Tag: experimental pop

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: METZ’s and Weird Nightmare’s Alex Edkins and Holy Fuck’s Graham Walsh Team Up on Propulsive “Casting No Light”

Noble Rot is a new collaborative studio project, featuring METZ‘s and Weird Nightmare’s Alex Edkins and Holy Fuck‘s Graham Walsh. The project can trace its origins back to 2011: Walsh was enlisted to produce METZ’s 2012 self-titled full-length debut. And since then, the pair have remained in a state of creative orbit.

Slated for a March 24, 2023 release through Joyful Noise, the duo’s full-length debut together, Heavenly Bodies, Repetition, Control reportedly shows Edkins and Walsh joyously stepping outside and beyond the lines drawn by their previously released work, with the album’s material being the culmination of a year’s worth of feverish studio experimentation influenced by film soundtracks, experimental noise, kosmiche muzik, ambient, psychedelia and more.

While their distance musical sensibilities remain intact, Noble Rot provides the duo with a new vehicle for pushing their boundaries of sonic exploration. The album’s material will reward the listener with a songs filled to the brim with unbridled curiosity and boundless excitement — with the hopes that it’ll surprise and thrill both longtime fans and periphery lurkers alike.

Heavenly Bodies, Repetition, Control‘s first single “Casting No Light” is a densely layered soundscape featuring glistening and wobbling synths, hypnotic bass lines, spiraling and looping guitar lines, and motorik rhythms are paired with chanted mantra-like vocals. While effortlessly and seamlessly meshing the long-held creative instincts of its individual creators, “Casting No Light” is underpinned by a mischievous, almost childlike sense of adventure and an irresistible groove. And adding to the collaborative nature of the project, Wire‘s and Immersion‘s Colin Newman and Minimal Compact‘s and Immersion’s Malka Spigel lend a hand, contributing bass and heavily modulated guitars to the song’s motorik pulse — before closing out with bongo drums and howling synths.

Heavenly Bodies, Reputation, Control is included in Joyful Noise’s The White Label Series. Currently in its sixth year, The White Label Series taps influential curators and creatives to shine a light on a previously unreleased album of their choice. This year’s list of curators is equally impressive as it includes Julian Baker, Sean Ono Lennon, Helado Negro, The Jesus Lizard‘s David Yow, Speedy Ortiz‘s Sadie Dupuis and No Joy‘s Jasmine White-Gluz, who chose Noble Rot’s debut for the series.

“Graham Walsh and Alex Edkin’s new musical partnership captures what I love most about their other musical endeavors (Holy Fuck, Metz); expansive production, musical moments of anxiety and calmness, unexpected earworms,” White-Gluz says of choice. “I love records like this that make me go ‘how did they make that sound?!’ and relisten to a song over and over.“

Directed by John Smith, the accompanying video for “Casting No Light” features an array of different colored shapes and lines squiggling and and moving along to the song’s motorik pulse. Smith, who’s a self-described “. . . long-standing admirer of synesthesia and its explorations by artists such as Kandinsky and experimental filmmakers such as Oskar Fischinger, Norman McLaren, and Walter Ruttman, I have been consistently inspired by the concept and its connection between sound and visual. For over two decades, I have been constantly exploring ways to express these connections, and upon first hearing the trance-like and multi-layered composition of “Casting No Light”, I saw a great opportunity to apply these concepts. With the assistance of Aaron Campbell, an interactive designer friend, we developed a system that translates every layer of sound into a corresponding visual component. Enjoying this experience with headphones will provide a much richer experience since you can better hear all of the nuances and textures in the song.”

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

Riches — Young Galaxy‘s Catherine McCandless and choreographer Wynn Holmes — is a multidisciplinary, intercontinental collaboration and ongoing dialogue between its two collaborators that combines music, dance and performance. Songs are the first iteration of the project, and they take a narrative approach to themes concerning the performance of creative rituals, identity, transgression and devotion.

The duo’s latest single, the slow-burning and woozy “Shadow of You” pairs syrupy, reverb-drenched beats and guitar and glistening synths with McCandless’ delicate upper register, which expresses aching, soul-deep longing.

The duo explain that the song “celebrates the entity and demon of Creation, serenading just how gorgeous, intoxicating, and potentially self destructive the compulsion of making art can be.”

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Tess Roby Returns with Ambient and Nostalgia-inducing “Path”

Over the past couple of months, I’ve written a bit about Montreal-based singer/songwriter and producer Tess Roby. Roby is a classically trained vocalist and self-taught synth player, who has developed and honed an exploratory sound and approach that blurs the lines between pop, ambient electronica and alternative folk with a decided emphasis on voice as its own instrument.

The Montreal-based artist’s sophomore album Ideas of Space is slated for an April 22, 2022 release through her own label SSURROUNDSS. The album reportedly sees Roby moving towards full artistic independence with the Montreal-based artist acting as songwriter, producer, musician, video director and art director throughout the entire creative process.

Ideas of Space features guest spots from BRAIDS‘ Austin Tufts, Joseph Shabason and Ouri, who contribute drums, woodwinds and cello respectively, adding intricate textures to material centered around fuller-bodied production and expansive song structures. The album’s songs shift effortlessly from jubilant highs to contemplative lows, evoking the concepts of duality, which run throughout the album’s material. 

So far I’ve written about two album singles:

  • The mesmerizing,  Kate Bush and Flourish//Perish era BRAIDS-like album title track “Ideas of Space,” which featured glistening and looping synth arpeggios, dramatic drumming and Roby’s achingly plaintive vocals. “‘Ideas of Space’ signals the beginning of a new chapter. This song is hypnotic and sinuous, and sonically possesses a certain power and urgency,” Roby says in press notes. “When I listen to it I imagine vast landscapes, a climb, a journey. Two distinct voices speak to each other; one lost, questioning, and the other guiding the way. I wanted to visually represent those voices and the journey I was on while making this album; one of self-discovery, hardship, adventure and in the end, confidence and strength.” 
  • The mediative “Up 2 Me,” which featured skittering beats programmed by BRAIDS’ Austin Tufts paired with glistening synth arpeggios and Roby’s plaintive vocals. “The making of this song was very meditative. It was the first song I wrote following a situation that had taken a toll on my mental health, and had kept me out of the studio for a long time,” Roby explains in press notes. “The first iteration came in the summer of 2020, and it rested as an instrumental demo for a while. When I was close to finishing the album, I searched through all my recordings to find a final track – this one stood out to me. I wrote the vocal melody and arranged the song, then brought the instrumental to Austin Tufts along with a beat and asked him to program and expand on the idea. At this point we had been working together for a while and he was totally immersed in my sonic universe and knew the mood I was after.”

“Path,” Ideas of Space‘s third and latest single features an atmospheric production centered around gentle layers of ambient and glistening synth arpeggios, skittering tribal house-like beats paired with layers of Roby’s plaintive vocals. Thematically, the song focuses on time — but through the prism of an older, wizened version of yourself speaking to a younger, more innocent version of yourself.

The accompanying visual features 16mm footage shot back in 2019 by Hugo Bernier before the song was even conceived. We see a slightly younger Roby dancing and swaying and running during golden hour — and during what now seems like a simpler, more carefree time.

“The 16mm footage in this video was shot in 2019 before ‘Path’ was written. Hugo & I sat with that footage for a while, at times forgetting about it completely, but always coming back to its beauty and simplicity,” Roby says in press notes. “I had the footage in the studio with me while I was writing and it ended up inspiring parts of the song. I had never worked in that way before; video footage influencing songwriting – it was an interesting process, reversing the way in which I usually work with video. So much has changed since that footage was shot. It was only natural to pair it with footage of me now, in this very moment, speaking to myself then: ‘you’re looking down, I’m reaching out, if only I could see it like you do.’”

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Bohemian Cristal Instrument Teams Up with Drum & Lace on Atmospheric “Evapora”

Splitting her time between Los Angeles and the Czech Republic, the Czech-born singer/songwriter, producer and musician Lenka Moravkoa is the creative mastermind behind the indie electro pop project My Name Is Ann. Moravkova is also the creative mastermind behind the rising, solo, experimental pop project Bohemian Cristal Instrument.

The Czech-born artist hails from the Bohemia region of the Czech Republic, a region famed for its glass industry. Inspired by the region’s history, Moráková created several striking multimedia installations based on the sound of local glass factories during their decline. Those installations also helped inspire and inform the Czech-born artist’s Bohemian Cristal Instrument project — and the unique instrument at the center of the project.

In the early 1950s, siblings Bernard and François Baschet developed a new instrument, the Cristal Baschet. With a Cristal Bachet, metal rods are embedded into a heavy plate to form the elements. Each metal rod is accompanied by an attached glass rod. The metal rod’s length, weight and position at the equilibrium point help to determine the sound’s pitch. The player gently strokes and/or rubs the glass rods with wet fingertips.

Moravkova’s Bohemian Cristal Instrument is a unique version of the Baschet’s Cristal Baschet that follows the Czech-born artist’s original design. With her unique instrument, the Czech-born artist creates immersive and hypnotic soundscapes that pair the otherworldly acoustics of the Bohemian Cristal Instrument with ambient and pulsating electronics and her vocals.

2017-2019 was a busy, breakthrough period for the Czech-born artist: In 2017 she went on her first European tour, which included a one-off collaboration with William Close and The Earth Harp Collective as a headliner at that year’s Colours of Ostrava. She performed at a TEDx Talk and with Grammy-nominated artist Bora Yoon at Los Angeles’ The Broad Museum. Live footage of Moráková in the California desert went viral, amassing over two million views.

UNICODE EP, Maravkova’s Bohemian Cristal Instrument debut was released in 2018. The following year, she performed at Eurosonic Nooderslag. She was shortlisted for SXSW in 2020 and this year. And adding to a growing profile, she has performed at Summit LA.

Maravkova’s latest Bohemian Cristal Instrument single “Evapora” is a cinematic collaboration with Sofia degli Alessandri-Hultquist, an Italian-born composer, sound artist and performer, who writes compositions for film and media, best known as Drum & Lace. Centered around glistening and ambient synth pulses, the theremin-like Bohemian Cristal Instrument and Maravkova’s processed yet ethereal vocals, “Evapora” is a slow-burning fever dream that feels as though it evokes water slowly evaporating away.

Accompanying the song is a gorgeous and cinematically shot live footage of Maravkova performing the song in the snow covered mountains of her native Czech Republic.

Moravkova and her Bohemian Cristal Instrument will be playing at this year’s Lighting in a Bottle Festival. The lineup is actually pretty bonkers — and her set will be on May 26, 2022.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Montreal’s Tess Roby Shares an Intimate Visual for Dreamy and Meditative “Up 2 Me”

This week will be very busy: I’ll be attending and covering this year’s New Colossus Festival. So while they’ll be posts, I probably won’t be posting with the same regularity this week — but it’ll be worth it. But in the meantime, let’s get back to business around here:

Montreal-based singer/songwriter and producer Tess Roby is a classically trained vocalist and self-taught synth player, who has developed and honed an exploratory sound and approach that blur the lines between pop, ambient electronica and alternative folk with an emphasis on voice as an instrument. 

Roby’s sophomore album Ideas of Space is slated for an April 22, 2022 release through the Montreal-based artist’s own label SSURROUNDSS. The album reportedly sees Roby moving towards full artistic independence with the Montreal-based artist acting as songwriter, producer, musician, video director and art director. 

Ideas of Space features guest spots from BRAIDS‘ Austin Tufts, Joseph Shabason and Ouri, who contribute drums, woodwinds and cello respectively, adding intricate textures to material centered around fuller-bodied production and expansive song structures. The album’s songs shift effortlessly from jubilant highs to contemplative lows, evoking the concepts of duality, which run throughout the album’s material. 

Last month, I wrote about the mesmerizing album title track, the Kate Bush and Flourish//Perish era BRAIDS-like “Ideas of Space,” which featured glistening and looping synth arpeggios, dramatic drumming and Roby’s achingly plaintive vocals. “‘Ideas of Space’ signals the beginning of a new chapter. This song is hypnotic and sinuous, and sonically possesses a certain power and urgency,” Roby says in press notes. “When I listen to it I imagine vast landscapes, a climb, a journey. Two distinct voices speak to each other; one lost, questioning, and the other guiding the way. I wanted to visually represent those voices and the journey I was on while making this album; one of self-discovery, hardship, adventure and in the end, confidence and strength.” 

Ideas of Space‘s second and latest single “Up 2 Me” continues a run of mesmerizing and dreamy material, centered around glistening synth arpeggios, propulsive and skittering beats programmed by BRAIDS’ Austin Tufts paired with Roby’s plaintive vocals.

The accompanying visual for “Up 2 Me” was shot on grainy VHS and is an interview look into Roby’s creative process (to some degree) as we see a black-clad Roby in the studio playing the song, thinking and dancing along to music, as well as the Canadian artist in a snow covered field gently swaying.

“The making of this song was very meditative. It was the first song I wrote following a situation that had taken a toll on my mental health, and had kept me out of the studio for a long time,” Roby explains in press notes. “The first iteration came in the summer of 2020, and it rested as an instrumental demo for a while. When I was close to finishing the album, I searched through all my recordings to find a final track – this one stood out to me. I wrote the vocal melody and arranged the song, then brought the instrumental to Austin Tufts along with a beat and asked him to program and expand on the idea. At this point we had been working together for a while and he was totally immersed in my sonic universe and knew the mood I was after. When I first heard the track with the drums, it was early Spring in April 2021. Montreal had this ridiculous 8pm curfew– it was 7:30pm or so and I left my apartment so I could listen outside. The sun was setting, the streets were empty, and I listened to the track on repeat until I had to run home.” 

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Montreal’s Tess Roby Shares a Symbolic Visual for CInematic “Ideas of Space”

Montreal-based singer/songwriter and producer Tess Roby is a classically trained vocalist and self-taught synth player, who has developed and honed an exploratory sound and approach that blur the lines between pop, ambient electronica and alternative folk with an emphasis on voice as an instrument.

Roby’s sophomore album Ideas of Space is slated for an April 22, 2022 release through the Montreal-based artist’s own label SSURROUNDSS. The album reportedly sees Roby moving towards full artistic independence with the Montreal-based artist acting as songwriter, producer, musician, video director and art director.

Ideas of Space features guest spots from BRAIDS‘ Austin Tufts, Joseph Shabason and Ouri, who contribute drums, woodwinds and cello to add intricate textures to material centered around fuller-bodied production and expansive song structures. The album’s songs shift effortlessly from jubilant highs to contemplative lows, evoking the concepts of duality, which run throughout the album’s material.

The album’s first single, album title track, the mesmerizing “Ideas of Space” is centered around glistening and looping synth arpeggios, dramatic drumming paired with Roby’s achingly plaintive vocals. Sonically, “Ideas of Space” manages to recall to Kate Bush and Flourish//Perish era BRAIDS. “‘Ideas of Space’ signals the beginning of a new chapter. This song is hypnotic and sinuous, and sonically possesses a certain power and urgency,” Roby says in press notes. “When I listen to it I imagine vast landscapes, a climb, a journey. Two distinct voices speak to each other; one lost, questioning, and the other guiding the way. I wanted to visually represent those voices and the journey I was on while making this album; one of self-discovery, hardship, adventure and in the end, confidence and strength.” 

Directed by Roby, the fittingly cinematic visual that features Roby lost and wandering the forest near the Quebec coast in a white frock. Her journey is arduous and in the video’s narrative, seems to take days — with a night sleeping in the elements. Eventually she comes to a clearing. And in the clearing, she comes across a Stonehedge-like structure where she encounters herself — and is greeted with a warm and loving hug.

“The video was made with a small and incredible team composed of DOPs and editors Patrick Boivin and George Allister (VideoCompany), and producer Sarah Mackenzie,” says Tess Roby. “It was an ambitious undertaking and I’m very proud of what we have made together.”

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Collapsing Scenery Shares Woozy and Uneasy “You Already Know”

Collapsing Scenery — long-time friends, New York-based artist and musician Don De Vore (Ink & Dagger, Sick Feeling, Lilys, The Icarus Line and Amazing Baby) and Los Angeles-based artist and musician Reggie Debris — can trace their origins back several years back: De Vore and Debris initially began collaborating in programming events with the Lower East Side-base D’agostino and Fiore Gallery.

Their first collaboration was a video installation, which led to a month of music and visual programming called “Rebuild Babylon.” That turned into a traveling residency series, which led to the duo’s musical project Collapsing Scenery.

Through their multimedia-based work, De Vore and Debris have been passionate about challenging and subverting perceptions in both the worlds of outsider art and political protest — and embracing the joyous, carnivalesque aspects of both. A 2016 artistic residency in New York saw Collapsing Scenery create a psychedelic immersive art installation that incorporated projections, layers of colorful plexi-glass, a reading from Genesis P-Orridge and performances from De Vore and Debris. Meanwhile in a clash of the old and the new, the gallery upstairs hosted a Picasso exhibition.

As a musical outfit, the duo started back in 2013 “in a pall of paranoia and disgust.” De Vore and Debris put their guitars away and began acquiring and assembling as much analog electronic equipment as possible, including samplers, step sequencers, synths and drums machines, and plugged them into a variety of effects pedals.

Their initial writing and recording sessions were largely improvised and were accompanied by Ryan Raspys (drums). The material they wrote managed to express their rage and frustration at the stage of the world, while drawing from punk rock, industrial electronica and techno, hip-hop, free jazz, disco, folk and more. Since they started the music project, De Vore and Debris have been restlessly prolific while also collaborating with Ninjaman, Money Mark, and James Chance among others.

The duo’s recently released Acid Casual EP is the first batch of material released from many hours of recordings they made during the pandemic. And with Acid Casual, the members of Collapsing Scenery sees the pair pushing deeper into sonic and genre experiments while finding beauty — and even joy — hiding within the cracks of the existential dread we’ve all felt in the past couple of years.

“You Already Know,” Acid Casual‘s latest single is a woozy and uneasy song centered around glistening and blown out electronic percussion, a mournful horn sample, live drumming wobbling synth arpeggios, Debris’ dreamily plaintive vocals, a chanted hook and bursts of scorching guitar before gently fading out. Sonically, “You Already Know” seems to nod at Tour de France era Kraftwerk, psych pop, trip hop and psych rock in a seamless and mind-bending fashion.

Directed, shot and edited by Kansas Bowling, the video stars Floyd Cashio, Park Love Bowling, Lo Espinosa and Kathy Corpus in a surreal fever dream fueled by obsession, slow-burning dread, violence. The video features a cameo from the members of Collapsing Scenery as inept and goofy hotel bellboys.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Kinlaw Shares Mind-bending Visual for “The Mechanic”

New York-based composer, choreographer, multi-disciplinary artist, multi-instrumentalist and singer/songwriter Sarah Kinlaw may be best known for their multimedia-based productions and collaborations with the likes of Devonte Hynes (a.k.a Blood Orange), Caroline Polacheck, SOPHIE, Dan Deacon and others that feature as many as 200 performers. She was aslo the co-founder of acclaimed JOVM mainstay act Softspot. 

Kinlaw stepped out into the limelight as a solo artist with her solo recording project Kinlaw. Last year, saw the release of the New York-based artist’s full-length debut, The Tipping Scale, which found Kinlaw showcasing their work in a new light.

Initially writing material with a goal of finding entry points that felt honest and authentic to their work, Kinlaw frequently saw their music directly relating to motion: “I would start with a gesture and let it build into something until a memory attached itself to it,” the New York-based artist explained in press notes. “The memory would become a story and the story would reveal itself as something important that needed to be expressed in this album.” 

Lyrically, the album’s material bridges the universal with the deeply personal as Kinlaw explores loss, empathy, regret, confusion, strength, identity, hope, power, and change among other things. Sonically, the album’s songs are centered around slick electronic production and a refined compositional sensibility with ornate flourishes paired with the New York based artist’s expressive and gorgeous vocals.

In the lead-up to The Tipping Point‘s release, I managed to write about three of the album’s singles:

  • “Blindspot,” a slow-burning and dramatic track featuring Kinalw’s yearning and ethereal crooning paired with shimmering synth arpeggios and stuttering beats.
  • “Permissions” a track inspired by physical movement that evokes a rapidly vacillating array of emotional states including confusion, heartache, self-flagellation and despair as its narrator seemingly is in the middle of a difficult conversation with themselves. 
  • “Haircut,” a deeply intimate monologue of a song that reveals its narrator’s inner world with an uncomfortable and unvarnished honesty that was centered around reverb-drenched, ethereal production featuring glistening synth apreggios and bells.

Kinlaw begins 2022 with the release of a remix EP titled TTS Extended — and The Tipping Point‘s fourth single, album opening track, the Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel-like “The Mechanic,” a single, which features an expansive, cinematic production and arrangement of glistening and twinkling synth arpeggios, skittering castanet-like percussion, angular guitar and bass paired with a soaring hook and Kinlaw’s achingly expressive vocals. The song’s narrator discusses their feelings about a relationship that’s rooted in a weird and uneven power dynamic; but the song also touches upon regret, self-doubt and confusion simultaneously.

Created by with New York-based artist and creator Dance Lawyer over the course of several months, the recently released video for “The Mechanic” sees Kinlaw attempting to bridge the gap between video recording and live performance, while pushing the idea of movement being deeply musical — and sound is an intricate dance.

Kinlaw’s interest in psychoacoustics and cinematic sound design led her to recruit sound designer Colin Alexander, who weaves in sound effects with Kinlaw’s choreography, giving the video’s dance sequence and added musical quality.

“The remixes are playful. It doesn’t take itself too seriously but is still exploratory,” Kinlaw says. “Video brought new life into these recordings initially, so I worked with Colin Alexander to weave SFX with the choreography, turning the dance into this added musical element within the track.” 

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: AURUS Returns with a Mesmerizing New Single

Bastien Picot is a rising Réunion Island-born, Paris-based singer/songwriter, producer and creative mastermind behind AURUS, a rising electronic music project that specializes in an orchestral-leaning take on electro pop that has drawn comparisons to Nakhane, Woodkid, Peter Gabriel and others. 

With the release of 2019’s “The Abettors,” which featured Sandra Nkaké, Picot exploded into the French scene: The track thematically raised awareness of a system that exploited and took the living for granted. He started off last year with sets at  MaMA Festival and Bars en Trans Festival, opening for Vendredi sur Mer at L’Olympia, and being named a “revelation” of Chantier des Francos. 

Building upon that momentum, the rising French artist released his self-titled debut EP last June. Since the release of the EP, Picot has been busy: he recently released his highly-anticipated full-length debut Chimera, which feature the brooding and cinematic, Security-era Peter Gabriel-like “Momentum,” and the yearning, Amnesiac-era Radiohead meets contemporary alt pop-like “AWOL.” Conceived, written and recorded between Reunion Island and Paris, the album is an intuitive and tribal journey, in which what may seem irreconcilable meets and merges: Sonically, the songs mesh brooding atmospherics, tribal bets, military rhythms, and elements of trance, pop ballads and more with lyrics sung in English and Reunion Island Creole.

Chimera‘s latest single “Horus” is a mesmerizing, brooding and difficult to pigeon hole song: Featuring lyrics sung in alternating burst of English and Reunion Island Creole, the track begins with a cinematic opening organ and mournful yet regal horns before morphing into stunning electro pop centered around yearning church-like vocals, trippy yet propulsive polyrhythm, atmospheric synths and Picot’s unerring knack for infectious hooks paired with devastatingly earnest songwriting within material that’s simultaneously challenging and accessible.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: AURUS Returns with a Delicate Ode to Vulnerability

Bastien Picot is a French singer/songwriter, producer and creative mastermind behind AURUS, a rising electronic music project that specializes in an orchestral-leaning take on electro pop that has drawn comparisons to Nakhane, Woodkid, Peter Gabriel and others. 

which featured Sandra Nkaké thematically raised awareness of a system that exploited and took the living for granted. Picot followed “The Abettors” with a massive 2020 that included sets at that year’s MaMA Festival and Bars en Trans Festival, opening for Vendredi sur Mer at L’Olympia, and being named a “revelation” of Chantier des Francos.

n a rapidly growing profile across the Francophone world, Picot released his AURUS self-titled debut last June. Last month, I wrote about EP single “Momentum,” a brooding and cinematic track featuring skittering and percussive beats, atmospheric horns and synths and Picot’s plaintive vocals. The end result is a song that sonically meshes house music and contemporary electronic production with a bit of Security-era Peter Gabriel. 

Absent Without Leave.” The collaboration with Mathéo Técher continues a run of incredibly cinematic material. Centered around twinkling piano, buzzing bass synths, Picot’s achingly tender vocals, thumping beats and a rousingly anthemic hook “AWOL” — to my ears, at least — reminds me a bit of a mix of Amnesiac-era Radiohead and contemporary alt pop while expressing a deeply vulnerable yearning. Interestingly, as Picot explains he and his collaborator Técher use the expression in a metaphorical sense, to illustrate what they believe is the desertion of our being, as though being barricaded behind shells that we strive to build to camouflage our wounds, cracks and scars. “‘AWOL’ is an Ode to fragility, to the beauty of our imperfections, a fight against the military discipline that we inflict on ourselves to smooth the roughness of our contours but also a call to courage.”

The recently released video for “AWOL” continues a run of mesmerizing visuals: This time two masked dancers expressively dancing — eventually tearing off figurative armor off each other and themselves, exposing their delicate and glowing insides.

Video by William Ruben Helms

Live Footage: Orions Belte Performs “Lotus” at Mulakamben Norway

Norwegian-born musicians Øyind Blomstrøm (guitar) and Chris Holm (bass) have spent the bulk of their careers making a living a touring musicians, and as a result, they’ve frequently been on the road As the story goes, when Blømstrøm and Holm’s paths crossed for what seemed like the umpteenth time, they bonded over a desire to create instrumental music — and they decided to start a band together. They recruited Holm’s Bergen scene pal Kim Åge Furuhaug to join the band and to complete Orions Belte lineup. 

With the release of 2018’s Mint, the Norwegian trio quickly established a reputation for crating a genre-defying, style-mashing sound that draws from 70s Nigerian rock, postcards from French Riviera, Formula One traces at Monza and 1971’s “Fight of the Century” between Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali. It’s follow-up, 2019’s Slim EPfeatured inventive reworkings of songs they love by artist’s they love — including Ghostface Killah‘s “Cherchez La Ghost,” Milton Nascimento‘s Tudo O Que Você Podia Ser” and an original cut that pays homage to Norwegian beat group The Pussycats and the Mac Miller. 

Amidst the chaos and uncertainty of last year, the acclaimed Norwegian trio managed to be productive: they released 600m, another EP of experimental instrumental music that derived its title from the name of an elevator in Tokyo that can transport 40 people at a time a maximum speed of 600 meters per minute, and found the trio continuing to push the boundaries of instrumental music as far as they could. 

Continuing upon that momentum, Orions Belte’s sophomore album Villa Amorini is slated for a Friday release through Jansen Records. The album derives its name from a popular Bergen nightclub, which was the place in town where everything happened — and where you needed to be a part of it. Originally opened in the ’80s as a fine dining spot, the business eventually evolved into an extravagant nightclub where you’d see artists and DJs in loud t-shirts and oversized sunglasses. Sonically, the album is reportedly a mix of the sounds the trio likes, including underground pop, psych and world music, while continuing their reputation for their unique ability to pull in listeners of diverse genres and styles in a fashion that’s simultaneously calm and chaotic. And with that in mind, it shouldn’t be surprising that the album’s material manages to set up a particular scene: the energy of a busy downtown sidewalk with the instrumentation being intricately layered to draw you in and leave you wondering where it will lead. According to the trio, the album is a “homage to an era of loud music, club nights, ugly shirts and long afterparties.” 

Much like album single “Mouth,” ‘Lotus” is a laid-back, hotel lounge-like bop centered around a strutting groove, shimmering guitar, a sinuous bass line and hip-hop inspired drumming. Sonically “Lotus” is a slick synthesis of dusty J. Dilla-like samples, funk and neo soul in a way that feels familiar yet alien.

The band released live footage of themselves performing the song in the gorgeous environs of Mulakamben, Norway.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Late Aster Releases a Trippy and Feverish Visual for “A Minor Fantasy”

Split between Brooklyn and the Bay Area, the emerging experimental pop act Late Aster — Ami Hochhalter, Aaron Messing, Charles Mueller and Cameron LeCrone — can trace their origins back to when its members met while studying jazz and/or classical music performance at Northwestern University and the University of Southern California. The members of the band quickly bonded over a mutual love of experimentation: the band employs brass instrumentation with electronics and popular music forms and melodies to push and pull at the boundaries of classical, jazz, pop and rock. The quartet’s sound finds the band looking to draw out the intimacy and versatility of instruments commonly related to a much more secondary role in rock.

The quartet’s debut EP True and Toxic is slated for a May 21, 2021 release through Bright Shiny Things. The EP features a collection of musical sketches on the modern human condition — and thematically, the EP’s material focuses on relationships, politics, sciences and digital society to create a soundtrack for our incredibly polarizing society. Each song is paired with a visual accompaniment by Four/Ten Media, Deadeye Press, Harrison Atkins and Kelsey Boncato.

The EP’s latest single “A Minor Fantasy” is centered around skittering drum beats, shimmering synth arpeggios, regal sounding horns and ethereal vocals placed within an expansive and cinematic-leaning song structure. Sonically, the song reminds me — to my ears, at least — of Flourish//Perish-era BRAIDS and People Museum but with a dreamy yet brooding quality. “This song is inspired by a Shostakovich piano prelude I listened to for years before attempting to learn. I thought the way the piece moves through the harmony would suit it well for an additional melody on top, which became the vocal melody,” the band’s Aaron Messing explains in press notes. “The prelude is in the key of A minor, which I eventually used as the name of the song, both because it describes the piece musically but also because read literally, it actually describes the meaning behind the words of the song: A dream-like state that is simultaneously exciting and ominous.”

The video created by Four/Ten Media is a surreal and psychedelic fever dream. “Working with Four/Ten Media was an obvious choice for this song because of their background as classically trained percussionists,” the band’s Anni Hochalter, says about the video treatment. “We wanted a team that was going to really understand how to feature the virtuosic beats written by our drummer Cameron LeCrone, as well as be experimental in visual aesthetic to capture the new sounds of electronics and brass. We combined two visual inspirations for the video – 1. Liquid lights created with layers of colored mineral oil and alcohol placed over a projector lens and which produce changing color patterns for a psychedelic effect. And 2. an early animated film that uses color and silhouette cut-outs, called The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926).”