GRALITSA — MORNING BUSTLE IN THE HOUSE OF INTELLIGENT PEOPLE

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What a wonderful noise this is. It’s a frenetic collection of objects thrown together, a series of chaotic collisions, unidentifiable percussion and cartoonish sound effects, that gives Gralitsa’s track its spark. Titled ‘Morning Bustle In The House Of Intelligent People’ (as if that wasn’t enough), this truly is the horror of waking to last night’s detritus, the morning routines, pouring cereal into bowls.

Like a sort of Dadaist folk song, it’s a soundtrack of all the switches and buttons we press, the doors and compartments we open and close, all little noises we make on our way to working our way out of the door, and how we deal with that. A semblance of calm composure wavers behind in the form of wobbling synths, and finally the day begins: chords reverberate out of earshot, resonating onto the street.

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• 🔔 Gralitsa’s ‘Morning Bustle In The House Of Intelligent People’ is taken from their album Little Mosquitos Are Sleeping This Night. Stream and purchase it on Bandcamp.

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CRYSTAL — PHANTOM GIZMO

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⌾ LISTEN PHANTOM GIZMO BY CRYSTAL ⌾

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CRYSTAL’s music always feels a little bit like constructivist art: A red triangle here, a blue square there, a black squiggle or two, all set in arrangements of bold, jagged simplicity. Accordingly, that’s how ‘Phantom Gizmo’ erupts into view, unfolding rapidly with staccato orchestra hits like a transforming robot. A collage of beats like crazy scaffolding waltzes throughout; MIDI bass (composed by Stephen Bruner, aka Thundercat) pops and gallops.

But the Tokyo-based duo (Sunao Maruyama and Ryota Miyake) elevate the track into something more than its vital foundations. Though synth stutters and the heavily vocodered vocals keep some parts lively and minimalist, other sections of ‘Phantom Gizmo’ seem to soar into the sky, the blocky buildings of the bass and beat immersed in pastel fog and indistinct video game visions. Cue virtuoso leads wiggling into through the soft-yet-hard space of the song with all the joy of an artist’s paintbrush.

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• 🔔 'Phantom Gizmo' is tkaen from CRYSTAL's upcoming Reflection Overdrive LP, due out on Tokyo's flau records on 30th April. You can pre-order Reflection Overdrive from flau's Bandcamp (available on colored vinyl and digitally).

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🐣 CORD LABUHN — HEARTSHIPS

Sounds from here, sounds from there, sounds from everywhere in this buzzing collage of sound, a list of luscious samples located and lifted into the frame of 'Heartships' by Berlin-based musicmaker Cord Labuhn. Record scratches, vintage crackling thumps, bass kicks, a delicious fingerclick, trickling hi-hat ticks—a treasure trove of percussion beats out an exploded hip-hop rhythm, sparse and minimalist to an extent, but on the other hand it's also packed full of flavour, each sound texturised and four-dimensional, a snippet of life, Cord Labuhn as the lepidopterist of sound pinning each one in new shapes and patterns.

Guitar pings add to the percussive nature of this collage so far, reverbing into the gallons of negative space that brim with chill either side of the punctuation perforating the quietude. Aching moments from unidentifiable songs appear throughout, rapid sonic snapshots that resonate even after their brief flash on the bustling canvas. Things agitate towards the middle: the feeling of running or rolling downhill, picking up momentum, new samples sliding into the mix getting ever busier, packed with flavours, and then it falls back to the cooling patterns as before, subtly and simply dynamic; funny how something so clearly constructed, so abstract in execution, can also be so smooth and natural to our ears.

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• 🔔 Like previous track 'Asap Daddy', this one is also taken from the Berlin producer's OUTTAKES project. You can download the track here.

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🐣 CYANURA — SPLASH

There is a wholesome realness in this track that makes it difficult to not bring your other senses along for the ride: skin tingles and warms, mouth and tongue seems to anticipate flavours and textures of tasty food, visions of a natural world elsewhere swirl like mists into your mind. Combining the sounds of outside, the sounds of nature with its luscious crunches and the inviting glory of water sloshing and soothing, combining these with the sounds of indoors, the ultimate indside sounds in the form of synths that bleep simple and videogame-esque or resonate rounded and glassy with artificial digital perfection, Vancouver musicmaker cyanura transports us to wherever we most associate these sounds, a lake shore, the ocean, a boat, a riverside, a tropical island—where there's water, there 'splash' is.

With a big emphasis on foley – that is, creating sound effects or in this case instruments by effectively sampling real life sounds – cyanura serves up a bustling collage of percussion that gives this song its rich textural dimensions, that all-senses effect where the clean clicks and clops tapping and popping in the track feel like different hard sweets: it is quite literally delicious. We have the crunch of footsteps, the dry shuffle of sheafing through pages of a book, reverbing finger clicks, distant hi-hats, tiny rolling snares—a percussive playground. It almost overshadows the beautiful plaintive melodies of the track, a modern day pastoral, the childlike nature of it summoning a deep sense of fun and nostalgia associated with fun and the places where it can be had. Idyllic is the word.

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• 🔔 This beautiful track is cyanura's first to be uploaded so keep an eye on their SoundCloud.

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🐣 JOANNE POLLOCK — EXPECT ME

The space in this track makes all of its sounds feel so wonderful, the breathing space between the experimental hits of digitised synth and beats allowing the tapestry of noises to make their impact and help create this sense of voidsome expanse, of space-anchored clusters of free-floating alien matter, this entity that exists in its own location and in its own time with no references to anything but the silence that frames it and punctuates its tumbling sentences and phrases. Listening to 'Expect Me' is like satisfying a craving: same way your stomach growls your ears yearn and for things such as this, these are tasty treats, Canadian singer and musicmaker Joanne Pollock spreading a controlled cacophony of booms, clacks, ticks, tings, trickling icy overdriven percussion.

Adjoining sounds range wonderfully, wildly, high-pitched synth twinkling, traditional warm chords, bops and beeps all bloopsome, squashed columns of sub-bass heavy and rumbling, gleaming otherworldly, so much of it unconventional and unusual all broken and fragmented abstract and collage-like, noises cut and pasted for maximum atmosphere evoking impact, her voice wandering amidst the thickets layered and just lightly airbrushed with reverb with this human quality that bridges the dimension where this icy music exists and your mind, part of you perishing as the poetry proceeds. How a sense of space sets this so far from the here and now, from your situation, reminiscent of nothing but instead Joanne Pollock's unique universe of sound.

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• 🔔 This is taken from Joanne Pollock's album Stranger, out now via Venetian Snares-owned Timesig, a Planet Mu imprint.
• 🔔 The fittingly abstract and alternate-world-summoning, very water-themed video for 'Expect Me' was directed by Desiree Deleau alongside Joanne herself.

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