2

Meet Mac Demarco. He hails from Vancouver, British Columbia but has transplanted to Montreal. It's hard to describe what he does as other than laid-back fun, with simplified guitar lines and non-pretentious singing. I almost didn't want to give it a chance because it seemed so good-natured and sweet and reminiscent of Jimmy Buffett. If anything, 2 borders on sounding so cohesive the songs become indistinguishable from one another. The album's gentle acoustic closer, "Still Together," does much to even out the rest of the album, wrapping up the eccentric smoky guitar jams and tongue-in-cheek moments of 2 with an unexpectedly sweet slice of spare, devotional balladry. DeMarco is still a befuddling character, but the compressed landscape of 2 takes steps away from his cartoonish beginnings toward something equally strange, but possibly more grown up. Buy your copy of 2 here.

Instrumental Tourist

Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never) and Tim Hecker go together like chocolate and peanut butter. This collaboration between the drone-based musicians is improvisational in nature, with the two meeting up in Brooklyn to book some studio time together. Most of the album doesn't feel like a meeting of the minds so much as a melding of them. Says Daniel Lopatin on Pitchfork.com, "The idea was not to overthink. I didn't want a commercially fabricated studio environment; I just wanted long stretches of time where we're more or less just going at it. There was one point seven hours into it where we were fucking famished and exhausted, and we were like, 'Jesus, we have to stop now and eat.' We work until we're dead, then we have a huge meal." To me this sounds like the working method of any artist deeply ensconced in their project. It's difficult, in the best possible way, to tell which artist contributed which elements to any given track; one could make a guess about the glitches and torqued string melody on a piece like "Uptown Psychedelia," but the way Hecker and Lopatin combine their styles into a versatile mix of melody, drone, and distortion on "Ritual for Consumption" and the title track is too seamless to dissect. They also explore the possibilities of seemingly hokey/patronizing "ethnic" instrument presets, including the koto, sitar, and lap steel, to transcend their intended uses,"it was a way to sidestep the world music debate while using the palate of world music in some weird way-- almost like a fantasy interpretation of what world music is", says Tim Hecker. The title "Intrusions" hints at the album's questioning of "exoticism" and cultural appropriation, but its mix of glitched electronics and penetrating drones that get pinched into shrill spikes stands on its own. Overall, Lopatin and Hecker take the sounds in their intentionally limited palette to places they may never have been expected to go, and the journey is intriguing and frequently lovely. That Instrumental Tourist's music was recorded in three days makes it all the more impressive, and bodes well for the rest of the SSTUDIOS albums. This makes for a great album to listen to while practicing meditation or as background music whilst working on something creative or as a wintry soundtrack. Recommended if you like: Seefeel, Mountains, either member's solo work, Diskjokke, or Dntel. Watch and Listen to Intrusions here: Buy Instrumental Tourist here.