🐣 DRENS — BICYCLE RIDER

⌾ LISTEN TO DRENS, BICYCLE RIDER ⌾

A frantic wallsmash of an ode to riding bicycles, the theme of German band Drens' pogosticking 'Bicycle Rider' doesn't need to be guessed at. The drums are destroyed as the thud fuzz of the snare and splashing razor cymbals become a crashing cutlery drawer of mayhem, setting the rocky terrain where the rest of this track tumbles and divebombs.

We asked the band about the background to 'Bicycle Rider'.

"Our rehearsal room is in a rough area in Dortmund, so we park our bikes inside. [Drummer] Joël saw them and started to shout this "bicycle rider" thing," Drens co-founder Fabian Livrée (vocals, guitar) told us. "The special thing is that we didn't replace the lyrics, because we started to like it. It's our kind of humor and we really like riding bikes."

It's just over a minute of wiggling arpeggios, thrashing guitar and thick galloping bass – complete with stringbreaking guitar solo and vocals overflowing with breathless bite – for a punch-in-the-face parody of the surf sound: instead of hitting the waves, they're tearing up the streets by pedal power.

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• 🔔 Get this brash and bouncy bike ballad via your fav streaming service.
• 🔔 'Bicycle Rider' is taken from Drens' recently released Nowhere Beach EP, which you can/should listen to on their SoundCloud.

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☟ Drens Internet Presence ☟
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MUS.HIBA – PASANIA

As part of Japanese indie label Virgin Babylon Record's 5th Anniversary, they've curated a compilation for which they asked a variety of artists to submit around one minute of music – fittingly, it's called ONE MINUTE OLDER and features FIFTY very diverse tracks from FORTY-NINE very diverse artists, including Miii, N-qia, world's end girlfriend, Shokuhin Matsuri a.k.a Foodman, and canooooopy. However, I've decided to put a small spotlight on just one artist whose work I particularly enjoy: mus.hiba.

Back at the end of 2014 I wrote about a mus.hiba track called 'Slow Snow', which basically sounded like slow snow – beautiful, delicate, mystifying. It was from his White Girl EP, which followed in mus.hiba's style of vital, intricate beats and intense synth chords, all tied up with the interesting concept of equating the fragility of winter with the ephemerality of using the voice of virtual singer Sekka Yufu (a character from singing synthesiser application UTAU). His addition to Virgin Babylon's compilation is called 'Pasania', and is in keeping with his intense yet delicately chilled style.

'Pasania', you may or may not be interested to know, is the name of a defunct genus of trees now known as Lithocarpus in the family Fagaceae (beech trees), which also includes the better known Quercus, or oak trees. Many of the species are endemic to East and South East Asia, specifically Lithocarpus edulis or Japanese Stone Oak (マテバシイ = Matebashī), which is cultivated for ornamental purposes. Wow that was a lot of words about trees.

The actual morsel of music 'Pasania' by mus.hiba is a delicious temporary shelter from the storm of life, a plethora of sumptuous percussion – lip-smacking clacks, clip-clopping sounds, pulsing thuds for kicks, occasional clusters of hi-hat hits, saturated hand-claps – cascading alongside dramatic torrents of astral synth that seem like the sonic equivalent to sitting beneath a waterfall and letting the weight and all-encompassing nature of the water wash your mind clean of thoughts.

A dynamic-urgent electronic bassline, delightfully synth-rock sounding, provides dramatic movement beneath the onslaught of chill from the beat and the chords, and moves in line with bustling breezy piano that paints a picture of airy beauty throughout. Extremely tasty throughout, a little bit of rapid-fire, pitch-shifted vocal sampling signals the end of the track as a cherry on top, a tantalising cliffhanger to a short track that nevertheless exemplifies the mood-setting talents of this producer.

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• Grab the Virgin Babylon Records 5th Anniversary compilation, ONE MINUTE OLDER, from Bandcamp.
• It's not Winter now, it's Summer, but still you could check out the themed Winter Chill mix that mus.hiba made for YES/NO Guest Mix series.

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☟ mus.hiba Social Media Presence ☟
Facebook • SoundCloud • Twitter • Tumblr

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不明 FUMEI – GINSENG COFFEE

The sun is hanging low in the sky, hitting the magnolia tree outside the window, throwing dappled shadows on the table where I'm sitting writing this. I love magnolia – it's like blossom (or it just is blossom), but big blossom, blossom that means business, Serious Blossom swaying in a sleepy breeze… and it's in this blissful spring-but-feels-like-summer evening that I stumbled across this track by 不明 FUMEI (不明, pronounced 'fumei' means "unknown"). I think Fumei might be from Italy but I could be wrong, might be German or something else. Who knows. Anyway, unfortunately the track in question, 'Ginseng Coffee', is only 1'30" but it's currently on repeat, sending its nice vibes into my brain.

Something about boom-bappish hip hop sounds like this fit this time of day so effortlessly – and if we're talking specifics then I suppose you'd have to say it was the listless offbeat clacking for the duration of the song, the soft but robust bass locked into the kick drum for undeniable rhythmic harmony, the lounge-leaning chords oozing with somnolent tremolo, phasing icy synth, hollow vox-esque sounds plaintively echoing a half-done melody in the midst of sunny heat haze; it's all this that makes this track so lovely, all of it culminating in a sound lightly decayed by its own innate sense of bliss.

'Ginseng Coffee' (which is just titled 'Ginseng' on the release – see below) embodies chillment of a very high degree crossed with otherworldly wooziness, summoning the groggy feeling of having fallen asleep in your garden and waking up with hot skin and absolutely no concept of time, birds zipping home to roost with chirps and whatnot, blue sky littered with near-dissipated clouds.

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• It's from a split release between 不明 FUMEI and o k h o called La Caffeteria, a 22-minute long selection of beats in the same vein as this, born from an apparent concept of sitting in a café, track titles including 'Espresso', 'Smokers Zone', 'Take A Sip' and 'Beans Smell'. Perfect leaning-back-with-a-coffee music. Buy it here. And here it is below :)

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☟ 不明 FUMEI Social Media Presence ☟
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☟ o k h o Social Media Presence ☟
Facebook • SoundCloud • Bandcamp • Twitter • Instagram • Last.fm

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PRIMAPARTE – 1975. // noire

This ain't the newest song from this German beatmaker, but it is the first one I heard when I stumbled onto his SoundCloud page. I also listened to a couple of his other tracks, but, yeah, still decided to show you guys this one.

It's called '1975.' and it's by a guy from Essen, Germany (fun fact: the city recently started an initiative which pays alcoholics in beer to clean the streets) called primaparte. It is hip hop, or at least utilises an offbeat that is very hip hop, as well as a whole lotta sampling and looping.

The track soars with the sound of astronauts talking to mission control and gloopy pianos playing a warm walking-through-the-door-of-your-childhood-home type melody, as electronic buzzing and beeping get giddy in the crackling ambient cosmos conjured by the beatmaker. Note also the well-placed truncated sample of "Motherf—"

Speaking of which, and after a sampled "YEAH", you'll see it's smart af, with metronomic hi-hats ticking above tight snares that clack alternately to the thud-boom of the kicks, holding up this transportive wonder – even if it is only 1m 33s long.

And fuck it, why not listen to the sparkling 'noire' as well—

—which aches with sultry urban brass blares that announce the triumph of nocturnal lassitude, with the occasional sample of someone laughing, as if the kitchen utensil percussion is actually tickling him, whose beat is boom bap through and through. It basically sounds noire.

• If you like the looped chilled stylings of these tracks then get yourself over to primaparte's SoundCloud and follow.

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☟ primaparte Social Media Presence ☟
Facebook • SoundCloud • Bandcamp

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