RIP. A weekly roundup of releases on Bandcamp and Soundcloud selected and delivered by Aidan
Bandcloud 272
For a variety of reasons, there was no Bandcloud last week. Part of me wants to apologise, but I also feel it's important to say that this is, for want of a better word, a hobby. A pet project. Life can — and must — get in the way sometimes. Funnily enough, a day after I wrote this one son got a vomiting bug and the other developed hand, foot and mouth disease. Great buzz. In other news, I've seen a couple of high-profile newsletters spring up lately and I can't say it hasn't made me feel some pressure, if only self-imposed, but I can only do what I do. It is what it is.
Hydrangea - Secret Garden
I love Hydrangea's sound, equal parts driving and dubby techno. This track, from a four-person VA EP, builds and grows before shimmering into nothingness.
Big Zen - Big Time Crush
This is the second release on DustWORLD, a new label from Canada run by Dust-e-1. It's hazy and breaksy, with a nod to the past in its chords and sound effects, but it's big and bold and pristine. 'Buoyant Beat' is a no-kicks dreamy banger that makes my eyes wet. 'RBZ' is a 13-minute epic that's like BT's Ima if the tempo was dragged down into a more languid dimension. Gorgeous and powerful stuff.
EROTIKA 25 – Felisha Ledesma
Given the life circumstances mentioned above I can't go into some things as much as I'd like. This piece is one such casualty. It's a half hour of layered ambience, ghostly vocals, cavernous effects and melodies that start off clear and end up processed to oblivion.
Shida Shahabi - Shifts
While I'm not one for most modern piano music, this one really spoke to me. Maybe it's the crunchy, crusty effects and surrounding ambience, maybe it's the drifting strings that accompany the leading instrument. Either way this short release really grabbed me.
Cosmin TRG - Protection 1 [Protection]
These are just previews, sadly, but they sound quite different from anything I've heard from Cosmin in a bit. Slightly crispy and punchy synth music over delicate, bouncing percussive sounds, it seems like more no-kicks drama. The B2 has a sound like the "womp" of Timo Maas's 'Dooms Night' remix, and as I will never tire of that track I'm always happy to be reminded of it.
Adderall Canyonly - Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
First off — what a name??? Surprised I've never featured him before, if only to comment on that wordplay. This is the latest release from Bibliotapes, the label that releases soundtracks to books. It's all over the place, in that the themes and ideas spread across different styles rather than continuing within a certain mode. There's lots of synth beauty, some guitar stuff that's almost jaunty, just wild stuff altogether. One track calls to mind RHCP's 'Other Side' of all things, while others play with panning and levels to an almost nauseating degree.
ALEX M 2019 TRAX MIXTAPE ( ALL UNRELEASED TRAX)
Thank you James Bangura for sharing this into my timeline. It's a 50-minute mix made up of music by Alex M, a Texas-based producer. It's kind of housey techno (but definitely not tech house), leaning heavily on tropes like M1 organs. It's all utterly fresh, however. I've found it hard to listen to a lot of "dancey" mixes lately but this one hit the spot.
A ∩ D (Live at Face Guts 10.06.19) Excerpt
Here's an all too brief excerpt from a performance by A ∩ D, a duo made up of Ang Wilson on modular synth and Devin Sarno on bass and FX. It's live, so you can hear footsteps all around. It's beautifully haunting.
Nature Tales Mix #11: Echo and Rauschen - Tropical Mysteries
I said above that I find dancey mixes hard lately. I generally find it hard to get through anything longer than 90 minutes. Yet I allowed this upload to take over an entire half day of work this week. It's a four-hour mix of ambient sounds, tropical winds, lapping water, crickets, birdsong, lovely synth and anything else in that vein. You can put it on and allow it to soundtrack your life for a more serene approach to your day. I love it.
VA - New Anxieties (Crux Axul)
This tape was put together for Cassette Store Day and released on Halloween. It's a rare compilation in that it manages to bring together disparate sounds and artists yet really feels like a single, cohesive work. As the title suggests, it's largely made up of deeply anxious music, full of noise, space, creaks and crashes. Shō's 'This Tired Feeling' is particularly masterful, moving through a range of such spaces, while Aeon Gate's 'S2HG' (swear to heckin' god?) is so good I played it twice in a row on my show in October. Accidentally, but I wasn't upset about it. YS's 'Malaise' is a series of sonic blasts, evoking protest and unrest. Lymbs's 'Endless Growth Forever' is as terrifying and unsettling as the ideas its title evoke. It's a seriously good collection and I hope the label doesn't take another two years until its next release.
SR25: Ma Sha Ru - Near The Equinoxes EP
Ma Sha Ru is a Russian duo based in New York, and this release is a wonderful blast of dance music that's as fun as it is accomplished. It's gnarly and punchy but then gets silly and irreverent. Top buzz.
MAbH - On Being Pollinated
I'm in the fortunate position of often receiving music for free - be it SoundCloud or Dropbox links, Google Drive folders, Bandcamp yum codes and so on. I was sent this album and really loved it. But the packaging is so delightful I shelled out for the physical release — a tape wrapped in a cardboard sleeve that resembled an old penguin novel. The artist "forges soundtracks for imagined landscapes" and this one really captures that. We have strange looped sounds, samples jumping against newly created notes, plenty of field recordings, unsettling crackles and noises, searingly impressive ambient that's been stretched into a sheen of noise, silly noise that's like West Country gamelan fed into Ableton; it's just a brilliant album that I'm privileged to share with you.
RuheCast #044: Lara Palmer
Hooooold up. Another lengthy ambient mix??? This one is just two hours but it's magical. It's a recreation of a set the artist and writer performed in Leipzig last month. It alternates between dank ambient and empty sound art, hazes of synth and almost beatless EBM, if you can imagine that.