Forty + Essential Releases of 2018-2020 on Bandcamp To Buy this Friday As Bandcamp Waives Their Fees

 

As always, the world is in chaos, so this Friday Bandcamp is waving it’s revenue share for artists  Decaycast sounds off fifty releases that are essential from 2018 on  spanning noise, experimental, rap, neo soul, black metal, musique concrete and more. Make sure to buy these records and support the artists. In times of chaos, artists, cultural producers, and activists are often left in the dust to fend for themselves. Here’s some of the music  that got us through the last few years. Here we have  choosen to focus on Black, Brown, Indigenous and queer artists, who are  always under represented in music media, because of white supremacy, erasure, which come as by products of capitalism. This is by no means a complete list, moreso what we’ve been listening to the last few months on heavy rotation. SUPPORT THESE ARTISTS!

 

1. Moor Mother – Analog Fluids Of Sonic Black Holes

2.Abdu Ali – FIYAH

3. SB The Moor – Spirit Realm . Final

4. Debby Friday – Death Drive

5. The Bedroom Witch – Diaspora

6. Backxwash – Deviancy

7. Spellling – Mazy Fly

8. Jasmine Infiniti – Art & Performance

9. Forest Management – After Dark

10. Mourning {A} BLKstar – Reckoning

11. Georgia Anne Muldrow WVETO II

12. Dj Haram – Grace

13. Yatta – Wahala

14. Kaleta + Super Yamba BandMedaho

15. The Uhuruverse – Who killed Kenisha?!

16. Anna Luisa – Green Remixed

17. Harlem Gospel Travelers – He’s On Time

18. LSDXOXO ft. Bbymutha – Blackwidow

19. Kel Assouf – Black Tenere

20. Laura Ortman “Elevator – *​+​*​+​+​*​* *​(​for Layli)”

21. Elisa Harkiss “Mvkerrv (Deceitful One)”

22. Edgeslayer “She Don’t Text Back / Spell Check”

23. DONormaal

24. Death Convention Singers “s/t”

25.  Kepla & DeForrest Brown Jr “The Wages of being Black Is Death”

via the label: “‘The Wages of Being Black is Death’ is an exhausted and defeated audio documentation of the alienation – and eventual distillation – of the Black Body as a subject and content of the social sphere by Kepla & DeForrest Brown, Jr. Written and recorded in a week’s time between file-sharing and overnight home studio binges, the mixtape is framed as a deadpan comedy that follows a slothful and downtrodden Black Body as it drifts amongst the ambient commons of the Whites. Artist Ryan Kuo states that, “Whiteness acts by dictating the terms and categories that describe everything in the universe except itself.” ‘The Wages of Being Black is Death’ in turn serves as a reversal of the nominal gaze of categorization, a paranoid disavowal of an uneven and silent social contract as well as an intimate encounter with the daily, incessant slights and traumas felt by the Black Body in everyday life. “

26. Secret Sidewalk “Primal Dap”

27. King Vision Ultra “Archive 011018 (KVUmix01)”

28. William Winant / Marshall Trammell “s/t”

29. Guayaba “Guayaba Presents: Fantasmagoría”

30. Beast Nest “A History Of Sexual Violence”

31. ONO “Red Summer”

from the artist/label:

“It’s been “Red Summer” for over a hundred years. While the term “Red Summer” typically refers to the race-driven violence in the Summer of 1919 across the United States, its repercussions, its vocabulary can be felt or heard on every corner of every street. In Chicago, it has a special significance, as Chicago was one of two catalysts for that era’s violence, exploded by invisible racial borders along the South Side, a phenomenon that exists today, constantly considered by long-running gospel industrial band ONO.

ONO bandleader P Michael Grego and frontperson travis had met before 1980, sharing a love for written and spoken word, the transcendent, and the genuine. Through continual poking and prodding, P Michael convinced travis to join him in ONO, the name coming from shortening “onomatopoeia,” and underscoring a desire to create “noise not music.” P Michael would handle the audio. travis the words. Since January 5, 1980, ONO’s roster has changed drastically, but always fiercely defended a singular construct: “The ONO STATEMENT OF PURPOSE: Experimental Performance, NOISE, and Industrial Poetry Performance Band; Exploring Gospel’s Darkest Conflicts, Tragedies and Premises.”

32.  Russell E.L. Butler “The Home I’d Build For Myself And All My Friends”

33. Tyler Holmes “Her Is”

34.  San Cha “La Luz de la Esperanza”

35. V.E.X. “Between Worlds”

36. White Boy Scream “Remains”

37. Lexagon “Electric Meats”

38. Maria Chavez “Plays”

“Turntablist and sound artist Maria Chávez turns in her first continuous full length audio work. “Plays” is a DJ mix CD that doesn’t feature any tracks. It is a remix of a work whose original doesn’t feature recorded sound. It is a minimalistic yet complex electroacoustic work, literally built from scratch, bootstrapping sound out of sheer silence: creatio ex nihilio.

The story of this album starts with a record given to Chávez as a birthday present. It is Stefan Goldmann’s ‘Ghost Hemiola’, a double vinyl set of empty locked grooves. The record contains no sound whatsoever other than the vinyl’s own surface noise.
Chávez’s work with records and turntables usually features a rich layer of recorded audio which is transformed, cut up and
rearranged by a wide range of fearless physical manipulations. By contrast ‘Ghost Hemiola’ is a blank canvas, unveiling her craft in its purest form, unobstructed by any audio content other than the sounds of the medium itself.
Breaking up the medium is happening both ways here, literally as well as figuratively. Unlike with her live performances, for “Plays” Chávez employs digital processes extensively, zooming into minute details of sound and the artifacts of both mediums, the tangible vinyl record and disembodied digital audio. Narrowing down shards of sound to extremely short frames creates metallic timbres, reverberating quasispaces and percussive layers. Slowing down the tempo until sound halts at one sample of its digital representation brings forth emergent frequencies, which Chávez then uses to play melodies – vaguely resembling her analog technique of playing melodies by skipping a stylus back and forth across a test tone record.

39. JLin “Autobiography (Music from Wayne McGregor’s Autobiography)”

40.  Irreversible Entanglements “Who Sent You?”

41.  Solarized “A Ghost Across Hell from Me”

42. Maya Songbird “80/90”

43. Ed Balloon “Flourish”

 

Please consider picking one or more of these up today (or any day really) Support the artists by sharing their work with your friends and on your social media. These  are excrusiating times for all and eollective support and empathy are the only way through.

 

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Vortex Empath Xen (V.E.X.) Share First Two Singles – “Demon Dimension” & “Split Orb” from New album Out on Psychic Eye 3/27

The post-punk, industrial-inspired queer duo V.E.X. is at it again with their new full length.

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Vortex Empath Xen plays Oakland 3/27 w/ False Figure @ Elbo Room Jack London. Oakland

 VORTEX EMPATH XEN “Between Worlds”,  which comes out 3/27 on Oakland’s own Psychic Eye. Here we bring you an exclusive stream of the first two singles, “Split Orb” and “Demon Dimension” V.E.X. further develops their ever-evolving sound with dark these two powerful post-industrial / post-rock tracks, utilizing all of their signature sonic elements;  arpeggiated bass and synth lines, funky, chaotic melodies, complex arranging, pummeling drum machines, buzzing horns, mangled samples, angular, distorted, blown-out guitar, and everything gelled together with the duo’s iconic evocative vocal styles, which skate atop the cauldron of twisted sounds perfectly and solidify their art as one of the hardest to quantify into a single genre, V.E.X can simply not be defined in this way.  If you remember, we reviewed the duo’s other project MOIRA SCAR “Wound World Part 1” (also released by Psychic Eye) and you can read that here and order the CD, at the same time your hopefully ordering this one, which held a similar complexity, however “Between Worlds” takes the creativity to another undiscovered level. Sonically, the duo is at times more post-punk, at times, more experimental and always pulling from a queer, post-industrial framework, VE.X. is constantly shifting and re-adapting their sound and visions to the cutting edge of a  violent world. From the band:

Demon Dimension is a Deep Delve into Depressive Paranoiac Mind traps Human brain like hamster on wheel spinning around it’s cage for eternity.Discordant screams waking in a nightmare.”     – Lucifer Gamma Ray  & Roxzan Zatan

Lucifer Gammaray and Roxzan Zatan split vocal duties on this pair of singles, undulating between a more operatic style such as found on the break of “Split Orb” or like the orator of controlled chaos, the singing/screaming dichotomy on  “Demon Dimension” increases the intensity in a very real and visceral way. After only hearing the first two tracks, we know “Between Worlds” is going to be an underground queer staple of post-rock/post-industrial.

“Split Orb is a journey across time and space from within/outsider/multiplxpersonaliti cell/root/complex, we are growing into new beings, what we have been what we are becoming, change is the moment, hybrid hubris, we are flesh channels for source/spirit, we are unbecoming.” –  Roxzan Zatan & Lucifer Gamma Ray

 

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PREORDER NOW from: Psychic Eye Records

LISTEN LIVE: V.E.X. Plays Elbo Room Jack London 3/27 with Mystic Priestess,  False Figure &  more. 

 

 

 

DECAYCAST Premieres: Post-Industrial Darkwave duo V.E.X. Shares New Video “Dancing At The End Of Time”

DECAYCAST Premieres: Post-Industrial Darkwave duo V.E.X. Shares New Video “Dancing At The End Of Time”
0006663860_10Bay area artists Roxy and LuLu, as V.E.X., (and a myrid of other projects) have been playing music and creating art together for years on end in the bay area and beyond, yet somehow always bring something refreshingly new and politically necessary to the table, and their latest single, supported with a brand new video here “Dancing At The End Of Time” is certainly no exception.
From the artists;  “Dancing At The End Of Time” is a low-fi synth ballad of remembrance and resistance in a dying world, the true story of two femme freaks gentrified out of the city but not out of their souls, holding onto their love in spite of all the hate, dedicated to crafting underground subculture music for outcasts, the forgotten, and those fighting back in this genocidal abusive white supremacist capitalism patriarchy death spiral.
“Dancing At The End Of Time” offers a celebratory, yet real and  visceral look at two femmes resisting the violent forces of oppression and gentrification through the streets of a forgotten and endlessly morphed San Francisco.  “Dancing…” gels haunted vocals and murky, analog synth arpreggiations, creating both a serene and haunting vibe which encapsulates the listener into a tale from the past.  Watch the  video below and read some words on the track and video from V.E.X. below. The track is from an upcoming split with Moira Scar.

“Roxy and LuLu have been playing music together since 2001, as The Floating Corpses, Angel On The Nod And The Phantasy Defylement, Terrran Traumantics, Moira Scar, and V.E.X. being the most recent incarnation. V.E.X. (Vortex Empath Xen, formerly Voltage Empath Xanaxax, Ventriloquest Ectoplasmold Xanaxax) is Lu Lu “Lucifer” Gamma Ray and Roxzan “Roxy Monoxide” Zatan as industrial-dark-wave synth-punk surreal-doom noise-romance duo. V.E.X. creates, V.E.X. records, V.E.X. plays shows.”

Check their bandcamp below and make sure to check for select tour dates and an upcoming split with Moira Scar.
https://xanaxax.bandcamp.com

 

DECAYCAST Reviews: MOIRA SCAR “Wound World Part 1” (Near Dark, 2018)

 

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Bay Area queer deathrock stalworts MOIRA SCAR are back with their new full length on CD/CS/ and  digital via Oakland’s NEAR DARK imprint, which is run by dark gothic outfit, OTZI whose newest offerings, “Ghosts” was  covered HERE a few weeks ago. Moira Scar currently is in trio form with their latest offering  with Roxy Monoxide: guitar, sax, vocals, LuLu Gamma Ray: synthesizers, vocals, and Aimee S: drums. Moira Scar’s newest full length, “Wound World Part 1” boasts seven snappy, punchy, femme forward dark punk/death rock cuts,  intentionally building upon their unique, sought after, indimable sound of their previously released full lengths, “Psychoid”  and “Scarred For Life”. With an augmented lineup, and a slightly darker and more rock forward sound, “Wound World Part 1” might be the most intentionally straight forward, intense  and focused sound the outfit has  concocted yet, and the  recording production suits the  sound perfectly. Thick pummeling percussion, wailing, screaching vocals, fuzzed-out chugging, angular guitar riffs and the staple walls of  reverb’d saxophone.

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Snap Back” might be the most traditionally “Moira Scar” sounding cut on here blending heavy bass riffs, walls of  sax with driving punk inspired hard hitting  drumming and the signature  layered vocal efx stylings which could take the  sonic shape of anything from low  distorted  growls to high pitched shrieks of intense washes,  utilized to great success on the track “Chrysalis Skull” The operatic style walls of  vocals blend perfectly over the frantic, manic heavy  drumming and thick slabs of  guitar and  bass work. Slower, more  post rock inspired track “Zeta Rainbow” offers chugging, blown up guitar riffs with dragging slagged out bass lines with more  traditional breakdowns where the guitar and  dual vocal  processions shine brightest.

Moira Scar’s  sound is  thick, violent,  present, and demanding of the space it requires and  deserves. Death rock, like any “sub-genre” can be formulaic, boring, and  predictable, but “Wound World Part 1” is the complete opposite; fierce, unique, cathartic, and nasty!. In a time where we need it most,  Moira Scar once again, and perhaps with more force than ever proves they are  here to stay with some of the most forward thinking and necessary sonic offerings within the contemporary rock scope. This record rallies against the dying, boring, overdone and under thought  droves of CIS white-male “dominated”capitalistic rock scenes, by raising the bar and  flushing the  boring and  inspired rock trends down into the sewer where they have belonged this entire time, and serve as an assault on the  normative, re-hashed, uninspired music that often fills the  airwaves. Moira Scar is a weapon against a  violent, patriarchal system of despair, confusion, and  entanglement and  “Wound World Part 1” is the next logical step in the bands seemingly endless progression of reinvention. One of the most important contemporary dark rock acts going, period. This record is not to be overlooked.

Order the  New record HERE and  HERE

MOIRA SCAR

NEAR DARK RECORDS