Shelter Point - Forever Now (Hot Flush 22nd August)

Shelter Point - Forever Now (Hot Flush 22nd August)

Shelter Point's debut EP for Hot Flush marks a distinct evolution for the primarily dancefloor label; incorporating elements of hypnagogic pop, found sounds, shoegaze and lo-fi, it's a brilliantly skronky mess of melancholic and euphoric sounds channeled into four quality tunes. Certainly, Forever Now shares DNA with other Hot Flush acts - Mount Kimbie most obviously, though there's elements of George Fitzgerald's r'n'b stylings in there - but Shelter Point's sound is a good a two steps to the left of anything else we've seen from Scuba's baby. The two piece act manage to work with a spectacularly diverse sound palette of analogue synthesis, upright pianos, spectral effects and some unique vocals that will undoubtedly garner James Blake comparisons, despite having a great deal more in common with Burial.

Much like Burial, Shelter Point approach dance music with a heavy focus on deconstruction, reconfiguring the building blocks of dance music from the ground up; blurring the synth lines and drawing out the vocals to leave the melodies feeling strained, distant and ineffable. The percussion feels like a vague sketch of a familiar shapes, as hi-hats and claves are reduced to mere frequency spikes, shorn of their decay, whilst the staple 909 snare becomes a broken-glass shatter, or the harsh metallic strike of Zippo. Forever For Now exhibits this best, with brittle yet forceful drums stabbing up through the mix, harshly punctuating the isolation tank synths. In the most literal sense, Shelter Point's aesthetic is "post" dance music - the sounds from after the dance, the fuzzy third-hand memory of bright lights and big beats, drawn from background hum of the city. Occasionally this drags a little, and the 2nd half of the EP is nowhere near as strong as the first, with both Hold on Me and Sleep Easy indulging in excessive chopped and screwed dynamics that detract from their beautifully melancholic feel. That said, the formers detuned vocal snippets are beautifully executed, and hint at further greatness. Coupled with two really strong tracks in Braille and Forever For Now, this is an exciting debut from an act we'll definitely be watching.

Ulrich Schnauss - A Long Way To Fall

I've always been a sucker for Ulrich Schnauss' genre-smash of kraut, shoegaze, trip-hop and everything but the kitchen sink. Maybe it's just a temporal thing, y'know? Maybe everyone's got that one album that just made it for them that one time and they can never let it go. Like how I still love to play Anaesthetic on pub jukeboxes, despite it not even being slightly similar to anything I listen to now, sober, reeling or otherwise. It was just there, then, when I needed it to be. Sixteen with a false ID and a few pounds of spare change...

A Strangely Isolated Place, Schnauss' mega breakthrough, was a massive critical success and deservedly so - just short of an hour of hazy wondrousness that you could lose yourself in over and over again. Even after various lesser works like the rather over-produced Goodbye, his name always reminds me of grey-tinted living rooms at 6am, 275ml Carlsberg bottles in various state of half-fullness, and the fuzzy awareness that the world was coming to life in the flat above, whilst you were living the dream and the party was still going.

New album, free preview. This seemed more interesting than anything critical I could say.

Pole - Waldgeschichten 3 (August 27th)

Pole - Waldgeschichten 3 (August 27th - Pole Music)

Pole continues to broadcast from the most strangely isolated places with the third and final part of his Waldgeschichten series, producing two defiantly dub cuts that work the listener hard with seemingly unending repetition, before finally allowing rays of light to permeate the mix. In contrast to the skanking dub of the first EP, and the more agressive follow-up, Waldgeschichten 3 takes the slip-slide groove of minimal hip-hop and spreads every element thin, amplifying and enunciating the edge sounds to create a spectral palette. In keeping with the minimalist aesthetic, both tracks work with very simplistic dub structures, slowly shifting timbre and key until the repetitiveness verges on unbearable... and then carries on a while for good measure. Moos places particular emphasis on a resonant clave that becomes almost jarring, so that when the simplistic two-note bassline finally emerges, it's dynamic impact is far more significant. In other hands, this kind of slow-burning minimalism could end up uninspired or boring, but Pole's delicate engineering always ensures a certain level of quality, and Lurch's deliberately rough recording quality and heavy emphasis on static and microphone pickup yields an intriguingly different aesthetic.

14.09.12 Sopot (PL) – Open Source Art Festival (video by P.MA)

04.10.12 Braga (PT) – Semibreve Festival

http://www.festivalsemibreve.

com/

06.10.12 Graz (AT) – Musikprotokoll

http://musikprotokoll.orf.at/

Brain Activity

We like a bit of Blue Daisy on this blog.  His ear for massive noise-scapes lifts his music out of the trip hop genre and into something futuristic and comfortingly dystopian; like William Gibson doing yearn-core.

The new shit? Well, it turns out that shit's fuckin' awesome as well.






Follow him on twitter, where I found the above excerpts.