Stream: Fog Lake “Virgo Indigo” + Interview (exclusive)

04 Feb 2014 — Andi Wilson

St. John's, Newfoundland is home for Aaron Powell who is the marvel behind the lo-fi ambient dreaminess of Fog Lake. Following bedroom-recorded releases, farther reaches and holy cross [ep], Virgo Indigo is a step into new waters especially production-wise, collecting all emotions within the tracks' clear fidelity. Powell's lyrics and moody vocals are so vulnerable, becoming immediately relatable. While still absorbing this record, it overall makes one feel like embracing a sort of visceral state of mind and losing sense of time in a hazy, beautiful surrounding. 

Virgo Indigo is available to download for free through bandcamp or you can purchase one of the 50 lavendar cassette tapes via Orchid Tapes. 

Listen while reading this lovely interview with Aaron himself about the release and how Fog Lake all began. 

For those who aren't familiar with Fog Lake, when did you start recording under the name? Also, when did the project become to materialize for you?

AP: Fog Lake began in January of 2012 when I resurfaced some old ambient/drone recordings from 2008-2009, my high school days. I originally intended FL to be just a drone recording alias, but that drastically changed when I started tinkering around with more pop oriented 'songs'. I decided to stick with the name Fog Lake. I feel like the project began to materialize when I finished up my first record, and I got a little bit of exposure from that. I gotta say I was quite surprised and flattered that anyone would even bother to listen to what I was doing, so I decided to try pushing it further.

How did your relationship with Orchid Tapes establish? We are major fans/lovers of the label.

AP: It's an interesting one, I knew Warren way back on this music forum. This was around 2008-2009 as well. He'd always be posting about his new recording project "Foxes in Fiction" which I was heavily into and inspired by. "Swung from the Branches" remains one of my favorite albums of all time. Over the summer of 2013 Warren asked me if I would like to do a release with Orchid Tapes and it was an opportunity I couldn't pass up. I was so excited that I scrapped what I was working on at the time and began work on what would become "Virgo Indigo".

What does Virgo Indigo as a phrase mean to you, in relationship to the album or in general?

AP: I'm gonna keep it real here because I simply thought it sounded cool. The name popped into my head one night and I liked it. Combining words and phrases that kinda slip off the tongue is a lot of fun to me. "Virgo Indigo" sounds like some weird color you'd see in a paint shop, or some bullshit psychic hotline.

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The album's theme seems to particularly play with a notion of heartbreak and loneliness, attached to a dreamy nature and glimpses of hope. What are your current surroundings like and did they inspire your lyrics/sounds?

AP: I have to spend a lot of time by myself to make these records, which I hope can change in the future. 2013 was another bad year and I moved to the city during the writing/recording of Virgo. I tracked it in a pretty cramped room, right in the heart of downtown St Johns. You know, jelly bean houses. It was a drastic kind of change for me, so everything from the sounds of traffic at night to the orange glow of the city sky inspired the sound of the album.

Do you plan on touring for this record? I feel like you would melt many hearts / make people cry (in a good way).

AP: Aw, thank-you! Well I've only played a few shows so far in the city of St John's but touring is something I've been thinking about a lot. I've been talking to my friend Michael of The Raspberry Heaven who is based in Toronto and I can see us definitely doing a tour there sometime soon. Michael's been a great supporter of my music and I would recommend anyone to check out his. We collaborated on a track over the summer and you can find it on youtube I believe. I am also considering touring the island of Newfoundland or trying to get a gig at the Halifax Pop Explosion or something. It's definitely something I need to put more thought into.

What is your favorite genre or artist to listen to on a rainy day?

AP: That's a good question. I think my favorite "pouring rain" band would have to be Slint. I love rain and Slint goes well with that. Spiderland really does it for me. I wanna go back to 1991 every day.

 

Vaghe Stelle “She Sometimes” (exclusive)

04 Feb 2014 — Henning Lahmann

With his twisted and off-kilter take on contemporary electronics, Turin producer Daniele Mana aka Vaghe Stelle has repeatedly haunted these pages already (as well as our showcase at Chesters back in November), and later this month he'll return with a new full-length on esteemed London imprint Astro:Dynamics. Sweet Sixteen comprises eight new transmissions that aim more for the mind then the feet, mostly arranged around intricate rhythms that reject any 4/4 comfort zones. The synth patterns are thick and moldy, adding an earthy touch to the more detached drum machine intrusions. Below, you may take an exclusive listen to album track "She Sometimes", a composition that almost entirely eschews any purposeful structure in favour of loose, layered synth contemplations that are as psychedelic as they are strangely unsettling. Yes indeed, music to take drugs to.

Sweet Sixteen is out February 17 on Astro:Dynamics.

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Review: Hemlock Shaw “I Danced All Night”

04 Feb 2014 — Josh Ginsberg

I Danced All Night, the new EP by New York experimental-pop musician Hemlock Shaw, is a penetrating suite of synthesized chamber music, composed for the flat, cold tones of an inexpensive keyboard’s orchestral voice bank. Just as 2013’s LP The Hell Under the Ground abandoned the freak-folk forms of its predecessor, 2012’s Tidal Tracks, I Danced All Night, Shaw’s first release since his relocation from Queens, New York to Edinburgh, Scotland, finds its auteur exploring a different idiom of songwriting and dressing his songs in a radically different garb. The recognizably synthesized timbres of the harps, organs and lyres that support Hemlock Shaw’s coos and bellows at once evoke the warmth of Romanticism and the strange digital remove of Nobuo Uematsu’s Final Fantasy scores. While the songs’ emphasis on rich chord progressions and twinkling arpeggios over percussion may seem to cast the EP’s title in an ironic light, the persistence of the songs’ intrinsic pulses produces motion in very much the same way that trance does. Hemlock Shaw’s latest is music to waltz or sway, better suited to a moonlit courtyard than a grimy club.

I Danced All Night’s greatest treasures reveal themselves when one attends closely to its lyrical musings on the body and the natural world. On opener “Down by the Grotto,” Shaw situates the inconceivable magnitude of nature within the intimately human when he describes a companion’s exhalation, so heavy with the scent of Clamato that it “smelled like a bay.” While this excerpt owes some of its success to the way Shaw enters into dialogue with eighteenth-century philosophers’ attempts to parse the Beautiful and Sublime, the singer’s comments on more pedestrian matters are just as resonant. The couplets of closer “Scepter” accomplish something truly remarkable as they manage to distill adolescent frustration and anxiety into a few lines without falling prey to any of the pitfalls that often mar reflections on youth. In the space of a few bars, his young speaker’s thoughts drift from wondering if his classmates would like him better if he were better dressed to wishing he “could wear wizard robes to school” so to get out of having to play basketball.

Listen to the dense riddle that is I Danced All Night below. But be careful not to slip (slip, slip) and kiss (kiss, kiss) Hemlock Shaw’s lips (lips, lips), for he warns that if you do, he’ll die and if that happens we might not have the pleasure of parsing the lusty Olympian’s next battle cry.

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Watch: Vehicle Blues “Letter Writer” (exclusive)

03 Feb 2014 — Trey Reis

There’s lo-fi recordings that demand your attention and repeated listens to hear not only what is there, but also what would be there had the limitations of recording not put up a block on the road to (high) fidelity. And then there are those lo-fi recordings so perfectly buried in the low-ceiling mix, that expanding the range of available tones would only get in the way. Like, it may be an unfinished basement we’re talking about here, but the layers of dust piled onto all of these piles of boxes filled previously loved objects from the past: they provide a certain warmth. The boundaries of the sound space drawn in blurry lines by the knobs on effect pedals and amplifiers. Completeness certainly isn’t always measured by fullness, but on Letter Writer, those familiar waves of Vehicle Blues guitar strums are piled to previously unreached heights. The result is something of an enclosure without walls, where distance becomes negligible. Every wave of guitar or drum machine thump or cloudy voice feel simultaneously close and infinitely far away, like the sound of a whisper amplified through the scratch of handwriting on a personal letter sent from the other side of the world. Letter Writer indeed.

Watch the video for the title track below, and buy the whole tape from Chicago’s Pretty All Right label.

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Review: Planningtorock “All Love’s Legal”

03 Feb 2014 — Evelyn Malinowski

There is something saddening about admission, to obtaining a goal much dreamt of.

Planningtorock’s highly anticipated All Love's Legal, out in the matter of a few weeks on Human Level Recordings, more than presents us to this acute emotion. While the album possesses experimental dance songs like “Misogyny Drop Dead” and “Let’s Talk about Gender Baby," which are doubtlessly of anthem caliber, other songs like “Welcome,” “Words are Glass,” and "Answerland," ensue striking ambient embodiments of melancholy after admission. In this context, the saddening admission is that gender equality and human rights for all are still overshadowed by xenophobia and oppressive religious belief. The album's tones of sadness are rooted in lamentation for dreams of a better political environment, for not being told that you cannot "fall in love with whoever you want to." It’s like we’re not in 2014, and the hands of feudalism, which worked to try and model society after antiquated depictions of the ascent to heaven, are gripping desperately on modern society before they can't to hold on anymore.

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Medievalism is inherently misogynist, and while PTR shouts with her difficult-sounding voice that misogyny should drop dead and step back, it is the patriarchical practice of marriage that corrals us, which should see the ax first, and head over and out. Furthermore, taking into account the themes of steps on the album, we have ourselves a funny sort of medieval deconstruction of All Love's Legal.

13th century poet Chretien de Troyes epitomized the melancholy that succeeds admission and obtainment in the Arthurian romance Erec and Enide. Although this romance comes from a literary epoch around 1170, it communicates a timeless, tragic aspect of heroism: putting down your sword after getting the lady of your dreams. Due to their intense attraction, Erec and Enide hardly leave the bed after their wedding until Enide, satisfying the feminine eavesdropper archetype, overhears Erec’s former comrades talk shit about his becoming a lover: "He turned all his attention to embracing and kissing her; he pursued no other delight. His companions were grieved by this and often lamented among themselves, saying that he loved her far too much."

Then Enide admits this to Erec: “My lord, since you press me so, I shall tell you the truth; I shall conceal it from you no longer, but I fear it will distress you. Throughout this land all people … are saying that it is a great shame that you have laid down your arms. Your renown has greatly declined …. It grieves me deeply when they speak so, and it grieves me even more that they place the blame on me."

To offset their toxic lulling, they go on a journey together with a rule that disallows Enide to look back at Erec riding behind her. This metaphor, arguably, is about punishing Enide for her admission. Be that the case or not, it is still Erec’s admission and obtainment of the object of his affection that initializes crisis in the tale; it is Erec’s obtainment that causes others, including Enide, to lament.

I draw on de Troyes because it reflects on the lamentation afoot on PTR’s new work and likewise subverts the misogynistic promotion bound to art in medieval society. While Erec and Enide struggle due to giving into heterosexual, ordained love, PTR contends with the burden of having to speak up for ongoing issues concerning gender equality in the modern day, since ambivalance seems to have taken over to an extent. The haunted, ineffable parts of All Love's Legal specifically come from a struggle similiar to Enide's, that state of awareness of a truth that the target audience doesn't want to hear. Just because some progress has been made as far as equality goes doesn’t mean that the journey to make the situation more sustainable and gender aware should pause. What happened with the members of Pussy Riot between 2012 and 2013 in Russia is an enormous example, and irrefutably part of the inspiration behind this album's concept. 

Can PTR’s next album please be a full-on ambient one, exploring the sound of this phenomenon further? In the mean time, All Love’s Legal is indeed a chivalrous performance at the court of an already gender aware kingdom. Let’s help it reach the serfs who scoff at or are unaware of using human drama to learn about the nature of love and liquidity of sexuality.

All Love's Legal is out February 18th on Human Level Recordings.

Review: Alexander Winkelmann “Untitled”

30 Jan 2014 — Lukas Dubro

I met Alexander Winkelmann as a singer with guitar. He played one of our parties in spring 2012 and I liked his show immediately. His lyrics posessed a striking blended sort of humor. The audience laughed at his jokes while gleaning a deeper intention behind them. I remember that he didn't care about his singing and playing skills, he just sang and played. It was like he was saying, "I am Alexander Winkelmann, like me or not." And I liked it. I've only missed one show since.

Today, on his 30th birthday, Alexander is releasing a new EP.

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He is not a singer with guitar anymore. In his last three records, he toyed with instruments ranging from oldschool 80s synthesizers to found objects like bubble wrap and effervescent powder. His arrangements became more complex, incorporating both pop and experimental elements. This same playful approach can be found on his latest record. What's different from the last releases, however, is that Winkelmann is singing in an invented language. Only a few words like "tengo" or phrases like "I don't mean to let it go" can be understood.

Despite the inability to understand exactly what Alexander is saying, the music is energetic and enthraling – the beats are quick, the guitars distorted, the synths aggressive, the volume high. Here we find the most arresting characteristic of his music, the intensity. Whether he is shouting into the microphone or jumping up and down stage, Alexander invests everything. This passion and power is something rare in contemporary pop music, where artificiality and irony are still an unfortunate standard. At his last concert at famous jetset techno club Kater Holzig, where Winkelmann has been working the door, he got the crowd dancing. Previously, I've seen an audience member so touched by this energy that they were brought to tears.

So whatever he does, you will get a hundred percent Alexander Winkelmann – no matter if he has a guitar, or a water bucket with him on stage.

Get the EP over here. Come to the release party at Das Gift in Berlin tonight!

IYDES “Call to Reason” ft. Danglo

30 Jan 2014 — Henry Schiller

London grime survives a nuclear holocaust and emerges stronger, more vicious than ever. On “Call to Reason” IYDES props cyclical grime beats against the more intimate sonic structures of contemporary electronica. Each of Danglo’s oblique sputters is crammed into luscious globules of aural indignation that stick on the peach-fuzz hairs of your earlobes.

Analogues can be drawn between the London electronic scene - IYDES's London - and the first wave of British prog-rock. The almot academic focus that artists give to technique and detail, barely masking an emotional frailty that resonates immensely with obsessive, equally astute listeners. IYDES has carefully crafted a semantics of musical ingenuity around a scene history he seems hellbent on tearing to pieces. It might sound incredibly contrived, but there really is something to that notion of caustic reverence that reminds me of the way early prog outfits like King Crimson and Yes interacted with the carefully set up paradigms classical music and folk, eventially burning them to the ground.

Then again, those groups never moved you like IYDES does.

PHASE EP is out March 2014 on Dandelion Lotus Records / Kompakt.

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