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Ata Kak Ata KakAta Kak's music has been a legend on the internet since Awesome Tapes From Africa made the mysterious Ghanaian singer/rapper's tape its very first blog post. The auteur's left-field highlife-hip-house creation is one of the more joyous sounds out there.Obaa Sima, released 03 March 20151. Obaa Sima2. Moma Yendodo3. Adagya4. Medofo5. Daa Nyinaa6. Yemmpa Aba7. Bome NnwomBorn September 29, 1960 in Kumasi, Ghana, Yaw Atta-Owusu didn’t seem to have music in his future. After attending AME Zion Mfantsipim Senior High School and managing the bar at the Kumasi Golf Club, he lived with his father for several years before moving to Germany in 1985 to join his wife, Mary. For 9 months he took German classes and planned to attend university but his wife got pregnant with Kevin, their first son. Living near Dortmund, Atta worked as a day-laborer, farmhand and English teacher, but he was also absorbing Stevie Wonder, the Staples Singers, KC and the Sunshine Band, Michael Jackson and the disco movement.Living in Germany opened new doors for Atta. Landing somewhere between Dortmund and Düsseldorf, he discovered work opportunities, made some friends and he was introduced to playing music for the first time. From a young age, he loved to dance and listen to music but never had the means to pursue it. It wasn’t until a German guy approached him at the post office and asked if he knew how to play. Atta fibbed and told him he could play drums—though he'd never played in his life. (His wife thought he was nuts!) The band got together and Atta joined on drums, and he was predictably terrible. After five weeks of rehearsing though, with Atta mastering drums and very soon lead vocals as well, he learned to jam on the band's repertoire of reggae covers. Increasingly confident with his self-taught skills, Atta was an active musician for the reminder of his time in Germany.Atta moved to Toronto in 1989 where he was invited to play in a highlife band. Although highlife had been the dominant musical genre in Ghana during his youth, he hadn’t actually played it. Unhappy at first—he preferred reggae—he picked up highlife quickly. He played drums for the band Marijata (not related to the other Marijata from 1970s Ghana), which rehearsed in a basement on the edge of town. They played shows around Canada and released three albums. The group featured Agyemang Opambuor (vocals and lead guitar), Marshal [Atta can’t recall his last name] (keyboard) and Anthony Frimpong (bass). His highlife influences spanned the classics—C.K. Mann, Nana Ampadu—but he also had James Brown, Elvis Presley and the Bee Gees on his mind in his approach to Ghanaian pop music. All the while, Atta taught music lessons at church and worked primarily as chief cook at a condiments factory in Bolton, Ontario. Around December 1991, Atta decided to record his own songs. But he felt his bandmates could not (or would not) perform the new style he envisioned. Lacking the cash for studio time, he cobbled together his own using mostly second-hand equipment: a computer with Atari Notator software; a new synthesizer with built-in drum sounds; a reel-to-reel recorder; a 12-channel mixer. It took a long time to gather equipment, learn how to use it and finally record the new songs that Atta had found so easy to write. He and his friend Yanson Nyantakye (who contributed technical expertise as assistant engineer) laid down the tracks, slowly. Yanson originally sang backing vocals but Atta replaced his voice with that of Lucy Quansah, whose brother was a bass player friend of Atta's. In apartment 617 at 215 Gosford Blvd, as his infant son Jeffrey looked on, Atta occupied the living room and washroom to record what would become Obaa Sima. The seven tracks on Obaa Sima traverse a pop music landscape that encapsulates international modes--rap, techno, saccharine melodies—while reflecting contemporary Ghanaian music via highlife-style refrains, aggressive rapping and use of Twi language. Inspired by a Grand Master Flash & The Furious Five performance of “New York New York” he saw on television, Atta wanted to rap on his new project. (Melle Mel's look on a 1983 German TV performance of the song bares an uncanny resemblance to Atta's image on his cassette cover.) He was not aware of the hiplife—localized rap—movement in Ghana, in its very infancy by 1994 when Obaa Sima was released. Rapping in English didn't feel comfortable and he began writing and practicing rhyming in Twi, the most widely-spoken language in Ghana. The distinctive rapping on Obaa Sima became one of the earliest and most intrepid examples of Twi rap in a period when young rappers in Accra and Kumasi were still mimicking Tupac and Shaggy.The name Ata Kak came from the fact that he was born a twin, which in Akan society usually means one child is named Atta (or Ata) and the other child is named Ataa. He shorted his first name and added Kak, which is short for kaakra, meaning "small," often added to the name of the younger twin. It proved costly to manufacture the tape in Toronto, so he sent it to Ghana to be mastered and duplicated. His twin brother organized the cassette cover design with help from Professor O.A. DeGraft Johnson, head of the publishing department at the local university. Atta loved the artwork. Around 50 copies were made and released in 1994. They were testing the market with the initial pressing but no one showed interest. DJs wanted cash to play it. He couldn’t invest in promoting it. Atta never once played it for anyone in Ghana and has never heard anyone talk about it. He believes approximately 3 copies were sold and the rest were scattered among family and friends in Ghana and Canada. A group of friends in Toronto for whom he played it loved the recording, but it didn't make an impact in Ghana. Awesome Tapes From Africa founder Brian Shimkovitz bought a copy of Obaa Sima in a roadside stall in Cape Coast, Ghana in 2002. The tape sat in a box for a few years and, following a year-long return trip to Ghana, it became the inspiration for the ATFA blog in 2006. Soon a cursory search for Ata Kak began, with Google and endless phone calls providing no leads. As the search became more serious, and obsessive curiosity built, there were still zero clues among Ghanaian friends, acquaintances and music industry professionals, who had never heard of Ata Kak. In October 2006, Atta moved back to Ghana, where he invested in a well-digging business. The machinery broke down and led to a failure of the business, which has prevented him from further focusing on music. Back in Kumasi today, Atta continues to write songs for his own enjoyment. After 20 years, Atta’s master DAT of the recording degraded in Ghana’s heat and humidity. It split apart when digitization began and the music could not be recovered. With Atta’s only cassette copy too stretched out and sonically-damaged to use—over time, other copies were found but didn’t sound good enough—the original tape Shimkovitz found in 2002 became the source for this release. Jessica Thompson at the Magic Shop in NYC transferred, cleaned up and otherwise restored the sound. Mysteriously, Atta’s original recording was slower than the one ATFA posted (indicating the album might have been pirated at some point). This release maintains that faster sound almost everyone except Atta is used to, mostly because slowing down the faster version revealed too many sonic problems. So a download is included so everyone can hear both versions. Platform: Bandcamp Signup for Free. No Credit Card required. |
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Toydrum https://toydrummusic.bandcamp.com ToydrumFuture World (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack), released 15 June 20181. Future World (Intro) / Raiders Theme Prt 12. Future World (Finding Ash)3. Liquid Nights (Dance Party) / Fight To The Death / Stomach Meds4. Lei Escapes / Robot Hope Prt 15. Take Us To Drug Town / Meet The Drug Queen / Getting High On Your Own Supply6. Oasis Queen Is Dying / Good Guys Ride Out7. Love Town Prt 1 – 28. Desert Times9. Robot Hero Prt 1 / Raiders Chase10. Future World (Robot Love/hate)11. Good Guy Stretches Out / Warlord Dream / Paradise Beach12. Oasis / Raiders Scream / Old Traveler Knows All13. Raiders Vs Drug Town14. Love Town (Mans A Pimp)15. Future World (Bad Robot)16. Robot Hope Prt2 / End Titles V2ABOUT FUTURE WORLDInside a desert oasis, a queen (Lucy Liu) lays dying as her son Prince (Jeffrey Wahlberg) travels across barren waste lands to find a near-mythical medicine to save her life. After evading violent raiders on motorbikes led by the Warlord (James Franco) and his enforcer (Cliff “Method Man” Smith), Prince meets Ash (Suki Waterhouse), the Warlord’s robot sex companion-assassin who's in search of her own soul. As Prince is captured by the Druglord (Milla Jovovich), the Warlord’s forces roar in – and Prince fights to save the remnants of humanity.About TOYDRUMPablo Clements has a long history and following for his remixes from his PYSCHONAUT and MO WAX days and in UNKLE along with James Griffith, they remixed the likes of Massive Attack – False Flags, Noel Gallagher AKA What A Life and Noel Gallagher – Let The Lord Shine A Light On Me – Black Mountain – No Hits, Autolux – Turnstile Blues, The Queens Of The Stone Age – I’m Designer, Evil Nine – 13 Icicles, The Big Pink – Too Young To Love, Grinderman (Nick Cave) – Worm Tamer, Trentemoller – Neverglade. In 2012 Pablo and James Griffith along with James Lavelle collected Remixer of the Year (for UNKLE) award from the UK Music Producers Guild for the remix of Band of Skulls – The Devil Takes Care Of His Own.Pablo and James work is very versatile, as well as writing music for their own collaborative projects they are able to switch their hand to scoring music for films. They have co-written, produced and recorded many tracks for the big screen, including With You In My Head for the TWILIGHT SAGA: ECLIPSE directed by David Slade, Every Single Prayer featuring Gavin Clark for the film THE CALLER directed by Matthew Parkhill, the whole music score for ODYSSEY IN ROME, directed by Alex Grazioli a documentary on the life of Abel Ferrara and the documentary LIVES OF THE ARTISTS FOR RELENTLESS directed by Ross Cairns for RELENTLESS, a film about extreme sports people (snowboarding, musicians and surfers).In 2012 James Lavelle decided to put UNKLE on hold for a while, so Pablo and James built their own studio in Brighton, the TOYROOMS, where they operate under the Producers/Artist name Toydrum. They have worked on a variety of projects, LAWLESS with Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, Red Shoes – A short film For Vivienne Westwood, PIECES a film directed by Jack Weatherly, who they have worked with before on a film called THE SCORE FOR EURO 2012, remixes for the likes of Trentemoller and Noel Gallagher. They remixed Noel’s In The Heat Of The Moment from his album Chasing Yesterday, the remixed was used on Assassin’s Creed Syndicate E3 trailer.Toydrum released Distant Focus (2014) on their own label Underscore Collective a 6 track mini album it is a progression of the work Pablo and James Griffith created under the UNKLE name. They released EVANGELIST (2015) album, a project they worked on with the late Gavin Clark, which obtained great reviews. The tracks God Song and Whirlwind Of Rubbish featured in the Bafta wining series THIS IS ENGLAND ’90 written and directed by Shane Meadows. Toydrum scored the film LONDON FIELDS and the film DETOUR. They previously wrote the music for Alice Lowes film PREVENGE, which Lakeshore Records released in 2017. Category: Arts & Entertainment > Movies Platform: Bandcamp Signup for Free. No Credit Card required. |
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Music | POSHGOD POSHGOD.Miami, Florida.cyberpunkfunk Category: Arts & Entertainment > Music & Audio Platform: Bandcamp Social links: 
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Otherr Otherrhttps://lnk.bio/steveotherNo Matter - EP, released 11 January 20221. Comatic AI2. Pandora Category: Arts & Entertainment > Music & Audio Platform: Bandcamp Signup for Free. No Credit Card required. |
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Mamalarky https://mamalarky.bandcamp.com Mamalarky<3 <3 <3 <3booking:msandrin@tourpeachy.comPocket Fantasy, released 30 September 20221. Frog 22. Mythical Bonds3. Little Robot4. You Know I Know5. It Hurts6. July7. Building Castles8. Dance Together9. Shining Armor10. The Hour11. Mote Controller12. NowSix months into the pandemic, three-fourths of art-rock four-piece Mamalarky plunged into a new experiment: they moved in together. Guitarist-vocalist Livvy Bennett and keyboardist Michael Hunter drove across the country, decamping from Los Angeles to bassist Noor Khan’s hometown, Atlanta. In September 2020, the trio rented a giant old house with vaulted ceilings, a tire swing, and a bare-bones little studio room. There, the band made its largely home-recorded sophomore full-length, Pocket Fantasy, due September 30 via Fire Talk.When they needed breaks, the group would take walks to a nearby creek, surrounded by tall trees and a cacophony of birds. On a particularly sublime day of swimming, Bennett and Khan soaked in the sun, watched the light refract the water, and time stood still—a blissed-out moment captured in the purejoy of “Mythical Bonds,” an ode to friendship told through playful grooves and zigzag riffs. “I really needed to write something to accurately show Noor how much her friendship means to me, and our journey as musicians and friends,” Bennett reflects.Pocket Fantasy is an instant-classic sunny-day record, imaginative and introspective, an enveloping listen of skyhigh hooks and keyboards that soar with joyful abandon. Its twelve kaleidoscopic tracks shapeshift aesthetically and thematically, through ideas about death and impermanence; love and gratitude; nature and technology; humor and hope. “We were just living in the album for an entire year,” says Bennett. Physically enmeshed in each other’s lives and processes in new ways, the trio connected more deeply around one another’s creative languages, honing in on their tight-knit group-logic. “We would work on it all day, and I would fall asleep with the songs in my head. It was really: eat, sleep, breathe, record music.” Drummer Dylan Hill remained based in the band’s hometown, Austin, collaborating through voice memos, and making regular trips to Georgia to record. “It felt like I was stepping into another world,” Hill says, of those fruitful visits. Mamalarky formed in 2016, growing out of the house show scene in Austin, TX that surrounded their cooperative student housing. But their roots as friends run even deeper: Bennett and Hill met in middle school band, and they’ve played in bands with Hunter since high school. (Lead single, “You Know I Know,” nods to the big music dreams of their Texas upbringing.) When the band moved to LA after the release of their first record, they met Khan. Pocket Fantasy follows their 2020 self-titled full-length debut, the 2018 EP Fundamental Thrive Hive, and support tours with Slow Pulp, Jerry Paper, and Ginger Root, among others. When they’re off the road, Mamalarky now jokingly calls itself “tri-coastal,” with Bennett and Hunter back in LA, Hill in Austin, and Khan in Atlanta.The process of home recording helped crack open their collaborative approach. Constant tracking at home helped take off some of the pressure of the studio; the group could experiment without regard for whether songs would make the album; they could just write and play and collect material without worrying if anyone would ever hear it. “It’s more alive,” Bennett says. “And less over-thought. It felt like it was pouring out continually.” Hunter adds: “We were very much learning the home-recording process as we went along… It’s music that’s heavily inspired by the process.” Pocket Fantasy comes to a close with “Now,” a fluttering contemplation of gratitude, of wishing time would slow down as everything picks back up again. It’s a sweet and slow-riffing moment of taking stock, knowing things can’t stay the same forever, but why should they? “Life is an experiment,” Bennett sings. “Let’s just keep living it.” Platform: Bandcamp Social links: 
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Scope Music https://collide-o-scopemusic.bandcamp.com Eidos by Collide-O-Scope Music, released 05 November 20181. Lou Bunk: A Shadow on the White (2014)2. Robert Morris: Foray (2016)3. Robert Morris: Sabi (1996)4. Jason Eckardt: Rendition (2006)5. Lou Bunk: Fortune (2015)6. Yotam Haber: Estro Poetico-Armonico II (2014)The six works contained on "Eidos" have been integral parts of Collide-O-Scope Music's programming repertoire over the past several years; four of the six, in fact, were composed for the group. "Eidos" is an ancient Greek term used by both Plato and Aristotle to denote "essence." It is an especially relevant concept for musical composition and particularly for the works on this album, as they all to some degree distill, transfigure, conjure, etc... conceptual, historical, and even directly musical essences in a variety of forms. Essences can be thought of, as it were, the raw magma of these works; whether it is Yotam Haber reaching back across time to conjure the ornamental and harmonic essences of Baroque composer Benedetto Marcello, who himself was recalling the virtual essences of even older musical forms, or Lou Bunk evoking the aesthetic contemplation of delicate fluctuations in shade during a snowstorm. Jason Eckardt's darkly provocative, ominous, and brutal "Rendition" bravely plants itself in the unbearably violent essences of piercing torture, while Robert Morris's "Sabi" crystallizes in musical form essential character foundations from Japanese haiku poetry. In the six works on this album, a brilliant diversity of essences both musical and extra-musical emerges.Lou Bunk: A Shadow On The White (2014)I wrote this composition thinking about the drama of subtle and abrupt contrast; listening to the hushed sound of my neighborhood during a heavy snowfall, against its noisy yet static appearance; comparing the uncertainty of memory, against the vivid emotion of recalling; staring at my plain off-white wall long enough to see past its visual banality to a chiaroscuro like beauty in the shadows on the white.This composition is written for pianists Marilyn Nonken and Augustus Arnone.Robert Morris: Foray (2016)Foray was directly influenced by Augustus Arnone's pianism, which I finally heard in the spring of 2016 in a Collide-O-Scope concert featuring the music of Milton Babbitt and some younger composers. His remarkable ways of voicing and articulating piano sound made a big impression on me. So in mid-July of 2016 an idea for a piano piece popped into my head and the character of the piano ideas was something I thought Augustus would like to play, so I dedicated the piece to him. The basic idea of the piece is that an opening series of ten chords arranged in an arc (maybe a rainbow, since each chord is of a different harmonic “color”) each generate music in subsequent sections of the piece. Thus the form is the arc followed by ten sections in different registers and densities. As the music goes on, the derivation of the music from the chords gets progressively more complicated and obscure in the way the music is parsed, registered, and embellished. The process is from isolated objects to mixtures and blends—an entropic process.Robert Morris: Sabi (1996)"Sabi," is a Japanese aesthetic term for "loneliness," one of three characteristics of Haiku poetry (along with "wabi" (poverty) and "yügen" (mystery)). As Leonard Koren has written, wabi and sabi together "is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. It is a beauty of things modest and humble; it is a beauty of things unconventional." Wabi/Sabi captures the transient quality of this piano piece (autumn, 1996) and much of my recent music.The piece is based on eight simultaneous unfolding, 55-note strings of pitches, quickly saturating the 88 notes of the piano. The unfolding happens four times, the middle two involving direct (if camouflaged) octaves. From time to time, the music relaxes as if to contemplate its progress or reflect on the moment.Lou Bunk: Fortune (2015)“Fortune” is a reconstruction of melodic material from Machaut’s Motet, “Ha Fortune”. Using six melodic fragments from Machaut, I create new textures and harmonies while blending in noise and microtones. The instruments are often working together to create a group sound. Though occasionally, and with little ambiguity, certain instruments are featured. Three text phrases are borrowed from the Machaut, each being the first sung words in the three‐part original: “Ha! Fortune”, “Qui es promesses” (who trusts in the promises), “Et non est qui adjuvat” (and there is no one who helps). I decided to have the players sing this text at key moments, as its meaning inspired the emotional drive of the composition. Through the music, I explore the idea of being powerless over unexpected events, and how the beautiful can be destroyed by ugly and scary circumstance, and yet in the end, seemingly out of nowhere, good fortune may arise.Jason Eckardt: Rendition (2006)Beginning in the mid 1990s, the CIA instituted a program of extraordinary rendition, wherein foreign nationals suspected of terrorist activity were detained, without legal process, and then covertly transported to countries where regulations for interrogation were less stringent than those imposed the United States or completely absent. The program was dramatically escalated after the September 11 attacks and has been defended vigorously by the Bush administration. Former CIA agent Robert Baer describes renditions bleakly: "If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan. If youwant them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear — never to see them again — you send them to Egypt."The etymology of "extraordinary rendition" can perhaps be traced to the meaning of the verb rend: to tear, to remove from a place by violence, to wrest. Other meanings include to tear (the hair or clothing) as a sign of anger, grief, or despair, to lacerate with painful feelings, and to pierce with sound.Yotam Haber: Estro Poetico-Armonico II (2014)Commissioned by the Fromm Foundation for Collide-O-Scope EnsembleEstro Poetico-Armonico ii is a work that takes as its launching point the fifty psalm settings of Benedetto Marcello, a contemporary of Bach, who paraphrased or elaborated on the liturgical music of the Venetian Jewish community. I came across his music when I was living in Rome working on "Death Will Come And She Shall Have Your Eyes" (2008) for string orchestra, mezzo-soprano, and archival recordings of Roman cantors from the 1940s. I was inspired by the Jewish community of Rome and Venice that were segregated for so many generations since their initial arrival in Italy after the destruction of the second temple in Jerusalem. Without any real musicological proof, nor really requiring one for artistic license, I imagined that one generation passed on to another these ancient musical traditions, and through a kind of telephone-game-evolution, the music lost or gained its essence on each transference. When I came across the first edition of Marcello’s psalms, I read his introduction with great astonishment and pleasure: he, too, spoke of an imagined musical filament connecting the music sung in the Venetian synagogue of his day with an “ancient music sung passed down from Mount Sinai”. The theory, of course, can never be proved, nor should it be, in order to appreciate the beauty and brilliant inventiveness of his music. Estro Poetico-Armonico II is my re-imagining/re-hearing/re-creating in a very far-away, distant sense. Category: Games > Computer & Video Games, Arts & Entertainment > Music & Audio Platform: Bandcamp Signup for Free. No Credit Card required. |
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Ohtis OhtisBooking-----------North America - devin@overrunbooking.comEurope - ed@freetradeagency.co.ukPR--------US - lisag@grandstandhq.comUK - Bree@yesplease.fmROW - matt@endoftheroadfestival.comMGMT----------- matt@endoftheroadfestival.com & simon@endoftheroadfestival.comSchatze b/w Failure, released 26 February 20211. Schatze (feat. Stef Chura)2. FailureThe latest in Saddle Creek’s Document Series, Schatze b/w Failure 7” features two new tracks from Ohtis, including a duet with Stef Chura, and was mixed by Collin Dupuis (Lana Del Rey, Angel Olsen, St. Vincent). It follows the release of Ohtis' critically acclaimed 2019 debut album Curve of Earth.The release is led by “Schatze,” a new song that features Saddle Creek’s Stef Chura. A character study of the Selfish Antisocial Male, it is told primarily through the lens of his long put-upon girlfriend - which Chura acts the part of - in a series of complaints about his objectionable behavior. “I’ve always loved Ohtis and Curve of Earth is one of my favorite recent releases to come out,” Chura says of her involvement. “Sam is a rare songwriter. He speaks from an honest and dark place with a sincerity that I think is refreshing and deeply relatable. Adam is an old friend who was living down the street from me in Detroit at the time this collaboration came to be tossed around. I think someone on my Instagram kept asking me about doing a song with them... So I made a poll as a joke which led to the inevitable. When they showed me the song and the call and response format I was instantly in love with it.”Though light-hearted and fun in its tone, “Schatze” offers no illusions about the state of affairs: he is wrong, selfish, and unrepentant about it all. “I got the idea for the song on an oceanfront balcony up in Cambria when my wife got annoyed by my neurotic vape addiction crampin’ the vibes,” Sam says. “Most of the rest was written and recorded last year, late at night in a hotel room in Amsterdam.”The track actually takes its name from a cat belonging to Sam’s friend Gerald, which Sam says is extremely violent and possessive. “He has put Gerald's wife Teri in the hospital, and fucked me up badly more than once because I had refused to admit there was a cat alive whose heart I could not win,” Sam says. “Turns out Schatze is such a cat.”B-side “Failure” can be seen as the Selfish Antisocial Male in a moment of introspective crisis. He is struck by fear and panic about the consequences of his behaviors and what it means for his future. Whereas in “Schatze” he breezily appeals to his freedom to do as he pleases, in “Failure” his fears indicate that perhaps these behavior patterns do not represent personal freedom but in fact quite the opposite.“‘Failure’ was written many moons ago after visiting a walk-in clinic for an STD test attended by a ‘Dr. John’ and psyching myself out waiting for the results,” Swinson says. “They eventually came back negative, but not before spawning this insane fucked up stream of consciousness song. I had always stood by the song living up to its title until Adam and Nate dug it back up and added this Bonnaroo-worthy outro to it.”Offering even further insight into a brutally honest mind, the two new songs are dark, raw, but always tinged with a compelling sense of sardonic wit. Category: Arts & Entertainment > Music & Audio Platform: Bandcamp Social links:
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Ed Schrader's Music Beat https://edschradersmusicbeat.bandcamp.com Ed Schrader's Music BeatOn Riddles, Music Beat begins their new life. Working steadily for two years in the apartment studio of close friend, electronic-pop maestro Dan Deacon, three evolving musicians pushed through an intense period of personal tumult and found purpose in the sounds they were committing to record. The result: a polished and passionate masterpiece of nuanced alt-rock. Nightclub Daydreaming, released 25 March 20221. Pony in the Night2. This Thirst3. Eutaw Strut4. European Moons5. Hamburg6. Black Pearl7. Echo Base8. Skedaddle9. Berliner10. Kensington GoreAfter turning heads with the densely orchestrated Riddles, produced by Dan Deacon, the Baltimore-based duo Ed Schrader’s Music Beat have given us another giant leap forward with their fourth record Nightclub Daydreaming. The whiplash-inducing stylistic shifts between aggressive noise rock and operatic gloom pop that have become the band’s trademark have given way to a single aesthetic that fuses both impulses. On Nightclub Daydreaming, menace teems just below the surface as propulsive, stark arrangements leave space that Schrader fills with strident, reverb-soaked narration.When Ed Schrader and Devlin Rice began writing the record in 2019, the idea was to make a fun, danceable album, but an underlying moodiness proved unshakeable. As Schrader puts it, “The cave followed us into the discotheque.” The duo road-tested the songs “This Thirst,” “Echo Base” and “Black Pearl” with drummer Kevin O’Meara on tour with Dan Deacon in February 2020. COVID restrictions cut the tour short, squashed plans to go immediately into the studio and sent the touring party on a sprint from LA to Baltimore. “We broke down outside Roswell,” Schrader recalls. “And these cops laughed at our dumb asses as we used all our pent-up stress and fear to propel our half-submerged bus out of the muck, yelling epithets to the sky.”It was one of the last experiences they had with O’Meara, whose death in October 2020 weighed heavily on Rice and Schrader’s minds as they worked on the record. It was also a cathartic moment that presaged the aesthetic that would permeate the songs on Nightclub Daydreaming: “mad euphoria in the face of doom,” as Schrader puts it. “This Thirst” is an alienation-fueled barn burner barely restraining itself through musically sparse, lyrically dense verses to culminate in a howling, synth-saturated chorus that beats horror punk at its own game. “Came from the north with a twisted planetarium, rock salt, nervous tic and novocaine,” Schrader sings, assuming the guise of a vagrant whose irresistible urges lead him through a fever dream of chemicals, back-alley bartering and existential threats.The hyperactive “Echo Base” exudes agitated-cool, with breakneck drum fills and a relentless bass line. The narrator is stranded in a frozen landscape and running out of options. “She is just a night train away,” we are assured, and yet we sense that may not be an altogether good thing. The band recorded and mixed Nightclub Daydreaming over a two-week period with Craig Bowen at Tempo House in Baltimore with David Jacober on drums, turning demos with artificial sounds and placeholder melodies into fully realized songs playable by a live band. The end result is not the album of “sunny disco bangers” that Rice says the band set out for, but something deeper, darker and more rewarding. Category: Arts & Entertainment > Music & Audio Platform: Bandcamp Signup for Free. No Credit Card required. |
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uX uXSensual melodic electronica & dubstep by the artist uX.I Remember - [original mix], released 01 April 2020 Platform: Bandcamp Signup for Free. No Credit Card required. |
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The Masses https://wearethemasses.bandcamp.com The MassesThe Electric Information Age Album, released 17 September 20121. The Book of the Now2. Involve Us in Depth3. Verbal-Visual-Vernacular4. In The World of Emotion5. Mass Glass6. Erasing Time7. Page 828. Decisions9. Page In10. Drill Press (Dub)11. Page 12212. Philosophical Works13. Tomorrow Today14. Printing Printing Printing Printing15. Non-Tribal Placard16. Pattern Recognition Pattern17. T>E>I>A>B18. Arts First Spoken Dance To19. Page OutOn July 15, 1967, a vinyl proposition packaged in a dangling preposition was released into the world under the title of the book that inspired it. I’m talking about “the first spoken arts record you can dance to,” issued by Columbia Records as an acoustical interface to the Jerome Agel and Quentin Fiore cut-and-paste Marshall McLuhan paperback primer The Medium is the Massage. The LP in question was a free-standing remix: an acoustical roller-coaster ride through whispers and shouts, ethereal theorizing and Laugh-In humor, studio wizardry and lollipop clips, conversational chitchat and prophetic pronouncements. It prefigures the present LP just as The Medium is the Massage figures as the centerpiece of The Electric Information Age Book (TEIAB), the print exploration produced by Adam Michaels and myself on a window in the history of industrial paperbacks when they became sites for multimedia experimentation. The window remained open for less than a decade and the ludic pairing of print and sound was mostly ignored. Few heard in the McLuhan/Agel/Fiore soundtrack what Alan B. Cameron described on the pages of the Village Voice: “for the first time, techniques developed in electronic music and its forerunner musique concrète, applied to spoken narrative, […] the first guided tour through the paradoxes, problems, and possibilities of the auditory media.”Sixties critics (Cameron aside) may have proved deaf. But THE MASSES have heard the call from the distant shore of another cybernetic age. Our reply takes the form of a vinyl bridge to The Medium is the Massage; a performed reading and reading performance of a book; an acoustical interface to TEIAB that we are calling The Electric Information Age Album (TEIAA).Like the B-side on which it is built, this after-the-fact A-side, produced with Daniel Perlin, takes you on an inner trip into the interior of a volume that has been vocalized, chopped up, re-scripted and remixed. The spoken architecture of TEIAA (and of the works it inventories) takes varied forms, from page cues, lists, quotations, slogans and paragraphs. At times, the sound of the record refigures the very act of paging, providing a recurring rhythm track alongside the sounds of cities, bodies (some lifted from “the first spoken arts record you can dance to”), and the patter of printing — all layered with real and synthetic drumbeats, guitars and basses. Alternately remixed and massaged, the voice of McLuhan professes alongside that of other clued-in or clueless professors in a conversation that spans four and one half decades of media history and theory. The Book of the Now is a perpetual work in progress, so THE MASSES serve up little more than time grains on this mid-century vinyl platter.What’s the difference between this “second spoken arts record you can dance to” and its 1967 predecessor? For all its pop fizz, the latter dangles its propositions and prepositions, but seems to leave the body stumbling, fumbling for itself on the dance floor. In its labors of reworking, The Electric Information Age Album honors its predecessor while seeking to further advance its claims.But, first, a question: how do you like it so far?— Jeffrey T. Schnapp Platform: Bandcamp Signup for Free. No Credit Card required. |
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