21-12-2021 alter:MiX # 33 alter tracks in PRSNT_PRFCT_MiX (2h 15m)

21-12-2021 alter:MiX # 33 alter tracks in PRSNT_PRFCT_MiX (2h 15m) [2019-2021] # Son Lux, TOY, Eerie Wanda, Rose City Band, Goat Girl, Benjamin Lazar Davis, Urlaub in Polen, Bradford Cox / Cate Le Bon, Lost Under Heaven, The Growlers, Pom Poko, Deap Vally, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, Night Flowers, Desert Sessions

M U S I C (2h 15m)

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Originally the post-rock project of composer/keyboardist/vocalist Ryan Lott, Son Lux grew over the course of the 2010s to include guitarist/composer Rafiq Bhatia and experimental drummer Ian Chang. Combining live instruments with computer-manipulated acoustic performances, samples, and Lott's strained vocal delivery, Son Lux's bold, dystopic sound often correlates with anxious lyrics about a fearful future.

Son Lux 

Bodies 2:41

Warning 3:02

from Tomorrows II 2020

Son Lux released the first installment of their Tomorrows trilogy in August of a turbulent 2020. Fourth months later, and loosely reminiscent of the second movement of a classical symphony, Tomorrows II proves to be a relatively more hushed, introspective volume. Like Tomorrows I, it was recorded with group members and contributors separated in such far-flung locales as New York, Los Angeles, Indianapolis, and Budapest... 

London's TOY borrow from shoegaze, Krautrock, and classic psychedelia to make pulsating, absorbing music. 

TOY 

Down on the Street 4:43

A Doll's House 3:35

from Songs of Consumption 2019

TOY started 2019 with one of their lushest releases and ended it with a study in minimalism. On the full-length Happy in the Hollow, they indulged in as many styles and sounds as they could pack into its songs, but on Songs of Consumption, they don't pile on layer after layer to keep things interesting. Both rawer and more electronic than any of their previous music, this covers EP finds TOY drawing on the evocative simplicity of vintage synth pop, minimal wave, and electro-punk as they reimagine songs by artists ranging from the Troggs to John Barry. Not only does the band have an enviable record collection, they know how to pick songs that challenge them. They begin the EP with one of their biggest departures: Their taut version of "Down on the Street" trades the Stooges' raw power for sullen synth rock with a cruise-controlled Motorik beat... The band gives Nico's "Sixty Forty" a makeover that's nearly as radical, miniaturizing its dark, rolling majesty into something more intimate but just as poignant... Their dedication to stripping these songs down to their bones yields especially fascinating results on "A Doll's House," where they translate the complexity of John Barry's composition with just a handful of instruments. Even when TOY returns to a more familiar sound, they do it creatively...

The Dutch band Eerie Wanda are led by vocalist/songwriter/guitarist Marina Tadic, whose warmly intimate vocals are paired with melancholy pop songs influenced by psychedelia (as on their debut album, 2016's Hum) or, as on their second record, 2019's Pet Town, sweet early-'60s ballads and rockabilly.

Eerie Wanda 

Pet Town 3:27

Rockabiller 3:32

Hands of the Devil 2:35

from Pet Town 2019

...There are traces of girl group sweetness, soda shop, rockabilly, and lots of Ricky Nelson's "Lonesome Town" in the sound Tadic and her mates create. It's quiet and peaceful, but never boring thanks to the richness of Tadic's voice and the power of her lyrics. There's a disarming directness to both the melodies and the words, and though one might miss Verhulst's pulsing basslines or the electric guitars, the unbroken mood Tadic creates is entrancing. .. Pet Town makes for the perfect record to calm down at the end of a typically bonkers day or as a brief respite from the storm during the middle of it. Tadic's vocals are endlessly soothing, the arrangements are comforting, and the warmth of the songs emanates from the speakers like gentle heat waves from a crackling fire. Stripping back from the already gentle sound of Hum could have been a step in the wrong direction' instead, it's a perfect evolution and a wonderful album.

After initially appearing as a semi-anonymous psychedelic country jam band, Rose City Band was revealed to be the project of Wooden Shjips/Moon Duo guitarist/vocalist Ripley Johnson. He worked with indie giant Thrill Jockey to reissue the band's 2019 self-titled debut after a self-released pressing quickly sold out. ..

Rose City Band 

Rip City 3:49

Rivers of Mind 6:34

Fog of Love 4:22

from Rose City Band 2020

Mysterious and calm, the debut album from Rose City Band rolls in slowly like the morning fog. Produced by Moon Duo/Wooden Shjips member Ripley Johnson, the project filters the softer side of the Grateful Dead's jammy explorations through a gentle, spaced-out haze. Where other late-2010s disciples of Garcia and Weir sometimes reworked the Dead's amped-up boogie rock tendencies, Rose City Band's self-titled debut leans more into the moments of soft, cosmic elegance that sometimes arrived deep into lengthy space jams... Rose City Band is ultimately less about the songs, or even the jamming, and more about the muted, textural palette it stretches out on.

06-12-2021 alter:MiX # 33 alter tracks in PRSNT_PRFCT_MiX (2h 22m) [2019-2021]

06-12-2021 alter:MiX # 33 alter tracks in PRSNT_PRFCT_MiX (2h 22m) [2019-2021] # G. Love & Special Sauce, Pearl Charles, Still Corners, Little Barrie, Malcolm Catto, Circles Around the Sun, Geese,Radiohead,Son Lux, TOY,Eerie Wanda,Rose City Band,Goat Girl

M U S I C (2h 22m)

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G. Love & Special Sauce are a Philadelphia-based trio whose laid-back, sloppy blues sound is quite unique, as it encompasses the sound/production of classic R&B and recent rap artists (the Beastie Boys, in particular). The group -- G. Love (born Garrett Dutton) on guitar/vocals/harmonica, Jeff Clemens on drums, and Jim Prescott on upright bass -- released their self-titled debut in 1994 on OKeh/Epic..
G. Love & Special Sauce 

Go Crazy (feat. Keb' Mo') 3:40

Fix Your Face 3:15

from The Juice 2020

Now that they're over a quarter-century into their career, it's time to come to terms with a simple fact: G. Love & Special Sauce are no longer youthful upstarts, they're veterans. Fittingly, their 2020 album The Juice is the kind of record that could only be made by musicians who've been around the block a time or two. It's not that The Juice is the work of untrammeled virtuosos -- it is most decidedly a vibe record -- but rather that it's an album that's casually confident that also happens to have an offhand sense of community. At its core, The Juice derives from a series of Nashville sessions held with Keb' Mo', who is credited as a co-producer and appears on a fair chunk of the album...

Singer/songwriter Pearl Charles has a knack for writing melodic, low-key indie pop with a jangling country tone. After coming up through the Los Angeles lo-fi and garage scenes, she made her full-length debut in 2018 with Sleepless Dreamer, a finely crafted slice of warm country-pop. She followed it up three years later with Magic Mirror...

Pearl Charles 

Imposter 3:25

Magic Mirror 2:58

Sweet Sunshine Wine 4:10

from Magic Mirror 2021

In a pleasing tangle of sun-warmed melodies and 1970s influences, Pearl Charles strikes a confident, if laid-back tone on Magic Mirror, her sophomore album. The Los Angeles native has been bubbling under the radar for nearly a decade, trying her hand in a variety of indie subsets from lo-fi Americana to garage and psychedelia before landing on a more polished amalgam of vintage-flavored country-pop and West Coast soft rock. Her 2018 debut, Sleepless Dreamer, showed plenty of promise and laid the framework for the more fully realized sound she achieves here... The production and arrangements throughout are impeccable, warm, and well-suited to the kind of thoughtful, low-key songwriting at which Charles excels. Neither basking in its vintage flavor nor overplaying its strengths, Magic Mirror is the kind of subtle record that reveals its pleasures through repeated listens. Even Charles' voice is a comfort; after a decade of mainstream mumblers and overwrought affectations, her enunciated vocal style brings a conversational tone to the songs...

United by Tessa Murray's delicate vocals and their love of otherworldly atmospheres, Still Corners' music is otherwise in constant motion. .. Still Corners formed shortly after Hughes, a native of Austin, Texas, met Murray by chance at a London train station. Taking their name from a phrase in Robert Frost's poem "New Hampshire," they soon began making music together...

Still Corners 

The Last Exit 4:41

A Kiss Before Dying 2:45

It's Voodoo 4:44

from The Last Exit 2021

More than a decade after they formed, Still Corners and their music remain in constant motion. Over the years, Greg Hughes and Tessa Murray have relocated from London to the English seaside to Texas' Hill Country, and their sound has shifted with every move. On The Last Exit, however, there's a slightly shorter distance between where they've been and where they are. They embellish on the sunbaked dream pop they introduced on Slow Air... Even if The Last Exit is sometimes a little too wispy, it's still a fitting soundtrack for getting lost on the open road.

Little Barrie are a London-based trio led by ace guitarist Barrie Cadogan, whose sound is an exciting blend of hard rock, blues, soul, and funk that calls to mind classic bands of the '60s like Traffic and Cream... By the time of 2020's Quatermass Seven, the band had staked out a place all their own sonically and Cadogan was firmly entrenched on the short list of best guitarists of his era...

Little Barrie, Malcolm Catto 

Rest In Blue 4:20

Repeater #2 4:02

After After 8:10

from Quatermass Seven 2020

After the release of their 2017 album Death Express, Little Barrie suffered the tragic loss of drummer Virgil Howe, and the remaining two members of the group, guitarist Barrie Cadogan and bassist Lewis Wharton, took some time deciding whether they wanted to keep the band going. When they did choose to make more music together, they called in drummer Malcom Catto of the London jazz group Heliocentrics. The trio began jamming in the drummer's basement studio, liked what they came up with, and turned their ideas into a set of songs. Recorded simply on vintage equipment, the seven-song Quatermass Seven album crackles with energy and shines like a gritty diamond as the three players delve deeply into grooves so deep they feel bottomless... It's a heady mix of vintage sounds, just like the band usually put on tape, but a little freer and tougher thanks to Catto's jazz background, the urgency of Cadogan's singing and playing, and the sense that the emotional stakes are a little higher...

Circles Around the Sun is a contemporary instrumental rock band that formed with the specific purpose of creating intermission music for Fare Thee Well, a series of reunion concerts played by the surviving members of the Grateful Dead during their 2015 tour. Those shows celebrated the band's 50th anniversary and served as their official send-off, while Circles Around the Sun was designed to reflect the Dead's spacy and grooving overall feel...

018 ALTER.NATiON: weekly favtraX 27-01-2019

ALTER.NATiON

Marina Tadic / Eerie Wanda

Eerie Wanda, TOY, Royal Canoe, Mike Krol, FIDLAR, Rival Sons, William Tyler, Kamaal Williams, Julia Kent, Mono, Swallow the Sun, The Writhing Squares

weekly favtraX

27-01-2019

Eerie Wanda - Sleepy Eyes from Pet Town
Eerie Wanda is the brainchild of audio and visual artist Marina Tadic. Born to Croatian parents in the former Yugoslavia, Marina became a political refugee when she was just 6 years old. Forced to leave their home due to the Bosnian war, Marina’s parents sought asylum in the Netherlands- which is where Marina grew into an adult, became an accomplished artist, and where she still resides.

Her second LP, Pet Town is an exercise in isolated creativity. Using minimal recording techniques, Tadic shapes these ten songs from sheer intuition, while drawing inspiration from solitude. Although her two bandmates Jasper Verhulst and Jeroen de Heuvel are each relatively close geographically (residing in Amsterdam, Utrecht, and Nijmegen), the band decided to record each of their parts alone, in their own homes. And weave the songs together remotely, like pen-pals making a quilt. "I've written the songs in a period of my life in which I was feeling quite alone. I wanted the recording process to feel like that too", says Marina.

TOY - Energy from Happy in the Hollow
Happy In The Hollow is entirely uncompromising: an atmospheric capturing of a state of mind that touches on Post Punk, electronic dissonance, acid folk and Krautrock. Familiar qualities like metronomic rhythms, warping guitars, undulating synths and Tom’s gentle, reedy vocals are all in there, but so is a greater emphasis on melody, a wider scope, and a combining of the reassuring and the sinister that is as unnerving as it is captivating.'
The sound has without doubt expanded — and grown more confident — in part because this is the first album for which Toy has become a self-sufficient five-person unit doing everything for themselves.

Royal Canoe - Black Sea from Waver
Waver, the fourth proper LP from Canadian art-pop sextet Royal Canoe, finds the band trying to whittle away a few layers from their quirky, genre-inclusive approach. Largely self-produced with some help from engineer John Paul Peters, the ten-song set follows the Winnipeg band's breakout sophomore album, 2013's Juno-nominated Today We're Believers, and its overly busy follow-up, Something Got Lost Between Here and the Orbit, which came out in 2016 and was helmed by Animal Collective producer Ben Allen. Royal Canoe's ambitious mashup of pop, hip-hop, soul, and math-inclined rock rides the fine line between wishing to entertain and challenge listeners, veering frequently to one side or the other and occasionally failing to achieve either task.

Mike Krol - Arrow In My Heart from Power Chords
Most of the garage-punk acts that have emerged in the wake of Ty Segall and Thee Oh Sees in the 2010s have been bands with no small amount of studied cool lurking behind their sweaty energy. Mike Krol is a vital exception to this rule; Krol is far too concerned with pumping out his fuzzy, no-frills, hook-infused rock and laying his heart out for all to see to have much truck with being cool. And that's a large part of what makes his music work so well. Krol clearly has a sense of humor and isn't trying to reinvent the wheel, but it's clear that rock & roll means a lot to him.

FIDLAR - Alcohol from Almost Free
Taking the acronym that forms their name ("F*ck it dog, life's a risk") as a literal credo, L.A. garage punks FIDLAR try their best to evolve past the dumb but somewhat endearing slackery of their early days with Almost Free, their difficult third full-length. For a band whose primary themes involved getting baked, getting wasted, skating, and partying, the growing pains that come with trying to be taken more seriously are going to be tough. Their spotty sophomore release, 2016's Too, wrestled with frontman Zac Carper's newfound sobriety in the face of the group's chosen lifestyle and typical subject matter; on Almost Free, they further complicate things by introducing some politics and social commentary into the mix. To their credit, FIDLAR have made legitimate attempts to get out of their creative comfort zone and go somewhere new.

Rival Sons - Feral Roots from Feral Roots
Fuzzed-out classic rock revivalists from Los Angeles whose sound evokes the bluesy sound of legendary bands like Led Zeppelin.  Evoking the bluesy rock of bands like Led Zeppelin and the Black Crowes, California's Rival Sons emerged in 2012 as hard rock classicists with a modern edge thanks to their breakout second album Pressure & Time. Establishing a strong collaborative bond with Nashville producer Dave Cobb to helm each of their albums... Since debuting in 2009 with the self-released Before the Fire, Long Beach, California's Rival Sons have been on a tear, delivering a refreshingly unfussy blast of blues-blasted hard rock on an almost yearly basis...

William Tyler - Our Lady of the Desert from Goes West
William Tyler’s new record, Goes West, is the best music that he’s ever made. I’m sure of this because I know and love all of his music intimately, and this album moves me the most, and the most consistently. The first time I heard it was in the late spring in the Texas Hill Country, rolling between limestone and scrub. I was on a cleanse then—no alcohol, no drugs, no evil thoughts—and was astonished at the emotional clarity that the album held. It offered up a model for what I wanted my head to feel like. Goes West marks a sort of narrowing of focus for William’s music; it sounds as though he found a way to point himself directly towards the rich and bittersweet emotional center of his music without being distracted by side trips...

Kamaal Williams - Snitches Brew 2019
Kamaal Williams (aka Henry Wu) follows his universally acclaimed 2018 full-length The Return with this two-track 12" single that, because of its compositional and improvisational acumen, plays more like an EP despite its relatively brief playing time... The flipside, "Snitches Brew," with its left-field nod to Miles Davis in the title, is a trio affair produced by Wu and recorded and mixed by Syed Adam Jaffrey. It hosts the producer on synth bass, Mansur Brown on electric guitar, and the wonderful Dexter Hercules on drum kit. It's introduced by a jagged synth bass bubbling in an angular, insistent riff with double-timed snare, kick drum, and cymbals by Hercules, who is clearly seeking the tune's bleeding edge. When Brown enters with his wah-wah pedal, things get wonky. While it doesn't sound much like Davis, it does recall the more cosmic funk traverses of early Weather Report à la Sweetnighter and Mysterious Traveler. Halfway through, the tempo increases and Wu's bassline is merely the anchor as Brown uses his instruments as exploratory tools and Hercules breaks the beat, adding weight and balance to the atmospheric textures..

Julia Kent - Floatingg City from Temporal
Cellist/composer Julia Kent's fifth solo album primarily consists of pieces written for dance and theatre productions. As with her previous releases, she uses looping devices and electronics to frame her intense, rhythmic cello playing, sometimes building up to turbulent, choppy waves. The majority of these pieces clearly sound conceived with choreography in mind, evenly progressing and introducing more dramatic sections at a logical pace...

Mono - Sorrow from Nowhere Now Here
With Nowhere Now Here, their tenth album, Japan's Mono celebrates their 20th anniversary. They've expanded their sonic palette and continued to keep a close ear on their roots even as they've woven ambient sounds, cinematic power metal, and dissonance into a unique melodic sensibility at once fragile and beautful. Often using chamber and symphony orchestras, they've built on their dynamic contrasts -- dark and light, violence and stillness, chaos and tranquility -- with a remarkable, emotionally potent consistency.
Nowhere Now Here recombines most of the elemental musical traits apparent throughout the band's history, while adding electronics to their arsenal. The quartet has undergone its first personnel change with drummer Dahm Majuri Cipolla replacing Yasunori Takada...

Swallow the Sun - Never Left from When a Shadow Is Forced into the Light
...When a Shadow Is Forced Into the Light's title is drawn from a Stanbridge lyric. Its songs are more melodic than anything in STS's catalog. Instead of bone-crushing doom-death metal, they deliver atmospheric post-metal undergirded by gothic rock with shards of black metal and doom. The title-track opener eases the listener into the darkness with the sound of roaring wind, ritualistic drums, and a processional modal melody. Its swirl is elucidated by strummed acoustic guitars, languid keyboards, and vocalist Mikko Kotamäki at his most soothing...

The Writhing Squares - A Whole New Jupiter from Out of the Ether
Even though Philly-based band the Writhing Squares is made up of just two people, they conjure enough layers of sonic sludge to sound not just like a large band on full power, but a wall of beautifully gnarled noise calling out from the depths of a black hole. Building on the clatter of decidedly primitive drum-machine rhythms, Daniel Provenzano's overdriven bass lines wobble and churn as his bandmate Kevin Nickles fills in any space with tentacular waves of saxophone, delay-drenched vocals and deep-fried electronics. Their numbers are small but the sound is far from minimal...

Eerie Wanda, TOY, Royal Canoe, Mike Krol, FIDLAR, Rival Sons, William Tyler, Kamaal Williams, Julia Kent, Mono, Swallow the Sun, The Writhing Squares