From the generally untidy mind of Aaron Levin:
Destructive guitar congruance. Menacing synthetic tones. Echo-to-infinity vox processing. Extirpated TASCAM wreckage. Neat and Tidy in My Mind is the most relentless barrage of left-field maximal synth North American has ever seen. It’s the second cassette by solo, multi-format Vancouver artist Emily Faryna, whose visionary digital mythics have been obscured by Canada’s under-documented vintage cassette scene. Her conical prose hovers darkly over Neat and Tidy‘s minor-key delirium, brewing the magnetic urgency coursing through its self-producing ether; a last, desperate attempt to convince the world that the mind’s ailments exist on the outside. It’s a gateway drug into the underbelly of a hyper intimate experimental underground torn from the pages of Neuromancer and, to me, the flagship vehicle for the vanguard of fringe-Canada. Words left to describe Neat and Tidy in Your Mind: ambitious, singular, forward-thinking, powerful, intense, and prodigious. There is a reissue in the works.
EMILY – Who Cares
EMILY – Compromise

From the ghostly bedding of Aaron Levin:
Vancouver’s synthetic underground is bubbling for the second time since the 80s when labels and artists were populating basements, clubs, cassette racks, and ideas with bleak drum machines and coarse synthesizers. COSMETICS, magneticring, N.213, Twin Crystals, MYTHS, Von Bingen, Haunted Beard, [insert band I'm forgetting] and now the industrial gothic Mode Moderne project Vancouver as a city on the brink of a synth-adjective explosion. Ghosts Emerging live centre-stage in the unassuming minimal-synth-pop arena with secret conviction and harmonic prowess, drifting listeners on their currents of nostalgic woe. Vocalist Phillip Intile’s non-chalant industrial modulations makes the whole trip strangely manipulative as you wake up mid-album unaware of your new musical surroundings: pulsing drum machines, swathy synthesizers, ethereal guitar leads, and blankets of ambient-satin. Let’s welcome the new age.
Mode Moderne – Les Neuf Soeurs
Mode Moderne – Radio Heartbeat

From the synthetic moons of Aaron Levin:
Bernardino continues to peel wigs and sublimate minds with his vicarious cosmic voyage through swaths of electroacoustic winds and perilous Ace Tone waters. This time we are lead by a transplanted Odysseus, bravely steering Bernardino’s vast synthesizer vessel through mysterious wires and serene circuitry. La Montaña del Capricornio is a continuation from Las Enamoradas‘ granular synthesia, diving deep into the dilemmic waves of warm ambience and dark druid-age. Hobo Cult cleverly realized Bernardino’s brilliance as a double-sided cassette, focusing your energies on the immaculate details emanating through tape hiss and Dolby warmth, adding comfort to the brooding sounds beneath its alluring orphic cover. A++++++.
Bernardino Femminielli – La Montaña del Capricornio – Side A
Bernardino Femminielli – La Montaña del Capricornio – Side B

From the perilous necklace of Aaron Levin:
I want to live Precious Necklace. I want tight sweaters. VIP access to the clurb. Double martinis. False love. Teen soundtracks blasting. I want the whole world in a song and I want to dance; pulsing drum machines, echoey vocals and exaggerated pop-harmonies. Let the music take you back in time. Nintendo, cocaine, plastic people, and radio hits. Sex in bathrooms and parental neglect. Stereotypes. We’ve lost our youth. We can take it back. The Silly Kissers, in a futuristic act of heroism, are our only hope. Their fourth and most realized effort to-date showcases their perfected 80s-pop ventriloquism. Precious Necklace is a re-imagining that only nostalgia can deliver; glossing over the weaknesses of an era we will never truly understand and manipulating the pearls of its bounty to deliver every genre’s saving grace: synthetic pop perfection. Precious Necklace, released as a limited-edition 10″ on Montreal’s Arbutus Records, is a 10/10 major-scale heart-melt. The world has never needed so much. They will deliver. GRIP. IT. NOW.
Silly Kissers – You Could Even Like Me
Silly Kissers – Treat Me Like You Do
Silly Kissers – Precious Necklace

From the synthetic mellowings of Aaron Levin:
In the not-too-distant future, Joshua Stevenson will be listed in the canon of modern Canadian synthesia. Earlier this year we saw the release of Josh’s debut into meanderonic minimalism via his solo project magneticring. Meanwhile, an ensemble of Vancouver-area heavyweights (including Josh), titling themselves Von Bingen, reared a massive, ugly head in the latter half of the annum with a difficult-to-find LP of perturbed disquality. Channeling the early fuse of Irrlicht-era Klaus Schulze with droning, distorted guitar fanfare amongst cathedrals of unorganic chambers, Von Bingen subjects you to a sexcellent multi-textual unification of analog-electro genius. Pulsing mechanics, forced dualities, and atonal guitar workouts part the static stasis within the dark shadows of your listening cosmos and reveal the inner beat of our earthic tunings. Part psychedelic, part synthetic, part experimental, but as a whole, rewarding on multiple listens; an entity better heard than read. Packaged with a loving, two-colour essay.
Von Bingen – Eyeglasses of Kentucky
Von Bingen – Murray 606

From the floating naked body of Aaron Levin:
Real mysteries, when they happen, are as surprising as a naked woman bathed in foreign moonlight, floating atop the red desert. Which is why I welcomed Las Enamoradas, Bernardino Femminielli’s debut, with open and inquisitive arms. Let his mysterious sound waves, polluted with synthetic granularity and ambient tones, wash your uncertainties away until you find yourself floating atop your own desert, naked and confused. Which is precisely when you’ll realize the deep, meditative state Bernardino has put you in; a true mage of the mind, able to manipulate your consciousness from great distances without the expense of mana. It’s a marvelous document of the experimental scene, totally unafraid to pass through the stargate, embrace all influences and step into the void of unchartered creativity. The result? An electronic voyage across psychedelic landscapes lacking any pretense or temporal vignettes. Keep an eye out for Bernardino’s 7″ on Fixture Records coming soon!
Bernardino – El viaje interior
Bernardino – Las enamoradas dopadas
Bernardino – Santuario de Las Appariciones

The first time I got close to another women (during our junior-high dance) I went for a butt-grab. I was twelve. She told me she had to go to the bathroom and never returned. The confusion hanging in the air post-grab-pre-rejection would have been the perfect foreground for the Silly Kissers’ new adventure into vintage summer-of-’84 teenage angst. Six months after they dropped Love Tsunami, their take on the more danceable side of ’84, the Silly Kissers return with a thoughtful, less sugary, and more interesting segue into the unchartered waters of extreme-catchiness and mid-80s radio-faire. They depart from the Human League standard and set-course towards a more emotional and distorted take on ’80s-balladry. The rapid key-scales and spoken-word segways are still there, so you know it’s the same band of creative sailors on a quest for some higher understanding of pop. The new album is a grower and it’s blowing up my spot right now. I love it.
Silly Kissers- Easy Fantasy
Silly Kissers – Thinking Of You

OK, I apologize for not posting a review yesterday. I was too busy trying to see Lethbridge’s weird-science-punk marvella Endangered Ape, Calgary’s what-is-going-on-in-that-city Hunter Gatherer, and hobo power-popper Nobunny. All of this spread over two venues and many hours. Endangered Ape and Hunter Gatherer will be coming very soon to a Weird Canada nearest you.

In the meantime I’ll posted my latest **Space obsession. Maybe I’ll even start a “This Week in **Space” for those great bands that don’t have releases yet.

COSMETICS (Vancouver, BC)
File Under: Cosmic disco wave.
::web/sounds::