Bandcloud 403
Leda Maar, Almanacs, Shy One, Conducive, Cassie Kinoshi, Elaine Howley, MONA DEMONE, Li Yilei, Christina Vantzou, Michael Harrison and John Also Bennett, Whaler, Jennifer Loveless and more
It’s been hot again this week. Not like, hot hot. But 25 degrees is a lot for us pasty gingers. I’ve been doing lots of painting. Coat upon coat. I’ve been listening to some audiobooks while doing this but also trying to listen to a lot of music. So lots of stuff here this week has been heard in that frame of mind. Then in the car yesterday I needed Google’s directions so I listened to Josey Rebelle’s Trilogy Tape.
What a sublime piece of work!!! Four sides of varying musical approaches, from deep whispers of sound to strange vocals to gorgeous choral moments to squidgy electronics. I’m not sure how I could even describe or categorise this work, I just think everyone should sink into it repeatedly.
Almanacs - Spirits of the River
This is the kind of thing you want to hear during a hot and sweaty week, blissful ambient bells and gorgeous synth melodies, aural moods of relaxation and beauty. That’s not to say that ambient only exists to accompany your restful moods, far from it, but this perfectly fits into that particular mode.
Shy One - From The Floor To The Booth
I mentioned broken beat last week, and here is some brand new stuff that falls under that umbrella. Chonky. Can’t wait to hear the rest.
Conducive - Global Makeshift Wounds
In my previous life as a subeditor at a magazine for ophthalmologists I regularly visited cities such as Paris, Lisbon, Belgrade and Marrakech for work. Exciting as this seems, I rarely got to see much of these cities as I was invariably working at a hotel or conference centre from 7 until 7 each day. This two-track work seeks to explore the inability to see the world, with “the sounds of airport terminals .. meant to aurally represent the closest you can get to leaving...whilst still being stuck in the same place”. Perhaps that’s more about people stuck at home rather than in a conference centre, which in a way is almost more painful, being in the very place you want to see, such as an office staring out at the Eiffel Tower without being able to escape, but I understood the intent in my own way.
Cassie Kinoshi - BalletBoyz: Bradley 4:18
I saw a prescient tweet from Cassie Kinoshi during the week so it led me to checking out her music. She’s no newcomer I should say, with her SEED Ensemble receiving a Mercury nomination in 2019 for the album Driftglass. This particular set of music is her composition for Bradley 4:18, a dance performance inspired by the lyrics of Kae Tempest’s Pictures on a Screen. “I know it’s happenin’, but who’s it happenin’ to?” The song tells of Bradley, a PR dude who feels life is passing him by. I haven’t been able to see the performance, but the music is excellent, capturing the confusion and dread of monotonous existence. “I know I exist, but I don’t feel a thing”.
Elaine Howley - The Distance Between Heart And Mouth
I was trying to think of a genre tag for this and I didn’t quite land on anything, although the words neo-folk-jazz may have been rattling around in my brain. Who knows. Elaine Howley has featured in BC before as part of Crevice and on a compilation for Touch Sensitive (who release this album) but I believe this is her first outright appearance. It’s charming and scuzzy and shoegazey and folky. I’m a fan.
The songs of S3RP3NT are meant to be anthemic. Trans people don’t have enough anthems and we deserve to be celebrated. We break barriers simply by existing as our true selves. I want these songs to lift us up, to celebrate us, to dance, to connect and to dive deeper into our transformations. Let’s grow our roses now while we are still here. Make the soil rich and send it forward.
This is a powerful and inspiring blurb. The album is exuberant and, indeed, anthemic, a pure adrenaline rush with skittering sounds and delicate percussion offset by a vocal style that’s almost Gregorian in its approach. Not your regular club offerings but all the more interesting because of it.
This album is wild, with wonderful melodic work colliding with modems and all manner of machinery. ‘Bird Box’ reminds me of living through the 90s and early 00s and also this long-running joke on Monkey Dust. ‘Slice’ reminds me of some of the stranger works on SAW II. ‘Mosquito Alarm’ is, I think, the sound of a fax machine. The way in which the album moves between beautiful music (in the biblical sense) and terrifyingly mundane modern noise is striking.
This isn’t out for a few weeks but it made an excellent accompaniment to my painting. It’s a collaboration between Christina Vantzou and John Also Bennett (who together made one of my favourite albums of recent years in Thoughts of a Dot as it Travels a Surface as well as excellent solo work) and Michael Harrison. Harrison is a composer and pianist who worked under La Monte Young and Pandit Pran Nath and operates a daily raga practice. I first learned of ragas through the work of arushi jain. Unique to Indian classical music, a raga is “a melodic framework for improvisation akin to a melodic mode”. Conversations and musical sessions came together, with each contributing either in direction or performance, with ragas joining improvisations on a custom-tuned grand piano as well as a bed of synth sounds. It’s blissful and serene, and I’m sure deeper listening will uncover hidden depths.
Ukrainian artist Whaler has released an album imagining a distant future where “artificially piloted ships scout the space for planets suitable for human lifeforms”. Beautifully maudlin travel among the stars, alone, forlorn, hopeful and fraught with anticipation. Remind you of anything?
Jennifer Loveless - Reverse Cowgirl 2
Jennifer Loveless is to drop a six-track EP on Butter Sessions next month. It’s full of stompers, but ‘Reverse Cowgirl 2’ caught my ear because of it’s resemblance to the Salt City Orchestra Nightclub Mix of ‘Post Modern Sleaze’ by Sneaker Pimps. I’m not sure if that guitar lick is a sample or just freakishly similar, but that’s what I hear. And it’s good! The tracks are very different, I should say. ‘RC2’ is a thumping banger of a track, a world away from the slower, sultry groove of its predecessor. Bang bang.
OMS - “Lime Matrices Deep Afield”
I don’t know where to begin with this one. It’s on the relatively new Blorpus Editions label, run by Max Allison of Hausu Mountain and Good Willsmith fame. On the same day that Hausu announced a Moth Cock boxset, Blorpus put out “over an hour of new music by the brilliant Kazakhstan-based producer/sound collagist Octa Möbius Sheffner. their work melts my mind, overwhelming in scale & density. so happy to work with them”. It’s true. It’s mind-bending, spirit-rousing stuff, with a million sounds happening at once and any number of potential avenues to explore.
Tim Smith - Machine of Your Time
Lots of dance music is heavy and serious, but there are many ways to make it “fun”. You can remix or sample a popular tune. You can write a big anthem. You can also make it all a bit silly, with strange, weird synth melodies. That’s what Tim Smith has done with ‘Losing My Echo’, the opener on Machine of Your Time. Tracks like ‘Altered Dance’ are more straightforward and less outré, harkening back to specific modes of dance music, but the overall vibe is slightly off-kilter and unexpected. Top work.
Hadi Bastani and Yalda Zamani - TWO (Live at tak Theater Aufbau Berlin)
Tehran’s Noise à Noise continues to drop super experimental music, this time a live performance from two stellar modern composers and performers. A live expression of improv through modules and coding, it’s a thrilling combination of noise, samples, oddities and unknowable entities.
Great recommendations! If you are on the hunt for something new to experience, check out our podcast. Keep up the great work!