The Predatory Wasp
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!
Carmen Villain’s new album Memoria is built around the idea of sound as memory, with old recordings pulled apart, processed and folded back into new ones. The result sits somewhere between dub, ambient music, free jazz and there’s loads to get lost in across the record, but Blue is the one I keep coming back to. Flutes and clarinet drift in and out, weird little electronic details flicker around the edges, and everything seems to exist in this strange, suspended space. It’s hazy, immersive, tense and really quite unsettling.
Windy and Carl join fellow Michigan duo Optigan Conservatory for an album of blurry guitars, electric piano and synths, recorded with very little planning and, seemingly, a few sounds nobody remembers actually making. ‘Timelines’ is a lovely little stretch of deep-space drift, with soft chords slowly folding into one another and the whole thing hovering somewhere between ambient music and a half-remembered sci-fi soundtrack. Hazy, slightly spooky, very nice indeed.
https://windyandcarl.bandcamp.com/album/windy-carl-meet-optigan-conservatory
L’Rain’s fourth album fata morgana is described in the press notes as “a fearless reckoning with self-doubt and the mirages of belonging and alienation that shape Taja Cheek’s lived experience”, and by me as “something I haven’t had the chance to listen to in full yet”, but based on the strength of the phenomenal lead single elmyra I’m going to enjoy my time with it.
John Beltran released one of the years best album’s back in February, Canada, and has another, Sunrise and the Life We Live, due in October for Music For Dreams. If that’s still not enough dreamy electronics for you, yesterday From Detroit From Love reissued his 2020 EP, from which this arpeggiated delight is taken.
In late 2024, J.WLSN and Liam Keenan recorded a short session with David Akerman at Lost Sound studio in Marrickville, Sydney. At the time, the pair were working as art and music curators at a major Sydney art museum. Both had long made music independently, but a collaborative record between them was overdue.
Country / The County is the first result of that collaboration, drawing on a shared love of longform, expansive and distorted sound. Built from subtle guitars, modular synth pads and sample-based loops, its reverberant compositions explore the landscapes and environments that shaped both artists growing up. Perhaps it’s lazy to compare this to Stars Of The Lid – not all drifting ambient needs to sound like them – but this has enough depth and emotional heft to justify it.
I wonder if anyone will write about Hana Stretton’s new album tiarn without mentioning Grouper? Not me, that’s for sure! Comparisons are apt, along with a leaning towards the creaky, plaintive instrumentation of Corina Repp, but while Liz Harris’s musical world can often feel claustrophobic and paranoid, Streton sounds open, almost joyful, even when her compositions are hinting towards the skeletal conjured on standout track Right Whale.
I’m jumping aboard the hype train with this as everyone seems to be singing the praises of mary in the junkyard, but this song in particular, from their debut album Role Model Hermit, is really worth your time. Big Thief comparison’s abound, but I can hear more of the ethereal Scandi-pop of bands like Lowly and Wildhart in this one. The whole album is pretty great, too.
https://maryinthejunkyard.bandcamp.com/album/role-model-hermit
I have fond memories of being driven around Cornwall listening to Carpenters Gold on repeat, and this, from Shannon Lay’s new album Past The Veil, is currently making me feel extremely nostalgic for those bucolic golden hours.
This came out back in May, but it’s new to me and may well be to you as well. The collaborative project of Lankum’s Ian Lynch alongside George Brennan, One Leg One Eye output could mildly be described bleak and foreboding, with the inimitable Boomkat describing their new LP CRONE as “imagining Celtic folklore as molasses slow, rust-caked transcendent doom”.
The Predatory Wasp 