16 Mar 2011 — Henning Lahmann
With the means of cheap contemporary blogosphere jabbering (yes, I guess this is self-criticism), it's kinda hard to describe the music of Brooklyn trio
La Big Vic. We're not alone though. The band itself struggles to come up with any fitting adjectives attributable to their sound, coming up with rather obvious and sorta lame characteristics such as cosmic ("no") or weird ("..."). So as a start, let's stick to the bare facts: We got a rather unusual setting, with Emilie Friedlander (of
Visitation Rites and
AZ) on violin and vocals, and her bandmates Peter Pearson and Toshio Masuda on synth, drum machine, guitar, and whatever else might be necessary to create those sounds that indeed do speak a language of their own. Take their first single
Musica as a striking instance: The song starts with a slow drum loop, kraut-informed synth patterns and Emilie's almost classic folk-like violin play, and it takes more than two and a half minutes until her vocals finally set in, gently, almost subtly uttering "musica", "mystica", or "maxima" again and again while the instrumentation unobtrusively meanders along over the course of the piece's almost eleven minutes. A rare, gratifying experience.
Musica will be the closing track of La Big Vic's forthcoming full-length
Actually on
Underwater Peoples. The song itself was recorded as part of Philadelphia's
Shaking Through music and video web series for emerging independent artists, curated by
Pixelhorse's Elise Oleksiak. Don't miss the video of the recording session below.
La Big Vic - Musica
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15 Mar 2011 — Henning Lahmann
On Sunday, we familiarized you with the deep and heavy analog synth sounds by Portuguese experimentalist Luís Fernandes aka
The Astroboy and his terrific new album
The Chromium Fence. Now, let's go one step further ahead with this sapid, album-closing remix of the track
The Voight Score by fellow Portuguese producer Bruno Miguel who's known under his moniker
:papercutz. He has reworked the dark and threatening synth noises of the original into a slightly brighter, in any case more comfortable ambient soundscape by adding some cinematic piano chords and widescreen sampled string patterns over the dense layers of drone, ending up with something entirely different but equally compelling.
The Astroboy - The Voight Score (:papercutz rework)
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15 Mar 2011 — Henning Lahmann
Beautifully melancholic bedroom crooning here by Dartmouth, Nova Scotia pal Garrett Mombourquette, a very young artist making music under the moniker
Aux. Out. His reduced and distant dream-pop has been stuck in my head since he'd rather randomly posted the title track of his latest EP
Read Quickly on our Facebook wall yesterday, slow, reverb-heavy songs that are hidden behind a thick fog of tape hiss with gentle melodies and Garrett's fragile voice.
Read Quickly is especially lovely, a glowing meditative séance in loneliness that abruptly ends after three and a half minutes right in the middle of a bar - by the way not only for pure artistic reasons but also due to the rather profane fact that "the cassette ran out at about two seconds after that", which kinda is as authentically lo-fi as it gets.
Download the whole EP for free at Aux. Out's
bandcamp.
Aux. Out - Basic Geography
Aux. Out - Read Quickly
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15 Mar 2011 — Henning Lahmann
Some hazy garage jams here by Bloomington, Indiana outfit
Ivory Wave, consisting of two young and restless minds named Josh Menashe and Matt Jackson.
Nothing Here shows almost all qualities we'd expect from lo-fi, gently punk-informed indie pop, so there's really nothing to complain about here: We just dig this tune, that's all. Cop the rest of the duo's new EP
John Depp (yes indeed)
over here.
Ivory Wave - Nothing Here
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14 Mar 2011 — Henning Lahmann
Drop your pens or whatever might be in your hands at this very moment, breathe deep and then get ready for
Baby Birds Don't Drink Milk's terrific new video, a psychedelic collage by Brooklyn's
George de Moura that takes the viewer on an extremely tantalizing and quite disturbing trip made up of blurred and diffuse images of violence and catastrophes, perfectly underlining the musicians' excursion into slowly meandering, scary noise and drone experimentalism on
Yaddle's Pad.
The song itself is part of a two-track single, dropped today as Baby Birds Don't Drink Milk's contribution to LA's very prolific
Deathbomb Arc Digital Singles Club.
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14 Mar 2011 — Henning Lahmann
Pretty stoked by the by the lush and mysterious sounds of
Sun Glitters, which is the recording moniker of Victor Ferreira who despite his name appears to be based out of Luxembourg. He has just released his debut
Everything Could Be Fine via
bandcamp, a piece of very dreamy (sorry) and slightly melancholic sounds that rely on intense beats and awesome vocal manipulations that heavily remind us of the output of a certain
Balam Acab - which is, given our tremendous love for that young Pennsylvanian, anything but a bad thing. Listen to the wonderful
Too Much to Lose below, and then cop the whole thing
over here.
Sun Glitters - Too Much to Lose
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