Lounge Sounds began as an opportunity to find out what some of Australia’s best DJs and selectors had been listening to at home during the 2020 lockdown. For our fifth edition of the series, rather than get a bunch of music picks from a single person, we asked several of the artists on our label’s debut compilation release for one recommendation. All selected an album (in some cases more than one) and told us a little about why that piece of music is particularly significant to them. Gi Gi, Slowfoam, Hugh B, Alexandra Spence, èvia, BODY CORP, Salamanda, Concave Reflection and Match Fixer all contributed, and all have tracks on Out of Season, which will be released this Bandcamp day Friday on Theory Therapy Recordings. Here are their Lounge Sounds.
VA - Out of Season, out August 6th on Theory Therapy and available exclusively on Bandcamp.
Gi Gi
Hysterical Love Project - Endless Bliss Weekender
I've found myself leaning more towards music that has some sort of pop fusion/crossover appeal lately (as opposed to the staunchly capital-e experimental stuff) and of course this record has that in spades, while still being obtuse enough to be inspiring. The vocals evoke the lilting melancholy of Jonnine Standish (perhaps an obvious comparison), but the instrumental backdrops cover a much wider amount of ground than her solo work or HTRK, from sun bleached Primal Scream-style psychedelia (‘Love-In-A-Mist’), beatless drone poems (‘Suncatcher’), chopped and screwed Sade (‘Backseat Of Forever’) to the mandatory-for-2021 but nonetheless effective breakbeat grooves of ‘Joyride’ and ‘Psychic Nausea’. Perhaps the most effective element at play here, though, is the fleeting runtimes and arrangements of these tracks. Few of these eleven tracks crack the 3-minute mark, and while it's a well worn trick of pop music, this album succeeds at this sort of teasing. Like the refrain of ‘Glass’ goes – "I want more..."
Slowfoam
Maurice Ravel - Miroirs
I've been regularly listening to Miroirs by Maurice Ravel, a 5-piece suite for solo piano. Finding this music felt like a gift and immediately filled me with chills. I've since revisited this album when I want to evoke a mood; it's great for long walks along the canal, baths, meditation, focus, daydreaming, etc. And as a water enthusiast myself, I'm bewildered at how beautifully Ravel captures some of its many modes in his complex melodic structures, like psychedelic layers of rippling waves, the sea's paradoxical destructive and healing powers, and arpeggiated ocean currents. It's so dreamy and full of stimulating imagery.
Hugh B
Sam Wilkes - Live on The Green
A CD copy of Transcendence by Alice Coltrane sat in my friend’s car for years. Occasionally I’d wind up sitting shotgun, put it on and hope the trip was long enough to get us to track 4, ‘Sivaya’. A proper devotional tune, chant vocals, hand percussion and Alice’s unmistakeable organ. Fast forward to 2019 and Sam Wilkes releases a live version of his beautiful album from earlier that year, simply titled Wilkes. Contained within the brilliant live renditions of his music was a cover of Alice’s ‘Sivaya’. Chants are exchanged for the floating sax of Sam Gendel, organ replaced with a beautiful synthesised pad and chorus-drenched guitar chords, hand percussion now live drums, while Wilkes holds down the bassline in an understated manner.
This is the best kind of cover version, close enough to be familiar/comforting but reimagined for a new or enduring audience of devotees. Rest of the album is fantastic too. Perfect for a couch session of deep listening.
Alexandra Spence
Christina Vantzou - Multi Natural
+ Beatriz Ferreyra - ‘Echos’
+ Lucy Railton - ‘Olivier Messiaen – Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus (from Quatuor pour la fin du temps)’
I’ve been thinking a lot about real versus imagined places and acoustic versus digital spaces. In the past I’ve limited my compositional process by only using sounds from one geographical place – enmeshing my memories with field recordings of specific places to create a kind of collaged sonic postcard. But more recently I’ve become interested in blurring reality and creating imaginary landscapes instead. This Vantzou album achieves that so perfectly. It’s so enigmatic and warped, it feels like the moment when you’re just getting to sleep and you ‘fall’ into your dreams. I enjoy these other two tracks for their manipulation and exploration of space – after the year we’ve just had (are still having), I’m feeling fatigued by digital spaces – the physicality of analogue and acoustic spaces in these works lends an uncanny quality. I love the disembodied and dreamlike voice Ferreyra explores by splicing tape recordings of her niece singing. And this recording of ‘Messiaen’s Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus’ performed by Lucy Railton reminds me how special communal listening in physical/acoustic spaces can be.
èvia
Ulla - Limitless Frame
I've been listening to Ulla's new record, Limitless Frame. It seems to touch on some things I've been feeling too, about music and life, I'm grateful for her music.
BODY CORP
Valentino Mora - Underwater
Recently, I’ve been listening to Valentino Mora’s, Underwater LP out on Spazio Disponibile. The album is a collection of 8 tasteful ambient/techno/dubby acid tracks that are a little more on the darker side that you find yourself just getting lost in. It’s been perfect for when I’ve gone out on bike rides in the misty mornings as of late and it’s also been really nice winding down to at home in solitude. I find the overall sound of this album quite inspiring as I find it hard to write music without "over layering" and so when you hear an album with subtlety like this, it definitely helps you in embracing a “less is more” approach and being more refined in what you’re recording. The cover art is also really nice too.
Salamanda
Various Artists - Heisei No Oto: Japanese Left-field Pop From The CD Age- 1989-1996 (digital version)
We both have been listening to this album for a while now, and it's such a feast for the ears. First we fell in love with the artwork, and then we got mesmerised by the rich textures of each track and dreamy vocals used in tracks like ‘Miko’ or ‘Mermaid’. It's such a delightful album that brings back good memories and happiness. Must listen!
Concave Reflection
Trux - Helix #2
Hard for me to choose! One that jumps out to me as having a really profound impact is Trux - Helix #2 on Fatma Recordings. There’s something really special about this release for me that I struggle to put into words that’s had me playing it on loop for a few months now. I love the pads, tones, textures, and arrangements. But mostly it’s just the raw feeling it evokes that does it for me. Zones I can really get lost in.
Also Hysterical Love Project - Endless Bliss Weekender has to be one of my most played albums of the year. My Purelink band mates and I are on that bandwagon. Just all around inspiring instrumental and vocal performances across the whole record.
Lastly, my band mate Akeem sent me the track ‘Sulphur’ by O Yuki Conjugate recently and I just cannot get enough of it. That classic ‘90s dub/downtempo jam band feel. And a killer bassline!
Match Fixer
Celer - Gems, 9
The track ‘Gems 9’ by Celer is unique in the sense that it’s not obviously loop-based (as is often the case with Celer) and nor is it ambient. Nothing in the music attempts to cushion the spatial borders that I inhabit as a listener. There's nowhere I can rest within the sound. But I don’t mean to suggest that the piece is restless either. ‘Restless’ wouldn’t be the right word. At first, my sense of the music falls into a generic abstract mode of description, with words such as ‘sinking’, or with phrases such as ‘back in the womb’, or with a sense of colour, or maybe even with a personal reflection such as ‘this time last year I was…’ Abstractions come to mind, and I find my thoughts encircled within various imagined spaces and borders. Another analogy (and perhaps a more obvious one) would be the ocean – in both its vastness and its mass, and in its crushing softness, but not necessarily in its beauty when viewed from a distance. Rather, in the sense of a place without obvious pathways.
Forgive me if I get caught up in this analogy of the ocean for a moment (I only write what comes to mind while I listen) but I hear ‘Gems 9’ like a distant funeral dirge – a hundred distant fog horns bellowing for a burial at sea, with the ocean as the burial ground. And beyond the final ‘letting go’, there’s a body, but also a shadowy seafaring undertaker, and a watcher – who is, perhaps, me myself.
Through the fog, the watcher can’t make out much of what lies in front of him. And least of all can he make out the details of the undertaker’s face. The watcher’s sight is overwhelmed by the pre-dawn hues, which are filtering through a fog that blurs every contour and surface. He observes a kind of slow materialisation of isolated forms, and the pulsating of a disembodied distant figure, which appears like a dull translucent moon, fading in and out at different points through the fog. These forms appear to the watcher from various perspectives, and always at a distance.
The undertaker wears a long, threadbare overcoat, which is so weathered that it’s almost ornamental. He works away steadily with a procedural detachment. His connection to the sea, as a place of burial, is cyclical. Each body that he sends down into the deep, is another body closer to his own. How many bodies now have drifted beneath his boat? Even when he rests on his hard single bed, he feels as though he’s down there upon the sleepless waters, drifting, sinking.
On the waters now, in this imagined space, there are no words, no tears, just the foggy movements that the watcher observes while countless distant fog horns breathe across the waters. As it sinks into the cold black water, the body wears a loose, ghostly, pastel garment. The undertaker himself knows little of what’s beneath the water’s surface, yet he feels as though something of himself descends into the depths with each body. For the watcher, it’s almost quiet now. He listens to the arrhythmic tapping of ripples at the boat’s stern. But the undertaker no longer hears these gentle tappings – for him, they’re drowned out by the hundred fog horns, which blow relentlessly across the waters of his consciousness.