🐣 QUARTETTO MINIMO — ATLANTICO

⌾ LISTEN TO QUARTETTO MINIMO, ATLANTICO⌾ RPG meets jazz in 'Atlantico', a sandswept soundscape from Madrid-founded, Paris-based band Quartetto Minimo. With a guitar melody – composed one summer in southern France – that summons a kind of intrepid videogame castle exploration and sparkling harp that harks back to faraway dark-wood-panelled rooms fable baroque (let's talk E.M.M.A's 'Mindmaze') a time and place, nowhere concrete, gets a bold, impressionistic illustration.

"It's funny that you said it sounds like baroque," guitar player Nicolas Arzimanoglou Mas tells us over email, "because for the past 2 years the bass player and I have actually been playing baroque music, with different instruments and bands of course."

Combine it with organic rough textured bass that feels noir and fantasy, and drums that give it pace and intrigue, and there is excitement, the urgency of jazz merging this into the battle music, penultimate level themes; in terms of real videogame comparisons, it sounds much like the 'Gerudo Valley' theme from Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

The medieval-summoning chamber aesthetics with kinetic energy of improvisation and quick tempo gives it that VGM dynamism. A new jazz release that crosses boundaries and conjures a world away from the traditional; it's chamber jazz.

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• 🔔 This track is taken from the album of the same name, Atlantico by Quartetto Minimo. Feel free to stream and/or download it on Bandcamp.

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📠
☟ Quartetto Minimo Internet Presence ☟
facebook ⚘ soundcloud ⚘ bandcamp ⚘ official site ⚘ instagram ⚘ spotify

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🐣 TYLER — TOUCHING

'Touching' by South African producer Tyler purportedly inhabits the world of Wave, an environment like domed gardens on a terraforming planet, palm fronds jostling against plexiglass in artificial breezes: artificial, harsh, but deep and thriving with life. The musicmaker arrived to the scene just over a year ago, courtesy of a friend who suggested he listen to the Plastician's now-defunct Rinse.fm show—citing that "the slower tempo allowed for a more emotive journey," he ditched his previous dustup outputting moniker Melodik and blasted off into space for this, his first ever release.

And space is what it is. With the reverse synth sounds, tinged with Middle Eastern elasticity in its slow aching melody, it sounds very much like a cosmic version of the theme for Shifting Sand Land from Super Mario 64; whilst the twisting scattered glitter mingles with the warbling modulated waves of cold synth for that air of elsewhere mystery, the bass below rumbles with ascending melody, slow and steady, pushing the music upwards for a determined feel, more like the Mario 64 Bowser Road theme in feeling: big, impending doom, otherworldiness, but ultimately gritted-teeth pushing forward. And then we have more textured flute sounds into the bargain, enriching the track with body as the beat ticks and rattles, a rolling of clacking fills and trills.

This is scene-setting stuff—the wild expanse of it, the far-flung exotic nature of it as the spacey synths mix with closer-to-home melodies of Eastern persuasion, familiar but altered in form, silicon sands reaching out to a black horizon that glows where the void meets the sharp dunes of the desert, human vocal samples ghostly and faded like the memories and paranoia of explorers bound never to set foot on Earth again.

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• 🔔 You may stream 'Touching' by Tyler via this hyperlink here. It's been released courtesy of UK label Liquid Ritual, founded by producer Kareful, amongst others.

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📠
☟ Tyler Internet Presence ☟
soundcloud (as Melodik) ⚘
youtube (also as Melodik)

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🐣 11:37 — FALCON

A juddering twang of a synth bass, halfway between doinging a ruler on a table and the crundering of a plectrum picked bass guitar, a sort of synthesised bass vibraslap, and it pops out with groove that sits simply in the bottom layers of this bitesized track called 'Falcon' from newcomer 11:37—this enigmatic name is taken, the musicmaker says in the track's description, from their time of birth. Although in this digital setting, something they wrote calls to mind a DIY ethic that is often overlooked when it comes to SoundCloud producers: "Saw no need to draw it out," they said, "because if the Ramones can keep it short and sweet why can't I."

The producer keeps it bright and textured, adding shakers and shimmering tambourine hits as well as delicious wet handclaps and a gleaming chime that glomps into the distance, all before the main body of the track begins beset with a parade of pitch-shifted vocals. Wordlessly these call out rhythmically jumping octaves, skipping and dancing through the columns of thudding bass kicks and tight snares that punctuate the streaming glittering mist of reverb from those vocals, the ticker tape of hi-hats and sheafing cymbal whooshes subtly detailing the beat. Here in 11:37's debut track there is expansiveness, attention to fine-tuning the track's ingredients, sort of like the eponymous soaring falcon zooming in on the minutiae of the landscape with its keen vision.

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• 🔔 You can show early support for 11:37 and 'Falcon' on iTunes if you want.

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📠
☟ 11:37 Internet Presence ☟
facebook ⚘ soundcloud ⚘ twitter ⚘ instagram

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🐣 OKPK — PARADISE [初演 • PREMIERE]

The opening seconds of sound in this track are transportive. It becomes very clear very quickly that you're no longer where you thought you were. The damaged digital synth that pings out wonkily as if you've just stumbled on some ancient technology and somehow awakened it, a sound that conjures something between earthly magic and inexplicable otherworldliness, spiritual electronics, familiar yet foreign, exotic and integral. That remoteness is echoed eerily in the vocal samples crying out pitch-shifted unfamiliar; and the doomful gloopy modulated synth sound that plays the robust refrain, arriving obtusely, keeping sparse abnormal rhythm; here is 'Paradise', an arid yet living melted-sky landscape.

Created by Victoria, Canada-based musicmaker okpk, this morsel of music is a dream-gone-wrong of subtle menace and narcotic haze. The sounds are immediate in their emotivity, their power to transport, with crackling arpeggio music box twangs, phasing columns of electric crunch, and plosive percussion clustering infrequently with glutinous kick flurries and thin rollicking snares and ts-ts ticking hi-hats and smart fingerclicks set out in the quivering crumbling space. With the legibility of vaporwave's decayed scene-setting, its inherent neither-here-nor-there extradimensional quality, 'Paradise' paints a surreal soundscape, a beautiful wasteland of an inverted paradise.

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• 🔔 This sonic scene turns out to be at the heart of the Pleasure Seekers EP from which this track is taken, being a "soundtrack to an imaginary film about a pair of lovers trapped in a disintegrating virtual paradise," but with the twist that "their collapsing environment is a manifestation of the unspoken problems in their relationship." That's thematically very vaporwave. The EP is set for release on 30th June via r/n collective and features artwork by multimedia artist Arya Hawker, who has created six videos, one for each of the EP's tracks.

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📠
☟ okpk Internet Presence ☟
facebook ⚘ soundcloud ⚘ bandcamp ⚘ official site ⚘ twitter

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DAMACHA – YIYUAN

Tagged "places u went" and called 'yiyuan' presumably after the mountainous 沂源 county in China this is a beautiful new-ish track from Shanghai musicmaker Damacha. It is a sprawling hive of living percussion, luscious rainstick sounds and far-off forest wooden clackings and jangling like lost ghost currency and lots more besides, blending together at first in clattering cocktail of arrhythmia, soon syncing to a pummelling beat, nuanced and free and towering.

Bass surges and rumbles in healthy slices below, propping up these delicacies of sound like time-lapsed hillsides and peaks jutting out newborn forming the rugged earth. Alongside these elastic beat arrangements are gentle bell chimes and plaintive 8-bit melodies, this simple tapestry of synth matching the percussion in all its sparkling illustration, pencilling details and adding ornamentation – a sonic mirror of the drama and gargantuan scale of natural landscapes, of the feeling of being simultaneously tiny yet liberated in the midst of such places, of their simplicity and their complexity; it is a landscape painted with sound.

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• This track is a free download as you can see above.
• Check out Damacha's half-year-old 3E3240 EP on Bandcamp.

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☟ Damacha's Social Media Presence ☟
Facebook • SoundCloud • Bandcamp • Twitter • Instagram

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