Looming Blooms...

Saul

'Blame It All On Love', released 20 October 2023 on Counter Records: https://poolside.lnk.to/biaolSo

I Feel High (with DRAMA) [Extended Edit]

No No Lola EP

Lonely Days

Passion Love

Hey Girl

Bananarama

Cruel Summer

Australian band The Jumpers released this song in 1980 on the compilation "5MMM's Compilation Album Of Adelaide Bands 1980". It also appeared on the first "Ska Skank Down Under" comp.

Ska Skank Down Under

The Jumpers - 1966

Moog Recordings Library is new record label established specifically to release limited editions of recorded works, sessions, concerts and audio experiments utilizing The Moog Sound Lab UK (Est. 2015).

THE GRID “ONE WAY TRAFFIC’ Excerpt

The final single from Gia Margaret's forthcoming ambient album, Mia Gargaret (out June 12 on Orindal Records in North America & Dalliance Recordings everywhere else).

https://giamargaret.bandcamp.com/album/mia-gargaret

barely there by Gia Margaret

"Cruel Summer" is  first single from Songs for Peacock by TJO, out July 10, 2020 on Orindal Records.

Twenty-eight years into her kaleidoscopic discography, Songs for Peacock is the first album singer/guitarist/composer Tara Jane O’Neil has credited to just her initials: TJO. Recorded at home using primitive electronic instruments in addition to heavily effected electric guitar, bass & voice, Songs for Peacock is a collection of pop covers recalled from TJO’s youth, intended as a “mixtape” for her late brother Brian. Over twelve tracks & thirty-nine minutes, Songs for Peacock abstracts radio hits by the likes of Boy George, Bananarama, Leonard Cohen, Siouxsie and the Banshees & INXS, distilling earworms into thin wisps of dreamlike atmosphere, or stretching them into languorous psychedelic soundscapes. Songs for Peacock warps our collective musical memory to form a singular & cohesive body of work that defines TJO’s highly personal sonic landscape.

Tara Jane O’Neil explains:

This album is a mixtape, it is homage and it is distortion of sounds that were around in 1983, around the home I shared with my brother Brian. Some songs aren’t from that year; Yoko Ono came before but reached me much later, Leonard Cohen was not yet a fixture in my life in the way Duran Duran was. But I can render them like Bauhaus or Yazoo. The songs fit in this relation. In 1983 I was not yet a musician, or a critic, I was an older sister but also a younger sister, and I marveled at everything my older brothers brought in from outside the walled suburban experiment of Orange County, California. In 1983, pop star drag included some measure of cross-dressing or bedraggle, and I wanted to wear those wrestling boots and sailor hats, I wanted that unevenness and its celebration. In 1983, young girls with strawberry blonde locks would go with a jet black chop and send their mothers into desperate frenzies trying to get their beautiful daughters back. Sometimes they would come to my house looking like Siouxsie and smelling of tea rose, wearing the Wham! slogan “Choose Life” on their chests. I was too young for the early ’80s to be my teenage trial-and-error times, and so better I can remember them.

Songs for Peacock began in the fall of 2019 in the wake of the sudden death of Brian. This recording, with a borrowed drum machine and simple synthesizer, was exposure therapy and a healing mechanism.

Q: What does a person do to stop feeling blue when love disappears?
A: I recorded these songs. 

Brian sent me a mixtape a year after he moved out of the house. I only remember that Blondie, Aztec Camera and INXS were on it. I don’t know if he ever listened to Leonard Cohen or if he had an opinion about the song “Believe.” This mixtape I made is not a completist effort. It is a tribute to him who was, in 1983, the bee’s knees.

—TJO

Cruel Summer by TJO

Tucson, Arizona interdisciplinary artist Karima Walker walks a line between two worlds. Aside from her long resume of collaborative work with artists in the diverse fields of dance, sculpture, film, photography & creative non-fiction, Walker has long nurtured a duality within her solo work as a musician, developing her own sonic language as a sound designer in tandem with her craft as a singer/songwriter. The ongoing conversation within her music has never been so articulately explored, or imbued with as much intention, as it is on her new album, Waking the Dreaming Body.

With the exception of C.J. Boyd’s bass on “Window I,” Waking the Dreaming Body was written, performed & engineered entirely by Walker. Harmonic layers of guitar, piano, synthesizer, percussion, field recordings, tape loops & Walker’s own dulcet singing voice form a 40-minute dream-narrative of her conscious & subconscious minds, deftly moving between the rich textures of her ambient work & the melody & poetry of her Americana-tinged songwriting. The album’s more conventional, lyrics-focused tracks (“Reconstellated” & “Waking the Dreaming Body”) are punctuated by psychedelic instrumentals (“Horizon, Harbor Resonance,” “For Heddi”), their ebb & flow mirroring those waking moments where images & emotions are recalled & forecasted by the previous night's dreams. Night falls in regular intervals throughout the album, forming a natural dialogue between waking & dreaming.

Unlike her previous album (2017’s Hands in Our Names), where many of the tracks blended together as a continuously flowing narrative, Walker had a different intention for the eight stand-alone tracks that make up Waking the Dreaming Body. Walker explains:

“I wanted these songs to have more lyrical structure, to stand alone as more complete worlds, & this required a shift in my usual way of writing. I found myself trying to escape from an excess of interiority by exploring outward, by thinking about the mirroring & projecting that happens when you seek connection to others & to the natural world—when you try to bring the outside in. I sought to make arrangements that swell at certain moments & barely hold together at others, moving with my breath & other rhythms connecting my body to the natural world. Ultimately, I was seeking to draw myself out, to reconstruct my personal narrative with nature as my guide.”

Waking the Dreaming Body is out February 26, 2021 on Keeled Scales / Orindal Records.

keeledscales.com
orindal.limitedrun.com
karimawalker.com

Looming Blooms...

muddy mike