Song Review – Page 56 – Queen City Sounds and Art

Otis Mensah’s Mystical, Existential “That Mouth Of Rainfall” is an Avant-Downtempo Hip-Hop Exploration of Identity, Depression and Dreams

Otis Mensah, photo from cover of *WINTERSKIN*

Otis Mensah, the first Poet Laureate of the City of Sheffield in the UK, free associates spiritual imagery and experiences with those more earth bound throughout “That Mouth Of Rainfall” (featuring contributions from Rituals of Mine). In the music video we see Mensah walking through a church and the streets of Berlin captured on Super 8 which suits well the soft, soulful, pulsing synth and hushed, downtempo production and Mensah’s sentiments with each line of lyrics. Mensah navigates issues of perception and reality, of identity and aspirations and how those intersect with a life that can seem to throw you setbacks and opportunities at seemingly perversely random intervals. Mensah is open about an extended depression and contemplating surrendering to what seems inevitable and pulling back and finding vitality in new experiences and contemplating possibilities. In the soulful vocals of Terra Lopez aka Rituals of Mine (some may know Lopez for her tenure writing and performing music as Sister Crayon) we hear an emotional clarity as a companion to Mensah’s flow of existential sketches, an architecture of the song that reflects Mensah’s seemingly dialectical narrative with self. The effect of all these elements working in perfect sync with each other brings a great dimensionality to the song musically, thematically and emotionally all while pulling you into its gorgeously lush layers of melody and gentle rhythm. All in all a fine example of the kind of music we’ve come to expect from Sheffield in terms of being incredibly experimental and forward thinking and accessible in ways that aren’t immediately predictable. Watch the video for “The Mouth Of Rainfall” on YouTube and follow Otis Mensah at the links below. The album WINTERSKIN dropped on October 4, 2023.

Otis Mensah on Facebook

Otis Mensah on Instagram

Johnathan Maske’s Chilling Folk Single “Chasing Shadows” is Like the End Theme Music for a Haunted Spaghetti Western

Johnathan Maske, photo courtesy the artist

Johnathan Maske sounds like he immersed himself in some late 60s and early 70s folk singers on “Chasing Shadows,” the debut single from his forthcoming album The Down Valley (out in May 2024). The vocals tilt over the edge a little when hitting that falsetto with raw feeling but reel back in with the the chill melodies that run through the song. There’s a melancholic tone to the song and its orchestral songwriting is reminiscent of something out of a Spaghetti western but with all the desert tones turned icy and overcast rather than sun scorched, like a film Sergio Leone might have made based on an Edgar Allan Poe story. The shuffling beat and slightly lo-fi production lends the song a quality that feels like it’s from another decade like music you’d hear in the end scenes and credits of a baroque horror or thriller film from the UK or Europe in the aforementioned era of folk. The sentiments of the lyrics read like the thoughts of a person who is trapped by his own paranoid thoughts and visions of failure, petty revenge and futility and the song serves well the tragic mood of that kind of emotional isolation and that the song sometimes feels like it could fall apart the essential fragility of that headspace. And yet there’s a compelling hauntedness to the song that draws you in to the end. Listen to “Chasing Shadows” on Spotify and follow Johanthan Maske at the links below. In the months ahead Maske will release further singles from the album leading up to its issuance in the spring.

Johnathan Maske on Facebook

Johnathan Maske on Instagram

Johnathan Maske on Bandcamp

The Fog Enshrouded Melodic Drones of CoastalDives’ “Bloodline Through The Mirage” is Like a Conscious Sleepwalk Through a Long Dark Night of the Soul

Distorted, fast rippling pulses of tone rising and falling issue forth at the beginning of CoastalDives’ “Bloodline Through The Mirage” like something from the more industrial end of The Legendary Pink Dots. But streams of clear melody cut through that sonic fog after a minute or so like a lifeline of clarity through the haze to a zone of soporific drones that warp at the edges. Those guidance melodies arc into different shapes around you cleansing the grit of the earlier part of the song and replacing it with haunted fogs and spectral beacons to lead you further into the mysterious space that CoastalDives has crafted. In the last quarter of the song there’s a sense of being on the edges of that roiling cloud of melancholic haze that feels like it’s moving further away while you wake from what has felt like a mysterious dream all along into wakeful clarity and silence like Elena at the end of Beyond the Black Rainbow when she leaves the Arboria Institute free from years of experimentation,, the extended nightmare over. What did it all mean? Who can say but it is a listening experience that leaves your brain feeling better. Listen to “Bloodline Through The Mirage” on Spotify and follow CoastalDives at the links below. The song is the first single from the album Lineage due out in early 2024, mastered by composer Rafael Anton Irisarri of The Sight Below.

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CoastalDives on Instagram

CoastalDives on Bandcamp

AUS!Funkt’s Art Garage Funk Punk Single “That’s a Fact” is an Exhilarating Anthem Against Xenophobia, Fascism, Racism and Misogyny

AUS!Funkt sound like a futuristic garage rock band on the noisy and discordant funk punk of “That’s a Fact.” In the music video the four figures representing the band look like The Residents gone cyberpunk anti-authoritarian gang, appropriate to the subject of the song. Pulsing, seething, distorted synth over urgent guitar and an almost hypnotically steady beat are the back drop to lines like “I don’t want to stop and reflect, xenophobia’s real that’s a fact, I never know what to expect, racism kills, that’s a fact, social norms we need to reject, misogyny hurts, that’s a fact, I have a need to disaffect, fascism kills, that’s a fact.” Indubitably. The song sounds frantic and emphatic on those points and even with the breakdown section mid-song for a breather with a repeat of the lyrics, the Canadian band leaves us with no doubt about its intentions and the kind of presentation of these truths that we’ve been needing to remember for decades but the immediacy of which is more than looming on the horizon at this moment. AUS!Funkt’s song, the title track to its December 22, 2023 EP, doesn’t overcomplicate the messaging nor simplifies a complex set of issues, it simply states some core principles with clarity and sets it to exhilarating and exciting art punk. Watch the video for “That’s a Fact” on YouTube and follow AUS!Funkt at the links provided.

AUS!Funkt on Facebook

AUS!Funkt on Instagram

Michael James Tapscott Collaborated With Psych Folk Legend Ed Askew For the Transcendent and Nightmarish “Police Patrol the Border”

Michael James Tapscott (middle) and Ed Askew (right), photo courtesy the artists

Michael James Tapscott brought psych folk legend Ed Askew on board for vocals for “Police Patrol the Border.” Askew’s vulnerable voice tells the tale a guy whose night seems haunted by his memories of a time of a time of conflict and perhaps of war. Askew’s voice has enough of a quaver to give the song a deeply haunting quality and emotional weight while also able to carry the melody into its melodic heights. Electric organ and synth swells alongside elegant acoustic guitar figures recall the kind of weirdo folk from the realm of music Askew helped to usher in during the late 60s and 70s. Maybe more in the vein of the likes of Comus, Mason Proffit, Pentangle, Fairport Convention. But there’s a bit of an edge with this song that feels very present and reflecting modern anxieties that echo some of those of another era. That quality lends the song a timeless quality present in the production and songwriting in the rest of Tapscott’s new EP Charlie No-Face (released December 15, 2023 on Royal Oakie Records). With contributions from members of Odawas and Sugar Candy Mountain the songs incorporates elements of lo-fi indiepop more often heard in the 2000s with an ambitious songwriting style that one might associate with late 60s art rock and folk groups including what sounds like a touch of Mellotron tones. Listen to “Police Patrol the Border” on Spotify and follow Michael James Tapscott at the links below.

michaeljamestapscott.com

Michael James Tapscott on Instagram

The Lingering Luminosity of the Melodies of loverghost’s “there was a hole here” is an Audio-Visual Haunting You’ll Want to Revisit

The new single by loverghost “there was a hole here” is as much an abstract downtempo ambient song as existential and enigmatic, science fiction horror short. Maybe best experienced watching it in the dark and taking in its hauntingly beautiful and unusual imagery. The tones are in that saturated lo-fi production style that sounds like it was done on cassette and transferred to digital. Maybe even recorded to VHS like the visuals very well could be and then manipulated into otherworldly dimensions utilizing sources that already have great potential to convey both a tactile and human immediacy of physical space and pure emotional expression. Amid visions of animals in the dark, glitched out faces, silhouettes on a luminous backdrop and slow streaks of melody and incandescent electronic piano we hear a voice seemingly lost in reverie drift in and out of the track and as spectral as the video is you almost want to be in that blissed out emotional space disconnected from the demands of everyday life. Visually it’s reminiscent of the aesthetics of Skinamarink and perhaps even The Outwaters or Beyond the Black Rainbow but altogether it resonates with what acts like Yoga and Peaking Lights at the outer edges of its experimental soundscaping, think the more blurry boundaries of The Stargazer Lilies. But this all sounds purely electronic in its composition and its arrangements seemingly as informed by visual editing processing and techniques as those more musical. Watch the video for “there was a hole here” on YouTube.

“Extraordinary Love” by evrshde Blends Lush, Downtempo New Age Pop with Sensuous and Soulful Sophisti-pop

evrshde “Fear of Falling” cover, image courtesy the artists

“Extraordinary Love” by evrshde features an electronic horn that runs through much of the song, melancholic in the middle distance. The beginning of the song has near whispered vocals for an effect like the mysterious sounds of Enigma on that 1990 debut album MCMXC a.D. But no Gregorian chants in this downtempo. The vocals quickly transition to a sound that is introspective but present in expressing features of a love that is brimming with yearning, passion and connection beyond mere attraction and consistent and enduring. The music’s layers of sensual tones and pulsing rhythms has a jazz-like quality akin to another downtempo band that first came to prominence in the 90s, Everything But The Girl. This song unites the latter’s soulful sophisti-pop with the aforementioned Enigma’s more New Age pop sound and establishes an undeniably alluring mystique. Listen to “Extraordinary Love” on Spotify and follow evrshde at the links below. The group’s 2023 album Fear of Falling dropped November 29, 2023 and is available to stream on Spotify as well.

evrshde on Facebook

evrshde on Instagram

Swimming Ignorant Fire Creates a Warm Sense of Nostalgia in the Sepia Toned Ambient Sounds of “Up Yonder”

When the pedal steel bends its streaming tones into an infinite horizon in Swimming Ignorant Fire’s “Up Yonder” it seems entirely appropriate to the title. The informal melodic lines sit in the sound of a found piano gospel tape look. The net effect that of a sepia toned film with the opacity of images switching back and forth and layered on top of one another in a seamless flow of transition with the loop taking us to the end with the pedal steel in the deep background. It’s a sustained sense of wonder and mystery at what the original context of the artifact of the tape loop might be while appreciating how the exploratory performance of pedal steel seemingly draws that piano from some ambient source of collective memory impressed upon the landscape by the psychic energies of the people that lived nearby or impressed into the original spools of magnetic tape some of their own appreciation of the moment captured minus the direct human interpretive input. It’s like a strange, offbeat, alternative science fiction story in musical form and soothing in its idiosyncratic evocation of a nostalgia for something you’ve never experienced. Listen to “Up Yonder” on Spotify and follow Swim Ignorant Fire at the links below. The album Glow released on November 3, 2023 and can be accessed at the streaming links provided.

Swimming Igno rant Fire on Facebook

Swimming Ignorant Fire on Instagram

Swimming Ignorant Fire on YouTube

Six Missing Dissolves the Nodes of Stress and Anxiety in the Psyche With the Oceanic Visualizer for Ambient Song “Cleanse”

You don’t need to see the visualizer music video for “Cleanse” to feel the full impact of its tonal bathing of he psyche. But Six Missing aka TJ Dumser provided one that looks like a drone footage of ocean waves headed to shore and processed in a way that syncs with the strands of sounds flowing and interacting in the composition. Melodic drones stream and motes of melody bloom and fade in a constantly moving yet consistent in its soothing tones and subtle textures like the ocean itself. Dissonance in the track hangs and flows until it dissolves into the harmonic flow so that the song has a therapeutic quality that takes into account the static nodes in the psyche and rather than resist them, take them in as part of a bigger picture of human experience as yet another element of life that isn’t inherently a permanent state even if we can often get stuck in pools of what can feel like negative emotion. That the song isn’t pristine in its tonalities all the way through makes it that much more effective and having the visuals of the waves breaking rather than a simple, unbroken body of water smoothly flowing puts that personal immediacy of feeling in the context of an entire life or at least a period in that life. Because of that the title of the song has a deeper meaning beyond the conventional with cleanse meaning coming to terms with the totality of life and accepting the impermanence of situations, moods and conflict. Watch the video for “Cleanse” on YouTube and follow Six Missing at the links below. The new album Here For Now was released for digital download and streaming on December 15, 2023.

Six Missing on Apple Music

Six Missing on Facebook

Six Missing on Instagram

Khodumodumo’s “Trapped in Deluded and Helpless Loops” is an Unsettling Yet Quirky Trip on a Musical Rube Goldberg-esque Nightmare Machine

“Trapped in Deluded and Helpless Loops” by South African experimental music project Khodumodumo is like an audio horror short film. In the beginning urgent, noisy sound and the sound of breathing and the sound of some object hitting another can be heard like what you would expect in a scene before the opening credits. But then that noisy sound hovers in and out in the background at varying distances in the background. We hear knocking, the scream of a small creature, more labored breathing, an out of tune stringed instrument being struck, spooky, old synths in a gleaming sound like the audio equivalent of a flickering chandelier in an ancient house. And in the end a sound like the buzzing white noise of an amp connected to a cable that has been disconnected from a guitar. The latter suggesting all we’ve heard has been part of a monstrous single instrument, a musical Rube Goldberg-esque nightmare machine. And that’s the sort of unique listening experience, all conceived with differing sound palettes, textures and emotional resonances, to be had on the Khodumodumo album What The Fuck Are You Doing This Side? which released on December 8, 2023. Listen to “Trapped in Deluded and Helpless Loops” below and give a listen to the rest of the album on Bandcamp also linked below.