Agreeably mellow and low-key abstract hip hop courtesy of Cuttooth aka Newcastle resident Nick Cooke. "Old Tape Machine" features vocals by King Midas Sound's Kiki Hitomi, whose slightly aloof and frail voice nicely enfolds Cooke's restrained beats and distantly tinkling sample works. Cuttooth is set to drop two releases in 2013, the first record via 4Lux White, which will include "Old Tape Machine", and an EP on Plynt with 'more hip-hop orientated' material, according to the artist. More info soon, stay tuned.
Toronto's Brandon Hocura works as a DJ, helps with record re-issuing at Invisible City Sound System, and is in charge of Polyphasic Studios. But as that isn't enough apparently, he also has a musical endeavor with his wife Naomi, a filmmaker, named Seance Centre. The duo is set to drop debut EP Chandigarh soon both digital and on vinyl. Hocura tells us a bit more about the release:
'The EP is named after Le Corbusier's modernist experiment in urban planning, the city of Chandigarh in Punjab, India. We travelled to the city almost 10 years ago, and the city felt like an improbable collection of contradictions; cold and modern, yet brimming with exciting life; futuristic, but already in a slow-motion state of decay; chaotic as any Indian city, but somehow things had this incredibly organized flow. In the center of the city was also a beautiful verdant park, one of the best we saw on our entire trip. Apparently Corbusier designed the city to resemble the human circulatory system. I guess we found this place very provocative and hope that in some ways our music has some of the contradictions that made this city so interesting.
'[Seance Centre] started when we were hosting and doing a small tour with legendary Italian DJ Beppe Loda. We started messing around in the studio with some synths and drum machines and in the presence of Beppe we felt a bit like Klein + M.B.O. Although nothing from those sessions made it on the EP, we feel that Beppe's spirit, maybe channeled through obsessing over his Elettronica Meccanica tapes had a profound influence on our sound.'
The music of Seance Centre is massaging, 'the slow-motion state of decay' as Hocura describes it aptly. The EP fritzes out and sizzles. It doesn’t feel 'cold' or in any way like decay though. However, it does have the 'flow' that Hocura mentioned when talking about the Indian city, a flow from song to song and flow within each song. "39 Clocks" (perhaps named after the band) is a loosey goosey, cyclical song where the singing is most noticeable on the EP, whereas "La Chinoise" (maybe or maybe not a reference to Godard) bobs with hems and haws so well that you almost forget there were vocals somewhere in the first place, until Naomi comes back in with her raised and rising huffing. The title track is the sound of fusing, or as Hocura himself puts it, 'the cosmic sound also came from Italy around the same time, from the Cosmic club. It's mostly associated with Daniele Baldelli who is Beppe Loda's rival. The "Cosmic" sound has come to be associated with slowed down electronic "disco" and this is also something that influenced us.'
Listen to the whole EP below and look for it to be released soon.
Yola Fatoush are looney. Before the London duo's debut album, Up Out of It, comes to us courtesy of Time No Place on April 30, here's album opener and first single "Eagle Works", which acts as a hypnosis on the singers but also the listeners themselves. It's a song that wafts with vocals. We reach the doors of something somewhere by the track's terminus, but who knows what Yola Fatoush are pushing us towards? Hopefully, that's what Up Out of It will tell us soon. Find "Eagle Works" below and have fun playing on their website.
Deptford Goth's LP Life After Defo, one of the most stunning and immaculate debuts I've come across in a long long time, is finally out today via Merok Records. Back in December, we posted the video for the single "Union", and today, Dazed & Confused unveiled the video for one of the absolute album standouts, the achingly beautiful "Feel Real", stylistically done in a similar fashion as last year's predecessor. Watch it below, and get Life After Defo now over here. Needless to add, highly recommended.
Magnificent Montréal-based wave duo Gold Zebra will finally drop their proper debut LP sometime this year via Visage Musique. While this information in itself might be a bit tenuous, the first song off the record to be reveiled does provide an excellent hint of what to expect, all noirish synth menace, motorik beats, and deceptively sweet, crystalline vocals. Take a listen to "Invisible Disorder" below.
Opale is the Paris-based duo of Madrid native Rocío Ortiz and French artist Sophia Hamadi, whose 2012 debut EP as Playground turned quite a few heads with its eerie, transcendent synth soundscapes somewhere between 80s cold wave tropes and latter day, drone-informed ambient psychedelia. The follow-on project taps into the same undercurrents, again relying on reduced, clinical wave bass lines and glacial synth incursions. Below, watch the Elise Tippins-made video for "Les Champs Magnétiques", the first track off Opale's forthcoming LP L'Incandescent, which will be out in May via Stellar Kinematics and Heia Sun.
Yes. We do know it's Monday already. Still, here's our latest selection of delicious videos, and as Video Sunday has been on a brief hiatus, we present our favourite works of the past few weeks, including those fabulous new pieces for Ducktails and Vondelpark, plus some excellent contributions by Ensemble Economique, Test House, and new NFOP favourites Millennium. Enjoy.
Millenium - Q&A (directed by Millennium & Adrian Parvulescu)
Vondelpark - California Analog Dream (directed by Rollo Jackson)
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Ensemble Economique - Something New Is Happening (images by Norman McLaren)
The first Sullen Tone release not credited to Old Apparatus, the forthcoming debut EP IAO by new project Khing Kang King still has the elusive London collective's signature approach to electronic music written all over it. Which is, to be sure, hardly a surprise: Khing Kang King is a duo formed of acclaimed UK rapper Mowgli and Old Apparatus member LTO, who had already been responsible for last year's excellent Realise EP. While IAO is quite a contrast to the actual Old Apparatus material on the production side, the beats and textures being more restrainedly applied in order to leave enough room for Mowgli's staggering, abstract poetry to unfold, the character of LTO's artistic logic remains intact, the overall tone of the release still evoking uncanny images of a forlorn, nocturnal metropolis. Listen to first cut "Metal on Oxtongue" below.
