Friday Five: Abigail Stauffer, Eye O Mighty, Hannah Baiardi, MEMCO Exposure Mixes, Jason Adam Voss

MUSIC FRIDAY FIVE

Art for the albums and singles featured in this week's Friday Five.

Friday Five highlights music by Washtenaw County-associated artists and labels.

This week features soulful pop by Abigail Stauffer, rap by Eye O Mighty, jazzy pop by Hannah Baiardi, MEMCO Exposure Mixes by Goodmother and Naphtha, and experimental piano by Jason Adam Voss.

 

Abigail Stauffer and the Wisdom feat. Nickie P and Jenny Jones, "Embodied"
Ypsilanti's Abigail Stauffer has long straddled the line between pop, rock, folk, and soul, and her new song, "Embodied," is no exception. Whitmore Lake rapper Nickie P and Ann Arbor singer-songwriter Jenny Jones also contribute to the uplifting tune, which was co-written by Stauffer's longtime collaborator Dave the Cellist (Dave Haughey) and released on March 8—International Women's Day. "A therapist suggested thinking more about how it feels to be in your body rather than what your body looks like," Stauffer told Concentrate in an article about the song and its accompanying video. The promo clip was shot by Ypsi filmmaker Toko Shiiki in Frog Island Park and The Ypsilanti Performance Space and co-stars Cristina G. Benn, a UMich dance major.

 

Eye O Mighty, IF THE OCEAN WERE ORANGE
Is the title of Ypsi rapper Eye O Mighty's latest album referencing Frank Ocean's Channel Orange? Seems possible just based on the way Mighty, like Ocean, toys with a mix of rap, R&B, pop, and psychedelia. But unlike Ocean, whose singing is polished and pretty, Mighty's voice has a nasal tone that he leans into, and he also doesn't shy away from letting sung notes break and bend to serve the 12 songs on If the Ocean Were Orange.

 

Hannah Baiardi, "Getaway"
The ever-prolific Ann Arbor singer-songwriter-pianist Hannah Baiardi is back with a whimsical R&B ballad about escaping it all. (I accidentally misread the title as "Breakaway" when I first saw the song, and now I want to hear Baiardi do a cover of that Kelly Clarkson jam.)

 

Goodmother, Exposure Mix 053
Naphtha, Exposure Mix 054
The prior mix by Goodmother—née Good Mother—I wrote about was a March 2022 funk-a-thon for a Michigan Electronic Music Collective party at Ann Arbor's Club Above. She's back with another strong thematic mix for MEMCO's Exposure Series, but this time it's all about blending classical music and techno. Brill.

Naptha's Exposure Mix is an adventurous journey with twisting roads and falling rocks followed by long stretches of open highway. The music flows from ambient to drill techno to the whole damn kitchen sink, and then back to a gentle soundscape to end your far-flung travels.

Jason Adam Voss, New Directions in Subharmonic Pulse Piano
Various artists, The Garage Is Too Cold, Let's Go Into the Living Room and Warm Up

Jason Adam Voss is posting one item a month to Bandcamp from the early 2000s Ann Arbor DIY label We're Twins, which he ran with friends. But for this month, he posted the 12-song compilation The Garage Is Too Cold, Let's Go Into the Living Room and Warm Up from the long-gone Ann Arbor label Casanova Temptations, which existed from 2005 to 2009. Like We're Twins, Casanova focused on lo-fi bedroom pop and electronic experiments, and this compilation is a nice summation of the label's aesthetic. Familiar names include Jib Kidder, Fred Thomas, Patrick Elkins, and Kelly Caldwell. (Voss has also made three cassettes available for purchase from Kidder, Elkins, and Voss that were recorded in 2018 as part of a planned but never launched label called Lamb Life Tapes.)

Voss is a lifer who has never stopped making and releasing music. For his new album, New Directions in Subharmonic Pulse Piano, he programmed pianos in Logic with just intonation and, as he says in the liner notes, "All of the material uses notes tuned to subharmonics of a fixed note that pulse at regular time intervals according to the note's frequency." Five tracks of percussive piano plinks and plunks.


Christopher Porter is a library technician and the editor of Pulp.