Guest Mix: Moth - Mist Sketches

New guest mix for y'all from our main man Moth. This one is mostly ambient and dreamy house, the same mood we explored in our Deep House Introspective. We've also got the tracklist exclusively here on White Noise. Enjoy!

Tracklist:

2 8 1 4 - 恢复

Moomin - Valentine

Arnaldo - With You By The Lake

J Albert - Come Across

D. Tiffany - Tranq Moon

Lnrdcroy - I Met You On BC Ferries

Tuff Sherm - Burglar Loops

DJ Koze - XTC

John Roberts - August

Nick Holder - Feelin' Sad

DJ Richard - Vampire Dub

Vril - Torus XXXII

Oneohtrix Point Never - Chrome Country

PLO Man - Stations Of The Elevated

Label: Acting Press

While it hailed rave reviews and steep discogs prices, the first release on Berlin’s freshly-minted Acting Press label was not to everyone’s tastes. That 12”, courtesy of a collective known as CC Not, toyed with what we expect from dance music yet for us seemed as difficult and cerebral, a demanding proposition from the EP format.

One of CC Not’s constituents, PLO Man, has stepped out solo for the label’s second offering, and the music is far more inviting. Stations Of The Elevated doesn’t break any stark new ground: it quite closely references a quasi-spiritual period of early 90s house, dealing in meditative home trips composed of breakbeats and pads that stretch on for days.

Rare Plastic

While PLO Man’s core sounds may not be daring in their nature, here they are elegantly assembled and draw the listener in through structure as much as texture. First cut Rare Plastic throws its danciest shapes early on, as a catchy synth line entwines with wheeling breaks, but then as the energy dies down we the track’s only half done, giving onto a hypnotic four minutes trading rough-edged drums with icy ambience.

Nearly Invisible takes root with a soft test-tone, like a gentle alarm that proceeds to bind seven minutes of whirring ambience and woody rhythms. It’s an appealing slice of sound design but it’s thirteen-minute closer Type Damascus that proves the release’s most hypnotic work. Here is a real sound voyage, aqueous pads sifting like clouds over a gloriously slow build of dusted breaks, metallic clanks and swandiving sub-bass rattles. It ends, again, with three minutes of glassy ambience so entrancing that you’ll wait for it to completely fade away before you flip the record over to start again.

7/10

Lifted - 1

Label: PAN

There’s an interesting tension that exists in the world of dance music between the ideal of innovation and its execution. As heavy consumers of electronic and dance music, we tire of hearing the same thing and long for something that feels new and exciting, yet in general our expectations of ‘new’ and ‘exciting’ fall within a very narrow margin of musical possibility – we still want our sturdy beat pattern and arresting melody, just with the variables tweaked in a fresh way. Ultimately the difference between critically lauded ‘forward-thinking’ dance music and the most generic tech-house imaginable is a little like the genetic difference between a human and a banana – absolutely crucial if you happen to be a human (/banana) or a dance-head, but rather minor if you’re looking at the situation from the outside. Example: would one of your friends who doesn’t listen to dance at home but casually enjoys it in the club actually hear a huge difference between your favourite underground house jam and the latest David Guetta single?

This is why, in a sense, when we encounter true innovation it first seems baffling rather than dazzling, given that it doesn’t conform to our very strict expectations of what ‘our music’ should be. Lifted’s debut album '1' is just such an example. Granted, this wouldn’t exactly be called dance music, and while the broader electronic music tag includes some sounds which could be distant relatives to this LP (perhaps Oneohtrix Point Never and Holly Herndon as second cousins, twice-removed), the fact that Lifted is in fact a collaboration of some of our dance scene’s most brilliant minds makes it a worthy inclusion to the debate.

Lifted is an artistic project in the truest sense. Future Times’ endlessly compelling Max D (Andrew Field-Pickering) has teamed up with Co La (Matthew Papich) to create an album of material which is damn near uncategorisable, enlisting the help of Jordan CGZ and Gigi Masin on the overdubs. The music, all sent remotely between the group with little physical contact and released on Bill Kouligas’ reliable PAN imprint, shows the team breaking free from the fetters of the 4/4 and conformist dance music, shooting joyously into the sky with a rush of featherweight free-jazz and synthwork.

The music of '1' is so removed from points of reference that it defies easy description. It’s slippery, and on first listen may prove challenging, hard to grab on to. But once the listener gets used to the album’s internal logic it’s a thrilling piece that feels genuinely liberated, experimental music which soars with a light playfulness not often found in music which so overtly defies convention.

There are two key ingredients to Lifted’s sound. One is its chaotic rhythms, more free jazz than house. Whether the drums are hyper-filtered on Intoo, tumbling beyond rhythm on 3D or occasionally courting the ghost of a 4/4 on Total Care Zero, the effervescent percussion provides a nimble base for the range of melodic experimentation that is the album’s other crucial ingredient. The synths glide like chrome on Intoo, drift opulently on the gorgeous Mint or sketch future-grime figures on album highlight Bell Slide, constantly giving something new to the listener. 1 even briefly comes down from its lysergic rush on a couple of lush piano pieces, Lift a gentle celestial voyage and Silver more earthy, evoking a hushed loss.

Lifted’s debut is the rare album which feels purely next-level, like music beamed from an idealised future. And on its best moments, like Mint or the sparkling chill of closer Medicated Yoga, that future is very jazzy indeed. The sound that the group have created is like an unstable chemical: constantly mutating, joyously effervescent. So few artists who chart fresh electronic terrain manage to do so with such lightness and joy in their sound. Because Lifted do, you won’t just follow them willingly – you’ll do it with a broad smile on your face.

8.5/10 

Michael DeMaio - Half Cross

Label: Opal Tapes

Opal Tapes doesn’t really work like other labels. Aside from their pitch-black aesthetic and signature narcotised sound, the UK imprint helmed by Stephen Bishop (aka Basic House) put out all of their releases on cassette only until recently. Even when Bishop joined the online wagon he did it differently: every so often, seemingly when another batch of cassettes is ready to sell, he uploads a fistful of LPs onto the label’s Bandcamp for paid download. Considering that this is a label with a fanbase as slavering as any in the underground electronic spectrum, it all plays out a little like the long starvation before a feast.

So when it’s that time of the year, we pick our way through the latest offerings, many good, some great, secretly hoping to find another masterpiece like Patricia’s Body Issues LP from 2013. It might not be quite up there, but an album from the unknown (to our ears, at least) Michael DeMaio stood out from the pack this January. His LP Half Cross is an impressive work: swampy underworld sonics, crossed wires and profane frequencies.

Half Cross offers music as ambiguous as its cover art: is that a grimace of pleasure or pain? Across its six tracks, DeMaio establishes a strong central sound and explores it deftly, different paces and moods occupying the same ominous halflight.

The 11-minute title track is a real trip straight out of the gate. It takes its time to build over a shimmering ambient wash, before mutating into a murky house tune, with clashing hi-hats, desaturated chords and a pummelling kick that comes out in ragged bursts. Yet this is no outsider house by numbers: there’s an impressive range of rhythms that emerge and recede, generating real momentum where so many others would fall prey to inertia over ten minutes.

Nor is house necessarily the only order of the day. Across the album DeMaio proves adept at twisting sounds conventionally associated with IDM, ambient and experimental music to his own warped agenda. South is a stark construction of hi-hats like needles skating over echo-chamber handclaps and a diving bass hit. Each sound is crisp, isolated as if suspended in a vacuum. Then it all gives way to a distorted growl, where a ghostly vocal, brutalised beyond recognition shifts from threat to full-on horror. And then it’s gone. There’s a real flair for drama here, making for a very engaging listen despite the menace and humidity of DeMaio's sound.

Each tune is remarkably distinct for an album with such a coherent sound. The Blunt is a tougher trip, snares and hats cutting like daggers through a nervy ambient wash: this is more of a muscular club number, with a dreamy synth melody bringing it to an unexpectedly pretty close. Across Shatter and North DeMaio somewhat loses his energy. The former is an Actress-style meander into noodling synths and hollow snares, while the latter sports a hair-raising intro but gives way to industrial piston kicks and insectoid chittering. They’re atmospheric but disappointingly lacking in progression - though it could be argued that stasis is kind of the point here.

If those two tracks don’t quite seduce like the album’s first half, DeMaio certainly saved something special for a finale. Let me step out of my journalistic shoes for a moment and say how great the track title Knives Like Dresses is: the simile first works on the level of the visual, the corresponding shapes of the two objects bringing up a striking parallel. In terms of meaning, the reverse idea of ‘dresses like knives’ would already be great, unearthing the violence in a symbol of lightness and femininity. But by twisting it DeMaio conjures something more brilliantly unsettling – the elegance and beauty in an object of violence. The track is the album’s coup de grace, opening with a soup of corrosive distortion and mutilated vocals and having all appearances of continuing in the same vein. Then out of nowhere a shuddering kick arrives, frenetic, tripping and stumbling over itself but not shifting or letting up. There’s a raw brutality to it, an uncompromising ugliness which proves utterly consuming. As suddenly as it started, it's gone, leaving only echoes.

If this album is a building it’s a haunted castle: full of trapdoors, corridors at acute angles, surrounded by acres of twilit marshland. There’s a real power lurking here. Come and find it.

8/10

Roly Porter - Life Cycle of a Massive Star

Label: Subtext

Electronic music is an appropriate form to explore hefty emotional and existential concepts: as the music is a result of the careful sequencing of sounds and samples, the listener’s mind does not leap to associate it with the human who sings or plays instruments. Freed from this human association, electronic composition gains a curious sense of objectivity: standing as a complete product whose creation process is often incomprehensible, it can conjure the otherworldly, the fantastic and the terrifying in a way acoustic music cannot. As a tool to explore big themes it’s not just an apposite form, it’s downright liberating – yet within the market-driven musical sphere one seldom finds artists who choose ambition, who try to explore themes beyond love-, street-, or club-life.

From the opening bars of Roly Porter’s new album, Life Cycle of a Massive Star, it is clear that we are being offered something special. Following his work with pioneering dubstep duo Vex’d, Porter split from partner Kuedo to follow a darker, more abstract muse, fusing a clutch of genres from ambient to drone, dub to classical, culminating in his 2011 album Aftertime. Two years on, Porter’s second LP is an epic work, abstractly charting the creation and destruction of an interstellar body, and it's pulled off with an unparalleled sense of scale and emotional scope.

It may only last 35 minutes, but Life Cycle contains the richness of many albums three times its length. This is because it makes you think: using its cosmic themes, this LP is able to open a dialogue on mortality, tacitly questioning the significance of the human by contextualising him within an immense cosmic abyss. This sense of immensity is produced with sonic dualities: droney ambience is set against emotive orchestral figures, alienating blasts of noise nestled against intimate string sections. Rather than exploiting the hoary trope of techno as man vs. machine, Porter sets the human against the void, and the results are utterly captivating.

The word ‘cycle’ is key here: not only does human life move in cycles, but through the album’s central dualities the acts of creation and destruction are shown to be inextricably linked; death portrayed as another stage of the life process rather than its opposite. Opener Cloud contains clear human traces but its vocal sample is gravity-crushed, de-oxygenated and looped over a taut, juddering beat. The piece is astonishing to behold, gathering momentum as the beats jar like locked machinery, giving way to an ominous ambience which swallows those final strings.

Each sequence of Porter’s cycle is considered yet visceral, making an immediate impact and still rewarding detailed listening over repeated spins. Gravity contains several movements, its frightening intro of whirring machinery set starkly against subtle strings which build to a nakedly beautiful climax by the track’s close, swallowing the listener whole in a wash of reflective melancholy. Birth begins with what sounds like a vacuum gasping in air, flares of sound evoking the primal forces of the universe, here contrasted with stirring woodwind and choral movements which create a mesmerising dichotomy. The hypnosis continues on Sequence, a softer procession of drones and distant orchestras which moves with the glacial pace of stoic practitioners Stars of the Lid.

For his dramatic finale Porter configures Giant, a petrifying piece where abrasive squalls of stomach-churning noise are set against sudden silence, leaving the listener alarmed yet wholly receptive, emotionally rent open by the unpredictable textures of the previous thirty minutes. It’s a wild ride, yet for all the space present on Life Cycle of a Massive Star, it is not a work that exists in a vacuum. Its context is what makes the album shine, both sonically and spatially: brave sound calling out into the abyss, humans persevering despite the angst of insignificance both cosmic and human. This LP contains a universal sound: it is a sonic black hole which buckles the listener, forces patience and openness, and encourages us to hear differently. It is an awe-inspiring achievement.

9/10

Huerco S. - Colonial Patterns

Label: Software

Up until now, the career of Kansas native Brian Leeds has followed much the same path as many other lofi electronic practitioners. A trio of releases on boutique labels Future Times, Opal Tapes and Wicked Bass allied the Huerco S. name with an experimental approach to house and techno, heavy on distortion and murky atmospherics. Yet with a signing to Daniel Lopatin’s Software label (a man many will know better as Oneohtrix Point Never), Leeds’ debut arrives with a lot more press than expected, alongside a clear academic slant explicit in the album’s title.

The sudden elevation of a cassette-releasing experimentalist to Pitchfork prominence may lead to some suspicion, asking whether the historical interrogation implied by track names likes Quivira are a solid base for intellectual exploration, or an obscure attempt to twin trendy post-colonial examination with trendy lofi house jams. Fittingly, we can look to Leeds’ past, as well as his present, for answers. The producer has more than proved his musical dexterity over his few releases to date: from the eternal, heartbroken ambience of Battery Tunnel to the mesmeric groove of career highlight Apheleia’s Theme. Colonial Patterns is an expansion of the Huerco S. sound, delivering a haunting musical landscape which is suggestive rather than didactic, beguiling through its ambiguous themes and textures.

The first thing listeners will notice about Colonial Patterns is its dedication to ambience. Unlike Leeds’ previous releases, much of the hour-long album is beatless, bringing to mind the introspective depths of recent albums from Vessel and Actress. Unexpected it may be, but the new focus on ambience does not disappoint: the album’s textures are magnificent, its decayed sounds evoking a timeless sense of loss. From the woozy strings of menacing opener Struck With Deer Lungs to the subtle hues of Monks Mound (Arcology), many of the piece’s highlights play out melodies buried under static and distortion, left for the listener to unearth and interpret.

In a sense, it is these atmospheric sections which draw the purest parallel to Leeds’ colonial commentary. A proud Midwesterner, he talked engagingly in a recent interview about his homeland’s colonial context. Some of these ideas do come across in Colonial Patterns: by subjecting contemporary house and techno to the decay of music’s past, he provokes a convincing discourse on history’s susceptibility to manipulation. This is most clear on standout track Prinzif, where a veil of meditative ambience is abruptly parted, revealing the robust, colourful terrain buried – and far from dormant – beneath the surface.  

Yet for all of this theoretical interpretation, some of the album’s ambient pieces still slip through the gaps, lost between stronger compositions and lacking the memorability of Leeds’ more beat-driven compositions. As a result, the likes of ‘Iińzhiid and Ragtime U.S.A. (Warning), providing not only clear beat patterns but transparent melody and vocals, constitute the album’s most focused, engaging moments. It’s a murky, sometimes alien trip through inversions of the dance music we know, yet Colonial Patterns excels in its ambiguity; genuinely thought-provoking and – when the clouds part – nakedly beautiful.

7/10