Zaflon (Photo credit: Artist’s Facebook)
Join us once more beneath the echoing skies of Unknown Pleasures as Getintothis’ Mike Stanton nudges another selection of hidden gems in your general direction.
Zaflon likes to challenge and explore through his music, guiding us through the often claustrophobic and dusk-shrouded forests of his creations.
Utilising hip-hop and trip-hop beats, dub bass lines, talented guest vocalists and MC’s, London-based producer Zaflon forges dark and unsettling grooves. Melding a variety of styles, sounds and moods he constructs collages of found sounds and samples, loops and beats, glitched voices and warping electronics on his latest release Melt The Moose Goes For A Swim.
Frenetic breakbeats under a harsh and opaque dub groove create urgency and a barely-contained intensity punctuated by chopped vocals wrapped in stretched ambient blankets of deep space electronics. You can even detect what sounds like Jethro Tull flute samples in there, so distorted and glitched-out they sound like thrash guitar stabs or fuzzed radio chatter.
This is what Zaflon does best, painting trippy and psychedelic landscapes that burn beneath boiling skies of beats and bass. Melt The Moose Goes For A Swim encapsulates his ear for the transcendent, harsh ambience and slow motion breakcore.
Melt The Moose Goes For A Swim is out now.
Grace Inspace (Photo credit: Artist’s Facebook)
Grace Inspace introduced her songwriting smarts on her recently released debut single Tame Teens, displaying her flair for melody, lyricism and room-swelling anthemic choruses. Her latest release Watersource builds on this formula and she has created a sound that combines a range of styles and moods re-appropriated for a new age of socially aware songs.
Drummer and singer in Californian trio Apocalyptic Kitchen (a band that seems to have zero online presence), Grace is branching out on her own and making beats the centrepiece of her sound. Watersource opens with her easy-glide and laid-back vocals over propulsive beats that resemble the 90’s big beat stylings of Jacknife Lee and Fatboy Slim.
Grace is an excellent songwriter sketching a song inspired by the drought-ravaged areas of California, continuing her singular view of a world in decay. Her self-styled ‘protest pop’ is aimed at highlighting environmental concerns beneath sweet melodies and addictive pop hooks.
Grace explains, “Road-tripping through drought-stricken areas of California – that was quite an eye opener! It was an apocalyptic vision. Everyday life in the comfort zone ticks along, but outside the city the ground is grumpy, closing in. On that trip, I internalized a sense of water as a luxury item.”
Watersource is out now on AWAL.
Le Fruit Vert (Photo credit: Artist’s Facebook)
Le Fruit Vert release their debut album Passiflore on July 20th on Preston label Them There and going by track opener Ephémérides it’s promising to be a near-shamanic experience.
Dense electronics, sampled vocals and coiling pulses are layered throughout the eldritch baroque-pop single Ephémérides. This is a journey of warping chant and transcendent drones, modal harmonies and flickering minimalism. Swirling with an hypnotic intensity Le Fruit Vert have produced a strange jewel of fragile harmonics and electronic madrigals swathed in layers of blurred sound and stretched out syllable by syllable.
Ephémérides contains enough mystery and intrigue to inspire sonic exploration, urging the listener into the textured vocal tones of contrapuntal melodies and eerie harmonics. Majestic and orchestral Ephémérides is a beautiful, absorbing and haunting chamber of echoing patterns, casting shadows into the furthest reaches of your mind.
Ephémérides is out now on Them There Records.
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