Friday, 31 October 2014

DEAREST – BEACON

On the surface, from the start at least, this track by California ("the deserts east of Los Angeles") band DEAREST could seem just like a "regular", but still v v good, indie track – the guitars speak with a delicate honesty, the vocals stream out with soft aching (I mean, just check out (0:45) the sweetly poignant way in which singer, Tessa Bolsover, poses the question, "Do you still have dreams / of endless highways?"), a drum machine patters its pattern in the background. Everything seems normal.

But just under halfway, a portal opens up. You step through. 'Beacon' receives a simple bassline and some gentle noise plays a cosmic solo, sounds like a theremin. Vocals arrive in pitch-shifted layers, "ahh ahh ahhhh…", thin cymbals like white noise rain pour down, the beat feels bigger, kicks more pronounced…

So yes, you get the picture: this is anything but regular. Electronic precision with its clinical cosmos-conjuring vibe is paired with the raw, stark reality of live instruments, and as you heard even the vocals do not go unaltered, themselves pulled like a yielding star into the enveloping black hole of the electronics' manipulation. It is simultaneously cold and comforting, sharp and soft – long dead and perpetually haunting, but desperately alive at the same time.



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Thursday, 30 October 2014

CLAS TUUTH – HALF HOUR FROM HOME

I've been meaning to write about this guy for some time, and when opportunity knocks… open the door? Is that even a thing? I've never heard it before. Anyway, yes, this is Clas Tuuth, a musicmaker from London, whose sounds are ghostfully analogue, plainly minimalist. Listening to his music is like watching a grainy video of yourself in your most solitary moments, and from his most recent 003 EP I've picked the one that most resonates with this feel, and perhaps with me.

Called 'HALF HOUR FROM HOME' (or without the caps, which some people would deem "shouting", the fools), its title speaks a lot for the song. Perhaps not the most popular track from the EP, it nevertheless demonstrates the sound of Clas Tuuth: cassette aesthetics and singular noise, trails of atmosphere trapped inside machines dusty with crackling distortion.

Like I said, for this one it's in the title. Within the track there is the same obliterated monotony of commuting, the ennui that stales the air when it takes ages to get home from a night out, the drear feeling of wanting so much to be at home when you are not at home. It doesn't matter if you're two hours from home or half an hour from it – you're either at home or you're not; the closer you get the more you ache for its warmth.

The mechanical lamenting of the track is layered in a choir of arpeggiating voices, soft but crackly, led by a tenor of buzzing synth, gesticulating its longing with resounding reverb that seems to just stretch out the feeling; you yourself seem to expand and fill the space between home and wherever, thinly spread in patterns of draining hunger between the two until you reach one or the other.

  • I really think you should check out Clas Tuuth's 003 EP, which is out on indie label, NeedNoWater Records. If only just to see what the shit I'm talking about.



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Wednesday, 29 October 2014

SEYMOORE – RAMEN

What attracted me to this song? It is at once warm and welcoming, effusing charm with endearing itself with the soft, playful sounds of its synth.

Who is it by? It is by Seymoore, a person with a few followers on SoundCloud, and I just assume they make music. What is it called? 'Ramen'. And no, I don't just like it because of the concept of ramen – and no, I am not hungry.

However, I often do this thing, and I'm sure a zillion others do as well, where I listen to a song with its title in mind. Maybe this track kind of sounds like ramen – soupy and full of steaming flavourful notes, with understated clicking beats the gentle sounds of spoon and chopsticks as the bowl is gradually emptied of its delicious sea of delicacy.

I like the hi-hat pattern, its constant tick with the open hi-hat sound seeming random with its gem-like glisten. I like the wibbly synth, feels like improvised flute – certainly like actual noodles themselves, upheld with warm chords, chopped like samples (unless they are actually samples); I definitely like the dynamic pauses throughout the whole track, like pauses to have a glass of water with your food, or say something to somebody eating with you (like, uh, "this is so tasty" – "can i finish your food please" etc.), or otherwise just pause to think about how great life is.

0:30 – the synth goes "woo-oo" like a flailing noodle.

I truly dig the blissful chill of this. It contains within it the blissful warmth of eating food, especially your favourite food. It feels homely, kind, personable. Who are you, Seymoore? What are you doing right now? Are you eating ramen?



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Tuesday, 28 October 2014

LONG NEK – MELTING ICE

Last time I heard from Long Nek was on his production on Taiwanese rapper Simon's track '城市車手' ("City Riders"), where he created some soulfully lilting boom bap complete with saxophone and funk-flavoured guitar. Long Nek is from Kaohsiung, Taiwan, and it may surprise you to learn that the island country itself is home to a burgeoning, underground hip hop scene: I also love the flow of female rapper Aristophanes, and the productions of fellow-beatmaker, Luviia.

Not by any means his latest track but one that I've enjoyed since I heard it first is this one, 'Melting Ice'. What he does here definitely has more of a combination hip hop / footwork feel – the BPM feels pretty fast all the way through (no I'm not gonna guess, you guess). It goes through different parts, all bridged by the constant drip-drop of melting ice that is the glassy electronic piano chords, feeling decidedly cool creating their mist above the jazzy stand-up bass flourishes, and the smart raw clacking of the somewhat urgent beat – maybe reflecting the image of actual melting ice and/or the prevention of such melting.

Every now and then a synth lead erupts into view, squawking wildly in the same kind of pentatonic pattern that you'd expect some duelling electric guitars to be in. Sometimes that solo sound is calmer – such as at the start of the second half, where it summons a super-chilled feel. Add to this some rich brass blares, delayed with dub lassitude, and you have yourself a unique number, an atmospheric double-time hip hop head-nodder with all the dancefloor potential of juke.



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Monday, 27 October 2014

JACOB 2-2 – SAVE MIRACLES

The way Jacob 2-2 makes music creates a good listening environment; it seems architecturally led, constructed with slabs of robust building materials and decorated with the synth equivalent of glitter to ornament his sometimes towering, sometimes sprawling, winding, tunnelling, labyrinthine edifices. These are not gothic structures however, nor Edwardian or art-fucking-deco or harsh brutalism; in fact, it might be better to say that his music – a mix of hip-hop patterns and glitching noises childhood-memory-summoning – is more of a collage.

And it has never been more of a collage than with the opener on his new EP, The Rec, called 'Save Miracles'. This is a dadaist collage, a plasticine stir-fry, funky fragments weaving in and out of mist left by resonant cold cosmic chords, squelchy bass breakdancing as the beat skiffles in flourishing waves of virtuosity; chopped chunks of sound rapid-fire like kaleidoscopic stills flashing in front of your eyes; its interior is splashed with biomechanical groove, funk flavours written in abstractions on the walls, but otherwise it is another Jacob 2-2 construction with its odyssey of chords feeling like empty oddities, a yellow brick road leading to blank nostalgias, roughly sketched by its creator for you. This is not your nostalgia it is a manifestation of collective recollection.

Um…

  • Like I said this comes fresh from J2-2's The Rec EP, which is actually aptly described as "late-night lock-in gymnasium funk" – which is about right. You should check it out.
  • Oh and this comes fairly soon after his album, Herbivore, to which I gave a massive thumbs-up, awesome-out-of-awesome. If those were homely, bedtime sounds, The Rec effuses a slightly more adolescent attitude.
  • He made a rrrrrrreally cool mix called Abiogenesis for YES/NO, a blender full of jazz, hip hop, electro, prog rock. Really do check it out when you got time.



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Sunday, 26 October 2014

LOUMAR – GROUND

I stumbled across this the other day and was literally like wtf where has this been hiding. It is an EP called AVRIL by Parisian musicmaker, Loumar. Bass-heavy, experimental and all-encompassing, it is a captivating collection of sounds. To give you an idea of what that is like, I've selected 'GROUND' (or 'Ground'? whatever) – surprisingly the least popular track on the EP, but by far the most… unique.

Beginning with, and punctuated throughout by, samples from the 2012 Wes Anderson film Moonrise Kingdom, it feels like an ode to dreams – not sleepy dreams, but waking, real-life, what-do-you-want-to-do-when-you're-older dreams; the kind of dreams that you forget and remember years later having done nothing about them. In 'GROUND', Loumar presents a personality that will support your dreams, the booming submarine kicks of the beat playing beneath the repeated words: "I don't let you hit the ground, no."

But this head-in-the-clouds mentality is underpinned by a miasmic soup of sounds, a confused swirling of clap clusters, ambient whale-song synth, disco-conjuring cowbells alongside ticking shakers – suggesting that this is the ground, i.e. real life, somewhat doom-laden, deep, and difficult to comprehend at the best of times. Even the refrain itself is spookily pitch-shifted, effusing this feel of dangerous delusion; you would think that the sample at the end – "I wanna go on adventures, I think. Not get stuck in one place" – would cancel this out, carve out a warmer feeling, but even this is cold.

On the whole, it feels like inverted dance music, narcotic and nauseating, dysphoric, warped beyond recognition, leaning almost towards witch-house in genre (if you excuse my saying so), having extended its tendrillar feelers into the deeper burrows of Loumar's mind. But it's brilliant.



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Thursday, 23 October 2014

MORGAN HISLOP – BRIGHT AS THE MOON, BUT DARKENED BY THE DRAMA

The third release as part of Singles Club on Slugabed's brilliantly named Activia Benz label, this is 'Bright As The Moon, But Darkened By The Drama' by a musicmaker named Morgan Hislop (also the drummer for futuo-R&B outfit Tropics) whose intergalactic track 'Small Rooms & Nocturnal Thoughts' – released as a standalone single on cool label Astro Nautico – we wrote about earlier this year.

The wonky hook of the track is a pitch-shifted vocal sample, chopped to catchy rhythm, appearing throughout in varying forms of iteration, and stands out amidst the bustling fluid beat of the track. Half-dakly cosmic and half-retro-minded, the track features as many ambient washes of sound as it does robust piano chords and sunny joyful synth jollities; at one point the beat feels as if it could have been lifted from an early '90s hip hop track; at other times, it is heavily accented and future-facing with trilling snares and stuttering plasma-vision synth.

It also features English artist James Bright aka Hairy Hands on vocals, whose words arrive stoned and chewed up with echoing harmonies of hazy sound, with phantomatic ad-libs sounding like a giant cat's purr in places, suiting the bliss and clatter of Mr Hislop's unplaceable style. Someone else suggested it sounded like "Aphex Twin gone pop" and in some ways – with the samples and bristling beat – they're not entirely wrong.



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Wednesday, 22 October 2014

BLAZ – SINK

Waaaaa! Wows. This is a really cool sound. You fall through a wormhole into the centre of the Earth and come out the other side and realise you're in a different dimension where everything glints towards bioluminescence and in the air there is the aroma of biological immortality achieved through hundreds of years of research on Turritopsis dohrnii jellyfish and transdifferentiation. Everyone lives forever and nothing is sacred yet we wonder still why and how everything is as it is. Humanity bulges in our corner of the universe and religion is a fairytale and we are all individualist libertarians.

Anyway, like, that's kinda what I felt when I listened to this track. It's by a person from Austin, Texas, who makes music under the name of Blaz. The track itself is called 'Sink' and, well yeah, it's kinda like sinking. First inspired to make electronic music whilst living in France a few years ago, Blaz calls it "very shiny and digital" and that's it on a basic level. In an email to Y/N, Blaz also shared some background information about the song: "The inspiration for it was old N64 video games... and a desire to take some of the recent PC Music sound, which I love, and twist it into something a little darker and heavier."

From the start, eternal arpeggios stream into your ears like schizoid pulsar stars, glassy galactic fog breathing with it, spiralling towards the main body of the track.

Tumbling fragmented kicks ba-dum-ba-dum-dum beneath, which become a regular beat punctuated with kung-fu-punch snare-claps, occasioned with stark synth chords blasting, which break into a melody towards the end alongside rollicking snares for building up and virtuoso popping sounds in what could be one of the regular favourites at the juke-specialising Club Satellite orbiting the earth (circa 2376), a slowdown retro sample ringing out: "This is how we—" ("—do it," I guess).



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Tuesday, 21 October 2014

MUS.HIBA – SLOW SNOW

Never before has a song sounded so much like its title. Well maybe it has but anyway… This is 'Slow Snow' by mus.hiba and yes, it basically sounds like slow snow. It is a delicate and gentle song, artfully spanning the four minutes of its existence with a snowscape of sound, a soundscape of snow; it falls from the evening sky in slo-mo spirals, highlighted in streetlights that grace the already fallen layer of snow on the ground – no one is around in the frozen streets. It sure does paint a picture.

The track is all set to a slow and carefully considered beat that summons the laid-back style of southern hip hop and trap, giving substance to the hugely expansive synths that satisfyingly dip in volume with each heartbeat kick. Dancing with these synth chords are piano melodies and clusters of gravity-defying glockenspiel, chiming evermore towards the end of the track.

On vocals it features not an actual person but one of the voices or even personalities taken from voicebank freeware UTAU, called Yufu Sekka, the gentle sounds of whom whisper like breezes in the synthetic snow-swirls of mus.hiba's production. Using this hyperreal technique, mus.hiba has created an entire album of music centred around themes of snow and winter, "to express the fragility of a two-dimensional character singing." I very much like this idea. Top marks.

  • The album is called White Girl, it is scheduled for release 10th December (suitably wintry) on the Japanese Noble Label and it will be very, very beautiful if 'Slow Snow' is anything to go by. Go buy it here.
  • Also check out the fragmented prettiness and gradual intensity of the other song released from the album so far, 'Moonlight'
  • Fun fact: Yufu Sekka = Yufu, ユフ, inverse of fuyu (winter); Sekka, 雪歌 ("Snow Song") – so there you go.



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Monday, 20 October 2014

LEMONADE – COME DOWN SOFTLY (ET ALIAE REMIX)

From the first organic twinklings of this track, it's a joy to listen to from start to finish, and marks a slightly harder sound for its creator, the one who remixed 'Come Down Softly' rather, London musicmaker et aliae. The kicks, locked into syncopation with the smart synth chords, seem to thud with more rumbling punch than they ever have done, yet she retains the sense she brings to all her songs, that of floating in a known unknown, a substantial cloud of nothingness travelling down glossy new waterslides in the slacker capacity of ride tester; you don't have to queue for this shit, it's instantly accessible.

The original track by Brooklyn band Lemonade (who can now count et aliae as a labelmate; this remix marks her induction to supernice label CASCINE) is a reverbing wash of sound with an oceanic feel, one that et aliae has channeled into fluid streams and angularly winding rivulets through her use jazz-flavoured chords and more legible beats than feature in the original, abounding with virtuosic hi-hats and tropically lilting shakers, and retaining the phantomic reverbing of the original's vocals.

I guess this is it. A very nice remix of a tasty song, which has helped to illustrate the power of internet music: even without pretence, it WILL BE and HAS BEEN noticed.



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Sunday, 19 October 2014

PRIMAPARTE – 1975. // noire

This ain't the newest song from this German beatmaker, but it is the first one I heard when I stumbled onto his SoundCloud page. I also listened to a couple of his other tracks, but, yeah, still decided to show you guys this one.

It's called '1975.' and it's by a guy from Essen, Germany (fun fact: the city recently started an initiative which pays alcoholics in beer to clean the streets) called primaparte. It is hip hop, or at least utilises an offbeat that is very hip hop, as well as a whole lotta sampling and looping.

The track soars with the sound of astronauts talking to mission control and gloopy pianos playing a warm walking-through-the-door-of-your-childhood-home type melody, as electronic buzzing and beeping get giddy in the crackling ambient cosmos conjured by the beatmaker. Note also the well-placed truncated sample of "Motherf—"

Speaking of which, and after a sampled "YEAH", you'll see it's smart af, with metronomic hi-hats ticking above tight snares that clack alternately to the thud-boom of the kicks, holding up this transportive wonder – even if it is only 1m 33s long.

And fuck it, why not listen to the sparkling 'noire' as well—

—which aches with sultry urban brass blares that announce the triumph of nocturnal lassitude, with the occasional sample of someone laughing, as if the kitchen utensil percussion is actually tickling him, whose beat is boom bap through and through. It basically sounds noire.

  • If you like the looped chilled stylings of these tracks then get yourself over to primaparte's SoundCloud and follow.



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Saturday, 11 October 2014

DOUJINSHI – LALALA~

Hmmm, I can't think of a song recently that's had such overt classical influences as this one seems to have had. Mmm… nope. Can't think of one. Anyway. This is a track by Doujinshi (or dōjinshi, meaning self-published stuff like zines and comics – music in this case, I guess), whom I first became aware of thanks to, well, I can't remember actually, soz.

Since then I've been, like, lazy, oblivious, otherwise engaged, and for some reason or another have never gotten around to giving Doujinshi a little feature here. Well, the time has come. That day has arrived. And as such, here's a really great new track from the producer called 'lalala~' (TextEdit just corrected that to 'llama~').

You hear the classical influence? Yes, it sounds very much like Baroque composer Pachelbel's most famous, uh, "piece" Canon in D Major. It's kind of not though. But it is super relaxing and soft-edged, these harmonious sweeps of feather-touch pliable synths. Claps reverb out into this gentle space, followed by the virtuosic kicks and gattling hi-hats of the beat, the foundation for this gorgeous track.

The vocal sample here has a lot to answer for. It's like, so addictive. I think its relatively slow rhythm against the carnivalistic trap regularity of the beat has something to do with it; the tone of the voice is great, too; also don't forget the virtuosic pitch-shifting by Doujinshi at work here. And when the actual "laaa laaa laaa…" comes in, layered on top of existing vocals, it's another level of pure joy. And it all slows towards the finish, a subtle dynamic that brings the track to a tidy, natural ending.

As often happens I spent literally ages looking for the source of this friendly and inexplicably captivating vocal sample. Thankfully, as doesn't always happen, I found that it was from a song called 'Nijiiro' ("rainbow-coloured") by Ayaka – a stripped-back piece of fun, chilled & breezy J-pop released earlier this year.



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Saturday, 4 October 2014

Y/N GUEST MIX 017 :: MEMORY CARDS PROJECT DREAM MIX

It's that time again. Another guest mix from an artist we like. This time around it's the turn of Memory Cards. He's a musicmaker who began making music in LA but currently resides in Arizona who makes super dreamy trap-flavoured music. The kind of thing that has been labelled "otaku trap" (kinda for good reason, in that much of the music is at least anime-inspired, with some out-and-out covers/remixes of anime themes, etc.) of late. But labels are for card catalogues.

"If I had to pick a season for this," Mr Memory Cards (irl name Jonathan) tells me via email, "I think this suits the beginning of fall more." And right now, as I write this listening to the mix for severalth time, looking out the window at grey-white sky and permanent rain, I can safely say that I totally agree. So this is when it's happening. Listen to this mix and kick up some dead leaves.

Why is it called Project Dream? And why is the artwork like it is? Both are inspired by Initial D, a manga/anime that is centred around the world of illegal street racing in Japan, of which Memory Cards had just started watching the final season at the time of making this mix.

I ask him what inspires his own music. "Nostalgia," he says. "For me, a vital part of the music making process involves introspection and seeing how my recollections can be incorporated into the work I make. Since for the most part the music I make doesn't really have words (or at least my own words) it's difficult to explicitly articulate these concepts. However, I try and draw inspiration from forms of media and popular culture that have brought me joy in the past. By doing so, I hope that I can at least partially convey who I am, where I've been and where I'm going not just as a producer or a musician but as a person as well.


I dream a lot

MEMORY CARDS

And what about the mix itself? "Really the only unifying theme with this mix is that they're all tracks that I've been very much enjoying lately," he explains. "Some of the tracks have a sort of eerie menace to them while some have a more jubilant nature to them. Others still carry an air of sweetness tinged with a shade of melancholy, so there's a variation in what I consider to be the themes of the songs I chose." He then adds something that seems to be an overriding theme of internet music: "I would also like to say that I consider myself friends with or at least acquaintances of a good portion of the producers featured here."

It's solidarity, a support network of artists who are at least right now eternally collaborating with each other, bigging each other up, and generally just being nice to one another. Since it's not a local scene, you don't have to "put up" with people, you choose your friend group based mainly and firstly on similar interests rather than spatial limitations; these pockets collect online, attract more people. Soon enough you have a veritable movement.

So from the stand-out electronic atmospherics of the Sonic Adventure-inspired indoors track 'Mystic Ruins' made for the pretty cool CHAO GARDEN compilation (curated by collective MECHA YURI and Memory Cards' own floating cloud sparkling euphoria in 'Fantasia Arc', to the glitzy ambient/future funk crossover in 'SUMMER VI', a collaboration between Bansheebeat and Yung Bae, to Shoujo Eyes and his track 'My Magical Girl' playing us out with gorgeous chiptune melodies, this mix is as varied and evocative as Memory Cards said it'd be, bristling with thickets of machine gun hi-hats and videogame samples (Link swinging his sword in ☆ICEAGE☆ by allegedly 14yo producer, manitee, or original Smash Bros. "choose your character" sounds in Cosmastly & Heavy Hearts collab, 'Fighting Polygon Team') – a great showcase of young producers making music right now.

Plus I think I finally got Memory Cards' name – it's all about recollections, memories… memory cards… store memories… of games.


• T R A C K L I S T •
  1. 32jnqwn-_-_-_ - ECSTATIC CLARITY
  2. memory cards - Fantasia Arc
  3. Childish Gambino – candler road (memory cards Chopped & Screwed Edit)
  4. indoors - mystic ruins
  5. Oliver~ - <3 Sosa Screwx
  6. Howlings - What We Could Have Been
  7. mizukage - OG Bobby
  8. tones_ - heal 
  9. HiGHBRiD - N E X U S
  10. grèg - 水族館 (将来)
  11. highbrid x memory cards - bandana . witta . mullet
  12. // Hydro // - ~ R E A C H ~
  13. manitee - ☆ICEAGE☆ (1.5k special free dl)
  14. ║丂イ乇√乇刀 ۩ d乇乃レムƬ║ - clementine// ありがとう『feat. NET WORTHY』 
  15. d o w n s † a † e - i c e ` g r a v e
  16. ║丂イ乇√乇刀 ۩ d乇乃レムƬ║ -i dont understand… (•̩̩̩̩_•̩̩̩̩) ……╔ feat. H i G H B R i D ☥╗ 
  17. [bansheebeat + yung bae] - SUMMER VI 
  18. COSMASTLY ✗ HEAVY HEARTS - FIGHTING POLYGON TEAM
  19. A$AP Rocky - Wassup (LOSTSVUND Remix)
  20. ILOVEMAKONNEN - Tuesday (ft. Drake) (MXRA & LOSTSVUND Remix)
  21. Shoujo Eyes - My Magical Girl



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Thursday, 2 October 2014

LIQUID SUNSHINE – BE NICE

Woo. Here is some new music from a guy called Hosh'ki Tsunoda, a Japanese producer currently making music in Costa Mesa, California. Oh yeah his musicmaking name is Liquid Sunshine, and the music he makes is prettttttty close to this moniker: liquid shots of actual sun, blended up (blent up?) UV, drinking the sun and all the confusing physics and superheat that goes along with it. Complicated space stuff, y'knoooowww. He actually does describe himself as a "Cosmic beat maker" so…

Annnnyway, his new track is called 'Be Nice' (good message) and it's a mixture of understated, sweaty euphoria and wobbly, wonk-laden hip hop, using shoegazing phasers and a whole host of other FX to paint a multi-flavoured soup of rising/falling swirling synth, grinding bloops, seesawing squeals, dappled light glittering and beachside breezes on the melted façade of a hot afternoon.

All the while kicks sub-boom their slow way along, texturised claps like slapping gravel-filled puddles of water, dynamic build-ups with steady loudening snare rolls, bursting with low-key energy. Crackles and tropical percussion whisper in the quieter moments, just one of many layers of this richly bustling track.

This arrives as the first single from Tsunoda's upcoming EP (dunno what it's called yet, sorry), out 15th October, courtesy of internationalist netlabel, Rootnote Collective, arriving as the first volume – Vol 1.0 – in their The Rooted Arts series, an "exclusive SoundCloud project" aiming to showcase music from a wide range of artists, stemming from a weariness of the current "homogenization of a singular sound." Go for it, I say!

  • Please (if u liked this stuff) go have a listen to his other two EPs, his debut, liquid.sunset, off the back of which performing at Shibuya-based online venue, 2.5D, and the slightly more recent Voices EP.



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Wednesday, 1 October 2014

PALE – SILENCE (EYEDRESS REMIX)

The shifting & shuffling night-drive R&B of London-based Pale's recent track 'Silence' is beautiful; synth chords drenched in chorus seem to laser through ur mind with pulsar hypnotism riding the plasma length of each resounding blast; minimalist guitar reverbs with cold sharp twangs of introverted sound; vocals, smooth and wracked with heartfelt longing — for what? Silence? Who knows.

This has now been acquired by Filipino musicmaker Eyedress for a suitably hazy remix. This guy, whose alias is a phonetic rendition for all those who would mispronounce his actual name: Idris (Vicuña), is well known for his powerful, ghost-flavoured originals and remixes alike. And in the same vein as his past efforts, 'Silence' becomes a different beast.

Soaked with off-kilter sweeps of wobbling, grinding synth, the track is set adrift a turbulent undercurrent of clap collections, urgent hi-hats and syncopated snares, beset with an occasional near-supersonic scream whirling about like some nightmare flying insect that's like a horrifically sized cranefly but with a death-coloured human head and long flowing greasy hair. The vocals are now stretched from their original pitch, wrenched through the nocturnal sludge of Eyedress's witchy sound for an unsettling decoration atop this subtly stormy sound.

  • The original 'Silence' is taken from Pale's recent The Comeback EP, a four-song showcase of downtempo beauty seasoned with R&B lilts. You'll like it, probably.



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