I mean COME ON. How much insane talent can you pack into a single track. It’s amazing, because obviously it is. Absolutely ridiculous.
Author: The Predatory Wasp
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D’sinatra – Virgil Abloh
I can find out absolutely no information whatsoever about D’sinatra online except that’s he’s from Toronto, but this is a fucking brilliant, moody, atmospheric hip-hop track that more people should be listening to, so here you go.
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Poolside – High Season (with Buscabulla)
High Season is the title (and final) track from Poolside’s new album which landed last week, and features a load of pretty diverse collaborators including Satin Jackets, everyone’s favourite garage OG Todd Edwards and – most excitingly for me – Buscabulla, who can basically do wrong as far as I’m concerned. This is a perfect lazy summer BBQ jam, so couldn’t have been timed better for anyone living the UK.
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Loscil – Lumina
Loscil has been making consistently brilliant, deeply atmospheric electronic music for two decades now, and over the course of 15 or so albums has established himself as a producer with a clear and precise vision. Lumina is taken from his latest album, Clara, which came out last week, and is a perfect example of his patient, haunting approach to production, with reassuringly warm, sweeping pads accompanied by a winding, bubbling synth line that both soothes and invigorates.
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Paper Dollhouse – Sapphires
Paper Dollhouse have been responsible for a staggering amount – and variety – of extraordinary music over the years, so it’s a real shame the project is coming to an end. Released today, Claiming The Sapphire To Liquid Return is a collection of previously unreleased or rare recordings that acts as the final statement: a moving epitaph for a band that I genuinely love and will miss. Despite essentially being a collection of scattered, disparate recordings, it holds together remarkably well, sounds like a properly coherent album, and includes this title track which has to be in the running for the most heartbreakingly beautiful song I’ve heard all year.
https://paperdollhouse.bandcamp.com/album/claiming-the-sapphire-to-liquid-return
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Eager Atom – Ambient I
Eager Atom is the latest musical project from Dutch producer and composer Gydo Keijzer, and Ambient I is taken from his new album Extrastatecraft. It’s a powerfully cinematic slice of ambient that could just as easily soundtrack the most unsettlingly poignant moments of a lo-fi Adam Curtis’s documentary as it could the final, cathartic , “tears in the rain” scene of a multi-million dollar sci-fi epic. Both of which are compliments, just in case I lost you at “ambient”.
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Cody Uhler – Fairy Tech
My obsession with video-game inspired/evoking music continues unabated, and Cody Uhler’s debut single Fair Tech is the latest in a long line of tracks to scratch that particular itch. This is taken from his forthcoming LP Darbo’s Island, which Uhler bills as “the greatest video game that never existed”, and like the very best video games, it’s fun, slightly puzzling and relentlessly addictive.
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Moomin – For Willow
Moomin’s wonderful debut album The Story About You came out a literal entire decade ago, in what seems at this distance to be a time so far removed from my (and possibly the world’s) current circumstances that I can’t be completely sure it wasn’t a dream. In fact I’m pretty sure the only thing that hasn’t changed in that time is the music Moomin makes, which is still dreamy, drifty, dusty and hugely evocative. In my head this track is dedicated to his newborn baby – a fittingly beautiful tribute to a new life entering its first stages of consciousness – a flight of fancy so fitting I’m not even going to bother to check if it’s true.
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Erika de Casier – Make My Day
Erika De Casier has now released two albums that sound like nothing else out there. Despite wearing their 90s r&b influences proudly on their sleeves, both 2019’s Essentials and the newly released Sensational (how’s that for a pair of chest-beating titles?) manage to forge new paths for the kind of introspective, moody but ultimately easily accessible pop that I am bang into. Make My Day is an early highlight – that haunting little synthy wail at the start of every bar, I mean come ON! – but it’s all ultimately brilliant.
Kenyan artist KMRU follows up the two fantastic albums he released last year with another cut from the same exquisite cloth. Logue came out last week and is another gorgeous, delicate electronic album that explores ambient experimentalism, almost approaching beatless techno with some of its tracks. 11 is meditatively percussive, with spine-tingling synths and rich warm pads creating an intensely cosmic – but also firmly grounded – atmosphere, like a caveman staring longingly at the stars in search of the divine.
The Predatory Wasp 