STATE OF SOUND is a feature on The Sights and Sounds where we select new electronically focused bands/artists (Either 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 bi-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 every two weeks for a new set.
_______________________________________________________________________________

NIGHT SPORTS- “YOUTHQUAKE”/”SUBSTANCE”Authenticity matters.  We’re all on the lookout for something that smacks us in the face and makes us go ‘whoa’; and we’ll pull back ourselves, we’ll act haughty and with a sneer, and we’ll trounce around torturously in ourselves until we reach it. That’s what we’re exploring this STATE OF SOUND; and that search for substance, for someone that meets the full brunt of your mind and heart and returns resilient to you, matters more than anything else to Night Sports. Both on the sweling “Substance” and the tanatlizing “Youthquake”, Night Sports is on the search for something real. It doesn’t matter if its coming from a faded star shining in the Milky Way, the explosion of energies between two substantial people can relight you. All that matters to him, and to the art that flows from him in search of it, is that a kernel of a true person existed before they met.  Night Sports’ music is so good (one of my favorite new artist finds this year) that I’d be insanely suprised if he doesn’t blow up soon. That he hasn’t with such a substantially impressive discography is beyond me.

FOLLOW NIGHT SPORTS ON FACEBOOK/ SOUNDCLOUD


_______________________________________________________________________________

TOVE STYRKE- “EVEN IF I’M LOUD IT DOESN’T MEAN I’M TALKING TO YOU (WHITE SEA REMIX)  And I’m going to pull back from this. I ‘burst from [my] solitude’ and it struck a nerve, these thoughts I have, these insights which drive me.  I’m just a bastard face in your eyes, but even I deserve better than being just a billow of hot air in your mad crush for yourself as you fall deeper and deeper into your ego.  This isn’t real.  I don’t fall for people who think they’re my superior.  If I’m reduced, a fraction of what I could be to make you comfortable, then this is just orchestrated. But as this stellar remix by M83 collaborator White Sea, that process of freeing ourselves as bombastically awesome and anthemic as we want to make it, is still one rife with strife and shades of unwarranted self-deprecation we turn into daggers to protect ourselves. Our ‘half-ass rhymes’ may set us free, but in the search for something deeper, something real, fuck, I wish we never had to think of them that way.

FOLLOW TOVE STYRKE ON SOUNDCLOUD.

_______________________________________________________________________________

HOPIUM- “DREAMERS”  (LANKS edit) It’s supposed to be your year.  I can envision myself saying  that to myself all the years, the past four years running.  I can smell the moment, feel the loneliness of the air, the club sounds ringing amongst my contemplation, the surge in hope each time I say it. I honestly believed it. But self-destruction, man, I’m my own wrecking ball to the stilts I’m rebuilding my life upon after it spectacularly imploded. Some time by the spring, I’m stumbling home , my hand vacantly putting the key in the door, my eyes walking me to a bed I don’t want to escape from, my soul sucked into the vacuum my fucks up put it in. I’m my biggest barrier to something real. Or I have been. The days of darkness turned to weeks, which slipped into years, as LANKS’s remix so aptly highlights, and I fell, but each year I held on with the implciit belief that in me, I was ‘one of the dreamers’. And that would get me out, even if it was bloodied. And so, this year, finally, fucking finally, I looked at the reel of my haunted life and said:

LANKS remix is such a  marveously, mawkishly militant march through the domain of your darker thoughts on the way to freedom. Amongst its beats is hidden all the weight of the promises you make to yourself, the fate of the failure to keep them, and that bit of light when you finally do . It’s exquisite work.
FOLLOW LANKS ON SOUNDCLOUD/ FACEBOOK

31

Add to the story...