RUUD VOESTEN — THE CRYPTO SHUFFLE

⌾ LISTEN TO THE CRYPTO SHUFFLE BY RUUD VOESTEN ⌾

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The meandering noir jazz morsel that is 'The Crypto Shuffle' toes a balance between groove and chaos, organised structures and freeform forays into the abyss. Though it's kind of the saxophones that steal the show here, fluttering and squealing and smooth caramel all at once, the track comes from the the mind of drummer amd band leader Ruud Voesten, who says it's "about the capital sin of greed".

Ultimately it follows a concept of setting Dante's Inferno to music, this being the portion occupied by greedy people "who constantly bicker" with each other, as exemplified by rapid-fire frustrated feeling in the duelling saxophones, played by Mo van der Does (alto) and Wietse Voermans (tenor).

To lead his third single through this capitalistic subject matter, Voesten channels his stream of percussion, a successive fluid parade of ghostly liquid knocks and taps that tumble alongside a satisfying buzz and twang of bass. Ultimately, like I said, saxophone rules 'The Crypto Shuffle', being given ample space to wander, but perhaps that's a reflection of the "greed" that inspired the track - more, more, more - and it's a banger beacuse of it.

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• 🔔 'The Crypto Shuffle' is taken from a forthcoming Dante-inspired album. It's set for release later this month on Nethelands indie jazz label ZenneZ Records.

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ÆGIR — LOOK AT PRETTY THINGS

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To hear something from Iceland that isn’t solely gently electronic or obviously introspective is a huge gulp of fresh air. ‘Look At Pretty Things’ begins with a mesmeric fumble through tracts of bubbling synth, an oscillating hot tub of thick relaxation, but this serves to lull your ears into a state of malleability.

For Icelandic musicmaker Ægir, clearly this is the ideal ground on which plant his bumper crop of barrelling breakbeats. These come into earshot like a mob of metallic beetles — the snarling snap of snares slapping the air while the kick drum thunders and quakes.

Ægir’s background as a hardcore drummer gives the percussion a living-and-breathing feel; the sense of direction in the beat, despite its speed, is expertly crafted. Overall, ‘Look At Pretty Things’ is a cross between an alien abduction and a sweaty basement gig: weird, but 100% worth it.

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• 🔔 This track is taken from Ægir’s album The Earth Grew Uncertain, released back in June on Reykjavik’s very own Why not? Plötuútgáfa! Records. Stream, purchase it on Bandcamp. There's also a video for 'Look At Pretty Things'.

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🐣 MATT SOKOL — THE ART FACTORY [初演 • PREMIERE]

There is a great deal of urgency in Matt Sokol's 'the art factory', a track brimming kinetic energy courtesy of collusion between breakneck drums and earthy handfuls of synth arranged in robust arpeggios. Melodies cry out in its first half like little robots communicating brightly with chirruping bleeps-n-bloops, evoking the scene assumed by its enigmatic title: an art factory, where art is made; the sound is industrious, cheerful, with dips of intrigue and doom effusing from a couple of key changes within the first minute. Who are these robots on the production line? For whom is this art being made? We wonder.

Talking to us about the track, Matt Sokol – a drummer himself as well as producer – explains the hyperactive beats: "My love for drums and youthful obsession with math rock drumming means I can't help it," he writes in an email to us, "so many of my beats are crazy fast, flying all over the place."

'the art factory' goes through not only key changes, but whole stylistic shifts. At 1:14 the arpeggio falls away leaving a naked footwork beat thumping beneath a new set of spooky, gleaming synths, chiptune-esque (the VGM sound is "ultimately a coincidence" however), signalling a darker twist behind this art factory, a growling crunch of distortion raging till its crescendo at 1:46 summons an overwhelming sinister tone; look at the artwork—is that blood trailing from what we assume is the factory? The track ends with calm and steady beat, gentle guitar riff, with chilled sweeps of the strings—things are back to normal. It is a multifaceted offering. These are more than superficial changes, however, and are reflective of a thought process.

"I think my mind moves faster than average, both in good and bad ways," Sokol tells us. "I can think fast but also sometimes I can think too fast and go down crazy intellectual pathways in my mind that are not useful."

"With music it seems like that aspect of my personality comes out in overdrive."

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• 🔔 'the art factory' will be released as a standalone single on 19th January.
• 🔔 Matt Sokol's debut EP bloomer was released in October last year and you can listen to and purchase it over on his Bandcamp.

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🐣 SONNY — AGORAPHOBIA

The momentum in this one, the wintry movement the piles of snow beside the road zapping past the window as whatever vehicle passes by whatever. This kinetic morsel, this quest of sound, has been created by Danish musicmaker Sonny—and despite this sense of motion it's titled 'Agoraphobia'. But perhaps in all the jostling drums with the skittering cymbals and the tumbling tip-tapping snares, in the refraining bassline, the gradual crash of hi-hats, there is the tension of psyching oneself up to venture outside, the sweat and the empty indoor comfort; the snow flurries out the window.

And that coldness: huge robust piano chords crunch – later in the track moving between menace and triumph as the agoraphobe reaches trembling clammy hand to the door (03:45) – the glistening marimba sounds, the hi-pitch synth all snowflakes, the whirl of icicles in the cyclical build of the ending. The explosions throughout the song, and the contrast with the bass-and-drums simplicity otherwise, this is the indecision that is always the hypeman of fear, the enduring legacy of watching a wished for world unexplored from a window many times looked through.

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• 🔔 'Agoraphobia' is taken from Sonny's debut C.E. EP, which is out now on newly launched Copenhagen-based label Koldt Bord. You can purchase the EP here.

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🐣 ZIÚR — U FEEL ANYTHING?

Here we are inducted into a harsh world of cliffs and outcrops, jagged mountains, errant bewildering boulders, an arid landscape strewn with stones and with suitably tough greenery dotting the brown-grey-red of it all with mossy juttings; totemic natural or are they natural structures tower into the pale tangerine sky half-toppling above it all. It is an alien landscape, something wholly foreign, a visual conjuration courtesy of these breakneck bone-shattering beats built by Berlin-based musicmaker Ziúr. The pugilism, the violence at work here cannot be understated: this is a brutal piece of work, the alarm clock of the deep cosmos calling you, wrenching you awake, rollicking machine-gun snares, sub-bass-explosions opening up fissures in the earth, an avalanche of perilous percussion.

Yet behind these hard and hefty tracts of beating battering drum sounds there is something more gentle at work in 'U Feel Anything?', noises erupting from the cracks opened up by the piledriver bangs and booms of the beat, sonic awakenings, modulating unidentified sounds pouring out and into the air. In the midst of this irregular pneumatic drill almost grime-flavoured uptempo-ness, this seismic doom, ectoplasmic synth bulges and bubbles in simple patterns, high-pitch needling insectoid sounds sharp and lasering, augmenting the sense of alien unfamiliarity in the already far-flung force of the drums—those drums, textured with crunching, crushing, exoskeletons bursting, the fragmentary abstract ADD itch, the champion drum, the charred earth, the nucleus of energy cracking the frame of terrestrial reality.

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• 🔔 This amazing track is taken from Ziúr's debut release, also called U Feel Anything?, which is out via Planet Mu / Objects Ltd. on 6th October.

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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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🐣 ÄTSCH — UP

What really is surprising about this track is how it sounds like a variation on a theme of Bert Bacharach's smooth 'What The World Needs Now', its introduction fogged with those reminiscent chords, soft and lounge-leaning, a lull of resting heart-rate and horizontal chill. It is not exactly reflective of the track as a whole, nor the heart of the track, but it is a component of what this instrumental journey is all about—and that is drama. So this intro, the heartfelt touching sweetness of it, a trough of energy, soon builds with a flying formation of acrobatic distorted guitar into a peak, the concoction of it soon towering and vibrating all around you cinematic and atomic.

There's a great point in 'Up' where the Dublin-based band ÄTSCH, having already skipped up some gears via new zooming tempos and cascading drums that skiffle and shimmer sharply and a storm of bass, where it all joins together in-sync and wonderful, jumping into staccato patterns at 03:05, locking in gloriously and falling away for the drums again to roll tornadoes into the proceedings, and the virtuoso guitar wailing now with jazz freedom furious rapid lightning in the crashing noise of it all. And we end where we began, the gentle piano chords resonating quietly, framing this dramatic sojourn of sound, this ascension into the clouds and somewhere beyond.

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• 🔔 'Up' is taken from the Irish band's upcoming EP; peep a preview of that here.

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🐣 SHE TALKS SILENCE — SORRY, I AM NOT

The pace of this one, wow, listen to it zoom along, the pace of it, the skirling skitter of the drums, the frenetic pace of it, the satisfying metallic crash and scurry ding-shkr-shkr-shfshfsh-shkr the sword from the sheath sharpness of the hi-hats bounding along with lightning steroid bounce, ultra-jazz, twitchy, the drumkit equivalent of popping candy with the raw fizz of the snare alternating with the pecuniary metals and the hearty thud of the kick. Supra-drum-and-bass intensity. With this Tokyo music entity She Talks Silence mixes a mantra of viscous liquid guitar, collage snaps of plucked bass, layered over each other in a dark refraining tract of atonality. 'Sorry, I Am Not' is this rattling beat, these unrecognisable patterns of notes.

Throughout the careful leftfield punk of this track vocals add a spooky threatening element to the speed of the drums and the off-kilter glitter of the guitar sounds, words sumptuously chewed as they are sung, whispered and caressed as they slow dance into the bristling thicket of percussion that drives this track along. Surprise element when a lo-fi guitar chord jangle kicks off a segment of the track that features moderate bass acrobatics and a turnabout of vocals and a more jogging-pace beat to go with the jangle, the tones colourful, sunny, but with whips of guitar distortion we find ourselves again in the storm and stress of the sprinting drums from before, the ghostly vocals whispering words in your ear once again.

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• 🔔 It is the opening and title track of Sorry, I Am Not, the new She Talks Silence album released today (5th July) via Shibuya-based record label AWDR/LR2, in association with similarly located label/mgmt/distro entity SPACE SHOWER MUSIC.
• 🔔 The brilliantly conceived abstract video for 'Sorry, I Am Not' – a frenetic flurry of feathers as well as transparent overlays that fits the zippy beat and lo-fi indie quality of the track – was created by Minami Yamaguchi aka the person behind She Talks Silence.

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BUDDHAHOUSE – PUBLIC ENEMY

Ready to go on a journey of jostling energy, drink a cup of urgency pressed and bottled in the chilly Japanese city of Sapporo, elbow your way into some space on the dancefloor and buss out the hardiest and most robust of your two-stepping prowess? Because that's what you're gonna get with 'Public Enemy' by BUDDHAHOUSE.

I've already mentioned the city, but yes, BUDDHAHOUSE is a self-professed "DJ, beatmaker" from Sapporo, which is on the "wild frontier" island of Hokkaido, Japan. And this track, like I mentioned, is a wonder of energy and urgency, of no-nonsense, no-frills, wild dance-only music.

Dissect it and you'll find – within a dynamic ebb and flow of drops and build-ups – its punchy punchy kicks, its marching snare drums urging you abrasively into rowdy dancefloor formation, rolling toms adding warlike pugilistic flavour, jangling jingling scathing hi-hat noises crashing together like a box sharpened swords going down a slide, its cutting synth chord pattern sweeping over the bustling bang of the beat. Shuddering galloping aggressive house with retro ornamentation; imagine someone breakdancing to this in the snow at the side of a road as confused cars slow down to watch.

Two great parts: at 2:53, a turntablist record scratch bookends a slice of slow amen beat bustle, before the shout of "Somebody in the house say 'yeah!'", which is sampled from Public Enemy's 'Caught, Can We Get A Witness?' and thus giving BUDDHAHOUSE's track its name.

And from 4:28 onwards, where there's this tiny rising-and-falling bleepy melody that really really reminded me of the tiny bleepy melody in the breakdown bit of the theme for Stage 2 from Streets of Rage.

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• And look, here's a free download of 'Public Enemy' for all your listening and body-moving needs.

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LANCASTER – SUNSET DANCE

Here's a lovely rich and crunchy gravel-zest slice of future funk from a producer called Lancaster. What do you need to know? His real name is Luis Rodriguez and he is from Philadelphia and from the looks of things he was born in 1996, making him like 18 or 19. As many other talented purveyors of future funk are, he is an associate of KEATS//COLLECTIVE – spiritual home to other creators of modern funk/disco/soul classics, including Skylar Spence (fka Saint Pepsi), Harrison, and Rollergirl, to name just a few on their long and illustrious roster.

Looking at the lists of artists included in their compilations sometimes it's like… Pokémon, or something equally collectible. Each of the numerous artists exists in this stylistic, aesthetic-led, nostalgia-breathing space, yet they're all different people, with their own individual styles and flairs. Let's get going on the Future Funk Trading Card series – that would be suuuper fun!

Anyway, here we are with Lancaster (a fine name) and his track 'Sunset Dance'. It begins with a sample of some sort of interview with… some punk people (forgive me for not knowing), something which pops up throughout the track; they talk about being individual, and not wanting to wear Lacoste clothes, and how punk is "overwhelmingly loud". An interesting thing: the interviewer notes that in being different to everybody else, punks end up looking the same. More on this in a second~

This song is thick with funk, a multicoloured miasmia of music that samples a lo-low pitch-shifted version of '80s group Manhatten Transfer song 'Spice of Life' , distorted and overdriven, with classy-breezy horns added along with semi-brutal ricocheting drums – it's even tagged "oversaturated".

Now, this could be a reference to the actual music itself, or something else: if you take the snippets of punk interview present here and equate them with future funk, this track could be taken as a message about the current online music scene being oversaturated. Maybe. Rodriguez also says in the SoundCloud description, "this song means a lot to me." On the other hand, the insertion of this punk interview could just be ascribing to a punk aesthetic, a rebellious spirit, alive in the sample-heavy music of future funk; this kind of attitude, just because it's not distorted guitars and gobbing on people, can thrive in any new music form. For me, chopping up old songs and making new jams outta them, well, I love it, and I definitely think there's something punk about it: nobody's asking permission here, it's about producers using raw materials (samples, sounds, effects) in any way they want in order to portray a fantasy, an idealised throwback to the past, a netting of old music bent to the will of the producer and moulded in whichever way they want: it's freedom.

Another note in the SC description simply says "press play pt 2," which – judging from the title of his 2013 Bandcamp release Press Play, could be heralding a brand new album from Lancaster. Hooray! (maybe)

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天才子役の息子の気持ちD – 巻貝

I don't know what's going on. I first am not very proficient in Japanese, not nearly enough to make sense of stuff on a regular basis. So I do the only thing you can do: GOOGLE TRANSLATE. Right? And then with a little bit of common sense jigging around and searching specific kanji for their individual meanings and trying to put them together… only in some cases where Google Translate makes literally no sense at all… sometimes it's worth this extra effort. More often than not I end up getting lost in a world of language.

This time I somehow ended up on a blog that had written quite an extensive article on the depiction of cannibalism in comics and I feel really disgusted now, why did I keep scrolling down? Yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck.

Anyway: language. 天才子役の息子の気持ちD is the name of the artist in this instance. It means something like "Feelings of genius child actor son, D" – they're from Uchisaiwaichō (neighbourhood in Chiyoda, Tokyo) and they make music. Minimal, experimental, beat-focused music. In fact, their most recent EP is composed entirely of drums. 真海雷巻 is the EP title. All the tracks are named after various water-based creatures: shrimp, common octopus, snakehead, and this track I'm sharing, 「巻貝」 (conch).

It begins life as a metallic tin can rainstick rattle, which leads into a swaying, head-noddingly regulated beat, with vacuum cleaner sounds supporting abrasive velcro snares that also sport spray can ornamentations throughout – these grow more prominent, as they were at the beginning, towards the end, neatly tying up the soundscape with an ouroboros of noise. Wheezy miniature bellows flap around like a thin watercolour of rhythmic turntablism, joining two notes of some miniature bongo thing for the only "melodic" sounds of the track, and then there's these tiny rolling tom sounds.

All of it adds up to a delightful almost-two-minutes' worth of percussive crunch and crackle, thump and fizz, a container of organic, naturalistic beats that shows a sensitivity to the natural world, and a desire to rhythmicise that world in short drum-based vignettes.

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• You can download the 真海雷巻 EP for free from Mediafire.

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ON AN ON GHOSTS

This is the quite lovely and nice sound of a little band from America called ON AN ON with a song called 'Ghosts'. Yes, I'm doing it again, the song is old, blah blah blah.

Who cares. Maybe I should even just stop pointing that fact out. It's late and I'm tired. Sorry.

There is something about this song that is quite magical. To be honest, this style is not the kind of music that I'd listen to out of choice - the intro sounds a bit like THAT Snow Patrol song, for one, and that put me off straight away. But I am quite happy to say that my opinion changed quite quickly. There's so much going in the song in terms of interesting sounds and dynamics and stuff that makes it really nice to listen to. When I first listened a few weeks ago I was watching the video below along with it. Suffice to say it's mesmerising.

Mellow.

I love the faraway vocals (first lyrics are fab) and the endless quality of the gently strummed guitar, in fact the endless quality of the whole thing - it is a panoramic camera forever turning slowly around a mountain scene with cold clouds and marching pines, with smoke coming from some undefined point that drifts just as endlessly. That's what I get from it. A nice expansive sound.

But there are also really quality details that just make my ear hairs tingle when I hear them. The sometimes explosive drum snare, like a pile of cardboard boxes toppling over, is wonderful, as are a lot of the drum noises: especially the barely-audible taps and the lush paradiddles that pop out of the jumble of guitar sounds. There is also a very nice guitar noise at about 3 minutes 30 in the video. The bass, too, especially when it is alone at that same break in the song sounds gorgeous and clean-yet-unpolished. Never thought I'd be going into such raptures over this kind of indie-rock-I-guess but this one's good innit. Comes from album Give In which is out now.

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