THE PINK FROSTS — A SMILE AWAY

⌾ LISTEN TO A SMILE AWAY BY THE PINK FROSTS ⌾

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Gripping. Captivating. This gorgeous number will grab you, albeit gently, and whirl you around in a jolly dance, various aspects of your life whizzing in watercolour, leaving you in soft focus with a handful of flowers and a heaful of fondness. That is at least the general vibe emanating from 'A Smile Away', an affirmation of a song by Wellington-based New Zealanders, The Pink Frosts.

Optimism brims from the beginning, a propulsive and purposeful stride on the drums (Peter Molteno), the bass (Neale Willis) stepping carefully, softly upwards, the backdrop to a simple sun-glint of a guitar melody (Oliver Gaskell) and dreamy synth (Hedley Dew), married in musical harmony like a dawn chorus played out in post-punk. Things get distinctly more noisy with crashing cymbals and tumbling snares and swooshing guitar distortion, a welcome dynamic, joy bursting in sonic form.

It's on this alternating backdrop that Dew pours out his earnest baritone vocals, a kind of cross between Ian Curtis and Jack Steadman (Bombay Bicycle Club), conjuring tableaux so bundled with emotion yet honest and low-key they bring pre-tears heat to the eyes. I mean, "Wake up one morning with a smile on / You slept well and you don't feel worn / Breakfast of choice and the coffee's warm / The high couldn't be more lovely"? This song couldn't be more lovely.

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• 🔔 This wonderful piece of new music from The Pink Forsts is the first single taken from their upcoming Unremarkable Product EP. The self-released set trio of songs is scheduled to be available from 29th September.

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RAYONS — A FRAGMENT OF SUMMER

⌾ LISTEN TO A FRAGMENT OF SUMMER BY RAYON ⌾

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Images of summer float by to the drifts of piano in 'A Fragment of Summer'. A cicada screams in the humid green park. Bright blurs of dappled sun wave on tree-shaded grass like living islands. A collection of clouds cruise in a pale blue sky. Cricket and frisbee, sunset drives, salt-washed skin and sandy feet, mopping sweat off your brow on a melting pavement beneath tall gleaming buildings. While the song is a fragment of summer, it evokes many fragments of summer, like a beam of light shot through a prism, dazzling with an iridesence of vignettes and beaming photos.

This is the quiet power of Rayons, aka Masako Nakai, whose playing feels like waves, rhythmic and organic. Nakai weaves in a melody like a tapestry pattern, a motif following a swing beat like the rhythm of a train, a cantering horse, an active hearbeat. Washes of emotion range throughout, encapsulating the contentment, sadness and promise of summer. In Japan, this season comes and goes in a whirl of mind-altering heat, merging the human world and something altogether more earthly, deeply entrenched in the buzz of insects, the burning green of leaves, the hot grey heavy skies.

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• 🔔 This slice of new music is the second in Rayons' digital single series, following on from her previous release 'Luminescence'. Stream and/or download it courtesy of her label home, Flau.

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MATTHIAS GUSSET — FAREWELL

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The organ is the original drone and ambient instrument from way back when, let’s be honest. It’s a wonder that it isn’t used in more tracks, as Matthias Gusset has expertly employed it in ‘Farewell’. The track’s chord progression is simple enough, a switching oscillation between two chords, then another, in cyclical rotation from start to finish. This provides a soft backdrop, dim lighting, for the emotive action that follows.

Melodies rise up from the bright drone of ‘Farewell’, at first like birdsong, or the dappled light of the sun twinkling on bough-shaded paths, and then in more prominent, layered stretches, calling out from the grove and its summer flowers and its butterflies a warm, pastoral goodbye.

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• 🔔 Taken from Matthias Gusset’s Inbetween Birdsongs, out now on Radicalis, which you can purchase and/or listen to on his Bandcamp.

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CUUSHE — MAGIC

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Cuushe is back. Recently she announced her upcoming album WAKEN via the fresh vitality of its first single, 'Hold Half'. This time around, it's 'Magic' that faces up to the grey piercing light of morning.

A slow steamroller of a beat thuds as the propulsion to 'Magic', rusted metallic percussion ticking faintly at its mechanical heart. A set of heavy-hearted piano chords plays a downcast reverb-laden refrain; "I just wanna die.." Cuushe's voice whispers from this fog of sound. Craggy synths crack in mournful reply, a glistening gloomy call-and-response.

Starting quietly, almost from another perspective, later in the track her vocals rise up, outraged: "Magic... Why are you so silent?" A question perhaps posed to the once-dreaming individual now scrutinised by reality. Lightness eclipsed. This refrain cuts through a wash of intense sounds, synths glittering and roaring together with the clatter of a bright guitar riff — a combination of playful concreteness and fantasy synthetic noise that runs through 'Magic'.

It's all been brought to life with a video by director Tao Tajima. On a backdrop of footage filmed in the wilds of Tibet, it's a tale of ghostly girls tied with string to insistent flapping birds, drawn in their phantomic pastels by sometime Cuushe collaborator Yoko Kuno. The music — mysterious yet methodical in its makeup — matches the stark marching mountains and vast empty tundra.

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• 🔔 'Hold Half' is taken from Cuushe's forthcoming new album Waken, set for release 20th November on her label home flau. Pre-order it over on the flau bandcamp.

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☟ Cuushe Internet Presence ☟
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TAY NOEL — LAST TIME

⌾ LISTEN TO TAY NOEL, LAST TIME ⌾

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With its beat echoing in a collage of ticks and booms as if caught in a looping memory, 'Last Time' is a vessel of tender emotion tumbled along by the multifaceted rhythm of time. Sultry chords paint a soundscape with muted synth glow, a picked melody adding a gentle delicacy to the scene.

All the while, percussion rattles, cymbals whisper metallics into the air, a lone, full-bodied snare explodes in the near-distance laden with reverb. Created by Virginia producer Tay NoeL, 'Last Time' is a gleaming marvel of measured, minimal production.

"This song came from a personal experience," the producer tells yes/no via email. "It was inspired from a mutual breakup between me and a girl before I shipped off to the Navy."

A hollow synth melody that calls out every now and then, a hollow, flute-esque R&B-flavoured beacon that stretches out slowly above it all. It's a sound that summons the spiritual aesthetic of old-school lovesongs, but in its descending notes, its hint of a mournful tone, it becomes emotive.

"When I create I need to have an emotion in my mind, either from personal or what I believe the song is trying to show me," he adds.

"In better words, I speak my mind and emotions through my music."

The unpretentious simplicity of 'Last Time' — and indeed many of the instrumental soundtracks to emotion and experience to be found on Tay NoeL's album The Vibez: Chill Instrumentals — calls to mind the vaporwave sensitivity to scenes, times, places, fantasy visions, nostalgia. But there's one presiding difference: this music remains gloriously rooted in and inspired by reality.

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• 🔔 You can stream and/or download The Vibez: Chill Instrumentals, Tay NoeL's collection of instrumentals, over on Bandcamp.

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🐣 JOHNNY JEWEL — RED DOOR

Just about two minutes of blissful-abrasive noise, of arching plumes of synth that seem to wash across your mind like clouds careening across a curdled sky; thinner more modulated chords raising the tone, raising the mood just slightly, but with thinner tracts of sound spelling out some sort of indefinite threat, and scratchy nanobot insectoid chirrupings like malicious electronic signals. Yes, this is ominously titled 'Red Door' by Johnny Jewel, a maelstrom of seemingly innocuousness, like the beautiful azure tide of the sea receding as it laps a beach to reveal a carpet of shattered bones; a paradise lost, bountiful beauty at crippling cost.

Of course, Johnny Jewel has had a hand in the soundtracking of much anticipated Twin Peaks: The Return (albeit with Chromatics in one of its episode's musical endings) so it may explain the dual-minded mood of 'Red Curtain' - as well as its name - so much of the Twin Peaks atmosphere is an uncomfortably close juxtaposition of terror and humour, safety and danger, and thus this track soothes but it also scathes somewhat—it is a comfortable haunting.

"I was about a year deep into recording what would become Windswept when I heard that David [Lynch] was making Season 3 [of Twin Peaks]," he explained. "It's been a year since Chromatics performed at the Roadhouse. With disintegrated memory through the haze of television snow, I wanted to share a glimpse behind the red curtain." And here it is captured: the eternity and mortality in those anxious pre-show moments, the mystery of backstage ritual.

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• 🔔 The haunting/comforting 'Red Curtain' is taken from new Johnny Jewel album, Themes for Television. Released back in late May, the project began "as a sonic exploration of the sounds I was hearing in my nightmares," said Jewel in a press release. "I wanted to find my way out of the maze by focusing on beauty over fear — like the way the fractured sunrise looks in a dream."

  You can grab it on vinyl

• 🔔 The atmospherically relevant video for 'Red Door' was directed by Radka Leitmeritz; with its slow-motion and lingering fades, its enigmatic steely-eyed star Czech model Eva Klimkova and the monochrome-except-for-red colour scheme, it's a spiritual cousin to the track itself.

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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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☟ Nathan Fake Internet Presence ☟
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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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☟ Хьёрдис Internet Presence ☟
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🐣 EMMECOSTA — HEAVY HEART

Slowly slowly this track rolls along, the eternal trundle of curling clouds across a greyscale landscape, the horizontal energy of chillwave simplicity sweeping into the foundation of this track: the dom-dom glooping bass of the kicks and the thin abrasion of the snare tinged with lo-fi, the soft constancy of the synth constant like a tide in the sidechain of it all. 'Heavy Heart' unfolds like a flower turning and opening to the day's first flood of light, the vocals of Gothenburg-based Italian trio Emmecosta adding silken texture to the track, the languorous luxury of it heightened. Here we are laid-back and loafing, bleary and wandering.

And around 2:40 the brief disappearance of the beat, relegated to its most bassy parts, highlights another element that bejewels the track; these high-pitched pings, synth or effected guitar it may be, how they cry into the air, splashing watercolours, the stifling distortion of it, the degradation of the pure sound conjuring this feel of something pushed to its limit—and the energy in this scathing absent melodies is something that aches and pines and yearns, careering into a blanket of dazzling stars. The electronic tricks of 'Heavy Heart', the sometimes staccato cuttings through the track, that ebb-flow sidechain, both betray and bolster how human it is, how organic, how like a melancholy nostalgic longing howl into the ether it is.

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• 🔔 'Heavy Heart' is taken from the August-released EP from the band, Velour, which was brought into the world courtesy of Stockholm label ICEA. You can listen to and download it from Bandcamp.

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🐣 PASTEL — SILHOUETTE

This is a mind-cleanse, a slow sandstorm that wraps you up in it, a feeling of being lost with no way out and not knowing which way to turn, but it's not closed-in and claustrophobic like a labyrinth, more the feeling of being small in a huge expanse, a greyscale desert of sound that leaves you speck-like in its centre and the rippling dunes drift off distantly and the sky is hard and stony and the landscape looms towering all around: the giant them, the insignificant us. Ambient yet noisy, the hypnotising sounds of it all are instantly emotive.

LA-based Gabriel Brenner aka pastel crafts a leviathan of sound in 'silhouette', the touching tracts of synth swirling misty, melancholic watercolours that veil the heavy reverberations of the vocals, a haunted voice low and descending, lines ending with gentle vibrato, speaking from a lonely distance of Native American identity in its early refrain "the skin doesn't lay quite right, does it?" and later there are enigmatic descriptions of moments where the self in this regard is questioned—"gave me a card: painting of a woman with a feather in her hair." A gradual crescendo fades out, the booming of a drum, the gentle noise subsides like something forgotten and out of reach.

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• 🔔 'silhouette' is taken from pastel's upcoming absent, just dust EP, due for self-release on 25th August; download this first track and pre-order the EP on Bandcamp. Half the proceeds taken from its sales will be given to FreshestCollective.org, "who have provided continued legal support to water protectors since the founding of the Sacred Stone Camp."

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水曜日のカンパネラ –『シャクシャイン』

Sunday, April 3rd. Hiroshima. Walking around Tower Records, listening to their music selections, noticed a Listening station dedicated to someone I'd never heard of before. Listened. The pull on my liking mechanism or my affection neurones or like whatever was INSTANTANEOUS AND LASTING. LASTING ENOUGH TO COME BACK TO THE APARTMENT AND WRITE THIS.

The name of the someone is Wednesday Campanella or WEDNESDAY CAMPANELLA or 水曜日のカンパネラ [Suiyōbi no Kaｎpanera]. It is made up of frontlady KOM_I and producer Hidefumi Kenmochi and director Dir.F, whose videowork gives the duo's kinetic music a very very worthy visual equivalent (see below). [Another great video is the one for 『ディアブロ』 ]

and song that captured and arrested my senses about well a few hours ago is called 『シャクシャイン』 or 'Shakushain'. Shakushain was an Ainu (indigenous people of northern Japan and more notably of Hokkaidō, northernmost island of Japan, which was formerly known as Ezo) leader, involved in a conflict which became known as Shakushain's Revolt. Trade between the Ainu and Tokugawa-ruled Japan favoured the latter, Ezo having been brought under de facto Japanese control centuries earlier, and was managed by the Matsumae clan. Shakushain led a brief war in 1669 against the Matsumae, and other specially appointed forces sent to bolster the region threatened by a united Ainu, before surrendering. After peace deals, the Ainu generals celebrated. That same night they, inclduing Shakushain himself, were assassinated by the Matsumae. This was one of the only instances of large-scale resistance against Japanese rule by the Ainu. Hiistorryy lesssooooooooooonnn~~~~~~~~

This is interesting because 水曜日のカンパネラ's song is wordularly an ode to Hokkaidō (the video as you'll see is a sightularly ode) and its modern delights. It's interesting because the beat is brash and polished and heavy on the bass and pops in your ears peppered with a bristling hail of percussion, with satisfying cymbal crashes and awesomely expansive and rich handclaps exploding on occasion. It's interesting because strings and simple melody crescendo in parts carrying a somewhat melancholy undertone beneath its tide of feeling, a part of which – an organlike sound – continues into the second verse, where the first was bare of instrumentation bar the booming beat and KOM_I's rapid fire layered softly-spoken rapping; it's interesting because the song presents a quirky beat-based modernity alongside unpretentious and swelling heartfelt instrumentation, two distinctly different things melded skilfully and, more important, very enjoyably.

☟☟☟☟☟☟☟☟

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• 『シャクシャイン』 is track 1 of 水曜日のカンパネラ's 2015 album ジパング, Zipangu. it is presumably titled after what the explorer Marco Polo reported as the Chinese name of Japan at the time: Zipangu (or Cipangu)... either that or after the manga Zipang
• urge whoever is reading to watch a playlist of this and previous songs w/ vids on YT

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MEISHI SMILE – BLANK OCEAN

Meishi Smile has shared a song via Ryan Hemsworth friends-only-not-a-label Secret Songs. Who is Meishi Smile? I hear you cry. Don't worry. His real name is Garrett Yim and he is from California and he makes music so sweet you'll want to cry, so bleakly sad that you'll want to smile. At the beginning of last year he released his debut album, LUST, which I really enjoyed – a high-energy whirlwind of J-pop flavours that was as wistful and introverted as it was all-encompassing and euphoric. A lovely mix, in short. Oh and he is also the head of alternative pop label/collective, Zoom Lens.

Anyway, the track is called 'Blank Ocean' (the title alone is the first tearjerker – even that speaks to me) and it's really good, basically. The intro is a real killer, a 27-second gradual slide into the track's candy-coloured bounce featuring cold, fizzing synth with hints of the Amen-style breaks. The main body of this track is all breakbeats, with zithery plucked instruments plaintively echoing the melody of the vocals, which are vocodered to good effect, almost as a detachment from the true emotion of what they're singing.

Mr. Meishi Smile has kindly provided the lyrics and with lines like, "let's end our lives in a sentimental way / let's echo our youth like death in poetry," the fearsome despair and hopelessness at the heart of this song become more evident.

In true Meishi style, he's also added some brilliant pan flute sounds, the hollow quirky sound of them conjuring the otherworldliness of one of his influences, the soundtrack of Bomberman 64. Add to this the blooping (almost like Sonic jumping circa 1991) synth hook and breezy guitar chords, and you have a whole lot of disparate and perhaps even conflicting elements.

But Meishi Smile weaves them all together with a finesse that not only results in a well-crafted piece of sugary and emotive pop, but that also, in its loud and bustling way, harks back to Meishi's roots in harsh noise music. Top marks!

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• Meishi Smile made a guest mix for YES/NO last year – Valentine's Day-themed, too! It's really good! Go listen! And download it~!
• Also I interviewed Mr. Meishi for Red Bull Music Academy magazine regarding Zoom Lens. Go read!

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MORGAN HISLOP – SMALL ROOMS & NOCTURNAL THOUGHTS [FREE DOWNLOAD]

I was supposed to or rather I meant to write about this guy, UK-based Morgan Hislop, a looong time ago but, like many things in life, it slipped me by or I was having a panic attack and my mind went blank for months or I just simply forgot about it. One or more of those things. In any case, we tweeted briefly today about the benefits of Ping Pong (dim sum resto, not table tennis) and I wondered what he'd been up to musically and I saw this track – one I was gonna write about ages ago. And I thought hmm well let's just do it now.

Sorry for waffling but idc really: I will waffle. The track is 'Small Rooms & Nocturnal Thoughts', a title that suits the quasi-claustrophobia of small rooms and the often bizarre lonely sentiments of nighttime, especially nighttimes in small rooms. Clunky percussion coupled with hard kicks, swaddled with a gloomy gloss of sub-bass, and harpsichordish synth melodies form the main rhythmic pattern for the song, but it has this added phantom-cosmic quality with strange vocal samples, pulled apart like plasticine in places and in others spilled out in endless reverb like exploded mists of dry dust.

A bit that I particularly like arrives just after the halfway point, the music drowned out by a gritty splash of abrasive white noise and wiped out in a voidful moment, where it's only the clunking beat and vocal samples chime in like messages from ancient spacemen garbled by unknown phenomena; this bit is brilliantly lonely, like a mind in turmoil behind unthinking everyday actions. An exciting, indescribable journey through a nicely crafted soundscape, mindscape, whose sounds are almost edible they are so delicious. Download this song from M. Hislop's SoundCloud (link belowww) if you want :)

• Fun fact: Morgan Hislop is the drummer in Tropics, the deeply soulful progeny of Chris Ward. I urge you to check out the Home & Consonance EP from last year, it's pretty beautiful.
• Normal fact: 'Small Rooms & Nocturnal Though' is taken from the Atlantics Volume 3 compilation by extraordinarily cool Brooklyn "label/blog/party" Astro Nautico, which incidentally you can download for name-your-price here (CLICK).

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