If you’re an avid follower of the blog, you’ll have noticed it’s been rather quiet over the past few weeks. Things have been crazier than usual in the real world, and I’ve found myself more and more distracted. It’s been hard to summon the mental energy to sit down and write about music, let alone just give my full attention to an album. I’m hoping the worst of that is behind me, but only time will tell.
This isn’t to say I haven’t been listening; music is a near constant companion, even if I can’t always give it my undivided attention. Even in my harried state it has been an embarrassment of riches over the past few weeks; there are plenty of releases that deserve to be highlighted on the blog, and I’m going to start remedying that now.
Over the next week or two, I’m going to publish a series of roundups, each about a group of albums and songs that feel thematically connected to me. Today, we’ve got “dreamscapes”: music that hovers somewhere between the corporeal and spiritual realms.
Nondi_ – Flood City Trax
From its opening moments, Flood City Trax had me hooked. Muffled, blurry synths rattle around for nearly a minute, serenaded by swirling ambience. Rhythms emerge from and recede into the background, making their presence known but never forcing their way into the spotlight. That opening track, “Fcd (Floaty Cloud Dream)” does exactly what its title promises, constructing a gauzy, dreamlike sonic confection. Over the following eleven tracks, Nondi_ uses footwork, breakcore, ambient and even strains of video game music to build a series of dreamscapes, each hovering in some liminal space between reality and fantasy. Many of the obvious influences here are rhythm heavy genres, but Flood City Trax somehow manages to make them feel light and airy, almost as if they’re being heard through a dense fog. An early contender for one of my favorite albums of the year.
Tolerance – Divin
Little is known about Tolerance, the duo of Junko Tange and Masami Yoshikawa. They released two albums together (1979’s Anonym and 1981’s Divin) on the legendary Vanity Records before disappearing from the music world completely. Both are about to be given the reissue treatment, but Divin is the one that’s been rattling around my head for weeks. The album sounds like a basement rave thrown and attended by ghosts; their music is full of throbbing mechanical beats and disembodied voices, but rather than feeling harsh they have a soft, almost spectral quality to them. Some tracks are extended rhythmic experiments that take on an almost meditative quality; others flirt with traditional song structures, ending up with a catchy but incredibly warped approximation of pop. If any contemporary artist was making music like this, it would still sound ahead of its time.
Ayoolii & xaviersobased – “Pop Trunk”
xaviersobased and Ayoolii have both been making waves over the past year or so. I’ve enjoyed releases from both, but their latest collaborative track, “Pop Trunk”, has stuck with me more than anything else I’ve heard from their respective discographies. The two have very different approaches to the etherial beat provided by Surf Gang’s evilgiane: xaviersobased’s verse seems to flit around and, at times, dissolve into it, while Ayoolii’s prefers to soar and dive over it. The result is part muted party anthem and part mysterious nocturnal dispatch, a track that’s only made stronger by the obvious chemistry between the two. Though it only lasts ninety seconds, its magic lingers long after.