Eliethel’s Haunted Dreampop in Ding Dong

Eliethel's album: Ding Dong

Once you listen to this music, you get drawn into the dream. Especially if you’re a musician. And just as in Inception, you’re never really sure whether you want to ride the kick back to reality.

Eliethel (aka Greek multi-instrumentalist Evangelina Alexaki) creates dainty, haunting pop music laced with downtempo electronica, carefully pieced together and balanced to the point of obsession. You can tell when music has been slaved over. And this collection sounds like it took upwards of half a year. Possibly more.

Her album Ding Dong is eight tracks of folktronic, keyboard-based vocal pop that showcase some unique arrangements and instrumentation (the drums and bells of the title track for example). When she sings in English, the words come out with a pretty Greek accent that adds to the entire mystery of the experience. The music is sometimes world music, other times, folksy, and sometimes even ambient.

It makes sense when you realize she’s an undergraduate in music composition in Ionio University, Greece. Hence the attention to sonic detail, and the brilliant use of arrangement and texture.

SUMMARY:
With vocals like Dido or Kate Bush, and instrumentation like Sophie B. Hawkins, Eliethel’s music is the sort you listen to at night while writing heartfelt pleas for love on your LiveJournal blog, or while finding yourself lost in a strange country where every corner holds a promise of adventure.

Details:
As of June 2011, you can download her latest album Ding Dong for free by registering with your name and email on her artist website. A truly worthwhile deal if you ask me.

Fan her on Eliethel’s Facebook page.

Follow her on Eliethel’s Twitter stream.

Blusmoke’s Lo-fi Soundtracks for Life

Blusmoke at work in his home studio

Blusmoke (aka Ryan Itchon) is a guitarist and electronic music producer from Paranaque City, Philippines who uses a combination of hardware synth boxes and software to make music.

His electronic music is all over the map in terms of genre — jumping from soothing Ibiza-inspired downtempo peppered with classical guitar melodies (The Red Jacket, Of Roses and Synthetic Dreams) to frenetic video game music (Rapid Induction) and outright trance complete with endless 16th note snare drum rolls and soaring synthlines (Sunrise, Maiden Flight, A Tribute to the Noble Knights of the Temple, The Contrast of White on White).

The unifying element in all nine tunes he offers for free download on his Facebook page is the idea of the soundtrack. His music has the ability to seamlessly melt into the background, refusing to jar your consciousness from whatever it may be doing, and instead, creating an underlying bed of emotion on which to experience your current activity.

I’m not sure if my ears are fooling me or if some of the tracks are really encoded at a low fidelity bitrate, but nevertheless, the overall output carries the same emotional weight. This is electronic music that feeds the heart while allowing you to experience life.

Details:
Blusmoke’s Facebook page http://listn.to/­blusmoke contains nine downloadable or streamable tracks.

Soundclick page: http://www.soundclick.com/blusmoke

Capac’s downtempo shoegazing live electronics

Capac - EP sampler

Capac is Gary Salomon, Stu Cook and Joshua Davenport — a three-person live electronica act based in Liverpool, England. Formerly known as the group A Cup Of Tea,  they concoct their sound from primarily organic sources – using these as starting points for their unique blend of progressive live electronica. And they raise the “live” banner  high, in opposition to acts who press play and dance onstage.

Their free 2 track sampler EP available on their bandcamp website showcases how they put together expansive instrumental pieces using a minimal sonic palette, but are able to tweak effects and note parameters for variation. “Imagine This Was All Purple” is a downtempo track which flows from a clean sterile beat to all-out fuzzy white noise chaos by the 4-minute mark. “Palindrome” is the equivalent of a high-flying guitar solo, complete with wall-to-wall delay and reverb effects, except using keyboards and very live-sounding drum patterns.  Shoegazing electronica? Minimal live downtempo? Whatever pigeonhole you want to tag their music as, Capac will make your ears happy.

Their full EP is due in early 2010 on Ontheshelf Records.

DETAILS

Download their 2-track EP sampler via their bandcamp site.
Capac on MySpace.

Capac playing live

The Subtle Downtempo of Koei: Aion OST

 

Koei : Aion OST

IMAGE: http://one.dot9.ca/2/releases/011/images/225.jpg

When Vincent Fugère (aka Vizion) feels sad, he doesn’t just mope about the Interwebs, posting emo messages on Twitter. No sir. He gets to his workstation and channels his doom into his music. This EP released on the One netlabel, is 24 minutes and 49 seconds of quiet lonely introspection and undistilled sadness. Conceptually the EP is a soundtrack for the last man on earth, Koei, using the haunting imagery of a possibly non-existent graphic novel entitled Aion. 

It is both organic and mechanical, mixing ethnic percussions and subtle electronic beats with sad synth pads and flowing melodic lines. In “Izanami All Over Again” and “And the Nightsky Fell Upon Us” you have spoken word samples from faded documentaries and long-dead homilies coming back to remind Koei of the civilization that once was. There are touches of IDM and glitch in “As I Gasp For My Last Breath: Introspection” giving menace and atmosphere to a simple tune. The final track “Le Point de Fuite” is nothing more than long melodic tones reverberating over dead space and then a slow muted groove.  Overall, “Aion” is a beautiful EP of subtle electronic downtempo which is a perfect background for working or for rainy days contemplating your own eroding mortality. 

 

DETAILS: 

7 MP3s, 192 kbps stereo, 44.1 kHz

Download all tracks as one zip file. (34 MB) 

http://www.archive.org/compress/one09

Release page  on the One Netlabel 

http://one.dot9.ca/2/releases.php?id=011

Vision’s artist website:

http://vizion.genshimedia.com/

 

Koei - Aion OST

When Vincent Fugère (aka Vizion) feels sad, he doesn’t just mope about the Interwebs, posting emo messages on Twitter. No sir. He gets to his workstation and channels his doom into his music. This EP released on the One netlabel, is 24 minutes and 49 seconds of quiet lonely introspection and undistilled sadness. Conceptually the EP is a soundtrack for the last man on earth, Koei, using the haunting imagery of a possibly non-existent graphic novel entitled Aion. 

 

It is both organic and mechanical, mixing ethnic percussions and subtle electronic beats with sad synth pads and flowing melodic lines. In “Izanami All Over Again” and “And the Nightsky Fell Upon Us” you have spoken word samples from faded documentaries and long-dead homilies coming back to remind Koei of the civilization that once was. There are touches of IDM and glitch in “As I Gasp For My Last Breath: Introspection” giving menace and atmosphere to a simple tune. The final track “Le Point de Fuite” is nothing more than long melodic tones reverberating over dead space and then a slow muted groove.  Overall, “Aion” is a beautiful EP of subtle electronic downtempo which is a perfect background for working or for rainy days contemplating your own eroding mortality. 

 

DETAILS: 

7 MP3s, 192 kbps stereo, 44.1 kHz

Download all tracks as one zip file. (34 MB) 

Release page  on the One Netlabel. 

Vizion’s artist website.

 

The Dark Horror of a Fictional Soundtrack – Maujud

 

Adit Bujbunen Al Buse - Maujud OST

Have you ever downloaded music from countries whose language you don’t understand? If you’re a regular on AudioStylites then be prepared for this to happen to you often. And pleasantly.

Here’s a gem from Indonesian graphic designer and sound designer Adit Bujbunen Al Buse. The EP is a 9-track, 27-minute soundtrack to a fictional horror film entitled Maujud. In it, he juxtaposes rock and swing jazz with industrial white noise, spitting sounds, musique concrete, distorted guitar riffs, spoken word, mechanical reverberations and even snippets of bossa nova guitar. On several tracks he collaborates with 4 other artists elsewhere in the world.

The overall effect, rather than being a disunified mess, is actually a united body of downtempo and sound art that would be perfect for a horror movie. Or simply a sleepless night of fevered dreams.

Track by Track

Track 3 “Gothesque and the Pond of Thousand Sad Faces” is a lazy downtempo track mixing female spoken word samples with a creepy drum track and a simple piano melody. Nightmare sequence? Poetry while under a trance? Theme music for serial killers? All of the above.

Track 6 is nothing but a male vocal chant over a drone and effects.

Track 9, “Eulogi Arsenikum,” is composed by Cholil and remixed by Adit Bujbunen Al Buse. The plucked guitar motif moves forward on a downtempo drum pattern laced with audio samples from news and TV programs.

Track 5 “Unfinished Business” is my favorite with its swing jazz feel and excellent bass guitar solo (probably by collaborator and director Danif Pradana).

Links
Download the entire EP on a single zip file. [38 MB]

Release page on Internet Archive.

Adit Bujbunen Al Buse on MySpace.

Netlabel YesNo on Internet Archive.