The Predatory Wasp
Live’s new LP (EP? mixtape?) is a pretty tough listen in places. The hecticness of the opening track almost seems designed to put you off, but you’ve settled into its crunchy, super-lofi aesthetic, there are a few moments of genuine brilliance, Mashed Feelings among them. It’s unlikely to generate quite the same hype as last year’s Girl In The Half Pearl, but it’s still definitely worth a listen.
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.
It’s taken more than two decades for the music I was obsessed with as a teenager to become fashionable again. It’s been worth the wait. There are a few artists pushing this sound now, but German duo DJ Heartstring have got the formula down to a fine art. Trance? Yes! Hardcore? Sure! 90s pop-dance. Of course! Taken from their three-track EP Don’t Stop which clocks in at sub 10 minutes for the lot. Saccharine beats for happy-sad lads.
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.
It’s always nice to find an album that so unnerving I need a couple of breaks to get through it. Madeleine Cocolas’ latest LP Bodies set out to explore similarities between bodies of water and human bodies and to blur the boundaries between them, incorporating sounds of water Madeliene recorded on trips to the Australian coastline as well as creeks and waterfalls in Far North Queensland. Drift, with its bubbling, optimistic lead line, is probably the most accessible track. Elsewhere things get very intense very quickly.
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.
This came out last year, but I’m highlighting it now as a) I’ve only just listened to it and it’s brilliant and b) he’s playing in my hometown next week, and is the first musical act I’ve been genuinely excited about here for ages. Significant serpentwithfeet vibes. And he’s playing in a library! Madness. More of this kind of mournful electronic-indie R&B, please.
The now 10 year old Acid Test 09 sees a special anniversary edition repress with a new vocal mix of track Test 3 which arguably distracts from the near-perfect bubbling simplicity of the original, but is nevertheless a nice reminder of how brilliant this collaboration was.
I finally watched Aftersun last night and woke up still feeling pretty sad about it, so needed something to bounce me into the weekend. This (relatively) new EP from Lossy is perfect, and at times reminds me of some of Barker’s recent, beatless(ish) work.
The Predatory Wasp 