If there was a space station in orbit around the titular planet of Comfort Level 7’s “Saturn,” the soundscape of the song is the analog of the both the endless mystery of the gas giant and the dark thoughts that might run through your mind if you were a scientist stationed there, remote from all civilization for months on end. The white noise drones and distant sounds of who can say playing about like a kind of bleak space wind you couldn’t possibly hear but which might exist like a ghost in your imagination where lie vague memories of Lovecraftian horror with the Great Old ones and their offspring colonizing not just earth but the outer planets of the solar system as well. The ululating tone that runs through the piece and the staccato arpeggiated rhythmic tone gives voice to imagined horrors out in the deeps of the planet named after an ancient Roman deity. The song isn’t easy listening but its brooding drone and spooky vibe is nevertheless entrancin. Listen to “Saturn” on Soundcloud and follow Comfort Level 7 at the links below where you can also find the project’s 2019 EP Bindrune which includes this track.
“Osc Nova” by at her open door sounds like the soundtrack for a bizarre video game set in the universe of 80s science fiction cinema and video games. Distorted synth drones are the baseline with minimal electronic percussion pounding an descending tonal progression. Highly processed guitar sounds flare as though the representation of either intense combat or action in some kind of competitive exercise. The production is a hybrid of classic hip-hop and Herbie Hancock-esque experimental jazz and modern 8-bit giving it that touch of retro electronic musicality composed from a more modern sensibility and freeform blending of styles that would rarely have been threaded together in years past and not with the same freshness of approach in seeing all sounds and methods as fodder for songwriting. Listen to “Osc Nova” on Spotify and follow at her open door at the links provided.
Isik Kural’s enigmatically titled “The Childish Tendency to Speak of Events as Coincidences” begins with a gentle oscillating tone that increases in volume slowly before its intertwining layers vividly manifest, like an object in the distance before dawn, illuminated to reveal itself as more than another shadow of the skyline. The tone fades into melodic drones punctuated by higher pitches and textural sounds like glasses struck slightly nearly out of hearing. Toward the later middle part of the song these abstractions solidify some with what sounds like a piano figure heard from a building on another floor of a building drifting in through the window as birds greet the sun edging higher in the sky, its golden strands expressed as bright, streaming tones and a breeze through branches as white noise. Less a song than the evocation of an environment expressed through sonic analogues of that experience, the track is a great example of how music, imaginatively conceived and executed, can convey a sense of time and place better than words and visual representations alone. Take a listen to “The Childish Tendency to Speak of Events as Coincidences” on Spotify.
Yellow Rainbow’s single “Trail Through the Underbrush” sounds like a journey along the track that is the title. But a journey that takes in the rich details of the surrounding landscape, all its textures, its interweaving ecological systems, the ambient energy of the area. This deep taking in of the myriad details our conscious minds gloss over in seeking out what we usually deem the most salient data makes you aware of the mystery and the beauty in what might otherwise seem mundane. Composer Brian Lee uses field recordings taken in the Canadian Rockies to give this ambient track a concrete sense of place and texture while slow sweeping drones give an informally melodic voice to natural light, slowing it down in the listening and in the experiencing of that light as it plays on leaves and branches in the ever changing visual stimulation of the natural world paired with its full sensory experience. “Trail Through the Underbrush” conveys this taking the time to absorb what the world is giving to you in as much of a whole as possible given human limitations and in doing so it whispers into your mind a deep sense of peace. Listen to the song on Spotify and follow Yellow Rainbow at the links below.
The juxtaposition of black and white cultural artifacts of media yesteryear with rich, distorted synths and electronic beats in The Great Dictators’ video for “Killing Fields” is surprisingly effective in creating an otherworldly space to explore themes of modern anxieties. Humanity has been through periods of that seemed like the end of history or at least of the world as we have, collectively, known it. And all through those times people have had to live their lives and not put everything on hold even as they tangle with the possibility of their way of life coming to an end and the march of historical events right into their lives. The lived experience is not in chapters you can conveniently analyze from a temporal distance. Honorius seeing the Visigoths march into Rome, Paul von Hindenburg appointing Adolf Hitler Chancellor of Germany, the days leading up to the fall of Saigon and countless other points in human history when people made fateful decisions, faced their own destruction or the end of their civilization had mundane stuff they had to deal with. The Great Dictators aren’t saying at all that it’s all going to be okay, even though the upbeat rhythm and brooding pace has some nice pop hooks. They are showing solidarity with the mundanity of even the most dramatic periods in our history like the one we face now and to suggest that many of us, if not most of us, will make it through and have to pick up the pieces as best we can. Watch the video for “Killing Fields” on YouTube, follow The Great Dictators at the links below and look out for the band’s new full length One Eye Opener due out April 17 via Celebration Records.
There is a sense of floating through a long, gray, luminous tunnel toward an unknown destination in Mingo’s “Morphogenetic Field.” When the percussion comes in it sounds as though it has traveled through water some distance like an echo. The harmonic tones running through the piece drift and fade like rosettes of light through which you pass on the journey. Toward the end of the song these tones unite for a long fade out with the low end becoming more prominent. One imagines experience a slowed down process of being transformed from matter into energy and beamed across space or to parallel dimension and feeling the gradual transfer and remanifestation into physical existence at the end. Or the sensation of traveling through a space fold with one of the Spacing Guild Navigators from the Dune universe and the surreal actuality of bearing witness to such an event firsthand. It gives one pause to consider the many ways we experience technology and how it must seem, echoing Isaac Asimov, like indistinguishable from magic for most of our actual knowledge of its workings. Listen to “Morphogenetic Field” on Spotify and follow ambient/experimental electronic artist Mingo at the links below.
The video for Mazeppa’s single “The Way In” shows us a woman searching through old stacks of books as the band issues forth layers of drone accented by a Motorik beat and ritualistic vocals. The woman finds herself leaving the shelves of books through an opening into a forest brimming with warm motes of light to meet with two figures wearing vaguely earth goddess robes and painted symbols. They help her discard the raiments of modernity to reveal her new wardrobe as an initiate of an expanded mystical awareness. She dances at a fire while the band, made up to by mystics in their own right, plays for the gathered seekers, the visual sense warping with the bends in tone and ebb and flow of sounds and rhythm. At the end the members of Mazeppa are seen with eyes glowing from the collective illumination that took place and to which you have been invited as well. Musically it’s in the realm of psychedelic rock but one that seems to time travel for influence and borrowing elements of the aforementioned Krautrock and more than the Motorik beats, the modulated distortion into droning atmospherics in hypnotic repetition as one might hear in the records of Spacemen 3 and the mystical bent and ritualistic compositional aspect of Sky Cries Mary. But Mazeppa here doesn’t sound throwback as the sound itself suggests an immediacy and focus on the moment from the beginning of the song to the end. Watch the video for “The Way In” on YouTube, follow Mazeppa at the links below and look out for the band’s full length album due out in 2020.
The title track of Locate S, 1’s upcoming full length album Personalia is an upbeat exploration of the wave of darkness that has seemingly filtered through the culture and the consciousness of so many of us in the past several years. With the strong bass line, bright synths and melodious vocals Christina Schneider, singer and main songwriter behind the project, gives us some poetic nuggets of personal despair and self-deprecation like “I can’t see myself in anything” and “Curse another crowd that doesn’t get it. Maybe something’s wrong with me. Maybe I’m just dumb.” Anyone with sensitivity has probably felt that first line and anyone in a “local” band in a city where you’re not playing a trendy style of music, which is to say most artists, has felt the second set of lyrics. You get to the point where you wonder what’s the point. And Schneider nearly did quit, perhaps more than music, as hinted at in the lines “Almost killed myself so I went home / I just cannot take these local shows.” Maybe not to be taken literally but the picture Schneider paints of the mood of late is one that honors the dark places your mind goes when it all seems like you’re hitting your head against the wall for years and for what? Whether that’s with music or just trying to get by in life. But somewhere in the song Schneider reconnects with the small things that make it seem worth it: “Plug in tonight when I get to my room / pretend I’m someone that I could believe in” and “I’ve shorted out but if I play long enough I’ll become the person that I wanna be again.” In singing that Schneider isn’t just saying it’s all going to work out or that hope and “manifesting” is going to make it happen but rather that some self-belief will help make it all seem worthwhile to you even if it isn’t celebrated by masses of people. The song’s fusion of gritty rock with ethereal soundscapes and Schneider’s melodious voice is a refreshingly effective take on a subject that is often avoided in a world of pop where people mention mental health issues but don’t dive deep enough into the core of those anxieties without getting lost there. Personalia, named after a poem by Mary Ruefle, is out on April 3 on Captured Tracks. But for now watch the video for the song on YouTube and follow Locate S, 1 (on tour with of Montreal in Spring 2020) on Facebook, linked below.
Sophomore album Personalia out April 3 on Captured Tracks
On her single “Fear the Fear,” Siv Jakobsen bares the tension between the anxiety and fear that rattle her psyche and their twin ability to fuel the subject matter of her songwriting. She sings “Shake it off, I can’t, I won’t. ‘Cause what would I write about if I don’t fear the fear inside my bones” and evokes another layer of anxiety regarding losing the personal demons that she fears define what seems like an important, and even core, aspect of her identity. In the music video she dons a head lamp, like a personal beacon of hope, and walks through the darkness of that moment looking fearful and nervous but moving forward as wind-like drones swirl in the background, her strong yet delicate vocals provide a focus in the song as though talking herself through the times when that colossus of nerves threatens to overwhelm her. Anyone that has been through that battle themselves can hear their own struggle with no permanent resolution on the horizon in Jakobsen’s song and while the song offers no shallow, pat answers in its gentle guitar melodies and the soothing vocals there is the unspoken will to be calm and patient with oneself until the wave of self-eroding emotional energy passes. Watch the video for “Fear the Fear” on YouTube, follow Siv Jakobsen at the links provided and look out for the songwriter’s new full-length A Temporary Soothing, due out April 24 on U OK?
At the beginning of The Qualia’s song “Like Bricks,” the staccato guitar line accented by bass with percussion counterpoint is like the introduction of a stream of consciousness timeline. But the story about how life throws unexpected events in your path, often in your face, hitting just as the title suggests. The dynamic unfolding of the song allows all the instruments and the vocals to shine together even though they seem to be going in different directions that somehow still compliment each other. It gives a sense of paradoxically focused disorientation. Maybe because even in the face of multiple challenges in your life you have to at least pretend to be keeping it together while you figure out your bearings to get through. Musically it’s reminiscent of an unusual mixture of Joe Jackson, Supertramp and The Dismemberment Plan as it has that tinge of soul that informs the music of all of those artists. That and a sense of something mysterious on the horizon threatening to crash into your life. “Like Bricks” takes you through some turns but in the end it’s comforting in the way that something or someone can be when you’re hearing your own struggles echoed in someone else’s words and music. Listen to “Like Bricks” on Bandcamp and follow The Qualia at the links provided.
Queen City Sounds and Art 
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