The Predatory Wasp
This is exactly the vibe I need for today. Unhurried, gentle melodies bubbling over warm pads alongside soft 8-bit bleeps and the occasional purred ‘yeah’. Like Boards of Canada without even a shred of existential angst. Taken from Khotin’s new album Release Spirit which landed last week on Ghostly.
A lot of good music has been released today, but nothing excites me more than Keep Up The Good Work, the new album from Danish group Lowly. I love their previous two LPs, and on first listen it sounds like this new one is keeping the bar just as high. Happen is vintage Lowly, with warm, haunting melodies and Soffie Viemose’s distinct vocal becoming ever more anguished as it progresses.
https://bellaunion.ochre.store/release/338316-lowly-keep-up-the-good-work
Brooklyn-based visual artist, poet and musician Xena Glas released her new Movement EP last week, including To the A: a restrained and beautiful slice of electronica heavy on choral vocals and atmosphere. Xena employs content from a single field recording of her walking from her Crown Heights apartment to the A train, and then off the train to the Hudson River in Manhattan, which adds a flavour of the mundane in this otherwise ethereal track.
Earlier this month Dawn Richards teamed up with multi-instrumentalist, producer, and composer Spencer Zahn on Pigments: an extraordinarily good album that explores themes including “the power of self-expression through living art, through motion”. A hypnotic mix of classical, jazz, soul and electronica, it flits between being deeply meditative and intensely rousing, often within a single song, before segueing seamlessly into the next . A truly impressive body of work.
Taken from her new album Classic Objects, Year of Sky is as evocative and transportive as anything Jenny Hval has created, soundtracking a rite of passage into a world only she can perceive but that she’s desperate to share with us.
Shout out to Joe Muggs’ always enlightening Bandcamp Daily column for the recommendation on this one. Johnny Aux – aka Quinn Whalley, one half of always interesting acid house group Paranoid London – teams up with George T for a three-track EP that includes this dubby slice of post-punk-techno-industrial-electronica-etc, featuring a dour vocal and even dourer muddy bass thumps. Uplifting it ain’t, mesmeric it most certainly is.
https://optimomusic.bandcamp.com/album/making-excuses-for-you-ep
There’s no shortage of people making whimsical, melody-focussed electronica, and in the wrong hands (ie. the vast majority of the time) it can come across as overly sincere or laughably lightweight. Varsity Star hits the tricky-to-find sweet spot here with Mixtape – the lead single from a forthcoming mini-LP – pairing crushed, broken beats with a glistening synth line and demonstrating it’s perfectly possibly to make something beautiful yet punchy in this genre, as long as you get the balance just right.
Traumprinz is back, with a new alias, and another epic 3 hour drop of music. lost in dreams is the latest collection from the anonymous producer and follows last year’s double DJ Metatron / The Phantasy release, which, even though there were unquestionably some gems in there, I didn’t rate quite as highly as most of their previous work. lost is dreams is an absolute masterpiece though, reminiscent of his dj healer set from a few years back. It is truly remarkable that someone this talented has completely removed their ‘self’ from their art, and delivers such an insane amount of incredible music without ever feeling the need to revel in the glory that would inevitably come from unmasking themselves. Long may it continue.
This is the latest single from Sofi Gev, the solo project of American singer-songwriter and indie pop artist Hannah Lovelady. Blending elements of folk, indie, electronica and pop, You’re The Star features some wonderfully subtle and evocative vocal manipulations reminiscent of Oklou’s recent album. But while Oklou’s music feels sparse and at times detached, You’re The Star is warm and richly populated with a variety of instruments and textures: an intimate, glimpse into both the strength and fragility of desire.
Jim-E Stack is an artist who’s slowly crept onto my radar over the last couple of years by putting out a steady stream of reliably good but usually fairly understated, indie-electronica. “I’ll give this a shout out on the blog” I naively thought a couple of hours ago. “He could probably do with the support…” but oh right turns out he gets well over a million monthly listeners on Spotify and is already kind of A Big Deal. Probably should have guessed as much given the featured guest on this is Saint Bon Iver to be fair. Anyway, it’s great: and I’m very excited about his new album, Ephemera, which is out later this month.
The Predatory Wasp 