MUSIC

A Colourful Storm begins 2024 with a luxurious suite of daydreaming introspection courtesy of Unchained, the longstanding solo project of Nathaniel Davis. Recorded at home between 2020 and 2023, Gabbeh is the latest expression of Davis’s guitar-based instrumental musings and represents an almost two decade-long stylistic evolution of his self-released noise tapes and CD-Rs into romantic, bossa nova-influenced melody-making. He wrote the tracks sporadically, with minimal instrumentation and intervention. Electric guitar, bass improvisations and rhythms from an old drum machine are layered and given new life, the space between them softly breathing with minutiae of the everyday: the buzz of cicadas, the passing of cars, the whistling of passersby. The psychogeography of Grenoble, Davis’ home since 2018, played a conscious role in the weaving of Gabbeh’s fabric: “I think certain songs reflect, in ways, Grenoble’s natural surroundings. ‘Drac’ is named after the river that flows from the mountains down to the city… ‘Dru’ is the name of a well-known peak near Chamonix”. And from the city’s strange humidity, alpine surroundings and significance in the lives of, say, Henri Fantin-Latour and Stendhal, feelings at once hopelessly romantic and deeply melancholic permeate throughout the album. Opener ‘Largo’ sets the mood, its primitive samba rhythm concealed by a cloud of saudade, guided by the spirit of Wes Montgomery. “I take inspiration from Wes’s disregard for conventional technique and his insistence on feeling above all else,” reflects Davis, who also cites the multifaceted dexterity of Toninho Horta and lucid expressionism of Maurice Deebank as influences on his work. The bebop sensibility follows suit in the title track, the tension between its angular picks and percussive shuffle a wondrous balancing act, while the intoxicating sway of ‘Rambler’, an updated version of a track Davis self-released in 2020, is perhaps the most poignant expression of longing and loss we’ve heard in recent years. Pure atmospheric bliss floating into the clouds, Gabbeh captures a longing for endless, hazy days.

"Kevin, a new collaboration between Ben Bondy and Mister Water Wet, presents what feels like a time-machine hidden in the back of your closet. ‘Laundry’ pleasantly haunts listeners with phantom purrs, harmonies, hums and horns. This project is a hand reaching through the void and out of your speakers responding to moments of isolation and pining with resounding gratitude. It makes space for warmth in slow-healing wounds; the gift of reset that is born from the call and response between friends." -Yves B. Golden

Sounds like a daydream, pale performances and beautiful singing voices. A faint and ephemeral album, as if Bill Evans met acid pop. The disc guide book "Bound for Everywhere" published in 2003 was a book that introduced basic records, but there was a CD-only chapter at the end, where I introduced this masterpiece "Ninth Elegy". And the impact of this album was so great that I had vocalist Fuminosuke participate in my album and live performances. Even now, the impact remains the same. In the age of fast fashion, this kind of discourse may not suit you, but I believe that good things will still be great no matter how many years pass, and they will definitely be recognized somewhere. Finally, finally analog. I will send it to everyone, including those who have been waiting for it, and those who are new to me. Pale acoustics, performances and arrangements with as few notes as possible, androgynous vocals, psychedelic, acid and alternative pops. I listened to it carefully for the mastering after a long time, but it was a wonderful album that transcended time as usual. In order not to make it too nostalgic, I gave the mastering a little bit of modern feeling. -- First on Vinyl Label Curator, Calm

NUG is the musical collaboration of artists Jordan Juras aka PVAS and Florian T M Zeisig. They previously released their debut album Napping Under God on 3XL (2022). Recorded February 2022 in Hinang, mixed November 2022 in Berlin.

Dub, Folk … Rat Heart lands on Modern Love’s 7” series with two asymmetric ohrwurms, featuring Ben Vince on the stunning saxophone-led A side, with a wildly morose Spanish guitar ballad on the flip.

Repress! Vinyl LP presented in a deluxe edition with printed innersleeve and a special transparent obi strip; the cover is also printed internally. Hand numbered. Making music is trying to start over again every time. It’s a matter of questioning and approaching. It’s never settling for the sound that fills the world around. It’s looking for a door in the sky. And maybe find it, open it, go beyond it. Rod Modell and Gigi Masin, this time together, are offering each other vibrations and insights. The former lives between two lakes, the latter between the Venetian lagoon and the sea. Everyone on their own shore, building electronic bridges in semi-darkness to allow us to cross too. No words would be needed to explain this work... It is the meeting of two people, an exchange of different points of view. A way to meet and then break up. Rod has reworked a piece of Gigi making it his own... and so did Gigi with a piece of Rod. A magnificent intersection of sounds and thoughts... remaining suspended to watch the passing of time, to listen to the noises and silences of life that passes inexorably around us.

Opening the window, I look at the light, it connects me to something more vast. Felicia Atkinson’s music always puts the listener somewhere in particular. There are two categories of place that are important to Image Language: the house and the landscape. Inside and outside, different ways of orienting a body towards the world. They are in dialogue, insofar as in the places Atkinson made this record—Leman Lake, during a residency at La Becque in Switzerland, and at her home on the wild coast of Normandy—the landscape is what is waiting for you when you leave the house, and vice-versa. Each threatens—or is it offers, kindly, even promises?—to dissolve the other. Recognizing the normalization of home studios these days, she revisited twentieth-century women artists who variously chose, and were chosen by, their homes as a place to work: the desert retreats of Agnes Martin and Georgia O’Keefe, the life and death of Sylvia Plath. Building a record is like building a house: a structure in which one can encounter oneself, each room a song with its own function in the project of everyday life. At times listening to Image Langage is immediate, something like visiting a house by the sea, sharing the same ground, being invited to witness Atkinson’s acts of seeing, hearing, and reading in a sonic double of the places they occurred. In an aching moment of clarity in “The Lake is Speaking,” a pair of voices emerge out of the primordial murk of piano and organ, accompanying the listener to the edge of a reflective pool that makes a mirror of the cosmos. “I open my feet to fresh dirt, and the wet grass. I hold your hand. You hold his hand. In the distance without any distance. The comets, the stars.” At other times, listening to Image Language is more like being in a theater, the composition a tangle of flickering forms and media that illuminate as best they can the darkness from which we experience it. On “Pieces of Sylvia,” a noirish orchestra drones and clatters beneath and around a montage of vocal images, stretching the listener across time, space, subjectivities. Atkinson says that Image Language is like the fake title of a fake Godard film. There is indeed something cinematic about Atkinson’s work—not cinematic in the sense that it sounds like the score for someone else’s film, but cinematic in the sense that it produces its own images and language and narratives, a kind of deliberate, dimensional world-building in sound. Image Langage is built from instruments recorded as if field recordings, sound-images of instruments conjured from a keyboard, instruments Atkinson treats like characters, what she calls “a fantasy of an orchestra that doesn’t exist.” And then, speaking of Godard, there are the monologues, operating as both experimental-cinematic device and a literary style of narration. Voice can be a writerly anchor or a wisp of a textural presence. Atkinson’s capacious and slippery speech plunges into and out of the compositional depths, shifting shapes, channeling the voices of any number of beings, subjectivities, or elements of her surroundings—not unlike her midi keyboard, able to speak as a vast array of instruments. Image Langage is an environmental record, in the vastest sense of the world. It is about getting lost in places imagined and real; it registers, too, the dizzying feeling of moving between such sites. It puts forth a concept of self that is hopelessly entangled with the rest of the world, born of both the ache of distance and the warmth of proximity. — Thea Ballard, 02.2022

Trances, Jules Reidy’s follow-up to the celebrated World in World (2022), takes place in between states, tracing a kind of restless movement in search of—or is it away from?—a center. The twelve tracks shift between fragment and epic, returning to familiar phrases between forays outward into uncertain expanses. Through its exploration of the cyclical movements of grief and emotional turbulence, Trances produces a sonic world as raw, absorbing, and surprising as anything Reidy has created to date. Trances’ primary instrument is a custom hexaphonic electric guitar tuned in Just Intonation. Reidy’s combination of fingerpicked phrases, open strums, and corrugated processing push on the grammar of guitar-driven experimentalism, locating expressive heft in open-ended harmonics and the odd angles formed by overlapping elements. Chords are slowed and stretched as if to examine their resonance, then overtaken by subterranean motion. The effect is that of oceanic depth, but the rippling that passes between the compositions’ sedimentary layers often takes on a metallic edge. The addition of synthesizers, sampled 12-string guitar, field recordings, and half-submerged autotuned voice further denaturalize the compositions. Reidy’s vocal interjections—their particular linguistic content rendered inaccessible—are based on counting and self-observational techniques for bringing oneself back into the present; at times Reidy’s picking also assumes a mantra-like quality, though ultimately the flow of the composition subsumes both. There is a heavy sense of the strange throughout these songs, which bleed at their edges into a continuous, questioning whole. That Reidy’s compositions here have a tendency to engulf the listener, like a wave or a squall, can be variously comforting and disorienting. Either way, we are fortunate to follow Reidy on such a journey.

Brooklyn-based DJ and producer Ben Bondy follows releases on Good Morning Tapes, West Mineral, 3XL and Quiet Time Tapes with Por, the second release from his k2dj alias. It arrives on Montreal label NAFF with six tracks of pristine, crystalline electronica with the notable presence of processed vocals which create a sort of metallic, shimmering futuristic alien pop music.

picnic follow up their self-titled debut album with ‘creaky little branch’. 

A love for early 00's electronica guides the listener as it sits somewhere between familiarity and the unknown. However, this isn’t an exercise in nostalgia, instead foreground for the here and now.

With contributions from Alejandra & Aeron, el2, Kindtree, Nico Callaghan, samb_rules, Craig Tattersall (The Humble Bee, Hood, The Boats, etc.), Theodore Cale Schafer and Ultrafog.

Recorded in correspondence throughout a calamitous and uncertain 2020, “Eye of the Sea" is a collaborative record made by Tom James Scott of the United Kingdom and Svitlana Nianio of Ukraine. Active since the late 1980s, Nianio has released a treasure trove of diverse and beguiling music under her own name, as a member of the legendary Ukrainian experimental unit Cukor Bila Smerť, and in collaboration with the late musician and instrument maker Oleksandr Yurchenko. For his part, Scott has steadily published solo recordings since the mid aughts on labels such as Bo’Weavil, Students of Decay, and Where to Now?, and worked often in collaboration with kindred spirits like Andrew Chalk and Timo Van Lujik. “Eye of the Sea” began as a series of intimate, muted piano sketches put to tape by Scott, which Nianio embellished and re-contextualized with voice and instrumentation before returning them to Scott for further overdubbing, editing, and mixing. Listening to these recordings, I’m struck most by their patience, frailty, and beauty. Soft piano lines unspool alongside Nianio’s weightless voice on tracks such as “Slowly Turns the Spring,” which achieves a richly devotional air, and “Lotus,” a piece that all but halts the passage of time as it slowly blooms into expression. But despite their elusive, gauzy palette, there is a startling directness to these recordings that feels unique in the oeuvres of both musicians. Much like Nianio’s wonderful “Lisova Kolekciya,” (reissued by Scott on Skire in 2017) there is the sense that this music, particularly the vocal arrangements, is firmly rooted in some hermetic, primordial tradition. Ultimately, “Eye of the Sea” is a work of romantic, phantasmagoric beauty shot through with morning light; one which draws deeply on 20th century classical, chamber and liturgical musics, and ambient minimalism to arrive at a distinctive voice of its own. - Alex Cobb (Students of Decay/Soda Gong) credits

This is the story of two sisters who nurtured a dream for half a century and never let it die. Vicki and Ronni Gossett launched their musical career as teenagers in Whittier, California in 1966. They called themselves the Female Species. Members came and went; their base of operations moved to Las Vegas, back to LA, and over to Nashville. Along the way their sound transformed from garage rock to lounge to country-pop, the only constant being an innate mastery of hooks and harmony. These ladies had it. Along the way, they crossed paths with The Carpenters, Paul Revere & The Raiders, The Judds, and seemingly half of the industry's power players, rebuffing all untoward advances, focused always on their craft. In the 1980s they became staff songwriters for music publishing companies in the hit-making business. Relentless pushing landed them a once in a lifetime audition before the court of RCA’s top executives — the kind of new talent showcase that almost never happens after 30. Vicki and Ronni were by then in their 40s. Tale of My Lost Love is the whole story from beginning to end of two sisters who gave everything to their dream, yet never made a single record... until now. Sometimes great music just isn’t enough to break through — until it is. Numero Group is thrilled and proud, at long last, to introduce Female Species.

Japanese obscure dream pop gem! Two elevator bangers to get through the gloomy holiday season by Japanese artist, Sonoko, probably made somewhere in the 90's. Merry ye ye

Ulla returns with ‘Foam’, a surprise new album unlocking variants of ambient pop and looped jazz/dub styles coiled inside a glitched matrix that reminds us of Huerco S’ ‘Plonk’ as well as Ekkehard Ehlers fractal treatments and those incredible, smudged and disneyfied edits of Celine Dion released earlier this year by elusive outfit Romance. It’s an absorbing, quietly significant album for 3XL, on its most substantial release to date. Responsible for one of contemporary ambient’s finest breadcrumb trails in recent years, Ulla leads on from an acclaimed run of albums toward a more filigree style on ‘Foam’. Deploying fragmented morsels resembling glass-cast confectionary with a burbling vernacular, these ephemeral new works dissolve into a supine, shoe-gauzy and jazzed bliss that’s best compared with Jan Jelinek’s efforts in this dream-staged arena, the subs x piano minimalism of Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto’s revered collabs, as well as the memory-frothed echo of claire rousay and Co La’s fractal baubles. Aye, it’s a sound close to our hearts and one weft with a certain sort of magic that sparkles on the nerves and imagination with delicacy. Intending it to “feel like a keychain”, the album follows a logic that’s almost algorithmic with its haphazard mutations, but which ultimately displays a more human pulse on pieces like ‘foam angel’, weaving forlorn brass around jazz samples and Ulla’s disjointed voice murmuring unintelligibly like some cyborg liz frazer speaking into the sublime. Effusive solo keys and strings cascade like petals on ‘song’, where familiar leitmotifs become wind-dispersed like seeds. We’re snagged on the bittersweet tang of ‘popping out’, and the unexpected dance between marina’s jazz guitar lilt and the aerosoul thizz on ‘sad face’, while the tongue-tip sensitivities of ‘blush’, and ‘for your love’ sound like Rihanna produced by a Systemisch-era Oval. As tangled and complex as it is filled with improbable ohrwurms, ‘Foam’ is unlike anything we’ve heard from Ulla before, and it just might be the weirdest ambient/pop dislocation of the year so far.

Black Truffle is pleased to announce Down On Darkened Meetings, the first solo release on the label from the quietly prolific Giuseppe Ielasi. Recorded at Ielasi’s studio in Monza outside of Milan over two days in February 2022, the seven pieces presented here continue the renewed exploration of the guitar that marks much of his solo work over the last few years. Emerging in the late 1990s as an improviser working primarily with prepared acoustic and electric guitars, the instrument became less prominent in his work over the next decade, ceding to loop-based constructs that would eventually split into abstracted takes on club music and hip-hop (including his work as Inventing Masks), on the one hand, and spectral electroacoustic explorations (such as the stunning triple disc 3 pauses), on the other. Returning to the guitar in recent years, he has approached the instrument as a source of shimmering metallic glissandi (Five Wooden Frames) or as the vehicle of elegiac double-tracked lines that feel almost like Frisell playing Feldman (The Prospect). Here the focus is on electric guitar filtered, looped, and splayed out into fields of irregular echoes through a bank of pedals.

Like many of Ielasi’s releases, Down On Darkened Meetings is structured as a set of short untitled pieces (here ranging between two and six minutes in length) that single-mindedly explore a single instrument or source throughout. The opening track immediately introduced the distinctive timbral world of fizzing, heavily filtered tones, chiming harmonics, and woozy looping bass figures inhabited throughout. At points it becomes near impossible to trace these sounds to the strings of an electric guitar; at others, as on the final two pieces, the instrument is unmistakable, as Ielasi builds up his shifting loops from snatches of almost unintentional sounding half-playing that give these closing tracks a hushed, private atmosphere reminiscent of Tolerance’s Anonym. While the repeating chords and hanging melodic figures present on many tracks call to mind earlier Ielasi classics like Gesine and Untitled, here the music feels less meticulously constructed than played: Ielasi’s lyrical guitar lines obscured by a battery of effects at times come across like a dilated take on the outer-fringe fretwork of improvisers like Henry Kaiser and Raymond Boni, and the muddy, asynchronous fields of pops and hiss at times wander into areas reminiscent of the hand-played dub techno of Vladislav Delay’s Multila.

Like much of Ielasi’s work in recent years, these seven pieces perform a delicate balancing act: between abstraction and immediacy, austerity and abundance. Imbued with Ielasi’s distinctive lightness of touch, considered approach to pacing, and subtly psychedelic approach to the stereo field, Down on Darkened Meetings is a major new work from a quiet master of contemporary experimental music.

October felt like the appropriate time for Yara Asmar to unveil her intimate new album "synth waltzes & accordion laments" - a captivating new collection of home recordings Acclaimed Lebanese artist Yara Asmar is set to mesmerize listeners once again with her new album, synth waltzes & accordion laments. This eagerly anticipated album, a collection of intimate recordings, provides another glimpse into Yara's world. The album showcases her ability to channel raw emotion into her music. Vulnerable, intimate and moving these pieces were once again recorded at her home in Beirut using lo-fi recording processes. The sound palette here is richer than on her debut, with more focus on synth work and the warm drone of her grandmother's Hohner Marchesa accordion. The album is available through all the streaming apps, as digital download and as a limited edition cassette (200 copies worldwide)

From the academy of deep soul and no ego, Reverend Baron delivers visions of liquor store East LA, the off-the-freeway dry mirage of slow motion graffiti and lonely seagulls. A nylon stringed zen fog with themes of woozy love, layered dimensions of nostalgia and glazed neighborhood tales that roll in with a natural ease. After notching a permanent status in the skateboarding orbit as Danny Garcia, he transferred his effortless style, dedication and authenticity into music. Practicing a philosophy of demystifying the process and doing it yourself, he has become a proficient multi-instrumentalist, engineer, and producer of his own and other artist's music. All streams of curiosity converge into the river. An enigma, Reverend Baron emerges from the proverbial gray overpass with no sense of urgency. He takes a sharp gaze at his surroundings and processes them through a factory of depth and gentle swag to yield a sound that sits as easy as fallen molasses on the bodega shelf. The songs are an unassuming invitation to either walk through the doorway or lean on the wall outside, either way something beautiful and rare.

Irresistible, charming and intimate DIY/outsider psych-folk from London troubador Gengis Cohn. What we get is the inner dialogue and storytelling of one man and his guitar (which is apparently over one hundred years old!) with some additional violin from Lauren Collier, and occasional hand drumming and harmonica. Over intricate string plucking, we get dream logic lyrics that paint surreal pastoral vistas, all with a quintessentially English feel.

Príncipe zoom out from dancefloor immediacy to dreamiest zones with XEXA's outstanding debut of world-building wanderlust, oscillating between bloozy ambient intimacy to lilting rhythmelodies and widescreen modern classical tipped if yr into Vox Populi, Emeka Ogboh, Laurel Halo, Rafael Toral, Arthur Russell, and David Toop. A reminder to never second guess Lisbon’s brilliant Príncipe, ‘Vibrações de Prata’ (’Silver Vibrations’) showcases the sparkling imagination of new signee XEXA. Her striking debut began life as part of her studies at Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London, where she developed a compositional style of organic electro-acoustics woven into impressionistic storytelling, deploying original instrumental performance and nuanced sound design at the service of immersive, poetic aural environments.

Innse Gall ‘The Islands of the Strangers’ is a companion piece to the film An Dà Shealladh ‘The Two Sights’; a sound-forward documentary that cinematically re-connects the disappearing Gaelic oral tradition of the Outer Hebrides to its surroundings. The accompanying LP explores the shifting acoustic ecology of the islands interwoven fragments of dialogue, song, and industry. These two compositions were developed from studies made for the soundtrack of the film using the same elements: hydrophone and field recordings collected on the islands of Barra, Berneray, North Uist, Harris, & Lewis between 2017-19, collaged and assembled in Ithaca, New York 2017-20.

Another blink and you'll miss it transmission from the heart and soul of Manchester artist Tom Boogizm's Rat Heart project alongside The Peanuts (?!?!). The Pamela Peanut Kitchen Sessions is a window into the psyche of this creative force, created in the spirit of purest underground DIY self-expression somewhere between Arthur Russell and The Durutti Column, stoned to the bone.

This music helps me understand how I’m feeling, which is the secret, and there are others. Maybe a product of lyrics sung as if into my ear alone. Or, I hear what I want to hear, or can. That dear experience of understanding your words one way even when I know I’m wrong, like that first line in “Take Mine” which is stuck in my head as: “I wanted to tell you I follow girls like you all the time.” Something about this slip speaks to me, for me, and it’s a kind of magic to open sense up to possibility. These songs are full of similar moments that reach deep, disorient with their candor, and linger long, into lightness. Little truths hook and curl. Is there actually a place where I could fall behind with you? Where we can measure time by creeping vines? I’d like to. Because she did blow in on a cold wind, and how did you know? Precious images, misplaced memories, that this album has captured, nurtured, shared. - Natalia Panzer

All songs originally written by J & reinterpreted by the 'J and the woolen stars' Emile Frankel, Rosy Angela Murphy & Nico Callaghan. Artwork by J Pictures by Bernard Caleo Mastered by Shy