FLOOR BABA — DO NOT LOOK AWAY

In 'DO NOT LOOK AWAY' Pittsburgh-based producer and visual artist FLOOR BABA (Jesse Martin) takes us on a journey to the suburbs where all is not what it seems. Well, it's more than seeming not what it is. Panning over low-poly renders of greenery-lined streets, playgrounds and parking lots, we see trees fragmented in post-exploded stillness, trucks chewed by digital rot, skies sinking into corroded community pools.

Over this, with no regard to x or y axes, stomp faceless figures remiscent of Zelda: Ocarina of Time/Majora's Mask-era ReDead (for those unfamiliar, see here). As the title suggests, in Martin's animated illustration we are privy to the things we usually look away from — in the melted, corroded visuals we sense the unease that lies behind apparent perfection, while the ReDead-esque figures symbolise those who trample unchecked over the green grass and picket fences and, by extension, over the lives of others.

It's all soundtracked perfectly. Cricket-like chirps and destructed background fuzz add supplementary percussion the boom-tick of a forboding beat, while echoing detuned synth vox flutter unsettlingly on a bed of disarmingly warm chords that move in impresonal lounge-flavoured progression. In the final third, we enter a quasi-West Coast groove with a flute refraining a simple melody over clanging synthetic plucked strings. Martin mixes ambient textures with a more attention-forward dynamic to create an atmosphere that is at once detached but invested in the accompanying scenes.

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• 🔔 For more FLOOR BABA fun, you might want to check out their most recent album waking, self-described "experiments in soft music" that are full of incredibly pleasing noises and soundscapes. You can do this by tapping or clicking here to move your digital attention to Bandcamp.

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FOREST SWORDS — THE LOW

⌾ LISTEN TO THE LOW BY FOREST SWORDS ⌾

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'The Low' cuts a mysterious figure. From the outset it's a cavalcade of metallophonic glonking, bone-rattling clacks, rusted but razor sharp hi-hat sheafings and thumping distorted tambor booms to keep time. A druidic ritual crossed with a downtempo warehouse number, this altered beast of trip hop crouches loaded with potential to pounce at any moment.

Vocals rise up, plucked from the air and woven throughout the bristling beats like a sea breeze blowing through craggy sea stacks and yawning arches. But in a triumph of dynamism, rather than trail off like a will-o'-the-wisp the phantom noise is cut short, suddenly revealing once more the silence and scratch of the song. (In fact, the whole thing is truncated, snipped at the end into a full-stop).

Add to this a skirling, distorted call of distorted brass proportions — how you might imagine a carnyx to sound — and there is urgency here, but a fogged ancient urgency, like a message from the actual earth, but summoned in a Liverpool warehouse by Forest Swords.

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• 🔔 It's official: there's a new Forest Swords album coming out. It's called Bolted and it's arriving 20th October via Ninja Tune; you can pre-order it on Bandcamp now digitally, on vinyl, CD and cassette. 'The Low' follows previous single 'Butterfly Effect', also taken from the upcoming album.

  Forest Swords (aka Matthew Barnes) explains that it's "based on a beat I’d originally intended for Yoko Ono." It's an important track, too, and "features elements I made both at the start and end of the album," he says, "so ties together a lot of the sounds and emotions I was exploring during the writing process."

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🐣 WUH OH — PRETTY BOY

⌾ LISTEN TO WUH OH, PRETTY BOY ⌾

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The distorted arpeggios that wind their way through 'Pretty Boy' by Glasgow producer Wuh Oh give it this final act suspense. Instead of drops, the track opens up into gaping chasms, the suspense weaving its way through like the last level on a platformer; all the difficulty with the final boss yet to rear its head.

Different elements fade and fall from the scathing, sharpness of it all, with only the gleaming vocal harmonies (what Wuh Oh calls his "angelic choir impression") lancing in like the glow of some unholy machine, innocent in its unholiness—a sense of discovery, uncovery, delving deeper into an expansive, but increasingly claustrophobic world.

The synth scuttles and twangs, the bugs on the underside of a rock in a parallel dimension.

"The track Pretty Boy happened in a weird way," Wuh Oh tells yes/no over email. "I set myself the challenge of writing a track using only one synthesizer and no drums to see if I could achieve enough tension and release without resorting to typical build up and drop tropes.

"[But] the arpeggios were all major key. It sounded like an advert for a cruise holiday or some shit."

Moving the notes around, 'Pretty Boy' then transformed from his "corniest song yet" to his "spookiest." It's spooky alright. Sinister and demented in its last moments, everything comes to a stop as the synth takes on a new, garbled flavour; the motion of this final stage ends and the game's final boss appears. It's that scene-setting.

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• 🔔 Watch this space for more about Wuh Oh.

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🐣SHLOHMO — THE END

⌾ LISTEN TO THE END BY SHLOHMO ⌾ Chaos and calm collide in this calamitous track, a dirge of insular sunbeam hope, a decree for celebration burned at the edges and wet from acid rain. Shlohmo's 'THE END' basically works out for the best.

It's a tale of different influences, from the doom of the clanging metallic guitars and their twinkling-in-the-basement arpeggios – feeling a little like Brand New's most despondent moments – to the vital trap thump of the beat with its ripped paper handclaps and ticking white noise hi-hats, it is a beast of everything; thin synths even herald better things with their shining, future bass builds—before, of course, the guitars tear them to shreds.

Dusty pianos tumble decayed in the background, spook house chimes trickle by warped and chopped with radiation shimmer, whilst bass rumbles lo-fi in the distance. As far as a track charting apocalyptic mess goes, Shlohmo's is one of consideration, playing your favourite trap heroes as the windows melt; nonchalance in the face of extinction.

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• 🔔 This crunchy anti-melodrama is the title track taken Shlohmo's THE END, the upcoming album due out 22nd March via Friends of Friends / WEDIDIT. You may even purchase this lovely track and pre-order the album in deluxe vinyl form from Shlohmo's Bandcamp, if you like.

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🐣 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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🐣 TSUKI — LAPSE

As if it wasn't enough to treat us to such a stunning display of textured beat - as if those gorgeous handclaps, delicious organic flesh-and-boiled-sweets sort of texture to it, the streaming liquid sounds on loop gently swaying from left to right, the treble of it rising and falling like that warm state on the cusp of sleep and waking life, the shuffling grit of the let's-dance shakers, the delicate clockwork toy hi-hats, the tambourine's sparkling shiver; as if all that weren't enough, TSUKI had to go and make 'Lapse' even more beautiful, a vessel of delicate decay. (In fact, there is a feel to it that's reminiscent of the percussion in the Gerudo Valley theme from Zelda: Ocarina of Time).

The synths in this track, soft like silky smoke, like tea diffusing in boiling water, croon out a gentle repeating melody, this worn-down moderately decayed texture combining with the unexpected high notes in the pattern to give it a sense of tired-eyed drama. A feeling of watching the world from a window. Slow chords join in, warm and fuzzy, as a new lead melody wiggles in, crooning its spectral heartache, a friendly ghost seeped through your door leaning on your wall sighing beyond belief trembling from the cold; there's love in the warbling melody here, lost love, found love, a feeling of seeing someone passed just once more. But fleeting: in the ceaseless handclaps of the beat there is a sense of motion, or continuation—time rolls on in spite of what your heart has lost.

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• 🔔 This lovely morsel of music appears on this year's WINTER WINDS vol. 5, an annual compilation by collective SVNSET WAVES meant for the chilly weather of winter. It can be purchased and streamed over at their Bandcamp.

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🐣 GHASPER — LUVN U

Future bass is the sort of genre that tends to produce many copies; similar beat sounds are used by different artists, the same fizzy synths flutter in the drops, accompanied by the same pitch-shifted vox. It becomes a paint-by-numbers: the same overall outline, which might be pleasant and interesting, but is ultimately reused in varying colours. This track, 'Luvn U' by US musicmaker Ghaspr however, is something different. Though structurally it follows the build-and-drop foundation, its heart feels in a different place, its noises scream with intrigue, even in the drop which, whilst somewhat typical, uses it to present a gorgeous and delicate antithesis to the more glowering elements of the track.

Yes: the first thing to note here is by and large future bass is pastel-toned, bright, summery, positive. Ghaspr instead conjures a brooding, nocturnal atmosphere, one that's feels quite garage-flavoured - mainly in the rainy-night vocal sample, the shuffling two-step rhythm of the beat, the rumbling modulated bass bulging beneath. It's somewhat sinister, the beat rattling with bristling textures, little insectoid noises wheeling in the background, a spooky music box plink, too. So the drop, with its sudden plasma beam of synth and sense of space, feels like coming up for air; the javelins of sunlight piercing through tracts of overcast sky.

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• 🔔 Ghasper's 'Luvn U' is taken from the musicmaker's Mima EP, which is out now available to stream and purchase if you so wish.

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🐣 SUSPECT — SAY IT WITH YOUR CHEST

Sometimes it is what's left unsaid that is most powerful, and in the case of instrumentals it's what's left unused and untouched: space. A sense of space can give a sense of majesty and grandeur as well as chilling tension and literal expansiveness. And so it is in 'Say It With Your Chest', the latest from London rapper Suspect—synths glassy and glacial, halfway between a slowed-down music box and a warped gamelan, chime out a haunting melody that adds a calculated coldness to the track.

Between these chimes is space, and lots of it, plenty for Suspect's murderous bars, who breathlessly and growling explains the advantages of not talking behind someone's (i.e. his) back – "bet you can't @ me when you're dead" – and challenging you to "say it with your chest," this hook screaming out guttural with reverb and ad-libs yelping in the void of the track. A huge trap-flavoured beat thumps and rattles, the minimalism and delicacy of the instrumental making the venom and aggression of the words all the more effectively brutal: "all I smell is death in the air / it gets dark in the depths."

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• 🔔 This track is out now on RINSE and you can stream it variously here.
• 🔔 The video for 'Say It With Your Chest' was directed by Bafic and Hector Dockrill, who explain the ideas behind the vivid visuals, dark yet colourful: "Suspect wanted to shoot a hood video with colour, so we experimented with lights around Wooly [Walworth Road] — we wanted to capture everything in its correct environment, but within a heightened reality."

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🐣 TÉNÉRÉ — TENEBRIS

Firstly this sounds like waking up from a night of forgotten but disturbing dreams in an ant colony. Something about the beginnings of this track just sound like that, the strange alien opening up of the synths, a reluctant fanfare, the sound of an orchestra tuning up and then fading to these subterranean falling-away sounds, spooky slices of organ-esque synth, wobbly, sheet-with-cutout-eyes-ghost-costume-ish, like a 16-bit depiction of a graveyard. We are in the ant colony and it's huge and filled with intricate little details, the tunnels, the foodstores, the ants themselves rushing through the earthen tunnels propelling themselves along in tweakish meanderings stopping to frantically touch antennae withanother of their kind. And you're there, taller than an ant, but still tiny and small enough to be inside this ant empire. The ticking clock of synth, the rich wonky descending downcast bleeps that ping a signal diminishing in strength as you attempt to escape but head deeper into the tangle of tunnels; it counts down, giving this track a decided sense of urgency.

And this, 'Tenebris' – which is Latin, the ablative form of tenebrae meaning darkness – is created by French producer TÉNÉRÉ. A formic frenzy of footwork, the beat alternately booms below with bassy kicks and scuttles above with insectoid hi-hat scuttlings and the rapid rattling thwacks of snare, and occasional clusters of drum machine bloop-boops tumble through like accidentally looking at somebody for too long and then turning suddenly away. Hollow reverbing neon columns, or columns miniature, like glass straws, give it a sense of futuristic grime coldness, as the beat continues its syncopation; then, then those graveyard chords appear again, but this time as stewards of melancholy ambience, not spooky but wide, sometimes muffled sometimes sharp, careering through with a sort of hopelessness, blank and vacant, which helps paint the unreal walls of this otherworldly den of insects, and coupled with the beat, effuses a sort of resolute determination, a must-do of escaping, of feeling frustrated within your own skin, vigorously worried, the clasp of clawing hands for something recognisable in the dark below ground.

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• 🔔 This lovely slice of music is taken from TÉNÉRÉ's Lux In Tenebris, a two-track offering whose other track 'In Lucem' is a warmer, slower, more sultry number than 'Tenebris'. You can stream and/or purchase this by clicking this hyperlink.
• 🔔 The artwork for the release comes was created by Kinu Kamura, a fitting illustration almost in monochrome that captures an inherent bleakness as well as brightness that dwells at the heart of this track.

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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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🌭 KAMI-O — FEEL

The gradual creeping progression, the unsteady vibe the uneasy feeling, the atmosphere of paranoia, the cyclical introverted mantra of it all, this track is true to its name in that you can do nothing but feel it. The atonal modulation of the sample as it cuts in and out of the static silence as the track begins is unsettling, seeming to occupy a space between traditional notes, and already the speed of the track is evident as it flashes in and out like a nightmare of strobe. A ghoulish call-and-response falls into place as an immediate answer to each sample slice lasers in like plasma on supra-boil, a dislocated feel, jarring, but in so gratifying a way that you wish it'd go on and on glaring and gleaming with its digitised menace.

Glasgow-based producer Kami-O adds yet more elements, sliding them in as the song hurtles on its way forwards, the doof-thud of punchy kicks, uzi-fire hi-hats, and yet more in a plethora of percussion, a hurricane of hissing clicking ticking clacking tapping banging, a rhythmic collage of broken sounds that swish onwards whilst the quivering samples are checked and suppressed and brought back again in simple mathematical dynamics. The subtle rumble of sub, a rasping handclap. Like garage music made with trees and gravel as much as obsolete circuitboards and the troubled souls of broken computers and programming errors, 'Feel' is a phantasm of humans harangued by anxiety and obsession, a foreshadowing of our finding solace in machines.

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• 🔔 It is possible for you to download 'Feel' if you hop over to Kami-O's Bandcamp.

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FADED GHOST – TALK TO ME

Disclaimer: this song is three 3 years old. But since it's only been played on SoundCloud just over 900 times... well, you know, u kno. It feels and sounds new to me. Not fresh necessarily because that's a sound in itself, but it is still in terms of fruit or vegetables "fresh" yes it's fresh. I found it when looking up some of the people/artists/acts who played at this year's JUE | Music + Art festival in Shanghai I liked the name Faded Ghost so that was one of the first musicmakers I checked out but then I just ended up trying to find the sounds of the entire lineup. Faded Ghost is the alias of Shanghai-based singer ChaCha.

Anyway! It was an immense surprise to find something so tantalising tucked away a bit of scroll down Faded Ghost's SoundCloud, a lovely gratifying surprise to discover the Ghost Ark EP which is yeah, 3 years old. But it's so experimental and searching forth for new sounds with inquisitive tendrils of exploration yet so stylised and cohesive in the atmosphere which it creates that for me it deserves for a few more people to know about this music, to hear it and breathe it in.

That is what the first track on this EP is like. It's called 'Talk To Me' and from its first wooo-eee-oooooooooo soft misty eerie chords gliding from note to note, cool and spectral, it is entering a new world, a portal of simultaneous chill and psychic reverberations. Ghostly glittering sounds, cracklings and sumptuous rainstick percussion, humble sub-bass rounding things off, those icy chimes throughout sharp and shivering, the vocals of ChaCha suddenly lancing up through the fog of sounds – growing more intense, more intense, more layers to the voice, vocodering and alarming – the synth chords taking a more abrasive turn, sawing the heavy air and seemingly echoing everywhere, all of it by the end fading out, evaporating slowly into nothingness.

You're sitting lotus position (cross-legged) in the middle of your bed browsing the internet on a notebook. You like a tweet, feels too much to retweet. You never retweet anything.

Your phone hums by your left knee. Picking it up, you note its weight: you always like the weight. Someone's liked a photo on Instagram, the picture of your cat half-asleep in morning sunlight draped over the floor, a study in light and shade. More likes than usual. Notebook forgotten, you trawl Instagram, liking only the crisp, the intentional lo-fi and the well positioned. More likes pour in – pride wells up in you. The cat photo, perfect.

Checking your notifications, it's not the cat photo that's getting all the likes, but all of your photos. Every single photo gets liked in the space of a minute, all from the same account: @ – just @. Blank. Nothing. Your photos are being rapidly liked and unliked, turning on a switch of panic in your mind. You can't block the account. It has no profile.

Your notebook screen has gone black. You press a key, but nothing happens. The power button, mashing the keyboard, nothing, nothing. The phone buzzes uncontrollably.

Locked in position you feel your stomach rise, the feeling of free-fall, your mind fogs, eyes glazing, panic terror panic. The notebook screen now on but dim shows the vague outline of a face, floating. Its eyes unable to keep a steady gaze you cannot help but stare into it, your head getting closer, closer. Drawing nearer, your forehead nearly touching the screen, the woozy eyes of the ghostly face suddenly lock hard on your own eyes, force power strange. Nothing else now, nothing else but these eyes. The buzzing phone is a steady drone louder not only in your ears but everywhere, all around, in your mind, remembered and anticipated and experienced all at once. Still cross-legged somehow but face down pushing your nose and forehead into the notebook screen, straining its hinges, snapping slowly, still the face, still the face – the eyes saying something. So much loneliness, permeating your skin, seeping into your blood, mind saturated, so lonely, no friends, talk to me please PLEASE talk to me please tell me who you are what do you like doing...

A knock at the door and a muffled voice and someone enters. They see a notebook snapped in half and bedsheets in a mess and have no idea.

Or at least that's the kind of scene I envisaged when listening to this one track. The other tracks on Faded Ghost's Ghost Ark EP are well worth your time, too: there's the piano and double-bass of 'I Remember' and its spooky dark dub atmosphere; and last but not least is the eponymous 'Ghost Ark', a subterranean rumble of sub-bass, plinking purring synth glistening into the dark and night noises reverberating, muffled distorted kicks coming in later as the glitter fades and the track dims.

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• Faded Ghost is the project of Shanghai-based singer ChaCha, who is much more active under her original moniker than this one here, so check out her SoundCloud.

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AUSCULTATION – PROMISE YOU'LL HAUNT ME

We begin weaving this basket of words housing our morsel of music for the moment with a smidgen of etymology. Auscultation comes from the Latin word "auscultare" which means "to listen" and refers to the practice of listening to the internal sounds of the body. Whilst less familiar with this more technical term, you will probably know what a stethoscope is; long-named French man René-Théophile-Hyacinthe Laennec invented this instrument in 1816. Apparently the practice of listening to body sounds (lungs, heart, intestines, etc.) has been mentioned in ancient Sanskrit texts, and was also used by ancient Greek physician, Hippocrates.

But enough of this. You'll know it all if you're a medical student and if you're properly interested in getting the meaning of everything you stumble upon, like YES/NO is, you'll google it, right? Whatever. It's time to talk about the musical, non-medical Auscultation and his track 'Promise You'll Haunt Me'. True to its name, there is a definitive feeling of otherworldliness here, of waking up past midnight with your digital clock flashing next to you and a stomach churning sense of the barrier between the realm of the living and the dead oozing and deteriorating, the sweat of spooky summer nights, that monumental feeling of mere minutes seeming to be hours as you wait for something to appear, eyes wide and strained into the heavy glowering pitchblackness of your bedroom.

This sound is in the gently decayed ectoplasmic merging synth chords, pulsating through a hypnotic series of loops whose progressions are joyful yet jarring, relaxed yet maniacal – the nightly breath-hold anticipating a sojourn from a spirit, a mix of curiosity and sustained terror, of happiness and regretful longing. Robust bass columns in beneath, matching the chords, soon joined by thudding kicks, lo-fi muted handclaps, and nocturnal spookily jangling clanks of cymbals, not to mention the high register chirruping melodies that shine lifee-giving and springlike in the more regular chord progressions. But there is an intermittent switching between these "regular" sections and parts that exhibit a slightly more unhinged collection of chords, clouds of shuddering fear or dreadful anticipation in this general blue sky of happiness, heart flutterings as the door creaks, or something taps on your window.

The aesthetic of this track, a sort of half-submerged quality that gives everything a warm veil of misty fuzz, serves to add to the idea that its title suggests, a semi-decayed veneer that speaks of nostalgia and bygone, happier days. Whatever its connection to its title, whether the title came after the music or if its sound was inspired by those words, it remains an arresting, intriguing track that nevertheless speaks of phantomatic trysts, longing and loneliness after death, love crossing the gulf between here and the unknown.

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• 'Promise You'll Haunt Me' arrives as the first track from Auscultation's cassette release on 100% Silk due tomorrow, 14th August, called L'étreinte Imaginaire ("The imaginary embrace" in English). Track titles continue a theme of emotivity — Side A: 'Drop Off', 'Black Window', 'Composure Fog'; Side B: 'Vanda', 'Stranded Love', and 'Lost You In The Fog'. You can get it here (click).

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PALE – SILENCE (EYEDRESS REMIX)

The shifting & shuffling night-drive R&B of London-based Pale's recent track 'Silence' is beautiful; synth chords drenched in chorus seem to laser through ur mind with pulsar hypnotism riding the plasma length of each resounding blast; minimalist guitar reverbs with cold sharp twangs of introverted sound; vocals, smooth and wracked with heartfelt longing — for what? Silence? Who knows.

This has now been acquired by Filipino musicmaker Eyedress for a suitably hazy remix. This guy, whose alias is a phonetic rendition for all those who would mispronounce his actual name: Idris (Vicuña), is well known for his powerful, ghost-flavoured originals and remixes alike. And in the same vein as his past efforts, 'Silence' becomes a different beast.

Soaked with off-kilter sweeps of wobbling, grinding synth, the track is set adrift a turbulent undercurrent of clap collections, urgent hi-hats and syncopated snares, beset with an occasional near-supersonic scream whirling about like some nightmare flying insect that's like a horrifically sized cranefly but with a death-coloured human head and long flowing greasy hair. The vocals are now stretched from their original pitch, wrenched through the nocturnal sludge of Eyedress's witchy sound for an unsettling decoration atop this subtly stormy sound.

• The original 'Silence' is taken from Pale's recent The Comeback EP, a four-song showcase of downtempo beauty seasoned with R&B lilts. You'll like it, probably.

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IN LOVE WITH A GHOST FEAT. ECHO – FUSIONAL

I dunno how or I can't remember how I stumbled across Parisian singer-songwriter ECHO – it was a while ago. I followed her on Twitter, occasionally checking her SoundCloud; all I know is that she's good. For instance, you may want to check out her Midnight Chronicles EP, released recently on French label Cosmonostro.

Called 'Fusional' it is a creation of fellow Parisian In Love With A Ghost, a purveyor of substantially chilled sounds – as you can instantly tell from the endlessly arpeggiated harp sounds at the beginning of this track. But as soon as the robust beat drops, thick with bass and the crack-rasp of snare, it becomes a different beast: an odyssey of cool plucked ambience, like a fresh breeze, paired with the stifling heaviness of trap-inspired beats, a soothing yet spooky adventure through musical phantasms.

And of course there is the voice of ECHO, singing with an endearing lilt and layered with a pitch-shifted equivalent that follows her like a murky shadow. Her brisk delivery has an almost rap-like air to it, following a simple melody, evoking calm-faced ghosts singing with otherworldly beauty; it's hard not to like the way she sings "So many clouds above me…" or "I want to free myself from this / I'm so in love with a lie" – and with that sludgy low-end doppelganger layer almost growling beneath, it's perfect for this track.

It comes from In Love With A Ghost's aptly named Love Ghost EP, something that lives up to its title – in the same way that 'Fusional' does it, these four songs demonstrate not only phantomatic vibes but also those of styles often used in songs of love and lust, think R&B slo-jams distorted, played backwards through haunted apartment blocks, and you're pretty much there. It feels sad, but it also feels accepting of that sadness – a nice mix.

• Download this song on a name-your-price basis from In Love With A Ghost's Bandcamp (CLIIIICKY CLICKY).

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SHAM AN – GHOSTS [FREE DOWNLOAD]

Ahh… so we meet again, SHAM AN! Last time we heard from this Montpellier-dwelling producer, he was vibing out an unofficial Burial remix, which I said was basically "fluidity chopped and punctuated with a slo-house beat comprising of cricket-like percussion snapping snares and erratic-heartbeat kicks." You can imagine it, right? Dark and ambient. Previous to this, if you're interested in looking into Mr SHAM AN's backstory, he remixed a song, 'Voices Of War' on fellow Frenchman Tealeaf's Yugen EP.

But now! But now: we have NOT a remix from Pierre-Emmanuel Récio (the real name of this musicmaker), but an entirely original song, 'Ghosts'.

As neutrally spooky and expansively ethereal as you'd expect a true ghost to be, the track is firstly flooded with subtle waves of ambient, fog-like synth; the first spotting of a ghost, when your blood chills and your spine seems to want to jump from your trembling body. But soon wisps of synth melody make their way in softly, combined with heartwarming strings that send an all-clear signal – the phantom is not as terrifying as you thought it was; in fact, it's speaking pleasantly to you. At 1:40, all sense of fear dissipates with an almost comically wilting pitch shift.

The rest of the song rolls trappishly with the bright percussion that'd been the order of the day from the beginning, rollicking hi-hats and shining cymbals, which in the first half combined with kicks to provide dynamic pulses of energy behind the song's grey, misty exterior. There's one particular word that I'd describe this song as, and that's "pure". Pure. It sounds pure. Refreshing. Well-balanced. Not too dark and spooky but not utterly euphoric either; it harbours a relaxed spirit of clarity.

This was premiered exclusively on a site that doesn't even exist yet, Mayne – a France-based (and perhaps France-centric, too, but who knows) "MUSIC SHARING PLATFORM / BLOG / INDEPENDENT LABEL". Despite not having an actual www site, there is a SoundCloud, Twitter & Facebook account with which you may get acquainted if you feel like it.

• Download this brush with the afterlife from Mayne's FB page (cliquez!)

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VULKANO SPIDER SPIDER [FREE HALLOWEEN DOWNLOAD]

Hi everyone. Whoa. Feels like it's Halloween today? I'm sorry, I'm being sarcastic. It doesn't feel like it at all. I'm sitting looking out the window at a pretty dull day half-watching Russia Today considering a cigarette even though my mouth has been numbed by a too-strong coffee. In case you're wondering, I usually go for Al Jazeera but my TV has decided not to find it today - maybe it's a sign of Halloween after all. Halloween. Abby Martin certainly makes you think doesn't she?

Anyway, here is like, a Halloween treat or something like that. Maybe it's a trick. It's a bit of both. Rather than trick or treat it's more like "trick AND treat" (trick 'n' treat). Basically, it's by Vulkano and it's called 'Spider Spider'. Despite being trois mois old, this Swedish duo have given this song free download status for Halloween, something akin to offering up a virgin for sacrifice but with less gore and more music. I last wrote about these two - real names: Lisa Pyk-Wirström and Cissi Efraimsson - in July when their song 'Vision Tricks' sparked my interest; it called to mind the unnerving minimalism of The Cure's 'A Forest', complete with thick and rumbling bassline to add a bit of menace.

This song though is like a dark sound poem illustrating the movements or thought patterns of an actual spider. The dull thudding bass is definitely a spooky sound, almost like some homemade instrument made of human bones in a dodgy old shed in the middle of some overgrown garden of a derelict mansion. Or something like that. It's blissfully simple, following the same notes and patterns throughout, more like a creepy dance song than a pop song, the repetition like the frenzy of a cult-level mantra set to thumping kick drums, rolling toms and rattling-chain tambourines.

Cissi's vocals yelp in unaffected clarity, injected with the same passionate quirkiness that the music exudes. Opening, she sings, "I am out on spider hunt, I collect them, I collect them" - a line that drips with a light weirdness in which the rest of her lyrics are soaked. It's a fun song. Not pretending to be or even straying near the realms of "goth" or anything like that, it's interesting to see something music with such an unconventional spirit so near to pop - Vulkano recently went on tour supporting Kate Nash. Imagine that!

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FROST SOMETHING NEW

Dark and moody. That's the direction of a lot of electronic music now. Granted, it's still kind of sitting in the corner like a withering wallflower, but it's gaining popularity. What better way to get you dancing than out of some sense of vague fear. Do not run from your demons, dance with them. Is that a saying? No, it isn't.

But in any case, here's Frost with something new. Got you there didn't I? Because the song's called 'Something New'. And I said "something new". They're, like, the same. It's the latest single from their album Radiomagnetic (released September 2012), and it's a good one indeed. Gnawing at you with ice cold trance synths yet keep keeping it all cushioned with some sub-zero bass, and getting you all anxiously excited with frenetic hi hats on speed, the vocals speaking like a ghost through a radio, the song is an unexpected foot-tapper with some lovely screeching build-ups and fading come-downs that keep this 8-minute doozie flowing and interesting. Layering helps, too, like the snare sound later on in the song that sounds like some phantom of the past dragging its feet along concrete corridors. Spooky and chilly but cool. I'd check their album out on Spotify, too, if I were you, plenty more beats and clever electro trickery await you.

The bizarre video fits the song perfectly. But what's it all about? Well...

The footage is part of an obscure documentary project entitled ‘Ghost Radio Hunter’ – a collaboration between Carl Critical, Russian underground filmmaker Kostya Shamshin and Frost, covering an expedition into the Arctic looking for the source of mysterious radio signals that were the inspiration for the making of the album ‘Radiomagnetic’.

There you go. Frost are Norwegian, by the way, and have actually been around for 1997 - of course, they're pretty well known in their motherland, but for us their sounds are as new as a polished baby.

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Frost on Facebook
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Frost's official site

CLAUDE VONSTROKE LE FANTÔME FEAT JAW

I continue my obsession with the voice otherwise known as Jaw with another track that's been recommended to me by Teki Latex. It's a song by Claude VonStroke, (real name Barclay Crenshaw, hailing from San Fransisco, USA) called 'Le Fantôme'. It sure is a big tune.

Claude VonStroke himself is a pretty extensively known for his music. He's "headlined almost every major club, festival and basement after-party in the world," so I can safely say that this guy knows what works when it comes to music designed to make you dance. This song, featuring the vocal gems of Jaw, is absolutely no exception.

'Le Fantôme' indeed does have all the trappings of a toe-tapping, feet-moving wonder. And that's what it is really. Starting off with this beefy techno kick that ignites the beat and fires the rest of the song into life, the path ahead is a laid-back and funky minimalist house-style furore all the way to the end of the track. For example, the build-up at 4:40 and the nonchalant dropping back in of the beat at 5:10 is such a brilliantly thought-through moment.

The organ-style synths that get louder and louder as the song progresses, and the whispers every now and again, reflect the slightly sinister atmosphere floating above it like a dusty ghost - but a dusty ghost who not only likes to but also knows how to dance. He's doing a two-step now, can you see?



That selfsame spooky (Ghostbusters-style) atmosphere is bolstered by the splendid vocals of Jaw, which I could really listen to all day and and night. He sings about being your worst nightmare / your best dream / behind the mirror / when you scream - at least I think that's what it sounds like. He also declares about a third of the way through: I'm a ghost. The effect on the vocals does well to make them sound as wobbly and warbling as possible without losing the meaning. This is what I imagine ghosts to sound like, to be honest.

So it's very spooky. But with such an affable bassline, it couldn't be any spookier than spooky. Kind of like a techno house response to Michael Jackson's 'Thriller'. Spookstep.

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• More Claude VonStroke sounds on his SoundCloud
• Here he is on Facebook
• Wikipedia page about Claude VonStroke
• Myspace?
• Follow Claude VonStroke on Twitter
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