Bandcloud has looked the same for more than three years so let's start 2018 in a new direction. Less division between sites, less focus on that at all actually. Bandcloud is a state of mind.
The Missing Ensemble - Zeropolis
Starting the new year I have an album that is more than a decade old, but it's timeless really (plus I only just came across it anyway). It's on a noise tip, but it's subtle and quiet, daringly so. Drifting freeform sounds from trumpet, guitar and more. Harsh and discordant at points, almost dainty at others.
SOMMER - Songs for Psychic Travelers
Swooping grinding noise that came out early last month/late last year (ho ho, no more of that kind of dad joke I promise). It's got raucous, distorted guitar, wailing shrieks, distant vocals, all the sort of sounds you expect from a release that comes in a small wooden box and has titles like 'Surface Crumbles as Sirens Sing' and 'To Dive Through the Event Horizon'.
Crevice - In Heart
Crevice is a new project from Irish artists Irene Buckley, who's part of WRYMYRRH with Ellll, and Elaine Howley and Roslyn Steer, who are both in Morning Veils. This album is on Fort Evil Fruit. It's a truly beguiling release that falls somewhere between shoegaze and hauntology. Soft, whispered vocals, distant drums, eerie keys and percussion that's palpably synthetic yet all the better for it. Check out 'Anita's Altar'...
Lucia Luna ✧ I Swallowed
This is too damn short. It feels like a dank trap beat (without the actual beat) that's got entrancing vocals on top. It's got some properly gnarly sub-bass towards the end so if you're using earphones that are in any way basic you'll need to crank it right up to appreciate this one fully.
Spacer - Doing Well
Nice wee lush thing built around guitar licks and hazy synth shared into my life by my pal Aidan Wall. I dig the Nintendo-based pentagram in the artwork, though the music is more languidly affable than one might suspect. Somewhere between digital folk and swirling ambient.
NIP 11 | Kiernan Laveaux
You may recall that Kiernan Laveaux was one of DJs named by Objekt in his EOY list for Bandcloud. This is her latest mix, which dropped just before New Year's for the Neptunian Influence series. In her own words: "a space opera attempting to conceptualize a year of finding peace within intergalactic purgatory <3"
Ghost Signs - Declaration of Conformity
I love this first of all for the title and image. The artist tells me he took it from the manual that came with his new car. The track is ace too, as it happens, a kind of jerking slop of dank noise. There's a lot of that this week, but I will not apologise. It's not the right time for clean lines or funky house, is it???
James King - Plant 6
This is a wonderful track that straddles the ambient and jungle lines that its tags suggest, not misleadingly at all. You know how sometimes genre tags lie. Not here. We've got a lengthy drift of beautiful sounds that gives way to brutally efficient percussion. My face at that switch was the like that of the dog to the right.
Jaclyn Kendall - Easy Freak
And finally this week, some utterly banging demonic techno from Jaclyn Kendall, who has never featured here before, bizarrely. It's almost 160bpm, so it's not for everyone, but hey. The beats feel like 90s hard house but somehow it's quite subdued at the same time, untethered fizzing underneath the percussion lending kinetic, nervous tension.
Okay, that's the first one of the year down. DDR show on Sunday at 8pm.