Hidden Shoal News
New Single and Music Video from [The] Caseworker – Free Download
We have an absolutely beautiful new single and stunning accompanying music video for you from garage-dreampop trio [The] Caseworker. ‘Voices Out There’, the title track to their forthcoming new album (24th October), is available now as a free download and for streaming on SoundCloud. The accompanying 3D animated music video by Cam Merton, Hidden Shoal label manager and experimental film-maker, is available for streaming on YouTube and Vimeo.
Of all the songs on Voices Out There, the title track is most explicitly coloured by Conor Devlin’s experience of recovering from a serious car accident in 2012. ‘Voices Out There’ vividly surveys the morphine hallucinations experienced while confined to a hospital bed in Switzerland. The song’s chiming modulated guitars, gently bobbing rhythm section and warm yet dislocated vocals generate a sense of intimacy and fragility that is deeply affecting. The track’s 3d animated music video visually renders the intimate, surreal and dislocated spatiality conveyed so beautifully in the song.
The track is lifted from the band’s fourth album, and their second for Hidden Shoal, Voices Out There, which sees [The] Caseworker rein in the lo-fi guitar-pop impulses of acclaimed third album Letters From The Coast to explore a more expansive, minimal sound, akin to Conor and Eimer Devlin’s previous band Half Film. The band maintain their enigmatic intimacy and atmosphere, while suggesting haunting vistas just beyond the horizons of these succinct, sad songs.
[The] Caseworker – ‘Voices Out There’ from Hidden Shoal Recordings on Vimeo.
New Music Video from Kramies Forthcoming EP
In less than two weeks we get to share the absolutely beautiful new EP from Colorado-based dream-pop merchant Kramies. The Wooden Heart (Oct. 17th) features the production and instrumental talents of Jason Lytle of Grandaddy fame, along with the inimitable production and additional instrumentation of Robert Pollard co-conspirator Todd Tobias.
We’ve already released the first taste of the album with the epic title track which you can stream or download for free. We now present another sneak peak into the EP with this mesmerising short video for the parting track from the release ‘The Ending’. Check it out below or stream it directly from YouTube or Vimeo.
Fantastic Review of Markus Mehr's "Live In Bari" at Cyclic Defrost
Check out this fantastic review of Markus Mehr‘s brilliant live album Live In Bari over at Cyclic Defrost. Here’s a taste,
“The sounds just feel organic, not trapped inside circuitry. Coming after a decade or so of solo, loop based, ambient-noise explorations of every shade, the fact that Mehr has created a piece, within these parameters, that doesn’t sound stale, rote or like an artist going through the motions is an achievement in itself. That is imminently listenable, evocative and beautiful as well is a great bonus. The hearty applause at the end of the set is thoroughly justified.” – Cyclic Defrost
If you’ve not heard Live In Bari yet then you’ve got no excuse as this sublime live recording is available for free download from the Hidden Shoal Store!
perth Featured at PerfectMidnightWorld and Mess & Noise
The fantastic music blog PerfectMidnightWorld has just dropped a loving write up for the just released single ‘Drank and Kites and Tomorrow’ by perth. Check out a taste of it here,
“The track opens with a sighing brass arrangement that feels as melancholic as it does triumphant, and is soon joined by layers of skittering beats and heavenly ambient tones. The extended intro pulses alive and soon the the sounds melt into a spiraling electro-psych-pop wonder, drenched in swirling, warm electronics and vocals cloaked in hushed reverb. Before you know it, you’re wrapped in a warped psych pop lullaby that would feel right at home on a Spiritualized record. The track has an exciting sense of discovery that opens itself up like a new dawn sun, expanding further into fertile new territory with each passing second.” – PerfectMidnightWorld
The lovely folks over Mess & Noise have also just featured the new perth single and wrote up the album for their Forthcoming Releases segment.
‘Drank and Kites and Tomorrow’ is available now as a free download from the Hidden Shoal Store. The track lands ahead of the release of perth’s sophomore full length What’s Your Utopia? our November 14.
Kramies 'The Wooden Heart' Single Reviews and Features
Kramies‘ sublime new dreamgaze single ‘The Wooden Heart’, taken from his forthcoming EP of the same name (October 17), has recently been receiving the kind of love a song like this deserves. First up the wonderful Mark Barton over at The Sunday Experience blog gave the track a glowing write up, then the fantastic Hey Reverb made the track one of their “Steal This” feature spots along with a beautiful review and last up for this little roundup the excellent French magazine Obskure recently wrote a lovely little pre-release review of the EP.
“Pressed upon celestial arcs that usher in distant memories of the mercurial melodic musings of slowdive and chapterhouse at their most fragile and angelic peaks, ’the wooden heart’ is wrapped longingly in snow bursting showers of dream dipped porcelain signatures so intricately woven, airless and frail that you fear they will shatter just by your closeness in earshot of them, a beautified aural apparition teased in yearning introspection and sweetly glazed in the kind of unworldly rapture that suggests its author is well versed in the songbook craft of the crimea and mirror mirror.” – The Sunday Experience
If you haven’t secured your free copy of ‘The Wooden Heart’ single then head to the Hidden Shoal Store and download yourself some melodic majesty.
New perth Single 'Drank and Kites and Tomorrow' (Free Download) !
We’re super excited to announce the release of the fantastic new single ‘Drank and Kites and Tomorrow’ from Australian experimental popsters perth. The track is lifted from their highly anticipated sophomore album What’s Your Utopia? out November 14th through Hidden Shoal. Download the single now at the Hidden Shoal Store and via Bandcamp or stream it over at SoundCloud.
There’s a triumphant yet subtle majesty to ‘Drank and Kites and Tomorrow’ as the track summons forth glowing brass arrangements, reverb-drenched vocals and skittering breakbeats crafted from found sounds. What begins as an addictive dream-pop tune with a wonderfully bucolic atmosphere builds into a krautrock jam reminiscent of Neu! and Caribou if they’d used ocarina and Casiotone. This opening to their forthcoming sophomore album is a delicious portal into perth’s incandescent musical universe.
perth’s forthcoming album What’s Your Utopia? manages to meld psychedelic pop, folk-laced electronica and shoegaze into a beautifully cohesive statement – a tribute to the idea of a fond place, or utopia, quietly residing in ‘no place’, beyond ourselves. The band’s magic lies in their ability to refract the individual members’ unique sensibilities through an experimental lens.
The band’s debut Babes, Water, Waves landed in a number of best of 2012 lists and scooped glowing reviews wherever it was covered. Here’s a quick taste,
“a record that has surpassed all expectation… combines elements of post-rock, electronica and psych, but this genre-collage never feels forced. Instead, it’s a well-constructed body of work that sounds more accomplished than any debut record I’ve heard in quite a while” – Life is Noise on Babes, Water, Waves
perth – ‘Drank and Kites and Tomorrow’
New Shows + More From Markus Mehr
Sonic wunderkind Markus Mehr has an exciting rest-of-2013 ahead of him. Earlier this month, the video for Duck Become Swan from the 2012 album On competed as part of the official selection at the 19th l’Etrange Short Film Festival in Paris.
On September 21, Mehr’s audiovisual installation with Stefanie Sixt, titled Sublimit(y) Water, will show at the Artparcours Festival in Augsburg. The artwork utilises abstracted footage and sound recordings of nearby water bodies and seeks recontextualise the Western world’s approach to water consumption and wastage.
Mehr and Sixt will also be performing their audiovisual piece B C H I J, an examination and exploration of Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism. Those performances will happen in Berlin on October 24 and at the Dok Festival in Kassel on November 16.
The performances for First Live, a play for which Mehr contributed music, will take place on September 20 and 22 at Festival Center in Mannheim and January 17 and 18 at the Pumpenhouse in Münster.
Finally, a reminder that Mehr’s fantastic new live album Live In Bari is available for free download from the Hidden Shoal Store and Bandcamp.
Markus Mehr Performances & Installations
September 20 – Mannheim, Festivalzentrum (w/ First Live, Theater Performance)
Septembe 22 – Mannheim, Festivalzentrum (w/ First Live)
October 24 – Berlin, Ausland (w/ B/C/H/I/J)
November 16 – Kassel, DokFestival (w/ B/C/H/I/J)
January 17-18, 2014 – Münster, Pumpenhaus (w/ First Life)
Markus Mehr – “Live In Bari”
New Video Clip from “I Razor” (Feat. Robert Pollard, Circus Devils and Todd Tobias)
We’re excited to present another wild and wonderful cut from from I Razor, the no-budget experimental feature film directed by Todd Tobias. Both tracks in this clip, ‘March of the Homunculus’ and ‘Star-Peppered Wheat Germ’, are available on the brilliant recently released I Razor soundtrack album out through Hidden Shoal. The soundtrack comprises work by Todd Tobias and Circus Devils featuring vocals from Robert Pollard (Guided by Voices) as well as instrumental versions of some of the Circus Devils’ existing songs. The album is a cinematic feast within itself, uncompromising, redemptive and always engaging.
I Razor – ‘March of the Homunculus/Star-Peppered Wheat Germ’
Apricot Rail Soundtracks Duct Tape Surfing Doco
The incredibly inspirational story of paraplegic surfer Pascale Honore by the wonderful filmmaker Mark Tipple was recently released. The short doco features the perfectly matched song ‘Halfway House’ by Hidden Shoal’s Apricot Rail. The video was chosen as a Vimeo Staff Pick and has been picked up by news networks across the US and Europe, not to mention going viral online. Wonderful stuff! Check out the video below.
New Apricot Rail Video + Single
We’re excited to send you the new freely downloadable single and music video from Australian majestic pop instrumentalists Apricot Rail. Taken from their latest album Quarrels (mixed by Scott Solter), ‘Dore Strauch’ is an incandescently beautiful track, featuring cascading glockenspiels, haunting guitar arpeggios and rhythmic eddies, stirred into confluence by gorgeous updrifts of woodwind melody. The accompanying video directed by Jules Gay and shot in various locations in Germany, including Berlin depicts a young woman’s hallucinogenic journey through both forest and city, through colour and monochrome, between memory and the now. This music transcends fads and trends to appeal to anyone drawn to beautiful, supple songcraft.
You can download the track here, check out the stunning album this track is cut from here, read a full press release here and check out the video at Vimeo and Youtube.
Hidden Shoal MixTape
