SHADI G — GODDESS PT. 1

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The minimal production of 'Goddess pt. 1' by Swedish artist Shadi G doesn't just serve to create a luxurious atmosphere — it allows the vocals of the musicmaker herself to soar and glimmer unimpeded. A patter of kicks and the abrasive pop of a snare propels the track forward on a blanket backdrop of soft synth chords, a glitter of zithers ornamenting it all; at the forefront, Shadi G's voice itself lilts and meanders with slow, acrobatic ease, vocal reverb like mist casting a dreamlike softness over proceedings.

"I felt I was in a place where the fun and playfulness could take a bigger part," says Shadi G in an email to yes/no.

'Goddess pt. 1' may be at its core a silky R&B number, but it's also a soulful exploration of the singer's Iranian heritage: lines of Farsi curl and spiral into earshot in the finale. "I love the melody of the language, the nature of the language itself is so poetic," she says, explaining that she chose include Farsi into her track because of the importance the language has played in her life.

"I really want Farsi to get a platform to be heard and seen," she adds. "Music isn't just made in English, even though it's the language that's given the most exposure and space by the industry."

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• 🔔 You can stream and/or download 'Goddess pt. 1' by Shadi G via whatever music service on this list is your preferred choice.

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CUUSHE — MAGIC

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Cuushe is back. Recently she announced her upcoming album WAKEN via the fresh vitality of its first single, 'Hold Half'. This time around, it's 'Magic' that faces up to the grey piercing light of morning.

A slow steamroller of a beat thuds as the propulsion to 'Magic', rusted metallic percussion ticking faintly at its mechanical heart. A set of heavy-hearted piano chords plays a downcast reverb-laden refrain; "I just wanna die.." Cuushe's voice whispers from this fog of sound. Craggy synths crack in mournful reply, a glistening gloomy call-and-response.

Starting quietly, almost from another perspective, later in the track her vocals rise up, outraged: "Magic... Why are you so silent?" A question perhaps posed to the once-dreaming individual now scrutinised by reality. Lightness eclipsed. This refrain cuts through a wash of intense sounds, synths glittering and roaring together with the clatter of a bright guitar riff — a combination of playful concreteness and fantasy synthetic noise that runs through 'Magic'.

It's all been brought to life with a video by director Tao Tajima. On a backdrop of footage filmed in the wilds of Tibet, it's a tale of ghostly girls tied with string to insistent flapping birds, drawn in their phantomic pastels by sometime Cuushe collaborator Yoko Kuno. The music — mysterious yet methodical in its makeup — matches the stark marching mountains and vast empty tundra.

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• 🔔 'Hold Half' is taken from Cuushe's forthcoming new album Waken, set for release 20th November on her label home flau. Pre-order it over on the flau bandcamp.

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TAY NOEL — LAST TIME

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With its beat echoing in a collage of ticks and booms as if caught in a looping memory, 'Last Time' is a vessel of tender emotion tumbled along by the multifaceted rhythm of time. Sultry chords paint a soundscape with muted synth glow, a picked melody adding a gentle delicacy to the scene.

All the while, percussion rattles, cymbals whisper metallics into the air, a lone, full-bodied snare explodes in the near-distance laden with reverb. Created by Virginia producer Tay NoeL, 'Last Time' is a gleaming marvel of measured, minimal production.

"This song came from a personal experience," the producer tells yes/no via email. "It was inspired from a mutual breakup between me and a girl before I shipped off to the Navy."

A hollow synth melody that calls out every now and then, a hollow, flute-esque R&B-flavoured beacon that stretches out slowly above it all. It's a sound that summons the spiritual aesthetic of old-school lovesongs, but in its descending notes, its hint of a mournful tone, it becomes emotive.

"When I create I need to have an emotion in my mind, either from personal or what I believe the song is trying to show me," he adds.

"In better words, I speak my mind and emotions through my music."

The unpretentious simplicity of 'Last Time' — and indeed many of the instrumental soundtracks to emotion and experience to be found on Tay NoeL's album The Vibez: Chill Instrumentals — calls to mind the vaporwave sensitivity to scenes, times, places, fantasy visions, nostalgia. But there's one presiding difference: this music remains gloriously rooted in and inspired by reality.

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• 🔔 You can stream and/or download The Vibez: Chill Instrumentals, Tay NoeL's collection of instrumentals, over on Bandcamp.

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HEIGHTS — SILLY

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Occupying its time of existence with plumes of bass that collapses in on itself with potential, and with a restless energy curled like a cosmic spring that provides the aesthetic casing for the track, 'Silly' by Brighton-based musicmaker HEIGHTS is a tale of willing one thing leading to another, of inching towards what you desire.

While the propulsive kick-snare pattern and misty tick of cymbals keeps impatient time, the voice of HEIGHTS herself skips over the lyrics, the vocal nonchalant, lilting and heady, turning fully acrobatic in the chorus, splitting sentences in graceful slices: "And I want you to take this / lip lock / No shock / I like this kind of vertigo / From time / to time / I see you when my eyes are closed / No low / no lie / Seen a little light now I want to see the full storm."

Washed with an icy haze of ambient synth throughout, summoning a cityscape at night, HEIGHTS builds a story on tantalising lyrics, weaving between cryptic self-enquiry and concrete, relatable imagery. The opening lines paint this interplay with particular skill — "Would you believe I’ve still not made it home? / I still have the city underneath my bones" — and later announcing "Summer inside my soul" before a harmony of realness erupts with the refraining "all I wanna feel is love".

Splicing this poetic deftness and effortless songwriting with a moody instrumental that feels as though a post-night out atmosphere has been bottled up and presented in sonic form, somehow, the other triumph of 'Silly' is how its title belies its brilliance.

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• 🔔 'Silly' is taken from HEIGHTS' debut self-released EP, also called HEIGHTS, which you can stream on SoundCloud.

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ATREM — SLICER

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'Slicer' by Japanese duo atrem — comprising Ryuichi Shima and Yusuke Kamimura — is a multifaceted being of a track. It all begins with the tricking of looped electronics, glistening drops of glitch, a tour of circuit boards and the shifting complexities of sound.

Streams of harmonised vocals flow into the mix. If you've ever played PS2 RPG EverGrace (2000), the way voices in 'Slicer' are so drastically instrumentalised may remind you of Kota Hoshino's surreal and vocal-heavy soundtrack for that game.

Before long, 'Slicer' shifts into gear. A crescendo of sound, bubbles and crashes into view, drowning out the voices. HEALTH-esque distorted synths swirl and slice through the bristling hyperactive breakcore beats that propel the track into its final section, where wordless vocals soothe the disjointed disquiet that came before.

A showcase of how this atrem can be as intricate as they can be aggressive, as blissed out and chill as they are dedicated to fully fledged noise, in 'Slicer' the duo have made a veritable journey of a track, a tale of kinetic movement, of graceful poise and letting loose.

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• 🔔 Check out the dramatic 'Slicer' as well as many more morsels of music on atrem's SoundCloud.

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🐣 BROKEN KID CLUB — LIGHTBEAM (WITH SQWD)

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Taken from his SONDER EP, Broken Kid Club's 'Lightbeam' is the softness of life entangled with its harsher parts. The stress of skittering percussion, hyperventilating synth, cracking synth, far-off gunshots, yes — but also the mellow of a clouded sunrise in tracts of modulated synth, calming vox rising up like a forcefield. Then, abruptly, the circuitry changes again.

Mexico City-based producer Broken Kid Club credits the intense-yet-beautiful sounds on their track 'Lightbeam' to a careful balance of tension and mellowed sounds. The track, they explain, represents his own musical journey — that of going from a "pop songwriter" to creating more complex music like this, enlisting the help of fellow musician, LA-based Sqwd, to execute it.

"I envisioned a lot of aquatic animals alongside different, colourful textures," Broken Kid Club says via email, speaking about the imagery behind the track that also went on to inform the EP's artwork.

Otherwise minimal and almost oppressive with its sense of space, 'Lightbeam' is noisy and pugilistic, shot through with glimmers of human joy and relief, a melding of machine and mind. "I believe living one of the world's most surreal cities has definitely impacted my production style," they say.

"It's impossible to see what one sees every day in my hometown and stay inside the box."

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• 🔔 . Listen to the SONDER EP in full over at Broken Kid Club's SoundCloud.

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🐣 TEPLICE – BRIGHT FUTURE

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From the very beginnings of 'Bright Future', with its curdled kazoo crunches and icy shards of synth, there's something in the sound that wrestles with the title of Teplice's track. Sub-bass tumbles along and a mellow miasma of plasma synth is ambient in the background, seeping into your skin when it all suddenly sinks into a mire of doom come chord-change.

The vocals do the hoping, literally. "I hope... / For a bright future" Berlin-based, London-born Teplice opens the song, unaffected and in a tired monotone. Later, insomniac lines – "I lay awake at night / Thinking of the moon / Sleep will greet me soon" – rise up and look likewise into a positive, albeit near, future. Alongside hoping is questioning, a haunted interrogation at the heart of this song like a mantra.

In harmonies that conjure spoken nonchalance like spoken spells under spectres that twang and lilt, something vocally like The Cranberries or maybe Warpaint, the existential inquiry curls out like smoke: "Is anything out there / Is anything out there / Is anything out there / Is anything..."—cut short at a moment of sudden discovery or resignation of futility. These vocals especially expel warmth, in tone, in rhythm, that makes the song bounce.

The simplicity of the lyrics stand the sentiment and imagery of up as monoliths, symbols and vignettes in a nocturnal frame of frozen electronica, driven by an unstoppable marching beat: the slow, officious plod of time. As ghostly as it is a real, true voice, 'Bright Future' wonders about the world outside—not outdoors, but outisde what you know, in something that summons the choice of music in Twin Peaks (inhabiting a realm similar to Rebekah Del Rio's 'No Stars', for example).

All the lilting vocals, all the sense of falling off the face of the Earth. And yet by the end of the track, the density of the track has lightened, the clouds begin to part; minimal and angular, 'Bright Future' is still warm and human, still hopes.

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• 🔔 The product of working at producer, label owner, radio show host E.M.M.A's Producergirls workshop, this track is taken from Teplice's upcoming Bright Future EP, inspired, she says, by "contemporary feelings of angst, stagnation and uncertainty" as well as wanting "to capture a sense of time elapsing at a personal, social and historical level."

  "In this sense," she continues, "considering how individual lives intersect with historical moments, my grandma has been a massive inspiration. [...] It was important to me that she was represented [in the artwork]."

• 🔔 The Bright Future EP is set to be released on Pastel Prism Records on 18th October, and marks the inaugural release on the label. Pre-order it on Bandcamp.

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👉 Read our interview with E.M.M.A by tapping these words 👈

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🐣 SHIGETO — FIGHT CLUB

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The kicks bubble and boom in Shigeto's homage to DIY dancefloors, 'Fight Club'. True to its name, this track flexes and thumps with pugilistic vigour. From the clean edges and simplistic space-filled beginnings of it all, right to the cavalcade of cauterised breakbeat clackings and harsh destroyed snares, the energy ramps up from boxing studio warm up to spun out sparring.

But it's not all the flurry of hits that keeps you on your toes as you listen. There's the smoke-filled, dystopian sheen of it all (much like Shigeto's 2013 'Detroit Part 1'), a darkened room and strobes feeling, rust and concrete toppling below the cyber hedonism of it all. This is what a club in Final Fantasy VII's Midgar Slums should sound like, the bouncing bass of the area's soundtrack mixing with the same sort of airy, scorched-out synth chords that play in the 'Infiltrating Shinra' theme later in the game—aged and ageless.

Needless to say, it summons this same soundscape, matching it for tone and mood with the funk jollity and downtrodden darkness of it all, mechanical beats and threatening space in a brutalist, otherworldly conjuring.

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• 🔔 'Fight Club' is taken from the ghostly-released Weighted EP, which arrived unto the world on 28th September 2018. You may stream and purchase this from Shigeto's Bandcamp.

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🐣 KAMAL — FEEL IT

Minimalism lies at the ambivalent heart of this dancefloor-flavoured number, a track so heavy in directional atmosphere that even in its minimalism there is serious gravity. The vocal samples in this track don’t have to be full-frontal, catchy things that other dance tracks may rely upon. Here they hold so much charged energy that each echoing vocal is like a crack of electricity on the robust, uncompromising beat.

“The creation of this track started with a drum loop,” the track’s creator, the Chicago-based Kamal, told us. “I wanted something that reminded me of when I was at the Chicago dance parties back in the 90's. This track was created with that party feel in mind.”

And as such ‘Feel It’ bumps away, syncopated plasma synth soft and cyclical conducting proceedings with wanton retro-futurism, the splashy strobes and laser shows in a the dark of a club, diagonal shots of dancers mid-move, drinks and sweat, sleek lines. That’s what this song is: an entire groovesome universe, something you might dance to on a space colony one day, like a throwback gem that turns everything wild.

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• 🔔 This track appears on Kamal's The Prerequisite EP, which you can listen to on SoundCloud.

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🐣 ROBOKID — WORTH IT

Right from its heavenly shining intro, with the gently clomping percussive synth and gradually gleaming chords, 'Worth It' feels like a perfect pop song: the syncopated synth bass that bloops and bops along in this pastel plaintive progression totally bumps the track along, the falling away of that lighter atmosphere into this hook – "I hope you know / how far this goes / it was worth it though / I'm never going home" – in which Robokid evokes emotion and intrigue, the very thought of never being able to go home, to anywhere, being a world-shattering prospect. It's a veritable story told with very few words; it's what's not said that makes it so effective.

"For this track I was trying to keep the lyrics less literal and be a little more cryptic," he explains to us via email. "I want people to make their own conclusions for sure, but it's a lot about everyone in my life however also talking to myself."

And that literal-cryptic mix comes to life in lines like: "I know you've had a bad year / and you keep saying you just wanna die / I think we have the same fears / cause you don't ever go outside." Whilst very literal, the captivating element of these words is their lack of divulgence: they don't tell you everything, just enough to touch your heart, not your mind. The rest of the track is characterised by a lack of lyrics, and an intensification of synth, spreading gossamer trance veils above garbled pitch-shifted vocals as it leads to its end; the whole thing a powerful parcel of music, like a deep and emotional DM sent to somebody but manifested in music form and seeded with upbeat pop accessibility.

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• 🔔 'Worth It' is out today on Robokid's debut EP Apart, released via Moving Castle. You can grab that here.

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🐣 SUSPECT — SAY IT WITH YOUR CHEST

Sometimes it is what's left unsaid that is most powerful, and in the case of instrumentals it's what's left unused and untouched: space. A sense of space can give a sense of majesty and grandeur as well as chilling tension and literal expansiveness. And so it is in 'Say It With Your Chest', the latest from London rapper Suspect—synths glassy and glacial, halfway between a slowed-down music box and a warped gamelan, chime out a haunting melody that adds a calculated coldness to the track.

Between these chimes is space, and lots of it, plenty for Suspect's murderous bars, who breathlessly and growling explains the advantages of not talking behind someone's (i.e. his) back – "bet you can't @ me when you're dead" – and challenging you to "say it with your chest," this hook screaming out guttural with reverb and ad-libs yelping in the void of the track. A huge trap-flavoured beat thumps and rattles, the minimalism and delicacy of the instrumental making the venom and aggression of the words all the more effectively brutal: "all I smell is death in the air / it gets dark in the depths."

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• 🔔 This track is out now on RINSE and you can stream it variously here.
• 🔔 The video for 'Say It With Your Chest' was directed by Bafic and Hector Dockrill, who explain the ideas behind the vivid visuals, dark yet colourful: "Suspect wanted to shoot a hood video with colour, so we experimented with lights around Wooly [Walworth Road] — we wanted to capture everything in its correct environment, but within a heightened reality."

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🐣 OURI × MIND BATH — WILD MOTHER

The minimalist space of 'Wild Mother' is as beautiful as the sound itself, and made beautiful in fact by that sound. The two, the presence and absence, work together to create this world of sequential peaks and troughs in texture: the rich and rounded boops of electronic summations feel plastic and colourful, liquid and wobbly, and the spaces between them are greyfully faded, the hanging in the air of static, the constant ache of the unobtrusive glossy column of bass propelling the track through a void.

Two Montreal musicmakers, harpist, cellist and producer Ouri, and Mind Bath – who here provides the vocals – duet: a human heart surrounded by circuitry and conjured abstract shapes. In fact it is more than just this electronicness to it. Scuttled metallic drums set this creeping organic tone, the constant shuffle of percussion texturing the dusty boom of the beat. The voice of Mind Bath croons outward, searching in the brooding intergalactic clatter of the track for meaning; and Ouri's artful construction of objects in aesthetic sultry dancefloor collage.

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• 🔔 'Wild Mother' is taken from Ouri and Mind Bath's collaborative four-track EP, OURI / MIND BATH, which you can purchase and stream variously via this hyperlink.
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🐣 HOTWAX — ROCKAWAY FEAT. STEFFALOO

The ten ton, no ten-thousand ton, crush of the kicks here, like the engine room of a huge vessel as it hums cyclopean across the stars, is the glorious intensity that lies at the foundation of 'Rockaway' by Floridian musicmaker Hotwax. It is this slow-down techno rumble that perforates the stillness of the air, the blank pugilism of it summoning hard trebles as well as full-body bass for a robust beat. It's the simplest backdrop to a swishing of mists that rain down like veils—vocals that cut across your hearing and drip down like oil in water, fathomless reverb like galactic ghosts in this tract of minimalism.

These are provided by Steffaloo, a prominent voice in chillwave, whose simple harmonies resonate and vibrate to give extra texture to the already grainy phantasm of her tone as it reaches out across the dark of the track. Alongside this, simple synth clouds bop and gleam softly, a tangle of silken fibres that threads through the void. Ornaments orbit the beat: panning abrasive shakers, decayed metallic cowbell, shuffling hi-hats, handclaps followed by veils of fog. The atmosphere is a sunken one, where the heaviness of the water weighs huge and choking, and where the prettiness of life glistens and sparkles in the winnowing waves above.

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• 🔔 The quite wonderful Steffaloo-featuring 'Rockaway' is taken from Hotwax's debut album Communicator out now on 2060 Records. You can download it free-of-charge, or $7 for a cassette, from Bandcamp.

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🐣 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.

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• 🔔 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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🐣 ISSERLEY — PRIVILEGE

The crunch of it, the frustrated clenched fists broil of it, the distorted decay of it all and veiled with a haunted corridor of wobbling ambient sounds to create this negative miasma clouding over the robust solidity of the mechanical swampsome sounds at the foundation, the emptiness that this track summons is vast and uncompromising. Sydney-based artist Isserley returns as the formidable force that we saw in 'Advent', her seemingly small childlike voice poised as it swoops disjointedly around the room, a glinting tone like a silvery flash in the dark, growling walls of synth bass fuzzing and pushing on your spirit, helping the musicmaker to illustrate the blocky angst at the heart of 'Privilege'.

"Sadness doesn't discriminate at all," Isserley writes in a message to yes/no, "and it always angers me when people assume that if you have money or a certain superficial quality, that life is inherently perfect."

Throughout the song she slurs in slow measured lines, monotone for the most part and sometimes dipping down to a low mutter, a drugged vacant quality as the languishing speaker attempts to tell themselves they have a secret weapon in privilege—the classic overcompensation of an unhappy soul. Isserley explains further: "The song is essentially a collage of miscellaneous misanthropy, nihilism and sarcasm directed towards the attitude that just because some people don't suffer the same problem as you, they're not suffering at all."

Indeed it begins, "I sit here waiting for the end of my suffering…" and the lyrics later ask, "But how can I be something, when I am surrounded by people who make me feel nothing?" — always the scuttled abrasive beat, the bruising calamitous synth, the soundtrack to dying inside.

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• 🔔 'Privilege' is part of a new cycle of songs by Isserley—will or won't there be a new release? Either way if you like this go check her 2016 album Messes on Bandcamp.

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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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