Showing posts with label lonely. Show all posts
Showing posts with label lonely. Show all posts

Monday, 1 October 2018

🐣 ZAP HOLMES — FLAKED OUT DREAMING

⌾ LISTEN TO ZAP HOLMES, FLAKED OUT DREAMING ⌾

This track floats along on two separate plain. One is this floating nebulous feeling, a flowing tide like the watercolours of a dreamscape, the melting mind of somewhere unknown, the swells of the tide of the unsconscious, sweeping along and founding this track on wholly ambient terrain. Like floating through space, it's the infinity of slumber.

On the other hand, it feels close and intimate, though detached and lonely, like the charting and observation of a biomechanical organism. The way samples chant in regularity, lo-fi and wheezing like some artificial life process, ticking percussion keeping time and clacking and sounding the cogs of static motion, trickling along like a living engine.

And that makes sense. Swedish musicmaker Zap Holmes tells us his inspiration for the track was his dreaming girlfriend.

"My girlfirend like to sleep and sometimes for many hours. And I made this track during one of those times," he said. "Got some recordings on my iphone when we messed around at home so I put some samples of her in the song also."

So 'Flaked Out Dreaming' has this sense of being alive in suspended animation, a grand dream arcing over whilst all the time no time is moving at all; those hazy, crackling samples counting the seconds till consciousness. It's an epic of sleep, where it culminates in these sometime crashing waves of charged white noise distortion, twinkling lights like neurons firing on the cusp of waking.


  • πŸ”” This is taken from Zap Holmes' Bluescreens EP - all of which he made on a "crappy little laptop when my main computer was broke. Was stuck with almost no samples and an old version of Reason."
  • πŸ”” You may stream or download 'Flaked Out Dreaming' via your fav service on this link right here.


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Monday, 29 January 2018

🐣 CRAPFACE — ALONE

https://soundcloud.com/markredito/better-off-alone-alice-deejay To hear this modern classic in such a new vessel is like the spirit of a pharaoh oozing inside a brand new Maserati, escaping the dust of death, transferral from one set of wrappings to another. Whilst Alice Deejay's original 'Better Off Alone' was in itself a major earworm of the late '90s, it was a Eurodance sensation of the time and was tempered with the trappings and tropes of the genre. It has been given a new lease of life in 'Alone' by Crapface, an homage to a track for which a certain segment of the online music community is eternally grateful; we're talking things like nightcore, PC Music and its peripheries.

The plaintive, haunting vocal melody of the original is played in on intricate medley of tuned percussion and synths in Crapface's version, replete with sound effects and irregular beats, wildly juxtaposing against the pogosticking dance of the original with a focus on space and texture, the clinking-clomping chimes sounding stark, monumental, lonely against a voidsome backdrop. These are then twisted and warped on a bed of booming bass before the "talk to me…" section rolls in, which is more of a direct successor to the original than the rest of the track. It is an exercise in celebrating a classic without being a straight cover, or a remix. Instead it has been painstakingly transposed, the essence of the original encased in crystal in a continuation of cultural preservation.


  • πŸ”” This was released courtesy of label, collective and brand, Palettes.


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Tuesday, 17 October 2017

🐣 YAEJI — DRINK I'M SIPPIN ON

The space here runs off into the distance like an endless profusion of cut-out apartment blocks and the black sky blanketing it all above with dim hundreds of lights below and the receding traffic, lonely open urban caverns and canyons; it is the silken void between angular concrete, the difference between tangible feeling and architectural corners, spirits and shapes—humans, the distances between them. This is the vital crux of 'Drink I'm Sippin On', a moonless city and its skyward turrets and those who inhabit the harsh environment, and how this landscape is conjured by its creator Yaeji. Each soft explosion of bass is the ghostly shape of a tower popping into your periphery, the trap-flavoured scuttling needling hi-hats the bird's-eye view of buglife people swarming and cars lurching, and smart snares cracking with the unforgiving tarmac, the flat pavements, the signs traffic lights the metal and glass and cement.

All of it is placed like building blocks with a minimalism, a brutal but soft stark sparseness, that allows this literally awesome sense of space to gush through and into the cityscape like a waterfall, like a dam destroyed and the flood pouring in lakeishly, oceanic; but it is not water, though it is as fluid as it. Yaeji's vocals come in here, the sea of soul that makes up the spaces between the percussive pillars of the beat, her voice in Korean and English somehow harsh as it whispers almost abrasive fizzing with satin smooth texture and the reverb of it dropped into this expanse and sweeping and deepening and besides this the catchy hook is the haunting reminder of rhythm and individuality, a lone isolated voice, amidst the illustration here of non-rhythm and non-individuality, of sprawling structures and the giant of humanity in all its multiplication. The spirit of Yaeji, though expressed through a hushed susurration, grows and fills the gaps between the coldness the bluntness of the beat, a single person speaking in a silenced crowd.


  • πŸ”” This wonderful track is taken from Yaeji's EP2, her second release this year, a six-track offering that will arrive into the world for your listening pleasure on 3rd November via Godmode.


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Wednesday, 12 April 2017

🐣 BLANK — HOLD ON

Short but undeniably sweet is this addictive slice of sound from musicmaker Blank. Not only is it dynamic in its bouncy slides between loud and quiet, bobbing around and positively jostling, but its clearly defined intro and outro, as well as the carefully crafted mood of the track, mark it out as something that deserves some attention. As such, it begins with innocent VGM-style synths, thin and small, setting a scene of distant homeliness as the the track appears to wind up and bubble ominously as if charging up a laser. And then it snaps into life with bustling thickets of percussion and smooth syncopated chords, footwork-flavour, and bulging bass menaces beneath it all, vocal samples "I'll run away" coming in chopped and strewn around.

And the next section, it's wonderful. It's a drop, of course it's a drop, it's been built-up and we freefall into this wide mouth of supercharged synths and whiplash rhythms that make it a dynamo of power and ear-satisfying amplitude. The neon chords strike at your veins, enter, and blast around your body, their tone one not of the overjoyousness but instead panic and frustration—and that's what makes it interesting. More of the brooding bass and again into this synth section, where the chords are wider, higher, thicker than before—before we reach the outro, where darkness seems to have fallen and home feels further off than it did before. The track feels precious in its simultaneous playfulness and maturity, in the sugary sounds that paint a picture of bitterer things.


  • πŸ”” This comes from Agari Vol. 006, a compilation by Sola, the sub-collective by collective Daruma. 'Agari' (δΈŠγŒγ‚Š) in Japanese means 'rising'.


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Monday, 7 April 2014

BURIAL – HIDERS (SHAM AN REMIX)

Taking the highly textured and lonely euphoria of the stunningly waterfallish Burial original 'Hiders' as his basic foundation, French maker of music SHAM AN (shaman) offers up an equally stunning remix. Who is SHAM AN? He is from Montpellier, his real name is Pierre–Emmanuel RΓ©cio, he makes good sounds. Done. Next.

But seriously like, this is a great song. It might as well be an original song. In fact, I bet many artists or people or whoever would get pretty angsty about unofficial remixes so maybe SHAM AN should've just called it something else for a title and said "YO HERE'S AN ORIGINAL" because, aside from some sampling, a similar vibe and rhythm, it's different. But this is semantics or maybe even just a pale rambling excuse for semantics, not music, and I'm sorry about that. Just listen up to some MUSIC.

It's a gradual climb from the dark ambience of the beginning of this track, but soon we are into the flesh of it, the rich portions of sound that thicken into a kind of heavy water; fluidity is the name of the game here, fluidity chopped and punctuated with a slo-house beat comprising of cricket-like percussion snapping snares and erratic-heartbeat kicks. It's a stream of sounds, a stream of noises, artificial and natural, beautifully half-preserving the samples from Burial's original in muffled ancient farflung capsules opening up and effusing their ghostly lo-fi sounds in the tide of warm synth. There is a heartrendingly empty feeling in the track, evoking the reclusives that (maybe) inspired the name and sound of the original 'Hiders', perpetually lonesome yet in that isolation is a fragile beauty kept alive by the joy of experience and life without too much involvement, and a swirling sweeping sadness due to that lack of interactivity, that lack of touch, that seekerless will-less attitude, ever-hiding. Or something.



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Wednesday, 6 November 2013

FORTUNE HOWL - INTERZONE EXPORT (BWOY DE BHAJAN REMIX)

Maybe the title of this track is influenced or inspired at least by William S. Burroughs collection of short stories Interzone (or maybe just the place mentioned in his more-famous Naked Lunch) - maybe it's not. Either way, although it's nice to know details like this, we shouldn't get tied up in the details.

I found out that an artist from Orlando, Florida, called Fortune Howl (whom I'd not heard of before) is releasing a remix version to his album Earthbound. Again my curiosity was piqued: What? Did he mean Earthbound as in the really cool SNES game Earthbound? Getting distracted again. In any case, this remix album is scheduled for release on label Relief in Abstract and, I've read, includes remixes from artists such as London Shibuya-kei enthusiast bo en and merchant of ultimate chill XXYYXX, amongst others.

One of these remixes is by Bwoy De Bhajan, the subject of this post right here. He's an 19-year-old beatsmith from Copenhagen called SΓΈren Thygesen who already has his own distinct style of abstract experimentalism that's sure to turn a few heads as time goes on (he himself describes it as "mind bending glitched out ethnic bouncy abstract whompy bass music" which is pretty much on the nose). He's remixed 'Interzone Export': a watery, ballad-like, somewhat epic number in its original form, turned now into something from another dimension.

Putting parts of the original to good use - the sweeping, faraway vocals, the watery noises, the snippets of acoustic guitar and those occasional tuned percussion (marimba?) flourishes - Bwoy De Bhajan puts his own spin on it. From the first crunching punch-thump of kick, river sounds ever-flowing in the background, a warm ambience pervades the song, decorated with an assortment of scratches, clanks, and gravelly crashes. The bass is finely distorted, a smooth gloss with a grainy-sand roughness to it. There is no in-your-face glitchiness here; everything is measured, the various percussion and other noises seeping into your mind rather than attacking it outright.

It's an ambient yet powerful treat that exudes a lonely-but-it's-fine-really feel, a curious vibe of necessity in being alone. Maybe it's just me. In any case you can cop this remix and more when this is released on 19th November, available for streaming & download on Fortune Howl's Bandcamp/SoundCloud pages (below).



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