MAGNETIC VINES — MAGNETIC VINES

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⌾ LISTEN TO MAGNETIC VINES BY MAGNETIC VINES ⌾

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Billing itself as “a soundtrack for tending rooftop gardens by moonlight”, Magnetic Vines’ eponymous release is a selection of essentially relaxing soundscapes. Many of the tracks have evocative titles; for example, there’s ‘Vines and Old Concrete’, ‘Night Bloom’ and ‘Quiet Old Shipwreck’, all of which feature age-warped acoustic guitar, plucked as if from a bygone time and space entirely.

Particularly interesting are the pieces forming the second half of the album; four tracks titled ‘Cyanotype’ and four named ‘Constellation’, ordered by key like an etude or a prelude. While the later Constellations are expansive and magnetic, the Cyanotypes — named after the blue-hued photographic printing process — are melancholic, inward looking, and range from space-filled and poignant (‘Cyanotype in G# minor’) to starkly ambient (‘Cyanotype in Eb minor’), with a warm nocturne in the form of the finale in C major.

Overall, the tones and textures of its Mediterranean-flavoured guitars, crooning brass, cradling harmonicas and subtle synthwork are perfectly paired with album’s core value: imagination. Magnetic Vines in its entirety is a wash of soft clarity, like holding an old book in your hands for the first time, or as its concept suggests, tending to the new sprouting leaves on familiar shrubs — all bathed in moonlight, of course.

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• 🔔 You can stream and or download Magnetic Vines variously by following this link right here.

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DANIEL BORTZ — YOU CAN STAY FOREVER

⌾ LISTEN TO DANIEL BORTZ, YOU CAN STAY FOREVER ⌾

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With its haunting pitched croons lifted from Alicia Keys' 'No One' effusing from a backdrop of synths bleeding together and time-worn beats, 'You Can Stay Forever' by producer Daniel Bortzreads like a vestige of the past. It moves through forests of flustered elastic acid arpeggios, plumes of vox synth laying a fog over proceedings, while the stuttering echoes of thin, gleaming chords punctuate the song like strobe lights.

The faint syncopation of it all, the crushed indistinct hi-hats, the destructed snares and their harsh reverberation, the lo-fi aesthetic, its juddering dancefloor atmosphere (sticky floors; the floral tangle of beer and perfume) — all of it culminates in an unearthed relic of a track; a cassette plunged into a tape deck that conjures ghosts and memories of a grainy, unremembered time instead of sound.

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• 🔔 This is taken from the new album by Daniel Bortz, Stay, out 16th October on Permanent Vacation. You can pre-order it on Bandcamp if you like, or memorise the tracklist below for fun.

  Daniel Bortz — Stay tracklist:
  1. Grind
  2. Holding You
  3. How Far Can We Go
  4. South Beach
  5. On A Boat
  6. Smells Like CK One
  7. Stay
  8. Teenage Emotions
  9. Isolation
  10. Together
  11. You Can Stay Forever
  

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EDYTH — AGAIN

⌾ LISTEN TO EDYTH, AGAIN ⌾

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'Again' by producer Edyth begins with resonating drone and distressed aging analogue textures, gleaming with poignancy like a key item suspended, spinning, glowing above an altar at the end of an ancient colonnade (Triforce, anyone? Or maybe when the key drops down with that glimmering sound when you defeat Bowser in Super Mario 64.)

Anyway. This is scene-setting ambience, and it grows more mechanical in its whirring heart, gradually moving into curling waves of static that envelop the atmosphere with intensity; the perception of a physical object, or a feeling, warping in memories over time.

The track effuses vaporwave, not only in its curdled sonic aesthetics, but also in how a pitch-shifted vocal rhythmically trundles into earshot, whispering sharply. Trap-flavoured sub-bass hops from note to note, somersaulting octaves in simple dance-mat steps, the constant tick of a hi-hat like the chain of a drawbridge raising — the portal to another realm.

Elevating vaporwave past its usual tropes and combining it with other contemporary musical traditions, Edyth creates a simple but blissful marriage of background aesthetics — and all the soundtracking potential they bring with them — and the close-at-hand vitality of a beat that roots 'Again' more readily in a real world setting.

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• 🔔 'Again' by Edyth is actually taken from an album called Sadie Pop, which was released via netlabel Kalibrplus. You can choose the preferred way you stream or purchase the album by clicking on this link.
• 🔔 Speaking about Sadie Pop, Edyth says that it's "meant to be a small but different type of beast from what I usually do," going on to call it "a refining of my production pallette and a gift to those that have enjoyed what I do as a beatmaker" and "a display of my love for the types of music I've loved listening to this past decade: wave, vaportrap, sad boy, cloud, witch house, dub, bass and phonk."

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☟ Edyth Internet Presence ☟
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💿 AIDA SKEE — MACH LEISURE

⌾ LISTEN TO AIDA SKEE - PKMN SNAP ⌾

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Skittering and beset with structured staccato slices of unidentifiable sampling, 'Pkmn Snap' by Aida Skee feels like a cool breeze. What relevance it bears to 1999 N64 title Pokémon Snap isn't immediately obvious, and perhaps there isn't one, but in its simplicity — its lines of airy sampling, sparing and delicate bassline, background ambience — there is something at least in spirit to the game's soundtrack, notably its 'The Young Photographer' theme.

Cheerful without being sunny, sparse without feeling overly lonely, 'Pkmn Snap' similarly conjures an imaginary landscape. Not unsurprising, as the musicmaker themselves revealed to yes/no that Mach Leisure, the beat tape which the track is taken, is inspired at least partly "hiking while listening to Knxwledge, Marvin Gaye, and deep cut '70s R&B." Physical landscapes, and how music enhances or reflects them, play their part.

This musical foundation is noticeable on the rest of the beat tape, which sometimes gloops with vaporwave ooze ('can't see shit'), glitters like the vapor-friendly tracts of nostalgia in title track 'MACH LEISURE', or radiates warmth as in the comforting groove of album closer 'Where to start it'.

Attention to detail comes to the foreground in tracks like 'right' — its beat clicks into something high octane, before samples drop in slowly skewed and bubbling. It's places like this where Aida Skee's process reveals itself, Mach Leisure being a collection of experiments in high BPM tracks that still retain a "relaxing element of R&B sample-based music."

This sense of relaxation is an element throughout that was (probably) sought after and welcomed by the musicmaker themselves. "I made this whole tape while living alone in Montreal, smoking too much legal weed," they say. "The theme is meant to be like attempting to attain relaxation as fast as possible and how that's sort of an oxymoron."

Tricks in tempo aren't the only cocktail that binds Mach Leisure: "The tracks integrate pitched up and pitched down components of the same sampled tracks, use heavily warped or distorted sample components in tandem with non-distorted loops," the producer explains.

That sense of speed, as well as glistening pairings of pitched and non-pitched samples, occurs in 'like relaxing in a car that's going fast' — a title that sums up the whole idea behind the album — and following track, 'Keep me talking', whose sampled flashes and snaps crackle with chaos. In them, the situation of creating the album — not just hiking in the mountains and listening to music, but also weed and panic and paranoia — come into play. It's both a result of, and a cure for, those negative emotions that inspire minds to race and disappear into realms we wished they wouldn't.

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• 🔔 Stream and download Mach Leisure over on Aida Skee's Bandcamp.

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☟ Aida Skee Internet Presence ☟
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E.M.M.A — INTO INDIGO

⌾ LISTEN TO E.M.M.A - INTO INDIGO ⌾

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E.M.M.A has been an interesting producer for yes/no ever since 'Mindmaze'. This bouncy splice of beats and baroque was inspired by educational dungeon crawler/quiz 'em up Mindmaze, a side-game featured on the much-loved e-encyclopedia Encarta 95 (see here for reference.)

Moving on two and a half years since then, E.M.M.A has amassed full power into Indigo Dream, her first album since 2013's Blue Gardens (also marking a titular move on to the next major hue of the rainbow). And the first track to be taken from the forthcoming release — 'Into Indigo' — is a gleaming overture into E.M.M.A's multi-faceted electronic world.

Like 'Mindmaze', though fuller bodied and less midiwave in aesthetic, 'Into Indigo' speaks of a fantasy world, fugue-flavoured, interpolating notes. Feeling akin to microgenre dungeon synth — more to the point, without being beholden by that label — the track glimmers with soft synths tumbling in a mesh of arpeggio and flashing flourishes, each element kinetic, like everything's vibrating. It's the sort of highly credible induction into a different reality that hints of vaporwave influences, too.

The metallic fuzz of a picked bass propels the track forward, a battlement of thumping, treble-focused kicks and punchy snares, doused with splashy cymbals, builds itself up amidst the spectral synth. It's a combination that feels reminiscent of Jim Guthrie's soundtrack to 2011 videogame Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP: transportive, but rooted in real-world instrumentation.

Drama twists its way into the track, space and simplicity like gaps in towering clouds, trails through ancient woodland, mountain paths; the background noise of buffeting wind summoning resolve, grit. And after this sonic introduction, clambering the epic ridge that separates wherever you're listening to the album from the aural forms of the album itself, the world map of Indigo Dream stretches out ahead.

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• 🔔 Check out our Lazy Interview with E.M.M.A
• 🔔 Indigo Dream by E.M.M.A is out 23rd July on London label Local Action. You can pre-order Indigo Dream via E.M.M.A's Bandcamp, available as a digital download and on cassette. A "deluxe edition" cassette bundle bags you a poster, eight-page photo inlay and a special E.M.M.A guitar plectrum.
• 🔔 A whole hosts of artists have contributed to visual side to Indigo Dream, with exquisite portrait photography by Ivan Weiss, more photography (this time on a beach) by Sophie Davies, a prog-rock worthy typeface designed by Patrick Saville, and Morgan Hislop putting together the exclusive poster (see below).

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🐣 KAZU — SALTY

⌾ LISTEN TO KAZU, SALTY ⌾

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With its delicious blooping bumps of bass drum and pastoral soft sounds rising in thumb-daubed pastel arpeggios, 'Salty' is a mist of sea air, a coastal breeze, an idyll of freshness swirling around gnarled trees; it is also urgent, a bubbling of thoughts, gradually turning into something that feels almost panicked.

"hurry up" KAZU sings towards the end, whilst sounds become like short breaths, spots of light in your vision, being unsure where to look anymore. Cells vibrating like molecules.

That KAZU is Kazu Makino, co-founder of rock Blonde Redhead, and 'Salty' - so named for its cryptic and statemently loveable hook, "i bet you're salty" - is the first track to be taken from her upcoming debut solo album, Adult Baby.

With credits on the single a starter-pack rollerdex of names ranging from Brazilian percussionist Mauro Refosco to composing legend Ryuichi Sakamoto, the instrumental for 'Salty' is unquestionable. Plumes of lightness, trinkets of percussion, analogue loops and dives that breathe extra vitality into the track. Though KAZU, with her expressionist lyrics and distinctive, rounded tones, emotes enough for multiple lifetimes throughout.

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• 🔔 'Salty' is taken from the upcoming debut from KAZU, Adult Baby, which is set for release on Kazu Makino's brand new imprint of the same name later this year. It will be distributed by !K7, by the way.
• 🔔 The video for 'Salty', a concept of Makino herself, was directed, filmed and edited by Paride Ambrogi and Jonas Ranner in Elba, Italy.

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☟ KAZU Internet Presence ☟
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🐣 RIVAL CONSOLES — MEMORY ARC

You know that feeling when the sun is too bright, and it's too hot, and humid, and the brightness of the sun is so much that you can basically feel the UV toasting your skin, and you can smell the heat. That piercing abrasive sunlight feels like the sounds in 'Memory Arc', created by English musicmaker Rival Consoles; primarily this is a heavenly harp sound that is degraded and decayed, the scorch of retinas as humans look upon gods, the curse of theophany. Like a molten zither it plays—or like inverse steel pans for an inverted paradise.

Because there is that flipside to tropical beauty and to the beauty of nature in general, and that is in the danger of it, the undesirable and uncontrollable; survival at nature's mercy. The sweltering heat, dehydration, poison and venom, infection, insects. It feels as if the lower tones of Rival Console's monolithic track provide the looming menace, of something primeval and earth-shaking, whilst the scorching sweeps of melody above paint a picture of the parched sun.

And so there is this sense of wonder, but at no time does it feel triumphant, or chilled. The feelings here, in the drawn-out nature of it, the abrasiveness, the actual progression of the notes, the feelings are of anxiety at its root, the basest worries in the midst of a world a million times bigger than ourselves; a concept that is reminiscent of a similar one in The Drowned World by J. G. Ballard, where global warming has taken our minds back to a world of prehistory. With these sweeping threats and glittering terrors, 'Memory Arc' may represent our most primordial collective recollections.

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• 🔔 The looming 'Memory Arc' is taken from Rival Consoles' new album Persona, released back in April on Erased Tapes.

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☟ Rival Consoles Internet Presence ☟
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📣 LAZY INTERVIEW #27: GLACCI

This laziest of interview series returns with the spotlight turned on UK producer Glacci, who is answering the pastel terracotta questions below in grey serif. Making vital music in the realm of experimental electronic, this crafter of sounds summons late night mindful meanderings with a cocktail of overdriven beats, rising tides of noise, glittering veils of synth, all of it providing a sufficiently intense experience. It inhabits this wonderful dimension of musical ambivalence: is it brutal, dysphoric? Or is it celebratory, euphoric?

Elements of these two sonic atmospheres crunch and glide in Glacci's music, perhaps the product of making music in "the early hours of the morning"—something about being awake when you're supposed to be asleep, or when most people at least are wrapped in slumber, is conducive to music that does not necessarily challenge but that strips away normal reality, revealing raw ragged ideas ripped directly from the brain unfiltered by pretence or presumption. This nocturnal freedom, this interdimensional codeswitching, thrives in the sounds created by Glacci, and is something very relatable if you are also a nocturnal soul. Let's learn a little more about him.

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w h o   a r e   y o u ?   w h e r e   a r e   y o u   f r o m ?   w h a t   d o   y o u   d o ?

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I'm Kyle, I’m from Nottingham in the UK and I'm a musician.

h o w   d i d   y o u   s t a r t   c r e a t i n g   m u s i c ?

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When I was young I grew up surrounded by many different genres of music. Everything from late 90's French House to Hip Hop to Metal and everything in between. I already played guitar and some drums, then I learned how to DJ before I made electronic music. My cousin had a club residency when I was 13 and he would show me tons of old Trance, Happy Hardcore and Rave music which got me interested in creating my own art.

h o w   w o u l d   y o u   d e s c r i b e   y o u r   s o u n d ?

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Airy, sparkly, psycheadelic, visceral.

i s   t h e r e   a   p e r f e c t   t i m e   a n d   p l a c e   f o r   l i s t e n i n g   t o   y o u r   m u s i c ?

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Somewhere where you can fully immerse yourself in the music with no distractions. The early hours of the morning are always when music seems to come alive in my head, I make a lot of my music during this time, so listening to it in this environment would be best suited. „
It's very inspiring to me when I see other musicians carve a very specific sound with their art, there's something super cool and empowering about it.
” w h a t   i n s p i r e s   y o u   m o s t   w h e n   m a k i n g   a   t r a c k ?

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Body sensations and energy. Quite often when I'm writing my best tracks I'm experiencing a feeling or a memory that is guiding my musical intuition. It is a reaction to my surroundings and personal perspective.

w h a t   i s   y o u r   m o s t   m e m o r a b l e   m u s i c a l   e x p e r i e n c e ?

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My most memorable and fond musical memories are playing sets with my friends in dark small clubs, you can feel the energy around you, people know the music and are all there for that. The atmosphere pushes me to my happy place, I always feel inspired to write music coming back after a show I've played.

w h a t   a r e   y o u r   f a v o u r i t e   t h r e e   s o n g s   a t   t h e   m o m e n t ?

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It’s not recent, but I've been listening to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kanye West a lot as of late. The sample choice in ‘So Appalled’ will always be so cool to me.

Another track I've been going back to a lot lately is ‘Actual Air’ by Oneohtrix Point Never, the ambient synths to me are so interesting. I love how the song detunes progressively more and more as it goes on.

Reassemblage by Visible Cloaks is another record I've been listening to a lot lately. ‘Terrazzo’ is a noteworthy track. My girlfriend and I often listen to this before we sleep and it always allows me to have better and more lucid dreams. The synth work is incredible and I admire the use of negative space in the music. The gaps of silence are very dynamically interesting to me.

w h o   d o   y o u   m o s t   a d m i r e   i n   t h e   m u s i c   w o r l d ?

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Creativity and individuality. It's very inspiring to me when I see other musicians carve a very specific sound with their art, there's something super cool and empowering about it. I hope one day to achieve such originality, as some of my favourite artists have done with their own music.

i n   y o u r   o p i n i o n ,   w h a t   i s   t h e   f u t u r e   o f   m u s i c ?

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Audio-visual integration and new media arts. I would love to perform at an art installation one day because I feel like it can create total immersion over all senses. I recently went to see a band called Dragged Into Sunlight who used smells such as incense, which I thought was also an interesting concept. The future of music I feel lies with overlapping more senses together, to create a journey and an immersive experience.

w h a t ' s   t h e   f u t u r e   o f   y o u r   m u s i c   –   w h a t   d o   y o u   h o p e   t o   d o   n e x t ?

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I hope to do something similar to what I mentioned. I would love to combine other forms of art with my music for future live performances, definitely focusing on visual arts in particular. I'm working on another album right now, which I hope will be very different to Lifeforce. My goal is to make every record different from the last and for them to stand the test of time. I'm working on playing some more shows outside of the UK too. I would love to perform in Asia and the US at some point before this year closes.

w h a t   i s   m o s t   i m p o r t a n t   t o   y o u ?

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Happiness and creating music. Both of these things are what I need in my life, always.


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• 🔔 Glacci's debut album Lifeforce is out now on London-based label Terrorhythm. You can stream it and download it digitally for £9 from the label's Bandcamp.
• 🔔 In celebration of the release of Lifeforce there's a launch party tomorrow night (5/8/17) down at Kamio in Shoreditch, where Glacci himself will be playing alongside Klasey Jones, Lifeforce collaborators Kareful and Plastician. You can find more details of that on Facebook.

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☟ Glacci Internet Presence ☟
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L  A  Z  Y    I N T E R V I E W    S E R I E S

← #26: KERO KERO BONITO #28: ??????? →

💿 PAISLEY — 404 FUNERAL

'Time Passing' – one of the more diminutive tracks among this selection of seventeen – is as good as any a place to start off this odyssey of beats. Fluttering whooshes like the track's just landed on your windowsill and will start cooing to you at any moment, it arrives with decayed instrumental sample, glitchified percussion with hi-hats that fizz, kicks that thud with MegaDrive distinction. 404 Funeral is a selection of vignettes that feel like this. 'U Got It Going On', one of the more wobbling tracks in this series of seventeen, feels decayed, suffocated by age and warped beyond recognition, with elements that feel similarly bitcrushed; 'Squash' feels like a flood, fifty-two seconds of mashed beats and samples that feels like a luscious rainstick of sound.

Paisley's new stream of lo-fi creations – "made well over a year ago" – does go beyond just tape cassette decay and crackling nostalgia. The retro VGM sound to some of the percussion is matched by a sharp and delicious outpourings of drum sounds, like on 'What's Your Name' where behind snippets of Japanese dialogue a hi-hat dimly ticks with rounded flavours, and by the real-life drum-kit's-next-door feel beat in 'Lost My Suica'; here the outdoors noises, the singing birds of evening and the whir of insects, are evocative of the track's eponymous story: losing a Suica card (one of Japan's numerous, regional travelcards) means walking through the pseudo-suburbs that blossom between Tokyo's main hubs, thus hearing the city differently—here is where the titles of these tracks meet their content perfectly, a contemporary urban idyll. Indeed with this in mind the album's title could refer to the organicity of these tracks, embedded in the real world: '404' refers to a missing webpage and the 'funeral' part, well, netdeath: becoming a web ghost.

So 'Sunday' is chilled, samples like colours melting into each other stream along with a sleepy feel. In 'Until Next Time' the music wobbles rapidly like eyes welling up, the samples plaintive, painting the thoughts you have after a goodbye. But it's not all rose-tinted: 'I Need an Adult' seems to signify, with its exorbitant trap-infused beat and dramatic icy tones, a twinge of despair, a sense of longing exuding from its cold booms. Amidst the warped pianos that sound like television in black-and-white with no remote controls, rotary dial telephones, floorboards and gas lighting, there is more. Stand-out and yes/no favourite '1992' sounds like a joint right out of Earthbound, 'Battle Against a Machine' to be exact, with its huge gloopy constructivist beat and cold-sleek sampling; 'Nobody' makes groovesome use of a funk sample, 'Doomed' weaves in MF Doom—'One For Rex' glosses futuristic with hollow synth melodies.

404 Funeral skips along for just twenty-one minutes of your time, each track just over or just under a minute long. But it is that exact brevity which makes Paisley's morsels of music so delectable. To conjure a feeling through music, any feeling, is impressive, but to do it in a matter of never much more than 100 seconds feels wonderful, a bagful of gems, a batch of cookies, sketches, a pile of postcards that etch images for us, evoke comfort or love or adventure or relaxation, that temporally, spatially send us elsewhere: time passing.

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• 🔔 You can download 404 Funeral in all its glory from Bandcamp for a mere $3USD. Tokyo-based Paisley has also put the album on YouTube for streaming purposes.

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🐣 COSGROVE — EASTERN CARAVAN

Beginning with magic and majesty, the soft clattering of different elements poised to join together and jam – the reverbing muted rumble of the drums, faroff breeze of cymbal, the bass plucked slowly and poignant in the tense silent air – Cosgrove's track 'Eastern Caravan' is a dream of music, skiffle skittering audio elements blend for an intricate tapestry of different noises, but overall the atmosphere is one of horizontal reclining chill, and of unknown locations only limited by where your imagination can take you—the title suggests something that the band had in mind, but its lonely expansive feel, the focused yet wandering jazz of it all, is a clarion call for conjuring mystical cutscenes.

As the song kicks in proper, the plaintive saxophonic hook twists and meanders over the smart snapping drums that bounce throughout, the rimshots and tom hits and the metallic skiffing of the cymbal, the veil of rhythm that works as the misty mainstay of the track. Guitars that sweep distant distorted chords wait their turn through a bass solo where the beat loses momentum and seems to melt before you, evocative as sliding into warm water, the blues-tinged virtuoso of the guitar crinkling and winding into peals of piano. Emotion abounds, the drums now at their most glimmering glitter sprinkling gold as now the warm tones of the saxophone fall back in and eventually grooving into that first melancholic hook with which the song began. A haze of restrained prodigy, the mastery of creating a sense of otherworldliness truly abounds here.

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• 🔔 'Eastern Caravan' is the opening song to Cosgrove's recently released album Volume 1., which you can now purchase from iTunes should you wish to do so.

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KIDKANEVIL – MY LITTLE GHOST

From the first ambient whirrings into life on 'All Is Lost', the opener – and more of an electronic dawn than a big bang – to Kidkanevil's brand new album My Little Ghost is in essence a sojourn through soundscapes; it's a walk through the woods, through your city at twilight, down a countryside lane at early evening; it's a lazy afternoon watching TV with sun bulging through the windows, a rainy day spent watching a rainy day go by, a snooze on a beach. At the same time, these are spacey, fantastical, cosmically charged pieces that conjure as much unreality as your mind can imagine.

Songs with titles like 'Escape Pod' take us away on journeys; in an escape pod, or rather, the song itself is an escape pod. A cute menagerie of bleeps and bips great and small gives way to nebulose sounds, shooting through space on a hopefully homeward yet lonesome trajectory, mechanical percussion skittering all the way. Next track 'Dimension Bomb' (presumably named after the short animated film of the same name) starts with a boom, which pockmark the track later on as explosions in other planes of existence felt here & now, then follows an arpeggio as it mutates through thickets of ever-frenzied cymbal, kinetic fizz and organ-like synth. Fantasy atmospheres arise in piano-flavoured 'Shunkanido' ("Teleportation" in Japanese), whose melody seems fittingly in a Japanese scale of some kind; I imagine somebody trying to teleport somewhere – and nearly getting there, with the exciting clatter of cymbals and sub-bass bulges – but ultimately finding themselves in the same room. A very persistent image of persistence and hope in light of frustrating failure.

Playful yet serious vibes arise in the glisteningly FX-laden beats and relentless arpeggios of 'Keroro Dub', inspired by Keroro Gunso, the least perhaps "atmospheric" of the tracks. It's almost in direct opposition to Japan-only track 'Tales Of Moonlight And Rain', whose hip hop tilted beat harbours videogame sounds, clusters of invading glitch, and a final third that glows feel-good with electronic watery burblings and gurglings and warm synth chords like the sun peeking out just before rain finishes. Likewise 'OG San' (a pun on the Japanese for uncle, 'ojisan') commands its fair share of atmosphere, feeling like a dim and nowhere house with all its domestic noises of fridge hummings, distant TV sounds, contented breathing replicated by insectoid percussion, warm synth and snippets of tiny piano.

This comes after the pair of tracks, 'Ohayo' ('good morning') and 'Oyasumi' ('goodnight') – the first opens up with warmly stumbling successions of spherical tones, echoing a clumsy body and slow state of mind in the morning; the second is more structured, running on an insomniacally ticking beat, and restlessly reverbing marimba, a vocal sample nestled nonchalantly in there, breezy squelch synth following the marimba all the way to the chaotic ending. Given its busier setting, it's as if Kidkanevil (who gives his location as "Tokyorkshire") is trying to say it's more exciting being a night owl than an early bird.

'Earth to G San' is the first of a few collaborations on My Little Ghost, working on this classically glitchy track with Tetsuya Hikita to produce rippling arpeggios (that put me in mind of the Final Fantasy VII prelude) over scratching hiss snare and random noises. Next up, the organic-meets-synthetic bustle of 'Inakunaru' co-stars experimental hip hop producer Phasma, and is a shapeshifting song, changing form and tack a few times as it goes on. The ever-welcome singer/songmaker Cuushe appears, twice, once in arguably the album's strongest song, 'Butterfly/Satellite' – which, also featuring the beatmaking prowess of London's submerse, shows off the breathy richness of Cuushe's vocals and provides an addictively synthetic juke rhythm to bop along to; later on, Cuushe lends her composition skills to the glockespielic, music-box-like, touching toybox sounds of 'All Is Not Lost' – the direct antithesis to starter track 'All Is Lost'. Glitched-out beats underpin plumes of bass and organesque synth, melodic percussion flitting in the air alongside bleeps and buzzings, gloriously and fluidly transitional from start to finish. Whereas 'All Is Lost' is a drizzly, despair-filled morning, 'All Is Not Lost' is a golden afternoon with promise of more to come.

Also lending her talents to 'All Is Not Lost' is Cokiyu, who also features on 'Tomie' (named after the manga of the same name, maybe) – her ghostly voice adds a phantomesque quality to what is possibly the most minimalist track on the album. Its transition from worrisome breezes and xylophonic platitudes to a second half of plaintive singing and simplistic melody alongside disturbed white noise panning from ear to ear is not only effective but clever and beautiful too. It's a good illustrator for the album as a whole: with electronic noises and organic percussive sounds arises two feelings, one of cuteness and playfulness – with all its titular references to otaku and Japanese culture – which fades to one that's kind of a blank, directionless hope.

That's not to say it's negative, or even melancholy; My Little Ghost, in its very title, summons a more diminutive, more romantic, less threatening yet just as omnipresent and affecting version of "the black dog", a euphemism for depression. It might not be that, exactly – it could be more that a particular memory or another feeling, maybe even just curiosity, is the "little ghost" – but it's certainly a thoughtful, beautiful title for a thoughtful, beautiful set of songs. It's something to put on, leave on, listen to, walk in and out of, and lie back to.

• My Little Ghost is out now on flau and Project: Mooncircle
• Oh, and check out this interview w YES/NO in which Kidkanevil was kind enough to take partake

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MEISHI SMILE – LUST

Oh goddd this like everything else has taken ages to actually get from my ears to my brain to my fingers to the keyboard. It was released over a month ago. What is "it"? God damn— it's Meishi Smile with his debut album Lust. Yes indeed it's "The 1st Album" – there can never be another one by Meishi Smile, no no nope. This is the 1st album and it always will be.

But what is it like? Lust is essentially a mix of rough and smooth, a mix of harsh self-berating distortion and endless reverb free-floating out into the gulf of digital voids, all beset with J-pop sensibilities; it's sugar-coated white noise, it's dance music for bedroom dwellers and indoors inclined individuals, it's idealised. Within its 8 tracks, there are many moments where it soars past the boundaries of euphoria with a post-Balearic furore, too happy to be real; a gentle, dream-induced kind of EDM, not the type you'd hear in a massive tent at a festival, but the type that takes you away to weird worlds in the middle of the lonely nights.

Opener 'AJS' perhaps embodies this EDM style most clearly, keeping all the tropes of the so-called genre – like multiple drops and trance-like melodies skirling away in hookish fashion; likewise, 'Honey' drops in with octave-skipping bassline and clean-cut fast-paced synth melodies. However, here is a quirk of the album: the vocoder. There is something retro about the vocoder, yet in its very nature it IS a modern device. It is at odds with itself. But this works perfectly for Meishi Smile. The vocoder appears as a mainstay of 'Pale', which alongside its icicle-esque synth glistenings gives the track an atmosphere of coldness, of chill in the nominal sense. It's also in the chilled atmosphere of the next track, 'Still' – looping vocoders battling high-register hollow synth and wide washes of dreamy chords.

These chilled vibes start the proceedings on 'Heart', a song that moves between swaying seabed ambience and bouncing electro-dance; thick synth bass grooves in a pop mood and the vocoder seems here to be "singing" more than anywhere else. It's a song of slow and fast. That slowness, however, is portrayed so much better on the almost-surprise track 'Ai' – this one sounds like a super-reverbed and super-distorted version of the kind of slo-house synthpop that the infamous Drive soundtrack popularised with artists like College and Kavinsky (in this instance, more by the former than the latter). It reeks of nocturnal stylings, a simple melody and a steady, driving beat fogged by reverb and underpinned by formative rows of saw-wave bass jounce.

That's in direct contrast to the happy-happy pop of previous track 'Summer Blue', a foray into something maybe you'd find on a videogame – squelchy bass, simple but very effective synth raining down in showers of 8-bit bleepery with an overriding melody played by synth lead and vocoder, syncopated toytronic chords in lieu of house piano for extra oomph. This is in direct contrast to the closer and most crazy of all tracks, 'Tears'. Meishi Smile mysteriously describes it on SoundCloud: "Dedicated to the one who was lost." And indeed, in title and in its near-happy hardcore extreme distortion, this aims to reflect not the moroseness, the lassitude, of being sad, but the fury and frustration of sadness, wholly up-tempo yet down-beat, tear-like droplets of synth raining down amidst the whirlwind haze of twisted grey noise synth.

BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE. There are remixes. KOSMO KAT keeps 'Summer Blue' close to the original, adding touches here and there – percussion, a sunset-conjuring breakdown, droplet sample – for what is 'Summer Blue V2' basically. 'Heart' retains its washes of sound, yet is given a gentle touch of officious industry by Uio Loi, and la pumpkin turns it into an almost beatless slice of bassy experimentalism with added instruments, with the original melodies picked out and spotlighted. mus.hiba does likewise with 'Pale', extracting the song from its up-tempo frame and giving it a semi-trap makeover with added 80s synth melody and waves of trance synth. My favourite, I think, is gigandect's redoing of 'Honey' – now essentially a chiptune number, completely overrun with glorious bleeps, from its low-low buzzing bass all the way up to its fluid telephonic melody.

Phew. Well, this ain't conventional dance music; Meishi Smile ain't conventional. This is dance music hazed over with influences from videogame music to shoegaze and beyond, dreams converging like clouds to rain down startling reworkings of various recollections, feelings, and recollections of feelings. It's icy and robotic, but this cybernetic feel exudes nostalgia and emotion with subtle effortlessness; behind a mist of idealised sounds, just as anybody URL is veiled by idealised monikers and titles, Meishi Smile is there with boundless feeling.

• Get Lust for 10USD by clicky-clickin over here
• Listen to the truly awesome guest mix that Meishi Smile made for YES/NO

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BRETON WAR ROOM STORIES LP

When I first knew the release date for Breton's second (or "sophomore" like an absolute pleb) album War Room Stories, it seemed like an age away. Yeah, and I'd be a different person by that date – maybe I'd be a real person, with a suit and a nice house, and a part to play in local politics; with the whole world changed, we look towards a united effort in space exploration, and I look down at my hands and they seem older, wrinkled elastic. But no. It turns out that a few months zip by in no time. (The) 3rd (of) February arrived a lot sooner than I had imagined. How mundane to talk about a date like this, I'm really sorry.

In any case, it's not like I've been waiting for the date to HEAR the album – that's been done. Heard it a lot, in my car, in my room, and it's fair to say that a) I really like Breton and, b) I think that a lot of people around the UK will love it too. Having been played on BBC 6 Music, it's only a matter of time till they're on Radio 1 – that's when you get big in the UK, isn't it? Anyway, they deserve it. And whilst waiting for the album, there's been a steady flow of tracks and videos, even an EP, released in the meantime. Arguably the catchiest and addictive of these, 'Envy', starts War Room Stories with a bang, a tropico-indie sound, rich with orchestration and nonchalantly yelped vocals, the likes of which appear all over the album with near-intense coarseness that oozes satisfaction. A more melodic example of the vocals is in the dynamic folds of 'Search Party', where the guitar and bass guitar shine out with only minimal plinks from the orchestra, and atmosphere-forming house piano chords; that is until the end where bass gushes forth in brain-drowning quantities.

Where the vocals might not be exactly as strong as they are elsewhere is on 'Legs & Arms' – where they're sung through a megaphone. Maybe I just don't like megaphones or megaphone settings. The rest of the song – a kind of grey day revolution vibe – shows off the 44-piece orchestra with whom Breton recorded this album; rich cascades of strings and bolshie brass blasts, the kind we find on brash, synthy bass-heavy thudder 'Got Well Soon'. Here too the beat, as elsewhere, conveys brimming brutal energy. Recent single 'S Four' gives pride of place to its beat – which by the end is a towering beast of a beat – a fractured dubstep style that thumps below faraway vocals that ask as a simple, looping lyric "How will I be in two places at once? And how will I drag myself out from there?" – add to this rainy night garage-style pizzicato strings, videogame bleeping synths and you have yourself a winner.

Clattering schizoid drums roll their virtuosic way through 'Closed Category', regulating themselves towards the song's end as the strings reach a crying crescendo, a real mind-possessing moment on the album. A similar, energy-catapulting moment is the final part of the final song, 'Fifteen Minutes' – littered with saw-wave bass, gorgeous hi-hat fills and rich piano chords; snare roll leads into an up-tempo crash of sound, synth bleeps playing a buzzing lead, soon followed by the strings – cymbals exploding with the gun-stutter of mental snare and tom drum assaults, ending in a calm of background noise. That fast-paced beat appears before, however, in futuristic and noisy 'National Grid', whose vocals are thickly layered and gloriously laid-back alongside glittering star-like synth leads that lance through the fuzzy phasing bass.

Breton's penchant for hip hop beats, which was shown off in their pre-album EP Force of Habit, comes across in '302 Watch Tower' – a bouncy track which features hypnotising vocal samples and reggae-style bassline, both underpinning a sun-kissed beeping synth solo towards the end. A more experimental beat pops up in next track 'Brothers', comprising of percussive sounds rumbling in thick-aired, dusty rooms, heaped with reverb, like the faraway vocals and ghostly low-register piano. Around halfway through, it comes into its own however, and changes gloriously into a funky, disco number with a beautiful crowd of catchy vocals: an extremely danceable, and ultimately singable, track.

It's difficult to say exactly what is Breton's strength on this album – truth is, it's a lot of things and a lot of things combined that give them their signature sound. The new addition of the 44-piece orchestra gives songs that, perhaps without these soaring organic sounds, might not have the same gravitas as they do with orchestral ecstasies. That said, it's pointless to say that because these songs arrive with orchestra, so that is how they are supposed to sound – hypothetical 'well if they didn't have this then blah blah blah' situations are kind of a non-issue. In other places, the band execute unbeatable moments of excitement – the funk of 'Brothers', the climax of 'Fifteen Minutes', most of 'Envy', for instance – and this is mainly down to the undeniable rhythm with which these guys seem to be partly made of. Composition, and not just because of the orchestra, also plays a large part, with things like 'Brothers' turning from a genreless experimental sound into a tropico-funk disco; 'Legs & Arms' turning gradually from brash to beautiful; 'Fifteen Minutes' and its euphoric ending.

It's a stylistic, at times epic and often dancefloor-led, collection of music, familiar enough to please general crowds of music-likers, and creative enough to satisfy those looking for something new in the world of what is essentially indie music; indeed, it marks – and is resultant of – the evolution in indie music from traditional 'band' formations, adding not only classical instruments, but also elements of urban electronic music with which the music world is suffused: as natural as it is original.

War Room Stories is OUT NOW and available for purchase both digitally and of course physically.

Also check out the YES/NO interview with Breton's frontman Roman Rappak!

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PSAPP WHAT MAKES US GLOW LP

Earlier this week I posted a little interview I did with the two people who make up London two-piece Psapp, namely Galia Durant and Carim Clasmann. It was kind of in conjunction with the release of their latest album, What Makes Us Glow. In some ways, it was quite beneficial to get the insight of the duo on how they make their music, what they're interested in; I find myself, right now, listening to the album thinking about the things they said about not basing songs on chords, making use of found sound via objects that on an everyday level are not deemed to be musical, finding accidental notes in certain things - "a hoover, a creaky door, a swing, a washing machine, a distant argument" - and creating melodies from them.

The album begins as it ends, with field recording of rain dripping somewhere (or maybe something being fried), making it a cyclical experience, connecting the string of musical sounds, songs, with a snippet of everyday noises that show how the creative process is not an endless composition but a series of bright sparks in the mundanity of life. The first song I encountered from this album was the 'Everything Belongs To The Sun' - its strong emphasis on beats and chanting vocals, each with a tribal lilt, gives it an exotic appeal, painted by all the uncountable and sometimes unknowable amount of percussion infused into the song. Percussion - intricate, makeshift, homemade - plays a large part. Much less tribal but just as interesting are the scurrying noises of 'That's The Spirit' - alongside twisted, breathy organ sounds, the scuttling clips of percussion help provide a "noir" atmosphere, a sense of black comedy.

That same spirit is found in 'The Cruel And The Bad', a kind of a hot & sweaty burlesque number with a macabre brass section and a galaxy of pinging noises mixed with claps and shakers in 3/4 time. 'Seven' plays out in a similar vein, whisking you away to some exotic, fantasy bar where candles strewn with melted wax light cabaret acts; it has a fresh atmosphere with a dark jazzy twist - sultry crooning, double bass, clean guitar chords in a funky progression, and there's even a background sample of someone shouting. The bossa nova rhythm and woody percussion of 'In The Black' takes you to another tropical location. Plucked strings and a old guitar providing a lovely pizzicato melody, ending in a frenzy of Middle-Eastern-sounding melodies crossing each other. This one teeters over the friendly precipice of pop.

And it's in the fuzzy arms of pop that we find single 'Wet Salt'. Luscious sweeps of percussion punctuate the song's catchy organ-type chords and melodies, as well as the richly layered vocals. A half-lament-half-celebration of the respective dirt and magic of city life, specifically in London, it dreams as much as it stays rooted to the ground. But it's here that we first see the power of Psapp to create ear-friendly tunes. Likewise, 'Your Hot Knife' is a head-bopping toytronic pop number. It's evident in its core of low electric piano chords, the vocal patterns and the way they flow in delicate harmonies. It's one of the most upbeat songs on the album and is certainly easy-on-the-ears. Some great found sounds too: for instance, a bell from a bicycle. The organ solo towards the end is a lovely subtle touch.

In a similar pop vein, the title track 'What Makes Us Glow' is really lovely. A warm and calming track soaked in comforting and playful melodies, familiar vocals float in rich harmonies especially in its chorus refrain of "We choose what makes us glow". It's a sitting-by-the-fire kind of song. Those playful melodies are a real strongpoint of the duo, strong in most songs but in particular in 'The Well And The Wall'. The way the strings are here at the start give it a baroque feel. Or even before that. It's like lute music. A medieval feel, the vocals plaintive. It gradually falls into a mind-bending subversive version of some kind of courtly dance, with lightly crashing cymbals and glitching bleeps.

But it's not all about being busy and bustling. Psapp do minimalism, too. Each sound in 'Bone Marrow' is allowed to breathe in uncrowded space. Cutesy bells and woodblocks add percussive flair whilst the different vocal tracks in the chorus are layered with a simplistic intricacy. I found 'In And Out' to be a similar experience; starting with sound of someone breathing in and out, or maybe someone pumping bellows or something, it's another homely number that sleeps with dreamy chiming xylophones, bristling with pinpoint percussion, violins enriching with their organic woodiness. These sounds remind me of the music from Zelda: The Wind Waker; woody, organic noises that rattle in a light fantasy world of trees and magic.

And it's on that note that the true nature of Psapp's What Makes Us Glow becomes apparent. It's not a clashing but a melding of worlds: the bustling cosmopolis on one side and the essence of natural folk on the other; electronic noises and pioneering experimentalism, yet a delicate organic touch with pre-electricity conjurings and orchestrations. And with the duo saying in the interview that they want to carry on being more experimental, with increased found sounds and field recordings, as well as writing scores for more traditional instruments, it seems that this twoness of Psapp is going to go through intensive development. And there's nothing better for music, or even the universal creative process, than directive forward-thinking that is not forced, but freeform and fuelled by passionate curiosity.

Stream What Makes Us Glow on Hype Machine and/or buy it on iTunes.

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BOTANY LAVA DIVINER (TRUESTORY)

Google "the death of the album" and you have like a zillion results (259 million on google dot com), the top one being a Wikipedia entry on the actual phrase itself. A lot of publications have based entire articles around this phrase, which you can see on the Wikipedia snippet described as a "perceived decline of a traditional album in the 21st century." The keyword here, however, is "perceived" - and of course, it is perceived. It is not fact. You don't need to read any article to refute it. Although single songs are more readily available and people aren't necessarily having to buy entire albums just for one song anymore (as my dad admitted he used to do), these single songs happen to come from actual albums. People are still making albums. It's not, or shouldn't be, a big debate. It simply shows the readiness and the willingness of people to jump on the naysaying bandwagon and commit themselves to pronouncing the supposed decline or, more melodramatically, "death" of something, almost like a celebratory lament: a virtual conjuring of vultures circling. Tell me if I'm wrong.

In a similar vein, I'd like to introduce the new album, Lava Diviner (Truestory) by Texan producer Botany. It was released this week and it is a concept album, charting an imaginary cult in their efforts to make a volcano erupt via their prayers. I've already written about a couple of songs from the album, 'Quatic' and 'Simple Creatures', and was curious to hear how they fit into the concept, because both tracks are strong by themselves. Let's see, shall we?

From the bubbling bleeps and drum chaos of at the intro of 'Comm', we're led into a soothing paradise of sounds: true glitters of metallic percussion and chanting, wordless vocals. An introduction to the ideas behind this album, a searching view of a distant, unknown, tropical land. Tribal drumming rises out of the sounds, fades out, until a raw hip hop beats comes in, leading us to the next track, 'Anchor'. True to its name, heavy, bursting kicks lie at the heart of the beat, cementing it as the rest of the sounds are free to float all around - a dream world of pretty, ambient sounds. Inhuman voices yelp out, as if you're passing by the glowing mouth of a cave in the sweat of ominous night air. We're taken slowly into that forboding maw, as a low shamanistic vocal chants at the beginning of 'Owa'.

White noise fills your ears to the bounce of the beat, swimming synth echoing more singularly than before, the howl of voices in a labyrinth of tunnels. Things start to heat up. A huge room opens up, signalled by the expansive fluttering of the sounds in 'Per Eon', a greeting of a song where unintelligible voices chatter in its intense, all-encompassing sound, slowly fading to nothing. It's here, in 'Simple Creatures', where things turn a little eerie, helped by the soaring vocals of RYAT, our brief guide who in otherworldly layerings of aching tones repeats the mantra "simple creatures". We find ourselves in the midst of a ceremony in 'Cant / Goosemother' regular stamps of beating drums give way to hoards of relentless clapping and looping bloops of some giant marimba. A chorus rises up and sways. By the end, we're left with a more peaceful beat, more delicate sounds that herald utopian visions underpinned by sub bass.

But the real truth lies in the raw boom-bap of the unnerving 'Quatic' - euphoric sunny guitar sweeps get left behind for the hard reality of molten lava and ever-maddening voices, twirling over distorted walkways of bass. Things get serious. 'Small Keys' explodes with a hard, aggressive beat, decorated with snare ornamentations, a frenzy of sparkling noises jostling for supremacy. We finally meet the 'Lava Diviner' - a short oasis of exalted, choral reverence. Then the lamenting guitars of 'Celeste' and breezy drums give way to a dubstep beat, the perfect rhythmic vehicle for the less-busy, darker sounds of this track. Whooping, chuckling shades of vox fly out at you. Things turn orchestral as strings take over hounded by white noise. By the end, it's nothing but a frightening concoction of noise and brief murmurings of a low, demonic voice: a glimpse of the dark heart at work.

Perhaps things have faded for now. Carefree, complex drum patterns characterise 'Sunna / Show Me', a track whose jazzy, lounge leanings feel like gusts of pure air compared to the suffocatingly intense feel of some of what has come before. The drums fade and a flute plays alongside a lo-fi piano, the thin air of dawn. One single menacing note of bass sounds and leads us into 'Birdlife'. It's a structured, 2/4 affair, rich waves of chords ushering in a sense of calm as vocal samples skip along. It builds to an overarching crescendo of farewell. But as you look back, mournful strings remind us of the journey we've taken, remembering strange destructive human desires, the sound of molten bubbling still in our heads. Whether this cult prays for it or not, the threat and the power of the volcano is always there: nature remains.

... A journey, that's for sure. That's what this album was. And it's all thanks to a skill at moulding a whole plethora of analogue noises into evocative, believable soundscapes. Well-crafted, often intricate beats keep the pace and augment the dynamics inherent in these sounds. Botany himself, real name Spencer Stephenson, calls the whole thing a "cathartic release" - perhaps, then, it reflects his own heart, his own passions. This album itself was an eruption waiting to happen.

It's out now on Western Vinyl (as vinyl) and you can also buy it from iTunes or Amazon.

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JACOB 2-2 HERBIVORE LP

"Like all of nature's creatures, the child must one day go exploring by himself," one of the many samples taken from Jacob 2-2's brand new LP, called Herbivore, gives you a good insight into how the album sounds - to a certain degree, anyway. Herbivore is all about that wonder we all had as children, how amazing the world seemed, how small details of things existing in the world fascinated us, how exploration and adventure lay at the end of each newly discovered suburban road, each new park visited, each new videogame played.

Something somewhere said something about Jacob 2-2's music, something about the inspiration behind it. I think it was about classic 80s sci-fi movies for children, saying how they'd all start in some kid's bedroom somewhere before going on some crazy adventure. That's another theme. Not just actual childhood itself, but the imagined childhood of children in the different media we consumed in our younger years - the magical places where who we wished to be with all our hearts. And it's amazing how this heart-warming feeling transcends above the not-necessarily-heart-warming landscape of hefty beats that Jacob 2-2 throws around with rather a lot of skill.

I've written about just one of these songs before, 'Milo De Venus', a song that reeks of homely, close-to-the-heart nostalgia with a fidgety glitch-hoppin' beat, but now it seems quite a challenge to cover all of them comprehensively without being too waffly. Well, the next logical step is to bop over to 'Empire Plaza'; it contains the ticking of architecture, the glitter of industry, straight-talking beats - schizoid hi-hats and brief coughs of snares - that Jacob 2-2 has used to illustrate Empire Plaza, Albany, with its equally straight-talking brutalist buildings. Did you also hear the slowed-down sample of the opening chords of Tears For Fears' 'Everybody Wants To Rule The World'?

'Platforms' also contains another fantastic example of Jacob 2-2's beatsmithing razzmatazz, with its intricate beat bleeding a swaggeringly slow yet frantic hip hop style into the song's magical melodies; looping, chopped-up vocal samples in the second half are expertly executed and conjure a computerised, adventuresome otherworld - wishful thinking for a childlike mind. Likewise - swaggering, stumbling, half-dancing-half-sashaying onwards - laid-back bass and lickety-split beats give the mesmerising 'Red Heather, Yellow Heather' some attitudinal oomph. This is contrasted with the childhood-recalling sample of those read-a-long cassette books, "Turn the page when you hear the chimes…" The title refers to the tonguetwister constructed by varied sampled voices in the song: "red leather, yellow leather".

Jacob 2-2 animated this video himself as a trailer for the album - cool huh?

In the art of makin' beats the hip hop way, sampling does indeed play a massive part. Huge. So it's not surprising, but still damn cool, that Herbivore is packed full of delicious samples. Cut up bits of 90s-esque sounds hold up UK trackmaker Pogflipper's nostalgia-driven rap in 'Sunrises'. 'Lower 3rds' begins with the sample "In 1978…" and ends with the sample "…when teenage boys forget about girls" - between these two blasts the adventurous kinds of sounds that invaded people's heads when videogames first arrived on the scene. Dinosaurs were an obsession when I was younger - I am sure it was the same with a lot of people, seemingly including Jacob 2-2 himself, who in 'Struck Out / Foliage' samples archive footage of a man talking about the way the dinosaur world worked. This is only in the second part of the song, 'Foliage'; the first half, 'Struck Out', deals with the bummed-out feeling of losing in a game, namely being struck out in baseball, samples of "Hit it!" and "Here I go…!" giving the sense of a baseball field in soft focus, plush with rose-tinted memories. In near-heartbreaking opener, '2LTL', there's a child's sampled voice saying, "Boy, I'm too little for everything…" The song has, in its whirling synths and raining bleeps, the wild determination of a child who does want to do everything, despite their age, size, or lack of comprehension.

Feelings and images pop up out of everywhere: in title track 'Herbivore' there is leaf-eating innocence in its friendly bassline and glittering showers of synth (the carnivores can have their sharp teeth and mean looks, but triceratops, stegosaurus, brachiosaurus - they were pretty cool). 'Construxon Time Again' sounds like what scientific discoveries should be unveiled to - the soundtrack of progress - somebody demonstrating an email being sent for the first time; the slow, touching euphoria of 'Baby Duckbill'; the industrious bassline of 'So Long, Solaris' with its wondrous synths gives way to a vision of loss with lamenting strings (possibly a nod to the acquiring by IBM of Sun Microsystem's Unix operating system, Solaris. Possibly not); 'Rm W1' is a hypnotic dose of spaced-out echoing synths, an ambient journey into an adventure-movie-induced dream; 'Snow Brite' is like watching the frozen outdoors in winter from your window; 'Asphyxiation' - the majesty of a single human floating gracefully through space, without a space suit, but still marvelling at the grandeur of everything. There's such a lot that sparks the imagination.

Two contrasting tracks end this delightful album; whilst 'Quarantine Kid' exudes that listless feeling that went with being stuck indoors as a child, 'The Light Shines' sounds like the freedom of the summer holidays and the glory of playing outside in the sun. I think I've said enough. What more can I say? The exploration of the sometimes downright magical nature of childhood, all the entertainment and adventure and wonder and unanswerable questions, is something that I've never heard before - certainly not to the occasionally harsh nature of the hip hop-flavoured beats that underpin each floating synth, each retro sound. It is the clashing of a half-imagined world and one that is rooted in reality - yet in both there is discovery and ingenuity. So nostalgic. So nice.

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CUUSHE BUTTERFLY CASE LP

This second half of this year has been dominated by the news of Cuushe's upcoming new album (or LP as I've anomalously called it in the title), Butterfly Case, and all that went with it, including sneak previews of how the album would sound thanks to a steady stream of songs uploaded from it. It's always been shaping up to be a rather beautiful-sounding collection of sounds and now the time is upon us. It's out, officially, today. It's been available to stream for a few days, but if you wanna own that album physically - and you're not from Japan - you can order that today. Literally.

My first contact with Cuushe, the Kyoto-born trackmaker, was when I wrote about an updated version of her song 'Airy Me' - from her debut album Red Rocket Telepathy - and the stunning hand-drawn animation that went with it. I've been intrigued since then, but luckily I haven't had to wait very long. For long-time Cuushe fans, however, it's been a long time in the making; Butterfly Case comes four years after her debut, and more than a year after 2012's EP, Girl You Know That I Am Here But The Dream.

However I am happy to report that anybody, fans and newcomers to the music, will be heartily pleased by this dreamworld of sounds that Cuushe has lovingly conjured. It is a blanket of close and comforting sounds that, with the very first sounds, envelops you, takes hold of you. Those first sounds come from 'Sort Of Light', an up-tempo number that soars above the clouds in a post-Balearic kinda euphoria. It encompasses, in general, a dreamy pop sound that is employed with catchy aptitude across the album. For instance, Cuushe's vocals are at their catchiest in 'Butterfly' (you should check out Kidsuke's remix), an uplifting number with a fluttering, kinetic beat, vital bass - almost as if its breathing - decorated with with synth leads that scream their existence in between the chugging rhythm chords. 'I Love You' is a pop song whose edges are undefined, whose sounds bleed indulgently into each other, but whose heart remains the same; an overflow of noise in the chorus here perfectly illustrates the strong emotions that dwell in love.

And shining out as a lovesong, but of the sad variety, is 'I Miss You' - there are wonderful percussion clicks here, giving the beat an understated vibe as the emotion of the song takes over, helped by a slo-house feel mixed with Cuushe's beautiful imploring voice. It's almost an obvious fact about the beauty of her voice, but it really is lovely: in 'Lost My Way' she could almost be crying out for guidance, whereas her voice seems telepathically sent from a dream in 'Twilight' (which I wrote about in more detail last month). At times her voice is as much an instrument as anything else, in 'Steamy Mirror' it weaves in and out of the crackling ambience, the ghostly synth, the blur of sounds.

There can be drama in Cuushe's songs, not just beauty. Although, a well-executed sense of drama - flawless dynamism - is kind of beautiful in itself. 'Twilight', for example, starts slow and humble, but ends as an near-overwhelming cascade of frantic synth and percussion. However, something like 'Swing Your Heart' is all drama: a subtle beat fizzes almost as if it's battling against torrents of rain, the rise and fall of the free-spirit guitars and synths crowd the heart and mind with a beautiful kind of melancholy feeling, and the quasi-anthemic chorus of "Swing your heart…" just leaks emotion. 'I Dreamt About Silence' exalts in a celebration of sound, a swaying field of synth - that gladness you get when you wake up and realise the dream was just a dream. Piano blusters and drums fizz; the build up later in the song, dropping with the resurrection of its icicle-like synths, is stunning.

Even the slow closer, 'Hanabi' ("fireworks" in Japanese), emulates the slow spectacle of a fireworks show, heavy echo on all parts of the percussion giving the sense of many staggering bursts of colour. But there is quiet here, too. Ambient quietude can be found all over the album. In some cases it is almost a sad sense of quiet and stillness, as in delicate 'Lost My Way', with its ever-so-slightly unnerving ambient noises, like frost glistening on the branches of trees, and its beatless nature conjuring the feeling of being lost. And in 'Hanabi', although there's the magic of seeing fireworks for the first time, there is the feeling of empty disappointment that arrives when the show's over. At other times it's not so gloomy, however, like the warm, homely feeling towards the end of 'Steamy Mirror'.

All in all it's one of those albums you put on, listen to all the way through, and sit there afterwards in a daze, like waking up from a dream. I listened to this in the car today and thought that it sounded as if we were travelling in a dream-like bubble, the grey day outside passing us like a faraway blur. And also I now understand the title, Butterfly Case. It's a place where dead butterflies are pinned and look beautiful, despite not moving or being alive anymore. And that's the case (no pun intended) with Cuushe's album; she's taken her emotions, that were vibrant, moving, mutating, and pinned them down in her own butterfly case. Although the very moment of feeling these things is not alive anymore, they have been preserved here beautifully.

It's out now on flau. Get it.

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