Marooned In A Rangoon Fever Dream

I only heard about A Postcard From Rangoon Island last week - Matt Kennedy (Kitchen's Floor) mentioned The Rangoons' release in passing as one of the Australian offerings he had recently been getting into. And it is great - a four-track cassette of skewed pop weirdness featuring Ela Stiles (Bushwalking, Songs), Emma Ramsay (Holy Balm) and Jay Cruikshank (Home Run). It's his spoken word diatribes that at first seem the odd thing out here - a rambling pastiche of stream-of-consciousness whimsy and laconic barbs that belie a truly dark solipsistic worldview, covering topics such as sharks, shotguns, maniacal restauranteurs and tropical relaxation anxieties...I think. It is all delivered in such a throwaway fashion that it comes off as gleefully apathetic, even borderline sociopathic. Then of course there is the music - flutes, guitars that swing from crystalline chime to blood-encrusted fuzz, tippling drums that threaten to implode in a confusion of poorly-constructed kitware, painful ineptitude and devilish indifference. It all marries up into a exotic Petri dish of sonic equatorial disease, the hallucinations hovering before, or even in, the eyeballs, delirious before death - a deliciously dishevelled way to shuffle away. Grab this incredibly infectious fever dream through Paradise Daily here.

Circular Songs

(Song by Dave Kan)

This time last week Sonic Masala combined with Bedroom Suck Records to present the first solo show in Brisbane for Ela Stiles (Songs, Bushwalking) - the above photo is from that performance. Stiles has an incredible presence which comes down to her haunting, commanding voice. It filled out the venue (formerly The Healer, currently Electric Playground, soon to be The Brightside) and, although she was accompanied with her guitar for most songs, it was this that marked the performance as something special.

This is ever more evident from the genetics of her debut solo record, out soon on Bedroom Suck. The album is an a cappela tour de force, drawing together her looped voice to become a haunting choral mantra, taking in Eastern stylings and drone aesthetics to form a soundscape of undulating melodicism, the soundtrack of a atmospheric meditation into the Self, channelling the losses of the world. The first half of the record is filled with songs that barely reach one minute in length (in fact only two, 'kumbh Mela' and 'Untitled Man', of the six tracks on the A side reach that milestone); whilst the B side is a ten minute drone transition based solely, again, on Stiles' voice, the sound of howling wind nearby immediately evoking a frozen arctic tundra, lost in the whiteout. It's a bewitching release from a woman who continue to beguile with each successive musical experimentation.

Pre-order Ela Stiles here.

Ela Falls Apart To Come Back Together

You might be familiar with Ela Stiles from her work alongside Max Doyle in Songs; you may be familiar with Ela Stiles from her Bushwalking sojourns. Well soon you will be familiar with Ela Stiles for being Ela Stiles, as she prepares to release her debut solo album on Bedroom Suck Records in May. If 'Kumbh Mela' is anything to go by, expect a album that's a rich tapestry of cavernous harmonics, the melodies weaving in and out of consciousness, Stiles' voice warbling like a spinning top, strong within its centrifugal force yet slightly quivering, wavering, threatening to topple over - yet the longer it hovers, the stronger it intrinsically becomes. Think Grouper without the sonic squalls or even the latter day electronic maladies - in fact, with no instrumentation at all. If you ever read Little Star by John Ajvide Lindqvist, then you might be with me when I picture the protagonist Theres, her voice pure yet spectral, hypnotic, dangerous.

Intriguing stuff - especially as most of the record will be in the same vein albeit for one voice-based drone composition that'll comprise one whole side of the album. I cannot wait to hear that track.

Just Vaguely Running

I mentioned in a recent post about Brisbane band Cobwebbs that it pisses me off when people assume that something is cool just because it is inaccessible. I know people who say they like things because they are oblique, obtuse, confrontational, indecipherable, and therein lies the attraction - most people will not attempt to penetrated such barriers, so the people who DO attempt it believe these artists must be geniuses. It may be true for some, but in most cases - such as the Vice review of Cobwebbs' All Around - it's utter bullshit. And totally untrue anyway - I saw a dude buy a copy from Rockinghorse Records on Saturday (I was buying Goat, Natural Child and The Animals LPs, just in case you were wondering).

I stumbled across this Impose article about Chicago band Running. Now, judging them on that name along, they (like Sydney band Songs) are very difficult to look for on Google. The writer of the article made it sound harder to hunt this band down than it truly was. as they had a album on Permanent Records and another on Captcha that came out last year. In fact, back in 2010 we wrote about that Permanent Records album right here. This isn't a "beat them to the pulse" kinda deal, I just don't like people immediately assuming that the inaccessibility of information on the Internet about something or someone means they are necessarily any good, or that they are even hiding from the perceived limelight.

Maybe they just don't own a computer.

That said, the Impose article isn't bad, and Running is fucking awesome, plus they are launching a new album on Castle Face that I believe could be one of the best records of 2013. Vaguely Ethnic is its name, and if 'Controversial PR' is anything to go buy, we are in for some serrated, bare-arse noisemongering, made by drunken degenerates in checked shirts, with bruised kidneys. The trio have going sans vocals on this one, which heightens the Pissed Jeans comparison sonically - breakneck breaking of necks are likely to ensue. 

Vaguely Ethnic isn't out for a couple months yet, but rest assured, expect to hear more about this release as it comes to hand. It will be a completely amazing physical package also - they take great care in their aesthetic, something akin to Double Dagger in that respect, which only helps to heighten the anticipation. I imagine they frequent The Empty Bottle too - and if you live in Chicago and DON'T frequent the Empty Bottle, we don't know each other anymore.