Canadian psychedelic, electronic dance quintet DOOMSQUAD are set to bring their desert party back to Europe this November with a run of live dates, including a headline show at London's Waiting Room on 9th November:
Friday 4th November - Iceland Airwaves Festival
Tuesday 8th November - Café Video, Ghent, Belgium
Wednesday 9th November - The Waiting Room, London
Thursday 10th November - Oakford Social Club, Reading
Sunday 13th November - The Old Pint Pot, Manchester
Monday 14th November - Komedia Studio, Brighton
Tuesday 15th November - Het Depot - Leuven, Belgium w/ Peaches
Wednesday 16th November - Hafenklang, Hamburg, Germany
Thursday 17th November - P8, Karlsruhe, Germany
Friday 18th November - TBC, Zurich, Switzerland
Saturday 19th November - TBC, Leipzig, Germany
Sunday 20th November - Urban Spree, Berlin, Germany
Tuesday 22nd November - Paradiso, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Wednesday 23rd November - Vera, Groningen, Netherlands
United by their love of rhythm and exploration, Beyond The Wizard's Sleeve has also reworked Doomsquad's Pyramids on Mars, which Clash describes as, "Flushed with electronics, the eight minute re-work is genuinely stunning: a languid, wide-open re-work flirts with lysergic realms while remaining rooted to urban claustrophobia." Listen below...
Having formed in 2012 siblings Trevor, Jaclyn, and Allie Blumas soon began to explore trance and electronic beat making. Their shared fascination with dance culture, rhythm, and the unknown, along with their lifelong immersion in the arts, began to manifest as a collective ethos. Before long, DOOMSQUAD had mushroomed into a full-scale art project.
Inspired by some of their favourite artists — Georges Bataille, Richard Tuttle, Tanya Tagaq, and Genesis P-Orridge — DOOMSQUAD travelled to the New Mexican desert to write and record Total Time, creating dark, pulsating beats interspersed with hypnotic, incantatory jams. Upon returning home the band continued to draw inspiration from the Toronto arts community, their friendships and connections led to some fortuitous collaborations, including one with Canadian avant-garde legend, Mary Margaret O’Hara, whose otherworldly vocals grace ‘The Very Large Array.’ The driving, dirty bass lines and analogue layers of effects come care of Graham Walsh (Holy Fuck), who produced and mixed the album.
The record features a number of other contributors: Mike Haliechuk of Fucked Up plays guitar. Industrial noise experimenter David Foster aka HUREN offers vocals on ‘Russian Gaze.’ Colin Fisher and Brandon Valdivia of free-jazz duo Not the Wind, Not the Flag bring instrumentals. And galactic twins Josh and Jesse Hasko, who perform as North America, are also a crucial part of Total Time and are now members of DOOMSQUAD’s live act.
soundcloud.com/bella-union/doomsquad-pyramids-on-mars-beyond-the-wizards-sleeve-remix/s-K4qQj
Following on from debut single 'The Church', which sold out immediately and reached number one on Hype Machine, Manchester-born, L.A. resident Patience - aka Roxanne Clifford - returns with 'The Pressure', taking her crystalline synth-pop further into the dry-iced corners of a club in 1983. Marrying a cold production, aided as before by Happy Meals’ Lewis Cook’s engineering, with the inherent sweetness in her vocal, 'The Pressure' never relents, with pulsating waves of harmony and crisp snare cracks building like the greatest early Mute Records 7” they never released, an ode to relationships and the craziness they inflict on us.
With a bittersweet stream of melancholy trickling through the half speed drum machine, her plaintive appraisal of life’s turmoil, a period spent changing, aches across the ages. On the flip, 'Wait For You' is the make up after the pressure of the fall out. Following on from her sister-band Veronica Falls’ penchant for covering Roky Erickson, Patience’s quietly dramatic take on his sweet love song is enhanced by Clifford’s Mancunian lilt and the drone-pop synthesizers humming sweetly. Dressed in Clifford’s harmonies, the song’s sweetness brings a soothing counter-balance to the A-side.
Beginning as a harbour for Clifford’s songwriting while Veronica Falls were on hiatus, Patience has now blossomed into a persona channelling Italo-disco, classic British synth-wave and Clifford's uncanny knack at writing melodies that catch the heart and ear of the listener. It’s a calling that Clifford has been answering since her first guitar groups, but with Patience, Clifford’s solo vision is pure, streamlined, and liberated by her new sound. Clifford’s prowess as a singer has also taken many forms including guest vocals for various acts, most notably Metronomy and Franz Ferdinand.
Patience constitutes just one exciting avenue of Clifford's craft, a testament to the song prevailing over the context. The future is bright, one just has to wait.
DIORAMA return to the musical front. ZERO SOLDIER ARMY, released on the 9th September 2016, follows the renowned album EVEN THE DEVIL DOESN’T CARE, a week-long fixture in the Top 3 of the German Alternative Charts.
From the highly-explosive opener ZSA to the surreal finale STAY UNDECIDED, DIORAMA celebrate their typical mix of dark electro, indie and progressive rock.
“The songs were conceived in a time of increasingly complicated global crises which coincide with fanatical nationalisms and other delusions. We wanted to counteract our bewilderment in the face of the fiasco we’re heading towards with a term symbolising defencelessness and militancy at the same time – the ZERO SOLDIER ARMY,” explains Torben Wendt. “We have no weapons. But we have love, freedom, and music. And Gin.” – “What counts is: not to abandon naivety, to fight destructive powers and to revive dreams that are in danger of getting lost. While producing ZERO SOLDIER ARMY, we rediscovered how much we love this powerful, electronic sound, and we took it one step further. This album is a hundred per cent Diorama, from the first note to the last.”
The CD artwork was created in cooperation with Stefan Alt (ant-zen) and, apart from atmospheric shots of Leipzig-based photo artist “Propeller”, it contains a booklet-size stencil of the band logo – an exclusive collector’s item.
After almost 30 years of silence, O Veux make their comeback with 2 double vinyl compilations and a very special performance on the 1st of October at Café Café in Hasselt with Jo Billen a.k.a. Een Huis and Marcel Vanthilt (DJ Set).
More than 40 tracks spread over 2 double vinyl compilations.
Belgian post punk band O Veux will issue two self-titled archival releases via Softspot Music (US) and OnderStroom Records (BE). The OnderStroom compilation features unreleased & live recordings from 1981-1982, never before released on vinyl. The Softspot release features O Veux’s complete studio recordings from 1982-1986 with additional unreleased tracks. For fans of Mars, DNA, Cultural Decay and De Brassers.
The Flemish Region of Belgium is unfamous for its punk, post punk and Coldwave music in the 1980s, and yet a trove of bands like AA, The Cultural Decay, and Kebab came up in Flanders and self-released small runs of their own music. Another one of these unfamous bands was O Veux.
In the early 80s four unemployed guys from Hasselt, Belgium sought out raw, progressive music in order to escape the boredom of their daily lives. Heavily influenced by the Hasselt music scene, a breeding ground for left-of-center groups, the guys decided to form their own band. Despite the fact that none of them could actually play an instrument, they were committed to the fundamental belief that anyone could play if they so desired. So Rudi Reners, Marc Vandezande, Valentin Smeyers and Ivo Geurts bought the cheapest instruments they could find.
After touring and gigging relentlessly all over the world, Mathieu Vandekerckhove (also Amenra, Kingdom, Sembler Deah) locked himself in to compose the follow-up to the introspective journey that was 2012’s universally acclaimed masterpiece “Now and Forever”. The brand new album follows the same path of meditative drones and deep and subtle melodies, blurring lines between ambient and postrock music.
The journey that “Now and Forever” started is on “Forever and a Day" explored in more intricate depth, with layer upon layer of mesmerizing aural waves that floods and grabs its audience. The subtle but distinct contribution of Dehn Sora (Treha Sektori, Sembler Deah, Ovtrenoir) adds to the overall direction of the album, with melancholic and pensive moods being entangled with a sense of longing, aspiration and belief. “Forever and a Day” is another milestone in Vandekerckhove’s oeuvre.
“Now and Forever” was a dialogue between a father and his son -- as the title of the new album suggests -- the bloodline is continued on “Forever and a Day”, with a dialogue between a son and his father.
The cover art depicts a sculpture made by Syndrome’s Mathieu Vandekerckhove’s father. The sculpture was made around the time Vandekerckhove was born, and it was prominently on display in the family’s living room.
It literally was a centerpiece in the young and adolescent life of Vandekerckhove, with him growing up in constant proximity of the sculpture. Now in his adult life, the sculpture becomes the centerpiece of his musical development.
The bronze sculpture not only resonates with Vandekerckhove’s past, present, and future; it also perfectly connects with the musical story he tries to convey: the work of art has no limbs, but only a torso and a head with no eyes. Despite it being a motionless entity, it emanates a lot of force. However, that force is caged in the prison of its own body. It knows no freedom, there’s a constant notion of absence, a dark and brooding void; sorrow, bereavement and grief.
It’s adamantly clear that to Vandekerckhove the image is much more than a decorative ornament; it depicts his coming of age — both musically, but also on a deeply personal level, confirming the journey we’re invited to partake in come September will be a spiritually profound one.
