The Predatory Wasp
+3 is somewhat of a shift for Samba Jean-Baptiste, still hazy and inward-looking but with more shape than his debut, leaning into blurred guitars, soft-focus vocals and loose, drifting arrangements and pulling from the same orbit as artists like Dean Blunt or Frank Ocean. There’s definitely a bit of drift over the album’s running time, but when it connects, as on Fatale, it hits real hard.
Occasionally ambient can suffer from a distinct lack of low-end, making it feel almost entirely weightless. Often that’s the point: who doesn’t like drifting away from the world to a higher plane from time to time. Appleblim’s new album for quiet details, Liminal Tides, for all its soft synth washes and ephemeral moments, is anchored by the kind of heft you’d expect from one of bass music’s most celebrated artists, and is all the more impactful as a result.
Just the other day I was listening to Kelela’s excellent live album In The Blue Light from last year and wondering when we’d get some new music, and POW!… here it is. idea 1 is indeed fairly simple and stripped down, but not as disposable as the throwaway name suggests, and perhaps signals a shift in her sound, throwing in distorted, shoegaze-y guitars alongside her familiarly breathy vocal.
“‘idea 1’ is about what it feels like to exist in this climate — the weight of being expected to witness, absorb, and speak truth at a time when the world feels like it’s unraveling. That’s a particular kind of burden Black women know intimately. Co-writing it with my best friend Janiva Ellis, hearing Oscar [Scheller]’s production give it shape, and then watching 91 Rules bring that tension to life visually feels like the beginning of a much larger conversation I’m ready to have.”
The Canadian singer-songwriter on the spooky atmospherics of a song from a cult horror classic
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!
Ora Cogan is a Canadian singer-songwriter whose work sits somewhere between folk, slowcore and dreamlike indie. Her records are sparse and carefully arranged, often built around voice, guitar and a restrained sense of atmosphere. There’s a cinematic quality to her writing, with themes of isolation, faith and memory running through much of her catalogue.
Written in the quiet, slightly uncanny surroundings of Nanaimo, B.C., her new album Hard Hearted Woman took shape through a loose, lived-in rhythm of cold-water plunges, long river swims, late-night conversations on art and politics, and drives through the Lillooet landscape to visit her godmother.
Her debut for Sacred Bones, the record carries that atmosphere with it. Drawing on haunted folk, psych rock and a shadowed edge of country, Cogan sketches out something immersive but controlled, where release feels textured, elusive and necessary.
For her One Track Mind, Ora has picked out a haunting song from perhaps the definitive British folk-horror movie.
Ora Cogan on Magnet – Willow’s Song from The Wicker Man
“The Wicker Man is one of my all time favourite films. It felt close to home as I grew up on a small island with a lot of wild weirdos. I watched this film at a formative age and the very immersive storytelling of this masterpiece has stayed strong in my imagination ever since.
“What an epic pagan love song. Sooo spooky and dreamy. While I’m writing songs I imagine I’m writing them to score films. I love the way a song can evoke a whole realm you could get lost into.”
Ora Cogan – Heart Hearted Woman is out now on Sacred Bones
Usually when couples break up, they don’t decide to write an album together. But in this case, I’m very glad JJ Weihl aka Discovery Zone and John Moods did exactly that. Dreaming for Miles is a collection of songs that were written over the past ten years or so and recorded between their basement practice space and at their home in Berlin. After spending over a decade living together and playing music together, their lives pulled them in different directions, but during the process of separation, they decided to make a final record together. The result is reflective, often deeply sad, but also somewhat hopeful; a beautiful, poignant distillation of two singular artists saying goodbye to one another.
https://mansionsandmillions.bandcamp.com/album/dreaming-for-miles
Xylitol aka producer and DJ Catherine Backhouse shifts up the refinement and musical breadth for her second album Blumenfantasie, which landed earlier this month on Planet Mu. Blumenfantasie draws heavily on the work of Sarajevo-born minimal synth composer Miaux, whom she recognises as “a kindred spirit in terms of her directness and melancholy, as well as her lightness of touch”, rolling through immersive jungle workouts with the occasional dip into beatless ambience.
Some slightly uncharacteristic (for this blog) jangly indie for you today courtesy of Snail Mail from her new album Ricochet. Not sure if it’s due to the fact that it’s Friday and the end of a pretty hectic week, but it’s been making me smile all morning. “Misery feels safe to write about because I am good at it,” she says, “but I’m not bathing in my own agony anymore.” Quite. And “agony” especially feels far removed from these effervescent songs, on the surface at least.
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.
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
Sometimes all you need to start the day right is a nice, fried slice of deep, dubby house; so here’s Mammo serving up the goods. Taken from his new album Lateral which clocks in at an intimidating 99 minutes, but is well worth your time if you’re into stripped back techno, sketchy ambient and a few things in between.
The Predatory Wasp 