A big thanks to Ingrown Records for featuring Rained Down on the Outsider Radio Show #27. For reference Rained Down plays at 2:21:04 during the show.
I’d highly recommend checking out their excellently curated shows on their website or on Mixcloud. They also have a great range of records for sale and merch as well!
This is a song called Rained Down — a bass-driven track, originally written on guitar and Fender Rhodes, where complex-yet-subtle layers of textural sounds ebb and flow to create a distorted, other-worldly and dreamlike environment for a voice that speaks about reaching through uncertainty to catch your dreams.
From the second verse “ Ghost-like face uncertainty, one moment you’re trapped the next you’re free, a sea of dreams the people need, and the last thing you can’t see yourself.”
Shot on 35mm film, Mark Howden’s Sun is Through draws inspiration from the remoteness and grandeur of the New Zealand landscape and from the allure of aerial photography.
In 2001 while strapped to the door of a little Cessna photographing the landscape, the first impression I had was that I was seeing familiar things from a new perspective. Roads I had driven on, beaches visited or camped, sometimes an intimate knowledge of certain areas, houses or buildings. I was seeing it apart from what I knew.
I had this constant awareness too that the subject I was involved with would change, because I could see some of this process at work from the plane. Working with this footage now evokes this concept —now though with the perspective or what has changed.
The landscapes are from another reality, the project is now a dream.
Turns and Returns was released last week, completing four-sixths of the Dreams EP 2025. Thanks Frequency State and (the now defunct) Jahrund for including it in their playlists!
Frequency State: Slow Motion System: Downtempo and Trip-Hop
It was so excellent to see Chords, track 2 from the Dreams EP featured here. Shoegazer Alive is a great blog/playlist/Facebook group with a really good selection of music. I’d highly recommend anyone interested in the genre to check it out.
I do have one tip though :)
Please, playlisters, bloggers, reviewers, music channels, platforms et al — if you do come across music and decide to use it for your own purposes by featuring it on your blog, playlist or website..or all the above, find the time to like it, subscribe to it and respect the artists by notifying them. Yes, we know you are busy listening to music, but not only will artists thank you for it and most likely pay it back, you help make the world a better place!
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The true beauty of something lies not in its bold pronouncements, but in its hidden nuances. In the almost-there, the nearly-not, the subtle friction that creates something entirely new.
Turns and Returns finds inspiration in exploring the exquisite, often overlooked drama unfolding in the fractional spaces. Here, the familiar is reimagined in the creative process of finding inspiration in unexpected visual and auditory landscapes where familiar daily sounds are woven into an unforeseen experience.
“Turns and Returns” is the forth track from Mark Howden’s Dreams EP, a 2025 release characterised by a dreamy, otherworldly aesthetic. The track is a collaboration between Howden, a music producer, and the digital artist known as Gaming.
Mark Howden 