Please note: prices do not include VAT/sales tax (where applicable). Erratics & Unconformities is the first album by Craven Faults. It follows three EPs: Netherfield Works, Springhead Works and Nunroyd Works. Real-time journeys across decades and continents, and swathes of post-industrial northern Britain. The journey on Erratics & Unconformities picks up where Netherfield Works left off. We take the canal towpath out of the city. We fork north shortly afterwards. Is this where it started? The terrain gradually becomes more rugged. Familiar. Wild. Evidence of human activity is less immediate in this glacial landscape. It’s there if you seek it. But easy to ignore. If you listen carefully, you can still hear the weight of the ice-sheet carving its way through the rock. Scepter Studios, Manhattan. September 1967. Vox amplifiers driven to within an inch of their lives. An insistent rhythm. Familiar. Wild. We head across the city to 30th Street Studios a year later. More refined. Capturing a moment four years after its inception. We call into Command Studios in London on an evening in March 1972 before the pace drops. A moment to take in our surroundings. Music born in New York that has travelled beyond our solar system. A sense of weightlessness. We go as far back as 1906. Central Park. Tone poems underappreciated at the time - a visionary. We pay a visit to the village of Wümme in northern Germany. Forward momentum. There’s a nod to the rhythm of the loom. The studio building echoes with its own history by way of an early 70s Elka drum machine. We come to Van Gelder Studio in 1962 by a process of addition and elimination. We stay for the next three years. We’re also put in mind of the time we spent at Dierks Studios in 1972. A treasured record bought at sixteen. It takes time to reveal itself completely. Perhaps it never does. It would be lost now. 8th January 2013 – 19:16 – Farfisa drone through diode filter and phaser – 26 mins 38 seconds Everything in its own time. The output from the old textile mill Craven Faults calls home is no longer as linear as it once was. There was no clear start point for the project, rather simply rediscovering the joy in experimentation with no material goals. Some of the recordings that make up Erratics & Unconformities go back almost seven years. Tracks have come and gone in that time. They don’t leave until they’ve undertaken a stringent quality control process. It started slowly, but has picked up momentum in the last eighteen months. Recorded and re-recorded to the correct level of imperfection, and then left to breathe. Mixed and re-mixed. Carefully compiled when the time was right. 3rd July 2019 – 12:34 – Mixdown The journey is just as important as the destination.
If there is a recurring theme to be found in Phoebe Bridgers’ second solo LP, “it’s the idea of having these inner personal issues while there\'s bigger turmoil in the world—like a diary about your crush during the apocalypse,” she tells Apple Music. “I’ll torture myself for five days about confronting a friend, while way bigger shit is happening. It just feels stupid, like wallowing. But my intrusive thoughts are about my personal life.” Recorded when she wasn’t on the road—in support of 2017’s *Stranger in the Alps* and collaborative releases with Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker (boygenius) in 2018 and with Conor Oberst (Better Oblivion Community Center) in 2019—*Punisher* is a set of folk and bedroom pop that’s at once comforting and haunting, a refuge and a fever dream. “Sometimes I\'ll get the question, like, ‘Do you identify as an LA songwriter?’ Or ‘Do you identify as a queer songwriter?’ And I\'m like, ‘No. I\'m what I am,’” the Pasadena native says. “The things that are going on are what\'s going on, so of course every part of my personality and every part of the world is going to seep into my music. But I don\'t set out to make specific things—I just look back and I\'m like, ‘Oh. That\'s what I was thinking about.’” Here, Bridgers takes us inside every song on the album. **DVD Menu** “It\'s a reference to the last song on the record—a mirror of that melody at the very end. And it samples the last song of my first record—‘You Missed My Heart’—the weird voice you can sort of hear. It just felt rounded out to me to do that, to lead into this album. Also, I’ve been listening to a lot of Grouper. There’s a note in this song: Everybody looked at me like I was insane when I told Rob Moose—who plays strings on the record—to play it. Everybody was like, ‘What the fuck are you taking about?’ And I think that\'s the scariest part of it. I like scary music.” **Garden Song** “It\'s very much about dreams and—to get really LA on it—manifesting. It’s about all your good thoughts that you have becoming real, and all the shitty stuff that you think becoming real, too. If you\'re afraid of something all the time, you\'re going to look for proof that it happened, or that it\'s going to happen. And if you\'re a miserable person who thinks that good people die young and evil corporations rule everything, there is enough proof in the world that that\'s true. But if you\'re someone who believes that good people are doing amazing things no matter how small, and that there\'s beauty or whatever in the midst of all the darkness, you\'re going to see that proof, too. And you’re going to ignore the dark shit, or see it and it doesn\'t really affect your worldview. It\'s about fighting back dark, evil murder thoughts and feeling like if I really want something, it happens, or it comes true in a totally weird, different way than I even expected.” **Kyoto** “This song is about being on tour and hating tour, and then being home and hating home. I just always want to be where I\'m not, which I think is pretty not special of a thought, but it is true. With boygenius, we took a red-eye to play a late-night TV show, which sounds glamorous, but really it was hurrying up and then waiting in a fucking backstage for like hours and being really nervous and talking to strangers. I remember being like, \'This is amazing and horrible at the same time. I\'m with my friends, but we\'re all miserable. We feel so lucky and so spoiled and also shitty for complaining about how tired we are.\' I miss the life I complained about, which I think a lot of people are feeling. I hope the parties are good when this shit \[the pandemic\] is over. I hope people have a newfound appreciation for human connection and stuff. I definitely will for tour.” Punisher “I don\'t even know what to compare it to. In my songwriting style, I feel like I actually stopped writing it earlier than I usually stop writing stuff. I usually write things five times over, and this one was always just like, ‘All right. This is a simple tribute song.’ It’s kind of about the neighborhood \[Silver Lake in Los Angeles\], kind of about depression, but mostly about stalking Elliott Smith and being afraid that I\'m a punisher—that when I talk to my heroes, that their eyes will glaze over. Say you\'re at Thanksgiving with your wife\'s family and she\'s got an older relative who is anti-vax or just read some conspiracy theory article and, even if they\'re sweet, they\'re just talking to you and they don\'t realize that your eyes are glazed over and you\'re trying to escape: That’s a punisher. The worst way that it happens is like with a sweet fan, someone who is really trying to be nice and their hands are shaking, but they don\'t realize they\'re standing outside of your bus and you\'re trying to go to bed. And they talk to you for like 45 minutes, and you realize your reaction really means a lot to them, so you\'re trying to be there for them, too. And I guess that I\'m terrified that when I hang out with Patti Smith or whatever that I\'ll become that for people. I know that I have in the past, and I guess if Elliott was alive—especially because we would have lived next to each other—it’s like 1000% I would have met him and I would have not known what the fuck I was talking about, and I would have cornered him at Silverlake Lounge.” **Halloween** “I started it with my friend Christian Lee Hutson. It was actually one of the first times we ever hung out. We ended up just talking forever and kind of shitting out this melody that I really loved, literally hanging out for five hours and spending 10 minutes on music. It\'s about a dead relationship, but it doesn\'t get to have any victorious ending. It\'s like you\'re bored and sad and you don\'t want drama, and you\'re waking up every day just wanting to have shit be normal, but it\'s not that great. He lives right by Children\'s Hospital, so when we were writing the song, it was like constant ambulances, so that was a depressing background and made it in there. The other voice on it is Conor Oberst’s. I was kind of stressed about lyrics—I was looking for a last verse and he was like, ‘Dude, you\'re always talking about the Dodger fan who got murdered. You should talk about that.’ And I was like, \'Jesus Christ. All right.\' The Better Oblivion record was such a learning experience for me, and I ended up getting so comfortable halfway through writing and recording it. By the time we finished a whole fucking record, I felt like I could show him a terrible idea and not be embarrassed—I knew that he would just help me. Same with boygenius: It\'s like you\'re so nervous going in to collaborating with new people and then by the time you\'re done, you\'re like, ‘Damn, it\'d be easy to do that again.’ Your best show is the last show of tour.” Chinese Satellite “I have no faith—and that\'s what it\'s about. My friend Harry put it in the best way ever once. He was like, ‘Man, sometimes I just wish I could make the Jesus leap.’ But I can\'t do it. I mean, I definitely have weird beliefs that come from nothing. I wasn\'t raised religious. I do yoga and stuff. I think breathing is important. But that\'s pretty much as far as it goes. I like to believe that ghosts and aliens exist, but I kind of doubt it. I love science—I think science is like the closest thing to that that you’ll get. If I\'m being honest, this song is about turning 11 and not getting a letter from Hogwarts, just realizing that nobody\'s going to save me from my life, nobody\'s going to wake me up and be like, ‘Hey, just kidding. Actually, it\'s really a lot more special than this, and you\'re special.’ No, I’m going to be the way that I am forever. I mean, secretly, I am still waiting on that letter, which is also that part of the song, that I want someone to shake me awake in the middle of the night and be like, ‘Come with me. It\'s actually totally different than you ever thought.’ That’d be sweet.” **Moon Song** “I feel like songs are kind of like dreams, too, where you\'re like, ‘I could say it\'s about this one thing, but...’ At the same time it’s so hyper-specific to people and a person and about a relationship, but it\'s also every single song. I feel complex about every single person I\'ve ever cared about, and I think that\'s pretty clear. The through line is that caring about someone who hates themselves is really hard, because they feel like you\'re stupid. And you feel stupid. Like, if you complain, then they\'ll go away. So you don\'t complain and you just bottle it up and you\'re like, ‘No, step on me again, please.’ It’s that feeling, the wanting-to-be-stepped-on feeling.” Savior Complex “Thematically, it\'s like a sequel to ‘Moon Song.’ It\'s like when you get what you asked for and then you\'re dating someone who hates themselves. Sonically, it\'s one of the only songs I\'ve ever written in a dream. I rolled over in the middle of the night and hummed—I’m still looking for this fucking voice memo, because I know it exists, but it\'s so crazy-sounding, so scary. I woke up and knew what I wanted it to be about and then took it in the studio. That\'s Blake Mills on clarinet, which was so funny: He was like a little schoolkid practicing in the hallway of Sound City before coming in to play.” **I See You** “I had that line \[‘I\'ve been playing dead my whole life’\] first, and I\'ve had it for at least five years. Just feeling like a waking zombie every day, that\'s how my depression manifests itself. It\'s like lethargy, just feeling exhausted. I\'m not manic depressive—I fucking wish. I wish I was super creative when I\'m depressed, but instead, I just look at my phone for eight hours. And then you start kind of falling in love and it all kind of gets shaken up and you\'re like, ‘Can this person fix me? That\'d be great.’ This song is about being close to somebody. I mean, it\'s about my drummer. This isn\'t about anybody else. When we first broke up, it was so hard and heartbreaking. It\'s just so weird that you could date and then you\'re a stranger from the person for a while. Now we\'re super tight. We\'re like best friends, and always will be. There are just certain people that you date where it\'s so romantic almost that the friendship element is kind of secondary. And ours was never like that. It was like the friendship element was above all else, like we started a million projects together, immediately started writing together, couldn\'t be apart ever, very codependent. And then to have that taken away—it’s awful.” **Graceland Too** “I started writing it about an MDMA trip. Or I had a couple lines about that and then it turned into stuff that was going on in my life. Again, caring about someone who hates themselves and is super self-destructive is the hardest thing about being a person, to me. You can\'t control people, but it\'s tempting to want to help when someone\'s going through something, and I think it was just like a meditation almost on that—a reflection of trying to be there for people. I hope someday I get to hang out with the people who have really struggled with addiction or suicidal shit and have a good time. I want to write more songs like that, what I wish would happen.” **I Know the End** “This is a bunch of things I had on my to-do list: I wanted to scream; I wanted to have a metal song; I wanted to write about driving up the coast to Northern California, which I’ve done a lot in my life. It\'s like a super specific feeling. This is such a stoned thought, but it feels kind of like purgatory to me, doing that drive, just because I have done it at every stage of my life, so I get thrown into this time that doesn\'t exist when I\'m doing it, like I can\'t differentiate any of the times in my memory. I guess I always pictured that during the apocalypse, I would escape to an endless drive up north. It\'s definitely half a ballad. I kind of think about it as, ‘Well, what genre is \[My Chemical Romance’s\] “Welcome to the Black Parade” in?’ It\'s not really an anthem—I don\'t know. I love tricking people with a vibe and then completely shifting. I feel like I want to do that more.”
“I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig” reasoned George Bernard Shaw. “You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.” True to form, Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs have left the wiser of us aware that they are no band to be messed with. In the seven years since this band’s inception, the powerful primal charge at their heart has been amplified far beyond the realms of their original imagination. What’s more, no one has been more taken aback by this transformation than the band themselves. This culminated recently at a sold-out show at London’s renowned former fleapit Scala “That was the first gig where we were properly smacked with a feeling that something had shifted” reflects vocalist Matt Baty. “Something big and bold and positive. I felt quite overwhelmed with emotion at one point during that show. I’m not sure anyone paid to see me cry onstage, but I was close.” This upward trajectory has done nothing to make the Newcastle-based quintet complacent however, as they’ve used the cumulative force behind them as fuel for their most ambitious and hard-hitting record yet. ‘Viscerals’, their third proper is an enormous leap forward in confidence, adventure and sheer intensity even from their 2018 breakthrough ‘King Of Cowards’. Incisive in its riff-driven attack, infectiously catchy in its songcraft and more intrepid than ever in its experimental approach, ‘Viscerals’ is the sound of a leaner, more vicious Pigs, and one with their controls set way beyond the pulverising one-riff workouts of their early days. Whilst the fearsome opener ‘Reducer’s battle cry “ego kills everything” brings a philosophical bent to its Sabbathian abjection, elsewhere ‘Rubbernecker’ may be the most melodious ditty this band has yet attempted, redolent of the debauched swagger of Jane’s Addiction. Meanwhile the sinister sound-collage of ‘Blood And Butter’ delves into jarring abstraction anew, ‘New Body’ countenances a bracing Melvins-and-Sonic-Youth demolition derby and - perhaps most memorably of all - the perverse banger ‘Crazy In Blood’ marries MBV-ish guitar curlicues in its verses to a raise-your-fists chorus worthy of Twisted Sister or Turbonegro. Yet Pigsx7 have effortlessly broadened their horizons and dealt with all these new avenues without sacrificing one iota of their trademark eccentricity, and the personality of this band has never been stronger. “We’re a peculiar bunch of people - a precarious balance of passion, intensity and the absurd” notes Baty. Indeed, locked into a tight deadline in the studio, the band were forced to rally forces and to throw everything they had into created as concise and powerful a statement as could be summoned forth. “We booked dates in Sam’s studio before we’d written 80% of the album” reveals guitarist Adam Ian Sykes “We definitely thrive under pressure. It’s stressful but that stress seems to manifest itself in a positive way”. Yet for all that this record is the most far-reaching yet, its ability to get down to the nitty-gritty of the human condition is implicit from its title outwards. “Viscerals is reflection of many things I guess” says guitarist Sam Grant, whose Blank Studios was the venue in question for the band (whose rogues gallery is completed by bassist John-Michael Hedley and drummer Christopher Morley). “It’s the internal; it’s our health and physicality; it’s bodily and unseen; it’s essence that forgoes intellect; and it’s not a real word!” “At times it feels like we’re on a playground roundabout and there’s a fanatical group of people pushing it to turn faster” reckons Baty. “Then when it’s at peak speed they all jump on too and for just a few minutes we all feel liberated, together.” Such is the relentless momentum of this unique and ever-porcine outfit; hedonists of the grittiest and most life-affirming ride in the land, and still the hungriest animals at the rock trough. ---
clipping.\'s second entry in their horror anthology collection follows up 2019\'s *There Existed an Addiction to Blood* by conjuring up an atmosphere that rarely allows a moment to catch your breath. William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes\' experimental production pushes their concepts even further, drawing inspiration from traditional hip-hop (\"Say the Name\" mixes a Geto Boys sample within a Chicago house music vibe, while \"Eaten Alive\" is a disorienting tribute to No Limit Records), power electronics (the blown-out blast of \"Make Them Dead\"), and EVP field samplings (the urgent \"Pain Everyday\"). These textured compositions allow Daveed Diggs\' narration to take center stage as he reconceptualizes scary-movie tropes with today\'s modern societal terrors, fleshed out by a couple of eclectic features. Cam & China flip the \"final girl\" cliché on its head on the uptempo \"’96 Neve Campbell,\" while alt-rap duo Ho99o9 relate inner city violence to auto-cannibalism on the industrial-leaning \"Looking Like Meat.\" Here the Los Angeles-based trio takes Apple Music through the record\'s many horrors. **Say the Name** William Hutson: “I had always wanted to make a track using that phrase from the Geto Boys, and we had talked about doing a Dance Mania Chicago ghetto house track about *Candyman*. I always liked that idea of a slow, plodding, more dance-oriented track, using that line repeated as a hook.” Daveed Diggs: “We had always talked about how that line is one of the scariest lines in rap music, it\'s just really good writing. Scarface does that better than anybody. What we had was this very Chicago, these really specific reference points, to me, that I had to connect. That\'s how I saw the challenge in my head, was like there\'s this very Texas lyric and this very Chicago concept. Fortunately, *Candyman* already does that for you. It\'s already about the legacy of slavery in this country. So I just got to lean into those things.” **’96 Neve Campbell (feat. Cam & China)** Jonathan Snipes: “This was actually the second thing we sent them—we made an earlier beat that had a sample that we couldn\'t clear. We wanted to make something that sounds a little more like jerk music and something that\'s a little bit more tailored for them.” WH: \"We didn\'t have our *Halloween*, *Friday the 13th* slasher song. The idea was to not have Daveed on it at all, except to rap the hooks, and just to have female rappers basically standing in for the final girl in a slasher movie. But then we liked Daveed\'s lines, we wanted him to keep rapping on it.” DD: “It felt too short with just two verses. We were like, ‘Well, put me on the phone and make me be the killer.’” WH: “There\'s a Benny the Butcher song called \'’97 Hov,\' this idea of referring to a song by a date and a person that\'s the vibe you\'re going for. So some of the suggestions were like, \'’79 Jamie Lee Curtis\' or \'’82 Heather Langenkamp.\' But then with Daveed on the phone and making a *Scream* reference, \'’96 Neve Campbell\' made more sense.” **Something Underneath** DD: “There\'s a whole batch of songs we recorded in New York while I was also doing a play, and so we\'d work all day and then I\'d go do this show at night. For a long time, there was a version of this one that I couldn\'t stand the vocal performance on. It\'s obviously a pretty technical song, and I just never nailed it and I sound tired and all of this. So it ended up being the last thing we finished.” **Make Them Dead** WH: “We did ‘Body & Blood’ and ‘Wriggle,’ which both take literal samples from power electronic artists and turned them into dance songs. The idea for this was, let\'s do a song that instead of borrows from power electronics and makes it into a dance song, let\'s try to just make a heavy, slow, plodding thing that feels like real power electronics.” DD: “When we finally settled on how this song should be lyrically, it was actually hard to write. Just trying to capture that same feel. There\'s something about power electronics that feels instructional, feels like it\'s ordering you to do something. The politics around it are varied, depending on who is making the stuff. But in order to sit within that, it had to feel political and instructional, but then that had to agree with us.” **She Bad** WH: “That\'s our witchcraft track.” JS: “Obviously, this ended up having some melodies in it, but it started as those, but it really is just field recordings and modular synths, and there isn\'t a beat so much and the melody is very obtuse in the hooks. It\'s mostly just looped and cut field recordings.” DD: “I\'ve been moving away from something that we did in a lot of our previous records, like really super visual, like precise visual storytelling that feels really cinematic, where I\'m just actually pointing the camera at things, so that was fun to try that again.” **Invocation (Interlude) (with Greg Stuart)** WH: “It\'s a joke about Alvin Lucier\'s beat pattern music, his wave songs and things like that, but done as if it was trying to summon the devil.” **Pain Everyday (with Michael Esposito)** DD: “I love this song so much. Also, I definitely learned while writing it why people don\'t write whole rap songs in 7/8. It\'s not easy. The math, the hidden math in those verses is intense. It kept breaking my brain, but now that it\'s all down, I can\'t hear it any other way, it sounds fine. But getting there was such a mindfuck.” WH: “So then the idea was it\'s in 7/8, it\'s about a lynched ghost, so the idea we had was a chase scene of the ghost of murdered victims of lynching.” **Check the Lock** WH: “This was conceived as a sequel to a song by Seagram and Scarface called ‘Sleepin in My Nikes.’ That was a rap song about extreme paranoia that I always thought was cool and felt like a horror, like an aspect of horror.” JS: “This is the one time on this album that we let ourselves do that like John Carpenter-y, creepy synth thing.” **Looking Like Meat (feat Ho99o9)** DD: “I think they reached out wanting to do a song, and this had always felt, we always wanted this to be like a posse track, kind of. This was another one that I wasn\'t going to write a voice for actually, we were going to try to find a better verse.” JS: “Which is why the hooks are all different—we were going to fill them in specifically with features, but sometimes features don\'t work out. This is like our attempt at making the more sort of aggressive, like a thing that sounds more like noise rap than we usually do.” WH: “The first thing on this beat was I bought 20 little music boxes that all played different songs, and I stuck them all to a sounding board and put contact microphones on it, and just cranked them each at the same time.” **Eaten Alive (with Jeff Parker & Ted Byrnes)** DD: “I had been in this phase of listening to Nipsey \[Hussle\] all day, every day, and all I wanted to do was figure out how to rap like that. So from his cadence perspective, it\'s like my best Nipsey impression, which we didn\'t know was going to turn into a posthumous tribute.” WH: “And the rapping was also partly a tribute, just spiritually a tribute to No Limit Records. That\'s why it\'s called \'Eaten Alive,\' which is named after a Tobe Hooper horror movie about a swamp.” **Body for the Pile (with Sickness)** WH: “It already came out \[in 2016\]. It ended up being on an Adult Swim compilation called *NOISE*. We did it with Chris Goudreau, our friend who is just a legendary noise artist called Sickness.” JS: “We always thought that would be a great song to save for a horror record, and then years went by and we weren\'t going to include it, because we thought, ‘Well, it\'s out and it\'s done.’ We looked around and I don\'t know, that comp isn\'t really anywhere and that track is hard to find, and we really like it and we thought it fit really nice. When we started putting it in the lineup of tracks and listening to it as an album, we realized it fit really nicely.” **Enlacing** WH: “The cosmic pessimism of H.P. Lovecraft is all about the horror of discovering how small you are in the universe and how uncaring the universe is. So this song was about accessing that fear by getting way too high on Molly and ketamine at the same time, then discovering Cthulhu or Azathoth as a result of getting way too fucking high.” JS: “My memory is that this was never intended to be a clipping. song, that you and I made this beat as an example of, ‘Hey, we can make normal beats.’” DD: “That Lovecraftian idea was something that we played in opposition to a lot on *Splendor & Misery*, so it was good to revisit in a way where we were actually playing into it, and also it definitely feels to me like just being way too high.” **Secret Piece** WH: “We wanted to really tie the two albums together, so the idea was to get everyone who played on any of the albums to contribute their one note. So we assembled the recordings of dawn and forests, and then almost everyone who played on either of these two albums contributed one note.” JS: “We have a habit of ending our albums with a piece of processed music or contemporary music. We ended *midcity* with a take on a Steve Reich phased loop idea, and we ended *CLPPNG* with a John Cage piece, and then *There Existed* ends with Annea Lockwood\'s \'Piano Burning.\' So we wanted something that felt like the sun was coming up at the end of the horror movie, a little bit.” WH: “That was the idea was that we were exiting, it\'s dawn in a forest. So dawn in a forest in a slasher movie or a horror movie usually means you\'re safe, right? The end of *Friday the 13th* one, the sun comes up and she\'s in the little boat, but that doesn\'t end well for her either. We did not have the jump scare at the end like *Friday the 13th*.” DD: “I pushed for it a little bit, but some people thought it was too corny.”
It’s auspicious that Sonic Boom—the solo project and nom-de-producer of Peter Kember (Spectrum, Spacemen 3)—returns in 2020 with its first new LP in three decades. Kember’s drawn to the year’s numerological potency, and this intentionality shines into every corner of All Things Being Equal. It’s a meditative, mathematical record concerned with the interconnectedness of memory, space, consumerism, consciousness—everything. Through regenerative stories told backwards and forwards, Kember explores dichotomies zen and fearsome, reverential of his analog toolkit and protective of the plants and trees that support our lives. Sonic Boom’s second album and first for Carpark began in 2015 as electronic jams. The original sketches of electronic patterns, sequenced out of modular synths, were so appealing that Stereolab’s Tim Gane encouraged Kember to release them instrumentally. “I nearly did,” confesses Kember, “but the vibe in them was so strong that I couldn't resist trying to ice the cake.” Three years later, a move to Portugal saw him dusting off the backing tracks, adding vocals inspired by Sam Cooke, The Sandpipers, and the Everly Brothers (which he admits “don’t go far from the turntable pile”), as well as speculative, ominous spoken word segments. His new home Sintra’s parks and gardens provided a different visual context for Kember’s thoughtful observations, and he thematically incorporated sunshine and nature as well as global protests into the ten resulting tracks. “Music made in sterility sounds sterile,” he says, “And that is my idea of hell.” Over the vivid, calculating arps of opener “Just Imagine,” Kember nudges listeners to do as the title suggests. It’s based on a story he read about a boy who healed his cancer by picturing himself as a storm cloud, raining out his illness. “The Way That You Live,” a rollicking drone powered by drum machine rattles and bright chord beds, morphs political distrust into a revolutionary mantra about ethical living. “I try and live my life by voting every day with what I do and how I do it, who I do it with and the love that I can give them along the way,” offers Kember. An unusually curated gear list accompanies each song, unexpected layers reinforcing the monophonic skeletons. Mystery soundscapes and grinding sweeps were teased from EMS synths, synonymous with and evocative of ‘60s BBC scoring and ‘70s Eno. Pacing basslines oscillating into warbling heartbeats came from a cheap ‘80s Yamaha. A modern OP-1 generated subtle kicks and eerie theremins, while his toy Music Modem—an unused holdover from sessions Kember produced for Beach House and MGMT—finally found its recorded home. It’s rare to see liner notes where synthesizers rather than humans are credited (other than guest vocal stints from “co-conspirators” Panda Bear and Britta Phillips), but Kember is masterful at finding the unique personality in his machines. “I tried to find the deepest essence of the instruments & let them play,” he offers. What emerges from these considerations on technology and humanity is a honed collection both philosophical and grooving, spacious even as it fills to its brim. It’s distinctly Kember—more than that, it’s distinctly Sonic Boom.
Makaya McCraven is a student of Chicago’s jazz scene, but his rise as one of the genre’s most innovative drummers has brought him into collaboration with players from around the world. He’s involved with Kamasi Washington and the West Coast Get Down in California, the underground New York City scene, and even the psychedelic jazz revolution occurring in London and the UK. McCraven’s vision of jazz is slightly inverted: He takes marathon sessions and chops them up, not unlike a hip-hop producer does. When XL Recordings tapped him to reimagine Gil Scott-Heron’s seminal 2010 album *I’m New Here*, he used his unique aesthetics to reframe the album as *We’re New Again*, a staggering world built from the soil of Scott-Heron’s unique vision. “Gil is an exemplary vision of the poignant black artist,” McCraven explains to Apple Music. “I recognized that impact from a young age, later connecting things that I didn\'t know belonged to him, like ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.’” Instead of hiding behind the gargantuan shadow of Scott-Heron, though, McCraven embraces the challenge. It’s a stellar tribute, but decidedly crafted from Makaya’s perspective, and less of a cover album than a conversation between two powerful black artists. “I just feel very happy to be given the responsibility of work with this material,” he says. “I\'m honored.” Here McCraven talks through a few of his favorite tracks from the project. **Special Tribute (Broken Home, Pt. 1)** “The ‘Broken Home’ pieces across the entire record are something that particularly stuck out for me. I used samples from when Gil is talking about the women who raised him, and you get a sense of his whole life in a way, too. He goes through some different things about his mother, his grandmother, and just his story. So I felt like that had framed a lot of the record well. The record opens up with a special tribute, which is basically the music or some element of *I\'m New Here*, but backwards.” **I’m New Here** “This is a special track. Even the original, which Gil is covering, is quite sparse—there’s this empty feeling in a way. I really wanted to do something different with it. Even as I dug into it, Gil\'s version is very similar to the original version. So I took a slightly different approach, and I felt like it really brought another light or two to the lyrics, because there are a lot of different emotions there.” **Running** “‘Running’ was an interesting one to record, at least in terms of sound. The bells are recorded with Ben LaMar Gay, and they’re a kind of church bells—you wear white gloves to play them—and we were doing a session to create some different timbres around the material. From there I chopped up the instruments around the lyrics and the poem. I’ve always really, really loved the poem. I was working a lot with just the stems of Gil\'s voice, so that was really interesting, too, because I had a wide-open palette to start to try to interpret some of the pieces. Gil called himself a \'bluesologist\' in some interviews—there\'s so much blues in what he does in his legacy of music. And when I was recording with Ben LaMar Gay, we really tried to hone in on those blues elements.” **Lily Scott (Broken Home, Pt. 3)** “This is actually sampled from one of my father\'s records—he\'s playing a kalimba and there\'s some percussion. My mom is playing a Hungarian recorder or flute. This is the piece that Gil is speaking about his grandmother, Lily Scott, who helped raise him, in a kind of an homage to the women in his life. This was a nice way for me to personally touch this project. It was an honor for me to inject some of my family’s identity into Gil’s song about his family identity. I like having my own imprint on it.” **I’ll Take Care of You** “There were several versions I was working on to try to get this one to come together. The very last touch of this album was just finishing that song. I like to imagine the album playing as a full record. In stints it plays like a narrative more than as a bunch of singles or tracks. But ‘I\'ll Take Care of You’ is one of the songs I\'d describe as more of a stand-alone track. The piano in \'I\'ll Take Care of You\' comes from some outtakes of Gil in the studio playing piano and singing some different songs. I wanted to take his touch on the piano and isolate a bunch of the pieces and spread them out on various pads, kind of like a MPC, and create some progressions with Gil\'s touch on the piano. That\'s where the piano and the progressions came from on that track. I also did some more corrective vocal chopping around that one, utilizing pads and the MPC.” **Me and the Devil** “This begins with a sample from a track called ‘Allah,’ so that was apropos. This one comes from a Robert Johnson song and also features a blues form. I shifted the form a bit to make the chords reflect themselves in the verses. This one features Jeff Parker on guitar; when this project came up, I immediately thought of Jeff and Ben LaMar Gay. ‘I\'ll Take Care of You’ has Brandee Younger on harp. ‘Me and the Devil’ came together pretty early on in the process. It was just a really fun one to work on, because I was playing with the band, whipping it up on guitar and using a bassline and a saxophone to carry the song. A lot of the stuff I work on is approached from a variety of angles. It starts from a place of pure creativity, and then I carve away at it after the fact until I can get it to a place that I’m proud of.”
It took Kelly Lee Owens 35 days to write the music for her second album. “I had a flood of creation,” she tells Apple Music. “But this was after three years that included loss, learning how to deal with loss and how to transmute that loss into something of creation again. They were the hardest three years of my life.” The Welsh electronic musician’s self-titled 2017 debut album figured prominently on best-of-the-year lists and won her illustrious fans across music and fashion. It’s the sort of album you recommend to people you’d like to impress. Its release, however, was clouded by issues in Owens’ personal life. “There was a lot going on, and it took away my energy,” she says. “It made me question the integrity of who I was and whether it was ego driving certain situations. It was so tough to keep moving forward.” Fortunately, Owens rallied. “It sounds hippie-dippie, but this is my purpose in life,” she says. “To convey messages via sounds and to connect to other people.” Informed by grief, lust, anxiety, and environmental concerns, *Inner Song* is an electronic album that impacts viscerally. “I allowed myself to be more of a vessel that people talk about,” she says. “It’s real. Ideas can flow through you. In that 35-day period, I allowed myself to tap into any idea I had, rather than having to come in with lyrics, melodies, and full production. It’s like how the best ideas come when you’re in the shower: You’re usually just letting things be and come through you a bit more. And then I could hunker down and go in hard on all those minute nudges on vocal lines or kicks or rhythmical stuff or EQs. Both elements are important, I learned. And I love them both.” Here, Owens treats you to a track-by-track guide to *Inner Song*. **Arpeggi** “*In Rainbows* is one of my favorite albums of all time. The production on it is insane—it’s the best headphone *and* speaker listening experience ever. This cover came a year before the rest of the album, actually. I had a few months between shows and felt like I should probably go into the studio. I mean, it’s sacrilege enough to do a Radiohead cover, but to attempt Thom’s vocals: no. There is a recording somewhere, but as soon as I heard it, I said, ‘That will never been heard or seen. Delete, delete, delete.’ I think the song was somehow written for analog synths. Perhaps if Thom Yorke did the song solo, it might sound like this—especially where the production on the drums is very minimal. So it’s an homage to Thom, really. It was the starting point for me, and this record, so it couldn’t go anywhere else.” **On** “I definitely wanted to explore my own vocals more on this album. That ‘journey,’ if you like, started when Kieran Hebden \[Four Tet\] requested I play before him at a festival and afterwards said to me, ‘Why the fuck have you been hiding your vocals all this time under waves of reverb, space echo, and delay? Don’t do that on the next album.’ That was the nod I needed from someone I respect so highly. It’s also just been personal stuff—I have more confidence in my voice and the lyrics now. With what I’m singing about, I wanted to be really clear, heard, and understood. It felt pointless to hide that and drown it in reverb. The song was going to be called ‘Spirit of Keith’ as I recorded it on the day \[Prodigy vocalist\] Keith Flint died. That’s why there are so many tinges of ’90s production in the drums, and there’s that rave element. And almost three minutes on the dot, you get the catapult to move on. We leap from this point.” **Melt!** “Everyone kept taking the exclamation mark out. I refused, though—it’s part of the song somehow. It was pretty much the last song I made for the album, and I felt I needed a techno banger. There’s a lot of heaviness in the lyrics on this album, so I just wanted that moment to allow a letting loose. I wanted the high fidelity, too. A lot of the music I like at the moment is really clear, whereas I’m always asking to take the top end off on the snare—even if I’m told that’s what makes something a snare. I just don’t really like snares. The ‘While you sleep, melt, ice’ lyrics kept coming into my head, so I just searched for ‘glacial ice melting’ and ‘skating on ice’ or ‘icicles cracking’ and found all these amazing samples. The environmental message is important—as we live and breathe and talk, the environment continues to suffer, but we have to switch off from it to a certain degree because otherwise you become overwhelmed and then you’re paralyzed. It’s a fine balance—and that’s why the exclamation mark made so much sense to me.” **Re-Wild** “This is my sexy stoner song. I was inspired by Rihanna’s ‘Needed Me,’ actually. People don’t necessarily expect a little white girl from Wales to create something like this, but I’ve always been obsessed with bass so was just wanting a big, fat bassline with loads of space around it. I’d been reading this book *Women Who Run With the Wolves* \[by Clarissa Pinkola\], which talks very poetically about the journey of a woman through her lifetime—and then in general about the kind of life, death, and rebirth cycle within yourself and relationships. We’re always focused on the death—the ending of something—but that happens again and again, and something can be reborn and rebirthed from that, which is what I wanted to focus on. She \[Pinkola\] talks about the rewilding of the spirit. So often when people have depression—unless we suffer chronically, which is something else—it’s usually when the creative soul life dies. I felt that mine was on the edge of fading. Rewilding your spirit is rewilding that connection to nature. I was just reestablishing the power and freedoms I felt within myself and wanting to express that and connect people to that inner wisdom and power that is always there.” **Jeanette** “This is dedicated to my nana, who passed away in October 2019, and she will forever be one of the most important people in my life. She was there three minutes after I was born, and I was with her, holding her when she passed. That bond is unbreakable. At my lowest points she would say, ‘Don’t you dare give this up. Don’t you dare. You’ve worked hard for this.’ Anyway, this song is me letting it go. Letting it all go, floating up, up, and up. It feels kind of sunshine-y. What’s fun for me—and hopefully the listener—is that on this album you’re hearing me live tweaking the whole way through tracks. This one, especially.” **L.I.N.E.** “Love Is Not Enough. This is a deceivingly pretty song, because it’s very dark. Listen, I’m from Wales—melancholy is what we do. I tried to write a song in a minor key for this album. I was like, ‘I want to be like The 1975’—but it didn’t happen. Actually, this is James’ song \[collaborator James Greenwood, who releases music as Ghost Culture\]. It’s a Ghost Culture song that never came out. It’s the only time I’ve ever done this. It was quite scary, because it’s the poppiest thing I’ve probably done, and I was also scared because I basically ended up rewriting all the lyrics, and re-recorded new kick drums, new percussion, and came up with a new arrangement. But James encouraged all of it. The new lyrics came from doing a trauma body release session, which is quite something. It’s someone coming in, holding you and your gaze, breathing with you, and helping you release energy in the body that’s been trapped. Humans go through trauma all the time and we don’t literally shake and release it, like animals do. So it’s stored in the body, in the muscles, and it’s vital that we figure out how to release it. We’re so fearful of feeling our pain—and that fear of pain itself is what causes the most damage. This pain and trauma just wants to be seen and acknowledged and released.” **Corner of My Sky (feat. John Cale)** “This song used to be called ‘Mushroom.’ I’m going to say no more on that. I just wanted to go into a psychedelic bubble and be held by the sound and connection to earth, and all the, let’s just say, medicine that the earth has to offer. Once the music was finished, Joakim \[Haugland, founder of Owens’ label, Smalltown Supersound\] said, ‘This is nice, but I can hear John Cale’s voice on this.’ Joakim is a believer that anything can happen, so we sent it to him knowing that if he didn’t like it, he wouldn’t fucking touch it. We had to nudge a bit—he’s a busy man, he’s in his seventies, he’s touring, he’s traveling. But then he agreed and it became this psychedelic lullaby. For both of us, it was about the land and wanting to go to the connection to Wales. I asked if he could speak about Wales in Welsh, as it would feel like a small contribution from us to our country, as for a long time our language was suppressed. He then delivered back some of the lyrics you hear, but it was all backwards. So I had to go in and chop it up and arrange it, which was this incredibly fun challenge. The last bit says, ‘I’ve lost the bet that words will come and wake me in the morning.’ It was perfect. Honestly, I feel like the Welsh tourist board need to pay up for the most dramatic video imaginable.” **Night** “It’s important that I say this before someone else does: I think touring with Jon Hopkins influenced this one in terms of how the synth sounded. It wasn’t conscious. I’ve learned a lot of things from him in terms of how to produce kicks and layer things up. It’s related to a feeling of how, in the nighttime, your real feelings come out. You feel the truth of things and are able to access more of yourself and your actual soul desires. We’re distracted by so many things in the daytime. It’s a techno love song.” **Flow** “This is an anomaly as it’s a strange instrumental thing, but I think it’s needed on the album. This has a sample of me playing hand drum. I actually live with a sound healer, so we have a ceremony room and there’s all sorts of weird instruments in there. When no one was in the house, I snuck in there and played all sorts of random shit and sampled it simply on my iPhone. And I pitched the whole track around that. It fits at this place on the record, because we needed to come back down. It’s a breathe-out moment and a restful space. Because this album can truly feel like a journey. It also features probably my favorite moment on the album—when the kick drums come back in, with that ‘bam, bam, bam, bam.’ Listen and you’ll know exactly where I mean.” **Wake-Up** “There was a moment sonically with me and this song after I mixed it, where the strings kick in and there’s no vocals. It’s just strings and the arpeggio synth. I found myself in tears. I didn’t know that was going to happen to me with my own song, as it certainly didn’t happen when I was writing it. What I realized was that the strings in that moment were, for me, the earth and nature crying out. Saying, ‘Please, listen. Please, see what’s happening.’ And the arpeggio, which is really chaotic, is the digital world encroaching and trying to distract you from the suffering and pain and grief that the planet is enduring right now. I think we’re all feeling this collective grief that we can’t articulate half the time. We don’t even understand that we are connected to everyone else. It’s about tapping into the pain of this interconnected web. It’s also a commentary on digital culture, which I am of course a part of. I had some of the lyrics written down from ages ago, and they inspired the song. ‘Wake up, repeat, again.’ Just questioning, in a sense, how we’ve reached this place.”
“It\'s taken me back to that space,” Little Simz tells Apple Music—“it” being the 2020 coronavirus lockdown. “Back to when I was at my mum’s and in my bedroom just doing my thing. I\'ve recorded my albums at proper studios, with engineers, all these things. Then the world stops and that\'s taken away from you. I\'ve just reminded myself: ‘No, I\'ve been doing this from early. I taught myself Logic \[Pro\]. I taught myself how to record myself, how to mix. I used to mix my friends\' songs. I\'ve been doing this.’” Which is how the North London rapper hurdled self-doubt and quarantine-related creative blocks to arrive at *Drop 6*. It’s an EP that, in fact, wasn’t part of the 2020 Simz plan. “I was just going to write my next album and go and shoot *Top Boy*,” she says. “Maybe practice piano, work on a photo book project, you know? Just behind-the-scenes, low-key stuff.” Instead, we get a brave and emotionally charged leap forward—perhaps best captured with the visceral, siren-blaring “might bang, might not” and the stripped-back gratitude on “one life, might live.” “The track titles here are…well, it’s like I’m talking to myself,” she says. “That’s the mode I was in, because I was in isolation. Sometimes you do need to remind yourself: I know now within myself that when everything stops, I can still do what I love regardless.” Here, Simz talks us through *Drop 6*, track by track. **might bang, might not** “I\'m sitting here recording in my house and I\'m getting gassed, but I\'m alone, you know? I don\'t know how this is going to go off in the real world. But in my apartment I love it. So I was like, ’This might bang, it might not.\' This was produced by Kal Banx. I met him in LA—really, really amazing producer, he’s a part of Dreamville. He was sending me stuff on a certain vibe and then randomly he sent me this one, and I was like, ‘Oh, OK!’ Sometimes when things are weird and different it just gets you up. So I gave it a shot and it worked.\" **one life, might live** “This is about being grateful. When I think about what life was like for me a year ago, I was on tour, I was living my best life, and I was just having fun with it. I just wanted that song to kind of reflect that. At first I remember we just had the bass and I was rapping over it, then I tried to send it to a few producers to add stuff, to try and add more to it. Eventually I decided to just strip it all the way back and keep it exactly how it was when I first recorded it. Sometimes, I don\'t know, you lose the magic when you try to overcook it.” **damn right** “This is also produced by Kal Banx. I sent it to him, just as a rough demo. He was like, ‘Yeah, you\'re floating on this. This is cool as fuck.\' It\'s just my time to flex a little. I just want to say some shit. It\'s not too thought-out. I don\'t remember really writing my words down on this. It was literally just a vibe. That\'s why there\'s not really a hook like that. And it banged. I like it. It\'s one of my favorite songs off the EP.” **you should call mum** “At first I wasn\'t actually going to title any of the songs. I was just going to call them \'Track One,\' \'Track Two,\' \'Track Three,\' whatever. I didn\'t have any of these names, but I was speaking to a friend. He was like, \'Yo, these deserve titles.\' I just wanted this EP to be low-key. But as I started going through and really listening, and taking up what my friend said, I knew they needed titles. On this song, I\'m pretty much saying how I feel in the present moment, being in isolation. My mum is the one person that\'s been constantly checking up on me. Constantly like, \'Do you need food? Do you need this?\' I guess in those moments of feeling down I remember, yeah, I have a mum that I can just call her and chat to her and she makes me feel at ease and settled.” **where’s my lighter (feat. Alewya)** “Alewya is someone that I met maybe a year ago, a year and a half maybe, through a mutual friend. I just went to see her play at a show in West London, this little underground club, and I just thought she was hard. I thought her whole steez, her whole thing, was sick. I think she’s Ethiopian and Egyptian, and you can hear how she’s rooted from that in her vocal. Some of the runs and the stuff she does, you can\'t teach someone how to do that shit. You\'re just born with that. Before the whole lockdown situation, she\'d come to my house a couple times with my DJ, OTG, who produced this song, and we just vibed. This is one of the vibes we created. It was so bare. There was nothing to it. She even freestyled that hook, it was just one take. She wanted to record it again and she did, and I was like, \'No, man. The freestyle you done that time when you was just not thinking and it was just off the dome, it\'s hard,\' and that\'s what we ran with.”
Daniel Avery returns with his third full-length album, Love + Light, a surprise release out now via Phantasy worldwide and Phantasy/Mute in the United States and Canada on all digital platforms, with ethereal artwork taken from an image by Avery’s tour photographer Keffer. Love + Light arrives unexpectedly, following Avery’s recent collaborations with Alessandro Cortini on the critically acclaimed Illusion of Time LP (“a record that suggests Godspeed You! Black Emperor in drone mode, reimagining Music For Airports as if the runways were covered in gravel and air traffic control was on strike,” said Loud & Quiet, while Q hailed it “lush mood music to get lost in”) and alongside Roman Flügel under the alias of Noun. Avery’s previous solo album Song For Alpha was released in 2018 to similar acclaim. Avery shares, “This record has been a real positive force of energy in my life, to the point where it almost formed itself in front of me. In that same spirit, I wanted to share it with you now, as soon as it was finished. As I started to collect the pieces together, it was apparent that the album would be split into two distinct halves but halves that were inexorably tied together. One could not have existed without the other. Music has always been a source of personal strength for me yet I remain fascinated by the power it can possess of its own volition. Releasing the record in this way, just a couple of weeks after the final note had fallen, felt like a decision made by an outside force yet one I agreed with entirely. Stay safe, friends and I’ll see you on the other side soon. DA xxx”
Bold, weird, wild, wired, sonically luxurious yet never losing touch with its DIY-‘til-I-die roots, Thumb World is a voyage to the outer rings of Pictish Trail’s mind at its darkest, funniest and most inventive – a plugged-in, fuzzed-out, fucked-up contemplation on, as he puts it, “life repeating and gradually degrading, the inevitable cyclical nature of things, and the sense of their ultimately being no escape.” Expect alien abductions, thumping beats, Trump-haired pigs, paternal panic, astronaut sex, bad acid trips, worse hangovers, lashings of distortion and a lot of anthropomorphic thumbs. “Our opposable thumbs are the things that separate us from most other animals on Earth,” Pictish explains, of the fat digit symbolism, “they are also the things that we use to swipe on screens, to separate ourselves from our normal lives, but which in turn trap us within an artificial reality.” Produced and mixed by Rob Jones, featuring string arrangements from Kim Moore and drumming from Alex Thomas (Squarepusher, Anna Calvi, Air), Thumb World is Pictish Trail’s most collaborative album to date. An audio-visual dialogue with Swatpaz, AKA Scottish artist Davey Ferguson – the man behind the Turbo Fantasy series and an entire episode of cult TV phenomenon Adventure Time – furnished Johnny with not just a graphic aesthetic for the album, but even helped him to shape the sound of the finished record. “I sent Davey a work-inprogress mix of the album,” Johnny says, “he came back with sketches in which he had reimagined Thumb World as an 80’s arcade game. Some of the songs are centered around specific visual images, inspired by Davey’s sketches.” Due for release on Fire Records on February 21, 2020. Four years in the making, Thumb World is the much-anticipated follow-up to his critically acclaimed Scottish Album of the Year Award public vote winner Future Echoes.
Released in June 2020 as American cities were rupturing in response to police brutality, the fourth album by rap duo Run The Jewels uses the righteous indignation of hip-hop\'s past to confront a combustible present. Returning with a meaner boom and pound than ever before, rappers Killer Mike and EL-P speak venom to power, taking aim at killer cops, warmongers, the surveillance state, the prison-industrial complex, and the rungs of modern capitalism. The duo has always been loyal to hip-hop\'s core tenets while forging its noisy cutting edge, but *RTJ4* is especially lithe in a way that should appeal to vintage heads—full of hyperkinetic braggadocio and beats that sound like sci-fi remakes of Public Enemy\'s *Apocalypse 91*. Until the final two tracks there\'s no turn-down, no mercy, and nothing that sounds like any rap being made today. The only guest hook comes from Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Mavis Staples on \"pulling the pin,\" a reflective song that connects the depression prevalent in modern rap to the structural forces that cause it. Until then, it’s all a tires-squealing, middle-fingers-blazing rhymefest. Single \"ooh la la\" flips Nice & Smooth\'s Greg Nice from the 1992 Gang Starr classic \"DWYCK\" into a stomp closed out by a DJ Premier scratch solo. \"out of sight\" rewrites the groove of The D.O.C.\'s 1989 hit \"It\'s Funky Enough\" until it treadmills sideways, and guest 2 Chainz spits like he just went on a Big Daddy Kane bender. A churning sample from lefty post-punks Gang of Four (\"the ground below\") is perfectly on the nose for an album brimming with funk and fury, as is the unexpected team-up between Pharrell and Zack de la Rocha (\"JU$T\"). Most significant, however, is \"walking in the snow,\" where Mike lays out a visceral rumination on police violence: \"And you so numb you watch the cops choke out a man like me/Until my voice goes from a shriek to whisper, \'I can\'t breathe.\'\"
India Jordan’s first EP feels like someone turning the valve on a cylinder of pent-up euphoria. The Doncaster-born producer and DJ has forged a reputation over the past 10 years as a resident DJ and club promoter across the northeast of England. But after starting to make music two years ago—and following 2019’s series of excellent and well-received singles—they’ve quickly singled themselves out as one of electronic music’s most enticing new prospects. “I called the EP *For You* because it’s been a bit of a dream of mine to have a record out,” they explain. “So I wanted to dedicate it to myself and be like, ‘This is what you’ve wanted forever, to have that physical piece of vinyl in your hand, and you’ve got it now, so well done.’” Everything from hardcore to liquid drum ’n’ bass is put through Jordan’s blender, and there’s an overwhelming sense of someone coming to terms with and celebrating themselves. With cover art shot in the toilets of legendary queer London venue Dalston Superstore and a track dedicated to the main character in Sarah Waters’ 1998 novel *Tipping the Velvet*, a celebration of India’s identity runs clear. But beyond that, the EP feels like an exuberant celebration of life itself. Here’s Jordan’s track-by-track guide. **I’m Waiting (Just 4 U)** “This track came from an experiment I did on my \[2019\] track ‘WARPER.’ Originally I was trying to put a vocal on ‘WARPER’ but I ditched it because it didn’t really work, but I decided the vocal was good enough on its own as this fun disco edit. It feels like a follow-up to my track ‘DNT STP MY LV’ from \[2019\] as it’s in the same disco style.” **For You** “This is the main single from the EP, and I made it on a train from London to Middlesbrough, where I was going to watch England’s women play Brazil in the football. I hadn’t seen my partner for a while as we’re long-distance, so all the energy in the track captures the excitement of that. I always try to make tracks on trains. It’s a really effective time and space where you just have nothing else to do. A lot of people think there’s an Orbital sample on the track, but it’s not. It’s from a sample pack that I then pitched up and down, and it sounds a bit like \[1989 Orbital track\] ‘Chime’ but it’s not intentional.” **Emotional Melodical** “I made this track when I was really sad. My partner had just moved up north while I was still in London and we were going through a bit of a difficult patch. I was in a bit of a pit of depression about it. I wanted to make a really cathartic emotional tune to help me process it all. It was super cathartic, and it’s me just outpouring all these feelings. It’s 140 BPM, so it’s a bit dubsteppy, I guess, but not dubstep. It’s the first time I’d tried to make something with a half-time break in it.” **Rave City** “I made this around the same time I made ‘I’m Waiting (Just 4 U),’ and I wanted to make a hardcore track with really euphoric piano in it. One thing I’ve realized since I started to make music two years ago is I’m really into big waves of synths which are filtered. It was called ‘Untitled Rave Track’ for ages.” **Westbourne Ave** “This is an ode to my early days DJing and being into drum ’n’ bass back in 2009. I was obsessed with Hospital Records, and it’s named ‘Westbourne Ave’ because that was the street in Hull I lived on when I learnt to DJ. It’s an ode to the gatekeeper d’n’b heads who made out that production was super hard and I wouldn’t be able to do it! I wanted to make a liquid d’n’b tune to prove them wrong.” **Dear Nan King** “Nan King is a character from Sarah Waters’ novel *Tipping the Velvet, which is about queer characters in London in the 1890s. I saw the TV adaptation when I was 12 when I was just starting to figure out who I am, and it felt pretty revolutionary to me to see this representation on TV. I finally read the book and I just completely fell in love with it. It was the same time I was writing this tune, and the joy and excitement of reading that book really fed into the song, so I sampled a line from the show on it. There’s a line from the BBC adaptation at the end of the track that says, ‘There’s nothing wrong with me at all,’ and I thought it was a great way to end the EP.”*
Horse Lords make music for the liberation of mind and body. The Baltimore quartet's new album The Common Task points to a utopian, modernist ideal, recalling as diverse a cohort as The Ex and Glenn Branca to raucous Saharan guitar music, Albert Ayler, and James Tenney. As evidenced by the album’s title, as well as songs like “Fanfare for Effective Freedom” and “People’s Park,” the band’s penchant for radical politics is especially accentuated on this release. Horse Lords are the Pied Piper of experimental music and radical thought. Their music is unabashedly fun, and experiencing it in a live context is an experience of collective ecstasy, each body moving to its own notion of what the beat may be. By showing just how joyous it can be to imagine new futures and possibilities, by making us dance and howl with each tectonic shift, they show how dazzling the path towards utopia could be.
The songs comprising Keeley Forsyth’s debut are, she states simply, “like blocks of metal that drop from the sky.” With its minimal arrangements placing her recollections and dissections of sometimes harrowing experiences front and centre, Debris showcases her elemental voice and an outpouring of candid, haunting lyrics detailing the seismic ruptures which take place behind closed doors. “There was a lot going on in my life that was heavy and hard,” she adds. “Songs were made under that moment.” Born and raised in Oldham, Forsyth first made her name as an actor, and while the creation of music has been a constant feature in her life, she’s taken the long road to its release. A deeply intuitive and singular musician, she began writing several years ago, accompanying herself on harmonium and accordion. “I came up with lots of songs in a very short space of time,” Forsyth recalls. “Most songs were written in the time it took to sing them. But I held them close, and often thought I needed to do something with them. It never felt right to go out and look for it. I felt like I needed to wait and move when I felt inspired.” That inspiration struck one evening while listening to the radio, where she first encountered pianist and composer Matthew Bourne’s work. “I heard his music and suddenly I could hear them both together,” she says of her songs and his compositions. “I felt compelled to write to him. He got straight back and said he loved what I was doing.” What followed were quick and instinctive collaborations with Bourne and producer and musician Sam Hobbs, with the initial burst of momentum Forsyth felt when writing carried through into the studio, preserving the intricacies and accidents that make an album human.
“My music is not as collaborative as it’s been in the past,” Jeff Parker tells Apple Music. “I’m not inviting other people to write with me. I’m more interested in how people\'s instrumental voices can fit into the ideas I’m working on.” As his career has evolved, the jazz guitarist and member of post-rock band Tortoise has become more comfortable writing compositions as a solitary exercise. While 2016\'s *The New Breed* featured a host of contributors, *Suite for Max Brown* finds the Los Angeles-based player eager to move away from the delirious funk-jazz of earlier works and towards something more unified and focused on repetition and droning harmonies. “I used to ask my collaborators to bring as much of the songwriting to the compositions as I do. Now, I’m just trying to prove to myself that I can do it on my own.” Parker handles most of the instruments on *Max Brown*, but familiar faces pop up throughout. The opening track, “Build a Nest,” features vocals from Parker’s daughter, Ruby, and “Gnarciss” includes performances from Makaya McCraven on the drums, Rob Mazurek on trumpet, and Josh Johnson on alto saxophone. Other frequenters of Parker’s orbit, like drummer Jamire Williams, appear throughout. But *Max Brown* is Parker’s record first and foremost, and the LP finds him less willing to give in to jazz’s typical demands of dynamic improvisation and community-oriented song-building. Here, Parker asserts himself as an ecstatic solo voice, where on earlier albums the soft-spoken musician may have been more willing to give way to his fellow bandmates. *Suite for Max Brown* is an ambitious sonic experiment that succeeds in its moves both big and small. “I like when music is able to enhance the environment of everyday life,” Parker says. “I would like people to be able to find themselves within the music.” Above all, *Suite for Max Brown* pays homage to the most important figures in Parker’s life. *The New Breed*, which was finished shortly after Parker’s father passed away, took its title from a store his father owned; *Max Brown* is derived from his mother’s nickname, and Parker felt an urgent desire to honor her while she was still able to hear it. “My mother has always been really supportive and super proud of the work I’ve done,” he says. “I wanted to dedicate an album to her while she’s still alive to see the results. She loves it, which means so much.” It’s an ode to his mother’s ambition, and a record that stands in awe of her achievements, even though they’re quite different from Jeff’s. “She had a stable job and collected a 401(k). My career as a musician is 180 degrees the opposite of that, but I’m still inspired by her work ethic.”
“I’m always looking for ways to be surprised,” says composer and multi-instrumentalist Jeff Parker as he explains the process, and the thinking, behind his new album, Suite for Max Brown, released via a new partnership between the Chicago–based label International Anthem and Nonesuch Records. “If I sit down at the piano or with my guitar, with staff paper and a pencil, I’m eventually going to fall into writing patterns, into things I already know. So, when I make music, that’s what I’m trying to get away from—the things that I know.” Parker himself is known to many fans as the longtime guitarist for the Chicago–based quintet Tortoise, one of the most critically revered, sonically adventurous groups to emerge from the American indie scene of the early nineties. The band’s often hypnotic, largely instrumental sound eludes easy definition, drawing freely from rock, jazz, electronic, and avant-garde music, and it has garnered a large following over the course of nearly thirty years. Aside from recording and touring with Tortoise, Parker has worked as a side man with many jazz greats, including Nonesuch labelmate Joshua Redman on his 2005 Momentum album; as a studio collaborator with other composer-musicians, including Makaya McCraven, Brian Blade, Meshell N’Degeocello, his longtime friend (and Chicago Underground ensemble co-founder) Rob Mazurek; and as a solo artist. Suite for Max Brown is informally a companion piece to The New Breed, Parker’s 2016 album on International Anthem, which London’s Observer honored as the best jazz album of the year, declaring that “no other musician in the modern era has moved so seamlessly between rock and jazz like Jeff Parker. As guitarist for Chicago post-rock icons Tortoise, he’s taken the group in new and challenging directions that have kept them at the forefront of pop creativity for the last twenty years. As of late, however, Parker has established himself as one of the most formidable solo talents in modern jazz.” Though Parker collaborates with a coterie of musicians under the group name The New Breed, theirs is by no means a conventional “band” relationship. Parker is very much a solo artist on Suite for Max Brown. He constructs a digital bed of beats and samples; lays down tracks of his own on guitar, keyboards, bass, percussion, and occasionally voice; then invites his musician friends to play and improvise over his melodies. But unlike a traditional jazz session, Parker doesn’t assemble a full combo in the studio for a day or two of live takes. His accompanists are often working alone with Parker, reacting to what Parker has provided them, and then Parker uses those individual parts to layer and assemble into his final tracks. The process may be relatively solitary and cerebral, but the results feel like in-the-moment jams—warm-hearted, human, alive. Suite for Max Brown brims with personality, boasting the rhythmic flow of hip hop and the soulful swing of jazz. “In my own music I’ve always sought to deal with the intersection of improvisation and the digital era of making music, trying to merge these disparate elements into something cohesive,” Parker explains. “I became obsessed maybe ten or fifteen years ago with making music from samples. At first it was more an exercise in learning how to sample and edit audio. I was a big hip-hop fan all my life, but I never delved into the technical aspects of making that music. To keep myself busy, I started to sample music from my own library of recordings, to chop them up, make loops and beats. I would do it in my spare time. I could do it when I was on tour—in the van or on an airplane, at a soundcheck, whenever I had spare time I was working on this stuff. After a while, as you can imagine, I had hours and hours of samples I had made and I hadn’t really done anything with them “So I made The New Breed based off these old sample-based compositions and mixed them with improvising,” he continues. “There was a lot of editing, a lot of post-production work that went into that. That’s in a nutshell how I make a lot of my music; it’s a combination of sampling, editing, retriggering audio, and recording it, moving it around and trying to make it into something cohesive—and make it music that someone would enjoy listening to. With Max Brown, it’s evolved. I played a lot of the music myself. It’s me playing as many of the instruments as I could. I engineered most it myself at home or during a residency I did at the Headlands Center for the Arts [in Sausalito, California] about a year ago.” His New Breed band-mates and fellow travelers on Max Brown include pianist-saxophonist Josh Johnson; bassist Paul Bryan, who co-produced and mixed the album with Parker; piccolo trumpet player Rob Mazurek, his frequent duo partner; trumpeter Nate Walcott, a veteran of Conor Oberst’s Bright Eyes; drummers Jamire Williams, Makaya McCraven, and Jay Bellerose, Parker’s Berklee School of Music classmate; cellist Katinka Klejin of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; and even his seventeen-year-old daughter Ruby Parker, a student at the Chicago High School of the Arts, who contributes vocals to opening track, “Build A Nest.” Ruby’s presence at the start is fitting, since Suite for Max Brown is a kind of family affair: “That’s my mother’s maiden name. Maxine Brown. Everybody calls her Max. I decided to call it Suite for Max Brown. The New Breed became a kind of tribute to my father because he passed away while I was making the album. The New Breed was a clothing store he owned when I was a kid, a store in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where I was born. I thought it would be nice this time to dedicate something to my mom while she’s still here to see it. I wish that my father could have been around to hear the tribute that I made for him. The picture on the cover of Max Brown is of my mom when she was nineteen.” There is a multi-generational vibe to the music too, as Parker balances his contemporary digital explorations with excursions into older jazz. Along with original compositions, Parker includes “Gnarciss,” an interpretation of Joe Henderson’s “Black Narcissus” and John Coltrane’s “After the Rain” (from his 1963 Impressions album). Parker recalls, “I was drawn to jazz music as a kid. That was the first music that really resonated with me once I got heavily into music. When I was nine or ten years old, I immediately gravitated to jazz because there were so many unexpected things. Jazz led me into improvising, which led me into experimenting in a general way, into an experimental process of making music.” Coltrane is a touchstone in Parker’s musical evolution. In fact, Parker recalls, he inadvertently found himself on a new musical path one night about fifteen years ago when he was deejaying at a Chicago bar and playing ‘Trane: “I used to deejay a lot when I lived in Chicago. This was before Serrato and people deejaying with computers. I had two records on two turntables and a mixer. I was spinning records one night and for about ten minutes I was able to perfectly synch up a Nobukazu Takemura record with the first movement of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme and it had this free jazz, abstract jazz thing going on with a sequenced beat underneath. It sounded so good. That’s what I’m trying to do with Max Brown. It’s got a sequenced beat and there are musicians improvising on top or beneath the sequenced drum pattern. That’s what I was going for. Man vs machine. “It’s a lot of experimenting, a lot of trial and error,” he admits. “I like to pursue situations that take me outside myself, where the things I come up with are things I didn’t really know I could do. I always look at this process as patchwork quilting. You take this stuff and stitch it together until a tapestry forms.” —Michael Hill
Drew Daniel’s solo alias The Soft Pink Truth was originally fueled by a distinctly madcap energy. Without the elaborate conceptual frameworks of his duo Matmos, Baltimore-based Daniel was free to let his imagination run wild. His 2003 debut, *Do You Party?*, braided politics with pleasure in gonzo glitch techno; with *Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Soft Pink Truth?* and then *Why Do the Heathen Rage?*, he turned his idiosyncratic IDM to covers of punk rock and black metal. But *Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase?* steps away from those audacious hijinks. Composed with a rich array of electronic and acoustic tones, and suffused in vintage Roland Space Echo, the album strikes a balance between ambient and classical minimalism; created in response to politically motivated feelings of sadness and anger, it is also a meditation on community and interdependency. Guest vocalists Colin Self, Angel Deradoorian, and Jana Hunter make up the album’s choral core; percussionist Sarah Hennies lays down flickering bell-tone rhythms, while John Berndt and Horse Lords’ Andrew Bernstein weave sinewy saxophone into the mix, and Daniel’s partner, M.C. Schmidt, lends spare, contemplative piano melodies. The result is a nine-part suite as affecting as it is ambitious, where devotional vocal harmonies spill into softly pulsing house rhythms, and shimmering abstractions alternate with songs as gentle as lullabies.
The Soft Pink Truth is Drew Daniel, one half of acclaimed electronic duo Matmos, Shakespearean scholar and a celebrated producer and sound artist. Daniel started the project as an outlet to explore visceral and sublime sounds that fall outside of Matmos’ purview, drawing on his vast knowledge of rave, black metal and crust punk obscurities while subverting and critiquing established genre expectations. On the new album Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase? Daniel takes a bold and surprising new direction, exploring a hypnagogic and ecstatic space somewhere between deep dance music and classical minimalism as a means of psychic healing. Shall We Go On Sinning… began life as an emotional response to the creeping rise of fascism around the globe, creativity as a form of self-care, resulting in an album of music that expressed joy and gratitude. Daniel explains: “The election of Donald Trump made me feel very angry and sad, but I didn’t want to make “angry white guy” music in a purely reactive mode. I felt that I needed to make music through a different process, and to a different emotional outcome, to get past a private feeling of powerlessness by making musical connections with friends and people I admire, to make something that felt socially extended and affirming.” What began with Daniel quickly evolved into a promiscuous and communal undertaking. Vocals provided by the chorus of Colin Self, Angel Deradoorian and Jana Hunter form the foundation of most of the tracks, sometimes left naked and unchanged as with the ethereal opening line (“Shall”) or the sensuous R&B refrains on “We”, at other times shrouded in effects and morphed into new forms. Stately piano melodies written by Daniel’s partner M.C. Schmidt as well as Koye Berry alongside entrancing vibraphone and percussion patterns from Sarah Hennies push tracks toward ecstatic and melodic peaks, while rich saxophone textures played by Andrew Bernstein (Horse Lords) and John Berndt are used to add color and texture throughout. The album’s overall sound was in part shaped by Daniel hosting Mitchell Brown of GASP during Maryland Deathfest. Daniel borrowed Brown’s Roland Space Echo tape unit which he then used extensively throughout to give the album a flickering, ethereal quality. By moving beyond simple plunderphonic sampling and opening up a genuine dialogue with other musicians, Daniel left room in his compositions for moments of genuine surprise, capturing the freeform, communal energy of a DJ set or live improvisation session more than a recording project. Shall We Go On Sinning, a biblical quote from Paul the Apostle, was chosen by Daniel because it describes a question that he was applying both to his creative practice and how one should live in the world. The melodies, jubilance, and meditative nature of album provides a much-needed escape from the contemporary hell-scape. The process of creating Shall We Go On Sinning, in and of itself, is the Soft Pink Truth’s way of championing creativity and community over rage and nihilism.
Rian Treanor returns to Planet Mu for his second album "File Under UK Metaplasm". In 2018, Treanor left his home of Rotherham, a working class town in the North of England not far from rave nexus Sheffield, and headed to Uganda. He'd been invited to perform at Nyege Nyege festival, a mythical event that takes place on the shores of Lake Victoria in Jinja once a year. After nearly a week of almost non-stop syncopated bass, Treanor drove to the country's capital city Kampala to produce music for a month at the Nyege Nyege's Boutique Studio - an incubator that serves as a central hub for the record label and its many harmonic ventures. A week later, while he was performing at Hollywood, the tiny dive bar that housed the Nyege Nyege crew's first events, Treanor began to think differently about the sound he'd been developing since 2015's acclaimed "A Rational Tangle". "Everyone was still beaming after the festival, full of energy and wanting it raw and fast," he explains. Treanor had been collaborating with Acholi fiddle player Ocen James, and absorbing sounds from the other producers at the studio like Tanzania's Jay Mitta and Sisso and Glasgow experimental duo The Modern Institute. The result was a jerky blend of hybridized footwork and singeli (Tanzania's own lightning-fast dance sound) that clocked in at a rapid 200bpm. "I played a Jlin track at the wrong speed and it was about 225bpm," he admits. "But it sounded really good so I went with it. People were going mental, it was so much fun." Arriving home, inspired by the singeli production process, he focused on energy, building tracks and exploring urgency as the guiding method. Over the course of the year Treanor refined these ideas, building from raw components and eventually focusing on engineering the physicality of the sound. And at the end of 2019 he had the opportunity to tour Japan, where he was able to work out the finishing touches performing on some of the world's best soundsystems. This polarity - the enigmatic, sweaty energy of singeli juxtaposed with slick, high-def bass weight - sits at the centre of "File Under UK Metaplasm", Treanor's second full-length. Opening track 'Hypnic Jerks' is maybe the perfect example of this, with crinkled percussive loops cut through by machine-gun kicks and acidic wobbles. Elsewhere, 'Vacuum Angle' takes Sheffield's Warp-ed legacy and brings it crashing into the future, with rhythms collapsing into static and noise but never deconstructing or losing the flow. 'Debouncing' meanwhile folds gliding square synths into rattling dancehall kicks, joining the dots between SND, Equiknoxx, Wiley and MCZO & Duke with a neon Sharpie. "It's using all those formulaic dance structures but just slightly mangled or messed up," he says. "I'm still focused on making functioning dance music for clubs, but I'm really interested in how far you push that before it's just like - no."
one long song recorded nowhere between May 2019 and May 2020 released Aug. 7th, 2020 as a 2xLP by P.W. Elverum & Sun box 1561 Anacortes, Wash. U.S.A. 98221
Midwestern by birth and temperament, Freddie Gibbs has always seemed a little wary of talking himself up—he’s more show than tell. But between 2019’s Madlib collaboration (*Bandana*) and the Alchemist-led *Alfredo*, what wasn’t clear 10 years ago is crystal now: Gibbs is in his own class. The wild, shape-shifting flow of “God Is Perfect,” the chilling lament of “Skinny Suge” (“Man, my uncle died off a overdose/And the fucked-up part of that is I know I supplied the n\*\*\*a that sold it”), a mind that flickers with street violence and half-remembered Arabic, and beats that don’t bang so much as twinkle, glide, and go up like smoke. *Alfredo* is seamless, seductive, but effortless, the work of two guys who don’t run to catch planes. On “Something to Rap About,” Gibbs claims, “God made me sell crack so I had something to rap about.” But the way he flows now, you get the sense he would’ve found his way to the mic one way or the other.
Listen on Spotify here: spoti.fi/2XGbxdf Listen on Youtube here: bit.ly/3ahjjNw Watch video for Puppet here: youtu.be/Hl5GkgthbVQ 'New music from dgoHn (John Cunnane) is always exciting, this LP especially so. After a recent release on Astrophonica, a self released collection of tracks in 2018 and 3 singles on Love Love since the inception of their partnership in 2016, John comes back to Love Love with the big album. Conceived in the Essex heartland, 'Undesignated Proximate' contains 12 all-killer mega fresh cuts of the kind of boundlessly creative material that we have come to know him for, marking the most comprehensive collection yet of dgoHn’s music. With a meddlesome level of experimentation and a knack for pumping out truly futuristic rhythms, john’s ideas are utterly compelling, effortlessly peddling some of the most refreshing sounds to be found in the drum and bass / drumfunk / jungle worlds over a quarter of a century since the birth of the style. Not constrained by genre however his resolute chops, rich sound worlds and melodic structures form very real pieces of music, full of character and feeling. The production here is tighter than ever and while the tracks are technically adept, they drip in pure personality and raw energy. These are tracks made with a brain and a heart. Likenesses to great Jazz drummers are just as appropriate to his music as they are his contemporaries in braindance or drum and bass and his noisier influences often bleed through. 'Stachybotrys' sees dgoHn’s drums at their most frantic and tracks like this, as well as 'Invisible Sandwich' and 'Ninnyhammer' are rinsers of the highest calibre. The depth of these compositions are a complete antidote to mundanity and while the mainstay of the productions on the album are fully sound system-ready, cuts like 'Electryon', 'Puppet' and 'Windy' are so smooth they could almost be considered ambient. 10 years on from the classic album ’Some Shit Saaink’ made with friend Bob (Macc) on Subtle Audio/Rephlex, John’s music has garnered many notable fans including Aphex Twin, Skee Mask, DJ Food, Thom Yorke, Ben UFO, Lee Gamble and Tom Ravenscroft finding a firm place in the hearts of many. 'Undesignated Proximate' is a timeless collection of music that sets a high bar for what can be achieved with a computer and some nifty ideas.' All Tracks by John Cunnane Artwork by Colin McCallister Mastered by Robert Macchiochi loveloverecords.net
“I was fresh from a war but it was internal/Every day I encounter another hurdle,” J Hus spits as he closes *Big Conspiracy* on the piano-led “Deeper Than Rap”. That war, and the highs and lows of Momodou Jallow’s life, make for a mesmerising second album. Lyrics address his incarceration, street life, God, violence, his African roots and colonialism. From others those themes would feel heavy, but delivered in J Hus’ effortless voice, with a flow that switches frequently, they stun. The references are playful, too—Mick Jagger and Woody Woodpecker are mentioned on “Fortune Teller” and Destiny’s Child get a recurrent role in the standout “Fight for Your Right”. Hus is backed by inventive instrumentation encompassing delicate strings, Afrobeats, reggae and hip-hop and nods to garage and Dr. Dre’s work with 50 Cent, while Koffee and Burna Boy contribute to the celebratory feel on “Repeat” and “Play Play”. This is a record as diverse, smart and vibrant as anything coming from the UK right now.
VINYL / CD VIA STOLEN BODY RECORDS: www.stolenbodyrecords.co.uk/shop/vinnum-sabbathi-of-dimensions-and-theories 3 years have passed since the release of "Gravity Works". We have been through unique experiences and colossal changes during this time, not only as musicians but as human beings as well; this is our vision of those experiences. "of Dimensions & Theories" stands on a thin line between sci-fi and an impending doomed reality. The year is 2061 and humanity is ready to become a planetary force with a complete scientific and technological mastery boosted by the invaluable data transmitted from cosmonaut Fritz on her way into a black hole, but the final piece of the puzzle lies hidden in deep space. Rushed by the constant threat of nuclear war, disease and the imminent collapse of the environment (known as the Sixth Glare) humans have set the ultimate expedition; four earthling cosmonauts prepare to be the first ones in deep space exploration. Their mission: to reach and explore the "point one" location in order to collect the missing data required to avoid this crisis and finally leap into inter-planetary conquest. The Album is divided into two "Dimensions" and two "Theories", best represented on the vinyl edition. The 12" holds the two sides of this story while the 7" introduces different points of view from the general public about the current situation on the planet.
By welcoming the beauty of imperfection and simplicity, Sven Wunder applies the timeless wisdom of wabi sabi on this musical journey. What you can hear is filtered through Ukiyo-e (which translates as “pictures of the floating world”), which illustrates everyday life, as well as through Japonism, the study of Japanese art, and more specifically its influence on European works. The result is a surface that creates an illusion by sound. The infusion of Min’yō with jazz rock, this hazy scene evokes the landscape of Monet’s ”The Water Lily Pond”, which depicts the painter’s Giverny garden, with a Japanese bridge, bamboo, ginkgo trees and the reflection of the sky in the pond. This illusion constructs both time and space. The surface of the music, like the canvas of the painting, invents a journey between now and then by interpreting the idiom of folkloric and western art instruments. In this composition, the sound of the Western concert flute, which stretches back to the Renaissance and Baroque periods, evokes the sound of the bamboo-flute (”shakuchachi”), which reached its peak during the Edo period. The guzheng, also known as the Chinese zither, with a more than 2,500 year history, joins traditional Japanese folk melodies with modern pop percussion and 20th century electronic instruments such as the Moog synthesizer, Wurlitzer electric piano and electric bass. This is the illusion that celebrates the fleeting nature of all things. A journey. A deep inhale and a slow exhale. It has a mix of jazz (both funky and progressive), East Asian and South Asian sounds. The idea of fusing these styles and reframing them with the aesthetic of wabi sabi is to reconnect with nature and concentrate on asymmetries and emphasize ornamentation to generate new ways of looking at the world, here and now. This record is produced with financial support from the Swedish Arts Council. www.discogs.com/Sven-Wunder-Wabi-Sabi/master/1726413
Once upon a time, Squarepusher’s Tom Jenkinson was hailed as the master craftsman of drill ’n’ bass. You don’t hear that term so much anymore, but on Squarepusher’s first album since 2015’s *Damogen Furies*, he revives the style’s dizzying spirit: *Be Up a Hello* is a tour de force of high-velocity drum programming, punishing basslines, and frankly mind-bending sensory overload. Recorded largely in single takes on a hodgepodge of vintage gear, it’s also flat-out fun, with a dynamism in keeping with its spontaneity. “Oberlove” cheerfully pairs relentless breaks and bass riffs with almost melodramatic melodic flourishes; the unhinged “Speedcrank” shudders like a tilting pinball machine. It can be surprisingly pretty: “Hitsonu” taps into a naive grace seldom heard since Squarepusher’s early releases on Aphex Twin’s Rephlex label. As a counterbalance to all that untrammeled adrenaline, the ambient “Detroit People Mover” and “80 Ondula” give the British producer the chance to explore his most cinematic inclinations. And the glowering “Vortrack” moves into darkly atonal territory—proof that even looping back to the sound of his early work, Squarepusher keeps pushing forward.
“Recorded on analog tape with an ear to the production techniques of Brazilian records from the ’60s and ’70s… Rastilho explores folk music textures with a chunky, percussive playing style and a taut energy that recalls Kiko’s experience in the city’s punk scene… vivid playing, with rhythmic, resonant thrums”. PITCHFORK On Rastilho Kiko Dinucci absorbs the lineage of Brazilian guitarists such as Dorival Caymmi, João Gilberto, Baden Powell, Jorge Ben and Gilberto Gil - yet filtered through his uniquely ‘punk’ musical vision. His style is raw - technically, he seems to attack the guitar strings, lyrically he explores Afro-Brazilian culture, slavery, Brazilian revolutionaries, candomblé and evangelical Christianity. Dinucci is one the most innovative artists in contemporary Brazilian music – as well as a member of Metá Metá, who combine elements of Brazilian music, candomblé, punk rock and free jazz, he has worked with Tom Zé, Criolo and Elza Soares. Kiko: “I’ve wanted to make an album dedicated to the guitar for a long time. As a child, I treated it as a toy. In my teens, with my guitar patched with pieces of sellotape, I tried to reproduce heavy rock riffs whilst finding inspiration in the Afro works of Baden Powell and guitars of Dorival Caymmi, João Bosco, Jorge Ben and Gilberto Gil. In the 90s my experience in the São Paulo hardcore scene was mirrored by time spent in candomblé activities - both shaped the way I play guitar today” translated by David McLoughlin (Brasil Calling
You don’t need to know that Fiona Apple recorded her fifth album herself in her Los Angeles home in order to recognize its handmade clatter, right down to the dogs barking in the background at the end of the title track. Nor do you need to have spent weeks cooped up in your own home in the middle of a global pandemic in order to more acutely appreciate its distinct banging-on-the-walls energy. But it certainly doesn’t hurt. Made over the course of eight years, *Fetch the Bolt Cutters* could not possibly have anticipated the disjointed, anxious, agoraphobic moment in history in which it was released, but it provides an apt and welcome soundtrack nonetheless. Still present, particularly on opener “I Want You to Love Me,” are Apple’s piano playing and stark (and, in at least one instance, literal) diary-entry lyrics. But where previous albums had lush flourishes, the frenetic, woozy rhythm section is the dominant force and mood-setter here, courtesy of drummer Amy Wood and former Soul Coughing bassist Sebastian Steinberg. The sparse “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” is backed by drumsticks seemingly smacking whatever surface might be in sight. “Relay” (featuring a refrain, “Evil is a relay sport/When the one who’s burned turns to pass the torch,” that Apple claims was excavated from an old journal from written she was 15) is driven almost entirely by drums that are at turns childlike and martial. None of this percussive racket blunts or distracts from Apple’s wit and rage. There are instantly indelible lines (“Kick me under the table all you want/I won’t shut up” and the show-stopping “Good morning, good morning/You raped me in the same bed your daughter was born in”), all in the service of channeling an entire society’s worth of frustration and fluster into a unique, urgent work of art that refuses to sacrifice playfulness for preaching.
Martin Khanja (aka Lord Spike Heart) and Sam Karugu emerge from Nairobi's flourishing underground metal scene as former members of the bands Lust of a Dying Breed and Seeds of Datura. Together in 2019 they formed Duma (Darkness in Kikuyu) with Sam abandoning bass for production and guitars and Lord Spike Heart providing extreme vocals to the project. Recorded at Nyege Nyege Studios in Kampala over three months in mid 2019 their self-titled debut album fuses the frenetic euphoria, unrelenting physicality and rebellious attitude of hardcore punk and trash metal with bone-crunching breakcore and raw, nihilist industrial noise through a claustrophobic vortex of visceral screams. The savant mix of brutally adrenalized drums, caustic industrial trap, shredding grindcore inspired guitars and abrupt speed changes create a darkly atmospheric menace and is lethal on tracks like the opener "Angels and Abysses" , "Omni" or "Uganda with Sam". The gruelling slow techno dirges and monolithic vocals on "Pembe 666" or "Sin Nature" add a pinch of dramatic inevitability bringing a new sense of theatricality and terrifying fate awaiting into the record's progression. A sinister sonic aggression of feral intensity with disregard for styles, Duma promises to impact the burgeoning African metal scene moving it into totally new, boundary-challenging experimental territories. VIDEO FOR LIONS BLOOD HERE: youtu.be/zd35MhHqjhc VIDEO FOR OMNI HERE: youtu.be/ffxLsl8MWXE
“It was a really good tour to be on because it wasn\'t me in charge,” Kate Stables tells Apple Music about writing most of the songs on her fifth studio album as This Is the Kit while supporting The National as a guest vocalist on their *I Am Easy to Find* 2019 world tour. “I had a lot of time on my own to think and just mull things over. I think mixing that solitude while meeting new people, having these new experiences, and seeing far off lands I\'ve never been to before influenced the writing in quite a big way.” After taking some time to soak up that experience, the Paris-based singer-songwriter got together with her bandmates in early 2020 for a week-long residency in the middle of the Welsh mountains to flesh out her acoustic-based songs. With the help of longtime collaborator Jesse Vernon, who added horn parts and delicately arranged orchestration to her sparse, understated folk, Stables got in touch with producer and multi-instrumentalist Josh Kaufman (Bonny Light Horseman, Muzz) to add a whole new layer to the album. “I feel like a lot of that richness is thanks to Josh and the extra little touches he adds,” she says. “With the last album \[2017\'s *Moonshine Freeze*\], it was much more like what we sound like when each of us play our instruments during a gig. This album has more instruments that we don\'t play live. I feel really lucky that I can be in a band and that the songs are given a new kind of dimension.” Here, Stables shares some insights into the album, track by track. **Found Out** “This was one of the earlier ones I had written for the album. And for me, it was going to have to be the first song on the album, because it\'s quite representative of the time we spent in the studio together. It\'s the energy and the joy of playing together. And also, just the relationships between people and the kind of bonds that get mysteriously formed. Over time, you might not see someone for 10 years, but then you\'ll see them again and you\'re still kind of as joined as you were before.” **Started Again** “I think sometimes it\'s easy to resist starting from scratch again. But I think it\'s part of what life does, and it makes you stronger and wiser. And we should embrace it, I think. Human beings are kind of like ants, carrying things from A to B and then back again. And we don\'t always stop to check in with what we\'re doing and why we\'re doing it. Sometimes it\'s a physical baggage we\'re carrying, and sometimes it\'s the emotional bits and bobs that we hold on to that we could just decide not to carry around with us anymore. We could just decide not to hold that grudge or think about this one thing over and over again.” **This Is What You Did** “This song is about how sometimes it\'s hard to know whether the voices in our heads are actually the voices in our heads or the voices of other people. It\'s a dangerous game, assuming what other people are thinking about you. It\'s not that it\'s a waste of time worrying about it, but it\'s still something that we worry about anyway. It\'s about trying to get out of bad mental habits when you think negative thoughts, and instead make an effort to get outside and go for a walk or a run and get out of your head and a bit more into your limbs.” **No Such Thing** “I have a strange relationship with calling it this title. It was named after a demo that I sent to the band. There was two versions: one where I\'d strummed it and the one where I picked it. I asked the band which direction we should go in, and they all said \'picky.\' This song was me a little bit thinking about what would happen if we let go our identity and didn\'t rely on it as much, and also not making so many assumptions about other people\'s identity, too.” **Slider** “One way of putting it is not wanting to get out of bed, or not wanting to face up to things that you\'re feeling daunted by and thinking about how much we allow ourselves to cancel things or to back out of things, or to go through with them or to make ourselves do it.” **Coming to Get You Nowhere** “I was sharing a friend\'s little practice space to go and work and write, and I just needed a bit of a break. I decided to play whatever chords came out and made up words; it was an exercise in making up lyrics as I went along rather than a plan to write a song. Eventually, it kind of took shape as a song, but I still wasn\'t sure that it was going to be on the album until right at the end.” **Carry Us Please** “I was thinking about our relationship with leadership, and with representation and responsibility. Do we need someone to follow or can we as individuals come together and sort stuff out? There’s this tendency these days to slag things off on the internet just to be mean rather than to make any physical change in our own communities and neighborhoods. We\'re not as involved as we used to be. We want role models to carry us, and it\'s kind of reasonable, but at the same time, it\'s not reasonable. We have to be the change we want to see as individuals.” **Off Off On** “This song grew out of this experiment trying to find the melody. I was enjoying singing a note on the offbeat, and then again on the offbeat, and then singing it on the beat. And so the first idea of this phrase was me just singing \'off off on\' because that\'s where the note was going in relation to the beat.” **Shinbone Soap** “I love bars of soap. I just find them to be such pleasing objects to hold and smell. And that\'s the same with bones; I quite often find myself wanting to hold a bone in between my teeth. That sounds really stupid, but I\'m often quite jealous of dogs when I see them biting on a bone. Which is ridiculous, because I\'m also a vegetarian. I guess it\'s linked to my relationship with words and how they sound in your mouth and the sensation of that. I guess I\'m quite an oral person. Maybe I\'m still a one-year-old at heart that wants to put everything in my mouth.” **Was Magician** “It’s inspired by a set of books by Ursula K. Le Guin. In part, I\'m talking about the characters in these books that have these powers. I\'m also talking about these really young people I have met who to me seem to have this willfulness or determination—like when you meet a child who\'s incredibly stubborn or really articulate. It was also me thinking about the youth movements that are kind of getting engaged at the moment and sticking up for the planet, whether it\'s lobbying and protesting and communicating. It\'s their futures that are going to be hugely changed by the disaster that we\'re already in in terms of the environment on this planet.” **Keep Going** “This song imposes itself in subtle ways that were unforeseen by me and other people. I wanted to end the album on a positive note. Although you may interpret the sound as mellow or sad, maybe, it’s very positive in terms of its message of hope, perseverance, and faith in the future. Sometimes the subject matter of my songs doesn’t always match in the way that you’d expect with the vibe and energy. It eases us out of the album before we even realize what’s happened.”
Kate Stables’ group This Is The Kit have created a name for themselves with songs that untangle emotional knots and weave remarkable stories. Their second album for Rough Trade Records, Off Off On, (October 23, 2020) is a beautifully clear distillation of Stables’ songwriting gifts. Recorded just before the pandemic forced the world to hit the pause button, the songs are exquisitely astute, the album title suggesting life’s glitchy rhythms – “two steps backwards, one step forwards… Swinging between good places and bad places inside and out.” Off Off On is about “events catching up with you and how you catch up with events,” explains Stables, “not so much mood swings as brain swings, the here and there that your brain tugs you on.” Stables’ words – lyrical but always lucid – chime with a world tilted on its axis, from the flickering ‘This Is What You Did’, a testament to what Stables calls the “night-time mind race and morning day dread”, to the uninvited vampires hovering on the threshold in ‘Shinbone Soap’. The title track is about “a friend who got very ill and then didn’t make it. But I remember visiting him in hospital and seeing everything differently there. The people working there, the other visitors, the buildings, the grounds.” By the end of 2018, This Is The Kit had finished touring their last album, Moonshine Freeze, and begun to write Off Off On when Stables was invited to join The National on the road for multiple tours and TV appearances – a continuation of her contributions on their album I Am Easy To Find. “I think it did me loads of good,” laughs Stables. “It was so brilliant when I was writing to be away from my songs and the responsibility of being in charge of a band or a project - just to forget about that for a while and be a minion in someone else’s band was brilliant, I loved it. I think it really helped my writing and my getting through whatever I needed to get through.” As the songs coalesced, she decided to work on the new record with producer Josh Kaufman, a New York-based musician, Hold Steady collaborator and member of Bonny Light Horseman and Muzz. Stables first met him when working with Anais Mitchell on a cover of an Osibisa song, their paths crossing again at Bon Iver and Aaron Dessner’s PEOPLE residencies in Berlin and Brooklyn. “We were on the same page about a lot of musical ideas, as well as doing things I definitely wouldn’t do musically,” Stables says. “It was a lovely mixture of wow, you’re exactly in my brain and exactly at the opposite end of my brain.” After the band – completed by Rozi Plain (bass/vocals), Neil Smith (guitar), Jesse D Vernon (??), and Jamie Whitby-Coles (drums), – rehearsed the songs at an isolated cottage in Wales, they headed to Wiltshire’s Real World Studios in the UK, finishing just in time for everyone to get home for lockdown. The result of their work together is Off Off On. Richly illuminating and acutely sensitive to the pulses and currents of life, the album shows This Is The Kit overflowing with ideas, energy and power.
Autechre albums are like language immersion programs: At first they don’t make sense, but listen close and familiar shapes emerge. Not that *SIGN* is accessible per se: We’re still talking about something closer to computer programming than what most people would consider music. But for a group that can be almost mythically forbidding (2016’s four-hour-long—and 12-hours-dense—*elseq*), *SIGN* is almost pop. Thirty years in and the UK production duo’s roots still show: Hip-hop on “M4 Lema,” house on “psin AM,” far-out synth soundtracks on “F7” and “Metaz form8.” But it all remains deconstructed and once removed. Most music depends on memories of something you’ve heard before. With Autechre, you can feel your brain stretch as you listen. Normally they sound like they’re pushing forward or settling in. With *SIGN*, it’s both.
No map is a match for Kate NV. On her third album, the Moscow electronic musician shreds conventional geographical boundaries, leaving border fences splintered in the rearview. Her music is, very roughly speaking, a mixture of Japanese city pop and the sort of avant-disco that used to soundtrack downtown New York spots like the Mudd Club. The synths and marimba are straight out of ’80s Tokyo; the sumptuous production and dubbed-out vocals suggest ZE Records artists like Cristina; the layered horns might as well be those of session players from Arthur Russell’s orbit. We haven’t even touched upon her singing, which flits between French, English, and Russian as she juggles experimental vocal techniques with the breathy sighs of dream pop. For all their idiosyncrasies, these songs have a way of sinking into your psyche. “Not Not Not” smooths its staccato phrasing into a form lilting and hypnotic; “Sayonara” smears slap bass, streaks of synth, and hiccupping sighs into a splotchy pointillism that’s both abstract and intuitive. On their own, any one of these tracks might be mistaken for an artifact from an alternate-universe ’80s; taken together, they amount to a triumph of world-building. Kate NV has said that she wrote these songs during an emotionally difficult period, but you’d never know it: Every one quivers with the thrill of unlimited possibility.
Spiritmuse Records proudly presents ‘Kahil El’Zabar’s America the Beautiful’, a tour de force musical testament that speaks directly to the heart, mind and spirit. Kahil El’Zabar composed, arranged and conducted ‘America the Beautiful’ to speak musically about the turbulent issues in America (and the world) today, as well as his hopes and love for a better tomorrow. This incredible album features Kahil El’Zabar with an extended ensemble of woodwinds, brass, strings and an array of Afro-percussion, showcasing extraordinary players such as Corey Wilkes, Tomeka Reid, James Sanders, Josh Ramos, Miguel de la Cerna, Ernie Adams and Hamiet Bluiett (to whom this album is dedicated, as this was his last recording). El’Zabar developed the initial inspiration for this project from his musical origins in the above mentioned documentary, and later added new works that would explore issues related to current affairs and past histories of America and the globe, regarding race, ecology, economic disparity, and his hopes, aspirations and love for a better world yet to come. The album’s theme is a unique reworking of the anthem ‘America the Beautiful’ into a multi-layered cacophony of altered harmonies and contrapuntal rhythms that speak to the bittersweet ironies of American society. Familiar classics such as ‘Express Yourself’, ‘How Can We Mend a Broken Heart’ and a killer, Afrocentric version of ‘Afro Blue’, have all been re-written with El’Zabar’s original arrangements and conducted by him in way that engages the listener in an audible landscape of thoughts and emotion that transverse the greater meaning of living in these times. El’Zabar’s powerful new compositions such as “Freedom March”, ‘Jump and Shout (For Those Now Gone’) and “That We Ask Of Our Creator”, further explore the adventure of melody to dissonance within the romance and passion of creative improvised music. The album speaks to the times that we are living in today, in the wake of a worldwide pandemic, despotic leadership, mass social discontent, disproportionate poverty, Black Lives Matter and other disenfranchised peoples’ movements and the ecological and economic disparity of our planet. It is time to express ourselves with compassionate art that will hopefully propel better and clearer thoughts about where we are now and where we are going in the future. Kahil El’Zabar’s ‘America the Beautiful’ is an inspirational message channelled through powerful, spiritual music, that speaks with love, urgency and hope to our current times!
Springing from a decades deep body of work, defined by a rigorously singular and adventurous approach to sound, cellist, composer, and improvisor, Okkyung Lee, returns with Yeo-Neun, her first outing with Shelter Press, and arguably her most groundbreaking and unexpected album to date. A vital, present force in the contemporary global landscape of experimental music, Okkyung Lee is widely regarded for her solo and collaborative improvisations and compositions, weaving a continuously evolving network of sonority and event, notable for its profound depth of instrumental sensitivity, exacting intellect, and visceral emotiveness. Yeo-Neun, recorded by Yeo-Neun Quartet - an experimental chamber music ensemble founded in 2016 and led by Lee on cello, featuring harpist Maeve Gilchrist, pianist Jacob Sacks, and bassist Eivind Opsvik - represents the culmination of one of longest and most intimate arcs in her remarkable career. A radical departure from much of the experimental language for which she has become widely known, it is equally a fearless return. Yeo-Neun loosely translates to the gesture of an opening in Korean, presenting window into the poetic multiplicity that rests at the album’s core. Balanced at the outer reaches of Lee’s radically forward thinking creative process, its 10 discrete works are born of the ambient displacement of musician’s life; intimate melodic constructions and deconstructions that traces their roots across the last 30 years, from her early days spent away from home studying the cello in Seoul and Boston, to her subsequent move to New York and the nomadism of a near endless routine of tours. At its foundation, lay glimpses of a once melancholic teen, traces of the sentimentality and sensitivity (감성 / Gahmsung) that underpins the Korean popular music of Lee’s youth, and an artist for whom the notions of time, place, and home have become increasingly complex. Elegantly binding modern classical composition and freely improvised music with the emotive drama of Korean traditional music and popular ballads, the expanse of Yeo-Neun pushes toward the palpably unknown, as radical for what it is and does, as it for its approachability. In Lee’s hands, carried by a body of composition that rests beyond the prescriptive boundaries of culture, genre, geography, and time, a vision of the experimental avant-garde emerges as a music of experience, humanity, and life. Meandering melodies, from the deceptively simple to the tonally and structurally complex, slowly evolve and fall from view, the harp, piano, and bass forming an airy, liminal non-place, through which Lee’s cello and unplaceable memories freely drift. Remarkably honest, unflinchingly beautiful, and creatively challenging, Shelter Press is proud to present Yeo-Neun, an album that takes one the most important voices in contemporary experimental music, Okkyung Lee, far afield into an unknown future, bound to her past. Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker, housed in reversed-board printed inner and outer sleeve with artwork by American photographer Ron Jude.
*“It’s beauty meets aggression.” Read an interview with Abe Cunningham about Deftones’ massive ninth album.* “My bags are still packed,” Deftones drummer Abe Cunningham tells Apple Music. The California band was set to embark on a two-year touring cycle when the pandemic hit. “We were eight hours away from flying to New Zealand and Australia,” he says, when they received the news that the festival that was to signal the start of their tour had been canceled. The band had spent nearly two years before that chipping away at their ninth album, *Ohms*, while also planning to celebrate the 20th anniversary of 2000’s *White Pony* with a remix album, *Black Stallion*—which is to say, they had more than a few reasons to take their show on the road. “There was talk of delaying the album,” he says, “but we were like, ‘Shit, if we can help somebody out, if we can get somebody through their doldrums and their day-to-day shit, let’s stick to the plan.” *Ohms* is a triumph that serves the stuck-at-home headphone listener every bit as much as it would, and eventually will, the festival-going headbanger. It reaches into every corner of Deftones’ influential sonic repertoire: chugging grooves, filthy rhythms, extreme vocals, soaring emotions, experimental soundscapes, and intentionally cryptic lyrics, open for each individual listener’s interpretation. “We try to make albums,” Cunningham says. “Sequencing is definitely something that we put a lot of thought and energy into.” Opening track “Genesis” begins with an eerie synth, a slow, wavering riff. And then, with a hint of reverb and Cunningham’s sticks counting it in, there’s an explosion. Guitars and bass pound out an enormous, droning chord as Chino Moreno screeches: “I reject both sides of what I’m being told/I’ve seen right through, now I watch how wild it gets/I finally achieve balance/Approaching a delayed rebirth.” “Ceremony” opens with staccatoed guitar and muffled vocals, followed by a feverish riff. “The Spell of Mathematics” is an epic album highlight that combines doomy basslines, breathy vocals, and screams, before a midsection breakdown of finger snaps that you can easily imagine resonating across a festival field or concert hall. “It’s one of those things that just happened out of nowhere,” Cunningham says. “Our buddy Zach Hill \[Death Grips, Hella, and more\] happened to be in LA when we were tracking everything, so we all walked up to meet him and had one beer, which led to three and four. He came back to the studio with us. The snaps are our little attempt at a barbershop quartet. It just worked out organically, and we have one of the baddest drummers ever just snapping.” The band took time off after touring their 2016 album, *Gore*, allowing them to take things slow. “In the past, it’s been, ‘All right, here’s your two months, you’re off tour, take a break. All right, you’ve got studio coming up, go, be productive!’ And we’re like, ‘Okay, but what if I don’t feel productive today?’ Tensions can come in. So we decided to take that year off.” Each band member lives in a different city, so they’d get together for a week or so once every month to jam and write songs, ultimately creating *Ohms*, in the order it was written. “Each time we would jam, we started making songs and we treated it as a set list,” Cunningham says. “We’d go home, stew on that for the month and see what we had, live with it, then come back and play those songs in order.” Summing up their approach, Cunningham says, “It’s beauty meets aggression. We’re trying to make a lovely mix of things that flow. I think we have more to offer than that, but it’s definitely one of our trademarks. I think our frustration is just trying to fit all these things that we love into one album.”
On April 6, 2020, Charli XCX announced through a Zoom call with fans that work would imminently begin on her fourth album. Thirty-nine days later, *how i’m feeling now* arrived. “I haven’t really caught up with my feelings yet because it just happened so fast,” she tells Apple Music on the eve of the project’s release. “I’ve never opened up to this extent. There’s usually a period where you sit with an album and live with it a bit. Not here.” The album is no lockdown curiosity. Energized by open collaboration with fans and quarantine arrangements at home in Los Angeles, Charli has fast-tracked her most complete body of work. The untamed pop blowouts are present and correct—all jacked up with relatable pent-up ferocity—but it’s the vulnerability that really shows off a pop star weaponizing her full talent. “It’s important for me to write about whatever situation I’m in and what I know,” she says. “Before quarantine, my boyfriend and I were in a different place—physically we were distant because he lived in New York while I was in Los Angeles. But emotionally, we were different, too. There was a point before quarantine where we wondered, would this be the end? And then in this sudden change of world events we were thrown together—he moved into my place. It’s the longest time we’ve spent together in seven years of being in a relationship, and it’s allowed us to blossom. It’s been really interesting recording songs that are so obviously about a person—and that person be literally sat in the next room. It’s quite full-on, let’s say.” Here, Charli talks us through the most intense and unique project of her life, track by track. **pink diamond** “Dua Lipa asked me to do an Apple Music interview for the At Home With series with her, Zane \[Lowe, Rebecca Judd\], and Jennifer Lopez. Which is, of course, truly a quarantine situation. When am I going to ever be on a FaceTime with J. Lo? Anyway, on the call, J. Lo was telling this story about meeting Barbra Streisand, and Barbra talking to her about diamonds. At that time, J. Lo had just been given that iconic pink diamond by Ben Affleck. I instantly thought, ‘Pink Diamond is a very cute name for a song,’ and wrote it down on my phone. I immediately texted Dua afterwards and said, ‘Oh my god, she mentioned the pink diamond!’ A few days later, \[LA-based R&B artist and producer\] Dijon sent me this really hard, aggressive, and quite demonic demo called ‘Makeup On,’ and I felt the two titles had some kind of connection. I always like pairing really silly, sugary imagery with things that sound quite evil. It then became a song about video chatting—this idea that you’re wanting to go out and party and be sexy, but you’re stuck at home on video chat. I wanted it as the first track because I’m into the idea that some people will love it and some people will hate it. I think it’s nice to be antagonistic on track one of an album and really frustrate certain people, but make others really obsessive about what might come next.” **forever** “I’m really, really lucky that I get to create and be in a space where I can do what I love—and times like the coronavirus crisis really show you how fortunate you are. They also band people together and encourage us to help those less fortunate. I was incredibly conscious of this throughout the album process. So it was important for me to give back, whether that be through charity initiatives with all the merch or supporting other creatives who are less able to continue with their normal process, or simply trying to make this album as inclusive as possible so that everybody at home, if they wish, could contribute or feel part of it. So, for example, for this song—having thousands of people send in personal clips so we could make the video is something that makes me feel incredibly emotional. This is actually one of the very few songs where the idea was conceived pre-quarantine. It came from perhaps my third-ever session with \[North Carolina producer and songwriter\] BJ Burton. The song is obviously about my relationship, but it’s about the moments before lockdown. It asks, ‘What if we don’t make it,’ but reinforces that I will always love him—even if we don’t make it.” **claws** “My romantic life has had a full rebirth. As soon as I heard the track—which is by \[St. Louis artist, songwriter, and producer\] Dylan Brady—I knew it needed to be this joyous, carefree honeymoon-period song. When you’re just so fascinated and adoring of someone, everything feels like this huge rush of emotion—almost like you’re in a movie. I think it’s been nice for my boyfriend to see that I can write positive and happy songs about us. Because the majority of the songs in the past have been sad, heartbreaking ones. It’s also really made him understand my level of work addiction and the stress I can put myself under.” **7 years** “This song is just about our journey as a couple, and the turbulence we’ve incurred along the way. It’s also about how I feel so peaceful to be in this space with him now. Quarantine has been the first time that I’ve tried to remain still, physically and mentally. It’s a very new feeling for me. This is also the first song that I’ve recorded at home since I was probably 15 years old, living with my parents. So it feels very nostalgic as it takes back to a process I hadn’t been through in over a decade.” **detonate** “So this was originally a track by \[producer and head of record label PC Music\] A. G. Cook. A couple of weeks before quarantine happened in the US, A. G. and BJ \[Burton\] met for the first and only time and worked on this song. It was originally sped up, and they slowed it down. Three or four days after that session, A. G. drove to Montana to be with his girlfriend and her family. So it’s quite interesting that the three of us have been in constant contact over the five weeks we made this album, and they’ve only met once. I wrote the lyrics on a day where I was experiencing a little bit of confusion and frustration about my situation. I maybe wanted some space. It’s actually quite hard for me to listen to this song because I feel like the rest of the album is so joyous and positive and loving. But it encapsulated how I was feeling, and it’s not uncommon in relationships sometimes.” **enemy** \"A song based around the phrase ‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.’ I kept thinking about how if you can have someone so close to you, does that mean that one day they could become your biggest enemy? They’d have the most ammunition. I don’t actually think my boyfriend is someone who would turn on me if anything went wrong, but I was playing off that idea a little bit. As the song is quite fantasy-based, I thought that the voice memo was something that grounded the song. I had just got off the phone to my therapist—and therapy is still a very new thing for me. I only started a couple of weeks before quarantine, which feels like it has something to do with fate, perhaps. I’ve been recording myself after each session, and it just felt right to include it as some kind of real moment where you have a moment of self-doubt.” **i finally understand** “This one includes the line ‘My therapist said I hate myself real bad.’ She’s getting a lot of shout-outs on this album, isn’t she? I like that this song feels very different from anything I’ve ever explored. I’d always wanted to work with Palmistry \[South London producer and artist Benjy Keating\]—we have loads of mutual friends and collaborators—and I was so excited when my manager got an email from his team with some beats for me. This is a true quarantine collaboration in the sense that we’ve still never met and it purely came into being from him responding to things I’d posted online about this album.” **c2.0** “A. G. sent me this beat at the end of last year called ‘Click 2.0’—which was an updated version of my song ‘Click’ from the *Charli* album. He had put it together for a performance he was doing with \[US artist and former Chairlift member\] Caroline Polachek. I heard the performance online and loved it, and found myself listening to it on repeat while—and I’m sorry, I know this is so cheesy—driving around Indonesia watching all these colors and trees and rainbows go by. It just felt euphoric and beautiful. Towards the end of this recording process, I wanted to do a few more songs and A. G. reminded me of this track. The original ‘Click’ features Tommy Cash and Kim Petras and is a very braggy song about our community of artists. It’s talking about how we’re the shit, basically. But through this, it’s been transformed into this celebratory song about friendship and missing the people that you hang out with the most and the world that existed before.” **party 4 u** “This is the oldest song on the album. For myself and A. G., this song has so much life and story—we had played it live in Tokyo and somehow it got out and became this fan favorite. Every time we get together to make an album or a mixtape, it’s always considered, but it had never felt right before now. As small and silly as it sounds, it’s the time to give something back. Lyrically, it also makes some sense now as it’s about throwing a party for someone who doesn’t come—the yearning to see someone but they’re not there. The song has literally grown—we recorded the first part in maybe 2017, there are crowd samples now in the song from the end of my Brixton Academy show in 2019, and now there are recordings of me at home during this period. It’s gone on a journey. It kept on being requested and requested, which made me hesitant to put it out because I like the mythology around certain songs. It’s fun. It gives these songs more life—maybe even more than if I’d actually released them officially. It continues to build this nonexistent hype, which is quite funny and also definitely part of my narrative as an artist. I’ve suffered a lot of leaks and hacks, so I like playing with that narrative a little bit.” **anthems** “Well, this song is just about wanting to get fucked up, essentially. I had a moment one night during lockdown where I was like, ‘I *just* want to go out.’ I mean, it feels so stupid and dumb to say, and it’s obviously not a priority in the world, but sometimes I just feel like I want to go out, blow off some steam, get fucked up, do a lot of bad things, and wake up feeling terrible. This song is about missing those nights. When I first heard the track—which was produced by Dylan and \[London producer\] Danny L Harle—it immediately made me want to watch \[2012 film\] *Project X*, as that movie is the closest I’m going to feel to having the night that I want to have. So I wrote the song, and co-wrote the second verse with my fans on Instagram—which was very cool and actually quite a quick experience. After finishing it, I really felt like it definitely belongs on the *Project X* soundtrack. I think it captures the hectic energy of a once-in-a-lifetime night out that you’ll never forget.” **visions** “I feel like anything that sounds like it should close an album probably shouldn’t. So initially we were talking about ‘party 4 u’ being the final track, but it felt too traditional with the crowd noises at the end—like an emotional goodbye. So it’s way more fun to me to slam that in the middle of the album and have the rave moment at the end. But in some ways, it feels a little traditional, too, because this is the message I want to leave you with. The song feels like this big lucid dream: It’s about seeing visions of my boyfriend and I together, and it being right and final. But then it spirals off into this very weird world that feels euphoric, but also intense and unknown. And I think that’s a quite a nice note to end this particular album on. The whole situation we’ve found ourselves in is unknown. I personally don’t know what I’m going to do next, but I know this final statement feels right for who I am and the direction I’m going in.”
