Bandcloud 271

Halloween is over but of course, loads of people only put out Halloween music yesterday. I'm certainly not going to pass it over just because the date on the calendar has changed.

Sleep Temple 10/10/2019 WNUR 89.3
Adam Rowe wears a lot of hats. He works at Chicago's Gramaphone Records, he's junior resident at Smartbar, he's co-owner of the Stripped & Chewed label and he also has a regular radio show. This month's edition of the show is delectable. I was going to write some blather but it's just a really good selection of ambient tunes, ranging the spectrum from dank murk to crystalline beauty. 

VA - Volume 12 (Fright Night Club)
This is one of those Halloween things I mentioned above. It's a collection of seasonal numbers, all indebted to horror films of various eras. Ffion reworked Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells, for example (unpopular opinion: The Exorcist is a bad film and is not scary). There are garage rock songs, Italo synth workouts, utterly spoopy windy affairs, a really dank cover of 'Maneater' and so on. My picks come from Loomis, Skeleton Beach and Antoni Maiovvi but there's plenty to enjoy.

Ivy Barkakati - self-soothing
My younger son woke up from his nap early at the weekend so I picked him up, brought him downstairs and he was already dozing again. I put this on as he lay asleep on my chest and it was perfect. 

مشهد قحل - ما بعد الموت | Eromoscape - After Death
The cover of this album features large skeletons taking away young infants. It looks like an old inscription, a lithograph or frontispiece. It certainly adds to the ominous vibe. I can't find much about the artist other than that he's from Damascus in Syria, and I can't find any statement about the album. What I can say is that it's a fascinating work filled with droning passages, mild distortion, judicial use of space and ghostly whispers.

Recordat Ramallah #014 Session 02 by NRD
Just over an hour of various strands of house music recorded in Bethlehem by NRD, who is Founder of Radio Nard collective, Palestine's independent underground radio station.

VA - Wacker That (Touch Sensitive)
Last week I wrote about this, then accidentally deleted a bunch of blurbs and forgot I had written about it. My brain. Anyway. This is a collection of tracks from Belfast label Touch Sensitive. It includes spoopy weirdness (Radio Weirdo, Elaine Howley), swirling synthy electronics (Sonopy, Barry Lynn) and a whole lot more. It's fantastic.

juneunit - s​/​t
The latest release on Jacktone is one of their best to date. And I say that as someone who's a dedicated fan of all of their releases. This one is just a step beyond, for me. It's as if Boards of Canada were making music with Silent Season in mind. The titles are each a series of letters, potentially with some meaning for the artist, or maybe they're entirely random. My personal favourites are 'enwm', 'lude' and 'hsn7', but honestly it works beautifully as a whole. I was enjoying it already, but I went for a walk on a misty, drizzly evening with this in my ears and it made such perfect, perfect sense.

ORE - Live At H.A.N.S III Festival
Half an hour of drones from trombone and tuba. If you like the sound of that, dive in.

Ancestral Voices - Samhain
Ancestral Voices is Liam Blackburn, aka Indigo, known for his work as half of Akkord. This release is his latest under this alias (I just learned he put out an album in March?) and it's an utterly brilliant piece of work. As a reminder, the title is an old Irish festival marking the end of harvest and start of winter. It's also the Irish word for November. The title track is on some Shackleton-esque percussive wildness, probably not the kind of thing you'd hear in pagan Ireland but still. Raucous and exhilarating. The next track, 'Fómhar' (which means harvest), is a beautifully balanced number, with snarling bass matching gorgeous harp-like arpeggios. 'Blewit Mist', finally, is a beautifully hazy affair. Blewits are mushrooms (depicted marvellously on the release's artwork) and this track seems to represent a state of wide-eyed wonder, enlightenment even. 

séverine - HEAVENSGATE
TRANCE HELL. Choppy, gated riffs, not just laced with but drowning in emotion. I can't do this one justice. Just go listen.

Elizabeth Joan Kelly - Farewell, Doomed Planet!
"Farewell, Doomed Planet! is about the apocalypse. And Chernobyl wolves. Pollution. And space travel. Existential dread. And whales." So yeah. What can I add to that??? Elizabeth Joan Kelly featured here relatively recently for an album about a visit to the Department of Motor Vehicles, and her latest work is an ode to a dying planet. It features songs that are jerky and weird, beautiful ambient numbers ('Whaliens' is sublime), all with her strange slant on chord progression and songwriting. It's fascinating.

MikeQ - Halloween Vogue Tool
MikeQ has been working on this one for more than a year and dropped it yesterday. It's a vogue take on the Halloween theme. Those ominous chords, that chilling piano, all over classic vogue sounds. (Unpopular opinion, apparently: Halloween is a masterpiece.)

TML - Noods Radio - October 2019
Finally this week, TML put this together to soundtrack the hour or so you may have spent offering sweets to children calling to your door. Like the opening mix this week, it's languid, murky, comforting, chilling. Some tracks in particular that grabbed me come from Mono Junk and Boreal Massif, but it's greater than the sum of its parts and all that.