Whilst aimlessly roaming the blogosphere, close to one in the morning (as I often do), I was fairly pleased with my evening's music exploration, and was considering turning the lights off and heading off to beddy-byes, when I remembered it had been a while since I checked out Tympanogram, one of my favourite blogs listed on the right of this page. The festive period is pretty dry when it comes to new releases (although a few beauties got thrown up, but maybe more on that some other time) and I had been spending a lot of time checking out other blogs/sites and somehow overlooked Tympanogram.
Sifting through the plethora of New Year's "Introducing..." posts these guys have done, I came across a post on Hourglass Sea. My intentions to shut down and go to sleep where quickly curtailed.
Hourglass Sea (stage name of Bradford based Dean Bentley) is some of the best electronica I've unearthed online in AGES. He has two tracks available for free download over at Tympanogram and they are both awesome.
"Teenagers" is a massive, intense, blistering blitzkrieg of glitzy beats, expertly stolen video game sounds and drum sounds that (if they're not computerized) would make a drummer's hand bleed buckets. This is how I like my electronica. It veers in several directions, with half a dozen things going on at once, creating an insane, overloaded, epileptic fit of a track. It's quite reminiscent of Crystal Castles first album, but breaks into it's own totally unique 8-bit strain. A spasmodic, glitchy synth and drum opening slaps you around your little face before the track dives into murky depths of dubstep bass drones, which are then layered with soaring Ananamaguchi style twiddles, glitches and distorted vocals, which remind me of those arcade games where you'd be controlling a fighter jet, shooting along at like a billion miles an hour, blowing the crap out someone. I think it was normally the Japanese. Like this:
"LA Lights" isn't as blisteringly furious as teenagers, but it's still a huge intense affair. It starts off with soulful synth chords and a bouncy, echoey riff, and then more and more sounds come in, starting with cascading drum rattles. It favours towering walls of bassy synths that wobble with elephantine dubstep swagger, which is layered with video game glitches and pings (I'm fairly sure that Super Mario Bros is in there somewhere). There are breaks where everything pans out and a huge sense of space is created by a glistening air of synths, before the drum beat paces it like a heart monitor heading towards death, and then the tremendous bass sounds thunder in, bigger than before, like Gandalf returning from the dead. Only this time, he'd riding that friggin' Balrog.
Click here to download these two track from Tympanogram, and click here for Hourglass Sea's MySpace.
He's got more on the way soon apparently, so I shall be keeping an eye! I don't care if this music changes the world. It's epic, awesomely fun electro. LET'S BOUNCE!!!
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