RIP. A weekly roundup of releases on Bandcamp and Soundcloud selected and delivered by Aidan
No discounts here today, just your regular free weekly newsletter. Lots of cool stuff this week that hopefully you won’t see anywhere else.
Tousist. - Life Melody Rocky Kingdom.
Something about this almost feels like an ambient version of ‘Born Slippy’.
darkmavis & sweet philly - Euphore
Two Dublin upstarts come together to create some beautifully glistening club music. Arpeggiated sheens of sound, delicate Amen breaks, 90s rave stabs and sparkling synth lines, particularly on ‘Stabbed’, render this whole release euphoric, fitting the brief and the title to perfection.
Alexandra Spence - Submerged tape loops
This is not for everyone. The artist records short field recordings on tape, then buries the tape in the place where the recording was made. In this case “the loops consist of two 7-second field recordings, one recorded above the water, and one recorded from within the water”. And while in other circumstances the tape is placed in the ground, for this set the tape was placed in the water, in and around Hong Kong during an artist residency period. Then the tapes are dried, cleaned etc and digitised.
“Unknown artist” is really killing it this year!!! jk lol. This is a nice rumbling techno piece from ???. Lumpy.
cosmo - Dropping away drops away
Nice wee ambient bit from my man cosmo. Gorgeous crackles, a staid and wavering stone that sing with clear beauty.
This is brilliant, rhythmic utterances, coughs, blubbers and ululations, all tied together into something coherent and fascinating. It then moves into poetry over these strange sounds. An unusual world.
New age schoo schmage. This is lovely. At times (‘Flight 7’) it can sound a bit like hold music, but if I had this on hold instead of some of the awful stuff I’ve heard in my time, maybe I wouldn’t be so angry to be on hold.
This is a really interesting release, thumping and club ready but strangely intricate and clear and foggy and terrifying at the same time. Across three tracks of course.
VA - Tying Up Loose Ends #1 - Culport (Tone Burst)
I hear a lot of compilations in this line of work/amateur hobbyism, but this is genuinely one of the most consistent and excellent collections I’ve come across lately. There’s abstract drone, experimental piano, strange electronics… I found myself listening to it backwards (as in last track, second last track, not literally in reverse) and it was a thoroughly rewarding experience. Apparently this is the first selection of two inspired by BBC shipping forecasts, and it’s focused around the fictional land, and surrounding coast, of “Culport”.
RIX - Buhe Bariyan (2-Step Bumpin Remix)
Rix’s SoundCloud bio reads “Grew in the Wookie, Sunship, Artful Dodger, Heartless Crew Era”. That’s clear from the beats and melodies on this track, which come up against a vocal from a track called ‘Buhe Bariyan’ (or ‘Boohey Barian’, I’ve seen both - I guess this is a problem with different alphabets and scripts). It’s super anyway, and follows on from Yung Singh’s smash Punjabi Garage mix last year.