The Latest From Stilll

The small Belgian label Stilll initially leaped onto my radar because they released Off The Sky’s excellent It Is Impossible To Say Just What I Mean last year. The label has recently announced their latest releases, Immune’s Sound Inside (SCD004) and Holiday For StringsCD (SCD005).

Instead of simply offering MP3 downloads from the albums (though they have those as well), Stilll offers audio montages of each album, with short segments from selected tracks fading together. It’s an interesting way to get a nice overview of the album, which can sometimes be difficult when you listen to just one track.

Listening to Sound Inside’s audio montage, it’s obvious that the album is a rather dreary affair, and I mean that in the nicest way possible. The band’s website describes it as something akin to a melding of Hood jamming with Mark Hollis, the thought of which just sets my little heart a-twitter. The album’s sound is certainly inline with Hood’s pastoral meanderings circa Rustic Houses, Forlorn Valleys (a disc I’ve been meaning to review for quite some time, by the way), with sparse guitars, layered vocals, and sad piano and string arrangements, with just a hint of electronic glitch n’ fuzz.

The audio montage for CD, on the other hand, is quite a bit different than what I was expecting. It’s far more rhythmic and stripped down, and rather funky — if you could ever consider Sonic Youth funky, that is.

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