🐣 LIPTICISM — WELLINGTON

⌾ LISTEN TO LIPTICISM, WELLINGTON ⌾ At first ‘Wellington’ is like a dream where you wake up floating in space: the cascading chimes, the reverberating plasma bass, modulated chords like the PS2 startup, the lances of synth soaring into an unseen distance. But there’s something super grounded about Lipticism’s track, owing to the earthbound first line and refrain: “That girl from Wellington, she says she never wants to see me again.”

The vocal, equally imploring and detached, spins a story with this stark statement: What girl? Why? What happened? Instant connection and intrigue.

And in its never-the-same-twice choruses, ‘Wellington’ is a swirl of glitter, sludgy sub kicks, hissing percussion, the voice of Lipticism herself rising in a nebulous stream; a shredded melodic line, lamenting coolly, overlaps into the next section - something this song does well, a constantly morphing dynamic.

More lyrics half heard in this jostling milky way of sound present the realness, the semisadness and frustration in simple terms: “That’s how it used to be…” and “I can’t read your mind” standing out beacon-like. And always it is cosmic, it is star-flung, sparklingly offbeat, visions of a void—the actual self, alone but catapulted above earthly troubles.

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• 🔔 Listen to more Lipticism over on her SoundCloud.
• 🔔 'Wellington' is taken from Lipticism's album emergency released via CRY LIKE DONNA which is where you can also stream and purchase it should you wish to.

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📠
☟ Lipticism Internet Presence ☟
soundcloud ⚘ instagram

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🐣 NATRIUMS — SPLEEN ARROW

As much as this track is an invitation for chill and respite, there is a sense of unknown exotic bristling at its heart. Without a legible groove, beat, refrain, or anything particularly recognisable for most of it, 'Spleen Arrow' by natriums from Louisville, Kentucky, is a continuously shifting beast, its tack continually altered, its spinning narcotic haze in a whirling instant transforming terrain—not satisfied with one world the interplanetary train of thought at work here tethers you to one set of textured sounds and tactile percussion after another. The lonesome disjointed howling digital ghost guitar solo of the beginning, with its indistinct pulsar synths, morphs into nebulous neo-jazz, piano chords resonating, thin sounds veilsome like insectoid chirruping.

And we leave, transitioning from that world of jazz, the touchful pluckings of the bass leftover for the briefest foundation, the cold shif-shif-shif of echoing percussion, and soon we are chilled by delicate chords that ring out lounge-like, images of slow-motion ski-jumping flutter across our imagination, and the temperature drops further, glassy sounds like icicles drip-dropping smooth and frozen and imperfect, a digitised chiming, the gentle descent of snow. 'Spleen Arrow' engages, lulls and agitates in a morsel of music that twins ambient downtempo with doses of jazz-in-circuitry, presenting a permafrost sense of noir.

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• 🔔 This track is one of the tracks taken from natrium's recently self-released album, Façade, which you can peep and download on and from Bandcamp.

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📠
☟ natriums Internet Presence ☟
soundcloud ⚘ bandcamp ⚘ twitter

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SPACE CANDY – SHIMMERING BEACH WORLD

What happens when two experimental electronic labels team up for a compilation? You get a lovely cocktail of flavours, that's what. Two labels DESKPOP and Galaxy Swim Team recently joined forces for their Summer Solstice compilation, which dropped a week or so ago. With it dropped this particular morsel of music, fallen from the sky from some distant planet: 'Shimmering Beach World' by space candy. Who is space candy? What does space candy want? Otherwise known by human name Alex Polanski, there's not a lot else I can say about this musicmaker.

As for 'Shimmering Beach World', it's a blend of jabbering vox, rich synth chords that buzz and flash, and beat combinations that whilst disparate work together wonderfully. At once it feels intergalactic and spacey, wonky soft chords winding like wreaths of smoke with glittering unexpected melodies bustling around, a sense of intoxication and otherworldliness emanating from the unusual, unconventional sounds. Combine with moments of slow, seething beats, drums tumbling like boulders, fizzing percussion, a definitive intensity set against the more horizontal parts, and you have yourself a little party in your ears, like the aural equivalent of a popping candy and sour Haribo mix, with marshmallow thrown in for good measure.

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• Enjoy and maybe purchase the Summer Solstice compilation in its entirety over here.

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☟ space candy's Social Media Presence ☟
Facebook • SoundCloud • Twitter • YouTube

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VOYAGER – PARSEC

Just to clear things up to begin with, a parsec is "A parsec is an astronomical unit of distance derived by the theoretical annual parallax of one arc second, and is found as the inverse of that measured parallax" (thanks Wikipedia), wherein 1 parsec is equal to 3.08567758 × 10^16 metres – of course. Duh. What else is new?

It's a pretty big distance. Big distance for a big place: SPACE. I wonder if it's longer than a light year… (just looked it up, IT IS). So it's like... just a different measurement. Even in space there's a metric/imperial-style confusion and conflict at work. We never learn.

So anyway, now that that's outta the way we can have a listen to 'Parsec' by VOYAGER, or stylised V O Y A G E R (but it's too much effort to write every time) on his actual SoundCloud, the moniker of musicmaker Paco Santos from Manila. 'Parsec' is a basically a groovesome piece of music that finds its feet in funk as much as it does in the slow sensuality of R&B.

Beginning with a glorious palm-muted guitar intro, suggesting that we will be delving into a wholly funky number, we soon find out that we're in something else entirely, something a bit more intergalactic or spacey, suiting the track's name. This is a soaring morsel, deliciously rich with ever-reverbing piano chords that provide a beautiful blanket of noise on top of which everything else sits quite nicely – below this, the bassline ascends and descends, supporting the slow, R&B-style beat. There's something ultimately chilled about this, laid-back, barely sung vocals echoing amidst the smart synth arpeggios and lead guitar-esque melodies.

It's basically like a cross between a pop song and a vision of what indie music might actually be in the future – without going as far as saying it's outright funk, R&B (not least with the "future-" prefix), chillwave, whatever. Really genuinely beautiful & catchy stuff here.

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N.O.R.K – YELL OUT (LADY CITIZEN REMIX)

What is N.O.R.K? Well, they're a R&B-inspired duo from Tokyo who seem to be set on success – or least that's the idea that you get from the preview of their upcoming album ADSR; stunning harmonies from the pair, Nariaki Obukuro and Ray Kunimoto, sing out over huge soundscapey instrumentals. Only formed in 2013, their sound is already massively polished and I'm sure set for big things.

There's also a few of remixes on the album (more a mini-album cause there are only 4 originals), including one from Licaxxx (aka Rika Hirota, whom you may have seen in the video for Spazzkid's '40 Winks') and one from DJ & producer Lady Citizen – as you can tell from the title of this little post right here, he's remixed 'Yell Out' and it sounds a little something like the embedded thingy below. In addition to this, I believe that it, perhaps because of simplicity, improves upon the original.

What you'll notice straight away here is the huge attention paid to the bass here, pulsating like the mechanical heartbeat of some huge machine, becoming the sludgy yet smooth foundational beat to the track. Airy, intergalactic drones provide wall-of-sound appeal as glittering synths make their appearance above, in golden echoes of sunlight sweeping across the crests of gently lapping waves. The beat is joined by gentle percussion towards the end, popping tom sounds and tambourine rattlings that move in tandem with the great bulges of sub-bass.

The vocals become unearthly here, soaked with reverb – as is the rest of the track – for spacey appeal, a lonely sound that puts voice into a void. The futuristic simplicity of this track's reliance on bass, and not much more (and what there is used only for ornamental purposes), is kind of fascinating, hypnotising in a way – an all-encompassing take on dance music.

• N.O.R.K's ADSR is out 14th May on Japanese label Anay

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Like N.O.R.K. on Facebook
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Watch N.O.R.K. on YouTube

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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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METOME – SAMPLE CHAIR [FREE DOWNLOAD]

It's only been a few weeks since we heard from prodigious Japanese producer Takahiro Uchibori, aka Metome – in the form of the moody 'Rainmaker' and its ominous video – but already there's something new for us all to savour. Yep, he's as prolific as he is good. And this time around it's something a bit different to the norm; usually Metome is all sumptuous post-lounge with free-flowing jazz instrumentals and rapid-fire sampling— usually.

But the oddly yet somehow brilliantly named 'Sample Chair' is a sketch of something different, a foray into a different set of sounds, an experiment with wide synths that seem to have been given off by some distant space ship somewhere, a far-flung space-disco orbiting a planet where we'll arrive hundreds if not thousands of years from now. Perhaps that's the case. The other possibility is that Takahiro's mind is as elastic and frenetic as his sounds, and hence the seeming strangeness of 'Sample Chair'.

That of course is not say that it isn't good. It's great! Irregular bouts of keyless almost atonal synths pop up unexpectedly, bouncing around as if being thrown and somersaulted in low gravity; here the virtuosity isn't in the notes themselves, but how the notes are manipulated, how they are placed with regard to rhythm, or maybe more accurately with no regard to rhythm. Organic kicks and claps and clicks occasionally pop up; the melody whirlwinds at times in a frenzied storm; high-register vocal samples chirp in the expansive galaxy of the blissful chords.

There is almost no reverb at work here at all, invoking a heavier sense of silence or rather the space between sounds than previous Metome tracks, which often were hazed or lightly breezed with soft and pretty reverberating sounds. It's experimental, taking the essence of glitch (look at the track image for instance) – which is to create glitchy sounds – and using it to instead twist and manipulate his sounds in natural, real-life, less digitised ways, as if his synths are putty that he simply plays with.

• Discover a lil more about the lovely Metome w this lil interview he did for YES/NO

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LAZY INTERVIEW #16: SAMUEL

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← #15: ARISTOPHANES 貍貓 #17: BOTANY →

Here's a thing. It's time. Time for another Lazy Interview. The series is coming along nicely now. Sure is. You could, if you wanted to, actually have a flick back through past Q&As in the series - you can do that literally by just clicking where it says "INTERVIEWS" above. That's only if you want to. No one is forcing you. Hmmm.

So anyway yeah this is the latest one. It was a relatively quick turnaround. From pitching this guy to Dummy, getting a glowing green-light, writing about his Falling Star EP for them, and then writing about it for me (here), and then actually sending him the below questions, it's been a week since I first heard Samuel's music. Who is he? Well, this no-surnamed enigma of a man is a singer who recently released an EP, co-produced by Okzharp, that not only pushed boundaries musically - with a super smooth intergalactic post-R&B feel - but that also acted as a showcase for Samuel's voice; it has dynamic fluidity and capacity for expression that feels fresh at all times.

In any case, let us read.

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Who are you? Where are you from? What do you do?
I am Samuel and I make music bits. I live in Lewisham, from the green shores of Ireland.

Why did you decide to start creating music?
Just to feel better, really. Sadder, funn-er, detached-er-er, hopefuller. Lovinger. All the er's.

How would you describe your sound? What makes you and your style stand out?
I find it hard to process many things at once. I am loyal. I like clear bits. To hear fucking beautiful sounds and not want to overcrowd that beauty. Space to let the bits breathe. Milky. Milk with edge. Gangsta milk. Um, I don't know that it stands out. I don't know that it's good. I know that I am in it and that I feel that it is probably me within it, by the time I get to you hearing it.

Is there a perfect time and place for listening to your music?
At night. When your body settles and your mind starts to close out, in a field with a scotch egg and folk that you love.

What inspires you most when writing a song?
Love.

What is your most memorable musical experience?
Growing up in catholic convents, singing to the Jesus doll. If you allow yourself to believe in him, singing to him can blow your fucking heart out.

What are your favourite three songs at the moment?
Tramp and Tom Waits - Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet
The Abyssinian Baptist Choir - I Want To Ride That Glory Train
+ I really gotta settle on the third coz the finality of this is making me palpitate.

Who do you most admire in the music world?
I try to keep my blinkers in place. I guess music for me is glued into a therapeutic need/want/mess. I make it because I need to. I don't need to share it or have it dazzle out my ego but I do need it. So I find it hard to listen to other peoples music. I would like to have music friends but I can't. Ha! It's painful, doll.

In your opinion, what is the future of music?
I don't care to know this. Who could care? If I could know the face of my first born froglette, I'd probably just wait. Or the day to die. Yea, some things should be care-less.

What's the future of your music - what do you hope to do next?
I hope to keep making it. Maybe I could share it, or perform it to folk who like it. To keep making music.

What, aside from music, is most important to you?
Hair. I know a day will come when it shall leave me and that makes me sad. But then, there are sadder things to feel sad about.

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Samuel seems to have appeared from nowhere, with nothing but the beautiful Falling Star EP under his belt - a mystery as much as he is a talent. The above at least sheds a little more light on him. A little more. He seems genuine - wanting to create music to enhance everything: to "feel better" in every respect. In some ways, excluding himself from the current music world by keeping his "blinkers" in place, it not only allows him to concentrate on his own development as an artist, but it also allows his sound to be unpolluted by anything as fickle as fashion, the transient trends in music not affecting his sound.

And what about his sound? Well, you'd better check out the EP if you haven't done so already. Then you'll see that he pretty much sticks to what he says about not wanting to overcrowd beauty - it is a stark collection of sounds, something that allows each note to breathe, each element of each song never goes too far, never suffocates other elements, everything growing organically together in stunning simplicity. All he is concentrated on is his sound, his music, or rather the process of making music, being able to leave part of himself behind in each song without worrying too much about the result, or even the future at large - doing things in the moment. He said it best: "I make it because I need to." When something is this necessary to a person, no real influence can be made on it. It's pure.

Losing one's hair is also a sobering thought.

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← #15: ARISTOPHANES 貍貓 #17: BOTANY → - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
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SAMUEL FALLING STAR EP

Sparks of brilliance sometimes just come from nowhere without any forewarning. Such is the case with London-based Samuel, an enigmatic no-surnamed Irish-born singer & songmaker. Recently he has worked with Gervase Gordon, aka Okzharp - 1/3 of London trio LV - to produce this brand new Falling Star EP.

It's a collection of sounds that have really put a spin on the world of R&B, falling much more into a kind of swirling post-R&B protoplasma, a place where all the form and style of "urban" music is taken from the streets and blasted into far-flung galaxies where physicality is something dreamt-up. Much of this is owing to the noises that in all their careful minimalism make for an enormous atmosphere of a futuristic space-age of music. There are distorted delayed synths in the menacing subby sea of 'Death Star Wonder', sounds of lasers rippling by like a neon-tinged dogfight in space - which is kinda perfect as the song is an intergalactic vision of dancehall-flavoured music, a club night orbiting Earth where there is no day, only the eternally danceable night.

Likewise, in 'Boom Boom Boom', the ultra-clean snapping beat of "present-day" R&B becomes an otherwordly, liquidly-distorted bounce, the romantic pizzicato strings become ultra-computerised beeps. Hip hop faces the future in the short-n-sweet title track 'Falling Star', its shuffling rhythm combining sharp synth chords with fidgeting lead bleeps that become more and more paranoiac towards the end of the song. Here also, Samuel's vocals themselves go through a change with a Jamaican lilt that he clearly seems to enjoy singing with, feeling each note with a longing ache.

One of the crucial elements of all good R&B is of course the voice and it's no different here. Samuel's soulful vocals change to suit each track; they're clean and almost sing-along in 'Death Star Wonder', holding up against the harsh sounds of the song; then there's his tongue-in-cheek parody of contemporary R&B with some of the lines in 'Boom Boom Boom' - "Errbody say hey, hey", mentioning "East Coast" and "West Coast", and declaiming "I'm not a fighter. I'm a lover, baby" halfway through. But in 'Steam Train' his vocals are softer, wrapped in a thin mist of hush that totally suits the slow chill of the song - it's a perfect start to the EP, one that instantly introduces the glistening melodies of imagined planets before going into a gloriously minimalistic verse: each sound is left to resound by itself, Samuel's voice given space to reverb heavenly over everything else.

I wrote about this EP for Dummy magazine at the end of last week. It's difficult to sum it up using different words than I used in that article, so I think what I'll do is just copy and paste them here. Yeah, it's lazy, I know, but, well, maybe there's just no other way to say what I think, ever consider that? "These are isolated idylls of romance; all of it holds reminders of traditional modern pop music, yet its far-flung progressive sound makes it something much more exciting." Pretty much. Where will we find Samuel's voice next? Singing in a pod slowly making its way across the universe... Perhaps not, but if ever there was a sound to remember when the sound of R&B music begins turning its head towards the endless chasm of the future, it's this Falling Star EP.

PS. This is released on Ninjatune affiliate, Technicolour.

PPS. Check out my interview with Samuel!

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