After half a decade of searching, a publisher finally agreed to publish my novel – a weirdly introspective travelogue that interrogates mental health, identity, temporality and horror. It’s a book of which I am immensely proud – a work for which, despite eliciting more rejections than all of my other artistic endeavors combined, I strongly believe deserves a proper release. This initial joy upon receiving a contract from a publisher was immense – but sadly tempered by the details contained within. Buried amongst the legalese – print numbers, distribution rights, and so forth – was that abject parasite of vanity publishing – ‘the author agrees to pay 4000 Canadian dollars for this service’.

I don’t have 4000 dollars, Canadian or otherwise. And even if I did, it’s pretty obvious such arrangements don’t really benefit authors – and they certainly don’t benefit culture as a whole. We have arrived at the overcrowded, claustrophobic backwater of our digital hell, wherein anyone can buy there way to, if not success, then at least the prospect of a fighting chance, a narrow valley through the eternal noise. In writing, in art, in music – the cultural landscape is dominated by those who can afford to live there, whilst the rest of us struggle to find the time to even court the crumbs of our latent creativity.

Children from poorer families are half as likely to even take up music, whilst of those who do, an astonishing 91% can’t even afford the equipment required to facilitate a hobby let alone a career. Add to that the fact that over 70% of musicians are depressed, and 50% can’t afford to actually tour, and we are left with a world that doesn’t simply not prioritize creativity, but actively works to stamp it out. Where we once had amateur artists and professional artists – always a fairly fragile distinction – we now have simply the rich and everyone else, clinging on to their ever-shrinking dreams through determination alone.

In this climate, the need to support grassroots artists is more urgent than ever. Picking up an album, going to a show, buying a print… these are not ‘nice’ ways of supporting the disenfranchised, but rather important acts of resistance that, in their small way, fend of the parasitic talons of end-stage capitalism. It would be wonderful if such statements were melodramatic. They are not.

Pep talk over, here at MEANS we’ve been drowning our sorrows in a rich array of new music – check it out below and, if your in a position to do so, pick up an album or two. It really does make all the difference.

landfill electronics

by vx:

by Michael Conboy

If you are a fan of experimental drone then this long-term project could very well be right up your street. Tracks have been added at random intervals and each track with the same title just chronological ordered and numbered accordingly. You have to tune your hearing into these track, sometimes harsh, often noisy but comfortingly beautiful in their bleakness.

With the albums title as good as this one why not name all the tracks with the same name. Track 1 “1” I have listened to this a few times now and my brain and ears are telling me something different with each listen. I initially thought 1950’s America sat out on the porch watching the sun go down listening the crickets and dragon flies go about their business. Another listen I heard a magician’s drum roll before he astonishingly pulls a rabbit out of his hat.

On to track 2, you guessed it “2”, the slow creaking of the door opening into a large industrial factory shop floor the sounds of the machinery all working away in sequence is eerily relaxing.

Track 3 suggests rhythmic tuneful undertones, only to be hacked down by harsh DIY brutalism. The last track gives the listener what sounds like a beat pattern, sporadic in its lack of melody, almost out of tune, erratic but beats nether the less. Like a crazy drum and bass track.

This album won’t be to everyone’s taste, but it’s worth an exploratory taste, something a bit different from the alternative menu.

Sylvan Sequences

by Kosmikos

Quality study music here – a wash of background electronics that hums and ticks along in the background forever. It’s good old fashioned modular stuff, but with a distinct underplayed tone: not really ambient but nonetheless operating at a level somewhere south of consciousness, a drifting ebb, all musty pulses and plucked gates. There’s a proto-techno vibe at work, not unlike the work of Ricardo Donoso, but with perhaps a mitre more urgency.

Music like this should be easy to make – rich as it is with repetition – but there’s an art in doing the same thing over and over and maintaining some semblance of interest. Kosmikos succeeds by never breaking out into either dance-music-proper nor endless ambient drone, occupying instead a somewhat tense middle-ground, an almost-scape of alienesque timbres.

As pleasing as the whole affair is, the closer – Mangrove Sanctuary – gets into some truly sublime territory. Beds of emotive strings are set against drip and taps of some reverb-laden wooden structure; tastefully squelching bass marries the occasional otherworldly howl of quiet filtered noise. There’s little more to it than that, its sounds evolving sparsely over a 15-minute forever, each fresh injunction no more than a slight variation on the past, a searing ode to the affordance of restraint.

Wield Your Hope Like A Weapon

by Soot Sprite

I can’t seem to get enough of this. Lightly twanging distorted guitars entwine with mid-tempo drums, the vocals impressively underbaked. There’s nothing showy here, and that’s not the point – ‘Wield Your Hope Like A Weapon’ is an album of compromise, of defeat and acceptance, an ode to the deflated tenor of modern life. There’s something deeply moving about the rather cold, lethargic nature of the band – not so much depressed as utterly depleted by the inane toil of the everyday and trying simply to make the best of it. Lyrics like ‘to be soft is a form of defense’, and ‘change what you can, what you control, let the rest wash over you, try not to fold’ parry with an ill-fitting college rock aesthetic, the mood so far from PARTY-VIBES that its hard to imagine Soot Sprite have ever had fun.

The first three tracks are all bona-fide fire, particularly the near slow-core sprawl of Spectator, a tune than laments its own impotence, with mutely sung lines like ‘all I can do is sing, I’m just spectating, I’m not helping anything’. News signings on the always strong Specialist Subject record label, Soot Sprite are probably frighteningly young, but don’t let their (probable) youth distract you. This is top notch stuff, easily rising to the surface of the middle-of-the-road pop-rock that there sound swells dangerously close to. It’s a lesson in the value of just doing what you do really, really well: ‘Wield Your Hope Like A Weapon’ excels by virtue of its perfect limp, its performative sigh, its ability to work with tried and tested tools to produce something that feels like a perfect example of its genre.

Orchid Mantis / Breach

by Michelle Helene Mackenzie & Stefan Maier / Olivia Block

A masterpiece of modern composition, this two part composition – the first by Michelle Helene Mackenzie & Stefan Maier, the second by Olivia Block – moves between the electronic and the electro-acoustic, a world of abstract tones and mechanistic toil held together by ever distant hum. It’s ominous, labored stuff, rich with unspent tension, but avoiding ever leaning too far into any given aesthetic. Bells, bowls and chimes coalesce into a crescendo of harmonics, the sonic spectrum and endless, inhospitable stream. But where others might opt for noise, ‘Orchid Mantis’ opts for sudden changes of pace. Walls of sound give way to delicate high-pitched tinkering, the amorphous din of unspecified field recordings. At times, more identifiably ambient textures prevail – the drawn out breath of some string instrument colliding with warm drones and the mating call of a stridently synthetic duck. It’s fascinating and disconcerting in equal measure.

Olivia Block’s ‘Breach’ is a more purist affair. Mildly punishing organesque tones dance around the speakers, a descent into granular madness wherein what was once simple soon devolves into a complex and irregular cloud, a dying robot falling inevitably into the sea. Both works reflect the professionalism you might expect from an institution as renowned as GRM – in Block’s work it is the sumptuous juxtaposition of its field-recordings and minimal synthesis that seems almost otherworldly in its precision. The tender and the pure gives way to the aggressive and the petulant – an almost tropish display of laser blasts and distorted undulations, a world reduced to the minute fodder of bit-crushed splutters and incongruous avant-garde harmony.