Never mind the editorial bit at the top or what we said the last time, you’ve read all this already, just jump down past this editorial and let the actual music do the actually walking and the talking. Exact same thing again, another five (or so) slices of musical things that have passed our way recently and however you like to slice it and of course it was the price of apples and here comes the intro….
Five? There’s something rather compelling about five. Cross-pollination? Five more? Do we need to do the editorial bit again? Is there another way? A better way? A cure for pulling flying rabbits out of the clouds? Is there a rhyme? Is there a reason? Was there ever a reason? What do reasons make? Five more? Snake oil? Everything must go and same as last time (and the time before that) five, and no, we never do and the proof of the pudding is in that proof reading. When we started this thing, oh never mind, it doesn’t matter why we started this damn thing and like we asked last time, does anyone bother reading the editorial? Does anyone ever actually look down the rabbit hole or is it all just method acting? We do really try to listen to everything that comes in, we do it so you don’t have to, we are very (very) very very picky about what we actually post on these fractured pages or about what gets played on the radio or indeed what we hang in a gallery. Cut to the chase, never mind the editorial, there’s loads of music further down the page, well five or so pieces of music that have come our way in the last few days and cut cut slash and cut it, who needs an editorial or words or worms in general? What’s Wordsworth? Just facts and links and sounds then. Here you go, play the music, grab your five, eat your greens, go eat some art, go eat some fresh music and don’t forget whatever it was we said last time…
Here we go again, in no particular order….
1: Sleepytime Gorilla Museum – Selfish? Shellfish? I guess we should actually mention that the giant musical beast that is Sleepytime Gorilla Museum are back. This has been mentioned and tracks played on the Other Rock Show (over on Resonance FM) already of course, but we should, I guess, mention the fact that after 13 years of silence, the Oakland California band are back here on these pages. There’s a taster via a slice of video and a really really tasty far larger slice that tells us they’re sounding as good as ever over on their Bandcamp page. You can hear that one track from the rather unexpected return and the new album at the foot of this little piece, the album is apparently due out at the start of February next year. They are a band we covered lots and lots back there of course and we like most people, thought they had packed it all in but then again does any band ever truly pack it in? Feels like every band that ever existed still does in one form or another, this return is of course more welcome than most, that one taste on bandcamp sounds massive…
“After thirteen years of hibernation, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, the most gloriously uncategorizable American band in existence, has emerged from stasis to proudly announce the imminent release of their fourth studio album, of the Last Human Being. The album marks the first release of AVANT NIGHT – a new imprint headed by Nick Ohler and facilitated by Joyful Noise Recordings.
Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, comprised of multi-instrumentalists and rotating vocalists Nils Frykdahl, Carla Kihlstedt, Michael “Iago” Mellender, Matthias Bossi, and Dan Rathbun, plays an arsenal of instruments ranging from the somewhat standard (drums, electric guitars, bass, electric violin) to the rare (bass harmonica, nyckelharpa, marxophone) to the homemade (Slide-Piano Log, Electric Pancreas, Pedal-Action Wiggler). The group has consistently evaded easy categorization, garnering accolades from across the aisles of contemporary classical music, prog rock, industrial music, metal, avant-garde improv, and more. Their music, inturns bashing and bucolic, enveloping and unsettling, tends towards long-form epics interspersed with mysterious field recordings.
“As this slow-rolling planetwide Anthropocene Extinction event deepens, Sleepy- time’s work has only grown more resonant, more prescient,” offers Mer Yayanos, current symposiarch and secretary of the Museum’s long standing social math club, the John Kane Society. “What better time for them to Bring Back the Apocalypse than right now,with a new full-length record that integratesthe past and the future?”
2: Softcult, the rather beautiful Canadian twin duo, have squeezed one more taste of their forthcoming EP into 2023, with latest track Heaven. “Ethereal and crushingly-heavy in equal parts, the dense swathes of sound on Heaven evoke the claustrophobia of body dysmorphia and swells with optimism for better times”. This time around they sound like a classic Snub TV 90’s shoegazing band to these ears, all those slowdives and chapter houses that we loved back there. Here’s the track and the video….
The band comment: “We wrote this song about overcoming dysmorphia and beginning to feel more at home in your own skin. Often the way other people see us isn’t how we see ourselves, and it’s hard to live in a body that doesn’t feel like “you.“ But when you feel seen by the people in your circle, it makes all the difference.
This song describes that idealistic utopian future that we hope can one day become a reality; a world where everyone is accepted for who they are, where everyone has equal opportunity, where one’s background or identity does no dictate how they are perceived by society, where privilege and advantages are recognized and shared to build stronger communities, and a society that celebrates diversity, difference, and otherness as strengths.”
“On this next collection of songs (release date still to be announced), siblings Mercedes and Phoenix Arn-Horn shine a more brilliant light than ever before on the many complexities of human existence. Though they’re still yet to release their debut album, Softcult are already carving out a signature sound with their enthralling, celestial shoegaze bliss interlaced with impassioned lyrical calls, opening conversations about gender equality, violence, climate change, corporate greed and much more. Heaven follows recent single Haunt You Still, which found the duo unpacking the lingering impact we each inevitably have in our past relationships and friendships”.
3: Locrian – Chicago/Baltimore-based experimental/drone/post-metal trio Locrian have, so we’re told, “unleashed new EP Solar Lodge via Profound Lore Records”. Solar Lodge is of course a Coil thing from way back in 1984 and Coil’s debut album Scatology, We get four mixes on this new EP. Hard to judge a band on just one cover (or “reimagination” if you like) of someone else’s work but they do sound rather promising in a slightly unsettling intensely heavy kind of way…
“In 2022, we started looking back to the roots of our project, specifically our mutual interest in experimental, avant-garde, and ambient music.” – explains André Foisy. “This examination of our foundation as a group led us back to our shared respect for Coil in how they expanded sonic boundaries and explored unconventional themes. From 2014 through the last time we played live in 2016, we closed our live sets with a cover version of »Solar Lodge«. Last year, we recorded our take on that track, a song that alludes to the Coil’s interest in exploring hidden dimensions of consciousness.”
4: Stockholm’s Les Big Byrd have just announced their new album Diamonds, Rhinestones and Hard Rain, an album that’s due out 1st March 2024 via Chimp Limbs. The news arrives together with Mareld, an almost 11 minutes long, mostly instrumental song, based around a shimmering repetitive synth riff, droney fuzz guitar and and what they choose to describe as “trippy” vocal harmonies….
“The best thing about releasing music on my own record label is that there was nobody to try and convince me that a 11 minute synth jam isn’t single material” says Chimp Limbs director of the board, Jocke Åhlund. “The title Mareld is the Swedish word for the strange bioluminescence phenomenon, a kind of bacteria that lights up the night time ocean’s surface in a ghostly fashion, and we wrote this one equally as much for dancing as for meditation.”
5; TR/ST - ”The dark electronic pop dialect of Robert Alfons aka TR/ST (fka Trust) emerged fully formed in 2010, and quickly sent ripples through the vibrant Toronto underground, culminating in 2012’s cult classic debut, TRST. Subsequent world tours and a permanent relocation to Los Angeles further widened the project’s horizons, which Alfons refined and distilled across three more widely celebrated full-lengths: Joyland (2014), The Destroyer – Part One (2019), and The Destroyer – Part Two (2019).
Fittingly, TR/ST’s next chapter will unfold in partnership with LA / NYC’s prime institution of adventurous music, Dais Records. To christen the union, Alfons has announced a swooning new single, “Robrash,” which was co-produced by Nightfeelings and mixed by the legendary Nick Launay. “Robrash” is available today alongside its instrumental version and is a dramatic preview of what’s to come from TR/ST in 2024″.
Here’s some links and the Bandcamp with the other version of the single –
That make ne want some Trust now, original French versions from the last century though, don’t waste your time with the English version they recorded later, got to be the orginal French versions…
And here’s some live Sleepytime from back in 2010, just before they packed it all in…
And back from when we first started covering them
THE ORGAN 