Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0119 (August 19, 2025)

It’s kind of the cruelest trick that now I’m free of one responsibility to get up and go in the morning, only to face a new, earlier moment to rise, as I don’t live as near the school anymore and am eager not to get stuck in the rush of dropoff. Hell, I got resumes to send out and cover letters to write now. What it means is that hopefully Heathen D will be getting to your inbox earlier in the day until there’s a hog butcher in sight willing to give me bacon to bring home again. Yes, I need a job, a digital product to manage or team to direct. KPIs, OKRs, the things you don’t miss until they’re gone.

Fittingly, my stereo receiver is about to shit the bed, and I need to replace it, cheaply and quickly and reliably. It won’t stop the writing here but it would make it a lot easier if I had something that worked. Any advice is welcome.

Movies watched recently can be read about. I might use Letterboxd more than any other app. What a shelter it provides, too. It’s a big tent, one for our youngest cinephiles to shitpost in, while some rando chides you for not knowing Ernest Borgnine was up for a part in The Godfather Part II and didn’t get it. It’s a great place to show us how smart you are, an oddly level playing field for everyone who lives in the glow of movies like a poncho.

I want to start a microcinema. Do you run one? Can you tell me about it?

Heathen D runs twice a week and aren’t you glad for that? Subscriptions are cheap (only $3 a month) and you’ll get the full contents of each newsletter plus the long tail of the archives. 119 newsletters in the space of a year is a feat; I’ll do 119 more, I don’t give a fuuuuuck.

Send in your music: PO Box 25717 Chicago IL 60625 // [email protected]

Otherwise, keep reading about it here.

And it begins…

MARIANNE NOWOTTNY Marzanna LP (The Abaton Book Company)

As if we’re somehow willing the millenium cusp back into being, here’s a new record by Marianne Nowottny, the still-inscrutable, once-teenage chanteuse that Other Music built. Seeing this name coming across the transom sent me into a minor fit, back to the books, and an artist that existed before a scene could contain her, and whose major works landed at the digital divide, too early for the streaming era but not too late for CDBaby, Napster, AudioGalaxy and the download blogs of the early-mid ‘00s to bury her purring hacksaw voice in a sea of unregulated online shenanigans. Like Williamsburg before CocoRosie priced us all out, Nowottny is finished turning the Lower East Side into her own personal nuclear winter, long decamped for steadier climes (Florida, in this case), and presents her alter ego glamour shot, Marzanna, in an almost-all-covers effort that’ll have ‘em running for the tanning beds just to thaw out. Listen as she bites a blood capsule and lets it run all over choices obvious (“Wuthering Heights,” “Both Sides Now,” “Michelle”) and considered (Neubauten, Siouxsie), and an original “Winter Moon” that seems like it belongs on a more specific album. Expect synths, strings and unrestrained Brechtian filigree. Kinda nice to tap into a vision forced into specificity like this – she’s still got it.

More good stuff under this paywall. It’s worth knowing about music.