It\'s not enough that rising Spanish star ROSALÍA ingeniously blends traditional flamenco with contemporary pop on her second album—she also gets a narrative based on medieval literature in there, too. Inspired by *Flamenca*, a 13th century book about a woman imprisoned by her jealous fiancé thought to be the first modern novel, each of the 11 songs on this collaboration with producer El Guincho (Pablo Díaz-Reixa) serves as a “chapter” of a running story about a doomed relationship. ROSALÍA went through the album track by track with Beats 1. **MALAMENTE (Cap. 1 Augurio)** “It’s a premonition—this moment when you know in the beginning of the story how it’s gonna end, but even then you go and do it. I was trying to compose a song everybody could understand, doing experimentation with electronic sound but also connected with my roots and flamenco. It’s combining these worlds.” **QUE NO SALGA LA LUNA (Cap. 2 Boda)** “This song is about commitment and that feeling you get when you get in a relationship with somebody. Sometimes you lose something of yourself in the process. It\'s the dark side of getting engaged—it\'s something beautiful but at the same time, there\'s another part, right?” **PIENSO EN TU MIRÁ (Cap. 3 Celos)** “It’s ‘Thinking About Your Gaze.’ This was a song that started from a sample of Bulgarian voices. I did the bassline on an island in Spain, El Hierro. I was so inspired in this place.” **DE AQUÍ NO SALES (Cap. 4. Disputa)** “It’s the most aggressive part of the record...and one of the most risky. I wanted to use the motorcycles in this song with this crazy rhythm that combines \[chapters\] three and four. Khalid told me he liked the song—I would love to do music with him.” **RENIEGO (Cap. 5. Lamento)** “It’s a traditional melody from flamenco. \[Spanish singer\] Camarón was singing with an orchestra; he created the arrangement. I think it sounds very magical.” **PRESO (Cap. 6 Clausura)** “You can hear Rossy de Palma’s voice—she’s an iconic actress from Spain. You can feel the experience in her voice. It’s heavy, you know?” **BAGDAD (Cap. 7 Liturgia)** “I was very inspired by an erotic club in Barcelona called Bagdad and by ‘Cry Me a River’ by Justin Timberlake. He heard the song and said, ‘Yes, you can use the melody’; I was so excited because he never approves anything.” **DI MI NOMBRE (Cap. 8 Éxtasis)** “It’s a very flamenco vibe, very traditional, \[but\] the structure is very pop. It’s about this connection between two people; the sexual moment. The lyrics—\'Say my name, say my name\'—I\'m such a big fan of Destiny\'s Child. \[It\'s\] paying tribute to all these artists I heard when I was a teenager. ” **NANA (Cap. 9 Concepción)** “This is a traditional flamenco melody used when you have a child you’re trying to make fall asleep. I was very inspired by what James Blake does—the space and the production he uses in his songs. I feel like in 50 years, people in universities will study him.” **MALDICIÓN (Cap. 10 Cordura)** “We’d been working with Pablo on the production and composition for a year and a half, and I didn’t like it enough. Then: This Arthur Russell sample—I think it’s perfect in this moment.” **A NINGÚN HOMBRE (Cap. 11 Poder)** “The last song of the record is the first I composed. Pablo was very excited by it and we saw that we sound good together, so I was like, ‘Let’s do the entire record together.’ It’s about the power of a woman.”
Barker makes solo debut on Ostgut Ton with new experimental dancefloor EP Sam Barker has had a long ongoing relationship with Berghain and Ostgut Ton, having released two LPs and various EPs as one half of Barker & Baumecker and hosting regular nights at the club since September 2008 as co-founder of the label Leisure System. 2017 marked the beginning of his solo residency, 2018 sees his first solo release with Ostgut Ton. Both as a musician and label owner, Barker operates on the fringes of techno, balancing experimentation with functionality. On Debiasing, he takes a hard look at the musical elements often considered necessary to maintain dancefloor momentum, with four distinct tracks of morphing synth stabs and paired down metronomic rhythms in varying time signatures. While there is no kick, snare, or clap to be heard, the result is not experimental techno deconstructions but driving, hypnotic and unlikely dancefloor tools.
Aïsha Devi has announced the release of her sophomore album ‘DNA Feelings’ out 11th May via Houndstooth. In conjunction with the album announcement comes first single ‘Inner State of Alchemy’. No one on this planet sounds like Aïsha Devi. Her voice is her most powerful tool in a repertoire that includes thumping beats and rave stabs, seraphic and guttural throat singing, mystical linguistics and corporeal sonics. Her music is spiritual and her live shows are transcendent experiences. She is a rebel and a radical alchemist who is breaking down barriers and traversing dimensions with her art. Born by the Swiss alps with Nepalese-Tibetan heritage, a transversal of cultural and spiritual identity was forged, guiding both her personal and creative process as a non-conformed seeker. Devi applies meditation techniques in her approach to production and performance, channeling metaphysical research, ritualistic practice and healing frequencies into an alternate club paradigm. Dislocating pop culture, also evident in her mixes for NTS, FACT, etc., is one of her foundational tools and stylistic signatures. In 2013 Devi co-founded Danse Noire, a label collective supporting insurrectional club music from around the world, where she released her breakout single ‘Aura 4 Everyone’ followed by ‘Hakken Dub / Throat Dub’ in 2014, giving context to her universe alongside artists including Vaghe Stelle, El Mahdy Jr., J.G. Biberkopf, GIL and IVVVO. In 2015 Houndstooth released Aïsha Devi’s debut album, 'Of Matter And Spirit', a significant sonic statement rich in political and philosophical subtext. The process led her to collaborating with Chinese visual artist Tianzhuo Chen on videos featuring profane and sacred iconography, as well as theatrical dance performances together with the Asian Dope Boys. Photographer Emile Barret is another longtime artistic collaborator, touring throughout the world with their spatially disruptive audiovisual show. But Aïsha Devi is just as magnetic performing solo. With her mesmeric digital mantras and a captivating stage presence she’s bowled over crowds at CTM, Mutek, Unsound, Boiler Room and countless festivals and venues from Siberia to Mexico and beyond. Look out for further updates on www.aishadevi.com
The doomy club mutations of Bristol producer Vessel’s 2014 album, *Punish, Honey*, left the shadowy post-dubstep of his debut, 2012’s *Order of Noise*, in the dust. He travels an even greater distance with *Queen of Golden Dogs*, a thrilling fusion of acoustic chamber instruments, voice, and jarringly digital timbres. “Fantasma (For Jasmine)” lays out the album’s extremes in somber strings and thrashing synths and drums. From here he zigzags wildly, through the spectral choir of “Good Animal (For Hannah)” to the buzzing drum-pummel of “Argo (For Maggie),” from the neo-Baroque harpsichord of “Arcanum (For Christalla)” to the trance arpeggios of “Glory Glory (For Tippi).” It’s a dazzling and even overwhelming listen, in the best way—a trip through the distant past to a mind-bending future you never saw coming.
Queen of Golden Dogs -the third album from Vessel- was conceived, developed and rendered into life over eighteen months of solitude in rural Wales. In essence, it is an exploration of living a life devoted to uncertainty, curiosity and change. Influenced by a range of writers, the painter Remedios Varo, and a new love, the album is a marked departure from Vessel’s previous work. The world of QoGD is saturated with colour; oscillating between grief, bombast and fierce joy, this is music shot through with both sincerity and irreverence. Whilst traces of his sonic signature remain, there is much changed since Vessel’s second album, Punish, Honey. An infatuation with chamber music brought about in collaboration with his violinist lover, and a voice given by singer Olivia Chaney leave strong impressions, providing landmarks in a world that is essentially about the joys of difference. ‘Fantasma’, a prologue of sorts, careens from bent cello to blunt force percussion and billowing synthesisers, dispersing into the harmonically restless lament of ‘Good Animal’, providing the album with the first of it’s many purposefully uncomfortable segues. Ideas of transformation are regularly explored internally within individual pieces, as well as across the album as a whole, dominated by unpredictable shifts in tone. The probing string swells of ‘Argo’ give way to throbbing bass and slippery rhythms, which twist briefly into an almostpop leaning chorus before a barrage of fuzzy drums lead to one of the albums most straightforwardly techno moments. The layered voices of ‘Torno-me eles e nau-eu’ offer the most overt example of Vessel’s move towards classical forms. Using chromaticism, dissonance and sweetness, he explores a space that seemingly refuses to resolve, although eventually revealing itself as an extended reflection of album centrepiece, ‘Paplu’. "I wanted to make this work to realise experiences that I thought I had already had. Quite quickly I realised that I was reaching too far; and because I wanted so much more I had to give more. I often think that the writing was mutual." - Vessel ‘I become them and stop being I’ -Fernando Pessoa
Not heard since 2016, that Duppy Gun siren sounds again. Miro Tape is a 50 minute mixtape of twisted dancehall fuego, with the new school microphone talent of Sikka Rymes, I Jahbar, Early One, Lyrical Wiz, Sniper, Buddy Don and Lopo. They clash on riddims from Bokeh Sound (Jay Glass Dubs, Seekersinternational, Abu Ama) and the Duppy Gun Production House (D/P/I, Butchy Fuego, Big Flyte & Velkro and Ras G.) Re-configuring dancehall DNA for 7 years now, Duppy has been a huge inspiration since Dayone’s conquering Multiply landed in 2011. Miro is a taste of some collaborative efforts cooking between the two labels. Mixed by Velkro and recorded in Duppy Gun’s newly-built Jamaican HQ (headed by I Jahbar); 80% of the material here is unheard and ready for global release. Founded by Sun Araw and M. Geddes Gengras, Duppy Gun pairs under-cover West Coast producers with Jamaican vocalists like G Sudden, Early One. In This Time Of Many Dancehall Think-pieces: Live Long And Grow Strong.
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.”
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.
Debit’s debut album Animus consists of a cross genre between dance and ambient tracks, exploring the fundamentals tenets of the genres, while narrating the artist’s interpretation of the animus. Animus is about the gendered body’s inner struggle between the personal consciousness and the social consciousness of their sexuality in a spectrum of codified sex. The key to controlling one's animus is to recognize it when it manifests and to discern it apart from our reality. Each track is a point of tension and resolution, the ebbs and flows in rhythms speak to the inner struggle we all necessarily go through in order to face and resolve our issues with our animus. The album was mixed and mastered alongside sound engineer Peter Geiser in the Red Bull Music Academy Studios in New York, in September 2017.
Earl Sweatshirt’s second album, 2015’s *I Don’t Like S\*\*t, I Don’t Go Outside*, is a masterwork of efficiency. At just 10 songs over 30 minutes, not a word is wasted nor a note held a second too long. Brevity, specifically, is a concept Sweatshirt cites in interviews as a guiding principle in his art, one he leans into even further on *I Don’t Like S\*\*t*’s follow-up, *Some Rap Songs*. At an even brisker 15 tracks in 25 minutes, the project is mineral-rich, Sweatshirt losing himself in a relentless pursuit of clever and complex bars. His rhymes are marvels of non sequitur, rarely tracking a theme or singular direction for more than a few lines, all delivered over subdued and unrelenting soul loops. The former Odd Future standout handles the bulk of production as well, though *Some Rap Songs* also includes contributions from frequent collaborators Denmark Vessey and Gio Escobar (of NYC art-jazz duo Standing on the Corner), among others. Vocal guests include two of Sweatshirt’s oldest inspirations—his mother, UCLA professor Cheryl Harris, and late father, South African poet laureate Keorapetse Kgositsile.
'Another Life' is the debut album from Amnesia Scanner, the Berlin-based music duo, performing arts group, experience design studio and production house, created by Finnish-born Ville Haimala and Martti Kalliala. Founded in 2014, Amnesia Scanner's approach is informed by a unique perspective on technology and the way it mediates contemporary experience. System vulnerabilities, information overload and sensory excess inform their work, which has found a home in both clubs and galleries. Building on their mixtape 'AS Live [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]' (2014), Amnesia Scanner’s critically acclaimed audio play 'Angels Rig Hook' (2015) laced a potpourri of dancefloor tactics with a machinic narrator. Their dual EPs for Young Turks, 'AS' and 'AS Truth' (2016), distilled this immersive environment into an abrasive collection of cryptorave tools. The most striking detail of ‘Another Life' is Amnesia Scanner's use of both human and inhuman voices. The latter is provided by the latest addition to the production unit, a disembodied voice called Oracle, which represents the sentience that has emerged from Amnesia Scanner. Oracle's vocal performance ranges from exuberant mania to anxious dread and beyond. Coupled with the pop song structures that Amnesia Scanner employs for the first time, the avant-EDM productions of ‘Another Life’ evocatively explore a schizophrenic present marked by narratives of a slow apocalypse or salvation via technology. Indeed, the lullaby of 'AS Another Life' swings between trill hope and casual threat, lending a precarious gait to the song's staggering rhythm. The album's first single, 'AS Chaos', is its most powerfully direct track, with Pan Daijing’s English and Mandarin vocals taking over for Oracle. At its peak intensity, as in ‘AS Faceless’, Amnesia Scanner's doombahton overheats into nu-metal-gabba. Amnesia Scanner has presented work at art institutions such as ICA London, HKW Berlin, and the Serpentine Gallery Marathon in London. They collaborate with PWR Studio for their design and visual direction. The AS live experience is co-created with Stockholm-based Canadian designer Vincent De Belleval. When unplugged from the Amnesia Scanner stream, Haimala works as a composer and producer with a wide range of musical and visual artists, and Kalliala co-directs the think tank Nemesis. The album is mastered by Jeremy Cox, featuring photography by Satoshi Fujiwara, and visual direction from PWR Studio.
Neville Watson returns to DBA with The Midnight Orchard, his first full-length in five years. Watson is a key figure on the electronic music scene at large and has made regular appearances on Don't Be Afraid, as well as on celebrated imprints such as Crème Organization, Clone and Rush Hour, where he released some of his best-known work alongside Kink. In a crowded landscape of factory-line jack trax and synthesis for the sake-of-it, it's little surprise that Watson's physical, arresting takes on house and techno have been such a staple in the record bags of the world's leading DJs for the past twenty years. Throughout The Midnight Orchard, Watson seamlessly bridges his futurist leanings gleaned from a lifelong commitment to electronic music with the anarchic spirit of his acid-house heritage. The record still finds catharsis in the relentless pulse that has defined Watson's life since his early residencies where he peddled ecstatic escapism to towns on the commuter belts of London, notably via his involvement in seminal Reading party Checkpoint Charlie. However, there's a more somber, arguably introspective and perhaps even somewhat wistful tone at play throughout. This might surprise those who've invested their feet and hearts in tracks with titles like Night Of The Inflatable Muscleheads and Everything I Know About House (I Learned on Facebook). In a move away from his previous musical leanings, The Midnight Orchard embraces a distinctly more UK sound, unapologetically chronicling the paranoia that can be found skirting the euphoria of rave. And while Watson has avoided the eyebrow-arching pitfalls of the self-serious DJ full-length, it must be noted that the rhythms here are more skittering, the atmosphere less jubilant and the signature lo-fi hiss, fully popularised and bastardised since Watson's last album, has taken on a more fore-boding tone. Meanwhile, the atmosphere elsewhere harks to a more idealistic world, particularly on the cascading and subdued Eine Kleine Emusik, and the euphoric We Own The Night. Twin Tub and Reet Dux provide dubby, sensual moments of escapism. There's uncompromising, hard-nosed rhythms on Dee Sides, and cosmic electro throughout 4am in the Trees. The album then concludes in a bold fashion with Displays of Brotherly Love and the resolutely hopeful atmosphere of Phosphorescent. Reflecting decades of immersion in club culture and taking inspiration from wider-found sounds, The Midnight Orchard is loaded with thrilling parallels and a sense of genuine unpredictability. Tracks like Come On In and Anarcho Midnight are layered with unease, utilising pitch dark arpeggios and skittish, growling electronics to devastating effect. Having dedicated the last eighteen months of his life to the studio, Watson has rec-orded what is undeniably the most unexpected music of his career. Amid the dark-ness, The Midnight Orchard has borne fruit.
*digital album available from Renick's Bandcamp renickbell.bandcamp.com/album/turning-points Live coding by Renick Bell Art by George Tourlas Compiled by The Fissure Family Mastered by Philippe Vandal SR064 "Renick Bell is one of the most notable members of the “algorave” movement, a scene made up of artists that write club music with code in real time. Ableton Live this is not: Bell writes tracks by the seat of his pants, manipulating samples with simple text-based editing software. Although some of this tension is diminished when you hear this music outside of a live setting, the way in which Bell keeps elastic kicks, rubber synths and rattling kickdrums spinning around an unstable center of gravity makes Turning Points one of the year's most thrilling club albums." - FACT Magazine "...Renick Bell is one of the best in the business for this sort of thing, and [his] new tape Turning Points demonstrates exactly why. Frenzied IDM, digital MIDI-bap and slamming Szare-like techno all rear their head here in Turning Points' first three tracks alone." - Norman Records
Cardi B’s “Bodak Yellow,” the most chantable song of 2017, introduced the Bronx MC’s lively around-the-way-girl persona to the world. Her debut album, *Invasion of Privacy*, reveals more of Cardi\'s layers, the MC leaning forcefully into her many influences. “I Like It,” featuring Bad Bunny and J Balvin, is a nod to her Afro-Caribbean roots, while “Bickenhead” reimagines Project Pat’s battle-of-the-sexes classic “Chickenhead” as a hustler’s anthem. There are lyrical winks at NYC culture (“Flexing on b\*tches as hard as I can/Eating halal, driving a Lam”), but Cardi also hits on universal moments, like going back and forth with a lover (“Ring”) and reckoning with infidelity (“Thru Your Phone”).
Released (LP) September 2018 by Ba Da Bing Composed and mixed by Sarah Davachi Recorded April and July 2017 at Hotel2Tango in Montréal QC, engineered by Howard Bilerman Additional overdubs recorded at home in Los Angeles in November and December 2017 Performed by Sarah Davachi (flute, Mellotron, organs, piano, synthesizer, voice), Thierry Amar (contrabass), Terri Hron (recorder), Jessica Moss (violin), Lisa McGee (voice) Mastered by Sean McCann Photography by Dicky Bahto From Ba Da Bing: Sarah Davachi has quickly risen in prominence since her first release five years ago, and Gave In Rest represents her highest artistic achievement. By infusing her compositional style within a predilection for medieval and Renaissance music, Davachi unearths a new realm of musical reverence, creating works both contemplative and beatific, eerie yet essentially human. Gave In Rest is a modern reading of early music, reforming sacred and secular sentiments to fit her purview and provide an exciting new way to hear the sounds that exist around us. Between January and September of 2017, Sarah Davachi lived in flux; storing her belongings in Vancouver, she spent the summer in Europe, occasionally performing in churches and lapidariums and seeking respite from her transitional state while surrounded by such storied history. “I’ve always been a pretty solitary person, but that summer I discovered quiet moments to be increasingly valuable,” says Davachi. “I became engaged in private practices of rest and rumination, almost to the point of ritual.” Though not religious, she sought ecclesiastic environments, sitting for hours in muted spaces and listened to how church instruments augmented them – their pipe organs, their bells, their choral voices – and resolved to “tap into that way of listening.” Davachi went deeper into studying early music over that summer, considering how Renaissance musicians experimented with new instruments, forms, and texture. Her reflections led her to the duality of stillness and rest, and upon entering Montréal’s hotel2tango with Howard Bilerman, she adapted her modern style to standard approaches of a recording studio’s function. She composed the majority of the record alone at the piano to find specific harmonic colors and movements, then brought in an ensemble of musicians to interact and extrapolate organically with those tones. Gave In Rest opens and ends at its most unornamented moments: the first track, “Auster”, being played entirely on a recorder and then, “slowed down and opened up so you can hear the innards of the sound,” and the final track, “Waking”, one long take of Davachi on a Hammond organ. The latter is a solitary departure of concrete simplicity and is allegorical in its inclusion at Gave In Rest’s end, with harmonic structures of a Baroque style materializing and wavering in long, textural passages of consonance and dissonance. The overdubbed, chant-like singing on “Evensong” was treated through an EMT 140 plate reverb, the very same unit Stevie Nicks used for “Rhiannon”. Completed after this period of suspension in her life, Davachi finished Gave In Rest while establishing herself in Los Angeles. Her new home is a radical departure from her previous Northern surroundings, with its vast reach, otherworldly terrain, and bizarre, isolating nature; “It is easy to remain anonymous in Los Angeles,” says Davachi. Gave In Rest was mixed over a period of two months while she adjusted to this new lifestyle. Davachi has mined a bottomless landscape where listeners can witness music’s participation in their solitudes. Gave In Rest lends a voice to her personal exploration with a firm, intuitive stance.
There had always been a burning sense of resistance baked into SOPHIE’s experimental soundscapes, which simultaneously honored and rejected the tropes and rules of mainstream pop. But the Scottish producer’s visionary debut album is an exhilarating escalation—a work that not only exploded expectations around song structure and form but conventional notions of gender, identity, and self, as well. *Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides* is sweeping and defiant, pinballing from glitchy rave cuts (“Ponyboy”) to ethereal pop elegies (“It’s Okay to Cry”) to ambient passages that feel practically spiritual (“Pretending”). Each left turn is an invitation to slip further into SOPHIE’S neon universe. In the hands of any other artist, such dizzying digital distortions would appear to warp reality. Here, though, they clarify it. Every synthetic vocal, slithering synth, zigzagging beat, and gleefully warped sample brings us closer to SOPHIE\'S truth. Some of the project’s headiest questions—those about body, being, and soul—seem to rest on a distant horizon the rest of the world hasn’t caught up to yet. “Immaterial,” a fizzing, maximalist hat-tip to Madonna, moves the goalposts even further, proposing a version of consciousness in which the material world is, in fact, only the beginning.
"Ambient duo Space Afrika offer a bird’s eye view of the city centre at night with Somewhere Decent To Live; their keenly anticipated first LP on sferic. Unshackled from dancefloor needs, but still inspired and feeding off its spirit and romance, the pair respectfully acknowledge the undercurrents of Jungle, dubstep, ambient techno and deep house which feed into their home city’s late night economy, dowsing their tributaries back to dub and rendering the findings in a quiet, modestly lush ambient haze with a flawlessly anaesthetising effect. Taking gaseous form as a series of dark blue hues and electromagnetic subbass impulses, the vibe inside is delectably elusive. Unlike their previous transmissions on Where To Now? and Köln’s LL.M., the pair’s dancefloor urges are dissolved in favour of suggestively mutable ambient frameworks this time, leaving the kicks in the club whilst they appear to float overhead like the dead kid embarking his Bardo in Gaspar Noé’s Enter The Void. In firm but gentle style they feel out eight interlinked headspaces, drifting like spectral flanneurs from the Diversions-like opener uwëm/creãtiõn to intercept telepathic thoughts from Teutonic friends in the percolated subs and drizzly ambient clag of sd/tl, before arriving at the most arresting moment in their catalogue thus far with the masterfully widescreen yet immersive bly and its sublimely smeared timbral thizz. The 2nd half of the record subsequently describes a more inward journey from wistful loops in u+00B1 to the sylvan 2-step of gwabh and curve feat. Echium, ultimately culminating in the echo chamber melt of dred." (Boomkat)
Hilary Woods’ artistry is one of rare emotive reach. Her minimalist and compositional finesse combine with densely layered atmospheric instrumentation and dreamlike vocals to create music rich with both delicacy and intensity. The Sunday Times hailed her early solo recordings as “a revelation.” After the release of two critically acclaimed EPs, Woods spent 2017 writing and recording songs on an eight-track in an abandoned flat she was living in at the time. Layering piano, synth, tape machine, field recordings, vocals, drone, unadorned beats, and old string instruments, these songs culminate in her debut solo LP Colt. Straddling the acoustic and electronic worlds, Colt is an intensely personal journey through grief, abandonment, and mutating love. Woods navigates this journey with a lyrical potency that cuts through stark piano, sensuous synth work, and textural acoustics. Somewhere between Marissa Nadler, Grouper and Julee Cruise, these songs evoke both the anguish of their content and the ecstasy of their craft. The power at the heart of Colt is a siren’s song, at once mysterious, dark and beautiful, pulling you in. Opening song “Inhaler” is a conceptual cry for oxygen, illustrating the desolation felt in the absence of a lost lover, but the song’s velvet fluidity feels like a long, enveloping exhale. “Jesus Said” is an entrancing expression of abandonment and catharsis, seeking absolution where none can be found. Percussion is sparse and intentional throughout the record, and “Jesus Said” is one of few songs with prominent beats. When the beat finally breaks the tension of the longing introduction, it creates an intoxicating kaleidoscope of rhythm and improvised piano. Written and recorded at home in Dublin, Colt was mixed by and co-produced with James Kelly (WIFE, Altar of Plagues) in Berlin in the winter of 2017. The dynamics of the production serve to temper layers of instruments, giving the compositions breathing room to match their pacing. Growing up in an artistic household on Dublin’s Northside, Woods studied film and literature, dropping in and out of fine art school. In 2014, she returned to music to record in whatever free space was available in and around the city. A singular vision and tenacious creativity has seen Woods cross multi-disciplinary thresholds, exploring visual and performance art alike. In 2017, she was chosen as Dublin Fringe Festival's “Wild Card” artist after writing a theatre piece from sound design. Whilst earlier in the year she was asked to compose original scores for horror film as part of the Irish Film Institute's season celebrating the cinema of the Weimar Republic. “Colt was created as a way to process and make sense of the everyday,” Woods imparts. “As a means to speak with inner voices, explore aloneness, and understand the complexities of desire. As a vehicle for imaginative flight, as a quest for resilience and connectivity to the outside world, as a medium through which to journey into the present, to temper the mind and inhabit the body.”
Picture a big-budget heist film starring a tag team of vixens (that’d be JT and Yung Miami) who live to party, steal boyfriends, and run up massive bills on mens’ credit cards. That’s the energy on the debut mixtape from City Girls, the dynamic South Florida duo who began rapping on a whim after being friends for a decade and, soon after, became QC labelmates with Migos and Lil Yachty. Raunchy, rude, and fiercely girl-powered, the pair also has a playful reverence for rap history: “I’ll Take Your Man” is a revamped version of the 1986 Salt-N-Pepa hit.
Beta Librae is Bailey Hoffman, a producer from Kansas City, living in New York City, who co-operates the extremely vital Technofeminism residency with Umfang at Bossa Nova Civic Club, and has previously released tapes on 1080p and Lillerne Tape Club, as well as a single on Physical Therapy’s Allergy Season. Incienso is extremely hyped to release “Sanguine Bond”, the debut LP from Beta Librae. An extremely singular ambi-tech-no-house album, encompassing all the deepest vibes of the rave - warm and fuzzy afterglow dub mixes, emo-ambient ‘ludes, yogic, tribal downtempo vibes and all, mixed with love by the one and only!
It was worth the wait for Colombian-American songstress Kali Uchis’s first full-length. A romantic collage of artists and sounds she’s encountered along the way—Tyler, The Creator and Bootsy Collins on “After the Storm”, and Gorillaz’ Damon Albarn on the surfy “In My Dreams”—the album draws on Latin pop (“Nuestro Planeta”), hypnotic R&B (“Just a Stranger”), and high-flying psych-rock (“Tomorrow,” with production from Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker). It’s a sign of Uchis’ artistic vision that she pulled so many creative minds into a single body of work that sounds so distinctly her own.
Even before Playboi Carti’s breakout single, “Magnolia,” early fans were expressing an insatiable demand for new music from the rapper. *Die Lit* comes a year after the self-titled album that brought us that hit, with 19 tracks to make up for the wait. Having joked openly about being called a “mumble rapper,” Carti aggressively leans into the distinction here, thickening his Atlanta accent and even pitching up his delivery on songs like the spacey “Fell in Luv” and “FlatBed Freestyle,” where his couplets devolve into rhythmic yet indecipherable vocals. On the whole, *Die Lit* is a collection of earworms built on minimal and bass-heavy production from Pi\'erre Bourne, assisted occasionally by contributors like Lil Uzi Vert, Skepta, and Nicki Minaj.
Bruce – AKA Larry McCarthy – is set to release his debut album Sonder Somatic this October on UK imprint Hessle Audio. The album packs 11 singular UK club tracks that evoke a distinctly emotive and dense energy, channelling detailed sound designs, tangled textures and club anthems for 2018 and beyond. The record is deeply varied in styles, ideas and tempos; from the tight rhythmic groove of album opener 'Elo' to the weaponised onslaught of ominous club cuts 'What' and 'Cacao' - through drifting, meditative techno and the skeletal sound design of 'Ore' and 'Baychimo.' Each track shifts the tonal mood in subtle and distinct ways, whilst retaining a consistent icy sound palette infused with colour and human warmth. The shapeshifting Hessle Audio imprint is run by Pearson Sound, Ben UFO and Pangaea. For over ten years, through their combined tastes they have continued to unravel and explore the edges of sounds and ideas from the wider dance music scene, across the boundaries of the functional and the experimental, with consistently innovative results. As a long time follower of the label, Bruce wanted to craft an album that continues their singular attitude and approach; incorporating vibes from UK soundsystem music as well as music from his home town of Bristol. "From being a fan of their work from the very beginning, it's not only the music they have released that has informed my taste/work, but also the journey they have formed through the application of their attitude and approach." - Bruce Much of Sonder Somatic was shaped by Bruce's own understanding of club culture as a whole, and predominantly his personal relationship with it both professionally and recreationally. The album was partly written as an attempt to capture that rare transformative feeling that can cause you to fully lose yourself in a club space, disconnecting from your immediate environment for a short time. Sonder Somatic follows EPs for Timedance, Livity Sound, Idle Hands and Hemlock, and comes 4 years after his debut EP 'Not Stochastic' for Hessle Audio. The album pushes the boundaries of what club music can be whilst expertly refining his work as both a club producer and an experimental sound designer. With a unique sense of flair that sets him apart, Sonder Somatic is set to raise Bruce's profile across all corners of the dance world.
H.Takahashi, Tokyo based Architect and sound designer. ‘Low Power’ draws strands of Minimalism from the Japanese Minimalist works from the likes of Hiroshi Yoshimura and Satoshi Ashikawa, to masters such as Erik Satie and John Cage, and Ambient leaders Brian Eno and Roedelius. His sound sometimes seems to be drizzling like rain, but still the feeling of refreshing sounds sinks pleasantly inside the body like a shower bathed after running 100 meters with full power. A genuine melody gives a feeling that drifts in the water. The philosophy of simple timbre composition and placement makes me feel the composition of the Japanese garden and the minimalism of Sen no Rikyu. やけのはら、P-RUFFらとのユニットUNKNOWN MEも話題となり、Where To Now?からの作品でも海外を含め高い評価をえた日本人アンビエント作家"H.Takahashi"の新作『Low Power』がWhite Paddy MOuntainから登場！！ 『Low Power』はこれまでのH.Takahashiの作品がそうだったように、吉村弘、芦川聡などの日本のアンビエントミュージックの伝統を感じさせつつ、エリック・サティやブライアン・イーノなどの正統派アンビエントの歴史的解釈をふまえ、そこに独自のミニマルな美学を刻み込んだ金字塔的なアルバムとなった。時にしとしと降る小雨のような、それでいて清涼感溢れる音の粒は100m走を全力で走った後に浴びるシャワーのように体内に心地よく沈み込む。地の果てから届くような、ものうげなメロディは、水中の中で漂うような感触を与え、シンプルな音色構成と配置の妙は日本庭園の哲学や千利休的なミニマリズムを感じさせる。音の向こうに叙情的な景色を呼びおこすアンビエントの名盤がここに誕生した。 Profile 東京を拠点とする作曲家／建築家。作曲にはiPhoneを用いアンビエントをメインとした 作品をWhere To Now?(UK)、Constellation Tatsu(US)等から発表する。
"What works reliably is to know the raw silk, hold the uncut wood. Need little. Want less. Forget the rules. Be untroubled." Laurel Halo presents six instrumental pieces that form a meditative, cinematic listening experience. Inspired by recent film score work for Metahaven and Ursula Le Guin's translation of the 'Tao Te Ching'. Featuring cello work by Oliver Coates and percussion by Eli Keszler. Working in abstraction leads to a deeper longing for touch and closeness. The tactile sensation of struck organ keys and bowed strings, wood and felt on drum heads. Smoke and dirt and stone. Febrile and tactile, hairy and hissy. A clover of highway onramps, a continuous flow, like old leaves melting on their way down a stream at the back of a house. Constant contradiction, the truth's nowhere. —
All five projects to come from Kanye West’s summer 2018 creative spurt have appeared to be equal collaborations between West and his G.O.O.D. Music colleagues, but that balance manifests itself most clearly on Harlem singer Teyana Taylor’s *K.T.S.E.*. The project—eight songs, one more than its four predecessors—owes as much to Taylor’s airy melodies as it does to Kanye’s studied production ear; the producer utilizes vocal samples as choruses, as bookends to her verses, and as the backbone of beats. For her part, Taylor is the embodiment of the formidable, around-the-way-girl persona fans have adored since her debut in the late aughts. Addressing a one-time elephant in the room on “A Rose In Harlem,” Taylor sings, “N\*ggas like, ‘You ain’t hot, you ain’t pop/Yet, sup with you and Ye?’” And in *K.T.S.E.*, they have their answer.
Napoli-based Montreal artist CECILIA presents her first full-length album, Adoration, out via Halcyon Veil. The 33- minute, 10-track LP follows last year’s visual EP Charity Whore, released on Yves Tumor’s Grooming Label. CECILIA is the dissociative metamorphosis of multidisciplinary artist Mélissa Gagné, whose practice spans music, video, installation, performance and theatre. She recently collaborated on two songs on Les Fleurs du Mal, the latest album from Halcyon Veil founder Rabit. Her musical output under previous DJ/producer alias Babi Audi includes harrowing electronic releases Club Dead LTD (Hoss Records, 2015) and Mommy Dust (self-released, 2015) as well as the visual concept mix 6 Page Letter (DIS magazine, 2016). Gagné is also the creator of hybrid stage works, notably Nailed High (Mutek, 2017) and Sochi Snow (Sight & Sound, 2015). Adoration is her most refined, delicately crafted effort to date. Entirely written, composed and produced by CECILIA, Adoration is a lucid-dream immersion into a state of deep, personal interiority. The album’s 10 experimental tracks move through a desolate soundscape, hollowed out yet humid with emotion. Here, in this phantasmagoria, loss and romanticism commingle, “The adorer has been stripped of what was there to adore. The album is the consequence, the symptom of an adoration made impossible” CECILIA explains. “Most of us are miserably constraint to love conditionally, rationally and pragmatically. How could we possibly adore again?” she asks. Wielding bare-essence fragments of synth, guitar and beat improvisations, polyglot vocalizations from original poems and film samples, CECILIA creates a distilled language of tactile sound and intimate utterance. The album’s evocative textures are arranged with devastating restraint and specificity- muted plucked strings, hobbled beats, a metallic trill, a wobbly horn line, sirens wailing in dialogue; some gather the substance of leitmotif. And all the while, threading through Adoration is the female voice. Breathless, plaintive, incantatory, in French, English and Italian we hear from the artist, her friend Jasmine Pisapia, the writer and activist Grisélidis Réal, the actress Jeanne Moreau : a ventriloquy act by CECILIA. “You are in a psychic chamber and premonitory voices reach you from all sides. The album is an inner dialogue one must have with oneself but also a conversation one must have with the most malicious interlocutor. One is summoned to whisper truth, beauty, tragedy to demon ears.” Adoration incubated for a year and a half in between Montreal, Toronto and New York, during a time of personal tumult, and finally came together in a room with a door of Queens, on a beach terrace of Brighton Beach, and on a sun-exposed roof strewn with pages by Audre Lorde, Hélène Cixous and Pier Paolo Pasolini.
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.
New York-based artist Eli Keszler is at the apex of his career. This year alone he’s had a three-month-long solo exhibition (“Blue Skies” at Fuse Arts, Bradford, UK), performed internationally in a duo with Laurel Halo, collaborated with noted Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai, taught experimental composition and performance at Camp in the Pyrenees mountains, composed music for Turner Prize–winning visual artist Laure Prouvost, and most recently embarked on a world tour with Oneohtrix Point Never. “Stadium” is his new album for Shelter Press. As his ninth solo record,“Stadium” reflects his move from South Brooklyn to Manhattan, where he produced the album. The constant blurry motion and ever-changing landscapes of the fast-paced island helped him modify and shape his sound into a new kind of film noir. “After we moved into our East Village apartment,” Keszler explains, “we found a guitar pick on the floor that read ‘Stadium’. We looked at each other at the same time and had the same thought. It could have gone any number of ways.” Indeed, there is a startling amount of expression at play on each track, where intersections of melody, restraint and rhythm are used to challenge the idea of memory, impression and space. Keszler is often mistaken for an electronic musician, but in fact his sounds are raw and natural, produced by hand live in-situ. His performance with the drumset and acoustic percussion are central to his work. He produces almost impossible textures through self-realized methodologies: cascading melodies, a shadow of voices, and a unique pointillistic materiality. Although playing with the intensity of digitally-created music, his communications are done live with no processing. These haptics are what give “Stadium” its depth and its warmth. In a recent interview for Dazed, collaborator Oneohtrix Point Never comments, “I’ve always described his playing as bacterial. He’s able to parallax into very small, very acute, very specific relationships between percussive textures. It’s beyond just being a drummer—he’s a world-building percussionist.” In “Stadium,” Keszler uses lived experience to realize the most wide-ranging sound he’s created to date. “Stadium” draws out textures from overlapping geographies (from Shinjuku arcades to city streets and Brutalist architecture) and transforms these travelogue field recordings into starting points for composition. He then builds on these environments to create subliminal spaces for his percussion, keyboards and acoustic instruments. His “world-building” techniques are pushed to new levels with mesmerizing string and brass arrangements. Throughout the album, Keszler’s writing, keyboard playing and scoring operate like a sonic channel that transports the listener into a quaking web. Perhaps this is the “stadium” referred to in the title: a larger network of sound and bodies moving continually, oscillating and turning in on itself. Keszler has explored these ideas before both in his visual work and sound installations—especially notable on projects such as his massive Manhattan Bridge installation ‘Archway’ or his Boston City Hall work «Northern Stair Projection.» “Stadium” takes these long-running ideas to new depths. “My installations work with massive city spaces for a complex of individuals,” Keszler states. “The recordings on Stadium are inverted. They are landscapes scaled for the singular. Like a mass collecting in one arena, this music compresses city spaces, genre and instrumentalism into an amorphous form. On the record, there are ruptures of information and happenstance. Like a game, it could go any number of ways.”
Dirges made by Kali Malone on the Kaliff pipe organ at Kungliga Musikhögskolan in Stockholm Sweden
Mumdance and Logos' Different Circles imprint are proud to present the first artist album to be released on the label, from the Italian producer Chevel. Over the nine tracks of Always Yours, Chevel presents his most focused and realised vision yet, capturing the spirit of the signature weightless sound of the label, but filtered through a unique and deeply personal house and techno prism. The results occupy a hazy interspace somewhere between Lee Gamble, Logos and Actress. In The Call, the lead track from the album, Chevel summons the spirit of hypnotic minimal techno and late 90s UK sound system music in what could be one of the standout dancefloor weapons of 2018. Tracks like Arp 2600 and Data Recovery traverse hypnotic rolling terrain and sit in juxtaposition to radical pointillist exercises in Bullet and Dem Drums. A third strand of ambient textures – including the stand-out impressionist study One Evening in July – weave a subtle thread through the work.
In 2018, Low will turn twenty-five. Since 1993, Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker—the married couple whose heaven-and-earth harmonies have always held the band’s center—have pioneered a subgenre, shrugged off its strictures, recorded a Christmas classic, become a magnetic onstage force, and emerged as one of music’s most steadfast and vital vehicles for pulling light from our darkest emotional recesses. But Low will not commemorate its first quarter-century with mawkish nostalgia or safe runs through songbook favorites. Instead, in faithfully defiant fashion, Low will release its most brazen, abrasive (and, paradoxically, most empowering) album ever: Double Negative, an unflinching eleven-song quest through snarling static and shattering beats that somehow culminates in the brightest pop song of Low’s career. To make Double Negative, Low reenlisted B.J. Burton, the quietly energetic and adventurous producer who has made records with James Blake, Sylvan Esso, and The Tallest Man on Earth in recent years while working as one of the go-to figures at Bon Iver’s home studio, April Base. Burton recorded Low’s last album, 2015’s Ones and Sixes, at April Base, adding might to many of its beats and squelch and frisson beneath many of its melodies. This time, though, Sparhawk, Parker, and bassist Steve Garrington knew they wanted to go further with Burton and his palette of sounds, to see what someone who is, as Sparhawk puts it, “a hip-hop guy” could truly do to their music. Rather than obsessively write and rehearse at home in Duluth, Minnesota, they would often head southeast to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, arriving with sketches and ideas that they would work on for days with Burton. Band and producer became collaborative cowriters, building the pieces up and breaking them down and building them again until their purpose and force felt clear. As the world outside seemed to slide deeper into instability, Low repeated this process for the better part of two years, pondering the results during tours and breaks at home. They considered not only how the fragments fit together but also how, in the United States of 2018, they functioned as statements and salves. Double Negative is, indeed, a record perfectly and painfully suited for our time. Loud and contentious and commanding, Low fights for the world by fighting against it. It begins in pure bedlam, with a beat built from a loop of ruptured noise waging war against the paired voices of Sparhawk and Parker the moment they begin to sing during the massive “Quorum.” For forty minutes, they indulge the battle, trying to be heard amid the noisy grain, sometimes winning and sometimes being tossed toward oblivion. In spite of the mounting noise, Sparhawk and Parker still sing. Or maybe they sing because of the noise. For Low, has there ever really been a difference?
On her 15th studio album, and first in four years, Mariah Carey’s graceful R&B is punctuated by crisp hip-hop production, this time via Timbaland, DJ Mustard, and Drake’s frequent producer Nineteen85. Along with them are some of the most memorable hip-hop features in R&B: Ty Dolla $ign for the chant-led “The Distance” and Gunna on the upbeat, trap-influenced “Stay Long Love You.” When she’s on her own, she uses her spotlight to give a little female-empowerment sass on “GTFO” and “A No No.” But the real standout of the set may be the slinky, six-minute “Giving Me Life,” featuring Slick Rick and Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes. Mariah Carey largely set the template for the current era of hybrid hip-hop/R&B-pop, and *Caution* proves she’s still pushing the musical conversation forward.