I have fond, if slightly intense, memories of Demdike Stare’s Before My Eyes nights they used to put on in a tiny London basement, especially one where my friend took too much K and ran, pretty much crying, from the room. Their new album sees them in their usual chaos mode, as they destroy and piece back together piano and vocal recordings by US filmmaker-musician Kristen Pilon, with unsurprisingly unsettling results. For fans of The Caretaker, crunchy drums and feeling generally a little bit tense.
New York-based composer Elori Saxl’s score, Texada, is the official soundtrack for the film of the same name. Directed by Claire Sanford and Josephine Anderson, and produced by the National Film Board of Canada, the film charts life on Texada Island off British Columbia’s coast. On tracks like lead single It Will Be Gone, Saxl translates the island’s geological and human narratives into sound. Employing analog synthesisers, processed baritone saxophone (performed by Henry Solomon), and subtle field recordings, the score maps textures ranging from stone and water to the hum of industrial activity.
Did you miss me? I was in Scotland for a week, and the wifi situation was untenable. Anyway I’m back now and have this deliciously mournful, Grouper-adjacent recommendation as an apology gift. The alias of Colombian-born artist Mónica Mesa, doris dana delves into the abstract aesthetics of liminal spaces and intangible experiences, and her new album Reveries is a late contender for experimental album of the year.
College Music Presents: PhonoSynthesis is the label’s fourth VA compilation, and explores the intimate relationship between music and nature, spanning solo, acoustic sounds through to modular synthesis masterpieces, and everything in between. Includes contributions from Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Shopan and this beauty from Dylan Henner.
Well this is just totally lush. DANIAILYAS is a transatlantic collaboration between Barcelona’s Dania Shihab and Portland’s Ilyas Ahmed. On their debut EP, Enough For Me To Remain, Shihab’s ethereal vocals and sweeping synths are intricately intertwined with Ahmed’s fluid, unpredictable guitar work. The result is a deeply immersive, almost spectral experience, balancing tenderness with an underlying tension. What emerges is both intimate and disorienting, like a love letter written in shadow and light, offering release and rupture in equal measure.
Joshua Idehen is a British-born Nigerian based in Sweden. A spoken word artist and musician, he has contributed poems to Mercury-nominated albums Channel The Spirits by The Comet Is Coming, Your Queen Is A Reptile and the Mobo winning Black Is The Future, both by Sons of Kemet. His latest single, Mum Does The Washing, takes a simple household chore and turns it into a commentary on society and the way we structure it, his dry, spoken-word delivery floating over stripped-back production, making the whole thing feel introspective yet still sharply pointed.
Kilometre Club’s heartbreakingly beautiful ambient track Dividend is taken from a benefit compilation for FLAP (Fatal Light Awareness Program Canada), an organisation that seeks to protect migrating birds. Curated in part by TPW favourite Avi C. Engel and including several of their collaborative tracks with Bradley Sean Alexander, it’s Polar Seas’ 75th and final release and a fittingly contemplative collection of meditative tones and melodies.
Apologies for the complete lack of music recently, but it’s been a busy old week. Hopefully you’ve been finding your own way regardless. I’ve been doing some deep ambient dives over the last few days to help me coping with the rising tension, and have come across a few gems I missed from earlier in the year, my favourite of which is probably Numa Gama’s album A Spectral Turn which brilliantly blends ambient, and IDM textures with post-rave, dub techno-adjacent rhythms.
Maria W Horn’s new album Panoptikon is a suite of choral and electronic music originally produced for an installation in the disbanded Vita Duvan panopticon prison in Luleå, Sweden. According to the press materials, the circular prison structure of Vita Duvan, which enabled central monitoring, was meant to create a sense of omniscient surveillance. The panopticon made the inmates aware that they could be monitored at any time without having any way of checking if this was actually the case.
Panopitkon was originally presented as a multichannel sound and light installation where the imagined individual voices of the inmates were represented by loudspeakers placed in the various cells of the prison. Opening track Omnia citra mortem (everything until death) is a legal term that means prisoners who did not confess their crime could not be sentenced to death, but only to torture until a confession was forthcoming.
If this all sounds overwhelmingly bleak, then yes, there is undoubtedly a darkness and meaning tone to much of the music here. But it is also in parts quite overwhelmingly beautiful, and has already had a profound effect on me. Without doubt one of the most striking and accomplished albums of the year so far.
The Predatory Wasp 