In an email back-and-forth on the subject of hypnagogic pop, published in Fall 2009 on music critic/Volcanic Tongue founder David Keenan’s personal blog, Dan Lopatin of Oneohtrix Point Never and Games offered a compelling alternate name for the new “movement” Keenan had christened in the August issue of the Wire. In embracing the various iterations of pop musical kitsch they had grown up alongside in the ’80s and early ’90s, outsider musicians like James Ferraro and Spencer Clark were creating “noise without borders” — noise music that engaged in an open dialogue with the sounds it had previously excluded in its hermetic exploration of “sound” as material. The interview is no longer accessible to the public, but I remember Lopatin characterizing h-pop as a new, distinctly “feminine” alternative to the confrontational and unreflecting masculinity of pure noise, namely in that it allowed itself to be “penetrated” by other musical styles. Speaking historically, Keenan and Lopatin recognized the post-punk of the late ’70s and the early ’80s as another avant-garde moment that had allowed itself to be “penetrated” in this way, softening the resounding “no” that punk had pronounced to society into a more fluid stance that made room for dub, funk, and disco.
Dublin’s Thread Pulls, whom 20 Jazz Funk Greats spotlighted on Altered Zones a few weeks back, sound nothing like any of artists who founded or climbed their way into Keenan’s hypnagogic pop pantheon; in fact, seeing as our ears are pretty much glutted with cassette hiss and warped supermarket adagios at this point, they may even sound refreshing. Thread Pulls’ stripped-down, tightly-wound spin on post-punk is just as much a case for “feminine openness” as The Skaters or Oneohtrix, but it approaches this ideal from the opposite end of noise rock — purging where hpop oversaturates, refining and clarifying where hpop blurs. On their MySpace, Gavin Duffy and Peter Maybury confide in us that they are “only nearly a rock band, stripped back to a core of drums and bass”– though vocals, trumpet, and synths discover room in the equation as well. Little things start meaning a lot, the associations start flowing like crazy. A snappy note change in the bassline brings back James Chance and the funk he himself was bringing back (“Sink and Swim”); a twitch in the synth sounds vaguely arabesque, while also reminding us that ’60s psych was capable of swallowing anything (“Weight”). Thread Pulls swallow almost nothing, swallows it raw, and makes it sound like a full plate.
Thread Pulls, “Sink and Swim”
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“Weight”
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