♫♪  SWAN MEAT - LATHE OF HEAVEN

SWAN MEAT, an image I have held like a shred of torn satin. For the past couple of years, a steadily affecting flurry of singles, mixes, and radio shows has graced the libraries of AMEN, AQNB, Disc Magazine, JEROME, Rinse FM, and our own guest mix series, and bountiful solo and collaborative releases have appeared on PERMALNK and Apothecary Compositions.

SWAN MEAT’s sound shares much with the disorienting darkness of clubs, electronics dumps, glitchy nightmares, empty hospitals, disintegrating chapels, stained glass, broken mirrors, lost highways, brackish rivers cutting through burnt-out banks on the outskirts of future cities. This latest mini EP, LATHE OF HEAVEN, named after the late Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1971 novel, swivels towards the ethereal, which, when I Google Image search that word, returns pictures of haunted nightscapes and ghostly purple tones and rendered rays of swooping light—as those made by a CGI sword quickly slashed—and a logo for a doom metal band and a goddess emerging from the wispy fibers of some pink and blue clouds. Tricks of light, but not necessarily lightness.

The EP’s tracks are actually completely different and feel like speculative beginnings built from the scattered crumbs of yore. Choral chants, epic orchestration, off-kilter beats and other surprises ruminate secrets into fresh ears, blooming, like once-gnarled gardens are outside. Stream below and head here to purchase.

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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