Tag Archives: ambient dub

Expugnantis – Return to Madadeni (enmossed)

Posted by John Lithium on

Label Description:

“On 𝑹𝒆𝒕𝒖𝒓𝒏 𝒕𝒐 𝑴𝒂𝒅𝒂𝒅𝒆𝒏𝒊, Expugnantis brings to Enmossed a compendium of nine dubs of minimal, crystalline excellence. Reflecting on “foggy” memories of a long car ride from the uKhahlamba-Drakensberg portion of the Great Escarpment, the album texturalizes Expugnantis’s grainy sentimental remembrance. The aquatic production is filtered through cloudy synth pads and plucky percussion. Here the expanse sits in the gestures of the minimal, not hampering the listener with dense maximalism or dramatics, but evoking focus through precise and considered repetition.

While the rooting of the compositions is hypersomnic and sentimental, they are filtered through the geographical contexts of recording and operating in the isolatory confines within Columbia, South Carolina. The murk of the percussion is the architectural foundation for the recordings, the pivoting agent between what Expugnantis thinks of as the immersive aquatic field and the game of going within and out. Emotive but not cliche, driving but not oppressive; Expugnantis takes us to Madadeni or somewhere akin.”

– Nick Klein, June 2024

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Marcus Mtshali is a producer and DJ based out of Columbia, South Carolina.


Recorded by Marcus Mtshali
Audio and design finalized by Glyn Maier
Interview by Rob Goyanes

Golden Brown – Whisker Fatigue (Eiderdown Records)

Posted by John Lithium on

Label Description: Under the Golden Brown moniker, Stefan Beck has carved out a comfortable niche for himself over the past several years. The Colorado-based guitarist’s discography is packed with expert acoustic fingerpicking, warm melodies, gentle lap steel reveries and twinkling electronics. It’s music that provides the listener with a welcome escape, a dreamy sonic landscape to wander amidst. And if Beck stayed planted in this particular landscape, blowing smoke rings in the Shire on a sunny afternoon, that’d be just fine.

But Whisker Fatigue suggests that there are further corners of the Golden Brown-iverse left to explore — much darker corners. From the very first moments of “Beelzebufo,” it’s clear that Beck is guiding us through swampier territory, something akin to the slo-mo elegy of Miles Davis’ “He Loved Him Madly” or the low-sun western hauntology of Earth’s The Bees Made Honey In The Lion’s Skull.

Stretching out to almost 15 minutes, “Beezelbufo” (named for a fearsome, thankfully extinct amphibian from the late Cretaceous also known as “the devil frog,”) oozes with a strange, primordial dread. A busted thrift store organ and spectral percussion all contribute to an ever-deepening chthonic wooziness, with the silvery strands of Beck’s electric guitar serving as the only lifelines to keep us from disappearing completely into the mire.

The album’s other epic, “Boom Boom Pachyderm” feels similarly heavy, ghostly harmonics and funereal keyboard accents from Prairiewolf’s Jeremy Erwin floating over restless seas, uneasy rhythms. This is music that feels closely in tune with the modern malaise, when the way forward is unclear, when storm clouds seem to be constantly gathering on the horizon.

Fear not, Whisker Fatigue isn’t fully doom-stricken. Throughout there are glimmers of light — like the playful dubby textures of the title track, or the steady momentum of “Cross Pollination,” or the mystical guitar work that drives “Ancestral Slime.” Beck doesn’t want to abandon us to a desolate fate in the Swamps of Sadness; this is just one more beautiful chapter in the Golden Brown saga. Go ahead and sink into it