The Predatory Wasp
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
Deep, meditative dub techno here courtesy of Shanghai-based producer Rainsoft with a specific focus on the interplay between the natural world and modern production methods. Think Donato Dozzy if he got lost in a rainforest for a couple of years. This is the title track from her new LP, and it’s very good.
This is taken from the Thom Yorke-composed original score for Daniele Luchetti’s film Confidenza, an adaptation of the Italian drama based on Domenico Starnone’s novel of the same name. The soundtrack LP sees Yorke working again with Sam Petts-Davies as well as the London Contemporary Orchestra alongside a jazz ensemble which included Robert Stillman and fellow The Smile bandmate Tom Skinner.
Given the artist and title of this, I’m not sure I really need to explain why I love it.
“How are you expected to put your hands in the air when you can’t even rise from your knees?”
https://3six.bandcamp.com/album/trance-anthems-for-a-sunken-generation
Wil Bolton is a composer, musician and artist based in East London. His work is inspired by place, memory, resonance and finding beauty in ruins, decay and the details and textures of everyday scenes. His latest album Null Point is dub techno meets Eno, blending gorgeous melodies and ambient textures with a more rhythmic approach than most of his previous work, with skeletal beats constructed from thuds, clicks and crackles sampled from a vintage 7” record of heart sounds as the backbone.
The Predatory Wasp 