The Predatory Wasp
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.
After various collaborative projects over the past few years, Donato Dozzy finally gives us what we all want: a solo ambient techno album, tailor-made to make us weepy. “An emotional homage to family and the Adriatic Sea” (!), Magda is absolute fucking perfection and if it’s not in my top 10 albums this year, it will have been a frankly ridiculous year for music. At times evoking, possibly even surpassing his seminal Voices From The Lake project, if you don’t like Le Chaser at least, we can’t be friends.
Apparently the “sad cowboy” aesthetic is a thing, and while I categorically refuse to dive into TikTok to confirm this, I’m definitely interested in its musical manifestation. Cowboy Sadness is a project from some of my favourite musicians – The Antlers’s Peter Silberman, David Moore of Bing & Ruth, and Nicholas Principe of Port St. Willow – so even without the deliciously bait title of Selected Jambient Works Vol. 1 I was fully invested before I’d heard a note. Cue an hour of luscious pads, hushed drums and effervescent melodies evoking dusty plains and big ol’ skies as far as the eye can see.
https://cowboysadness.bandcamp.com/album/selected-jambient-works-vol-1
Eriks de Casier announces her forthcoming album Still with new single Lucky, which treads a familiar but nevertheless enjoyable path: warm chords, stripped-back, evocative breaks and plaintive, romantic vocals. The most interesting part of the announcement though is the list of collaborators Casier produces on the album, namely They Hate Change, Shygirl and Blood Orange. Still is out 21 February, so I don’t even need to spend too much time imagining what that will sound like.
The Predatory Wasp 