The Predatory Wasp
Synthpop royalty Vince Clarke recently announced his debut solo album, Songs of Silence alongside the lead single The Lamentations of Jeremiah. The album is described as “10-track lyric-less album of uncategorisable ambient beauty” and yes this is definitely true of the lead single, but “uncompromisingly bleak and foreboding” is another way of describing it. Situation it certainly ain’t.
https://mutebank.co.uk/products/vince-clarke-songs-of-silence-cd
Grant Chapman’s new album Revisions starts with an anguished scream and ends with a breathy vocal repeating “it’s so sad” for a couple of minutes, but despite this it’s actually a joyful listen, and really not depressing at all (honestly). Calm and serenity permeates through the entire album, which makes that jarring start all the more surprising. It’s hard to pick out a highlight as all the tracks flow pretty seamlessly, but sometimes it really is “so sad”, so Comedown gets TPW seal of approval. Also, at the time of writing this currently has zero views on YouTube, so it makes me feel good to know that might increase to a dozen or so following this post.
The latest album from Norwegian-Mexican artist Carmen Villain is comprised from parts of her score for Eszter Salamon’s two-and-a-half hour dance performance, Monument 0.10 : The Living Monument. Most of the track included here are edited down from the long-form versions that accompanied the ultra-slow scenes of the performance, which means that somewhere there’s probably an extended version of this incredibly lush album opener that I need to find and have on repeat for months to come.
https://carmenvillain.bandcamp.com/album/music-from-the-living-monument
“Cold Ecstasy is the ultimate memory rush. It’s the album I’ve always wanted to make“
Cold Ecstasy is the latest album from 36 – the ambient and experimental electronic music project of UK artist Dennis Huddleston. An homage to the happier, more emotionally-charged aspects of the UK hardcore and rave scene, it is a truly beautiful body of work, playing with themes of memory and deeply rooted in nostalgia: something with which I have an arguably unhealthily obsession.
I love Cold Ecstasy, so was delighted that Dennis agreed to answer some questions about his inspirations and approaches to its creation.
For the majority of the 00s and 2010s – and arguably even in its 90s heyday – trance and the happier aspects of hardcore were pretty much written off as unserious and not worthy of respect. Why do you think that is?
People are too serious, perhaps? Look, I get it. There were some absolutely dreadful happy hardcore tunes. Things got pretty stupid after 1997. But UK hardcore has always had this duality, right from the get-go. For every classic tune like Ellis Dee’s “Free The Feeling” we also got gimmicky trash like “Sesame’s Treet”. Happy hardcore just took things to the extreme, since the bad stuff was really, really bad. It was an easy target, I found it hilarious how Sharkey was a key part of hardcore’s downfall with much-maligned tunes like “Toytown”, yet he was also instrumental in pushing the Freeform sound years later, which gave us so many great tracks. As I say, such is the duality of man!
Of course, it’s a phenomenon which isn’t exclusive to hardcore. Every genre has good and bad tunes. It encourages you to dig deeper to find the stuff that shines brightest. Believe me, there’s plenty of classic happy hardcore tracks, if you give it a chance. I wouldn’t have listened if they weren’t there.
As a result of the deep calm I felt after the first few minutes of listening this, I was very much unprepared for its final third. I won’t spoil the surprise.
I came across this during a frantic Spotify cull of albums I’ve saved but rarely (if ever) listened to. Cucina Povera is the alias of the Glasgow-based artist Maria Rossi, originally from Finland, and this is taken from her 2021 LP Dalmarnock Tapes, throughout which she layers her own vocals to create a choir of one, with invariably intensely haunting results.
Finding albums like Not Marshall’s Fragments of Varnished Visions makes me a bit happy and a bit sad: happy, as I feel like I’ve stumbled on something brilliant that hasn’t already had its praises highly sung; sad as this is flying so hard under the radar that it’s difficult to imagine any more than a small handful of people will ever get the chance to enjoy its magnificence. I literally can’t find anything about it online except its listing on AOTY, not even a Bandcamp page. It’s not often ambient is explicitly joyful, but that’s certainly the case with About The Desert, and the rest of this deeply buried gem is equally lovely.
I’m back! Sorry for the extended silence, but Glastonbury etc. Slowly getting back into the new music swing though and just came across this glorious new album from Not Waving, The Place I’ve Been Missing, on which the Italian artist explores “grief, gratitude, and new beginnings” across a mix of ambient, electronica and jazz. Lead single Fool includes elements of all the above, and is really very lovely indeed.
https://notwavingmusic.bandcamp.com/album/the-place-ive-been-missing
I’m off to Glastonbury tomorrow (wallop!) and time is tight, but here’s a lovely, meandering slice of cosmic ambience for you, and the opening track from UK jazz keyboardist Greg Foat and Venetian downtempo electronic maestro Gigi Masin’s collaborative new album Dolphin. See you on the flipside!
Released as a Bandcamp exclusive in April and now available everywhere, Romance’s Fade Into You is descrived as their “first album proper” in the press notes, which is a little confusing, as there are at least a couple of what I’d consider full length releases out there already, as well as their collaborative albums with Dean Hurley. So who knows. But anyway… Fade Into You is a beautiful, delicately textured ambient album loosely inspired by Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1972 film The Bitter Tears Of Petra Von Kant – “an unforgiving dissection of the toxic relationship between a haughty fashion designer and a beautiful but icy ingenue” – and continues the mysterious producer’s penchant for warping well known records almost beyond recognition, creating at times eerie but more often than not deeply emotional soundscapes from the resulting wreckage. Presumably there’s some Mazzy Star buried deep in here somewhere; some of the other building blocks are more explicitly labelled.
https://youmustrememberthis.bandcamp.com/album/fade-into-you
The Predatory Wasp 