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Music

Bianca Scout – Forest Spirit feat. Darkmarik

Blurring the lines between chamber music, contemporary dance, dark pop and ethereal ambience, Klein, Mica Levi and Space Afrika collaborator Bianca Scout distills a decade of multidisciplinary work with her new album Pattern Damage, moving between diaristic ephemera, demure post-punk and chamber ambient, and cracking open bewildering crypto-romantique wormholes in the process. And yes, this is pretty much a direct copy and paste of the release hype, but a) it’s accurate and b) it’s a bank holiday and I have better (lazier) things to be doing.

https://sferic.bandcamp.com/album/pattern-damage-2

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Music

Laetitia Sadier – Protéïformunité

French artist Laetitia Sadier’s new album Rooting For Love is billed as a call to the traumatized civilizations of Earth, urging us to “evolve past our countless millennia of suffering and alienation”. Organ, guitar, bass, synth, trombone, vibraphone, live and programmed drums combine, yes, Air comparisons are appropriate and not just cos French: but there’s a edge here that’s absent from much of Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel’s soft-focus oeuvre.

https://laetitiasadier.bandcamp.com/album/rooting-for-love

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Music

Adrienne Lenker – Already Lost

I run a little hot and cold on Big Thief – some of their work is incredible, some very meh – but I’m really enjoying Adrienne Lenker’s new solo album Bright Future, which is way more stripped down and even more contemplative, and even veers into Sufjan territory when she picks up the banjo. Track titles like Sadness As A Gift should give you an idea of the overall tone, but if you’re keen for some (arguably) self-indulgent introspection then it absolutely delivers. Already Lost is a highlight, including as it does some truly devastatingly poignant melodies.

https://adriannelenker.bandcamp.com/album/bright-future

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Interviews Music

One Track Mind: Laryssa Kim

The Italian-Congolese artist on the overwhelming melancholy of Silver Mt. Zion’s best-known work

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!

Laryssa Kim is an Italo-Congolese singer and composer based in Brussels whose latest album Contezza came out last month. Merging the experimental spirit of Acousmatics with soulful global influences, Kim’s music invites listeners into a dreamlike state, blending ghostly vocal fragments with electrifying riffs and natural sounds.

Contezza, meaning consciousness in ancient Italian, reflects Kim’s inner voyage during the solitude of the 2020 pandemic. Influenced by meditation, esotericism, and a diverse array of cultural artifacts, Kim explores themes of love, introspection, and the complexity of human emotion. The album serves as a magical ritual, an exorcism of beauty against personal demons. With influences ranging from Brian Eno to Erykah Badu, Contezza is a testament to Kim’s innovative approach to music and her profound engagement with the world’s infinite details.

For her One Track Mind selection, Laryssa has highlighted a deeply melancholy song, discovered during a period of mourning after losing a friend.

Continue reading “One Track Mind: Laryssa Kim”
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Music

Arooj Aftab, Vijay Iyer, Shahzad Ismaily – To Remain/To Return

I’ve been sulking about the woeful Glastonbury line-up for the last few days, but now it’s time I got over it and got on with my life. And even though there are so few acts I’m excited about seeing that it genuinely makes me sad, there are a few glimmers of light; Arooj Aftab among them. To Remain/To Return is from Love In Exile, an album I completely missed last year, with Vijay Iyer on pianos and electronics, Shahzad Ismaily on bass and Moog synth Aftab’s soaring Urdu vocals.

https://www.loveinexile.net/

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Music

HOMESHAKE – Letting Go

HOMESHAKE is the long-running solo project of Toronto-based musician Peter Sagar. His sixth album, CD WALLET landed last week and was written and recorded over a majority of 2023 at his home studio in Toronto and was ““made in a heavy, straightforward indie rock style to impress my childhood self”. Hazy guitars abound, and there’s something quietly addictive about the creeping melancholy of Letting Go that’s making me listen to it on repeat.

https://homeshake.bandcamp.com/album/cd-wallet-2

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Music

Il Quadro Di Troisi – La Terra

Not content with releasing arguably the best electronic album of the year so far, Donato Dozzy / Dozzers / The Big Dozz has reunited with Eva Geist – alongside the now permanent addition of previous collaborator Pietro Micioni – for a new LP under their Il Quadro Do Troisi moniker. Set for release later this month and billed as “classic Italian songwriting with an electronic spin”, expect soaring vocals and plenty of bubbling, electro basslines.

https://raster-raster.bandcamp.com/album/la-commedia

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Music

Numa Gama – exex (hack)

Apologies for the complete lack of music recently, but it’s been a busy old week. Hopefully you’ve been finding your own way regardless. I’ve been doing some deep ambient dives over the last few days to help me coping with the rising tension, and have come across a few gems I missed from earlier in the year, my favourite of which is probably Numa Gama’s album A Spectral Turn which brilliantly blends ambient, and IDM textures with post-rave, dub techno-adjacent rhythms.

https://numagama.bandcamp.com/album/a-spectral-turn

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Music

Oneohtrix Point Never – CC

Oneohtrix Point Never's new album, R Plus Seven, comes out Oct. 1.

Soaring, celestial ambient modulations from the always interesting Oneohtrix Point Never, taken from his new Ambients collection on Warp.

https://soundcloud.com/oneohtrix-point-never

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Music

Maria W Horn – Omnia Citra Mortem

Maria W Horn’s new album Panoptikon is a suite of choral and electronic music originally produced for an installation in the disbanded Vita Duvan panopticon prison in Luleå, Sweden. According to the press materials, the circular prison structure of Vita Duvan, which enabled central monitoring, was meant to create a sense of omniscient surveillance. The panopticon made the inmates aware that they could be monitored at any time without having any way of checking if this was actually the case.

Panopitkon was originally presented as a multichannel sound and light installation where the imagined individual voices of the inmates were represented by loudspeakers placed in the various cells of the prison. Opening track Omnia citra mortem (everything until death) is a legal term that means prisoners who did not confess their crime could not be sentenced to death, but only to torture until a confession was forthcoming.

If this all sounds overwhelmingly bleak, then yes, there is undoubtedly a darkness and meaning tone to much of the music here. But it is also in parts quite overwhelmingly beautiful, and has already had a profound effect on me. Without doubt one of the most striking and accomplished albums of the year so far.

https://xkatedral.bandcamp.com/album/panoptikon