CS + Kreme - Snoopy

Wow, this is maybe even better than the album

This is absolutely perfect self-isolation music

it is. i have been telling anyone who will listen the exact same thing.

this is excellent! spent the first couple tracks reaching for some portmanteau-style comparisons (The For Carnation produced by Pole, etc.) and then gave up as it's really quite hard to pigeonhole

Anyway, trip hop, Coil, it's all very hazy

What Coil albums sound like this? I've been meaning to check them out for a while but have never got round to it

I was about to post that I just don't see the Coil comparison but actually, thinking about it I guess it is true. 'Saint' is pretty Coil-esque. A touch of the 'The Last Amesthyst Deceiver' about it perhaps?

I'm not sure there is an album by Coil that really sounds like this paolo, but maybe 'Musick To Play In The Dark vol 1' or 'The Ape Of Naples' would come sort of close in places, and either way both are incredible albums worthy of exploration.

Yeah I’m not sure there’s anything so close to either Coil or CS and Kreme but there is something about the mood of stuff like Musick to play in the dark that reminds me of tracks like Mount Warning.

(I mean that I don’t think there are any other acts that sound particularly close to either of them, and they don’t sound particularly close to each other, and yet I don’t think there is nothing to my initial association of the two.)

Wow--just gave a listen to "The Ape Of Naples" having never checked it out before, and yeah, Track 2 on the album which you point out, Stirmonster, is def in the proto-Snoopy zone in terms of how the vocal declamations float over top, as well as the simmering synth and bassline underneath (the marimba's a very cool unexpected touch, too!).

(and you're also right in that the whole album is indeed sounding incredible)

'Musick To Play In The Dark vol 1' or 'The Ape Of Naples' would come sort of close in places

I gave these a listen and they're really good, so thanks! I was concerned that they'd be too heavy/intense for me because I really can't listen to much heavy music right now but they're not too scary. And I can see the similarities with CS + Kreme - they're both quite dubby in places and both have surreal/daft lyrics that they can make sound all ominous

Still probably my favourite album of the year.

New companion EP: https://csandkreme.bandcamp.com/album/howwouldyoufeelwithoutthatthought

Snoopy will def be among my very fave albums of the year, and this EP is a very well-executed appendix

I am four minutes into "April Fools' Day" and oh shiiiiiiiiiiiiit this is good.

It just occurred to me that Snoopy will possibly forever be classified in my head as my 'post brain surgery pre pandemic' album.

Fuck this EP is so great.

It occurs to me that CS + Kreme are to 2020 what A Mountain of One were to 2007.

It's like, get on this music now because its resonance may dim in a few years time.

For me this is totally a pandemic album, and it's merged with many cold dark evenings in lockdown in April (and now again). I've barely listened to it in daylight.

Checked out Snoopy on the basis of this revive and shiiiiit its amazing

i've listened to 'snoopy' a few times over the past months, only thing i really remember are vague crespuscular labradford vibes crossed with a sort of deadpan dead c.-esque vocal delivery, but that might all be a distortion of memory. also, the question 'where did blueberries go?' keeps running through my head at random moments. guess i'm due a revisit?

The Labradford vibe is real, I listened to this for the first time last night and was like "this reminds me of Labradford, and also weirdly of Legendary Pink Dots."

Pan American more specifically imo

It's my pandemic album of choice for sure and perfect all over again for dark winter lockdowns. The new EP is great too.

The Legendary Pink Dots reference is really interesting. I'm not really getting that but perhaps it had just never crossed my mind. Will definitely consider that next time I listen and as LPD has been another pandemic big listen, it may make perfect sense.

Might have something to do with vocal affect, for some reason I kept thinking of Shadow Weaver.

Can't really see how an album could be any better for lockdown listening.

Slightly off topic but I've been getting into Coil after reading this thread and I can totally see the similarity, especially on Ape Of Naples. Will need to check out Labradford and LPD too. Other recommendations for similar artists would be appreciated!

I had somehow never listened to Shadow Weaver before. It's so good and I can totally hear how it realates to "Snoopy".

Shadow Weaver was my first LPD, found a tape copy in a free box. Eventually my car tape deck tried to eat it and it became unspooled, but unbeknownst to me, my then-new boyfriend took it, found a new cassette housing, and re-spooled the tape by hand while decorating the outside of the housing with creepy graphics. He gave it back to me for my birthday, and is now my husband.

Wow, Shadow Weaver sounds great! Gonna have to buy the expanded reissue with the 20-min bonus track.
Had read about LPD for years as a big part of the whole England's Hidden Reverse axis, but 20-odd years ago it was of course much harder to investigate, so cheers...

I have quite a few LPD albums and always like everything I hear but their catalogue is so vast so I have no doubt missed lots of great ones. the table is the table, that is a great story about your husband!

I have quite a few LPD records, but totally get the vastness issue. The thread on ILM was actually quite helpful for getting into them!

Pan American more specifically imo

― rob, Tuesday, November 10, 2020 6:19 PM (yesterday)

I put on Labradford's "Mi Media Naranja" after posting this, and I have to retract this opinion. But the first self-titled Pan American album is kind of slept on and you should check it out anyway (PA is a solo project for Mark Nelson)

i love this album and i love that it's called snoopy

So fellow CS + Kreme fans, is there a track that we can all get behind for the end of year poll? I love Snoopy and will be voting for it is my A of the Y but I don't think there's any standout tracks, ie they're all at a similar level of excellence. Wouldn't want to go for Pussywhistle Tea though because fuck me that's a terrible song title.

Could go for either of the tracks from the new single too

Very tough to pick a standout track as it is a much more an overall immersive listen. "Snoopy" will be in my top 2 of 2020 but for a track I think (if i were voting) I'd maybe go with "Bugged" off the new single.

i'll def be voting for it in the albums poll

Bugged is immense. Love the beat but unable to explain exactly how it is “wrong”

Mount Warning would be the track for me; but it'll be Snoopy I vote for.

this album is something else, it does not go down easy for me. it’s so haunted... supremely chill surface but it’s as if it’s hiding something really nasty and awful underneath... idk.. “thoughts”

“Where did blueberries go” is definitely the best album-opening line of 2020

some of it kind reminds me of some of Piano Magic’s eerie early stuff

vibes wise

anyone get that two cassette mix they just put out, reel torque 20? i've got it but i won't get a chance to listen until christmas (it's wrapped rn up as a lil present to myself), no tracklist, what a mystery

don't know how i missed this all year, incredible stuff

track in the first post is still my favorite but yeah this is good stuff

anyone get that two cassette mix they just put out, reel torque 20? i've got it but i won't get a chance to listen until christmas (it's wrapped rn up as a lil present to myself), no tracklist, what a mystery

Jealous - I didn't know about that. Hopefully someone will rip it to Youtube at some point.

this album is something else, it does not go down easy for me. it’s so haunted... supremely chill surface but it’s as if it’s hiding something really nasty and awful underneath... idk.. “thoughts”

― brimstead, Thursday, December 10, 2020 12:19 AM (twenty hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah. i'm just going off "roast ghost (ultra lavender mix)" but it's like plants growing out of chopped up bodies or something.

(xp) I assumed from the way that it's described on Boomkat that the Reel Torque tape is a DJ mix with maybe some original material sprinkled in, not worlds away from many of the cassette-only releases on The Trilogy Tapes

So fellow CS + Kreme fans, is there a track that we can all get behind for the end of year poll? I love Snoopy and will be voting for it is my A of the Y but I don't think there's any standout tracks, ie they're all at a similar level of excellence. Wouldn't want to go for Pussywhistle Tea though because fuck me that's a terrible song title.

― paolo, Wednesday, 9 December 2020 13:06 (two days ago)

It's tough to pick a single track, it does all sort of flow together. Blue Flu & Mount Warning are maybe the two that jump out at me most often, but then Saint feels like the one that's the perfect lockdown time capsule. Will definitely be voting for the album high up on my album ballot anyway.

Appreciate the suggestions for similar artists/albums upthread. Got Shadow Weaver by Legendary Pink Dots on just now & it's sounding pretty great.

New album!!

https://csandkreme.bandcamp.com/album/orange

Snoopy is hard to follow up. The same brilliant musicality is lavished on Orange — a combination of unmistakably original, skittering drum programming, startlingly fresh instrumental interjections, creepily invocatory voices, and dubwise treatments — giddily imbued with the dark arts of ritual and seance. But Orange is more gripping, focussed and urgent, more intense and ambitious. Next level.

Its first quarter presents a trio of forays in suspense.
Bassline squares up like an epic psych-funk grinder, with a moody guitar line traversed by ticking drum patterns and faint electric crackle. In no time the guitar is staggering and stammering under the duress of echo and distortion, and over-run with percussive electronics and the first of the voices massing in the music’s head. The mood has quickly become more trepidatious. We're deeper underground; it’s gloomier, wetter.
Shred propulsively ratchets up the tension and menace. Glazily tentative xylophone is played against slashing, nervy cello. The voices are more strangulated and sick now. Flutes and chimes evoke the same kind of beautiful, contaminated efflorescence which is pictured on the LP’s front cover.
Voice Of The Spider makes easier progress across this cavernous, shadowy, dripping terrain, with funky pads and Nasty, eighties, No Wave electric bass; woozy chimes, non-plussed keys, singing-in-tongues.

Pink Mist marks an arrival, or unbottling, with annunciatory church-organ and choral voices from the off, and a newly relaxed, head-nodding kosmische rhythm.

Mandarin is a short, beat-less and voice-free interlude for piano and bass. It's reflective and nostalgic, ambivalent and inconclusive, with a lovely snatch of melody. A bridge half-way.

Would You Like A Vampire is a triumphant, mesmerizing go at New Folk, with strummed acoustic guitar, descant song, and jazzily restless drum programming (including a tasty bass-bin trembler). Amazingly, Conrad Standish is joined at the mic by none other than Bridget St John. Together they sing 'Earth is Paradise’ so repeatedly and tremulously — and the song is cut off so abruptly at the end — it seems as if the verb is teetering on the past tense, and hymn fading into valediction and catastrophe.

Similarly Storm Rips Banana Tree begins idyllically enough, with a CS-&-Kreme-style raga… before something like an immense, obliterative drill starts up. Harpsichord and organ — by James Rushford — and flutes, and clapping, distant chanting and insectile percussion steadily leaven the dread, till finally all that is left is lapping water.
It’s an epic, deeply immersive, compelling, thought-provoking, twenty-minute finale… the coup de grâce.

Hmmm, this sounds pretty good so far, but I have to give it a few more listens before I commit to buying the record and paying for exorbitant international shipping. On first pass, "Bassline" and the Bridget St John one stuck out the most, but I'm missing some of the Jon Hassell-meets-Coil weirdness of the previous work. As the press release says, Snoopy is a hard record to live up to.

OK, I take it back, definitely some Coil moves on "Would You Like A Vampire." Maybe I'll buy this after all.

The first two tracks are very twitchy, like they've switched out Snoopy's 'clammy dread' for 'panic attack'

i didn't gel with the first two or three tracks. it felt like yet another overly introspespective 'lockdown' session, when that is probably the last thing i'm looking for currently, or maybe i just wasn't in the right mood. But then 'Mandarin' won me over and 'Would You Like A Vampire' is up there with the best they have recorded.

going to go in for a second round.

yeah I'll have to return to it. listening first thing in the morning was not a good call

Took me at least five listens to fully appreciate Snoopy. Only listened to this one once but it does feel a bit more introspective and moody than Snoopy, which was of course plenty introspective and moody already. That's what I'm after during the winter months tho

Given the cost to ship a double album overseas, I really wish artists would consider pressing up a few hundred CDs for us plebes

I love this on first listen. Does feel even more claustrophobic, perhaps, but I was listening whilst cleaning my extremely messy office, so yknow.

This is really growing on me

this feels like the fraught escape from the mirrored nightmare chamber you were trapped in in snoopy

some fairly disturbing shit tbh especially “shred”

https://www.ursss.com/2022/06/cs-kreme/

Hadn't seen this before (concert from earlier this year, has some tracks from Orange).

at this point i think this can only be called a massive disappointment. unfair i know, but still. only thing that comes close to snoopy is the vocal track near the end with the acoustic guitar. will relisten soon, but realized that i have not thought about this album at all after listening to it every day when it came out, waiting for it to reveal itself, but now i think there's no there there, sadly.

Gonna have to disagree with you here. I'm enjoying it more with every listen.

I'm with paolo. I was initially a tad underwhelmed, but I've come around to thinking it's almost as good as Snoopy

same!

FYI don't know if anyone in the states is waiting for vinyl but I just got an email notification that mine shipped

I've also found it pretty hard to grasp. I've listened to it a few times from front to back, but cannot recall anything in particular other than a vaguely grim oppressive atmosphere and the striking cover.

Not even "Would You Like A Vampire?"

I wouldn't say that the release is a massive disappointment to be clear. Vagueness can be a worthy aesthetic in its own right, especially their version, which is disconcreting, mundane, horrific, occasionally revelatory. They're definitely channeling a structure of feeling. I think someone upthread mentioned Snoopy as a pandemic soundtrack. I can think of any number of other dystopian, yet ungraspable conditions we're living through.

"Would You Like A Vampire?" does feel an like exception on Orange. There's a sense of release when it finally arrives. Maybe it's comparable to the final minutes of "Mount Warning" in that respect. But somehow I don't recall it as strongly as the atmosphere that they build up before, then there's that image of the seaweed looking fetid and dead, maybe still swarming with some kind of bacterial life. Both hyper-realistic and allegoric.

I was maybe thinking of picking up it up on vinyl, even just for the cover image, which I bet looks pretty impressive on the sleeve.

Good post! And good points. I'll concede that, though I've probably listened to Orange close to ten times, which is a lot for me, I rarely have the patience for "Storm Rips Banana Tree." I just don't think it totally justifies its sidelong status, and I think perhaps this is where the vagueness you speak of falls short for me. I'm sure there are situations for which this track is perfect, but I haven't found them yet.

i mean it is still well made, and i know it is unfair to compare to snoopy which is singular both in its content and the context it found itself in

but still, there is not a lot going on underneath the well-done sound design. one stays on the surface with this record, maybe intentionally. it's like walking around a city with mild drug withdrawals or something. just does not have the enveloping quality of snoopy at all. but being twitchily outside was what '22 was all about so maybe they captured the zeitgeist again

it's like walking around a city with mild drug withdrawals or something

sold!

I cant tell if its not as good or not, I find it really discomfiting to listen to. not in a way where I think there's something wrong w it, but in a way where I dont find myself pulling it out much because its too effective at unsettling me haha. idk I like it a lot but also have a kind of fear of it

yall are just writing very tantalizing ad copy at this point

Orange is way too unsettling for me to have listened to during lockdown. Snoopy was just unsettling enough

I forgot I ordered this lol. Unsettling mysteries incoming.....

Deej OTM. I decided not to listen to this album any more because it just vaguely upset me.

there is a real queasiness to it. i’m drawn back to it though

"this album makes me feel bad and i don't want to listen to it ... maybe this is good" never change yall

i kid i kid, but still, it's not like snoopy made me feel good or anything. it's not about feeling good, it's about the quality of feeling bad, and on that measure snoopy succeeds via a sort of dream logic, this is a bit surface level to my ears, but will give it some more spins.

if you like 'orange' i feel like rabit's recent oeuvre is hitting the same zones

I think of this band as being mainly good bc of artfully juxtaposed surfaces so when ppl say 'this one feels surface level' im like well yea

playing in London on March 31st (sadly I'll miss them yet again): https://ra.co/events/1661923

i like orange more than snoopy!

danker, scrapier. you can’t imagine anyone calling it “illbient”.

i obviously apologise unreservedly for using that word.

orange is my new workout music btw not joking

despite knowing the artist I have always misread this thread title as “CS plus Kreme minus Snoopy”, thank you for listening

illbient is good, tho?

snoopy is cool because it is pretty traditional in terms of instrumentation, but super otherworldly in its effects. more badalamenti than anything else, really. or like certain moments in harold budd's catalog - like you can sing "where did blueberries go" over this track pretty easily!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo0ng_0NYnA

relistening to orange, it's unfair to compare it to snoopy. it has its own thing going on. and that thing is really bad, to me. i will say it's rare for me to actively loathe music, usually it's just boring, so they have accomplished something real in that sense.

I'm actually surprised by how polarizing this record seems to be. It isn't exactly leagues apart from the previous album

i think it is at least a league apart. to me it does feel like a very different thing from Snoopy.

as someone who has had trouble totally processing orange I definitely don't think its 'boring'

i feel like walking around Glasgow in early March would probably be a good way to "get" it

i'll try that tomorrow Tracer.

d-40, me neither; wasn't as clear as i could have been.

anyways. still one of the best acts out rn i think. and 'vampire' is truly excellent