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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FOREST SWORDS — THE LOW

⌾ LISTEN TO THE LOW BY FOREST SWORDS ⌾

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'The Low' cuts a mysterious figure. From the outset it's a cavalcade of metallophonic glonking, bone-rattling clacks, rusted but razor sharp hi-hat sheafings and thumping distorted tambor booms to keep time. A druidic ritual crossed with a downtempo warehouse number, this altered beast of trip hop crouches loaded with potential to pounce at any moment.

Vocals rise up, plucked from the air and woven throughout the bristling beats like a sea breeze blowing through craggy sea stacks and yawning arches. But in a triumph of dynamism, rather than trail off like a will-o'-the-wisp the phantom noise is cut short, suddenly revealing once more the silence and scratch of the song. (In fact, the whole thing is truncated, snipped at the end into a full-stop).

Add to this a skirling, distorted call of distorted brass proportions — how you might imagine a carnyx to sound — and there is urgency here, but a fogged ancient urgency, like a message from the actual earth, but summoned in a Liverpool warehouse by Forest Swords.

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• 🔔 It's official: there's a new Forest Swords album coming out. It's called Bolted and it's arriving 20th October via Ninja Tune; you can pre-order it on Bandcamp now digitally, on vinyl, CD and cassette. 'The Low' follows previous single 'Butterfly Effect', also taken from the upcoming album.

  Forest Swords (aka Matthew Barnes) explains that it's "based on a beat I’d originally intended for Yoko Ono." It's an important track, too, and "features elements I made both at the start and end of the album," he says, "so ties together a lot of the sounds and emotions I was exploring during the writing process."

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SATOSHI KANNO — MONOC

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'Monoc' by Japanese digital artist and producer Satoshi Kanno appears like a electronic spectre on a nocturnal city street. Sparse chopped vocal samples merge with flickering percussion, skittering on a bed of bumping kicks and the soft bursts of distortion. Its angular structure feels mechanical, industrial almost, as the track moves into a moody footwork-infused midsection.

The splicing sounds and fusion of elements in 'Monoc' was a result of Kanno's approach to the track.

"I was inspired to compose this piece to reflect on the ways and meanings of communication between all things in our time," he says to yes/no via email. "The noise in the song refers to nature, animals, plants, machines, and humans, and even though each form remains the same, when they overlap each other, they transform into another form."

The track ends up as a "collective form", each element adding to a whole that brings together its fragmented parts to a sonic sum: a reflection of how an individual is ever-transforming, reacting to their situation, the times in which they exist.

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• 🔔 This is the title track from Satoshi Kanno's Monoc EP, scheduled for release on 10th December via ADRS Collective. You can pre-order the EP on Bandcamp.

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TAY NOEL — LAST TIME

⌾ LISTEN TO TAY NOEL, LAST TIME ⌾

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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MADANII & LLUCID — DANDELION

⌾ LISTEN TO MADANII & LUCID, DANDELION ⌾

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It's not only the combination of lush textures and minimalism that makes 'Dandelion' so captivating. The beat is a collage of snares, metallic percussion and whispering cymbals, crisp handclaps — I mean, you could even count the found sound natural noises of outdoors, birdsong, footsteps on gravel, among the songs percussive elements. This by itself affords MADANII & LLUCID's track a certain flow, each click, tick, slap and crash the like a stream dancing between its rocky banks.

There's the delicious syncopated clonk of the marimba (or whatever it may be), lending a fresh flavour, a cucumber and soda water fizz, to proceedings. All that's left is the foundation, the smooth synth of the bass, rounded and acrobatic enough without being too busy or overpowering. LLUCID's production is cooling, allowing the warmth of singer MADANII to radiate outwards.

Her vocal lilts with a touch of onstage crooning, but stays within such a digestible range that makes it feel conversational, close-at-hand, as the lyrics to 'Dandelion' spill diary-like into the stream. While the song begins with the mention of "a little town, not far out" — the sparkle of storytelling firmly set — the chorus whirling listeners into a satisfying cycle of relatable feelings:

"Leave it all behind out of sight / Following the sun / On my homesick run..."

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• 🔔 You can listen to and/or download 'Dandelion' via MADANII & LLUCID's Bandcamp. You'll also find the full lyrics there too, which are pretty cool to read.

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🐣 ZAP HOLMES — FLAKED OUT DREAMING

⌾ LISTEN TO ZAP HOLMES, FLAKED OUT DREAMING ⌾

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This track floats along on two separate plain. One is this floating nebulous feeling, a flowing tide like the watercolours of a dreamscape, the melting mind of somewhere unknown, the swells of the tide of the unsconscious, sweeping along and founding this track on wholly ambient terrain. Like floating through space, it's the infinity of slumber.

On the other hand, it feels close and intimate, though detached and lonely, like the charting and observation of a biomechanical organism. The way samples chant in regularity, lo-fi and wheezing like some artificial life process, ticking percussion keeping time and clacking and sounding the cogs of static motion, trickling along like a living engine.

And that makes sense. Swedish musicmaker Zap Holmes tells us his inspiration for the track was his dreaming girlfriend.

"My girlfirend like to sleep and sometimes for many hours. And I made this track during one of those times," he said. "Got some recordings on my iphone when we messed around at home so I put some samples of her in the song also."

So 'Flaked Out Dreaming' has this sense of being alive in suspended animation, a grand dream arcing over whilst all the time no time is moving at all; those hazy, crackling samples counting the seconds till consciousness. It's an epic of sleep, where it culminates in these sometime crashing waves of charged white noise distortion, twinkling lights like neurons firing on the cusp of waking.

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• 🔔 This is taken from Zap Holmes' Bluescreens EP - all of which he made on a "crappy little laptop when my main computer was broke. Was stuck with almost no samples and an old version of Reason."
• 🔔 You may stream or download 'Flaked Out Dreaming' via your fav service on this link right here.

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🐣 LYCORISCORIS — FLIGHT

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

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

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

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🐣 NELYLAND — SUNRISE

It’s an added bonus when a piece of music sounds like its title, or more correctly evokes its title with sound, and that is the case with Nigerian artist Nelyland. His track ‘Sunrise’ is a nod to the subtle feeling of pre-dawn, the muted sky washed in a gradual brightening and lightening of colour, dark clouds becoming white, purple skies becoming blue – the soft synth rising up in the subtle afrobeat rhythm of the track represent that tone, those dark pastel shades when day still cannot yet shake the night, nor take the sleep from its eyes.

Speaking of that afrobeat rhythm, it’s a sparse semblance of a beat that propels this track forward, with robust thudding kicks like a gradual step towards the proverbial light, and softer percussion popping alongside in an angular, fragmented cluster of beats that gets smooth shaker and hi-hat accents. Nelyland’s soulful vocal itself calls out fringed with autotuned brightness, telling his story: “I been through the storm and the hurricane / Searching for love but it never came.” These lamenting yet determined verses are contrasted with the gradual hope that rises up in the hook: “Sunrise, sunrise, they pray for my downfall but I’m praying for my sunrise…”

It represents that dark side of hope, when you realise that by the very act of living in hope you are without something, struggling, and could be on a long journey to realise your dreams. And yet the slow, steady pace of ‘Sunrise’ feels like a march, a tenacious beeline set for what Nelyland wants to achieve: tell his story to the world.

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• 🔔 The description for 'Sunrise', a track written by Nelyland following the loss of his mother, reads as follows:

  "I'm sure there are a couple of people out there still trying to find the light. I want to help you realize that your light is already within you and that you should just let it shine! RISE UP LIKE THE SUN !"

  The track is out now courtesy of Afrocentric independent label Sufferings & Offerings and you can listen to it on SoundCloud as above, or via Spotify if you like.

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🐣 THE EARFLOWER EXPERIMENT — PASS(H)ERBY

Something steeped in humidity here actually turns out to be the perfect soundtrack to watching the snow fall (the UK is currently wrapped in a frosty Siberian weather front). The blissful soft snowflake sounds of the hank drum employed in this track by Indian artist Astaaq Ahmed aka The Earflower Experiment – tuned in the cheerful key of C, he tells us via email – ping and pong with a soothing pace and texture. ‘Pass(h)erby’ is like a panacea, a gorgeous weave of textures, the cradle of bristling rich percussion that arrives, the warm waves of synth that waft in resolutely, the sparkling deep-breath lead synths.

“While conceptualising this song, I was mostly concerned with trying to capture the essence of a constantly moving, fast-paced world,” says Astaaq. “There are things happening in our lives on a regular basis, but our stories, in the larger scheme of things, don’t have any impact on anyone but us. The world is blissfully ignorant of your happiness, anger, pains and sorrows, and it just keeps spinning.” And this track has that motion, the gently unrelenting beat that fades into a lullaby on a patchwork of chirruping night insects: the heartbeat of your panic and pain as ignored by the natural world. And how fine that is, how ok the world is even after tragedy, how this track comforts you.

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• 🔔 This comes from The Earflower Experiment's An Anecdote EP, which Astaaq tells us "tries to convey the life cycle of a rather unfortunate relationship."

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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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🐣 BELS LONTANO — LOVELY PATH

We are back in the misty moods that define the music of Bels Lontano, and this time we are inducted into the sumptuous beats and the trickling of percussion of 'Lovely Path' that helps to make it a textured journey of sound. Whereas 'Smokkr' was a delicately decorated tract of sultry ultrachillment, this one is a more winding, creeping sonic illustration, more a flurry of house-styled kicks that keep it uptempo, some sense of vague worry like being lost without fear in a wide wonderful world.

Simple bass underpins the cascade of it all, an ascending pattern of notes that gives the impression of motion, sidechained to the beat for this wavy in-and-out-of-earshot vibe. Chimes glisten and gloss together, insectoid chirruping zings in the background; the clink-clank of hefty metallic objects draped across each other and dragged along for the ride. Harp sounds evoke something heavenly in the nocturnal marrow of this track, a path through an ancient forest lit for your safety by bioluminescent mushrooms: a lovely path.

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• 🔔 This arrives ahead of Bels Lontano's Kin Decade EP, which is "out soon".

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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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🐣 POOL BOY — OLD DOG NO TRICKS

The first thing here is a sense of familiarity. Though it is new and from a new artist going by the name of Pool Boy, the bassline is a constant refrain of the first four beats of the bassline in 'Don't You Want Me' by The Human League. Intentionally, it is an innocent nod to something everybody knows. Unintentionally, it shows the pervasive nature of "classics" of the late 20th century. Either way, there it is; and 'Old Dog No Tricks' continues with a clatter of disco percussion, scathing hi-hats, cool lounge bongos, smart handclaps.

The heaviest element of the track is that bass. Above that close-quarters groove the feel is one of haze and otherworldliness. A constant fog of ethereal synth creeping across the floor; and above that a twinkling cluster of notes hangs in the air. Lead melodies spin like submerged guitar solos, muffled and wavering. Against this mirage of sound, like a disco in a dream, real world noises pour in: birdsong, fresh and innocent, and the wash-crash of the sea, expansive and farsighted—as with the musical elements, it is light and heavy combining.

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• 🔔 This appears courtesy of London label Coastal Haze as a single ahead of the Pool Boy LP, scheduled for release on 22nd January. You can pre-order it digitally or on cassette from Bandcamp.
• 🔔 The description of the track reads: "Produced overlooking the port of Vancouver but ..who is Pool Boy?!" We have an inkling.

  1) The track itself was reposted by Cyril Hahn.
  2) One SoundCloud comment reads: "At last more music by Cyril!"
  3) Also he is Canadian, and it was produced in/near Vancouver.

  But we shall see.

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☟ Pool Boy Internet Presence ☟
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🐣 SARO — LOOKING (CITY FATHER REMIX)

The bristling insectoid sounds of night, the found sounds of the world, the swirls of dust and debris in our everyday waking hours come to life and trickling nocturnal with a moon hanging in the sky seeming to swing like a pendulum. This track certainly is night, unsociable and filled with bustling beats like the unkempt untamed thoughts of a restless mind in the body of a human out walking to put themselves at ease. It's a remix of LA singer Saro's track 'Looking', a much slower number that booms along with heavy walls of synth, as opposed to this frantic and clattering juke-ish rework by fellow LA resident and producer City Father; "I wanted this remix to be like a distorted reflection of the original work," CF tells us in an email. "I tried to respond to its ideas with sounds and textures that would tell the same story, like samples of Saro's breath and field recordings I made wandering around downtown LA in the middle of the night."

And in the new nighttime feel the vocal from the original – "hope you find... what you're looking for" – is the main refrain in this interpretation, now rapid and repeated, bright and hopeful amidst tumbling angular polyhedrons of percussion clacking and bursting for that tarmac pavement (asphalt sidewalk) concrete glass, hard urban materials that give a harshness to the cityscape as much as the beats lend their polisve clatterings to a harshness in the soundscape. Inspired by the "dark" undertones of the original, City Father explains that he wanted to give everything a "hazy, metallic, solitary color" in order to represent the "subtle messages within the original song." So there are bristling impersonal samples, unclaimed and writhing and ambient, the cold textures of the city—and the synth chords, which do not respond to any offerings of company or social gatherings but wait and then walk alone, melancholy and resolute.

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• 🔔 This remix was released in association with Mateo Sound, an artist collective located in LA.

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🐣 TONIO GEUGELIN AND MOGLII — SCHILLERIZE

The smoothness, the channels of caramel that flow wonderful in this track, the untouched pristine minimalism of it, all of this, the popping percussion tumbling along like light-up spheres gently donning into one another. There is just such a tract of these delicious percussive noises going on here, such a catalogue of textures, a gentle curve of creation, cuteness in motion. German musicmaker Moglii and producer-violinist-singer Tonio Geugelin's organic wonderland of a track is powerful in its pastel hues, a vision of the potential intricacy in dance music, in electronic pop music, beyond formulaic future bass and beyond the esotericism of IDM, into a world of warmth and easy intrigue.

Toy instrumentation might not be a true part of the duo's brand new track 'Schillerize' – referring to the process of creating an artificial iridescent sheen in crystals – but there is certainly an element of it present; wind-up toy sounds creak and trickle in the background, ping-pong bloops ding and pop, the sort of sounds you might hear from a VTech electronic learning product, or maybe more like a retro-leaning drum machine tom; percussion like pearl necklaces or bags of marbles jostle and ticker-ticker, big handclaps count out the hidden footwork energy at the heart of the rhythm, this natural world, this flora of beat ornamentation.

Producer Moglii speaks about the track: "It lives through the combination of the organic electronic beat with the acoustic beauty of a violin and vocalchops to get an unique soundscape," he tells us. "Therefore violinist and singer Tonio Geugelin was the perfect partner for this track."

Vocodered vocals, sometimes layered lightly with faint pitch-shiftings of itself, sing out in syncopation, eschewing the typical synth chord or piano syncopation of electronic music, with the synth instead snaking throughout, with not a build-up or a drop in sight, gradually rippling harder and heavier towards the end, the whole track feeling like a distortion of the glassy crystalline surface of a turquoise brilliant body of water.

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• 🔔 'Schillerize' is out today on BonFire Records.
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🐣 GEO — FOR YOU

There it is, that liquid sound, that trickling water, the jagged trajectory of a countryside rill becolumned with rocks and pebbles and clear as glass, all of it glistening atop and refracted below, glinting glinting, overhanging plants, the gnarl of ancient trees, flowers, heather, stone and water, angular and fluid. And it's all created with percussion, plumes of percussive sound that jingles and rat-tat-tats metallic and clinking, all light and lo-fi, a constant trundle, close to haunting with the vintage crackle infused in this textured tapestry. Romantically titled 'For You' this wildly ornamental piece of sound bedecked in silver and gold and iridescent gems was created by LA-based producer GEO, sultry and splendrous, smooth and shivering.

The clanking evolves into more woody sounds, clopping clonking robust hollow tick-tockings lashed together with sharp sheafing hi-hats, blessings of percussion that make the skin quiver, hairs tightening in their follicles on the nape of your neck. As if that wasn't enough, bass with a beautiful thick rounded tone scoops out the underlayers of the track and fills it with slow bubbles of groove for a slow-jam feel, soon joined by warm piano chords that lock in with the bassline, play with organic power the hot sighs of a beating heart. Vocals lifted from somewhere paint in silken soothing brushstrokes crooning romance. Little squelchy bleeps act all playful with soft melodies and synth peals soar into the sky. Streaming and flowing riverine and pastoral, here is that sonnet of sound, that melodious pouring forth of emotions, something beautiful carved for a beloved someone.

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• 🔔 You can find GEO's stunning 'For You' on Hype Machine and give it some love if you like.

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🐣 OSCAR OSCAR — HEY HO

This is the sound of dopamine acrostics, the sound of wondrous sultry nights permeated with loneliness, the sound of the gargantuan grey of rainy mornings, the intensity and power of distraction, the chimes of loss, the jostling gongs of creativity—it is many things. 'Hey Ho' is all about texture, from the curved angularity of metallic percussion and the bright clinking strings of a sampled East Asian instrument, to the insectoid crinkling trickle crackle like white noise and the smooth satin of oscar oscar's voice itself folding its falsetto through the diverse soundscape. Texture, and the variety of it, sets this track ablaze with lightning intrigue.

The noise that stands out the most in this slow bopping refreshing sluice of sound is that soft clonk of marimba, each note in the chord deliciously minutely out of time with others, producing a low-key audio instrumental version of a light slurring voice, just ever so slightly off, the reverb luscious, the sound so very organic, so very human: it's no wonder that this noise is often left to its own devices in the track, cradled between thudding kicks and tight snapping snares. The second half of the track is more about the samples, truncated snippets of oscar oscar's vocal like avian ad libs, as the song reaches its dissolution into its simplest elements towards the end, languorous and nocturnally downtrod as it began.

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• 🔔 You can check out 'Hey Ho' on various streaming services here, courtesy of majestic casual records.
• 🔔 The dark and dramatically lit photography that graces the artwork for this track, and very suitably, is by fellow Brisbanite and photographer Bruce Truong. The Korean script says oseuka oseuka—oscar oscar.

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🛰 GUEST MIX 029 :: SIMILAROBJECTS

"Over the years I've developed a nasty habit of digging for music during my spare time," Manila musicmaker Jorge Juan B. Wieneke V aka similarobjects writes in an email. "Whether it be the sounds of the past, present or future it always seemed like I've got a habit of seeking for something good for my ears to munch on." He's the latest artist to step up to the plate and smash a guest mix out of the park—and it seems as though he's a good choice because music, and not just making it, is a big part of this producer's life.

"For writers, people say that "reading is writing" and I feel like this applies to us musicians as well," he explains, "so when I'm not creating I just spend a lot of time digesting music from everywhere and anywhere."

In this guest mix, our 29th, similarobjects takes metropolitan Latin flavours and psychedelic guitars, moods conjured with gentle glossy keys and meandering jazz journeys, magical crooning pop party music, and gradually mixes them into the indigenous interiors of the Philippine islands with darkly chiming percussion and fresh organic textures: it is a cocktail of history and culture.

"As of late I’ve really been stuck on listening to a lot of Filipino records from the '60s, '70s and '80s that draw influences from Western jazz, Indo-jazz, jazz-funk, jazz-fusion, ethnic, samba, folk music, Brazilian, as well as some pieces that fall under the category of ethnomusicology," Jorge writes, taking us through the mix. "I thought I'd share a slice of Filipino culture through some of my favorite selections as a lot of these artists/songs really spoke to me and I hope this mix finds you well. And for those who follow my work maybe this mix can paint a picture of where my head is at the moment."

Previously the musical output of similarobjects has been typified by enigmatic atmospheres, otherdimensional flavours, beats that range from dusty organic to clipping and chaotic, a sonic world of synthetics and introspection. The gentle, cleansing house ambience in last December's two-track release Etheric is different to the high-concept frame of SoundCloud album Happiness is a deactivated Facebook Account, filled as it is with nerve-racking breakcore-style beat glitches and a hectic dystopian mood. He mentions in his email that he's working with RBMA Paris alumni JOHN POPE on "a collaborative EP in the form of a videogame," which will be announced properly soon.

This guest mix, however, acts as a precursor to another upcoming release that seems as though it will be moving away from his past futurist abstractions. It's an EP called UGAT.

"Ugat means "Roots" and it carries with it a sense of re-connecting with our roots as Filipino people," Jorge tells us. "The underlying concept of this EP is that the whole body of work is an ode to forgotten and lost instruments, rhythms, cultures, traditions and practices of the Philippine Indigenous Tribes and our Ancient Ancestors."

As such, some parts of this mix – the obscure mystery of 'Suling Suling' and 'Ugnayan' for instance – really feel like a moodboard for the producer, fresh paint on the palette for his next artistic endeavour, the next step of his musical evolution.

☆TRACKLIST☆
００：００ Bong Peñera – Batucada Sa Calesa (1977)
０２：５４ Bobby Enriquez – Recado (1982)　
０９：４４ Flip Nuñez – See You Later　(1976)　
１７：１４ Bob Aves – Gongs Can Swing (2014)
２０：５３ Boy Katindig – Midnight Lady (1978)
３１：２５ Dakila – Makibaka/Ikalat (1972)
４０：０６ Pasta Groove – Suling Suling (Dr José Maceda Rework) (19??)
４２：０８ Dr José Maceda – Ugnayan (1974)
５２：０２ Joey Ayala – Buwan Buwan　(1991)

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📠
☟ similarobjects Internet Presence ☟
facebook ⚘ soundcloud ⚘ bandcamp ⚘ official site ⚘ twitter ⚘ instagram ⚘ spotify

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🐣 ZIÚR — U FEEL ANYTHING?

Here we are inducted into a harsh world of cliffs and outcrops, jagged mountains, errant bewildering boulders, an arid landscape strewn with stones and with suitably tough greenery dotting the brown-grey-red of it all with mossy juttings; totemic natural or are they natural structures tower into the pale tangerine sky half-toppling above it all. It is an alien landscape, something wholly foreign, a visual conjuration courtesy of these breakneck bone-shattering beats built by Berlin-based musicmaker Ziúr. The pugilism, the violence at work here cannot be understated: this is a brutal piece of work, the alarm clock of the deep cosmos calling you, wrenching you awake, rollicking machine-gun snares, sub-bass-explosions opening up fissures in the earth, an avalanche of perilous percussion.

Yet behind these hard and hefty tracts of beating battering drum sounds there is something more gentle at work in 'U Feel Anything?', noises erupting from the cracks opened up by the piledriver bangs and booms of the beat, sonic awakenings, modulating unidentified sounds pouring out and into the air. In the midst of this irregular pneumatic drill almost grime-flavoured uptempo-ness, this seismic doom, ectoplasmic synth bulges and bubbles in simple patterns, high-pitch needling insectoid sounds sharp and lasering, augmenting the sense of alien unfamiliarity in the already far-flung force of the drums—those drums, textured with crunching, crushing, exoskeletons bursting, the fragmentary abstract ADD itch, the champion drum, the charred earth, the nucleus of energy cracking the frame of terrestrial reality.

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• 🔔 This amazing track is taken from Ziúr's debut release, also called U Feel Anything?, which is out via Planet Mu / Objects Ltd. on 6th October.

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📠
☟ Ziúr Internet Presence ☟
facebook ⚘ soundcloud ⚘ twitter ⚘ disk agency ⚘ youtube ⚘ instagram

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🐣 CHLOE X HALLE — USED TO LOVE (MOZADO REMIX)

Half sleekly clinical space-age white with reflective smooth screens, half organic heartfelt body and muscle and historical small streets and cafes, this track is a clear split, a love-letter to real humanistic flavours told with synthetic electronics, the hip shuffle of salsa bossa nova patterns exude through the syncopated piano that pulses cosmopolitan below the wonderful velvet vocals that skim warm richly throughout. These are the voices of sister duo Chloe x Halle, this track being a remix of their song 'Used to Love', a gorgeous a cappella composition filled with sultry lilting lines thick with harmony, solo parts powerfully cutting through and soaring gutsy above these choral comforters, impatient spoken-word "ok…ok…" and handclaps perforating the languor with potential energy.

But musicmaker and serial remixer Mozado, clearly seeing the promise of these incredibly endearing vocals, as well as the non-instrumental setting, turned this from an album intro light and airy as that time between asleep and awake, falling into slumber in the warmth of the sun, takes this feeling and through rhythmic permutations of Latin sashay and ticking trap brings out the bubbling energy of its heart, the powerful vocals now washing through the thudding beats that Mozado punctuates with luscious percussion chiming pots-and-pans tinkering and the warmth of the plasma synth matching the richly layered vocals, the hefty sub-bass, the dynamic of it all, this instrumental sliding along like a cloud-filled dream as much as it bumps and whips with pumping blood panache, this remix a vital reaction to the raw honest beauty of the original.

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• 🔔 Mozado's remix can be downloaded for free via this little link here.
• 🔔 'Used to Love' is taken from Chloe x Halle's debut self-released mixtape, The Two of Us. You can listen to this collection of goodies on YouTube. In addition it can be streamed or purchased variously via this link.

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📠
☟ Chloe x Halle Internet Presence ☟
soundcloud ⚘ official site ⚘ twitter ⚘ instagram ⚘ wikipedia

☟ Mozado Internet Presence ☟
facebook ⚘ soundcloud ⚘ twitter ⚘ instagram ⚘ snapchat

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