Sneaker is going deep with his interpretation of Raï music on
RAT 6. "Raï is a type of Algerian popular music that arose in
the 1920s in the Algerian city of Oran, back then known as
“little Paris”, it was a melting pot of various cultures, full
of nightclubs and cabarets, it was the place to go for a bawdy
good time. Out of this milieu arose a group of Male and Female
Muslim singers, who rejected the refined, classical poetry of
traditional Algerian music. Instead, to the accompaniment of
pottery drums and end-blown flutes, they sang about the
adversity of urban life in a raw, gritty, sometimes vulgar,
and inevitably controversial language that appealed especially
to the socially and economically disadvantaged." Sounds like
the definition of Rat Life! Put some drum machine patterns on
top of it and here we go: long overdue Sneaker solo EP on Rat
Life Records!
I often get Mercury in Retrograde stuck in my head as a foggy theme of liminal spaces and dreamy headspace but Bed of Nails feels like analog skronk is about to drip straight through the walls into the basement Carl Fisk
Philadelphia's Lira Landes's first LP as Plastic Ivy is a dreamy New Romantic love letter to the possibilities of the analog synth. Bandcamp New & Notable Sep 22, 2020