Sun Araw: New Album, French Video, Classic Mix

Posted on Posted in Inter-Dimensional Music, VisualsTagged , , , Leave a comment

http://official.fm/tracks/kplL?artwork=1&tracklist=1&width=500&height=200&artwork_left=1&skin_bg=000000&skin_fg=FFFFFF

Sun Araw’s hour-long mix of screwed and chopped preachers, time-stretched blues, conga-speckled acid rock and fractal R&B — is that Soul II Soul stuck back there in the resinous bass trap? — is about as disorienting and groove-heavy as you might expect. Listen above or give your email address to Secret Thirteen for a download. Lotta rad-looking mixes over there at their site. (via random shit)

Cameron and company’s box-fresh new album, The Inner Treaty, dropped earlier this week on Drag City and we’re still trying to get our heads around it. Kinda minimal for these dudes, mellow keys, on some real laid back shit that only fully manifests once you’ve made the rounds a couple times. Pop a top, seek guidance from the plant mind via the inebriation vector of your choosing and contemplate the spaces in between.

And finally, here’s the full Sun Araw Band jamming Ancient Romans‘ centerpiece “Impluvium” in Paris in June, 2012.

Moebius’ Sra: New Translation

Posted on Posted in VisualsTagged , , , , 2 Comments

Oh man … Moebius, aka Jean Giraud. If you don’t know already …

The French graphic novelist and comics legend was like a pervy psychedelic Zelig: He launched the French predecessor of trippy “mature audiences only” comics mag Heavy Metal, Métal Hurlant. Collaborated with Jodorowsky and Michael Moorcock. Did storyboards for Alien, Tron, Willow, The Fifth Element and on and on. His best work — see the Arzach series for starters, or my personal favorite, his “Crystal Portfolio” — is sort of like all the high desert psychedelia parts of Star Wars minus George Lucas’ bummer-nerd trip, or maybe Frank Herbert’s Dune if he’d gone native down in Mexico.

Plus boobs. Dude often slipped into deeply trippy, taboo-violating sexual illustrations in the pages of Métal Hurlant. He also created strange, violent Western comics featuring a character named Lieutenant Blueberry, stories that hold their own in the Peckinpah/Leone/El Topo universe of surreal, brutalist cowboy mythology.

Much of his best work was brought to America by Marvel’s edgy Epic imprint in the late ’80s, and while currently out-of-print these volumes are widely circulated by well-meaning preservationists online. Continue reading “Moebius’ Sra: New Translation” →

“the synthetic veneer of exoticism as pushed air captured by oscillating ribbons”

Posted on Posted in Inter-Dimensional Music, VisualsTagged , , , Leave a comment

The intrepid cowboy sound-voyager was inverted, forging a synthesis with the Ecstatic Other; digested exotic instrumentation fuel the tepid journeys of a sampler tourist. Instead of leaning heavily on the proverbial Malian time signature’s sublime truth, Instrumental Tourist pictures the synthetic veneer of exoticism as pushed air captured by oscillating ribbons. (via Self-Titled) 

“Uptown Psychedelia”, a glimpse of the new Instrumental Tourist album coming on November 20 from Tim Hecker & ONP. Yes, please.

New Old Boards of Canada, Machinedrum Restoration

Posted on Posted in Inter-Dimensional Music, VideoTagged , , Leave a comment

Machinedrum has taken an unreleased AUD-sourced track from Boards of Canada’s performance at Warp’s 10th Anniversary show — that’s the original low-fidelity recording via YouTube up top there — and …

Since I am a huge nerd I decided to take this bootleg recording and re-produce it for fun. Using the recording I laid new drums over the existing drum patterns (almost 100% accurate to original), replayed some synth parts and the bassline. The only thing I didn’t try to re-create was the original vocoder parts and some random samples so I used the original bootleg recording for that. I was tempted to make a shorter 4-5 minute version but I figured I should preserve the original piece in its intended length.

It is excellent. Get the whole story at Self-Titled.

Underwater Idylls

Posted on Posted in VideoTagged , , , , Leave a comment

Regular listeners of Inter-Dimensional Music will be familiar with the music of Lieven Martens, a Belgian fellow who records under the name Dolphins into the Future. His 2009 album … On Seafaring Isolation now canonized in the expanding genre of Cetacean mind-jams. It’s just been reissued on the Fonal label, and as we were skimming through the press release the closing line caught our attention:

But if Martens taps into a pool of tropical references (as he undoubtedly does), such influences are relayed from an unashamedly outside perspective – a deliberate refraction of nature, a re-imagined idyll, that shows him to be as close in spirit to the Romantics, or perhaps even filmmaker Jean Painlevé’s surreal take on aquatic life.

A few keystrokes later and we were lost in the surreal “scientific-poetic cinema” of Painlevé’s films on YouTube. Two of our favorites from the French anarcho-biologist are below: The Love Life of the Octopus (1967), scored by Pierre Henry, and Sea Urchins (1954) with original music by Yo La Tengo from the eight-film cycle they scored as part of Science is Fiction, a 3-disc survey of Painlevé’s films from Criterion.

Vintage Campground Footage with Thoughts on Air

Posted on Posted in Inter-Dimensional Music, VisualsTagged , Leave a comment

Two videos from ID Music fave Thoughts on Air, the ethereal Earth-psych project of Hamilton, CA-based Scott Johnson aka Scott Cloud. Waves of obfuscated, pitch-shifting guitar melody echo all around as corn cooks on an idyllic ’50s campfire. The second video is somewhat more bewildering, as it features ’50s-era car crashes over ToA’s mellow drones. (via ToA)