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).
Dennis Huddleston’s music has always been based around loops, and his latest album as 36, Ablyss, is the fullest expression yet of this obsession. The 21 tracks that make up the LP are not unfinished ideas, waiting to be fleshed out into fully formed tracks: they exist purely in their own terms, tools for drifting off and becoming completely detached. Or as he puts it: “Feel free to get lost in them whenever you need them.”
“These days I feel somewhat in control of what I choose to believe”
Nina Kinert released the album Romantic and the EP In Twos in 2018 and was awarded Composer of the year at the Independent Manifest gala in Sweden that same year. Her new album Religious – her first release since 2021’s Wild, Wild Geese – tells personal stories about growing up within the Pentecostal Church Community in Sweden, while simultaneously exploring her attraction to both nature and the supernatural.
Romantic was my album of the year in 2018, and still affects how I search for new music today. I’m pretty much always on the lookout for ‘the next Nina’; to discover an artist about whom I was previously unaware, but that goes on to have a huge significance in my life. So to say I was happy that she agreed to an interview is somewhat of an understatement.
Religious tells stories about you growing up in the Pentecostal Church, and also explores your attraction to spiritual mystique and the supernatural. Were these attractions you felt as a child, or did they come later?
I’ve always felt open to different possibilities, and maybe seen that as a result of my childhood within the church. As if it gave me an understanding of belief – no matter what the belief relies on. But when I was a child I thought everything needed to be categorised, divided into good or evil. That’s not how I see it now.
LXXXVIII is the ninth Actress album, and is presented as “the very first presentation of [his] voyage into ‘luxury sonics’ – the culmination of 25 years’ honing mind-shorting, soul-igniting audio infusions for dance floors, rave dens, festivals, and concert halls”. I’m not even going to attempt to top that, other than to say that this is as meditative and immersive as Darren Cunningham’s music has ever been.
