This mysterious self released single showed up a few weeks ago from Luftwaffe, out of Philly and it sounds like a home recorded, layered mystery of loops and subtle instrumentation.
The A-Side, "Never Let Me Go" uses this plinky streets-have-no-name electric guitar delay that has the notes bouncing all over each other while a low synth bassline moves so slowly it's hard to notice a change in the drone. It's an atmospheric future-folk along the lines of Woods or Sore Eros, putting a heavy delay on everything, bury the vocals and keep time with a sleigh bell. When it picks up, it's purely tribal and primitive, heavy on rim shots, metal sticks..unconventional hits.
They have an odd rhythmic sensibility that feels like a conscious choice to save these odd signatures and clipped samples. The loops aren't ever obvious, they work like the transition pieces of Person Pitch joining any two journey's together without incident...changing time for those few minutes just barely enough to notice something just happened.
The B-Side, "Old Friends" is heavily looped sounding, compared to the 'live' previous side...and here it's slightly getting Panda Bear in it's layered vocal sections that disappear into the melody. Really though...who doesn't love that sound of infinite delay?
If you take Ducktails as an end point this would be somewhere at the beginning of Matt's process, this could possibly be one of the sources before it ended up on Backyard, before the filters and re-mic-ing, and lengths of frayed cables. This is a pretty clear vision comparatively when it comes to piling up the sound. There's no texture from any kind of media on this entire single. That's where the big difference is, all that your left with is the sounds they've deliberately created and captured. It all exists in the undefinable space that's never
On "Warm Blood", there's a lot more experimentation with samples that shouldn't go together but then again you can get something great when forced to make an off rhythm like this work somehow. They're setting themselves up to fail a little bit and then in that struggle find their own way through the haze with hardly any vocals on this one just the sparsely layered mechanics and loops.
Even though this second side tracks feel a little brief, Luftwaffe can sort of drop you right into a track when it's already going at full steam and the pieces have gotten to know each other and are fighting it out without any lengthy buildup, the listener ends up filling in those intro blanks.
This double exposed photo across the sleeve is the perfect visualization for the hazy sound inside. Are you hearing double? It's just a shame they didn't do anything with the blank 7" label, but that adds to the mystery of this self released single, available, who knows?...maybe hit them up on their facebook page....or catch them live.
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