The Predatory Wasp
Sufjan! Sufers! The Big Suf! Yesterday our founding father announced a new album, Reflections, a studio recording of his score for Justin Beck’s ballet, performed by pianists Timo Andres and Conor Hanick. To be honest, I don’t really like this very much – all a bit ‘jazzy’ for my tastes – but if Sufjan releases, this blog must report. Hopefully they’ll be some sad bits on the full album than I can cherrypick.
Woozy hip-hip, courtesy of, well, ALL the artists. Given soundgood is less than three minutes long I’m not entirely sure what all these dudes are adding – a sigh here, a cymbal crash there – but it’s really lovely regardless.
American singer-songwriter, poet, and photographer Thomas Meluch aka Benoît Pioulard put out his latest album last month, Eidetic: a word denoting the ability to recall mental images with extraordinarily rich precision. To record much of the album, Meluch holed up in a a cabin in rural Maine with a bit of percussion, a couple of Fender electrics, and a parlor guitar made by his friend. You can sense both the isolation and natural splendour throughout Eidetic, which ranges from Stars of The Lid-esque ambience of tracks like Where To to more structured, vocal-led pieces.
I expect some of you are fairly fragile after a long, sunny Bank Holiday weekend of ill-advised excess, so here’s some lovely floaty folk for you courtesy of Kate Stables’ This Is The Kit, who also announced that her new album Careful Of Your Keepers will be coming this June on Rough Trade Records. Feel better?
Last week we had the creator of one of the all-time great remixes, and today we have the man he remixed, proving that they are completely incapable of doing anything too far away from one another. Taken from his new album Crystal Vision, Bibled is glorious, soaring, soft-focus breaks that Mixmag would doubtless describe as “tailor-made for the afters”.
Thunderous modular techno from Sibel Koçer, AKA JakoJako for you today, taken from her Verve EP which is well worth checking out in its entirety, comprising four distinct tracks taking in a range of influences from heady dub to soaring trance.
I posted about the lead single from this album, Let The Moon Be A Planet – a collaboration between guitarist and songwriter Steve Gunn and pianist and composer David Moore of Bing & Ruth – back in January, and was very much looking forward to its arrival. It landed last week, and hasn’t disappointed. The album initially took form over a series of remote sessions and was completed once Gunn and Moore got together in Hudson, New York. If you’re feeling in any way stressed at all, this will help.
https://stevegunn.bandcamp.com/album/reflections-vol-1-let-the-moon-be-a-planet
A hefty dose of Anatolian funk-rock for you here, courtesy of Amsterdam-based Altin Gün whose experimentations with Turkish folk songs have seen them meander through various genres over their last few releases. Su Siziyor is taken from their new album Aşk, which is packed full of languid basslines and hazy atmospherics a la a slightly more vigorous Khruangbin.
You know Eddie Chacon as one half of Charles & Eddie, the duo behind Would I Lie To You – one of the biggest hits of the early 90s and a song so overwhelmingly ubiquitous that Chacon eventually abandoned the music industry in an attempt to escape it. He returned in 2020 with a debut solo album, and has just released its follow-up, Sundown, from which Far Away is taken. Sitting somewhere between soft-focus soul and meandering jazz, its reminiscent of acts like Rhye, and is about as distant from the bombast of Would I Lie To You as its possible to get, which is probably the point.
The man responsible for one of the greatest remixes of all time has a new album – his first for six years – out today, and so far it’s fantastic – even though some of the tracks descend into what can only be described as “a right old jazzy mess”. Trust Your Feet is one of the more restrained moments, gently building through shimmering synth lines before some dramatic, metallic chords take over. Bones points for an album title that sounds both profound and massively pretentious at the same time.
https://jamesholden.bandcamp.com/album/imagine-this-is-a-high-dimensional-space-of-all-possibilities
The Predatory Wasp 