I’m not even going to attempt to interpret the cryptic madness of the Bandcamp description of this track, but any new material from Voice Actor is very welcome. Hopefully this is part of a wider forthcoming project… but who knows.
Tag: experimental
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More Eaze – distance
more eaze is the moniker of Brooklyn-based composer, orchestrator, and multi-instrumentalist, mari rubio, and her new album sentence structure in the country is a collection of compositions across ambient and experimental pop, each beautifully realised, self-contained worlds, with influences stretching from country to jazz. The album’s compositions evolved over a number of years, with each updated version informed by both the context of rubio’s performances and the musicians she chose to create them with.
https://moreeaze.bandcamp.com/album/sentence-structure-in-the-country
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OHYUNG – Nevada
Bruce Springsteen had his Nebraska, a bare-bones, notably bleaker record. OHYUNG now has her IOWA; stripped-down and self-produced. Ghostly echoes, mouth sounds, simulated tape hiss, late night gloom. Though beautiful, there’s an illness-of-ease to the music, a fog of threat, numerous points of rupture in otherwise serene tracks, massive subwoofer activations that could be heaven’s kick drum or the slam of a bomb. Sampled choirs in rapture, a fine line between terror and reverence. Happy Friday!
Caterina Barbieri and Bendik Giske’s collaborative project started during an artistic residency in Milan’s ICA in 2021, by invitation of Swiss artist and curator Jan Vorisek. This meeting, and the preceding closure of sites for cultural exchange, made their work together “feel like springtime” according to Barbieri. Throughout the tour, they continued to develop material live, and their album, At Source, feels true to that ever-evolving process of creation. Impatience, Magma feels like the centrepiece of this extraordinary EP, glowing and languorous, with Giske’s saxophone at its most affecting.
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Mandy, Indiana – Life Hex
I really didn’t get on with Mandy, Indiana” celebrated debut i’ve seen a way, at all, despite multiple listens and various people telling me how brilliant it was. Their new album URGH, however, has definitely got me. Written during a residency outside Leeds and completed between Berlin and Manchester – with the band working through ongoing some pretty significant health issues at the time – URGH moves between industrial pressure, fractured club textures and metal (probably?), creating moments that feel both at times deeply claustrophobic, at others spacious yet still uneasy. But most prominently of all, it’s ragey – in a very satisfying way.
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Maria BC – Night & day
Maria BC’s third studio album Marathon lands at the end of the month, and Night & day is the second single: a haunting, reflective experimental folk song. The album itself is billed to deal with themes of “resistance, environmental ruin, personal disruptions and destruction”, which feels very 2026.
Kaitlyn’s Aurelia Smith’s last album GUSH was one of the best albums of the year, and didn’t get nearly enough love in the end of year list, except mine of course. There’s a risk new EP Thoughts On The Future will also get a bit lost as it came out just before Christmas when no-one’s really paying attention, but it shouldn’t. Entirely instrumental, and echoing artists like Kelly Moran in its use of slowly evolving rhythmic repetition, Smith described it as “a contemplative body of work that examines what grief does to the body and the mind – the necessary disembodiment & cocooning — how it suspends us, how it empties us, and how it quietly begins to rebuild us in its own time.”
https://kaitlynaureliasmith.bandcamp.com/album/thoughts-on-the-future
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Ethel Cain – Punish
And so begins the inevitable march of posting all the music from 2025 that I missed, starting with this beautiful, devastating track from Ethel Cain’s album Perverts. It doesn’t really do justice to listen to it in isolation from the rest of the album, but it is an undoubted highlight – if a ‘highlight’ can make you want to curl into a mournful little ball and never go outside again. Perverts is one of the bleakest, most sorrowful albums of the year, and I can’t stop listening to it.
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µ-Ziq – Majadahonda at Dawn
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.
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Betty Hammerschlag – Circlesss
Betty Hammerschlag arrives on blush with a beautiful set of abstracted folk diversions on her new LP fake girl. Sits somewhere between Grouper and ML Buch; with heartwrenching melodies submerged beneath layers of reverb, dust and melancholy.
The Predatory Wasp 