VLNA – Turquoise Threads

Before you start listening, answer this: what associations do you have with a band name like VLNA?

Personally, I prepared for somewhat ‘unpersonal’ and possibly even ‘harsh’ sounds when I started listening.

But I was in for a surprise:Turquoise Threads is an ‘impressionist vocal’ album – an album with spoken words fragments, humming, whistling, intertwining with ‘a thick veil of atmospheric noir from threads of adapted violins, guitar’ (and electronic treatments).

Boozoo Bajou – 4

The music of Boozoo Bajou (German duo Florian Seyberth and Peter Heider) has always been quite atmospheric.
The three full albums (and numerous 12-inches) they have released since 2001 contained the low-tempo dubby trip-hop often called ‘Lounge’ – the lush kind of sounds that German musicians seemed to master exclusively.

Their latest album, 4, manages to build on all they did before, and use it as a foundation to create an album that ‘transcends basic categories and expectations’.

Kyle Bobby Dunn – Bring Me The Head of KBD

Like his previous release on the same Low Point label (A Young Persons Guide to KBD from 2010), Kyle Bobby Dunn‘s latest release is a 2 hour double album set with a title suggesting a somewhat bombastic “grandeur”.

But the sound on Bring Me The Head of Kyle Bobby Dunn offers the opposite of what the title suggests.  “Drawing upon a love for emotional detailing and cinematically charged grandeur, these suites offer an apex in romantic, haunting and lonely bliss”.