Amina Hocine is a young interesting artist hailing from Göteborg, who also has Algerian roots. She experiments with ambient backgrounds, which she explores with her lyrics and vocal melodies. It’s naked, creative and entralling as I listen to the albums she’s released on her Bandcamp page. You can also follow her music on Soundcloud. You can find her site on Tumblr and she also has a Facebook page.
Some music needs some time before you can enjoy it. And sometimes you need som kind of door opener before you can experience it “for real”. This happened to me with the Swedish-American band Susurrus Station’s latest album “Antinomie”. The first time I listened I couldn’t really get it so I let it go for some time. A month later they sent me the video they made for the song “Alluvia”, which sort of unlocked the doors to “Antinomie” for me.
This is their fourth album, but I haven’t heard any of the former ones, so I can’t really compare. I can tell you, though, that this is an interesting, varied, unpredictable and dreamy genre mix of an album. Listen more on Spotify or on Wimp. You can find the band on their site.
Here is the latest single from pop experimental Fortune Cookies Blues, “Where Is My Plough”. This suggestive, dreamy song was created around the sound of falling water drops from a leaking tap and all the chords and harmonies have their origin in the band playing along to this sample, a sample which is still in the song.
The band name is a little different and I asked them how they came up with it:
Originally Fortune Cookies Blues is the name of a little piece of art music, and this name simply stuck in the back of the head about ten years ago. When this project was starting to take shape, the name surfaced again. It soon became the working name, even before the songs were named. Initially it was the sound and the feeling of the name that felt instinctively right, and the more we worked with the music the more fitting the significance of the name felt.
FCB’s songs and lyrics is grasping after the feeling of not being comfortable with the place in the fate lottery you have reached, a longing for something abstract “else” or “elsewhere”. Like a sorrow and a longing in one, a blues over the text line from the fortune cookie.
(translated from Swedish)
This is the band’s second single and you can listen to the songs together with several remixes on Spotify and there’s also music on their Facebook page where you can follow the band.
Below you’ll find a remix by Swedish duo Liquidizer and you can listen to the original song in the video. The videon is created by the Estonian artist Ulla Saar.
Tenonsaw is a Swedish-Irish duo with the members Salt Eriksson and Thomas Luke. In the Autumn they first released the debut album “Beginnings”, and later, in November, the EP “Pact”. It’s not that easy to describe their music and I can’t really find any close comparisons among other artists.
The foundation, and what they also started with, is folk music; melancholic and with Tom’s acoustic guitar accompanying Salt’s sad song melodies. Soon, electronica, guitar figures and other sounds add new layers in a minimalistic way. Scales clashes with other scales and new layers add other types of emotions, which sometimes create slightly chaotic situations where there are no rules. They describe the ambition themselves:
…create emotional songbased music, based on the principle on finding the balance between clarity and confusion and between ugliness and beauty.
There is a large span between the songs, where they sometimes lie very close to folk music tunes and sometimes have left it completely behind. You can listen to the title track from the EP here below, and the rest of the songs are available on their Bandcamp page. You can find the duo on their site and on Facebook.
The name Tenonsaw they found in a dictionary while looking for a suitable band name. They liked the association with sharpness and details, and that it’s a small saw, not a big dangerous one.
A Dutch musician that has moved to Sweden may ring some bells. A. S. Swanski, though, produces music in quite different genres than the late Cornelis did. Here it’s about electronica, of the experimental kind, on the border to ambient, often with industrial vibes and sometimes with a feeling of mystique.
The song here below, “The Assassination”, was largely inspired by the parliament elections in both Holland and Sweden last year, and is a part of an EP with the same title. Presently he’s working on a full length album, to be released later this year. You can follow A.S. Swanski and listen more on his site.
Meadow Music in swedish
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