VIDEO / DOWNLOAD: Blissed Out - Drones (Ritualz Remix)

Where did witch house go?  It just ate itself and regurgitated it into an pulse quickening collaboration with neon aacid vomit visuals.  Gnarly retro-active blog music from the blistered fingertips of Blissed Out given a relentless rescrub by dark artisan Ritualz

Download from the Soundcloud or from Mediafire if that's all gone (which it probably has at the time of writing).

STREAM: †‡† - Ritualz

This reached it's download limit of 100 almost immediately earlier today, and luckily for everyone who grabbed it they've got a real piece of art in their hands. Unfortunately the rest of us will just have to stream it to be able to hear it, and that's a bit of a pisser because this one I'm going to come back to as much as album tracks Kvltstep and San Marino. †‡† / Ritualzzz / Ritualz (not quite sure what the preference is) has taken the WitchHouse sound he helped set up, and tweaked it ever so subtly onto the next solar plane; a beautifully absorbing slice of speedball sideway sliding drugginess; neither an up or a down just a high, and whichever way you take that is entirely of the listeners own making.



Also freshly exhumed today is a remix of Health's In Violet - The noisy clatter of the original smoothed out, to an extent, and worth it just for the juddering finish as the clapped out rescrub surges to its climax:

VIDEO: †‡† - ▲

Video for one of the best tracks from one of the finest witch house acts of the year: †‡†.  Diorected by Petit Pistolette it's a refreshing break from the de Xam dominated visuals that usually accompany anything of this genre, and the lo-res graininess of the film suits the low contrast bleakness of the track, which in spite of itself strives and succeeds at achieving a kind of slo motion euphoria. This one's a keeper.

REVIEW: ISVOLT - A DISARO Compilation

ISVOLT - A DISARO Compilation
Robot Elephant Records
ORDER

This is the long-awaited DISARO artists compilation, released on London's Robot Elephant (run by the God Don't Like It guys), and if anyone approaches this thinking it will explain Witch House to them in one sitting, or offer them an easy in to the genre they're going to come out the other side even more confused or worse, more mentally compromised, than when they went in. This is a prism to fracture their preconceptions into seven shades of black light (or nine, if the analogy covers ever track on here) and drops subtle clues that there's a whole lot more to discover. No answers here, although this is a genre that constantly poses more questions and throws up more conundrums as part of its raison d'etre. This is essential, let's just make that clear right the now. As a guide to a genre it's a peerless companion to the multitude of mixes and blog comps out there, and as a label overview, its flawless.

Starting with the unholy blackened cacophony of †‡†'s Misery Walk it drops straight onto the beat with the scenery smashing bass howl of Party Trash. A bottom end that sucks up all the attention, bowling over the lightly played primitively pretty keys that would pick out a straight melody if they weren't getting blasted into a spidery scrawl. Next up it's the Arctic warehouse euphoria of Fostercare's Cold Light a track every DJ should keep in their box, the stuttering hi hat, echoic vocal exhortation and constant threat of a massive peak breaking out at any time cold be dropped into any set to redirect it and leave the field open to all sorts of directions out of it. Immense. //TENSE// sound like an overly buff IDM Blank Dogs. That deep lunged Ian Curtis intonation, sombre, but earnest and fronted by a muscular petrol headed throb that surrounded that metallic piston melody and oiled rhythm, the whole track unnervingly dirty, masculine and fetishistic. It's a sound that follows through into a more streamlined feminine version in Modern Witch's Your Life's A Movie, which flows along clean, supple lines but still retains a feral presence. Mater Suspiria Vision provides a rush trademarked ghost-drone, with possessed, shackled voices, chained to a bed of needling synth lines that overlap and slither forward into ///HORSE MACGYVER\\\'s Nod; one of the most invigorating artists, and the more ridiculously competent at conjuring a sense of dread from a few minimal tones drawn from short-circuited noise boards. Finally, and quite prominently, Raw Moans horrible ballad seals the set. Which is to say, it's a ballad in the style of, say, George Michael, but with a discordant atonal melody running at odds to the sighing vocal harmony, with the space in between filled with an aviary of mechanical birds, or a cave of robot bats,depending how occulty you want to take it. It's not occult at all, it just sounds healthily wrong, and a such is a fitting kiss off to the years most welcome label slash scene primer.

The album is released on Monday and to celebrate Robot Elephant are bringing Mater Supiria Vision, Fostercare and Robert Disaro to play the launch party at The Den + Centro. Pretty incredible line-up.