Posts Tagged ‘atmosphere’

Watch: ‘Stamp You Out’ by IST IST

Posted: 21 October 2022 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Delivering a resolute punch with an acerbic sting in its tale, new single ‘Stamp You Out’ sees the Manchester band return to the spotlight with commanding form and typically uncompromising style.

From its blistering post/punk guitar lines to its punishing percussives, ‘Stamp You Out’ creates an impending atmosphere of anxiety throughout. With Adam Houghton’s trademark baritone vocal booming with all the force of an omnipotent autocrat at the lectern of a police state; it makes for a powerful statement of intent that instantly envelops listeners back into the shadow-strewn world of IST IST.
Speaking about ‘Stamp You Out’, Houghton says:

“[Stamp You Out] tips its hat to the previous IST IST where the modus operandi was to try and make an impact in the most forceful way; pounding drums and bass and repetitive lyrics. I remember watching a news report where a politician, whose name I forget, just kept saying: ‘we need to stamp this out’. I was thinking ‘we need to stamp you out’, so I wrote an aggressive fight song and a call to arms about it.”

The single is accompanied by an official video that sees the band deliver a voltaic performance of the track against a flurry of incandescent lights. Watch it here:

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Of the video Keating adds: “We felt like the track is a straightforward rock song which required a straightforward video and we didn’t want to over-embellish the visual aspect. For existing IST IST fans, it re-affirms what we’re all about, and for anyone new it tells you everything you need to know.”

The new single is also accompanied by the announcement of IST IST’s third studio album Protagonists, out 31 March 2022 via Kind Violence Records. After securing their status as one of Manchester’s most exciting acts with their 2020 debut Architecture, and then consolidating the title with its 2021 follow-up The Art of Lying; new album Protagonists arrives as something of a new dawn for the four-piece. As Andy Keating says:

“This was our first straightforward album, which sounds strange given it’s the third one. Our first album was a little bit of a back catalogue, and the rest was written in the same vein to have a coherent record. The second album was a stab in the dark and written and recorded during lockdown restrictions, but it broke us into the top 100. ‘Protagonists’ feels like the first album where there’s no pressure.”

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An album all about new beginnings, with a nod to the trials and tribulations of love, tricky family relationships and the feeling of being trapped by the past, ‘Protagonists’ arrives as an attestation to a band sure of their own identity. With the time and space to experiment in order to solidify their own sound, Keating adds:

“We originally started just exploring sounds and textures which appealed to us, and it evolved into fully-fledged songwriting. There are some elements which hark back to our ballsy days of a heavy sound, but we feel like this is a band expressing themselves how they want to.”

Owing its title to songwriter Adam Houghton’s magpie-like method of writing, Protagonists finds the frontman taking prominent characters that have caught his imagination, whether fictional or non-fictional, and transplanting them into dystopian worlds with new and uncertain outcomes. As Hougton explains:
“My process has always been taking inspiration from everything around me including but not limited to TV, Books, Movies, Newspaper, Articles on Wikipedia, Crime Documentaries etc. I then use these sources to craft fictitious stories around an imagined persona. The title ‘Protagonists” seemed to work with this method.”

Blurring the lines between fact and fiction and traversing a broad spectrum of genres, tracks like “Nothing More Nothing Less” — a  “simple love song written from a woman’s perspective” — take on a gauzy and ethereal pop-tinted quality, while slightly more menacing moments like “Fool’s Paradise” and “Trapdoors” find closer alignment with the band’s brooding, brazen rock roots.

From future favourites like “Something Has To Give”, a jittering guitar track about “a stick or twist situation”, to fully fitted-out classics like the anthemic “Emily” (a live fixture from the band’s earliest days, which has finally found its place on this record), ‘Protagonists’ will provide plenty to pore over for fans new and old.

Recorded and mixed by Michael Whalley and IST IST at Milkshed Studios, the album was mastered by the legendary  Greg Calbi and Steve Fallone at Sterling Sound (The National, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol).
A compulsive, character-driven record from a band hitting their creative zenith, IST IST will release ‘Protagonists’ in Spring of 2023.

To mark the release, IST IST will be playing a special hometown launch show for the new record at the Manchester Ritz in March next year – details below. There will also be a small preview tour before the end of 2022, with dates in London, Birmingham and Hebden Bridge. Standby for further UK live dates soon.

IST IST UK LIVE SHOWS

NOVEMBER 2022

3/11 O2 Academy 2, Islington,
4/11 The Rainbow, Birmingham,
25/11 Trades Club, Hebden Bridge (Sold out)

MARCH 2023

31 – Manchester Ritz

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Paul K – The Space Between

Posted: 23 September 2022 in Albums
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21st October 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s been almost three years since Paul K delivered Reconstructed Memories. Listening to The Space Between, it becomes apparent why. Pandemic or nay, this is an ambitious and complex album which sees Paul return to the territory explored on 2018’s The Fermi Paradox and go the whole hog on devising and scoring a vast conceptual progressive work that’s heavily invested in narrative as it traces what he outlines as being a story ‘about an astronaut who has volunteered for a one way journey through space to pass through the Heliopause and is set maybe 30/50 years in the future.’

Space is both the backdrop and the story, in many ways, and the fascination it holds is something that transcends words or even rational explanation. Perhaps the fact that the sheer enormity and infiniteness of space is beyond our comprehension is a major factor in our space obsession. And however far and deep we probe, I suspect we will never truly be capable of assimilating the universe, especially as we, as a species, struggle to comprehend that we do not exist at its centre.

In classic sci-fi form and echoing 2001: A Space Odyssey, the concept behind the story is that the astronaut’s sole companion is an AI robot that becomes sentient during the journey, before the astronaut eventually dies and the robot continues the journey alone.

As Paul explains, ‘Each track plots the journey from liftoff looking back at the Earth (True Splendour) to the debilitating effect of years alone in space (Pareidolia) and is also related to the love and loss the astronaut has felt in his life’.

Understatement is the album’s defining feature. While it is unquestionably ambitious and incorporates cinematic arrangements, and notably choral-sounding vocals, the instrumentation is subtle and layered.

‘True Splendour’ makes for a gentle introduction and very much sets the tone. The Space Between keeps the drama and pomp to a minimum, and instead, the mood is contemplative, almost subdued, as strolling basslines wander sedately through soft washes of sound. Percussion is minimal, and low in the mix.

‘Sleep Within’ is perhaps the album’s most conventional ‘rock’ composition, but there’s a subdued, soporific overlay to its mid-pace melodic drift, although the reflective, wistful ‘Spektr’ has a certain solidity to it. In contrast, ‘Artifact’, the point at which the AI assumes autonomy, is almost vaporous, a soft piano reverberating among wispy sonic contrails.

The Space Between is an album that functions on numerous levels simultaneously, although they’re not all necessarily obvious. But it’s not imperative to follow the narrative to appreciate the detail; the album works in a way that not only creates space, but conveys space, the eternal distance, the vast emptiness… we are all lost and floating. But some are more lost than others. Welcome to The Space Between.

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AU vs FDO – AU // FDO

Posted: 1 September 2022 in Albums
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Dret Skivor – 5th August 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

In typical Dret style, the accompanying notes are brief and to the point; functional, you may say.

As such, we know nothing of either AU or FDO as individuals – if indeed they are – of their previous works or methods, but then, nor to we need to in order to address the release at hand. ‘When analogue electronic drone meets toy keyboard drone, the results are this.’

‘This’ being a forty-three minute piece of continuous drone. Not that it’s all just one long drone: it’s multiple drones that hang and hover in layers. Despite its lack of overt structure or form, there are clear distinctions and a strong separation between the different layers, that, unexpectedly – and whether intentional or not – bring something of a conventional musicality to proceedings, with a distinct ‘lower’ drone overlaid with a higher ‘lead’ drone, as well as incidental moments of discord and dissonance as the shifting tones interact with one another. And, as the piece progresses, so the pitches change, and consequently, so do the moods. At first comparatively calm and tranquil, the tension rises over time.

Shrill wraith-like whispers flit through a darkening atmosphere as the lower drone begins to thicken and swell in density and volume and the overall sounds grows murkier, forging a more sinister, ominous feel.

Over time – and here, time feels like a vague concept, where seconds stall and minutes moderate and ultimately swing in suspension, slowing, until reaching a point around twenty-five minutes in where nothing moves and a perfect stasis is reached. The interweaving drones remain locked, and there is no movement. Life itself has stopped and the listener finds themselves frozen, like an insect set in amber to be preserved for all eternity. And here – here – the urge for any form of transition or trajectory abates, simply sliding away along with even the desire to move.

Somewhere along the way, you simply forget you exist and the sound becomes everything, and yet, simultaneously, it fades into the background as you find yourself in a fugue-like state, entranced, and barely notice when it ends.

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Distance H – Bitch 16

Posted: 13 May 2022 in Singles and EPs
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2nd May 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

‘Bitch 16’ is the debut single from French darkwave project Distance H. It was recorded in collaboration with Ophelia from Saigon Blue Rain, one of a number of female vocalists to feature on Distance H’s forthcoming EP, Intimacy.

It’s a deft slice of dark pop with both atmosphere and edge, not to mention hints of Garbage. And while not without hooks – it has plenty – it’s the atmosphere that stays with you, at least after the first listen, and it’s the vibe you want to revisit and which makes you hit repeat – and that urge to hit repeat is strong.

Propelled by an old-school drum machine sound, there are some retro drum fills that sound just a shade clunky against the austere, smooth-surfaced synths, but there’s a compelling urgency, and a certain sass about ‘Bitch 16’ as Ophelia’s vocals glide and soar – and yes, perhaps it’s something about the translation, as the band summarise that ‘Bitch 16’ is ‘in some ways opposed to Sweet 16 and its form of happy, carefree transition. When sweetness gives way to brutality; when detachment gives way to obsession, when desire gives way to disgust’.

These are strong emotions, and Distance H have distilled them into a taut four and a half minutes, making for a strong debut.

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Watch: ‘Stratum’ by Jana Irmert

Posted: 2 May 2022 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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In the magical volcanic landscapes of Lanzarote, Jana Irmert found images for the ideas, moods and feelings that fueled the work on the tracks of What Happens At Night: For me this release is a window through which I could express my thoughts and feelings about our planet in turmoil. Starting out from a point of hopelessness, my fascination with travelling into Deep Time and learning about geologic ages grew. After all, what will be left of us will only be a delicate layer in the rock.“

‘Stratum’, named after the word used in geology for a single layer of sediment, attempts to dissolve time and space, merging the abstract and the concrete. The volcanic landscapes, which are very young from a geological perspective, thereby become a place where human existence plays only a marginal role.

Watch the video here:

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The fin. – Deepest Ocean

Posted: 24 January 2021 in Singles and EPs
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22nd January 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

Penned in 2018 as a reaction to the effects of constant touring and international travel, and the sense of groundlessness it brought, ‘Deepest Ocean’ is the third single to be lifted from The fin.’s upcoming album. It finds the Japanese duo, consisting of Yuto Uchino and Kaoru Nakazawa in a reflective mood, and immersing themselves in some deep retro synth tones that truckle and weave over a slow grooving bassline.

It’s got a kind of vaguely funky vibe that’s a bit prog, a bit electrop, a bit 80s and a bit lounge. And even a bit disco: the clean guitar that nags away, coupled with the soft-focus production reminds me for some reason I can’t entirely pinpoint of Imagination (specifically ‘Body Talk’) and I really can’t decide if this is a good thing or not.

I mean, it’s certainly got a hook, and a strangely sultry atmosphere that’s not so much sleazy as semi-soporific in a smoky, opiate way, but it’s also a bit soft and wet, a shade limp in its smooth slickness. So where does this leave us? Clean, vibrant synths run ascending and descending runs, and things layer up deep, and fast over a metronomic key stab and backed-off beat.

I suppose it’s a matter of taste, and I’m flapping to and fro like a fish out f water wondering if I’ll get sold or left to rot, caring not one iota if I’m a British fish or not. It’s proficient musically, and on all technical levels from the composition, arrangement., performance and production, ‘Deepest Ocean’ is genuinely impressive, and conveys a sense of fuzziness, of being at all sea. But ultimately I feel the unsettling emptiness of transient entertainment and instant gratification which lies at the heart of the song’s inspiration becomes something of a self-made outcome, and that its success is also its failure: in embodying the sensation it’s intended to convey, it recreates the experience of that emptiness, that sense of hollowness and an absence of soul.

Heat Death Of The Sun – Drinking Oil From The Black Fountain

Posted: 15 November 2020 in Albums
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Cruel Nature Recordings – 6th November 2020

Christopher Nosnbor

The latest release from Heat Death of the Sun, aka Eugene Davies, was recorded live in Newcastle at The Cluny – a venue that provided a space for many oddball / alternative / noisy gigs and hosting many of the artists on local labels Cruel Nature and Panurus Productions – in May 2019. Yes, back when live music was a thing. There’s a semi-ironic joke to be made that people were practising social distancing at shows like this long before it became a thing, and that there’s likely less chance of catching even the most contagious of viruses at an ultra-niche gig than in your local Aldi, but the sad fact is that while it’s tough for the everyone involved in the music industry, the impact of lockdown on the micro-communities which exist through underground music is immense in mental health terms.

It may not be a fresh observation for me to note the other irony here, namely that people who are disparate, disconnected, and often prone to anxiety and low mood come together over some of the darkest, most challenging music. Often, it’s because they find it articulates their feelings in ways they can’t, and music has a near-infinite capacity to transcend words.

Listening to Drinking Oil From The Black Fountain – a single, continuous piece spanning twenty-eight minutes and documenting HDoTS set – I find myself lamenting my inability to travel to Newcastle and the fact I wasn’t present at the show. The atmospherics are deep and dark and I imagine at the appropriate volume, in a darkened room, the experience must have been immersive and fully multisensory. The range of frequencies is extensive, and winds buffet long and low against tremolo notes that seesaw and drone, intermittently interrupted by swells and glitches. Despite the distance, it holds up well as a recorded audio work.

As the piece progresses, the ruptures become more pronounced, the thudding detonations of bass more resonant, and the whole sonic web begins to tangle itself more irrevocably, twisting and knotting, with the result that what began as a softly oscillating wash transmogrifies into an unsettling, uncomfortable source of tension, and there’s still fully ten minutes to go as I ding my muscles tensing, my jaw clenching, and my stomach beginning to lurch.

Twisted folksy drones shudder in and out of the increasingly warped array of sounds as they slowly melt together before collapsing in a liquefied state as storm clouds gather and thunder rumbles ominously and culminating in a slow, looped throb to fade.

It’s a powerful, hypnotic work that evolves nicely over its course, with just enough angles and disjointed corners to render it challenging without being a total headfuck.

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GHXST – Gloom EP

Posted: 9 December 2018 in Singles and EPs
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16th November 2018

Christopher Nosnibor

The latest offering from gothy New York duo GHXST is appropriately titled. That said, ‘gloom’ carries connotations of moping, listlessness, and the six tracks here are anything but mopey or listless: the downcast, foreboding bleakness of atmosphere is matched by a crackling tension which provides a more complex dynamic.

It begins with a dark pulsating throb and a heartbeat bass drum, distant, buried. Guitar excess howls over the top before settling to a dirge-like crawl of spindly, echo-soaked twang reminiscent of latter-day Earth with hints of Neurosis-inspired post-metal. Shelly X croons and whispers, a combination of ethereal longing and menace as shoegazey washes of sound carry her disembodied voice through the clouds towards the stratosphere.

‘Ocean is a Desert’ is still atmospheric, and combines searing country an psychedelia into the mix to create something epic and immersive Moreover, it brings a greater sense of solidity and a more obvious structure as they start getting riffy and the mechanised drums kick through the murk, and things grow denser still on ‘Vaquero’, which invites comparisons to Chelsea Wolfe and Esben and the Witch at their most sonically dynamic with its brooding drama.

Samples and strings and quivering synths pave the way for the 80s-shaded synth-goth of ‘Bad Blood II’, a chilly, steely grey song that’s both graceful and tense and calls to mind Curve at their best. Single cut ride is dark and dense, taking cues from The Jesus and Mary Chain’s ‘Mushroom’ and offering hints of A Place to Bury Strangers to deliver a deep, dark buzzing throb of mid-tempo droning guitar noise, before ‘Ride’, unveiled in advance of the release, is a gritty, grainy, mess of low-slung low-end riffage swamped in reverb and dirty distortion. And that’s the appeal of GHXST right there. Music to get lost in and to drag you down into the undertow of those dark, deep currents.

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Astrïd & Rachel Grimes – Through the Sparkle

Posted: 24 July 2017 in Albums
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Gizeh Records – GZH73 – 1st September 2017

Christopher Nosnibor

Because this is a Gizeh release, it’s beautifully presented, housed as it is in tri-fold card sleeve with subtle, minimal artwork. While the front cover is difficult to be certain about, the interior tryptic shows a panoramic landscape of a wide glacial valley somewhere in Britain. Observing the division of the fields draws the attention to the relationship between physical and human geography, and this all feels somehow fitting in the framing of Through the Sparkle.

And because this is a Gizeh release, the music it contains is delicate, haunting, sparse yet rich and contemplative. Through the Sparkle sees French ensemble Astrïd collaborate with American pianist and composer Rachel Grimes to spin seven contemporary classical compositions which massage the senses almost with the softest of touches.

Through the Sparkle is not an ersatz pastoral suite, but does keenly conjure a certain, if indefinable, natural spirit. The piano work is exquisite in its subtlety, rippling gently beneath tapering woodwind on ‘The Theme’, while on ‘Mossgrove & Seaweed’ notes lap evenly and lightly to create an air of lightness, of rapid yet serene movement, natural and fluid. It’s a flickering, shimmering sonic tension that shifts and changes shape over its duration,

Nothing about these pieces feels forced or intrusive. They’re the sonic evocations of dappled shade through leaves on a sultry, sunny August afternoon, a light breeze and the full spectrum of verdant hues – albeit with the shades muted by the distance of fading memory. There’s nothing about Through the Sparkle which feels overtly or calculatedly centred around a sense of nostalgia, but a sad, aching beauty – intangible but distinct – will inevitably evoke a certain wistfulness. And so it is that a degree of melancholy drapes itself around the hushed, rarefied atmosphere of the compositions on Through the Sparkle.

A sombre tone overarches the slow march of ‘The Herald en Masse’, which slowly breaks into an uplifting wash of rhythmic sound. It may not have quite the intensity of Swans, but it’s in the same sphere as it rises toward an almost transcendental sway.

Hesitant notes hover at the start of ‘M5’ and the rich, resonant and loamy tones call to mind latter-day Earth. Its sparse arrangement conjures a spacious atmosphere and pulls the listener’s attention into the details of the tone, texture, reverb and a sense of the individual notes breathing in the space around them.

‘Hollis’ brings a graceful melody that’s sad because it’s beautiful, while ‘M1’, the second-half counterpart to ‘M5’ – feels very much about the space between the notes as brief notational sequences cascade from a softly picked acoustic guitar before silence follows. There’s something almost flamenco about the picking of the strings and the way the notes resonate against one another.

The mournful tones of the final track, ‘Le Petit Salon’ are haunting in their understated discord, as piano and strings drift in different directions over percussion which fade in and out. It’s all about progression and movement.

Through the Sparkle balances shimmering, softly shining upliftingless with shifting shadows. It’s an easy yet rich listening experience which brings with it a sense of the way in which music can enrich the soul.

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