Brainchai/Ilkae – ‘ATHENA’ $6
RIYL: cyberpunk geriatric sex scenes, the soundtrack of the burning of a slot car race track. edition of 75. The second split ever from Field Hymns brings the crackling 8-bit EDM of Eirik Suhrke (Brainchai) and Montreal’s Aaron Munson (Ilkae) to the shores of tape mountain. Brainchai sounds like a cross between James Brown’s washing machine full of Yellow Magic Orchestra’s silk underwear and a drum machine achieving sentience. Over on side B, Illkae provides burners that roll across the magnetic landscape on a diet of cool electricity and Pac Mac vitamins towards dark siesta of the soul. We need to do this split shit more often.
Millions – ‘LINE IN THE SKY’ $6
RIYL: experimental ambient drone, a omni-present feeling of lurking danger. edition of 75 David Suss (Millions) uses Thomas Pynchon’s “Against The Day” as inspiration for this 4 track suite. Eschewing the traditional post-rock build-up, he kicks off this broad, tense piece with a long, chesty blast of total noise before settling down and coasting into a existentially dreary but dreamy bliss for the rest of the album, especially about the time the EVI solo comes ‘round. Dissonance, meet cognitive dissonance.