co:clear

co:clear is overjoyed to welcome Jonnnah to its fold, with a new long-form 12” edition. Featuring Pavel Milyakov (aka Buttechno) right off the bat, ‘Me, With You’ is an album that grips its listener tight with gleaming electronica, off-kilter trip-hop and swampy bass.

With past offerings to Soleil Rouge and Second End Records – a label which he heads – there's a thread that laces all of Jonnnah’s work. Although never sticking to a definable bracket, the Lyon-dweller effortlessly floats through various tempers, peddling impeccable electronics as equally suited to colossal sound systems, as they are to solitary early morning walks in headphones. It's ambient for the foreground that surprises with flurries of two-step and amen breaks – present-day sonics that doff their cap to what’s come before.

A leading light of neo-ambient takes their maiden bow on Glasgow’s stealthily expansive co:clear label after cherished turns with the sferic and Stroom labels. The International Billionaire’s Love Child, or tiblsc for brevity, is the avatar of a Leipzig-based artist in possession of a distinctive, world-building ambient purview that has clearly stroked a nerve for listeners chasing the modern ambient zeitgeist, especially their couplet of ‘Delusive Tongue Shifts - Situation Based Compositions’ (2021) + ‘Hypertranslucent’ (2022). Those albums’ careful bends of pulpy sentiment and intricate, immersively dreamlike architecture is now echoed in ‘City of Something’, where her tender feel for compression and blends of HD and lo-fi tones fosters a gauzy sense of depth perception and sonorous emotional resonance. More so than her previous work, the eight tracks here are laced with a flickering pop spirit that riddles the album’s finely meshed dimensions, calling to mind aspects of Perila that are whisked to its most elegant frisson in ‘Resting Bitch Face’, or catching breathy contrails of an airspun pop song in ‘The Sun Really Is Something Round’, whilst tickling private parts of the imagination with the compressed artefacts of ‘You Just Want’, edging on Shinetiac’s take on smudged sheogaze trip hop in ‘Scare Me’, and teasing the most elusive urges on a secretive, quietly restive closer ‘Until the End of Time’.