The Predatory Wasp
The Worlds We Leave Behind, the second full-length from the duo of zakè (aka Zach Frizzell) and Tyresta (aka Nick Turner), opens with Undiscovered; a heavenly, inviting glide that occupies a full quarter of the album’s run time. It sets the scene perfectly with a bedrock drone beneath a cyclical, ascending melodic theme, until gently shifting into shadows and choral loveliness in its final third.
https://zakedrone.bandcamp.com/album/the-worlds-we-leave-behind
Oklou has been pretty quiet since the release of her exceptionally good 2020 album Galore; a Sega Bodega collab here, a remix EP there, but very little else. Friends & Family is her first official, original single for a number of years and finds her back in familiar territory: breathy vocals, simple, naive melodies and an unmistakable nostalgic quality emphasised by the home movie quality of the music video. Let’s hope there’s more to come, soon.
I was recently introduced to Qendresa’s brilliantly hazy 2020 album Midnight Request Line which I would highly recommend to any fans of Sade, System Olympia, and lo-fi r&B in general. Her latest single Sweet Lies, co-written, produced and mixed by Jkarri, came out last month and is well worth your time.
Now this was an unexpected delight. Says Liz Harris of the experience: “Making music was only an idea in my head when I first fell in love with Slowdive. What a strange dream all these years later to work with them. This track was such a lush pop hit to start, I just tried to boost and smear those gauzy highs and fields of dreamy texture, and Rachel’s ethereal vocals. Added a touch of tape, Wurlitzer, and space echo too. It was a pleasure to work on.”
Grouper’s celestial interpretation was accompanied by a Daniel Avery remix, which is also very good, but this is the one for me.
“We get lots of inspiration from the natural world: its quietness, rhythms and beauty”
Mary Lattimore and Walt McClements are two of contemporary music’s most renowned innovators. Lattimore’s inventive harp processing and looping has brought the instrument to a new audience and her prolific run of celestial solo albums and evocative film scores have redefined the instrument in the modern consciousness. Her genre-agnostic collaborations include work with Kurt Vile, Steve Gunn, Jeff Zeigler, Meg Baird, Bill Fay and Thurston Moore.
McClements, who tours as a member of Weyes Blood, is an acclaimed composer in his own right, sculpting glacial atmospherics from the accordion.
Recorded in the cozy setting of McClements’ apartment during a rainy December in LA, their new collaborative LP Rain on the Road unfurls as a series of sonic vignettes, rolling landscapes hewn from longform improvisations for harp and accordion. Embellished with additional instrumentation such as the shimmering constellations of hand bells on “Stolen Bells” that glisten like lights on wet pavement, or the stately piano figures on “The Top of Thomas Street”; their pastoral pieces manage to paint vivid images.
Currently in the middle of an extensive European tour, I was very happy they agreed to have a chat about the album, the origins of their collaborations and why Spotify sucks.
When did you first meet, and how long did it take for you to decide that you wanted to work together on music?
Walt – We met in 2017 when we were both playing a festival with the same band. I feel like we became friends then and did some collaboration here and there, Mary played some harp on an old project of mine’s record. But maybe not until the pandemic did we start to connect more musically. I had started making more instrumental ambient/drone work, and Mary was a big influence and supporter. I played on her porch when she started hosting socially distanced outdoor shows, and then we went on tour together in 2021, and I started to sit in on a few songs at the end of Mary’s set, which was so fun, and that led to the idea of making a record together.
Mary – We both grew up in North Carolina and turns out we attended some of the same shows. This collaboration and friendship feels meant-to-be. I’m a big fan of Walt’s ear and aesthetic and sonic curiosity, so it was natural to ask him to sit in when we were on tour together. It feels like a really organic way of getting to know someone, personality and musical sensibility and instincts going hand-in-hand.
There’s a three track run in the middle of Nilüfer Yanya’s new album My Method Actor that is so good that after a few listens I’ve convinced this is the best album released this year so far. Time will tell if that remains to be the case, but for now it’s made me a) cry with happiness and b) want to listen to it multiple times every day. It feels that despite consistently excellent reviews of her music, Yanya hasn’t received quite the recognition she deserves as yet. Hopefully that will now start to change.
RIP summer! It was fun while it lasted, but we’re done with you, and with the first Friday of Autumn we can welcome a load of interesting new album releases. Top of the pile is Pale Jay’s Low End Love Songs, possibly my most anticipated album of the year and which starts with the most glorious opening track I’ve heard in ages. Plus, it’s just in time for my birthday! Thanks, Jay. ❤
Mariachiara Troianiello aka Katatonic Silentio continues her exploration of spatial, experimental sound design on her new EP Axis Of Light, slicing and splicing various forms of dub, techno and breaks while following her instincts towards storytelling in each track. Bridging The Gap is skeletal, paranoid, sketchy and extremely good.
“The story of my life doesn’t exist. Does not exist. There’s never any center to it. No path, no line. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it’s not true, there was no one. I started to write in surroundings that drove me to reticence. Writing, for those people, was still something moral. Nowadays it often seems writing is nothing at all. Sometimes I realize that if writing isn’t, all things, all contraries confounded, a quest for vanity and void, it’s nothing.”
The Predatory Wasp 