The Predatory Wasp
Avi. C Engel’s new album Too Many Souls lands 23 February digitally, with additional formats including cassette by Cruel Nature Records (UK) and on CD by Somnimage (US). Lead single Hold This Flame is a spectral delight; sparse and haunting with Engel’s ghostly vocal contrasting with the gently rising dissonance of strings and percussion.
After various collaborative projects over the past few years, Donato Dozzy finally gives us what we all want: a solo ambient techno album, tailor-made to make us weepy. “An emotional homage to family and the Adriatic Sea” (!), Magda is absolute fucking perfection and if it’s not in my top 10 albums this year, it will have been a frankly ridiculous year for music. At times evoking, possibly even surpassing his seminal Voices From The Lake project, if you don’t like Le Chaser at least, we can’t be friends.
Apparently the “sad cowboy” aesthetic is a thing, and while I categorically refuse to dive into TikTok to confirm this, I’m definitely interested in its musical manifestation. Cowboy Sadness is a project from some of my favourite musicians – The Antlers’s Peter Silberman, David Moore of Bing & Ruth, and Nicholas Principe of Port St. Willow – so even without the deliciously bait title of Selected Jambient Works Vol. 1 I was fully invested before I’d heard a note. Cue an hour of luscious pads, hushed drums and effervescent melodies evoking dusty plains and big ol’ skies as far as the eye can see.
https://cowboysadness.bandcamp.com/album/selected-jambient-works-vol-1
the unfolding rose is an ever expanding album mostly made up of improvised one-take songs, recorded, mixed and mastered by aloisius alongside various collaborators. If you’re in the market for an extremely challenging 4+ hour ambient/experimental LP, this comes highly recommended. Patience definitely required, but there are some truly extraordinary moments of beauty hidden between the sketchy snatches of conversation and – at times overwhelming – dissonance. This particular track also ticks the elusive ‘zero views on YouTube’ box, which makes me feel exceedingly niche.
My favourite album of the year was a nostalgic reimagining of mid-90s rave with all the sharp edges removed, so it’s unsurprising that I’m similarly enamoured with Metro Riders’ backward-looking LP Lost In Reality, which examines 80’s proto-house through an extreme lo-fi lens. A project of Henrik Stelzer, this latest Metro Riders album aims to “map out an emotional geography of cities at night” and absolutely nails the sense of time and place, like a Roland-obsessed Burial for the Stockholm underground.
For the next few weeks the newness of the music featured here will take a back seat as I trawl through the many (many) end of year list and discover everything I missed. But hopefully much of it will at least be as new to you as it is to me, so we can still be friends. Popmatters’ ambient selections are always especially strong, and so it proves once again as they’ve introduced me to this beautiful piece from Sweden’s Prins Emanuel, taken from him album Diagonal Musik II.
Traumprinz / DJ Healer / whoever continues his annual tradition of releasing new music as we enter the festive season. This time it’s some additional material from 2022’s life, presumably recorded around the same time, alongside weltenbrände, which is an “associative prose poem” in German. So fairly niche, that one, but extra life at least is a welcome reminder that he’s still the undisputed king of emotional techno.
Who’d have thought we needed an ambient flute album from Outkast’s Johnny Vulture, but here we are.
Landing last week, Statues II is the culmination of a double album that began with his Statues I, released in August of this year, both of which follow his incredible collaboration with Dawn Richard on Pigments; one of the best album of 2022. Leaning hard into both ambient and jazz, OST is a fuzzy, celestial, faintly ominous delight.
The Predatory Wasp 