Firstlin3
Releases from the Jordan-based Drowned By Locals label are typically accompanied by cryptic texts that bring to mind the lore spun by Underground Resistance’s Unknown Writer. The label’s three founders introduce themselves as follows: Laith Demashqieh is general of war and commander in chief, Firas Shahrour is accounting, legation and stuff, and Shereen Amarin is voice of reason and everything else.
It’s playful mythologising, but as Amarin, Demashqieh and Shahrour explain, there’s a coherence to it beyond high-jinx. Asked about the label’s name, they highlight their slogan: “Voice and face to the marginalised brutes, misfits and savages, but delicate at heart.”
“Our slogan hints at what Drowned By Locals could mean; it holds an intuitive sympathy for the most abased and marginal members of society, with a violent contempt for authority,” they explain over email. “The name, in the context of a developing country like Jordan, which to us is culturally stuck in the dark ages, alludes to the feeling of being suffocated by the conservative masses; and in a global sense, to the ongoing lynchings and witch hunts exercised by groups against individuals.”
Their roster covers diverse ground stylistically and geographically, from dub-inflected country crooners (Bristol’s Ambulance vs Ambulance) to broken dancehall. “We believe in a self-indulgent, embarrassingly honest expression of one’s desires, fetishes, fears and perversions,” they continue. “Regardless of genre, tool and technical virtuosity – it could be made by sticks and stones as far as we’re concerned – as long as it’s done with sincerity and conviction, vividly reflecting a psychological state, we extend our understanding towards the difficulty of the process, the difficulty of the content and sometimes the difficulty of the personality from which it all stems. A sense of humor is also essential.”
You sense that Drowned By Locals want to flood the mundane with bizarre information, to briefly disrupt normality’s onslaught by threading a multimedia counter-narrative through it.
Firstlin3 – ⛧Paranoia Star⛧
(Drowned By Locals)
With release notes equating the Madrid-based artist’s home city to Babylon, and customized rolling papers included with the tape, (a herb grinder is also available) Firstlin3’s ⛧paranoia star⛧ is typical high weirdness for Drowned By Locals. The album is described as an “earthquake through the doomed metropolis,” and this millenarian tale fits well with its mangled dancehall. Firstlin3 pulls in a huge range of collaborators to rap, rant and contribute autotuned choirs over their bass heavy productions. On ‘Got A Friend At Last/Codeine’, featuring Signal 0 and Adios Adios, a pitch bent tirade erupts over lurching low-end. Elsewhere come hyperactive trance pop, industrial reggaeton on ‘Bound (feat ID)’ and desert grime on ‘Madrid Babylon’. While each track is rooted in party music, the plethora of voices and the feverish production give ⛧paranoia star⛧ as a whole the feeling of a burning world on the precipice of paradise and mania.
India Sky – Somewhere Over The Mystic Moon
(Ratskin Records)
The first thing that jumps out on India Sky’s debut is the richness in her neo-soul productions. Synths shimmer and glow, cushioning her vocals and beats. It’s a depth and warmth more than matched in her songs. The lyrics are voyages through personal memories and wider ruminations on how relationships reshape us. It risks sentimental cliché, but her vivid storytelling and detail evade that trap. ‘Breakdown’’s rolling percussion and melting guitar lines give optimistic momentum to post-breakup uncertainty, as Sky struggles to separate present from past, singing: “I only know how to love because you showed me what love was”. On ‘Begin Again’ waltzing arpeggios battle lethargy while Sky asks us to look to the sky to see how many stars we can find. Somewhere Over the Mystic Moon is a deeply generous album, an invitation to a place where sadness and hope exist as one.
Paszka – Lapton
(Gin&Platonic)
Krakow-based Paszka (aka Szymon Sapalski)’s Lapton feels like playing a platformer. Not just because of the sounds and velocities used in their computer generated, constantly refracting beats, but because the structures in their music mimic the suspense and reward patterns peculiar to gaming. Their tracks sit in a zone where gabba pace meets hi-NRG warmth. ‘Jade’s’ glitch-shuffle flies forward with gleeful abandon before pivoting into double time as though you’re abruptly in a perilous race against the clock. ‘Zabol’s’ freefall start into gothic-funk bass patterns echo as they tumble into a subterranean boss battle. The final three tracks move through an almost Drexciyan digital exotica, as though you’re proudly exploring a fiendishly hard to reach hidden-level. Warp Records ‘Artificial Intelligence’ compilation signified dance music’s migration from the club into the home stereo system. paszka shows it can produce addictive narrative possibilities beyond both.
Merche Blasco/Derek Baron – Travesía/The Matrix
(Full Spectrum)
The closing minutes of Derek Baron’s side of this split are dominated by an unaccompanied circular saw. As your ears acclimatize, you start to sense a musicality to it. That gets confirmed when it gets sucked into a regal brass ensemble (sampled from Samuel Adler’s The Study Of Orchestration) as part of a bizarre crescendo. ‘The Matrix’ was assembled from Youtube trawls and Baron’s personal archives. Droplets of harp, piano and speech weave through a constant low hum of mundane sounds, creating a peculiar theatricality from ordinary sources. Merche Blasco’s ‘Travesia’, reflects on a network of Franco-era defensive bunkers in the Spanish Pyrenees. Construction was left uncompleted when the dictator died and the fortifications were buried. The architect Paul Virilio read Nazi bunkers on the French coast as portentous buildings which compressed the occupant’s perception of space and time. Blasco’s composition, rife with ghostly synths, eerie singing, and far off explosions, is anything but static. It pieces together proof of a world in motion outside a bunker’s fixed perspective. Both Baron and Blasco treat collage as a means of investigation, cut and paste detectives pinpointing new connections and patterns.
Rainbow Island – Moonlit Panacea
(Riforma)
Rainbow Island work in palimpsestic slow-mo beats on third album Moonlit Panacea. There’s something loosely reminiscent of Model Home in the Italian quartet’s jams, but they move in a trippier, more digitalized zone. Opening track ‘Karplusan Forest’ has a thick pulsation for a bass line. Vocals come out in distorted globules, so placeless they could be being broadcast direct from your cranium. Elsewhere are lulling keys, fluctuating percussion and, on the last few tracks, a dive into enchanted synthesis. The songs were built up from jams, both in person and online, before being chiseled down to the document here. Thankfully that editing hasn’t been too precise, because it’s the unmarked borders that really make this. Rainbow Island’s music revels in instability, the sense this mirage-like dub could dissolve back into the drift from whence it came at a moment’s notice.
Asleep Country – Fake Opulent
(New Motion)
Asleep Country is one of many aliases of Octavia Möbius Sheffner. Fake Opulent is a two cassette, near-three-hour long bath of reality-drowning hypnosis that’s vast in every direction at once. Sand covered guitar lines blend into tape-hiss smudged polyrhythms. Crust punk screams meet interludes of cursed hauntology via trancey synth pile-ons. The album sits in the interference pattern of crossed transmissions, but its glitching density settles into joyous flow. The Kazakhstan-based artist’s music can seem chaotic, but when you hear how the beats keep morphing under a looping bass line on ‘The Summer Solstice’ without breaking the groove, or how ‘Golden Goose Of Rock Bottom Fauxberge By Committee’ sounds like four different songs captured in perfect equilibrium, you realise there’s a sense of order here that’s as brilliant as it is mischievous. The level of saturation sits somewhere between Gnawa ritualistic ecstasy and jungle frenzy while operating in a radically different terrain to either. This music feels distinctly of a time of access to endless information. But Asleep Country harnesses the flood, surfing the deluge and rerouting the torrent of stimulation into psychedelic new forms.
Jackie O Motherfucker – Channel Zero
(AKTI)
This tape captures a 2006 live set in Tarcento, Italy from Portland free-folkers Jackie O Motherfucker, here joined by Eva Saelens (Inca Ore). It captures clearly the band’s skill at extended, liberatory jams and luminous tangles of percussion and wind instruments. The first two tracks are wonderful excursions through the band’s trippy folk meets celestial noise blueprint, but it really escalates on the closer. Beginning with Saelens rabble rousing over an gossamer of wordless vocals somewhere between sound poetry, doo-wop and chant, through this babbling ether emerges a hypnagogic country song, before the players hit flickering levitation. It’s a portal of a performance, the band balancing on the precipice of two cosmic planes.
lupa lari – lupa lari
(Peach Records)
“I found myself singing a lot about a kind of unlived, unliveable queer, trans life; feeling out of the way of the world, or locked out of it,” Derawan, aka singer-songwriter lupa lari, explains of their debut EP, recorded with multi-instrumentalist Lucilla Sullivan and producer Kyle Acab. Written while Covid shielding, a longing for connection seeps into every facet of these songs. Combining ukulele, gentle orchestration and crumpled electronics, Derawan’s music is inviting, but encased in a shimmer of sonic photopsia – far off voices, sourceless echoes and ethereal tones – which give a distancing effect. Their lyrics are reminiscent of an inner monologue traced from unsent draft messages, giving them a stream of consciousness candor. “Why don’t you come over Sunday, I don’t have any plans as long as you’re free, so why don’t you come around and save me,” they sing on ‘Lovesong’, over a bubbling synth that yearns to escape but can’t stop tripping over itself. These are sad but optimistic songs, a light perhaps lit by an acceptance that tears are better than numbness.
Shiit Creek – Small Pond Recordings
(Panurus Productions)
Released back in December, Small Pond Recordings finds Shiit Creek in contemplative mood. Usually releasing as ‘Shit Creek’, Lewis (he prefers to only reveal his first name) suggests that the extra vowel in the project’s name here is partly to signal a musical departure. The album is named after the small studio where it was produced, which in turn triggered Lewis to dwell on ideas of stillness. Rather than busting out the hydrophones and waders then, it’s an impressionistic take, frazzled loops and bowed lines reflecting layers of cyclical movement. Part of these recordings involved Lewis playing violin with his foot rested on a e-bowed guitar, for the sound but also a ritual to break a tendency to fidget while playing. It hints at what makes this music so enthralling. Shit/Shiit Creek’s frayed edges convey a blemished beauty, acutely aware that moments of serenity are hard-won and fleeting. It’s reminiscent of Rimarimba or Tuluum Shimmering, a solo composer able to construct sonic worlds huge yet intimate. He’s also just released a great tape on Liquid Library, a set of more ragged, hypnagogic jams.
Juuichi – an odyssey: a chapman stick player with ambient street sounds
(reset)
Japan-based Juuichi plays the Chapman Stick. A close relative of the guitar, it’s tapped and hammered rather than plucked and strummed, allowing the player to deliver melody, chords and bass lines simultaneously. Nowadays it’s commonly used for solo arrangements of pop and rock classics. On An Odyssey: A Chapman Stick Player With Ambient Street Sounds Juuchi (aka Satori Tsuji) shows it retains evocative potential beyond Youtube novelty covers. Past releases have seen him perform with a vocalist, but Juuichi goes solo here. His playing is open-ended, equal parts jovial and wistful in his eddies and flurries. Carried by a low-key fervour, it’s meditative without ever becoming ambient. Weaving into a subtle backdrop of traffic and bird sounds, his playing joins the dots to evoke mental images of a rainy city at night, and all the hustle, bustle and energy that goes with it.
