Music

[Music] Ataşehir – AVM

/ Rudy Carrera / Leave a comment

Ambient as a cool breeze meeting a calming shopping experience.  Oxymoronic, I know, but humor me a bit.

This description fits this release from Ataşehir (an alias of the ever-wonderful project and friend to this blog, Sumatran Black).  AVM in a Turkish acronym for alışveriş merkezi, which translates into supermarket or shopping mall, though I might be mistaken.  There is a nearly vaporwave aesthetic to their music in this release.  It’s ambient, of course, but spiced with a touch of 80s or 90s cheese, the sort you may have encountered wandering in a mall 30 or 40 years ago.  Modern Muzak.  The music of my youth spent in elevators, escalators and fast food courts.  Very pleasant, indeed.

[Music] This Is Wreckage – I Don’t Live, I Exist

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I’ve quite enjoyed releases from Forbidden Place Records, as I’ve come to enjoy stoner rock and more advanced and interesting forms of metal, a genre I couldn’t stand some years ago.  This Is Wreckage offer a rather brutal, bass-driven album which would remind a listener of groups like Pailhead (the collaboration between Ministry and Fugazi/Minor Threat lead singer Ian Mackaye) and the legendary Helmet, though more raw in sound and feel.

[Music] RRUFF – Impresiones

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RRUFF are a band based in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico.  Though they are tagged as “dungeon-synth,” there is a dark, rather pleasant, atmospheric, air about this two-track album.  The work seems to come from a performance-oriented project focused on the ideas of Joan Fontcuberta regarding the state of photography and image.

From the band’s Bandcamp page:

Today photographs have ceased to be a memory to be ephemeral. The massification of photography has led us to a new situation in which it is not so important to own as to share. We live or perceive through the screens, which, like the shadows of Plato, are now our access to reality.

Perhaps it is because she was on my mind today, but the second track reminds me of American composer Pauline Oliveros, of blessed memory. RRUFF are in good company.

[Music] Zan Hoffman & Hubert Heathertoes – Kaunastic Relapse of Idiosyncrasies: The Baltic Innoculation and other wayward ditties

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Zan Hoffman and Hubert Heathertoes have been featured twice on this blog before (see here and here), and each time, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by their output.  The good lads continue their tradition of splicing together drone, field recordings, and an aura of pleasantly calming weirdness together for well over an hour of headphone bliss.