“Lost in the Woods” by Stef Animal

Our day 23 song for New Zealand Music Month 2020 is “Lost in the Woods” from Dunedin digital sound & vision explorer Stef Animal.

The track opens a recent album “The Spooky House” which is billed as “the creepy soundtrack to “The Spooky House” – a modern videogame for your home computer system. Twenty-five minutes of hair-raising music to enhance your “Spooky House” experience.”

As with Stef Animal’s adventurous “Top Gear” album, “The Spooky House” soundtrack is really a far more accomplished musical and artistic work than ‘just’ a ‘chiptune’ or vaporware video game soundtrack. The pieces are created with intricate sonic and musical arrangement detail and are full of adventure, wonder, fun, human emotion and a sense of deep melancholic weight at times among the ‘spooky’ themes. Video game soundtrack purpose aside, what Stef Animal has created here for “The Spooky House” is once again conceptual digital sound art of the highest order.

“Astronomy” by The Golden Awesome

Day 13 of PopLib’s 31 Days of May celebrating New Zealand Music Month is another Psychedelic Sunday so here’s “Astronomy” by Wellington ‘shoe-gaze’ noise band The Golden Awesome.

“Astronomy” is from an album called “Autumn” The Golden Awesome released on the US M’Lady’s Records label which is a bit hard to find round these parts now.

Although ‘shoegaze’ tends to be the genre most often used in relation to The Golden Awesome there is a healthy a dose of The Jesus and Mary Chain about the crushing bass guitar and swarming feedback guitar drones on some of the tracks on “Autumn” as well as the kind of swooping sonic overload and sweet melody associated with heavy ‘shoegaze’ favourites My Bloody Valentine which you can hear in “Astronomy”.

The mix of crushing saturated walls of glorious drone noise and breath-taking dream-pop melody is a feature of the album. The keyboards and the distinctive harmoniser processed vocals are from Dunedin musician Stef Animal and you can find out more about who else is in this low-key band in this rare UTR interview.

At the 5 minute mark in the video below you can watch the band playing “Astronomy” live at the Radio KDVS studio in Davis California when the band toured the US West Coast a few years ago.

“Autumn” by The Golden Awesome

The Golden Awesome is a ‘shoegaze’ guitar & keyboards band predominantly from Wellington, NZ. They released an album called “Autumn” in 2011 on the US M’Lady’s Records label which is a bit hard to find round these parts now. Here’s the title track which opens the album:

Although ‘shoegaze’ tends to be the genre most often used in relation to The Golden Awesome there is a healthy a dose of The Jesus and Mary Chain about the crushing bass guitar and swarming feedback guitar drones here as well as the kind of swooping sonic overload and sweet melody associated with heavy shoegaze favourites My Bloody Valentine.

That mix of crushing saturated walls of glorious noise and breath-taking dream-pop melody is a feature of the album. The keyboards and the distinctive harmoniser processed vocals are from Dunedin musician Stef Animal and you can find out more about who else is in this low-key band in this rare UTR interview.

Here’s the wonderful trippy video for “Autumn” too: