New Selections — HARMS, HHY & The Macumbas, CUTS, CAVE, Never Betters, Surachai, S-E-R-V-I-C-E

Sorry to have quiet on the singles front for a while. Enjoy.


HARMS: "Car Outside"
(via Good Eye Records / Substream Magazine / Soundcloud)



Via Good Eye Records:

While playing with his other band, What Moon Things, Brooklyn-based artist Jake Harms began to start to feel an itch to make something wholly his own. It didn't start as a record - just a group of songs that seemed to make sense out of a fog of journal entries and scraps and demos and half-finished ideas throughout the years. 

Working as HARMS, the inspiration for his forthcoming, debut EP, Aquarium, came from a poem he had previously written about the feeling of living in New York City for the first time as an adult:

walking around is like
being at the aquarium
observing 6 tons
per square meter
of pressure on the glass
dividing you
and everything else

The resulting EP finds Harms crafting pressurized dark rock fusing the goth grandeur of The Cure with the lonely indie pop of Porches.

"Walking around the streets of the city felt like being at an aquarium," shares Harms. "The pressure from millions of thoughts and bodies pushing against glass that just barely separates you from them. The sound and feeling are shaped by riding the subways in Brooklyn, hearing sirens, scrapes, voices filter in to the space in my arrangements, the space in my headphones."

HARMS links:
Facebook
Instagram


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HHY & The Macumbas: "Swisid Mekanize Rejiman"
(via Rarely Unable / House of Mythology / YouTube)



Via Rarely Unable:

Portuguese collective HHY & The Macumbas share a new video for "Swisid Mekanize Rejiman", taken from Beheaded Totem LP/CD/DL", which was released September 28th by House of Mythology. Directed by Diogo Tudela, and starring Frankão and Teresa Froufe Castro, the collective's brainchild Jonathan Uliel Saldanha talks us through the video...

“This video is made in a vibe and tempo that brings a spasmodic effect to the hyper-presence in the music of HHY&TM. With images that I’m sure can resonate with peripheral places in any human city, but in this case comes with flavours from a popular Portuguese party style called “Romaria”: done in earlier days for the saints, but now serving mainly the sinners that look for trouble in the night – a night illuminated by explosive pyrotechnics."

WATCH THE OFFICIAL VIDEO FOR "SWISID MEKANIZE REJIMAN" BY HHY & THE MACUMBAS

About Beheaded Totem...

Febrile, haunting and at times overwhelming, Beheaded Totem is nothing short of a dream for the necro-tourist. Cerebral and alluring. Toxic. Welcome to the four-dimensional meltdown.
“Beheaded Totem continues a long investigation into percussion, circular rhythms, dub strategies, and horns coming from the alcohol-fuelled Portuguese marching bands,” says constructor and conductor in the world of HHY & The Macumbas, Jonathan Uliel Saldanha. For those unfamiliar with the Macumbas, they are a shifting musical entity. Built amid smoke and fiery red lights, the performers on Beheaded Totem are: João Pais, Filipe Silva, Frankão and Brendan Hemsworth on percussion, and Álvaro Almeida, André Rochaand Rui Fernandes on horns. An Arkestra reaching not for the stars but the boiling core under our feet.

This music stems from a deep connection with the streets of Porto and its undertones, nights and drags,” Saldanha says. Emerging from SOOPA, an art and music production unit based in the old harbour city, he has been a leading force in the Portuguese experimental music scene since the early 2000s, through which he coined a signature “skull-cave echo.”

“It comes with a love for trance, otherness and sound pressure,” he explains. Beheaded Totem is indeed a pulsating and physical album, revealing both an ultimate pain and unbearable joy – a funereal ecstasy – as if everything might collapse in on itself at any moment. The disruptive nature of the seven tracks also hints at a free form. They are more evocations than songs, found in the depths Saldanha reached for in the filmic and musical explorations of Tunnel Vision (2016), made alongside director and musician Raz Mesinai. Recorded in tunnels and cavities in and around the city of Porto, the sub-frequencies of Tunnel Vision functioned as a panoramic documentation of the underground, a “dub fiction,” as Mesinai put it. Add the Macumbas’ already famed live capacities evoked on this album, and Beheaded Totem comes across as a fear- less interpretation of sulphurous storms. Both meticulous and massive, raw and ravishing, as if their minds are set on rewilding a hollow earth.
And as the nightly creatures prepare themselves to join HHY & The Macumbas in a final Danse Macabre, they might realise what they’re in for: to never find their way back to the corrosions of daylight. But, then again, some sacrifices come with joy.

– adapted text, originally by Tore Engelsen Espedal, May 2018

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CUTS"From Here to Nowhere"
(via Big Mouth Publicity / Village Green Recordings / Vimeo)


CUTS - From Here To Nowhere from Village Green Recordings on Vimeo.

Via Big Mouth Publicity:

CUTS, the audio-visual project of composer and filmmaker Anthony Tombling Jr, will release his debut album A Gradual Decline through Village Green Recordings on 30th November.

Continuing with the environmentally themed videos, after the beautiful yet foreboding "A Gradual Decline', CUTS have now shared one for 'From Here To Nowhere'. He explains:
"This was the first piece I wrote for the album. I watched British diver Rich Horner’s powerful and devastating film of him diving in a sea of plastic and felt inspired to write something to it. It was the catalyst I guess for the rest of the album and its themes. Rich kindly gave his permission for me to use the film. I’m sure a lot of people have seen it, but if more people end up watching it as result of this, then that can only be a good thing."

WATCH 'FROM HERE TO NOWHERE' VIDEO HERE

Summoning 11 widescreen, electronic compositions in response to global political and environmental breakdown, album A Gradual Decline addresses the planet’s current fragility using actual field recordings of ice collapsing from glaciers. Weaving these momentary, dramatic events directly into the DNA of the music, CUTS has sculpted rhythmic elements out of geological transformation.

“We are living in the age of the Anthropocene and it feels like everything is in decline,” reflects Anthony. “We’re in a moment where extinction is regular. I wanted this record to reflect these frailties.”

A stark sense of urgency permeates A Gradual Decline. At times chaotic and alarming, the album’s siren-like tones and volatile, stuttered beats converge with synthetic gales of melody and glacial percussion. Elsewhere, the sense of precariousness is subtler, enveloped in gaseous chords that swell and evaporate, ethereal and dense guitars and distant vocals – all hallmarks of previous CUTS material - here honed into a concise, conceptual set.

“I have tried to make a record that feels like it’s all come from one place," explains Tombling Jr. “My only musical influence on this was William Basinski’s ‘Disintegration Loops’. Not the music, but the process. The idea of a decline in sound really suited the concept of this record. All this music and instrumentation trapped in this declining digital signal. I wanted it to sound brittle and precarious. I also wanted to avoid doing overly dark material, opting instead for something that was more fragile, melancholic and even hopeful in moments.“

CUTS signed to Village Green Recordings earlier this year and released the double EP EXIST in April. The EP featured the track ‘Bunsen Burner’, which can be heard in the memorable climactic scene of Alex Garland’s Ivor Novello-winning, sci-fi masterpiece, Ex Machina. Tombling Jr’s composition was also used in the finale of JJ Abram’s cult TV show, Person Of Interest. Taken from the same double EP, ‘Dream Voyager’ was remixed by shoegaze legends Slowdive and Village Green label mate, Ben Chatwin.

CUTS has performed at ATP, Simple Things, Drill Festival and played with Fuck Buttons, James Holden, Haxan Cloak and Wire.

PRE-ORDER DEBUT ALBUM A GRADUAL DECLINE HERE

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CAVE"Beaux"
(via Rarely Unable / Drag City / YouTube)



Via Rarely Unable:

Regardless of any perceived time between record or tours, CAVE keep such a fluid beat that their actual musical time becomes a universal constant. CAVE's music relies equally on energy as well as a formalist rigor, and Allways may be their finest example. CAVE's chosen path of expression is bed-rocked in repetitive and interlocking rhythmic patterns, and over the course of their rich catalog, one can easily identify modes and moods that can be described as punk, funk, post-punk, kraut, psych, boogie, and jazz. Yet no matter which way you listen, CAVE sound uniquely like CAVE and nothing (and no one) else.

Perhaps it's this singular nature that makes "Beaux," the endlessly pleasing jammer from
Allways, so outrageously groovy. We could describe it with various fluff and verbiage and still never quite land on what makes it such an ear tingling delight. Now "Beaux" can be seen in a way that's just as wild and stunning as it sounds on record: CAVE present "Beaux", a video directed by Krzys Piotrowski with VFX from Nick Ciontea.

The audio portion of the video for "Beaux" was recorded live to tape in session Labranza with no overdubs as it was being filmed, all in one take. A beautifully kaleidoscopic snapshot of a band with peerless sound and vision.

CAVE are set to hop back into the van for a string of US dates on the East Coast and in the Midwest, and in Europe in 2019. Full dates below.

CAVE EUROPE 2019 TOUR DATES

29/3/2019 Galeria ZdB, Lisbon PT
30/3/2019 Palacio de La Prensa, Madrid ES
4/4/2019 Radar Estudios, Vigo, ES
6/4/2019 Psych Fest, Barcelona ES
7/4/2019 SUFRE Soundsystem, Valencia ES
8/4/2019 Planta Baja, Granada ES
11/4/2019 Sala X, Seville ES
13/4/2019 Vera, Groningen NL
14/4/2019 Roadburn,Tilburg NL
15/4/2019 The Shacklewell Arms, London UK
16/4/2019 Gullivers, Brighton UK
19/4/2019 Rotondes, Luxembourg LU
20/4/2019 Rockerill, Charleroi BE

CAVE Online:
Drag City-http://www.dragcity.com/artists/cave
Order-http://www.dragcity.com/products/allways


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Never Betters: "Alone"
(via Auteur Research / Soundcloud)


Via Auteur Research:

Never Betters are pop worshipping punkers in the church of fuzz. Danny got a good deal on a sick amp; Davita teaches drums to children; April lip syncs; Pat doesn’t want to deal with their bullshit anymore (neither did Nathan, Joey, or Andrew — hopefully Bob sticks). They're just trying to be better.


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Surachai: "An Unfamiliar Reflection Activates a Gate (feat. Aaron Harris)"
(via Speakeasy PR / Resident Advisor / BL_K Noise / Bandcamp) 




Via Speakeasy PR:

Surachai, the musician/producer who has been hailed for his adeptness at merging the worlds of tweaky electronics, aggressive metal and avant-garde noise, returns with his seventh full-length album, Come, Deathless, on Jan. 25 via BL_K Noise.

“I spent a terrible year recording sounds around the world and finding places for them to fit into this semi diary of an album,” explained Surachai about the 12-track release.

The album also features three guests: ISIS/Palms’ drummer Aaron Harris, The Locust/One Day As A Lion keyboard player Joey Karam and newcomer, singer Sara Kendall. Resident Advisor recently previewed the track “An Unfamiliar Reflection Activates A Gate”, which features Harris’ contribution.

Come,
Deathless pre-orders, which include limited edition test pressings, various vinyl editions, cassettes and digital options, are available now via surachai.bandcamp.com.

Surachai’s most recent release, the 2016 album Instinct and Memory, has been praised across a wide spectrum of outlets, with XLR8R saying his music is “conjured from a deep knowledge and relationship with machines, machines that in this case sound like they are let off the leash to run wild across a desolate, apocalyptic sonic landscape. Post-Punk said Surachai’s releases are “always dangerous, never predictable,” while No Clean Singing described his technique of layering samples with guitar and various electronics “creating an almost symphonic atmosphere.”

# # #
Surachai.bandcamp.com
Facebook.com/SurachaiMusic
Instagram.com/surachais


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S-E-R-V-I-C-E: "Who Are You Anyway?"
(via Tell All Your Friends PR / Glide Magazine / Vimeo)


Indianapolis-based band S-E-R-V-I-C-E have shared the live video for new single, "Who Are You Anyway," in an exclusive premiere with Glide Magazine. They had high praise for the visual, saying "The video perfectly captures the band’s hard-charging rock and roll sound in what looks to be a backyard day party." Previously, the band shared "Hey". Magnet premiered the track calling it "a caterwauling assault of a post-punk song that will help you end your bummer summer on a high note." Both of these singles can be found on the band's forthcoming debut album Drag Me due for release in early 2019.

S-E-R-V-I-C-E began when Jon Spencer Blues Explosion drummer Russell Simins and We Are Hex singer Jilly Weiss met on tour. They wrote their first song together in 2015 at a messy kitchen table in his Manhattan apartment. They fell in love, got married, and wrote a dozen or more perfectly flawed rock and roll songs.

Taking a breather from JSBX, Russell joined Jilly in Indianapolis to turn these raw songs into an urgent, swaggering rock and roll record. They found their accomplices in Sharlene, Johnny, and Mitch. Together they’ve made S-E-R-V-I-C-E into the most authentic expression of vulnerability and self-awareness, with wildly impactful vocals set against roaring guitars and a giant beat. It’s post-punk, then punk again.

S-E-R-V-I-C-E is Sharlene Birdsong (keys, guitar, noises from space), Mitch Geisinger (guitar), Russell Simins (drums), Jilly Weiss Simins (vox), and Johnny Zeps (bass).

Their debut record
Drag Me will be released early 2019 with supporting tour dates.

LINKS
Website | Facebook | SoundCloud | Instagram


Sincerely,
Letters From A Tapehead

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