The Predatory Wasp
I first heard this only a couple of days ago, and it has already brought a ludicrous amount of joy into my life. As my brother said when I sent it to him: “It’s the DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ x Blood Orange x Two Bears mashup I didn’t know I needed, but absolutely do”. I’d also add Prince and Jai Paul to those reference points. High praise indeed, and deserving of every word.
To continue along the distinctly trance-themed path of recent selections, next up we have Maxime Denuc and his excellent new LP Club Imperiale. Named after a now-shuttered nightspot that overlooked the beach on Italy’s picturesque Tuscan coast, the album is framed as a work of speculative historical fiction, imagining a point of creative symbiosis between the Catholic church and the ecstatic dancefloors of the early ’90s. In simpler terms it occupies one of my favourite sub-genres, seemingly set up to answer the question: “what if trance but minus drums plus reverb?”.
Even arguably the most credible techno producer ever, King Doz, is now making trance. WAKE UP PEOPLE!
Nearly arrives two years after Nathan Jenkins’ previous album as Bullion, Affection, and is full of the kind of yearning bedroom pop I really enjoy, landing halfway between Bayonne and John Moods. And if you don’t know either of those references, shame on you. Go and read every page of this blog, immediately.
Space Afrika, the Manchester/Berlin-based duo of Joshua Tarelle Reid and Joshua Inyang, make raw, intensely detailed, visceral music with shades of ambient, trip-hop, techno, and modern classical, drawing spacious urban dubscapes from the contours of their city. Their new album Quiet Storm is the duo’s highly anticipated follow-up to their 2021 LP on Dais Records, expanding on its predecessor’s sound and scale in pretty much every way.
Astel is a new alias from Addison Groove, also known as Headhunter, an artist whose work has shaped key moments in UK electronic music for over two decades. With Shards, he steps away from the rhythmic intensity of the dancefloor, turning instead towards stillness, atmosphere and a more contemplative way of listening. This belongs to the increasingly popular “producer who used to make techno bangers and now is too old to go to clubs and makes ambient” sub-genre, and is fast becoming my favourite.
https://biofieldrecords.bandcamp.com/album/astel-shards-biofield-002
“When we say feral we mean killable and ungrievable; an animal for whom violent deaths are a possible outcome; that can be culled by slow poison, trapped and left to knaw its own leg off; that is worthless unless domesticated.
“When we say feral we point to an ideology of extermination and control.
“When we say feral we mean resisting
“When we say feral we mean unapologetic.”
John Beltran released one of the years best album’s back in February, Canada, and has another, Sunrise and the Life We Live, due in October for Music For Dreams. If that’s still not enough dreamy electronics for you, yesterday From Detroit From Love reissued his 2020 EP, from which this arpeggiated delight is taken.
Sleep D and Mosam Howieson join forces for an EP that sits between peak-time bangers and deep hypnotic terrain, with Intetia my pick of the bunch thanks to its Barker-esque melodic synthline and the fact that the breakdown reminds me of 00s prog.
