New Music – Page 195 – Queen City Sounds and Art

The Granular Sonic and Emotional Collage of Vijuuns’ “Overlay” Makes For an Immersive Listen

Vijunns_Overlay1_crop — Vijunns “Overlay” cover

Vijunns’ song “Overlay,” named after the Photoshop blending tool, explores the theme of urban decay. With the accompanying music video with performance artist playing the role of an enigmatic figure walking through and moving about various settings in Bombay Beach on the Salton Sea, the layers of sound – flowing and swirling winds of white noise, granular, melodic tones, pulsing arpeggios, meditative beats – work enhance each other while existing independent of each other. The effect gives a different emotional context when taken as a whole and the use of the imagery of urban decay draws on a sense of a memory of a place that persists in the mind that in your emotions overlays the current conditions of the landscape. Walking through them those layers of meaning for you mingle and you come to appreciate the world as it is now in a new way as it has a new context for people that don’t remember it as you once did and so it exists in experience purely in its current form. The track, too, is reminiscent of early Tycho or early 2000s Boards of Canada with their own drawing upon sonic and emotional artifacts of an earlier era to craft a musical experience for today that anchors the listening experience across time if you can tap into its references and if not just provides a soothing and deeply immersive and lush bit of ear candy. Watch the video for “Overlay” on YouTube and connect with Vijunns at the links below.

vijunns.com
soundcloud.com/vijunns
facebook.com/vijunns

“Of Two Minds (feat. Boy Indigo)” by Adrianna Krikl is Like the Romantic Outro Music to an Unconventional, Sprawling Space Opera

AdrianaKrikl_OfTwoMinds1_crop — Adrianna Krikl “Of Two Minds” cover

The appropriately titled “Of Two Minds” by Adrianna Krikl featuring with Boy Indigo is like being invited into a windswept realm of streaming, melodic drones, floating on rising, blissful clouds of tone while a nearly androgynous voice sings like the collective voice of that ethereal space. What the song brings to mind is what the outro soundtrack to a cinematic version of the Saga comic series by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples might sound like. There is an air of romance and mystery to the song, of promise and uncertainty but unshakeable hope and inner tranquility in the face of any turmoil to come. Listen to “Of Two Minds” on Bandcamp and connect with Adrianna Krikl at the links below.

adriannakrikl.com
tidal.com/browse/album/131467630
deezer.com/us/album/131894332
soundcloud.com/adriannakrikl/of-two-minds-feat-boy-indigo
music.apple.com/us/album/of-two-minds-feat-boy-indigo/1499157476?i=1499157477
open.spotify.com/album/0IQPOJ8hrz2GP9vlTkoU0M?highlight=spotify:track:2bAXwwOPcrm5OQ5Yu8sD83

Laveda Makes Having Youthful Illusions of Immortality and Vigor Shattered Sound Triumphant and Life-Affirming on “Ghost”

Laveda_Ghost1_crop — Laveda, photo courtesy the artists

Give Laveda’s “Ghost” some of your time to come to full bloom. The introduction sounds like someone recorded a secret practice session, like the first recordings you might make before you figure out anything like mic placement or having a real mic at all. It is a sonic metaphor for the vulnerability and tenderness, hopefulness, honesty and bravery in the music and words to follow. The song quickly gets to its grand sweeps of melodic guitar and vocals that both sit perfectly with that melody and float breathily over the quiet sections. Though the song is about being in a situation that changes your perspective on life in an instant by shattering the illusions you might have about your own immortality when you’re young or your personal myth of willpower overcoming all when you’re a little older. Laveda’s great momentum in the song also indulges in moments of imperfection that give it the grit and unvarnished quality that actually complements well its polished grandeur. Fans of Slowdive and Alvvays will appreciate not just the delicious atmospheres but the song’s creative dynamics and layered emotional colorings. Listen to “Ghost” on Spotify, connect with Laveda at the links below and look out for the group’s new full length What Happens After out April 24 via Color Station.

soundcloud.com/lavedamusic
open.spotify.com/artist/4k9HOB4zrVAEasP7nm31F7
facebook.com/lavedamusic
instagram.com/lavedamusic

Owsey Remixes Koresma’s “Northern Lights” to Craft the Chillout Lounge Music For a Floating Nightclub in Full View of the Aurora Borealis

Koresma_NorthernLights_OwseyRemix1_crop — Koresma “Northern Lights (Owsey remix)” cover (cropped)

The Owsey remix of Koresma’s “Northern Lights” gives it a dusky and lush, downtempo sheen. Adding sultry vocals, some subtle low end, and luminous strings, Owsey has enhanced the electronic horns of the original so that the song develops from a late night jazz vibe to a trance-y, chillout atmosphere that glimmers with shifting colors of the actual Northern Lights. Like if you could be in some kind of floating nightclub somewhere within clear visual distance of the phenomenon and the sense of wonder and calm that might fill you seeing them for the first time in person without the haze of pollution putting a filter between you and the experience. Listen Koresma’s “Northern Lights” as remixed by Irish producer Owsey on Soundcloud and connect with Koresma at the links provided.

soundcloud.com/koresma
open.spotify.com/artist/14EybDMySlkntyuxgm1pek
twitter.com/Koresmamusic
facebook.com/koresmamusic
instagram.com/koresmamusic

The Dark Atmospherics and Breakbeats of “No Fun” by Sundaes is the Soundtrack to Falling Out of Fascination With Self-Destructive Fun

Sundaes_NoFun2_crop — Sundaes, photo courtesy the artist

When “No Fun” by Sundaes begins you may have a flashback to 90s electronic music like Underworld with some hushed atmospherics and low key breakbeats. But when the nearly whispered vocals come in it takes on the quality of one of those dreams where everything seems murky, dark and lit by cool colors. The most distinct sonics are the shimmery drones and the accents of tone like glitches, flashes of another world, in the beat. The narrative could be a dialogue or memories of an emotionally abusive relationship with someone or some thing that seemed to be so fun and exciting until things took a turn toward the worse. The vocals and words don’t seem anguished but understanding of the dark appeal of Dionysian fun that lasts until its borderline forbidden exotic quality turns from pleasure into pain. It’s almost as if the song is capturing in retrospect the early phases of being in the social circles of someone mysterious and exciting who does help facilitate moments of seeming transcendence in hedonistic pursuits until you have to deal with real life stuff and that person proves not to be as amazing as maybe you once thought. “No Fun” is the third single from Sundaes’ debut full length Volume 1 out on Nashville’s Banana Tapes. Listen to the song Soundcloud and connect with Sundaes at the links provided.

sundaes.band
soundcloud.com/sundaesmackenzie
open.spotify.com/artist/7qiXFwby9N5MEUFATBy5cp
youtube.com/channel/UCPR0cy8PuhdGR5-4eGa6iSQ
facebook.com/sundaesyummysundaes

Suzie Chism’s New Album Where Examines and Questions the Internal Narratives of Our Lives

SuzieChism_Talkers1_Crop — Suzie Chism, photo courtesy the artist

Suzie Chism’s new album Where dabbles in styles across its nine tracks but in doing so it reflects the themes of the record. Fuzzy guitar give a quality of modern garage rock or neo-grunge, melancholic synths create introspective moods and textural acoustic guitar give a sense of spontaneity. All contribute to an album that seems to come from the perspective of someone who left her home town to go to some place more seemingly glamorous until you get there no matter how streetwise you thought you were before getting there. The story arc of the album, if indeed there really is a through line, is one of a person who puts on a brave face in situations that seem to call for it and in a process of self-discovery and adapting to life in a bigger city with a culture where presenting yourself is expected one can come to lose a bit of a sense of self for a moment or for an extended period of time until you realize you yearn for real connection with people. Throughout the album you get the feeling the narrator in each song is struck with a forlorn heart. On the title track the line “If lonely is a state of mind then where am I?” speaks to the existential crisis you hit when deep down you know that so much upon which you’ve been focusing your energy is folly.

On “Something Blue” we hear that maybe the spirit of making the best of things is derailed when the subject of the some comes to the realization that in her headlong pace to reach what she thought was desirable is making her miss what’s actually good in her life and that she’s fearful of staying in bad habits that make that an inevitability. And by the end of the album, these personal insights set the stage for at least trying to make one’s actual dreams come true. “Night Walks” is like a cross of rockabilly and 60s pop and there is a vibe of 60s girl groups and the compelling melodrama of that music to Chism’s songwriting on Where but it has that sense of self-awareness that one hears in more modern times by similarly influenced music with Best Coast—the knowledge that maybe you have made some missteps in life but having an internal compass can keep you aimed toward what matters. It is a record about questioning your own assumptions about what you’re life is supposed to be about. Listen to Where on Spotify.

Perfect Tenant’s Hypnotic Post-punk Track “D.Y.C.A.I.” is Like the Evocation of a Lucid Dream Rendered in Greyscale

PerfectTenant_DYCAI2_crop — Perfect Tenant, image courtesy the artist

Writing music under the moniker Perfect Tenant, Leon Piers found a way to reconcile his songwriting and recording with being someone who never had enough money to rent a studio space, rather having to operate living in shared houses or in apartments. The almost claustrophobic quality of his new track “D.Y.C.A.I.” nearly reflects that psychological space of reigning in your sonics or capturing them in a way that works to maintain that already challenging balance of living. The creeping bass line is hypnotic. The slowly seething guitar and its the evolving, shifting volumes makes a virtue of repetitive minimalism as dynamic, tonal textures. The vocals are not disengaged so much as resigned as they float through a song that also manages to rise to emotional peaks of the kind you reach in surreal, lucid dreams where intense situations are happening but you know you can pull away whenever you like. The production on the song is borderline lo-fi but in a way that worked for The Fall in the early 80s and on Colin Newman’s 1981 solo album A-Z by establishing a freshness, authenticity of emotion and grit that slick production makes impossible. It also has a similar otherworldly quality that makes it difficult to pin down to any specific stylistic period other than under the broad umbrella of post-punk though this is obviously on the more experimental end of that. Listen “D.Y.C.A.I.” on Spotify.

Trav B. Ryan Deconstructs Received Identity and Yearns for Discovering One More Authentic on “No Home”

TravBryan_NoHome1_crop — Trav B. Ryan, photo courtesy the artist

Trav B. Ryan was inspired by The Mandalorian in writing “No Home.” The song is about abandoning your belief systems in order discover your true self. There is a bit of trap production in the vocals with some light auto tune but it is couched in a sonically rich beat that combines a textural shuffle in the percussion and a descending, echoing drum line with a melancholic piano melody. It conveys a sense of taking a deep assessment of your life as though you can step outside yourself and your usual contexts and can see your life with a new perspective. The lyrics articulate a desire for independence from what you used to know and how that defines you. Its metaphors of self as weapon and reloading to put yourself in the same realm of life that limits you in ways that have never suited you. The lyric “If I fall from grace burn this place to the floor, tell them I died in war, don’t tell them I went soft” points to not wanting to have a place to return to in order to for yourself to reinvent yourself on your own terms. The chorus “I am all I own” is an acknowledgment of needing to start from the ground up in creating an authentic life of one’s own by not taking back on an imposed identity. There is something that is the opposite of bravado to the song and the way it constructs peeling back the layers and knowing that vulnerability and the embrace of doubt and not automatically knowing where everything fits together immediately so that you can come to know yourself and then other people in ways that are more genuine and so that your sense of home is within and where you would like it to be and not purely determined by what others have told you. Listen to “No Home” on Soundcloud and connect with Trav B. Ryan at the links below.

soundcloud.com/travbryanmusic
open.spotify.com/artist/4vx9ia0fGzUWKQPFjC3EbT
youtube.com/channel/UCX8ADiuxNTZEhVbhjvVo4MA
m.facebook.com/travbryanmusic
instagram.com/travbryanmusic

Erik Hall’s Brilliant Solo Interpretation of Steve Reich’s Music For 18 Musicians Preserves the Relentless Pace and Physicality of the Original With a Smaller Sound Palette

ErikHall_Pulses1 — Erik Hall, photo courtesy the artist

Erik Hall recently conceived of and recorded his interpretation of Steve Reich’s seminal, avant-garde, 1976 masterpiece Music For 18 Musicians (due out May 8, 2020 via Western Vinyl). Hall’s version of the aforementioned work is only the second ever successfully accomplished by a solo artist. The lead single from the record, one of the sections of “Pulses,” was performed with muted pianos, electric guitar and synth. But as with the original, the relentless pace, the percussive and textural quality to the tones that convey a physicality like getting the raw data packets, the very quanta, of existence as expressed through a minimal flow of composed and arranged sounds that contain a diverse complexity in themselves. Reich’s 1976 performance of the music was aptly titled and used classical instruments in a unique way to almost mimic what electronic music would sound like later and in its way it must be seen as an influence on ambient music much as was John Cage, 60s avant-garde, early synth music, Krautrock and library music. Listen to a sample of Hall’s loving rendition of Reich’s music on Soundcloud and connect with Erik Hall at the links below.

twitter.com/erikhallmusic
facebook.com/erikhallofficial
instagram.com/intallbuildings

The Unabashed, Imaginatively Eccentric Video for PRIG’s “Plants” is the Kind of Weird the World Needs Now

PRIG_Plants1_lg — PRIG, photo courtesy the artists

PRIG’s song “Plants” shouldn’t work. The distorted, warbling drone, surging synth sounds and slightly off-kilter vocals and playful guitar/plinky keyboard melody is not for anyone looking for something they’ve heard a million times on commercial radio or like-minded playlists. Its eccentricity is unabashed and seems utterly unselfconscious. It’s like hearing the early Ween for the first time or The Frogs or King Missile after a lifetime of having your brain conditioned to accept more traditional and established faire. But part of your brain knows that a lot of those rules of how a song should sound are arbitrary and the sort of quirky 16-bit video game soundtrack aesthetic of “Plants” has an undeniable charm. The accompanying video for this mini-opus too looks like something someone made using 1990s graphic design software ideas in the context of a more modern video editing platform. When the flower shoots lighting and levels buildings and the guys shoot it with cans from a, yes, cannon, and bring it low before a mob of flower people come to chase them off it just seems perfect for a song that belongs on the same shelf as the aforementioned as well as The Residents and Renaldo & The Loaf. Watch the highly imaginative, animated video on YouTube and connect with PRIG at the links below.

soundcloud.com/user-634784243
open.spotify.com/artist/4D6kv0QCWdOpsIt006M5r1
youtube.com/channel/UC31ytm74SYDPGWJH1CucGEA
facebook.com/prigberlin
instagram.com/prigband