Pretty Please

Two Shell “(rock✧solid)”

Two Shell make exciting music about feeling excited. Like, if there’s any other point to a song like “(rock✧solid),” I can’t discern it. They want to make people excited, so they built a track that piles on exciting sounds so it sounds like the excitement is eternally escalating, and you can feel their excitement in the studio come through the speakers. Good energy is contagious. Also, it was only a matter of time before someone made a great track mixing that Go Team/Justice “kids chanting” trick from the 2000s with PC Music tricks from the 2010s. It works!

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Mouse On Mars “zeHrog”

This track is part of a score Mouse of Mars made for Werner Herzog’s film Fata Morgana, but was ultimately never approved by Herzog. I’ve never seen this film, so I can only hear it for what it is – music that Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma composed and performed in real time. It’s the real time aspect I find fascinating, particularly on this portion of the score which is relatively chill and groovy in context. It’s interesting to hear this knowing there’s a significant degree of improvisation going on, and that the two of them are switching up instruments and other gear while moving through the composition. I like the looseness, and I especially love when the song picks up tricks from dub reggae, most obviously on the reverb-drenched blasts of vocal sounds.

Buy it from Bandcamp.