TAMON TAKAHASHI — GHOST OF PROW

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⌾ LISTEN TO GHOST OF PROW BY TAMON TAKAHASHI ⌾

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There’s a richness to the soundscape at work in Tamon Takahashi’s ‘Ghost of Prow’. A swaying sweep of guitar floats through like the slow swell of the sea, paired with brass that peals and tapers with a stoic lilt — a sombre contrast to the evocative guitar solo that ends the piece. The vocals in the Hokkaido-based artist’s track are a hefty pairing of voices that add organic texture to proceedings, the bass smooth and crooning beneath it all.

Ultimately, with its pendulum-esque rhythm, and lavish, illuminated textures, the bittersweet charm of ‘Ghost of Prow’ illustrates the doomful passing of time with a world-weary sparkle.

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• 🔔 Listen to more from Tamon Takahashi over on his Spotify.

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☟ Tamon Takahashi Internet Presence ☟
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🐣 JESSI LEE — NEVER NOT [初演 • PREMIERE]

This song has a very easy way of draping itself around your head and enveloping you in its softness, in its blanket of silken sound that is evident from the very first depth-charge sub-gloop bass, synthetic yet with this deep organic tenderness, a classic feel, that seems as though it could be a plucked double bass. And adding further softness to 'Never Not', Jessi Lee spins aching vocals, whisper-crooning from far-off, taut and quavering with memories, or as the producer-singer herself calls them, "those ghostly things that stay with us."

"And even though they're still there, we can move forward and look back on those things from afar as lessons learned fondly."

The NYC-based musicmaker takes us through the song via email. "'Never Not' is about love that endures even after it has been lost," she explains. "[It's] a dreamy experimental take on deconstructing a '50s style doo-wop ballad."

Self-admittedly more a producer than a singer, Jessi Lee tells us that this song – a minimalist exercise in experimental yet familiar styles – is quite personal to her: "I felt like I really had to be the one to vocalize it," she says, "and honestly use this music as a device to come to terms with my own love lost. It was very cathartic to say the least."

The twirling modern imaginary ballroom of 'Never Not' is realised in a video directed by Frankie Leroux>, which uses Coney Island as the backdrop—"a location personal to the story behind the song," says Jessi Lee; "Everything was very deliberately placed," she continues, "from the setting sun to using Coney Island as a character itself."

The slow steps of the bass underpin the fabric of the song, this intense rumble, these notes each one a cloud of pastel fog slo-mo exploded from thin air. Simple drum machine aesthetics make up the rest of the beat, an electronic tom keeping gloriously slow time. Chords like a mist sweep their way through. Ticking percussion peeps out at the chorus, warm and dreamy, it embraces you, the illustration of closeness.

Equally, it is distance, the miasma of feelings that float in the air after a relationship ends, a sultry sashay of tragic proportions, a slow dance till the lights go out.

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• 🔔 'Never Not' is taken from Jessi Lee's Deep Rest EP.
• 🔔 Jessi Lee plays saxophone in The Love Experiment and also is a sometime writer and performer with future soul duo, Broken Luxury.

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☟ Jessi Lee Internet Presence ☟
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🐣 COOL TRIPS — LANDMARK

The melting atmosphere, the horizon spilling onto the earth and the grand oil colour splashes, the waves of thick stodgy paint, swirling and whirling together and running over the land like a flood in slow motion. That's 'Landmark' setting the scene for you, the low-slung sludgy psychedelia of it crafted by Portland-based musicmaker Cool Trips—not the typical sun-glittering stuff you might be used to, but this inhabits a different time of day, a different state of mind, the chorus crooning in with grounded wisdom: "I can't live forever / forever's too long."

"I think the hook is going to tend to sound a little morbid to a bunch of people," says Cool Trips in an email to us, "but to me it's about living and dying in moments in a metaphorical sense more than anything... and learning where the high roads are and how to find them. It's strangely positive given all the reminders of inevitable death." And to frame this darker theme, this slice of surreal reality, the kick drum slams overdriven and the tottering bassline skips and dawdles, abrupt atonal synth sweeping sharply above, the vocals call out as if from a different dimension, as if already having died and giving melodic advice from beyond the grave, a slow and steady zombie march of sound.

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• 🔔 You may purchase the fascinating 'Landmark' via Amazon if you so wish. Alternatively, or additionally, you can listen on Spotify. It's taken from Cool Trips' Bloodshot Moon(& The Heart vs Reality) EP.

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☟ Cool Trips Internet Presence ☟
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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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🐣 SHLOHMO — SLOW DESCENT (TOMMYJARVIS REMIX)

The chaotic original 'Slow Descent' by Shlohmo, with its spooky twisted rounded organic synth sounds and vital menagerie of clipped click-clacking tight tumbling percussion, a dark shade of broken beat flavours, gets a reworking here courtesy of French musicmaker Tommyjarvis, styled after the Friday the 13th series protagonist of the same name. This new version takes the almost breakbeat speed and agility of the original and crushes it, that jittering nervous mood eradicated and replaced with something that has been under the hardships of life, a tract of overdriven saturated noise, the kinetic energy transformed into that of jostling saturation, a condensing of synth flavours.

The flighty acrobatic beat is no longer, and if any remnants of it remain in this new greyscale moss-ridden ruin of a track, they are slowed down, crippled from their original outing and now pulsing occasionally beneath the new viscous shroud of the track, Tommyjarvis creating crashing crowds of crinkled synth that spin damaged and zinging, the semblance of a melody on this dark nocturnal breeze, the rest of it a swamp of curling crunch, the power sapped from its abrasive bubblings by bassy kicks that fall into the electrogasm of it all and ripple slovenly, a trial of despondence and screaming noise that crouches in the corners of your mind, the abyssal yin to the original track's cascading yang.

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• 🔔 So the Tommyjarvis remix of Shlohmo's Dark Red album track 'Slow Descent' can be downloaded for free, as you can see on the SoundCloud player above.
• 🔔 Tommyjarvis is a part of Rouen-based musicmaking collective KNGS.

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☟ Tommyjarvis Internet Presence ☟
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🐣 CARLOSH GARZAT — SUBMERGE (HYPERBARIC OXYGEN MIX) [初演 • PREMIERE]

Washes of warm soothing synth roll gently over your mind, a sense of space gracefully opening up with the tide-like flowing and ebbing of those gentle chords, a cradle of calm that lulls you into a spell of somnolence. Created by Mexican artist Carlosh Garzat, this soul-melting track is a remix of an original much more conventional track that he released earlier this year: "The lyrics talk about submission in love, about emotions being fluid and sometimes changing too fast," he tells us, "as well as the fear of drowning in those emotions but wanting to experiment them nevertheless." However in this new version of 'Submerge', there is a feeling of vastness, a sense of acceptance in the waves of sound that aim to chill and placate, and it all came from a chance encounter with a Hyperbaric Oxygen Chamber.

"I was advised to have a couple of sessions," Carlosh explains. "It's used mainly for scuba divers and for relaxation purposes and anxiety in which pure oxygen is provided inside a chamber under reduced atmospheric pressure." Equal parts therapeutic and somewhat disturbing, the sessions inspired this new enlightened and awakened form of 'Submerge', where the vocals appear and float before your eyes, refraining like a mantra in the cloud of sound, the lightly clinical minimalism augmented by sparse pristine percussion snapping occasionally. In this new vessel, an almost uterine experience, the song is relaxing yet troubled by these words, almost like an interior monologue, yet in the serene vastness of it the power and immediacy of anxiety and doubt and negative emotions are lessened, reduced to what Carlosh calls "an impending fear."

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• 🔔 The 'Hyperbaric Oxygen Mix' is out as a single today (11th August) alongside the original mix of 'Submerge'.
• 🔔 The original 'Submerge' is taken from Carlosh Garzat's Agoraphobic EP, released earlier this year. Feel free to purchase it via iTunes if you want.

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☟ Carlosh Garzat Internet Presence ☟
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🐣 THE ANALOG GIRL — MORE THAN YOU KNOW

Into a world that seems far from our own, a world of swirling intoxicating fog and mists of multicolour dust, a hazy rainbow, slow-dance smoke machine sensibilities as the morsel of music moves along andante, the sashay of the bulging bass bloop and popping drum machine thud of the kicks and snares, a creeping walking pace, a poised-to-pounce looming approach, the click of heels on a marble floor, a cyberpunk sky clouded over outside, retro-futurism propelling into your brain. A world far from our own for sure, that's what Mei Wong aka Singaporean musicmaker The Analog Girl paints with the sparkling-abrasive glitter of 'More Than You Know'.

Glassy synth arpeggio melody gives off a touch of upscale fragility, something digital and cutting-edge but with a decidedly retro air of obsolescence; a more piercing sound than this lances over the top, doused in reverb and resounding into the cold quiet patches of the track, sharp and needling, lo-fi glimmer like television static in pastel and neon; towards the end a more robust flavour of synth comes into view, thick saw-wave. And then you have The Analog Girl's voice, a collection of whispers, clusters of slow threatening vocals, whooshing and distorted, simultaneously organic and glitch-laden, harsh yet floating, the reflective representative human voice to this dreampop noise, this aesthetic dystopia of sound.

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• 🔔 'More Than You Know' is taken from The Analog Girl's recently released album Golden Sugar Crystals, available for purchase via download on Bandcamp.
• 🔔 The abstract video for this track was created by digital fashion artist Laura E Shepherd LS528 (formerly known by her glove line Glovedup Gloves). "Her fashion animations were more than fashion" says The Analog Girl; "they carried a sense of mystery, intrigue and pop artfulness. One look and I knew I had to feature them on my music video."

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☟ The Analog Girl Internet Presence ☟
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🐣 EPROM — KOUMMYA

At the speed of a dirge or a march of the dead across a netherworld of convenience store carparks, this track clonks along with menace and dread, sumptuous percussion marking time, unfathomable threats looming at the sidelines and cheering the procession on ghoulishly, the sheen of villainous majesty and baroque solemnity aloof and alive in the wide organ chords that soar down like eagles with talons poised and ready to snatch away and shred—in this sense quite Bowser-esque, sounding very much like the Castle Theme from New Super Mario Bros. Wii. The dusty tones of the organ and their funereal yet triumphal atmosphere works in partnership with the constant brutal buzz that EPROM lays down as a foundation in this one, a gothic tale with arabesque twists, a 19th century wandflick of macabre mixed with merciless modern bass distortion.

'Koummya' refers to a curved dagger traditional to the Atlas region of southern Morocco—often ornately decorated, always with a peacock tail-shaped end to the hilt, these were as much a part of traditional dress as they were intended to incapacitate and kill. Similarly, EPROM's track is as decorative – the breathy flourishes at the beginning of the track, phantomatic and nightmarish, the glittering intoxicated waves of golden sound like blankets of cut gemstones, the "yeah" sample – as it is harrowing: that sludgy bass, the needling crescendos, the inescapable unrelenting swirl of its crushed abrasive sounds. A perfect soundscape, dreadful and awesome, terrible to behold, daunting and gratifying, breathtaking noise with a purpose, destroyer and yet destroyed: 'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'

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• 🔔 The marvellous 'Koummya' is taken from EPROM's Pineapple EP, which is out now and which can be downloaded and streamed variously. The five-track EP includes an official remix of the title track 'Pineapple' by G JONES.
• 🔔 Australian artist Jonathan Zawada created the exquisiteglistening 3D artwork for the EP, combining its namesake – a pineapple ring – with a gem-like cherry complete with tongue-tied stem, a scraggle of barbed wire and an extra-long and rather barbarous-looking dagger. Intangible, abstract and decorative at the same time as exuding an imminent sense of simultaneous unpredictable danger and fun, the artwork, like a twisted crest, is a perfect fit for the big, experimental, spike-laden sound of EPROM. Zawada has also made artwork for the likes of Flume, Baauer and Mark Pritchard.
• 🔔 The San Fran-originated Portland-based musicmaker is named after EPROM, erasable programmable read-only memory, "a type of memory chip that retains its data when its power supply is switched off." (Wikipedia).

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☟ EPROM Internet Presence ☟
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🐣 LUNAR — GLAD YOU STAYED

Swirling with emotive intensity this track exists in a mist of sound, an all-encompassing atmosphere that seems to veil everything around as you listen. A dreamy slow-jam drenched with feeling. Piano chords reverse-resonate from distal zones between the percussive punctuation of the swaying beat, fading-in to the warm dusty clonk of the chord, plaintive and balladic. These layer up, forming cushions of sound upon which the voice of Lunar herself floats lilting and mumbling, the colloquial endeavour of the singing style effusing honesty into the nebulous haze of the track, her words sometimes nuanced with quavering ornamentation.

The lovesong quality of 'Glad You Stayed' shows itself through those cradling vocals, the to-and-fro embrace of the beat with its swishing hi-hats and powerful drum fills and its skittering percussive thickets, where sometimes Lunar's voice quivers without instrumental interruption, whirling and caressing the air with its creaking silken tone. High string sounds twinkle achingly in the chorus, the acute pinch of longing, gut-twisting desire, glimmers sharply, contrasting with the syncopated thump of the kick throughout. The track ascends at the end, whooshes of sweet textured sound rising with sparkles of vocal sample ringing out in the crystalline white noise of it all, the rush of love in a crescendo of memory.

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• 🔔 This is Lunar's first upload on SoundCloud—keep an eye on it for more from this London musicmaker.

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☟ LUNAR Internet Presence ☟
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🐣 DOT — GRAVITY

It's the raw guitar with fingers sliding on the strings, its cyclical melody, the first indicator of an opened-up, unfiltered feeling that characterises the soundular beating-heart organism of 'Gravity'. This natural guitar trickles beneath Dot's vocal which flutters and soars by turns, twists and aches in rich layers, velvet vibrato, each consonant lustrous and whispering into the distance soaked in reverb, how they whirl and mist in the chorus: "It's heavenly to fall into your gravity", sung with slow jam dreaminess.

Heavenly indeed. The intensity of it all magnified by quaking rumbles of sub-bass, the simultaneous beauty ornamented by flighty crystalline glitterings of high-pitched harp-like notes, just audible, modulated chords lasering warmth into the mix. The luscious soundscape gets treated to a treasury of percussion, slow cymbals, clopping fingerclicks, jangling metallics, tick-tocking woodblocks. That's before a boom-bap of a beat takes the reins for a spell, sharp hi-hats keeping time, as Dot sings "I've lost the ground"—a signal of that spiral up to heavenly heights, a herald of majestic movement. You give yourself to this song and let it take you where it goes.

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• 🔔 'Gravity' arrives from upcoming album Retrofuture, out 12th May on Unspeakable Records. The label was founded by Dot, who incidentally is also a member of Team Supreme.
• 🔔 'Gravity' and previously released single 'No Filter' are purchasable on iTunes—the album too when it's out.

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☟ Dot Internet Presence ☟
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DOT ROTTEN – CHECK ME OUT

I do believe this is the first time I've written about Dot Rotten. He's a grime artist who's been floating around for a while now, probably most notably getting nominated for BBC's Sound of 2012 list. If you don't know (i.e. you've never lived in the UK) his name is a pun of a character from a London-based soap opera called EastEnders – you must've heard of it – whose name is Dot Cotton. She's about 500 years old and smokes a lot.

Anyway, my ears were on like, red alert or whatever when I heard this new-ish song from Dot Rotten. It was new when I first heard it, around a month ago, on Charlie Sloth's Saturday night show on BBC Radio 1/1Xtra. It's called 'Check Me Out' and it's real cool. But the one I heard on the radio also featured fellow grime MC JME and now I can not find it anywhere. Please, if you can find it, or if you know where to find it and you see this message washed up on the shores of the internet in months or years to come, please direct me to the Dot Rotten x JME version. Thank you.

'Check Me Out' is dark and narcotic, a lazy haze conjured by Canadian producer Sevn Thomas. Bubbles of growling synth switch in the grime style between a repeated few notes, a muffled crunch that accompanies fittingly directionless bleeps which echo into the darkness. Fragmented percussion features lone snares for the verses before rattling hi-hats summon booming columns of sub-bass for a decidedly sordid beat that fits the subject matter.

Over the track, Dot Rotten assumes the role of an overprivileged member of the upper class, affecting a posh / aristocratic accent with a genius bit of nonchalant smugness thrown in for good measure. Essentially he paints a picture – and perhaps quite rightly – of the debauched and arrogant upper middle class (yeah we love classes in the UK). The words themselves are brilliant, I want to write them all down. He talks about drinking chamomile, scones with strawberry jam, eating caviar whilst the lower classes are in Malia. Little things, too, like posh, fake laughter fluttering in the background alongside non-posh words like "swag" as the narrator says how the-shit he is – I love it!

A couple of choice lines: "Fuck that business meeting / I shall not be showing up / Father says I'm childish / Fuck him, I'm not growing up" and and also "Red wine from '08 / Been here for a century / Strolled into my mansion / And there's four girls with four friends for me," not only demonstrating great imagery but also punchy and effective rhymes, too.

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• It's taken from Dot Rotten's Remember Me EP (you can download it for freeeeee), also featuring production on one track by Stwo, which is just extra cool.

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☟ Dot Rotten Social Media Presence ☟
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METOME – RAINMAKER [VIDEO]

Well well well here is a surprise outta nowhere. Straight out of the blue up the avenues of unknown fizzing in a bottle of Diet I-Dunno opened to the world and poured out in a sparkle of sudden realisation. Anyway it looks as though Metome, the prodigious musicmaker from Japan, has made some more music. At least, I haven't seen this song anywhere before. It's a new one! And it's a video straight off the bat! Boom! Whoosh! Zip!

So it's something new and already you can hear that it has a subtly different sound to the shining Metome gems of old. These, from the up-tempo and blissful 'Water Cycle' to the slow jazz sensuality of 'Take This Love', are pretty much all free-form improvisational numbers, polished with an organic aesthetic and a penchant for glitch multiplicity, all smothered in wholly cool lounge-like atmospheres.

'Rainmaker' sees Metome take a turn for the darker, for the more mystical, perhaps just in the style of the vocal sample – utterly drenched in a fog of reverb – which as usual he gleefully twists and turns with deft touches here and there; but then this "darker" sound is also in the cold, glacial nature of the washes of chords that summon a certain swirling bleakness, a cloud sea quaking with sub-bass where components of the beat – tight snares that roll rat-tat sometimes, unassuming collections of clicks – and shoals of bleeps float in graceful flotsam colonies.

Made by Videcam Production, the video suits this somewhat more serious sound down to the ground, documenting a Pan's Labyrinth-type affair, in which a girl finds herself magically beckoned by a demoniac skull-headed magician and whisked to another world. The washed out colours of the video suiting the freezing breeze of sound in the song, its slightly unnerving vocal sample singing a plaintive lament that, on its own, could plot the fateful journey of the girl to the magic door in the video.

• At the end of last year, Metome released Objet, an album of old and new stuff. It deserves your attention!
• In addition, come have a look at an interview with Metome.

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TOKOMA NONKA RAINY APARTMENT

Ho ho ho! Merry Christmas! Actually, that's all over and done with now isn't it? I guess it is. But, if you were thinking in terms of the "12 Days of Christmas" then it's actually not over till 12 days after Christmas. I think we do it the other way round now. Christmas starts mid-November and finishes on Boxing Day, at least it does here in the UK. I kinda wish it did stick around for 12 days afterwards. Maybe it does. But anyway, we have New Year's Eve to look forward to now. But how are we going to look sexy in our spangly new outfits with the sudden weight that's come from the insane food gorging over the last few days? I don't know.

Anyway, I thought I'd post something today. Just because, well, it's been too long. It's been over a week since I posted something. It's felt like forever, though. So maybe I just miss it. You know what? I probably do. But I— eugh. Who cares! It's the New Year soon! So here is something pretty and reflective just for you that I hope will make you sit there and have a nice little introspective moment about 2013. It's by a Japanese guy called Tokoma Nonka who is part of the electronic group Leaseka, describing themselves as "dreamy / darkness / deep sea / cosmic / fantasy" – a lovely mix.

Now, I'm not sure if this song is supposed to be called 'Rainy Apartment' or '101102201202' – as it says on SoundCloud – but I'm gonna go for the former because, well, it sounds better. So if it's not the real name, I'm sorry.

Featuring as its eternal backdrop, the sound of an evening (I assume) downpour of rain, the song reflects the icy and sometimes isolating atmosphere of this sort of precipitation with all of its elements; yep, from the synth lead parts, which drip with glassy percussion and that also sound a little like the beautiful melody from Ryuichi Sakamoto's 'Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence', to the beat itself – whose snares are like pinging missiles of rain into deep plopping puddles – it's the very embodiment of an actual rainy apartment. Glowing sounds ache from one emanating note to another behind the plinking melody and distorted vocal samples mix with shuddering noises and ambient grumbles to form a decorative representation of the rain's distorted barrier to the outside world; everything is grey and piled with the grainy footage of rain.

It's a simplistic concept that has a lot of sounds at work at the same time, taking you off and away from where you're sitting to a cosmic, fantasy world where everything is seemingly the same yet slightly changed. I would actually love to listen to this whilst watching the rain – I think it would be the perfect soundtrack. There is also a remix of this by Tom Bombadil, which features heavier drums that you should check out as well.

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Listen to Tokoma Nonka on SoundCloud
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EN2AK WOODWORK MISFITS (JOLLY MARE REMIX)

It's Jolly Mare! Hooray! I probably could've written about this guy a hundred times between now and the time that I last wrote about him, but I haven't, so— anyway, here he is again with a remix of Wrocław-based Polish musicmaker En2ak's bristling track 'Woodwork Misfits'.

Before I go any further, some of you may be thinking, "who the literal hell is Jolly Mare?" – well, that's kind of easy to answer. From Italy, his real name is Fabrizio Faberismi, and I've written about a couple of his songs before – namely 'Nobody Cares', a vaporwavey number, and 'Castlemare', sounding like the hardest videogame boss fight ever; he was also a participant in the Red Bull Music Academy. So too was En2ak – and that is how the two met. And so Jolly Mare ended up as one of the artists featured on 3 Remixed – a set of remixes of the songs from En2ak's 3, set for release on Christmas day (25th December lol) of all days, via Warsaw-based label U Know Me Records.

But what about the actual remix? En2ak's original – from his third album, simply titled 3 – is a bustling tin-pan assortment of percussion mixed with bubbling bass and phasing synths polka-dotted with tuned vocal samples, turning in its second half into a more menacing rumbler of a track, all with a distinct ghetto house feel to it.

Jolly Mare's version is nothing short of brilliant. Taking on the mind-bending dub sounds of reggae, this remix is a warm and synth-laden foray into a stress-melting atmosphere; bass bulges lazily alongside the raw drums and the glitchy lead synth sounds. Occasional samples from the original cut through the chilled blanket of noises in thin reverbing stabs. By the end of the track, you're so far engrossed in its bliss that it's almost as if you could be on holiday – soaking up the sun and feeling a single beat of sweat drip from your forehead. It also positively aches with an 80s sensuality, perhaps in the raw, almost primordial synth sounds that Jolly Mare chose to use in the track.

His remix, though different to original (which ain't a bad thing yo), is a sultry, head-bopping number that whisks us away from the cold gusts of wind that winter is currently throwing our way – at least in the UK anyway – and takes us to a fantasy island, where the beach is endless, and all the amenities you could ever desire are sitting right behind you, nestled under rows tall palm trees. It's the soundtrack to a sexy dub holiday, that's what.

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Like En2ak on Facebook
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TREE FT BEAT CULTURE AND LENA KUHN DEMONS

Yo yo yo yo. How are you? Good, me too. So I was sent some info that included a link to this song, 'Demons', a while ago and I was pretty surprised at the originality at work in the sounds. It's by Tree, real name Oliver Tree Nickell and features beats and noises from experimental pop music-maker, Beat Culture, as well as vocals from Lena Kuhn. I still haven't heard much about these guys, though I did just google Lena Kuhn and found that a lot of other music blogs wrote about this song already. Boo-hoo poor me I'm so lazy.

It's from Tree's debut EP also called Demons, released on Apollo Records late August. I listened to all of it and really liked it, but it turns out that I like this song the most out of all of them. It's a really good song that leaks an atmosphere of angst and anxiety all over the shop. There's such a glistening array of noises present here that it's kinda impossible to listen all the way through and not like at least one thing about the song. But the star of the show is Tree's voice, I'd say, but it's the mix of everything that gives the end result. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I guess? Lol?

Anyway, it begins with some languishingly strummed guitar that's augmented by this haunting whistling-wind kinda sound. Starting quiet and then in rumbles some hefty bass and the skeleton of a beat whose snare crashes like distant ships running aground in a pitch black night, whose hi-hat glitches like a neurotic clock. Emotion seeps in with grey flights of ever-falling strings, thickening later on in the song with something more cello-like. It's a sophisticated atmospheric composition where bright loses to dark in an emotive murk of sounds.

The vocals from Mr Tree himself are pretty spectacular as well. It's kinda like rapping, kinda like spoken word, kinda like singing. His words teem with emotion, not just in the near-twisted aggressive way he spits the lines as if them being in his mouth is leaving too sour a taste, like he's gotta get them out, but also in the words themselves. The lyrics are morbid and paranoid and are littered to references to demons and "the self". Some that stick in my head: "Sometimes I look at who I am in the mirror and forget / Sometimes I return home to demons on my doorstep / Just let me be / I want you to leave / Sometimes I get so suffocated I could barely breathe" and "I knew that it was time to go face to face with demons from my last life" and the chorus refrain "Sometimes it's easier pretending that you're somebody you're not". All conjure the sense of different parts of a person wrestling with themselves, the frustration of defining yourself to yourself. And the backing vocals from Lena Kuhn give everything a spooky, near-schizophrenic vibe - a quite beautiful effect if I may say so.

A real surprise. Dark, experimental, brimming with emotion... What will come next. I don't know. Watch & see.

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