June 3, 2021 at 9:15 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
The North Sea & hyacinth.: Poppies
I haven’t caught up with all the releases on Brad Rose’s
The Jewel Garden label yet, but
this split between their long-running The North Sea project and Portland’s hyacinth. is a marvel of polar opposites. The North Sea’s “The Stationer’s Shop” is 22 minutes of COVID-induced doom, violently shaking and squirming in place like it’s glued to the floor, with heavier, more prowling synths gradually piling on more and more layers of dread. You feel like you’ve been in a sort of reverse car wash afterwards, hosing you down and scrubbing you with dirt and grime, yet it feels just as cleansing afterwards. And then the
hyacinth. tracks are basically a beat tape of relaxed, slow-moving chill grooves, with airy sequences levitating over thumping, skipping beats. Each track sounds it would perfectly soundtrack a brief, slightly offbeat scene that basically involves some strange objects swaying or whirling around. A few tracks like “casper.” sound especially off-spool and doused with narcotics, but a fair amount of it could fit in pretty much any poolside beats playlist.
June 2, 2021 at 9:35 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Iran: Aemilia
Not to be confused with the noise-rock band led by the late Aaron Aites,
this Iran is an Italian trio who make sprawling but structured improvised instrumentals, using analog keyboards, guitar, and drums. There’s also self-described “crappy drum machines”, toy keyboards, field recordings, and other sounds and instruments in the mix. The opening track “Qom” is a very ragtag piece with noisy analog keyboards and metallic percussion, and while it twists in a couple different directions, it’s very groove-forward, which keeps it from getting completely chaotic. “Magnitogorsk” has a more consistent mood, with hypnotic patterns played on well-worn keyboards over skittering, echoing drum machines. The nearly 10-minute “Xenopolis” is a sort of junkyard battle that ends in a desert hallucination. “Regium Lepidi” starts out soft and slow, but its rusty saxophone helps blow it out of balance, and the whirring keyboards warm up and the drums whisk it off the ground. After another dusty epic (“Cuma”), “Aral” is easily the album’s most upbeat, joyous track, but also one that bubbles, boils, and haunts. Finally, “Bam” mostly drifts rather than scorches, although there is a spicy part in the middle.
June 1, 2021 at 6:13 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Melissa Grey & David Morneau: Symbolic Gesture
A sonic response to an exhibition,
Symbolic Gesture is a short 5-track release filled with interconnected patterns and an inventive mixture of chiptune textures, refracted effects, trombones, and field recordings. Matching the album’s intricate cover art, a throbbing beat frames the prismatic patterns, which are twisted at irregular intervals, while voices interject the words which make up the titles of the pieces. String duo Miolina add delicate plucks to the somewhat awkward breaths and airy pulsations of “Kirlian”. After the minimalist RPG score of “[again]”, “Shekinah” comes alive with hordes of chirping insects, then eases into a slowly chiming drone which oozes back and forth.
May 30, 2021 at 3:21 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
møziz: E-møtion: Time Machine + Cycles
The
debut album from møziz, a producer from the Ivory Coast who’s now based in Montreal, is a 19-track set of warm-but-wintry, expressive techno and IDM tracks which clearly aim to capture a wide range of feelings. The tracks are spacious yet busy and highly considered yet filled with spontaneous energy. “Time Machine (The Night of My Life)” switches from skittering electro to a steadier but still swift BPM tempo, beautifully incorporating vocal phrases and delicate melodies, as well as dubby percussion attacks. “When I Can’t Stand I Float” is a great title for a song that slowly rises rather than walks upright, and still seems like it just started when it fades away after 5 minutes. The haunting atmospheric trap of “Oosx” takes a darkly realistic turn with the addition of the words “We don’t want to do anything to scare your children” and police sirens near the end. The braindance-dubstep highlight “War” is immediately reprised by its “emo edit”, and while the original was emotive enough, this version fleshes it out and makes it trippier without losing its affectionate core. “Butterflyeffects” was the first track released in advance of the album, and it hooked me immediately with its abrasive beats at the beginning, then surprised me with how it progressed into faster and more slowly drifting parts, with rippling textures and nostalgic melodies all appearing and resurfacing later. It feels like a sort of audio community rather than a properly structured song, if that makes sense. møziz truly has a skill for making electronic compositions that feel like living, breathing entities.
May 28, 2021 at 5:17 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
CAMÍNA: Te Quiero Mucho
Dallas resident Ariel Saldivar, known pseudonymously as
CAMÍNA, produces vivid songs of love and resistance. Her strong, expressive vocals are backed up by heavy bass, slightly cracked trip-hop beats, and worn, faded samples drawn from her Mexican heritage. The samples on “Cinnamon” do a delicate dance with the blown-out head-nod beats, while Saldivar’s multi-tracked, bilingual vocals sing of rising above, even though the damage is already done. “Forever and Always” is kind of a ghostly R&B slow jam, as she pours her heart out over starry organs and booming beats. “Burn for Eternity” continues with the bittersweet trip-hop vibes, this time a bit more upbeat and ready to dance like nothing matters. “Maleguena” is the most sonically dizzying track, with Saldivar wailing like young Liz Fraser in Spanish over curdled samples and monstrous beats. On “Se Puede”, she creatively duets with sampled lyrics about desire and perseverance.
May 27, 2021 at 8:41 pm | Posted in Foxy Digitalis, Reviews | Leave a comment
Charlatan: The Glass Borders
I’ll be surprised if anyone reading these words remembers this, but I wrote for Foxy Digitalis from 2008 until the site shut down in 2013, at which point I started posting reviews on this site. That 5-year period was an immense time of growth and education for me, it taught me so much about underground music and expressing myself through writing about it. I will always be thankful to Brad Rose and Eden Hemming for letting me write for their site for so long. I’d written for websites before (all of which are long since deleted), but if it wasn’t for my tenure at FD, I wouldn’t have had the confidence to start doing this for a living at AllMusic. Anyway, Brad shut the site down in 2013, and then the Digitalis label disappeared without warning a year or two later, and for a long time there just wasn’t any word from Brad at all. But now
Foxy Digitalis is back, with Brad regularly posting reviews and interviews almost every day, and they’ve been releasing a ton of new albums through a new label called
The Jewel Garden (and also making a lot of older releases available on Bandcamp again
here).
The Glass Borders is their first release on an outside label since coming back from hiatus, and even though there’s been a bunch of recent releases by Charlatan and many other aliases, this still feels a return to an area that’s been closed off for a while. The first side of the tape is taken up by the 25-minute “All Your Gifts Are Weightless”, a dazzling synthscape which cycles and swerves through various shimmering patterns and bell-ringing tones, calms down and switches gears, then goes into rhythmic cruise mode while a slightly detached, cloudy pattern floats overhead. Truly sublime. The shorter pieces on the other side each seem to concentrate on a singular mood. “Living Structures” is a bit muted and dungeonesque, then “Saturnine” opens up a bit, gradually letting more feelings and light rays trickle in. “On the Cheek” could also have been titled “On the Creek” due to the rushing water sounds, and the synth notes feel submerged, but glowing.
May 26, 2021 at 8:41 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Ben Rosenblum Nebula Project: Kites and Strings
Jazz composer, arranger, and musician Ben Rosenblum alternates between piano and accordion, so that alone is enough to make me interested in checking out his music. Opener “Cedar Place” fluidly switches between lead instruments and styles, from hard bop to Latin and French accents, without sharply contrasting, and keeping up a joyous spirit. “Kites and Strings” is cooler and more vibraphone-centric, with accordion and trumpet providing warm hugs. “Halfway to Wonderland” gradually starts to work into some sort of hypnotic Philip Glass-type patterns right before it ends suddenly. “Motif from Brahms (op. 98)” is as close to a lullaby as you might expect, but then “Fight or Flight” is a fun klezmer-tango jam to invent a weird, wonky dance to. A rendition of the
West Side Story standard “Somewhere” starts out soft and classy before taking off with trumpet and bass clarinet solos. Following two ballads which gradually swell up, including a cover of Neil Young’s “Philadelphia”, “Laughing on the Inside” is a more upbeat tune with trumpet which does seem to be laughing, as well as knotty accordion and bass clarinet riffs. Finally, the version of the Bulgarian traditional song “Izpoved” that closes the album is its most solemn, direct moment.
May 25, 2021 at 7:03 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Birthday Ass: Head of the Household
Brooklyn’s
Birthday Ass play horn-heavy no wave which reminds me of Scissor Now! and Palberta, but with an expanded 6-person lineup. Priya Carlberg (the group’s leader, composer, and director) has an acrobatic vocal style, wailing and blurting out nonsense syllables as often as she sings more recognizable lyrics, and the band matches her style with angular arrangements, sometimes speeding up into a chaotic rush (“Jello”) or turning into atonal klezmer-sludge (“Spiced Twice”). “Buckle My Shoe” is a deconstructed nursery rhyme; it’s even interrupted by construction noises. “Malai, My Guy” is sort of close to hobbled dance-punk, and it continues to get progressively more rambunctious. “Broccoli Face” is manic scrunch-punk which gets pummelled with beats at the end. Finally, “K Helap” is a dramatic epic in which Priya gets swept away yowling that she can’t stand to be alive, then questioning if her life is a dream.
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The Answer Is In The Beat 