There are many albums that convey a sense of place. Sometimes the place is an entire town or nation, other times it’s a small bedroom. Nick Schofield‘s excellent new ambient music album, Glass Gallery, conveys the energy of part of Ottawa’s National Gallery of Canada. The gallery is full of high ceilings and massive windows, creating a space full of light, air, and meditative quiet.
“Central Atrium” immediately puts you into the right headspace for the record with its warm synths and simple, relaxing chords. Listening to “Mirror Image” is like listening to a prism with light shining through it. I’m not sure I can describe it better than that. “Getty Garden” blips and bleeps like a happy robotic cat. “Water Court” seemingly drifts along without effort, and “Molinarism” sounds like the theme to a Blade Runner spin-off TV show.
“Travertine Museum” and “Snow Blue Square” are luxurious meditations. “Ambient Architect” is a good way to describe Schofield himself, as the song weaves intricate yet relaxing patterns of synth chords over and through each other. “Garden Court is a nice compliment to “Water Court.” “Kissing Wall” is as intriguing as its namesake and a perfect song for androids who want to make out, with humans or other synthetic beings. The album ends with the subtle, but no less hypnotizing, “Key of Klee.”
What makes this album even more impressive is when you consider it was made with just one synthesizer – a Sequential Circuits Prophet-600. I couldn’t make this with ten synthesizers if he, Gary Numan, and Giorgio Moroder were coaching me. It’s a lovely piece of work.
Keep your mind open.
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[Thanks to Gabriel at Clandestine Label Services.]
Today, Los Angeles-based Rochelle Jordan returns with “ALL ALONG,” her second single of the year for TOKiMONSTA’s Young Art Records. Following the recently released “GOT EM,” “her most devastating dance floor track to date” (Resident Advisor), “ALL ALONG” is an R&B song tapping into a new jack swing sound. Working again with producers KLSH and Machinedrum, “ALL ALONG” is percussive and lush while showcasing Jordan’s rich and hushed vocals.
“ALL ALONG” initially developed as a love song to someone close to Jordan, but as she continued listening, it transformed into an ode to self-love. “As the song started to close in, I began to get this overwhelming feeling that I was actually speaking to myself. This song felt better to me once I started hearing it as the importance of recognizing your own self as your greatest lover. It’s so easy for us to get caught up searching for someone else to fill our voids, instead of working on us in order to make ourselves whole.” Listen to Rochelle Jordan’s “ALL ALONG”
Born in London to British-Jamaican parents, Jordan and her family relocated to the eastside of Toronto in the early ‘90s. Her father, a drummer, encouraged her love of art and instilled an appreciation for Northern soul, Jamaican reggae and dancehall, while an adolescent Jordan simultaneously soaked in the record collection of her older brother: funky UK house, nocturnal drum and bass, garage, and all the gospel samples contained therein.
Since relocating from Toronto to LA, Jordan has gone on to tour with Jessie Ware, collaborated with Childish Gambino (Donald Glover) on his 2014 Grammy-nominated album, Because the Internet, and landed a stint doing voice over work for the Adult Swim show, Black Dynamite, where she appeared in a memorable episode featuring Erykah Badu, Chance the Rapper, and Mel B. of the Spice Girls.
“ALL ALONG” and “GOT EM” are Jordan’s first pieces of new music since last year’s single, “Fill Me In,” in addition to collaborations with the likes of Jacques Greene, Machinedrum, Jimmy Edgar, and others. Stream/Purchase “GOT EM”
The opening track of Psymon Spine‘s new album, Charismatic Megafauna, “Confusion,” is pure dream / synth-pop bliss and lets you know that you’re in for a treat. The whole album mixes dance grooves with synth hooks and funk and inspires you to move and / or chill.
Bright synths, cool bass, and sweet disco beats are all over this record. Psymon Spine’s founders, Noah Prebish and Peter Spears, describe the slightly dark “Modmed” as a break-up song about leaving their previous band – Barrie. The bass on it is as thick as a dozen donuts eaten during a self-pity binge that becomes a “You know, what? Screw it. I’m eating these donuts because I’m moving on.” celebration. “Jacket” moves and sways like it has some junk in the trunk.
“Jump Rope” is a sexy romp with female vocals about meeting and defying expectations. “Milk” features Barrie – the lead singer of Prebish and Spears’ former band – doing backing vocals on another cool, bass-heavy track. “The game is called ‘Channels,” they sing on “Channels” – a fast dance-punk track about the drudgery of work and going along with the crowd when you really want to go off-road, forge your own path, and tell your doubters, “Get the fuck out of my face.”
“Different Patterns” mixes acoustic guitars with Knight Rider bass for a weird, dreamy effect. “Real Thing” bubbles and pops with synths that remind me of God Lives Underwater tracks and electric drums hit so snappy they could be a breakfast cereal. “Solution” bounces with a wicked house music beat that builds to a floor-filling frenzy. The album ends with “Unwound” – a bit of a psychedelic treat to send us off on a trippy note.
It’s a pretty cool record that blends its multiple influences well – making you dance and think. That’s not an easy task, but they make it seem easy.
Audiovisual artist, vocalist and experimental producer DEBBY FRIDAY has shared her new single & video “RUNNIN”.
Shedding the previous layers of noise and catharsis, the Vancouver-based artist drives home a snaking synth-rap jam that’s primed with electric potential. Speaking about her thrilling new single, she says:
“This new record is about pure expression. I don’t feel like I need to exorcise anything from myself anymore. I wanted to to push myself in different directions and see what would happen and I think I accomplished what I set out to do. “RUNNIN’” is a cheeky song that has DEBBY FRIDAY themes present, but now I’m having so much more fun.”
A trippy experiment in exposure techniques, “RUNNIN” is brought to life by its own hypnotic video, which was shot on 35mm and directed by FRIDAY and Ryan Ermacora. Filmed near Hope in British Columbia, the visual was inspired by the colour palette of tinting techniques in early cinema, and shot using multiple exposures on one roll of film.
Born in Nigeria, raised in Montreal and now based in Vancouver, FRIDAY released her debut self-produced, rap adjacent EP, BITCHPUNK in 2018. In 2019, Deathbomb Arc ushered in her second, critically acclaimed EP, DEATH DRIVE, which throbbed with eroticised electropunk fervour and cleared a path for self-actualisation. The project was accompanied by FRIDAY’S first music video and directorial debut for the lead single “FATAL”, which was subsequently nominated for the 2020 Prism Prize Award.
Having swapped Montreal’s heady nightlife scene for Vancouver’s scenic mountain views two years before, FRIDAY spent much of last year in lockdown figuring out this new direction in her life. “I was going through another change that involved so many other things – internally and externally in the world – and I felt like I needed to create something to represent that rebirth. Making a short film had been on my bucket list for a while.”
Conjuring elements of folk horror in its bewitching depiction of nature and isolation, the eight and a half minute film BARE BONES is an ode to the cycles of change, building upon FRIDAY’s self-mythology. “I like things that have a little bit of a creepy vibe to them,” she offers. “I like things that are just a little bit unsettling, because I think it brings you back to yourself in a visceral way. It reveals the subconscious.”
“RUNNIN’” celebrates rebirth, and the next stage of DEBBY FRIDAY’S evolution. Working with producers Cayne and Andrew of Big Kill, this track marks FRIDAY’S first studio outing, having previously produced everything from her bedroom.
Recorded barely a month after King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard released their breakthrough album, Nonagon Infinity, Live in San Francisco ’16chronicles the band playing a small club before they would soon be filling large concert halls and curating their own music festival. The power of a KGATLW show is on full display, and it’s great to hear them still with a raw edge and eager to promote Nonagon Infinity to the world.
A good chunk of Nonagon Infinity is here for us, including the opener “Robot Stop,” which is a pleaser to the eager, appreciative crowd. KGATLW come out like a flame thrower unleashed on an audience made up of hungry fire elementals. “Hot Water,” with its happy flute solos, keeps everyone bouncing. There’s barely time to breathe by the time we get to “Big Fig Wasp,” which has great double-teaming of guitars and drums that must’ve blown the audience’s minds as good as it sounds on this.
As wild as that is, “Gamma Knife” is somehow crazier – launching the show, audience, and venue like a cannonball across the California salt flats. There’s a brief pause as they build into “People Vultures” to let the audience cheer and hydrate for a moment before thunder rolls over them.
By the time lead singer Stu MacKenzie asks, “What’s goin’ on?” before “Trapdoor,” I imagine some of the answers he got included, “I can’t feel my face!” and “I feel like I’ve run a marathon!” “Trapdoor” slows things down a bit, but not by much as its groove is made for dancing. The double-shot of “I’m in Your Mind” and “I’m Not in Your Mind” makes for a wild trip. “Cellophane” moves back and forth between psychedelic grooves and flat-out punk rock screams. Everyone agrees that “I’m in Your Mind Fuzz” pretty much sums up how the audience feels by this point – fuzzed-out and tripping. Someone in the audience has lost their glasses by this point, but thankfully the band finds and returns them to the owner.
“Yeah! Fuck yeah!” a woman yells at the beginning of “The River.” I agree with her, as it’s a great live rendition of the happy psychedelic tune that last almost eleven minutes. The song drifts into space now and then, leaving the audience thinking the song is over before coming back to further hypnotize them. They follow it with “Evil Death Roll” to kick out the jams once again and blast the paint off the back walls. They close the show with over twenty-two minutes of “Head On Pill,” which lulls the audience into premature cheering multiple times as it winds across a desert dune like a sidewinder that’s just eaten a psychedelic mushroom.
It’s one of the best of multiple live albums KGATLW have put out in the last couple years, and a great addition to any collection of psych-rock or live music.
Kalbells—the collaborative art-pop project of Kalmia Traver, Angelica Bess, Sarah Pedinotti, and Zoë Brecher—today shared their new single “Pickles,” a fun and buoyant track featuring multimedia artist/rapper Miss Eaves off the upcoming full-length, Max Heart, releasing March 26 via NNA Tapes.
The wordplay-laden track debuted today via FLOOD Magazine, where Traver shared some thoughts: “The song is about escaping a romantic pickle by grudgingly accepting getting one’s ego chopped down, or at least chopped back…. and then realizing the whole experience can be kind of fun, sadistically, but also existentially thrilling and weirdly healing. For the second verse Miss Eaves and I had a long conversation about fuckbois and then she turned around this glistening cave of pickle puns and our mouths all dropped to the floor and we all fell in love with her.”
The sophomore album from Kalbells, illustrates the formidable love Kalmia Traver (Rubblebucket) discovered with her touring band turned bandmates. Together, Angelica Bess (Giraffage, Body Language), Zoë Becher (Hushpuppy, Sad13), Sarah Pedinotti (Okkervil River, LipTalk) and Traver, practice both listening and accountability, rejoicing in their queerness, and promoting each other to be their most genuine selves. The result is Max Heart—ten vibrant and subtly layered tracks of mesmerizing psychedelic synth-pop. Common groove language is a rare medicine to happen across, which is why, as a group, playing together has been not only exciting, but healing. Max Heart harnesses this magnetic power for a collection of songs that are packed with inspired tension and daring surreality. Read the full bio here.
Max Heart is available to pre-order on standard black & “Salty Pickle” green vinyl, as well as on compact disc and digital formats here. The album will be available on “Red Marker” red vinyl exclusively from local indie record stores.
Tracklist
1. Red Marker 2. Flute Windows Open In The Rain 3. Purplepink 4. Poppy Tree 5. Hump The Beach 6. Pickles 7. Bubbles 8. Big Lake 9. Diagram Of Me Sleeping 10. Max Heart
Tokyo-based producer YoshinoriHayashi announces his new album, Pulse of Defiance, out April9th on SmalltownSupersound. The album is an outstanding statement, expanding Hayashi’s ever-growing world of sound and showcasing his musical versatility in the process. Spanning ecstatic jungle breaks, club-ready techno, and free jazz’s unpredictable gait, Pulse of Defiance is a sonic journey through Hayashi’s marvelous mind that provides new surprises at every turn, and with every successive listen. Jockeying lead single “Touch” oscillates with floating synth and a danceable beat, presenting a first taste of his expansive and addicting sound.
Pulse of Defiance is the latest and most fascinating step in Hayashi’s still-blooming career—a half-decade of fantastically quixotic output that’s established him as one of electronic music’s most fascinating aural conjurers. After a string of releases on esteemed labels like LoversRock, GoingGood, and JINN, Hayashi made his Smalltown Supersound debut with 2019’s Ambivalence, his first full-length album. An immersive and fascinating work, Ambivalence submerged Hayashi’s sound in distant, underwater textures that added layers of allure to its loose, jazzy confines; it was followed up by last year’s Y, a four-tracker that splayed drum-machine freakouts and wobbly low-frequency textures across techno’s brittle framework.
In 2020, space disco masterminds PrinsThomas and BjørnTorske offered lush remixes of Ambivalence cuts that emphasized just how musically fluid Hayashi’s style is—and Pulse of Defiance is more concrete proof that he’s working without limitations. Within the opening third of the album’s enticing sprawl, the listener’s treated to gorgeous jazzy hip-hop breaks, upward-scaling piano drama, and cavernous techno reminiscent of rave-era greats like Orbital and Underworld. From noise-bursted drum’n’bass to rapid-fire club music, there simply is nothing Hayashi can’t do.
Indeed, such virtuosic and diverse-sounding music collected in a single statement brings to mind myriad reference points; but Pulse of Defiance is also a work that could only come from him at this point, the latest delightfully surprising release from a musician that continues to chart his own path.
Pulse of Defiance Tracklist: 01. Callapse 02. Make Up One’s Mind 03. Luminescence 04. Touch 05. Twilight 06. Go With Us 07. Morning Haze 08. Frequency 09. Flow 10. Shut Up 11. Gallop 12. I Believe In You
Brijean – the Oakland-based duo of Brijean Murphy and Doug Stuart – presents the new single/video, “Hey Boy,” from their forthcoming album, Feelings, out February 26th on Ghostly International. Following “Ocean,” “Day Dreaming,” and “Moody,” “Hey Boy” radiates with a percussive, atmospheric energy. Murphy calls the charming track a “psychedelic guide — the exploration of finding what feels good — through sorrow, anxiety, apathy.” This mentality applies to Feelings on the whole: in these nebulous and verdant worlds of hazy melodies, feathery hooks, and percussive details, the songs simply want us to feel alive. Murphy, also an accomplished visual artist, illustrated and directed the video in collaboration with motion graphics artist Rose Biehl and producer Samantha Sartor. Throughout, Murphy’s vibrant animations of the duo dance and play across the screen.
Murphy explains the video process: “My visual art style really developed when I began making hand-drawn flyers for a nightclub in Oakland. I hosted a recurring jazz night every Tuesday for a few years. The bands were always amorphous and always centered around percussion. That left a lot of elasticity in the genre — the musicians were often rooted in different cultural and musical backgrounds (Salsa, Gospel, Blues, Hip Hop, etc.) — and in turn, that attracted a wide range of dancers and drinkers to fill the space. This music video is a homage to that club and its people, infused with some psychedelic and cheeky moments.
The idea of shared experience, though a virtual reality, had shifted my perspective of shared space, which informs the visuals. Seemingly isolated dancers move within the compartmentalized windows and grids of a surreal technicolor world. We’ve all found ourselves here in this time, sorting through complicated information and synthesizing our inherited and undulating present. For me, I’ve found comfort and inspiration in tethering to the playful stuff.”
Murphy – one of indie’s most in-demand percussionists (Poolside, Toro Y Moi, U.S. Girls) – and Stuart, who share backgrounds in jazz, Latin and soul music and were both fixtures in Oakland’s diverse music scene, began collaborating in 2018. Following the duo’s first sessions, which resulted in the mini-album Walkie Talkie(released in 2019 on Native Cat Recordings), Brijean continued collaborating in Oakland, inviting friends Chaz Bear, Tony Peppers, and Hamir Atwal, who all would end up contributing to the album. “We improvised on different feels for hours,” says Murphy. “Nothing quite developed at first but we had seeds. We re-opened the sessions a couple months later, after returning from tours, and spent a month developing the songs in a little 400 square foot cottage.”
The leap from 2019’s Walkie Talkie to Feelings is marked by a notable expanse in range and energy. Brijean’s signature sound — a golden-hued dream pop tropicalia of dazzling beats and honeyed vocals — elevates with the addition of live drummers, strings, and synths. The album also finds Murphy fully trusting in her strengths, not just as a percussionist, but as a songwriter and collaborator. “Valuing myself as elemental instead of an ‘aux’ percussionist, and the undoubted support and talents of Doug, encouraged me to both make this project and collaborate with many different people.”
Brijean wants you to move, physically, mentally, dimensionally; this is dance music for the mind, body, and soul. With Feelings, they’ve manifested a gentle collective space for respite, for self-reflection, for self-care, for uninhibited imagination and new possibilities. Watch “Hey Boy” Video
London-based band Dry Cleaning – Nick Buxton (drums), Tom Dowse (guitar), Lewis Maynard (bass) and Florence Shaw (vocals) – announce their debut album, New Long Leg, out April 2nd on 4AD, and present a new single/video, “Strong Feelings.” Buoyed by the universal acclaim they received for 2019 EPs Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks and Sweet Princess, the foursome spent more and more of their lives on tour, refining their craft even further. The intensive time they spent together meant they developed a near-psychic knowledge of how to leave the right amount of space for each other in their songs. The resulting New Long Leg is more ambitious and complex, with Shaw’s spoken vocals tightly intertwined with the band’s restless instrumentals. With lyrics preoccupied by themes like dissociation, escapism, daydreaming, complicated feelings of love, anger, revenge, anxiety, the kitchen, lethargy, forgetfulness, and survival, Shaw says, “the title is ambiguous; a new long leg could be an expensive present or a growth or a table repair.”
When the coronavirus pandemic hit in March, forcing a swift end to their US tour, Dry Cleaning had their new songs demoed, but had to bide their time before they could enter the studio. They contributed a few new recordings – one being last year’s “Scratchcard Lanyard” – passing a Tascam four-track cassette recorder to one another from the window of Maynard’s car, cleaning it with antibacterial wipes before recording their parts one by one. Facilitated by the unexpected time apart and the introspection of lockdown, Buxton started experimenting with drum machines, Dowse with a noisier, more deconstructed guitar sound, Maynard with subtler and more flexible basslines.
By June John Parish had emerged as the perfect producer and was keen to explore these creative developments. The band holed up with him at Rockfield Studios in rural Wales for two weeks, finding this isolation from the outside world “liberating,” as Buxton puts it. They got on well with Parish, buoyed by his enthusiasm, directness, and full-bodied commitment, and he was unafraid to push them when he sensed a song could be refined or taken in a different direction. “It’s not just sheer pent-up energy all the time in the way that the first two EPs were,” adds Shaw of the resultant album. “I feel more confident with leaving gaps.”
There’s tension when they duel with one another, satisfaction when they move in snaking tandem, and breathless anticipation when she steps back for a moment to let the music build. She’s constantly speeding up and slowing down, alliterating, repeating, rhyming, umming, erring and stuttering with pinpoint accuracy. These methods are prevalent in new single “Strong Feelings.” A love song of sorts, Shaw says, “it’s about secretly being in love with someone who doesn’t know it, and Brexit’s disruptive role in romantic relationships.” Its accompanying visuals, directed by guitarist Dowse, came about after Google searches brought together an informational video on road building basics from New Zealand and Massachusetts-based glitch artist, Sabato Visconti.
Firm friends for years, Dry Cleaning only started making music after a karaoke party in 2017 inspired a collaboration. They wrote instrumentally to begin with until six months later Florence Shaw, a visual artist, university lecturer and picture researcher by day – with no prior musical experience – turned up to a band rehearsal with a copy of Michael Bernard Loggins’ Fears Of Your Life to read out over the music. Before long she was the group’s frontperson, contributing words of her own, and serving as the perfect foil to the band’s music. Shaw extracts the most immense meaning from the most trivial things; she peppers the songs with a thousand tiny details, little witty asides about supermarkets, cupboards, beauty products and body parts add up to sonic landscapes that teem with the strange magic of ordinary life.
New Long Leg Tracklist 1. Scratchcard Lanyard 2. Unsmart Lady 3. Strong Feelings 4. Leafy 5. Her Hippo 6. New Long Leg 7. John Wick 8. More Big Birds 9. A.L.C 10. Every Day Carry
Blanck Mass – the project of musician Benjamin John Power – presents a new video for “Starstuff” (Single Edit) from his forthcoming album, In Ferneaux, out February 26th on Sacred Bones. The video, created by Danny Perez, visualizes the track’s vibrant, erratic sound. “I have been a fan of Danny’s for years, I feel a strong connection to his use of texture and colour in an emotional sense,” says Power. “I felt that because the music of In Ferneaux is highly expressive, emotive and insular; by giving Danny free creative control of the video for Starstuff, it would only add to the experience. I always find it exciting to see how others interpret my music visually.”
The follow-up to 2019’s Animated Violence Mild, In Ferneaux explores pain in motion, building audio-spatial chambers of experience and memory. Using an archive of field recordings from a decade of global travels, isolation gave Blanck Mass an opportunity to make connections in a moment when being together is impossible. The record is divided into two long-form journeys that gather the memories of being with now-distant others through the composition of a nostalgic travelogue. The journeys are haunted with the vestiges of voices, places, and sensations. These scenes alternate with the building up and releasing of great aural tension, intensities that emerge from the trauma of a personal grieving process which has perhaps embraced its rage moment.
A blessing is often thought of as a future reward, above and beyond the material plane. With In Ferneaux, Blanck Mass wrangles the immanent materials of the here-and-now to build a sense of transcendence. Here, the uncanny angelic hymn sits comfortably beside the dirge. The misery and blessing are one.
