Content creator Tia Ho takes Kayla Sandiford through the pivotal songs in her life.
Over the past few years, the landscape of musical discourse has undergone drastic shifts.
While authoritative voices of music criticism, curation, and scene spotlighting have largely sat within print or on the airwaves, the methods by which music content is delivered have expanded to include videos. Not big-budget productions or lengthy YouTube video essays, but short-form, digestible analyses of the musical ecosystem, often captured from the comfort of a creator’s own home.
One such creator, who is steadily rising to prominence across Instagram and TikTok feeds, is Brooklyn-based “critical glazer” Tia Ho. A former social media lead at KEXP, Seattle’s beloved independent radio station, she spent six years within one of music’s most respected institutions before walking out the door with no plan, just three goals and a hunch. “I never would have thought in a million years that this last year would have gone the way it went,” she says. “I never thought that I’d be able to have a fulfilling, or even financially feasible, career in music content.”
That hunch proved right. Nearly a year on from leaving KEXP, she’s made good on all three of those goals; working with thee of her favourite independent labels, interviewing one of her favourite artists, and being invited to cover a festival as a music content creator. When Ho and I speak, she’s just two days shy of celebrating one full year as a content creator, and she can comfortably say that she’s achieved more than she initially set out for.
She describes it as “baptism by fire”. Suddenly, labels were reaching out, she was being offered coverage opportunities from SXSW to Coachella, and suddenly, she was leading conversations with both rising artists, and established names artists that she’s long admired. Now, Ho is on the other side in her first-ever interview, something that serves as a milestone in itself.
Ho’s initial break in the music industry was somewhat unconventional, she tells me. She grew up in Seattle, the daughter of Vietnamese parents who fled Saigon in 1975 and came of age in a city where Sub Pop was everywhere. “My mom has been working at the same dental practice since the 90s, and Sub Pop was having their moment,” she explains. “They needed a dental practice to send all of their bands to before they hit the road. So all of Sub Pop staff still go to the same dental practice, and they would also send their bands there too. Nirvana went; Kurt Cobain’s chart is still at the dental practice.”
“Because of that, my mom grew up knowing Megan Jasper, and when the time came for me to look for an internship, I ended up interning for Megan at Sub Pop when she was still the vice president. That was my first real experience in the music scene.” Years later, applying for a part-time social media role at KEXP, she listed Jasper as a reference without realising she’d since joined the station’s board of directors. “The stars just kind of aligned,” she says.
Ho spent six years at KEXP as its first full-time social media hire, learning how to build content for the station’s social channels from scratch. “I was the very first person, or the very first full-time hire for social media, and it was a really intense job. It was juggling producing content and managing content, talking to every single department about their needs, while also trying to create systems that allowed us to have a constant flow of content to these channels that I was then having to manage and write copy for.”
And while social media was a practical step for Ho, and she could recognise the importance in it, it wasn’t her passion. What truly lit a fire in her was editorial work, which she managed to squeeze into little pockets of time when she could, whether it was album reviews, personal essays, or interviews. Her manager and close friend Dusty Henry, then head of KEXP’s digital content team, was the one who encouraged her to keep going.
Overtime, Ho began noticing a broader shift towards a social-editorial sort of content. This was still in its early days, it didn’t quite have a name or a format, but Ho saw fertile ground, and started using her own channels to test video formats, hoping to eventually hand them off to KEXP DJs to use as ready-made blueprints. However, those early videos found their own audience. Ho began to establish an on-camera presence that resonated with people and gave her a platform to say everything that she wanted to within an editorial capacity.
The nine songs that Ho has chosen don’t just mark her path, but place emphasis on the things that captivate her about music, drawing out the core of what keeps her excited as and impassioned as a music content creator. They move from Édith Piaf, a song her parents carried over from French colonial Saigon, and the first music she can remember, through the pop sensationalism of Britney Spears and Eurodance and the explicit and devastating emotionality of My Chemical Romance, and Death Cab for Cutie, all the way down to finding connection with her heritage through Vietnamese icon Thanh Tuyền, and unlocking paracosms with Washed Out.
As she reflects on Fred again..’s ability to revive the emotion of electronic music, and YHWH Nailgun’s capacity to place her at the edge of a creative cliff, Ho invites me into a system of doors that constantly swing wide open into new worlds of boundless musical potential. “All of these songs score a certain kind of revelation for me in terms of why I love music, what I love about it, and what possibilities of music can be,” she tells me. “It’s like a treasure box or something!”
“La Vie En Rose” by Edith Piaf
TIA HO: I had such a hard time picking a first song, but this is a song that is still very important to my mom and my dad. It’s one that I remember being constantly referenced. My dad would sing it, my mom would talk about how her dad would hum it while walking around the house, and she adopted that. I grew up with my grandma as well, and she loved the song as well.
So, I grew up with “La Vie En Rose”, and I think it’s an interesting pick because the reason that my parents and grandmother attached to this song so deeply comes from a very complicated relationship with French culture as Vietnamese people.
My mom and dad both grew up in Vietnam when it was still a French colony. They both left Vietnam in 1975, right before Saigon fell. My mom went to a French private school when she was growing up, and she studied French, so there was a lot of emphasis on French culture and not so much on Vietnamese culture. French was taught in those schools rather than Vietnamese.
Because of that, my parents have very strong ties to both cultures. But in a way, bringing that song over, and having such an emotional connection to it represents a very tenuous but real tie to war-torn Vietnam. This song represents a very multicultural facet of my upbringing. It’s also deeply nostalgic for me in a different way than it is for my parents. It’s music as a family heirloom, and it’s ultimately one of my earliest memories of music.
BEST FIT: “La Vie En Rose” has been coined as a post-World War II message of optimism. Do you feel like that’s something that resonates with your family, given the dynamics between France and Vietnam?
I think it’s a song of optimism, for sure. That may be more of a projection on my part. But my parents grew up in French colonial Vietnam. I don’t know if they had a lot of opinions about it. Their parents definitely did, but on both sides, my parents were directly related to the Vietnam War and Hồ Chí Minh’s original group of revolutionaries.
My parents were very much exposed to French culture through the lens of French culture, and they both think of this song so fondly. I don’t think that the optimism is too far removed from their experience of the song.
Would you say that French music was prevalent for you growing up?
It definitely was. French culture was something that I grew up around, more so than other kids, which I didn’t realise at the time. You know, I was bringing pâté sandwiches to school for lunch, which I thought was a normal thing to do as a 10-year-old. I think I had a predisposed openness to French culture and French music.
I’m writing a piece about a French artist right now, so I’ve been retracing my steps. At first, I thought that I don’t actually listen to much French music. You obviously get the typical exports, like Daft Punk and Phoenix. But then you’ve got Ed Banger Records, Justice, and Busy P, who I totally loved. Or Club Cheval, Canblaster, and everything associated with them. Then there’s Carla Bruni, who has this minimalist, French-coded vocal austerity thing that I have such a deep love for.
It’s such a specific moment in my musical evolution, even back then. So even though I would have initially said no before I was working on that piece, I’d say it’s absolutely there.
“Lucky” by Britney Spears
I had to put a pop pick in there. This was still the time of monolithic music culture, and pop was everywhere. It was everything. And I think on some level, there was a yearning for some sort of cultural assimilation, because it was so fun to be able to participate in something that mattered so much to me on a personal level.
But it also mattered so much to other people, strangers, my peers. It was all of the usual suspects. Britney sort of teed it up, but I loved The Backstreet Boys, NSYNC, Christina, then I was into Hilary Duff, who was actually my very first concert. And I think pop made me realise how powerful fandom is.
I don’t know if you listen to Maral at all. She’s incredible, nothing to do with pop whatsoever, but she makes these brain-breaking but incredible avant-garde, abstract, electronic pieces. And I bring this up because she has this great quote in an interview that my friend did with her, where she talks about how the only places you can access the level of spirituality that you might get in a temple these days are in a club.
And I was like, ‘You know what? That’s so real’. I think about that constantly these days, and I think that very much relates back to the formative experience of pop and pop fandom. I’ve never seen Britney live, but pop, and specifically pop fandom, is so fascinating to me.
As someone who was growing up during that time of pop mania and then also going to my first stadium show and thinking, ‘Oh my God, this is so beautiful’, the fact that 25 or 30,000 of us can all come together and experience this thing together. Even though I didn’t really consciously understand it, I was very moved by that as a kid.
It’s interesting, because pop music feels very accessible and is widespread, but as you expand your taste, you get to tap into more subcultures and see how those temples exist within different scenes.
For sure. I think that’s why I love fandom, period. And I think that’s also why even if I can’t personally find emotional resonance in a song, I will never hate on somebody who does, because it’s such a personal experience. I think that fandom, in a lot of ways, justifies itself. Not for everything, but just in all these different music cultures. It was my first brush of being like, ‘Oh wow, music is speaking to these people en masse’, and in such a beautiful way.
Looking at the content of the song, the idea of a pop star who’s adored but deals with this intense loneliness, how do you think that expressing an isolating inner experience relates to Britney’s ability to create a sense of community among her audience?
I love the role reversal of it, to be honest. What I’ve learned through so much music, ‘Lucky’ included, is that talking about the hyper-personal, which often does include being extremely isolated, is almost the fastest way to tap into the masses.
It feels counterintuitive, but I think everyone struggles with the reality of human existence. So to have someone like Britney, with all of her fame and all of her glory, even though I couldn’t understand the lyricism deeply at that age, I’m sure endeared her to so many more people because of that vulnerability.
I was super young at that time. I was a ‘90s kid, but I wasn’t making memories in the ‘90s. My brain was still figuring out how to fuse together. But pop was everywhere. Everyone was listening to the radio, and it was dominated by the Top 40. There was hysteria around all of these pop icons, and I got excited about it. It was also an opportunity for me to not just connect with arenas of people, but also my classmates.
I loved the fact that we were all participating in this conversation, whether you love it or hate it. I think these were the early moments where I started realising that I needed to work in music, because the fact that people can feel so strongly about this thing is really fascinating to me from a cultural perspective, and on a personal level.
“Heaven” by DJ Sammy feat. Yanou & Do
This is more of a transition into Eurodance. How did you first get into it?
This definitely bridges back to radio. My mom is a huge Eurodance person. She was the person who originally got me into electronic music and dance music, which feels quite random for a mom to be into. She first showed me Diplo, for example. My mom loves dance music, and she has ever since she was at college.
Some of my most vivid memories growing up were being in the car, and as a kid, time spent in the car was so important to me. When my mom picked me up from school, or a friend’s house, or wherever, the radio was always on. There was this one radio station, C89.5, from Nathan Hale High School, and I thought that it was so cool that high school students could program a radio station.
My mom loved it, she would always have C89.5 blasting in the car. I think this was after the height of Eurodance and Europop, and whenever this song would come on, she would turn it up. There were other songs from that era, like “Better Off Alone” by Alice Deejay or “Listen To Your Heart” by Cascada, but when she was driving me around, this is what was always playing.
I loved seeing her access this part of herself that she never really got to as someone who was always going to work, or taking care of me, or my grandma, or whatnot. She would turn on dance music in the car and inhabit this version of herself that she didn’t get to anywhere else, except for maybe the club, which I wasn’t there for.
These were my first seedlings of falling in love with electronic music. It was the beat, the propulsiveness. There are elements of this in pop music too, but with Eurodance in particular, it’s so garish and maximalist in a way that’s liberating as a listener. It was like a door that opened.
It sounds really special to be able to connect with a part of your mom that she didn’t get to express often, and to see that the joy of experiencing dance music isn’t just limited to the club.
Totally! Bring the club to the car. That’s personally what I love about having a car. Whenever I go home, you can bet it’s C89.5 all day. When you grow up on radio, it’s a communal experience. And even as a kid, that was so powerful to me.
“Thank You for the Venom” by My Chemical Romance
Are we entering your emo phase?
Absolutely. It’s funny, because I was very much a pop girly down to my inner core, and then scene kid on the outer core, but then lover girl on the outside.
I remember this so distinctly, because if you’re listening to pop music and Eurodance, then your cousins from Orange County come to stay with you in Seattle for two weeks, and they pull out this CD that has two hand-drawn lovers splattered in paint, you’re like, ‘What the fuck am I looking at?’
It was a world apart from anything I’d seen before artistically, even just the album art alone. But then to listen to the music and be like, ‘Oh my God, this is a new world of music to me’. I didn’t realise that music could sound like that. My Chem was definitely not playing on the radio, or at least not the stations that I was listening to. It was one of those moments where I realised that if this world exists, there are so many other worlds that exist through music as well.
I love the aggression of it. I loved the deeply visceral emotion of all of the songs on Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, and all of them mean a lot to me. It also made me realise that I loved rock, the harder edge, the ferocity, and the different types of emotions that it could convey. It’s the same emotions that “Heaven” is also conveying, but in a totally different format and a totally different spiritual medium.
In the moment, I was probably like, ‘I’ve never heard anything like this. What is this? I need to understand it.’ But I think in hindsight it was so theatrical. The more that I listened to it, the more that. I fell in love with My Chem. And I mean, “Welcome to the Black Parade” is an even better example of the theatricalisation of music. But they were a band that made me realise just how creative the medium of music could be. That you can do so much within the confines of an album or a tour, and that definitely spun me out into a scene kid phase. I got super into pop punk at this point in time.
Gerard Way has said that My Chemical Romance was meant to be this very intense art project explored through the different concept albums. Do you feel like you picked up that intention at the time that you discovered Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, or does it come across as you revisit their work?
I do, and even more so now, if anything. Only because last year I went to MetLife and saw them in their hometown for the Long Live The Black Parade tour, which was incredible. I mean, the fact that they turned it into a play essentially felt like such an amazing realisation of the album. And for them to pivot into playing songs from all of the other records was amazing.
It was also really funny being at those shows too, because there were young kids there, and I thought, ‘Damn, this stuff is speaking to them too.’ Even though they didn’t grow up with it, and they weren’t even alive when it came out. As an art project, it still finds new people, and I still get a lot out of it. Most of it is nostalgia coded, but I definitely feel like it’s the art project thing.
The other aspect of their music that I’m appreciating in a new light is that they were initially inspired by 9/11 and started the band then, which I didn’t realise. So much of the music that I’m interested in now and have always been interested in is from the New York, New Jersey area, which I didn’t realise at the time, but now do realise, was deeply inspired by tragedy. So that’s a new way that I’m looking at the music; there are so many layers.
Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge is centred around grief, but “Thank You for the Venom” carries more resilience. Do you feel like you receive that message from the song?
I think I do. There’s a lot of mourning and loss on that record, and you don’t get a lot of bright moments. But the chorus on “Thank You for the Venom” is one of them. I also love this song because it’s so dynamic, and it plays with space in a really interesting way.
If you listen to My Chemical Romance on the whole, they do that really well, but to have captured it in a single song, it feels like all off the best parts of My Chemical Romance wrapped up in a couple of minutes. It’s a message of resilience on an otherwise pretty bleak album.
“Transatlanticism” by Death Cab for Cutie
“Transatlanticism” is a pretty devastating, epic song. How did you find it?
“Transatlanticism” is a really interesting one, because the way I found my way to that song was first through a live experience. This was in the post-Plans era, but at school, I’m growing up in Seattle, so Sub Pop music is everywhere. My friends were showing me Death Cab, and with Plans specifically, I rinsed that record. I would listen to it front to back repeatedly, and there’s so much death in that one too.
That one’s pretty bleak, but through this tender indie rock that only Ben Gibbard can do. This really poetic and beautiful, loving examination of loss and relationships. I was so taken by this way of songwriting, and it was yet another door that swung open, which was basically the antithesis of the aggression, fury, and rage of My Chem.
My friend was going to see Death Cab, and she had an extra ticket, so Death Cab was my second concert ever. I think this must have been during the Plans tour, and they closed with “Transatlanticism”.
It was the first time I’d felt that feeling of leaving my body, that transcendence. It was so powerful. Not in the dissociative, ketamine way, but in that ‘I’m deeply present, and I’m the most present I could possibly be’. I’m inside this piece of music, floating in the ether above all these people in the same arena, like the way that I saw Hilary Duff. I was so moved, and it felt like another revelatory moment for me.
With “Transatlanticism”, there’s a lot of uncomfortable space that you’re forced to sit in, which is quite different to the very full, intense sound of “Thank You for the Venom”. Do you feel like it helped you appreciate the use of space to bring out emotion in music?
I think it totally did. That was the first time I proactively engaged with a song that liberated itself from the confines of the pop structure. I have so much love for pop music still, but I think this was another lesson for me to learn that there are no rules. With My Chemical Romance, it was like, ‘Wow, I can’t believe they’re using the medium of music to do this bleak 9/11 art project’, while with Death Cab was like, ‘We are going to sit here and do nothing but play these beautiful, sustained guitar notes, and you will cry’.
But Gerard is right, and Britney is right, and Édith Piaf. So it definitely taught me a very important lesson in space, and also in letting a feeling breathe. Where ‘Thank You For The Venom’ might have been catharsis to meet a certain feeling, ‘Transatlanticism’ is more the act of capturing what the feeling actually sounds like. I think that distinction is something I’ve continued to be fascinated by throughout my career.
“It All Feels Right” by Washed Out
“It All Feels Right” feels much warmer, it’s a big contrast.
My depressive winter episode was over. I had a really hard time figuring out what Washed Out song I wanted, and I knew that it had to be from Paracosm. In general, the sound of Washed Out is summer, but it’s also like cinema. Another Sub Pop artist, I’m realising, but it’s so cinematic and so dreamy, and I love music’s ability to accompany moments.
There is a very specific reason that I chose a song from this record. As a writer, I’m a really big fan of words. I love diction, and paracosm in particular, is such an interesting word. The first time I’d ever heard it used was when this album came out. It’s a detailed, complex, immersive and imaginary world. It’s very specifically about a world that you build throughout your life, from childhood to adulthood.
But Ernest Greene was particularly inspired by Henry Darger, who was a janitor who did odd jobs throughout his life. After he passed away, when they were cleaning out his apartment, they found thousands of pages of novels he’d written and hundreds of illustrations to accompany these fictive works. That is a paracosm. And from that, I like the idea of someone having such a rich inner world that they develop over time and potentially never even share with anybody.
Without realising it, I’d always been looking for a way to describe what an album is to me. I think learning about this term was a light bulb moment, because with every album that comes out, we’re getting a glimpse into this world that has its own visual and musical language. It has its own priorities, storylines, characters, and the portal to that world is probably closed after the recording is done. I love the idea of albums being their own paracosms.
Paracosm, in particular, has such an interesting musical language to it. I think all Washed Out records do. He’s one of the few artists who create music but somehow occupy this space where people don’t even try to replicate that sound much.
With Mr. Mellow, the album that came after that in 2017, he played 150 different instruments on that record. He definitely embraces the idea of paracosm, where every record has its own sonic confines, where he’s developed the limitations and rules of each of these worlds. If you look at Washed Out on the whole, his entire discography is its own paracosm, because no one has tried to do his thing.
“Con Gái Của Mẹ” by Thanh Tuyền, Saigon Supersound
This is a Vietnamese song. I chose this song because I moved to Vietnam after I graduated. “Con Gái Của Mẹ” was released on Saigon Supersound, which is a whole album, but I wanted a song that represented my time in Vietnam. It was a really interesting time for me.
Thanh Tuyền has been regarded as a singer who’s been really important for preserving Vietnam’s cultural and musical identity and allowing that to resonate with Vietnamese people abroad. Do you feel like that was the case for you?
Definitely. There’s a compilation album that came out a long time ago called Saigon Rock & Soul, and it’s great. It’s specifically a kind of Vietnamese acid rock that was created between 1965 and 1974, but not as many people know about the Saigon Supersound series, which is another series of compilations that do exactly what you’ve just said. Preserving and documenting Vietnamese music pre-1975, but specifically music that has a vintage Western pop feel to it.
It’s interesting to be someone who was born here, whose parents were born in Vietnam, but prior to moving to Vietnam, I’d never been there. So, I always felt like my Vietnamese heritage was a bit at arm’s length. But then, finding out about Saigon Rock & Soul and Saigon Supersound, I realised that there was a time that, due to the multicultural aspects of war, there was a golden age of pop culture and music in Saigon.
Everyone was bringing over crazy psychedelic folk music and learning about that helped Vietnamese culture feel more accessible to me. And I love the actual sound of it as well. It’s so cool to hear Vietnamese music with this Western musical style. I feel like now you see a lot of Japanese and Korean music adopting more Western musical styles, but you don’t really get that with Vietnam.
So it was really cool that part of Vietnamese musical history is this time period where Western pop culture was infiltrating Vietnamese music.
“Kyle (i found you)” by Fred again..
We’re veering back into electronic territory. Fred again… was your first editorial interview, would you say that he’s a pretty notable artist for you?
He was. This pick is definitely a big career one. So much of what I was doing for KEXP was very much rooted in behind the scenes social media stuff, but as I was getting my hands dirty in editorial, I realised that I have a very profound love for telling stories, sharing music, and using my perspective or experience of interacting with music as a bridge to help other people understand music as well.
At this point in time, I’d done that through a number of essays, but never an interview. I’d been introduced to Fred through his debut album, Actual Life, in the week it came out because a couple of producer friends sent it to me. We were still in lockdown, more or less, but I’d just moved to New York, and it was such an interesting time to move there, because no one was outside. Everyone was quarantining. But then I got to see the city open back up, and that was really special.
It was interesting that with this album, at least the way I initially interpreted it, was him bringing so many different voices of people who were discussing or experiencing loneliness, grief, love, and longing, into one single, really beautiful tapestry. It was kind of a stand-in for the fact that we couldn’t all be together.
At the time, I thought it was such a beautiful companion piece to the pandemic, not knowing that it was actually not at all about the pandemic, but instead a very hyper-specific story about the grief that he was experiencing. But even then, it was cool to have the record be something that I was constantly turning to during the pandemic, and then the danciness of it soundtracked my experience of watching New York come back to life after things were lifting.
Once things were in full swing a year later, I figured I might as well interview him. And Dusty was like, ‘Yeah, if you can get an interview with him, let’s try it’. So I pitched him a track-by-track, and it ended up being my first artist interview at that point in time. I think I’d interviewed a couple members of staff, non-profit organisations, and an author by that time, but I’d never talked to an artist about music.
This track pulls from a spoken word poem, but it’s totally reimagined. Do you feel like this opened an appreciation for spoken word being used in music?
Definitely. I think the way that Fred was sampling people on this album opened up yet another door, because looking back at electronic music, having been co-opted by pop, it’s been sort of removed from the emotional core. People were using songs by The Chainsmokers, Diplo, and Swedish House Mafia. And they’re all great, but they were dominating the airwaves at this point.
So, to have Fred sample a bunch of spoken word pieces, especially Kyle, I think it’s profoundly beautiful. Fred said in that interview that Kyle’s words are the perfect blend of poetry and, this isn’t the exact word, but I’m going to say, practicality, because his poetry never gets in the way of the meaning of the piece. I think it’s so beautiful, and a really interesting way to collaborate. It’s an interesting way to have made a letter to someone he loves.
I think it’s shifted some tectonics plates in electronic music, where a lot of people are doing the emotional electronic thing and sampling in a different way now, which is great, but I do think that even on a personal level, it was really cool to hear this shift from a pop artist singing an amazing topline melody for a couple of times before moving on to a different song, to sampling someone processing something.
He wasn’t the first one to do that, and definitely not the last, but the way he did it was beautiful. He captured what it sounds like to find this person that you love, the awe and wonder of it, but also disbelief, and the euphoria coming out of this melancholy.
“Sickle Walk” by YHWH Nailgun
There’s a lot that I love about this song. YHWH was one of the first bands that I really fell in love with being here, and it’s kind of a funny story. I worked with Saguiv on a project involving Hello Mary, another band that I totally love, and Saguiv sent me early YHWH demos. I was like, ‘Holy shit, this is crazy.’
It’s got this percussive energy that’s so weird and danceable, but you can tell that Sam is a jazz drummer, Saguiv was doing some crazy shit on the guitar, then you have the low end rounded out by Jack and his insane synths, and Zach is delivering poetry in a strangled whisper. It’s some of the most outrageous music I’ve ever heard, and yet it speaks to this part of me that I still don’t really understand, and I’m still working to figure out. I think that’s what excites me about music in general, proactively engaging with it with confusion. It’s challenging and so rewarding.
To have Saguiv send me those early demos, and then to see what YHWH has managed to accomplish over the last few years, especially with their debut album that dropped last year, has been incredible. Because I’ve gotten to see them from that early stage to what they’ve built now, and they really do represent, in a lot of ways, this era of New York music. Like I was mentioning before in relation to My Chem, I see so many similarities between post-pandemic New York and post-9/11 New York, in the sense that people were faced with their own mortality, and there was so much stress that they needed to let out.
As the city was opening back up and venues were reopening, I felt this creative ferocity take over. I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m hearing some of the craziest music I’ve ever heard’, YHWH included. And now all those bands that emerged right after the pandemic are crystallising into these micro-scenes, their own little paracosms.
That’s why I find YHWH so interesting. They’re strange in a way that I find cathartic and compelling and visceral, like I’m staring over the cliff of no-wave-adjacent noise rock. They really represent the cool shit that’s happening here, and on a personal level, how much my music taste has shifted.
You’ve been championing YHHW for some time, you even included them in your ‘50 Bands Scoring New York’ post last year. Do you feel like platforming local bands is a necessary part of your platform, regardless of where you are?
That’s a good question. I do think so, yes. Even as I was preparing for this and thinking through my picks, so many of these songs and the reasons they’re important to me illustrate my fascination with fandom, culture, and experiencing music. For any given scene - and people will come at me sometimes about how I define a scene - take New York or even London, as long as you’re in either of those metropolitan areas, there’s an exchange of energy that happens, and that alchemy shows up in the music.
It’s so interesting to have a document of what’s happening in a space at a specific time, even if an artist is only there for two months, or two years, or two decades. Something very important is happening here right now, in the same way that something really important is happening in London.
As someone who covers music, I’m not even looking for a story to be told. I love celebrating what’s happening in a place because music is a reflection of that place. Maybe not unlike how this random confluence of cultures was happening in Saigon during the war, obviously in very different circumstances, but covering scenes has only made me more deeply appreciate where I live. Understanding where I am through what I listen to is something that’s fun for me, but also a cool way to process and synthesise the music being released.
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