NYC music
fromBrooklynVegan
2 days agoOur Favorite Songs of the Week (Playlist)
Dillinger Four and various artists released new music featured in BrooklynVegan's weekly playlist.
Now in the fourth year of a war sparked by Russia's 2022 invasion, life in Ukraine is challenging in ways that only those that have lived through something similar can even begin to comprehend. It's the loss of a generation of men fighting and dying on the front lines; civilian deaths and injuries caused by indiscriminate drone and missile attacks; acute shortages and the manifold disruptions of everyday life, not least of the hopes and aspirations of young ballet students in a country with a proud tradition in this art form.
Fifteen years ago, when the Lisbon imprint was reckoning with near-empty dancefloors at the recently shuttered Musicbox venue, it would have been inconceivable for Principe to host a party at Lux widely considered to be among Europe's best nightclubs let alone pack out the roughly 1,500 capacity venue with the likes of minimal techno legend Richie Hawtin in attendance.
The left bank of the Dnieper River has been very hard hit by Russian strikes, leaving most people in the dark for days on end. Their houses are without warmth and without electricity, and the old people try to heat themselves by wearing more clothes and turning on the gas of their stoves. They suffer a lot.
Between our daily coverage, our Notable Releases and Indie Basement columns, and our monthly punk and rap roundups, we post tons of new music all the time here on BrooklynVegan. In an effort to keep track of all the new music we're excited about, we've been posting a new playlist each week with many of the songs we love that were (mostly) released that week.
There is nothing quite as eerie as living in a city with no power. Outside, ice and snow, Inside, there is no water from the tap, no electricity, not even the background noise of normal life. The city goes quiet, unnaturally quiet, until the low growl of generators breaks the silence. In that moment, everything stops. It feels apocalyptic, not because of panic or chaos, but because of what's missing.
Helicopters, you could say, is a reaction to the lack of action or misaction we have witnessed over the last three years (but in reality, throughout my whole life) in regard to the blatant slaughtering and exploitation of our brothers and sisters around the world. The manipulation, lies, and treachery that the powers that be rain down upon us with absolute impunity.
When he's not making proggy folk as a solo artist, Richard Dawson gets his skronk on as part of proggy new-wave art-rock group Hen Ogledd. Despite my attempts to do so in the previous sentence, the band are hard to succinctly describe: they can pivot from warm synthpop to mossy faerie folk to baggy Manchester shuffle beats to dense prog and even flashes of hip hop. Hen Ogledd are weird, but also welcoming.
DJ-Kicks is a series that shaped how I think about DJing and listening. I played the DJ Koze mix an unhealthy number of times, to the point where it basically lives in my DNA now. Those mixes taught me that the best ones aren't about showing off; they're about taking people on a journey. They move, twist and surprise you. They give you goosebumps when you least expect it.
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.
Between our daily coverage, our Notable Releases and Indie Basement columns, and our monthly punk and rap roundups, we post tons of new music all the time here on BrooklynVegan. In an effort to keep track of all the new music we're excited about, we've been posting a new playlist each week with many of the songs we love that were (mostly) released that week.
Their gathering still had to be dispersed, but the enthusiasm that Ored Recordings inspires even among enforcers of the law speaks volumes about the power of what Khalilov and his friend and label co-founder Timur Kodzoko call punk ethnography: the recording of religious chants, laments and displacement songs at family gatherings, local festivals, in people's kitchens, to fight against the erasure of Circassian culture.
Green-House will release new album Hinterlands on March 20. The Los Angeles duo of Olive Ardizoni and Michael Flanagan has left their longtime home of Leaving to sign with Ghostly for the follow-up to A Host for All Kinds of Life. Listen to a new song from the record, "Farewell, Little Island," below, and scroll down for the album art.
Each stage is designed with a clear purpose, allowing different parts of the electronic spectrum to exist without compromise, from peak-time headline techno to foundational house, from high-pressure intensity to emerging local voices. Together, the stages form a complete ecosystem where every sound has room to exist properly, and the whole site is steeped in the famously high spec production, light and sound that makes this one of Europe's leading events.
Skrillex surprised-dropped his latest EP on Thursday (January 15). The three-song Kora includes contributions from frequent collaborators Varg2™, Siiickbrain, and Whitearmor. It's the produer's second EP in as many months, following November's Hit Me Where It Hurts X. You can listen to the new one and check out its cover art below.
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,