New: Carnivals - Absences/Ino (Parts 1 & 2)

Having uncovered Carnivals’ first release just under a year ago in the form of the Mavi Kara EP, I’m seriously excited for the year ahead now the Sheffield ‘romanticist’ producer has returned with a double sided single ‘Absences / Ino (Parts 1 & 2). In a field of moody electronica suffering saturation and lacking true pioneers, Carnivals is leaning towards an amalgamation of his former sounds: leading to the minimalist and vaguely exotic hip-hop sound particularly prevalent on ‘Leeda’ (which I broadcast at the Netaudio Festival in May), and its being combined with the claustrophobic tendencies, overcast, disconsolate murmurs and climactic, scintillating motifs to bring us ‘Absences & Ino’. One of this year’s most promising surprises has come very early on indeed..

Three Fields - Wild Blue Yonder (Installed Worlds Label)

Its a strange coincidence that I spent this whole Sunday morning listening to Birmingham producer Three Fields’ back-catalogue, before he dropped, unannounced, a new two-track release, ‘Waiting’ on his Sound cloud page. Its a sound with which I’m becoming obsessed, lonely, 4am electronic music built from the distant sounds of industrialisation, equal parts earthly and Eno-esque as the depths of unimaginable space. Cold like the raw, barren, industrialised heathland of the Midlands, associated at least in my head with the night-time mystique of crop circles, fields and the shrubs and bushes of rural British or Eastern European agriculture.

I find it difficult to avoid contradiction in describing Three Fields sounds; ‘Waiting’ procures a degenerative and acidic mist out of which a striking melancholy seeps and trickles. ‘The High Clouds’ has a slower decay, surrounded by a ghoulish web of chordal patterns, by which it is never quite engulfed.

Three Fields has two EPs to date, ‘Irregular Verbs’ (2010), and ‘Promenade’ (2011). His third, ‘Wild Blue Yonder’ will be released November 21st 2011. I’ve posted ‘Like Vortices’ already, from the release. See below for today’s offerings.

Stream, in full, the Wild Blue Yonder EP here.

Waiting by Three Fields

The High Clouds by Three Fields

Oneohtrix Point Never - Replica

Destructive and soul-shattering, Oneohtrix Point Never’s Halloween release is a truly terrifying ordeal in what surely couldn’t have come from anything other than a disturbed individual. Roughly, parts of ‘Repilica’ sound as follows: tape-noise set to infinitely regress amidst cascading towers of classical piano, icy horns deflecting through a misty and murky human-like breath, wild synthesised white noise, occasionally tribal flute-like representations, an uncomfortable and detached feeling of claustrophobia, ritualistic keyboard choirs of jazz-notes and polyrhythmic delay whirs. Razor sharp panned buzzes, searing whistles of flying objects, babies crying and broken arcade game jingles. When songs are pinned together, its only by a single instrument, often piano, atonal, unpatterned and withering away in mournfully emotive declines. Pre-order vinyl at Mexican Summer. First 1000 will press white - nice.

Oneohtrix Point Never - Replica by Mexican Summer