“Each [artist] present[s] a side of music that doesn’t sound written or recorded as much as spilled out and gathered back up quickly, out of necessity and through broken and hurried means. Busy and tired but still distracted, holding on to memories like crumpled drawings pulled from the trash”

If that doesn’t make you want to listen then I’m afraid you’ve wandered into the wrong corner of the internet.

Ylayali gets side A and starts as he means to go on with ‘Clicking Clanking’, counting himself in with some DIY knocks before presenting a lovely little lo-fi acoustic track, complete with reassuringly miserable lyrics such as, “Today I left my room twice, recorded a song I don’t really like”. ‘Blab’ is mainly all lo-fi guitar again, joined by some minimal percussion. It feels patient and intimate, enclosed in the same sense of everyday melancholy that makes Talons’ so great, that feeling of long afternoons in gloomy rooms, when the rest of the human population seem faraway and indistinct, like figures from barely remembered dreams.

“I really miss that shirt and that watch that I lost
and also spending every weekend together
and every summer
going further away from home”

‘Pinkies’ is a short song which follows a similar thread, full of vague lines which you feel mean the world to the characters involved. “There if you need me, not if you don’t”, he sings. “Walk to the store with you for us both. I want you to know that our pinkies broke”. ‘Crud’ is shorter still, clocking in under a minute yet carrying the same emotional heft (“Something good came out of both of us instead I saw some little bit of crud, a little thing about to fall off of the bigger better thing”), while ‘Cool Burnout’ starts with a jittery looped drum sample before vocals enter and the percussion settles into a simple beat, like the sound of someone striking a hollow bamboo shoot over and over. “After dinner the day feels over” Lyons sings, ensuring that the air of despondency lasts until the very end. The track finishes side A with some heavier reverb-laden guitars, which themselves cut very abruptly, paving the way for the next act.

‘April Journal Excerpts’, the first offering on Lung Cycles’s side B, is a sonic collage of slightly distorted audio clips and ambient recordings, things like people chattering and birdsong, what could easily quite literally be diary entries of the aural variety. After a while some gentle guitar work enters too, ticking over like time on fast-forward. ‘Pull Me Apart’ is a very pretty song with swirling tumbling guitar and hushed vocals, while the closer, ‘Hottest Day of the Year So Far (11pm version)’, is a measured guitar track with a background hum of tape hiss that sounds like running water or falling rain in some analogue dreamscape.

You can get the album on cool limited release cassette (see below), or as a digital download, via the Lily Tapes & Discs Bandcamp page.

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German Error Message (the alias of multi-instrumentalist Paul Kintzing) provides the first three tracks, making what the blurb wonderfully describes as “densely-layered and blanket-thick bedroom folk” (a line I plan on stealing the next time someone asks me what music I’m into). It’s something along the lines of the melancholy mumble of Talons’ crossed with earthy folk-rock and gauzy bedroom pop. That’s a pretty terrible description, so just check it out for yourself.

Ben Lovell (who, unless I am mistaken used to record as Squanto) then chips in with two tracks of his own, under the moniker Lung Cycles. But this is no flying visit as they come in at 10+ and 7+ minutes respectively. The songs are subtle and restrained for the most part but prone to the odd grand gesture, like some post-rock that got to feeling really sad and wandered off into the fog.

I’m going to go back to LT&D’s blurb to finish, mainly because they’ve already done it far better than I’m going to. “Bear with us as we stumble through the snow, wondering about who lives behind all the windows on the way to our own. Keep these songs close to you this winter and they’ll keep you warm”. That sums up how I feel about this release rather nicely. It’s perfect for a quiet, cosy moment on a pitch-black night in the dead of the oncoming winter. To put it succinctly, it’s hibernation music.

You can buy the EP on a lovely casette tape in a letterpress printed, watercolour painted package via Lily Tapes and Discs. Follow the same link to grab it as a name-your-price download.

Another option is the ‘2014 Batch’ which, for a reasonable $20, gets you a tape copy of every Lily Tapes and Discs release from this year. What better way to familiarise yourself with one of the coolest little labels around?

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First up is Wild Woods by Tape Sounds (who we featured on our favourite free music of 2013 list). Supposedly the soundtrack to a tale of post-apocalyptic isolation, each song is intended to serve as a chapter in the story (credit to posts on Twoism forums for the info).

Next is a self-titled album by frenchman Eliott Z. Gualdi. The preview track offers fourteen minutes of zen-like meditative guitar and piano (and probably some other instruments I don’t know the names of). That’s his grandfather one the cover by the way, which is pretty cool.

Last but not least is a split release from Mark Aubert and Bluezr, entitled Pause. Aubert’s preview is a really interesting collage of samples and chopped up beats. Bluezr’s opens with the haunting sound of a siren and opens into a very chill ambient track. The term hypnagogic was coined for stuff like this.

You can get all three right now from Carpi Records.I probably don’t need to tell you that the cassettes are beautifully designed. All releases are extremely limited so grab one now before they go.

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