YMIR — MAGMA OCEAN

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We always have time for Ymir. This time, the ambient artist is carving out the slow, aching sounds of molten rock in ‘Magma Ocean’. Starting quiet and thin, the ebb and flow of synth in this track soon rises above its initial glassy waves, seeming to summon the Earth itself in the thick, textured triumphs of sound.

Keeping it harsh around the edges, Ymir still allows a crystalline gleam to shine through like the glow of magma itself, while piling on a beautiful, billion-year-old breadth to the billowing swells of his music, showing a complexity at work in the depths of the seemingly simple track. Vast but very minute.

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• 🔔 Check out more of Ymir's unreleased electronic work on his SoundCloud.

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☟ Ymir Internet Presence ☟
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ATREM — SLICER

⌾ LISTEN TO 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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☟ atrem Internet Presence ☟
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AKIYOSHI YASUDA — MEMENTO

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Taking as the theme for this track as leaving behind his view of life and death, 'Memento' by composer and producer Akiyoshi Yasuda (aka STARGUiTAR) is an existential whirlwind. Harsh gales of ambient waves rush forth, speckled with the static of distortion and decay, a vague hope spun in the rising, gleaming resonance that lies at the heart of it all.

"In 'Memento' I'm trying to capture the scales, melodies, rhythms, verses, emotions, ups and downs... you can strip away all that stuff that music should have, and you can make it work," Yasuda tells yes/no via email.

"I'm composing to express the sound as if it were swimming freely."

Free of constraints, 'Memento' (taking its name from the Latin expression memento mori, a symbolic expression or reminder of death) erupts as if from a spring, but also falls into an empty sky like mist; it is dynamic, shifting through different textures — sharp, soft, glittering, whispering — and yet it is still; it feels as though it could be sunk in depression, but at the same time optimistic and upward-looking as if glimpsing a sunrise; preparing for sleep, seizing the day.

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• 🔔 'Memento' is taken from Akiyoshi Yasuda's Memento — Day 1 EP. You can stream and/or download that from this extensive list of streaming services.

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☟ Akiyoshi Yasuda Internet Presence ☟
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🐣 PATH — WIDESCREEN TREMOLO

⌾ LISTEN TO PATH, WIDESCREEN TREMOLO ⌾

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Hazy and sunwarped, the grinding tremolo at work in aptly named 'Widescreen Tremolo' by UK musicmaker Path provides the jagged cradle which rocks the track into unseen oblivion. A gloopy bass groove hides in the background; so too does a shuffling scuttle of a haphazard beat.

Speaking to yes/no via email, Path talks about the track. "I wanted to try to get that early 90s indie vibe but only using synth drums and synth guitar," he says. "I’m pretty happy with how it turned out."

At the halfway mark, the track diverges into a stream of distortion, guitar stabs glittering and the whole thing a ghostly sort of Stone Roses revist meets HEALTH primitivism and self-destruction, plasma-like vocals crooning out from the drone and dust storm of it all.

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• 🔔 'Widescreen Tremolo' is taken from Path's 2019 album Pianoburger, which you can stream and/or download on Bandcamp if you feel like it.

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☟ Path Internet Presence ☟
⚘ https://path2.bandcamp.com/ ⚘

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🐣 CLAWS AI — EURISKO

⌾ LISTEN TO CLAWS AI, EURISKO

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Fuzzy, outright violent, decayed and broken in instrumental terms, 'Eurisko' by CLAWS AI is a self-destruction of sound. In a good way. The drums tumble angular and warped in the background as the chorus spins a howling refrain, "I know you're sleeping around..."

But rather than this uncontrollable reaction to infidelity, the true intent behind 'Eurisko' matches the scorching jagged nightmare of its distorted storm of guitars, the harshness and noise of it all, the full-bodied thump of bass guitar.

"Eurisko draws upon this lingering, maybe personal feeling of instability and chaos in the air," the musicmaker explains to us via email. "Both in my own life and in the world."

Mentioning war explicitly in his response, CLAWS AI helps make sense of the "bullets flying around" line in the chorus. This concept also very much gives grounding to the wild gravel and grit of the track — its noise in a word. Though 'Eurisko' isn't all noise. Liquid chorus FX add grunge warp to the pre-chorus, whilst the whole coda of the track feels like a psychedelic sway into death: a wounded soldier lamenting their involvement.

It's a reflection that, "maybe through catharsis" he tells me, "each of us can win the spiritual war within ourselves and avoid an actual war." An anti-war anthem told with the personal tint of expressionist lyrics and post-punk trauma.

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• 🔔 Stream the song and examine the lyrics of 'Eurisko' by CLAWS AI over on SoundCloud.

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MORE MUSIC BY CLAWS AI → 777

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☟ CLAWS AI Internet Presence ☟
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🐣 YEULE — POCKY BOY

Firstly those synths, warped and wild, wrap the track in wreathes of rolling fog, a heavysoft sound that ushers you into this sunken world. Grainy and cutting, like a rain of razor wire, this is the cloud on which you sit throughout the song, the vantage point for witnessing yourself like an out-of-body experience. 'Pocky Boy' is all about this atmosphere, tender but cutting, harsh.

The voice of yeule adds to this sense of sea-mist, this mind miasma, the curdling of nebulous thoughts that end up as "voices in my... head." Her vocal reverbs into itself, a series of cyclical ruminations, sheaves of a diary ripped out scratching together dusty and fragmenting into a distant breeze, incoming.

Ultimately though there is this violent ambience, this scathing wall of grey noise punctuated by the pastel of those synths (struck by their stumbling rhythm, their picking-up-the-pieces irregularity, the head-in-hands voidsome chords of it), but it is given motion by the thump of a meaty house kick: the simple secret to continuing with life. The easter egg of a gun cocking.

And yeule's own voice, looped, echoes itself, a frenzy of movement—by the end, we return to those chords by themselves, ready to begin again; foreboding instead of finality.

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• 🔔 So the 'Pocky Boy' video is above, of course, and features instant messaging, some urban exploration and a little bit of pocky play, too. Directed by friend-of-the-artist Rabbit Sashimi (actually a thing; though we cannot find a jot of a soul online), it is described by the Singapore-and-London-based yeule as follows:

  "At the dawn of the new age, civilization has been wiped out by an alien race that can shape-shift into the humans that used to walk the earth centuries before. The aliens attempt to grasp the differences of gender and form that humans beings had, even though they do not know the difference because of their nature as non-binary beings."

• 🔔 This track was actually released back in April via Zoom Lens, so you may straightaway download 'Pocky Boy' here, should you wish to do so.
• 🔔 Aaand... yeule will be playing her first LA show on 23rd August, 7:30pm - 11pm, as part of Zoom Lens-curated night Malform. The location of this show is TBA.

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☟ yeule Internet Presence ☟
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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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☟ Rival Consoles Internet Presence ☟
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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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☟ bod [包家巷] Internet Presence ☟
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🐣 DUCKY — WHAT U SAY

To find a sort of absolutism for sounds and styles of sounds in the music world today is something of a rare thing. Genres have become so fluid and superfluous a notion that, instead of being rallied around and defining a fanbase, they are treated more like palettes, or moodboards, and can be blended in new ways according the artists' desires. And so it is with musicmaker DUCKY. In particular 'What U Say' is a cocktail of chiptune, VGM, dubstep, pop, footwork, drum and bass, an experimental track, as many tracks that make their way into the pages of yes/no tend to be; gone is the label of 'experimental' as mere code for 'abstract' or 'unlistenable', experimental is vibrant and fresh and very online.

But to say that is to discredit the clear leaning towards, or rather the roots in, rave and specifically dubstep and the combination of sweet upbeatness – euphoria – and hard, noisy, quite dark manifestations that loom in both. 'What U Say' begins something like a track from SNES racer Top Gear, triumphal synths blaring overdriven abrasive, pulsing bass bobbling with excitement. It builds, handclaps taking us to the apex from where we plummet into grinding squelching synth and a punchy thudding beat. Vocodered vocals skip like a robotic sirensong. A small bridge where marimba-like chimes resound darkly amidst warm crackles and ominous tides of sub-bass gloop. And at breakneck speed: rapid kicks take us back into the chaos of neon bubblegum high-end melodies and scraping searing synth that storms with the beat.

Delicately, that chiming once more in earshot, DUCKY's track ends. And you realise, despite the squalling dubstep sounds at work, despite the familiar rhythms, it is alive with freshness, with emotivity, illustrating chaos and calm like an electronic symphony.

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• 🔔 The wonderful 'What U Say' is track number 3 on LA-based DUCKY's new EP I Fall In Love With Everyone I Meet, which you can stream and download variously here.

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☟ DUCKY Internet Presence ☟
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🐣 LUNICE — DISTRUST FEAT. DENZEL CURRY, J.K. THE REAPER & NELL

Visual distortion and contortion, twisting, trapped in a virtual world: this is the video for 'Distrust' by Canadian DJ and producer, Lunice, the videogame feel of it evident not only in the glorious glitching visuals but also in the music, in the atmosphere-conjuring sounds that Lunice lovingly sets into motion throughout. We have these stoic synth bass hits, rounded and gloopy, the foundation for this macabre march of music, the slow rolling snares, the soft wonky sounds that have this veilsome spooky quality to them fluttering phantomatic alongside it all. On top of this, we have three vocals that perforate the polished parade of this track: Nell and Denzel Curry, as well as J.K. The Reaper, who starts proceedings with nihilistic flair—"I'm an outer body experience, my ligaments attached to this soulless corpse i been living in"—before he asks existentially, "am I the only human in truest form?"

In his breathless verse, Denzel Curry casts some vivid vital imagery: "here's a kiss from the dragon hot as the back of my spliff" precedes the relatable line "fisticuffs, knock your ass out, that's Jigglypuff," which references either the ability of the Pokémon to sing opponents to sleep or, as a character in Super Smash Bros, a seemingly innocuous move ("Rest") that if executed correctly is a very powerful attack; either way, this line has made an impact. For the outro of the song, Lunice suddenly turns it overcast and gloomy, low-pitch piano and atonal chiming strings marking the beginning of the finale, a tract of noise-inspired harsh abrasive beats and ever more gruesome glitching and Curry's final distorted mantra: "Tell the cops i don't give a fuck / run and hide, boy you better duck."

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• 🔔 The wonderful digital gore of this video has been created by director Sam Rolfes, which was recorded "live within a game engine." The resulting warped human forms that are thrown and skewed around the screen reflects the revolt of the soul intimated by the lyrics (notice the decayed confederate flag in the still we took from the video up top), the unconventionality and affront of these same images a suitable accoutrement for the noisy sonic experimentation in this track.
• 🔔 Listen to and/or purchase 'Distrust' via this link here.
• 🔔 'Distrust' is taken from Lunice's debut album, CCCLX, which will be released on 8th September via Scottish label LuckyMe. Pre-order it here.

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☟ Lunice Internet Presence ☟
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☟ Denzel Curry Internet Presence ☟
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☟ J.K. The Reaper Internet Presence ☟
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☟ Nell Internet Presence ☟
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🐣 SHLOHMO — SLOW DESCENT (TOMMYJARVIS REMIX)

The chaotic original 'Slow Descent' by Shlohmo, with its spooky twisted rounded organic synth sounds and vital menagerie of clipped click-clacking tight tumbling percussion, a dark shade of broken beat flavours, gets a reworking here courtesy of French musicmaker Tommyjarvis, styled after the Friday the 13th series protagonist of the same name. This new version takes the almost breakbeat speed and agility of the original and crushes it, that jittering nervous mood eradicated and replaced with something that has been under the hardships of life, a tract of overdriven saturated noise, the kinetic energy transformed into that of jostling saturation, a condensing of synth flavours.

The flighty acrobatic beat is no longer, and if any remnants of it remain in this new greyscale moss-ridden ruin of a track, they are slowed down, crippled from their original outing and now pulsing occasionally beneath the new viscous shroud of the track, Tommyjarvis creating crashing crowds of crinkled synth that spin damaged and zinging, the semblance of a melody on this dark nocturnal breeze, the rest of it a swamp of curling crunch, the power sapped from its abrasive bubblings by bassy kicks that fall into the electrogasm of it all and ripple slovenly, a trial of despondence and screaming noise that crouches in the corners of your mind, the abyssal yin to the original track's cascading yang.

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• 🔔 So the Tommyjarvis remix of Shlohmo's Dark Red album track 'Slow Descent' can be downloaded for free, as you can see on the SoundCloud player above.
• 🔔 Tommyjarvis is a part of Rouen-based musicmaking collective KNGS.

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☟ Tommyjarvis Internet Presence ☟
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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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☟ pastel Internet Presence ☟
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🐣 BLIND POSES — FADING

The progression of this track is quite something, from the basic semi-industrial mechanics of its first steps as a slice of sound, until its final moments faded and out of fuel, it charts futility and energy transfer, one thing turning to another thing, the flash of a flame before it fizzles into the ether, into nothing, and how fitting then that it is titled 'Fading'. It's exactly what it sounds like. The occasional retro lo-fi drum machine thump of the kicks twinned with the pulsing zing of its cymbals keep things steady as a plaintive musicbox melody plays, an innocent meandering of harp-like plinking reverbing mistily into the air. Further clanks of percussion make their way into the mix, a fluttering garbled wow-wow of synth grabbing space for itself before later a tiny flute, melancholy, homely, plays its sweet song in the increasing jostle of the beat, drips with aching nostalgia like a phantom.

The mounting tension of this thicket of sound created by London musicmaker Blind Poses with its metallic mire of percussion plays aside this wonderful pastoral synth melody, rounded and retro-feeling, a filmic vision of returning home and of domestic scenes, of comfort and stability, heartfully emotive. There is a moment of teetering over the edge and an insistence of beeping from 2:35–2:58, and then synth splashes in oily explosion, distorted tracts of keyboard-born sound following the original melody and then warping so that it is noisy and atonal and crashing crazily whilst that innocent melody struggles in this sonic storm, the beat now with brutal gnashing teeth bashes its way along. Gradually it becomes calmer, the beat a now a clatter of percussion, noises falling away until there is no more, the living-breathing analogue organic journey of this track lodged like a memory in your mind.

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• 🔔 'Fading' is taken from Blind Poses' upcoming debut Muddy Thoughts EP, described by the musicmaker themselves as a "collection of hazy synths and tape-crusted drum samples created with an MPC1000 and some guitar pedals."

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☟ Blind Poses Internet Presence ☟
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🐣 ILLION — BANKA

Inhabiting a place caught between two different worlds, one of lightness, human reality, softness, flesh and blood, heartfelt emotions, and one of gravity, fear, something inhuman, irregularity, hardness, mechanics, uncontrolled urges, Japanese musicmaker illion (solo project of Yojiro Noda, lead singer of rock band RADWIMPS) croons his way through gentle clouds of aching cello and piano chords, creating a wholly balladic feel in 'BANKA'. Beneath this soft surface, where real feeling is told in washes of watercolour with these traditional instruments and with illion's lilting vocals, lies something darker: acceptable emotions and "normal" ways of expressing them cover the bricked-up well of inner turmoil, of the rarely discussed and unspeakable.

So it is that the choked secrets of 'BANKA' bulge beneath the pop ballad beauty, wholly at odds with the delicate piano, this internal conflict begins with indistinct rumbles glossed with sandy abrasions and grows throughout the song, elements of glitch and breakcore and noise infused in these sudden fragmented outpourings of grief and despair—the twinkling piano is cut short at 3:59 for just under 10 seconds of unadulterated chopped sounds with rollicking percussion and grinding distortion gnashing its teeth before the song's crescendo, illion crafting a legible beat, layering vocals that echo strong, awakened, in this final showdown of sound, the culmination of these combined elements now working in harsh heartfelt harmony.

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• 🔔 Though taken from illion's 2016 album P.Y.L, 'BANKA' is the theme song / lead track taken from the soundtrack to the live action adaptation of Tokyo Ghoul. Based on Sui Ishida's manga of the same name, the film hits theatres worldwide on 29th July. This hyperlink leads to a trailer.
• 🔔 The limited edition album P.Y.L [Deluxe Edition] will be released on 26th July via Warner Music Japan—get it here.
• 🔔 The video featured in this post is around half the length of the actual version; stream and purchase the full-sized 'BANKA' by illion on various platforms via this link.

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☟ illion Internet Presence ☟
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🐣 SEO — LAVENDER

The impressive experimentation at work here belies a sense of punk chaos, the scratch of harsh noise, a definitive sense of the whatever-who-cares, but there is something extra here, not merely an affectation of chaotic sound but a reflection of a feeling, actual music representing actual feelings. If we go by the super-endearing vocals that ostensibly Lagos-located Seo weaves by turns through gritted teeth or half-open-mouth slurs, there is some level of fire and aggression bubbling and broiling and burning here, the most earcatching refrain "I'd rather that you fucking leave me" spat into a howl of freezing cold synth gales. Here is conflict, heartbreak: it is a decided fuck you, but there is hurt and injury here, a delicacy and a warmth that's been shattered.

The decayed melody that plays throughout, almost like a musicbox, gentle or once gentle but now abrasive, caught now in cyclical thoughts, dripping with melancholy, tinged with hopefulness but ultimately damaged, it dings throughout like a slow whirlwind of thoughts focused on the same thing the same thing the same thing, the idea of broken trust as a broken toy instrument wonderfully evocative, reflective of this line that suggests as much: "There are many things that you told me, none of which I still believe…"

It booms with sub-bass, all-encompassing, pulling on you keeping you still, strings and stand-up bass sound add their organic natural human sound, the texture of various trickling percussion for ornamentation, the aching anger of the final moments of this song where Seo urges truly that she'd rather that you fucking leave. Visceral but beautiful, touching and cute but wracked with darkness and noise, the experimental 'Lavender' is a multifaceted gem of a track reflecting, probably, a likewise artist behind it.

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• 🔔 Hear more from Seo on SoundCloud.

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☟ Seo Internet Presence ☟
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🐣 THE ANALOG GIRL — MORE THAN YOU KNOW

Into a world that seems far from our own, a world of swirling intoxicating fog and mists of multicolour dust, a hazy rainbow, slow-dance smoke machine sensibilities as the morsel of music moves along andante, the sashay of the bulging bass bloop and popping drum machine thud of the kicks and snares, a creeping walking pace, a poised-to-pounce looming approach, the click of heels on a marble floor, a cyberpunk sky clouded over outside, retro-futurism propelling into your brain. A world far from our own for sure, that's what Mei Wong aka Singaporean musicmaker The Analog Girl paints with the sparkling-abrasive glitter of 'More Than You Know'.

Glassy synth arpeggio melody gives off a touch of upscale fragility, something digital and cutting-edge but with a decidedly retro air of obsolescence; a more piercing sound than this lances over the top, doused in reverb and resounding into the cold quiet patches of the track, sharp and needling, lo-fi glimmer like television static in pastel and neon; towards the end a more robust flavour of synth comes into view, thick saw-wave. And then you have The Analog Girl's voice, a collection of whispers, clusters of slow threatening vocals, whooshing and distorted, simultaneously organic and glitch-laden, harsh yet floating, the reflective representative human voice to this dreampop noise, this aesthetic dystopia of sound.

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• 🔔 'More Than You Know' is taken from The Analog Girl's recently released album Golden Sugar Crystals, available for purchase via download on Bandcamp.
• 🔔 The abstract video for this track was created by digital fashion artist Laura E Shepherd LS528 (formerly known by her glove line Glovedup Gloves). "Her fashion animations were more than fashion" says The Analog Girl; "they carried a sense of mystery, intrigue and pop artfulness. One look and I knew I had to feature them on my music video."

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☟ The Analog Girl Internet Presence ☟
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🐣 26CARAT — SEE THROUGH YOU [初演 • PREMIERE]

Channeling latter-day house music with a memorable but not altogether placeable syncopated synth hook, 26CARAT induces you into a world where noise crosses with dance. By noise, that's not murdering analogue machines-type noisy but more noisy—sounds merge together in a whirl of reverb, elemental intensity and a clattering collage of percussion. In this regard it's a dreamy affair, nebulous and floating. And dance? It's that sort of dance sound that's not quite old enough to be classed as retro and not new enough to be wholly fresh or widely followed, that late-'90s-early-'00s sound that teeters on an edge between forgotten and rediscovered. In this way, 'See Through You' has the same feeling as Pictureplane's 2011 album Thee Physical, brimming with that sense of something memorable but unplaceable, pop crossing with outsiderism, the past dredged up to build the future.

But here there is something more delicate at work. Dreamlike and hazy, this thin atmosphere pervades the whole track, trickling through and whirling around, those previously hard bassy notes that made up the melodic hook now watery and delaying into the icy backdrop, melding with the airy croon of the vocals, breezy-ghostly electronic arpeggios, and beneath all this a single column of synth modulates bubbling with digital menace. And with this a tract of intricate percussive elements skitters and tumbles throughout, plosive drums popping abrasively, kicks thud-thudding rapid, wreathed with the shh-shh-tick-tock of hi-hats and attenuated snare sounds. Yet in the wake of this pastel partnership between 00s euro-dance and dream-pop, there is a considered aggressiveness here, a hardness, more a nod to trap-ish vibes, something that keeps things from being over polished and confined and instead allows the song to spill over the edges and scribble outside the lines: a slack, smart cocktail of our eternal today.

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• 🔔 'See Through You' is downloadable for free and you can do so by clicking this link right here.

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📠
☟ 26CARAT Internet Presence ☟
facebook ⚘ soundcloud ⚘ official site ⚘ twitter ⚘ instagram ⚘ vk

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🐣 AMY AXEGALE X CRAPFACE – SKYPE

Past the obvious sheen of speedy nightcore and sugary early-00s dance pop associations, this track emerges skewed through a prism of noise and angst that sees soft and brooding, crunchy and cute play together in a wild and simple fantasy of sound. It comes from the hivemind of a collaboration between Crapface, location unknown, and Amy Axegale, fka ZEN, who is from Melbourne, Australia.

Smooth syncopated chords boop bubblesome in a pattern that continues safely throughout, but then there's this heavy twist, a smudge of darkness on this candy gloss, pouncing out from the pastel fog like a tiger when the chords grow and distort, baring teeth, with kicks pulsing in time below and savage snare hits popping above, filling those formerly playful tropical chords with dread and frustration. This noisy electro sludge, the hardcore edge going on here reminded us of the rabid 'Dog' by SebastiAn, whereas its pairing of conventional and unconventional feels very Mr Oizo — cradling and destroying sounds. These two sprang to mind almost immediately.

However, 'Skype' is of course neither, but perhaps exists for similar reasons as these French artists' music: A reaction to the clean-cut in sound, simultaneously exhibiting that emotions can exist in electronic music with this howling wordless disconnect from physicality. Similarly the song title, an ambiguous summoning of Skype as an experiential thing that can mean anything to anyone, exhibits an aphysical source of inspiration. And as the track dances away in its closing 30 seconds, hi-hats ticking with the beat, the synth wonky and bleary, you feel that the Skype call went to plan, and the song's dynamic swing between a contentment and something verging on rage, a burning internal struggle, is quelled for now at least.

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• This is an apparently one-off release courtesy of London-based entity Calm Records.
• Also, the artwork for this track, some fantasy palace in some fantasy garden, is by visual artist beeple (human name: Mike Winkelmann). It's called ISOTOPE. His Tumblr showcases lots of art and it's all imaginative and grand.

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📠
☟Amy Axegale Internet Presence ☟
SoundCloud • Twitter • YouTube •

☟ Crapface Internet Presence ☟
SoundCloud • Twitter • Instagram

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LOTO RETINA – PREMIÈRE SÉANCE

ATMOSPHERE. Atmosphere is a big deal. Without atmosphere, or ambiance if you will, cocktail lounges would not feel chilled out yet classy at the same time, forests would not effuse as much peacefulness as they do, a spa would not be as relaxing, theme parks would not be as exciting — put simply, atmosphere is important. And, if you didn't notice, the link between all those aforementioned places is sound. or MUSIC. Music creates atmosphere. One might just like singing along to music, or dancing to it, but, perhaps unbeknownst to the singer or dancer, these things are being acted out in the midst of ambiance or atmosphere conjured by music; it affects not only an individual mood, but the mood of an entire locale, wherever the music is in earshot. It is the particular character of our surroundings.

Why am I talking so much about atmosphere? Because of nice morsel of music I stumbled across over the weekend. Le morceau est creé par un producteur français qui s'appelle loto retina, et le son s'appelle «première séance». Alors, l'anglophone pourrait assumer «séance» en le sens de «séance de spiritisme» – en fait, je fait exactement ça! Donc je l'ai écouté, attendant pour quelque chose fantasmagorique, mais plûtot j'entendis des sons beaux ondulant, des melodies flous répétant – l'atmosphère divine de la musique lo-fi.

Whoa, what happened there? That was weird.

But anyway, loto retina has shared his "first session" not his first "seance", which would have been decidedly more spooky than a session (of musicmaking). It's a little old, 4 months says SoundCloud, but that's neither here nor there. The sounds of 'première séance' are hypnotic, a combination of lightly undulating melodies soaked in dreamy delay, and one-note bassy rumblings beneath these fluttering sounds, all of it soaked in gorgeous soft lo-fi aesthetics.

The first section, for there is one – marked by a strange dinosaur screech or synth-made scream – is brighter, rising higher than the second goes, which for the most part follows a mesmerising loop (except for one cutesy melody standing out at the 2:19 mark) all the way till this sweet little track's end, where it is beset by monstrous scathing mechanical noises, metallic analogue vocal chords shouting, and where the sounds become slightly distorted, muffled, mangled, finishing up a relaxing and intriguing sojourn into a world of pure, innocent atmosphere.

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☟ loto retina Social Media Presence ☟
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YEONGRAK – POPPUNK

Continuing the YES/NO love affair with lolicore/noise/and-other-things label Mecha Yuri, I'd like to introduce another proponent of the label, yeongrak. A musicmaker from New Zealand (I think), they've just recently released an album, little submucosal via the netlabel, a collection of mesmerising noise-infused morsels of music that vary from explosively overdriven to delicate and brain-cleansing, bristling with punchy experimentalism.

Because we love knowing shit, I googled "submucosal" – a biological term, turns out it refers to being situated in between the "mucosa" (a lining of the throat and intestines, to do with facilitating the production of mucus) and the tissue that connects the mucosa. Interesting. Gross. How can just reading about the body feel like a horror film? But in this lies the key element of rebellion-through-shock that is a widely held, stylistic and ideological tenet of the lolicore genre and all associated its associated offshoots.

Anyway, we've chosen the album's opener, 'poppunk', to showcase.

In its glistening digitalism, its chimes and soothing ambient electronic croons, is the fleeting beauty of life; our fragile nature at heart played out on childlike glockenspiel, a living-dream feel resounding in the soft tangle of synth at work in the ether throughout the track. A beat heralds reality: an almost confusing medley of stuttering hi-hats, heart-bursting kicks and abrasive velcro handclaps. It becomes noisier, more damaged, with the added distorted husk of a bass kick crunching its way onward, and razor sharp open hats adding their lethal metallic touch to the track; all in all, there is in 'poppunk' all the unexpected, offbeat fun of grime, but with a combined and equal penchant for delicacy and noise at the same time.

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• You can obtain the album little submucosal from Mecha Yuri's Bandcamp.
• yeongrak recently did a split album with goreshit, one of the originators of lolicore as a genre of a music, called safety cuts. Check it out.

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☟ Social Media Presence ☟
SoundCloud • Bandcamp • Twitter • Tumblr

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