June 2018 Roundup

Jon Doyle — Tue, 03 Jul 2018 11:08:19 +0000

A dry, hot month has just left us, but luckily we featured more than enough cool music to keep things bearable. Here’s a playlist featuring all the acts we covered in June 2018, except for Boreen‘s ‘Myers-Briggs’ and Color Tongues‘s ‘Adult Lessons’, which are not available for streaming just yet. We’ll add them once they are live, but otherwise listen below, and click through the links in the tracklisting to be taken to the specific posts.

Tracklisting:

Dear Nora – White Fur
Lawn – 2000 Boy
Pearl Crush – True Blue
Dead Painters – Fool On Fire
Slowcoaches – Found Down
Two Meters – Left Behind
Kerem Atalay – Winter 2
Pat Moon – I Belong
Blood Hype – Not Too Good
Talons’ – Driving Home From Shows
The Nova Darlings – I Like Crashing My Car (Into Yours)
Dead Sullivan – Swallow
Onlyness – Comfortable
Of the Valley – Italy
Nice Knees – Backout
Suburban Pets – Candy
Minor Moon – It’s Okay
Caroline Lazar – Georgia
Heatwarmer – American Dog
Jacob Furr – Life Comes At You Fast
Deux Trois – Dave
Grace Turner – Dead or Alive
Britton Patrick Morgan – Southern Drawl

You can find all previous monthly roundup playlists here, and a variety of other such mixes here. Also, you follow us on Spotify or Playmoss to stay right up to date. Be sure to stay with us through July in what promises to be another great month for music.

The post June 2018 Roundup appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Song Premiere: Kerem Atalay – Winter 2

Jon Doyle — Tue, 12 Jun 2018 13:29:17 +0000

Kerem Atalay, a musician and guitarist working out of Mount Rainier, Maryland, taught himself guitar during his time studying computer science at college. From those origins emerged a technical and evocative brand of instrumental music in the American Primitive tradition, songs which forgo accompaniment and embellishment to allow the finger-picked guitar to do it’s work.

However, the relatively simplicity of the arrangement says nothing of the detail and scope of the music, as though in this genre there is an inverse relationship between number of instruments and level of detail. Indeed, as his bio states, Atalay’s music “varies in structure and character, ranging from long-form compositions to brief impressionistic explorations of a theme,” and thus through guitar alone he is equally capable of evoking moments in time as he is entire landscapes.

Teaming up with the good folks at Dust Etc. to put out what will be the first album that he has not released himself, this month sees the release of the latest Kerem Atalay, Summer Winter. Performing something of a balancing act between the poles of long form and vignette, the album draws its atmospheric core from the equally antithetical seasons of the title. The good folks at Post-Trash featured lead single ‘Summer 1’ a few weeks ago, a track they described as “warm and vibrant, beaming down like the hot sun and entrenched in long day vibes and late nights […] creep[ing] forward with a winding arpeggiated melody, bright and beautiful, with a sense of wonder.”

We’re super pleased to be able to share ‘Winter 2’, a brand new track from the thematic flip-side of the album. But that’s not to say Kerem Atalay moves away from a sense of wonder. The duality between summer and winter is not easily partitioned into a happy/sad divide, and ‘Winter 2’ could be said to match or even trump the brightness of ‘Summer 1’. This is a track representing early January mornings where the sun stretches shadows and shimmers layers of frost, life emerging from the night before, red cheeked and speckled with an icy light.

Summer Winter will be released on the 22nd June via Dust Etc. and you can pre-order it now from Bandcamp.

Tape design and photographs by Mindy Burgess and Caleb Kong

The post Song Premiere: Kerem Atalay – Winter 2 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Kerem Atalay Archives - Various Small Flames

June 2018 Roundup

Song Premiere: Kerem Atalay – Winter 2