"You're wearing red. I'm wearing red. Coincidence? I don't think so." Three exceptional new pieces surface in SoundCloud within minutes of each other - leaving me musing idly about a Jasper TX/Erstlaub/John Chantler supergroup (a prog crime that I seem willing to tolerate, even laud, in more experimental contexts).
While that liaison seems remote, even if each other's differently dark aesthetics were negotiable, here's the next best thing - this trio of talents back-to-back. JTX builds with blobby restraint through a shoe-storm & releases again back down the other side. Erst brings thrumming clicks & gloopy chords to bear on some wind-gusting shore. & Chantler brings it all home in a kind of mod synth take on freak-folk...
A welcome pretext to revisit Jefre Cantu-Ledesma’s blissed and blown out epic, Love is a Stream, among the best of an uneven year for Type, is its appearance in vinyl, specifically the nifty bonus disc, Love is a Dream, on which head Type-ist, Xela, re-channels tracks from Stream into Dream.
'Shoegaze' has moved from among the maligned (see your LMYE resident footwear-stare commentator previously on Scott Cortez / lovesliescrushing) to being one of the genre epithets to drop when seeking to appeal to the New Ambient And Home Listening Hipster (cf. Kosmische, hypnagogue pop, cold wave, et al.). And J.C-L's first Type solo album has ridden in on the crest of this wave. It opened up a new world of shoegaze-dreampop that melded the eu- to the caco- of the phonic. Stream (and its Xela relative, Dream) is the sound of J.C-L ramping up the lowlight drone sonatas of his earlier work (see later this post) to take a walk on the wildside of bleached-out shoegaze abstraction. Sometimes summery with an upward dynamic, other times plunging cavernously, J.C-L comes on here like the bastard love-child of Kevin Shields and Tim Hecker fostered by Robin Guthrie and Fennesz, the album artfully referencing these previous while retaining its own integrity. Thrill to the sound of etiolated almost-hooks and spectral melodies buried beneath grit slurry, static flurry, and tonebent guitar motifs in a washed out tape-saturated sunburst finish.
