AKIYOSHI YASUDA — MEMENTO

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Taking as the theme for this track as leaving behind his view of life and death, 'Memento' by composer and producer Akiyoshi Yasuda (aka STARGUiTAR) is an existential whirlwind. Harsh gales of ambient waves rush forth, speckled with the static of distortion and decay, a vague hope spun in the rising, gleaming resonance that lies at the heart of it all.

"In 'Memento' I'm trying to capture the scales, melodies, rhythms, verses, emotions, ups and downs... you can strip away all that stuff that music should have, and you can make it work," Yasuda tells yes/no via email.

"I'm composing to express the sound as if it were swimming freely."

Free of constraints, 'Memento' (taking its name from the Latin expression memento mori, a symbolic expression or reminder of death) erupts as if from a spring, but also falls into an empty sky like mist; it is dynamic, shifting through different textures — sharp, soft, glittering, whispering — and yet it is still; it feels as though it could be sunk in depression, but at the same time optimistic and upward-looking as if glimpsing a sunrise; preparing for sleep, seizing the day.

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• 🔔 'Memento' is taken from Akiyoshi Yasuda's Memento — Day 1 EP. You can stream and/or download that from this extensive list of streaming services.

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☟ Akiyoshi Yasuda Internet Presence ☟
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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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🐣 PASTEL — STAMMER

It would be very easy to say that this track is ambient and ethereal and leave it at that. However there is much more to the continual hypnotic hum of synth and wordless voices that call and cry throughout than a cleanse of the soul, or as background music for chillment—it is actually the opposite. Much like with his previous track 'silhouette', pastel creates this whirlwind of sound in 'stammer' that blocks and muffles the outside world, stuns and clears the mind, in order to set a very lonely scene. It is a vast landscape and there is nothing but the wind which is howling but muffled and there's you yourself standing in its midst as it whips up the sand. The colour is down so low it might as well be greyscale.

Talking about the track, pastel writes that it "deals most explicitly with an inability to formulate language around the historical and generational trauma tackled in the preceding tracks of the EP." This is a reference to his latest self-release as a whole, absent, just dust, a collection of music that illustrates loss as viewed from the perspective of Native Americans, himself coming from this background. Words fail, unable to form into something that can fully explain what has been done to the New World's original people since European colonisation: a very big, very old subject. So it's no wonder that the voice in 'stammer' literally stammers, stuttering fricatives of words truncated, struggling, the forgotten language of communities in the dust, in the ghostly wind, the traumatic growl of sub-bass

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• 🔔 'stammer' is the finale of pastel's absent, just dust EP, released at the end of last month, which you can grab from 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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☟ pastel Internet Presence ☟
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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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📠
☟ pastel Internet Presence ☟
facebook ⚘ soundcloud ⚘ bandcamp ⚘ official site ⚘ twitter ⚘ instagram

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