Hot on the heels of the release of his second album, eyeamsound, Kuwaitian electronic multimedia artist Zahed Sultan is sharing another single off it, the opening track ‘No Me Canto’. Themed around love and loss according to the press release, ‘No Me Canto’ is described as “an ethereal journey of vulnerability evoking emotion while embodying prominent elements of live instrumentation as well as improvised textures”.
Give it a listen now.
Two years on from the release of Tales Of A Grass Widow, freak folk sister duo CocoRosie have announced the release of their sixth full-length album. Currently on tour in Europe, before heading to North America in the Autumn, CocoRosie are giving audiences the chance to hear and experience the album in a live format.
Here’s what Bianca “Coco” and Sierra “Rosie” said of the album:
“This will be our sixth record! Like many of our past records, we wrote and gathered much of the material at our farm studio in the south of France with minimal equipment, vintage toys and antique instruments. Going back to a ‘4-track’ style approach, we limited ourselves to essential, acoustic accompaniment, played by us, and select percussion, toys from our old suit cases dating back to the “La Maison” days. Unlike our more psychedelic/electronic explorations of the last two records, our latest songs have a dusty southern feel with old-timey poetry. We ended up in Argentina where we finished the recordings and mixed the record with engineer Nicolas Kalwill with whom we’ve worked on two previous records. The spirit of Buenos Aires added to our already teen-romance-nostalgic-mood where we spontaneously shot a music video casting over 30 local girls.”
Ahead of the album’s release on September 18th, CocoRosie have shared the first superb taste from it, a live version of ‘Heartache City’. The recording was done on their second show in Milan. Listen to it now.
Berlin based Japanese vibraphonist Masayoshi Fujita, who is also known under moniker el fog, is gearing up to release a new full-length album. His new effort, entitled Apologues, is due out on September 11th via Erased Tapes.
Other than the vibraphone, Apologues sees Masayoshi using for the first time several other instruments, incluing the violin, cello, flute, clarinet, French horn, accordion, piano and percussion, all arranged by himself. Speaking about the album, Masayoshi had this to say:
“With this album the main idea was to evoke images, atmospheres, sceneries and stories in the listener, the images that have accumulated in myself. At the same time it was an exploration of the unexplored beauty of the vibraphone, and also a pursuit of the charm of the instrumentation and the music itself. Erased Tapes releases a lot of great stuff and naturally became my favourite label of late. And I thought it would fit well to my music.”
‘Tears of Unicorn’ is the first beautiful single lifted from Apologues. Listen to the track below, and straight after check out a solo vibraphone version of it performed live in Berlin.
Haiku Salut’s second album, Etch and Etch Deep, arrives on July 31st via How Does It Feel To Be Loved?. The Derbyshire based trio had already shared the first wonderful single, ‘Bleak And Beautiful (All Things)’. Now they are offering another taste from the album in the shape of ‘Hearts Not Parts’, a whimsical song featuring vocals for the first time. “We wanted to make a song that was both poppy and creepy and we used our voices to do that,” said the band’s Sophie Barkerwood. “It isn’t an act of compliance or defiance, it just seemed like the next natural step this song had to take.”
‘Hearts Not Parts’ comes out on July 13th but you can already wrap your ears around it.
Haiku Salut have announced a couple of live shows this summer, on August 7th at The Voicebox in Derby and on August 9th at The Lexington in London.
We’re always excited to hear about new releases coming out through Constellation Records. And there’s plenty of good reasons for that. One of them is Montreal based post-punk quartet Ought, who last year released their debut album, the outstanding More Than Any Other Day. The outfit have just announced its follow-up, entitled Sun Coming Down. According to the press release, the album “maintains the band’s tight, twitchy and economical sound, with the unfussy, understated rhythm section of drummer Tim Keen and bassist Ben Stidworthy anchoring Tim Darcy’s electric guitar and Matt May’s fuzzed-out keys (sounding, as often as not, like a second guitar)”. It adds that “Sun Coming Down confirms the distinctive vitality and purposive naturalism of this band; Ought resists facile primitivism and overhyped dynamics in equal measure, keeping things hermetic but never airless, ascetic but never dispassionate, literate but never prolix. “.
We’ll have to wait till September 18th for Sun Coming Down to drop, but luckily Ought have let loose the lead single off it, ‘Beautiful Blue Sky’. We were lucky to hear it live last month in Porto’s Primavera Sound and we’re glad we can now listen to it again and again.
Ahead of the album’s release, Ought will be hitting our shores again earlier in September, to play in London, Manchester, Birmingham and at End of the Road Festival in Dorset.
With only a couple of weeks to go till Liberez release their new album, All Tense Now Lax, the Southend-on-Sea experimental industrial outfit are enticing us further with a new single. ‘419 Chop Your $’, offered with an accompanying video, is described as “a brooding collage of smudged percussion and eerie strings, with obscured vocals that lead up to the refrain of “It’s just a game”, the unnerving repetition at odds with the sentence’s meaning.”
Check out the video below and watch out for the album’s release when it drops on July 24th via Night School Records.
In other related good news, Liberez are performing a record release show on July 27th at Cafe Oto in London.
