The Predatory Wasp
As Halloween approaches, I’d like to recommend this terrifying album from Prurient, Noise For Halloween Night. Lock the doors, turn the lights off, listen loud and have a panic attack. Happy Friday! 🖤
https://prurient.bandcamp.com/album/noise-for-halloween-night
Klein’s sleep with a cane isn’t so much a “mixtape” in the conventional sense as it is a sprawling ambient dossier. She frames it as such herself – “an epic ambient tape” – but over nearly 90 minutes, the record travels through murmurs, ruptures, and confessional loops. It’s experimental, deeply personal, intimately bound to her London roots and a strong contender for ambient album of the year.
The Spanish composer and sound artist on the fragile solemnity of a late-period Low masterpiece.
The premise of One Track Mind is pretty simple: I ask artists to pick one track that means a lot to them – either something they’ve discovered recently, something that’s been with them for years, or one that reminds them of a specific time in their life or career – and tell me what makes it so special to them. I get to talk to the artists I love, and they get to talk about the artists they love. Love all round!
Spanish composer and sound artist Arvin Dola works at the intersection of music, cinema, and performance. His background in scoring for film and theatre informs a deeply textural approach, where sound becomes a vehicle for memory, emotion, and unresolved narratives.
His new LP O GHOST is his debut album release and is inspired by absence, memory, and the weight of unresolved time. Written in the wake of personal loss, it folds grief into a subtle kind of presence. Drawing on hauntology and shaped by Dola’s work in film and performance, the record blends ambient, drone, and disintegrating motifs that never quite land or leave.
For his One Track Mind selection, Arvin has chosen to highlight a track from an incredible album which also happens to be one of my all-time favourites.
Marta Forsberg returns to Warm Winters Ltd. with her new meticulously woven album Archaeology of Intimacy. Soothing, gentle, yet uncompromising and strikingly beautiful, the album sees the Swedish-Polish composer move away from more long-form compositions into what the press notes describe as “pop”, but I definitely wouldn’t. Closing track closing Dreamers is an almost operatic piece which combines clipped and heavily auto-tuned vocals, a string section and beautiful synth melodies to impressively hypnotic effect.
https://martaforsberg.bandcamp.com/album/archaeology-of-intimacy
I don’t even know what this is really and I can’t find anything about it online other than that’s it a project of Luke Wyatt and Jessi Long, but it’s incredible.
The accompanying PR text for Joanne Roberson’s new album simply reads: “Blurrr was written in between painting sessions and also whilst raising a child”, which is appropriate for an album of such understated brilliance. Mainly comprised of Robertson’s mournful guitar and heartbreaking, spectral vocal, there are several collaborations with Oliver Coates – perhaps best know for his devastating score for the film Aftersun – including Always Were, which is just ludicrously good.
Minnesota-born, L.A.-based musician, mastering engineer, and co-founder of the Jungle Gym label Jared Carrigan records solo and in collaboration under a web of guises: V. Kristoff, Congo River Club House, Freaks of Nature, Easy Rider plus plenty more, including, most relevantly to this post, René Najera – his longest-running alias. His new LP Painted Life took shape from the seeds of a 2023 set prepared for a string of shows in Japan. Elements were later remixed, finessed, and expanded by a cast of inner circle collaborators, including Leech who contributed to this album standout.
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.”
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.
The Predatory Wasp 