This is not a record that unfolds gently, beginning with what could equate to a sonic jump-scare from its very first second. ‘The Temple (Hymn)’ opens with pounding percussion, like a malevolent force hammering at the door, demanding entry. From there the track builds into an insistent march, snarls and stabs of distorted atmospherics giving the whole thing an ominous inevitability. A swift and unavoidable fall into what’s to come, the harsh and brutal world of Myths.

If ‘The Temple’ is the descent then follow-up ‘Depth’ feels like an arrival. The track is a slow build masterpiece, all ominous percussion and ghostly groaning drones. Here the drums take a backseat as the ambience gusts and moans like alien gales across the scorched earth of this new landscape. ‘Invok (Pure Kult)’ follows suit, steeped in a dreadful unease, its percussion like the sound of your own heartbeat jumping in your ears in the ominous too-quiet. ‘The Truth’ goes even further, perhaps the record’s subtlest track which plays something like the abstract wind sounds that give so many David Lynch scenes the lingering sense of the strange and powerful.

Myths’ longest piece, ‘Feral Fauna (Severed Myth)’ arises from the previous track with the patience and rhythm of a ritual, ghostly synths snaking from the centre of a shifting ring of rattling percussion. It might not pack the same primal punch as the opening track, but it’s the moment that best captures the essence of the record. A ritual rite, a dark and primitive hymn, a celebration or summons to long-forgotten ancient forces.

Myths is out now and available via Bandcamp. Alternatively, head to Lost Tribe Sound to get the entire subscription series.

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This spring sees the pair return with their third album, Constant Connection. A joint release between Night School and Fire Talk Records, the record represents a development of this style. Soundscapes as both landscapes and mindscapes, spaces through which Orchard’s vocals emerge with an almost incantatory logic.

Erasers have unveiled the title track as a preview of the record, and its intuitive and immersive sound captures the atmosphere perfectly. “The core of this song came together quickly over the course of a morning writing session,” the band explain. “As many good ideas do, this one seemed to gel in the space of a few minutes, the drum rhythm, bassline, and repeated synth melody sat well together immediately […] there’s something about this one that just sits really well with us, so it seems fitting to have named the album after it.”

The result is something of a paradox, evoking both the fragility and timeless majesty of the land. A force almost beyond comprehension that nevertheless requires care and fostering. “As usual, layers of synth and keys whirl around over the top of a classic Rupert drum loop,” the band continue. “Voice is used almost as another instrument, making melodies and repetitions on the delicate nature of existing in the world and the strength in connection.”

The track comes complete with a video directed and edited by Duncan Wright:

Constant Connection is out via Fire Talk and Night School Records on the 22nd April and you can pre-order it now from the Erasers Bandcamp page.

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After a long stint on tour, Lord returned to Future Museums with renewed focus. The result is Pre-Form, a record released on Holodeck Records inspired by his experiences of lucid dreaming and out-of-body experiences. Previous Future Museums releases have been rooted in guitar, and Pre-Form sheds this completely, a symbolic gesture that speaks to the themes of the record. A pull away from conventional pop structures as a kind of sonic astral projection, the Future Museums spirit existing beyond the framework which brought it into life.

The mood is typified by ‘Leaving the Vessel’, the title representing both out-of-body experiences and the move beyond stylistic conventions. The sense of transcendence which permeates Pre-Form goes far deeper than the typical ambient escapism. Rather, it represents a cohesive move to push outside of so-called limits in the hope of finding something new.

Take ‘Peace Guppy’, its peaceful swirls leading the listener out into an expansive dreamscape, though the mood is complicated beyond its blissful shimmer by a pressing synth that emerges from the back of the scene. A force just out of view which Lord, and thereby the listener, is encourage to pursue.  For the work of Future Museums presents meditative relaxation as a means not an end, encouraging curiosity and exploration in order to achieve new things.

Pre-Form is out now via Holodeck Records and you can get it from the Future Museums Bandcamp page.

Artwork by Samantha Wendel, Photo by Daniel Di Domenico

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Just how these demons manifest within your technology is unclear, though perhaps Rochester, New York-based recording project Occult Modem Settings has inadvertently taken a good guess. Latest release Something Died in the Wall sits at the intersection of the quotidian and horrific, blending lo-fi bedroom tones with devotional peals and ominous noise. Lead single ‘Doubled-Edged Convenience’ serves as the perfect example, its sincere ambient sound hammered flat by a depressed air, while an ever-present menace lurks in the form of distortion.

The atmosphere holds across the record. Something like Talons’ should their equipment be possessed by our friends Boyce and Boice. From the haunted field recordings of ‘Good Ambiguity’ and the title track, to the malevolent static and weight of ‘Never Hear It’, Something Died in the Wall offers songs inhabited by something violent and strange. Though most unnerving is how the mood lands not as some aberration from everyday living, but rather the unspoken textures beneath its mask.

Something Died in the Wall is out and available from the Occult Modem Settings Bandcamp page.

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As we wrote in our review of Like Author, Like Daughter, Johnston developed the Midwife project during a residency at Rhinoceropolis, a Denver venue/co-op that was closed in 2016 during a period of high tensions around the safety of DIY spaces following Oakland’s Ghost Ship fire. Residents like Johnston found themselves evicted and forced to disperse across Denver to start over. But despite being closed as a physical space, the spirit of Rhinoceropolis lived on, not least in the friendships and creative partnerships that were forged there.

One such relationship was between Johnston and her Rhinoceropolis roommate Colin Ward. “He was my roommate and was the embodiment of that place in a lot of ways,” Johnston describes. “I was always learning so much from him, about life and being an artist. He was an amazing teacher and friend to me.” Sadly, Ward passed away in 2018, and Johnston turned to music to try to capture the ensuing, otherwise indescribable feelings.

Forever is the result, a six song record that the label describe as “a latticework of soft focus guitars and precise melodies—anthems of light piercing through gray clouds of drone.” Opening track ‘2018’ approaches the loss that formed the album’s context head on. “This is really happening to me,” Johnston sings, the track’s ethereal drift like the weightless descent of delayed grief. “Get the fuck away from me 2018.”

Single ‘Anyone Can Play Guitar’ is an attempt to square the enormity of grief against its thousand banal components. Johnston’s declarations—anyone can play guitar, fall in love, say goodbye—could be read as warnings, as self-deprecation, as fatalism in the aftermath of the loss. Maybe the sheer commonality of death makes a joke of us, or perhaps the shared nature of grief elevates us to a higher purpose.

But the confrontation of ‘Anyone Can Play Guitar’ cannot be maintained. The plaintive instrumental ‘Vow’ follows, like the jarring second slap of mourning that arrives later and always in solitude, a creeping, sinking finality that’s been waiting for the guard to drop. Anger and disbelief exhausted, the focus switches to memorial. ‘Language’ comprises of just one line, the first half of which is repeated across the four minute run-time. “How do I say this in every language?” Johnston asks, before following with the second half, delivered just once but with sledgehammer poignancy, “I will never forget you.”

The first half of ‘C.R.F.W’ is a poem read by Ward himself, capturing mortality in the image of a leaf falling away from a tree during autumn, a verse that is incredibly moving even without the prior context (the piece, which can be found in Junk Jet n°5, is experimental in form and presentation, so this is an approximation of the structure according to our display limitations):

d e a t h   i s   n o t   v i o l e n t

if  you ask the leaf on the tree in autumn if it is scared to fall off the branch, it will say,

‘i have given all I am to this tree, am tired, and i’ll float on down now’

imagine  the  way  a  breeze  feels  against  your  leaf   body
while  you  finally  don’t  have  to  hold  on anymore.

There’s a moment once these final words are delivered, the briefest pause of silence. When Midwife’s haunting tones reemerge, they do so as an extension of this. Non-silence as silence, sound as movement and light. The sensation continues into the fuzzed-out shimmer of finale ‘S.W.I.M’, and somehow works retroactively back through the preceding songs too. The record is not Colin Ward remembered but transfigured, absorbed into some greater energy, some bigger thing. Lost, but only to those left behind. “I wanted to write him a letter,” Johnston says, “I wanted to make something for him in his memory.” But Forever feels more like a letter from him to us. Hang on in there, he seems to be saying. Hang on until it is time to let go.

Forever is out now on The Flenser and you can get it via their webstore or the Midwife Bandcamp page.

Photo by Alana Wool

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This month sees Dylan M. Howe team up with Lobby Art to release Southern Gap, the first proper album under his own name. Building upon the foundations of his previous work, the record finds an artist at the height of his powers, the ten years of groundwork leading to a newfound clarity and assurance. “Southern Gap is a confident gesture,” writes Sam Wenc (AKA Post Moves). “A patient and pensive collection of tracks that point to an artist valuing growth, expansion and peace with the palette in which they color their world.”

Thematically, Southern Gap is concerned with the empty and the derelict, evoking structures stripped of their intended purpose, left as monuments to a sense of hope and ambition that has long since receded into irrelevance. “This is music for buildings that no longer serve a human purpose,” Howe explains. “A sonic embodiment of spaces that were once meant for dwelling but can’t function as such.”

The pervasive drone of opener ‘Arcade Flutes’ conjures such spaces, housing nothing beyond draughts and damp air and a creeping sense of loss. The melodica and other sounds warbling beneath the tone are echoes of a squandered future, old energies vibrating, haunting, merged now with the creak of the wind and drip of the walls. Community, it seems, has long since departed from Howe’s world. Only isolation and its steady decay are waiting for us now.

Its downbeat opening spoken word segment like some elegy for lost things, ‘Ritual For Conscious Dying’ continues such ideas, pushing a brooding ambient sound toward a subtle dub beat. In shading its melancholic spirit with an ominous edge, the track is suggestive of some dark force within time, or perhaps some ulterior timelessness, a lurking menace that will outlast us and our plans, and sweep into the hollow remains when all else is gutted. Is it any wonder then that we spend to much time looking backward, towards the past?

There’s a near geological weight to ‘Ninety Blocks’, its organ hum needling high and falling again, an earth force of rock and gas and heat. Wenc draws an accurate comparison to the work of Kali Malone, the track sharing the same willingness, be it patience or bravery or resolve, that made The Sacrificial Code so besetting and moving. With its delicate rumbling synths and cyclical discordant samples, closer ‘Courtyard’ brings to mind other sources, the sinister industrial dread of Pye Corner Audio blended with the atonal, obscured violence of Dean Hurley’s work on Twin Peaks. The track is a fitting conclusion, painting a world in which echoes rise to replace all things and mourning this loss with a plaintive, wounded hum.

We’re delighted to share the record in full a few days early, so grab your headphones and dig in below:

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Released via Whited Sepulchre, Passageways sees Daniel work in his most personal manner yet. Inspired by the secluded apartment complex his parents managed in Cleveland, the album is one of stillness and hidden spaces, the quietness just a front behind which life both familiar and strange unfolds. Therefore, while built from solitudinous echoes, the record is permeated by an ever-present fondness that is anything but alone. “This is my folk record in a way,” Daniel explains. “It is not musically obvious, but more in terms of how I approached the writing: A sense of sentimentality about home, about a place and time.”

Passageways could be said to refer to the corridors of the apartment complex, its songs a slow walk along their labyrinthine course. The silence there is tangible, a sound unto itself, yet each closed door represents not restriction but possibility. The sound maps such an idea through suggestion, an indirect recreation of Daniel’s own experiences. The album is one of hindsight, something of a retracing, Daniel charting his current position right back to a childhood spent imagining life behind closed doors. His role as an artist is not to show us the potentialities that exist, but rather remind us that they do. For we all have our own hallways to wander, our own homes to return to.

Passageways is out on now via Whited Sepulchre and you can get it from Bandcamp.

Photo by Jared Britton

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Though to focus on terrible feelings as a beginning and end of Megadead is to miss the point. […] To flatten this into the trope of anti-social introvert misses the true admixture of forces at work—the guilt, the shame, the dreams impossible to achieve. The promises that could never be kept, the nostalgia for things that never existed.

We’re really pleased to be able to share Shaw’s own words on the record with this detailed track-by-track analysis.

1. megadead dot party

Like most of my stuff these days, this started off as me just playing a sad melody on my laptop keyboard. Qwerty-Fi. And like most of this album, it mostly sounded rubbish until my friend Neil (Broken Shoulder) added his magic guitar noodling. I sent him the album demos late last year and asked if he could add as much or little guitar to them as he could, with the condition that my control-freak self could still chop them up and use them however I wanted. I loved the guitar on this one so much that I didn’t touch a thing and fairly instantly promoted it to album opener.

2. All Body Start Feeling Down

More Qwerty Action. I feel like a lot of work went into this, but I’m not sure it shows. Finding the right samples was key to setting the emotional tone here I think. The main keyboard melody is lowkey sad, but it’s the answerphone messages that really pushes it over the edge. It kinda continues with the party theme too. Your loved ones miss you, you don’t even want to be at the stupid party, but yet here you are anyway, in a mess again.

3. Melanomates

The title here is some of my best work – encapsulating my dual fears of both skin cancer and making friends. It doesn’t have much to do with the song, but it’s a winner. The song however, regales one of my bucket-list wishes to take a golfclub into work and smash up the office. I don’t want to hurt anyone, just cause insurmountable property damage.

4. PUSH IT DOWN

Another one here where Neil’s guitar probably saves it from being a pretty unremarkable B-side. He didn’t have to write three completely different and complementary guitar parts, but he did, because he’s a saint. It’s one of those moments where I think “if I’m just going to rely on someone else always saving this album from being consistently average, should I really call it a ‘Benjamin Shaw’ record?” But then like everything else in my life, I just PUSH THOSE FEELINGS DOWN and let my sub-conscience and existential early morning anxiety deal with it. It’ll be fine.

5. Terrible Feelings!

Speaking of which, here is one of my favourite songs on the album. I just like that it has no real structure or pattern, just keeps pounding and spinning like those hangover panic attacks you started getting recently. Let it be known that this is MY GUITAR on here though. All mine. Hence it just repeating over and over again like it’s an artistic choice and not just lack of skill or imagination.

6. This is Stupid.

A quick palate cleanser here. I honestly think this is just on this album to undercut myself. Or more likely to make it look like I’m undercutting myself, so the singer-songwriter-ness of my choices aren’t so shameful. The slots and pokies sounds were recorded at the Croxton Hotel just down the road. It’s a nice place with just old people playing the poker machines all day, and they let me sit there on my laptop for hours with just one drink.

7. Blue Teeth Thursdays

This is a whole lot of emotions here. Too much for me to cope with anyway, so I’ll brush over all that. The bones of it actually date back to like 2006 or something, and there’s snippets of the acoustic guitar in there from the original 2006 demo. It’s actually one of my favourite songs I’ve ever written. I like how there are completely definable melodic sections to the song, but none that could be called a verse or chorus with a sentimental hook. It just keeps leaving and moving on and starting again, never really finding itself. SOUND FAMILIAR??

8. A Brand New Day

I swear this started out as an upbeat tune, like something that Eels guy would crank out in his sleep. But then Neil added his guitar and I was like, ‘damn, all this has to go’. So I binned everything I’d done and just kept Neil’s numerous guitar parts and shifted them down a few tones and speeds, and ended up with a nice wee dirge. The robot voices are from a neat freeware voice synth called Alter/Ego. The internet is ace.

9. hole

The first song I wrote for this album, and the first song I’d written in around 3 years. Again, no real chorus, but I’m not a miracle worker. I’ve seen a lot of people say they think this album is weird, but it really doesn’t feel like that to me. I honestly tried my hardest to make this album sound as beautiful as I could, and I think this last song almost reaches what I was grasping for. It’s a sad one (obv), but it’s got some nice bits in there. Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoy.

Megadead is out now on Audio Antihero and Kirigirisu Recordings.

Photos by Aisha Latosski

The post Benjamin Shaw – Megadead: Track by Track Guide appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The lack of breaks or pauses provides a clear through line to the EP, allowing Barfoot to blur the distinction between styles. As such, even the most divergent sounds feel interconnected, any changes feeling not some whim of the artist but a clear progression from what has come before, leaving the listener to probe exactly how and why each development relates to the previous sound. This lends something of a supple nature to the sound, an organic plasticity like that of the mind, where wildly altering thoughts can occur, though a clear path can always be drawn between points.

Which is how haunted drone of the opening can transition into the glitchy electronic continuation, and then into the thin, ghost town echoes of the closing period without any sense of abruptness. Instead, the sonic transformations leave an intuitive impression, some esoteric logic creeping through from a world not quite our own. The description of the release calls the sound “ambient experiments with tape memories. Fragments from a nice old plateau; a thin place between worlds,” and while the sentence might not make much sense before listening, you soon discover it to be the perfect summation of Barfoot’s aesthetic.

A Thin Place Between Worlds is out now via Canigou Records and you can get it from Bandcamp, including on a limited cassette edition, complete with hand-stamped artwork, and digital.

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‘Ambitions’ is an apt word, because We Gathered at Wakerobin Hollow is more than an album. To be released over an 18-month period, the project consists of forty songs split across nine chapters that combine to form a speculative narrative. Beginning in Odena, Alabama, where a fire devastates an oil refinery, the release charts the lives of various characters as they grow from children to adults and eventually spread out across the country, following their own stories. Still, the world impinges on their lives in its strange ways, with a variety personal, public and ecological forces eventually driving them away from homes in Asheville, New York, and Bennington and back to Odena and Wakerobin Hollow.

This month sees the release of the first chapter of the project. Subtitled It All Starts in Odena, these five songs introduce Emma, who appears to be the central protagonist, along with her father Alan and sister Jen, plus friends Julia, Marsha and Jon. The beginning of the story also serves to introduce the Mending sound, which is marked by a sense of weight and poignancy, the melancholic-yet-affirming instrumentation almost conjuring The Antlers’ Hospice.

As the narrative unfolds chronologically, Chapter 01 is understandably concerned with openings. ‘Alan at Emma’s Cradle’ depicts just that, a father not sure he can be what is required of him but determined to try all the same, while ‘Black Soot’ heralds the oil refinery blaze, a portent that some great event is occurring on the horizon. ‘Alan after the Fire’ zooms into the disaster headlong, though the immediacy is offset by a sluggish tempo, as though shock and trauma has numbed the violence of the moment.

As if to prove its novelistic heft, the closing two songs switch the focus away from the fire and onto Emma’s youth. ‘Emma, Jon, and the Bee Sting’ is a fairly bucolic vision of her younger days, though there is a sense of danger and loss hanging over the scene both through the bee sting of the title and the risk of someone leaving. This continues into the adolescence of ‘Nicholas Quarry, the ordinary scene of teenage risk and rebellion shot through with a sense of natural wonder and happenstance, as highlighted by an encounter with a doe in the final verse.

The close is appropriate in that it captures the Mending aesthetic, a close engagement with both the highs and lows that serve to jab and jolt us into remembering how we are alive. Ultimately, this sense of awe is what marks the first chapter, and the ambition to explore it so profoundly and patiently seems to be Mending’s unique talent.

The first chapter of We Gathered at Wakerobin Hollow is out now and available from the Mending Bandcamp page, and the next chapters will be released on a bi-monthly basis.

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