The Predatory Wasp
LXXXVIII is the ninth Actress album, and is presented as “the very first presentation of [his] voyage into ‘luxury sonics’ – the culmination of 25 years’ honing mind-shorting, soul-igniting audio infusions for dance floors, rave dens, festivals, and concert halls”. I’m not even going to attempt to top that, other than to say that this is as meditative and immersive as Darren Cunningham’s music has ever been.
Suntub is the second full length album from ML Buch, a double record of 15 pieces by the Danish composer and producer; a dreamy mix of shoegaze, experimental electronics and bedroom pop. I’ve only listened a couple of times so far, but so far it’s pretty much flawless, and up there with my favourite albums of the year. So many highlights, but album opener Pan over the hill should give you a good idea of what to expect.
Hinako Omari’s debut album a journey… was one of my favourites of last year. Released last week her new LP stillness, softness… explores a new sonic range, and was mainly composed on her Prophet ’08, the Moog Voyager and UDO Super 6, an analogue hybrid synthesizer that creates binaural, 3D-simulating sound. The album is darker, more expansive and more overtly theatrical than her previous work, but still seems to exists in the liminal space between wakefulness and dreaming, with the brief but beautiful stalactites illustrative of its meditative tone.
Continuing the trance revival theme today with this melancholy banger from Lee Gamble’s new album Models, which, when compared to some of his previous work, is surprisingly accessible. According to the PR, “it’s pop music, but it ain’t background music” and I’m not sure I entirely agree with either of those statements, but it is very good. Elsewhere on the album you’ll find him autotuning the fuck out of Lana Del Rey, which is also fun.
Trance really is having a moment. It feels like everyone is finally ready to accept what I’ve known all along: trance is the best, most credible and timeless genre of all! The latest evidence of this seismic shift is the Warp-approved Evian Christ and his debut album Revanchist, which explores “the latent potential in Trance to evoke, beyond Euphoria, the fullest feeling of the Sublime.” Yes! Silence is a reimagining of Delirium’s proggy masterpiece of the same name. Rave like it’s 1999 all over again.
I’m not sure why it’s taken this long for me to get stuck in to Raw Poetic and Damu The Fudgemunk’s Away Back In LP, but I have now, and it’s great. 2022’s Laminated Skies is a masterpiece and didn’t get anywhere near the attention it deserved. Away Back In is described as “a transcendent musical fusion of hip-hop, jazz, and garage rock”, and lead single and opening track Ease Side is indicative of its loose, upbeat vibe.
I love Nina Kinert. Her 2018 album Romantic and In Twos EP from the same year are releases I return to frequently, but she’s been relatively quiet since then, averaging about a single a year in the intervening years. So I was very excited to get stuck into her new album Religious, which explores some of her stories about growing up within the Pentecostal Church Community in Sweden , while at the same time dealing with her “attraction to spiritual mystique and the supernatural.” As with most of her work, Marble Armour is hauntingly beautiful, and a great entry point into her often electronically inflected, folk-led musical world if she’s escaped your attention until now.
Taken from Helena Deland’s second album Goodnight Summerland, Roadflower is quietly stunning. Written in the aftermath of the death of Deland’s mother, many – if not all – of the songs deal with death and its aftermath, with its tone similar to recent albums by Tomberlin: mournful, but exquisitely, cathartically so.
https://helenadeland.bandcamp.com/album/goodnight-summerland
On the strength of its final 30 seconds alone, Blender in a Blender would be one of my favourite pieces of music this year. A collaboration with guitarist Roy Montgomery, the track was first drafted by Lattimore during an artist residency program in UCross Wyoming, and later evolved over the duo’s pen pal correspondence. Montgomery’s chords emerge from the harp-induced haze in the outro, and are completely and utterly mesmerising. It’s taken from Lattimore’s new LP Goodbye, Hotel Arkada, an album so obsessed with nostalgia it could have been tailor-made for me.
https://marylattimoreharpist.bandcamp.com/album/goodbye-hotel-arkada
“Cold Ecstasy is the ultimate memory rush. It’s the album I’ve always wanted to make“
Cold Ecstasy is the latest album from 36 – the ambient and experimental electronic music project of UK artist Dennis Huddleston. An homage to the happier, more emotionally-charged aspects of the UK hardcore and rave scene, it is a truly beautiful body of work, playing with themes of memory and deeply rooted in nostalgia: something with which I have an arguably unhealthily obsession.
I love Cold Ecstasy, so was delighted that Dennis agreed to answer some questions about his inspirations and approaches to its creation.
For the majority of the 00s and 2010s – and arguably even in its 90s heyday – trance and the happier aspects of hardcore were pretty much written off as unserious and not worthy of respect. Why do you think that is?
People are too serious, perhaps? Look, I get it. There were some absolutely dreadful happy hardcore tunes. Things got pretty stupid after 1997. But UK hardcore has always had this duality, right from the get-go. For every classic tune like Ellis Dee’s “Free The Feeling” we also got gimmicky trash like “Sesame’s Treet”. Happy hardcore just took things to the extreme, since the bad stuff was really, really bad. It was an easy target, I found it hilarious how Sharkey was a key part of hardcore’s downfall with much-maligned tunes like “Toytown”, yet he was also instrumental in pushing the Freeform sound years later, which gave us so many great tracks. As I say, such is the duality of man!
Of course, it’s a phenomenon which isn’t exclusive to hardcore. Every genre has good and bad tunes. It encourages you to dig deeper to find the stuff that shines brightest. Believe me, there’s plenty of classic happy hardcore tracks, if you give it a chance. I wouldn’t have listened if they weren’t there.
The Predatory Wasp 