Music I Made #2 - They Thought We Were Sunk

More music from me here, you can listen to it on Soundcloud and let it slither around your brain for a while.




Thanks.

IM.

A Bouquet of Fire #3: DJ Gammer - 'Nostalgia (Rustie Edit)'

Everyone has their low moments, the times when it feels as though the walls are bending in on themselves to crush you, when the clouds roll heavy and grey and the world seems some distance away. It's in those times when it helps to marshall all the forces of the universe to cocoon you in an aura of cosmic contentment. This is not an easy thing to immediately achieve, but this track contains within it an exact distillation of that sensation. I therefore prescribe this track as a quick fix for melancholy. I love the original version, it's urgent and accelerated, it grabs you by the lapels and shoves you onto a supersonic travelator, but you have to be ready to go from 0 to 100, you have to have already carved out a piece of yourself to offer up to its raw power. Rustie's edit beckons you to come a little closer before it launches you skywards. The lightness of the opening piano and the deep steady pulse act as instant reassurance, before the music holds you by the hand and starts to take flight. All the rave ingredients from the synths through to the cheerful drum breaks are here laid out like a trail of happiness and painted on the insides on your eyelids in big neon letters, so for days afterwards when you blink there's an echoing burst of glory, turning out a delicate essence of what nostalgia is, re-experiencing the past in order to focus more hopefully on the present. This track lifts you up to watch a chain reaction of familiar euphoria. Each piece of the song erupts with an exhilarating enthusiasm for life, reminding you how thrilling existence can be. The string breaks in the song are sections of pure reflection, for all the times you felt love, and the summer evenings when the sun started to set. When the drop kicks in on this track, it is a perfectly spiked energy rush, and a call to joy, it is like the planets all swooping into alignment just for you, and then all the other melodies cascade over the top of each other and bring a warm, intense celebration of your being, like your own personal choir of synthetic angels are reaching deep inside you and pulling a perfect moment into your throat. This is unshrinking optimism, it is the collection of your past victories, a reminder of all you have accomplished and that even when the day is dark, and cold forces bump you from one wall to the other, that you will come home to yourself in the light and the warmth and taste the breath in your lungs. There are times when I find myself wishing I was somewhere else, and the simple overture from that piano conjures the belief that maybe that's possible, that maybe I'm even already there.

IM.


This music is great, you can find the original here and Rustie's version here.

You should also buy Rustie's album here, and check out DJ Gammer's stuff here and here.

A Bouquet of Fire #2: Rihanna - Bitch Better Have My Money

This track from its first penetration of my ears curled up like a panther in my very core and has been tapping out streams of morse code with a claw on my nervous system ever since. This has tattooed itself on me internally, like the nagging guilt of a lapsed vow, it finds its way to my head with an OCD regularity and there is some moment, most days, when a partial fragment of this tune comes swaying into the tempo of my thinking, it's become the sound of my thoughts taking a breath. In the first pulses of a grey morning I might come around to consciousness with an inner Rihanna tossing out the "Yea-yo, yea-yo" or whatever call to attention she's issuing at the beginning of the song, a casual loop playing over and over. Other times, I get the song's bridge, with all its gun-you-down swagger, and it's there, just waiting, cued up ready. And a lot of the time it's just the chorus rolling on and on in my head, over and over, like bra, bra bra. It's some kind of mental tic I think, it's seeped too far into me, I can't extract it from myself. It has become the musical equivalent of the kind of compulsive persistence in enforcing reparations that Rihanna sings about here. It's a lurking presence, a constant reminder that this song exists, and that I've chosen to fuck with it, and it's left its stain. The song is joyously vicious, it is a cold hard stare, it's a ringmaster of bad days, roping up temper and resentment into a victoriously vindictive chorus of vengeance that can bring everything down like dominoes with one movement. The music has this weird twilight zone, acid trip at the amusement arcade, wonky keyboard in the background, like when you've been drugged and dragged down an abandoned pier in the middle of the night to face your creditors. On top of the tilted keyboard, there's a clicking wrench of drumbeats, like the sleepless grinding teeth of anxiety from mulling over the weight of inescapable debt that's owed, the Rihanna-sized anchor around the neck, and the only dreams that come are you standing naked in a room full of cracking knuckles. 

Rihanna sings this all out like it's standard practice, like of course it was going to turn out this way, you let her down, and this was the only possible response. The tone running through the whole thing seems to be oblivious as to why anyone would be surprised by this retaliatory behaviour. And it's actually easy to take from Rihanna for that reason. It's like being face down on the floor, because that's where you live now that you can't pay your dues, and the skies have all darkened, and the muscles in your neck are starting to atrophy, so you can't lift your head and you have to start marking the shifting time of day through the length of the shadows as they fall on the ground beside you, and you live in the endless hope that at some stage the forces of Rihanna's retribution, having held you to a life of servitude for your insincere approach to debt repayment, might find enough grace on a warm spring afternoon to drop you the half-chewed remains of a lunch burrito, so you can fill your mouth with the taste of what once passed for a sense of dignity. And in the background there's still that "Yea-yo, yea-yo" on a loop and you wish it would stop, and then you don't because it's so brutally catchy that all you can do is tap your foot in concert with each whimpering breath, and still the beat goes on. 

IM.



This is a good song, and maybe you already own it, but if you don't, maybe you should own it, from here. Get Rihanna's album if you want, even though this track's not on it for some reason. 

A Bouquet of Fire #1: Dub Phizix & Skeptical - Marka (Feat. Strategy)

Ok, so I know that this isn’t all that new, but ever since I listened to this for the first time, it bounces around my head with recurring regularity, it creeps into my spine out of nowhere and jitters me, and every time I hear this track, it just slayz, it slayz without exception. The early section lurches in like from distant passageways, full of strange echoes and digital bells tolling. The beat pulses with such heat that it spirals up to the ceiling and unfolds like its own microclimate, like a warm dense mist. This song has everything in its corner, “Stinking of Issey Miyake, dark rum and the marijuana” is an amazing first line to set up an atmosphere of controlled menace perfectly, and the deep vocals pull that vibe further down, bubbling with a kind of hypnotism, as though you’re being beckoned into a trance, disembowelled, and having your future divined from your spilt entrails while you stare off into the middle distance, body swaying uncontrollably with the hard rhythm of boiling, thumping bass. This track is like an incantation, calling the sky down, asking for darkness. This is the throwing down of a gauntlet so heavy that no one could possibly pick it up, it just lies there, sinking further and further into the wet ground. The break in the middle of the song brings the nocturnal essence of the track back into full focus, like the vocals just appear out of a sleep fog, and when the short fast bars come, growls lying behind them with the provocative “and what?” mantra, it’s like a faceless manifestation of your ego bursting from a dream and attacking you with scissors. Like I said, it slayz, all day, every day, it lays waste to dominions and principalities, it reverberates long and loud across scorched earth. This scares my friends. It’s the kind of track I can imagine crawling on my belly in the dirt to, pulling myself prostrate from end to end of a vast subterranean kingdom, vipers snapping at my heels. It’s unapologetic and tough and it’s a steep drop at the end of a long night; as stylish a fall out you could ever hope for.

---

IM.

This music is awesome, you should buy it here and check out their website.

In Praise of #1: SOPHIE

SOPHIE makes such writhing and electrified music, and is totally under-appreciated by pretty much everyone I know, which makes this an excellent opportunity to pour out all the pieces of moments that this music has erupting in my head. Everything SOPHIE produces is a cool and weird mix of ultra-peppy bouncy vocals, popping over hyper-crisp bleeps that sparkle and flare, but on top of that, at times there are tracks that go darker and start to rumble with a low rising aggression, like heavy clouds rolling in. It‘s probably easy to declare SOPHIE an amalgam of teenage enthusiasm, there is definitely something distinctly fresh about the music, possibly basking in a sort of sun-drenched innocence, but I really feel like there’s so much more to it than that, I think it’s youth, but shot through with adrenaline, turning the velocity of living and the experience of being young right up, with a foot hard down on the accelerator. The vocals are all these statements of carefree recollection, but among that, there’s something not quite real, as though all this is just a performance or recording of an idealistic vision of how things ought to be, or might have once been, and it rolls over me like a videogame enactment of nostalgia. I feel a pull to the idea that underlying all this music is a fast-paced sense of finality, that everything will soon be forgotten, and that these tracks capture brief scenes of joy and honesty that have already passed us by, and there’s something decadent about the melancholy of that. I hear these tracks like a loop of lost memories, trapped automated in an electronic vault somewhere, playing round and round on repeat to an empty world. I wanted to try and pin down exactly how SOPHIE’s music engages my consciousness, and to have free reign to indulge all my concepts of what this music is for me. To make it more focused, I’ve chosen three particular tracks as examples to respond to. 

To begin with I’ve selected ‘MSMSMSM’.

This one’s fully agitated and has a glaring menace colouring its sinister bass, the high pitch punchiness of the core sounds is the kind of thing that could soundtrack a game of dangerous warehouse hide and seek. It also sounds like a cyborg stag weekend, a squad of marauding droids, with all their glistening chrome and titanium polished to perfection, every joint and LED slathered in the solvent stench of high grade oil, I can visualise marching robots synchronised in their mechanised sexuality. The metallic drums in this song reverberate like a rubber band ball pinging around the inside of my skull, bringing a little buzz to my bone cavities. I like how it’s harsh and jumpy at the same time and it’s adolescent, with an attention deficit disorder sweetness, cute then mean, starting to hold your hand a little bit tighter, like things could go bad, but there’s something thrilling about that. 

There’s a short uplifting melodic part in the middle of the track, but it feels like self-delusion, the attempt to convince yourself you’re having fun on your own at the party where you vaguely know two people, but in reality you’re edging closer and closer into a corner and wondering whether you could get away with pulling a blanket over you and pretending to be a beanbag for the rest of the night. You can dance to this track for sure, but it also feels a bit like you could beat yourself up to it as well. 

Next up, I want to focus on ‘Lemonade’.

This rattles into my head as the music that would be playing in a sleep-walk of late summer, like lying all day beside a lover in a field back where the old fairground used to be, staring up at the pylons and drinking from a dosed hipflask, getting warm and drowsy with each big gulp, and letting my eyes sink closed, lurching awake to find it’s three weeks later and trying to roll over on the scorched grass but my skin’s welded itself to the earth and giant mutant field mice are nibbling at my ribcage beneath a shredded T shirt, and I‘m alone except the rodents, and the sky’s pink and laughing and my brain feels like it’s melting out my ears, and the air smells like the last day of everything, and my jaw’s locked in a continuous grin even though the sun’s bleached my corneas. By all of which I mean, this track feels all bright and high and glowing like July, the vocals sound so happy, as though I just made a connection with someone, and the minute I felt it they’ve already gone, there’s a promise of something wonderful, and then later, as the sun goes down, you realise all you had was lemonade, if you even had that. 

‘Just Like We Never Said Goodbye’ is the last track I’m going to mention.

It is a beautiful song, it’s a story, starting keen and honest, young lovers reconnecting, but because these things in my head tend to spin out until they find some darkness, I’ve started to consider this song as the euphoria of a death dream, stretching on into a purgatorial groundhog day of endless reunion. Maybe it’s the lack of conventional drums, which is unexpected and interesting, that makes the song carry a sadness, like a faded portrait of a computer to human relationship, a techno-romance reaching its unavoidable end with the human body as a frail and failing form, a bundle of collated cancers, organ failure, coma, one last logical act of affection from an adoring operating system shutting down the life support, to let the body go. In the background of this song, there’s a sound of a digital trickle, like a running tap, and it brings a quiet subtle urgency to the whole track, like time’s dripping away. It’s seems to me a tender song, but it also strikes me as being retrospect rather than looking towards any actual future, I can see it as a tribute to youth and connection, timelessness and the endurance of love, but it’s tinged with the sense that there is a goodbye, and it’s inevitable, and that someone always leaves first. This one is also so catchy, it rises and rises and although it never explodes in the way it keeps teasing that it’s going to, it reaches the kind of peak that pulls you all the way up with it, so that when the vocals gather pace right at the end, I’m almost begging for them to stay a little longer, just as all the lights go out.

SOPHIE is really good and you ought to buy his music here or here. 

IM.