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TRACK PREMIERE: Mohama Saz “Quemar las Naves”

October 23rd, 2020

This smoldering new track from Spain's Mohama Sazout Dec. 11 on L.A.'s iconoclastic Mock label—is a slow-motion spin through several waves of psychedelia and the musical heritage of at several subcontinental cultural regions. Described to us as "Mediterranean Psychedelia," "Quemar Las Naves" is swimming in the east-meets-west-meets-analog-high-tech sound familiar to fans of Sublime Frequencies, Finders Keepers and those awesome-but-legally-iffy comps of rare 45s from Turkey, Lebanon, Africa and beyond. There's a particular mindscape where an endless desert meets a bottomless sea, and where the music is all about negative space and hypnotic rhythm, and that's where "Quemar Las Naves" walks the tideline at sunset.

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TRACK PREMIRE: HEALING GEMS “TIJUANA MUSHROOM (DRIVING ON LSD)”

July 17th, 2020

Exotica is a bizarre and sometimes uncomfortably ... complicated genre-slash-phenomenon, but the sensation of being somewhere else is more than welcome right now, and nobody makes a living room seem like a distant lagoon more than L.A.'s Healing Gems. They make songs that sound like Moon Gas meets Ennio Morricone with happily saturated production dripping with cinematic effects and unpredictable instrumentation, often soundtracking deadpan lyrics about ancient curses, legendary ruins and dreams so real they override waking life.

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TRACK PREMIERE: SAFE JAZZ “GOOD VIBES”

May 22nd, 2020

Jesse Schuster is the kind of musician who moves in every direction at once—he performs, he produces, he makes sure the video is treated just as reverently as the song and when he finds both inspiration and the opportunity, he turns a genre inside out with his project Safe Jazz. His new single "Good Vibes" is like jazz in schematic—instruments and melodies bisected and disconnected to expose their inner mechanisms and space and clarity enough to see how everything fits together. (And of course sample snippets to remind you what we're building here: good vibes!)

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TRACK PREMIERE: HARMLESS “NOTICE ME”

May 11th, 2020

L.A.'s Harmless (Nacho Cano) has a lot of raw experience finding creativity within adversity—within agony, really, as he painstakingly put together January's Condiciones EP in the aftermath of an especially brutal car accident. (“I started recording many of the songs while I couldn’t use my legs. I waited to record most of the vocals because I had lost my front teeth," he told Remezcla.) His latest "Notice Me" (like so many new songs) is an invention born from the tension of quarantine and the sudden solitude that demands its own kind of relearning. The pain here thankfully isn't nearly as literal, but "Notice Me" is still a response to realizing the future you thought you'd have has been indefinitely postponed.

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TRACK PREMIERE: GIANNA GIANNA “SUFFER”

May 8th, 2020

This is the insomniac national anthem. Gianna Gianna’s latest ‘Suffer’ is a skittering, frenetic passion play in many acts, except you’re the one hung up in the end. It’s so intense listening to this during quarantine—its propulsive tempo and fortissimo power shake you out of your unwashed PJs. This is free-punk, rousing and potent and a sonic hookworm, pulling you close for a bite just before snatching itself away.