The Predatory Wasp
My dude 36 is back with yet another album, hopefully the first of many this year. Reality Engine is the third and final LP in 36’s synth trilogy, concluding the melodic, melancholy machine sound started with Wave Variations and continuing with Symmetry Systems. See how it glimmers! Feel better!
In August 2022, Ariel Kalma, a renowned fourth-world (nope, me neither – but apparently it’s a thing) music artist, joined BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction for a special collaborative project, pairing with artists Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer. This partnership, led to the creation of twenty minutes of music through a back-and-forth exchange of ideas and contributions. After fulfilling their initial commitment, the trio felt compelled to continue their collaboration, expanding upon their initial creations, which ultimately culminated in an album The Closest Thing to Silence. The album’s title, inspired by a Kalma quote and echoing an ECM Records motto, emphasizes music’s profound connection to silence – so expect plenty of ambient, experimental meanderings, and quite a lot of space.
https://intlanthem.bandcamp.com/album/the-closest-thing-to-silence
In a first, and hopefully last for this blog, I’m posting something that I absolutely cannot stand and wish didn’t exist. Orbital’s Belfast is a really special record; not only one of the best electronic tracks ever produced, but one that remains utterly timeless and never fails to elicit an emotional response in me. This new version is none of these things. It’s trite, cliched nonsense, and I have no time for it at all. Rather than rehashing classic records, perhaps everyone involved should focus on doing something genuinely creative.
There have already been some banging albums out this year, Naliah Hunter’s Lovegaze not least among them. Depending on which publications you trust this has been labelled as ambient, experimental, folk or a combination of all these and more. If you trust this blog, I’d just say go and listen to it and make your own mind up (but it’s definitely not ambient).
Avi. C Engel’s new album Too Many Souls lands 23 February digitally, with additional formats including cassette by Cruel Nature Records (UK) and on CD by Somnimage (US). Lead single Hold This Flame is a spectral delight; sparse and haunting with Engel’s ghostly vocal contrasting with the gently rising dissonance of strings and percussion.
Unsurprisingly, two of the guys from one of the world’s most acclaimed band of all time, plus another guy, make some pretty astonishingly good music that sounds enough like their other band to be comforting, but different enough to make middle aged men very, very excited and feel as if they’re at the cutting-edge of the scene once again, you know, the same way it felt when their first band made all that amazing stuff in the 90s.
Buffalo rapper and producer Che Noir kicks off 2024 with a four-track EP The Color Of Chocolate. The first of many projects expected from her this year, she dominates on every song, even when up against some talented guests. On Vanilla Skies she goes solo, and it’s all the better for it.
https://chenoir.bandcamp.com/album/the-color-chocolate-vol-1
Hailing from Cornwall – namely Mousehole, which is what most people imagine when picturing a Cornish finishing village – Daisy Rickman is an artist, photographer and folk musician whose second album Howl is due out in March. Feed The Forest is the album’s lead single, a song that perfectly blends discordance with melody, and warmth with a creeping sense of dread, with Rickman’s confident, earthy vocals as haunting as they are reassuring.
Here’s something else I missed from last year: Tom Findlay (of Groove Armada) and James Alexander Bright’s collaborative album Slow Dance, which moves effortlessly through 11 funk, lo-fi house and very, very sexy mid-tempo jams. Melt like butter.
The Predatory Wasp 