The Quietus Albums Of The Year 2020

Drew Daniel’s solo alias The Soft Pink Truth was originally fueled by a distinctly madcap energy. Without the elaborate conceptual frameworks of his duo Matmos, Baltimore-based Daniel was free to let his imagination run wild. His 2003 debut, *Do You Party?*, braided politics with pleasure in gonzo glitch techno; with *Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Soft Pink Truth?* and then *Why Do the Heathen Rage?*, he turned his idiosyncratic IDM to covers of punk rock and black metal. But *Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase?* steps away from those audacious hijinks. Composed with a rich array of electronic and acoustic tones, and suffused in vintage Roland Space Echo, the album strikes a balance between ambient and classical minimalism; created in response to politically motivated feelings of sadness and anger, it is also a meditation on community and interdependency. Guest vocalists Colin Self, Angel Deradoorian, and Jana Hunter make up the album’s choral core; percussionist Sarah Hennies lays down flickering bell-tone rhythms, while John Berndt and Horse Lords’ Andrew Bernstein weave sinewy saxophone into the mix, and Daniel’s partner, M.C. Schmidt, lends spare, contemplative piano melodies. The result is a nine-part suite as affecting as it is ambitious, where devotional vocal harmonies spill into softly pulsing house rhythms, and shimmering abstractions alternate with songs as gentle as lullabies.

The Soft Pink Truth is Drew Daniel, one half of acclaimed electronic duo Matmos, Shakespearean scholar and a celebrated producer and sound artist. Daniel started the project as an outlet to explore visceral and sublime sounds that fall outside of Matmos’ purview, drawing on his vast knowledge of rave, black metal and crust punk obscurities while subverting and critiquing established genre expectations. On the new album Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase? Daniel takes a bold and surprising new direction, exploring a hypnagogic and ecstatic space somewhere between deep dance music and classical minimalism as a means of psychic healing. Shall We Go On Sinning… began life as an emotional response to the creeping rise of fascism around the globe, creativity as a form of self-care, resulting in an album of music that expressed joy and gratitude. Daniel explains: “The election of Donald Trump made me feel very angry and sad, but I didn’t want to make “angry white guy” music in a purely reactive mode. I felt that I needed to make music through a different process, and to a different emotional outcome, to get past a private feeling of powerlessness by making musical connections with friends and people I admire, to make something that felt socially extended and affirming.” What began with Daniel quickly evolved into a promiscuous and communal undertaking. Vocals provided by the chorus of Colin Self, Angel Deradoorian and Jana Hunter form the foundation of most of the tracks, sometimes left naked and unchanged as with the ethereal opening line (“Shall”) or the sensuous R&B refrains on “We”, at other times shrouded in effects and morphed into new forms. Stately piano melodies written by Daniel’s partner M.C. Schmidt as well as Koye Berry alongside entrancing vibraphone and percussion patterns from Sarah Hennies push tracks toward ecstatic and melodic peaks, while rich saxophone textures played by Andrew Bernstein (Horse Lords) and John Berndt are used to add color and texture throughout. The album’s overall sound was in part shaped by Daniel hosting Mitchell Brown of GASP during Maryland Deathfest. Daniel borrowed Brown’s Roland Space Echo tape unit which he then used extensively throughout to give the album a flickering, ethereal quality. By moving beyond simple plunderphonic sampling and opening up a genuine dialogue with other musicians, Daniel left room in his compositions for moments of genuine surprise, capturing the freeform, communal energy of a DJ set or live improvisation session more than a recording project. Shall We Go On Sinning, a biblical quote from Paul the Apostle, was chosen by Daniel because it describes a question that he was applying both to his creative practice and how one should live in the world. The melodies, jubilance, and meditative nature of album provides a much-needed escape from the contemporary hell-scape. The process of creating Shall We Go On Sinning, in and of itself, is the Soft Pink Truth’s way of championing creativity and community over rage and nihilism.

Arriving in June 2020, into a world locked down by pandemic but rising up in anti-racist demonstrations, Special Interest’s second album reflects the turbulence of the age. Cloaked in the New Orleans band’s frenetic, galvanizing fusion of punk, glam, No Wave, and electronic, these songs examine injustice, violence, obsession, and change with honesty and wit. They’re stories of defiance and hope, expressions of autonomy and solidarity, a love song for a city and, as the four-piece’s Alli Logout tells Apple Music, “a love song from hell.” “There were a lot of feelings to sit with and unpack,” says the singer, guiding us through the album track by track. **Drama** “What can I say? We love drama. Often when we play this live, we loop a vocal sample from \[Club 69’s ‘Drama’\] over the beat that says, ‘My life is a drama, with a beginning, a middle, and no end...’” **Disco III** “From the first time we jammed it out in practice, we knew it had to be the third installment of our Disco Trilogy. The first ‘Disco’ \[from 2018’s *Spiraling* album\] was critiquing cis gay dude culture’s cliché complacency. ‘Disco II’ \[also from *Spiraling*\] is a beautiful anthem about that feeling of being free in your body despite the world around you. For ‘Disco III,’ the pulsating nature of the beat deeply threw me into that moment where you and the girls are going to carry by any means necessary. For the verses, I went out and decided to describe everything that was going on in our chase for rapture. A lot of the lines in the song come from that night. Fighting and sodomy on LSD were just destined to ensue. In these moments of rapture, the greatest pleasures came from our defiance. Our defiance against this world, this regime, and our bodies. So maybe ‘Disco III’ is a love song...but from hell.” **Don’t Kiss Me in Public** “Heartless cinema is what I use to describe films that have no passion and were made with the intention of turning a profit off of exploiting a subculture. These films are often emotionally manipulative with no real character development of their black or trans characters. I see this more in TV right now, by the way. Anyway, I used it in the song to describe the performative gestures people use to claim your body. In that way that hurts, in the way that rips you from your autonomy. So pretty much it’s a song about being used, but not in the hot way. But, alas, I\'m the one who is a titty baby in the end because I let myself be used again. Maybe there is some part of that darkness and sadness that gives me a thrill, but I think I\'ve learned my lesson though.” **All Tomorrow’s Carry** “In this song, I was writing about the nuances of being a daily witness to Black suffering but also Black joy while also experiencing both those things in my own body. I was sitting by the train tracks at a punk show, as tanks rode by on a train as the bands played. For a long time I have focused on partying rather than actually trying to build trust and connections in my community, and that is one of the most violent things a gentrifier can do. I\'m always thinking about violence and gentrification; we should all talk about it more, but it\'s just so easy to be complacent, especially when the world is a mess and your house is dilapidated and falling apart. You just want for everything to be easy and to escape, especially if no one has ever actually offered you concrete tools to heal yourself. I feel blessed I have people in my life supporting that growth and offering me those tools now, but I was writing about that feeling when you know you need to change but also don\'t know how—but actually you do, it just takes agonizing daily work. It\'s interesting now with the uprisings—I listen to this song and ‘Are we going out tonight?’ turns from a bratty, messy party girl inquiry to a commanding decree summoning us to go out and fight the police and YES WE ARE GOING OUT TONIGHT! That makes the song magic. That is exactly what New Orleans breeds, and I am proud to call it home.” **A Depravity Such As This...** “This was the only improvised song we made in the studio for this album. I asked Maria \[Elena, guitarist\] what it should be about and she was like, ‘Please, not another song about a girl! Maybe the city?’ And I was like, ‘What if I wrote a song about the city as if she was my lover?’ Everyone rolled their eyes, but it worked out and we all love it. I really just do love wet heat...” **Homogenized Milk** “I was in a whole mood when I wrote this. I think the final lyrics—‘You and I are not uniquely fucked’—sum it all up. I am frustrated with the state of things. Especially how I feel that most view violence on some hierarchical system, that some violence is more harmful than others. The psychological terror of white supremacy is just so maddening and everywhere. We need to talk about it.” **Passion** “Ruth Mascelli \[keyboards/electronics\] back at it again with her dreamy textured soundscapes. This marks the middle of the journey through *The Passion Of*. There were a lot of feelings to sit with and unpack, and these textured sounds give a sense of wonder and disillusionment (the number one survival mechanism) as we persist and move forward.” **Head** “We pop you out of your disillusionment straight into a whole-ass mess. A ticking time bomb of an explosion of obsession and suffering. This song was written years ago but didn’t get recorded in time to put on our last album, *Spiraling*, but still the song fits in the oeuvre of the Special Interest canon. I was battling with obsession, not being able to truly see myself or my actions. I wanted to be anywhere other than in my head with all my demons. It’s a fun song, but I feel the pain in my heart every time I sing it. There is nothing worse than the terror and illusions your mind can create when you are in pain.” **Tina** “This song is funny and fun. I love a lot of people struggling with substances and wanted to write a funny song acknowledging that struggle. I want everyone I know and love struggling with something to know that I am here for you always, sis! So yes, ‘Tina’ is another love song.” **Street Pulse Beat** “The street is alive, it has a pulse. It\'s the pulse that moves us forward towards liberation. When a love doesn\'t work, your street pulse weakens and you lose sight of who you are. It’s not a song of unrequited love—though at the time you couldn’t tell me otherwise—but about a love so pure it had to be let go. It\'s about wanting someone to save you when you know in the end you are the only one to save yourself. It is agonizing to love someone so. My heart rips open every time I hear or sing it. One thing I do know is that we will always be fighting in the streets side by side because our pulse now is strong within us both without each other. So in the end, this song is an ode to change. God is change.” **With Love** “Where are we now at the end of our journey? What have we faced, what have we learned? I had to end the album with this love letter directed at everyone who hears it. I wrote it over the course of five days as my friends kiki’d around me. It is a personal letter I wrote to you all, it is a spell. May we all keep transforming ourselves into the people we want to be. May we rise in the midst of all hope that has been co-opted by this regime. May we live our lives decadently, in splendor. May we learn to work with, understand, and struggle with everyone around us until we all taste the sweetness that is freedom. I look around the room and see nothing but black trans bodies laughing and smiling. My passion is our devotion to love and transformation. May all the mutants of the Mississippi River swim in clean water one day...”

But would you bat an eye waiting for war machines to pass you by? But aren’t we going out tonight? Aren’t we going out? Special Interest have returned with their sophomore LP. A dual release from Night School (EU) and Thrilling Living (US). The Passion Of... combines elements of glam rock and no wave pushed through a mangled filter of contemporary electronic forms. Special Interest present a precise and deranged vision of punk, an apocalyptic celebration, a step forward into a perverse and uncertain landscape. AVAILABLE ON VINYL: US: thrillingliving.bandcamp.com EU: night-school.bandcamp.com

Lyra Pramuk’s debut Fountain explores a post-human, non-binary understanding of life Lyra Pramuk fuses classical training, pop sensibilities, performance practices and contemporary club culture in what may best be described as futurist folk music. While the American operatically-trained vocalist and electronic musician is perhaps previously best known for her work with musical collaborators such as Holly Herndon and Colin Self, she is set to release her debut album, Fountain, via Iceland’s Bedroom Community label in March 2020. Created entirely from her own voice, although often shaped and structured by electronics, Fountain is an emotional, sensual, and devotional journey. The title is derived from her family name, Pramuk, which translates from Czech as ‘well spring’ or ‘fountain.’ Often wordless, these songs evoke a new wholeness sustained by the ritual force of drowning, immersion, cleansing, and bathing – also referred to in the album artwork by acclaimed visual artist Donna Huanca. Fountain plays with the perception of music, rhythms, speech, body, and the relation between technology and humanity, exploring a post-human, non-binary understanding of life and the fragile ecosystems it depends on. The work documents a healing that is still in process, and a full circle-moment that reunited Lyra with her sound engineer twin brother, Ben, for the final mix, which they completed in tandem. As a vocal activist and member of the queer community, Fountain’s creation also coincided with a personal rejuvenation for its author. Its completion culminated in the live premiere of the album material at Unsound Festival in Krakow in 2019, where she performed through a multi-channel array designed by Ben Frost, opening for Sunn O))) and Roly Porter. A closer collaboration with Frost on a soundtrack for a new film project will be announced later in 2020. Her performance at Berghain on 30 January for CTM Festival in her hometown of Berlin promises an even more confident and joyous realization of the album’s song cycle. Lyra moved to Berlin in 2013 as a DAAD postgraduate study scholarship recipient, following her degree at the Eastman School of Music in New York. Since then, she has also been awarded residencies at Elektronmusikstudion EMS Stockholm, Open Port Club Residency in Tokyo and Sapporo, and Future Music Lab of the Atlantic Music Festival in Maine. Her interests also encompass writing, poetry, and fashion, where she is sometimes called upon as a model. As a performance artist, she has collaborated extensively with Donna Huanca and at events such as Glasgow International and the Rochester Fringe Festival.

Once upon a time, Squarepusher’s Tom Jenkinson was hailed as the master craftsman of drill ’n’ bass. You don’t hear that term so much anymore, but on Squarepusher’s first album since 2015’s *Damogen Furies*, he revives the style’s dizzying spirit: *Be Up a Hello* is a tour de force of high-velocity drum programming, punishing basslines, and frankly mind-bending sensory overload. Recorded largely in single takes on a hodgepodge of vintage gear, it’s also flat-out fun, with a dynamism in keeping with its spontaneity. “Oberlove” cheerfully pairs relentless breaks and bass riffs with almost melodramatic melodic flourishes; the unhinged “Speedcrank” shudders like a tilting pinball machine. It can be surprisingly pretty: “Hitsonu” taps into a naive grace seldom heard since Squarepusher’s early releases on Aphex Twin’s Rephlex label. As a counterbalance to all that untrammeled adrenaline, the ambient “Detroit People Mover” and “80 Ondula” give the British producer the chance to explore his most cinematic inclinations. And the glowering “Vortrack” moves into darkly atonal territory—proof that even looping back to the sound of his early work, Squarepusher keeps pushing forward.

Nazar is a 26-year-old Angolan producer who grew up in Belgium until his late teens, when he returned after the civil war and is now based in Manchester. Nazar coined the term Rough Kuduro on his Soundcloud page, as an interpretation of the Angolan music and dance style, ‘weaponising’ it on his first EP 'Enclave' released in late 2018, translating the normally upbeat style to expose the uglier side of what he saw in Angola. On Guerrilla Nazar uses Rough Kuduro to sensitively examine and digitalise his family’s collective memory and country's past, threading together oral histories, political realities and most significantly re-imaginings of direct horrors. Every track on Guerrilla documents his personal story of the war and its aftermath in countless people's lives in a detailed and episodic manner. Nazar’s father's rank as a Rebel General led to prolonged separation of his family across continents, with continued effect.  “A couple of years ago, on one of many road trips I had with my father, we talked extensively about the conflict driving through Huambo and Luanda in Angola' where some of the events of the album took place. These, along with his father’s published wartime journal Memorias de Um Guerrilheiro (2006) planted the ideas for the themes of this album, and it began to take shape over trips back and forth, from Angola to his Manchester studio. Nazar tells his story both impressionistically, evoking atmospheres and dramatic themes and at times with stark directness.

Autechre albums are like language immersion programs: At first they don’t make sense, but listen close and familiar shapes emerge. Not that *SIGN* is accessible per se: We’re still talking about something closer to computer programming than what most people would consider music. But for a group that can be almost mythically forbidding (2016’s four-hour-long—and 12-hours-dense—*elseq*), *SIGN* is almost pop. Thirty years in and the UK production duo’s roots still show: Hip-hop on “M4 Lema,” house on “psin AM,” far-out synth soundtracks on “F7” and “Metaz form8.” But it all remains deconstructed and once removed. Most music depends on memories of something you’ve heard before. With Autechre, you can feel your brain stretch as you listen. Normally they sound like they’re pushing forward or settling in. With *SIGN*, it’s both.

** Digital and vinyl now available through our friends at Rocket Recordings! Buy/stream/support: landtrance.bandcamp.com/album/first-s-ance ** 'First Seance' is the debut album by Land Trance, a new collaboration between Liverpool-based musicians Andrew P.M Hunt and Benjamin D. Duvall, released via Forest Swords' Dense Truth label. Sharing rehearsal rooms, houses and band-mates for over a decade across Merseyside, the duo developed their respective practices in tandem with each other. Duvall delved into percussive ensemble composition as the founder of the acclaimed Ex-Easter Island Head, Hunt exploring the possibilities of songwriting, synthesis and texture as Dialect (who released album ‘Loose Blooms’ via Dense Truth in 2019) and leader of art rock band Outfit. Working together as Land Trance, they utilise spontaneous electro-acoustic improvisation and studio-as-instrument post production to explore the inner and outer reaches of each other's musical vocabularies. Recorded in spaces including a bedroom overlooking Concert Square, the thumping epicentre of Liverpool nightlife, and pieced together in the home studio they share in a converted embassy, tracks here oscillate between vocal-led ecclesiastical yearning (Transcript, Chilean Miners) and ecstatic assemblages of sound (Beach Mystery, A Raft), always suggesting a palpable sense of geography with an allusive sense of place. Using zither, drum machine, music box, dictaphone, ocarina, synthesiser and melodica amongst other sonic sources, through the course of the album threads of potential narrative and association circle like the rods of a mobile. 'First Seance' elevates deceptively simple materials and means with vivid imagination and bold compositional strategies, transcending the intimate scale of bedroom recording and DIY sound creation. It presents a wholly original set of musical environments, and a compelling document of intuition, friendship and artistic curiosity.

Martin Khanja (aka Lord Spike Heart) and Sam Karugu emerge from Nairobi's flourishing underground metal scene as former members of the bands Lust of a Dying Breed and Seeds of Datura. Together in 2019 they formed Duma (Darkness in Kikuyu) with Sam abandoning bass for production and guitars and Lord Spike Heart providing extreme vocals to the project. Recorded at Nyege Nyege Studios in Kampala over three months in mid 2019 their self-titled debut album fuses the frenetic euphoria, unrelenting physicality and rebellious attitude of hardcore punk and trash metal with bone-crunching breakcore and raw, nihilist industrial noise through a claustrophobic vortex of visceral screams. The savant mix of brutally adrenalized drums, caustic industrial trap, shredding grindcore inspired guitars and abrupt speed changes create a darkly atmospheric menace and is lethal on tracks like the opener "Angels and Abysses" , "Omni" or "Uganda with Sam". The gruelling slow techno dirges and monolithic vocals on "Pembe 666" or "Sin Nature" add a pinch of dramatic inevitability bringing a new sense of theatricality and terrifying fate awaiting into the record's progression. A sinister sonic aggression of feral intensity with disregard for styles, Duma promises to impact the burgeoning African metal scene moving it into totally new, boundary-challenging experimental territories. VIDEO FOR LIONS BLOOD HERE: youtu.be/zd35MhHqjhc VIDEO FOR OMNI HERE: youtu.be/ffxLsl8MWXE

When the largely anonymous UK collective Sault released *Untitled (Black Is)* in June 2020, it arrived on the heels of global unrest spawned, this time, by the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. That album spoke to the profound grief and rage that so many Black people (and their allies) felt, offering a lifeline and a balm at the perfect moment. *Untitled (Rise)* comes three months later, celebratory in its spirit and poetic in its motion—the fresh air inhaled after a summer of drowning. Soulful disco and buoyant funk inform the album from the outset. “Strong,” complete with regal marching band flourishes, beckons to listeners to get up and move: “We\'re moving forward tonight,” a vocalist commands in the early seconds of the opener. “We won\'t back down tonight.” What follows is a monument to resilience and Black people\'s ability to conjure joy under any circumstances, and the songs keep the freedom of the dance floor (or the square) in their center. “I Just Want to Dance” is an intoxicating collage of percussion, while the loose groove of “Fearless” and the kineticism of “Street Fighter” keep up the energy. Elsewhere, “Son Shine,” with its affecting gospel choral arrangements, connects spiritual history with the present, a reminder that so much of this magic has long been intertwined with the sacred: “Let the son shine through my pain, so we will rise.” Towards the back, the tempo slows into the meditative, strings replace the much of the percussion, and the spaces between lyrics become more prominent leading into “The Black & Gold,” a solemn instrumental that evokes peace or rest. The final track offers one last thematic tie: the pain but also the divinity, a guilty world and the preservation of innocence. At its core, *Untitled (Rise)* is about duality and holding multiple truths in a single heart; it asks and extends levity while ensuring, also, that we do not forget.

The songs comprising Keeley Forsyth’s debut are, she states simply, “like blocks of metal that drop from the sky.” With its minimal arrangements placing her recollections and dissections of sometimes harrowing experiences front and centre, Debris showcases her elemental voice and an outpouring of candid, haunting lyrics detailing the seismic ruptures which take place behind closed doors. “There was a lot going on in my life that was heavy and hard,” she adds. “Songs were made under that moment.” Born and raised in Oldham, Forsyth first made her name as an actor, and while the creation of music has been a constant feature in her life, she’s taken the long road to its release. A deeply intuitive and singular musician, she began writing several years ago, accompanying herself on harmonium and accordion. “I came up with lots of songs in a very short space of time,” Forsyth recalls. “Most songs were written in the time it took to sing them. But I held them close, and often thought I needed to do something with them. It never felt right to go out and look for it. I felt like I needed to wait and move when I felt inspired.” That inspiration struck one evening while listening to the radio, where she first encountered pianist and composer Matthew Bourne’s work. “I heard his music and suddenly I could hear them both together,” she says of her songs and his compositions. “I felt compelled to write to him. He got straight back and said he loved what I was doing.” What followed were quick and instinctive collaborations with Bourne and producer and musician Sam Hobbs, with the initial burst of momentum Forsyth felt when writing carried through into the studio, preserving the intricacies and accidents that make an album human.

In the realms of heavy amplification and monstrous riffage, one crucial ingredient can make the difference between an outfit doggedly hammering away at their chosen art and another whose graft is alchemically transformed into something of compelling fury and primal satisfaction. That ingredient is malevolence, pure and simple; the sense that something authentically vicious and debauched is going on at the root of the racket assaulting the sensibilities. Needless to say, Sex Swing - the London-based group whose mercurial and uncompromising onslaught now sees its second iteration to the wider world - have no shortage of this elixir. Since their foundation in 2014, this rogues gallery of luminaries of the UK underground have consistently proven to be capable of projecting vibrations that transcend and usurp any idea of the sum of their component parts. It is true that they’ve clocked up notable experience sparking tinnitus with everyone from Mugstar and Bonnacons Of Doom (bassist Jason Stoll) to Dethscalator (vocalist Dan Chandler and drummer Stuart Bell) and from Earth (guitarist Jodie Cox, who also introduced keyboard player Ollie Knowles to the melee) to a dizzying variety of endeavours from the paint-stripping skronk of Dead Neanderthals to the righteous ire of Idles (all via saxophonist Colin Webster) . Yet Sex Swing represents less a group of disparate musicians pooling their resources, and more a peculiar spark of collective chemistry, with all forces gravitating towards the pursuit of the same dissolute and mysterious goal. ‘Type II’ - recorded by Martin Ruffin at Hastings’ Savage Studios and mixed at Bear Bites Horse by Wayne Adams - is that goal reached in effortless style and amplified to intimidating aural vistas. This mighty monument of swagger and malice also sees fit to add a certain amount of glitter to the trademark grit this time around. Just as the artwork from long-term collaborator Alex Bunn boasts a luminous sheen absent from the unsettling abjection of the sleeve of their 2016 debut on The Quietus Phonographic Corporation, so the rolling grooves and mantric hypnosis here boast a new-found structure and a feline sleekness fresh and unusual for this pugilistic outfit, just as Chandler’s brooding presence disguises a twisted lyricism. Nonetheless, this remains a band fundamentally obsessed with the expression of decadence and wrongdoing through the mediums of repetition and overloaded frequencies. Opener ‘The Passover’ hits like hammer to skull right from the off, a relative moment of calm soon being broken by an ungodly squall of horror from Webster’s sax, before a fearsome and naggingly catchy debacle ensues akin to Suicide grappling with downers in dancefloor rapture. Elsewhere, rock abjection is filtered notably through an electronic prism, as krautrock grace and garage brawn engage in a strangely beguiling wrestling match to the death – ‘Valentine’s Day At The Gym’ is this vision at its apotheosis, rising like a Birthday Party-esque phoenix from the ashes of bad decisions and late nights - a tapestry of croon and warped groove that gathers momentum and power on a pathway to a particularly handsome kind of oblivion. ‘Type II’ is more than the mere machinations of a rock band - it’s a howl of malfunction rendered terrifyingly visceral. It’s the lightning flash and unearthly roar of the primeval battle between Godzilla and Mechagodzilla that provokes awe and disquiet in the realm of fantasy, It’s the haunted clangour of the faullty air conditioning unit that lurks in the anonymous office building yet lends it eerie ambience. It’s man vs machine where discord becomes harmony, and it’s a fearsomely invigorating spectacle to behold. ---

Mike Hadreas’ fifth LP under the Perfume Genius guise is “about connection,” he tells Apple Music. “And weird connections that I’ve had—ones that didn\'t make sense but were really satisfying or ones that I wanted to have but missed or ones that I don\'t feel like I\'m capable of. I wanted to sing about that, and in a way that felt contained or familiar or fun.” Having just reimagined Bobby Darin’s “Not for Me” in 2018, Hadreas wanted to bring the same warmth and simplicity of classic 1950s and \'60s balladry to his own work. “I was thinking about songs I’ve listened to my whole life, not ones that I\'ve become obsessed over for a little while or that are just kind of like soundtrack moments for a summer or something,” he says. “I was making a way to include myself, because sometimes those songs that I love, those stories, don\'t really include me at all. Back then, you couldn\'t really talk about anything deep. Everything was in between the lines.” At once heavy and light, earthbound and ethereal, *Set My Heart on Fire Immediately* features some of Hadreas’ most immediate music to date. “There\'s a confidence about a lot of those old dudes, those old singers, that I\'ve loved trying to inhabit in a way,” he says. “Well, I did inhabit it. I don\'t know why I keep saying ‘try.’ I was just going to do it, like, ‘Listen to me, I\'m singing like this.’ It\'s not trying.” Here, he walks us through the album track by track. **Whole Life** “When I was writing that song, I just had that line \[‘Half of my whole life is done’\]—and then I had a decision afterwards of where I could go. Like, I could either be really resigned or I could be open and hopeful. And I love the idea. That song to me is about fully forgiving everything or fully letting everything go. I’ve realized recently that I can be different, suddenly. That’s been a kind of wild thing to acknowledge, and not always good, but I can be and feel completely different than I\'ve ever felt and my life can change and move closer to goodness, or further away. It doesn\'t have to be always so informed by everything I\'ve already done.” **Describe** “Originally, it was very plain—sad and slow and minimal. And then it kind of morphed, kind of went to the other side when it got more ambient. When I took it into the studio, it turned into this way dark and light at the same time. I love that that song just starts so hard and goes so full-out and doesn\'t let up, but that the sentiment and the lyric and my singing is still soft. I was thinking about someone that was sort of near the end of their life and only had like 50% of their memories, or just could almost remember. And asking someone close to them to fill the rest in and just sort of remind them what happened to them and where they\'ve been and who they\'d been with. At the end, all of that is swimming together.” **Without You** “The song is about a good moment—or even just like a few seconds—where you feel really present and everything feels like it\'s in the right place. How that can sustain you for a long time. Especially if you\'re not used to that. Just that reminder that that can happen. Even if it\'s brief, that that’s available to you is enough to kind of carry you through sometimes. But it\'s still brief, it\'s still a few seconds, and when you tally everything up, it\'s not a lot. It\'s not an ultra uplifting thing, but you\'re not fully dragged down. And I wanted the song to kind of sound that same way or at least push it more towards the uplift, even if that\'s not fully the sentiment.” **Jason** “That song is very much a document of something that happened. It\'s not an idea, it’s a story. Sometimes you connect with someone in a way that neither of you were expecting or even want to connect on that level. And then it doesn\'t really make sense, but you’re able to give each other something that the other person needs. And so there was this story at a time in my life where I was very selfish. I was very wild and reckless, but I found someone that needed me to be tender and almost motherly to them. Even if it\'s just for a night. And it was really kind of bizarre and strange and surreal, too. And also very fueled by fantasy and drinking. It\'s just, it\'s a weird therapeutic event. And then in the morning all of that is just completely gone and everybody\'s back to how they were and their whole bundle of shit that they\'re dealing with all the time and it\'s like it never happened.” **Leave** “That song\'s about a permanent fantasy. There\'s a place I get to when I\'m writing that feels very dramatic, very magical. I feel like it can even almost feel dark-sided or supernatural, but it\'s fleeting, and sometimes I wish I could just stay there even though it\'s nonsense. I can\'t stay in my dark, weird piano room forever, but I can write a song about that happening to me, or a reminder. I love that this song then just goes into probably the poppiest, most upbeat song that I\'ve ever made directly after it. But those things are both equally me. I guess I\'m just trying to allow myself to go all the places that I instinctually want to go. Even if they feel like they don\'t complement each other or that they don\'t make sense. Because ultimately I feel like they do, and it\'s just something I told myself doesn\'t make sense or other people told me it doesn\'t make sense for a long time.” **On the Floor** “It started as just a very real song about a crush—which I\'ve never really written a song about—and it morphed into something a little darker. A crush can be capable of just taking you over and can turn into just full projection and just fully one-sided in your brain—you think it\'s about someone else, but it\'s really just something for your brain to wild out on. But if that\'s in tandem with being closeted or the person that you like that\'s somehow being wrong or not allowed, how that can also feel very like poisonous and confusing. Because it\'s very joyous and full of love, but also dark and wrong, and how those just constantly slam against each other. I also wanted to write a song that sounded like Cyndi Lauper or these pop songs, like, really angsty teenager pop songs that I grew up listening to that were really helpful to me. Just a vibe that\'s so clear from the start and sustained and that every time you hear it you instantly go back there for your whole life, you know?” **Your Body Changes Everything** “I wrote ‘Your Body Changes Everything’ about the idea of not bringing prescribed rules into connection—physical, emotional, long-term, short-term—having each of those be guided by instinct and feel, and allowed to shift and change whenever it needed to. I think of it as a circle: how you can be dominant and passive within a couple of seconds or at the exact same time, and you’re given room to do that and you’re giving room to someone else to do that. I like that dynamic, and that can translate into a lot of different things—into dance or sex or just intimacy in general. A lot of times, I feel like I’m supposed to pick one thing—one emotion, one way of being. But sometimes, I’m two contradicting things at once. Sometimes, it seems easier to pick one, even if it’s the worse one, just because it’s easier to understand. But it’s not for me.” **Moonbend** “That\'s a very physical song to me. It\'s very much about bodies, but in a sort of witchy way. This will sound really pretentious, but I wasn\'t trying to write a chorus or like make it like a sing-along song, I was just following a wave. So that whole song feels like a spell to me—like a body spell. I\'m not super sacred about the way things sound, but I can be really sacred about the vibe of it. And I feel like somehow we all clicked in to that energy, even though it felt really personal and almost impossible to explain, but without having to, everybody sort of fell into it. The whole thing was really satisfying in a way that nobody really had to talk about. It just happened.” **Just a Touch** “That song is like something I could give to somebody to take with them, to remember being with me when we couldn\'t be with each other. Part of it\'s personal and part of it I wasn\'t even imagining myself in that scenario. It kind of starts with me and then turns into something, like a fiction in a way. I wanted it to be heavy and almost narcotic, but still like honey on the body or something. I don\'t want that situation to be hot—the story itself and the idea that you can only be with somebody for a brief amount of time and then they have to leave. You don\'t want anybody that you want to be with to go. But sometimes it\'s hot when they\'re gone. It’s hard to be fully with somebody when they\'re there. I take people for granted when they\'re there, and I’m much less likely to when they\'re gone. I think everybody is like that, but I might take it to another level sometimes.” **Nothing at All** “There\'s just some energetic thing where you just feel like the circle is there: You are giving and receiving or taking, and without having to say anything. But that song, ultimately, is about just being so ready for someone that whatever they give you is okay. They could tell you something really fucked up and you\'re just so ready for them that it just rolls off you. It\'s like we can make this huge dramatic, passionate thing, but if it\'s really all bullshit, that\'s totally fine with me too. I guess because I just needed a big feeling. I don\'t care in the end if it\'s empty.” **One More Try** “When I wrote my last record, I felt very wild and the music felt wild and the way that I was writing felt very unhinged. But I didn\'t feel that way. And with this record I actually do feel it a little, but the music that I\'m writing is a lot more mature and considered. And there\'s something just really, really helpful about that. And that song is about a feeling that could feel really overwhelming, but it\'s written in a way that feels very patient and kind.” **Some Dream** “I think I feel very detached a lot of the time—very internal and thinking about whatever bullshit feels really important to me, and there\'s not a lot of room for other people sometimes. And then I can go into just really embarrassing shame. So it\'s about that idea, that feeling like there\'s no room for anybody. Sometimes I always think that I\'m going to get around to loving everybody the way that they deserve. I\'m going to get around to being present and grateful. I\'m going to get around to all of that eventually, but sometimes I get worried that when I actually pick my head up, all those things will be gone. Or people won\'t be willing to wait around for me. But at the same time that I feel like that\'s how I make all my music is by being like that. So it can be really confusing. Some of that is sad, some of that\'s embarrassing, some of that\'s dramatic, some of it\'s stupid. There’s an arc.” **Borrowed Light** “Probably my favorite song on the record. I think just because I can\'t hear it without having a really big emotional reaction to it, and that\'s not the case with a lot of my own songs. I hate being so heavy all the time. I’m very serious about writing music and I think of it as this spiritual thing, almost like I\'m channeling something. I’m very proud of it and very sacred about it. But the flip side of that is that I feel like I could\'ve just made that all up. Like it\'s all bullshit and maybe things are just happening and I wasn\'t anywhere before, or I mean I\'m not going to go anywhere after this. This song\'s about what if all this magic I think that I\'m doing is bullshit. Even if I feel like that, I want to be around people or have someone there or just be real about it. The song is a safe way—or a beautiful way—for me to talk about that flip side.”

AN IMPRESSION OF PERFUME GENIUS’ SET MY HEART ON FIRE IMMEDIATELY By Ocean Vuong Can disruption be beautiful? Can it, through new ways of embodying joy and power, become a way of thinking and living in a world burning at the edges? Hearing Perfume Genius, one realizes that the answer is not only yes—but that it arrived years ago, when Mike Hadreas, at age 26, decided to take his life and art in to his own hands, his own mouth. In doing so, he recast what we understand as music into a weather of feeling and thinking, one where the body (queer, healing, troubled, wounded, possible and gorgeous) sings itself into its future. When listening to Perfume Genius, a powerful joy courses through me because I know the context of its arrival—the costs are right there in the lyrics, in the velvet and smoky bass and synth that verge on synesthesia, the scores at times a violet and tender heat in the ear. That the songs are made resonant through the body’s triumph is a truth this album makes palpable. As a queer artist, this truth nourishes me, inspires me anew. This is music to both fight and make love to. To be shattered and whole with. If sound is, after all, a negotiation/disruption of time, then in the soft storm of Set My Heart On Fire Immediately, the future is here. Because it was always here. Welcome home.

Horse Lords make music for the liberation of mind and body. The Baltimore quartet's new album The Common Task points to a utopian, modernist ideal, recalling as diverse a cohort as The Ex and Glenn Branca to raucous Saharan guitar music, Albert Ayler, and James Tenney. As evidenced by the album’s title, as well as songs like “Fanfare for Effective Freedom” and “People’s Park,” the band’s penchant for radical politics is especially accentuated on this release. Horse Lords are the Pied Piper of experimental music and radical thought. Their music is unabashedly fun, and experiencing it in a live context is an experience of collective ecstasy, each body moving to its own notion of what the beat may be. By showing just how joyous it can be to imagine new futures and possibilities, by making us dance and howl with each tectonic shift, they show how dazzling the path towards utopia could be.

‘Workaround’ is the lucidly playful and ambitious solo debut album by rhythm-obsessive musician and DJ, Beatrice Dillon for PAN. It combines her love of UK club music’s syncopated suss and Afro-Caribbean influences with a gamely experimental approach to modern composition and stylistic fusion, using inventive sampling and luminous mixing techniques adapted from modern pop to express fresh ideas about groove-driven music and perpetuate its form with timeless, future-proofed clarity. Recorded over 2017-19 between studios in London, Berlin and New York, ‘Workaround’ renders a hypnotic series of polymetric permutations at a fixed 150bpm tempo. Mixing meticulous FM synthesis and harmonics with crisply edited acoustic samples from a wide range of guests including UK Bhangra pioneer Kuljit Bhamra (tabla); Pharoah Sanders Band’s Jonny Lam (pedal steel guitar); techno innovators Laurel Halo (synth/vocal) and Batu (samples); Senegalese Griot Kadialy Kouyaté (Kora), Hemlock’s Untold and new music specialist Lucy Railton (cello); amongst others, Dillon deftly absorbs their distinct instrumental colours and melody into 14 bright and spacious computerised frameworks that suggest immersive, nuanced options for dancers, DJs and domestic play. ‘Workaround’ evolves Dillon’s notions in a coolly unfolding manner that speaks directly to the album’s literary and visual inspirations, ranging from James P. Carse’s book ‘Finite And Infinite Games’ to the abstract drawings of Tomma Abts or Jorinde Voigt as well as painter Bridget Riley’s essays on grids and colour. Operating inside this rooted but mutable theoretical wireframe, Dillon’s ideas come to life as interrelated, efficient patterns in a self-sufficient system. With a naturally fractal-not-fractional logic, Dillon’s rhythms unfold between unresolved 5/4 tresillo patterns, complex tabla strokes and spark-jumping tics in a fluid, tactile dance of dynamic contrasts between strong/light, sudden/restrained, and bound/free made in reference to the notational instructions of choreographer Rudolf Laban. Working in and around the beat and philosophy, the album’s freehand physics contract and expand between the lissom rolls of Bhamra’s tabla in the first, to a harmonious balance of hard drum angles and swooping FM synth cadence featuring additional synth and vocal from Laurel Halo in ‘Workaround Two’, while the extruded strings of Lucy Railton create a sublime tension at the album’s palatecleansing denouement, triggering a scintillating run of technoid pieces that riff on the kind of swung physics found in Artwork’s seminal ‘Basic G’, or Rian Treanor’s disruptive flux with a singularly tight yet loose motion and infectious joy. Crucially, the album sees Dillon focus on dub music’s pliable emptiness, rather than the moody dematerialisation of reverb and echo. The substance of her music is rematerialised in supple, concise emotional curves and soberly freed to enact its ideas in balletic plies, rugged parries and sweeping, capoeira-like floor action. Applying deeply canny insight drawn from her years of practice as sound designer, musician and hugely knowledgable/intuitive DJ, ‘Workaround’ can be heard as Dillon’s ingenious solution or key to unlocking to perceptions of stiffness, darkness or grid-locked rigidity in electronic music. And as such it speaks to an ideal of rhythm-based and experimental music ranging from the hypnotic senegalese mbalax of Mark Ernestus’ Ndagga Rhythm Force, through SND and, more currently, the hard drum torque of DJ Plead; to adroitly exert the sensation of weightlessness and freedom in the dance and personal headspace.

The natural world has long been forced to reckon with an expanding human influence across its surface. Is mechanisation incompatible with the splendor of nature? Lean in close to the music of upsammy and find out how beauty and the blur can exist in harmony. Zoom is Thessa Torsing’s first full-length album as upsammy. Since 2017, she has developed a signature style in front of listeners eyes and ears: hers is a mesh of airy tones, tender melodies and highly technical drum patterns which wrap around the body of the song like colourful thread around a metallic spindle. Zoom, a refinement of her sound and an expansion of its ambition, is evidently electronic yet seems to float some way off beyond the glow of a screen. “I don’t like it when something sounds stiff,” upsammy says. “If electronica is super sharp, quantized, hi-fi-ized, this is kind of logical; it is a computer after all. But then, for me, all the emotion is removed. I like little imperfections.” The title is an invocation for people to look a little closer at their surroundings and replenish their stock of wonder: “People can be consumed by really big or ‘fantastical’ things in life, but don’t see the small things that have great emotional, artistic or even spiritual value...I’ve always had a lot of curiosity for my surroundings, trying to grasp, understand and be amazed by what is around me.” Zooming in is central to the album’s dominant theme, but also essential to its internal programming. Across the 11 tracks on Zoom are moments that sharpen your focus then throw you off guard. On “It Drips,” a chunky beat conjures the image of a stomping machine. Not so – within seconds a gentle frosting of notes begins to emerge atop the song before a lead melody yawns into view. This technique recurs on “In A Shade”, where buzzy static around the margins of the track and a robust low-end are merely the sediment for the song to grow into another form altogether. Using only an Analog Rytm drum machine, Ableton, some modular kit and field recordings to achieve such a wide palette of sounds, the album reflects the excitement of its maker throughout the production process. “I always try to make my music vibrant and dynamic with elements moving in and out, like a living organism,” upsammy explains. Pulling the listener’s attention in multiple directions at once could induce a sensation of dislocation, were it not for deliberate care to give space for every intersecting element to breathe: “I pay a lot of attention to the higher frequencies in my music, and especially for this album. I think that’s where most of the clearness and definition is. This is what makes it feel light,” she thinks. Light comes in two varieties on Zoom. On one hand, there is the lightness of touch which gives the songs in the second half of the LP an airborne quality in spite of their complexity and quickening pace. “Extra Warm” clips ahead above the 170bpm mark, bubbling and churning as it goes. On “Overflowering,” opposing leads chase one another about, like a “Flight Of The Bumblebee” rendered for the IDM generation, leaving miniature contrails in their wake. But then, there is literal light too, as on the album cover, which upsammy took herself. “The picture is a piece of ice coming from a glacier in Switzerland,” she says. “There was a beautiful moment as the sunlight bounced through it, and I could see all these nice lights in the ice. The fact that this piece of ice is now gone but still captured is a symbol of transience, so to speak.” The packaging for Zoom contains yet more reminders of the everyday – from associated imagery and text and videos, all compiled and executed by upsammy, to a limited clear vinyl pressing as part of Dekmantel’s physical release. Zoom is upsammy’s most comprehensive release to date, something she remarks is “a closer and truer look into my work right now” – though this won’t preclude chasing other ideas in the near future. upsammy notes that the album is not about climate extinction, in spite of track titles that divine inspiration from nature (“Subsoil, Twisted Like The Flame”, Growing Out Of The Plastic Box”) and its earthbound feel overall. “I guess it’s more about memories of these magical moments and scenes in reality. And these do often happen more in a natural setting,” she concludes. The music on Zoom reminds us to snatch moments of reprieve and take heart in the occurrences of bliss around us. Zoom in and you might find that statement bigger and bolder than at first glance.

“My music is not as collaborative as it’s been in the past,” Jeff Parker tells Apple Music. “I’m not inviting other people to write with me. I’m more interested in how people\'s instrumental voices can fit into the ideas I’m working on.” As his career has evolved, the jazz guitarist and member of post-rock band Tortoise has become more comfortable writing compositions as a solitary exercise. While 2016\'s *The New Breed* featured a host of contributors, *Suite for Max Brown* finds the Los Angeles-based player eager to move away from the delirious funk-jazz of earlier works and towards something more unified and focused on repetition and droning harmonies. “I used to ask my collaborators to bring as much of the songwriting to the compositions as I do. Now, I’m just trying to prove to myself that I can do it on my own.” Parker handles most of the instruments on *Max Brown*, but familiar faces pop up throughout. The opening track, “Build a Nest,” features vocals from Parker’s daughter, Ruby, and “Gnarciss” includes performances from Makaya McCraven on the drums, Rob Mazurek on trumpet, and Josh Johnson on alto saxophone. Other frequenters of Parker’s orbit, like drummer Jamire Williams, appear throughout. But *Max Brown* is Parker’s record first and foremost, and the LP finds him less willing to give in to jazz’s typical demands of dynamic improvisation and community-oriented song-building. Here, Parker asserts himself as an ecstatic solo voice, where on earlier albums the soft-spoken musician may have been more willing to give way to his fellow bandmates. *Suite for Max Brown* is an ambitious sonic experiment that succeeds in its moves both big and small. “I like when music is able to enhance the environment of everyday life,” Parker says. “I would like people to be able to find themselves within the music.” Above all, *Suite for Max Brown* pays homage to the most important figures in Parker’s life. *The New Breed*, which was finished shortly after Parker’s father passed away, took its title from a store his father owned; *Max Brown* is derived from his mother’s nickname, and Parker felt an urgent desire to honor her while she was still able to hear it. “My mother has always been really supportive and super proud of the work I’ve done,” he says. “I wanted to dedicate an album to her while she’s still alive to see the results. She loves it, which means so much.” It’s an ode to his mother’s ambition, and a record that stands in awe of her achievements, even though they’re quite different from Jeff’s. “She had a stable job and collected a 401(k). My career as a musician is 180 degrees the opposite of that, but I’m still inspired by her work ethic.”

“I’m always looking for ways to be surprised,” says composer and multi-instrumentalist Jeff Parker as he explains the process, and the thinking, behind his new album, Suite for Max Brown, released via a new partnership between the Chicago–based label International Anthem and Nonesuch Records. “If I sit down at the piano or with my guitar, with staff paper and a pencil, I’m eventually going to fall into writing patterns, into things I already know. So, when I make music, that’s what I’m trying to get away from—the things that I know.” Parker himself is known to many fans as the longtime guitarist for the Chicago–based quintet Tortoise, one of the most critically revered, sonically adventurous groups to emerge from the American indie scene of the early nineties. The band’s often hypnotic, largely instrumental sound eludes easy definition, drawing freely from rock, jazz, electronic, and avant-garde music, and it has garnered a large following over the course of nearly thirty years. Aside from recording and touring with Tortoise, Parker has worked as a side man with many jazz greats, including Nonesuch labelmate Joshua Redman on his 2005 Momentum album; as a studio collaborator with other composer-musicians, including Makaya McCraven, Brian Blade, Meshell N’Degeocello, his longtime friend (and Chicago Underground ensemble co-founder) Rob Mazurek; and as a solo artist. Suite for Max Brown is informally a companion piece to The New Breed, Parker’s 2016 album on International Anthem, which London’s Observer honored as the best jazz album of the year, declaring that “no other musician in the modern era has moved so seamlessly between rock and jazz like Jeff Parker. As guitarist for Chicago post-rock icons Tortoise, he’s taken the group in new and challenging directions that have kept them at the forefront of pop creativity for the last twenty years. As of late, however, Parker has established himself as one of the most formidable solo talents in modern jazz.” Though Parker collaborates with a coterie of musicians under the group name The New Breed, theirs is by no means a conventional “band” relationship. Parker is very much a solo artist on Suite for Max Brown. He constructs a digital bed of beats and samples; lays down tracks of his own on guitar, keyboards, bass, percussion, and occasionally voice; then invites his musician friends to play and improvise over his melodies. But unlike a traditional jazz session, Parker doesn’t assemble a full combo in the studio for a day or two of live takes. His accompanists are often working alone with Parker, reacting to what Parker has provided them, and then Parker uses those individual parts to layer and assemble into his final tracks. The process may be relatively solitary and cerebral, but the results feel like in-the-moment jams—warm-hearted, human, alive. Suite for Max Brown brims with personality, boasting the rhythmic flow of hip hop and the soulful swing of jazz. “In my own music I’ve always sought to deal with the intersection of improvisation and the digital era of making music, trying to merge these disparate elements into something cohesive,” Parker explains. “I became obsessed maybe ten or fifteen years ago with making music from samples. At first it was more an exercise in learning how to sample and edit audio. I was a big hip-hop fan all my life, but I never delved into the technical aspects of making that music. To keep myself busy, I started to sample music from my own library of recordings, to chop them up, make loops and beats. I would do it in my spare time. I could do it when I was on tour—in the van or on an airplane, at a soundcheck, whenever I had spare time I was working on this stuff. After a while, as you can imagine, I had hours and hours of samples I had made and I hadn’t really done anything with them “So I made The New Breed based off these old sample-based compositions and mixed them with improvising,” he continues. “There was a lot of editing, a lot of post-production work that went into that. That’s in a nutshell how I make a lot of my music; it’s a combination of sampling, editing, retriggering audio, and recording it, moving it around and trying to make it into something cohesive—and make it music that someone would enjoy listening to. With Max Brown, it’s evolved. I played a lot of the music myself. It’s me playing as many of the instruments as I could. I engineered most it myself at home or during a residency I did at the Headlands Center for the Arts [in Sausalito, California] about a year ago.” His New Breed band-mates and fellow travelers on Max Brown include pianist-saxophonist Josh Johnson; bassist Paul Bryan, who co-produced and mixed the album with Parker; piccolo trumpet player Rob Mazurek, his frequent duo partner; trumpeter Nate Walcott, a veteran of Conor Oberst’s Bright Eyes; drummers Jamire Williams, Makaya McCraven, and Jay Bellerose, Parker’s Berklee School of Music classmate; cellist Katinka Klejin of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; and even his seventeen-year-old daughter Ruby Parker, a student at the Chicago High School of the Arts, who contributes vocals to opening track, “Build A Nest.” Ruby’s presence at the start is fitting, since Suite for Max Brown is a kind of family affair: “That’s my mother’s maiden name. Maxine Brown. Everybody calls her Max. I decided to call it Suite for Max Brown. The New Breed became a kind of tribute to my father because he passed away while I was making the album. The New Breed was a clothing store he owned when I was a kid, a store in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where I was born. I thought it would be nice this time to dedicate something to my mom while she’s still here to see it. I wish that my father could have been around to hear the tribute that I made for him. The picture on the cover of Max Brown is of my mom when she was nineteen.” There is a multi-generational vibe to the music too, as Parker balances his contemporary digital explorations with excursions into older jazz. Along with original compositions, Parker includes “Gnarciss,” an interpretation of Joe Henderson’s “Black Narcissus” and John Coltrane’s “After the Rain” (from his 1963 Impressions album). Parker recalls, “I was drawn to jazz music as a kid. That was the first music that really resonated with me once I got heavily into music. When I was nine or ten years old, I immediately gravitated to jazz because there were so many unexpected things. Jazz led me into improvising, which led me into experimenting in a general way, into an experimental process of making music.” Coltrane is a touchstone in Parker’s musical evolution. In fact, Parker recalls, he inadvertently found himself on a new musical path one night about fifteen years ago when he was deejaying at a Chicago bar and playing ‘Trane: “I used to deejay a lot when I lived in Chicago. This was before Serrato and people deejaying with computers. I had two records on two turntables and a mixer. I was spinning records one night and for about ten minutes I was able to perfectly synch up a Nobukazu Takemura record with the first movement of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme and it had this free jazz, abstract jazz thing going on with a sequenced beat underneath. It sounded so good. That’s what I’m trying to do with Max Brown. It’s got a sequenced beat and there are musicians improvising on top or beneath the sequenced drum pattern. That’s what I was going for. Man vs machine. “It’s a lot of experimenting, a lot of trial and error,” he admits. “I like to pursue situations that take me outside myself, where the things I come up with are things I didn’t really know I could do. I always look at this process as patchwork quilting. You take this stuff and stitch it together until a tapestry forms.” —Michael Hill

After the very acoustic "¿Dónde estás María?". I decided to try a new experiment taking as a reference the legendary group "Cumbia siglo XX" which is a group who explores a futuristic vision of coastal cumbia in the 80s, together with other groups such as "Grupo folclórico", "2000 voltios" and others, mainly under the label Machuca and Felito records. This new 80s cumbia was a combination of funky basses and a further evolution of the rhythms, blending this style with disco and even rock music and superimposing the traditional versus the urban context and the modernity. Meridian Brothers took this as a departing point and inspiration, making the same experiment but in XXI century, using the modern media of this time; all kinds of drum machines, guitars and synths, algorithmic software etc, and also taking into account the global exposition of modern cumbia in the 2010s. So all kinds of influences and genres are blended around this cumbia axis. Urban beats, synthy grooves, glitches and all kinds of swear words (and its censoship &$*/#), and all kinds of slang languaje are included in the songs of the album. All these elements are filtered and passed through the traditional train of thought of Meridian Brothers, which is the figuration of an abstract picture of sound put it within a concrete context or cultural tendency.

If bioluminescence could assume a musical form, it might sound like Ana Roxanne’s *Because of a Flower*. On the Los Angeles-based electronic musician’s second album, dream pop and ambient swirl together, glowing as they drift; in “Venus,” the gentle sound of lapping waves even accompanies her spoken-word ruminations on the nature of liquids, keyboards twinkling like a galaxy reflected in the tide. She has a minimalist’s sense of economy: Most of her music is made of little more than synthesizer and her own multi-tracked and harmonized voice. But her influences are vast, taking in medieval European choral music (“A Study in Vastness”), slowcore (“Suite Pour L’invisible”), new age (“- - -”), trip-hop (“Camille”), and even Hindustani singing (“Venus”). And though the mood is often melancholy, it is never despondent; grief and hope exist in equal measure. As she sings in the spare, searching “Suite Pour L’invisible,” “Endless sorrow, endless joy, endless sorrow/I’ll hold your joy/I’ll hold your pain.”

The sublime songs comprising New York-based musician Ana Roxanne's second record, Because Of A Flower, germinated gradually across five years, inspired by interwoven notions of gender identity, beauty, and cruelty. She describes her process as beginning with “a drone element and a mood,” then intuiting melody, syllables, and lyrics incrementally, like sacred shapes materializing from mist. The experience of identifying as intersex informs the album on levels both sonic and thematic, from spoken word texts borrowed from tonal harmony textbooks to cinematic dialogue samples and castrati aria allusions. It's an appropriately interstitial vision of ambient songcraft, a chemistry of wisps and whispers, sanctuary and sorrow, conjured through a fragile balance of voice, bass, space, and texture. Despite a background studying at the prestigious Mills College in Oakland, Roxanne's music rarely feels conceptual, instead radiating an immediate and emotive aura, rooted in the present tense of her personal journey. She speaks of the flower in the title as a body, singular and sunlit, as many petals as thorns, an enigma beholden only to itself. But whether taken as surface or subtext, Because is a transfixing document of a rare artist in the spring of their ascension.

In the FBI file on the American rock ‘n’ roll band Algiers—which given their prior penchant for repping the Black Panthers, Malcolm X, Angela Davis, and Afeni Shakur, among others, surely exists—under the subheading for their third album, There is No Year, the intelligence should soon read: all prior analytics appear outdated… this undoes everything we thought we knew about their intentions…what hides inside them… as if they are mutating live on camera, between frames… Indeed, even those aware of the ideals of this outspoken four-piece will find their latest direction traversing unprecedented ground. Coming off two years of nonstop world-touring for their critically acclaimed second album, The Underside of Power—including Central and Eastern Europe, the Baltic States and the Balkans, where they have established a rabid following; an extended stint opening for Depeche Mode in huge stadiums such as the 75,000-capacity Olympiastadion in Berlin; as well as Glastonbury 2019—There is No Year solidifies and expands upon the doom-laden soul of their foundation, toward an even more epic, genre-reformatting sound, one somehow suspended in the amber of “a different era,” as described by guitarist Lee Tesche. From the instant synth-pulse of the opening seconds of There is No Year, it’s clear that Algiers have set out to stake new ground, internally as much as sonically. At the forefront of this evolution is the centrality of power housed in Algiers’ multi-instrumentalist lead vocalist, Franklin James Fisher, whose voice and words provide the backbone of the album, his lyrics sourced entirely from an epic poem, “Misophonia,” composed during his search for meaning amidst a protracted personal period of anxiety and lack. “What I wanted to do is create a negative space wherein I can exist and engage but at the same time not be so exposed,” Fisher explains. He speaks of the record’s perspective as not only a political apparatus, but an intimate, responsive evocation of his understanding that “nothing is ever what you expect”, that what might seem for now to be well known or assured is not always so, that there is no safety net. The effect, as felt on the record, is undeniable: Fisher sounds like he is singing for his life—for all our lives, really—baring his soul while the walls disintegrate around us. The pool that he draws on is at once penetrating and exhilarating, wielding its anguish like a mirror at Medusa, full of hell. Whether he is lilting over post-Lynchian synth-whorl like a spot-lit bandleader, as on “Unoccupied,” or reincarnating the spirit of thrumming 80s R&B into a proto-no wave dancefloor classic straight from 2046, as on “Chaka,” there is a tangible emotional electricity to Fisher’s delivery, a personal valence that makes you want, more than anything, to believe, even while not quite knowing where we’re headed. No less next-level in Algiers’ conception is the ambition of the aural architecture they manage to summon. Under the direction of producers Randall Dunn [Sunn O))), Earth] and Ben Greenberg [Zs, Uniform (as featured on Twin Peaks season 3)], the same exciting duo who first teamed up on Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Mandy soundtrack in 2018, the clearly studied composition of this new horizon finds an outlet for turmoil via a fascinating synthesis of styles— There Is No Year encompasses future-minded post-punk R&B from the trapped heart of ATL, where they began; to industrial soundscapes à la 4AD-era Scott Walker or Iggy & Bowie’s Berlin period; to something like the synthetic son of Marvin Gaye and Fever Ray. The whip-tight rhythm section of Ryan Mahan and Matt Tong (ex-Bloc Party) moves back and forth from infectious menace to sci-fi soundtrack to big band fever dream, seamlessly syncing fresh continuity. Mahan’s beat programming and synth constructions fill out the fibrous threshold, while Tesche’s sound-sleeves and aural-layering shapeshift into a richly polished means of exploration, revealing more and more the deeper you delve. “This is the sowing / Of the whirlwind,” Fisher sings on “Repeating Night.” “Don’t forget it’s us against them.” There’s something more behind the curtain of our daily-headlined pain, the album’s title seems to suggest—something even larger at stake than rage, or even revolution; which is exactly what Algiers’ music appears to have resolved itself to channel, and to wield. Their essence on There is No Year is a statement of their defiance, their desire to feel and be human even beyond the necessary fight back, sprawling head-on into the burning wind of doubt and fear and all it’s claimed, arriving on the far side of calamity more alive than ever. - Blake Butler

“A disco ball allows you to see light in the darkness,” Kylie Minogue tells Apple Music, neatly encapsulating why her 15th album *DISCO* is a welcome bright spot in a distinctly dingy year. “I’ve turned off the dirt road and onto the supersonic highway—straight to the galactic disco.” Indeed, *DISCO* is a marked departure from 2018\'s country-tinged *Golden*, transporting its listeners straight to the kind of packed dance floor they could only dream of amid 2020’s global lockdown. And yet *DISCO* was recorded during isolation in a makeshift home studio made up of clothes rails, curtains, and blankets—all of which earned Minogue her first engineering credit (“I went to recording kindergarten and had to learn to use GarageBand,” she says). Minogue, of course, isn’t the only artist turning to disco as a radical form of escapism in 2020, a year that’s also seen Lady Gaga, Dua Lipa, Jessie Ware, and Róisín Murphy experiment with the genre. “At its inception, disco was a way of allowing people to dance through their struggle and pain,” says Minogue of why rolling back the years has proven such a tonic. “Some of the best disco songs are mission statements of strength. Even though I started recording before the dramas of 2020, there is a correlation.” Read on as a music legend takes us inside the thrilling *DISCO*, one track at a time. **Magic** “‘Magic’ is a kind of hors d’oeuvre for the album. The main course will be coming in a while—and leave space because there is going to be tiramisu. It feels classic, grown-up, and polished, but there\'s still an element of surprise with the falsetto notes.” **Miss a Thing** “I first heard the demo for this in February and loved it. It fitted the brief: There was enough disco in there, but it also felt like a fresh interpretation. I was due to fly to LA in March and work on it with one of the key writers, \[Finnish songwriter\] Teemu Brunila. Then of course lockdown happened so we ended up working remotely. I had a meltdown one day with him. I was trying to do this vocal and I was so exhausted, and stressed, I couldn’t. I felt like I was failing him and me. I didn’t go to the full cry, but I came close. All this, and yet we’ve never met. I can\'t wait to give him a hug when we finally can.” **Real Groove** “Because I was recording my own vocals at home, I found myself doing a lot more takes than I usually would, to the point where I literally had to back away from my laptop. ‘Real Groove’ was one of the songs where I did the most takes. I wanted to take the melody down half a tone. We experimented with doing it lower, but ultimately the higher notes were the sweet spot. You don’t know what’s coming, and then the song ends up really pumping. It was worth the effort.” **Monday Blues** “I almost gave up on this track. It initially had a different chorus, so it took some juggling. We had to dig deep and nail it with a proper chorus. I became quite insular in lockdown and didn’t really go out much, but I listened to a version of this during a rare walk and it started to make sense. It was so uplifting and cool. It’s so different listening to music away from the environment in which you’re making it. Hearing it on a sunny day, taking a stroll, I really felt: ‘This is going on the album.’” **Supernova** “There’s a vocoder voice at the start of the song. In my mind, it’s the voice of a little space creature who’s my friend in the song. I’m always drawn to celestial words and imagery, so this was a fun chance to play with all of those elements. I think making it slightly spacey was a way to do disco without being trapped in the 1970s. \[Songwriter\] Skylar Adams, who also co-wrote and produced on this, has a baby boy called Jupiter, so we wanted to work his name into the lyrics too. If you weren’t awake before ‘Supernova,’ you’re awake by the time it starts.” **Say Something** “You need a rest after ‘Supernova,’ and ‘Say Something’ is a chance to calm down and reflect a little. It’s one of those songs that just dropped from the sky. I recorded it in my first session, before I even had a timeline or an album planned. I was working with \[writer and producer\] Biff Stannard and \[British songwriter\] Ash Howes, who I’ve worked with a lot, and \[producer\] Jon Green, who I worked with on *Golden*. I knew that the three of us would do something different, but I didn\'t know it would be this. It started as a beat, and we were all just singing into a microphone to capture everything. The ‘love is love’ part is almost like a different song, but somehow it lives with the rest of it. The song literally spilled out of us that day.” **Last Chance** “‘Last Chance’ is very inspired by ABBA and the Bee Gees. I was obsessed with ABBA as an eight- or nine-year-old. They’re pure perfection. I can\'t compare with these all-time epic, amazing songs. So what I tried to do was absorb them, try to understand them and then just stay on my own path. This was one of the last songs that came about, just as the doors were about to shut. It just goes to show you\'ve really got to keep going until it’s closing time.” **I Love It** “This was another one that I started working on with Biff, a day or two before lockdown. Again, it had a slightly different chorus, which just wasn’t hitting it. We didn’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so when I was making changes at home I chipped away at it and added the line ‘So come on, let the music play, we’re gonna take it all the way,’ which was inspired by Lionel Richie. That little restructure lifted it to where it needed to go, and it found its place on the album.” **Where Does the DJ Go?** “I wrote this with songwriters Skylar Adams and Daniel Shah, and Kiris Houston, who’s a wonderful instrumentalist and very hands-on. It was in the period just before lockdown, so we were acutely aware that something was happening. The lyric ‘The world’s trying to break me, I need you to save me’ echoes how we were feeling, and the ‘Singing I will survive’ line was inspired by the Gloria Gaynor song. It was our way of saying, ‘Please pull me out of this situation!’” **Dance Floor Darling** “There are songs on the album that have another meaning to them, or a slight melancholy. ‘Dance Floor Darling’ doesn’t have any real depth to it, but I think it feels like a hug. It feels like a wedding reception where everyone’s eaten sufficiently, had a few drinks, all the official stuff’s out of the way, and—especially once the track speeds up in the middle eight—Gramps is on the dance floor. It makes me picture David Brent busting out his dad moves. We wanted escapism, and we committed to it.” **Unstoppable** “Earlier I was describing ‘Magic’ as an hors d’oeuvre. Well, ‘Unstoppable’ is a refreshing sorbet, a palate cleanser. I worked on it with \[songwriter, producer, and instrumentalist\] Troy Miller, who is another writer I only know from the waist up on Zoom. The vocals are quite different, and I wasn’t sure if he was pleased with what I was doing when we were recording because he really didn’t say much. But it turned out he just wanted to go with the vibe and let me go for it!” **Celebrate You** “I’ve never written a song in the third person before. The character of Mary was born out of mumble-singing melodies. Mary is anyone and everyone who needs reassurance that we are enough and we\'re loved. The last part of the album has a pretty high BPM, so ‘Celebrate You’ is the wind-down. It’s last orders at the pub—all of the family’s there, and Auntie Mary’s had a few too many. I’ve introduced you to this stellar landscape, we’ve gone to supernova, but we’ve come back down to Earth. This is about heart and connection.”

In April 2020, just freed from his fourth prison stint, Headie One flew back to a locked-down London in a helicopter. Sitting in the passenger seat and reflecting on his sentence, the capital’s biggest drill star set out his intentions for the rest of the year. “The plan was to shock the world,” he tells Apple Music. “I had my mind right, my energy right and I knew that I was coming out to make some serious moves.” Revealing a strong aversion to taking breaks, the prolific Tottenham rapper quickly set about on executing a much-delayed debut LP that he’d already titled whilst incarcerated. *EDNA* bears the name of his late mother but also carries promise of a new chapter for Headie One—facing up personal demons and sitting with his life’s lessons. “She was a really positive person,” he says of Edna Duah. “I think that’s gotta be my strongest memory of her.” And in this image, “Teach Me” and “Psalm35” open the album in stunning fashion. The running theme of facing up to uncomfortable truths is explored further on “The Light” and “Breathing”. Concurrent to his path of self-evolution, Headie carries a drill crown that comes with increasing weight and contention. Few artists have negotiated a bumpier ride to UK rap’s top table, but fewer artists still arrive at this moment co-signed by such illustrious contemporaries. With an all-star list of features that include Future, Skepta, Aitch and Drake, the album completes a turnaround almost unthinkable this time last year. “Every mistake I made I feel like I’ve learned from it and it’s got me to this point here,” he says. “Tough times don’t last but tough people do.” Here, Headie talks us through some highlights of his debut album. **Psalm 35** “I would read this verse in the Bible quite a lot; in troubled times it would always bring me peace. It’s really simple but it always makes a lot of sense to me. Most people wouldn’t expect my album to start off like this but I don’t really think about expectations from fans or other people when my music gets made, trust me. Do that in life and you’ll be going around in circles.” **Bumpy Ride (feat. M Huncho)** “There’s a lot of energy to this one and a lot of melody. That’s almost expected though, with me and Huncho here together. We were in the studio when we cooked this one up and it all happened quite quickly. I feel like the title speaks for itself too, we’re just going in about the realities of what’s going on right now. It’s one of my favorites. The thing about the drill scene and the way our words and terms change around over time is that you just can’t force these things. That’s what makes it so good. The inspiration is all in the air—it’s just an energy—you pick up what you can and go with it.” **Mainstream** “I say, ‘Labour or Conservatives I ain’t got a preference/The only thing that they consider is two-thirds of a sentence’, because truthfully politics is something I don’t pay any mind. It’s all a joke in the UK. I’ve always kept my views to myself generally, but even in looking at the way they’ve tried to block and blackball drill music to stop us when we were on the rise? It’s not for me. I’m a guy that works with energy and I can’t get with that. I’d rather not involve my thought process in those games. I’d rather move forward and try and be positive.” **Breathing** “That’s one of my little broskis I’ve recorded at the beginning here. He’s in custody right now but he called to tell me that he’d been writing loads inside. So I threw a bit of that on here. He’s one of the \[three\] young Gs I mention in the first verse here. We all grew up in the same estate and I’m a bit older than them but I would see them constantly. Back then, there wouldn’t always be a lot of positive things going on to tell you the truth but I’d be trying to speak to them. I’d be trying to get them to see things differently, you know, pick alternatives. But…yeah it hasn’t worked out for them. They all received life sentences. And to be honest, when I was their age there wasn’t really anyone around to show me the reality of these things either. No-one told us how certain things could lead to other serious consequences.” **Only You Freestyle \[Headie One & Drake\]** “There was so much stuff going on in the background around this time I remember it so clearly. All the George Floyd protests, it was crazy. I called my manager on FaceTime after Drake hit me up. The first thing he said to me, ‘Well, what type of song is he looking to do?’ So we waited, and when they sent over the beat we were laughing, like, ‘This is *too* easy!’ It was a bit of genius from him to send that too, because it’s perfect production for me and I hadn’t really got on something like that in a while. It was love from Drake and I’m happy that it came out so natural and unforced. I get that some people out there thought Drake was offbeat, but nah. Straight away I understood what he was doing. It was a very intentional thing. I completely understand those flows. When I’m in the studio, my team tell me the same thing at times: ‘Can you re-do this here and make it tighter?’ or ‘The flow’s a bit off here.’ But this is how it sounds to me, in my ears, when I’ve got a flow. If you wanna come off beat for four bars and then land on beat for the fifth, then that’s what you wanna do! As artists we should be allowed to do what we want.” **Try Me (feat. Skepta)** “The beat’s really energetic. I really like this one, it’s a bit different to \[2019 single\] ‘Back to Basics’, our first track together. The best way to describe this is ‘straight to the point’. It’s hard-hitting and Skepta brought his A-game. To me, it’s just two rappers rapping. Skepta would always be a person to help out or give me advice, people might not know that. From when me met, it was a matter of time before we got in and recorded something. We linked up earlier in the year at Fashion Week, we were just rollin’, having a good time. We didn’t have to rush to get to it because the energy has always been great with him.” **Everything Nice (feat. Haile)** “To go back to the start of this song, it could have been really, really different. I think I only had my melody on it. I kept on working on it and the sample on the track was so crazy, and the production—it was almost like a hit a bit of a brick wall with the song. I tried so many different things but truthfully I just wasn’t feeling it. So we sent it to Haille, and he literally sent the song back. Complete. Now it’s a movie!”

to whom it may concern... its too beautiful to embrace change and to challenge urself to find something meaningful in it... i love my friends and love is deep :') i want them to know that always... but sometimes i get busy and overwhelmed n im not the best at saying how i feel always... just want to sit around and talk and feel understood together w someone who you like or u find interesting.. thats the best :) and if the day is nice or if the day is not nice but ur inside and its cozy.. thats too wicked. and ur making a soup and eating it together... just with the stuff in the kitchen.. dont even go out to get ingredients.. no need to follow a recipe.. cause ur grandma taught u to cook w the "sazon" (cooking by tasting w as u go on adding diff ingredients and spices.. no recipes. .. u can only really cook if u can freestyle in the kitchen she said).. and then u think about how ur grandma taught u that.. and your w someone in the kitchen making something together.. and then u taste it and it warms u up and ur like damn this is fire.. thats what this and i think maybe what "its all" about... thank u for taking time to read this and i hope you enjoy the album... kiss u... brian

Throughout the late ’90s and 2000s, Destroyer was essentially a guitar band. Whether principal singer-songwriter (and erstwhile New Pornographer) Dan Bejar was exploring glam rock’s velvety contours (2001’s *Streethawk: A Seduction*), experimenting with drum- and bass-less baroque pop (2004’s *Your Blues*), or orchestrating a grand rock opus (2006’s *Destroyer’s Rubies*), six strings generally provided his songs their backbone. That changed with 2011’s *Kaputt*. “I cast down the guitar in disgust,” the Vancouver-based Bejar tells Apple Music, partly kidding, but mostly serious. *Kaputt*’s focus on atmosphere and mood (its soft-rock synths, fretless bass, ’80s jazz-pop saxophones) signaled a major shift in not only how Bejar would write songs (“I like to avoid writing on an instrument at all,” he says), but also how each of his subsequent albums would sound. The experiments with chamber strings and horns on 2015’s *Poison Season* and the apocalyptic New Wave of 2017’s *ken* were essentially a lead-up to the band’s 12th album, *Have We Met*, Bejar’s most self-aware, confident, and abstract work to date. It’s also his darkest, filled with scenes of violence, isolation, and existential dread, most of which Bejar wrote and sang into his laptop at his kitchen table at night. (He then sent those files to bandmates John Collins and Nicolas Bragg, who added everything from bass, drums, keys, and guitar to the glitchy bee-swarm textures that close out the LP.) But for all its excursions into the unknown, *Have We Met* is still very much a Destroyer album—those hyper-literate, self-referential lyrical flourishes and melodic arrangements that have become Bejar’s signature still fully intact. No matter how different things might feel this time around, \"You can see a Destroyer song coming a mile away,” Bejar says. Here, he deciphers his 10 latest. **Crimson Tide** \"It\'s composed of the style of writing which I usually call like \'old Destroyer.’ I don\'t see that kind of lyrical attack too much in any song I\'ve written since \[the 2009 EP\] *Bay of Pigs*. I had it in my special ‘this is for something else\' book, and finally wrote the song from disparate chunks of writing that struck me as kind of musical. But it was really all over the place, and I needed to tie it in together somehow. And for some reason I thought a good way to do that would be to constantly say \'crimson tide\' at the end of every stanza. It has specific connotations in America—like a college football team or a submarine movie, which are really dumb. And so I think that\'s important to point out, when there\'s dumb American things that take over language. It has an end-of-the-world ring to it, as like blood on the horizon, or some kind of apocalypse incoming. It was a loaded two words, and it felt good to sing it at the end of each verse and just see what the song ended up meaning.\" **Kinda Dark** \"As opposed to \'Crimson Tide,’ \'Kinda Dark\' I felt was some other kind of writing that I didn\'t really know—a kind of music, especially in the last half of the song, that I felt was a bit more violent-sounding than the band usually is. It\'s supposed to be the three stanzas, with the last one being particularly gnarly. The first one is kind of a cruising imagery, leading up to sitting on a park bench next to the Boston Strangler. The second one is more slightly eerie sci-fi. And the last one is just a dystopic kind of dogfight or something like that. Like a torture chamber with an audience.\" **It Just Doesn\'t Happen** \"That song was kind of different from the rest. I wrote it on the guitar, for one. And I sat down, and I just wrote it. When I do that, the songs always have kind of a ditty quality—a happy-go-lucky quality—as opposed to the song that comes before it, which has none of those qualities. I thought that the song titles themselves \[the lyrics name-check Primal Scream’s “You\'re Just Too Dark to Care,” Charlie Patton’s “High Water Everywhere,” and The Platters’ “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”\] somehow reflect the vibe of being alone at night in a strange place. Which is something that happens to me a lot. And then wondering if that feeling of isolation is really so special or so specific to you, or is it maybe something that every single person is feeling on and off.\" **The Television Music Supervisor** \"For such specific subject matter, it came to me as if in a dream. It just came to me with the melody in this kind of lilting way. And it was just supposed to be this sad moment in someone\'s life, looking back on their life. It\'s either with perhaps some sense of regret or some sense of amazement. It really depends on what you get out of the words \'I can\'t believe what I\'ve done.\' I also thought the title was maybe such a specific phrase to the early 21st century, just because it\'s possible that in 20 years, no one will actually know what that means—the job that most specifically sums up our day and age. It really rolled off the tongue, too—for such a weird thing, it really feels so musical and melodious to sing it. I think that\'s why I wanted the music to be dreamlike and collapsing, like a fog that I sing through. John \[Collins, producer\] really nailed that one.\" **The Raven** \"I like art that talks about what it\'s going to do when it makes art—and then at the end, that\'s the piece of art. The art that\'s just like, ‘Here\'s my plan, it\'s going to be great,\' and then in the description of the plan, you get the plan, you don\'t get the thing. And that\'s kind of what \'The Raven\' is. The last line that repeats itself kind of alludes to that: \'That\'s what I\'ll write about when I write about The Raven.\' I think it\'s me—or it\'s the singer, because that\'s not me necessarily—talking about... In some ways it\'s kind of like \'When I Paint My Masterpiece,’ the Bob Dylan song. You know, when I get around to writing about the serious topics, this is what it\'s going to be.\" **Cue Synthesizer** \"I like that song a lot, for very different reasons. Part of it is that the production is just way more maniacal than I\'m used to, and extreme in its rhythm. It\'s kind of obliterated by guitar playing that\'s used as samples. I find it very groovy and also ominous at the same time, which is a combo that I like. I also really love stage direction as literature. It\'s maybe my favorite form of literature—the stuff in parentheses before there\'s any action in the play. Like, ‘Cue this, exit that.’ It\'s all a lead-up to the last verse, which is just unbridled dread. I don\'t normally let it loose like that. And when it\'s a song that\'s leading up to a portrait of a doomed world, it\'s interesting to me to see how musical words can be painted or darkened or made evil-sounding when you know what the last verse is. Or I guess before you even know, maybe the point *is* to make them sound terrible—to make the word ‘synthesizer\' or ‘guitar\' or ‘drum\' or \'fake drum\' sound like weapons.\" **University Hill** \"That\'s maybe my favorite song on the record. University Hill is a school in Vancouver in what is now a really nice part of town. When I was a kid, it was kind of a small school where fuck-ups would go. But the main thing that University Hill is is a description of some kind of force that comes and kills and puts people in camps. I mean, that\'s literally what the words describe. So there\'s very little room for interpretation, aside from the very end of the song that has this \'Come on, University Hill!’—like a school rallying cry. What I really needed, though—this will give you deep insights into how I work—the last verse goes, ‘Used to be so nice, used to be such a thrill.’ I needed something that rhymed with \'thrill.’ And I knew deep down it was going to be some kind of hill. And I was like, what hills have I known in my life? And out of nowhere, I was like, oh, there\'s University Hill, and that\'s kind of a big part of my childhood. It comes loaded with real imagery for me.\" **Have We Met** \"The original idea was for the record to be an attack on melody, to completely clamp down on that. But in the end, that\'s not what me and John like. I knew that Nick had been making these guitar pieces over the last couple of years, and I just wanted that one. There was a claustrophobic kind of Max Headroom vibe to the album, which was purposeful. But a moment of sighing, a moment of respite, would be really nice. I also just think it\'s kind of a really beautiful track. I wanted there to be a title track—and it made the most sense for that to be it. I knew the record would be called *Have We Met*. And I wanted that expression to be as open-ended or endless as it could possibly be. As far as the title, I realize I\'ve never heard that said in my entire life, even though I\'ve always heard it said in movies. So it automatically seemed strange to me, and it seemed really deceptively simple. I purposefully left the question mark out, so there could just be words. And there\'s something vaguely noir-ish to it, which I love in all things.\" **The Man in Black\'s Blues** \"I think that song was initially called ‘Death\' or \'Death Blues.’ It\'s just a song about death. One thing that I always seem to write about these days is the world disappearing or erasing itself. And I think that song is supposed to be on the more personal side of that, and it\'s just about what it looks like to be faced with utter loss. But also, it\'s supposed to be kind of like a balm. It\'s not like a dirge. And it\'s not wailing. I feel like it’s kind of a stroll through grief. The original demo was a lot like what you hear at an Italian ice cream parlor maybe, in the late \'80s. It had this kind of weird fairground midtempo disco. More than any other song on the record, I feel like there\'s a real disconnect between what I\'m singing and how I\'m singing it and the music around it, but I didn\'t want it to be a depressing song. I wanted it to be kind of danceable—a moment of levity—especially at the end, where it\'s pretty goofy, and it\'s like, \'Knock knock/Did you say who you come for?\' It\'s literally supposed to be the Grim Reaper at the door, but I kind of sing it in this British funk kind of way.\" **Foolssong** \"I wrote it around the same time that I wrote the *Kaputt* songs, but it didn\'t fit on that record, because there were no 6/8 or waltz-time songs allowed; if you didn\'t have a steady beat to it, then you got kicked off that album. But it was definitely written as a kind of lullaby. A lullaby\'s a vulnerable song, just purely because you sing it to a baby or a small child, which is a vulnerable headspace to be in. I feel like it\'s not a song I could write now. Maybe it\'s the only instance where I\'ve ever thought, like, I\'m serenading myself. And, you know, the lines are not comforting at all. The end refrain, \'Its figures all lit up/Nagasaki at night/At war with the devil\'—I guess maybe lullabies have a history of containing terrifying imagery. But maybe it\'s not so strange. I think there\'s a tradition of gothic horror in lullabies. This makes total sense.\"

Boomkat review: Heather Leigh is a musical polymath in the truest sense of the word; primarily known as an influential practitioner of pedal steel guitar, her work is impossible to pigeonhole - all-over-the-place in the best way, from collaborations with Peter Brötzmann and Shackleton to a properly mind-bending duo of albums for Stephen O’Malley’s Ideologic Organ and Editions Mego - hers is a sound that’s both highly sensual and aesthetically aggressive, beautiful and fearless. Her ‘Glory Days' album for Documenting Sound has now been remastered and pressed on vinyl - and is, for our money - one of the most intangible yet open-hearted pop records of the year. Composed, performed & mixed by Heather Leigh "at home with the window open” in Glasgow, ‘Glory Days’ contains a shocking half hour of music; a 13 track opus that is, by any measure, nothing short of a modernist folk masterpiece. Recorded quickly and instinctively in April this year, it continues to reveal new dimensions with every listen. Played on pedal steel guitar, synthesizer and cuatro, and featuring Heather Leigh’s voice throughout, the songs here capture a sense of physical longing wrapped in a boundless creative energy. What started out as hours of diaristic recordings quickly became honed and crafted into powerful and highly memorable songs - vast in scope and depth of feeling. It’s hard to fathom that these 13 songs were made on the hoof, they capture that most elusive of artistic qualities - an urge to continuously evolve.

In the months leading up to his first tour date supporting 2019’s *Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest*, Bill Callahan was struck by what he describes to Apple Music as “the perfect inspiration for the perfect goal”: Before he left home, he’d try to write and record another album. “I\'m the type of person that can only do one thing at a time,” he says. “I just knew that if I didn\'t finish it before the tour, then it would be a year before I could even think about working on these songs. And I knew that if I did finish it, I would feel like a million bucks.” So Callahan drew up some deadlines for himself and began finishing and fleshing out songs he had lying around, work he hadn’t been able to find a home for previously. *Gold Record* is the short story collection to his other LPs\' novels—a set of self-contained worlds and character studies every bit as detailed and disarming as anything the 54-year-old singer-songwriter has released to date. It also includes an update to 1999’s “Let’s Move to the Country,” a song (originally under his Smog pseudonym) that was calling out for some added perspective. “I have a natural inclination to try to make a narrative out of a whole record,” he says. “But this time, it’s really just a bunch of songs that stand on their own, not really connected to the others. That\'s why I called it *Gold Record*—it’s kind of like a greatest hits record, though singles record is maybe more accurate.” Here, he takes us inside every song on the album. **Pigeons** “I noticed when I got married that I finally understood this word ‘community.’ I was always hearing it, but it never really meant anything to me. But then when I got married—and especially when I had a kid—that word became my favorite word. It meant so much. This song is just about the feeling of marriage, how it connects you to life processes, to birth and death and your neighbors. I think if you have a partner, you can\'t be the selfish person you used to be, because there\'s actually someone listening to you when you\'re being that way, so it kind of steers you into being more considerate and a more generous person. Because when someone is hearing what you\'re saying, then you are hearing what you\'re saying for the first time. That leads to being married to the world, I think.” **Another Song** “I actually wrote that song for a producer who contacted me. They were making a covers record with Emmylou Harris, and so I wrote that for her. The record never happened, so I just used it for myself. I think that one has a different feel because I got \[guitarist\] Matt Kinsey to play bass on that one song, and he has a pretty distinct and melodic kind of up-front way of playing bass.” **35** “It\'s definitely an experience that I had, where I felt like I’d read all the great books and would just be disappointed or feel alienated from any new authors that I would try to read. In your late teens and early twenties is when you read great books and you kind of take them on as if they are books about you, or books that reflect your inner world perfectly. But whenever I try to go back to those, I\'m just not interested. I look at it as a good thing: You are kind of unformed in your twenties, and then hopefully, by the time you hit 30, you are somewhat formed. I think that it\'s like you\'re getting your wings to fly. When you\'re unformed, when you\'re a fledgling person, you can\'t really express a lot. I think it\'s a good thing to have that feeling of not connecting necessarily with art, because it prompts you to work on your own.” **Protest Song** “That song is probably the oldest new song on the record. I started it ten years ago, got the idea and just never finished it. But I considered putting it on *Shepherd*, just as I considered putting it on \[2013’s\] *Dream River*. It didn\'t seem to fit either of those. It was kind of a revenge song. At the time I used to watch a lot of late-night shows, just because I was curious about what kind of music gets on there. At least at the time, it was almost invariably the worst people out there, in my opinion. So it was just kind of like a revenge fantasy, on the musicians that are performing. That accent I use is just a film noir that lives inside me.” **The Mackenzies** “When I bought my first car 30 years ago, the couple who was selling it invited me into their house and made me a cocktail. I just kind of hung out with them for a while, which was just a very pleasant and unusual thing. It was a used Dodge minivan, and he was a Dodge mechanic. I figured it was probably the safest person to buy a car from, a mechanic. They were maternal and paternal, to a complete stranger, me just coming out to their house. They also had one of those very homey houses that some people have. Some people master the art of comfort—they have the best couches and chairs and shag carpet and stuff. That\'s what stuck with me—their warmth, their instant warmth. But maybe that\'s because I was giving them a check for five grand. The song is fairly new, but those people had been in my head for a long time. I guess I always believe that if it\'s something you always think about, then that means it\'s very important—it\'s a good way to find out about what you should be writing about, if you have recurring thoughts.” **Let’s Move to the Country** “I always like playing it live, but I kind of stopped and then resurrected it a couple of years ago on tour. It seemed like there was something missing, and because of developments in my personal life, it just seemed like I should write a new chapter to the song. The original is from the perspective of someone who can\'t even say the words ‘baby’ or ‘family.’ The updated version is someone that can. It\'s sort of a mystery, and deciding if you\'re going to have a second one or not is kind of almost as big a decision as having one kid, because it could be looked at as whether or not you\'re happy having kids. I\'m totally not saying that people that only have one kid aren\'t happy having kids, but by having this second kid, you\'re definitely making some kind of deeper commitment, I think. You\'re saying, ‘Okay, I\'m willing to get deeper into this.’” **Breakfast** “I think it just started from an image I had of a woman making breakfast for her man—doing that kind of affectionate thing, but not having affection for the person. What are the dynamics of that? What\'s going on in that type of relationship? Why is she still feeding him and feeding the relationship when she\'s not happy? I was trying to explore that kind of dynamic that relationships can get into sometimes. I also find it interesting with couples: who gets up first and the way that changes sometimes, depending on what\'s going on. Who\'s getting out of bed first, and who\'s laying in bed longer?” **Cowboy** “It’s kind of nostalgic for the way TV used to be. There would be a later movie, and then later there was a late, late movie. If you were staying up to watch that, it would usually be after *The Tonight Show*. That meant something. It meant you\'re up pretty late, for whatever reason. You might be being irresponsible, or you might just be indulging yourself. Now that TV is on demand, I don\'t think anyone really watches late-night shows at night anymore—they just watch the highlights the next day. So on one level, it\'s about that loss of sense of place that TV used to give you, because it was a much more fixed thing. And that kind of correlates to watching a Western, because that\'s about a time that is also gone. I was just thinking about that, the time of your life when you can just watch a movie at two in the morning.” **Ry Cooder** “He\'s someone that I\'ve been familiar with maybe since his \[1984\] *Paris, Texas* soundtrack, but I hadn\'t really explored his records very much. Maybe three or four years ago I started digging into all of them and was really being blown away by how great so many of his records are and how different each one is and how he really uplifts and kind of puts a spotlight on international musicians. Unlike \[1986’s\] *Graceland*—where people think that Paul Simon kind of was just using those people—Ry Cooder really seems to want people to know about all this other kind of music. If you watch or read an interview with him from now, he\'s totally stoked about music and not at all jaded or bored or anything. I just thought that he deserved a ballad, a tribute. Because I think he\'s great.” **As I Wander** “I tried to make it a song about everything that I possibly could. I was trying to sum up human existence and sum up the record, even though it wasn\'t written with that intent necessarily. All the perspectives on the record are very distinct, and limited to just that narrative. But with ‘As I Wander,’ I tried to hold all narratives at the same time. Just like a great big spaghetti junction where all the highways meet up and swirl around.”

From thrilling affairs that dissolve into sweaty desperation (Night Chancers) to the absurd bloggers, fruitlessly clinging to the fag ends of the fashion set (Sleep People), via soiled real life (Slum Lord) social media – enabled stalkers (I’m not Your Dog) and new day, sleep – deprived optimism (Daylight), the record’s finely drawn vignettes, are all based on the corners of world Dury has visited. Baxter says “Night Chancers is about being caught out in your attempt at being free”, it’s about someone leaving a hotel room at three in the morning. You’re in a posh room with big Roman taps and all that, but after they go suddenly all you can hear is the taps dripping, and all you can see the debris of the night is around you. Then suddenly a massive party erupts, in the room next door. This happened to me and all I Could hear was the night chancer, the hotel ravers”.

Young Knives release the their fifth album, Barbarians. The album was written, recorded and mixed by Young Knives (brothers Henry Dartnall and The House of Lords) in their studio near Oxford, UK. John Gray’s book Straw Dogs inspired the brothers to dial into the ultra-violent, brutal nature of human beings. Our progresses in science and knowledge have not made us any less barbaric: our entertainment is obsessed with it, our world is full of it. What if cruelty to others is just part of who we are? How do we live with that? Building on a base of loved hits from their early work last decade (Voices of Animals and Men, Superabundance, Ornaments from the Silver Arcade) and the metamorphosis of 2013’s Sick Octave, Barbarians is a leap into sonic experimentation by a band who love to confuse and entertain in equal measure.

Still House Plants present their second LP FAST EDIT. Cultivated over the course of 2019, the album switches the combativeness of previous releases for bare intimacy. FAST EDIT is a palette of qualities and curdled headspaces. Now living far apart and coming together only for intense periods of shows and touring, the band have come to rely on an archive of mp3s (quick recall overtakes stable long term memory). Written on mobile phones, dictaphones, and laptops, FAST EDIT cuts rehearsals and schemas with tight, raucous tracks. This is most tenderly at play on ‘Shy Song’ – a cut'n’chase piece, in which all sounds are ghosts of another. ‘PredikateD’ is a phone on the ground: the voice is air, the guitar and drums meld with the plywood and sand-bag structure, the seams exposed. The taste of the record is captured in an intervention written for the cancelled 2020 edition of Glasgow’s Counterflows Festival by Frances Morgan: ‘How do you think we should do this? The song does something different now, puts the other foot forward. How do you know when it’s done? End on a verb and it becomes a command: run! Towards the next thing. Do – towards the next thing to be done.’ For North and South America and Asia, please order via blankformseditions.bandcamp.com/album/fast-edit

Following remix work for Björk and Zola Jesus, productions for serpentwithfeet, and her debut album on Tri-Angle, American experimental musician and producer Katie Gately moves to Houndstooth for her sophomore album Loom, dedicated to her mother, who passed away in 2018. “My mother’s voice is in this record, her picture’s in the sleeve notes. This record is for her” says Katie. Katie’s mother was diagnosed with an extremely rare form of cancer shortly after seeing Katie perform for the first time, and Loom was made during her mother’s illness. To solidify the enormity of a loss like this, Gately has added the seismic rumble and aural grit of real earthquake recordings in her productions – alongside her signature adventurous sound design and earwormy melodies – to signify how grief like this is like the shifting of the earth. “I felt like my world was being shaken,” says Katie. “I was losing the person who created me, and it seemed an appropriate time to sample earthquakes.” Where her debut album Color, (2016) deployed fractured rhythms, fierce licks, bold samples and her signature paintbox pop hooks, Loom reveals crepuscular textures. Her voice is more forward in the mix, often densely layered in choral laments above a coarse foundation of hard and brittle sound design, the latter of which is rooted in her film school training. As well as earthquake sounds, Loom includes more samples, chosen for their associative power, peacocks screaming, pill bottles shaking, a coffin closing, wolves howling, a shovel digging, a paper shredder, stone grinding and heavily processed audio from her parent’s wedding. At the time of her mother’s diagnosis, Katie was near completion of an entirely different album, but says that very quickly she realized she “didn’t have the bandwidth to make that record anymore.” She returned from LA to her family home in Brooklyn and started again, completely rebuilding the album around the track ‘Bracer’, which was her mother’s favourite. She made it while she couldn’t sleep, and the result is a record she says is powered more by heart than mind, with sucker-punch richness and keening vocals that are unflinching. “The process is blurry to me now,” she says. “I don’t know if I’d recommend it, but I didn’t have time to worry about perfecting things, I was just working when everyone was asleep – it was the only time I had.” Her lyrics are rooted in the events she was experiencing, but describe personifications and abstracted feelings. ‘Flow’ is written from the perspective of her mother; in ‘Allay’ she speaks as the cancer; in ‘Tower’ she inhabits the medicine that confronts the cancer. “They’re darker in tone,” she explains, “but I see beauty in that.” ‘Waltz’ and ‘Bracer’ are tracks she describes as being like a brother and sister: “They’re about the same thing, about being disoriented and wanting to check out with a substance – I used whisky.” ‘Waltz’ spins in on itself, whereas ‘Bracer’ reaches for a series of climaxes that drop out before they can peak. The three interludes, ‘Ritual’, ‘Rite’ and ‘Rest’ are a triptych that carve out light and space to breathe – sometimes synthesizing sounds like exhalations – between the density of other tracks. They are spliced sections of one longer track, with ‘Rest’ closing the album. “When my mother passed I ate doughnuts and slept for a month,” she says. “The pressures from the music industry just fell away – release schedules and the like just didn’t matter any more. But a callous had to be formed, so after that I finished the record, and it was done by the beginning of 2019.” Katie has also released 12”s and a cassette on a number of notable underground labels – Public Information and Blue Tapes, as well as the critically acclaimed FatCat Split Series. This summer Katie was part of the recent Mary Anne Hobbs curated ‘Queens of the Underground’ Festival in Manchester alongside Houndstooth musician Aisha Devi. She is currently living in LA and teaching at CalArts.

“While you live, shine” Epigraph of Seikilos - 1st or 2nd century AD For my sins, I spent many years teaching the history of Western music to undergraduate students. I taught the “grand tour” - two millennia of music history crammed into three terms. The party line in the textbooks I was required to teach from was clear - after a brief detour to Ancient Greece, Western music unfolded from the voice, evolving with logic and clarity, from plainchant to organum and the motet, polyphonic counterpoint and beyond, successive genres building on and fractally expanding what came before. Dadabots, the duo of machine learning specialists CJ Carr and Zack Zukowkski, trained their neural network Sample-RNN on hours of a cappella recordings of my voice, producing 841 files over 40 generations of training. When CJ and Zack sent me the files, I was struck deeply by how it felt to listen to the network learning - the early files consisting of long notes and glitchy errors gradually giving way to moments of bizarre melody, whistles and washes of white noise before the sound of my own voice began to emerge. I was struck by the parallels with the party line of my music history days. 40 generations of my voice; 40 human generations living and dying over the 1200 years of music history we covered in the first term.  In A Late Anthology, I map the development of the network’s understanding of my voice onto the history of early Western music. Machine learning is used as a filter to listen to the history of early Western music; Western music history is used as a filter to listen to machine learning. In combination, they produce a new alternative tradition, a proposal for a different way of thinking about, listening to and making a history of Western music.