Julia-Sophie - 'y?'

By Phillipe Roberts

If you’re not a member of the COVID truther brigade tainting the air with hoax logic, space–physical, mental, and emotional–has been incredibly hard to find during lockdown. You’ve picked up at least trace amounts of social anxiety that no amount of brain-picking nasal swabs can totally soothe, and the first thing you’ll notice about anyone on the street is the presence or absence of a mask. Distance is safety. Hurry back to the nervous bubble and scrub off the outside.

Enter the microverse of y?, the debut EP from UK singer/producer Julia-Sophie and your personal escape hatch into endless open space. Clocking in at a bite-sized fourteen minutes, y? dives deep in search of emotional truths, unraveling and savoring each feeling with spellbinding patience. Soothing without neglecting the complex, violent honesty that comes with setting yourself free, these tunes breathe life into solitude. Stuck inside or masking up, this is a moment to let your guard down.

Though it’s destined to find its way into the vast chillscape that dominates the playlist world, y? glides to the head of the pack in its surgical use of textured sound to support its blistering lyrical excavations. Opener “breathe” expands and contracts like a lung, flowing from tender verses that cling tightly to a distorted drum rattle before erupting into a cavernous–“with your heart in my hands/I feel safe.” Bits of Julia-Sophie’s voice get lost in space. A sliver of desire–“kiss me”–slips into a brief moment of stillness. “x0x” punches the hardest of any track here. Heartbreaking self-doubt blooms from a flurry of beats that evolve continuously over the track, pressing you forward as the words “nobody wants me here” swirl overhead and a garbled French transmission overwhelms the senses. It’s a panic attack in real time, and you’re strapped in.

After the glittering respite of the interlude “i told you everything”, Julia-Sophie unveils “i left you”, the slow-burning pop gem that should become her calling card. “I try to buy time to be okay tomorrow/ to look inside my mind” hits unreasonably hard, pressed to the front of the mix and decorated only by the nervous ticking of synthesizer blips. Blurry passion is discarded with the ruthless admission “I don’t feel alive enough to call you.” Rather than present a mere snapshot of uncertainty, a portrait of loneliness or disillusionment, “i left you” drags you through all the hope, expectation, and self-annoyance that comes with stunted desire. Without a clear cut victory or loss, it makes up its own mind. Julia-Sophie’s emergence from her day job on the frontlines of synthpop trio Candy Says feels perfectly timed to create more than a space for therapeutic dreaming; y?’s soft curiosity is a gentle reminder to go beyond the pain of self-discovery and explore your own hidden worlds. What emotional spaces are you neglecting? What barriers are you building against the gathering storm of your own feelings? What better time than now to listen deeply? 

Vilde - Grace

By Phillipe Roberts

Layers of electronic percussion hold back waves of gently warping guitar as Thomas Savage, aka Vilde, creeps into the pulsating neon carnival of an arcade. He tests all the classics. Leaning into the turns on MotoGP, losing a prize to the loose grip of a claw machine, and staggering in place with Dance Dance Revolution, he drifts in solitude between the cabinets. Patterns of flashing lights slip in and out of phase with the echoes of a cold and dreamy lead guitar line, deepening the trance so completely that you hardly notice when Savage, prickling with energy, steps back into the night. 

Directed by Elin Ghersinich with a little bit of inspiration from Lost In Translation, Savage’s hypnagogic video for “Grace” belies the tension that wore on him in creating the track. “I discovered the chord progression one day on a guitar, and played it repeatedly for about 40 minutes,” Savage explained, “Everything fell into place in my mind, the beat, the synths. I avoided beginning production on it, working on other songs instead, for fear I’d ruin it.”

But for all the anxiety of losing that initial spark, the inspired production choices and inclusion of submerged spoken word - a first take wonder for Savage in an attempt to preserve the track’s purity - add up to a truly disarming sonic daydream. Like all the best, it feels almost uncomfortably tangible while burning just out of reach.

The first single from an upcoming Summer 2020 LP, Savage’s fourth as Vilde in as many years, “Grace” is a nostalgia trip with teeth, biting back softly.

KUNZITE - NOVAS

By Charley Ruddell

Throughout his time on this planet, the great jazz sorcerer Sun Ra left bestowed scraps of cosmic wisdom for anyone deft enough to listen. “As far as people on this planet are concerned, they know far less than they do what they know,” he emanates in the opening moments of electro-psych duo KUNZITE’s newest video for “Novas,” their first release via Wilder since 2018’s BIRDS DON’T FLY, as a pair of Trekkian-esque anthropoids gyrate through the gorgeous terrain of White’s homeland in the islands of Hawaii. 

Photo by Priest Fontaine Batten

Formed after chance encounters on tour stretches during the early-aughts, Stroud (one half of electronic duo RATATAT) and White (formerly of psych outfit White Flight) formed KUNZITE through a shared interest of beat-heavy, acid-tinged psychedelia. “Novas” is the pinnacle of this brain trust. The bombastic, maximalist body of “Novas” immediately calls to mind the glitch-hop realm of Stroud’s former project, while the zipping synths and sun-drenched vocals bring the utopia of the West Coast to the forefront. With its freewheeling swagger and bumping grooves, “Novas” invokes a certain shaggy-haired assurance to those of us yet to be raptured by the dance floor enlightenment of the Western world. 

As Stroud and White perch upon the rolling red canyons and glistening ocean stones with guitars slung and beards flowing, the cosmonauts trek through the lush jungles of the Pacific Southwest. Kaleidoscopic shots of waves and waterfalls make the earthly landscapes feel otherworldly. It showcases the duo’s eagerness to turn something so familiar into a feeling of bewilderment. “My music is about changing things,” Sun Ra concludes in his opening monologue, an affirmation KUNZITE has clearly plastered on its DJ decks. 

Mood Tattooed - No Compromise

Gerard Marcus

Brooklyn-based Mood Tattooed is a musical project which balances elements of electronic synthesis, American folk tendencies, and fluid song structure to create music that sounds free of constraints. Written by singer-songwriter and composer Hagan Knauth, his music is generally melancholic, dealing with themes of both internal and external fear and anxiety. His new music video for “No Compromise” explores these themes visually. Made in collaboration with videographer Matthew Sullivan and artist Margaret Pinto, the video follows an alien being as it explores the forest and small towns of rural upstate New York. The creature is immediately odd juxtaposed against its surroundings. In a statement from the artist, he says he “wanted the creature to appear inefficient and out of place in the landscape,” which gives the character an enjoyable sense of absurdity. As you watch it move through the wilderness of rural upstate New York, it just seems odd, less of an immediate threat than just a confused being clearly in the wrong place. It’s almost funny, until you realize the creature’s mission, which is to collect various objects and eventually abduct a human for a bizarre ritual of unknown purpose (except to the creature performing it). Who or what is this creature? What is it doing here? Should we judge it based off of its absurdity or its actions? There are all good questions with no definite answer, other than to pull it back to themes found in the music. In the words of the artist himself, “perhaps the fact that the creature is simultaneously threatening and laughably absurd is all a metaphor for the little monsters we make in our heads.”

Jenny Pulse - My Love Turns To Liquid

Phillipe Roberts

For her reimagining of Dream 2 Science’s “My Love Turns to Liquid,” Jenny Pulse doesn’t so much rebuild the song’s aquatic groove as put it on ice. Gone are the watery drip samples and the soothing waves of vibraphone. She drains the warmth out of the bassline until it stings and lets the lead synth glide and creep. With her voice caught in this untamed whirl, Jenny Pulse sounds adrift but playful, blissfully lost in a glacial landscape far from the original’s soulful electronic paradise.

The video, premiering today here on ThrdCoast and edited by CMI in Minneapolis, takes that vibe of joyful isolation and runs with it. Filmed on a (to quote the artist) “very fucking cold” day in January, it chronicles a Lower East Side, New York romp through the rapidly decomposing lens of a VHS camera. Jenny frolics freely while her surroundings are cloaked in glitchy anonymity; other than a peculiarly menacing snowman, hers is the only face visible, prancing about in frosty joy as the world distorts and collapses around her.

Pre-order Jenny Pulse upcoming tape "Jenny Pulse Cassette" HERE. Out August 31st via Drop Medium.