Queen City Sounds and Art

Lucas Thijs Elicits a Sense of Breaking Mundane Life Limitations on “Waterhole Web”

Lucas Thijs evokes a sense of the cosmic from the very beginning of “Waterhole Web” before the song launches into its main piano melody splashed with a halo of sounds: side melodies that echo and fade, textural swells and glitches of white noise that serve as informal percussion and filigree of dramatic 80s rock guitar. But the song gives us some breathing room from the way it takes us in its embrace for passages that feel like what it must be like to be able to float into space through a column of starlight. Forget hardware, this technology as manifested in the music requires no equipment bur rather an unlocked inborn ability to transcend normal laws of physics and our own human limitations. And the song and its spiraling drift of blissful sounds embodies the impulse to that kind of liberation from everyday limitations. Listen to “Waterhole Web” on Spotify and follow Lucas Thijs at the links below.

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Lucas Thijs LinkTree

Chromadescent’s “Saturate” is Like the Bright and Warm Sound of Summer in Winter

Chromadescent, photo courtesy the artist

Chromadescent’s “Saturate” is brimming with shimmery sounds that swirl together with bell tones giving it solidity and rhythm before the saturated synth, piano and more vivid rhythmic and textural elements enter and transform the song into something that has an expansive fluidity. But over halfway through the it drifts into the ether once again anchored by a distant piano melody, percussive accents and lingering notes like being immersed in a virtual world where EDM, IDM, flamenco co-inform each other in a fully synthesized style. It has an energy like a modern version of Balearic Beat – incredibly calming but stimulating to the imagination in elevated emotional resonances. It’s a song that sounds like summer in the winter. Listen to “Saturate” on Spotify and follow Chromadescent at the links provided.

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Bad Flamingo’s “Devil and the Deep Blue” Channels Private Anxiety Into Moodily Transformative Americana Art Rock

Bad Flamingo, photo courtesy the artists

Bad Flamingo has crafted a typically unpredictable song with “Devil and the Deep Blue” beginning with a brooding bass line lead and the most minimal of guitar accents. Then the vocals come in sounding very focused within a narrow yet expressive range compared to some of the duo’s songs of years past but within the style of its more recent songs. It just makes it feel like the words are being given to us in confidence with a direct focus. Later in the song acoustic guitar and electric come in to give some sonic shading and detail with the electric ringing out like a briefly echoing thunderclap before the song returns to its simple, rhythmic elements that are more percussive than melodic giving the song a bit of a 1980s Tom Waits flavor circa the weirder end of Swordfishtrombones. It shouldn’t work but it does and breaks standard songwriting forms. At times the song is reminiscent of the sort of thing Barry Adamson was doing on his 1996 opus Oedipus Schmoedipus through inverting jazz tropes to make something that sounds like it isn’t beholden to anyone else’s established style while remaining accessible and with a vibe of hushed immediacy. The song seems to be about one of anxiety and urgency but coping through channeling the nervous energy away in almost tribal, ritualistic rhythms. Listen to “Devil and the Deep Blue” on Spotify and follow Bad Flamingo at the links below.

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badflamingomusic.com

OR/ANA’s “Burned Down” is a Moody Dream Pop Song About Personal Transformation Through Devastation

OR/ANA’s “Burned Down” has a simple structure and not a lot in the way of lyrics but what is there is layered and arranged in such a way that gives the song an atmospheric spaciousness and depth of mood laid out like a cinematic listening experience. A distorted synth tone pulses urgently as melodic sparkles stream in the backdrop of your hearing as vocalist sings about how “everything is falling apart” but “what a beautiful farewell.” And the first what we might call act or chapter of the song is like a mantra to this concept. Of familiar structures and habits coming apart to make way for something new even if it can feel scary and unmooring at first. Then near the midpoint of the song the distorted pulse drops away and we are carried off into a billowy field of ethereal sound that yield’s a second chorus of “I’m so down, everything’s burned down” like a statement to self of acceptance of change while mourning what was lost. In the last roughly third of the song the elements from the first third return but in a form that sounds in an urgent kind of disarray and as the final set of lyrics with “All you see in flames, running after me” and “there’s a fire in my house and it burns down.” This suggests the way in which we can see the chaos and discord affecting other people as things going south and bemoaning it but when it comes to your own situation how does one deal with societal and world events when they can no longer be abstracted with a kind of dissociation. Perhaps it’s not a metaphor for the uneven impacts of inequality, climate change, social upheaval, a global pandemic, environmental destruction in pursuit of short term profits and the effects on health and society but it works for that too. OR/ANA gives that experience a gorgeously affecting soundscape here without hitting you over the head with obvious symbolism in casting it in personal terms like a journey of growth and transformation that can apply deeply personally or far beyond one’s immediate experience. Listen to “Burned Down” on YouTube and follow OR/ANA at the links below. The Expansion EP was released in 2022 and can be heard on Spotify.

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Father Baker’s “The Downhill Chill” is a Hip-Hop Poem and Mantra of Resistance to Complacency

Father Baker imbues “The Downhill Chill” with an air of bravado in the face of resignation in bracing for the inevitable turn of fortune in one’s life, especially in the long term and the limited time we all have in life to attempt to do something meaningful or at least truly desirable with our lives while we can. The production by CEE GEE and Camouflage Monk of Griselda Records loops a haunting guitar part and swells of strings and a hypnotic beat really cloaks the track in a sense of menace and anxiety. And yet Father Baker’s refrain of “chill the fuck out and breathe” is like a mantra out of focusing on inevitable cycles that you see coming when “all the shit flows downhill.” The sample that closes out the song wherein a speaker talks about the social conditioning we receive in life and how individuality, and really creativity and imagination, are discouraged and often beaten out of people in various ways and that most people “don’t have enough so you become watchers of game shows and things like that.” This song appears to be an attempt to at least remind the artist and listeners that it doesn’t have to be that way even when headed into middle age and beyond and that awareness is one of the first steps to change and establishing better habits of mind. Fans of Anticon projects like Deep Puddle Dynamics and early Atmosphere or the likes of cLOUDDEAD or Hymie’s Basement will find much to enjoy here. Listen to “The Downhill Chill” on Spotify where you can listen to the rest of the recently released Towers EP and follow Father Baker at the links below.

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fatherbakerknows.com

The Audio/Visual Dept.’s Cathartically Ambient “Healing Happening” Soothes the Jagged Places in the Mind

“Healing Happening” is the fourth track from The Audio/ Video Dept.’s latest album …it all felt so real (which dropped December 9, 2022). Though part of a larger larger project involving saturated tones and elegant use of space and musical texture the song stands on its own as an expression of the release of fixed energy into a billowing flow. Chimes, metal and wood, sound in the entrancing swirl like a slow moving frequency that works out the stubborn jagged spaces in your psyche that sit there as bad habits of mind upon which one’s ability to move on to greater fulfillment can get snared. The sound sounds also like a great and gentle untanglement. It’s echoing ripples and expansive dynamic is not merely tranquil, it flows into and out of the mind leaving clarity in its wake. Listen to “Healing Happening” on Spotify and follow The Audio/Visual Dept. at the links below.

The Audio/Visual Dept. at Instagram

The Audio/Visual Dept. on Apple Music

David Curington’s Sprawling, Plunderphonic Ambient Piece “Assured Listening Experience” is Like a Creative Deconstruction of the Constant Media Content Bombardment of Everyday Life

David Curington, photo courtesy the artist

“Assured Listening Experience” sounds like David Curington paired various clips of radio theater programs, corporate training videos, industrial and scientific data audio, the news and random conversations with short bursts of white noise, animal samples, synth drone, oscillators, field recordings, perhaps movie dialogue, segments of a random piano work and an array of sound effects. All throughout the first portion, at least, a voice is heard reciting various playing cards and their suits. Later facts and figures in the same deadpan voice. Is there a pattern to the cards? Significance to the numbers and figures? Probably but decoding that might take the attention to detail and associations of a savant and at any rate it fades out or well into the background like the ghost of a numbers station. The oscillating drones that periodically change in pitch might have a pattern with an intended psychological effect in the layers of voices and sounds like the ghosts of a thousand BBC transmissions into space pooled into the collection of a listener and curator on a distant world pulling these sounds together to make some sense of what put together might seem like chaos but which at one time each had its discreet context but in this new arrangement takes on an amalgamated new significance as disembodied and de-contextualized artifacts of culture. By the time the 26 minute track comes to the conclusion of its three movements it’s like an avatar of the background, constant stimulation of everyday life so that such an array of signifiers becomes its own kind of ambient art piece that hits with an alienness in its familiarity. Listen to “Assured Listening Experience” on Soundcloud and follow David Curington at the links below.

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Stargurl’s “Floral Hotline” is a Chill and Tranquil Journey Into the Depths of the Night Time of Dreams

Stargurl sets a scene of chill tranquility and dreamlike introspection with the opening section of “Floral Hotline.” The sound of wind flowing as a backdrop and intermittent tones like stars in the night or the twinkling of distant city lights. String synths stream in dusky resonance. At the halfway point a gently echoing saturated melody drifts through the mix like a buried emotional memory surfacing but still amorphous and mysterious as it takes form in the mists of the subconscious and dissolving back into that fog. The song is like an extended dream sequence soundtrack from a lost section of the film Monsters (2010) and Stargurl’s chosen tones more the night time counterpart to John Hopkins’ own sunny electronic sequences. Listen to “Floral Hotline” on Spotify and follow Stargurl on Instagram.

Neil Foster Evokes the Hushed Energy of the World After Sunset on “Nightfall”

With the gradual replacement of sunlight with the shadowy low light and darkness of the night sky, Neil Foster arranges layers of airy drones and streams of melodic tone on “Nightfall.” What is gradual becomes an engulfing flow of cool sounds and echoing winks of single note arpeggios dotting the soundscape and rays of subdued sonic luminosity streaming through the murk like rays of moonlight. The cover image for the single shows hills shaded and billowy, gray clouds partially masking the setting sun. The song embodies the kind of hush immediately after the sun sets and before full moonrise and depending on the time of the year when the evening can seem darkest. But Foster also conveys the underlying activity that continues well after daylight takes a break before the next morning but with a sometimes subdued energy as diurnal activity transitions to the nocturnal. Foster’s composition maintains a sense of liminal wonder and tranquility that one doesn’t regularly hear in the realm of music and the track begins as it ends with a subtle fade out into what comes next. Listen to “Nightfall” on Spotify and follow Neil Foster at the links below.

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Vague Lanes Craft a Spacious Sense of Emotional Suspension and Release on “We’ll Always Have Never”

The sharp, edgy and lingering guitar work at the beginning of “We’ll Always Have Never” by Vague Lanes is anchored by a subtle but moody bass line and propelled by the accents of percussion. It’s a dynamic that gives the song great sense of space and brooding atmospheres. When the vocals come in they sound like someone suspended in that space and when all the music more or less tops you can almost feel the source of the voice fall off a cliff into the splashes of rhythm and tone and the flow of synth melody that carries you until the end. The song somehow brings together the intimacy of a lo-fi recording with the detail of a full studio recording and its’ particular flavor of post-punk has more in common with early Skinny Puppy and Fields of the Nephilim at once than modern darkwave in its expert use of electronics and live instrumentation in crafting an emotive aural experience. Listen to “We’ll Always Have Never” on Bandcamp and follow the Swiss band at the links provided. The new album Foundation and Divergence released on December 24, 2022 on digital, CD and vinyl formats available through the Bandcamp link.

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