Helado Negro has just premiered a video for the outstanding track ‘Relatives’, featuring Bear In Heaven’s Jon Philpotone. The track is lifted from his recent third album Invisible Life, out now via Asthmatic Kitty and due out on May 6th in the UK. Watch the video below, directed by Zircon Prince.
Birmingham native Gareth Jones aka Grandmaster Gareth hasn’t released an album in 7 long years but he’s been working on it and he’s ready to drop his third full-length solo album. Magical Sound Shower, the follow-up to his 2003’s An Introduction to Minute Melodies and 2006’s The Party Sounds of Grandmaster Gareth, arrives on June 10th via his own GM Sounds. The album will be available on vinyl, CD and digitally, and you can pre-order it now.
Magical Sounds Shower takes inspiration from B-movies, pulp sci-fi books, bee documentaries and an extraterrestrial state of being, as the press release explains. The album “sits alongside and builds upon its contemporaries, turning out nineteen tracks of space exotica – the soundtrack to a sci-fi movie that doesn’t exist or a modern day equivalent to Joe Meek’s ‘I Hear a New World’.”
We missed the album’s first single release, ‘The Hoarder of Moments’, but we didn’t let the second one, ‘The Dewormer’, slip through our net. Listen to both tracks below.
Danish four-piece Pinkunoizu have unveiled a video for ‘I Chi’, a new cut lifted from their upcoming EP Second Amendment.
Due out on May 6th, the EP will be available digitally via Full Time Hobby and physically with a limited edition 12” vinyl via Everybody’s Stalking.
Second Amendment was recorded in London in one day and edited afterwards in Berlin by the outfit’s lead songwriter Andreas Pallisgaard and drummer Jaleh Negari.
“We initially wanted to make a pure, live documentation from the sound we had built together whilst touring, but I think in the end we always find it a bit boring to just do that.”, explain Pinkunoizu. “Listening to our music on record should be more of a fictionalized space rather than an attempt to present something as being real and happening in front of the listener when it in fact is not.”
Speaking about the title chosen for the EP, Pallisgaard said it “also hints at clouds of gunpowder, men on horses, frantic ideas of property rights on a deserted barren continent, weary attempts at defining cultural structures and personal freedom.”
Here’s the video for ‘I Chi’ directed by Ewan Jones Morris. Straight after listen to the EP’s closing track ‘Tin Can Valley’.
Stephen Wilkinson aka Bibio‘s forthcoming seventh full-length album Silver Wilkinson arrives next month and the British producer and musician had already conquered us with the gorgeous first single ‘À tout à l’heure’.
Its follow-up, ‘You’, emerged a couple of days ago and comes with a statement from Bibio himself:
“‘You’ has the longest history on this album because an early version of it was actually made around 5 or 6 years ago. At that time I was making a lot of cut-up sampled hip hop type stuff on my MPC. I always liked the track but it felt unfinished at the time and I didn’t want to just put out short beat type tracks on my albums. Tracks like ‘Fire Ant’ (from the album Ambivalence Avenue) started in a similar way, until I worked more sections into it and fleshed it out. A similar situation happened with ‘You’ but this time it was partly prompted by the positive response I had from early versions of the track. I did quite a few shows between 2009-2011 around the world, mostly Europe, and an early version of ‘You’ got played at most shows. It always seemed to get a good response, people reacting like they already knew it… then people started asking what it was. It brought my attention back to the track when I was in my studio – thankfully I had saved all the original samples on my MPC so I ‘produced’ it again, pretty much from scratch, upping the tempo and making it bounce more and getting the groove to sit right. I still felt that it needed fleshing out, so I revisited the record where I got the original samples from and sampled more parts to create the outro as well as adding more of my own instruments and drums. The intro was made with live instruments, me playing bass, guitar, a sitar-like string instrument and rhodes piano as well as drum machine sounds. I referenced the melodies I had created in the main sampled section of the track by highlighting them in the instrumental intro section. Finally the track felt complete so it was then added to the ‘potential album’ playlists which had been growing over the last two years. Tracks in the playlists got added and taken off on a regular basis, but ‘You’, despite being one of the older tracks, always remained there – it felt right and I never tired of it. It’s also the only track on the album that relies more on samples as opposed to multi-tracked live instruments, so I think for this reason it kind of stands out.”
Listen to ‘You’ below and watch out for the release of Silver Wilkinson on May 13th in Europe and May 14th in North America via Warp.
With the imminent release of a new EP, San Francisco based septet The Seshen dropped a second single off it earlier this week, titled ‘2000 Seasons’.
Aki Ehara, Lalin St. Juste, Akasha Orr, Kumar Butler, Mirza Kopelman, Mahesh Rao and Chris Thalmann, who make up the outfit, said the new single is “about the story of self-entitled conquest”. They added that “it addresses the individual who believes he has a calling to attain what is rightfully his but loses himself in the process.”. The song is named after the 1973 historical fiction novel by Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah. It definitely conquered our ears. Be sure to check it out below.
Brighton’s AK/DK have announced the release of their new EP Dispatch #3. Graham Sowerby and Ed Chivers, who make up AK/DK, first released Dispatch #1 in 2011 and its follow-up Dispatch #2 dropped last year.
Dispatch #3 comes in the shape of a limited edition fluorescent cassette and is slated for a May 20th release via their own imprint LittleMissEcho Recordings.
Known for their fierce improvised shows, the forthcoming EP “sounds as raw and energized as their live performances” and sees the pair “resisting the temptation to edit or add anything in post-production”, as the press release describes.
Lucky for us, ahead of the EP’s release, AK/DK are offering the brilliant and thunderous single ‘Battersea’ as a free download on their bandcamp. Listen to it now.
AK/DK’s debut full-length is expected this summer, we’ll keep our ears peeled for updates. In the meantime, make sure you listen to the excellent mixtape they put together for Cast the Dice last month.
