ANADOL & MARIE KLOCK — RENTRER À LA MAISON

Turkish sound artist Anadol (Gözen Atila) and French writer-musician Marie Klock have teamed up once again teamed up to create an upcoming album, Manivelles (May 15). The first single, 'Rentrer à la maison', also arrives in video form, a wonderous home movie-style affair in grainy VHS quality that very much fits the vibe of the song — the drear brick walls of the suburbs; driveways and gardens; dad is washing the dog.

Klock sings of the trials we face when confronted with that most comforting yet most alienating of things: returning home. How far we come only to arrive home again! Whether it's Christmas or someone's birthday or popping over for a cup of tea, to sit around the same table and hear the same stories and feel the same way as the child version of you all over again — a bittersweet tragicomedy (or comitragedy?).

With characteristic Klock humour, the lyrics for 'Rentrer à la maison', for the chorus at least, translate to

Whenever you go home
You start off with great intentions
And then, shove ‘em up your ass
Nice and deep, nice and deep

For some, I imagine that sounds about right. And with the vocal melody and the accompanying soundscape, the song has the melodic drone of a moralistic folksong or classic chanson, while during the verse the vocal skips over the lines like beat poetry.

Atila's instrumental work features time-worn analogue synth and thin drum machine beat, the kind of sounds that might emerge from a dusty childhood keyboard inherited from some uncle or another. It's as if the pair, one having accompanied the other to their parents' house, actively composed and recorded the song during such a visit, barricaded in a tiny time capsule of a bedroom and won't emerge until everyone has mercifully gone to bed.

✧

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• 🔔 The video for 'Rentrer à la maison' was created by video artist and film-maker Timo Schierhorn and was produced by Hamburg-based filmmaker collective Auge Altona. Unfortunately we do not have a name for the dog. [Edit: The dog's name is Fips, and his owner was Schierhorn's grandfather; it's a special posthumous appearance from them both.]
• 🔔 Anadol & Marie Klock's new album Manivelles is scheduled for release 15th May on Hamburg label Pingipung. You may pre-order it in vinyl and digital form from Bandcamp.

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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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CUUSHE — MAGIC

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Cuushe is back. Recently she announced her upcoming album WAKEN via the fresh vitality of its first single, 'Hold Half'. This time around, it's 'Magic' that faces up to the grey piercing light of morning.

A slow steamroller of a beat thuds as the propulsion to 'Magic', rusted metallic percussion ticking faintly at its mechanical heart. A set of heavy-hearted piano chords plays a downcast reverb-laden refrain; "I just wanna die.." Cuushe's voice whispers from this fog of sound. Craggy synths crack in mournful reply, a glistening gloomy call-and-response.

Starting quietly, almost from another perspective, later in the track her vocals rise up, outraged: "Magic... Why are you so silent?" A question perhaps posed to the once-dreaming individual now scrutinised by reality. Lightness eclipsed. This refrain cuts through a wash of intense sounds, synths glittering and roaring together with the clatter of a bright guitar riff — a combination of playful concreteness and fantasy synthetic noise that runs through 'Magic'.

It's all been brought to life with a video by director Tao Tajima. On a backdrop of footage filmed in the wilds of Tibet, it's a tale of ghostly girls tied with string to insistent flapping birds, drawn in their phantomic pastels by sometime Cuushe collaborator Yoko Kuno. The music — mysterious yet methodical in its makeup — matches the stark marching mountains and vast empty tundra.

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• 🔔 'Hold Half' is taken from Cuushe's forthcoming new album Waken, set for release 20th November on her label home flau. Pre-order it over on the flau bandcamp.

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YMIR — RADIATION

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The music of Ymir delights in providing a soundtrack. Though it's what's being soundtracked that differs from most theme songs, environmental and accidental music, OSTs, even vaporwave excursions: it's simply a soundtrack of the experiment that is involved in its very creation. Very meta.

Accordingly, 'Radiation' is a glistening arrangement of destructed synth, the flickering of a door sliced into the fabric of time, a haphazard slash spilling out light in clutches of strobe and stage-show sparks. It's close to closing, or has not been opened correctly, so knowing whether this quantum fissure is an interdimensional or simply an intertemporal or interspatial passageway, is impossible. All we know is its resounding, soft glimmer in the background, beneath the crackle of Geiger counter distortion.

Fitting the growth and decay of the otherworldly ambient track, the video features the hypnotic spin of an object in a constant state of flux and decay. "Both [the track and the video] play with different types of distortion," Ymir says via email.

"For the music, I focused on creating a kind of organically bubbling, on-the-brink-of-overload sound. For the video, I entered the parameters of each frame by hand, rendering them all separately so that I could interrupt them at various stages of completion, and combine them to create a stuttering, glitchy video."

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• 🔔 Last week yes/no was proud to premiere Ymir's celestial track 'Stair'. Alternatively, or additionally, you can also check out more of Ymir's unreleased electronic work on his SoundCloud.

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🐣 KAZU — SALTY

⌾ LISTEN TO KAZU, SALTY ⌾

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With its delicious blooping bumps of bass drum and pastoral soft sounds rising in thumb-daubed pastel arpeggios, 'Salty' is a mist of sea air, a coastal breeze, an idyll of freshness swirling around gnarled trees; it is also urgent, a bubbling of thoughts, gradually turning into something that feels almost panicked.

"hurry up" KAZU sings towards the end, whilst sounds become like short breaths, spots of light in your vision, being unsure where to look anymore. Cells vibrating like molecules.

That KAZU is Kazu Makino, co-founder of rock Blonde Redhead, and 'Salty' - so named for its cryptic and statemently loveable hook, "i bet you're salty" - is the first track to be taken from her upcoming debut solo album, Adult Baby.

With credits on the single a starter-pack rollerdex of names ranging from Brazilian percussionist Mauro Refosco to composing legend Ryuichi Sakamoto, the instrumental for 'Salty' is unquestionable. Plumes of lightness, trinkets of percussion, analogue loops and dives that breathe extra vitality into the track. Though KAZU, with her expressionist lyrics and distinctive, rounded tones, emotes enough for multiple lifetimes throughout.

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• 🔔 'Salty' is taken from the upcoming debut from KAZU, Adult Baby, which is set for release on Kazu Makino's brand new imprint of the same name later this year. It will be distributed by !K7, by the way.
• 🔔 The video for 'Salty', a concept of Makino herself, was directed, filmed and edited by Paride Ambrogi and Jonas Ranner in Elba, Italy.

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🎥 CHAI — CURLY ADVENTURE

In the video for Nagoya-based band CHAI's 'Curly Adventure', curly hair literally becomes synonymous with adventure; the protagonist as animated by LA artist Sean Solomon daydreams the lyrics of the four-piece's thunderous ode to curly hair.

"Long long time ago, my hair is troubling me…" the song begins with singer Mana spinning these hair-based lyrics composed by bassist (and art director) Yuuki.

With the fizzing-crash of the drums alongside a galloping funk of bass, plasma watery synth shoots through this track distorted and fluid all at the same time, a storm of summer-summoning sound; half '90s-remembered sparkly sun-soaked jam, half explosive reaction against the slump of frustration.

Lines in CHAI's song like "curly hair: that is amazing" and "curly hair means being yourself" can resonate with anyone having to alter themselves for the sake of uniformity. And this is reflected in Solomon's video for 'Curly Adventure', with its carefree spirit, popping colours, winding roads and undersea treasure hunts.

Watch it below, obviously.

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• 🔔 'Curly Adventure' is taken from CHAI's 2019 album Punk.

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🐣 YEULE — POCKY BOY

Firstly those synths, warped and wild, wrap the track in wreathes of rolling fog, a heavysoft sound that ushers you into this sunken world. Grainy and cutting, like a rain of razor wire, this is the cloud on which you sit throughout the song, the vantage point for witnessing yourself like an out-of-body experience. 'Pocky Boy' is all about this atmosphere, tender but cutting, harsh.

The voice of yeule adds to this sense of sea-mist, this mind miasma, the curdling of nebulous thoughts that end up as "voices in my... head." Her vocal reverbs into itself, a series of cyclical ruminations, sheaves of a diary ripped out scratching together dusty and fragmenting into a distant breeze, incoming.

Ultimately though there is this violent ambience, this scathing wall of grey noise punctuated by the pastel of those synths (struck by their stumbling rhythm, their picking-up-the-pieces irregularity, the head-in-hands voidsome chords of it), but it is given motion by the thump of a meaty house kick: the simple secret to continuing with life. The easter egg of a gun cocking.

And yeule's own voice, looped, echoes itself, a frenzy of movement—by the end, we return to those chords by themselves, ready to begin again; foreboding instead of finality.

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• 🔔 So the 'Pocky Boy' video is above, of course, and features instant messaging, some urban exploration and a little bit of pocky play, too. Directed by friend-of-the-artist Rabbit Sashimi (actually a thing; though we cannot find a jot of a soul online), it is described by the Singapore-and-London-based yeule as follows:

  "At the dawn of the new age, civilization has been wiped out by an alien race that can shape-shift into the humans that used to walk the earth centuries before. The aliens attempt to grasp the differences of gender and form that humans beings had, even though they do not know the difference because of their nature as non-binary beings."

• 🔔 This track was actually released back in April via Zoom Lens, so you may straightaway download 'Pocky Boy' here, should you wish to do so.
• 🔔 Aaand... yeule will be playing her first LA show on 23rd August, 7:30pm - 11pm, as part of Zoom Lens-curated night Malform. The location of this show is TBA.

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🐣 LYCORISCORIS — FLIGHT

Bustling and crackling with organic buzz and with a heartbeat thudding like the constancy of living and breathing against the melancholic backdrop of the ever-shifting seasons, the rising strings all emotive and tear-jerking, a never-ever feel to it, a will-I-ever feel to it (a la Jon Hopkins) this is Tokyo-based Lycoriscoris aka real life human Yunosuke Senoo. The motion of it suits the name 'Flight', but other than the clear image of something literally flying, what else do we have here?

Well, with its trickling percussion like icicles melting, and the frosty frosty touches of piano sparkling like sun on snow summons a stark landscape, wintry, but with the hope of spring and summer on the horizon, the rising nature of those strings are like the possibility of new life; a mix of depression and hope, it charts the cusp of the year where life teeters between holed-up against the snow and taking tentative steps below freshly unfurling leaves.

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• 🔔 This is the title track taken from Flight, Lycoriscoris' debut album released at the end of May this year via Anjunadeep. You can download or stream it via your favourite service.

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🐣 CURXES — THE STARS, LIKE DUST

This is the tightrope walk between nostalgia and a sort of despairing doom, the warmth of uncovering objects entangled with happy feelings yet in the miasmic embrace of the baleful knowledge that it is but a fleeting glimpse into the past; this is 'The Stars, Like Dust' by UK musicmaker Curxes, where the synths skew and fizz with something memorial, the beat – dusty, sharp, abrasive – ticks and stutters with mechanical stamina, where the bass bulges in ominous waves.

Formerly a trio, the now solo Curxes (aka real human Roberta Fidora) herself spoke to us via email to explain the track, which she admitted she wanted to sound "somewhere between ocean and space organ waves." And there is that sense of organic vs. synthetic broiling in the almost living-and-breathing irregularity with how the synths dip and peak minutely but remain zingy and metallic.

The lyrics are desperately alive, calling from this pocket of bright, submerged flavours, this whirling and swirling of sound—the words feel like they've arrived via signals that are lightyears away, rebounding and crackly, crooning with nonchalant distress about "an age of infinite dread."

"The lyrics were written at a period when I felt that the entire country was going through a transitional phase and not for the better, fuelled by misplaced nostalgia," explains Fidora. "I think many of us have our own nostalgia to deal with, but generally it isn't anything that has the ability to distort or disrupt people's lives." And so 'The Stars, Like Dust' is a cocktail of that childhood yearning for the stars and that deathly, adult fear of what we might find there; the reluctant progression of vast swathes of humanity.

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• 🔔 Curxes tells us a bit more about the creation of the eccentrically British visuals for 'The Stars, Like Dust' - complete with triangle sandwiches, a chihuahua, and reclusive behaviour.

  "I worked with portrait photographer and 50s sci-fi enthusiast Rob Luckins to make a video based on our collective love of space travel, which seems to be undergoing a resurgence, maybe because it gives people the hope that they can escape the things to which they don't belong."

• 🔔 This song is taken from the 2017 Curxes album Gilded Cage.

• 🔔 You may stream and purchase 'The Stars, Like Dust' via Bandcamp.

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🐣 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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🐣 RYAN HEMSWORTH — FOUR SEASONS FEAT. NEWAGEMUZIK

Honestly it was a surprise to hear about this. It’s a very UK sound that internet music progeny Ryan Hemsworth has created here, a fusion of pop softness and afrobeats rhythm. Gently clanging icy digital chords summon songs of yesteryear, while columns of sub-bass give it that deeply rumbling contemporary sound; more of that chilly atmosphere comes from that twinkling intricate refrain that Hemsworth casts over the top, like a layer of frost sparkling in the sun. That icy delicacy belies the warmth here, helped not only by the full-bodied nature of the track, but by the smooth vocals of featuring artists, NewAgeMuzik.

The North London duo bring rich vocals, turned lightly plasma with subtle autotune, to the bumping afrofusion beat, a clatter of percussion that clicks and ticks which give an extra dimension to the familiar swung beat that we hear in African-flavoured music. The vocals, full of raw laid-back soul, giving human heart and character to the technical splendour of the instrumental. But the beat has that cute touch, rounded and miniature in places, and its warm-chilly contrast is a combination that makes this track light and upbeat despite its bass heaviness; the skitter and brightness of ornamentation right next to the sweat and heat of intimate close-quarters rhythms.

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• 🔔 'Four Seasons' is out already, and it's from Ryan Hemsworth's upcoming new Elsewhere.
• 🔔 The video was directed by London-based Sammy Shoots, and stars Kamo and Prince of NewAgeMuzik, matching the chill vibes of the track itself.

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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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🐣 MEN I TRUST — I HOPE TO BE AROUND

Much like the wispy incense smoke of the last time we heard from the Montreal trio, Men I Trust have created a delicate soundtrack to daydreaming in 'I hope to be around'. Key to its success as wonderful song are the four elements that comprise it: the bass plays plasma-textured, deep and modulating, this what is essentially a rock bassline, brooding in pentatonics; its string sister the guitar is an occasional ripple on the surface of a glassy pond, wobbly, cold and clear all at the same time.

The drums tick throughout toeing a line between meticulous drum machine and '60s minimal, thin and precise. And the vocals – wide and whispering and wistful; the Three W's of Wonderful – send this wraith of swirling around your head, the lack of variegation and the lack of range, as well as the repetition, make this a haunting mantra, its gaseous nature slipping into your ears and turning your thoughts to tomorrow and yesterday and nowhere ever all at once—"I dream of my future / Remote from time bounds / Becoming myself / Without any end."

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• 🔔 You may download Men I Trust's lovely, thoughtful track from their bandcamp.
• 🔔 The video for 'I hope to be around' was conceived and directed by the band themselves. "We filmed the music video in Montreal’s beautiful neighbourhoods and landmarks," they explain, "of which many seem to be frozen in time around the end of the 60’s."

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🎥 RARE FACTURE — VERSE GIRL

This track, with its indelible europop atmosphere, is wave of euphoria, but dimly lit and soaked with rain. Icy chords wobbly softly, snowy and glacial, sadly fall like an electronic hail, strings spin tension, descending icicles of sound sparkle, a cradle of sharp throwback arpeggios whirling over a pulsing beat and the propellant bass both bumping the track into overdrive below the stuttering serenity of the track. There is this serenity to it, somewhere in there, the light at the end of the tunnel of urgency that it does summon, and it sounds like this for good reason.

Salt Lake City duo Rare Facture tell us that 'Verse Girl' was inspired by women "who have ended up in abusive or controlling relationships but can't escape." Continuing, they explained further over email: "It's about the reality of there being a happier world out there with someone who loves you for you. I guess in the end, like much of the songs we write, 'Verse Girl' is about love."

This simultaneous heartbreaking and heartwarming quality, brightness and darkness, energetic and unfathomably kinetic trance sound yet downcast and slow-motion, the dual nature of love spun with throwback synth-pop that feels as timeless and as timeworn as the inspiration for the track itself. The duo went on to talk about the video for the track itself, which in its monochrome and snow-filled way reflects the song's lyrical and sonic elements—and, in yet more echoes of the track's inspiration, in a case of "art imitating reality," the duo tells us, "the girl in the video is literally the girl the song is about."

Euphoric and dysphoric, the hard, sad realities of life and the specks of hope that come with it are reflected with this digital fantasy of sound.

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• 🔔 'Verse Girl' by Rare Facture is out now courtesy of Groove Distortion, and can be purchased via iTunes and also Amazon.

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🎥 GIANNI PACI — IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT [初演 • PREMIERE]

Gianni Paci tells us that he wrote 'In The Middle Of The Night' "at a time when many of the pillars of stability in my life were crashing and burning like it was the end of the Roman Empire." And with that in mind the savagery of the song doesn't just blast satisfyingly out: it makes sense.

"Rather than turning inward," he continued. "I took all of that anger and incredulity and channeled it out into this kind of nasty send off."

There's the guitar, turning in on itself, the exploding distortion. And not to mention the drums, which similarly pound their way supercharged and fuzzed-out between the roaring open chords and the regular crunch of that deathly palm-muting. The raw energy, particularly of the drums which sound as though they're being played in the room next door but still loud and popping enough to be featured, is delicious.

But alongside the incendiary drums and the gravely sweeps of abrasive guitar, the vocals play out in a different way. Not only does that guitar summon something dark in its quality, there is something in what it plays also, something sultry, close to flamenco in key and rhythm, which combined with the distortion gives it a harsh, metal edge. Further mix this with the crooning vocals and you have this subversion of doo-wop flavoured garage rock which has the vocals falling in line with that tone when Paci sings the titular mantra "In the middle of the night, it's a scary place / In the middle of the night, won't you keep me safe."

'In The Middle Of The Night' is jarring – not beautiful, soaring, heavenly – but clashing, verging on strange. But it is a fruit punch: Paci's voice spins catchy pop-leaning lovelorn lyrics, parts of the song are familiar – the pre-chorus "So what am I to do?" – and this is the sweet fruit; simmering throughout however is the punch, pungent and pugilistic, intoxicating, woven with overdrive and broken wavelengths. Together it makes for this wonderful inversion of norms which has arisen from what Paci himself calls "feelings of great loss and abandonment."

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• 🔔 The video for this track, echoing the decayed aesthetic of the music, was directed, shot, produced and edited by Gianni Paci.
• 🔔 'In The Middle Of The Night' is taken from Gianni Paci's I Tried To Right My Wrongs, But I Made A Left EP, which is out now. You may purchase it from Bandcamp.

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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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🐣 SHIGETO — DETROIT PART II

Four years following the release of previous album No Better Time Than Now, Shigeto has produced a follow-up to 'Detroit Part I', an almost symphonic morsel of music, a journey of a track in which a brooding atmosphere is beset with bristling sounds, a melancholy atmosphere where a sense of downcast dystopia looms somewhere in the lament of it all. 'Detroit Part II' is a different beast entirely. If the first part of this sonic homage to the Michigan city charts abandoned buildings and boarded up houses and forgotten assembly lines, the dereliction of Detroit, all angular and atmospheric, then the second part is humanistic, living-and-breathing, focused on how people react to their surroundings in terms of art: its musical culture and heritage.

The track thumps along with a dusty wheezing organic thud of a kick, luscious handclaps and muffled snare rimshots and delicious clopping woodblocks and shuffling shakers punctuating and decorating this subtle driving force of a beat, a tangible waterfall of textures. Soft synth bass plunges fuzzy giving the track a wandering breezy groove, the meandering jazz feel of it augmented by saxophone peals that prize open the heart of the song and allow life to flow forth. Barely discernible, a mist of gentle keys gloss glassy nebulous aching and accepting, merging with the whispering tones of the vocal sample that reverbs into the streaming percussive beat and its homely comforting sense of space. This is a change of heart, the silver lining of the cloud, the other side of the coin.

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• 🔔 'Detroit Part II' is taken from upcoming Shigeto album The New Monday, which will be released via Ghostly International on 7th October.
• 🔔 The suitably atmospheric video for the track, a production of The Work Inc., shows Zach Saginaw (real name of Shigeto) driving around Detroit and recording the track in glorious greyscale. It was directed and produced by Brandon Rottman.
• 🔔 Here's the yes/no review of Shigeto's 2013 album No Better Time Than Now.

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☟ Shigeto Internet Presence ☟
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🐣 TOYA DELAZY — KEKEKE

The swirling hypnotic synth, the gentle nature of it, makes you feel that you're in good hands, that you're in a safe, comfortable place; these cushions of sound, these soft fluttering filtered noises, fading into the negative space left lovingly at the heart of 'Kekeke', providing the perfect backdrop for the vocals of London-based South African musicmaker and singer, Toya Delazy. Sung in Zulu, her mother tongue, the artist channels her great-grandmother – actual Zulu royalty, Princess Constance Magogo KaDinuzulu, "one of the first indigenous female composers," she tells us – by infusing the praise singing traditions of her ancestor with contemporary surroundings that fizz contemporarily energetic. "I wanted to bring back the concept of praise singing in a modern setting, almost in a slam sort of way," Toya explains.

So we have this bright voice, a vocal that seems to shine as it calls into the mists of synth that curl as the track's backdrop, just a few portions of percussion to help solidify the frame surrounding the blissfully content yet far-flung and nostalgic singing. A sparse scattering of a beat thuds lo-fi four-to-the-floor whilst hi-hats scrape, in a section where the vocals turn to something more akin to rap: the lower pitch, the rapidity, the low-slung laid-back nature of it, the superb simplicity of it, the airy instrumental letting the words breathe. "The song is about the hypocrisy of people talking behind your back and the crooked smile they wear when they next see you," Toya explained the song's Zulu lyrics over email. "No matter how pearly white the smile, beware the crocodile."

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• 🔔 You can download the wonderful 'Kekeke' for free directly from Toya Delazy's official site.

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☟ Toya Delazy Internet Presence ☟
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🐣 LUNICE — DISTRUST FEAT. DENZEL CURRY, J.K. THE REAPER & NELL

Visual distortion and contortion, twisting, trapped in a virtual world: this is the video for 'Distrust' by Canadian DJ and producer, Lunice, the videogame feel of it evident not only in the glorious glitching visuals but also in the music, in the atmosphere-conjuring sounds that Lunice lovingly sets into motion throughout. We have these stoic synth bass hits, rounded and gloopy, the foundation for this macabre march of music, the slow rolling snares, the soft wonky sounds that have this veilsome spooky quality to them fluttering phantomatic alongside it all. On top of this, we have three vocals that perforate the polished parade of this track: Nell and Denzel Curry, as well as J.K. The Reaper, who starts proceedings with nihilistic flair—"I'm an outer body experience, my ligaments attached to this soulless corpse i been living in"—before he asks existentially, "am I the only human in truest form?"

In his breathless verse, Denzel Curry casts some vivid vital imagery: "here's a kiss from the dragon hot as the back of my spliff" precedes the relatable line "fisticuffs, knock your ass out, that's Jigglypuff," which references either the ability of the Pokémon to sing opponents to sleep or, as a character in Super Smash Bros, a seemingly innocuous move ("Rest") that if executed correctly is a very powerful attack; either way, this line has made an impact. For the outro of the song, Lunice suddenly turns it overcast and gloomy, low-pitch piano and atonal chiming strings marking the beginning of the finale, a tract of noise-inspired harsh abrasive beats and ever more gruesome glitching and Curry's final distorted mantra: "Tell the cops i don't give a fuck / run and hide, boy you better duck."

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• 🔔 The wonderful digital gore of this video has been created by director Sam Rolfes, which was recorded "live within a game engine." The resulting warped human forms that are thrown and skewed around the screen reflects the revolt of the soul intimated by the lyrics (notice the decayed confederate flag in the still we took from the video up top), the unconventionality and affront of these same images a suitable accoutrement for the noisy sonic experimentation in this track.
• 🔔 Listen to and/or purchase 'Distrust' via this link here.
• 🔔 'Distrust' is taken from Lunice's debut album, CCCLX, which will be released on 8th September via Scottish label LuckyMe. Pre-order it here.

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☟ Lunice Internet Presence ☟
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☟ Denzel Curry Internet Presence ☟
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☟ J.K. The Reaper Internet Presence ☟
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☟ Nell Internet Presence ☟
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🐣 MAHALIA — SOBER

This lovely track is arrives like a cool breeze through a window, contains within it that sheepish drowsy feeling that accompanies the delicate stages of the early morning following the inebriation and fun that bubbles between four walls and down corridors and in the garden, with its wonky boom-bap beat describing sonically that state of disarray as you awake from slumbering stupor and attempt to be a human, memories of the house party arising as you survey the room that was so hectic the night previously which now is filled with hangover and headache. "This story is totally about the morning after," says 19-year-old Leicester-based Mahalia about her track 'Sober'. "Thinking about the night before - all the mistakes you made, all the muddled texts you sent."

And so the track bounces this off-kilter pathway, the low subtle bass groove which charts this fresh, clean feeling throughout, the wobbling nature of it all giving the track this post-spinning-room relief in drymouthed stability. Yet we also have the vocals of Mahalia herself, not wonky, nor hungover, but self-assured and epiphanous, silkenly spinning lines that represent a realisation of good sense; "This is me waking up and smelling the roses," she explains further her first official single. Smooth, hazy, soulful, 'Sober' is an analogy for turning your life around, a night of revelry illustrating past mistakes, maybe even a whole lifetime of folly, but realising in a moment of clarity that things should and could be different.

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• 🔔 You can download or stream 'Sober' in various ways via this link here.

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☟ Mahalia Internet Presence ☟
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