Cut Hands “Damballah 58”

11 Nov 2013 — Evelyn Malinowski

The violence involved with listening to Cut Hands can be seen physically manifested while William Bennett thrashes his head and hips around to the beats he is orchestrating. 

He moves in such a way that it looks like he almost isn't in control of the beats, although he clearly, masterfully is; It is more that he appears to be channeling them, summoning them, opening a digital doorway for them to come running through, pouring out from a Haitian, Subsaharan alternate dimension which houses spirits of questionable behavior. Today's new release, Damballah 58 on Blackest Ever Black, nourishes Cut Hands fans and reinforces that, as always, brutality, unorderly comprehensibility, and primitive bashing about – actions associated with physicality – are all also preservable within the aural world. "Damballah 58," the EP's title track, likewise denotes that this alternate dimension doesn't give a fuck whether you understand the premise or not.

BØNE SQUAD “VVINTER (Feral Remix)”

10 Nov 2013 — Tonje Thilesen

If I were you, I'd keep my eyes up for the New York-based producer Feral in the coming year, having already made a great impression on us with his superior reworks, swiftly appearing on his Soundcloud page throughout the past year. More notably, his original track "Haymaker" (as introduced by yours truly back in August) might be his best work up to date, but following his creative development up until this point, that may soon change. Another name you should not pass unnoticed (by the way), is the young grime producer BØNE SQUAD — having released the splendid 12" EP Skal & Bones on Deadboy's new imprint Total Fantasy back in May, described in the press release as "the sound of the UK underground filtered through the dark forests of Norway". Duh, I'm sold.

Below, listen to Feral's excellent edit of BØNE SQUAD's "VVINTER", a pairing so great that we're literally crossing our fingers for a future collab between the two producers.

Review: James Ferraro “NYC, Hell 3:00AM”

09 Nov 2013 — Andrew Wagner

James Ferraro’s come a long way. It’s hard to believe it’s been only two years since Far Side Virtual, Ferraro’s bewildering, maximalist masterpiece of an album, came out. At the time, Far Side Virtual seemed to signify a major transformation in Ferraro from an (extremely) lo-fi, hypnagogic aesthetic to a clearer, more future-oriented sound composed of digital scraps. Yet, as incongruous as Ferraro’s new sound may have seemed, Far Side Virtual still shared a certain over-the-top, witty approach to our cultural detritus that was keeping in line with earlier albums like Night Dolls with Hairspray or On Air. NYC, Hell 3:00AM, however, couldn’t feel further apart from these earlier works, the humor sucked out and replaced with a deeply meditative and somber soundscape.

Not that NYC, Hell 3:00AM should be surprising, per se. Indeed, Ferraro’s most recent release, the mixtape Cold, superficially shares many of NYC’s sonic elements: brooding synths, hip-hop drum beats, Ferraro’s strained and crooning voice, and the occasional piano flourish. On Cold, the hip-hop and R&B elements grounded Ferraro, pushing the songs forward even when the vocals threatened to become completely lost in themselves. In contrast, NYC finds all of the sonic elements—beats included—becoming sucked into a sort of whirlpool of despair. At the same time that the song structures endlessly drift, they never seem to get anywhere. Hell, indeed.

What exactly is Ferraro so depressed about? Oftentimes it’s unclear, with Ferraro’s vocals warbling around, subsumed by the music’s synths. When they do come through, they suggest an utter discontent with the city. “City Smells,” ostensibly a love song, feels far more like a lonely individual trapped in himself and his nihilism: “Oh girl I know you want to love me / What it’s like in the empty city.” The elements of the city that do peak into Ferraro’s insular world are dark, verging on the apocalyptic. Computerized voices alternatively announce “breaking news”, “money, money, money”, “AT&T,” and “sextape pixilation.” “Stuck 1” opens with sirens, but even these are slowed down to match the near creeping pace of Ferraro’s universe.

And yet, in spite of its overwhelmingly nihilistic outlook, NYC is immensely listenable. It isn’t quite enjoyable as much as it is cathartic. “Cheek Bones,” one of the album’s most straightforward tracks, exemplifies how relatable NYC can be. Ferraro sings, “I don’t want to get cancer / but these cigarettes give me cancer / and I start to cry." It’s a sort of strangely circuitous logic matched by the song’s formal structure, going somewhere but never quite making it past where Ferraro starts. In spite of how simple the solution might seem to the outside listener—just quit smoking—there’s something eminently understandable about Ferraro on this song, of knowing that one needs to stop something but not being able to bring oneself to. Throughout the track, Ferraro emits a borderline disgusting, gutteral noise that almost sounds as though he’s throwing up. It’s the sort of left-field weirdness that characterized so much of his earlier noise work, but used here for far different means. It’s refreshing to hear Ferraro using all of his tools to so sincerely describe a certain human condition.

Some of the most enjoyable parts of the album, though, come on its few instrumental tracks. Here, NYC comes the closest to flirting with prettiness—albeit a deeply melancholic one. On “QR JR.”, for instance, Ferraro combines wind chimes, drifting pianos, and the occasional found sound sample. The song achieves an impressionistic beauty reminiscent of some of Dirty Beaches’ recent LP, Drifters/Love is the Devil. “Vanity”, though more beat driven, similarly achieves a strange sort of beauty with its looping strings. Throughout both songs, Ferraro adds enough weird sounds to add depth to the compositions, keeping them from being merely sentimental. In turn, such tracks (as well as “Stuck 1” and “Stuck 2”) might be some of Ferraro’s most compelling and challenging music yet. Uncomfortably sitting between sincerity and irony, the digital and the analogue, they construct a sonic space that is at once seductive and off-putting. Such characteristics extend to NYC, Hell 3:00AM as a whole—the album, at once unbearably bleak, is also one that entrances the listener and keeps her listening.

NYC, Hell 3:00 AM is available now from Hippos in Tanks.

Watch: Ensemble Economique “Into Nowhere Again” (exclusive)

08 Nov 2013 — Henning Lahmann

Maybe it's simply that everything Brian Pyle puts out under his Ensemble Economique solo moniker is just too consistently excellent, but it's surprising to see how little attention – in comparative terms – the Californian experimentalist's latest full-length Fever Logic has received so far. The LP is classic EE material: eerie and cinematic synth soundscapes, slowly burning, menacing, rattling drum patterns, and Pyle's wistful mourning. The nightmarish tunnel vision in the new video for album track "Into Nowhere Again", directed by Leonard Fresquez, appropriately captures the music's impression of loss and despair. Watch it below.

Fever Logic is out on Not Not Fun. Get it over at Boomkat, highly recommended.

COIN “Inside Palace”

08 Nov 2013 — Trey Reis

It’s probably because I just finished seeing Gravity for the second time, but that subtle synthesizer throb that starts this new COIN track, just before those mile-high drum hits come stomping in, makes me think of a slowly rotating planet. One in which you can see patches of clouds and continents rotating out of the cosmic body’s darkside, outlining the planet’s entire Western edge, as it repeats its own spin around its axis.

It’s what Opal Tapes is good at: releasing artists working within the confines of an enormous sound space in which suggestion plays as large of a role as presence. For every choice of instrumentation, listeners wonder where it came from, where it is going, and what else could have happened outside such minimalism, swelling beyond its own means in the small corner of the larger space for which it exists.

Listen to the first single, “Inside Palace”, from COIN’s upcoming Opal Tapes release of the same name, out in early December.

Angel 1 “Angel Activate”

07 Nov 2013 — Trey Reis

How do you classify a tape label so consistently unclassifiable? “Post-genre” itself is not a determiner. In fact, those words offer nothing to the listener besides the suggestion that what they are about to hear might not sound even remotely familiar. It makes me think more of the definition of a music label. The word label, in general, is a synonym for genre. Perhaps the only proper classification for releases from labels like Beer on the Rug is “Beer on the Rug,” so we can stop throwing words like “ambient” and “vapor” and “post” at the wall like splatter paint and seeing what it looks like afterward.

Angel Activate, the new Beer on the Rug release from Angel 1 is par for the course in the unclassifiable. Jumping from walls of white noise through daytime television static to party-on-the-floor-above-you bass beats is another solid example of a label so of the times that we probably won’t be able to properly define it until long after these miles of magnetic tape are long gone, decaying slowly into the dirt.

Listen to it below.

ILLLS “Colleen”

07 Nov 2013 — Parker Bruce

Last year, ILLLS (human name being Steven Ross) released his Dark Paradise EP, and on November 12, he will put out his first album, Hideout from the Feeders on Aloe Music, a New York-based label. "Colleen" is just good rock, plain and simple, with all the charge, chug, and glug. Do your pre-ordering here and go find a car because you're going to want to drive around listening to this.