Szun WavesNew Hymn To FreedomThe Leaf Label
There’s also a constant tension between order and chaos on the record, particularly on the track ‘High Szun’, which remains in some kind of perilous balance – it feels like it might unravel at any point, its warbling sax and synth lines suddenly taking flight and disappearing behind the clouds.
Yves TumorSafe In The Hands Of LoveWarp
The lyrics in the percussive, string-sample lead ‘Noid’ invoke the fear and trauma induced by police brutality as he sings of fearing for his life, being scared to go outside and experiencing PTSD and depression. It all comes accompanied with Yves Tumor’s most (only?) hook-laden chorus to date as he calls “911, 911, 911 / Can’t trust them.” ‘Licking An Orchid’ is a heartrending, toxically romantic duet with vocalist with James Kay, all to the tune of hollowed out psych-pop and R&B.
Laura CannellReckoningsBrawl
Reckonings is a set of pieces made during short visits to the church, no more than half an hour each time, to improvise and record. They reflect the different seasons in which they were played, from the light pattering of sunlit notes on ‘Golden Lanes At Dusk’ to the troubled, wintery drone of ‘Reckonings’. For an album that lasts just over 30 minutes in total, Reckonings encompasses a remarkable range of music.
Gabe GurnseyPhysicalPhantasy Sound
There’s something compellingly awry with the songs that are more explicitly sexy. On ‘Heavy Rubber’, for example, and on ‘I Get’, where the more you hear the repeated hook lyric – “the feeling I get when I’m with you” the more you wonder, actually, what the feeling is. The more you might think of mouths too dry for blowjobs, cocks that can’t deliver what their chang-ed up owner promises, or just of wanting to curl up gently under a duvet in the dark.
Skee MaskComproIlian Tape
Compro, Skee Mask’s second album, sees the producer push out beyond the breakbeat and techno-driven experimentations of his debut LP, folding in a wider variety of tempos in the process. Ambient cuts such as opener ‘Cerroverb’ and ‘VLI’, which are usually relegated to secondary status on numerous ‘dance music’ LPs, offer a vital counterpoint to the breakbeat science of jungle tracks such as ‘Soundboy Ext.’ and ‘Kozmic Flush’. Melody has long been one of the producer’s strong points – both as Skee Mask and in his SCNTST moniker – and Compro sees him continue to excel.
Mouse On MarsDimension PeopleThrill Jockey
You can hear from the 145bpm machine-gun-regular opening hits of ‘Dimensional People Part I’ – it’s actually the heavily manipulated sound of a robot hitting a woodblock – that this is an album that is conversant with footwork. (NB: this is not a juke album in the same way that Mouse On Mars have never made a drum & bass LP or acid house LP, per se.) But this is the background theme and tempo that binds the album into a unified whole.
Aidan Moffat and RM HubbertHere Lies The BodyRock Action
Hubbert’s flamenco-punk guitar is as expressive as ever – variously invoking nylon-strung restlessness, ardour, agitation and grief – while Moffat’s doctrine vis-a-vis the vagaries of lives lived and wished-for, and ageing, and lust, remains unsurpassed. He offers us acute insights on middle-age (“And now it takes so long to even look alright”), and the rules of attraction (“She’s a bombshell in leggings / A goddess in jeggings”), and perhaps the greatest-ever analogy for diminishing sexual prowess (“The ride’s all weathered”). Everything’s getting older.
LaibachThe Sound Of MusicMute
To get to grips with the myriad grotesque and nightmarish situations that face us in this strange and uncomfortable era requires strange and uncomfortable art made by those who have empathy and understanding. We need more like Laibach, not fewer. Playful, poignant, sublime and ridiculous, in The Sound Of Music Laibach continue to hold up a mirror to a divided world.
Jenny HvalThe Long SleepSacred Bones
This album demonstrates an urge to express rather than capture, explore rather than explain; she uses words to tell us how inadequate words are, music to tell us how inadequate music is. It is light and substantial, full of death and full of hope, happy and sad; Hval is not fooled by binaries, basically, and the result is elegantly subversive. It is gimlet-eyed and hopeful.
The YossariansAmbition Will Eat ItselfRepton
This record is 17 minutes long, and within that time The Yossarians offer a richness, depth and intensity that it’d take many of their contemporaries a whole career to achieve. The last of its five tracks, ‘As In Life As In Chess, As In Chess As In Sex’, is under four minutes long, and spends the first half of that time drifting through a hazy, drone, chimes and flourishes of Eastern scales drifting in and out of the mist. The explosion that this builds up to, however, is titanic.
Todd BartonMultum In ParvoBlue Tapes
I’ve listened to Multum In Parvo a dozen times or more and I’ve never heard the same album twice, because I change and my mood changes but also because incidental noises in my body and my surroundings – from sighs to car horns to distant giggles – all seem to be on very friendly terms with Todd Barton and his Buchla.
SophieOil Of Every Pearl’s Un-InsidesTransgressive
Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides is SOPHIE’s latest stride towards whatever frenetic musical techno-future it is that she envisions, and the latest demonstration of her language: a vernacular of pounding kicks, human voices processed into oblivion, uncomfortable squishing noises, revving engines and clattering metal. This language irrefutably excels in creating jarring juxtapositions; equally irrefutable is the relish SOPHIE takes in setting them up.
PlanningtorockPowerhouseDFA
Powerhouse is Jam Rostron’s fourth album but in some ways it feels like a debut: there is a stepping out and a sense of ‘here I am’ which is related to their transition over the past couple of years, and also to their autobiographical depiction of family on the record. The title track, a softly soaring ballad-lullaby, is about Jam’s mum, Janet; second single, ‘Beulah Loves Dancing’, is an almost ridiculously joyful and bouncing ode to their sister.
Eric ChenauxSlowly ParadiseConstellation
This is a remarkable record – it is wildly experimental and as comforting as a soft embrace. The most interesting art almost always has a sense of duality, and Slowly Paradise is no different; where it radically differs is in the lack of combat between those opposing forces. Chenaux’s love for Sade, for example, in no way contradicts or confuses his love for Derek Bailey.
Erland CooperSolan GoosePhases
It’s a record of simple beauty, exploring the place where electronic and classical music can co-habit, and inspired by Cooper’s childhood home of Orkney and birdwatching expeditions with his father. Via strings, piano and ambient guitar, Solan Goose, pulses with Orcadian spirit. Magnificently barren seascapes, Norse mythology, Neolithic history and the poetry of George Mackay Brown gush forth from the songs, each titled after a bird of Orkney.
Gbor LzrUnfoldThe Death Of Rave
‘Squeeze’ melds a screwface-inducing bassline with a beat that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on a classic Ruff Sqwad mixtape, while closer ‘Overall’ comes across like a skewed take on the UK techno of labels like Livity Sound and Timedance with its starry synths and swung drums. Unfold is Lázár’s most complete work to date pushing his glitch-ridden experimentations into considerably more 4×4 territory than before.
GrouperGrid Of PointsKranky
The record is quiet, even for Grouper’s standards, and it runs little over 22 minutes. Everything’s held back, and it creates mesmeric payoffs in microscopic instrumental introductions – like the recording artefacts on ‘Driving’.Harris is as elusive as her music, and gives few interviews. You follow her airy vocals through deserted landscapes with no guide aside from the track titles and occasional discernible lyrics. Mundanities, like roaming through a parking lot, driving and even breathing, are made eerie.
SenyawaSujudSublime Frequencies
Opening with an invocation where the power in Suryadis’ thunderous chords, played on a new guitar hand-built for the album, is matched by Shabara’s mantra such that they magically merge. It prepares the room for the dramatic liturgy to follow, starting with the subtler, although no less penetrating, title track. The plucked and bowed folk strings on ‘Sujud’ combine with Shabara’s deep-throated commandments to build a devotional fervour worthy of its title, which translates as ‘Prostration’.
PanopticonThe Scars Of Man On The Once Nameless WildernessNordvis
Holy fuck, this is good!
Julia HolterAviaryDomino
Holter has described Aviary as “the cacophony of the mind in a melting world”, and it’s easy to feel that mania in its erratic structures and fleeting absurdity. But very often those segments bloom into long and sustained areas of beauty. The thing is, neither the harmony nor the ugliness is given more prominence – they are both valid states and one will always lead to the other. This cyclical nature is inevitable, and analogous with our own existence; everything is impermanent, and this is the only constant. As Holter puts it at the start of ‘I Shall Love 2’: “That is all, that is all / There is nothing else.”
