SNEAKPEEK’s “Serendipity” explores themes of connecting dots from seeming fortuitous coincidences in everyday life. The music video has washed out colors and looks like something generated on a computer suggesting a kind of virtual reality and/or that we’re all living in a simulation and that we can figure out deeper or broader meanings with leaning into an intuitive awareness of messages from the universe. According to vocalist Dora Hiller the song was inspired by the teaching of Abraham Hicks (a non-physical entity channeled by Esther Hicks) and Yogananda (a Hindu monk who helped to popularize the practice of yoga in the West and proposed unified underlying principles to world religions). But whether or not one subscribes to these ideas there is something alluring to the song’s techno-industrial dance beat, layered synths combining a hazy distortion and playful arpeggios and Hiller’s melodious voice sounding like a confident guide into a realm of manifesting one’s dreams and aspirations through directed intention. Watch the video for “Serendipity” on YouTube and follow SNEAKPEEK at the links below.
When “Moonlight” by Amor Experientia begins it’s more a drift into texture and a processed piano loop and haunting downtempo vocals. But near the minute mark a sound like a scream signals the next passage of the song that has the cool, sultry/soulful female vocals that embody the tranquil strands of white light through the dark of night like a beacon through the dusky haze of the track. That scream-like pique of tone that punctuates the track is reminiscent of something Dilla would have done for Donuts but spookier and like a darkwave hip-hop track. It ends too soon and suddenly for an effect of getting a taste of something tantalizingly mysterious. Listen to “Moonlight” on Soundcloud.
Vinyl Williams offers us another transporting bit of cosmic pop with “Petroglyph” from his forthcoming album Aeterna which releases August 4, 2023 via Harmony Records. The bright drones wrap around the ethereal, floating harmonies like sparkling garlands while Williams’ vocals guide us through a magical landscape of sounds and fantastical imagery of sacred geometry and celestial bodies. The accompanying music video is like a journey through a cultural home city in an MMO with wondrous features to discover for the curious and intrepid explorer and carried aloft by the hazy uplift of the song that outros with a dreamlike shimmer into the next adventure. Watch the video for “Petroglyph” on YouTube and follow Vinyl Williams at the links provided.
The Onion Rats wrote “Choke” in 2020 when the pandemic was new and civil unrest over a variety of issues was ambient but one branch of that really got the spotlight when the protests around the murder of George Floyd by police flared far and wide. You can hear the frustration and rage in the song and at times the words flow in distorted bursts but the contorted sonic pathways of the song contain the acute awareness felt by most people who aren’t rich that the powers that be whether in the economic of political elite cared more for maintaining the regular flow of markets at any cost and a return to the illusion and delusion of “normal” as soon as possible however that needed to be rationalized and often plenty of people rationalized that to themselves in the name of the fiction of self-perceived and false notions of liberty and freedom. But you hear none of that foolishness in this song. It is imbued with the simmering anger at a social and economic order that treats most people as expendable and unimportant. In its darkly psychedelic nightmare harmonies there is that persistent awareness that the world as it is is propped up by a contingent reality that is dependent on an austerity consensus we could snap out of and topple late capitalism if we wanted to, if there was the will to do so. Listen to “Choke” on Spotify and follow The Onion Rats on Instagram.
La Sécurité’s video for “Anyway” and its lo fidelity imagery and lack of color correction looks like an alternative section of V/H/S/99 but instead of a more straight ahead punk band called R.A.C.K. in the “Shredding” story line it’s a band traversing a hybrid of Goth and New Wave. The retro melodies and sound is like of a band took a lot of inspiration from Missing Persons, B-52s and a sassy, irreverent, neo-death rock band. Except in this short film there are no murderous ghosts and instead we see the life of a band on the road or playing around town, in the practice space, playing video games and performing at the kinds of small clubs most bands do and making the most of it and not looking like Goth fashion victims but rather with a joyful exuberance and sense of humor that gives some context to a song that seems to be about the petty dramas many people get into when they’re operating from an inflated sense of their own tragedies and ego but not getting dragged into it all because scene or social circle drama, who can make much time for that? Watch the video for “Anyway” on YouTube and follow La Sécurité at the links below.
Vessel on its “Telephone” single truly puts the essence of a song into every moment. Like something out of an old hardcore tune, it dispenses with an intro, minimizes or eliminates a traditional outro and keeps the song lean, concise and imbued with a rare clarity. The song isn’t even two minutes long but in that time it conveys a message of yearning but not wanting to seem clingy but not shying away from genuine feelings and affection and how separation can feel like forever with your loved ones. The guitar line is minimal, like a single note melody more like a pulse, the bass line ascends and carries with it a swing heard in the emotive vocals and saxophone accents, all seeming to work in perfect tandem without overwhelming any of the elements until the end when everything comes together for a rich and full conclusion. It’s post-punk for fans of 99 Records artists and perhaps Essential Logic and Grass Widow. It’s a gentle song that is striking in how its sheer economy of songwriting can contain multiple emotional resonances. Listen to “Telephone” on Spotify and follow Atlanta’s Vessel on Instagram.
Boko Yout envisioned the seven tracks for the new EP AS SEEN ON TV (which released on May 12, 2023) as different channels of a fictional TV network called Boko Communications. Teleprompter sounds like something that was recorded, mixed and played on some old technology and on the verge of glitching out. Like some 1980s children’s toy technology with the electronics distorting slightly. But the vocals seem to trace an informal rhythm that’s more intuitive yet syncs up with the light splash percussion beats in the end. The lyrics sound like something an underworld hustler would say to a potential rival or up and coming underling who has gotten a little too big for their britches. But set to the swirl of otherworldly non-verbal vocals like cybernetic birds or anime faerie folk singing as a chorus for the main vocals, languid bass line and cascading dynamic the whole song has a more playful tone than one menacing. Maybe this channel on the album is one showcasing the grimier side of life but one with distinct style for which Yves Tumor might contribute theme music. Listen to “TELEPROMPTER” on Spotify and follow Boko Yout at at the links provided.
If Buzzcocks dirtied up their sound a little and shot it through with buoyant synth melody and distilled a song to its essential minute thirty-six it might sound a little like “Television Funeral” by Mononegatives. There’s something gritty and lo-fit, even gloriously amateurish to the production on the song but its energy is infectious like when Wire cut to the chase on every song on Pink Flag or POW! gone even more punk but seeming to draw upon the sensibilities of another era and bringing to it some new vitality, a collision between New Wave and punk to produce a sound that was never supposed to be reconciled back in the day but absolutely can now without cultural betrayal or irony. Or not too much irony. Listen to “Television Funeral” on Spotify where you can hear the rest of the new Mononegatives album Crossing the Visual Field and follow the band at the links provided.
Mcclendon’s dusky, saturated synths on “Loving For A Season” and the relaxed pace of the song conveys a mood that captures a melancholic spirit born of an acceptance and yearning for meaningful connection. You hear a sense of loss and in its streaming atmospherics and in the lonely saxophone expressing the ache more fully than the vocals which carry the weight of what could have been. It sounds like a song set in a story of a tragic love that couldn’t last forever set in the backdrop of a time not so far from now when people are hiding from pollution reddened skies except for a rare simply hazy blue day now and then when a glimmer of hope for the future and unguarded personal connections seem more easy. One might describe it as apocalyptic synth pop but one more rooted in a realistic scenario of diminished possibilities rather than a perilously dramatic and sudden downfall and the romance of a climate like that hits more acutely. Listen to “Loving For A Season” on Spotify and follow Mcclendon at the links below.
Kyle Bates is a composer and multi-instrumentalist whose work has most often been heard as his musical project Drowse. Founded in 2013 in Portland, Oregon, Drowse has released a few albums and numerous EPs and split releases. The music could be considered in part ambient, slowcore, shoegaze, drone, experimental folk and perhaps even transcendental black metal. But all categories aside, each Drowse recording is a journey into unique and nuanced emotional spaces exploring and living within a flow of emotions and thoughts that open the mind to new ideas and interpretations. And more so the moods, frequencies and textures on a Drowse recording, or really any of the releases in which Bates is involved, express a state of mind that one enters after having moved past a peak of anxiety or personal darkness and contain that tenderness and rawness one often needs to pull oneself out of a place of acute pain and psychological paralysis. The gentleness of the music is part of its power and appeal as Bates seems keenly aware of what it’s like to experience that period in life where you don’t feel like you can push or strive any further and you need an experience that is the opposite of that very modern and American internalized urge to keep at things to the extreme and prove yourself endlessly more and more. The core sound of Drowse is that of the musical equivalent of acceptance of one’s human limitations and of being open to what will nurture your well being and spark your imagination into nudging you toward fulfilling experiences.
Throughout his work as Drowse Bates has collaborated with Maya Stoner (Floating Room), Thom Wasluck (Planning for Burial), Madeline Johnston (Midwife), Taylor Malsey, Amulets, Daniel Schmidt and others. In 2023 Bates released an album as Kyle Bates and Lula Asplund called A Matinee that expands upon the format of his songwriting and production with two extended tracks that sound like an improv session one might have stumbled into in cutting room floor recordings of Alan Hankshaw and/or Brian Bennett had they been asked to provide music for a forgotten and mystical place. While it may sound like Bates’ work sets your mind into a different place than where it began upon listening to it, it does, but it is not escapist. Like the work of Grouper or Tim Hecker, Bates’ music has delicate immediacy that engages as it soothes and it stirs the emotions and the imagination.
Listen to our interview with Bates on Bandcamp and catch Drowse on tour now throughout the US and select dates in Europe through August including at the Hi-Dive in Denver on Monday, June 12, 2023 with Agriculture, Sprain and Palehorse/Palerider. For live dates and to hear A Matinee please visit the Drowse Bandcamp page linked below the interview and for more information on Bates’ projects and performances visit kylebates.net.
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