MATTHIAS GUSSET — FAREWELL

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The organ is the original drone and ambient instrument from way back when, let’s be honest. It’s a wonder that it isn’t used in more tracks, as Matthias Gusset has expertly employed it in ‘Farewell’. The track’s chord progression is simple enough, a switching oscillation between two chords, then another, in cyclical rotation from start to finish. This provides a soft backdrop, dim lighting, for the emotive action that follows.

Melodies rise up from the bright drone of ‘Farewell’, at first like birdsong, or the dappled light of the sun twinkling on bough-shaded paths, and then in more prominent, layered stretches, calling out from the grove and its summer flowers and its butterflies a warm, pastoral goodbye.

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• 🔔 Taken from Matthias Gusset’s Inbetween Birdsongs, out now on Radicalis, which you can purchase and/or listen to on his Bandcamp.

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MASAYOSHI FUJITA — BIRD AMBIENCE

⌾ LISTEN TO BIRD AMBIENCE BY MASAYOSHI FUJITA ⌾

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The natural world. That’s the overriding force at work in ‘Bird Ambience’ by Berlin-based vibraphonist and composer Masayoshi Fujita. But that — signalled by the track’s robust percussion, tumbling marimba and keen ceramic reverberations — is only half of the story here. For all of its organically glossy and glomping collisions of beater against solid object, there’s a smattering of inorganic glitch, sharp and harsh, zooming around within; an ancient computer of some forgotten century still whirring brokenly amidst vast trees and choking vines. And all around, ghosts — the nebulous vocals of singer Hatis Noit cooing through the canopy.

The sheer space between each knock, each tap, hit and plonk — and the constrasting soft, sheafing ambience of each successive contact — gives Fujita's ‘Bird Ambience’ an empty-yet-full feeling: Navigating the voidsome depths of woods, its trees and the heavy air between the trunks and branches. There’s an essence of kankyō ongaku or “environmental music” here, with textural elements reminiscent of Hiroshi Yoshimura’s ‘Time After Time’. There's less in the way of melody, of rigidity, Fujita's track instead creeping along almost at random, solidly and yet as if it were mist.

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• 🔔 This track is taken from Masayoshi Fujita's upcoming album Bird Ambience, scheduled for release on Erased Tapes on 28th May. You can pre-order it from Bandcamp digitally, as a CD or limited edition 2LP.

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🐣 FOUR TET — BABY (FT. ELLIE GOULDING)

⌾ LISTEN TO FOUR TET, BABY ⌾

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Two things stand out quite a lot in this Four Tet track. First of all, the chopped Ellie Goulding vocals are a surprise — a welcome one. Giving 'Baby' its title, the samples litter the track with UK garage flavourings, what with the deft angular cuts, the intentional tinniness, the warmth of the words. The general minimalism of 'Baby' — with its ambient gossamer synths and its shuffling '00s beat — nudge yet more wintry garage aesthetic into your auditory cortex.

Secondly, the midsection. The beat falls away and we are left with gleaming synths, resonating slowly like the radiant heat of a sunny day on tarmac; the glass of a shop window glittering, swaying trees in a city park. What happens here is the emergence of that garage sound into a leafier part of town, the clearing of a green space in a forest of blocks and buildings; birdsong and glowing ambience, reminiscent of Japanese "environmental music" — ambient, but with added flora and fauna for full outdoorsy immersion.

Percussive and driving, warm and emotive, 'Baby' paves a way into inner city paradise, juggling beats, ambient and the sounds of nature for a city walk that leaves the rush, the traffic, for private reflections of the day in a public park.

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• 🔔 Purchase 'Baby' as a single. It's taken from Sixteen Oceans, Kieran Hebden's 10th studio album as Four Tet, released 16th March, 2020 via Hebden's own Text Records which you can purchase on Bandcamp.

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🐣 RIVAL CONSOLES — MEMORY ARC

You know that feeling when the sun is too bright, and it's too hot, and humid, and the brightness of the sun is so much that you can basically feel the UV toasting your skin, and you can smell the heat. That piercing abrasive sunlight feels like the sounds in 'Memory Arc', created by English musicmaker Rival Consoles; primarily this is a heavenly harp sound that is degraded and decayed, the scorch of retinas as humans look upon gods, the curse of theophany. Like a molten zither it plays—or like inverse steel pans for an inverted paradise.

Because there is that flipside to tropical beauty and to the beauty of nature in general, and that is in the danger of it, the undesirable and uncontrollable; survival at nature's mercy. The sweltering heat, dehydration, poison and venom, infection, insects. It feels as if the lower tones of Rival Console's monolithic track provide the looming menace, of something primeval and earth-shaking, whilst the scorching sweeps of melody above paint a picture of the parched sun.

And so there is this sense of wonder, but at no time does it feel triumphant, or chilled. The feelings here, in the drawn-out nature of it, the abrasiveness, the actual progression of the notes, the feelings are of anxiety at its root, the basest worries in the midst of a world a million times bigger than ourselves; a concept that is reminiscent of a similar one in The Drowned World by J. G. Ballard, where global warming has taken our minds back to a world of prehistory. With these sweeping threats and glittering terrors, 'Memory Arc' may represent our most primordial collective recollections.

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• 🔔 The looming 'Memory Arc' is taken from Rival Consoles' new album Persona, released back in April on Erased Tapes.

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🐣 CHRONO TRIGGER OST — SECRET OF THE FOREST (LEON EDIT)

The slow and breezy original 'Secret of the Forest' is a track taken from SNES game Chrono Trigger, playing in Guardia Forest; it conjures the freshness of nature and its greenery, the dappled light and leaf shadows faintly swaying on the ground mirrored in the glistening arpeggio that chimes throughout, spreading at the same time with its ambivalent pattern of notes a veil of mystery; the piano midway is steady with jazz flavour, reflecting a sort of laid-back tranquillity that goes with chilled nature; there's wheeling high-pitched melody with lingering glissando that feels like birds swooping and singing. It's almost spiritual.

But there's this deep fragmented bass and a semblance of percussion that gives it this poised edge, like something's about to kick in—the dense forest as not only chilled hideaway for humans, but a place of vague looming danger, too. And that's where Leon comes in. Increasing the tempo of the track, this musicmaker introduces a robust boom-bap flavoured beat to the gleaming soundscape, picking out the distinct but sparse groove of the bassline and carving into something full-bodied with thudding kicks and abrasive snares; turntablist edits pockmark the new jogging-paced 'Secret of the Forest' for extra texture, the swing-beat breeziness matching the irresolute magic of the glittering florafauna conjured in the instrumental.

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• 🔔 Little thing: the description for Leon's edit simply reads: items: strength capsule (2), shelter — Nice inventory~
• 🔔 The creator of the Chrono Trigger soundtrack, Yasunori Mitsuda, got the job after he told then-Square vice president Hironobu Sakaguchi that he would quit if he couldn't compose (he had worked on sound design for previous titles such as Final Fantasy V and Secret of Mana). Sakaguchi agreed, and Mitsuda ended up composing all 54 tracks for the Chrono Trigger OST, working so hard on it that he gave himself stomach ulcers.
• 🔔 For a masterpiece from Leon you should check out his album bird world, made especially for a game that had been imagined but never made; and it makes you think of that uncreated game and how it would be to play it. Listen to that splendidly fun soundtrack over on Leon's SoundCloud.

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🐣 CLOZEE — HARMONY (AXEL THESLEFF REMIX)

As gentle and ostensibly ‘world music’ as this track appears to be, there is something darker within; it lulls you into a state of exotic pastoral bliss, with textures that swirl around like the spirit of a rainforest, percussive ticks and clicks amidst an organic drumbeat sailing through all the sights and sounds of typically beautiful Earth. But soon we are sucked into a swamp of mystery, clanging metallics in the thin air and mists crawling across the once green vista, the vision of cave mouths yawning craggy monstrous, the untameable force at the heart of everything.

These two universes inhabit the original ‘Harmony’ by globally minded French musicmaker CloZee - a sort of slow sashaying to some globular heartbeat mixed with a distorted synth drop - which is echoed in Axel Thesleff ’s treatment of the track, a minimal reworking that pits the languor of leafy slo-house against bare bubbling beats and stark synths, a contrast that retains a sense of exoticism but dilutes it out into something more generally beautiful, whilst creating tons of space in the existential thump of the drop, a wholly unnatural counterpart to the soft omnipresence of natural, forest-conjuring sounds.

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• 🔔 Finnish producer Axel Thesleff's remix of 'Harmony' is out on Gravitas Recordings and you may stream and download via these various links.

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🐣 HIDDEN SPHERES — LIANAS

The delicacy of this tropical track is beautiful, charting its namesake – liana, a species of woody vine that climbs to the top of a forest canopy for sunlight – as it twists slowly onwards towards life, glassy synths illustrating the robust nature of these vines with their percussive feel and full-bodied warmth, as well as the clack-clopping of subtle snare-woodblock. Manchester musicmaker Hidden Spheres inches his track towards brightness, gradually adding elements that conjure dappled sunlight, like vital breathy hi-hats, and a simple two-note horn refrain that blasts out low-key triumphantly.

The natural element to this chilled and breezy lounge-flavoured track is more than in the name, however. It begins and continues throughout with a backdrop of the rainforest itself, ambient sounds of insectoid white noise and mammalian hoots and indistinct birdcalls, taken from 1970s documentary Wonders Of The Rainforest. And so with the veil of nature draped firmly over the bumping kicks and skiffling percussion, which includes the tactile rolling of bongos, 'Lianas' is with those gorgeous chords and the aching rise and fall of more fizzing synths, lush and living, playful and paradisiacal: music for the splendour of the natural world.

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• 🔔 'Lianas' is in fact taken from the producer's upcoming Wonders Of The Rainforest EP, directly inspired by the documentary of the same name. It arrives on 2nd February, and will be the first release on Hidden Spheres' brand new label, Fruit Merchant.
• 🔔 Listen to a preview of Wonders Of The Rainforest here.
• 🔔 Since 'Lianas', the next track that has dropped in full from the EP is called 'Sapodilla' and you should listen to that too.

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🐣 KORESMA — FOREST SANG

The gradual crescendo that this track leads us into is like walking into the middle of the woods, further and further from real civilisation, the sounds of cars replaced with the whoosh of wind through the tops of trees, everything all around a slow whirlwind of nature. Suitably it is titled 'Forest Sang' and arrives from the mind of North Carolina musicmaker Ryan Lindberg aka Koresma, who describes it as "a song made after a bear encounter in the woods."

With this force of nature as ferocious and fear-inducing as it is, Koresma nevertheless approaches the mood of 'Forest Sang' with a fresh, breezy outlook, ensuring that there is this sense of palpitation – the uptempo beat, the kinetic escape, the arpeggiating synth – without a sense of immediate danger, resulting in a chilled track. There is a sense of awe in the robust natural sounds that abound in the track, the wooden twang of the acoustic guitar, the breathy tracts of flute that summon something earthen and spiritual: "a musical byproduct of my experiences in nature," says the producer.

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• 🔔 This track appears on Koresma's East EP, part of a wider EP sequence Next Frontier, which comprises four releases based on the compass points. You can listen to East here.

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🐣 BOD [包家巷] — EMPTY MOUNTAIN WEEPS ALONE [空山独哭]

The screaming cosmic synth that hits at the start of this track, it arrives scathing and scorching, but shot through in the midst of its scratchings and scrapings is this plasma modulation, a sense of the steel and unbridled progress of the present and its outstretched hands craving the years ahead and beyond. The decayed whistle and muffled impact of a bomb, the PA system speaking to the crowd as you embark a ship to a future industrial megacity. This is the scene-setting power of two-thirds noise one-third classical in 'Empty Mountain Weeps Alone [空山独哭]' by LA-based musicmaker Nicolas Zhu aka bod or Baojiaxiang[包家巷] ('Baojia Alley'), presumably named after the same street in Chengdu. Maybe not.

Halfway through this short sharp snippet of sound we are introduced to this gargantuan construction site, the glitching beat like heavy machinery working in unison clashing together cranes and cement mixers and all the movement and drills and hammers and metal and muscle carving away at the surface of the earth and constructing a cradle of consumerism. In the background the silken tones of a traditional Chinese lute-like instrument (there are many so to name one would be a guess), like a sigh of nature drowned out by the grunts of advancement, reminscent of the hole-boring mall-making and gaudy grandiosity at tourist destination Yangshuo. Nature as stomped on by humanity. And it ends, the rush of cars in the rain, piano sounding a gentle shrug as protest, a casual hands-in-pocket lonely lament.

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• 🔔 This wonderful experimental piece arrives from bod's upcoming release for Zoom Lens called Piano Compositions: a 17-minute piece of which this snippet is in fact the 3rd movement. It's out and available tomorrow (15th December).
• 🔔 Read about the strange carnival that is Yangshuo right here, which we wrote about as part of our Visits travel series.

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🐣 MOSSY — GLASS

This track exudes wandering feeling, something achieved by the first wide chords that fade into the tract of percussion already at work, and kept up by the multiple switches that happen throughout the track's duration, this sonic shape of meandering through somewhere, the kind of soundscape that fits weaving in and out of trudging commuters, or watching the land change blurring through the window on a road trip, a sense of discovery summoned by mossy, ever-present amidst the uncountable percussive clinkings and the space-leaning synths that shine and gleam and add a steamy water vapour rainforest mist to the proceedings, this natural feel conjured by these endless tracts of percussion luscious and wonderful, ornaments for 'glass'.

Snaking hi-hats rattle and handclaps slap-slap-slap-slap and a triangle tings and rainstick streamings and smart snapping snares and synthetic woodblocks clip-clip-click and far-off textural deliciousness cash registers a book flying through the air hitting a tree trunk with a stick—and then the marimba glockenspiel is chiming mysterious heavenly percussive glinting amidst the thicketing forest of sound. Modulating synth beams glowering below, a deep bubbling, the untameable core of https://soundcloud.com/julianborrego, whipping past leaves and crunching soil as you walk further into it, vocal samples yelping out of the neardistance hopeful representation of familiarity within the bristling trees and what they hide yet how strange they sound; the final vocal sung "I've been thinking about feeling something… every time I try, I feel nothing…" The simple longing for a connection whilst encased in chaos, looking from the outside into something better, how to break the barrier.

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• 🔔 'glass' is the third single to be taken from mossy's upcoming debut EP. More will follow so keep an eye out.
• 🔔 You can download 'glass' from Toneden if you like.

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🐣 YOMO-DA — ODAYAKA?

It's a sea-based intro, setting the scene with the clopple and clapping of watery sounds morphing to the crash and topple of waves on a beach. A tract of piano with dramatic baroque flavours of minor-major modulations switches between daintiness with light trills and skipping notes and something more colossal, strong robust chords; between a picture of the calm sea and the ocean fraught with ferocity. A plaintive melody chimes in, something reminiscent of the opening theme to Zelda: Link's Awakening, which also features strong maritime themes with 8-bit renderings of sea and surf. At 1:10 chimes whisk us from the ocean scene, the cresting waves, shifts the camera from directly focusing on the sea to the town cradled in the bay, the buildings overlooking the blue expanse.

Japanese musicmaker yomo-da turns the track into a jazzy illustration of life by the sea, a bossa-nova rhythm in the soft percussion the tingling cymbal shuffle and offbeat allure of the bass-rimshot pattern, a Latin coastal groove that soaks your mind with sultry azure visions. Warm organ chords play with airy turbulence and romance, a fluttering tremolo pulsing in your ears with a dreamy, far-off appeal, the muffled bed over which the piano returns and tumbles virtuoso, twinkling with the angularity of light and shade in the city, the bustling boulevards, narrow lanes, breezy palms, all of it fading into an aching silence where this conjuration gradually dissolves. 'Odayaka?' is the sea – fickle, light, beautiful, vast – whilst it also reflects the moods, the hearts, of the people who live with it.

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• 🔔 'Odayaka?' is taken from yomo-da's recent EP, よりぬき四方田 (Yorinuki Yomoda – The Very Best of Yomoda). Released by Japanese netlabel OMOIDE LABEL, you can download it from their Bandcamp page on a name your price basis.
• 🔔 In the SoundCloud description of this track is written:

  おだやか たおやか
  海を見に行こう

  mild, magnificent
  let's go to the sea

  The title, 'Odayaka?' refers to the mildness of the sea. Yes it's nice, it's breezy, calm—but, taking special note of that question mark, not always.

• 🔔 The artwork for the EP was created by 南雲哉果 Saika Nagumo. The selection and mastering of the four tracks for the EP was done by OMOIDE label owner, YZOX.

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🌭 INCHANGE — NIGHT SHIFT

The repeating melody at the heart of the track effuses as much down-to-earth somewhat melancholy reality as it does a sense of something secret and unreal, mysterious, discoverable yet undiscoverable at the same time. It plays like a harp, heavenly, warping with effects and glistening into the neardistance, a gentle dreamy arpeggio that oscillates, aloof and empty, pure and puzzling; light and breezy yet dark and looming. Russian musicmaker Inchange offers up a sacred grove of sound, an idyll that is real and organic as dappled light through shimmering leaves, as constructed and awesome as ruined columns and archways: wayward-sounding but refined, cultured.

There is a hint of VGM sound in 'Night Shift', in the exquisite expansive exploratory ambience of the track, in the trickling shuffle of the beat and its call-to-action feel, the fresh pluckings of that refrain, the what's-over-there intrigue of the small pings of delayed guitar that ebb and overlap—it's almost very nearly like a piece of music that could have been included in Zelda: Breath of the Wild (or maybe it's closer to Ocarina of Time's title theme), what with all its scene-setting music that draws up an atmosphere with unobtrusive non-earworming melodies, relaxing with hints of restlessness. The coursing lullaby is founded on glowing columns of sub-bass gloop that charge and pulse beneath everything, adding more fluidity to the track, rising and falling, more subtly dynamic nuances for this multifaceted morsel.

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• 🔔 'Night Shift' is taken from Inchange's recently released Through Noise EP—peep it and download over on Bandcamp.

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🐣 SHUNYA — MOUNTAIN GAZER

Atmospheric, chilled, this is a Romantic piece of swaying electronica crossed with actual instruments, a morsel of music as stark and fresh as a cold Spring day with the sun out and the sky blue dotted with white tufts of cloud. It comes from Irish musicmaker Alan Keary aka Shunya, who adds the muted glitter of plucked guitar and soaring lilts of violin freely; flute, chilled and jazz-tinged, blows through airily, and saxophone adds peals of soul later on, a whole host of tones and timbres, representing the very non-uniform variety of mountain slopes and escarpments. This Bonobo-flavoured track is called 'Mountain Gazer'.

Succulent percussion layered and rich clicks and tick-tocks sumptuously, providing that texture like a stream rippletrickling around rocks and breezed leaves sheafing and rustling together creaking trees footsteps crunch-scraping on pathway gravel all at once—lovely organic instinctual noises. The explosive handclaps, thuds, clunking noises, snare hits, hi-hats, rainsticks, shakers, all of this adds its rhythmic ambience to the wavy segments of sidechained sound, the rumble of bass and warm chords, fading in and out. This sonic scenery, its mix of instruments, the culmination of it all, feels just like the detached drama of looking at a mountain landscape—ridges into the distance, peaks into the sky, between the green earth and vaulting blue.

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• 🔔 This track comes from Shunya's Mountain Gazer pt.2 EP, available for listening and purchasing on Bandcamp.

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FÁBIO CARAMURU – CIGARRA

The releases of Tokyo-based flau records span the distance from Japanese music like the constructivist electronica of CRYSTAL and the constant dreamworlds of cuushe, to the music of artists from all over the world, like Taiwanese cello-guitar-violin ensemble Cicada, with many genres represented in between—and never do they disappoint. It's ever the same with a beautiful new piece called 'Cigarra'.

A mix of natural found-sounds and fluid waxing-and-waning piano-playing, 'Cigarra' is the work of Brazilian pianist and composer Fábio Caramuru. Taken from an upcoming collection of pieces in which Caramuru "speaks" to the fauna of his home country, this particular track is a conversation with the ostensibly whining and screeching of cigarra – meaning cicada in Portuguese. Its violent buzzing, though, feels like a lament here, the piano reflecting brightly and empathising with grave and tumbling tones the constant call of this long-living insect.

Like the the cicada, the piano too seems to be calling out, mimicking its song with a rapid refrain, soaring into flighty introspection at times, and falling to its refrain again by the coda, repeating endlessly with a certain sadness alongside the cicada, into the air, where the music goes to whose ears that will hear it.

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• That collection of pieces is an album called EcoMúsica - conversas de um piano com a fauna brasileira - ("conversations between a piano and the fauna of Brazil") and it will be out on flau on 7th September 2016. Alongside the album opener 'Cigarra', other tracks/animals included are 'Uirapuru' (musician wren), 'Anu-branco' (guira cuckoo), and 'Tuim' (a type of forpus parrot). And you may pre-order it from flau here if you like the sound of that.

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ANCHORSONG – ORIENTAL SUITE

I heard this playing during a wander around on a blue sky day with the sun shining in Harajuku outside Beams Records and I was drawn into the shop and I stood there drinking up the music not really looking at any of the CDs just kind of pretend-browsing. To hear it outside a siren song with its bells and chimes blown about by the early afternoon breeze and to be drenched in its subby sound inside the shop... it's a tasty treat for the ears, a cyclical journey of a track, walking a circuit trail through a sun-dappled grove.

It is 'Oriental Suite' and it is by Anchorsong (named after Björk's 'The Anchor Song'? maybe), a musicmaker whose real name is Masaaki Yoshida, a Tokyo person now living in London. Reading up about it now, Beams Records were playing his music because they had an advance sale of the album Ceremonial, and I happened to be there a day before the album's release party (28/1), so that's that.

The track is built on a shaker-sprinkled shuffling of a beat, in a slowed-down-garage-flavoured rhythm but wooden and organic, like it is made of felled logs and fistfuls of earth and tangled wires of ivy – you also get this feeling with the clop-clopping marimba sounds hollow and rustic later on in the song. Samples drop in and out of the track, vocal snippets of cut-up conversation and longer drawn-out singing voices like chanting.

It begins thin and almost minimalist, mystical reverbing chimes giving you a hint of what lies ahead, it ending up a bustling whirl of delicious percussion and vocal samples, that shaking beat with hi-hats zinging to help the frenzy of sounds along, underpinned with rumbling undulating sub-bass that makes the shuffling groove robust and... so like moss-covered walls constant under the wash of pines and murmur of people and animals; do you not feel teleported elsewhere?

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• 'Oriental Suite' is a track on Anchorsong's latest album Ceremonial, which was released last month.

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MUS.HIBA – PASANIA

As part of Japanese indie label Virgin Babylon Record's 5th Anniversary, they've curated a compilation for which they asked a variety of artists to submit around one minute of music – fittingly, it's called ONE MINUTE OLDER and features FIFTY very diverse tracks from FORTY-NINE very diverse artists, including Miii, N-qia, world's end girlfriend, Shokuhin Matsuri a.k.a Foodman, and canooooopy. However, I've decided to put a small spotlight on just one artist whose work I particularly enjoy: mus.hiba.

Back at the end of 2014 I wrote about a mus.hiba track called 'Slow Snow', which basically sounded like slow snow – beautiful, delicate, mystifying. It was from his White Girl EP, which followed in mus.hiba's style of vital, intricate beats and intense synth chords, all tied up with the interesting concept of equating the fragility of winter with the ephemerality of using the voice of virtual singer Sekka Yufu (a character from singing synthesiser application UTAU). His addition to Virgin Babylon's compilation is called 'Pasania', and is in keeping with his intense yet delicately chilled style.

'Pasania', you may or may not be interested to know, is the name of a defunct genus of trees now known as Lithocarpus in the family Fagaceae (beech trees), which also includes the better known Quercus, or oak trees. Many of the species are endemic to East and South East Asia, specifically Lithocarpus edulis or Japanese Stone Oak (マテバシイ = Matebashī), which is cultivated for ornamental purposes. Wow that was a lot of words about trees.

The actual morsel of music 'Pasania' by mus.hiba is a delicious temporary shelter from the storm of life, a plethora of sumptuous percussion – lip-smacking clacks, clip-clopping sounds, pulsing thuds for kicks, occasional clusters of hi-hat hits, saturated hand-claps – cascading alongside dramatic torrents of astral synth that seem like the sonic equivalent to sitting beneath a waterfall and letting the weight and all-encompassing nature of the water wash your mind clean of thoughts.

A dynamic-urgent electronic bassline, delightfully synth-rock sounding, provides dramatic movement beneath the onslaught of chill from the beat and the chords, and moves in line with bustling breezy piano that paints a picture of airy beauty throughout. Extremely tasty throughout, a little bit of rapid-fire, pitch-shifted vocal sampling signals the end of the track as a cherry on top, a tantalising cliffhanger to a short track that nevertheless exemplifies the mood-setting talents of this producer.

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• Grab the Virgin Babylon Records 5th Anniversary compilation, ONE MINUTE OLDER, from Bandcamp.
• It's not Winter now, it's Summer, but still you could check out the themed Winter Chill mix that mus.hiba made for YES/NO Guest Mix series.

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天才子役の息子の気持ちD – 巻貝

I don't know what's going on. I first am not very proficient in Japanese, not nearly enough to make sense of stuff on a regular basis. So I do the only thing you can do: GOOGLE TRANSLATE. Right? And then with a little bit of common sense jigging around and searching specific kanji for their individual meanings and trying to put them together… only in some cases where Google Translate makes literally no sense at all… sometimes it's worth this extra effort. More often than not I end up getting lost in a world of language.

This time I somehow ended up on a blog that had written quite an extensive article on the depiction of cannibalism in comics and I feel really disgusted now, why did I keep scrolling down? Yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck.

Anyway: language. 天才子役の息子の気持ちD is the name of the artist in this instance. It means something like "Feelings of genius child actor son, D" – they're from Uchisaiwaichō (neighbourhood in Chiyoda, Tokyo) and they make music. Minimal, experimental, beat-focused music. In fact, their most recent EP is composed entirely of drums. 真海雷巻 is the EP title. All the tracks are named after various water-based creatures: shrimp, common octopus, snakehead, and this track I'm sharing, 「巻貝」 (conch).

It begins life as a metallic tin can rainstick rattle, which leads into a swaying, head-noddingly regulated beat, with vacuum cleaner sounds supporting abrasive velcro snares that also sport spray can ornamentations throughout – these grow more prominent, as they were at the beginning, towards the end, neatly tying up the soundscape with an ouroboros of noise. Wheezy miniature bellows flap around like a thin watercolour of rhythmic turntablism, joining two notes of some miniature bongo thing for the only "melodic" sounds of the track, and then there's these tiny rolling tom sounds.

All of it adds up to a delightful almost-two-minutes' worth of percussive crunch and crackle, thump and fizz, a container of organic, naturalistic beats that shows a sensitivity to the natural world, and a desire to rhythmicise that world in short drum-based vignettes.

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• You can download the 真海雷巻 EP for free from Mediafire.

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☟ 天才子役の息子の気持ちD Social Media Presence ☟
SoundCloud • Bandcamp (nothing here)

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PUPILATION – NATURE

How about something from Spain right now? Is that gonna float your boat? Well in some ways it doesn't really matter where anything is from, but in others it matters a great deal. Let's just split the bill and say that it depends – it depends entirely on the situation I suppose, and your interest. Me, for example, I'm interested in where stuff comes from. Sorry but I am.

Anyway, in this instance here is something not from "Spain" as it were but from Euskal Herria – Basque Country, and it arrives in the form of a track called 'Nature' by Bilbao-based beatmaker Pupilation – or PVPILΔTION. For the sake of ease, I'm going to say Pupilation from now on. Sorry about that.

True to its name, 'Nature' features sounds of birds singing, chirping noises that ease you into the glittering glitz of wide chiming melodies that float over the top of this track for its entire duration, like a silvery mist. Bass grooves with slow and simple funk pattern, filling the deep void beneath the the shuffling raw beat that shakes its way forward with harsh hi-hats and dull-thud organic kicks and resounding snare. The middle of the track marks a return to the sound of birds; other sounds join in, glassy shearing synth sound, stepping patterns of harpsichord-like twinkling.

Little things – like the introducing the beat with just bare hi-hats, like muting all sounds except the drums for less than a second just before the middle break, like the beat's staggering return to life for the final part, like the chunks of leftover bass chopped at the end – make this track what it is: very cool. It's these simple things, simple acts of not even decoration, but of minimal subtraction, dynamic placement, that keep things interesting in this track, which with its sounds and fresh beat is very, very pretty anyway.

This guy makes music under not only Pupilation, but also Ber SO and Zitrick – maybe this current moniker is the ultimate one, the name of choice. In any case, he seems to upload a tune here and there pretty regularly, so if you're into this just check his SoundCloud every now and again.

• There is also an album, free to download, called Land of Lies.

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Like Pupilation on Facebook
Listen to Pupilation on SoundCloud
Watch Pupilation on YouTube

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LAZY INTERVIEW #22: VULKANO

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← #21: DCUP #23: HARRISON →

Meet Vulkano. Do you know them? It's ok if you don't. But perhaps you should. They inhabit a strange esoteric area of music, a kind of mystic post-punk – a Swedish girl duo who screech and sing and howl, pogo-stick with whirling energy and bash the spirits out of drums: all with visceral intent. Formerly members of Those Dancing Days, this week (3rd Feb) they released their debut album, Live Wild Die Free. It's a journey through forests, crepuscular creepings, rites of nature, cold and spooky atmospheres cradled in raw craggy basslines and frenzied drumming, as synths float like mists and farflung vocals hold your attention with their endearing high-pitched warcry tones.

But that's what Vulkano are like. Nature, love, friendship – these three things imbue their music as much as they do the people themselves. Having been making music for a long time, perhaps they feel that they have finally arrived at a juncture which allows them to couple their creative output directly with what their hearts feel. The energy of their music is overwhelming, the enthusiasm is evident; and (so I have heard) their live shows are, unsurprisingly, rather mad. Feeling the music is always a sign of a genuine love for music, however. Anyway. They were very kind in answering the YES/NO Lazy Interview, which is below.

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Who are you? Where are you from? What do you do?
We are a two-girl band called Vulkano based in Stockholm, Sweden. We like to think we come from space and we are here to give music to the world. Cissi Efraimsson sings and plays the stand-up-drums and Lisa Pyk Wirström plays the keys and percussion.

Why did you decide to start creating music?
We got to know each other when we were 14 and we started to hang out because our biggest interest was music. We went to a lot of concerts and both of us thought it looked so much fun to be on stage playing for an audience and being on tour so we decided to start a band and since then we've played together. For us music is magic.

How would you describe your sound? What makes you and your style stand out?
Our sound is raw and filled with energy. It’s fun, primal and straightforward. We stand out because we follow our instincts and not any rules. When we play together it’s like the world around us disappears and we create our own crazy colourful creepy fantasy world. I think people can hear that in our music and like to be a part of it.

Is there a perfect time and place for listening to your music?
Under the full moon in the desert with a cold beer in your hand. You’re sitting in a nice chair in warm cloths with a home knitted blanket over you. You lay back, watch the stars and let the music take you out of your mind and out of your body.

What inspires you most when writing a song?
Nature, great songs, art, the superficial, volcanoes, other dimensions, colors, science fiction, space and life on Earth. We also inspire each other a lot. We are like ying and yang.

What is your most memorable musical experience?
God this is hard. Ok we’ll choose three.

1. Our first gig with our first band called Her Peace. We were 14 years old and played at youth garden outside of Stockholm. Cissi who was the drummer played every song so fast. Lisa was so nervous so she had to skip school the same day. The gig went quite bad but the feeling after was something new. We totally felt like rock stars!
2. Going to Japan to play with our previous band Those Dancing Days.
3. Recording our debut album Live Wild Die Free in the nicest studio we’ve ever been to with the coolest people Patrik Berger and Nille Perned. The studio’s called Ingrid. It was three of our best days of our lives.

What are your favourite three songs at the moment?

1. Julee Cruise - Floating
   
2. Tussilago – The Sulfur, the Tar and the Smoke
3. Talking Heads - This Must Be The Place
   

Who do you most admire in the music world?
We admire artists that go their own ways without compromising with their music and style. For example: David Bowie, Björk, MGMT, Siouxsie Sioux, Syd Barrett and Lykke Li.

In your opinion, what is the future of music?
Music is constantly changing. I feel like music right now is moving to a more electronic sound. I see a trend with less bands and more solo artists. More synth and more drums, less guitars. It also seems like indie bands and commercial bands sound more and more alike. I guess it has to do with that it’s so easy for anyone to learn how to produce music nowadays. I’m not sure I like this trend. I hope to see a much wider sound spectra in both electronic and “real instruments”. I also wish people will be brave and dare to make weird and different music. I don’t want commercial hit music to be the ideal for everyone.

What's the future of your music - what do you hope to do next?
The future of our music is to explore deeper parts of our creativity and come up with even better music and ideas. We don't want to be held back by anything, especially not ourselves. When we write new songs we are being totally open to whatever feels inspirational so that we don't risk losing anything on the way. We hope to tour around the world with our music. We recorded a psychedelic short film that will be released this year and we’d love to do more films beside of the music.

What, aside from music, is most important to you?
Love and friendship. It's important that we treat everyone the same and are open to whoever comes across our life paths.

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As for Live Wild Die Free, perhaps you've heard 'Spider Spider', an eerie clanker of a song they offered up as a free download last Halloween, or maybe you've heard the epic wooded mystery of 'Vision Tricks' – both are a good indication of the album's proceedings. But it's more varied than you'd imagine from my descriptions – sometimes outright punk (as in 'Too Young To Die' with its mad screams of "Don't kill me! Don't kill me!"), sometimes gentler pop sounds, sometimes inspired by nature ('Jungle', for instance, which literally describes a trip through a jungle), sometimes not, sometimes noisy, sometimes stripped-down. But it's always a daring sound, sonically diverse and certainly appealing to anyone looking for a bit of energetic music in their lives.

You can stream the whole thing here.

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← #21: DCUP #23: HARRISON →

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Like Vulkano on Facebook
Follow Vulkano on Twitter
Listen to Vulkano on Soundcloud
Visit Vulkano official site

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TABLE MUSIC MEETING & RAINBOW VALLEY AUTUMN SONGS

Something a bit different now. It's interesting because music doesn't always have to be stuff you can dance to, stuff you can sing along to, or indeed have any real intent for anything other than being a piece of music. In essence: music as music. As such, I would like to introduce a split between two acts whose distance from each other has not stopped their very pretty collaboration; Table Music Meeting, a band from Japan, and Rainbow Valley, a singular music-maker from Southend-on-Sea (UK), have teamed up to create the wonderful Autumn Songs.

Instigated by Rainbow Valley (aka Graham Boosey and owner of microlabel, Wrieuw Recordings) when he stumbled upon the music of Table Music Meeting by chance on Lastfm, the two entities agreed to each write and record a song about autumn. It's a magical time of year; despite the cold and windy weather, autumn is special for the obvious transition between warm and cold, growth and hibernation, especially in the changing leaves. So anyway, both of em did it and here we are: Autumn Songs is here.

Table Music Meeting's 'Autumn' comes first, a blustery, breezy affair that perfectly captures the atmosphere of the season. Using an assortment of instruments — clarinet, recorder, something brassy, xylophone — sounding a little like a glorious toy orchestra, the group create a jaunty melody which contains within it a certain stubbornness to accept the onset of colder weather, as well as the feeling of that slow walks people take when admiring the season's new brown, red and yellow scenery. Dissonant chords play lightly on a piano, summoning the sharp sense of losing summer's warmth, with an overall sound that directly embeds in my head images of people wrapped up warm in cafés, looking out into an increasingly desolate natural world.

The contribution from Rainbow Valley, however, is quite different. 'Spinney' (a word that means "a small area of trees and bushes", less dense than a thicket, not as tree-heavy as a copse) is for the most part an ambient field recording of some birds - particularly, I think, song thrushes - chirping away: a very autumnal sound, the sound of early evening and swift sunsets. A slow, simple electric piano melody fades in, plaintive in the midst of nature's continuation, a flow of human understanding and feelings. Soon, a glockenspiel melody floats above, alongside an old guitar playing a slow arpeggio. The sounds of rustling leaves rise up from the background recording as the original electric piano notes grow glitchy before being cut completely out of earshot. A more delicate approach, one closer to nature perhaps, than TMM's offering.

However, both summon feelings and images associated with Autumn, though in different ways, which could reflect the potentially differing ways in which autumn as a season is viewed in Japan and the UK, respectively. Instrumental music like this, stuff that has pretty much nothing to do with current trends in the modern/popular music world, continues the tradition of classical music's supposed or maybe inherent ability to paint a picture based on a theme (whether it's antiquity or nature or whatever), but also has a touch of folk sensibility to it, utilising the organic feel and sound of mostly non-electronic instruments to take you on a short but sweet musical journey.

PS. Each song has a lovely video that has been created by Rainbow Valley to accompany the release: the autumn leaves of 'Spinney' and one for Table Music Meeting's 'Autumn'.

You can pay what you like for this digitally, or order the CD and the cute artwork (from A Sparrow By Water, asparrowbywater.com) that comes with it from Wrieuw Recordings' Bandcamp.

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Like Table Music Meeting on Facebook
Hear more Table Music Meeting on Myspace

Like Rainbow Valley on Facebook
Follow Rainbow Valley on Twitter Check Rainbow Valley on Tumblr

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