Monday, 14 August 2017

🐣 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.


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


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Mahalia Internet Presence ☟
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🐣 BRIKA — JUST WANNA BE SINGLE

It's a jostling multi-faceted party atmosphere, that heat-warped guitar chord sweeping sultry in the cool balm of night and the bounce of the lightly shuffling beat, those foot-tapping hi-hat sheafing, the starry open skies of the slow melt into meandering dance and conversation through the lens of intoxication, carefree and sprinkled with hedonism, somehow those bopping percussive drum machine toms rhythmically echoing measuring time in their rounded synthesised droplets. In 'Just Wanna Be Single' Miami artist Brika invites us to the party, says stay a while, chill.

She sings slow in the verses, silken and low and conversational with the pattern of notes that skip up and down, amidst the luscious spread of percussion, the lovingly crafted handclaps, the sandy shakers, the thump of the kick. Light decorations tastefully adorn the nocturnal groove, little guitar licks in reverse like strings of fairy lights, the occasional wah-wah wobble of a synth chord, and that last slowly building shade of plasma sound, into the eponymous chorus, the laid-back vibe supporting Brika's desire to remain free of obligation and commitment, this sombre starlit saturnalia of sound a suitable vessel for the vocalisation of single life.


  • πŸ”” This track has been co-written/produced by Shy Girls alongside award-winning producer Julio Reyes Copello—it's taken from an upcoming EP, so keep your eyes out for that if you like the sound of 'Just Wanna Be Single'.


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🐣 ZENXIENZ — MISSING CALIFORNIA

A self-destructed blare of lights and colour, of rocks and cosmic material, a delicious morsel of music that mixes these things in a heady unidentifiable salad of matter and anti-matter. Cacophonous and bustling, the sounds crammed into this track fuse together without dissolving into one another, like those vintage psychedelic visuals of oil and water swilling in a tray atop an overhead projector but sped up, these sounds crash and rollick, storm and surge, smack and clatter, synths and percussion alike, all of it alive and wriggling for being alive. This is 'Missing California' by zenxienz, something that begins slow and composed despite the sloshing of colours and sounds, the bleeperie of electronics like the conjurations of circuitboards.

Beneath these slower sections a heavy beat cranks muffled and smothered by synthetics, distant booms and clacks close-at-hand but stifled in the bubbling heat of the sounds, some of them jostling woodblock smacks and clatterations—and then this segment of breakbeat-flavoured percussive patterns, the drum & bass toppling of this sonic tower into a kinetic mash of music, wide horizon-searching synth playing a solo, an aching landscape intoxicated lead, and later on the psychedelic infusion is evident with a scramble of freeform melodies and irregular shapes, zooming towards the end, a dizzy psychic joyride into the wonderfully chaotic imagination of this musicmaker.


  • πŸ”” 'Missing California' is from zenxienz's second album Brainforest, to which you can listen via SoundCloud.


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🐣 CHLOE X HALLE — USED TO LOVE (MOZADO REMIX)

Half sleekly clinical space-age white with reflective smooth screens, half organic heartfelt body and muscle and historical small streets and cafes, this track is a clear split, a love-letter to real humanistic flavours told with synthetic electronics, the hip shuffle of salsa bossa nova patterns exude through the syncopated piano that pulses cosmopolitan below the wonderful velvet vocals that skim warm richly throughout. These are the voices of sister duo Chloe x Halle, this track being a remix of their song 'Used to Love', a gorgeous a cappella composition filled with sultry lilting lines thick with harmony, solo parts powerfully cutting through and soaring gutsy above these choral comforters, impatient spoken-word "ok…ok…" and handclaps perforating the languor with potential energy.

But musicmaker and serial remixer Mozado, clearly seeing the promise of these incredibly endearing vocals, as well as the non-instrumental setting, turned this from an album intro light and airy as that time between asleep and awake, falling into slumber in the warmth of the sun, takes this feeling and through rhythmic permutations of Latin sashay and ticking trap brings out the bubbling energy of its heart, the powerful vocals now washing through the thudding beats that Mozado punctuates with luscious percussion chiming pots-and-pans tinkering and the warmth of the plasma synth matching the richly layered vocals, the hefty sub-bass, the dynamic of it all, this instrumental sliding along like a cloud-filled dream as much as it bumps and whips with pumping blood panache, this remix a vital reaction to the raw honest beauty of the original.




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🐣 KAREFUL — H2O

The sky is collapsing in an instant at the beginning of this track and the ground opens up and everything from above begins to tumble down this expanse of space now bored through the earth, the most fantastic fissure that we find ourselves in, what darkness and undeniable foreboding dwells in the ranging ripples of reverb, the arpeggiating synths, the hardness of the electronic beats like jagged rocks, the nocturnal rumbling modulation of synth that columns barrelling through the lower reaches of this track. Like a cathedral freefalling through a bottomless pit lined with sparkling jewels and gemstones and a carved alien script that glows turquoise and sunset-orange, UK producer Kareful's track 'H2o' is a judgement day of sound on a rushing epic scale, a conjuring of otherness with otherworldly sounds.

The feeling of this track is heavily towards the baroque, towards the polished and filigreed, the ornate and broadly twisting, romance and distance conjured by the incredible vocal sample, foreign even to our world, pitch-shifted and lingering on each word, aching, searching for a soul, a slow display of beautiful turmoil. "I've always found myself heavily processing vocals to make them sound nothing like what I originally found," Kareful himself tells us about those beautifully meandering vocals. Inspired by an "involuntary break in music" after losing everything on an previous PC, he calls 'H2o' a romantic track: "Many of my tracks are…" he confirms: "I'm somewhat of a hopeless romantic myself." And in the track, its heartbeating dynamic grime-trap-flavoured percussion pulsing, there is such a sense of grandiose gothic hopelessness, of crushing from afar, the all-encompassing wreathes of unrequited love.


  • πŸ”” 'H2o' is taken from Kareful's upcoming Alchemy EP, out 15th September via trapdoor records. Download the track and anticipate the release via this specific site.
  • πŸ”” You can grab the producer's previous release, the 2016 album Deluge, over on iTunes if you like.
  • πŸ”” Recently Kareful featured as one of the collaborators on Lifeforce, the debut LP from Nottingham's very own Glacci.


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KAREFUL Internet Presence ☟
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