This is the first music of the month round-up to appear on the new-look tQ which launched earlier this month. Not only does the arrival, at long last, of a fully-functioning website make my job a lot smoother (gone are the long evenings of manually coding every hyperlink!), it’s also left me feeling a renewed passion for the kind of music that we cover – music that, in an era of widespread layoffs, publications folding and algorithmic fuckery from streaming services, deserves to be covered to the fullest extent.
Perhaps it’s the rare flash of optimism that our relaunch has instilled in me that makes me feel like this month’s selection is even stronger than usual – there are a fair few picks below that, for me at least, will certainly be reappearing once end of year chart season arrives in December.
Everything you’ll find below, as well as all the other excellent music we’ve covered at tQ this month, will also be compiled into an hours-long playlist (a bumper edition covering two months rather than one) exclusive to our subscribers. In addition, subscribers can enjoy exclusive music from some of the world’s most forward-thinking artists, regular deep-dive essays, a monthly podcast, specially-curated ‘Organic Intelligence’ guides to under-the-radar international sub-genres, and more.
To sign up for all those benefits, and to help us keep bringing you the kind of music you’re about to read about below, you can click here. Read on below for the best of the best from May 2024.
Patrick Clarke
Ex-Easter Island HeadNortherRocket Recordings
‘Weather’, the opening track for Ex-Easter Island Head’s latest album, emerges inconspicuously from the silence – the band built itself six-note randomisers, constructed from haptic vibrational motors taken from old mobile phones, which “dance” across guitar strings, creating a sound which recalls field recordings, the audio capture of nature, changed by the weather conditions. Repetitive phrases multiply, the bass line comes in, and the waves of music mesmerise. It’s far from codified noisy post-rock, but rather a subtly space-appropriating music that merely covers the repetitive sound.
Similarly, ‘Magnetic Language’ leads towards an accumulation of vocals played through smartphone speakers and then amplified by guitar pickups. The result is the analogue of an Auto-Tuned choir, an exceptionally emotionally poignant track with a crescendo in the final. It is the essence of Ex-Easter Island Head: one small element multiplied until it adds up to something remarkable.
Elaine MitchenerSolo ThroatOTOROKU
Elaine Mitchener is a vocal contortionist. The performer and composer may start by singing melismatic melodies, but in a second she can transform them into gurgling throat calls or hushed whispers. In every motion, she extracts the underlying meaning of her words, using extended techniques to illuminate their power. It is a skill Mitchener has developed over the last fifteen years while also maintaining her movement practice and collaborating across disciplines and with fellow experimental musicians such as George Lewis, Matana Roberts, Moor Mother and Apartment House. On Solo Throat, she exemplifies her vocal skill with twelve concise pieces that each examine poetry from all angles, breaking it down and piecing it back together again.
Sisso & MaikoSingeli Ya MaajabuNyege Nyege Tapes
Singeli Ya Maajabu opens with the absolutely delirious ‘Kivinje’. Here, Sisso strings together a loop of ear-massaging beats as if concocting a score for Maiko to follow with his Yamaha electric piano and FL Studio wired controllers. Maiko’s licks move at the speed of light, frantically jumping between and over the rhythms, sprinkling bleeps and bloops all over the place – think Sonic The Hedgehog losing his rings – and ripping out searing long riffs as if he were playing a rhythm-based video game during a particularly hard boss encounter.
Arooj AftabNight Reigndecca
Much is made of the Sufi connection with Arooj Aftab’s music, the artist herself says. But her minimalism is as important as anything else. Although she is inspired by ghazals, they are, she’s keen to stress, just another element of her own hybridity. Like a magpie, she flits between these things, giving us the space to, as she rightly puts it, just feel. Chasing “the sound” in her head has always come from this place of authenticity, she muses. “I’m trying to make the music tell you what’s happening,” she says with a smile – “and that’s a beautiful place to be.”
BEAK>>>>Invada
Despite a mooted return to basics, >>>> is a more accomplished record than its feted cult predecessor, mainly by virtue of the fact that these men have a certain telepathy now from playing together for so many years. For an album with apparently no frills, their fourth isn’t half proggy in places, especially on the Pink Floyd-esque ‘Hungry Are We’.
There’s certainly nothing wrong with that, and making a statement about the sanctity of the album as a monolith is to be applauded in the pervading, invidious culture of streaming, though there’s a risk that a) their insistence on capturing the sound in the room begins to look like plain old showing off when the playing itself is executed with such adroitness, despite the austere limitations, and that b) the didacticism will incite accusations of them being grumpy old men. You suspect they can take it.
Eric Chenaux TrioDelights Of My LifeConstellation / Murailles Music
Delights Of My Life is no great departure for Eric Chenaux. The abiding meandering, exploratory quality remains, as does a captivating lyrical landscape that sometimes feels under-appreciated in his oeuvre. There is a flavour of mid-20th-century American poetry to his verse: perhaps the excitable urbanity of Frank O’Hara, or the focus on phonetic rhythms and breath of the Black Mountain school – thanks to an intriguing compositional process in collaboration with Driver.
VerracoBreathe… GodpseedTimedance
Verraco creates stylistically eclectic maximalist techno with strong ties to the Latin American musical vocabulary, and conjures powerfully resonant atmospheres and hyperspecific vibes. A large chunk of contemporary dance music is either packed with hackneyed tropes or is simply too ‘out there’ to have an impact on dancing bodies. Striking the balance between these two extremes requires special skills. On Breathe… Godpseed, Verraco finds the sweet spot between the sophisticated and the accessible, providing instant sensorial and spiritual gratification.
BroadcastSpell Blanket (Collected Demos 2006-2009)Warp
There’s a strange kind of emotional whiplash attached to Spell Blanket, the first of two demo albums that mark “a closing of the door” on Broadcast. On the one hand there’s a real sense of surprise and joy in hearing this music – the first significant amount of “new” material from the band in over a decade. On the other, it’s also a sorrowful reminder that this band, largely a cult concern at the time but now rightfully celebrated, still had so much to offer and an over-abundance of ideas.
Some of the material feels like a natural extrapolation of the band’s final completed works, while other pieces hearken back to the early days. Broadcast were consummate crate diggers as anyone who has listened to Trish’s Mind Bending Motorway Mix, a compilation CD that Trish Keenan made for a friend, full of the likes of Emerald Web and The Vampires Of Dartmoore, will attest, and that’s reflected here. Spell Blanket sees the band firing in all directions, exploring new ideas and trying on different genres for size. A more polished record would likely have winnowed these down into a coherent statement, but there’s a real pleasure in being able to leaf through Broadcast’s scrapbooks.
MahtiMusiikki 3Riot Season
Following his botanically themed joint record with Circle, 2021’s Henki, Richard Dawson has now shuffled his way into one of their side-projects too, along with his partner and Hen Ogledd/Bulbils bandmate, Sally Pilkington. Which band wouldn’t be improved by adding those two musicians to the lineup? AC/DC? Sugababes? Run The Jewels? Answers on a postcard, please. Anyway, they join Jussi Lehtisalo and Tomi Leppänen from Circle, plus an ex-member of that group, Teemu Elo, and the kantele-playing academic Hannu Saha.
‘Brisahka’ is the gorgeous opening piece on which Dawson’s non-lexical falsetto floats on top of bubbling synth noise and tinkling strings. ‘Ruskoi’ is a touch darker thanks to the regular interruption of distorted thunderclaps and the way it grows more insistently pumping in the second half, almost like John Carpenter playing with Heldon. Chanted group vocals form the spine of the pastoral ‘Hof-falssi’, on which Dawson can be heard wailing soulfully in the background, and ‘Lippa’, finally, provides a nice ambient ending to drift off to.
Anastasia CoopeDarning WomanJagjaguwar
Anastasia Coope’s debut album will no doubt be labelled freak folk, though perhaps vibrational frequency folk might be more suitable given how ghostly it all is. Darning Woman is quaint and pleasingly unusual in its execution, with songs like ‘Sounds Of A Giddy Woman’ and ‘Women’s Role In The War’ seemingly plucked straight from the 1940s thanks to Coope’s uncanny antenna to the spirit realm. Transposed then onto an acoustic guitar and recorded in achromatic lo-fi, it’s the missing link between R. Stevie Moore and Doris Stokes.
GnodSpot LandRocket Recordings
For those who know Gnod as purveyors of the sort of music that suits getting blasted and waving your arms around, new album Spot Land might at first come as something of a shock. 2022’s Hexen Valley was a trans-Pennine bad trip with hints of the later The Fall-era’s sludgy intensity but with (given the title, appropriately) bad-vibes murk, as if Mark E. Smith and Co’s Salford Van Hire transport had veered off into the brown gurgle of the River Calder after a gig at the Trades.
Its successor is an almost bucolic contrast, a wander up to the Tops on a rare bright May spring day. Yet this isn’t a radical departure based on being bereft of ideas, but a dramatic evolution of their sound that retains every ounce of Gnod’s inquisitive nature and desire to progress. This richly textured album is an exercise in refinement; perhaps not minimalism, but certainly distilling the essence of Gnod to five tracks that within their quiet oddness lies as much (and perhaps even more) power than when the band are at their glorious noise rock biker-gang full-throttle excess.
Wu LuLearning To Swim On EmptyWarp
There’s an overwhelming feeling of emptiness that many of us can relate to at the moment – a feeling that weighs heavily in the context of surrounding events, becoming our everyday experience. It’s somewhat normal to be furious yet numb; profoundly sad yet totally void of the appropriate response mechanisms.
In both the title and contents of his new EP, South London vocalist and musician Wu-Lu has managed to capture this emptiness, as well as the corresponding impulse to push through and find something to grasp firmly with both hands. Learning To Swim On Empty is intimate in its writing, but the recurring motif of water and of drowning and floating, which runs throughout, makes it a record that holds both listener and artist close, in a compelling way.
Jacken ElswythAt FargroundsWrong Speed
The title of Jacken Elswyth’s new album, At Fargrounds, speaks to a sense of otherworldliness. The banjo is a particularly eerie instrument. Since every note resonates with itself, tunes sound as though they are being stalked – followed by a shadow that’s too close to quite glimpse. It is surely the music that would be playing in an enchanted wood, but one haunted by unease, like CS Lewis’ ‘Wood Between Worlds’, or Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood, a “chthonic resonator”.
Elswyth’s technical abilities are remarkable. She makes the instrument speak in multiple voices, using a fretless mountain banjo alongside a standard version. On the traditional tune ‘Sugar Hill’, it is clear, plangent and expressive. On the improvisation ‘Waken Workshops’, it is skittish and disturbed. Elsewhere, the music carries menace. The improvised ‘Who Remembers’ is a creaking, groaning piece, that features a banjo being aggressively scraped, alongside a poltergeist soundscape. It could be the soundtrack to a piece of unsettling 1970s television involving a suburban family moving to a house that doesn’t seem to welcome them, in a wood that’s more alive than they would like.
Arab StrapI’m Totally Fine With It👍 Don’t Give A Fuck Anymore👍Rock Action
What an album title, huh? Attitude, a saucy swear, emojis that may or may not wreak havoc with websites’ CMS [they do, Ed], nonstandard capitalisation! It really has it all. But what if I told you that Arab Strap were lying? What if I told you that despite it being called I’m totally fine with it don’t give a fuck anymore, it’s clear from both content and delivery that Arab Strap are not fine with it and very much do give a fuck? Would that shock you? Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton care – a lot.
NaemiDust Devil3XL
If you’re new to the work of naemi – an enigmatic Kansas-born, Berlin-based producer, who is one of the key figures in the enthralling 3XL label universe – there’s no better way to get acquainted than with their nimble, captivating debut album proper, Dust Devil. Pulling together an array of influences loosely fixed around the ambient music world, as well as an extensive cast of collaborators, each new cut beckons us down a different curiously psychedelic avenue.
Opener ‘It Feels So Good’, featuring a tantalising vocal turn from Erika de Casier, draws on tranquil New Age synths, while Perila guests alongside meditative emo guitar strums on album highlight ‘Day Drifter’, one of the tracks here that perhaps best follows a standard ‘pop song’ structure. ‘Couch Angel’, another highlight which welcomes Arad Acid and Huerco S. into the fold, harks back to reverb-drenched shoegaze of the 90s, all galloping drums and mumbled, buried vocals. With additional references to trip-hop, glitch-ridden IDM and lounge music following through the record’s remainder, Dust Devil is an unorthodox, but deeply comforting, listen.
TRACKS
Lankum‘The Rocky Road To Dublin’Rough Trade
Anyone who’s witnessed Lankum’s mind-blowing live shows will have been waiting for some time for their compelling version of ‘The Rocky Road To Dublin’ to receive a proper release. Now, in the first single from a forthcoming live EP, we finally have it.
Becker and Mukai‘Kinoko No Kioku’Sounds And Sons
The first taste of Jean-Gabriel Becker and Susumu Mukai’s guest-laden new LP brings in Japanese genre-hopping singer songwriter Yama Warashi and Trinidadian Steel Pan master Fimber Bravo. The result is a crystalline beauty of a single.
PinkPantheress‘Turn It Up’Warner
PinkPantheress’ latest single glides by effortlessly, buoyed by its own effervescence. It’s as sweet as candyfloss, and somehow even less weighty.
Ebbb‘Himmel’ / ‘Swarm’Ninja Tune
Mysterious London newcomers Ebbb have announced their arrival with two stunning debut tracks. ‘Himmel’ moves from transcendent washes of psychedelia to a rapid-fire ambient pummel; ‘Swarm’ is a pop song that leaps and sparks in every direction at once, twisting and transforming itself over and over again.
KOKOKO!‘Bazo Banga’Transgressive
A straight-up, front facing banger from Kinshasha’s KOKOKO!, swirling manically and joyously around a gut-punch brilliant bassline, this is the third – and so far most exciting – taste of forthcoming LP BUTU, due in July.
