it is till it isn't

"The Feeling is Mutual (You're So Unusual)" by TRAAPS is an alternative pop song with darkwave sensibilities that features a male and female duet. The song has a hauntingly beautiful quality, with the duet vocals blending together seamlessly over brooding synth lines and a driving electronic beat. The male and female vocals trade verses and harmonize on the chorus, creating a sense of tension and release throughout the track. The lyrics of the song explore themes of self-discovery, individuality, and the complexities of relationships, making for a deeply introspective and emotional listening experience. Overall, "The Feeling is Mutual (You're So Unusual)" showcases TRAAPS' unique blend of alternative pop and darkwave, with a dynamic male/female vocal interplay that adds an extra layer of depth and intrigue to the song.

The Feeling Is Mutual (You're So Unusual)

Popsnöre

@minor-science—aka UK-born, Berlin-based musician Angus Finlayson—makes his Balmat debut with 'Absent Friends Vol. III', the third installment in a shape-shifting series across a variety of formats and platforms. And with it, he pushes forward his vision of ambient music as neither static vista or merely mood-setting atmosphere, but rather a dynamic matrix of textures, sensations, and even rhythms.

The first two Absent Friends—a 2014 set for Blowing Up the Workshop, and a 2017 cassette and web player for Whities (now AD93)—were hybrid affairs, part DJ mix and part collage, mostly featuring music made by other people. Then, in 2020-21, Finlayson developed the project into a live show of his own material. Armed with hundreds of bespoke stems created in his studio—idiosyncratic FX chains, feedback loops through cheap rack gear, heavily post-processed field recordings, found voices, etc.—he would improvise on four CDJs, mixer, FX, and live synths, extending techniques he learned as a club DJ into a live context, accompanied by visuals by Stockholm-based artist Paul Witherden.

'Absent Friends Vol. III' is an album of studio versions of the music developed for the live show. But in Minor Science’s world, even a category as simple as “studio versions” is slightly opaque. “Most of these tracks weren’t ‘composed’ in the studio,” Finlayson explains: “The sounds started out as stems and source material for the live show, and might not have been intended to go together—but then through performance, they settled into shapes that worked. I then recreated those performances in the studio.” That organic process of ideation and realization might help explain the unusual coherence of the album, in which sounds and textures flow seamlessly from one to the next, sometimes seeming to stand still, and sometimes looping back. There are virtually no melodies, few recognizable motifs or riffs, yet the eight-track album nevertheless moves with a distinctive logic and a determined sense of purpose, from the frozen-in-time shimmer of the opening “Introduction” through the early cuts’ studies of space and light; from the seemingly autobiographical “Summer Diary” through the rushing trance (yes, trance) arpeggios of “Contingency” and on to the dulcet denouement of the closing “Gather Your Party (Dispersed Mix).”

The album’s underlying themes—reflected in Witherden’s video for lead single “Dread the Evening”, as well as the print that accompanies the limited-edition version of the LP—include psychedelia and togetherness, universal cornerstones of virtually any experience of dance music. “Overall I see this record as almost like a photographic negative of the other release I did this year, 064 on AD93,” says Finlayson. That EP’s two fiercely peak-time-oriented tracks, “Workahol” and “Casheine,” offer “a response, by way of caricature, to the time scarcity, precarity, and hypercompetitiveness that are features of my life right now (and I think many other people’s too),” he says. “Absent Friends Vol. III responds to the same situation in a contrasting way. I like that both have a clock on the cover. Both invite you to consider the passage of time. On the club record, time is finite and ticking away fast. On this one, there are little moments where the secondhand seems to pause.”

Absent Friends Vol. III

Minor Science - Absent Friends Vol. III [BALMAT07]

Cosmo

Ozuna, Maldy - Brabus

SNATCH!076
SUSPICIOUS BEASTS - Might Die Tomorrow LP/CD
Out Sep 2015

Might Die Tomorrow

Summer Child

SUSPICIOUS BEASTS - Summer Child

STAR is Ted Beck, Scott Cortez and Shannon Roberts.

You’ve got trouble so you’re looking for me
But I don’t want to
And I don’t need to
Pull out the big guns
Just for you my son
Every time I read that letter
Written in blood
That I addressed to everyone
I’m sorry I hurt that man
But that’s my problem
You’ve got your own now
And you’re on your own now
To solve it
You’re a cock swan

You say that’s not fair cause we’ve got history
Well, I don’t remember 
It being a pleasure
Don’t you recall
Laughing with them all
Each and every time they knocked me down
You know what this sounds like?
It sounds like the last laugh
You’re a cock swan

Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!
Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!


STAR - Cock Swan

Download

~space✿

Debut single off Born Days' forthcoming EP "Where We Live" due out October 4, 2019 on Rain Heart Records.

Follow Born Days online:
https://borndays.bandcamp.com/
facebook.com/borndaysmusic/
instagram.com/born_days/
twitter.com/borndaysmusic
www.borndaysmusic.com

Where We Live

general thoughts

GB 165 -  R.M.F.C. / SET TOP BOX - Split - 7" 

R.M.F.C. from Sydney recently completed a wildly appreciated tour 
of Melbourne, for which they’d made a tour tape together with 
Set-Top Box, released on Ishka’s own Wartmann Inc. label. 
Some of those songs  (+ 2 unreleased)  are now set to be released 
on a split-45  on Goodbye Boozy records. There’ll also be some new songs where the bands 
cover a tune each by their friends. What a great idea! 
– truly a match made in heaven.

limited 280 copies 

1 cover art 230 copies Black and White + insert
2 cover art 50 copies  Negative + insert

STAR - Cock Swan

Isle of Right

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Brett Marren

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