The Predatory Wasp
“Free-flowing jazz improvisation” is not generally a musical description that will get me reaching for the headphones, but there’s a melancholy quality about Alfa Mist’s new album Variations that appeals to me. Cycles itself meanders around pleasantly for less than two minutes with a bassline strongly reminiscent of Echo Beach, so maybe its the 80s nostalgia – rather than any overt jazziness – that’s got me hooked.
Cannons defined the summer of 2022 for me, when barely a day went past without me listening to at least part of Fever Dream, thanks in large part to it being one of the few albums my kids were happy to listen to in the car in its entirety. So with the sun starting to remind us of its existence, here’s a shimmery new Cannons single for me to relentlessly overplay. Hazy dayz.
Sufjan! Sufers! The Big Suf! Yesterday our founding father announced a new album, Reflections, a studio recording of his score for Justin Beck’s ballet, performed by pianists Timo Andres and Conor Hanick. To be honest, I don’t really like this very much – all a bit ‘jazzy’ for my tastes – but if Sufjan releases, this blog must report. Hopefully they’ll be some sad bits on the full album than I can cherrypick.
Woozy hip-hip, courtesy of, well, ALL the artists. Given soundgood is less than three minutes long I’m not entirely sure what all these dudes are adding – a sigh here, a cymbal crash there – but it’s really lovely regardless.
American singer-songwriter, poet, and photographer Thomas Meluch aka Benoît Pioulard put out his latest album last month, Eidetic: a word denoting the ability to recall mental images with extraordinarily rich precision. To record much of the album, Meluch holed up in a a cabin in rural Maine with a bit of percussion, a couple of Fender electrics, and a parlor guitar made by his friend. You can sense both the isolation and natural splendour throughout Eidetic, which ranges from Stars of The Lid-esque ambience of tracks like Where To to more structured, vocal-led pieces.
I expect some of you are fairly fragile after a long, sunny Bank Holiday weekend of ill-advised excess, so here’s some lovely floaty folk for you courtesy of Kate Stables’ This Is The Kit, who also announced that her new album Careful Of Your Keepers will be coming this June on Rough Trade Records. Feel better?
Last week we had the creator of one of the all-time great remixes, and today we have the man he remixed, proving that they are completely incapable of doing anything too far away from one another. Taken from his new album Crystal Vision, Bibled is glorious, soaring, soft-focus breaks that Mixmag would doubtless describe as “tailor-made for the afters”.
Thunderous modular techno from Sibel Koçer, AKA JakoJako for you today, taken from her Verve EP which is well worth checking out in its entirety, comprising four distinct tracks taking in a range of influences from heady dub to soaring trance.
I posted about the lead single from this album, Let The Moon Be A Planet – a collaboration between guitarist and songwriter Steve Gunn and pianist and composer David Moore of Bing & Ruth – back in January, and was very much looking forward to its arrival. It landed last week, and hasn’t disappointed. The album initially took form over a series of remote sessions and was completed once Gunn and Moore got together in Hudson, New York. If you’re feeling in any way stressed at all, this will help.
https://stevegunn.bandcamp.com/album/reflections-vol-1-let-the-moon-be-a-planet
A hefty dose of Anatolian funk-rock for you here, courtesy of Amsterdam-based Altin Gün whose experimentations with Turkish folk songs have seen them meander through various genres over their last few releases. Su Siziyor is taken from their new album Aşk, which is packed full of languid basslines and hazy atmospherics a la a slightly more vigorous Khruangbin.
The Predatory Wasp 