Sadly, Now More Than Ever, every single Bandcamp Friday is possibly the last chance to get maximum revenue to artists in a convenient way.
So, today, here is what I picked up.
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The Number Five Forever and Ever and Ever and Ever by Robert Grieve This is a colleague of mine from the Recurse Center. He plays fretless guitar, and this is somewhere between a drone album and a free jazz album that somehow feels like this
Yoshi Wada album despite being completely different instrumentation and being quite a bit busier having a lot of discrete events.
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Dimanche à Bamako
by Bounaly This is a band in Mali just going at it live at a wedding. Pentatonic stuff is not my style, but this is the most vibrant and expressive guitar soloing I've heard in quite a while.
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Golden Pear
by Omni Gardens I have a playlist called "Slow Life 2" that I'm trying to grow. It's all relaxing, non-obstrusive music. Ideally, I could just pipe in a lot of comfy synth, but the problem with comfy synth is that a lot of it leans into the cloyingness, which I understand is part of the point. I can't take that. The tracks I've heard from Golden Pear so far are refreshingly not too-sweet and not too-boring while still not breaking one out of the Slow Life vibe.
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Hymns From The Apocrypha
by Suffocation I just found out about this album an hour ago! I tend to want to say, hey, this weird new form of metal is totally killing! But I have to admit, a lot of adventurous new metal like Pyrrhon and Ulcerate just make me think "Interesting. I support this but I think I'll listen to something else" as opposed to adventurous old metal like Gorguts and Demilich, which really do connect. This new Suffocation album sounds like a refinement of their classic churning NYDM stuff from the '90s, which was adventurous in 1991 but not adventurous by 1999. And yet, it's not the kind of refinement that's drained the blood out of it. They still sound really into it (even without Frank Mullen), and I find it really nourishing.
Queen of the Golden Wood
and
King of the Golden Hall by Jim Kirkwood. Jim Kirkwood inspired dungeon synth by making dungeon synth two decades before the term was coined. There is a real sense of adventure in these pieces, as you'd expect, a freshness that comes of someone doing something out-of-genre (sort of like the bands that played death metal before death metal was codified), as well as really mature flow control of long pieces that is missing from a lot of longer dungeon synth pieces (including mine).
I don't know what's going on with the pricing. His albums are all set to £0.50, and he doesn't let you pay more. But the better for you! You can get eight albums for the price of an iced coffee.