Impermanence never takes a break, and neither does Ka Baird. Returning to Europe in support of their recent album, Bearings: Soundtracks for the Bardos, Ka will visit Germany, Poland, Czechia, Austria, and Switzerland over the next couple weeks. complete dates below, including a special performance at Unsound Festival on October 5, where Ka will be accompanied by Henry Fraser, Artur Majewski and Paulina Wos.
“Apparition (feat. Malibu)” is the glistening new single from Oliver Coates’ new album Throb, shiver, arrow of time. Stuttering plumes of poetry by Coates’ long-time collaborator Malibu materialize in introspective shades around burnished flickers of string. As the track plunges into its cavernous depths, her crystalline ruminations on “swimming into the sunset” undulate through viscous, stretched-out sound, drowned and suspended in spectral radiance.
“Apparition” arrives accompanied by a video from multimedia artist Charlotte Wells, whose 2022 film Aftersun Coates’ scored. Of the video, Wells says, ““When Olly sent me the track and shared Sarah Sze’s work as the feeling of a video — refracted, chaotic, searching — I thought of an experiment of sorts that friend/artist/collaborator Greg Oke did a while back using personal photographs in rapid succession. Olly shared thousands of photographs from the past eight years or so and I kind of curated them, encouraged them into the timeline while remaining deferential to the serendipity of their chronology and structure; repeated, inverted, whatever. There’s intention, but mostly just life.”
View Wells’ video for “Apparition” just below:
Although we might selfishly want Isik’s music to remain cocooned, soundtracking our private day dreams, his work continues to grow beyond encapsulation, maintaining a sense of wonder but finding new, worldly, and otherworldly, forms to express this. We love working with Isik, and we (ultimately) love being able to share this work with you.
Ahead of its release this Friday, September 6, we offer a final preview of Isik Kural’s new album, Moon in Gemini, in the form of “Most Beautiful Imaginary Dialogues.”
Accompanied by a video from Öykü Dikmen, filmed in Olympos, Turkey (Isik’s home country), the closing track on Isik’s album embodies the altogether dreamier atmosphere that separates it from his previous work. As a songwriter, Isik is an intuitive and playful lyricist who allows his deep love of literature to flow through his off-kilter texts. On “Most Beautiful Imaginary Dialogues,” echoes of Silvina Ocampo’s poem “Dialogues of the Silence” reverberate from the margins while a hushed piano and field recordings create a tender pastiche and invite the listener to daydream as-deep-as-possible.
Isik’s music reaches forth from a place of future memory. His humble and intimate songs are collaged from fleeting moments, tinted with literary references and flickers from life’s silent cinema to create an impressionistic snapshot of the world that is perfectly imperfect in its poetry. Isik’s music tunes into tender and liminal states of being where the simple wonder of everyday life peeks through and the imaginary is always ripe for discovery.
Experience Öykü Dikmen’s video for “Most Beautiful Imaginary Dialogues” just below. Artist and “standard” LP and JP CDs are shipping now before Moon in Gemini is available across the digital universe on Friday.
The Invisible Road: Original Recordings, 1985–1990 compiles an unheard, previously unreleased body of recordings by Sussan Deyhim and Richard Horowitz, dissidents from diametric backgrounds who met during the heady days of Downtown New York in the 1980s.
This collection reveals the creative and life partners’ radical shared vision of avant-garde pop in all of its boundary pushing freedom, combining Deyhim’s singular approach to vocalization, Horowitz’s invention of new musical languages, and touchstones of traditional music from around the world, creating a new music that ultimately retains a voice entirely its own.
Today we share a first listen to the collection in the form of “craving your embrace,” accompanied by a video compiled from Mitsuru Hiyashi’s 1988 film In Search of Desert Equations and footage from a 1987 performance of Azax Attra 1 and 2 at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in NYC.
Gregory T.S. Walker’s Minstrels & Minimoogs marks Freedom To Spend’s fourth release in uncommon¢ (uncommon sense), a series that focuses on the deeper/weirder/most unknown corners of our collective interest. It’s out now, and it’s a doozy.
Originally released as a small run LP in an edition under 100 copies in 1988, and available exclusively at performances at the UC Boulder Fiske Planetarium from a motley crew of student pranksters dressed up in renaissance faire appropriate garb. The band, assembled by Walker (check the FT$ site for his story — it’s wild), used all technologies available to them at the venue — music, dance, lasers, film projection — to tell these tales of a fictionalized past held by different class, caste, and religious tensions.
On Minstrels & Minimoogs, we land in a place where there are certainly songs and music somewhat in the original venue appropriate style of planetarium psych pop, but to get there, we go through a fair amount of electro-fried baroque prog moves and avant-electronic blips backing in-character storytelling. It’s as niche as it sounds, but it also sounds truly original and full of weird, wonderful life.
FT$ is happy to be getting this record out to a slightly larger public who might be interested in the hot cyber-prog soundtrack to the robo-renaissance festivals of 2089. And we’re grateful to Greg, the monk pictured below, for allowing us to shoot this shot. Look out for some live performances of M&M this year!
