The Predatory Wasp
The first new music since the release of her excellent 2023 album Spike Field, Taper was written and recorded around two years ago, and is “about searching for someone who doesn’t want to be found and mourning a future foreclosed. grief and longing, basically…”. Bleak! And beautiful!
House, post-punk, funk, Afrobeat and disco collide on the new album from Ibibio Sound Machine, Pull The Rope. Mama Says strongly reminds me of Crazy P as seen through a lens of afrofuturism and is absolutely essential for three-quarters of its running time, after which it transforms into a completely different, deeply irritating song that’s probably just best ignored.
It’s Friday, the sun is shining, so here’s some deeply paranoid bleakness from Keeley Forsyth’s third album The Hollow which came out today. The album’s title comes from her discovery a long-abandoned mining shaft whilst out walking, while musically it incorporates aspects of minimalist post-classical, dark ambient and film and theatre soundtracks, with occasional warped pitch-shifts of her overwhelmingly mournful vocal for additional headfuckery.
Live’s new LP (EP? mixtape?) is a pretty tough listen in places. The hecticness of the opening track almost seems designed to put you off, but you’ve settled into its crunchy, super-lofi aesthetic, there are a few moments of genuine brilliance, Mashed Feelings among them. It’s unlikely to generate quite the same hype as last year’s Girl In The Half Pearl, but it’s still definitely worth a listen.
Written and recorded in 2021, Doer connects the dots between Frankfurt-based Man Rei’s (aka Kristin Reiman) debut Cusp in 2020 and their more recent recordings for Glasgow’s Somewhere Press. Bona Fide is about as hauntingly beautiful as it gets; a ghostly chamber piece where Reiman’s voice provides both the lead vocal and the shifting background textures.
Nina Kinert released RELIGIOUS last year; an album telling personal stories about growing up within the Pentecostal Church Community in Sweden. Her new LP CHORALS is a continuation of RELIGIOUS and is billed as “an experiment revolving around voice and death” recorded in close collaboration with Anton Sundell and Daniel Fagge Fagerström. It’s beautiful, and if you’re interested in hearing more about Nina’s experiences and the recording progress, be sure to check my interview with her from last year.
This blog is leaning ever more exclusively into ambient, so if you’re not into that – I’m sorry. But it’s hard not to when there’s so much good/weird/dreamy stuff around. Here, Not Waving and Romance take inspiration from Botticelli’s ‘The Birth of Venus’ on their third full-length LP Infinite Light, and the album’s title track is unquestionably its centrepiece; a ten-minute celestial epic to send even the hardest-lined of atheists quivering to their knees.
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It’s taken more than two decades for the music I was obsessed with as a teenager to become fashionable again. It’s been worth the wait. There are a few artists pushing this sound now, but German duo DJ Heartstring have got the formula down to a fine art. Trance? Yes! Hardcore? Sure! 90s pop-dance. Of course! Taken from their three-track EP Don’t Stop which clocks in at sub 10 minutes for the lot. Saccharine beats for happy-sad lads.
Deep, meditative dub techno here courtesy of Shanghai-based producer Rainsoft with a specific focus on the interplay between the natural world and modern production methods. Think Donato Dozzy if he got lost in a rainforest for a couple of years. This is the title track from her new LP, and it’s very good.
It’s always nice to find an album that so unnerving I need a couple of breaks to get through it. Madeleine Cocolas’ latest LP Bodies set out to explore similarities between bodies of water and human bodies and to blur the boundaries between them, incorporating sounds of water Madeliene recorded on trips to the Australian coastline as well as creeks and waterfalls in Far North Queensland. Drift, with its bubbling, optimistic lead line, is probably the most accessible track. Elsewhere things get very intense very quickly.
The Predatory Wasp 