The Predatory Wasp
Newfoundland-raised, Montreal-based Aaron Powell returns as Fog Lake with Bogus, the lead single from his forthcoming seventh album Hollowbody. The new LP continues a project that’s spent well over a decade finding interesting ways to make beautifully worn-out indie rock, with Bogus landing pleasantly between the stoned, shambling warmth of Kurt Vile and the more personal yearning of Adrianne Lenker.
To continue along the distinctly trance-themed path of recent selections, next up we have Maxime Denuc and his excellent new LP Club Imperiale. Named after a now-shuttered nightspot that overlooked the beach on Italy’s picturesque Tuscan coast, the album is framed as a work of speculative historical fiction, imagining a point of creative symbiosis between the Catholic church and the ecstatic dancefloors of the early ’90s. In simpler terms it occupies one of my favourite sub-genres, seemingly set up to answer the question: “what if trance but minus drums plus reverb?”.
Even arguably the most credible techno producer ever, King Doz, is now making trance. WAKE UP PEOPLE!
Nearly arrives two years after Nathan Jenkins’ previous album as Bullion, Affection, and is full of the kind of yearning bedroom pop I really enjoy, landing halfway between Bayonne and John Moods. And if you don’t know either of those references, shame on you. Go and read every page of this blog, immediately.
Space Afrika, the Manchester/Berlin-based duo of Joshua Tarelle Reid and Joshua Inyang, make raw, intensely detailed, visceral music with shades of ambient, trip-hop, techno, and modern classical, drawing spacious urban dubscapes from the contours of their city. Their new album Quiet Storm is the duo’s highly anticipated follow-up to their 2021 LP on Dais Records, expanding on its predecessor’s sound and scale in pretty much every way.
Miyaxx is the duo of Lea Thomas and John Thayer, who have been making music together in various forms for more than a decade. Their album Hold Your Ego Out Like a Sun brings Thomas’s voice, songs and open-tuned guitar together with Thayer’s percussion, field recordings and electronic production. There’s a folk record at its centre, though it often takes unexpected turns into various different genres. But above all, it is achingly beautiful. And sad; very sad.
https://miyaxx.bandcamp.com/album/hold-your-ego-out-like-a-sun
Astel is a new alias from Addison Groove, also known as Headhunter, an artist whose work has shaped key moments in UK electronic music for over two decades. With Shards, he steps away from the rhythmic intensity of the dancefloor, turning instead towards stillness, atmosphere and a more contemplative way of listening. This belongs to the increasingly popular “producer who used to make techno bangers and now is too old to go to clubs and makes ambient” sub-genre, and is fast becoming my favourite.
https://biofieldrecords.bandcamp.com/album/astel-shards-biofield-002
New Agnes Obel album today, her first in six years, and it’s sent me back to seeing her at the Barbican about 15 years ago, when I remember being completely drawn into how sparse and strange her music could feel while still somehow filling a room that size.
The Meaning of Flowers is built from piano, strings, her voice and all these small details that seem to appear around the edges, and I’ve only had a first listen so far, but it already feels like one of those records where the more interesting things will probably reveal themselves in due course. It’s very lovely.
“When we say feral we mean killable and ungrievable; an animal for whom violent deaths are a possible outcome; that can be culled by slow poison, trapped and left to knaw its own leg off; that is worthless unless domesticated.
“When we say feral we point to an ideology of extermination and control.
“When we say feral we mean resisting
“When we say feral we mean unapologetic.”
This is a long way from from the music I usually gravitate towards, but I find it incredibly hypnotic. Billy String is, I’m reliably told, a leading figure in the modern bluegrass revival, pushing the genre into wider territory by combining traditional flatpicking and Appalachian roots music with psychedelia, rock, country and the extended improvisation of jam-band culture. I really like it!
