Only Now - Only Now

[awepittance 6]

Artist: Only Now

Title: Only Now

Label: Record Label Records

Release date : June 2, 2015

Catalog Number: RLR041
Format: Mp3/Flac/Wav & Cassette

1. Mid Riot

2. Needs

3. Inside The Mineral Room

4. Only Power

5. No Escape

6. Dante
   

Artwork: Arastoo Darakhshan

Preorder Limited Edition Cassette:
https://onlynow.bandcamp.com/album/only-now

 

After years away of experimentation in african percussion and industrial sound, Kush Arora decided to launch Only Now to explore new forms of sonic architecture, dripped in apocalyptic fantasies. Influenced by his more traditional excursions in the niche scenes kuduro, dark electronics, and tribal sounds, he aimed to fuse it with tuned metal, voice, and strange synthesis. Influences can be heard from Buraka Som Sistema to Wax Trax Records and haunting film soundtracks peppering the record, but at the core of it lies unbridled experimentation and wall of sonic low end.

 

 

Soundcloud Page: https://soundcloud.com/onlynow2

Full Album Preview:

'No Escape' from Only Now [preview]

Excerpts from the Only Now Live Set [unedited]

Edited May 12, 2015 by John Ehrlichman

[roasty 94]

Mmmm, nice Modern Love vibe on this

[Goiter Sanchez 410]

Wow, he has a great deal of expert control over the low end of his tracks! Really impressive and original sound! I am really wondering how it would sound on cassette!

[awepittance 6]

http://www.factmag.com/2015/06/01/cyberpunk-meets-african-rhythms-on-kush-aroras-new-project-only-now/

 

San Francisco drummer and producer Kush Aroraintroduces his new project, Only Now.

Arora has been releasing music for over a decade now, drawing from dancehall, dub, industrial and more. He describes Only Now as a place where “cyberpunk aesthetics and spacious explorations into cinematic synthesis collide”, with this release taking particular influence from African rhythms.

Arora has been inspired by the worlds of zouk, gqom and afro-house for some time now – they’re combined with dancehall vocals on his past releases with Jahdan Blakkamoore – and tells us that although he’s still got things to learn about those sounds, “I want to try and bring something new to table for those guys as well – instead of purely imitating sounds from Lisbon, Luanda, and South Africa.”

“On this record”, explains Arora, “I’ve used many of those niche African dance music patterns as templates but replaced it with my own sound design and style without forcing the juxtaposition of the genres. The process began when I worked with Pyramind Studios SF to create a custom percussion library featuring Nappy G, Baba Deru, and Enrique Padilla who are some of the most notable percussionists in the afro latin space, with Baba Deru playing percussion in the original Herbie Hancock Headhunters ensemble. After a few years of contorting the results of these sessions Only Now was birthed.”

Only Now’s self-titled debut EP will be available as cassette tape or digital from Bandcamp (the cassette comes with a bonus track, ‘Utter Chaos’). We’re streaming full audio of the release below, and there’ll be a launch party this Saturday in San Francisco with Joe Nice, Seven and others. For more on that, head here.

correction: this is not a 'bandcamp' release, this is a release on RecordLabelRecords here. Not sure why they omitted the label it was coming out on.


Full stream of Only Now - Only Now (release date is tomorrow)

Edited June 1, 2015 by John Ehrlichman

[Guest sotesound]

http://www.factmag.com/2015/06/01/cyberpunk-meets-african-rhythms-on-kush-aroras-new-project-only-now/

 

 

 

San Francisco drummer and producer Kush Aroraintroduces his new project, Only Now.

Arora has been releasing music for over a decade now, drawing from dancehall, dub, industrial and more. He describes Only Now as a place where “cyberpunk aesthetics and spacious explorations into cinematic synthesis collide”, with this release taking particular influence from African rhythms.

Arora has been inspired by the worlds of zouk, gqom and afro-house for some time now – they’re combined with dancehall vocals on his past releases with Jahdan Blakkamoore – and tells us that although he’s still got things to learn about those sounds, “I want to try and bring something new to table for those guys as well – instead of purely imitating sounds from Lisbon, Luanda, and South Africa.”

“On this record”, explains Arora, “I’ve used many of those niche African dance music patterns as templates but replaced it with my own sound design and style without forcing the juxtaposition of the genres. The process began when I worked with Pyramind Studios SF to create a custom percussion library featuring Nappy G, Baba Deru, and Enrique Padilla who are some of the most notable percussionists in the afro latin space, with Baba Deru playing percussion in the original Herbie Hancock Headhunters ensemble. After a few years of contorting the results of these sessions Only Now was birthed.”

Only Now’s self-titled debut EP will be available as cassette tape or digital from Bandcamp (the cassette comes with a bonus track, ‘Utter Chaos’). We’re streaming full audio of the release below, and there’ll be a launch party this Saturday in San Francisco with Joe Nice, Seven and others. For more on that, head here.

correction: this is not a 'bandcamp' release, this is a release on RecordLabelRecords here. Not sure why they omitted the label it was coming out on.

 

 

Full stream of Only Now - Only Now (release date is tomorrow)

 

You should write Factmag and ask for a correction (Fact-check)...

[awepittance 6]

i think i will in fact

[awepittance 6]

FLAC, WAV, and 320 MP3 available for order & immediate download now
http://recordlabelrecords.org/199.html

Now also on Bleep: https://bleep.com/release/61120-only-now-only-now

Edited June 3, 2015 by John Ehrlichman

[awepittance 6]

via : http://www.cvltnation.com/warped-voodoo-only-now-self-titled-tape-review-stream/

 

ONLY NOW is a new musical project by East Bay-born and now San Francisco-based dub producer Kush Arora. A fixture of SF’s underground club scene, Kush has been featured in The Wire, Spin Magazine, XLR8R, Fact Magazine, SF Guardian and countless outlets for his notable work in the tropical bass, dancehall and crossover scene. His remixes and collaborations span artists as diverse as Balkan Beat Box to Elephant Man, but this project marks a new beginning for him. After years away of experimentation in African percussion and industrial sound, Kush Arora decided to launch Only Now to explore new forms of sonic architecture dipped in apocalyptic fantasies. Influenced by his more traditional excursions in the niche scenes kuduro, dark afrohouse and tribal sounds, he aimed to fuse it with tuned metal, voice and proto real synthesis. Influences can be heard from Buraka Som Sistema toWax Trax Records, and haunting film soundtracks pepper the record, but at the core of it lies unbridled experimentation and a wall of sonic low end.

 

This self-titled tape by the Bay Area producer kicks off on an ominous note, with the spooky and liquefied rhythms of “Mid Riot,” a percussive sand-blasting to the senses that is capable of bringing back to mind the best mid-career Scorn tangled with Roni Size. Following track, “Needs,” makes the listener plunge deeper into this word of textured and warped bass and sinister rhythms, and this is where the African and voodoo-like hysteria of the percussion section really grabs a hold of you, dragging you into a sonic maelstrom of tribal and exotic ritualism. Only Now here appears like a frantic, more spastic and more cyberpunk version of Spiritchaser-era Dead Can Dance, fused together with Tehcno Animal, assuring for a puzzling but glorious trance-inducing track. “Inside The Mineral Room” is the most laid back moment of the record. The almost entirely percussion-less track is a careful and masterful layering of shoegaze-tinged synths and glitchy overtones that bring to mind both Amon Tobin and Boards of Canada bathing in a pool of melancholy and transcendence. “Only Power” brings back the tribal sprawl and crumbling industrial rhythms showcased in the opening moments of the album, but presents them to us in a more hallucinated and unpredictable pattern, driven by odd and chopped up time signatures and by intermittent synth patterns that create a sense of loss of balance and vertigo in the listener. Something that shifts your pole of balance, putting you in an oblique state of mind. In the end, the track opens up into a vast and bleeding wall of guitar-like, shoegazy feedback that rises like a tidal wave at the horizon, creating some pretty amazing apocalyptic atmospheres. “No Escape” is one of the darkest moments of this tape. The track is a bass-heavy, lighting-cracked slab of twisted metal and gnawing rhythms that twists and morphs in and out of various styles like a mutant cyberpunk monstrosity. Scorn’s Stealth comes back to mind, but so do Skinny Puppy, Coil and Prurient. Closing track “Dante” further expands upon the works central fixture, the African percussions, melting them down into a sea of molten static and buzzing ambience and meshing everything into a spooky and haunting plasma of beats, dark ambient and collapsing rhythms that are both puzzling in their mesmerizing abstraction and threatening in the dark and driving tones.

Only Now’s debut tape has dropped June 2nd on the East Bay Area’s RecordLabelRecords, a label founded by Fluorescent Grey, and that he started while he and Kush were in high school. The label carries some of the most oddball experimental and cultural hybrids around these days – always uncompromising music, ranging from sounds reminiscent of the aforementioned Scorn to Japan’s Contagious Orgasm, to Dalglish. Fans of dark, dripping, bass-heavy industrial dub hybrids can not miss out on this release. Get the tape from the label or from the band, and if you live in or around the Bay Area, don’t miss Kush playing an opening set at the Elbo Room in San Francisco on Friday August 21 for none other than Cut Hands, the new solo project by William Bennett of Whitehouse fame.

Edited June 9, 2015 by John Ehrlichman

[awepittance 6]

San Francisco DJ and producer Kush Arora steps forward for this new project on Record Label Reocrds. Marrying a wealth of industrially-rooted influences, Arora crafts a sound on this eponymous debut like no other. Whilst it is his 5th release for the imprint, Only Now is a project unlike anything else Arora has turned in for Record Label Records. Cuts like Inside The Mineral Room and No Escape carry a cerebral quality that many might associate with Arca or the Janus collective. There is a visceral power in these compositions which climaxes on the slow-building fragmented breakbeat of closer Dante.

 

Bleep kindly reviewed the record and is now selling it digitally https://bleep.com/release/61120-only-now-only-now

 

oddly though the cover art looks like its in 16 colors on their website, no idea how that happened. any graphics professionals know why a greyscale tiff submitted would turn into this on the other end?

Edited June 23, 2015 by John Ehrlichman

[RickDastardly 1]

Looks greyscale on my phone.

[cear 149]

hella fine

[awepittance 6]

exclusive Only Now live set will be posted on Media Roots Radio soon, a ton of unreleased tracks contained within.

Also cassettes now available and will be at Norman Records soon

my RLR site cart system is fucked up so until i fix it please order cassettes from :

https://onlynow.bandcamp.com/releases