You may know the drill by now, but today (July 3) is Bandcamp’s fourth fee-waive day, in which the company gives up its usual 15% share on digital sales and 10% share on all other sales for 24 hours.
First launched on March 20, these fee-waive days, initially introduced to encourage music buyers to support their favourite artists and labels who’ve been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, have grown to become something of a monthly event. Many artists have put together new EPs and produced new music especially for the occasions, while record labels and collectives have pieced together compilations full of new music and waived their own share of sales in the name of supporting their artists or chosen charities.
Last month’s Bandcamp fee-waive day, on June 5, saw a number of labels put their share of sales towards supporting US bail funds and Black-focused charities around the world in response to protests across the US and beyond against systemic racism and police brutality following the murder of George Floyd. You can still find a number of recommendations of releases by Black artists that our writers and staffers shared that day here.
For Bandcamp’s latest fee-waive action, we’ve come together to pick out some of our favourite releases from the month of June that are available to purchase on the site, which you can find below. Amongst those selections are a milestone compilation of techno and house from some of the scene’s best independent Black artists in the form of Haus Of Altr’s HOA010, cosmic oscillations from Teleplasmiste, all-out percussion freak-outs from Nihiloxica, and much more besides.
Below that, if you keep checking this page back through the day, we’ll also be updating a list of some of today’s new Bandcamp releases, covering EPs and singles, albums, and compilations. Bandcamp is waiving its fees from midnight until midnight Pacific Time, so that’s 24 hours onwards from 8am BST, but if you need some further timezone help, you can head here to check if it’s Bandcamp Friday where you are yet. Happy virtual digging!
Regis – Hidden In This Is The Light That You Miss
(Downwards)
There is a certainty at play throughout Hidden In This Is The Light That You Miss, an absolute clarity of purpose. Each element seems in its right place, each moment feels considered without feeling overworked. It is, like the rest of O’Connor’s body of work, utterly contemporary and effortlessly relevant. Hidden doesn’t fall victim to the navel-gazing or rumination or over-reliance on past formulae that often plagues artists who’ve been in the game as long as O’Connor, but then, as far as new work is concerned, that’s never been his way.
Bernie Brooks – read the full review here
Nihiloxica – Kaloli
(Crammed Discs)
Kaloli, the debut album by Anglo-Ugandan sextet Nihiloxica, is a powerful and exciting record which follows up two EPs that were fine works in their own right. Time might come to acknowledge it as a watershed release for percussion-based music – this being the essence of the project: the four members from Uganda’s capital city Kampala shape the sound via an assembly of drums specific to that country, while their two English foils contribute synths and other digital elements.
Noel Gardner – read the full review here
Phoebe Bridgers – Punisher
(Dead Oceans)
Love, death, fear, the apocalypse: Phoebe Bridgers is preoccupied with the same titanic anxieties as the entire world, but few are able to crystallise it with such dexterity and such wit. On her second album, Punisher, Bridgers cements herself as a prophet for a broken generation: sad, lonely, but furiously aware of how fascinating the details of it really are.
Ella Kemp – read the full review here
Aging – Sentenced To Love
(Gizeh/Tombed Visions)
David McLean, Aging’s foundational member and guitarist/pianist on this release, has enlisted the help of fellow Manc label Gizeh to co-release this alongside his own Tombed Visions, and where previous joints like 2017’s Suitable For Night were borne of improvisation, these six pieces are more composed, in both senses. Musicians you may have encountered in bands such as Action Beat and GNOD, as well as McLean’s one-off Crime Scene Ensemble performance in Salford, work with a sparse tenacity, Will Lewis-Clarke’s trumpet especially lyrical and delicate as vocalist Ali Bell melts into the soundworld through often-wordless crooning and muttered monologues.
Noel Gardner
Katatonic Silentio – Prisoner Of The Self
(Bristol NormCore)
A year on from her excellent debut solo release, Emotional Gun, Italian producer Katatonic Silentio returns with an album of system-crushing IDM experiments. The militant, bassbin-rattling energy of that debut EP returns on Prisoner Of The Self, its seven tracks locked down by double-time drums and an unceasing air of dread. Tracks like ‘Waiting For The Dust To Settle’ and ‘Fragile Bodies’ cut through with a brash dancehall swagger, while closer ‘Spheres Of Solitude’ is an all-out breakcore assault not for the faint of heart.
Christian Eede
Teleplasmiste – To Kiss Earth Goodbye
(House Of Mythology)
The tracks on To Kiss Earth Goodbye seem to trace a journey, from the more earth-bound ‘A Goodly Company’, with its gentle throb and shifting repetitions, to the thoroughly trippy ‘Possessors Of The Orb’, which is propelled by oscillations and soundwaves. A particular highlight is ‘An Unexpected Visit’, which uses the only vocals on the album – a sample from ‘The King Of Witches’, Alex Sanders, and his partner Derek Taylor conducting a ritual in Bexhill during the 1980s.
Tom Bolton – read the full review here
Sly & The Family Drone – Walk It Dry
(Love Love)
Walk It Dry is a record that sees Sly & The Family Drone digging deeper than ever in search of the most uncompromising, blasting music that it is possible to make, distilled this time into eight relatively short tracks rather than the vast sprawls that have characterised their former records. It’s the best example yet on tape of just how jaw-droppingly powerful the band can be.
Patrick Clarke
Owen Pallett – Island
(Secret City)
Island is the strongest album Pallett has released to date. There is a newfound maturity to his song-writing. That is not to say it was missing before – far from it – but on Island you get the impression that Pallett really pushed himself sonically. The guitar work is hypnotic. The strings have a giddy vitality to them and Pallett’s vocals have never sounded better. Defiant with flourishes of hope.
Nick Roseblade – read the full review here
Various – HOA010
(Haus Of Altr)
MoMA Ready, the New York DJ and producer behind Haus Of Altr, has fully embraced the instancy that a platform like Bandcamp gives over the last few years, frequently throwing out just-finished music without any needless PR build-up while building up a loyal fanbase in the process. Haus Of Altr’s 10th release is a landmark compilation that collects music from a number of leading Black electronic music artists including Loraine James, Galcher Lustwerk and Russell E. L. Butler. I can’t think of better hooks for a 27-track compilation than the belting breakbeat-rave-house-meshing of MoMA Ready collaborator AceMo’s opening effort ‘Heaven (2020 Mix)’.
Christian Eede
Modern Technology – Service Provider
(Cruel Nature)
The heavy and intense brand of noise-rock that’s spat out by London’s Modern Technology is so dense and ferocious, it’s hard to believe the band consists of only two members. Now up for pre-order, their debut full-length was produced by Wayne Adams at Bear Bites Horse Studio. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll have noticed that Mr. Adams has single-handedly produced almost every great noise-rock record of the last few years (and plenty more besides). Like everything Modern Technology do, a proportion of the profits from this release will be donated to charity, and not one of them bad charities like Eton.
JR Moores
Pyrrhon – Abscess Time
(Willowtip)
That the wonky, relentless dirge of the opening title track of Pyrrhon’s new album recalls the beginning of Brutal Truth’s classic Need To Control feels very fitting, as if any contemporary band so whole-heartedly represents that album’s fearless, experimental spirit, it’s surely Pyrrhon. After building all that tension, the release of frantic, maelstrom-esque tracks like ‘Down At Liberty Ashes’ and the no-holds-barred burbling brutality of the minute-long ‘Teuchnikskreis’ feels all the more visceral and violent, but there’s an extremely focussed approach to these dense clusters of wild, dissonant riffs that keeps the whole thing sounding as cohesive as it does chaotic.
Kez Whelan – read the full review here
upsammy – Zoom
(Dekmantel)
There’s an interesting playfulness to the rhythms on upsammy’s debut album, which share a close lineage with the kind of bumpy IDM that you can frequently expect to hear in her DJ sets. Curious, fizzing melodies shine throughout, from the dubby ‘Extra Warm’ to the percussive, rolling energy of ‘Subsoil’ and chunky electro-esque ‘Overflowering’. I’ve long admired upsammy’s openness to eschew obvious club functionality in the rhythms and melodies that typify her productions and DJ sets, and Zoom is undoubtedly her best record yet.
Christian Eede
New Releases On Bandcamp
EPs/Tracks
• Azu Tiwaline – Magnetic Service
• Bridget Hayden – The Night’s Veins
• Hieroglyphic Being – The Future Shock Chronicles Vol 1
• HTRK – ヾ(⌐■_■)ノ♪ ･ﾟ✧ ✧ﾟヽReal Headfuck ♪ ♪ Reverse Déjà Vu :･ﾟ
• JK Flesh – Dissociation (Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement Extended Remix)
• MC Yallah & Eomac – Mama Waliwamanyii
• Ricardo Villalobos & Oren Ambarchi – Hubris Variation Parts 2 & 3
• Vatican Shadow / Salford Electronics – Temple Gas Mask
LPs
• Akio Suzuki & Lawrence English – Boombana Echoes
• Black To Comm – Three New Albums
• Dreamcrusher – Another Country, Nexus Nectarine Session 5
• GNOD & João Pais Filipe – Faca De Fogo
• JK Flesh – Depersonalization
• Kevin Richard Martin – Frequencies For Leaving Earth (Vol. 3)
• Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith – The Kid [Test pressings]
• Mark S. Williamson – A Hole In The Ground
• Moor Mother & Yatta – Dial Up
• Mulatu Astatke & Black Jesus Experience – To Know Without Knowing
• Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe – Timon Irnok Manta
• Sex Swing – Passovers [Remix album featuring versions of Type II tracks by Jane Weaver, METZ and more]
• Sun Of Goldfinger – Congratulations To You
• UKAEA – Where The Tide Broke
Compilations
• Allergy Season / Discwoman – Physically Sick 3 [Includes music from AYA, Special Request, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Surgeon, DJ Bone, and lots more; raising money for Equality For Flatbush]
• Bechdel – Bechdel Volume One [Featuring music recorded at former Brighton bi-monthly event for female-identify and non-binary performers; raising funds to help trans artist Jae Josephine access facial feminisation surgery]
• Dark Entries – Lost & Found Vol. 1 [Includes music from Patrick Cowley, Borusiade and more; donating proceeds to Black-led trans organisations]
• Haus Of Altr – HOA011 [Includes music from MoMA Ready, Loraine James, Speaker Music, and more]
• Hospital Productions – Computer Murder [Includes music from Alberich/Prurient, Skin Crime and more]
• Príncipe – Verão Dark Hope [Includes music from Nídia, DJ Lilocox, DJ Marfox, and more]
• Qu Junktions – Hold Music [Includes music from Moor Mother, Giant Swan, Pan Daijing, and more]
• Samurai Music – Outliers:2 [Includes music from Homemade Weapons, Sam KDC, Artilect, and more]
• Towhead – New York Dance Music IV [Includes music from MoMA Ready, AceMo, Kush Jones, and more]
• Various – Music In Support Of Black Mental Health [Includes music from Jlin, Beatrice Dillon, Speaker Music, and more]
This list is being regularly updated
