DECAYCAST Reviews: MAYA SONGBIRD “Cats From Venus” (Psychic Eye Records, 2022)

“Cats From Venus” is the newest full length offering from Bay Area stalwart and all around magical musical hybrid presence MAYA SONGBIRD, who between runnings her own label, Wired Weird Entertainment, The Magic Shop – a brick and mortar retail space in Oakland, CA as well as producing events, and meticulously handcrafting merch of a myraid of shapes and sizes, including a custom candle line which has garnered a cult following around the bay area, has found time to give us another stunning full length record of her signature style. “C F V has all the signature Maya Songbird musical stylings; retro, sexy synthesizers which create movement in the mind and body for even the most sour wallflower. “C F V” gives track after track of unmatched vocal performances over her queer and funky brand heavy electronic post punk / disco. A collection of ten soon to be favorites dance numbers which will last through your next three breakups.

“You let me know I’m not appreciated”

The songs on ” C F V…” are powerful, quirky femme anthems and demand their own space and time from each other and other works in the “genre” as a whole. “C F V” is a special and beautifully honest and unique album which only Maya Songbird can create. On “I Don’t Ever Have to Be Nice” the artist belts out the empowering, lines of self actualization over a heavy, hypnotic beat and stirs a pot of seductive sweets and spices for the perfect recipe of self empowerment.

https://psychiceye.bandcamp.com/album/cats-from-venus

“Cats From Venus” is Songbird’s most fully realized full length project to date. Released by Oakland, CA’s Psychic Eye Records “Cats From Venus” combines queer disco beats ala Patrick Cowley’s productions for Bay Area disco legend Sylvester, funky, sweaty, sensual, funky post-punk freaked out numbers topped with iconic vocal performances from Songbird on nearly every track. “Cats From Venus” is the queer party album packed with anthem after anthem lined up in a row for this fall 2022 which has left us in a world that’s both at once gifting beauty and breaking apart at the seems. We need Maya Songbird’s “Cats From Venus” now more than ever, but do we deserve it?

Via the artists website maysongbird.com, the artist states about “Cats from Venus” –

“This album I got a chance to really speak my truth and heal especially on human life/Live Again. I honestly can say when Live Again was recorded I was going through something tough. Promise me you will listen to every word I wrote on this song ok? Its really dope how Amelia the producer had driven up to oakland from la and we recorded I think “Live Again” and “You should be dancing” in my living room space.”

“Disco Bill” is one of the albums creative peaks, as it has the potential to move a room of thousands all the way down to driving a singular dance party at the end of an earbud. “Seduction”, another banger that’ll have you take over the steering wheel from the bus driver and crash the bus into a pond filled with LSD and neon pool noodles as you scatter away to the party, set a cop on fire to light the room just to make love on the dance floor.

Available on Cassette and CD from Psychic Eye Records and Wired Weird Ent now!

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DECAYCAST Announces Preorder For HAURAS 4/9/21 “Chant For A Broken Chalice” OUT 5/7/21

DECAYCAST Announces Preorder For HAURAS 4/9/21  “Chant For A Broken Chalice” OUT  5/7/21

HAURAS has crafted a lush and foreboding sonic landscape with “Chant For A Broken Chalice”, their first release for Oakland based imprint DECAYCAST. On “Chant For A Broken Chalice” intentional and otherworldly sounds envelop into a whirlwind of a slow churning concoction of beauty and anxiety. Dense choral envocations pulse over a sea of strings, keys, percussion and voice. HAURAS crafts tense and delicate music concerned with the rapid decline of empathy as intensified through the violent throes of capitalism. Both meditative and a warning, like a distant pulse of a lighthouse gently peaking over the fog as a distant warning of impending doom and collapse, scary and at this point completely unavoidable, but wow the beauty and elegance of the message is not something to soon be forgotten. 

“My work is concerned with the psychology of society at the end of Civilization.” – HAURAS

 The first single “Hold My Hand” takes a psychedelic dubbed out industrial approach to transport the mood and psyche of the listener to a blissful yet slightly unnerving underworld. The vocals glide through the mix like a robotic worm infecting an unknown host. Like most of Hauras’s work; “Chant For A Broken Chalice” holds the listener in an hourglass where time is rapidly and chaotically slipping away.  Intentional, heartfelt, and intense. 

“You’ve heard of the Music of Tomorrow? This is the Music of the Day After

Tomorrow.” – Chris Ryan (Composer, Cerddorion Ensemble,, Tzadik)

“The sonic equivalent of expired film in my Holga.” – Richard Youngs

RIYL: COIL, Psychic TV, The Residents, Snickers 

“Hold My Hand” Public Stream

Tracklisting:

1.  Somnia

2.  On The Morning

3.  Rotagivan

4.  Hold My Hand

5,   Chant For A Broken Chalice

6.   Standing At The Entrance

HAURAS has shared bills with:

Sarah Davachi, Laaraji, Father Murphy, Low, Tom Carter, Common Eider King Eider, Mary Lattimore, Tom Weeks, Lee Noble, Louise Bock, Clarice Jensen, Jonas Reinhardt, Carl Hultgren, John King, Lea Bertucci,

Saariselka, Nels Cline, Jessica Moss

ARTIST PHOTO:

More info / questions / press requests: decaycast@gmail.com

http://decaycastoakland.bandcamp.com

DECAYCAST Reviews: Electric Sound Bath “Of This World” (Moon Glyph, 2020)

Electric Sound Bath is the new age / ambient duo of Angela Wilson & Brian Griffith. Their newest, “Of This World” is out now via the mighty Moon Glyph Records. Large, swelling synths, rumbling sub bass undulations slowly bubble up through ambient swells on forgotten tones, a warm but slightly unsettling and unresolved tension. Electric Sound Bath is the perfect conceptual and sonic reference for this work, as the tones eclipse the listening space in a spacious and breath-like eclipse of sound. Channeling early Eno and Godspeed You Black Emperor, ESB’s tones slowly peak and dip with a graceful ease, a constantly shifting tone poem enacted with grace and precision. relaxing, calming, and blissful despite holding a tight intensity at times, never fully resolving to “background sounds” but engaging movements of pressure and movement.

The duo’s sounds have room to undulate within controlled structures, allowed to breathe on their own without much chaotic interference. Like an old ham radio beckoning into an empty sky, with hope of contact returned. Bordering on psychedelic ambient, and new age, the sound switches gears occasionally but slowly and carefully, dark and low string sounds guide the work like a distant light ahead, while warmer and more glassy synth voices continue to pulse – shimmering ever so steadily through the thick fog of the sonic space.

“This long-form creative process mirrored the duo’s own life trajectory and experiences ‘of this world’. The result is a celestial wash of MIDI-driven modular synthesizers crafting slow, unfurling caverns of sound. The type of deep, meditative tones that reward loud and close listening. Allow this music to patiently flow over you, reveling in the crystalline details and heavenly peace.”

Order now via Moon Glyph Records

DECAYCAST Reviews: B L A C K I E “Face The Darkness” (2020)

B L A C K I E: Face the Darkness reviewed by mynameisblueskye

“What is freedom to the average person?”

How ever you answer that question, the one thing you should know is that it probably doesn’t mean the same thing as does to art-punk auteur Michael LaCoeur aka B L A C K I E. To those who have ever listened to B L A C K I E, you will release that his album represents a natural freedom. The freedom to just be the man he was made to be without the world seeking to destroy him or cage him in. Nomadic by nature, nonconformist by choice and perhaps even by nature and unafraid to encourage it for others in his position. The opening lines of “While They Try to Kill Each Other” outlines one of his overall thesis of being B L A C K I E over electric drums better than any of us could ever try.

“Children laugh while they try to kill each other/at least the blood returns to the earth where it belongs, and out of the hands of in power”, bellows Michael in his dry and world-weary town crier scream. With danger everywhere in his wake, it would make sense that he finds silver linings here…if that is what you want to call it. On “There Is No Light”, he reports the history of laid waste in front of and committed towards the people. “There was no food, there were fists/there were no light, there were fists” all to come back to the devastating line. “We use to eat each other!” Entrails wrapped in crimson blood line the periphery of wherever B L A C K I E looks, even amongst those who towards those who call themselves allies and heroes. His second overall thesis “I am not you’r nigger!” is delivered in an angry tone only punctuated by a deep sense of pain and sorrow.

B L A C K I E’s mind may be a mass of continuously spinning wheels, but he will be damned if it ever spins for you. Even as he tackles topics such as suffering from a crippling addiction (“How to Let It Control You”), toxic “patriotism” (“Wave Your Flag”) and fascism/fake empathy (“Uncounted”), Michael knows that even HE is not above occupying the hot seat. Painting a picture of anxiety through a descriptive lens, “Meet the Demons” is claustrophobic in its description of not being able to think and feel freely.

Not being able to just be without judgment. So, after all of this, hearing him emerge free and ready to escape on “It Can’t Define Me” feels not only heartening, but like an anthem written to those looking for their own escape. B L A C K I E’s Face the Darkness may start off as B L A C K I E in the slaughter line witnessing victims meeting their end in HD and plotting his escape from such slaughter, but it sees to it that he isn’t his own cause of danger to himself. In the midst of this, B L A C K I E emerges with one last message (clue, rather) that overall defines not only the entire album, but the world and the philosophy of B L A C K I E: “Look around/Don’t look down”.

– Mynameisblueskye

Mynameisblueskye is a singer, songwriter, poet, and occasional blogger. An American-born Renaissance man who loves music so much, he has too many videos in his Watch Look after list. His bandcamp can be found here:

DECAYCAST Premieres: Ezra Feinberg “Castle and Sand” & John Kolodij “Beyond the Fragile” streaming now! (Whited Sepulchre Records, 2020)

Ezra Feinberg & John Kolodij share the first two tracks off of new LP on Whited Sepulchre Records. , 

The preorder is live now and the LP comes out August 28, 2020.

 

Ezra Feinberg shares “Castle and Sand”, A beautiful, warm, introduction to a slowly shifting, bending, humming soundscape, unfolding inside the ear, setting off a trigger of washed out humming strings, a caucophanous silence, a briightly lit star millions of miles away, these. tones escape the source and paint a distant hum that grows brighter, and quieter. John Kolodij’s “Beyond the Fragile” escalates the listener to fever pitch psychedelic hums of bending light across a plush, dimly lit, mist cloaked forest.

On his side Feinberg compliments Kolodij perfectly with warm strings resonating and shaking across a barren sea. drenched in reverb, archaic strums pluck broightly across a sea of glass. Friction like a creaking ice tray about to crack Feinberg’s music is relaxing bt holds an intensity that could erupt at any moment but never quite does, leaving us on the edge of bliss and loneliness.

from the label:

“Bless whatever cosmic winds brought together this split between NYC guitarist and composer Ezra Feinberg and multi-instrumentalist John Kolodij. Traveling deep blue highways of the mind, their split LP opens up the stunning vistas that link these two artists in sound and texture.”

Preorder the LP HERE,  scope out W S R  vast and eclectic discography  HERE

DECAYCAST Guest List: Gremlin2Movies’s Year End Songs Of The Year End List Of 2019

DECAYCAST Guest List: We asked some followers and co conspirators to round up their favorite music and art from 2019. Here’s the first installment with Bay Area artist and producer Gremlins2Movie

2019 was a year, big year, very big year and after a hiatus from listening to music entirely, these are the songs that held my attention during this further plunge into the hellscape we know as planet earth.

Xque – Torn Natalie Imbruglia

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sj0qYqfSnwM

We will begin this yearly round up of my favorite songs of the year with a song that didnt come out this decade. I think everyone should hear this at least once.

Star Searchers – Previsual Avatar Blue

https://soundcloud.com/pacificcitysound/previsual-avatar-blue

While this is just a lead up track to what is my favorite concept for an album all year, Spencer Clark sets you up with some information regarding the basis for his soundtrack to the still unreleased Avatar sequel, Avatar 2. If text to speech for 9 minutes and 19 seconds isnt your cup of tea well i suppose you could just not listen to anything.

100 gecs – 745 sticky (Mikey Joyce Still Stuck Remix)

https://soundcloud.com/mikeyjoyce/745-sticky-mikey-joyce-still-stuck-help-remix

Well first off if you arent aware of 100 gecs im sorry to hear that you must need help immediately,. Now there was alot of 100 gecs remixes this year some might say there was…. 1000 of them. But this stands as one of my favorites of the year. One of my favorite remixes using a beep beep horn.

Tyler Holmes – Basic Beach

https://ratskinrecords.bandcamp.com/track/basic-beach

Not only is Tyler one of my favorite artists, singer and songwriter, she consistently puts out music that will make you smile and cry at the same time and puts on a lovely intimate live performance that is not to be missed. I urge you to listen to the full release, Devil, and would be hard pressed to find anyone who doesn’t fall in love with it.

Charli XCX – Thoughts

Now for something completely different, Say or think what you want about charli or pop music in general(you may be right but probably not), but i really think she did something great with her latest release simply titled Charli. I went with thoughts mostly because im keeping with the theme of songs ive cried to this year. Everything from the simple but effective drum part, those autotuned “oooo’s”, something about ballad that isnt afraid to touch on the fact that everything around you is literally fucked speaks to me. (second choice is: official)

100 Gecs – 800db Cloud

https://100gecs.bandcamp.com/track/800db-cloud

Staying with the theme of songs ive cried to multiple times this year, we arrive at my favorite 100 gecs song of the year, spawning the now infamous phrase : I Might Go Throw My Phone Into The Lake, Yeah. And possibly being one of the only songs of the year futuring autotune and grindcore vocals. I really cant just pick one song off this album so just listen to the whole things 1000 Times. 

DJ DJ Booth – make u levitate (closer to god)

https://soundcloud.com/dj-dj-booth/make-u-levitate-closer-2-god

DJ DJ BOOTH does “it” again with this song that was stuck in my head for a good month or two after hearing it, probably my favorite piano part in a song this year. Its just simply fucking good. And should be on any uhhh playlist that you listen to before going to church.

Burial – Claustro

https://burial.bandcamp.com/track/claustro-2

I spent years ignoring the output of Burial but this was the track that made me actually listen to and fall in love with Burial. No one wants to hear anyone wax poetic about burial, but this song fucks big time.

Lighght – The Temple (Libretto) 

https://soundcloud.com/lighghtmusic/the-temple-libretto?in=lighghtmusic/sets/gore-tex-in-the-club-balenciaga-amongst-the-shrubs

When i read a tweet about this song on twitter dot com i was like oh hell fucking yeah and it really paid off, this year we have learned that i really fucking love just straight up wall of texts on a nice track. Another example of a track and album that just simply goes the fuck off. Towing a line between music that might ask you what your major is and if you have any more drugs.

Medulasa – Typhoid Mary Ep

https://medulasa.bandcamp.com/album/typhoid-mary

Just the whole damn thing, it is a touching tribute to a friend who has since passed away and its keeping with the theme of music i have cried to or have made me cry. This release was featured on fact dot com according to tweets.

Follow Gremlin2Movies here and here:

DECAYCAST Premieres: Experimental Artist OUTPUT 1:1:1 Shares “Retroactive Rock Record” Video/Single

Output 1:1:1 is currently preparing for the release of his upcoming EP “Retroactive Rock Record”, due out on November 1, 2019, and has been kind enough to share with us the premiere of the second video, Directed by Elias Campbell and single from the album under the same name, “Retroactive Rock Record”. The track blends slow moving hypnotic vocals, dark plucked ethereal synthesizers and strings, and lush, ominous and lonesome sounding electronic background sounds. The sound of “Retroactive Rock Record” tells a dark and confusing story about confusion, loss, the unknown. The tones blend together perfectly to create at once a hopeful, albeit slightly unsettling sonic vibe. Take a look at the video below and make sure to pick up the album on November 1.

: “Writing this song was incredibly freeing, despite the central idea of it being a complete lack of control. I wrote the lyrics of the song the night of the 2016 US election. I felt a sense of helplessness swell as Trump’s election became inevitable-Canada seems to follow US election cycles pretty closely. I think helplessness can really encourage shame-the sense that I’m terrible and I am in this mess because I deserve this. It takes a lot more than reinforced positive thinking to work through, and writing this song was an attempt to redirect my helplessness into creating something.

watch the video here:

DECAYCAST Reviews: qualchan “Goodbye To All That” (Houdini Mansions, 2019)

Back from a little break to review the newest release from Houdini Mansions, from Cascadian producer qualchan, titled “Goodbye To All That”, and it’s a rather fitting title as the short, bending, warbling loops come into our lives like short lived, lush experiences that vanish into the haze as quickly as they appeared on the horizon. on “Goodbye To All That” qualchan focuses on subtle shifts within these micro compositions that span ambient, post rock, muzak/library music and more. Some of them operate as escaped breaths from larger compositions, perhaps to be expanded upon, while others are self contained and don’t seek anything outside of themselves. Warm, trippy, fuzzed out loops for a moist walk through an all but abandoned forest. Beautiful release.

DECAYCAST REVIEWS: Attilio Novellino & Collin McKelvey – “Metaphysiques Cannibales” LP/ Digital (Weird Ear, 2018)

DECAYCAST REVIEWS: Attilio Novellino & Collin McKelvey – “Metaphysiques Cannibales” LP/ Digital (Weird Ear, 2018)

 

by Diego Aguilar-Canabal

My first instrument was not a guitar, piano, or computer—it was a space heater. I crawled up to it on my feeble haunches (so my parents recall), eyeing with skepticism the plastic cage holding its inner circuitry, and scraped a toy truck against its indifferent grooves. It was music, but not art; in a word, it was sound, yet without form.

Humans entertain themselves by forming patterns out of meaningless garbage, and the venerable Weird Ear imprint is almost religiously devoted to stripping those patterns back down to the garbage whence they came. No less ambitious is their latest platter of sonic sacrilege, Colin McKelvey & Attilio Novellino’s Metaphysiques Cannibales.

The anti-conceptual hodgepodge of musique concrete motifs is named after and perhaps inspired by a book of the same name by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, a poststructural anthropologist who sought to reimagine the study as a revolutionary “decolonization of thought.” That’s a tall order, and no single record will get the job done, but McKelvey & Novellino’s mystical ballet of bleeps and bloops certainly gets the ball rolling.

As you may remember from your earliest toys—particularly from your realization that anything in your hands could be a toy—no melody is inherently happy or sad. No ritual carries inherent reward. It seems like only the Pavlovian training by authority figures can teach you, fragile caged pigeon that you are, can pair a major-key waltz with a sweet refreshing ice cream, or the somber diminished chord with a demonic possession. But is that really how it works?

Side A of this mindfuckery starts with the buzzing whiplash of factory-like rhythms, swirls into the void of a cosmic dentist’s drill, and fades into the spacious echoes of a zombie-ridden hospital morgue. Sources are obscured, and the arbitrary distinction between impact and intent implodes in a serene chaos.

Side B creeps into your consciousness with the whispers of a long-lost French interrogation recording, swallowed by the tinkering and thudding of a conch shell sceance. A molten fax machine emerges from the sludge of a forgotten video game organ dirge, and a scintillating synthesizer drone evokes Laurie Spiegel and Roedelius before sinking into a lonely abyss. The urgency of a broken dial-up connection is tempered by the ebb and flow of a chilling piano loop.

While the grating hiss of granular synthesis is typically the domain of futuristic computer music—you know, all those sweaty nerds coding in Max/MSP—here it gives the music a sense of being unimaginably ancient, like a mad scientist’s vision of the future whispered into a phonograph to pass the time while waiting for the brine to embalm a dead monarch.

“By always seeing the Same in the Other,” writes Castro, “by thinking that under the mask of the other it is always just ‘us’ contemplating ourselves, we end up complacently accepting a shortcut and an interest only in what is ‘of interest to us’—ourselves.”

Indeed, the image we see of ourselves in this record is a terrifying one, and not seeing yourself reflected is a “don’t think of an elephant”-esque impossibility. We’re tragically vain, capricious, greedy yet wasteful, hungry to build something meaningful out of heaps of trash we never wanted in the first place.

If you’re ready to sweat through your nightmares and wake up more confused than ever, this is a record worth adding to your trash-heap.

DECAYCAST Reviews: THE FATHERS “Sound Advice” Cassette / Digital (T/ECA, 2018)

DECAYCAST Reviews: THE FATHERS “Sound Advice” Cassette / Digital (T/ECA, 2018)

The Fathers is Nathan Bowers of Tusco Embassy, Coagulator, Sun Poisoning, Sexorcyst and many  many others, and Derek Gedalecia of  Headboggle / Hillbogglle, Headlights et al taking a fresh and free sonic approach to  avant gardism through minimal, stringed  psychedelia. On “Sound Advice”, Bowers and  Gedalecia seamlessly concoct  a sonic stew of a tonal stringed rhythms through oceans of various tunings and strategies. Synthesizers, tapes, and guitars bend, flex, bow, and squeal through a distorted and plucked array of sonic excitement.  Big chords, dizzying chords , buzzing chords are  accented by splattering drum machines, long synthesized echoes, minimalist plucks, scrapes, taps, pings, rings, and reverberations  melt into distant walls of unknown feedback.  Eerily scraped axes, densely weighted keys, arpeggio stringed madness is the twisted spine of these dense  arrangements.

Click tape to order from T/ECA Store

The Fathers cover a wide  range of  sonic territory on “Sound Advice” effortlessly oscillating between musique concrete, new music,  avant grade classical  and  even some  straight up  noise  to boot. The Fathers  don’t stay in one place for  very long, but  long enough to give these  pieces life beyond  just improvisational experimentations, these are complex, complete  sonic works into themselves, but they also tell a longer, deeper story to the listener who is willing to make the connections or  break the connection.   The  A side offers one long twenty minute track which begins with subtle synth blips, churning and chirping morse code to a dead  radio who’s operator has long abandoned ship,  backed by low and slow droning pulses, fluttering distant ringing warning bells of a barge slowly approaching the shore. The A  side  builds on ominous waves of  tension,  sounds elasticizing into each other in a sort of  Rude Goldberg style of call and response, but  it never sounds contrived or  “jammy” all of the  sonic events seem intentional  and as if they have a place in the overall crescendo and decrescendo of a  complex and damp mix. The sound never drops off, it only drops into the smallest part of  the listeners  ear to create a micro symphony of contorting notes and densely weighted rhythms.  The blending of the  guitars, synthesizers,  tapes and other instrumentation gel into a warm, atonal stew of  deep, soupy events.  Texture and thickness of  sounds  expand and  contract as the push and pull stylings of The Fathers operates like an elastic band of  tension, composition, and  duality, springing into a new  space to once again fold  back on itself.  The Fathers  create new  guitar music  quite unlike anything else, this tape is a must and it’s  exciting to see the  possible  return of T/ECA, who offer some of the most  unique and honest hand  silk screened layouts to date, a must own.  Grip it now.