HELFER – DESIGNS

Please don't say that I am alone in saying that I hate Sundays. They are rank with conservatism and stink of boredom and hold up a telescope to the very end of your days. Sunday opening hours are lame — super lame, in fact, and we should do away with them. Let's open up and embrace a new era of consumerism that cuts to the very core of this vile Christian-led freezing of life every damn week. Who's with me?

Can you guess that it's Sunday? So yeah it's that day. But luckily, I do this writing thing basically every day so it's no skin off my nose what day it is anyway. I just observe that Sundays are rubbish, that's all. Anyway. So here we are. And here is another song to moisten your eyes and tap your heart and jiggle your mind and skip over your skin; it's from a person who I've written about before, but who has changed their name. Formerly known as NoamiKo, this musicmaker from Israel now goes by the name Helfer – and this particular song is called 'Designs'…

Moving forward from a curling insectoid sprint of bleeping synth leads in the beginning, we're treated to icy glistening cascadings and simple-smooth bass that columnates the underside of the track. As the song starts proper, an aching grind of noise soars overhead, deep kicks bump below and rolling claps join slivers of hi-hat; vocals enter as heavily echoed snippets of refrain, giving the song a spectral dimension; noise crescendos throughout, spacey glimmerings with stringy richness dominating the richly bleeping soundscape and scratchling beat.

It's a huge, poignant sound that has developed from what I last heard from this guy. This is a time-travelling whirl of sounds that takes you from sofa to space station to proto-nightclub surroundings. Moving from totally unknown indie to underground indie is a small but frenziedly discernible step, and this is exactly what Mr Noah Helfer is proceeding with; indeed, 'Designs' is taken from his upcoming Air Drops EP, which comes courtesy of dunno-where-it's-based label, BLDG5 Records.

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TOKYOLITE COBA (HIROTO KUDO REMIX)

You're like almost always guaranteed some fun when it comes to the variegated artists that wade in the warm shade of Japanese netlabel Tanukineiri's umbrella. Taking a pun for a name ("feigning sleep" but also "sleeping tanuki" – hence the label's Tom Nook-esque mascot), they've slowly infiltrated the minds and hearts of many an underground artist and listener; not least this faceless entity of mine called YES/NO.

Moving on. Two artists affiliated with Tanukineiri have just collided in a rather spectacular fashion, or rather, many artists have collided with just this one in a remix extravaganza. Songs from the Hello EP by Indonesian band Tokyolite (I wrote about their song 'Yes! Dance!' last year) have been remixed every which way by 20 – yes TWENTY – artists, including 食品まつり a.k.a. foodman and mus.hiba to name a couple of those with whom I'm more familiar. One particular remix really stood out to me and it has been on a loop for about half-an-hour because it's one of those golden-sunlight tracks: you never want it to end.

Who's it by? Hiroto Kudo, that's who. I wrote about his song 'Magic Raincoat' at the height of last summer's heat and enjoyed his music very much. Now, confronted with this wholly awesome remix, I'm left gasping for breath as I watch the song tick away to its end before pressing play again. Taking the vocals from Tokyolite's 'Coba' (presumably named after the ruins of the Mayan city that go by the same name), Kudo twists them and squeezes them through his magical remix machine, giving them a multi-layered poignancy with their achingly delicious high-register and far-flung echoes above the spectral gusts of synth that whirl underneath.

The track cascades with sundrip bleeps the whole way through and is soon, which is set to a dubstep-flavoured beat swaying as if through a blustering torrent of pent-up appreciation for beauty. Explosions of fizzy white noise erupt around halfway through, giving the track an unprecedented rush of energy and an exciting booming dynamic: a surprise gift in a shower of presents. To create this different a song from the original – a Latin-like, funky number – is really impressive. Hiroto Kudo's knack for creating fresh music is nothing short of brilliant; so I'm, and you should be too, expecting even more great things from him in the future.

Grab the remix album Tanukineiri Sometuke Series Vol. 1 ~ TOKYOLITE ~ for basically free or pay what you want

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Listen to Hiroto Kudo on Soundcloud
Listen to Cajits on Soundcloud
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LAZY INTERVIEW #22: VULKANO

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← #21: DCUP #23: HARRISON →

Meet Vulkano. Do you know them? It's ok if you don't. But perhaps you should. They inhabit a strange esoteric area of music, a kind of mystic post-punk – a Swedish girl duo who screech and sing and howl, pogo-stick with whirling energy and bash the spirits out of drums: all with visceral intent. Formerly members of Those Dancing Days, this week (3rd Feb) they released their debut album, Live Wild Die Free. It's a journey through forests, crepuscular creepings, rites of nature, cold and spooky atmospheres cradled in raw craggy basslines and frenzied drumming, as synths float like mists and farflung vocals hold your attention with their endearing high-pitched warcry tones.

But that's what Vulkano are like. Nature, love, friendship – these three things imbue their music as much as they do the people themselves. Having been making music for a long time, perhaps they feel that they have finally arrived at a juncture which allows them to couple their creative output directly with what their hearts feel. The energy of their music is overwhelming, the enthusiasm is evident; and (so I have heard) their live shows are, unsurprisingly, rather mad. Feeling the music is always a sign of a genuine love for music, however. Anyway. They were very kind in answering the YES/NO Lazy Interview, which is below.

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Who are you? Where are you from? What do you do?
We are a two-girl band called Vulkano based in Stockholm, Sweden. We like to think we come from space and we are here to give music to the world. Cissi Efraimsson sings and plays the stand-up-drums and Lisa Pyk Wirström plays the keys and percussion.

Why did you decide to start creating music?
We got to know each other when we were 14 and we started to hang out because our biggest interest was music. We went to a lot of concerts and both of us thought it looked so much fun to be on stage playing for an audience and being on tour so we decided to start a band and since then we've played together. For us music is magic.

How would you describe your sound? What makes you and your style stand out?
Our sound is raw and filled with energy. It’s fun, primal and straightforward. We stand out because we follow our instincts and not any rules. When we play together it’s like the world around us disappears and we create our own crazy colourful creepy fantasy world. I think people can hear that in our music and like to be a part of it.

Is there a perfect time and place for listening to your music?
Under the full moon in the desert with a cold beer in your hand. You’re sitting in a nice chair in warm cloths with a home knitted blanket over you. You lay back, watch the stars and let the music take you out of your mind and out of your body.

What inspires you most when writing a song?
Nature, great songs, art, the superficial, volcanoes, other dimensions, colors, science fiction, space and life on Earth. We also inspire each other a lot. We are like ying and yang.

What is your most memorable musical experience?
God this is hard. Ok we’ll choose three.

1. Our first gig with our first band called Her Peace. We were 14 years old and played at youth garden outside of Stockholm. Cissi who was the drummer played every song so fast. Lisa was so nervous so she had to skip school the same day. The gig went quite bad but the feeling after was something new. We totally felt like rock stars!
2. Going to Japan to play with our previous band Those Dancing Days.
3. Recording our debut album Live Wild Die Free in the nicest studio we’ve ever been to with the coolest people Patrik Berger and Nille Perned. The studio’s called Ingrid. It was three of our best days of our lives.

What are your favourite three songs at the moment?

1. Julee Cruise - Floating
   
2. Tussilago – The Sulfur, the Tar and the Smoke
3. Talking Heads - This Must Be The Place
   

Who do you most admire in the music world?
We admire artists that go their own ways without compromising with their music and style. For example: David Bowie, Björk, MGMT, Siouxsie Sioux, Syd Barrett and Lykke Li.

In your opinion, what is the future of music?
Music is constantly changing. I feel like music right now is moving to a more electronic sound. I see a trend with less bands and more solo artists. More synth and more drums, less guitars. It also seems like indie bands and commercial bands sound more and more alike. I guess it has to do with that it’s so easy for anyone to learn how to produce music nowadays. I’m not sure I like this trend. I hope to see a much wider sound spectra in both electronic and “real instruments”. I also wish people will be brave and dare to make weird and different music. I don’t want commercial hit music to be the ideal for everyone.

What's the future of your music - what do you hope to do next?
The future of our music is to explore deeper parts of our creativity and come up with even better music and ideas. We don't want to be held back by anything, especially not ourselves. When we write new songs we are being totally open to whatever feels inspirational so that we don't risk losing anything on the way. We hope to tour around the world with our music. We recorded a psychedelic short film that will be released this year and we’d love to do more films beside of the music.

What, aside from music, is most important to you?
Love and friendship. It's important that we treat everyone the same and are open to whoever comes across our life paths.

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As for Live Wild Die Free, perhaps you've heard 'Spider Spider', an eerie clanker of a song they offered up as a free download last Halloween, or maybe you've heard the epic wooded mystery of 'Vision Tricks' – both are a good indication of the album's proceedings. But it's more varied than you'd imagine from my descriptions – sometimes outright punk (as in 'Too Young To Die' with its mad screams of "Don't kill me! Don't kill me!"), sometimes gentler pop sounds, sometimes inspired by nature ('Jungle', for instance, which literally describes a trip through a jungle), sometimes not, sometimes noisy, sometimes stripped-down. But it's always a daring sound, sonically diverse and certainly appealing to anyone looking for a bit of energetic music in their lives.

You can stream the whole thing here.

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← #21: DCUP #23: HARRISON →

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Like Vulkano on Facebook
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Listen to Vulkano on Soundcloud
Visit Vulkano official site

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BRETON WAR ROOM STORIES LP

When I first knew the release date for Breton's second (or "sophomore" like an absolute pleb) album War Room Stories, it seemed like an age away. Yeah, and I'd be a different person by that date – maybe I'd be a real person, with a suit and a nice house, and a part to play in local politics; with the whole world changed, we look towards a united effort in space exploration, and I look down at my hands and they seem older, wrinkled elastic. But no. It turns out that a few months zip by in no time. (The) 3rd (of) February arrived a lot sooner than I had imagined. How mundane to talk about a date like this, I'm really sorry.

In any case, it's not like I've been waiting for the date to HEAR the album – that's been done. Heard it a lot, in my car, in my room, and it's fair to say that a) I really like Breton and, b) I think that a lot of people around the UK will love it too. Having been played on BBC 6 Music, it's only a matter of time till they're on Radio 1 – that's when you get big in the UK, isn't it? Anyway, they deserve it. And whilst waiting for the album, there's been a steady flow of tracks and videos, even an EP, released in the meantime. Arguably the catchiest and addictive of these, 'Envy', starts War Room Stories with a bang, a tropico-indie sound, rich with orchestration and nonchalantly yelped vocals, the likes of which appear all over the album with near-intense coarseness that oozes satisfaction. A more melodic example of the vocals is in the dynamic folds of 'Search Party', where the guitar and bass guitar shine out with only minimal plinks from the orchestra, and atmosphere-forming house piano chords; that is until the end where bass gushes forth in brain-drowning quantities.

Where the vocals might not be exactly as strong as they are elsewhere is on 'Legs & Arms' – where they're sung through a megaphone. Maybe I just don't like megaphones or megaphone settings. The rest of the song – a kind of grey day revolution vibe – shows off the 44-piece orchestra with whom Breton recorded this album; rich cascades of strings and bolshie brass blasts, the kind we find on brash, synthy bass-heavy thudder 'Got Well Soon'. Here too the beat, as elsewhere, conveys brimming brutal energy. Recent single 'S Four' gives pride of place to its beat – which by the end is a towering beast of a beat – a fractured dubstep style that thumps below faraway vocals that ask as a simple, looping lyric "How will I be in two places at once? And how will I drag myself out from there?" – add to this rainy night garage-style pizzicato strings, videogame bleeping synths and you have yourself a winner.

Clattering schizoid drums roll their virtuosic way through 'Closed Category', regulating themselves towards the song's end as the strings reach a crying crescendo, a real mind-possessing moment on the album. A similar, energy-catapulting moment is the final part of the final song, 'Fifteen Minutes' – littered with saw-wave bass, gorgeous hi-hat fills and rich piano chords; snare roll leads into an up-tempo crash of sound, synth bleeps playing a buzzing lead, soon followed by the strings – cymbals exploding with the gun-stutter of mental snare and tom drum assaults, ending in a calm of background noise. That fast-paced beat appears before, however, in futuristic and noisy 'National Grid', whose vocals are thickly layered and gloriously laid-back alongside glittering star-like synth leads that lance through the fuzzy phasing bass.

Breton's penchant for hip hop beats, which was shown off in their pre-album EP Force of Habit, comes across in '302 Watch Tower' – a bouncy track which features hypnotising vocal samples and reggae-style bassline, both underpinning a sun-kissed beeping synth solo towards the end. A more experimental beat pops up in next track 'Brothers', comprising of percussive sounds rumbling in thick-aired, dusty rooms, heaped with reverb, like the faraway vocals and ghostly low-register piano. Around halfway through, it comes into its own however, and changes gloriously into a funky, disco number with a beautiful crowd of catchy vocals: an extremely danceable, and ultimately singable, track.

It's difficult to say exactly what is Breton's strength on this album – truth is, it's a lot of things and a lot of things combined that give them their signature sound. The new addition of the 44-piece orchestra gives songs that, perhaps without these soaring organic sounds, might not have the same gravitas as they do with orchestral ecstasies. That said, it's pointless to say that because these songs arrive with orchestra, so that is how they are supposed to sound – hypothetical 'well if they didn't have this then blah blah blah' situations are kind of a non-issue. In other places, the band execute unbeatable moments of excitement – the funk of 'Brothers', the climax of 'Fifteen Minutes', most of 'Envy', for instance – and this is mainly down to the undeniable rhythm with which these guys seem to be partly made of. Composition, and not just because of the orchestra, also plays a large part, with things like 'Brothers' turning from a genreless experimental sound into a tropico-funk disco; 'Legs & Arms' turning gradually from brash to beautiful; 'Fifteen Minutes' and its euphoric ending.

It's a stylistic, at times epic and often dancefloor-led, collection of music, familiar enough to please general crowds of music-likers, and creative enough to satisfy those looking for something new in the world of what is essentially indie music; indeed, it marks – and is resultant of – the evolution in indie music from traditional 'band' formations, adding not only classical instruments, but also elements of urban electronic music with which the music world is suffused: as natural as it is original.

War Room Stories is OUT NOW and available for purchase both digitally and of course physically.

Also check out the YES/NO interview with Breton's frontman Roman Rappak!

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Hear more Breton on Myspace
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BLUFRANK I FELL IN LOVE WITHOUT YOU :&: PILL FOUND / FIELDS OF NOTHING

Cairo's own indie dance producer offers up some new stuff. Maybe this time around I could just say that and that it's "sounding really good this evening" or something like that and just be done with it. I could but I won't. Good music deserves more words than you think they do. It's an extended compliment; a song-length description; accompaniment. Quick—! Steal the keyboard! Stop me waffling!

So anyway, this is a new (but not the newest) track from Egyptian musicmaker, BLUFRANK, whom I wrote about at some point last year for the first time. It's interesting to find out about someone in Egypt because, well, there was a revolution there last year (the second in as many years) and in such an atmosphere it seems that creativity continues (the internet probably helps in this respect), with BLUFRANK herself playing at a downtown-Cairo club called Vent for New Year's Eve just gone. It just surprises me.

In any case, let's have a little listen to BLUFRANK's penultimate track, 'I Fell In Love With You'.

Thumping along to a clean, allegretto hip hop beat throughout – complete with snappy snares and thud-pulse kicks – the track is a hypnotic trek through surreal club landscapes, walls dripping with sweat in slow-motion and the floor a bouncing mat of disorientation. Samples, some female vocals sung, are dropped throughout the song, as are snippets of vocal well after the halfway mark, combined with the ripping crash-crackle of water & bubbling bongwater sounds, as the drums go virtuoso with rapid-fire hi-hats. The thick jumble of sounds that creates the track's foundation gives it a heavy, mesmerising flavour, whilst the sharp drums and sample placement keeps it exceedingly fresh.

On the other hand, BLUFRANK's true latest track is a mix of acid house with a dark, almost icy disco-house tang towards the end, a mix of styles that indeed is reflected in its title, 'Pill Found / Fields Of Nothing':

Whilst in my opinion not as strong as 'I Fell In Love Without You', well actually that's not fair to say: it's not a strong STARTER but it certainly ends with a bang of disco-house beats. (Interestingly, the end of this track leads pretty much perfectly into 'I Fell In Love Without You' – a nice EP set up, perhaps…?) The second half of this track, 'Fields Of Nothing' I guess, is really great, dominated by its foot-possessing beat and muffled synth waves, enshrouding you with addictively comforting white-noise-esque sounds as you dance in a mindless fog. Void! That's why we dance yo.

So, get to know. I'm looking forward to seeing how BLUFRANK evolves in the future. Here's to creativity!

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