Vampire

This came out a week ago, in time for Halloween so I'm a week late but better late than never- and I guess there's no such thing as late for the undead. OBOST's three track EP Vampire is led by the title track and is filled with spooky noises- owls hoot and creatures crawl- but the music is a delight, alt- pop/ electronic synthwave with a lovely laid back vocal from young Bobby Langfield. 

Even better is the Blood Dub, a stripped back, darker and weirder version that sounds like something prowling in the woods after nightfall, insistent synths and bass, everything growing in intensity and becoming increasingly hypnotic. You'll have to invite him in. 

A third track, Keep Your Eyes Shut, is so far gone that its difficult to tell what's real and unreal- a soundscape backing of noise and screams, gurgles and something descending down a lift shift with random bursts of voices from American TV. Something wicked this way comes. 

You can get the EP Vampire at Bandcamp.

When I was a teenager I read Stephen King's Salem's Lot and it coincided with the 1979 David Soul version for TV being shown. I don't know if I had an overactive imagination but it got to a point where I could only read the book during daylight hours. The nightwalking vampires that terrorised the town of Jeruslaem's Lot in the novel had me scared stupid and I don't think I was easily spooked- I was reading 2000AD and Starlord as an eight year old and they both contained some horrific storylines not least Fiends Of The Eastern Front (actually that one did spook me). By coincidence while channel surfing late one evening at the weekend I happened upon an episode of the David Soul TV version of Salem's Lot and it brought it all back....

Define, Take A Minute And The Ghosts Of Dawn

Friday this week is a bumper post, new music from three artists old and new- OBOST, James Hardway and Reverb Delay, between them all showing electronic music- techno, acid, dub, house, whatever- is in good health and flourishing. 

The very young and very talented Bobby Langfield, who records as OBOST, released an album and some singles/ EPs last year and played live at The Golden Lion in March. Today sees the release of a two track EP- Define/ Redefine. Define is led by a robotic stutter and squiggle, a voice, distorted toplines and piano kicking in and out. The vocal eventually reduces to the title, just the word 'define' repeated as keyboard notes rising and falling. 

Redefine is a tougher, muckier and heavier take on the original, some serious acid techno at play, the rhythm thundering away, the sequencer caught in an endlessly addictive groove and the vocal several octaves deeper. Define/ Redefine are both available at Bandcamp.  

Half the world away in Los Angeles David Harrow has resurrected his James Hardway persona for brand new tune and an eight track EP packed with versions and some remixes courtesy of the very much in  form Rude Audio. Take A Minute appears in DnB version, a TikTok Mix, a 3Step one, the Footwork Mix and here as the House Mix where it feels like a crossover, some long lost futuristic 90s house playing in the  third decade of the 21st century, the vocals by DangerRed beamed in from the aftermath of a party. 

Rude Audio's remix reworks the tempo and the rhythm, dropping the vocal down (as OBOST did too) and adding some typically South London dub to the LA dubstep. All eight versions/ mixes/ remixes are at Bandcamp. 

Reverb Delay is Marcus Farley whose EP Horizontal Rain came out on Mighty Force last month. A new thirteen track album, The Ghosts Of Dawn, is out today, an album that is in part a tribute to Berlin, its techno and dub sounds- for Marcus, the album is about the thrill of 'chasing the dawn', the ride on public transport to the centre of the city, entry to the clubs, immersion in the dancefloors, and then the journey home. 

The Ghosts Of Dawn starts as it intends to go on- with an eight track dub techno excursion, rattling drums and gliding synths called Into The Night. As well as the music of Berlin, Detroit is very much  present as is the Birmingham techno scene much loved by Marcus, Sandwell District and Surgeon, plus the mid 90s speaker shaking sounds of Bandulu. On One Four the kick drum hammers onward while synth stabs and arpeggios dance away at the top end. 

The title track comes into the second half, a sense of calm and space, a slight lessening of the tempos and tension. Underground Overground is a nine minute wait for the train home, the night's adventures still running the mind and then Train Three brings station announcements, train noise and ambient techno chill. It's very much an album to be listened to in full, a piece and not just a collection of tracks, a journey into and through the night- you can find it at Mighty Force. 

Pass A Wish And Take Me To The House

Out today on Brighton's always reliable Higher Love label is one of my favourite EPs of the summer, Pandit Pam Pam's Pass A Wish with a pair of Jezebell remixes. Pandit Pam Pam is an electronic musician from Sao Paulo whose album Camburi came out in July (and featured some guest spots from Henry Olsen, formerly the bass player for Primal Scream in their late 80s/ early 90s pomp and before that part of Nico's touring band in the 80s). I wrote about Camburi here. Eduardo, one of the two men behind Pandit Pam Pam also puts music out on his Boston Medical Group label and has sent me music from time to time, including releases by Feriasdasferias. On Pass A Wish Eduardo in Sao Paulo gets remixed by my favourite remix/ edit pair Jezebell, Jesse (in Stockholm) and Darren (in London). 

Pass A Wish is a dreamy, floaty four minutes of music, built around a fluttering rhythm and with horns hinting at its Brazilian origins and surroundings. The synths bubble away and a female voice drifts on top, somewhere between singing and talking. It nods in the direction of A Man Called Adam's 1990/ 1991 sound- yep, that good. 

The pair of Jezebell remixes both transport Pass A Wish elsewhere. Jezebell's 50 Ways Remix presumably tips its hat at Paul Simon's 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover (whose drum break has been sampled widely, not least by one Andrew Weatherall on his head spinning remix of Love Corporation's Give Me Some Love). The drums give it a funky, constant motion while the synths and voice swirl around the rhythm and the chopped up horn drops in and out. Very cool indeed. 

Jezebell's Leave Your Lover Mix is sleek and chuggy, a different rhythm and feel, more night time with handclaps and percussion leading the charge, the horn chopped up and FXed even more, everything pushed a little further into the cosmos. The Pass A Wish EP is available at Bandcamp from today. You know what to do. 

Also out today is the latest release from teenage wonderkid OBOST. Take Me To The House was one of the standouts on OBOST's debut album (released at the start of this year), a shimmering, multi- coloured slice of electronic euphoria, rising and falling synths and four four drums. On the new EP the original is reworked into Take Me To The Basement, a slowed down version with a juddering rhythm and fizzing synths. 

There's a remix too by Tronik Youth, a much beatier, more percussive version, with a no nonsense kick drum, pulsing synthlines and heading straight to the heart of the dancefloor. The EP is out today and again, available at Bandcamp. 

Tock Tick

A Certain Ratio's It All Comes Down To This is one of 2024's most played albums round these parts. Last week they announced the release of a 7" single, a song and a dub of the song recorded during the sessions for the album with producer Dan Carey- Clockwork Orange. ACR have refused to stand still and repeat themselves. This song shows them continuing to break new ground- it kicks into life with Jez's FXed voice intoning, 'tock tick tock tick', and a grimy industrial groove, a bassline that buzzes ominously and then a second Jez vocal, verses and choruses about cruelty, hatred and a clockwork orange. The distorted, grinding rhythm nods to one- time Factory label mates, early 80s Cabaret Voltaire, but this is still very much ACR being no- one else but ACR. 

More new music? I shared Er... Hello? by OBOST earlier this year, an absurdly accomplished and wonderful album made by seventeen year old Bobby Langfield and an EP of remixes of his song I Don't Want To Be Alone (including one by Richard Sen whose forthcoming album India Man promises to be one of 2024's highlights). Bobby/ OBOST has recently remixed the work of a classical pianist Christian Blandford, taking tracks from Christian's album The Waves and editing/ remixing them into one piece, The Waves (OBOST Unification Mix). There's a minute of juddering, out of time and out of sync sound, pianos glitching, and then it all suddenly snaps into place- a drum track rattles away, layers of piano and synths come and go, all flowing onwards and together/ against each other. Really good stuff. Find it here. 

Let's complete a Tuesday new music trio with Sheffield's Crooked Man whose It's My Pleasure- Part 4 came out at the end of last week in three versions- a lush, mid- tempo nine minute main mix, an instrumental and an acapella. There's a lot going on, layers of synths, drums, ripples of sounds, a house vocal, and an insistent groove that grows increasingly percussive and intense. The EP is at Bandcamp. In a neat link to the Cabaret Voltaire sounds of the ACR song that opened this post, Crooked Man aka Richard Barratt was one half of legendary Sheffield bleep techno pioneers Sweet Exorcist along with the Cab's Richard H. Kirk. Cab it up. 

Bagging Area Book Club Chapter Three- Solstice Edition

Today is the summer solstice, midsummer, the longest day and shortest night, a celebration of the sun that has been observed since the Neolithic era. To mark this event I thought I'd add to my recent Bagging Area Book Club posts with some solstice adjacent reading material. In May 2019 the first edition of Weird Walk was published, specifically timed to coincide with May Day (Beltane in Gaelic). Since then there have been a further six editions, with the Number Seven in 2023 the most recent although as the photo above shows I only have issues one, three and seven so far. Weird Walk was started by three friends 'walking and engaging with the British landscape and its lore'. Forty pages printed on good quality card, well designed with quality photographs and illustrations and packed with interesting articles, Weird Walk is a treasure trove to be dipped in and out of. The first page of the first issue quotes Julian Cope in The Modern Antiquarian- 'people don't go anywhere unless there's a signpost'- and from that point has included articles on Medieval graffiti, dolmen, Dungeon Synth, flat roof pubs, a walk around Avebury, a feature on the life of 'seminal Tudor loon' William Kempe, an interview with writer Ben Edge, the folklore of booze and of cheese, explorations of portals in Wiltshire, acid folk, author Benjamin Myers writing abut Lindisfarne, and the pastoral ambient cassette sounds of the label Verdant Wisdom. 

Acid folk? Here's some Pentangle from 1969...

House Carpenter

Weird Walk is well worth looking out for and can be bought online from their website, each edition available for £5.50. 

I thought I'd throw in some more sounds for the solstice, some acid house rather than acid folk, recent releases to soundtrack tonight and beyond. First up is Temples remixed by Jono from Jagwar Ma, originally released in 2014 for Record Shop Day and recently made available at Temples' Bandcamp page. Shelter Song (Jagwar Ma Jono's Wrong Mix) takes Temples psyche rock and gives it an electronic thump and pulse, the synthline twisting its way round and round. 

Richard Sen, who compiled one of the best compilations of last year and a superb remix EP to accompany it (Dream The Dream) and who appeared on our Sounds From The Flightpath Estate Volume 1 album with the speaker shaking sounds of Tough On Chug, Tough On The Causes Of Chug, is set to release a debut solo album later this year, an album called India Man. To lead into it he's released a single, Hills Of Kashmir, a cosmic disco/ acid house thumper that goes on with little let up in intensity and is very good indeed. 

Richard also turns up today at the latest release by teenage wonderkid OBOST who's debut album Er... Hello? I wrote about a month ago. Sen has remixed Don't Want To Be Alone, a star sailing, bleepy, dynamic version of the song with Bobby's vocal on top. The EP is out today at Bandcamp. Richard's remix is worth the price of admission alone but you also get OBOST's own Jittery remix of the song and a new track, Take The Message. Happy solstice. 

Er... Hello?

A friend sent me this recently, an album from January this year which deserves to be heard more widely- OBOST's Er... Hello? OBOST is multi- instrumentalist Bobby Langfield, just 17 years old and currently studying for his A Levels. Bobby has grown up in a household where the music of Andrew Weatherall, Kraftwerk, Paranoid London and Red Axes was a constant backdrop. Bobby, as OBOST, sings, writes, records and mixes. That this is a debut album, thirteen songs across a slew of electronic styles, is one thing- that it's been made by someone so young is something else. 

Er... Hello? album opens with You Messed With Fire, acoustic guitar chords and the thud of a kick drum and then a wash of guitars, synths and a very distorted voice, everything swimming and swirling around as the kick keeps things moving forward. The sound of fingers on guitar strings appears, handclaps and wobbling synth parts and that voice, never clear enough to hear what it's saying. It's a nicely disorientating start followed by some slowed down electronic pop, I Don't Want To Be Alone, Bobby's voice and machines pulling off that trick of electronic euphoric melancholy- synths that suggest good times with minor chords and lyrics that hint at something else. Over the course of the ensuing eleven songs there is FX and sample driven electronic music, drum machine driven cosmische, experimental instrumentals, glitchy pop that calls to mind The Xx, rippling synthlines and on Another Type Of World, alienated synth pop with double time drum machine and eventually walls of noise.

The second half of the album spins even further and more wildly, a range of styles and sounds on offer, all the while the fizz and clatter of keys and drums set against the doleful vocals. Penultimate song Hurry Up has a wall of Daniel Avery style drone and static and then the judder of synths and hiss of hi hats, a techno workout. The album finishes with Lips Fade to Blue- it starts with the crackle of vinyl and an acoustic guitar part circling as Bobby sings a lament, and then shifts somewhere else, 80s synth pop colliding with 21st century electro, that dissolves into a mess of repeating loops and FX. You can get it at Bandcamp. 

Since Er.. Hello? came out OBOST has followed up with Apollo, a track in two versions, DanceApollo and DubApollo. Both here and free/ name your own price. The Dub version is eight minutes of clashing sounds and samples, thudding drums and eventually some very gnarly slo- mo sounds. I Don't Care For You came out at the end of 2023, an EP that included this song, Look Inside Your Mind. All of this is highly recommended.