Archive for the ‘MUSIC’ Category
Mutations Festival is back! Featuring performances from 100 of the most exciting, inspirational and relevant artists, performing over 4 exuberant days and 11 of Brighton’s most treasured Grassroots Music Venues.
Including Anna Meredith, Baxter Dury, Beak, Ross From Friends, This is the Kit, Working Men’s Club & more.
Born in 2015, the genre melting Mutations 001 set the foundation for its daring line-ups to come. 2019 saw a mysterious venue unearthed on the outskirts of the city as Mutations 002 evolved into a powerhouse of creative exploration. Arriving at any place and at any time, Mutations Festival is an ever evolving and unforeseen meeting of like minded music fans, hungry to uncover the unknown and the unexpected. With a passionate belief that all customers should be able to enjoy the festivals headline acts we’ve structured Mutations Festival 2021 such that the festival uses lower capacity venues, but more of them, during the day, as the afternoon progresses the number of venues being used reduces and the capacities increase, culminating in the evening with one single headline stage each day where all customers can enjoy the final acts of the night .Get ready to embrace the experimental and the brave at Mutations Festival 2021.
Willie Dunn shared truth through song and celluloid. “It’s like the reason you’re supposed to make music,” said Kurt Vile about the song to MOJO Magazine in 2015. “He was our Leonard Cohen,” said singer-songwriter Eric Landry about his musical hero. In talent, he is Cohen, Dylan, and Cash rolled into one and along with Buffy Sainte-Marie, Floyd Red Crow Westerman, and A. Paul Ortega, brought a new set of perspectives and realities to the folk music tradition. “The Pacific”, Willie Dunn’s third album, originally released in 1980, is available for streaming and digital download for the first time. We are humbled to help honour Willie Dunn. May he never be forgotten… PEACE.
released August 13th, 2021
The project of the now LA-based songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Noah Weinman, Runnner’s poignant reflections on the isolation and anxiety caused by a sense of rootlessness radiate with wit and charm. While writing the songs that now span “Always Repeating“, he floated between Providence, Los Angeles, and New York. “It’s like I sing about these places yearning to be there, but also knowing full well that what I’m really missing is the people I met and the experiences I had,” Weinman explains. “I get restless and frustrated in my present, and romanticize my past while pushing myself into some different chapter—one that usually starts with me in a dark place and some songs in my journal. These songs end up being the constant for me over the years.” Always Repeating, self-produced and recorded wherever he called home at the time, documents this cycle of looking back and moving forward, of alienation changing to reconciliation.
The 10-track collection is composed of five re-recorded versions of songs that appeared on Runnner’s 2017 debut, Awash, and 2020’s One of One EP. Although the songs were written over the course of three years, all find Weinman grappling with the same thing: feelings of uncertainty about his life. After leaving college, his friends, and his beloved life in Ohio, Weinman made the reluctant decision to move back to his hometown of Los Angeles; not because he wanted to, but because he wasn’t sure where else to go. It was an extremely isolating time and that existential dread pervades the music. “I began to feel like all of the people I knew and had met maybe never really existed,” Weinman explains. “I fell out of touch with everyone. It was really lonely. I wrote these songs as a way of reaching out and trying to reconnect. It’s interesting that the feelings I had then overlap with the feelings I’ve had in the past year, where everybody feels distant and far away.”
For Weinman, Runnner is primarily a solo endeavour with an ever-expanding musical community of musicians collaborating on his albums and shows, which at times have been known to feature up to a 7-piece live band (he also has a burgeoning career as a producer, notably working on Skullcrusher’s critically-acclaimed debut EP for Secretly Canadian). Weinman completed “Always Repeating” last fall in Western Massachusetts and Woodstock using a mobile studio set-up. He played the majority of the instruments himself, including guitar, bass, trumpet, banjo, piano and synth. The goal was to create the perfect balance of intimate and melancholy song writing through the lens of hi-fi/lo-fi dynamics, inspired by his favourite artists like Bon Iver, the Microphones, and Julien Baker. “I want it to feel honest and homemade and a little rough around the edges, but where the roughness doesn’t preclude somebody from engaging with the song,” Weinman explains. “Like you’re in the room listening to it all be made. I tried to preserve some artifacts of the process to help it feel present.”
The songs draw from personal emotions and experiences—with Weinman usually more interested in posing questions than in always providing answers—and are sometimes inspired by the works of writers such as Angela Pelster, Max Porter and Donald Barthelme. “Awash” embodies the feeling of being lost and adrift through its aching melody and acoustic riffs, while the pulsating “Urgent Care” uses humour and light-heartedness to touch on Weinman’s very real anxiety. The relatable album opener, “Monochrome,” resonates as he tries fruitlessly to recall mundane and insignificant moments from his past. While the songs are about feeling alone, they also offer the hand of connection. “The act of writing songs and the time being alone making songs has been a way for me to work through those feelings,” Weinman says. “I write songs hoping for connection: if someone else feels less alone from listening to my music then I might also feel less alone.” He is looking towards the future, but he also knows that the songs on Always Repeating probably haven’t finished playing themselves out–and they probably never will.
Always Repeating ultimately tells the start of Weinman’s journey as Runnner, and his cyclical feelings of being connected and then disconnected from the world over and over again. This collection of songs reflects a constant, honest search for attachment and a sense of place–and a vulnerability that empathizes with listeners who may face that same challenge. “When I first left college I was uncertain and afraid, and I knew I had changes ahead of me, but I wasn’t sure if I was ready to make them,” he recalls. “I was just circling in my own anxiety and indecision, and now I’m back to recording those same songs again, in a world that is in many ways more uncertain than it was then. Me struggling with loneliness and anxiety is true for all of the music I write. And pandemic or not, these songs would still feel relevant. I went through it then, I’m going through it now, and I’ll probably go through it again in a few years.”
Released July 16th, 2021
Julia Shapiro (Chastity Belt, Childbirth, Who Is She?) is back with her second solo album, “Zorked”, the follow-up to 2019’s superb “Perfect Vision”. Set for an October 15th release on Suicide Squeeze Records, the 10-track LP features co-production from Melina Duterte (Jay Som), who helped Shapiro record at home during lockdown in Los Angeles, and pushed her to explore a sound distinct from both her solo debut and her work with Chastity Belt.
Lead single “Come With Me,” out now alongside a psychedelic, live-action/animation-hybrid music video (dir. Ertugrul Yaka), is our first preview of that new sound: dreamy, but dark—nightmarey, more like—with droning synths that jab your nerves, hazy and hallucinatory lyrics, and layered Shapiro vocals that evoke MGMT. It’s a sound cleverly calibrated for these times, in which we’re all “zorked” in one way or another, whether by virtue of chemical intervention, or our mental circuits simply overloading.
Julia Shapiro “Zorked” out October 15, 2021, on Suicide Squeeze Records.
North Carolina singer/songwriter Indigo De Souza has shared another preview of one of our most anticipated records this month. “Real Pain” is the third single from the rising star’s forthcoming “Any Shape You Take” (August 27th on Saddle Creek Records), following “Kill Me” and “Hold U,” .
“Real Pain” begins in a place of radical acceptance in the face of suffering: “When pain is real, you cannot run,” De Souza sings to open the song, the lyric as devastating as her vocals are delicate. A single electric guitar and a few scattered synth notes expand into enveloping percussion and reverberant distortion while De Souza insists, “I still feel you,” allowing us to wonder whether she’s addressing a person or her pain itself, then sweetly croons, “I don’t believe the way I’ve been / going.” From there, the song is all beautiful breakdown, a symphony of screams set to a pounding, deep drum. You won’t believe the way De Souza brings it all home until you hear it.
‘Real Pain’ is about facing grief and loss, and having compassion for yourself in that space. It’s about learning to be unafraid of experiencing a full spectrum of emotion, and welcoming the way it teaches you and changes you,” De Souza says of her new song in a statement. “For one of the sections in the song, I put out an invitation for people to anonymously send me voice memos of ‘screams, yells, and anything else.’ I layered the voices on top of one another to embody a kind of collective experience.
“I felt an incredible catharsis hearing their voices stacked with mine,” she continues. “While we live such separate lives, we are connected in the way that we all navigate immense amounts of pain and love and fear in our bodies every day. It can be hard to be a person! It’s okay to acknowledge that sometimes. It’s okay to feel things fully and to allow others space to do the same.”
from Any Shape You Take out August 27th on Saddle Creek Records.
The Australians are coming out in full force. One of the continent’s finest bands, Melbourne duo Good Morning, announced their newest album “Barnyard” due out October 22nd via Polyvinyl, which arrives two years after their packed 2019 that saw the release of The Option and Basketball Breakups.
In addition to the album announcement, the band have released its lead single, ‘Country’. Written by frontman Liam Parsons, the track reflects on the singer’s desires when he was younger, and how they’ve panned out in adulthood.
Alongside the announcement was the duo’s newest single, “Country.” Over an infectious guitar riff that slowly builds into a folky bounce, Liam Parsons sings of wishing to return to a simpler life and younger desires. The entrancing video is set against the backdrop of Parson’s childhood: 1st Eltham Scouts Hall. “I was always too embarrassed to admit that I was a scout to my school friends, the same way I was too embarrassed to admit that I got piano lessons,” Parsons reveals. “Both of those things are ridiculous. Scouts is cool and so are piano lessons.” Ditto “Country.”
The record was made “in slightly simpler times” at Wilco’s recording studio, The Loft, in Chicago over a five-day period.
From the album ‘Barnyard’ out October 22nd via Polyvinyl & Good Morning Music Company Worldwide
WEDNESDAY – ” How Can You Live If You Can’t Love How Can You If You Do “
Posted: August 13, 2021 in MUSICTags: Wednesday
Karly Hartzman, vocalist and lyricist of Asheville five-piece Wednesday, she writes with a rapidly shifting focus and no sense of chronology, imprinting a sense of longing on their songs.
Hartzman cites Brautigan as an influence on the band’s forthcoming album, “Twin Plagues”, out on August 13th via Orindal Records. Brautigan’s work predates shoegaze, but Wednesday’s distorted, wailing guitars pair perfectly with this style of writing, which is just as blustery and powerful as their triple guitar barrage. Wednesday aren’t a straightforward band by any means they also fold in elements of slacker rock and country, but they harness a considerable amount of force from their rugged guitar roars and quiet-loud dynamic.
A lot of shoegaze sounds like it exists outside of time and space, but because Wednesday’s music contains Southern twang and suburban imagery, their songs feel like a dream world placed right in the backyard, a place where the shed starts to levitate, birds move like marionettes and the adjacent home feels just as deeply as humans do. Lyrically, “Twin Plagues” is a gloomy album ominous, even, but it feels like a destination that must be visited in order to move past pain.
Sonically, their hooks give the album an exhilarated joy, which heightens all the other emotions present. Twin Plagues is one of the best and most consistent records you’ll hear this year. It’s a stunning body of work for many reasons the way it grapples with trauma, the way it captures suburban melancholia, the way each hook somehow sounds better than the next, the way they manage to spark something inside the listener with such specific lyrics—but more broadly, it’s because every song feels like a cathartic explosion.
“I have a pretty good memory, especially for bad times,” Hartzman says over the phone as she strolls through the hilly streets of Asheville. “I’m honestly trying to forget and move on, rather than hold onto these memories. I’m writing about them to let them go. I’m ready to move on from a lot of stuff. That song about the broken foot and my friend doing acid and jumping out of a window [“Birthday Song”], like I’m desperate to forget that memory.”
The band’s new LP is their third to date and second as a full band, and it largely centers on the traumas Hartzman incurred during her junior and senior years of high school. “That’s a hard time for everyone, but there’s a lot of bad stuff that happened that I’m still processing,” Hartzman says. “It’s just really hard to escape pain, even in a moment of happiness. I think that’s just how trauma works. Any moment of happiness, you’re going to be like, ‘I wish this person was here to experience it with me.’ Or ‘I wish I could let myself feel this fully, but my mind is thinking about this other thing.’”
Throughout the album, Hartzman alludes to a car crash that had a big impact on her life, and she also lays out more general fears and anxieties she can’t quite evade. It’s an album rooted in pain, but the way it describes the messiness of memories and the tension that lingers in the air when things aren’t okay feels like an emotional breakthrough and the turning of a page. It also has an affection for her Southern upbringing and all the imagery that elicits, which adds a softness to the record. Throughout our conversation, she professes her love for the slow pace of the South, and she jokes about the normalcy of the Greensboro neighbourhood she grew up in. “My neighbourhood was called Northern Shores, and there was a Southern Shores and an Eastern Shores and every direction Shores,” Hartzman says. “It was very typical.
On “Handsome Man,” she compares her surroundings to a snow globe, and on “Gary’s,” she describes a long walk to get the mail, but chief among the references to her hometown is the title of track three, “The Burned Down Dairy Queen.” To most, that image would seem rather dark—a disconcerting reminder that things don’t last forever, or a relic of capitalism—but Hartzman sees it differently. “I don’t think that’s a sad image,” she says. “It more just encapsulates where I am, and because of that, it makes me happy. Even though it represents, to me, being an empty shell of a person, I look at it and say, ‘There’s me.’ I’m so glad I can see myself reflected in this place where I live and these things I’m surrounded by.”
Hartzman has always been in touch with her creative side. She skipped classes during high school roughly three days out of the week to write and draw at a coffee shop, and she frequently tagged along with a friend to DIY shows in Greensboro. As she gradually saw more female musicians in her local scene, she began to fantasize about joining a band. She read as many memoirs by female musicians as she could find, and she was inspired to keep plugging away at the guitar after watching Mitski’s 2015 Tiny Desk Concert. Hartzman moved to Asheville for college, which is where she met guitarist and eventual bandmate Daniel Gorham. Gorham, who has since left the band to play with Prince Daddy & The Hyena, helped Hartzman record her first album as Wednesday, “yep definitely”, a lo-fi pop record heavily inspired by The Sundays.
Hartzman formed a band called Diva Sweetly with her high school friends, who had previously performed as Pictures of Vernon. They released one album titled In The Living Room back in 2019, but it was a far cry from the type of music Hartzman was hoping to make. Hartzman was psyched to finally be in a band, but as a shoegaze fan, she knew she hadn’t yet fulfilled her artistic vision. Wednesday eventually expanded and became a full group, resulting in the release of their second album I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone in 2020. Hartzman is proud of the record, and it felt closer to the sound she was trying to capture, but still considering herself a musical beginner, she knew she could make something even better.
By the time the band started composing and recording “Twin Plagues”, Hartzman felt much more confident in her abilities as a musician and songwriter, and you can tell by the immediacy of the songs. You can also hear the band’s growing musical chemistry, particularly in the way their three guitarists interact with each other. Hartzman plays guitar alongside her partner Jake Lenderman and Xandy Chelmis, who plays lap steel, and this combo creates a fascinating back-and-forth. “I’m always so impressed by them and their ability to work around each other and create space for each other,” Hartzman says. “They always know when to hit with the same part, musically, and when to do different things.”
Hartzman doesn’t think about Wednesday’s music in stylistic terms. Instead, she tries to align their sound with the emotions of every line she’s written, which accounts for the dramatic peaks and troughs within their songs. “I feel like ‘Cody’s Only’ is a really good example of that,” Hartzman says. “I wanted the song to shrink away and then explode at the end because that’s how I felt singing the words. So it’s really just trying to match up everything emotionally, and it happens pretty naturally once we gather what I’m feeling about stuff, line to line.”
Specific imagery like a Dallas Cowboys urn (“Cliff”), condensation on the bathroom mirror (“Cody’s Only”) and a gutter that drips like a runny nose (“Toothache”) draws you closer to Wednesday’s songs, creating an intimate bond that wouldn’t occur if these songs were painted with broad strokes. In a way, Hartzman is trusting listeners with these images, inviting them into the depths of her memory and sharing the good, the bad and the ugly. “I always feel like there are so many songs about general stuff that anyone and no one can identify with,” Hartzman says. “But your memories, specifically, and the more details you use to describe them, that’s the most special goldmine of lyrics in the world, because no one else is gonna [write] the same way you do.”
Hartzman sings, “Jealous of the rooms whose floors can feel your weight upon them,” on a song from Twin Plagues. Both lines exude love, pain and loneliness, and the evocative, roundabout way they describe these feelings brings new meaning to these sentiments. Wednesday’s music feels sacred, like something you’re going to keep in a safe place and devour routinely in times of need.
vocals and guitar Karly Hartzman
lead guitar Jake Lenderman
Bass Margo Schultz
Drums Alan Miller
Lap Steel Xandy Chelmis
“Twin Plagues” is out on August 13th via Orindal Records.
London-based experimental post-punk ensemble Bas Jan return with a new expanded line-up and their first brand new music in three years. Released as part of Lost Map’s PostMap Club monthly subscription service in August, and available to stream and share from August 13th, ‘You Have Bewitched Me’ is an enrapturing reflection on the mesmerising power of first attraction and new love. It follows the release on Lost Map Records in 2018 of the Instant Nostalgia EP, and before that, Bas Jan’s critically acclaimed debut album Yes I Jan, which was hailed for its “messy majesty” (9/10, Uncut) and “beautifully fractured art-pop” (★★★★, MOJO).
“This track was a result of an Arts Council funded project,” explains Serafina, “for Bas Jan to rehearse and record as live at a performance space [Cafe Oto, London] during lockdown autumn 2020. It was then mixed by Capitol K at Total Refreshment Centre. ‘You Have Bewitched Me’ marks a new era of collaborative writing as a four-piece – more of which to be revealed soon.”
Bas Jan are:
Rachel Horwood
Emma Smith
Serafina Steer
Charlotte Stock
Released August 13th, 2021
The Fat Angel Sings 