The Predatory Wasp
I’ve previously featured a Ben Frost remix of alva noto’s Uni Normal, which was fairly brutal, punishing techno. This is at the other end of the electronic spectrum entirely, and is about as fragile and tranquil as music gets, with poignant strings, gently pulsing bass and very little else.
Flower was released back in February, but I’ve only just heard it on my first listen of her new album TO LOVE IS TO LIVE which came out today. It starts life as a brooding electronic pulse with her closely mic’d vocal barely raising above a whisper. And then the chorus, which takes us from Portishead-like restrained anguish to full blown OTT drama in a single swoop.
Flawless ambient dub techno taken from Night Sea’s LP Still, which is in their words “the culmination of a two-year journey playing with the relationship between sound, repetition, and impermanence.” Couldn’t have put it better myself, so I’m not going to try. It’s out now on Silent Season, which is probably my favourite label for this kind of stuff, and if you like Manila I would highly recommend checking out their Campfire Stories series of mixes, as well as the rest of their catalogue.
Shimmering electronic pop from the Glasgow-based Elisabeth Elektra today with Sadie, which is far and away the most restrained track from her new album Mercurial, steadily building the tension for its duration with billowing pads and an increasingly anguished vocal. I love it: it’s pure, glacial melodrama and the rest of the album is definitely worth checking out if you’re in the market for 40 minutes of joyous, synthy escapism.
Cindy is an alias of Kai Hugo, who produces various shades of house music as Palmbomen II. The backstory of the Cindy project is fascinating and involves the X-Files and an extensive fictional biography for ‘Cindy’. It’s too lengthy to go into in detail here, but there’s a great Quietus review of the album complete with David Lynch comparisons that you should check out if you’re so inclined. In terms of the music, Never Let Me Go is part stripped-down electro, part dream-pop and entirely beguiling.
I have tried hard to love græ, the new album by Moses Sumney. It’s clearly brilliant, and the scale of it is pretty staggering, but I’ve found it almost overwhelmingly impenetrable on the many occasions I’ve sat down to listen. This is a failing on my part. However, there is a three-track run at the start of the second side of the double LP that is utterly sublime, kicking off with Two Dogs. I just wish I liked the rest of the album as much as these 10 minutes or so. I’m sorry, Moses: I have tried, and been found wanting.
Billy Woods has now contributed to two of my favourite tracks of the month, featuring on Preservations’s Lemon Rinds last week and now under his Armand Hammer project alongside Elucid. Pommelhorse is dark, eerie, politically charged and brilliant, as is the new album Shrines from which it’s taken.
Sitting somewhere between bedroom pop and folky electronica, Big Nothing Glow is taken from Westerman’s new album Your Hero Is Not Dead. It’s a gentle, hauntingly affecting song that calls to mind various other artists with whom I’m more familiar: Autre Ne Veut, Her, Toro Y Moi amongst them. I haven’t properly got stuck into the album yet, but on the basis of this it’s something I’m going to be spending a lot of time with.
Also, remember Just Jack? Westerman looks so much like him I had to check several times that they’re not the same person. So there’s that.
LG_Amb is taken from Italian producer Andea’s debut album for Ilian Tape which explores various different electronic styles, from ambient and dubby techno to more visceral jungle/breakbeat cuts. LG_Amb sits somewhere in the middle of these: what starts as dreamy, shimmering ambient is quickly joined by clattering broken beats and eventually rich, warm pads. It’s really lovely: so lovely in fact that I do wish there had been a few tracks of a similar vibe on the album. There are a few that sound a little overproduced and clinical as a result, whereas this melts out of the speakers, fully formed and organic.
On his latest LP Eastern Medicine, Western Illness, renowned beatsmith Preservation – who’s produced for Mos Def, RZA, GZA, Raekwon and Aesop Rock amongst many others – crafts every beat from Chinese-issued records he came across while living in Hong Kong. The result, unsurprisingly, has a similar vibe to some of those Wu-Tang affiliates’ albums but absolutely stands on its own feet, with a heady, smokey atmosphere complimented by some solid guest features, including bill woods on the stand-out Lemon Rinds.
The Predatory Wasp 