I've been pretty obsessed with Estasy this last week after seeing a video post from How To Dress Well's twitter account. I was able to track down a download of this at Bedroom Fantasia. I also ordered the tape of her(?) second album on Living Tapes and proves to be well worth the dough as well. Estasy, from what I can tell hails from Italy. She plays some seriously soothing folkish melodies sung in the high register and approach of what sounds like a 7 year old child virtuoso. Each song usually features either acoustic guitar, warbled bird chirps, toy keyboards, pianos and the like to accompany these insanely beautiful and other-wordly vocal melodies. All of these sounds are filtered through what I can only assume was a handheld tape recorder, ever increasing the innocent authenticity that this album executes and achieves unapologetically. There are gorgeous forces at work inside of this artist and I feel lucky to have had this music come in to my life in the last week. Below is a video for a song from this album. Take the pill.
I was realizing how under-represented Paul Kim (aka 1/2 of Demons) is on this blog. Another formidable pillar of the the Dekalb music scene in the aughts, he's been making sample based music for the better part of the last 5 years or so with fellow pillar, Sam Cholke, under the guise of Demons. I'm not sure of their exact process(es) but Demons always achieves a completely natural-sounding approach to sampling records and creating beats on top of them. This particular EP features Elena Haliczer (yet another Dekalb acquaintance of theirs, presumably) singing over top of old soul and R&B samples. In a sense, it's almost as if they are creating brand new soul "standards" by using the very elements of the originals that made them standard in the first place. This EP goes well with a gin and tonic whilst thinking of someone you love. You can download this EP for free and many more Demons releases at their bandcamp.
