Cassette: 面多 (Multi-surface)-晩秋 (Late Autumn)

Ambient music is still something that takes me the longest time to wrap my head around; to submerge myself and get lost in. It seems like it comes so naturally to people, especially with the massive amounts of the genre that seem to be constantly created on a daily basis. So it was wonderful to listen to 面多 and have his music instantly envelope my brain. 面多 (or Multi-surface, in my Latin-root based language), is Tomokazu Fujimoto of Japan. This is his very first musical offering, the perfectly titled 晩秋 (Late Autumn). A singular piece of music that unfolds over 32 minutes, it has a very pensive air to it, every moment of feeling thought out, yet its slow unfolding feeling very human and natural. In that time, Multi-surface captures the shift in time, the gentle decay of the surrounding world as as the brightness of autumn fades into the inevitable cold of winter. The slowly cascading & humming guitars that start out Late Autumn become cold, amorphous electronic clicks and bumps, before the two meld together in the end to become a blanket of cold, forbidding wind. Fujimoto's main profession is that of a gardener, and that makes sense while listening to Late Autumn; it's audio crafted to soundtrack a world you helped to cultivate become undone and slowly dissolve before your eyes.


Links:

Buy the 晩秋 (Late Autumn) cassette here, from Patient Sounds intl.

Dan Svizeny-It's Beautiful

Usually, when Dan Svizeny releases music, it's under the name Cool Cough. It's been his moniker since 2009, him and him alone making anything from lo-fi indie rock to drony electronica over several tapes and more recently, LPs. Yet, Svizeny has decided to use his own name and not the Cool Cough title for an upcoming tape on Mirror Universe. So it makes you wonder what Svizeny is feels he's doing so differently with these songs that it made him want to use his real name for the first time. Maybe they're more personal and heartfelt than you realize. It certainly feels that way with "It's Beautiful", the first taste from the tape. The song certainly isn't very removed from his Cool Cough material, and I mean that as a compliment. The percussion is industrial and blown out yet closer to haunting than harsh. The guitars are simple & repetitive, but dreamy as well, even if they are fuzzy and warbled as hell. And Svizeny's vocals feel tinged with a little more longing, a little more sadness than they have been before. Whatever the moniker, Svizeny has made another nighttime gem, the type of thing that should leak out a radio while driving home through a city at two in the morning.



Links:

Cool Cough's Tumblr
Pre-order the s/t cassette soon, from Mirror Universe Tapes

Cassette Review: SUR-Dog Daze EP

Is it possible for a band to be all over the place, and for them to not only succeed, but have that be their strongest trait? The answer is yes, or at least I feel SUR have managed to pull that off on their Dog Daze EP. SUR are not noise rock, although their songs are in the red and distorted for harshness rather than melody. They're not post-hardcore, although they have the intensity that is on par with some of the best. They're are definitely not psych-rock, even though you can hear some of the influence in the way the guitars chime through the noisy haze. Instead, SUR of are a compression of all these things (and bits of several other genres), constantly interweaving between one another, making music that is unstable but unrelenting as well.  

Despite all that, there is some general direction to the tape. The first side is built around SUR's shorter songs, and in turn they pack much more of a sonic, blistering punch. The Dog Daze EP opens on "Shadow Puppet", with distortion crafted perfectly to sound like a raging hornet's nest before launching to a drug damaged mixture of post-hardcore and noise rock, like Lightning Bolt and Double Dagger thrown into a room together, fighting and recording a song together. The energy lasts in the rhythm section, but has been drained from the guitars and vocals once the tracks "Jail" & "Rumors" hit, creating this wonderfully disconcerting feeling that makes it feel as if everything is off balance and about to fall apart. It works even better because it allows for moments in each of the song for the band to launch into these noisy assaults that let the song burn bright for short time before crashing down in again. Even the sun damaged psych surf of "Shut Up", has moments of chaos to keep it from falling trap to convention.

The B-side is where the band really stretches their legs and let the sprawl take over. "Fox M" is an almost tribal tune, spacy and percussive, enhanced by the band's female member Danielle Moran taking over vocal duties. The track would almost be a Explode into Colors track if not for the drill like guitar within it. Dog Daze ends on "Great Plains/Synesthete", an almost pure instrumental track that is the tape's most straight forward song, a steady beat with grungy riffs played continuously through the song. That is, until everything shifts in the song's last minute to reveal a bright, melodic patch of guitar rock that had lay hidden underneath. And really, there is no better way for SUR to have ended the tape. If nearly everything about SUR's sound collided with one another, it seems fitting that the last thing heard by them is a momentary burst of catchiness, if only to contrast everything else that was just heard.



Links:

SUR's Facebook
Buy the Dog Daze EP cassette from Mirror Universe/Sleeping Giant Glossolania on September 16

OR

Grab a copy from your local music store as a part of Cassette Store Day

DSTVV-Crusher

While no one in their right mind would ever call DSTVV’s music organic, “Crusher” seems to demonstrate they have the ability to make it increasingly more natural. The song is just as bombastic as anything that was on the Molly Soda EP, possibly more so from the (mildly) notched up production. However, there is an evolution here buried beneath all the pseudo-intensity. The song has a dance, almost rave like flare to it thanks to the increased utilization of the drum machine, which the band approaches in a much more creative fashion. The club like mentality they create serve as the perfect contrast to the vocal breaks in the song, which feel just as lonesome and alienated as ever. “Crusher” feels like it is recreating the feelings off feeling completely alienated in a massive social situation, complete with sense overloading blasts of sound in the form of chiptune processed shoegaze. It's saturated and noisy as all hell, along with being laying just at the edge of pure insensarity, but that all adds to the world "Crusher" is trying to make, and demonstrates that DSTVV can still make some utterly brainbashingly good music as well.



Links:

DSTVV's Tumblr
Pre-order the Underground Product cassette here, from the Wormhole Records