knottedthread (Member)

Late last night after attending a vegan cookoff with a theme of cooking with liquor, feeling ultra full, watching Clueless with my friend & smoking a joint I walk upstairs to my attic bedroom and realize I need to unwind before I can fall asleep.

Enter Mobster.

Hailing from Paris, Mobster makes beats, tracks that sprawl and disappear into your consciousness, a click & drone that sends you away from where you are. His music sounds like soaring in an airpane high above this earth as the sun is rising and you are just opening your eyes to another day.

Listen to when you want to disappear or reappear.

Hello, so I have not written in here in ages although I've been listening to tracks in the down-tempo, glitch, electronic, avant garde styles for the winter. Today I need to bake bread and was scanning through ITunes through the hip hop genre. I saw some playlist I downloaded awhile ago from here with a track by The Insider.

Click for a listen. This. This is what I want to listen to. It's a bit glitchy, dancey, rhythmic. Some songs feel like you're on a beach at sunset and it's still 28 degrees outside, perfect. Other songs remind me of dancing on drugs in a dark cave surrounded by sweaty bodies writihing on a dance floor sparkled with neon lights across what seems like void space.

Instead of dancing, writhing, and feeling like it's July I'm going to spend some quality time in my kitchen baking bread while this Pacific Northwest storm passes over the city. Cold, dreary days, time to heat up with these tracks.

Imagine you are on a hillside in some foreign town. The air is warm, a slight breeze, lights hang from buildings, small shops, people conversing happily, drinks in hand, the seashore off in the distance, down the hill. The sky painted pastel from the sinking sun, you feel calm, at peace and then, this song...

This song took me away, The Vévé Seashore, found accidentally and boy am I happy about it.

Listen to them when you want to be transported to a seaside village, listen to Seven Years of Gulliver for a more absurd sound. You will be pleased. I shall start you off with something simple, The Forest and The Avalanche.

Enjoy.

Earlier this morning I discovered The Solitarians. Unfortunately they no longer make music but what exists is perfect for a lonely day by yourself baking bread (which I am currently doing). Their name is poignant, they do make you feel solitary but they make being solitary a good thing, calm sounds, a sweet voice and lovely lyrics that make you feel okay with the fact that you are spending your day alone... or with your sick best friend (again, something I am currently doing).

Make some tea, sit in a chair and do a crossword puzzle while listening.

I'm going to be honest, I am currently listening to Stray Dogg's music for the fourth time in a row. It reminds me a bit of being a sad teenager, dreaming of love, longing, and train rides. It sounds calm, relaxed, like I am moving slowly through a landscape of birch trees losing their leaves, as if the world is slowly passing me by in the most beautiful way but I am standing still.

With only nine songs on FMA I think you should listen to them. I have been sitting here in my living room with Dukat Stray's voice rolling around in my head. He makes me want to get up and walk, find a friend, and take them on an adventure to the sparse forest.

Listen to them when you are nostalgic about a lost love.

Listen when you are on a train ride leaving a place you want to be but you cannot stay.

Listen while the sun is setting and you are alone on a downtown rooftop you have someone managed to clambour onto.

I've been listening to drone since around the age of seventeen, sometimes I forget that it exists until a dark, dreary, rainy day appears when you have been waiting for sunshine for months and then suddenly, you turn on some drone and feel like you are falling into the sky.

This is what happened to me today with Love Cult.

Sitting at my desk, listening to the cars drive outside on slick wet roads, splashing through puddles, as I stared at a blank piece of paper thinking of desert inspiration from a road trip I took a month ago to Death Valley. I read "Love Cult" on the front page of FMA and thought, "well that would be the type of cult I would join" and then I was transported into a feeling of clouds, dreams, nightmares. I sat drawing for hours listening to the repetitive sound of tings, haunting voices, dull sound.

Sometimes it's those dull sounds that capture your imagination. You could almost sit and stare at a wall for hours listening to the sounds of Love Cult.

Listen when you feel a bit too excited and you need to calm down.

Listen in a rainstorm when you've decided to stay inside but you want to feel like you are outside.

Listen when you want to be enveloped in sound.

So, being jobless means sitting at home, baking bread, drawing, writing, and reading and the soundtrack for those calm quiet moments has been the albums of The New Mystikal Troubadours. The twangs, rattles, zips, clangs, and the haunting voices and drawn out soundscapes. Listening to them makes me fall into a dream space where time disappears and I awake from a trance as the album ends with papers, scissors, glue, magazine clippings, and pens covering my desk. I stare, look at what I have been working on and press repeat so my hard work and dreamy atmosphere can continue.

The voice on Second Spring reminds me vaguely of a friend, Ok Vancouver Ok. Some similarities can be found although I feel The New Mystikal Troubadours have a sound their own even with the popular wave of psych-folk right now.

Their music is reminiscient of riding in a colourful caravan full of artists, musicians, and animals. As if you are heading up a large hillside and when you look down over the top you see the city but you decide to play the dream out, start a fire and sit on the hillside looking down at a place of hustle and bustle but keeping calm and letting the music play on.

Listen to them when you want to be taken away in a dream or late summer heat and long evenings.

Listen to them when you want to lay on your bedroom floor with a single sunbeam blazing across your body, feeling the heat of that one sunlit stripe.

Listen to them when you want to dance in your yard barefoot.

It was last summer when I discovered Big Blood hearlding from Maine. My friend Aaron aka Honeybear played them for me while we we're driving in a Winnebago from Portland, Oregon to Calgary, Alberta. Each day driving in a Winnebago from 1973 was pretty ridiculous. We were the slowest vehicle on the road, cars were constantly passing us and the summer sun was blazing down. With Aaron's dog Jasper in the back, crying and sleeping and us in the front with our tapes, C.D.'s, books, collage materials, empty & full cans of Pepsi, figurines from thrift stores on the dash we would slowly drive through central and eastern Washington on a straight away road with hills and fields for miles with Big Blood as the soundtrack.

From their handmade albums with original artwork, collage, screenprints and beautiful album inserts and then to their music which can lead any road trip on the right path. Big Blood was my soundtrack to last summer. The layers of sound, clapping, shaking voices, crishrounds as my friend Jeff calls them, ghost sounds. You feel like you are around a campfire of gypsies singing, dancing, contemplating, awaiting spirits, roasting food, enjoying life.

Listen to them when you want to escape in your mind to a place of heat, colour, comradery.

Listen when on a road trip in the desert.

Listen to them when you're having a bonfire with friends in your hometown with beers and fire roasted apples.

Listen to them in a summer rainstorm.

They are currently touring Europe. If you're out there you should really go check them out, I would love to one day see them perform. Check out their tour schedule here