Avant-garde soundtracks, full-on mind expressions and weirdo soundscapes curated by UN/TUCK co-founder MAARA.
Mazzy Mann aka MAARA, woman of many different performance monikers and characters, genre defying performance artist, producer and singer-songwriter pings at the heart of the existential with emotions evocative of rich sound textures, chopped up beats, operatic chamber delivery, and electro-acoustic avante. Marrying the oldness of turn-of-the-20th century circus folk, cabaret and 1940s lounge with the futurism of dense sound, 90s trip-hop and lo-fi anachronism, Mazzy spins a disposition that constricts like a web and frees you like a rainy midnight.
Having released the compilation MAARA 2.5: X MIXES & REMIXES on UN/TUCK label featuring producers such as Bored Lord, Octo Octa, Gag Reflex, Him Hun, and Dan Miles with UN/TUCK residents Floraviolet, Stem Cell Uterus, Close Qrtrs and Sister Zo, Mazzy’s latest character MAARA sets out to explore the capacities of the internet, loneliness, pandemic burnout, and perceived identity.
Buy Music Club Buy Music Club Buy Music Club Buy Music Club Buy Music Club Buy Music Club Buy Music Club
Words and curation by MAARA.
Floraviolet – Circle (UN/TUCK)
Floraviolet’s Circle spins like a cyclical recurrence, blending a cinematic nature of wall of sound techniques with a driving sub that moves you like the very first or last song played on the dance floor, wrapping the night or just beginning it all over again. There’s a sense of celebration and horror simultaneously that echoes the sensibility of feeling trapped in a circle, as cyclical as the nature of the crushing weight of mental illness, or an enlightenment that speaks much beyond the final sweeps of the sub flickering out.
Him Hun – You Thought (Ariel’s Pearls x Stress Edit) (Self-Released)
Him Hun throws a roll in sonic speed into a demonic possession, always looking behind a clapback in rhythm. With an ascending synth allowing one to hold their breath like a train is barreling ahead, and light screams that feel familiar in a way that toes the line between deep techno and soundscape, Him Hun is the master of craft. Through the building sound textures, deconstructed waves of ballroom begin to create shapes in vocal loop sampling and building percussion like an apparition through the dance floor.
Bored Lord – No More Hiding Who I Want To Be (Knightwerk Records)
Bored Lord takes an anthemic spin on grime in Transexual Rave Hymns, turning a rave track into a hymnal. In line with the metaphysical response to dancefloors in a safer space where you can be whole, Bored Lord elevates the sense of liberation and freedom of identity in a combo of 90s throwback and the future of spiritual trans liberation.
EBONY TUSKS – HDF (Intelligent Sound / High Dive)
EBONY TUSKS drives sound through it’s negative space. In the eeriness of what seems to be missing is where the tension lies. In a bouncy sub that dwells like David Lynch’s “Lost Highway”, MC Marty Hillard illustrates the weariness of capitalism, the failures of American economy, and the hardship of the labor force in the food service industry. The laser precision of Hillard’s delivery cuts through you like a prophet’s knife, his words a warning and a vengeance: a rising and broken proletariat who has no fear.
Close Qrtrs – SMART CUTE AND TOUGH (UN/TUCK)
Adorably enough, Close Qrtrs has a penchant for electro that packs a sweet-smart punch. Bringing it back to the Powerpuff Girls, the sampling brings a sensability to the melodic oscillating synth, creating a nostalgia that feels comforting and cute, yet aptly sets the pace for movement.
Mister Water Wet – Sarah Sleeping (West Mineral Ltd.)
Mister Water Wet takes ambient minimalism a step further with crisp textures, sweeping reverse crash, crackling and the nuance of a sweet murmuring in a space that feels so scenic, it stops and sets like the sun on the horizon. What feels like a lullaby comes in tune with Mister Water Wet’s great understanding of depth of field: nuance and sounds of nature blended into percussion that feels so light, it’s nearly indiscernible.
Babydoll – Flamethrower (Self-Released)
In these weird times where everything seems out of place, Babydoll paints a mythos that imitates life peering into the armageddon of a falling west. With what feels like a message in a bottle washed up ashore, a bittersweet farewell, a surreal awakening out of a fever dream, Babydoll gives us a drudgy guitar driven distorted pop anthem that swallows itself in the fog dissipating around western individualism, entrapment, and time trickling away with all of it’s feeble conceptions.
KILLUS – HAVEN (Mother Russia Industries)
The master of Midwestern industrial, KILLUS clears the cathedral with a driving deep kick awashed in doom and dread. The drone-like quality of the ebb and flow of HAVEN becomes a pulsating tornado siren of spiraling satanic ritual steeped in a spacious mass. What seems lost in the space KILLUS creates is really subtly evolving, exchanging deep techno for ambient soundscapes that wanders deep into a sandstorm far away from any place above earth.
Adee Rocket Dancy – Ain’t Blowing Over (Self-Released)
In blending cabaret, pop and jazz Adee Rocket Dancy weaves a contemporary one act musical tale of deceit, betrayal, and a reclamation point: walking away from the wreckage stronger and wiser than the day before. In a world where toxic positivity and brushing over the problem becomes more acceptable than reclaiming your time, space and walking away from toxicity, Adee reminds us who we can be and how to tap into that strength to prevail in power.
Tim J Harte – Introduction To the Ralph Waldo Emerson Style, 8 (Mother Russia Industries)
Tim J Harte, master of many monikers, sounds and ensembles, creates texture as a philosophical entry point: the postmodern thesis. Through plucking strings, dull guitar tones, and beepy chimes, a contemplative yet therapeutic texture emerges. Where sound art and musicality collide, in Harte’s world, ambient music becomes a future of broken concepts and re-used Americana intellectual figurines. To say a person is a sound, or a study and thesis of sound, reimagines music outside of genre or individualistic identity. Harte ironically removes the face of self in music to take the broken pieces of an Americana past to pave the way for a new future of sound, and an intellectualism not often subscribed to in ambient form.
Ahya Simone – Frostbite (Pique Records)
Classical harpist Ahya Simone steps into R&B like a mystical dream, bitter-sweet with ambient bewonderment and the rich soulful sadness of Simone’s vocal. Simone gives a warning of the frost bite that could take your life, creating an analogy for isolation being cold and alone. The soothing tones and cooling nature of space used moves like a slight breeze, never too consuming but gently lifted, nurturing but keeping caution from the wind.
Stem Cell Uterus – Truscum (Mother Russia Industries)
In the midst of chaos there is a beauty that emerges. Stem Cell Uterus paints with a broad stroke ranging from overblown kicks and shrieking synthesizer to acoustic piano and lush driving melody so whiplashed, it passes like a nostalgic memory. SCU creates a wall of emotion to put up a boundary, reclaim space, and to segway from the noise to the sadness. In a world that can placate, tokenize and sensationalize transexuality, SCU converts narrative and stands in place never losing grip on self, ever evolving as the layers peel back.
Betty Maun – Minecraft ft. The Epitome, MX.MRS (FUKLYFE/ Breadbaux)
As a clever nod to minecraft, Betty uses themes of life like a gaming mod in a halfway built world: arriving at a crux point. Through Betty’s delivery and keenly placed features, a narrative comes into fold that is baptismal, somewhere between drowning and floating back to the surface of self and identity. At the point before great change and enlightenment, comes the darkest question of self and identity as a portrait of the past and the future simultaneously.
Bath Consolidated – Medulla (Cloister Of Trials I) (Orange Milk Records)
Bath Consolidated creates an atmosphere that feels gutted in Medulla. In a grand biblical sense, voices get lost in the stratosphere of a postmodernist hellscape. Medulla feels like an epic of flying too close to the sun, rockets failing, lightboards glitching in and out throughout the vast soundscape of actualization. Whether through the lost generational narrative, or intellectualism moving backwards on itself, the fury of sound is omnipresent in a way that feels all consuming like the first breath, or the last wish.
Floraviolet – Dead of Spring (Self-Released)
Beginning with the tranquil thin metallic atmosphere like a bad codec on an mp3 rain sample, Floraviolet eases you into a world that has lost its purity. Once a neoclassical melodic piano drifts in, you can further feel the disposition of the machinery cutting, grating, bombing through a sub bass eclipse of sound, cutting through the thinly veiled track. At the bridge there feels like a valley in the forest with rain drying up and the atmosphere taking a humid shape; one sees the glimpse of beauty in purity before the reality drifts away like an echo. What once felt so attainable floats away with the somber wind, seeing beauty in a past that looks back and sees remnants and then, nothing at all.
Check out the list on Buy Music Club HERE.
