Tone Freq Studios captures pristine acoustics and emphasizes analog warmth, creating a tactile space that values collective experiences over the convenience of digital recording methods.
"Honora exists in a strange place. It's essentially a jazz record, which will likely turn off RHCP fans. And jazz heads may approach the record with skepticism since Flea's day job band is often maligned by 'serious' music fans."
"It felt jarring and lonely, not exactly the comfort I was hoping for, but one afternoon I made a little voice memo while playing a piano mumbling the phrase....I wanna build a dream for you. That's when this whole thing kind of started. Like a little spark."
I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Laurie Spiegel for the site. As preparation for the interview, I spent a lot of time over the last couple of weeks revisiting Spiegel's records, most notably The Expanding Universe, her 1980 masterpiece that blends synth experimentalism with early examples of what would eventually be called ambient music, and algorithmic composition techniques. It's a marvel that sounds both nostalgic and cutting-edge at the same time.
Paradessence draws its title from a portmanteau of "paradoxical" and "essence," coined by author Alex Shakar. Per Visible Cloaks, the word embodies the oppositional-but-coexisting concepts they're trying to explore with the new album. "Instead of creating pieces that function horizontally as environments, we wanted to conceptualize them as living material changing in space, continually in flux," Doran shared in a press statement.
The work behind "Waiting for You" by Monotronic spanned two years and several geographic mindsets. Its songs were built in the contained spaces of an East Village apartment and the open humidity of Tulum, initially seeming like disparate projects with no clear direction. Only in retrospect did their shared disposition come into focus. This is an album about the slow work of self-knowledge, which here looks less like an epiphany and more like the gradual acceptance of a particular signal,
OKO DJ's music is best measured not in decibels but in candle watts. Sunlight, one suspects, would reduce it to ashes. Her debut album, As Above, So Below, is a seance of a record, a journey into the darkest corners of the night. The Athens-based musician, aka Marine Tordjemann, is host of an NTS Radio show called Twisted Dream Diary, and As Above, So Below, is similarly steeped in dream logic and surrealistic visions. In its collision of bleak sounds and cosmic mysticism, it often feels like a gothic take on new-age spirituality. It might be the post-post-punk equivalent of a European art-house film shot in grainy black and white, framing monologues muttered in French and Greek in dramatically austere trappings. It's a mood piece par excellence.