The Predatory Wasp
Meticulously assembled from a good 15 years’ worth of source material, Cong Burn boss John Howes’ second Paperclip Minimiser album takes as its source material an unreleased album that Howes engineered in various locations across the north of England, starting way back in 2011. The result is a sparse but satisfying mix of bass, techno and drone, with A2 a glitchy highlight.
Yaya Bey’s new album Fidelity is a companion piece to last year’s do it afraid. Where the previous record was framed by grief, Fidelity pushes further, examining how that grief is processed and centres on what Bey describes as the “Three Deaths”: personal loss following her father’s passing, the erosion of community through displacement and fragmentation, and a wider loss of innocence tied to cultural and societal shifts. Built around a light, disco-funk rhythm “Forty Days” is a stand-out moment: a meditation on transition and mourning and drawing on the belief of a 40-day passage into the ancestral realm.
Penelope Trappes A Requiem was one of the best albums of last year. Since then she’s released an expanded edition with A Requiem: AEternum and more recently a remix LP OPVS NOVUM: A Requiem Reworked featuring new interpretations from artists like Julia Holter, Dania and Saint Etienne, whose dreamy, emotionally-charged take on Platinum landed last week.
https://penelopetrappes.bandcamp.com/album/opvs-novum-a-requiem-reworked
+3 is somewhat of a shift for Samba Jean-Baptiste, still hazy and inward-looking but with more shape than his debut, leaning into blurred guitars, soft-focus vocals and loose, drifting arrangements and pulling from the same orbit as artists like Dean Blunt or Frank Ocean. There’s definitely a bit of drift over the album’s running time, but when it connects, as on Fatale, it hits real hard.
Just the other day I was listening to Kelela’s excellent live album In The Blue Light from last year and wondering when we’d get some new music, and POW!… here it is. idea 1 is indeed fairly simple and stripped down, but not as disposable as the throwaway name suggests, and perhaps signals a shift in her sound, throwing in distorted, shoegaze-y guitars alongside her familiarly breathy vocal.
“‘idea 1’ is about what it feels like to exist in this climate — the weight of being expected to witness, absorb, and speak truth at a time when the world feels like it’s unraveling. That’s a particular kind of burden Black women know intimately. Co-writing it with my best friend Janiva Ellis, hearing Oscar [Scheller]’s production give it shape, and then watching 91 Rules bring that tension to life visually feels like the beginning of a much larger conversation I’m ready to have.”
Xylitol aka producer and DJ Catherine Backhouse shifts up the refinement and musical breadth for her second album Blumenfantasie, which landed earlier this month on Planet Mu. Blumenfantasie draws heavily on the work of Sarajevo-born minimal synth composer Miaux, whom she recognises as “a kindred spirit in terms of her directness and melancholy, as well as her lightness of touch”, rolling through immersive jungle workouts with the occasional dip into beatless ambience.
Some slightly uncharacteristic (for this blog) jangly indie for you today courtesy of Snail Mail from her new album Ricochet. Not sure if it’s due to the fact that it’s Friday and the end of a pretty hectic week, but it’s been making me smile all morning. “Misery feels safe to write about because I am good at it,” she says, “but I’m not bathing in my own agony anymore.” Quite. And “agony” especially feels far removed from these effervescent songs, on the surface at least.
The ambient artist on the arresting simplicity of a song by Myriam Gendron
The premise of One Track Mind is pretty simple: I ask artists to pick one track that means a lot to them – either something they’ve discovered recently, something that’s been with them for years, or one that reminds them of a specific time in their life or career – and tell me what makes it so special to them. I get to talk to the artists I love, and they get to talk about the artists they love. Love all round!
Brad Deschamps, recording as anthéne, is a Canadian ambient composer whose work leans into stillness, tone and emotional weight. His music draws on soft drones, field recordings and minimal melodic fragments to build pieces that feel immersive without becoming overworked, with releases across labels such as Home Normal, Whitelabrecs and Past Inside the Present.
His latest release is a collaborative album with Alessio Bertuzzi aka Far Away Nebraska, great plains, which leans heavily into the ‘country ambient’ aesthetic, and has been a daily source of morning calm for me over the past several weeks.
For his One Track Mind, Brad has picked out a deeply meditative song from a celebrated Canadian musician and songwriter.
anthéne on Myriam Gendron – Solace
“Though I’m constantly seeking out and listening to new music, when I think of the last decade or so there are a few artists that really stick out as being extremely important to me. Myriam Gendron is one of them. Her discography is all so amazing, but this song “Solace” from Not So Deep As a Well is one that I return to very often. The guitar playing bares a passing similarity to another song I almost chose for this, “Sleepwalker” by Julie Byrne, (another one of those artists whose work I’ve spent a lot of time with in the last 10 years or so).
“The combination of her beautiful guitar playing and the words of Dorothy Parker is really arresting, and it’s also just a very novel idea to set Dorothy’s poetry to music. To me the song/poem seems to be about grief, letting yourself feel sadness and not trying to hastily move on:
There was a rose that faded young;
I saw its shattered beauty hung
Upon a broken stem.
I heard them say, “What need to care
With roses budding everywhere?”
I did not answer them.
There was a bird, brought down to die;
They said, “A hundred fill the sky-
What reason to be sad?”
There was a girl, whose lover fled;
I did not wait, the while they said,
“There’s many another lad.”
“Having seen her perform live a few times, her music on record and in person feels very warm and inviting despite being so minimal and somewhat somber, and I take great comfort in it. Perhaps most inspiring is this song is from Myriam’s first album, recorded alone in her apartment with no prior knowledge of sound engineering, and to have composed and recorded something this beautiful is really something.”
anthéne & Far Away Nebraska – great plains is out now on Home Normal
I’m not even going to attempt to interpret the cryptic madness of the Bandcamp description of this track, but any new material from Voice Actor is very welcome. Hopefully this is part of a wider forthcoming project… but who knows.
more eaze is the moniker of Brooklyn-based composer, orchestrator, and multi-instrumentalist, mari rubio, and her new album sentence structure in the country is a collection of compositions across ambient and experimental pop, each beautifully realised, self-contained worlds, with influences stretching from country to jazz. The album’s compositions evolved over a number of years, with each updated version informed by both the context of rubio’s performances and the musicians she chose to create them with.
https://moreeaze.bandcamp.com/album/sentence-structure-in-the-country
The Predatory Wasp 