N-QIA SHOOTINGSTAR // TREE [VIDEO]

Last time I heard from Tokyo duo N-qia it was their collaboration with Italian producer Neeva for the song 'One Day' on his Even If... EP. That particular song offered up orchestration and melody in the midst of an EP fraught with deep, dark sounds - my favourite out of all the tracks on it in fact. So naturally I wanted to follow up and see what N-qia were doing now.

Turns out they're doing an album. Doing, making, whatever, but an album is imminent from these two. Yep, producer Takma (aka solo artist Serph) and vocalist Nozomi will be releasing Fringe Popcical 26th October on Japanese label Virgin Babylon Records. Until then, we have the following songs taken from that upcoming release with which to enjoy ourselves.

First off there's 'Shootingstar', the perfect showcase to this duo's style of alternative, "unexplored" pop. With Takma providing staccato MIDI-esque guitar sounds alongside soaring clouds of bleeps, the track runs as a house tune with the four-to-the-floor beat thumping below. There are plenty of moments where the song breaks, like sunlight through clouds, to provide bright piano work, chords that conjure the smell after summer rain, the consequent glitter of golden sun on soaking pavements.

Nozomi's vocals are stunning, urgent whispers often in monotone that gives a sharp humanity to the coastline of complex sounds that Takma lays down, adding contrast with her slow, considered style against the frenetic percussive and melodic patterns of the song; her voice offering up a subtle starkness with its layered and sometime-harmonising mist of hush.

They're even more haunting in the dramatic track 'Tree', where they shoot through like rapid cross-hatchings of vapor trails. Here they follow the melody of the song, which is one seemingly struck with powerful notions of human cohabitation with nature (that's what I imagine, anyway). Her style is one in which her voice holds onto each single note with lingering love, so each change up or down is breathtakingly vivid.

The video for this track features what resemble Balinese shadow puppets; the music, too, is reminiscent of the orchestra of instruments that usually accompanies these traditional shows, the gamelan. The percussion in the song is lush and clattering and is supported by a rich sea of plucked strings, a modern day gamelan if ever there was one. Takma seems to be at his best when the sounds he creates are most compositional, orchestral, and the strings, flute-like noises and soft synth vox sounds he weaves together are perfect evidence of this. The beat in this track, especially when it first comes in, is something that cannot be ignored, either - it's addictive and effective. What else can I say but that this is a beautiful track with an equally beautiful video.

The album Fringe Popicical sounds as if it is going to be a wonderful collection of well-composed, gloriously percussive tracks inspirited with visitations of ethereal vocals. Look out for it. Well I will be looking out for it so you could just look out for my own look-out, ok?

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TREE FT BEAT CULTURE AND LENA KUHN DEMONS

Yo yo yo yo. How are you? Good, me too. So I was sent some info that included a link to this song, 'Demons', a while ago and I was pretty surprised at the originality at work in the sounds. It's by Tree, real name Oliver Tree Nickell and features beats and noises from experimental pop music-maker, Beat Culture, as well as vocals from Lena Kuhn. I still haven't heard much about these guys, though I did just google Lena Kuhn and found that a lot of other music blogs wrote about this song already. Boo-hoo poor me I'm so lazy.

It's from Tree's debut EP also called Demons, released on Apollo Records late August. I listened to all of it and really liked it, but it turns out that I like this song the most out of all of them. It's a really good song that leaks an atmosphere of angst and anxiety all over the shop. There's such a glistening array of noises present here that it's kinda impossible to listen all the way through and not like at least one thing about the song. But the star of the show is Tree's voice, I'd say, but it's the mix of everything that gives the end result. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I guess? Lol?

Anyway, it begins with some languishingly strummed guitar that's augmented by this haunting whistling-wind kinda sound. Starting quiet and then in rumbles some hefty bass and the skeleton of a beat whose snare crashes like distant ships running aground in a pitch black night, whose hi-hat glitches like a neurotic clock. Emotion seeps in with grey flights of ever-falling strings, thickening later on in the song with something more cello-like. It's a sophisticated atmospheric composition where bright loses to dark in an emotive murk of sounds.

The vocals from Mr Tree himself are pretty spectacular as well. It's kinda like rapping, kinda like spoken word, kinda like singing. His words teem with emotion, not just in the near-twisted aggressive way he spits the lines as if them being in his mouth is leaving too sour a taste, like he's gotta get them out, but also in the words themselves. The lyrics are morbid and paranoid and are littered to references to demons and "the self". Some that stick in my head: "Sometimes I look at who I am in the mirror and forget / Sometimes I return home to demons on my doorstep / Just let me be / I want you to leave / Sometimes I get so suffocated I could barely breathe" and "I knew that it was time to go face to face with demons from my last life" and the chorus refrain "Sometimes it's easier pretending that you're somebody you're not". All conjure the sense of different parts of a person wrestling with themselves, the frustration of defining yourself to yourself. And the backing vocals from Lena Kuhn give everything a spooky, near-schizophrenic vibe - a quite beautiful effect if I may say so.

A real surprise. Dark, experimental, brimming with emotion... What will come next. I don't know. Watch & see.

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Listen to Beat Culture on SoundCloud