Stadiums & Shrines
You

 

In a very human way, “You” finds itself somewhere between assured and uncertain. It hesitates; it glides. It commands with baritone fact and rhymes with endearing naïveté. It flourishes in delay: in strums, elegant and ominous, in strings, fairytale-bound and nightmarish.

Givan Lötz masters this mood. Or rather, this cathartic junction of moods (“obsession, loneliness, desire, paranoia, tragedy, sensuality and melancholia”). Over the past four years, the South African artist has crafted four albums of slow-moving, ‘uneasy-listening’ material. The series is nothing short of overwhelming. And soon it will be available in definitive redux version as SNARLING, a limited cassette/digital release out December 17th through Other Electricities.

In the meantime, while Lötz’s overall creative output ranges wider than we can properly wrangle at the moment, the set below is a fitting entry point.
 

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Lost My Way

 

From the onset, “Lost My Way” is not trying to find or be found. While anxious, the song maintains a meandering pace, as if accepting its fate, the mist, this labyrinthine circumstance. A voice navigates throughout, quite sublimely, almost to a point of orientation but then in the final third, latches onto the lead of a late piano. There’s a sense this could go on forever; perhaps behind the next tree is a harp, and so on, into the abyss… an alluring loop. Fortunately, its creator—Tokyo-born, Berlin-based artist Cuushe—does have the last say here, knowing just when to wipe the ground out from below us.

Butterfly Case is out September 23rd on Flau.

Hark

 

Whatever film London, Ontario artist Joshua Cwintal has in mind here, it is no doubt striking. While not an actual score, Hark does soundtrack a few slow-moving characters: “The Archivist” dwarfed in dusty halls of recorded history. “The Cartographer” hunched over a desk, meticulously modeling reality into spatial information. Then at the EP’s center is a cerebral (almost Reznor/Ross-ian) piano piece, capable of turning a casual listen into a scene itself.

Hark is available at bandcamp.