25 Jan 2014 — Andrew Wagner
“Shibuya”, producer Beat Culture’s latest, begins delicately. KID A sings of a “magic hour” over some dreamy synth strains that seem to absentmindedly float about. The vocals remain ethereal as noiser and noiser synths pile on top of each other. By the time the pulsating beat kicks in, you can barely make out KID A, and the whole song feels like a joyous eruption. “Shibuya” is the perfect complement to the dancier (but no less dreamy) “Drifter”, both out now as a 7” single.
Stream "Shibuya" below. "Drifter/Shibuya" is available for purchase through B3SCI Records.
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24 Jan 2014 — Dalton Vogler
Could we interest you in some synth-pop music from the producer that brought you BROODS and Lorde?
With vocals that invoke sounds of Lykke Li and Memory Cassette, New Zealand’s Indira Force is off to a great start in 2014 with the release of “Stay”, a song from her experimental solo project, Indi.
“Stay” combines ethereal synths with reverberating, distant vocals to create a hauntingly beautiful pop song. It’s a significant change in direction from Indira’s earlier work, which focuses heavily on ambient, spacious sounds.
You can download “Stay” and check out other sounds from Indi. at her bandcamp, here.
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24 Jan 2014 — Tonje Thilesen
After two years of almost complete silence, Berlin-via-Georgia instrumentalist and producer Gacha returns with his second release on R&S Records' subsection Apollo Records, following the splendid UK garage infused 12" single (B-side) "Bowl" back in 2012. His new EP The Watchmen Saw The Light starts off with the stellar ambient ballad "Saysea", featuring Natalie Beridze (TBA) on vocals, giving us a clear reminisce of Destroyer's "Bay Of Pigs", but quickly escales both in atmospherics and rhythm throughout the EP's six tracks. On track 5 and 6, however, Gacha leaps back into his love for garage, though clearly infused with his cinematic, Jon Hopkins -esque trademark.
The EP set to release on Apollo Records on January 27th.
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23 Jan 2014 — Dalton Vogler
After his groundbreaking 2012 debut EP, Seeing Her Naked, Amsterdam-based Mar makes his return to the R'n'B scene with a new track, “Man x Woman”.
Mar’s unbelievably smooth vocals guide the track, but it’s really his evolution as a producer that makes the song stand out. His presentation is so polished and clean that it adds legitimacy to Mar’s lyrical guarantees. Then of course there’s the minimal instrumentation at the beginning that sets the stage for his breathtaking house breakdown a minute in.
Hopefully this is a sign of big things to come for Mar, who has a new EP, Form, set to release later this year. Until then, download “Man x Woman” here, for just the price of a like.
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23 Jan 2014 — Trey Reis
Hobo Cubes, aka Montreal's Franceso De Gallo, has a real hefty discography, spread over a list of labels, the likes of which you can’t do your daily new music research without reading something about -- names like NNA, Deep Tapes, Orange Milk, Opal, Digitalis. The list goes on. And that’s all in addition to the work De Gallo does with his own tape label, Hobo Cult, which collects explorative music as stretched out to abstraction as the artwork printed on the J-Card.
With “Structures in Stasis”, the first track previewed from the upcoming Hobo Cubes release on Seattle’s Debacle Records, entitled Apex Ideals, De Gallo enters with a smathering of dance music signifiers, like synth washes, thumping bass beats, and drill-like hi-hat sputters. But at the point that is all begins to ascend, and we, as listeners, are trained to expect it to all drop heavily back on top of us, it instead continues to rise, blending into the low-hanging fog we have suddenly found ourselves encompassed in, blurring into something post-textural, softly transforming and beautiful.
Similar things go on in "Synchronicity", although the pulsating synth pattern is even more heavily muffled, giving way to piercing noice disruptions in a more loosely knitted, impressionistic arrangement. The videofor the track, premiered below, aptly translates De Gallo's sonic abstractions to the visual realm.
Listen and watch below, and look for the entirety of Apex Ideals from Debacle Records on February 11.
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22 Jan 2014 — Trey Reis
Denver-via-Chicago and back again carried on a heavy gait of that Windy City footwork, Thug Entrancer, aka Ryan McRyhew has been skewing modern tendencies in dance music since his early days among all of those other foot-of-the-mountain weirdos at Denver’s Rhinoceropolis. It wasn’t more than a couple of months ago that I had the privelage of seeing McRyhew play on the matted, 70s carpet of Iowa’s similarly named Elephungeon in the little old town of Boone. And then a few weeks later, I find out the tape I picked up that show, Death After Life, is being given the vinyl treatment by none other Mr. Lopatin’s Software imprint. Huge, y'all.
Watch the eerie repetition of it all crest and fall like an oil spill into open water in the video for “Death After Live IV” below, and look for the full-length LP from Software on February 11.
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22 Jan 2014 — Kelsie Brown
Last summer, we were introduced to Seattle duo Cock & Swan and quickly fell in love with their lush sound. Wisconsin producer Chants has taken a different approach to envisioning the duo's dreamy "Animal Totem", adding a level of lightness and turning it into a daytime lullaby. The remix is accompanied by a video filled with animated paper animals frolicking through fields of flowers and ponds full of lilypads, with an ending perfectly fitting of the peacefulness that the song evokes. The material for the video was taken from a 2000 animation found in Archive.org's SIGGRAPH collection.
"Animal Totem" (Chants remix) is taken from the second remix album of last year's Cock & Swan album, Secret Angles. Recess Tangle, Vol. 2 is out January 28 through Hush Hush Records. Watch the video and stream the track below:
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22 Jan 2014 — Henning Lahmann
The most interesting thing about shoegaze probably is that it still works so damn well. We're not only some 25 years after its original inception, but it's also almost five years after the genre's latest genuine revival, and already a year after Kevin Shield's celebrated if overhyped return from the death. Brooklyn's The Tower of Light does not seem to care about timing: the mesmerizing soundscapes the artist has constructed for "Honey Resist", taken from his forthcoming debut full-length, are as untimely as they are timeless. The references, therefore, are too obvious to matter, which is just fine because it enables us to entirely focus on the song's strengths. The static, detached rhythm is too unassuming and way too familiar to distract from the wistful, expressive vocals, while the smudgy chord progression provides exactly that kind of sluggish mournfulness that will never grow old, or at least that's the only logical conclusion after listening to a track like "Honey Resist" in the year 2014. The melody, needless to add, is simple but pretty, and pretty effective. File under "to get lost in".
The Tower of Light's self-titled LP is out February 4 via Felte. Pre-order the album now over here.
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