A little Icelandic darkwave in honor of the upcoming solstice, perhaps?
Á sólstöðum í svartnætti tunglið geislum grætur
Vetrarnótt; við erum þínar sönnu svörtu dætur
Winter solstice in the black night
the moon cries its beams
Winter night; we are your true dark daughters
Of course you may have some, my darkling dearies. Enjoy.
NOTE: It seems that iOS dislikes most audio files. I have replaced the audio file with one coded in .MP3, so let me know if there are still issues on your platform of choice.
Happy Sunday evening (or Monday morning) to you all.
Quite possibly against my best interests considering that I am coming out a bit with a truly frightening prospect for anyone who knows: a full song recording that I’ve been working on with some bloke I know named Michael singing. He’s not the best singer out there, but hopefully his contribution to this composition was at least serviceable.
As you know, when time permits, I’ve been working on trying to work on getting a few music snippets out that play with a modified 80s-era post-punk sound influenced primarily by early Cure and Joy Division, with hints of all of the other bands from that era to more modern bands like The Eden House and Kælan Mikla. More than just playing around with sound, I felt I should finally commit to making a full song.
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One of the things I like to do to break up the creative cycle is to noodle around with music. As some of you may recall, I’ve played music in several different genres on a number of different instruments — bass, keys, guitar, 12-string guitar, mandola, drums/percussion (short-lived at the throne), and generally anything that comes my way (tabletops, trash percussion, violin bow on electric bass, vocal experimentation, etc.).
Below is the product of my noodling around last night.
(more…)Here’s another of my stumble-on bands while listening to music discovery nominally inspired by a resurgence of 1980’s-era post punk and bands like Kælan Mikla, Mochat Doma, as in addition to older bands such as Dead Can Dance.
Another criteria for inclusion is a preference for bands that use a language other than English for their songs, although that is not an absolute requirement. I am more interested in discovering music that I would not have otherwise encountered save for going where the labyrinth leads me.
If you want to listen to other bands that I’ve found, you can follow my YouTube station (all ad revenue goes to the evil overlords, not me), or hit play in the embed at the bottom of this post.
I did not expect it to take me to Аметистовые Вены (translation: Amethyst Veins), a Russian band (specifically, from Naberezhnye Chelny) that popped up in my feed.
Listening to some of the post-punk/darkwave/synthwave music I’ve been listening to these past few weeks has inspired me not only to pick up the bass once again, but to get back to playing around with some songwriting and DAW recording as well. [DAW = digital audio workshop, a home studio option for the modern era].
As I was discussing this direction in comments with Chris, I began to think that it might be interesting to at least some of you to share with folks the general thought process and progression of how some of us — or at least I do — get about to writing music.
(more…)When I first saw the the Berlin-based band on the upcoming playlist, “Pink Turns Blue”, I almost outright dismissed them. The name evoked for me a sound other than what I thought I was looking for because it reminded me of the song “Pink Turns to Blue” on Hüsker Dü’s 1984 seminal album, Zen Arcade. I figured that if a band had intentionally named themselves after a hardcore band from my youth, they would probably play hardcore punk as well, which is not the music I was looking to discover at this time. If the name shared an accidental (or esoteric) relationship, it still seemed like an odd name to choose for darkwave. But, following my commitment to discovery via music “radio” I gave them a whirl anyway, figuring that I could skip the song part way through if it turned out not to be the genre I was looking for.
I’m glad I didn’t instant-skip.
How I have never managed to hear of Pink Turns Blue is a bit surprising to me. I’ve found plenty of indie bands over the years that were not easy discoveries to be made back in the 80s and 90s. A German band playing a darkwave, guitar-based sound during my old-school goth days falling off my radar? That seems almost criminal.
The band was formed in 1985 and, yes folks, they named themselves after that aforementioned song (which I’ve included on my YouTube playlist for this series, if you are curious). The song that I heard first heard was “Your Master is Calling”, but it is one of those songs from the 80s that, while it caught my attention, also followed the habit common to the period of overstaying its welcome at over seven minutes, so I elected to share a different song that still captures the vibes of the band but is of a shorter duration.
This is not like the synth-oriented sounds of the genre, but has more of a 3-piece sound: guitar, bass and drums. Some people would likely class the band as more gothic or more straight indie rock, but I can heard some of the precursor sounds in the band’s songs that feel very borrowed from earlier acts like Joy Division while avoiding some of the more Velvet Underground sound of Sisters of Mercy.
If you listen, you’ll have to let me know what you think of this discovery in the comments below.
Seeing as now that I have more time to actually get on with doing actual writing instead of kvetching about bugs in my commenting system, I plan to fall into a bit more of a rhythm with this series of posts. The current plan is to post the “Towards the Within” series of musical discoveries on Wednesdays and Saturdays each week.
My current flavor of discovery is focused on trying to find international artists who record darkwave/coldwave/post-punk, or feel as if they might be inspired by that sound. As I listened, I started marking down bands and songs that caught my attention. I always have a handful other than my twice-weekly pick to choose from to write about. Lucky for me, I have been managing to find standout songs new to me that grab me and so that I give it a good couple of listens.
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As I described in my last post for this series, Towards the Within, I have decided to do a bit of discovery when it comes to music and report back what I found on that adventure. Briefly: I seeded a “radio station” on YouTube Music with several darkwave and experimental folk bands, set it at high discovery and high artist variety. I tried to give preference in my “seed” to non-English-speaking artists to drive the algorithm in that direction. And then, I set off a darkened path and into the labyrinthine woods I had just created.
Did I find something interesting in the deep woods? Or did the monsters eat me?
(more…)One of many plans I have with migrating from my previous site to this new site, one was to begin a musical odyssey of sorts that I would call Towards the Within. The focus of this series is introduce myself to entirely new musical experiences. I hope to encounter new sounds and bands during my experiment. As I do so, I will share the more interesting discoveries with you in a series of posts.
I deciding that I wanted to avoid having too heavy of a hand in determining the direction of my musical exploration. Instead, I would only determine the trailhead at which I would enter a new wilderness. After which, I would let the algorithms of the internet guide me. Part of those initial guardrails would be set based on my mood of the month.
This month, my mood happens to be international music mixed with non-english darkwave. I added a dash of some traditional influences as well to drive the music in a folksy direction. YouTube’s has a “Create a Radio Station” feature where you can set up some basic parameters, then seed it with an artist list. Doing just that, I set the radio to high artist variety with a high discovery ratio.
And now I’ll wait to see what there is to see as I wander into the wilds…
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