DOWNLOAD: Vortex Rikers – Wake Up And Smell The Ashes

Vortex Rikers

Wake Up And Smell The AshesAMDISCS
DOWNLOAD

One of the most interesting groups to have emerged from the movement of desolate electronics, Vortex Rikers drop their third release and it's a great one.  AMDISCS have offered up another arresting take on a haunting yet mechanically visceral sound, similar to Dream Boat in the bands abilities to really convey a sense of tense atmosphere and cinematic narrative over short spaces of time.  Named after the spaceship that crashes in a first-person shooter they owe it to themselves to produce an atmosphere quickly, and the opening bars of A False Prophet conjure images of industrial gothic vistas, ghostly metropolises overseen by spectral caretakers; on earthm, in Space; the origin of their sounds is kept ambiguous; there's a cosmic drift to the tracks nudged into existance by sparse yet motorik beats, the upward motion of the tracks inducing a euphoria that gently coalesces amongst the grey, earthy sense that you can roll around in the thick dirt of the drone. The final We Live As We Dream pushes down on the drums that much harder and draws the record to climax, but neither stellar nor tera firma potential is pushed too hard leaving the ultimate experience an entirely subjective one that makes these six tracks all the more compelling.

Tracklist

01 A False Prophet

02 Wake Up And Smell The Ashes

03 Vanishing Point

04 Hope Rhymes With Despair

05 Void

06 We Live As We Dream 

VIDEO: Dream Boat - XVII

New track and unnerving new video from Dream Boat, one of the most arresting witch house associated bands around; my review of their Visions album is currently the most read thing on the blog; this band's recordings are going in my top 20, if not top 10 if the year (working on it). The footage is from Danish film Lykkefanten about a young girl's struggle to cope with an alcoholic mother. Sombre, hard hitting stuff. Just like this track. Little build up, just straight in under the uncompromising winged cloak of darkness.

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: