Darkstar - Civic Jams Remixes - VINYL LP

Paradessence, Visible Cloaks' third full length, is a work of emergence and illusion. The album's fourteen songs shift, heave, and shimmer against a faintly luminous backdrop of night, a cavernous space shaped by sparse hyperreal representations of the natural world. The arrangements are simultaneously grandiose and fragile, both an inversion and culmination of what came before and as adventurous as anything they've produced so far.Since transforming from Cloaks to Visible Cloaks in 2014, Spencer Doran and Ryan Carlile have mapped a complex matrix of oppositional concepts organic and artificial, chance and deliberate, authentic and replicated. The album title itself, drawn from author Alex Shakar's satirical portmanteau of InchparadoxicalInch and Inchessence,Inch reflects these tensions directly the paradessence of consumer product is the Inchschismatic coreInch that gives rise to it's desirability (in Shakar's example, coffee is desired because it is both relaxing and stimulating simultaneously). The balancing act of Paradessence brings these strains into greater urgency as life in the 21st century is reordered by these same tensions.Silence is an important character in Paradessence, felt not only in the sculpting of sound but in the pressure it exerts on everything and what emerges. The group took influence from architectural theorist Christopher Alexander's concept of Inchpositive space,Inch an idea that the same degree of care can be given to the shape of the void around an object as the construction of the object itself. We hear how sounds carry their own silence, oscillating in and out of existence, running through life cycles like a microorganism.There is a collectivity to the instruments that underpin Paradessence. They move like a herd, as when wind drifts over a field of leaves and the air becomes visible in the absence of motion; multiple species cohabit

As we slowly make our way out of the fog that consumed the world over the past year, we may be surprised at where we find ourselves. So many people on this planet have been feeling completely unmoored and adrift-happy to see the shore but unfamiliar with our surroundings. That's the sensation that Pedro Franke leans into on Corisco, his latest solo venture recorded under the name Bonifrate. The Brazilian musician wrote this suite of psych-pop songs, as he puts it, Inchtrying to read the world around us, feeling lost or found in it. Mostly lost.Inch While that would suggest a gauzy, hard to grasp album, or at least a sorrowful one that can only be appreciated in small doses, Corisco finds Franke mastering many different moods and flows with deceptive ease from start to finish. InchCorisico (parte 1),Inch for example, is a fuzz-laden garage pop jam that Franke says was inspired, in part, by watching a growing electrical storm outside his window. InchGrande nóInch damn near beats Spoon at their own musical game with it's bouncy rhythm and deeply considered atmospherics. And InchCara de panoInch is a multi-part anthem that runs through a quick history of rock music from the '50s to the '70s in one three minute dose. Perhaps the most impressive element of Corisco is that the album was recorded by Franke on his own. That's been the method to Bonifrate's musical madness from of his first EP Sapos Alquímicos na Era Especial back in 2002. But while that first expression from Franke was done in lo-fi fashion on an old four-track recorder, he's been upping his game considerably since, with well received albums like 2011's Um Futuro Inteiro and 2019's Mundo Encoberto. Corisco stands out, in part, because Franke decided to use fewer MIDI instruments and loops this time around, sticking to analog instruments. That choice led Franke to grab his friend and bandmate in Supercordas,

Darkstar return with their fourth album 'Civic Jams' on 15th May. On their most personal record to date, Darkstar counterbalance observations of their home with those of the community surrounding it. 'Civic Jams' is a photonegative of a dance record shaped by a dialogue between shoegaze atmospherics and UK bass music's 'hardcore continuum'. Darkstar find themselves at once looking homeward and venturing further into their own psychic hinterland with each record. They've covered a lot of ground from the introspective expanse of their debut 'North' [2010], to utopian visions of society in 'News From Nowhere' [2013] and the unique dynamics of a pre-Brexit northern England on 'Foam Island' [2015]. On their latest offering, home is within reach. Inspired by the intervening years, Darkstar (aka Aiden Whalley and James Young) show how the personal can be political and reveal more of themselves than they've ever done before. Imagine emotional realism built from spectral rave echoes, anchored in timeless songs of love and loss in the digital now and you've got