#fightpicker

[fightpicker]

Home Alone, by smnspz

2 track album

it is absolutely pathetic and simultaneously brilliant that this pair of songs recorded on an iPhone are better recorded than a lot of the stuff I have covered in dispatches to date. reconsider your aesthetics, people! sure, some of the sounds are out of the box effects but smnspz sings and plays multiple layers of an organic-sounding acoustic guitar and the whole thing comes across like a solid Tascam recording in the vein of Phil Elvrum or Khonnor. two brief summery songs, the second of which, ‘Little Bolder’, is genuinely good. isn’t technology great? (7)

[fightpicker]

From Void To Matter Volume 1, by Bolywool

2 track album

I’m continually surprised at Sweden’s knack of churning out fine summer music, given its perception as a cold winter land. And yet aside from a few luminaries it has less of a stock in bleak winter metal and more of a faithful allegiance to the universal of long grass, slow days, and pastoralist fantasy. It’s there in Dungen, Parson Sound, Fylke, The Cardigans, The Soundtrack of Our Lives, and now, Bolywool.

This release comprises two immaculately written, performed and recorded tracks that lock into this history and charge it with added enigma. Both tracks have two halves: the first exploring and yearning, the second breaking open into confidently stacked melodies and surges through space. May there be many more volumes to come. (9)

[fightpicker]

Mechanical Insect, by Ad Marginem

2 track album

o bandcamp randomiser, please free me from the cycle of Russian nerdboys who don’t leave the house enough. Mechanical Insect nearly an hour of harsh digital noise, the first half of which is monolithic and intense, giving way to a second almost identically-long track that is more tentative and crackly. i hate both of them and by now i am convinced of noise as music for people acting hard. (2)

[fightpicker]

Sorry, I'd Really Like To Help You. (EP), by Young Thymos

3 track album

Kent, the garden of England, famous for the award winning Music Hall in Ramsgate, and the birthplace of the Canterbury Scene. But local resident Young Thymos isn’t interested in noodle-brapping heady pastoral prog and rather sets control for the heart of the heart, writing gothic minor key piano-led pieces that reference and imply depression and suicide several times over the short run time. There are stylistic nods to Perfume Genius, Have A Nice Life, Angels of Light, maybe even a little Elliott Smith. There’s a previous album, I notice, called Zelfmoord. As bandcamp doesn’t have the notional welfare checking that one might expect from the label system (even if it is just an imagined label boss listening to this record on delivery and firing off an email saying ‘are you ok pal?’) then this record possibly sits closer to catharsis and anguish than something that I’d be comfortable with attempting some kind of critique of. I think rating this would be unfair.

[fightpicker]

07.05.2017, by Monofaktura

1 track album

around 18 minutes into this harsh noise track from Russian noisester Monofaktura (17 release in 2 years under this name indicates a mere pup, though his Light Collapse project has racked up 121 releases in 10 years - that’s the shit) you can feel the cells in your brain dying and your skin peeling off and the whole process of perdurance speeding up tenfold. i am genuinely interested in this noise proliferation in the former Soviet states from a sociological standpoint but hardly any of this stuff is interesting to listen to. (3)

[fightpicker]

SEN$ATIONAL EP, by DJ $TOCKER

4 track album

‘browserwave’ is a new thing on me but at a complete guess this is a kind of computer music mixed with plunderphonics from running multiple tabs on a browser all loaded with sound samples and sources? maybe it is best not to know. a lot of it sounds like the cool interstitial parts of a Wu record but without really kicking out a brilliant song.

there’s also a strong whiff of vapourwave in here too, though this music is less keen on evoking some kind of dystopian computer reality and is more keen on its own trip. it is absolutely inventive and entertaining for its duration to someone like me but some will question whether this is even music (it is, there’s a process, there’s transformation, there’s framing, there’s effort). at its best it evokes Muslimgauze but at its worst it can be like an early stab on a beats-making .exe file. (6)

[fightpicker]

Freaky Family, by Black Dough

7 track album

ostensibly Black Dough play pop music but it is a form of pop music being exploded across the galaxy, pop music being stretched in a million different directions, towards jazz, noise-rock, 70s prog, Bowie, and places between and betwixt. a sort of pop music for people who hate pop if pressed.

this kind of entre-deux music generally appeals to me because i. i think most genres are tired and used up and hollowed out and calcified and ii. hybridity is the only real authenticity that there is, no matter what anyone says, we have to join things together and mix them up to ensure survival.

this Gothenburg group are the brainchild of Miranda Raeder, whose voice bestrides this music and equips what could be genre-exercises with a sense of purpose and play, wrongfooting with some oblique note choices, and impressing with a measured power. not that the band are unimpressive at all. they are all very good second bananas.

people looking for obvious hooks and 3 minute marvels should look elsewhere, but those looking to marinade in a unique mood/mode might find a lot to love across these seven lightly-sprawling songs. (8)

[fightpicker]

you can't breathe that far, by Samuel Dillon

11 track album

introspective Leeds-based bedroom indie with occasional and welcome flourishes coming from production techniques rooted in freak folk and the kind of outsider music you’d get on like Type or Fonal or maybe K in one of their summer hot flushes. songs are short and spartan but fully realised, accomplished miniatures rather than grand-scale epics. music for remembering a summer’s day spent with a fondly-remembered love. (7)