The MTDE Awards (MaHaWaM and Farrah Abraham)

[koganbot]

Dave posted this on Tumblr:

I seem to be subconsciously looking for the closest thing I can find to the vibe of “My Teenage Dream Ended” each year (last year it was Jenny Wilson's EXORCISM).

This year it appears to be Mahawam: Is an Island, which is very brief and very good.

I replied:

Dave, I just checked YouTube to find that Farrah Abraham has

Comments

Re: Follow-up question

[skyecaptain]

MaHaWam and 100 gecs -- I didn't recommend the latter to Jukebox though I did hear them in my Spotify playlists and immediately checked out the whole album. I like it, though it's at too much of a remove, too mannered (relatively speaking, anyway, that would be a weird word to use without Farrah Abraham as the comparison point) to get at what I mean by the spirit of MTDE. MaHaWam has some of the more important signposts even though musically he's working within a more obvious weirdo house genre -- his weirdnesses, though weird, are within the normal range of weirdness of other music. Some of it reminds me a little of a midpoint between Shamir's two albums, one a slick club-pop album produced by Nick Sylvester(!) and the other a lo-fi set of demos he recorded mostly on four-track in his bedroom, something like that.

What it does have is, to use your word, a restlessness to it, an aura of anxiety tempered by playfulness, and a certain daring to it, the ability to go to odd corners for meaning. Where Farrah has the Autotuning, MaHaWam has his natural voice, occasionally processed a little but pretty striking on its own, unpolished, lisping, sometimes struggling to keep up with the pace he sets for himself. It sounds like the whole album is happening inside his head -- maybe that's the best way I can describe it? Albums can be introspective and poetic and affecting without actually sounding like they're being dreamt up on the spot -- that's closer to what the MaHaWam album does.