The Predatory Wasp
Billy Woods has now contributed to two of my favourite tracks of the month, featuring on Preservations’s Lemon Rinds last week and now under his Armand Hammer project alongside Elucid. Pommelhorse is dark, eerie, politically charged and brilliant, as is the new album Shrines from which it’s taken.
Sitting somewhere between bedroom pop and folky electronica, Big Nothing Glow is taken from Westerman’s new album Your Hero Is Not Dead. It’s a gentle, hauntingly affecting song that calls to mind various other artists with whom I’m more familiar: Autre Ne Veut, Her, Toro Y Moi amongst them. I haven’t properly got stuck into the album yet, but on the basis of this it’s something I’m going to be spending a lot of time with.
Also, remember Just Jack? Westerman looks so much like him I had to check several times that they’re not the same person. So there’s that.
LG_Amb is taken from Italian producer Andea’s debut album for Ilian Tape which explores various different electronic styles, from ambient and dubby techno to more visceral jungle/breakbeat cuts. LG_Amb sits somewhere in the middle of these: what starts as dreamy, shimmering ambient is quickly joined by clattering broken beats and eventually rich, warm pads. It’s really lovely: so lovely in fact that I do wish there had been a few tracks of a similar vibe on the album. There are a few that sound a little overproduced and clinical as a result, whereas this melts out of the speakers, fully formed and organic.
On his latest LP Eastern Medicine, Western Illness, renowned beatsmith Preservation – who’s produced for Mos Def, RZA, GZA, Raekwon and Aesop Rock amongst many others – crafts every beat from Chinese-issued records he came across while living in Hong Kong. The result, unsurprisingly, has a similar vibe to some of those Wu-Tang affiliates’ albums but absolutely stands on its own feet, with a heady, smokey atmosphere complimented by some solid guest features, including bill woods on the stand-out Lemon Rinds.
Kate Shilonosova is a Moscow-based producer, composer, designer and front girl of the Moscow new wave-post punk band “ГШ”. There are significant Kate Bush comparisons to be made on Marafon 15: the meandering structure and whimsical nature of the production, vocally when she hits the high notes – even before you get to the video, which is pretty much a direct homage to Bush’s avant-garde theatrics – but it more than holds its own.
Ryan Lee West aka Rival Consoles has just announced details of his new album, the follow-up to 2018’s very well regarded Persona. Articulation is the lead single, and is probably the track I’ve enjoyed most of his to date, with West intertwining some beautiful melodies and evoking a sense of both space and restraint, while also sounding like it would punch pretty hard in the right setting.
Extravagant is everything I love about Kamaiyah in a single track: big, bold, old-school sounding production, super-confident delivery and tongue-in-cheek lyrics that are perfectly balanced between the self-aggrandising and the ridiculous. “I took off big like a rocket / I’m eating sushi with my hands, fuck chopsticks”. Iconic.
Ingrid starts off with nothing more than a solo, softly reverbed cello, which wanders round a little before locking into a single repeated refrain. Over the course of the next 20 minutes it’s slowly joined by various electronic textures, gradually dissolving into a cacophony of static before Lewis strips everything away again until only the stark, fragile strings remain. It’s stunning, and Lewis’s ability to wring this amount of tension and emotion from a single, simple loop is really quite breathtaking.
This is the opening track of Brigid Dawson’s latest LP Ballet Of Apes: an epic, foreboding construction that conjures images of vast, wild American vistas and the dangers, opportunities and hardships they suggest. I’ve not really heard anything else quite like it recently, and though the album doesn’t quite live up to its promise it’s still an impressive record.
Brooklyn-based synth enthusiasts Nation of Language have just released their latest album Introduction, Presence, which sounds exactly like the soundtrack of your favourite offbeat 80s drama where the protagonists embark on nihilistic but ultimately seductive adventures until someone dies of a drug overdose and they have to question their behaviour but ultimately just end up lighting yet another cigarette and saying “fuck it… where’s the party?”. If that sounds like the kind of film you’d enjoy, then you’ll probably really like lead single September Again.
The Predatory Wasp 