Working between soul, jazz and R&B, Portland, ME-based artist Angelikah Fahray is a rising star of the New England scene, winning attention with a sound willing to embrace both haunting and sensual styles. Latest single ‘In My Coffin’ is the perfect introduction for those unfamiliar. A slow, sultry croon which envelopes the audience, the song occupies an ambiguous tone which never quite shows its hand. Is it romantic, bitter, melancholic? Or perhaps all three spun into an enthralling web?

‘In My Coffin’ is out now and available from the usual places.

Casual Technicians – On A Trip To Nowhere

Though now separated by geography, all three members of Casual Technicians have a long history with the music scene in Portland, Oregon. Tyler Keene and Nathan Baumgartner were founding members of And And And while Boone Howard fronted The We Shared Milk and the Boone Howard band. This experience shined through on Four Corners EP, the latest release from Repeating Cloud, where the band offer a confident and playful sound that’s not only willing to experiment between genres but to meld them together seamlessly. Opener and single ‘On a Trip to Nowhere’ plays something like the bummed-out dispatch from contemporary existence a la talons’ as processed through a laidback Steely Dan warmth.

there’s so many times that I’m tired and I’m in the basement
working on stuff and I take a nap
and I go out in the backyard and cut the grass
and shave it down as close as my old head

I feel beefed up but burnt down
burping up bubbles from a weird old beer
that looks like its been open for a half of a year
imagine that

makes me wish it was later in the day

French For Rabbits – Leech

Towards the end of next month, Aotearoa dream pop band French For Rabbits return with a brand new EP In the End I Won’t Be Coming Home. The follow-up to 2021 LP The Overflow, the four song release was recorded this past summer with strings from Auckland’s The Black Quartet and sees an evolution of the French For Rabbits style that we’ve previous described as “translucent and melancholic and alive.” Latest single ‘Leech’ is the perfect introduction, an exploration of “the push and pull of love” suffused with ethereal harmonies and a soaring atmosphere, at once epic and fragile, the lingering melancholy burning away to reveal the rousing chorus.

Cause your love is my only comfort
And your love is my only reward
But if my heart is a leech and you’re still out of reach
All I’m left with is all of my thoughts.

German Error Message & Noah Kittinger – It’s night and you’re alone

The latest release in Furious Hooves‘ Furhoof Halloween Split Series, It’s night and you’re alone offers two ambient instrumental tracks—one by German Error Message and one by Noah Kittinger (of Bedroom)—which live up to the release’s title and offer the ideal Halloween soundtrack for those looking beyond the cliched and the camp. The songs were written six years, eleven months and one day apart from one another, though despite the gap somehow seem to be in conversation. Paul Kintzing’s ‘10.30.16’ plays as a walk down a lonely forest path as night descends, its slowly gathering momentum mimicking the kind of latent dread which comes down with the dark, while Kittinger’s ‘10.1.23’ offers a different sort of night-time passage. A lonely journey through a darkening countryside as viewed from the window of a train, and furthermore one complicated by the liminal strangeness of such an experience. Time both upended and hauntologically conspicuous, your own reflection mirrored back to you in the glass, both part of the view and not.

It’s night and you’re alone is out now via Furious Hooves. Get it via Bandcamp.

Library Card – Cognitive Dissonance

Drawing inspiration from acts like Protomartyr and Life Without Buildings as well as poets such as Anne Clark, Rotterdam’s Library Card are a band of contradictions. Dissonant yet melodious, rambunctious yet taut, volatile yet cool. Lead by Lot van Teylingen and featuring Emre Karayalçin, Kat Kalkman and Mitchell Quitz, the outfit are now preparing to release their new EP Nothing Interesting, and single ‘Cognitive Dissonance’ serves as a encapsulation of this incongruous sound. An examination of the competing forces which coexist within us, an internal struggle between the desire to be selfish and altruistic.

Unspeakable
Unthinkable
Do we simply stare at what’s horrible and forgive it?
Do we simply notice but not see at all?
Truth is a beautiful illusion
Where is your truth now

‘Cognitive Dissonance’ is out now via AT EASE. Get it from the Library Card Bandcamp page.

MVSO – Hold Clear

A collaboration between songwriter/vocalist duo Mat Vairo and Saumon Oboudiyat, MVSO originated as little more than a space for the pair to experiment with music, though soon developed into something more considered and official. The result is Proprioception, an EP pencilled for release in spring 2024 which sees the artists explore universal themes of life, death and the passing of time through a decidedly personal lens. This allows them to take on the biggest ideas while also recording a specific moment in their lives and the position of their friendship within it. Single ‘Hold Clear’ hints at the evocative, simmering style this takes, where the intimacy of the personal opens out into something cryptic and deep.

MX LONELY – Rest In Salt

With their new EP SPIT coming on Candlepin Records early in 2024, Brooklyn‘s MX LONELY have unveiled single ‘Rest In Salt’ to signal their pivot towards a heavier alt rock/shoegaze aesthetic. With Rae Hass taking over lead vocal duties, the song pitches the listener into a shadowy, foreboding world full of needling intensity and crushing weight, the vocals emerging from within this tumult like the helpless cries of the damned. “’Rest In Salt’ is about being trapped in purgatory, pure and simple,” as Hass explains, “about being ridden with anxiety and stuck to the couch. It’s that feeling of jealousy for the dead and the tinge of guilt that follows. When you lie so still you think you can almost remember the freedom of being nothing at all.”

SPIT is out on the 6th February via Candlepin Records and you can pre-order it now.

See Jazz – 1982

Described as a band for “uncool people everywhere scattered to the edges of contemporary anywheres,” See Jazz might be the solo vehicle of Aaron Pfannebecker, though the endeavor is far from a one-person project. Forthcoming album Is This Anything?, out next month via Flower Sounds, sees the likes of Adam Langellotti (Kurt Vile and the Violators), Jed Smith (My Teenage Stride and Jeanines) and Zara Bode (Sweetback Sisters) lend their talents to bring to life a sound at once ethereal and danceable. Take single ‘1982’, so airy if feels on the verge of drifting upwards and away, though all the while anchored by Pfannebecker’s vocals and their exploration of the stubborn nature of human perspective.

Is This Anything? is out on the 10th November via Flower Sounds and you can pre-order it now.

Wet Fruit – Dandelions at the Gate

Hailing from Portland, OR, Wet Fruit take inspiration from a grab bag of genres to create their own singular sound. New album Dandelions at the Gate, out now via Half Shell Records, has indie rock, punk, psych and experimental DNA. But far from an unwieldy mutant, the result is something honed and cohesive. Take opener and title track, its dreamy textures and harmonies cut through with a propulsive energy, giving the sense of escalating towards some moment of chaos or clarity. But as songs like ‘St. Charles’ show, the band are about more than hectic rhythms, stripping away the frenetic elements in favour of something more drifting. Like a late-night drive, sealed into your own little world and estranged from passing cars, left instead to consider the finer textures of solitude.

Dandelions at the Gate is out now via Half Shell Records.

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With new EP Rooting For You out early in October, Philly-based songwriter Air Devi has returned with the single, ‘Ashrita’. Based on a bad personal experience with a musician, the track looks to the artists who persevered in an industry not always welcoming—Ashrita from Pinkshift, Lata Mangeshkar, Abi from Kulfi Girls, Noor Jahan—ultimately finding empowerment within stubborn perseverance.  “But Ashrita she’s got my back now / Oh Ashrita, Saraswati can rock out,” Devi Majeske sings. “And Lata Ji I know that she’d be proud / Oh Ashrita won’t let us feel left out.”

BAL – Hyperdrive

After introducing themselves with title track ‘Seafoam‘, BAL continue to lay the foundations for an upcoming album on Furious Hooves with latest single, ‘Hyperdrive’. A huge, swaggering song which shows both the attitude and playfulness of the band. Its sci-fi themes brought to life with pounding drums, bold guitars and ice cool vocals. Futuristic rock with more than one foot in the nineties. Check out the animated video by Brandon Hackler below:

Seafoam is coming soon via Furious Hooves.

Bambara – Tapetown Session

Earlier this year Brooklyn-based post-punk outfit Bambara released their latest album Love on My Mind via Wharf Cat Records, and recently the band called by Copenhagen‘s Grapehouse Studio for a Tapetown Session to perform a couple of the tracks. Despite the cinematic nature of its gothic style, Bambara’s work has always primarily hinged on a sense of impassioned momentum, the sound and Reid Bateh’s frantic delivery fuelling one another. These live takes harness this in its purest form, with performances of ‘Mythic Love’ and ‘Birds’ displaying both their fervent preacher ravings and stone cold cowboy cool.

Love on My Mind is out now via Wharf Cat Records and you can get it from Bandcamp.

Cache Mirrors – Collision; Losing The Work Horse

The project of LA‘s Cormac Shirer Brown, Cache Mirrors creates compositions at the intersection of ambient and drone. With new record History of a Closed Circuit about to be released on Repeating Cloud, Brown has unveiled the single ‘Collision; Losing The Work Horse’ to give a picture of his work’s careful depth. A slow-moving track which seems to possess an almost nostalgic remove, though as it progresses it inches closer to the listener until it’s nearby and all around, then fades out just as readily.

Katharina Nuttall – Inspired by John Keats

After a period spent scoring films, Katharina Nuttall is set to return to art rock spheres with her fourth full-length album, The Garden, on Novoton. Latest single ‘Inspired by John Keats’ highlights the idiosyncratic vision and depth of her work. A surreal dreamscape which keeps its true nature close to its chest, the strange and eerie march of the opening unfolding into something quietly transcendent, though returning to the original rhythm before any crescendo is reached. All the while Nuttall’s vocals barely more than a murmur, ambiguous until the end. Check out the video directed, filmed and edited by Jacob Frössén below:

‘Inspired by John Keats’ is out now via Novoton and available from the usual places.

Lore City – Animate

Following on from 2021 album Participation Mystique, Portland’s Lore City are gearing up for the release of brand new 7″, Under Way. The track expands upon the style developed on previous releases, merging widescreen and often ominous post-punk soundscapes with the ethereal textures of folk. Lead track ‘Animate’ pitches the listener into such a world, tactile with pounding rain and open space yet somehow uncoupled from the physical plane too, its percussion like some disembodied stalker. An entity with a message to share.

Matching Outfits – It Keeps Happening

The debut single of Berlin‘s Matching Outfits, ‘It Keeps Happening’ serves as an introduction to their forthcoming album Band Made Out Of Sand, out next month on Kitchen Leg Records. Pairing playful pop tones with droll conversational delivery, the song subverts its twee roots with deadpan glee, the vocals possessing a genuine fatigue with the self-centred drive of songwriting. And as the thought develops, so too does the tempo, the rhythms lifting as though a fire is lit beneath it, leading towards the final, furious catharsis.

I’m tired of me
I’m tired of talking about me
I’m tired of singing about me
But it keeps happening

Band Made Out Of Sand is out on the 21th September via Kitchen Leg Records and you can find Matching Outfits on Bandcamp.

Monolithe Noir – Askre

Back in July we previewed Rin, the forthcoming album from Monolithe Noir on Capitane Records and Humpty Dumpty Records with single ‘Barra Bouge‘. “Steady rhythmic drumming allow[s] the track to coil tight like a spring,” we wrote, “but the unerring purpose of its slow march is warped by some strange force […] a world of lightning and dense cloud always gathering toward its own thunderous end.” Latest track ‘Askre’ is no less evocative, another transportive vision built around a theme played on a home-crafted hurdy gurdy. A digi-medieval dream which unfolds with portentous weight.

Rin is out now on Capitane Records and Humpty Dumpty Records and you can grab it from Bandcamp.

Phoebe Go – Hey

The third solo release from Melbourne‘s Phoebe Go, latest single ‘Hey’ highlights the songwriter at her most poignant and open. A track written in the aftermath of a family tragedy, the stripped back sound exists within the strange quiet which follows traumatic events. Hushed and confessional and wearing its pain openly, probing not only the grief inherent in such a loss but the attempts to understand them too. And how personal emotions can come to cloud our ability to truly empathise. “Around the time I was writing it I was sort of fixated,” Phoebe Go explains, “trying so hard to understand him, you know, what he was thinking and feeling and living. I think my own perspective got so lost in his.”

Sister Wanzala – Top Drawer

Back in May, we shared the triumphant return of London‘s Sister Wanzala with single, ‘Perfume‘. The band had been away for a while, went the gist of the piece, but they were back and the dream was still alive. Whether or not that still stands true is up in the air, internecine conflict being part and parcel of any project made up of siblings, but they have managed to share new track ‘Top Drawer’ regardless of whether any ceasefire has been breached. “I’ve been dreaming of disaster more and more and more,” sings Patrick Wanzala-Ryan on the rich and drifting track. The dream isn’t over, but who ever said it was a pleasant one?

Sophia Hansen-Knarhoi – Disguise

The first glimpse of forthcoming EP, Wildflowers, ‘Disguise’ introduces the immersive detail and evident control which marks the work of Perth‘s Sophia Hansen-Knarhoi. A reflection on the past offered with slow-burning clarity, enticing the listener in with its ethereal grace but smouldering beneath the surface as it recalls the mistakes and betrayals which mark the strange gap between youth and adulthood. Ultimately recognising the period for what it was, and blossoming into the space left in its wake.

I’ll take my time again
To feel everything in full
Cuz I won’t settle for you
I’ll clean my act up wash you away
In a feat of triumph you’ve left no stain
I watch in fear and disdain

Spirit Ghost – No Future

Pandemic tracks aren’t exactly uncommon right now, but where most look for solace and soul-searching amid the trauma, the new single from Alex Whitelaw’s Spirit Ghost embraces pessimism wholehearted. ‘No Future’ is a track about just that. The inability to imagine good days ahead as the threats pile up, and how this neuters the dreams one has worked towards their whole lives. “Always there’s no future / I feel dumb and useless,” Whitelaw sings, “At least there’s no future / Just another loser.” A society built towards constant growth and progression cannot face the emergent trials. There can be no future for such a place.

Tenci – Two Cups

Following 2020’s My Heart Is An Open Field, Tenci returns this autumn with brand new record A Swollen River, A Well Overflowing on Keeled Scales. It’s an album which utilises the distance its predecessor lacked, allowing Jess Shoman to consider trauma and pain with a clearer perspective. As shown by single ‘Two Cups’, what results is new mood. Call it wisdom, call it understanding. A willingness to embrace of change as an opportunity to grow, no matter how difficult it might seem. Even a glass half empty can be filled again.

The post Weekly Listening: August 2022 #5 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Those who do are greeted with quite the collection. Released in 2017, Mouth Mirroring Ear introduced the instrumental aspect of Blue’s work, its psych-inflected folk soundscapes charting New Weird America in all of its scale and detail. Sound Portraits From The Gelmer Tastle Odyssey (2020) pushed further into free folk territory, playing the soundtrack to a film both surreal and fond, a description which also fits the 2021 releases, albeit in very different ways. Just compare the off-kilter reflection of ‘Born in September’ from Little Dry Creek to the frantic and dramatic ‘A Bio-Forming Populous Cross Cut Into Oblivion’ on Bowl of Art Fruit. Each of the records might fit under the banner of free folk or New Weird, but even these loose labels fail to portray the variety present. Better to just step in and allow them to stand for themselves.

The good folks at Furious Hooves released the four Loretta’s Museum albums over the past five years, and have recently teamed up with Blue’s own Frillimcaster Records Unlimited to put them out on cassette for the first time. In addition, they also released Collected Streams: Singing Songs 2014-2021, a kind of ‘greatest hits’ release of (as the title suggests) Blue’s work with lyrics/vocals, as a special edition vinyl. Essentially an all-access ticket to Loretta’s Museum, allowing the listener to explore every nook and cranny within.

We took the opportunity to ask Loretta a few questions about the release to dig a little deeper into their influences and creative practice.

Hi Loretta, thanks so much for taking the time to speak with us. How does it feel to release a new record and revive a handful of older ones on tape?

Hello, thank you for reaching out. It feels quite exciting to have these new releases in physical form. I love holding objects in my hands and having something tangible to account for the things I’ve created is really important to me. It was also a lot of fun to work with Ryan McCardle in the design and layout process of all these tapes and vinyl.

There’s a noticeable distinction between the instrumental, soundtrack-adjacent work of the four records and the more traditional songs of Collected Streams. Do you recognise a clear distinction between these styles? Are you more attached to one or the other?

I suppose I am a person with many sides for better or for worse, I can’t really tell… But you know, when it comes to making art I’m a firm believer you gotta just go for the feeling that’s closest to you in that exact moment in your life. At times I’ve had a lot to say and felt the best way to manifest those words and feelings was to put it into a fairly simple singing songwriting style. At other periods what worked for me was to just let the instruments do the talking and enjoy the process of bending sound into an encompassing landscape that I feel best portrays my latest phase. I’m not sure I’m attached to one style more than the other but they both hold different meanings to me and each carries a particular set of challenges that I very much enjoy navigating.

I’m always fascinated by the way art arrives to an artist. The mechanics of starting something and seeing it through to its final form. What comes first, what triggers everything else. Could you talk a little of the process in your experience? Curiosity and exploration feel so inherent to the LM sound that the question feels all the more interesting. How do you build something which feels like it is unfurling in real time?

Mmmm, yes, yes… Well, I think when it comes to creating art I always approach it free-style. I almost never have a plan at first. I’ll start with a thought or an image or memory and just see what comes from it with whatever I’m holding in my hand. Then when it starts to grow I get excited and jump up in my seat and say “Ooo! This is fun!” and then I let it all just build from there. I’d say at that point most of the song or painting or poem just creates itself, I’m merely a little vessel for its delivery. When it’s about 90% complete I come back to it and try to wrangle the tangles into something cohesive and understand its direction. I’ve always maintained the belief that making music is a collaboration with the universe just as much as its current state of principles. I think what I mean by that is, I can’t really take much credit for anything I create, maybe just 15% or so? I owe it all to the movement and stillness between the characters and scenery and gravity and trinkets on the trinket shelf. Like I said, I’m just a voluntary vessel.

Collected Streams gathers work written across a sizeable period, and I’m interested in your relationship to the various songs. Do the older track feel distinctly different to the newer ones? Does your most recent work always feel the most familiar, the most inherently you, or are such things not so simple to explain?

Oh dear. Well, everything feels different for sure but the beautiful thing about creating art is that each piece is a perfect snapshot of where I was at when I created it. A very detailed page from an honest diary, I can smell the sweet potatoes simmering on the cast iron or perfectly see the smile on a friend’s face while he rides a dirtbike in the back yard or the way it felt to really know someone deeply even if only momentarily and just play with stillness in the middle of nowhere inside a rental car. When I listen to a song I’ve made it’s a visceral experience of perfectly reliving my state of mind when it was created.

The balance between the physical and metaphysical is a striking aspect of your work. Songs clearly rooted in physical details—be they of the landscape, persons, life itself—but also reaching beyond this in search of a more cosmic tone. As though to accumulate corporeal details with a certain order or intensity is to transcend them somehow. Where would you map your songs on the continuum between ‘real’ and spiritual? Is it even sensible to make such a distinction?

“Corporeal”. I like that word, I’ve never heard it before so I had to look it up. “Relating to a person’s body, especially as opposed to their spirit.” I don’t know that anything is more spiritual than real, but then again I don’t really know much about anything in particular. I’d say if I had to choose I would say my art creations are spiritual ballads for the cosmic abyss. In that maybe, all I’m doing is swimming in one of many physical planes projecting a voice into the unknown and carefully listening for an echo. I think you touched on an important element of my process, I’m always reaching, though that quest isn’t always linear and sure maybe it’s a little to follow. But the lines between the spirit world and what feels so tangibly visible is often very much lost in the moments of constructing a composition.

Could we talk a little about influences? Be it in terms of the music itself, the lyrics, or moods and themes more generally. Are there any songwriters, poets, artists etc. who stand out as having a significant impact on your own style?

This feels like the hardest question of all. That’s good though, I love a good challenge. Well, I think if we’re being real a big influence for my music and art will always be people. I love characters. Sometimes in the grocery store or out on a walk or at work or on a drive I’ll see someone and they’ll just really fill me to the brim with feelings and thoughts. I’ll write a little poem or take their photo. I’ll sit on the feeling they conjured within me and usually it’ll turn into something, someway, somehow. Maybe sometimes it’s someone I loved and I’ll close my eyes and lay on the floor and find them through a beam from my center and wander in the labyrinth until it’s time, time to turn all that reaching into something that can sit still in the sound field or word stew… Yah, know? Make it into art I guess.

My music tastes are so scattered, I don’t even know… but if I’m in the process of making a record I will solely listen to the works in progress. I’ll play a song I’m working on over and over for months, judging it’s every detail until it sits right in the balance of its concept.

What’s next for Loretta’s Museum? Do you have anything in the pipeline, or an idea of the direction you’d like to explore next?

I’d like to do an ultra marathon, so right now I’m just training for that. It’s my hope that in about a year and a half I can do a 100 mile race. I’m not sure what’s possible with the body I sit inside of but it feels good to explore my potential and try something a little different. I don’t have any recordings in progress at the moment, actually I think this is the longest I’ve gone in my adult life without creating music. I just spent the last year locked up behind T-Walls and razor wire, I think I just want to explore for a little while and take in the freedom. Maybe something will come but if I’ve learned anything in my years of creative pursuits, something forced just isn’t worth a damn. We are all little artists and there’s always a poem on our hand.

Collected Streams is out now via Furious Hooves and Frillimcaster Records Unlimited, including a vinyl edition which you can get along with the four previous records on cassette in one handy bundle. Half of all sales from the bundles are being donated to Trans Lifeline.

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Released under the name Dæva, 2016 album Beta Persei focused on an unrefined, instinctual dimension of this self, with both the moniker and title evoking ancient demons and finding a sense of empowerment within the attached connotations of force and independence. This manifest itself as a growing confidence across the record, the music showing a clear development as it progressed. The icy, dreamlike synth pop style grew richer and more fully realised, often compelling itself into motion with dance rhythms which found power in intuitive movement. Put simply, it was anxious and introverted bedroom pop that transcended itself by tapping into the elemental nature of supernatural forces.

That Mead has decided to change her moniker is therefore significant. For new album Vocivos, out via Furious Hooves on the 27th March, Dæva has become Deva Grace. A shift away from ancient demons, Mead explains, and toward “her core being as a plant spirit.” This turn to a more personal essence is born out in the album through an intimate, diary-like style, and though the otherworldly post-Witch House sensibilities remain, Mead employs a richer palette of instrumentation. Deva Grace moves beyond the strictly electronic confines of Dæva and embraces a warmer sound with layers of harp, bass, guitars, Korg Minilogue and Omnichord.

We’re delighted to share a three-track sampler ahead of release to introduce this new aesthetic. The shimmering column of synths in opener ‘Ego Death’ is clearly indebted to Beta Persei but markedly different too, as if blossoming in the space its predecessor created. Likewise the cold haze of ‘Ephemera’ and the way it wears its shadows so lightly, holding the ominous depths as an inviting mystery rather than some inhospitable void. ‘Ribbon’ embraces this luminosity most fully, Mead’s vocals cycling with hypnotic charm. “A ribbon grounds me / voice manifesting” she sings, a mantra that charms the bright instrumentation around itself as a kind of rebirth. Dæva is no more, long live Deva Grace.

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The latest signing of Furious Hooves, BAL is the brand new project of Jack Foster and Jordan Powers, long-time bandmates from acts like House of Fools and Far-Less, who longed to tap into a different side of their artistic sensibilities. Namely a passion for sci-fi and 90s alt/heavy rock. Debut single ‘Seafoam’ introduces this style, a track which transports you to a lush new world, one weighted not by gravity as we know it but hefty guitars and drums. Check out the video by Brandon Hackler below:

‘Seafoam’ is out now via Furious Hooves and you can get it from the BAL Bandcamp page.

Bartees Strange – Heavy Heart

We’ve followed Washington D.C.’s Bartees Strange since 2018’s Magic Boy, and his subsequent rise has been nothing short of meteoric. After his acclaimed debut album Live Forever on Memory Music, Strange has now signed with 4AD, a new period marked by new single ‘Heavy Heart’. The single feels like an acknowledgement of everything that has changed and all that has not. An apology, a promise.

I never wanna miss you this bad
I never want to run out like that
Sometimes I feel just like my Dad
Rushing around
I never saw the God in that
Why work so hard if you can’t fall back?
Then I remember, I rely too much upon
My heavy heart

Check out the video directed by Marisa Dabice of Mannequin Pussy below:

‘Heavy Heart’ is out now via 4AD and you can get it from the Bartees Strange Bandcamp page.

Cave People – I Don’t Want Hope

“I don’t want hope / I don’t need that kind of misinformation.” So opens the lead single from upcoming LP Wind Burn by Philadelphia‘s Cave People on Disposable America. But contrary to its central sentiment, ‘I Don’t Want Hope’ is an upbeat indie rock number that finds some affirming joy in relinquishing one’s optimism. As though the only thing weighing it down were the dreams and expectations, empty things now cast to the wind. “Just don’t give me something to believe,” the track continues, “it won’t agree with my new cynicism / fatalist but at least it’s my decision.”

Dao Strom – Inside

Following 2020’s Traveler’s Ode, Portland, Oregon-based artist Dao Strom has returned with a brand new album, Redux, on Antiquated Future Records. Or perhaps not brand new, because as the title suggests, the tracks are reimaginings of older songs taken from past decades, reworked into what the label describes as a “haunting song-cycle about loved ones, the natural world, and the nuances of emotional memory and Vietnamese diasporic identity.” It’s a process which proved more fruitful than Dao Strom ever expected. “I wrote my songs from a place of honesty in those times,” she explains, “yet in re-recording discovered in them even truer timbres. As if the songs had been waiting for me all this time, to come back to them, to reclaim something left undone; still hidden; left othered.” Check out the single ‘Inside’ below:

Dittocrush & Daniel Young – Coral Rose

With last year’s debut album Growth at a Death Pace, Dittocrush introduced their transportive blend of organic and electronic sounds, using analogue tape samples to create slow and subtle soundscapes full of spirit and texture. A collaboration with Daniel Young, new single ‘Coral Rose’ is no less evocative. Wending pedal steel anchors the track in the American landscape, though by the close you will suddenly realise you have been taken away from earth and returned just as gently.

Laveda – bb

Albany’s Laveda have made their name with a brand of dream pop which feels far larger and deeper than something made by two people. New single ‘bb’ sees Jake Brooks and Ali Genevich pull the trick once again. An introspective meditation on pandemic isolation, the track grows slowly from morose shadow and blossoms into something urgent. “It sounds sad, but it’s not,” Genevich explains. “It’s just reality, and sometimes it’s ok to be angry with the way things are.”

Mark Twang – Sweetness & Love

Gambier, Ohio duo Mark Twang are preparing to release their debut full-length, Companion, and the first single gives a real insight into the album’s sincere, reflective tone. Rising from the ashes of a past relationship, ‘Sweetness & Love’ stands apart from the traditional bitter break-up track, instead choosing to acknowledge and foster the fondness that remains. What emerges is small and tender, and no less beautiful for it.

i hope you find someone
who can give you what you want
i wish you nothing but sweetness and love

Wombo – Below the House

Louisville‘s Wombo have been putting out a series of great singles on Fire Talk Records and their latest ‘Below the House’ is no different. The song is “about leaving things buried for the best sometimes when there’s nothing you could gain from trying to make sense of them,” as the band put it. A track “loosely based on a nightmareish type dream” which exudes its own inherent unease. Like some liminal space between waking and dreaming where nothing is quite what it seems.

‘Below the House’ is out now via Fire Talk Records and you can get it from the Wombo Bandcamp page.

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This style can be traced back through the German Error Message catalogue. A clear through-line exists between Mend and the anxious longing for epiphany on ‘2017’, one rooted in the developments first seen on 2014 album, Haunts. The latter, released on Furious Hooves, itself rose from the cold and melancholic After the Warmth, as though the seasons were reversed and winter broke to a golden autumn. This progression is telling, for it fits within the overarching thematic concerns of Kintzing’s work. Epiphany and transcendence are not as forthcoming as one would wish, and when change does arrive, it is not guaranteed to last. A winter curtailed by a new autumn is a tenuous relief. A season glorious perhaps, but fading all the same.

Though preceded by a number of releases, After the Warmth therefore represents something of an origin point for German Error Message. A record rooted in the isolation of iced windows and early dark created by an artist realising their direction. “I had moved to a new city for school the year before and didn’t know many people and all of my free time outside of school was spent working on it,” Kintzing explains. “My friends would sing with me and add parts when we were home for holidays. The songs came out quickly, many close to fully formed, and I’d rush to get them recorded while they were still fresh. I was still figuring out how to record, and these songs bounced around between an early digital multitrack, a four track cassette recorder, an ancient PC, and finally a Macbook.”

The album never got an official physical release, but in recognition of its eleventh anniversary, Furious Hooves have stepped in to put this right. On February 15th, exactly eleven years to the day since the original release, a cassette edition of After the Warmth will be available. It’s an exciting announcement, not only because it celebrates an incredible record, but because cassette feels like its perfect medium, the enveloping ambience and murmured volume accentuated by the warm organic hiss of a tape deck.

Today we’re delighted to share a video for single ‘Discontent’ to celebrate the announcement. Filmed by Furious Hooves’ Ryan McCardle, the video is the perfect encapsulation of After the Warmth. The sensation of being cut off in a world slowed down by the cold, the only company the small lights peeking through closed blinds across the way. Kintzing’s words are candid in the manner one can be in an empty room. Promises or threats offered to the quiet stillness like prayers. But no matter how sorrowful things sound, there’s something almost magical in the sharing, and the very fact that you’re there to hear it begins to feel miraculous. A reminder of the lights beyond the immediate present, and of the importance of lighting your own lamp too.

After the Warmth is out via Furious Hooves on the 15th February and you can pre-order it now from Bandcamp.

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In celebration of the project’s ten year anniversary, Furious Hooves are releasing Furhoof Halloween Split Series: 2011​-​2021, a limited edition package which collects all eleven Halloween Split Series releases in a double cassette set. Some entries (Iike the songs by mumbledust and the impressively named Spooky Booty & The Tombstone Goofs) capture the kitschy, spooky fun of costumes and free candy brittle, while others turn altogether darker. That something just not-quite-right that walks the streets once the trick-or-treaters are warm and safe in their beds. Check out the likes of Temazcal or Man Eating Sloth if that’s more your thing.

The set also includes this year’s release, which pairs Richmond, VA‘s Jeff Haley and fellow Virginian Kevin Knight. Haley’s song, the ambiguously titled ‘Three Sisters,’ is a jangly if slightly sedate indie pop song on the surface, but there’s something uncanny about the whole thing. Something shifting just out of view, as though there is more to the scene than you can know.

Knight’s ‘Decompose’ is darker still, an ominous late-night descent into streets abandoned to spoil and decay, what Furious Hooves evocatively describe as “a dark journey through a post-apocalyptic forest thick with spore clouds, where the trees have been replaced by the fruiting bodies of a gigantic sentient mycelium.”

Furhoof Halloween Split Series: 2011​-​2021 releases this Halloween, in a double cassette (with “Radioactive Pumpkin” and “Purple Potion” tapes) and zine package. Preorder it now from the Furious Hooves Bandcamp page.

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This summer sees the release of In-Between, a brand new Rainwater LP to be released on vinyl and cassette via Furious Hooves and Luley’s own label, The Home Dome. The title is once again fitting, because while he is now settled in a new home, the record finds Luley experiencing a number of other fundamental changes. The songs were recorded in snatches of free time while finishing grad school, starting to teach at an elementary and preparing for the birth of his first child, not to mention the ongoing pandemic. An album, in other words, recorded in between the more pressing demands on one’s life.

As ever, Rainwater take on such themes shrewdly, homing in on specific situations and emotions within these larger circumstances and casting everything in a poppy, dreamy light. Anxiety and grief might be the driving emotions, but In-Between is probably the most vivid offering yet. This time Luley plays all the instruments, inviting wife Aviva Stampfer, cousin Amy Godwin and friend Stephen Steen to provide lush vocal harmonies. Add in drum machines, synths and drifting, glistening guitars, and the result is anything but gloomy. As the press release puts it: Who knew working through the hardest experiences of your life could sound so fun?

Today sees the release of the LP’s second single, ‘Us Only’, which you can listen to below. With its weightless synths and near-whispered vocals, the track evokes the shimmering dread of sleepless nights, emerging raw and tenderised and in search of some reprieve. The atmosphere will be familiar to anyone who’s had even the briefest of skirmishes with insomnia. The hyper-vivid textures of sleep deprivation, a kind of emotional knife-edge where everything is cast in its most extreme light. The state finds Luley turn inward, collapsing the world down into its smallest, most bearable form. Taking consolation from the love close at hand.

Up all night,
mute dark meets mirrored moonlight
feel alright,
just not quite right

My eyes weak by the time
sun soaks sweaty sheets
my heart meek
by the time I remember what I need

Hold me like the world’s us only

In-Between will be released on 13th August on Furious Hooves and you can pre-order it now from the Rainwater Bandcamp page.

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Rainwater are back with a brand new record, and the transformation has been ongoing in their absence. Again released with Furious Hooves, Saturn Returns sees Luley embrace a newly-collaborative style, welcoming Stephen Steen, James Kasinger and Amy and Drew Fitchette into the fold to cement Rainwater’s status as a full band. For the astrologically-minded, ‘Saturn return’ refers to the period when Saturn is restored to the position it occupied during one’s birth, supposedly ushering in a time of change and growth that can trigger a kind of self-actualisation, or even rebirth. Saturn Returns finds Rainwater in such a state, changing into a truer version of itself as Luley takes stock of his new home and relationships.

We’ve previously described the Rainwater sound as something of an amalgamation of dream rock, post-rock and folk (where “melancholy and hope ac[t] as counterbalances, light and dark swirling through one another in complex patterns”) and Saturn Returns leans further into the diverse sound. With the added heft of the band members, the arrangements are rich and heartfelt, permeated by a strange cousin of nostalgia that registers as a kind of fond melancholy for the present. “Now more than ever,” reads their bio, “Rainwater just sound like themselves.”

We’re pleased to share the lead single, ‘Pink Flowers’ in anticipation of the release. Rising out of a crepuscular quiet, the song slowly rises into something insistent and fierce, the dreamy meander of the opening half giving way to rises in tempo joined by impassioned vocals. The track comes with a suitably warm video, shot by Luley in Seattle and Bacalar, Mexico.

I don’t know who I am
I don’t understand
How you know
It’s truly you

Saturn Returns is out on the 7th June via Furious Hooves and you can pre-order it now. Rainwater are playing a few shows too, so check out the dates below and head along if you are in the area.

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Out via Furious Hooves, Knight’s latest record With Hat feels like the full realization of this vivid style. The first of his DIY discography to fully embrace a more polished aesthetic, Knight calls on F.M Turner (electric Bass/bowed upright bass), Caleb Flood (drums/percussion) Hamilton Belk (pedal steel guitar) and Kaily M. Schenker (cello) create something of a hybrid style—the triangulated point between folk, indie rock and psychedelic dream pop.

The album opens with ‘Come Back’, itself an encapsulation of Kevin Knight’s range and ambition. The track flickers into life with gentle guitar, though the true energy of the song dawns gradually, eventually coalescing into a swift rhythm. Only, Knight is not satisfied with a single build, the track breaking down into a heavy rock squall before emerging from square one, this time stronger and brighter than before.

“Come back to me,
I’ll wait for you”

Leaning decisively into indie rock territory, ‘Said & Done’ deals with shedding worries and moving on, its relaxed energy offering a sense of carefree abandon, while ‘Little Human (Going on the Day)’ pivots into moody folk rock, an ominous thunderhead of a song that calls to mind Campdogzz’s In Rounds. But storms never last, and ‘Worm Smell (Petrichor)’ emerges from the deluge into the damp warmth of a new day. The song is something of an anthem for life after darkness, where everyday sights and smell are made new by the sheer novelty of the earth’s continued spin.

“After the rains made
A beach of suburban pavements
They breeched our brain waves
And left a song of dreams

It makes a worm smell”

‘Sucker in the Shade’ has a sultry, psychedelic air, while tracks such as ‘Darkness’ and ‘Learning’ take a different route, their more traditional folk styles slow-moving and smouldering with emotion, the blues of the lyrics matched only by the marigolden warmth of the music. Instrumental track ‘Quiet Dog’ is folk distilled further, pushing into American primitive territory with its evocative guitar work, though is soon followed by the mellow tones of ‘Choose Love’.  The song has a crepuscular air, conjuring the low-lit, near-dusk space where it is possible to make peace with your faults and longings.

If the previous track finds the sun going down, then closer ‘Lonesome Howl’, exists some hours later, a nighttime confession and message of gratitude. “Give now praise to ancient beasts ,” Knights sings, “of love and light and rest and peace / Finding food out in the sand / Now you eat right from my hand / You’ll still hear me in the pack / Now i know there’s no going back / To my lonesome howl.”

With Hat is out now via Furious Hooves and you can grab it from Bandcamp, complete, as ever, with a tape release.

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