DOWNLOAD: Gorgons - four demo tracks

Four tracks from a mysterious US producer from Chicago uploaded to Soundcloud within the last two weeks and already picking up over a hundred plays each. Something very interesting happening here.  Gorgons makes wintery, claustrophobic snowstorm beat ambience.  Possibly like Burial would sound if he were from the Windy City, a soundtrack to a lost Guy Maddin film.  Four considerably different pieces of music; The mst recent, The Midnight Trail / A Dark Token, a huge swelling disturbingly creepy wall of consuming noise; elsewhere, icy enchanted vocals drift hazily through the shadowy groove of Red Cloud; a deep resonant bass tone thrums through the heart of Films at 11-02's dark nightscape, beset by muted explosions of beats that sound like shoes softly crunching through snow, evoking a lonely isolated vista that leads to the pure snow-storm white-out drone of Models.  All tracks are beautifully produced pieces with texture and detail.

DOWNLOAD: Deekie - Brickenden EP

Deekie
Brickenden EP
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This London based duo have produced four releases in the last six months, pouring music from their third eye of creativity at healthy rate - all available to download from their Bandcamp, as well as real world formats. As they say themselves "Deekie make music fast." 

Fast, but unhurried.

This new one is four tracks, opening with a softly looping misty-eyed glacially toned vocal drone and finishing with a heavy lidded twilight male vocal piece with quiet melodica there's a sweetly dreamy innocence pervasive through the music.  Combined with the childish font of their name and the sparse cover you could mistake the minimalism for amateur simplicity, but there's a sophisticated and complex understanding of their musical craft, the simple ideas of the songs reproduce until they are complex organisms by the time the tracks conclude; a see-saw hum and swaying melody echoing elegantly into intensifying infinity, galloping beats spreading out through tracks like ripples exacerbating the momentum of their own patterns.

Lovely stuff.

They've got a full complement of sites for you to stalk them over:

Bandcamp
tumblr
Last.FM
Twitter

DOWNLOAD: Wreck and Reference - Black Cassette (Self-Release)

Wreck and Reference

Black Cassette

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Read the article about this on the excellent Lurker and barely finished reading before I jumped to download it.  It's Metal of many kinds with no guitars, a “DIY electronic Doom band” crafting “wastelands of sonic chaos and despair”; it's digital noise formed into blackened metal shapes overshadowed by the hand of doom. It has a sense of the industrial about it, but not Industrial; the electronics providing electrical charge, thunderstorms of crackling intensity. The vocals sound a lot like David Tibet, a haunted nasal form of rhythmic speech, intoned with holy menace and latent grandiosity.  You might have to be told that the wall of roaring static pouring from the speakers come from key-tones rather than steel string abuse so stylistically textural is the sound, yet in a similar way to how Servile Sect suck up Metal and Atmosphere and produce something alien sounding out of the familiar, Wreck and Reference also produce a parallel take on metal and subvert the pre-requisite set-up for producing it in the process. There's shades of the shadowy Menace Ruine about the smoky shapes blown out of the atmospheres.  A thick, tense and tangible threatening presence.   

The dark storm of All The Ships Have Been Abandoned crashes waves of rousing noise against a titanic beat then stutters to a climax building a rockier groove into its spaces.  In Chains starts with furious drumming that smooths down to a thick bass tom beat for the veils of noise to descend over them, vocals and keys soaring upwards to meet another euphorically bleak wall of crashing turbulence.  The finale is one of the most powerfully stirring pieces of music you might hear all year; concluding the record's existential themes of human futility and finity in a simultaneous maelstrom of all emotion as waves of bliss stained bleakness crash and flutter into cosmic oblivion.

This release isn't just digital, and if all 50 copies of the cassette tape haven't sold out already listening to this should not take long to convince you to own it.  Tapes come in black hand sewn cloth sleeve with lyric insert. The band are currently working towards a full length album, but this release should easily sustain you for longer than they might possibly take to record it.

On another head-spinning note, it turns out that one half of the duo – Ignat - used to be in a band called Bison who pre-empted Women's post-Sonic Youth textural strung out rock musics by about two years with an excellent demo and the track Painted Gold which I played to death in the early days of NFR.  Amazing.

DOWNLOAD: Tree of Sores - Tree of Sores

Tree of Sores
Tree of Sores
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Trio from Leeds make epic ep of crushing shapeshifting doom. CD version is released on Witchhunter Records, limited to just 150 copies so be quick, if it's not too late already. bands with this much promise don't stay in stock for long. And by promise, I mean already delivering in the extreme.  The production might need a bit of beefing to add some more weight, but it's not so necessary.  The gnarly grunting basslines and sheer walls of guitar scree morph beween solemn chugging and cyclones of kinetic fury with an intrinsicly momentus sense of composition. No aimless drift between segments, just pure atmospheric build and howling release with hair raising, teeth clenching results. The six tracks are also heightened with the addition of female vocals - too rare in this kind of music, but almost always well deployed when they are - to add to the range of anguished spite.

Excellent release, worth owning - before it owns you.