Damnnnnnnnnnnn this is so good. Really dug what James Welch (aka Seams) put together for his Tourist EP last year, but man, he’s really outdone himself with this new two-track single. I don’t want to ruin the surprise of first listening, so just check it out for yourself:
Focus Energy/Motive Order by seams
You can pre-order the vinyl and/or mp3s here.
Damn, I can’t get this new Seams stuff out of my headphones. Fresh off a stint in Germany, Seams (better known as James Welch in real life) is slated to release his latest EP, appropriately entitled Tourist, in a month or so. As a teaser, he’s released the song “Hung Markets” for free from his bandcamp page and it’s a seven minute duesy of a track.
The thing that hits me the hardest about Welch’s music is how he’s able to weave (for the pun-lovers, “seamlessly”) simple layers into an incredibly complex fabric — and “Hung Markets” is no exception. You really hear this starting at the 3’12” mark where Welch combines a fuzzy rhythmic pulse in the mid-range with a typical bass line and, to highlight the simplicity, adds a bell strike at the start of every measure. After about a minute-and-a-half and the addition of only a couple of other layers (the most noticeable being a whitewash of synth sound covering the entire composition), what you wind up with is something that is so textually dense that it’s hard to believe that essentially the exact same elements are in play. I don’t know what slight-of-hand Welch is doing to create this effect, but whatever it is it’s very interesting and it works incredibly well.
You can check out an mp3 of “Hung Markets” below and keep refreshing his bandcamp page daily to see if/when more tracks will be released:
A couple of weeks back I came across an awesome video from London electronic artist Seams (aka James Welch) for his track “Glitch” that made me want to play Lemmings really badly. Well today Welch passed along another gem of a song — this time a remix of his hypnotic track “Nightcycles” from fellow UK artist Shells.
Even by cutting the 7+ minute playback time of the original in half, Shells is still able to fully develop the song by giving it more momentum through an added trap drum set and a prominent chime-like bell line. Although the differences are noticeable, the remix still adheres to the dream-like tone set by Seams’ version. The trance inducing quarter note swells are still present as is the apt vocal sample “I saw colors / like I was floating on a cloud”, keeping the song in the sky, just not high up in the exosphere.
At the cost of an e-mail address, you can snag the original from Seams’ website while you can check out the remix below:
Here is another weekly wrap-up of some of my favorite music related videos I stumbled across in the past seven days:
If you don’t have a good half hour of time, then I suggest you skip this first video. Temporary Copenhagen: An Experiment on a New Danish Scene is the work of videographer Vincent Moon. I’ll let him go ahead and describe it:
This is a 30min piece we created on the spot. 9 local bands, only 3 i knew, 2 hours to organise something before the audience arrives, and the objective to create a unique sound piece, a collaborative concert which would be moving in an intimate space. Only one take, no cuts, loads of tension, maybe an interesting talk between cinema and music where each one feeds the other one. And a certain idea of a document on a city and its creative life.
Some of the Danish groups participating in the project range from the widely popular Efterklang and Slaraffenland to up-and-comers Choir of Young Believers and Murder. Check it out below:
One of my favorite live videos from this past week was a Vivian Girls a cappella rendition of “He’s Gone”. Although the video isn’t particularly great, the audio is what makes it worth it:
I don’t know where the people at Delicious Scopitone find some of their stuff! Their latest post on Seams’ video for the track “Glytch” is sure to rile up the geek inside you:
The folks at Sup’ Magazine just recently posted a couple of videos from French music princess Charlotte Gainsbourg’s set in Brooklyn a couple of days back. Here’s one of her covering Bob Dylan’s “Just Like a Women”.
Alex Bleeker & The Freaks‘s self-titled album on Underwater Peoples had to be one of my top five favorite debuts of 2009. Courtesy of the Pelly Twins‘ flip-cam, here is a video of them performing two new tracks (jump to about 30 seconds in):
Finally, my favorite video of the week belongs to the rooftop collab of El Perro del Mar and Lykke Li on del Mar’s song “Change of Heart”:
