Youth

Parisian label boss Florent Hadjinazarian aka Hajj updates ‘90s illbient with contemporary instrumental rap, vaporwave and pop influences in a richly pungent and queasy debut album for YOUTH - tipped if yr into DJ Lostboi, Pan Daijing, Croww, Burial. Bringing on the cold rush, seven tracks, all 3:33 long, Hajj’s sound is among the most distinctive in his field on ‘No Soul, No God, No Devil, No Existence’. Influenced by Marian Dora's 2009 film 'The Angels' Melancholia', the album is perhaps best defined by the stark negative ecstasy of its highlight ‘Drag Me Into the Void’, presenting Hajj as a master of collage-like structure, in possession of a compelling grasp of atmosphere. It stands out from much of the contemporary french music we’re aware of for its oblique rejection of club muscularity in favour of more unusual, weightless pressure and suggestively gestural arrangements. That’s not to say it’s not ripe for certain moments in the club, it just doesn’t give them readily. Beginning like Biosphere doing dankest road rap with DJ Lostboi (anyone checked that Nedarb cut lurking on Æ’s Bandcamp purchase list yet?) in ‘Our Lady of Darkness’, he holds an immaculately dark-but-lush appeal from the K-hole nightmare of ‘Loosing U 4 Ever’ to the cosmic plangency of ‘Vox Tenebrae’, meting out discomfiting intro rap like a fantasy Croww x Ronce in ‘Heaven’s Calamity’, and like Spectre x Pan Daijing in ‘Do U Remember Bein Born’, while his ear for saliva-inducing textures comes to fruition on the voyeuristic vortex of ‘Burning Illusions’, perfectly distilling the cold rush on an original mix of the glorious ‘Drag Me Into the Void’. Sickest thing for a while on YOUTH for our $$.

Bleep's "100 Tracks 2019" includes Bogdan Raczynski, 808 State, etc. New York's up-and-coming producer Significant Other, who has also worked with Oscilla Sound and anno, released new album. D. Bola, Jay Glass Dubs, Spectre, and even Rob Hall meld together uneasily in his theme of emotions "born from moments of extreme passion and pain". This is a gloomy, meditative IDM/industrial ambient piece that will appeal to anyone who is drawn to the atmosphere around Hype Williams!

Returning from a self-imposed musical hiatus, Silvia Kastel materialises on YOUTH with a long-incubated follow-up to her 2017 'Air Lows’ album for Blackest Ever Black. It’s an oddly rendered trio of soundscapes somewhere in the vicinity of Madalyn Merkey, Lucy Duncombe or Maja SK Ratkje - beatless - and far from straightforward. Inspired by Toshiya Sukegawa’s Bioçic Music series, which Kastel describes as both calming and eerie, ‘Mantide’ manifests a mix of raw directness and conceptual subtext. Featuring loud birdsong recorded outside her Berlin apartment, Kastel foregrounds her subjects against strafing choral motifs in a way that refuses to inhabit new age environmentalism. It’s all genuinely unsettling - on paper it reads like a calming listen, but instead plays into something much more angsty, and hard to define. On 'Spoons' Kastel takes pointers from electronic music pioneer Carl Stone (who is supposedly working on his own version of the track for future release), as well as "Îles Resonantes", a short documentary about Éliane Radigue. It’s a slowly keening smear of quizzical chords and ribboning tendrils that wrap up into what she intends to “sound and feel like a long goodbye hug…surging and overdriven at times, quiet and soft at others… “ Xantharmony closes the EP on its weirdest flex, constructed entirely out of layered and processed vocal elements. It recalls Lucy Duncombe’s clipped theatric melodrama and Maja Ratkje’s more guttural vocal acrobatics, but follows its own hackle-raising logic, acting more like a cue, or trigger, for sudden and overwhelming feelings of unease. And in our book - that’s high endorsement for continued, closer listening.

‘Beautiful Age’ is SSIEGE’s reflection on adolescence and the gauzy fidelity of memory, using an electro-acoustic array of piano, samples, tape loops, synths and field recordings to evoke feelings of longing for the eternal spring of youth.

“Lone is about loneliness and hidden places. It’s been my shelter for the last three years. It’s a work full of internalized questions. Am I still who I was before? Do I have the same energy and ambitions? Is this all still really me? A sense of nostalgia permeates through all its tracks, though each one has a different root. I’ve always felt connected to both tribal and dark atmospheres, and cinematic moods as well. The beautiful dualism with CTM’s cello, and the romantic guitar featured by Carlo Teo Pedretti speak to this; they communicate very intimate feelings. In Lone, you’ll be shackled between chorals and techno kicks. The album should carry you through my many different approaches.” – Tadleeh

YOUTH are back in town on a 3rd Sports volume packed with exclusive chops from Michael J. Blood, Rat Heart, Sockethead, pigbaby, FUMU, and Iueke, plus new cats Craig Birrel and Zesknel among many others. Programmed by footie-mad graphic designer/DJ, Andrew Lyster, ’Sports 3’ casts a wide net over work by Youth label friends and extended family with results limning a dead cranky conception of club music and blooz/beatdown pressure. All sharing a taste for texture that sounds like the masters were left to decompose for winter, the 16 cuts map odd gooches and ginnels of the contemporary soundsphere from the washed-out jazz reminiscence of Zesknel next to harder-to-place works such as the metallic cyborgian slug of ‘Driesh’ by Craig Birrel, or the groggy breaks of ‘Cocaine’ from HR For Drug Dealers. Pigbaby plays the game with a highlight of midnight keys on ‘Far From Home’, and we spy a zinger from Sockethead on the feral yowl of ‘Coarse Ground’, while Dave Saved keeps it slanted on ‘Abisso 66’ and into a super glum one by the still enigmatic Yugen Disciple. That sense of entropy also infects the set’s more energetic bits, as with the PointilisticT arp flight of ’T’ by S, and the drowning struggle of ‘When It Rains (It Pours)’ from Significant Other complementing the worn out acid trample of Iueke’s ‘Videoslash’ and Jessic*nt’s murky stealth bomb ‘Manic/Panic’. Rat Heart, Michael J. Blood x Sockethead unsurprisingly steal the show on the slow cymbal-crash blooz of ‘True’, and the album ends with Lyster’s own VIP of NW / HR tripped & screwed hardcore submersion.