Braden McKenna's solo neo-nu-age psych-folk project Wyld Wyzrdz new album is the first of the year on his own Inner Islands label (even though I reviewed the Ashan album first) and the final one for him in this guise. It picks up where he left off with last September's From A Stone, reflecting on the theme of acceptance, as the title suggests, built on a collection of soft drones,
melodic hooks, vocal chants and moving percussion. Another heady tapestry of handbuilt sounds from McKenna's excellently expanding label.
Alongside this album comes a video titled ALL FIRE // ALL LIGHT directed by Lawrence Martinez, with its own website The Range of Light. It's an evocative twelve minute collage of 16mm and Super 8 shot landscapes, interspersed with illustrations and fx with a soundtrack from Inner Islands artists Gkfoes Vjgoaf, Stag Hare and Wyld Wyzrdz.
GuMMy†Be▲R! drops another ep of his increasingly glamorous take on post-club electronics in the evolving collection of sounds of what was once called Witch House and is now not really known as anything, so disparate and far flung have many of its previously chief proponents been cast from each other. Time picks up where Herr Gummy left us with his last release Oakland but there's another level of development in the production - again, this guy just can't stop getting better. The beats are feeling more intuitive, the sounds becoming more substantial ad the tracks themselves bearing greater presence. Far removed from his first productions involving the garbled voices of children, gunshots and little else.
Among the highlights of the nine tracks the stuttering house of the opening Cognitive Ascension evolves as its name implies, adding waves of melody that push the conscious up into sweaty peaks; the crystal clear heat haze of Sleeping in Dubai and its infectious treble drop, Astroid's bass throb and glassy counter rhythm, Fractured serves up a soundtrack to a lazy Californian beach side drive and the dreamy Friendzone vocalled Can't Go Wrong is pitchshifted into a subtle state of bliss.
The physical release came out at the end of August (didn't realise I'd had this on repeat so long!) on Disaro Records, limited to 200 CD copies,so it's probably all gone - check the status - but you can still get it digitally from the Disaro Bandcamp HERE
Two new demo tracks for downloading from one of Brighton's most promising electronic producers; Adolescent. Following up on the excellent Run Away From Bad People ep released earlier in the summer this double whammy of killer atmospherics and shadowy beats sets out this artist's sound as one to get seriously involved with. The first track, Don't Feed Anger, builds up layers of beats, stuttering melodies, and vocals samples into a looping psychedelic peak. Second track Walk Free, Walk Fast has that Bristol dubstep sound that Joker once called Purple. An itchy, twitchy rhythm locked over a soulfully bruised ambience decked out with futuristic tone jewels. Amazing.
Neon Island is the second album of
equatorial chillwave electronica from Atlanta basedRobel Synthesia.
It's a progression from
his first album, defining his sound into something different to the
tropical daze feelings permeating strains of the subgenre in the
forms of bands such as Ducktails, USF (Previously Universal Studios
Florida) and Gala Drop. There's a golden heat-haze shimmer that
characterises much of the album that starts warming up straight from
first balmy delay soaked track
Sun Rave, whose languid vocal
sample of 'Yeah yeah' melts in and out of the mix in intervals. The
album's concept follows the course of a day from dawn 'til sundown,
so as the suns rays start to burn into the earth so too do the tempos
of the tracks that chart its progress. Ultra Magic Leaf,
surely an ode to that first
smoke of the day,follows
it by bringing the beats; a clipped triplet marching towards the high
sun of midday lead by a reverbed synth line, wordless (or at least
indecipherable) vocodered voice and glittering melody. Beach
Chairs gets blasted again,
slowing things down to a foggy smoked out drone, then on to
Rainforest Kiss with
its lush wavering backdrop of animal sounds and synths picked across
by a thoughtfully pretty lead. Citrus Sunset's
conga shuffle heralds the twilight hours along with a soaring voice
that leads into the faster Liquid Stars and
down tempo again into the dreamily atmospheric Moon
Potion.
Here's the artist's self-made video to go with Rainforest Kiss.
As with Indica
Float, this is almost
incessantly listenable anytime album that I find myself putting on at
all hours. Robel still has some way to go before his songwriting and
production matches that of Washed Out, but his ambition and ideas are
apparent and he may only be a side-chained compression mix away from
achieving it.
Twilight descends once more, cast from the speakers in long drawn shadows, the light of the fading sun flickering across the room in its own . I've had the previous Evenings release, North Dorm ep on repeat since Nathan Broadus put it out last summer. It says a lot for the tenacity of the atmosphere he creates that I've been playing those five songs for ove a year and still haven't tired of them. It wouldn't be quite appropriate to say it's been a long wait because I've been so immersed in that release that I haven't really yearned for anything else from him, though often wondered how he would develop his sounds. This new release exceeds and confounds any expectations I had. This has been out a couple of weeks now and has been subtly dominating my stereo. Focussing on the ambient elements, losing the chillwave-comedown beats and bouyant patterns in favour of pure evocative vignettes, it is a romantic slowdance of an album that slowly bleeds into the darkest corners of consciousness inducing hypnagogic states and daydream paralysis.
Lately gently winds up with a music-box introduction that sets the scene for that half-asleep fabricated memory nostalgia that H-Pop is famous for, yet presenting it with a clear-eyed production that still somehow manages to retain all that hazy mugginess and an intimacy that makes you want to get even closer into it, let all those bulging bass bubbles surround you, swim your prone body trance-like through the amniotic pulses. There are snatches of vocals, beyond disembodied, barely human; a snatch of a laugh in Genève; in Lo-Vélo amongst the trembling melody they appear out the other side of elegent and ethereal, descending from an angelic plane, falling from the sky through the earth into a watery realm, through male and female, through refracted lights and colours; in [I] Softly We Go they are shapeshifted into avian coos; then the finale of [Lately] See You Soon brings in piano and a completely compressed voice that sounds like the softest pecussion to match the beautiful key note impact of padded hammer on string.
The track titles are all punctuated, accented, distorted and minimised. Not in a Witch House way, more of a Warp/Rephlex kind of abstracted yet almost meaningfully ambiguous fashion. It adds an aesthetic that worked well for Aphex Twin and it works here. The track lengths are equally erractic, the brief //// an 8-second murmer betwen two 3-minute pieces, there's an 8-minute micro-epic that begins with the sounds of the sea. It's actually a very rare and refreshing thing to see an artist capable of allowing the songs to develop and conclude within their own worlds; it suggests music dictated to the artist through the virtues of their own existance. Absolutely nothing of this album feels forced and that's a small but no means insignificant illustration of it.
The enigmatic London based electronic producer Hallsreleases new jams alongside Sun Glitters, and the two remix each other. World spins slightly slower at a more distant angle. Light refracts softly, time locks in a disembodied loop of your own inner experience. Beyond lush.
That cover art should clue you in to the sounds of Honeydrum: a romantic clinch, mid waltz, blurred out of focus, shaking with both emotional tension, erotic release and the furtive hand of the voyeristic cameraman. This six track album develops the band from their seven previous eps into a proposition less fierce than the likes of Ghost Animal, less murky than the handful of Beach Fossil bands yet muddier that the clear-eyed Wild Nothings, Honeydrum have a sound that is definitely of the now, with a distinct feel and tone that sets them out from their peers - in their own words; "Atmospheric mall jams". The way they shuffle their feet and hunch their shoulders gives them the air of a slouchier, grouchier Blank Dogs - by now you're getting into the references - a mix of John Hughes and John Waters films. Heavy 80's hangover.
You can download it for free, so you should probably just do that right now: Digital version out now on the band's BANDCAMP. Cassettes available from 15th August to order HERE
Exquisitely beautiful drone from Japanese composer Ex Confusion. There is a Soundcloud to follow, as well as Bandcamp, from which you can get this new album, and last years Something To Remember
Sounds like it was recorded straight to grainy tape through entirely analogue equipment, the matt finish and fuzzy edged vingetting the sound, suspending it away from any edge, away from harshness; that same amniotic feeling Eluvium's Similies album offered. Wonderfully immersive and evocative.
Continuing these incredible few weeks for metal releases, here are download links for free copies of Umesh Amtey's new project The Ash Eaters' 2010 three-track demo Cold Hearts. Mediafire files includes artwork and lyrics.
Amtey's second Moribund released Brown Jenkins album, Angel Eyes was my album of the year in 2008, and with all his Jenkins' releases he has single-handedly drawn a distinct circle from which his unique recasting of black metal and funeral doom has grown, towering alone unchallenged with a monolithic stature. The Ash Eaters follows on from where he left off with his mostly solo Brown Jenkins project - nightmarishly blurred fever dreams of howling leviathan stalked voids - Lovecraftian cosmic horror. This new band is a two-piece including Demiurge who worked on Brown Jenkins final album Death Obsession.
The first striking addition to the sound is the wall of screeching feedback cast over the first past of the opening Desperate Angels. Where Jenkins worked with dissonance and the manipulative shearing of reality from hallucination, The Ash Eaters use a slightly heavier set brute energy to barge its way into your senses.All the cascading riffs from before are present, that signature sound boiling with a tar-thick viscosity throughout, a confounding rabid lushness. All Your Stars Will Die drops in deep gothic choral vocal accompaniment to the tremelo waterfall of rushing appegiated chords and the Heavens open to rays of black light, burning through on a guttural chug of bassy riffs contrasting, swirling into a sickly whirlpool of sound as the two tones warp aural perspectives. This is deliberately overwhelming and all-consuming music that succeeds not through speed and battery but with crushing airless momentum and a euphoric relentlessness that provokes adreneline rushes with changes in density and volume of sound, pressure drops and disorientation. Night Never Ends throws in a couple of shapes that develop the sound of Brown Jenkins and mark out this project as distinct; two minutes into the enveloping darkness a choppy speeding riff savagely gnaws into the drums thundering at it, it has a looser, wilder, rockier feel, separate to the wildness evident in the rest of the tracks; later on there is a booming yawning feral climax that spirals upwards in appropriate conclusion.
The band have already recorded the first album in full and are in the process of securing a label and distribution for it , so hopefully the full debut should be not too far away. Umesh is already writing the guitar parts for the 2nd album right now, so The Ash Eaters are a fully active and dangerous concern - not just that, but they plan on moving up to New York at some point too. The Big Apple won't know what's hit it when this Texan dust blown dirt rolls in.
Malibu Wands, aka Gremlynz, aka Pink Priest, aka God of Blues releases this new long one, sparse and wintery minimal drone track in homage and dedication to Varg Vikernes, aka Count Grishnak, aka Burzum.
In the 'Wands' own words:
"This is you in the icy wind, fucked, and pessimistic, looking for a glimmer of hope, with all your personal demons kicking snow in your face."
Portland's The Steven Lasombras releases this new brief 2-track ep on BANDCAMP for name-your-price monies. After the A Diamond Eye Shines... album found it's way into my top 50 of 2010 I've been on the lookout for more TSL and here it is. Actually, he found me to ask how the hell I found him to have his album in my end of year list because he doesn't tell anyone about them - that's just how I do (A: Ribs Out).
Like an industrial TV On The Radio these two tracks grind off a parallel universe of soulful pop hooks, nimbly dodging the piston heavy stomp of martial drumming dropping around them, kicking up dust and filthy noise in their wake. The first track is a little more song-oriented, the second spreads itself into a more ambient and lopsely structured artifact. It's a nice two-sided double shot of this bands capabilities, underlines the two key features of last year's album.
A Diamond Eye Shines In Failing Light is still available for name-yr-price HERE, which you should invest your time and attention on immediately.
Just when I was wondering where all the Black Metal is on Bandcamp this pops up. A one track release from South African four-piece black metal band Heathens. They describe their own three ep trajectory thusly: "The band began playing a groove oriented form of black 'n roll. With the addition of a second guitarist, they have begun producing more atmospheric black metal."
This is a pretty neat track, a feral urgency to the scrabbly tremolo, a great drop around the 2 minute mark that heralds some of that aforemetioned rock and roll referencing looseness. The drums have a nice leathery sound, less cardboardy but still boxy - which in this game is a good thing. For an atmospheric post-BM band they don't sound that much like Wolves In The Throne Room, which is pretty refreshing, though their sound bears all the hallmarks and signifiers of it it comes off more as a cross-pollination between gnarly Finnish shops and Cascadian structures.
They have two more multiple track eps over on their Bandcamp, with less ephemeral and more Death-like gory artwork. Having only been around for a year, this is some very promising stuff indeed.
Here is a joint post about two new deep and out there psych-folk releases on the recently formed label Inner Islands. Their first release was a Stag Hare / WYLD WYZRDZ split 7" last summer and now this lp and cassette make it three releases in total. The label's emphasis is "on a connection to nature and the inner journey", which is lushly manifest in these releases so far. Their release schedule for the year looks pretty tasty, and goes a little something like this:
Download releases from the label's BANDCAMP or order the physical copies from the WEBSITE
Are you ready to trip? Here we go.
Gkfoes Vjgoaf The Joy of Awakening
Last year's Light Weaving from the California-based Sean Conrad made number 18 in my top 50 of the year, so no surprise that my third eye lit up when The Joy of Awakening dropped into my inbox. A series of seven spontaneously recorded episodes riffing on different senses and peaks in the fluctuations of energy, this album sounds quite different to the tape of last year which was a more contemplative beast, slumbering gently, rousing slowly across it course. On Joyof Awakening there's a slightly more restless spirit at work, the album moves in a slightly more searching direction, less instinctively driven; as Conrad puts it the arc of this celestial voyage is like "being taken by an unseeable tribe of spirits that are trying to help you see the true nature of things", so it is perhaps symptomatic of both being led, and being led into the new. There's are still acres of beautiful space shimmering across the album, spiking into heavy rolling folk with rattling, chugging and chiming acoustic guitars pulling shapes out of the misty climbes, mostly backing up the surroundign tones with an earthy core, but on Samantha some full Appalachian picking takes the fore backed by twittering birds and rays of sun on the face. Elsewhere there is some wonderfully dense Animal Collective echoic vocal-loop harmonising buried within the sheets of vibrating drone, and across the whole thing, your passage is kept within the constant presence of a layering of fauna calling out from somewhere within the mix. Singularly the embodiment of the label's ethos, and possibly only from California.
River Spirit Dragon C45
The third release from the label is the debut album from River Spirit Dragon on cassette. It's a collaborative channeling from Stag Hare, Gkfoes Vjgoaf, and WYLD WYZRDZ. Fully improvised and recorded in thrall to the moment of time in which it was captured; Two tracks, taking up a side each of contemplative, slow moving, communicative, meditative percussive trance and long spacious loops of beautiful drone, always involving, evolving, building towards a renewed moment of communion, reaching one peak, grounding themselves within it then reaching up and out to the next, exploring with each other and expanding to within sight of that higher state these three astral navigators hope to achieve. The artwork is an fine indicator of where things are at here - glowing.
In Elevators are a garage rock five piece from Louisiana, New Orleans led by the excellently named Billy Hawk. We met over a mutual love of the man John Dwyer, which is almost all the credentials you need on someone. Think Jay Reatard, Times New Viking, Oh Sees....then think no more - you'll get nowhere with this kind of racket trying to sweat brains out of it - it's not your mind it wants to challenge, it's your body so hook this pair of jump leads into your cortex, crank up the dial and get cooking.
They have a self-released debut 7"arriving in the world imminently. Keep an eye on their Bandcamp or Last.fm for news of the record dropping any day now.
This is an album that appeared in my top 50 last week, but I thought I'd highlight this one track again, and because in writing up my list I noticed the 12" is still available.
Stag Hare teams up with White Rainbow to form the regally named White Stag duo to produce a technicolour disco-drone collaboration that takes the rustic elements of the former weaves them into the transcendental psychic rays of the latter then scrubs some insistent house beats all over the shop and blasts the thing into the italo-cosmos. Beautiful stuff. Go to Marriage Records and get the limited 500 edition hand painted/screened vinyl version (comes with digital download)
Here's another incredible free album for you, from New York band Guards. 3Syllables are putting this out on limited edition 12" in November, but it is also available to download for free from their Bandcamp right now and it is one of the most exciting and fresh reinventions of recent history I've heard all year - this will make your weekend. With no web presence other than a recently activated twitter account - possibly at the insistence of friends Cults and Best Coast - and the Bandcamp, Guards offer a fresh enigmatic yet uncontrived take on their self-promotion. Similar to Twin Sister, which I like to describe as Vintage, this is a sound that rolls so many references into it that it sounds instantly classic - IS instantly classic - take opening track Resolution of One; as soulful as a Stax ballad with an injection of garage-rock adrenaline to take it into an altered dimension of musical lineage that continues through the album to mix disparate elements and meld them into a beautifully high-functioning Pop music; a multiverse of free spirited downtuning and dissonance, lilting horns and shimmering waves of chilled surf twang; Cults join them on Sail It Slow, dialling the pace down several notches with a slow-motion take on 50's heartbreaking milk-bar jive; closer I See It Coming matches the epic scale of Arcade Fire with chime backed ooohs and aaaahs but adds a feral a kicking upswing of tenacious rock and roll With an album that's as effortlessly all-encompassing as this they're easily a band that is going to get catapaulted to...you know, like MASSIVE Blog Hype or something even bigger, and deservedly so.
Before the physical album release, they're putting Resolution of One out on 7" through Small Plates now, which you can order from HERE and to celebrate their first ever gig the band have put up new song Swimming After Dark to download from Yours Truly:
Yellow Ostrich is the solo work of Alex Schaaf - a Wisconsin born New York resident who has put out a string of excellent avant indie-pop releases as pay-what-you-want downloads from his Bandcamp. The sound is a slightly slicker take on Shins kind of college rock; the guitars are trebly, with spindly yet gripping melodies yet there's all sorts of colourful fills, effects and song dynamics going on, similar to how Kevin Barnes plays around with Of Montreal; the vocals are quite nasal, yet Schaaf is posessed with an excellent range of vocal skills and the multilayerd barbershop sections of the opening and closing track especially are remarkably arranged. If Deerhunter added the same to their sound peopel wold go nuts and Yellow Ostrich rally challenges Bradford Cox's songwriting on a few tracks here, with a few gently shifted yet momentous movements of garage pop. The songs on this new album are even more accomplished and assured than those of his Wild Comfortalbum earlier in the year; both of which should be taken together as a sign of an emerging talent that will not remain hidden in the depths of the internet for too long.
Here's Schaff's words about the build-up to it and his thoughts on the release:
This one's actually quite special. For the past year or so I've been working on one album called The Mistress. I've released many other things while working on this album, but this has been the one I've kept coming back to. It's easily the longest time I've ever spent on one album. That says nothing of its value to the listener, of course, but I will leave that up to you. I've labored over it for months, and I'm actually pretty happy with how it turned out. It's the first album to feature musicians other than myself. I got some friends to play drums and guitars and bass here and there. Most of it is still just me, but there's some nice touches here and there that I couldn't have done otherwise.
Here's a video for the album's second track The Whale:
Here's some haunted ambient witch house to spook yourself with. California ghostgaze band Ghost Houses' Division EP makes it's influences very clear from the track titles, but as you can see from the artwork they have a very visceral edge to their sound that isn't present in the obvious touchpoints. Available to you for free from their Bandcamp, this is something that would definitely deserve to be released on a nice heavy 7" given the chance (label owning readers take note!)
Ready for a little post-prog dose of ex-Diagonal member Baron's horn blasting crime fuzz? Here's a triple tracker demo you can stream from his bandcamp. he keeps his myspace pretty minimal, but there's some beautiful pictures on it that illustrate the sounds of these tracks.
A Finnish one-man drone ritualist, Bird From the Abyss' tribal trance inductions are steeped in the ancient traditions of the Earth and the old ways of man. The runic text of his name is pretty cool, reminds me of Blood of the Black Owl and the rest of the Bindrune clan in that respect, and there's also a sense of that blackened doom through this, although anything Finnish, no matter how upbeat has an aura of darkness about it.
III is the third release from JuhoMatiasAaltonen's project, available as both a 50 copy limited miniCDr and digital download from the Bandcamp page. It features one long 13 minute opening piece followed by two short 4 minuters. The long Neck Deep In Swampy Mud uses takes it's time to peal open a crackly foggy scene setting drone that gets punctuated by steel guitar strings after around 4 minutes, with a gritty rumble of bassy guitar weighing the background out nicely, sounding like a sparse take on Harvestman, a less musically intricate Evan Caminiti or Jon Porras band such as Barn Owl or Higuma, or a more Metal oriented Natural Snow Buildings. Distant minor-key harmonic synth chords and almost-vocals cloaked in reverb fill out the middle ground creating a full affecting landscape of tones. I hate to say this too, but it really sounds Witch Housey, with the grim ambience and pitchshifted voices creating a rhythmic pull and wash that has palpable momentum until it finished in a garbled vortex as the layers of sound get warped and faded out.
Powers Hidden opens with a sagely mystic talking of the fearsome black powers, then a grey folk progression marches through the foreground and on into a hypnotic raga of wyrdness. The final Interlude From Abandoned Well as a decrepit rasp to the guitar playing, which is fiercer, more riffy, jagged and aggressive with slides, abrupt cuts to distortion and a more robust heroic feel to it that the more rurally oriented tracks.
It's a very involving trip, and one that's already borne out several fully immersive repeat listens. A very intriguing prospect of a band.
The first release I is also up for free download; the second came out on a limited run of 100 gold CDs but is still available digitally for $4.50
