SubmitHub – Page 10 – Queen City Sounds and Art

Patrick Shiroishi’s Ambient Noise Rock Piece “Mountain take that wing” is the Sound of Ancient Life Reclaiming Consciousness

Patrick Shiroishi, photo courtesy the artist

“Mountain take that wing” opens with a burst of high frequency sounds like the final emergency transmission from a starship falling from orbit. The glitches in that signal break its uniform, piercing quality and it crackles to give way to minimal saxophone warble and ghostly guitar, courtesy SUMAC’s Aaron Turner, streaming in the middle distance. The breathy saxophone notes that take the central spot in the mix overlayered by some animated saxophone and guitar that distorts abstractly like a sudden fissure opening to another dimension breaks into the more grounding sounds. But the guitar unleashed intones mournfully like a kaiju awakening from millennia of dormancy. The title provides a perfect image of an immense, ancient earth beast regaining full consciousness and indeed taking to flight, serenaded by angelic voices, provided by Gemma Thompson formerly of post-punk band Savages, in the last minute of the song. We hear the majestic creature crying out as it enjoys its liberty once again. Listen to “Mountain take that wing” on Spotify and follow Patrick Shiroishi on Instagram. His new album Forgetting is Violent is out now on vinyl, digital download and streaming via American Dreams.

Pynch Elucidates the Gutting Sadness of Certain Kinds of Modern Love on Gorgeously Melancholic Dream Pop Single “How You Love Someone”

“How You Love Someone” finds Pynch exploring melancholic feelings from a slightly different angle than usual. The slow glitter jangle of the guitar melody with the vocals sounding every slightly weary and plaintive serves well a song about a relationship that felt like something truly significant but which ultimately didn’t and couldn’t work out the way either person wanted. It perfectly articulates not just notions of modern love as ultimately temporary experiences but how people can often be so in their own head about what they think they want in a relationship and the feelings they associate with that fantasy that when a real human being fails to live up to that the instant urge to move on sets in rather than taking the time to develop real connection and cultivating that and not needing someone else to be a kind of weird vehicle for personal wish fulfillment they can never be. The synth work provides a lively pulse and vivid tones while the guitars are delicate and fleeting in their almost impressionistic character. Altogether it sounds like the feeling of ennui and disappointment and indeed a deep down sadness that things that seem to have had promise really didn’t not because they couldn’t between two people but because the will to really try wasn’t a shared sentiment in enough time to salvage what might have been. Watch the also rather romantically doleful music video set in city nightscapes on YouTube and follow Pynch at the links below. The group’s new album Beautiful Noise dropped October 3, 2025 on Chillburn Recordings on vinyl, digital download and streaming.

Eric Angelo Bessel’s Ambient Single “Scavengers” is an Enigmatic and Haunted Evocation of the Mysteries of Hidden Depths

Eric Angelo Bessel, photo courtesy the artist

Eric Angelo Bessel is half of Portland, Oregon-based, ambient post-punk experimenters Lore City. With solo work the sound palette is more abstract and ahead of the October 31, 2025 release of his second solo album Mirror at Night, Bessel offers the single “Scavengers.” All the sound sources have a quality as though having passed through the ocean before reaching your ears so that the tonal lines don’t doppler so much as they might with the wind but resonate in a linger and trailing manner. Like an impossible piano being played at the bottom of the ocean with its notes intact, a Phantom of the Opera of the depths, a piece for the lost episode of The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau in which the crew discovers the entrance to the ruins of Atlantis or at least their showcasing the wonders of the underwater constructions of Nan Madol. There is something of a spirit of wonder to the track as much as it is enigmatic and when it’s over all too soon it leaves you yearning for more of the mysterious side of our world not yet completely mundaned by overexposure. Listen to “Scavengers” on YouTube and follow Eric Angelo Bessel at the links below. Mirror at Night will be available on limited edition 12” vinyl, digital download and streaming.

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King-Mob’s Industrial Post-Punk Single “Buddha Tombing” is Like the Menacing Soundtrack to a David Fincher Thriller

King-Mob’s single “Buddha Tombing” started off as music for a short film and composed of experiments with an AKAI S900 sampler. But what has evolved from that sounds like a mutated hybrid of Dazzling Killmen and A Place to Bury Strangers. Like deconstructed industrial post-punk but with deep reconfiguration of rhythm so that it comes off like a real time hip-hop beat played with live instruments. It has an edge, a brooding menace and it sounds futuristic and beautifully disorienting with its riffs stretched to the breaking point. The fractured beats really make it when paired with the measured pounding of the drums so that it does have a cinematic quality like a soundtrack to a new David Fincher thriller. Listen to “Buddha Tombing” on Spotify and follow King-Mob at the links below.

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“Let Go/Ascent” by SOHN is the Sound of Both Cosmic Horror and Existential Transcendence

“Let Go/Ascent” by SOHN is almost iterative in its slow flowing, evolving harmonics and melodic pulses as the track goes from distant and dusky to bright and present. The music video depicts a sunrise and the music itself reflects a time of early morning quiescence with a sustained, slightly distorted synth drone that elevates in tone gradually and then rapidly before cutting off suddenly to give way to throbbing synth lines and an icy synth backdrop. The video for this half of the song shows an eye blinking at the rising dawn sun. Sonically it’s reminiscent of Sinoia Caves’ saturated synth work for soundtrack to Beyond the Black Rainbow and Ben Salisbury’s and Geoff Barrow’s score to Annihilation. It’s an enigmatic mood with elevated, abstract, spectral melodies anchored by distorted low end that warps and modulated the stretch out the trailing ends of tone for an effect that’s both entrancing and foreboding. Watch the video for “Let Go/Ascent” on YouTube and connect with composer and producer SOHN at the links provided. SOHN at the links provided. SOHN’s new album Albadas (Dawn Songs) is out October 10, 2025 via APM Records.

The Analog Detail of loverghost’s “sweet tooth” Render’s Lends Deeply Vulnerable Love Song a Cozy Intimacy

For the recording and music video for “sweet tooth,” Virginia Beach’s art pop band loverghost undertook meticulous, even granular, execution of production to maximize the analog feel of all elements. Recording partly to a Tascam Portastudio 424 (who that recorded up through the mid-2000s didn’t have one of those and how many wish they had one now?) and a video that includes VHS live footage, hand drawn animation, processing through analog video synthesis (something one most often sees done at a live show) and printing out hundreds of frames through a thermal printer to lend yet another layer of something that seems like it’s coming from another time the whole presentation of the song is incredibly intimate. Which suits its tender sentiments expressing love for someone that doesn’t really get and thus appreciate music which is a bit of a quandary if you’re a musician who these days have to orient part of their navigation of getting the music out toward the attention economy that is partly ruining the purity of creating and experiencing music directly. Musically it resonates with Broken Social Scene’s “Anthems For A Seventeen Year Old Girl” and its own deeply vulnerable energy. The song balances openly confessional affection and acceptance of potential rejection and being willing to risk that heartache if the feelings aren’t mutual. Knowing how much effort went into the final presentation of the song isn’t essential but one can feel the love and care that went into the whole thing listening the song and taking in its fascinating visuals and that makes a major difference in a world where so much music is treated as disposable by culture and for sure by the industry. Watch the video for “sweet tooth” on YouTube and follow loverghost at the links below.

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Kramies’ Psychedelic, Orchestral Pop Single “Hollywood Signs” is a Trip From Haunted Headspaces to Tranquil Accceptance

Kramies’ lead single from the forthcoming new album Goodbye Dreampop Troubadour (out October 10, 2025) “Hollywood Signs” emerges as almost a musical avatar of the historic times we’re living through. Produced by David Bowie producer/engineer Mario J. McNulty, the song has a measured pace, sheets of spectral background harmonics and the songwriter’s voice relating a portrait of a relationship that has long since fallen out but where the connections linger. The lightly psychedelic choruses are reminiscent of something a gentle mashup of Sgt. Pepper’s and Days of Future Passed. Along with that an orchestral sensibility in the way the song is structured. The song sounds both deeply haunted and as though the feelings it conveys sustain an immediacy that keeps you engaged throughout. It’s the kind of song you can and want to lean back into for the trip through its melancholic spaces to its conclusion being left on the side of a pastoral roadside with the last of the warm mornings coming on before the full swing of fall in a state of rest—emotionally, physically and spiritually. It’s a perfect song for this season. Watch the beautiful lyric video with its lo-fi animation on YouTube and follow Kramies at the links below.

Ana Hausmann’s “nausea-stalgia” is an Organic Ambient Articulation of the Dark Mysteries of Nighttime Streets

In the organically immersive flow of Ana Hausmann’s “nausea-stalgia” one hears not just intermittent textures like hearing the detritus in the breeze of nighttime streets on the edges of an urban sprawl. The oddly harmonic scraping of hinges articulated by processed violin harmonics, the plinking of kalimba like sonically stylized droplets of rain and the low rumble of bowed guitar like the barely felt but always present thrum of aircraft from an airport in the distance. The field recordings of wind and environmental noise is used with such care it is impossible to fully tell the difference between that and an intentionally generated sound such is Hausmann’s care in the mix and layering of elements in the aim of crafting a unique listening experience. It is a “song” in an expanded understanding of the term as a composition that evokes emotion and provokes a psychological response. In this case it is a sense of mystery and distant menace, of a haunted landscape nearby whose tendrils of mood are in a constant drift to draw you in to something that might be fascinating if not dangerous. Listen to “nausea-stalgia” on YouTube and follow Ana Hausmann on Spotify.

Blankslate’s Exuberantly Affectionate “Nov. 16 (Paper Ducks)” is a Riotous Declaration of Love

Blankslate’s curiously titled “Nov. 16 (Paper Ducks)” is an unconventional love song, a riotous declaration of affection and devotion worded in endearingly idiosyncratic terms. It does read a bit like a cherished journal entry that spells out one’s effusive feelings of adoration for another person couched in the images of private moments and memories that permanently embed someone’s essence in your heart. Musically it has some distortion on the vocals in the beginning and ramps up to nearly shouted joy between the band’s two main vocalists like that welling up of love is bursting out because it feels impossible to hide it any longer and intertwined with confessions of one’s own shortcomings that the recipient of your passionate regard helped you to overcome perhaps without intending to. It’s a string of words worthy of Andrea Gibson’s own, exuberant and entirely sincere poetry along similar lines of expression. It’s indie rock buoyed with driving rhythms and excitement but balanced by tender moments that resonate with an irresistible sincerity. Listen to “Nov. 16 (Paper Ducks)” on Spotify and follow the Denver-based Blankslate at the links provided. Its latest album Lookout Mountain Charley released August 9, 2025.

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The Pastoral Grandeur of Dustin O’Halloran’s Minimal Piano Piece “Gold” is an Expression of the Mind Free of the Pressure of Mediated Life

Dustin O’Halloran, photo courtesy the artist

“Gold” was recorded in one take by Dustin O’Halloran in his studio in Reykjavik, Iceland. The member of A Winged Victory for the Sullen captured the intimacy of just him at his piano and natural resonances and reverb without removing the physicality of the instrument and its moving parts heard in the recording nor punching in any “mistakes” in the performance or the intonation the can change when you’re using analog instrumentation. The result is the essence of what it would be like to be there and experience the lingering progression, the chords sounding out and trailing off before being replaced by the next set of sounds. O’Halloran’s accents and minimal arrangement lend the pastoral piece a quietly majestic quality that is adjacent to melancholy but is more reflective as though concentrating on and taking in moments of pure tranquility separate from the press of mediated information that clutters up so much of modern life unless you take the time to disconnect and prioritize life and experience as we had it more than a decade ago and can still have it if we indulge our capacity for grace and patience to benefit our inner psychological spaces and not fill it with maximized and monetized content.