🎶 Kouek - Apogee (or: How I made music listening interesting again)
Taking back control of my music listening
(Feel free to skip this part, full thoughts about the album itself are below.)
Earlier this year, I decided to get back into listening to music through some sort of physical format. The lack of tactility which accompanies an all-digital music library seems to have killed the immersion that I remember having as a young adult; Taking a cassette or CD out of its case, inserting it into the player, hitting the play button and intently staring at the album art and track list while listening to something new and exciting. I simply don't feel connected to the actual listening experience in the same way that I used to.
Don't get me wrong; As a person who deeply loves music, having access to millions of songs with just a few clicks has made music discovery easier than ever, and a lot of the music I currently enjoy I would never have found without streaming services like Spotify. I don't want to give it up entirely, but with all the controversy surrounding streaming services starving artists of money (and thus their creative potential), and all the discourse around subscription-based business models killing our rights to actually own the things we buy, I figured the time was right to actually start buying music again.
MiniDisc has always been my favorite physical format for music. Cassettes had generally poor audio quality (but at least you could record them yourself). CDs were too flimsy; They would get scratched and their cases cracked so easily. They were also, in my opinion, too big. MiniDiscs were different. I loved the futuristic feel and look of this miniature re-writable disc encased in a colorful see-through shell that was compact enough to bring anywhere, but didn't need to be handled like egg shells for fear of breaking it. It had all the benefits and (perceptible) audio quality of a CD but with the durability of something like a 3.5" floppy disk, and was even smaller than both of those! As close to perfect as a physical format has ever been, imho.
Thus I decided to pull the trigger this summer and buy a used portable MD-player that I could hook up to my computer through USB. For the first time in many years I was once again able to get music off my computer and onto an actual physical disc that I could play back completely independently of any music app. It felt really good, but I didn't want to stop there. I wanted to buy new music on discs as well.
While excitedly researching where I could buy some music on MD (or at least digital downloads I could export to my MDs), I discovered that Bandcamp had a huge scene of vaporwave, synthwave, and future funk artists that were quite fond of releasing their music on retro formats like cassette, vinyl, and sometimes even minidisc. As I was browsing through the catalog of a particularly interesting label called My Pet Flamingo, I spotted the amazing album cover you can see above and thought it looked interesting. Little did I know that I was in for quite a ride!
So, what about this album?
Kouek is a french artist, and they don't have a lot of releases under their belt. In fact, Apogee is only their second album. But I tell you, when I first fired this album up back in June, I was immediately brought back to the glory days of french house; Daft Punk, Cassius, Modjo, Bucketheads. The kind of music where the sampling is obvious, but it's all about the way you put it all together and build around it to create something new and interesting.
The album consists of 14 tracks spanning a breezy 45 minutes, all infectious and memorable in their own right. In true future funk style, the majority of the album has pumping beats throughout, lots of filtering, and of course vocal and instrumental samples from the more obscure disco and funk music of yesteryear. The grooves are undeniable from the get-go, and I found it nearly impossible to keep my feet from tapping for almost the entirety of the runtime.
As bad luck would have it though, this album was not available for purchase as a minidisc physical copy. But the beauty of MD is that you can make them yourself, so I hit the buy button for the digital edition and immediately made myself a copy that I could use with my new player. I put it on a glorious transparent blue disc to match the album cover's vibe, and it immediately became a staple of my new physical music collection. The undeniable album of the summer for 2024.
Don't get me wrong, there's already been a ton of great music this year, and it's all gotten its share of plays on my end, but there was just something about the vibrancy and uplifting mood of this album that kept bringing me back to it. I will not be surprised if Kouek ends up as my #1 artist on Spotify this year as I've also listened to the album plenty when I'm driving, or just sitting at the computer. If you are even remotely interested in future funk, do not miss out on this! It's really, really good.
You can listen to the album in its entirety on Kouek's YouTube channel. Head to Bandcamp if you'd like to support the artist.
Favorite tracks: Only You, Seventy Kinds of Lovin', Stay, Heart, and Club Dial.