Unquiet
Things

It’s been a good, long while since I’ve put together a For Your Ears post–which isn’t to say I am not listening to music, of course. When the day comes that I am not hunting out new sonic gratification, well, you’ll know it’s because I am dead or something.

Previous installments: For Your Ears (midsummer 2016) // For Your Ears (August 2015) // For Your Ears (June 2015) // For Your Ears (April 2015) // For Your Ears (March 2015) // For Your Ears (February 2015) // For Your Ears (January 2015) 

See below for 10+ (it’s actually more like 13) fantastic bandcamp picks that are currently in heavy rotation ’round these parts. What are you listening to right now? Anything you think I should add to the list? Link me in the comments!

2016 Halloween-themed offering from VHS Glitch, full of ambient dark synth and reminiscent of such gems as Ghoulies or Night of the Demons.

Kristine Barrett’s intimate collection of experimental traditional folk music, sea shanties, & hymns from Ireland, Scotland, America, & Iceland.

Golden Garden’s particular blend of mystical, luminescent dream pop, an “invocation to the warrior queens and the enchantresses, the mystics and the misunderstood.”

Ethereal, evocative, and entrancing new offering from Ayla Nereo, an artist who makes music with a love for the earth, a devotion to our planet.

On Gramarye, Lotus Thief’s atmospheric post-black metal, space rock and ambient sound is inspired by and brings life to ancient texts, secret grimoires and forbidden rituals

Mournful balladry, pure and furious, revelatory and unsettling, from Emma Ruth Rundle (whose earlier work, Some Heavy Ocean, was also excellent)

What do we call this guy? Neo-folk? Post-punk? I find King Dude’s stuff simultaneously starkly morose and strangely catchy, and I couldn’t agree more with the reviewer who notes that this is probably what “rock and roll sounds like in hell”.

I can’t have a list like this without some melancholy piano tinklings. This offering from Murcof x Vanessa Wagner is moody and minimal, dreamy and delicate.

A singular and entirely heartbreaking concept: this album features the sounds from the journey The Caretaker will make after being diagnosed as having early onset dementia. Each stage will reveal new points of progression, loss and disintegration. Progressively falling further and further towards the abyss of complete memory loss and nothingness.

Immensely beautiful and intensely dark; I initially found her through Katie Metcalfe of Wyrd Words & Effigies recommendation

Blackgaze darlings Alcest’s Kodama is heavy stuff, both ecstatic and sorrowful.

Still Corner’s broody, swoony, shimmering synth pop is an aural treat and Dead Blue is probably my favorite entry on this list.

Bonus

Meredith Yayanos released this new Parlour Trick track on Halloween, a 33 minute, terrifying sonic hellscape, a piece called “Wandering Room”, about which she says: “It’s… not cute. Sometimes, you have to go back to some dark and nasty places to rescue your inner child.”