Claire Rousaya heavenly touchAlready Dead
a heavenly touch is perhaps Claire Rousay’s most successful experiment with her drum kit-free form of fractured percussion concrète, introducing (I think for the first time) her own keyboard sounds too. Seven relatively short tracks assemble everyday sounds besides the dull hum of domestic life, wandering dream like from moment to moment: a text arrives, TV channels are surfed through, a cacophony of lo-fi whispering Rousay’s surrounds us, an electric piano version of The Paris Sisters’ ‘I Love How You Love Me’ plays.
Memnon SaWorld SerpentCrypt Of The Wizard/ Holy Mountain
World Serpent, the fourth album by Memnon Sa – the London producer Misha Hering – portends disaster. Its doomy, droning soundscapes are ambient music for the daubing of large pentangles in red on chilly marble floors. It’s an initiation ritual to an event that I would not want to attend. Or the event that we’re all, right now, attending? I listened to this for the first time on a Sunday, on my state-approved walk, and it was the first time during lockdown that music has felt entirely congruent to the low-level but ever present dread of the streets.
MenziImpazamoHakuna Kulala
Impazamo comes as the breakthrough release from young producer Menzi. One of the pioneers of the Gqom scene as a part of the Infamous Boiz, his work as a producer for South African acts Babes Wodumo and Moonchild Sanelly has occupied his creativity thus far. Now, Menzi dissects the Gqom scene and pastes it back together again. His own coinage of “futuristic gqom” is deeply fitting for the nexus of industrial and techno electronics on this six-tracker.
Dale CornishThug AmbientVanity Publishing
Yeah, sure, Dale Cornish’s latest is another excellent release in a catalogue full of excellent releases. But! There’s something else at play on Thug Ambient, his ode to “the reconstruction of club music, Nag Nag Nag, masculinity, Finland, and Vatican Shadow memes.” A good handful of the tracks here feel tighter, harder, more ready for the floor than they have in a bit, while all the things his fans have come to rely on – his cheeky sense of humour, a real mastery of space, Dale Cornish Brand (TM) claps and kicks – are very much present and accounted for.
Anna Högberg AttackLenaOmlott
Swedish alto saxophonist Anna Högberg knocked me out with the ferocious 2016 debut of her sextet Attack!, balancing the heat of free jazz with a strong yet unobtrusive compositional underpinning. It’s been a long wait for the follow-up, and happily, Lena delivers in a big way. The leader’s writing draws upon Swedish folk themes (‘Pappa Kom Hem’), modal jazz (‘Dansa Margit’), and contemporary music (‘Pärlemor’, colliding excellent prepared piano work with post-cool horns), yet there’s an attractive transparency at work so that her powerful band – tenor saxophonist Elin Forkelid, trumpeter Niklas Barnö, pianist Lisa Ullén, bassist Elsa Bergman, and drummer Anna Lund – are free to push and pull against the notes on the page.
Haq123Evil Spirits Who Prowl About The World Seeking The Ruin Of SoulsSelf-Released
The premise of incredibly titled album opener ‘96% Warrior, 4% Barber’ is truly inspired and/or a direct appeal to my specific sense of humour: wobbly new age soundbaths, like Laraaji or someone, overlaid by encouraging phrases which turn out to be the motivational pablum shouted by (as I imagine to be the case here) parents on the touchlines of junior football matches. Which, on a release which also includes the lines, “I am a man of unclean lips and I live among people of unclean lips” and “Football, swingball, nerf, all the greats,” is but one of several highlights.
ttmaNecroscapeIpecac
tētēma are a band consisting of Mike Patton, consummate frontman of Faith No More and Mr Bungle, and polymathic Australian composer and avant garde musician Anthony Pateras. Both are the kind of artists blessed with staggering range and explorative instinct, and when they come together as tētēma their talents do not just combine, they multiply. Necroscape is a corybantic and raging record, a zealous, ambitious, fiery and joyous piece of art that demonstrates the considerable breadth of their powers.
PyrrhonAbcess TimeWillowtip
It really feels like Pyrrhon have outdone themselves again here, managing to broaden their sound out into even stranger, psychedelic places whilst retaining that core intensity that’s always made them such a thrill to listen to. This is some truly top shelf, forward-thinking 21st century extreme metal right here. Cherish it.
TeleplasmisteTo Kiss Earth GoodbyeHouse Of Mythology
To Kiss Earth Goodbye is an entrancing, enveloping experience. Mark O Pilkington (previous form including Raagnagrok, Urthona and The Asterism) and Michael J York (from Coil to Shirley Collins via The Utopia Strong) seem to have been heading for this point for a long time, and the music they are now making sounds as though it was meant to be. It’s an album that is guaranteed to satisfy anyone who needs to be taken away from themselves, and off to a better place. And right now, that includes all of us.
Laura CannellThe Earth With Her CrownsBrawl
An uncommon trait in the field of improvised and gestural music, The Earth With Her Crowns is immediate in its conveyance of quietly ever-present emotional realism – the scale of its vast emptiness never far from the forefront. It’s a welcome accessibility in a style that might be best described as ‘ancient-futurism’, managing never to fall into formalist trappings that many such commissioned works do.
Katatonic SilentioPrisoner Of The SelfBristol NormCore
A year on from her excellent debut solo release, Emotional Gun, Italian producer Katatonic Silentio returns with an album of system-crushing IDM experiments. The militant, bassbin-rattling energy of that debut EP returns on Prisoner Of The Self, its seven tracks locked down by double-time drums and an unceasing air of dread. Tracks like ‘Waiting For The Dust To Settle’ and ‘Fragile Bodies’ cut through with a brash dancehall swagger, while closer ‘Spheres Of Solitude’ is an all-out breakcore assault not for the faint of heart.
Brent FaiyazFuck The WorldLost Kids
There aren’t many who can match the soulful, dream-like tones of Brent Faiyaz, but while his style of R&B may sound like melting butter on a surface level, lyrically he is deliciously toxic. On the ten track Fuck The World project, you could be forgiven for loving every second of it as the 24-year-old Grammy-nominated artist brings you into his world and shows another side of R&B that is different from the norm but just as enticing to the ear.
Junk DrawerReady For The HouseArt For Blind
Written long before lockdown, Year Of The Sofa landed like a sardonic prophecy for 2020. With riffs that burn like bong rips and a few motorik wormholes to jump through, the Belfast quartet ruminate on lethargy, depression and the sense of time flown out the window. It’s full of heart, albeit passed through a distortion pedal or ten.
DeerhoofFuture Teenage Cave ArtistsJoyful Noise
An album imagining post-apocalyptic humans balefully trying to recall the world they once knew, recorded remotely with the band’s members in four different cities before the coronavirus pandemic was even a known threat, it’s fair to say the 15th Deerhoof album is somewhat prophetic. It’s also one of their best records to date, a fractured and strange LP that thrives on a sense of fragmentation, veering one way and another in terms of both melody and fidelity as the four members piece together their respective home recordings.
Zebra KatzLESS IS MOORZFK
It’s been seven years since Zebra Katz’ stellar mixtape DRKLING and eight since breakout track ‘Ima Read’. Despite what might seem to be an odd lack of new material since, it’s been a busy time for Zebra Katz, from a collaboration with Gorillaz to a tour with Azealia Banks. This peculiar gap illustrates more the struggle of an independent artist in the modern day, rather than any kind of creative standstill. What we finally have with debut album LESS IS MOOR is a vastly developed continuation, but with that key “Zebra Fucking Katz” stamp. The record is a sprawl of beats that bang but also hang in unease. Everything is melancholic, topped with lyrics that balance wit with severity.
Rising DampPetrol Factorywherethetimegoes
Released on the ever-reliable wherethetimegoes label, Petrol Factory finds one of Ireland’s most febrile live acts fusing EBM, post-punk and industrial manipulations to cauterise the country’s socio-economic landscape, tackling subjects from the rise of fascism and the banking crisis to the relentless terrors of late-stage-capitalism.
LaylowTrinityDigital Mundo
Trinity is a concept album that follows Laylow, as protagonist, through a complex dance with a program called Trinity – a name borrowed from Carrie-Ann Moss’ character in The Matrix – which simulates (or stimulates) emotions. As well as being told through interludes, what’s striking about the story is the way it is echoed by the sounds on the album. The virtual, ‘digital’ world is reflected in extreme autotune tweaking, trap beats, luminous synths, and the glam stomp of ‘Megatron’ (an obvious nod to ‘Black Skinhead’) but also distortion and glitches – like the moment in ‘Dehors Dans La Nuit’ where it sounds like your headphone jack has popped half-way out of the socket.
Daniel CraigA Past Yet To ComeEconore
The fact that Daniel Craig’s new album seems to have simmered into existence over a full three-year period is far from surprising. The low-end obsession, meticulous detail, and sheer scope of aesthetic put into A Past Yet To Come by the Aussie producer is, no bullshitting, breathtaking. Just listen to the 16-minute opening track for a lesson in Craig’s ‘beat concrete’ approach.
RegisHidden In This Is The Light That You MissDownwards
There is a certainty at play throughout Hidden In This Is The Light That You Miss, an absolute clarity of purpose. Each element seems in its right place, each moment feels considered without feeling overworked. It is, like the rest of O’Connor’s body of work, utterly contemporary and effortlessly relevant. Hidden doesn’t fall victim to the navel-gazing or rumination or over-reliance on past formulae that often plagues artists who’ve been in the game as long as O’Connor, but then, as far as new work is concerned, that’s never been his way.
Swen WunderEastern FlowersLight In The Attic
A guitarist from Sweden, Wunder released this record as Doğu Çiçekleri last year on Piano Piano, which was finally given a wider release by Light In The Attic this past April. The grooves are hard, the guitar lines are sweltering and each track is conceptually part of the bouquet. Tulips, red roses, hibiscus, hyacinths, chamomile, magnolia, daisies – nothing but flowers.
