New Music – Page 180 – Queen City Sounds and Art

“Aftermath” by Psybos is an Audio Image of the Sense of Mystery and Wonder of the Future Exploration of the Ruins of Our World Today

The windswept drones of “Aftermath” by Psybos sounds like what a world recovering in the wake of some kind of global disaster, human made or otherwise, might sound like. A third of the way through the song a wordless human vocal rings out as the melodic arpeggio cycles through the organic momentum and wends its way through a more distinct and more background quality like a visual element coming into the forefront and then back like someone following a former mountainside train track and its meandering path. Toward the last third of the song the melody increase in intensity before giving way to spacious vistas of white noise and distant ambient drones with bird sounds closing out the track. Images of the classic science fiction conceit of the post-apocalyptic world doesn’t quite suit the song. More like what might happen a hundred years following the collapse and people exploring the sprawling urban decay with a sense of wonder and potential menace. Listen to “Aftermath” on Spotify, follow Psybos at the links below and look out for the album Year 0 due out later in 2020.

https://soundcloud.com/psybos
https://psybos.bandcamp.com

Biiig Stretch’s Instrumental Hip-Hop Song “Her Garden” Paints a Picture of Idyllic Intimacy and Gentle Affection

Biiig Stretch, photo courtesy the artist

Biiig Stretch wrote “Her Garden” inspired in part by days when he and his fiance didn’t have to work and could spend time relaxing in her garden. The instrumental hip-hop track has an idyllic quality that wouldn’t be out of place in a montage sequence in a quirky indie romance. The hazy string line, the sampled percussion noises put together like a collage of a beat that sounds like it was assembled from available parts rather than something programmed digitally. Altogether the elements give the song a beautiful blend of organic textures and produced composition that conveys a sense of intimacy and gentle affection. Listen to “Her Garden” on Soundcloud, connect with Biiig Stretch at the links below and look out for the project’s latest album Butterfly Princess which was released in May 2020.

https://soundcloud.com/biiigstretch
https://twitter.com/BiiigStretch
https://www.instagram.com/biiigstretch

S. Touze Holds Up a Mirror of Hard Truths to the American Dream on “USA”

S.Touze infuses his song “USA” with a touch of Bernie Worrell-esque keyboard work and production reminiscent of 90s hip-hop. But there’s a more contemplative tone to the song even as it clearly, with rapid cadences, peels back the layers of privilege and lack of self-awareness that seems to permeate the perspectives of people who take their higher relative political and economic status in the world for granted. At times it comes across as a mirror image and cousin of 2Pac’s 1996 hit “California Love.” And yet didn’t Tupac hint at the negative side of the American empire as well even in his most celebratory songs? When S. Touze raps “Walk around with a golden spoon when you’re born in the USA, go to school and make your dreams come true if you come to the USA” he exposes the American dream for a fraud both for people who come to the country seeking opportunity and for people from the USA who have yet to realize they’re never going to achieve that dream so long as the whole thing is rigged if you’re not the right color and not of the proper economic class. But S. Touze focuses on the immigrant experience and the tragic allure of America for many at any time but especially in the last few years when it seems you can be detained and separated from your children and allowed to die because you have no legal status. S. Touze casts this situation more poetically in the song but never tries to sugarcoat it while having written a composition that holds your attention regardless of your own feelings on the issue. Listen to “USA” on Soundcloud and connect with S. Touze at the links provided.

https://www.youtube.com/user/esaietouze
https://twitter.com/sdiiddy
https://www.facebook.com/esaietouzebey
https://www.instagram.com/s.touze

ST3PH Deftly Uses the Metaphor of Interdimensional Travel and Parallel Existence for Personal Transformation on “Spaced Out”

ST3PH employs the metaphor of traveling between dimensions and becoming aware of alternate universes and existences for liberation through personal transformation on the single “Spaced Out.” With coolly luminous keyboard sounds in the beat as well as accelerating synth flourishes and percussion accents it sounds like a synthesis of dub, trap and darkwave. While it wouldn’t quite fit to compare the song to something by Danny Brown, it shares that genre bending quality in which Goth-y dance music and hip-hop compliment each other so well as to create a different flavor and mood for both in one song. The story could be just another struggle and striving song but given a different kind of musical context it takes on another dimension giving the song a greater thematic depth than expected. Listen to “Spaced Out” on Soundcloud, follow ST3PH at the links provided and look out for the TRIME Vol. II EP due later in 2020.

https://soundcloud.com/st3phofficial
https://twitter.com/st3phofficial
https://www.facebook.com /st3phofficial
https://www.instagram.com/st3phofficial

The UMS Virtual Festival Livestreams From the Hi-Dive on July 25, 2020

The Milk Blossoms at UMS 2019, photo by Tom Murphy

As with all things live music the annual The Underground Music Showcase (UMS to most) can’t happen in the usual manner but the organizers put together a lineup for a virtual music festival, variety show and retro telethon. Partnering with Colorado Music Relief Fund which supports Colorado musicians and music industry professionals affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, the event with run on Saturday, July 25, 2020 from 7 p.m. through 10 p.m. Mountain Time. There will be prize giveaways and party supplies delivered to viewers and while not quite the sprawling marathon of music, local and otherwise, it promises to provide some humor and good times with hosts comedians Christie Buchele and Nathan Lund. The event will broadcast from the Hi-Dive a venue that has been associated with the festival for most its run thus far.

This year’s lineup (in alphabetical order) includes:
Down Time
Float Like a Buffalo
Lily Fangz
Los Mocochetes
Nathaniel Rateliff
Neoma
Ramakhandra
The Milk Blossoms
The Still Tide
TheyCallHimAP
Turvy Organ
Wave Decay
Wes Watkins
Whitacre
Wildermiss
YaSi

With additional music provided by DealzMakesBeats.

For more information including where to catch the livestream, please visit undergroundmusicshowcase.com. And you can donate to Colorado Music Relief Fund at www.comusicrelief.org/home.

Yung Ugly Bastard’s Punk Rap Song “Sea Anemone” is an Explosive Exorcism of Personal Darkness and Self-Anger

Yung Ugly Bastard’s “Sea Anemone” is a punk rap song that is design to be abrasive, to make you feel that intense sense of anxiety and desperation that comes from being angry at yourself for allowing people to take advantage of you yet again. Those pulses of rage directed at yourself as you burn out the feelings inside you rather than take it out on anything or anyone. Fans of Death Grips and Ho99o9 will appreciate the almost industrial beat that glitches out in disorienting shifts in tempo, tone and texture. It is the perfect portrait of a mindset as the messages in your mind haunt you with a blaring volume and flood your heart with all the aggressive demons of personal darkness before being exorcised by the song’s end. Listen to “Sea Anemone,” produced by MERCYKILL, on Soundcloud and connect with Yung Ugly Bastard at the links provided.

https://soundcloud.com/yunguglybastard
https://www.instagram.com/yunguglybastard

Bad Flamingo Sketches the Attraction of Rebellion Against Restrictive Culture Mores on “Bad Apple”

Bad Flamingo, photo courtesy the artists

Bad Flamingo’s single “Bad Apple” sounds like a bit of blues folklore told accompanied by percussive banjo, slide guitar flares, acoustic guitar strum accents and a touch of synth. Like a soundtrack to a tale of someone who has spent entirely too much of their life doing what’s good and proper only to find out whatever defines those things in a conventional sense aren’t very psychically satisfying. So she years to be lead astray, as it were, by someone who other people say is the proverbial bad apple. But as in real life this person’s life represents liberation from an internalized oppressive culture rather than genuinely a bad person but as anyone born to rebel against the status quo what that person represents is an element of danger too as when you learn that you have so many more options in life you don’t want to go back into the cultural corral. At times it’s reminiscent of a Kimya Dawson song or Garfunkel and Oates but without the comedy and more emphasis on the surreal and freely associating and subverting cultural myths. Listen to “Bad Apple” on Soundcloud and connect with Bad Flamingo at the links below.

https://www.badflamingomusic.com
https://open.spotify.com/artist/3Ht7Wd1qVgmFyW63bl5eKE
https://www.facebook.com/badflamingomusic
https://www.instagram.com/badflamingomusic

The Minimalist Sound Collage of Tallinn’s “At the Freeport” Questions the Inevitability of the Transformation of High Art Into a Form of Currency in Late Capitalism

Tallinn, Varieties of Exile II cover (cropped)

Tallinn is the project of Scott Whittaker who is working on a trilogy of EPs that “deconstruct the jazzy sophistication of soft rock with corroded noise and experimental textures.” That succinct description fits the track “At the Freeport” from Varieties of Exile II EP (out May 25, 2020). The song is like a collage of sound utilizing marimba as both a textural and rhythmic element, what feels like samples of sounds as quick swells of tone and drone (the latter in the form of what sounds like a disintegrating tape of an electronic organ played backward) and lightly phased vocals. The effect is reminiscent of arty post-punk band Shriekback at its most avant-garde. The percussion and impressionistic guitar work ground the song while the other elements seem like blown out ghosts that come in to haunt the song fitting its themes of questioning whether its inevitable that high can become a form of currency in the process of universal commodification under late capitalism. The song doesn’t answer the question but it does provoke contemplating to whom does great art belong and to whom do great do great ideas belong in the end. And one can easily conclude that all of it can and should benefit the greater human community and coming to that realization does that suggest other obvious parallels in how we organize our political and economic lives? That the song can prompt such a string of thought suggests that maybe art can be inherently a method of communicating and inspiring change in a way that transcends a culture that turns all activity into a transactional relationship. Listen to “At the Freeport” on Soundcloud and connect with Tallinn at the links provided.

https://soundcloud.com/xtallinnx
https://xtallinnx.bandcamp.com
https://twitter.com/xtallinnx
https://www.instagram.com/xtallinnx

Bathe Alone Reflects on the Enervating Effects of Living a Life Perpetually on and Often Over the Edge of Anxiety With “Champagne”

In Bathe Alone’s song “Champagne” the songwriter addresses the way anticipating the breakdowns in your mind can be an exhausting proposition that warps the way you live your life. You are always on edge about what might trigger a panic attack or a paroxysm of anxiety in general born of trauma. The title of the song apparently refers both to imagining what it would be like to trade places with someone you see randomly in the world and to the realization that even with your your own struggles that you have things about your life that are good and that part of mental health problems is feeding into them even if almost against your control, in particular by comparing your life to that of other people. But that insight does seem to take the edge off even if you’ve gone some way down the path of having having an episode as it suggests that you can often derail that procession to emotional disaster. And yet the song and its beautifully melodic dissolves and ethereal tones isn’t sitting in the moments of greatest stress, it seems to come from that time after the worst wave of it has passed and you are able to have some perspective on what it is that triggers you and amplifies the experience. What makes this thematic and musical contrast especially interesting is that though it’s essentially a blissed out, soulful synth pop song, at no time does Bathe Alone try to placate you by saying it’s all going to be okay or any of the other useless platitudes you often get from people who might have better mental health but no insights into how to make things better. Rather the song honors the experience while transforming that energy into something more introspective and reflective and thus more manageable. Listen to “Champagne” on Spotify and connect with Bathe Alone at the links provided.

www.bathealone.com
https://soundcloud.com/bathealone
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9hpjK2lI9E24Y40Dl6knfA
https://bathealone.bandcamp.com
https://twitter.com/bathemusic
https://www.facebook.com/bathealone
https://www.instagram.com/bathealone

Drones Que Caen’s “Condicionado” Casts a Beautifully Doleful Musical Drift Like a Montage of Your Life’s Regrets

Drones Que Caen, photo courtesy the artists

Argentinian experimental rock band Drones Que Caen from Buenos Aires is doing the soundtrack to a documentary film to be released at the end of 2020. The film is about a homeless poet who lived on the same street in Sao Paulo for more than a decade. Throughout 2020 the group has been and will release a single every month that reflects its eclectic musical interests that span the kind of intensely emotional singer-songwriter material we heard from Jeff Buckley and Elliott Smith, the production heavy industrial rock of Nine Inch Nails and the similarly-minded and musically diverse Argentinian rock band A-Tirador Láser. That said, its single “Condicionado,” written as the main theme of the aforementioned documentary, breaks from all expectations one might have of the group’s cited influences. Its drifting yet fluidly seething synth drones cast a melancholic, dream-like tone. The composition makes exquisite use of a simple keyboard figure as a kind of framework from which the other sounds including an elongated, doleful guitar drone hang like uncomfortable memories passing through your mind in a montage of regret. Listen to “Condicionado” on Soundcloud and follow Drones Que Caen at the links provided.

https://dronesquecaen.bandcamp.com
https://soundcloud.com/drones-que-caen