Experimental Music - part 6

Vocal Ambient

Rembihnútur (Liminal re-work by Paul Corley)

Drift Below

Nepenthe

Labyrinthine

All songs written, performed, recorded, mixed, and mastered by Mike Schmidt. Not like anyone would try to take credit for this anyway.

Blue Dome Glowing

Istanbul’s producer extraordinaire Grup Ses and Cologne-based electric-saz player Elektro Hafız get together for Varyete. Travelling from deep Anatolian psychedelic grooves to dirty electronics, playful beats and hip hop, Varyete is an adventurous ride of genre-bending music.

Elektro Hafız - Mega Hafıza 2 (with Grup Ses)

Chugging Anatolian acid on a new collaborative LP from Istanbul natives @elektrohaf-z and @grupsesbeats. Out on @zelzelerecords.

Read more & buy: http://www.stampthewax.com/2019/05/31/elektro-hafiz-mega-hafiza-2-grup-ses-acid-cut

Varyete

Elektro Hafiz - Mega Hafıza 2 (Grup Ses Acid Cut)(STW Premiere)

DJ Lostboi & Torus - The Flash

sitequeeste.bandcamp.com/album/the-flash
Available 24 January 2020 on LP and digital platforms.

Following 2019’s hibernation, Queeste reappears with the mnestic soundscapes of DJ Lostboi and Torus’ split album The Flash. Across eight gossamer evocations—four from each artist—the duo reflect on individual journeys from airport to sea during the blissful embers of fading summer. Their gaze expands and contracts naturally with passing locations but lingers on the titular flash, what the two artists describe as “the rare sight of the sun giving off a bright green lightburst into the horizon.”

Made up of sounds sourced and appropriated from these commutes—pop music heard on the radio, jumbled street recordings, and everyday technological objects—The Flash evokes the melancholic pull of such recollections without ever succumbing to nostalgia. The moments eked from these samples stretch into quiet eternity—still and suspended—while retaining their quotidian, terrestrial qualities.

DJ Lostboi successfully refines the warped atmospherics heard on his previous edits of pop, rap, and emo. First track ‘Open World’ welcomes listeners with lapping waves and plaintive wavering tones—like a glittering video game environment—until real life interrupts on ‘Ordinary People’ as an automated answer phone message: an unknown voice lets out a weary sigh. Its foggy pianos and soft vocals offer melody and buoyancy where ‘LB 100’ circles on moody, dream-like pads. We follow the artist’s oceanic voyage to its culminating trance-like shimmers which dissolve into cool water: reflective, endless, yet ultimately hopeful.

Netherlands-based Torus foregoes the dancefloor dynamics of 2016’s Engine Malfunction for a series of calmer, cloudless drifts. On ‘Enter The Sun’—a sparse, yearning composition—washes of noise and clipped auto-tuned vocals pulse over a haunting refrain until ‘Pier’ arrives with whirring engines, sweet birdsong, and decaying synths. The album’s lightest piece comes with the skipping ‘Radiate 540’—euphoric dance minus the kick—which rises from a muffled human interaction until slow motion cinematics signal the trip’s end: ‘Arrival’ collapses into the sea elegantly mirroring DJ Lostboi’s final track.

Despite its hushed ambience, The Flash is an album committed to forward momentum. Each composition reveals a discrete chapter of DJ Lostboi and Torus’ journey building to a moment of bittersweet ascension. The results of such heartfelt wandering recall the spatial dynamics of The KLF’s zoned post-rave landscapes but these works flicker with thoroughly modern paraphernalia and emotions.

The Flash

DJ Lostboi - Don’t Worry (Child Mix)

@myk1i

With the world in Covid-19 lockdown and the events industry stopped in its tracks, artists and online media like ourselves have been left financially vulnerable and, well...pretty bored. In an effort to alleviate both, Stamp The Wax launches Isolation Therapy, an emergency compilation built from scratch at lightning speed. 

We reached out to a bunch of friends who may need a hand, and gave them three days to make a track from scratch in isolation. 27 artists rose to the challenge and within a week from our first reach outs we were ready to go with masters (s/o Adam Scrimshire) and artwork (s/o Jess Ebsworth)⁣⁣. Final s/o to Aly Gilani for helping pull it all together. 

To provide artists with financial support as quickly as possible, royalty splits have been increased and accounting periods have been reduced to fortnightly during Coronavirus restrictions. Isolation Therapy will also provides much-needed funds for STW, having been hit heavily by the collapse of the events industry and postponement of all our media partnerships. If you can afford to buy the album, even if you don't like every track, it will be a massive support for independent journalism and go a long way to help us fight through this lockdown.⁣⁣

Buy: bit.ly/IsolationTherapy

Isolation Therapy

MYKI - Genesis [6:29]

(brave ~ strong) bedroom Mix

Collected over three years within the overlaps between music, poetry and visual arts, Music for Self Esteem is what Tucson-born, Berlin-based artist bod [包家巷] refers to as a world-building exercise from an alienated yet observant perspective on unrestrained fields of research.

Designed for the diffusing boundaries expressed in contemporary technology and life, the thirty-seven track album Music for Self Esteem refuses sonic isolation, instead abruptly switching from gentle piano melodies to harsh noise, snippets of dance tunes to apathetic ambiences.

@baojiaxiang
musicforselfesteem.com

Dedicated To Danse Noire (the briefest, weakest, most vulnerable moment is the most powerful)

Dedicated To Beerwizard (a memory of a different self is a reminder of repeatable mistakes)

Dedicated To AMEN (reinvigoration of a sense of aesthetic belonging in a foreign concept)

For Everyone Who Released Shorter Or Secretive Works

LA Was Worth The Struggle But I Had To Leave

Dreamcycles - Future Lights and Archetypes

https://sitequeeste.bandcamp.com/album/future-lights-and-archetypes
Available 1 May 2020 exclusively on Bandcamp. Available 29 May 2020 on all digital platforms.

Dreamcycles, the moniker of Irish-Canadian artist Jennifer Moore, emerges from the ashen present to deliver her conceptual debut mini-album Future Lights and Archetypes. Operating at the node between technological reality and speculative fiction, Moore transforms ethereal bedroom pop and monolithic electronics into uncanny soundscapes to explore what she describes as the “landscape of a future global economy.”

Moore’s imagination conjures a new order of global governance which uses data to assess the competencies, characteristics, and productivity capacity of its citizens. Predictive analytics are used to shuttle humans around the globe in a tightly choreographed dance of space, labour and capital. Spanning a perspective both personal and systemic, the Dublin-based producer guides the listener through her sober invention, anchoring its alienating events around simple longings for home.

Across six tracks, present-day sonics are repurposed to create warped atmospherics. “If I wanted to see the world, I’d have to imagine it,” says a disembodied voice on opening track ‘Memory (Temporary Access)’. Pitter-patter footsteps, playing children, and whirring device noises swirl around the words: harsh, familiar, and ultimately unsettling. ‘Fonn Abhaile’ follows—its vaporous synths matched by breathy vocals—but ‘Abrasive Routes’ reveals the haunting potential of Moore’s psychoacoustic constructions. News report snippets detailing the Dublin financial district jostle with screeching high-definition cars. “It’s become the most extraordinary contrast to everything else here,” recites a roving correspondent, cataloguing inequalities suffused into the electronic artist’s home.

As the mini-album progresses, the emotional intensity rises. ‘Memory Laneways’ pairs an elegiac refrain with industrial kicks before ‘Playing with the Concrete’ offers a moment of brightness. “You look good when you’re smiling,” sings Moore over a distant sinogrime melody, followed by her closing, and most affecting track, ‘Final Goodbye.’ Meditations on belonging are swept along by circular, trance-like synths whose closing destination is bittersweet: euphoria tempered by the artist’s sombre backdrop.

Moore describes Future Lights and Archetypes as a “post-extraction artefact.” Through its diary entries, radio clippings, and fragmented songs, the mini-album resembles an object hewn from a fully-realised world, like an Ursula K. Le Guin novel refracted through machine learning. Keen listeners might also detect a flicker of Grouper’s place-based musings or even the crumbling electronics of Actress. But this release melds intimacy with pulsating stimuli, Moore’s gaze oriented firmly towards the human cost of an omniscient technological future.

Future Lights & Archetypes

Dreamcycles - Memory Laneways

Dreamcycles - Future Lights and Archetypes

sitequeeste.bandcamp.com/album/future…d-archetypes
Available 1 May 2020 exclusively on Bandcamp. Available 29 May 2020 on all digital platforms.

Dreamcycles, the moniker of Irish-Canadian artist Jennifer Moore, emerges from the ashen present to deliver her conceptual debut mini-album Future Lights and Archetypes. Operating at the node between technological reality and speculative fiction, Moore transforms ethereal bedroom pop and monolithic electronics into uncanny soundscapes to explore what she describes as the “landscape of a future global economy.”

Moore’s imagination conjures a new order of global governance which uses data to assess the competencies, characteristics, and productivity capacity of its citizens. Predictive analytics are used to shuttle humans around the globe in a tightly choreographed dance of space, labour and capital. Spanning a perspective both personal and systemic, the Dublin-based producer guides the listener through her sober invention, anchoring its alienating events around simple longings for home.

Across six tracks, present-day sonics are repurposed to create warped atmospherics. “If I wanted to see the world, I’d have to imagine it,” says a disembodied voice on opening track ‘Memory (Temporary Access)’. Pitter-patter footsteps, playing children, and whirring device noises swirl around the words: harsh, familiar, and ultimately unsettling. ‘Fonn Abhaile’ follows—its vaporous synths matched by breathy vocals—but ‘Abrasive Routes’ reveals the haunting potential of Moore’s psychoacoustic constructions. News report snippets detailing the Dublin financial district jostle with screeching high-definition cars. “It’s become the most extraordinary contrast to everything else here,” recites a roving correspondent, cataloguing inequalities suffused into the electronic artist’s home.

As the mini-album progresses, the emotional intensity rises. ‘Memory Laneways’ pairs an elegiac refrain with industrial kicks before ‘Playing with the Concrete’ offers a moment of brightness. “You look good when you’re smiling,” sings Moore over a distant sinogrime melody, followed by her closing, and most affecting track, ‘Final Goodbye.’ Meditations on belonging are swept along by circular, trance-like synths whose closing destination is bittersweet: euphoria tempered by the artist’s sombre backdrop.

Moore describes Future Lights and Archetypes as a “post-extraction artefact.” Through its diary entries, radio clippings, and fragmented songs, the mini-album resembles an object hewn from a fully-realised world, like an Ursula K. Le Guin novel refracted through machine learning. Keen listeners might also detect a flicker of Grouper’s place-based musings or even the crumbling electronics of Actress. But this release melds intimacy with pulsating stimuli, Moore’s gaze oriented firmly towards the human cost of an omniscient technological future.

Dreamcycles - Final Goodbye

13 lit candles, a candle for each month and an extra one for luck.

With the end of May comes Eastern Nurseries 1st anniversary. We had plans to celebrate it together, from moonlight until dawn. This new normality demands that we do it apart, so we present you with the 10th release on the Eastern Nurseries imprint. 'The Violence Of Merging' is a digital platter for digital times. 13 portraits of togetherness. A still-life reunion for a still world.

“You'll miss the sunrise ahead if you're not gazing at the horizon.”

EN10

Artwork by Laura Costas

The Violence Of Merging

Burning Pyre - Impermanence

Under the alias Jane in Palma, artist Julian Smith seeks to explore human sustainability through consciousness via a sonic blend of garage rock, post punk and surf rock.

Read more & buy: https://www.stampthewax.com/2020/07/17/premiere-jane-in-palma-modern-tackle/
Listen on Youtube: https://bit.ly/JaneInPalma

Safety Net

Listen on Youtube

Jane in Palma - Modern Tackle (STW Premiere)

Krautrock meets funk à la Can and ESG on this debut from London four piece Monzanto Sound. Out on @none-more-records.

Read More & Buy: https://www.stampthewax.com/2020/07/22/premiere-monzanto-sound-23/
Listen on Youtube: https://bit.ly/MonzantoSound