MORIMOTO NAOKI — INSIDE IX - CONNECTION

Stillness pervades 'Inside IX - Connection' by Japanese ambient musician morimoto naoki — the kind of stillness that could, on some days, invite a certain melancholy into the air. Instead morimoto's delicate soundscape, intended for listening within four walls (and ideally with a view), captures introspection that is calm over fragile, peaceful rather than close to collapse.

That said, the sounds that skip and chitter throughout this piece of music feel as though they could fit in the palm of your hand. We find toy-like scrapings and found-sound aesthetic, varying layers of background fuzz that shear through the dust of everyday silence like an old electric fan; high-pitched artificial beeps and electronic twangs add to the sense of miniaturised aesthetic.

Aside from casting a scale model spell on one's domestic surroundings, morimoto's guitar graces 'Inside IX - Connection' with half-tunes, melodies that never start, anti-refrains that in their simultaneous quietude and strong non-statement noodling elevate procrastination to a thing of beauty. We drift into his audio daydream, refreshed and ready for our own.

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• 🔔 'Inside IX - Connection' is taken from morimoto naoki album Still Inside, released by Lontano Series (a division of Sardinian indepedent label ROHS!). You can purchase the album digitally and as a compact disc over on Bandcamp, should you so wish.

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ODOX — IN MY ROOM

⌾ LISTEN TO ODOX, IN MY ROOM ⌾

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The far-off, splashy reverb in the soft synths that swirl in instrumental of 'In My Room' by Wolverhampton artist Odox transforms an ordinary bedroom into an angular icy cavern. Notes clamber over each other, merge into each other like interweaving thoughts and worries; emotions bounce off the dark, glossy walls, reflecting, refracting in a mystical prismatic space.

It's no surprise, really, as Odox himself tells yes/no how this track was created during the UK's lockdown.

"My thoughts when making this track was about me getting used to being inside learning to be happy being in my room, instead of my happiness depending on if there is any events or friends to see," he says.

"Lockdown has been a time where I have really looked inside myself and thought about what I want to create. It's been positive for my creativity: the amount of ideas I've been able to pursue and time I've had to do that is crazy."

He adds: "Time's always what you make of it."

As the minimal beat rattles, clacks and thumps with sparse surety, producer Hughie preserving space in the track, lines like "stress makes it hard just to breathe" adding a tender counterpoint to the cool ambition of "count them bands..." And in adding his own voice to the cosmic frost of the instrumental, Odox completes its sense of understated majesty.

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• 🔔 For more music from Odox, check out his SoundCloud.

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🐣 STEVEN A. CLARK — KARMA

⌾ LISTEN TO STEVEN A. CLARK, KARMA ⌾

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"Just getting into bad relationships over and over. Then one day you realize that these relationships are just a reflection of what’s going on inside of you," writes Steven A. Clark of 'Karma'. With the skewed bassline cutting a warped groove, the cyclical – yes, karmic – guitar twinkling out of focus, and lyrics that speak of that "internal battle", the spills into your mind, seeping through the cracks.

At its centre swirl the vocals of Steven A. Clark himself. Worn, cradled in woozy effects and cutting an infectious R&B glimmer in lines like "Everyday, everyday, everyday / Telling me lies disguised as truths" and laying himself bare (literally) in the opener, "I'm naked / Over you..." it swings between these flying falsettos and a soothsaying mantra crooned in a plasma gravel: "Cause when the karma comes / The karma comes / karma's coming your way." A feverish warning.

"We do some much external shit looking for people, places, things, activities to make us happy, or distract us from the way we feel about ourselves," he explains more about the track. Something like Tame Impala analysing the uglier sides of the brain, 'Karma' is a psychedelic saunter around the block, a me-and-my-thoughts gloopy, gossamer tangle.

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• 🔔 'Karma' is taken from Steven A. Clark's upcoming album Hypervigilant, actual release date TBC. Stream 'Karma' by clicking this text and choosing from one of the various streaming services that you desire.

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🐣 MEN I TRUST — I HOPE TO BE AROUND

Much like the wispy incense smoke of the last time we heard from the Montreal trio, Men I Trust have created a delicate soundtrack to daydreaming in 'I hope to be around'. Key to its success as wonderful song are the four elements that comprise it: the bass plays plasma-textured, deep and modulating, this what is essentially a rock bassline, brooding in pentatonics; its string sister the guitar is an occasional ripple on the surface of a glassy pond, wobbly, cold and clear all at the same time.

The drums tick throughout toeing a line between meticulous drum machine and '60s minimal, thin and precise. And the vocals – wide and whispering and wistful; the Three W's of Wonderful – send this wraith of swirling around your head, the lack of variegation and the lack of range, as well as the repetition, make this a haunting mantra, its gaseous nature slipping into your ears and turning your thoughts to tomorrow and yesterday and nowhere ever all at once—"I dream of my future / Remote from time bounds / Becoming myself / Without any end."

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• 🔔 You may download Men I Trust's lovely, thoughtful track from their bandcamp.
• 🔔 The video for 'I hope to be around' was conceived and directed by the band themselves. "We filmed the music video in Montreal’s beautiful neighbourhoods and landmarks," they explain, "of which many seem to be frozen in time around the end of the 60’s."

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🐣 ANNE DEREAUX — ROCK AWAY (SHINES REMIX) [初演 • PREMIERE]

"I listened to the original quite a few times and really just tried to put myself in that situation," Shines tells us, talking about the creation of this remix, debuting today on yes/no. The original 'Rock Away' by Nashville-born LA-based Anne Dereaux is imbued with a brooding attitude and beset by hard thudding beats. Shines takes that looming atmosphere and stretches it out over a collage of percussion, knife-edge cymbals and clanking hi-hats and organic clops and clicks, sub-bass glooping with subtle confrontational booms, vital and spooky, like noises of a nocturnal forest. Dereaux's vocals float ghostly with reverb, resonating in the mysterious thickets of sound.

The track moves via an insectoid flourish at 01:45 from its first, trap-inflected tract to a midsection whose lo-fi clacking beats underpin a bubbling cauldron of synth, tick-tocking in its slow-motion clock swaying rhythm, heady ambience swirling with phasing coils of twinkling sound like watching a meteor shower in an intoxicated haze, the sound building from the sparse yet viscous brutalism of its first section into something ambiguous. The third and final section is doused with clarity, the sounds warmer, less abrasive, glimmers of glitter as the vocals call out and whirl like dappled sunlight. "The goal was for you to go on an introspective trip," explains the producer—and as we move from the dense depths of the forest, lost, stumbling unwittingly through thick undergrowth, and make it into spots where finally you can see the sun through gaps in the trees, it feels as though this goal was thoroughly achieved.

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• 🔔
• 🔔 In related news, Shines' self-titled EP is out now.

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🐣 RUIDO — INNERVISION

We follow this one through its dusty drums and through its swirling synth pads and through its plumes of smoky desert noise from start to finish in a blissed out chillmenture of analogue sound and minimalist groove. And what a thing to follow, to be sucked into, what a thing to wash away like soothing white noise the craggy escarpments of the mind and lure you into a cyclical nowhere, no-thought, just simple music and motion. This is 'Innervision', the debut track from London musicmaker Ruido, as basic as monotone, as gloomy greyscale but also as stark and effective.

And it's warm. It's a warm journey. How at first the sounds seem cold and hollow but how over the duration of the track it transforms from lonesome sound to a fuzzy blanket, a comforting beatscape. We are warmed first and foremost by its rich sounds, its lavish textured synth chords, secondly by its gloopsome columns of bass toppled and bulging bounce beneath the steady house heartpump of the beat. Thirdly, how the piano, the loops of piano, play out a melody fluttering of a rainy city sky at night with the droplets caught dreary drizzle in dim streetlights, but how simultaneously this warms with its muffled tones. 'Innervision' is an introspective jam, a detached weary wide-eyed soundscape, the watchful gaze of yourself on yourself as you attempt to fathom your own thoughts.

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• 🔔 Ruido's wonderful track arrives courtesy of Bristol label Fly Boy, and it's also available to download for free so that's nice.

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