🐣 INNING — EXPENSIVE FLIGHTS

The name of the game here is hazy. It's also cloudy, misty, nebulous—it's all of those things. That insubstantial foggy-headed feeling, sun glinting in your eyes, all created by gorgeous washes of sound that swish and sway with lo-fi abrasions like some sort of dust storm just so that they graze your mind ever so slightly, so that all that loveliness can pour in, you know. It's called 'Expensive Flights' and it toes the line somewhere in the heavenly kingdom between chillwave and dream pop, a delicious combo of live drums and bass and guitar and synth in a soothing symphony of sound created by the Charlottesville-based Inning.

Like dream pop, it feels alive yet somewhere else, voices soaring in the sky, and the drums thump and rattle with a doofing pulse and scritch-scratch metallics – yet in a pattern that summons something more electronic-based, a slow house sorta pace; but though a 'real' instrument, the bass guitar coarse and grinding in low-slung indie-band fashion, it is founded on this sub-bass frequency that has that quality of being able to erase everything going on around you. And at a heavenly crescendo the guitar arpeggiates like glitter, like light, soft synth chords ever-present, everything slots into place as the vocals refrain enigmatic: "Are the things that I like me for the reasons I like you, or are things that I like you for the reasons I like me?" Self-doubt broiling beneath a calm exterior; a vocal that with its reverb and light decay feels faraway, like a vague worry.

This is a late afternoon sound, a montage of the day's move into night, with that beatless and wordless outro, cool and blissful, hitting just as the sun fades and dusk sets in, inky and purple, a watercolour in sound of the feeling that comes at the end of a good day with its effusion of doubt and its memories, when the passing of time is most visible and poignant in a dramatic colour-changing sky. And besides, Inning sang it at the start of the track:""Yeah I like you, but right now things aren't right." A breeze picks up, and your summer clothes feel suddenly inadequate.

---

• 🔔 'Expensive Flights' is taken from Inning's recently released D.C. Party Machine EP, a 5-track exposition of thick body-wobbling low-end frequencies and hazy-headed washes of sound in patterns that evoke vague emotions amidst of chillment. You can listen to/download it on Bandcamp if that sounds like your thing.

---

---

📠
☟ Inning Internet Presence ☟
facebook ⚘ soundcloud ⚘ bandcamp ⚘ spotify ⚘ twitter ⚘ instagram

---

---

🐣 BARAKA — LEISURE

The beat here, the decayed whispering tap of the boom-bap beat, shoots a beam of instachill as soon as it starts its swaying swing beneath the bendy bass and liquid stream and sultry vocals that fall in like a fog as the beat becomes more legible and the kicks bump the ambience with their cassette tape thuds. This horizontally inclined track is from producer and jazz pianist Baraka (real name Geoffrey Dean) and it is very fittingly named 'Leisure'—and that is exactly it, jazz flavours combining with beats to create a sense of blissful nothingness.

Effusing from the track – from its golden haze of sound, the soothing textures of those crooning vocals, the ambient plasma of synthetic noises, the deep chimes, the snippets of flute that wind in – is a big sense of leisure, of having nothing pressing to do, of melting into a sunset, dissolving into nature, occupying oneself with no occupation. The way the sounds weave between each other, a loose tapestry of languorous dimensions, this one fading into that one, this one falling away, now all of it gradually breaking only to return in fuller form, this pattern is random in the gentle way that clouds pass by overhead; so here we are, outstretched in warm glinting grass, observing the ebb and flow of clouds pluming majestically in its grand wisps melting and growing and merging and going.

---

• 🔔 'Leisure' is one of the tracks on Baraka's album V, released at the start of June. Listen to it on SoundCloud.

---

---

📠
☟ Baraka Internet Presence ☟
facebook ⚘ soundcloud ⚘ official site ⚘ twitter ⚘ instagram

---

---

🐣 BELS LONTANO — SMOKKR

In here is chill, in the haze of 'Smokkr', the impressive debut upload by Bels Lontano. Chiming cascades of harp swirling and dancing like sun glints on rippling water, shining and icy above the occasional bass making subtle forays into the foreground, warm and slow, whilst longed out stretches of synth wheel around above the plateau of tumbling offbeat downtempo bumping kicks and clacking snares, slicing through the smoothness and ultrachillment of it all.

Vocal samples ornament the track, calling out wordless and pitch-shifted into the nebula of sound, and simple arpeggios of synth boop and bleep. And with hidden, well executed complexity: as someone points out in the SoundCloud comments, the time signature changes with a break in the track, catching you off-guard but keeping the groove of the track intact, a wonderful execution of dynamic without obvious change. It's beautiful, crafted like someone's baked an incredibly delicious cake, as robust and substantial as it is delicately decorated, as good to look at as it is to taste.

---

• 🔔 So this is Bels Lontano's first upload, debut and utter fresh. And if this is anything to go by, there is more goodness to arrive. Keep your eyes peeled.

---

---

📠
☟ Bels Lontano Internet Presence ☟
SoundCloud • Twitter • Instagram

---

---

不明 FUMEI – GINSENG COFFEE

The sun is hanging low in the sky, hitting the magnolia tree outside the window, throwing dappled shadows on the table where I'm sitting writing this. I love magnolia – it's like blossom (or it just is blossom), but big blossom, blossom that means business, Serious Blossom swaying in a sleepy breeze… and it's in this blissful spring-but-feels-like-summer evening that I stumbled across this track by 不明 FUMEI (不明, pronounced 'fumei' means "unknown"). I think Fumei might be from Italy but I could be wrong, might be German or something else. Who knows. Anyway, unfortunately the track in question, 'Ginseng Coffee', is only 1'30" but it's currently on repeat, sending its nice vibes into my brain.

Something about boom-bappish hip hop sounds like this fit this time of day so effortlessly – and if we're talking specifics then I suppose you'd have to say it was the listless offbeat clacking for the duration of the song, the soft but robust bass locked into the kick drum for undeniable rhythmic harmony, the lounge-leaning chords oozing with somnolent tremolo, phasing icy synth, hollow vox-esque sounds plaintively echoing a half-done melody in the midst of sunny heat haze; it's all this that makes this track so lovely, all of it culminating in a sound lightly decayed by its own innate sense of bliss.

'Ginseng Coffee' (which is just titled 'Ginseng' on the release – see below) embodies chillment of a very high degree crossed with otherworldly wooziness, summoning the groggy feeling of having fallen asleep in your garden and waking up with hot skin and absolutely no concept of time, birds zipping home to roost with chirps and whatnot, blue sky littered with near-dissipated clouds.

---

• It's from a split release between 不明 FUMEI and o k h o called La Caffeteria, a 22-minute long selection of beats in the same vein as this, born from an apparent concept of sitting in a café, track titles including 'Espresso', 'Smokers Zone', 'Take A Sip' and 'Beans Smell'. Perfect leaning-back-with-a-coffee music. Buy it here. And here it is below :)

---

---

☟ 不明 FUMEI Social Media Presence ☟
Facebook • SoundCloud • Twitter

☟ o k h o Social Media Presence ☟
Facebook • SoundCloud • Bandcamp • Twitter • Instagram • Last.fm

---

---

MELTING MOODS – WAHULA

Ohhh yeaa, here's a track for you. It's a nice one. God I gotta stop talking like this. This arrived in my inbox and I really like it. Please keep sending things, I love to hear things. Anyway, the track is called 'Wahula' and it's by a Brooklyn-based maker-of-music called Melting Moods.

There is indeed something extremely melty about Melting Moods. Real name Andrew Krzynowek, he manages to create some explicitly melty atmospheres in all of the three songs on his SoundCloud. 'Black Magic' is a skewed reality of a track, a semi-nightmarish carnivalistic psychedelic electro number, and there is a ton of melted-sun funk aesthetic appeal in 'Space Walker', but the one that stuck out most to me was the most recent, 'Wahula'. Like I said.

Anyway um the synth in this track is gloriously affected, twisted with pitchbends and wah-wah, writhing over the top of muffled pulsar squelch bass, soon joined by scathing waves of distorted saw-wave chords and a crackling melody of high-register hollow synth. But in the middle we're treated to delicious portion of sumptuous funk, guitar crying carefree and groovesome bass mixed in with weird vox. These come up again, eerily repeating the song's name in barely audible lows (I thought I was hearing things at first).

All in all 'Wahula' sways with its ultimate chillment rubbing shoulders quite comfortably with the bummed-out vibe inherent in its stylised sounds, like someone artfully shrugging on a backdrop of eternal summer afternoon. I really like it. It kind of waxes your mind as if you're standing absent-mindedly watching your car get washed in a gold glint of sun through water.

---

---

Listen to Melting Moods on SoundCloud
Follow Melting Moods on Twitter

---

---