After an encouraging club night launch in spring this year, we spent a hungover/semi drunk next day hurriedly looking for new bands to play the next event. With the night based in East London, and budgets low, we needed local bands. Instead, we drifted online into one US outfit after another, mainly from the East Coast, all of them working the indie/electronic template into new and immersive shapes. So we thought we'd get a compilation together instead.
People had been talking about chillwave for a couple of years, and if that was a subgenre no one was mad keen to attach themselves to, the recent appearance of witch house has self-respecting East Coast hipsters running for the hills. F*>ck Dance Let's Art isn't a chillwave or witch house comp, but does include some of the bands thrown into these genres heaps.
If there are opposite ends of a spectrum here, rather than separate points around a circle, we'd put Washed Out on one side. “Feel It All Around” is chilled, and wavey, warm and kinda luxurious sounding, like 10 cc gone slo mo disco. The sort of sound you'd imagine would put it's creator Ernest Greene in line for some major label moolah and soundtrack work and stuff. But we heard he got so bored of the messages left on his mobile by fawning A&R men he sampled them on a track that was less than complimentary about their attention, and has basically been black balled by the powers that be since he posted it up online. Who knows how much truth there is in that, but it made us dig this even more:
At the other end of the, erm, circle, we found Baghdaddy's “Hot Shit” on our late night crawl around the deserted remains of the increasingly ghostly Myspace. It's a remix from New Yorkers Creep, and from their occulty page with its [former] “rapegaze” genre tag, we're guessing their disembodied ethereality and alienated electronica is founded on all sorts of dark Crowley-esque aesthetics and existential, gothic nihilism. Or it's a couple of art students from Brooklyn wondering where Telepathe disappeared to. Either way, we like a lot.
Small Black's “Despicable Dogs” lies in the middle of this linear spectrum that we're now accepting doesn't exist. This is classic, understated electronic pop from a band that could be on their way to greater things, with an accompanying surf related video, which is always a good thing (see also Air France's “No Excuses”).
We can't really remember why we included Crystal Castles vs Health on the comp, as it doesn't really fit, and it's from a different era, like three years ago or something. It might have been because Health wouldn't let us use one of their own tunes, or maybe because of an inappropriate Alice Glass crush. Either way, here's them performing it (without Healt ) under a walkway on UK TV:
