MIDORI JAEGER — EXASPERATE

'Exasperate' feels like a heist. It's the way cellist midori jaeger plays her instrument in a syncopated dance of pizzicato swirl, body-popping its way through a what might as well be a tangle of red lasers and tip-toeing through shadows. It's fitting, given that jaeger says the song is centred on the "overpowering urge to break away from old patterns, to so desperately want the new at any cost, but to feel overwhelming regret for things lost." It makes sense that we have this sense of minimal noir jazz, like a break-in, except this is a break-out — from the old and what no longer serves, but to what, and at what cost?

"I’ll leave this door wide open / To remember how you filled my days, oh but now / I want something unfamiliar, unpredictable" she sings, amidst a lyrical labyrinth delivered in jaeger's cool tones and tumbling vocal style.

On a broadly jazz-inflected canvas, the London-based composer paints a bristling blend of organic and artifial, with icy reverb on her woody cello lines and understated synth gently blooping alongside intricate clattering percussion (provided by co-producer Felix Higginbottom). It feels earthy yet augmented, an idiosyncracy that more or less reflects the song's raison d'etre: restlessness, the desire and constant push for newness. Though sonically harmonious, this cocktail of living instruments and the synthetic figuratively creates the tension inherent in an unnatural pairing, a desperation like a tree wanting to uproot and sprint off into the sunset.

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• 🔔 'Exasperate' is taken from (Un)planted (due out 9th March), the result of ten days of recording in Lisbon. It's the first in a pair of upcoming EPs by midori jaeger.
• 🔔 Another track has already been released from the EP, namely 'dark green' — gentler and warmer than 'exasperate', but with a similar minimalism and that same characteristic stamp of living-and-breathing crossed with buttons-and-waveforms.
• 🔔 The EP's confessional cover art (as seen above) is the work of Glasgow-based photographer Inigo Blake.

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[PREMIERE] MARCUS HERNE — FORMS

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"I have always been fascinated by evolution," says UK-based composer Marcus Herne, and it certainly shows. 'Forms' is a track that begins as practically nothing — whispering wind with glimmers of sound like dappled light — and evolves into something momentous.

What starts as ambient haze, this fragile, pastoral scene with shimmering synthetic birdsong (almost) gradually grows into something more complex and nuanced. A twinkle of piano here, a croon of cello there; analogue synths tumble in from the distance, falling like angular rain, a hail of colorful, textured static. Finally 'Forms' gallops into life.

It's an apt title, as each formless element entering into earshot is sculpted into something recognisable — that rainy synth, for example, rolls into a galloping frenzy of melody. It also refers to the interplay of organic and artificial sounds, something that Herne is eager to blur the lines between: "My sound lives somewhere in the expanded middle," he says.

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• 🔔 'Forms' is taken from Marcus Herne's Forms EP, which is out today. Listen to it over on Spotify.

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AKB — SAKTMODET

⌾ LISTEN TO AKB, SAKTMODET ⌾

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Though it's possible to be fooled into thinking that AKB is a thinly veiled tribute to J-pop megagroup AKB48, it simply spells out the initials of Swedish musicmaker Anna-Karin Berglund. Names aside, her track 'Saktmodet' (loosely translating to "gentleness") is a gloriously organic, living-and-breathing piece of ambient music.

The song is a crooning collection of woodwinds, and the crash of resonant, lightly phasing piano (reminscent, in texture at least, of 'Canticle' by English band These New Puritans). It came to life while working on her 2020 album. Marianergraven, which was more focused on "mechanically profound sounds and sound worlds."

"This song," Berglund tells yes/no via email, "was a respite to work more with traditional instruments like piano and clarinet."

'Saktmodet' is an illustration of hot and cold: sharp, icy sounds ping out, and there's the accidental rustling and whispering of breath, all cushioned by rich, warm sounds of the clarinet and the fading, post-percussive glow of piano chords. More than temperatures, however, more than indoors and outdoors, it's the vital, close-at-hand feeling of the instruments that give this slice of ambience a real sense of human effort and emotion.

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• 🔔 'Saktmodet' arrives via Swedish label Lamour Records, originally featured as a bonus 7" bundled in with AKB's limited edition Marianergraven. You can listen to the track on Spotify, if you like.
• 🔔 If you want to hear more from AKB, it's possible to stream and download Marianergraven from Lamour Records' Bandcamp.

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🐣 WILLIAM CASHION — TRIPLE OCEAN

⌾ LISTEN TO WILLIAM CASHION, TRIPLE OCEAN ⌾

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Most well known not by name, but for being the bassist of Future Islands, now Baltimore-based William Cashion is carving out a world of music all his own with the release of a debut solo album.

'Triple Ocean', one of a pair of singles taken from the album, exemplifies the ambient flavours that feature on it, the title of which —Postcard Music — echoes ancestor of ambient Erik Satie's musique d'ameublement or "furniture music" and purveyor of Japanese ambient equivalent, kankyō ongaku (environmental music) Hiroshi Yoshimura's Music for Nine Post Cards.

The watery credentials of Cashion's track are, of course, an intended product of his creation, named 'Triple Ocean' after a hand-painted sign he saw along the road during a trip to Jamaica in 2015.

"I initially came up with the piece that would become 'Triple Ocean' on the Eastern Shore of Maryland during a weekend trip to focus on writing," he tells yes/no via email. "It began with some simple layered guitar lines, which I edited down, cut up, and drenched in reverb." Note the drenched.

"When I sit down to work on music, I don't necessarily have anything in mind at first. I just start along a path, so to speak, and see where it leads me."

With cello added to make it sound yet more lush, Cashion's approach to ambience seems to be natural, prizing real-life instruments over synths, resulting a rich, living-and-breathing soundscape.

Beginning with a majestic tract of gleaming waves, a sonic introduction, the song moves into a mid-section that twangs gently like a sort of lucid lullaby. Then its "third movement" — which "emerged over time" — rises up; it ebbs and flows into a gradual crescendo of destructed wind and waves, like soft rocks tumbling over each other in the surf, empty grey skies hanging like gates to forever. Gazing at the horizon, it begins to get a little closer.

"I love the abstract and disparate effects instrumental music can have on the listener," Cashion continues, speaking on the attraction of ambient music away from the dramatic, focused songs of Future Islands. "The mind can wander, go wherever it likes. There's no focal point, no voice telling you exactly what the song is about. Music to dream to.

"I recommend listening to it with your eyes closed."

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• 🔔 Listen to Postcard Music on Spotify, or maybe you have another fav streaming service (choose). Otherwise, head over to William Cashion's Bandcamp to purchase it for yourself.
• 🔔 If you like things physical, then luckily for you there's an LP available.

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🐣 TOMC — BAKE THE HOUSE

⌾ LISTEN TO TOMC, BAKE THE HOUSE ⌾ Like trying to tune into a feeling, the same way you'd find a station on an old radio, this track flits and skips between different textures from all directions; discovering and pinpointing disparate but harmonious sounds in a cocktail of audio collage. TOMC's collection of samples and noises spills out like a painter set free, all of it washed with thick, glittering warmth and backed by thumping house kicks.

Reassembling and restructuring audio samples taken from a Japanese bakery, amongst other things, the trackmaker spreads out a blanket of clinking metallics, mechanical squeaks, the sound of trays being set down, fractious bubbling, as well as stuttering synths, far-off soulful singing and slices of lounge guitar licks to quell the chaos; sharp hi-hats cut and shakers alternate to keep the beat shuffling.

Originally created for a company to the theme of "enjoy bread with the five senses", 'Bake The House' is TOMC's definitive intermingling of senses: the ripples of space and texture like the centre of a loaf, the clusters of clanking utensils the zing of flavours, the beat measuring out calorie intake.

And to take it, partly at least, from the inner workings of a bakery speaks of both its subtle delicacies and its machinelike industriousness—breathing like dough as much as it whirrs like a pocketsized factory.

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• 🔔 TOMC's abstract festival for the senses 'Bake The House' was released via Tokyo label PURE GOOHN and can be purchased via this actual link. It comes packaged with a remix by "Tokyo house unit" Pee.J Anderson.

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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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🐣 DOWNSTATE — HOW TO FIX AN IBM FAX MACHINE INSTRUCTIONAL GUIDE 1996

This one is a scenic soundscape, a canvas painted with old tools, vintage equipment employed in the creation of something new and something beautiful, something that summons an elsewhere. In the description of the track on SoundCloud musicmaker and creator of this particular track – the descriptively titled 'how to fix an IBM fax machine instructional guide 1996' – downstate wrote: "I made this with the drum sounds from a dying roland jv30 and the korg M1 digital synthesizer." At points it's like breakcore made with an old drum machine, which in fact might be exactly what it is, with the percussive clacks and metallic zings zipping and trilling with glitch intensity and wheezing retro quality.

There is that newness to it, painted with old brushes and old paint. But then there is this golden-age sound to it, and it probably has a lot to do with the warmth of this, the analogue warmth in the thick chords that bubble in their slow singular refrains, as much as it has to do with the quite literally gleaming melodies that ache and twinkle zither-like above. And in this classic sound is perhaps an inherent leaning towards cinematic, scene-setting, VGM-style (thinking Earthbound, Streets of Rage, for instance), the expansive, exploratory feel of it. downstate also mentions that they probably "could have cut the hiss from the broken keyboard but i like it sounding like shit its authentic." But that hiss, that decayed grey noise hovering throughout, does indeed add to it, does add authenticity, gives it the swathing static of ages gone by as a backdrop.

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• 🔔 You can download all and any of Downstate's tracks from this Wordpress that they've set up as an archive.

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🐣 SHIGETO — DETROIT PART II

Four years following the release of previous album No Better Time Than Now, Shigeto has produced a follow-up to 'Detroit Part I', an almost symphonic morsel of music, a journey of a track in which a brooding atmosphere is beset with bristling sounds, a melancholy atmosphere where a sense of downcast dystopia looms somewhere in the lament of it all. 'Detroit Part II' is a different beast entirely. If the first part of this sonic homage to the Michigan city charts abandoned buildings and boarded up houses and forgotten assembly lines, the dereliction of Detroit, all angular and atmospheric, then the second part is humanistic, living-and-breathing, focused on how people react to their surroundings in terms of art: its musical culture and heritage.

The track thumps along with a dusty wheezing organic thud of a kick, luscious handclaps and muffled snare rimshots and delicious clopping woodblocks and shuffling shakers punctuating and decorating this subtle driving force of a beat, a tangible waterfall of textures. Soft synth bass plunges fuzzy giving the track a wandering breezy groove, the meandering jazz feel of it augmented by saxophone peals that prize open the heart of the song and allow life to flow forth. Barely discernible, a mist of gentle keys gloss glassy nebulous aching and accepting, merging with the whispering tones of the vocal sample that reverbs into the streaming percussive beat and its homely comforting sense of space. This is a change of heart, the silver lining of the cloud, the other side of the coin.

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• 🔔 'Detroit Part II' is taken from upcoming Shigeto album The New Monday, which will be released via Ghostly International on 7th October.
• 🔔 The suitably atmospheric video for the track, a production of The Work Inc., shows Zach Saginaw (real name of Shigeto) driving around Detroit and recording the track in glorious greyscale. It was directed and produced by Brandon Rottman.
• 🔔 Here's the yes/no review of Shigeto's 2013 album No Better Time Than Now.

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🐣 EMMIT FENN — FEATHERS

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

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

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

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🐣 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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🐣 EMSEATEE — PEER (LOMEA REMIX)

Shuffling sheafing leafs of metallic whooshing hi-hat fluttering electric with glitching staccato sharpness, the thin cutting veilsome foundation of this track, the garage offbeat swing tending to our hearts and nerves with its gratifying regular irregularity the extra monomolecular blades that swish through the air, here is the overriding rhythm of it, London-based Lomea's remix of 'Peer'. The original track by Oxford dwelling producer Emseatee is a brooding quick march with a heavy atmosphere and similar glitching electronics, which glitters and stutters with broken down computer aesthetics towards its end.

This new version holds onto that glitchiness, twins it with satisfying organicity in the realness of its percussion, the real rattling rasp of its hi-hats, the snapping clack of the snare as it gets cut-off and left to resonate alternately, the shuffling pattern of the booming kick. Juddering stabs of electro wonderland begin to jostle as the track starts lift-off, rising synths creating a blinding blare of bright light, more and more electro parts joining and crammed together and now this intensity, this grind and buzz with still that sizzling garage rhythm, an airy track that takes the original and feeds it steroids and incants strange magic to it, grows it some wings, flies it too close to the sun.

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• 🔔 Lomea's remix of 'Peer' is taken from The Nostos Remixes, a collection of remixes taken from Parts 1 and 2 of Emseatee's previous Nostos EPs. You can listen to it on SoundCloud or download it from Bandcamp.

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☟ Lomea Internet Presence ☟
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🐣 BOUT — AFTER U

Here is a cave network of sound, a lo-fi labyrinth of carved tunnel gloom and the majesty of something once-great but lost, the dripping stone calcification of it all and the millennia smell of this absolar world and its ruins hidden and hemmed in by rock, chambers and rooms and cathedralic spaces with vaulted ceilings and arcane edifices staring silent on the walls. Here we are, in the wheezing industrial mechanics, the dusty ancient organic flavours conjuring human spirit, the sense of elsewhere and of subterranean secrets constructed with progressive analogue hammer-and-anvil growth for maximum atmosphere effusion, the soundtrack to abandonment.

'After U' by Dallas-based producer BOUT completely transports, not with an alien sound but with one that is this expansive burrowing sort of vibe, an alternate history of the world, gorgeous thudding kicks trailed by abrasive scrapes dig into the ground joined by muffled clacking percussion tumbling rockily, wide chords rise up illustrative of illustrious spaces now decayed with white noise howling from a distant past. Those dusty kicks advance and march four-on-the-floor in an uptempo charge of esoteric techno rumbling with cranking cog hi-hat clink-clanking, paving the way for that humanistic guitar to float low and lamenting amidst a swirl of cooing ghosts in this crackling crystal ball vision of a track.

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• 🔔 It is possible to purchase the quietly incredible 'After U' on Bandcamp.
• 🔔 The track is taken from BOUT's debut EP Some Dream, out digitally 16th August and on cassette tape 31st August.
• 🔔 The spooky abandoned building-themed video for 'After U' was created Olivia Themudo.

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🐣 MARIUS — EASY

This one tumbles and crashes and thuds and explodes with organicity, a track that jostles with maddening energy, a multi-limbed cartwheel, a staircase of descending rhythmic rigid boxing gloves pugilising each step, a combination haymaker of a track—and this is all courtesy, mainly, of the gorgeous drums that essentially define this morsel of music. You hear them at the beginning, they stop, and then gradually here they are again, popping out with dusty vitality, muscly forearm ferocity, the raw hi-hats sheafing and swishing, everything breathing, even the underpinning bass sound is like a windpipe of superhuman exhalation, a robust didgeridoo drone that packs a punch as much as those grass-growing living cliff mental mountain drums.

Named 'Easy', this track by Norwegian producer Marius trundles along with flesh-and-bone breakbeats till its tectonic titanic end, when the cymbals rush out and smash like storms in the swaying doses of the new rhythmic 2-step-flavoured beat, feeling closer to metal with its juddering electronics like palm muted distorted guitars. It's a heavy finale. This in contrast to a soft beginning, those chords that fluttered slowly, a fragile innocence exuding from the thin resounding synth; in contrast to the far-off like a distant memory sample that sounds as though it's been lifted from a museum audio guide. The shattering shuffle of this track, its wicked rhythm, its full-blown tree-sap felled-logs life, is a joy of sound, and made even more sweltering in the wake of the shred of quiet that gleams faintly throughout.

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• 🔔 You can download 'Easy' by Marius, real name Marius Elfstedt, from ToneDen.

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☟ Marius Internet Presence ☟
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🌭 FIREWOOD POETRY — SKIN

This music spreads out beautifully, like a waterfall, like watching water spill from a vessel onto the floor in slow-motion, the gradual coursing-through-veins feeling of warmth, of gentle-handed bliss, a gradual shiver through the body. And just as liquids fit the space they're in, the spillage unfurls and seeks all available channels and carvings and gouges and forms expeditionary rivulets that snake and wind along the earth. The atmosphere in 'Skin' by Canadian producer Firewood Poetry is one of searching, one of blankness becoming unblank, of unknown becoming known.

Fractional fears skitter and creep as the percussion ebbs and flows sharply textured, a grainy crackle like a geiger counter spits and stutters familiar throughout the track; totems of half-knowledge loom in the mild glower of the gloom, that sub-bass outlining indistinct far-off forms; a thin stream of ambient synth materialises and goes through a process of dissolving and then solidifying again; snippets of soulful saxophone exhibit almost sultry longing, illustrate carnal humanity; and the vocals, soaked in reverb, resonate past what we can hear, lilting heartfully, with a rich tone, and are on occasion spun backwards; it is a tract of esoteric flavours, a soundscape that dazzles and bewitches, the spice of occult in the cooling sub sandwich of trip-hop angularity.

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• 🔔 You can download 'Skin' by clicky-clicking on this link.

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☟ Firewood Poetry Internet Presence ☟
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🐣 MICRONISM — ENGAGING CAUSELESS MERCY

The muffled roar of rumbling sub-bass, the pulsing vitality of it in organic waves—we could be inside a giant, swallowed up by a gargantuan something and dwelling there. The bio-industrial feeling of the track is evident. The whooshing breeze of sound like the inner workings of this huge being, the organo-mechanical movement of tendons and pneumatics. Acid synth twinkles elastically, delaying and echoing into the distance and creating an illustration of the remote and unfamiliar. The kicks arrive and thud with vigour, heartbeat of these futurist flavours, urgent and interior and solid.

But the alien nature of 'engaging causeless mercy' is remedied by New Zealand musicmaker micronism, balanced by rich chords lilting with horizontal lounge cool, a prescription of chill that quenches the fire flaming in the innards of the gooey magma golem. This new laid-back sound becomes scattered with rhythmic hi-hat shuffling rapidly, rollicking and twisting until the track's finale where the chords become hollower and longer and the beat and other noises fall away and we are left still vibrating still warm from the grand intensity of the track and its unrelenting living body, floating now in this slumbering stream of sound.

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• 🔔 This track first appeared on micronism's 1998 album, inside a quiet mind – "one of New Zealand’s most acclaimed electronic albums" – which was created entirely without computers and only outboard equipment. It has been recently rereleased by Wellington-based label Loop Recordings and can be purchased as a limited edition double LP or digitally on Bandcamp.
• 🔔 The album was originally released by Kog Transmissions, on a very limited CD-only run, where it was mastered by Chris Chetland. He is also behind this re-mastering. "Somehow or another," says Denver McCarthy (the brain behind micronism), "Chris managed to make it releasable 20 years ago, and now he has given new life to the album by a further smoothing of the edges, and polishing it to a level of shininess where it even sounds good in my ute."
• 🔔 fyi: "micronism (plural micronisms). A theoretical microorganism living in the ice or under the surface of Jupiter's ice moon Europa." (Wiktionary).

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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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☟ Shunya Internet Presence ☟
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ISABELLA – BUDGE

Sometimes the best way to whip up a frenzy whilst also creating a wholly original track is not through any special secret method, but through simple addition, subtraction and repetition. When it comes to dance music, maybe all music, this surely is the golden rule—in 'Budge', a recent standalone SoundCloud upload from Isabella – producer of, she says, "odd acid and sloppy techno" – this is, quite gloriously, the case. Full name Isabella Koen, and previously known as Sitting Adult the musicmaker is not only ultra-pro at this dynamic setting down and extraction of parts in music, but also of creating sound itself: the sounds she uses are organic, like half-machines-half-lifeforms moving in unison rather than artificial noises.

The drums start proceedings with juddering kick, thin snare and harsh handclap, overdriven toms making their way into the mix weaving in an added complexity and precision, with a series of beeping bloops and bleeps like building blocks falling into place next, a shroud of shredded plasma gradually making its way to the fore like a mechanised spiritual presence. The track then begins in earnest, a four-note refrain, a digitised sound textured with knife-cut electric treble and plunging bass at the same time, seeming to hang in the air before sheaves of open hi-hat fall and propel the track forward, percussion tumbling now, through various changes in these parts, a tunnel of cold simplicity, a futuristic Hazy Maze Cave (that's a level from Mario 64 if you didn't know), an effortless feat of atmosphere and aesthetics, ghostly and physical, mathematics and rhythm.

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• Isabella's most recent release is the self-titled Isabella (a slightly harder, harsher sound in general than this decidedly minimalist standalone track) released tape-wise on Philadelphia label Embalming Lately; listen + download on their bandcamp.

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☟ Isabella's Internet Presence ☟
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TIM SHIEL – TANGERINE

This tasty morsel is by Tim Shiel; 'Tangerine' is the title of it. Through the clunking clatter of rapid fire percussion samples, banging and clacking and cutting with the additional flare of razor-sharp cymbal, you can instantly imagine this track as a living-and-breathing entity, something played by many people with mostly live instruments; hear the pounding robust 4/4 house thud of the kick drum, the subtleties of the ticking hi-hat. Even the bass feels "real", rumbling and rough-edged, undulating like lungs expanding and contracting.

Add to this the twists and turns of hypnotic reed instrument singing out of the flowing mist of the track, and bouts of intensification, where ghostly breeze synth whirls up and around, thickening the mist, howling with the added jangles of percussion, the raging whirr of the bass chopping through the air; add all this, and hear how it pours from your headphones or speakers, how it fills the air with spirit and passion, and feel how at the same time it is a lifeless wonder, a cold uncaged monster born of circuitry.

It may seem obvious but I revel in it, so let's talk about it anyway: strange, but amazing, how a soul can inhabit a machine, and how something so clearly "electronic" can feel so organic you can practically feel its pulse hot and streaming in your heart.

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• Tim Shiel is from Melbourne, Australia, and aside from making music he also has a radio show called Something More on Double J / triple j.

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☟ Tim Shiel's Social Media Presence ☟
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BENJHA – ΣALAD DAYS

'Σalad Days' is a four month-old song that popped up as recommended on SoundCloud when I was writing about something else that is more than a week old and I could not just sit here and hear the sumptuous sounds of it without putting some words onto the internet, sending something out into the nethersphere. It is a track by someone called Benjha who may or may not be based in Texas. I've now been just sitting here with the song on repeat going around and around and around and taking me with it to wherever it may be going, to space, through walls, floating just a few feet above the ground and wafting home like a tired ghost through commuter streets and suburban spaces. I'm there, I'm fully there.

There is a sense of the spooky in this track but it's nothing to get scared about because the track is more delicious than mere atmosphere conjuring; it's full of textures and tastes that are undeniable and that swirl into your brain like weed smoke and there's nothing you can do except shrug and get the fuck high with it running through your nerves and thoughts like a lazy lust. What does Benjha do that's so nice?

This musicmaker carves out a huge wonky beat, jingling and crunching with cascades of percussion, crackling with the familiar smell of vinyl and off-beat hip-hop tint to it, rough and heavy guitar sounds decorating a thunderous beginning, where also synth chords wash into the mix, a soft cosmic cavalcade, then rich cymbals begin to ding ding ding ding... a woodblock click that reverbs so far into the swirling decorative void of the song... a slow groovesome bass that evolves into a bending foundation of blooping bass made the whole track reminiscent of a much more chilled version of this battle music from Earthbound.

A piercing synth lead lances up and soars, melting like a bleeding rainy sunset sky and all streetlights and strangers' eyes downcast as you make your way places. The synth bulges and buzzes abrasive and thick sometimes, with other ornamentations coming from crashing cymbals and clapping hands, the beat thickets with noises, it is alive with sonic observations, a stream of sound that is a microcosm in itself. And then it ends in a slow unnerving smog, like the realisation of a ghost that there is no living left but only ghostly journeys.

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• There is also a video for this track.

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☟ Social Media Presence ☟
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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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