Luna Kafé e-zine - Various Artists: Eat Your Friends

Luna Kafé record review

Various Artists
Eat Your Friends - A Hidden Shoal Compilation
Hidden Shoal Recordings

Happy 10th anniversary, Hidden Shoal! Cheers! It's been a pleasure follow you for the first ten years. Please continue your quest for finding and presenting neat, marvellous music of any colour, shape or size for years and years to come.

The label has built an incredible roster over the years. There have been so many highlights; it is hard to pick a few examples just like that. For any newcomers, you'd better check in on this celebratory compilation where you'll find some songs by a number of Hidden Shoal artists covered or remixed by other Hidden Shoal artists. Keep it in the family, right. You get to hear artists/bands like Antonymes, Arc Lab, Brother Earth, Cheekbone, City of Satellites, Gilded, Wayne Harriss, Kryshe, Liminal Drifter, Chloë March, Markus Mehr, Memorybell, Erik Nilsson, perth, REW<<, Slow Dancing Society, Tangled Star, Umpire and Zealous Chang to name some of the fine acts from the excellent Hidden Shoal label. But, hey! - there are more acts to find such as Apricot Rail, AWMA, Battlestations, DrAlienSmith, Glassacre, Craig Hallsworth, Half Film, HC-B, Involved, Elisa Luu, My Majestic Star, The October Solution, Toby Richardson, Salli Lunn, Joe Sampson, The Slow Beings, The Star Department, Todd Tobias, Kramies, .... You'd better go explore the entire sound of Hidden Shoal right now.

Eat Your Friends is a laidback, soothing, chilling listen. Here's a lot of piano magic and fine, meditative and atmospheric songs and sounds. So, anyway, if I were to pick a few tracks, I'd say 'Go, check out': Erik Nilsson's remix of Brother Earth's "Out Like a Lion", because Nilsson is a great instrumentalist/artist and "Out Like a Lion" is a spellbinding (and a somewhat scary) song; REW<<'s cover of Umpire's "Green Light District", simply because REW<< is a great act; Markus Mehr's remix of Erik Nilsson's "Moksha Can Wait", because Mehr is a clever electronic artist; Antonymes' cover of Cheekbone's "Reef", simply because Antonymes creates hypnotic, fragile soundscapes. According to Hidden Shoal themselves, Eat Your Friends presents '...solar-flared adaptations [...] delicately reconstructed covers, deep space jam reworkings, and shimmering ambient tapestries...'. This is musical cannibalism at its most constructive.

'Shoals are characteristically long and narrow (linear) ridges. They can develop where a stream, river, or ocean current promotes deposition of sediment and granular material, resulting in localized shallowing (shoaling) of the water.' (Wikipedia) Hidden Shoal's currents are safe and their 'sediments' are rich and fascinating. Keep on swimming, diving, rising, hiding, walking, running, somersaulting, swirling, sneaking, jumping, spinning. Anything, something, everything. Ten more years! Cheers, Cam and co.!