воскресенье, 30 августа 2015 г.

Acid Socks – The Extended Play (2013)


I want to start with the release I cherish a lot, and it’s not just because I was involved in it as a vocalist and lyrics-writer :)

The Extended Play is one and only solo release by Acid Socks so far, but I hope this project will return from hiatus it was put in back in 2013, quite soon after The Extended Play came out.

As far as I know, Acid Socks were formed in 2009, it was basically solo project, but some other musicians were briefly involved in it, anyway, not much is known about first couple of years of project’s life, partially because the founder of the project is very modest guy not looking for any fame (by the way, he’s also a talented short story writer and voice actor), moreover, it seemed like he tended to create some kind of halo around Acid Socks, or, better to say, the public image, it was actually a parody to bands’ public images, the approach which is very peculiar to Concern Void artists.

So, the leader of Acid Socks often introduced himself as Socks’ promoter or producer, it’s quite similar to what Jandek’s doing, but I can assure you that back then we didn’t know who Jandek is.

Now I should somehow describe the sound, though it could be different, “Socks can play any style of music”, claimed their founder. The music of Acid Socks is almost entirely electronic, generally, they made awesome short instrumental electronic pieces (often minimalistic), and probably, if you’re interested, we’ll return to Acid Socks’ earlier tracks, and I’ll write another post reviewing them, but now let’s continue talking about the project’s history.

Shadowplay City community releases annual music samplers since 2011, and Acid Socks participated in them ‘til the project was put on hiatus. 2011 was very productive to Socks, and so was 2012, but the project didn’t make albums, all tracks were available for free listening just when they were finished.

And in spring 2013 The Extended Play was released. Working on it was easy and interesting, I had probably nicest impressions I ever had in any musical collaboration. At first, Socks wrote instrumentals, and then I suggested to write lyrics and to add my vocals, Socks agreed, and that’s the way we made this EP.

Its sound was described by a reviewer as “Soft “evening” music; good to listen when you’re coming home tired after a workday”; we consider the style of EP as some kind of synthpop with a bit of post-punk and low range vocals, although synthpop may sound differently than our EP :)

Perhaps, the reviewer was right when he felt the sense of coming back home, but I feel it was more like a story of progressive disappointment with life, all songs were connected with each other, and I even find them sort of cinematic.

The Huge Opportunities, the expectations from life, get destroyed on Corporate Picnic showing the feeling of frustration, which leads to Bedridden’s isolation and turns out into growing despair of Ridiculous. That’s how I felt, but you can interpret the lyrics whatever you want.

See through a window – there is just another wall
We’re locked here, we are still
Immovable
(Bedridden)

This EP is very short but very important for us. Hope you like it!

Have a listen:



 

Or check out Youtube or SoundCloud playlist of The Extended Play

Contact the founder 
(you may need to sign up)

Sincerely yours,
John “Grey Lenses” Grey

суббота, 29 августа 2015 г.

Welcome to Concern Void Blog!



Hi everyone, and welcome to Concern Void Blog! Here’s a greeting message and also some kind of manifesto to explain who we are, what we do and so on.

Concern Void is the musical subdivision of independent web-art-community “Shadowplay City”, formed in 2009. Concern Void tends to unite and to somehow promote music of our participants (“citizens” of Shadowplay City) in the Internet.

Nevertheless, despite the fact we add numbers to our releases just like real labels, we can’t claim ourselves as the real label, we don’t sign any contracts and don’t ask for any obligations from our participants, as well as we don’t pay to anyone for anything and haven’t earned even a cent of profit so far.

We’re a quite small community, but we don’t ask you to support us anyhow except of the moral support and maybe sharing links to our posts in your social networks’ accounts :)

Initially, we’re going to publish some posts about our artists and releases, but in the future, if our blog would reach any acclaim, we might consider telling you about some other artists we find rather interesting, entertaining, actually worth being more famous than they are. Anyway, we promise you to make at least one post per month.

All our music is free, you’ll get free download links in our posts (if you’ll find any link “dead”, just send us a message, and it’ll be re-uploaded soon); also, you may listen to some of our music via our YouTube channel and some other services (links will be followed). True art can only be free, that’s our deepest belief. If you want to get the physical copy (tape), please contact us, and we’ll definitely discuss it!

Shadowplay City and, of course, Concern Void, is mostly Russian project («Шэдоуплейск», “Shadowplaysk”), the majority of our participants are either from Russia or from other ex-Soviet countries, so we’re interested in promoting the true underground  (like having 5 listeners only) music from our countries, because we realize that people from other countries might know our music not quite well, probably because of the language barrier, so I’ll try to write (I hope) interesting articles with biographies, album reviews and translations of the lyrics to help you understand us better.

We mentioned the countries of our origin just to underline the cultural difference, we are beyond any politics, and we don’t want any political statements or discussions in this blog. Also, we mentioned this fact to show you that English is not our mother tongue, so we apologize for any possible grammar mistakes in our articles and we’ll be grateful if you point at them to make our texts better.

Sincerely yours,
John “Grey Lenses” Grey,
Founder of Shadowplay City