🐣 ХЬЁРДИС — РАЗРУШЕНИЕ

The satisfying snowbreeze from the underworld, this calming wave of white noise that is so abrasive and scratching at your ear canal and like the ghost of a chainsaw somersaulting through the sky, a downpour from tungsten grey clouds soaked in distortion. That is the crux of this track by Russo-Ukrainian duo Dmitry Gruber and Marianna Diakova aka Хьёрдис (Hjördis), the shoegaze wall of crushed wavelengths that rifles through the track at all times. Called 'Разрушение' (meaning destruction or demolition) it's a song whose lyrics, sung in contrasting plaintiveness by Diakova, read simply in translation: "I want to destroy / Everything I see / Everything I feel / Is nothing."

Speaking to yes/no via email, Gruber told us that the track is "mostly about feeling, when you're calm, dreamy but very destructive at the same time." And at the heart of this song is that explosive gale of a guitar sound that feels as though it could strip cement from the metal bones of a building, and propelling it there is this driving energetic beat with popping kicks and snares, yet there is this golden guitar chord all liquid and chorused and with this brilliant rippling sheen to it, and there are these sunny vocals, innocent and fresh like clear sky after rain. It is exactly that balance: dreamy but destructive. "Some kind of ambivalence," Gruber clarifies. And you feel it, this infectious nothingness, how it would be to crush a derelict building with one thumb vs. imagine flying without a care. Similar feelings.

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• 🔔 You may purchase 'Разрушение' from Bandcamp.
• 🔔 Dmitry Gruber, the Russian half of the duo, also uses the band's name as a netlabel.

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☟ Хьёрдис Internet Presence ☟
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🐣 ELMARI — YOU KNOW ME

Taken on some sort of spacewalk now, the long weightless sway into starry void, the cosmic vacuum just existing there and a figure slowly spinning into some oblivion, it's not loneliness they feel as they drift but more a sense of solitary contentment, the secret mystery of oneness unfolding itself in the expanse. That is what it feels like anyway, 'You Know Me' by East London producer ElMari, it feels very space-destined, future-aligned, and that is first and foremost down to the nature of those synth chords: stripes of the heavens swipe in thin fizzing neon swathes of sound. But of course it's not just the actual quality of the sound itself, it's how that sound progresses that gives it this windingly slow velocity.

It's also the decreased attack and relatively low sustain of the synth which gives it that slow-motion feeling, along with the sparse beat, well placed clusters of hi-hat ticks and clacking snares as well as the syncopated solidity of the robust kicks, this lack of accentuation minimal nature summon that galactic feel, the simple melodic twinkling of synth mirrors the sparkle of distant celestial bodies, and the rumble of modulated bass in the middle gives intensity and power. But within there is something human, the vocal sample, stammering and effusing a sultry R&B flavour, and suddenly it wasn't a solitary spacewalk but an low-gravity airlock sex scene that this track conjures. Or maybe it's both.

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• 🔔 More of ElMari's releases can be found over on his Bandcamp for download and listening purposes.

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☟ ElMari Internet Presence ☟
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🐣 DOWNSTATE — HOW TO FIX AN IBM FAX MACHINE INSTRUCTIONAL GUIDE 1996

This one is a scenic soundscape, a canvas painted with old tools, vintage equipment employed in the creation of something new and something beautiful, something that summons an elsewhere. In the description of the track on SoundCloud musicmaker and creator of this particular track – the descriptively titled 'how to fix an IBM fax machine instructional guide 1996' – downstate wrote: "I made this with the drum sounds from a dying roland jv30 and the korg M1 digital synthesizer." At points it's like breakcore made with an old drum machine, which in fact might be exactly what it is, with the percussive clacks and metallic zings zipping and trilling with glitch intensity and wheezing retro quality.

There is that newness to it, painted with old brushes and old paint. But then there is this golden-age sound to it, and it probably has a lot to do with the warmth of this, the analogue warmth in the thick chords that bubble in their slow singular refrains, as much as it has to do with the quite literally gleaming melodies that ache and twinkle zither-like above. And in this classic sound is perhaps an inherent leaning towards cinematic, scene-setting, VGM-style (thinking Earthbound, Streets of Rage, for instance), the expansive, exploratory feel of it. downstate also mentions that they probably "could have cut the hiss from the broken keyboard but i like it sounding like shit its authentic." But that hiss, that decayed grey noise hovering throughout, does indeed add to it, does add authenticity, gives it the swathing static of ages gone by as a backdrop.

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• 🔔 You can download all and any of Downstate's tracks from this Wordpress that they've set up as an archive.

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☟ Downstate Internet Presence ☟
facebook ⚘ soundcloud ⚘ bandcamp ⚘ traktrain

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🐣 CITY FATHER — COQUETTE

A tumbling drumkit and a set of disembodied hands engaged in a rapture of rhythm, the hammering and clatter-tshh of the virtousic fills and thuds that trill and flood the air with hard bristling organic sound, the ultimate in percussive propellant, summoning the speed of rolling down inclines and speeding around corners late at night with dim street lights thumping your peripheral vision. The beat in 'Coquette' by LA producer City Father is full of life, both by extension of its sense of movement and also by its intimate, sound-coming-from-the-room-next-door aesthetic, ostensibly real sounds that breathe and scrape with robust physicality.

It begins thin, just this thunder-and-lightning of percussion bumping the track along on a backdrop of nocturnal void, as well as this sampled panting whispering and sheafing through the track like turning the page of a dusty book, the regular breathing of a late-night rendez-vous, but harshly cutting through the sound, a particular detail of memory on loop. The track morphs via scintillating synth details, fibrous and plasma-like, into something with more body, sludgy synth bass rising like a tide towards the end – something like a vocal hooting and crooning wordlessly colourful in the monochrome of it all – heating the track up into a scathing crescendo before it cuts off and fades into forlorn quiet, the empty feeling of despondence.

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• 🔔 This track arrives courtesy of LA-based label and artist collective Mateo Sound. You can download it for free via The Artist Union.

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☟ City Father Internet Presence ☟
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🐣 HOTWAX — ROCKAWAY FEAT. STEFFALOO

The ten ton, no ten-thousand ton, crush of the kicks here, like the engine room of a huge vessel as it hums cyclopean across the stars, is the glorious intensity that lies at the foundation of 'Rockaway' by Floridian musicmaker Hotwax. It is this slow-down techno rumble that perforates the stillness of the air, the blank pugilism of it summoning hard trebles as well as full-body bass for a robust beat. It's the simplest backdrop to a swishing of mists that rain down like veils—vocals that cut across your hearing and drip down like oil in water, fathomless reverb like galactic ghosts in this tract of minimalism.

These are provided by Steffaloo, a prominent voice in chillwave, whose simple harmonies resonate and vibrate to give extra texture to the already grainy phantasm of her tone as it reaches out across the dark of the track. Alongside this, simple synth clouds bop and gleam softly, a tangle of silken fibres that threads through the void. Ornaments orbit the beat: panning abrasive shakers, decayed metallic cowbell, shuffling hi-hats, handclaps followed by veils of fog. The atmosphere is a sunken one, where the heaviness of the water weighs huge and choking, and where the prettiness of life glistens and sparkles in the winnowing waves above.

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• 🔔 The quite wonderful Steffaloo-featuring 'Rockaway' is taken from Hotwax's debut album Communicator out now on 2060 Records. You can download it free-of-charge, or $7 for a cassette, from Bandcamp.

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☟ Hotwax Internet Presence ☟
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