Archive for November, 2015
Rob Masterton’s new batch of electronic songs with feeling popped onto the internet this week and all of our week’s are that little bit brighter for it. He’s a Melbourne based producer that I’ve never met in the time that I’ve been living down here (wanna get a beer next week Rob?) but we chat over twitter every now and then and he invariably keeps me updated whenever new music is ready. Well, here’s an entire new EP for you to rally around. He’s cheating a little because track four is a remix but in essence it’s meant as a precursor to the full length he’ll be releasing in 2016 through the same Seattle label Hush Hush.
I’ve singled out the first track from the EP because like the last SMH track I wrote about, it’s a warmly produced piece that makes me feel a little hopeful, a little wistful, a little nostalgic. It’s called ‘Crazy About You’ and it immediately drew to mind another song that I really liked but which sat on the tip of my brain-tongue, my cognitive fingertips brushing the edge of the handle each time I tried to grab it cleanly. Lots of listens later though, and I now know that the song is Heaven’s On Fire by The Radio Department which makes plenty of sense since that song too is an absolute delight and a staple of the DJ sets I play in my car with my wife and child. Anywho, that song and this song, they’re both worth an immediate listen but if you’re got to drop some money on either, please deposit it into the SMH purse because he is about to become a dad and probably bankrupt for it.
I reserve a certain few overly hyperbolic praise for a couple of top tier artists. Not commercially top tier, but top tier in the heartranks of this particular digital publication. I’ve toyed with the idea of creating a Sound Doctrine canon but it’s always felt too self-important so I’ve settled with just covering every bit of work a certain few artists release without reprieve. Among the alumni are artists like D.D Dumbo, Oscar Key Sung and today the very, very special Lower Spectrum. His last EP/video (out through Zero Through Nine) elicited some fairly strongly worded praise from these dry lips and found itself placed squarely at the top of my best of 2013 list. So, as the glow of your monitor and my words intermingle, know that I have been anticipating these new Lower Spectrum songs for a minute or two already and the giddy praise that pours forth might be tainted by disgusting, putruid subjectivity.
‘Proxima’, like everything else that Ned Beckley has worked on, is meticulous in its clarity. He’s one part producer/musician, one part raw sound designer. Every single note is just so, a part of an overall narrative that could only be structured around sounds that speak. The attention to detail when it comes to aural nuances sees him score fashion weeks, ballets, short films and sometimes even long films which traditionally differ from short films in terms of duration. Mostly, they are longer. I won’t get too bogged down in the structural elements of this thing because I’m always more interested to talk about what I feel than what I hear and talking about me is terrific while writing about how things sound is quite hard.
This new single is an overwhelmingly heavy thing, battering you not with any ominous ‘heaviness’ as prescribed through metalcore or grind but the sense that something truly colossal cometh. There’s no fear in the face of the glacier but there sure is a whole bunch of awe. It’s no wonder it’s taken Beckley as long as it has to deliver new music, he’s evidently been tube feeding high calorie meals to this song for nigh on eighteen months until it reached suitable girth to overburden our airwaves. Now it’s in danger of pulling our silly blue planet out of orbit and plunging us all, screaming into the sun. Cheers Ned, didn’t need a planet anyway.
There’s an EP due out sometime soon via Pilerats which will redefine physics
Artists you need to know rn
| 1. 1300 |  |
316 |
| 2. Voidhood | |
259 | 3. jamesjamesjames | |
186 | 4. Zan | |
174 |
| 5. Sesame Girl | |
147 |
