Various Artists - Shadow Garden (blush)

*** This blog post first appeared in TSMM's May 18th Newsletter, where you can get all the tips (and more) first ***

As with so many of TSMM’s recommendations I stumbled across this great compilation this week in my Bandcamp feed when a couple of music lovers that I respect and follow suddenly purchased the compilation, hence alerting me and taking me into territory that I tend to ignore. Honestly, give me mouth to mouth recommendations over algorithmic ones any day.

Excitingly it’s from a new label out of Glasgow which I’m now also following with interest. As a music discovery tool Bandcamp takes a bit of work to get going and you have to start following a few labels and artists to get your feed flowing. One thing I did with this release was quickly hover over the people who had purchased the release and noticed Claire Rousay - who has featured in the newsletter, had purchased the release so I'm now following her as well. Even if you don’t know the people who purchased a release you love you can click on their profiles and check out their collection and if you like what you hear then give them a follow, you suddenly have a taste-making friend that will make your music discovery easier and pleasantly unpredictable. If you’ve got a lot of time on your hands then you can even follow genres. As I say it takes a while, but eventually you’ll be rewarded. Being an early Bandcamp adopter I’m currently following 5670 artists and labels as well as 74 other music fans so I have a constant stream, some would say a deluge of releases to explore. Needless to say my much touted digital detox hasn’t encroached too far into my music discovery.

Anyway I digress, what of this compilation? Well the rather sparse liner notes bill it as a, “a moonlit anthology of contemporary DIY guitar music“, which doesn’t quite do it justice and depending on what you read into the word contemporary, could be positively misleading. I’d also suggest that the moonlight is more of a crescent moon rather than a full one, the tracks on the whole inhabiting shadowy, genre ambiguous grey areas. They’re also decidedly laid back and almost borderline ambient; there will be no moshing or stage diving to frenzied guitar solos here thank you very much. But what makes the compilation even more exciting is the fact that I only knew the humble bee - who provides a typical slice of tape distressed, ambient guitar and piano introspection, prior to listening, meaning there’s now eleven new artists to assess and potentially follow - bonus.

The comp opens up with the dark ambient winds and heavily effected, barely recognisable electric guitar of A Happy Return, before heading over to the lighter, piano led, lightly distorted electronics, field recordings, acoustic guitar and gentle vocal tones of Astrograph. Mlinpatz’s bass guitar then creeps through some quirky sound design and sparse, reverberating electric guitar to cinematic effect.

Tibslc’s voice echoes over an edgy, but not uncomfortable degraded machine noisescape. Betty Hammerschlag’s lighter vocals and sunnier approach is made somewhat unsettling by the reversed guitar samples, and Shiner & Natalia’s oddball, softly delivered poetry rides a glitchy, perky, outsider slice of downtempo.

I guess you’re getting the idea by now. It’s a pleasingly off-kilter collection of darker ambient hues and quirky songs that inhabit a distinctly underground bunker, but which sit together very nicely as a cohesive listen. Just don’t expect too much guitar.

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Playlist Companion

Find more quirky outsider vibes check out the Slow Oddities Playlist: