Mark Kozelek goes full lounge on his latest single. It might be a joke, but I really like it.
Categories
Sun Kil Moon – Mindy
Categories
Traumprinz – extra life
Traumprinz / DJ Healer / whoever continues his annual tradition of releasing new music as we enter the festive season. This time it’s some additional material from 2022’s life, presumably recorded around the same time, alongside weltenbrände, which is an “associative prose poem” in German. So fairly niche, that one, but extra life at least is a welcome reminder that he’s still the undisputed king of emotional techno.
Categories
Kamaiyah – No Pape
Another Summer Night seems to have landed at least six months too late; I can’t really think of a title (or vibe) less suited to the general mood in the UK right now. However Kamaiyah is as bouncy as ever, and although this doesn’t really compare to her divinely brash and boisterous debut A Good Night In The Ghetto, it’s a diverting change from the rain-lashed misery we’re all currently sucking up.
Who’d have thought we needed an ambient flute album from Outkast’s Johnny Vulture, but here we are.
Categories
Rozi Plain, Hannah Miette – Let me know
There’s absolutely nothing online about this except a very minimal Reddit thread, so I’m not entirely sure it even exists. Although: here I am listening to it, and writing about it, so I suppose it must. Rozi Plain’s Prize is one of the best albums of the year (official ranking coming soon!), and this follows its folksy-electronica footsteps, starting small and breaking down into increasingly weird whimsy in its final third.
Categories
Spencer Zahn – OST
Landing last week, Statues II is the culmination of a double album that began with his Statues I, released in August of this year, both of which follow his incredible collaboration with Dawn Richard on Pigments; one of the best album of 2022. Leaning hard into both ambient and jazz, OST is a fuzzy, celestial, faintly ominous delight.
Categories
Kelly Moran – Soft Focus
The always captivating Kelly Moran releases her first new solo music in five years with Vesela. Those hoping for glitchy, hi-gloss electronics may be disappointed, but if you’re in the mood for plaintive classical pieces written as a means to “sublimate feelings of devastation instead of running from them” then you’re in luck.
Categories
Interview: DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ
“Music is such an abstract listening form, your mind needs to fill in gaps“
“Sabrina Spellman was mixing dope beats in the other realm, which she recorded onto her inherited heirloom tape machine, made with her carboot-sale drum machines and charity-shop synthesizers” So runs the legend and origin story of DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ, the anonymous producer with a penchant for warping 90s samples into nostalgia-rich, tearjerking electronic music.
Several albums, hundreds of tracks and a 1975 collaboration later, her latest LP Destiny arrived earlier this year in all its 4 hour + running time glory. One of the most innovative and original electronic artists to emerge in the last few years, I was very pleased to welcome her to TPW for a chat…
To start off I’d like to ask something I hope you don’t take the wrong way – what on earth possessed you to release a four hour album?
Well, I wanted to beat Charmed’s length cause everyone prefers the longer albums (they’re more popular among listeners) compared to the shorter albums (they’re less popular among listeners) and I wanted to find a way to supplant Charmed as it was still very popular even after three albums released since lol! I also had a lot of songs finished and they all worked too well for me to cut them (I think I only cut two songs eventually from the album).
Categories
Cannons – Sweeter
I absolutely rinsed Cannons’ 2022 album Fever Dream. It wasn’t the best album of the year by any means, but it was far and away my favourite, and already, less than a year later, evokes feelings of deep nostalgia, which is pretty impressive given that my life is essentially exactly the same now as it was 12 months ago. Anyway, their new album Heartbeat Highway has a lot to live up to, and on the first couple of listens Sweeter – a perfect, yearning, synthpop melter – has emerged as the clear stand-out.
Categories
36 – Blue Zone
Dennis Huddleston’s music has always been based around loops, and his latest album as 36, Ablyss, is the fullest expression yet of this obsession. The 21 tracks that make up the LP are not unfinished ideas, waiting to be fleshed out into fully formed tracks: they exist purely in their own terms, tools for drifting off and becoming completely detached. Or as he puts it: “Feel free to get lost in them whenever you need them.”
The Predatory Wasp 