Memory keeper. Mostly music and movies, plus some series and video games. Obscure darkness meets pop culture glow.
It’s electronic music with tribal and psychedelic sounds. I could call it quirky downtempo, so I guess that’s what we have leftfield for. Interestingly it reminds me of the time when I discovered the Afro-Caribbean scene even if the stylistic expression is different.
Easy listening nu jazz. I rarely listen to this genre nowadays but it’s nice to come back to something that brings back memories of the Couch Records of dZihan & Kamien, the !K7 of Tosca, the Sonar Kollektiv of Jazzanova. Smells like sitting on a terrace on a summer night with warm breeze moving around the little paper umbrella pinned to a slice of lemon sitting on the top of a gin tonic and having no problems at all in the world.
I remember travelling to Vienna, Austria with a group of music journalist to report from a concert and during the night ride home talking about what’s hot in music, and there was this guy saying that nu jazz is the best music genre in the world and will stay forever. It was 2006. I wonder if he was right: looking at Skalpel underlines that it’s indeed here even if not topping the charts although it never have done so. Being the cornerstone music of the ruin pub revolution in Budapest was never a Billboard chart defining attribute for a genre I guess.
I remember a guy from Byron Bay, Australia who I quite randomly met at a coffee place in a small town in Hungary and who told me he had a vinyl and surf shop by the oceanside. His main reason to travel to Central Europe every year was to seek out new nu jazz records. That and pretty Hungarian girls. Anyhow, his favorite label was Couch Records, we got along quickly. He ended up leeching most of my music collection and went on to Vienna with a long list of new record ideas to collect for his shop.
Many people were crazy about nu jazz 15-20 years ago, it was an underground music movement that I never understood why stayed underground. Probably the easy listening tunes are too perfectly fit for mindless chilling on a beach and in popular use it just stuck to that lounge setting and noone really paid attention.
Another collection of beautifully sophisticated downtempo electronics from Four Tet. At certain points I tend to think this record loses some of the uniqueness that I attribute to Four Tet, but at the end of the day these songs are still so full that love and soul that I feel pouring out of the headphones while listening to them. And in that sense I distinctly feel that I’m still listening to a Four Tet album.
Love Salad plays all the notes that I’m looking for here, this is what sounds like Four Tet in 2020 for me: long minimal beat prologue, heartfilling melody, shows the past, represents the present. There can be Bibios and Apparats out there playing along similar strings but this guy still takes it home best for me. Also and maybe most importantly the upbeat airiness that I feel so well in this track is what defines his sound right now, and it’s quite a long journey from when As Serious As Your Life was my favorite track in 2003. The triphop heavy thoughts and blue moods are overshadowed (or overlit rather) by a breeze of fresh air and the ease of motion that enables a carefree dance. Even in a track called Something in the Sadness it’s just rolling and moving and jingling and it’s dropping the burden and not carrying it around. I love this Four Tet now.
Ranging between metalcore, melodic hardcore, and mathcore. It’s like a little boy brother of Meshuggah who is still listening to some Slipknot and post-hardcore emo stuff. This album is acutally from 2017, I just came across this now because of a new single (Metacortex), which is way more all-out industrial infused metal, but both their earlier and new songs are fantastic. I wonder, which will be the future direction once a new record is out.
Electronic ambient with some oriental instrumentation and spoken words, but the most powerful bit and its most unique voice is at the end in the last two tracks, which are totally detached fromt he arc of the album by the way. Actually I’d rather have those two separately as an EP and be happy with it.
Self Doubting Trip is a cinematic-atmospheric soundscape with a tight beat and tense tune, like when the big reveal of an exciting movie is just being unfolded. Then in Dekotur this continues with some chiming sounds and a whole lot of layers building up very slowly. This latter bit actually feels a lot like the beginning of Johnny Jewel’s Vapor, the two could nicely play after one another. (It’s like the end of Terminator and the beginning of the Matrix.)
Four mid-tempo techno tracks from four angles, very different approaches and sounds, what connects them is the trippy feeling of them all. First it’s bouncing back and forth between ears in stereo, then it’s a phaser modulating all over the place, later it takes an epic hallucinogenic journey ala The Orb with a spoken word meditation guide. A more chilled and easy to listen choice for an Ostgut Ton release.
Laidback, melodic lounge vibe and UK garage breakbeat rhythm. Great for relaxing and chilling, also for work.
Good punk rock with a proper average track length below three minutes. And just like any politically charged punk rock in 2020 it’s an all around anti-Trump statement. Coming from Anti-Flag who self-admittedly “have actively chosen to not attack presidents directly”. It’s another record in the long list of such albums spanning now across so many different genres.
It sounds like a classic industrial-EBM album from many years ago getting a remaster in 2020 with a techno heart. Sounds like an abandoned factory, heavy beats, greasy and steamy noises, distorted synths, slow marching rhythms. It is something not new but refreshing to hear. This could only possibly come from Berlin, has a cosy home at Ostgut Ton.
One of my go-to focus music for the past month. Cinematic ambient with chiming sounds, dark textures, monumental spaces, it’s quite a journey. I see the full movie playing in my mind. Also great for reading, especially something eerie, mystical, or set in outer space.