RIP. A weekly roundup of releases on Bandcamp and Soundcloud selected and delivered by Aidan
This coming Monday marks eight years since the first Bandcloud was sent out (with the simply dreadful subject line of THE INAUGURAL WEEKLY BANDCAMP SOUNDCLOUD ROUNDUP TING (in search of a better name)). It went out to just over 40 people initially. Nowadays it goes out to a few more than that. WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN? I’ve no idea. Thanks for sticking around, thanks for reading or sharing or whatever you do with these mails. My wife and I always joke about “X” being the friends we made along the way, but honestly I’ve made so many friends through this silly project and it’s enriched my life in untold ways.
This week’s edition is unintentionally dank. Sometimes the dank just finds you.
VA - Hauntology In UK (Eighth Tower Records)
I shouldn’t admit this, but I’m not fully sure what hauntology is. There’s a galaxy brain meme that I can’t quite remember that explains it in ever-greater detail before landing at “spooky” or something like that. It’s not about being spooky though. At its crudest, it’s something like a simulacrum of memory, not even borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered 80s but manufactured nostalgia for the non-existent [insert time period here]. Thinks Boards of Canada and their faceless album covers and sounds that throwback to unspecified childhoods, or Burial’s ‘In McDonald’s’, an aural representation of a non-place.
This week saw the release of Hauntology In UK, a compilation from Italian label Eighth Tower Records. In the accompanying blurb it quotes the late Mark Fisher, who was instrumental in bringing the concept of hauntology to the fore in music.
In Fisher’s view, the 21st century is oppressed by a crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion”; the current cultural moment is “in the grip of a formal nostalgia”, in which ostensibly “new” things are produced only through the imitation and pastiche of old forms. As I listened to this album I saw a headline about a Fresh Prince of Bel Air reboot. You couldn’t make it up, etc etc. Thankfully, the music here, while perhaps familiar in its approach and general makeup, is refreshingly interesting.
Deionarra - Freedom is a lonely hill
This release sounds like a folky soundtrack to a 70s horror. A nice combination of soft guitars and plaintive synths. Not the brash and overbearing 80s sound, something more elegant, perhaps, not at all lining up with the imagined horrors within. It is tagged as “old school dungeon synth”. And I guess that’s apt.
I listened to this while reading the MR James story ‘Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad’. It’s an intense droning piece that moves along slowly and steadily. Almost like a frog in a pot, it seems to shift and change without you realising, moving slowly in different directions and gathering its energies until you’re in a new space entirely.
I saw a tweet doing the rounds this week about the only acceptable song longer than eight minutes (I won’t even tell you what it was). I guess that person never listened to dance music. DJ Python just announced a new release on Antony Naples and Jenny Slattery’s Incienso label and the opening track clocks in at 10.52, and it’s worth every second. Another tweet that I noticed and is relevant to this discission came from Tone Glow’s Joshua Minsoo Kim, who said the following:
one of my least favorite things someone can say about a piece of art is, “my only complaint is that it’s too short!” what’s often the case is that it’s good *because* it’s short! much love to art that thrives due to brevity or perceived incompleteness.
Obviously ‘Angel’ cannot be accused of brevity, but I could definitely listen to it for longer. But then it wouldn’t be what it is, and that is perfect. You can buy the release digitally, on record and together with a small thing of perfume and/or a candle.
Mysterious ambient from an unknown SoundCloud producer.
I won’t go into Soichi Terada’s history (you can read a 2017 interview with him here). This is new music from the man who came to prominence in circles familiar to me with the compilation Sounds from the Far East some years back. That compilation featured music made in the early 90s and while many of the sounds here may contain the same spirit and energy, indeed they were made using the same instruments, they’re brand new. It’s gorgeous and effervescent, shiny and exciting. It twinkles with house loveliness and brings a smile to my face. Finally, thank you to @timmychunks for getting me this for my birthday.
olga.zubova - OUT-DISAPPEAR ME
I’ve listened to this several times at different volumes. Things are happening in submerged spaces and it’s key to find them in between bangs, potentially drums but just as easily empty tubs.
Against music? I thought we were for music? Thanks, I’m here all weekend. This experiment in sound drifts between abrasive noise and blissful melody across the same track. The blurb states that the sound came from a conjunction of synthesis and convolution, which I don’t understand at all, which was then manipulated by the artist. The results are cool anyway.
Solastalgia is a word describing the negative distress of environmental change. “The homesickness you have when you are still at home,” according to Glenn Albrecht, who coined the term. It can also relate to the global climate crisis, and in this case it seems to stand for both. The artist wrote the following on Instagram:
music has always had this duality of expressing my anxieties and also comforting them. This album is definitely more about expressing the dread I feel about the future for humans on this earth . Not all hope is lost though. There is no one “tipping point” that's what they want us to think so that things will stay the same. To hell or utopia. This is a warning.
The music is indeed full of dread, and can feel like a something that will pull a sensitive listener into a tailspin. It can also liberate and invigorate, offering a terrifying vision of what could be and acting as an impetus for change.
Euphoria Echoes Of Inotai - Euphoria Echoes Of Inotai
Clank, fuzz, whir, buzz. “Life is a beach and then you dry.” How droll.