Bandcloud 324

I realised this week that both Christmas Day and New Year's Day will fall on Fridays, so no Bandcloud for those two weeks. Which means that this is the penultimate mail of the year. My EOY coverage is going to be a bit different this year. Instead of a series of lists, I've decided to do a few interviews instead. People who might have something interesting to say about the year. Not that lists aren't interesting of course, but I'd like to get a bit deeper. First this week we have Richard Chartier, who runs the LINE label, and Rachael Williams aka Ambient Babestation Meltdown, booker at Rye Wax in London.

Insitu Sessions Volume 2
Eight pieces for gamelan. These were recorded in 2016 and released in 2017, but I've only come across them lately. I love this stuff. I can't say I know anything about the intricacies of the music or technical qualities of the players, but it sounds great to me.

AH014D Ms Puerto Rico - All Hands On Deck Mix Series
A globe-spanning mix of music from "geographical Latin America and the wider Latin diaspora". Party sounds throughout, but a constant shift between pop and rnb and salsa, "dance" music and more.

Gaapiiiii - Tobira Records Instore Showcase Vol.2 December 6th 2020 (Live)
A recent live performance from the city of Kasai in Japan. It's a combination of noise and ambient drone. Tagged under "experimental".

ARCH-ALCOHOL OF SONG - PAPAL BULL
This is a right weirdo of a release. On a label called My Dance The Skull, which is pretty nonsensical in itself, it's a two-track series of strange, garbled, tape-stretched noises and gently soothing samples along with screeching sounds and so on. Blissful bells and rumbles add a kind of playful wistfulness, though ominous detuned speech brings horror.

Mariassunta - Il Vulcano
Wonderful noise drone pop stuff from Mariassunta, moving between jagged, glacial tones and charming found sound, wistful melodies meeting dire cacophonies.

eszter musiński - complete works - 2020
Forty tracks here, all the music released by eszter musiński this year in one go. Very experimental sounds for piano and strings and drones and whatnot. Titles like '20180426/oh to be a leaf falling on the cheek of a sleeping girl'.

Zeze Wakamatsu - A Tortoise Walks in The Rings of Saturn
Treefingers ambient. Is that fair to say? It's really nice.

VA - Wound Without A Tear (Daisart)
A nice collection of sounds from a variety of Australian artists making ambient music. Kazumichi Grime's 'Rounded' is especially excellent, as is Pretty Boy Crossover's 'Audio Letters'.

TAIGA - TAIGA 1
Just some loud and raucous noise for y'all. "TAIGA is a project meant for drone, ambient, and making a sense of dread, horror, and apocalyptic scales." Yes please.

Borrowed cs - Grooves
I spoke a bit last week about textures. This is really nice and fuzzy and gooey. Head-nod house music, some trippy synth melodies, thick and chonky bass, some rattling drums. It's sold out now but there was a run of phones loaded with the album, which is pretty hilarious I think. Not sure how limited the run was, lovely idea though. Reminds me of that sug album that came on reused iPods.

vida voyage - my travels (rec nov '19)
This is a soft and hazy vocal track from vida voyage, aka vida vojić. Beautiful.

Dalot & Sound Awakener - Departures
Sound Awakener featured here recently with a live show, and here it's alongside Dalot with an album several years in the making. Their process is slow but deliberate, with crunchy field recordings sitting over and under mournful ambient stretches. Uncertainty reigns throughout, with the album a reflection on migration and movement. It's dense, weighty and deserving of repeated listens and serious attention.

scamu. - uno.
scamu. is an artist from Johannesburg in South Africa, and this release features a blend of English and Zulu lyrics, with titles like 'izinyembezi zaka'nokuthula' (tears of peace) and 'inyanga neze inkanyezi zezulu' (the moon is never a star in the sky). The sound is hip-hop/neo-soul, a languid air of dusty Rhodes-y tones and plaintive vocals. There are also a lot of, I don't know what you might call them, sounds of real life, but not field recordings. Conversations, storytelling, hard to say through the barrier of language. The music underneath is beautiful, the sound of an elder friend or family member lending gravitas, while crying children ground one in the home, birdsong outside the door.

Kareem El Morr - Wasteland Breaks
Really exciting techno from Kareem El Moor on the Molten Moods label, which previously released DINA. It moves between heavily breaks-laden sounds to more intricate and contemplative, yet still danceable zones. Great stuff all round.