Monolith Cocktail Blog

REVIEWS
Words: Ayfer Simms

Goodwood Atoms   ‘Place EP’

I can breathe in the ocean, where the water is the thickest; I can breath in space where the density is unbreakable. I can float where we walk because there is no gravity and there is nothing holding me down. I can dance when the mood is poisonous. I can swear when you love me.

The Goodwood Atoms are in love.

Because the melodies break the silence of dawn with an irresistible sensuality, explorers of a lunar land, with no aspiration of returning, the machine in the sky stays, afloat, splendid in its romantic attire, devils of slow motion: What instruments do they use?

Ethereal baggage, because of festive shadowy souls, the Plan EP is a joyous temptation, a fluid motion toward a vast desert full of enslaving tracks, which traps and travels to the very edges of you.

Hajk   ‘Hajk’
Jansen Plateproduksjon

Breezy, strong, confident, cleverly assembled, intricate with the different styles married together, Hajk brings the coolness of the north and with it, the freshness of the eighties, revisited modernized and digested for good.

The music is as comfortable to ride as a summer pop tune and leaves the listener in a state of glow with the fiery melodies launched in a bright sky, opening up to an imperceptible distant star. There, high above, the purity we long for appears, and with it, serenity, composure, temperance, youth and intelligence.

Hajk’s music whispers the distant memories of three decades ago. And our sleeves are up like in a cheesy TV series from the 80s, and love is induced with a romantic shield, the texture of which is a wonderful brewery of styles. Each song, stamped with the bands lightness of being sends us back to the years where the inadequacy of our teenage-hood were for some – most, perhaps – paralyzing, Hajk rewrite that period by removing the oddness.

Top gun’s jets carries our innocence, swirl it around the sky and brings it back to our old adolescence room where Hajk’s music plays, delivering us from timidity, touching the future ever so slightly with great promises.

Ayfer Simms is a Franco-Turkish author, Agatha Christie obsessive, martial arts practitioner and contributor to the Monolith Cocktail who lives in the ancestral family home of Üsküdar-old Scrutari in Istanbul, Turkey with her husband and daughter. Ayfer currently works for the Institute Francais in Istanbul; a role that has recently involved her organising musical soirees and helping to bring Mali’s desert blues doyans Tinariwen to Turkey. Ayfer is just putting the finishing touches to her debut novel.