ENTER THE OUT HOUSE
A new genre of dance music pokes out its little turtlehead
On Sunday, latent saint and founder of the iconic label Ghostly Sam Valenti IV premiered a new mix of ours on his always-superb Substack Herb Sundays. Sunday’s post also featured a new mix from Olof Dreijer (ex-The Knife) and a longform piece on Olof by Sam. His writing is both sharp and casual. To receive praise from him is to be draped in garland. That’s because he holds the knowledge and power to decimate you. We’re talking about the Ghostly Twitter Night Manager here. He’s singlehandedly sniped legions of shit DJs from his nightly Twitter perch.
Last year, on Herb Sundays, he featured one of our favorite artists, Okay Kaya. For our money, his piece remains the definitive writing on her art. See for yourself:
“In 20 years, I presume her work will be a good touch point for the moment we are currently living in. It’s alive to every smile, but with something stalking our every move. She’s cool in that very real way, and very much online it seems, whether making a music video with Pokémon Go, using DALL-E for one, or showing up on the soundtrack of Hideo Kojima 2019’s Death Stranding video game. Like fellow polymath Martine Syms (Herb 68), she shares her experiences in mental health, sex, and love very candidly but never loses her detached eye.”
His posts are full of good shit like that. In fact, we imagine you’re probably here now at ULYSSA TV because of his post way back in April when he mentioned our <1000 BEYOND BAGGY collection, writing: “A cool analog for [Blackbird Spyplane] in music may be the Bloomington, Indiana-based label/collective, Ulyssa whose cassettes and playlists are always worth a look. They invent genres, including the <1,000 series (less than 1000 plays on Spotify) and the important Toejazz oeuvre which embarks on finding proto-litefunk tunes that could sit next to songs from the video game ToeJam and Earl (1991) on the aforementioned Sega Genesis. The new <1,000: Beyond Baggy playlist pulls in cuts that sound like beautiful K-Mart versions of Everything But The Girl.”
Our Herb mix, Out House, is quite simply vernacular dance music — achieving undeniable, ass-freeing beats through peculiar, if not backasswards, methods. This mix is intended to build like a proper DJ set at 11 PM on the sands of Ibiza. Your body is a rubber bag of warm water. A couple electric eels are set loose inside of you. They zip and zap up and down your extremities. We achieve frenzied skullcap liftoff by midnight, only to lay you down gently into a bed of fluffy steaming rice. We suggest a 10 second crossfade if possible. The <1000 lifestyle groove is in the heart.
Using proprietary trade secrets to bypass the algorithm’s demonic banality, ULYSSA is able to identify and sift through hundreds of thousands of hours of musical content, uploaded to CD Baby once upon a time and forgotten in the void. And using our own innate curious tastes, we are able to pluck diamond after diamond from the tumult. We’ve found genius in this bottomless trench. Often, we come across would-be musical communities separated by the decades and by the continents, new genres and scenes comprised of complete strangers: Toejazz, Popilepsy, Beyond Baggy, Pontoon Spiritual, Dub & Dubber. Now, we’ve found an Out House community of artists who will never know each other exists.
Of Out House, Sam writes:
“The Out House mix (very much Outsider music) is their version of a dance playlist, and features some of the most oddly captivating music I’ve heard this year. The Inga McDaniel track is so humid that the rhythm is practically falling off the rest of the song. The fake crowd noise of “Photo Shoot” would make this a top 10 easily on Boomkat’s annual charts. When I got to “Sloth Groove” in my car it just about finished me off for good, the chunky bells and the errant guitar blasts were all too much. Then there’s the beautifully named project NEV (Aka DJ JunglePHD) who lays down the thin vasectomystep sound in “Did You See” to maxx effect.
The terrifying thing is that the Ulyssa boys have a lot more of this in store. You are advised to follow them on Bandcamp or Substack to follow their genre tributaries.
Heralding the “<1000” plays sound is digging at its best, a balm against rote popularity and convention. I was chuffed to see their playlist share inspiration with my Herb 51 mix, a faux Ibizian dance party. Theirs is way more wigged though.”
Huge thank you to Sam for the love. Feeling very seen and heard.
And *SPOILER ALERT* we’re working on a very special project with the artist Inga McDaniel that Sam highlights. We found her music in the abyss of Spotify and she just happens to live 8 blocks from my front door. No shit. The <1000 life keeps giving.
ENTER THE OUT HOUSE: