New York-based cassette label Lily Tapes & Discs have recently been putting out some great split releases – we really liked the German Error Message and Lung Cycles split they released late last year, and were very pleased to hear they had another release in the pipeline. This is said release, another split featuring Ben Lovell’s Lung Cycles, this time paired with Ylayali – the solo project of Francis Lyons (who has also played with Free Cake For Every Creature and Grady Stiles). The blurb says this of the album:
“Each [artist] present[s] a side of music that doesn’t sound written or recorded as much as spilled out and gathered back up quickly, out of necessity and through broken and hurried means. Busy and tired but still distracted, holding on to memories like crumpled drawings pulled from the trash”
If that doesn’t make you want to listen then I’m afraid you’ve wandered into the wrong corner of the internet.
Ylayali gets side A and starts as he means to go on with ‘Clicking Clanking’, counting himself in with some DIY knocks before presenting a lovely little lo-fi acoustic track, complete with reassuringly miserable lyrics such as, “Today I left my room twice, recorded a song I don’t really like”. ‘Blab’ is mainly all lo-fi guitar again, joined by some minimal percussion. It feels patient and intimate, enclosed in the same sense of everyday melancholy that makes Talons’ so great, that feeling of long afternoons in gloomy rooms, when the rest of the human population seem faraway and indistinct, like figures from barely remembered dreams.
“I really miss that shirt and that watch that I lost
and also spending every weekend together
and every summer
going further away from home”
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‘Pinkies’ is a short song which follows a similar thread, full of vague lines which you feel mean the world to the characters involved. “There if you need me, not if you don’t”, he sings. “Walk to the store with you for us both. I want you to know that our pinkies broke”. ‘Crud’ is shorter still, clocking in under a minute yet carrying the same emotional heft (“Something good came out of both of us instead I saw some little bit of crud, a little thing about to fall off of the bigger better thing”), while ‘Cool Burnout’ starts with a jittery looped drum sample before vocals enter and the percussion settles into a simple beat, like the sound of someone striking a hollow bamboo shoot over and over. “After dinner the day feels over” Lyons sings, ensuring that the air of despondency lasts until the very end. The track finishes side A with some heavier reverb-laden guitars, which themselves cut very abruptly, paving the way for the next act.
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‘April Journal Excerpts’, the first offering on Lung Cycles’s side B, is a sonic collage of slightly distorted audio clips and ambient recordings, things like people chattering and birdsong, what could easily quite literally be diary entries of the aural variety. After a while some gentle guitar work enters too, ticking over like time on fast-forward. ‘Pull Me Apart’ is a very pretty song with swirling tumbling guitar and hushed vocals, while the closer, ‘Hottest Day of the Year So Far (11pm version)’, is a measured guitar track with a background hum of tape hiss that sounds like running water or falling rain in some analogue dreamscape.
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You can get the album on cool limited release cassette (see below), or as a digital download, via the Lily Tapes & Discs Bandcamp page.
