Geotic – Mend

Anyone who’s had the fortune to see Baths live will know that Will Wiesenfeld is not one to stand still. Hunched over his gear, his torso rocks metronomically while his arms flail in front of him, pawing and dabbing at his bank of dials with a controlled mania that is both enthralling and exhausting to witness.

So what to expect from his side project, Geotic? Probably not an album of blissfully ambient guitar loops, but that’s what he’s given us. Written over just four days in late December (a revelation in itself given the depth and attention to detail of Baths’s album Cerulean) it is a warm and understated record, the songs drifting into one another to create a sonic collage that intermittently lulls and grabs; a perfect early January record to numb the trudge back to work. Best of all though, he’s released it for free on his Angelfire page, where you can find a load of his early work under the same name.

Go here to get the album and see below for a little sampler.

Add Void’s Ten From 2010 #4

Keeping up with the down-tempo side of things, mix number 4 is a little sortie into the world of slow and syncopated beats. That’s about as close you’re going to get to defining a genre with thousands of sub-categories to choose from – some favourite classifications I’ve found include fun-dip, soul-electronica and the curiously apt, drown-step – but however you want to label or pigeon-hole them, these tracks have gone towards making the year in ‘beats’ a pretty amazing one…

Go here to download the mix, get the tracklist and feed yourself on our other end of year offerings.

Like the picture? Check out Mark Warren Jacques

Oval

I discovered Soft Circle on a line-up with Nedry, Baths and Boredoms at the upcoming Rhythm Section live weekend organised by The Wire magazine at the ICA, which features in its programme the ’100 Greatest Rhythms of All Time’ – a combination of words that should make even the most flat-footed of you start toe-tapping in anticipation. To give a teeny, tiny, possible suggestion of what might be happening at this awesome sounding event, here are two of the only tracks of theirs I could find online. Heavy, tribal and trance-inducing, whilst at the same time skitteringly syncopated and ceaselessly textured, can’t help but make you want to move.

Unclean

So it’s fair to say that Anticon has been through a fairly lean patch in the last couple of years; with the noted exception of Why? the label’s output has veered between pedestrian dross (Telephone Jim Jesus, Odd Nosdam’s Time Soundtrack) and dense, scantly rewarding hip hop (Themselves’ The Free Houdini and Crowns Down).

Things have, it seems, turned somewhat of a corner though. Tobacco’s wonky samples ‘n synths affair, ‘Maniac Meat’ is a pleasingly forward thinking record and now we’re presented with Baths, who at first looks set in the same mould as many of the current crop of electro ingénues enjoying the spotlight. His beats certainly crackle and fizz with the same lopsided gait we’ve come to associate with Gold Panda or Nosaj Thing, but listening to his debut album, Cerulean, it’s clear his sound can also take on a more melodic and uncluttered bent. Whilst Aminals bounces  and clacks to a bassline so smooth G-Funk era Dr. Dre wishes he wrote it, ♥’s lilting piano line and plaintive vocals manage to supercede the patchwork of percussive ticks that underpin his sound, adding a warmth and pathos that can only propel him beyond his contemporaries.

Expect big things.

Myspace here: http://www.myspace.com/bathsmusic