Various Swell Sounds is a new collaborative playlist series from Shana Hartzel of Swell Tone, Jon Chin of Cereal and Sounds, and myself. Instead of constantly exchanging tracks amongst each other, we have decided to work together to bring them to more ears. Every month, we will match a selection of our old and brand new favourites to a specific theme, as decided on a revolving basis month by month.

Following the dangerous freedom of Shana’s Unguarded Beach, and the angsty heartbreak of Jon’s Violet’s Aren’t Blue, the third edition sees us take up the mantle with something altogether more unsettling. Because, let’s be honest, we live in unsettling times. Silicon Valley is (allegedly) controlling our elections, Russian spies are being attacked on foreign soil and Infowars has a White House press pass. Yes, we’re paranoid. But are we paranoid enough?

1. Crystal Stilts – Alien Rivers
2. Sixteen Jackies – VHS #1
3. The Paranoyds – Sleep Paralysis
4. The Buttertones – Ghost Safari
5. Total Control – Stonehenge
6. WINT – Dark Matter) We (Endless
7. Iguana Death Cult – Whispers
8. Screaming Females – Glass House
9. Vundabar – No People to Person
10. Liza Anne – Paranoia
11. Big Air – Mr. Mind Control
12. Matias Aguayo & The Desdemonas – Cold Fever
13. Baby Brains – Walk Alone (The Cave Collection)
14. Pye Corner Audio – The Black Mill Video Tape
15. Protomartyr – Here Is The Thing
16. Eddy Current Suppression Ring – Colour Television
17. Silly Pillows – Figment of Your Imagination
18. Stef Chura – Becoming Shadows
19. JACK – Fear Of
20. Eerie Wanda – Happy Hard Times
21. Cave & Lenderson – Friedgeman
22. La Luz – Cicada
23. Snakadaktal – Fall Underneath
24. Institute – Familiar Stranger
25. NOTS – Fluorescent Sunset
26. CLINIC – The Return of Evil Bill
27. Lying Down – Betty and Barney
28. Dr Dog – Listening In
29. Timber Timbre – Creep on Creepin On
30. Good Good Blood – Dinosauria

Spotify:

Playmoss:

Artwork by Liam Doyle, logo by Stolen Chapstick

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Haints Stay is nothing if not gritty. Colin Winnette’s novel focuses on a pair of brothers, Brooke and Sugar, professional murderers who spend their days doing other people’s dirty work. They ask very few questions and seemingly find neither pleasure nor disgust in their task, as long as they earn enough coin to feed themselves and put a roof over their heads, at least once in a while.

The story opens with the pair returning to town, ready to be paid and bathed. Instead they find the place in ruins and under the rule of a sinister tiny man and his thugs. Things soon turn ugly, causing the brothers to flee into the wild, only to run into further danger and strife. The focal point of this trouble begins when they wake one morning to a strange, seemingly amnesiac boy (whom they christen Bird) who has quite literally nothing, not even clothes. Bird exists at the opposite pole as the brothers, his blank, unknowing innocence juxtaposing the killers’ world-weary ruthlessness perfectly. He’s not even afraid, which the brothers are soon to put right:

“‘My brother is trying to scare you.’

‘Why?’ asked the boy.

‘Because you’re wrong not be be frightened of two men sleeping in the woods,’ said Sugar. ‘Especially these two men.'”

Things soon stray into even darker and stranger territory, as Winnette exercises his plain and unflinching language to detail all manner of violence and terror, from marauding bandits to a nightmarish boogeyman in the woods. It’s a dangerous game to compare anyone to Cormac McCarthy, a man almost closer to the authors of the old testament than contemporary fiction, but Winnette’s prose has that same calculated indifference, twisted characters held at arms length and captured with a cold and unlikely logic.

From a brilliant line on the very first page (“Each night, Brooke counted the stars until he fell asleep and woke blinded by the one”), Winnette paints the desperate, surreal fringes of the American West in prose that possesses not just heft and weight but also an undeniable beauty.

Haints Stay shares that backwoods weirdness of McCarthy’s early work, the characters existing at a violent and isolated edge of society,  plus strains of Blood Meridian, particularly during the brothers’ plain philosophising on the nature of killing and death. Take for example the passage in which Brooke and Bird are stalking a deer:

“You’re going to feel a certain kind of pride, a sense of accomplishment. But you’re also going to feel uneasy with that, as if there’s something wrong with it. There isn’t. Its as natural as breathing. That guilt is all fear anyway. Fear that one day you’re going to be on the receiving end of a blow, and the sudden wish that no one had to do that kind of thing ever.”

Needless to say things twist and turn as the story progresses, as both future and past is revealed. You’ll have to read it to find out what happens, but expect sudden snows, severed limbs and even childbirth. Oh and killing. Lots of killing.

The music I’ve chosen to accompany Haints Stay attempts to capture an atmosphere, that dark underbelly of America that has been expressed through folk music for years. Some of these songs are classics, others released this year, and all hold links (at least in my mind) to the novel.

Tracklisting:

1) Let’s Burn Down the Cornfield – Randy Newman
2) Hang Me, Oh Hang Me – Dave van Ronk
3) Trouble Comes Knocking – Timber Timbre
4) She Goes Alone – Mariposa
5) O Death – Ralph Stanley
6) Us – Western Skies Motel
7) Death to Everyone (Bonnie “Prince” Billy cover) – Psalmships
8) War Paint – Water Liars
9) Sugar Baby – Dock Boggs
10) Satan is Real – The Louvin Brothers

Haints Stay is out now on No Exit Press (UK) and Two Dollar Radio (USA). Buy direct from the publisher via the links or ask at your favourite independent bookshop.

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Obody are a band from Caroline, New York, consisting of four core members and a revolving cast of collaborators. They have recently put out a five song EP called Except For A Song, a release almost as long as some albums and which defies simple description. The press release does as good a job as I ever could when it describes it as “deliberate but methodical…a forest of soundscapes and confessions that will make the hair on your neck perk”. Lead Peter Vincent’s noirish baritone will draw inevitable comparisons to Timber Timbre, but rest assured that Obody are very much their own unique act.

The release opens with ‘Stone’ which simmers for over ten minutes, creeping through the undergrowth like the roaming spirit of a dreamer with morbid contemplations:

“Take these bones away
cos they just hold in place
something that longs to be spread far and free
and some things just need to be released”.

The track has a vague, dreamlike quality that fans of Old Earth will appreciate, all held together with strumming guitar and warbling cello, and lines such as:

“What if there’s a place of no separation
between our creations
and all I think is all you see?”

Next up is ‘The Devil’s Reeds’, a sinister song about giving in to evil (“The devil’s reeds do not silence / just because you arenot listening / when you let that
sound take you over / you are king”), followed by ‘Trees in the Desert’, which continues with the opaque and tenebrous imagery, inhabiting a shadowy alternate reality. ‘Spiders Web’ plays like a
sad and lonely fairy tale from the creepy depths of an enchanted forest, a
tale the Brothers Grimm rejected for being too dark and morbid. Rife with the isolation and entrapment
of a spiders web, complete with a skittering click on the edge of hearing which sounds ominously similar to the jointed legs of a giant arachnid. But despite this, the final
lines somehow transform the track into an unlikely love song:

“And you can
have anything that I have
and you can be anyone
that I am
and you can see
everything that I can
and you can hold me
in the spiders
web”.

The final track, ‘No Sensation’, is slow and sedate with
melancholic instrumentation and a fleeting background rumble, what can only
be described as the aural manifestation of dread. This lends the track an oppressive air, like tossing and turning in a nightmare:

“Maybe I
would stay up all
night
figuring some way out
because I hear the pauses
so much more
than I hear
the breathing in and out from my chest
the heartless projections of what I want
won’t let me rest”.

I guess what I’m getting at is that this is not some kind of sugar-coated easy-listening. This would be dream pop if dream pop was like real dreams and not the fuzzy, loved up ones it’s usually so preoccupied with, all twisting corners and illogical transitions, vague sensations of both familiarity and unease.

You can buy Except For a Song via Chicago’s Already Dead Tapes on transparent blue cassette (NB. there are only 100 so if you want one then I’d grab one as soon as you can). If you miss out on a cassette (or just don’t want one), you can get the album as a digital download via the Already Dead Tapes Bandcamp page.

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Labeling Conversations as “dream pop” would be to do it a disservice. This isn’t some formulaic collection of by-the-numbers, post-chillwave, bedroom recorded, melancholic pop music, but rather an assortment of influences and ideas, a willingness to experiment with sounds and structure. For example, the album’s shortest song (excluding a forty second instrumental piece), ‘All In The Name Of Good Dancing’, clocks in at under two minutes, whereas ‘Dream Talk’, the album’s sprawling midsection, breaks the ten minute barrier.

The album opens with ‘Drift Down’, which you can see in video form below. The song is perfectly titled, feeling like the soundtrack to a slow and gentle descent. Next up is ‘Familiar Ground’ which starts slow and considered and builds into a climax that shimmers and swirls like something by Beach House.

‘The Bear’ is a Gothic folk fairytale, reserved and slightly creepy, like Timber Timbre whispering as they fall asleep. It tells the tale of a journey into the woods and an encounter with a grizzly bear.

“Trapped we are inside this place, 
trapped we will dig our own graves

But the bear will keep us safe,
if we only do one thing for him.”

Perhaps one for your alternative Halloween mixtape?

The aforementioned ‘Dream Talk’ descends into a lovely throbbing murmur, with barely audible vocals that echo and fade, not entirely unlike Julianna Barwick. ‘Ill’ is devastatingly sad and pretty, opening with the line, “try to pretend you’re not dying”, it captures the same mournful air of The Antlers’ brilliant album, Hospice. Next, ‘All In The Name of Dancing’ changes the tone, a Memoryhouse style pop song. The album closer (this time excluding an instrumental/ambient bonus track) ‘Chairs’ is all dreamy and pretty for a while and then begins a slightly surreal acceleration and ends in some kind of muted frenzy.

Check out the video for ‘Drift Down’ below:

You can get Conversations on a pay-what-you-want basis via the band’s Bandcamp page. It’s not often you find ‘free’ music with as much heart and attention to detail as this, so please dig deep and give the band a little something, they deserve it.

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