Links:

• Tycho
• ISO50

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
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
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.

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.

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.

Link: http://www.ghostly.com/releases/you-ep

Gold Panda’s debut delivers us with an introduction that is starkly glitched-out and electronically progressive in a non-progressive sense.

Only two originals mark this EP with the rest being remixes of “You” and  a digital bonus remix of a song called “Killing Yourself On A Beach” which has nothing to do with the other original “Peaky Cups.”

I am probably making it more confusing than it really is so let me break it down. If it were not for the remixes, this EP would fail bases solely on the two originals presented. It’s the remixes of “You” that bring out the potential of the song and expand it into an expansive frame of mind. When you listen to the original, you feel like something is lacking. The vocal strobe effect turned-Hindu chant sounding gets old after a while and you feel like Gold Panda did not know exactly what direction to take it. The remixers know exactly where to take it.

But “Peaky Caps” is the highlight. It’s like watching water glisten in the sun. Your mind will wonder to all sorts of sensations as you let Gold Panda guide you with this downtempo ambient shangri la. If only they continue to do something in this realm, only the future will behold.

Link: http://ghostly.com/artists/mux-mool
The Viking Funeral EP is a free download on the Ghostly International website.

I just found an old promotional video for the Xanadu architectural project (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQOHVOduYX8). in the 1980s, Bob Masters and Roy Mason built the house of the future made of a foam-like material in two locations: Kissimmee, Florida, and the Wisconsin Dells. On my many trips to Walt Disney World throughout the ‘80s, the pamphlet located in the front lobby display of any motel would entice us with curiosity despite the reality that we Disney World trumped a visit to the house.

Touted as the “Computerized House Of The Future,” inside the house it was ran by now vintage Commodore computers and served more like a walk through “Tomorrowland” outcast. For the house, the future was 2001, and voice-activated machines would make your meal plans, adjust the temperature of the house, and plan your day.

While enjoying the interesting oddity and although still futuristic conception now antiquated technology of the house itself, I so happened to have Mux Mool’s Skulltaste on in the background. And for a distinct moment, the two were synced up perfectly. It was then I realized that Mux Mool’s vintage electronics were indeed the sound of the future and the comforting analog that filled my ears was a timeless commodity that, if presented in the right atmosphere, could never go stale.

It was a slightly different story when I first heard it. With Skulltaste, you have to adjust your eardrums for an expectation. Sometimes Hip Hop in nature (“Hog Knuckles”), sometimes infectiously disco-tinged (“Enceladus”), while other times glitch electro-funk (“Death 9000”) or songs that could be confused with Spacetime Continuum’s work (“SFW Porn”), Mux Mool spins the strange and quirky into something mostly interpreted as cool even if it’s all a geek fest by the time it’s over.

I wondered if everything Mux Mool did was as sterile beautiful like “Dandelion” or geeky in a Short Circuit or Zapped kind of way like the title track was. So I dug into Viking Funeral to get an alternative view of Mux Mool’s vision. “Teal Trim” supports New Age ambiance with upper class coolness. The Live Edit of “Ladies Know” explore more into Pop territory than anything else he has done, but still leaves a Mux Mool imprint to the song. And “Goblin Town” makes me wonder if he spent way too much time watching cartoons in the ‘80s. Turn off that Dungeons & Dragons dude. Okay that vocal version of “Death 9000″ does the trick.

But this proves that Mux Mool can adapt to about anything and everything he thinks is cool and morph it into his idea of electronic music to a great deal of success.

Links:
Solvent: http://ghostly.com/artists/solvent

One thing you can say about Jason Amm is that he’s constant. His post-techno talent from album to album has remained top notch, and Subject to Shift stays true to that statement.

The songs on Subject To Shift seem to be more accessible than his stretched out electronic instrumentals and more synth-poppish than what we heard on Solvent City, but they are indeed staple Solvent material and everything you come to expect and want from Amm.

Utilizing antique Roland sounds on “Formulate” to the simple drum thumping on “A Product Of The Process,” the acidic synthesizers will burn holes in your brain as Solvent dares you to indulge yourself in the Euro-style dancefloor coolness as he builds from one layer to transition over to the next while keeping the basic posturing intact.

His collection of vintage synthesizers get plenty of play on this album, giving us the best of ‘80s synth-pop without been righteously overbearing about it.

Subject to Shift has its memorable moments with plenty of standout pieces like the ghostly communicative “Don’t Forget To Phone,” a reply to “Don’t Forget To Phone,” or the robotic “Caught A Glimpse.”

But when it comes down to it, there is not a bad song in the lot and a testament to Solvent’s long-lasting talent.

What begins as electronics blasting out of your headphones like the moment the sun explodes over the horizon in the morning, Ylajali other-worldly vision is a gorgeous attempt at creating a soundtrack for the beyond. It’s not that “Twentytwohundred” is powerful in a loud way, it’s expressive and glistening demeanor with coldwave constructs give this song a glow all of its own.

There are two sides to Syntaks. One side is a blast of spaced out feedback and fuzz that turn songs like “Mistral Moon” into a layered depth of loudness and sampled schematics. The other side is a darker, isolated sphere of ethereal instrumentals. “The Shape of Things To Come” expressively builds introspective behavior through reversed notes and ghostly chimes. But even then they cannot contain themselves and revert back to the wall of noise.

Or sometimes, the two blend in together and if lost to the conventions of Syntak’s sound, you may not catch where the one will lead to the other and back again.

Ghostly capitalizes on the discernment of cross-cultured Shoegaze with deep space Ambient where you get to define what the depths of “space” are.

Metaphysical in nature, Syntaks vision will sometimes leave you breathless, sometimes mindless, and always a sense of intrigue as to how high this band will take you and how deep into the musical unknown they are willing to travel.  -

With their debut album This Loves Last Time (TrySquare), their 21st Century pop not only became a highlight for 2009, it also pushed the boundaries without forcefully doing so. For Hawkins and Young, it’s an accomplishment that will drive them forward as musicians.

Hawkins talks about what went into the making of the album and what it means to him as a musician, as well as what is up his sleeve for 2010.

Link: http://www.bellhorses.com/

Tell me about the Bell Horses project in comparison to what you have done in the past? What is different? What have you expanded on? What did you do with Bell Horses that you may not have in the past?

The main difference was that it had been a long time since I’d written with acoustic instruments as the start point – there are of course a bunch of electronics on the record but I wanted the music to take a more organic approach than what I’d gotten used to as my process making Sybarite records, which tend to be more sample based. We were emailing song parts back & forth and I wanted to give the vocalists (Jenny & Alex) something that wasn’t just static and repeating. The music was the jumping off point for the vocals so I wanted them to have something that would inspire them to elaborate on whatever they felt the music evoked.

What are your favorite elements to “This Loves Last Time?”

I brought my friend Eve in to play violin and viola in after most of the songs were tracked. I worked on the mix for a long time and getting the strings to sit with the songs in such a way that they create a fabric with the other instruments – often you can’t tell that’s what you’re hearing – a violin or a synth or a guitar. One thing I was really happy with was the result of this blend where it serves to give the songs a quality that’s hard to pin point. And, of course, the vocals.

Why did you choose a converted Victorian Church to record this album? How do you feel location and space affected the album?

Well, it was cheap and an obvious choice as it’s where I live! I have a small studio set-up and I used the main space to record some of the acoustic stuff. I’m not sure how much the sound of the church ends up filtering thru (probably not much) but I think the main affect of working on it here was I was able to listen to things in this big space and it helped with getting inside the mixes & bringing out the details.

Tell me about your relationship with Jenny Owens Young? How did you two meet and what led to this collaboration? What were you looking for when starting up this project and watching it mature? Is this something you have been thinking about for a while or is what we hear a spontaneous after effect?

I got in touch with Jenny after hearing her song ‘Voice On Tape’ streaming on some internet radio. I fell in love with her voice and had been looking for a singer to work with – it seemed like a perfect fit. We exchanged some music and met up over drinks in NYC and decided to try collaborating. I think neither one of us knew what to expect and particularly because of the distance involved in the creative process it took some time to understand how best to proceed with the songwriting. We’ve still never been in the same room together while working so hopefully that’s something that will change as we continue to collaborate.

Tell me about the content that resides in “This Loves Last Time” and how it serves into the whole construct of the music?

To me the content is all of it – the instruments, together with the vocals and the lyrics – they are really entwined and there’s no real hierarchy. I think particularly with this recording within each song are opportunities to get more than what’s on the surface. If you listen just once you hear the veneer of the songs, which may turn some people off – but I think one of the success of the record is the capacity for the music to open more with each listen.

You brought in some talented musicians to help contribute on the album? How did that come about and why did you choose who you did?

Besides Jenny the other vocalist is Alexander Ericson who had I was turned onto by producer Mark Van Hoen (Mojave 3, Seefeel) who had worked with him. Alex has a really dynamic voice with a impressive falsetto and I wanted a good balance / complement to Jenny’s vocals – which I think it brings. Eve Boltax is a classically trained string player who really doesn’t do any music like this but has a great ability to improvise. Michael Lerner plays with The Antlers and is one of my best friends and a great drummer whom I’ve been playing music with for years now.

This album is the first for your Trysquare label? Can you tell me what you plan for the label’s future and its purpose? Also, why start up a label beyond releasing your own material or it is specifically for your own material and collaborations?

At this point the label is primarily for my own pursuits. This record took a couple years to finish & I had paid for all the recording costs myself so, I felt like why give away half of the rights to another label when we could do it ourselves & retain control. I think it was a good decision – having an outlet like this allows for a lot of creative flexibility down the line.

What inspires you to create the style of music you create? What affects you from making that music?

I always have a starting point in mind but if I set out to make a straight-up minimal techno record, or a folk record – it would always end up sounding like something else. I think that tendency and my lack of interest in creating music that’s easily defined is what pushes me forward with what I do. The style is often more a result of who and what I choose to work with rather than a notion of emulating something specific.

Bell Horses is a collaborative effort. Do you see that continuing? What do you help will come out of this and what ambitions do you have for this project?

It is continuing, we’re working on writing some new material now. At some point, hopefully with the next record, we’d like to tour a bit & bring these songs into a live setting.

What plans do you have for 2010?

There is a remix record in the works for This Loves Last Time – contributing are myself with as Sybarite, The Antlers, Inch-Time, Nudge, Opiate & a couple others. This should see the light of day sometime in the Spring of 2010. Outside of Bell Horses I’m working on another Sybarite record & some solo guitar based stuff that I’ll hopefully be playing live later in the year.