XLR8R 136 (Nov/Dec 2010)

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ways, [school] has been frustrating, but in some ways, it's cool to have something grounding us rather than just playing shows," explains Weiss. Takahashi studies in a program called TIMARA (Technology in Music and Related Arts), so all of this could, one hopes, be considered fieldwork. Takahashi and Weiss met three years

ago, on their second day of college. Within a week they were jamming together. "We were writing our first song so we could play this party at our school," explains Weiss, "and we put the songs on MySpace just to show people. We only had two friends on there." One of their those early friends was 20 Jazz Funk Greats, the esteemed music blog of Tri Angle Records

head Robin Carolan, where one of their songs got posted and earned them attention from well beyond their immediate peers. While incorporating tropes from danceable, bygone eras in pop, R&B, and club sounds, the Teengirl sound rarely coalesces into straight-up club tracks—their narcotic, mercurial jams, tinged with Krautrock and 4AD pop sensibilities, are usually better suited to the home-listening realm. Their sound seems as influenced by Manuel Göttsching as it is by, say, Mariah Carey, whose "Touch My Body" they deconstructed into delirious abstraction. These styles that they're reimagining and recontextualizing have been

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