MJ Linckoln and the webwavers (# optional)

MJ Linckoln

Wading through and chewing over the below webwave compilation (the snappily titled 

:​:​:​:​:​蒸気​:​:​:​:​:) yielded much treasure but, as with compilations as expansive and bewildering in diversity as this (RVIDXR KLVN's Greatest Hits comes to mind), the iPod star rating comes into its own as a sorting tool: 'avoids' are given 1, excellence recognised with a 5 and songs of note, intrigue or requiring further research get a 4; 2 and 3 aren't used.

One of my webwave 5 star champions, MJ Linckoln, has a decent and recommended discography available for free through bandcamp on Sunup Recordings. My personal favourite is the Matterhorn pt 1 EP, containing some fine, suffocatingly slurred eccojams named after American celebrities, their names oblique and mysterious to me.

Elsewhere, with the Now that's what I call Music! vol 2 EP (credited to マイケル·ジョーダンLINCKOLN, Japanese for Michael Jordon or 'MJ'), we're treated to a earnest chopped n' ecco'd showcase, smearing and mystifying classics from Enya and Berlin -the Enya track in question (from 'Memory of Trees') was one of my first CD purchases as a young boy, so hearing it again for the first time in about a decade was neatly nostalgic and the first personal fluttering connection I've made with a track from this genre, what with other chopped/screwed/slowed/throwed/eccojammed/skrewed songs being relatively easy to identify by sound or by tag.
A certain admirable balance is achieved between a pop-musik black mass and dadaist joke, deadly serious exploration and tongue-in-cheek irony; the revealing chorus for many songs acting as punchline. Just when you're noddingly up to your ears in reverb, appreciating the disorientating slab of sound that churns, heaves and seems to struggle to breath out its own colossally wheezing chords, drums falling in a heavy stumble, the whole avant-garde noisescape is revealed to be Take My Breath Away by Berlin (if you don't catch the telltale bass melody, that is, which my wife didn't: when the chorus came, so did the guffaws).

The effect is one of deconstruction, conceptually as well as sonically. Like a dadaist ready-made, Daniel Lopatin's genre-defining Nobody's Here (as Chuck Person) took a terminally uncool music faux pas and turned it into a cutting edge, highly influential webwave 'masterpiece'. Playing with the giants of pop, simply slowing them, altering their tone and introducing some choice cutting and a dose of sub-aqueous reverb, is close to the 21st Century Internet equivalent of scrawling R. Mutt across them.

Yet, despite this gnawing feeling of 'am I listening to great/nearly great art or am I the butt of someone dicking about on Audacity's joke?' (which does fade), I'm utterly in thrall of MJ's work and that of his contemporaries and peers (Internet Club, $PL$H ¢LUB 7, Mediafired and just about anyone on the :​:​:​:​:​蒸気​:​:​:​:​: compilation ['vapour', in Japanese, badaway]) because, on one level, they appear to have quickly exhausted the possibilities of this technique and so, being evidently creative and productive minds, I want to know what they'll turn to next.

Already, since I began typing this, Matternhorn pt 2 has appeared on the Sunup Recordings bandcamp (although credited to 'Malibu Locals Only', an alias of Sean Petell of MJ, named after a small, violent gang from Malibu, the MLO) which is a more expansive creature, more indebted to sun-kissed drone, psychedelia and has more composed, cleaner feel. A wonderful tape, I'm thrilled to hear this maturation of style and purpose occur so quickly.

Although a fan of chopped and screwed, I'd never immersed myself in the blurry, aqueous, sensory-deprivation to any great extent, merely listening and enjoying albums as sonic curiosities rather than distinct pieces of work, such as the 'purple' versions of my favourite hip-hop artists. My first exposure to the style came through Hype Williams, of Hippos in Tanks association, with their drained, dreamy slo-mo bass music that held me in thrall for most of last year. Since then, I've casually sought out examples where the technique is applied, strategically and alongside other tricks n' tools, rather than expressed in pure form. Apart from Salem, who I feel sort of cheated despite being ahead of the (wider) game, I wasn't wholly satisfied.

MJ Linckoln, despite facing the initial blurry danger of blurring into the previous blurry-eccojam, has managed to keep my attention with his overall thematic content: the naming conventions of releases after famous American cars -from where the name derives, albeit with a kinky additional K -the curious reference to Michael Jordon and aforementioned American B-listers used as track titles (Art Garfunkel being the A-grade exception, maybe) tie the whole thing up into a neat, not too flashy, not too ironic, not too drained of substance package.

I'm still devouring the releases, trying to make time to consolidate them in my mind alongside other releases in the wider-genre, but hope to revisit MJ with a solid release review and verdict/discussion.