STATE OF SOUND is a feature on The Sights and Sounds where we select new electronically focused bands/artists (Soundcloud/Facebook followers < 3000) and bring their best songs to light. Getting traction on blogs can be a pain in the ass if you don’t already have traction in, but we happen to think there’s a whole sea of bands waiting to be discovered. Selection for these weekly Sunday ‘Soundcasts’ is highly selective on quality only, as we want to help select the next set of blogosphere buzz bands.  So we hope you’ll share this list with your friends to give these artists the exposure they deserve and return each week for a new set. AZURA-“SMOKE” “My mind’s gone, but the sanity’s strong”.  Emotions, the kind that can pummel you in the face upon first meet (and you let them), have turned all the boundaries of my mind moot.  The walls, the rules and all the barriers fabricated for the sanctity of you, feel as poorly counterfeit construction as they always were as one smack of true feeling combusts them gaseous.  Azura’s “Smoke” is that song, finding you freefalling through the vapors in your head. An inner world that  used to find you  bittersweetly groping your way around a concrete labyrinth designed to let you only feel parts of everything now has you suspended in the airy seas of Saturn; and it feels like freedom, replete with all the sweetness and danger that always accompanies it. Still, you wouldn’t trade access to stumbling around on everything  in your mind for anything.

Follow Azura on Soundcloud / Facebook / Triple J Unearthed YOUNG THE GIANT-“ISLANDS (ARK PATROL REMIX)” Like a salve over an open, self-inflicted gash, Ark Patrol’s remix of Young the Giant’s ‘Islands’ hovers about, swimming amongst  the pain, warming it to other possibilities. And as you let it soak in amongst you, it tenderly reattaches tendons, settles skin shouting to not be closed, and let’s the blood flow push placidly back to your pumping heart.  In Ark Patrol’s hands, the first moments of Sameed Gharia’s vibrato in the song are so disabling, they’re like a tranq gun to the carotid for even the most restless emotional runners.  Throughout the rest of “Islands”, the sparseness of his production instead fills your mind with snapshots of a wonderland that’s impossible not to yearn for, not to call up a lover on a rainy Sunday afternoon and snuggle the fuck out of them in bed. Follow Ark Patrol on Soundcloud/ Facebook. CLOUDY SUN-“DREAMER” You might as well resign yourself to it.  Being trapped in monsoon rains, walking down the streets of Bangkok at dusk as the sunset prayer of Salat al-Maghhrib emanates from the mosque near you, echoing off the thunderclouds in the sky and your mind, is the antidote to sorrow for a dreamer like you. Parisian group, Cloudy Sun, as their song ‘Dreamer’ feels like an anthemic precursor to an On The Road life change where you’re done surrendering to the pressures and the paucity of modern western life. But what strikes me the most, is that’s it’s far from a screaming off the roof ‘We’re not in fucking Kansas anymore!’ kind of track, it simmers with acute anxiety, a swallop of sadness and the beginning of a spine beginning to form somewhere in the mists of your mind.  Which captures beautifully–and accurately—all the justifications you feel you owe, the guilt you feel for marking off different, and the fear that comes with that first launch step forward. Follow Cloudy Sun on Soundcloud / Facebook.

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