The Predatory Wasp
I CANNOT STOP listening to this track. Song of the year. Apparently it came out about a year ago, but I only just heard it as the second track on james k’s new album Friend. I love it so much!
Announced alongside a new album, Don’t Trust Mirrors due in October, Kelly Moran’s Echo in the Field pairs prepared piano with synths and strings, creating a piece that shifts between delicacy and propulsion. The accompanying video, directed by Katharine Antoun, places Moran herself at the centre. Speaking about the decision, she said: “Few things in this world terrify me more than the idea of me dancing in a music video. I wanted to address that fear head on because this is the first track I’ve written that makes me want to get up to dance, headbang, and generally lose my shit.”
Hailing originally from Montenegro, but having long departed for stints living in London, Rome, Philadelphia and his current home Nicosia in Cyprus, Martel is a former architect who has turned to building dystopian and subversive soundscapes. After creating characteristically atmospheric tracks for film and theatre, he’s launched his own Evil Ideas label and has just released ‘The Ghost’, a super-detailed techno cut that layers Dozzy-esque polyrhythms with hand-played percussion and synthetic textures. The full Zaire EP will be landing on vinyl later this year.
XENIA REAPER lands on Berlin’s Oscilla Sound with seven deft cuts, gently fusing the outer realms of spectral ambience and delicate breaks.
First Floor‘s Shawn Reynaldo described Canadian producer 747’s new LP Pacific Spirit as “if Tin Man made a jungle record”, and that’s pretty much all you need to know. Where his past work etched itself in acid techno, Pacific Spirit blooms with expansive, saturated colours and wears its vulnerable, optimistic heart very much on its sleeve.
A new Burial record is an increasingly rare thing: his new EP Comafields / Imaginary Festival is his first original material for over a year, following a split release with Kode 9. Comafields opens with a sample of Russell Crowe as Noah from Darren Aronofsky intensely odd 2014 movie (sure) and then meanders through all the Burial tropes: vinyl crackle, celestial rave, abrupt tonal and rhythmic shifts, ethereal, whispered vocals, before seemingly sampling himself with the final shuffling percussive flourish. And… it’s great!
https://burial.bandcamp.com/album/comafields-imaginary-festival
Described by the ever understated Boomkat as “up there with some of the most satisfyingly deep and frazzled gear this century”, I’m not sure whether I enjoyed or endured Demdike Stare’s new LP Who Owns The Dark?, but it certainly left an impression. A long-in-the-making collab with Cherrystones, it’s even sketchier and more unnerving than To Cut & Shoot from earlier this year, which is really saying something.
Purelink embrace liquidity on their second album Faith, washing live instrumentation and exposed vocals over their patented cascade of dubbed ambience and ebbing rhythmic experimentation. With a vocal appearance from Loraine James, Rookie stands out even amongst all the other floaty excellence, her voice floating like smoke over pattering rhythms and airy synths
Fantologia I is a 17-track compilation curated by Quixosis and DJ +1, bringing together experimental electronic artists from across Latin America. The release explores themes of uncertainty and instability in the region, focusing on the idea of hauntology and the disappearance of promised futures. The music ranges from ambient and textured soundscapes to more rhythmic, club-influenced tracks, tied together by a shared sense of tension. Arriving at around the midpoint of the VA, Peruvian artist Orieta Chrem’s track KON blends Aphex Twin-esque disquieting synth lines with haunting vocals and clipped drums.
Maiya Blaney describes her second album A Room With A Door That Closes as “a love letter to her blue,” an emotional state that she defines as “a kinetic, intense, and dark energy that needs to be expressed as soon as it is felt.” The eleven songs on the album span radioactive kiss offs, sorrowful meditations on yearning, and gossamer reveries about self image, with the stand-out And moving through pitch-shifted drone, majestic strings and soft guitar over the course of its 6+ minutes.
https://maiyablaney.bandcamp.com/album/a-room-with-a-door-that-closes
The Predatory Wasp 