Tone Ranger – Confluence
Tone Ranger (Alex Simon) is an artist from Santa Fe, NM who’s current with a new album, Confluence. My sister lived for years in Taos, and this record does really crystalize many of my experiences out there. As Simon’s pseudonym reflects, it’s absolutely still the Wild West. And it’s not just the landscape; it’s impressively thin in terms of population density, and the stark divide between wealth and poverty reminds me of old Westerns where everyone in town is suffering except the evil Mayor/local oil baron. But northern New Mexico is also a place that inspires psychedelia in an almost primordial way. That is partly the landscape itself, and the people the high desert has attracted for generations. Simon’s music no doubt reflects this. Confluence is quintessential modern desert music; it’s mostly ambient and produced mostly electronically–but also feels authentic in its reverence of the region’s musical history. There’s a certain clear-eyed quality about most of the album that makes it feel thoughtful and personal, but with enough tongue-in-cheek self-referentialism so it avoids becoming pretentious or excessively serious. Really refreshing. Grab the album on bandcamp or find it for streaming.
Tone Ranger – “Elk”
Tone Ranger – “Channel” ft. Elena Shelton
Tone Ranger – “Wonder”
alcnoir – another picture
There was a period (maybe still) where people–myself included–were using the term “post-dubstep” largely to describe music inspired by Burial. Now I think the operative popular term I see is “future garage.” Neither of these really gets at the point. I’ve written about this before, but a more accurate term would simply be “post-Burial,” as macabre as that sounds out-of-context. Why not say it like it is: the guy synthesized (hah) the feelings of a generation of young urbanites, inviting them to romanticize the dystopian qualities of their undermaintained post-industrial cities. A lot of these kinds of tributes miss the aesthetic point, but some come from artists with their own clarity of vision, just borrowing a style or two for exercise’s sake. The latter is the case for alcnoir (Alessandro Pio Caruso), an Italian artist who quite literally describes his music as “for polluted cities.” He sent this pair of tracks recently; the first is a heartrending, knives-clattering take on the post-Burial sound; the second is just as dystopian but rhythmically somewhere closer to the kind of dubby downtempo you might hear on a Lorn record. Both of these are available on bandcamp, along with so much more work–alcnoir is prolific. You can also find his catalog on streaming services.
alcnoir – “another picture”
alcnoir – “i felt seen”
Half-Ass Astronaut – I Like Pretty Things
Speaking of music written in homage: I’ve frequently written about music written in direct admiration of late 90s and early aughts-era Warp artists. With the likely imminent return of Boards of Canada, we’re sure to see a new wave of that soon. I’m not mad at it–we all pay tribute to what we love in one way or another, and those tributes only really represent our own feelings, ultimately divorced in all real terms from the subject they may honor. Neil Burkdoll, an American living in Germany, who makes music under the name Half-Ass Astronaut is paying that sort of tribute. After not recording music since the late nineties, he’s current with a charming album that doesn’t shy away from its influences. It’s his alone, but there’s no mistaking who he reveres; nothing wrong with that. I Like Pretty Things is out on bandcamp or for streaming, and Burkdoll was kind enough to let me share with you a couple of the songs below.
Half-Ass Astronaut – “Aye Eye”
Half-Ass Astronaut – “Loom”