Ambient maestro Loscil recasts Souns' raw energy into a truly beautiful form

Building on the success of his 2017 album, ‘Aquamarine’, fixture of the Vancouver scene Michael Red, under his ambient alias Souns, prepares a remix EP featuring hand-picked artists to re-work his track ‘Sun Inside The Sun’. Close followers of ADSR may remember Michael Red from his performance at an ADSR show in Vancouver a couple years back, but since then his ambient project Souns has really taken off. The original ‘Sun Inside The Sun’ is a beautifully chaotic track, with pulses echoing about, capturing the energy and entropic dynamics of a hidden world.

Today, we get a peek at the remix from another Vancouverite, and prolific ambient artist in his own right, Loscil. Loscil takes the original’s syncopated form and morphs it into a rhythmic force. If Souns’ original track were stone blocks, rough, weathered, jagged and beautiful in its own right, Loscil’s remix would be a cathedral, with calculated flying buttresses and meticulously carved pillars. It’s a gorgeous rework, with each element fully coordinated with the whole, slowly building to a harmonious crescendo.

Stream the Loscil remix above, and if you like it, hop over to the Souns Bandcamp to pre-order. The EP is set for release on 31 May 2019 on Subtempo.

— review by Autonomy

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NOMVDSLVND finds his place with 'Belong'

NOMVDSLVND (pronounced ‘nomads land’) may live in Toronto, but as many of us in large cities can attest to, having a home and knowing your place are two very different things. Despite a background in dance, NOMVDSLVND crafts music that, instead of compelling an energetic dancefloor, interrogates the uncertainty that comes with trying to find one’s community. Perhaps his transition from dance to music was the creative spark for this idea. Many of the tracks on Part 1 of the 2-part release ‘More Harm Than Good’ slip in and out of musical ideas at ease, like a wallflower timidly testing the waters of a gathering. NOMVDSLVND creates lush backdrops for these ideas, mixing field recordings, found sounds, and broken beats that make each track an entirely new space.

On ‘Belong’, which you can hear above, he uses Rhodes-like chords to invoke a melancholy mood, a sense of feeling unsettled, of knowing what you want but not knowing how to get there. Broken beats skitter underneath, dropping in and out of the track, underpinning that anxious feeling. Punctuating this idea, he uses heavily processed vocal snippets throughout that further capture the distance we can sometimes feel between where we are and where we want to be. It’s an intoxicating concoction.

‘More Harm Than Good Part 1: Here For Now’ is out March 8th on Toronto label- ‘Bedroomer’ and can be preordered now. If you liked ‘Belong’, check out lots more over on Bedroomer’s Soundcloud.

— review by autonomy


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