Witch House... And Some Such

LIstening to Stuart Maconie's Freak Zone back in January I heard this track: oOoOO - Hearts
 

It's purportedly Witch House (which is a largely made up and not particularly helpful genre). I went in to Rough Trade East and asked if they had the E.P. that it came from (I didn't realise then that the band's name is pronounced "oh" so you can imagine how daft I felt asking the assistant for "ooooo"). They didn't have it, but he recommended something else that fell loosely into that category - The Church Of Synth of which Die Paradoxen Gebote Gottes is a fairly representative example

As you can hear, it's completely different, but very good if you like waves of blarty synths (and I do).

So from these two very different sources, I simply followed breadcrumb trails and discovered a heap of music that I didn't know existed, but that I now love.

So, from the oOoOO side of things which feature downtempo/chill scrunchy/crackly beats and waif-like melodies - many of which are on the excellent Tri Angle label...

Here is Clams Casino - Waterfalls (from the Rainforest E.P.)

Holy Other - With U (from the With U E.P.)

And Balam Acab - Oh, Why (from the album Wander/Wonder, which I simply cannot stop playing - it's utterly marvelous)

From here if you like this sort of thing, try the Nicolas Jaar album Space Is Only Noise (not quite the same, but similar downtempo/chill vibe).

Now from the Church Of Synth side of things, which is more or less purely synth based, I found Kuedo - Memory Rain (from the album Severant, which uses many of the synth sounds favoured by 80s Vangelis with modern beats, so much so that he takes one of the themes from Blade Runner in the track Flight Path).

Com Truise - VHS Sex (from the album Galactic Melt - which parodies the Unknown Pleasures album cover and to my ears takes the tunes Boards Of Canada are so good at and re-fries them through what sound like 80s video game synths. Great bass sounds here all through the album).

A little more like the  Church Of Synth track up above, this is more in the waves of sound category. Blanck Mass - What You Know (from the S/T album - it's a solo project from one half of F*ck Buttons)

And there you go. I'm putting this together with the sinking feeling that none of these videoa are going to come out, so you might have to be patient and wait while I figure out how to fix them if I have stuffed it up!

And stuff it up I did. What a joy this forum software is!