#microcastle

[brian-em0]

[rastronomicals]

6:49 PM EST February 23, 2025:

Deerhunter - "Saved By Old Times" From the album Microcastle (August 19, 2008)

Last song scrobbled from iTunes at Last.fm

File under: Ambient Punk

--

  <525x525>

[doriandistortion]

My “LITERALLY ME” songs

Get to know me but the higher the song is on the list, the more relatable the song is for me. 😋

(A cry for help)

[arloqui]

Álbumes favoritos de Julio / July favorite albums 🌠

Kate Bush, Hounds of Love, 1985

El sueño marítimo de una genia ochentera.

Deerhunter, Microcastle, 2008

Un gran viaje a la juventud, los amigxs y buenos recuerdos.

Babasónicos, Jessico, 2001

Irreverente, divertido y grandes letras.

Yves Tumor, Safe in the Hands of Love, 2018

La mitad del tiempo no sabía qué estaba escuchando, no es queja.

Björk, Homogenic, 1997

Creo que ya visité Islandia gracias a las postales glaciales de Björk.

My Bloody Valentine, Loveless, 1991

Cristales y seda para corazones rotos.

Fennesz, Endless Summer, 2001

Si mezcláramos en una licuadora la estética de una TV, mosquitos flotando sobre una laguna y rolitas de los Beach Boys.

Charly García, Terapia Intensiva, 1984

Una joyita de instrumentales por el eterno Charly.

Prince, Dirty Mind, 1980

Derroche de descaro y sensualidad en una fiesta disco funk. Los falsetes de Prince 5/5

Frank Ocean, Blonde, 2016

Participé en una rifa para llorar y me compré todos los boletos con esta maravilla.

[kickerofelves]

[albumcoversuperimpositions]

Boards Of Canada - Geogaddi (2002)

Deerhunter - Microcastle (2008)

[burlveneer-music]

Echonomist - Strymonas [microCastle]

Petros Manganaris better known under his artist moniker Echonomist has been a constant in the electronic music for quite some years. With releases on Upon.You, Multinotes or Rebirth the Thessaloniki based artist set the bar high for following releases and does not disappoint his audience with his most recent work 'Strymonas', which is named after the Greek region and river close to Petros hometown. Just like previous releases from the Echonomist 'Strymonas' again is accompanied by a hype ever since Àme played the track last year – for a good reason. 'Strymonas' is dark, it's edgy, it's simply outstanding in its thoughful arrangement as Petros finds a way to combine creaking synth-chords and on the contrary bright and bleepy soundscapes that create a well-balanced harmonic track that has a colorful tone in an overall dark musical construct.

Echonomist's EP 'Strymonas' will be released on microCastle February 22nd, 2019.

[therisingnight]

Cassettes/Cathedral

I know I never use this for anything but uh

Today marks the tenth anniversary of the physical release of Deerhunter’s Microcastle, one of the most celebrated records of the dreampop wave of the ‘00s, the breakthrough record of the band, the this, the that, whatever.  

That's not what I want to talk about.

I want to talk about the bonus disc.

Everyone knows this story, right?  Deerhunter record Microcastle, Microcastle leaks, Deerhunter secretly records Weird Era Continued to accompany the physical release, Weird Era Continued (and Atlas Sound’s Logos) leaks too, everyone’s kinda miffed about it.  Still, both get released ten years ago, and Microcastle is one of the Albums of the Year, and Weird Era is

also there

And maybe it’s because I’m looking back at it now, and maybe I’m missing something.  But it always felt like people give this short shrift.  And to be fair, Microcastle does have the one-two opening salvo of “Cover Me Slowly”/“Agoraphobia”, and the storm of “Nothing Ever Happened”, and the other storm of “Twilight at Carbon Lake”, and really it’s a flawless post-pop record front-to-back unless you’re not a fan of “Activa” and its cousins—but I didn’t know that.

I wouldn't hear Microcastle until 2011.  My dad, who’d caught Cryptograms when it came out, bought Weird Era, and only Weird Era, online back in ‘08.  I was eleven. I wouldn’t know about its mirrortwin until after Halcyon Digest.  In other words, I heard Weird Era Continued in a vacuum.

And this is important, because, barring some brief, forgotten experiences with Heaven and Las Vegas, …And Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out and maybe The Campfire Headphase (good god my dad was/is hip), this was my first experience with dreampop or shoegaze, and one of my first with indie rock. 

Guitarist Lockett Pundt would go on to say that the album was made with a a haunted vibe in mind, and I see that, and I love it.  The whole album echoes.  Guitars and pianos meld into a crackling quicksilver.  Voices fade in and out, unintelligible, washed.  Waves of noise crash against the rhythms—and the rhythms are on point too!  The Fauver-Archuleta dreamteam at its best, tuneful and thundersome and just weird enough.  Even the songs that are just Bradford or just Lockett sound like part of the whole.  Indivisible.  This is the album I judge all shoegaze records, all noise-pop records, every damn lo-fi record of the early 2010s against, and so few albums feel so warm and so vital.  It shimmers so, so clearly for such a foggy record.  Nothing comes close for me.

But what I love now, other than the sound (and no wallofsound will ever hit me as hard as “Calvary Scars II”, which hit me so hard with only three chords that it made me pick up the guitar) is how damn lonely it is.  

Stay: I don’t want you to stay.  I need you.

It’s not just that the record sounds like it was recorded by ghosts.  It feels like it was written by ghosts, too.

When friends go away for a while, they always come back. But now if friends go away for a while then they never come back

My favorite track—one of my favorite songs of all time, even ten years later—is “Vox Humana”.

And I remember holding the hand of the skeleton prince, and he swept me into his arms, and he—he had—tremolo—deep in the back of his black eye sockets, and he said, 

"Do you want to come away with me Into the pitch black pool?”

And I said, "I don't know,  I don't know, I don't know”

Photocopied, and the wind ripped through the trees.

It’s the “Be My Baby” beat, and it’s the first time I’ve ever heard it, and the band swirls dreamike ‘round it and Bradford Cox is as lonely and spectral as ever he’s been, and I’m young, and this is what music could be, this is a sound I can carry around beside me and lull myself asleep to.