Hominid – Wind Chime
First up tonight, this is from Play Fighting, the new EP by Hominid (Benny Jennings), an artist based in Te Whanganui a Tara, NZ. “Wind Chime” marries brick and glass — the fuzz of a blown speaker cabinet reverberating against an untreated room sits beneath glittering crystal tones. These give way to a brief moment of clarinet-driven serenity, and then a swift return of windchimes against the clang of industry. The rest of the EP is similarly concerned with fusing disparate elements into something greater than the sum of its parts. Very worth a listen. Grab the EP on bandcamp or find it for streaming wherever you do that sort of thing.
Hominid – “Wind Chime”
Hominid – “Moon Weight”
SUUNCAAT – bite
Next up is a track for dancing on cement floors. SUUNCAAT — real name Fanny Brouillard, an artist from Montreal — delivers detached near-whisper vocals atop sludgy donks, digital squelch, and hoover stabs. Where her previous work sat more in the realm of effervescent hyperpop (though that genre name turns out to have been re-coined for the modern era by an in-house Spotify curator, so let’s not use it), this song is decidedly more bloodshot. I came for the beat not beam tourisms, she murmurs; It’s about going to the club solo, and attempting to become invisible amidst the crowd, avoiding the social elements and engaging only the music. That used to be one of my favorite activities, and the music captures it vividly. Grab this on bandcamp or find it for streaming all over.
SUUNCAAT – “bite”
sofiee – .pryr
Finally this evening is a song that reminds me of that moment in the early aughts when indie artists all seemed to decide to buy korgs and samplers, and the result was this endearing breed of butchered, twee indietronica chaos. Though definitely drawing on the legacy of that era, this track from sofiee (Sofie Clarke) is a bit more refined than were most of the products of that time, probably owing to her competency as a producer. She explains that the song is an attempt to draw a thread between her own experience navigating psychosis and the group-dissociation we’re all experiencing in the face of crumbling political systems, the loss of objective measures of reality, and internet-driven apathy. Instead, the song suggests we should seek to recapture our own innocence, embracing “radical earnestness,” to ward off the “collapse of meaning.” I absolutely endorse this approach; nothing feels more like a stab in the heart than watching my young daughter slowly develop self-conciousness. I would give my left arm if it meant she could maintain her innate sense of confident playfulness forever, and remain unafraid of showing the world every side of her mind without compromise. No bandcamp for this song unfortunately, but sofiee was kind enough to let me share the mp3 with your below, and you can also find it for streaming.
sofiee – “.pryr”