NihiloxicaKaloliCrammed
Drum patterns are enacted with such heads-down precision you sometimes feel like Nihiloxica’s beatsmen could human-loop in perpetual motion, but in fact these tracks mutate with subtle incrementalism, rarely telegraphing their switch-ups. ‘Mukaagafeero’ – a rare slowing of pace, Alimansi Wansu Aineomugisha and Jamiru ‘Jally’ Mwanje’s engalabi drums given more room to breathe than usual – and ‘Tewali Sukali’, where Henry Kasoma’s namunjoloba cuts through the tricksy main percussive pattern with sustained, reverb-y hits, are instructive examples.
Charli XCXhow i’m feeling nowAtlantic
At its best, Charli’s music leans into the nebulous, peculiarly millennial apprehension that partying is a mere simulacrum of adventure. It reckons with clubbing as a substitute, with our tendency to dramatise and overstate the significance of nights spent hammering away at the brain’s pleasure pathways with friends and tunes and pills, and with the awful ‘Am I wasting my life?’ feeling that strikes halfway through a sesh. With a wink and a perfectly-judged handclap, Charli prods the listener towards a simultaneous contention with the consequences of escapism and an escapist zone of her own. This time, though, we deal with a total lack of egress. “I wanna feel the heat from all the bodies,” Charli sings, and it’s touching in its sincerity.
NdiaNão Fales Nela Que A MentasPríncipe
Nídia is an artist whose name has come to be synonymous with Lisbon label Príncipe’s brand of kuduro and tarraxo club music, following her first release with them in 2015. Não Fales Nela Que A Mentes, her second album for the label, sees her push her sound further into the more experimental territory first explored on her 2017 debut LP, Nídia É Má, Nídia É Fudida. ‘Popo’ is an outstanding combination of laidback Atlanta trap and Afro-Portuguese sounds while ‘Raps’ features an earworm of a lead melody and knockout drums. Perhaps the highlight though is ‘Capacidades’ with its hollering vocal samples, accordion-aided lead melody and syncopated drums.
Jerskin FendrixWinterreiseUntitled
The risk with an album this multi-faceted is that it could easily just descend into a muddle as its components clash into one another – like mixing too many colours of paint to get a sludgy brown. However Jerskin Fendrix’s main success is how that doesn’t happen, how its pace is too blistering and his creativity too electric to ever get bogged down. He expresses himself in so many ways, in such a short space of time, but succeeds in more or less every single one. His beat-making is unique, his instrumentation prolific, and his lyric-writing witty and rich. For all of this, however, you’re still left wondering who, at the core, Jerskin Fendrix really is. The record is as if he’s wearing one lavish, intoxicating disguise after another, but never revealing who lies underneath.
DJ DiakiBalani FouNyege Nyege Tapes
One of the best labels in the world finds yet another way to keep the average BPM of its releases at truly aorta-scorching levels. Based in Uganda’s capital Kampala, Nyege Nyege Tapes’ recent releases have sometimes ventured beyond that nation’s border (and beyond the eponymous format); DJ Diaki lives in a Malian village and plays Balani Show music, totally hectic percussive workouts which are supplemented by a live drum machine during DJ sets and built unapologetically for serious dancers. If you have a rhythmic affinity with go-go, ghettotech, ballroom house or the madness Nyege Nyege have previously unleashed from the Sisso collective, gird your loins.
Jennifer WalsheA Late Anthology Of Early Music Vol. 1: Ancient To RenaissanceMigro
A Late Anthology Of Early Music Vol. 1: Ancient To Renaissance, while subtly dichotomous, doesn’t succumb to the conflict between “the human” and “the machine.” Instead, it discovers serendipitous parallels. Here, the building materials are sourced from a torrent of Walshe’s a cappella singing regenerated by SampleRNN, an artificial neural network created and wielded by CJ Carr and Zack Zukowski alias Dadabots. And the partitur? The ostensible “history of Western music,” filtered through the artist’s whimsical perspective and teaching experience. Using the spawned samples as bricks and plaster, Walshe constructs a simulated narrative that traces the transformations of her voice in Dadabots’ accelerated Petri dish – where millennia fit in the span of minutes – and applies it to the similarly abbreviated canonical progress of vocal music.
Yves TumorHeaven To A Tortured MindWarp
Sean Bowie – aka Shan Bowie, AKA Rahel Ali, AKA Teams, AKA Yves Tumor – has always made difficult music. Not difficult to enjoy, but to reckon with. The precarious dance they are able to do between deeply soulful, humanistic music and aggressively opaque, nasty, rough noise makes each of their projects a challenge. One moment your surroundings seem to reveal themselves, the next you’re launched into mirages again, rooms full of mirrors that stretch and distort things you ought to recognise. On Heaven To A Tortured Mind, Yves Tumor harnesses their relentless curiosity to test the boundaries of rock and noise – and reinvents what we expect from both in the process.
Shabazz PalacesThe Don Of Diamond DreamsSub Pop
Shabazz Palaces’ latest album opens and ends with a heavily distorted voice intoning, “Be inside your mind / Paint a picture.” This, in essence, is what distinguishes the album from the slightly gloomier (though no less interesting) material on the two Quazarz LPs. While there was a sense of dismay running through those at a reality that was beginning to fracture, The Don Of Diamond Dreams feels imbued with a sense that alternative realities – different ways of telling stories, different mythologies to reflect our true nature – are always within our reach, if only we’re able to fully embrace our own imaginations.
Pink SiifuNEGROSelf-Released
Nyx NttAux Pieds De La NuitMelodic
Aidan Moffat has worn many hats over the years as lyricist/songwriter, collaborator and solo artist (mostly as L. Pierre), and here we see his composition rather than his writing foregrounded and developed. He’s given himself a broad palette here of samples, SFX, keyboards, and objects, and it’s often difficult to hear which is which. And though the press release speaks of a clarity of production, actually it’s a lack of clarity which is perhaps this album’s greatest strength. Things clip and are saturated, often removing a known sound from its deserving context. The effect of this is to disorientate, to warp and unnerve.
ArcaKiCK iXL
KiCk i is a head-spinning record, one in which pillars of absolute pop transcendence emerge from a kaleidoscopic and glitchy vortex of constantly shifting noise. It’s a chaotic, courageous and relentlessly forward-thinking record, one that finds Arca changing guise on every song. For all its boldness and experimentation, however, it’s also her most immediate and catchy album to date, and is at its very best when it dives headfirst into the irresistible, straight-up banger ‘KLK’, a collaboration with Rosalía. Taken as a whole, KiCK i presents Arca at both her most experimental and her most accessible, without compromising either extreme.
Phantom PosseForever UndergroundOrchid
After several attempts, New York producer Eric Littmann – the Phantom Posse collective’s linchpin – has accidentally made an album for the times, a warped reverie of a soundtrack for empty urban landscapes. That’s what these 14 cuts of disorientating ambience feel like, anyway – or does everything feel like that these days?
Cavern of Anti-MatterIn Fabric OSTDuophonic
Slipping into a cinema on a rainy afternoon in Soho to watch Peter Strickland’s In Fabric was one of my more psychedelic experiences in recent years. Poised just as the film is between the encroaching terror and glitzy laughability of consumerism, the score by Cavern Of Anti-Matter lingered even longer in the mind than the movie did. Brimming with retro giallo soundtrack signposting, the spiralling melodic themes provided Tim Gane and synthesist Holger Zapf augment and mimic the film’s hypnotic pace. From the flow of the devilish cursed dress at the heart of the movie, to the lingering sense of dread and melancholy behind every boldly colourful shop window, Cavern Of Anti-Matter perfectly augment In Fabric‘s rich aesthetic.
Luminous BodiesNah Nah Nah Yeh Yeh YehBox
This collective of scruffians have two beatmongers just like all the best bands (The Fall, Melvins circa 2006, the final incarnation of Fugazi, NoMeansNo, The Glitter Band…). Butthole Surfers are probably Luminous Bodies’ principal double-drummer muse, mind, seeing as opener ‘Sykes’ sounds like rock & roll as veritable apocalypse, and one that you can growl along to no less, while the planet drowns in a plague of locusts accompanied by a lung-collapsing deluge of disgusting riffs. Faster numbers like ‘Hey! You!’ and ‘The Lidless Eye’ are probably a hoot live, as long as you aren’t standing next to one of the violent psychopaths who are no doubt drawn to this group’s ugly aural shenanigans.
DJ PythonMas AmableIncienso
New Yorker Brian Piñeyro, AKA DJ Python, regularly describes his sound as “deep reggaeton.” Past releases for labels such as Proibito and Dekmantel, as well as 2017 debut LP Dulce Compañia, have seen him blend the low-slung dembow rhythms of reggaeton with breakbeats and wistful melodies. It’s a deeply hypnotic combination that only grows more entrancing on his second album, Mas Amable.
UpsammyZoomDekmantel
There’s an interesting playfulness to the rhythms on upsammy’s debut album, which share a close lineage with the kind of bumpy IDM that you can frequently expect to hear in her DJ sets. Curious, fizzing melodies shine throughout, from the dubby ‘Extra Warm’ to the percussive, rolling energy of ‘Subsoil’ and chunky electro-esque ‘Overflowering’. I’ve long admired upsammy’s willingness to eschew obvious club functionality in the rhythms and melodies that typify her productions and DJ sets, and Zoom, her latest act in doing just that, is undoubtedly her best record yet.
Lorenzo SenniScacco MattoWarp
Scacco Matto, Lorenzo Senni’s latest effort for the Warp Records imprint, puts me in the mind of a brash sports car, something like a Lamborghini or whatever Richard Hammond has pinned to his wall. Jeremy Clarkson would love it and say, “Yes!” and “Power!” and “Speed!” while giving it a good romp around the racetrack. James May would find it all a bit unnecessary.
Run The JewelsRun The Jewels 4Jewel Runners/BMG
If it had appeared at any other time, Run The Jewels 4 would hold up as a brilliant and extremely potent record, but the latest record from El-P and Killer Mike feels inseparable from the time it was released. Appearing as the protests sparked by the death of George Floyd were hitting their peak, when the reality of just how much progress and change was to be achieved from amidst the turmoil, and when Mike’s impassioned, eloquent and powerful speech to the people of his native Atlanta proved once again his incredible oratory skills, the duo’s inherent vitality feels amplified just that little bit further.
VillaelvinHeadroofHakuna Kulala
I’m going to hazard a guess that the idea of a lockdown won’t impede the vivid creative drive of Elvin Brandhi – one part of the daughter/father duo, Yeah You, given that, notoriously, some of their shows have taken place in rush hour traffic, or parked up in a layby. I dare say, the front room holds no fear… Headroof is a dynamic, thrilling, absolutely blazing collaboration with several members of the Nyege Nyege family which took place at their Villa in Kampala, Uganda a year ago.
Land TranceFirst SeanceDense Truth
One of the biggest reasons Land Trance are such a successful project is the cohesion that constituent members Benjamin D. Duvall of Ex-Easter Island Head and Andrew PM Hunt of Outfit have established when combining their two voices; you can hear the former’s psychedelic instincts being pushed further outside of the box by the latter’s driving spirit and his innovative approach to instrumentation. The result is an unfathomably gorgeous album, lush and layered with a powerful and personal core.
