🐣 ÄTSCH — UP

What really is surprising about this track is how it sounds like a variation on a theme of Bert Bacharach's smooth 'What The World Needs Now', its introduction fogged with those reminiscent chords, soft and lounge-leaning, a lull of resting heart-rate and horizontal chill. It is not exactly reflective of the track as a whole, nor the heart of the track, but it is a component of what this instrumental journey is all about—and that is drama. So this intro, the heartfelt touching sweetness of it, a trough of energy, soon builds with a flying formation of acrobatic distorted guitar into a peak, the concoction of it soon towering and vibrating all around you cinematic and atomic.

There's a great point in 'Up' where the Dublin-based band ÄTSCH, having already skipped up some gears via new zooming tempos and cascading drums that skiffle and shimmer sharply and a storm of bass, where it all joins together in-sync and wonderful, jumping into staccato patterns at 03:05, locking in gloriously and falling away for the drums again to roll tornadoes into the proceedings, and the virtuoso guitar wailing now with jazz freedom furious rapid lightning in the crashing noise of it all. And we end where we began, the gentle piano chords resonating quietly, framing this dramatic sojourn of sound, this ascension into the clouds and somewhere beyond.

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• 🔔 'Up' is taken from the Irish band's upcoming EP; peep a preview of that here.

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🐣 SHUNYA — MOUNTAIN GAZER

Atmospheric, chilled, this is a Romantic piece of swaying electronica crossed with actual instruments, a morsel of music as stark and fresh as a cold Spring day with the sun out and the sky blue dotted with white tufts of cloud. It comes from Irish musicmaker Alan Keary aka Shunya, who adds the muted glitter of plucked guitar and soaring lilts of violin freely; flute, chilled and jazz-tinged, blows through airily, and saxophone adds peals of soul later on, a whole host of tones and timbres, representing the very non-uniform variety of mountain slopes and escarpments. This Bonobo-flavoured track is called 'Mountain Gazer'.

Succulent percussion layered and rich clicks and tick-tocks sumptuously, providing that texture like a stream rippletrickling around rocks and breezed leaves sheafing and rustling together creaking trees footsteps crunch-scraping on pathway gravel all at once—lovely organic instinctual noises. The explosive handclaps, thuds, clunking noises, snare hits, hi-hats, rainsticks, shakers, all of this adds its rhythmic ambience to the wavy segments of sidechained sound, the rumble of bass and warm chords, fading in and out. This sonic scenery, its mix of instruments, the culmination of it all, feels just like the detached drama of looking at a mountain landscape—ridges into the distance, peaks into the sky, between the green earth and vaulting blue.

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• 🔔 This track comes from Shunya's Mountain Gazer pt.2 EP, available for listening and purchasing on Bandcamp.

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SAMUEL – THESE DAYS

Ever since I first heard Samuel's debut EP, Falling Star I was hooked. Here was a very fresh, very haunting new voice seeping into the music world. The EP was produced by Okzharp (of London-based outfit LV) and paired Samuel's aching vocals with a futuristic post-R&B sort of sound to a stunning degree of hypnotic clarity – though his voice, both then and now, feels as if it transcends any association with "dat future bass". Just like Samuel as a person, his voice is unique.

So thankfully this rare voice, this anti-commonplace set of vocal chords and their unconventional owner, is back for your ears to enjoy, beaming themselves into a new morsel of music called 'These Days'. Produced by London producer Kwes, it's a different sound to the type that graced the Falling Star EP – the cold, glacial, future-forward sounds are gone. However, the minimalism, which basically translates to the producer's careful consideration with Samuel's voice, is still there.

The production is bright, summerful and sunny, soft and soothing synth chords cushioning the vocals, with pockmarking plunks of bass left to peddle their simple subtleties below the meandering croons of Samuel rather than rumbling in-your-face. Clusters of homemade-sounding DIY-esque percussion clink and clankle in the chorus alongside shakers and the lonely thud of a kick as Samuel sings the cryptic hook, "These days are brighter than the sun, so tell me what you want / tell me what you want" – a sentiment reflected in the dripping innocence of this heat-warped music.

What else is good about this? The soaring vibe, the delicious synth sounds, the whole atmospheric, far-off feeling, the spirit of new romance, the deepness of the vocals coated in rich textures snaking through this cloud of production like a lone bird hovering silhouetted against vast blue, or even a the fleeting glint of a passenger plane caught by shards of sunlight amidst nonchalant clouds as it flies lonely and steady out of sight.

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• Please feel free to pre-order 'These Days' from Ninja Tune online shop (the Ninjashop) – or from Bandcamp. It gets released on 31st July via Ninja Tune subsidiary Big Dada.

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☟ Samuel Social Media Presence ☟
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YES/NO GUEST MIX 009 :: HARMFUL LOGIC

Number 9 number 9 number 9 number 9 number 9 number 9 number 9 number 9 number 9. This is the ninth guest mix created for YES/NO. This time, the half-hour collection of tracks has been lovingly stitched together by Harmful Logic. A producer from Drogheda, Ireland, called Steven Clarke, he usually makes music that combines a love of dark, experimental hip hop and trap with animé and the cute sounds of J-pop – two seemingly disparate areas of interest, but it works. It works I tell ya. Check out, for instance, his free-to-download track of 2013's post-summer period, 'Sorry', a hypnotic drone of a track, or the more recent mix of cute and heavy in '愛'.

In this, his 'I Got So Emotional Doing This Mix That Now My Laptop Has Water Damage From My Tears' Mix, Harmful Logic shows us what's been tickling his fancy recently, most of the tracks being much less than a month old. Be prepared for a clash of Japanese pop culture and bristling beats, heavy and soft, harsh and soothing. A highlight, for me personally, arrives early on in the mix, with Montpellier musicmaker TeaLeaf` sampling Ryuichi Sakamoto's 'Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence' in his trap-flavoured track 'San' – and later on with the remix of memory cards' track 'phoenix downs' by yandere, a pretty special spark of electro-glitch.

So please, sit back or find something to do – like accounting, tidying your room, yoga, or just plain old URL browsing – and enjoy the next half an hour of sounds, the musical tastes of Harmful Logic.

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TRACKLIST:

1. Visionist – V-Day
2. GR€G – 水族館 (将来)
3. TeaLeaf` – San
4. Royce Charms – DIVINE
5. GOLDEN LIVING ROOM – 風 DIGITS (FEAT. ULTRA ウルトラ)
6. Le Real 現実 – 2Keybladez (prod. ALTOSOUND)
7. gluTTony – ライトの何百万人 [~Millions of Lights]
8. AEGYOKILLER + Groundislava – GEUMYONG
9. //Y E Λ R S// – Ecole [ 編修 ]
10. memory cards – phoenix downs (yandere remix)
11. t.A.T.u. – Not Gonna Get Us (PURPLE Remix)
12. FRXXMASONS – Karma (YNG SAD Remix)

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PREMIERE 初演 • HARMFUL LOGIC – BETTER TIMES WILL COME [FREE DOWNLOAD]

So here we are. It's a moment in the history of this little site. Remember remember the 4th of November. This is the first time that this blog hosted a premiere of a song. Perhaps the first of many. Perhaps a one off. Perhaps the first in a long series of occasional first-plays and first-listens. In any case, I'm really sorry to call it a premiere because, well, why should we be using the French word? Is there not a better word that we can come up with? All it means is 'first'. So why not another language? We can rule out Russian beacuse it's первый and in the Latin alphabet that's 'pervyy'. Erste - that's German; it's fine. Első sounds nice and that's Hungarian. Or even 第一, which is Japanese and says 'daiichi'. Don't worry. All you'd need to remember is that those two characters mean 'first' and you'd be fine. I've put it in the title just now as a test. Take that, French-rooted English!

In any case, we're here to celebrate the exclusive first-play, first-everything, new song by 20-year-old Irish producer Harmful Logic (real name: Steven Clarke). He is part of the PIR▲.MD Records family, a Mexican label focusing on "new forms of hip-hop and electronic beats" - they released Harmful Logic's debut album Lost In The World, a lush sea of subby beats featuring samples from anime and PlayStation (the first one yo) games with a few collaborations with people like mus.hiba and Kryone. That album is free to download. Indeed, whilst I didn't write about that, I did write about a recent song of his that was free to download called 'Sorry'. In fact, all of his songs are free downloads so I'll just stop mentioning that. Um sorry to go on but also I thought I should mention that Harmful Logic has also participated in Piramd's series of daily free tracks, along with many others on the label.

Shall we get down to it then? Here is his most recent track, not from an upcoming EP or album, but simply a new track for you to enjoy. So please do.

Adopting an otherwordly feel from the start, sped-up samples are rinsed out and drip-dried into a steady set of vocal and instrumental samples that are chopped above an ever-glistening river of ambient synth that washes through the mind. Those samples are taken from J-pop singer Kyary Pamyu Pamyu's song 'Chan Chaka Chan Chan' and used effectively to perpetuate a cyclical feeling of half-happiness in limbo. If the title of the track is anything to go by, it has the sound of a prelude to joy, a proto-euphoria where positive feelings seem to be exuding from the song's soft sounds, yet only in a thin mist.

It does have, however, an all-encompassing vibe that may owe to its luscious synths and samples, but which may be equally indebted to its unchanging gentle beat, a firm, unsyncopated hip hop style rhythm whose kicks boom quietly like gigantic bubbles in the ocean and whose unassuming snares keep time alongside miniature-sounding hi-hats. The unchanging nature of the song, its repetition, holds within it the captivating aura of dance music with a higher tempo, yet because of its own speed keeps it pretty chilled. There's also a sample at the end of some people speaking; this is from anime Puella Magi Madoka Magica.

There's a clear love of Japanese pop culture here, which is absolutely fine, in fact, I actively endorse it. Why limit our entertainment to our own language and culture?

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SAMUEL FALLING STAR EP

Sparks of brilliance sometimes just come from nowhere without any forewarning. Such is the case with London-based Samuel, an enigmatic no-surnamed Irish-born singer & songmaker. Recently he has worked with Gervase Gordon, aka Okzharp - 1/3 of London trio LV - to produce this brand new Falling Star EP.

It's a collection of sounds that have really put a spin on the world of R&B, falling much more into a kind of swirling post-R&B protoplasma, a place where all the form and style of "urban" music is taken from the streets and blasted into far-flung galaxies where physicality is something dreamt-up. Much of this is owing to the noises that in all their careful minimalism make for an enormous atmosphere of a futuristic space-age of music. There are distorted delayed synths in the menacing subby sea of 'Death Star Wonder', sounds of lasers rippling by like a neon-tinged dogfight in space - which is kinda perfect as the song is an intergalactic vision of dancehall-flavoured music, a club night orbiting Earth where there is no day, only the eternally danceable night.

Likewise, in 'Boom Boom Boom', the ultra-clean snapping beat of "present-day" R&B becomes an otherwordly, liquidly-distorted bounce, the romantic pizzicato strings become ultra-computerised beeps. Hip hop faces the future in the short-n-sweet title track 'Falling Star', its shuffling rhythm combining sharp synth chords with fidgeting lead bleeps that become more and more paranoiac towards the end of the song. Here also, Samuel's vocals themselves go through a change with a Jamaican lilt that he clearly seems to enjoy singing with, feeling each note with a longing ache.

One of the crucial elements of all good R&B is of course the voice and it's no different here. Samuel's soulful vocals change to suit each track; they're clean and almost sing-along in 'Death Star Wonder', holding up against the harsh sounds of the song; then there's his tongue-in-cheek parody of contemporary R&B with some of the lines in 'Boom Boom Boom' - "Errbody say hey, hey", mentioning "East Coast" and "West Coast", and declaiming "I'm not a fighter. I'm a lover, baby" halfway through. But in 'Steam Train' his vocals are softer, wrapped in a thin mist of hush that totally suits the slow chill of the song - it's a perfect start to the EP, one that instantly introduces the glistening melodies of imagined planets before going into a gloriously minimalistic verse: each sound is left to resound by itself, Samuel's voice given space to reverb heavenly over everything else.

I wrote about this EP for Dummy magazine at the end of last week. It's difficult to sum it up using different words than I used in that article, so I think what I'll do is just copy and paste them here. Yeah, it's lazy, I know, but, well, maybe there's just no other way to say what I think, ever consider that? "These are isolated idylls of romance; all of it holds reminders of traditional modern pop music, yet its far-flung progressive sound makes it something much more exciting." Pretty much. Where will we find Samuel's voice next? Singing in a pod slowly making its way across the universe... Perhaps not, but if ever there was a sound to remember when the sound of R&B music begins turning its head towards the endless chasm of the future, it's this Falling Star EP.

PS. This is released on Ninjatune affiliate, Technicolour.

PPS. Check out my interview with Samuel!

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HARMFUL LOGIC S☹RRY [FREE DOWNLOAD]

At the time of writing, I'm currently upstairs in a house somewhere in the suburbs of Surrey buzzing off some coffee. It's "French" coffee from Tesco's. Someone is hoovering relentlessly outside the room, thoroughly sucking up that dust 'n' dirt. I've just been having a look at Rob Kardashian's new sock range (here are my favourites) and outside it's kinda sunny but kinda damp as well. But it's not raining, which is a plus. Why do I tell y'all dis? Just to paint a picture. That's all. Oh - I'm getting a bit annoyed with someone putting their feet in my face, as well.

Anyway. We are here for music. But that is an image of what I am doing whilst I listen to this song 'S☹rry' (hereinafter 'Sorry', can't be pastin' that forever) by 20-year-old Irish producer Harmful Logic, aka Steven Clarke, who is from Drogheda. Ever heard of it? Me either, sorry, but apparently it's got quite a nice art scene. That's all I know, thanks Wikipedia. My mind's feeling pretty cloudy and the fizzy wash of sound that exudes from 'Sorry' is quite a nice cushion to wrap around it right now.

The song is based on a semi-unrecognisable set of samples including a woman saying something and a sound like Gregorian chanting - giving it the bleak sense of sanctuary that comes with wandering around a musty old church - as well as more instrumental samples, a stringed something-or-other like muffled glitter in the bubblesome deep of the white-noise synth that shudders below and within all the other sounds.

The beat is done in a lo-fi hip hop style, thin snares cloaked with reverb partner with the slightest of kicks to the metallic metronome of the hi-hat, speeding up and disappearing at some points for some subtle dynamic changes. It suits the lo-fi sound in general, really. Altogether this song is like being dipped in that kind of feeling where you're somewhere but not REALLY THERE, the mush of conversations passing over your ears, other thoughts on your mind. Kind of dark, but relaxed about it all. Chillin'. That's what this song's like.

If you like this then you'll be pleased to know that Harmful Logic also recently put out an album - his debut, Lost In The World - on Mexico-based label, PIR▲.MD Records.

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