There’s a lot to enjoy on Ela Minus’s debut album acts of rebellion, which moves from the expansive experimental electronica of its opener through moody synth-pop and glassy ambient, all within its first few tracks. And then you get to dominique, which is a towering presence at around the album’s midpoint; one of those ‘woah’ moments that makes you double check what you’re listening to, knowing before it’s even finished that’s it’s going to be on hard repeat for quite some time to come.
This is taken from Call Super’s excellent new album Every Mouth Teeth Missing. I’ve always found Call Super’s music vaguely intimidating, for reasons I’m not entirely clear about, but whatever the reasons might be this is the first album I’ve got properly stuck into and I’m very glad I did. Pleasure For Pleasure is like two different tracks hammered together: the glitchy, video game-evoking bounce of the main rhythm section and the glassy pads that are occasionally permitted to break through more and more frequently until it all gels together into a satisfying mess of phased drums and white noise.
The second joint production by pianist Sebastian Knauer and the composer Arash Safaian, This Is (Not) Beethoven is an album made up of variations on themes from Ludwig van Beethoven, aiming to modernise the work of the classical musician to mark the 250th anniversary of his birth. More recently, the project was opened up to a number of remixers, among them Matthew Herbert, who provided this epic reworking of Adagietto. Patient, haunting and completely transfixing, it’s an incredible reimagining, and goes to show you really can remix anyone and anything, as long as you do it properly.
This is taken from Biig Piig’s latest EP Oh No / Liahr and is inspired by the fact that Jess Smyth often felt like her room was where she found the most solace: the place she’d retreat to if things got a bit too much. “When I get paranoid or anxious or upset, hiding away felt like the easiest thing to do. Which is mad, because then quarantine happened and that literally was the safest place to be.” It’s definitely a lot more reflective and downbeat than a lot of her breezy hip-hop tracks, but no less engaging, with Smyth creating an atmosphere that moves from the claustrophobia of the verses to the expansive redemption of the chorus.
Why stop at four aliases when you can just keeping making up new ones? DJ Healer / DJ Metatron / Traumprinz / Prince Of Denmark recently announced two double EPs under a new moniker, The Phantasy, and – obviously – it’s great. As usual it’s vinyl only and also as usual it sold out about in about a minute, however all the tracks are now up on YouTube. Usually I wouldn’t condone this kind of behaviour, but as this is the only way the 95% of us who love the music but aren’t prepared to pay insane prices on Discogs will ever get to hear it, I think it’s probably fine.
There’s also a new DJ Metatron album Loops Of Infinity (A Rave Loveletter) that I haven’t even had a chance to listen to yet, but I’m pretty confident will also be exquisite. I’ve said it before: what a time to be alive.
Gabrielle Current new single marks a bit of a departure from her previous glossy pop, and channels 90s R&B aesthetics to very enjoyable effect. Both the vocal and production are hazy and understated, gently rolling along without vying for your attention and creating a quietly beguiling, nostalgic atmosphere as a result.
Clocking in at under two minutes there’s not an awful not to Hey Boy, but what it lacks in length it more than makes up for in sultry smoothness, with both Apollo and Kali Uchis delivering their short verses in tones that can only be described as sexy AF. Hey Boy arrives at around the halfway point of Apollo’s excellent new album Apolonio and is a masterclass in modern soul-inflected R&B.
Erika de Casier’s 2019 album Essentials washands down one the best LP’s of last year, and came – at least for me – completely out of the blue: fully formed, unique, brilliant. Newly signed to 4AD, No Butterflies, No Nothing is her first new music since then, and is a bit of a departure from her previous work. Where Essentials was light and buoyant – naive almost in its simplicity – the production on No Butterflies… is much darker and more complex, reminiscent of something like Kelela’s Frontline. Still great, just in a different, slightly more intimidating way.
Lots of you will already be very familiar with The Caretaker and this record – especially as it came out in its final form more than a year ago, and much of it was originally recorded at least a decade before that. If so, please forgive me for delving back into the recent and not so recent past, which is, after all, exactly what Everywhere At The End Of Time is all about.
Probably the best-known alias of Leyland James Kirby, The Caretaker is someone I’ve always thought I would enjoy, but never really gave the proper time and attention – due at least in part to the fact that none of his work ever appears on streaming services. Recently this 6-hour+ epic has become a trend of TikTok, a Quietus article about which made me finally commit an extended listening session.
Everywhere… was released in instalments, each portion of the release representing a different stage of the progression of Alzheimer’s disease until – with the final instalment in 2019 – The Caretaker character died and the moniker was retired. The Caretaker project was initially inspired by the haunted ballroom scene in The Shining, and like many of his albums – and often revisiting and sampling his earlier work – Everywhere… is mainly comprised of treated and manipulated samples of 1930s ballroom recordings, which disintegrate further and more violently into chaos as the album progresses, representing the various stages of memory decline brought about by the disease.
The result is utterly haunting, harrowing, beautiful and existential, and one of the most profound – if at times extremely challenging – experiences you can have listening to music. Will I be making a TikTok video to share my experience? I shall not.
Jim-E Stack is an artist who’s slowly crept onto my radar over the last couple of years by putting out a steady stream of reliably good but usually fairly understated, indie-electronica. “I’ll give this a shout out on the blog” I naively thought a couple of hours ago. “He could probably do with the support…” but oh right turns out he gets well over a million monthly listeners on Spotify and is already kind of A Big Deal. Probably should have guessed as much given the featured guest on this is Saint Bon Iver to be fair. Anyway, it’s great: and I’m very excited about his new album, Ephemera, which is out later this month.
The Predatory Wasp 