Academy Garden - Big Player

Academy Garden is out with an expansive, oscillating, chilled-out track that is sure to elevate your mood. For some reason I want to listen to this on a chairlift. But seeing as I don't have a chairlift handy - I knew I should've moved to Colorado - I'll make do with watching the music video, which portrays a sequence of relaxing wilderness shots.

Minor Pieces - Rothko

Ian William Craig and Missy Donaldson collaborate under the name Minor Pieces. Their debut single “Rothko” from their upcoming album The Heavy Steps of Dreaming is out now.  Speaking to Brooklyn Vegan, Donaldson describes a difficult writing process: “Our creative processes are markedly dissimilar. So there were times when we could’ve just walked away, seeing as sitting in the difficulty of learning and changing was uncomfortable, but as we grew to know each other, we identified that we were shifting through major barriers that were previously programmed.” 

This single leaves no doubt that beautiful music grew from that initial interpersonal creative tension. “Rothko” opens with Donald’s gorgeous, hymnal vocals, layered into a choir. For much of the song the main instrumental is a sparse acoustic guitar, but eventually, as intensity builds, the guitar gives was to stormy distortion, tape manipulation, ambient synths... Donaldson’s soars above it all, firm and defiant, and she has the final word. 

With track names like "Grace" and "Tender Fire", I am imagining the rest of the album maintaining a similar tone, and that is just fine by me. The album is out October 4, via Fat Cat Records.

CFCF - Liquid Colours

CFCF revels in the gulf between our present reality and the not-so-distant past. Refusing to be confined to one genre, he jumps around gleefully between once-trendy styles, and in so doing forces us to reconsider their artistic value and present-day relevance. From his minimalist (I mean really Glass/Reich-esque) 2013 release Music for Objects, to his 2010 Slow R&B for Zellers Locations Canada Wide (which sound post-modern and gimmicky enough to be in a David Foster Wallace footnote), CFCF plays with our expectations of what makes music good at a particular time and place.

His latest album Liquid Colours is a natural sequel to his 2015 The Colours of Life. He describes The Colours of Life as being primarily inspired by the super-optimistic Phil Collin’s track “Hand in Hand”, as well as by some electronic Krautrock and Balearic influences. He says the motivation for Liquid Colours began with “a simple challenge to myself to see if I could follow through on a continuous suite in one style. Much like COL, it was a break in working on another more involved, complicated album. I was interested in ‘corporatized’ pop jungle – totally inauthentic to the genre’s roots.”

Even when he’s admittedly being tongue-in-cheek, the album is composed with enough care to make you wonder how serious it is - to make you wonder if something this enjoyable can be tongue-in-cheek. Although divided into tracks, it might as well be one long track, as each blends into the next.

As the hazy, groovy 80’s synths ebb and flow, as the generic d&b percussion picks up and slows down, you have the sensation of listening to music that is sort of from nowhere. If you called a service number and heard this playing, you would role your eyes, and then you would turn your speaker to full volume just to listen.

Regular Citizen - Sleeping Unique

Surprising as it may sound, “Sleeping Unique” turns out to be a perfectly apt name for this debut album.

Regular Citizen is the pseudonym of Ivan Olegovich, a drummer/studio engineer/DJ who grew up in the Russian port city of Nakhodka. His Bandcamp self-description of this debut album says,

“In his uncompromising debut, Regular Citizen hums the tunes of his daily mood storms with 12 minimalistic electronic compositions. Ordinary life is nothing but a curtain of dreams, a display of emotions and circumstances made unique by his sensitivity.”

The description and album name are both absolutely, strangely, on the nose. The album has an unreal, dreamlike quality. While the tracks diverge widely in their tone and pace, Olegovich manages somehow to stitch them into a coherent and fluid whole, creating in the listener an experience as of cycling rapidly through related dreams. Or perhaps this ‘mood storm’ is more like being trapped in someone else's dilemma, witnessing different stages of an internal, personal argument play out, as new ideas – point, counterpoint, resolution – take up the mantle. With most of the songs clocking in around or under 2 minutes in length, you feel a sense of uneasy urgency, which is heightened by the regular use of irregular synth jabs. The more ambient tracks, like “Touching Softness,” wouldn’t be out of place in a sentimental animated short film. The album was released through Lorenzo Senni’s Presto!? label, and while the similarities between Regular Citizen and Senni himself are clear, Regular Citizen is very much doing his own thing.

BANDCAMP