GALTIER — DANCING ON RUINS

⌾ LISTEN TO GALTIER, DANCING ON RUINS ⌾

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What begins as a dark take on the Hazy Maze Cave theme from Super Mario 64 — which certainly had its own set of subterranean-flavoured rapid-fire drums — soon proves itself to be much more than a tumble of pugilistic percussion. In fact, this is more like the rave going on in the level's underground lake that Mario must have missed.

Any imagined similarities aside, 'Dancing On Ruins' is a frenzied beast of its own. Syncopated snares crack, punching their own time over a cavalcade of kicks, glossy razor cymbals splashing a liquid sharpness to the thud and gravel of the track. A bass wanders in, wooden and clackety.

It's around the halfway mark that UK producer Galtier seems to have summoned whatever was sleeping beneath the ruins themselves, plasma synths oozing their miasma onto the scene, ever more agitated robust sounds diving bombing the air like a swarm of steam-powered bees.

'Dancing On Ruins' is the sound of whirling over giant boulders and half-standing buildings, unearthing ancient technology and long-buried treasures. Its simplicity, space between sounds, and textures make for a terrifying storm of drama and dance.

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• 🔔 This track is taken from the eponymous Galtier EP which arrived on Mexico City-based label Infinite Machine. You can stream and purchase (if you like) Galtier's Dancing On Ruins EP from their Bandcamp.

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🐣 PETTICOAT — POMPOUS

You know in Super Smash Bros. how Kirby's Down Special Move turns him into some heavy object, like a spiked ball, 100-ton weight, a stone, a Thwomp, or a block of trash? Well this track is sort of like that. (If we assume that Kirby in his regular form is soft, then it works). 'Pompous' by the LA-based newcomer Petticoat is squishy, taffy-esque, pastel-coloured and popping with pizzazz, but then there is this constant, stony pugilism in the beat and the rolling modulated synth blasts that gives it a hard but sugary coating.

Kicks thump with a balance between gloopy and thudding, cementing the rhythm of the track and sending it up like karst landforms for a dramatic soundscape that juts out and jostles with jungle greenery; dreamy gleaming chimes chase each other in spears of glistening metallic dust—another similarity to the sparkly world of Kirby. And now piano chords clonk and clank polyrhythmic in the gorgeous goo of 'Pompous', pitched vocals squall heavenly in triumph at the terraforming foundation of it all. Durable, colourful, serious, soft, fantastical: get lost for a moment in the lovely world that Petticoat's created with his music.

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• 🔔 This is literally Petticoat's first original track so keep your ears peeled to his SoundCloud and follow him and stuff if you want to hear more.

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🐣 PORTALS — WAKELAST

This song was pitched very briefly with the captivating subtitle ‘Elvis trying to use Windows 98.’ Clickbait, you may think. But upon listening, upon hear the guttural abrasive vocals of PORTALS curling round each pointed word like a cyberpunk savant fortune-teller and the gabbering liquid gooey instrumental, this description seems quite spot-on - at least superficially.

“Looking back,” Alejandro Cañellas, the human behind PORTALS, kindly explains, “it seems the track focuses on the law of correspondence. Every line is a reference to either looking at myself from within myself or from without.”

Accordingly the lyrics of ‘WAKELAST’ - taken from a recent double-single Voult//Wakelast (tagged ‘win98core’ on SoundCloud) - are cryptic and self-examining. The refraining nature of it gives a mantra quality to how it is delivered, making it feel like a frenzied, searching howl into the vaulting void: “eyes look into the next life / myself always outside / eyes look into the next life / I stand behind my eyes.” Not to mention how it is viscerally scrawled into the air by the vicious vocals, falling thunderboltish on the bed of garbled plasma noise - a sample taken from 'jacket funk' by pilotredsun track. ‘WAKELAST’ is like a brutal reflection, self-reflexive poetry in the form of a fist to one’s own face—aggressive existentialism.

“It's like a hall of mirrors,” Cañellas tells us. “I think people should spend more time in mirror halls cause no matter where they look they're forced to stare at themselves and at their own vampire elementals and smoke demons.”

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• 🔔 Listen to the Voult//Wakelast double single over on PORTALS' SoundCloud.
• 🔔 There is also a suitably abrasive and glitched-out music video for the other track 'VOULT' to illustrate the garbled existentialist aggression of the track. This can be viewed on YouTube.

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🐣 SUSPECT — SAY IT WITH YOUR CHEST

Sometimes it is what's left unsaid that is most powerful, and in the case of instrumentals it's what's left unused and untouched: space. A sense of space can give a sense of majesty and grandeur as well as chilling tension and literal expansiveness. And so it is in 'Say It With Your Chest', the latest from London rapper Suspect—synths glassy and glacial, halfway between a slowed-down music box and a warped gamelan, chime out a haunting melody that adds a calculated coldness to the track.

Between these chimes is space, and lots of it, plenty for Suspect's murderous bars, who breathlessly and growling explains the advantages of not talking behind someone's (i.e. his) back – "bet you can't @ me when you're dead" – and challenging you to "say it with your chest," this hook screaming out guttural with reverb and ad-libs yelping in the void of the track. A huge trap-flavoured beat thumps and rattles, the minimalism and delicacy of the instrumental making the venom and aggression of the words all the more effectively brutal: "all I smell is death in the air / it gets dark in the depths."

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• 🔔 This track is out now on RINSE and you can stream it variously here.
• 🔔 The video for 'Say It With Your Chest' was directed by Bafic and Hector Dockrill, who explain the ideas behind the vivid visuals, dark yet colourful: "Suspect wanted to shoot a hood video with colour, so we experimented with lights around Wooly [Walworth Road] — we wanted to capture everything in its correct environment, but within a heightened reality."

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☟ Suspect Internet Presence ☟
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MARCIOZ – GOD AIN'T GONNA PAY YOU BACK

Well well well. This is pretty damn cool. Never before have I heard harpsichord in a song like this before, but here it, harpsichording away like some frock-coat-wearing, grey-wigged phantom of the baroque era floating over the distorted kicks of our hectic and noisy modern world. It arrives from the mind of 18-year-old musicmaker Marcioz, who is from Curitiba, Brazil, and it's called 'God Ain't Gonna Pay You Back'.

Flashing with antiquity, the track begins with the atmospheric and virtuosic harpsichord pluckings, soon joined by fallen columns of bass that seem to go on forever. Then from chamber music to a chamber of noise, as if you've stepped on a tripwire, huge laser beam synths shoot out at you with acid sharpness, loud and slick, accompanied by a screaming, spooky melody of synth. Later on this copies the harpsichord's melody, blooping all the way.

These chops of synth are replaced for the chopped up remains of some other track, these truncated snippets breathing over the the deadly tectonic beat whose kicks seem to move the very earth, and whose lethal snares slice the tops of mountains with their high velocity attacks; these sometimes turn into tongue-clicking woodblock clops, reverbing into the sophistication of the track. A vocal sample appears like a memory, framed by this mix of baroque music (the track ends with some mean sounding strings, too) and super-modern footwork-ish flavours – v unique sounds presented in a kind of satisfyingly jarring manner.

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ROBOKID – PANTHER

Du lourd! That's what I'd say in French. Means heavy. And this shit from Robokid is rather heavy, weighty – yeah, there's definitely a bulkiness to it, a dense mass of hard sounds. A congealing of liquid sounds into a more putty-like substance that rolls around consuming everything in its path, much like the blob in the 1958 film, The Blob.

Who is Robokid? A musicmaker from Boston. That's all you need to know. His track 'Panther' is pockmarked with vast, fuzzy sludgewalls of brass-ish blares, which form the bassline underpinning the bristling jungle-esque beat, itself a frenzy of urgent broken clockwork percussion. As this assault bears down on your brain, high synth soars in, lingering with eagle-call melodies; beeps 'n' bleeps join in, stuttering to be heard amidst tumbling marimba chimes that glisten through the heavy shades of this track.

It's kinda spooky sounding, but it's also kinda not; it draws you with its punchiness and keeps you there with its dynamic structure – its use of the space between sounds, for instance – and with its atmospheric noises, its busy bustling beat. What could be misconstrued as just one thing ends up being many things at once, without sounding even one jot jumbled or confused, an odyssey of proclamatory and exclamatory proportions. It totally knows where it's going and what it's up to.

• This arrives fresh-ish courtesy of burgeoning artist collective Lifted Contingency and a mini-compilation called 24k. At $1, it's a bargain. In the words of JME, "cop that, it's a deal like Ikea."

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FAILR – GAVE UP

BOM… CRRK… BOM–BOM–CRRK… It's embarrassing enough just imagining myself beatboxing out-loud and in front of people, but now I'm worried that I haven't typed it right – is it onomatopoeically correct? Yeah just so you know it's supposed to be like, this huge sparse beat. Sigh, anyway, that's how I feel after listening to this song.

What song? Well it is a song by a person called Failr, also named Warwick (the real name of this Sydney-based person), and the song is called 'Gave Up'. It gets its name from the cyclical sample used throughout the track, smooth silky vocals contrasting against the hard thudding beats (could you not tell from my literal beatboxing?) which are the very effective bedrock to this track, each kick a veritable blockbuster right hook, each snare a scathing slap. These play around with sombre lounge-esque piano chords, soft and warm, giving a lethargic attitude to the track that fits its defeatist title.

What I like about this is not only its thumping drums – punctuated by skittering hi-hats, and later on mobilising themselves double-time into an uptempo house rhythm – its hard style, but its simplicity: at its heart this is drums, piano, sample – a triumvirate of noise. Of course, there is a little more going on than just this, the fizzing white noise flapping ominously throughout the second half, the just-discernable bassline. With that in mind, you'll also notice that nothing is really repeated or looped so much – repetition falls by the wayside here for more of an experiment with different parts to the song, keeps things interesting.

This comes from Failr's first collection of sounds, the 5-track Lark EP – here he plays with sampling as well as with this style of satisfyingly punchy beats; personally I thought 'Gave Up' was the best example. The name of the EP is quite fitting, as larks (the bird) in literature symbolise daybreak which metaphorically ties in with the "dawn" of this project; on the other hand, it is an old-fashioned thing in Chinese culture for larks to be taught to mimic the sounds of other birds, thus tying in with the sampling side of things; still further, "a lark" is synonymous with "a laugh" or "some fun", so that could work too. Anyway! That's that.

• You can download this for name-ur-price at Failr's Bandcamp
• Failr/Warwick also founded & runs Lonely Kids Club, an independent clothing label based in Sydney

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