RIP. A weekly roundup of releases on Bandcamp and Soundcloud selected and delivered by Aidan
It’s been a tough week! I won’t lie! Been busy! Been emotional! Been late!
DEBONAIR invites Dee Diggs / NTS 06.05.2021
Dee Diggs turns in an hour of HAPPINESS for DEBONAIR’s NTS show. Severely down for this.
Polygonia - The Desire For Mechanization
The artwork for this is super creepy. The music is wonderfully hypnotic.
The latest entry in the Mixtape Club comes from Facta & K-LONE, who turn in “an hour of scuffed up Balearic grooves & sunburnt techno”. Perfect really, as two years in a row I’ve used their respective albums as sunny inspiration. This is genuinely the kind of thing I’d want to buy on CD.
Unknown Artist - Artfully Dodged Edits
This will make you smile or cringe. Three edits of pop classics here (although maybe ‘Forgot About Dre’ is the only “pop” song ever to feature lines about strangulation by chocolate). Toto, Dr Dre and Justin Timberlake each get the “Artfully Dodged” treatment, and will very likely make dancers smile at parties across the world over the coming weeks/months.
If this is also an edit, I don’t know its source material. Answers on a postcard.
The combination of MZA (not RZA) and the word Balmoral caught my eye. Balmoral, the home away from home of the Queen of England (or something, I don’t know), feels like a weird choice of title for a hip-hop release. Apparently it’s named after a bakery in the producer’s neighbourhood. The sound is spacey and dusty. Lackadaisical, dreamy. Just one track playing for now, the rest out next week.
Abby Echiverri - Sketches on Loss and Levity [Going In 014]
I’ve tweeted about this. I’ve featured it in a mix. And now I’m putting it in here because I keep listening to it. The opening few minutes remind me of LL Cool J’s ‘Doin’ It’ (sampling heavily from Grace Jones’s ‘My Jamaican Guy’), the chord sequence following similar pathways. A little while later new ideas come in and dance around to move away from this idea, only for even newer sounds, instruments and melodies to join the show. The central part of the 40-minute work is a long, acid trance-like passage, albeit entirely beatless. It’s almost like a deep and dreamy voyage through space or a languid morning on a beach. I don’t tend to talk about favourites (I’m 36, not 12) but this is one of the pieces of music that has spoken to me the most this year. 2020 was a bad one but 2021 has been pretty awful for me so the following words make a lot of sense: “Harmonic tones floating in the backdrop make everything feel soft around the edges, as if there’s acceptance in that grief. We are carried along in her current, and it is one that is gentle and deep.”
Eimear Reidy & Natalia Beylis - Whose Woods These Are
I kept reading the title of this work as “Whose Woods Are These?” when in fact it’s “Whose Woods These Are”. No one owns the land. “Imagine a public domain of trees where no one owned them & together we were their guardians. It is our hope that by bringing an audience to the trees, we will encourage people to relish time spent in nature and look after the woodlands.” The tracks here are long(ish)form pieces where piano, cello and electronics come together with birdsong, at times with great, frantic urgency, at others in a sort of deep repose.
Ireen Amnes & Kamikaze Space Programme - UNRAVELLING
Given the awful time I’ve been having lately, I didn’t expect some snarling jungle-meets-IDM-meets-electro stuff to get my head nodding, but that’s what happened when I pressed play on this one. Ireen Amnes and Kamikaze Space Programme each contribute a solo track alongside two collabs on this release that provides “a dark, sonic exploration of this perpetual state of unease”. Yeah I get that.
CPU always comes good but this one is particularly excellent. More nightmarish electro kinda sounds, Revelations sees features robot reveries and tragic electronic eulogies. ‘Walk Over’, apparently produced by Franck Collin aka Fleck E.S.C rather than Scally (aka Carl Finlow), is particularly weird’n’woozy. That in turn is remixed by Finlow, while Fleck reworks the title track as well, with razor-sharp scuzzy sounds.
dj))water)) - wayfaring strata
Perfect sounds if you’re feeling sad.
Cindytalk - Of Ghosts And Buildings
Glistening, uncertain ambience, roaring noise, thrashing guitar. Lots of things happening throughout these lengthy tracks, and the opening title is the story of my life.
Car Culture - Fitness Versions
Physical Therapy aka Car Culture tackles the ‘Fitness’ from the recent Dead Rock album under his different guises, with each offering a unique take on the track. Varying styles of breaks, techno, even further forays into ambient, they’re all there.
UTON - Processing the Unseen, Again
I’m almost sharing this for the track titles alone. Almost. It’s rather good. Weird and squidgy noise that looks like the soundtrack to the development of a planet like what you see on the cover.
Female Wizard - Messy-Podge-Mania
This is kind of unsettling at points. Like a thump-thump track in the rave that suddenly introduces loud, nightmarish stabs of sound. At other points it sounds like the inside of a computer or indeed a factory. Scales tiny and massive. It’s like club music that’s been abstracted (but not deconstructed) and reassembled and thrown back out on to the floor.
In which a series of artists of Indian heritage contribute their music in order to raise money to help the COVID-19 relief effort in India. Club sounds, garage, strange bells, bouncy techno and more from artists like Nikki Nair and Pooja B, who I believe set up the compilation.
Daytimers w/ Pooja B and Somatic - May 2021
Here’s a banging mix from Pooja B and Somatic for the Daytimers radio show.
The second release on Aya and BFTT’s label YCO (which stands for “yes come on”) comes from georg-i. Googling the name just gave me info on the 18th-Century monarch. Whomsoever they are, the three tracks are reet bangers. On top of that, 25% of label profits will be donated to Medical Aid for Palestinians.
From YCO to YOC(S). I don’t want to say the B word… So I will say that there are moments here that sound like … Coards of Banada. In a good way! It’s got that mid-90s Warp/Skam vibe. As well as the post-apocalyptic ennui of Tomorrow’s Harvest.
Diurnal Burdens & Matt Atkins - Idle Magnetism
This relief comes with a bunch of random phrases, one of which — “gulf of indefinable plight” — jumped out at me. When I first listened to the release I described it as “delicious fuzz”. Long, fuzzy, noisy tracks. Just dive right into the murk. Revel in it. You know that online cartoon about waiting for the void? This is that void.