The Predatory Wasp
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.
Shawn Reynaldo’s First Floor Substack continues to be a reliably rich source for electronic music reccomendations, and the latest edition highlighted an artist with whom he’s long been obsessed, J. Albert. Converge is taken from his album Return To Sender which sees the NYC-based artist flit between relatively down-the-line dub techno and more amorphous, experimental structures, into which latter category Converge neatly fits.
It’s taken me three months to listen to POLIÇA’s new album Dreams Go, but I’m glad I eventually got round to it because I completely love this song. Dreamy and somewhat morose with a fair few subtle electronic flourishes, it’s the kind of indie pop I can’t get enough of.
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
Big love to Kandi Phil for alerting me to this one, without whose sage advice I may well not have bothered paying attention. I often dismiss efdemin as merely providing the original ingredients for the greatest remix of all time, but of course there’s more to him than that. This entire album is great, but the first two tracks – especially Poly – are really quite special.
After their first outing on Future Retro London, Tim Reaper, Mantra & Decibella return with Sage EP for FABRICLIVE. Across four tracks they balance toughness and detail. Stand-out Sage Sage drifts between dreamlike textures and hammering drums, deftly flipping between amens and four-to-the-floor.
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.
Recorded at 5dB Studios in London, anaiis’s new albbum Devotion & The Black Divine explores uncertainty, acceptance, and the experience of new motherhood. The album reflects anaiis’s growing sense of grace and creative freedom, capturing human emotion in its raw, shifting form. I was a big fan of her last album – 2021’s This Is No Longer A Dream – and on the first few listens it seems as if Devotion will prove a worthy successor.
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’ve been getting to grips with the new Night Tapes album portals/polarities over the last few weeks, and while it hasn’t become an obsession in the way that last year’s assisted memories did, it still has its moments, one of which is the dreamily melodic swordsman. I just wish there were a few more of them.
The Predatory Wasp 