Community Picks is a weekly series where artists submit a release to be voted on by members of the Nina community. Once a week, the release with the most votes will receive editorial coverage. This week’s winner is "Toxoplasma" by Horse Vision. The track is an intimate indie pop tune anchored by a TB-303 bassline—perfect rainy day listening. We sent over some questions to Johan Nilsson and Gabriel von Essen of Horse Vision, read the interview and listen to "Toxoplasma" below.

Where are you from?

Horse Vision: Stockholm, Sweden.

How would you describe your music to someone who has never heard it?

Our music is centered around subtle, pumping acoustic guitars and various contrasting elements that we think are fun and beautiful. We try to make beautiful rock music that is somewhat self-explanatory; we're not trying to make it more complicated than it already is. Our music might come across as lo-fi, but it evades the binary of that and pop; we make pop-rock music and we try our best to make it as comprehensible as we can. Someone described it as sounding as if something very emotional and sincere is said in a subtle and commonplace manner. 

Tell us about your release on Nina.

It's centered around a very cute TB-303 lead melody that we based the entire song on. It was all recorded late at night, which made us play and sing very gently. It's about how things change and how that’s hard to handle.

What kind of tools do you use to make music?

We record acoustic instruments and elements, but it’s not really about capturing recorded sounds; we see the recording as a unit between the performance and the digital form of recording. We record a lot of samples from movies and social media that we process in plug-ins we’ve built in Max MSP and use them as backdrops in our tracks. It’s fun to play with the usage of strictly recorded sounds and their vulgarized and digitized counterparts—the acoustic guitar and the synthesized midi-instrument, the vocal and the vocaloid lead melody and so on.

Who are 3-5 independent artists you think people should check out? 

Threshold, Tiffi M, Sindy, Hannes Ferm, A Good Year.