From the first jangling sunshine chords on opening track ‘Mango’, Silver Dollar Moments announces itself as a proper piece of indie pop goodness. Then, across 45 minutes, it takes all kinds of turns, into ESG-ish yips and funk, dreamy-arch harmonies, disco synth-pows and stoner bongos, unsettling submerged voices - with all that and more it still flows like a fountain of indie pop, fresh and catchy and altogether. The album features the singles ‘I Only Bought It For The Bottle,’ ‘Let Your Dogtooth Grow’ and ‘Blue Suitcase (Disco Wrist).’
“Dear listeners. This is the first track from my new album, Dead Magic! Me, my band and Randall Dunn spent 9 days in Copenhagen recording this record. The great pipe organ you’re hearing is a 20th century instrument located in Marmor Kirken, "The Marble Church", Copenhagen. Here is a poem for you by the Swedish writer Walter Ljungquist (1900-1974): ”Take the fate of a human being, a thin pathetic line that contours and encircles an infinite and unknown silence. It is in this very silence, in an only imagined and unknown centre, that legends are born. Alas! That is why there are no legends in our time. Our time is a time deprived of silence and secrets; in their absence no legends can grow." Please enjoy the music. Yours sincerely, Anna von Hausswolff"
Sleep’s *The Sciences* begins with a three-minute warm-up of the same name. As though revving a long-dormant engine of feedback and distortion, it’s a fitting start to the legendary doom trio’s first album in almost two decades (released on 4/20, no less). Unlike their hour-plus stoner meditation, *Dopesmoker*, *The Sciences* is divided into six colossal tracks, anchored by the comforting familiarity of sludgy riffs and rumbling percussion. Throughout, you’ll find some of their greatest guitar solos (“Marijuanaut’s Theme”) and lyrics (“Giza Butler,” an homage to Black Sabbath’s Geezer Butler), while stunning, reflective closer “The Botanist” is among the best songs in their genre-defining career.
The Breeders’ music is a ball of little contrasts: beautiful but rough, off-hand but confident, spacey but tactile, lived-in—an unfamiliar object knit from yarn. The group\'s first album with a fully reunited lineup from their breakthrough LP, *Last Splash*, finds them back on their private path, balancing rave-ups (“Nervous Mary,” “Wait in the Car”) with heavy-lidded ballads (“All Nerve,” “Dawn: Making an Effort”) and blasts of noise with girlish harmonies, gently pushing the familiar garage-band template in new directions. As always, their ace remains an ability to elevate naiveté to mysterious, almost supernatural levels—just listen to “Walking With the Killer.”
Maribou State announce their new album “Kingdoms In Colour”, via Ninja Tune’s Counter Records imprint, their first full-length since 2015’s breakthrough debut album “Portraits”. The record features new single ‘Feel Good’ - a collaboration born of their friendship with Houston-based trio Khruangbin and a shared love of breakbeats, vintage surf riffs and a common desire to explore worldwide music cultures. "Sometimes a chance meeting plants the seed for something bigger,” say Khruangbin. “Such was the case when we met Maribou State at KOKO a couple of years ago. We are very happy to be involved in this project. And we ‘feel good’ already.” The band continue their long standing relationship with Holly Walker who has previously vocalled fan favourites such as ‘Midas’, ‘Steal’ and ‘Tongue’. Also featured on the record is recent single ‘Turnmills’ - named after the legendary London club which closed its doors in 2008 - the release was accompanied by a sold-out ‘all-night’ DJ set at Corsica Studios raising money and awareness for the The Night Time Industries Association's #SaveNightlife campaign to protect the UK’s most vulnerable music venues from closure. Today they also announce a new headline UK tour this Autumn. Returning with a 5-piece band, they play at London’s iconic Roundhouse on the 18th October. Ahead of this they will also embark on a string of European festival dates which include a headline show at Sonar By Day, Parklife Festival, Roskilde, Pukkelpop Festival, Nova Batida and recently DJ’d after Flying Lotus at All Points East festival in London. Beginning life in 2011 as a project between Chris Davids and Liam Ivory, Maribou State had released a string of EP’s and singles before the arrival of debut album “Portraits” propelled them to the world stage. Spawning a live show that took them around the globe and included standout festival performances at Glastonbury, Bestival, a headline slot at Secret Garden party; a 32-date European tour with two sold-out London shows including the legendary KOKO; plus dates throughout Asia, Australia and America. They received radio support from the likes of Annie Mac, Zane Lowe and Gilles Peterson, addition to the BBC 6 Music A-list, a 5-show BBC Radio 1 Residency, a slot on the legendary BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix and performed a session Live from Maida Vale. Critical support came from the likes of The Guardian, I-D magazine and Vogue, with the album amassing over 80 million streams to date and drawing comparisons to acts such as The XX, James Blake & Mount Kimbie, as well earning them plaudits from the likes of DJ Koze and Bonobo. This incredible success that followed the release of “Portraits” took Chris and Liam quite by surprise, “It was like Christmas every day” laughs Liam, “stuff like doing a show in Bangalore and having a crowd come and see us who knew the music and would sing all the words. It was an incredible experience”. After more than a year of touring they returned to the UK to begin work on new material, but relocating their studio from The Shack - their home-built studio at the back of Liam’s garden in Hertfordshire - to a new base in London found them struggling to find their creative flow. The solution was to start looking outward and back over their journey of the past two years. They began making regular excursions out of the city, setting up a temporary studio space for weeks at a time, they started to piece together a “sonic collage” - drawing on ideas that were written while touring in places like India, and on field recordings from Asia, Australia, Morocco, America and beyond - the result of which is the stunning "Kingdoms In Colour”. “The first album felt quite insular for us” says Chris, "not just in sound, but literally that it was all written in The Shack. We always had a bigger idea of what we wanted it to be, we wanted to create something that was palpable, that could in some way transport you to another country or another place entirely in your mind”. “The idea with Maribou State was always to draw on influences from different parts of the world” continues Liam "by traveling, sampling, recording, we wanted to create this all encompassing thing. Which is what this second record has ended up being for us”.
Starcrawler’s key reference points—The Stooges, Black Sabbath, Sex Pistols, T. Rex—are all old enough to be their grandparents. However, the L.A. quartet attack their swaggering, Ryan Adams-produced songs with such conviction and vitality that they always sound bracingly fresh. With jagged riffs and a pneumatic beat that carries the track to completion in under 90 seconds, opener “Train” is a thrilling statement of intent, while “I Love LA” and “Let Her Be” demonstrate the value of packing a robust tune beneath the noise and posturing.
Ought’s first couple of albums offered a tense, splintered if anthemic vision of post-punk, leavening their discord with hooks, their hail with the occasional hit of sunshine. Far more beautiful but no less exploratory, their third album finds them ascending to the gloomy grandeur of bands like The National or Protomartyr, from the gentle grit of “Disgraced in America” to the Joy Division-ish “These 3 Things” to the striking “Desire,” which blooms from a jagged whisper to a soul-dredging ballad.
Lucy Dacus is done thinking small. After her 2016 debut "No Burden" won her unanimous acclaim as one of rock’s most promising new voices, Dacus returns with Historian, a remarkably assured 10-track statement of intent. It finds her unafraid to take on the big questions — the life-or-death reckonings, and the ones that just feel that way. It’s a record full of bracing realizations, tearful declarations and moments of hard-won peace, expressed in lyrics that feel destined for countless yearbook quotes and first tattoos. Dacus and her band recorded the album in Nashville last March, re-teaming with No Burden producer Collin Pastore, and mixed it a few months later with A-list studio wizard John Congleton. The sound they created, with substantial input from multi-instrumentalist and live guitarist Jacob Blizard, is far richer and fuller than the debut — an outward flowering of dynamic, living, breathing rock and roll. Dacus’ remarkable sense of melody and composition are the driving force throughout, giving Historian the immersive feel of an album made by an artist in full command of her powers. The year leading up to "Historian," with its electoral disasters and other assorted heartbreaks, has been a rough one for many of us, Dacus included. She found solace in crafting a thoughtful narrative arc, writing a concept album about cautious optimism in the face of adversity, with thematic links between songs that reveal themselves on repeat listens. “It starts out dark and ends hopeful, but it gets darker in between; it goes to the deepest, darkest, place and then breaks,” she explains. “What I’m trying to say throughout the album is that hope survives, even in the face of the worst stuff.”
Cavern Of Anti-Matter return for their third studio album on their own Duophonic label. Hormone Lemonade sees the band heavily utilising the sounds of modular synths and home built drum machines, yet still keeping the loose, improvised sound familiar to fans of their first two albums, with minimal guitar melodies and live drum kit helping to build hypnotic layers of texture. The albums genesis was in the self-constructed rhythm machines of band member Holger Zapf, the Taktron Z3 and Taktron Z2, being recorded to tape during three one-hour sessions. These sessions also included the use of 70s Hohner and Eko drum machines. Holger played his parts in a free-form way and the bpm varied wildly as it was not possible to sync it to any outside controllers. Tim Gane edited these initial jams into useable chunks and proceeded to overdub each new rhythmic “chunk” with some basic musical ideas, keeping in tune to the hum of the machines and retaining the “feel” of the inherent pulse. Joe Dilworth arrived to lay down a beat over these minimal backing tracks, going with the flow as best he could. In the following months the music was fleshed out using various synths and sequencers from Roland, Arp, Oberheim and Holger’s modular synth set up. As well as many of the bass and sequencer parts the modular also supplied the chords by tuning each one of it’s five oscillators to specific notes and intervals.
It’s a good eight minutes and most of two songs into the second album from this Houston, Texas trio before you hear any vocals, and by that point they may well be superfluous. Khruangbin (the name translates from Thai as “flying engine” or “airplane” and the former feels particularly fitting) make immaculate instrumental tracks that effortlessly accommodates psychedelic rock, Thai funk, Caribbean grooves, vintage funk, and Middle Eastern riffs. What makes *Con Todo El Mundo* (another translation, this time from Spanish: “for all the world”) so pleasurable is the way those touchstones tie together to create a singular, gratifying sound. Bassist Laura Lee deftly moves in and out of the beat, guitarist Mark Speer supplies long and supple runs, and drummer Donald “DJ” Johnson places a funk kick on the rhythm as these songs unfurl without undue stress. Like gears on a car, the three-piece can shift up into the sharp, reverb-heavy bite of “Maria También” or slow into a nocturnal, jazzy drift on “August 10.” The feel is mellow, but it’s never merely easy listening; the shifting melodies and pinpoint drum parts keep you focused on the many possibilities of this sound.
It’s a good record. But I can’t really listen to it anymore. It kind of broke my brain. It took a year, and there were a lot of times I thought it was going nowhere, a lot of botched sessions. It was all my fault, no one else’s. I was just totally unprepared. I went in with over-confidence, I went in there like ‘Yeah, I’m ready to go!’ but I was just kind of bullshitting. I went in expecting to make a fucking masterpiece, but I kept hitting a brick wall. I was under a lot of stress because I was trying to make an anti-folk record and I was having trouble doing it. I wanted to make something deep-fried and more me-sounding. I didn’t want to be jammy acoustic guy anymore. I just wanted to make something weird and far-out that came from the heart finally. I was always trying to make something like this I guess, trying to catch up with my imagination. And I think I succeeded in that way — it’s got some weird instrumentation on there, and some surreal far-out words. And it’s more Chicago-y sounding. Chicago sounds like a train constantly coming towards you but never arriving. That’s the sound I hear, all the time, ringing in my ears. Everybody here’s always hustling. Everybody who talks to you on the street’s always got something they’re coming at you with. It’s the sound of strangers dodging one another. And landlords knocking on doors to get rent that people don’t have. But it’s eerily quiet at night. This record is the sound of walking home late at night through Chicago in the middle of winter and being half-creeped out, scared someone’s going to punch you in the back of the head, and half in the most tranquil state you’ve been in all day, enjoying the quiet and this faint wind, and buses going by on all-night routes. That’s the sound to tune in to. That’s the sound of Chicago to me. Chicago. More than ever I’m just finding little details about it that I love. There’s so many weird twists about it: the way that street lights look here is really peculiar, and a really bleak sense when you walk around. It looks gray, there’s not a lot of color, and I find a lot of radiance in that. And oh man it smells like diesel. And garbage cans. And in the summer when it really heats up it’s extra garbage-canny. And everything here looks like it’s about to break. It looks like it’s derelict. But that’s what I’m used to, that’s what I like. The amount of imperfection in this city is really perfect. So I’ve fallen in love with Chicago pretty hard over the past year, despite crippling depression. I’ve realized I can’t not be in a city. I appreciate nature, I appreciate driving through nature, but you put me in a campsite for more than two days and I’ll flip the fuck out. I need to hear people outside of my window trying to buy crack. I need to be able to buy a taco at two in the morning. I need to hear the neighbors yelling really fucking loud at each other in the middle of the night. I need people. I need people really fucking bad. You have to find calm in the city. You actively search for it. It’s not a la carte like it is in the middle of the Rocky Mountains. Which are beautiful, they’re one of God’s finest creations — I’m not talking shit about the Rocky Mountains. But in the city it’s like scoring drugs, you’ve got to score your tranquil situations. And that’s the sound of Chicago to me. The songs don’t really deal with any political or personal or social issues at all. Mostly it just comes from being bummed out. And there’s not a lot of musical influences on the record. I wasn’t even listening to music when I made it. Last year was probably the least I’ve listened to music in my adult life. I mean I was listening to stuff in the van — I listened to a lot of Genesis records. I got really into Genesis. But there’s nothing else I could point to. Maybe I’d say it’s a record for coming up or coming down. It’s not an album for the middle of the day. It’s for the beginning or end of it. I quit drugs and booze recently. I got sick of being a party animal — I don’t want to be 19-gin-and-tonics-Ryley any more. My brain is working a little better now, but man I was just going at it pretty wildly, and then trying to make a record while I was drinking, it was kind of like torture. We all had no idea what was going on, every song we’d be like ‘What is this record?’ Because every song sounded different. In a way this record was working with everybody that I’ve worked with for years, and it wasn’t like a Fleetwood Mac thing where everybody fell in love and divorced or anything, but a lot of times we were butting heads in the studio. I hadn’t played any of the songs live ever, whereas with my earlier records I’d play the shit out of them live and then go into the studio when they were totally cooked up and ready to go. But these songs were all half ideas and riffs I had on my mind, so that held things up for a while. Being meticulous and being deets-oriented is not my thing at all. I’ve never been like that. I’m kind of like go go go! Making a quick record is not hard, it’s the easiest thing the world, so working in this time frame, over a year, made me go kind of nuts and… oh, tortured artist bullshit, blah blah blah. But then last summer we started playing songs back to back and finally we started to hear a common thread running through the record. I’m lucky enough to have some people who are playing on it who had a big part in shaping the songs and writing with me. Cooper Crain, the guy who engineered it, and played all the synthesizers. And when the flute guy, Nate Lepine came in, that was really something that made it special. The producer was this guy LeRoy Bach. I love LeRoy, he’s a really talented guy. He did the last record too. The last record was cool but I was still figuring out what I was good at. But I’m fucking 28 years old, I’ve got to figure out a sound, figure out something that I enjoy doing. So this record is a little bit more grown up. Ol’Ryley’s just workin’ on bein’ a better Ryley. I think more than anything the thing to take away from this record is that I appreciate what improv and jamming and that outlook on music has done for me, but I wanted rigid structure for these songs. I don’t want to expand upon them live. There’s a looseness to some of the songs I guess, but I didn’t want to rely on just hanging out on one note. It’s so straight-forward that I can see a lot of people really not liking it to be honest. But I’m so happy, I’m happy that it’s completely different and unexpected. But I know it’s divisive. It’s hard to talk about. It’s a weird record. Ryley Walker was in conversation with Laura Barton As mentioned by Ryley above, Deafman Glance is the second Ryley Walker album produced by LeRoy Bach and Walker himself. It was largely recorded at the Minbal (now JAMDEK) Studios in Chicago. Some later sessions also took place at USA Studios and in LeRoy’s kitchen. Cooper Crain (Bitchin’ Bajas, Cave) recorded and mixed the album, as well as adding his shimmering synths all over it. Ryley plays electric & acoustic guitars and was joined by long-time 6-string sparring partners, Brian J Sulpizio and Bill Mackay, who both play electric. LeRoy Bach also plays some electric guitar, whilst adding all piano and other keys. Andrew Scott Young and Matt Lux play bass – Andrew supplying some double-bass, both of them played electric. Drums / percussion are handled by Mikel Avery and Quin Kirchner. Topping off this list of notorious Chi-Town players is Nate Lepine, who added a lot of flute and a little saxophone too.
Resolute in their sound, ‘Siesta’ is the perfect soundtrack for that summer romance and the inevitable break up. Heartbreak has never sounded so sweet! Hater’s powerful vulnerability and charm has seen them rise quickly through the ranks earning kudos from NPR (Austin 100), Stereogum (Best New Bands Of 2017), The Fader, BBC6 Music, BBC Radio 1 and more. Sprawling guitars chime whilst slow burning grooves and classic rock rhythms allow tender-hearted vocals to soar over intelligible dream pop. Effortless and assured, the Scandi quartet drift eloquently into well-structured and stunning melodies. Produced by Joakim Lindberg (Yast and Hey Elbow) at Studio Sickan within old railway sheds outside of Malmö Sweden. Hater tackle their personal experiences of life, love and relationships yet through their shared songwriting there's a togetherness. Synth pop earworm ‘It’s So Easy’ contrasts the slower paced 'I Wish I Gave You More Time Because I Love You' that blends beautiful sweeping sax from Inge Petersson Lindbäck. The haunting metronomic beat of ‘I Sure Want To’ calls to mind local residents Death And Vanilla, Hollywood glamour exudes on shimmering 'Things To Keep Up With' and 'Cut Me Loose' captures those long youthful days of summers gone by.. "Wouldn't it be fun? Noon is halfway and I feel gone". Hater “boast Marr-esque guitars and vocals reminiscent of fellow Swedes and The Concretes” (Norman Records) whilst having the pop sensibilities of The Chills, Alvvays, Snail Mail and Makthaverskan. In early 2017 Hater released their debut album ‘You Tried’ blending jangle with grit, their recent EP ‘Red Blinders’ (Fire Records) soon followed in support of their first headline tour across Europe. Festivals in 2018 have already included SXSW, Eurosonic and Ment. Hater release ‘Siesta’ on limited edition yellow opaque double LP, standard black vinyl and CD via Fire Records on 28th September.
"It was the most beautiful summer of my life." Memories — places, vacancies, allusions — are fundamental characters in Mary Lattimore's evocative craft. Inside her music, wordless narratives, indefinite travelogues, and braided events skew into something enchantingly new. The Los Angeles-based harpist recorded her breakout 2016 album, At The Dam, during stops along a road trip across America, letting the serene landscapes of Joshua Tree and Marfa, Texas color her compositions. In 2017, she presented Collected Pieces, a tape compiling sounds from her past life in Philadelphia: odes to the east coast, burning motels, and beach town convenience stores. In 2018, from a restorative station — a redwood barn, nestled in the hills above San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge — emanates Hundreds of Days, her second full-length LP with Ghostly International. The record sojourns between silences and speech, between microcosmic daily scenes and macrocosmic universal understandings, between being alien in promising new places and feeling torn from old native havens. It's an expansive new chapter in Lattimore's story, and an expression of mystified gratitude. A study in how ordinary components helix together to create an extraordinary world. Awarded a residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Lattimore spent two summer months living with 15 fellow artists — writers, playwrights, musicians, poets, painters, activists, curators — in a cluster of old Victorian military buildings on the Northern Pacific Coast. Days offered solitude; Lattimore set up in a spacious barn, able to arrange her instruments at will. Nights welcomed new perspectives. "Hanging out with a lot of accomplished artists with poetic ways of looking at the world was really inspiring. My heart was in a bit of a tangle after leaving Philadelphia. I was holding onto things instead of moving forward. My time there was a nostalgia detox, a way to press reset in a healthy way. Also breathing in the freshest air in America, straight off of the ocean, felt good." Throughout the shifting locales there is one consistent companion Lattimore engages: a 47-string Lyon and Healy harp. The instrument wires directly into her psyche. Pitchfork's Marc Masters posits, "she can practically talk through it at this point; she’s created a language." The space and stillness of the Headlands afforded Lattimore freedom to her expand her vocabulary, to stretch out and experiment with layers of keyboard, guitar, theremin, and grand piano. Lattimore's voice sweeps beneath the plucks and washes of opener “It Feels Like Floating,” enraptured by the winding current, and reappearing in the second minute of the immense "Never Saw Him Again." The track elevates towards a shimmering apex of static and percussion before organ drone yields to signature halcyon flutters. As with much of Lattimore's work, the track titles are telling; "Baltic Birch" is a somber windswept march that sways gracefully out of step, a remembrance of a recent trip to Latvia where she was struck by the abandoned resort towns along the Baltic Sea. “Hello From The Edge of The Earth” is an earnest reflection of Lattimore’s love of the natural world, recognizing the thresholds of varying terrains. The album's fifth track borrows its name from Lattimore’s favorite line in Denis Johnson’s short story “Emergency” from Jesus’ Son. A character, lost in a blizzard, reassesses a disjointed universe, a clash between curtains of snow and angels descending out of a brilliant blue summer: it isn’t an apocalypse, it is a drive-in movie, with stars hovering above the lot, off the screen, in the throes of the Midwestern storm. This mix-up is disorienting and existentially tragic; Lattimore's darkly strummed piece is a melancholic parallel, mimicking Johnson’s elegant suture attaching two remarkably discontinuous spaces. Micro-revelations, not quite as bright as torn skies but nonetheless enlightening, were everyday occurrences during Lattimore's residency. Living small days with small tasks — feeling little dramas within the arcadian universe of a national park — rendered her the sense that disjointed spaces can be interconnected no matter the enormity that divides them. It's in this elastic scale of perception that something as simultaneously simple and intricate as Hundreds of Days can flourish.
London trio Value Void are an offbeat proposition. A sui generis bolt from nowhere, their debut album Sentimental (due out in October on Tough Love) is a collection of luxuriantly deep, shag pile-warm, analogue proto-punk. Paz Maddio and Marta Zabala grew up with each other in Azul, a small town south of Buenos Aires, where the seeds of this project were sown. They collaborate in the same way that Elton John and Bernie Taupin wrote songs, with Marta penning lyrics then taking them to Paz to spin them in to music. Marta first came to London on tour with the super-slanted art punks Los Cripis, where she met Luke Tristram (of Cop, Score and Owner) who released their record via his Unwork label. Paz followed to join them and scrape rent from the city's bars and cafes. By early 2017 the three of them were holed up in practice rooms, Luke adding Evens-esque basslines that laid concrete to their minimalist guitar-lead pop songs. Originally as WVS, they started playing shows with bands that had once orbited the tiny Power Lunches venue in Hackney and, since its death, were now to be found on bills at DIY Space, New River Studios and other dusty successors of its autonomous, cheap drink, creative-friendly spirit. In common with bands like Shopping, rudimentary surroundings and resources fed into nonetheless ambitious, hooky work. Songs such as “Teen For Him,” a self-effacing lark importing strains of Leslie Gore and the Velvets; the minimal, Guided by Voices-reminiscent chug of “Bariloche” and “Cupids Bow,” an up tempo, Breeders-esque standout, were lynch pins of a pummeling, inspired set. In April of that year, they recorded with Euan Hinshelwood of Young Husband at the studio TVT, in an overlooked corner the other side of Blackheath, tucked under giant knots of flyover on the way to Charlton in South East London. The intention was casual but the results, seven dazzlingly assured songs nailed in a couple of days, sucked attention from several quarters as they skipped between hard drives. They secured a tour with Frankie Cosmos and signed to London label Tough Love, who released the single “Back In The Day” in May 2018. Upon deciding to flesh the songs out for a full length, they returned to TVT studios with Euan in April this year, tweaking the mix and laying down two new songs: “Mind,” a down tempo lullaby/lament in which the band track into the territory of early St. Vincent, Grouper or Julianna Barwick, supported by a raw dirge that blossoms in feedback, and “The Deluge,” which is also reflective but structured by a roaming curiosity and big chorus seeking road movie oblivion. The album is instantly affecting, with an ease and clarity that suits the elegance of the lyrics: coded love songs and cool reflections on life which are all the more vulnerable and touching sung in Paz Maddio's lilting, ultrachromatic voice - a ceramic-sharp diagonal transatlantic on a pure open tone, with subtle waves of vibrato at its top end. It's a particular heart breaker on tracks such as “Babeland” and “Dead Ladies Lament”. Restricted to a palette of drums, bass, guitar and double tracked vocals caught on 2" tape, coloured here and there with a daub of feedback or a passage of ground-shifting tape delay, this is the sort of thing that gets called “stripped back”. It speaks to the powerful understatement at the heart of their style, but it fails to capture the crafty, delicate, taught and spaced-out ride Value Void subject you to: a species of NY proto-punk and Californian post-hardcore born miraculously from London's piss swilling street level like religious icons in toast.
If Only There Was a River is the first full-length studio album from Anna St. Louis. The songwriter, who originally hails from Kansas City, began writing songs after moving to Los Angeles five years ago and has previously released a cassette of recordings on Woodsist / Mare Records, appropriately titled “First Songs”. The tape received notice from NPR: All Songs Considered, Pitchfork, and Stereogum. On her proper debut, St. Louis, spreads her wings and expands on the promise hinted at on First Songs. To achieve that end, St. Louis enlisted Kyle Thomas (King Tuff) and Kevin Morby to produce the album, which was engineered by Thomas in his home in Mount Washington, LA. The collection of 11 songs also features Justin Sullivan (Night Shop) on drums and multi-instrumentalist Oliver Hill (Pavo Pavo). While hints of influences like Loretta Lynn, John Fahey and Townes Van Zandt peek out of the corners of the songs, If Only There Was a River is not a nostalgic affair. Rather it marks the emergence of an artist fully coming into their own. “Being from the Midwest means a certain tone is woven into ones’ fabric. And every now and then, someone comes along who has the power to convey that feeling in their cadence alone. And so all hail Anna St Louis, who lets us into her world of heartache, wonder and a never-ending, never-beginning dance with time. Her album is for the mystics, reminding us that the world is full of magic at every turn, if only we let ourselves see it. Sometimes just by stating a simple observation, St. Louis lets us in on an infinite truth that perhaps we wouldn’t have seen otherwise. To step into the world of Anna St. Louis is to step into a world where the heart leads straight to the soul and where everything is cloaked in beautiful mystery. If Only There Was a River is a record of longing - of a soul reaching for more." -Kevin Morby
Even after a couple of albums, the instrumental combo known as Szun Waves still sounds unknowable. British producer Luke Abbott’s synthesizers have a dreamlike quality, and Australian drummer Laurence Pike (Triosk, PVT) conveys the immediacy of a live jazz room, with Londoner Jack Wyllie’s saxophone hovering in mysterious, melodic spaces between. That strangely organic mix, wholly improvised, is everywhere on *New Hymn to Freedom*: the whirring, whooshing feedback squalls of “Fall Into Water,” the noisy, interactive tumult of “High Szun,” the loose swing feel and soprano sax chants of “Temple,” and the lonesome synth meditation of “Moon Runes.” On the longest piece, the closing title track, the trio explore blurred zones between jazz and experimental electronic music, easing gradually into tempo from the primordial haze.
Sometimes in improvised music there can be a distance between listener and players, a sense you’re sitting back and admiring their interplay and abstraction – but with Szun Waves’ second album, you’re right in there with them, inside the playing, experiencing the absolute joy the three musicians feel as they circle around each other, exploring the spaces they’ve opened up. The three members already have sparkling pedigrees of their own. Norfolk’s Luke Abbott is well known for his explorations of the zones between pure ambience and the leftmost fringes of club culture. With Portico Quartet and Circle Traps, Jack Wyllie has been in the vanguard of UK fusions of jazz, classical and club music. Australian drummer Laurence Pike has likewise found a unique voice in improvised and experimental music-making, whether in the bands Triosk or PVT, or as a solo artist. The trio’s musical relationship has grown naturally and steadily, and it shows. From Wyllie adding shimmering sustained sax notes to Abbott’s gorgeous ambient pieces in 2013, Szun Waves emerged when Pike was added to the mix, energising the sound but still keeping its levitational qualities. Their 2016 self-released debut album hit a natural groove – it was a “proof of concept” as Abbott says – and now they’re in a place of pure spontaneity: New Hymn To Freedom is a document of six entirely live improvisations – “no edits or overdubs” – and its title couldn’t be more apt.
serpentwithfeet is an avant-garde vocalist and performance artist whose growing body of work is rooted in dueling obsessions with the ephemeral and the everlasting – key components of his artistic journey from a childhood stint as a choirboy in Baltimore through his time at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where he studied vocal performance before relocating to New York City. His forthcoming debut full-length album soil is a return to the sensibilities and wide-eyed curiosity of his musical youth before symmetry and sterile soundscapes ruled the roost. With the release of soil the chameleonic serpentwithfeet (born Josiah Wise) rediscovers and ultimately returns to the unhinged version of himself he was sure he had outgrown. “soil is about me returning home then realizing that i carry home with me daily.” Following the release of Blisters – his 2016 foray into hybridized pop produced by Björk collaborator The Haxan Cloak – and two big tours, serpentwithfeet returned to the studio in 2017. There, he explored the fullness of his voice and became increasingly interested in playful singing which intrigued recording engineer Jason Agel. That vocal performance was only complicated by his feverish rumination on the dissolution of an impassioned love affair that left him stunned and speeding toward the inevitable – a more intimate relationship with himself. One in which he embraces and mocks his own flaws with abandon, lets an uncharacteristic shock of hair down over his infamously provocative forehead tattoos, makes room for his most pressing sexual desires and returns to the gospel that dominated his formative years. In this embrace of imperfection and romantic failure, serpentwithfeet has found soil; the forthcoming album is his first release for the label partnership between Tri Angle Records and Secretly Canadian. soil features contributions from rising experimental producer mmph, sound manipulator Katie Gately, A$AP Rocky contemporary Clams Casino, and Paul Epworth – one of the Grammy Award-winning minds responsible for Adele’s critically-acclaimed album 21. The project recorded between New York City’s WhiteWater production house and Epworth’s London studio was co-produced by serpentwithfeet. On this outing he trades glossolalia and peacocking showmanship for intricately layered harmonies, a sumptuous bottom register that appears for the first time to challenge his fluttering tenor, and ballsy sonic experimentation encouraged by Gately, whose talent he describes as “making voices sound like elephants and elephants sound like car engines.” Together they develop an unctuous sound that suggests billowing clouds and the dense, plodding stomp of 12-bar blues. Once concerned with perfect execution of gospel runs and dishing up a gossamer falsetto, serpentwithfeet is out of balance and reveling in the concept of mess on soil. Particularly, what it means to part ways with sterility and the urge to uncoil himself in order to occupy more space. soil is the moment at which he unfolds himself with zero intention of closing back up. “I’m constantly talking about how black men are always manspreading and pushed to be these super masculine, bovine – seven foot niggas. For a long time I was interested in what would happen if we rebelled against that and we were small. I was into the minutiae and then I realized I wanted to take up space again. I have practiced that smallness and quietness and that’s fine, but now I don’t want to be that delicate. I’m not interested in that right now. This album definitely pushed me in that way. There’s a certain naivete in this new music. With the blisters EP, I was trying to prove a point to myself and the listener. I was trying to string together a lot of ideas before. This time I wasn’t trying to sound smart. I was as crafty as I could be with the words, but I just wanted to keep my eyes open and be accountable for what I was seeing .” Evocative of the stillness of lying down and feeling the gravitational pull of the earth beneath the body, soil is a writhing, electronic melodrama that pairs synth woodwinds and sinister transitions with serpentwithfeet’s extra-terrestrial timbre. The album elevates his most persistent weaknesses, and revisits the trinity of r&b, gospel, and pop that drove earlier projects. serpentwithfeet busies himself with a manic range of emotion which includes sobbing, laughing, mocking his own truculence and identifying his proclivity to smother lovers as a trait antithetical to the kind of intimacy they seek. He speaks as tenderly to the mythical men of his dreams as he does former lovers. His humor is apparent on songs like “seedless,” “messy,” and “slow syrup,” which poke fun at his overbearing presence in the lives of partners. serpentwithfeet tinkers with the extremes of his ideals to illustrate the ways in which past partners have felt oppressed by his needs; he likens them to unreasonable questions like, “Will you show up for me if I ask you to sharpen your teeth because we don’t have any knives and I need someone to cut this food?” “cherubim” and “fragrant” elucidate the connection between romantic obsession and the sentiments of church songs about unwavering devotion to god in statements like, “I get to devote my life to him, I get to sing like the cherubim.” In seeking to commune with a higher power across a number of bodies, from the individual self to the embrace of a lover and the sanctity of partnership, serpentwithfeet is responsible for a compilation that forces consciousness of the myriad intersections at which god exists. At once whimsical and mechanical, soil traverses the depths of human emotion in search of love. The music inspired by “intense collaborative work” is an extension of the mourning ritual a crestfallen serpentwithfeet first created to grieve heartbreak. He cites influences as varied as lullabies, an affinity for pungent body odor, his doll collection, and his mother’s love of traditional hymns. soil conjures his early fascinations with Brandy and Björk as easily as it references the pageantry of anthemic compositions by Antonin Dvorak and the ecstatic praise of the black church; the abiding prayer house rhythm is established by industrial washing machines on Gately’s opener “whisper.” serpentwithfeet is explicit, however, in breaking with the condemnations of taboo subjects in order to deliver the language necessary to provide black, queer people with a heartfelt, futurist folk –– a new mother tongue constructed to override his prolonged inability to articulate his love life because he had no knowledge of an established standard for speaking about intimate experiences beyond the binary lens of heterosexuality. In being vulnerable enough to vocalize his journey, serpentwithfeet encourages a systematic dismantling of the shame that is appended to homosexuality through the creation of a sonic space buoyed by radical acts of love and sustained repetition of his innermost thoughts. “I remember growing up there was language for how men and women interact. I don’t have a lot of examples of black gay men that are out here thriving. Because of social media we see more examples but at the time when I was thinking about this and dealing with my own relationship, I had difficulty articulating my feelings. I hate to say it , but I think there is still a lot of shame around two black men dating and loving on each other and I was very aware of that. While working on soil, i was exploring and trying to make sense of my needs and my love language. Because of this process, I’ve fallen in love with my idiosyncrasies. I’m growing my hair again. With this album I gave myself permission to let the leaves grow, let the flowers bloom, let myself be hairy and let my sound be hairy. I’m excited about the way things naturally come out of my body. I am always going to embrace discipline and streamlining. But I’m in a space at the moment where I don’t need or desire the corset. It’s time for expansiveness.”
Michael Rault's second full-length, It's A New Day Tonight, has its home in the darkness, like much rock and roll—many of its songs look at nocturnal activities, particularly sleep. "Sleeping and dreaming were attractive concepts," says Rault. "I was looking for an escape from a lot of frustrating and dissatisfying conditions in my day-to-day life." As he was working on It’s A New Day Tonight's songwriting, Rault kept entering the orbit of Wayne Gordon, producer and head engineer at Brooklyn's legendary Daptone studio—first through opening stints for the late firebrand Charles Bradley, then while on tour with Aussie shredders King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. The album has the loose-limbed feel of a lost album by '70s bands that bridged the gap between folk-rock's open-hearted strumming and power pop's crisp, melody-forward confections—Wings, Badfinger, Big Star, 10cc—yet possesses an energy shot through with 21st-century optimism.
A mutant offspring of diverse stylings, unlikely convergences, unfixed constellations, ZEBRA, Alexis Georgopoulos’ - aka Arp - fifth full-length album, is a post-everything symbiosis of ancient to future psychotropics, emphasizing points of connectivity between far-flung traditions. ZEBRA is as naturalistic as it is alien, disrupting outdated boundaries between musical traditions, hierarchies and genre politics.
Domino are honoured to introduce Devotion; the hugely anticipated debut album from one of London's most exciting underground talents, Tirzah. Arriving on the back of a lauded run of releases on Greco Roman, Devotion shines a brilliant new light on Tirzah's unique experimental pop, exquisitely soulful voice and potent contemporary lyricism.
Like fellow time travelers (and occasional tourmates) Tame Impala, Unknown Mortal Orchestra manage to update the mind-bending sounds of \'70s psychedelia in a way that doesn’t feel like a retread. Following the direction set out on 2015’s *Multi-Love*, *Sex & Food* dives further into soul and R&B, providing spaced-out takes on Prince (“Hunnybee”), Stevie Wonder (“Ministry of Alienation”), even straight-up disco-pop (“Everyone Acts Crazy Nowadays”). As strong as the hooks are, it’s the band’s sound that remains most immediate—a fascinating mix of hi-fi and lo-fi, slick and homespun, with everything crackling in the mix so warmly you feel like you can touch it.
Where are we headed? What are we consuming, how is it affecting us, and why does everything feel so bad and weird sometimes? These are some of the questions posed on Ruban Nielson’s fourth album as Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Sex & Food—a delightfully shapeshifting album that filters these real-deal serious themes through a vibrant sonic lens that spans battered drum-machine funk, doomy and thrashing rock, and pink-hued psychedelic disco. Recorded in a variety of locales from Seoul and Hanoi to Reykjavik, Mexico City, and Auckland, Sex & Food is a practical musical travelogue, with local musicians from the countries that Nielson and his band visited pitching in throughout. Over the last decade, Nielson’s established himself as one of the most inventive sonic traveler currently working, and Sex & Food is the most eclectic and expansive Unknown Mortal Orchestra release yet, from the light-footed R&B of “Hunnybee” to the stomping flange of “Major League Chemicals.” The adventurousness is all the more impressive considering that there’s a bit of DNA from the past UMO discography in Sex & Food: the soft-focus psych of the project’s 2011 debut LP, the lovely melancholia of 2013’s II, and the weirded-out funk of 2015’s virtuosic Multi-Love. But rather than living in the past, Nielson is firmly in the here and now, drawing from personal unrest and generational malaise while surveying a variety of societal ailments. “If You’re Going to Break Yourself” and “Not in Love We’re Just High” chronicle the effects of drugs and addiction on personal relationships, while the lyrics “Ministry of Alienation” drip with modern-day paranoia like the silvery guitar tones that jewel the song’s structure: “My thinking is done by your machine/ Can’t escape the 20th century.” It’s a scary world out there, and it’s been that way for a while—and Sex & Food finds Nielson surveying the damage while attempting to reckon with the magnitude of it all. Along with UMO bandmates and frequent collaborators Jacob Portrait and Kody Nielson, Ruban began work on Sex & Food in early 2016, initially intending to draw musical influence from post-punk luminaries of his youth—think Killing Joke or Public Image Limited’s singular Flowers of Romance. But as he toiled, Ruban began to realize the aesthetic limits of his aims. “Post-punk is so tasteful to my generation,” he states. “There’s no guilty pleasure to it—I just think it’s cool and good. When it comes to rock, I want to get into dodgier territory.” So Ruban exited his comfort zone, literally: even though some of Sex & Food was recorded in his Portland, Oregon home studio (the same one that adorns Multi-Love’s cover), his desire to “get out of there,” as he puts it with a chuckle, led to a quest for creative inspiration that literally spanned the globe—from Reykjavik to Mexico City, as well as the Vietnamese city of Hanoi, where Ruban was inspired to draw influence from the imagery of the Vietnam-based films of his youth, as well as the powerful images conjured by Jimi Hendrix’s recording of “All Along the Watchtower.” “It was just like I hoped it would be,” he gushes about the city. “It’s really hard to record there—everything is so humid—but it was a really inspiring place, too.” At one point in their travels, the recording process was interrupted while in Mexico City, as Ruban and bandmate Jacob Portrait were trapped in the city’s Chapultepec park following the devastating earthquake that hit Central Mexico this past year. “I was terrified,” he states about the experience, which cut off their access not only to the studio but to their lodgings. “I was so shaken up that I ended up getting a bunch of stuff done when I left,” Nielson explains on the effect that the experience had on Sex and Food’s creative genesis. And his journey eventually led him to a curious but fruitful fount of inspiration: his past work. “At first, I thought that this was going to be a sad record, like II,” he explains when discussing how reflection helped push Sex & Food forward. “I was influenced enough by my own early stuff that I went into it thinking, ‘If I was a fan, how would I want to bring some of that back into what I’m doing?’” That old-becomes-new approach is more than apparent on the lush, beautifully understated “Huneybee,” reminiscent of II’s “Swim and Sleep (Like a Shark)” and drawing lyrical inspiration from Ruban’s daughter whose middle name gave 'Hunnybee' its title. “I was trying to figure out how to write a love song about my daughter,” he states. “She’s seven now, but the song will still be there when she’s a woman, so I was thinking about encoded fatherly instructions. I thought it was cool to say, ‘There’s no such thing sweeter than a sting.’ It makes her the protagonist—she can kill you! I thought that was good. The other line was ‘Don’t be such a modern stranger,” because I was thinking about what if the world is more atomized and isolated as she gets older?” Indeed, the modern world—and all the thorny complications that come with living in it—loomed large on Ruban’s mind while making Sex & Food. But even though he’s not afraid to get topical throughout—as evidenced on the surprisingly boisterous “American Guilt” or the roomy-disco medication-meditation “Everyone Acts Crazy Nowadays”—Ruban was also careful not to get too political, and for good reason. “Everything is so soaked in politics, and it’s kind of depressing for everything to be political right now,” he explains. “I wanted to keep it light. I think everyone’s feeling angry, and there’s nothing particularly interesting about my anger.” A statement of selflessness, to be sure—but make no mistake: Sex & Food reaffirms the vitality of Ruban’s voice in today’s musical landscape, and when it comes to navigating the strange and often discouraging pathways our society’s taken, it makes for a damn fine compass, too.
The Beths occupy a warm, energetic sonic space between joyful hooks, sun-soaked harmonies, and acerbic lyrics. Their debut album "Future Me Hates Me," forthcoming on Carpark Records, delivers an astonishment of roadtrip-ready pleasures, each song hitting your ears with an exhilarating endorphin rush like the first time you heard Slanted and Enchanted or “Cannonball.” Front and center on these ten infectious tracks is lead singer and primary songwriter Elizabeth Stokes. Stokes has previously worked in other genres within Auckland’s rich and varied music scene, recently playing in a folk outfit, but it was in exploring the angst-ridden sounds of her youth that she found her place. “Fronting this kind of band was a new experience for me,” says Stokes. “I never thought I had the right voice for it.” From the irresistible title track to future singles “Happy Unhappy” and “You Wouldn’t Like Me,” Stokes commands a vocal range that spans from the brash confidence of Joan Jett to the disarming vulnerability of Jenny Lewis. Further honeying "Future Me Hates Me"’s dark lyrics that explore complex topics like being newly alone and the self-defeating anticipation of impending regret, ecstatic vocal harmonies bubble up like in the greatest pop and R+B of the ‘60s, while inverting the trope of the “sad dude singer accompanied by a homogenous girl-sound.” All four members of The Beths studied jazz at university, resulting in a toolkit of deft instrumental chops and tricked-out arrangements that operate on a level rarely found in guitar-pop. Beths guitarist and studio guru Jonathan Pearce (whose other acts as producer include recent Captured Tracks signing Wax Chattels) brings it all home with an approach that’s equal parts seasoned perfectionist and D.I.Y. “There’s a lot of sad sincerity in the lyrics,” she continues, “that relies on the music having a light heart and sense of humor to keep it from being too earnest.” Channeling their stew of personal-canon heroes while drawing inspiration from contemporaries like Alvvays and Courtney Barnett, The Beths serve up deeply emotional lyrics packaged within heavenly sounds that delight in probing the limits of the pop form. “That’s another New Zealand thing,” Stokes concludes with a laugh. “We’re putting our hearts on our sleeves—and then apologizing for it.” The result is nothing less than one of the standout records of 2018.
Piano & Clarinet: Selected Works Vol. 1 is the debut album from Group Listening, a collection of ambient works - from the likes of Brian Eno, Arthur Russell, Roedelius and Robert Wyatt - arranged for clarinet and piano. Black is best known for recording albums and touring extensively under the guise of Sweet Baboo, as well as working with Cate Le Bon, H. Hawkline and others. Paul is an acclaimed jazz pianist and experimental musician. He played with Keith Tippett, formed The Jones O’Connor Group, performed with noise improv bands and composed orchestral and chamber music. Cutting out the post production and keeping overdubs to a minimum, the clarinet and piano were passed through guitar stomp boxes and other analogue effects to enable processing and manipulation directly in performance. The result hums with the ghostly energy of sound pioneers Joe Meek and Martin Hannett, while mbira and drum machines are sparingly deployed amid enveloping folds of space echo. Like Virginia Astley or Simon Jeffes, Group Listening tread the overlap between classical and experimental music. Perhaps most startling here is the breadth of material arranged as one atmospheric whole. The pieces range from the ever-spiralling, fractal phrases of German composer Roedelius to the haunting rasps of game and Hollywood soundtracker Disasterpiece and the pioneering sonics of early electronic inventor Raymond Scott. Somehow, shot together through Group Listening’s electro-acoustic lens, these works evolve into something supremely calming, poignant and new.
Since they appeared with their self-titled, self-released EP back in 2016, Flasher has exuded both a clarity of intent and a radiant self-confidence. Critically applauded from the start, that initial release offered a clear blueprint. By turns razor sharp and woozy, skipping from shoegaze to punk and back again, it offered confirmation of a band whose wiry energy and melodic ease made them instantly arresting. After the release of one more 7” (the wonderfully nervous stutter of Winnie), they quickly found themselves signed to Domino and have since been quietly working on their full-length debut - Constant Image. Recorded in 2017 across a few sleep-deprived weeks at Rare Book Room in Brooklyn, NY, it was produced by Nicolas Vernhes (Animal Collective, Deerhunter, War On Drugs) and crackles with invention. This isn’t the sound of a band finding their feet, it’s the rare sound of three people who know exactly what they want to achieve from the start. From their hometown of Washington, DC, with its rich history of idiosyncratic underground music, Flasher - Taylor Mulitz on guitar, bassist Daniel Saperstein and drummer Emma Baker - has emerged at the forefront of a vibrant musical present. The three of them share vocal duties, sometimes harmonizing in gorgeous counter-melodies that sweep you away, sometimes taking turns to sing in nervous fits of emotion. Constant Image is an album of anxiety and escape, but also one of euphoria and freedom. There’s weight and lightness here. It’s not often a debut album arrives in so complete a form but when it does you know you’ve got something special on your hands.
Marie Davidson’s new album turns the mirror on herself. "Working Class Woman” is the Montreal-based producer’s fourth and most self-reflective record: it’s a document of her state of mind, a reflection of the past year she’s spent living in Berlin, and a comment on the stresses and strains of operating within the spheres of dance music and club culture. Drawing on those experiences, as well as an array of writers, thinkers and filmmakers who’ve influenced her, Davidson’s response to such difficult moments is to explore her own reaction to them and poke fun. “It comes from my brain, through my own experiences: the suffering and the humour, the fun and the darkness to be Marie Davidson.” It’s an honest document of where she currently stands. As she puts it, “It’s an egotistical album – and I’m okay with that.” She builds on the dancefloor-minded trajectory charted by her previous record "Adieux Au Dancefloor” [Cititrax / Minimal Wave], which drew praise from the likes of Pitchfork (“a project that indicates exciting and near-exponential growth in her ability as a writer and producer”), The Fader and Resident Advisor, and opened up her sound to a new, wider audience, earning support from peers such as Nina Kraviz and Jessy Lanza. The record is informed by a career which has spanned an ambient-influenced album as Les Momies De Palerme for Montreal’s Constellation label (home to Godspeed! You Black Emperor); her synth-disco styled duo DKMD with David Kristian; and Essaie Pas, signed to DFA, and with whom she’s shaped minimal synth and "cyberpunk coldwave” (the Guardian) sounds into a fresh mould, in partnership with husband and collaborator Pierre Guerineau. The sound of "Working Class Woman" is more direct than any of her previous outings. She still mines the same influences, from Italo Disco, to proto-industrial and electro, but leadens them with a gut-punching weight, making for a record that’s more visceral than any she’s released before. It’s combined with her characteristically-deployed spoken text – rather than spoken word, which she sees as a distinct tradition – that carries a more darkly humourous edge than before, making observations on both aspects of club culture as well as more oblique critiques of the modern world. It’s a record poised between dark and light. Industrial heaviness is balanced by Davidson’s words; dark, textured soundscapes are counterweighted by statements or observations which never take themselves too seriously. It’s something that’s encapsulated in the driving momentum of ‘So Right’: it matches pared back lyrics with a melodic bassline and bright synths, her words sketching out a euphoric feeling that chimes with the music. It’s the first single from the record, and comes backed by a John Talabot remix, where he slows down the momentum, creating a mellow pace guided a languorous bassline. In ‘Work It’, she probes her workaholic nature. In her opening spoken line, she declares, “You wanna know how I get away with everything? I work, all the fucking time.” The track is, appropriately, unrelenting: it’s a robotic, jacking groove that’s short but sweet. This track also hints at another influence on the record, which is Davidson's response to her life as a touring musician. Both under her own name, and with Essaie Pas, touring has taken up the best part of her last year and is an experience which she’s found both enriching and draining. Her stops have included Sonar Festival - where she performed her "Bullshit Threshold” show, combining performance, spoken text, video projections and analogue hardware - Primavera, Dekmantel and MUTEK in recent times. On the one hand, her live set is a creative endeavour that feeds back into her music. Playing, and travelling, on her own - which means marshalling a table of gear including sequencers, synths and a mic for her to sing and talk into (as well as transporting them between each of her shows) - allows her to improvise and play each set in a different way to the last. But at the same time, it requires her to project a persona: a demand that can become dispiriting. Another of the album’s early moments is ‘The Psychologist’, carried by a moody techno swagger that suggests a playfulness evident throughout the record. On ‘Day Dreaming’, soft chimes provide a moment of colourful respite, swirled around with a soft-focus ambience. In contrast, ‘The Tunnel’ is an ominous deep-dive into industrial sound-blasts, where Davidson darkly narrates, “I'm in the tunnel with all the other monsters and it's so messy.” And in ‘Burn Me’, she takes a turn at a more straightforward club rhythm, building up drones, an acid bassline and flashes of percussion into a tense slow-burn. Part of her response to these difficult scenarios is to turn to writers whose work offers guidance or inspiration. Recently, this has meant the likes of psychologist Alice Miller, physician Gabor Maté and filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky (in particular, his book Psychomagic). Their work explores ideas of the self and the ways in which people develop; relating their theories or stories to herself, it’s pushed her to explore the notion of therapy in relation to art and dreams. In turn, she has filtered her own reflections through their ideas. She’s always reached outward for the diverse influences that have informed her music, touching on big concepts and musical touchstones alike. But it’s with this release that she’s applied the same degree of focus to herself. The album is the product of a personal process: she looks inward to project a more expansive vision to the world.
Nothing is ever straightforward with Connan Mockasin, and nothing should ever be straightforward with Connan Mockasin. This riddled rule has never resounded more than on Jassbusters, Mockasin’s third album and first in five years. An unclassifiable, unconventional album that neither picks up from nor abandons the modes of 2013’s widely-embraced Caramel or its 2010 predecessor Forever Dolphin Love, Jassbusters foreshadows a five-part melodrama titled Bostyn ’n Dobsyn, directed by and staring Mockasin. Jassbusters soundtracks the unpredictable narrative of the television series in eclectic, electric ways. Whether bending genres for shits n’ giggles or collaborating with artists like James Blake (who might just appear on a Jassbusters track), MGMT, John Cale, and Charlotte Gainsbourg, Connan Mockasin has always maneuvered in mysterious ways. After touring with the likes of Radiohead and Neil & Liam Finn (Crowded House), the Kiwi R&B surrealist continues assembling a cult around his theater, nay spectacle, of life with Bostyn ’n Dobsyn screenings and Jassbusters performances throughout October and November 2018.
Some words from DX I’m Terry. Oh, you know me! There are two kinds of people in this world: not Terry, and Terry. I’m Terry. On HQ I sung about home and place. Terry does not endorse nationalism. On Remember, I sung about who gets to remember, what they get to remember, what memories are valued, what we need to learn to forget. Republic now please. :) AND NOW – I’m Terry. I’m Terry. They are Terry. Three LPs in three years that continue to fulfil their promise of their first 7”s: one moment a witty “art” punk Wire scramble, the next moment a dumb “pub” punk oi stomper, the next a beautifully orchestrated shimmering soundscape of rudimentary melodies cascading over one another; the point being these are disparate but always succinct songs soaked in melodies, vocal harmonies that sing-song verses and terrace chant choruses, all peppered with flourishes of synths, horns and violins. They perfected this almost immediately, and each record is a masterful fulfillment, and so… I’m Terry. There are so few bands attempting lyrics along these lines, so it’s worth to point toward them, as this is Terry: please be kind. We are spared the righteous indignation of identity politicians, but the empathy here for those under the boot of the colony, of the fortress, of the rich and privileged, and the disappointment and disgust at the effects of what we are calling toxic masculinity informs their more aggressive lambast, and this is delivered in an overt lyricism that doesn’t disintegrate into preach or self loathing lamentation. There’s an unbridled joy in Terry at the experience of making songs in times they are clearly contrary to, the empathy and the pleas for kindness and all that… I’m Terry is an expression of a humbling kindness, and 2018 needs more Terry! And now, here I am, I’m Terry. As you become culturally introverted, atomized and reduced to your best versions of your selves / selfies, I move from place to memory, now I move to the very marrow of things. The I. The ME. I’M TERRY. I’m Terry.
Contemporary pianist James Heather presents his debut album - 'Stories From Far Away On Piano', on vinyl for the first time on May 4th 2018 via Ahead Of Our Time - Ninja Tune founders Coldcut’s first label. This follows the successful release of the album digitally in August 2017, reaching No.2 in the classical charts on iTunes and over 20 million plays on Spotify. Since the release, Heather has been playing live shows ranging from the Greenpeace stage at Glastonbury to the National Concert Hall in Dublin. He was also handpicked by Laura Marling to support at her Brit Awards/War Child gig, whilst other supports have included Jóhann Jóhannsson and Lubomyr Melnyk (Erased Tapes). Heather is currently composing a score for Iskra Strings (Radiohead, The xx & Ólafur Arnalds) for his headline show at St Pancras Old Church in London on 9th May 2018. On the surface ‘Stories From Far Away On Piano”s solo minimal piano pieces have a simple, innate beauty, but there’s also a stark intensity simmering within, as the emotional landscape shifts from harrowing, sad, optimistic, to fascinating. Heather has spent many years honing composition before stepping out and making his fresh take on solo piano public. He takes influence from electronic music in structure, ambience and melody, whilst also utilising a classical and jazz grounding. The album’s concept meanwhile centres on Heather’s interpretations of real world stories he read in the news, while composing. Isis jihadists hijacking the Facebook account of an executed female activist in Syria, the British Empire’s imprisonment of Boers in South African concentration camps and the undiscovered remains of a disappeared Malaysia Airlines jet in the Indian Ocean, were sources of inspiration translated into abstract musical forms. Other catalysts include the terror suspect who had a change of heart at the last minute on taking part in the Paris attacks, and the Los Angeles man freed after 16 years in prison, having been wrongly identified by having the same teardrop tattoo as the offender. The black and white album art by Suki features layers of Indian ink bled into newspaper print, repeatedly scanned and treated to interpret the recirculation of information. It also plots the nine latitude and longitude locations where each story came from, forming an abstract world - reinterpreting place into something less literal and more expressive. The only piece breaking from the world news-based theme is ‘Pathos’, where Peckham in London is given as the location and the area where the album was recorded. The piece, as Heather explains, encapsulates an aim of the album. "Pathos is an appeal to emotion, a way of bringing the listener in, to evoke an empathetic response,” he says, adding “this is my interpretation of stories I discovered. The stories themselves are not the focus, but the piano assimilation is, as the album is about viewpoint, opinion and perspective.” Perspective is something Heather has in abundance; he nearly died in a traumatic road traffic accident in 2008, leaving him in a coma in intensive care and then off work for an textended time. One permanent injury was his finger, which became skewed in the crash. He was unsure if he’d ever be able to play to the same standard again. “When I eventually started to recover I began taking my musical sketches more seriously. I found solitude channeling my feelings into compositions.” James Heather is one of the new school set of ‘post classical’ artists flourishing in the wake of the long, steady but recently accelerated success of figureheads like Max Richter and Nils Frahm, and the wider public’s overdue but now burgeoning relationship with this varied genre.
Hailu Mergia — Lala Belu Side A 1. ትዝታ Tizita 2. አዲስ ናት Addis Nat 3. ጉም ጉም Gum Gum Side B 1. አንቺሆየው ለኔ Anchihoye Lene 2. ላላ በሉ Lala Belu 3. የፍቅር እንጉርጉሮ Yefkir Engurguro Hailu Mergia — Keyboards, Accordion, Melodica Tony Buck — Drums Mike Majkowski — Upright Bass Produced by Hailu Mergia Recorded at EMS4, London, UK Additional recording by Javon Gant, Cue Recording Studios, Falls Church, VA Cover image drawn live on iPad by Jenny Soep, Stockholm 2013 Back cover image photo by Piotr Gruchala
You can order Magic Ship on LP or CD here: merch.ambientinks.com/collections/mountainman
Seven is the magic number. What’s more, this is about more than the number of days in the week or continents in the world - psychologists have theorised that the human memory’s ability to calibrate information on a short term basis is mostly limited to a sequence of this length. Thus, it seems strangely fitting that Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs - the Newcastle-based maximalists whose riffs, raw power and rancour have blazed a trail across the darker quarters of the underground in the last five years, have made a second album in King Of Cowards which does its damnedest to take consciousness to its very limits. Moreover, another notable seven is dealt with here - that of the deadly sins. As vocalist and synth player Matt Baty notes “In terms of how the theme came together I’d relate it to throwing paint at a canvas in a really physical and subconscious way, then stepping back to analyse it and seeing it all as one piece. It wasn’t until then that I saw there was this continual thread of sin and guilt in the lyrics throughout the album. For a long time I’ve questioned how and where guilt can be used as a form of oppression... When can guilt be converted into positive action? After typing all of the lyrics up I realised I’d unwittingly referenced every one of the seven deadly sins throughout the album. That’s the fire and brimstone Catholic teachings I picked up at school coming into play there!” The period since Pigs’ Rocket Recordings 2017 debut Feed The Rats - a mighty tsunami of rancorous riffage and unholy abjection that wowed critics and wreckheads alike - has seen the band build on their incendiary live reputation far and wide, from the sweatiest of UK fleapits to illustrious festivals like Roskilde. Perhaps the most relentlessly head-caving outfit of an alarmingly fertile scene operating in Newcastle at present, the band have all been busying themselves in a variety of activities, with Baty running Box Records (home of underground luminaries like Lower Slaughter, Casual Nun and Terminal Cheesecake) and both himself and bassist John-Michael Hedley playing in Richard Dawson’s band - indeed Dawson himself guests on King Of Cowards, both on synth and as part of a vocal ensemble on the opening “GNT” - moreover, guitarist Sam Grant has been working hard on a new incarnation of Blank Studios, which began its life with the recording of this very album. This opus sees the band entering a new phase as a sleeker yet still more dangerous swineherd, with ex-Gnod and Queer’d Science drummer Chris Morley joining the ranks and a new approach being taken to its creation. The Iggy-esque drive to dementia, Sabbath-esque squalor and Motörhead-style dirt may still be present and correct yet the songs are leaner, the longdrawn-out riff-fests sharpened into addictive hammer blows and the nihilistic dirges of yore alchemically transformed into an uplifting and inviting barrage of hedonistic abandon. Against all odds, the writing of this record entailed encounters with actual pigs. “We hired a remote, converted barn in the Italian countryside and spent a week there writing the bulk of the album and trying to make friends with wild boar.” notes Adam Ian Sykes. “The results are shorter, more concise songs with, I guess, a little more focus, especially thematically. We wanted to shift slightly from our old jam-based way of working. In places, the album gets darker than Feed the Rats, especially lyrically but we also tried to get a fair amount of levity in there.” “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” So George Orwell noted at the end of a certain slim volume. King Of Cowards is nothing less than just such a metamorphosis, one in which - in a blur of primal urges and beastly physicality - this band shows us just which animalsare really in charge of the farm.
The Aussie dance-pop group know exactly how to start the party. In darkened bar just near heart of London, there’s a cartoon that’s come to life. While the rest of the city toils away watching the clock and waiting for home time, the bar staff here are working overtime to provide enough shots for their only customers – the living illustration that’s sprawled across table number 5. It’s a scene that needs to be seen to be believed. On one side, there’s a statuesque chap clad only in a pair of nothing-to-the-imagination hot pants sat next to a woman in a custom designed babydoll dress and shorts combo, it’s 6° outside. Facing them are two figures sat in silence; each veiled secretively in what look like a satanic beekeeper’s hat made of a material so black, the light seems to fall into it. The bar staff can’t work fast enough for them, shot after shot is delivered then downed but the demeanour never changes. Although the carnage going on is controlled for the time being (it’s 3pm after all – these people aren’t animals), there’s an air of nonchalance that seems to suggest that for them, it’s business time, all the time. It’s pure confidence, man. If Janet Planet, Sugar Bones, Clarence McGuffie and Reggie Goodchild weren’t a band already you’d be snapping at their heels demanding they form one before they left the bar. Fact is, they are. From Melbourne by way of Brisbane, Confidence Man are unarguably one of the hottest acts on the planet right now. A portable party that’s levelled dance floors and flattened festival crowds as it’s rolled out across the world, they are a machine custom designed to make you dance and lose your cool. How they formed is a matter of debate. Janet: “These guys (points to Clarence and Reggie, the veiled men) were real saddoes playing by themselves and I needed someone to play music with me. They were obsessed with trying to find someone cool and they saw me dancing in a club and were like, “We want that girl!” I knew if we were going to get anywhere, we needed a hot dude with a six-pack at the front of the stage to even things out because they were so damn ugly themselves. We were hanging out at the public pool one day and there was this hot pool guy cleaning the pool and dancing to the music in his head. He looked pretty good in hot pants and while his moves weren’t conventional, they had a certain flare. And now, we’re like mum and dad and these two are just our petulant kids.” *muffled disagreement from the veils* Sugar Bones: “Man, we’re all just trying to make it in this crazy world. *another shot goes down* It’s hard to work out what’s truth and what’s fiction when talking to Confidence Man – reality seems to bend around them with every glug of alcohol. They formed in Brisbane, four veteran musicians with no prior knowledge of the music scene they were entering. They moved into a big house together 1600 km away in Melbourne where the band took off at astonishing speed, thanks mainly to their full-force, unrelenting live show and their studio is in the study of their shared house. Even the factual information they share sounds outlandish – take, for instance, the tale of when they first realised the band had legs… Janet: “Golden Plains at the Meredith Supernatural Amphitheatre in Victoria. They’re incredibly picky about who they book. They initially didn’t want to book us because they didn’t think we were cool enough. Our manager convinced them to come see us and they booked us on the spot. We were playing at 2 in the afternoon and there was no one there, it was blazing sunshine. Then the arena started to fill and before we knew it there were 10,000 people in front of us, screaming, getting down, jumping back up.” Perhaps then the best way to drill right into the band’s psyche is through their debut album. Confident Music for Confident People sets eleven tales of 21st century ennui to irresistible, irrepressible dance music. The opening lines of Try Your Luck (“I must confess/I’ve been sleeping with your ex/’Cos I heard he was the best/I must confess/I never would have guessed he would get so obsessed… I’m not surprised”) set the tone perfectly for what follows. Here is a set of songs that take the kind of all-consuming interior monologues that bored, disaffected youth are wrestling with the world over and places them square in the middle of the dance floor before adding call-and-response choruses for good measure. You’d almost think it was made in some kind of sonic laboratory by crazed muso-scientists if you weren’t sat in front of the record’s unflappable, gloriously flamboyant creators on a wet Tuesday afternoon. Elsewhere, Sugar Bones effortlessly nails the snorting and cavorting lifestyle of fantasist rock stars “who think they’re hot shit” (Don’t You Know I’m In a Band) while on C.O.O.L. Party, Janet coolly brushes off her obsessive partner (a guy called Dave – “a dick surfer boy drug dealer who works on Wall Street”) to what sounds like a rocket powered futurist Tom Tom Club backing track. On Out the Window, the band reluctantly emerge blinking into the bleachy sunlight from a darkened house party while a driving Balaeric backing track that’s worthy of imperial phase Happy Mondays rolls out behind them; Better Sit Down Boy presents three and a half minutes of the most perfect pop music you’ll hear all year, a track so urgent you can almost feel the wind whipping past your head as it speeds by. Confident Music for Confident People is big and brash and bright as hell, like Dee-Lite tooled up and ready for our berserk modern times. The perfect embodiment of the characters that made it, the album manages to be both wildly ambitious and deceptively simple. Listening to it, one gets the impression that Confidence Man could go anywhere from here. Janet: “Eventually we want to record an EP for each person. You know… Clarence McGuffie takes you down memory lane, Sugar Bones sings the blues, that kind of thing. Five tracks from each person’s perspective. The series would keep going and getting darker when you get to the veil guys. Reggie’s tales from the world’s least glamorous toilet cubicles…” Sugar Bones: “We’re obviously pretty confident, and real confidence knows no bounds. I don’t think there’s any end to the ambition really. Janet Planet for President. She could run on the slogan ‘I’m The Best’.” Janet: “Basically, we’re all wankers. Nice wankers.” Sugar Bones: “Loveable wankers.” Clarence and Reggie: Nod agreeably It takes real confidence to speak up and say that. They’ll go far. Now, more shots please, barman.
For some, Gaz Coombes is just the mutton-chopped likely lad who peaked with Supergrass mega-single “Alright”. Those people are missing out. The trio were perhaps Britpop’s most underrated band (the mature, but commercially modest, later releases deserve rediscovery) and their talisman’s solo career has continued to burnish a robust and quietly brilliant talent. *World’s Strongest Man* is Coombes’ most confident solo album yet—a satisfying coalition of *Here Come the Bombs*’ trippy chutzpah and Mercury Prize-nominated *Matador*’s melodic sure-footedness. Highlights abound (the Berlin electro shuffle of “Deep Pockets”; “In Waves” and its sinister groove), but this is a carefully layered record to play right through.