The Predatory Wasp
benny! is one of the breeziest songs I’ve heard all year: bouncy, chunky drums, hazy background melodies and Khalil flowing effortlessly over everything. In and out in under two and a half minutes leaving a dopey smile plastered all over my big stupid face. More of this please.
The first track Nathan Micay ever finished was a jungle bootleg of Sufjan Stevens, so with credentials like that his place on this blog was pretty much assured before I’d heard even a bar of his new album The World I’m Going To Hell For. Happily, it’s absolutely brilliant, and A Razor’s Edge Requiem is an early highlight, blending Selected Ambient Works-era Aphex pads over thunderous broken beats and fizzing synth lines, before dissolving into a finale so moving it makes we want to spend the rest of the day listening to it on loop while gazing at little fluffy clouds.
Sudanese-American artist Dua Saleh started off their artistic career as a poet before releasing their debut single First Take back in 2017. smut is one of the tracks on their new EP, ROSETTA, which dropped last week. It’s an intoxicating pop-r&b-electronic hybrid: unpredictable and constantly shifting in tone and style over the course of its four-minute running time, and I absolutely love it.
While touring her last album There’s Always A Glimmer, Gia Margaret lost her voice, forcing her to prematurely end the tour and spending several weeks at home to recuperate. Initially removing herself from from music entirely, she eventually started playing around with her synthesiser and piano, and had soon written and recorded an album’s worth of (almost wordless) ambient. Mia Gargaret came out last week and is thoroughly beautiful, and 3 movements is just one of many highlights.
Tiger Song is the last track on Startisha, the first album US rapper Naeem Juwan has recorded under his own name. Best known under his Spank Rock moniker, Naeem retired that alias a few years’ back as he became frustrated with the limitations it imposed. “When I chose that moniker I thought I would be able to grow and change as much as I wanted to. But the audience didn’t allow me to do that” he told NY Times in a recent interview. I’m not hugely familiar with his previous output, but Startisha absolutely sounds like an artist testing their own boundaries, and Tiger Song is a powerfully unsettling end to an intriguing LP.
I’ve previously featured a Ben Frost remix of alva noto’s Uni Normal, which was fairly brutal, punishing techno. This is at the other end of the electronic spectrum entirely, and is about as fragile and tranquil as music gets, with poignant strings, gently pulsing bass and very little else.
Flower was released back in February, but I’ve only just heard it on my first listen of her new album TO LOVE IS TO LIVE which came out today. It starts life as a brooding electronic pulse with her closely mic’d vocal barely raising above a whisper. And then the chorus, which takes us from Portishead-like restrained anguish to full blown OTT drama in a single swoop.
Flawless ambient dub techno taken from Night Sea’s LP Still, which is in their words “the culmination of a two-year journey playing with the relationship between sound, repetition, and impermanence.” Couldn’t have put it better myself, so I’m not going to try. It’s out now on Silent Season, which is probably my favourite label for this kind of stuff, and if you like Manila I would highly recommend checking out their Campfire Stories series of mixes, as well as the rest of their catalogue.
Shimmering electronic pop from the Glasgow-based Elisabeth Elektra today with Sadie, which is far and away the most restrained track from her new album Mercurial, steadily building the tension for its duration with billowing pads and an increasingly anguished vocal. I love it: it’s pure, glacial melodrama and the rest of the album is definitely worth checking out if you’re in the market for 40 minutes of joyous, synthy escapism.
Cindy is an alias of Kai Hugo, who produces various shades of house music as Palmbomen II. The backstory of the Cindy project is fascinating and involves the X-Files and an extensive fictional biography for ‘Cindy’. It’s too lengthy to go into in detail here, but there’s a great Quietus review of the album complete with David Lynch comparisons that you should check out if you’re so inclined. In terms of the music, Never Let Me Go is part stripped-down electro, part dream-pop and entirely beguiling.
The Predatory Wasp 