♫♪  ideias, etc. - Insônia Terrível, Mas Conveniente

Have I grown antennae? Have little stereocilia sprouted on my fingerpads, allowing me to hear through touch?

Listening to Insônia Terrível, Mas Conveniente (Terrible Insomnia, More Convienient), it sure feels like my senses of audition and tactition have overlapped in strange ways. Though ideias, etc’s fourth EP release hits the scales at a slight five minutes, it is labyrinthine: navigating the record forces the listener to keep a hand pressed to the wall, prodding their way through a maze of shifting textures while steeped in a thick haze.

Intro track “Fantasmas” is hollow, yet cramped — an invasion of aural space that feels like a cotton swab lightly greasing your outer ear with the skeleton of some midwestern emo tune plucked out on your buddy’s nylon-stringed guitar or an ASMR video opened by accident.

This abstraction coagulates on “Conversas”, fleshing out the EP’s atmosphere with hoarse vocal harmonies and the occasional grunt of bass guitar that forms a spongy foundation for the song to soak into. Falsettos and add9 chords considered, it’s not far removed from the quaint portions of folk-rock dished out by Dinosaur Jr.’s J. Mascis on his solo outings.

As if to cement any possible comparisons to Mascis, finale “Dor/amor” scuffs its acoustic strumming with low-res crunch, its two verses calling and responding as they loiter by the door of a gas station, moths hovering beneath the bulbs overhead.

Chocolate Grinder

CHOCOLATE GRINDER is our audio/visual section, with an emphasis on the lesser heard and lesser known. We aim to dig deep, but we’ll post any song or video we find interesting, big or small.

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