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

This edition features beautiful voices from the University of Michigan Men's Glee Club, chill beats from White China, white noise and bleeps from The Chillennial, remixed and realigned R&B by Skyline, and icy post-punk indie by Modern Lady Fitness.

University of Michigan Men's Glee Club, This Is Our Song
U-M's Glee Club has released recorded music since the 1950s, which is only a fraction of the time the singing group has existed. Now in its 165th year, the Glee Club's latest recording, This Is Our Song, features 17 songs under the direction of Mark Stover, recorded live at Hill Auditorium (or so I think based on the cover photo—there's not much info out there about the album). There's some percussion on the two "Earth, Mother" pieces and "Canto E Libertad," sparse piano accompaniment on "Last Words of David," "Go Down Moses," and "I'll Be on My Way," plus acoustic guitar and violin on "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," This Is Our Song is all about the power of the human voice. The repertoire swings from the enslaved American hymnal "There's a Meeting Here Tonight" to Robert Schumann's choral work "Die Rose stand im Tau," to the U-M Glee Club longtime favorite "We Took Off Our Ugly Clothes," a peppy, jaunty, dare I say gleeful tune that was also recorded a decade ago by the group.

White China, Charivari
Ann Arbor's Caffeine Free Records is a bit of a mystery to me. It has been releasing electronic-oriented music on and off since 2012 but there's very little about the label or its bands online. White China has released music on Caffeine Free for nearly a decade, but I can't tell you a thing about the project. (Maybe my Googling skills are declining with age.) The group's album from last summer, Charivari, is a winsome collection of light electronica, ambient grooves, and chill drum 'n' bass.

The Chillennial, Approaching Planet Chillennial
"Bleeps, Bloops, and other explorations in modular synthesis," says the Bandcamp bio for the debut recording by this Ann Arbor artist. Approaching Planet Chillennial's 12 tracks remain fairly abstract throughout, sometimes sounding like a radio tuned between two stations and other times finding a more relaxed, ambient vibe.

Skyline, >ホライゾンズ (horizons)
Once relegated to the realm of SoundCloud, I keep stumbling across releases on Bandcamp that are essentially full albums of remixed songs by other artists. Ann Arbor's Skyline has done this in the past a couple of times with artists I know such as Sade and Gerald Levert. But most of the artists this anonymous remixer cites as sample sources for >ホライゾンズ (horizons) are new to me: Junko Ohashi, Wink, Hiroshima, After 7, Greg Adams, 障子久美, Babe, Megumi Shiina, and Telepath. All the song titles are in Japanese, and nothing is credited after the shout-outs, so you're on your own figuring out the direct source songs that were chopped and slowed into these 10 drunken Quiet Storm jams.

Modern Lady Fitness, Feast
Modern Lady Fitness combined its last four EPs—2019's RAWAR, 2020's IWOWI, 2022's DARAD, and 2023's EYKYE—to create the double LP Feast, which the group will celebrate with a release show at Ziggy's on November 23. Here's my December 2023 write-up of EYKYE, which quotes my previous blurb about DARAD—I recycle words like an environmentalist:

The fourth EP in Modern Lady Fitness' Feast series feels more like a companion record to June's DARAD EP than it does to the first two releases, 2020's IWOWI and 2019's RAWAR—a duo that also makes for a perfect pairing. That's because the Ypsi trio started to move away from 1990s-esque indie rock after the first two EPs and started to embrace moodier, early '80s-style post-punk. I described DARAD as something that recalls "the icy early years of Factory Records where bands like The Wake, Crispy Ambulance, and early New Order played a kind of moody, spacious, punk-inspired, jangly art-rock," and the same spirit permeates EYKYE.

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