The Predatory Wasp
A Warm Static Sphere sees TPW favourite 36 in ultra-deep mode – vast and immersive synths mesh with opaque waves of noise which give way to more delicate moments and open up to reveal fragments and minutiae buried in the depths. The press notes describe the album as “truly horizontal music”, and while I’m not entirely sure what that means, it definitely makes me want to lie down. In a good way.
https://quietdetails.bandcamp.com/album/a-warm-static-sphere
Mike Paradinas returns to Balmat with his new album 1979, the spiritual successor to his 2023 label debut 1977. 1979 explores a synth-heavy landscape of ethereal soundscapes, ominous crevasses, and strange, psychedelic fugues, and leans more readily into ambient-adjacent moods and textures than most of Paradinas’s more lively recordings as µ-Ziq on Planet Mu.
Shawn Reynaldo’s First Floor Substack continues to be a reliably rich source for electronic music reccomendations, and the latest edition highlighted an artist with whom he’s long been obsessed, J. Albert. Converge is taken from his album Return To Sender which sees the NYC-based artist flit between relatively down-the-line dub techno and more amorphous, experimental structures, into which latter category Converge neatly fits.
It’s taken me three months to listen to POLIÇA’s new album Dreams Go, but I’m glad I eventually got round to it because I completely love this song. Dreamy and somewhat morose with a fair few subtle electronic flourishes, it’s the kind of indie pop I can’t get enough of.
Big love to Kandi Phil for alerting me to this one, without whose sage advice I may well not have bothered paying attention. I often dismiss efdemin as merely providing the original ingredients for the greatest remix of all time, but of course there’s more to him than that. This entire album is great, but the first two tracks – especially Poly – are really quite special.
After their first outing on Future Retro London, Tim Reaper, Mantra & Decibella return with Sage EP for FABRICLIVE. Across four tracks they balance toughness and detail. Stand-out Sage Sage drifts between dreamlike textures and hammering drums, deftly flipping between amens and four-to-the-floor.
The Spanish composer and sound artist on the fragile solemnity of a late-period Low masterpiece.
The premise of One Track Mind is pretty simple: I ask artists to pick one track that means a lot to them – either something they’ve discovered recently, something that’s been with them for years, or one that reminds them of a specific time in their life or career – and tell me what makes it so special to them. I get to talk to the artists I love, and they get to talk about the artists they love. Love all round!
Spanish composer and sound artist Arvin Dola works at the intersection of music, cinema, and performance. His background in scoring for film and theatre informs a deeply textural approach, where sound becomes a vehicle for memory, emotion, and unresolved narratives.
His new LP O GHOST is his debut album release and is inspired by absence, memory, and the weight of unresolved time. Written in the wake of personal loss, it folds grief into a subtle kind of presence. Drawing on hauntology and shaped by Dola’s work in film and performance, the record blends ambient, drone, and disintegrating motifs that never quite land or leave.
For his One Track Mind selection, Arvin has chosen to highlight a track from an incredible album which also happens to be one of my all-time favourites.
It’s less than 2 months until the best album of 2025 will be released: Voices From The Lake’s II, the follow up to their eponymous, seminal debut. I’ve listened to this pretty much weekly in the intervening 13 (!) years, so the hype is very real. In the meantime, we have Valentino Mora’s also brilliant Biotope, released on Dozzy’s Spazio Disponibile and operating in a similarly atmospheric, hypnotic realm.
There are so many interesting and/or brilliant albums coming out at the moment that I find myself with very little time to actually write about them. Hopefully I’ll dig out a bit more time next week, but for now – and continuing the ambient theme of this week – he’s a deeply soothing track from Malibu’s excellent new LP Vanities which landed today.
I don’t even know what this is really and I can’t find anything about it online other than that’s it a project of Luke Wyatt and Jessi Long, but it’s incredible.
The Predatory Wasp 