[Weekly Mix] 2020.03 (5)

TOPS' new album 'I Feel Alive' is out April 3rd, 2020.

LISTEN / DOWNLOAD: tops.lnk.to/IFeelAlive

Pre-order TOPS' new album "I Feel Alive" on LP/CD/Cassette/Digital: tops.lnk.to/IFeelAlive

INSTAGRAM: www.instagram.com/tttopsss/
TWITTER: twitter.com/TTTOPSSS
FACEBOOK: www.facebook.com/tttopsss/
___

promise me we’ll always be together
we make sense in all types of weather
take a dive, jump right in
even if you drown

get a load of that sunshine in your life
they play shadow games
I play with the light
promise me we’ll always be 

overhead, underneath you see it
either side of what you thought you needed
dime for dime 
blowing through the seasons
tell me when you’re high 

get a load of that sunshine in your life 
they play shadow games
I play with the light
promise me we’ll always be 
kiss me tight 

sunshine
they play shadow games
I play with the light
they play shadow games

I Feel Alive

TOPS - Direct Sunlight

Oak beams and cobbled streets were weathered
We to, an imagined past, are tethered
Those streets have not been there forever
Nostalgia can't keep them together

Decay
Makes way
As we pave
Our way to a future of concrete anonymity

High rise and underpasses weathered
Cladding can't hold it all together
Estate town down and multi-storey blown up
Condemned as a 1960s hiccup

Decay
Makes way
As we build
A complex of unaffordable luxury apartments

History to memory is cuckhold
Progress and decay are but muddled
Nostalgia's got us in a chokehold
All agreed we need to be bold
But if it's not in our backyard then where's it going to be?

Redevelop, redevelopment
Redevelop, redevelopment
Redevelop, redevelopment
Redevelop, redevelopment

Redevelopment

written and performed by serena isioma
produced by cullen wagner-roach

Sensitive

Cookout

Stream/download

The Year Is Over

From the new album "Music For Looking Animals" available June 26th on Spartan Records.

• Pre-order: https://spr.tn/mountaintime
• Pre-save: orcd.co/mtntime

Music For Looking Animals

Pre-order

Mountain Time - Rosemary, Etc.

My new single Pure Luxury is out now on Memphis Industries. It's a song about luxury, status, and pursuing material wealth in the face of environmental catastrophe. ENJOY!

Pure Luxury

NZCA LINES - Pure Luxury

WINDOW “ENDLESS CYCLE” OUT MARCH 27TH 2020 
CASSETTE (LIMITED TO 100)  AND DIGITAL VIA THIRD COMING 
BUY CASSETTE/DIGITAL : https://bit.ly/2WaxDDS
STREAM : http://hyperurl.co/endlesscycle

One of the best kept secrets in the ebm/industrial scene, Window 
return with raw and relentless energy in the form of a 5 track EP 
titled “Endless Cycle”. This is the sound of those driven mad by the lust for civilizations end. Swarming synthesizers and shrapnel 
vocals paint a picture of creeping destruction, while steady rhythms trudge on gladly through the aftermath. All that remains in sight is the vacant city streets under a canopy of dust. 

Started in 2014, Window is a duo consisting of Dylan Travis (Some Ember) & Reuben Sawyer (The Column, Anytime Cowboy...). Known for intense live performances and blown out lofi production, 
Window has released material on cult underground labels such as Total Black and Fallow Field. They continue their objective of 
exploring abrasive modern electronic music.

Window - Ashen

"Cool To Be Unhappy" is about a girl I once loved who thought it was cool to be unhappy. Needless to say, it didn't work out. 

Written and Produced by Phil Danyew
Drums by Zac Farro
Mixed By Carlos de la Garza
Mastered by Dave Cooley at Elysian Masters

3/27/2020

Cool To Be Unhappy

Smoov is the second single off TONER's sophomore full length "Silk Road."
Out on Vinyl / Cassette / Digital via Smoking Room on April 17th, 2020.

PRE-ORDER THE RECORD HERE: smokingroom.bigcartel.com/

Smoov

Composed, produced and mixed by Dayflower 

Alex Clemence: vocals, guitar 
David Dhonau: bass, synth, percussion 
Chris Merriman: electric guitar 
Simon Bland: fuzz drums 
Tom Trigg: acoustic/ electric guitar 
Euan Rodger: room/close drums 
Leonie DuBarry-Gurr: vocal FX 

(special thanks to the CDSwappingPoppingChoir x) 

drums engineered by Jamie Ward at Seamus Wong studios
artwork: Risa Konishi 
mastered by Neil Segrott at Tiny Studios

PoppIng Candy

Having recently signed to FatCat’s 130701 imprint, and following closely on from Deutsche Gramophon’s release of Jóhann Jóhannsson’s ‘Last and First Men’ project which Yair co-composed, Yair Elazar Glotman & Mats Erlandsson’s sophomore album ‘Emanate’ is a powerful and stunningly executed extended duration work that utilises a fantastic ensemble cast and continues to explore their ideas of a 'displaced sound’ - combining electronic and acoustic sound sources through both analogue and digital means to create an ambiguous composite work, a music that sounds neither clearly electronic or acoustic, existing instead in some in-between space.

In many ways, the idea of a longform music is unsuited to and out of phase with our times. And yet, there is recent evidence of a reaction against this – witness the rise of the practise of mindfulness and the cultural elements of a ‘slow living’ movement; the huge success of Max Richter’s marathon 'Sleep’ project; and the emergence of an expansive musical niche that draws from drone, electroacoustic and classical traditions and prioritises a more immersive, durational sound worlds - see artists like Kali Malone, Ellen Arkbro, Clarice Jensen, Abul Mogard, William Basinski, Claire M Singer, and labels like Longform Editions and XKatedral. Music here is intended to function not as ambient backdrop to other activities but as a deep listening, intensive immersion.

Aligned with these approaches, Glotman & Erlandsson’s work is suffused with a chromatic density and a tendency towards an edgy darkness that puts it closer to Hildur Guðnadóttir’s ‘Chernobyl’ score or Jóhannsson’s ‘The Miner’s Hymns’. It shares that same brassy, bass heavy weight and glowering, simmering sense of tension as well as a similar, sliding feeling of instability. Its authors cite the influence of  Renaissance vocal polyphony; Giacinto Scelsi’s ‘Pranam II’; György Ligeti’s 1967 piece ‘Lontano’ (heard on the soundtrack to Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’ and Scorcese’s ‘Shutter Island’); as well as American composer Ingram Marshall, and Iceland’s Valgier Sigurdsson. Gorgeously recorded, beautifully focused and measured throughout, ‘Emanate’ is a texturally rich, deep spectrum exploration that flows and unfolds almost seamlessly throughout its fifty-minute span to create an energy field which feels simultaneously static and yet continually shifting.

Emanate

pre-order

Yair Elazar Glotman & Mats Erlandsson - From Procession To Refraction

The first single from Snowgoose's forthcoming The Making of You LP, out July 24th on Ba Da Bing.

Snowgoose - The Making of You

'Bad Company' is the title track from my debut EP. The song is about finding forgiveness when relationships don’t go the way good intentions would hope for. Sometimes things in life just don’t work out like we planned but there is so much beauty to be found in the process of releasing someone from feeling guilt, including yourself.

Bad Company

Glue

Waking Hours

Photay - Warmth in the Coldest Acre

NOVAS

Try Not To Worry

From Deeper's Sophomore LP "Auto-Pain" out March 27th on Fire Talk.

Buy: https://ffm.to/deeperband

What do you do when pain blots out joy? How do you learn to take care of yourself? What happens when the things you think are helping end up doing the most harm? 'Auto-Pain' is the Sophomore album from Deeper, a record that finds the band embracing open space, using synths to create shadows where bricks of guitars once would’ve blocked out the sun. The group — singer and guitarist Nic Gohl, bassist Drew McBride, and drummer Shiraz Bhatti — were all graduates of Chicago’s rich DIY scene who came together around their love of Wire, Devo, Gang of Four, and Television. While the new record is still within the Great Lakes post-punk tradition of their debut, the album isn’t as insular as its predecessor; it’s less interested in pile-driving and more willing to dwell in liminal spaces. Guitars enter the picture precisely, locked bass grooves propel things forward. Drummer Shiraz Bhatti, who is half-Pakistani and half-Native American, embraced the drumming patterns he’d heard growing up at pow-wows, channeling the anxieties of his heritage into his playing and keeping the group grounded when they switch into all-out percussive attack. The result is an album both more nuanced and catchy.Auto-Pain represents the constant wave of depression felt by many in everyday life. Stemmed from Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’, Auto-Pain is a concept meant to be an inverse to soma, a pill in the book which makes everything numb. The idea of auto-pain is to epitomize the desire to return to a connection with thoughts and clarity, which comes at the expense of feeling everything simultaneously. The album artwork features the now-demolished Prentice Women’s Hospital in Chicago capturing the band’s rounded-off brutalism, and the album title appears in Urdu, a nod to drummer Shiraz Bhatti’s Pakistani heritage. The record was recorded and mixed by Chicago scene luminary Dave Vetraino (Lala Lala, Dehd) and mastered at Chicago Mastering by Greg Obis (Ne-Hi, Melkbelly).

[Weekly Mix] 2020.03 (5)

Niche Music