New Music – Page 38 – Queen City Sounds and Art

Queen City Sounds Podcast S4E45: Death Doula

Kerry Jones of Death Doula, photo courtesy the artist

Death Doula is a band based on Portland, Oregon that released its debut Love Spells on October 11, 2024. Its music might be described as shoegaze but its tones are a little darker waxing into the territory of moodier post-punk and its textures more complex and prominent. The band’s guitar work is a little noisier and at times more angular than the typical shoegaze band and its lyrics more rooted in a kind of poetic lyricism rather than standard pop songcraft. Vocalist Kerry Jones’ vocals are versatile yet elemental in expression with words seemingly informed by a perspective that looks beyond the surface level of everyday experiences. Death Doula’s sound bridges the ethereal and the heavier end of atmospheric music and infuses it with an expansive emotional intensity that lends the music an unexpected power. The albums was recorded with Adam Lee at Jackpot Studios in Portland and its noisy and uplifting maelstrom of creative ideas and colorful soundscapes defies easy categorization but fans of brooding yet noisy post-punk, Helium and the more mystically-minded shoegaze and space rock bands like Space Team Electra and Sky Cries Mary will find great kinship across the record’s nine tracks.

Listen to our interview with Kerry Jones on Bandcamp and follow Death Doula at the links below.

deathdoulaband.com

Death Doula on Instagram

Alice Hebborn’s Ambient Modern Classical Piece “Saisons – Mouvement 6” is an Imaginative Voyage From Effervescent Spirits Into Meditative Quiescence

Belgian composer Alice Hebborn’s debut album Saisons is due out December 6 via Western Vinyl. The single “Saisons – Mouvement 6” is an immersive example of Hebborn’s gift for fusing tone, texture and rhythm as though sculpting it all out of an act of pure imagination trying to manifest a concept where the experience of each isn’t separated out as it might be in a more conventional musical mode. In that way Hebborn’s seemingly intuitive performance of the music is reminiscent of the work of Philip Glass and how his own best work seems to wed classical notions of tone and a more organic structure with rhythms drifting where the atmospheric emotional resonance guides it. In the case of this piece the piano, the electronics, the percussive sounds flow like a river and a journey along that river at once with dense sonics and atmospheres until the end where a calm spaciousness takes the place of layers of motion as though the energy of the earlier part of the song is finding its evening out of excitement into quiescence. Listen to “Saisons – Mouvement 6” on YouTube and follow Alice Hebborn at the links below.

westernvinyl.com

Alice Hebborn on Facebook

The Shimmering Spiral of The Album Leaf’s “Rotations” is an Emotional Journey to Tranquil Transcendence

The Album Leaf, photo courtesy the artist

The slow shimmering spiral of The Album Leaf’s “Rotations” sounds like what it feels like to look out the window flying over the Arctic circle and looking out the window at the frozen tranquility of the landscape below. It’s stark yet comforting from the relative safety of the airplane cabin. Then the song’s icy synths give way to more solid and direct tones that are vivid and rich yet smooth and resonant in a way that soothes at it stimulates your brain with its ascending melodies that build with subtly added brighter sounds that complement well and intertwine with the core rhythmic frequencies and textures until all glimmer into the distance. It’s a musical journey inward into more transcendent emotional spaces that leaves your brain at ease. Watch the visualizer on YouTube and follow The Album Leaf at the links below.

thealbumleaf.com

The Album Leaf on Facebook

The Album Leaf on TikTok

The Album Leaf on Instagram

Queen City Sounds Podcast S4E43: hackedepicciotto

hackedepicciotto, photo by Mara von Kummer

Berlin-based duo hackedepicciotto released its first live album on November 1, 2024. Titled The Best of hackedepicciotto (Live in Napoli) the album reflects two decades of collaboration and sound experimentation and the evolution of compositions as they have been performed live. The record, available as a limited double vinyl (which includes an exclusive signed print) and on digital, includes selections from across the project’s five albums. Each is an inspired reinterpretation of the original studio version as channeled through the lens of live performance over the last several years. The music combines electronic sounds, throat singing, spoken word, industrial beats, drone and psychedelic folk for a style the duo have called “symphonic drone.” Alexander Hacke experimented with tape loops in his early teens before joining foundational industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten. Danielle de Picciotto was one of the founders of Berlin Love Parade in 1989 as well as the singer of The Space Cowboys. She is also an acclaimed multimedia artist, writer and graphic novel artist who has documented pivotal cultural moments in the Berlin and international music and art world. Together Hacke and de Picciotto have established a consistently fascinating body of work that transcends standard musical categorization with a cinematic and dramatic sensibility that fuses concepts of performance art, music theater and film. The new live album performed entirely by the duo at Auditorium Novecento in Naples, Italy is a rich culmination of the project’s music practice as organically developed.

Listen to our interview with hackedepicciotto on Bandcamp and follow the band at the links below.

hackedepicciotto.de

danielledepicciotto.com

hacke.org

Stephen Caulfield’s New Age Ambient Song “Meltwater” Articulates the Wonder and Magic of the Transformation of Ice Into Liquid in Human Time

“Meltwater” from Stephen Caulfield’s new ambient EP Blue Vessels (available October 18, 2024) layers a glimmering foreground and low end background in the beginning. But this all dissolves a bit with abstract piano, minimal guitar and bass joining the synth in a free flowing and evolving drift as the harmonic composition shifts and swirls slowly. It is a musical embodiment of a time lapse view of ice transforming from solid into liquid and how it is both gradual and sudden and when being able to perceive it in more geologic time through the alchemy of a song written imagining this process magical and truly transformative. The shining melody emerging from the slow churn of elements strikes a gorgeous note as the song resolves into tranquility and the sound of droplets. Listen to “Meltwater” on Spotify and follow Stephen Caulfield at the links below.

stephencaulfield.com

Stephen Caulfield on Twitter

Stephen Caulfield on Facebook

Stephen Caulfield on TikTok

Stephen Caulfield on Instagram

Stephen Caulfield on Bandcamp

Stephen Caulfield on YouTube

Bird’s Orchestral Dream Pop Single “The Tides” is an Immersive Masterwork of Cinematic Downtempo

Bird aka Janie Price wrote a short film called Wider Than the Sky for which she also composed the soundtrack. And this year the album for that soundtrack released including the single “The Tides.” Now a new radio edit mix of the song is available with its lushly orchestral sound preserved like an even more deeply atmospheric downtempo track. Price’s emotionally wide-ranging vocals are paired well with transporting string arrangements for an effect like a Michael Jarre score for a David Lean film. Most impressive, though, is how Price matches and complements the orchestral sounds in tone and emotional resonance for a musical synthesis not heard often enough in pop music. Listen to “The Tides” on Spotify and follow Bird at the links below.

Bird on Instagram

Bird on Facebook

Bird on YouTube

Queen City Sounds Podcast S4E42: The Old Ceremony

The Old Ceremony, photo by Michael Benson

The Old Ceremony formed in 2004 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina fronted by Django Haskins. From the outset the band was conceived of as a group that could realize more orchestral pop arrangements. The latter style served well the literary leanings of the songwriting and pop noir sound lending the music a great range of dramatic and dynamic expression. Borrowing its name from the 1975 Leonard Cohen album New Skin for the Old Ceremony the band has released seven full-length albums including its latest Earthbound (available October 17, 2024 on streaming, for digital download and limited edition CD and vinyl). The story is that Haskins wrote some 115 songs during the pandemic and eleven of those made it onto the album. But each of those songs is a rich story in itself and worth exploring on their own with sly cultural references including name checking would-be Andy Warhol assassin Valerie Solanas. Its a sonically diverse set of cinematic pop songs that it’s clear underwent a good degree of development and set together with other songs that as a whole create a sense of a world that’s gone and missed and coming to terms with the world in which we currently find ourselves and moving through the next set of life challenges reminiscent of what we’ve seen before.

Listen to our interview with Django Haskins on Bandcamp and follow The Old Ceremony at the links below.

theoldceremony.com

The Old Ceremony on Instagram

Office Hours’ Clashing and Chaotic Noise Rock Single “No Quiero Votar” is a Raw Rejection of the Nihilism of Meaningless Choices

Office Hours, photo courtesy the artists

The clashing sounds, raw noise and chaos of “No Quiero Votar” by Office Hours gives way to wilder swings and jarring passages of guitar music with a hint of what might be described as atonal melody as the song rushes headlong to its conclusion. A fitting structure and arrangement for a song whose title in English means “I Don’t Want to Vote.” It sounds like a rejection of the illusion of choice when there are none that are particularly great in a political system geared toward giving the elites everything they want and the pandering pantomime of identity politics and fear mongering to an uneducated public that is largely apolitical but convinced of the validity of its opinions. The powers that be favor nihilism and de facto compliance from a citizenry that seems easily placated but for those that genuinely care about consequences and trying to live a life in a relatively sane and stable human community it just seems like a perverse and cynical set of choices so how to react initially except to maybe write a crazy song with a weary lyric expressing a simple denouncement of empty rhetoric. Listen to “No Quiero Votar” on Spotify and follow Office Hours at the links provided.

Office Hours on Facebook

Office Hours on Instagram

Bad Flamingo’s Darkly Dreamy “The Devil Knows” is a Gritty and Shimmery Murder Ballad of a Love Gone Wrong

Bad Flamingo, photo courtesy the artists

Bad Flamingo waxes slightly more folk on “The Devil Knows” with a touch of banjo and/or mandolin more prominently in the mix intermingling seamlessly with guitar. The kind of percussion established sounds like the kind of thing a performer will effect by knocking on their guitar and a tambourine on a foot. But there are some nice touches of production with a dramatic, swelling drone here and there and in the background as well as electric guitar shimmer and buzz. The themes are a new spin on a tale of personal darkness and struggling with self-redemption and the acceptance and even romanticizing of one’s lurid past and anti-social impulses. With this song we hear hints of actual skullduggery rather than merely misdeeds in the pursuit of fun or at the fantasy of violating the sixth commandment. Bad Flamingo’s songwriting and musicianship with the tactile quality of fretting the guitar lends the whole song a grounded quality so that it’s cinematic, dreamlike mood has an intimacy and immediacy that makes its story not sound so sinister. Listen to “The Devil Knows” on Spotify and follow Bad Flamingo at the links below.

badflamingomusic.com

Bad Flamingo on Facebook

Bad Flamingo on Instagram

Bad Flamingo on YouTube

Running Man Gives Voice to Modern Existential Weariness and Anxiety in the Caustic Proto-punk Flavor of “One Wrong Move”

Current Dead Kennedys singer Skip Greer has a new project called Running Man and its single “One Wrong Move” sounds like that desperate and caustic early punk era of the mid-to-late 70s but with a Midwest vibe. The edgy guitar and melody immediately resonates with Dead Boys’ 1977 classic “Sonic Reducer.” But this song is about the current era of society and civilization on edge and seemingly about trying to hold it together with so much seemingly at stake in one’s personal life and as a species and the lines “One wrong move and it’s game over” and “It’s been going on far too long” sum up the unfortunate combination of existential weariness and anxiety that permeates the world today. Listen to “One Wrong Move” on Spotify and follow Running Man at the links below. The band’s self-titled debut released November 15, 2024 on vinyl including limited edition pink, CD, streaming and for digital download.

Running Man on Instagram

Running Man on YouTube