SOFA PITS: “Matching Triangle”
August 10, 2012
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Imagine a pit in a remote location where adventurous souls go to battle used cushions, tattered and infested with bugs and secrets. The music behind such a human spirit struggle (if this debacle was a TV show that is) would definitely sound like that of Portugal’s Sofa Pits. His new album, New Moments, is a mad brew of lead guitar orgies, solid slippery bass, buried (infrequent) voice, some synth, and lo-fi beat machine thumps. The odd things about this release are the synth driven opening two cuts of the album. It’s as if the artist is torn between queuing up Duran Duran or PiL’s second album. Either way, we sleep easy at night ’cause the jams are on firm soil, and as menacing as some of the music is it’s also pleasantly hypnotizing.
Sofa Pits has a killer instrumental bag of riffage on his hands with “Matching Triangles.” Stuttering drum machine clatter tricks the ear into thinking one is about to enter a budget rave, but the bass and guitar parts are pure RAWK. This is fun listening and damn near banger material.The peaks are lofty – the pit is deep, dear friends. Enjoy!
New Moments is available for order from Chill Mega Chill Records
Written by Jeff Daily
Tags: coimbra, portgual, Reviews, Sofa Pits
Reviews
After releasing in rapid-fire succession the last few months under the names Mediafired, JCCG, and Sofa Pits, and establishing his own Exo Tapes as one of young tape labels to watch, the Portuguese chill out maester known as João/Johnny has launched a new project titled The Exhalers. While rigid song structures haven’t loomed large in his recent body of work, this new material sheds its pop allusions and sets about effortlessly hybridizing drone and ambient conventions, as well as digital and analog elements: the recordings were done on an old Fostex X28H multitrack cassette machine and prominently features the notoriously bright tones of a Casio CTK-495 . Throw in an army of web art dolphins, courtesy of Whatever™, and you have yourself an aesthetic. The cooing oscillations and digitized cracklings of “~player~” comprise the B side of Wave Reader II.O, which is the second (the others being I.O and III.O) in a series of three tapes. The semi-binaural pulsations are extremely relaxing, so we suggest you put on the good headphones and dive into this seriously blissful stuff. Look, even Putin is smiling.
The Exhalers: “~player~”
The Wave Reader I.O, II.O, and III.O tapes are available from Exo Tapes and you can hear more on Soundcloud. The artwork from the Wave Reader series will also be available in a limited of printed cards
Written by Luke Carrell
Tags: ambient, chill out, drone, Europe, JCCG, Mediafired, portugal, Reviews, Sofa Pits, the exhalers
