Tag: experimental

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NNAMDÏ – Anti

NNAMDÏ’s head-spinning new album Please Take A Seat takes great delight in wrong-footing you. Relatively straightforward rap one second, it will turn sharply into chaotic electronics or jaunty pop before throwing in the kind of guitar riffs more at home in 80s stadium rock. I’m not sure it always works, but it is highly ambitious and enjoyably eccentric. Anti is one of the more straightforwardly enjoyable moments, but it’s really worth checking out in its entirety to get the full effect of its undeniable power.

https://nnamdi.secretlyca.co/please-have-a-seat

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Music

Lucrecia Dalt – Dicen

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If Mondays generally make you feel tense and anxious, I’d suggest maybe skipping this one; and maybe the entire album from which it is taken. Lucrecia Dalt’s new album ¡Ay! does have contain some lovely melodies and lighter moments, but most of them are buried beneath twitchy, sketchy layers; rattling off-kilter percussion; warped, half-whispered vocals. It’s undeniably beautiful, but in a slightly panic-inducing way. And this weird video – despite it focussing on someone gently floating in water – is pretty much the opposite of relaxing.

https://lucreciadalt.bandcamp.com/album/ay

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Loraine James – Black Excellence (Stay On It)

Loraine James’s new album Building Something Beautiful For Me lands today and fucking hell it is amazing. I never really clicked with last year’s Reflection, but loved her ambient album as Whatever The Weather from earlier this year. Building… seems to sit somewhere between these ambient and club spaces and comes across almost like a work in progress, with tracks stopping abruptly or changing tone midway through. There are so many highlights picking a single track was very tough, but I went for Black Excellent (Stay On It) due to the simplicity of its construction – pretty much just a single, undulating synthline throughout – resolved perfectly by the bleak beauty of its final third.

https://clark.bandcamp.com/album/05-10

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St. Paul & The Broken Bones – Minotaur 

St. Paul and The Broken Bones is led by singer Paul Janeway (front).

Here’s one that completely passed me by, from all the way back in January. In a week in which pretty much everyone is – quite rightly – singing the praises of Gabriels’ incredible new album, I’m listening to an album which is similarly built around another extraordinary vocal performance, but that flew mostly under the radar, at least of many of the main music reviewers. The album, The Alien Coast, is unclassifiable in parts, but is at its most satisfying when it settles into its soul-forward groove, a la the stunning Minotaur.

https://atorecords-ffm.com/thealiencoast

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Mads Kinnerup – Morph

Apologies for my recent absence (you noticed, right?) I was enjoying some post-birthday seaside celebrations and was way too busy pretending I’m rich to waste my time with music! Anyway, here’s some glorious Aphex-adjacent weirdness from Mads Kinnerup – the first single from his forthcoming album Interpolation – by way of an apology.

https://www.instagram.com/madskinnerup

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Music

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith – Then the Wind Came

“Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith is dancing in an eye-scorching tumble of neon bricks and video game aesthetics” is the opening line to the Quietus’s review of her new album Let’s Turn It Into Sound, and while it actually describes a recent music video, it could just as easily be a neat single-sentence summation of the entire LP. Hauntingly introspective one minute, exuberantly unhinged the next, it’s an intriguing listen from start to finish, with the circling synth patterns and warped vocals of Then The Wind Came a personal favourite.

https://ghostly.com/products/let-s-turn-it-into-sound

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Factor Eight – A Voice (II)

Composed entirely using his voice, Canadian-based artist Andrew Bennett aka Factor Eight explores mental health and creates a platform to relay his experience with bipolar disorder, with all proceeds being donated to Canadian Mental Health Association Saskatoon. “I hope that through this project, my music might help to inspire a feeling of connection in those who struggle, and sense of compassion in those who struggle to relate.”

https://soundcloud.com/factoreight

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Salamanda – Hard Luck Story

ashbalkum – the new album from Seoul electronic duo Salamanda – is really, really lovely. In the press release, rather than banging on about all the different synths they used and talking about their inspirations, the overwhelming focus is the fun they had making it, and how their friendship inspired them to create music that was playful and soothing. How nice is that! And to quote directly from the PR: “Do dreams always reflect what we think? Is what we feel within dreams real? Ultimately, Salamanda don’t seek to answer these questions, so much as revel in the delightful liminality of it all.” Lush.

https://8salamanda8.bandcamp.com/album/ashbalkum

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Maria BC – ROF

ROF is taken from Hyaline, the debut album from Ohio-born, Oakland, CA based artist and songwriter, Maria BC. Described in the accompanying promo copy as “ghost stories, but not as we know them”, the world building throughout the album is really extraordinary, and the uncanny atmosphere is rarely more dense and intimate than on ROF, where a hushed, Grouper-esque guitar and a glacial vocal takes centre stage as eerie field recordings twist and scuttle in the distance.

https://mariabc.bandcamp.com/album/hyaline

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Mary Lattimore and Paul Sukeena – This Time Juliane Landed Softly

Press releases are usually at best informative and at worst a complete waste to everyone’s time. However the one for Mary Lattimore and Paul Sukeena’s new collaborative album West Kensington struck me as particularly well-penned, so here’s an excerpt that does a better job of evoking its strange and beautiful atmosphere better than I could.

It is shocking what your mind will choose to forget. Almost always it needs a tear, a clean dash, a straight passage into what you’ve already known. Looking back, West Kensington has achieved that very goal: creating a landscape for memory, an imprint of that horizon, suspended in the cosmos.

https://threelobed.bandcamp.com/album/west-kensington