Gabber Modus Operandi - Hey Nafsu

Several weeks back, a grainy cellphone video of a staged fight that seemed like it had come straight out of a martial arts film appeared on my Instagram timeline. After watching the exaggerated and comic stunts for a few seconds, I checked if there was any sound only to be greeted by the screams and dissonant feedback of a punk show. This was my first exposure to Gabber Modus Operandi, an Indonesian duo from Bali who, in addition to making fantastic dance music, also catalog media from various Indonesian subcultures on their Instagram. 

Their own music is unique and eclectic. It draws on each member’s roots in local punk/noise scenes, their love for Chicago footwork, and their investigations into traditional Indonesian styles of music, like dangdut. I loved their track on the SVBKVLT compilation Cache 01, and I’m very excited for their soon-to-be released album, HOXXXYA, but today I wanted to share an older piece: “Hey Nafsu” off 2018’s Puxxximaxxx. The vocal chant of children is met with thundering drums, but what really gets me is the sub-bass. It’s rhythmically offset in a way that feels like an stray shot of adrenaline straight to the heart. Take a listen.

Contributed by K. M. 

Antwood - Club Dread

The second track of Antwood’s fourth release on UK-based label Planet Mu begins with a vocal sample that stutters along over top of deep kicks and trappy stabs. On the higher end of the frequency spectrum, rollicking clicks and hits sprinkle themselves in among the atmosphere. Yet before long, a dark wave of noise collapses the beat in a slow and resigned exhale. When the track eventually regenerates, we move deeper into the club with harder kicks and a more driving rhythm, but as soon as we find our groove, we’re pulled back into ambient desolation as muffled booms anticipate silence. As we near the three minute mark, dread gives way once more to the clubby maximalism at the heart of the track. 

It’s this narrative movement that underlies the musical pleasure in “Club Dread.” And it’s this focus on story that sets Antwood (Tristan Douglas) apart from computer musicians who pursue sonic complexity to the point of gratuity. Quotes from Douglas that relate the conceptual underpinnings of his latest album abound online, but each track doesn’t need that foundation to stand. Give “Club Dread” a listen and be prepared to dive further into the world of Delphi.

- Contributed by K. M.

Flèche Love - Festa Tocandira

Hands up if you missed the debut album from Flèche Love. ^^ When you first learn about Flèche Love (real name Amina Cadelli), it is impossible to be indifferent to the confounding songwriter. She is a Swiss woman of Algerian descent who sings in English and Spanish. She describes her singing as both “angry” and “crystalline”. The press release for her first album Naga Pt.1 (released in March) calls her “half witch 2.0, half Shaman woman”. Themes on said album include mathematician Gödel and an Amazonian male initiation ritual called the “Festa de Tocandira”, which entails boys proving their manhood by thrusting their hands into gloves full of biting ants.

The genre? Let's call it avant-garde R&B-tinged electro soul. Let's.

With such a distinctive and incomparable persona, I don’t expect this will be our last exposure to Flèche Love. More commentary from me is unlikely to help matters, so I recommend you watch this bewitching video.

HTRK - New Year's Day

It has been ten years since HTRK’s debut, Marry Me Tonight, and four years since their last album, Psychic 9-5 Club. At long last, the Melbourne duo of Jonnine Standish and Nigel Yang are gearing up to release a new album, Venus in Leo. In the lifetime of their band they have tragically lost both their longtime collaborator Rowland S. Howard and bandmate Sean Stewart. Each new release find the duo pursuing catharsis in new sonic landscapes, while still preserving the distinctive hallmarks of their sound.

If Psychic 9-5 Club was an album seeking meaning in the abstract – with its exploratory minimalist sound design and soft, pensive vocals – Venus in Leo seems to be an album seeking meaning in the past, mining memories and episodes from which meaning might be revived. The energy is different, with Yang’s spacey, reverb-heavy guitars making a return; the band describes "returning to HTRK’s underground rock past with the stylistic playfulness and variety of a modern mixtape." And the themes are personal but accessible, even relatable: first kisses, childhood homes, New Year's celebrations.

The new single is “New Year's Day” - a song that drifts into psychedelic, shoe-gaze territory, while perfectly capturing the bittersweet feelings associated with a night full of bad decisions:

“New Year’s Day” traces a flimsy resolution to get healthier, instantly busted by an evening of debauchery, recalling “the worst possible start to the year with bad friends and bad behavior.” The silver lining is the sunrise: “pink, red, orange, white, peach” Standish repeats as the track laps with a velvety, hypnotic refrain."

Mercury 94 - Cry

It’s hard to resist admiration when something weighty and effective gets fashioned from modest materials. Think of Basque cuisine; the charcoal drawings of Rembrandt; the architecture of Mies van der Rohe (who insisted on the simplicity of angular metal and glass over decoration!).

At 2 minutes length, this track feels like a sketch. The percussion: a bass drum and a click. Soft, deliberate keys repeat a minimal pattern - just a handful of notes. And sitting in the middle is Mercury 94's subdued vocal delivery, spoken word in time; as the focal point of the track, your attention is concentrated on his enigmatic poetry:

“Been writing bout misery
What’s frightening is
The happiness
A docile aberration
Of fiery flame
A Pisces in name
When I was crying it was never in shame.”

The vocals are duplicated, the top track pitched up, which introduces a disquieting dramatic element, like Jekyl and Hyde are speaking at once. Behind the voice(s), a trail of mechanically whirring, unimposing distortion. 

It's exciting to see Mercury 94 make so much out of so few ingredients. I have no idea what is next, but whether it is 2 or 10 minutes long, I'm awaiting it expectantly.

Alexander Noice - Affectation

Sometimes you hear new music so unusual it seems like must have slipped through a crack from some alien dimension, if only because there is nothing on earth to which you can easily compare it. Alexander Noice’s recent releases fall into that category. Noice is a highly sought-after LA-based musician, recognized as a formidable jazz guitarist. He has been a composer and bandleader for various ensembles, most notably Falsetto Teeth and The Alexander Noice sextet.

His upcoming album Noice see him fusing electronic music, jazz, art rock, and minimalist opera, shaking them together like some mad composer-scientist. Somehow, instead of producing an unruly mess, Noice has come out of this process with intricate, compelling compositions.
The press release offers this description:

“Thumping drums and electric bass fuel the engine of NOICE, with interjections of tailor-made samples, organically woven into highly intricate arrangements. The samples include Ethiopian vocal recordings, 808 drum samples, and recordings of children with stuttering speech syndrome, among many others.”

This is music that is challenging, music that makes me squint as I try to remember music theory lessons from long ago, as I do my best to stay on top of the irregular rhythms, tapping them out of the table. This music is manic and explosive. If you want easy listening, you won’t find it here. Towards the end of “Affectation” there is a saxophone solo over a jazz drums, and you start to think you are familiar territory, but just as you feel you’ve gotten your footing, the saxophone begins to shriek, becomes more crude, more visceral than any saxophone you have ever heard before, and you are pulled back into Noice’s world, reminded not to get too comfortable as you watch this “hypnotic space opera” unfold.

KAZU - "Salty" and "Meo"

Kazu Makino has been the singer of New York indie band since 1993. Now she is trying her hand at a solo album. But "solo" is something of a misnomer. Her first single "Salty" salty saw her collaborating with talents like percussionist Mauro Refosco and composer Ryuichi Sakamoto. Experimental, layered vocals intermingle with rapidly-cycling loops. Soft, upbeat electronic percussion trips and flutters underneath the surface.

In the recently released second single "Meo", she brings Blonde Redhead bandmate Amadeo Pace on board. Atop New Agey synths and pointillist embellishments on keys, Kazu's cries asymmetrically, almost conversationally, lyrics that seem designed to unsettle: "Don't say it's different/Don't say it's fine/Don't say she needs you". Enter a surprise cinematic string section, courtesy of the Budapest Art Orchestra. You will have to make up your own mind about these tracks, but they are nothing if not original and experimental, and I for one am compelled - it will be fascinating to watch Kazu tread further into this undiscovered territory.

The album is Adult Baby and it will be released on September 13. It will be accompanied by a narrative film, shot on the Italian island of Elba (the few shots we have from the film look gorgeous).

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.

Jenny Hval - Ashes to Ashes

Jenny Hval’s last project was the highly acclaimed Blood Bitch: a disorienting album embroiled in menstrual blood, viscera and, of course, vampires. Meticulously composed, the album was stunning for the sheer size of the sonic toolshed she pulled from, and for the way she pressed the tools, familiar and unfamiliar, into eccentric service. Imagine her emerging from the shed with a scythe but instead of using it to cut weeds she uses it to shear sheep. What?But…what? 90’s pop synths? Of course. Samples of pencils scratching paper? Check. Black metal droning noises? Yep. On the vocal side, Hval similarly employs a full range, from shrieking, to whispering, to panting. While often unsettling, it is an accomplishment that Hval maintains intimacy through the album, drawing us in, compelling us to finish the bizarre story, to keep turning the pages.

With the release of “Ashes to Ashes”, we have our first glimpse of her new album. It is radically different. Gone is the motive to unsettle, to shock. Still, Hval conceives of this project as subversive in another sense: “The Practice of Love is almost subversive in its gentleness—a deep dive into what it means to grow older, to question one’s relationship to the earth and one’s self, and to hold a magnifying glass over the notion of what intimacy can mean.” This album pays homage to the 90’s dance scene, but its efforts to recreate some of those environments feels more like naïve nostalgia than mimicry. Hval comments, “The synth sounds are the things I imagined being played at the raves I was too young and scared to attend”. Juxtaposed with the washed-out upbeat synths in this track are assertive and surreal lyrics, breathily delivered: “We had a dream about this song/That I had not written yet/Like I used to dream of fucking before I knew how.”

If there is a through line between her previous album and this single, perhaps it is in the sense of intimacy she is capable of creating, even as her tools and techniques keep her in avant-garde territory. Hval ruminates on the album so extensively and thoughtfully on her bandcamp page that it feels futile for me to muse any longer. This song augurs more wonderful, strange material to come.

Olafur Arnalds- Undan Hulu

The first post that I made on NoiseDart took place a little over two months ago. It was a tedious   article about Icelandic composer Olafur Arnalds. At that time I had exactly one follower on my facebook page. Me, obviously. Considering the complete anonymity of my blog during that time, it seems only fair that I show him the respect that he truly deserves and share this incredible composer now that a few more people will see it.

At 25 years of age Arnalds has already five EPs, two albums, and the scores of three films under his belt. Few other people in our time have the ability to build complexity and emotivity out of a minimalist approach, using only a few instruments, but using them to their absolute fullest. Recently he has taken more experimental leeway in his methods, offering a fresh angle of his sound, but has never sacrifice the simple, unadorned beauty of his work. One of the first songs that he wrote was titled Undan Hulu, and I was thrilled the other day when he posted a video of him performing this song on German tv when he was only 20 years old. I hope you enjoy my favourite Icelandic composer.

Bam Spacey - Land

This morning I spent some time delving into this summer's releases, hoping to uncover a few of the numerous treasures from these past few months that I may have missed. Of the many releases to come onto my radar, one of the most arresting would have to be Land, the debut EP from Swedish producer Bam Spacey (Magnus Johansson). This latest edition to the long register of swedish producers,  introduces a unique brand of calming minimal electronica and exhibits avant-garde concepts that will engage and captivate listeners.

These tracks are full of warm, lush textures that firmly occupy the space in the tracks and carefully resonate on cue. As waves of ambience wash through they mingle with Johansson's breezy vocals and bright synth hooks. Many elements throughout the tracks show a clear influence from techno, which becomes most striking in the solid house beats that thud beneath the fog of ambience and often take over the track with a more confident dance-like vibe as they progress. Elegant, atmospheric, engaging, kaleidoscopic; This is the kind of EP that you may play as background noise while working, but several minutes later realise you have done nothing except listen.




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'The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than The Driver of The Screw And Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do

*(Breathe)

I wouldn't dream of trying to make sense of the title of Fiona Apple's newest album. Like it's creator, it is an enigma. As for the creator, Grammy award winning and critically acclaimed singer-songwriter Apple has, after seven years of silence, released her new album (title above). This is surely her most daring album yet.

Apple commands each track, creating and recreating a jarring and beautiful sonic environment to surround us, asserting her emotions and infusing them into every bend  and turn of the album, jealous one second, then furious, remorseful, violent. Raw emotion pulses through this album and resonates into every space. In "Left Alone" Apple desperately shrieks  "how can I ask anyone to love me when all I do is beg to be left alone?" but that vulnerability is quickly resolved and replaced by conceit in "Periphery" as Apple sneers "Those peripheral idiots always have a bite to bear/Bear it if you can/ If you really want to." She refuses to stay put.

Being a drummer myself, I could not in good conscience discuss this album and not praise the phenomenal, experimental percussion of Charley Drayton. He uses everything from a single snare drum, to...a timpani  at one point ( I think) to duck tape (yes duck tape!) to compliment and intensify each moment.

This album isn't pretty, because it isn't supposed to be. It is rough and crude. But it's crudeness is executed meticulously. Listeners will be engaged and captivated as this album seeks to keep them at a distance but simultaneously pulls them in. As Jim Beviglia writes "Like an open wound, The Idler Wheel isn’t always pretty, but it pulses with life, brutal and true".

BUY IT

Who is my newest favourite Icelandic composer?

Olafur Arnalds of course. If you've never heard of him then it's time that you did. Coming from the small suburban town of Mosfellsbær in Iceland, Olafur has worked tirelessly since his teens, proving himself as an innovative and talented composer. At the age of 21 he had already achieved great success, having toured with Sigur Rós and sold out the Barbican Hall in London. Four years later he has only risen to greater heights. He has composed and releasing much more material including an extraordinary album entitled "...And They Have Escaped The Weight Of Darkness". 


Arnalds went to University to study classical music for a short time before dropping out after deciding to pursue different aspects of music that he wasn't able to at university. In an interview with The Quietus he said about university that he "didn't really get to do the stuff (he) wanted to." About classical music he admits that "Modern classical music is very complicated and people don't understand it unless they've been studying it themselves. It's locked itself inside of a small circle and it's sad really because there's a lot of good classical music out there; and it's also sad because those in the circle are also prejudiced against other types of music". From that understanding Arnalds has taken his knowledge of classical music and has merged it with electronic production to create a style that is undeniably unique and beautiful.


This quote from Arnald's interview with More Intelligent Life sums up this song : 

"I love minimalism. I don't practice it to the extreme though. I'm much more fond of achieving big things with small things than with big things. I just find it more interesting"








His blog
Erased Tapes (The label that he belongs to is pretty awesome. If you have time check out the other artists)