MUSIC

"The phenomenon of the sound and music created here is very mysterious. These pieces of music, created without any intention of being published, reached my ears without warning. Of course, this happened because I have lived a life devoted to a certain kind of music, but there is a chance I would never have listened to them in my life. But, they came to me. Now they play over and over in my listening space - blending into the air that surrounds me. Vibrating. It is as if they had always been there from a long time ago." Chee Shimizu (Organic Music, Japan)

The bastard love child of Elvis and Lux Interior, Israeli guitarist Charlie Megira brewed a heady amalgam of ’50s trash rock, surf-y tremolo, and reverb-drenched goth during his all-too-brief 44 trips around the sun. He recorded seven albums worth of material in 15 years, primarily issued on CD-R, most of which is now unreadable or in a landfill. Armed with only an Eko guitar, a black tuxedo, and his signature wrap-around shades, Charlie Megira was a mold-breaking artist who disintegrated while we were all staring at our phones. We've chosen our 2 favorite cuts off his 2000 debut, Da Abtomatic Meisterzinger Mambo Chic. Hear as Megira channels the optimism of post-war America, narcoleptic surf, and the Twin Peaks soundtrack into a lo-fi masterpiece all his own. Sung in both Hebrew and English, Mambo Chic moves at a deliberate pace, unconcerned by the traffic of the modern world and wrapped in a blanket of Tascam 4-track hiss. On “Tomorrow’s Gone” Megira achieves the feat of being so far back in time that he’s somehow living in the future and waiting for the rest of us to arrive.

Discrepant introduces a new series of albums based on the concept of "aquapelago", with gooey compositions from Andrew Pekler, Sugai Ken, Mike Cooper, Yannick Dauby and others. What is it about water that makes it so inspiring for experimental musicians? Discrepant's new series of albums promises to expand on a concept that imagines a deep underwater world. So it makes perfect sense that Japanese composer Sugai Ken - who impressed with 2020's slippery "Tone River" - should start things off with the unsettling 'Boundary', a spoken word piece in English and Japanese leading into Andrew Pekler's predictably balmy 'Shima No Yume', that sounds like being underwater and marooned on a desert island simultaneously. Brussels-based Mexican sound artist Vica Pacheco takes a different approach, splicing together environmental recordings and juxtaposing them with half-speed, haunted brass that sounds as if it's been recorded in an empty swimming pool. Mike Cooper swerves any obvious signals completely, preferring to create a secluded paradise on 'Lamma Island' with gusty field recordings and beachy guitar harmonics. Italian duo Babau bolt together one of our favorite tracks, using idiophones to create a shimmering backdrop that harmonizes with Visible Cloaks' cult "Fairlights, Mallets And Bamboo" mixes.