Pulse: New Music You Need #19 – ArcTanGent Special

It’s Pulse, Jim, but not as we know it.

This time around, we’ve gone for a bit of a special theme when it comes to the New Music You Need. The theme, as you might’ve guessed from the title, is that of ArcTanGent; the alternative music festival that’s got you covered for post-rock, mathrock, post-metal, math metal, post-hardcore, mathcore. Basically, if you can put post or math in front of it, you’ll find it here;

ArcTanGent – it’s post-everything.

However, that doesn’t really cover it all, as you’ll also find electronica, folk, doom, shoegaze, punk, noise rock, progressive, and anything as experimental as you like. But yeah, it’s an ArcTanGent special edition of Pulse, because there’s damn fine new music there, and that’s what Pulse is for. There are some seriously big guns in their genres on the line-up this year, but I will always stick up for the little guy, so here’s a few of the newest, quirkiest, lesser known-est, and littlest guys at the festival. You need them.


Sonance

Sonance; the condition or quality of being sonant. Sonant; sounding; having sound.

Whilst I was learning that today, you likely were probably thinking, ‘Pfft, that could pertain appropriately to any band, or anything that makes a noise for that matter’, and you’d partially right. Smartarse. That is, until you listen to Sonance and it become audibly apparent (as most sounds are) how it couldn’t fit any other band better.

These five Bristolians craft their soundscapes with consideration and precision to create dense, exquisite, detailed, and visceral atmospheres. Within which they can explore the boundaries of everything from drone to doom, through sludge and noise, by way of orchestrally inclined film scores and post-rock epics.

 

IEPI

Now, I may not know what IEPI may stand, I may not even know what IEPI might mean if it doesn’t stand for anything. I may not even know a whole lot about IEPI as a band. What I do know though, is that this instrumental three-piece from Banyoles (okay, maybe I knew a little), are quite possibly batshit insane.

At least, if the ruckus they make is anything to go by anyway; a ruckus allegedly referred to as ‘progressive-organic-instrumental-superlative-superalternative-supermarket-noise’ – and I thought I was prone to descriptive nonsense.

If that ‘genre’ doesn’t help, try this on for size: IEPI play a resiliently unsettled variation of frantic instrumental math rock that, were it a person, would be diagnosed with any number personality disorders, and psychoses – generally considered a danger to itself.

 

Pocket Apocalypse

Proof that putting the word pocket in front of almost anything threatening or foreboding will take the power it wields away from it. The impending apocalypse, in its many guises, is always on my mind, but gosh darn, if I don’t want myself a pocket one to keep. I’d look after it Mister, I swear. I’d take it for walks everyday and everything. This Pocket Apocalypse is a different prospect altogether though, and a progressive prospect at that.

Taking the sense of scope and atmospherics most commonly associated with post-rock, and the intricate interweaving details of math rock, this latest Liverpudlian fab four then structure those elements within the context of anthemic alternative rock and a touch of angular post-hardcore.

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