Cellular Bits #1: I’lls, Dro Carey, Nakagin, Cassius Select

In the first of a new semi-regular column, LAWSON FLETCHER rounds up the latest Bandcamp, Soundcloud and YouTube streams from the fringes of local electronic music.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]

I’lls
‘Plans Only Drawn’
(single, Yes Please)

After self-releasing the criminally underrated Thread EP in 2011, Melbourne’s I’lls (pronounced ‘isles’, thanks guys) have been snapped up by the ever-in-tune Sydney label Yes Please. ‘Plans Only Drawn’ is the first single from their second EP, due late May, and it favours the more lush, oneiric side of their often busy, fractured sound. Drummer and singer Simon Lam recently went in on Naysayer and Gilsun’s excellent ‘In Mind’, and the same cavernous, echolocated vocal style is at play here. Snatches of Boards of Canada and Radiohead (minus the ego) glint through the darkness in the plaintive guitar loops and woodblock percussion.

[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.]I'lls - Plans Only Drawn by Yes Please

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]

Kučka
‘Phantasy’
(single, independent)

It’s a post-Grimes world, baby, and evidently an excellent one to be living in if the result is something like Perth wacko Kučka. Replete with foreign character accents, live snakes and a voice that, like Claire Boucher’s, is nearly alien in its register and constantly given over to caesura. It’s mainly the work of vocalist and producer Laura Jane Lowther, joined live by fellow nutters Jake Steele (Injured Ninja), Katie Campbell (Catlips) and Rosie Taylor. Kučka has done backing vocals for A$AP Rocky (I shit you not) and recently got a shout-out in the ludicrously patronising ‘best Australian bands you’ve never heard of’ article in The Guardian, but you don’t need the withering approval of the mother country to get into this. Just watch the video for the name-your-price ‘Phantasy’ and get lost in this playful, mutant avant-pop from WA.

[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.]PHANTASY by kučka

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Tincture
‘Threnody’
(single, Silo Arts Collective)

The sound has been called UK bass, and it has Burial’s grimy fingerprints all over it, but it’s really music for no place, or any place. Any haunting, gloomily-lit streetscape at night on the edgelands of crumbling cities, where you can hear the dark, throbbing sound from a distant club that never closes. A description of Brisbane it seems, if this Silo Arts Collective member has anything to do with it. After a series of heavily-blogged bootlegs and refixes – from Usher to Xtina – the young producer has branched out with his own composition, the dark, brooding ‘Threnody’, which not coincidentally is the term for a funeral lament. Perhaps we’re marking the passing of dubstep (“RIP dubstep; killed by brostep”) whilst praying that its ghost continues to haunt stuff as good as this. Look out for a full EP sometime this year.

[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.]Threnody (Free DL in description) by tincture

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Dro Carey
Vital Trails
(EP, independent)

Dro Carey has always been hard to keep up with – he seems to release an EP through Bandcamp or drop a random track on YouTube every other week – but he’s always ahead, or even completely ignorant of, the curve. This latest EP, released just last month, is further evidence. Whilst nominally a return to the battered club stylings of earlier releases, listening to it, I just keep thinking of barbed wire, MKUltra and abandoned brutalist buildings. It gets you moving, no doubt, but it’s also deeply unsettling, as the best of Eugene Hector’s work has always been.

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Lindsay Tuc
The flâneur
(album, independent)

Assembled straight from a series of “live hardware sets,” which presumably means he didn’t use any of that digital mumbo jumbo the kids are messing around with these days, The flâneur lives up to its title: “To walk is to vegetate, to stroll is to live” (Balzac). Tuc is an idle man about (Melbourne) town, someone who shoots the breeze, who can afford to stop and gaze at passers-by, who even has the time for multiple 10-minute-plus cuts of gradually undulating deep house. Background house, even.

[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.]Lord of Chaos - Part 1 by LindsayTuc*

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Nakagin
‘Orca’
(single, independent)

This guy deserves a lot more love than he is currently getting – this is seriously beautiful bedroom ambient and crisp electronica. After an earlier EP, Elsewhere, featuring Marcus Whale of Collarbones on vocals, and collaborating with fellow Sydneysider Guerre on a split 12” for The Finer Things, Hugh Luscombe has generously released this single apropos of nothing, for nothing, on his Bandcamp page. This trans-Pacific gem gently slips into your mind, reworking your mood on an almost chemical level. Smooth and welcome.

[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.]Orca by Nakagin

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Asger Jorn
Untitled EP
(EP, independent)

A palette cleanser. “Unsigned and unmastered” claims the Bandcamp page for this Untitled EP, the second of two EPs with the same name both released in February this year, making parsing Asger Jorn’s output a somewhat confusing but still enjoyable experience. And perhaps anonymity is the point here – this is nameless, placeless enviro-ambient, meant to evoke perfected natural vistas more so than any particular human dominion. Hypnotic, digitally-compressed waves break across synthesised beaches in these two tracks, ‘Violet Sky’ and ‘Magenta Earth’ – whose hue-based titles provide a pretty good sense of the music itself. Get lost; just drift.

[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.]Magenta Earth by Asger Jorn

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Cassius Select
‘Chalk’
(single, independent)

You sense Lavurn Lee doesn’t want to get too caught up in a trend, and as ethereal/lo-fi/indie/alternative R&B begins to coast down the other side of its trend peak, the man mostly known as Guerre has been putting more effort into his YouTube-founded current project, Cassius Select. The same beguiling visual aesthetic and odd mantras accompanying each track continue over from Guerre, but make no mistake, this isn’t sweet-voiced R&B. This is utterly outré techno. A lot goes down in the three minutes of ‘Chalk’ – a bio-technical synthesis of hard edges and strange, ethnographic samples. You’ve been forewarned.

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