Suche:the know escape

Scott Mou, known as one half of the duo Jane - the folk techno drone duo he had with Panda Bear - aswell as part of Manhattan's famous record store Other Music, debuts with his Soloproject Queens. 

Johan Jacobsen describes the wonderful music of Queens "in oxymorons; "colorful monochrome," "myopic depth," "sad joy," "driven slowness," "enlightened darkness," "universal intimacy ' , "ethereal earthboundness" ... As it should be. Queens is one of those wonderful artists who are hard to catch on the fly, who escapes easy definition. His music is an unexpected and unimagined universe ready to be explored, and it's a universe that is wonderful to be in."

When Dial Records' David Lieske and Peter Kersten listened to a performance of their New York based friend in 2009, it was one of those unforgettable unique experiences you only have once in a long while these days. The idea of releasing an album was born. The production of "End Times" involved other labelmates such as Phillip Sollmann aka Efdemin (recording), Kassian Troyer (mixing) and Hendrik Weber, who once joined a life performance on stage with Scott Mou in 2012. 

Australia-based musician Mark Gomes presents the debut full length under his own name for Soda Gong. “Alphane Moods” finds Gomes employing strategies that will be familiar to listeners of his work as Blue Chemise – elegiac, loop-based modes of composition and a predilection for concise etude forms – that manifest here with a strikingly different scope and intent, shifting from expressive abstraction into more conceptual terrain. Over the course of fourteen widescreen tracks, he navigates the gap between nostalgic and futurist sensibilities, concocting elusive, romantic, and sanguine settings that feel both plucked from the past and beamed in from a time still to come. Gomes describes his approach on the record as a “practice of ‘constructed ambience’, deploying sounds and track titles with pop-psychological associations of escape.” The result is a vivid, cinematic album that splits the difference between the worldbuilding retrofuturism of the best vaporwave music and the shadowy, homespun tape vignettes for which Gomes has become well known.

Written and produced by Mark Gomes
Master + cut by Kassian Troyer at D&M
Artwork by Alex McCullough