The LA area is notoriously without character - transient, populated by iterative rootless waves of itinerants from across the rest of the country. A sink that draws the most status-seeking and vain toward itself, a paradisiacal Eden promised and a tacky Babylon delivered. Each bug, throwing itself at the magnetic blue light as Icarus to the sun, lends its chitinous body to the gaudy spectacle of annihilation that recruits yet more of its peers to the same fate.
It's probably just about the worst place in the country, packed with nouveau riche mystery meats and careerist strivers on top of it. That's why it's such a surprise that the area has produced so much good music that even has a decidedly regional character, as though it were assembled as a subjective tableau of climate, time, mood, and esthetic, sifting through sensory impressions and leaving out all the people.
Codeine, likely due to the environment in which they came up, sound decidedly more immediately bleak, less wistful and languorous. I remember reading somewhere that the members went to school at Oberlin - not too far from you, but probably a world away.
Probably no coincidence that the frontmen of both Chokebore and Idaho were prettiboi Chadlites. They had a way to derive some benefit from their environment that most couldn't. If a were a Chad, I imagine that my life would have been soundtracked pretty well by this kind of stuff.
As it stands:
I'm not so much into Jazz anymore. I usually just default to electric Miles if anything (especially
On the Corner). Tend to prefer stuff like AMM and Borbetomagus if I go in for improv. Heard good things about Masayuki Takayanagi, but never listened.
Adorno was probably the least gay figure in the Frankfurt School though. Better than Habermas and Marcuse for sure. He was big into Schönberg and Webern if I remember.
Nice work - this one's quite good. Somewhere between Godflesh, Chrome, and Autechre.
Listened to a few of the bands you mentioned yesterday - Spite Extreme Wing was the one that I was trying to think of. Pretty good material: