Resident Advisor's Best Albums of 2018

Vinyl: honestjons.com/shop/label/Mana Gamelan and capoeira in dub. The collective behind this doesn’t like to talk much but their music is beautifully conversational. De Leon is the most organic and percussive of their shifting identities, developed on their Aught project in small-run, clear-shell cassette tape releases over the last few years. They've appreciated a cult interest for their takes on outernational rhythm, field recording, and the tension and relief on the knife-edge of dance music; all delivered with an impressive commitment to anonymity and clarity of vision through cut-and-dried aesthetic minimalism. These six pieces of music seem formed from wood, metal, air. Dramatic, balletic flourishes and tightly woven interlocking patterns are embedded in slowly changing and "live" atmospheres. The shadow of a hand over the mixing desk makes gradual adjustments to alter the pressure and dimension of the space. A number of tracks first appeared on De Leon's set for Blowing Up The Workshop in February 2016.

Deena Abdelwahed’s first album is shifting the epicenter of contemporary electronic music south: “Khonnar“ will be released on November 16, 2018 by InFiné. Pronounced “Ronnar“ (an essential detail so as to avoid facile misinterpretation by French- speakers) it is a term that makes the most of Tunisia’s cultural and linguistic spectrum. It evokes the dark, shameful and disturbing side of things, the one we usually seek to hide, but which Deena instead sticks our noses in with her debut. It is a testament to Deena’s coming into her own as a world citizen, and as an artist. A self-construction made of frustrations and constraints, borne of retrograde mindsets, which are not the prerogative of either the East or the West, and which she tirelessly strives to expose and break. Throughout the 45 minutes of “Khonnar“, Deena breaks down the codes of bass, techno and experimental music, and writes the manifesto for a generation that does not seek to please or to conform, taking back control of its identity – with all the attendant losses and chaos. A new creative world order is taking shape, a new tilting point between north and south, the response of a connected and liberated youth who takes the control of the new decolonization. Mask and photography by London based artist Judas Companion, who’s work is about transformation of human identity. She makes masks and masked portraits to create different layers of the human being. Drawing inside + poster "De quoi rêvent les martyrs n°7 & n°4" by Nidhal Chamekh © Adagp 2018 Design by Motoplastic All lyrics by Deena Abdelwahed except Rabbouni and Al Hobb Al Mouharreb written by Abdullah Miniawy All tracks performed by Deena Abdelwahed All tracks mixed by Edu Tarradas Mastered by Beau Thomas @ Ten Eight Seven Mastering (UK)

Two years after *Wonderland* blew the witchy sound of their early years to smithereens, Demdike Stare return even more forcefully: Their mixture of grime, dancehall, techno, and ambient sounds like a rave tape that had been buried for 30 years, dug up, and set on fire. After a dramatic noise intro, “At It Again” barrels ahead with jungle breaks, dub sirens, and white-noise blasts reminiscent of Pan Sonic; “Spitting Brass” smears grease all over grime’s brittle palette before “Know Where to Start” tosses the gritty, lo-fi UK style into a blender, shards flying every which way. But redemption comes with closer “Dilation,” a mournful nod to New Order at their most desolate.

German electronic producer DJ Koze has always been a self-selecting outsider, the kind of artist who sits blissfully on the sidelines of the big picture while the world passes him by. His third proper studio album unfolds like a daydream: breezy, sunny, and strangely beautiful, filled with ideas that don’t make sense until they suddenly—thrillingly—do. As with 2013’s *Amygdala* (as well as his endlessly inventive DJ sets and remixes), the style here is curiously out of time, touching on house (“Pick Up”), hip-hop (“Colors of Autum”), and downtempo soul (“Scratch That”), all with a slightly psychedelic twist that keeps everything hovering an inch or two off the floor. Fashion is fine, but it’s no match for a muse.

Back in 2015, Team OA proudly showcased the work of Georgian producer Gigi Jikia,better known as HVL. The Away From Everything We Know 12” was instrumental in establishing Organic Analogue’s tendency for deeper strains of electronic music, and now it feels right to be welcoming Gigi back to present his long-awaited debut album. In the past five years HVL releases have been flying out on labels such as Rough House Rosie, Housewax, Flyance and many more besides. Favouring a dubby aesthetic and adept at handling rhythms and tempos between house, techno and electro, the HVL sound is as distinctive as it is classically rooted. Part of this balanced approach is undoubtedly shaped by Gigi’s role within the scene in his native Tbilisi. As a resident of the much vaunted BASSIANI, he’s helped bring electronic music culture to Georgia and his debut album, Ostati, is a conscious tribute to this youthful, dynamic scene on the farthest reaches of Eastern Europe. The Georgian word Ostati describes, ‘one who has mastered their craft,’ and Gigi applies the meaning to both his own artistic development and that of BASSIANI and the Georgian electronic music scene that, even five years ago, was a faint whisper of what it is today. Sonically, the album (which Gigi refers to as one of his most personal works to date) is intended as a document of the sound of Tbilisi - a seductive, understated update on the established HVL dynamics, centred on warm, outboard house and techno but with a noticeably understated mood. There are ambient tracks that let sweeping pads and tones ooze from the speakers, but by and large the club tracks take a pared down approach that favours space and meditation over bold brush strokes. This is far from run of the mill minimal techno though. Whether it’s the teeth-gnashing bite of broken beat affair “Askinkila” or the rough and ready acid workout “Continuum”, the sound is gutsy and dripping with character. “Sallow Myth” unfurls itself over nine minutes, pitching somewhere between the warm-up and twist-out part of the night with trancedout acid lines and rugged drums to suit a heads down throng. If you think of releases on Ostgut Ton as painting a picture of Berghain as a club, then Ostati spells out a space where dim lights and mysterious corners provide a playground for wild ideas to dart around in the dark. The overall atmosphere may appear subdued, but it’s merely a cover for the fiery spirit lurking underneath. More than anything, this release defines a sound for HVL and BASSIANI distinct from what you might expect to hear in a more established cultural hub. While it may not be able to recreate the feeling of getting lost in the smoke in the middle of the empty swimming pool in the early hours of the morning, until you can make it to Tbilisi let HVL be your guide. (words by Oliver Warwick DJ mag / RA / Fact / Ransom Note)

On her debut, *Dark Energy*, Chicago producer Jlin took footwork music past the known limits of the form, braiding sleek, rolling drums into hypnotic triplet patterns; on the follow-up, *Black Origami*, she emphasized the globe-spanning percussive palette that makes her work unique. *Autobiography*, her score to a major piece by the British choreographer Wayne McGregor, represents a detour in her evolution. Stutter-stepping cuts like “Unorthodox Elements” alternate with synth-strafed trap mutations (“Annotation”) and even pensive ambient interludes like “Anamnesis, Pt. 1,” a minimalist study for piano and empty space. Jlin’s relentless kinetic energy shines like never before on tunes like “The Abyss of Doubt,” which sounds like a mainframe computer being torn apart by heavy machinery; it’s no wonder dancers would want to flex to this.

By now, the story of how Jlin went from working in a steel factory in Gary, Indiana to being one of the most widely appreciated electronic musicians is well known. “Black Origami” was one of the most lauded albums last year. Seriously prolific and seriously hard-working, she has toured constantly since its May 2017 release and despite being involved in a wide range of projects, still manages to find a balance and time to “do some personal healing and growing.” Here we are over a year later with “Autobiography,” the score for her collaboration with renowned British choreographer Wayne McGregor (a collaboration arranged by Krakow's Unsound). This isn’t technically her third album (that’s due to arrive in 2019 or 2020), but the soundtrack stands up on its own with all the emotional peaks and troughs of a well-sequenced LP. For Jlin, making music for dance is the fulfillment of one of her lifelong dreams – and remarkably, Company Wayne McGregor’s performance was the first show she’d ever seen. She describes the process of working with Wayne: “We first met face to face in October 2016 in a downtown Chicago hotel, talking for about a solid two hours. Immediately, I saw Wayne was very friendly and energetic. He’s brilliant, witty, and knows exactly what he wants; an absolute gem to work with. Before I even started composing for Autobiography, Wayne told me so gently that he trusts me completely with my direction of creating the score. That was the best feeling in the world. I would wake up at two in the morning and work until six in the evening until I completed all the pieces. We were both very happy with the outcome. Creating the score for an impeccable piece of work such as Autobiography changed my life as an artist.” “Autobiography” is a highlight in an evolving and growing career. During the last year, Jlin has also become an in-demand remixer, securing her place among a roster of music heavyweights. Unsurprisingly, given her positive and outgoing nature, she also developed friendships with the artists she has remixed such as Björk, Max Richter and Ben Frost. Jlin will be touring with Company Wayne McGregor performing “Autobiography” this year into next. She's also completed a commission for the Kronos Quartet titled “Little Black Book.” She still approaches every performance “with the same attitude of doing my best to execute a good show, no more, no less. Doing my best is what’s most important to me.” She also still lives in Gary, Indiana, which keeps her grounded. She notes with her typical humility, “The local community is a little more knowledgeable of me now. But I don’t mind my community taking its time.”

Aviary is an epic journey through what Julia Holter describes as “the cacophony of the mind in a melting world.” Out on October 26th via Domino, it’s the Los Angeles composer’s most breathtakingly expansive album yet, full of startling turns and dazzling instrumental arrangements. The follow-up to her critically acclaimed 2015 record, Have You in My Wilderness, it takes as its starting point a line from a 2009 short story by writer Etel Adnan: "I found myself in an aviary full of shrieking birds." It’s a scenario that sounds straight out of a horror movie, but it’s also a pretty good metaphor for life in 2018, with its endless onslaught of political scandals, freakish natural disasters, and voices shouting their desires and resentments into the void Aviary, executive produced by Cole MGN and produced by Holter and Kenny Gilmore, combines Holter's slyly theatrical vocals and Blade Runner-inspired synth work with an enveloping palette of strings and percussion that reveals itself, and the boundless scope of her vision, over the course of fifteen songs. Holter was joined by Corey Fogel (percussion), Devin Hoff (bass), Dina Maccabee (violin, viola, vocals), Sarah Belle Reid (trumpet), Andrew Tholl (violin), and Tashi Wada (synth, bagpipes).

Following his recent signing to Ninja Tune, Leon Vynehall announces his debut album Nothing Is Still, released 15 June - a record that sees him digging deeper into the family history that has always inspired his most iconic tracks, whilst returning to his own musical roots. Nothing Is Still is, at its core, an album dedicated to Vynehall’s grandparents. Emigrating from a leafy south east U.K. to New York City in the 1960s, their seven-day journey via boat from Southampton to Brooklyn, and the stories that followed, have only truly come to light upon the passing of his grandfather four years ago. “I knew they had lived in the U.S. and heard many anecdotes, but it was only after Pops died and my Nan presented these polaroids of their time there; of her waitressing at the New York Mayor’s Ball in ’66, or Pops with horses on a ranch in Arizona, that she delved deeper into their story, and I started to become overtly inquisitive about it” Vynehall says, following in depth conversations with his Nan to find out as much as he could about this part of his family history that was - in a way that easily resonates with us all - seemingly hidden in plain sight. “I felt the need to document this period for her, and it all just sort of snowballed from there.” The result happened quite naturally, those early conversations going on to form an album of immense scale, physicality and wonder as well as two accompanying elements - a Novella and short films which expand the scope and context of the narrative. This is extended further through the use of visual artist Pol Bury’s ‘George Washington Bridge, NYC’ from his ‘Cinétisation’ collection as the album artwork; with permission granted to Vynehall by Bury's wife - the artwork was created in New York by Bury at the same time as the album’s story takes place. Clearly, that aforementioned feeling of exploration resonates with Vynehall creatively too. Vynehall has released two extended EP's so far, his 2014 breakthrough Music For The Uninvited (3024) - a record inspired by the funk, soul and hip-hop tapes his mum used to play on car journeys which finished the year on a plethora of 'Best of the Year' lists including Pitchfork, FACT and Resident Advisor who called it "one of the most eclectic and rewarding house records you'll hear all year" - and 2016's Rojus EP (Running Back) which saw Vynehall building more layers and broadening the depth of his music to widespread critical acclaim including DJ Mag's 'Album of the Year' and 'Best New Music' from Pitchfork for fan favourite single 'Blush'. On both, he was crafting luscious grooves that were destined to dominate dancefloors. Nothing Is Still however, is defiantly atmospheric and textural, and finds him harnessing his passion for early contemporary minimalist composers such as Gavin Bryars as well as records like Philip Glass’ Koyaanisqatsi and Terry Riley’s A Rainbow In Curved Air. Written and predominantly performed by Vynehall with additional musicians including a ten-piece string section arranged by Amy Langley, Finn Peters (saxophone and flute), and Sam Beste (piano) whom completed the final recording sessions that took place at Konk Studio’s - Nothing Is Still was mixed by Blue May in London before making its own transatlantic flight to New York, where it was mastered at Sterling Sound by Greg Calbi. As well as being respected for the strength of his musical output, Vynehall has a global reputation as a DJ and curator. He has hosted and curated all-night-long residencies worldwide and has become a mainstay at many festivals including Glastonbury, Field Day and Sonar. Much as Nothing Is Still explores new territory sonically, Vynehall will be performing the album with a brand new live set-up with dates TBA.

Lucrecia Dalt’s Anticlines is a volume of poetic theory and sound contemplating the bodies of self above and beneath the earth’s surface. On Anticlines, Dalt conjures a sonic space of speculative synthesis and spoken word where South American rhythms rattle contemporary composition recalling Laurie Anderson, Robert Ashley, and Annea Lockwood. LP / CD version comes with lyric booklet documenting Dalt’s collaborative work with Regina de Miguel and Henry Andersen alongside a multi-format digital download code. A portion of the proceeds from your purchase will be charitably designated on behalf of Lucrecia Dalt to Tierra Digna, an organization dedicated to the defense of Colombian communities affected by economic policies that violate human rights and devastate the environment. tierradigna.org Come! Mend! For More Info: shop.igetrvng.com/collections/all/products/rvngnl47

Marie Davidson’s new album turns the mirror on herself. "Working Class Woman” is the Montreal-based producer’s fourth and most self-reflective record: it’s a document of her state of mind, a reflection of the past year she’s spent living in Berlin, and a comment on the stresses and strains of operating within the spheres of dance music and club culture. Drawing on those experiences, as well as an array of writers, thinkers and filmmakers who’ve influenced her, Davidson’s response to such difficult moments is to explore her own reaction to them and poke fun. “It comes from my brain, through my own experiences: the suffering and the humour, the fun and the darkness to be Marie Davidson.” It’s an honest document of where she currently stands. As she puts it, “It’s an egotistical album – and I’m okay with that.” She builds on the dancefloor-minded trajectory charted by her previous record "Adieux Au Dancefloor” [Cititrax / Minimal Wave], which drew praise from the likes of Pitchfork (“a project that indicates exciting and near-exponential growth in her ability as a writer and producer”), The Fader and Resident Advisor, and opened up her sound to a new, wider audience, earning support from peers such as Nina Kraviz and Jessy Lanza. The record is informed by a career which has spanned an ambient-influenced album as Les Momies De Palerme for Montreal’s Constellation label (home to Godspeed! You Black Emperor); her synth-disco styled duo DKMD with David Kristian; and Essaie Pas, signed to DFA, and with whom she’s shaped minimal synth and "cyberpunk coldwave” (the Guardian) sounds into a fresh mould, in partnership with husband and collaborator Pierre Guerineau. The sound of "Working Class Woman" is more direct than any of her previous outings. She still mines the same influences, from Italo Disco, to proto-industrial and electro, but leadens them with a gut-punching weight, making for a record that’s more visceral than any she’s released before. It’s combined with her characteristically-deployed spoken text – rather than spoken word, which she sees as a distinct tradition – that carries a more darkly humourous edge than before, making observations on both aspects of club culture as well as more oblique critiques of the modern world. It’s a record poised between dark and light. Industrial heaviness is balanced by Davidson’s words; dark, textured soundscapes are counterweighted by statements or observations which never take themselves too seriously. It’s something that’s encapsulated in the driving momentum of ‘So Right’: it matches pared back lyrics with a melodic bassline and bright synths, her words sketching out a euphoric feeling that chimes with the music. It’s the first single from the record, and comes backed by a John Talabot remix, where he slows down the momentum, creating a mellow pace guided a languorous bassline. In ‘Work It’, she probes her workaholic nature. In her opening spoken line, she declares, “You wanna know how I get away with everything? I work, all the fucking time.” The track is, appropriately, unrelenting: it’s a robotic, jacking groove that’s short but sweet. This track also hints at another influence on the record, which is Davidson's response to her life as a touring musician. Both under her own name, and with Essaie Pas, touring has taken up the best part of her last year and is an experience which she’s found both enriching and draining. Her stops have included Sonar Festival - where she performed her "Bullshit Threshold” show, combining performance, spoken text, video projections and analogue hardware - Primavera, Dekmantel and MUTEK in recent times. On the one hand, her live set is a creative endeavour that feeds back into her music. Playing, and travelling, on her own - which means marshalling a table of gear including sequencers, synths and a mic for her to sing and talk into (as well as transporting them between each of her shows) - allows her to improvise and play each set in a different way to the last. But at the same time, it requires her to project a persona: a demand that can become dispiriting. Another of the album’s early moments is ‘The Psychologist’, carried by a moody techno swagger that suggests a playfulness evident throughout the record. On ‘Day Dreaming’, soft chimes provide a moment of colourful respite, swirled around with a soft-focus ambience. In contrast, ‘The Tunnel’ is an ominous deep-dive into industrial sound-blasts, where Davidson darkly narrates, “I'm in the tunnel with all the other monsters and it's so messy.” And in ‘Burn Me’, she takes a turn at a more straightforward club rhythm, building up drones, an acid bassline and flashes of percussion into a tense slow-burn. Part of her response to these difficult scenarios is to turn to writers whose work offers guidance or inspiration. Recently, this has meant the likes of psychologist Alice Miller, physician Gabor Maté and filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky (in particular, his book Psychomagic). Their work explores ideas of the self and the ways in which people develop; relating their theories or stories to herself, it’s pushed her to explore the notion of therapy in relation to art and dreams. In turn, she has filtered her own reflections through their ideas. She’s always reached outward for the diverse influences that have informed her music, touching on big concepts and musical touchstones alike. But it’s with this release that she’s applied the same degree of focus to herself. The album is the product of a personal process: she looks inward to project a more expansive vision to the world.

Martyn releases new album ‘Voids’, his first for Ostgut Ton ‘Voids’ is in a few ways markedly different than previous Martyn records; it features no guest appearances or collaborations and at 9 tracks, is musically stripped down to the essentials. It’s also a highly personal take on forging new paths forward in genres where the Berghain/Panorama Bar resident has long been known for his production wizardry and innovation: post-dubstep and UK garage. The LP is roughly split between these musical foundations, recontextualized with elements of Nyabinghi, drum ‘n‘ bass, and gqom to form snarling, bass-driven hybrids. The direction was hinted at last November on his ‘GL Outtakes’ – reworks of his landmark 2009 album ‘Great Lengths’. In contrast however, ‘Voids’ is also an attempt to work through personal trauma and loss, including recovering from a heart attack and dealing with the passing of close friend and fellow producer Marcus Intalex aka Trevino, to whom the track “Manchester” is dedicated. The sound of ‘Voids’ is big and unapologetically rough around the edges. It is music as therapy, drawing on the healing elements of music past, but is far from retrospective. Indeed, Martyn is no stranger to electronic futurism, as his numerous solo productions for Ostgut Ton, Dolly, Hyperdub, Brainfeeder, Ninja Tune, Warp and his own 3024 label (run together with visual collaborator Jeroen Erosie) have shown. On ‘Voids’, however, these futuristic sonic qualities coalesce into something darker, more biographical and untethered from expectations. “Woken by the spirits of a new life dawning.” – The Spaceape

Objekt, the British-born, Berlin-based producer TJ Hertz, reinforces his reputation as one of bass music’s most creative minds with his second album. Like his debut, 2014’s *Flatland*, *Cocoon Crush* employs bracingly broken grooves and startlingly vivid textures, sounding like techno that’s been exploded into 11 dimensions. His former career as a developer of audio software pays off in jaw-dropping sound design, like the ratcheting rhythms of “Dazzle Anew” or the depth-charge bass of “Nervous Silk,” a psychedelic approximation of a diving bell’s descent. Despite glimmers of dance-floor energy here and there, this is first and foremost a listening album, head music of the highest order—but “Deadlock,” a slow, menacing hip-hop cut lacerated by speaker-shredding bass, is one of the heaviest things he’s ever done.

PAN welcomes back Objekt for Cocoon Crush, his first LP since 2014’s Flatland. Over the past four years Objekt has continued to challenge conventions with his club output (the Objekt #4 single release and the Kern Vol. 3 mix CD for Tresor), while maintaining his reputation as a DJ who deploys impeccable technical finesse in crafting elaborate narratives from a diverse and challenging palette of electronic music. Written between 2014 and 2018 in Berlin and on the road, Cocoon Crush once again sees the producer jettisoning the functional requirements of the dancefloor. Marking a further evolution from the youthful exuberance of Flatland, Cocoon Crush explores a more introspective side, with themes of human interaction resonating throughout the record as it ruminates on a spectrum of complex moods rooted in 4 years of sometimes turbulent personal experience. Cocoon Crush represents an aesthetic departure from Flatland’s largely synthetic tonality, drawing from organic source material and natural textures to illustrate perplexing and unfamiliar sceneries in photorealistic detail. In Cocoon Crush, Objekt diverges further still from his musical influences to craft the purest manifestation of his own musical personality to date: an intriguing and enigmatic album whose reference points are hard to pin down, in which ghostly synth passages weave through mind-bending, weighty drums, and ASMR-triggering foley collages scrape and sparkle. Through meticulous sculpting, Objekt traces a rich and impressionistic journey through claustrophobia, hope, guilt, anxiety and joy, nested in layers of sonic detail which reward with every listen. The album is mastered by Rashad Becker, featuring photography by Kasia Zacharko, and layout by Bill Kouligas.

If Robyn has found peace or happiness, you wouldn’t necessarily know it by listening to her first album in eight years. Opener “Missing U” sets the mood, with wistful lines about stopped clocks and empty spaces left behind. Yet it’s somehow one of *Honey*’s more upbeat tracks, with an insistent rhythm and glittery arpeggios that recall the brightest moments of 2010’s *Body Talk*. At its best, Robyn’s music has always straddled the line between club-ready dance and melancholy pop, and her strongest singles to date, “Dancing On My Own” and “Be Mine!,” strike this balance perfectly. But never before have we heard the kind of emotional intensity that possesses *Honey*; in the years leading up to it, Robyn suffered through the 2014 death of longtime collaborator Christian Falk and a breakup with her partner Max Vitali (though they’ve since reunited). A few one-off projects aside, she mostly withdrew from music and public life, so *Honey* is a comeback in more ways than one. Produced with a handful of collaborators, like Kindness’ Adam Bainbridge and Metronomy’s Joseph Mount, the album mostly abandons the disco of \"Missing U,\" opting to pair Robyn’s darker lyrics with more understated, house-influenced textures. She gives in to nostalgia on “Because It’s in the Music” (“They wrote a song about us...Even though it kills me, I still play it anyway”) and gets existential on “Human Being” (“Don’t shut me out, you know we’re the same kind, a dying race”). But for all the urgent and relatable rawness, *Honey* is not all doom and gloom: By the time closer “Ever Again” rolls around, she’s on the upswing, and there’s a glimmer of a possible happy ending. “I swear I’m never gonna be brokenhearted ever again,” she sings, as if to convince herself. “I’m only gonna sing about love ever again.”

Released (LP) September 2018 by Ba Da Bing Composed and mixed by Sarah Davachi Recorded April and July 2017 at Hotel2Tango in Montréal QC, engineered by Howard Bilerman Additional overdubs recorded at home in Los Angeles in November and December 2017 Performed by Sarah Davachi (flute, Mellotron, organs, piano, synthesizer, voice), Thierry Amar (contrabass), Terri Hron (recorder), Jessica Moss (violin), Lisa McGee (voice) Mastered by Sean McCann Photography by Dicky Bahto From Ba Da Bing: Sarah Davachi has quickly risen in prominence since her first release five years ago, and Gave In Rest represents her highest artistic achievement. By infusing her compositional style within a predilection for medieval and Renaissance music, Davachi unearths a new realm of musical reverence, creating works both contemplative and beatific, eerie yet essentially human. Gave In Rest is a modern reading of early music, reforming sacred and secular sentiments to fit her purview and provide an exciting new way to hear the sounds that exist around us. Between January and September of 2017, Sarah Davachi lived in flux; storing her belongings in Vancouver, she spent the summer in Europe, occasionally performing in churches and lapidariums and seeking respite from her transitional state while surrounded by such storied history. “I’ve always been a pretty solitary person, but that summer I discovered quiet moments to be increasingly valuable,” says Davachi. “I became engaged in private practices of rest and rumination, almost to the point of ritual.” Though not religious, she sought ecclesiastic environments, sitting for hours in muted spaces and listened to how church instruments augmented them – their pipe organs, their bells, their choral voices – and resolved to “tap into that way of listening.” Davachi went deeper into studying early music over that summer, considering how Renaissance musicians experimented with new instruments, forms, and texture. Her reflections led her to the duality of stillness and rest, and upon entering Montréal’s hotel2tango with Howard Bilerman, she adapted her modern style to standard approaches of a recording studio’s function. She composed the majority of the record alone at the piano to find specific harmonic colors and movements, then brought in an ensemble of musicians to interact and extrapolate organically with those tones. Gave In Rest opens and ends at its most unornamented moments: the first track, “Auster”, being played entirely on a recorder and then, “slowed down and opened up so you can hear the innards of the sound,” and the final track, “Waking”, one long take of Davachi on a Hammond organ. The latter is a solitary departure of concrete simplicity and is allegorical in its inclusion at Gave In Rest’s end, with harmonic structures of a Baroque style materializing and wavering in long, textural passages of consonance and dissonance. The overdubbed, chant-like singing on “Evensong” was treated through an EMT 140 plate reverb, the very same unit Stevie Nicks used for “Rhiannon”. Completed after this period of suspension in her life, Davachi finished Gave In Rest while establishing herself in Los Angeles. Her new home is a radical departure from her previous Northern surroundings, with its vast reach, otherworldly terrain, and bizarre, isolating nature; “It is easy to remain anonymous in Los Angeles,” says Davachi. Gave In Rest was mixed over a period of two months while she adjusted to this new lifestyle. Davachi has mined a bottomless landscape where listeners can witness music’s participation in their solitudes. Gave In Rest lends a voice to her personal exploration with a firm, intuitive stance.

serpentwithfeet is an avant-garde vocalist and performance artist whose growing body of work is rooted in dueling obsessions with the ephemeral and the everlasting – key components of his artistic journey from a childhood stint as a choirboy in Baltimore through his time at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where he studied vocal performance before relocating to New York City. His forthcoming debut full-length album soil is a return to the sensibilities and wide-eyed curiosity of his musical youth before symmetry and sterile soundscapes ruled the roost. With the release of soil the chameleonic serpentwithfeet (born Josiah Wise) rediscovers and ultimately returns to the unhinged version of himself he was sure he had outgrown. “soil is about me returning home then realizing that i carry home with me daily.” Following the release of Blisters – his 2016 foray into hybridized pop produced by Björk collaborator The Haxan Cloak – and two big tours, serpentwithfeet returned to the studio in 2017. There, he explored the fullness of his voice and became increasingly interested in playful singing which intrigued recording engineer Jason Agel. That vocal performance was only complicated by his feverish rumination on the dissolution of an impassioned love affair that left him stunned and speeding toward the inevitable – a more intimate relationship with himself. One in which he embraces and mocks his own flaws with abandon, lets an uncharacteristic shock of hair down over his infamously provocative forehead tattoos, makes room for his most pressing sexual desires and returns to the gospel that dominated his formative years. In this embrace of imperfection and romantic failure, serpentwithfeet has found soil; the forthcoming album is his first release for the label partnership between Tri Angle Records and Secretly Canadian. soil features contributions from rising experimental producer mmph, sound manipulator Katie Gately, A$AP Rocky contemporary Clams Casino, and Paul Epworth – one of the Grammy Award-winning minds responsible for Adele’s critically-acclaimed album 21. The project recorded between New York City’s WhiteWater production house and Epworth’s London studio was co-produced by serpentwithfeet. On this outing he trades glossolalia and peacocking showmanship for intricately layered harmonies, a sumptuous bottom register that appears for the first time to challenge his fluttering tenor, and ballsy sonic experimentation encouraged by Gately, whose talent he describes as “making voices sound like elephants and elephants sound like car engines.” Together they develop an unctuous sound that suggests billowing clouds and the dense, plodding stomp of 12-bar blues. Once concerned with perfect execution of gospel runs and dishing up a gossamer falsetto, serpentwithfeet is out of balance and reveling in the concept of mess on soil. Particularly, what it means to part ways with sterility and the urge to uncoil himself in order to occupy more space. soil is the moment at which he unfolds himself with zero intention of closing back up. “I’m constantly talking about how black men are always manspreading and pushed to be these super masculine, bovine – seven foot niggas. For a long time I was interested in what would happen if we rebelled against that and we were small. I was into the minutiae and then I realized I wanted to take up space again. I have practiced that smallness and quietness and that’s fine, but now I don’t want to be that delicate. I’m not interested in that right now. This album definitely pushed me in that way. There’s a certain naivete in this new music. With the blisters EP, I was trying to prove a point to myself and the listener. I was trying to string together a lot of ideas before. This time I wasn’t trying to sound smart. I was as crafty as I could be with the words, but I just wanted to keep my eyes open and be accountable for what I was seeing .” Evocative of the stillness of lying down and feeling the gravitational pull of the earth beneath the body, soil is a writhing, electronic melodrama that pairs synth woodwinds and sinister transitions with serpentwithfeet’s extra-terrestrial timbre. The album elevates his most persistent weaknesses, and revisits the trinity of r&b, gospel, and pop that drove earlier projects. serpentwithfeet busies himself with a manic range of emotion which includes sobbing, laughing, mocking his own truculence and identifying his proclivity to smother lovers as a trait antithetical to the kind of intimacy they seek. He speaks as tenderly to the mythical men of his dreams as he does former lovers. His humor is apparent on songs like “seedless,” “messy,” and “slow syrup,” which poke fun at his overbearing presence in the lives of partners. serpentwithfeet tinkers with the extremes of his ideals to illustrate the ways in which past partners have felt oppressed by his needs; he likens them to unreasonable questions like, “Will you show up for me if I ask you to sharpen your teeth because we don’t have any knives and I need someone to cut this food?” “cherubim” and “fragrant” elucidate the connection between romantic obsession and the sentiments of church songs about unwavering devotion to god in statements like, “I get to devote my life to him, I get to sing like the cherubim.” In seeking to commune with a higher power across a number of bodies, from the individual self to the embrace of a lover and the sanctity of partnership, serpentwithfeet is responsible for a compilation that forces consciousness of the myriad intersections at which god exists. At once whimsical and mechanical, soil traverses the depths of human emotion in search of love. The music inspired by “intense collaborative work” is an extension of the mourning ritual a crestfallen serpentwithfeet first created to grieve heartbreak. He cites influences as varied as lullabies, an affinity for pungent body odor, his doll collection, and his mother’s love of traditional hymns. soil conjures his early fascinations with Brandy and Björk as easily as it references the pageantry of anthemic compositions by Antonin Dvorak and the ecstatic praise of the black church; the abiding prayer house rhythm is established by industrial washing machines on Gately’s opener “whisper.” serpentwithfeet is explicit, however, in breaking with the condemnations of taboo subjects in order to deliver the language necessary to provide black, queer people with a heartfelt, futurist folk –– a new mother tongue constructed to override his prolonged inability to articulate his love life because he had no knowledge of an established standard for speaking about intimate experiences beyond the binary lens of heterosexuality. In being vulnerable enough to vocalize his journey, serpentwithfeet encourages a systematic dismantling of the shame that is appended to homosexuality through the creation of a sonic space buoyed by radical acts of love and sustained repetition of his innermost thoughts. “I remember growing up there was language for how men and women interact. I don’t have a lot of examples of black gay men that are out here thriving. Because of social media we see more examples but at the time when I was thinking about this and dealing with my own relationship, I had difficulty articulating my feelings. I hate to say it , but I think there is still a lot of shame around two black men dating and loving on each other and I was very aware of that. While working on soil, i was exploring and trying to make sense of my needs and my love language.  Because of this process, I’ve fallen in love with my idiosyncrasies. I’m growing my hair again. With this album I gave myself permission to let the leaves grow, let the flowers bloom, let myself be hairy and let my sound be hairy. I’m excited about the way things naturally come out of my body. I am always going to embrace discipline and streamlining. But I’m in a space at the moment where I don’t need or desire the corset. It’s time for expansiveness.”

Air Lows is the debut solo album by Silvia Kastel. The Italian artist has been a fixture of the underground since her precocious teens, clocking up many miles in Control Unit with Ninni Morgia (“It’s like Catherine Deneuve dumped two cases of post-Repulsion psychiatric notes over Pere Ubu’s Dub Housing, lit the fuse and, ahem, stood well back” – Julian Cope), including collaborations with the likes of Smegma, Factrix, Gary Smith, Aki Onda and Gate (Michael Morley of The Dead C). Through her own label, Ultramarine, she has released music by the likes of Raymond Dijkstra, Blood Stereo and Bene Gesserit. Both solo and in her work with others, Kastel has explored the outer limits and inner workings of no wave, industrial, dub, extreme electronics, free rock and improvisation. Air Lows – which follows the cassette releases Love Tape (2011), Voice Studies 20 (2015) and The Gap (2016) – is both her fullest and most refined offering to date, a work of vivid, isolationist electronics which draws deeply on her past experience but assuredly breaks new ground. Prompted by a late-flowering interest in techno and club music, Kastel sought to create something which combines a steady rhythmic pulse with the otherworldly sonorities of musique concrete, and avant-garde synth sounds inspired by Japanese minimalism and techno-pop (Haruomi Hosono’s Philharmony being a particular favourite). The formal artifice of muzak / elevator music, the intros and outros of generic popular songs, the extreme light-heavy contrasts of jungle, the creative sampling of hardcore, and the very “human” synths in the jazz of Herbie Hancock’s Sextant and Sun Ra: all these things were touchstones for Air Lows’ conception and composition. All strains of music addressing – and complicating – the relationship between the human and the technological. By extension, visual inspirations also proved important: anime, and the avant-garde fashion of Rei Kawakubo. What does that shirt or dress sound like? Though used sparingly, Kastel’s voice remains her key instrument, whether subject to dissociative digital manipulations as on ‘Bruell’, delivering matter-of-fact spoken monologues, or providing splashes of pure tonal colour. Recorded between her expansive Italian studio and a more compact, ersatz set-up in Berlin, Air Lows gradually takes on some of the character of the German capital: you can hear the wide streets and empty spaces, the seepage of never-ending nightlife, the loneliness. Air Lows is The Wizard of Oz in reverse: the glorious technicolour J-pop deconstructons of its first half leading inexorably to the icy noir of ‘Spiderwebs’ and ‘Concrete Void’. These later tracks are reminiscent of 2015’s magnificent 39 12”, Kastel in the role of numbed, nihilistic chanteuse stalking dank, murky tunnels of reverb and sub-bass. But there is contradiction and emotional ambiguity to Air Lows from the outset, and throughout: a sense of both infinite space and acute claustrophobia; energy and inertia; fluency and restraint.

w&p by Skee Mask

There had always been a burning sense of resistance baked into SOPHIE’s experimental soundscapes, which simultaneously honored and rejected the tropes and rules of mainstream pop. But the Scottish producer’s visionary debut album is an exhilarating escalation—a work that not only exploded expectations around song structure and form but conventional notions of gender, identity, and self, as well. *Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides* is sweeping and defiant, pinballing from glitchy rave cuts (“Ponyboy”) to ethereal pop elegies (“It’s Okay to Cry”) to ambient passages that feel practically spiritual (“Pretending”). Each left turn is an invitation to slip further into SOPHIE’S neon universe. In the hands of any other artist, such dizzying digital distortions would appear to warp reality. Here, though, they clarify it. Every synthetic vocal, slithering synth, zigzagging beat, and gleefully warped sample brings us closer to SOPHIE\'S truth. Some of the project’s headiest questions—those about body, being, and soul—seem to rest on a distant horizon the rest of the world hasn’t caught up to yet. “Immaterial,” a fizzing, maximalist hat-tip to Madonna, moves the goalposts even further, proposing a version of consciousness in which the material world is, in fact, only the beginning.

Domino are honoured to introduce Devotion; the hugely anticipated debut album from one of London's most exciting underground talents, Tirzah. Arriving on the back of a lauded run of releases on Greco Roman, Devotion shines a brilliant new light on Tirzah's unique experimental pop, exquisitely soulful voice and potent contemporary lyricism.