New Tunes 6.10.2023

Hello, music lovers and everyone else! 🎶

I didn't manage to post #newtunes last week but that's why I have a much bigger selection for today's Friday!

newtunes

Well-known, lesser-known, and even unknown musicians are releasing their autumn creations hoping to carve out a place for themselves on the global stage of musical creativity. Of course, you can't do without an audience! And if you have a few minutes of your time you can listen to the music suggestions for the weekend and beyond.
But if something doesn't suit you, feel free to skip it.

Music4life!

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Algiers - Cold World (Alternate Version)

I read that Algiers from Atlanta, USA, was about to break up after their third album. Well, they still managed to have the energy to release their fourth album 'Shook' in February this year with quite a few guest musicians and redefine their relationship with music. And it has paid off handsomely. Half a year has passed and most music critics consider it their best work. Maybe even the best album of 2023.
This blend of hip-hop, punk rock, electronica, and at times gospel takes you to new sonic spaces that can be enjoyed not just once, but with every listen, new doors of perception open. They didn't make it in the mainstream, that's a fact, but they decided to stay in the underground until the end. For a rock band, it's the only right choice, because crying and whining about why the world is the way it is mostly has no effect.

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LAIBACH - ALAMUT: FEDAYEEN (The Axe Is Sharpened)

Laibach, the controversial Slovenian band, a couple of days ago unveiled a video of the song Fedayeen (The Axe Is Sharpened), the third movement of their nine-movement symphony 'Alamut'.
This was filmed at the Križanke in Ljubljana on 6 July last year. Alongside Laibach, the participants included the RTV Slovenia Symphony Orchestra, the Human Voice Ensemble, the vocal group Gallina, and the AccordiOna Disharmonic Cohort. The conductor was Iranian Navid Gohari.

The symphony 'Alamut' is based on the famous novel by Slovenian writer Vladimir Bartol, which deals with 11th century Persia and the then heretic founder of the mysterious Islamic sect of the Assassins (Hash'shasin), whose name is still pronounced with awe today.

Warning: due to lighting effects, this video may not be suitable for everyone.

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U2 - Atomic City

A new U2 song opens the new concert venue "The Sphere" in Los Angeles. I haven't mentioned them in #newtunes for a while (why would I, there was no reason or news from their side :))
Well, this song is a nice post-punk-pop song, supposedly with a Blondie and George Moroder vibe, so a kind of revival of the seventies.
This hall, The Sphere, is really, at least if you look at a couple of U2 concert videos on YT, visually very impressive.

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Lakiko - Testosterone

Lakiko or Lana Kostic is a musician from Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. She studied classical cello in Bremen and Munich, then classical singing and composition in Bern. But her alter ego Lakiko emerged when, in collaboration with the Biel Neurological Centre, she connected to an electroencephalography machine that produced or sang and played the artist's brainwaves.
How much of this she used on her debut album 'What To Do, How To Live?' we don't even know, but it's clear that the vocals are in the foreground and the cello and minimalism of electroacoustics in the background. The singing technique is sevdalinka, or sevdah, a melancholic Bosnian folk song, albeit coated with theatricality if sung in English.

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Sexhater - За неимением правильных слов

Sexhater is Russian singer-songwriter and musician Timofey Podkolzina, who has been making music in the Russian underground for about six years and recently released the album Piramids (ПИРАМИДЫ). Just imagining living in a place where you're brainwashed with intense negativity is hard. What can one do in this case? He invents a new world and dreams in it.
Well, that's the case here.
Timofey, in a mixture of dream pop and post-punk, dreams in a kind of hypnagogic pop that evokes a sense of false nostalgia and a kind of subconscious image created more or less only in dreams.
The stylistic creativity, using a four-track Tascam analogue recorder, leaves an unmistakable trace of mechanical noise, evoking the feeling of forgotten recordings that have been found and then reprocessed.
The song За неимением правильных слов, or in English 'For lack of the right words', is exactly like that.

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Rat Cage - Nothing's Sacred Anymore

Rat Cage is the project of English musician Bryan J. Suddaby, who recorded and played all the instruments on the album 'Savage Visions', mixed and produced by the English label La Vida Es Un Mus, considered the most important label in the punk underground.
As with his previous products, it's clear that this is mostly punk with elements of hardcore and even old school metal, but after thirty years it still has enough fans to make it worth creating for.

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Bombino - Tazidert

I have to go to the Sahara again. Maybe because of climate change, who knows?
Tuareg musician Oumar Moctar, known as Bombino, has recently released a new album Sahel. He learned to play guitar by listening to tapes of Hendrix, Dire Straits, Carlos Santana, Ali Farke Toure, and so on. His discography includes several releases, the most famous being 2013's Nomad, a collaboration with Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys, which earned him a reputation as one of the best guitarists around. As on all his previous albums, Bombino sings in Tamasheq.
The song Tazidert is the introduction to the album, with melodic and varied guitar riffs intertwined with a progressive and psychedelic rock backing, and immediately we can be sure that our ears are about to witness another great album of desert blues. I recommend listening to the whole album.

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Elephantine - Trembler

Elephantine is a team of eight international multi-instrumentalists gathered around Egyptian composer and musician Maurice Louca. A new band for me, named after the Nile island and the ancient fortress that stands on it. This year they released their second album 'Moonshine'.
In their improvisations and sonic experimentation, combining soprano and baritone clarinet with saxophone, they emphasise a steady pulsating rhythm that is controlled and does not reach a breakneck pace. This creates a kind of bridge between jazz and folk music, because despite all the improvisation, the music is still danceable.