Hey, gang! Hope it’s been a good weekend for you. I spent mine thinking about Neil Armstrong, trying to wrap my head around the biggest trade in baseball history, and going on a serious backslide into Hokuto No Ken fandom, but none of that’s really relevant to the task at hand: serving you up some new tunes to get the week started. Let’s get to it!

Continues, “Lost Life (Handle with Care Remix by The Rorschach Garden) “
Hot off the servers! An EP of remixes for one of our favourite records of 2012, Continues’s debut, was just released on Bandcamp a scant few hours ago. Reckless Remixes features work from Rotersand and Imperative Reaction amongst others, and Alex’ll be posting a full End To End write-up of it later this week, but to whet yr appetite here’s a a nice and bouncy mix of my favourite Continues tune (okay, it’s tied with “September”) from Philipp Münch.

Strangers, “Safe/Pain”
A new British act offering up some synthpop marked by high drama which should appeal to fans of Hurts and White Lies. I was meaning to post this a couple weeks back (but was worried that batch of tunes was already too mellow), and found the chorus kicking about my head a fair bit in the interim. Some very sharp programming here, especially during the bridge.

A.D.A.C. 8286, The Intolerator
Anhalt rockabilly Eurotrash steal candy, rob the homeless, and generally do their best to earn ASBOs. Never let it be said that old-school EBM bands ever take themselves too seriously, or that they don’t take their basslines seriously enough.

A.D.A.C. 8286 – the intolerator from A.D.A.C. 8286 on Vimeo.

Spatial Relation, Escape Your Backmen
The debut track from this Nashville duo finds them sitting comfortably at the “flippin’ weird” end of the minimal synth dial. Structurally broken up and consciously monotone without sounding affectatious, this kind of reminds me of Bene Gesserit, or any of a handful of tracks from the seminal SNX compilation. I like.

Navicon Torture Technologies & Deutsch Nepal, Victvm Vermis
Sick of summer? Wish a sea of ash would blot out all trace of that glowing disc for all eternity? Dark ambient label Kalpamantra has the prescription for yr late-August blues: a free 31-track compilation featuring all manner of bleak soundscapes, including pieces by local ritual badasses Funerary Call and our comrades in Militia. Here’s a nice collaboration between my boy Lina Baby Doll of Deutsch Nepal fame and Navicon Torture Technologies, pulled from the latter’s swan song The Gospels Of The Gash. Loads of new and lesser known dark and droning stuff here, so dig in.

The XX, “Fiction (∆AIMON Remix)”
While I love The XX, you could drown Williamsburg in the amount of digital ink other music scribes have spilled on the subject of those precocious youngsters. So, I’ll avoid trying to frame their forthcoming second record and skip straight to the reason behind this track’s inclusion: the very light touch ∆AIMON take on their remix of new track “Fiction”. Honing in on the sparse dynamism of the original (The XX have always called the idea of negative space to mind), they slow the track down and add some subtle scrapes as well as their signature echoing drums. It’s not a choice of tribute I’d ever guessed would happen, but it made sense as soon as I heard about it, and it pays off nicely.

Dead When I Found Her, “Controversy”
Speaking of unexpected tributes, holy fuck. We’ve always dug Michael Holloway’s choice of covers when it comes to his great Dead When I Found Her project, whether it was NIN or Phil Collins. And while he’s covered the almighty Purple One before (I’ve always thought the bleepy synth lead on “Doves Cry” had something of early Puppy about it to begin with), he absolutely smokes an even earlier hit out of the park here. The recreation of the unmistakable keyboard lead on the chorus sounds great overtop of the punchy bassline, and holding your own instrumentation and arrangement-wise when yr dealing with a certified genius like Minneapolis’ Most Funky Player is no small feat. Consider our expectations for sophomore release Rag Doll Blues raised.
Controversy (Prince Cover) by deadwhenifoundher