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.
Eriks de Casier announces her forthcoming album Still with new single Lucky, which treads a familiar but nevertheless enjoyable path: warm chords, stripped-back, evocative breaks and plaintive, romantic vocals. The most interesting part of the announcement though is the list of collaborators Casier produces on the album, namely They Hate Change, Shygirl and Blood Orange. Still is out 21 February, so I don’t even need to spend too much time imagining what that will sound like.
It’s been a solid couple of years for Seoul based electronic duo Salamander, as they’ve slowly but surely become more widely known in the West via glowing features in tastemaker outlets like FACT and Crack Magazine. Sing Together landed on Christmas Eve and continues in a similar vibe to their latest album In Parallel; skeletal but warm electronic meanderings with naive melodies and plenty of whimsy.
As is traditional, the first few weeks (possibly months) of 2024 will see me catching up on all the brilliant music I missed from last year. I expect everyone’s feeling exceptionally bleak after big nights out/in a couple of days ago, so here’s something soft and restorative from Amsterdam’s nthng, taken from their latest album There Is A Place For Me. For fans of DJ Healer, breakbeats and being reflective (or just a bit sad).
Described on its release by FACT as “Christmas story about love, confusion and sexuality, and the best thing he’s made since Untrue“, Burial’s Rival Dealer EP came out 10 years ago, and includes what has become arguably the defining mid-period Burial track Come Down To Us – a 13 minute epic that starts and ends with crackly static (obviously) and tackles themes of identification and loss via a speech from transgender filmmaker Lana Wachowski, soaring melodies and what can only be described as Christmas bells. A decade later it remains both provocatively divisive and inescapably brilliant.
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.
After the soaring, organic beauty of 2021’s A Playground In A Lake, Clark’s new album Cave Dog is a bit of a hard landing back on digital earth, but not necessarily in a bad way. Take the very weirdly named Dogloch Dry As Ash, which comes in like a hybrid of Mylo and Boards of Canada with a sprinkling of the (original) Tron soundtrack; and if that sounds like an unlikely mix, then I agree – but there you have it.
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.
“Music is such an abstract listening form, your mind needs to fill in gaps“
“Sabrina Spellman was mixing dope beats in the other realm, which she recorded onto her inherited heirloom tape machine, made with her carboot-sale drum machines and charity-shop synthesizers” So runs the legend and origin story of DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ, the anonymous producer with a penchant for warping 90s samples into nostalgia-rich, tearjerking electronic music.
Several albums, hundreds of tracks and a 1975 collaboration later, her latest LP Destiny arrived earlier this year in all its 4 hour + running time glory. One of the most innovative and original electronic artists to emerge in the last few years, I was very pleased to welcome her to TPW for a chat…
To start off I’d like to ask something I hope you don’t take the wrong way – what on earth possessed you to release a four hour album?
Well, I wanted to beat Charmed’s length cause everyone prefers the longer albums (they’re more popular among listeners) compared to the shorter albums (they’re less popular among listeners) and I wanted to find a way to supplant Charmed as it was still very popular even after three albums released since lol! I also had a lot of songs finished and they all worked too well for me to cut them (I think I only cut two songs eventually from the album).
The Predatory Wasp 