The Predatory Wasp
Dylan Henner has made some of the most enriching, soothing ambient music I’ve ever heard, so I’m very excited about diving into his new album. Also, it’s called performs Raymond Scott’s Soothing Sounds for Baby, so I’m anticipating being pretty fucking relaxed in about an hour’s time.
https://dylanhenner.bandcamp.com/album/performs-raymond-scotts-soothing-sounds-for-baby
Following their excellent collaborative LP Dolphin, UK jazz maestro Greg Foat and Venetian electronic luminary Gigi Masin join forces once again for The Fish Factory Sessions, an exclusive release for Record Store Day 2024. Also featuring the talents Moses Boyd on drums and Tom Herbert on bass, Sabena is an alternative version of the track of the same name from Dolphin; a beautifully poignant tribute to Masin’s late wife, with this new version even more delicate than its predecessor.
https://gregfoat.bandcamp.com/album/the-fish-factory-sessions
Actress and Smalltown Supersound promise you a safe and transcendent journey…
Lots of good stuff out today, much of it pretty mournful (see also: most of Bat For Lashes’ new album) but this is my pick, from Arooj Aftab’s new album Night Reign which described in the press notes as “a perfumed, public garden of renewal”, and although I’m not entirely sure what that means, it’s very lovely.
HOMESHAKE continues to tease his second album of the year with a new single. Simple – accompanied by a music video directed by Jim Larson, – follows lead single Nothing 2 See,” and is the second part of a trilogy of videos for the forthcoming LP Horsie. For fans of 80s soft rock and prominent electric guitar.
House, post-punk, funk, Afrobeat and disco collide on the new album from Ibibio Sound Machine, Pull The Rope. Mama Says strongly reminds me of Crazy P as seen through a lens of afrofuturism and is absolutely essential for three-quarters of its running time, after which it transforms into a completely different, deeply irritating song that’s probably just best ignored.
It’s Friday, the sun is shining, so here’s some deeply paranoid bleakness from Keeley Forsyth’s third album The Hollow which came out today. The album’s title comes from her discovery a long-abandoned mining shaft whilst out walking, while musically it incorporates aspects of minimalist post-classical, dark ambient and film and theatre soundtracks, with occasional warped pitch-shifts of her overwhelmingly mournful vocal for additional headfuckery.
Written and recorded in 2021, Doer connects the dots between Frankfurt-based Man Rei’s (aka Kristin Reiman) debut Cusp in 2020 and their more recent recordings for Glasgow’s Somewhere Press. Bona Fide is about as hauntingly beautiful as it gets; a ghostly chamber piece where Reiman’s voice provides both the lead vocal and the shifting background textures.
Nina Kinert released RELIGIOUS last year; an album telling personal stories about growing up within the Pentecostal Church Community in Sweden. Her new LP CHORALS is a continuation of RELIGIOUS and is billed as “an experiment revolving around voice and death” recorded in close collaboration with Anton Sundell and Daniel Fagge Fagerström. It’s beautiful, and if you’re interested in hearing more about Nina’s experiences and the recording progress, be sure to check my interview with her from last year.
This blog is leaning ever more exclusively into ambient, so if you’re not into that – I’m sorry. But it’s hard not to when there’s so much good/weird/dreamy stuff around. Here, Not Waving and Romance take inspiration from Botticelli’s ‘The Birth of Venus’ on their third full-length LP Infinite Light, and the album’s title track is unquestionably its centrepiece; a ten-minute celestial epic to send even the hardest-lined of atheists quivering to their knees.
https://boomkat.com/products/infinite-light-e6c1ba09-0f31-4d2f-9708-2e7a5786ff69
The Predatory Wasp 