𝒸𝓇𝓎𝓅𝓉𝑜𝓅𝒽𝒶𝓈𝒾𝒶 𝒾𝓈𝓈𝓊𝑒 𝟣𝟥

Greetings and welcome to issue thirteen of Cryptophasia. Time moves so strangely these days that we overlooked the one-year anniversary of this newsletter, which was just before we published issue twelve. Happy one year anniversary Cryptophasia. Thanks for reading.

𝟩𝟢𝟢 𝐵𝓁𝒾𝓈𝓈, “𝒮𝒾𝓍𝓉𝑒𝑒𝓃”

DJ Haram: Did you see this new 700 Bliss thing?

Moor Mother: Oh,  I don’t like 700 Bliss… I mean, they always talking about the end of the world and motherfucker this and motherfucker that… it’s just so dark.

DJ Haram: Literally who wants to hear that shit.

Moor Mother: Their first album was called Spa 700, but it wasn’t very spa-like.

DJ Haram: Spa in hell.

So we meet 700 Bliss, the formidable duo of polyglot opposition artist Moor Mother—in rap mode—with Philly’s DJ Haram, on a genius sketch that appears about halfway through their debut full-length, Nothing to Declare. Yes they have a sense of humor. Yes the songs that follow offer scathing interrogations of the histories of slavery, patriarchy, and capitalism, featuring esteemed collaborators like Special Interest frontperson Alli Logout and electronic-music iconoclast Lafawndah. Ease is not the point, but 700 Bliss approaches a pop structure on the simmering “Sixteen,” the tale of a teen runaway fleeing legacies of violence. “When I was sixteen/I called my mom on the phone/Said I ain’t never coming home,” Ayewa raps, dropping each line like a brick. “Tired of the bullshit/The world’s so violent/I just want my own island.” As these immeasurable stakes entangle with the ecstasies of the dancefloor, it becomes clear that Moor Mother and DJ Haram don’t only approach art as multidisciplinary: survival is a many-angled fight.

𝒮𝓉𝓇𝒶𝓌 𝑀𝒶𝓃 𝒜𝓇𝓂𝓎, “𝐹𝒶𝒸𝑒𝓈 𝒾𝓃 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝒟𝒶𝓇𝓀”

In New York City, the local non-profit newsroom The City has spent the past two years attempting to memorialize all 40,000+ New Yorkers who have died of COVID-19 through its harrowing “Missing Them” project; it’s the best any regional outlet has done, and it’s currently covered only an estimated six percent of the dead, proving the brutal reality that Straw Man Army evokes when dryly singing of “another life gone, unobserved.” Taken from the spartan post-punk duo’s latest full-length, SOS, “Faces in the Dark” documents the early months of 2020, when mobile morgues popped-up outside New York’s hospitals and local electeds exploited prison labor to dig mass grave sites: “For six bucks an hour, a mask and some gloves/A kid on Rikers Island lowers caskets from a truck.” When the lyrics land on a list of false stories we’re sold, “that some people are meant to die/They’ll tell you it was just their time,” the song's blunt deadpan gets at something deeper: the violent myths profiteering politicians and corporate elites normalize in order to justify relentless, preventable death.

𝒦𝒶𝓉𝒾𝑒 𝒜𝓁𝒾𝒸𝑒 𝒢𝓇𝑒𝑒𝓇, “𝐹𝐼𝒯𝒮/𝑀𝓎 𝐿𝑜𝓋𝑒 𝒞𝒶𝓃’𝓉 𝐵𝑒”

As if anticipating the impending collapse, the D.C. rock band Priests played its final show on December 31, 2019—maybe they were just paying attention. The questions Priests posed in their eight-year existence ring even louder now: What does it mean to make politically engaged art? Does it have to make sense? Vocalist, producer, and songwriter Katie Alice Greer is following similar lines of inquiry on the first single from her solo full-length debut, Barbarism. Its title evokes a famous Rosa Luxemburg quote: “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads,” the Polish revolutionary once wrote, “either transition to Socialism or regression into Barbarism.” Greer’s palette of clattering industrial noise and hovering, almost disembodied hooks is fittingly provocative. Written at summer 2020’s edge of isolation and uprising, Greer sings of being watched, and of what happens beyond our watch. In the end, this uncanny song seems to process whether or not to make art now at all: “I need a reason to sing/I need to wait in the wings, you said/But tell me, aren’t we the ones that we were waiting for us to be?”

𝒿𝑜𝓎𝓇𝒾𝒹𝑒!, “𝒜𝓇𝒸𝒽𝒾𝓋𝒾𝓈𝓉”

Jenna Marx is a diary-keeper, a note-taker, a list-maker. As a pop-punk lyricist, she has a knack for excavating the depths of heart and mind in both first-person and through characters, in novelistic miniatures spun out in sugarrushing doubletime. She’s among the genre’s best at empathetically rendering the interior lives of women, how the world pressures them to disappear: girls physically shrinking themselves, mothers perpetually ignored. On her Bay Area trio joyride!’s fifth full-length, Miracle Question, she’s as attuned as ever to the fine-print of life. “Archivist” finds Marx singing of the city where she’s “the last one left living,” of fears of loss and leaving, of holding tight to her memories, collecting them in pages and pictures. “Every record, it was flawless/I documented all of it,” she intones, her voice as weary as it effervescently proud. “Because I was afraid I would forget/And I want to remember all of this.”

𝐸𝓇𝒾𝒸𝒶 𝒟𝒶𝓌𝓃 𝐿𝓎𝓁𝑒, 𝒱𝒾𝒸𝑒 𝒞𝑜𝑜𝓁𝑒𝓇, 𝐵𝓇𝑜𝓃𝓉𝑒𝓏 𝒫𝓊𝓇𝓃𝑒𝓁𝓁, “𝒯𝒽𝑒 𝐼𝓂𝓂𝑜𝓇𝓉𝒶𝓁𝓈”

“The Immortals” sounds like a dejected daydream of 1960s teen-pop, lost in time. It only makes sense that Bikini Kill’s touring guitarist Erica Dawn Lyle and drum tech Vice Cooler thought to send it over to West Coast underground rock’n’roll legend Brontez Purnell for vocals as part of the charity album Land Trust: A Benefit for Northeast Farmers of Color. For the collection, Lyle and Cooler collaborated remotely on instrumentals, and invited a guest singer to complete each track, including Kathleen Hanna, Kim Gordon, The Raincoats, Rachel Aggs, and others. “Nobody sees us and/Nobody stops us/Nobody betrays us, and/The door will not be locked when/We will last eternal,” Purnell sings, coolly and wearily, like a prayer for the marginalized and overlooked. “We will live forever.” Put into this thinking-dancing guitar pop song, it’s another step closer to the truth. “Art is like a message in a bottle,” Purnell said in a 2019 interview. “You’re just throwing it in the ocean, hoping someone gets it.”