🐣 KARYME — BACKYARD THOUGHTS

N E W M U S I C ⌾ LISTEN TO KARYME, BACKYARD THOUGHTS ⌾

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Space and colour get dribbled around the court like basketballs in karyme's 'Backward Thoughts', a gap in the fence of doziness and warm grass. Chords like the panting of a cosmic dog zoom in before warping away in a woozy procession punctuated by pummelling kicks. This double-tap rapid beat, the scratchy worn pastel tones in the wheeze of synth, adds to the cartoonish frame of 'Backyard Thoughts'. As if that wasn't enough, karyme throws jazzy chiming progressions for optimal haphazard lounge feeling. Part uobtrusive, part mindfully scattered: perfect for the nebulous thoughts and cloudwatching of a lawnside pause.

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• 🔔 'Backyard Thoughts' is taken from karyme's freshly released Backyard Thoughts EP. You can stream it on Bandcamp. The coordinated and clashing artwork was created by Daryosh.
• 🔔 The Backyard Thoughts EP arrives after Full Cream, an album of squidgy grooves and diagonal beats released by karyme in April 2019.

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🐣 ON-LY — PUCE

This track is movement in groovesome proportions, wholly kinetic and body-shaking with its impatient shakers and other shuffling elements of percussion with hi-hats and drumstick clacks and abrasive snare thwacks, giving the impression of movement unabated. And whilst the drums twist and turn with roly-poly energy, nervous and stifling, that groovesomeness pops out from below, a tumble of bass notes polished with slight distortion, clusters of bassline phrases that speak out with undeniable funk—Melbourne-based Australian musicmaker On-Ly carves out these layers of rhythm in 'Puce' with satisfying contrast: the robust kicks and bass; the shivering chatter of high-register percussion.

However, this building-blocks boom and shake of the beat and its accoutrements – a very real-life, very angular buildings, empty roads with streetlights' dim gazes, hard and brickish sort of sound – is juxtaposed with the emoting jazz fancy of the instrumental that whirls around those breezy nocturnal judderings. Tremolo keys chime and weave glimmering, stamping the air with clouds of warm lounge-leaning chords, twinkling virtuoso, whilst a synth refrain beset with peals of reverb plays occasional solos, both elements presenting a resounding sense of space and distance. Like parallel city Moonside in Earthbound there is a sense of elsewhere infused in 'Puce', a glittering warren of instrumental noises tinged with dreamlike flavours turn this into a sort of somnolent noir scene, a cocktail bar on the other side.

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• 🔔 'Puce' is taken from On-Ly's recently released The Purple LP, which can be listened to and downloaded over on Bandcamp.
• 🔔 The title of the track refers to a colour, a sort of brownish purple. Dictionary.com defines it thusly:

  "brownish-purple," 1787, from French puce "flea-color; flea," from Latin pucilem (nominative pulex) "flea," from PIE *plou- "flea" (cf. Sanskrit plusih, Greek psylla, Old Church Slavonic blucha, Lithuanian blusa, Armenian lu "flea"). That it could be generally recognized as a color seems a testimony to our ancestors' intimacy with vermin.

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🐣 SUPER MAGIC HATS — SEASHELL FEAT. MAYUMI

Here is an end of the day song from Super Magic Hats, a bittersweet what-a-lovely-time-we've-had-but-how-sad-it's-over kind of song, a song draped in gentle electronics and set on a bed of chill. In order to fully realise this feeling of melancholic euphoria the song features Tokyo-based singer Mayumi (aka GrayNightly, aka Chelsea Terrace) whose breathy vocal whispers plaintive and echoing through the synthetics, an illustration of a person alone in the world painted by the instrumental.

A genuine Balearic sunset sound exudes from the track, a slow sunset winding into the hazy indigo of dusk: the soothing just slightly abrasive pulse of the bass, the slow melody pinging into the distance with delay and reverb setting it timeless in space, the later arpeggios, all of it a well defined melt of tranquilising sounds. At the same time swells of emotion crest with the track's amplitude, with additions to the beat – syncopated snares, rapid hi-hats – with combinations of the two weaving together for subtle dynamics, a gradual rise and fade from the day to dark with memories in tow. 'Seashell' is the transition to twilight, the voice of Mayumi leading the way like a guiding spirit.

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• 🔔 This track is taken from Wish, the Super Magic Hats album released 15th March this year via Tokyo label PROGRESSIVE FOrM. It is possible to purchase it online.

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🐣 AMY AXEGALE X CRAPFACE – SKYPE

Past the obvious sheen of speedy nightcore and sugary early-00s dance pop associations, this track emerges skewed through a prism of noise and angst that sees soft and brooding, crunchy and cute play together in a wild and simple fantasy of sound. It comes from the hivemind of a collaboration between Crapface, location unknown, and Amy Axegale, fka ZEN, who is from Melbourne, Australia.

Smooth syncopated chords boop bubblesome in a pattern that continues safely throughout, but then there's this heavy twist, a smudge of darkness on this candy gloss, pouncing out from the pastel fog like a tiger when the chords grow and distort, baring teeth, with kicks pulsing in time below and savage snare hits popping above, filling those formerly playful tropical chords with dread and frustration. This noisy electro sludge, the hardcore edge going on here reminded us of the rabid 'Dog' by SebastiAn, whereas its pairing of conventional and unconventional feels very Mr Oizo — cradling and destroying sounds. These two sprang to mind almost immediately.

However, 'Skype' is of course neither, but perhaps exists for similar reasons as these French artists' music: A reaction to the clean-cut in sound, simultaneously exhibiting that emotions can exist in electronic music with this howling wordless disconnect from physicality. Similarly the song title, an ambiguous summoning of Skype as an experiential thing that can mean anything to anyone, exhibits an aphysical source of inspiration. And as the track dances away in its closing 30 seconds, hi-hats ticking with the beat, the synth wonky and bleary, you feel that the Skype call went to plan, and the song's dynamic swing between a contentment and something verging on rage, a burning internal struggle, is quelled for now at least.

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• This is an apparently one-off release courtesy of London-based entity Calm Records.
• Also, the artwork for this track, some fantasy palace in some fantasy garden, is by visual artist beeple (human name: Mike Winkelmann). It's called ISOTOPE. His Tumblr showcases lots of art and it's all imaginative and grand.

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TIM SHIEL – TANGERINE

This tasty morsel is by Tim Shiel; 'Tangerine' is the title of it. Through the clunking clatter of rapid fire percussion samples, banging and clacking and cutting with the additional flare of razor-sharp cymbal, you can instantly imagine this track as a living-and-breathing entity, something played by many people with mostly live instruments; hear the pounding robust 4/4 house thud of the kick drum, the subtleties of the ticking hi-hat. Even the bass feels "real", rumbling and rough-edged, undulating like lungs expanding and contracting.

Add to this the twists and turns of hypnotic reed instrument singing out of the flowing mist of the track, and bouts of intensification, where ghostly breeze synth whirls up and around, thickening the mist, howling with the added jangles of percussion, the raging whirr of the bass chopping through the air; add all this, and hear how it pours from your headphones or speakers, how it fills the air with spirit and passion, and feel how at the same time it is a lifeless wonder, a cold uncaged monster born of circuitry.

It may seem obvious but I revel in it, so let's talk about it anyway: strange, but amazing, how a soul can inhabit a machine, and how something so clearly "electronic" can feel so organic you can practically feel its pulse hot and streaming in your heart.

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• Tim Shiel is from Melbourne, Australia, and aside from making music he also has a radio show called Something More on Double J / triple j.

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SUI ZHEN – MEGA DRIVE

Oooo-eeeeee, wow, so, this is supremely pretty. More than that it's scene-conjuring, evocative, heartbreaking, heartwarming, tear-inducing, smile-making – it's 'Mega Drive' by Becky Sui Zhen aka Sui Zhen (aka DJ Susan), a musicmaker and all-round atmosphere creator from Melbourne, Australia.

'Mega Drive' seems to call out from an unplaceable, nonexistent retro-futuristic crevasse deep in the music world – there is something otherworldly about it, a gracious gentle delicacy achieved by the mix of plaintive, unthreatening keyboard-demo beat and the endearing vocals, like insubstantial wisps of clouds making their way across a splashed-orange sunset sky, or like friendly ghosts trying to make contact. The very title is a conjuring of nostalgia: the Sega Mega Drive: symbol of lost youth for a generation torn between the analogue and the digital age.

Synth strings follow the vocal melody somewhat with effortless simplicity, still that beat gently blooping with its semi-tropical snips of sharp percussion, decayed bass rolling itself around the bottom end of the track with a reserved attitude, wobbling slightly like the blurred edges of memories that make you laugh and cry, the whole thing pockmarked with indistinct shouts of "hey!" rising up as if somebody's trying to wake you up from a dream.

The aesthetic Sui Zhen has employed here is one that seeps into your spirit, cradles your sense of self with a forlorn feeling, effuses the reverie of the past from a chasm of abstract memories. It's like… the sense of unutterable longing for childhood and all its beautiful accoutrements, its comfort and its wonder and the sense of time being elongated into a fantasy future as yet undisturbed and waiting to be discovered, happy days of innocence and simplicity. That's how I understand it anyway.

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• 'Mega Drive' is taken from Sui Zhen's very very recent EP, Body Reset, a beautiful collection of introspective songs much in the same vein as this one, exploring "the resetting of both body and mind" and "influenced as much by late nights in Koenji, Tokyo as at an onsen/sauna in the mountains of Nagano," and released by boutique Tokyo-based label eskers.
• Purchase Body Reset on tape cassette here. (Also, don't you just love the art? The green and pink colours go together just perfectly~).
• Sui Zhen was part of the Red Bull Music Academy in 2010, alongside Daisuke Tanabe, and has previously worked with Andras Fox as Sui + Fox.

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SUPER MAGIC HATS – COASTLINE

This is some music from a Melbourne-based music entity called Super Magic Hats. Sometimes, according to the SoundCloud bio, it's two people, but it's "mainly" one person. Which is fine. That's fine for me.

What I also just noticed is that I was about to acronymise (?) Super Magic Hats and I got SMH. That might be intentional – if so, nice one; if not, I still love it. They tweeted me today after I mentioned something about a Tokyo band called LLLL (they make really pretty music) – after that I checked SMH's latest track and here we are: here is 'Coastline'.

It's intriguing that this downtempo cloudwave is so bleakly beautiful, so illustrative of standing on the edge of tomorrow with as many hopes as fears, scanning the sea for everything and nothing. Hey, I guess it's the nature of the inspiration for this track, which I can only assume is a coastline. It sounds like a coastline.

And it achieves this goal with crunching synth whirling around your ears, with hissing cymbals and multilayered clap-clicks and the hi-hat's frenetic mechanical tick, the fuzz of waves and wind merging into one. Wordless words soar from fore to background, disturbing the glisten of golden clouds, the tinkle of some glockenspiel type thing, making way for plums of aggressive pulsing synth to take over towards the end of the track. It's expansive and all-encompassing enough to penetrate your mind; just like staring out at the sparse horizon from the dynamic meeting of sea and earth, this track clears the mind of any needless bullshit that might happen to be stinking it up.

Um. That's it. And it in particular is taken from a forthcoming EP called Kumori (meaning "cloudy weather" or "cloudiness" in Japanese) that is not scheduled for release as much as it WILL be released at some point between now and the end of this year.

• While you're here, why not go check out Super Magic Hats' debut EP?

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LANKS – RISES AND FALLS

I've seen a lot of this recently. A lot of what? A lot of SoundCloud pages that are hardly filled, or which have just the one track uploaded, and few followers, but which already shows such a definitive direction, such a polished sound. Maybe it's a kind of perfectionism, in that only a few songs will ever be "perfect" enough for the purposes of sharing with a general public; maybe it's that inspiration doesn't visit often enough; or perhaps it's all just an intricate PR strategy, and everything is ready already— I don't know! I have no idea! But what I do know is that I've seen a lot of them recently.

What does that mean? It could mean that more and more people are paddling their own canoes, making their own music and sharing it with the world – perhaps inspired by others who have done the same (i.e. getting internet famous) – and this is the meaning that I would like to believe, at least for now. People just wanna make music. And let them!

With this said, please allow me to introduce all the way from Melbourne, Australia, LANKS *tiny fanfare*. Who? Well, LANKS is the electronic project, the moniker, of Will Cuming, the creator of the only song currently uploaded to SC, 'Rises and Falls'. Having a little nose around on his Facebook page revealed that this is taken from an upcoming EP – and this, if this one song is anything to go by, is going to very good.

The track is a unique in that you don't often hear stuff in 6/8 timing which this at least appears to be. A slightly disorienting beat juggles toms and slapping kick, scratching hi-hat and dusty electronic snare, leading you effectively into a whirling dreamworld. This is the perfect foundation for the song itself, for the lyrics, which describe a tragic story (I won't ruin it, just listen) in balladesque form. A voiceless chorus underpins the spoken-word/singing's intimate style, guitar arpeggios join in halfway, synth chords gradually rise up out of the deep. The timing changes at around 1:50, with sub-bass kicks booming a 4/4 pattern, a heartbeat for the intense tragedy of this moment; accompanied by female vocals, LANKS and militaristic snares and cymbals builds the track to a crashing crescendo. Fin.

Really interesting stuff, indie-sound (essentially) with a touch of electropop and folk, reminiscent of Alt-J dare I say, but more substantial both in sound and wording. When is the EP out? Dunno.

• But you can download this song for free from LANKS's Bandcamp.
• Also there's a nicely drawn video for 'Rises and Falls' that you can watch now too

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CHELA ROMANTICISE (BOYS GET HURT REMIX)

So I'll start this one by saying that I haven't actually heard the original of this song. Usually with a remix I like to hear the original version. But in this case, since I can't do that, I won't do that, and I'll just judge the song on what it is. A song, in and of itself.

It comes from a new EP, Romanticise, by Melbourne-based artist Chela released on freewheeling endless-2005-honeymoon French label Kitsuné. And as they often do, they've put a lot of remixes on the album too. Which is nice because it's a way to prolong the tastiest elements of an enjoyable song without just sticking it on repeat and risk damaging its freshness - plus it's also nice to give some exposure to those lesser known producers who "do" the remixes. In this instance, it's Japanese duo Boys Get Hurt.

Labelling themselves as emotional dance music - even "sea disco" - they create some really nice tracks that evoke sunshine and romance with a hint of nostalgia. I've even done a Q&A with one half of the duo, Yuki Abe. Their remix of Chela's 'Romanticise' exhibits that same brand of fresh, comfortable indie dance which first attracted me to them.

There's nothing really futuristic about it. Like I said, they seem to inject a sense of nostalgia into their tracks and this one's no different, despite being a remix. Perhaps it's that tropical vibe of theirs. Is that nostalgic? I suppose its of a certain time - mid-1990s, but then again what do I know. There's a beach-destined melody on the xylophone counterpointed with a marimba kinda sound that floats playfully within the beat, the new-pair-of-trainers-squeaking-across-a-polished-floor synth sound that bwips and bweeps, the bongo drumming that tribalises the atmosphere at the start. It's all delicious and catchy.

The vocals from Chela sing out with catchy emotion, moving from stretched high to low and confidential; they follow a nice stop-start pattern in the chorus that Boys Get Hurt have followed with a combined synth chord/bass off-beat rhythm. A slice of the vocal has been sampled and lowered, appearing towards the end, alongside a variously scatty hi-hat pinging - falling finally to reverberating piano chords, a shaker, that glockenspiel sound, and a clap. How else could you have wished the song to finish? It's nice. A real sunset ending.

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