The Predatory Wasp
As Halloween approaches, I’d like to recommend this terrifying album from Prurient, Noise For Halloween Night. Lock the doors, turn the lights off, listen loud and have a panic attack. Happy Friday! 🖤
https://prurient.bandcamp.com/album/noise-for-halloween-night
Big love to Kandi Phil for alerting me to this one, without whose sage advice I may well not have bothered paying attention. I often dismiss efdemin as merely providing the original ingredients for the greatest remix of all time, but of course there’s more to him than that. This entire album is great, but the first two tracks – especially Poly – are really quite special.
Klein’s sleep with a cane isn’t so much a “mixtape” in the conventional sense as it is a sprawling ambient dossier. She frames it as such herself – “an epic ambient tape” – but over nearly 90 minutes, the record travels through murmurs, ruptures, and confessional loops. It’s experimental, deeply personal, intimately bound to her London roots and a strong contender for ambient album of the year.
Recorded at 5dB Studios in London, anaiis’s new albbum Devotion & The Black Divine explores uncertainty, acceptance, and the experience of new motherhood. The album reflects anaiis’s growing sense of grace and creative freedom, capturing human emotion in its raw, shifting form. I was a big fan of her last album – 2021’s This Is No Longer A Dream – and on the first few listens it seems as if Devotion will prove a worthy successor.
Marta Forsberg returns to Warm Winters Ltd. with her new meticulously woven album Archaeology of Intimacy. Soothing, gentle, yet uncompromising and strikingly beautiful, the album sees the Swedish-Polish composer move away from more long-form compositions into what the press notes describe as “pop”, but I definitely wouldn’t. Closing track closing Dreamers is an almost operatic piece which combines clipped and heavily auto-tuned vocals, a string section and beautiful synth melodies to impressively hypnotic effect.
https://martaforsberg.bandcamp.com/album/archaeology-of-intimacy
I’ve been getting to grips with the new Night Tapes album portals/polarities over the last few weeks, and while it hasn’t become an obsession in the way that last year’s assisted memories did, it still has its moments, one of which is the dreamily melodic swordsman. I just wish there were a few more of them.
It’s less than 2 months until the best album of 2025 will be released: Voices From The Lake’s II, the follow up to their eponymous, seminal debut. I’ve listened to this pretty much weekly in the intervening 13 (!) years, so the hype is very real. In the meantime, we have Valentino Mora’s also brilliant Biotope, released on Dozzy’s Spazio Disponibile and operating in a similarly atmospheric, hypnotic realm.
Barke’s new album Stochastic Drift is absolutely brilliant, and if it’s not in my top 10 of 2025 at the end of the I will be amazed. It’s not really fair to pick out a single track as you should really just dive in in its entirety, but The Remembering Self is the one that really stopped me in my tracks: probably the most purely ambient track Barker has ever produced, and achingly beautiful.
The second LP from revered techno collective Sandwell District, End Beginnings, serves as a poignant tribute to the late Juan Mendez, known as Silent Servant, who died halfway through the album’s production. The closing track The Silent Servant is as a heartfelt requiem, weaving distant mechanical murmurs with orchestral synths, while white noise sweeps through like wind rustling barren branches.
I saw Walt McClements support Mary Lattimore in a tiny venue in a town most of you have never heard of last year, and it was pretty amazing hearing him create an overwhelming wall of sound from an accordion, a loop pedal and not much else. One woman fainted! But it was quite hot and she was quite old, so take from that what you will. You get a sense of the power and grandiosity of his music from Sirens, the latest single to be released from his upcoming album On a Painted Ocean, due out in April on Western Vinyl.
https://waltmcclements.bandcamp.com/album/on-a-painted-ocean
The Predatory Wasp 