Hailing from Austin, Texas and playing sold-out shows before they even released any music, Club Coma (Geoff Earle – synth, bass, and vocals, Scott Martin – guitar and vocals, and Aaron Perez – drums) play a neat mix of experimental rock, dance rock, and shoegaze on their debut, self-titled album.
Opener “Give Me a Chance” sounds like something Thundercat might cook up, and I’m sure he’ll be jealous that he didn’t create something so funky when he hears it. “The Mirror” has a bit of a dance-punk sound to it, and “New Cruelty” even adds goth-synth touches. “I’m frightened of my TV screen. I’m scared of the things it’ll do to me. I’m scared of the phone in my pocket. I keep checking, and I don’t know how to stop it,” Martin sings on “TV Screen.” Seriously, dude, we’re all with you on this (and the addictive beats of the song only help the imagery).
“I went through that bad shit, and now I’m immune,” they sing on “Immune,” an empowering track that has Perez knocking out a steady beat perfect for your bicycling playlist, Earle getting his groovy synth groove groovin’, and Martin reminding us that we’ve come through a lot in the past few years, and we can, and should, think of ourselves as bad asses from this day forward.
Their cover of The James Gang‘s “Collage” is sharp. They turn it into a synthwave stunner. “It hit me hard like a lightning bolt,” they sing at the start of “Anesthesia,” a song that might be about addiction, or it might be about, finally, getting a rest after all the stuff mentioned in “Immune.” The looping string section in it takes the track up a few notches. It’s a wild touch. “Keep It Together” gets dreamy for the final song, making you feel like the gentleman on the cover, an image of a modern Icarus, falling into the arms of people who seem happy to see him. You’re falling, or perhaps floating, into a calmer state in that club where being in a coma for a little while might do you good.
On his thrilling and immersive debut album, Skeleten (producer / vocalist Russ Fitzgibbon) dares to imagine new ways of being that are not characterised by doom or despair – a challenge in an era defined more by feelings of futility, isolation and precarity. Across eleven tracks of free-flowing, transcendent, and often euphoric electronic music, he plays spiritual guide to a musical journey which is wonderfully in touch with realms beyond our own. Praising the power of comradery and community, dreaming of a future that is joyously boundless, Skeleten’s singular debut LP is, to borrow from one of his own lines, music for dancing “any way your body turns.”
After years of cutting his teeth in Sydney’s tight-knit electronic community, Fitzgibbon forged his own identity and debuted under his solo moniker, Skeleten in 2020. It’s his most personal project to date, the sound of him unfiltered for the first time as both a vocalist and producer. At once intimate and otherworldly, at the core of the project lies a strong sense of uncomplicated openness and a deeply rhythmic, meditative ambience. Strikingly unplaceable, the result is a curious yet alluring amalgam of far-flung influences and emotive atmospheres that invites you to get repeatedly lost in.
In between his debut and the long-awaited release of Under Utopia, Skeleten’s consistent output has seen him accrue rotation and early praise from Triple J, Double J, XLR8R, Stereogum, NME, The Guardian, BBC Radio 6 Music’s Recommends Spotlight Artist, Brooklyn Vegan and receive the official remix treatment from the likes of Logic1000, Moktar and Jennifer Loveless.
Under Utopia sees its release today via 2MR (North America) and Astral People Recordings (ROW) on vinyl and across all digital platforms.
The liner notes to Ross Harper‘s The Dark Album Remixes Volume 4 EP describes one of the tracks as “a DJ’s dream come true.” Really, the whole record is that.
Starting with Coast2c‘s (also properly known as Sofia Acosta) remix of “Something New,” the EP opens with thumping bass drum and sizzling electro-cymbals designed to yank people onto the dance floor…and then that thick synth-bass hits and there’s no need to yank people onto the dance floor, they are running to it. Developer‘s remix of “Hard Patience” (the “DJ’s dream”) is pulsating, throbbing, sweaty trance that gives you an instant rush.
Amorphic‘s remix of “Narcissist” is almost a hypnotizing mantra of bass hits, fast cymbals, and pulsating synths. Finally, DJ Emerson‘s remix of “Deep Life” – a fun track that mixes hand percussion with sliced up vocals sounds, goth-industrial bass, and racing video game synths.
All four tracks on this are scalding hot. Don’t miss this if you’re a DJ or just enjoy EDM.
A pungent ooze emanates from the subway. As a sticky drum machine sequence rolls out like thick dark fog, ice cold synth swirls rise from the depths.
Since the debut album Europe By Night, one of the main references associated with Henrik Stelzer and his Metro Riders project has been that of cinema, and particularly the European genre films of the 1980s. With its seedy subject matters manifesting both in visual style and music, the vibe of that era has crystallized over time. Passed down to us from deteriorating video cassettes, it became an invaluable key to decoding our present day reality.
And this is true for his new album Lost in Reality, announced today for a September 29th release via Possible Motive. Stelzer does not hide the fact that he builds heavily on that vibe; referencing it through track titles and utilizing a particular recording setup consisting of a Fostex and a reel to reel in order to achieve and recreate the feeling of those soundtracks — as heard on magnetic tape rather than vinyl.
Hear it yourself on the new single “Spasm,” out today, and pre-order the album here.
The motion picture soundtrack as an arbitrary genre definition becomes, in the hands of Stelzer, a pair of X-ray specs for him to envision a kind of music that deals in grains and contrasts rather than hooks and choruses. And like Roddy Piper in John Carpenter’s 1988 film They Live, he hands those glasses over for us to see the true face of our times.
On Lost In Reality, Metro Riders maps out an emotional geography of the cities at night, wherein the cinematic haze becomes a tool by which we can view the cities with new eyes. Not steering away from the darker alleys nor the harsh realities of modern day politics masquerading as progress. Yet escapism, in the end, seems the only viable option. But not as an endgame, but rather a stepping stone for building a new vocabulary for an utopian language.
Lost In Reality is the second album from Sweden based Metro Riders (real name Henrik Stelzer). Employing outdated software and now obsolete analogue recording equipment, Metro Riders conjures a suspenseful and gloomy, true to the era re-imagining of lost sounds. Metro Riders encompasses a very niche palette, everything from the prophetic visions of John Carpenter,to the warbled world of Troma films, to Italian horror flicks, euro-crime and the cybernetic sewers of The Skaters.
Alternative-electronic artist Slighter presents his new album‘This Futile Engine’, released via Brutal Resonance Records and Confusion Inc. This 13-track record features collaborations with Steven Seibold (Hate Dept) and Craig Joseph Huxtable (Ohm, Landscape Body Machine, Front Line Assembly, Noise Unit), as well as Yvette Winkler (Vaselyne), Morgue VVitch and Deep Dark Water.
Slighter is the solo moniker of Colin C., who has been fine-tuning the future of electronic music since kickstarting his music in Mid City Los Angeles in the early 2000s. Creating from a unique vantage point, he was involved in collaborations for various Metropolis Records releases and Cleopatra Records compilations, in addition to Slighter releases via his own Confusion Inc. imprint.
Mixed and mastered atThe Cell Studio, through the sonic experimentation and innovation entailed in recording this album, Slighter continues to provide new fuel for the counterculture..
“This record was a lot of fun to make with my friends. I’m always enjoying collaborating on Slighter albums and, this time, it felt best to leave the majority of the vocal work to some great voices from Craig to Steven and Tara, Yvette, and Anastasia. It has been an experimental but cohesive experience, the classic cinematic vibes I’m known for hitting with faster Techno and killer bass lines across a 10 track narrative,” says Colin C.
“I think I have a pretty unique way of working outside of genres, but my work still gives off this sort of expansive cinematic vibe, which also retaining a darker mood that gets me associated with various dark sub-culture genres. The themes I often explore has me adopting an ‘Electronic Death Music’ umbrella for the music I make – a play on words, with the music I make being the antithesis of popular EDM”.
While very much an independent artist who largely files under the musical radar, Slighter’s music has also found its way on to mainstream shows over the years, with songs and remixes featured on such television shows as Showtime’s ‘House Of Lies’, ‘Elementary’(CBS), ‘Bones’ and ‘Lethal Weapon’ (FOX), ‘Defiance’ and ‘Covert Affairs’ (NBC-Universal).
As of July 21, ‘This Futile Engine’ will be released across fine digital platforms, including Apple Music, Spotify and Bandcamp. Available as a Deluxe Edition limited edition CD and as a digital download, this album includes three exclusive bonus remixes of ‘Cold Black Waters (feat. Morgue VVitch)’, ‘Pulling Me Under’ and ‘Have No Fear’.
Colorado-based artist Alien Gothicpresent their debut single‘In The Night’, a song that stretches cosmic goth music into a whole new realm, combining all the elements the duo has been striving to integrate into the project in the four years since their inception.
Conjuring up music that can be described as gloom from other worlds, they have been trying to find their way back to the original trajectory they were on previous to crash landing in Barnum, Colorado. With no time to put their lives on hold, they have cooked up a deal to release their ‘High and Dry’ album viaLatenight Weeknight Records.
With classic goth rock as its backbone, ‘In The Night’ also sees darkwave smoldering at the surface. A symphonic journey telling the tale of two unknown lifeforms, bringing their favorite sounds to a place they have never explored before, this music is inspired by the beauty of the world around them, while still being pulled into the darkness of the dead stars they came from.
The video tells the tale of their recent exploration as they look for a way out of this world, gravitating to the most iconic structures they find along the way. Mixing in elements of AI, traditional film and lost portraits of the two core members, the song blends reality and fiction, while introducing a vibe they hope to spread to all the other planetary systems around us.
Made up of Ryan Policky (A Shoreline Dream) and Andy Uhrmacher (Genessier), Alien Gothic creates deep gothic electronica, fused with spacial goth autoharp symphonies, deep mellotron overtures mixed with noises from unknown origins on the vast hour long debut. Themes and words recall events that the duo have had from the far reaches of the beyond. With deep beats, lush goth rock entwine with psych and shoegaze layers to create cosmic, pulsating melodies.
Recorded from 2020-2023, Alien Gothic take a journey out of a world gone mad, to spread a sound that is immersive and rich with varied instrumentation. Soundscaping goth is what these artists have become known for elsewhere along the milky way, their spectrums now hitting earth to bring forth a dreary alien orchestra, lost deep in a dark forest beyond the normal stretches of human imagination.
“It’s something we knew would destroy the seedy, cobweb filled danceclubs of the past, bringing forth a new era of goth… alien goth!” says Ryan Policky.
As of July 18, ‘In The Night’ will be available exclusively via Bandcamp. The full ‘High and Dry’ album will be released digitally on August 18 across all fine music platforms.
I first heard of Mort Garson on an Amoeba Music “What’s in My Bag?” YouTube video featuring members of The New Pornographers. In it, bassist John Collins mentioned how bandmate Neko Case introduced him to Garson – a fellow Canadian who made weird electro music for television, films, and plants. Collins describes him as “a real studio cat.”
That studio cat’s albums are being reissued by Sacred Bones, and one of them is Journey to the Moon and Beyond – a collection of TV ad themes, film themes, and, yes, music he made to be broadcast during the 1970 moon landing. It’s a wild collection of electro oddities and fascinations.
“Zoos of the World” starts us off with an immediate drop into a world of 1970s electronic wonder. It sounds and feels like something you’d hear on a Disneyworld ride that’s long since closed and been turned into an overpriced restaurant. “The Big Game Hunters (See the Cheetah)” mixes Esquivel-like jazz (and sexy feminine vocals) with psychedelic synths and slick beats. “Western Dragon” comes in three parts: One a brief outro (part 3), one with a wild guitar solo (part 2), and one a cool meditative track (part 1).
The album’s centerpiece is “Moon Journey,” which simulates the sounds of space capsules closing, rockets launching, heroes being heroic, navigational systems bleeping and chirping, retro-rockets firing, and the strangeness of being in low gravity. There are three tracks titled “Music for Advertising” (numbers 6 through 8). Number 6 has a little bit of a bossa nova feel to it, number 7 is luxurious and thrilling, and number 8 is bold, adventurous, and robotic.
The inclusion of the main theme and end credits to the 1974 blaxploitation film Black Eye is pure gold, as is “Captain DJ (Disco UFO Part II)” – a groovy, sparkling disco dance track with Saturday morning cartoon lyrics and vocals (“Disco U-F-Oh-Oh-Oh! The faster you spin, the further you go!”). “Three TV IDs” is a collage of three TV jingles for cool stations you saw as a kid and then never again because they were bought out by some corporate monstrosity.
“Love Is a Garden” could be a follow-up to his entire Plantasia album (an electro record made for playing to your plants), as it’s soothing and almost an 8-bit version of floating down a jungle stream. “The D-Bee’s Cat Boogie” is a wonky, wild trip, and the album closes with the Black Eye end credits and its sexy, smoky vocals atop Garson’s slick arrangements (check out that 1970s jazz flute!).
This is a super cool record, and one of the best reissues I’ve heard in a long while, let alone one of the most fun electro records I’ve heard in a couple years. God bless Sacred Bones for putting Garson’s stuff back out there for people like me to discover.
Keep your mind open.
[Journey to the subscription box while you’re here.]
Will Butler + Sister Squares announce their new self-titled album out September 22nd on Merge and present its lead single/video, “Long Grass.” Sister Squares are Miles Francis, Julie Shore, Jenny Shore, and Sara Dobbs; what made them a musical unit was working with Grammy winner and Oscar nominee Will Butler. The resulting Will Butler + Sister Squares is a record with a warm, humane soul.
“I met Jenny—my wife!—in college, the year before I joined Arcade Fire,” says Will. “When I needed a band to tourPolicy[Merge, 2015], I asked [Jenny’s sister] Julie to join because I trusted her musically. And I asked Sara, Jenny and Julie’s childhood friend, because I knew she was super talented,” says Will. “Antibalas (who I was drumming for) opened some Arcade Fire shows,” says Miles, who offered to play drums anytime Will needed. Will, Julie, Sara, and Miles jelled on tour and everyone worked on vocal arrangements. All along, Jenny contributed to recordings and general performance ideas, and she joined onstage in 2019.
“After Generations[Merge, 2020], I considered making a weird solo record. Me alone in the basement, etc., etc. Mostly I realized that what I wanted was the opposite,” says Will. He increasingly turned to the band for feedback on lyrics and song structures. He asked Miles if they’d produce the record.
“Will and I organically discovered our relationship as a production duo through making this album. We didn’t have to talk too much about things as they happened, because the music just flowed,” says Miles. “As a producer, working with Jenny, Julie, and Sara is the dream. They connect so innately. In one motion they can conjure a mood, or get at the root of a feeling.”
The band played a run of shows in August 2022, airing out studio ideas in live rooms. After coming home, the band regrouped at Figure 8 Studios in Brooklyn. The album, broadly, is equal parts from Figure 8, group experiments from Will’s basement, and sessions in Miles’ Synthia Studio.
“I had quit my band Arcade Fire very recently, after 20 years—maybe the most complex decision of my life. I had spent the preceding two years at home with my three children. I was 39 years old. I was waking up every morning and reading Emily Dickinson, until I had read every Emily Dickinson poem. I was listening to Morrissey, to Shostakovich, to the Spotify top 50. I had unformed questions with inchoate answers,” says Will. “But, honestly, I was feeling great about the record.”
The album projects widescreen emotional landscapes. Lead-off single “Long Grass” is like a Harry Styles song with 20 more years of life behind it. “I had read this novella called Jamila by a Soviet/Kyrgyz author named Chingiz Aitmatov from the ’50s,” says Will. “It’s about an artist looking back on his childhood in a small town in Kyrgyzstan in WWII. It’s about love, and becoming an artist, and melancholy, and vast landscapes with a single train track running through them. And it reminded me of young adulthood, of wandering moodily down the train tracks. Maybe the song is also about leaving behind the things that formed us, but trying to remember the world as it used to be?”
Will Butler + Sister Squares will tour in support of their new album this fall.
Edinburgh-based producer George T announces the release of his latest single, “Love Letter,” which is set to drop on Paradise Palms Records. The track, a beautiful mind buffet of left-field and dubby influences, marching hypnotic lead synth, pads, syncopation, and an enchanting, haunting vocal. “Love Letter” marks a new chapter in George T’s rich and ever blossoming career, showcasing his talent for crafting genre-bending tracks that blur the lines between electronic and experimental music. With its intricate production, mesmerizing melodies, and captivating rhythms, the single transports the listener to a warped pleasure planet. In addition to the original version of the track, George T also offers up a hypnotic dub version “Dub Letter.” Doused in acid and featuring an instrumental-only arrangement that emphasizes the song’s rhythmic and atmospheric qualities.
The single and accompanying dub is releasing digitally with Paradise Palms Records and being distributed globally through EPM on the 14th of July.
Keep your mind open.
[A subscription is like a love letter from you to me.]
A master of playful sonic whimsy, electronic pioneer Mort Garson spent a lifetime quietly pushing the boundaries of synthesis. The latest track to his name, “Zoos of The World,” is baroque and unpredictable. Centered on warm keyboard patches that come together to replicate the tonalities of a retro-futuristic orchestra, the springy cut was taken from a 1970 National Geographic special. The track follows “Moon Journey,”the soundtrack to the live broadcast of the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing, as first heard on CBS News. Nearly in tandem with the release date, July 20th will mark Garson’s 99th birthday, and the anniversary of the moon landing. Both taken from the forthcoming archival release Journey to the Moon and Beyond, out July 21 via Sacred Bones.
Journey to the Moon and Beyond advanced listening parties have been announced at the following locations for July 20, 2023:
Amoeba, San Francisco, US
Balades Sonores, Paris, FR
End Of An Ear, Austin, US
Family Store, Brighton, UK
Monorail, Glasgow, UK
Newbury Comics, Boston, US
Rough Trade, New York, US
Seasick Records, Birmingham, US
Stranger Than Paradise, London, UK
It’s hard not to use plant terminology when discussing the long, strange career –and subsequent renaissance– of Mort Garson. Like a seed buried deep and left to germinate for months (or in this instance, decades), his great body of work was scattered in record bins and tape closets and all but forgotten in pop culture. A classically trained musician and electronic researcher with a tireless work ethos that led to nearly over a thousand writing and arranging credits, Mort Garson’s music got buried in the topsoil of time.
When Sacred Bones first began their Mort Garson reissue project in 2019 with a proper reissue of Plantasia, the Garson-naissance began in earnest. Soon after, you could hear Mort Garson and his Moogs bubbling up on TV shows, documentaries, podcasts, hip-hop tracks, or anywhere else, the man a cultural phenomenon once more. (And naturally, just playing the vinyl reissue of Plantasia at home made every single plant in your house thrive.) Like a perennial that returns with each new spring, the Mort Garson archives have brought to bear yet another awe-inspiring bloom. Journey to the Moon and Beyond finds even more new facets to the man’s sound. There’s the soundtrack to the 1974 blaxploitation film Black Eye (starring Fred Williamson), some previously unreleased and newly unearthed music for advertising. Just as regal is “Zoos of the World,” where Garson soundtracks the wild, preening, slumbering animals from a 1970 National Geographic special of the same name. The mind reels at just what project would have yielded a scintillating title like “Western Dragon,” but these three selections were found on tapes in the archive with no further information.
The crown jewel of the set is no doubt Garson’s soundtrack to the live broadcast of the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing, as first heard on CBS News. That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for Moogkind. But for decades, this audio was presumed lost, the only trace of it appearing to be from an old YouTube clip. Thankfully, diligent audio archivist Andy Zax came across a copy of the master tape while going through the massive Rod McKuen archive. So now we get to hear it in all its glory. Across six minutes, Garson conjures broad fantasias, whirring mooncraft sounds, zero-gravity squelches, and twinkling études. It showcases Mort’s many moods: sweet, exploratory, whimsical, a little bit corny, weaving it all together in a glorious whole.
Maybe at the time it scanned as crass and opportunistic for Garson to apply his keyboards to subjects like astrological signs, the occult, hippiedom, houseplants, or the moon landing. But more than most other electronic music pioneers of his ilk, Garson foresaw the integration of such electronics into our daily lives, how they would allow us to engage with the world –in small daily things, popular trends, and big historical events– with our tweets, posts, reaction videos, and the like. In that way, Garson lived such history and then added his own little spin on things.
