Vyle brought on board an imaginative crew to craft “GEARSHIFT (Model S)/Front Row Stockist.” With production by Brodinski and contributions from Haleek Maul and Teki Latex the song from AÜTO/MÖTOR (released on September 22, 2023, the first ever WebVR album) the rapping comes at us like data packets of images of ideas swimming between pulses of dub-like electronic bass and what sounds like part of a siren abstracted and looped together. It lends the song a sense of urgency and grittiness and the lyrics employ the metaphor of the functions of a car to get into a high realm of life functioning. And then there’s a transition where the vocals all but whisper as we hear what could be a train underpass and/or the sound of distant gunfire all at once. The line “turn your dream into a nightmare” hints at this dark passage in the song before it gives way to a distorted, dreamlike outro where the vocals sound slightly overblown, wordless in ethereal flares ending abruptly with a metallic mechanical sound, a gear shifting to another setting. It feels like we’ve been hearing a musical diary reflecting a different head space across days edited together for a song that wouldn’t be out of place in the Warp Records catalog and reminiscent of the more experimental end of Sole and other artists in the Anticon universe with a similar instinct for changing up how hip-hop has to sound and not being limited by stylistic considerations. Listen to “GEARSHIFT (Model S)/Front Row Stockist” on Spotify where you can listen to the rest of AÜTO/MÖTOR and follow Vyle at the links below.
Thomas Frempong (often spelled “Frimpong”) was an important figure in the Ghanaian music scene for half a century before his untimely death on September 18, 2013 leaving behind a rich legacy of popular music. As fate would have it a treasure trove of Ghana Highlife records was found in the the bottom of a garden in the UK by DJ Jerry Frempong’s wife Katie. Frempong’s father Anthony Roberts Frempong, was the founder of one of the more important Ghanaian record labels Asona Records that championed Electric Highlife. BBE Music owner Pete Adarkwah heard about that discovery and worked out a catalog deal to reissue those records and make them available to a new generation of listeners. Asona had originally released Thomas Frempong’s 1985 album Aye Yi which came out in the wake of his move to the UK. BBE reissued the album on digital on November 10, 2023.
Any one of the four tracks on the record would be a vital example of Burger Highlife in the 80s but “Mada Meho So” is strikingly modern for our current time in its sensibilities. Its progressive and expertly accented funk bass lines, the intricate guitar work, splashes of echoing, haunting, rhythmic synth work and the energetic vocals have an irresistible immediacy. Musically it would fit on a playlist with the likes of Flying Lotus, Kaytranada and even the more jazz end of black midi. More than a decade ago indie rock bands like Suburban Kids With Biblical Names, Foals, Vampire Weekend and Dirty Projectors were dipping heavily into Highlife. But “Mada Meho So” and the rest of Aye Yi is heady trip through a refined peak of the art form. Listen to “Mada Meho So” on Spotify and explore the rest of the album there as well or through Bandcamp where a digital download is available for purchase.
A.K. Yeboah (aka Antony “King” Yeboah) began his career in music performing highlight in the 50s but in the 80s he started writing songs in Pidgin and his electric guitar style fit in well with “burger” highlife style of that decade as well and established himself as an influential musician for Ghanaian artists worldwide. As fate would have it a treasure trove of Ghana Highlife records was found in the the bottom of a garden in the UK by DJ Jerry Frempong’s wife Katie. Frempong’s father Anthony Roberts Frempong, was the founder of one of the more important Ghanaian record labels Asona Records that championed Electric Highlife. BBE Music owner Pete Adarkwah heard about that discovery and worked out a catalog deal to reissue those records and make them available to a new generation of listeners. “Nde Yen Da” by A.K. Yeboah & K.K.’s No. 2 Band is the title track to that group’s 1985 album.
“Nde Yen Da” has an immediate appeal the moment the song starts with its layered polyrhythms and intricate guitar melodies supporting the call and response vocals. There is compelling energy to the music that pulls you along for an experience that doesn’t require one to understand Pidgin to appreciate. The lead vocalist occasionally throws out some dynamic side narrative like a market hawker to break the almost hypnotic repetition of pointillistic guitar work in runs that would be impossible outside the hands of a master musician, the kind of performance that would challenge math rock riff masters. And in the evolving rhythm scheme that guides you to the edge and back of the song and one gets the sense that the song works like an experimental novel where you can pick up the vibe at any point and ride with it to the end and start over and get something unique out of it each time. Is the song 7 minutes 15? Yes. Does it feel like the average song over five minutes? No, because it has its own logic that seems outside the linear experience of western pop music formats. Listen to “Nde Yen Da” and the rest of the album on Spotify and find more information on the record and the reissue series on Bandcamp.
Don Sahand eases us into “Mirrors” (part of his forthcoming album My Missing Dentures) with some electronic clicks and simple percussive noises the likes of which one more often hears in the modular synth compositions of Kraftwerk. But the song’s moods build with a shivering melodic resonance like a walk down a long hall when lights triggered by motion sensors illuminate your path, in this case, perhaps a mirrored hallway in which you’re forced to confront your isolation and sense of alienation on your way to an uncertain future. Droplets of crystalline notes sound and trail off in the unknown distance like the hidden activities of the world around you that you’ll never full know but which you can sense, contributing to the enigmatic and haunted feel of the song and its sustained melancholia. Listen to “Mirrors” on Spotify and follow renowned composer Don Sahand on Instagram.
From the stop motion animated music video to the eclectic instrumentation and songwriting, vagaries also brings to “open waves” a sensibility reminiscent of a time in underground American rock when narrow genres all but aimed at the marketing of songwriting built into its conceptualization wasn’t a thing. The song’s lo-fi production is actually one of its charms and lends its blend of psychedelic and indiepop a freshness of presentation, a spontaneity and immediacy that carries you along so that it’s more than six minute length feels like less than half the time. The stop motion animation with colorful figures as the band too taps into an earlier era of music like evoking nostalgia without the sentimental aspects or feeling at all thrownback. Its melody is reminiscent of Ultravox’s “Reap the Wild Wind” but the distorted vocals and the hybrid style is resonant with what Studded Left has been doing lately in its own subversive pop songcraft. Watch the video for “Open Waves” on YouTube and follow vagaries at the links provided.
“Sage Creek” by Ithaca, New York’s Twin Court is the kind of song that has a softness and vulnerability that one might most often associate with a slowcore or indie folk type of band. But there’s a tonal uniqueness that may come from the band’s use of gamelan, bonang and harmonium along with the guitars. The song structure is also rather avant-garde with repeated themes to hypnotic effect and layered, interlocking rhythms that one most often hears in music out of the 1970s art rock tradition like a far more mellow and minimal Magma or Yes when the latter is in its more pastoral moments. It’s a song worth taking in full because it rewards the patient listener as the song progresses from its spare beginnings to weaving in an array of sounds in miniature orchestral fashion with GK Fulton’s vocals hitting and sustaining notes that interact with the rest of the music at unorthodox but always interesting angles giving the whole song an enigmatic character that sustains your interest until the end. Astute listeners may even here resonance with “Blue Milk” by Stereolab and/or a Linda Perhacs song in their ability to stir the imagination and demand acceptance on their idiosyncratic terms. Listen to “Sage Creek” on YouTube and follow Twin Court at the links below.
When “Sad Pisces” by aeonatan gets off the ground you feel like you’re in for a solid garage rock song but it quickly progresses into something more sonically ambitious and expansive. The crunchy and driving guitar takes on drifty atmospherics like something The Gordons or Bailter Space might have done but then when Jonatan Stenfor’s understated yet luminously melodic vocals step back the more garage rock aspect comes back to the fore as the full-on sheets of sound clear only to reassert itself soon enough. The final break toward the end of the song finds the vocals swimming in light, spacious psychedelia like a moment suspended in time and the headlong flow of the song that carries us to the end with rapid pulsing guitar work into a droning fadeout. The song’s unconventional structure and masterful use of unexpected layers of melody really give it an immersive quality that’s more creative than simply tapping into established genre tropes. Listen to “Sad Pisces” on Spotify and follow aeonatan at the links provided. Look for aeonatan’s debut album nihil due out in 2024.
Descending, piano chords with a touch of reverb and a background reverse delay tone precede ethereal vocals in “sleepy” by body / negative. In the accompanying music video we see some old footage from a wedding, presumably that of songwriter Andy Schiaffino’s parents, and in the background there are hints of children laughing and an audio source that isn’t really connected to the visuals on hand. It’s like future and present exist in the song structured a little like a repeating loop. The song feels like experiencing a waking dream and Simon Scott’s (Slowdive) mastering of the track allows its various layers resonate and intermingle in a way that might happen if you got some old stock, used reel-to-reel tape and fed that found audio material as a sound source into a mix bringing together field recordings of a campfire and the elegantly delicate vocals and instrumentation. On the surface it’s a simple and spare composition but its layers and complexity of expression and emotional nuance convey a sense of melancholic loss and affection that eases in with a heaviness when in the end we learn that the wedded couple is no longer with us. The song, featuring contributions from Midwife, is a beautiful testament to the life of the couple without having to employ heavy-handed theatrics or melodrama to capture a depth of feeling that flows throughout the song. Watch the video for “sleepy” on YouTube and follow body / negative at the links below. The Everett LP was released digitially on December 8, 2023 via Track Number Records with vinyl available for pre-order and shipping in March, 2024.
The splashes of trailing guitar scrawl match the flashes of film set lights in the video for The Fourth Wall’s “Never A Part.” Directed by both Eric Harrod and Stephen Augustin based on his concept, we see singer Augustin looking uncomfortable yet accommodating the attention from the production crew and script supervisor and director. Everyone goes through what looks like Polaroid stills from the shoot like fragments of the real person only to later burn several of the photos in a campfire. Like an act of reclaiming one’s identity from it being a fragmented product without context. The song seems to be about ties of family and blood and never quite belonging or being of a new home country or culture. Augustin’s parents immigrated from Korea and the Philippines and the new The Fourth Wall album Return Forever (due out in March 2024 on DevilDuck Records) is like nine chapters of exploring the immigrant experience and the complexities of that emerge from trying to come to terms with what is known and what is unknowable about one’s own history and how that impacts one’s own identity. The song comes out of Augustin’s imagining a conversation between his own grandmother and her grandson and gets into issues of what it means to love out of what might be perceived as some kind of family obligation and biological connections and how that might overlap with an unconditional love. We hear tension and drama in the song, urgent percussion, a cyclone of noise and melody that escalates and fades out by the song’s end. And earlier we hear those underpinnings of uncertainty and fragile shimmers and fast echos of tone held together by Augustin’s soaring vocals and seeming will to hold it all together and to comprehend some elusive truth and significance to make sense of what feels like an existential conundrum. And yet the song with all of its nervy energy ends with a kind of transcendent catharsis like an acceptance of contradictions the complete knowledge of which you may never fully understand. Watch the video for “Never A Part” on YouTube and follow The Fourth Wall at the links below.
Church Fire, photo by Tom Murphy, concept by Church Fire
Church Fire is a trio from Denver, Colorado that formed around 2010. It’s sound is “…equal parts industrial synth pop, hyperkinetic dance punk and dreamlike ambient 8-bit EDM doom,” or so this author wrote some time back. The project began as a duo of Shannon Webber and David Samuelson originally calling itself Sew Buttons on Ice Cream and performing shows in the local underground and DIY circuit. Samuelson had been a member of art rock bands Bangtel and Dinner With Cannibals and Webber in political noise punk trio Dangerous Nonsense (which she would continue to front until the mid-2010s). The latter and Samuelson’s previous bands were welcomed by the local, weirdo art rock scene of groups with a penchant for the mutant sounds of artists like Mr. Bungle, John Zorn, Chrome and Frank Zappa that once had a loose affiliation as the Denver Art Rock Collective before that fizzled out in the early 2010s.
In 2012 Church Fire dispensed with its odd assortments of instrumentation and focused on the more electronic songwriting with Webber’s commanding and emotionally electrifying vocals and stage presence and changed its performance moniker to its current form. The name seeming to reflect the band’s anti-authoritarian spirit and its always creative and earnest anti-patriarchal critique. Its developing sound then was more in line with what was going on in the nascent darkwave scene of which Church Fire was not a part and which didn’t have a strong showing in Denver. So the band garnered its own following in Denver aside from what one might presume to be its scene with always strikingly powerful live shows and its undeniably compelling dance beats, entrancing and transporting melodies and rare fusion of joy and righteous anger. All qualities that have remained an aspect of the band’s sound and performance style even as it has evolved.
Around the time Church Fire took on its then new name it shared bills with other acts emerging in new forms and under new names like The Milk Blossoms who had once been called Architect (in which Samuelson plays bass) and Mirror Fears, the solo project of Kate Warner, formerly of dream-pop/indie rock band Talk All Night. Webber and Samuelson grew up south of Denver and Warner grew up on the north side in a family that encouraged creative endeavors and with siblings who made a mark in music in their own right, her brother Andrew now in Slim Cessna’s Auto Club and Weathered Statues and having been in groups like Bad Luck City and Snake Rattle Rattle Snake. There seemed to be a natural affinity and stylistic compatibility between Church Fire’s music and that of Mirror Fears. Warner had played keyboards and synth in Talk All Night but for Mirror Fears she learned electronic production/composition and principles of audio engineering (in part from doing live sound and trouble-shooting gear for a local rehearsal studio and various events) further and her emotionally rich and vulnerable voice has a unique resonance that transcends any specific musical style. In the summer of 2019 Warner had joined Church Fire and put Mirror Fears on hiatus.
As a trio Samuelson took up drums with a rigorous practice regimen that honed a precision and power suitable for the band’s existing music with Webber and Warner experimenting with combining and playing off each other’s strengths as vocalists while taking the group’s songwriting in new directions and maintaining an inspiring and engaging live show. You can go to a Church Fire and be guaranteed to see a fiery performance that invites you along for a shared catharsis. To date the band has played hundreds of shows and released four full-length albums, an EP and a few singles, all worthwhile listens with memorable songs throughout.
Listen to our interview with Church Fire on Bandcamp and follow the trio at the links below. Chances are if it’s a month, Church Fire has a show or two. But the next two shows are on Saturday, December 23, 2023 at The Broadway Roxy with The Milk Blossoms, Curta and Debthedem0 at 8:30 pm doors, 9pm show and Saturday, December 30, 2023 at The Skylark Lounge with Watch Yourself Die, Voight and Horse Girl 8 doors, 9 show.
Queen City Sounds and Art 
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