Sneakpeek - Bethan Lloyd - Gal Musette - Sarah McQuaid
Los Angeles duo Sneakpeek have just returned with new single “Serendipity,” to announce their long-awaited sophomore album, Scene Within A Dream, for a June 2 release..” Discussing, Sneakpeek’s Dora Hiller noted, "Inspired by the teachings of Abraham Hicks and Yogananda, ‘Serendipity' is about the magic of synchronicity and how the universe sends us messages if we are willing to notice the signs.”
Hiller and Aric Bohn reemerged last autumn with the single, “Dreams That You Discarded,” time away focusing their creative energies on other mediums. The duo had released their self-titled debut album in 2013 on Burger Records, with the LA Times hailing it as a, “noisy nine-track album offering up heavy, druggy guitar riffs that’d make Kurt Vile (or Lou Reed) proud.”
While that record combined elements of dream pop with grungy, garage-rock sludge, “Dreams That You Discarded” pointed to a new direction in the duo’s material, with one foot in abstract avant-garde and another foot firmly rooted within the sensibilities of new wave and disco embedded with strands of mutant DNA. Surrounded by walls of synthesizers and vintage drum machines in their Glassell Park home studio, Dora and Aric leaned into their psychedelic abandonments, taking them out on the dance floor.
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Bethan Lloyd is a Welsh artist whose trance inducing vocals expand over an ocean of rave inspired production, harmonic layering and otherworldly ecstasy. Her sonic exploration has taken her from training as a classical singer, immersing herself in Berlin’s experimental music scene, to learning with shamans, masters and the ancient teachings of the natural world. In her latest album, Metamorphosis, Bethan, producing alongside Pre-Human bandmate and master of noise Isaac Ray, takes her intense explorations of the spirit and emotional realms and blends them into something playful and danceable, a gritty experimental pop.
Tracklisting
1.Boss Of Big Dreams
2.No Umbilical
3.Antares
4.Aria
5.Cutting Circuits
6.Parasitic Yes
7.None Of The Above
8.Whatever We Delete
Using expressive vocal layers and hypnotic acid breaks to pull the listener into an ecstatic experience, Bethan Lloyd begins this album by exploring the primal state of emptiness, a place where no thought exists and only being, acting and living remain. It is this state of emptiness and often The landscape itself which becomes the inspiration for Bethan's creativity. She is frequently journeying with her sonic tools to ancient Neolithic sites and places of awe and wonder and allowing her surroundings to inspire a unique vocal soundscape. A soundscape that stirs up a sense of the forgotten past.
The album explores the cosmos and the dark euphoria within it, the themes of mind control and diluted society ask a question about where we are headed as a collective. The music is a spell for transformation. A cry for a return to sovereignty and autonomy of mind and body. This project delves into the philosophy of animism, guiding humanity back from its abusive relationship with nature. Cutting the chords of consumerism. Cutting the circuits of control and returning to our true gifts, to the web and to the void.
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The new single "Moment" from pop noir singer/songwriter and piano virtuoso Gal Musette is quite stunning.
Gal confides, "Moment was a song I wrote one verse for 7 years ago, but at some point I lost the paper with lyrics on it and over time almost completely forgot the melody. Years later when I experienced a significant personal loss, I was struggling to express my grief and fell into a crippling season of writer's block.
By a stroke of serendipity, the lyric reappeared on a folded piece of paper in my glove compartment which triggered a memory of the melody, and led full circle to my finishing the song and beginning to let go." Gal's cinematic vocals sing bittersweet melodies over intoxicatedly esoteric chamber pop soundscapes.
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Ahead of a 21-show April-May UK tour that takes her from the West Country to Aberdeenshire and from Cumbria to Kent, folk singer-songwriter Sarah McQuaid has joined forces with Tim Norman of 1990s acid and ambient dub duo UVX ((Ultraviolet Explorer)) for “If We DUB Any Deeper It Could Get Dangerous”, a new remix of the title track from her 2018 album If We Dig Any Deeper It Could Get Dangerous.
“It all started with a tongue-in-cheek conversation when we were on tour in the USA to promote the album back in 2018,” explains Sarah’s longtime manager, producer and sound engineer, Martin Stansbury. “Long drives and longer days led, as they often do, to rambling chats that were occasionally intense and often frivolous in nature.”
One such conversation featured the development of a less-than-serious concept in which If We Dig Any Deeper It Could Get Dangerous could be reimagined as a dub album, akin to the Easy Star All-Stars’ classic Dub Side of the Moon.
The “dub remix” idea continued to pop up from time to time as a jokey reference over the ensuing years — until one day Tim Norman asked Martin to master a dub remix he’d done for a US-based singer/songwriter. This transformed into a simple labour exchange, and “If We DUB Any Deeper It Could Get Dangerous” became a reality.
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