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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Hobo Cubes “Structures in Stasis” / “Synchronicity” (exclusive)

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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Watch: Thug Entrancer “Death After Live IV”

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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Watch: Cock & Swan “Animal Totem (Chants remix)” (exclusive)

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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Watch: Holly Herndon “Chorus”

22 Jan 2014 — Evelyn Malinowski

Watching Akihiko Taniguchi's video for "Chorus" for a second time, I found myself rummaging for familiar items, like the F.A.T. sticker on the closed laptop toward the beginning of the video, and later the Spree Quelle bottle. When familiar colors/shapes/messages pass so quickly, and amid so many other souvenirs, conscious recognition doesn't take place without stagnation: there's a time lag of sorts. We see the stack of banana peels but they don't register as a stack of banana peels until a moment later.

That's not to say that the pace of this chorus of workspaces is a notably rapid one; on the contrary, the pace works perfectly with the controlled layers, textures, and curiosity neatly sewn in Holly Herndon's track. It's the clutter that makes objects and words hard to grasp. And it's the clutter that fills the video and complements the suffocation in the music, the struggle to get a clear clip of human, more-than-phonetic vocals. There's also something to be said about the suffocation of working from home. Presumably some of the smaller, clearer desks we see are the desks of individuals who don't work at home. While Herndon and Taniguchi's collaboration takes up issues of internet privacy and space as witnessed through virtual communication, it seems that in turn it furthermore comments on space filled by objects, the longing to want to clean it out and procrastinating, or the possibility that some people work well in confusion. The clearest, most comprehensible parts of the video and music are in the beginning, when we view fragments of the two artists' Skype correspondence, before dealing with the details of what lies around the scoped screen. Still, the essence of this video is indeed the viewing of the inside of people's private spheres, both through the webcam and outside of it.

Chorus EP is out now on RVNG Intl. You can order it here.

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Watch: Monsterheart “Oh Death”

20 Jan 2014 — Henry Schiller

“Oh Death”, from electro-goth singer Monsterheart, is an adaptation of sorts of the American folk dirge with the same name. The 100+ year old lyrics are given a unique spin, in a style reminiscent of recent work by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and commercials for upcoming seasons of AMC shows. Monsterheart resist the urge to crowd their interpretation with too much momentum or calamity, and the result is a version that is structurally unique but does not sacrifice the somber mood of the original.

Monsterheart’s debut album W will be out this spring. Watch the video for “Oh Death” below:

 

 

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Interact: Avalon Emerson “Quoi!”

16 Jan 2014 — Evelyn Malinowski

As if an effort greater than preceding ones to launch the ICEE HOT collective operating out of San Francisco into the global scene, Avalon Emerson, with her crunchy and optimistic style, has paid new and old dance fans a great service by marrying her instant classic "Quoi!," which earned a nine out of ten rating already in Mixmag, to its official interactive counterpart, a video by SF artist Cabbibo. 

The interactive video requires WebGL, best through Google Chrome. If you don't have Chrome and don't feel like installing yet want to hear the sounds and see the space, you can still watch a demo of the video and observe the moonscaped squares orbiting around some kind of fractal nucleus. And then the rave nostalgia kicks-in: Is anyone else reminded of Windows Media Player and iTunes 1.0 visuals? Does anyone see the re-emergence of warehouse parties in the Bay Area as history repeating itself, but hopefully with less E?

"Quoi!" displays fantastic restraint and knowledge of house archetypes. It starts off with a punch, then the sample, which sounds like something Fatboy Slim would've used, loops itself into a knot over the right amount of thumping bass, and builds long enough for us to think that the song is going to eventually explode into clubby loudness. Instead, we are mulled over by synth groove and a sharp but warm melodic centerpiece. There is more than a pinch of progressive house/techno nostalgia here, a reminiscence not altogether similar but corresponding somewhat with the latest from Fort Romeau. "Quoi!" differs in that it somehow manages both praise of the rave days and clean auspiciousness about new directions for dance music. Fort Romeau, on the other hand, while his sound is immaculate in several ways, sounds like he plans on staying in the past.

Just think, ravers and typical Ibiza-patrons in the mid-90s never saw this type of video work coming. All they cared about was getting Digweed to the warehouse to spin "Heaven Scent" over and over. 

Is that Avalon and ICEE HOT fifteen years ago?

But damn, it gives me chills, all of it. It gives me chills to indulge in that nostalgia, and it excites me to interact with this video, to puppet synaesthesia, and to think about how far we've come and more forward movement for dance, especially in the States.

You can preview "Pressure/Quoi!" here, or buy the record here.

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