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DARLING

ALL HANDS_MAKE LIGHT

Darling The Dawn

    The new kosmische electronic shoegaze duo of Ariel Engle (Broken Social Scene, Patrick Watson, La Force) and Efrim Manuel Menuck (Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Thee Silver Mt. Zion). Longtime friends, collaborators, and stalwarts of the Montréal post-punk community, this is their first full-fledged project together. Mixed by Jace Lasek (The Besnard Lakes) and featuring guest players Jessica Moss (Thee Silver Mt Zion, Big | Brave) and Liam O’Neil (Suuns).

    AH_ML weaves these 2 unique voices through lustrous tendrils of blown-out tones and drones, expanding on Menuck’s eponymous modular and analog synth-based work of recent years, now imbued with an additionally searing, soulful warmth and melodicism through Engle’s singing. “Darling The Dawn” is a spellbinding album of preternaturally genre-bending sonics and songwriting: a sort of electronic shoegaze suffused with freak-folk, kosmische, darkwave and post-industrial, flowing from ambient minimalism to pulsing maximalism, conjuring traditionals sung in the haze of earliest light accompanied by overdriven circuit boards powered with ungrounded wires.

    Engle and Menuck see AH_ML in a folk lineage traced through the likes of Pentangle and Trees to White Magic and Amps For Christ. While there’s no discernable guitar or acoustic instrumentation on the album (warm distorted synths provide the palette, along with signal-processed violin from fellow-traveller Jessica Moss), off-kilter drone incantations like “A Sparrow’s Lift” and “A Workers’ Graveyard (Poor Eternal)” perhaps sit most overtly within these seams of the skewed-folk substratum. The dichotomic ritualism of Can is an adjacent signpost, where methodical longform soundscaping combines with a feeling of extemporized immediacy. The album’s tremendous 10-minute centerpieces “We Live On A Fucking Planet And Baby That’s The Sun” and the motorik-driven “The Sons And Daughters Of Poor Eternal” also make this influence explicit thanks in part to the resplendent drumming of guest Liam O’Neil (Suuns), who helps propel both tracks to their spiralling peaks. Above all it’s the singing and lyrics, in method and melodic delivery, that conjure certain freak-folk furrows.

    Engle calls this “music inspired by ancestor music, sea shanties for seas we’ve never sailed” and the duo have indeed forged a collection on “Darling The Dawn” where vocals often feel strangely rooted in traditionals, while the instrumentation resonates out-of-time, in a liminal space at once glisteningly synthetic and oxidized in analog patina. As the album title suggests, sleepless anxiety/euphoria and a sense of somatic channeling is vital to these songs: “I mostly kept the first thought I had, like a cold read, I wanted the melodies to be immediate and to surprise me, not a laboured process; it’s about being a weather vane, guided by preconscious impulses” says Engle.

    For Menuck, the record started “with an idea of making a long thing about ‘THE DAWN’, the different weights of its radiance, the way it kisses our dumb faces when we rise and leave the night behind, the heaviness of that light when you haven’t slept.” “Darling The Dawn” captures a wholly compelling collaboration between Engle and Menuck in an album of genuine thematic power, thrumming with alternately tender and serrated beauty as only their combined strengths and sensibilities could conjure.

    TRACK LISTING

    1. A Sparrows’ Lift
    2. We Live On A Fucking Planet And Baby That’s The Sun
    3. Waiting For The Light To Quit
    4. A Workers’ Graveyard (Poor Eternal)
    5. The Sons And Daughters Of Poor Eternal
    6. Anchor
    7. Lie Down In Roses Dear

    Steve Marino

    Fluff

      Recommended If You Like: Bill Callahan, Cass McCombs, Damien Jurado, Hovvdy, Phoebe Bridgers, Sam Evian, Sun Kil Moon. Over the last decade Steve Marino has recorded multiple solo albums (as Moor Hound), been in countless bands, and toured the country consistently, but his newest full-length, Fluff, is the first collection of songs he’s released in his own name. In that sense it’s his “debut” album. One might expect such a transition, from the artifice of a band name to the intimacy of one’s given name, to be born of some newfound, inward focus. It makes sense; it’s a story of an artist going back to basics, getting real. It’s also not what happened.

      Fluff is an album about home, and one’s place in it, love, and intimacy, and it’s the result of Steve marrying his direct, honest songwriting with a deeply collaborative process. He developed the record with fellow Bloomington, Indiana resident, and standout producer/engineer Ben Lumsdaine (Kevin Krauter, Major Murphy, Spissy) and together they open up the songs, giving them tangible depth. The title track, “Fluff”, with its precise drums, layered guitars, and visceral, emotive vocals, captures the power of this collaboration. It’s a song that is delicate, yet driving, lyrically opaque, yet emotionally direct. It is, like the rest of the album, in perfect balance. Press Quotes: “Steve Marino’s folksy, Midwestern vibes are genuine. Based out of Bloomington, IN, Marino makes music that’s easy on the ear and the soul” Indie Shuffle // “Marino’s heartfelt tunes are ballads for the every person, stripped to simplicity for repeated enjoyment.” Austin Town Hall… Tracks: Fluff, Six Two Four, On the Line, Green and Blue, Open Door, Under the Table, Dehilya, Va. 

      Giona Ostinelli

      Darling OST

        How does it sound when you’re slowly being driven insane? Death Waltz Recording Company is proud to bring you a soundtrack that aurally illustrates this in great detail in the form of Giona Ostinelli’s mesmerising score to DARLING. Written and directed by Mickey Keating (POD) and starring Lauren Ashley Carter (THE WOMAN) and genre favourite Sean Young (BLADE RUNNER), the film is a psychological horror in the vein of pictures like such Roman Polanski’s REPULSION, and features a young woman who becomes a caretaker of an isolated New York mansion and is driven slowly insane while walking the corridors.

        TRACK LISTING

        A1. NYC Pt. 1 (1:23)
        A2. Darling (1:22)
        A3. The City (2:17)
        A4. Why Did You Come Here Tonight ( 2:04)
        A5. Abyssus (2:22)
        A6. Dragging The Body (2:18)
        A7. James Abbott (1:51)
        A8. Crucifix (2:04)
        A9. Falling ( 2:29)
        A10. Pacing Around ( 1:56)
        A11. Coming To Life (1:06)
        A12. The Phone Call (1:31)
        B13. Invocation (1:33)
        B14. NYC Pt. 2 (1:13)
        B15. The Door (1:34)
        B16. The House (1:13)
        B17. Conversation (3:43)
        B18. Following Him ( 1:10)
        B19. Henry Sullivan ( 4:46)
        B20. Abyssus Pt. 2 (2:05)
        B21. Inferno (1:07)
        B22. Makeup (1:17)
        B23. Encounter (2:39)
        B24. Exploring The House (4:48)
        B25. Scriabin Preludes Op. 11 (3:28)
        B26. NYC Pt. 3 (1:05)
        B27. Demon (0:49)
        B28. Second Phone Call (1:12)
        B29. I Couldn't Let Him Live (3:21)
        B30. Darling Reprise (1:09)

        The follow-up to Conor O’Brien’s debut, Becoming a Jackal, and its successor, Awayland - both hugely acclaimed and Mercury-nominated - is a breathtakingly beautiful, intimate album entirely about love and relationships.

        Darling Arithmetic was written, recorded, produced and mixed by O’Brien at home - the loft of a converted farmhouse that he shares in the coastal town of Malahide to the north of Dublin - revealing a single-minded artist at the peak of his already considerable songwriting powers. It encompasses the various shades of feeling – desire, obsession, lust, loneliness and confusion, and deeper into philosophical and existential territory, across a cast of lovers, friends, family and even strangers. Backing up his supple and emoting vocal and guitar is the subtlest palate of instrumentation – piano, Mellotron (which accounts for the album’s occasional horn and cello tones) and brushes. O’Brien plays every instrument on these exquisite, melodic songs in a sparse, spacious, acoustic-leaning fashion.

        On Darling Arithmetic, O’Brien doesn’t only pare back his use of language but looks deep into his own heart and motives. The opening track and first single, ‘Courage’, concerns the most important kind of love – for yourself: “It took a little time to get where I wanted / It took a little time to get free / It took a little time to be honest / It took a little time to be me.”

        TRACK LISTING

        1. Courage
        2. Everything I Am Is Yours
        3. Dawning On Me
        4. Hot Scary Summer
        5. The Soul Serene
        6. Darling Arithmetic
        7. Little Bigot
        8. No One To Blame
        9. So Naïve 


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