Got hit up recently by some pretty weird project named Myrrh, consisting of "two gypsies with a laptop and some screws loose". The latter assertion we can confirm, the former remains rather shady or should be read metaphorically, if anything, as it turns out that Myrrh is in fact the latest side project of Arc Light's Ryan Gabel with his "buddy Landon", which after all makes an awful lot of sense - indeed we find Gabel's distinct take on screwed, lo-fi psych-pop in here, and after a few listens this whole thing becomes strangely captivating. So go join the N'ajzabi Nation and cop the whole EP for free over here, and then you should probably get some shrooms as well, we guess they might help enhancing the whole experience. Seriously.
Myrrh - N'ajzabi NationRead more →
Arcseconds is the recording project of Calgary, Alberta native and current Berlin resident Mike Verdone. Jesse Locke of Montreal-based cassette label Planet of the Tapes recently sent over this marvelous outer space voyage of a track, the aptly titled Astronauts. The slow-burning, gently floating piece of drone and beautiful, slightly clipping synth patterns with heavily manipulated vocal snippets will be part of Arcseconds' upcoming split C-40 with Montreal's Sundrips. One of our favorite magicians of the visual, Hobo Cult/Moduli TV's Frank Ouelette, has produced the accompanying video, a stunning and absolutely fitting collage made up of footage from Terrence Rafferty's seminal 1989 documentation For All Mankind: Fantastic Voyage. Taken together, this splendid audiovisual experience is among the most overwhelming things happening to us lately.
Arcseconds - AstronautsRead more →
I can almost hear the crisp sound of the water flowing over my skin while swimming through a pitch black lake in the middle of the night. The trees form a perfect circle around me, pointing their elegant silhouettes up at the night sky above me like sharp, but peaceful arrows. And like soft rain that falls from the sky an early October morning, light finds it way down.
And that is just about as deep as I'm going tonight. This is Bendik, the name of a boy but the body of a girl behind it, Silje Halstensen from Bergen, Norway. Together with some helping hands, Silje crafts together foggy ambient pop from a wide, dim landscape that can make your heart skip a beat – or sometimes, if the condition is right, even stop completely. With her music being both freezing and warming at the same time, it makes me wish we lived in this calming, beautiful darkness for eternity. Bendik is silence, or as we also call it, stillhet – and the mellow sound of her accent brings out the magic of Siljes voice in a way that I think is hard to find in a language not so close to your heart. Honestly. Just listen.
Bendik - StilleBendik - Og tankeneRead more →
Music in times of recession. Recently, Emilie Friedlander of Visitation Rites linked the economic meltdown inter alia to the "return of outmoded recording technologies like the 8-track and the cassette tape". But as she herself observed as well, I’d argue that it’s by far not only the means of production that have taken a shift since Lehman went to the gutter, it’s also the music itself. Starting by the end of 2008 with some devastatingly beautiful tunes by a certain young man from Seattle who's recording under the moniker Perfume Genius, we've come across quite a few artists as of late that all share a remarkable propensity towards music that is all about fragility and pure introspection. Re-interpreting popular topoi of Sturm und Drang (Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther comes to mind in particular) and early 19th century romanticism, albeit perhaps unconsciously, American artists like Idiot Glee or Allister Izenberg have unintentionally established a sub-genre in contemporary popular music that more than anything else should go by the already outworn designation "bedroom pop", as the lonesome, unhappy adolescent creating music between his pillows while the world outside is happening without him is exactly the image being evoked by each and every of the musicians' frail melodies.
The latest exponent of this artistic development is another young man, this hailing from Southern California, named Alex Jacob aka Therapies Son. Having chosen the moniker after a "horrible breakup" and a subsequent, still ongoing therapy, Alex' gorgeous little pop gems became quite suddenly fairly popular in the blogosphere last November, and the hype has constantly been growing, although until this very day we've only been blessed with the scant amount of merely three songs. "I never wanted to be part of any movement", Alex told me recently, and sure he ain't. In fact, there's no "movement" to be found here - the introspective nature of the music itself seems to preclude the very possibility of anything even close to that. Still, it's hard to ignore the impression of a certain rise of such artists, and in his case it slightly appears as if someone had been waiting just for him to show up.
Of course, post-pubertal heartache and sorrows being sublimated into passionate love songs isn't exactly an uncommon phenomenon in the history of popular music, and the same certainly holds true for music as a means of self-therapy. But the attention these young and lost boys are receiving at the moment is striking nonetheless, exemplified by the fact that, according to the artist, it took Transparent's Jack Shankly and Sahil Varma only two days after Alex had started a myspace to hit him up. His unquestionably incredible talent notwithstanding, I maintain that this kind of awareness wouldn't have occurred during the heyday of late capitalism, an assumption that is reinforcing the sociological implication that modernity once again has led us towards introversion.
Therapies Son's debut EP Over The Sea is out on Transparent February 15. Pre-order via Pure Groove now. Below, watch the gorgeous video for Rose Red Rose, and don't miss the latest EP gem that has found its way into the interwebs (via Transparent) today, the absolutely gorgeous and amazingly playful Yellow Mama.
Therapies Son - Yellow Mama
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Speaking of James Friley aka Idiot Glee, Impose has debuted the brand new track Do You Wanna Go? today, another blissful, sixties-jangling reminder of why we love that dude so much. It's gonna be the a-side of an upcoming cassingle in Impose Magazine's cassette series. Pre-order here.
Idiot Glee - Do You Wanna Go?Read more →
Been banging pretty heavily to this new, two-song EP by Portland, Oregon outfit Hausu who first conquered my aural organs back in November with their rough and serious early 90s throwback The Haze, and now the band's moving even a little further back in time, with guitar styles over their basic punk patterns that feel very new wavey, and the singer's crooning heavily reminiscing some late Ian Curtis or early Robert Smith. Head over to Hausu's bandcamp and grab their other new tune Weaving Spiders, too.
Hausu - She's A BabeRead more →
Autumn is the legendary minimal wave project of Peter Bonne and Geert Coppens, two Belgians who started experimenting with the potentials of analog synthesizers during the late 70s until they put a band together in 1980, quickly becoming one of the true visionary groups for the emerging synth scene in Europe. Despite coming from the experimental/underground branch of wave music, Autumn had a "modest summer hit" with Synthesize in 1982. I Say You Hello is even more amazing, a plain and simple vocal hook, kinda meaningless yet insanely catchy, an incredible bass line and some mind-melting analog patterns is all it needs to completely persuade me.
With the Synthesize LP, there's finally a record that features a selection of Autumn's best material. It's gonna be out later this month on - of course - Brooklyn's outstanding experts in the field, Minimal Wave. Highly recommended.
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"I like to think about musical discovery as an astral voyage", Caitlin King of Planets Around the Sun told Jakob Battick in a recent interview for the University of Southern Maine's official student newspaper, The Free Press. And indeed, the first image that immediately comes to mind when listening to one of the group's meandering sonic explorations is that of a trip - not necessarily through space though, it could just as well be through deepest woods or across endless plains somewhere on the North American continent, or indeed simply deep into your inner self, but the idea of traveling in and of itself is certainly connected to the music of Planets Around the Sun.
For the group from the state of Maine that at its core consists of Ian Paige, Caitlin King and Matthew Lajoie (of Herbcraft and Cursillistas), improvisation consequentially plays an important role - it's about exploring in the first place, and not necessarily about getting somewhere in particular. Still, the densely arranged psychedelic folk efforts never appear to loose focus, even if the end isn't found before the twelve minute mark has been reached, as is the case with the gorgeous piece Slow Horse from their latest offering Tower which has been released on cassette via Matt's own L'animaux Tryst last month. The tape is already sold out, but you can listen to/download it in its entirety over at their bandcamp.
Up next will be an LP entitled Ram of Heart and the Earthen Chariot, a "double record concept album" that is composed equally of "messages" (i.e. songs) and "explorations" (i.e. improvisations). There is no label yet, but below you can already have a look at the appropriately psyched-out video for the marvelous LP track Sunshooter, which I'd include in the "messages" category.
Planets Around the Sun - Slow HorseRead more →
Of all the tracks of the excellent Clan Destine x Beko DSL compilation that dropped last night, the one that instantly stood out and took over my aural synapses today - apart from that marvelous, otherworldly beautiful tune by our long-time fav Ela Orleans - was Channel the Body, the contribution by a certain Petra Schelm; and though I'm not really sure how to endorse the fact that Columbus, Ohio resident Mollie Wells of Funerals chose the name of a misguided young girl that had joined the predecessor of the infamous, faux-marxist terrorist collective Red Army Fraction, ending up with a bullet in her forehead after speeding through a police roadblock in Hamburg on July 15, 1971, for her solo project (there is some explanation by herself here), at the same time it's hard not to admit that the choice perfectly fits the music: darkest wave driven by Wells' guitar play, with lots of empty space that drenches all sounds in an overwhelming, captivating surge of reverb, and her ethereal voice that all in all place the songs neatly between the genre's all-time classics from the 80s, Zola Jesus and Chelsea Wolfe. Simply put, absolutely incredible stuff all along.
Petra Schelm's debut, a split tape with Portland, Oregon's Warm Hands, is out now on Clan Destine Records. Below, listen to the compilation track (and make sure to grab the whole thing) as well as to Buried Deep which you'll find on the cassette.
Petra Schelm - Buried DeepPetra Schelm - Channel the BodyRead more →
Arcseconds is the recording project of Calgary, Alberta native and current Berlin resident Mike Verdone. Jesse Locke of Montreal-based cassette label Planet of the Tapes recently sent over this marvelous outer space voyage of a track, the aptly titled Astronauts. The slow-burning, gently floating piece of drone and beautiful, slightly clipping synth patterns with heavily manipulated vocal snippets will be part of Arcseconds' upcoming split C-40 with Montreal's Sundrips. One of our favorite magicians of the visual, Hobo Cult/Moduli TV's Frank Ouelette, has produced the accompanying video, a stunning and absolutely fitting collage made up of footage from Terrence Rafferty's seminal 1989 documentation For All Mankind: Fantastic Voyage. Taken together, this splendid audiovisual experience is among the most overwhelming things happening to us lately.
Arcseconds - Astronauts
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