RIP. A weekly roundup of releases on Bandcamp and Soundcloud selected and delivered by Aidan
Bandcloud 208
Average Friday. Today I'm going to look at wallpaper and go to the cinema.
Vida Vojić - Ephemeral Water
I really liked Vida Vojić's track on the First Terrace compilation so was delighted to see this new album of hers coming out. It's full of languid, lumpy ambient music, heavily reverbed sounds that make everything feel slow motion. Deeply muted strings and saxes and vocals, an 80s dream as seen through digital corridors and a medicated haze. And that's just the first track! There's the hiss of a rainforest (or lawn sprinklers), rumbling drums, abstracted song. You can listen to the album in individual tracks or as a single unbroken movement. Beautiful.
Unknown Cultures // Aciddict - N0002
Aciddict is a producer and DJ based in Barcelona. This is a weird, eight-minute stretch of tripped-out sonics. It almost feels like the opening notes of the Dr Who theme stretched out and distorted, embellished, fucked with. Sometimes writing these blurbs I dip in and out of tracks to remind myself what they sound like after my initial listen, but even though this one is eight minutes long I can't turn it off.
Tropa Macaca - Caçador do Futuro
You may recognise the name of this act from a 12" on The Trilogy Tapes (ps you should definitely check out the super weird but gorgeous mix Willy B did for RA this week). This release comes on Dunno Recordings and it's essentilally a slowly meandering long-form piece that gets under your skin and pushes and prods with its strange melodies and inexplicable instrumentation. At once alien and earthly.
KfeelzElectricWomenMix
New York's Kfeelz put together this mix for WNYU's Electric Women show last week. It opens with an SWV vocal over glistening ambient electronica, which moves into a variety of house sounds, from wonky and silly numbers to disco-laden jams, grand, emotive pieces and techy acid workouts. I don't recognise any of it but I love it all.
Zone Motif - Augmented Reality Breakdown
Zone Motif is a new project from Lone Dancer. He featured in these pages before Christmas with a super fun mix. This time it's Easter, and in the spirit of resurrection we have a mix that comes to life with fizzing excitement, crackles of industrial menace and robotic intrigue. It's part electro nightmare, part redemptive beauty. Take '1 4 7 6' for example. It's an airy, beatless affair that's undercut by strange indecipherable voices. Creepy. 'Bablyon Implant', meanwhile, feels like a dub techno joint that never gets off the ground, a lurching machine laced with dread.
Photek - T'Raenon (Fugal Edit)
Just a lil edit of a classic Photek track. I'll be honest, I never heard this one until Call Super's fabric mix, but I'm so new to Photek that I first heard of him through a Satoshi Tomiie remix ('Mine To Give', and much as I love it, the original is miles better). It's warm, smooth, liquid in its reinterpretation of this gorgeous track.
S & T Podcast 20 I Melquíades Live
Melquíades, aka Melbourne's Alexander Albrecht, has a new release out on Scissor and Thread today. This podcast is an hour of original material, all beautiful, emotive house music that grows from its opening moments and feels like one great big expansion on a single note. It shimmies and sidesteps into further realms as it approaches its conclusion, beautifully so, and stands as a great showcase for this artist spreading his wings in new territories.
SassyBlack - Pop/R&B Treasury Vol. 3: Brandy
This is classss. Seattle-based SassyBlack is a musician/ singer/producer/artist who makes and performs a load of different types of music, but I was really taken by this recent collection of tracks formed from Brandy samples. There's a flip of 'The Boy Is Mine' that turns those plucks upside down over head-nod beats, one that takes the piano from 'Full Moon' and puts with more skippy production, all making use of weirdly detuned vocals. For shame, I don't know the sources of the other two but they're just as brililantly put together.