D/R/U/G/S

Here's a fresh banger from Manchester duo D/R/U/G/S, whose frustratingly limited catalog of three original songs and one remix is completely forgiven by how freaking good these songs sound. "Liquid Max (Testmixx)" starts with a pulsing beat and throbbing bass chords that recall Radiohead's "Pyramid Song" and ends with cut-up diva vocals cascading over twinkling synths. If there's anything wrong with the song, it's the sudden ending and relatively short length of 3:22. When house sounds this good, I could listen happily forever.

D/R/U/G/S - Liquid Max (Testmixx)

"Hathaway (Testmixxx)" and "Love (Love/Lust Darkmix)" are equally excellent.  Check them below.

D/R/U/G/S - Hathaway (Testmixxx)
D/R/U/G/S - Love (Love/Lust Darkmix)

Follow D/R/U/G/S on Tumblr for more music and news on their debut 12".

RxRy - Ω

Please forgive my RxRy-related redundancy, but the artist has graciously offered his latest album, Ω, for free download at his blog. It readily awaits your consumption.

On first listen, Ω is a life-affirming stream of ambient soundscapes and stuttering beats. Song titles that reference air and rail travel feature aural examinations of the same: these are sounds we can only imagine we'd hear floating weightlessly above the clouds or charging full steam ahead, soaring or spinning metal traveling through space and time.

After one listen, or many, you may not find a "favorite" song or even remember any of the titles. That's because RxRy's music lulls you to dream-like state, where details such as song titles and track lengths aren't important or even perceptible. At a certain level, you are not actively listening to music. The music is actively transforming and transporting you. Let it take you where you want to go.

More words on Ω will likely follow in the near future.

Sample three artist-selected songs from Ω below.  Then get Ω - and the rest of RxRy's excellent discography - here.

ΩPLYLST by RxRy

Delorean & Lemonade @ Lincoln Hall

Genuinely looking forward to seeing Spain's Balearic pop stars Delorean and NYC-via-San Francisco electro-funk-punk trio Lemonade tonight at Lincoln Hall. A song from each follows.

Delorean - Stay Close

Lemonade - Lifted

The Morning Benders X The Golden Filter

 
Above, The Morning Benders' breathtakingly beautiful "Excuses" gets creepified by the always-reliable remixers The Golden Filter. Never ones to leave the original song anywhere near intact, The Golden Filter instead keep Christopher Chu's doo-wop vocals in a closet, claustrophobic among a choir of children, with a disco beat, plodding bass and twinkling synthesizers. You can grab the MP3 by using the above widget for the price of entering your email.
 
In case you've missed it, here's The Morning Benders' original version:
 
The Morning Benders - Excuses

And one of my favorite songs of all time, by The Golden Filter:
 
The Golden Filter - Solid Gold

(via Pitchfork)

RxRy.2

Here's an interview I wish I'd done: with RxRy, the self-described "drownstep" artist who's equal parts enigma and excellent. But never mind my self-interest: fellow blogger Stadiums and Shrines did a more than stellar job, with a beautifully-written introduction and insightful questions that both compliment and challenge the artist. What's revealed is an artist who's acutely aware of how identity and persona intersect in the age of instant gratification, and how these constructs affect our exposure to and perception of his music. Anonymity, it seems, can propel an artist from relative obscurity to omnipresence almost overnight (see: iamamiwhoami), but RxRy's preference for a "low profile" seems genuine, not gimmicky. Never mind a band biography or detailed demographics. RxRy might say: These are my songs. Or, more simply, these are songs. What do they mean to you? How do they make you feel?

Head over to Stadiums and Shrines for a great read. The icing on the cake is a gratis download of "Obtvse Boqœt Conc¨ssion," the second single, so to speak, from RxRy's upcoming album Ω.

RxRy - Obtvse-Boqœt-Conc¨ssion by casketcrashvigil

And here's "Aertigo Lapsees," the first single from Ω.

RxRy - Aertgo Lapsees

Previously:

RxRy - Sobr Vokbulry

RxRy - Eaurowi

New album from Girl Talk

In the absolutely absurd, inconceivably impossible event you haven't heard by now, reigning mash-up monarch Girl Talk has a new album of A.D.D-informed, ecstasy-inspired dance-pop tunes to fuel your upcoming rave, workout, all-night study session, night bus, etc. Entitled All Day, it's available for free download from Girl Talk's boundary-pushing label, Illegal Art. It's what (mostly) everyone will be listening to come the weekend, so you might as well get down now.

Dem Hunger

New track from Dem Hunger, whose twisted hip-hop beats are fried in a pan, coated in gray spray paint and left to bubble up from the bottom of a primordial swamp. "Squint Fucker" is the B-side to a split 7" out November 20 on vlek records. Its percolating synth melody sounds a bit like a Raymond Scott song played on a vintage video game controller, with the beat dragging its feet and a snowy noise pattern sullying the mix.

Dem Hunger - Squint Fucker by vlek

The split, with Belgium's Cupp Cave, is limited to 300 copies on 180-gram vinyl. Handmade and screen-printed with glow-in-the-dark or golden ink. Put simply, guaranteed to sell out fast. So pre-order here.

Kinder

Austin's Kinder is a rather excellent surgeon (of the sonic variety), stitching samples and suturing sounds into melodically-pleasing glitch-hop for our listening pleasure. Self-described as "dubbeatkrunk," which seemingly lumps London, Los Angeles and Lil Jon into the same genre tag, Kinder's beats are probably too disparate to be dubstep, too dynamic to be just beats and too intelligent to be drunk-stoned. That's a compliment to the artist - these tunes vary in tone and tempo and are melodically sophisticated, even transcendent. Fans of Flying Lotus and Gold Panda will find lots to appreciate here. Keep your computer keys and mouse clicking on Kinder; I have a feeling there's much more where this came from and that it's only getting better from here.

Kinder - Koto Winter

Kinder - Games At The Field

Kinder - Time To Move On

Kinder - No Regrets

Grab more Kinder at Bandcamp.

(via Don't Die Wondering)

Zonotope™

Screeching squeals of sound buttressed by a bumbling bass line.

Zonotope - Those Days

A robot on a roll-about chirps in transit, as it reads and stores data on its over-stimulating surroundings.

Zonotope - Inserting The Galactic Disc

Download Zonotope™'s Cruising Through The Hypersphere of Resonance at Bandcamp.

Awake, after a hundred-year hibernation in the heavens, holographs of a hazy history and mirages of moments past whiz outside the spaceship's window, hovering long enough to singe the time-worn tips of the spaceman's cerebral synapses, but wilting just as quickly as they blossomed in his bleary brain.

Zonotope - Under That Building

And, one of the most beautiful things I've heard in a long time.



Buy Zonotope™'s Excellent Realms cassette from The Curatorial Club before it sells out. Or buy a digital download here.

If Dan Lopatin and Matthew Dear scored a straight-to-VHS science fiction film, Excellent Realms would be its extraterrestrial soundtrack.

Excellent Realms, indeed. Essential listening.

(via Don't Die Wondering, ALTERED ZONES and Rose Quartz)

Magic Places

The Time-Traveler’s Pocket Guidebook. A presumptuous title, perhaps, but Magic Places' debut album more than keeps its promises. Rather than read the Guidebook, we simply open our ears to the sounds therein, and the secrets of time-travel are absorbed into our collective conscious. Upon absorption, we find an absolutely magnificent, synth-driven spectacle that does indeed slow seconds into minutes, minutes into hours, hours into days, and so forth. Some passages glisten and twinkle in a bubbling candescence, like celestial gems reflecting off moon-swept waters. Other selections drone on and gaze out, alternately stabbing and washing clean an otherwise shimmering electronic plane. Whatever the case, these are the marvelous sounds of traversing through space and time, blasting off against gravity’s grain, the push and pull of particles passing across the arc of time.

Like much of the bedroom-born, blissed-out laptop music of late, there's an undeniable degree of 80s nostalgia here - if not for synth pop, then for soundtracks to movies with giant, flying dogs and labyrinths. But like the best of the 80s revivalists - Memory Tapes and Washed Out - Magic Places is indebted to the past but not beholden to it. That is, Magic Places takes inspiration from the past, but he's also been to the future and knows what it sounds like, and that makes his present music-making all the more majestic and meaningful. A Time-Traveler's Pocket Guidebook, indeed.

Led by the stirring, soulful "Through The Map Door" and surrounded by equally excellent songs such as "Timespace Reveille," The Time Traveler's Pocket Guidebook certainly sounds like one of the year's best albums.

Magic Places - Through The Map Door

Magic Places - Timespace Reveille


Experience the complete Guidebook at Magic Places' Bandcamp.

(via Don't Die Wondering and No Modest Bear)