06 Sep 2013 — Nestor Burma
After choosing the world of city banking over a promising swimming career, Italian producer Sebastian Palomar has achieved creative redemption in the form of a motivational booklet with accompanying songs, entitled The Physical and Emotional Benefits of Swimming. While Seb's often baffling rhetoric is clearly the sound of a man who's gobbled up too much self-help literature (or chlorine), his music is welcoming and gorgeously narcotic. Over-treated synths and garbled instructions tow the listener through refractions of Debussy and Popol Vuh, evoking impressions of turquoise against marble or the cacophony of the bath. This is the noise of the swimmer's headspace - or, as Palomar would put it, the "weird kaleidoscopes of atomised thoughts" that come to mind when immersed. On "Alpine Retreat" we hear Seb at his luxurious and muscular best, reclining in a jacuzzi that could be powered by the man's pomposity alone. Sebastian Palomar's album is out now on Dramatic Records, and you can see him play live this Saturday at Hackney's Power Lunches.
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05 Sep 2013 — Kelsie Brown
Summer is rapidly reaching an end, and that means the time of summer nostalgia is approaching. Euglossine's new track does the trick. Based in Gainesvile, Florida, producer Tristan Whitehill makes glazed-over, hyped-up IDM. Bringing in elements of tropical pop, video game soundtracks, and wavy synths, Euglossine's Dance District is a uniquely modern twist. It makes us comfortable to know that lighthearted dance music like this does still exist.
Dance District will be out on September 14 via MJ MJ Records. Pre-order the tape over at their bandcamp, where you can also stream a few other tracks. Stay tuned to hear more.
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04 Sep 2013 — Andrew Wagner
Huerco S.'s new single, "Prinzif", sounds a bit like a song trying to start and not quite succeeding. The track begins with a simple drum beat and a looping, warbled synth line that comes in and out of clarity, forming the basis of a techno track but never fully coming together. The music then abruptly cuts out, leading to a long ambient passage adorned with the crackling of a tape recorder. After a long build-up, the song finally delivers on the promise of the opening few lines, with the song's seemingly disparate parts joining together to form a little nugget of techno bliss. It should come as no surprise that such bliss is shortlived, with Huerco S. cutting out on the jam nearly as quickly as it started.
Listen to "Prinzif" below. Huerco S.'s debut album, Colonial Patterns, is available September 23rd through Software Recording Co.
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04 Sep 2013 — Henry Schiller
Teen Beams is the recording project of Danish musician Niklas Langeland Pedersen, and below is the perhaps unofficial video for his song "Round the Cathedral". Sounding like a Cocteau Twins influenced version of Ducktails, "Round the Cathedral" takes me back to the halcyon days of 2009, when everything sounded like the mid '90s had been run through a flanger. There is a definite Smiths-influence on the guitar work that is audible beneath the effects, as well as on the song's gloomy-but-gorgeous aesthetic.
Do we move too quickly from one indie rock fad to the next? Are we, the music journalism community, crushing out genres before they even have the chance to grow? I'm not sure, but I do worry that people won't give Teen Beams a chance because his sound is a few years out of the mode. But "Round the Cathedral" is a fine piece of psych pop, and worth sullying your reputation as a forward-thinking music snob to get into.
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03 Sep 2013 — Ashley Canino
Popular Philadelphia freak folk outfit Norwegian Arms has released a video for "Wolf Like A Stray Dog," from their debut LP of the same name. The song is my personal favorite for the way it captures singer and mandolin player Keith Birthday (Brendan Mulvihill)'s experience abroad in thoughtful lyrics and frantic rhythms. The new video gets even more personal, featuring Brendan's father and family dog in moments of loneliness (or maybe just aloneness) and a race to home and family.
This video was produced by Out of Town Films. Wolf Like a Stray Dog is available for download here, and on vinyl, CD, or cassette from Big School Records.
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03 Sep 2013 — Nestor Burma
Interesting proposition here from Canterbury producer B£AMS and newcomer TESLA. While B£AMS's outing on No Pain in Pop's "The Bedroom Club II" saw him channel dark cymbal rushes and Caretaker-esque disintegrations, "Patches" finds the producer in colourfully lackadaisical mood. Velvety keys and molasses drone ooze from one daydream into the next, before ideas collapse and whispered vocals bubble and retreat Doppler-like. The producer's highlife roots are more apparent here than ever (he is the grandson of Nigerian Ogene legend Oliver De Coque). The flipside, from London-based doctor and noise-tamperer TESLA, is more of a mystery. Cavernous, anodyne ruminations soar high like vapour trails before morphing into expertly twisted hip hop beats reminiscent of Prefuse 73 or Matthew David.
Patches / Lazer-AC is out in late September via Kit Records.
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03 Sep 2013 — Parker Bruce
Okay so to be honest, I knew i was going to like this new demo, "Sightseeing," by Tokyo-based Teen Runnings aka Shota Kaneko because I love all things musically dealing with teenage life (see Beach House's "Teen Dream", obviously, Katy Perry's Teenage Dream, Teengirl Fantasy, A*Teens, Teen Witch, and everything Summer Camp has ever done -- and see BULLETT talk about the schoolgirl the other day, very related to the teenager). "Sightseeing" has revving, raring to go guitar that wafts and luau intimations. It harkens back to "Shimmy Shimmy, Ko Ko Bop" and at the same time, the current style of Dev Hynes. It's the perfect mix of new and old.
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02 Sep 2013 — Henning Lahmann
Haley Fohr's work is easily dressed in words. When I first came across the music she makes as Circuit des Yeux roughly two years ago, when she had released her compelling LP Portrait on the always excellent De Stijl Records, the attributes came up automatically. Dark. Eerie. Haunting. Uncanny. Bleak. You know the deal. In fact, you may leave it at that. Until you realise that Fohr's songs are not easy to grasp at all. Above the surely dominant melancholic underpinnings lie structures of cautious and fragile optimism, seeking for the kind of resolution that perhaps only this kind of intimate, introspective music can ever accomplish. This property of her art became most apparent in January of this year with her marvellous song "Lithonia", and it reemerges again in "Acarina", a track off of the forthcoming, fourth official Circuit des Yeux full-length Overdue. Albeit in a notably different gestalt: this time, a signifying moment of catharsis stays absent. Instead, the song meanders slowly, carried almost solely by silent, irresolute drums and a hesitantly plucked acoustic guitar. Rather than being blessed with a climactic arrangement that represents obvious redemption, what we are left with are the artist's challenging, increasingly menacing vocal experimentations that gradually take over, repeating the song's title over and over, before eventually collapsing into a sudden wash of static noise. In "Acarina", assurance might not be pushed to the fore; still, finally and subliminally, liberation awaits in the form of transcendence.
Overdue is out October 15. You may pre-order your copy now over here and check out Fohr's upcoming tour dates after the break.
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Sept 7 Chicago, IL – Constellation *RECORD RELEASE SHOW* #
Sept 21 Milwaukee, WI – River Public West^
Sept 22 Madison, WI – Dragon Fly Lounge^$
Sept 23 Minneapolis, MI – Cause^
Sept 24 Iowa City, IA – Trumpet Blossom^
Sept 25 Omaha, NE – Oleavers^
Oct 14 Chicago IL – Alhambra Palace*
Oct 16 St. Louis, MO – Old Rock House*
Oct 17 Columbia, MO – Mojos*
Oct 18 Springfield, MO – Outland Ballroom*
Oct 19 Norman, OK – The Opolis Norman*
Dec 19 Chicago, IL – The Owl
*with Bill Callahan
^with Spires That in The Sunset Rise
$with Bitchin Bajas
#with Ryley Walker
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