NOTHING – CANNIBAL WORLD

BY ALEX GIBSON
CONTRIBUTING WRITER

A chamber of screeching shoegaze immures you, the drone of guitars driven by relentless breakbeat snares circles and swirls, catching you in the tow of their whirlpool. You must look up to avoid drowning in it.

In their single ‘Cannibal World’, Philadelphia post-shoegazers Nothing explode against the eardrums with layers of refined noise. Those palpitating drums compel the continually bleeding guitars to flood outwards from singer Domenic Palermo’s oneiric vocal melody, creating a visceral body of sound.

Enveloped within this organism of unnameable noises, spilling through unnameable membranes, we are powerless but to grasp out at that unplaceable feeling — something “deeper than bone marrow”, as Palermo sings.

‘Cannibal World’ peels away its flesh to reveal a tender middle eight. Echoing vocals oscillate. Everything thickens and, for a moment, the drums disappear. It’s a peace that doesn’t hold. The song builds towards yet another geyser of sound with intimations of noise, a flashflood of pouring guitars and high-pitched, rhythmic judders. With an unsteady, staccato heartbeat, they whimper. And with this resolution, Nothing soars again.

✧

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• 🔔 'Cannibal World' is taken from Nothing's new album a short history of decay, which is out now and available on vinyl, cassette tape, compact disc and digitally. You may purchase it on Bandcamp.

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FOREST SWORDS — THE LOW

⌾ LISTEN TO THE LOW BY FOREST SWORDS ⌾

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'The Low' cuts a mysterious figure. From the outset it's a cavalcade of metallophonic glonking, bone-rattling clacks, rusted but razor sharp hi-hat sheafings and thumping distorted tambor booms to keep time. A druidic ritual crossed with a downtempo warehouse number, this altered beast of trip hop crouches loaded with potential to pounce at any moment.

Vocals rise up, plucked from the air and woven throughout the bristling beats like a sea breeze blowing through craggy sea stacks and yawning arches. But in a triumph of dynamism, rather than trail off like a will-o'-the-wisp the phantom noise is cut short, suddenly revealing once more the silence and scratch of the song. (In fact, the whole thing is truncated, snipped at the end into a full-stop).

Add to this a skirling, distorted call of distorted brass proportions — how you might imagine a carnyx to sound — and there is urgency here, but a fogged ancient urgency, like a message from the actual earth, but summoned in a Liverpool warehouse by Forest Swords.

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• 🔔 It's official: there's a new Forest Swords album coming out. It's called Bolted and it's arriving 20th October via Ninja Tune; you can pre-order it on Bandcamp now digitally, on vinyl, CD and cassette. 'The Low' follows previous single 'Butterfly Effect', also taken from the upcoming album.

  Forest Swords (aka Matthew Barnes) explains that it's "based on a beat I’d originally intended for Yoko Ono." It's an important track, too, and "features elements I made both at the start and end of the album," he says, "so ties together a lot of the sounds and emotions I was exploring during the writing process."

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SATOSHI KANNO — MONOC

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'Monoc' by Japanese digital artist and producer Satoshi Kanno appears like a electronic spectre on a nocturnal city street. Sparse chopped vocal samples merge with flickering percussion, skittering on a bed of bumping kicks and the soft bursts of distortion. Its angular structure feels mechanical, industrial almost, as the track moves into a moody footwork-infused midsection.

The splicing sounds and fusion of elements in 'Monoc' was a result of Kanno's approach to the track.

"I was inspired to compose this piece to reflect on the ways and meanings of communication between all things in our time," he says to yes/no via email. "The noise in the song refers to nature, animals, plants, machines, and humans, and even though each form remains the same, when they overlap each other, they transform into another form."

The track ends up as a "collective form", each element adding to a whole that brings together its fragmented parts to a sonic sum: a reflection of how an individual is ever-transforming, reacting to their situation, the times in which they exist.

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• 🔔 This is the title track from Satoshi Kanno's Monoc EP, scheduled for release on 10th December via ADRS Collective. You can pre-order the EP on Bandcamp.

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YMIR — RADIATION

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The music of Ymir delights in providing a soundtrack. Though it's what's being soundtracked that differs from most theme songs, environmental and accidental music, OSTs, even vaporwave excursions: it's simply a soundtrack of the experiment that is involved in its very creation. Very meta.

Accordingly, 'Radiation' is a glistening arrangement of destructed synth, the flickering of a door sliced into the fabric of time, a haphazard slash spilling out light in clutches of strobe and stage-show sparks. It's close to closing, or has not been opened correctly, so knowing whether this quantum fissure is an interdimensional or simply an intertemporal or interspatial passageway, is impossible. All we know is its resounding, soft glimmer in the background, beneath the crackle of Geiger counter distortion.

Fitting the growth and decay of the otherworldly ambient track, the video features the hypnotic spin of an object in a constant state of flux and decay. "Both [the track and the video] play with different types of distortion," Ymir says via email.

"For the music, I focused on creating a kind of organically bubbling, on-the-brink-of-overload sound. For the video, I entered the parameters of each frame by hand, rendering them all separately so that I could interrupt them at various stages of completion, and combine them to create a stuttering, glitchy video."

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• 🔔 Last week yes/no was proud to premiere Ymir's celestial track 'Stair'. Alternatively, or additionally, you can also check out more of Ymir's unreleased electronic work on his SoundCloud.

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ZILLAKAMI — ACAB FEAT NASCAR ALOE

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With City Morgue proponent ZillaKami at the helm, this track marks his first collaboration with fellow rapper Nascar Aloe. He's the self-proclaimed "new Sid Vicious" and aptly so for this slice of punk rap, 'ACAB'. The sound — the crunching kicks, slap-crack of the snare, distorted sub and indistinct lo-fi synth running through like a frenzy — is enough to summon this devastating stand-up-and-fight-back feel, but the lyrics to 'ACAB' provide the all-important message that rides in this horrorcore-meets-Mad Max of a sonic vehicle.

The song title gives listeners an inkling (ACAB is an acronym for "All Cops Are Bastards", fyi). It's the rallying mantra of the song, spelled out letter for letter and spat out fully: "A-C-A-B ACAB ACAB A-C-A-B ACAB yeah." ZillaKami uses this to preface each line in his verse, weaving it with references to videogames — "rig the block like Melee, yeah" and "Undertale, bitch, I am Sans, boy" — and imagery of scuffles with (the listener assumes, at least) police.

Nascar Aloe bursts in, growling lines that show disdain for both the police and their informants:

"Talk to fuckin' 12? [slang for police] I stomp his head under my sandal / Lock me in a cell, leave me for dead, bitch, I'm a vandal / Police power trippin', turn yo' ass into examples."

The rage is real, and manifests itself in a visceral way in finale: "Bitch, save our people, kill a cop." Undue severity, perhaps, but shocking as it may be for some, police brutality and undue use of force from above on those below has a much longer history than reacting to it.

Amidst the thump and crush of the instrumental, the straining vocal chords of both ZillaKami and Nascar Aloe — but most especially the latter — are delivered suitably dank; it speaks of street-level grime, graffiti, yes, but also of rising up from that place.

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• 🔔 'ACAB' is taken from City Morgue's album CITY MORGUE VOL 2: AS GOOD AS DEAD Deluxe edition. Stream, download or otherwise purchase it from your favourite amongst this list of services that allow you to do so.

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🐣 PATH — WIDESCREEN TREMOLO

⌾ LISTEN TO PATH, WIDESCREEN TREMOLO ⌾

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Hazy and sunwarped, the grinding tremolo at work in aptly named 'Widescreen Tremolo' by UK musicmaker Path provides the jagged cradle which rocks the track into unseen oblivion. A gloopy bass groove hides in the background; so too does a shuffling scuttle of a haphazard beat.

Speaking to yes/no via email, Path talks about the track. "I wanted to try to get that early 90s indie vibe but only using synth drums and synth guitar," he says. "I’m pretty happy with how it turned out."

At the halfway mark, the track diverges into a stream of distortion, guitar stabs glittering and the whole thing a ghostly sort of Stone Roses revist meets HEALTH primitivism and self-destruction, plasma-like vocals crooning out from the drone and dust storm of it all.

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• 🔔 'Widescreen Tremolo' is taken from Path's 2019 album Pianoburger, which you can stream and/or download on Bandcamp if you feel like it.

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🐣 FELDERMELDER — SHANGHAI (SHAO REMIX) [初演 • PREMIERE]

⌾ LISTEN TO FELDERMELDER, SHANGHAI (SHAO REMIX) ⌾

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By the trundling false-starts, erratic thuds and empty scrawls of shining synth and vocal sample etchings, it certainly does seem that in 'Shanghai' Swiss producer Feldermelder achieved the goal of reflecting a late night walk through a deserted area of the Chinese megacity. Based on a visual recording of that experience ("an attempt to capture nightly nothingness," wrote Feldermelder), 'Shanghai' glitches, squawks and buzzes throughout the track, a noisy, gleaming morsel with a mood ripe for remixing.

On that remix is long-time friend, Beijing-based producer and sound designer Shao. "It was last summer, on a rainy morning, I was drinking on the rooftop beside my studio," Shao remembers. "I got the message from Manuel [Oberholz, aka Feldermelder], asking me to remix a track that he did in China."

⌾ THE ORIGINAL 'SHANGHAI' BY FELDERMELDER ⌾

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Creating the remix was as simple as stripping the original track bare and then processing them with "some effects pedals, some delays" whilst adding a drum beat that matched the atmosphere.

"I just followed the feeling and the atmosphere and made a relaxing track," Shao, formerly known as Dead J, explains simply. Though focused recently on techno-flavoured production (see Shao's Doppler Shift Pt. 1), he decided to change things up for this remix.

The result is unrelaxing. A doomful doppelganger of the original, a doped dirge of surging drama like an undersea cave, a mirror to the mire of irony of lonely deserted streets in a huge city, crushing isolation told in drawn out growls of distortion and warped glitter.

And the beat, a sparse march of organic thuds, gives it a feeling of techno deconstructed, four-to-the-floor-minus-two, simultaneously creating – along with the teasing rise and fall of the synth waves – a sense of something about to teeter over the edge.

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• 🔔 This Shao remix of 'Shanghai' arrives ahead of Feldermelder's The Sound Of Remixes, out tomorrow 19th April on Zurich label -OUS. This release sees three tracks from the Swiss artist's 2018 The Sound Of EP. You can pre-order the remix EP here.

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🐣SHLOHMO — THE END

⌾ LISTEN TO THE END BY SHLOHMO ⌾ Chaos and calm collide in this calamitous track, a dirge of insular sunbeam hope, a decree for celebration burned at the edges and wet from acid rain. Shlohmo's 'THE END' basically works out for the best.

It's a tale of different influences, from the doom of the clanging metallic guitars and their twinkling-in-the-basement arpeggios – feeling a little like Brand New's most despondent moments – to the vital trap thump of the beat with its ripped paper handclaps and ticking white noise hi-hats, it is a beast of everything; thin synths even herald better things with their shining, future bass builds—before, of course, the guitars tear them to shreds.

Dusty pianos tumble decayed in the background, spook house chimes trickle by warped and chopped with radiation shimmer, whilst bass rumbles lo-fi in the distance. As far as a track charting apocalyptic mess goes, Shlohmo's is one of consideration, playing your favourite trap heroes as the windows melt; nonchalance in the face of extinction.

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• 🔔 This crunchy anti-melodrama is the title track taken Shlohmo's THE END, the upcoming album due out 22nd March via Friends of Friends / WEDIDIT. You may even purchase this lovely track and pre-order the album in deluxe vinyl form from Shlohmo's Bandcamp, if you like.

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🐣 CLAWS AI — 777

⌾ LISTEN TO 777 BY CLAWS AI ⌾

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Fully formed like a pile of earth you'd pat down as a kid till it was no longer dirt but a solid construct, '777' is all about its earthy substrates. Musicmaker CLAWS AI ensures that it not only goes full throttle, but that the track has solid foundations. So naturally the bass drum thumps and the punchy, punky bass guitar shoots through it like an electric current, screeching distortion leaving scorch marks over everything. It's a cross between heavy industry and discovering you've got superpowers, but there's more to '777' than inspiring noise.

"I sat down to write a simple song about a girl," CLAWS AI tells us over email. But it became more than that. "I am convinced the past few weeks of my life were steered by divine intervention. You know the feeling when you meet someone you know could change your life? Maybe fate had me and her intertwined and I got what I always wanted. You have to consider that it might be no coincidence."

This – and the history of making "mindless rock songs," as he describes it – gives CLAWS AI the perfect grounding to create something that scores top marks in somersaulting its way into your psyche. A stun grenade of sound, it's not only the power of the production in this track that immobilises you: it's the questioning lyrics that inject the intrigue, and the humanity in the explosive desperate vocals, that truly gives this track the nitro it possesses.

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• 🔔 Head on over to CLAWS AI's SoundCloud for more music.

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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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🐣 NAKURY — NECESARIO (BARZO REMIX)

Last time we heard for this Costa Rican MC it was from her incredibly breezy and bustling 'Aunque Quieras' (that's "whatever you want" in English), but this time around Nakury has offered up something quite different. Although the original 'Necesario' is a bass heavy brute of a track, ticking along with a nearly dubstep rhythm with minimal decoration save for the trilling rapid-fire flow of Nakury herself. However, this flip by fellow Costa Rican musicmaker Barzo adds a thick wall of metal guitars for an entirely different take on the track.

At first this reminded me of 'Dog', a crunchy SebastiAn song from Ed Rec Vol. III - the guitars are richly distorted, and the beat below thuds hard, with the snares grippingly abrasive and the hefty robust kicks entangled with just a touch of sidechain. Barzo's version sees the original vocal now skipping over the distorted riffs, the hook now anthemic with three pulsating chords giving the track a new smouldering rock atmosphere. A mix of not only hard beats and hard guitars, but also of Latin rap – ostensibly disparate styles (nu-metal, anyone?) – this is a sultry, genre-bridging track.

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• 🔔 The original 'Necesario' is taken from Nakury's album VIA, released via Lácteo Cósmico back in April 2017. You can download the album here here.

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🐣 MOON TALK — JACARANDA

A crazy overwhelming burst of vibrant flavour in ‘Jacaranda’ by moon talk, a morsel of music that ushers you into a bright world, harmonious and harsh simultaneously, a veil of dynamic electricity scorching the threads hat tumble their melodies in the upper reaches of the track. With these far-off crackling effects and close-knit distorted delay, the crunchy ambience here is metallic and glittering, shreds of regularity pierced by incessant sunlight, or it’s a descriptor for a not-too-distant future, the cracked utopia of tomorrow; the simple humming bass carves a humble and homely foundation, and is simple and human, is birdsong, is cup of coffee, slow traffic, carrying shopping, comfort, love.

moon talk tells us that he wrote the track after moving to LA, and is titled after the jacaranda tree . “They bloom for a couple weeks and that's it,” he says via email. “Most of the time they just look like insignificant normal trees but when they bloom they turn this surreal shade of purple.” The blooming, bursting-into-flower sound of ‘Jacaranda’ suits and echoes its namesake – honestly if you haven’t seen these trees at their fullest and most indigo, you should really Google them. Ticking abrasive hi-hats and clattering beats in the track sound out the triumphal rhythmic march in celebration of the jacaranda's beauty; later a vocal sample pitch-shifted and swimming in the crackle of the track seems to sing joyfully.

Talking about LA, moon talk explains further: “It’s a garden in the desert, a perpetual post-apocalyptic paradise,” he writes. “I wanted to try and capture that exciting contradiction at the core of the city.”

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• 🔔 'Jacaranda' is out now and it's taken from moon talk's upcoming a piece of the sky EP, set for release on 22nd March.

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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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🐣 NATHAN FAKE — SUNDER

This track begins and continues like a séance: a plaintive hollow synth faltering and calling out, later layered and turned into something spooky organ-like—the beat thumping like the thudding heartbeat of a cynical believer, overdriven with simple fills that remain this constant biological function of the track as different percussion comes in and out of view: sharp hi-hats, sshhing shakers like panting pitchshifted, rattling metallics and eventually this garage-flavoured snare but decayed clacks into earshot.

Contact is eventually made. The dearly departed dismal diction at 3:27 the the synths grow ever more intense, the inexpressible emotiveness of Norfolk native Nathan Fake's live, raw approach to sound getting the better of our consciousnesses—"There are no post-edits - they are left completely as they were recorded - so they're quite messy but I love that energy," he says, explaining the sound.

The hi-hat keeps scathing time and the beat falls away and the synth warm and shaking and screaming out for something, for a connection: still that plaintive sadness, human closeness across the digital void or the vaults of time. It calms, recedes, ends ominous and exhausted and alien with twiddling synths and this one final note of dissatisfaction and regret and joy all at the same time. Intangible ghosts, old friends, ebbing memory.

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• 🔔 This track is taken from Nathan Fake's exactly-the-samely titled Sunder EP which will arrive via Ninja Tune on 23rd February. You may stream and pre-order this track and the EP itself respectively in various ways on this page here.
• 🔔 The artwork for the EP (above) was created by Hubert Solczyńsk. It echoes the sadness, the new-and-old-ness of this track, and presumably the four-track EP itself; the desire to reach out and touch something that is not and never has been really there: both the past, and our ephemeral online worlds.

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🐣 ХЬЁРДИС — РАЗРУШЕНИЕ

The satisfying snowbreeze from the underworld, this calming wave of white noise that is so abrasive and scratching at your ear canal and like the ghost of a chainsaw somersaulting through the sky, a downpour from tungsten grey clouds soaked in distortion. That is the crux of this track by Russo-Ukrainian duo Dmitry Gruber and Marianna Diakova aka Хьёрдис (Hjördis), the shoegaze wall of crushed wavelengths that rifles through the track at all times. Called 'Разрушение' (meaning destruction or demolition) it's a song whose lyrics, sung in contrasting plaintiveness by Diakova, read simply in translation: "I want to destroy / Everything I see / Everything I feel / Is nothing."

Speaking to yes/no via email, Gruber told us that the track is "mostly about feeling, when you're calm, dreamy but very destructive at the same time." And at the heart of this song is that explosive gale of a guitar sound that feels as though it could strip cement from the metal bones of a building, and propelling it there is this driving energetic beat with popping kicks and snares, yet there is this golden guitar chord all liquid and chorused and with this brilliant rippling sheen to it, and there are these sunny vocals, innocent and fresh like clear sky after rain. It is exactly that balance: dreamy but destructive. "Some kind of ambivalence," Gruber clarifies. And you feel it, this infectious nothingness, how it would be to crush a derelict building with one thumb vs. imagine flying without a care. Similar feelings.

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• 🔔 You may purchase 'Разрушение' from Bandcamp.
• 🔔 Dmitry Gruber, the Russian half of the duo, also uses the band's name as a netlabel.

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🐣 LILAC — FEELINGS

Huge. The expanse of it, the ambience of it, the wild sandstorm blight of it, the pastel colour pleasantries taken and ripped to shreds and thrown in mad gallons of confetti across the every corner of Earth, the wind-up toy nature of it, but without that metal key at the back instead it spends a third of its duration inhaling air, capturing energy like charging a spirit bomb and gradually that meter is filling and—bloop! It reaches the top and this wondrous track charges into life, crowds the air like a cloud wrapped round a goddess cartwheeling to the ground the loudness of it crunching like thunder. And afterwards it fades into the ether, gorgeously slipping away into silence.

lilac's track 'feelings' is quite literally a long explosion of sound, thick layers of gossamer fibres glowing grey and pink and teal and then more robust rumblings under these electric coils of noise, a beat if you can even call it a beat like ultra-slowed trap, the kick overdriven self-detonating, delayed satisfying sidechaining with each distorted boom, sharply crashing cymbals cracking with each slow syncopated percussive hit, dynamic clusters of rattling snares, clipped handclaps keeping time for this gargantuan swaying rhythm. How soft at the same time, how muffled, the rounded cushioning of it, the feathering, the tenderness of it and how that tenderness warps and self-destructs into obsessive longing, a swirl of sound, of feeling, that takes up every surface every empty nodule of the mind.

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• 🔔 More fabulous tracks from lilac are available in a streaming as well as downloadable medium over on their Bandcamp.
• 🔔 Must admit: originally led to lilac because their profile pic is Lindsay (played by Linda Cardellini) from Freaks And Geeks.
• 🔔 Affiliated with SoundCloud collectives you may know: otter boys, Tsundere Fan Club, and REGRET.

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☟ lilac Internet Presence ☟
soundcloud ⚘ bandcamp ⚘ twitter

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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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☟ DJ Seinfeld Internet Presence ☟
facebook ⚘ soundcloud ⚘ twitter ⚘ instagram

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🐣 ISSERLEY — PRIVILEGE

The crunch of it, the frustrated clenched fists broil of it, the distorted decay of it all and veiled with a haunted corridor of wobbling ambient sounds to create this negative miasma clouding over the robust solidity of the mechanical swampsome sounds at the foundation, the emptiness that this track summons is vast and uncompromising. Sydney-based artist Isserley returns as the formidable force that we saw in 'Advent', her seemingly small childlike voice poised as it swoops disjointedly around the room, a glinting tone like a silvery flash in the dark, growling walls of synth bass fuzzing and pushing on your spirit, helping the musicmaker to illustrate the blocky angst at the heart of 'Privilege'.

"Sadness doesn't discriminate at all," Isserley writes in a message to yes/no, "and it always angers me when people assume that if you have money or a certain superficial quality, that life is inherently perfect."

Throughout the song she slurs in slow measured lines, monotone for the most part and sometimes dipping down to a low mutter, a drugged vacant quality as the languishing speaker attempts to tell themselves they have a secret weapon in privilege—the classic overcompensation of an unhappy soul. Isserley explains further: "The song is essentially a collage of miscellaneous misanthropy, nihilism and sarcasm directed towards the attitude that just because some people don't suffer the same problem as you, they're not suffering at all."

Indeed it begins, "I sit here waiting for the end of my suffering…" and the lyrics later ask, "But how can I be something, when I am surrounded by people who make me feel nothing?" — always the scuttled abrasive beat, the bruising calamitous synth, the soundtrack to dying inside.

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• 🔔 'Privilege' is part of a new cycle of songs by Isserley—will or won't there be a new release? Either way if you like this go check her 2016 album Messes on Bandcamp.

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☟ Isserley Internet Presence ☟
Facebook • SoundCloud • Bandcamp

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🐣 ZENXIENZ — MISSING CALIFORNIA

A self-destructed blare of lights and colour, of rocks and cosmic material, a delicious morsel of music that mixes these things in a heady unidentifiable salad of matter and anti-matter. Cacophonous and bustling, the sounds crammed into this track fuse together without dissolving into one another, like those vintage psychedelic visuals of oil and water swilling in a tray atop an overhead projector but sped up, these sounds crash and rollick, storm and surge, smack and clatter, synths and percussion alike, all of it alive and wriggling for being alive. This is 'Missing California' by zenxienz, something that begins slow and composed despite the sloshing of colours and sounds, the bleeperie of electronics like the conjurations of circuitboards.

Beneath these slower sections a heavy beat cranks muffled and smothered by synthetics, distant booms and clacks close-at-hand but stifled in the bubbling heat of the sounds, some of them jostling woodblock smacks and clatterations—and then this segment of breakbeat-flavoured percussive patterns, the drum & bass toppling of this sonic tower into a kinetic mash of music, wide horizon-searching synth playing a solo, an aching landscape intoxicated lead, and later on the psychedelic infusion is evident with a scramble of freeform melodies and irregular shapes, zooming towards the end, a dizzy psychic joyride into the wonderfully chaotic imagination of this musicmaker.

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• 🔔 'Missing California' is from zenxienz's second album Brainforest, to which you can listen via SoundCloud.

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☟ zenxienz Internet Presence ☟
facebook ⚘ soundcloud ⚘ twitter ⚘ bandcamp ⚘ official site ⚘ youtube ⚘ instagram

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