Julian Lynch's Lines has been one of my favorite releases of this year so far, and the new video for album track "North Line" might summarize my feelings more succinctly than words ever could. In the video, we find dogs with their heads and paws draped out of car windows, panting gleefully in the wind. It's a simple, colloquial image, but one that director Richard Law presents with remarkable gravity. On the song "North Line," too, Lynch performs a slide guitar-based acoustic song as though it were a composition for a chamber orchestra. Neither Lynch, nor the dogs in the video, need words to telegraph exactly how they're feeling.
Already around for roughly two years now, Portland, Maine-based project Afraid seems to have flown mostly under the radar until now, a fact that could and should change with the group's latest effort, a digital 7" dropped a few weeks ago, not least as the a-side features vocal contributions by Jarboe La Salle Devereaux or simply Jarboe, best known for her work with seminal NYC outfit Swans – check out the incredible result below. Today however we're delighted to premiere the brand new video for the single's equally remarkable b-side, "Your Dealer In Heaven", a noirish and brooding hybrid of post punk-indebted patterns underlying incisive electronic loops, restrained yet poignant beats, and male/female vocals that are as elaborate as they feel subtly vulnerable, at least until they submerge into a surge of effects that mark the track's finale. The visuals themselves are appropriately haunting, a series of occult images that underline the scenery's inescapable bleakness.
Sisters Forever b/w Your Dealer In Heaven is out digitally on Everything Is Chemical and available for free via bandcamp.
To get this cleared up straight away, Michael Lawrence's video for "I Dream In Neon", a song from the Drifters part of Alex Zhang Hungtai aka Dirty Beaches' Drifters/Love Is the Devil LP - probably my favourite album of the year so far - was for the most part not shot in Berlin, as the New York Times claims, except for the driving scenes, as Alex confirmed via Twitter last night. The rest was filmed in Hamburg, which seems only too appropriate, as I could hardly imagine a more fitting environment for the song's bleak undertones than the city's gritty red light district in St Pauli and its yearning dockside streets at twilight. Due to my affiliation to both towns I'm probably highly biased, but let's just call it 2013's most wonderful video for now.
It has, undeniably, been a while since we heard anything new from the Norwegian techno duo Bloksberg, keeping in mind that Eivind and Jens-Ole are one of those proclaimed perfectionists; and if you happen to identify with this category as well, you might know that things sometimes take a wee bit more time than originally predicted. Nonetheless, we believe it was worth the wait. "Gamlebyen" builds up a classic string of beats that continously evolves in atmosphere, finally releasing the duo's utter strenght; their hidden beast, so to speak, making you want to dance like there's no tomorrow. Accompanied by Caleb Dunham's strange, internet-esque 3D graphics, the outcome pretty much speaks for itself.
Gamlebyen/Eufori is out now on 12" vinyl via Terrella Records (still no information about this imprint as of yet), so uhm, it can apparently only be purchased in select record shops (Tiger, The Garden, Filter Musikk and Big Dipper) in Oslo. Otherwise, it is also on iTunes.
After dropping a glistening house 12" on LA-based NNF-offshoot 100% SILK, Melbourne native Rohan Newman aka Roland Tings did what you gotta do these days and took off to Berlin to soak up this city's fake-bohemian music scene. Unlike many of his compatriots, however, it turns out that he actually got something done while staying in town, and the key to that was, rather unsurprisingly, discipline: "Each day in mid-2012 at around 10am", so the story goes, he'd meet with his friend Nathan Savage at a studio "in an old converted governmental administration building next to a scrap yard on the canal" and "sometimes stopping by Berghain for a few hours on the way in", both probably just to perpetuate the cliché. Sorry for being a bit sarcastic, as there's actually no real need. The result of those morning sessions, Tings & Savage's Brain Foam EP, is a supreme instance of effortless yet sophisticated, immensely playful improvisation, naturally much rougher round the edges compared to Newman's Milky Way EP, landing in that unmarked territory somewhere between ambient, noise, and rugged techno that actually does not all too much sound like the city it was conceived in. Below, watch the aptly psychedelic video for EP standout "Sequins".
Brain Foam is out today on Vancouver's 1080p, Richard MacFarlane's new tape imprint which we introduced last week. Get the EP right here.
Barcelona producer and DJ Josep Xortó's new video for his debut single "I Remember" is a beautiful concoction of unique images put together by the always surprising Slurp Beta Tutor. The collage complements the track imaginatively, whilst we have Xortó's simple vocals accompanying it, intriguingly reminscent of The Teenagers' vocalist. Xortó really makes the song his own, exploring themes of late nights in a new city, joining a band, and ultimately and frankly how messed up the world is. These work surprisingly well with Xortó's brooding but darkly eloquent voice.
Deep and touchingly absorbing, the video leaves Xortó intensely staring back at us, making us reminisce our own memories.
Released on TAPErec, and co-produced by Mikko Gordon (Atoms for Peace), this video does perfect justice to the dark future disco-pop of Xortó's lyrically driven track.
In his review of Stellar OM Source's latest masterstroke Joy One Mile, author Andrew Wagner concluded by writing that it's "an album whose driving force may be an embrace of chaos, existing at the high levels of intensity where seemingly disparate emotions (the misery, the ecstasy) meld together and become one." Even more so than anywhere else on the album, this apt interpretation is best reflected by LP opener "Polarity", whose very title perfectly encapsulates the work's deliberate internal contradictions. The brand new video for the track, directed by Christelle Gualdi herself, translates the concept into the visual realm, creating further fissions on different levels: while the acting characters' beauty is out there in the open, the track's relentless acidic bass assaults give the video's commanding watery images an uneasy feel, adding something indistinctly uncanny to the women's slow dancing's sublimity. Sharing some of her throughts on the video, Gualdi adds:
"A feel of mystery and expectation initiates the sequences. I needed a central character to direct the energy flow, and the girl in blue face became this. When she submerges underwater, we understand her role. The flashbacks explain more before the ballet begins. The object of their dance is revealed in the end: polarity as an exchange of beauty."
Joy One Mile is out on RVNG Intl. Stellar OM Source will perform in Berlin together with Oneohtrix Point Never on October 4.
"Against Interpretation" was the first song that really caught our undivided attention when we first introduced London/Oslo duo Saa back in February, and it was the song we kept coming back to while it was sadlyy gone from their Soundcloud due to the happy news that they got signed to a label. A few thingshave been written about the music of Linn Carin Dirdal and Asher Levitas since then, so suffice it to add that not only are the sombre, slow-burning waves of signature track "Against Interpretation" back for everyone's pleasure, but they're now also accompanied by an absolutely gorgeous and appropriate video, unveiled yesterday and made by Tom Brigden. Watch it below.
Saa's self-titled debut EP is out July 8 on left_blank.
