Hello!
It’s been a bit bloody warm hasn’t it? I’m not complaining (apart from the whole hayfever part). After spending eight weeks in California last year, I realised I’m a bit more pro-summer than I thought. Shame about the humidity over here though. Nightmare. Anyway, let’s get on with things…
Stilz
RX-81
NewRetroWave
A bit of chillwave never hurt anybody, and for these long summer days Stilz has served up the exact sort of album to be turned up as the hazy orange evenings draw in. “A throwback album with a modern synthwave sound,” is how he describes it. I shan’t argue with that. It’s also a love letter to ‘Gundam’, his favourite Japanese anime series (hence the album artwork). You’ve probably heard of/seen a Gundam even if you think you haven’t and, if you haven’t, there’s a real life one in Yokohama in Japan. Anyway. Smooth beats ahoy on ‘Solar Glow’, that has a lick of Daft Punk about it, while ‘Newtype’ unfurls with dreampop ambience and percussion that’ll get your head nodding. The title tack alone is worth the price of admission, synthwave with a capital “S” with bright synthlines and a slick shredding guitar solo. Perfect summer listening.
Greylancer
SUBNET
Rosso Corsa
I’m a bit synthwave heavy this edition, which is no bad thing. I was previously unfamiliar with Greylancer, who released this stonker of a record at the end of May. Across six tracks ‘Subnet’ takes us on a voyage of Italo electro, cinematic in its scope and very much 80s-influenced. You can imagine opener ‘The Search’ being accompanied by a voiceover - “It was the future, the distant year of 1998”, as synth keys fade in and out. The standout here is ‘Viper’, a shockwave of a track that ripples with a sonic energy that oscillates until it’s nothing, though I was equally taken with ‘Phaserbolt’, which was made only with an Amiga 500 and a Commodore 64.
Don’t let this one pass you by.
Sigur Ros
ÁTTA
BMG
Well this was a lovely surprise. Announced just a day before release, Icelandic post-rockers Sigur Rós have blessed us with this new album ‘Átta’. I have loved Sigur Rós ever since discovering ‘Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust’ in high school, and at this point I don’t think I’ll ever get bored of Jónsi’s voice. “Cinematic” is a word that crops up several times during this edition of Happening Again, but it’s one that’s very much applicable to Sigur Rós, both in the metaphorical and literal sense (check out the video for lead single ‘Blóðberg’). ‘Átta’ is the group at their most nihilistic (if that wasn’t obvious from the album sleeve), sombre swells that tease of nostalgia as Jónsi’s signature croon drifts like the wind. This is more an ambient record than anything else, with little percussion and sweeping atmospheric strings. A track I keep going back to is ‘Skel’, an epic in every sense that has an air of triumph about it. But it’s all good stuff, with not a dud to be found in the 10 tracks. I’d be surprised if this isn’t one of my albums of the year.
Bendik Giske
BENDIK GISKE
Smalltown Supersound
So this is not, as I thought, Bendik Giske’s third solo outing - though we’re told that’s on its way. No, this is a self-titled outing that’s not quite an LP, but maybe a bit more than an EP, but definitely full of the experimental jazz stylings that Giske is well known for. Everything here was recorded in a single take, with no overdubs and only a “saxophone and his body”. No one can ever accuse this Norwegian saxophonist of being boring. This is striking, tantalising stuff, and could be challenging if you’re not familiar with Giske’s work. Tracks like ‘Rush’ start minimalist, building with an intense ritualistic energy before exploding into brassy wails, while ‘Not Yet’ is softer in its production, still tight with rhythm but slower in its flow. ‘Rise And Fall’? Does what it says on the tin, blasts of cacophonic sax that ebb in and out. There’s more of a focus on pattern and rhythm here, rather than melody, and this record is well worth your time while we wait for Giske’s third LP.
Mega Drive
ARC ASCENSION
FiXT
Another nice surprise, this. Mega Drive has been part of my musical canon since his 2014 album ‘198XAD’, a dark angry record chock-full of harsh cybersynthlines (say that after a few pints) and a cinematic view to its production. It was followed-up in 2019 with ‘199XAD’ and next month we’ll get the third entry in this series with ‘200XAD’. For now though this new EP ‘Arc Ascension’ will tide us over, featuring eight tracks taken from the upcoming record that have been released as singles almost-monthly from September last year. And boy it’s a good’un. Any record that opens with a bang as powerful as this title track gets top marks in my book, frantic electronics akin to a PC from the 90s being lobbed into a washing machine; ‘Persona Sync’ is like the soundtrack to having a drink in a neon-drenched bar in a dirty corner the Los Angeles of ‘Blade Runner; ‘Shadow Dancer’ is the soundtrack to the dystopian cop procedural taking place outside the bar you’re drinking in. And ‘Infrared Icon’? It’s the guy running away from the police, flying car kicked into sixth, over-exposed green and blue whizzing past his windshield while a synthesiser arpeggiates into next week. Sorry, lost myself there. July can’t come soon enough.
See you in two weeks then (I’m continually surprising myself with how well I’m keeping to this self-imposed deadline). As always you can find my ramblings elsewhere in both print and online in Electronic Sound, and also now at Juno Daily, where I’m reviewing the very best albums and singles. You can also follow me on Twitter. A few final curiosities that have caught my eye…
McDonald’s have released a Game Boy Color game called ‘Grimace’s Birthday’ centred around their large purple mascot having to collect 40 milkshakes to throw a birthday party at one of their restaurants. I thought this was a wind-up at first, but no it is an actual real thing that exists in the year 2023. It even features it’s own painfully 90s website complete with fake adverts for ringtones. You can play it on a real Game Boy as well. Why? Why not. Oh, and it was Grimace’s 52nd birthday for those wondering.
Last time in Happening Again, I wrote about Reddit’s two day blackout to protest incoming changes to its API and how it was killing third party apps. Since then, several corners of the site have descended into chaos. The other day I logged into r/interestingasfuck and was greeted with a tonne of porn, with the entire subreddit marked as NSFW. After trying to work out what was going on, I learned that NSFW subreddits can’t be monetised by Reddit, which had sparked several other normally safe subreddits to do the same; some subs have outright stayed private since the start of the blackout. In retaliation, Reddit has removed and/or suspended several of the mods behind some of the protests while the company’s CEO Steve Huffman called the site’s users medieval serfs. A Galaxy Brained comment if I’ve ever heard one. The company is also facing an attack from a group of hackers who are threatening to release 80GB worth of confidential data unless they roll-back their API changes. My favourite internet-related newsletter Garbage Day reported that r/mildyinteresting, a subreddit with 22,000,000 users is now completely closed down, with no mods or new posts. Oh, and some subreddits are filling their pages with pictures of John Oliver. Like I said - chaos.
Elon Musk is allegedly going to cage fight Mark Zuckerberg, for some reason. I sort of read this story through a sigh, bored of how the world has become a living version of one of those insane radio shows you can listen to while ploughing through pedestrians in ‘Grand Theft Auto’. But alas, this is the world we live in now. For the record my money’s on Zuckerberg, who is 12 years Musk’s junior and is a trained martial artist. I feel whoever wins, if it even happens, we’ve already all lost something from this.
Finally, Nintendo are remaking ‘Super Mario RPG’, a SNES game that was never released outside of the US and Japan. It looks great! Here is the trailer: