EVY JANE – CLOSER [VIDEO]

This is the brand new video from Vancouver-dwelling Canadian duo, Evy Jane, comprising of Evelyn Jane, whose voice you will hear ghostly smooth throughout the track, and Jeremiah Klein, who provides the thicket of sounds through which you follow the vocals like faint lights in a pulsing gloomy forest. It's an awesome pairing, one which has seen a self-titled release on lovely Canadian label King Deluxe, and now one that has led them to London's Ninja Tune with an upcoming EP, Closer, from which this track is clearly taken.

I was hooked from the start: that rat-tat-tat on the snare & the instantaneous dive into this plunge pool of never-static sounds – it's always fluid, always in motion as if itching for action, as if in anticipation. The synths groan and intonate in languorous pitch bends as slow arpeggios fade in and out like patches of dappled sunlight through gnarled tree boughs; all the while the beat sways in slow-jam consideration, the languid metronome for this distorted subversion of R&B, where Evelyn herself is not a diva but a phantom of diva-essence, drawing you into the glowing mist of her voice.

A soaring yet sludgy post-R&B number, the video comes courtesy of Kyle Bowman, aka Strawberry Jacuzzis, whose vision for the track was one "seen through a kaleidoscopic lens of fuzzy hallucinogens". It fits the narcotic warpings and distortions at work in the music, lo-fi, garbled with static and uncontrollable glitching layers of itself. Beautiful, in tandem with the sounds.

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MELTING MOODS – WAHULA

Ohhh yeaa, here's a track for you. It's a nice one. God I gotta stop talking like this. This arrived in my inbox and I really like it. Please keep sending things, I love to hear things. Anyway, the track is called 'Wahula' and it's by a Brooklyn-based maker-of-music called Melting Moods.

There is indeed something extremely melty about Melting Moods. Real name Andrew Krzynowek, he manages to create some explicitly melty atmospheres in all of the three songs on his SoundCloud. 'Black Magic' is a skewed reality of a track, a semi-nightmarish carnivalistic psychedelic electro number, and there is a ton of melted-sun funk aesthetic appeal in 'Space Walker', but the one that stuck out most to me was the most recent, 'Wahula'. Like I said.

Anyway um the synth in this track is gloriously affected, twisted with pitchbends and wah-wah, writhing over the top of muffled pulsar squelch bass, soon joined by scathing waves of distorted saw-wave chords and a crackling melody of high-register hollow synth. But in the middle we're treated to delicious portion of sumptuous funk, guitar crying carefree and groovesome bass mixed in with weird vox. These come up again, eerily repeating the song's name in barely audible lows (I thought I was hearing things at first).

All in all 'Wahula' sways with its ultimate chillment rubbing shoulders quite comfortably with the bummed-out vibe inherent in its stylised sounds, like someone artfully shrugging on a backdrop of eternal summer afternoon. I really like it. It kind of waxes your mind as if you're standing absent-mindedly watching your car get washed in a gold glint of sun through water.

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BOBMO – IT IS HAPPENING AGAIN

Premiering on Mixmag blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah here is Parisian producer Bobmo with new track 'It Is Happening Again'. With a Twin Peaks-inspired name – "It is happening again" is what The Giant says to Detective Cooper in a nightmarish premonition – and actually sampling those very words from the cult show, it's taken from Bobmo's upcoming two-track EP, When I Look, released on Marble, a label which he calls home (also home to other French acts including Myd, Canblaster, Para One, etc.).

So what can you expect from this dancefloor-destined number? It's dark and brooding, matching the subject material of its namesake, exploding with the brutal thump of techno, each kick snare-hit bringing up distorted dust – rattling floorboards and thundering skies float in its atmosphere. Distorted squelch bass bounces along in stuttering madness as high pitched overdriven whistle saw-wave synth rises and falls in and out of earshot, sometimes chirping pulsar blips, sometimes screaming sawmill grinding. Listen for nightmares and dance-desire.

There's this wondrous mechanical fuzz to it, a cautionless evaporation of clear-cut sounds for something deathly organic, frying in dry dust darkness – a pressure cooker of noise and danceable beats. Noisy and explosive, it's techno with acidic lilt, and you can't help but let yourself become infected with its virulent pulse. So yeah, if you liked this, there's another one where this came from on the When I Look EP, out 31st March. Eat it up if you feel like it.

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BOT'OX BASEMENT LOVE

As much as I love hearing music in general that I like, I love more to hear music that is not only fresh but wholly loveable at the same time. Often, and this is something I wrote about today in fact, music is reminiscent of something else or is directly derivative, but there is a uniqueness lacking that - for me personally - is something that I crave when it comes to all things in life (not just music). Call that 'hipster' and I'll blow your fucking brains out - I'm sick of that word.

You can imagine my relative joy, then, when I came across this tasty morsel from Paris-based band Bot'Ox called 'Basement Love'; released yesterday (10th Dec) as an EP, the entirety of which you can listen to on SoundCloud or download here, the song comes out as the first of a series of EPs or 'chapters' (released every two months apparently) leading up to an album, expected later in 2013: Sans Dormir, which itself comes two years after debut album Babylon by Car.

'Basement Love' starts as a flies-buzzing-round-a-window build up from a barely heard saw-wave synth into something surprising, a bassline almost like dub and a drumstep rhythm that captivates you from the very first beat. With popping synth arpeggios, a disconcerting voice comes in - the voice of Foremost Poets (or jOHNNYDANGEROUs, who also featured in Bot’Ox’s Perfect Pair EP in 2011) - a voice that is twisted with effects and comes ghostly from the centre of this dirge-paced basement anthem. Playing with dynamics, the distorted synth comes back and rises, flooding your ears with inescapable, raucous sound, scraping and noisy, near-unbearable - then it breaks off, revealing that calm dub and clear-toned guitar chords, small and different after all that loudness.

Reminding me of a cross between alt-J and TOYS (who we wrote about the other day), these guys cover a new, dark ground that still sounds like it has a lot to give. Listen below.

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