RIP. A weekly roundup of releases on Bandcamp and Soundcloud selected and delivered by Aidan
Some short and uninformed blurbs, some lengthy waffle.
I’m always wary of leaning too hard on acts that I think sound like Boards of Canada, but the comparison here is undeniable. This album in large parts sounds just like what those Scottish brothers were making in the mid-to-late 1990s, before they went down the road of electronic folk horror and societal collapse. There are similarities in the instrumentation and percussion, for example the warbling horn-like sound used in ‘The Knifonium’, which calls to mind sounds used throughout Twoism. There are also the muted and incoherent vocal samples and wavering tape effects that are hallmarks of BoC’s work. All that said, it’s really quite excellent. I’m not mad at all, because there’s been so little activity from BoC lately - the time between Tomorrow’s Harvest and today is longer than the time between The Campfire Headphase and Tomorrow’s Harvest - that anyone who might sound like them is scratching an itch and filling a void that needs filling. I’ve spent very little of this blurb talking about Raven’s Cottage itself, but I’m particularly charmed by ‘506627’ (featuring the wonderfully named Pandacetamol) and the rumbling darkness of ‘Open Windows’.
“12 tracks exploring the connection between Dembow, Garage, Cumbia, Dubstep, Dub. and Kuduro.” And every one a banger.
VA - Urbanismo Primitivo (Pakapi Records)
Noisy crunch, weird abstractions. Lots of weird sonic messing around, probably taken very seriously I should add, with deliciously murky results.
Harry Romero - I Love / The City
I’ve been working on a variety of mixes and shows and the like and keep trying to fit this in but so far I’ve failed. So I’m sharing it here instead. Just solid, proper house music, the latter track featuring an inspirational spoken word section.
I won’t go into it but I’ve had a pretty stressful and frustrating week. This is a balm for that. Just, without meaning this in any pejorative sense, nice music. RVNG invites friends and family to contribute new music for this compilation that has some vague relation to Adult Swim. It’s got stuff from Visible Cloaks, Batu (in a rare display of wildly exploratory ambient sounds), Anna Homler, Emily A. Sprague and more.
If 4T Thieves delivered the familiarity of sounds from the past, The Outsert offers strange and unknowable futures. The rhythms and styles are familiar, sure, but the combination of pulses, feelings and ideas are wholly new. It’s dark, it’s definitely club-worthy but it’s unsettling all the same.
More mad future sounds, Amazondotcom brings raucous and focused sounds on this release. There are tracks that are grindingly sparse, and then comes ‘Household Deity’, which feels like ‘Pon De Floor’ for a new, enlightened generation.
GRAND STREET SOUNDS @ The Lot Radio 09 - 21 - 2021
About 20 minutes into this set, whoever is playing moves from a live funk band into a track I know from John Digweed’s Hong Kong Global Underground mix, FC Kahuna’s Headstart Me Up Mix of Madder Rose’s Overflow. Only it’s at 96bpm or so. Weird. It’s a varied show with different kinds of pop and soul music, all enjoyable, drifting into up-tempo sounds for the final third or so.
Nothing In Moderation with DJ Voices and special guest CCL @ The Lot Radio 09 - 15 - 2021
Another Lot show here, yeah, from the dream team of Bandcloud friends DJ Voices and guest CCL. Two hours of fast’n’furious, frenetic jams for your road trip, morning commute, house renovation or gym session.
A very late entry, this was released this morning on Bandcamp. Sublimely dark and murky, it continues on in the same vein as the title track of the artist’s release on anno earlier this year. You could almost say it’s a continuation down a particular path seen on releases such as last year’s Club Aura, about which I used terms like “rumbles into existence”, “scattered, shuffling percussion”, “Where does this lead, where are we going etc.” and “uncertain future”, to name but a few. This is not club music any more, it’s more like the soundtrack to those confused moments at 3 or 4 or 5 or 6am when you’re not quite drunk, not quite sober, definitely at some sort of a loss. Hope and fear intermingled.
Nelly Furtado - Maneater (Ambient Babestation's Ketty Pubstep Edit)
Finally, here’s a proper naughty refix from Ambient Babestation Meltdown, taking Nelly Furtado and lending her a defiantly narcotic vibe. Like that FC Kahuna track mentioned above, it’s much slower than it ~should~ be but in this case it’s detuned too, lending a rather nightmarish vibe to the track.