Friday, May 20, 2016

Song of the Day #306 - matryoshka - Niedola Remixed by Ulrich Schnauss

Another milestone achieved!!

https://virginbabylonrecords.bandcamp.com/track/niedola-remixed-by-urlich-schnauss

Not "306", but something even more arbitrary/fun... We've hit ONE DAY worth of tracks covered! On my desktop, I keep a playlist of every song featured on Song of the Day, and with this (which is, strangely enough, exactly exactly 5 minutes long, down to the sample), and as of this addition, we'll be at over a day! Hooray! Now, we aren't gonna do some big stat retrospective like we did for #300, given that that was just 6 posts again. Instead I'm gonna update the sorting by genre and my top 25 list.

Aaaaaand we'll also celebrate by looking at this, the first single from the actual inevitable AOTY. Sure, we've already heard the meme-AOTY (TLOP) and the "woah maybe actually" AOTY (Sleep Cycle) and the "c'mon, you'll probably pick this" AOTY (AMSP), and the "if you're depressed" AOTY is coming soon (Swans), but pseudepigrapha is this years Joanna Newsom equivalent. If it isn't AOTY, something has gone horribly wrong. I could keep hyping it up, but we still have almost a month to do that.

Instead we'll focus on this for now. I'm assuming that the bandcamp page has a typo and that this is a remix by the famous Ulrich Schnauss, and not some unfortunately named non-famous producer with an extremely similar sound called Urlich Schnauss. Ulrich has been putting out electronica music since the 90s under various aliases, but the work released attached to his own name is his best and most successful. The albums are titled things like Far Away Trains Passing By and A Strangely Isolated Place and manage to live up to these poetical images through rich, ambient, beat-driven electronica. His presence on pseudepigrapha, the remix album of matryoshka's 2012 masterpiece Laideronnette is an exciting "outsider" presence, breaking into new ground of Western collaboration.

The results are... sublime? I think the idea of that word is that writing after it is futile. We'll try anyways, tho. "Niedola" is the penultimate track of Laideronnette, occurring in a place where much of the album's structural aspects are evaporating into layers of pure sound. Similarly, "Niedola" is one of the older tracks on Laideronnette, appearing on a 2010 collaboration album, and it reflects a place of experimentation after the established modes of Zatracenie. Ulrich's remix honors this feeling of a singularity, sprinkling on pretty Campfire Headphase-esque guitar and wonderful "submerged" sounds, not to mention his signature ambient-glitch. It wraps the original in many dimensions, leaving it even more iconic as the "core" of this genre exploration.

It's pretty nice... it's prolly AOTY.

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