You probably realised this long ago, but the idea of people who write about music being some sort of omniscient analysts of the form is absurd. They’re rarely even that well placed to say their piece really, just sharp-elbowed / unjustifiably self-confident and know the important descriptive differences between ‘…in a blender’, ‘…on acid’ and ‘…falling down a flight of stairs’. That’s why I’m here, anyway, but I’m writing about Unrecognisable, Alina Astrova’s latest LP as Lolina, because its watery worldbuilding hip-pop has wormed into my brain in the nicest way.
You might know Lolina as Inga Copeland and, with Dean Blunt, half of Hype Williams, which accounts for a fair-sized body of work over 15 years. I haven’t heard most of it, despite being in favour of Astrova’s inscrutable prankster steez and unfiltered rhythm-stacking – just too much stuff out there to hear everything, right. (This album has actually been online since spring, with a September vinyl release via the artist’s own label Relaxin.) I still believe myself to have shit-chatting authority in this instance, though.
Unrecognisable is a concept album, whose concept would be lost on me if it hadn’t been explained in writing (like nearly all concept albums), which finds Lolina taking on the roles of two characters, Paris Hell and Geneva Heat: style-conscious freedom fighters in a dystopian cityscape controlled iron-fistedly by the government. Built around attractive synth melodies, slo-mo rap drums and variously-pitched vocals spoke-sung with curious elan, this is an addictive 27-minute listen, though a consistently prickly one. You can pick out certain stylistic precedents along the way – Sade-esque 80s soul on ‘Meet The Devil’, coldwave on ‘Dejavu’ – but Astrova has fashioned something beyond genre here: a real keeper.
Artur Strekalov moved from Latvia to London, where he’s recorded music as Mu Tate since 2019. He also appears to have relocated to Berlin between the announcement of Wanting Less (Warm Winters), the third Mu Tate album, and its release, but you can prise this tenuous claim to nationality from my cold dead hands because this isolationist, field recording-embellished ambient dub session feels like nocturnal British city living to me. Would a track titled ‘Nocturnal’, with contributions from evident kindred spirit Rory Salter in his Malvern Brume guise, suffice to make my point? I can but hope.
Strekalov’s synths tend to drift and drone in a manner fans of Wolfgang Voigt’s Gas project will appreciate, while the extra layers he adds direct matters away from any threat of imitation. Surfaces crackle, voices glitch and beats betray an affinity with dance music but only occasionally approach danceability in their construction. Wanting Less is a headphones album par excellence, with seams of sub-bass running through cuts like ‘Spore’ and ‘Basement’, and levels of sonic detail that I suspect only Mu Tate himself has the full scoop on.
Further adventures in nomadism with Isik Kural, a Turkish fellow settled in Glasgow after studying in a couple of other countries, and his doll-pretty new album Moon In Gemini (RVNG). Field recordings play their part here too, such as on ‘Redcurrants’ and ‘Gül Sokağı’, though their roles are relatively minor amidst Kural’s generously tuneful keyboard fragments and guesting pals chipping in with various chamber instruments.
Most of the LP’s 14 tracks are under three minutes, which is fairly unremarkable in a pop or folk song context but makes them feel like wilful miniatures if considered compositional pieces. Certainly, there’s a sense that Kural and co – who supply piano, flute, harp, violin and clarinet – could have created something grander had they wished, which is not to say that the results are anything but desirable.
Kural’s own vocals (he sometimes passes the mic to Stephanie Roxanne Ward) are hushed and high-pitched – the suggestion is that it’s mixed more prominently than on his previous two albums, yet an image of diffidence remains. His lyrics support this when read: written in lower case and often ending with an upbeat exclamation point, I’ve a hunch they were first conceived as written poetry. In the event, intrigue is plentiful on another album built for late nights with no distractions.
Alrighty, we’ve got ourselves a couple of Theatre People here, and if Keir Cooper + Eleanor Westbrook’s first collaborative album is not theatrical exactly, it locates a peculiar expressive niche with no other occupants I know of. Titled Star Quality – Speculations For Guitar And Voice (Discus), Cooper plays guitar on these ten pieces, which he says have been given substantial digital editing after the fact – sometimes this is obvious, often it still sounds like a flowing piece of improvisation. You might think of Keith Rowe when Cooper’s guitar sounds least like one, Marc Ribot or Richard Dawson during folkier or jazzier periods.
This has been combined with the soprano vocal of Westbrook, whose operatic credentials are knowingly upturned by Cooper’s studio antics. It begins amiably enough, with a take on English folk song ‘The Willow Tree’, though we sense something’s afoot when Westbrook accompanies herself with a succession of blankly-recited non sequiturs. Thereafter, Westbrook’s vocal exhortations are wordless, still soprano in tone but reduced by Cooper to a patchwork of half-human, half-bird trilling and twittering. Meredith Monk and Maggie Nicols come to mind as antecedents of what’s going on here, although Star Quality’s vocals can’t be assessed independently of their production (or vice versa).
As Kitchen Cynics, Alan Davidson’s output totals over 100 albums, dating back to the late 1980s. Indeed, there’ve been two dozen or so since NWB started over seven years ago, and only some have crossed my path, but I’ve found his latest – As Those Gone Before (Cruel Nature), a collaborative cassette with Margery Daw – to be right up my outsider folk alley. Marge, as Davidson refers to her, has a far smaller discography under this name at least: she essentially has no online footprint, but I’d guess is of a similar age to Davidson (who was born in 1956) and possibly lives in Montrose, not far from Davidson in Aberdeen.
As Those… is a long album at nearly 70 minutes, but there isn’t a sense of filler or obviously subpar material across these 14 songs, certainly if your favoured style of folk music is eccentric and psychedelic. The pair’s instrumentation is extensive and diverse: Marge’s melodica is ghostly and nautical on ‘Seagull Skull’, backing her spoken narration; Davidson’s clarinet like a watercolourist’s palette on ‘Merry Marian’. It’s clear that with either musician removed from the equation this album would be a wholly different proposition.
Semiconductor Taxidermy For The Masses is Scarla O’Horror’s second album, with the four musicians having a previous collaborative history in London improv circles. Trumpeter Alex Bonney and electronics bod Sam Britton (going by alias Isambard Khroustaliov here), also co-run the Not Applicable label, on which this album is released. Its genesis, too, has a story: Bonney, Britton, James Allsopp (sax/clarinet) and Tim Giles (drums, more electronics) set up and played as per, with some synths recording this and making sounds of their own in response. Then Scarla O’Horror used this generative synth music as further direction in their playing.
Insofar as there’s no real way for the listener to gauge the effect of this method, my reaction to such process notes leans towards “cool! What do I do with this info?” Just write about the music, you say… well, that goes against all my principles, but okay. It’s great! A sub-three-minute segment, ‘Raccoon With Wound’, is followed by a near-20-minute one, ‘The Rats Of Gillet Square’, where Scarla O’Horror get to collectively cook – Bonney’s trumpet first jagged and staccato, then fluid and relatively melodic, as Allsopp intermittently demands entry via bellowing tenor sax and Giles ceaselessly rolls towards freedom for the first seven minutes before pivoting to his gizmos. ‘Ermine Chowder’ (14 minutes) is slow and crepuscular, its rhythms seasick and elusive and Bonney the focal point for large parts.
Harry Irvine, founder member of The Big Fuss Ensemble, also did the ‘record an album then up sticks before it’s released’ thing, though in this case from Bristol to Glasgow, ensuring its NWB eligibility is beyond question. The album is released by Ink, a new label set up by members of Warp Records postpunk types Squid, who exist somewhere above the underground the column serves to highlight – but their leftfield tastes have been noted, and The Face Of Us, Smiling On Its Own is a sprawling tape of freeform skronk and energetic jamming.
A free jazz influence pervades ‘Flesh Makes The Computer Crazy’ and ‘Beautiful Play Old Boy’, with cornet player Harry Furniss among the Ensemble’s lineup – one of only three names I recognise from the list, along with Owen Chambers (previously reviewed as Carnivorous Plants) and percussionist Dan Johnson (sounding very much in his element here). Elsewhere, there’s passages of muggy drone-rock, psychedelia at its least linear and, for a few minutes on ‘A Plagued Vision In Holy Fanfare’, some deeply industrial-sounding goings-on: the album was recorded in the basement of Bristol indie venue the Louisiana, perhaps near a noisy air conditioning unit. Good gear overall, in the spirit of bands like Faust and Jackie-O Motherfucker, and hopefully a project with more juice in it.
Self Love, from Cambridgeshire, released their first tape album in 2017. Selected Ambivalent Works (PX4M) – their third and latest – sounds like, if not a different band entirely, then one with an entirely different approach. No, that debut with its appropriately teen-snotty title, is bass/drums rehearsal room noise rock; seven years on, Luke Baguley and Joshua Roland are synthesised, plugged-in (plugin-ed?) and hair-raisingly digital, with the result some fine post punk hyperpop that’s arch and emo to equal degrees.
As its tepidly punning title sort of implies, Selected Ambivalent Works is a sort of compilation, with some of its 12 tracks re-recorded versions of older Self Love ones. It amounts to a cohesive statement, though – or at least, the most jarring stylistic transitions are within songs rather than between them. ‘Deconstructed Dove’ is one loop of arpeggiated freshwater keyboard, another of gabber kicks firing like ack-ack guns, with some semi-whispered sadboi lyrics coming and going. ‘Just Married’, first released on Self Love’s second tape from 2021, returns as a ‘Nightcore remix’, which means it’s been sped up a bit with little or nothing else changed. A very 2020s set of productions in certain respects, Selected Ambivalent Works nevertheless makes me think of various pop-breakcore shithouses of yore from Kid606 to Gay Against You.
These dispatches are never complete without some proper biz for the ravers, and Imogen Richmond – known to most only as Imogen – has stepped up for October with Metanoia, her second solo 12-inch. A techno DJ and producer, Southampton-raised but London-based, Richards has played plenty of big-potatoes clubs worldwide in recent years, and is resident at one of them, Tresor in Berlin. These six tracks (one digital-only) are released on Tresor’s label, whose towering techno legacy is upheld on a fierce, pacey EP.
Billed as a suite of mood music, inspired by Richards’ varied emotional states and handling of situations in recent months, induced collective euphoria can still very much be had – only quasi-ambient digital bonus ‘Melancholyflower’ excepts that rule. ‘The Way She Moves’ is a big-booted acid stomp, of a piece with that 90s/early 00s sound UK producers like Cristian Vogel and Dave Tarrida nailed; grimy Millsian electro number ‘Summer Kiss’ is enlivened by backspinning and ear-to-the-speakers distortion. A malevolent cackle punctuates ‘Tired Bones’, ‘Growing In The Dark’ is metallic and thudding as a school bell, and ‘Breathe Again’ has some yearning melody and a trance ancestry, though maybe the boshier Rising High Records type stuff than anything that approached commercial success.
Wanted to give some shine to Black Hair Rolled In Dried Blood, a project founded some 12 years ago by London’s Carl Fleischer, off the back of a new CDR, Colder Stars. On closer inspection, it turned out Fleischer had four releases in the space of one month, as ‘these types’ sometimes do. We’re talking noise music, as that memorable name might’ve hipped you to, but subtler, dank, bump-in-the-night industrialisms rather than blazing tone violence.
Colder Stars is comprised of ten similarly-titled tracks whose precise genesis is unclear, although a modular synth seems to be involved: the fifth, eighth and tenth parts are audibly what you might deem ‘electronic music’, others rumble, gripe and murmur in decidedly more obscure ways. It’s been followed up by Colder Stars XI-XXVIII & XXIX-XXXV, which continues the theme across two CDRs: I detect a greater affinity for dub spaciousness across this selection, notably on ‘XXIV’ and ‘XXXIII’, though it’s not like you’re going to find yourself shuffling to it on any dancefloor I’m aware of (there’s never been a BHRIDB live performance, either, as far as I know).
‘Sand In The Ointment’, digital-only (for now), is presented as a single 37-minute piece; its dronier moments verge on the beatific, its ruffer ones akin to the less shockjock-y end of Broken Flag-era industrial. That just leaves the debut of Electric Sheets Over Them, featuring Fleischer and Imogen Marks – who is described as “a filmmaker who has never attempted to make a film” and whose stated contribution to this self-titled cassette (released via Human Geography) is simply “the bounds of possibilities”. Fleischer’s modular setup delivers more familiar analogue burbling here, for the most part, though with a runtime of almost 90 minutes ESOT is far from breezy listening.
