Tag Archives: ghostly international
Tycho – Dive (Ghostly International)
Tycho
Dive
Ghostly International
Rating: 5 out of 5
Links:
As the air continues its decline deep into the chill of the bone, winter is on its way. There is no escaping the inevitable, but Scott Hansen has found a cure to the winter blues. Dive is a delicious effort that builds dreamscapes and intellectual utopias that lurk where the sand meets the sea; where the sunset reaches the water.
Building echoes of dissonant polyphonic sounds like waves bouncing off of the African landscape, “A Walk” is a coming of age for Hansen. He spent years listening…observing. And when he released his first album Sunrise Projector, later expanded and reissued as Past Is Prologue, his youthful spirit in the framework of the technology was a way for him to bring design and music together. With “A Walk” he’s put it all behind and focused on a hopeful feeling of prosperity that dwindles down to a hypnotic pulse and steady rhythm, the heartbeat of his future.
This is just the introduction. “Hours” is the true awakening, with waves of electronic bliss swooping and sloshing about as a simple drum beat points the song in a distinct direction, added by a catchy melody as layers of sound come in and out of the song like hues of natural light beaming through a windowpane.
The guitar-driven “Daylight” brings us back to Hansen’s youthful days. Harmonics flicker inside the capsule of a glistening instrumental “Dive” is a post-eight minute epic that takes the ideology on “Daylight” one step deeper. By now you will realize that Tycho’s songwriting is truly timeless. Through music, he visualizes any world and any dimension. His patience and attention to detail comes from his reaction as a visionary.
The album continues beyond the highlight of the title track. What we experience is reality skewed. “Ascension” gives us something familiar as sounds ripple off into alternate realities as tones melt away while “Melanine” drifts off into space like the lost soul in Solaris. For Hansen, we may never find this planet again, nor this moment, but he perfectly captured the feeling of it all and bundled it into some of the most beautiful electronic music I have heard in a long time.
It’s amazing how organic he makes it feel and how deeply entranced he is at paying extra attention to the smallest of detail. You have to concentrate really hard to grasp everything he is doing, but why would you. Sit back and take it all in. In my planet of my mind, Dive is that mirage we reach every time.
HTRK – Work (Work, Work) (Ghostly International)
MP3: HTRK – “Eat Yr Heart”
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (5.4MB)
HTRK
Work (Work, Work)
Ghostly International
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Link: http://www.facebook.com/htrkrtio?sk=info
HTRK surprises me with Work (Work, Work). The things I loved about early Cabaret Voltaire also felt limiting to me in the recording process. The rawness is enticing to an extent with some songs simply limiting. HTRK solved that problem for me.
Work (Work, Work) is an amazing album that demonstrates coldwave with aching beauty and pulsates like a star just before it dies out.
Blurred in the lines of Deutsche Industrial Realism and the haunting glow of light tracers burning through the night, HTRK is a gorgeous symphony of heartbreak melodies and sterile chrome hip swaying.
“Ice Eyes Eis” makes us realize that we are doomed from the beginning in the most romantic of senses. Glacial in size and apocalyptic in scope, the song moves like film through a broken reel of black and white. Painfully honest, you are hypnotized by its movement.
If you think the first song was lethargic, “Slo Glo” moves like kryptonite with the breath and mystery of an after Midnight realism.
As the album progresses, so does the power of these songs, pushing you deeper into its grasp. The beats on “Eat Yr Heart” move to the curves of the synths, where “Skinny” acts as the album’s ballad by dreaming in pixellated surrealism.
There is a sense of romance to the system that engorged these songs. HTRK penetrates the void of what is clean lines of electronic intensity and deep layering to bring to you song after song of rich sounds that only become more important the more you listen. What you may understand to be one thing, may just contort into something more strapping the next time.
This is a band who has taken notes on the allure of a young Einsturzende Neubeuten and the early 4AD projects to create an album that almost outplay the founding fathers of the genre.
Com Truise – Cyanide Sisters (Ghostly International)
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 4:37 — 6.7MB)
MP3: Com Truise – Slow Peels (from the EP Cyanide Sisters with bonus tracks).
Com Truise
Cyanide Sisters
Ghostly International
Rating: 4.7 out of 5
We were driving through the city the other night. It was dark, and the street lights reflected off of city glaciers that stuck around long after an ice storm created our faux planet Hoth. The XM was set to Chill and before we knew it, we were submersed in a deep, overpowering drum beat. Boom….bap! Brooding! Boom…bap! It kept a slow and steady pulse. Slow motion Italia disco dressed in latex. “Space Dust.” Reminded me of the words that Jeff Sutton exploited in The Mindblocked Man: “The fish eye! The distorted sky! The blob that ate the stars!” Even though the song is not long, the bleeding analogue loops eat up the drum cadence with fierceness.
Like Sutton was to science fiction (a loner in a world dominated by the Saberhagens, the Blishes, or the Dicks, to name a few), Com Truise is the anti-hero of the electronic music world. Someone who spent a decade tweaking knobs and manipulating analogue antiquities to create a new lifeform of glowing electronic bedroom music, his synth sounds take the obvious and make them spectacular.
The layering on “Innerfacer” is a marvel to behold. Bleeps act like glitter fluttering about the night sky while you are constantly reminded of the “Boom…Bap.”
You may not hear a tempo stroll beyond the pulsating two-two time frame, but it does not matter. The electronic drums are just there to keep things moving, it’s what lies around it in songs like “Sundriped” or “Norkuy” that you really should be paying attention to. It’s there where you will find the real creative talent behind Com Truise’s work.
If the past is the present, then his work lies well into the future like a blob that ate the stars of the electronic worlds.
Matthew Dear – You Put A Spell On Me (Music Review)
Matthew Dear
You Put A Spell On Me
Ghostly International
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
Link: http://ghostly.com/artists/matthew-dear
Matthew Dear’s latest offering is a brazen approach that will stick to you like dirt under a fingernail. You want the filth off of you, but you cannot help but be intrigued as to the context of it all.
Not as slashing as Jim Thirwell, Dear will still creep you out. And when you hear the saying “Little Red Nightgown” over and over again, you want to check outside the window to make sure a black van with no windows is not parked right outside.
The industrial slant builds up like noir and is seedy enough to creep you out while make you that much more intrigued about the shadows.
For the re-workings of this song, the only one really of note is Nicolas Jaar’s remix. It’s a sparse Coldwave landscape that shows irony when he sings, “Dance with me, on the big dance floor,” especially when you barely get an audible pulse out of the beat. What it comes to is that Jaar turns “You Put A Spell On Me” into something uniquely of his own.
Gold Panda – Lucky Shiner (Music Review)
Gold Panda
Lucky Shiner
Ghostly International
Rating: 3 out of 5
I have mixed feelings about Gold Panda. I wasn’t too thrilled when I first heard the You EP and way-too-many versions of that song drowned out an already mediocre view of the electronic style that was embedded in that song. The glitchy Asian theme felt more forced than what it should have been. And that’s the song that introduces Lucky Shiner.
But then I hear “Vanilla,” and I want to rave about this band. The deep house sound is glittered with dirty sampling that sounds like it’s bad vinyl being blown out by Marshall stacks.
And then there is “Before We Talked.” The song is cool with Spacetime Continuum angles, but what really makes any of this even worth it is the last minute or so of the song, barring some incredible ambient experiment that will have you lost in the sound. Again, it’s that dirty nature of his sampling that really accentuates things.
“I’m With You, But I’m Lonely” would sound like a great sound experience, but there is too much drum interference to make it seem edgy when it is a song that should not be anything but sound bliss.
And “After We Talked” should not even be on this album. Take this song out, and you won’t even miss it being gone. Hell, you wouldn’t even know it to be there to begin with.
But I give “India Lately” credit for being a great electronic song. However by this point in the album that dirty record player sound is well overplayed. Some may find the discontinuity to be a challenge worth accepting, but for me, I find it to be a little too distracting and a sign that more thought should have went into the making of this album.
