Daphni, the solo incarnation of the restlessly and relentlessly talented Dan Snaith (Caribou, Manitoba), has just released a brace of remixes for Emeralds’ album track Does It Look Like I’m Here. The quality is unsurprisingly high and the result is as expected; two sprawling tracks of kinetic synthscapes and hefty proto-techno. Good, good.
Image is by Martien Mulder.
Couple of videos for you here by the excellent Sabrina Ratté. We’ve featured one of her works before – the reverberating neon accompaniment to Boxcutter’s TV Troubles – and are proud to put them up again.
This time around she’s made them for Le Révélateur, the Montreal-based synth wizard on Steve Hauschildt’s (of Emeralds fame) label, Gneiss Things. Both video and music are precisely the kind of things we’re into here – haunting, mesmeric and hypnagogic recreations of distorted throwback sounds and visions – and we hope you like them too.
Image is by Kate Steciw, more of whose rather great digitally distorted works you can see here.
If you know Zs then you may well be aware of Ben Greenberg, the man who plays guitar in that band. However, you may very well not be aware of him. If that’s the case then it’s probably high time you raised your awareness of him to ‘aware’, because he’s about to release a solo album on Northern Spy Records, under the guise of Hubble.
Described by its creator as ‘Cyber-dread’, Hubble fits a lot of current stylistic tropes and moulds them into something really quite epic. A heady broth of staccato guitars, similar in timbre to early Battles EPs, forms the textural basis of the sound. Wailing psych improv and swathes of stellar chords float over this, forming something akin to Mark McGuire’s sound, but with a heavier, nastier feel. And just wait for the drums…
With most tracks around ten minutes and some extending to the 25 minute mark it wears its prog heart proudly on its sleeve. But when it’s as rich, dense and fucking heavy as this, it really can’t be a bad thing.
Check out a track from his upcoming album Hubble Drums (available November 8th, pre-order here), as well as a few other choice cuts, below.
Image is from some Leif Podhajsky’s Tumblr, Visual Melt. Which is really great.
It’s hard to know where to begin with Giant Claw’s latest schizophrenic, tangential and obtuse offering. It draws you in by conjuring giddy, technicolour imagery tinged with nostalgia for your old Atari, before devolving into passages of nightmarish fairground shlock that sound like a John Carpenter score realised by a toddler in the grips of a sugar high. There are some pretty euphoric moments peppered in the midst of all this though, particularly War Bride, which opens with the pitch-shifted glam stomp of Battles’ Atlas before devolving into a sparkling Emeralds-esque opus. It’s a lot of fun, but it’s probably not music to listen to if you’re planning on sleeping any time in the next few hours…
Image is by Vangel Naumovski
There’s what looks like a really great little festival going on this weekend. We got all excited by the line-up and were rubbing our grubby little paws together in eager anticipation when we happened to read the small (ok, fair enough, the totally normal-sized, if not actually quite prominent) print and discovered the bastard thing’s in sodding Chicago. Damn Yanks get all the fun.
Anyway, if you’re in the Illinois area this weekend (well, you might be), you should probably check it out. There’ll be sets from a lot of acts we’ve recently featured like Oneohtrix Point Never, Rene Hell, Mountains and the awesome White Rainbow, as well as plenty of other daringly original, genre-defying and thought-provoking artists. Here’s a quick round-up of what we would be looking forward to if we were actually going:
First off is the new solo side-project from interstellar voyager John Elliott. Not entirely sure how he manages to pump out so much stuff – whether it’s with Emeralds, solo or for his various label imprints – or how he manages to make it all so good. But it doesn’t matter. He does. And that’s all that counts.
Staying in similarly cosmic territory, Portland’s Pulse Emitter weaves glacial, dream-like synth sequences that stretch endlessly into the distance. Definitely one to bury your head and get lost to…
Veering towards more terrestrial tones, we come to the excellent C V L T S, who first came to our attention a few months back thanks to AV favourite Time Wharp and his remix of their track Angel Chromosome. Check that, as well as a cut released especially to coincide with the festival, here:
Angel Chromosome (Time Wharp Remix)
White Cluster
Slightly out of place, but no less worthy of a slot at the festival, is warped blues guitar wizard, Bill Orcutt, whose spell-bindingly frenetic youtube videos have been favourites of ours for some time.
Filling the yawning chasm between Grouper and Fuck Buttons is the mercurially-styled Leslie Keffer, whose past work has veered from punk rock, to extreme noise and now into electronic improv. Should be a really great set if this teaser of a track is anything to go by.
Back onto the intergalactic megabus now for Dylan Ettinger. Check out his awesomely heavy, uber-slow synth-dub odyssey, Lion of Judah. Nizzze.
Last, but absolutely, positively and resolutely not least, is Lucky Dragons. A group that seem to change their entire direction every time they release a new album or play a gig, they’re always an absolute treat to see live. Here’s a quick round up of what to possibly expect, or to make you surprised when they play something totally different.
Brooklyn ambient noise duo Mountains have been on our radar ever since we discovered their beautiful album Choral and its graceful acoustic minimalism a couple of years ago. Their new release, Air Museum, has surpassed all previous output in terms of mood, scope and technical proficiency, catapulting them into the hypnagogic realms of Ducktails, Emeralds and Oneohtrix Point Never.
Check out their stunning new video and an additional track off the new album here, then hop over to Thrill Jockey to pick up the album.
Image is by old fave Ryan McGinley.
Here’s another epic electronic soundscape from the sound-art genius that is Keith Fullerton Whitman. It’s got to be one of the most intense, sublime, enrapturing pieces of music we’ve heard for some time – like a collaboration between Emeralds and Oneohtrix Point Never doing a re-work of Vangelis’ Blade Runner score. Yes, really.
If any of his output from last year passed you by we’d urge you to jump on it – it’s got to be some of the most incredible electronic music ever produced. Absolutely crying out to have a film cut to it, too. One day, one day…
P.S
Another track’s just popped up on his Soundcloud, may as well share that as well:
Two new tracks for you from Spectrum Spools, an offshoot of the consistently brilliant Editions Mego label. The project is being curated by John Elliott, of Emeralds fame, and promises to bring you the finest in forward-thinking modern music. The tracks that popped up on his Soundcloud yesterday both attest strongly to this credo.
We featured Forma’s hypnotic Forma237B on one of our Best Of 2010 compilations and now it seems it’s going to be released as part of the Brooklyn trio’s first full LP. If this track’s anything to go by, the album could be one of the highlights of the year.
The second track comes from Mist, a side project of Elliott’s that also features Radio People’s Sam Goldberg. As you might expect from an Emerald, the track maintains a futuristic aesthetic, dealing in familiarly coruscating sequencers and warm synth washes. It’s the first track from the duo’s album, House, which arrives with us in May. It’s certainly part of a roster that we’ll have our eyes on in the coming months.
The photo is by Stephan Tillmans, from a series of photographs taken of tube televisions the moment they are switched off.
So it seems we’re slightly stuck in the past. 2010 is rapidly speeding into the distance and we’ve admittedly been a little slow in outing all of our favourite tracks from the year that’s passed.
As far as we’re concerned though, that’s no reason to stop looking back. At least three of the songs on this mix have come to our attention in the short window January has so far afforded, some from as far back as February last year, and I’m sure we’ll discover more as the year continues.
The selection of ambience and drone we’ve put together shows that 2010 was a year in which the marginal seemed to come to the fore. Emeralds and Oneohtrix featured in many a ‘best of’ list and they’re firmly nestled in ours alongside some less heralded favourites. This has been the hardest mix to finalise a track list for, with songs from Concern, The Fun Years, Barn Owl, Philip Jeck and Yellow Swans all just missing out. Still, there should be enough here to hold you interest for an hour or so. Click here to get the tracklisting and download the mix for free.
The picture is from a stunning collection of photos by Susanna Majuri called Nordic Water Tales. You can see more of her wonderful work here.
Shit, remember Jewel of the Nile? The long-awaited (alright, it came out a year after the original, but the prefix sounds good) sequel to the box office smash hit (ok, it made a bit of money but wasn’t huge) Romancing the Stone? With the scintillating on-screen partnership (fair enough, watching them kiss was like seeing puppies get crushed by logs hurtling downstream in a flash flood) of Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner? YEAH?! Well, the name of this band/guy/artist/musician is a jewel as well! MENTAL.
It’s good though. Really good. Proggy and psychedelic and hypnagogic and forceful and meandering and intense and utterly unique and original whilst constantly referring back to and referencing and suggesting things you’ve heard a million times like 80s cop thrillers and budget sci-fi movies and that kind of overblown psych-rock-jazz-fusion that you possibly hate cos your lame uncle (the one who lives in Tunbridge Wells and has a beard and African masks on his wall but always votes Tory and you always know that politics is going to come up at Christmas dinner and you hate it but you see it coming a mile away and still there’s nothing you can do about it) likes but that’s kind of what makes it great. Hippies wearing Ralph Lauren chinos and tin foil helmets and neon lycra sweatshirts and doing the robot dance to visuals by the combined psyches of Vangelis, Brian Eno and Eric Clapton. Argh, I don’t know what to think any more. And that is good.
Here are my two probable faves off their new album so far:
