STRANGEHEAD ㄷㄹㅊㅅ (DREAM CHASER) [FREE DOWNLOAD]

For ease I am not going to be dealing with the Korean characters, although here is a fun fact: it's called Hangul and instead of being written straightforwardly, each word is a 'block' of these little characters. Isn't that fun? Someone should create some blocky typography of English in this way. It'd look nice I think. What am I saying? Who cares. The Hangul here - ㄷㄹㅊㅅ - if you want to know, is like an acronym or abbreviation, cause it's in letter and not word form, and says: d r ch s. DRCHS - a truncated form of Dreamchase(r)? I guess.

Anyway, in the depths of the night I found this song and I enjoyed it a lot so I am writing about it right now. It's probably really bad for LA trackmaker Strangehead because I'm writing about this in a not very good mood so I don't think I'll do the song as much justice as I normally would, however I do hope that you - whoever is reading, skimming, or ignoring this writing right now - enjoy the song no matter what gibberish I blather, what garbage words I tip-tap into this word box right here. Pls enjoy it. Let's call it 'Dream Chaser'.

Caught up as I was in the 80s synth dreamscapes offered by people's musical reaction to the film Drive and its College & Kavinsky-dominated soundtrack, the love of this type of music has never left me so the opening to 'Dream Chaser' is like a sudden step into an alternate world populated by electronic beauty and the tough undertones featured in games like Streets of Rage. However, this song is the kind of thing you'd hear once you've cleaned up the city in that game, don't you think? It begins as a foray into dubstep tinged by bleeping arpeggios and a smooth lead synth heralding good news.

Claps lead up to a lovely winding build-up awash with freestyle beats, snares roll and hi-hats buzz with insectoid surgicality, the second part of this song being marked by the fun vocal sample of "Readyyy... Go!". It's a plunge pool of low melodies bopping over wide Sonic-inspired chords, clean and smooth and delicious. A second "take-off" at like 1:38 sends us into fantastically happy world, where house piano chords stab and vox synth provides simplistic melodies (sounding like a K.K. Slider song from Animal Crossing). More dynamic changes - strings join the show for drama - claps in a frezy. Then everything suddenly fades out leaving you with candy-popping soft synth mixed with a pop song sample from where I don't know.

How nice was that? And with all the videogame references I've made it's clear that, whether intentionally or not, the often underrated, earworming videogame sounds have made their influence known. With the song levelling-up its atmosphere of fun and magic, the title seems very apt indeed.

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TOUCH SENSITIVE – PIZZA GUY

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UPDATE: 'Pizza Guy', after being the most Shazam'd thing ever in the UK thanks to appearing in a Very.co.uk advert, is being re-released by Future Classic on 26th July 2015 〜❤️️

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Just heard this song on the radio and had to write about it. I just... yeah. I really like it. When they first said the name on the radio I was like, a bit confused. The first thing I thought of was an actual touch sensitive pizza guy, i.e. a pizza guy who is touch sensitive. In what way, I do not know. Perhaps it could be a comment on how everything, even pizza delivery, can be done through a touch screen on a phone - so in a way, the actual pizza guy who delivers it is himself "touch sensitive". But it wasn't anything as poetic as that. No. This is just a song called 'Pizza Guy' by a Sydney-based producer called Touch Sensitive.

Now that we've cleared that up, let's continue on our little jaunt. The first thing I liked about this song is the majorly major atmosphere that has been created with these sparkly synths all working together - one playing a simple arpeggio, one mapping out the bassline with a plunging funk that cannot be denied, one bopping like electric popcorn, one glassily jutting out through the rest like an ephemeral spike of sound. In that way it kind of gives me the same buzz that I got from people like College, Electric Youth and Kavinsky (to an extent) - the connection here is a 1980s "classic" aesthetic. Cheesy but meaningful - long walks and knowing glances. Do you know where I'm going with this? It could be in Drive, basically.

And with this wonderfully stylised video, you can tell that's the sound that has been chased like a dream and - I would say - rather successfully attained. Enjoy the sounds and sights.

What else I enjoy is the vocal sample. It is enjoyable. I love it when samples are twisted and turned - played with as if they were another instrument in the song. These dynamic cuts of the sample are supported very nicely by an equally dynamic powerhouse of a beat. Can't really tire of a beat like that. Meaty snare - heavy kick with a tinge of synth. Perfect tempo as well. Perfect for head-bopping whilst looking at things on the internet. That is what I used to do as my job, basically, and all the hours in that office were made all the sweeter thanks to songs like this one, songs that fall somewhere between sit-down-and-chill and get-up-and-boogie. But as I said in the beginning, it's that electric nostalgia that pulses through the atmosphere of this song that I can't quite get enough of.

It is a single off a very short EP of the same name (Pizza Guy) released on the effortlessly cool Future Classic. Anyway - Touch Sensitive will be closely watched from here on in.

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BEACON DRIVE

This is a song called 'Drive' from a Brooklyn, New York-based duo who go by the name of BEACON (aka Thomas Mullarney III and Jacob Gossett). It comes from their latest album The Ways We Separate out now on Ghostly International.

I was pretty much drawn to this track as soon as it started. It's a rigid bassline that grows and grows until it colonises your ears and rests in there, leaving you static for the remainder of the song. Nice. And that's how it begins. From there on in we are treated to soft synth that almost glitters over the top, high and low sounds tumbling together to create an abrupt melody that creeps up on you from all angles all at once.

Not only that, but we have breathy vocals singing lovely lyrics, like the refrain, "I've found someone to carry me home". The sound seems to inhabit the very air itself - a really great atmosphere. Add to these reverb and echo and you have this gigantic yet thin vibe on the voice, kind of like dry ice spreading at a school disco but better and with lasers cutting through it, a blazing white spotlight picking out the trails of it whilst everything else is muffled pitch blackness. That's what I get from this. What do you get?

There's something really nice about hearing that dubstep rhythm without hearing that now dreadfully typical 'dubstep' sound. In actuality, I don't think this has the BPM to be officially termed dubstep or whatever, but it is a slowed-down beat that gives it a late-at-night-no-one's-around reflective-chill kind of mood. It's not too strong, sounding even tender at times with soft snares that are like dropping a balloon filled with rice from a not-very-great height. Like it.

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