The first solo project from Alan Sparkhawk, formerly of Low, was always going to be difficult. Following the death of his wife and bandmate Mimi Parker in 2022, Sparkhawk hasn’t been absent as such, still recording with his son and playing the occasional live show, but his new album, White Roses, My God is certainly his fullest musical statement since Parker’s death. And a surprising one it is, with Sparkhawk going full Kayne, albeit thankfully only in musical rather than political direction, with heavily autotuned vocals stretched over stripped-back, electro-ish arrangements. Brother is the only track that features any guitar at all – which will probably upset Low purists – and benefits from the additional texture that brings. But at this stage I think he’s earned the right to do whatever he wants.
“We get lots of inspiration from the natural world: its quietness, rhythms and beauty”
Mary Lattimore and Walt McClements are two of contemporary music’s most renowned innovators. Lattimore’s inventive harp processing and looping has brought the instrument to a new audience and her prolific run of celestial solo albums and evocative film scores have redefined the instrument in the modern consciousness. Her genre-agnostic collaborations include work with Kurt Vile, Steve Gunn, Jeff Zeigler, Meg Baird, Bill Fay and Thurston Moore.
McClements, who tours as a member of Weyes Blood, is an acclaimed composer in his own right, sculpting glacial atmospherics from the accordion.
Recorded in the cozy setting of McClements’ apartment during a rainy December in LA, their new collaborative LP Rain on the Road unfurls as a series of sonic vignettes, rolling landscapes hewn from longform improvisations for harp and accordion. Embellished with additional instrumentation such as the shimmering constellations of hand bells on “Stolen Bells” that glisten like lights on wet pavement, or the stately piano figures on “The Top of Thomas Street”; their pastoral pieces manage to paint vivid images.
Currently in the middle of an extensive European tour, I was very happy they agreed to have a chat about the album, the origins of their collaborations and why Spotify sucks.
When did you first meet, and how long did it take for you to decide that you wanted to work together on music?
Walt – We met in 2017 when we were both playing a festival with the same band. I feel like we became friends then and did some collaboration here and there, Mary played some harp on an old project of mine’s record. But maybe not until the pandemic did we start to connect more musically. I had started making more instrumental ambient/drone work, and Mary was a big influence and supporter. I played on her porch when she started hosting socially distanced outdoor shows, and then we went on tour together in 2021, and I started to sit in on a few songs at the end of Mary’s set, which was so fun, and that led to the idea of making a record together.
Mary – We both grew up in North Carolina and turns out we attended some of the same shows. This collaboration and friendship feels meant-to-be. I’m a big fan of Walt’s ear and aesthetic and sonic curiosity, so it was natural to ask him to sit in when we were on tour together. It feels like a really organic way of getting to know someone, personality and musical sensibility and instincts going hand-in-hand.
RIP summer! It was fun while it lasted, but we’re done with you, and with the first Friday of Autumn we can welcome a load of interesting new album releases. Top of the pile is Pale Jay’s Low End Love Songs, possibly my most anticipated album of the year and which starts with the most glorious opening track I’ve heard in ages. Plus, it’s just in time for my birthday! Thanks, Jay. ❤
“The story of my life doesn’t exist. Does not exist. There’s never any center to it. No path, no line. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it’s not true, there was no one. I started to write in surroundings that drove me to reticence. Writing, for those people, was still something moral. Nowadays it often seems writing is nothing at all. Sometimes I realize that if writing isn’t, all things, all contraries confounded, a quest for vanity and void, it’s nothing.”
Yetsuby is the solo experimental electronic and ambient-focussed project of South Korean artist Yejin Jang who also records of one half of the excellent duo Salamanda. If I Drink This Potion is taken from her new album, b_b, her debut release on Seb Wildblood’s all my thoughts label; a striking mini LP that features some of the most arresting, engrossing and detailed production of any I’ve heard this year.
Reunion Island is Ashley Leer, Matt Leer, and Brad Loving, and that’s about as much information as I can find out them. Their second (I think) album Night Words came out last month, and it’s really very good; ambient techno one minute, shoegaze the next, and various things in between. Lost New is dubby, hypnotic techno, as soothing as it is stimulating.
I’ve spent a few weeks with Mabe Fratti’s new album Sentir que no sabes now, but it’s just not really doing it for me. Her last couple sounded like nothing else I’ve ever heard, properly visceral and overwhelming in parts, whereas this one just kinda of bobs along. Almosteveryone disagrees with me, so maybe I just don’t get it. Enfrente is pretty great though.
Loma’s 2020 album Don’t Shy Away was one of the best of the year: its somewhat paranoid but ultimately reassuringly intimacy the perfect companion for heading into a winter of lockdown bleakness. Four years later we now have the follow up How Will I Live Without A Body, and while the overall atmosphere hasn’t changed drastically – recording techniques include using the ruin of a 12th-century chapel as a reverb chamber – I’m not sure it quite reaches the insular beauty of it’s predecessor. How It Starts is lovely though.
American R&B singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Fana Hues describes the process of working through grief on her third album Moth as ““denying the fact that it happened, turning it into shameful pettiness, self-reflection, re-grounding myself and acceptance, and then letting it go”. The drums on Gone Again stand out – purposeful and intricate – with Hues’ airy vocal soaring majestically above them.
Illuvia is the music project of Ludvig Cimbrelius who also releases music as Purl, Eternell and Abraço de Vapor. New album Earth Prism is his third under this ambient drum n bass leaning alias, and does pretty much exactly what you’d expect, with atmospheric pads and lush melodies combined with lo-fi drums filtered almost out of existence.
The Predatory Wasp 