Premiere: (Video) Mike Gale ‘I’m Really Gone’
April 15, 2022
VIDEO PREMIERE/Dominic Valvona
Mike Gale ‘I’m Really Gone’
Taken from the upcoming Mañana Man album, released 20th May 2022
Although he’s adopting the procrastination title of “Mañana Man”, the former Black Nielson and Co-Pilgrim instigator turn soloist Mike Gale isn’t putting off his talent for capturing the mood with a beautifully, often woozy and wavy disarming musical palette. Releasing a laidback songbook (sometimes two) every year since the early noughties, his latest, and 18th, album sees a slight change in methodology; expanding upon the use of samples from last year’s brilliant Twin Spirit album, Gale returns to more traditional song structures and feel.
“Twin Spirit was the first album I’d used samples almost exclusively, from the writing process to arrangement of the songs. I really enjoyed this way of working and wanted to carry it on with Mañana Man. Twin Spirit was rather haphazard and more like a collage of sounds in places, so with Mañana Man I was trying to make an album of more traditional sounding pop songs while still utilising samples as the primary method of creating. I still played guitars and Bass etc. on almost half of the songs as well and I think this mix of samples and instruments is where I’m most comfortable.”
Channeling the Wilson Brothers as always like a lo fi Beach Boys serenade of one, Gale’s mañana mood permeates a gentle but deeply felt songbook of wistful dreamy, balmy longing and beachcomber ruminations.
The languorous comforted feels swim in the waters of late 70s Californian troubadours, soft rock, and dream and surf pop. Swaddled ‘Pumpkin Feet’ leave traces in the sand to the sound of The Flaming Lips, Lionlimb, Panda Bear, Ned Doheny, Gene Clark, Harry Nilsson and The Cry. That title-track is a lovely tropical, semi-Cuban instrumental with a surprising nod to Henri-Pierre Noel’s piano led Hispaniola dances, whilst ‘How Long’ seems to evoke the washed-out vibes of epic45.
Gale however reaches for both the stars (on the Spector Christmas album-style lilted ‘A Place Of Going To The Stars’) and heavens (on the harp-laced, mirrored and sweetened ethereal ‘You’re My Hand Glide’) from that beachfront escape.
Taken from that driftwood lullaby and flange-wash retune of a beautiful album, the Monolith Cocktail is premiering the video for the cosy ‘I’m Really Gone’. Perhaps casting veils of nostalgic locations and surrealism over a trippy ripple of lucid, hazed sadness, Gale dons a poodle mask whilst floating, bending to a psychedelic dream: imagine a kaftan wearing Carl Wilson fronting Morgan Delt or the Animal Collective. A waltzing couple, images of the Trevi Fountain and a park underpass form a background for the band – all Mike Gale I assume -, as the music melts; soaking up all the grief and malady.
Mañana Man is due out on the 20th May. You can pre-order it now via Gale’s Bandcamp page. Expect to see it included in our end-of-year recommendations, but sooner than that, a summer essential.
Our Daily Bread 476: Violet Nox ‘Super Fan’ Remix Video
October 22, 2021
VIDEO SPECIAL/Dominic Valvona
Violet Nox ‘Super Fan Remix Bu J. Bagist’
(Infinity Vine Records) Single 20th October/Video 22nd October 2021
Currently revitalising cosmic spells and futuristic travels from the back catalogue, Boston synth-heavy collective Violet Nox have once more called upon the transformative remix skills of J. Bagist and the video skills of Deb Step to create a new colourful vision. Both disciplines, along with the Peter Halley neo geo version of Kandinsky and 50s abstract futurism artwork by Jeff Bartell, come together to refresh the troupe’s cybernetic and vaporous voiced ‘Super Fan’ track.
Originally gracing last year’s navigation of brave new worlds Future Fast EP (which I reviewed here), the dub-like oscillating ‘Super Fan’ offered sulphur atmospherics, utterances of “sacrifices” and a strange kind of post-punk electronic grinding warp feel that grew coarser and more fearful as it went on. That original recording featured the shifting balance of Dez DeCarlo (on guitars, vocals, sonic effects and synth), Andrew Abrahamson (who not only mastered it but played synths and clocked devices), Alexis Desjardins (synth) and Fen Rotstein (vocals and digital turntables).
J. Bagist tones down the noise and makes the voices more ethereal, whilst introducing a dreamy atmospheric feel of flickers and cosmic slithers and a deep fuzzy depth charge bass. There’s hints of Speedy J and Seefeel now to this synthetic trance traverse. Deb Step’s electronic body movement like video of geometric waves and both overlapping black and white and more colourful TV screen filtered images, is one hell of a trip too. Together, it’s dance music (with a cerebral mind) perfection.
You can catch that video, which launched this afternoon below. You can also visit the futurist troupe’s Bandcamp to order the single and the back catalogue.
Premiere (Video): Field Kit ‘Don’t’
May 7, 2021
Field Kit ‘Don’t’
(Nonostar Records)
Cinematic electro-acoustic music with a small ‘c’, filled with gravitas and a hunger to stir the emotions, the Field Kit collective pairing of its central force and instigator, the Berlin-based composer-musician Hannah von Hübbenet, and her collaborative foil, the pianist-producer John Gürther, create mini filmic scenes and atmospheres together on the group’s eponymous debut album for Alex Stolze’s burgeoning imprint Nonostar.
Possibly the first album on the celebrated polymath’s label that doesn’t include Stolze’s magnetic tender collaborative skills (previous releases on the roster include the violinist, composer, songwriter and producer’s own solo work alongside his collaborative efforts with Anne Müller and Sebastian Reynolds on the Solo Collective, and with repeated foil Ben Osborn), Field Kit are nevertheless in a similar sort of neo-classical orbit to their label partner’s merger of strings imbued by centuries of swelling heartache and travail, voices and synthesised instrumentation effects.
Former students of both the Universität der Künst in Berlin and the Filmakademie Baden-Württemburg, violinist Hannah and pianist John now draw on that study for their inaugural adroitly blended album of ‘warm acoustic(s)’ and more ominous, incipient ‘cold mechanical’ movements and shadows: A sound that is described as ‘cyber-noir’.
Those cinematic qualities are in evidence throughout, with hints of Scott Walker’s late soundtrack work and also Johann Johansson’s on the almost bestial, caged and chained combative subterranean, hairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck-raiser, ‘Human Behavior’. You can hear a touch of both Mica Levi and Jed Kurzel on the heightened mourned strings yearn ‘String Adrift’. There’s a sense that unforeseen forces are ready to emerge from the duo’s conjured atmospherics; perhaps something otherworldly or horrifying, or something from another age, coming out of the mists – I thought for some reason of a Viking longship on the solemn opening crackled piece ‘Distant Approach’. Haunted coos, the vibrating resonance of finger bowls and a semblance of a removed Orientalism meanwhile permeate the plucked, dust trickled ‘Counterfeit’, whilst ‘Motorized Piano’ opens up the instrument’s inner workings and the movement of time for an almost clandestine thriller – the slow release UNCLE like drums roll in to set the pace; a race across a metro platform.
The single track we’re concentrating on however, and premiering the video of ahead of the album’s release next month, is the ethereal but fragile finale ‘Don’t’. Affected sighs, and sometimes heart aching strings, lunar synth and a gauze of electro-pop plaint form a bed for the manipulated vulnerable repeated vocals on a filmic score that borders on both trip-hop and the classical. Go now and immerse yourselves in this magical diaphanous suite from the collective.
Field Kits debut album is due out on the 4th June 2021 through Nonostar Records. You can order it now through the label’s Bandcamp page. You can now buy and download the single ‘Don’t’ from today.
Hi, my name is Dominic Valvona and I’m the Founder of the music/culture blog monolithcocktail.com For the last ten years I’ve featured and supported music, musicians and labels we love across genres from around the world that we think you’ll want to know about. No content on the site is paid for or sponsored and we only feature artists we have genuine respect for /love. If you enjoy our reviews (and we often write long, thoughtful ones), found a new artist you admire or if we have featured you or artists you represent and would like to buy us a coffee at https://ko-fi.com/monolithcocktail to say cheers for spreading the word, then that would be much appreciated.
Première: (Video) Balkan Taksim ‘Anadolka’
January 26, 2021
Words: Dominic Valvona
Photos: Miluţă Flueraş
Atavistic yet contemporary in its merging of Balkan traditions and psychedelics with broken-beats, synth-electronica, dub and global bass the Sașa-Liviu Stoianovici and Alin Zăbrăuțeanu duo of Balkan Taksim inject a respective new dynamism and energy into the music of their Romanian roots. They’ve expanded that to a wider exposure and education of Slavic cultures throughout the Balkans region, congruously working with local singers and musicians to record the songs, tunes of their heritage. Reworking this source material in the studio, they’ve added an air of modernity with an array of sophisticated and articulate (rather than “banging IDM”) style electronica sounds, atmospherics, heavy bass and powerful beats. But don’t call it a “fusion”: it goes deeper than that, with many of the sounds being sampled direct from original traditional Balkan instruments, both musical worlds existing on equal terms.
It’s a magical, transportive futurist vision that’s attracting a lot of acclaim and attention.
The duo, having just signed to the Parisian label Buda Musique, are readying themselves to release a debut album this Spring. Ahead of that, the Monolith Cocktail is premiering the brand new video for the “journey into a maelstrom of memory” imbued ‘Anadolka’. The duos take on a Balkan classic merges Yugoslav pop-rock with the sound of the long-necked Ottoman tanbur and electric saz and the plaintive lyrical poetry of Bosnia’s Serbo-Croatian dialect to produce an almost shivery, frayed and haunting malady.
The Romanian film director Andra Hera created the video for the reimagined ‘Anadolka’. She has this to say about the visual narrative:
“A contemporary poet is haunted by the spirit of a beautiful woman from the Balkans. He chases her shadow while visiting an old lonely house, by the side of a desolate lake. Wintertime brings memories of a past saturated with desire, with a guilty love that is on the edge of tearing apart an old friendship. A visual poem, in which the layers of time melt. In the end, the observer is the one who is observed.”
Balkan Taksim breath life into an ancient Balkan psychogeopgraphy, creating an often-entrancing atmosphere that weaves those Slavic traditions and yearnings with an amorphous soundtrack of electronica. Experience that mood music now with the première below.
Hi, my name is Dominic Valvona and I’m the Founder of the music/culture blog monolithcocktail.com For the last ten years I’ve featured and supported music, musicians and labels we love across genres from around the world that we think you’ll want to know about. No content on the site is paid for or sponsored and we only feature artists we have genuine respect for /love. If you enjoy our reviews (and we often write long, thoughtful ones), found a new artist you admire or if we have featured you or artists you represent and would like to buy us a coffee at https://ko-fi.com/monolithcocktail to say cheers for spreading the word, then that would be much appreciated.
Junkboy Special: ‘Belo Horizonte’ Video & Tropicalia Playlist
September 4, 2020
Playlist/Video Premiere
Words: Dominic Valvona
Junkboy ‘Belo Horizonte’
Taken from the reissued/remasterd Sovereign Sky LP, released via Fretsore Records, 25th September 2020
Junkboy ‘Tropicalia Special’ Playlist
Available via Spotify
In the run-up to the release of Junkboy’s acclaimed 2014 cult album Sovereign Sky (released later this month), the Hanscomb brothers in partnership with Ian Sephton of Fretsore Records (who signed the boys back in 2019) have already shared the hazy-soulful Love-esque lapping tidal reflection single-video ‘Salt Water’ with the Monolith Cocktail’s followers, and now, furnish us with a second single of equally lush quality, the sauntering Brazilian psych lilt ‘Belo Horizonte’.
A culmination of Mik and Rich Hanscomb‘s experiments with a number of different styles, Sovereign Sky adopted a relaxed attitude to the pastoral, to cooing frat-folk, surf music, Britpop, the hip sound of Tokyo’s Shibuya Kei district and surprisingly, the languid sweltering rays of late 60s and early 70s Brazilian psych: otherwise known as “Tropicalia”. That album gave fair voice and a wistfully charmed backing of tenderly picked acoustic guitars, stirring strings and hushed, almost whispered, vocals to both the pains and loves of maturity. The brothers mellowed tones and introspection offered a mature observation on the world around them: especially, at the time, their relocated new home of Brighton. It’s a place in which Marc Eric meets Cornelius, and epic45 make friends with Harpers Bizarre; a place where Hawthorne, California and the beach samba saunter of Brasilia is transcribed to the English downs and seaside.
Not just to tie in with that forthcoming reissue release but also, as Mik Hanscomb offers, a reminder that “this is a music of resistance, and well, perhaps that spirit is needed now more than ever”, the brothers have also compiled a homage style playlist to their Tropicalia influences for us on Spotify.
It maybe the end of the summer, but the boys has provided the perfect comedown and ease into autumn. Enjoy.
The remasterd reissue of the previously limited Sovereign Sky is being released on the 25th September 2020 through Fretsore Records. You can read our original review in the link below, and also find previous Junkboy posts and premieres.
Junkboy ‘Salt Water’ Premiere (here)
‘Sovereign Sky’ Review (here)
‘Trains, Trees, Topophila’ Albums Of 2019 (here)
‘Waiting Room’ Premiere (here)
Premiere: (Video) Junkboy ‘Salt Water’
August 14, 2020
Premiere/Dominic Valvona
Junkboy ‘Salt Water’
(Fretsore Records) Download only single, released 14th August 2020. Taken from the upcoming digitally issued/reissued Sovereign Sky album, released on the 25th September 2020
Attracting a sort of cult status over the years since it’s initial release back in 2014, the Estuary soft psychedelic and pastoral beachcomber Hanscomb brothers’ unassuming Sovereign Sky album, it seems, was limited to only a select few despite its critical acclaim: especially by the Monolith Cocktail. A culmination of Mik and Rich Hanscomb‘s experiments with a number of styles, Sovereign Sky adopted a relaxed attitude to the pastoral, cooing frat-folk, surf music, psychedelia, Britpop and the hip sound of Tokyo’s Shibuya Kei district. That album gave fair voice and a wistfully charmed backing of tenderly picked acoustic guitars, stirring strings and hushed, almost whispered, vocals to both the pains and loves of maturity, the brothers mellowed tones and introspection offered a mature observation on the world around them: especially, at the time, their new found home of Brighton. It’s a place in which Marc Eric meets Cornelius, and epic45 make friends with Harpers Bizarre; a place where Hawthorne, California is transcribed to the English downs and seaside.
One such convert to that most peaceable of songbooks is Fretsore Records’ Ian Sephton, who signed the brothers back in 2019, releasing their South Coast topography imbued Trains Trees Topophilia album that same year. He suggested re-releasing the album on all digital platforms and on digipack CD; augmented with liner notes written by Parisian record collector, vinyl archivist and fellow believer, Quentin Orlean. The boys rightly jumped at that suggestion, as Mik explains: ‘We used this as an opportunity to go back to the tapes and improve the sound for digital release utilizing our home studio’s new outboard gear and tech acquired in the interim period. And the benefit of hindsight!’
Sovereign Sky channels the kind of music Mik and Rich have listened to since their youth. A Thames Estuary take on the lo-fidelity, budget -baroque of the first Cardinal LP and the vintage mellifluousness of The Lilys. There’s also a healthy dose of British Romanticism – an imaginary Albion in their heads somewhere between the socialist utopia of William Morris and Bob Stanley’s Gather In The Mushrooms compilations- while their hearts lie sun-kissed and blissed in Southern California like a pair of burnt out troubadours in deck shoes sourced with meticulous discernment from the Shibuya Kei district of Tokyo.
‘And yes’ confirms Rich, ‘we were enamoured with so many (often) home studio cooked and lost West Coast psych records – A Gift from Euphoria by Euphoria, Save for a Rainy Day by Jan & Dean, Another Day, Another Lifetime by The David, Initiation of a Mystic by Bob Ray, The Smoke’s self-titled album, Marc Eric’s A Midsummer’s Day Dream, and anything by Merrell Fankhauser….’
Presented here in an enhanced format that manages to transcend even the original vinyl’s beauty, Sovereign Sky is a Nugget that deserves to be a little less lost and a lot more loved.
Taken from that revitalised album we have the video accompanied teaser, reminder, and downloadable single, the relaxed soulful Love-esque rhythm guitar played lapping tidal reflection ‘Salt Water’. A concise, post-sike ode to the soul replenishing nature of sea side town existence, the brothers made field recordings at Hove Lagoon, East Sussex and wove them into a song built around a circular riff Rich devised after he woke up from a dream in which a version of ‘Yacht Dance’ by XTC produced by American Beauty era Jerry Garcia was on the radio twenty-four-seven. Sweet dream, man!
For the video, the boys sought to juxtapose the gaudy, grim reality of Brighton beach with the soothing calm waves of neighbouring Hove by means of a gently psychedelic, deep chilled Zen trip undertaken by an origami boat: Music and visuals in perfect harmony. Lap it up while you can.
Related posts from the Archives:
Junkboy ‘Sovereign Sky’ Review
Albums of 2019: Junkboy ‘Trains, Trees, Topophilia’
Premiere ‘Waiting Room’
‘Fulfil b/w Streets Of Dobuita’ Review
Hi, my name is Dominic Valvona and I’m the Founder of the music/culture blog monolithcocktail.com For the last ten years I’ve featured and supported music, musicians and labels we love across genres from around the world that we think you’ll want to know about. No content on the site is paid for or sponsored and we only feature artists we have genuine respect for /love. If you enjoy our reviews (and we often write long, thoughtful ones), found a new artist you admire or if we have featured you or artists you represent and would like to buy us a coffee at https://ko-fi.com/monolithcocktail to say cheers for spreading the word, then that would be much appreciated.
Premiere: (Video) Mike Gale ‘Go Help’
August 5, 2020
Premiere/Dominic Valvona
Mike Gale ‘Go Help’
Video track taken from the upcoming album The Star Spread Indefinite, released 25th September 2020
A tropical-lilted wistful tiptoe sauntering continuation of the plaintive beachcomber Beach Boys sound that permeated the reclusive polymath’s output for a number of years, Mike Gale once again does wonders with another disarming yet disconsolate bobbing beauty, ‘Go Help’.
The former Co-Pilgrim and Black Neilson instigator has been highly prolific of late with last year’s Pacific Ocean lulled sorrow Summer Deluxe album, a recent compilation of (far from) unfinished works and B-side ruminations, paeans and breezes entitled B, C, D Side Volume 1, and a lockdown mini-album Sunshine For The Mountain God. And now with this precursor video track Gale announces the release of his next fully realized songbook, The Star Spread Indefinite; released on the 25th September 2020.
“A celebration of the value of quiet contemplation and the pursuit of solicitude and calm”, lockdown it seems may have just suited Gale, who retired from live performances in 2018. Inspired, in part, by escaping the daily divisive barrage of noise, Gale has also been reading Justin Hopper’s The Old Weird Britain book; in particular the passage about the ancient artwork found scratched into the wall of a flint mine in Sussex, who’s discoverer, rather poetically, embellished it with the title that is now borrowed to adorn Gale’s upcoming album.
Premiering today on the Monolith Cocktail, we have the ‘Go Help’ video, made by the photographer and video maker Jussi Virkkumaa, who juxtaposes the song’s quiet “dystopia” unease with a rotation of revolving surrealist objects: from a mannequin’s hand in a steaming bowl to fidgeting fauna and a stuffed crane like bird. Virkkumaa has this to say about his visual accompaniment and the song:
“Well I think that what I love about Go Help, is that I got a feeling of happy isolation, and little by little I begin to question the lullaby-kind of tune to be something more to the dystopian. It delivers (for me at least) a feeling of lost control, but at the same time there’s beauty. I tried to go kind of a similar route, choosing symbolic figures, which are in an absurd environment, just rolling around endlessly. I think the situation could be something like the Voyager’s golden record flying in outer space, just in case, a time capsule to burn in some distant planets atmosphere.”
If this latest effortless sounding wash of Afro-Caribbean lilt, Beat Connection surf noir and 80s pop snuzzled trumpet is anything to go by, then Gale’s cosmic-dreamily entitled The Star Spread Indefinite is set to be another languidly beautiful affair.
Related posts form the ARCHIVES:
Mike Gale ‘B, C, D Sides’ Review
Mike Gale ‘Summer Deluxe’ Review
Hi, my name is Dominic Valvona and I’m the Founder of the music/culture blog monolithcocktail.com For the last ten years I’ve featured and supported music, musicians and labels we love across genres from around the world that we think you’ll want to know about. No content on the site is paid for or sponsored and we only feature artists we have genuine respect for /love. If you enjoy our reviews (and we often write long, thoughtful ones), found a new artist you admire or if we have featured you or artists you represent and would like to buy us a coffee at https://ko-fi.com/monolithcocktail to say cheers for spreading the word, then that would be much appreciated.
Premiere (Single): Provincials ‘One-Armed Swordsman’
May 15, 2020
Premiere Single/Dominic Valvona
Provincials ‘One-Armed Swordsman’
(Sacred Geometry) Single/Video
Released during the tumult and crisis of 2019, in the throes of post-Brexit negotiations, alternative-folk duo Provincials produced the mesmerizing and spellbinding miasma The Dark Ages. At the time it can be seen as a protestation against the forces of Nationalism, even Imperialism, but as Covid-19 reaps its harvest and sweeps across the world in 2020 you can’t help but see it now as an augur of an all too real plague-crisis Dark Age. Despite the dread, the duo portrayed that Domesday dystopia with a diaphanous lulled and beautifully administered deft touch, painting a bleakly poetic diorama of being swept under a despairing riptide. That album – the duo’s second – was an increasingly more experimental move away from the serene changing-of-the-seasons joyful reflection of their earlier work, especially the Ascending Summer EP: which seemed like a dreamy folk ode and peaceable traverse of the English scenery.
Meandering along a path that stretches from the Norman church dotted shingly shoreline of the southeast coast of Romney to a revenge-soaked Iberia, taking in the trauma, stress of The Crimean War and WWI, Provincials conjured up a lamentable present on that last minor-epic. Recorded in the same period but left off the album, today’s premiere ‘One-Armed Swordsman’ was deemed perhaps too wild, different and incongruous to sit on that songbook. Not a problem, as the duo has found the ideal time to release it as a separate entity in the most anxious of epochs, and furnished with a rustic-set esoteric symbolized video, shot in lockdown isolation. In separate rural homes, Seb Hunter hangs his head wearily from atop of the stable, strains the lyrics from some dusty tome form behind his eagle like garden sculpture and re-strings his ‘baritone-growled’ guitar, whilst siren foil Polly Perry flails and dances round the Theremin. Both exude the pining mood of our alienated stasis.
A precursor to their third LP (scheduled for the Spring of 2021), to be released on Weird Walks co-founder and psychogeography musical artist Owen Tromans’ marvelous expletory landscape inspired label, Sacred Geometry, this gnarled, grunge-y plaintive tumult was recorded and produced by Dan Parkinson at Wooden Heart Studios, Hampshire. Dan also plays the grinded-out drums, which take time to emerge from the opening sustained gristle and entanglement of Hunter’s experimental guitar and Polly’s Theremin fluctuations lead-in.
A pained expression waiting to be let out, the encumbered ‘One-Armed Swordsman’ sounds like a torrid merger of Swans, Dinosaur Jnr. and Ultrasound. Marking a change perhaps in direction, this single may have been recorded in less daunting times, but encompasses the feelings of disconnection and nervousness in the now. We wait to hear the results of lockdown on the Provincials next album in the Spring of 2021.
Related posts from the Archives:
Provincials ‘Dark Ages’ Review
Provincials ‘Ascending Summer EP’ Review
Owen Tromans ‘Between Stones’ Review
You can now support the Monolith Cocktail via the micro-donation platform Ko-Fi.
Hi, my name is Dominic Valvona and I’m the Founder of the music/culture blog monolithcocktail.com For the last ten years I’ve featured and supported music, musicians and labels we love across genres from around the world that we think you’ll want to know about. No content on the site is paid for or sponsored and we only feature artists we have genuine respect for interest/love. If you enjoy our reviews (and we often write long, thoughtful ones), found a new artist you admire or if we have featured you or artists you represent and would like to buy us a coffee at https://ko-fi.com/monolithcocktail to say cheers for spreading the word, then that would be much appreciated.
Premiere: Video: Hallelujah! ‘Minipony’
March 2, 2020
VIDEO PREMIERE
Dominic Valvona
Hallelujah! ‘Minipony’
(Maple Death Records) Video
Assaulting our ears recently with their partially ironically entitled caustic synth punk album Wanna Dance, the disruptive Verona misfits Hallelujah! have recently pawned their lead guitar for a Korg MS20. The results of which sound like a retro-synth scuzzed chaos, fit for the dungeon dancefloor; a remolded sleazy spasm of Mute Records, DAF, Peter Kernel and The Pop Group.
Taken from that same album, released at the end of February, the erratic megaphone hailed fuzzed-up and bleeping abused ‘Minipony’ has been granted an equally diy style video. Directed insanely by Andrew Tee, this dog’s dinner of a weird set-up tells the tail of the love between one man and his canine pal – though it does seem to all intents and purposes as if the protagonist is actually ‘picking’ up the said dog from a bar. Fun and japes ensue from a trio of noiseniks that seem to have an obsession with animals.
Related posts from the Archives
Wanna Dance Review
Hi, my name is Dominic Valvona and I’m the Founder of the music/culture blog monolithcocktail.com For the last ten years I’ve featured and supported music, musicians and labels we love across genres from around the world that we think you’ll want to know about. No content on the site is paid for or sponsored and we only feature artists we have genuine respect for /love. If you enjoy our reviews (and we often write long, thoughtful ones), found a new artist you admire or if we have featured you or artists you represent and would like to buy us a coffee at https://ko-fi.com/monolithcocktail to say cheers for spreading the word, then that would be much appreciated.
VIDEO PREMIERE: Syd Nukuluk ‘Plasticene’
December 18, 2019
PREMIERE
Words: Matt Oliver
Syd Nukuluk ‘Plasticene (feat. Monika)’
Taken from the upcoming debut EP Data X Change, released on the 24th January 2020 via Slowfoot Records
When a seasonal centrepiece gets caught in Thanksgiving/Christmas crossfire and also flashbacks to The Simpsons episode when Jasper Beardley inadvertently did his part for DIY cryogenics, South London fever dreamer Syd Nukuluk presents the off-the-wall video for the eye-catching urban disturbia of ‘Plasticene’. A bit of Soundgarden, ‘Black Hole Sun’ eye-widening thrown into the mix as well from the blown brains of ones-to-watch Luke Kulukundis and Arthur Studholme, French-British emcee and poultry enemy #1 Monika becomes a symbol of modern times while rewriting the mantra of protect your neck, lightheartedness succumbing to deathly, deafening undertones.
‘Plasticene’ is released as part of the debut five-track Data X Change EP, a lo-fi quintet of synapse-firing electronica pushing indie, R&B and hip-hop to a shadowy left, on January 24th via the Slowfoot imprint.
Find the Data X Change EP via Bandcamp
Or through the following:
Slowfoot Website
Syd Nukuluk Website
Monolith Cocktail Blog 