🐣 R23X — TERRA_II

⌾ LISTEN TO R23X TERRA_II ⌾ Described as an "adventure to a long-forgotten space station/arcade orbiting the now-vacated planet once known as Earth," the two morsels of music that comprise R23X's latest release – Terra_II – act like a soundtrack to an imaginary videogame. They set the mood, induct you seamlessly into the world at the heart of this project.

The two parts to this single represent of the adventure to the eponymous space station/arcade: Terra_II. Partly summoning the steady pace of a space shuttle journey with its swaying march of layered beats, this track for the most part feels like walking around an abandoned space station.

There are the hollow synth boops that summon this sense of forlorn loneliness, the emptiness of robots with nothing to do—something once great rediscovered. But there's a cheerfulness to the coldness in the track: the two-chord vox sounds, the cut sample in the background, the videogame noises throughout that still erupt from the forgotten arcade machines.

But the last part of the track changes tack. Following a tiny break, where you feel the silence of creeping through a dripping tunnel to a new area on the station, the airy, analogue chords (conjuring the soundtrack of Final Fantasy VII) change dramatically. A now brooding, maybe more monstrous atmosphere hides in the hallways.

Part of the "mystery" at the heart of Terra_II as a whole.

'G.A.I.A. Probe' represents the (perhaps) discovery of something that might shed light on how the "thought-to-be destroyed space station has thrived and adapted in ways thought previously impossible."

It's just 54 seconds of sound, but for the duration of its series of rising, textured synth chords it shifts between beauty and decay, discovery and devastation. Synth vox suggests a hint of eerie humanity, no matter how long ago; the clinking bleeps ping a simple melody of inevitable but untimely shutdown.

Equal parts delicate and laden with the possibilities of space, shades of human emotion mingle with overtones of the sad uselessness of prodigious machines mired in neglect. In Terra_II, R23X marries with vivid colour and detail a scene of moody mystery with that strange lightness and gravity with which videogames consume and enthrall.

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• 🔔 Part of a project called EarthCade, created by R23X (Marc Junker) and Drew Wise (game developer, artist), which originally began as a game idea: "an exploration of bright and colourful animal characters who built a a self-sufficient arcade (The EarthCade) where everyone is welcome and included."

  Junker explains a little further. "We started the project with the idea of donating a portion of profits from every item sold to various charities (VOKRA, WCS, etc) that may prompt the audience (or their kids) to discuss/think about ways they can change/contribute for a better future on Earth!"

• 🔔 Terra_II is available now on Yetee Records, an offshoot of The Yetee, purveyor of art, apparel and more, where both Junker and Wise are both art directors. You can purchase Terrace_II on Bandcamp, if you like. And you can find more EarthCade products here.
• 🔔 We first stumbled across R23X in 2014. Check out the track that introduced us to R23X, 'Dry Summer'.

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📠
☟ R23X Internet Presence ☟
soundcloud ⚘ bandcamp ⚘ official site ⚘ twitter ⚘ instagram ⚘ spotify

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🐣 ZAP HOLMES — FLAKED OUT DREAMING

⌾ LISTEN TO ZAP HOLMES, FLAKED OUT DREAMING ⌾

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This track floats along on two separate plain. One is this floating nebulous feeling, a flowing tide like the watercolours of a dreamscape, the melting mind of somewhere unknown, the swells of the tide of the unsconscious, sweeping along and founding this track on wholly ambient terrain. Like floating through space, it's the infinity of slumber.

On the other hand, it feels close and intimate, though detached and lonely, like the charting and observation of a biomechanical organism. The way samples chant in regularity, lo-fi and wheezing like some artificial life process, ticking percussion keeping time and clacking and sounding the cogs of static motion, trickling along like a living engine.

And that makes sense. Swedish musicmaker Zap Holmes tells us his inspiration for the track was his dreaming girlfriend.

"My girlfirend like to sleep and sometimes for many hours. And I made this track during one of those times," he said. "Got some recordings on my iphone when we messed around at home so I put some samples of her in the song also."

So 'Flaked Out Dreaming' has this sense of being alive in suspended animation, a grand dream arcing over whilst all the time no time is moving at all; those hazy, crackling samples counting the seconds till consciousness. It's an epic of sleep, where it culminates in these sometime crashing waves of charged white noise distortion, twinkling lights like neurons firing on the cusp of waking.

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• 🔔 This is taken from Zap Holmes' Bluescreens EP - all of which he made on a "crappy little laptop when my main computer was broke. Was stuck with almost no samples and an old version of Reason."
• 🔔 You may stream or download 'Flaked Out Dreaming' via your fav service on this link right here.

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📠
☟ Zap Holmes Internet Presence ☟
facebook ⚘ soundcloud ⚘ bandcamp ⚘ twitter ⚘ youtube ⚘ instagram ⚘ spotify

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🐣 AUGUST ROSENBAUM — NEBULA

The sense of space, the resounding sense of vast expanse, the music here frames a snapshot of infinity, the conjuration of something gargantuan. Before its delicate guitars and dustyroom ancient pianos – vital human instruments, organic and tactile, the strings of the guitar pealing rounded and faint glimmer in the gloom of space, the gentle pluckings made intense in the hold-your-breath quiet of the track – before all that, August Rosenbaum crafts orchestral awakening sets the scene: majesty, and awe in the scale and glow of that majesty. The piano that follows gloops drily with melancholy, a lament under the eaves of wonder and fear, clanging with reverb that seems to call out, cello aches wooden and earthly, bass thumps subtle like heartbeat in your ears.

And a plaintive song, an analogue melody pings out with microdelay, plinking and blinking in tempo rubato, an alien sense at odds with the anthropoid regularity of sound blanketing the canvas, its dendro-life physical and easily manifested beneath this new noise, this unidentifiable sound, non-physical, abstract, void-born. It plays out a future romanza amidst the strewn neoclassicism vibrating through space. The music dissolves and rematerialises a whole new beast, shining beacons javelin through an ominous arpeggio, a brass growl, an ascension of strings, an introduction of the proverbial bigger picture. 'Nebula' paints loneliness, a sense of being small, an intergalactic search for more-than-this—and it paints discovery, the response to our calls, the giant unknowable to our minute but powerful and personal curiosity.

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• 🔔 'Nebula' is the first track to demonstrate August Rosenbaum's upcoming album Vista, due for release via Copenhagen record label Tambourhinoceros on 24th November. You can download the track from Bandcamp.
• 🔔 The unnerving video for the track was directed by Andreas Emenius and made in collaboration with Prxjects, "a culture laboratory initiated by Mercedes-Benz."

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📠
☟ August Rosenbaumn Internet Presence ☟
facebook ⚘ soundcloud ⚘ bandcamp ⚘ official site ⚘ twitter ⚘ songkick

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