GOURMET — STONE COLD STEVE AUSTIN

⌾ LISTEN TO GOURMET, STONE COLD STEVE AUSTIN ⌾

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Self-proclaimed maker of "spaghetti pop", the Cape Town-based Gourmet inducts us into a syrupy and psychedelic tribute to WWE star, Stone Cold Steve Austin. Well, tribute or not, much of the song — also named 'Stone Cold Steve Austin' — is spent with a vocal refrain that begins "Stone Cold Steve Austin..." It's wrestler-heavy, but it's not about wrestling.

It's just part of the idiosyncratic nature of Gourmet's music. A lyrical mosaic, stream of consciousness in style, the spoken word lines are unaffected, unpolished, and remain a refreshing strolling vernacular of a vocal.

Similarly, while decidedly modern in its undertaking, with its minimalist appeal and spacious production, 'Stone Cold Steve Austin' dips heavily into the hunny pot of the past, Gourmet also namechecking Michael Jackson as the track gloops onward in a groove, in a galaxy of its own.

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• 🔔 'Stone Cold Steve Austin' by (who calls it "intercontinental left-field pop music") is taken from his Peace Forever Seaside Senegal Castle EP, released by Baketown Records. You can get it on Apple Music among other places.
• 🔔 Update: There is also now a 'Stone Cold Steve Austin' video.

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☟ Gourmet Internet Presence ☟
facebook ⚘ soundcloud ⚘ instagram ⚘

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🐣 TYLER — TOUCHING

'Touching' by South African producer Tyler purportedly inhabits the world of Wave, an environment like domed gardens on a terraforming planet, palm fronds jostling against plexiglass in artificial breezes: artificial, harsh, but deep and thriving with life. The musicmaker arrived to the scene just over a year ago, courtesy of a friend who suggested he listen to the Plastician's now-defunct Rinse.fm show—citing that "the slower tempo allowed for a more emotive journey," he ditched his previous dustup outputting moniker Melodik and blasted off into space for this, his first ever release.

And space is what it is. With the reverse synth sounds, tinged with Middle Eastern elasticity in its slow aching melody, it sounds very much like a cosmic version of the theme for Shifting Sand Land from Super Mario 64; whilst the twisting scattered glitter mingles with the warbling modulated waves of cold synth for that air of elsewhere mystery, the bass below rumbles with ascending melody, slow and steady, pushing the music upwards for a determined feel, more like the Mario 64 Bowser Road theme in feeling: big, impending doom, otherworldiness, but ultimately gritted-teeth pushing forward. And then we have more textured flute sounds into the bargain, enriching the track with body as the beat ticks and rattles, a rolling of clacking fills and trills.

This is scene-setting stuff—the wild expanse of it, the far-flung exotic nature of it as the spacey synths mix with closer-to-home melodies of Eastern persuasion, familiar but altered in form, silicon sands reaching out to a black horizon that glows where the void meets the sharp dunes of the desert, human vocal samples ghostly and faded like the memories and paranoia of explorers bound never to set foot on Earth again.

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• 🔔 You may stream 'Touching' by Tyler via this hyperlink here. It's been released courtesy of UK label Liquid Ritual, founded by producer Kareful, amongst others.

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☟ Tyler Internet Presence ☟
soundcloud (as Melodik) ⚘
youtube (also as Melodik)

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🐣 TOYA DELAZY — KEKEKE

The swirling hypnotic synth, the gentle nature of it, makes you feel that you're in good hands, that you're in a safe, comfortable place; these cushions of sound, these soft fluttering filtered noises, fading into the negative space left lovingly at the heart of 'Kekeke', providing the perfect backdrop for the vocals of London-based South African musicmaker and singer, Toya Delazy. Sung in Zulu, her mother tongue, the artist channels her great-grandmother – actual Zulu royalty, Princess Constance Magogo KaDinuzulu, "one of the first indigenous female composers," she tells us – by infusing the praise singing traditions of her ancestor with contemporary surroundings that fizz contemporarily energetic. "I wanted to bring back the concept of praise singing in a modern setting, almost in a slam sort of way," Toya explains.

So we have this bright voice, a vocal that seems to shine as it calls into the mists of synth that curl as the track's backdrop, just a few portions of percussion to help solidify the frame surrounding the blissfully content yet far-flung and nostalgic singing. A sparse scattering of a beat thuds lo-fi four-to-the-floor whilst hi-hats scrape, in a section where the vocals turn to something more akin to rap: the lower pitch, the rapidity, the low-slung laid-back nature of it, the superb simplicity of it, the airy instrumental letting the words breathe. "The song is about the hypocrisy of people talking behind your back and the crooked smile they wear when they next see you," Toya explained the song's Zulu lyrics over email. "No matter how pearly white the smile, beware the crocodile."

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• 🔔 You can download the wonderful 'Kekeke' for free directly from Toya Delazy's official site.

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☟ Toya Delazy Internet Presence ☟
facebook ⚘ soundcloud ⚘ official site ⚘ twitter ⚘ instagram ⚘ wikipedia

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🐣 GOURMET — YELLOW

How so few elements can create such a luscious soundscape, yet here we are, a cradle of minimalism becomes this lavish tapestry of sound. The drums tumble thud and shimmy shuffle with kicks and clacking handclaps seesawing beneath sprinkling shakers, the whole roly-poly of it organic and breathy on the background of silence, a stark and basic binary where each percussive gambol is a 1 to absence-of-sound's 0. These are the wonderful foundations of 'Yellow' by Cape Town's very own Gourmet—atop these buttresses sit turrets and towers painted with wonky wah-wah synth chords that ring out with hollow iridality in patterns of innocence and playfulness.

In the midst of these half-triumphal quasi-brass hits, the vocals of Gourmet seem to spill out in a profound procession of detail and cryptic mentions that make this quite an abstracted stream of consciousness, the dry matter-of-fact tone in the voice adding to the humour and oddball hat-tips as they accrue collage-esque (much like the track artwork) throughout the track, snippets such as "you're blonde, that's unlikely" and specificities like "small hands, gluten-free spaghetti lad" as well as the hook that speaks of "cyan, magenta, yellow's such a boring word"—high on wordplay.

By the end it's a sudden sultry list of alliterative allusions to sex, "fingertips unzip clitoris lips and flickering anxiousness…" as synth bass pulses like a heavy heartbeat, disappears, gives way to more soft percussion as the vocals continue breathless, descending peals of synth like the jubilation of wedding bells, the scattered mutterings of nervous youth leading up to this crescendo of cloistered coupling that all awkwardness dreams of.

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• 🔔 'Yellow' by self-proclaimed "Spaghetti Boy" and musical entity Gourmet is out now courtesy of Cape Town record label, 1991.

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☟ Gourmet Internet Presence ☟
facebook ⚘ soundcloud ⚘ instagram ⚘ spotify

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