Pulse: New Music You Need #15

Takaakira ‘Taka’ Goto

There will of course be those surreal times too, when you find yourself slave to insomnia wandering desolate landscapes atop scorched earth and half-recognisable landmarks, more fitted as the scenery of a nightmare that seemed to go on too long, beyond the point you realised it was a dream, and expected to wake up but never did.

For those times, there is Takaakira ‘Taka’ Goto, composer and lead guitarist for instrumental purveyors of post-everything, Mono, who is now embarking on a solo career with the release of his debut solo album, Classical Punk and Echoes Under the Beauty. Having sat on this album for over ten years, keeping it personal and private, Taka now felt ready to unveil and release it.

Something we can all be thankful for as Taka’s solo output explores endless horizons with orchestral film-score scale and grandiose, alongside hypnotic, minimalist, simplicity, occupying perfectly that sense of insomniac uncertainty as you try to establish whether you’re dreaming or awake.

Lung Dart

Maybe you find a peaceful spot above the wasteland. Maybe you watch what goes for a sunset these days. Maybe you stare up at the night sky, tainted and tearing itself apart but somehow beautiful. Maybe you try and think back to a time before it all went wrong, back when life was to be lived and not survived, back when there was love to be loved. Maybe you fall asleep finally.

It’s at this point of bleak serenity and quiet beauty that Lung Dart comes into play, underpinning the melancholy memories and strange bittersweet appreciation for your new life and surroundings, spiralling you into a sleep filled with dreams of once proud cities lit up at night.

In the real world though, Lung Dart are a duo based out of London who create their sprawling soundscapes of ambient neo-soul, not just with synths, programmes, electronics, twilight jazz vibes and samples, but samples of washing machines and mobile phones falling into buckets of knives.

Thisquietarmy

You wake up to the harsh reality of your situation once more though, realising yet again that such serenity is fleeting, if not an illusion entirely, and hell is not other people, hell is existence now.

Thisquietarmy is certainly not quiet and is likely an army of demons or half-mechanical mutant men and women gone wild (because why not?). Though, at the same time it may very well be the musical project of former DESTROYALLDREAMERS member, Canadian composer, guitarist, and general maestro of musical maelstrom, Eric Quach.

Through Thisquietarmy, Quach experiments with how far he can stretch the boundaries of ambient guitar and loop based drones, whilst also colouring his sonic palette with elements of numerous genres, such as black metal’s relentless ferocity, doom metal’s funeral dirge, post-rock’s cinematic rise and fall, kraut rock’s mechanic hypnotism, and even shoegaze’s lush textures.

Willy Muse

Resignation. It’s gone. Everything is gone, and it isn’t ever coming back. There’s nothing left now, not even the chaos and the carnage of the immediate anarchy, post-apocalypse. There’s nothing but an horizon you’ll never reach and the barren badlands in between. The only thing to look forward to is the transition from night to day and back again, if you’re feeling optimistic.

You’ve found an old guitar though, and you pour your broken down and resigned heart and soul into the songs you play through it out into the ether. And that’s where Willy Muse comes into this absurd, apocalyptic narrative that I seem to have weaved half-arsedly, yet stubbornly so, through a feature on new music you should check out…

New York based indie rockers Widowspeak bassist, Willy Muse, casts a long and lonely shadow offset from a campfire in the desert at night with his solo output. Sparse, sombre, and downtrodden, but bolstered with a determined resilience, Muse’s music relies on the laboured strums of a beaten acoustic delivering a kind of lost, noir-country as he croons confessionally atop it with the kind of delivery that implies he’s using the last of his strength and passion to get through.

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