ÜUCE — GURU-GURU’S WINDMILL WALTZ

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Capturing the melancholic mood in which Erik Satie’s Gnossiennes are mired (particularly recalling Gnossienne No. 1), American musicmaker ÜUCE has reworked the Song of Storms — aka the Windmill Hut theme — from Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (and Majora’s Mask).

ÜUCE expands on the original, accenting it with shivering sweeps of the keyboard, adding clinking percussion, straining strings and a foundation of mythic drone. The original is synonymous with Guru-Guru, a character from both games, whose sudden angry face must be etched in the minds of all who saw it; accordingly, the fragile atmosphere of ‘Guru-Guru’s Windmill Waltz’ pries open the polygons and takes a look inside the fraught mind of this unhinged character.

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• 🔔 Listen to more ÜUCE on SoundCloud.

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PAUL COUSINS — THOUGHTS IN THE ETHER

⌾ LISTEN TO PAUL COUSINS, THOUGHTS IN THE ETHER ⌾

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Written "as a soundtrack to daydreaming," London-based producer Paul Cousins track 'Thoughts in the Ether' is all-encompassing. It toes a balance between warm pianos and gossamer threads of synth that tick with icy intent. It evolves organically, like the moment of pouring a drop of milk into the darkly glimmering black-gold depths of tea, or how smoke curls through the air.

"The scene changes reflect the different thoughts we have as we let our mind wander," Cousins says via email.

The gentle touches of piano, its chords and descending notes, serves as a heartfelt metronome to the shifting sounds. It may be intended as the soundtrack to daydreaming, but the slow piano melody seems to step into a fog of melancholy, a gentle realisation of deeper feelings when the mind steadies itself. The rhythm of the natural world floats past us, insubstantial; conversations, cars, convenience stores drift by; and inside, the slow tick of ourselves.

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• 🔔 Purchase, stream or otherwise admire 'Thoughts in the Ether' in hypertext stasis over on Bandcamp.
• 🔔 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfDABxWSF0Y There's a film to accompany 'Thoughts in the Ether'. Created by director Edward Harber, it's "an aerial study of the North Sea from Happisburgh in Norfolk, documenting a week in the evolving appearance of the water."

  Cousins adds: "I wanted the video to take place from a floating viewpoint, and to be similar to the phosphenes we might see when closing our eyes for a few minutes."

• 🔔 Inspired by Russian artist Kazimir Malevich, the track artwork — following the form of videos on Cousins' Instagram account — was created in collaboration with London-based graphic artist Signalstarr.

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🐣 LYCORISCORIS — FLIGHT

Bustling and crackling with organic buzz and with a heartbeat thudding like the constancy of living and breathing against the melancholic backdrop of the ever-shifting seasons, the rising strings all emotive and tear-jerking, a never-ever feel to it, a will-I-ever feel to it (a la Jon Hopkins) this is Tokyo-based Lycoriscoris aka real life human Yunosuke Senoo. The motion of it suits the name 'Flight', but other than the clear image of something literally flying, what else do we have here?

Well, with its trickling percussion like icicles melting, and the frosty frosty touches of piano sparkling like sun on snow summons a stark landscape, wintry, but with the hope of spring and summer on the horizon, the rising nature of those strings are like the possibility of new life; a mix of depression and hope, it charts the cusp of the year where life teeters between holed-up against the snow and taking tentative steps below freshly unfurling leaves.

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• 🔔 This is the title track taken from Flight, Lycoriscoris' debut album released at the end of May this year via Anjunadeep. You can download or stream it via your favourite service.

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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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🐣 NITEROOMS — HEADWAY

One of our favourite tracks of 2017 so far now and yeah that's 100% sincere and it's this track by South Wales trio Niterooms. What makes it so interesting? Well, there it isn't just the atmosphere of the track—that in itself is intriguing, a swirl of a picture so melancholy so swooning sad, but at the same time so interestingly done, so nuanced, that it cannot be called simply sad but needs to be addressed for its tight and stylistic attention to detail. The drums tap and tick, thump and thud with all the laid-back authority that trap-infused percussion commands, helped into a realm of oozing monochrome and disappointment by fantasy guitar that twangs and resonates all liquid oblivion. The basic effective dynamic achieved by removing the hi-hats and letting the beat click naked in a tide of sub, the structural ease of it calms the spirit, nothing to remember, nothing to challenge, only a story to hear, a painting to be engulfed in.

Niterooms are from Brithdir, "a small forgotten mining town in South Wales," and fittingly their music sounds like that of something forgotten, something discarded, something glittering and vital left at the bottom of an empty well, the tatters of a dream now whipped into some semblance of being by sheer emotive energy. Whilst a "band" they manage to create the same soundscapes that you'd hear in Drakean pop, that sort of post-R&B trap-flavoured sound with confessional lyrics, a candid soul laid bare in the whirls of something dreamy and unreal. The vocals croon low on the brink of despair and in various meters, quick triplets mixed in with slow lines. A clear lament of lost love, sorrow as old as time, like the story of Orpheus that moved even ghosts as he ventured to find his wife in the Underworld.

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• 🔔 'Headway' is taken from the band's debut self-titled EP, which you can stream on Spotify (recommended).
• 🔔 The suitably hazy visuals for the video above were conceived and created by Ed Townend.

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🐣 EMMECOSTA — HEAVY HEART

Slowly slowly this track rolls along, the eternal trundle of curling clouds across a greyscale landscape, the horizontal energy of chillwave simplicity sweeping into the foundation of this track: the dom-dom glooping bass of the kicks and the thin abrasion of the snare tinged with lo-fi, the soft constancy of the synth constant like a tide in the sidechain of it all. 'Heavy Heart' unfolds like a flower turning and opening to the day's first flood of light, the vocals of Gothenburg-based Italian trio Emmecosta adding silken texture to the track, the languorous luxury of it heightened. Here we are laid-back and loafing, bleary and wandering.

And around 2:40 the brief disappearance of the beat, relegated to its most bassy parts, highlights another element that bejewels the track; these high-pitched pings, synth or effected guitar it may be, how they cry into the air, splashing watercolours, the stifling distortion of it, the degradation of the pure sound conjuring this feel of something pushed to its limit—and the energy in this scathing absent melodies is something that aches and pines and yearns, careering into a blanket of dazzling stars. The electronic tricks of 'Heavy Heart', the sometimes staccato cuttings through the track, that ebb-flow sidechain, both betray and bolster how human it is, how organic, how like a melancholy nostalgic longing howl into the ether it is.

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• 🔔 'Heavy Heart' is taken from the August-released EP from the band, Velour, which was brought into the world courtesy of Stockholm label ICEA. You can listen to and download it from Bandcamp.

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🐣 DRESAGE — CENTER

At first listen this seems like a regular indie pop sort of song, you know, but there are touches to it that are unexpected, gorgeously so, and that's when you realise that actually there's a lot going on here—it's a cocktail of sound, a blend of different flavours that help to create this delicious unpredictable morsel of music. Called 'Center' it is this word that indeed places itself at the centre of this song, the word skipping in the choruses as sung by its creator, the LA-based Dresage. It's her vocal that adds one seemingly ill-fitting element to the bounce of the track, with her bright tone and swing rhythms and flitting melody, it is the epitome of breezy soul, best accompanied you may think by slapdash sixths and sevenths on a nylon string guitar.

But that is not the case here. The carefree spirit of her vocal pirouettes and leaps through the French touch infusion of the slow simple beat – the same robust kicks, the same semi-abrasive snares – through the rounded gloops of bass synth that nod in syncopation, simplistic and VGM-conjuring. It has this happy-go-lucky dewy green grass feel. Yet more elements subvert this: cuts of her own vocal breathy and whooshing rise up and down like a boat jostled by choppy waves, an inkling of glitch; and the most brilliant touch, a cluster of high-pitched tumbling piano, instant frosty chill in its twinkling notes, its far-reaching reverb garnishing the track with airs of melancholy; bright synth chord stabs that shock you awake with their plasma beam stridulation. 'Center' doesn't actually inhabit a central point, but instead is the things that orbit it, the influences and audiophilia on and of the musicmaker herself evident in the different moods it can conjure.

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• 🔔 Little bit of trivia for you: Dresage is also human person Keeley Bumford who has, amongst other things, contributed to the Bayonetta 2 soundtrack with the official theme for the game 'Tomorrow Is Mine', so there you go.

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🐣 EMMIT FENN — FEATHERS

The cyclical nature of this, the mid-level arpeggio of the left hand, the gentle piano paints a picture of cool melancholy, chilly and lonely, the melody expressing a certain amount of distress in its ascending refrain, its title 'Feathers' suggesting a fragility that is certainly effused from this brief piece of music, allusions to hesitation and hang-ups in its subtle slices of tempo rubato, all of it light, never heavy or strong, a floating atmosphere like feathers fallen from a bird now flitting in the air, the broken beauty of that vague loss visible in the song's delicate nature.

Created by California-located pianist and composer Emmit Fenn, 'Feathers' is very filmic. It conjures images of stark angular buildings on a night sky, no nature but cold clouds and the birds who fly under them from rooftop to rooftop, dropping feathers like snow across the anonymous cityscape. There is the feeling of being alone here, of looking out across a sea of souls and being distant to every single one of them, the baroque changes to minor chords and its fluttering trills reflecting a sense of teetering despair, calm and soft but inwardly harbouring a streaming cycle of doubts and worries.

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• 🔔 Recently Emmit Fenn released his Prologue EP via TH3RD BRAIN. You can listen to it on SoundCloud if you want.

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🐣 PASTEL — SILHOUETTE

This is a mind-cleanse, a slow sandstorm that wraps you up in it, a feeling of being lost with no way out and not knowing which way to turn, but it's not closed-in and claustrophobic like a labyrinth, more the feeling of being small in a huge expanse, a greyscale desert of sound that leaves you speck-like in its centre and the rippling dunes drift off distantly and the sky is hard and stony and the landscape looms towering all around: the giant them, the insignificant us. Ambient yet noisy, the hypnotising sounds of it all are instantly emotive.

LA-based Gabriel Brenner aka pastel crafts a leviathan of sound in 'silhouette', the touching tracts of synth swirling misty, melancholic watercolours that veil the heavy reverberations of the vocals, a haunted voice low and descending, lines ending with gentle vibrato, speaking from a lonely distance of Native American identity in its early refrain "the skin doesn't lay quite right, does it?" and later there are enigmatic descriptions of moments where the self in this regard is questioned—"gave me a card: painting of a woman with a feather in her hair." A gradual crescendo fades out, the booming of a drum, the gentle noise subsides like something forgotten and out of reach.

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• 🔔 'silhouette' is taken from pastel's upcoming absent, just dust EP, due for self-release on 25th August; download this first track and pre-order the EP on Bandcamp. Half the proceeds taken from its sales will be given to FreshestCollective.org, "who have provided continued legal support to water protectors since the founding of the Sacred Stone Camp."

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🐣 IMS — STILL CRYING OVER YOU FEAT. IEVADELI

It is this gentle freefall feeling, the misty atmosphere that washes all around—the thick warm waves of synth curling like clouds and fluttering with energetic pulse, the twinkling simple melodies pinging off into the starry distance of the song, the nocturnal feeling of abiding loneliness, a strange comfortable longing, the feeling of a break-up yet still being in love, sprinklings of pinprick hope scattered on the melancholy majesty of the soft chords. London-based producer Imad Salhi aka ims crafts this vessel of emotive sound with not just a certain optimism in the sound, but in the rhythm, the shuffle of the beat, the gloopsome robust bass groove: in the hopeful bounce of it all.

"The track was inspired by a conversation with a friend, as she shared her plans to win her boyfriend back," explained ims. "The energy of the song comes from her eagerness, whilst the melancholic feel reflects her despair." Lithuanian singer ievaDeli provides vocals that reflect the feeling of the song, crooning with doubt and ache in the verses, whilst in pre-hook parts her voice raises up, beginning to soar and take flight, bright and positive. Still there is uncertainty, in the synth vox that bubbles as the hook, in their wordless worry the sounds are cyclical, the way internal anxiety and sadness create circles that sometimes feel unbreakable. Yet glimmers of goodness are the mainstay of 'Still Crying Over You', suggesting that a positive outlook on life means everything.

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• 🔔 You can download 'Still Crying On My Own' over here if that is what you desire.

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🐣 LIL PEEP — BENZ TRUCK (ГЕЛИК)

The menace of the crunching bass and the downtrodden guitar, the slapdash strumming leading into a graveyard of sound that looms like something poised to pounce but never does—it's that ever-present threat of sound, melancholy on the edge of negative action, which gives 'Benz Truck (гелик)' its brooding atmosphere, a gothic gloom that is charged with potential energy yet which seems to shrink and wallow in grief. It does both. Producer smokeasac attaches a disjointed drum machine the dirge, thin gasping snares crack whilst kicks gloop and thud, subtle hi-hats ticking slow and sometimes tripling up like origami assault rifles takata-takata-takata just adding to the hype of the track, the electricity of it that you'd swear didn't exist here if it weren't as palpable and downright tangible as it is.

Slurring mumbling darkly with downcast confidence is Lil Peep, whose laid-back rap flows slow like spilled apple sauce, delivered with laissez-faire aplomb and a mellow fierceness. He casually delineates his situation whereby he has obtained money and success, enough for "iced out teeth on an iced out whip / with the limousine tints, you can suck my dick." He goes on to pre-empt accusations of sell-out that seem to come with the attainment of fame – "who you wanna hate now? pretty soon you gonna hate me" – as well as boldly stating: "all the money that I make now / I'll never let it change me." His tone, something like a drugged Jesse Lacey would sing over the top of something Brand New might play if they injected beats into their hard emo sound, is soaked with reverb, and conjures a persona at once calm and collected, less emo crying and commiserations, more stoic control of life.

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• 🔔 The track is taken from Lil Peep's album Come Over When You're Sober, set to drop at some point soon I guess. You can purchase, stream and/or download 'Benz Truck (гелик)' via this lil link here.
• 🔔 The Russian word гелик in the title refers to the exact type of Benz truck he's talking about: G-Class—the word, read as something like "gelik" in English, and let's assume it's a slang term, throws up images of black boxy cars on Google.
• 🔔 The video for the track was directed by Get Mezzy (also editor), SUS BOY, and Wiggy. It was animated by Chadwickmak and Connor Moy.

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🐣 XINOBI — SKATEBOARDING

A melancholic ride, sumptuous and nocturnal, dimly lit suburban streets, housefronts passing by as the wheels trundle on the tarmac, the determination and focus and the wandering meandering feel of freedom: this track is called 'Skateboarding' and it embodies the spirit of skateboarding—not what it means for everyone, but the spirit of skateboarding for Portuguese producer Xinobi. For him it's personal. "As a suburb kid in the late 80s, he was obsessed with the skateboarding culture, and had a strong urge to get himself a skateboard." After he got one there was an "abrupt and unexpected end to his skateboarding career" when he experienced a serious fracture in his arm. He stopped and took up guitar to rehabilitate his fingers. Xinobi, however, still had "a strong affiliation to the culture."

In the lonely emotivity of the track, its lamenting synth bloops and its plaintive chord washes wobbling into the air, in its solitary feel, there is a sense of being on the outside looking in, of imagining the technical nature and the mechanics of skateboarding, being part of skateboarding culture but not actually skateboarding. As such an intimate disconnect exists in this track, you can feel the closeness, the raw hi-hats and the vital fuzz of the bass synths and the acrobatic nuances of the beat and the organic lifeblood ambience trickling throughout, but in the sadness of some of the sounds there is distance.

Analysing this world from an outsider-inside perspective, Xinobi samples a speech at the US Library of Congress by harcore punk and post-hardcore figurehead Ian MacKaye about the philosophy of skateboarding. It summarises what the producer himself wants to say, encapsulates the power of the track itself, and the potency of the skateboard and its power to both physically and figuratively move.

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• 🔔 The aptly skateboardy video was directed by Lydie Barbara.
• 🔔 'Skateboarding' is the opening track from Xinobi's album, On The Quiet, which was recently released on Lisbon artist collective and electronic music label Discotexas, and you can listen to it on their SoundCloud.

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