Varsity Star is a Brooklyn-based electronic musician who grew up in the suburbs of Boston, but relocated to Berlin after a “biblical flea infestation” made his apartment uninhabitable. His remix of Coolgirl’s Gaussian Blur amplifies some of the more retro-leaning electronic elements of the original, upping the tempo and adding furious, Squarepusher-esque drums to run alongside the neon synth lines. By turns franticly glitchy and soothingly warm, it’s an assured reimagining of what was already a strong record.
To my shame, I only recently found out that Stars of the Lid founder Adam Wiltzie made up one half of A Winged Victory For The Sullen – the other half being L.A. composer Dustin O’Halloran – which considering how much I love SOTL, I really should have been more aware of. Desires Are Already Memories is taken from their forthcoming album Invisible Cities, which is a paired-down version of the score to Leo Warner’s acclaimed theatre production. Like much of their work it sits somewhere between hope and despair, with choral voices and aching beautiful strings combining to tremendous effect.
LAMBERT is a London based songwriter, producer and artist with a background in baroque and classical music and now creating some rather striking electronica. one x one is her latest release and pairs her granulated, ethereal vocal alongside starkly beautiful production. The track was produced while “coming to terms with the reality of losing someone close to me”, with LAMBERT aiming to make something that was both painful and beautiful to capture the feelings of that time. She’s undoubtedly succeeded.
There are only two possible musical routes for an artist name of Craven Faults coupled with artwork as starkly bleak as on Enclosures: screaming, piledriving metal and sinister, meandering electronica. Fortunately (for me at least) this is very much in the latter camp; an intricate, patient and atmospheric three track EP from an artist whose bio is as succinct and evocative as “half-remembered journeys across post-industrial Yorkshire”.
A while back I posted about Raggio verde, the first track of a new project by Andrea Noce (Eva Geist) and Donato Scaramuzzi aka Donato Dozzy aka one of my very favourite electronic producers of all time. It turns out that I’m such a big fan of his that I completely missed the release of the full, self-titled album last month. Anyway, it’s brilliant, and Sfere di Qi is just one of many of the tracks that balance Dozzy’s trademark hypnotic polyrhythms with Geist’s wonderfully evocative vocals.
Mark Pritchard is an extraordinary artist making some of the most visionary electronic music you’re likely to hear, ranging from the deeply unsettling and undefinable to blissful, meditative electronica like in My Heart. This is the final track on MP Productions – EP 1: a six track collection revisiting some of the aliases he has released under, and spanning a range of styles but predominantly focused on club music, which I would highly recommend checking out.
Nathalie Stern is a Swedish artist now based in Newcastle who served her apprenticeship in guitar-based bands such as Candysuck and Lake Me, before looking to traditional Swedish folk roots and more experimental sounds for her debut solo album Firetales in 2010. Nearly a decade later she released the incredible Nerves & Skin, from which Ember Child is taken: a stripped-down, haunting, electronic-folk ballad consisting of little more than single, lengthy notes and a handful of chords on an especially morose synth and her wonderful vocal. It’s about as minimalist a composition as you’re likely to hear, and one of the most impactful.
Columbus-based electronic artists CoastalDives and Henry Blaeser team up on Ghost II, a haunting, at times unsettling, but ultimately extremely warm slice of electronica landing on Chile’s renowned No Problema Tapes imprint. Dense, dark and intricate, it merges Blaeser’s cold, skeletal rhythmic & textural architecture with CoastalDives’ all-encompassing, haunting synth-scapes to tremendous effect.
Me Lost Me is the music project of Newcastle based musician Jayne Dent, and Nevergreen came out a few months ago as one of the singles from her latest album, The Good Noise, which was released last week. The entire album is brilliant, and ranges from meandering, folky ballads to soaring, ethereal pop, many of which are pinned together with crisp and precise drum programming. Nevergreen itself is a beguiling mix of all of these elements and more: something you could easily imagine soundtracking a hallucinatory scene in whatever mind-bending film Ari Aster currently has in the works.
I’ve been a big fan of Christian Löffler’s particular strain of electronic music for some time now, especially his 2012 debut A Forest and 2016’s excellent Mare, both of which are considered, completely absorbing bodies of work, mostly consisting of melodic and atmospheric house music that sounds like it’s been teased up from the earth rather than constructed on anything as rigidly mechanical as a synthesiser. For his latest single, Pastoral, he’s done away with the 4/4 structure – and in fact any kind of beats – entirely, instead focussing on the lush interplay of slowly rising strings and muffled piano.
EDIT: On digging a little deeper into this, I just discovered that it’s a reworking of Beethoven, which makes it the second Beethoven cover I’ve covered in a week, but as part of a completely different project. Has Beethoven just come out of copyright? Seems unlikely. Anywhere, here are a few words from the man himself (Christian, not Ludwig):
“Deutsche Grammophon invited me to listen to a number of historic recordings of Beethoven, shellac discs from the 20s. I have reworked four of the composer’s tracks for an upcoming EP called Parallels (Beethoven) and you can listen to the first single ‘Pastoral’ now.”
The Predatory Wasp 