PREMIERE: Twig Twig - It's Late

Raquel Dalarossa

After two EPs, both released back in 2016, it's about time for a full-length debut from twig twig. Dropping on May 4th via OTHERFEELS records, Darkworld Gleaming will feature eight new tracks from the Brooklyn artist, but until then, we have the album's first single to tide us over.

"It's Late" is an experimental electro-pop earworm with a rough-around-the-edges sound that makes twig twig's music feel instantly intimate and warm. The expert songwriting and mixing should be no surprise to those who know the man behind the solo outfit, Zubin Hensler, given his past life on the stage and in the studio with acts like Sylvan Esso, Son Lux, and Fleet Foxes. Hensler crafts the song's beat using the sound of ticking gears that occasionally skip, as though they're playing from a broken music box. Paired with his soft falsetto, it lends an almost child-like innocence that has become something of his signature sound. But it's contrasted against lyrics like "Try although I try / There's no way to look away," hinting at a quiet chaos around the song.

Of the track, Hensler notes:

"I began working on 'It's Late' in the summer of 2016, it was the first thing I wrote for this new album. I hesitate to say it's a political song, but I think everything was political that summer...I was definitely feeling a big sense of impending doom and searching for a way to process that."

We're looking to hearing what else he has in store with Darkworld Gleaming. Until then, watch our Blue Room video with the artist and pre-order the album here.

PREMIERE: Le Couleur - Underage (In Flagranti Remix)

Phillipe Roberts

Some remixes take special care in disassembling a recording. Zeroing in on minute melodic inflections that even the original artist may not have heard, they surgically remove the vestigial waste and leave you with only the purest of grooves, a Platonic ideal of bodily manipulation. Some remixes display a kind of reverence, a deliberate hesitation in scraping the sacred whole for parts. Some remixes prefer a scalpel.

In Flagranti, on their remix of Le Couleur’s “Underage,” prefer a bulldozer. The laid-back, tropical lilt of the original is sacrificed entirely—its sophisticated exterior shattered, the duo up the tempo and double down on the beat to create a high-powered, intensely explosive release of the densely packed pop energy at its core. It’s hack and slash from the minute the track starts, all sharp edges, with stroboscopic bass arpeggiations fluttering about and those glimmering synths crashing like thick waves of neon across an expanded landscape. In Flagranti do tremendous work playing with dimension; the refurbished song breathes easier even as it constricts around a more jagged pulse.

By the time a vocal sample from the chorus begins to infiltrate the mix, you’ve lost track of time and place, marooned somewhere out on the dancefloor. But In Flagranti know how to reel in a listener with confidence, dangling out all sorts of sonic bait in the form of sensor sweep reverse hi-hats that bend around each other in a feedback loop, and sampled French vocals detuned into a long, slow drip of unintelligible encouragement. Carved up to within an inch of its life, “Underage” is a snapshot of controlled chaos.

REVIEW: Boy Harsher - Yr Body is Nothing

Laura Kerry

It’s no surprise that, according to an interview from last year, the personal and musical relationship that comprises Boy Harsher began with a church/warehouse space and the song “Bizarre Love Triangle.” Back in Savannah, Georgia, where the duo lived and went to film school before moving up to Northampton, Massachusetts, Jae Matthews had an aha moment watching Gus Muller dancing to New Order, and she began to woo him by sending him her prose writing, which he set to music, thus creating their first project together, Teen Dreamz.

Now, an EP and a brand new full-length later, Boy Harsher has perfected the formula whose seeds lie in that revelatory moment in Savannah. On Yr Body Is Nothing, they mix post-industrial warehouses with the dry pulse of ‘80s new wave, creating synth-driven music that infuses its dark, creeping tone with an invitation to move. The duo resembles the band that is central to its mythology, New Order, in both sound and tone—the way it couches songs about emotional states (primarily overwhelming anxiety) in unexpectedly danceable tunes.

Throughout Yr Body Is Nothing, Boy Harsher flickers back and forth between the immediacy of those emotional states and simple numbness. That plays out in the vocals, which are sometimes distant and monotone (“Cry Fest”), and at other times close and despairing (“Last Days”), or even soulful (“Save Me”). In some songs, including the title track, they start out far away but come into focus, escalating the sense of anxiety as it continues. While build-ups in songs typically lead to some sort of release, here they serve to increase the tension, making the unease more palpable. When “Suitor” escalates, it does so in the form of a frenetic bass and a cacophony of voices, including deep breaths; when the beat “drops” after this and structure returns, the dance beat sounds ominous.

On an album full of songs with titles such as “Save Me” and “Cry Fest,” it doesn’t come as too much of a shock that one of the most danceable tunes is called “Morphine.” With a jittery bass line, deep, pulsing beat, and bright organ synth, the instrumentals lead to one of the few real hooks, “She’s like morphine on my mind / She’s like morphine all the time.” More than this refrain, though, another line stands out among the anguished whisper of vocals: "I want to make it hurt more / I want to make you dance." This seems to get to the heart of the album, suggesting that pain and fear and anxiety can push you towards the kinds of music that make you bob your head or move your hips, and that bobbing your head or moving your hips can create a kind of welcome numbness. Through the drone of bass, beat loops, and synths on “Morphine,” “Big Bad John,” and “A Realness,” among other tracks, it’s possible to achieve a moment of catharsis.

REVIEW: Douchka - Together

Laura Kerry

French producer Douchka is the paragon of cool. A graphic designer in Rennes, he entered the electronic dance music scene a couple years ago, playing the Red Bull Music Academy in Tokyo in 2014 and performing at The Sound You Need and the after party for the Pitchfork Music Festival that same year. Releasing his debut EP in 2015 with Nowadays Records, where he remains on the roster, he joined a rich legacy of French house music ranging from legends such as Daft Punk, Justice, and Kavinsky to a current flock of musicians rising onto the international scene.

Despite his coolness, though, Douchka’s latest EP, Together, is undeniably warm. From start to finish, the music seems to radiate and crackle with a gentle and hospitable heat—a feeling made literal with a sample of a fireplace on “Together,” a muted song that glows with the soulful voice of fellow Rennes-based alt-R&B musician Clarens. Amid movement-inducing percussion and the standard synth bloops and blips of EDM, Douchka’s album is blanketed in softness.

Like the fireplace in the opening title track, much of his sound library comes from tangible things in the world, lending a tactile quality to his breed of electronic music. In addition to found sound and acoustic piano, Douchka is also a fan of the mellotron, a synthesizer popularized in the pre-digital era of rock music, which lends a dreamy, slightly muffled effect to the synth sounds throughout Together. This electro-mechanical keyboard isn’t the only relic in the album: a sample from the Temptations’ “Ain’t Too Proud To Beg” in “Don’t Leave” acknowledges old-fashioned soul amid its ultra-modern interpretation, and a grunted “uh,” sampled from or in the style of old-school rap fills a break in “You Know Bae.” EDM is a transient genre, its thrills meant to last as long as its audience remains on the dance floor, but Douchka props his music up on more durable materials.

Radiating alongside the warmth in the album is a sense of aesthetic confidence. Though unified by gentle washes of keys and synth, each song is fully developed and unique. The percussion in “Don’t Leave” sputters and sweeps underneath a manipulated sample from the Tempations’ sample; “Rosmeur” sets an otherworldly tone with cascading layers of mallet synths; “All Night Long” shuffles along towards seductive beat drops; “Infinity” features female singer Lucid who guides pulsing layers that add up to a pop-R&B feel; and “You Know Bae” samples from what I think is a country-tinged song by Steven Curtis Chapman, a Christian rocker, manipulating it into something that sounds like a female Jackson 5.

For both EDM enthusiasts and those more inclined towards other genres, Together offers itself up clearly and cozily. Whether accompanying the pulse of a club or the quiet of a sunny afternoon bedroom, Douchka’s music radiates from the speakers and spills into the space, investing it with a warm, bright glow.

REVIEW: L.A. Takedown

Kelly Kirwan

L.A. Takedown. 

It’s a title fitting of an '80s cult cinema classic, one with slow, rolling shots of five-lane highway urban expanses—filmed in orange and yellow hues with neon turquoise accents. If there was ever an album that paid homage to its home city, it’s this one. With L.A. Takedown, you don’t just listen to the waves of synth dipping between bass and elongated guitar strums (which build into high-rising riffs in their own right). You’re in it. Released via Ribbon Music, the eponymous new oeuvre stretches roughly forty minutes over the course of a single track. So, to speak in label terms, it’s more of a “suite” than an LP. It’s also paired with time-lapse videos of Los Angeles, filmed by various friends of those that have contributed to the L.A. Takedown sound (with Aaron M. Olson, of course, being its nucleus and creator). 

Currently streaming off their website, I first clicked into a pink-streaked SoCal sky, silhouettes of telephone wires and shaded leaves in the forefront. If you feel like I’m deviating from main topic, bear with me, as this “suite” is a careful balance of audio and visuals. One would be incomplete without the other. The fusion of film and music makes sense when you consider Olson’s background scoring short films for his friends, using the very pseudonym we have here (“L.A. Takedown” isn't just a nod to the sprawling, smoggy city, but also a wink at director Michael Mann). For his own project, Olson was inclined to make these images even more immersive, syncing LA sunsets in real time to his website. In fact, that lingering last hour of day is a central motif of this album. It mimics the waxing and waning of Olson’s music, which oscillates between deliberate, chugging beats and lazy, almost island-style interludes. 

One of the defining features of L.A. Takedown is its fluidity. With only one track (albeit one with a generous time stamp), Olson bridges the gap between lethargic, brooding tones and upbeat, jazzy ventures with such ease, you forget there was ever a difference at all. To reference the man himself, the album “segues from driving evocative thrusts to atmospheric suspensions of tension and style.” It’s a plunge into electronica and performance art as expansive and nuanced as the various neighborhoods of this well-known city. Through the swells and dips of instrumentals and synths (definitely inspired by Jan Hammer), you feel that magnetic, manifest-destiny pull to the west coast, and maybe even a little nostalgia for a good '80s heist movie (coiffed hair and all).

If you’re looking for something tangible after this flurry of landscape-meets-soundscape, L.A. Takedown’s 12-inch vinyl edition is out November 20th. Until then, click in to revel in Olson’s sound which straddles the old-school and experimental, finding a niche in that tension between opposites. And as for you? You’ll fall into daydreams of lead pedals and westward expansion. Olson’s out to convert us all.