Bandcloud 311

Since I only share one of these a week, I have to be judicious in what I share. There's so much excellent music coming out on a daily basis that it would be simply impossible for me to cover everything without overwhelming you. So it's a bit frustrating sometimes when labels drop a bunch of new bits at a time. I think this is something to do with scale, ordering x amount of tapes being more cost-effective than ordering x-minus-y, but I could be wrong. In an unusual turn, I'm going to highlight a couple of things that appeared in tandem, mainly because they all appeared at once and they're all excellent.

SEBASTIANO CARGHINI - ENXPL02 - BLUE
ISHAM KOUIDRI - ENXPL03 - ALL I SEE IS BLUE
It's entirely coincidental that the newest releases from the Enmossed x Psychic Liberation joint venture both feature blue in their titles. The first, from Sebastiano Carghini, features tape recordings of tape recordings, loops replayed and relooped. Echoes and footsteps, clanks and noise, whine and hiss, stilted repetition and unpleasant frequencies. My kind of thing. Isham Koudiri's tape is apparently fashioned from a single piano loop! Also my kind of thing. I spent a while this morning looking through the early electronics/library music sections of the Trunk Records website, and this fits nicely into that sphere. Woozy, delicate but then slightly harsh, intoxicatingly adrift. Magical really.

Mercy. - Try
This track from Kenyan producer Mercy. is like the golden hour on a summer evening. It's warm, lush, soft, powerful, emotive and expansive. All my favourite words.

Coby Sey - River
I spent a lot of time listening to this release this week, in a stupor of sadness and melancholy. It's a series of recordings made in Westfjords in Iceland early this year, at the beginning of the COVID crisis. A reflection on the world and the specific location, the time and place, it's easy to see why the music that flowed out is so maudlin and hopeless. Maybe I'm inferring that sense of hopelessness, but it leaves me stunned and unable to move. It's beautiful, yes, but incredibly haunting. The amelodic slump of 'Ísafjörður, Vestfirðir' makes me sick to my stomach.

JamesBangura - R.Y.S.S.
JB was living in a hotel between jobs and living stations when he wrote this. It was just after his mother passed away and it reflects his emotions at that time. The title stands for Rejuvenated Youth Subliminal Saviour. Four marvellous tracks of perfectly rendered techno. Proceeds are going to a victim of physical abuse.

Forest Robots - After Geography
Deep and immersive ambient that's somehow inspired both by the Beatles AND the current moment, yet sounding nothing like either. Arresting, calming and loving, it's hard to write about it without making it sound twee, and yet it's all these things and more.

Soloman Tump - Weland EP
The story of Weland the Smith is incredibly dark. It's a bit Titus Andronicus or Tantalus, with one telling involving skulls used as tankards, and that's not even the worst part. Anyway it's inspired this EP, with sizzling, crackling noise and the clanks of smithery carrying the concept out of the abstract and into the music itself.

t. liefhold - tokyo painting
More tape loops, or should I say another tape loop, as it's a single loop, stretched into a 37-minute piece. Just in case you really want to lean into that sense of 2020 inertia.

Sputnik One - Kerosene
Sputnik One popped up last week on the Woozy comp, but this release dropped at the end of August and slipped through my fingers. It's heavily percussive, with choppy patterns drawn together with deep precision. Blah blah no clubs no bangers, just whack up the volume on her headphones (to a safe degree, look after your ears) and feel the rhythm. The bass and rattle of 'Skindrum' will give you a rush like a triple espresso.

bleed Air - s/t
Ball Geographie - Live at Budokan
Another double drop, this is from the new label superpolar Taïps. I'm not sure why the first word is lower case and the second is upper case in both bleed Air and superpolar Taïps, but as someone who's been consistently inconsistent with cases over the years (see haido and aidnq) I'm hardly one to judge. bleed Air is the label boss, and the self-titled tape features a melange of electronic styles, from squelchy synths over drum machine loops to unsettling bass throbs and fuzzy drones, it's a bit of everything. The Live at Budokan tape from Ball Geographie is similarly broad-minded, with jaunty loops and electronic crunch in equal measure. The label seeks to share "experimental electronic pop music", and with these two releases they've mailed it, I think.

ian fink - Nomovement EP
Three tracks of crisply rendered Detroit techno. fink seems to be a genuinely multi-talented artist who put out a piano album earlier this year. I nearly wrote summer, but we're definitely past that now. He called this a low-key release, put together because of a sense of longing at there not being any Movement festival this year.

Marta De Pascalis - Sonus Ruinae
I've heard this artist's work before on the Tapeworm label and here she is on Morphine. (Yet) Another album informed by tape loops, here De Pascalis takes synths and sets them in endless repetition. The title track comes in two large parts, and each is gorgeously weird, with strange, unknowable melodies wailing like 80s guitar solos, while shorter pieces demonstrate the true emotion that can be wrought from electronic music.

John Kolodij - First Fire • At Dawn
At first this sounds like a kind of relatively straightforward folksy piece with its plaintive fiddle, only for it to grow substantially, moving towards a sea of droning fog, like a static whirlwind gathering around the players as they sit in a dewy bed of grass next to a river.

isolatedmix 100 - Tom Middleton
Global Communication's classic 76:14 album was recently repressed on vinyl (along with a few others) and while doing some reading about that I noticed one half of GC, Tom Middleton, put together a mammoth 200-minute-plus mix for the Strangely Isolated Place series. I haven't listened to it all but it seems like something worth investigating. There's also an interview, notes on the tracklist and tips for sleep hygiene.