We’re back with another installment of DECAYCST Guest Mixes, this one from frequent mixer and digger DJ MICOSE.
This is a continuation of the “Digesting 2020” series I’ve been posting on the ploqueMixcloud, featuring only music that was released in 2020. It’s a free-form mix with abstract ambient sounds, industrial-influenced electronic songs, plus a variety of loud and repetitive rhythmic tracks. Features artists from Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Peru, Poland, Norway, and the US.
The Soft Pink Truth – Go
Racine – Geranium
Ale Hop – La Procesíon
Sébastien Brun – Empty
Tantão e os Fita – Ich Bin Der Fluss
Thoom – Large Fly
Negro Leo – Absolutíssimo Lacrador
Eartheater – Burning Feather
SIKSA – Proste Hasło
Jonquera – Artisou
Golden Oriole – The Granitoid Panics
The End – Allt Är Intet
Arrington de Dionyso – The Mani Malaikat Awakening
DECAYCAST Announces Preorder For HAURAS 4/9/21 “Chant For A Broken Chalice” OUT 5/7/21
HAURAS has crafted a lush and foreboding sonic landscape with “Chant For A Broken Chalice”, their first release for Oakland based imprint DECAYCAST. On “Chant For A Broken Chalice” intentional and otherworldly sounds envelop into a whirlwind of a slow churning concoction of beauty and anxiety. Dense choral envocations pulse over a sea of strings, keys, percussion and voice. HAURAS crafts tense and delicate music concerned with the rapid decline of empathy as intensified through the violent throes of capitalism. Both meditative and a warning, like a distant pulse of a lighthouse gently peaking over the fog as a distant warning of impending doom and collapse, scary and at this point completely unavoidable, but wow the beauty and elegance of the message is not something to soon be forgotten.
“My work is concerned with the psychology of society at the end of Civilization.” – HAURAS
The first single “Hold My Hand” takes a psychedelic dubbed out industrial approach to transport the mood and psyche of the listener to a blissful yet slightly unnerving underworld. The vocals glide through the mix like a robotic worm infecting an unknown host. Like most of Hauras’s work; “Chant For A Broken Chalice” holds the listener in an hourglass where time is rapidly and chaotically slipping away. Intentional, heartfelt, and intense.
“You’ve heard of the Music of Tomorrow? This is the Music of the Day After
Tomorrow.” – Chris Ryan (Composer, Cerddorion Ensemble,, Tzadik)
“The sonic equivalent of expired film in my Holga.” – Richard Youngs
Sarah Davachi, Laaraji, Father Murphy, Low, Tom Carter, Common Eider King Eider, Mary Lattimore, Tom Weeks, Lee Noble, Louise Bock, Clarice Jensen, Jonas Reinhardt, Carl Hultgren, John King, Lea Bertucci,
Beautiful new sonic offering from Minnesota-based sound artist Marsha Fisher titled “New Ruins” from the wonderful Full Spectrum Records which released Feb 15, 2021. “New Ruins” plunders a bun of discarded thrift store cassettes mined across the midwest to blissful and conceptually and sonically rewarding looping gifts. “New Ruins” shifts between hypnotic loops and drones done in an almost new age breath of exploration. The intro track is beautiful, crumbling voice textures, like ancient hymns broadcast through a ham radio- crackling as the wind. arrests their sounds and buries them under inches of gravel. On “New Ruins” Fisher acts like a sound archaeologist, pulling disparate loops from the earth and presenting them in a larger delicate breath of sound. Beautiful tones float on the surface as time warps and folds on itself, undecided on it’s. future like a plastic bag adrift in the wind. Sonically evocative of Phaedra era Tangerine Dream, but where the Dream dies Fisher digs deeper into an ambient palette of creation and destruction. Transmissions act like slow warnings to a future civilization, echoed from an uncertain present, the last communication beacon drains the last pulse from it’s batteries as it casts out it’s last bleep of a signal, praying to be discovered.
What could be lazily discarded as “radio static” and “chirping electronics” fade in and out, enacting the listener into a blissful hypnotic style, but n ever completely untethered from their reality, just temporarily detached and floating through a very different and unfamiliar world, that Fisher lays forth droplets of information for that makes this unknown world that much more mysteriously welcoming and desired. Fishers sound. sources appear to vary widely, and sampled of forgotten dust collecting christian alt rock tapes are sampled and manipulated seemingly beyond recognition, another conceptual element speaking to the dichotomies present throughout “New Ruins” .
From the label: “One of the tapes sampled here was a jazz fusion record, another featured instrumental soft rock – conceptually dry and inoffensive cultural documents created by Christian record labels for consumption by God-fearing men and women who perhaps did not want to associate with outlets like Windham Hill or Nadara Productions, who might have been slipping blasphemous ideas into their record, what with their eastern religious iconography and casual dips into spiritual mysticism.“
Pay Dirt“Error Theft Disco” is a collaboration between Victoria Shen and Bryan Day released on Shanghai based imprint Bluescreen. The sounds on “Error Theft Disco” escape rigid classification by all traditional methods. These are new and futuristic sounds stemming from what has obviously manifested as a highly effective collaborative process between these two prolific and renowned solo artists exploring a wide range within harsh / noise and experimental compositions. The pieces on “Error Theft Disco” hold a unique tension and create plenty of space for the listener to enter, but enter at their own risk, as their. sounds move and shake like a gauntlet made of swords the listener must navigate to a safe completion. Pregnant pauses of 60hz hum give way to explosions of feedback and chaos, but there’s also smaller and more delicate sounds to boot as well.
Home Learning has shared their newest video and song “Let Us Know You Are Here” from their new album released this past December, “The Case for Final” via Healing Sound Propagandist. “Let Us Know You Are Here”– is a beautiful ambient, soothing A/V tone poem exploring slow undulating shifting spaces within a beautiful marriage between image and sound. The track is evocative of sadness, unknowing, maybe even discovery, but within a paused and pregnant framework and the slow moving psychedelic visual eruptions are constantly birthing something new to be contemplated.
“This video for the first track off of Home Learning’s album “the case for final” was put together during the COVID 19 pandemic. It combines footage of suburban mall-sprawl, crowded with shoppers in spite of the health risks, with abstract visuals that evoke chemicals, fire, and a gradual build up of distortion/disintegration. Not everything is bleak…the colors and sounds also bring metamorphosis, slow but significant change, and eventually, light sifts in. “
Ethereal washes of sound and shape blend together like flickering bacteria under a microscope excited by a newfound chemical reaction. Gentle explosions are what come to mind visually, and the track itself brings thoughts of time collapsing between unknown worlds. Sounds delicately drone slightly in the red which gives the recording a slight bit of intensity without compromising the vibe or intent of the morose, and often times blissful offering that is “Let Us Know You Are Here”. Smoke dances across the failed architecture of a forgotten society and we dream and try to dream of a land almost totally forgotten. Very beautiful marriage of parallel moods to create an evocative and intriguing visual representation of the track bringing to the table both uncertainty and emotional resolution. WATCH BELOW NOW!
Home Learning is a long distance collaboration between Tom Schmidlin (Pagination) located in Bentonville, Arkansas. and Edmund Osterman (Screener) in Covington, KY
WOBBLY “Popular Monitress“to be released on cassette, CD, and digitally on 2/5/2021
Brand new high intense edit explosion from Negativland member, longtime radio show plunder-host/criminal, collaborator of hundreds near and far from People Like Us to Matmos to Thurston Moore, to now an army of touchscreen IOS nano bots- Wobbly aka Jon Leidecker. “Lent Foot” from his forthcoming album on Hausu Mountain, out 2/6/2021 titled “Popular Monitress“ . the album’s lead single, is an explosive electronic sandstorm fused together with textbook Wobbly-esque precision maneuverings amidst controlled chaos. Bloop alien-explosion tone poem comes etched into frantic speaker cones channeling an army of puzzling and buzzing IOS midi war-machine events from the future. “Lent Foot” then blasts into hyperdrive 8-Bit Stevie Wonder bass collapsing down the rear stairwell, as arches of folding warped cartoon glitched foley pillars roughly and jitterly try to prevent the full tumble all the way down the mental metal twisted staircase of synth and beat chaos. A perfect express of the Haus Mo sound and ethic-electronic explosion of the highest and densest order. Once again Wobbly does not disappoint for the maximalist sound-horder and psychedelic ear fiend
San Francisco-based multimedia artist, composer, and improviser Jon Leidecker makes music under the pseudonym Wobbly. He is an active member of both the seminal experimental group Negativland, and with the Thurston Moore Ensemble. Over the course of a varied musical practice that began in the mid-1980s, Wobbly has collaborated with artists including Matmos, Dieter Moebius (Cluster), Tania Chen, Fred Frith, Tim Story, David Toop, Zeena Parkins, and People Like Us.
Highly recommended.
PS. While you’re here check out this GUEST MIX Hausu Mountain busted for us last year. Ripe for a new listen.
Electric Sound Bath is the new age / ambient duo of Angela Wilson & Brian Griffith. Their newest, “Of This World” is out now via the mighty Moon Glyph Records. Large, swelling synths, rumbling sub bass undulations slowly bubble up through ambient swells on forgotten tones, a warm but slightly unsettling and unresolved tension. Electric Sound Bath is the perfect conceptual and sonic reference for this work, as the tones eclipse the listening space in a spacious and breath-like eclipse of sound. Channeling early Eno and Godspeed You Black Emperor, ESB’s tones slowly peak and dip with a graceful ease, a constantly shifting tone poem enacted with grace and precision. relaxing, calming, and blissful despite holding a tight intensity at times, never fully resolving to “background sounds” but engaging movements of pressure and movement.
The duo’s sounds have room to undulate within controlled structures, allowed to breathe on their own without much chaotic interference. Like an old ham radio beckoning into an empty sky, with hope of contact returned. Bordering on psychedelic ambient, and new age, the sound switches gears occasionally but slowly and carefully, dark and low string sounds guide the work like a distant light ahead, while warmer and more glassy synth voices continue to pulse – shimmering ever so steadily through the thick fog of the sonic space.
“This long-form creative process mirrored the duo’s own life trajectory and experiences ‘of this world’. The result is a celestial wash of MIDI-driven modular synthesizers crafting slow, unfurling caverns of sound. The type of deep, meditative tones that reward loud and close listening. Allow this music to patiently flow over you, reveling in the crystalline details and heavenly peace.”
DECAYCAST Reviews: Laura Luna Castillo “Tuberose” ((Whited Sepulchre Records, 2020)
Ohio’s Whited Sepulchre Records brings us another underground gem with the hauntingly moving and inspirational new album from Laura Luna Castillo exploring themes of time/place, fragrance and experience, and the sound waves a wonderfully complicated line between all of these. The sounds present on “Tuberose” evoke unknown histories as worlds with a dash of familiarity, like a distant world buried deep within the subconscious rhizome. The sound is both ethereal and cinematic, often holding a powerful tension both compositionally and within the sounds themselves. It’s the music for a slow growing tree; it stretches only inches between the time we are born and when we die, yet we can still be transfixed on it’s beauty, power and growth.
The natural world. and it’s sights and sounds, isn’t something foreign to the artist and her practice. Castillo states, ““I was inspired by the book “The art of perfumery, and method of obtaining the odors of plants” by G.W. Septimus Piesse from 1857 in combination with the exploration of the study of time, memory loops, ephemeral and elusive memories.
Oscillating in sonic zones akin to Terry Riley, Meredith Monk, A Silver Mount Zion/GYBE, the ambient sections of Neurosis, and early Wendy Carlos, Castillo blends experimental compositional techniques with stunning epic, over-arching movements in sound and space. These compositions hold great tension in many different moods, which Castillo stitches together flawlessly, as they shift between haunting, and reaffirming, morose, and explosive. Huge moments happen with the space of a few seconds, and yet, we have to dedicate our mind and ear to the entire journey and it’s slower changing moments as well, as they necessitate their own timelines of experience. A vastly complex and interesting album for so many different reasons which are better heard than read about . Castillo’s sounds, like nature, are complex, complex in detail in the most rewarding ways, at times unsettling even, but overall present as an abundance of sonic beauty. Powerful powerful music, hard to classify, and what’s even the point, just go buy it here.
B L A C K I E: Face the Darkness reviewed by mynameisblueskye
“What is freedom to the average person?”
How ever you answer that question, the one thing you should know is that it probably doesn’t mean the same thing as does to art-punk auteur Michael LaCoeur aka B L A C K I E. To those who have ever listened to B L A C K I E, you will release that his album represents a natural freedom. The freedom to just be the man he was made to be without the world seeking to destroy him or cage him in. Nomadic by nature, nonconformist by choice and perhaps even by nature and unafraid to encourage it for others in his position. The opening lines of “While They Try to Kill Each Other” outlines one of his overall thesis of being B L A C K I E over electric drums better than any of us could ever try.
“Children laugh while they try to kill each other/at least the blood returns to the earth where it belongs, and out of the hands of in power”, bellows Michael in his dry and world-weary town crier scream. With danger everywhere in his wake, it would make sense that he finds silver linings here…if that is what you want to call it. On “There Is No Light”, he reports the history of laid waste in front of and committed towards the people. “There was no food, there were fists/there were no light, there were fists” all to come back to the devastating line. “We use to eat each other!” Entrails wrapped in crimson blood line the periphery of wherever B L A C K I E looks, even amongst those who towards those who call themselves allies and heroes. His second overall thesis “I am not you’r nigger!” is delivered in an angry tone only punctuated by a deep sense of pain and sorrow.
B L A C K I E’s mind may be a mass of continuously spinning wheels, but he will be damned if it ever spins for you. Even as he tackles topics such as suffering from a crippling addiction (“How to Let It Control You”), toxic “patriotism” (“Wave Your Flag”) and fascism/fake empathy (“Uncounted”), Michael knows that even HE is not above occupying the hot seat. Painting a picture of anxiety through a descriptive lens, “Meet the Demons” is claustrophobic in its description of not being able to think and feel freely.
Not being able to just be without judgment. So, after all of this, hearing him emerge free and ready to escape on “It Can’t Define Me” feels not only heartening, but like an anthem written to those looking for their own escape. B L A C K I E’s Face the Darkness may start off as B L A C K I E in the slaughter line witnessing victims meeting their end in HD and plotting his escape from such slaughter, but it sees to it that he isn’t his own cause of danger to himself. In the midst of this, B L A C K I E emerges with one last message (clue, rather) that overall defines not only the entire album, but the world and the philosophy of B L A C K I E: “Look around/Don’t look down”.
– Mynameisblueskye
Mynameisblueskye is a singer, songwriter, poet, and occasional blogger. An American-born Renaissance man who loves music so much, he has too many videos in his Watch Look after list. His bandcamp can be found here:
Decaycast is back from the catacombs just before halloween to share this special release day review of the newest release from one of our favorite labels, Grimalkin Records who are always bringing important, under-represented artists into the forefront. One of their newest releases is “Profess” from GR-artist Woven In, which continues the strong presence of GR releases that bridge genres in really interesting and innovative ways in 2020, and since they have started really, and Woven In is no exception.
Woven In“Profess” is the 9th album from Woven In, the moniker of multi-instrumentalist Mariah Fortune-Johnson (she/her). Twenty-nine year old Mariah has been releasing music under the name Woven In since 2013.
On her newest offering, Woven In builds a sonic bridge across multiple styles to create a cloak of warmth, discovery, humanity and information through minimal electronics, voice, and movement. Fortune’s voice glides across the honest, minimal , rhythmic glassy synthesizers which create a perfect back bone for her to enrich the meaning of these relatable, warm compositions through the speakers and into our waiting consciousness. Pulling from early Kraftwerk with the intimacy of Wizard Apprentice or Arca, Fortune has created both a sound a a space all her own, while referencing a relatable and inviting composition style.
Tracks such as “Spoken From The Heart” offer an honest and intimate look into the album’s mantra perhaps “No it’s not very nice, but it’s spoken from the heart”. The phrase repeats as a dark heavy buzzing synth backed with looping synth arpeggios create a beautiful and heartfelt nod to 90’s Euro dance and late 80’s minimal electronics, all while accented through her lush, in the pocket, hauntingly elegant vocals; absolutely my favorite track on the record.
This record isn’t just for feeling good at the club or inside you perfect personal space however, this is a record connecting her own struggle as a Black Women in America as a central theme throughout the record;
“It’s social commentary on being a Black woman in America,” says Fortune. There are other themes within the album, including love, kink, and a couple of contemplative instrumentals. Digital only proceeds will be split evenly between Black Land Ownership and the Black Creatives Redistribution Fund founded by Mariah Fortune. The Black Creatives Redistribution Fund’s website is here
Through a powerful combination of voice electronics and percussion, Fortune has created a minimal pop masterpiece which will grow on the listener as it did me, beginning as a minimal pop record and blossoming into a contemporary minimalist electronic masterpiece. This record is honest in that it keeps on giving, it keeps letting you in with each listen, opening up new portals of meaning and new orientations to sound and meaning, and that is not an easy thing to do. “Profess” is out today and you can buy it here
D E C A Y C A S T Magazine 