Bandcamp’s outer limits continue to be a rewarding place for psychedelia, experimental club music, noise, vaporwave, and other sounds that are wholly uncategorizable. In each edition of Acid Test, Miles Bowe explores its far reaches to dig up hidden gems and obscure oddities. This March, we dive into a gleefully disorienting spoken word album, harsh noise conjured out of ceramic, warm folk tunes, and an electronic release so icily refreshing it might save you money on air conditioning this summer.
Torn Hawk
Trustfall
Cassette
Torn Hawk’s hypnagogic pop masterpiece Through Force of Will recently celebrated its 10 year anniversary with an expanded reissue. And while that album still sounds like it could have come out right now, you are missing out if you aren’t following what Luke Wyatt is actually releasing right now. Beginning with the spoken word segments included on his excellent 2022 album Toxic Sincerity, Wyatt has sculpted a character that falls somewhere between a motivational speaker, an Andrew Dice Clay-like open mic comic, and the hallucinogenic phone calls of real-life cryptid Longmont Potion Castle. On Trustfall, those segments become the entire album; a stream-of-consciousness waterfall of shaggy dog stories, intrusive thoughts, whizzing sound effects, and uncanny phrases that hook into your brain. For over 30 minutes, Wyatt virtuosically solos with words engaging us in a wrestling match of trying to follow what he’s saying, sometimes across a single sentence, and wins every time. Yet from this storm of words, thoughts, naggingly entertaining enunciations, and confessions comes a sensory pleasure not unlike a noise album. And it’s at that point that Trustfall starts to find a kindred quality to those hypnotic, chintzy synths in Wyatt’s earlier work I never quite noticed. Torn Hawk’s approach may be different on Trustfall, but it induces a feeling uncannily similar to his best work—which this very much deserves to be included alongside.
Jessica Ekomane
Manifolds
Vinyl LP
Half a decade after her jaw-dropping debut release Multivocal, Berlin-based sound artist Jessica Ekomane returns with Manifolds. Spread over half a split record (and with excellent company, considering Laurel Halo’s release on the other side), Ekomane’s 17-minute composition could nonetheless eclipse entire discographies. If Multivocal patiently built up its gradually dizzying polyphonic layers like tides, Manifold might as well open at the bottom of a trench as warped voices and wildly accelerating textures fill your ear. Yet Manifolds only grows more gripping as it evolves, reaching a dramatically spacious peak in its center before collapsing into piercing, intense electronics in its thrilling second half. Its impact feels instantaneous and all consuming. If Ekomane went on to spend the next 10 years making a composition half as short as this, Manifolds ensures that it would be worth the wait. But also: Please don’t do that!
Parris
Passionfruit
Vinyl LP
Forget songs, albums, or EPs—there may not have been a more perfect sound I heard in 2021 than Eden Samara’s multi-tracked vocals layering and harmonizing onto themselves at the end of “Skater’s World” from Parris’s debut album Soaked In Indigo Moonlight. A few years removed from that incredible full-length, the UK producer Dwayne Parris-Robinson has comfortably moved back into what he’s always done best, patiently releasing a mindblowing EP every couple years. The four-track Passionfruit continues that trend, while building on some of the surprises that made Indigo Moonlight feel like such a culmination. Similar to “Skater’s World,” opener “why can’t rabbits wear cowboy hats” and joyous closer “Underwater Fantasy” hit you with flurries of vocals, syllabic slivers that feel as welcome in Parris’ palette as the spare, effervescent synths pinballing through 2 Vultures or the frozen bass tones forming a foundation since Your Kiss Is Sour. “Slipping, Crawling, Falling” bears another Parris calling card, creating a slow polyrhythmic sleight-of-hand that’s easy to follow right until it becomes impossible, while the miraculous title track stretches those brief, bright synth hooks across an entire track. Passionfruit is incredible even for the standards Parris always sets; both a small step and an incredible leap in a near-perfect discography.
Love Is Yes
Love Is Yes
Vinyl LP
On their self-titled debut album Love Is Yes, the Netherlands-based duo of Sander van der Toorn and Dax Niesten make a powerful first impression, delivering an album that sounds fully formed while constantly upending expectations. The duo craft immensely beautiful folk songs from acoustic guitar and organ that will make your heart swell until they seem to sublimate entirely into spacious, tender drones. Bringing to mind Katie Dey, Ulla’s earliest work as YYU, or, most notably a warmer, brighter Natural Snow Buildings, Love Is Yes is an intimate, quiet, and small album but it quickly invites you into a much wider interior world. With the addition of Niesten’s stunning artwork and animations—full of strange, surreal monsters that all seem to radiate kindness—it’s a world I can’t wait to see grow as more people discover it.
Sug
Slug Beat
Compact Disc (CD)
Mike Sugarman’s work as Sug embraces dense electronic processing and taut rhythms, whether constructing large-scale work as he does on his Hausu Mountain releases or chopping a single pop song into an album-length explosion on last year’s Stang. Slug Beat is also packed with flurries of mindbending sounds, but they’re run through some of his most club-focused material. The nine-minute opener “(This One’s For The Lovers) In The House” moves from breezy drums to breakbeats before hitting an extended drift of abstract electronics, while the percolating, bass-heavy title track and late highlight “Devil Dust” bring to mind rRoxymore’s equally airy and impactful dub techno. Cushioned by the gentle, beat-less comedown of “Truth or Consequences,” Slug Beat is both a high point and an ideal starting place to enter Sug’s playfully challenging discography.
Slowfoam
Transcorporeal Portal
Vinyl LP
After releasing the foggy, saxophone-dappled Worlding With Earth late last year, Madelyn Byrd, aka Slowfoam, returns with another fusion of field recordings, electroacoustic composition, and breathtaking vocalizations. Transcorporeal Portal sounds seamlessly advanced and completely primordial at once, while offering its own sonic twists and turns. Opener “Enlightened Smudge on the Machine” seamlessly combines rattling electronics, delicate spoken word and rippling, heavy drums as collaborator Diane Barbé’s flute glides throughout. Striking highlights like “Soft Body Viridescence” or closer “Savor It” bend natural sounds of water or birds into jarring, alien shapes. Yet for all of its colliding and transforming sounds, Byrd is brilliant at zoning in on small striking details such as “Like Phantom Memories in the Slinking Storm” where whispered voice and what sounds like processed guitar plucks move in a quiet duet. Transcorporeal Portal is a fantastic next chapter for Slowfoam, an album able to induce quiet reflections and total sensory overload.
Melon Sprout
Collected Ceramic Memories
Compact Disc (CD)
If, like me, your thoughts about the sonic potential of ceramic extends to the occasional percussion solo by your pet smashing a coffee mug, then Melon Sprout will open your mind. Once electronic processes get involved, ceramic becomes a very strange material and the more I listen to Collected Ceramic Memories, the less I think I know about it. It insulates, it conducts; the oldest history museums and newest computer chips are full of the stuff. And yet Collected Ceramic Memories makes it all sound utterly alien—like dropping your favorite mug only to watch it bounce back into your hand—and like the best harsh noise, it envelops you.
R. Pierre
Spectra
Compact Disc (CD)
Jungle Gym co-founder Caleb Dravier delivers this icy and inviting new highlight to the enduringly trippy electronic label under his alias R. Pierre. Spectra is spread across five tracks of lush synths and delicately prickling textures. Every track is titled “Pool,” and every track feels like diving into one. It’s an immensely bright release, right up until the chilling closer “Pool V,” where Dravier turns those same euphoria-inducing textures towards unsettling darkness and horror movie atmosphere. It’s an unexpected twist and ambiguous ending that leaves Spectra all the more alluring.
