COVID-19 put the kibosh on the festival this year, but this newly released 2017 set from Japan’s Powder gives would-be partygoers the chance to soak up Sustain-Release’s vibe. Over the years, the festival’s small size and adventurous programming have drawn comparisons to events like Wales’ Freerotation and Japan’s Labyrinth, placing it in rarefied company. Perila – Études Mix N✤6Įvery autumn since 2014, Sustain-Release has drawn ravers to an off-season summer camp in upstate New York for an intimate weekend exploring dance music’s outer limits. Per the title, the whole set is as soft as a bed of moss, and just the thing for autumn’s falling mercury and waning daylight. Best of all might be Latvian duo Vladimir Levi and Kim Brejtburg’s 1993 song “ Ne Uhodi, Darjaŝij,” a winsome bit of new-age pop that suggests a kind of Soviet Cocteaus vibe. Jessica Pratt’s plaintive “ This Time Around” is a melancholy highlight from the first half of the mix, and Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s “Color of Anyhow,” cut from similarly folky cloth, ends things on a quietly rapturous note. The Russian group opens Sappell’s mix for Dublab with a reverberant mist of guitars that suggests an abiding fondness for Cocteau Twins and This Mortal Coil, effectively setting the tone for what follows: a haunting song from German psychedelic voyagers Popol Vuh, vintage post-rock from Leeds’ Hood, and even a choice Blue Bell Knoll cut. But recently, Motion Ward founder Jesse Sappell has been nudging the label toward dream pop-first glancingly, in the suggestive hush of artists like Perila and ᕦ(ò_óˇ)ᕤ (aka Nikolay Kozlov), and now more explicitly in the rose-colored swirl of AIR Krew. The two imprints share many of the same contributors (like uon, Exael, and Pontiac Streator), and both pursue a similar aesthetic: dusty, formless, and imbued with a weird, iridescent sheen, like a wadded-up ball of cellophane crinkling as it expands.
Los Angeles’ Motion Ward label inhabits the same galaxy of outer-limits ambient as Huerco S.’ West Mineral Ltd.
0 kommentar(er)
