The Quietus Albums Of The Year 2022

London duo Jockstrap first gained attention in 2018 with an almost unthinkable fusion of orchestral ’60s pop and avant-club music. On their debut album, conservatory grads Georgia Ellery and Taylor Skye continue to push against convention while expanding the outline of their sui generis sound. Skye’s electronic production is less audacious this time out; *I Love You Jennifer B* is more of a head listen than a body trip. There are a few notable exceptions: The opener, “Neon,” explodes acoustic strumming into industrial-strength orchestral prog; “Concrete Over Water” violently crossfades between a pensive melody reminiscent of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and zigzagging synths recalling Hudson Mohawke’s trap-rave. But most of the album trains its focus on guitars, strings, and Ellery’s crystalline coo, leaving all the more opportunities to marvel at her unusual lyricism. Her writing returns again and again to questions of desire and regret, and while it can frequently be cryptic, she’s not immune to wide-screen sincerity: In “Greatest Hits,” when she sings, “I believe in dreams,” you believe her—never mind that she’s soon free-associating images of Madonna and Marie Antoinette. And on “Debra,” when she sings, “Grief is just love with nowhere to go” over a cascading beat that sounds like Kate Bush beamed back from the 22nd century, all of Jockstrap’s occasional impishness is rendered moot. At just 24 years old, these two are making some of the most grown-up pop music around.

When Georgia Ellery and Taylor Skye make music as Jockstrap, the process and result has one definition: pure modern pop alchemy. Meeting in 2016 when they shared the same com- position class while studying at London’s Guildhall School of Music & Drama, Ellery and Skye founded Jockstrap as a creative outlet for their rapidly-developing tastes. While Ellery had moved from Cornwall to the English capital to study jazz violin, Skye arrived from Leicester to study music production. Both were delving deep into the varied worlds of mainstream pop, EDM and post-dubstep (made by the likes of James Blake and Skrillex), as well as classical composition, ‘50s jazz and ‘60s folk singer-songwriters. The influence of the club and a dancier focus, which was hinted at on previous releases, now scorches through their new material like wildfire. Take the thumping, distorted breakbeats of ‘50/50’ –inspired by the murky quality of YouTube mp3 rips –as well as the sparkling synth eruptions of ‘Concrete Over Water’, as early evidence of where Jockstrap are heading next. Jockstrap’s discography is restless and inventive, traversing everything from liberating dancefloor techno to off-kilter electro pop, trip-hop and confessional song writing; an omnivorous sonic palette that takes on a cohesive maturity far beyond their ages of only 24 years old. They have cemented themselves as one of the most vital young groups to emerge from London’s melting pot of musical cultures.

Composed in 2020 during the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, the first incarnation of the work was played as a sound installation at the Kapellen Leprosarium (Leper's Sanctuary) in Hanover, Germany. This sanctuary was built around 1250 and served as a quarantine for those who suffered from the plague and leprosy in the Middle Ages. This first presentation of Broken Gargoyles featured verses by German poet Georg Heym, “Das Fieberspital” and “Die Dämonen der Stadt.” The work was finalized in 2020 in collaboration with the artist and sound designer Daniel Neumann. In “Das Fieberspital” Heym describes the horrific state of people suffering from yellow fever who live in paralyzing fear of death and swirling delirium owing to their brutal treatment and isolation in medical wards in early 20th-century Germany. “Die Dämonen der Stadt” also addresses such grim portents of World War I; in this poem, the god Baal observes (like a gargoyle) a town from a rooftop of a city block at nighttime and lets a street burn down during dawn. Employing a vast array of advanced vocal and instrumental techniques, Broken Gargoyles is arguably Galas’ most intellectually, sonically and viscerally formidable work to date. The album finds the visionary artist deftly probing the weaving, warping transformation on the nervous systems of her post-traumatic soldiers and dying diseased. The album’s first part, “Mutilatus,” contains the Heym poems “Das Fieberspital” and “Die Dämonen der Stadt,” and concerns the suffering of the soldier in the trenches and during innumerable operations in the hospital. “Mutilatus,” was originally recorded in 2012-2013 in collaboration with recording and mix engineer Kris Townes and serves as a welcome into a parallel world of doom and delusion foretold. Sustained, portentous low-end piano rumble and Galás’ solo and multiplied voices create evanescent masses of tonality and, pertinently, a resonant frequency clash or harmonic distortion. You can hear it and feel it: she is inside her subjects, as if to emphasize with the sweaty diffusion of the patients’ feverish minds. When this extraordinary introduction of “Mutilatus” recedes in an approaching chilly ill wind, Galás intones over subdued whining electronics, cawing birds, semi-human verbalizations and something somewhere between these things. Representing the doomed, their punishers and perhaps her listeners in all our delusional wisdom, she rasps out words, or the sound of words; the electronic whine rises and falls. Then piano, left-hand low, and “vocalese” so high in deliberately splintery disfigurement, which gives way to the piano’s pulsing beat-figure darkly looming over the hill amid a babble of human voices and dark clouds of ravens. The often sisyphean sound throughout Broken Gargoyles plumbs great depths in the album’s second part, “Abiectio” (humiliation, dejection, despondency), which draws from the Heym poems “Der Blinde” and “Der Hunger” and the last verses of “Das Fieberspital.” Feedback moans over impending piano thunder, Galás rough-grain wheezes, bawls and howls. Multilayered voice becomes a flock of winged creatures. The effected vocal throngs reach out diseased limbs, mangled faces. Where humans become beasts become…A blind man is forced outside of an asylum to die, with the order "Look into the sun!" Galás makes the inference that the sun burns him alive. A man made delirious and dying through hunger and the sun (again) forces open the jaws of a hound in order to devour him and ends up falling into a dark crevice, where he disappears. The voice at the end of “Das Fieberspital” speaks as one with a burned throat might, through what sounds like an electrolarynx –– again a herald to fire, dehydration. This part of the poem observes the patients laughing in derision and delirium at the priest who approaches the bed of a man dying of yellow fever in order to give him the Last Rites. The dying man impales the priest with a stone he had been sharpening. The album’s title references Krieg dem Kriege!, a photographic book by the German anti-militarist Ernst Friedrich from 1924 documenting the atrocities of World War I, including the album’s nominal “broken gargoyles,” which is how the facially maimed soldiers were termed by their hospital keepers; the disfigured soldiers also had to wear metal masks to better hide their monster faces –– blown apart by shrapnel, burned by mustard gas and further mutilated by medical “researchers” –– from public view. Who is the beater and who is the beaten? What about the pain of the punisher? Galás stirs the damaged minds of the hospital surgeons and guards with the victims’, obscuring her cries as the pain ebbs and flows, panting or pummeling. She creak-croons as each party to this disaster would, sinister though not altogether cruel. Her piano’s stout low end comes down like a jail door; her voices hover, theremin-like. Her people, her “characters,” ascend and descend, haltingly reharmonizing, weakly but determinedly pushing forward toward their demise, or what their fates have in mind for them. Galás’ highly original use of studio effects and electronics melts down to amplify and ambiguize her soundstage, its storm clouds of sonority tormenting, perhaps comforting a roomful of zombified mummies surrendered to those who likely regard them as hunks of meat to root around in like hogs, to wade through like puddles of putrid chaos.

There’s an expansive, uplifting quality to caroline’s 2022 debut, the sense of a large group of people—eight, in this case—together in a room, breathing as one. Cozy as the music can feel, it’s an unusual blend: the woodsy, rustic quality of ’70s British folk, the grandeur of classic Midwestern emo, the abstractions of post-rock and free improvisation. By either grace or design, the closest metaphors are found in nature: a blossoming dawn (“Dark Blue”), crashing waves (the chaotic finale of “Natural death”), ice thawing in sun (“Skydiving onto the library roof”), and wind rippling through grass (“zilch”). Together, they ebb, flow, fray, and coalesce—emphasis on *together*.

UK eight-piece caroline’s eponymous debut album often cascades with force like an avalanche, squalling and rumbling on the edge of all-out collapse. At other points they slip back into impossibly fragile moments of quiet – a simple bassline or a rattle of snare the only sound amid a dark sea of silence. caroline know exactly the right balance between restraint and release. These songs are expansive and emotive pieces, their rich palette drawing on a mixture of choral singing, Midwestern emo and O’Malley and Llewellyn’s roots in Appalachian folk. “Sometimes things sound much better when there’s empty space,” says Llewellyn. “Sometimes you might populate [a song] with too many things and forget that an element on its own is enough.” Elsewhere on the record the band have employed a collage-like technique, combining snippets of lo-fi recordings from a myriad of different locations – a barn in France, the members’ bedrooms and living rooms, the atmospheric swimming pool in which they also filmed sublime live sessions for ‘Dark blue’ and ‘Skydiving onto the library roof’ – with more traditional group sessions at the Total Refreshment Centre and their studio in Peckham. The growth that began as a scrappy guitar band above a pub many years ago is still continuing. caroline’s astounding debut album is merely the first step.

Pop in your earpiece, close your eyes and embrace the wonders (and horrors) of augmented reality and prepare to travel 500 years into the future as Richard Dawson returns with…The Ruby Cord. These seven tracks plunge us into an unreal, fantastical and at times sinister future where social mores have mutated, ethical and physical boundaries have evaporated; a place where you no longer need to engage with anyone but yourself and your own imagination. It’s a leap into a future that is well within reach, in some cases already here.

When Kendrick Lamar popped up on two tracks from Baby Keem’s *The Melodic Blue* (“range brothers” and “family ties”), it felt like one of hip-hop’s prophets had descended a mountain to deliver scripture. His verses were stellar, to be sure, but it also just felt like way too much time had passed since we’d heard his voice. He’d helmed 2018’s *Black Panther* compilation/soundtrack, but his last proper release was 2017’s *DAMN.* That kind of scarcity in hip-hop can only serve to deify an artist as beloved as Lamar. But if the Compton MC is broadcasting anything across his fifth proper album *Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers*, it’s that he’s only human. The project is split into two parts, each comprising nine songs, all of which serve to illuminate Lamar’s continually evolving worldview. Central to Lamar’s thesis is accountability. The MC has painstakingly itemized his shortcomings, assessing his relationships with money (“United in Grief”), white women (“Worldwide Steppers”), his father (“Father Time”), the limits of his loyalty (“Rich Spirit”), love in the context of heteronormative relationships (“We Cry Together,” “Purple Hearts”), motivation (“Count Me Out”), responsibility (“Crown”), gender (“Auntie Diaries”), and generational trauma (“Mother I Sober”). It’s a dense and heavy listen. But just as sure as Kendrick Lamar is human like the rest of us, he’s also a Pulitzer Prize winner, one of the most thoughtful MCs alive, and someone whose honesty across *Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers* could help us understand why any of us are the way we are.

Born from the fractal innerworld of Vymethoxy Redspiders, better known as Urocerus Gigas from Leeds-based xenofeminist crisis energy rock duo Guttersnipe, The Ephemeron Loop's debut is a synaesthetic acid bath that cracks open the doors of perception to reveal a sonic landscape of ineffable beauty, divine femininity and continual transformation. "Psychonautic Escapism" sublimes Guttersnipe's teeth-gnashing spacegrind aesthetic leaving washes of dream pop ambience, dilated speedcore fusillades and shapeshifting psychedelic dub effects. It's an album that lodges itself creatively between Cocteau Twins, Arca, Basic Channel and Napalm Death, lysergically fluxing imperceptibly between seemingly contradictory sonics and philosophies. Miss VR took 14 long, difficult years to write the album, which developed cautiously as she broke through the misery of her pre-transition life with shoegaze music, rave and psychedelic drugs in Leeds' queer underground. An existence languishing in negativity, soundtracked by extreme music was replaced with the opportunity to experience euphoria, elation and ecstatic freedom, emotions that coalesce sensually on "Psychonautic Escapism". These formative experiences are the album's initial building blocks, assembled between 2007 and 2018 as Miss VR came to grips with her reality as an autistic/ADHD trans woman and the multi-dimensional psychotropic experiences that assisted that realization. And as V's worldview expanded and shifted as she lived a fresh life, the music itself developed spiritually. In 2018, after being impressed with producer Ross Halden's work with Guttersnipe, Miss VR asked him to assist her with developing The Ephemeron Loop's fragmented songs and visions. "I learned a lot about why people don’t usually combine various kinds of sounds or styles in music," she admits. "It is very difficult to get it to all work together!" But after two-and-a-half years of the duo navigating a "labyrinth of fragmented Reason 5 and Logic projects," re-recording and processing, and working tirelessly on complex arrangements and compositions, they eventually found a light at the end of the tunnel. The finished album is towering and ambitious, Escher-like in its illusory reconstruction of familiar elements into brain-altering forms. The album begins with 'Psychonautic Escapism (Cold Alienation)', decorating Miss VR’s disembodied moans with throbbing dub techno synths, insectoid digital percussion and disorientating high-BPM electronics. Her vocals hover weightlessly between My Bloody Valentine's Bilinda Butcher and Cocteau Twins' Elizabeth Fraser, and on 'Lattice Dysmorphism of Lysothymic Oneiroid Cytoterrain' drift against grinding industrial hardcore kicks, serrated bass and Lorenzo Senni-esque trance pointillism. On 'Trench Through Pink Death', Miss VR’s voice mutates into a shrill scream as she directs the music from splattered free-flowing doom into harsh hyper-speed death metal and breakcore. Woven together with both precision and delicacy, "Psychonautic Escapism" turns a rough patchwork of ideas, experiences, feelings and vivid emotions into a glorious neon tapestry. In living and exploring the realities of autism, ADHD and trans identity, Vymethoxy Redspiders has masterminded a sonic language that feels fresh, urgent and shockingly honest. Psychedelic is a term that gets thrown around far too loosely at the moment - in this case there's just no better way of describing the album's scope.

Nigerian sound and installation artist Emeka Ogboh will release his second album 6°30′33.372″N 3°22′0.66″E via his newly launched Danfotronics imprint for experimental electronic music from Nigeria, West Africa, and beyond. The album follows Beyond The Yellow Haze, which was re-released last year via Ostgut Ton sublabel A-TON after the inclusion of Ogboh’s composition “Ayilara” in the Berghain exhibition Studio Berlin. While Beyond The Yellow Haze took a more macro sonic overview of various areas in Lagos, 6°30′33.372″N 3°22′0.66″E turns its hyper-specific geographical focus toward the sounds and voices within the city’s Ojuelegba bus station and its environs. It’s a sonic “zooming-in” to the anarchic, self-organized urban node at a critical transformational juncture, previously immortalized on Fela Kuti’s legendary track and critique of post-colonial Lagos, Confusion. Ojuelegba was also the former location of a sacred historical shrine created for Eshu, the Yoruba god of dance and confusion (amongst other things), and located at the area’s main intersection. This junction is the starting point for Lagos’s numerous yellow VW Danfo buses, whose drivers and conductors, recorded by Ogboh, provide a kind of verbal mapping of the neighborhood on the album; spoken descriptions of bus routes, food, spiritual geography, history, and prostitution. On 6°30′33.372″N 3°22′0.66″E, Ogboh converts these field recordings and voices into a musical ode to Ojuelegba. Over eight tracks, Nigerian Pidgin, a form of Creole, takes center stage, guiding the listener from informal interviews on the origins of the name and descriptions of Ojuelegba via massive, cavernous drums, synth & bass of album centerpieces “Wọle” (enter in Yoruba) and “Ayilara” (the red light district). Elsewhere, the kick-less afroelectronics of “Verbal Drift” unfolds amid overlapping conversations and a bus conductor’s verbal spin on the neighborhood, while the ambient Lagos techno of “No Counterfeit” (one driver’s declaration of Ojuelegba’s matchlessness) and heady, hyper-detailed dub of “We Die Hia” (an avowal to never abandon Ojuelegba) serve as meditations on the area’s 24-hour accessibility. “Oju 2.0”, the album’s penultimate and longest track, is a blurry ambient orchestra of multiple neighborhood field recordings combined into a single, sonic landscape – each street scene decaying, reverberating and resounding at a different speed. As a sonic metaphor for order amid chaos, this sentiment echoes in the record’s final interviews on finding a future – Eshu willing – within the anarchy of a neighborhood that never sleeps.

Extended guitar hero Oren Ambarchi returns with Shebang, the latest in the series of intricately detailed long-form rhythmic workouts that includes Quixotism (2014) and Hubris (2016). Like those records, Shebang features an international all-star cast of musical luminaries, their contributions recorded individually in locations from Sweden to Japan yet threaded together so convincingly (by Ambarchi in collaboration with Konrad Sprenger) that it’s hard to believe they weren’t breathing the same studio air. Expanding on the techniques used on Simian Angel (2019), we can never be entirely sure who is responsible for what we hear, as Ambarchi’s guitar is used to trigger everything from bass lines to driving piano riffs. Picking up from the staccato guitar patterns that ran through Hubris, Shebang’s single 35-minute track begins with a precisely interwoven lattice of chiming guitar figures, expanding Hubris’ monolithic pulse into a joyous, hyper-rhythmic melodicism that calls up points of reference as disparate as Albert Marcoeur, early Pat Metheny Group, and Henry Kaiser’s It’s A Wonderful Life. Building from isolated single notes into densely layered polyrhythms, the muted guitar tones are joined by subtle touches of shimmering Leslie cabinet tones and guitar synth. Simmering down and funnelling into a single note, the guitar stew is soon thickened by Joe Talia’s propulsive ride cymbal, which blossoms into a beautifully flowing yet rigorously snapped-to fusion funk, whose ever-shifting details skitter across the kit – think 70s heavyweights like Jack DeJohnette or Jon Christensen. An unexpected entry of guttural bass clarinet licks from Sam Dunscombe begins the series of instrumental features that pepper the remainder of the piece. Soon we hear from the legendary British pedal steel player B.J. Cole (hopefully known to some listeners from his outer-limits singer-songwriter masterpiece The New Hovering Dog or, failing that, ‘Tiny Dancer’), whose languorous yet uneasy lines float in and out of a shifting rhythmic foundation supported by a single note bass groove, cut through with aleatoric synth articulations Though single-mindedly occupying its rhythmic space throughout, Shebang’s dense ensemble sound is carefully composed while drawing on the free flow of improvisation, with individual voices momentarily coming to the fore and subtle changes in harmony and texture. Perhaps the most surprising of these shifts occurs around half-way through when the smoke of a buzzing synth crescendo from Jim O'Rourke clears to reveal something like a piano trio, with Ambarchi’s guitar-triggered piano patterns providing restless accompaniment to flowing melodic lines from Chris Abrahams of The Necks, while Johan Berthling’s double bass and Talia’s drums fill out the bottom end. Before long, things take another left turn as Julia Reidy’s rapidly picked 12-string guitar lines take centre stage, with O’Rourke’s monumental synth clouds hovering in the distance. The ensemble surges through a slow series of harmonic changes before the whole shebang dissolves into a delirious synthetic mirage. Bridging minimalism, contemporary electronics, and classic ECM stylings, and bringing together a cast of preternaturally talented contributors, Shebang is unmistakably the work of Oren Ambarchi: obsessively detailed, relentlessly rhythmic, unabashedly celebratory.

Moundabout – Flowers Rot, Bring Me Stones Some of the most striking ancient structures in Ireland are not its standing stones but the country’s neolithic “passage tombs” constructed between five and six thousand years ago. As this modern name suggests, they were in all likelihood actual liminal zones bridging this world and the next; charnel houses, stone age reliquaries, bone gardens, cairns vibrating between planes and states of being. One of the most interesting of these graves is Knowth at Brú na Bóinne. Its huge, many-passaged central burial chamber is surrounded by 17 small barrows, and among these constructions is over one third of all the rediscovered megalithic art in Western Europe. Kerbstones and pillars are carved with a hypnotising array of spiral, serpentiform and lozenge-shaped patterns; alongside is chiselled the oldest known representation of the moon made by man. Moundabout is a new folk project based in Ireland by Paddy Shine of Gnod and Phil Masterson of Los Langeros/Damp Howl/Bisect, but the words ‘new’ and ‘folk’ need to be treated with care here. Listening to Flowers Rot, Bring Me Stones is like entering a trance state while staring at one of the Knowth spiral carvings. Like following a ridged epidermal loop inwards, tracing the spiral of an ammonite towards the centre or peeling back the layers of an onion, immersion in this great album sees you travelling both temporally backwards and spatially inwards simultaneously. The listener is invited to see folk – orally transmitted music often concerning national identity and culture played on traditional instruments – as a glowing helix of a continuum stretching way back beyond the revival of the 1950s and 1960s to an eternal vibrancy that predates classical antiquity and Irish civilisation itself. As the album moves the listener, they are taken on a geographical and geological journey as well as psychological and spiritual, traveling inwards from the coast (‘The Sea’), as well as down beneath the strata (“How many bog bodies are waiting to be found?”) And when you have been primed, it takes you all the way back to commune with older gods on the album’s epic centrepiece, ‘Dick Dalys Dance’, creating the kind of prehistoric drones and trance-inducing rhythms that the echoing, celestially aligned corridors of the Brú na Bóinne were built to amplify. This is not new music but the deep sensations it provokes will be new to most listeners. Imagine for a few minutes something as glorious as a Nurse With Wound List for the 21st Century… were I given such a formidable task as to organise such a collection of mind-bending music, Flowers Rot, Bring Me Stones by Moundabout would be one of the first records I would include. John Doran, Wiltshire, 2021 ---

Thrill Jockey is pleased to announce the return of The Soft Pink Truth, the solo electronic project of Drew Daniel, one half of Baltimore-found sound duo Matmos. Asked to explain his new album’s gauntlet-throwing title, Drew Daniel says: “Years ago a friend was DJing in a club and a woman came into the DJ booth and asked ‘is it going to get any deeper than this?’ and the phrase became a kind of mantra for us. What did she really want? This album was created as an attempt to imagine possible musical responses to her question.” Throughout the ten songs of the album, the provocation to go “deeper” prompts promiscuous moves across the genres of disco, minimalism, ambient, and jazz, sliding onto and off of the dancefloor, sweeping higher and lower on the scale of frequencies, engaging both philosophical texts re-set as pop lyrics and wordless glossolalia. Rather than a dryly pursued thesis, the music flows across emotional terrain from upfront peaks to melancholic valleys, often within the same song. This is the case on opening track “Deeper,” which morphs from Brainticket-Esque keyboard loops to a Chic disco groove to a Stars Of The Lid style heavy drone over eleven minutes. Evenly divided between opening lift-off, rhythmic peaks, and extended, spaced-out decrescendos, this is music that flickers and pulses and melts. Though the goal is depth, it also goes sonically wider than any other Soft Pink Truth record in terms of sound source. To craft the album during COVID and social isolation, Daniel assembled a fourteen-piece virtual disco band from friends and allies across the genre spectrum and across the world: Daniel’s romantic and musical partner M.C. Schmidt and friend Koye Berry play piano, Mark Lightcap (Acetone, Dick Slessig Combo) plays acoustic and electric guitar, Jason Willett (Half Japanese) plays bass, Nate Wooley plays trumpet, Brooks Kossover (Drugdealer) plays flute, John Berndt and Andrew Bernstein (Horse Lords) play saxophone, and shakers, shekere, tumba, triangle, and cajon parts are played by Cuban percussionist Ayoze de Alejandro Lopez. There are chamber instruments as well: harpsichord by Tom Boram, harp by Obadias Guerra, Irish harp by Una Monaghan, and on many tracks, lush string arrangements by Turkish arranger Ulas Kurugullu for violin, viola, and cello that recall the Love Unlimited Orchestra found on classic Barry White albums. From Caracas to Istanbul to Dublin, everyone recorded themselves at home playing along to skeletal demos, and then their contributions were assembled in Daniel’s home studio in Baltimore. This virtual experience of action at a distance, and of community coming together and then returning to solitude might explain the song “Moodswing” (which starts with a popping champagne cork and turns to broken glass halfway through); but that dynamic also explains the mood swings of the album as a whole, as joyful collective playing dissolves into tranquil, reflective atmospheres suitable to music made in response to a moment of doubt, complaint and mixed emotions. There are some perverse pop moments. One side, one, “La Joie Devant La Mort” takes a sentence in French by philosopher and erotica author Georges Bataille (“once more our steps lead us / into the forest and into the night / in search / of joy / before death”) and turns it into the lyrics of a gothic disco anthem with vocals courtesy of Jamie Stewart (Xiu Xiu). Intoned over scything disco strings and quantized insect noises, Bataille’s cryptic remarks skips the seminar room for a late-night queer cruising ground. On “Wanna Know”, the album title becomes an airy vocal hook as Jenn Wasner (Wye Oak, Flock of Dimes) harmonizes with herself singing “I just really wanna know/is it gonna get any deeper than this?” on top of rubbery bass guitar riffs and shimmering harpsichords that dissolve into a wall of stretched vocal manipulations and low sub-bass. Throughout, Is It Going To Get Any Deeper Than This? aims for a kind of psychedelic poolside take on disco, using the steady 120 bpm rhythmic chassis of the music as a launchpad for reverie rather than big room EDM bluster. With its coos and whispers and field recordings layered on top of crisp hi-hats and handclaps, “Trocadero” pays homage to the San Francisco discotheque whose DJs pioneered the slow and sensual afterhours Disco subgenre known as “sleaze.” While there are clubby moments, much of the mood is pastoral, more suited to mushroom trips in a forest than a basement rave. With its endless staircases of arpeggiating oscillators, the thirteen-minute “Sunwash” is the most overtly psychedelic piece and evokes the long-form synth-and-guitar workouts of ‘Rubycon’-era Tangerine Dream. The title can also operate as a dirty joke, and there’s a thread of pansexual eroticism that glides across the album, most notably in “Joybreath”, in which Brooklyn techno artist Rose E Kross intones Bataille’s text in French over throbbing low-end sub-bass, processed moans and vapor trails of synthesizer and saxophone. The record is not afraid to just throw down. “Deeper Than This?” delivers an upfront deep house track with a moody bassline that braids three different vocalists together: Angel Deradoorian sings the album title as a provocative question, Daniel Clark coos wordless soulful responses, and improvisational vocalist Id M Theft Able asks the album title question in a deep male voice over tight drum breaks and ghostly dub drop-outs. The album concludes with a cover of Willie Hutch’s “Now That It’s All Over” (which originally appeared on his soundtrack to “The Mack”); simplifying the chords and speeding up the tempo, Hutch’s funereal soul classic accelerates into an ecstatic peak before melting into whispers, harps, strings and a final acoustic guitar coda from Mark Lightcap. It’s a suitably soft landing for an album that reflects decades spent thinking back upon a moment in a DJ booth that passed in seconds. Sidestepping retro kitsch but paying homage to highly personal interpretations of disco such as Arthur Russell, Don Ray, Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band, and Mandré, or the jazz-funk of Creed Taylor and CTI records, its emphasis upon slowly morphing deep house grooves will also appeal to fans of DJ Sprinkles, Moodymann and Theo Parrish. At once catchy and spacey, poppy and perverse, Is It Going To Get Any Deeper Than This? shows a restless musician trying to square the circle of dance music, meditation, repetition, and change. The album was mastered by Heba Kadry and features cover design by Robert Beatty.

Listening to the Baltimore instrumental band Horse Lords’ mix of minimal art-rock and pan-African music is like looking at one of those optical illusions where you can’t tell if an image is static or moving, and if so, how fast. It can sound jarring and dissonant and almost purposefully ugly (“May Brigade”) but so trancelike in its repetitions that even its dissonances become beautiful (“Law of Movement”). And like Talking Heads or ’90s math-rock bands like Don Caballero, their kinship with punk isn’t just their intensity but their rebellion against the fantasy of rock music being something loose and free. They occasionally flirt with machines (the outro of “Mess Mend”), but their discipline is 100 percent human.

Horse Lords return with Comradely Objects, an alloy of erudite influences and approaches given frenetic gravity in pursuit of a united musical and political vision. The band’s fifth album doesn’t document a new utopia, so much as limn a thrilling portrait of revolution underway. Comradely Objects adheres to the essential instrumental sound documented on the previous four albums and four mixtapes by the quartet of Andrew Bernstein (saxophone, percussion, electronics), Max Eilbacher (bass, electronics), Owen Gardner (guitar, electronics), and Sam Haberman (drums). But the album refocuses that sound, pulling the disparate strands of the band’s restless musical purview tightly around propulsive, rhythmic grids. Comradely Objects ripples, drones, chugs, and soars with a new abandon and steely control.

Formed in the heart of London’s DIY punk scene, Big Joanie (featuring guitarist Stephanie Phillips, bassist Estella Adeyeri, and drummer Chardine Taylor-Stone) are a Black feminist punk band whose passionate live shows and moreish blend of nineties riot grrrl and synth-heavy post punk, have seen them steadily rise to become one of the most championed bands of the current era. Big Joanie are back with their sophomore record Back Home. Recorded at Hermitage Works Studios in North London, the album was produced and mixed by Margo Broom (Goat Girl, Fat White Family). Back Home is a dramatic leap forward for the band; the band build on their tightly knit, lo-fi punk formula to bring forth a collage of blazing guitars, down tempo dance punk, and melancholic strings that evoke the full depth of the band’s expansive art punk vision. The album title references a search for a place to call home, whether real or metaphysical. “We were really ruminating on the idea of a home and what it means,” explains Stephanie. “It’s about the different ideas of home, whether that’s here in the UK, back in Africa or the Caribbean, or a place that doesn’t really exist; it’s neither here nor there." The album’s strength lies in the band’s bold and varied new sound. Album opener ‘Cactus Tree’ is an eerie, gothic folk tale that tells the story of a woman waiting for her lover while a wall of euphoric harmonies and screaming feedback roll in the background. Lead single ‘Happier Still’ is a driving, Nirvana-influenced track that grapples with the idea of wanting to push through a depressive episode. Inspired equally by the melodic rock of Hüsker Dü and the mystical sensibilities of Stevie Nicks, closer ‘Sainted’ brings the club-ready sentiment of the 2018 single ‘Fall Asleep’ to its natural conclusion. Despite Big Joanie’s many accomplishments, there is so much more the band want to achieve and Back Home looks set to be the breeding ground for a new era of Big Joanie. With their boundary-breaking approach to punk, radical politics, and an appreciation for earworm melodies, Big Joanie are set to become important voices for a new generation of punks.

Persher is the new project from producers Arthur Cayzer (Pariah) and Jamie Roberts (Blawan). Both artists’ boundaryless solo releases have established them as two of the most inventive and versatile producers in electronic music, extending from chest-rattling rhythm workouts drenched in rumbling low-end to psychotropic soundscapes that blossom from synthesizer pads into tangible atmospheres. Their live collaboration Karenn recaptures the punk ethics and energy of early dance music pioneers, the duo improvising to create genuine moments of surprise and transcendence. Persher channels that same ingenuity and abandon into an exploration of heavier sonics, using unusual processes to sculpt sky-clawing riffs and bludgeoning rhythms on their searing debut Man With The Magic Soap. Balancing ferocious immediacy with meticulous sound design each track exudes the unchained energy and physicality of a live band despite its studio roots. The band elaborates: “Whilst making the record we tried hard to avoid thinking about how a band, playing in a room, might achieve a certain sound. And instead we used the instruments as source material in an attempt to produce new and interesting sounds that aren’t heard often in this type of music.” Using an amalgam of acoustic instruments and electronic equipment the duo warped original source material into bristling hooks and corrosive atmospheres, carving out an astonishingly heavy and unique sonic palette to inaugurate the project. The title track and opener “Man With The Magic Soap” emerges from a sea of writhing static, Cayzer’s lashing guitars cutting through the fog as Roberts’ vocals roll through like ominous thunderheads. “Calf” sinks back into the murk, before erupting into rolling waves of distortion and a blistering hardcore stomp on “Ten Tiny Teeth”. “World Sandwiches 2” stretches the former’s noxious electronics out into an even more colossal expanse, guitars filtered into scrambled alien transmissions in duet with Roberts’ vocals. “Face to Face Cloth” and “Mother Hen” delight in subtle intricacies, cycling through hypnotic loops that evolve slowly with almost imperceptible shifts, before collapsing into the decimating churn of “Patch of Wet Ground”. Much like labelmates The Body’s I Have Fought Against It, But I Can’t Any Longer, the resulting music exists in a kind of uncanny valley; both producers’ contributions metamorphosed into a document of a performance that never happened. Cayzer and Roberts’ debut as Persher is the culmination of a long creative partnership and friendship. Originally bonding over their love of heavy music when they first met in 2009, Man With The Magic Soap foregrounds those aesthetic influences that have always lurked in the shadows of their music, distilling decades of immersion in punk, hardcore and metal into a record that gleefully shirks categorization. Their debut draws distinct parallels between seemingly disparate genres, using electronic synthesis to harness a wild sonic adventurism informed by punk’s ethos. Through their application of their electronic music processes in a wildly different context Persher finds liberation, joy and caustic release in bleak sonics which side-step perceived genre constraints and carve out a unique space from the group’s inception.

Order the LP at Forced Exposure : bit.ly/3nApTYE In a trajectory full of about-faces, Music for Four Guitars splices the formal innovations of Bill Orcutt's software-based music into the lobe-frying, blown-out Fender hyperdrive of his most frenetic workouts with Corsano or Hoyos. And while the guitar tone here is resolutely treble-kicked — or, as Orcutt puts it, "a bridge pickup rather than a neck pickup record" — it still wades the same melodic streams as his previous LPs (yet, as Heraclitus taught us, that stream is utterly different the second time around). Although it's a true left-field listen, Music for Four Guitars is bizarrely meditative, a Bill Orcutt Buddha Machine, a glimpse of the world of icy beauty haunting the latitudes high above the Delta (down where the climate suits your clothes). I've written before of the immediate misapprehension that greeted Harry Pussy on their first tour with my band Charalambides — that this was a trio of crazed freaks spontaneously spewing sound from wherever their fingers or drumsticks happened to land — but I'll grant the casual listener a certain amount of confusion based on the early recorded evidence (and the fact that the band COULD be a trio of crazed freaks letting fly, as we learned from later tours). But to my ears, the precision and composition of their tracks were immediately apparent, as if the band was some sort of 5-D music box with its handle cranked into oblivion by a calculating organ grinder, running through musical maps as pre-ordained as the road to a Calvinist's grave. That organ grinder, it turns out, was Bill Orcutt, whose solo guitar output until 2022 has tilted decidedly towards improvisation, while his fetish for relentless, gridlike composition has animated his electronic music (c.f. Live in LA, A Mechanical Joey). Music for Four Guitars, apparently percolating since 2015 as a loosely-conceived score for an actual meatspace guitar quartet, is the culmination of years ruminating on classical music, Magic Band miniatures, and (perhaps) The League of Crafty Guitarists, although when the Reich-isms got tossed in the brew is anyone's guess. And Reichian (Steve, not Wilhelm) it is. The album's form is startlingly minimalist — four guitars, each consigned to a chattering melody in counterpoint, repeated in cells throughout the course of the track, selectively pulled in and out of the mix to build fugue-like drama over the course of 11 brief tracks. It's tempting to compare them to chamber music, but these pieces reflect little of the delicacy of Satie's Gymnopedies or Bach's Cantatas. Instead, they bulldoze their way through melodic content with a touch of the motorik romanticism of New Order or Bailter Space ("At a Distance"), but more often ("A Different View," "On the Horizon") with the gonad-crushing drive of Discipline-era Crimson, full of squared corners, coldly angled like Beefheart-via-Beat-Detective. Just to nail down the classical fetishism, the album features a download of an 80-page PDF score transcribed by guitarist Shane Parish. And while it'd be just as reproducible as a bit of code or a player piano roll, I can easily close my eyes and imagine folks with brows higher than mine squeezing into their difficult-listening-hour folding chairs at Issue Project Room to soak up these sounds being played by real people reading a printed score 50 years from now. And as much as I want to bomb anyone's academy, that feels like a warm fuzzy future to sink into. . — TOM CARTER

New Orleans no-wave punks Special Interest announce ‘Endure’, their third album and Rough Trade Records debut, for release on Friday, November 4th, 2022. Endure was self-produced and recorded at HighTower in New Orleans with engineering by James Whitten, mixed by Collin Dupuis (Angel Olsen, Yves Tumor, Lana Del Rey). Special Interest's songs recall the art rock of Sparks and The B-52s as much as politically-minded punk, and on “Midnight Legend,” the group is more overtly pop than ever before — making something fun during a time of frequent sadness became a central priority. But that doesn’t mean anything is simple or surface-level, with a darkness often treading beneath the smooth production. For as much as the band plays with dissonance, Maria Elena’s expressive guitar work and Nathan Cassiani’s grooving bass lines effortlessly weave together, and shade out the soundscape brought into existence by Alli Logout’s commanding vocal presence.

One of a pair of strong 2022 releases, Mary Halvorson’s *Amaryllis* finds her in a sextet lineup with Patricia Brennan’s vibraphone as the primary harmonic instrument and tone color. As a brass section and as individual soloists, trombonist Jacob Garchik and trumpeter Adam O’Farrill are superb in every respect. Bassist Nick Dunston and drummer Tomas Fujiwara achieve an ideal balance of driving, funky rhythm and sensitive support. On the latter half of the album, Halvorson adds the adventurous strings of the Mivos Quartet, offering a glimpse of the sounds she’s able to summon with Mivos on the full-length companion release, *Belladonna*. The breadth, detail, and sheer character of her writing on these releases is a marvel, attesting to her prodigious growth as an artist in this period.

Releases September 2022 All compositions by Sarah Davachi 'Alas, Departing' based on 'Alas Departynge is Ground of Woo' (Anon., ca 1450) Recorded between January and November 2021 carillon on 'Hall of Mirrors' performed and recorded by Tiffany Ng mezzo-soprano on 'Alas, Departing' performed and recorded by Jessika Kenney contralto on 'Alas, Departing' performed and recorded by Dorothy Berry violin on 'Icon Studies I' performed and recorded by Johnny Chang viola on 'Icon Studies I' performed and recorded by Andrew McIntosh cello on 'Icon Studies I' performed and recorded by Judith Hamann quartertone bass flute and alto Renaissance recorder on 'Icon Studies I' performed by Rebecca Lane, recorded by Sam Dunscombe violins on 'Icon Studies II' performed by Mira Benjamin and Gordon MacKay, recorded by Simon Limbrick viola on 'Icon Studies II' performed by Bridget Carey, recorded by Simon Limbrick cello on 'Icon Studies II' performed by Anton Lukoszevieze, recorded by Simon Limbrick trombone on 'En Bas Tu Vois' performed by Mattie Barbier, recorded by Sarah Davachi quartertone bass flute on 'O World and the Clear Song' performed by Rebecca Lane, recorded by Sam Dunscombe electric organ (on 'Hall of Mirrors), reed organ (on 'Icon Studies I'), pipe organs (on 'Vanity of Ages', 'Harmonies in Bronze', 'Harmonies in Green', and 'O World and the Clear Song'), synthesizer (on 'Icon Studies I'), and bell plates (on 'O World and the Clear Song') performed and recorded by Sarah Davachi Mixed by Sarah Davachi at Alms Vert in Los Angeles, CA, USA Mastered by Sean McCann

The latest release from nine-piece folk group Shovel Dance Collective, orbiting around the concept of water. Combining on-site documentation of traditional songs, folk tunes and field recordings in long-form sound-collages. The results lie somewhere between folk music, music concrete and acoustic ecology. Released collaboratively by Memorials of Distinction and Double Dare. Tracklist - I: The Bold Fisherman, Thames waters off Greenland Dock, The Weary Whaling Grounds, junkyard work next to Dartford Creek, rigging and reeds at Erith Marina, The Bold Benjamin, waterfowl on the Darent, The Herrings Head, water pump in Ladywell, Waves on the Shore, a Creek on the Llŷn Peninsula II: In Charlestown there Dwelled a Lass, Camera flash on the Deptford foreshore, The Rolling Waves, crashing spring waves by the Cutty Sark, Lovely on the Water, lapping waters by Tower Hill, Pump Organ Bellows being pushed by hand, The River Chess Trickles, Watermans Dance III: Tourists feed gulls outside City Hall, The Bold Fisherman, ferry east from London Bridge, A Fishermans’ Song for Attracting Seals / The Full Rigged Ship, clergy of Southwark Cathedral and St Magnus the Martyr bless the Thames, the organ at St Mark’s Clerkenwell, a fence at North Greenwich sings in the wind, distant cranes at Silvertown, The Wild Goose Shanty, slapping Thames water under a bridge, The Drowned Sailor, crashing waves at Deptford foreshore, Waterfall and Rain on the River Chess, Captain Kidd’s Farewell to the Seas IV: Waters of the River Ravensbourne beside Elverson Road DLR Station, Lowlands, The Cruel Grave, pump organs at Nick’s House, The Grey Cock, Dan wading through Elverson Road DLR Station Tunnel, Ova Canje Water

Stockholm-based Kali Malone is best-known for music that combines the rigor of electro-acoustic composition with the ruminative atmosphere of drone, doom metal, and medieval music—associations, no doubt, reinforced by her work with the pipe organ, which tends to put people in more primitive states of mind. As with a lot of her work (not to mention that of minimalist forebears like Eliane Radigue and La Monte Young), the process behind *Living Torch* is complex—pre-modern intonation, contemporary adaptations of Indian drone boxes. But the result is naturalistic and easy to listen to, conjuring dark hills, smoke-filled voids, and a pervasive sense of gloom that, while not threatening, point to forces and feelings modern life doesn’t tend to make time for. Listen loud and/or alone.

Living Torch, through its unique structural form and harmonic material, is a bold continuation of Kali Malone’s demanding and exciting body of work, while opening new perspectives and increasing the emotional potential of the music tenfold. As such, Living Torch is a major new piece by the composer and adds a significant milestone to an already fascinating repertoire. Departing from the pipe organ that Malone’s music is most notable for, Living Torch features a complex electroacoustic ensemble. Leafing through recordings from conventional instruments like the trombone and bass clarinet to more experimental machines like the boîte à bourdon, passing through sinewave generators and Éliane Radigue’s ARP 2500 synthesizer. Living Torch weaves its own history, its own genealogy, and that of its author. It extends her robust structural approach to a liberated palette of timbre. Living Torch was initially commissioned by GRM for its legendary loudspeaker orchestra, the Acousmonium, and premiered in its complete multichannel form at the Grand Auditorium of Radio France in a concert entirely dedicated to the artist. Composed at GRM studios in Paris between 2020-2021, Living Torch is a work of great intensity, an oeuvre-monde that is singularly placed at the crossroads of instrumental writing and electroacoustic composition. Living Torch proceeds from multiple lineages, including early modern music, American minimalism, and musique concrète. It’s a work as much turned towards exploring justly tuned harmony and canonic structures as towards the polyphony of unique timbres, the scaling of dynamic range, and the revelation of sound qualities. GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales), the pioneering institution of electroacoustic, acousmatic, and musique concrète, has been a unique laboratory for sonorous research since 1958. Witnessing the extreme vitality of the music championed by GRM, the Portraits GRM record series extends and expands this momentum with Kali Malone’s Living Torch. The French label-partner Shelter Press is proud to continue the collaboration with GRM, which Peter Rehberg of Editions MEGO set the foundation for in 2012.

Somewhere between the literal meaning of psychedelia as the revealing of the mind, and the literal meaning of apocalypse as the tearing away of the veil, this record stands, pulsing, totally blown out. Phase Corrected may be Shit and Shine at its nastiest and most brutal, but it is also––and by virtue of that fact––Shit and Shine at its most transcendent. Craig Clouse, aka Shit and Shine, has been called a genius and a maverick by the Wire. And the Quietus says he’s “uninterested in the self-imposed restrictions of genre.” From danceable electro-psychedelia to grinding, confrontational noise, Shit and Shine has, since 2004, made a practice of evading genre conventions. And the same goes for Austin-based Clouse’s explorations via USA/Mexico, his project with King Coffey from Butthole Surfers. But there is a common thread here, a sense of consistency that speaks to more than just bucking tradition. In fact, in all this experimentation and genre-bending, Shit and Shine seems to be meditating on and celebrating the very existence of the underground. The meditation and celebration continues on his latest full-length, Phase Corrected, an LP commissioned by The Garrote. Clouse wields glacial, staggeringly heavy riffs, industrial drums, and electronics that sound as though they’ve been put through a meat grinder. Or perhaps it all sounds like it’s coming from the basement. One can practically smell the cheap fog machine and the bodies milling about, maybe writhing. But like the most transcendent moments that can be found in the midst of milling or writhing through sweaty basements, propylene glycol coating the nasal cavities, Phase Corrected stands out as something literally psychedelic, perhaps literally apocalyptic. Phase Corrected is the sound of that moment, in that basement, when everything becomes either just too much or just the perfect amount, the moment when a complete saturation of the senses becomes an absolute falling away of everything else. EU/UK version at Riot Season Records with a variant cover. Garrote version available in limited quantities at Evil Greed in EU/UK

Marking the 50th release-proper on SVBKVLT, we are excited to present ‘Mutate’, a new album by ABADIR. ‘Mutate’ started when I was trying out Maqsoum loops at high bpm blended with Jungle tracks during one of my DJ sets. I noticed that the Maqsoum rhythm complements the Amen break in a refreshing way. The first time I actually tried integrating both in my productions using “call and response” was when Ice_Eyes asked me to remix one of their tracks. The result was the closest to what I had always imagined to be my own club sound. I set out to make an album using the same technique with some of my favorite club genres. My aim was to mutate those genres, collecting different types of Arabic rhythms and cooking them with Jungle, Jersey Club, Reggaeton, Footwork, etc. It’s an irreversible equation, like a chemical reaction, where the output is a melted piece which cannot be broken down into its separate inputs. Instead of ‘deconstructing’ or generally looking beyond club music, I made some fatty, straight up dance floor music.’ – ABADIR ------ AِBADIR (Rami Abadir) is a music producer and sound designer born in Cairo, Egypt. His work focuses on experimental, club, glitch and ambient music, and he’s one half of the duo 0N4B.

Porridge Radio are one of the most vital new voices in alternative music, having gone from being darlings of the DIY underground to one of the UK’s most thrilling bands in the space of less than a year. Their barbed wit, lacerating intensity and potent blend of art-rock, indie-pop and post-punk sounds like little else around, and led their 2020 album Every Bad to make the nominees list for the coveted Mercury Music Prize. For frontperson Dana Margolin, drummer Sam Yardley, keyboardist Georgie Stott and bassist Maddie Ryall – who met in the seaside town of Brighton and formed Porridge Radio in 2014 – global recognition has been a long time coming, after years of self-releasing and music booking their own tours. In those eight years, Dana has gained a reputation as one of the most magnetic band leaders around with an ability to “devastate you with an emotional hurricane, then blindside you with a moment of bittersweet humour” (NME). But if Every Bad established Dana’s lemon-sharp, heart-on-sleeve honesty, Porridge Radio’s third album takes that to anthemic new heights. Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder To The Sky is the sound of someone in their late twenties facing down the disappointment of love, and life, and figuring out how to exist in the world, without claiming any answers. It’s also catchy as hell. The title – which was partly inspired by a collage by the British surrealist Eileen Agar – speaks to the “joy, fear and endlessness” of the past few years. Dana’s songwriting and delivery is more confident, with the emotional incisiveness of artists like Mitski, Sharon Van Etten and Big Thief. Though it’s softer and more playful in places than Every Bad’s blowtorch ferocity, there are moments of powerful catharsis, ones that occur when you allow the full intensity of an experience to take hold. In places, that no-holds-barred rawness is on a par with bands like Deftones (their panoramic metal is a key touchstone of Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder To The Sky) or American emo, elevated by Yardley’s ambitious instrumentals. “I kept saying that I wanted everything to be 'stadium-epic' - like Coldplay,” says Dana. With Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder To The Sky, Porridge Radio have distilled their myriad influences down like they’re flipping through their own singular dial: dreamy yet intense, gentle but razor-edged, widescreen and yet totally intimate. People tell Dana that Every Bad got them through their cancer diagnosis, their break-up, their isolated lockdown. But with their new album, the band are taking a step up and spring-boarding into a bright, exciting unknown.

Songs created in the shadow of terror and loss, but that crackle and pop with defiance Fear Fear is a record made for agitating and dancing, for heart and soul, for here, now and tomorrow. It’s a record that explores juxtaposition; that of life and death, acceptance and isolation, environment and humanity, hope and despair, the real world and the digital world. That top to bottom rigour, the complete vision is what makes the second album from Working Men’s Club such a stunning and unique achievement. Their critically acclaimed self-titled debut album, released in summer 2020, was the sound of singer and songwriter Syd Minsky-Sargeant processing a teenage life in Todmorden in the Upper Calder Valley. He was 16 when he wrote some of those songs, now 20, he had to get up and out of the Valley. “The first album was mostly a personal documentation lyrically, this is a blur between personal and a third-person perspective of what was going on.” Fear Fear documents the last two years. Yes, there is bleakness – but there is also hope and empathy. “I like the contrast of it being happy, uplifting music and really dark lyrics. It’s not a minimal record, certainly compared to the first one. That’s because there’s been a lot more going on that needed to be said.” Making the busy feel finessed and the dreadful feel magical – Fear Fear manages those feats, and then some. Or, as Syd Minksy-Sargeant puts it: “We just set out to make the best-sounding album we could.”

Welsh producer/vocalist Kelly Lee Owens released her ultra-personal second album, *Inner Song*, in August 2020, in the thick of the pandemic. With any plans to tour the record scuttled, that winter she managed to decamp from her London home to Oslo—just before borders were closing again—for some uninterrupted studio time. Much like *Inner Song*’s rather short 35-day gestation, after a month of work with Norwegian avant-garde/noise producer Lasse Marhaug, Owens emerged with *LP.8*, her most experimental, liberating record yet. On her previous full-lengths—this is actually her third, not her eighth—Owens alternated between deep, plodding techno tracks and moody synth compositions, over which her lithe vocals floated effortlessly. But on *LP.8*, the contrasts—between the earthly and the ethereal—are felt more deeply. The opener, “Release,” plays like a lost Chris & Cosey cut, its crunchy precision finding that sweet spot between industrial and early techno. On the New Age-y “Anadlu,” “S.O (2),”and “Olga,” hints of Enya’s influence shine through, but the songs’ gauzy atmospheres are often counterweighted by brooding undertones. “Nana Piano” is a melancholy solo piano sketch, unfettered except for some gentle birdsong in the background. But the closing “Sonic 8” is Owens at her most direct and visceral: She channels all sorts of frustrations while intoning, “This is a wake-up call/This is an emergency” over a beat so skeletal and abrasive that it sounds like a frayed wire swinging dangerously close to the bathtub.

Born out of a series of studio sessions, LP.8 was created with no preconceptions or expectations: an unbridled exploration into the creative subconscious. After releasing her sophomore album Inner Song in the midst of the pandemic, Kelly Lee Owens was faced with the sudden realisation that her world tour could no longer go ahead. Keen to make use of this untapped creative energy, she made the spontaneous decision to go to Oslo instead. There was no overarching plan, it was simply a change of scenery and a chance for some undisturbed studio time. It just so happened that her flight from London was the last before borders were closed once again. The blank page project was underway. Arriving to snowglobe conditions and sub-zero temperatures, she began spending time in the studio with esteemed avant-noise artist Lasse Marhaug. Together, they envisioned making music somewhere in between Throbbing Gristle and Enya, artists who have had an enduring impact on Kelly’s creative being. In doing so, they paired tough, industrial sounds with ethereal Celtic mysticism, creating music that ebbs and flows between tension and release. One month later, Kelly called her label to tell them she had created something of an outlier, her ‘eighth album’. Lasse Marhaug is known for hundreds of avant-noise releases, previously working with the likes of Merzbow, Sunn O))) and Jenny Hval, for whom he produced her acclaimed albums Apocalypse, Girl, Blood Bitch and The Practice Of Love. A label mate of Kelly’s, Marhaug has recorded for Smalltown Supersound since 1997. Welsh electronic artist Kelly Lee Owens released her eponymous debut album in 2017 and followed this up with 2020’s Inner Song. She has collaborated with Björk, St. Vincent and John Cale. In April, she returns with LP.8.