Mi Ami – “Hard Up” practice tape [Daily MP3 #110]

Mi Ami – “Hard Up” MP3/download

Not the worst promo photo ever: Mi Ami ... one out of three beards can't be wrong!

Hey, remember Black Eyes? Yeah, they were awesome, though I suspect most folks in the indie community preTENDed to like them because they were on Dischord … the Black Eyes sound was just too abrasive for your average The Rapture fan; I was one of maybe two DJs that spun BE during my days at KZUU.

In retrospect, were they really that crazy? Not compared to what’s happened since. Gay Beast, AIDS Wolf, Les Georges Leningrad and several others have taken abusive-but-danceable quirk-rock to further extremes since then, and besides, one of Black Eyes’ most-valuable members has since attended music school, dropped out and, subsequently, formed Mi Ami (which is now a two-piece featuring Damon Palermo and Daniel Martin-McCormick.

I must say, I didn’t realize how good Mi Ami are. “Hard Up,” a free-download practice tape slapped onto the Internets for discerning MP3 hounds, is a glorious post-Not Not Fun — which sounds reductive of NNF but isn’t meant to be — continuation of the tastemaking squiggle-core genre, quite possibly invented by Morton Subotnick and also inhabited by certain Acid Mothers Temple albums, Sean McCann, Mafia Crystals, Edmond de Deyster (who actually made his tapes in the mid-’70s) and too many other tape-tradin’ fools to even get INto right now.

Good stuff, folks, good stuff; wanna fight about it? I’ll give you a BLACK EYE, biatch!