"Musical Schizophrenic"- A conversation with London indie pop artist Oscar

Oscar Scheller's a self-described "musical schizophrenic." If the London native's not recording bright, love-struck indie pop under the mononym Oscar, he's staying up in his flat until 5 in the morning recording "crusty acid house" with his friend Guy as Claude Money or dabbling in shifting garage music. He's a classically trained art school grad who wrote a dissertation on "The Emotional Economy of the Sampled Sound" and enjoys the head knocking NYC-rap of Lord Finesse, the careful R&B structuring of Destiny's Child, Ride's intimate shoegaze and infinitely fun baroque pop courtesy of the Kinks' Village Green Preservation Society. Scheller will go nearly a month without working and then have a deluge where he writes multiple songs in a weekend. 

When's he wrapped on one of those new tracks, he'll play it for his mom Rebecca, who he inherited part of his musical "disorder" from. Rebecca would make mixes of current U.K. pop hits for Oscar when he rode to school as a child, and splice in New Order, Blondie and the Slits, because she was "a bit of a punk." And if that weren't enough, Oscar's father Martin was a "Bohemian with a joint in his mouth," who made some of the earliest acid house as Funtopia for Arista. The deal never quite materialized, but Oscar still has stacks of the records from Martin's broke artist days. Music is permanently hardwired into Oscar's DNA and you can hear it in his baritone voice.

Who's at the top of the list of bands you'd like to see?
Modern bands...I wanna see Slowdive, I know they’re an old band, but I wanna see them. They would be top of my list, 100%. 

So you're a shoegaze guy then, have you seen My Bloody Valentine?
I’ve seen My Bloody Valentine, which was, I thought it was pretty amazing. It was so loud that people were kind of throwing up afterwards. It was intense. After a while all the feedback and frequencies made this incredible singing noise. It was beautiful, but deafening.

When did you start listening to bands like that?
I was quite late with guitar music. When I was a teenager, I was into R&B and hip hop. My sister was into drum & bass and U.K. garage and all that kind of stuff, so I kind of took CDs from her room and was involved with that, but I think when I first started listening to shoegaze I was about 17 or 18.
 
What about it appealed to you?
I suppose like the delicacy of it and the intimacy as well.

Shoegaze isn't unlike R&B in that way.
Oh God yeah. Some of the best R&B is really minimal.


I can hear shoegaze and hip hop elements in a song like "Be Good" but how does R&B fit in? With the R&B the influence of that is vocally, there are lots of indie singers that could have these crossover soulful voices because they actually sing it's not yelping into a microphone. Julian Casablancas for instance has a great voice. I guess Morrissey as well has got a good voice.

Morrissey is a comparison that comes up a lot for you in the press, why do you think that is?
I don’t think we sound anything a like. I think the reason that people say that is because I sing with my own accent. And as soon as you’re an English band that doesn’t sing in an American accent, you are someone else.

And they seem to suggest you're also gloomy? I just find it funny because I’m really not a miserable person, I’m really silly.

Where does a mistake like that come from? I think people can’t really work out what it is. I think because my voice is so low, people assume I’m kind of deadpan. And I try to sing higher, but I write songs for where my voice is.

But the whole sad thing is kind of a character and even when I do try to write happy songs, they do come out a bit bittersweet.



When did you first start writing?
I was 13 or 14 and started writing on the piano and it was straight up pop ballad kinds of things. I was listening to a lot of Alicia Keys. It was cheesy and really teenage. 

And then I picked up the guitar when I was 15. My friend showed me a few chords and my mom showed me a few chords too, she could play Buddy Holly.
I was in lots of bands that weren’t mine where I was asked to be the singer. Like from the age of 15 I was in bands and learning how to do that.

Was there any frustration with playing in a band versus solo because there was more to worry about? I think when you’re young, it was a lot easier because we all went to the same school, we all finished school at 4 o’clock, and none of us had girlfriends or real lives, so it was like 'yeah lets go practice and do that gig.' So in a way it was kind of easy, but it didn’t feel like that at the time.

And I started to realize that I really knew what I wanted and I had to sing other people’s lyrics which frankly I didn’t like and it wasn’t the best.

So was performing the plan then or did you want to go to school?
I did the whole art school route; I thought it was the promised land. You read about art school and you read about punk and all the great bands that went there and you think 'God that must be such an exciting place, you can dress how you want and you can just express yourself and do what you want.'

Of course that wasn’t the reality. Capitalism has kind of taken such a stranglehold on any kind of individual education system. It’s no longer a school of art, it’s actually a university which the semantics of are completely different. It's incredibly prescriptive and academic and in a way you can’t really call it art school anymore.

I definitely had a hard time there and that was definitely when I started doing the Oscar stuff. I was so pissed off with art school; I was just spending all my time at home writing and coming in occasionally and showing some work and sort of bullsh***ing.

Was the early music you were doing as Oscar for school at all or just an escape from all the bulls***? It was to get away from all the bulls***... I was kind of going through this conflict with everybody around me saying 'why the f*** can’t I come in and play my album or play my songs?' Because it’s as much art as whatever the painting is or whatever the installation is. So it was definitely the kind of escape from that.


How much of that was a conscious decision?
I was tired of straight indie music going to see boys with guitars. The whole thing was boring and tired. It was all either super electronic or complete rip offs. I wanted to exaggerate the fact that I’m an avid record collector. In a way the art school was helpful in that it makes you quite cynical and does strengthen all your references and makes you look at things in or out of context.

The music came about because I wanted to write pop songs, but I’m real, I’m in a bedroom. I’m not a manufactured artist, so I just kind of did it the way I knew best. I played around with lots of old school drum loops because I didn’t have a drumkit and couldn’t make a noise in my bedroom because I live in a flat. So it was the easiest way to do it. All late at night; just drum loops and singing really quietly into a microphone.

Lo-fi approach intentional or because you don’t have the equipment for it?
It’s not intentional. I think if I had a proper drumkit and I knew how to record it and I had studio time, of course I would love to have the songs fully realized. And in a way the songwriting has been improving. Now the songs I’m writing are kind of like album tracks and they do need a kind of high-fidelity.

I think the next thing is to release a new single or EP. Just keep building it.

Oscar's debut EP 146b is out now on Smalltown Supersound imprint Brown Rice.

In Revue: 'Wild' (Miguel)

While it seems ostentatious that kaleidoscopic crooner Miguel would surprise release a new EP of progressively druggy R&B less than a week after D’Angelo damn near broke the music web with his masterful sneak attack Black Messiah, it makes sense in the right frame.

Miguel has a penchant for psych-soul/funk/R&B "ballads" that transmute at least three times before his voice floats away from them. If D'Angelo didn't outright invent the style on his 2000 record Voodoo, he helped popularize it. A song like "Playa Playa" can shift from narcotized tribal chanting to muted horns and not bat an eye. Without D'Angelo's work on that sophomore LP, we arguably don't get: the Weeknd, Frank Ocean, Solange or Miguel. Miguel's decision then has nothing to do with brazenness; it’s a tip of the cap to a sonic forefather.

Even if this new untitled EP (Wild to make it easier) was positioned as a contender to D'Angelo's hazy throne it would still rightly be viewed as a success. Miguel really rose to prominence with the Art Dealer Chic EPs in 2012 and the format suits him incredibly well. Each plea for a late night rendezvous is more desperate; every line of pillow talk tenderer because you know there's a finite amount of time. The Sun will be coming up soon and then it'll all be over.

But that's one facet of Miguel's inimitable style. He can do braggadocio with the best of his R&B peers and Wild's opening track "nwa" allows him to fully indulge. "She just wanna ride with an NWA," he hums over closely-mic'd drums, G-Funk synth wobbles and dust settling guitars. It's the sort of the line that's infinitely cooler because of how calm Miguel sounds delivering it. He's not pretending, he's a legit "NWA," and if you don't believe him you can ask legendary Philadelphia everyman Kurupt. The Dogg Pound member goes the Miguel route, barely rising above a gruff whisper, but he doesn't have the same effortlessness. He's the dude memorizing pickup lines while Miguel's breaking the ice with something he just thought up.

And if closer "coffee" is any indication, those lines clearly work. What starts as chat about "street-art and high-fashion," accompanied by blankets of static and murmuring bass, soon "devolves" into tongue kissing. Everything follows a natural path until Miguel and unnamed lover end with "coffee in the morning." "Coffee" has one of the cleverer hooks I've heard in 2014, if only because it finds a new way to portray a night of passion. It documents the kind of psychic connection that can form between two people who started off looking for the physical.

Miguel's true genius then is taking genre tropes and spinning them into audio gold. Like "Candles in the Sun" before it, "hollywooddreams" should sink under the weight of its own idealistic hokum, but it doesn't because of Miguel's commitment to the material. He's earnestly hoping for a "big break," trying to find a dream lost under surging guitars and twinkly synthesizers. There's no doubt he'll spot that break. With the artistic vision Miguel has, he could find anything.

In Revue- 'You're Dead! (Flying Lotus)

The "new jazz" is what one enthusiastic Stereogum commenter calls the fifth Flying Lotus album You're Dead! But really that descriptor, while accurate, is one of countless ways to frame Steven Ellison's new masterpiece. Astral. Spacey. Soulful. Warm. Aggressive. Calm. Lively. Necromancing. Bold. Quiet. Circular. Universal. Those words are all equally appropriate. Particularly the last of that laundry list. Not "universal" in the sense that this album could be loved by everyone; it's far too "experimental" for that. Universal meaning that it shapes and molds stray notes into something so cosmically vast that continued exploration is not tiresome.

I've lived inside of You're Dead! for four days now, playing it at least 20 times all the way through. I've sprinkled flecks of ginger onto chicken while the funk guitars of "Cold Dead" surged from my speakers. A quilt covered my head when the tense strings of "Turkey Dog Coma" faded into the stale air of my dark bedroom. I bounced to the Snoop Dogg feature "Dead Man's Tetris" on the way to class in my Scion XB and felt like Leo in Titanic, "king of the world." And not once during any of those moments did I have the slightest urge to turn the music off.

Part of that can be chalked up to the hypnosis FlyLo puts you under on You're Dead! "Theme"'s initial raga-style drones create such a dense haze that movement is impossible. The image of a runner trying to push through an Olympic-sized pool of Jell-O comes to mind when Kendrick Lamar’s laudable verse bolts over "Never Catch Me"'s hobbled synthesizers. "Step inside of my mind and you'll find curiosity, animosity, high velocity like the prophesied meditation," the Compton MC breathlessly promises. With those rapidly firing neurons, he stalls on the simple idea of a song uniting us all in love. If we can find any kind of common ground, we can delay the “embalming fluid” for as long as possible.

Of course the whole idea of You're Dead! is that the pale specter of death will visit everyone, at least one time, if not more. The crooning vocals of "Coronus, the Terminator" could just as easily be the Grim Reaper's as Otis Redding's or Al Green's. Those little trembles in the background couldn’t possibly come from this plane of existence. FlyLo's metronomic drum claps move your feet, but those consciously weird effects paw at your soul with icy hands. The panning guitar that opens the track sounds is Isaac Hayes crossing over at séance. Or a funky soundtrack to crossing the River Styx.

Ellison never once says on the album that death isn't fearful, but he doesn't have to. The bold glimmering music speaks volumes about the beauty that lies in flatlining. There are former Dirty Projectors member Angel Deradoorian's sighs in "Siren Song" which fizz like a plastic bottle of gently shaken Sprite. Each "ooh" and "ahh" over the wah-wahing guitars and muttering bass is a pat on the back, a warm reassurance that everything will be okay in the end. The comfort continues into "Turtles" where the background jangle of wind-chimes and twittering birds calmly greet you. Initially it's jarring to hear something so naturalistic on an electronic album, but FlyLo's proven over time that he can make anything sound organic. Snoop Dogg's laconic G-funk drawl has no business pairing with experimental electronic-jazz, or whatever clunky descriptor you want to use for You're Dead!, but it's there on the hallucinatory 8-bit take "Dead Man's Tetris." "No jokes, no hoax, felt his palms he had no pulse" Snoop easily raps, sounding as good as he has at least since "That Tree." When Ellison's able to not only collaborate with true legends, but get them to bend to the afterlife narrative he's crafting, you see how inspiring his vision is.

If this all this talk of "grand visions" and death sounds self-serious, it isn't. Ellison's on record as saying, "I try to think about these things with a tongue-in-cheek perspective," and it's been rightly pointed out that the "joyous" exclamation point in the album title sheds some weight from the subject. "I wanted it to be playful, because it's the one experience we have in common. I wanted to make something that captures death from different angles—from the sad moments, to the confusing moments, to maybe even the blissful and silly ones," Ellison said in a Pitchfork Update.

That playfulness is everywhere. "Ready Err Not" ingeniously incorporates a version of the Looney Tunes "boing" sound effect into a mélange of metronomic ticks and aquatic bleeps. A laugh suspiciously similar to the Mortal Kombat chuckle bellows in "The Boys Who Died in Their Sleep." Something about Thundercat's feathery singing of "walls are closing in" on "Descent Into Madness" makes me picture a wise guy angel who can't keep from cracking jokes when you approach the pearly gates. He wants to get in one last knock-knock joke before he writes your name into the Book of Life. He says "there's no escape" but it's in such an airy tone that you'd never believe him.

A form of acceptance finally comes when Kimbra and Laura Darlington's voices coolly stutter "we will live on forever" as lithe bop piano sweeps up the last pieces of a life in closer "The Protest." It's a simple and calm declaration, one far less harried than the footwork moves around it, but incredibly profound. For all the worrying we do about the temporary nature of life, we never stop to think how long our names can live on. We don't consider that one simple action of opening a door for someone or letting another car go past in traffic can travel from one person to another in an unbreakable chain. Will all the cells in our bodies eventually wither away? Absolutely. So will every piece of hair, every hunk of skin, every last nail. But focusing on individual pieces is too myopic. We need to look at the bigger picture and see that death is just a part of life and vice-versa. So it goes with every cry, laugh, whisper and scream of You're Dead!. They're all fleeting moments pieced together to form a timeless album.

"i"- Kendrick Lamar

T.I. had a 2006 album where he proclaimed himself King. In the same year Pusha T's regal status was signified by a cockeyed crown he wore on the cover of Hell Hath No Fury. Hip hop's seen "the best rapper alive," "superheroes," and a "rap god." But every last one of those artists feels distanced from their audience. In being royalty you naturally slip from the everyday tedium of normalcy. The longer you sit on the mountaintop, the less time you have to commune with the villagers down below. 

One glaring exception to the rule and perhaps the only legitimate claimant to the title of king is "King" Kendrick Lamar. Between good kid, m.A.A.d. city's runaway success in 2012, the Twitter-breaking "Control" in August 2013, a particularly firebreathing BET Cypher session last October and a continuous stream of breathless guest verses in 2014, Lamar's firmly established his kingship. But he's also retained his "humanity" in the process. He headlines festivals while still rocking those Nike Cortez shows and white tees. Lamar still lays his head in Los Angeles and shows up to local radio stations to let the hometown hear a new single first, a single where he cops to lacking confidence. 

That new single, "i," has already been discussed to death for being "too pop," "too breezy," a sure-fire bet to soundtrack a Disney movie in the next five years. With its shuffling guitar, clopping pots and pans percussion, communal clapping and message of having to love yourself before you can love anyone else, it is poppy and breezy. Those liquid solos you hear in the chorus, pulled from the Isley Brothers' "That Lady," are the sort of thing that would've played in any number of 70s cop flicks. But Kendrick Lamar raps his ass off on this one. With absolute ease he stacks up images of "A war outside and a bomb in the street, and a gun in the hood and a mob of police, And a rock on the corner and a line full of fiends." If that weren't enough to allay fears, his message of loving yourself first isn't new terrain. Since day one he's shown us how far someone can go if they believe in themselves; continually exhorting himself and his audience to go farther. And of course this is just the first taste of what's to come from the third LP. There's a strong chance this is the "radio friendly" track Lamar pushes to make label execs happy before dropping another classic of chaos and confusion in the 21st Century. Whatever the case may be, Lamar can rest easy. The crown's not going anywhere for now.

There's no set release date for Lamar's third LP, but you can watch him discuss the process of recording the new album on Power 106.

"Blow that s*** away"- Future Islands Live at LouFest

"Sometimes you just gotta blow that s*** away man," Samuel T. Herring, Future Islands' powerhouse vocalist joked to a Sun soaked LouFest crowd Saturday afternoon. As the last notes of "Before the Bridge," a cut from the Baltimore synthpop group's last LP On the Water wafted into the sweat heavy summer air, Herring was blowing some invisible entity out of his hand. With the sheer force he put into puffing out his cheeks, then exhaling, you'd think he was an exorcist trying to cast out a demon.

But that's the intensity the group, particularly Herring approaches all of their material with. During indie song of the year contender "Seasons (Waiting On You)" William Cashion's thick running bass notes created a feeling of a dam bursting fourth; and Herring's "as it breaks" was the first gush of water through the concrete. The song's key line "I've grown tired trying to change for you," affects anyone who's ever lost too much of themselves in another person. And live the emotional relevancy Herring gave the confession was overwhelming.

The Singles lead track was one of several cuts from the 2014 record littering the group's 50 minute set. Gerrit Welmers' tidal synthesizer of "A Song for Our Grandfathers" found Herring looking up to a celestial plateau after each line about "grandfather watching over me." "This song's about burned out tobacco fields and those trying to be free and those that deserve to be," Herring informed the howling, clapping crowd. Whether freedom was ever attained, he never said.

"Light House" considerably picked up the synth pace and offered a shred of life saving hope once imparted on Herring. Though the words "this is not you," and "what you know is better, is brighter" were partially obscured by Herring's black metal shrieking, they still offered inspiration. Sometimes when you're trapped in the shadows all you need is assurance that light is out there somewhere.

Set closer "Spirit" continued the uplifting act. Herring giddily bounced up and down, while the rest of the group gelled into a robotic techno/funk groove. The song's all about finding that aforementioned light inside of yourself and near the end, I spotted a young red-headed child sitting on top of his father's shoulders beaming from ear-to-ear. So as "hokey" a challenge as "sharing" and "baring" the light sounds, when you see the joy of a small child, it's abundantly clear that radiant light exists.

As theatrical as all of the wailing, backwards dancing and pogoing that Herring did was, the most stirring moment came during Singles closer "A Dream of You and Me." Herring begged for peace, but was overcome with violence. He bizarrely contorted across the main stage and pulled at his face like he was trying to rip off a mask. When you're band that thrives on physicality, finding even a shard of peace isn't an easy task. 

"minipops 67 [120.2] [source field mix]"- Aphex Twin

A major mistake I made when listening to "minipops 67 [120.2] [source field mix]," British producer Richard D. James' first new work as Aphex Twin in 13 years, was assuming the stirring vocals that end the song were lifted from some "ancient" source. They're so frail and wobbly that I just imagined James clearing them off a hard-drive labelled "Samples" from the year 2000. 

It's the only thing though from "minipops 67 [120.2] [source field mix] that feels "dated."  The layers of fluttering drum machines, watery synthesizers and stray noises are remarkably of the moment; recalling Aphex Twin disciples like shadowy post dubstep artist Burial and experimental hip hop producer Flying Lotus. James' aforementioned sighing at the song's end could be confused for a new Radiohead effort. Aphex Twin's been dormant since the maligned Drukqs in 2001, but James has clearly been paying attention to his imitators.

So much so that it sounds like he's read ahead of the class. As much as "minipops 67 [120.2] [source field mix] is of 2014, it’s simultaneously out of time. Individual ripples of synth keys are soundtracking a sci-fi flick that won't be made for another 10 years. The robotic heaves throughout the track are alien to my ears. There's no Rosetta Stone to decode the language of James' vocal manipulations. Aphex Twin is unquestionably back and already out in front of the field.




Aphex Twin's new album Syro is out Sept. 23 through Warp Records. You can find James' mangled bio accompanying the new release here and view the tracklist below.

Syro:
1. "minipops 67 [120.2] [source field mix]"
2. "XMAS_EveT10 (thanaton3 mix)"
3. "produk 29"
4. "4 bit 9d api+e+6"
5. "180db_"
6. "CIRCLONT6A (syrobonkus mix)"
7. "fz pseudotimestrech+e+3"
8. "CIRCLONT14 (shrymoming mix)"
9. "syro u473t8+e (piezoluminescence mix)"
10. "PAPAT4 (pineal mix)"
11. "s950tx16wasr10 (earth portal mix)"
12. "aisatsana"