The Predatory Wasp
Loads of interesting stuff out today including albums from Choker, Altin Gun and perennial TPW favourite 36, but I’m choosing to highlight Isabel Pine’s new album Fables as it’s been the perfect, chill start to the day I needed.
With over 20 LPs under his belt, John Beltran returns to his much loved ambient / IDM / electronica alias Placid Angles with one of his strongest albums to date. Canada has properly blown me away and I’ve listened to it twice this morning already. Inspired by “everything from the scenery to the people … I decided to dedicate this record to them and that beautiful country”, Sainte Anne is a beautiful opening track and definitely gives you a sense of the musical world he inhabits, but I urge you in the very strongest terms to go listen in its entirety, ideally right now.
I really didn’t get on with Mandy, Indiana” celebrated debut i’ve seen a way, at all, despite multiple listens and various people telling me how brilliant it was. Their new album URGH, however, has definitely got me. Written during a residency outside Leeds and completed between Berlin and Manchester – with the band working through ongoing some pretty significant health issues at the time – URGH moves between industrial pressure, fractured club textures and metal (probably?), creating moments that feel both at times deeply claustrophobic, at others spacious yet still uneasy. But most prominently of all, it’s ragey – in a very satisfying way.
Yay! Gia Margaret is back with a new album, Singing, her first since 2023’s Romantic Piano. I’ve totally loved everything she’s put out for the last decade, the ludicrously beautiful 3 movements being a personal favourite – and based on this lead single from the upcoming LP I expect that trend to continue. “I wanted to make something that sounded hopeful” she says of the recording process, “which is a little ironic because I felt essentially hopeless during the entire process.” This is the energy I need I my life.
Appendix.files rolls out its second LP with Irradiated, an eight-part excursion from Berlin-based sound artist and producer Kurt ‘Reinartz’ Salgado. If you’re a fan of Barker’s beatless techno deconstructions, you’ll likely find plenty to like here.
Imarhan started out around 2008, a loose collection of friends who began to play together and whose style reflects their cultural and generational background; dry guitar riffs, pop melodies and pan-African rhythms which draw on traditional Tuareg music, African ballads and the modern pop and rock the band heard growing up.This is taken from ESSAM, their fourth album, recorded with the same core lineup, but with a significant shift in their sound and approach, moving toward something more open, modern, and exploratory.
The opening track on Pefkin’s new album Unfurling is a stunning, 11-minute blend of haunting folk and icy ambient, inspired by the artist’s dreams of the coming spring. Nature has always been a central part in Pefkin’s music, and on Unfurling she captures all the elements as the record follows the transformations of the land from winter into spring – air, light, temperature, soil.
SAULT start the year with a typically low-key release, their new album Chapter 1 emerging out of the January mists with barely a whisper of hype. Predictably it’s great, perhaps even a career highlight. Time will tell; but if you can’t find something to enjoy with Protector I’m really not sure what’s wrong with you.
It’s very encouraging to have an album this good released so early in the year. Tragic Magic pairs Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore in a collaboration recorded at the Philharmonie de Paris, made with rare access to instruments from the Musée de la Musique collection through InFiné. Co-produced with Trevor Spencer, the album was created in nine days, building from improvisation and the emotional carry-on of the moment.
Lattimore chose a run of historic harps that map the instrument’s evolution from the early 18th to late 19th century. Barwick worked with classic synthesisers including a Roland Jupiter and a Sequential Circuits Prophet-5, bringing soft-edged harmonic colour and air around the notes. The Four Sleeping Princesses may be a highlight, but its far from the only reason to immerse yourself in this forest of lushness.
https://marylattimoreharpist.bandcamp.com/track/the-four-sleeping-princesses
More good stuff I missed from last year here courtesy of Mikel Rev. Rev is a mysterious figure from the depths of the Oslo underground, who primarily operates as part of the Ute Collective – a group of producers and DJs pushing a unique electronic and trance-forward sound, through various sublabels and live events often set amongst the lush forests of Norway. Following his debut album The Art Of Levitation on A Strangely Isolated Place back in 2023, last year’s Journey Beyond presents a selection of tracks demonstrating his obsession with the porous boundaries between ambient and trance.
The Predatory Wasp 