STH — FINISH CROSSING

⌾ LISTEN TO STH, FINISH CROSSING ⌾

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It's on a backdrop of skittering Geiger ambience, the fuzz and dust of the years made sound and launched burrowing into the air, swarms of Big Bang television static, that Russian producer sth (short for "synthetic sequencing") overlays an otherwise calm, relaxing atmosphere.

There is a panicked feel in 'Finish Crossing' — noticeable in the bio-mechanical micropercussion shredding the air like paper rain, and the gurgling güiro-esque calling out like unknown nocturnal insects, the arrhythmic deep bass thuds — but there is laid-back lounge cool that exists here, too.

Electric piano chords spread muted gleaming softness into the proceedings, with later melodies inching in from far-off corners, and the clonk and woozy resonance of a vibraphone providing horizontal jazz. sth summons wordless vocals from the noise, adds a few drops of elastic synth and punches in dynamic punctuation (an abrupt one second of quiet at 3:16) to complete this comprehensive study in atmospheric sample-made music.

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• 🔔 'Finish Crossing' is one of the tracks taken from sth's album 35mm, the musicmaker's latest release for Russian label Radiant Sound. Recorded between 2018 and 2020, it's dedicated to analogue people living in the digital world. You can download it or stream 35mm on the label's Bandcamp if you like.

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DANIEL BORTZ — YOU CAN STAY FOREVER

⌾ LISTEN TO DANIEL BORTZ, YOU CAN STAY FOREVER ⌾

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With its haunting pitched croons lifted from Alicia Keys' 'No One' effusing from a backdrop of synths bleeding together and time-worn beats, 'You Can Stay Forever' by producer Daniel Bortzreads like a vestige of the past. It moves through forests of flustered elastic acid arpeggios, plumes of vox synth laying a fog over proceedings, while the stuttering echoes of thin, gleaming chords punctuate the song like strobe lights.

The faint syncopation of it all, the crushed indistinct hi-hats, the destructed snares and their harsh reverberation, the lo-fi aesthetic, its juddering dancefloor atmosphere (sticky floors; the floral tangle of beer and perfume) — all of it culminates in an unearthed relic of a track; a cassette plunged into a tape deck that conjures ghosts and memories of a grainy, unremembered time instead of sound.

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• 🔔 This is taken from the new album by Daniel Bortz, Stay, out 16th October on Permanent Vacation. You can pre-order it on Bandcamp if you like, or memorise the tracklist below for fun.

  Daniel Bortz — Stay tracklist:
  1. Grind
  2. Holding You
  3. How Far Can We Go
  4. South Beach
  5. On A Boat
  6. Smells Like CK One
  7. Stay
  8. Teenage Emotions
  9. Isolation
  10. Together
  11. You Can Stay Forever
  

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💿 AIDA SKEE — MACH LEISURE

⌾ LISTEN TO AIDA SKEE - PKMN SNAP ⌾

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Skittering and beset with structured staccato slices of unidentifiable sampling, 'Pkmn Snap' by Aida Skee feels like a cool breeze. What relevance it bears to 1999 N64 title Pokémon Snap isn't immediately obvious, and perhaps there isn't one, but in its simplicity — its lines of airy sampling, sparing and delicate bassline, background ambience — there is something at least in spirit to the game's soundtrack, notably its 'The Young Photographer' theme.

Cheerful without being sunny, sparse without feeling overly lonely, 'Pkmn Snap' similarly conjures an imaginary landscape. Not unsurprising, as the musicmaker themselves revealed to yes/no that Mach Leisure, the beat tape which the track is taken, is inspired at least partly "hiking while listening to Knxwledge, Marvin Gaye, and deep cut '70s R&B." Physical landscapes, and how music enhances or reflects them, play their part.

This musical foundation is noticeable on the rest of the beat tape, which sometimes gloops with vaporwave ooze ('can't see shit'), glitters like the vapor-friendly tracts of nostalgia in title track 'MACH LEISURE', or radiates warmth as in the comforting groove of album closer 'Where to start it'.

Attention to detail comes to the foreground in tracks like 'right' — its beat clicks into something high octane, before samples drop in slowly skewed and bubbling. It's places like this where Aida Skee's process reveals itself, Mach Leisure being a collection of experiments in high BPM tracks that still retain a "relaxing element of R&B sample-based music."

This sense of relaxation is an element throughout that was (probably) sought after and welcomed by the musicmaker themselves. "I made this whole tape while living alone in Montreal, smoking too much legal weed," they say. "The theme is meant to be like attempting to attain relaxation as fast as possible and how that's sort of an oxymoron."

Tricks in tempo aren't the only cocktail that binds Mach Leisure: "The tracks integrate pitched up and pitched down components of the same sampled tracks, use heavily warped or distorted sample components in tandem with non-distorted loops," the producer explains.

That sense of speed, as well as glistening pairings of pitched and non-pitched samples, occurs in 'like relaxing in a car that's going fast' — a title that sums up the whole idea behind the album — and following track, 'Keep me talking', whose sampled flashes and snaps crackle with chaos. In them, the situation of creating the album — not just hiking in the mountains and listening to music, but also weed and panic and paranoia — come into play. It's both a result of, and a cure for, those negative emotions that inspire minds to race and disappear into realms we wished they wouldn't.

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• 🔔 Stream and download Mach Leisure over on Aida Skee's Bandcamp.

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REEFS — TOGETHER

⌾ LISTEN TO REEFS, TOGETHER ⌾

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There's a playful feeling to Reefs' track 'Together'. But it's not just the synths somersaulting past in a rainbow-worthy of various colours that give it this vibe, it's also the different textures, the different sounds used that afford the track its level of liveliness.

"The first step was getting those drums to knock just right," Reefs tells yes/no over email. "The beat reminds me of a bird dancing for some reason!" The rest of the track is a tale of jazz-flavoured chord progressions, inspiration from music by the likes of Photay and Galimatias, and a sample of the moon scene from It's a Wonderful Life.

Garbled vocal samples pop, syncopated kalimba chords clonk uptempo and tropical, while every now and then a snappy staccato synth lead whistles with retro buzz, summoning a melodic feel leaning in the direction of Animal Crossing (Reefs calls that 8-bit synth a "pallet cleanser" to bring the listener back). And all of it lays on the punch and rattle of a trap beat, a robust foundation for the light and kinetic instrumental.

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• 🔔 Stream and/or download/purchase 'Together' from Reefs' Bandcamp if you like.

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🐣 DJ EARL — NO CAP 4 2020

⌾ LISTEN TO DJ EARL, NO CAP 4 2020 ⌾

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"Pretty much getting reacquainted with the scene back home," writes purveyor of footwork DJ Earl, speaking to y/n about his latest track, 'No Cap 4 2020'. With unrelenting rumble and aching classic piano stabs — the all-important vocals samples like a mind-over-matter mantra — it's a floor-moving sonic sojourn.

"I was hanging with some footworkers, specifically Jalen (TOG) & Acey (The Prophecy). They was saying how they miss me DJing the footwork battles and that it's a missing element in a lot of the music that gets played there," DJ Earl continues.

"They were saying my travels definitely changed my sound a lot and that they wanted me to, since I'm back on Chicago, start making battle tracks. So I went back to form and made a Chicago-themed soulful footwork track with some familiar chants like 'no cap' and 'you can’t fuck with me' being something that gets said between dancers as they compete."

The carefree, sing-song vocals that wing their way over the heart-pounding thump of 'No Cap 4 2020' add a playfulness to the frenzied repetition of those two phrases, the rapid fire "you can't fuck with me" melding with the clacking snares for a devastating result — replicating the "kinda energy the footworkers need to fuel high levels of creativity on the dance floor," as Earl puts it — all the while piano chords hang in the air, prismatic, like onlookers mesmerised by the scene.

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• 🔔 'No Cap 4 2020' is taken from upcoming footwork compilation Street Bangers Factory 14, out 5th June via Moveltraxx. Grab it on Bandcamp if you feel like it.
• 🔔 You can also stream or purchase 'No Cap 4 2020' via your fav service.

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RHYNE — BIG MAC

⌾ LISTEN TO RHYNE, BIG MAC ⌾

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'Big Mac' is a frenzy of colour and synth, hollow sounds plasma blasting into a bristling thicket of beats, unrelenting in their forward propulsion. Sounding maybe a little like the soundtrack to Einstein's theoretical riding on a beam of a light, the track is a hyperactive tumble into a world of stuttering vocal samples and bone-rattling percussion.

"I wrote it in Joshua Tree desert," says Los Angeles producer RHYNE over email. "I find tracks written away in remote locations tend to sound different to those written in your home studio."

As such, the track marries broad, cosmic brushstrokes of synth — almost otherworldly in aesthetics and 3D, reach-and-out-and-grab-it texture — with hard beats, like a dream spilling out of a brain and onto a packed city dancefloor. In short, leftfield creativity and pure, unadulterated energy combine for an explosion of sound.

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• 🔔 'Big Mac' is taken from RHYNE's PAINT EP, which you can stream or download on Bandcamp at your leisure.

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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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🐣 PORTALS — WAKELAST

This song was pitched very briefly with the captivating subtitle ‘Elvis trying to use Windows 98.’ Clickbait, you may think. But upon listening, upon hear the guttural abrasive vocals of PORTALS curling round each pointed word like a cyberpunk savant fortune-teller and the gabbering liquid gooey instrumental, this description seems quite spot-on - at least superficially.

“Looking back,” Alejandro Cañellas, the human behind PORTALS, kindly explains, “it seems the track focuses on the law of correspondence. Every line is a reference to either looking at myself from within myself or from without.”

Accordingly the lyrics of ‘WAKELAST’ - taken from a recent double-single Voult//Wakelast (tagged ‘win98core’ on SoundCloud) - are cryptic and self-examining. The refraining nature of it gives a mantra quality to how it is delivered, making it feel like a frenzied, searching howl into the vaulting void: “eyes look into the next life / myself always outside / eyes look into the next life / I stand behind my eyes.” Not to mention how it is viscerally scrawled into the air by the vicious vocals, falling thunderboltish on the bed of garbled plasma noise - a sample taken from 'jacket funk' by pilotredsun track. ‘WAKELAST’ is like a brutal reflection, self-reflexive poetry in the form of a fist to one’s own face—aggressive existentialism.

“It's like a hall of mirrors,” Cañellas tells us. “I think people should spend more time in mirror halls cause no matter where they look they're forced to stare at themselves and at their own vampire elementals and smoke demons.”

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• 🔔 Listen to the Voult//Wakelast double single over on PORTALS' SoundCloud.
• 🔔 There is also a suitably abrasive and glitched-out music video for the other track 'VOULT' to illustrate the garbled existentialist aggression of the track. This can be viewed on YouTube.

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🐣 LINDSAY LOWEND — GT40 (MAXO BOOTLEG)

Wow. Jumping off the back of the moving vehicle that is his October-released Skyriser EP, Maxo flies through the air somersaulting as he does and forward rolls landing very safely, spots something glinting in the sky and sprints to catch it as it falls – ping! It glows as it's caught, this object. Oh it's a USB! Maxo turns gold all over and spins off into the clouds. Centuries later he returns with it shining ever brighter: a bootleg remix of the classic 'GT40', opening track on Lindsay Lowend's pretty legendary Wind Fish EP, an ancient tome in the realm of internet music.

Though it runs along the same lines as the original, Maxo's version has of course had some magic infused; it's 20 seconds shorter and 500 times as fast. The breakcore values now imbued in this track give it a constant gleaming uzi-fire of hi-hats, the original lounge chords now rapid-fire and jolting, smeared like paint, rewound, scuttled and rebuilt; an intense keepsake of glitch. The bridge in the middle, usually a moody tract of VGM-juke, now has its sample mysteriously slowed-down as the beat continues its neon gallop to the finish. And Maxo on the back of a smaller flying whale uses the USB and opens a portal to the next area.

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• 🔔 Maxo's amazing track arrived at that tricky time of year to be noticed for anything other than a Christmas song: Christmas. So it may have been slept on by many. Including us. But don't worry because, well, just don't–it's bad for your health.

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☟ Maxo Internet Presence ☟
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☟ Antonio Mendez (fka Lindsay Lowend) Internet Presence ☟
soundcloud ⚘ vimeo ⚘ bandcamp

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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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☟ Hidden Spheres Internet Presence ☟
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🐣 GREG WANDERS — SINES

The sound of comfort, the sound of homely embrace, warmth and familiarity, the steps stepped a thousand times before, the furnace of love simmering the blood and the hot eyes of side-by-sideness, the cradled-by-someone feeling, enveloped enwrapped blanketed with safety and solace. 'Sines' by London-based Greg Wanders seems to fill your ears with gratitude and grace, a tract of soft sounds that conjure scenes of homecoming and fitting in, a heavy organ-esque synth sound that bubbles voraciously, squeezing up and down in pitch with theremin smoothness, an airship sailing through the clouds as the sun sparkles on the vessel. Because there is also this grand sense of expansiveness here, of skyward destinations, that oozing synth, the twinkling string sounds that seem to come from far afield, the glints of sun on long-distance travel.

Greg Wanders tells us via email that the creation of the song came "at a time of unease with song writing and my life-situation." Walking into the studio, he had low expectations of what would happen, "moving in circles of self-doubt and spending too much time in my own thoughts." But eventually the first line of the song that he sings with a soulful heartfelt croon – "Sines everywhere that I go" – the truncated echo of a cosy room, and the sine chords followed, warm, like a gurgling bath of sound, a slow beat punctuating, sometime vocal samples creeping in with virtuosity and the skipping-mind fizz of anticipation.

"The song is focused around human connection," he concluded, "which has been a topic I’ve wanted to write about for a while so it felt good to finally find the words, it felt completely natural."

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• 🔔 You may if you choose to do so stream and/or download this from your favourite streaming service.

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🐣 JREAMS — SEOUL

This is a bright electronic patchwork, an irregular mosaic of sounds, crackling tracts of airy modulated synth sounds touched with abrasion, a collage of differently pitched slices of sound that rainbow nocturnally or overcastly with a pastel-grey hue, impacting like hazy memories. These sounds get stitched together with a wealth of samples, a moneybag of it, mechanised glonks and clops that scritch-scratch trickling and boldly waterfalling throughout—colossal textures. Created by US-based Jreams, this track is called 'Seoul', and fittingly features samples of a lady speaking Korean, as well as found sounds taken from around the country itself.

"I found Korean culture fascinating and decided to take a trip over there and couch surf around Seoul," Jreams says, explaining the background of the track in an email to YES/NO. "I reached out to this radio station there and got a spot to play on Seoul community radio and then was invited to a few shows after that were all hip hop and electronic focused. I started making [this] track while I was over there and finished the rest of it when I got back to the states."

He concludes: "I wanted to showcase how great of a place Korea is."

The video for the track, pulsing with boomerang-esque forward-reverse scenes, glitching mashes of colour, and shots of the bustling city life of the Korean capital, fits the music itself, the beat sounding like bookcases falling down flights of stairs against explosions of colour, the grit and hard angularity of the place mixed with the airy dreamlike feel of its technological wonderland ideals and aspirational aesthetic that seeps into the population's everyday style.

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• 🔔 'Seoul' is taken from Jreams' Letters To Jupiter EP, which you can listen to on SoundCloud. Alternatively or additionally you may purchase this collection of sounds from iTunes if you like.

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☟ Jreams Internet Presence ☟
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🐣 TOBACHI — LABYRINTH [初演 • PREMIERE]

It is something awakening, this track, something birthed from a cosmic egg, reptilian and thin leathery but bright and speckled with pastel colours, and its first motion of life is fluttering, synth zipping along in echoing trills, swerving upwards and then from whatever physical form it holds this egg-born something begins to drop a dramatic soundscape from the sky, something grand, bold, the space between sounds resonating with its majesty. Booming bass kicks rattle the firmament, the sound of a car being beeped unlocked crams some minutiae of reality in the glistening grandeur of it, 15-year-old producer tobachi (aka Tobachi Luke) carving out this biosphere of sound, terraforming on a distant world with thoughts of Earth, a dog barking, some breathy human vocals, and other sounds collaging the nostalgic mind in the midst of all newness.

Space is the big thing here, and lots of it, space and endlessly space. How each sound clacks so much more, booms, explodes, cuts perfectively and zings much more with that hefty canyon of space that lies between each acoustic vibration. However, the threat level increases, chains begin to clink-clank deliciously, some chained monster, some errant ghost, but ultimately this idea of something held back but now moving, poised, ready to escape; the sharp sheafing metallic swish, like a sword being unsheathed, heralds the change into the track's next section, earth-dissolving bass reeling and charging forward whilst samples from Kendrick's 'Swimming Pools (Drank)' beam down, those fizzing synth chords still present from the beginning, and before you know it the storm is over and it is those rapid flutes again, the trilling free-form flight of them, the intensity of those beats and its impacting minimalism ringing in your ears.

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🐣 WALTER EGO — SENSU BEANS

In this track there is power and there is mysticism and there is beauty. A sort of expansive feeling that takes its cue from the reverb that seems to lance through clouds and into the stratosphere. A definite thud in the beat that has been bludgeoned into the shape of grime, sparse and robust, gaps where gaps feel good, the stop-start rhythm of it like a kickstart to the heart and blood pumping. And with this foundation, crinkling chimes form the main ornamentation, like gold foil covering jagged rocks on stark outcrops, jangling and warped and alien but warm in their mesmeric resounding.

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☞ YES/NO LAZY INTERVIEW #29 W WALTER EGO (September/2017) ☜

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This is the sound of Sheffield musicmaker Walter Ego. 'Sensu Beans' is essentially a classic minimalist grime instrumental with a futuristic lilt that channels Dragonball Z, the wholly fresh and weird and exciting feel of it with the homely nostalgic familiarity that this quite universal anime inspired and continues to inspire in many people. Combined with many samples presumably taken from the show itself – unplaceable, unintelligible but recognisable – the chimes summon that same alien warmth, a bulge of gradual bass creeping in the beat skittering virtuoso with clacking snares and hi-hats that tick staplegun and whirr uzi fast by turns and the sshh of sheafing shakers. And we are all healed, as well as amazed, by the miracle senzu beans.

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• 🔔 'Sensu Beans' is taken from Walter Ego's clearly DBZ-inspired Seven Star Ball EP, released last month via fellow Sheffield-based label Bad Taste Records. You can purchase the three-track wonder of hard beats and fluid sounds over here if you like.

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🐣 DAISILY — JEFF'S BEAT / SQUIRTLES DON'T DROWN

The emotive nature of this charged with nostalgia with the crackle of many moons past with the delights of some place some time that you reach for fingers outstretched and straining the odyssey of memory a fog in the mind slowly curling and crowding and fingertips glazed with yearning aim yesteryearly seeking for that one thing which is a something composite of many things this nebula of fond experience. It is beatmaker daisily's utilisation of this piano sample that so washes the track in gallons of organic ancestral yearning, a dusty tract of high-pitched keys that call out coldly chiming into a night that does not seem to be listening, or that listens a silently weeps knowing it can do nothing to ease the distress.

Wow. And that piano comes lifted, the musicmaker tells us via email, from an episode of the Pokémon anime called Pikachu's Goodbye: "it is pretty emotional if i say so myself." Light organs accompany the twinkling keys in the nicely named 'jeff's beat / squirtles don't drown' (it's true—they don't), now warped as if distorted through bleary tear-filled eyes, now fluttering like panicked heartbeats, providing soulful ambience on the backdrop of a crackling nocturnal canopy of sound, insectoid and chirruping, itself reminiscent of summer days, specifically summer nights, humid endless. The beat is persistent, the rapid double-tap thud of the kick, the full-bodied clack of the snare.

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• 🔔 This nostalgic track is taken from LESS FEEL I, the beat tape by daisily, which you can download from Bandcamp. It's dedicated, says he, "to the progenitors of my friends, they inspired this by n' large".

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🐣 CORD LABUHN — HEARTSHIPS

Sounds from here, sounds from there, sounds from everywhere in this buzzing collage of sound, a list of luscious samples located and lifted into the frame of 'Heartships' by Berlin-based musicmaker Cord Labuhn. Record scratches, vintage crackling thumps, bass kicks, a delicious fingerclick, trickling hi-hat ticks—a treasure trove of percussion beats out an exploded hip-hop rhythm, sparse and minimalist to an extent, but on the other hand it's also packed full of flavour, each sound texturised and four-dimensional, a snippet of life, Cord Labuhn as the lepidopterist of sound pinning each one in new shapes and patterns.

Guitar pings add to the percussive nature of this collage so far, reverbing into the gallons of negative space that brim with chill either side of the punctuation perforating the quietude. Aching moments from unidentifiable songs appear throughout, rapid sonic snapshots that resonate even after their brief flash on the bustling canvas. Things agitate towards the middle: the feeling of running or rolling downhill, picking up momentum, new samples sliding into the mix getting ever busier, packed with flavours, and then it falls back to the cooling patterns as before, subtly and simply dynamic; funny how something so clearly constructed, so abstract in execution, can also be so smooth and natural to our ears.

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• 🔔 Like previous track 'Asap Daddy', this one is also taken from the Berlin producer's OUTTAKES project. You can download the track here.

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🐣 KAREFUL — H2O

The sky is collapsing in an instant at the beginning of this track and the ground opens up and everything from above begins to tumble down this expanse of space now bored through the earth, the most fantastic fissure that we find ourselves in, what darkness and undeniable foreboding dwells in the ranging ripples of reverb, the arpeggiating synths, the hardness of the electronic beats like jagged rocks, the nocturnal rumbling modulation of synth that columns barrelling through the lower reaches of this track. Like a cathedral freefalling through a bottomless pit lined with sparkling jewels and gemstones and a carved alien script that glows turquoise and sunset-orange, UK producer Kareful's track 'H2o' is a judgement day of sound on a rushing epic scale, a conjuring of otherness with otherworldly sounds.

The feeling of this track is heavily towards the baroque, towards the polished and filigreed, the ornate and broadly twisting, romance and distance conjured by the incredible vocal sample, foreign even to our world, pitch-shifted and lingering on each word, aching, searching for a soul, a slow display of beautiful turmoil. "I've always found myself heavily processing vocals to make them sound nothing like what I originally found," Kareful himself tells us about those beautifully meandering vocals. Inspired by an "involuntary break in music" after losing everything on an previous PC, he calls 'H2o' a romantic track: "Many of my tracks are…" he confirms: "I'm somewhat of a hopeless romantic myself." And in the track, its heartbeating dynamic grime-trap-flavoured percussion pulsing, there is such a sense of grandiose gothic hopelessness, of crushing from afar, the all-encompassing wreathes of unrequited love.

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• 🔔 'H2o' is taken from Kareful's upcoming Alchemy EP, out 15th September via trapdoor records. Download the track and anticipate the release via this specific site.
• 🔔 You can grab the producer's previous release, the 2016 album Deluge, over on iTunes if you like.
• 🔔 Recently Kareful featured as one of the collaborators on Lifeforce, the debut LP from Nottingham's very own Glacci.

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☟ KAREFUL Internet Presence ☟
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🐣 RADICULE — BLUE LOTUS

Visions of what you should be doing whilst this song is playing rise up like sea fog or hazy summer memories: should you be reading books in a minimalist European café, should you be wheeling your suitcase through the arrivals section of a white-tiled airport anticipating a new city, should you be melting on Monacan yacht? It has this rich mahogany-and-teak feeling to it, probably effused mostly by the wide robust warmth of those piano chords just lightly touched with the decay of existence, a conjuration of insta-sophistication that is very wooden floors and old world cocktails, image-heavy magazines and leather armchairs—ceilings high and jostling with spirits of the past who never left these rooms of leisure once they broke free of their skins.

This open-armed embrace of classic flavours is the main body of 'Blue Lotus' by New York beatmaker radicule, that piano really drenching the air with all the sensations that this warmest of seasons evokes and inspires, relaxation especially with the multiple thudding kicks and the wonky offbeat slide of hi-hats and snares that swaggers throughout. An undeniable thickness of life lounges in the cradle of gemstone clinks and pecuniary chiming clanks that flow tapestry-like scuttling sewn-together bag of jewels spilling out, a luscious lawn of legal tender lolling along for gorgeous texture, a vital candelabra of ornamentation, working with a small flute interlude to dutifully deck out this ephemeral track with the sparkle and glitz of idealism.

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• 🔔 'Blue Lotus' comes from radicule's 9-track beat tape COMFY CAR CHRONICLES out now via Grape Records. You can listen to it here if you like.

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☟ radicule Internet Presence ☟
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🐣 MOSSY — GLASS

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

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

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

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☟ mossy Internet Presence ☟
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🐣 LIAM.M — DRIFTING

The sample here instantly calls to mind something high-altitude, something with the vast expansiveness of light blue skies, of thick cotton wool clouds like continents curling through the sky with wisps and breakaways like islands, constantly shifting and breezing through the cool upper air of the world, that string sound really soaring above it all. Brisbane's very own Liam.M sends that sound up, lets it fly, loosens it from its cage early on and adds extra glitter for a the gleaming sun glints that shine blindingly on airplane wings and the on the peaks that float on gargantuan cloudscapes. In 'Drifting' this brightness is the main thing: what else do you see above the clouds but the white blaring twinkle of our closest star?

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☞ PREVIOUS LIAM.M TRACK 'TON' FEATURED ON YES/NO (2017) ☜

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This is set on a bristling blanket of beats, a dense tract of luscious percussive sounds that feel like hardboiled sweets punctuated by the flutter of the sidechained kick that helps give the gleaming fog of sound above a sense of structural dynamism, sentences that speak another language that you can sort of understand, all the while shakers and hi-hats sheaf and shuffle, snares clack and click and snap, occasional dynamic slow drumrolls. The swirling opulence of this track is a satisfying flavour, a gorgeous texture like walking into a room where everything is a reflective sparkling surface—and underpinned by this solid beat that's decorated with as much flare it just becomes this jewelbox of sound, rhythm and light.

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• 🔔 'Drifting' can be downloaded for free via Toneden.
• The main sample in this track is lifted from 'February' by Italian composer Gianni Marchetti.

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☟ Liam.M Internet Presence ☟
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