Looking back and moving forward
Lynn Castle
“Rose Colored Corner” (Light in the Attic)
The respected Los Angeles-Seattle imprint Light in the Attic unearths another forgotten Southern California gem. In the mid-1960s, Lynn Castle was an L.A. hair stylist with aspirations far bigger than cutting the Byrds’ moptops (which she did).
After getting the attention of singer-producer Lee Hazlewood and his LHI imprint, Castle recorded a 1967 single, “The Lady Barber” backed with “Rose Colored Corner,” and headed into the studio with producer-arranger Jack Nitzsche to work out some demos.
“Rose Colored Corner” gathers that single and those demos, on which Castle sparsely accompanies herself on acoustic guitar. With a deep voice unafraid to growl and grumble, she maneuvers through her songs as Nitzsche guides her through the demo process.
The late producer, who made his name as Phil Spector’s engineer before turning to film scores (“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “The Exorcist” and “An Officer and a Gentleman,” among many others), understood something about echo and reverb, and surrounded Castle’s voice and guitar with them.
Those recordings never made it past the demo stage, but because of Light in the Attic’s access and good taste, Castle’s voice has finally wended its way into the musical conversation.
Ariel Pink
“Another Weekend” (4AD)
The Highland Parkbased singer and producer continues his vertiginous journey into the heart of AM radio. His mournful new song, the first solo work since 2014’s “pom pom,” addresses the passage of time as the artist born Ariel Rosenberg mourns the lost weekends gone by.
Like much of Pink’s immediately identifiable sound, “Another Weekend” suggests 1970s soft rock, if it were a little weirder and a lot more art-damaged.
He stacks his voice in layers, and his melancholy verses and choruses teem with woozy synthetic noises and ethereal background textures: “Another weekend I can’t rewind — another day not working for me.”
Dave Nada
“Teach Me How to Kizzy” (Soundcloud)
The Los Angeles-based underground production luminary is best known for his work with the duo Nadastrom, which is credited with inventing a whole dance music sub-genre called “moombahton.”
A fusion of house music and deep Afro-Latin rhythms, the instrumental, bass-heavy music has continued to evolve since its rise in the late-’00s; one of its primary producers, Dillon Francis, has since become one of the biggest names in electronic dance music.
“Teach Me How to Kizzy” confirms that Nada, born Dave Villeagas, is also evolving. The title is a riff on the hit “Teach Me How to Dougie” by the Cali Swag District, but references an Angolan music and dance made popular in Portugal called kizomba.
Nada also recently dropped two excellent mixes. The first is a moombahton collection that he spun on rapper Pitbull’s Sirius XM station, Globalization. The second is a mesmerizing mix of music from Fania Records, the great New York-based Latin label. Those mixes, as well as “Teach Me How to Kizzy,” can be found on Nada’s Soundcloud page.