🐣 DOT — GRAVITY

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

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

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

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📠
☟ Dot Internet Presence ☟
facebook ⚘ soundcloud ⚘ official site ⚘ twitter ⚘ instagram

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🐣 JULIETTE — MOM AND DAD

That first bright wobbling chord, the bumping bass kick and dry clack of snare that punctuates the drumbrushed static, the starry continuation of the synth in a plaintive melody, the chords warmer and more muted, pizzicato beeps in percussive arpeggios —the gentle slide into that gloomy gloop and groove of the bass, playing in unending cycles, decayed piano chords dusty and severed by the beat, veils of silken synth ghostly, and then just over a minute into this exquisite vessel of sound the sombre bounce of 'Mom And Dad' kicks in.

Created by self-appointed creator of "Seattle dance music", Juliette, the track expands, a procession into a sense of bigger space. The level of intensity rises: synth like a Hawaiian guitar winds in and out of earshot, buzzing saw-waves of bass crunch along the way, bongo percussion audible in the sad air of it all, that soft synth floating and drip-dropping, a handclap augments the snare clack, the punishing timekeeper, all of it mingling together to create an illustration of what the musicmaker themselves calls the "particular sensation of longing for your parents when you're at your lowest."

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• 🔔 You can download Juliette's self-titled EP over on iTunes, but ignore the stuff about being a French pop artist active in the '90s and '00s.

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📠
☟ Juliette Internet Presence ☟
soundcloud

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🐣 DOWNHAUL — HOW THINGS WORKED OUT

A story told in an intricate web of lyricism, weaving guitars, gymnastic bass and skilfully skittering drums, 'How Things Worked Out' arrives from Downhaul, a band from Greensboro, North Carolina. "So now we've got even less to show for all these years of whatever we haven't been"—the track speaks of something that was, now slightly faded in the light of present day, confessional, observational, rambling and revelling in minor but memorable details. From the very start, after a string of distorted chords and drumbeating, this is apparent: "I took your phonecall in my parents' unfinished basement."

When it's not effusing melodies math-rock-style fretboard-somersaulting, the guitar is warm, with just a little bit of grit from fuzzy distortion; in this latter way, in singular chord sweeps, it works with the slow jangle of the bass and calm smartly tuned drums to cushion sad lines like, "Well no one in my life now would even recognise your name," whilst at the same time the space afforded by these calm sections allows for the lyrics to hit bullseyes. At other times the lyrics are not necessarily sad but recognisably awkward and funny, as in "I drive an extra two-and-a-half miles east just to avoid the bank where your mom works, and I know it's total vanity to assume she had even the slightest clue as to who I am but that's all I got."

A tale of love gained, misplaced, and kindled as a set of memories and awkward constraints of movement and meeting, with all the embarrassment and half-obsession that the modern age affords, this is a post-post-breakup anthem in the form of a message never sent, strewn over the surface of this dynamic, rhythmic, melodic sea of sound.

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• 🔔 Did you like that as much as we did? If so, you'll be probably happy to learn that it comes from Downhaul's very recent four-track EP, About Leaving. Featuring three more songs, it's an extension of the sound of 'How Things Worked Out': calculated guitars, crackling distortion, jostling drums and all the everyday colloquial poetics you could ask for. You can listen and/or purchase for $1 or more at their Bandcamp.

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📠
☟ Downhaul Internet Presence ☟
facebook ⚘ bandcamp ⚘ instagram

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🐣 MECCA:83 — BODY GLOW

Here is a freshly dropped track from Manchester beatmaker, Mecca:83, a chillmatic sunsoaking piece of swaggery boom-bap inclined cocktail-by-the-pool-flavoured sample-led sultry optimism. But whilst it would fit hot sunny weather like a missing puzzle piece, there is an underlying iciness to 'Body Glow' that exists in its cold muted bubbling of the soft synths, the desolate reverb on the hollow snare clack, destined for a rise in temperature.

This frosty morning feel, animated by the alien synthetics and their continuous ambient wobble, is melted by certain elements of the track, perhaps giving it its name – take into consideration the warm glow of another human body amidst freezing bitter weather drifting around, or the warmth of love in a haze of emptiness. You have the rounded gloop of bass that grooves through, but the vocal samples lead the cheer, expertly selected for tonal variety, cut and served with rhythmic precision, each distinct from yet melting into the next. And if you take into account the trickle of birdsong at the beginning, it's nothing specific as it is general: this track is Spring itself after the thaw of winter.

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• 🔔 'Body Glow' arrives courtesy of London "Movement & Record Label", NINETOFIVE.
• 🔔 Recently Mecca:83 worked alongside British rapper Scorzayzee on their collaborative Cherish The Moment EP. You can listen to that on SoundCloud.

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📠
☟ Mecca:83 Internet Presence ☟
facebook ⚘ soundcloud ⚘ bandcamp ⚘ twitter ⚘ instagram ⚘ spotify

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🐣 STAR CHAMBERS — MATERIAL NOSTALGIA

This track is interesting in that it plays like a deconstruction of an original song into what might be argued to be its most memorable parts. Or rather, not memorable, but its most elementary components. We have the tumbling metallic slapped bass, flute synth scorching like a melted sunset, we have vocal fragments, faded keyboard synths. All of these, together, differentiating in melody, rhythm, these create a song. But what Star Chambers does here instead is leave them as extracts of the essence of a song, using them as building blocks to assemble the fragmentary retro dream that is 'Material Nostalgia'.

The sound is essentially compartments of sound interspersed with silence, over into which that bass, the vocal samples, the reverb from these noises, spills and fades into the quiet, creating an instantly dynamic soundscape where each break in audio is cushioned with warm whispers of reverberation, and where each node of noise is sharpened by the spaces between. At 01:00 the beat rolls in, thudding kicks, sword-from-a-sheath hi-hat, popping snare, disappearing between 02:24 and 03:12 where a new vocal hits rhythmically, pans left and right, a breathy almost alien section in the song that soon takes us back to sunny swagger of the beat. A retro reverie, and an exercise in what actually constitutes a song – simply the rhythmic placement of musical elements on a soundless backdrop – 'Material Nostalgia', if its title is anything to go by, plays on ideas of nostalgia, and how it can be summoned into our consciousness with just sub-second-long slices of sound.

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• 🔔 You can go listen to 'I Was Born Twenty Years Too Late', which you can also purchase for $1000. It's the first release from upcoming album Material Nostalgia, out sometime this year digitally and on cassette, too.
• 🔔 Does the name Star Chambers refer to the English court that existed at Westminster from the 15th to the 17th century? Who can say. More likely it comes from the related modern meaning of "legal or administrative bodies with strict, arbitrary rulings and secretive proceedings"—that's from Wikipedia.

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📠
☟ Star Chambers Internet Presence ☟
SoundCloud • Bandcamp

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