🐣 JOHNNY JEWEL — RED DOOR

Just about two minutes of blissful-abrasive noise, of arching plumes of synth that seem to wash across your mind like clouds careening across a curdled sky; thinner more modulated chords raising the tone, raising the mood just slightly, but with thinner tracts of sound spelling out some sort of indefinite threat, and scratchy nanobot insectoid chirrupings like malicious electronic signals. Yes, this is ominously titled 'Red Door' by Johnny Jewel, a maelstrom of seemingly innocuousness, like the beautiful azure tide of the sea receding as it laps a beach to reveal a carpet of shattered bones; a paradise lost, bountiful beauty at crippling cost.

Of course, Johnny Jewel has had a hand in the soundtracking of much anticipated Twin Peaks: The Return (albeit with Chromatics in one of its episode's musical endings) so it may explain the dual-minded mood of 'Red Curtain' - as well as its name - so much of the Twin Peaks atmosphere is an uncomfortably close juxtaposition of terror and humour, safety and danger, and thus this track soothes but it also scathes somewhat—it is a comfortable haunting.

"I was about a year deep into recording what would become Windswept when I heard that David [Lynch] was making Season 3 [of Twin Peaks]," he explained. "It's been a year since Chromatics performed at the Roadhouse. With disintegrated memory through the haze of television snow, I wanted to share a glimpse behind the red curtain." And here it is captured: the eternity and mortality in those anxious pre-show moments, the mystery of backstage ritual.

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• 🔔 The haunting/comforting 'Red Curtain' is taken from new Johnny Jewel album, Themes for Television. Released back in late May, the project began "as a sonic exploration of the sounds I was hearing in my nightmares," said Jewel in a press release. "I wanted to find my way out of the maze by focusing on beauty over fear — like the way the fractured sunrise looks in a dream."

  You can grab it on vinyl

• 🔔 The atmospherically relevant video for 'Red Door' was directed by Radka Leitmeritz; with its slow-motion and lingering fades, its enigmatic steely-eyed star Czech model Eva Klimkova and the monochrome-except-for-red colour scheme, it's a spiritual cousin to the track itself.

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☟ Johnny Jewel Internet Presence ☟
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🐣 RIVAL CONSOLES — MEMORY ARC

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

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

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

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

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☟ Rival Consoles Internet Presence ☟
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🐣 ISSERLEY — PRIVILEGE

The crunch of it, the frustrated clenched fists broil of it, the distorted decay of it all and veiled with a haunted corridor of wobbling ambient sounds to create this negative miasma clouding over the robust solidity of the mechanical swampsome sounds at the foundation, the emptiness that this track summons is vast and uncompromising. Sydney-based artist Isserley returns as the formidable force that we saw in 'Advent', her seemingly small childlike voice poised as it swoops disjointedly around the room, a glinting tone like a silvery flash in the dark, growling walls of synth bass fuzzing and pushing on your spirit, helping the musicmaker to illustrate the blocky angst at the heart of 'Privilege'.

"Sadness doesn't discriminate at all," Isserley writes in a message to yes/no, "and it always angers me when people assume that if you have money or a certain superficial quality, that life is inherently perfect."

Throughout the song she slurs in slow measured lines, monotone for the most part and sometimes dipping down to a low mutter, a drugged vacant quality as the languishing speaker attempts to tell themselves they have a secret weapon in privilege—the classic overcompensation of an unhappy soul. Isserley explains further: "The song is essentially a collage of miscellaneous misanthropy, nihilism and sarcasm directed towards the attitude that just because some people don't suffer the same problem as you, they're not suffering at all."

Indeed it begins, "I sit here waiting for the end of my suffering…" and the lyrics later ask, "But how can I be something, when I am surrounded by people who make me feel nothing?" — always the scuttled abrasive beat, the bruising calamitous synth, the soundtrack to dying inside.

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• 🔔 'Privilege' is part of a new cycle of songs by Isserley—will or won't there be a new release? Either way if you like this go check her 2016 album Messes on Bandcamp.

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☟ Isserley Internet Presence ☟
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🐣 ISSERLEY — ADVENT

Do you remember the music for the Big Boo's Haunt from Super Mario 64? It's this that literally sets the scene for the level being as frightening as it was and is. This cold synth sound like a freezing gale gives a sense of abandonment and isolation, of adverse weather conditions that go hand-in-hand with things like haunted houses. And it's also how 'Advent' by 22-year-old Australian musicmaker Isserley begins, along with a handful of sub-bass kicks that drag us into this dark pool of lust and self-doubt.

Raspy hi-hats cut in, a sparse two-note piano melody plinks with hefty reverb before turning into something more horrorfully cyclical with more notes, creeping, inescapable. All the while, Isserley talks in aching absent monotone, quiet and breathy against the bass, effusing an ominous atmosphere. And then it hits: a moment of buzzing intensity saws through this, dense synths droning and crashing towards the end, the beat turning busier and rattling sharply like gunfire. The contrast between this heavy blast of brash sound and the small voice of the artist herself is stark, and enough to prove frankly mesmerising. Similarly it's an illustration of surface-level brooding calm and inner turmoil, stillness and the storm beneath.

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• 🔔 Check out Isserley's 2016 album Messes, where you'll find tracks like the sludgy 'Daddy' and 'Deep Throat', which has a decidedly more industrial feel than 'Advent', with its ticking percussion, atonal synths crushed and grinding, simmering with its chopped and decaying vocal samples.
• 🔔 Aside from producing her own music, it turns out she's been utilising her sound for other projects. "I've been doing scoring for horror movies lately too," Isserley told YES/NO, "I'm scoring some of the new Silent Hill movie!"
• 🔔 Isserley is the second project of Roxxi Wallace, who is formerly of formerly existing duo, Girlflesh.

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☟ Isserley Internet Presence ☟
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TERUGKLAP – SILICONVERSION

Imagine an Earth dangling on the precipice of the 30th Century. Just imagine that for a second. Ok? Done? Well this is the concept behind ultracool Canadian label Kind Deluxe's ongoing thang, The 2999 Project. "What do you envision for our future? Specifically, in the year 2999?" is the question they ask; it is answered by electronic musicians, who provide a track with an accompanying piece of text (most recently, and this time around, composed by Amit Dutta) as a description of their vision. Alongside this, illustrators create cover art for each track inspired by the music – the resulting combinations are different every time and the output is nothing short of TOP QUALITY. & It's a great way to find new artists to listen to :)

This time around, Netherlands producer Terugklap (real name Sander Haakman) has created a nightmarish vision in 'Siliconversion'. It represents a post-human earth, described thusly Amit Dutta: "Waves of carbonic acid lap up against the glittering green and silver beaches formed by the the dissolution of organic marine life and the discarded circuitry detritus of a millennium of electronics evolution. Beaches rise up through to agate rock steppes formed by layers upon layers of concentric banded geometry… Further inland the landscape gives way to geysers of molten silicon bubbling at 1400 degrees and thrown into the air where it immediately solidifies into rock… dirty yellow volcanic snow-ash drifts down in thick sheets and is blown and hardened into tortured sculptures by the lowered jet stream as a planet slowly converts from Carbon based to Silicon based life."

Hence the title 'Siliconversion'.

This is one darkly heavy-duty track if ever there was one. Nominally "experimental", beginning with alien snorts and sniffs accompanied by noxious breezes like those on an unrecognisable Earth, the track burns with an angry molten fluid intensity, bristling and crackling all the way, as if replicating the now acidic waves of the ocean. And from the tortured planet's heartbeat we have this brutally booming rich infra-bass thud – a disorienting plosive sound that, along with the high-pitched tinnitusesque squeak that fades in and out, gives a feeling of deafness, sense deprivation, fear and complete unknowingness. It is the semblance of a beat, which is a massive understatement, later joined by a snare that seems lost in the midst of these vicious sounds.

• It's yet another showcase in King Deluxe's illustrious line of offerings, all of which YOU CAN SEE HERE and the earliest of which you can download from their respective places.

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