DOWNLOAD: Vagina Vangi - Locked Forever

Vagina Vangi
Locked Forever
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New four track EP from this Russian witch house oriented outfit following their Benighted United ep from December that develops their genrefied themes and expands their sound onto a wider plane. The track titles elude to an end times of occult darkness, Biblical prophecies, of damnation fire and brimstone, the wastelands and castigations of Milton's Lost Paradise, Satanic themes wrought in cold electronics.

The four tracks of Vagina Vangi's new release almost run straight into each other, barely missing a beat before seguing your attention through smoky fade onto the next budding tendrils of euphoria. That is certainly what the music in the EP hopes to achieve, through a mix of chest bursting throat choking euphoric trance and a dissonant yet equally complementary and enhancing use of noise, distortion and disintegrative effects. The sounds draw comparisons to, if not direct influence from, the feral trance of Salem and White Ring and the more studied bleakness of Vortex Rikers and Porn Antler. There is a fullness to the construction of these tracks which enhances their designs to lift the listener up on to a higher plane.

The first track Black Coils sets this landscape out in as epic proportions as an opening gambit will allow; charred beats imposing themselves across a smoothly twisting rhythm, a disembodied vocal slowly coalescing into a liltingly delicate refrain suddenly solidifies into full throated flight along with a soaring megaton blast of fiery synths. Europop and dirty noise drone balled up into an explosive comet of momentum.

Second track Goatghosts brings a haunted male vocal straight in over a thick cable of electro throb, the melody line sputtering and shorting like the most delirious Justice tracks. A distinctly European sound of French filter house and chart trance. Behind the fizzing live electrical lightshow are layers of rising key major chord synth stabs that get overloaded even more on the title track Locked Forever which almost roars out of the speakers where it not for that drive-time smoothness it's been finished with – it works, it sucks you in then hits you with a slamming beat straight in the solar plexus doubling the density of the track instantly with the kind of shocking elation that a good drop should feed you, and the effect keeps running through the rest of its' five minutes.

Final track, of Chaos and Hell is a slow burner, holding down an overarching atmosphere of doomy intensity, employing oppressive minor chord progressions that move with studied intent, building itself up over the spine of a martial tattoo slowly reappearing from some dirty and distant skirmish accompanied by clouds of ominous synth tone. As this seething mass of darkness draws nearer the cavorting shadows of the the former tracks can be made out, yet in its' final moments this release never quite opens out into a fully unleashed four to the floor onslaught that it might have set you up for leaving you on the edge of a climax that is yours to interpret as satisfying or otherwise. For me, it's all the better for the restraint.

Download from Bandcamp, stream and follow on Soundcloud.

If you like the sound of this keep your eyes on the blog, later today I've got an
interview with band leader Ilya Arhipov for you.

DOWNLOAD: Lake Radio - Delta

LAKE R▲DIO
Delta
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Another excellent EP from this somewhat antagonistic artist who first rose to infamy by exiling himself right out of the Witch House scene, proclaiming himself Witch-House-by-Design and immediately inviting upon himself the wrath of the gatekeepers looming large over the scene in certain areas. There's little occult cryptology at work in this incarnation of 19 year old Illinois based Caden Moore's LAKE R▲DIO, leaving the genre-baiting a distance behind him as he concentrates instead on producing an unhurried but kinetic form of bucolic electronica that I have been posting a lot of recently. The four tracks in this Ep echoes the present-moment, shared-consciousness reminiscence of Vondelpark or Evenings styles of phosphorescent sundown slow-burn electronica, and it's a sound that I haven't been able to get enough of late, especially with the light drawing out further into the night time. Still got clap beats though, ya dig.

REVIEW: I†† - The Lesser Keys

I††
The Lesser Keys

Tundra Dubs

The Lesser Keys is a six track ep of undulating dark ambient soundscape explorations from an artist I keep offering up to you, and one which you should be biting in to, released on rapidly up and coming Berkely, California based label Tundra Dubs. Each is a relatively brief excursion into a field of tone experimentation which greater track lengths could have benefited to flesh out each one's nuances. But that's because I'm a patient person. Other people might find the sub-3 minute lengths just enough to get the message clearly from each. I would quite like to have heard these thematically similar pieces melded together to create a more seamless 16 minutes – there's a progression across all of them, a definite sense of moving deeper into the middle of something, then back out again. 

The album title is reference to a 17th Century text on magickal spells and conjurations, written by King Solomon himself, but I find dispensing with the more arcane bacground and workign with this in a realtime, urban environment work even better at instilling a sense of suspense and atmposhere than overlaying it with doomy sorcery.  The album opens with a metallic sucking hum, a rapid pressure drop, to reveal a swirling cable of gently fuzzing static that gives way to D▲RKST▲R; an airier, less dense version of the first that allows an obfuscated glimpse of a beats, dark shapes moving amongst even darker undergrowth. They ripple and expand in such a way that their effect is less a music percussive propulsion and more a visual trick – bodies ghosting about in the peripheries of your vision, indistinct forms scuttling around. Creepy stuff. The third track is the longest, titled Ph▲sing it does just that, slowly unveiling a modulated phaser tone that unfurls into several strands of sound, some high pitched keening tones that fly into the upper reaches of the sonisphere, while others pitch down and rough themselves under a bed of distortion, burying deep into the bass elements of the track, their presence felt thereafter as waves of throbbing push to the surface. This bass throb continues into the next track that piles more distortion on to them, bending them at a harsher angle into a more triangular waveform with peaks and troughs, producing an eerie polyrhythmic ebb and flow. Then comes a snatch of reality, a clear beat, a fracture in the trance and a frightening moment of clarity. A proper song title: Above a Convenience Store. Not just reality here, but mundanity, the true essence of reality. It's the most kinetically active track of the ep, some kind of voice can be heard, there's a semblance of melody forming amongst the shifting rhythms, the beat, bass and shadow clap deflecting back off the curves of the lower registers. The final track, all high pitched at first. Discordant shrieking, burbling, computer chatter. The most absent of humanity in it's hollow coldness, after the comparative heightened passions of the track preceding it, it snatches any sense of hope away in the cruellest of denouements.

There is so much going on in such a short space of time across this album, it's a tiny vignetted frame of a complicated bigger picture that I'm almost tempted to retract my requests for a longer form of it because it works so well. I'm hoping to hear great things in the future from this artist, transcending several genres, carving out a very clearly defined musical environment for themselves and really elaborating on all the themes they touch on here.

Buy it now from Tundra Dub's Bandcamp page for an absurdly cheap $1.99

ORDER 

DOWNLOAD: Vortex Rikers

Vortex Rikers
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Vortex Rikers is a witch house-esque producer from Germany whose new untitled EP is available for free download from Bandcamp now.

Mixing thickly fuzz-toned rhythms and sickly chiming melodies into backgrounds of ominously swelling overcast drone there isn't so much occult to this to land it in that territory, instead it has a (possibly) subtler grasp of sound aesthetics rooting into a less controversial electronic environment than witch house: it hangs heavy with dark and portentous atmospheres that cross into dark ambient and yr less complex Rephlex or Warp tracks, the ones that are all out tone instead of all out acid. There's a hi-pitched tubular ripple in Nightmares that reminds me of the Shadow of the Beast theme music, which I posted up after getting fully into the Ikonika album: so this is an ep that also takes in an 8-bit dubstep reference too, albeit vicariously, but it also has a similar minimal, if not quite so smoothly produced, feel to Actress' Splazsh, featuring some comparatively elegant drum machine programming in tracks Dreams and O, and again, those peculiarly cavernous drips of melody. There's a lot of crossovers happening in this and it all works in its favour.

There's a fair bit of activity around this artist; the ep is due for a re-release with extra tracks on Sweat Lodge Guru at some point in the near-ish future (along with Expo 70 and Mpala Garoo who I wrote about last month), and there are several videos up for tracks off this release, the most recent being this for Dreams using footage from At Land by 1940's-60s' avantgarde film maker Maya Deren

Dream Boat - Visions

The internet has just lit up with the news of the debut full length album Visions from Dream Boat, released on the phenomenal Prague based AMDISCS label and available now. The label have become my highlight of the year, putting out incredible lo-fi yet hi-intensity EPs and albums that are either instantly addictive or provoke you into repeated listens that slowly crawl their way into your subconscious; the sound ranges across the current spectrum of beach-wave, witch house, hypnagogic pop and dark electronica, with a pool of artists drawn from all corners of the world. Highlights that will undoubtedly hit my end of year track and albums shortlists come from Daniel Radall,  Ghost Animal, Railcars, Pink Priest, Pears, Table, Twilight Owls, Unouomedude and Tearist.

Amazingly they release many of their artist's albums for free as well as offering them in cd and cassette form, but as big a feature as I could write about AMDISCS, this is really about one of my current obsessions; Dream Boat.

Their album contains Your Beaches from the Fevers EP which, if you've heard it, should convince you enough to part with €8 for the digital download alone - one immense track of stuttering, drum-machine groove, of claustrophic breathless euphoria kept a teasingly thin distance from total peaking; a psychological landscape of Lynchian twists and sidesteps, of Hitchcockian thrill and suspense, yet somehow that track was no one off; this album is full of the same rippling, haunted aggression and wired primitive atmospheres that characterized all their previous eps. Kissing Collar clips along with a solemn bounce, Rosary is dragged and screwed lightly enough to retain full pop glamour yet distorted enough to fetishise it's more sensual features.

The artwork too, has lost the overt provocative sexuality that defined that Jane Birkin Fevers EP cover and the mirrored nudity of True Love; although they've kept it up with the current image they're using as their band photos, this cover brings a sinister creepy edge, a black outline and blurred centre much like the music itself, all hazy visioned with steely definition. One hallmark of their sound is the gritty synth tone deployed in many of the tracks, like a subduction zone around the impact of each beat it grinds into the foreground pulling at your ears and pricking up your senses like an organic klaxon pulsing out from the deep undergrowth of the occult subgenre in which they dwell; and, it has to be said, sounds fucking badass. Along with the SALEM's epic King Knight it will become one of the defining sounds of the year for me, for the witch house genre and judging from the reaction to the release of this album, many other people too.  In tracks like No Air and Your Beaches, it ploughs a filthy furrow of noise straight down the lateral-lines, like a modern take on motorik, it's a distinctive pulse through the core of the tunes that draws the focus ofattention. Elsewhere, in Coals there's a tribal element that underscroes the sense of ritualistic primitivism in the sound, percussive drums drawn in tight circles, a clattering cacophany of ceremonial hedonism that takes over the body and leads from the outside in.

Order your copy HERE where they have 4 tracks to preview too.


All the previous ep's are still available as free downloads from AMDISCS from the following links:

Fevers EP
Dream Boat & True Love split
ARC & Dream Boat split


There's also a video to Kissing Collar directed by Kat Tedesco that is well worth disturbing your rods and cones with: