The Predatory WaspI’m currently spending way too obsessing about my end of year list, which doesn’t leave much room for new music. I did dutifully dive into Oneohtrix Point Never’s new album Tranquilizer though and yes – it’s quite good! Ben Cardew’s article for Line Noise did a great job of summing up my own ambivalent feelings towards much of his discography (TLDR: I think it’s impressive, I just don’t feel it) but Cherry Blue definitely stood out amongst all the glitchiness.
Originally released as a mixtape 5 years ago, there’s now a florescent pink vinyl edition to celebrate the first Romance release on Ecstatic, You Must Remember This. Fusing ambient texture with the emotive sweep of Hollywood’s golden-age symphonic soundtracks, this new version includes separated tracks, a full remaster of the original release, and two previously unheard bonus cuts from the archive.
https://youmustrememberthis.bandcamp.com/album/you-must-remember-this-expanded-edition
I really was intending to post something bouncy and uplifting to start the week, but then I heard Simone Seales new album Dearest and decided reflective, somewhat mournful cello was actually the way to go. Simone Seales’s debut studio album is a poetry-music album inspired by the warmth, nostalgia, and tension of first queer love which they wrote as a way of honouring and releasing their first relationship from a decade ago. So not bouncy, exactly, just very good.
A Warm Static Sphere sees TPW favourite 36 in ultra-deep mode – vast and immersive synths mesh with opaque waves of noise which give way to more delicate moments and open up to reveal fragments and minutiae buried in the depths. The press notes describe the album as “truly horizontal music”, and while I’m not entirely sure what that means, it definitely makes me want to lie down. In a good way.
https://quietdetails.bandcamp.com/album/a-warm-static-sphere
The title of Corrina Repp’s new LP, ACTIVITY DREAM: Instrumentals on the guitar Vol. 1, tells you everything you need to know. It’s beautiful, fragile music, ripe with wonder and yearning. There’s also a 36 page photo book that accompanies the release, described by Repp as full of “perfect accidents I feel lucky enough to witness.”
https://corrinarepp.bandcamp.com/album/activity-dream-instrumentals-on-the-guitar-vol-1
Unfolding is Jessica Moss’s most meditative and plaintive solo album, and perhaps the first in the Montréal violinist/composer’s decade-spanning discography that could properly be called ambient.
The album came together over a period of a year, inspired by the genocide in Palestine, and as a direct response to “our collective witnessing, our collective grief, as a portal to collective mourning, as a searchlight through our internal weather systems, seeking one another out in the dark.” Opening the album, Washing Machine traces its origins to a phone recording of a European laundry machine, captured by Moss as she sat next to it, heartbroken on the bathroom floor, finding solace by humming a melody along to the mechanical harmonics of the washer working through its cycles.
Mike Paradinas returns to Balmat with his new album 1979, the spiritual successor to his 2023 label debut 1977. 1979 explores a synth-heavy landscape of ethereal soundscapes, ominous crevasses, and strange, psychedelic fugues, and leans more readily into ambient-adjacent moods and textures than most of Paradinas’s more lively recordings as µ-Ziq on Planet Mu.
Betty Hammerschlag arrives on blush with a beautiful set of abstracted folk diversions on her new LP fake girl. Sits somewhere between Grouper and ML Buch; with heartwrenching melodies submerged beneath layers of reverb, dust and melancholy.
Shawn Reynaldo’s First Floor Substack continues to be a reliably rich source for electronic music reccomendations, and the latest edition highlighted an artist with whom he’s long been obsessed, J. Albert. Converge is taken from his album Return To Sender which sees the NYC-based artist flit between relatively down-the-line dub techno and more amorphous, experimental structures, into which latter category Converge neatly fits.
It’s taken me three months to listen to POLIÇA’s new album Dreams Go, but I’m glad I eventually got round to it because I completely love this song. Dreamy and somewhat morose with a fair few subtle electronic flourishes, it’s the kind of indie pop I can’t get enough of.
The Predatory Wasp 