Queen City Sounds and Art

Sonomancer Conjures the Ghosts of Modern Techno-Anxiety in the Beautifully Disturbing Video for “Digital Graves”

Sonomancer’s video for “Digital Graves” is strongly reminiscent of a Junji Ito manga if he and Inio Asano collaborated on a science fiction horror story about deep regret and the way the digital aspect of human relationships were the vector of cosmic horror. Like a generative disillusion and self-and-mutual alienation reflected in the song with its slow moving synth swells like a warning siren and ambient distorted electronic sounds and cycling sounds that are inescapable and crawling from all sides as a reminder that you’re never alone and always connected in this artificial way. Martha Goddard’s vocals are the beacon of humanity in the song expressing the regrets and misgivings of the specific ways we store our memories digitally through photos and videos or means of staying in contact and how what in another era might have been private is often exposed to too many people and which can be lost when technology glitches, fails or is discontinued in general. The song builds into a gentle and subtle industrial techno track with organic percussive textures that seem to compliment perfectly the shifting and disturbingly beautiful imagery of the video. It is indeed a track for our current era with the aesthetics to match. Watch the video for “Digital Graves” on YouTube and follow Sonomancer at the links below.

Sonomancer on Instagram

Nathan James Mills Considers His Cycle of Bad Habits on “These Friends”

Nathan James Mills channels touches of Jesus and Mary Chain and a bit of A Place to Bury Strangers on his punky post-punk single “These Friends.” Crunchy, fuzzy guitar riffs accent and then drive the dynamics bolstered by a steady beat while Mills considers his relationships with his vices and other people as types of friendships. He lists a short cycle of identity steeped in hedonism in the choruses by asking what would have have to say in casual conversation, with whom he would have sex and would he do drugs while down on his luck and are those kinds of friendships with behaviors and social situations the kinds of friends that are better than misery? Later in the song he sings of losing a friend because maybe he was too caught up in that cycle of past times to be present for a real relationship that isn’t a self-destructive coping mechanism or a tool to facilitate the same because “dysfunction is so pure.” But the moment of clarity peeks in as a hint, as a suspicion with the line “If I ever saw the other side maybe I’d just sit down and cry.” Indeed over wasted time, over wasted opportunities for a life you actually want to have instead of what seems to make you feel alive for a few moments here and there and over the trail of psychological neglect and carnage you’ve left in your wake along the way. It’s a short song at two minutes thirty-one but it packs in a lot and invites exploring one’s own bad habits. Listen to “These Friends” on YouTube and connect with Nathan James Mills on Spotify.

Secret Shame’s “Hide” is a Cathartic Declaration of Resistance to the Stultifying Energies of Psychological Oppression

Secret Shame, photo courtesy the artists

“Hide,” the lead track from Secret Shame’s forthcoming sophomore follow-up to its fantastic 2019 debut album Dark Synthetics is a statement on embracing one’s vulnerability and the dangers of always feeling like you need to hide part of yourself as an act of self-protection. In the choruses, guitar riffs hit in a measured yet expressive procession and then bloom forth in wide circles of melody as the rhythm section carries a lot of the weight of the track with an irresistible momentum and energy. In the verses the instrumentation gives the room that is so yearned for in the lyrics that Lena Machina delivers with a focused introspection. The song speaks to anyone that has had to turn a personal asset into a mark of shame because of the bad faith behavior of others and of a culture that consistently treats normal and not inherently destructive human behaviors as an aberration even if it’s something as simple as wanting to have your existence matter despite where the focus of society’s unspoken system of rewards is placed. Not to mention how one can internalize this mindset when it’s the bulk of what’s presented to you in life. It’s a song of no small amount of nuance in its sentiments and musically it’s a step further in the post-punk darkwave direction more than hinted at on the first record and its superb blend of punk and its darker cousin. Listen to “Hide” on YouTube, connect with Secret Shame at the links below and look out for the group’s new album likely announced later in 2022.

Secret Shame on Twitter

Secret Shame on Facebook

Secret Shame on Instagram

P Tersen’s “Methymnia” is an Otherworldly Fusion of Ambient and Drone with Modern Avant-Garde Classical Music

P Tersen’s “Methymnia” begins with a drone and brings in an array of organic sounds like a discordant orchestra. The title of the song is the name of the part of the island of Lesbos that was home to the poet and musician Arion who is attributed as having invented dithyrambic poetry, the precursor to Athenian tragic theater. In the context of P Tersen’s song one hears the deconstruction of classical structure favoring something more unorthodox in the vein of what Alexander Scriabin did with his “Piano Sonata No. 6” in crafting something singular and alien using fairly traditional instrumentation and pushing the aesthetics in ways that defy easy description using the usual language in capturing the tenor, mood and dynamics of music that seems to follow its own organic and internal logic. “Methymnia” bridges the worlds of ambient and drone with the classical avant-garde in a way that strikes the ears as mysterious and fascinating like remembering music from the world of dreams visiting another quantum reality where notions of harmony and melody at decidedly off from even the different cultural traditions in the earth we know. Listen to “Methymnia” on Soundcloud and connect with P Tersen at the links provided.

P Tersen on Vimeo

P Tersen on Instagram

Raelism Employs Spooky Atmospherics and Haunting Imagery to Process Personal Darkness on “Self-Soothe Mechanism”

Images in black and white, a woman laying on the ground looking into the near distance flanked by footage of the tides. Then tides coming in and in reverse out. Simple, ghostly synth melody echoing and then giving way to lightly distorted keyboard tracing a line that that goes up and slightly down as the tides move about and hints of another figure appears as a layer of the image over which the tides become slightly transparent. We see a man sitting in an alcove surrounded by an enclosure with foliage. This is how Raelism’s “Self-Soothe Mechanism” starts before the minimalistic percussion edges into the soundscape. The atmosphere of the song and the footage is reminiscent of what a sequel to the 1962 horror classic Carnival of Souls might look and sound like. Especially when the spooky glimmers of higher pitched synth bursts in with short lines answered by hovering, darkly ethereal drones. And then the color as the figure sings/speaks “I didn’t hit you, I didn’t cut you” in almost deadpan fashion. Then the male figure crawls menacing forward from his greened alcove juxtaposed with an image of him sitting at the top of a staircase and holding his face in his hands. It’s a psychological horror in short form and the title of the song might seem counter intuitive except that when someone repeats what he wants to believe to himself to soothe a guilty conscience over some actual or imagined wrong it definitely serves that purpose. Like a mantra that can also serve to heal through reaching into that personal darkness deeply and bringing forth deep seated feelings that haven’t been allowed expression by the conscious mind. And yet the chilling aspect of the composition especially given the video treatment while unsettling is also calming. The combination is like if Alien Sex Fiend made a chill, ambient track with an A24 director directing the music video except in this case it was Abigail Clarkson. Is that perhaps too on the nose connecting the name of this project with the UFO cult of the same name started by Claude Vorihon in the 1970s? Maybe so, but it’s another dimension to this fascinatingly unusual music. Watch the video for “Self-Soothe Mechanism” on YouTube and follow Raelism on Spotify. Look for The Enemy is Us EP set to release in 2022.

Egopusher Conveys a Sense of Great Emotional Poignancy and Emotional Complexity on “Patrol Rework”

Egopusher has described their music as being akin to something Sofia Coppola would have in a science fiction movie of her making and the duo’s song “Patrol Rework” bears this concept out. It is minimalistic, lush, moody and yet has a physicality that feels like both a wind sweeping past you and into the distance only to return like the flutter of feelings when a memory strikes you and you take the time out to contemplate the swirl of emotions evoked strongly yet again. Which is a bit like Coppola’s own filmmaking—a creative evocation of nostalgia and the role of memory in shaping your emotional reactions. But “Patrol Rework,” though tinged with melancholy also feels like a lingering on a memory and living in that moment not as a negative or a positive but as the complexity of experience that often is how we lived and felt at a time of great significance to us. And as something remembered not for any specific resonance but as something poignantly felt giving it the significance and power that a specific context anchors so strongly in our psyche. The songwriters’ use of a simple and evocative piano figure, strings bowed and plucked, synth drones, processed white noise and tonal sweeps is layered but of a piece that covers a great spectrum of sound while sounding tastefully spare. Listen to “Patrol Rework” on YouTube and follow Egopusher at the links provided.

Egopusher on Instagram

Survival Skills’ “Tethered” is Like the Luminously Captivating Outro Music For a Cosmic Science Fiction Series

Survival Skills, photo courtesy the artist

Despite its title “Tethered” by Survival Skills sustains a steady momentum suggestive of linear movement. Like the soundtrack for a transcendent, science fiction side scroller video game. Layers of synths intertwine and trade out prominence in maintaining a theme and a tone run through with a dynamic rhythm that pulses and hits percussive accents. Another image that comes to mind is like the outro music from a season of a TV show about the adventures of another Gallifreyan time lord that isn’t the Dr. Who. You can almost hear the luminous imagery and stream of stars or the visualizer of a trip through a worm hole to another galaxy in the song’s cycling drones and fragmenting streams of sound. Listen to “Tethered” on Soundcloud and connect with Survival Skills at the links below where you can also listen to the rest of the recently released Cascade Concrete EP out now on Bandcamp.

Survival Skills on Instagram

Live Show Review: Wallice at Mission Ballroom 02/24/22

Wallice at Mission Ballroom 2/24/22 photo by Tom Murphy

About five minutes into Wallice’s set it looked like someone had passed out or otherwise fallen down near the middle of the room. But instead of letting the show go on while staff took that person to another area the band stopped to make sure the person was taken care of while urging other people present to remember to drink their water and otherwise take care of themselves. When it was determined that things were fine Wallice Watanabe and her band got back into the swing of the music.

There were people present who didn’t know who Wallice is referring to her as the “opening act.” I didn’t know that her name was pronounced with the first syllable like the word “wall” and thus the name pronounced much like “Wallace.” But these distractions and observations aside, what Wallice’s singles and creative music videos didn’t make so obvious was how the songs were written aiming for more than a bedroom pop type of thing even if many of them were probably written in that way. All the singles you might know like “23,” “Hey Michael,” “Punching Bag,” “Little League,” as well as other Off the Rails tracks, and new material were showcased and Wallice commanded the large stage of the Mission Ballroom not like it was her or that of her bandmates first time on the stage. Wearing a cowboy hat and dancing about with dramatic flair and with little in the way of a set or special lights Wallice had obvious charisma and poise. The diversity of the material has been one of the songwriter’s strong points and one of the new songs came off like some kind of post-grunge rocker more than the pop songs but it all fit in somehow. Bassist Caleb Buchanan also engaged the audience directly at times and seemed like a long time collaborator (perhaps he is) and his contributions to great recent records by Mamalarky and Pulp are proof positive that he could easily add to Wallice’s aesthetic.

Maybe most people weren’t there to see Wallice having bought tickets to the Still Woozy show but with the strength of the material and the live performance, coupled with the graceful ease and friendliness of the performers drawing you in, there’s a better than average chance that in a year or two, Watanabe and her band of that time will be headliners in their own right.

“Olympic Skeleton” by McDead is Like an Instrumental, Wire-esque Soundtrack to the Exploration of Past Sites of the Olympics

If Wire had done a more pop score to the 2022 Winter Olympic games it might sound a bit like McDead’s instrumental post-punk song “Olympic Skeleton.” The driving, angular guitar lightly distorted with a touch of fuzz, playful interludes with call and response with synth bell tones, accented leads, start and stop dynamics that come off like freezing on an image for a second before the tenor of the song switches. Yet there’s a brightness to the song that contrasts a bit with the image conjured by the song title which might make those in the know recall the 2010 horror film Frozen (nothing like the beloved 2013 Disney animated feature). But there are no dire endings here and no morbid tones which gives the song a surreal aspect like someone years from now finding a skeleton from a lost fan or competitor found while excavating a former Olympic site and pondering on who that person is and how they got to be there. Perhaps it’s all just a play on words with the name of the project in mind and/or an oblique commentary on what happens to the sites of Olympics once the games move on to the next country following all the development no longer always put to civic use. And on that note, check out the song on Bandcamp and explore the works of Kev McDead by following him at any of the links below.

New Goo’s “Distancer” is a Finely Crafted, Ebullient, Otherworldly Indie Pop Gem

“Distancer” sounds like New Goo rapidly laid down layers of sound collage and yet this dynamic works as an unconventional architecture for what is essentially a pop song. It has a buoyant energy that carries you along for ride through bursts of sonic color and textures. Which is why Aspen De Rosa’s video (linked below on YouTube) with the bit about carnival rides seems so fitting. Dot Ashby of New Goo imaginative uses a keyboard chord that would be atonal in another context yet seems to perfectly complement Ashby’s breathy and melodic vocals. It never feels rushed and to say it’s reminiscent of a more manic and classic indie pop flavored Broadcast might be to overstate the song’s momentum and yet the song really hooks you from the beginning with sounds both alien and comforting that are instantly inviting into an alternative creative headspace that inspires repeated listens. Check out the track for yourself on YouTube and follow New Goo at the links below.