🐣 NATRIUMS — SPLEEN ARROW

As much as this track is an invitation for chill and respite, there is a sense of unknown exotic bristling at its heart. Without a legible groove, beat, refrain, or anything particularly recognisable for most of it, 'Spleen Arrow' by natriums from Louisville, Kentucky, is a continuously shifting beast, its tack continually altered, its spinning narcotic haze in a whirling instant transforming terrain—not satisfied with one world the interplanetary train of thought at work here tethers you to one set of textured sounds and tactile percussion after another. The lonesome disjointed howling digital ghost guitar solo of the beginning, with its indistinct pulsar synths, morphs into nebulous neo-jazz, piano chords resonating, thin sounds veilsome like insectoid chirruping.

And we leave, transitioning from that world of jazz, the touchful pluckings of the bass leftover for the briefest foundation, the cold shif-shif-shif of echoing percussion, and soon we are chilled by delicate chords that ring out lounge-like, images of slow-motion ski-jumping flutter across our imagination, and the temperature drops further, glassy sounds like icicles drip-dropping smooth and frozen and imperfect, a digitised chiming, the gentle descent of snow. 'Spleen Arrow' engages, lulls and agitates in a morsel of music that twins ambient downtempo with doses of jazz-in-circuitry, presenting a permafrost sense of noir.

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• 🔔 This track is one of the tracks taken from natrium's recently self-released album, Façade, which you can peep and download on and from Bandcamp.

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☟ natriums Internet Presence ☟
soundcloud ⚘ bandcamp ⚘ twitter

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🐣 XINOBI — SKATEBOARDING

A melancholic ride, sumptuous and nocturnal, dimly lit suburban streets, housefronts passing by as the wheels trundle on the tarmac, the determination and focus and the wandering meandering feel of freedom: this track is called 'Skateboarding' and it embodies the spirit of skateboarding—not what it means for everyone, but the spirit of skateboarding for Portuguese producer Xinobi. For him it's personal. "As a suburb kid in the late 80s, he was obsessed with the skateboarding culture, and had a strong urge to get himself a skateboard." After he got one there was an "abrupt and unexpected end to his skateboarding career" when he experienced a serious fracture in his arm. He stopped and took up guitar to rehabilitate his fingers. Xinobi, however, still had "a strong affiliation to the culture."

In the lonely emotivity of the track, its lamenting synth bloops and its plaintive chord washes wobbling into the air, in its solitary feel, there is a sense of being on the outside looking in, of imagining the technical nature and the mechanics of skateboarding, being part of skateboarding culture but not actually skateboarding. As such an intimate disconnect exists in this track, you can feel the closeness, the raw hi-hats and the vital fuzz of the bass synths and the acrobatic nuances of the beat and the organic lifeblood ambience trickling throughout, but in the sadness of some of the sounds there is distance.

Analysing this world from an outsider-inside perspective, Xinobi samples a speech at the US Library of Congress by harcore punk and post-hardcore figurehead Ian MacKaye about the philosophy of skateboarding. It summarises what the producer himself wants to say, encapsulates the power of the track itself, and the potency of the skateboard and its power to both physically and figuratively move.

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• 🔔 The aptly skateboardy video was directed by Lydie Barbara.
• 🔔 'Skateboarding' is the opening track from Xinobi's album, On The Quiet, which was recently released on Lisbon artist collective and electronic music label Discotexas, and you can listen to it on their SoundCloud.

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☟ Xinobi Internet Presence ☟
facebook ⚘ soundcloud ⚘ official site ⚘ twitter ⚘ tumblr ⚘ instagram ⚘ discogs

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🐣 MOOKHI — LACUNAE

We slide down this archaic manuscript of sound with the warm vintage crackle and the plink-plink-plink that speeds up into a dusty pulsar and becomes a constant, we slide and reach the end where we fly off a ramp and hurtle with a rushing whoosh into a vacancyof sky that's littered with a luscious collage of sounds looming and lilting. This is 'Lacunae' by Sydney producer Mookhi, a dose of sound that's intricate and intense, a tapestry of gleaming sounds from pealing violins and rivers of soft synth and flighty chimes, to harp sounds and robust piano, all in a plume of textured smoke, nebulous and narcotic swirling and diving and curling and writhing through a slalom of percussion that thumps with heartbeat bass and shines with sharp hi-hat sheafs and scathing abrasive virtuoso snares.

The dynamics of 'Lacunae' lie in its expert transitions: the beginning, the ramp and take-off, the initial swaying rhythm pockmarked with the reeling snare rolls and wide wheeling atmosphere with those three chords blasting out mistily, an expansive feeling; and then the mid-section where sampled voices and crunching outdoors found sounds jostle like snippets of memory; and then the sounds multiply and grow richer and resonate with wild gentleness; and it ends with those plink-plinking parts, just as it started. By this rise in intensity as it progresses, it's noticeable that crucially this track is marked by an urgency to go forward, with that persistent sample continuous from the beginning, with the impatient snare rolls, the increase in the thicketing sounds, yet it is veiled by a fog of the past – the quality of some of the sounds, the archaic record player crackle, the nostalgic warmth of it – so that the future though seemingly close at hand is out of reach.

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• 🔔 Earlier this year Mookhi aka Olympia Henshaw released a quite well received project in the form of her Lost & Found EP. You can listen to that over on her SoundCloud.
• 🔔 'Lacunae' is the plural of lacuna which means like a gap or unfilled space. It comes from Latin where it means hole or pit and is actually the diminutive form of lacus—that's lake.

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☟ Mookhi Internet Presence ☟
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🐣 OKPK — PARADISE [初演 • PREMIERE]

The opening seconds of sound in this track are transportive. It becomes very clear very quickly that you're no longer where you thought you were. The damaged digital synth that pings out wonkily as if you've just stumbled on some ancient technology and somehow awakened it, a sound that conjures something between earthly magic and inexplicable otherworldliness, spiritual electronics, familiar yet foreign, exotic and integral. That remoteness is echoed eerily in the vocal samples crying out pitch-shifted unfamiliar; and the doomful gloopy modulated synth sound that plays the robust refrain, arriving obtusely, keeping sparse abnormal rhythm; here is 'Paradise', an arid yet living melted-sky landscape.

Created by Victoria, Canada-based musicmaker okpk, this morsel of music is a dream-gone-wrong of subtle menace and narcotic haze. The sounds are immediate in their emotivity, their power to transport, with crackling arpeggio music box twangs, phasing columns of electric crunch, and plosive percussion clustering infrequently with glutinous kick flurries and thin rollicking snares and ts-ts ticking hi-hats and smart fingerclicks set out in the quivering crumbling space. With the legibility of vaporwave's decayed scene-setting, its inherent neither-here-nor-there extradimensional quality, 'Paradise' paints a surreal soundscape, a beautiful wasteland of an inverted paradise.

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• 🔔 This sonic scene turns out to be at the heart of the Pleasure Seekers EP from which this track is taken, being a "soundtrack to an imaginary film about a pair of lovers trapped in a disintegrating virtual paradise," but with the twist that "their collapsing environment is a manifestation of the unspoken problems in their relationship." That's thematically very vaporwave. The EP is set for release on 30th June via r/n collective and features artwork by multimedia artist Arya Hawker, who has created six videos, one for each of the EP's tracks.

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☟ okpk Internet Presence ☟
facebook ⚘ soundcloud ⚘ bandcamp ⚘ official site ⚘ twitter

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🐣 FLUME — HYPERREAL FEAT. KUČKA (LACED REWORK)

With the skipping vocals of Kučka whirling around, the wonky shuffling beat and its doof-doofing kick, the glitching ectoplasms of synth like electronic phantasms of auroraborealis offcuts, Flume's bonus track 'Hyperreal' is a paragon of its titular promise. There's a dim darkness effused by the track, framed by a sense of cold futurism, something minimal and menacing, and it's this theme that Laced seems to have picked up on in their reworking. With a decided focus on those thudding kicks, the musicmaker strews them in four-on-the-floor formation for a deep and devastating house feel; hi-hats like daggers unsheathing and cutting the air add rasping sharpness to the shuffling rhythm; a constant synth rumbles balefully below.

And then you realise at around 00:58 that a lot of those sounds weren't hi-hats at all but overlapping inhale-exale breaths sampled and shivering, isolated for their impact before a tidal wave of sound begins, a break in the house regularity, a swaying from rapid gloopy kicks and sub-bass bwaoom to clacking rolling snare and a twinkle of metallic ticking. An unexpected part of the song, splitting sounds in two and letting them crash into the slices of silence, this segment does not refrain later on but instead remains a totemic midsection between the hard thudding house vibes, the garage-tinged shuffle of everything—it's a natural evolution of the original track (like the artwork: a darker version of the artwork for Flume's Skin Companion EP II), but it's replete with a dark and dusty emotiveness of its own.

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• 🔔 Listen to more Laced tracks over on their SoundCloud.

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☟ Laced Internet Presence ☟
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