Resident Advisor's Best Albums of 2023

“You can feel a lot of motion and energy,” Caroline Polachek tells Apple Music of her second solo studio album. “And chaos. I definitely leaned into that chaos.” Written and recorded during a pandemic and in stolen moments while Polachek toured with Dua Lipa in 2022, *Desire, I Want to Turn Into You* is Polachek’s self-described “maximalist” album, and it weaponizes everything in her kaleidoscopic arsenal. “I set out with an interest in making a more uptempo record,” she says. “Songs like ‘Bunny Is a Rider,’ ‘Welcome to My Island,’ and ‘Smoke’ came onto the plate first and felt more hot-blooded and urgent than anything I’d done before. But of course, life happened, the pandemic happened, I evolved as a person, and I can’t really deny that a lunar, wistful side of my writing can never be kept out of the house. So it ended up being quite a wide constellation of songs.” Polachek cites artists including Massive Attack, SOPHIE, Donna Lewis, Enya, Madonna, The Beach Boys, Timbaland, Suzanne Vega, Ennio Morricone, and Matia Bazar as inspirations, but this broad church only really hints at *Desire…*’s palette. Across its 12 songs we get trip-hop, bagpipes, Spanish guitars, psychedelic folk, ’60s reverb, spoken word, breakbeats, a children’s choir, and actual Dido—all anchored by Polachek’s unteachable way around a hook and disregard for low-hanging pop hits. This is imperial-era Caroline Polachek. “The album’s medium is feeling,” she says. “It’s about character and movement and dynamics, while dealing with catharsis and vitality. It refuses literal interpretation on purpose.” Read on for Polachek’s track-by-track guide. **“Welcome to My Island”** “‘Welcome to My Island’ was the first song written on this album. And it definitely sets the tone. The opening, which is this minute-long non-lyrical wail, came out of a feeling of a frustration with the tidiness of lyrics and wanting to just express something kind of more primal and urgent. The song is also very funny. We snap right down from that Tarzan moment down to this bitchy, bratty spoken verse that really becomes the main personality of this song. It’s really about ego at its core—about being trapped in your own head and forcing everyone else in there with you, rather than capitulating or compromising. In that sense, it\'s both commanding and totally pathetic. The bridge addresses my father \[James Polachek died in 2020 from COVID-19\], who never really approved of my music. He wanted me to be making stuff that was more political, intellectual, and radical. But also, at the same time, he wasn’t good at living his own life. The song establishes that there is a recognition of my own stupidity and flaws on this album, that it’s funny and also that we\'re not holding back at all—we’re going in at a hundred percent.” **“Pretty in Possible”** “If ‘Welcome to My Island’ is the insane overture, ‘Pretty in Possible’ finds me at street level, just daydreaming. I wanted to do something with as little structure as possible where you just enter a song vocally and just flow and there\'s no discernible verses or choruses. It’s actually a surprisingly difficult memo to stick to because it\'s so easy to get into these little patterns and want to bring them back. I managed to refuse the repetition of stuff—except for, of course, the opening vocals, which are a nod to Suzanne Vega, definitely. It’s my favorite song on the album, mostly because I got to be so free inside of it. It’s a very simple song, outside a beautiful string section inspired by Massive Attack’s ‘Unfinished Sympathy.’ Those dark, dense strings give this song a sadness and depth that come out of nowhere. These orchestral swells at the end of songs became a compositional motif on the album.” **“Bunny Is a Rider”** “A spicy little summer song about being unavailable, which includes my favorite bassline of the album—this quite minimal funk bassline. Structurally on this one, I really wanted it to flow without people having a sense of the traditional dynamics between verses and choruses. Timbaland was a massive influence on that song—especially around how the beat essentially doesn\'t change the whole song. You just enter it and flow. ‘Bunny Is a Rider’ was a set of words that just flowed out without me thinking too much about it. And the next thing I know, we made ‘Bunny Is a Rider’ thongs. I love getting occasional Instagram tags of people in their ‘Bunny Is a Rider’ thongs. An endless source of happiness for me.” **“Sunset”** “This was a song I began writing with Sega Bodega in 2020. It sounded completely nothing like the others. It had a folk feel, it was gypsy Spanish, Italian, Greek feel to it. It completely made me look at the album differently—and start to see a visual world for them that was a bit more folk, but living very much in the swirl of city life, having this connection to a secret, underground level of antiquity and the universalities of art. It was written right around a month or two after Ennio Morricone passed away, so I\'d been thinking a lot about this epic tone of his work, and about how sunsets are the biggest film clichés in spaghetti westerns. We were laughing about how it felt really flamenco and Spanish—not knowing that a few months later, I was going to find myself kicked out of the UK because I\'d overstayed my visa without realizing it, and so I moved my sessions with Sega to Barcelona. It felt like the song had been a bit of a premonition that that chapter-writing was going to happen. We ended up getting this incredible Spanish guitarist, Marc Lopez, to play the part.” **“Crude Drawing of an Angel”** “‘Crude Drawing of an Angel’ was born, in some ways, out of me thinking about jokingly having invented the word ‘scorny’—which is scary and horny at the same time. I have a playlist of scorny music that I\'m still working on and I realized that it was a tone that I\'d never actually explored. I was also reading John Berger\'s book on drawing \[2005’s *Berger on Drawing*\] and thinking about trace-leaving as a form of drawing, and as an extremely beautiful way of looking at sensuality. This song is set in a hotel room in which the word ‘drawing’ takes on six different meanings. It imagines watching someone wake up, not realizing they\'re being observed, whilst drawing them, knowing that\'s probably the last time you\'re going to see them.” **“I Believe”** “‘I Believe’ is a real dedication to a tone. I was in Italy midway through the pandemic and heard this song called ‘Ti Sento’ by Matia Bazar at a house party that blew my mind. It was the way she was singing that blew me away—that she was pushing her voice absolutely to the limit, and underneath were these incredible key changes where every chorus would completely catch you off guard. But she would kind of propel herself right through the center of it. And it got me thinking about the archetype of the diva vocally—about how really it\'s very womanly that it’s a woman\'s voice and not a girl\'s voice. That there’s a sense of authority and a sense of passion and also an acknowledgment of either your power to heal or your power to destroy. At the same time, I was processing the loss of my friend SOPHIE and was thinking about her actually as a form of diva archetype; a lot of our shared taste in music, especially ’80s music, kind of lined up with a lot of those attitudes. So I wanted to dedicate these lyrics to her.” **“Fly to You” (feat. Grimes and Dido)** “A very simple song at its core. It\'s about this sense of resolution that can come with finally seeing someone after being separated from them for a while. And when a lot of misunderstanding and distrust can seep in with that distance, the kind of miraculous feeling of clearing that murk to find that sort of miraculous resolution and clarity. And so in this song, Grimes, Dido, and I kind of find our different version of that. But more so than anything literal, this song is really about beauty, I think, about all of us just leaning into this kind of euphoric, forward-flowing movement in our singing and flying over these crystalline tiny drum and bass breaks that are accompanied by these big Ibiza guitar solos and kind of Nintendo flutes, and finding this place where very detailed electronic music and very pure singing can meet in the middle. And I think it\'s something that, it\'s a kind of feeling that all of us have done different versions of in our music and now we get to together.” **“Blood and Butter”** “This was written as a bit of a challenge between me and Danny L Harle where we tried to contain an entire song to two chords, which of course we do fail at, but only just. It’s a pastoral, it\'s a psychedelic folk song. It imagines itself set in England in the summer, in June. It\'s also a love letter to a lot of the music I listened to growing up—these very trance-like, mantra-like songs, like Donna Lewis’ ‘I Love You Always Forever,’ a lot of Madonna’s *Ray of Light* album, Savage Garden—that really pulsing, tantric electronic music that has a quite sweet and folksy edge to it. The solo is played by a hugely talented and brilliant bagpipe player named Brighde Chaimbeul, whose album *The Reeling* I\'d found in 2022 and became quite obsessed with.” **“Hopedrunk Everasking”** “I couldn\'t really decide if this song needed to be about death or about being deeply, deeply in love. I then had this revelation around the idea of tunneling, this idea of retreating into the tunnel, which I think I feel sometimes when I\'m very deeply in love. The feeling of wanting to retreat from the rest of the world and block the whole rest of the world out just to be around someone and go into this place that only they and I know. And then simultaneously in my very few relationships with losing someone, I did feel some this sense of retreat, of someone going into their own body and away from the world. And the song feels so deeply primal to me. The melody and chords of it were written with Danny L Harle, ironically during the Dua Lipa tour—when I had never been in more of a pop atmosphere in my entire life.” **“Butterfly Net”** “‘Butterfly Net’ is maybe the most narrative storyteller moment on the whole album. And also, palette-wise, deviates from the more hybrid electronic palette that we\'ve been in to go fully into this 1960s drum reverb band atmosphere. I\'m playing an organ solo. I was listening to a lot of ’60s Italian music, and the way they use reverbs as a holder of the voice and space and very minimal arrangements to such incredible effect. It\'s set in three parts, which was somewhat inspired by this triptych of songs called ‘Chansons de Bilitis’ by Claude Debussy that I had learned to sing with my opera teacher. I really liked that structure of the finding someone falling in love, the deepening of it, and then the tragedy at the end. It uses the metaphor of the butterfly net to speak about the inability to keep memories, to keep love, to keep the feeling of someone\'s presence. The children\'s choir \[London\'s Trinity Choir\] we hear on ‘Billions’ comes in again—they get their beautiful feature at the end where their voices actually become the stand-in for the light of the world being onto me.” **“Smoke”** “It was, most importantly, the first song for the album written with a breakbeat, which inspired me to carry on down that path. It’s about catharsis. The opening line is about pretending that something isn\'t catastrophic when it obviously is. It\'s about denial. It\'s about pretending that the situation or your feelings for someone aren\'t tectonic, but of course they are. And then, of course, in the chorus, everything pours right out. But tonally it feels like I\'m at home base with ‘Smoke.’ It has links to songs like \[2019’s\] ‘Pang,’ which, for me, have this windswept feeling of being quite out of control, but are also very soulful and carried by the music. We\'re getting a much more nocturnal, clattery, chaotic picture.” **“Billions”** “‘Billions’ is last for all the same reasons that \'Welcome to My Island’ is first. It dissolves into total selflessness, whereas the album opens with total selfishness. The Beach Boys’ ‘Surf’s Up’ is one of my favorite songs of all time. I cannot listen to it without sobbing. But the nonlinear, spiritual, tumbling, open quality of that song was something that I wanted to bring into the song. But \'Billions\' is really about pure sensuality, about all agenda falling away and just the gorgeous sensuality of existing in this world that\'s so full of abundance, and so full of contradictions, humor, and eroticism. It’s a cheeky sailboat trip through all these feelings. You know that feeling of when you\'re driving a car to the beach, that first moment when you turn the corner and see the ocean spreading out in front of you? That\'s what I wanted the ending of this album to feel like: The song goes very quiet all of a sudden, and then you see the water and the children\'s choir comes in.”

The sparse, Afro Caribbean sound of the Lisbon label Príncipe has made for some of the most hypnotic dance music of the 2010s and 2020s. Into the conversation steps Daniel Veiga, a Portuguese producer born to Angolan parents who once answered the question of what his music sounded like by saying it paired well with sunsets. *Ansiedade*—“anxiety” in Portuguese—is one of the label’s mellowest releases but also a quintessential one, mixing addictively off-center rhythms with a minor-key ambience that wavers between blissful and slightly sinister. He does bring those sunsets (“Tarraxo,” “Mar Vista”), and even in his most experimental stretches holds onto harmonies more aligned with classic rumba or son than anything else (“Gentleman,” “Robert Johnson”).

“Gratitude Practice” is the first single from DJ Gigola’s upcoming album “Fluid Meditations”, set to be released on the 3rd of February 2023. On her debut LP, she explores shared aspects of meditation and the dance experience, fusing them into a new form of introspective practice. Gigola expresses her approach through the lens of guided meditation with spoken word. Lyrically, she traverses three aspects in particular: awareness of the now, embodiment and unfolding of the ego. Her work presents these themes chronologically ordered in a continuous mix. The very personal compositions deliberately juxtapose leading themes of a virtual world, such as anonymity, the restlessness of online interaction, and the physical disembodiment. We are guided through this process by her voice, which DJ Gigola places against a background of low-pass frequencies, field recordings, breathing techniques and ASMR. These are synthesised with a warp of organic percussions, goa, and psytrance - creating a meditation practice that goes beyond traditional methods by decontextualizing elements of rave as a catalyst for Gigola’s own exploration of escapism.

Whether as Fever Ray or with her brother Olof in The Knife, the Swedish electro-pop artist Karin Dreijer has always used alien-sounding music to evoke primitive human states. It isn’t just *Radical Romantics*’ metaphors that scan as sexual (the surrender of “Shiver,” the dominance-and-revenge fantasies of “Even It Out”); it’s the way their squishy synths and herky-jerky club beats conjure the messy ecstasy of our biological selves. And then there’s Dreijer’s voice, which through expert playacting and the miracle of modern technology creates a spectrum of characters, from temptress to horror-show to big daddy and little girl.

For James Blake, making his sixth album felt like going home. Since emerging as a post-dubstep trailblazer in 2010, the electronic producer from the outskirts of London has explored a realm of different sounds including minimalist pop, trap beats, stark ballads, sparse chamber music, digitalized experimentation, and more, all while becoming a go-to collaborator for a wave of game-changing artists (Kendrick Lamar, Frank Ocean, Beyoncé, and Dave among them). On *Playing Robots Into Heaven*, though, he reconnects with the club sounds that fueled his early work—and a side of himself he felt compelled to tap back into. “It felt like, ‘Oh, I’m going to do the thing that I do really easily,’” Blake tells Apple Music. “Writing songs is definitely something I love doing, but it doesn’t come naturally to me. It’s really rewarding and challenging, but not my most natural thing. I think probably my most natural thing is collaging shit together.” That’s the approach Blake employs on *Playing Robots Into Heaven*, a captivating record where twisted loops and warped samples intertwine with the melancholic warmth of Blake’s trademark piano chords, hypnotic hooks, and heavily treated vocals. Following a loose narrative arc of a night out raving—taking in the euphoric thrills, spills, ups, downs, and return to reality—it’s a heady trip. Creating it, Blake realized that putting yourself through the wringer to make a record doesn’t have to be the mark of a serious artist. “What I learned was that the feeling of ‘Is this too easy?’ is actually a good feeling,” he says. “It means you’re onto something, it means you are doing something right.” Blake is in his element on *Playing Robots Into Heaven*—and here, he guides us through it, track by track. **“Asking to Break”** “I made this with \[Mount Kimbie’s\] Dom Maker. He started it off with a loop of me playing piano and singing, which is the first thing you hear. The refrain and the song came from that. It happened pretty naturally, pretty quickly. I’m not sure what word it is that the chord sequence evokes, but it evokes something. It doesn’t really happen on the rest of the songs. It’s unique to the album. I like this song as an opener just because it’s not exactly rave-y, but it’s sort of giving you a little nudge in that direction.” **“Loading”** “The whole album is the arc of a rave, basically, or the arc of maybe some kind of drug experience that includes a high and a comedown. ‘Asking to Break’ sets that up and then ‘Loading’ starts to bring you up into more of that place, \[with\] a little bit more euphoria. That’s why I liked it as a second tune. It’s not crazy hyped, but it’s suggesting it and you get that big release at the end. Again, I collaborated with Dom on this one. He made the loop that you hear at the beginning and then we bounce off each other really well.” **“Tell Me”** “‘Tell Me’ started on the tour bus. Me and Rob \[McAndrews, co-producer and Blake’s live guitarist\] were messing about with modular stuff and we ended up with a thing we really liked. There’s actually a video of us playing an early version of it, just bobbing our heads on the tour bus. We’ve got nothing else to do, we’re just eating peanut butter and drinking shit coffee and making stuff on this thing. I knew this had that transcendent wave vibe about it and it felt like a perfect one for the record.” **“Fall Back”** “I had a little modular jam I was working on. Yaw Evans is a producer from South London and I discovered him because he was remixing old grime a cappellas but using old hardware, and it was kind of unusual. I messaged him like, ‘Hey, I love what you do and it’s inspiring to me because I’m doing something a bit similar. Do you want to send me any ideas because I’d love to incorporate what you do into a song?’ Two of them ended up being on the record. One was the drums on ‘Fall Back,’ which I then manipulated a bit to bring it into that world. It’s got echoes of Burial but also maybe more traditional garage stuff. The way he programmed was different and maybe better than something I could do so I was just like, ‘Well, let’s use that.’ It could have been a case of like, ‘Oh, these drums are cool, I’ll do something like them,’ but I don’t really do that. I like to get it from the source.” **“He’s Been Wonderful”** “I actually remember playing an early version of this on Radio 1 about seven years ago. I ended up playing it out a lot at my 1-800 Dinosaur \[club nights\] back in the day but also the CMYK nights that I’ve been putting on—I’d be playing it every set. This song doesn’t feature my voice. I think the thing that some people might find odd about this record is that there are a couple of tracks where I’m not singing and it’s a sample of someone else. But there was a bonus on *Overgrown* that had Big Boi samples on it, ‘Every Day I Ran,’ so I’ve done it before.” **“Big Hammer”** “When I put this out as the first single, I was like, ‘This is the only way to make it clear that this record’s going to be different.’ Some of the other songs might have just been seen as slightly different James Blake tracks but this one was like, ‘OK, people aren’t really going to know what’s going to happen next,’ and that’s what I wanted. I sampled \[Hackney’s proto-jungle adventurers\] The Ragga Twins, who were a huge voice for me growing up. They’d either be at the things I was going to, or they’d be in the tracks of the DJs I was listening to. They were a big influence and when I sampled them, the tune just felt like, ‘Now I’ve got it, now it’s done.’ They brought the energy that the tune had without actually even being there.” **“I Want You to Know”** “This again is something that started with Yaw Evans’ drums. I was in a studio in Los Angeles and I was playing chords over it, just seeing what I could find. I ended up writing a little bit over it and then there was a moment where the only melody I could hear over this song was the Pharrell line from the end of Snoop Dogg’s ‘Beautiful.’ I was listening to it in the control room and once I’d sung it out loud, I was like, ‘Oh no, there is no better melody than that, that’s the only thing.’ It was like, ‘All right, let’s hope they clear it.’” **“Night Sky”** “This is now the arc downwards. We’re starting to really wind down. It’s a pretty odd piece of music. I really love the strange Gregorian-sounding shit at the end where you don’t really know what it is, whether it’s a voice or whatever, but it sounds haunting. I made it with Rob again. We started it together at my house with modular stuff. Those weird voices at the beginning, that’s all me put through some technology. I thought it created the perfect ladder down back to Earth.” **“Fire the Editor”** “The editor in this case is yourself and your self-censorship, and when you’re not truly saying what it is you want to say, or you are saying a version of it but not the whole thing. It’s a tough place to be. It’s a rallying cry to a freedom of thought and personal freedom. There’s a lyric in this song I really love: ‘If I see him again, we’ll be having words.’ There’s something a little bit confrontational about it, but the idea is that it’s setting you free at this moment in the album.” **“If You Can Hear Me”** “This is a letting go sort of song, too—a letting go of the constant pursuit of something, the pursuit of success or the pursuit of music, or the pursuit of whatever it is in your own life. It was actually written at the time of the movie *Ad Astra*, because I was writing something for it which ended up not being used. It was written to the scene where he finally communicates with his father who’s out in space and who might never come back. I think that in some way it’s a nice metaphor for how we go on our own path compared to our parents or maybe our father, in this case. We are trying to go as far as we can in a certain direction without getting lost and hopefully not repeating the same mistakes they did, but also learning from what they got right.” **“Playing Robots Into Heaven”** “The title *Playing Robots Into Heaven* came from an Instagram post where I’d made this jam on a modular synth. For some reason the phrase ‘The organist that plays robots into heaven’ is what came to mind because that’s just what it sounded like for me. This is the track that I posted on my Instagram during the pandemic and it’s on the album in full without any modification, exactly the piece that started the album off. Again, it’s bringing you all the way down back to Earth.”

*Digital download includes pdf booklet of Jorge Velez illustrations (available exclusively via Bandcamp)* “I wanted this to be my most open record, uncynical, naive, unguarded, the record teenage me wanted to make,” says electronic explorer James Holden of his generically unconstrained new album of rave music for a parallel universe 'Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities'. “I used to balance my clock-radio on a wardrobe to catch the faint pirate FM signals from the nearest city, dreaming of what raves would be like when I could finally escape and become a New Age traveller. So it’s like a dream of rave, a fantasy about a transformative music culture that would make the world better. I guess it’s also a dialogue with that teenage me.” The New Age traveller lifestyle may have ultimately eluded Holden, as by the time he was old enough to actually go to raves the UK’s infamous Criminal Justice Bill of 1994 had long since clamped down on the traveller free party circuit, and instead in 1999, when he was just nineteen years old, he fell into a professional career in the more commercialised end of dance music after an early 12” ('Horizons') was picked up by a Sony Music-backed trance imprint. But here and now, with this latest album offering that tops off a musical career spanning over twenty years, Holden is seeking to recapture that feeling of hope, freedom and possibility (both musical and otherwise) that characterised those venerated earliest days of dance music, when the boundaries of the distinct genres as we now know them had yet to crystallise, and a starry-eyed teenage Holden was still dreaming in the bedroom of his Leicestershire village. Standing in contrast to the expanded band and live take recordings of its predecessor 'The Animal Spirits' (“Dramatic, colourful and Holden’s fullest-sounding work yet” 9/10 Loud And Quiet), Holden’s fourth solo artist album is more of a continuous sound collage, artfully juxtaposing audio worlds in his own inimitable manner, with a respectful hat tip to the pastoral classics of his early nineties youth (notable mentions to The KLF’s timeless 'Chill Out', and the sprawling radio soundscapes of Future Sound of London). But where his first wave forebears pilfered freely from the history of recorded music to date, Holden’s sample sources are custom generated, drawn from recordings of his own performances on the modular synth, keyboard, organ and piano plus the lesser explored drones of his childhood violin, cut-up bass guitar, overblown recorder, all manner of percussive trinkets and the serendipity of the odd field recording, as well as guest contributions from various members of the wider Animal Spirits live family: long-time touring companion drummer Tom Page, tabla-championing percussionist Camilo Tirado, multi-instrumentalist for hire Marcus Hamblett (here, on double bass and guitar) and saxophonist Christopher Duffin (on loan from Xam Duo and Virginia Wing). Some of the references here undeniably draw from the past: 'Trust Your Feet' is dominated by the most unashamedly ravey stabs Holden has ever played, yet by the end has seamlessly unfurled into a hand-drum-and-flute campfire singalong, whilst the more Balearic 'Common Land'’s pairing of percussive bird samples with the evocative reverberating saxophone of Christopher Duffin casts it as a distant cousin of 808 State’s 'Pacific State'. But this anything goes approach also welcomes contributions from the left of field: the bold piano flourishes and trembling violin which emerge seamlessly in the middle of jolly Sabres of Paradise-esque tabla jamboree 'Contains Multitudes'; an unexpected dalliance with the slap bass on the fantasy alliance between John Cale and Simple Minds that is the audacious 'Worlds Collide Mountains Form'; the overblown recorder that heralds beatific mellotron, squealing synths and soaring guitars on ceremonial march in the style of Popol Vuh 'The Answer Is Yes'; and to close proceedings, the expressive pitched tabla motifs which punctuate melancholy outro 'You Can Never Go Back', as played by Camilo Tirado. Holden is an artist who has traditionally found it difficult to settle, no sooner finding himself momentarily aligned with one musical milieu before he is off onto the next thing. But 'Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities' also seems to represent a coming-to-terms with his own musical past, with subtle nods and callbacks to notable moments in Holden’s twenty year long sonic history: the undulating dancefloor melancholy of 'In The End You’ll Know' and the spiralling kinetic pixie arpeggios and hazy vocals of 'Trust Your Feet' and 'Continuous Revolution' awaken the distant memory of his erstwhile career as an international DJ and remixer to the stars, whilst the driving synth and drum, pagan thud, synthesized strings and woozy shimmering nostalgia of his landmark 'The Inheritors' era (Resident Advisor ‘Album of the Year’) remains omnipresent ('Continuous Revolution', 'Worlds Collide Mountains Form', 'The Answer Is Yes', 'Infinite Fadeout'), albeit with a somewhat lighter and brighter sheen. “It’s full of things I’ve come to terms with – I’ve always hated the call of a woodpigeon, synonymous with unending suburban weekend boredom for me, but they’re in there ['Four Ways Down The Valley']. Or, despite learning both piano and violin I never used either on my records, ashamed of my playing and turned off by their connotations but I’m happy they’re both in there too ['Contains Multitudes']. And for a while in the mid 2010s I couldn’t hear dance music anymore, a single kick drum had me lunging for the skip button, but I’ve found my way back to that – reclaiming the bits I liked (the hypnotism, the utopianism, the wide ranging cross cultural freedom) and leaving behind what I don’t need.” And as if to prove he means business, after a prolonged absence of almost ten years Holden has recently dipped his toe back into the remixing culture where he built his name, with XAM Duo (Sonic Cathedral), GoGo Penguin (Blue Note) and Lost Souls of Saturn (R&S) the latest blessed recipients of a Holden rework. The hefty album title ('Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities') meanwhile is suitably suggestive of the utopian sense of hope, freedom and transformative potential that resonated throughout early rave culture, but it was actually discovered scrawled in Holden’s own notebook after a long night of delirious hyper-focussed coding, as a message to his future self. Holden is a long-time advocate of Cycling74’s Max/MSP programming language, and most recently he has used it to build an ambitious custom modular sequencing and synthesis environment to facilitate his live performances, which he also (in keeping with his collectivist impulses) plans to make available to other budding music makers via his website. “A song isn’t the recording that starts at 0:00 and finishes at 4:32 or whatever,” he explains. “It’s the system, the rules, the limits, the relationships contained in it, and it could’ve turned out so many other ways. If a song had only two midi controls to play the whole thing you could map it to a walk around a 2D map, but a real song is a journey in some kind of high dimensional space, and also the knowledge of all the other journeys it could’ve been. Probably a metaphor for life, I dunno.” 'Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space of All Possibilities' will be released via Holden’s own proudly DIY Border Community label on 31st March 2023, on double vinyl, CD, digital download and streaming. For the album’s distinctive hand drawn artwork and accompanying twelve page comic booklet insert, Holden called upon Amsterdam-based illustrator and musician Jorge Velez to help flesh out the visual component of the immersive fantasy world that is conjured up in 'Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space of All Possibilities'. The result is a twelve panel storyboard (one per track) documenting the rave rituals of an alternative reality populated by magical creatures, which owes much to the pair’s shared love of the soothing retro-futurist colour palettes of the late and truly great French cartoonist Moebius (included in pdf form exclusively with Bandcamp downloads).

The nearly six-year period Kelela Mizanekristos took between 2017’s *Take Me Apart* and 2023’s *Raven* wasn’t just a break; it was a reckoning. Like a lot of Black Americans, she’d watched the protests following George Floyd’s murder with outrage and cautious curiosity as to whether the winds of social change might actually shift. She read, she watched, she researched; she digested the pressures of creative perfectionism and tireless productivity not as correlatives of an artistic mind but of capitalism and white supremacy, whose consecration of the risk-free bottom line suddenly felt like the arbitrary and invasive force it is. And suddenly, she realized she wasn’t alone. “Internally, I’ve always wished the world would change around me,” Kelela tells Apple Music. “I felt during the uprising and the \[protests of the early 2020s\] that there’s been an *external* shift. We all have more permission to say, ‘I don’t like that.’” Executive-produced by longtime collaborator Asmara (Asma Maroof of Nguzunguzu), 2023’s *Raven* is both an extension of her earlier work and an expansion of it. The hybrids of progressive dance and ’90s-style R&B that made *Take Me Apart* and *Cut 4 Me* compelling are still there (“Contact,” “Missed Call,” both co-produced by LSDXOXO and Bambii), as is her gift for making the ethereal feel embodied and deeply physical (“Enough for Love”). And for all her respect for the modalities of Black American pop music, you can hear the musical curiosity and experiential outliers—as someone who grew up singing jazz standards and played in a punk band—that led her to stretch the paradigms of it, too. But the album’s heart lies in songs like “Holier” and “Raven,” whose narratives of redemption and self-sufficiency jump the track from personal reflections to metaphors for the struggle with patriarchy and racism more broadly. “I’ve been pretty comfortable to talk about the nitty-gritty of relationships,” she says. “But this album contains a few songs that are overtly political, that feel more literally like *no, you will not*.” Oppression comes in many forms, but they all work the same way; *Raven* imagines a flight out.

Laurel Halo’s 2018 album, *Raw Silk Uncut Wood*, marked a shift in her work, pulverizing the avant-techno rhythms of records like *In Situ* and *Dust* into choppy electro-acoustic textures flecked with jazz piano. On *Atlas*, her first major album in five years, her music continues to dissolve. Across these 10 elusive, enigmatic tracks, there are few melodies, no rhythms, no fixed points at all—just a hazy swirl of strings and piano that sounds like it was recorded underwater and from a great distance. Yet for all the music’s softness, it bears little in common with ambient as it’s typically conceived. An air of disquiet permeates the pastel haze; her atmospheres frequently feel both consonant and dissonant at the same time. Even at its most abstract, however, *Atlas* radiates unmistakable grace. In “Naked to the Light,” melancholy piano carves a path halfway between Erik Satie and mid-century jazz balladry; in “Belleville”—a distant tribute, perhaps, to the Detroit techno that influenced her—a languid keyboard figure echoes *Blade Runner*’s rain-slicked noir before a wordless choir briefly raises the specter of Alice Coltrane’s spiritual jazz. But those reference points are fleeting: For the most part, *Atlas* is a closed world, a universe unto itself, in which blurry shapes tremble in a fluid expanse of deep, abiding melancholy.

No, you can But how Just think of anything How can it just be anything Why does it need to be more Because they’re afraid of it.  They’re not afraid of the words Then what are they afraid of The power behind the words How can words have power If you say something, only you, maybe I can hear it. Perhaps someone sitting over near that tree can hear it too. If we say it together, maybe we can reach past that tree and reach that rock. But if us and a million others say them same thing, all at the same time. Then every tree and every rock everywhere will hear us.  Trees and rocks don’t have ears.  No they don’t but they do.  Why don’t they just cover their ears Because then they need to do that every time we use our voice. And use them we did and use them again we shall. They got tired of covering their ears, so they decided to cover our mouths. Won’t they hear us now?  We’re safe here.  For how long will we be safe?  For now. Perhaps until later. Just try. Read the words like I’ve written, but do so like the birds in the trees.  You are my sunshine A little louder You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, you make me happy When skies are grey You’ll never know dear How much I love you Please don’t take my sunshine away Beautiful. Shall we go teach the others When will we have enough to free ourselves We’ll always have more than they do. We only need to not forget I’ll never forget Sing it again.

In early 2021, Tom and Ed Russell were working on a mix for the iconic London club fabric. They knew they wanted a particular tune included, but simply couldn’t find the track anywhere or remember its name. Faced with a deadline and an endless dig through disc logs, the pair changed their approach: They would themselves write the song they could hear. The track became June 2021 single “So U Kno”—an insidious, addictive banger that’s a cornerstone of the Russells’ debut album as Overmono. It’s an anecdote that reveals a great deal about the brothers’ practical mindset and prodigious abilities. Veterans of the UK dance scene (Tom, the elder Russell, released techno as Truss, while Ed put out drum ’n’ bass as Tessela), the Welsh-raised producers combine for something special here. *Good Lies* is an extraordinary electronic record: a genre-defying set glistening with purpose, poise, and dance-floor delirium. “The main anchor for the album isn’t genre-based, it’s an emotional place,” Ed tells Apple Music. “It’s a particular emotional sense that we try and achieve with a lot of our music—depending on what mood you’re in on that day, you could interpret that state in a few different ways.” Tom is able to pinpoint the origins to that “emotional ambiguity.” “I think our formative experiences of partying in the Welsh countryside had a massive impact on us,” he says. “When you have the sun going down and the sun coming up, and those emotions of somewhere between euphoria, slight sadness that the night’s coming an end but a real sense of optimism that you’re going into a new day. These sorts of weird crossover points are what we try and find in how we put our music together.” Read on for the brothers’ track-by-track guide. **“Feelings Plain”** Ed Russell: “It was originally going to close the album. We wanted to see if we could make a sort of plainsong piece of music—13th-century church music, where someone would be singing one note over and over and then someone else joins in, and everyone’s singing these cyclical things. But when it all comes together, they start cycling differently and you get this big wash of voices. But we wanted to try and do a sort of R&B take on plainsong—it was one of the songs that had a more conceptual start to it.” Tom Russell: “It was the furthest we’d gotten in terms of direct new avenues that we might explore. It’s a bold statement of intent to start.” **“Arla Fearn”** ER: “When did you first write this bassline, Tom?” TR: “About 1976. No, I think it was about 15 years ago.” ER: “I would tell Tom it’s the best thing he’d ever written. It’s got so much mood and character and just sounds so satisfying to me.” TR: “I know Ed meant it as a compliment but I kept on taking it as a bit of a diss really. But I finally gave in.” ER: “We spent ages processing the drums and then Tom sampled the Geovarn vocal and came up with the insane outro. The track is at 135 BPM, and by the end it’s at 170 BPM, but you never really notice it’s changed—it just flips the vocal into a different spot. We really wanted the album to be a place where tracks would often morph into something completely different. That it’s bubbling over with ideas.” **“Good Lies”** ER: “We went through a phase of trying not to sample every Smerz song because they just had so many good hooks. They’re incredible at writing these top lines that sound straight off early-2000s garage records, but not in a pastiche way. We had the vocal from \[2018 Smerz track\] “No harm” and spent a lot of time chopping it into the phrasing we wanted and creating a hook out of this little section that had jumped out at us. The demo for the instrumental then came together in a day, but there was an 18-month, almost two-year period from writing the demo to coming back and starting to really chip away at it.” **“Good Lies (Outro)”** TR: “When we were writing the ‘Good Lies’ instrumental, we thought we’d see if we could flip it and turn the vibe on its head into something moodier. It’s always going back to that ambiguity with us. There’s something of that in the *Good Lies* title. What constitutes a good lie?” **“Walk Thru Water” (feat. St. Panther)** TR: “Ed was at my studio in February \[2022\], and we were battening down the hatches for Storm Eunice.” ER: “It was this quite nice feeling of, ‘All right, there’s a storm coming, we’ve got loads of snacks and a few drinks, the place to ourselves, and we can’t go anywhere.’ Tom had written these really beautiful chords and I’d kept saying I wanted to do something with them. We got really stoned while the rain was coming down, listening to these chords, and we came across the St. Panther vocal.” TR: “I then started doing the beat on the Pulsar—which is a drum machine that’s quite difficult to tame but on certain things it just works beautifully.” **“Cold Blooded”** TR: “This started out as something quite different. It dawned on us that we’d written this massive IDM tune.” ER: “It was a bit too nice, wasn’t it?” TR: “It was this late-’90s breakdance thing—not really the vibe we should be going for.” ER: “I had this Kindora sample that I’d wanted to use for ages, and then Tom sent me this slowed-down version of ‘Cold Blooded’ with the new drums and I realized it’d be fucking killer. It then became a month of last-minute adjustments, which we sometimes get ourselves into a bit of a hole with. Tweaking everything until the last.” **“Skulled”** ER: “We had the Kelly Erez sample put away into our sample folder. And then we built a drum machine—a copy of a ’70s drum machine called the Syncussion, made by Pearl, the drum kit manufacturer. It \[the Syncussion\] was meant to sound like a normal drum kit, and it sounds so far away from real drums it’s insane. We spent a couple of weeks trying to make our version sound like we’d soldered it not quite right. It has this weird, sort of dry, alien, ’80s vibe to it. Like with all our stuff, it’s processed so heavily.” TR: “Ed has come up with this mad compression chain, which you can basically put any sort of drums into and you get this massive wall of noise.” ER: “I said earlier the best thing Tom has written was the bassline on ‘Arla Fearn,’ but I’ve changed my mind now: It’s the piano outro to ‘Skulled.’ We both loved the idea of the song ending like a classic ballad—a Céline Dion tune.” **“Sugarushhh”** TR: “We liked the idea of trying to shoehorn in a screaming 303 to the album somewhere.” ER: “Tom’s good at doing these quite irregular things that you don’t immediately notice. This, if you actually count it out, is in some weird time signature and it’s cycling every nine bars. It was also really important that we had this abrasive, aggressive 303 line being offset completely with a really beautiful vocal.” **“Calon”** ER: “Tom played me the first iteration of this in the back of a van on the way to a festival in Minehead. We’ve sampled Joe Trufant a few times before and we liked the idea of there being a few familiar voices on the album.” TR: “We then hired a studio in Ibiza and Ed had the idea of making the beat much slower. It became this big, slowed-down house tune—it dropped to something like 110 BPM.” ER: “We were in a US club sound-checking and played through some tunes from the album. Hearing it on the club system we were like, ‘Fuck me!’ It’s this sneaky banger.” **“Is U”** ER: “We’ve both been massive Tirzah fans since the start, and one day the ‘All I want is you’ line from ‘Gladly’ just jumped out of the speaker at us. We then spent ages trying to make the beat on this mono machine we have, which has all these really shit ’80s drum samples. We just mangled them until we had the beat, and then chopped up the vocal to get what we felt was a really strong and more confrontational delivery. Tom then put these lush chords in the breakdown and it opens the track up, like the sun coming out from behind a cloud.” TR: “It’s amazing when a track starts to take on a life of its own. Playing this out and seeing the reaction gives me goosebumps every time.” **“Vermonly”** ER: “A lot of our tracks will be written on just one piece of gear and we see what you can do with it. I had bought Tom a synth for his birthday, but when I gave it to him he said he wasn’t going to be in the studio for a few days, so I asked if I could take the synth I had just given him. I sent him a really rough 16-bar loop with the main melodic ideas, and he did the rest, really.” TR: “Tracks like this are really important to us. They might get lost on an EP. It’s not always about writing dance-floor bangers.” **“So U Kno”** ER: “We were doing this mix for fabric and we both knew we wanted a very particular tune in the mix but couldn’t find it. So we basically just thought, ‘Fuck it, it’ll be quicker to write something ourselves.’ I had a chopped-up vocal and a rough beat going, played it to Tom, who went straight over to a Jupiter-6 synth and immediately played the bassline before doing the same with the chords.” **“Calling Out”** TR: “Ed had suggested to try and sample something by slowthai and I managed to find this little \[section\] I really liked from quite an obscure track called ‘Dead Leaves.’ I loved the line ‘I’m like the sun, I rise up and then gone.’ Then we combined it with a CASISDEAD and d’Eon sample and it really started to make sense. I have a tendency to overcomplicate things, but Ed is often able to say, ‘We don’t need that,’ or ‘Change a snare from there to there.’ A tiny idea or decision can make such a huge difference.” ER: “I remember when Tom sent me the chords for the end and I felt like it reminded me of old Radiohead—the perfect way to close the album.”

In March 2023, Tresor Records will release "Crash Recoil", a new album by Surgeon. It marks Anthony Child's first techno LP in five years, following a period in which he felt uncertainty in his role as a techno producer and found it tough to locate inspiration. This new album encounters him drawing on spontaneous techniques to arrive at unchartered topographies. "Crash Recoil" originates from Surgeon's recent live sets, where he experimented with constraints in performing and embracing the twists, turns and paradoxes that arrive from this. Each fresh iteration on consistent MIDI sequences and hardware reconfigured tracks into different constellations, creating an inspiring vortex of unpredicted events where ideas could flourish. This new approach allowed him to capture the spontaneous energy of his live shows in a way he had never done before. "This is not a live album, since it has not been recorded in one go during a live performance. In the same way that bands tour songs before going into the studio to record an album, I was able to explore these songs and hone their effectiveness during my live performances before creating a studio version." The result is eight tracks that emphasise a new techno sound for Surgeon, drawing in references from across the musical spectrum. "I can hear Coil, King Tubby, Detroit Techno and The Cure all wrapped up with 30 years of DJing," Surgeon says of the album. Melancholic hum-like ambiences smudge around unadorned, near-droning basslines, crunching rhythm and percolating arpeggiations. The tracks carry unique and potent locomotion, with a low-slung grind through toughened terrains, breathing with a free spirit, untethered by a studio-based perspective. We hear manifestations of the same raw material across the album, like a textural motif, carving new variants and creating a cohesive work full of recollection.

Like all great stylists, the artist born Sean Bowie has a gift for presenting sounds we know in ways we don’t. So, while the surfaces of *Praise a Lord…*, Yves Tumor’s fifth LP, might remind you of late-’90s and early-2000s electro-rock, the album’s twisting song structures and restless detail (the background panting of “God Is a Circle,” the industrial hip-hop of “Purified by the Fire,” and the houselike tilt of “Echolalia”) offer almost perpetual novelty all while staying comfortably inside the constraints of three-minute pop. Were the music more challenging, you’d call it subversive, and in the context of Bowie as a gender-nonconforming Black artist playing with white, glam-rock tropes, it is. But the real subversion is that they deliver you their weird art and it feels like pleasure.