Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0112 (July 25, 2025)

There seems to be a lot of new folks here today so some rehash is in order:

I’m Doug Mosurock. Like that Mitch Hedberg line about “I used to do a lot of drugs. I still do, but I used to, too,” I used to write about music. My main thing for a while was this column on Dusted called Still Single, which reviewed all the vinyl I could get my hands on from 2005-whenever. I did the bulk of that writing in NYC, but I moved to Chicago 10 years ago, and my output dwindled in the face of parenting, work, responsibilities, changing priorities (7 years tied to the albatross of community radio), etc.

Last year I decided I missed writing about music and started this newsletter. It publishes twice weekly and is mostly about new music, though I do dip back into the archives for crucial re-evaluations. If you like it, great, because a good chunk of it gets paywalled, and I hope you think it worth the $3 a month to stay with it. People say I’m pretty good at this, and I feel the 10 or so records a week covered here is a manageable amount for mid- to high-volume listeners to not get overwhelmed, and for bystanders to rejoin the thinning herd of those who know and care about what’s worth your time.

If you want to send in your music, I’ll check it out: Doug Mosurock, PO Box 25717, Chicago IL 60625 USA // [email protected] 

I drove a distance since yesterday, and join you now from Lewisburg, West Virginia, where I am in a beautiful Southern inn (The General Lewis) and wearing a comfortable bathrobe. I’ll be in North Carolina all week and you’ll be hearing from me on the beach.

Thanks for reading and I hope you like it.

SUPERMALPRODELICA x BLASON Mer Changeante 2xCD (Bruit Direct)

Challenges await: the only reliable place where I can listen to a CD is in my car, and I am really not in the mood to deal with Chicago traffic lately in a way where I can appreciate music as I’m driving, so a road trip it was. I popped this in as I departed a Freddy’s Steakburger (worst food imaginable) yesterday afternoon and needed a spiritual boost. Even more challenges: French and katakana? What am I, made out of languages? More stuff to unlock for when I had some time to investigate, so my listens were uninformed. Not for long though: disc one is filled with these plangent, pillowy, tactile melodies from a monophonic synth, short tracks which kept returning to as the CD looped back and started over. Chiptune seemed like a reference, but to a peaceful game that doesn’t exist, one where your character is bounding skywards on clouds and communing in caves (like the ones at the far eastern map of the last Zelda game for Switch), but no villains or frigid waters are in your way. Maybe not musically at all, it reminded me of seeing Tenniscoats and Susumu Yokota CDs at Other Music, wrapped in cellophane and beaming pleasantly from the shelves. Over on disc 2, welcome to Minus World, a depleted husk of the first disc, played on a different synth (perhaps note for note, or at least in deference to the other album), turning to dust while holding a long stem rose in slender fingers. Should I have played them together, Zaireeka style? I couldn’t (and they wouldn’t both fit in the CD player at once – I tried, folks). All I sensed was this personal joy over this careful music, and then the remnants of those sounds, as if a threshold was crossed that can never be rewound. Both records felt like singular experiences: resplendent life in a bespoke environment, then whatever comes after that ends.

Come to find that this is from two separate artists, three people among them, and why it sounded so perfect is that the songs belong to another; these are all re-interpretations of Scritti Politti’s surprise late-career entry White Bread Black Beer, a record I don’t have any memories of, covered song by song in this very specific style, then copied again in another. Supermalprodelica has the upside (performing on a cuddly synth called the Persephone); Blason, a duo, has the flip, run through an ARP. It’s unlike much I’ve had cause to listen to lately, which might be why it’s so effective, but you’ll probably agree that this takes up a special place, and pulls you back to a time when you could hold an import CD in your hands and know that you got something new and special from far away.

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