🐣 JAPOR — OH HEART OF GOLD

This is an enigma of a track, a home recording with choppy ambient noise both warming this morsel of music and making it feel exposed, a simultaneous lonely feeling sinking behind the superficial fuzzy texture of it. With that in mind, 'Oh Heart Of Gold' by the equally enigmatic Japor seeps into your consciousness not like most lo-fi tracks with their hearts set on triggering your nostalgia, but more anti-nostalgia: a true representation of lo-fi. Live, very raw, and unedited.

It pulls no punches in this regard. Listening to 'Oh Heart Of Gold' is like listening to a slice of reality - a lingering twinkle of guitar plays throughout, unconcerned for tempo or a steady rhythm, becoming more agitated as the song continues until the rattling keyboard drum preset kicks in, when the guitar morphs into a sparse offhand groove, something that morphs into something more legible by around the 5-minute mark. Throughout there is a percussive thump - the unheeded sound of a hand or foot setting off the drumbeat.

Unimpeded by pretence, Japor has created their own unconventional type of music, and with its looping feel and the stream-of-consciousness guitar - sort of 'automatic' playing: a surrealist approach - it feels hypnotic as much as incidental.

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• 🔔 Classification seems to play a big part in the music of Japor. For example, description for this track on YouTube is:

  "This is my instrumental live single "Oh Heart Of Gold (Guitar Drum Instrumental)". It has an early eighties modernised rock guitar melody. (It is best listened on headphones)."

  Similarly, the description for another track reads as follows:

  "This is my live single "It Is A Dark Time". It has a hard rock guitar based tone. It has a hard lyrics addition. It is a blended contrast. (It is best listened on headphones)."

  His Twitter, in likewise fashion, seems to follow a pattern of four or five tweets that vary in subject matter but are structurally identical. It's a mystery.

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📠
☟ Japor Internet Presence ☟
facebook ⚘ soundcloud ⚘ tunecore ⚘ official site ⚘ twitter ⚘ pinterest ⚘ youtube ⚘ reverbnation ⚘ myspace ⚘ linkedin

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MOSLEM PRIEST REAL SWIMMIN'

Take a little look outside of your own culture once in a while and you will find that, truly, people aren't that different in other cultures. People are, at the end of the day and when all has been said and done, people. Wherever you go. So, of course, people are creative right across the globe – there are no exceptions. Someone somewhere is always making something interesting, in all forms of art – and for the sake of this site, we'll say ESPECIALLY music. Especially. Music, believe it or not, exists outside of the UK, outside of the USA, outside of whatever country you're from. One good example is Moslem Priest.

Real name Farhan Yassin, Moslem Priest lives and makes music in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. His name – curious and awesome as it is – comes from an incident that occurred when he was in London once, when one of my fellow countrymen yelled "Muslim priest!" at him in the street; he liked it and it stuck. I stumbled across his music when I was having a look around KL-based magazine, Gumball, for whom I also write a weekly (mostly...) article. It was his latest track that interested me the most, so I'd really like to share it with you: here is 'Real Swimmin'' by Moslem Priest.

What you'll notice at first is the strong emphasis on samples of all kinds: a constant background noise of running water attacked by the sound of a phone ringing. Then, of course, the song's namesake, the rhythmic vocal sample of "Real, real, real real real" makes its appearance throughout the track. Wobbling soft synths wibble their way through, becoming more heavily layered and intense as the track progresses; clocks provide an unrelenting tick-tock; gunshots take the place of snare hits.

It's a Dadaist take on hip hop: the down-South beats with the extreme sub-bass thundering throughout and skiffling hi-hats combine with all these strange samples – there's even a dog barking at some points – to paint the kind of landscape you'd see in a dream of some surreal domestic situation. This is a bold collage of sounds that booms right into your brain, leaving delicate touches to those who believe experimentation should be subtle; Moslem Priest does it differently.

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Listen to Moslem Priest on SoundCloud
Follow Moslem Priest on Twitter
Check Moslem Priest on Tumblr

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