Late night sessions as the clock ticks on towards dawn
Dreamtrak – Do Re Mi
Ungh! This track is almost vulgar. It’s so fun. I don’t know about you, but it makes me feel like I’m a 1000′ robot with a 300′ dick smashing planets on a light-speed journey through space.
Holy Other – Yr Love
Listening to this feels like everything, including yourself, is made of glass. It’s shimmering, cold, fragile and beautiful.
Burial – Shell Of Light
The vocal samples in this track make it feel like the same feeling is echoed from disparate sources – they crisscross, connect and add to each other. It feels like standing still and observing all of your thoughts about a feeling. It’s hard to pinpoint, but it’s strong, moving and full of heart.
Recondite – Levo
Recondite sounds like machines singing to each other about forests.
Mirror People – Kaleidoscope (Psychemagik remix)
Psychemagik’s wonderful remix of Mirror People’s Kaleidoscope makes me imagine skating across a frozen lake in the Tron universe.
Daniel Avery – Naive Response
This is ear and bod candy. The first time I heard it was live in an underground parking lot, and Avery was really observant and in tune with the room and the atmosphere – check him out if you get the chance! The vocal sample that starts looping at 3:04 feels as if it was designed to ping pong off every possible surface before bouncing around inside your skull. Dance-inducing!
DJ Rashad – Let U Know (feat. Spinn)
All the components in this track sound really disruptive individually – start-stop-chop-stuff. But it comes together so well. Like tripping up and closing your eyes and catching your breath, anticipating a painful fall, but instead opening your eyes and finding that you’re floating an inch above the ground.
The Internet feat. KAYTRANADA – Girl
Winding down’o’clock. This track is great: simple, sweet, direct and clever lyrics delivered with sensual cool by Syd with off-kilter production. It’s a slow-dance in a low gravity.
Boards Of Canada – Peacock Tail
Winding further down. Boards Of Canada have an image for the record this track is off – The Campfire Headphase. “… this character losing his mind at the campfire and compressing weeks of events into a few hours”. If there’s one track off the record that could work as an apt summary for entire thing, it’s this one. And the chord progression is just wonderful.
Windy & Carl – The Sun
This feels like being nostalgic for the present moment. Good night <3 span=””>
TICKTOCK ‘FAULT LINES’ EP (THE BIG OIL RECORDING COMPANY)
Following his debut release TCOLT, part-Danish and nominal part-English citizen Sebastian Zieler – aka ticktock – is unveiling Fault Lines, his second EP, on 4th December 2015 via The Big Oil Recording Company.
Zieler’s brand of austere electronica takes as many of its cues from sci-fi (from Blade Runner to Iain M. Banks’ Culture series) as it does from pop producers from Timbaland to Grimes. Fault Lines combines grainy samples with polished production – “nature and tech growing together,” as Zieler would have it.
So ‘optinoptoutoptnot’ opens the EP on an unexpectedly low-key fashion, with the startling order “Punch it in my thigh, carry me to sea,” and ‘Stripped of Reuptake Inhibitions’ marries a joyful almost calypso-like melody to politically charged lyrics. Meanwhile, lead single ‘Pastel Clouds’ turns the futuristic R&B sounds of FKA Twigs on its head, its hypnotic stop-start structure only emphasising the dark turns its lyric takes (“I love you waking me, breaking my skin…”).
But as ticktock would have it, there’s hope to be found within Fault Lines five songs. While not lyrically a concept album, Zieler has a very specific vision of the sonic universe in which the EP is set: “Where the last EP was all Ridley Walker, everything-has-fallen stuff, Fault Lines is a future that succeeded,” he explains of his motivations. “Machines think, minds are expanding – and at the same time, it’s all green and lush and in harmony with nature. It’s techno-optimistic sci-fi, really. Hopeful and longing fantasy.”
TICKTOCK ‘FAULT LINES’ EP THE BIG OIL RECORDING COMPANY. Out 4th DECEMBER 2015
