🐣 TEPLICE – BRIGHT FUTURE

⌾ LISTEN TO BRIGHT FUTURE BY TEPLICE ⌾

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From the very beginnings of 'Bright Future', with its curdled kazoo crunches and icy shards of synth, there's something in the sound that wrestles with the title of Teplice's track. Sub-bass tumbles along and a mellow miasma of plasma synth is ambient in the background, seeping into your skin when it all suddenly sinks into a mire of doom come chord-change.

The vocals do the hoping, literally. "I hope... / For a bright future" Berlin-based, London-born Teplice opens the song, unaffected and in a tired monotone. Later, insomniac lines – "I lay awake at night / Thinking of the moon / Sleep will greet me soon" – rise up and look likewise into a positive, albeit near, future. Alongside hoping is questioning, a haunted interrogation at the heart of this song like a mantra.

In harmonies that conjure spoken nonchalance like spoken spells under spectres that twang and lilt, something vocally like The Cranberries or maybe Warpaint, the existential inquiry curls out like smoke: "Is anything out there / Is anything out there / Is anything out there / Is anything..."—cut short at a moment of sudden discovery or resignation of futility. These vocals especially expel warmth, in tone, in rhythm, that makes the song bounce.

The simplicity of the lyrics stand the sentiment and imagery of up as monoliths, symbols and vignettes in a nocturnal frame of frozen electronica, driven by an unstoppable marching beat: the slow, officious plod of time. As ghostly as it is a real, true voice, 'Bright Future' wonders about the world outside—not outdoors, but outisde what you know, in something that summons the choice of music in Twin Peaks (inhabiting a realm similar to Rebekah Del Rio's 'No Stars', for example).

All the lilting vocals, all the sense of falling off the face of the Earth. And yet by the end of the track, the density of the track has lightened, the clouds begin to part; minimal and angular, 'Bright Future' is still warm and human, still hopes.

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• 🔔 The product of working at producer, label owner, radio show host E.M.M.A's Producergirls workshop, this track is taken from Teplice's upcoming Bright Future EP, inspired, she says, by "contemporary feelings of angst, stagnation and uncertainty" as well as wanting "to capture a sense of time elapsing at a personal, social and historical level."

  "In this sense," she continues, "considering how individual lives intersect with historical moments, my grandma has been a massive inspiration. [...] It was important to me that she was represented [in the artwork]."

• 🔔 The Bright Future EP is set to be released on Pastel Prism Records on 18th October, and marks the inaugural release on the label. Pre-order it on Bandcamp.

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👉 Read our interview with E.M.M.A by tapping these words 👈

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🐣 ELMARI — YOU KNOW ME

Taken on some sort of spacewalk now, the long weightless sway into starry void, the cosmic vacuum just existing there and a figure slowly spinning into some oblivion, it's not loneliness they feel as they drift but more a sense of solitary contentment, the secret mystery of oneness unfolding itself in the expanse. That is what it feels like anyway, 'You Know Me' by East London producer ElMari, it feels very space-destined, future-aligned, and that is first and foremost down to the nature of those synth chords: stripes of the heavens swipe in thin fizzing neon swathes of sound. But of course it's not just the actual quality of the sound itself, it's how that sound progresses that gives it this windingly slow velocity.

It's also the decreased attack and relatively low sustain of the synth which gives it that slow-motion feeling, along with the sparse beat, well placed clusters of hi-hat ticks and clacking snares as well as the syncopated solidity of the robust kicks, this lack of accentuation minimal nature summon that galactic feel, the simple melodic twinkling of synth mirrors the sparkle of distant celestial bodies, and the rumble of modulated bass in the middle gives intensity and power. But within there is something human, the vocal sample, stammering and effusing a sultry R&B flavour, and suddenly it wasn't a solitary spacewalk but an low-gravity airlock sex scene that this track conjures. Or maybe it's both.

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• 🔔 More of ElMari's releases can be found over on his Bandcamp for download and listening purposes.

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🐣 YAEJI — DRINK I'M SIPPIN ON

The space here runs off into the distance like an endless profusion of cut-out apartment blocks and the black sky blanketing it all above with dim hundreds of lights below and the receding traffic, lonely open urban caverns and canyons; it is the silken void between angular concrete, the difference between tangible feeling and architectural corners, spirits and shapes—humans, the distances between them. This is the vital crux of 'Drink I'm Sippin On', a moonless city and its skyward turrets and those who inhabit the harsh environment, and how this landscape is conjured by its creator Yaeji. Each soft explosion of bass is the ghostly shape of a tower popping into your periphery, the trap-flavoured scuttling needling hi-hats the bird's-eye view of buglife people swarming and cars lurching, and smart snares cracking with the unforgiving tarmac, the flat pavements, the signs traffic lights the metal and glass and cement.

All of it is placed like building blocks with a minimalism, a brutal but soft stark sparseness, that allows this literally awesome sense of space to gush through and into the cityscape like a waterfall, like a dam destroyed and the flood pouring in lakeishly, oceanic; but it is not water, though it is as fluid as it. Yaeji's vocals come in here, the sea of soul that makes up the spaces between the percussive pillars of the beat, her voice in Korean and English somehow harsh as it whispers almost abrasive fizzing with satin smooth texture and the reverb of it dropped into this expanse and sweeping and deepening and besides this the catchy hook is the haunting reminder of rhythm and individuality, a lone isolated voice, amidst the illustration here of non-rhythm and non-individuality, of sprawling structures and the giant of humanity in all its multiplication. The spirit of Yaeji, though expressed through a hushed susurration, grows and fills the gaps between the coldness the bluntness of the beat, a single person speaking in a silenced crowd.

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• 🔔 This wonderful track is taken from Yaeji's EP2, her second release this year, a six-track offering that will arrive into the world for your listening pleasure on 3rd November via Godmode.

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🐣 DYR — ALL THE TIME

Heavy on the bass glooping swampy digital gloss clean and rounded with angularity in its gradually sharpening shape and the offbeat syncopation as the thudding techno kicks round it up lasso it together with small but explosive snares that thin and crashing echo in the nocturnal ambience of the track. A great sense of minimalism pervades this one, small changes subtly altering the route of the track as it trundles along like watching a storm that hasn't yet arrived is not yet overhead can't feel the rain but distantly the thunder is booming and the clouds even blacker than the night sky itself and towering. Watching from a distance. Not pulling you in nor under but mesmerising from afar, 'All The Time' by Seattle producer DYR slips into this state of easy awe, a digestible titan of sound.

It is practically defined by that bass, present at almost every moment, which shifts during the track's duration shifts slightly, becomes sharper fuzzier more distorted but not extremely, and also it writhes with delay later on, the now wooden twang of it more rapid fire than its original stark simplicity. Throughout there is a little procession of organic sound in the form of palm muted guitar, whether synthetic or real it is difficult to tell, but this provides a dim twinkle for the murky atmosphere, as do the later additions of gossamer layers of ambient synth like laser light crowning odd rock formations, haloing trees, glittering on dark dewy nighttime grass. A picture-painting morsel that is pneumatic and tireless in its dance energy, and emphatically chilled, yet without a single drop nor vocal sample in earshot, eschewing needless things for the barebones of beat and bass with little jewels of ambience to decorate.

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• 🔔 You may buy 'All The Time' for only $1 from DYR's Bandcamp if you like.

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