Please can we have like one chill week when nothing important actually happens. | Enjoying 1.5x Speed? Feel free to send this newsletter to your buds, and click here to read previous editions. And hey, feel free to write me anytime: nicholas.quah@vulture.com. | Want more recommendations from our critics? Subscribe now for unlimited access to Vulture and everything New York. | | | Photo-Illustration: Vulture | | Anchored by Christian Dueñas and Yosuke Kitazawa, the show recently wrapped up its first season all about City Pop, the '80's-era Japanese genre whose fingerprints can be found all over the lo-fi music boom that's taken over sizable pockets of the internet in recent years. Dueñas is a huge music head and veteran producer at MaxFun, while Yosuke Kitazawa is an indie music label guy who, during a previous tenure at the reissue-oriented Seattle label Light in the Attic, produced reissues and compilation records. One of those compilations was "Pacific Breeze," a multi-volume set that pulled together choice City Pop tracks — though, the genre apparently wasn't fully identified as such at the time. "I think we called it 'Boogie something and City Pop' back then," he recalled, when the three of us jumped on a Zoom call a few weeks ago. (Kitazawa now runs his own label, Temporal Drift.) Together, the duo has strung together ten episodes that function as a kind of intro syllabus for the genre, with each installment delivering conversations with guests about seminal tracks and albums. | For Dueñas and Kitazawa, one of the animating impulses behind Primer is embracing the value of the singular cultural object, something that's largely come under duress in the streaming age. "I mean, it's easier than ever to listen to music with YouTube and Spotify and all that," reflects Kitazawa, who typically speaks in a measured cadence. "You have access to all this music, but then information about that music is not always available. It's harder than ever to find info about the actual artists who made these songs." An old-school head, he believes in the primacy of the album: a physical object that can hold an artist's entire context in one place. | Dueñas agrees. "Honestly, my music discovery has been mostly throughlike random record buys that I'm vibe with," he said. "But it's super luck of the draw kind of stuff. You're always hoping you spent your $30 wisely, but that's how you end up in a situation where you might stumble into a record that says, like, 'dungeon synth,' which makes you go, 'what the fuck is dungeon synth?' And then you search it up and go, 'yo this shit is tight.' Then you dive into that world and it takes over your life. It's just the best feeling." | He added: "That's the thesis with Primer, I guess. I want that joy of discovery to be part of the feeling of the show." | I asked Dueñas and Kitazawa to talk about a few podcasts — and other things — they've been enjoying lately. | | | | | | Of course, my first pick is music related. This podcast is based on a series of little books about specific albums. I guess it's kind of like Primer in a way. It's hosted by Prince Paul from De La Soul, and what makes it interesting is some of the combinations they get between guest and album. For example, they got RZA to talk about Portishead's Dummy, which was so interesting. When you listen to the podcast and their conversation, it totally makes sense that RZA is a big fan of Portishead; the production techniques, the sound. They go deep into how the album was produced, and RZA would be like, "Oh, it's kind of the same thing I was doing, but thousands of miles across the Atlantic." Portishead was way ahead of their time. They would record their own samples and record with a live band, and then they'd press it on vinyl and then they would sample from that vinyl that they made themselves. It was an innovative way of using samples and RZA was saying, like, he had never heard of that before. So it's like him learning about production techniques through listening to this particular album. That was pretty cool. —Yosuke Kitazawa | | | | | | So, I'm a big video game guy, and I'm a big fan of the video game website Giant Bomb. They have a ton of podcasts out there: gaming news, they have one about Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. But the one that I wanted to shout out has nothing to do with games, and it's a long-running show called Voicemail Dump Truck. | It's one of those shows where you have to listen to 10 episodes to understand the vibe. Sort of a Doughboys situation where you have to get into the groove. The premise is, basically, there's usually four hosts on the show and they have listeners call in and leave a voicemail about literally whatever. And usually, people are encouraged to only call in at 3 a.m., so they can get messages at their most, like, bleary or "I'm high or drunk." | I love listening to this show every time. It's also one of the few podcasts where, on a road trip, I'd actually play it with a friend 'cause it doesn't require much setup. It's just "We're gonna listen to three episodes because we gotta get to Vegas and we gotta kill some time, you know?" It's really good for that. — Christian Dueñas | | | | | | It's a great memoir. Won the Pulitzer Prize, I think, so a lot of people probably already know about it, but I still recommend it for those who haven't read it. It's about the author growing up in California, the child of immigrants, and going to college at UC Berkeley and forming friendships there. It's kind of a coming of age story, about the meaning of friendship, about loss; a big part of the book is about how his best friend in college got murdered, and the impact that friendship still has on the author's life. He's also a music obsessive. So he would have conversations, deep conversations about the music that they liked, and he would make zines about the bands that he liked. | I feel a personal connection to it. I also went to Berkeley soon after when the memoir took place. I also grew up in California, the son of immigrants and all that. And I was also a music obsessive. Of course he's also an incredible writer. Just the style and everything. The way he talks about taste — about talking to his father about Kurt Cobain and how his father would look at a guitar solo as a culmination of learning the technique but how he would hear a guitar solo and think of it as an expression of freedom. It's so good. — Yosuke Kitazawa | | | | | | Probably my favorite album of the past couple of years. I loved Danny Brown, I love JPEGMAFIA. I love Danny Brown's podcast, even. And so I was really excited for when this album came out. I was pumped, you know? My expectations were high, and it met those expectations and exceeded them. I still listen to it all the time. I saw them live at the Palladium. Incredible show. I have a T-shirt. The production work shines through; it has this J Dilla style where it sounds like he's chopping things up by hand and then looping things back in. I don't even know if he was able to quantize his beats or whatever, but it's basically very DIY. Very rough. Aggressive, but also very on purpose, very specifically harsh. They later released an expansion, like a deluxe version, which was just a four pack of songs, and that was also really good. — Christian Dueñas | | | I hope you don't mind a bit of self-promotion. I run a label called Temporal Drift, and we've been releasing music by this band called Les Rallizes Dénudés. They were an underground Japanese band that was around from the sixties to the nineties, and they're centered around this front man, Takashi Mizutani. They were pretty much an underground band for much of their existence, doing this heavy psychedelic noise rock. They never even released an album until pretty much right before they broke up, but they developed this strong cult following. Their live shows were a true experience, and tapes of their shows would be traded among fans — kind of like The Grateful Dead, I suppose. A couple of years ago, my label, in partnership with the band's estate, started officially releasing some of this music, and I've been listening to them a lot again. I would say it's for people who are into, like, the Velvet Underground and Sonic Youth, or shoegaze bands that are on the noisier end of the spectrum. — Yosuke Kitazawa | | | | | Photo: Carole Bethuel | I'm a big horror movie guy, and I'll be honest: We've been in a rut lately. Many of the new releases are real stinkers. So I want to talk about Titane, which came out a few years ago — I guess you describe it as French body horror, gender horror. I don't know, it's a tough one to genre-ize. I went in knowing nothing, which is probably the best way to do it. Like, you cannot do any research into what this movie is, but you have to be cool with horror movies, and specifically body horror. All I knew going in was that it won the Palme d'Or in 2021. | It is very upsetting. But it's also saying something. There's a lot of commentary on family and love and gender performativity — and there's a sequence in the movie that uses a Future Islands song that is just so perfect. I think that's what's missing in a lot of horror movies, especially mainstream ones. There's a lot of things that are, like, an allegory for trauma or something, which is totally fine. But also, can we say something new about trauma? You know what I'm saying? Like, Hereditary comes to mind. I like Hereditary a lot. I have a poster somewhere here. But it's one of those things that started off the trend of, like, "this is more about the trauma of something than it is the actual horror of it." And that tendency has led to a bunch of mid movies, in my opinion. Titane is just balls to the wall. It really challenges you, but it's also a fantastic movie. I've seen it maybe four times at this point. I love it. — Christian Dueñas | ➽ In the Dark, now housed at The New Yorker, will kick off its long-anticipated third season next Tuesday. | ➽ Hysterical, the new Dan Taberski joint about a mysterious illness that broke out in western New York a decade ago, dropped its first two episodes earlier this week. | ➽ As to be completely expected, The Bill Simmons Podcast's episode titles remain unmatched: "Biden Drops Out, a USA Hoops Six-Pack, and 'Heat 2' Ideas with Bryan Curtis, Tara Palmeri, Sean Fennessey, and Chris Ryan." Incredible. Just incredible. | ➽ You hear that sound? That's the sound of the election-politics podcast economy kicking into extra high gear. | ➽ On the Media makes it official: Micah Loewinger is now Brooke Gladstone's full-time cohost. | ➽ Twisters … a damn good time. What more can I ask for? | And that's a wrap for 1.5x Speed! Hope you enjoyed it. We're back next week, but in the meantime… | | | |
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