Herb Sundays 124: Ian Kim Judd
The intuitive New York DJ and label runner shares "a late summer interlude."
Herb Sundays 124: Ian Kim Judd (Apple Music, Spotify).
Art by Michael Cina.
“while centered on no theme or vibe in particular, the aim when i was compiling this playlist was to evoke a sort of lyrical late summer interlude. included herein is a collection of great music i loved that came out this year and years past. i played it for my wife on a drive across washington state last week and every other song she would remark 'this is very you'.”
- Ian Kim Judd
Ian Kim Judd is a DJ currently based in New York City. He is a longtime NTS resident and runs a label called OST. He’s also a Front-end developer at Nina Protocol (which just launched its iOS app). As Ian would say, “Hearing is believing.”
I first met Ian around 2017 as a clerk at the sorely missed Commend store, which was across the street from Ghostly’s previous NYC HQ. While we’ve only hung out a handful of times, he’s someone who makes an impression with his steady-state affability. Not one to drone on about the past, Judd has a wide-reaching history in music that I had to source independently, from coming up in Washington state, co-running previous labels (Couple Skate Records), and being in bands like Laced with Beach Fossils’ Dustin Payseur. Judd is someone who respects and energizes whatever scene he is in by his mere taste and presence.
Having established himself as a respected DJ with a flair for smeary, glistening ambient and related sounds, it was after a lockdown engineering boot camp that Judd also taught himself to code, and is currently the front-end developer for emerging music company Nina, “a modern platform and toolkit for independent music” (I contributed a hub here) which I’ll simplify as a blockchain-enabled sales/streaming platform with a robust editorial POV and agenda. It is one of many answers to the question “what's next” in a paranoid music market, but just as important as its technical and revenue possibilities for artists, its smaller functions as event creator, blog, and scene distillate are welcome at a time when related opportunities are sorely needed.
I have generally been moved by most things Judd touches, from his headlining mixtapes to his Lot Radio DJ sets, and this playlist carries this on. Judd’s musical universe feels like an abundance of submersed hooks, somewhere near the reissue Aussie folk that’s being sold and distributed by London’s World Of Echo label/store or favored by scene hero Jonnine Standish (Herb 30) of HTRK or the insurgent fourth world avant-pop of ML Buch (Herb 101).
Judd’s NTS radio show is called Fifth World, a riff on Jon Hassell's aforementioned Fourth World series, which is further defined as such: “Where Hassell focused on creating ritual music of potential societies that didn't exist; Ian Kim Judd seeks to evoke the notion of potential utopian societies that could exist. In these times of global instability and uncertainty, Fifth World seeks to posit an alternative, with scenes from an optimistic future.”
This is a nice manifesto for Judd’s musical vision and one that cascades into this playlist. It feels almost like an alternate universe pop landscape, one where some of the more furtive corners of the underground where Judd resides present their best entrants. It’s not necessarily a party at first as the ghost of Judd’s youth in landlocked Spokane, Washington, presents itself in the echoing guitars before giving way to the contemporary downward gaze of now, containing singular voices across the electronic and indie genre forms Judd is conversant in.
The Herb 124 playlist is indeed what Herb Sundays was built for, a blend of the new and the old(er), the local and the far-flung. My old head heart sang when I saw some early Morr Music (Guther), Her Space Holiday, and Jackson’s magisterial “Midnight Fuck” mix of M83 from their best album, a song which remains peerless as the cross-section of French Touch’s joie de vivre and the immature capriciousness of IDM. It’s a “what could have been” for both genres.
But more important than the older cuts are the new ones. The underground is a potent place right now, as Judd can attest. Maybe things are becoming less coastal or careerist and instead more familial. The looming question is whether we can continue to sustain it and elevate it, even in the aftermath of so much reduction in the industries which has empowered it, a beat that folks like
have steadily walked. In Judd’s world, a Through the Looking-Glass possibility emerges. Someone like Lolina (as interviewed via Nina) doesn’t feel a million years off from a 2020s Annette Peacock, or Judd fave James K, who probably has my song of the year, is a Laurie Anderson, or a more radical circuit-fried variant of Sarah McLachlan, not that anyone involved would love these comparisons. Hearing Ivy Knight here hit me as hard as Ethel Cain (Herb 12) on the first listen.
While IKJ’s communication style veers towards simple kindness and away from stoic manifesto, his musical choices are a permission to feel deeply, and his playlist, as intended, captures this moment between seasons, joyful but mixed with melancholy, a goodbye to frivolity. A Sunday of moments.
Yesterday afternoon, I was feeding my infant daughter and listening to the playlist and was brought back to the music I leaned on during a deep depression not too distant from the time when I met Ian. One stop on that treatment train was an IV-based ketamine course in a dusty midtown NYC building; when the well-meaning operators flicked off the lights and the grey din of sunlight expanded upon the walls, I employed music as an assistant, seeking tunes they shared the seasick sensation of the drug, leaning into the curve so to speak. My go-to playlist had Rap with Haunted Mansion proportions and RVNG Intl. latticed Ambient, invoking voices such as Tinashe, Pauline Anna Strøm, and Judd’s pal Khotin. I would have loved Judd to take the controls for me.
If modernity is about how we see things, Judd’s proposition is popular music for the actual now, irrevocably altered by technology and time but clinging to meaningful ideals for living. Another world is possible.
Her space holiday, what a flashback.. and beautiful otherness , this song takes me back, body chills. Thanks for this mix.
ty for the james k mention…been rinsing the track ever since. captures a very specific feel that reminds me of growing up in the 90s with a younger, new agey mom who was very much listening to contemporary artists at the time, as opposed to my friends’ more firmly boomer upbringings. i can’t yet pin exactly what artists it reminds me of, but the sarah mclachlan reference is certainly apt IMO. looking forward to diving into james k and hopefully stumbling across other similar artists!