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The Labor Of Love
We start off with the first LP from Sex Worker, solo project of Mi Ami member Daniel Martin-McCormick (Check out the Water Sports LP from Mi Ami. One of the better things out this year). As an album it certainly has the vibe of a sex worker, not that I'm familiar, but its sparse and drifting synths, matched with the chaotic and desperate vocals give it an air of loneliness and despair. Twisting patterns take you down dark corriors, electronic drones suffocate you as the glitches rain down. Voices reach out at you, but you can't really find or understand them through the din of pulsing noise.
It all drops out and your left to take on another journey along the rhythmic spine of emotive drum machines. More voices reach out, but you can't really get to them as it crescendos into a void.
Then we get the first glimmer of hope in shining, pretty synth/vocal loops while vibes play softly underneath. It's almost as if to remind us that under the repungance of the sex trade, their is a child-like innonence and playfulness that is being destroyed, though it is ultimately the hope that makes it worth going.
A very personal project from a skillful musician. Freeing bodies through ryhthm.
NO MORE
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Silver Sea Surfer School
This album plays on some of the more abstract parts of the Inca Ore repetoire, with dense sound sheets and lack of melody, but also comes through with upbeat singing/talking through loops that seem both ancient and new, both human and animal. The dense cathedral organs are always nice, too, and shiny synth fuzz is never far behind.
Between the more structured moments, abstract sounds and pretty tones, Silver Sea Surfer School manages to blend them all pretty seamlessly, affording the sound to be just more than the sum of it's parts.
The songs are nice and concise as well. For every reflective, lilting ode there is a quick cut up of borrowed sound collages and fractured voices, often echoed in bells off in the distance. Very eerie yet somehow homey (with sultry voices and sun ra keyboard freak outs to boot).
That's what I kind of think of this record. It's like the feeling of travelling or being in an alien environment. For all the new things pushing their way into your conciousness, there is always that bit of familiarity that is universal and warm in its own way.
ADVENTURE OF LIGHT
DYLAN ETTINGER AND EXPENSIVE SHIT WERE COVERED FOR IMPOSE. CHECK IT OUT!
READ ALL ABOUT IT
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Smokin'
NNF177—7"
The second of the Dylan Ettinger singles out on NNF recently. This wax edition of futuristic old-schoolism features "The Heat", lending more gravitas to Ettinger's midi and synth dominated Miami Vice skylines.
Sure enough, you drop in and you're waiting for the camera to pan back to show a dystopian city scape that only our hard-boiled hero can save. The addition of the saxophone leaves you with the kind of slinky, down-and-out vibe, while the subtle guitar work is a piercing anecdote to Ettinger's sound wall creation.
The second side starts slower, building. Strangled voices off in the distance of a simple drum-pattern. Things build, shit happens and it gets totally out of control. The sleaze and paranoia are dripping, twitching mustaches looking over playing cards in rooms full of cigar smoke.
No, I don't know. In all seriousness, it is hard not to think about 80's film imagery even if you were barely born in the decade. I just like how it doesn't try to touch on some kind of nostalgia from the period, but just recreates it. It's more of a homage than a reimagining, though the futuristic tweaks are certainly there. Happy to be what it is, neither pretentious or trendy, just fun jams to get your late night stake out on to.
SMOKIN'
And on top of this there is the new Topaz Rags full lengther a bunch of represses and a bunch of random awesomeness available in limited amounts on the web site right now!
NOT NOT FUN
