The latest offering in Antiquated Future‘s ever-reliable Selected Songs series, Somehow We​’​ll Grow Into Some Overlapping Oak offers a glimpse into the fluid, experimental world of The Binary Marketing Show. The Portland, Oregon-based project has welcomed various members into its fold across over two decades, and this release focuses on the period headed by duo Abram Morphew and Bethany Carder. A time in which the pair created music the label describe as “existing on the outskirts of experimental pop, indie electronic, singer-songwriter, and electro-acoustic composition,” where the line between the familiar and strange is blurred by an immersive blend of homemade instruments, synths, bass and found sounds. Though only representing a snapshot of this style, single ‘Daydream (I Cannot)’ is as good a place as any to enter into this world, offering a sound somewhere between Trouble Books and Cloud Cult in its experimental yet emotionally engaging tone.

Divorce Court – 140

The music of Divorce Court stands as a representation of its creator Lynden Williams’s subconscious, its rich and often hazy soundscapes able to evoke the smallest of distances alongside deceptively cavernous crescendos. The ideal vehicle to explore all things introspective. With new album Two Hours coming later this year, lead single ‘140’ introduces this style with an indirect examination of how therapy and psychedelics helped to restore Williams’s inner child. “No one in your corner / Days almost over,” Williams sings, though the loneliness is counteracted by the vivid sound and the transportive secret inherent within it. That the subconscious is a world of its own, and escapism is possible no matter where you might be trapped. “Your body’s a safe place,” as Williams continues, “Eyes closed and melt away.” Watch the video directed by Trevor Free below:

Two Hours will be released on the 8th July. ‘140’ is available now from the Divorce Court Bandcamp page.

East Forest x Peter Broderick – Landscape

Written and recorded during a stay in County Clare’s karst/glaciokarst landscape known as The Burren, Burren is a new collaboration between multi-genre artist East Forest and composer Peter Broderick. The pair met for the first time in person during the period and arrived with no plan beyond an openness to the surrounding landscape. What emerged is both a testament to the chemistry between the two artists and the striking climate in which they were housed. Single ‘Landscape’ offers a glimpse into the folk-inflected ambient soundscapes they created, managing to convey the fine beauty and fierce drama of the Irish environment as Marissa Radha Weppner’s spoken word vocals add to the mystery of the scene.

Lisa/Liza – Held Together

Under the moniker Lisa/Liza, Portland, Maine songwriter Liza Victoria makes what we have previously described as “deliberate, unhurried songs made in the image of nature’s patient rhythms […] that examine how surrounding landscapes are tied to our most intimate emotions and memories.” In April, Victoria returns with Breaking and Mending, her first full-length since 2020’s excellent Shelter of a Song, again on Orindal Records. Written while working through chronic illness and the heavy legacy of past trauma, the record captures what Victoria describes as her “emotional landscape in the last two years,” and lead single ‘Held Together’ introduces these themes with tender beauty. Constructed of picked guitar and softly crooning vocals, its a song about weathering changing seasons of an internal nature, about holding on for metaphorical buds of spring.

Maruja – Kakistocracy

With a thunderous amalgamation of punk, post-rock and jazz, Manchester‘s Maruja have been winning fans with a sound at once menacing and cathartic for a while now, and debut EP Knocknarea looks to only further their standing. New single ‘Kakistocracy’, AKA ‘rule of the villains’, throws listener into the deep end of the Maruja style, a general sense of foreboding escalating across its length with desperately yelled vocals and driving drums and eventually unhinged sax too. What results is something both crushing and transcendent, like some great rough thing slouching towards us with a decidedly sublime doom.

Knocknarea is out now and available on streaming services.

Michael Cormier-O’Leary – Letter From Alan

Following 2021’s More Light!!, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter & Dear Life Records founder Michael Cormier-O’Leary has a new album on the way later this spring. Titled Anything Can Be Left Behind, the record is a wildly creative meditation on constant change and the bonds of perceived identity. Utilising unexpected melodies, liberating improvisation and a mélange of fact and fiction, it explores life’s oddities and uncertainties in inquisitive and good-natured style, turning up the contrast until every story pops with colour. Nowhere is this more apparent than on latest single ‘Letter From Alan,’ a bouncy indie pop song which, as its title suggests, details the correspondence between two friends. It’s funny, inventive and as one line puts it “a bit surreal and a little mundane,” and somehow feels all the more true because of it.

His letter said:
“It’s your friend Alan
Greetings amigo
From Pamplona, Spain
Didn’t run with the bulls
If that’s what you’re thinkin’
I can get crazy
But I’m not insane!

Mike Tod – The Coo Coo

Described as “a wry and raspy tenor that sings well-worn traditionals,” Canmore, Alberta musician and ethnomusicologist Mike Tod has dedicated his life to ushering old-time folk music into the present day. Next month he will release a new self-titled album, and has unveiled single ‘The Coo Coo’ to whet appetites. Originating in the Scottish borders, the song traversed the Atlantic and was popularized by Ramblin’ Jack Elliott on the rodeo circuit in the forties. Tod’s version is wonderfully dark and ominous, transforming it from cowboy song into something of a psychological horror tale. “If you listen closely to the lyrics of the song, they really are quite horrific,” he explains. “You have all the elements of a horror film: Living on the fringes of society, obsession, potential addiction, loss of love, loss of life.” The video, animated by Molly Little, follows the story using a crankie, a form of storytelling popular at the turn of the twentieth century. Check it out below:

Mike Tod will be released on 13^th April. Pre-order a CD or LP now via the Mike Tod website.

O Slow – Two

The recording project of Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist Jacqui Miranda, O Slow is a dream pop project which draws its beauty and ambiguity from the real world. Shaped by Miranda’s time within a religious cult during childhood and her travels across California by train, the songs evoke both internal and external environments with all of their strange nuances intact, as typified by single, ‘Two’.  A track inspired by Miranda’s favourite freeway which allows itself to bask in nostalgia for specific times and places even if the context now loaded onto such periods is less rosy in retrospect. A sign of O Slow’s willingness to sit with conflicting ideas in order to better represent a lived truth—you can still long for something, even if it no longer means what it once did.

Summersets – Afterall

Small Town Story, the forthcoming album by Ontario duo Summersets, has echoes in the history of its creators. Kalle Mattson and Andrew Sowka, who themselves met growing up in Sault Ste. Marie, decided to tell the story of two fictional individuals brought together by chance, following the relationship from this origin to its eventual climax. “I was really interested in telling the story of a relationship across a collection of songs,” as Mattson explains. “Changing perspectives and spanning milestones, both big and small, over the course of a lifetime.” At turns melancholic and hopeful, lead single ‘afterall’ is a great snapshot of the feeling of the album’s style, a song which finds the characters some years down the line with a break-up between them, hinting at the golden threads of reconciliation which will see the relationship continue on through.

The years pass on by
One by one, out of sight
Still there was you & I
The years passed on by

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