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.
Brand new clip for my favourite track - currently, it changes every day - from the multicoloured kaleidoscope that is Grimes'Visions album. The combination of smooth doo-wop backing 'Wah-wah's' and
contrasting anti-melody of that synthetic grinding sound are a good showcase for the way in which she throws her genres together with an almost haphazard mission, sometimes the idea never fully blooms, but othertimes the come off sounding unlike anything else, and that magical concoction would be this track.
Brand new video for the new single from the finest rock band the UK currently owns - watch this and have Turbowolfown you right back.
This is one of the most ferocious tracks from their album, and one of the finer examples of how they manage to cram so many great moments into such a short space of time - the burbling synth prologue to the slamming intro riff then BLAM into the meat of the piece, squiggly, squealing, imploding guitar solo (how do they make that sound!?), heavyweight intense breakdown, instant classic lyrics, all blasting along with that unbridled sense of momentum that only the truest Rock can deliver - and it's called Let's Die! It;s all about careening into oblivion and embracing every moment of it.
The video, directed by Casey & Ewan is a futuristic and thrownback as the music - 70's style stop motion animation, velvet shirts, Chris' absurd facial hair, all booted into the future with copulating Terminator robotics and chipboard bedsheets. Sexy what?
There's no reason to to love the whole of this with the whole of your being.
The 14 track album is less than a fiver from iTunes, so go get. It wasn't in my Top 50 albums of 2011 for nothing.
This video is directed by illustrator Ben Symonds,
using footage from the BBC's Planet Earth and Frozen Planet - beating
them to the punch of using the music over their footage he's used their
footage under Halls' glacially evocative electronics. Lifeblood is the second track on the beautiful Halls' new Fragile EP available as a download and 12" vinyl from the label Sound of Sweet Nothing.
Matt Berry fronted epic 11+ minute sci-fi video for Three Trapped Tigers' "pretty huge" Reset track.
This is actually incredible. Jaw-dropping, time-stopping head-turning. Not sure if you're watching a real sketch show, short film or one of the greatest music videos commited to tape. It helps that the music of TTT is so polymorphously perverse that it could be soundtracking any of those things - from 2001 to Look Around You. Deadly serious in it's tounge in cheek luminosity.
Play this full screen size if you can, and on the biggest one you can find.
Colour me psyched about seeing Wooden Shjips at End of the Road festival in a couple of weeks. A band that really makes more sense live - by virtue of smashing your own senses into fractal shards of blues rock repetition.
New video and track from the ever excellent Asian Women On The Telephone in which the band dredge up tranced out chains of dungeon clank and cackle. The video collages together hellish visions and live footage to illustrate this somewhat more demonic slab of industrial drone.
Roll the Dice trail their forthcoming album In Dust, with a teaser video directed by Frode Fjerdingstad featuring words written by Rory Gibb ( DiS / Sonic Router / Always Everything ) narrated by the gravel voiced Paul Bolderson and backed by some cinematic granite heavy drone from the duo. The result is a cross between Godspeed and a gritty Western, coupled with the visuals that illustrate and reinforce both those comparisons again.
The album is released on 12th September. Preorder at the Leaf Label HERE
Where did witch house go? It just ate itself and regurgitated it into an pulse quickening collaboration with neon aacid vomit visuals. Gnarly retro-active blog music from the blistered fingertips of Blissed Out given a relentless rescrub by dark artisan Ritualz
Download from the Soundcloud or from Mediafire if that's all gone (which it probably has at the time of writing).
Really densely colour-warped, maxxed out super8 high-gain grainy clip for London based psych-drone duo Deekie's The Wedding Song, lifted from the Brickenden EP, which I wrote about here, and still available for naught over here: http://deekie.bandcamp.com/
Classic rock powered up to '11 with a vintage video style to go with it, this is a brand new clip from Bristol's hard rock heroes Turbowolf. A Rose For The Crows is the first single from the debut self-titled album Turbowolf, to be released on the tidily numbered 11/11/11 through Hassle Records. Too awesome, as always. Too long to wait for that full length.
Lovely grainy super8 clip directed by Julieta Triangular to illustrate the wonderful Felt Drawings' grainy super8 darkened electro pop. Taken from April's self-released Body ep (which I wrote up here), Barriers is just one of the many glittering industrial jewels in Dominic Tiberio canon.
MyCults single d/l post from last year is one of the most read things of the last few weeks - is that all you naughty scamps looking for the album link? This is the song that hooked me into a state of obsession for a brief period back there. Turns out it's really the only song they have, but it's a killer and now it's got a proper video to go with it.
Another excellent Brighton based electronics artist producing blurred head and heart music. Alex Parish is Adolescent, and although it's not the greatest of names to get started with don't let that deter you at all because the music inside it is of as high a calibre as that fuck-off massive rifle on the cover art. It's rare to find artists transposing a tangible mental and physical state into their own music, and sharing such personal problems in as subtle a fashion as Alex does - he suffers from Temporal Lobe Epilepsy and takes the distortions of "mood, memory, time perception" which affect him through his condition and replays his experiences through synth and computers to produce a sound that shimmers with a deeper resonance that merely artfully placed sound can convey alone.
As the EP progresses, whether by design or happy accident, the tracks seem to get denser in their cloudbursting sense of euphoric harmonic detail - the double ambient sucker punch drift implosion of KNEKT and The Source is an equal to the hallucinatory blissproduced by artists such asVondelpark, Moths, and Holy Other.
Follow him on Soundcloud, then watch this: The haunting docu-music-video to the opening track TLE (Temporal Lobe Epliepsy), which records Alex's visit to a hospital for a brain scan for the condition which he suffers from. His backstory is copied below.
BACKSTORY:
Since I was very young I've had Temporal Lobe Epilepsy. In my case, seizures are quite infrequent, usually occurring in batches over a few days, every 4-6 weeks.
The seizures are not so physical, instead they affect my mood, memory, time perception, and create massive confusion.
For the past 5 years I have been attending frequent brain scans such as EEGs and had an MRI, the reason for this being that my seizures are so infrequent it is almost impossible to catch one on record to analyse it.
This 72 hour brain scan was the last ever scheduled for me, and I was told that if I didn't have a seizure whilst staying there, then there wasn't much else they could do.
I decided that I would document the first day of the brain scan to accompany a piece of music I had been working on, that was supposed to mimic my seizures in both the sounds used and the mood created.
This was the second time I had produced and edited a video, so I hope you like it!
In the end I DID have a seizure whilst there which was a miracle and am waiting on the results of the test.
If you haven't had enough videos from me recently then have another - a romantic visual aid toLeatherette's sesual and soulful house number Maybe. Another excellent Synesthesiae Films produced clip with footage taken from the 1960 Japanese film Cruel Story of Youth. Particularly love how the track's chorus vocal is synched with the image of the woman walking mouthing words, works wonderfully well, like a real lip-synched pop song.
Premiered over on FACT, this is the new video for TV from Vondelpark's nyc stuff and nyc bags ep, out to order on R&S now. I seem to have had it on pre-order for ages! Long time waiting for new material from this outfit, though both this and Camels are slightly removed from the languorous sun baked hypnogogic dreambeats of the Sauna ep so it remains ot be seen if the new record will be as insistently addictive as that has been.
Here's one of the most intriguing and exciting propositions to have emerged from my Brighton city in a while: Regal Safari. One pay through the three tracks on their Bandcamp will have you besieged by contemporary comparisons; the first ones that struck me were Balam Acab (or indeed, one side to the TriAngle sound that isn't shaded the colour of Witch House), Solar Bears, Caribou, Blondes, Worriedaboutsatan - lot's of dreamy and spacey artists who evoke elusive and somewhat intangible landscapes built of disembodied vocals, drifting cosmic ambience; sensuality, euphoria.
They're playing the Green Door Store in October and supporting Gazelle Twin in November. Stalk them on Facebook too.
Here's a brand new synapse frazzling remix of similarly awesome category-evading artist Seams' Hung Markets from their Soundcloud, stream three of their own tracks - Only, Triumph and Light - and/or download them all from Bandcamp.
