Way Back Wednesdays: The Future Sound Of London – ‘My Kingdom’

March 30, 2022 — Leave a comment

Pictured: Garry Cobain (Samples/Production) & Brian Dougans (Samples/Production) (Date n/a) (Photo via Clash)

Good Morning to you! This is Jacob Braybrooke, and it’s time for us to go ‘retro’ for ‘Way Back Wednesdays’ with yet another daily track on the blog, because it’s always my day-to-day pleasure to write up about a different piece of music every day! If you are not sold on the strength of the premise of a diverse tapestry of dystopian, dark-leaning IDM and Electronica with a loose theme of urban dilapidation and urban decay, with a hint of paranoia and a Cyberpunk aesthetic alone, the UK Top 15-charting single of ‘My Kingdom’ may just convince you otherwise. This single was released in 1996 by The Future Sound Of London – an English electronic music duo formed in 1988 by Brian Dougans and Gary Cobain who met in Manchester, ironically – in the build-up to their third studio album ‘Dead Cities’ they released in the same year. The record is an expansion of the ideas they explored on 1994’s ‘Lifeforms’ EP, a more nature-oriented and pastoral record, albeit with a darker variation of sounds. ‘Dead Cities’ also included the duo’s highest-charting single ‘We Have Explosive’, which was licensed as the theme track for the ‘Wipeout’ video game on the original Playstation, and it reached #12 in the UK Singles Chart. ‘Dead Cities’ is personally one of my favourite electronic records of the 90’s because it serves as a road trip of post-apocalyptic Ambient textures, but what really makes ‘Dead Cities’ click together so neatly is the stylistic tweaks which the duo make throughout it. The ballad-style tone and floating Piano chords of tracks like ‘Max’ are very different to the ring tone-style synths of tracks like ‘Antique Toy’ or the insistent drilling of the title track that are more harsh and dissonant in mood, or really feel like they are attacking the listener. Throughout it’s 12 tracks (and a hidden segment that starts around one minute after the final track plays like an MCU-style Post-Credits scene) and a hefty duration of 70 minutes, The FSOL create a varied tapestry of electronic sounds spanning through Psychedelia, Trip Hop, Techno, Dark Ambient, IDM and Dub that are tethered to a connected, if non-singular, vision – and I also feel the record has a softer side to it that can be overlooked in favour of the more crowd-pleasing Claustrophobia of EDM cuts like the more well-known single. ‘My Kingdom’ was the preceding single to ‘We Have Explosive’ and it was given a fairly low-budget looking music video that was animated by Buggy C. Riphead – who designed the graphics of the LP’s physical copies. The CGI is dated by modern standards – but their imagination is still there. Check it out below.

‘Dead Cities’ is an underrated classic which was released on the major label Virgin Records in the UK along with Astralwerks in the US, and many music critics have attributed the album’s mastery to being the reclusive duo’s most accessible work commercially, although it still unmistakably sounds like them. In fact, ‘My Kingdom’ got to #13 in the UK Singles Chart, joining an elite club of bizzare top 40 radio hits like The Chemical Brothers’ ‘Setting Sun’ and The Orb’s ‘Toxygene’ from around it’s then-contemporary times too. The opening of ‘My Kingdom’ carries it’s weight with an Urban Trip-Hop feel as ethereal samples that give the drums an African percussion feel guides us through a gradual lift-off, before the sampled voices of an elusive choir and wistful Asian-style Horn samples that evoke a stop-and-start pace slowly join the fray of the scattered soundscape, with breakbeats and light downtempo ambience separating the structure of the elements to blend them into a more cohesive whole together. The choir section is a highlight, as the duo’s modulation makes their voices feel distant and hollow, conveying the mournful themes of a ‘Dead City’ with expert precision. I also love how the mixture of aggression and percussion on ‘My Kingdom’ has a dark edge to it and takes center stage as the drawing, expansive structure of the piece comes into view. The duo dip their toes into Blade Runner and Ennio Morricone samples specifically here, and they combine the downtempo elements of those original recordings with gloomy, foggy Ambient Electronica sounds neatly here, almost creating an abstract characteristic of a dense forest that could remind you of their prior ‘Lifeforms’ work quite noticeably. ‘My Kingdom’ has the power to give you goosebumps because of it’s darkness and vibrant atmosphere, with a certain doom-and-gloom or woe-is-me tone that is turned into something surprisingly beautiful and hypnotic as the samples stretch along it’s duration progressively and conjure up the power to create it’s own experience that feels a little seperate to ‘Dead Cities’, but is enhanced by the context of the sounds, tones, atmosphere and textures of the album it is from. It is a very well-crafted record which each lover of music should experience.

Pictured: Inserted Artwork for ‘Dead Cities’ (CD) (Released in 1996 via Astralwerks/Virgin EMI) (Photo via Eil.com)

That brings us to the bottom of the page for another roughly 24 hours period, and thank you for taking a short moment out of your day to support the site and the independent creatives that I, in turn, support here as well. It is back to new music recommendations tomorrow, as we turn our attention towards a new single by a now-duo of Indie Pop and Disco proportions from Brooklyn, New York who previously included Coco’s Dan Molad amongst their line-up. Their albums have also received acclaim from The New York Times, Rolling Stone, NPR, Paste and The Village Voice too. Their new LP – ‘Second Nature’ – will release on April 8th via Mom + Pop Records.

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New Album Release Fridays: Max Cooper – ‘Exotic Contents’

March 25, 2022 — Leave a comment

Pictured: Cover Artwork for ‘Unspoken Words’ (LP/Album) (Released on March 25th, 2022) (via Mesh Records)

Good Morning to you! This is Jacob Braybrooke, and it’s time for you to get invested in yet another daily track on the blog, because it’s always my day-to-day pleasure to write up about a different piece of music every day! Facing stiff competition this week from the likes of Ibibio Sound Machine, Young Prisms and Aldous Harding is Max Cooper, who earns the ‘New Album Release Fridays’ spot on the blog for his sixth studio album – ‘Unspoken Words’ – that he’s released today via Mesh Records. One for fans of ambitious experimental electronic composers like Phillip Glass or Jon Hopkins, Max Cooper is a London-based IDM, Electronica and Techno producer who takes his recordings to an audio-visual level. He’s received positive write-up’s from publications like Clash, and he has released a multitude of highly produced, emotive records for labels like the London-based FIELDS label and German label Traum Schallplatten. He has also remixed an exhausting list of artists including Hot Chip, Hiatus, Nils Frahm, Olafur Arnalds, Guy Andrews, FC Kahuna, Michael Nyman, Jim Wallis, Henry Green and Stephan Bodzin over the years too. I read an article all about ‘Unspoken Words’ on Creative Review recently, and it sounded very interesting. For his latest project, Max Cooper has been exploring the difficulties of communicating with words to articulate your emotions, and the music is being accompanied by the Blu-Ray release of 13 short films – to represent each track on the record and serve as a meta-narrative to inform his work. Cooper will also be performing at Cambridge’s The Junction on April 20th. Check out Xander Steenburge’s video for ‘Exotic Contents’.

Xander Steenburge is a digital specialist who specializes in machine learning, who draws on the writings of 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein for the short film of ‘Exotic Contents’. These texts were fed to an AI system, which churned out the hypnotic visuals for the video. Talking about his collaboration with Steenburge, Cooper says, “It’s interesting for me to see the incomprehensible philosophical language interpreted visually like this, full of symbolism and the boundaries between language, our selves, the world, broken down into flowing abstraction. I haven’t really taken it all in yet, I feel like there’s more to discover in it that I can appreciate”, in his own words. Going back to the music itself, ‘Exotic Contents’ may feel like a subtle departure from the more club-oriented roots of his Techno-oriented work because he dips his toes into a collage-style suite of ambient and industrial sounds, where he uses an interpretation of words for an abstract soundscape where a half-time drum and bass format collides with the sharpness of his sound design. The beats scatter and break to an assortment of high-pitched frequencies, to the point where the production feels polished but not massively excessive. It carries the mood of a relief of stress or tension as a whole, and it definitely feels cathartic in the way that squelching breakbeats and the harsher, more dissonant Drums mimic the alleviation of a surging intensity by getting the chaos out of its system, in an ironic figure of speech. My main concern is that the music may not really communicate its ideas and themes clearly without any of the visual elements to help, and it may come across as challenging or tricky to initially grasp if you’re going into the album as a purely audio experience blind. Aside from that little question, it combines the clever pacing of IDM’s traditional production with a more intimate and emotionally driven core in intriguing and expansive ways – and the distance may not feel quite so exotic after all.

Pictured: Max Cooper in a podcast recording session for Sound Motives (2019) (Photo via SoundMotives.net)

That brings us to the end of the page for another day! Thank you for continuing to support the site, and I will be back tomorrow to present my review for the newest comeback single by a Los Angeles-based rock band who are famous for albums like 2006’s ‘Stadium Arcadium’, 2002’s ‘By The Way’ and 1999’s ‘Californiacation’. They have won six Grammy’s and they just received a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame.

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Today’s Track: GoGo Penguin – ‘Ascent’

March 15, 2022 — Leave a comment

Pictured: Chris Illingworth (Piano), Nick Blacka (Bass Guitar) & Jon Scott (Drums) (2021) (Photo by Emily Dennison)

Good Morning to you! This is Jacob Braybrooke, and the time has come for us to rise to the occasion for yet another daily track on the blog, since it’s always my day-to-day pleasure to write up about a different piece of music every day! You can hear the break-beat’s and minimalist ambient Piano section of Aphex Twin’s discography, Electronica-inspired drums that could be right out of Squarepusher’s playbook, the groove-oriented blueprints of the heavyweights of contemporary classical composers like Phillip Glass, and countless more influences like Trip-Hop and Nu-Jazz in the music of the Manchester-formed Progressive Jazz band GoGo Penguin, who we previously covered in time for their self-titled album release in 2020 with the engaging single ‘F Maj Pixie’. Two years later and the Mercury-Prize nominated modern classical composers are back with ‘Ascent’, a deep 4-minute minimalist ambient piece that takes it’s inspiration from the likes of Brian Eno, Massive Attack and Radiohead. The band are currently signed to the French independent label Blue Note Records and are one of the label’s best-selling artists in selling in excess of 300,00 albums. The new track is also their first to feature the new drummer Jon Scott, who has replaced Rob Turner, a departure which was announced via Bands In Town and the group’s other social media platforms last December. If you live in Cambridgeshire, you can catch GoGo Penguin at The Junction on November 9th. Let’s give their newest single a spin.

Jon Scott’s name was the first to come up when the band was looking for a new drummer as bassist Nick Blacka had played some Jazz gigs with him when they started out in Manchester years ago and they have crossed paths several times since, and so the freshly re-established trio retreated to Peter Gabriel’s ‘Real World’ studios in Wiltshire to work on new material late last year, becoming stronger by the pandemic as a result of being unable to tour. Talking about ‘Ascent’ in a press release found on the Terrorbird website, pianist Chris Illingworth says, “The composition takes it’s inspiration from the duality often found in the big events in our lives, moments that can simultaneously make us feel both loved and isolated, fearful but confident, proud and humbled”, adding, “Ascent expresses the journey through these experiences in life, moving forward into the unknown, but with hope not fear”, in the trio’s statement. All things considered on that front, ‘Ascent’ starts off with a peaceful tone as a stuttering drum opening paves the way for a signature minimal Piano beat to create waves of arpeggiated Piano melodies to form the meditative groove for the main bulk of the well-structured and steadily sequenced track. The Piano pattern is repetitious, but it is well-developed because it is supported by a neatly balanced rhythm section and a backdrop of warmth in textures throughout, with elements of roots-flavored Jazz and electronic dance that introduce a morphing set of fresh melodies into the fray frequently enough. The cohesive and percussive drum patterns convey the reflective tone tidily, while the electronic elements and slight club music motifs make the piece feel more modern and contemporary overall. ‘Ascent’ provides for a peaceful and emotionally varied space for escapism, relaxation and enjoyment while being held together by a robust yet reliable rhythm. It definitely reminds me of Richard D. James’ downtempo Piano work, and, as a huge fan of Aphex, I find this particular influence to be appealing. Despite introducing a fresh member to their ranks and rebuilding chemistry – I felt that ‘Ascent’ picked up right where they left off.

Pictured: Cover Artwork for ‘GoGo Penguin’ (Self-Titled LP) (Released on June 5th, 2020) (via Blue Note Records)

If you love ‘Ascent’ and want to hear more of this band, you can Go Go here for more:

‘F Maj Pixie’ (2020) – https://onetrackatatime.home.blog/2020/06/11/todays-track-gogo-penguin-f-maj-pixie/

Pictured: Chris Illingworth & Nick Blacka with their former member Rob Turner (2020) (Photo Credit: Jon Shard)

That’s all for today! Thank you for checking out my latest post on the blog, I hope that you enjoyed reading it and your support is always highly appreciated! I’ll be back tomorrow as we go retro for ‘Way Back Wednesdays’ on the blog, as we revisit an indie rock favourite from 2006 that KEXP presenter Abbie Gobeli recently reminded me of. The title track of an album with the same name, the dance-rock meets garage revival number has been proclaimed as the unofficial theme track for the popular British 00’s drama ‘Skins’ because it was used a lot on the DVD menu and promotional material for the programme. The associated album reached #1 on the UK Indie chart.

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Today’s Track: Whatever The Weather – ’17ºC’

March 7, 2022 — Leave a comment

Pictured: Vinyl Copy of ‘Whatever The Weather’ (LP) (Available from April 8th, 2022) (via Ghostly International)

Good Morning to you! This is Jacob Braybrooke, and the time has arrived for me to get typing up for yet another daily track on the blog, whatever the weather, because it has always been my day-to-day pleasure to write up about a different piece of music every day! An experimental club music producer who majored in Commercial Music at The University Of Westminster, Loraine James took Piano lessons at a young age when she was introduced to the allure of 00’s Alternative Rock bands like Death Cab For Cutie, yet she also discovered a love for Acid Techno, Drill ‘N’ Bass and IDM, citing Squarepusher and Telefon Tel Aviv as some of her heroes within the experimental electronic landscape of the 1990’s. I was delighted to hear about Whatever The Weather, James’ newest solo side project, because I’m already an existing fan of her work, much like BBC radio presenter Tom Ravenscroft – who has the fanboy T-shirt to prove it. ‘Reflection’ was released last year, and it found a place in the top three of my year-end list of the Best Albums Of 2021 – with more publications including Mojo, Uncut, Pop Matters, Beats Per Minute, The Quietus and Pitchfork showering the record with praise too because it was a deep and diverse exploration of the brain of a modern queer black woman from Enfield, South London. James has a true affinity for creating strange and hypnotic grooves, which she builds with rapid percussion and hazy filters that really create an in-depth atmosphere with deliberately disorienting production to neatly complement her themes of mental health and peak-pandemic paranoia from ‘Reflection’ in 2021. She released that album on Hyperdub, and she fits right in with the experimental club heavyweights like Burial, Jessy Lanza and Kevin ‘The Bug’ Martin that have established their own legacies through releasing their work on the forward-thinking London-based label. She’s already set to follow it up – in a way – with ‘Whatever The Weather’ in April, by setting up a new moniker and a new album, with the interesting concept of naming her track titles after different temperatures and making tunes that permeate the moods in which they evoke for her. I cannot wait for it! A strobe warning comes with the music video for ’17°c’ below.

‘Whatever The Weather’ will be released on April 8th via Ghostly International, and James has cited the likes of Deftones’ Chino Moreno and American Football’s Mike Kinsella as her inspirations while pitching her voice for the specialist project. She also collaborated with director Michael Reisinger for the video, and she states that she began working on the creative project while she was finishing up ‘Reflection’ last year. She also teases, “There’s a song in there with a melody I made when I was 13 and finally used it in a song”, for the self-titled LP release on Instagram. She also describes ‘Whatever The Weather’ as a more “ambient-minded project” on her Bandcamp page, and this is a direction that I can understand through listening to the lead single. Themes of Electronica and Industrial are noticeable from the glitchy outset, as we start with a simulating set of Synths that have an atmospheric gloom and an underlying warmth to the textures, but James mixes up the tone when the skittering Bass patterns and the cerebral, yet percussive and rapid-fire Drum rhythms, competes with a gently operatic female vocal sample to lead the track with a potent blend of aggressive Synths and textured percussion sounds. Much like the weather, and how the tone and interchangeability of the weather takes place unpredictably at times in a typical day, James’ sonic combination of crackling Bass and electronic Drums also has a feel of synesthesia, of-sorts, to it when she encapsulates the specific temperature of the track’s title. She makes sure that the structure of her track is full of meticulous micro-adjustments and that her Synths have a wide range of flexibility to them to mimic the weather and the effect on nature that it provokes within a landscape. That’s not to say that her patterns are random, but they are irregular and carefully mapped out as to convey the shifting patterns of rain and the subdued warmth of the hot weather that lies beneath the drizzle, and so the tune contains a lot of the technical production standards that I’ve praised James for producing in the past, in one respect. In another, however, the lack of traditionally recorded vocals from James allows for a larger emphasis on her ambient influences and allows the tone and textures of her electronic instrumentation to evoke a certain mood that she specifies instead of telling a more fixed narrative. The same, but also very different, to the work that I’ve loved hearing from James in recent history – Whatever The Weather is shaping up to be a very successful side project that, while falling into a bit of a niche regarding its reach to audiences, feels free-form and reflects the production strengths of James as an artist while tackling a conceptual risk that more mainstream IDM-based artists may never fully consider. The new album is going to be ‘radical’ – if that is a cool thing that the edgy youth would still say at the Littleport Skate Park near me.

Pictured: Loraine James in an official publicity photoshoot for Pitchfork.com (2020) (Photo Credit: Ekua King)

As I mentioned, James is a highly praised alumni on the blog, and you can check out some more posts that are related to her, if you enjoyed ’17°c’, below:

‘Running Like That’ (feat. Eden Samara) – https://onetrackatatime.home.blog/2021/07/01/todays-track-loraine-james-feat-eden-samara-running-like-that/

‘Don’t You See It?’ (feat. Jonnine) – https://onetrackatatime.home.blog/2020/10/07/todays-track-loraine-james-feat-jonnine-dont-you-see-it/

Pictured: Cover Artwork for ‘Reflection’ (LP/Album) (Released on June 4th, 2021) (via Hyperdub)

That brings us to the end of the post for today! Thank you very much for joining me, and I’ll be back to do it all over again tomorrow with an ‘International Women’s Day’ special just in celebration of the titular day. We’ll be listening to a track from one of my favourite female artists with a track title that is very fitting of the day’s theme. She won the BRIT Award for Best New Artist and she has acted in Netflix’s ‘Top Boy’ series.

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Today’s Track: Awkward Corners – ‘Somebody Somewhere Dancing In A Field’

January 27, 2022 — Leave a comment

Pictured: Chris Menist (Awkward Corners) in a PR shot for his Bandcamp profile (2021) (Photo via Shapes of Rhythm)

Good Morning to you! This is Jacob Braybrooke, and it’s time for you to get invested in yet another daily track on the blog, because it’s always been my day-to-day pleasure to write up about a different piece of music every day! If you love the textural warmth of ambient albums like Aphex Twin’s ‘Selected Ambient Works 85-92’ released in 1993, I think you’re going to find something to enjoy with the post-90’s rave feel of ‘Somebody Somewhere Is Dancing In A Field’, an instrumental track with a euphoric feeling of post-festival musings and realistic ‘Hangover Vibes’, so to speak. Awkward Corners is the musical project of the London-based DJ and writer Chris Menist, who formed the project in Islamabad in the late-2010’s, where he was living at the time. Initial recordings were made in conjunction with local music artists in Thailand and Pakistan, and his releases have spanned multiple labels including Boomkat and Real Torque. Menist has also hosted programming on NTS Radio and has played in The Paradise Bangkok Molam International Band as their percussionist, and so he’s got a fascinating little backstory behind him if you search for him on the internet and find out some more details. Nevertheless, his range of music mostly fits in the Ambient, Downtempo, IDM, Devotional, Middle Eastern and Experimental Electronic genres and he’s known for LP’s like July 2021’s ‘Amateur Dramatics’ that you can purchase from his Bandcamp page. The follow-up EP – ‘Somebody Somewhere’ – is out now via the London-based indie label Shapes Of Rhythm. Let’s listen to the centerpiece cut below.

The ‘Somebody Somewhere’ EP marks the second guest appearance of the multi-faceted South London-based DJ and composer Hector Plimmer on the Shapes Of Rhythm label for the opening track ‘No Words’ and the EP is decidedly more upbeat and more focused on the 4/4 style of genres like Microhouse, and so it promises to be a new favourite for the dancefloor when the clubs are finally allowed to open up again, contrasting the more downbeat and introspective tones of Menist’s earlier releases as Awkward Corners. There’s a true, yet definitive sensibility of 90’s Acid Techno to ‘Somebody Somewhere Is Dancing In A Field’, meanwhile, an Ambient piece that echoes the Ambient Works of Aphex Twin during the early 90’s and the ethereal side to Orbital’s glitched trademarks in terms of the influences and the memories that it brings to my ears. It feels danceable and light-hearted, yet it also evokes a very calming mood with its ‘World Music’ percussion that evokes a smooth and silky set of soothing qualities in terms of the emotion being conveyed through the music. The 808 sound structure invokes feelings of early Techno and subtle Chicago House while the trickling Synth lines and the spacious Drum patterns, that feel a little African in their delivery, keep things moving at a mid-tempo pace. It’s mostly down to the Conga syncopations that are spread throughout in which we end up with repetive melodies that simply massage your eardrums at an easy-going feel, while the thumping bass kicks represent a more heavy drum machine workout in terms of the instrumentation. A polite reminder of the intimate side of 90’s heavy-hitters like Aphex Twin, while also building up some hypnotic and textually warm grooves, this is a comforting nudge from the past that somebody, somewhere will be dancing in a field to in the summer, if not now, and it feels like a simple joy to listen to.

Pictured: Vinyl bundle of ‘Amateur Dramatics’ (2021) & ‘Dislocation Songs’ (2020) (Photo via Bandcamp.com)

That brings us to the end of today’s discussion, and thank you for joining me on One Track At A Time for my latest music-related musing for a spare minute of your day. It’s ‘New Album Release Fridays’ tomorrow and we’re sampling the soon-to-be latest LP from a Salinas-born R&B, Soul and Blues singer-songwriter whose debut single – 1998’s ‘Make It Hot’ – was certified Gold. She was also once a protege of Missy Elliott.

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Today’s Track: Fasme – ‘ICI’

December 7, 2021 — Leave a comment

Pictured: Fasme (aka Tom Ferreira) playing a live DJ set at Gaîté Lyrique, Paris (2020) (Photo by Underscope TV)

Good Morning to you! You are reading the words of Jacob Braybrooke, and it’s time for some big room melancholy that comes courtesy of yet another daily track on the blog, because it’s always my day-to-day pleasure to write up about a different piece of music every day! Said ‘big room melancholy’ is one niche that the Belfast-formed dance duo of Bicep (Matthew McBriar & Andrew Ferguson) have become a pair of unofficial kings of, scoring Best British Group and Best New Artist nominations at last year’s BRIT Awards for their concoction of Italo-inspired Electronica and multi-layered Breakbeat production. However, the duo have set a few new parameters for curatorial duties with the launch of their appropriately titled imprint label, Feel My Bicep. Their first signee is the Paris-born and Nantes-based experimental electronic dance music producer Tom Ferreira, who releases his music under the moniker of Fasme. Having caught the attention of the big-league’s Bicep when he released the ‘Stretched World’ EP last April, Bicep found ‘ICI’ on YouTube and so began playing Ferreira’s music in projects like a Friday Guest Mix for Mary Anne Hobbs on BBC Radio 6 Music and the duo’s own FMB radio podcast on Apple Music. Fasme has recently supported them on tour in October and he performed a live DJ set at Sarcus Festival in France in late September. Ferreira has said that “Fasme” is a nickname that his aunt gave him at her house during the summer one year. He takes his style from the Braindance, IDM and Techno Ambient scenes of the 00’s and he has named acts like RX 101, Binary Digit, James Shinra, David Harleydson and EOD as his influences. ‘ICI’ is taken from the new ‘Home’ EP which he released in late October via Feel My Bicep, of course. Check it out.

Bicep, as the co-managers of the Feel My Imprint indie EDM sub-label, writes that “his melodic sound is created on analog synths, evolving between Acid, Electro and Braindance” on the Bandcamp listing page for Ferreira’s recent ‘Home’ extended play, adding that Ferreira describes himself as “more of a live performer than a studio man” in the product’s description page. A track that reminds me of Aphex Twin’s ‘Druqks’ double album released in the early 00’s of misfit recordings with it’s set of minimalist Classical influences and Tin Man-esque Acid Jazz wiggling production that aims to conjure up some ‘Alien-like’ qualities overall, ‘ICI’ is a mid-tempo Trance serving that wants to provide a great example of why Fasme is a decent fit for Bicep’s Feel My Bicep label. Thankfully, this is a goal that Ferreira seems talented enough to succeed within, and ‘ICI’ has all the building blocks required to be in place to keep the festival crowds grinning, as well as feeling soft and melancholic enough to please those who would rather listen while tucked into their beds with their headphones at a good volume late at night because the chords never feel too overpowering and the distorted electronic Keys sounds never feel too harsh or aggressive for the scene either. It has it’s moments of melodicism with some moody chords that take a dark approach to the layered Lo-Fi production and some big emotive Synth hooks, as well as some mechanical electronic drum kit programming that gives the tone of the track a suitable uplift, but it never quite channels these sounds into an explosive track full of beat-driven sounds and plenty of ‘Bro-Step’ energy. Instead, it feels like a more pensive and contemplative wind-down for the end of a long night. A nebulous mix of acidic Synths, heartbroken Piano chords and neat, warm Bass stabs – ‘ICI’ is more concerned with multi-layered Synth loops and powerfully entrancing moments. Overall, ‘ICI’ is an impressive little recording that pulls off the fairly difficult task of making the Bicep-esque rave-ready despondency sound a tad more positively wistful.

Pictured: Fasme (aka Tom Ferreira) photographed for a wertn.com Q&A feature (2020) (Picture via Leviet.org)

That’s all for now! Thank you for checking out my latest post, and we’ll be counting down to Christmas with another festive-themed post featuring a track that left its mark on the niche in 2005. At the time, the track was written and performed by a Philadelphia-based indie rock band, but the project is now the solo work of multi-instrumentalist and producer Alec Ounsworth. The band appeared in the 2008 film ‘The Great Buck Howard’, and David Bowie was famously seen at some of their shows.

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Today’s Track: Hiro Ama – ‘Autumn Colours’

November 9, 2021 — Leave a comment

Pictured: Promo for Hiro Ama’s interview on WorldwideFM.Net (2020) (Photo via Artist/Facebook.com)

Good Morning to you! This is Jacob Braybrooke, and it’s time for us to enjoy a stroll in the Autumn along to your daily track on the blog, because it’s always been my day-to-day pleasure to write up about a different piece of music every day! Autumn, which is more widely known as ‘Fall’ to any Americans reading this for some strange reason, is a month where we all love to reflect. This is clearly very significant for the Japanese-born and now London-based Japanese Ambient composer Hiro Ama, who has just released the seasonal new single, ‘Autumn Colours’, via PRAH Recordings. Dabbling in the Contemporary Classical, Drone and Electronica genres, Ama is perhaps best known for his ‘Uncertainty’ EP that he released in 2020. On that record, Ama mixed tonal references to his Japanese homeland with pared-down House melodies and Pan-Asian instrumentals and it was self-produced within one month in his London flat during lockdown. Keen gig-goers may have noticed that Ama is also the drummer of the British Indie Pop group Teleman, alongside vocalist Thomas Sanders and bassist Pete Cattermoul, whose three studio albums have all reached the Top 75 of the UK Singles Chart and they opened for Belle & Sebastian on a tour in 2016. For his solo work, Ama has taught himself how to play the both Guitar and Piano. He has also remixed the likes of Rozi Plain and Alabastor De Plume. Out now on his Bandcamp page, ‘Autumn Colours’ is the first taste of his upcoming second solo EP, ‘Animal Emotions’, which comes after a rare break from live touring in eight years, will be released at an undetermined point of time. Settle into Ama’s ‘Autumn Colours’ below.

“As the song title says this is a song for Autumn which is my favourite season. Autumn makes me feel nostalgic and melancholic somehow and I like those feelings. Spring is too pretty and Summer is too happy – I feel Autumn represents myself perfectly”, Hiro Ama explains on his Bandcamp page, adding, “I find a bit of sadness or darkness makes music more beautiful, maybe because it’s imperfect or fragile”, to his discussion behind his latest single’s themes and explorations. Opening with an easy-going kick drum beat that rolls along at a joyous pace, ‘Autumn Colours’ bursts into life with a contemplative Piano riff and a scattering Bass line that occasionally crackles along to the upbeat tempo of the instrumental grooves. The floating Piano riff cascades into a variety of colourful guitar licks and spacious Drum grooves, with a reflective tone that keeps the proceedings feeling warm and relatively bright, but gentle and grounded in delivery. The second half of the song is where things get a little more progressive, as a harsh Synth riff introduces a more distorted nature into the track and continues to add some more diversity to the ongoing spiral of pretty, yet a little somber, Piano melodies and the Drums/Bass combo that adds a more melodic quality to the beats. There’s no need for the vocals, as the more downtempo feel of the Classical instrumentation and the more buoyant acoustic instrumentation conjoin together for a relaxing mix of laidback melodies with a darkened, sometimes rougher, undercurrent. The wavering Synth riff, found in the latter half of the track, continues to add more contemplation to the emotive style of the track and blur the lines between the lighter feelings and the more intense sequences. Overall, ‘Autumn Colours’ is a seasonally appropriate mix between an interpretation of surroundings and an internal monologue, with some hazy melodies and an ever so slightly more sinister touch, yet the Easy Listening style and flair of the track and the blissful instrumentation keeps a fairly light-hearted Jazz element in tact, as the jolly feel of seasons past draws to a close and the leaves turn brown in a surprisingly short notice.

Pictured: Hiro Ama with a Vinyl copy of the ‘Uncertainty’ EP (2020) (Photo via Artist/Facebook.com)

That’s all for now! Thank you for checking out my latest blog post, and I’ll be back tomorrow for the final entry in our ‘Way Back Wednesdays’ feature of the year, as the series will be taking a short hiatus until very early in the new year. That’s because Chrimbo is a-coming, and so we’ll be beginning our ‘Countdown To Christmas’ where we review some alternative festive anthems, both old and new, that could make your seasonal playlists this December. We’ll be rounding things off with a bang instead of a whimper, as we divert our attention to a cult classic single from a French-English Avant-Pop group who are still one of the most influential bands to reach our shores as they renewed interest in older analogue equipment at a desperate time of need. They combined elements of Kraut-Rock & Lounge Jazz, and founded their Duophonic label.

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Today’s Track: Jon Hopkins (feat. Ram Dass & East Forest) – ‘Sit Around The Fire’

November 4, 2021 — Leave a comment

Pictured: Jon Hopkins in a photoshoot for a FACT! Magazine feature (2015) (Photo by Dan Medhurst)

Good Morning to you! This is Jacob Braybrooke, and I’ve got a relaxing pick for your daily track on the blog, because it’s always been my day-to-day pleasure to write up about a different piece of music every day! You may know the Kingston Upon Thames-born electronic music producer Jon Hopkins from his work on composing the soundtrack for the 2010 cult science fiction drama film ‘Monsters’, or his time playing the keyboard for Imogen Heap on tour. He has also produced or contributed to albums released by Brian Eno, Coldplay, David Holmes and others, and he’s taken part in various collaborations with King Creosante and Leo Abrahams. Whether you’ve heard of him or not before, the fact remains that Hopkins has always left exciting projects in his wake. His next album – ‘Music For Psychedelic Therapy’ – is set for release on November 12th and it promises nothing different than a bold new chapter of his career, exploring genres like Ambient and Electronica in their most blissful forms. The follow-up to 2018’s Mercury Prize-nominated sister projects – ‘Singularity’ and ‘Immunity’ – his next record was inspired by a creative expedition that he took at the Tayos Caves in Ecuador during 2018, and he says, “What grew from this experience is an album with no beats, not one drum sound, something that is closer to a classical symphony than a dance/electronica record”, also adding, “The freedom from traditional rhythmic structures unlocked so much – it felt like I was free to explore a new form of rhythm, one that you discover when you just allow things to flow without letting yourself get in the way”, to his announcement. The lead single, the 8-minute LP closer, is ‘Sit Around The Fire’, that sets a lesser-known talk from ceremony guide Ram Dass, as well as a music video set to scenes from his illustrated book ‘Be Here Now’, to additional production by East Forest. Let’s drift off to it below.

“Music For Psychedelic Therapy is not Ambient, Classical or Drone but has elements of all three. For me, it’s a place as much as it is a sound. It works for the somber mind, but takes on a new dimension entirely when brought into a psychedelic ceremony”, Jon Hopkins notes in a press statement, explaining, “I love this idea of music as something you inhabit, something that works on you energetically. In fact, it was while in that state that the title appeared to me. Psychedelic-assisted therapies are moving into legality across the world, and yet it feels like no one is talking about the music; the music is as important as the medicine”, in his own words. ‘Sit Around The Fire’ is possibly the most accessible track on the LP because it features some fairly conventional lyrics, which are recited in a Spoken Word poem recorded by Ram Dass that was used for a real-life psychedelic ceremony. The first half of the track is dominated by field recordings instead of catchy chords, with some sparse Lo-Fi beats and a motivational speech about presence of being and the source of the light from Dass driving the lyrics forwards. Later, East Forest introduces a calm and plaintive Piano melody to the mixture, which gently complements the ongoing vocal samples. Hopkins brings some melodious chimes into the background, while Dass continues to confront inward vocal tones through to the eight minute mark. The recording feels long, but it never feels overbloated because Hopkins manages to mesh the glitchy elements of Indietronica with the solemn, meditative style of softly building Ambient music to create something that feels more refined and introspective altogether. The lead vocals from the spiritual teacher allows you to feel sand slowly sinking between your fingers, with some calming vocals and some spacious pacing that provides some extra breathing room for the instrumentation to come through clearly. Standouts include lyrics like “You don’t need loneliness/For you couldn’t possibly be alone” that speak about the judgments and opinions of the mind, and vocals like “You don’t need greed/Because you already have it all” that evoke anti-materialism ideas, and later sections like “You don’t need doubt/Because you already know” that speak about finding inner connection and submitting yourself to existence beyond a metaphysical construct. Overall, ‘Sit Around The Fire’ was something very interesting. Far from a conventional single, it is not beat driven at all and is simply built for a different purpose than most other music. It may appear too fanciful at first glance, but the new single is an exemplification of Hopkins’ ideas to arrange music for philosophical commentary. It strengthens Hopkins to be a proper artist because he is not restricting himself to conventionality, and instead chooses to explore broader concepts on his own terms. We could all do with this 8-minute psychological mindfulness in our lives.

Pictured: Cover for ‘Music For Psychedelic Therapy’ (Available on Nov 12, 2021) (via Domino Records)

Thank you for reading my latest post, and I look forward to delivering yet another ‘New Album Release Fridays’ pick tomorrow as we delve into one of the singles taken from one of the weekend’s most notable album releases. If you were a big fan of Soft Cell or Depeche Mode in the 1980’s, you’re hopefully going to love tomorrow’s post. It comes from a US indie Synth-Rock/Post-Punk band who have previously worked in other side projects including The Static Jacks and Machinegum throughout the years.

Pictured: Jon Hopkins performing a live DJ set at Parklife Festival (2018) (Photo by Max Miechowski)

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Spooky Season Special: John Carpenter (feat. Cody Carpenter & Daniel Davies) – “The Shape Burns” (From 2018’s ‘Halloween’)

October 31, 2021 — Leave a comment

Pictured: John Carpenter (2021) (Photo Credit: Marlow Stern/Abaca Press/AP/TheDailyBeast.com)

Halloween greetings to you! This is Jacob Braybrooke, instructing you to park your Broom up and sit for a spell, since its time for the second part of our Spooktacular specials where we compare the classic and contemporary Halloween soundtracks, because it’s always my day-to-day pleasure to write up about a different piece of music every day! Yesterday, we took an in-depth listen to ‘Michael Kills Judith’ from the titular scene of John Carpenter’s seminal 70’s horror flick, ‘Halloween’, and, today, we’re listening to ‘The Shape Burns’ from the recent reboot of the series. The production stages of 2018’s ‘Halloween’ saw the original film’s director and composer, John Carpenter, make his return to the series for the first time since 1982’s ‘Halloween III: Season Of The Witch’ as an executive producer and general creative consultant, and he also composed the soundtrack alongside Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies. The flick was directed by David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express, Manglehorn) and it also saw Jamie Lee Curtis return to the franchise for more to reprise her role as Laurie Strode from the original film. Ignoring the narrative continuity of previous films from the series, which saw diminishing returns in later installments, the plot of 2018’s ‘Halloween’ is set 40 years after the story of the original Thriller film and it follows a post-traumatic Laurie Strode who prepares to face Michael Myers in a final showdown on Halloween Night. ‘Halloween’ (2018) was an enormous commercial success when it broke box office records for the Slasher genre previously held by 1996’s ‘Scream’ and it has gone on to become the current highest grossing Slasher film in unadjusted dollars, racking up over $255.6m in cinema ticket sales against a fairly small production budget of $10m. ‘The Shape Burns’ occurs during a pivotal moment in the film where Strode traps her old rival – Michael Myers – in the basement and sets him alight for the final time, presumably, since Myers also stars in ‘Halloween Kills’, the sequel that is now showing in cinemas. In the US, the new sequel is also streaming on some tiers of the Peacock streaming service for 30 days after its theatrical release. Another sequel after that – ‘Halloween Ends’ – will follow in 2022. Grab a slice of Barmbrack and hear The Shape burn below.

“We wanted to honor the original Halloween soundtrack in terms of the sounds we used”, Davies has explained in a press release for the reboot’s OST, adding, “Being limited by the length of time in scoring the sequence, we focused on the director’s tempo, timing, and vision. He would tell us what he had in mind, how long the cue should be, what emotion he wanted, and we would take it from there. It’s only the three of us, there is no elaborate system. We wrote, performed, and orchestrated everything”, to his notes for the OST’s release, with the aim of paying homage to the major ‘Halloween’ score that Carpenter composed and recorded in 1978. As with yesterday, I’ve attached a clip of the scene where ‘The Shape Burns’ is used below and a piece of the audio with a plain text background in this post – just for your preference of reference! At first instance, ‘The Shape Burns’ feels surprisingly very similar to the ‘Michael Kills Judith’ stinger from the original film that we explored yesterday and that is because Carpenter and company bring back the tingling Synth melody that goes back and forth throughout the original soundtrack. Once again, things feel minimalist and the production design is not very elaborate, instead relying on rather simplistic melodies to convey emotions of bittersweet melancholy and taking the final stand that Laurie Strode and the other characters perform in the movie since the chords feel urgent. There’s less of an emphasis on tension, however, and more of an Orchestral style that suggests something has been paid off, mixing some feelings of triumph and relief in the contemporary score. It revisits the chilling Synths of the original score and the non beat-driven nature of the old soundtrack with the clear nods to Halloween’s late-70’s past, but there’s a higher tempo and some more varied Electronic keys sequences that inspires a ‘send-off’ or ‘battle’ theme, connoting a higher sense of action and pace in the recent film than the vintage one. The score taps into a slightly higher gear and it introduces some lower pitched Synths that feel more grand and cinematic than what came before, but the production methods still feel rather low-key and not too overly produced because the formula is kept simple. Overall, ‘The Shape Burns’ promises a thrilling and exciting sequence that hurtles the unsettling Strings at a neck breaking speed, while keeping the same Synth patterns and Lo-Fi production of the original score in tact. This move, in turn, adds new bells and whistles to the score in comparison to the original flick but it also manages to make it feel rather old and reminiscent of the original flick due to the clear similarities which point directly towards the late-70’s. How very Ghoulish.

If you are not currently up to speed on the first part of our Spooky series that began yesterday, check out these thoughts on ‘Michael Kills Judith’ from the original ‘Halloween’ score. Try not to get caught up in Michael Myers’ killing spree while you do it here: https://onetrackatatime.home.blog/2021/10/30/spooky-season-special-john-carpenter-michael-kills-judith-from-1978s-halloween/

Pictured: Cover Art for ‘Halloween’ (OST) (Released in 1979) (via Columbia Records/Varese Sarabrande)

That’s everything for now – and all for this year’s All Hallow’s Eve too. There’s no tricks tomorrow though, and just treats, as we jumpstart the beginning of the new month with new music from a new artist. It comes from a 17-year-old singer songwriter who is releasing her ‘Artificial’ EP next Friday. She makes indie alt-pop songs with a hint of psychedelia and jazz – and she has received daytime airplay from BBC Radio 6 Music.

Pictured: Actor Nick Castle with Michael Myers’ iconic Halloween mask (2018) (Photo by Ryan Green)

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Spooky Season Special: John Carpenter – “Michael Kills Judith” (From 1978’s ‘Halloween’)

October 30, 2021 — Leave a comment

Happy All Hallows Eve! I’m Jacob Braybrooke, and I’m wishing you a spook-tacular season with a two-part spread of new posts where we compare the work of John Carpenter’s music for the original 1978 version of ‘Halloween’ and the recent 2018 rebooted edition, because it’s always my day-to-day pleasure to write up about a different piece of music every day! Born in Carthage, New York – John Carpenter is an American film director, composer and producer who is known for films like ‘Dark Star’ (1974), ‘The Thing’ (1982), ‘Big Trouble In Little China’ (1986) and ‘Vampires’ (1998), with the latter earning him a Saturn Award for ‘Best Music’. His films range between cult classics and commercial successes, but he was given the Golden Coach Award by the French Directors’ Guild in 2019 at the Cannes Film Festival for his overall contributions to cinema as an art form. Carpenter also holds a Commercial Pilot’s Licence and he has appeared in many of his own films as a pilot with a rotorcraft helicopter in cameo roles. None of his movies arguably scream seminal quite like his famous 1978 horror film, ‘Halloween’, which was selected for preservation in the US National Film Registry by the Library Of Congress for being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” in 2006. It remains to be one of the most profitable Indie films of all-time following its release way back in 1978, and it has grossed over $70m globally. The success of ‘Halloween’ kicked off a long line of Alfred Hitchcock-inspired Slasher flicks, and it has spawned a media franchise of sequels, remakes, reboots, novelizations, comic books and video games in the years to follow. The plot of the film follows the events of mental asylum patient Michael Myers, who was committed to a sanitarium for murdering his babysitting teenage sister on Halloween night – October 31st – when he was six years old. Fifteen years later, he’s on the loose and he escapes to his hometown, where he stalks a female babysitter (Laurie Strode, played by the very famous actress Jamie Lee Curtis), while being pursued by his Psychiatrist. It sounds like terrifying stuff – although I’ve only ever seen bits and pieces of the original film and the 2018 reboot, which we’ll be discussing to see what has changed (or not) tomorrow in musical terms. We’re going to listen to the music that plays in the opening scene where Michael kills his sister Judith, the catalyst for all of the stories that followed, from the original soundtrack released in 1979 in Japan, and 1983 in the USA. Grab your Pumpkin Spiced Latte and get in the seasonal spirit below.

‘Halloween Kills’ is the latest film in the series, which is showing in cinemas now. In terms of the original soundtrack, however, it was originally falsely credited to the Bowling Green Symphony Orchestra because one of the film’s producers felt that it wouldn’t be taken seriously if credited to Carpenter honestly. However, the harsh Synth theme of the film seems more famous than the film itself in some ways, and so the joke’s on them. Carpenter also states in several interviews that his father was a music professor who taught him to play a drum beat on the Bongo’s in a 5/4 time signature when he was a child, and that was the key inspiration behind the notable, abrasive Synth chords in the film that run throughout the score. I’ve included the scene where ‘Michael Kills Judith’ is used in the film for your reference, and a plain text background featuring the music itself above, just for your preference of reference! Anyways, it is easy to see that Carpenter wanted to capture a very seriously murky and uneasy atmosphere for his score, and he packs a lot of minimalist suspense material that basically acts as a recapitulation of the same eerie Synth motifs of the ongoing music into the scene. He doesn’t try to replicate a fake imitation of an orchestra playing the music, and he instead leans in to the unusual Drone sounds of the spacious instrumentation that he uses quite scarcely. The Synths are piercing and unpleasant as the original Synth sections from the original theme music keep replaying, but the opening music of the scene is not beat driven at all, and the chords and melody is barely existent. Instead, we get a slow and plodding build to some jump scare-ish like rhythms as the ghostly Piano music uses its few melodies to key effect and flutter beneath the long, Drone sequences of Ambient production. The sound quality is very good, but the patterns are irregular and they create a sense of ‘unearth’ and discomfort when you listen to it since there’s no emphasis on consistent hooks or very frequent patterns. However, there’s a slight glistening effect of the Synths at the start that could lull you into a sense of security that later proves to be false. In conclusion, this is a great part of the official soundtrack because it creates the atmosphere of inevitable stabbing and subtle tone changes to complement the horrific visuals of the movie scene while using elements of Drone music and Ambient classical music to create abnormality and uncanny emotions for the listener through the uneven instrumental patterns that are difficult to predict. It doesn’t necessarily frighten me or even scare me, but it manages to put me on edge a little bit since it prepares me for the dark and occasionally Gothic, yet coherent material of the movie.

That’s all for now! As mentioned, we’ll be comparing and contrasting the soundtracks of two of the more popular ‘Halloween’ films over the weekend, and it continues tomorrow when we listen to something from the more contemporary reboot of the series from 2018, which broke prior box office records held by ‘Scream’ on its release.

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