Who is girlscoutcookies?

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I can’t remember what breadcrumbs led me to girlscoutcookies’s Bandcamp page, but that’s the only place you’ll find them, and considering the wanton obfuscation surrounding their profile: various aliases, deliberate misspelling, tangential links and general unwillingness to give away anything but music, it’s pronoun ambiguity all the way. I don’t trust that profile photo one bit (as I was writing this the profile photo actually changed to the rear DJ shot), especially as I feel the music can only be coming from someone of more mature years, and probably a bloke.

What is for sure though, is that they’re making some great, genre-melting underground dance music. There’s a strong murky techno leaning, which might suggest they actually do live in Berlin as the profile states, but as you hit play on various releases you realise how wide-ranging their influences are, from dub and dark techno to jazz, UK bassline and disco house, to name a few. Take their recent course EP below; after the deep house opener, I could even imagine a flea-market-clothed singer turning ‘slep’ (track 2 below) into a perky alt-pop gem, but then the title track scurries through the speakers on a low-gravity techno mission.

They’re ridiculously prolific as well, suggesting they might not have a day job, that they have problems sleeping, or just a good work flow. They know their musical onions though. The irgenwas mit EP highlights their fondness for, and ability to integrate jazz nicely.

‘lalalaa’s’ introduction hints at a sense of humour, before single-handedly starting a tribal techo revival, whilst ‘ring a ding ding’ combines jazz hi-hats, a gnarly UK Garage bassline and a flickering, distorted machine-malfunctioning atmosphere, and ‘better run’ takes a murky trip back to the turn of the millennium nu-jazz heyday.

I could go on listing more of the twenty-three releases they’ve dropped in the last year alone, or perhas pull up a few releases from the similarly vague, though at least better credited (or are they?) releases on the ro pax label that they link to from their home page, or repost the link to a Berlin jazz club that I found whilst surfing, but I’ll leave the ball in your court. Let me know if you find out who they are, though I probably won’t tell anyone.

This review ran in TSMM's October 18h newsletter. If you'd like album tips direct to your inbox or the Substack app — plus the odd bit of industry insight and existential musing from TSMM HQ — you can subscribe here.

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