New Future Times - Steve Moore 'Zen Spiders'

Spacious, beautiful, new-age & balearic house from NYC based producer Steve Moore on Washington DC's Future Times label.

Steve Moore does a whole bunch of musical projects including Zombi, has been known to play with Sun 0))) and has released on L.I.E.S, Kompakt, Moon Glyph and Mexican Summer. A busy guy. Check out this stunning track.

John Heckle

Fresh-faced Scouser John Heckle is really quite an astonishing producer of carpet-burn-raw house and techno. His tripped-out-to-fuck music sounds like he takes a lot of hallucinogenic drugs but I'm assured he's a clean cut kind of guy.

'Ahead of Time', below, from a 2011 Mathematics release, is enthusiastically unhinged and deeply unstable. Definitely veering into the interesting end of the experimental spectrum. His debut album has grown-up a touch and stabilised somewhat (the right meds, perhaps). It's got the most incredible lo-fi production and astonishing tracks all. over. it. I wanted to upload 'Atomic Response' but it's not on Youtube so here are the hypnotic 'Red Defender' and the surprisingly uplifting,synthy disco-y (French-Kiss-ey) 'The Voyageur (Voyeur)', both from the album (which I've actually already written about for the blog but I just wanted to post about his stuff again).

The story of getting to signed to Mathematics Recordings, apparently - he went up to Jamal Moss/Hieroglyphic Being in a club with a demo, HB was less than interested but took the tape without saying anything. A few months later, an A4 envelope arrived at Mr Heckle's residence, inside - Mathematics Recordings contracts for signing. No fucking about, then!

(disclaim-- John Heckle's done loads of other tracks, these are just some that I particularly like)

Paved with Gold - ISYS and NTS at Tate Tanks

Earlier this evening ISYS and NTS got their London thing on at the Tate's new Tanks space. There were five films screened and soundtracked live, and some poetry from host James Massiah.  The videos were really lovely, with an impeccable ISYS eye for London's beauty and style. Footage of crowds, the city streets, people and fashion were edited and soundtracked so well it made me kind of see the city again and this time catch the aliveness and the energy...



The music was varied and pretty great too - My Panda Shall Fly did an improvised sitar, electronics and vocals set and Dark Sky played a kind-of-heavy but still poignant dubstepish-bass-ish track complete with London sound recordings. Okay, so that didn't make it sound all that great but actually, it really was.

Revealing the soul and beauty in the everyday life of city without getting sentimental is a lot easier said than done, but the films and music tonight pulled it off perfectly. It was like being shown the city afresh, and it was really touching.

If you haven't already, check out ISYS and NTS, two banging websites. 

We Can Elude Control @ Bold Tendencies 6

Saturday night was the second of Paul Purgas' 'We Can Elude Control' sound-art night at Peckham's Bold Tendencies. Despite the sweltering heat the lower level of the car park was packed with the art-school kids, extreme-beard hipsters, black-garmed NHS Specs intellectual types and sandal-and-sock wearing Gruniad readers who make up the core South London art crowd.

I arrived in time to hear the end of Bill Kouligas (the man behind Berlin's PAN Records). The bass and power of the sound were making the concrete throb, which was both cool and kind of worrying. Inside the thunderous wall of noise sharp sounds played off each other, matching power and knife-edge precision. 

After a cooling breather on the roof, it was back into the carpark for Roly Porter, who played an improvised experimental electronics set with Cynthia Miller (they're keeping it in the family apparently, as she's his Aunt). Their heavy set was nicely primal, with unsettling rumblings and deep dark undercurrents. 

Out one side of the crowded dark carpark you could see the lights of the London skyline and overground trains which perfectly complemented the tough electronics noisily rumbled past on the other. Roly Porter and Cynthia Miller seriously cranked it up in the final minutes for an especially brutal onslaught, then that was it - time to bolt upstairs for fresh air and Camparis. 

New L.I.E.S. - MUTANT BEAT DANCE - SKETCH III

New on the lovely Brooklyn-based L.I.E.S. label is this track from Mutant Beat Dance, aka Beau Wanzer and Melvin Oliphant (who is also known as Traxx). As with all the Mutant Beat Dance stuff I've heard, the beats are just pretty damn tough. Not hard, mind, they just ooze dancefloor rawness. And the rest of the track is nicely unhinged, there's a looped keyboard sound in there that's menacing like a Goblin soundtrack, some incomprehensible vocal samples and lots of raw jacking vibes. It's heavy and it's weird and it'll make you jack, it's mutant beat dance.

 

Holy Mountain

Trailer for the Jodorowsky film.

Heroin in Tahiti

Surf-drone? Kraut-surf? Whatever, Heroin in Tahiti are two guys from Rome and they make heavy, whacked-out, heavenly kitsch.