SONIC ROUTER: Interview & Mix - Konx-om-Pax [Display Copy]

 

My second feature for the awesome Sonic Router blog is up today: An interview with Glaswegian digital artist and sonic experimenter Tom Scholefield, aka Display Copy, aka Konx om Pax. He's given the Router a mix featuring a load of far out techno and experimental electronic musics.  I had a chat to him about it and his own album which is out now.

Here's a bit - more and the mix inside the TELEPORTER:

"I started out making really really hard Jeff Mills-y techno when I was about 15, on a Yamaha DJX keyboard. Really purposeful hard as fuck loopy techno. It sounded really bad and then I learnt more about production and stuff, moved away from more traditional music and got into noise based stuff later on.

On the mix there's a thread between the tracks that ties them together, a sense of formlessness to it, an amorphousness which is a counterpoint to the more structured techno...

They are two really clear things in my head and I understood when you said formless, I like the really loose and unformulaic – no rigid bar structure or tempo, music that doesn't have a repetitive structure. Really weird compared to more traditional dance music. There's definitely quite a strong link between most of the tracks in the mix.

There’s a noisiness and a trance-y, meditative aspect running through to the last track... a kind of religious, ritualistic trance music...

That sounds like something out of Blade Runner doesn't it? I found that last track on a really cool blog; it was tagged with the genre 'Ceremony'. I like that there was a genre called Ceremony. "

Wooden Stake - Invoke the Ageless Witch

This immense slab of monolithic doom is brought to you by the boy/girl two piece Wooden Stake
but it sounds as full as any band you'd care to mention, and after hearing this you'll be tripping over yourself to cram a list of influences as long as your arm - but that's almost irrelevant in the face of something of this magnitude. Their debut full length album, Dungeon Prayers & Tombyard Serenades, is out now on Razorback contains nine epic pieces of tortured incandescent grim horror.  Vanessa Nocer handles vocals and bass with Wayne "Elektrokutioner" Sarantopoulos on guitar and drums. Double tracked multi-ranging voices splinter rafters and carve trenches out of the cold earth - deep, dense and violent always, a harbinger of doom in the truest sense. Music that is theatrical without blowing over into shlock horror, there's atmosphere in every eerie corner of this, and suspense behind every twist.

STREAM: Halls - Soundcloud Set - Solace, Colossus & Brave New World

Two brand new tracks from London producer Halls, uploaded into his recently opened Solace set - Colossus and Brave New World join Solace in this producer's deepening catalogue of sumptuously consuming music, similar in effect to Holy Other, evoking an out-of-body weightlessness and checkabale against the likes of James Blake and Jamie XX in tems of subtle textures. These new tracks moves at a beautifully glacial pace; Colossus' sounds refracting through a coolly composed blue ice core. As the name suggests there's something imposing about this piece, but it's an enormity that lacks intimidation, it is instead a tenderly enveloping presence that blocks out all other stimuli from your senses. The track's passage slowly grinds across a landscape of flickering beats, humming synths locked on course for the transcendent, and a mournful reverb heavy vocal that slowly slowly pulls you closer in to it's thrall.  Brave New World is an even more cosmic piece, sounding exactly like a 2001 style shot, a camera slowly panning out of pure darkness to reveal space dust, a thin shimmering atmosphere and the enormous body of a mysterious planet. 

Play and be sucked in.

VIDEO: Xander Harris - Tanned Skin Dress

Official video for the trailer track from Xander Harris' 12", Urban Gothic.  Released on Amanda Brown's 100% Silk label, and directed by her and Ben Shearn, this is a smoother, housier slice of synth cosmia that previous releases from The Deeep and Ital, but is nonethless distinctly Silk, especially when coupled with Brown's trademark tone-washed memorabilia video style.

VIDEO: Teehn Bwitches - Wicked Dr (Instrumental edit)

Fokkawolfe steps out of his bloggers seat to take up the directors chair for a second witch house related video. His first was an unofficial clip - a personal ode and illustration for the short Ritualz track Russia Ukraine, but this is his first official video - for the artist Teehn Bwitches.  technicolour gore recalling the likes of horror classics Carrie, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and managing to get some geometry in there too. Looks great.

DOWNLOAD: Holy Other - Touch

This track debuted on Gorilla Vs. Bear & Altered Zones yesterday and it's getting a starry-eyed repost from me to underscore/overstate how highly I rate this artist - a simple RT wouldn't do.  One of the greatest artists to have emerged from the margins of the witch house scene, the Berlin-based Mancunian Holy Other will be releasing his second record, the12" With U on Tri Angle on 6th June.  Seems a long time to wait, but I lasted a full 6 months on Yr Love and We Over so I can go two on this one beautiful pulsing burst of electro-cosmic R&B.  It's swirling firmament pierced with 8-bit blips, incoming radar signals of alien, otherworldy origin towing universally recognised symbols of romance in their wake - starbursts, moon beams and solar flares. The peaks engulf the speakers in fantastical euphoria, the basslines carry eddies of dark matter and your mere human ears are locked betwixt the two; stultefied into trance and blissful submission.  No idea what happens when this drops onto dancefloors; I guess people start to slowly fuck each other into serenity.

DOWLOAD: Holy Other -Touch

Play on repeat for weeks to get the full effect.

DOWNLOAD: Ajris - Uccanen Imellalen N Tamazgha

Ajris
Uccanen Imellalen N Tamazgha
DOWNLOAD

Atmospheric black metal from Algeria?  I remember an interview with Sunn O))) years ago where Stephen O'Malley said he was looking forward to the incoming wave of Nigerian BM that was headed this way.  At the time I was sure he was joking, now I'm not so sure.  Huge influx of savage grimnity from the Middle East and Africa of late and although none of it is really pushing anything hugely groundbreaking in songwriting or structure it's interesting enough to hear the subtle variation that comes from an excess of heat rather than cold.  Bands like Tadnees, Al-Namrood and many other on the Shaytan Productions label are all pushing a malaevolent inferno of noise that has exchanges sinuous trance for a brute aggression - the Lebanese band Ayat pushing their incarnation of anti-existence anti-Islamic hate energy to the same punishing extremes as Anaal Nathrakh with even more brutal production.

This demo from Ajris sits somewhere in the middle of all that is current across the world, influenced as it is by the intrisically less aggressive strains of depressive, atmospheric and ambient black metal, but still has a deep bite, especially in the guttural vocals and constantly blasting drums.  The rhythm section sets up a rushing undercurrent that sweeps beneath the trebely drone of guitar on top.  All works really nicely together with some great movements within the long (10+ and 18+ minute) tracks.

Find them on Facebook and Reverb Nation

REVIEW: Evenings - North Dorm

Evenings is a one man band from Charlottesville, VA resident Nathan Broaddus.  His music's electronic/analgoue shimmer-gaze invokes a certain whimsical nature, the kind whose steely glare is fixed at some far-off point in distant reminiscence in a similar way to Surrey artist Vondelpark who I wrote about recently, and Felt Drawings - both one man outfits creating beautiful music with a sensitive and brooding centre.  Last year's North Dorm Ep is the only release from Evenings so far but there should be plenty here to keep you involved and hooked for some time, especially now the sun is coming out, these kind of soporific sounds are still the essential soundtrack for basking to.

Getting his sounds further out there, Broaddus has given the final track to a short film directed by Daniel Vasquez titled Conviver no Sertao which documents the subsistence lifestyle of a family living in the Brazillian countryside.

Follow him on Twitter.

VIDEO: Moon Tides - Swimming

Suitably aquatic video to set off the lilting shoegazey haze pop of Colorado's Moon Tides' track Swimming.  The video features a swathe of current trends in spades - lens flare, soft focus, instagram-esq sepia and nostalgia finishes.  Hands up I'm a sucker for those, they look nice don't they? And they go so well with the washy reverb of the guitars, all out and back froth and swash. I'm far from being bored of looking at and hearing this kind of thing yet, so bands don;t be afraid to keep 'em coming.  The big bonus in this video being the potential for shark attack at any moment. Someone cut an extended edit for me?

Download the track for free from the band's Bandcamp, where you can also get the track To Be which they put up in January this year too.

guys, let's all post in the LASTFM THREAD!

Stats time. unfazed by the shifting hours. DiS Vs. Last.fm Vs. NFR

I couldn't live without our last.fm threads

Good week.

ps iTunes, I hate you; scrobble my cocking ipod.


01. Craft Spells - 104

02. GuMMy†Be▲R! - 85

03. Evenings - 41

04. Daterape - 37

05. Guards - 33

05. The Soft Moon - 33

05. Twin Shadow - 33

08. Bosco Delrey - 31

09. Sealings - 30

10. Gruff Rhys - 26

11. Peaking Lights – 24

1 - New album on Captured Tracks, sounds almost identical to Wild Nothing but without the prominent basslines. Really good. After The Moment has a gorgeous hook.

2 – Witch Made Knicca king Herr Gummy releases his first full album of WitchHouse begat dystopian mostly-instrumental R&Bastard acid electronica. Free download: http://gummybear.bandcamp.com/album/oakland

3 - $5 gets you five doses of cloudy comedown dream-wave electronics to melt your fragile mind into: http://evenings.bandcamp.com/

4 – Nowhere near as shit as you'd expect with a name like that. In fact, they added me on Soundcloud and I ignored them for over a month but it turns out they're really very good. More free rekkids for you – the track Cold Remains is the one to go for, if nothing else. But you'll like them all if you;re into cold-wave darkane electro/ whytch hauz. Link you to my blog this time: http://dlvr.it/LHfsT

5 – Still good. Still hugely preferable to listening to Arcade Fire – what you like about Funeral stripped of everything you didn't like that came after. And guess what – No charge: http://guards.bandcamp.com/album/guards-ep

5b – Another Captured Tracks release another band to obsess over. If you haven't heard this album yet you need it in your life now (part one) If only they could finish songs properly

5c - If you haven't heard this album yet you need it in your life now (part two)

8 – Off the chain gospel soft-rock ramalama rockabilly lunacy. Pretty similar to Ariel Pink's Before Today in the way it pops hooks out of the unlikeliest places. Damn catchy.

9 – Fucking righteous noise rock from Brighton Get some: http://awesomeghost.tumblr.com/

10 – Don't really like this as much as Candylion but it is good.

11 - If you haven't heard this album yet you need it in your life now (part three; the best)