The Predatory Wasp
Mike Paradinas returns to Balmat with his new album 1979, the spiritual successor to his 2023 label debut 1977. 1979 explores a synth-heavy landscape of ethereal soundscapes, ominous crevasses, and strange, psychedelic fugues, and leans more readily into ambient-adjacent moods and textures than most of Paradinas’s more lively recordings as µ-Ziq on Planet Mu.
Betty Hammerschlag arrives on blush with a beautiful set of abstracted folk diversions on her new LP fake girl. Sits somewhere between Grouper and ML Buch; with heartwrenching melodies submerged beneath layers of reverb, dust and melancholy.
Shawn Reynaldo’s First Floor Substack continues to be a reliably rich source for electronic music reccomendations, and the latest edition highlighted an artist with whom he’s long been obsessed, J. Albert. Converge is taken from his album Return To Sender which sees the NYC-based artist flit between relatively down-the-line dub techno and more amorphous, experimental structures, into which latter category Converge neatly fits.
It’s taken me three months to listen to POLIÇA’s new album Dreams Go, but I’m glad I eventually got round to it because I completely love this song. Dreamy and somewhat morose with a fair few subtle electronic flourishes, it’s the kind of indie pop I can’t get enough of.
As Halloween approaches, I’d like to recommend this terrifying album from Prurient, Noise For Halloween Night. Lock the doors, turn the lights off, listen loud and have a panic attack. Happy Friday! 🖤
https://prurient.bandcamp.com/album/noise-for-halloween-night
Big love to Kandi Phil for alerting me to this one, without whose sage advice I may well not have bothered paying attention. I often dismiss efdemin as merely providing the original ingredients for the greatest remix of all time, but of course there’s more to him than that. This entire album is great, but the first two tracks – especially Poly – are really quite special.
After their first outing on Future Retro London, Tim Reaper, Mantra & Decibella return with Sage EP for FABRICLIVE. Across four tracks they balance toughness and detail. Stand-out Sage Sage drifts between dreamlike textures and hammering drums, deftly flipping between amens and four-to-the-floor.
Klein’s sleep with a cane isn’t so much a “mixtape” in the conventional sense as it is a sprawling ambient dossier. She frames it as such herself – “an epic ambient tape” – but over nearly 90 minutes, the record travels through murmurs, ruptures, and confessional loops. It’s experimental, deeply personal, intimately bound to her London roots and a strong contender for ambient album of the year.
Recorded at 5dB Studios in London, anaiis’s new albbum Devotion & The Black Divine explores uncertainty, acceptance, and the experience of new motherhood. The album reflects anaiis’s growing sense of grace and creative freedom, capturing human emotion in its raw, shifting form. I was a big fan of her last album – 2021’s This Is No Longer A Dream – and on the first few listens it seems as if Devotion will prove a worthy successor.
The Spanish composer and sound artist on the fragile solemnity of a late-period Low masterpiece.
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!
Spanish composer and sound artist Arvin Dola works at the intersection of music, cinema, and performance. His background in scoring for film and theatre informs a deeply textural approach, where sound becomes a vehicle for memory, emotion, and unresolved narratives.
His new LP O GHOST is his debut album release and is inspired by absence, memory, and the weight of unresolved time. Written in the wake of personal loss, it folds grief into a subtle kind of presence. Drawing on hauntology and shaped by Dola’s work in film and performance, the record blends ambient, drone, and disintegrating motifs that never quite land or leave.
For his One Track Mind selection, Arvin has chosen to highlight a track from an incredible album which also happens to be one of my all-time favourites.
The Predatory Wasp 