Tracklisting

1. Saturday Night – The Wooden Sky
2. Wings – Field Report
3. Infestation – Bear Medicine
4. Cigarettes – Oquoa
5. Chris Bell – M. Lockwood Porter
6. Ride On, Molina – Rivulets
7. Farewell Transmission – Songs: Ohia
8. HSKT – Sylvan Esso
9. Reconstruct (feat. Seafloor) – Photay
10. Second Night – Mansionair
11. Beacon – DEAREST
12. Sweetness – Wayne Szalinksi
13. Yellow Leaves – Ezkiel
14. Travel Advisory – Baby Mollusk
15. ESRT (2001) – Whatever, Dad
16. Black Kettle – Real Life Buildings
17. Six Dollar Sunglasses – Steve Palmer
18. I Have Heard of a Land – C.Strøm
19. Blue Ridge Mountain Blues – Wes Tirey
20. Breaking Bad – Talons’
21. Raft – Sarah Winchester
22. Ontario Gothic – Foxes in Fiction
23. Thrown – Kiasmos
24. You (Nate Connelly Rework) – Nils Frahm
25. Form By Firelight (With Raphaelle Standell) – Jon Hopkins
26. Lights – Mt. Judge
27. I Love – David Karsten Daniels

Remember that we make a mix like this every month, so if you want even more cool new music then head over to the Wake the Deaf 8tracks page, or read the site itself!

October 2014 Mix from Wake The Deaf on 8tracks Radio.

The post October 2014 Roundup – A Mixtape appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The band utilize an odd brew of instruments, including the standard fare of guitar, piano bass and percussion, as well as cello, flute, harmonica, mandolin and even circus organ. Opener ‘Redbird’ is an instrumental track which reminded me of JBM but then ‘Big Chief,’ another instrumental, uses flutes to invoke mystical-desert images, and while I’m no expert on Native American music (so this might be a pop culture-induced error), we get the most explicit shamanistic vibes of spirits inhabiting bright star-filled skies and hard flat plains filled with scrub and birds and visions.

Other standouts include ‘Infestation’, a dark and rollicking number supported by stuttering cello and wild harmonica, ‘Blood in Common,’ another finger-snapping rock track and ‘Sevens’, which a far more gentle, pastoral folk song.

There’s a strange something that runs through these tracks, and to ignore this something is to miss what makes the album so distinctive. This something is not entirely earthly but neither is it extraterrestrial. It’s more about that feeling of profound mystery we feel when looking into space or considering existence beyond our own experience of it. It’s to do with our relationship with the moon and the stars before we started measuring them and visiting them and giving them numerical codes as names. It’s an album about unanswerable questions. This is captured perfectly on the final track, ‘All You Celestials’, with its lyrics of :

“Didn’t you see how the moon split the sky
and poured out it’s cold light on hollow dark nights?
And all you celestials in orbit display
a circular pattern of waxing and wane.”

You can buy the album now on CD, Vinyl or digital download via Bandcamp.

The post Bear Medicine – The Moon Has Been All My Life appeared first on Various Small Flames.