Queen City Sounds and Art

Rindert Lammers Eases Us Into a State of Tranquil Restfulness on Ambient Jazz Track “Sleep Well Hiroshi Yoshimura”

Rindert Lammers, photo courtesy the artist

Peter Marcus’ video treatment for Rindert Lammers’ “Sleep Well Hiroshi Yoshimura perfectly captures the tone of a transitional time of day at dusk and the air of peace that can permeate the landscape. At the beginning we hear a recording of a woman talk about how she slept in the back of her car on the streets of Tokyo for two years and having the greatest time of her life. It sounds like what it is, a speaker reading the words of a comment on a YouTube video, in this case one for Japanese ambient legend Hiroshi Yoshimura. This narrative gives way to soothing soundscapes and rhythms joined by Joseph Shabason’s warm saxophone melody sitting well within the incandescent tones, spare and hushed percussion and sketches of guitar. Altogether it establishes a calming pattern like the mind transitioning from wakefulness into the realm of unconsciousness as you drift off into unknown vistas of restful dreams. The light in the video fades into darker night in the video and all we hear is the vestige of the aforementioned voice and the abstract remnants of music. The song is part of the debut Rindert Lammers album Thank You Kirin Kiki which became available April 18, 2025 on Western Vinyl. Watch the video for “Sleep Well Hiroshi Yoshimura” on YouTube and follow Rindert Lammers at the links provided.

westernvinyl.com

Rindert Lammers on Instagram

Isaiah Stone’s Psychedelic Rock and Soul Single “Leavin!” is an Exuberant Anthem of Self-Liberation

Isaiah Stone’s commanding vocals and command of a guitar riff hook you instantly on “Leavin!” It’s a song about not just being frustrated with circumstances where you are geographically, socially, culturally, in your place in life and in your mind and doing just like the title suggests. The song starts and stops on a dime throughout to give the sentiments time to echo and turn in various directions as the song progresses. It’s a hard rocking psychedelic rock song in the tradition of Hendrix and Prince and Stone clearly embraces his other roots in R&B in his vocals just as did the aforementioned. The song feels like being infused with excitement for new horizons and finding a space of one’s own in which to develop into the person you were always meant to be. Listen to “Leavin!” on Spotify and follow Isaiah Stone on Instagram.

Sweets Reflects on Life’s Deep Memories and Personal Transformation on Post-Punk Hip-Hop Single “HOCKEY PUCK”

“HOCKEY PUCK” by Manchester-based artist Sweets has a sonic forcefulness and urgency out of the gates that sounds like a thrilling amalgamation of the industrial end of JPEGMAFIA and moody post-punk. There is a scrappy quality to the vocals mixed with a reflective melancholia channeled into catharsis. Sweets looks back on memories that have stayed with him of peak moments and resonant details from his life that have made helped shape who he is. Yet later in the song he considers how memories of your past can trap you into a way of being and thinking that he wants to break out of the song’s sheer momentum sounds like the amplified will to burst out of limits and modes of thinking and being that one has outgrown. The song takes some moments in dreamlike spaciousness before getting back into the direct drive of the song to its conclusion. The song is a hybrid of styles that feels like something new that fans of the aforementioned and the attitude and sonic adventurousness of Sleaford Mods will appreciate. Listen to “HOCKEY PUCK” on Spotify and follow Sweets at the links below.

Sweets on Apple Music

Sweets on Facebook

Sweets on TikTok

Sweets on Instagram

Tess Perry’s Vibrant Synth Pop Single “Anemoia” is a Song About Connecting With the Romance of a Time Before Technofeudalism

Tess Perry’s choice for the title of her deeply melancholic song “Anemoia” is well chosen. It means “nostalgia for a time you’ve never known.” Meaning either having cultural artifacts of a time that appeals to your psychology and being able to mediate on what it must have been like, what of that time resonates most with you and given the appropriate period of human history or decade this could include cinematic depictions and a rich body of cultural artifacts like literature, music and art and even being able to meet the people who made it or at least have access to their own words about their time and their work. It can make you feel like you missed out on something special or a time that had a different set of challenges and limitations that for whatever reason feels right to your own sensibilities. Perry’s song is brimming with lush synths and sequenced, melodic rhythms and steady electronic drum beats. Her own vocals match the bright elevated tone of the song entirely with a saturated production reminiscent of Them Are Us Too. The line that hints that maybe the nostalgia is misplaced comes to us around the middle of the song with “The only thing we have left to do/Is clean up messes made by you.” Like a prior generation used up everything good and seemingly did everything worth doing before you got a chance. It’s a relatable feeling in particular if someone from another generation impresses that notion into you and don’t we hear a bunch of older people talk about how the younger generation is going to save us from all the terrible stuff from their own generation that they didn’t or couldn’t address. Perry seems to mourn that fact a little too in the song but it’s not a song that feels depression so much as yearning for something satisfies your curiosity in seeking meaning outside of your own mind and to find inspiration and vitality in a world that doesn’t often present itself as used up and leeched of psychological resonance. One hopes in creating a song about this subject that Perry is showing others that it’s entirely possible to create something that can serve oneself and others the same way the object of one’s anemoia does but in the present tense. Listen to “Anemoia” on Spotify and follow Tess Perry on Instagram.

TR!CKS’ Noise Punk Single “Place 2 Hide” is Humorously Surreal and Sinister

With lilting yet scrappy vocals and start and stop dynamics, TR!CKS might be excused for sounding like some kind of post-Riot Grrrl punk band. At least on “Place 2 Hide.” But the song’s surreal quality and sustained vocal warble in the last half of the song and the distorted guitar psychedelia that flares out at the end of the song enhances the air of something sinister in the lyrics. Do we hear the lines about “Place 2 Hide” end in the words “your body”? Either way it strikes a humorous and tone and the song reminiscent of a wonderful hybrid of Low On High, early Sleater-Kinney and Babes in Toyland’s more fanciful moments seems to embody the title of the band’s album Nightmares available now on cassette through Freeloader Records. Listen to “Place 2 Hide” on YouTube and follow TR!CKS on Spotify.

a.MIDI’s 16-bit Ambient Composition “nighttime on earth” is Like a Journey To a Hopeful Future

The use of a placid, pastoral yet futuristic imagery in seeming 16-bit graphics, a.MIDI’s visualizer pairs well with the saturated synth melodies and cascading twinkles of tone and sweeps of harmonic lines of the song “nighttime on earth.” We see a figure in what looks to be a space faring suit looking into the galactic core spread across the night sky. The melody lilts into ascending figures and seems to trace both the breezes we see moving the grass in the foreground as well as the grand mystery of deep space before us. Mixing the natural landscape with that more otherworldly the visualizer matches the song in its fantasy story resonance of New Age ambient uplift and the sense of wonder of the more benevolently Utopian science fiction of new worlds to meet and explore free of the dystopia of the world we seem to be living in every day. The electronic music and its detailed composition is a bit like the best video game music like that for Metroid or Final Fantasy but crafted for a refreshing repose. Watch the visualizer for “nighttime on earth” on YouTube and follow a.MIDI at the links below. The new a.MIDI album an interplanetary adventure released on March 14, 2025.

Piscean Daydreams’ Tranquil Ambient Single “Transmedium” is the Soundtrack to Cosmic and Aquatic Voyages Into Mysterious Spaces

Take a look at the cover art to “Transmedium” by Piscean Daydreams and close your eyes while listening as the sound of water rolling off a large craft as it rises from the ocean, splashing back down into the surrounding ocean. Harmonic tones swell and ascend with a luminous resonance reminiscent of the more otherworldly sections of Pink Floyd’s “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”—immersive and calming. The craft, built for underwater voyages and those into outer space, rises into the sky toward destinations off world but who can say where yet the tone of the song gives the scene a sense of wonder about the unknown. The song and its textures conveys a sense of both curiosity and tranquility like you’re seeing a cosmic traveler set off destined to return with horizon-expanding knowledge and accounts of realms well beyond our immediate experience. Listen to “Transmedium” on Spotify and follow Piscean Daydream at the links below.

Piscean Daydreams on Apple Music

Piscean Daydreams on Instagram

Piscean Daydreams on YouTube

Baby Bats’ Darkwave Techno Single “too much” is a Dance Track Against the Downsides of the Attention Economy

With a spaciousness and clarity Baby Bats brings together introspective vocals, percussive synths, spare drums and crystalline melodic sequences to create an enigmatic mood on “too much.” One gets the sense that the song is about an association or an aspect of one’s life that saps you of your energy and motivation on a deep level. The lyrics to the song suggest that this is an expectation or obligation that makes constant demands on your time and attention. Like the phenomenon of doom scrolling or if you’re an artist or anyone that depends on awareness of your efforts to even try to thrive the way you have to contribute to performative social media platforms. It’s a fact of life and a dynamic that can be completely enervating. The song’s low key dance beats sound like the new version of dark synth pop akin to the likes of Nuovo Testamento in that the vibe is 80s dance club informed by modern techno production and though more on the melancholic side equally entrancing. Listen to “too much” on Spotify.

SUNGRAVE’s Post-Metal Epic “Contorta” Reflects the Dynamic Drama of Human Civilization Unraveling

“Contorta” sounds like SUNGRAVE has deconstructied and re-assembled epic, science fiction soundtracks and injected them with Neurosis-esque heaviness and psychedelia. When the vocals come in they sound despairing yet defiant in a song that seems to be about people who have neglected to their detriment ideals, a natural world that nurtured until it was abused and poisoned and each other as a community and all that’s left are the ruins of all truly meaningful values. The tone struck in the song is a mix of outrage and transcendence. The streams of sound unite a sustained rhythm, incandescent, almost screaming guitar and crushing yet fluid riffs and a raw human expression of pain and desolation that really pulls you in like a dystopian film set at a time before an apocalypse, before the collapse of civilization, at a time when people have to make serious decisions for themselves and their civilization, frankly a time like now when we’re on the brink of climate and civilizational collapse and so this song and the album from which it hails, Idyll (released December 20, 2024 and available on vinyl, digital download and on streaming), hit as very of the moment. Listen to “Contorta” on Spotify and follow Denver’s SUNGRAVE on Instagram.

Tapeworms Invite Us Into an Effervescent World Illuminated By Retrofuturist Synthgaze on “Pitch Pop”

The beginning of “Pitch Pop” by Tapeworms sounds like what it might be like on a event-filled summer day with sparkling and saturated synth tones. Or like what it might be like to have daily adventures and new, stimulating experiences akin to living inside an ever-evolving video game with a superb soundtrack. Perhaps the buoyant melodies and playful use of processed sounds and sampled noises reflect the band’s experience of living in Japan for a year far from their home in Lille, France. The group orchestrates bit-crushed synths and processed vocals like a retro-futurist version of hyper-pop. Think like Jockstrap and Sextile collaborating with Phoenix and you’re in the realm of what Tapeworms does on the song and its new album Grand Voyage (out April 11, 2025 on vinyl, digital download and streaming) conveying a dreamlike resonance but one in which one is fully awake and leaning into the flow of events with a joyful sense of wonder. Listen to “Pitch Pop” on Spotify and follow Tapeworms at the links below.