Missing Person.

04 Feb 2011 — Henning Lahmann

Golden Birthday has been present in Chicago's synth underground scene for quite a while now, yet since their 2008 debut Infinite Leagues, it has been rather quiet around the illustrious project that has included half of the Windy City's musical avant-garde in the past, with members such as Adam Griffin of Night Gallery and Beau Wanzer of Streetwalker (who we had on these pages earlier this week), among musicians of Cave, Mahjongg, and Lazer Crystal, all gathered around creative mastermind Ryan Sullivan. This year Sullivan will finally be back with two new releases, an EP named Illusions on Florida's Aural Pleasures soon, and later in 2011 with Golden Birthday's sophomore full-length Blue Island on Chicago's own Rainbow Body Records, the label that had blessed us with Night Gallery's terrific Constant Struggle LP last year. While the upcoming Illusions will again contain some full-band collaborative efforts, the EP track below is one of the pieces that Sullivan has done all by himself, but there's clearly nothing missing in Missing Person, an upbeat yet strangely slow-burning wave monster made up of thick layers of washed-out synths and a driving drumbeat that just keeps going on and on over the course of almost eight minutes, an amazing track all along that is less about blowing you away and more about creating a certain kind of atmosphere than the works of his prominent contemporaries like Gatekeeper, and that will surely secure Sullivan's unique status in Chicago's rapidly emerging synth wave scene. Golden Birthday - Missing Person Read more →

Clownfacee.

04 Feb 2011 — Tonje Thilesen

I've wanted to write about this EP ever since I got the e-mail from Mike Quigely, the guy behind the mask of NYC based Clownfacee last month. With so much music sprouting up from the earth these days (as if the spring had arrived a little early around here), it is easy to fall off the hook — something I think many of you might agree with.

Enough with that.

Winter will undress itself for you on this cold and beautiful EP with the same title: Winter. Like water running beneath an ice covered stream, the music of Clownfacee moves gently in the direction of your ears, leaving traces of beauty everywhere. Call it bit ambient, a bit indie/folk or a bit experimental if you like, but it is not so much about the genre anyway. Just don't leave it unheard, mkay? And it's free, too.

Clownfacee - Feel It More

Clownfacee - Annabelle

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Seed of the Transformer.

04 Feb 2011 — Tonje Thilesen

Hailing from the east coast of the US, Seed Of The Transformer creates spaceious and weird electronic that came to life after discovering an 80's cassette tape featuring an audio tour of the Gettysburg battlefield in an old medicne box. After recieving one of their limited edition tapes in the mail (with the envelope stuffed with blue and red confetti) my interest was immidiately caught at the second track Lee's Army, mixing slow motion drum machine beats with blown-out synths with samples from the thirty year old cassette tape. A hipster dream, in other words. The album might get slightly repetitive in the length, but definitely contains some rather interesting sounds spread throughout its 35 minutes of spinning. Pre-order The Gettysburg Address tapes via 16 Pound Rabbit. Seed of the Transformer - Lee's Army Read more →

Soundtrack to your future nostalgia.

03 Feb 2011 — Tonje Thilesen

I wouldn't claim they have the most original band name around, but the Brooklyn duo Guitars surely knows how to compose catchy and quirky pop songs that makes you wish everyday was one of those lazy Sundays dedicated to long breakfasts and good novels. Their throughoutfully beautiful album Soundtrack to Your Future Nostalgia from 2010 gives us a sound with elements from both country/bluegrass and psych-folk: sometimes as soft as silk, and sometimes even making your dancing feet tickle a little. By recording the album in a temple and a farmhouse in upstate NY, Guitars have managed to capture an atmosphere unlike to anything similar I've heard, giving it that warm, almost carefree sound. Check out the music video for Keep in Mind below, featuring three whole minutes of beautiful women crying. Pretty amazing.

Guitars - Keep In Mind

Guitars - My Bad

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Alps of New South Wails.

03 Feb 2011 — Henning Lahmann

Seriously! Did somebody say "summer"? Outside my window, the sky has decided to showcase its "Berlin grey", which is, in case you've never been here in January, the greyest grey imaginable, yet my inbox is slowly turning into a beach. After Colorado's Moon Tides yesterday, a couple of hours ago I received another pretty sandy mail, this time by New South Wales resident Chris Hearn, who has been making music as Alps for the last six years. Chris is about to release his fourth album Alps of New South Wails (after Alps of New South Wales in 2006 and Alps of New South Whales in 2009, oh yes indeed), and the two songs he sent over are purest, sundrenched and hazy bedroom indie pop goodness, slightly distorted with an all-over lo-fi feel to it, but most strikingly with melodies that are mind-meltingly pretty to an extent that one could almost suspect some kind of sneering at us Europeans and North Americans who are still stuck in deepest wintertime. The album itself - which you can stream and pre-order here - is considerably more diversified, with some other tracks where Chris' lush guitar play gets superseded by synth or organ patterns, but it never completely abandons its concept of being made for days of sunshine, going to the beach and swimming in the deep blue sea - or, indeed, for just sailing away. Alps - I Get So High Alps - Sail Away Read more →

Haze for Daze.

03 Feb 2011 — Henning Lahmann

Some really fine tropical jams coming to you from the town of Washington, North Carolina, where Robert Thompson is recording synth-based psychedelic drones under the moniker Mohave Triangles, experimental yet easily digestible, evoking warm and lush feelings that make his latest tape Haze for Daze an excellent score for your January daydreaming, longing for those summer days to come. Haze for Daze is out on Digitalis Ltd. Also, you can stream/download the whole thing over here. Mohave Triangles - Mango Haze (Excerpt) Mohave Triangles - Tropical Daze (Excerpt) Read more →

Video Premiere: Fostercare - Sunfreeze (Refix).

03 Feb 2011 — Henning Lahmann

Hailing from the darkest streets of Brooklyn, Marc Jason aka Fostercare delivered some brilliant, considerably gloomy stuff via Disaro and Clan Destine last year, making him one of the most exciting exponents of that certain genre whose name is banned from these pages. In any case, Marc hit us up with exciting news the other day, announcing a new label he has set up to release a few artists a year, thereby focusing on music "that is experimental and works outside of a singular genre, while also having a distinctly pop aesthetic", which sounds more than noteworthy to us. The first work dropped via JI9X is Refixes, a collection of Fostercare material that's been, well, "refixed", which in the artist's description means that the jams have been reworked to make them more complex and to add a "screwed rave aesthetic". Considering the terrific result re Sunfreeze, the title track of last year's EP on Disaro, he has obviously been successful, as his Blown Out Refix is five minutes of deepest black that nonetheless makes you wanna dance in strange ways, and hasn't this kind of music always been all about that in essence? Below, watch the exclusive premiere of the video for the refix of Sunfreeze, an adequately dark piece that indeed is terrifying by all means, a flickering, restless collage of all nightmares you possibly had as of late. You probably shouldn't watch this right before going to sleep. We've warned you. Fostercare - Sunfreeze (Blown Out Refix) Read more →