A feature of the Zoroastrian tradition of sky burial, the tower of silence is a raised circular structure used to offer the bodies of the dead to vultures and other scavengers without the remains contaminating the earth. A single from 2021 album Lain Prone, Belaver‘s ‘Tower of Silence’ mines this imagery for its themes of isolation and slow disintegration, not only referring to the process itself but also the manner in which such rituals are under threat in the contemporary age, as the bird populations are challenged by the unfolding breakdown of the climate. A new video directed, shot, and produced by A. Jung casts the track as a first-person horror story, leading the viewer through an assortment of corridors and rooms to discover a body, and then bending reality by replaying the journey on a projected screen.

Lain Prone is out now and available from the Belaver Bandcamp page.

Brake Run – Valid

The new project of Brianna Snider (half of duo Bexley Moms, and previously of saltlick), brake run combines slowcore and shoegaze influences into sound full of dark texture and pressing weight, as captured on new EP lift hill soundtrack. Single ‘valid’ is typical of the style, Snider’s vocals emerging from within a wall of gauzy guitars and pitch black atmospherics, transcending the gloom or else embracing the surroundings as the reality of things. Fans of the likes of Midwife take note.

without anything in my back pocket it feels very hard to cope

Expensive Music Band – Cool Aunty

Inspired by the birth of their daughter, Expensive Music Band’s Troon Lienad set out to write a song to celebrate the importance of aunties within the family structure. “A cultural exchange that is generational, witty and fun,” as the press release aptly describes it. Enter ‘Cool Aunty’, the latest single from the Cringila, Australia project’s forthcoming record Things to say at a barbecue, where Lienad looks forward to a potential future where his daughter is taken under the wing of the titular figure to become a person just as kind, stylish and effortlessly cool.

Kitba – My Words Don’t Work

“What’s my worth / If my words don’t work?” asks Brooklyn-based songwriter and harpist Rebecca Kitba Bryson El-Saleh, AKA Kitba, on the lead single from their upcoming self-titled debut. “Can’t get the meaning to hold / What’s the point / If my words don’t mean / What they’re supposed to mean?” Released via Ruination Records, the album sees El-Saleh look to conquer the barriers between interior and exterior worlds, and communicate the personal without the message becoming denatured in transit. ‘My Words Don’t Work’ starts this process by confronting the problem head on, and ultimately pushing beyond language to convey the meaning between or underneath words. Watch the video directed and edited by Robin Sessions below:

Kitba is out on the 21st July via Ruination Records and you can pre-order it now.

Requiem – Tired Hot and Bothered

Consisting of musician and multimedia artist Doug Kallmeyer, visual artist Monica Stroik and guitarist, soundscape designer and conceptualist Tristan Welch, DC-based outfit Requiem exists at the intersection of post-rock, pop and electronic sensibilities. A project which looks to combine the dramatic weight of Explosions in the Sky or GY!BE with the spacious qualities of ambient music, and further develop the result with visual accompaniments to their live shows so as to become a fully immersive experience. Debut POPulist Agendas is coming this summer on Mutineer Records, and lead single ‘Tired Hot and Bothered’ is the ideal introduction to the style, spanning the gamut of emotions and moods which feature in Requiem’s work and sounding altogether larger than its four minute runtime.

POPulist Agendas is out on the 7th August via Mutineer Records and you can pre-order it now.

Tiara Mustafa – Beyond the Shadow

Known primarily as one half of of Brunswick County, Virginia folk pop duo Tiara & Andrew, Tiara Mustafa recently released TRIBE, a solo EP on Grimalkin Records. Its two songs were born out of a very difficult period, which saw her mother diagnosed with cancer, the death of her cat and the loss of an album’s worth of Tiara & Andrew material. But rather than dwell on sadness and worry, Mustafa was able to find hope, something second track ‘Beyond the Shadow’ illustrates very well. “There’s a light in darkness, creeping up your spine,” Mustafa sings in what’s an ethereal and soothingly peaceful pop song, “Hide beyond the shadow, you will breathe in time.”

The Weather Holds – Five Roses

Producer and composer Devon Bate has worked behind the scenes on a number of Juno and Polaris award-winning albums, as well as equally stellar dance and theatre productions. But after giving so much to the Canadian arts in relative anonymity, at least to the general audience, his project The Weather Holds sees the favour repaid. Bate calls on the connections made over the years to create a supergroup which unites the indie and classical music scenes. An immense amount of talent features, including the likes of Common Holly, Jean-Michel Blais, Jeremy Dutcher and composer Beatrice Ferreira to name but a few, and resulting album You Couldn’t Ask For a More Beautiful Day is striking in its richness. Take single ‘Five Roses’, a celebration of the Montreal community brought to life by a dozen musicians.

Who Is She? – Thursday

With new record Goddess Energy coming this August on Father/Daughter Records, Seattle supergroup Who Is She? have unveiled lead single, ‘Thursday’. The album sees Robin Edwards (Lisa Prank), Julia Shapiro (Chastity Belt) and Bree Mckenna (Tacocat) joined by fellow Tacocat member Emily Nokes, and the new song hints at the harmonies the newly bolstered line-up will bring. An ode to the titular day which will be stuck in your head all week, andan excellent example of the goddess energy emanating from the project. Check out the video directed by Sébastien Deramat below:

Goddess Energy is out on the 25th August via Father/Daughter Records and you can pre-order it now.

Will Orchard – Simple Magic

Will Orchard is a songwriter from the East Bay of Rhode Island who we first wrote about back in 2019, describing the tone as “certainly nostalgic, and therefore focused on things now lost, though cast in a fond light—committed to bringing to life those moments, however mundane or ordinary, that help us become ourselves.” Taken from new album Learning to Stand, latest single ‘Simple Magic’ is the encapsulation of this style, unfurling with a careful tenderness and drawing the listener into a space of calm contemplation.

The post Weekly Listening: May 2023 #4 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The result of all these years of creation and experimentation, You Can’t Erase Us is the debut D’Vorah Maya album, which releases today on Grimalkin Records. As you might expect, it’s a record which draws on elements from across the musical spectrum, utilising synths and electro-acoustic instruments to create a distinctive sound that’s part pop, part folk, part electronica. Opener ‘one by one we disappear’ is an instrumental piece comprised of soothing synths and crystalline electronics, a gently poignant beginning to a record that is unafraid to convey its messages in both a whisper and a shout.

This opening segues into the tonally very different title track, with its galloping drums, infectious handclaps and dramatic vocals. It’s one of the most capital-P “pop” moments on the record, sounding like an underground smash hit from the late 80s that’s lay dormant for thirty years. It’s also the first introduction to the record’s thematic concerns, both a celebration of trans and queer identities and something like a lament for what they are forced to endure. The message that feels particularly timely during this period of increasing animosity towards those communities, and one all the more empowering for the way in which it’s delivered. “Both a battle cry against those who attempt to negate our existence and a portrait of the toll such negation can take on those forced to endure it,” as the label puts it. “Living undercover or buried alive,” Maya sings, “the future is our right, right to survive,” before going on to the repeated chorus line in a moment of defiance that sums up the entire album. You can’t erase us.

Elsewhere across the record, D’vorah Maya melts down all those inspirations from her upbringing and crafts them into new shapes. ‘the prison ventriloquist’ is a folk-tinged pop song as smooth and rounded as a pebble, ‘best behaviour aches over bare acoustic guitar, and the sunshiney acoustic guitar and perky percussion of ‘children of an endless war’ highlight the golden threads of hope it offers anyone going through identity struggles.

Even individual songs refuse to sit still. ‘follow the rain’ begins with cold sci-fi synths and downbeat lyrics (“I’ll follow the rain down to the sea floor again / where the cold broken light in my face is as warm as your embrace”), but bursts into technicolour energy between each verse, while the country and classic rock-influenced ‘fading gold spheres’ pairs rich vocal melodies with cathartically shredded guitar. Even the seemingly monolithic closer ‘the heavens will open the control towers will collapse’ turns out to be no monolith at all, its sludgy, reverbed build evolving in the closing minutes. The dark weight shed in favour of sparkling transcendence, the lyrics ending as a prophecy or promise. “Inevitable / inevitable confrontation.”

These final words capture the spirit of a release Grimalkin describe as “a document of loss, survival and resilience in the face of personal and collective trauma… imbued with a sense of urgency and defiant hopefulness.” Because You Can’t Erase Us contains multitudes. Offers pain, despair and hope side by side. And while this hopefulness cannot be said to fully triumph over the competing forces, it is the thing which ultimately shines through. Because no matter how violent or sustained the anti-trans movement becomes, D’vorah Maya is proof that queer and trans folk are not going anywhere. That they will not be erased.

The post D’vorah Maya – You Can’t Erase Us appeared first on Various Small Flames.

It is unsurprising then that Light Play takes inspiration from the speculative and socially-aware sci-fi of the likes of Octavia Butler and the Strugatsky brothers. Fiction of imagined futures and distorted pasts which refracts the present back to us in all of its strangeness, able to describe not only its outrages and weirdness but that which is absent too. (is) conjures her own world of synths and static and subdued beats, an “ambient album for the apocalypse” which evokes what we’ve lost, what we’re in the process of losing and what never came to be.

Take the spacious drift of opener ‘Deep Time (Degenerating Spine Mix)’, which together with its spoken word poetry evokes the present as a thin line between unknown future and primordial ancientness, rendering its banal cruelties in all of their ridiculous transience. The brooding creep of ‘Psychoprobe Console’ unfurls into a kind of melancholic march, while ‘Diffraction (Bellona Transmission)’ blurs any line between organic and digital in its verdant textures. Though, as in final track ‘departure’, the clarity which comes with this sense of the natural is invaded by distortion. Staticky glitches that reveal the whole thing to be a dream or projection, something we might have had. The mood is central to the release, one which demands we return to the present against our wishes or failing judgement. “Hovering somewhere between signal and noise,” the album notes conclude, “Light Play echoes back from (im)possible futures to ask a singular question of the uncertain present: what now?”

Cover art by Vin Tanner

The post (is) – Light Play appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Back in 2019, she released For As Briefly As I Live, a collection of quirky piano-based pop songs on Virginia mutual aid-oriented label Grimalkin Records which explored themes of love, death and commitment “from the perspective of a frequently shy, nervous, and lonely trans woman.” Next month, Dani Lee Pearce returns to Grimalkin Records to release a brand new album. Titled Spider Mountain, it looks to continue her creative evolution, from early no wave-influenced experimental compositions to what Grimalkin describe as “synth-rooted progressive pop with a distinct queer ethos.”

Today we are sharing the record’s second single, ‘Foxhood and Twink Lucifer’. Opening with lush, crystalline synths, the song soon morphs into something unabashedly dramatic and impassioned, drawing on left-field pop icons from the last half century. It’s a track that weaves its own mythology, full of strange dream-like logic and oblique imagery. Whether the events it describes are literal or allegorical seem besides the point, but regardless, this is not some timid reverie. There are serious barbs built into the sound, specifically ones pointed at the callous parts of society. “A rich man is a bitch man, this we know,” Pearce sings at the close, “a rich man is a snitch man, this we know too.”

The post Dani Lee Pearce – Foxhood and Twink Lucifer appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Made in collaboration with producer Sawtooth, February 21 is as intense as that description sounds, each song set within a sense of inner turmoil, wrestling with demons both personal and societal. But there’s more to the music of Kofi the Spiderman than one-dimensional anger and ennui. Even the darkest moments are silvered with a sardonic lining, a kind of droll humour that captures life in this 21st century hellscape with a grim and knowing fatalism, revealing strength and vulnerability alike. “Kofi lays bare their soul with earnestness and wit,” Grimalkin describe, “they search for hope, or create it, when there is none to be found.”

This atmosphere is illustrated perfectly on lead single ‘Piñata.’ Ostensibly the record’s poppiest moment, the driving beat and 80s synths conjures the lonely and slightly wild feeling of driving through deserted streets at night. But Edzie’s modulated vocals nevertheless ache with candid emotion and unrest.

The post Kofi the Spiderman – Piñata appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Their new standalone single and Grimalkin debut, ‘Hold On Up’ is a great introduction to Qween Paz, a four minute slice of pop that is as laidback as it is luminous. The track builds on a deceptively simple chord progression that sways with a summertime easiness, the soulful vocals exuding strength and vulnerability in equal measure. It’s raw without being overtly loud or angry, building into an irresistible flow of thoughts and emotions that feels potent and invigorating and genuinely cathartic.

I need more days for my own things
And fresh air
To clear my head

The post Qween Paz – Hold On Up appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The record is a companion piece to The Fairies Sing Each to Each, a libretto Nguyen is publishing with Flower Press. Described as “an ambitious hybrid of opera, poetry, and prose,” the story follows a character named Amadeus Vu, a traumatized individual, as they construct their own myth via a tangled narrative of gender, monstrosity and the divine. Expect an examination of neurodivergence, chronic illness, queerness and life as an Asian American through a wildly speculative lens.

Weak & Divine explores trauma in all of its complexity, looking to madness and mythology to fill gaps in the story left by the simplified conventional view of the world. “Traumatized people are either seen as helpless innocents or conniving villains,” FEYXUAN describes:

Either you have no agency, or you do the wrong things with your agency. Either way, the narrative is taken from you. Amadeus Vu is a traumatized individual who is the creator of her own myth, seizing her origin story from her abuser, and also seizing it from all that would seek to view her through a reductive lens of absolute, binary morality.

In anticipation of the record, FEYXUAN is today releasing the lead single, ‘Lord of the Butterflies,’ a strange and surreal three minutes that could form the soundtrack to a long-lost darkly psychological and philosophical JRPG. In keeping with the ambitious storytelling of the libretto, the track is challenging and ambiguous, the dream-like repetition and droning keys lending a skewed sense of the sublime. It is a song of juxtapositions, religious imagery sitting next to the profane, the cold inhumanity of the digital next to the powerful superhumanity of the divine.

who are you? who are you?
“I am a man who will become God”

The post FEYXUAN – Lord of the Butterflies appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Here is a list of songs from 2020 that we liked but didn’t get around to writing about.

If you find something you like, follow the link in the embed to support the artists and labels on Bandcamp. And of course, there is a whole year’s worth of pieces on releases we did manage to write about, so have an explore through our reviews, previews and interviews from 2020.

The post Music We Missed in 2020 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Nancy was kind enough to answer some of our questions on the album, as well as their other musical projects, the work of Grimalkin Records, and wider questions on the state of the music scene.

Your latest release, Live, while not a live album in the usual sense, is very much influenced by how you perform these songs live. How is this different to your recorded releases?

What you are hearing outside of all the transition pieces is what my live sets sound like for the most part. I play stripped down versions of my songs and tried to keep the main parts of the songs much like I sound live. I also recorded the songs with my electric guitar which I rarely use these days when recording. I typically use my classical guitar in recordings but I play my live sets using my electric. I imagined that the transition pieces could be played during my sets between songs and the video that Rafa (Rafael de Toledo Pedroso da Silveira) and I created to go with the songs could be used as a backdrop when playing out.

Is playing live something you have learned to enjoy, or is it still nerve-wracking?

I started playing out in January of 2019 and was playing out quite often up until the beginning of March 2020 when everything shut down due to the pandemic. Playing out was scary to me and I never really thought I would do or enjoy it but I pushed myself to get out of my comfort zone. I figured the first step would be just being comfortable playing stripped down versions of just guitar and vocals and imagined once I mastered that, I would start adding things in. The last show I played before the pandemic was probably my best one yet and I was just starting to feel a lot more comfortable. It was still nerve-wracking, and probably always will be, but I was getting more comfortable with it. I felt like people responded to it positively, and I actually enjoyed it. I felt like I got a lot out of it personally and musically.

Playing out is different because I was practicing every day since I started doing it and I was really sitting with songs for much longer lengths of time than I was used to previously, and so as I played them out, I would start settling into the songs and they would slightly change over time. I was writing new songs and would introduce them into sets and that was a different way to develop a song. I would rework older songs and add them or rotate them into my sets so it was just a very different way about working on my music. Once the pandemic hit and I could no longer play out, I decided to make an album of what I imagined a future set might sound like if I had kept playing out.

You have begun to go back and remaster your old releases, an experience that has been both nostalgic and bittersweet. Has this period of revisitation changed your approach to making new music?

The main thing that was really great about going back and remastering songs is remembering and rediscovering some of the songs I’ve written that still stood out to me. That inspired me to start rotating some of them into my sets and reworking them. I’ve been recording and writing for a long time now and so every once in a while I’ll find a bunch of songs I forgot about. I just recently found over 100 songs from 1997-2007 that I forgot about. Most of it was crap but I found a bunch that were decent and I just finished mastering and releasing those on my Bandcamp. I have a few albums of songs like that now (Thoughts, Olden, Backwards, and 13). Those albums are songs that I found later on and were never really meant to be albums.

This set is called 13 (my lucky number) because I narrowed them down to the best 13 songs in this recent set of found songs. When I go back and listen to old stuff, sometimes it brings back the memories of those feelings when I wrote them. That can be overwhelming. Writing and recording has always been therapeutic for me but sometimes that means the songs are just too personal or painful for me to share with others. I left the really heart wrenching ones off 13.

How do you feel your music has changed since those early releases?

Almost all of these songs were never released anywhere. I would just write and record for myself. I would make tapes and CDs for friends sometimes or upload songs to Myspace but for the most part, I wasn’t thinking of the listener. Now I do more so. I write music with the intention that I am going to release the ones I like or I am intentionally writing albums, but for most of my music-making life, that wasn’t even a consideration at all. The benefit of that is nothing is hidden, censored, or held back because the idea of releasing them wasn’t a consideration.

The downside is that many of the recordings are imperfect or unfinished ideas. I didn’t have the same care involved in the recording process as I do now. There are a lot of good ideas though in that older stuff and can evolve into better songs over time. I think that’s what I like the most about going back through all my old stuff. Relistening now is like going back and taking a piece of myself and seeing it through what I hope are wiser and clearer eyes. I can learn and take from that and mold things into the present.

Your label/collective Grimalkin Records continues to go from strength to strength, and it has been great to see artists like Backxwash getting coverage in large publications. What are you plans going forward?

I hope we keep growing and expanding in new ways. Mutual aid is at the focus of most of what we do. That has been growing and we are excited about that. We hope to be able to grow more as an international collective as well.  I was laid off the end of March and so Gr has become my sole focus and it’s my full time job now- it’s like more than one full time job really. We’ve picked up a lot since the pandemic in terms of support and also work and so I couldn’t even keep up with the level of work Gr has become doing the job I had before I was laid off. It was never intended to be my sole job, but here we are.

At first I was devastated when I was laid off. My job was really important to me, but now I see it was a blessing and I feel like a lot of the disability advocacy work I was doing with my job is something that we can bring into Grimalkin. Almost all of us in the collective have disabilities or are on the spectrum, and so really Gr has become all encompassing for me. I feel like it has all of my loves and passions, and after getting laid off and investing myself even more into this work, I feel like it’s everything I’m supposed to be doing.

The collective also really believes in what we are doing and so what I felt initially was a pipe dream really now seems like a possibility. It helps a lot to have people believing in you. We really are trying to create something different and special within the music community and show others that there is a different way. You can forge and create new ways. You don’t need to exploit and profit off the backs of artists. There are better and more sustainable ways built on mutual aid and support. We never profit from artists so the only way I will ever be able to do this as a job and also pay others for more than just freelance work is by patrons, Bandcamp subscriptions and grants, and it does seem like that may be possible one day. I guess time will tell.

What role do you believe music/art can play in these difficult times?

This is a difficult question to answer because I am dissatisfied with the main stories that have been told through art and music, with the people telling those stories and controlling those stories, with the people who own art and music and with the people who decide what is of value and what should be heard and seen and remembered. Grimalkin strives to create something outside of those constructs.

Of course I think art and music is incredibly important, but more than anything, we need to create spaces that are outside the structures that exist now. That may sound weird when we are becoming something like a LLC but that choice was mainly made to legitimize what we are doing so that we can’t be easily shut down by the government. I’m not a fan of working within these systems. I used to believe in that bullshit (working within the system to change it), but I no longer do at all, but still in order to survive you do have to work around the systems and structures that exist in order to survive.

White people control the music and art world and that needs to change. People need to relinquish their power and do more to support others. I believe white people with means and power in art and music need to make real amends. Reparations need to be paid with time, money and labor. I strongly believe in the value and reward of being in the service of others. Grimalkin’s role is forging a path for a better way and hopefully setting an example for others and inspiring others to do the same or in finding their own new ways for creating supportive spaces in their own communities.

Art and music can be many things to people, especially during difficult times. We all need to listen and learn from others, especially from marginalized people. From there you can begin to see the change you hope for, and from there you need to do the work within yourself. I want people, especially white and cis people, to stop talking the talk and performing bullshit and get serious about what it is going to take for us to have a better and more just world.

I always have hope though even when I feel like I don’t. It is okay, especially now, to feel like quitting somedays or like we will never have the change we need, and maybe the whole planet will be extinct before we get there, but all I can do is focus on the present and be mindful by envisioning and investing in the future I hope for. We can each work on ourselves and hopefully inspire others. If you’re digging deep enough inside yourself and doing the work and practicing it in your daily life and then taking that energy to meet and organize with others, even if it is small like what we are doing with Grimalkin, then that is something.

Grimalkin cannot take on the shitty music world all alone but we can carve out a space and make something real, and hopefully that will keep growing and inspire others, and then hopefully that will keep on growing and slowly affect change within the music world, and hopefully that will also grow and branch into other things since music isn’t all that we are doing in Grimalkin. Even if we can’t change the world today or even tomorrow, we can at least make the one we are in right now more livable and sustainable

Live by Spartan Jet-Plex is out now and available via Bandcamp, including on the cool VHS edition you can see below. Also head to the Grimalkin Records Bandcamp page to see other forthcoming releases, their website for more information and consider becoming a patron via Patreon.

The post Interview: Spartan Jet-Plex appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The latest Spartan Jet-Plex album, Resurrected, released on Halloween, sees Kells re-animate songs from previous releases. These new and alternate takes feel like a conjuring trick, Kells taking the personal, social and political themes that form the bedrock of their music, and bending them into new, hallucinatory forms. If you’re already familiar with these songs, then the effect is one of a dream-like paradox in which everything feels unrecognised but oddly familiar.

‘Fear’ begins with a grandly somber patience, the overall atmosphere one of a misty midnight graveyard as things begin to story beneath the earth. This feel is exacerbated by the susurrant ‘Clown (Spell)’, wordless vocals gathering like fingers of fog across the leaf-strewn ground. ‘Meant’ is the closest thing the record has to a conventional folk song, stripped back to acoustic guitar and Kells’s vocals, subtly atmospheric synths curling around the foot of the song like tendrils of fog.

There’s a similar feel on ‘Stop’, the patient and beguiling track that first appeared on Godless Goddess, what I’ve previously called “a hit pop song slowed just slightly, giving it a before unheard dreamy majesty.” The swirling haze of the original is cut entirely, replaced by gentle guitar, but the emotion of the track is somehow concentrated, Kells sounding purposeful and confident in the simplified setting.

Resurrected has two brand new tracks too. ‘Material’ is perhaps my favourite, electrified with sharp jags of guitar that illuminate the song stark and white like forks of lightning, Kells’s voice skating above like wisps of cloud. The other new one is ‘Parallel’, which begins in disorientating vocal loops before switching into crunchy lo-fi folk. Both songs hint at another side to Spartan Jet-Plex, dark and magnetic folk rock in the vein of Jason Molina or Neil Young.

Resurrected is out now and you can get it on LP, cassette or download from the Spartan Jet-Plex Bandcamp page.

The post Spartan Jet-Plex – Resurrected appeared first on Various Small Flames.