Jeremy Ray - "M.I.N.O"

By Gerard Marcus

With so much (needed) attention being placed on some deep rooted issues in our country, it may sometimes be hard for people who don’t face systemic harassment on a regular basis to remember that people who normally face that harassment have been facing it their entire lives. A lot of the issues that are now seeing more or less universal empathy have sadly become normalized in the world of the afflicted. There’s a tension between a lot of the new voices strongly calling for change, and an unwillingness of some from affected communities, who have been given false promises before, to believe that call. Jeremy Ray’s new single/video ‘M.I.N.O’ (murder is not opportunity) explores this tension from the side of the afflicted. 

The video is a simple one, finding Jeremy in an acid-kissed dreamscape proposing questions and relaying observations from the mind of someone who is searching for an optimistic future, but has experienced the dulling pain of crushed hope again and again. ”Are we not on stolen land?” Jeremy asks, pointing to the foundation of pessimism. How can a person looking back at our country's entire history open themselves up to believe this time will be different? “So involved you couldn’t see the violence.” How does that person know this isn’t another passing social media phase driven by people's inability to access a lot of the normal comforts of their daily lives? As soon as those people regain their comforts, will they just lose interest like they have so many times before? “Well I wake up scared for my brothers / Hope they’re not mistaken for another man.” This struggle is everyday. 

How do you comfort that? For those new voices so adamant to take action, how do you convince a person who’s mother, father, grandparents, great grandparents, and on have been harassed and taken advantage of that change is coming to a system that defines the rules of the society they live in? There is no one answer, but a strong way to start is by giving your continued time and attention. When life for you gets easier again, don’t forget that this ease isn’t universally experienced. The struggle for equality has been a frustrating, Sisyphean struggle for a lot of us. It would be nice to finally have enough people stick around to help us make it to the top of the hill.

This is the first solo release from Jermey Ray (formerly Dove Lady) who, rumor has it, will be doing a release on Canada based label Vain Mina Records in the not too distant future!

Nicomo - "Other Line"

By Charley Ruddell

There’s a sweet sadness beholden to relationships that slowly dissolve and meander apart. Like clinging to a severed piece of driftwood at sea, the last legs of the most deteriorated partnerships often arrive after having already drifted so far from happiness, the only real sense of comfort found is in the connection of not being alone. This is “Other Line,” off Nicomo’s 2019 EP Views.

When Nico Osborne sings “I saw you look away like, ‘What’s that over there?’”, the magnitude of distance behind that observation feels overwhelming. It’s a subtlety marked by a David Longsteth-ian vocal chorale that brings a taciturn action to the forefront of a greater issue. On a macro scale, “Other Line” does this with a range of despondence; an aching set of three chords and a cascading guitar line move under sedation, feet dragging, while Osborne’s weighty voice hums with a soft regret. The song’s cathartic chorus—drums anchoring the downbeat, soaring falsetto harmonies, a devastating minor chord at the turn—crashes in strong waves, like grief, or clarity. It’s a song that feels entirely born from an emotional experience, like it formed in one stoic stream of tears, ambivalent, but willing enough to embrace the coldness of singularity.

Will Roane’s accompanying video punctuates the theme with a precious vision. Loosely inspired by the stories of his grandparents’ inextricably woven lives, the concept of doubt shifting to hope (and vice versa) plays out in a narrative of two adults who, despite their aged and profound connection, are still searching for something. Through walks in the woods and the tranquility of a waterside cabin (beautifully shot by Bucky Illingworth), there’s an underlying sense of distance, portrayed both delicately and playfully by Cynthia Babak and Sid Ross. It manifests microscopically, almost telepathically, through passing glances and furrowed brows. And while ultimately the pair are united by a photograph, the lingering emotion of “Other Line” recalls Roane’s theme that hope and doubt are always vacillating. Interchangeable, in a sense—complex, but necessary for change. 

Nnux - Calles

By Phillipe Roberts

Making a grand entrance with elemental synths blasting, Mexico City’s Ana López Reyes illustrates the surreal reality of cultural erasure with brutal clarity on her latest single “Calles,” imagining a post-apocalyptic transformation that allows the suppressed past to resurface. Rattling with constantly shifting, fever-dream percussion and organized bursts of overdriven noise, Reyes’ newest experiment as Nnux, accompanied by beautifully futuristic video directed by visual artist Martha Maya (LVSTVCRV) and 3D by Intton Godelg, implodes oppressive futures by wreaking havoc on the present.

“Calles” emerged from a visit to El Templo Mayor in Mexico City, where pre-Spanish Aztec architecture still visible among the constructs it was never meant to survive brought the song’s core concepts to life. “I wrote about a ‘city made of water’ buried underneath the current city, because the ancient city had canals instead of streets, it was all water,” Reyes explains. “I wrote this song about a city on top of another city, which for me is a symbol of domination of a culture on top of the other. I wrote lyrics talking about how the fallen gods and the wounded temples are hiding beneath everything we see in the city, as a symbol of how oppression is present at all times.”

Nnux’s life-giving synthesizer and ecstatic vocal sampling-work, paired with the elongated harmonized crooning of her voice, lift that curtain with a bold palette of sounds that never settles into a mechanized pattern. The elements swim and drift within and around each other with a stunningly organic quality. There’s a distinct sense of almost breaking through to that tantalizing future that’s never quite satisfied, highlighting the post-apocalyptic yearning that Reyes so adeptly invokes. Combined with Martha’s meticulous and psychedelic visual mutations, Mexico City’s indigenous past springs to life with revolutionary lucidity. “When Martha and I started working on the video, she told me she was imagining that the song was talking not only about the ancient city, but the current city being eaten up by water in the future,” Reyes says, ”like seeing the symbols of our current city from a future where the city doesn’t exist anymore, or at least is not how we know it now.” Indeed, as the Google Maps image of the city spins and distorts, flooding the city with shimmering 3D water and ghostly projections of temples, vegetation, and towers of glimmering psychic energy, their shared lucid dream offers a glimpse of apocalyptic justice that strikes to the core.

Nnux’s debut album, Ciudad, is out now via Mexico City’s VAA.

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.

Half Shadow - House of Unknowing

By Charley Ruddell

The mysticism of Joshua Tree National Park precedes its serenity. Ghost stories of the desert are as abundant as black-tailed jackrabbits. Spirits emanate from the sand. It’s within these dunes where Jesse Carsten of Portland, Oregon’s Half Shadow wrote the sparse “House of Unknowing,” a single off his Dream Weather Its Electric Song released last October. 

Half Shadow’s video for “House of Unknowing” emphasizes the uncanny wonders of the human world. Through pictures of ancient sites of reverence and self-portrait cutouts, Carsten explores the historic venues of God and men using stop motion animation. Bongos rattle as Carsten manipulates the surrounding land and architecture, his deadpan croon unraveling heady epithets: “The seeds of silence bloom in the doorway, space expands to include everything.” The cryptic, folkloric poetry reads as the early conjurings of man in barren land with only the guiding light of mystic divinity, implied with a soft touch. Carsten’s voice doubles and triples with harmonies that echo as the anxious assertations of village settlers. 

Half Shadow’s underlying bohemia gives a more contemporary breath to an otherwise psychedelic dwelling in the pietism of yore. There’s moments of Mark Kozelek and Brigette Fontaine in the poetic cadences; the eastern influence of John Frusciante in his dark age ring in the drones. 

Carsten’s hands reach out to the last remains of human reverence on earth with an almost plea-like urgency. The landmarks return a steadfast silence, and man is once again left pondering into the void.