Loud Sounds 32
Cover photo: Gloomer
"Loud Sounds" are some of the best new tracks we've found. We are coming back with the 32nd installment of the series. This is a psychedelic edition. Enjoy.
Gloomer – Drumjoy

Definitely one of the most fresh-sounding releases we've heard in a while – a kaleidoscopic mix of dreamy overdriven guitars, ghostly vocal samples, psychedelic sound textures and feverish drums. The artist behind it is Elliott Kozel known for his producer work with acts including Jean Dawson and Yves Tumor.

Elliott Kozel
I made the track by writing weird chords in and open tuning on guitar and then chopping up my friends ill peach's song in a granular sampler and creating new melodies and phrases, I wrote maybe 6 or 7 different parts that would be jarring to the listener and then editing it all down into something that made sense. I was inspired by Yo La Tengo's singing style and tried singing on the track at a barely audible level and it seemed to work.
Macro/micro – Awe

Get ready for another experimental journey. This time it's an excellent album Things Will Never Be The Same Again by Macro/micro, electronic music project of Los Angeles native Tommy Simpson. The artist himself compares this album to a psychedelic experience, and treating it like one is a perfect way to listen to it, in our opinion. Let things happen, they might be devastating, they might be beautiful. Or both. At the end of the journey you will return to the same point, but transformed. Which brings us to the album's other topic – "stepping in the same river twice". Our favourite track on the album is its opener Awe, which is a rework of its closing song. Awe gently pulls you into the fascinating, scary and multidimensional world of Things Will Never Be The Same Again fulls of weird textures, ghostly distortion and swarms of synths that sound like cyborg insects.

Tommy Simpson
This is the opening track to my new album Things Will Never Be The Same Again. It's actually the last song I wrote for the record and the only one I had a specific "purpose" in mind when making it.

I usually like to start creating tracks as little experiments for their own sake, like little journeys into the unknown to see what I can bring back to basecamp. Once I have a number of them, the tracks start "reveling" to me a bigger story that the album then becomes. Once I had the other 4 songs mostly finished, I knew the album was at least partly about the timeless idea that "you never step in the same river twice". I wanted to create an opening piece that had elements of the final track which you wouldn't notice until having had multiple listens, therefore giving the listener the impression that they're in the "same river" but having a new experience in it, seeing the old with fresh eyes... reborn.

Another theme of the album is the typical arc of a psychedelic experience. When coming up, there's an initial surge pulling you towards a great attractor that feels on one hand terrifying and on the other ecstatic. I wanted the drums to be devastating but for the distorted ambience to carry you gently downstream and ride the wave of possible destruction gracefully.

One of my favorite pieces of studio gear that I used all over this song is the Plasma Rack by Gamechanger Audio. It's a unique fuzz distortion that takes an audio signal, converts it into electricity that runs through a crazy high-voltage xenon tube and gets converted back into a heavily saturated and scathing audio signal. You actually get to watch the electricity twist and shred in the tube and the audio truly sounds like it looks. It's not only beautiful to watch, it makes some of the coolest distortion I've ever heard.
Check out Macro/micro's earlier single Myasorubka.