🐣 SANTINO LE SAINT — MAGIC

Somewhere in a desolate wasteland between completely despairing of your situation and carnal pleasures, the trade-off between sex and happiness, feelings and sparing feelings, is the incredibly feel-tastic lamenting lovesong that is 'Magic'. Created by London model, producer, singer and musician Santino Le Saint, it's a tract of scalding synth sounds winding between just a few notes making it feel cyclical – the going-round-in-circles of a restless mind in love – set against a trap beat that rumbles like gurgling lava, sharp industrial snares and ticking hi-hats like a sense of stomach-churning immediacy.

Obviously there is this trap heaviness to it. And to add to the lamenting vibe of this literally magical track there's some serious shredding going on, a Latin-infused '80s-metal guitar solo cavorts in aching interludes in the midst of 'Magic', before becoming the coda of the track, crying out, rapid-fire and raucous. But vocally it feels like an R&B-flavoured slow-jam—Santino Le Saint's satin voice skillfully lilts from the sensually stark and beautifully confused first few lines:

"You should fuck me in the back of this Uber, baby
I know this isn't something you're used to baby
Life's changed and I'm still getting used to it lately
Nothings what it used to be baby..."

Yet it's coated in this metallic decay, as if those words are already ruined, already not worth communicating to whomever they're directed. It's continues thoughtful and reflective: "I was sitting in the passenger, flicking through the calender, thinking about the shit we've done" — "If we were in a different situation we'd be better off." And doubtful: "Now you're saying that I love you but you never know..." And at times it's like a storytelling Bonnie-and-Clyde-esque stream-of-consciousness, e.g. "but if we're gonna die young then / you'd better promise me if you can shoot then drive" — "...and if they try and pull us over put the metal to the floor."

"I actually wrote the first line of 'Magic' whilst I was drunk in the back of an Uber on my way home from a party," said Santino Le Saint, talking about the track. "I like to arrive on a track with impact and this was so direct and to the point... I sort of forgot about the lyrics, and a few months down the line the concept came back into my mind and the rest of the track fell into place. You know when you're drunk or high, feeling yourself and just fantasise about shit, that's 'Magic'."

In all, the track brings an everyday, an everynight, Uber ride to a startlingly evocative and cinematic height, from where it drips greatness and sharpness onto you like tears and static—and in a unique vessel that crosses the epic poetry of guitar solo with R&B's sensuality and emotion.

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• 🔔 This lovely piece of music is taken from Santino Le Saint's recent XENO EP, three-track offering that acts as a composite of these guitar, vocals and beat in a modern-day slice of Prince-esque compounding. You can – and most definitely should – listen to it over on his SoundCloud.

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🐣 ALBERTA BALSAM — FEELS / I CAN'T SAVE YOU

It’s the enchantment of synthetic regularity and modern-day decay, and what that decay leaves roiling and gushing behind in its wake - absence, void - that fills the soundscapes of Rotterdam’s very own Alberta Balsam. Both ‘Feels’ and ‘I Can’t Save You’ are pristine currents curdled by a sense of warped disintegration, the synth burbling like overused magnetic tape, the tinge of distortion like fabric frayed at the edge and sun-bleached; ‘I Can’t Save You’ feels cold, a light phaser hypnotic and thin on its fuzzing columns of clouded sound, but a constructivist arpeggio (late-20th century documentary footage of money being printed; cameras panning up half-built skyscrapers) keeps spirits up, along with a soulful sirensong of a vocal oscillating in and out of earshot.

In both tracks too, the beat is this set of building blocks - in ‘I Can’t Save You’ patterns of polyrhythms layered on each other mix themselves into a cocktail of organic clacks and synthetic ticks, a snappy clatter of lightly cudgeling percussion almost nudging the track into the realm of broken beat. The decidedly darker ‘Feels’ uses percussive sound to punctuate the track with glistening mystery, golden exotic clockwork on electrified fields of thick synth with liquid ghostly vocals running through, and crunching columns of synth and a stuttering sling of skittering beats.

These two morsels illustrate a deeply embedded duality that is always recognisable - that idea of dark and light, night and day. Though icy, robotic and eaten-at, ‘I Can’t Save You’ is Alberta Balsam’s bright-side, no matter how lonely the minimalism makes it seem; ‘Feels’ is its antithesis. And yet how its creator is recognisable in both, like sonic siblings they complement and oppose each other, each a distorted reflection of the other.

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• 🔔 You can stream and download 'Feels / I Can't Save You' from Bandcamp, if that is something you wish to do. This double single arrives after Alberta Balsam's debut track which dropped back in January, 'Ngelem'.
• 🔔 ‘I Can’t Save You’ comes with a music video too. Shot in Rotterdam, it “follows a lost spaceman on a journey through a desolated city filled with alienating architecture,” Alberta Balsam herself tells us. Directed by Rick van de Dood, and with Boris Chomette starring as the Spaceman, it illustrates the angularity and singular feeling of detachment with which the track is imbued. You may watch the visual treatment below at your convenience.

• 🔔 Unsure whether the moniker Alberta Balsam is based on the title of the Aphex Twin song, or whether it’s based on Alberto Balsam, the line of shampoos and other potions which is the song’s namesake. Maybe we’ll never know. On the other hand, her human name is Aniek de Rooij.

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🐣 RIP SWIRL — LONG ISLAND MEDIUM

Extending the legacy of fairly new style lo-fi house, Berlin-based producer RIP Swirl (it’s like rip curl, you see) not only gives us a satisfying overdrive crunch-gloop in the kicks that bump and propel this track along, but also transports us into a retro realm of beige computers and fax machines: sharp metallic orchestra hits squeak out of the hazy crackle in ‘Long Island Medium’, with laser gun zips and turntable scratches cutting in for good measure. Synth chords bulge softly below with dance sensibilities in their refraining nature.

The old-school keyboard sounds, like the lo-fi veil draped over this track, aren’t all about nostalgia but instead add to the subtle abrasions of the track—it isn’t necessarily the sound itself that is the focus of our attention, but the quality of that sound and how it fits into the vessel of sonic imperfection that RIP Swirl has carved out. The hi-hats trickle-tick distortedly, the snare is crushed; both are jagged, whilst the synths are nebulous cushions that these harsher sounds strike against and pierce; the soft yet shattered atmosphere of new becoming old, old becoming obsolete.

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• 🔔 The artwork for the cover was created by Conrad Hübbe, a photograph of something new and pretty—and yet it's a grainy photo; like RIP Swirl's track, it is a skewed representation of novelty, a new feeling or concept as much as a physical thing, by which we encounter newness through an old medium.
• 🔔 RIP Swirl's 'Long Island Medium' is out now on PARADISE HOUSE.

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🐣 TOPAZ — CROSS

The main core beating-hear of this track is that overdriven bump, that tumbling rhythm of distorted boops that seem to roll around your head as you listen; that, strangely, is the catchy part of this track. For a rhythm to be catchy is quite some feat, rather than, you know, an obvious hook, the hook here in 'CROSS' by Chicago-based musicmaker TOPAZ is the deep-set creaking bulky hypnotic foundation of the track itself. Vocals croon ghostly contentment whipping through the canyons and peaks of crushed sound, ushering you in.

Alongside this the upper air of the track flickers and crackles with all the negligent energy of an ancient television, an incorrectly repaired plug, an original tract of music with guitars and vocals sent through a digital mangle. Tracks with this sort of quality always have this feeling of speaking from elsewhere, having to squeeze signals through a fissure in time in order for them to swim scratchy gorgeous in your ears, like a kind of aural oxidation, the track feeling dug-up, uncovered.

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• 🔔 The artwork for 'CROSS' was created by João Coutinho.

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🐣 DJ SEINFELD —TIME SPENT AWAY FROM U

The overdriven beat is what starts this track on its way to you heart. It is not only the superficial decay of it, the lo-fi crackle as the booming kick begins to distort into a speaker-blowing splodge, the grainy swishing of the hi-hats as they cut through the buzzing air, the exploding handclap hidden in the splash of curdled noise, the snare like robust cardboard thudding its accents on the beat—it's not just the beat existing in this way. It's not just the entire track existing this way, actually, the whole of 'Time Spent Away From U' shuffling with the rhythm of funky house, big sunset crashes of synth destroyed by sidechain and the decay of the track, the vocals crooning ancient lovesongs into the mix. It is not the mere fact of DJ Seinfeld's track existing in this lo-fi manner.

It is more what this actually conveys. What does it convey? When people think of vintage crackle, what is that? It's from turntables, from old records warped and scratched, from old never-replaced needles. But the nostalgia, unless you are old enough to remember it, from these is borrowed, nonreal. The nostalgia of the warping and destruction of this track is blissful and intimate, it has a bootleg feel, as if it were captured on a tape recorder in someone's back garden shed, as if it were being shared by friends on a hi-fi, the speakers already damaged from playing music too loud and now this late night discovery blaring on the speaker, all of you crowded around. It is not just the sound of a song being played a thousand times already, but of the soundsystem it's played through being used even more times. The warmth of this situation, the uncapturable time-and-place perfection of it.

This quality, this aching tragic nostalgic quality of the track, our generation's recognisable nostalgia, not borrowed—this quality, coupled with the sudden gutwrenching drop in the stomach that the big pianos of the track conjure, perfectly illustrates its title. Missing somebody, longing, needing; simply told, bold and blocky, brash and blunt. And through the bleary-eyed sadness of it, we come through the other side, the crunch and depression of it ceasing to quake our ears, the final few seconds of the track free of decay and distortion as we enter into our cold realities once more.

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• 🔔
• 🔔 This track is take from Barcelona-based DJ Seinfeld's debut album of the same name, Time Spent Away From U, which is being released on 3rd November courtesy of Lobster Fury (Lobster Theremin / Media Fury). You may pre-order the vinyl version of this, which features more tracks than the digital version, by clicking this hyperlink.
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🐣 RADICULE — BLUE LOTUS

Visions of what you should be doing whilst this song is playing rise up like sea fog or hazy summer memories: should you be reading books in a minimalist European café, should you be wheeling your suitcase through the arrivals section of a white-tiled airport anticipating a new city, should you be melting on Monacan yacht? It has this rich mahogany-and-teak feeling to it, probably effused mostly by the wide robust warmth of those piano chords just lightly touched with the decay of existence, a conjuration of insta-sophistication that is very wooden floors and old world cocktails, image-heavy magazines and leather armchairs—ceilings high and jostling with spirits of the past who never left these rooms of leisure once they broke free of their skins.

This open-armed embrace of classic flavours is the main body of 'Blue Lotus' by New York beatmaker radicule, that piano really drenching the air with all the sensations that this warmest of seasons evokes and inspires, relaxation especially with the multiple thudding kicks and the wonky offbeat slide of hi-hats and snares that swaggers throughout. An undeniable thickness of life lounges in the cradle of gemstone clinks and pecuniary chiming clanks that flow tapestry-like scuttling sewn-together bag of jewels spilling out, a luscious lawn of legal tender lolling along for gorgeous texture, a vital candelabra of ornamentation, working with a small flute interlude to dutifully deck out this ephemeral track with the sparkle and glitz of idealism.

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• 🔔 'Blue Lotus' comes from radicule's 9-track beat tape COMFY CAR CHRONICLES out now via Grape Records. You can listen to it here if you like.

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🌭 GLACCI — CELADON FIRE

Icy: the cut glass crystalline precision yet far off distal feeling of the beginning of this track, the delicate mysterious entity vibe of it, belies what comes next. A grinding thumping mayhem erupts from its centuries old hiding place, bursts forth from the ice cavern, boulders toppling from the blocked entrance as the track marches out with the speed and intensity of techno, the dust storms raging in the wake of its unrelenting thudding kicks, a bed of crackling decayed overdriven noise spreading over the land. Nottingham-based producer Glacci ushers us into this uptempo driving beatscape with the sheer energy from those rounded kicks drawing us in and ever closer, letting it bounce into our hearts and through our veins.

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☞ YES/NO LAZY INTERVIEW #27 W GLACCI (August/2017) ☜

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But 'Celadon Fire', itself evoking something almost contradictory – a fire the colour of celadon, a sort of pale green – whilst delivering gallons of this beat-centric seismic activity, does so with a keen sweetness, a bright bold neon-leaning glaze of gemstone synth, a breezy Fox's Glacier Fruit, iridescence and clarity ringing out against the ballast of the beat and its piledriving nature. There is darkness summoned in the brutalism of the beat, but this sheen on top, this lemon curd, this sugarwork of shining sound, the bundle of glacé cherries that Glacci places on top helps curb that darkness, brings it somewhere otherworldly and turns this into a beacon of a track, a flame in the darkness, the sparkling brilliance of discovery in its buoyant gravity.

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• 🔔 'Celadon Fire' is taken from Glacci's debut album Lifeforce, out via London label Terrorhythm on 31st July. You may pre-order from iTunes if you like.

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