DAMACHA – YIYUAN

Tagged "places u went" and called 'yiyuan' presumably after the mountainous 沂源 county in China this is a beautiful new-ish track from Shanghai musicmaker Damacha. It is a sprawling hive of living percussion, luscious rainstick sounds and far-off forest wooden clackings and jangling like lost ghost currency and lots more besides, blending together at first in clattering cocktail of arrhythmia, soon syncing to a pummelling beat, nuanced and free and towering.

Bass surges and rumbles in healthy slices below, propping up these delicacies of sound like time-lapsed hillsides and peaks jutting out newborn forming the rugged earth. Alongside these elastic beat arrangements are gentle bell chimes and plaintive 8-bit melodies, this simple tapestry of synth matching the percussion in all its sparkling illustration, pencilling details and adding ornamentation – a sonic mirror of the drama and gargantuan scale of natural landscapes, of the feeling of being simultaneously tiny yet liberated in the midst of such places, of their simplicity and their complexity; it is a landscape painted with sound.

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• This track is a free download as you can see above.
• Check out Damacha's half-year-old 3E3240 EP on Bandcamp.

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TIM SHIEL – TANGERINE

This tasty morsel is by Tim Shiel; 'Tangerine' is the title of it. Through the clunking clatter of rapid fire percussion samples, banging and clacking and cutting with the additional flare of razor-sharp cymbal, you can instantly imagine this track as a living-and-breathing entity, something played by many people with mostly live instruments; hear the pounding robust 4/4 house thud of the kick drum, the subtleties of the ticking hi-hat. Even the bass feels "real", rumbling and rough-edged, undulating like lungs expanding and contracting.

Add to this the twists and turns of hypnotic reed instrument singing out of the flowing mist of the track, and bouts of intensification, where ghostly breeze synth whirls up and around, thickening the mist, howling with the added jangles of percussion, the raging whirr of the bass chopping through the air; add all this, and hear how it pours from your headphones or speakers, how it fills the air with spirit and passion, and feel how at the same time it is a lifeless wonder, a cold uncaged monster born of circuitry.

It may seem obvious but I revel in it, so let's talk about it anyway: strange, but amazing, how a soul can inhabit a machine, and how something so clearly "electronic" can feel so organic you can practically feel its pulse hot and streaming in your heart.

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• Tim Shiel is from Melbourne, Australia, and aside from making music he also has a radio show called Something More on Double J / triple j.

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BUG BUS PIANO – BUG YIV BUSKONG P

What better way to while away your time than to listen to music, to sink into it, to have it envelop you and curl around you in wreathes of hazy smoke - just for a while. For some minutes it's enough to entertain, to ignite inspiration, to illustrate your current activity with sound, to colour your nothingness. What better way. And what better way than with this cryptically named track, 'Bug yiv buskong P' by Bug Bus Piano.

Writing this I am sitting on the second floor of a coffee shop in Taitung, Taiwan, watching the lights on a crossroad go from green to red, a steady stream of cars and scooters go by. The piano in this track injects a melancholy calm into the situation, a shroud of contented inevitability draped over the vehicles and cyclists and marching pedestrians, over the grey roads and bright vertical signage tumbling out of sight. Timeless piano, making poetry of the scenes below.

Alongside the beautiful piano, vintage crackling runs through the track distorting the soft keys, a sense of ancient electronics, of a dusty phonograph, making it feel like the sort of music that plays in memories, more sounds accompanying the piano with bassy machine rumbles, insecto-avian chirruping towards the end, the piano skewed with sharply added treble, muffling softly, and distorting like a damaged cassette tape. In short, this is heady nostalgia condensed into 5 minutes 19 seconds—but nostalgia for what? Nostalgia for longing and longing for nostalgia.

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• It seems that Bug Bus Piano is a real person called Jake born in 1991 residing in Seattle. According to this blurb on a split release he did with OOAA on French label CINDYS TAPES, Jake also "likes drawing" and "sometimes practising animation." Accordingly "rides the bus everyday."
• This was put out on BBP's SoundCloud prior to releasing an album called Oldest crab on Dominican (?) label, El cuarto elástico, which you should probably listen to if you liked the sound of 'Bug yiv buskong P'.

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TOYOMU – 深い川

– Evolution is always an intriguing thing in music; how you can be listening to something with a particular theme one minute that can be, with fluid motion and simple addition and subtraction of elements like instruments and amplitude, transformed quite utterly into something different. With this track, '深い川' (fukai kawa—"deep river" in Japanese, and maybe referring to the novel of the same name by Shusako Endo), what begins as something small and potentially cutesy ends up growing and building exponentially.

Created by Kyoto-based musicmaker called TOYOMU, '深い川' is in its beginnings gentle and quiet, a sample on loop, a slow-march of a beat, but with gradually creeping strings and warm, heavy bass, echoing harp it transforms through a suspenseful dreamland of melancholy, finally arriving at an unexpected space of haunting wonder, made huge and powerful with grand brass sounds, an intensification of the sweeping strings, the ticking hi-hat keeping officious time, modern touches with blooping synth and occasional bulge of sub-bass, and the drums, bridging the gap between "classical" and "modern", old and new—between somewhat traditional (the Okami soundtrack springs to mind) and simple genreless, timeless creation: painting a picture using the palette of your own experience.

Fittingly, in the description of the track it's written (I am unable to translate it properly, but the general gist is: "old things, important, but also new things. i want to see much more"):

古いこと。ずっと大事にしておきたいけど、
新しいこと。もっと見てみたい。

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• This is taken from TOYOMU's 印象V : そうだ、京都。 (Kyoto Music) [Impression V: Oh yes, Kyoto], an album released at the start of June which you can listen to, buy and/or download over here. The above quotation, in Japanese, is

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WOSX – CHUVA

How vapourwave has evolved since it popped up a few years ago. One label intent and determined to continue the story of this genre, and of all forms of vapour (minus "-wave" suffix, plus "hard-" prefix, etc.) is Dream Catalogue – literally a pick-your-own of artists making sounds, images and ideals to select from and "install" into your mind. Not literally, but figuratively at least, since losing yourself in a lot of this label's output is not a difficult thing: it's all about imagination, dreaming. Not least in the highly evocative 'Chuva' by wosX.

Abrasive synth brass paints plaintive melody lines melting into one another, summoning a humid sort of sadness and longing; this continues for the whole track, swooping and groaning with damaged majesty. wosX weaves percussion into the mix, sharp metallic rattling, woodblock cowbell clopping, eventually erupt with thundering drum ('chuva' means rain in Portuguese) into a house beat thumping along amidst the drama. Vague whisperings and far-off vox tantalise in the neardistance.

It's nocturnal, but not exclusively so, akin in mood to the dark exoticism of John Talabot's 2012 debut album, ƒIN. For me this worked out well: it soundtracked a bus ride through jungle-thronged hills and heavy skies from Taipei to Luodong, mingling easily with the grand landscape.

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• wosX - pronounced "wossex" - is formerly known as Wolfenstein OS X and is from Montreal.
• This comes from wosX's latest album, Brasil World Cup 2034, out now on Dream Catalogue.

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