Vee Hua 華婷婷HITS – “Big Metal” (Track Premiere)
Those in the Pacific Northwest may have remembered a glorious time in the past when locals were lucky enough to enjoy the percussion-heavy dance music of Explode Into Colors, a three-lady powerhouse of sound. Since then, its members have never really quite gone away, popping up here and again in Portland with drum circles, fashion shows, and interdisciplinary art projects galore. With HITS, these busy ladies get even busier, as Lisa Schonberg and Heather Treadway — two-thirds of the former Explode Into Colors crew — team up with !!! founding member Allan Wilson, to create their latest record, Sunshine Baby.
The product of a month-long residency at artist Andrea Zittel’s A-Z West compound in Joshua Tree, Sunshine Baby is as meditative and hypnotic as anything you’d expect to grow out of so much time spent banging on drums, likely around campfires, in the middle of the California desert… which is certainly not to say that the record sounds like a hippie free-form jam out, either. The project’s sound design, initially designed to be performed in a multi-channel environment, is much more deliberate and sculpted — but still manages to encourage the same kind of loose-limbed nature worship any hippie jam out would be on board with.
HITS at their month-long residency in Joshua Tree. According to their press release, “To realize the sound pieces in a performance context, the band employed a multi-channel speaker array designed by Wilson, and donned gowns designed and crafted by Treadway with dyes inspired by desert soils and plants.”
Stellar OM Source – “Sudden”
Blasting off into hyperspace comes the intro track to Stellar OM Source’s latest record on RVNG Intl, Nite-Glo. With this four-track EP, French electronic producer Christelle Gauldi expresses her personal need for catharsis by channeling the confusion and transience of a challenging time into dance music with a trance-inducing quality at its core, thus staying true to her name and M.O. True — much of this type of music can be considered trance-inducing due to its repetitive nature, but with Stellar OM Source, imbued intention seems key.
“Nite-Glo continues an off-script musical journey informed by Gualdi’s formal training in electro-acoustic composition at the Conservatoire de Paris and an ascent from the DIY synth scene of the mid-aughts to a global dancefloor. Rewarding listeners keen on conscious listening, the passages of Nite-Glo crystalize as tracks unfurl and sequences reveal an absolute power over time.” – RVNG Intl. Press Release
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Navi Esparza
Jake Renn
