VIDEO: Blackbird Blackbird - Euphoria

Official video for Blackbird Blackbird's utterly lush and appropriately titled track Euphoria. Mikey BB has been keeping the slowly shimmering beach front flame of chillwave alive while people like Memory Tapes and Washed Out have been off and out the limelight working on new material, consistently putting out tracks that evoke the feeling of running through endless fields of distant summer.

This video has been produced by an equally consistent charachter on the hypnagogic-esque scense of electronica and pop, Synaesthesiae Films.  I don't regularly post their clips for nothing.

DOWNLOAD: Kohwi 's Psychedelic Sleep Music

Kohwi is the one man band moniker of Cory Levinson, an enigmatic sound manipulator from Ann Arbor Michigan who describes his work as 'psychedelic sleep music' - which may be one neat way to sidestep the Hypnagogic word, because it does fit into both quite elegantly.  His music is created by disrupting the time continuum with disorientated splicing and fx reworkings of olde vynal samples, melting the original forms into slowed and skewed landscapes populated by fleeting beats and glitches in the matrix.  For me, it's a little too lively to sleep too, but his work has a pillowy soft aura around it that finishes the new electronics with a matt pallor to allow them to naturally commune with the muted crackling of the old vinyl.

All his releases are available to download for free from his Bandcamp:  There's the most recent single track Tides, which immediately deploys an arresting guitar strut then quickly begins unpicking it and destabilising any foundations you thought you'd settled on:

DOWNLOAD: Tides

June's double track REM/Play With Me comes from an equally left field; the first song is a bit more minimalist while the second deploys a whole lotta vinyl samples:

DOWNLOAD: REM / Play With Me

Finally, he has a beautifully flickering remix of Blackbird Blackbird's Pure than harmonises Kohwi's fondness for glitched stutters with the swooning prettiness of the original.

DOWNLOAD: Blackbird Blackbird - Pure (Kohwi Remix)

Full set of links:

Bandcamp

Soundcloud

Last.FM

Twitter 

MySpace

VIDEO: Blackbird Blackbird – Pure

One of the artists to have picked up and fully embraced the chillwave baton San Francisco's Blackbird Blackbird.  The one man band of Mikey S has been slowly pushing his shimmery dream-pop reverie onto an even grander scale with each release (of which he has many); since I first heard the effervescent bounce of Happy High I've been hooked, and his tracks just keep getting more assured and more capable of conveying the genres trademark giddy heat-haze euphoria with an increasingly breezy effortlessness.  It's all adding up to eclipse the simple solo bedroom band it started out as.

He makes good use of his Bandcamp site, where you can get the recent Modern Disbelief ep for free, and the new Summer Heart LP,  for $9.99.  According to his (very active, informative) Twitter feed, he's just been invited to play at the Hype Machine's CMJ showcase, which, as he says, is a pretty big deal: Last year, Sleigh Bells, Neon Indian, and Midnight Juggernauts played it.  So to say his star is in the ascendant would be an understatement yet it's a position that would come totally warranted if the trajectory of his releases are an indicator of where his music is headed.
 

His big news this week is the release of his debut video for the track Pure (taken from Summer Heart) and it has made the front page Editor's Pick on Vimeo; In his own words:  "I am extremely overwhelmed"