Spectral Hypnosis: Orcas, CFCF, Jogging House MP3 Streams & Downloads

Orcas – Orcas

Two Pacific Northwest musicians — electronic-minded singer-songwriter Benoit Pioulard and minimal composer Rafael Anton Irisarri (of The Sight Below) — have gotten together for the aptly-named Orcas. Their upcoming self-titled album is a beauty, full of ambient space as well as structural mastery. Expect more from us from this release, because it is beautiful. Out April 24th, 2012, on Iceland’s Morr Music.

And if this teaser track below is not enough to satisfy your cravings for good music, check out this mix the two put together for Self-Titled Mag, which features such musicians as The Durutti Column, Fennesz, The Zombies, Cocteau Twins, and Broadcast, along with the reasons the two chose those songs.

ORCAS TRACKLISTING
1. Pallor Cedes
2. Arrow Drawn
3. Standard Error
4. Carrion
5. A Subtle Escape
6. Until Then
7. Certain Abstractions
8. I Saw My Echo
9. High Fences

CFCF – Exercises

With his latest album, Exercises, Montreal-based DJ and electronic artist CFCF goes two-fold, simultaneously embracing analog and digital sounds with equal measure, through inwards and outwards-flowing cascades of keys. This series of ‘exercises” are like warm-up lessons that pull influence from Philip Glass, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and David Borden, amongst others — but the tracks, which sound initially simplistic, build progressively into full-fledged compositions. Exercises feels like a more muted counterpart to CFCF’s 2009 debut, Continent, solifidying CFCF as one of few DJ’s and artists that treads the line equally between the indie-electronic and the club-electronic.

Exercises will be released on April 24th via Paper Bag Records, and we are sure to cover it a few times more.

Listen to “Exercise #3 (Building)” below.

EXERCISES TRACKLISTING
Exercise #1 (Entry)
Exercise #2 (School)
Exercise #3 (Building)
Exercise #4 (Spirit)
Exercise #5 (September)
Exercise #6 (December)
Exercise #7 (Loss)
Exercise #8 (Change)

Jogging House – Relations

Relations is the new EP from Frankfurt’s Jogging House, available for free download on their Bandcamp! Inspired by ’80s vocal pop artists like Cindi Lauper, Prince, and Michael Jackson, songwriter Boris Potschubay wanted to make a slowed-down resemblance of a traditional pop act. Calling his style “lo-fi R&B,” Potschubay has made a series of pop songs that fall somewhere between liquid drum n’ bass and indie R&B from How To Dress Well’s world.

Potschubay describes the themes of his music, saying:

The lyrics in my jams don’t make any sense at all, but if you listen to them for a while they sound like they would. I played them like instruments and tried to make them sound like vague and distant love cries. In the end, those lyrics mean what you hear in them… it’s nothing about me personally but it’s a theme everybody can relate to. And that’s what makes something pop, I guess.