GoGo Penguin’s “Saturnine” is neither slow nor gloomy. Perhaps the meaning of the word mysterious is better. But no, its upbeat rhythms and lively piano melody with finely accented bass has an energy that propels the song forward. Throughout the song each component of the instrumentation plays off each other taking on the role of carrier of rhythm, of accenting that rhythm and in the case of piano and bass offering an unconventional countermelody that frames the percussive melody underlying that emerges to prominence as the rest of the instrumentation drops out. Its a style of composition that provides dynamic contrast that gives this instrumental track and the group’s other material a distinctive character and expressive personality that conveys a complexity of emotion that something more spare and minimal and less layered would not. Listen to “Saturnine” on YouTube and follow GoGo Penguin at the links below.
“Bad Business,” the latest single of Codefendants with N8NOFACE, crashes together industrial beats with an almost screamo rap fitting the scenes from the music video. Codefendants is Fat Mike of NOFX fame, legendary rapper Ceschi Ramos and Get Dead vocalist Sam King and the project thus far has pushed the artists into powerful new territory. “Bad Business” presents scenes from a prison and the skullduggery and violence and stark reality in general of serving time and the system in which one finds oneself. It’s snippets of a particularly dramatic period in the lead character’s life and the thrumming low end and IDM industrial beat has a menace and unsettling quality that explodes into distorted and desperate vocals in both English and Spanish like an Aphex Twin and Death Grips mashup. It’s raw and takes you through the paces of a life you hope you never have to experience but in doing so triggers a brief adrenaline rush like a more straightforward, established genre song often can’t. Watch the video for “Bad Business” on YouTube and follow Codefendants at the links below.
Noah Before’s “Pole Tracking (inlier)” requires some initial patience that pays off in the end. The spectral drift of drone comes wafting in like an early morning, snow strewn breeze in the dead of winter after days of blizzards. There is a stark and melancholic beauty to hearing those freezing winds in the distance that one witnesses from time to time in more moderate climates but frequently as one gets closer to one of the earth’s poles. One wonders if Noah Before did some mathematical mapping of weather patterns charted via satellite and plugging the data in to generate the swelling and swirling sounds that manifest and bring with it that specific and special energy of a place of climate extremes forbidding to all but the most intrepid and adapted creatures whether naturally or with humans technological assistance. This track gets into the headspace of what it might be like to be a scientist studying the Arctic or Antarctic in person for months at a time. Its composition evokes the mystery of it all and what one might call its intimate grandeur that not everyone gets to experience except for limited periods of time when a polar vortex sweeps south. It is the sound of weeks of endless night and of endless day in its constantly evolving gyre of electronic drones. Listen to “Pole Tracking (inlier)” on Spotify and follow Noah Before at the links below.
A Very Special Episode, photo courtesy the artists
A Very Special Episode has a name like a humorous reference to one of the worst episodes of a TV series with a heavy-handed theme but that wry nod to televised melodrama suits its own music that is swirling with a deeply atmospheric urgency. Or so it seems from the single “Heaven’s Gate,” whose lyrics seem to take the concept of cults, and that specifically named cult lead by Marshall Applewhite, and how they appeal to the emptiness and atomization of modern life. And how cults provide the kind of social and emotional support system that feels more authentic than a mere job or many family situations especially for people who are at an unstable and vulnerable point in their lives. In the horror film-esque music video directed by Jen Meller we see imagery that looks like it could be from the 1980s or 1990s with the lead character played by Gillian Leigh Visco working in an office on an old CRT screen as happened when you worked for a company that was operating off an older database system or even merely Oracle. This little details takes the setting out of time a bit because certainly misguided cults and cult-like behavior and manipulations have become part of American life in a more overt way. When Visco enters into the cult compound and engages with the lurid and bombastic new community lead by A Very Special Episode singer Kasey Heisler the video enters into Kenneth Anger territory of the darkly dreamlike. This richness of imagery and presentation is certainly not necessary but it helps to make a song that is already engulfing and brimming with heightened emotion and densely dynamic sounds even more memorable. A Very Special Episode is tapping into that realm of where shoegaze and post-punk meet akin to what one might expect from Ganser or The Prids and “Heaven’s Gate” is just a hint of what else awaits on the group’s new album Freak Me Out which releases on June 23, 2023 on digital and “blue light vinyl.” But for now watch the video for “Heaven’s Gate” on YouTube and connect with A Very Special Episode at the links below.
“Nova” sounds like you’re getting to be in deep space surrounded by luminous energies streaming through utter darkness. Nebno’s vocals are ghostly yet stream with a clarity that fades from a central point of resonance. The track is a part of an improvised set of processed vocals that echo lightly into reverb and layered with other streams of voice that flicker in a hard digital angle like something going through a tremolo effect set to one extreme end. But in doing so it’s like being able to hear digital packets transmitted through a quantum communication device through interstellar space. The touch of synth drone distorting into nothingness at the end is not unlike a nova flaring out into the void of cosmic time. Perhaps as an exercise in developing her future aesthetics Nebno has in this track imagined what it might be like to experience the dramatic events of just a few years compressed at the end of the life of a star into four minutes, fifty-six seconds, and give voice to the glorious beauty of that time while expressing the melancholia of bearing witness to the death of a star. Listen to “Nova” on Soundcloud and follow the Swiss artist Nebno at the links provided.
The music video for Miriam Clancy’s “Cassowary” seems to embody the image of that solitary and scarce species of bird. Clancy can be seen running off into the dark and wallowing alone indoors and overlooking a city in the music video directed by the artist and JP Winger. The circular web of acoustic and electric guitar melodies with Clancy’s breathy and introspective vocals sketch the image of an insular world of a person reluctant to give up the private world of imagination and creativity to seek to expose one’s work to a world that will take it in and have opinions based on projection and interpretation that may not extend the same level of sensitivity and desire to connect genuinely. And you have to let go of that intimate creation and let it fly where it will and become what it will to other people. Maybe this song with its hushed and midnight ponderings aesthetic is about a specific relationship but it sounds like a commentary on the life of an artist with an audience and the delicate balance of inviting people in to one’s private vision and resonating with others and the judgments that may follow and the kinds of attention and creative dissection that makes you want to not risk that process again. And most people with any level of sensitivity probably feel these things even if it’s not about a creative work, but rather one’s ideas and feelings that aren’t perfectly crafted or manicured for public consumption at a time in our collective social history when many of our public interactions have become such. It’s a song with layers and its dream pop sound is one that renders its complexity immediately accessible. Watch the video for “Cassowary” on YouTube and follow Miriam Clancy at the links below. Clancy’s new album Black Heart released on February 3, 2023 on Bandcamp linked below as well.
Vessels to Motherland released its latest album LIVE IN BROOKLYN on February 3, 2023. Rather than a traditional live album as the title might suggest it’s an attempt to convey a journey across roughly an hour in familiar places but focusing on elements we sense but often tune out. It is the inverse of the way some ambient albums are conceived in drawing out attention to these environmental details. Each track is an anagram of “anomaly” excepting the closing track with that exact title. The opening song “ymnoala” pairs the sound of a space mission with echoing metallic string sounds, what sounds like coils being bowed at times, a ratchety noise maker, lonely synth drones resonating through an open space, nearly chaotic zither sent through natural reverb. It’s all both otherworldly and intimately familiar like the soundtrack to an industrial part of town at night with mysterious activity going on around you unseen but heard and felt. And the rest of the album is a similarly abstract yet tactile vein. Listen to “ymnoala” on Spotify and follow Vessels to Motherland at the links below.
The black and white noir aesthetic of El Morabba3’s video for “El Wuhoosh” with its use of animation techniques and visuals give it the aspect of an experimental science fiction movie. The song is about struggling with the forces of hostility, strife and oppression that exist within and between nations. And the haunting and unsettling imagery of the video is reminiscent of a darker corner of the Zone from Tarkovsky’s Stalker or one of the pockets of Hell in Can Evrenol’s Baskin. The figures in the video look like they’ve been smeared with the spirits of the battlefield and shaking off that psychic poison. A spectral drone serves as the backdrop to the lyrics with the swells of human voices drifting into a spiral of tones and distorted washes of sound and flickering noises. That is until the song blossoms into an expansive dynamic that breaks through the silence and the dark boundaries of the bleak nighttime forest setting. It’s the sound of hope against hope, against an extremely challenging present. For some the song may be reminiscent of some of the more unusual experiments in sound and conceptual songwriting that Peter Gabriel did early in his career, to others more in the realm of modern masters of dark yet colorful moods like Laurel Halo and Grouper. But El Morabba3 presents us with its own unique vision and expression of a conflicted world and an attempt to come to terms with how to transform these situations through creative acts. Perhaps in a way that more blunt action in the world has yet to accomplish. Watch the video for “El Wuhoosh” (which in English is “Monsters”) on YouTube and follow El Morabba3 at the links below.
A repeated, evolving guitar figure of glittery gossamer tone runs through ONBC’s “Heady Days” with the barest drum strike to mark time. Horns resonate in the distance and then up close dolefully toward the end of the song. The song is just two minutes seventeen and feels like a pool of a contemplative mood you can dive back into repeatedly. The lyrics are enigmatic and dark about being told that the best days, the heady days, are ahead but you keep waiting and they never come so you have to do something. In the song “the choir just burned down the place while thinking about you and the heady days” because you can’t wait around forever and leave your dreams on a shelf without becoming a bit of a tragic figure in your own life. Structurally and tonally it’s reminiscent of Slowdive’s “Crazy For You” but even more spare and to the point. Listen to “Heady Days” on Spotify and follow ONBC at the links provided.
Ania offers a strikingly vivid portrait of the false glamour of the image of a striving musician in an industry that will take and give little back. The song has a world weary tone and its style is eclectic taking some strands of grunge and 90s alternative rock but giving it some new life with unpredictable and darkly evocative key changes throughout when the song veers off familiar territory like Ania is subverting the expected songwriting form and melodic scheme which is what keeps the song a fascinating listen and the music video while mostly the usual band performing live shows the dark side of the music world too and the self-questioning and anxieties and disillusionment. Ania has played guitar for a variety of bands, has played many of the rooms in Los Angeles and its environs that people not living there and operating as a musician in that city might assume is a “great opportunity” and other clichés and projected fantasies when you’re not living and trying to make it in that cultural milieu and this song seems informed by the reality of trying every avenue as approach as a working musician trying to also establish an outlet for one’s own creative work while remaining true to yourself as a human and how challenging it can be. So yes, it’s a another take on a classic theme but Ania infuses the songcraft with not just musical chops but a willingness to take the music beyond established boundaries in rock even in titling the song the ways she does as in context it takes on an expanded meaning of having put in your time with earnestness and skill and often getting the same results yet still being willing to try a life in the arts. Watch the video for “Grass Is Greener” on YouTube and follow Ania at the links provided.
Queen City Sounds and Art 
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