What to watch
WHY PATTERNS? is a new luminous synthesizer/saxophone soundscape two piece from Paris, France. The debut single “GIVE THE WORD,” has a jazzy and drone repetition to it, following a live abstract video from the French/Bosnian artist, Dabube. We envision more madness from WHY PATTERNS? soon in the form of an EP this spring.
Australia’s Dan Webb could be considered the country’s Bonobo with his maximalist approach to orchestral electronica and psychedelic electro-jazz. His newest track “Drifter” is part Bonobo’s Black Sands or some of the work of Blockhead. The strings push the calming track into the stratosphere, adding to the halcyon feel.
Dan Webb’s music exists in a state of constant evolution. Since emerging with his debut EP in 2009, he has gleefully erased the lines between genres, combining psychedelic atmospheres, electronic experimentation and classic songwriting into a kaleidoscopic sound all his own.
He has just released an accompanying visualizer for the new track “Drifter,” and hopes to announce a new album in the coming months. Rumours speculate that he worked with a few other collaborators for the upcoming fourth album, including the likes of Greg Saunier of Deerhoof.
Check out Drifter below.
We are excited to co-promote the Chose Sauvages and Lash show for this year’s Taverne Tour. It is at 9pm at L’escogriffe.
Full setlist of Taverne Tour below!
In anticipation of her new album L’eau et les rêves (March 24, 2023 via Mothland), singer-songwriter and performer N NAO (Klô Pelgag, LUMIÈRE, Laurence-Anne) presents her latest track “Tout va bien,” with a new video of her intimate escapades filmed in the fresh water streams of the Gaspé and Charlevoix. Created intuitively with a feminist approach, her images could be described as haptic; the magic of a precious glow falling into the water as it falls and illustrate the desire to surrender to life to surrender to life beyond the screen.
As the clock approaches midnight, the Montreal-based artist manages to create ‘an ode to the giddiness of falling in loveˋ sparkling, delicate and visionary, reminiscent of the natural musical rituals of Jenny Hval or Björk. Recorded at Greenroom Studios in Montreal, the song was produced with the help of Charles Marsolais-Ricard (founding member) for the inspiration of the lyrics, Lysandre Ménard (Lysandre, Helena Deland) on synthesizer, Samuel Gougoux (TDA, Corridor, Keel Avil, VICTIME) and Jean-Bruno Pinard (co-director) on the drums, and Étienne Dupré (Duu, zouz, Klô Pelgag).
Sleaford Mods – UK GRIM
The Sleaford Mods are set to release their new album UK GRIM on March 10th, arguably their most danceable effort and one that sees the duo collaborate with Jane’s Addiction’s Perry Farrell and Dave Navarro, as well as Dry Cleaning’s Florence Shaw, among others. To make the video for UK Grim, the Mods enlisted the talents of British illustrator and satirist Cold War Steve, who signed his first video and animation here, supporting another excellent and vindictive socio-political charge from the Nottingham duo.
I remember the first time I threw on Atsuko Chiba’s 2019 album, Trace. My partner stepped into the room and asked me why I was listening to “vampire music.” Vampire music … perhaps so … if a bunch of prog rock/synth enthusiasts in Transylvania were creating mind-expanding sounds up in a neon-lit high bell tower. The real band, however—who take their name from a character in the dream detective anime, Paprika—are five guys from Montreal who happen to love strange time signatures, Delphic lyrics, drone, and basically anything and everything outside the realm of ‘simple music.’ They even made a crazy prog-rock hip-hop chameleon called “Quick Infant Guilt,” which sounds like MF Doom fronted by King Crimson.
But Atsuko Chiba has a knack for making its maelstrom of prog, drone, and psych sound digestible and easy to latch onto, with their latest offering “Seeds,” being a testament to that statement.
“Seeds,” clocking in at 7 minutes and 45 seconds, is an immersive journey that puts the listener into an out-of-body trance. Trilling guitars, harmony after vocal harmony, sprawling synths, tasty/grooving bass, sprinkles of percussion, and smashing crash cymbals, and a gorgeous string arrangement by Montreal quartet, Quatuor Esca, “Seeds,” nestles deep into its own sonic universe and leaves a burning and enigmatic uncertainty. You’d go mad trying to decipher its meaning, but a lovely music video, directed by Rodrigo Sergio and starring Jade Maya does just that. Maya reacts, dancing and contorting to the music, changing her movement tones from a quaint forest environment to a brutalist city underpass.
Enjoy the “Seeds” video here before Atsuko Chiba’s third full-length, Water, It Feels Like Its Growing drops in January via Mothland.
When he’s not crushing the mic and drumset with FHANG, a newer genre-manipulating electronic duo from Montreal, Sam Woywitka is working as a producer, and now solo artist, under the moniker SAMWOY. His debut single “Sbwriel,” which sounds like a made-up word, is actually Welsh for “rubbish,” and comes with a shiny music video that features Sam parading around the UK like a fiend, donning a bedazzled gem mask. The project is also on Woywitka’s new label, Hidden Ship.
Like FHANG’s sound, SAMWOY’s music feels like you’re on psychedelics—the kind of psychedelics that make you question everything you know and hold dear, but for the better. “Sbwriel” is a song about self-improvement, or rather, giving up on it and accepting who you really are—a gutsy, dirty, vagabond with a flair for a spectacle that no one will ever really understand. And that’s OK.
Musically, this track shifts from a grooving Sisters of Mercy club-era bassline, punctuated by an assortment of sonic experimentation and cryptic lyrics. The payoff is a freaky fuzzed-out guitar solo, which reminds me of Marc Ribot on morphine.
Check out the music video below.
“DADA always reappears, in one way or another, whenever too much stupidity accumulates,” wrote the artist Kurt Schwitters in 1924 about Dadaism, an international and committed artistic movement born during the conflicts of the First World War. A century later, Trees Speak plays with coincidence and brings back to life the Ghost before breakfast (Vormittagsspuk), a short movie made in 1928 by the German painter, sculptor, and filmmaker Hans Richter and censored by the Nazi regime at the end of the 1930s as “Entartete Kunst”, i.e. degenerate art. Inspired by the avant-garde music of composers John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, the disturbing, upside-down atmosphere of the title Zeitgeber suggests the idea of an out-of-control internal clock and foresees the frantic rhythm of environmental changes to come, in the face of the absurdity of a world in the process of self-destruction, where strange machines, whose mechanisms we do not fully understand, are damaging bodies and consciousnesses. It is easy to understand that modern man has become an unstable robot by the technological innovations he himself has created, like a broken combination of pieces that fail to work together, as a chimerical creature between the mechanical world and the natural world. In the face of machines of mass destruction, this joyful Dadaist chaos, both strange and mysterious, proves that even everyday objects could well revolt against the control of the established order. Hasn’t Tristan Tzara warned us: “I destroy the drawers of the brain, and those of the social organization – Beware of DADA”?
The band Staraya Derevnya has been creating psychedelic kraut-folk for over 25 years now. With a dual home base in London and Tel Aviv, the group takes its name from the historic Staraia Derevnia neighborhood in St. Petersburg. The single “Tangled Hands” comes from Boulder Blues, which will be released on Friday, August 5 on Ramble Records. Berlin-based Belarusian pianist and singer Galina Chikiss spices up “Tangled Hands” with her own cries and whispers. The artwork is by Danil Gertman and the animation by Maya Pik.
The new video of The Sadies’ newest album Colder Streams, on which hovers over the memory of Dallas Good, who passed on last February.
Ben Shemie is a movie buff. We noticed that a long time ago. During Suuns’ mini-concert recorded at the Rouen Studio for Pan M 360, in the fall of 2021, Ben had integrated into their gig a sound extract from David Cronenberg’s Videodrome. In this case, the influence of Andrei Tarkovski’s Solaris permeates this long clip that includes two pieces. These songs, entitled “The Mirror” and “Future Indefinite,” are featured on Desiderata, Ben’s fourth solo album which is a collaboration with the Molinari Quartet. We’ll review it here shortly. Brandon Blommaert animated both songs and directed the video.