DANIEL BORTZ — YOU CAN STAY FOREVER

⌾ LISTEN TO DANIEL BORTZ, YOU CAN STAY FOREVER ⌾

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With its haunting pitched croons lifted from Alicia Keys' 'No One' effusing from a backdrop of synths bleeding together and time-worn beats, 'You Can Stay Forever' by producer Daniel Bortzreads like a vestige of the past. It moves through forests of flustered elastic acid arpeggios, plumes of vox synth laying a fog over proceedings, while the stuttering echoes of thin, gleaming chords punctuate the song like strobe lights.

The faint syncopation of it all, the crushed indistinct hi-hats, the destructed snares and their harsh reverberation, the lo-fi aesthetic, its juddering dancefloor atmosphere (sticky floors; the floral tangle of beer and perfume) — all of it culminates in an unearthed relic of a track; a cassette plunged into a tape deck that conjures ghosts and memories of a grainy, unremembered time instead of sound.

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• 🔔 This is taken from the new album by Daniel Bortz, Stay, out 16th October on Permanent Vacation. You can pre-order it on Bandcamp if you like, or memorise the tracklist below for fun.

  Daniel Bortz — Stay tracklist:
  1. Grind
  2. Holding You
  3. How Far Can We Go
  4. South Beach
  5. On A Boat
  6. Smells Like CK One
  7. Stay
  8. Teenage Emotions
  9. Isolation
  10. Together
  11. You Can Stay Forever
  

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☟ Daniel Bortz Internet Presence ☟
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🐣 INDIGOS PARADISE — UNDERGROUND

⌾ LISTEN TO INDIGOS PARADISE, UNDERGROUND ⌾

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The ambience of a city — the apartment blocks with glowing windows, the brake lights flashing in the rain, the parades of people on the pavement, umbrellas, dog-walkers, stairs down to metro stations, neon eateries — is at the heart of the imagery conjured by 'Underground' by Boston-based indigos paradise.

On a blurred, watery backdrop acting as a melodic palette where all the fatigue that glittering city life can have is mixed, the producer adds snappy handclaps and sharp hi-hats for the the inescapable regularity of it all: the rectangular buildings, the traffic lights, the endless grids.

"How I see my hometown, with big buildings through the skyline, brings out different visuals and imagery I put towards my music," says indigos paradise via email. "Let's say that you are walking down a path, and it's good warm day to go for a walk. You hear this elegant track when you click to the play that gathers the whole surroundings around you. The wind starts breezing through your scalp and goes down to your neck while hearing it.

"I kinda picture my music as the 22nd century."

Adding to the beat and the all-encompassing shades of the synth whirling like a deluge, staccato synths hop smartly throughout for a bustling atmosphere, as if, now that you have the city, here is the life — the people — to jostle around it, here are their silhouettes and footsteps. Nocturnal and doused with faded uptown glamour, 'Underground' is the malls and walkways of yesteryear, still just half-empty with promise.

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• 🔔 'Undeground' is taken from indigos paradise's New York EP — find out more about it here. Alternatively you can also listen on Spotify.

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☟ indigos paradise Internet Presence ☟
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🐣 MARQUIS HAWKES — DON'T U FEAT. URSULA RUCKER

Uplifting, yes, but not to the point of euphoria—uplifting from a low-level mood, bringing you out of the darkness, the feeling of looking up at the blinding sun after you've fallen over and grazed your knees or just woken up from a nap and remembered all the things that are making you anxious but then you rationalise. Far from the dancefloor, Marquis Hawkes' track feels more as though it both reflects and alleviates suburban misery. It is a track of small, important victories: dancing won't heal you, but it's fine for now.

Part of that almost solemn feeling of 'Don't U' comes from those skyward synth chords - in the style of a chapel organ, the continuous chords with occasional single note changes feels very organ-like; it suggests something redemptive about this track. The tone of those chords has us pointing ourselves similarly skyward: they're slightly decayed and warm, not too bright but also not dull; the synth – like the track itself – is elegant in its simplicity.

Simple acid synth bass squelches in sparse groove to give this sense of dynamic movement alongside the constant house kicks. Ursula Rucker's star-of-the-show vocals softly pad alongside the incidental gladdening synth chords feeling like a motivational speaker or a pastor telling you what you want to hear—or else they sing in gentle butterfly snippets. Combine that with simple dynamic subtractions and additions, tumbling toms, a handful of simple percussion, teetering on the edge of lo-fi house to deliver an atmospheric, modern-day sermon of a track in the church of dance with an overflowing heart.

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• 🔔 You may, if you choose to, stream this track via some sort of service or order the physical 12" copy of it – complete with three versions of 'Don't U' on top of this. It arrives courtesy of Fabric's label Houndstooth and precedes Marquis Hawkes' second full-length release sometime this summer.
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☟ Ursula Rucker Internet Presence ☟
twitter ⚘ discogs ⚘ wikipedia

☟ Marquis Hawkes Internet Presence ☟
facebook ⚘ soundcloud ⚘ bandcamp ⚘ official site ⚘ discogs

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🐣 RIP SWIRL — LONG ISLAND MEDIUM

Extending the legacy of fairly new style lo-fi house, Berlin-based producer RIP Swirl (it’s like rip curl, you see) not only gives us a satisfying overdrive crunch-gloop in the kicks that bump and propel this track along, but also transports us into a retro realm of beige computers and fax machines: sharp metallic orchestra hits squeak out of the hazy crackle in ‘Long Island Medium’, with laser gun zips and turntable scratches cutting in for good measure. Synth chords bulge softly below with dance sensibilities in their refraining nature.

The old-school keyboard sounds, like the lo-fi veil draped over this track, aren’t all about nostalgia but instead add to the subtle abrasions of the track—it isn’t necessarily the sound itself that is the focus of our attention, but the quality of that sound and how it fits into the vessel of sonic imperfection that RIP Swirl has carved out. The hi-hats trickle-tick distortedly, the snare is crushed; both are jagged, whilst the synths are nebulous cushions that these harsher sounds strike against and pierce; the soft yet shattered atmosphere of new becoming old, old becoming obsolete.

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• 🔔 The artwork for the cover was created by Conrad Hübbe, a photograph of something new and pretty—and yet it's a grainy photo; like RIP Swirl's track, it is a skewed representation of novelty, a new feeling or concept as much as a physical thing, by which we encounter newness through an old medium.
• 🔔 RIP Swirl's 'Long Island Medium' is out now on PARADISE HOUSE.

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☟ RIP Swirl Internet Presence ☟
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🐣 VARSITY STAR — SOFT NOTHING

Here there is the sound of a vague dwindling hope sailing through the air like a stream of faint aurora lights, against the void of despair and the absence of hope. The rounded, clanging synths have a delicious texture to them – tinged with warped decay – as they play the downcast melody, but things do begin to look up, the plaintive song teeters between giving-up and persevering, the beat propelling it forward with clusters of thin snares, and later a shimmering parade of icy cymbals. An ambient hiss whooshes as a backdrop, making this feel all the more vital, authentic, a mild eruption of life amidst a broken landscape.

It arrives from the mind of New York-based musicmaker Varsity Star. Beginning life as an idea on a friend's Roland Alpha Juno, recorded on an iPhone and archived, it was two years until it surfaced again. "The morning after the 2016 election in the US, I came across the recording again and immediately felt where it could go," the producer told us via email. "The working title was "Hopeless", but after I got more of a blooming sound into it, I felt like there was more to the track than that, so I called it "Soft Nothing". I like to keep titles short if I can, and for me that was the shortest way to describe my late-2016 feeling of insignificance."

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• 🔔 This is from Varsity Star's self-released album Model Home. Speaking to us about the ideas behind it, the musicmaker told us that it was inspired by the scenery of the New England suburb in which he grew up. "I don't expect anyone listening to necessarily see those same things that I do when they hear the music," he explained, "and that's why I chose the title Model Home: it's there for people to put their own 'furniture' into and visualize their own experiences in." You can stream it, and purchase it, on Bandcamp.
• 🔔 The art for the album is by London-based studio Partners In Crime; Varsity Star told us about them: "The designers who worked on the album cover did a really beautiful job of bringing that kind of vague notion of the area [of New England] to life, especially considering they're from another continent."

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☟ Varsity Star Internet Presence ☟
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