7th Level Music

WSND DJ set list: Manic Monday – June 01, 2026

Thanks to everyone who tuned in for my latest all-80s Manic Monday show on WSND. Here’s the massive set list:

Stevie Nicks – Edge of Seventeen (1981)
Sheena Easton – The Lover in Me (1988)
Genesis – Invisible Touch (12” mix) (1986)
Frankie Knuckles – Your Love (1989)
Diana Ross – It’s My Turn (1980)
Van Halen – Jump (1983)
David Lee Roth – Coconut Grove (1985)
Eddie Van Halen – Donut City (1984)
Tears for Fears – Everybody Wants to Rule the World (alternative single version) (1985) (request)
Whitesnake – Is This Love? (1987) (request)
Lionel Ritchie – You Are (1983)
Bryan Adams – Summer of ’69 (live) (1985)
Wall of Voodoo – Mexican Radio (live) (1983)
Katrina and The Waves – Mexico (1985)
Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark – Enola Gay (long version) (1980)
The Jesus and Mary Chain – Taste the Floor (1985)
The Clash – Look Here (1980)
Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers – Refugee (1980)
Motörhead – Heart of Stone (1982)
Depeche Mode – People Are People (1984)
Klymaxx – Meeting in the Ladies Room (1984)
Menudo – Hold Me (1985)
Amy Grant – Find a Way (1984)
Dokken – Alone Again (1985)
Hall & Oates – Possession Obsession (1984)
Kenny Loggins – Forever (1985)
Don Henley – Not Enough Love in the World (1984)
Bon Jovi – Only Lonely (1985)
The Hooters – All You Zombies (1982)
Imagination – Just An Illusion (1982)
The Cramps – Human Fly (1984)
Living Colour – Cult of Personality (1984)
Circle Jerks – Beverly Hills (1980)
Samantha Fox – I Wanna Have Some Fun (1988)
Men Without Hats – The Safety Dance (1982)
Godley & Creme – Under Your Thumb (1981)
Midnight Oil – River Runs Red (1989)
Suzanne Vega – Luka (1987)
Peter Schilling – Major Tom (Coming Home) (1983)
Prince – When Doves Cry (1984)
Nik Kershaw – Wouldn’t It Be Good (12” mix) (1984)
The Sugarcubes – Birthday (1987) (request)
Paula Abdul – Straight Up (1988)
Steve Winwood – Roll with It (1988)
Ray Noble & Al Bowlly – The Shining trailer music (1980)
Vangelis – Wait for Me (1982)
Eddie Rabbit – I Love a Rainy Night (1980)
Blondie – Call Me (1980)
NRBQ – Me and the Boys (1980)
XTC – Senses Working Overtime (1982)
The Stranglers – Golden Brown (1982)
Romeo Void – A Girl in Trouble (Is a Temporary Thing) (1984)
Martha and The Muffins – Echo Beach (1980)
The Korgis – Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime (1980)
Giorgio Moroder – Together in Electric Dreams (12” extended version) (1984)
Eddy Grant – Electric Avenue (1982)
New Order – Thieves Like Us (1983)
Hipsway – The Honeythief (1986)
Buckner & Garcia – Pac-Man Fever (1981)
The B-52s – Private Idaho (1980)
Dire Straits – Money for Nothing (live) (1985)
Bauhaus – She’s in Parties (1983)
Siouxsie and The Banshees – Spellbound (1981)
The The – This Is the Day (1983)

Come back next week for another all-80s marathon on WSND!

Keep your mind open.

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WSND DJ set list: Nocturne – May 31, 2026

Thanks to everyone who listened to my latest Nocturne show of new and used music on WSND! Here’s the set list:’

Adam and The Ants – It Doesn’t Matter
The Body Shop radio ad
Menace – Electrocutioner
Bad Religion – There Will Be a Way
Bad Religion – Don’t Sell Me Short
Blackwater Holylight – Void to Be
Boy Harsher (featuring Ms. BOAN) – Machina (request)
L’appel Du Vide – Verschlungen
Devo – Jerkin’ Back & Forth
Warner Brothers “It’s the plastic” radio ad
The Beach Boys – Good Vibrations
The Black Angels – Bad Vibrations
Hüsker Dü – All Work and No Play (live)
Alice in Chains – Sludge Factory (live)
Failure – Enjoy the Silence
American Sharks – Not Dead Yet
TV on the Radio – Happy Idiot
Treat Her Right – Gilded Splinters
Morphine – Imaginary Song
Radio ad for The Nazz
The Nazz – See What You Can Be
Soledad Brothers – Lay Down This World
Elephant Stone – Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin
Tafo ft. Nahid Akhtar with Medhi Hassan – Zambo Zambo
Cat O’Nine Tails radio spot
Rituals of Mine ft. KRIS – Free Throw
Rival Consoles – Gaivotas
Crystal Castles – Celestica
The Chord Memory Club – Recipe for Justice
Abdiodun Oyewole – Somebody Else’s Idea (Baris K & Mini Bashekim remix)

Tune in next week for more new and used music!

Keep your mind open.

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WSND DJ set list: Deep Dive of Run-DMC

Thanks to all who listened to my deep dive of Run-DMC on WSND, celebrating the birthday of Darryl “DMC” McDaniels. Here’s the set list:

Run-DMC – It’s Tricky
Kurtis Blow – The Breaks
Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five – The Message
Run-DMC – It’s Like That
Orange Krush – Action
Beastie Boys – Sucker MCs (live)
Riot – Born in America
Run-DMC – Rock Box
Run-DMC, Kool Moe Dee, Special K – Rap battle
Run-DMC – King of Rock (live)
Run-DMC – Roots, Rap, Reggae
Yellowman – Noboby Move Nobody Gets Hurt
Run-DMC – Can You Rock It Like This
LL Cool J – The Boomin’ System
Krush Groove ad
Sheila E – A Love Bizarre
Fat Boys – All You Can Eat
New Edition – Mr. Telephone Man
Run-DMC – My Adidas (request)
The Knack – My Sharona
Run-DMC – Peter Piper
Run-DMC & Aerosmith – Walk This Way
Smashed Gladys – It Ain’t Right
Run-DMC – You Be Illin’
Run-DMC – Run’s House (request)
Run-DMC – Mary, Mary
The Monkees – Mary, Mary
Run-DMC – Radio Station
Coke Escovedo – I Wouldn’t Change a Thing
Tougher Than Leather ad
Run-DMC – Ghosbusters 2 theme (DJ Richie Rich remix)
Run-DMC – Faces
Run-DMC – Don’t Stop
John Davis & The Monster Orchestra – I Can’t Stop
Run-DMC – Down with the King (request)
Moby – Bodyrock
Third Eye Blind – Graduate
Run-DMC – Together Forever (live)

Be sure to tune in next week for another Deep Dive!

Keep your mind open.

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Rewind Review: The Limiñanas / Laurent Garnier – De Pelicula (2021)

Take psych-rock / ye-ye giants The Limiñanas and combine them with DJ / producer Laurent Garnier and what do you get? De Pelicula – a super-groovy, super-trippy album that tells the tale of two lovers in a film soundtrack format. The album’s title even means something akin to “like something out of a film.”

“Saul” is a mysterious track about a man who loves film and music but isn’t happy with life until he meets a young woman and decides to leave everything behind to follow her. Saul (“A small town guy.”) and this woman, Juliette (A “beautiful and gentle” prostitute), are prominent figures throughout the record. “Je rentrais par le bois…BB” (“I was returning / coming home through the woods…BB”) is a slightly frightening psych-drone track with Garnier’s synths creating a weird landscape and Marie Limiñana‘s beats creating a slightly paranoid sense.

“Juliette dans la caravanne” (“Juliette in the trailer.”) has Saul meeting Juliette in her 1960s trailer for a rendez-vous that changes his world and unsettles him. “Que calor” brings in Spanish lyrics instead of the French you’ve heard so far. Lionel Limiñana uses a mellotron and organ to neat effect here and the entrance of his fuzzy guitar turns your head into a strong wind.

“Promenade oblique” is another solid instrumental track with a groovy bass line from Lionel. “Te tournes en boucle” (“You’re turning / going in circles.”) is a twisting, looping track that details Saul feeling lost until Juliette shows up to pull him back into a clearer headspace. “Steeplechase” races along with some of Marie’s snappiest drumming and Garnier’s spy movie car chase scene-like synth pulses.

“Juliette” is the tragic backstory of the female half of our lovers in this tale, told through haunting synths and raging guitar. Juliette, born to a single drug-addicted mother, drifts into drugs and eventually kills a pastor who takes advantage of her…only for her to end up a party girl on drugs and having sex for money. “Ne gâche pas l’aventure humaine” (“Don’t spoil / waste the human adventure.) repeats the lyric of “Je t’aime.” (“I love you.”) again and again as siren-like synths give us a warning of what’s ahead for our star-crossed lovers.

“Au début, c’était le début” (“At first, it was the beginning.”) has Garnier taking lead vocals that sound like he’s mourning for lost times, reflecting Saul’s wish for something better for he and Juliette. He doesn’t get those better times, however, because at the end of the album, on “Saul s’est fait planter,” (“Sault got stood up.”), Juliette leaves him. She gets on a train and never returns. That’s French cinema for you.

It’s a cool record telling a cool story with cool grooves. You won’t regret taking this trip.

Keep your mind open.

[N’oubliez pas de vous abonner!]

Bad Stuff’s new single, “Invisible Man,” is actually good stuff.

Photo credit: Rachel Lemoine & Mia Yannimaras

Bad Stuff share “Invisible Man” (https://youtu.be/4c3g8la29Dc), the second single from their forthcoming self-titled debut album, Bad Stuff, arriving June 5 via Relapse Records. Featuring members of True Widow (Dan Phillips and Nicole Estill) with Dallas art rock luminaries Jackie Dunn Smith, Gabriel Spatz, and Laura Hartman Pearl, the band channels hypnotic post-punk, blown out garage rock, and slow-burning heaviness.

“The song that would later become ‘Invisible Man’ was one of the first songs I wrote specifically for Bad Stuff,” explains Phillips. “I made a drum machine demo on my ADAT machine and sent it to Gabe with a gibberish vocal track so he could hear the melody and phrasing I had in mind, but when I got it back, he had sung over a part I had not intended to have vocals on. I started to tell him ‘eyo, don’t sing on this part,’ but immediately changed my mind because it was actually way cool. Now I can’t imagine the song without that part. One-take Gabe needs no editing.”

Spatz adds: “Yeah, I’m glad that part stayed in the song. Some of my favorite lines are in there; lines that kind of expand the meaning of the song for me. I remember singing it into my phone in the bathroom and on the roof of my building and having to retake it over and over again because I kept getting interrupted by the sound of horns and barking dogs.”

Bad Stuff first introduced themselves with the debut single “Summer Girls,” a simmering track anchored by hypnotic circular rhythms, low end drone, and Phillips’ unmistakable guitar work.

The band began as two separate projects: Latent Print, an instrumental outfit featuring Phillips and Estill, and Concord Kill, Dunn Smith’s synth and drum machine driven project. “So these songs from our two bands are sitting there, one set that I wrote for Latent Print and another set that Jackie wrote on a four-track recorder, and one day we decided that maybe we’d try to put it all together and see if it worked,” recalls Phillips. “And it did. When we were doing the sequence for the record, that “switching the dial“ thing became apparent– there’s not just one sound or one style. It really makes the pacing of the record work and sort of showcases each of the songs.”

Bad Stuff is available now for pre-order/pre-saves (https://orcd.co/badstuff) on vinyl, CD, and digitally.

Keep your mind open.

[Not subscribing is bad stuff indeed.]

[Thanks to Monica at Speakeasy PR.]

Review: Rare DM – Attention

It’s no surprise that Rare DM (Erin Hoagg) titled her new, entirely self-produced and recorded album Attention. The whole thing demands your attention, and your pulse.

Opening track “Compliment” hits all the right beats and gets your pulse elevated for what’s to come. You’ll need the energy for all the dancing, and Rare DM’s often breathy vocal delivery is as seductive as the beat. “The Ring” throbs in your head and your hips, and, yes, it’s about the Japanese horror film Ringu and the wicked ghost in it who slays people via VHS tape. Rare DM loves blends of music and visuals, technology and humanity, sex and science fiction. It’s a perfect fit.

“Honey” has a drifting, floating, tactile sound that sounds like a cool darkwave track you haven’t heard in years. The question on Rare DM’s mind at the beginning of “Mean Girled” is “We’re not even fuckin’, but am I worried about you?” She’s trying to figure out a weird relationship dynamic and if it’s worth taking to another level or if she should just walk away.

“Butterfly Historian” is drenched in muted bass and sultry sweat. “325” might be the best love song about a vehicle since Queen‘s “I’m in Love with My Car.” Speaking of vehicles, the next track is “LA Traffic,” in which Rare DM laments (over drum and bass beats) over being stuck in it while friends wait for her at the club. “Lil DM” has her wishing for at least a night free of phone calls and e-mails.

“Skater Hits Me Harder” has Rare DM looking back on an adolescent crush through the lenses of adulthood and time. “Significant Other” is an instrumental banger. “Do you like me better, now that I’m like you?” Hoagg asks on the near-industrial “Feel Nothing.” She’s come to realize that she doesn’t need what her lover is selling. The album ends with the lush “Landed,” showcasing Hoagg’s misty voice and sunlight-through-the-fog synths (most of which, by the way, are vintage gear she’s collected from all over NYC).

Pay attention to this album. You’ll notice something different every time.

Keep your mind open.

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[Thanks to Andi at Terrorbird Media.]

Top 25 albums of 2021 – 2025: #’s 5 – 1

Here we are. The top five albums I reviewed in the last five years. I revised this list of all twenty-five records several times. It wasn’t easy to get here, but here we go.

#5: The Black Angels – Wilderness of Mirrors (2022)

This was a great return for my favorite band. The Black Angels came back in 2022 with anger about the past and hope for the future. It was a psychedelic, heavy reflection on the current times, what came before, and what was looming.

#4: Shame – Drunk Tank Pink (2021)

The album’s name refers to a color that’s often painted in jail cells to calm rowdy people. This post-punk album blends rowdy rage with punk riffs and cutting lyrics about how bonkers the world was back then…and still is.

#3: Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs – Land of Sleeper (2023)

Good heavens, this thing is massive. Pigsx7 unleashed an album that was designed to shake us out of our doldrums and also explore the weird world of dreams and how they merge with reality. It rocketed into my “best of” list for 2023 upon my first listen, and their tour for this was solid.

#2: A Place to Bury Strangers – Synthesizer (2024)

Speaking of albums that landed in my “best of” lists for a particular year and then never moved out of it, how could I not include an album by APTBS that, no joke, you can turn into an actual synthesizer. The album cover is a circuit board. You can create music with this thing. Plus, the whole album shreds. It’s a stunning work that I think only they could imagine and then execute so well.

#1: Matthew Halsall – An Ever Changing View (2023)

I almost didn’t hear this album or discover Halsall’s work. It got buried in a big stack of unread e-mails and press releases and I didn’t open the file until late fall of 2023, not long before I was about to make my “Best of 2023” list. Lo and behold, it was the most beautiful album I’d heard all year. “Ambient jazz” doesn’t describe it well enough. It’s an album that instantly changes the atmosphere around you for the better.

There you have it. Up next, my top twenty-five concerts of the last five years…which was more difficult to determine than this list.

Keep your mind open.

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Félicia Atkinson creates new score for a classic French horror film.

Today, renowned French musician and artist Félicia Atkinson announces new album SANS VISAGE, a reimagined score for Georges Franju’s cult 1960 horror classic Les yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face), out June 26 via Viernulvier Records. The news arrives alongside lead preview “Les Yeux II” and follows her recently released collaborative album with Christina Vantzou, Reflections Vol. 3: Water Poems, via RVNG Intl., as well as her acclaimed solo releases Promenades and Space as an Instrument on Shelter Press.

Atkinson first saw Les yeux sans visage when she was a teenager, around the turn of the century. The film made an impact for its iconic imagery and the way Franju draws on the aesthetics of early filmmaking, from its score that relies on stylistic markers typical of the 1940s or 50s to the decision to shoot in black and white. Even four decades after its first release, it was clear that this was a work that stood outside of the cultural moment that birthed it, speaking through time in ways that were uncanny, but profound.

A quarter-century later, Atkinson was approached by the Belgian cultural center VIERNULVIER to create a new score for Les yeux sans visage for its celebrated Videodroom series, which has seen artists like claire rousay, Mabe Fratti, Lee Renaldo, and many more create new original scores for cult classics and genre cinema. Atkinson’s music, with its sublime meditations on space and proximity, its elusive sense of narrative development, mirrors the pacing and mystery at the heart of horror filmmaking. There is a shadow at the heart of her soundtrack to Les yeux sans visage, an ever-shifting wisp and an insinuation of encroaching transfiguration. Echoing a climactic moment in the film, the music obliquely points to “the Beyond,” an impossible place of discovery and revelation.

Atkinson envisioned her music as something akin to the air moving throughout and beyond the many cages that appear in the film, unconstrained by the bars and with undefined borders. Those cages hold the victims of a madman surgeon, determined to graft a new face onto his daughter, the protagonist Christiane Génessier, who lost hers in a car accident while he was behind the wheel. Atkinson was reminded of her predecessors at the pioneering French studio the GRM, who approached sound in a less sinister, but similarly surgical manner, and took inspiration from their playful approach to cerebral soundmaking for the electroacoustic topography into which the piano is embedded. As such, Atkinson’s reactions to the larger themes and the minute-by-minute happenings onscreen are both audible simultaneously.

A film about a man who destroys the lives of young women marked by their beauty and similarity to his daughter in a shame-fueled rage has clear, continuous cultural resonance. “Through the music, I decided to bring back their empowerment despite what they endure,” says Atkinson. “This is why the record is also dedicated to Gisèle Pelicot, whose trial happened while I was in the process of composing the music and kept thinking of her strength and her decision to share her trial in order to reverse the shame.”

This recorded version of the soundtrack is a 34-minute synthesis of the full 90-minute score, presented on LP along with an essay by writer-musician Claire Cronin and drawings by Momo Gordon, together forming a complex reflection on the film’s themes. If these sounds move as if the bars of cages are no barrier, they also intimate the freedom and power of those held behind them. Rather than simply mirroring the fear and confinement shown onscreen, Atkinson offers an elusive escape, a beacon for the characters, and the listener, to follow as they reckon with the narrative and move through it.

Listen to “Les Yeux II” above and stay tuned for more from Félicia Atkinson ahead of the full release of SANS VISAGE on June 26 via Viernulvier Records.

Keep your mind open.

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[Thanks to Cody at Terrorbird Media.]

Top 25 albums of 2021 – 2025: #’s 10 – 6

We’ve reach the top ten albums I reviewed in the last five years. It gets more difficult to make these lists as the numbers grow smaller, but here goes.

#10: Yard Act – The Overload (2022)

These post-punkers seemed to come out of nowhere and hit us with multiple sharp singles from their debut. The whole album was witty, biting, and wicked.

#9: King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard – PostDragonic Apocalypse; or, Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation (2023)

Part-thrash metal, part-environmental activism record, all great. The title and cover image alone let you know you’re in for a wild time, and King Gizz pull no punches on it.

#8: DITZ – Never Exhale (2025)

A whole post-punk album about tension – a topic that post-punk does very well, as do these Brits. The cover image conveys the sense of the record and, like the music, puts you on edge and keeps you there.

#7: Aaron Frazer – Introducing… (2021)

Stepping out from his main gig with Durand Jones and The Indications, Frazer dropped one of the best soul records of recent memory and probably got a thousand date offers just from the first couple tracks.

#6: Gum / Kenny Ambrose-Smith – Ill Times (2024)

This dynamic Australian duo created a cool, electro / dance-rock record that tackled grief and uncertainty. It made you want another one from them right away. I still do.

Who made the top five? Come back tomorrow. It was a tough call, but I made it.

Keep your mind open.

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Cornelius unveils long-awaited new music with “Yumenemi.”

Today, Cornelius returns with his first new music in years, opening a long-awaited new chapter on Eat Your Own Ears Recordings. His new single, a cover of “Yumenemi,” was originally released in 1989 by one of Japan’s most iconic singer-songwriters, Yosui Inoue, and remains a cult Balearic classic.

Reimagined through Cornelius’s singular lens, the track marries his signature collage-like production, intricate rhythmic detail and soft-focus electronics with a lilting tropicalia inflection, for a swirling, heady track befitting of it’s title, which roughly translates to “dreaming”.

Watch the video for “Yumenemi” here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sqPMEL21PE
Other streaming links:https://cornelius.lnk.to/yumenemi

The new track arrives following a recent resurgence of interest in his work, including a viral TikTok moment and a nod from Rosalía, who featured “Typewrite Lesson”, originally a b-side from Cornelius’s iconic 1997 album ‘Fantasma’, in her Met Gala–themed Vogue playlist of all-time favourites.

Cornelius is the musical project of Japanese multi-instrumentalist Keigo Oyamada, who began his career in his teens and launched the Cornelius name in the early 1990s after his band Flipper’s Guitar. The project takes its name from Planet of the Apes.

He broke internationally with 1997’s Fantasma, a genre-blurring album of cut-and-paste production that drew comparisons to Beck and The Beastie Boys and was released worldwide by Matador Records. Often dubbed a “modern-day Brian Wilson,” Oyamada became a sought-after producer and remixer, a “musician’s musician”, collaborating with artists including Blur, Beck, Sean Ono Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Plastic Ono Band, Haruomi Hosono, James Brown and many others.

With 2002’s Point, Cornelius shifted toward intricate loops of organic sound sources, from water droplets to vocoder-heavy reinterpretations, pushing his meticulous sound design further on 2007’s Sensuous. His live shows are renowned for precision-synced visuals, custom lighting, and immersive, band-led performances that treat the stage as a fully integrated audio-visual system.

The companion release Sensurround + B Sides was nominated for Best Surround Sound Album at the 2009 Grammy Awards.

“Yumenemi” marks the start of a long-awaited new body of work, set to unfold over the coming months.

Cornelius links:
https://www.corneliusjapan.com/
https://www.instagram.com/corneliusofficial/
https://www.facebook.com/corneliusofficial
https://x.com/corneliusjapan
https://www.eatyourownears.com/releases
https://eatyourownearsrecordings.bandcamp.com/

Keep your mind open.

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[Thanks to Kate at Stereo Sanctity.]