Cassette Culture is a month-to-month column devoted to exploring the varied artists that inhabit the expansive cassette market. Drawing from bands and labels world wide, this column will try to spotlight a number of the finest artists and albums from this world group.
Mighty Theodore
Set Out in the Dark
(Icy Palms Records)
There’s been numerous darkness within the lifetime of DJ and producer Mighty Theodore, sufficient to fill volumes, and on his newest album, Set Out within the Darkish, he interprets these pervasive shadows into a set of songs highlighting the necessity for perseverance as we traverse this darkened world. That includes visitor spots from Fly Anakin, Sean Born, J Scienide, Tesla’s Ghost, Brainorchestra, and a handful of others, the document attracts inspiration from movies like The Warriors and 80 Blocks from Tiffany’s – in addition to the chaos surrounding the New York Metropolis blackouts in 1977 – to create a simmering brew of angst, anger, and frustration at numerous misplaced alternatives and a want to rise above the noise and violence that marked his youth.
These tracks transfer with an assured path, aided by a confidence that pours from Mighty Theodore, and it finally speaks on bigger problems with generational trauma, redemption, and the necessity to endure and to create one thing to cross on to those that come after. Hip-hop has hardly ever felt this private and very important, and so unanchored from any particular level within the style’s historical past. Set Out within the Darkish is a revelation of intimate associations and risky musical experimentation, and it stands as a reflective triumph for an artist who yearns to supply a spark of hope for these whose struggles threaten to overwhelm them.
Snowpoint Lounge
感情 EP
(Lightsurf Tapes)
The music of Snowpoint Lounge exists in an eternally gauzy ether which homes all kinds of “-wave” subgenres. For his or her 感情 EP, there’s a tendency to wander via the vaporous avenues of jazzwave and to seek out that means within the act of breaking down and reassembling numerous musical aesthetics. These songs haven’t any actual definition, however that isn’t to their detriment. The music purposefully shields its meanings behind shiny instrumentation and ethereal rhythms, buoyed by jazz percussion and a have to obliterate musical conference. Parts of recent age and ambient ripple simply beneath its floor, including to the general haze of mysterious intent that the album sustains.
These songs rely on particular person impressions, as every one capabilities with out concrete borders or melodic specificity, providing landscapes via which we will vent our inside emotional conflicts with no need to stick to a sure musical historical past. And it’s on this obscure sense of affiliation that permits it to function from a really limitless perspective, as we imprint our personal revelations and epiphanies to its moments of weightless design and chance. It’s the type of album that requires a number of listens and divulges refined variations and shades of emotional vulnerability with every plunge into its sophisticated depths.
North Carolina alt-rock duo BAL – based by Jack Foster and Jordan Powers of Far-Much less, Home of Fools, Sarah Shook & the Disarmers – take the crunchy guitars and driving rhythms of bands like Failure and Native H and imbue them with their very own distinct aesthetic, a mix of riotous rock and roll and sci-fi ideology. Their debut album, Seafoam, finds them exploring a grungy, raucous sound that recollects the roar of recent rock radio from 1993-1996. Crammed in between science fiction terminology and melodies that get caught in your head for days, the band gives up a number of the chunkiest riffs this aspect of a Mudhoney document. The guitars are saturated past perception, and the drums are able to pulverizing granite, however the band nonetheless focuses in on the underlying basis of this thumping noise.
As a lot as you’re going to be twisting your neck misplaced to maintain up with its pummeling actions, you’re simply as more likely to be reveling in its capability to evoke each the previous and the current with out wallowing within the successes of its influences. They work inside a well-known sound, however Foster and Powers have discovered a solution to make these churning sounds really feel model new and very important, reinvigorating these various atmospheres and offering appropriate assist for Seafoam to develop and evolve right into a mantle bearer for 90’s-era exhausting rock.
Fan Fiordo
Plaisirs Caméléons
(Underwater Computing)
Argentinian producer Fan Fiordo has lengthy held an affection for the MPC-11 “Akira” soundcard and for the methods during which it could actually channel and specific the complexities of the Korg M1 synthesizer. Actually, his newest album, Plaisirs Caméléons (or Chameleonic Pleasures), is constructed round these items of {hardware} and software program, evoking an eclectic and 80’s-leaning sound that makes use of an array of spry chimes, dramatic percussion, ethereal choirs, and all method of oscillating tones. Skirting the perimeters of ambient and vaporwave, these songs dip into these often-formless genres whereas additionally sustaining one thing resembling an advanced skeletal construction.
There’s additionally one thing barely hypnagogic about these songs, as they really feel like soundtracks to these moments simply earlier than you go to sleep, all obscure impressions and fuzzy emotional associations. However even right here, when our unconscious is vying for management, you’ll be able to nonetheless detect a refined path orchestrated by Fiordo, melodies that repeat and department out in any respect angles and lead us beneath the veil of sleep. Veering between a wash of minimal circuits and lusher tides of sound which really feel cushioned inside their particular person landscapes, Plaisirs Caméléons is a byzantine detour via affect and inspiration, via pop and home music, and thru the numerous potentialities of recent digital music.
Sean Trelford
Care Home Party
(Hidden Bay Records)
It’s exhausting to imagine that recording started on Sean Trelford’s debut album, Care House Get together, when he was solely 14 years outdated. The Cambridge musician suffered heartache and lockdown (as all of us did to various levels) in 2020, and in these months, he started the work of writing and recording the songs that will type the premise of his first document. These tales of angst, ache, and frustration are all writ giant in shades of lo-fi bed room pop and indie rock, telling a narrative of how he endured and processed this era of ache in his life. Between lilting piano revelries and emotional outbursts, Trelford adopts a genre-spanning perspective, one that permits him to cobble collectively an aesthetic becoming his wants and which avoids laying allegiance to any particular musical lineage.
“By no means Received Anyplace” drifts by in a hazy blur of DIY pop motions whereas “How was I Speculated to Know?” is a bit more dissonant in its reveal, with noisy percussion colliding with fuzzed-up guitar and dramatic keys. “Our Final Goodbye” closes out the album with mild piano strains and vocals that sound as if they recorded six ft underground – and that’s all earlier than it erupts right into a ragtime-adjacent gallop earlier than as soon as quietly drifting again away from Trelford’s grasp. Pushed by an pressing want to precise unbelievable heartache whereas additionally adjusting to the turbulence of a pandemic-marked world, Care House Get together is his manner of providing some measure of understanding for all these shouldering the load of their very own troubles.
永遠的悲傷思考
會議總理
(Illuminated Paths)
Listening to 會議總理, the ambient and experimental new album from 永遠的悲傷思考 (roughly translated to “unhappy reflections on endlessly”), you get a way of infinite horizons stretching out past our comprehension. There’s a miraculous expanse right here, one which feels each alien and acquainted, a slowly churning smear of incandescent tones and droning rhythms. Every observe is a world to discover and obsess over, its musicality topic to our personal views and headspace. There’s a larger sense of dynamism to this album than a few of its digital friends, and that’s because of the inherent flexibility of its writer, a determine cloaked in anonymity whose capability to show these variables sounds into one thing grand and emotionally involving appears supernatural in its execution.
As ever with vaporwave and ambient collections, a lot of what you get out of it correlates to what you deliver to its cavernous recesses. With every bent be aware and wavy contour, you end up drawn additional into landscapes from which there appears to be no escape. There’s valuable little details about the discharge, however I imagine it capabilities as a rating to a movie – and when seen from that angle, it reminds us of the ability of aural and visible collaborations. These songs wander and mesmerize as they unfold, however in addition they evoke odd photographs of smash and stillness and rebirth, finally sculpting a phenomenal ode to the instability and adaptation of life.
Blue Chesterfield & Pavel Kielberger
Songs for the Fall
(Self-released)
Czech musicians Blue Chesterfield (aka David Jirka) and Pavel Kielberger received collectively again within the fall of 2021 to document a sequence of songs pairing ambient rhythms with fluctuating guitar strains, making a 6-track album known as Songs for the Fall. Synths and programmed drums additionally whirl round within the combine, offering a little bit of construction to the wispish strums and plucks. Ghostly vocals sometimes seem, working their manner between the sounds, establishing a noticeable momentum even when the tempo of the music slows to a crawl. Whether or not it’s a gradual burn or one thing extra uniquely tangled, Jirka and Kielberger handle to inject a essential vitality of their work, leading to a noise alternately weightless and complex.
From the prolonged ambient opening of “Fig. 20” to the clacking percussion and ethereal voices layered all through nearer “At Them”, Songs for the Fall presents a wide-ranging viewpoint on the intersection of a handful of genres. Recalling the avant strategy of Harold Budd and Brian Eno and infusing every observe with a nervous power, they permit their influences to direct their strategies with out changing into burdened by the histories of those self same musical antecedents. Using a parallel tangent from the standard ambient mechanisms, Jirka and Kielberger have common a set that speaks to their shared affection for ambient actions and lithe fretwork.
Joakim Blattmann
Stegla
(Dinzu Artefacts)
Earlier this 12 months, Oslo sound-artist Joakim Blattmann took half in an audio set up on the Buskerud Kunstsenter in Drammen, Norway. The exhibit offered a sequence of sounds drawn from timber and the bugs which name them dwelling. These experimental aural passages, collected as Stegla, have been managed in actual time via bioelectric alerts from the timber and additional amplified via floor transducers connected at numerous factors on every one. For the official launch, these recordings have been mixed and handled with totally different electronics and tape machines to spotlight the innate variations hidden inside this arboreal soundscape. Comprised of two components, this album works as a snapshot of nature in movement, of textural modulations pushed by the introduction of artificial mechanisms right into a world of absolute natural processes.
It could be beneficiant to characterize this as music, nevertheless it does develop its personal cadence, its personal method of talking that resolves via melodic echoes from the timber and its host of assorted segmented residents. There are moments while you really feel as in case you are immersed in a dripping forest of earthen garbage and overcast skies. Blattmann has concocted an ingenious solution to pull these sounds from nature, to offer voice to issues which have by no means been allowed to speak in their very own distinct methods. The easiest way to expertise it to let it wash over you, permitting it to totally engulf your senses. And thru this album, you start to see an unlimited undiscovered world of sound surrounding us and the methods during which we will work together with and understand these unseen landscapes.
Hamish Lang
Seasons
(Hush Hush Records)
Throughout a very tough lockdown in Melbourne in 2021, sound artist Hamish Lengthy was impressed to jot down the tracks which might develop into his newest album, Seasons. Residing at dwelling together with his associate, who occurs to be a florist, Lengthy was always surrounded by numerous flowers and sought to create one thing that will equally hum with its personal life – one thing a bit much less ambient than a few of his earlier data. He needed to faucet into the vivid energies and vibrant hues of the crops that regularly flooded his cloistered actuality. Tapping into the amorphous shapes and angles of his earlier releases, he imbues these tracks with their very own evocative atmospheres, every a dynamic response and rebuttal to emotions of isolation and private distancing.
It doesn’t utterly break together with his previous work, however Seasons is a extra absolutely developed realization of his ambient tendencies, full of neo-classical impulses, IDM reactions, and subdued home soundscapes. There’s a radiance working from inside every track, unfolding into a way of acceptance and understanding of the troubles Lengthy is making an attempt to avoid. From the loosely gathered piano tones in nearer “Piano Sleep” to the attractive synths radiating from “Scarlett, he breaks down the fundamentals of ambient music and performs round with momentum and stillness in ways in which really feel fashionable and modern. Oddly gravitational and drawn out via huge areas of sound, these songs envelop their viewers, reminding us that there are nonetheless many issues left to find on this inclusive mix of genres.
Gvantsa Narim
Gvantsa
(Cruel Nature Records)
Written and recorded in Tbilisi, Georgia between 2018-2022, Gvantsa Narim’s new album Gvantsa is an insightful look into the best way she capabilities as an artist. Drawing inspiration from spirituality, esotericism, and Georgia polyphonic music, she crafts a droning brew of ambient repetition, lite-psych ramblings, and a little bit of post-rock theatricality that adapts and shifts its perspective via a sequence of ghostly digital experiments. Pushed by dense feelings lurking simply beneath its measured floor, the document permits Narim to discover a variety of feeling whereas plumbing the depths of this seemingly bottomless rhythmic combination. Steering away from resolutely darker territories, she embraces a lightness and an innate benevolence which so few artists examine with any critical consideration.
From the mild piano notes of opener “Gvantsa” to “Levitation”’s prolonged drones and the twinkling passages of “Shoretis Melody”, the album is in fixed movement, by no means rushed or disoriented however shifting froward at its personal tempo. The album’s cowl is centered round a motif from Georgian avant-garde painter David Kakabadze, and the six tracks right here equally operate as a way for unfiltered inventive interpretation – on this case, Narim’s otherworldly capability to transcend common musical conventions and develop a sound that feels as if it’s feeding off of and responding on to our personal feelings. We come to know her a bit higher via the glistening rhythms and wobbly melodies offered for our enjoyment, fostering an unseen bond along with her as she slowly reveals particulars about herself through the experimental divinity of Gvantsa.
Fordmastiff
Counterfeit
(Municipal K7)
Brazilian musician Lucas Stamford (AKA Fordmastiff) needed to discover the hidden worlds that quickly revealed themselves throughout Rio de Janeiro’s iconic Carnival Parades celebration. And so, for this newest launch, Counterfeit, he envisioned a soundtrack to a metropolis haunted by shadowy figures and subterranean secrets and techniques, one the place a magical realism usurped the drab hues of recent actuality. “I’ve at all times felt the town has a type of secret hidden actuality in itself, as if past the seen, there was an invisible world striving to manifest via portals that develop into accessible between a sure a part of the evening and daybreak, possibly round 3 to six am,” he explains. The songs right here mirror his want to uncover the weird life and actions of the town that solely seem every year.
Counterfeit takes on the type of a lo-fi campaign pushed by Stamford’s have to reconcile the unseen with the fabric world round him. Parts of dance, ambient, and numerous different sub-genres of digital music are damaged down and reassembled right into a cohesive perspective on how music shapes Rio and why this particular celebration briefly alters its psychological and bodily panorama. Synths swell and dissolve, opening the best way for dizzying rhythms that sometimes embrace half-buried guitar strains and subaqueous vocals. The borders between what we will understand and what we’re subconsciously conscious of are tenuous throughout this era. “Carnival is a peculiar occasion the place that separation is subverted,” he continues, “the place normality will be all of the sudden disrupted, and the fantasy realm takes over the town symbolically.”
Golden Brown
Moonrise Orb Weaver
(Eiderdown Records)
Recording beneath the guise of Golden Brown, Colorado musician Stefan Beck conducts cosmic drone experiments that use off-kilter guitar strains, odd bits of percussion, and liquefied keys to tune into some increased aircraft of existence – really, it’s fairly earthen in its mannerisms nevertheless it’s one which most individuals have by no means noticed earlier than. On his newest assortment, the 4-track Moonrise Orb Weaver, he balances kosmiche, drone-folk, and dense layers of psychedelic noise to curate an ode to Native Individuals, particularly these of the Kaw, Kickapoo, and Osage nations. That is heard most clearly on “Hol-n-roc”, a observe devoted to Gap within the Rock in Baldwin Metropolis, Kansas, a pure geologic formation that presently sits on the ancestral lands of these peoples. There’s even a little bit of historic narration offered within the track to elucidate the story of this specific place.
The opposite tracks wind their manner via numerous ambient landscapes plagued by various percussive parts, discipline recordings, and Brown’s meticulous consideration to element. Quite than reveal the whole lot unexpectedly, he slowly permits these sounds to bloom and adapt to their environment, casting a hypnotic spell inviting you additional into their vaguely swirling depths. It’s a stunning set of songs, and Brown expertly navigates each the narrative themes regarding indigenous communities and the droning soundscapes on which he lays out the echoes of his coronary heart and thoughts. When you develop into accustomed to his mind-set and the best way during which he assembles these sounds, the music takes on a much more private outlook, one pushed by inside conversations and the stark interaction of those minimal, but significant, sonic layers.
Matt Evans
Soft Science
(Moon Glyph)
Brooklyn percussionist and composer Matt Evans enjoys creating miniature melodic opuses mixing jazz rhythms, digital instabilities, and hazy ambient worldbuilding – all seen and processed via an avant-garde lens. His work is way extra dynamic and denser than typical ambient music, however you continue to get that very same sense of musical opacity showcasing the style’s innate transformational qualities. For his newest launch, Gentle Science, Evans has created a full of life house the place he’s capable of enjoy a sonic alchemy. Aided by visitor spots from musicians Ka Baird and David Lackner, these songs discover elements of sci-fi futurism via extraterrestrial synth strains and the readability of cosmic atmosphere, calling to thoughts the environment of some alien bar blasting Tom Waits whereas patrons stare into their rainbow-hued drinks.
Self-described as “Jambient Zone Poems”, these songs are frenetic and risky in methods his earlier work by no means tried, molding these percussion efficiency items to engulf an orchestra of Casio keyboards. Nevertheless it’s not all ahead momentum and galloping tempos; he pulls again at occasions to let a sure quiet fall over every observe. This juxtaposition between the noisier parts of the music and these moments of calm assist to maintain Gentle Science from ever feeling acquainted or too eager to stick to style traditions, as gauzy and shapeless as they could be. This album examines the consequences of a boundless creativity unbound by particular musical lineages and amplified via Evans’ personal impressionistic views and private associations. Erratic, swish, and beamed in from distant photo voltaic system, Gentle Science is an intricate and intriguing glimpse into one man’s inventive course of and the emotional connections he makes together with his personal work.
KeepSleep
Thunderclouds
(No Problema Tapes)
The ambient work of Chinese language musician KeepSleep possesses an innate tacticity, good for folks craving these ASMR triggers. Burbling tones, aqueous melodies, and synths that stretch out for miles are all entangled collectively in a foggy assortment of principally instrumental passages designed to interact a number of senses and encompass you of their omnipresent atmospheres. She was impressed to create her newest album, Thunderclouds, after watching Hideo Nakata’s Honogurai Mizu No Soko Kara, a psychological horror movie that reveals the lengths a mom will go to with a view to save her daughter from supernatural forces. The opening observe, “Dizziness”, particularly feels drawn from the watery depths of that film’s headspace, incorporating darkish textures, melancholy atmosphere, and liquified landscapes to evoke loss, sacrifice, and unnerving emotional instability.
Recorded in a 360-degree panorama, it usually feels as if the music is urgent in on you from all instructions, giving little room for escape or distance from its shadowy recesses. Often, you’ll come throughout moments the place sudden sounds reveal themselves – particularly on “Mirror the place she introduces bells, develops a slight percussive presence, and gives her personal vocalizations in service to the observe’s general murky aesthetic. The album is well-titled as every track grows right into a harbinger of issues to return, even when the decision of these occasions is left to our personal creativeness. Portentous however by no means with out some small little bit of lightness to stability out the load of its actions, Thunderclouds is each a tactile exercise for these wanting engagement on a number of sensory ranges in addition to an enveloping sequence of measured rhythmic disturbances simply ready for the suitable time to burst aside and swallow all of their path.
Richmond hardcore band Faucet function inside a world of distorted noise, punk rock freneticism, and risky emotional volatility. It’s an excellent racket and one which deserves much more consideration. Fashioned in 2018, the band shared their debut album, Bitter Insane Melting, in 2020, an unhinged brew of heavy punk and noise rock, and so they have been set to take their roar on the street earlier than the pandemic stalled these plans. However from disappointment sprang inspiration, because the band took that point to start engaged on their sophomore document, Lament KSO, and at the moment are able to unleash it upon the senses of their followers. Stitched collectively from group recordings and solo performances, is an artifact of how the band coped with and processed the frustrations, solitude, and distance that marked this era of their lives.
Constructing upon the ferocity and noisy eruptions of their debut, Lament KSO distills their model of chaotic, punk-indebted hardcore machinations into its purest essence, aided by the howling voice of singer Laura Marina and the locked-in interaction of guitarist Landon Walker, bassist John Graham, and drummer Abdul Hakim Bilal. There’s no extra right here, only a presentation of the brilliantly sinewy explosions the band has been refining since they first started performing. The guitars screech and shudder, serrated devices being pulled aside whereas the music is pushed ahead through pummeling percussive outbursts. Marina’s vocals barely maintain all of it collectively, nevertheless it’s this sense that all of it would possibly collapse utterly which lends it such an urgency and calls for that we take note of each certainly one of its cathartic (and admittedly, pissed off) revelations.
Pulse Emitter
Dusk
(Hausu Mountain)
Portland-based producer-synthesist Daryl Groetsch has a substantial again catalog of music, releasing round 80 albums over the past twenty years. It may be formidable to strategy, not to mention discover with any sense of completeness, however when taken on their very own, his albums are wholly immersive and imminently approachable. Comingling kosmiche, new age, and drone, he balances extra austere digital aesthetics with punchy synth rhythms, making a sound as dynamic as it’s intuitive. On his newest album, Nightfall, he opts for one thing a bit extra grandiose at occasions, extra attuned to cosmic change and the methods during which numerous empyrean occurrences enable us to mirror on the importance of issues on Earth. Alternately targeted on widescreen experiences and people shrunk right down to one thing a bit extra internalized, Groetsch makes use of these songs as a car for private meditation in addition to for expressions of a lot bigger inventive insights.
The usage of droning tones, versatile synths, and warbling melodies all act as siren calls to attract us additional into the album’s dense patchwork of noisy substructure. Taking treatment from numerous terrestrial climes, tracks like “Snow Diamonds” and “Temple within the Mountains” use pure formations and seasons to behave as sources of musical adaptation. Exploring the cycles of life, the music turns into a press release on renewal and the act of creation. As every observe rushes ahead in its efficiency earlier than drifting again to far, you get a way of the size Groetsch is working to current. Nightfall is a masterwork of artificial reconstruction, a bridge between our concepts of natural origins and the artifice with which we so usually encompass ourselves. He leaves little question which is most popular, and which gives the best useful resource for sustained inventive expression.
Earth Speaks
at Garden of the Gods
(Home & Garden)
Recorded by Matthew Himes (beneath the moniker of Earth Speaks) at Backyard of the Gods Wilderness in Shawnee Nationwide Forest, which is situated in southern Illinois, at Backyard of the Gods is a meditation tape stuffed with birdsong, the hum of unidentified bugs, and the wind because it passes via the treetops above. There’s no grand idea to the tape, only a 30-minute go to to a spot the place the concerns and struggles of life will be loosened for only a bit. It’s fascinating how these frequent sounds start to take the form of a structured rhythm in your head; it capabilities as a type of melodic reassessment of the on a regular basis noises we frequently take as a right. As every sound seems and retreats, the world it presents turns into extra absolutely realized, leading to a sonic panorama the place this push for leisure and inside readjustment permits us to deal with particular sounds whereas blocking all out the pointless issues surrounding us.
And whereas Himes isn’t attempting to reinvent the wheel right here, this act of “musical conservation” as he describes it’s nothing wanting revelatory. By permitting the pure world to exist because it has for numerous centuries and utilizing this tape as a car for its majesty, he’s completed a really inspirational feat: he has created an aural artefact of significance for future generations – by no means thoughts the peace of thoughts it offers for these of us listening now. It turns into a name to forgo false ambitions and to focus on what really makes you content and content material in your life. The straightforward issues are sometimes essentially the most significant, and thru this assortment of pure sounds, we start to understand that these issues are a lot nearer than we would have thought.
More Eaze
Strawberry Season
(Leaving Records)
Strawberry Season, the newest album from Austin musician Extra Eaze, is all about affirmation within the face of horrible circumstance. And whereas the previous few years have been a low level in a lot of our lives, with the pandemic and different well being considerations battling for consideration amongst studies of battle and the fragility of many social establishments, multi-instrumentalist Mari Maurice has is taking time to mirror upon the positives that may, with just a little encouragement, be seen throughout us. This document veers between ambient pop and experimental digital aesthetics, culling what she feels is pointless and assembling the remainder right into a vivid and buoyant portrait of pleasure amidst private hardship. These songs are strewn with circuital ephemera, stringed prospers, and moments when the monotony actual life intrudes upon our expertise with the music – however even that’s a part of the album’s appeal and relatability, providing the world as it’s, full with all of the day by day trivia we interact with and course of.
When the music begins to get barely noisy, which may occur at occasions, there’s at all times a restraint proven, a sense that she doesn’t need the dissonance to considerably form the tones on show. As its identify recommend, Strawberry Season is all in regards to the sweetness situated throughout us, suggesting a stability between the apprehension all of us really feel and one thing extra optimistic is manageable, although we now have to work at sustaining that equilibrium because the world regularly units obstacles in our path. We’re supplied a reprieve if just for a short while, a sequence of moments designed to assist us adapt our pondering and to align our ideas with brighter recollections and loving reminiscences held shut. We could not know when any sense of normalcy will return o our lives, however this document makes an attempt to create a buffer between us and the harsher parts we face, pushed by a rhythmic tenacity and digital innovation that leaves your jaw on the ground and your coronary heart in your sleeve.
Craig Salt Peters
Stuck in the Present Tense
(Lost Sound Tapes)
Typically issues simply don’t work out the best way you propose. Simply have a look at Seattle indie rock musician Craig Peters and his newest album, Caught within the Current Tense, a set of songs he wrote round eight years in the past however that are solely now coming collectively for launch. Initially aided by guitarist Jacob Jaffe, bassist John Broback, and drummer-keyboardist Zach Burba, the band finally fell aside as every individual moved away and pursued different pursuits. However within the winter of 2021, they regrouped in Seattle and labored their manner again via these songs, recording them on the Unknown in Anacortes. Relearning these songs felt like skimming via an outdated picture album, remembering the previous however feeling as if you’ve doubtless grown previous no matter you wanted at the moment. These songs converse to the previous, to nostalgia and ache lengthy since buried however nonetheless affecting the current in unpredictable methods.
And although they don’t fairly have the emotional resonance they did when Peters first penned them, they nonetheless possess a fancy perspective on reminiscence, ambition, and desires – taking a look at these themes as each sanctuary and devourers of time. From the raucous fretwork of opener “Forecast” to the measured grooves of the title observe, this document ambles and stumbles and infrequently stomps because it finds methods to make acquainted sounds really feel refreshingly modern and greater than the top results of an amalgam of influences. Usually recalling the jaunty indie-pop of bands affiliated with the Elephant 6 Collective, however with a extra muscular basis underpinning some tracks, Caught within the Current Tense is an examination of existential drama as seen via the blur of odd experiences, and it’s this perception into on a regular basis occurrences which makes it really feel so uniquely attuned to Peters’ personal emotional historical past.
Nakayama Munetoshi
Court
(Muzan Editions)
Composed fully from modular synths, Buchla Easel, and a Yamaha DX7, the newest assortment of minimal electronics from Japanese artist Nakayama Munetoshi feels skeletal, crystalline, sometimes kaleidoscopic. It’s additionally unimaginable to disregard when you’ve noticed its hypnotic rhythms. Regardless of its relative austerity, it doesn’t really feel slight or underweight; granted, the tones are measured and slide by with out a lot in the best way of exact path, however Munetoshi infuses these sounds with an sudden density and the clattering of inside clockwork. There are choose moments when the tracks tackle an aquatic look, with dripping, clicking instrumentation recall the gradual ebb and circulation of round tidal actions. You lose all sense of time right here, because the music blurs the boundaries between the world we’re listening to and the one during which we bodily exist.
Some songs similar to “Imaginative and prescient” and “Carnival” stand out for his or her (relative) momentum and noisy constructions. Set in opposition to the softer, extra subdued ones like opener “Admission” and “Clock”, these tracks act as counterweights to provide a sonic equilibrium grounding the album in all kinds of timbres and tempos. As every begins their work to stretch and billow and show a singular fluidity, we come to understand that Courtroom is definitely extra outlined that initially look. It’s true that you may spend all day attempting to disperse the gauzy atmospheres right here looking for some concrete theme, however that continuous pursuit of definition is what elevates these sounds above the standard flutter and ethereal nature of most ambient music normally. Munetoshi revels in vagaries, letting the music act as a transitory gadget for our personal analyses, offering a stable basis for the interpretive acts we carry out as every track is skilled and processed.
Slowfoam & Neilll
kindly
(Lillerne Tapes)
There’s extra lurking beneath the floor of kindly, the brand new collaborative album from Berlin musician Madelyn Byrd’s Slowfoam moniker and Los Angeles artist Tim Bomberg’s Neilll challenge, than you would possibly notice upon first hear. They’ve created a model of ambient music that it much more dynamic than is common, balancing tones which can be heat and welcoming with these which can be prickly and preserve their distance. There’s a playfulness to the gathering that highlights their innate musical affections, providing brilliant avant-garde rhythms that stand in distinction to extra serrated noises welling up from the depths of their collective creativities. There are occasions when the sounds are as dense as granite, permitting little to no gentle to cross via its obfuscating views, however then you may have intervals of lighter atmospheric disturbances, moments when the shadows retreat and provides room for warped melodies to unravel into distorted reflections of experimental pop and ambient euphoria.
From the opening warbles and wobbles of “Cyberpoetics”, the document by no means units particular expectations, nor does it explicitly state its intentions, opting to go away all of it fairly obscure and mischievous. The wide-open areas and hissing echoes of “Taking part in with Sublimity” run counterpoint to the noir-ish clangor of “For the Tree Exterior My Window (is {that a} saxophone?) – and all of it works to additional the disparate approaches that Byrd and Bomberg take to corral these often-uncharacterizable sounds. Plinking notes stability alongside the shake of spacey synths inside a sequence of blurry ambient environments. With every progressive plunge into these crackly and heartfelt experiments, you develop into extra conscious of the sophisticated emotional framework they each faucet into of their pursuit of a broader rhythmic, and arrhythmic, reference to their viewers, and kindly turns into much less a non-public dialog between two musician and extra a roundtable the place all views are allowed to be expressed and explored.
Maharadja Sweets
Whatever Dreamy Void
Oxtail Recordings
Brooklyn musician Richard Exelbert develops a mysterious presence by effortlessly divining a mix of digital experimentation, bed room pop blurriness, and heart-on-sleeve folks ruminations which speaks to his influences in addition to to the significance of reconfiguring these sounds and permitting them to have the liberty to wander beneath their very own impulses. And No matter Dreamy Void is an ideal instance of how he manages to mix these totally different aesthetics with out shedding their rhythmic individuality. It’s 9 tracks of lo-fi disintegration, and it’s a privilege to observe as he dismantles every whereas sustaining a sequence of cohesive atmospheres during which they will flourish. They make their manner from ramshackle folk-pop confessions to ambient-leaning digital experiments, making a smeared panorama of musical hues and melodies constructed from stray ideas and wondrous revelation.
There’s a way of inventive abandon right here, as if Exelbert merely allowed his instincts to run wild and emerged with this assortment that spoke to his personal inspirations whereas additionally feeling utterly unburdened by any particular musical histories. He roots round in some acquainted sounds, however the execution possesses an off-kilter genius that marks it somebody who finds goal within the act of rearrangement and adaptation. It’s an apt title as nicely, as these songs usually appear to be whirling round in some hazy formless house, able to erupt at any second however protecting their plans near their hearts. There are occasions when it appears we’re listening to them via some ghostly barrier, an incorporeal demarcation that separates their world from our personal. It may be disorienting attempting to parse out that means and intent, nevertheless it additionally feels refreshing to not have the whole lot spelled out in huge daring sentiments. No matter Dreamy Void is a testomony to what will be conveyed with out strict emotional alignments and pushed by a want to supply an impressionistic canvas for intimate remark fairly than dwelling on blunt power realizations.
Andrew Oda
Back to the Body
(Mappa)
Again to the Physique, the newest album from electroacoustic artist Andrew Oda, is all about processing trauma and the methods during which we transfer previous it to seek out some sense of decision and therapeutic. Through a sequence of ambient soundscapes, he takes us via the phases during which we tackle and interact with emotions of damage, anger, and acceptance – and in these wordless musical choices, we’re given room to discover these feelings with out concern of judgment or reprisal. Oda has stated that these songs are about reaching a spot “the place true intimacy can occur…a spot of forgiveness of self and different”, and it turns into evident fairly early on that he has created a document which permits us to just do that. As straightforward as it’s to develop into misplaced among the many glistening synths, piano, strings, and guitar strewn about these tracks, you do get a way that he retains us on a path towards solace and luxury, and by no means wavers in his perception that gentle can at all times break aside the darkness.
All through the album, Oda presents moments when gentle washes over you, the primary rays of a brand new day, the popularity of ahead motion. The trauma all of us cope with shapes us in methods we would not notice, and it is a central theme behind Again to the Physique. Quite than permitting the scars and emotional devastation to outline us going ahead, the album means that we will flip the expertise of confronting these wounds into a vital a part of our psychological well being recuperation. Dissonance does happen once in a while, similar to on nearer “i forgive you, i forgive me/belief that we’re held(womb)”, however even then, it will definitely shifts to a extra spry, danceable shuffle. The overarching narrative constructed into these songs is offered with out a lot context, giving us all ample house to strategy and join at our personal tempo, present inside this panorama of swelling rhythms and atypical melodies whereas we attempt to kind via our inside and exterior struggles.
Eugene the Oceanographer
The Maze
(Biloxata)
Underneath the alias of Eugene the Oceanographer, musician Matthew O’Toole has lengthy been an advocate of cross-genre embellishment, discovering alternative ways to attach discordant sounds in an try and reveal the frequent roots between these disparate musical lineages. Mixing ambient, plunderphonics, chilly wave, experimental, and punk, he’s developed an aesthetic as uncommon as it’s revelatory. On his newest launch, The Maze, he turns his eye and ear towards the shared histories of Eire and Ukraine, two seemingly unrelated nations, and focuses in on themes of occupation, revolution, and famine. From the opening bells and plinking synths of “You might be Now Getting into Free Derry” to the chaotic electronics of nearer “Перм-36”, the album revels in its capability to carry parts from virtually anyplace and to compile them in such a manner as to disclose hidden nuance and relevance the place none existed earlier than.
Recorded in Kyiv, the album options visitor appearances from Maja Nikolic, Gentils Floquets, and Cult Get together, displaying that O’Toole is simply as comfortable to have collaborators as he’s to focus on his personal distinctive musical perspective. There’s an underlying pressure to those songs, a sense of unresolved hostility and hints that some issues can’t be mounted, simply remembered. Between dirty dancefloor arrythmia and lo-fi punk clangor, The Maze, by no means loses its personal drive towards style deconstruction and adaptation. Even with all of its shifting musical influences, the document by no means feels disjointed, solely anxious to attract in additional sound sand pull them aside on the seams. It’s desirous to see what will be constructed from the detritus of noise and a want to make use of these numerous sounds as connective tissue between two geographies so totally different in some ways and but so related in others. The tip result’s an album of contrasts and resemblance, an ode to human relationships and the methods during which he can destroy these private networks and the way we would additionally restore them.
