Bandcloud 338
With music from Vray, LILES / MANIAC, ike release, Jo Johnson, Carly Barton, a Queen Aminah, Christina Chatfield, Ambient Babestation Meltdown, Jumping Back Slash, Ribeka, Cromie/rRoxymore, and more
It’s a Bandcamp Friday. May your emails be full of Booyakasha!s and Cha-ching!s.
Vray - Child Of The 90's (MIU002)
This label puts ridiculous art on its releases. See above, Kevin from Home Alone. Other releases feature the Whitney Houston and Brazilian footballer Romario (which sent me down a World Cup YouTube rabbit hole). Silly as that may be, the music is quite good. It’s light and airy, with tinges of acid, crisp with rolling M1 melodies, piano chords lingering over choppy beats. Tears on the floor stuff.
I first came to the work of Andrew Liles when he created a fake soundtrack for the fake movie in Berberian Sound Studio. Of course, his work goes back decades. But that’s for another day/newsletter. This is a recording of performance by Liles and Maniac, the alias of Norwegian death metaller Sven Erik Fuzz Kristiansen. It’s a funy one for me, I’m not of that world at all, but my limited experience with harsh noise and cut-up sounds brings me to this with open ears. It’s utterly gnarly. Strange spoken word, at times yelled in fact, and twanging guitars, distortion and the occasional operatic sample. It’s a marvel. Hard to imaging how it was performed live but there you go. Download here.
More colourful club-ready (sob) entries from ike release, one of which got an airing on my DDR show last week. Rich with brilliant ideas on ever level, from melody and construction and sound design to the artwork on display.
Jo Johnson - The Serpentine Path [Going In 012]
Modular enthusiast Jo Johnson recorded this piece for a livestreaming festival organised by Going In, a sub-label of The Bunker New York. The Bunker specialises in mind-bending techno, and with Going In they opt for similarly spirited yet aesthetically differing sounds. This is a beautiful piece 35 minutes of meandering melodies. As the title suggests, it’s circular, exploratory work, inspired by ideas around labyrinths throughout the ages. “Johnson’s work makes you wonder—in the best way—do we ever really go anywhere but in?”
Fresh off an appearance on secondnature & friends Vol. II, Carly Barton turns in a mix for the feted Daisychain series. It features an hour of interesting sounds, from stranger wobbling introductory pieces to plodding mid-tempo acid bumpers and melody-free percussive ramblers. All in all a thrilling journey.
a Queen Aminah - Social distancing BREAKS mix
A few months old, here we have a thrilling mix of breaks to be enjoyed safely. It comes from New York DJ a Queen Aminah.
A singular work of electronic wonder, Christina Chatfield makes her debut on the excellent Mysteries of The Deep label. Deep indeed. Rich with sonic textures, big booming sounds, occasional beats and cavernous atmospheres. If you like 12-minute trance-like riffs that shimmer with light, this one is for you. If you like short and sweet nightmare squelches, this is for you. If you like the gurgling sounds of prog house without the beats, this is for you. If you’re me, you’ll absolutely love it.
Moving Still Presents - Rachael's Asian Disco Special
Ambient Babestation Meltdown has featured here a few times lately and not without good reason. This mix is a selection of “Asian disco” tracks, with disco spanning a range of sounds from the latter half of the 20th Century. We have a lot of covers, we have instrumentals, originals. Just an hour of absolutely face-hurtingly FUN mix. in particular we have M Ashraf & Noor Jehan’s ‘Disco Dildaar Mera’, the absolutely timeless acid chug of Charanjit Singh’s ‘Raga: Bairagi’, an incredible Burmese cover of Laura Branigan’s ‘Self Control’ from Connie and much much more.
Jumping Back Slash - 2011-2021
I’ve only got to know the man named JBS over the past two years or so, but apparently he’s been making music under that name for a full decade. For the day that’s in it, he’s released a selection of unreleased tracks from the past 10 years. Twenty tracks in total. Obscene. Bangers the lot of them. Half the proceeds will go to the Nonceba Family Counselling Centre in Cape Town, a centre that helps the victims of domestic abuse and violence.
Clyde Built Radio: Ribeka - Under The Answering Sky (28/03/2021)
Two hours of lazy jazz, foggy ambient and spoken word sounds, dream pop, with occasional forays into dub and electro.
Cromie - Bloom In (rRoxymore rRemix)
The one time I met Ribeka was when I was in Glasgow for a gig in The Art School, with rRoxymore on the bill. She shows up here on remix duty for Cromie, whose name always makes me think of a line from Jay-Z’s ‘Do It Again’: “How the fuck you gon' talk about MCs on our heel? When we just cop them things homie, the chromey wheels.” Anyway. the remix is trippy, unhinged and nightmarish, with strange and unsettling melodies darting about over a brilliant lead bass line while vocal samples scream and wail.
Dame Area - No Pares De Trabajar
Just a weird lil electronic number for Barcelona duo Dame Area. Title means “don’t stop working”. Well today is a fake bank holiday so I am not taking that literally.
This is really blog house revived. Simple whispery rap, big hoovery rave sounds, uptempo breaksy beats. Stupidly big bass and retro keyboard hits.
Shout out to Nondi_, always.
Aylu - Coral Isla Coral (En Vivo)
Some friends and I have a long-running joke that one of us really likes the band Jet, of ‘Are You Gonna Be My Girl’ and that terrible Pitchfork review fame. He doesn’t, but we like to keep up the charade. You know, for lols. That has nothing to do with this piece of music, other than the word appearing in the score that illustrates it on SoundCloud. It’s a short piece for flute, clarinet and tenor,saxophone, and it’s a daring and exciting listen.
Ketallonia, Lumitecc, Vadim Griboedov, Lostlojic - ep3
This is a collection of tracks from Kyiv. Are they house? Are they techno? Are they tech house? Who cares. They bang.