Teacups - Songs about Yarn (Rack & Ruin)

Rack & Ruin Records is certainly one of the fewest labels which has the ability to astonish the melomans at times. The album of 16 tracks gets involved in interesting aspirations. The main feature is to "mess up" the sounds of chiptune/8-bit and orchestrated sound/chamber pop, this is actually the reason why you can hear naivistic and rough electronic music approaches alongside with lucid symphonic sounds. The last mentioned ones are based on violin loops and tehnique of modifying some octaves and the first named are conjured up from old game consoles such as SNES and N64. Although almost all tracks are instrumental and have short duration, nevertheless, the picture will not get fragmentized yet. There are 2 exceptions, though - Knitting for your Resume (SNES) is a beautiful indie pop bob with singing. Also, it would be unfair not to mention the main and longest track Songs About Yarn in B-flat which does come forward through blithesome soundtrack-alike milieu. Listening to Songs about Yarn is a really worth experience, mainly by 2 aspects - solidness and extraordinariness.

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9.4

[Old but important] Ashbrg Music for Cats (Hamsterloco)

Actually the first premise is very promising anyway - Aleix Pitarch `s music is without any doubts always liked by me, and secondly, the cats are always enough cute to be welcomed and dedicated something to them. However, can we expect the new turns regarding artistic freedom, i.e playing with various forms and genres?

30-year old Catalan has released a bunch of personal issues under his own Hamsterloco label, many of whom have been re-issued recently. Indeed, Music for Cats, consisting of 17 tracks and enduring merely 32 minutes, was initally brought to an end in 1998 having revealed his unconventional approach to 8-bit/tracker music. On the one hand, all of those acid synth lines, bewildering and quaint sonic layers and mutated samples, and on the other side, it is all blended into a weird mix with a lot of diverse references - drum and bass, big beat, downtempo, ambient, and chilltronica. Even indie tunes are represented here - actually red eyes does bid bass sequences which, indeed, are probably one of the best moments on it. Also, there are quite a lot primitivistic sound collage as well, which conceptually is immanently concomitant with 8-bit music anyway, though, it seems the Barcelonan is used to involve to trying to magnify even more differencies and gaps to bring forth interesting contrasts between its parts. In any cases, though, psychedelic undercurrents are the corpuscles of his bloodstream. There are some very eccentric tracks too - for instance, country phone, does it belong more to the Kenny Rodgers`universe, or the Bruce Haack/The Jackpine Savage`s weird one, though? Will it be playlisted in Country music radio shows? Another example, flinser, is a hauntingly rumbling one, or spy which is built up on a sample of a sufi song, or empty going on a fly and disappearing into endless desolation. However, if you are being aware of Pitarch`s favorite artists (David Bowie, Cocteau Twins, The Residents, Deerhof, Scott Walker, The Cure, Yellow Magic Orchestra) it does not surprise you, though.

No doubt, it is one of the top releases in the 8-bit/tracker music universe.

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