The Predatory Wasp
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.
Sodium Pentothal is a rapid-onset short-acting barbiturate general anesthetic and the substance Stars of the Lids’ Adam Wiltzie used as inspiration for his latest album, Eleven Fugues For Sodium Pentothal; a suite of songs inspired by a recurring dream wherein “if someone listened to the music I created, then they would die.” Pretty bleak right! And he doesn’t stop there. “When you are sitting face forward on the daily emotional meat grinder of life, I always wished I could have some [barbiturate], so I could just fall asleep automatically and the feeling would not be there anymore.” If this all sounds overwhelmingly depressing, the music is anything but, with Dim Hopes especially building towards a climax that is without doubt closer to catharsis than to oblivion.
https://adamwiltzie.bandcamp.com/album/eleven-fugues-for-sodium-pentothal
Kilometre Club’s heartbreakingly beautiful ambient track Dividend is taken from a benefit compilation for FLAP (Fatal Light Awareness Program Canada), an organisation that seeks to protect migrating birds. Curated in part by TPW favourite Avi C. Engel and including several of their collaborative tracks with Bradley Sean Alexander, it’s Polar Seas’ 75th and final release and a fittingly contemplative collection of meditative tones and melodies.
https://polarseasrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/sky-within-us
Apologies for the complete lack of music recently, but it’s been a busy old week. Hopefully you’ve been finding your own way regardless. I’ve been doing some deep ambient dives over the last few days to help me coping with the rising tension, and have come across a few gems I missed from earlier in the year, my favourite of which is probably Numa Gama’s album A Spectral Turn which brilliantly blends ambient, and IDM textures with post-rave, dub techno-adjacent rhythms.
Soaring, celestial ambient modulations from the always interesting Oneohtrix Point Never, taken from his new Ambients collection on Warp.
Maria W Horn’s new album Panoptikon is a suite of choral and electronic music originally produced for an installation in the disbanded Vita Duvan panopticon prison in Luleå, Sweden. According to the press materials, the circular prison structure of Vita Duvan, which enabled central monitoring, was meant to create a sense of omniscient surveillance. The panopticon made the inmates aware that they could be monitored at any time without having any way of checking if this was actually the case.
Panopitkon was originally presented as a multichannel sound and light installation where the imagined individual voices of the inmates were represented by loudspeakers placed in the various cells of the prison. Opening track Omnia citra mortem (everything until death) is a legal term that means prisoners who did not confess their crime could not be sentenced to death, but only to torture until a confession was forthcoming.
If this all sounds overwhelmingly bleak, then yes, there is undoubtedly a darkness and meaning tone to much of the music here. But it is also in parts quite overwhelmingly beautiful, and has already had a profound effect on me. Without doubt one of the most striking and accomplished albums of the year so far.
I’ve been revisiting the discography of the hugely underrated and now sadly defunct band Paper Dollhouse recently, and there are parallels to be drawn between their work and the Save The Cat’s debut LP; stripped-back guitars, mournful vocals and a lot of reverb that occasionally descends into blinding static. The whole album is incredibly sad and depressing and I really love it.
My dude 36 is back with yet another album, hopefully the first of many this year. Reality Engine is the third and final LP in 36’s synth trilogy, concluding the melodic, melancholy machine sound started with Wave Variations and continuing with Symmetry Systems. See how it glimmers! Feel better!
The Predatory Wasp 