VIDEO: German Army - Pulling Lashes

Vide to illustrate the proto gunk crunk German Army track Pulling Lashes, produced by Moduli TV.  Taken from the DryR ep out now on Amdiscs:

  

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: Honeydrum - Pink Lips

New album from the darkbeat pop combo Honeydrum, available from their Bandcamp.  Lovely black romance and dim candle flicker romanticism, juxtaposed against bontempi rhythms and an almost tropical flourish. A little bit Ducktails in Human Stuff, a little bit Ariel Pink in Dream Eyes, these new tracks are beautiful progression from their last releases - all of which are up for d/l from their Bandcamp and one of which gets a new video featured here:

VIDEO: PWIN ▲▲ TEAKS - Phantasmagoria

I'm still waiting for the PWIN ▲▲ TEAKS Aoxomoxoa LP to be released. Not sure if it's snuck out without me noticing but I can't find it. I think it's going to be pretty special, on a par with Yoga's shapeshifting hypnogogic black metal. In the meantime, here's a video, directed by Cosmotropia de Xam, for the track Phantasmagoria that was unveiled in the summer.; A lot of these witch house artists keep spawning track after track, but not Pwin. He/she/it has barely any mp3's around illegally let along a host of Soundclouds, there's so little by way of material for this artist that what there is is made all the more alluring in it's isolation. This track is a blood curdling brain freezing ring-modulated soul burner, that dislocates sense and reason, mind and body with sinister effervescence; the video is vintage Cosmotropia, and there's also a Mater Suspiria Vision unrated skinfest version too:

VIDEO: Asian Women On The Telephone

This is the first ever video pop promo for Russia's psychedelic industrial gymnasts Asian Women on the Telephone, who I wrote about last month during my heated whirwind tour of the USSR's subterranean band scene.  A martial beat acts as the spine to the track, a rigid column along which garbled vocals rattle down and sticky streams of electronics drip. The visuals are collage, animation, overlay and projection, as much The Pink Floyd as they are propoganda and their use of slow repetition and dark tones is juxtaposed with frenetic bursts of colour that refract the activity of the music, working together to draw you along wth the narrative of frost-dried shrieks. 
 

VIDEO: oFF & GR†LLGR†LL - Emodancers Never Stop

Here's the LOL-tastically titled new track Emodancers Never Stop from one of my favourite Witch House acts, GR†LLGR†LL - creators of a full proper narrative album, and the only real one until SALEM's King Night dropped - whose ectoplasmic mutant hallucinations here involve a mysterious new Berlin outfit called oFF (who also plays degraded Goth'N'B as Gay Mormon Kissing Club) adds another dimension of warped club euphoria to their haunted ghost-hop; a spaced out aura that shares the space crawling slow-motion cosmic ambience of H0ly Other's Yr Love or Blissters; really quite haunting and beautiful.

Here's the video Or find it on Soundcloud HERE

VIDEO: Light Asylum- Shallow Tears

This year is definitely on to something special for promo videos.  Here's another excellent clip for Light Asylum's Shallow Tears.  All the hallmarks of an 80's slowdance tearjerker are there in the music then the video twists it up a bit; almost like a sequel to Massive Attack's Teardrop  The video is directed by Fabian Svensson & Jens Klevje @ Conjunction Films, Sweden - who also made the unsettling video for Fever Ray's Keep The Streets Empty For Me

Zen Death Squad

Zen Death Squad have a track called Awesome Patrol on the MySpace player. You should go listen to it immediately. It's haltingly brief but in it's 1:12 running time it manages to convey an entire agenda more convincingly than most band manage in 5 minutes.  It's grinds liquid funk into a glitch prism and pops a body rocking groove into it's vital parts. They have a free download on their Bandcamp
of their remix of.....Roger Troutman's Superman.  They make their music with serious style, but not without their tounges in their cheeks.  Their line-up features a man named Halogen who makes excellently subtle ambient IDM electronica, who sent me his first album a couple of years ago and I still listen to it regularly.  Download that, a couple of others and see his extensive appearences list on his MySpace.

Here's the Bruno Costarelli directed video for their intoxicating single Galaxy:

VIDEO: Balam Acab - See Birds (Sun)

Oh holy wow! This is incredible. The video to Balam Acab's See Birds (Sun) goes so well with the music and is about as Witch House as you could want. An amazing start to TriAngle's label career; if they can keep producing videos like this to match the quality of their recorded releases we'll be in for a mesmerising year in 2011. 

Ready yourselves for total immersion in Balam's stroboscopic Rorsarch response inducing visual vortex hypnotism. 

VIDEO: Blackbird Blackbird – Pure

One of the artists to have picked up and fully embraced the chillwave baton San Francisco's Blackbird Blackbird.  The one man band of Mikey S has been slowly pushing his shimmery dream-pop reverie onto an even grander scale with each release (of which he has many); since I first heard the effervescent bounce of Happy High I've been hooked, and his tracks just keep getting more assured and more capable of conveying the genres trademark giddy heat-haze euphoria with an increasingly breezy effortlessness.  It's all adding up to eclipse the simple solo bedroom band it started out as.

He makes good use of his Bandcamp site, where you can get the recent Modern Disbelief ep for free, and the new Summer Heart LP,  for $9.99.  According to his (very active, informative) Twitter feed, he's just been invited to play at the Hype Machine's CMJ showcase, which, as he says, is a pretty big deal: Last year, Sleigh Bells, Neon Indian, and Midnight Juggernauts played it.  So to say his star is in the ascendant would be an understatement yet it's a position that would come totally warranted if the trajectory of his releases are an indicator of where his music is headed.
 

His big news this week is the release of his debut video for the track Pure (taken from Summer Heart) and it has made the front page Editor's Pick on Vimeo; In his own words:  "I am extremely overwhelmed"

VIDEO: Teengirl Fantasy - Cheaters

Here's the recent video to Teengirl Fantasy's Cheaters. The track is on the album 7AM, released on London's Merok. This sounds more like a 2am track to me, all peaked hands reaching up to the roof with an over earnest over the edge energy pushing on. The video is not removed quite far enough from yr windows media player visualisations, but if you let it, you can totally succumb to the overwhelming cosmic disco trippiness of it all. The vocals are especially intoxicating.

VIDEO: Turbowolf - Ancient Snake

Our long time running Best New Band Of Almost Ever have finally put out a full on official video for one of their tracks. Ahead of their forthcoming EP The Big Cut Turbowolf give you a technicolour splatterfest for Ancient Snake. It's wild like the woods!

See them support Korn and Dimmu Borgir in Europe very soon. Now there's a sentence I never thought I'd get to type.

"The Drexciya security blanket"

I've been reading the Konx-Om-Pax interview in Wire magazine - Tom Scholefield of the Display Copy blog/design house responsible for Oneohtrix Point Never album covers and Hudson Mohawke videos.  He mentioned this track as one of his ultimate post-rave comedown mental reset switch flickers. And you know what?  It's pretty nice.

VIDEO: Tearist - a of n

Here's a video I've been after for ages, but only just turned up now - any recorded Tearist track would be great, but this one especially might be my favourite of their 2009 CDr....for now.  It keeps changing, and I'm not complaining; each of the tracks on it is mesmerising in it's own way - similar to to effect Crystal Castles had on me when I first heard them; there's something dangerous and loose about this ordeal, and it's boy/girl, and she's up front - right up front in yr face.  Comparable to White Ring in the Witch House scene, and Souxie & The Banshees outside of it - bit dark, steely and aggressive.  Watch and listen, loudly.

VIDEO: Neon Indian - Sleep Paralysist

Here's the video for the new track by Neon Indian that he put out a little while ago. In an interview with Spinner mag the video's director Ben Chappell says that the murky plot is loosely based around Neon Indian mastermind Alan Palomo becoming "a tourist in this big hallucinatory land, so he passes through all these different crazy scenarios."

Drug tourism? Chillwave? Never.





And here's that Spinner interview in full:

VIDEO: New Oneohtrix Point Never!

Just in time for his set at the Freebutt tonight - and our DJ set at the Penthouse above - here's the new track ‡PREYOUANDI∆ and suitably hallucinatory video from the luminous mind of Daniel Lopatin.

VIDEO: oOoOO - Seawww

Here's the video to accompany the release of this split 7" between oOoOOand White Ring on Emotion Records. Directed by Dan Lopatin of Oneohtrix Point Never, Skyramps and Games. The low fi digital aesthetic is a little cruder than Lopatin's musical tones but it suits the track.

VIDEO Yoga - Reptoids

Hot off the press of the Drowned in Sound community music board, from the mouth of that lunatic savant Saint Cronin comes news of the next Yoga album.

The new album will be called Skinwalker and will be a remastered collection of previous tracks from split eps and demo cassettes, plus a few new tracks such as this one, Reptoids, that has been furnished with visuals from the black psychedlic mind of Mater Suspiria Vision. Psychedelic Black Metal meets Witch House. Last year's Megafauna could well be considerd a heralder of Witch House with its blackened occultified hypnagogia but this looks like the full melding of styles. This year just keeps getting better and better! More hybrid genres like this one please.

After releasing Megafauna Holy Mountain are set to release this second album due for release in the Autumn. In anticipation of that; feast your eyes, ears and fourth mind on this:

PWIN ▲▲ TEAKS

This is an interesting one, as befits this interesting juncture we find ourselves at as the subgenre eddies of Chillwave and Witch House spin off into different shapes, some remingling and others whirling further from the motherpool that is Hypnogogic Pop. 80's + cognitive dissonance = 2010.  Sharing a similarity in ambience to Ducktails with their languid tropical shimmertone that sits them firmly in the Chillwave camp there is also a malevolence in the way PWIN ▲▲ TEAKS dismember and recast radio hits of the 80's that is one of the gory signatures of Witch House.  That and the geometry in the name. Sympathetic sampling is one of Chillwave's central tenets, but over on the darker side its more about the torturing, like some kind of payback for all those times trapped with the radio tuned to a local Golden Hits.   Their top friends on myspazz are Kria Brekkan, Washed Out, Disaro and How I Quit Crack. There's some kind of coordinates for you there.

Here's two tracks to celebrate and demonstrate the fork in the road that we're getting to chose a route down.

First, take I Will Always Love You - a remix, reworking or ritual sacrifice (whichever way you want to spin it) so profoundly simple, sinister and unnerving the Master Butcher would be proud to hang it in alongside his greatest love songs. Check the way the track gets sucked into a dismal vortex around the 4 minute mark, then pops back out into it's parallel dimensional form of euphoria. Beautiful freaky. Then listen to Beach Bubble and just lay back and relax as it's soporific heatwave fans out over your body slowly brushing across your skin in waves of lilting intensity as the clouds gently shade the colour of its rays.

Winter Drones

Winter Drones is the other band from Leon Dufficy of Hush Arbors. They formed around 2006, so they're not new and this video is a couple of years old, but it;s all we have to preview their new cassette Blood in the Coffin out now on SexBeat Records. Bongs Dream Pt.2 was also featured on the Menagerie compilation on Blackest Rainbow Records - another one of our favourite labels. All good company.

The languid kraut groove of Neu, with a bit of Wooden Shjips style bluesy drugginess. The sound features a lot of gently controlled feedback to give it the ethereal dream/drone pop air of Deerhunter. All that, then there's the graven shadow of Stiff Wizard, featured on the SexBeat 002 compilation - it's a stomping fuzzed up monster of a track that roars out of the speakers with no small amount of malice in it's stride. If you never got that comp you can get a taster of it on the MySpace page. But for the here and now you can have Scene Through, a far more sedate affair that still flows really deep.

Now melt into this: