Sparkle Division To Feel Embraced

Retro ambient lounge / jazz vibes taken to another dimension with deep bass, an impressive spatial design and glitch hop accents. Psychedelic too, as if you danced and chilled out in a smoking room in… what a David Lynch movie would be like if it felt good and trippy instead of eerie and disturbing? Grandma came back to life and the jazz band playing in the room are time travellers. Kind of mesmerizing.

I would never have guessed William Basinski is part of this project, it sounds nothing like the other releases I’ve heard by him. (And I personally like it a lot more.)

▷ Bandcamp
▷ RYM

death’s dynamic shroud.wmv Faith in Persona

I didn’t like I’ll Try Living Like This but this one is different! Very catchy tracks based on looped vocal samples, as if spinning in circles, caught in time or repeating the same thoughts. The grooves and hooks are solid (and these alone would make the album), but there’s also a sense of unease or even panic; sometimes the music seems to contradict itself, like on “See Me” where the interruptions (and realization that part of the melody is an old Windows startup jingle) become uncanny. But most of the time they come together in a relatable way. Like when you’re stressed out with a cool song playing on repeat inside your head.

▷ Bandcamp but it’s for subscribers only
▷ RYM

Darius Čiuta _ju-i-ra

Čiuta’s been releasing a lot of works on Archive.org for free, mostly field recordings/experimental. No descriptions, no explanations. This is the one I’ve come back to the most so far, a single hour-long track with some gently dissonant electronic tones over field recordings I can’t really identify. Mysterious, not overly austere, my kind of thing.

▷ Archive
▷ RYM

Darius Čiuta fi-zm

Two hour-long field recording tracks, one with plenty of natural sounds (but probably more of a park than of nature), one in a more urban setting. Some sounds are repeated — it might not be always obvious, but there’s a sense of rhythm here. And it took me a long time to notice that peculiar absence: for the first hour and a half, nobody talks. There are sounds of human activity, yes, but no voices.

▷ Archive
▷ RYM

Material Girl Tangram

Seven tracks as seven different pieces, coming together in non-obvious ways. Elements of instrumental hip hop, experimental jazz, other electronic genres, consistently interesting yet elusive, and — this is what sets this album really apart from other experimental instrumental hip hop projects I’ve heard, I think — always unexpectedly nice and soothing, almost ambient. It’s not easy to see where Tangram is going, and it doesn’t have obvious highlights, but it works.

▷ Bandcamp
▷ RYM

อภิชาติพงศ์ วีระเศรษฐกุล [Apichatpong Weerasethakul] ลุงบุญมีระลึกชาติ [Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives]

I like to watch films to change my mood and feel like I’m somewhere else, and this took me to another place from the very start*, with the beautiful landscapes, peaceful yet mysterious slow pace and supernatural occurences. Very few things happen but the mood, photography and sound design were really good.

(Also this has nothing to do with the actual film but I really like how Thai script looks. Does anyone know of good examples of Thai calligraphy?)

(* I wanted to use the word “dépaysant” here. Probably the best French word English doesn’t have an equivalent for.)

Wacław Zimpel Massive Oscillations

Long, slow progressions. Minimal pulses and beats. Grooves. Progressive electronic. Something like a jazzy feel too?

▷ Bandcamp
▷ RYM

Lionel Marchetti & Vanessa Rossetto The Tower (l’escalier en spirale)

A very interesting collaboration between two musique concrète stars. I don’t know what it actually is about, but it feels less impenetrable than Rossetto’s other works; perhaps like exploring a cosmopolitan city from a better world, brighter and more peaceful, close to what ours could have been.

And a cool thing about The Tower is that it exists in two versions, built from the same material — this is Marchetti’s, nocturnal and unfolding in a more analytic, linear / narrative way, each track focussed on a particular sound or idea;

▷ Bandcamp
▷ RYM

Vanessa Rossetto & Lionel Marchetti The Tower (The City)

whereas Rossetto’s version is more synthetic, very polished, much shorter but with more going on at each given moment. Also more comforting, diurnal, a little ambient-like.

Don’t ask which one is better — I think both are equally good and it’s particularly interesting to compare them. Two ways of describing the same imaginary place, with the same vocabulary but a different rhythm, a different grammar, a different tone, different lighting.

▷ Bandcamp
▷ RYM

Nagabe The Girl from the Other Side

Original title:『とつくにの少女』
French title: L’enfant et le maudit

A minimal story with a melancholic atmosphere and gorgeous drawings. It’s about two misfit characters living in a cursed divided world (humans in medieval cities / outside creatures in the forest): the unlikely relationship between an abandoned little girl and a tall outside creature who acts like a parent figure to her. The world is cold, mostly ruthless, mysterious. Only the little girl seems completely oblivious to all this.

Traumprinz B2B DJ Metatron Live at Planet Uterus

As dreamy, deep and emotional as I hoped it would be — it’s the best thing I’ve heard from him yet. And the unexpected breakbeat takes it to another level.

▷ Soundcloud
▷ RYM

HANSA He Is Risen!

Everything derelict, distant and distorted, a mess of ruined buildings falling apart with some lights, TVs or radios still flickering before they die. Maybe they’ll stay messed up like that for a little more. Who knows. There can be something weirdly comforting about the apocalypse sometimes.

▷ Bandcamp
▷ RYM

Graham Dunning Panopticon

This album was played using a video game as an instrument! Dunning replaced all the original sounds from Half-Life by “90s rave tracks and sample CDs” and recorded himself experimenting as a player in the modified game to make interesting results (you can see videos below). It’s disorienting, the sounds sound as if they were affected by an unfamiliar force, prevented from forming the rhythmic patterns they’re meant to but without becoming a senseless mess either. An absurd deconstruction that also sounds like a strange new world.

▷ Bandcamp
▷ RYM
“Motian Capture” (video)
“Yellow Henge (Radio Occult)” (video)

Dis Fig FACT Mix 654

This mix has teeth. A rhythmic trip to the most exciting regions of industrial and experimental music, featuring Pauline Oliveros, clipping., Diamanda Galás, 9T Antiope and many others I like — edited, reshaped, recontextualized.

▷ FACT (free streaming + download)
▷ RYM

天気予報 Final Transmission

It’s ridiculous just how comforting “PLAYBACK_REWIND” is — crackle and a warm slow, droney melody on repeat. Just that, for than half an hour. And it hits the spot perfectly. (“PLAYBACK_CORRUPTED” is also good in a similar vein but hits it just a little less.)

▷ Bandcamp
▷ RYM