by Leander Cohen, editor-in-chief note: this originally ran in the June 2017 print edition of Bound Magazine I was first exposed to PC Music over Christmas break two years ago. For weeks I had obsessed over the online-persona of a certain upper-termer producer-DJ, and scrolling through his SoundCloud likes, I came across “Every Night” by Hannah Diamond. And I hated it. Why did the cover art look like it was stolen from a 2006 Radio Disney ad? Why was it so repetitive? Why were the lyrics so empty and meaningless? And who was Hannah Diamond? Since discovering Pitchfork as a seventh grader, I had prided myself on my music taste. I played LCD Soundsystem at parties; I shared all my Neutral Milk Hotel-filled Spotify playlists on Google Plus. A ninth-grader well-versed in all things “indie,” I wondered, How could my upper-termer idol like something this generic? I investigated the page that posted the track— PC Music. A British label founded in 2013 by A.G. Cook, a recent art-school graduate, “Every Night” was their most popular song. Combing through the page, I quickly discovered its diverse body of work— each artist had their own well-defined, distinct sound. For GFOTY (Girlfriend of the Year), it was shallow, Ke$ha-esque party girl lyrics over choppy, abstract instrumentals; for Kane West, it was cheap-sounding techno beneath computerized voices; for Hannah Diamond, it was simple, middle-school-romance- themed lyrics that often bordered on melancholy.
Last month, the label announced a “Month of Mayhem,” promising to release new material every day for the month of May. Not only did they follow up on this promise, they released some of their strangest, most inventive works to date. “POBBLES,” a collaboration with visual artist George Michael Brower, is a one- minute burst of bright, fast-paced pop, sung by a cast of smiling, animated balls. The vocals are high-pitched and heavily affected, the lyrics are unintelligible, but both the melody and the ball characters are incredibly endearing, making for a short, captivating project that begs to be replayed. In GFOTY’s “The Argument,” she sings entirely in gibberish, only adding in the occasional English word: “Harum, hum hum klum, crumb crumb crumb crumb cum, lum lum / Mair, marum, mum mum mum marum, a neuron.” In both these tracks, the meaning lies in the apparent absence of one; as listeners, our willingness to enjoy and engage with such unintelligible lyricism reveals our tendency to value certain pop conventions (a catchy instrumental) over others (meaning). This is what PC Music does best: through their outsider approach to the sounds and structures we associate with pop, they constantly blur the lines between satire and sincerity, leaving us, the listeners, to ask: What is this, and why do I like it so much? It’s in the warped, percussive synth-bleeps of SOPHIE’s “Lemonade” and the shrill, frothy vocal samples of Easyfun’s “Laplander” that PC Music shows us again and again that they can generate sounds that are intriguing and fun to listen to, all while adapting, parodying, and questioning the conventions of modern pop music. Constantly pushing boundaries and making us re-evaluate our notions of what pop music can be, PC Music is the alien world of pop I fell in love with.
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