Moon Mullins - Candlewood Lake

By Charley Ruddell

Remember that one summer? That one beautiful day at your uncle’s lake house where you went tubing and ate chicken fingers from a local food shack? And you felt the sublime connection of friendship enveloped by the summer sun? Do you remember that? Can you even? 

While it seems impossible to recall anything preceding March 2020, New York experimental producer Sean Mullins, also known as Moon Mullins, aims to jog your memory with “Candlewood Lake,” the lead single from his upcoming album Goes Swimming, out via Atlantic Rhythms April 10. Accompanied by a charming stop-motion collage video by Renata Zeiguer, Mullins’ instrumental morceau feels warmly reminiscent, like unearthing a dusty box of old photos from the attic, but with the soft, numbing touch of nostalgic recollection: will there ever be times as joyous and pure as these? 

Behind the sub-aquatic synths and casio claves in “Candlewood Lake”—sounds that feel imported from a Harvest Moon soundtrack—is a series of lolling, yet distinguished harmonic movements that progress at a stroll. Paired with the lofi affability of Mullins’ bedroom production, “Candlewood Lake” yields a baroquian experiment as delightful and obscure as Arthur Russell at his most keyboard-iest. 

Parallel to the video for Ian Davis: Rock Band’s “Who You Say You Are,” Zeiguer uses vintage cut out photos and earnest stop-motion techniques to tell a story. Inspired by Mullins’ summer trips to Candlewood Lake in Connecticut as a child, Zeiguer features a group of lizards to paint the pictures—deck chair lounging, boat rides and frozen drinks, the pristine blue sky overlooking rolling hills. The beauty of the song and video lies in their simplicity; memories so fond and precious never need to be overstated for others to relate.

Year of Glad - Aquatic Ruin

By Charley Ruddell

We are living in an age of environmental collapse–the Anthropocene–the latest ecological chapter in Earth’s history, in which humans have irrevocably impacted every major ecosystem. We stare into the ruins with the smoke of the human machine billowing from our backs.

As the sound dwindles from Montreal experimental folk group Year of Glad’s newest project “Aquatic Ruin,” a chorus of frogs chirp into the faded black. Lines of text appear above a digitized shot of a campfire: “In matters of life and death, there are breaks that define a before and an after. The Anthropocene is a break; we are in the after.” It’s a plea for restoration while extinction lurks within a sniper’s range.

Created and developed at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, the gorgeously haunting video for “Aquatic Ruin” follows a horse-headed “hooded druid” through a digitally contorted dystopia. Creators A.P. Bergeron, Nicolas Bergeron, and Bucky Illingworth draw on the tension and trepidation in the song’s opening act, as A.P. rasps with a menacing scorn: “Heed my word / You pothead / It’s an awful game / Aquatic Ruin.” Low synths and static noise hum like an aftershock; drums rattle and churn with an impending eruption. The druid stands perched on the rock cliffs above bleached tides, saturated, distorted, and confined to the simulation against its own volition. “What an awful game,” Bergeron wails with despair as noise swirls around his voice like debris in a tornado.

Then, the vision breaks. The focus shifts, the warped portal closes. Reality emerges. Pristine images of water, earth, and sky feel like a consolation following the turbulence. We see the cloaked figure staring off into the crystal waters of a freshwater lake as the music softens. A single cello whinnies in the peeper’s cadence. “Lead the way,” Bergeron murmurs, his breath trailing the last word like a crisp zephyr.

“Aquatic Ruin” raises the alarm that the vision of our own reality is reversing. What once began as pristine and beautiful has devolved into distortion. We are the druids stuck in the simulation. We are in the after.

ESHOVO - ok u mad

By Phillipe Roberts

Anger doesn’t need to be righteous to be real or worth hearing. As the oppressive foundations of the good old USA crumble beneath us a bit more visibly these days, sharing our deepest, most visceral emotions shouldn’t require justification. Sometimes, “u mad” is all the recognition you need, and who better to unpack the boundlessness of anger than PG County label-dodger ESHOVO? 

A frequent collaborator of ThrdCoast favorite Tony Kill, ESHOVO makes space in the cracks between genres, blending noise, cinematic atmosphere, and off-the-wall sampling across a universe of albums and singles that stretch back to 2013. He truly takes off on his 2018 project Listening or Of Empathy and Echo, where his sprawling sensibilities collide for an expedition into a loud mind that’s tired of existing in silence.

“Ok u mad,” the album’s second track, evolved gradually from a rant over a hastily-assembled instrumental, to the self-assured verbal sparring that rumbles out of your speakers. “Before actually writing to it, I layered a recording of myself speaking for a few minutes on the track,” ESHOVO explained, “I was saying something about perceptions, self and external. After writing it, I didn’t touch it for a few months, and when I got in the studio it was like I was right back in the shit, in a good way. That's where everything else came out.” 

That refined stream-of-consciousness, punctuated by waves of twinkling synth delays and an arsenal of clattering percussion, throws punches against being misread and misrepresented, and keeps the focus on observation. “Watch my words and keep ya eye open,” he says, bobbing and weaving through the beat with glee.

The song’s video, which arrives today on ThrdCoast, follows ESHOVO as he dances, plays basketball, and wanders through tall fields on grainy video. Directed by fellow PG County artist R. Treshawn Williamson, the video’s sketch-like quality brings out the track’s not-so-hidden vulnerability incredibly well, capturing both the isolation and joy that comes from feeling that anger deeply and fully. The video’s treatment of lyrics about staying cool and validating aggressive emotions is particularly effective, juxtaposing these lines against two people slap-boxing from a skewed angle, just out of frame. 

Playing with that tension between emotion and expression is key to their collaboration. “Emotions are really complex, and letting out your aggression is even more so. It’s just something really sublime about feeling what you need to feel,” Williamson says, “I feel like, for us, coming from where we come from, slap boxing is the most controlled form of aggression I’ve ever seen. But at the same time, you can only slap box so long before it gets actually real. That teetering point with aggression, that’s exactly what getting mad is about. When you juxtapose things together, like the slap box does, there’s only a certain window of time before it becomes something entirely different."

Check out the song’s video now and dip into ESHOVO’s discography at his Bandcamp page.

Luka - Lost Today/Found Tomorrow

By Charley Ruddell

Finding peace in uncertainty is a boundless struggle, but the rewards are eternally fulfilling. 

Rotterdam-based singer/songwriter Lisa Lukaszczyk, otherwise known as Luka, is enlightened by this. On “Lost Today/Found Tomorrow,” her debut single with Dutch indie label Snowstar Records, Luka presents acceptance with an electro-pop grace, summoning the ethereal spirit and pop drama found in artists like Imogen Heap and Bon Iver. The song’s accompanying video, directed by Charlene van Kasteren, captures this grace by using space to depict beauty found in the surrounding nothingness.

“Lost Today/Found Tomorrow” is a guided meditation in embracing an inevitable end. “What was lost today / Will be found tomorrow,” Luka sings with poise in a swirling cavity of soft synth pads as a slow zoom looms, her face wrapped in a hazy light emanating from the faded curtains behind her. She moves steadily, subtly. Like a tibetan singing bowl or a Koshi chime, the gentle repetition of the synth knells feel like anchors within the song’s otherwise untethered transcendence. “I’ve been gone for days / But I count on tomorrow,” she poses; it’s a conjuring of the soul in the steps of acceptance, peeling away the brittle layers of skin hardened by humanity to revel in the singular beat of a pulse.

Van Kasteren’s vision is stark, but brimming with bliss in every corner of each frame, one that uses the void of space to capture how life extends beyond human sentience. You can feel the crisp air in the barren landscapes, you can smell the dust settling among the furniture in the quiet house. As the story progresses, Luka’s movements, though delicate and smooth, become swifter and more exaggerated. These moments add up to a greater whole, unfolding in a euphoric surrender. Luka, lying flat, feet dangling, slowly lifts into the sky, raptured by the great uncertainty of what lies beyond existence, arcadian and whole. 

Panther Hollow - Atoms in the Universe

By Phillipe Roberts

Guitar-backed meditations on insignificance tend to accumulate in locations with a little bit of breathing room–where folks live close enough to taste forest-cleansed air, feel the spray of the ocean, or gaze out into the eerie desert night with a sense of wonder and enough wisdom to quench your ego before the majesty of “empty” space. Perhaps it’s the daily grind of charming and clawing your way to the top in the urban world, or the grandiose monuments to human exceptionalism that cities pretend to be, but within these walls, it’s be big or go home.

Well light pollution be damned; Queens’ Panther Hollow are out here, squinting through a telescope for a taste of that sweet, sweet insignificance on their track “Atoms in the Universe.” The opening and title track for an EP released a year ago today, the song balances gentle folk finger-picking and phaser-enhanced psychedelic rock bombast as it tumbles through a window-gazing reverie into a more innocent time “when we were atoms in the universe / falling down.” Led by Bernardo Ochoa’s telephone-effected vocals and meandering guitar, Panther Hollow paints an ambiguous scene that manages to feel immediately emotionally familiar. From the gentle romance of “when you're right beside me, no one contains us / but our clothes” to the dorm-room psychedelic come-down poetry that “your room is an island / where we are stranded” calls to mind (maybe just mine?), Panther Hollow comes equipped with the lyrical artillery to match their own formidable instrumental fireworks.

The song premieres today on ThrdCoast with a brand new music video. The brilliantly salvaged remains of an animation project, the melted studio playthrough of the song shows off the constellation of collaborations behind Panther Hollow. “This whole process definitely took longer than I intended,” explains Ochoa. “At the time I was planning on organizing a visual EP, and I initially wanted to animate all four songs. But after we released the audio in February, I realized that publishing and moving on was more important to me than finalizing my initial vision. So what's left is these amazing videos shot by Camille Petricola and animated by Joyce Zhao and Dan Criblez. It wasn't what I thought it would be when I first started conceptualizing the EP, but I'm super happy with the work that came out of it.”

Stream the full Atoms in the Universe EP at the band’s Bandcamp page.