Night hangs differently; the bedroom anchored in a slow glow, the neighborhood spins…

Chemists // 化学者 is Virginia-based artist Danny Bozella. To date the project has collected Bozella’s solo experiments away from Rem’s Floating Chandelier. With Slow House Virtual he’s focused in on a sound, fusing wobbly guitar work with atmospheric beatmaking. While still abstract and fleeting, together the sketches make for a rather warm, transcendent little listen here.

A milky bridge rolls over the alps of Zell am See. Morning glory foreign.

Somewhere in the valley, a cathedral bellows. Organ cries ricochet in thermal currents.

A great lift; the wings respond.

White horses prance below, their lines written loosely across the vast face of the mossy glade.

Curiously charmed, the passengers wish this drift to last—to reach some zephyr’s summit, or recede into the lost sanctuary. Or even to arrive in the company of extinct creatures.

Alas, the shade casts across the patchwork, racing to meet the glider as its brief voyage hovers to an elegant halt.

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Candy Claws are no strangers to lands dreamt or hidden. We’re honored they decided to hang here with us, coincidentally right before backpacking the Austrian Alps in reality, which is roughly where they are at the moment. Ceres & Calypso in the Deep Time, their 4th full length album, is due out June 25th on twosyllable.

“…all environmental sound and non-sound begin to have a meaning to me and the sound begins to shine.”

Above is the music and the words of Michiru Aoyama. Both are in reference to the composer’s regular practice of meditation in Zen Buddhism. Matched with Prelinger-sourced infrared footage, “日本の空気 (Air of Japan)” illuminates those shining subtleties in hyper-awareness. The four minutes works well as a standalone zone-out, but we also recommend letting them open up a nice half-hour of textural ambient and static drone at bandcamp via Hamburg-based label Organic Industries.

Alone; a vibrant desire, a glimmer so high…

The art of floral arrangement known as Ikebana inevitably comes up here when highlighting a project that shares its name, and its principles—”minimalism, beauty in space, calmness…”. The parallels are immediate; “Kiss” enchants with restraint, its chords plucked almost as selectively as its words. The message is sincere, and as focused as its title. The pacing is unforced, its end result reaching somewhere uniquely sublime.

The song appears on the Japanese female duo’s LP when you arrive there, due out July 8th via Flau.

Moons rest low enough to touch. Everything; all walls and walkways, even the luminescent spheres themselves, porcelain.

Men wander the labyrinth of labyrinths of labyrinths, peaking in and out of corridors. Passing the same markets again and again and again… they pick up telephones, only to meet the vacant hiss of the exiled. Omnipresent mantras tangle in the shadings of stone and menacing branches.

They find doors within doors within doors, confronting interiors far larger than spatial reasoning would suggest. Beyond one frame, a desert fortress overlooks the Dead Sea at high noon, a panning mirage. Inside another, the scene repeats from the opposite vantage, hours later, glistening under moons partially submerged in salt. Through the next, a threshold brightens at dawn, clearing the fortress and the sea overhead, its reflection cycling from speck to surge—cumalitively, again, rippling porcelain without end.

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Recycle Culture is the project of an Erik, whose whereabouts for now remain simply on the World Wide Web, in a collection of masterful downtempo and uptempo work found at bandcamp.

Inanimate to an unfocused eye, yet, if an ear were pressed against it…

As evidenced by the smooth, barely-varying pulse of its soundcloud wave, Solar Year‘s “Lines” is completely, and quite serenely, flattened here by Heathered Pearls. While such a treatment could risk erasing identity, this one preserves just enough—somewhere in that hum is a crucial trace of the original, the lines carry on.

Waverly, their 2012 debut, is set for re-release on vinyl June 25th via Ceremony (US) and Splendour (EU). Jakub’s own Loyal LP is available through Ghostly.

Angel Olsen

Kurt Vile & The Violators

Four worlds expand over separate easels and outwards, selectively intertwined by the unknown—this constant, revolving sense of consideration.

A manor constructed over a reservoir, its residents accept life at an aqueous tilt. Two tribes peel Mount Victoria from the water’s edge, its range perpetually snow-capped, sapphire blues overlap. Badlands collapse into boreal forest and back again; horses gallop above the timberline; a man repels through time, reading the eons, meter by meter.

Eyes between canvas and cliff, she watches him, wondering what other accents of hers might appear and which may fade. Like the seasons, but more sporadic, she thought, like emotions.

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Cemeteries is Kyle J. Reigle, whose debut album was one of our favorites of 2012. Foxes in Fiction is Warren Hildebrand, whose debut album was one of our favorites of 2010. Kyle has a release due out later this month under the side project Camp Counselors on his own Snowbeast Records. Warren has a release in the works as well as a showcase in Brooklyn this Saturday for his own Orchid Tapes. Busy, beautiful people.

Majical Cloudz

Youth Lagoon

The sound: drum machine pulses, guitar flourishes, and synth washes. The setting: California by way of construction paper landscapes. Together they are FWY!, a project distinctly focused on the sensation of driving—all the work of San Francisco resident Edmund Xavier, who takes us through its inseparable elements below.

You’ve had a number of recording projects over the years. How did you arrive at this one, making “music for freeways“?

I grew up in Fullerton, California. You basically grow up on the freeway down there. It’s a whole lifestyle. In high school I had two delivery jobs with long depressing freeway runs. I know them well.

I love simple repetitive music, stuff that’s considered monotonous or even boring. About five years ago I started working more with drum machines, and the pulse naturally felt like ‘driving music’. I had the idea to make utilitarian music, sounds that worked as background in the car with the wind-rushing in or with passengers talking over it, mood music.

The German references are there any time you work with drum machines, but I tried to add certain ‘California’ sounds like freestyle beats, guitar twang and ‘desert’ post-punk like Savage Republic. I also draw on bits you would commonly hear on nostalgic radio, melodies from the intro to a Tom Petty or Grateful Dead song, rhythms from Salt N’ Pepa, Blondie, New Order etc. etc.

Having lived in California, I especially appreciate how each of your tracks takes on a particular town or highway as its title. How direct of an inspiration are these locations when you record?

Often they are directly inspired. For instance, my friend Kerry told me she was working a job in Marina Del Rey last year, so I made that track as a sunset come-down for her commute.

Sometimes I just like the way a place’s name looks and want to give it new life as a song title. When you are isolated in your car for hours, mundane road signs start to take on new meanings… you start to read into them. You can see the simple poetry in a name like “BUENA PARK”.

Describe the process of making FWY! cover art. Is each tear planned with a final design in mind or is there an element of chance?

I use dull scissors, X-acto knives, and glue stick. There is a lot of random cutting and then very specific cutting and measuring. There are also black & white xerox elements too that come from old books and pamphlets I find in the dollar bins at this library cast-offs book store. It takes some time to get them right. If one isn’t working, it’s easy to re-purpose and cut it apart.

Jean (Hans) Arp used construction paper in his Dada series According to the Laws of Chance. Children use it every day in kindergarten… the paper art spectrum is pretty broad. What draws you to the medium?

Yep, I feel like a kid when I am making them. I wanted to work with blocks of color, and I am not a painter. The construction paper is a cheap and easy way to move huge sections of color around. I love the restricted palette too and the dull earthiness of the tones. I create a series of images first, then work on the music.

There are obvious influences from Dada and Futurism to post-punk. The ’78-’84 era is the heyday for me… new wave graphic artists like Barney Bubbles, reggae sleeves, Factory Records, xerox punk. To bring it back to Southern California, I am influenced by surf and skateboard graphics, the logos on condominium complexes, frozen yogurt shops, office parks, freeway vistas, suburban landscaping, road construction…

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FWY!’s most recent tape is available through Moon Glyph, and all past releases are at bandcamp.