SandwichBubble is one of Sputnik’s soundest denizens and a longstanding hero of the Digbox. Today, he comes to conquer!
How very conceited of me to think anyone wants to hear my lame digs, amiright? Yeah, I know, I’m well aware. But, I actually have a few reasons for wanting to do this. For one, I helped make the new logo for this series, so I feel like I have a small stake in its success. But the main reason was because I wanted to check if some of my recent Bandcamp finds were on Spotify. See, I’ve barely used my Spotify account the last 2-3 years, and I know people that prefer streaming their music, so I thought this would be a good way to introduce you all to some good tunes and finally give me a reason to use my Spotify account. Seriously though, Bandcamp is way better and all of you should be using it to find music. Anyways, strap in, because here we go:
[“Digbox” – reimagined by SandwichBubble, 2021]
Cold Meat – Nice Girls
You just can’t beat some good hardcore/garage punk. You just can’t, alright? I recently found this Australian band on one of my Bandcamp digging sessions and was immediately hooked by Cold Meat. Their particular brand of raw punk rock gets me going. I wouldn’t go so far as to call “Nice Girls” anarcho-punk or something, but there’s definitely some 80s influence to the…
Today we welcome Sputveteran Josh D. to the Digbox. Boy, can he dig!
Over to you, Josh D.. Good luck!
It’s me, the user that’s been on this site for almost half his life. And still, somehow, I can’t seem to remember any site features that really jingled my dingle. But when I saw the birth of Digbox, I thought “cool”. Every other user-posted list is for recs or current digs, so a short but more curated version in blog form is a welcome variation. Especially for me since I write a review every 4 years or so. As for the songs below, I tried to choose things that might be vaguely familiar at best to maximize the amount of unheard music for everyone. This is also the reason I chose people from different eras, surroundings, and styles. Gotta show how eclectic we are while we’re at it. And we’re off:
[“Digbox” – reimagined by SandwichBubble, 2021]
Susumu Yokota – “Purple Rose Minuet”
I hype this album every chance I get to obtain that cool “I love this album you’ve never heard of, check it out” cred, assuming the person likes it after listening. Symbol consists of Susumu’s electronic stylings mixed with samples of classical music, and “Purple Rose Minuet” draws in the piano from Debussy’s “Clair De Lune” to underscore the most dreamy orchestral offering from the album. It’s a blend that almost feels out of place here due…
Today we welcome dedex to the Digbox. Hello, dedex! Off you go!
Hello, welcome to the Digbox. This is a [now confirmed] blog(!) series where a person throws down a few epic jams and talks about them a little bit, or a lot. List is digs, and all that. The only rules set by local resident JohnnyoftheW**b are 1) no more than nine songs (what a random choice btw), to keep this succinct for the readergang, 2) this is primarily about songs, not albums or other things(?), and 3) at least most of the songs have to be really, really good for reasons that aren’t ironic. Cool? Cool. Digbox: begin:
[“Digbox” – reimagined by SandwichBubble, 2021]
Disclosure – “Watch Your Step”
The biggest mystery of 2020: where were y’all when the last Disclosure album dropped? With an, erm, impressive amount of 46 ratings, it was less hyped than some obscure metalcore album. I get that some specific genres attract many peepz here, but the lack of ass-shaking praise makes me sad. What makes it even sadder is that the average is painfully low, the record being unashamedly tackled for its “genericness”. “Watch Your Step” ain’t no generic mainstream fodder, no! It’s a dangerously infectious banger that bleeds for us all to go tear the clubs up, its catchy refrain only waiting for hundreds of voices to join in unison while dancing feet swaggily stomp the floor. Maybe y’all just weren’t…
Hello, welcome to the Digbox. This is a [potential] blog(!) series where a person throws down a few epic jams and talks about them a little bit, or a lot. List is digs, and all that. The only rules I’m gonna set for it are 1) no more than nine songs, to keep this succinct for the readergang, 2) this is primarily about songs, not albums or other things(?), and 3) at least most of the songs have to be really, really good for reasons that aren’t ironic. Cool: Digbox: begin:
[Digbox – colourised 2021]
Spangle Call Lilli Line – “Mio”
This song is mid-key the catalyst that got me writing this to begin with. Its name is *deep breath* “Mio” (phew) and it’s one of the best and most sophisticated dream pop songs I’ve heard in a long time. I’m obsessed enough not to want to write on it any further. Ugh. Let’s start on the surface: this ultra-clean style of production is something I usually associate with overbaked bilge, but Spangle Call Lilli Line’s veteran songwriting chops, flair for killer melodies, and sensitivity to balancing sparseness and intricacy in a complex arrangement give them the footing to knock this one out of the damn ballpark. Take that, shoddy indie-lounge!
“Mio” is teeming with great melodies and instrumental nuances, but there’s never too much going on at any one time; it has the hooks…
Back at university, I remember there being a point at which my dissertation tutor told me to put the whole thing on hold and read up on the meaning and application of arthouse. I spent approximately two hours of my life reading relatively uncomplex definitions and unpackings, but damn would it have been easier if he’d just sent me away and told me to check out Blonde Redhead (I’m sure he could have done, too – he pitched surrealist film to me using Pixies lyrics and half the reason I originally asked him to help me out was over a rant we had about the bonus tracks on Sonic Youth’s Bad Moon Rising, but I digress).
Sorry, what’s arthouse?
One big hybrid, innit. A bastard product of ‘high’ and ‘low’ art that’s not pure enough to satisfy elitists, too edgy to sell to the mainstream, but an exciting box of treats for anyone who doesn’t mind getting their paws a little muddy. It derives most of its innovation from pastiche and appropriation rather than groundbreaking originality, and the styles it draws from are often both a little behind the times in their sourcing and a cut above in the way they’re dealt with. Bonus points for any cross-cultural, trans-geographical or oh-it’s-quite-hard-to-label-comprehensively content, all of which amounts to a notoriously broad collection of categories. You get the picture.
Sorry not sorry for the wank onslaught, but all this fits Blonde Redhead down to…
Ichiko Aoba has a new single and – shock horror – it’s gorgeous and utterly spellbinding. Listen to it.
For those unfamiliar with Aoba, the usual deal is that you sit down and press play, and then she appears like a magical headphone fairy for an hour (give or take twenty minutes) with her excellent guitar and her excellent guitar technique and pretty much nothing else aside from her voice, with which she sings songs so pure and intimate that you’d feel like you were the only person in the world who could her them even if they were being broadcast at deafening volumes on loudspeakers in the middle of Shibuya Crossing or wherever.
“Seabed Eden” differs both significantly and subtly from the Aoba precedent. On an immediate level and in the softest of revolutions, Aoba has swapped her guitar, once her inseparable confidant, for an electric piano. It’s obviously striking that she’s literally playing a different instrument, but the greatest change here is the melancholy minor 7th-fest of a chord progression that she follows throughout; in a similar way to how her January single “Amuletum” was immediately evocative of classic Studio Ghibli soundtracks, this progression is unusual for Aoba that it immediately screams of a real world precedent outside of her own quiet universe (in this case, the wistful melodic jazz of Erroll Garner’s “Misty” and the fifty zillion descendent numbers you’ve heard with or without realising it). Ichiko Aoba hasn’t lost her magic touch – this track is…
In August 2020, Sputnikmusic emerged from its longstanding morass of thesaurus metal and folk diarism, spurting to sufficient heights of credibility that it became possible to review unofficial Soundcloud demos without pulling the tier-Z faux pas of punching above our weight. Some would suggest becoming a not insufferable writer and “saving the w**k for the bathr**m fl**r” before exploiting this field of journalism, but Rome wasn’t built in a day. This is Sputnik’s biggest opportunity since sliced bread. In we go:
Better known as the vocalist for glitch pop/indietronica/post-anime/neo-alternative folktronica/dream pop group Macaroom, Emaru is an enigmatic lady who dances like a fucking weirdo, nailed whisper pop as an artform before Eilish apologists took out a loan on critical legitimacy, and runs a solo project on Soundcloud for obscure tracks and semi-developed drafts. Her new song “よるのみち” makes innovative and unconventional use of the platform by being a worthwhile piece of music released there in 2020.
It comes from an artistic mind so cutting edge that the majority of Americans will be flat-out incapable of understanding her, something I could tell immediately by the fact that she is wearing a mask in her profile picture. Her speaking a language that demands constant contextual awareness for basic comprehension absolutely in no way compounds this. Maybe this song will mark a renaissance for Soundcloud (it won’t). Does Soundcloud need a renaissance? I used to think it was going the way of MySpace, but then a girl…
This feature is part of a hopefully ongoing series aimed at exploring the discographies of interesting and/or important bands whose wider body of work is often overlooked on this site. There will be lots of words and a few pictures, but the main deal is that if a band features here, they are good and you should listen to them! And if you already jam them, hit up the comments and explain where and why this is wrong! Get going!
Few projects inspire childlike wonder quite like San Francisco’s Sweet Trip. Comprised of multi-instrumentalist/programmer Robero Burgos, vocalist Valerie Cooper and a slim roster of session contributors, this project’s respective forays into indietronica, shoegaze, IDM, glitch and dream pop are so richly atmospheric and emotively crafted that they breeze effortlessly over listener preconceptions and strike to the heart of that early-teen feeling of awe at the sheer expressive and imaginative power of music. For those whose childhoods followed the correct timeline, this should align neatly with your first-time-hearing-Dark Side of the Moon memories.
Fortunately, Sweet Trip come with none of the teenage baggage – there’s something deeply cleansing about their approach to simple melodies and sophisticated arrangements that, even at their most intense or erratic, never fails to make me feel as though some previously unnoticed weight has suddenly disappeared from my shoulders. Roberto Burgos has a talent for imbuing mechanical sounds with a human…
This feature is part of a hopefully ongoing series aimed at exploring the discographies of interesting and/or important bands whose wider body of work is often overlooked on this site. There will be lots of words and a few pictures, but the main deal is that if a band features here, they are good and you should listen to them! And if you already jam them, hit up the comments and explain where and why this is wrong! Get going!
“I saw Stereolab in Bellingham and they played one chord for fifteen minutes / Something in me shifted / I brought back home belief I could create eternity.”
This is unfortunately not my anecdote, but rather a disconcertingly well-timed snippet from Phil Elevrum’s reminiscences on the new Microphones album. It stands out as the only moment on that record that I paused and rewound on first listen last night to confirm that I had heard it correctly, and it solved the problem I had been grappling with as I came to the end of marathoning the Stereolab discography: how on earth do you go about writing a fresh introduction to such an iconic, influential and well-chronicled band?
Fortunately, Phil was so kind as to answer this question by (probably) confirming my loose theory: pick out any forward thinking artist active in the indieverse over the last two and a half decades or so, and…
Haru Nemuri is a Japanese singer and rapper based in Tokyo. Her style is self-described as hip-hop with the spirit of rock ‘n’ roll, and her2018 debut Haru to Shura became a viral cult classic, leading to a successful Europe and UK tour in 2019.
She was scheduled to tour America for the first time in March, but all performances (including a SXSW appearance) were cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic. These have been rescheduled for a September tour. Her new minialbum LOVETHEISM released digitally March 20th and was followed up with a 12” vinyl on June 12th.
In between all these developments and rearrangements, Haru found the time to chat with Sputnikmusic about her release and her experience as a Japanese artist on the world stage.
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JohnnyoftheWell/Sputnikmusic: Hello!
Haru Nemuri: Hello!
How’s it going in Tokyo?
While almost all the music industries in Tokyo have not turned back to normal due to the Coronavirus situation, some people get on trains every morning as usual. I think what they think about this situation depends on their standpoints.
Your tour was cancelled, but you managed to reschedule – thank goodness! Can you tell us what it was like for you when things got chaotic and all your plans started changing?
It was so disappointing to postpone my first North American tour and I cursed this terrible situation. Like an insect waiting for the spring in the ground, I could do nothing but sleep and make music in my room.…
