CARPAINTER – SUMMER LETTER

My bias towards things named after things from videogames continues with this one right here from a Yokohama-based DJ and musicmaker called Carpainter (real name Taimei Kawai, he also heads up label Trekkie Trax). If you know Earthbound (a game for SNES that was last year re-released on the Wii U eShop) you'll know that this is a reference to Mr. Carpainter, the leader of "the Happy Happyist" cult that appears at one point in the game. It's not my first encounter with Carpainter, but every time I re-encounter him and his music I can't help but feel warm and fuzzy thanks to the reference.

If indeed it is a reference. If it isn't and I'm just being stupid then I dunno, I might cry. Hey, it's Christmas Eve. I'll give myself the benefit of the doubt.

I don't know if it was released earlier in the year or it was just an unreleased gem that was kicking about in the ether – either way I'm just glad it's here. Kind of moving on from the footwork that seems to have characterised his music in previous months and years, Carpainter's sound moves onto one more inspired or at least influenced by UKG.

The skiffly beat in this track 'Summer Letter' is nothing but garage, with its kinetic hi-hats and pulsing kick, as are the the chipmunked pitch-shifted vocals, singing out with unintelligible yet catchy energy – and the occasional chops of these vocals seem tiny, but this is garage through and through.

Add to this a constant background bustle of summer insects chirruping, misty synth chords that add a kind of dreaminess to it all, heavenly synthetic harp noises, and you have a unique, subtly-dance-oriented foray by Carpainter into a genre that previously soundtracked the oft melodramatic lives of British teenagers 10 years or more ago, one that is joyful and wholly refreshing.

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• This appeared on European label/club entity Top Billin Music's compilation Premium Crates 4, which aims to "look back on what happened in the past 12 months, and also what the future holds for club music."

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KOLOTO KILL SCREEN

I wrote about Koloto, real name Maria Sullivan, last month - her track 'Fox Tales' was a hotbed of organic sounds and glitchy beats. I suppose in many ways it still IS. But we are forever moving forward. So let's move on. It'll be on her forthcoming EP (no name nor date for that yet) in any case. We now arrive at her new musical creation, 'Kill Screen'.

It's very different from 'Fox Tales', which was a very natural-sounding track. Full of innocence. This one instead is unnatural, in that it's pretty much wholly synthesised, and it is also not innocent. Not at all. Instead 'Kill Screen' brims with a looming menace from the very outset. A low and gloomy ambient atmosphere is cast with waves of dwindling hollow synth and a glitched-out harp arpeggio; aching sounds, like something being tightened, pressure rising, conjures images of something lurking in the background. A shuffling shifty clipping noise builds up to the drop.

And when it comes it's quite a change.

The harp turns into chiptune synthesisers, wildly bleeping in that same arpeggio; that tightening sound becomes a frantic frenetic beat. It's easier to hear the progression now - a kind of fugue that I guess even Bach might have been proud of - which gives it an epic kind of sound. Those bleeps though, aren't they delectable?

And it gets even more wild after the second drop. The synths are layered on top of each other, the beat more full yet still staccato. It conjures an image of an old castle from some old videogame - it would naturally be like, a boss fight or something, and it wouldn't be easy either. Or a chase scene. In any case, it's a menacing, Dracula-is-coming-for-you vibe that is still whizzing around in my head even after I've stopped listening to it - wholly worthy of its title, I say.

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