Firstly it's like an overdose of caffeine and the juddering jitters that go with it, the free-form jazz of thoughts that hurtle round the mind on this sort of high, thigh-jiggling anxiety, dopamine cranked up rounds of it uzi-fire like a fanfare of madness. None of this negatively. The hyperactivity at work in 'Sลlar Blade' by UK musicmaker IGLOOGHOST is nothing short of addictive, compelling; it is not going on around you but instead it flows into you, it vibrates you, it enjoins us to join it enjoying the Jupiter storm swirls of it caught up in itself all wonderful, all jelly beans and jewels tornado jam. The never-faltering full-speed footwork beat pops and thuds in rapid-fire flurries like Bruce Lee punches, pugilistic, simultaneously knocking you into a, and out of your, stupor.
Pulsating columns of buzzing synth bass paw at your ears as they pour through the track like molten canals of lead and electricity, creating instant solid robust intensity, and over them crackling and fizzing like sparks and popping candy are gold-dust clusters of melody in an out-of-control strobing zoetrope of different textures and flavours – pizzicato strings, squeezy needling synth, triumphal trumpets, wheezy flute-esque noises—literally blink, with your ears, and you'll miss them, such is the depth of details dredged up from IGLOOGHOST's mind. And wiggling with these is a tract of sped-up nightcoreish vocal, whence it came is unknown; however it does infuse the cosmic playroom feel of the track with something external and real world, albeit warped and gibbering.
'Sลlar Blade' dips somewhere in the middle, and towards the end, where we enter this playful otherword courtyard garden of sound with birdsong and a dark mystic melody flashing interdimensional oddities at the windows, in the lightbulb, through the walls.
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This wonderful track is just one of many wonderful tracks taken from the wonderful new and debut album by IGLOOGHOST, Neล Wax Bloom, out today on Brainfeeder. You may attain it for yourself digitally and physically via this piece of clickable text.
Opening the email that contained the story behind Touch Sensitive's masterwork in electropop, 'Pizza Guy' – the song that burst into our consciousnesses in 2013, re-released two years later to even wider appreciation – was disarmingly exciting. It's a funny story actually.
"My friend and former band mate from Van She started a night called Pizza Party and he never invited me to play which is understandable because we lived in each other pockets," he writes, "But at the time I was disappointed so in a fit of rage when I was bouncing it to send to Future Classic I called it 'Pizza Guy'." Don't worry, he and Nick (Routledge) can laugh about it now. Originally an instrumental, he told us how it went through "so many different versions" and finally became non-instrumental: "A friend of mine (who went on to become a global superstar) cut up a vocal from an undisclosed location and that's kind of it."
And even though the song isn't this romantic tale of a struggling real-life pizza guy, we can still live vicariously through the video for the track which features Touch Sensitive as the eponymous purveyor of pizza.
Between then and now the Australian musicmaker has dropped a string of singles, including the glistening bouncy 'Slowments', and finally his debut album has appeared: Visions. Funnily enough the album opens with a self-referential track called 'First Slice', a dreamified snippet of 'Pizza Guy', and if that wasn't enough of a nod the "official visualizer" has the producer walk over to a table, open a box and pull out a slice of pizza that he nonchalantly munches as he gazes out a window—the majority of the album tracks do also come with visuals, including the album's piano-thumping lead single, 'Lay Down', which "went through 50 versions," we are told. Elsewhere on the album Harriet Brown features on two songs, there's an instrumental called 'The Mystery Of Cats', and glorious tape warp on 'You're My Last Chance (Interlude)'. Visions glitters and clacks, glows warm and textured with classic synthesiser sounds.
But with the album release behind him by about two weeks now, Touch Sensitive was finally able to sit down with a slice of pizza and a kitten curled up next to him and answer our world famous Lazy Interview questions. Read on, dear reader, read on.
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w h o a r e y o u ? w h e r e a r e y o u f r o m ? w h a t d o y o u d o ?
My name is Michael Di Francesco, I'm from Sydney Australia and I make and play music.
h o w d i d y o u s t a r t c r e a t i n g m u s i c ?
I played in bands at school then studied it at university then I discovered Daft Punk so I sold my double bass and went halves with a friend in a TR909 and an EMU sampler, after that we went crazy collecting records etc. etc. I also spent many years playing in cover bands and doing whatever session gigs I could, I got to play with some cool people most of whom are/became my friends.
h o w w o u l d y o u d e s c r i b e y o u r s o u n d ?
Not sure but I'm constantly trying to make it better and break out of harmonic and rhythmic habits, that's the greatest challenge for me anyway. It can always be better. But by better I don't mean technically or rather sonically, the combination of the elements.
i s t h e r e a p e r f e c t t i m e a n d p l a c e f o r l i s t e n i n g t o y o u r m u s i c ?
Maybe driving, I'm not sure.
„
If anyone likes anything you do it's nice and if it made people happy that makes me happy
”
w h a t i n s p i r e s y o u m o s t w h e n m a k i n g a t r a c k ?
A sound, something that just happened, a couple of words or a phrase.
w h a t i s y o u r m o s t m e m o r a b l e m u s i c a l e x p e r i e n c e ?
I got to do a session with Snoop once, that was pretty cool, also had the privilege of playing with Jamie Liddell many years ago, that was cool too, some of the best ones are in a friends studio or at home.
w h a t a r e y o u r f a v o u r i t e t h r e e s o n g s a t t h e m o m e n t ?
w h o d o y o u m o s t a d m i r e i n t h e m u s i c w o r l d ?
Anybody that finishes stuff and puts it out.
i n y o u r o p i n i o n , w h a t i s t h e f u t u r e o f m u s i c ?
I think it's an exciting time on so many levels but also it's a bit sad at times because most of the time music is not all about music, there are so many contributing factors, there are amazing players and performers all over the world who don't get the accolades or recognition they deserve. On the other hand with the technology we have now it's easier to find these people and message them direct.
w h a t ' s t h e f u t u r e o f y o u r m u s i c – w h a t d o y o u h o p e t o d o n e x t ?
Not sure but not the same as last time. I just pulled my studio apart so time will tell.
w h a t i s m o s t i m p o r t a n t t o y o u ?
The Rhodes Chroma from a materialistic perspective but as a human being probably coffee and good manners.
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Touch Sensitive's debut album Visions is out now on Australian label Future Classic. You will find streaming options on this hyperlink, whilst over here is a more physical offering in the form of a vinyl, CD and merch bundle.
There is particularly something about the real noises that click and clatter, fidgeting and mechanical, like a rubber stamp or a stapler, a cosmic set of office supplies possessed and parading around the peeling paint and pockmarked plaster of their now tumbled-down surroundings. Delicious lip-smacking clicks and clacks, crackling vintage wear-and-tear, trickling jingles, all of it in a mixing bowl and whip into stiff peaks and let it become cooked in an oven and it's the meringue of this track, the sweetness but with simplistic block colour and sort of hard externally and kinda soft in the middle.
The chilled gooey sensation of 'Jafiah' by London/Brighton musicmaker nimino is alive and gloriously minimalist in its structure with just a few details like pine needles or tiny pebbles. Smooth synth chords bop along, wheezy and rounded, supported by occasional bubbles of bass rising to the surface; a shuffling beat sashays in, ricocheting hi-hat metallics and the organic percussive clopping sound, and this rolling snare insertion. A wonderful change in time signature brings the song to a heavier dimension, low synthy vocals croon in monosyllables in this new surreptitious wobble with its suave smears of synth whispering bassy. How 'Jafiah' seems so simple but is a meeting of opposing textures, a merging of rhythms, blocky but jewel-encrusted music.
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The full version of nimino's 'Jafiah' is actually just over four minutes long and is taken from a compilation called Ample curated by London label Panel—and, in fact, it is their debut album. Various media for streaming this full version can be found listed at the destination of this hyperlink.
In music whenever two disparate elements are mixed together you would expect a lack of cohesion. Something too x mixed with something too y. But these forces are often complimentary—a certain hardness, for instance, helping to underpin uncontainable jelly softness. This is the case in 'I Agonize Myself', a wonderful morsel of music that illustrates its title with self-torturing million-miles-an-hour thoughts in the form of a skittering tumble of beats, a landslide sped up five, ten times as fast, burying the self on its winding road through life with worries and wants. These are the foundations of breakcore: inhuman beats that twinge and judder, cut and re-cut and delayed, messed-with beyond the realm of regularity for the ultimate in what the addled mind desires.
But in clear opposition to these theatrical swarming insectoid beats, Laxenanchaos, the musicmaker behind the track, summons a sea of music that with strings and synthesised sound spin slow melancholy crooning lamenting, the steady swirl of clouds spellbound grey and white and the spluttering rapidity of the rain below. A vocal sample later in the track narrates the emotion behind it all. Whilst the whooshing orchestration paints thickly and expansive an undeniable sadness, each peal and strain of melodious sound infused with heartache and downcast feeling, passive, the barrage of beats is aggressive, active, a jitter of attention-splitting details, pockmarks and craters of anxiety: the unrelenting internal monologue.
The track grows in intensity as it rolls onward through our minds, beginning with real-world sounds, the sweet sentimentality of birdsong, and grows, rushing into a hurricane until around 2:38 when the kick thuds with more bass than before, bumping the track into a new realm of feeling. We end up in a thicket of bristling ambience, fading once more into the innocuous real world sounds of breeze in trees, birds singing. 'I Agonize Myself' in this way represents the little storms we go through each day; how in real life we can be going about our business in any setting – shown by the found sounds that book-end the track – and be suddenly beset by the gravity of emotion, the sudden tumult of mental illness.
And we join the calm and crash of Laxenanchaos, our own feelings mirrored, our noxious negativities compounded, condensed, and then let loose in an LHC of emotive noise, both illustrating and providing even just a moment's respite from ourselves.
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This incredible track, which originally surfaced in 2015, is taken from Laxenanchaos EP MEMORIES, which can be attained in the form of a free download from Bandcamp courtesy of Virgin Babylon Records. As the label themselves state in the description of the EP, the musicmaker himself "invites you to feel catharsis from chaotic emotion."
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The artwork for MEMORIES, at the top of this post, was created by Osaka-based illustrator mieze. It depicts a girl hugging a horse, drawn in unreal melancholy pastels. Often a symbol of unrestrained freedom, and in this case perhaps a representation of the girl's own freedom, the horse is free from tack, is riderless, whilst the girl herself is fettered with a bridle. The hug itself, a deep closed-eye embrace, seems emotional enough to be a farewell. It may also be important that the girl's hair is styled in a ponytail: the name of the style is enough, but the fact that this is a way of taming hair by tying it up suggests even more lack of freedom for the girl.
The EP's title, "memories", seems as though it is reflected in the artwork—indeed, instead of a current freedom that has been let go, it may well be that it is the freedom of the past, childhood, which is the recipient of this goodbye. The horse in question is actually quite a lot smaller than the girl, maybe suggesting that it isn't fully grown and that it does represent the passing of childhood, the loss of that much freedom, and moving into adolescence and adulthood whereby the individual is bridled not just by society, school, work, but by oneself as a reaction to these facets of life.
When the sun is setting across Japan, down suburban city streets, a song is played through speakers on every corner. We asked a Japanese friend why this was—they told us it was to let the children know that it’s time to go home, called the goji no chaimu (5ๆใฎใใฃใคใ ) or the "5pm bell".
The first time we heard the tune we were returning to where we staying in Sasazuka, Tokyo, along the same paths as the weekday commuters. The shadows were long and the air was cold; through an open window we could hear a child was practising trumpet; all was calm and in the place that it needed to and should be. This was when we realised that Tokyo was much more than the sense-overloading megalopolis that people would have your believe it is. Here was a city of delicately layered lives, people filling up every corner of entwining towns, each of them brimming with their own texture, complexion and charm.
Although the whimsical whistling of the 5pm bell is a test of the public emergency alarm system, it illustrates the peacefulness of residential routine, encompasses the almost indescribable subtle world of Tokyo's suburban backstreets. The goji no chaimu appeared in our ears like a melancholic melody; a wash of perfect sound flying along the waves of the golden evening sun that was swiftly losing its touch to the dying darkness of the winter's night. The lasting light glowed orange and yellow in blocks of shape across the uniform patchwork grids of tiles on the facade of low houses and lit up the leaves on the faithfully arranged potted plants placed on doorsteps and atop air conditioning units. The aesthetic of care and consideration. Of making the best of the practical situations of life. The tangles of telephone wires up above echoed the song and people slipped silently off of the road and through the front doors to their small dwelling calling 'okaeri' as they left the city streets behind, all on a track, one by one slipping off into their different private worlds.
From the spiderweb of roads between Sasazuka and Shibuya station, to the old wooden shitamachi (downtown) of Yanaka, the aesthetic of Toyko is not the singular hi-modernity of glowing lights and high-rise buildings. The winding backstreets at sunset—the peaceful stillness of a graveyard in the snow—Toyko's delight is all in the delicate details and intimate atmospheres. The city is more than what first meets the eye. Before we arrived in Japan the notion in our mind's eye of Tokyo was seen in flashes of images – Scramble Crossing, Harajuku fashion, blaring lights, overwhelming crowds – a daunting and hardy futuristic metropolis. What we discovered was global city filled with fun and warmth, careful pragmatic design, understated style and endless heart.
Firstly it's like an overdose of caffeine and the juddering jitters that go with it, the free-form jazz of thoughts that hurtle round the mind on this sort of high, thigh-jiggling anxiety, dopamine cranked up rounds of it uzi-fire like a fanfare of madness. None of this negatively. The hyperactivity at work in 'Sลlar Blade' by UK musicmaker IGLOOGHOST is nothing short of addictive, compelling; it is not going on around you but instead it flows into you, it vibrates you, it enjoins us to join it enjoying the Jupiter storm swirls of it caught up in itself all wonderful, all jelly beans and jewels tornado jam. The never-faltering full-speed footwork beat pops and thuds in rapid-fire flurries like Bruce Lee punches, pugilistic, simultaneously knocking you into a, and out of your, stupor.
