The Predatory Wasp
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.
Blurring the lines between chamber music, contemporary dance, dark pop and ethereal ambience, Klein, Mica Levi and Space Afrika collaborator Bianca Scout distills a decade of multidisciplinary work with her new album Pattern Damage, moving between diaristic ephemera, demure post-punk and chamber ambient, and cracking open bewildering crypto-romantique wormholes in the process. And yes, this is pretty much a direct copy and paste of the release hype, but a) it’s accurate and b) it’s a bank holiday and I have better (lazier) things to be doing.
French artist Laetitia Sadier’s new album Rooting For Love is billed as a call to the traumatized civilizations of Earth, urging us to “evolve past our countless millennia of suffering and alienation”. Organ, guitar, bass, synth, trombone, vibraphone, live and programmed drums combine, yes, Air comparisons are appropriate and not just cos French: but there’s a edge here that’s absent from much of Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel’s soft-focus oeuvre.
Not content with releasing arguably the best electronic album of the year so far, Donato Dozzy / Dozzers / The Big Dozz has reunited with Eva Geist – alongside the now permanent addition of previous collaborator Pietro Micioni – for a new LP under their Il Quadro Do Troisi moniker. Set for release later this month and billed as “classic Italian songwriting with an electronic spin”, expect soaring vocals and plenty of bubbling, electro basslines.
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.
The Predatory Wasp 