Underground Hottlanta: Lid Emba

One of my favourite things about this city is how vibrant the avant-garde/experimental scene is here. There may not be a huge audience flocking to shows, but there are a multitude of extremely talented artists doing their thing. Multi-instrumentalist Sean Moore, aka Lid Emba, is one such champion of music as art. In addition to putting forth some fine material from his own project, Moore is involved with two other great, progressive ATL outfits, Envie and Tenth To The Moon.

After dropping his spectacular Reason Isn't Radar back in 2006, he began working on a The Postal Service-esque long distance collaboration with an equally deep-underground artist from Indiana, Bobcrane. On his myspace, Sean Moore explains the project:

As of the release of We Substitute Radiance, me and Ryan Huber of Bobcrane had yet to be in the same room. Picking each other out of a police lineup could have only been based on intuition; voice recognition might have been possible if our words were cloaked in the tinny sheen of telephone speak.

Our collaboration was catalyzed by a common association with Gavin Frederick's Stickfigure Records and Distro. Ryan is based in Bloomington, IN, and has his own label, Inam Records, which in addition to putting out stuff by Dirac C and others, has been releasing CDRs by Ryan's Vopat, Olekranon, and Bobcrane projects for a few years now. All of these are cool, but his work as Bobcrane particularly caught my ear back in 2007; I dug it's economy, symmetry, and dronescape-meets-boom-box vibe. We got in touch and started working on a few tracks to see how things went. Things sounded good, we were intrigued by the weird feeling of working together without being together, and the project gradually morphed into the collection it became.

To say it wasn't easy would be an understatement. It was kinda primitive, actually. We'd e-mail mp3s back and forth as shit developed, then snailmail completed wav files for the other to augment and accessorize. Despite having different hardware/software setups and being separated by over 500 miles, we somehow managed to construct the six tracks that became Radiance.

I've been jamming We Substitute Radiance really hard as of late. It is what I like to call "A blunt and headphones record". The album envelopes you in a bizzaro world aesthetic that somehow manages to be dark and disturbing yet reassuring at the same time. The opening track, "Toxic Utopia", takes you through a slowly building crescendo that could be a march for some evil, alien army. One of my favourite things about this album is how much imagery the completely instrumental songs lend themselves to. It feels like there is so much detail to the emotions they are expressing, but it never seems too complex to comprehend. We Substitute Radiance's greatest triumphant is that a project so experimental on every level is able to communicate each of the duo's visions to the listener so vividly.

The two pieces following the first track take you down to a chiller, more laid back, yet far from comfortable weirdness. It's hard for me to think of songs so ambient with so much rhythm. I think I would categorize a lot of this stuff as "dance drone". Midway through, "Braille Phantom Braille" breaks down the dub-type groove with an electronic anthem before giving way to an even deeper dive into the abyss. Things go from strange to WTF, just the way I like it. The atmospheric jazz section finally builds to a short reprise of the opening melody.

The momentum returns in the trip-hoppy "Stampeder" as their command of beats remains dazzling. Even the sound-cutout parts at the end of the track have such a tribal velocity to them. The epic 9+ minutes closer, "Flying Undead Overhead", is a truly gorgeous opus that exemplifies everything We Substitute Radiance is about; masterfully expressing the most natural and pure emotions with the most synthetic palette possible.

The more I listen to We Substitute Radiance, the more it becomes one of my favourite albums to come out this year. Here's the first two tracks to wet your appetite:

Lid Emba & Bobcrane : We Substitute Radiance : Toxic Utopia


Lid Emba & Bobcrane : We Substitute Radiance : Bird Brain


As a bonus, here's a video of a live performance from Lid Emba last month:



Lid Emba myspace

Bobcrane myspace

Buy We Substitute Radiance here

Underground Hottlanta: The Hijacking Music Collective

Miles From Pangea

One of the many things I love about the Atlanta music scene is the sense of community that is very prevalent between artists, and everyone else associated with it. It is common around here for bands who share a vision to come together and help each other promote themselves and record and things like that. Industrial Strength Promotions is great example of this.

Recently I became aware of one such conglomerate called "Hijacking Music". It consists of 3 new and talented bands including 13 Day Mission (ATL), Beatrix Kiddo (Athens), and Miles From Pangea (Marietta). All three are instrumental groups that I would consider in the greater realm of post-rock and everything I've heard from them shows a ton of promise and potential. They have a recording studio they use called the "O Zone Lair" and they even have a blog: O Team Press. Give them a listen:

13 Day Mission : Eat All Speaking Canaries


13 Day Mission : El Spectaculare


Beatrix Kiddo : Lena


Beatrix Kiddo : Dominique Dawes


Miles From Pangea : Blackwater Pond


Miles From Pangea : Crimson Sky



In terms of official releases, so far there is only 13 Day Mission's EP from last year, Ex Incendia Libertas, which I have been jamming out constantly over the last couple weeks, and it is available for free at their myspace. I highly recommend you go pick that up. Also, this Friday night, you can catch all three bands at 11:11 Teahouse with me for what looks to be a pretty awesome night of music and art:



13 Day Mission Myspace

Beatrix Kiddo Myspace

Miles From Pangea Myspace


13 Day Mission

The Hometown Hottness: Atlas Sound

photo by Biggie C

Last week we caught the Atlas Sound show at The Drunken Unicorn (2/19/08). For those who don't know yet, Atlas Sound is the solo project of Deerhunter's Bradford Cox. He just released his first full-length album, Let The Blind Lead those Who Can See But Cannot Feel, but it is far from the first material he has put out under the Atlas Sound name. On his blog, Cox regularly puts out material he makes over a weekend, or old stuff he did when he was a kid, or all sorts of interesting music available to everyone for free. To me, his blog is a revolutionary medium for musicians. While there certainly have been plenty of extremely prolific artists before him, Bradford is able to have a much more intimate experience with his audience, regularly giving away his material to his fans directly, and so far, there is no one else who is pulling this off so successfully. As the Internet continues to steer the world of music into interesting directions, Mr. Cox has embraced these trends and utilized them to enhance his art.

What's even better is that almost all of his material that I have listened to in this way is good. I'm still jamming out the Orange Ohms Glow EP constantly that he put on his site weeks ago. The new proper LP is stunning too, a very different beast than Cryptograms.

For the live shows, Bradford has put together a nice collection of musicians to form the Atlas Sound Music Group. He came on stage repping a No Age T-shirt. Another thing I love about him is how he manages to team up with and support many of the other great new musicians in their prime right now. The Atlas Sound performance struck me very differently than the many Deerhunter shows I caught last year. When writers talk about Bradford, they aways bring up things like the dress wearing and all of the supposedly obscene blogging he was doing last year. He is always billed as a spectacle because of this and he sort of became a polarizing figure. While I'm sure that many of the things he did also functioned as attention grabbers, it always felt like they were more about forming a barrier of inaccessibility between him and the audience. As if it were more a distraction from the fear of putting himself and his work out their in an honest and naked way for all to see. Even at the end of the year when he ditched most of the stage act, he would always feel distant on stage, and this Atlas Sound show was the first time to me that he seemed to have a very inviting demeanor and open up. He seems to be more comfortable with putting all of his being on display and for a fan like me, it was pretty amazing to see.

Biggie C got some photos:













I got some videos, "Recent Bedroom" (I love this song so much):



"Quarantined":



"Scraping Past":



"Winter Vacation":



"Requiem For All The Lonely Teenagers With Passed Out Moms":



Sloan Simpson taped the entire show and you can find that here at Southern Shelter.

Atlas Sound Myspace

Buy LTBLTWCSBCF Here

Deerhunter/Atlas Sound/Lotus Plaza Blog


Bonus: White Rainbow

White Rainbow is is on tour with Atlas Sound, in fact the one man loop-fest badass is in the Atlas Sound Music Group. His set was really cool too, you can listen to it at Southern Shelter also. A couple pics from Biggie C:





White Rainbow Myspace

Underground Hottlanta: Slushco

Since taking up this Ohmpark project, it never ceases to amaze me how many great bands from Atlanta that I continue to discover. The deeper I dig, the more talented artists I find. Slushco was another of the plethora of bands I had heard of, but never really looked into hard until recently, upon hearing about the new album, When I Met The Boss of Nova. Showing up late to this party, I've found that Slushco is no longer a band and is now a solo project of Brian Slusher. I contacted Brian via Myspace so he could tell a noob like me what the dilly is: "As far as Slushco, it is strictly a one man studio project now. The band fell apart when Mikey the synth player left for Germany. We toyed with the idea of replacing him but, band morale was collectively down. Aaron the drummer also wanted to concentrate on his other interests. While all of this was happening, I was quietly making the Nova album."

Brian stressed that the band's demise was an amicable one. "It was actually better for all of us. We wanted different things and that's ok. We're all still friends." He went on to talk about the new album that was originally planned to be a solo album for him. "At first, the goal was to prove that you can make a record with a $24 casio keyboard that I bought off Ebay. One of my friends was complaining that he couldn't get his stuff sounding like mine in his home studio. I was trying to encourage him to try anything. Then I actually started making really fun songs with the casio. The first song I wrote for the album was Photograph. I would take it into my kitchen and play around while I was waiting for my pasta to boil. Voila! Being that it keeps tempo very well, it was easy to play notes with my right hand and switch beat settings simultaneously with my left hand. Casio's are great. You should get one if you don't already have one. So eventually, the casio became a one trick pony. I quickly started programming beats with the same plastic feel. It would have been very boring if I hadn't used other drum sounds."

Mr. Slusher is not stopping there as he has some more releases planned for this year: "I am also putting out The Silver Surface for sure. This was going to be the album after Clouds but, we just didn't get around to recording it while all of the breakups and replacements were going on. The recordings are my original demos that I made for the bandmates. There are lots of blemishes and harsh sounds but at the same time, it's really honest. I didn't want to rerecord it without the original members and I also don't want it to go unheard. I guess I'm setting myself up for criticism. It's a very dynamic and flashy album. Our last few shows were based around it. There's also one called The Softer Side of Synchronicity that I am currently working on. As always, they will be my standard 7 song format. I think people get bored with the same topic if it's too long."

I think this 7 song structure is a very interesting way to format an album and I think he is on to something about being able to make a thematic album more effective in a shorter span of time. Another thing I've learned since doing this blog thing is that EPs are really underrated. As for seeing Sluscho in a live capacity anytime soon, it may only be wishful thinking. "I don't know if I will play any shows for a while. It's really hard to get all of the people together and actually do well. I love being in my studio. I feel like I'm actually being more honest with the music listener on record rather than playing a bad show and pretending to enjoy myself. Good shows are great. Bad shows are devastating."

Since downloading a copy of Nova (to cut down on distribution costs, so far he is only releasing it digitally), I've been jamming it out relentlessly and I can't recommend it enough. It is easily one of the best albums to come out so far this year. Here's a little Slushco to try:

Slushco : When I Met The Boss Of Nova : Photograph


Slushco : Slushco : Getting Through A Normal Day


Slushco Myspace

Buy When I Met the Boss of Nova Here

Buy other Slushco albums here

Underground Hottlanta: This Piano Plays Itself

By now, you know all about the bigger local acts that are blowing the city up, like Deerhunter, Mastodon, Black Lips, Snowden, etc. Well, those superstars aren't the only ITP folks that are churning out the kickass tunes. This new Ohmpark series is going to be all about finding the less known, newer faces that are warrioring the scene. One newer band that is really impressing me and showing a ton of potential is This Piano Plays Itself. After playing a killer set at Home Park Fest (which we will have video up from soon), I got a copy of their "Pre-Demo Demo" and have been jamming it hard lately. They take post-rock and electronica jams and arrange them in more conventional structures that utilize vocals/lyrics and create a really cool hybrid. Give it a listen:

Oh Haste The Proletariat Waits


Awake And Asleep


There Are Segments Of Revolving


All those songs plus more are available on their Myspace page, so go hit them up. I'm excited to see what their finished product is going to be like and expect big things from these guys in 2008.