Need some new ear candy? Here are four tracks brought to you by locals to get you grooving.
"Perpetual Motion," Scattered Melodies
Scattered Melodies collaborated with local producer Jack Howell for this track from their Summer Sampler EP, on which Howell joins drummer Josh Montag and bassist Jake Johnston with vocals, guitar and keyboard.
"After recording our first album at Jack's studio, we realized how much we liked working on music with each other, so we began what we like to call our 'moment sessions,'" Montag says. "It starts with us sitting around together and discussing what to write a song about, something that inspires us in that moment in time, and once we have a theme or concept, we start jamming and eventually write and record the song in the same day."
"This is important to us, because a lot of music that is put out today is really dissected, which takes away the purity of creating music," Montag says. "The best way to capture a moment in time is to create what has been inspired and to leave it as is. We eventually elaborate on further ideas such as backup vocals and added instruments, but the roots and message of the song are left as is once we record it that same day, which is special to us."
"Perpetual Motion" is the first track the trio wrote together, and all three had a part in crafting the lyrics, which touch on the effects of dreams.
"Dreams are just another form of consciousness and can be very exciting at times," Montag says. "Dreams can take us to places our awake state of mind can't, which can be both good and bad."
Catch the band play the track live next week in Bisbee, Arizona, at the 3rd Annual Sidepony Express Music Festival Friday, November 14 through Sunday, November 16.
"Shy for MP," Samba Nonsense
Miguel Ivery, aka DJ Seduce, has some new music for Valley Brazilian music lovers. He recently signed Brazilian group Samba Nonsense to his Afro:Baile label, and they recently released their five-song EP, The Experiment Began. The disc includes "Shy for MP," which you can hear below.
"Vocalist Jefferson Placido told me the band was creating something smooth but soulful and mixed with some jazz, and complicated but simple rhythms," Ivery says. "He sent over the album, and I was hooked. It was grooving right from the start, one of those albums you let play through on repeat, because it feels good to listen to."
"Although the lyrics are simple, the message and vibe of the song brought this simple and raw energy together for a very cool, classic Brazilian soul-jazz sound," Ivery says. "The song sounds current with the different instruments and beats, but still faintly old-school at the same time. Once I heard it, I could only imagine spending the day with that special someone on the beach in Ipanema."
Ivery says the debut video captures the day in the life of Brazilians in Rio de Janeiro, with a throwback style that mimcs what it meas to be shy and in love.
"Sometimes when finding that special someone, you spend a whole day enjoying that person's company in the ocean, on the beach, around a fire, or just dancing samba till the wee hours," Ivery says. "It's the simplicity of being shy that we forget sometimes."
"My Riad," The Oxford Coma
"My Riad" is all about one of the seven deadly sins: envy, and how The Oxford Coma singer/guitarist Billy Tegethoff reacts to it.
"It's about the desperation of wanting something so badly, morals and ethics go out the window to get it," Tegethoff says. "It's about a toxic relationship ending and, afterwards, my longstanding delusion it was going to make me happy. There's sort of a split personality that emerged while going through all that. There was the part of me that was watching what I was doing, feelin, and thinking, and knowing how insane and misguided it all was, and there was another that just went ahead and did it all anyway."
"Envy seems to be my reaction to myriad unrelated circumstances, whether logical or not," Tegethoff says. "It has been a struggle for most of my life to feel happy for anyone else who is succeeding at something I wish I was. It's this persistent idea that if someone else is doing well, then it means I can't. It's a projection of an internal problem onto every thinkable external person, place, thing or event."
As for the video, which starts out static-y and noisily before swerving through psychadelic twists and turns, the clip comprised of a montage of interesting images was inspired by "fucked-up" movies by director Lars Von Trier.
"His movies piss me off because they do away with almost all convention in terms of storytelling, so there's nothing for me to ground myself in when I watch them," Tegethoff says. "It's just this giant, uncomfortable, uneasy mess of emotional triggers and general weirdness. The directing and the cinematography are absolutely stunning, though. They are an absolute joy for the eye. He uses ultra-high frame rates to capture motion that happens much too fast for the eye to see unaided and plays it back at a frame rate our eyes can see, so you get this incredible slow motion footage that is hypnotizing. That was my ideal when I started."
"I didn't have any half-million-dollar cameras at my disposal, so I did what I could with the equipment I had. It mutated a fair bit as it went along, and I eventually got more footage based on where the video was headed. I think you can still see the influence in a few parts though."
Hear the track on the band's upcoming EP, Morphine, which they'll release at their show Saturday, November 29, at Club Red, before it's available for free download to the public December 2. You can here more music here.
"Mono," Jonathan Sakas
Jonathan Sakas fans are used to vocals by the electronic dance music artist, but for "Mono," they're treated to a rare instrumental track from 2012 that was cut from his 1984 EP.
To capture the song's essence on video, Sakas employed a freelance director, resulting in yet another distinctly stylized clip to add to his video collection.
Catch Sakas playing music next at Rogue Bar Saturday, November 22.
Find any show in Metro Phoenix via our extensive online concert calendar.
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