HIDDEN FORT — DREAMS FROM THE ROLLER PALACE

⌾ LISTEN TO HIDDEN FORT, DREAMS FROM THE ROLLER PALACE ⌾

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It's new music time. As you may or may not (probably not) know, YES/NO MUSIC has launched a record label. Called Pleasant Place, it is dedicated to all manner of instrumental music that summons worlds, allows listeners to escape or relax, and provides an undemanding but imaginative sonic space. You can learn more about it on our dedicated page or you could even head over to http://pleasant.place yourself to check it out.

Our first release is an album called Dreams from the Roller Palace by Hidden Fort. This is a "musical tour" of Maida Vale Roller Skating Palace and Club, which was to all intents and purposes an Edwardian roller disco and pretty much London's top spot for skating between 1909 and 1912 (when it closed). Many years went by and it later became home to the BBC and is now best known as Maida Vale Studios. It was up for auction recently; thankfully composer Hanz Zimmer brought it in partnership with several others, sealing the fate of the iconic studios, but hopefully for the best.

Hidden Fort, a transcontinental duo (one in Tokyo, one in London) who would seemingly prefer to remain anonymous, have created a pretty gorgeous love letter to the heritage of the studios. It's new music, of course, but Dreams from the Roller Palace feels utterly timeless.

We are very happy to be the label home for this rather stunning debut release; yes, we're biased, and yes, it would be a conflict of interests of we were to write a long, gushing essay about how intriguing the concept is, or what wondeful flights of fancy are summoned by the smorgasbord of vintage instruments are used throughout, or comment on just how unusual their mix of ambient and postclassical structures is. But it's cool, and we hope you think so too.

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• 🔔 Dreams from the Roller Palace by Hidden Fort is out now. You can purchase this lovely slice of new music over on Bandcamp, either digitally or physically as a cassette tape. How exciting.

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☟ Pleasant Place Internet Presence ☟
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CUUSHE FADED CORNERS

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Tokyo-based singer and producer Cuushe (aka Mayuko Hitotsuyanagi) is summoning the ancient past with this slice of new music. 'Faded Corners' features her tradebmark vocals, a textural combination of a far-off call and close-quarters whisper, as they spin words based on 'Asobi wo sen to ya~', a famous poem that was included in the Ryōjin Hishō, a 12th-century anthology of imayō — lyrical poetry that was intended to be sung with music (and dancing).

It's an masterclass in atmosphere-making — the soothing ambient wash of chords, the urgent hush of the vocals — but it's also an excercise in creating a sense of propulsion and a vehicle of dance without actually using a constant beat (aside from the odd deep, bassy thud of a kick). The overlapping rhythms combine to create a complex footwork-adjacent web of energy, extra rhythm provided by the muffled splash of syncopated synth chords.

The stirring strings and plumes of bass, the scratching, glittering, richly textured soudscape reflects the violence and beauty that comes with the preservation of ancient culture through the centuries. Pages tear, fires burn, people forget, and yet scholars record, artists revive — marvellously mirrored in the dense yet flighty crescendo of 'Faded Corners', like a sky ripped asunder.

The single arrives with bonus remixes. Flau label boss aus takes the track to the boundaries of a frosty realm in his 'reprise', waves of ambient synth washing through a minimal landscape with cascading clusters of bleeping synths and snippets of harsh noise, ending with intense destructed glimmers of sound.

Elsewhere there's a chilled, almost New Age vibe to the remix by Korean duo Salamanda, complete with slow, deeply blooping drums spinning a relaxed groove. Melati ESP, on the other hand, makes things propulsive with a bouncing beat and tropical approach to its bubbling collection of iridiscent synths.

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• 🔔 'Faded Corners' by Cuushe is out now! It is available to download digitally from Flau's Bandcamp, or else you can purchase the CD, giving you access to a CD-only track called 'Tsuki to Sakana'.
• 🔔 You can also watch the official video for Cuushe's 'Faded Corners', directed by Tao Tajima.

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☟ Cuushe Internet Presence ☟
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GOLD PANDA 222 / 0.2

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New music from Gold Panda alert. It's called '222', which is fun because the song is also two-minutes-two-seconds long. It's a song of two halves, or thereabouts. We begin our journey into the minutiae-filled world of Gold Panda (aka the human Derwin Schlecker) with a whirl of dynamically wobbly, out-of-tune chords and masterfully cut glossy vocal samples sitting between them like half-said sentences.

At around the 1:11 mark it becomes a rapid fire stream of what may be guessed to be koto strings, the detail and design of it all underpinned by a minimalist garage shuffle, and occasional bass boops driving a groove like a gossamer stake into a patch of tofu-soft ground.

But that's not all. Alongside this single we get '0.2', like a coda to the strings that came before, except this time stuttering and decorated with a pitched-down melody, gradually swimming in hefty reverb and a touch of distortion. Buy the end, the sttuttering glitches have become the tickings of a machine, the hands of a clock; angst meets ambient. Together these two tracks present a well-studied soundtrack to everyday living, the movement and the stillness alike.

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• 🔔 This slice of new music from Gold Panda is available to own physically on a 6" transparent PVC lathe-cut disc, but you must buy it to possess it. Bandcamp is the place to go for all your purchasing options, which also includes a digital download.
• 🔔 The art though. That shade of purple, more a lilac or lavender, really hits. The photo (taken by GP himself) of the abandoned kei van next to those half-toppled plastic crates gives you a good idea of the imagery that you should hold in your mind's eye when listening to these pieces of music.
• 🔔 You may also be interested to note that Gold Panda's 2010 debut Lucky Shiner was re-released on 9th August as part of Ghostly's 25th Anniversary celebrations. It is possible to purchase a deluxe edition of Lucky Shiner over here via Ghostly.

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☟ Gold Panda Internet Presence ☟
facebook ⚘ soundcloud ⚘ bandcamp ⚘ official site ⚘ youtube ⚘ instagram ⚘ wikipedia

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SLAKE MOTHS — AFFECTION

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How so dirge-y a song, so despondant and swept up in a sense of looming despair, can be so exciting is only down to the skill in its execution. The simplicity at work in the moody and minimalist 'Affection' by Glasgow musical entity and human beings Slake Moths is part of this. They describe their music as "melancholic and electronic, a result of listening to too much Neu! and the like during their lost adolescences in the sunlit uplands of North Lanarkshire."

Not a bad description. Splashes of synth move in static ripples, ending in resonating one-note skirls, above a bubbling column of glossy but pitted bass. All of it cycles over a stoic, disjointed half-skeleton of a beat, the slow scuttle of hi hats, taut kicks and fibia-tapping snare clicks.

Halfway through, the simplest of switches: an addition of slow arpeggio of gentle boops, but set rhythmically so they cut in syncopation with the beat. If this is affection, it is unreturned, unfulfilled, clouded and cursed — apt enough for a music-making unit named after giant interdimensional mind-eating butterflies. Indeed the track feels very much like an evolved form of witch house; combined with the occultish artwork, the adjacency is clear to see.

But it wasn't always so minimal. The band tells yes/no via email that 'Affection' was "originally a lot more complex and layered, but we pared it down to just a couple of tracks and slowed it way down, which seemed to bring out all the ambiguity and sinister feeling." It's the first track taken from their upcoming self-titled debut album, due out this year on Slake Moths' own microlabel, Firth Records.

Live shows may be forthcoming, they continue, if interest is there. "The internet might have made music omnipresent, but performance, proper theatrics, is still a rare quantity. If people are fine going to a cinema to be made uncomfortable, to be disturbed, then why not a concert?" the band says. "We have a great many ideas, most of which are probably unsound and ill-advised, but it would be nice to try them out on-stage."

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• 🔔 'Affection' is taken from Slake Moths' debut album, also called Slake Moths, due out sometime in 2024.

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☟ Slake Moths Internet Presence ☟
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LINDSAY LOWEND — BRADDOCK RUN

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It's time for some new music from Lindsay Lowend, the human Detroit-dweller, educator and game composer, Tony Mendez. Differently from his recent releases, the chiptune-heavy Chiptunes 2022 (clue's in the name) and the demoscene-dedicated Nectarine (also released in 2022), the focus on this EP is a real instrument: the guitar. It's appeared in his high-energy frenetic VGM-flavoured compositions before — LL 2020 - Volume 3, for example — but never with such prominence as to be the crux of the release itself.

That's where Braddock Run is different. Named possibly after a tiny little river in Pennsylvania, or maybe not, the five-track EP is characterised by the same Lindsay Lowend lyricism, all those refraining melodies and addictive, looping progressions — take the splashy chords in the calypso-inflected 'Smokestacks', a sunny number that also retains the emotive soft synth goodness that Mendez is known for. Little avenues of guitar work with the synth, different melodies folded into each other, perhaps most noticeable on the virtuoso, math-leaning melodies that skip and skitter in 'Blue Nun'.

High reverb on the synths give a gossamer backdrop to tracks on Braddock Run, providing a suitably seasonal scattering of frost and fog to the atmosphere. 'Höfner' displays this nicely, with a stutter of sharp synths and a repeating tract of delayed guitar disappearing as if down a sparkling wintry lane into the low, sheltered hills beyond. We even get a taste of outdoors on opener 'Horseshoe Crab' with its crispy field recordings. Mendez is no stranger to field recordings; his redubs can be found on Vimeo, where he once uploaded an exercise in foley in the form of redubbing environmental noises in Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

Contrasting with the cool temperatures, but wholly coexisting with them if not codependent on them entirely, is the warmth of indoors. You can't be cosy without the cold. It evokes a table set with breakfast items, a pluming mug of coffee, a steamed-up window with a vista of some hivernal scene.

The thudding rounded tones of the beat throughout provides this — especially the slightly distorted drums in title track (and final song) 'Braddock Run', crackling like glowing hearth-bound firewood — as does the bass, creating unobtrustive grooves like a quilted coat. Simplicity rather than elaboration in the beat-and-bass foundations provides the stable conditions to press pause on your day and be caught in the music.

There's a sense of end-of-the-day resolution, a kind of sunset finality, on the EP's closer, the meldoy skipping upwards but falling back with melancholy-tinged contentment. The guitar on this track exemplifies the guitar on the entire EP, the melodies affectionately layered over each other, each a copy but differing just so. Compare it with 'Horseshoe Crab', with its introductory feel, its Animal Crossing gentleness.

While the feel of Braddock Run may be more "real" than Mendez's previous endeavours, the sense of everyday escapism, of familiar fantasies, is heightened with his command of the fretboard, working with synthetic elements to create a composite daydream of chilled — and chilly — proportions.

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• 🔔 Listen to Lindsay Lowend's Braddock Run EP all you like over on Bandcamp. You can even buy it on a name-your-price basis.
• 🔔 The cover photo for the EP is by Detroit-based artist and designer Nick Tilma, who also designs some wonderful furniture.

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☟ Lindsay Lowend Internet Presence ☟
soundcloud ⚘ bandcamp ⚘ twitter ⚘ spotify ⚘ reddit (dedicated r/Lindsay Lowend, not endorsed or managed by Mendez)

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