NEONNOONE can name the exact ingredients: art deco Miami Beach, dark and seedy bars thrown out of time, neon lights on deserted streets right after rain. The band calls the result cinematic post-jazz.
Place shows up in these interviews as something more specific than an origin story. It supplies images, constrains what is possible, and occasionally does something genuinely strange.
NEONNOONE
Based in Miami, four years in, and reaching for Dark Jazz, Doom Jazz and Jazz Noir before settling on cinematic post-jazz - a merger of jazz and post-rock. Twin Peaks was a formative influence; when it aired in the 90s there was nothing remotely like it. They record elsewhere: at BC Studio in Gowanus, Brooklyn, the theremin started playing by itself in an empty dark basement. They want the next release on vinyl, reasoning that this music would sound gorgeous with surface noise and crackle. Their organising idea is that music is the only art that speaks straight to feeling, bypassing nationality and culture on the way, and they promote it by building a community around the genre rather than the band - the power, they say, is in camaraderie.
Buzzard
"I live in the eldritch hills of Western Massachusetts," says Christopher Thomas Elliott, whose one-man doom folk metal project is Buzzard. His elevator pitch: what if Bob Dylan listened to Black Sabbath and read H.P. Lovecraft. He describes it as outsider music with a singular point of view, from an only child who has watched human society skeptically from the playground to the political arena. He does not join groups. Songs start from a single line, a couplet or a phrase carrying a feeling or a point of view, and the music grows out from that seed.
BÁL
BÁL is a one-man black metal project from Hungary, and the name is a piece of the artist's own. His first name is Bálint; BÁL is the particle left over, and in Hungarian it means a festival where people gather to eat, dance and feel good - not an obvious fit for the discography, which runs from raw black metal through atmospheric and post-BM. It started around 2016 as personal therapy for processing what was going on around and inside him. He refuses to force it: "If I feel that I'm challenged to write new stuff, I simply stop."
CIAO MALZ
CIAO MALZ grew up in Eastern Connecticut and moved to New York for college, which she describes as a huge change. She had played guitar since childhood, but GarageBand was the discovery that mattered. After college came a year of not playing at all - then, in her words, she went insane and started pursuing music more seriously. The latest EP, Safe Then Sorry, sits on an uncomfortable question: what if you do all the right things and still end up sorry. She writes with no expectations, playing guitar until something happens, and midway through the EP swapped her programmed drums for real ones played live. Her promotion philosophy matches the records: bring the same energy and humour to sharing them as to making them.
BEELZE
BEELZE is New York based but moves around a lot, raised in a small North Carolina town called Sanford. The origin is pandemic boredom and pirated Ableton, used to make literally anything possible. He now lands on IDM as the best descriptor. The process is unglamorous and honest: mostly sitting around all day doing next to nothing, or experiencing a lot at once and then coming back to his room. One recent track took under fifteen minutes and two takes, helped by a plug-and-play Logic setup that lets him move the moment an idea arrives. He hopes the comedy comes through in the absurd things he makes.
T. Houze
T. Houze makes what he calls Lounge Rap - chill, but weighted toward poetic lyrics and delivery - and the room matters to him structurally. "Most of my music is recorded in an isolated space, so I can sit with my thoughts and try many variations for the production." He started from self-consciousness: his voice cracked early and he fought that feeling for a long time before making something of it.
The room and the record
None of these artists is writing about their city. NEONNOONE is not making Miami music; they are making music out of specific Miami images. Buzzard's hills are eldritch because that is the register the songs are in.
The pattern is that place gives you material and constraint, then gets out of the way. BÁL took a word for a party and made black metal with it. That is roughly how all of this works.