Foxy Digitalis
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An intoxicating blend of wistfulness, acceptance, and joy permeates The Big Net’s “Bine,” the melodic pomp making our bodies move and our hearts full. As the frontman sings, “Everyone wants to feel free, I can’t tie your heart to mine,” we are pulled in. Crunchy guitars riff on the last hours before dawn well and […]
Tenniscoats is truly one of my favorite projects of the last couple of decades, and as the 15th anniversary of the crucial Totemo Aimasho approaches, Room 40 has a new edition ready along with a bootleg cassette from a performance in Tasmania from 2009. Saya and Ueno have such a special ability to capture the fragility and […]
Haunted worlds and hypnagogic atmospheres bathe the sonic environment of “Tango Zero” in a faded neon glow. Scratched-out textures leave a mark, coalescing into otherworldly shapes and tonal patterns. Equohm pushes ideas etched out on his recent album, Tango Lento, beyond written boundaries, into sun-parched emptiness. There, this music thrives. Familiar sounds bleed into alien arrangements […]
Intermediate zones bleed into spectral spaces within Joshua Hill and Micaela Tobin’s “Fade Away.” Born in a tent outside Hill’s parent’s home in Arizona, the duo’s Tent Music expands into unfathomable terrain. Forward-marching cadences grow into a ramshackle brilliance, Tobin and Hill’s voices climbing higher through a billowing, existential framework. Basslines find grooves in the echoes atop […]
Repetition gently builds into a feeling of relaxed wonder on Flaer’s beguiling “Forever Never,” the second single from their upcoming album, Preludes. Acoustic guitar and piano melodies intermingle, buoyed by their fragility, opening gossamer patterns that stitch together ephemeral sonic reflections. “Forever Never” glows with an infectious impermanence as it pulls our focus toward the disintegrating […]
Even in the subterranean cataclysms of Lea Bertucci and Lawrence English’s “Amorphic Foothills,” the sky above ignites with a thunderous fervor. Discordant strings wallow beneath layers of gray, flailing through the air as though they’re being chased by resonant hellfire. “There are moments, traveling through new terrains, that the strange familiar resonates with extra clarity,” […]
“Take My Heart” starts with a pop, Francie Medosch’s unforgettable voice a clawhammer strike right at the core. “Take my heart,” she pleads, “and be kind” over a rickety stew of Dinosour Jr.-esque guitar scrawl and simmering pedal steel. Inside the restrained bombast of earworm verses and an anthemic chorus, melodies flash bright smiles while […]
Worlds created from revolving scraps of everyday objects follow the exploratory sonic spirit of Noémi Büchi’s “Prelude for Rational Freshness.” Lightning arpeggios gloss into dazzling waves, rising like celebratory tides and fading into apprehensive restraint. Büchi creates a sense of grandeur through these shifting chord progressions and changing moods, all heightened by Christoffer Joergensen’s hypnotizing video. Shapes […]
Hollow sounds are calming. Deep, mutating resonances moving like a slow breath pull us downward into a space of subterranean stillness. Through contact recordings of a highway’s substructure, Lisa Lerkenfeldt finds inward-facing soundworlds in a surprising place. “Shell of a City” is minimalist, but that only heightens its visceral impact as tones have room to […]