Tri Angle records: the story so far

Balam Acab's Wander/Wonder is the latest excellent release from Robin Carolan's Tri Angle Records imprint, with Ayshay's Warn U EP to follow before the end of the month and Water Border's Harbored Mantras due in October.

Ayshay - WARN-U by TriAngleRecords

Water Borders - What Wiwant by TriAngleRecords

Of the latter release, Boomkat says: "the San Fran-hailing duo of Amitai and Loric use the rhythms of contemporary ritual dance music to resurrect the occult soul of Coil and their cabal in unique and succinctly pop balanced new forms. A couple of mixtapes - both self-released and for the brilliant DIS magazine - display their influences quite clearly, working in a circle of influence ranging from Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson's eerie Threshold HouseBoys Choir to James Blake's chamber pop and the rhythm schematics of Doc Daneeka or DJ Elmoe, and it's fair to say this album sums up all of those and more."

It really has been exciting to watch the development of Tri Angle over the last year: the label has well and truly outgrown its initial association with 'witch house', each successive release offering something new. I interviewed Carolan for State a couple of months back, and since then my enthusiasm for the label has only grown, with Clams Casino's Rainforest EP and Balam Acab's album taking things to the next level. Here's a recap of the Tri Angle back catalogue so far, starting with the free-to-download Let Me Shine For You mixtape:

Tri Angle Records presents Let Me Shine For You

"Inspired in part by Lindsay Lohan’s grotesquely fascinating black hole existence and in part by my unwavering belief in the power of pop music as an artform, I saw an opportunity to create something interesting with her music, and decided to ask some friends to reinterpret some of Lindsay’s songs. “Tri Angle Records Presents: Let Me Shine for You” is the result. Even though we are all fond of Lindsay in our own ways, there is no FREE LINDSAY agenda here. We all love pop music and this is merely an experiment. All of our intentions are very sincere."

Tri Angle Records Presents: Let Me Shine for You by DISmagazine

Balam Acab - See Birds

"this isn’t dark or sinister music; in fact, it’s incredibly serene, full of crystalline shapes viewed from underneath water, ripples filtering their form as just out of sight vocals, synths and harps get refracted through its surface." - FACT

Balam Acab - See Birds (Moon) by TriAngleRecords

oOoOO - oOoOO EP

"Tracks like 'Hearts' with its Fever Ray-meets-Cassie feel or the arcane hooks of 'Burnout Eyes' have the mark of a scarily intuitive Pop genius, knowingly built with the most conventional structures yet nudged at all the crucial moments with choruses that beguile like a shy, lo-fi version of Kate Bush's finest or enrapture like David Sylvian at his most melancholy, perpetually toying with the tuning for spine chilling and perspective re-aligning effect." - Boomkat

Burnout eyess by oOoOO

How To Dress Well - Love Remains

"The songs here are deliberately lo-fi, filled with bits of feedback and vocals that seem to crackle if they dare to reach above a whisper. But unlike many of his peers on, say, Olde English Spelling Bee, Krell's tracks don't feel formal exercises. These are pop songs. Just listen to the fuzzy, but ever-present thump of the live track, "Walking This Dumb." He's a crowd-pleaser at heart." - Resident Advisor



Holy Other - With U

"The debut EP from Manchester's Holy Other takes the label's aesthetic deeper into 4/4 territory than it's gone before, but otherwise it's Tri Angle music par excellence, with glum, shuffling beats, vaporous vocal samples and a slow wash of synthesizers. Once you acclimate yourself to the ever-present fog of vocals and reverb, there's a nice range of styles on display." - Resident Advisor

Touch by HOLY OTHER

Clams Casino - Rainforest

"Rainforest is an isolationist hip-hop epic that accords perfectly with the Tri Angle aesthetic while also affirming and deepening Clams' singular production style" - Boomkat

Stop Making Seance: witch house mix

Over at Not For Resale (http://nfrblog.blogspot.com/), Meatbreak's put together a witch house mix. In his own words:


"So this Witch House stuff is about to whip into a full eldritch storm when the TriAngle twin release and SALEM albums drop in September. Best not be sitting on the Hate side of the fence when that hits. This has taken me ages to do and I’ve surprised myself by missing out some of my favourite tracks from massive scene shiners like White Ring, TEARIST, Passions, SLEEP∞OVER and others, but I wanted it to be a tight, focused & fully effective freak of a mix instead of a full primer style overview, which I think it is now; but trust me, it hurt to do it. Someone already told me I should do another one with just the hits. Maybe.

So much to say about this; such little inclination to decry the hate; if you keep up with the blog you’ll have read my opinions and know my position. This is a sound I’ve been waiting for for years – it’s been in my head forever and if you’ve heard about Witch House / Haunted House / Spook / Ghost Drone / Drag or whatever it’s getting called on the blogs you read you’ll have the gist of the genre – multi-roomed subterranean crypto-occultism with an indecipherable debased aesthetic.

Listen to this mix and tell me there’s not meat to chew off them bones"






The tracklist:


De/Void – The Spooning Couple (Self-Release)
†‡† - gOth bb (Self-Release)
SALEM – King Night (King Night, IAMSOUND)
Dream Boat – Your Beaches (Fevers Ep, AMDisc)
/// ▲▲▲\\\ - Tetanus Wine (_v_o_i_d_, Disaro)
Balam Acab – Heavy Living Things (Self-Release)
Dir†yprid3 - sOmethiNgiNtheway (cobain) (CDr, Disaro)
Modern Witch – Cinema (Beko Box 1, Beko)
oOoOO – Seaww (Emotion 7“, Disaro)
▲ - Pyr▲mid (Self-Release)
Mater Suspiria Vision - Seduction of the Armageddon Witches (Self-Release)
xix – Deep Void (Self-Release)
GuMMy†Be▲R! - We Live Here (3-Track Promo, Self-Release)
GR†LLGR†LL - ...sLOwLickiN... (wayne) (CDr, Disaro)

You bet I copied and pasted that. The mix is available to download from here: http://nfrblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/download-stop-making-seance-nfr-mix-05.html.

Witch House

There's been a plethora of strange band names of late, with symbols replacing letters and so on. It's no coincidence, however: most of these artists are singing from a similar hymn sheet aesthetically. Names used to describe this burgeoning movement/genre/scene include 'haunted house' 'drag' and 'ghost drone', but 'witch house' seems to be the one that's sticking. The characteristics of the genre include 'chopped and screwed' hip-hop influences (an earlier form of hip hop that slowed down street-rap's flow to create a drugged-out, eerie sound); slowed down, ghostly vocal samples; a fascination with the occult and ritualism/symbolism (reflected in the use of upper/lower case punctuation, triangular symbols etc.), and the twisting inside-out of conventional pop songs.

From Joe Colly's Pitchfork article 'Ghosts in the Machine':

"Each artist has his own take: Balam Acab sounds almost like rudimentary dubstep, oOoOO's songs are ethereal and sample heavy, and White Ring are on the darker edge of synth-pop. But they share some common traits. "Drag" tracks are always beat-driven but molasses-paced-- the bass is prominent, but drowsy and languid. Vocals are there, but no one's singing upfront. (Typically, vocals are manipulated in some way and buried in the mix.) It's not necessarily tech-y music-- there's a human quality to these songs but it's ghostly and distorted, as if the tracks themselves are haunted."

An excellent introductory mix can be found at http://dontmakelists.tumblr.com/post/807753756/mixtapetryangel.

These links are also essential:

http://pitchfork.com/features/articles/7806-ghosts-in-the-machine/

www.myspace.com/ffdisaro (DISARO Records)

http://witchtrial.tumblr.com/

http://www.myspace.com/triangledreams