Olly Bailey is wearing a Hole t-shirt in the video for “Still Young” and the big, distorted riffs that drive the song hearken back to the grunge era without miming it. His spirited vocals and song dynamics that swing the chords deftly from the melancholic to the brash with major progression leads that have a bold momentum reflected in the performance of the song in general. There is a fiery aggression to the sound of the song that serves as counterpoint to a fairly raw and sensitive reflection on youth and outgrowing the naivete of your younger years while trying not to lose your enthusiasm for life and without developing a calloused and jaded heart. Watch the video for “Still Young” on YouTube and connect with Bailey’s solo rock band Jaws The Shark at the links below.
“We Come From the Sky” finds Italian composer Exumano using a shuffling, industrial rhythm and repeated motifs to build a sense of space and movement. The single tonal pulse amid the more percussive and texture soundscapes is like a guiding beacon in the fog through the constant flow of information and marketing to which we’re subjected daily as a distraction from finding a focus and purpose in life. The processed piano section is like a guiding lifeline through this tidal wave of info-junk and as the track progresses an urgent melody emerges to suggest getting to the end of this glut of inessential stimuli or at least to be able to tune it out and at song’s end the white noise clears with a strong rhythm line underneath a more blunt pulse that no longer feels like a beacon in the distance. Musically it’s reminiscent of early 2010’s techno and deep house but blended with industrial musicand the prepared sonic environment composition end of ambient. Listen to “We Come From The Sky” on YouTube where the visual element was done in collaboration with Arice CG and follow Exumano at the links below.
Imagine yourself looking out the window of being lowered into the Great Barrier Reef in a transparent submersible while listening to Julian Zyklus’ “Waterpiano n.1.” The sounds of water flowing and lapping against the side of your craft as you hear widely dynamic and expressive, joyfully elegant piano work and bright synth tones trace the path of your trip and enhance the raw and otherworldly beauty of your environment before you are pulled back out into the world you know. The track is the first on Zyklus’ forthcoming EP Waterpiano. Listen to “Waterpiano n.1” on Spotify and connect with Zyklus at the links below.
The all but black and white video treatment by Alex Schuurbiers for Shellter’s single “Wissant” poignantly complements the song’s feeling of utter emotional desolation. Shellter’s powerfully expressive vocals manage to be forceful yet fragile as she sings words that describe the aftermath of a break-up. But it is bereft of any rage, of any anger, and all that’s left is the hurt and the vulnerability that you have to allow yourself to feel in order to process the experience of a bad break-up especially one in which one’s emotions were put into such turmoil and in which you were made to feel like the villain. The ache in the lines “How your voice hit me hard without caution/How I broke like a branch in slow motion” and later the refrain of “How you made me believe that was me” hit deep even though Silke Janssens (aka Shellter) sounds like she’s merely contemplating some melancholic episode of the distant past with some time and space between. Her words for this song are poetically visceral and without going into the gory details it’s obvious she felt that hurt profoundly and found a way to transmute it into a song that with the presentation of her voice front and center and tender instrumentals augmenting the reflective vibe of the song is something one can take on and maybe find a way to process one’s own heartfelt hurt in the resonance of the lyrics and accessible tones employed by the songwriter. Watch the video for “Wissant” on YouTube, follow the Belgian singer-songwriter at the links below and give a listen to the rest of Shellter’s debut EP The Sun’s Already Low which was released on November 26, 2021.
The sound of a winter storm in your head is the dynamic of siera wiski’s song “moondore.” Icy synth lines echo, highly processed vocals run through like Alice Glass gone fully ambient pop. The lyrics describe being in an emotional place of stasis with seemingly no way out with time around you moving forward but you’re moored to your own low state without the wonders of the world or dreams and aspirations to pull you out of it. But the raw, ethereal sweep of the song suggests that maybe those events that seem to pass you by might bring something your way to nudge you out of your psychic quicksand in a way you didn’t seem coming and had no hope for happening. And in that dynamic of the song there is a ghost of hope and sometimes that’s enough. It is a gripping and gorgeous evocation of depression in the broad experience of it without hackneyed rhetoric and that’s exceedingly rare. Listen to “moondore” on Soundcloud and follow siera wiski at the links provided. The song is also available as a t-shirt on Bandcamp linked below.
The engimatically titled “Summer ’94” by the creatively named Pyxis Iota establishes a simple yet inviting rhythm line early on that carries you along throughout the song. But around that line tones drift and gyre, intertwined with a meditative guitar line that shimmers in counterpoint to the shimmering and glimmering synth drones that swell and fade. Perhaps it’s the title but the way the song plays out, even when the guitar drops out replaced by gentle distorted waves of synths, it sounds like the act of remembering a time in your life when things seemed less compressed, when summer seemed to last forever with amble time to play, learn, explore, discover and travel before demands of school or of a job post-college graduation demanded the bulk of your time and energy. There’s something magical about that headspace, the eternal liminal, that seems to nourish the psyche and spirit and Pyxis Iota evokes that energy with this track. Fans of early Oneohtrix Point Never and turn of the century Boards of Canada will appreciate the textures and evolving atmospheres of this song greatly. Listen to “Summer ’94” on Soundcloud and follow Pyxis Iota at the links below.
Le Big Zero chose a more than averagely clever band name and its video for “Horror Movie Pie Fight” directed by Jeanette D. Moses is a good reflection of the group’s offbeat sense of humor. It features a vampire trying to navigate an even more vampiric world of people coasting through modern life until she cuts that faux party time mingle short with an extravaganza of gore satiating her thirst for blood. But the video has that quality of the awkward comedy but one that is actually darkly funny rather than something from which to walk away partway through. The music is reminiscent of the dynamic starts and stops of what made so many of those Boston bands of the 80s and early 90s so interesting in the way the songs hit with both a forcefulness and a sense of fun—art punk with a knack for pop hooks and bereft of pretentiousness. Though, to be fair, Le Big Zero has its roots on the east coast but not Boston. It’s difficult to be funny as a band and write music that isn’t easily dismissible but Le Big Zero has accomplished that. With beautifully X-esque vocal harmonies and wiry and scrappy guitar riffs anyone into early alternative rock will find something to like with Le Big Zero. Watch the video for “Horror Movie Pie Fight”on YouTube and look out for the release of the act’s new album A Proper Mess out on April 8, 2022 through Know Hope Records.
Erika Wester’s single “Novelty” has all the hallmarks of a classic pop song: gorgeous melodies, entrancing arrangements that pull you immediately into the embrace of the song. And that’s exactly what makes it such a poignant and effective bit of musical writing in general. Webster honed in on the essential dysfunction of a toxic relationship and her own complicity therein by allowing the person bad for her having their hooks in her psyche and not quite being able to resist those charms because of some bad emotional habits she picked up along the way. It happens. But right from the beginning Wester sings “I hate the way you make me feel, I think I make up what I want to be real” as an acknowledgment of that the relationship and the connection in general is bad and that she has some issues with identifying what is real and what she wants to be real and holding on to what does feel good rather than what she wants to feel good because it’s supposed to because all relationships should be fulfilling even when they’re not, right? The rest of the song Wester paints for us some small situations that would be gutting in the experiencing but sounds not so bad with the tone of the song. And that’s the seduction of being the kind of person who hasn’t quite jettisoned these ingrained behavior from their psyche. But knowing you deserve and want better is a good first step and Webster begins with that. Is this literally about Wester’s life? It doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s something in the past, maybe it’s not, but it is an extremely relatable situation and mindset for most people at some point in their lives and laying it out there sometimes helps in getting the will to move onward from a psychological space that no longer serves you well. Titling the song “Novelty” frames the deeper sentiment of the song so well because no one wants to be that, no one wants to just have an emotional bond with someone on that basis and sometimes something or someone will appeal to us simply on that basis when we shouldn’t take it or them so seriously and make it or them part of our lives. Listen to “Novelty” on Spotify and follow Webster at the links below.
On the title track to his forthcoming EP Rabbit Feather, Jackson Hill brings extremely tactile sounds together with an electronic production aesthetic that both grounds what you’re hearing and transports you to an otherworldly headspace of pure imagination. Soft electronic drones swell and swarm while percussive sounds mark out unconventional rhythms in modulated clicks and snaps, strings resound with an unmistakably delayed and drawn out strum, bass traces downward arcs in jazz-like downtempo style. It is layers of minimalism that matches the surreal imagery suggested by the title of the song. For something so peaceful and spare there is a lot of movement and forward momentum in the song and altogether it sounds like little else unless you could vaguely trace a lineage to some of the work of Laraaji, Brian Eno’s and David Byrne’s 1981 experimental world music album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and maybe the more avant eras of Anthony Braxton. It is a unique and rewarding listen for anyone that has an ear for the music that is somehow both tuneful and requires taking it in on its terms rather than imposing genre requirements in order for it to be enjoyed. Listen to “Rabbit Feather” on YouTube and connect with Jackson Hill at the links below. The Rabbit Feather EP is being independently released on March 18, 2022.
Peaces is no stranger to the recontextualized pop hit and cultural reference mashup and remix but with “Down To Earth” he has outdone himself with the both the audio and the unusual collage music video. Crafting a hodgepodge of a sample of Avril Lavigne’s “Sk8er Boi,” some ever so slightly warped Don Toliver flourishes and what sounds like a modified UK garage beat, Peaces invites the listener to rethink how popular music works and how it can sound. Certainly hip-hop and EBM artists have used sampling and sequencing to place sounds seemingly disparate into new contexts for a different way of creative thinking and Peaces is operating out of similar aesthetics but updating the sample base and imagining how they might work as a piece of music in the context of his own composition. Sure, DJ Shadow did that in the 90s and Girl Talk took the mashup to glorious new extremes. But with “Down To Earth” Peaces takes bits of popular music that many might dismiss as mainstream fluff and makes it into something experimental, surreal and cool. Watch the psychedelic music video for “Down To Earth” on YouTube and connect with Peaces at the links below.
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