Uncanny simulacra abound through the music tonight. What is real?
Mal Devisa – Next stop [Top Shelf Records/Bandcamp]
Show Me The Body – Halogen (feat. Mal Devisa) [self-released]
Mal Devisa – Crowd Pleaser [Top Shelf Records/Bandcamp]
This Wednesday, US label Top Shelf Records is re-introducing the incredible poet, musician, singer & rapper Mal Devisa with a big album called Palimpsesa. The woman born Deja Carr came up with the Mal Devisa project as a solo vehicle after a funk band she formed with friends at school. A poet and rapper who’s also an expressive singer with a huge range, she’s also a producer & musician, and can easily span acoustic folk, jazz & soul, bass-heavy hip-hop, funk and rock, all with a healthy experimental backbone. Across 90 minutes, Palimpsesa showcases a breathtaking depth of work, with a ridiculous number of strong, catchy songs that deserve wider recognition. She writes of blackness, queerness, gender and intersectional liberation with an artistic ear. Here, read some of her poetry.
Perera Elsewhere, Andy S – Fuck Le System [Friends of Friends/Bandcamp]
I loved Sasha Perera aka Perera Elsewhere‘s 2022 album Home, an album of “doom-folk”, but actually experimental electronic pop songs. The following year she put out an album of remixes with some excellent contributors, and in October there’s finally another album, Just Wanna Live Some. Her musical net is cast wide, mixing UK soundsystem culture in with music from different parts of Africa, Indonesia and Europe (she’s based in Berlin). The first double single features two tracks with Côte d’Ivoire MC Andy S, rapping (mostly) in French over infectious beats.
Rachika Nayar & Nina Keith aka Disiniblud – It’s Change (feat. Willy Siegel, katie dey & Julianna Barwick) [Smugglers Way/Bandcamp/Bandcamp]
The two women who make up Disiniblud come from different backgrounds, neither of which is immediately indicative of what their self-titled album has to offer. Rachika Nayar‘s music has generally been based around her guitar, albeit granulated and processed, and on her last album expanded with synths, subs and occasional beats. Nina Keith, on the other hand, writes delicate chamber music, played by herself on various acoustic instruments. When they first worked together (to my knowledge) on RVNG Intl.‘s 2021 Salutations compilation, the seeds of Disiniblud were already there – shining melodies and glitchy harmonic textures – more ambient perhaps, but no less ecstatic. On their album, these same textures and emotional gestures are more fully orchestrated, with various guests contributing often wordless vocals. The unspoken is as important: the guests are all female or trans; it’s particularly lovely (for this listener anyway) to hear Tujiko Noriko‘s unmistakable voice on the last track. It’s a celebratory album, of the artists’ friendship and of the queer/trans utopia that could be.
Feronia Wennborg & Lucy Duncombe – Your Lips Covering Your Teeth [Warm Winters, Ltd./Bandcamp]
Feronia Wennborg & Lucy Duncombe – Assembling Air [Warm Winters, Ltd./Bandcamp]
Feronia Wennborg & Lucy Duncombe – The Air of An Error [Warm Winters, Ltd./Bandcamp]
From Adam Badí Donoval‘s perfectly-curated Warm Winters, Ltd. comes an album of beautiful, uncanny vocal simulacra, working together in a strange kind of plainsong, hinting at Medieval music as recalled by malfunctioning robots. Feronia Wennborg & Lucy Duncombe both make exploratory sound-art: Wennborg is interested in the exchange involved with listening and “sounding”, and makes art from the digital transformation of the sound of people together; Duncombe’s work transforms her voice and others, glitching and reassembling the sound, pushing them into the surreal or irreal. Accordingly, this is a haunted album, in which the artificial voices never quite succeed in voicing complete melodies, instead looping and stuttering, pitched outside their intended registers, mournfully ironising the title, Joy, Oh I Missed You. The results are queasily beautiful.
Giant Claw – No Life [Orange Milk Records/Bandcamp]
Giant Claw – Decadent Stress Chamber [Orange Milk Records/Bandcamp]
Under his own name, Keith Rankin is an incredible visual artist, whose retro-futuristic style is found much further afield than his own Orange Milk Records, but it certainly helps define the label’s aesthetic, as it does his own music as Giant Claw. This is a project that uses General MIDI instruments and either vocal samples or computer-generated vocals, artfully cut up in a way that makes it clear that everything’s sampled and reconstructed. On Decadent Stress Chamber the tracks are the closest he’s gotten to pop songs, but are peppered with chopped heavy metal guitars and weird fake-outs in the structures. You’d be hard-pressed to find a greater master at the uncanny.
tedzi تدزي – Mn Dehab [mnjm/Bandcamp]
Lebanese producer and multi-instrumentalist Teddy Tawil releases electronic music as tedzi تدزي. His debut album Mn Dehab is balanced about half-half with industrial-strength glitched bass and IDM on the one hand, and deep, granular (and no less “industrial”) beatless pieces. The full liner notes for this album show the state of mind projected into these sounds: it’s a kind of poetic manifesto for survival, pitting the west’s relentless thirst for brown people’s blood and the internet’s relentless thirst for our attention against the need to write music, to make rooms shake with sound.
Sha ke aaaal ll l l l l lll the rroo ms.
also with sound.
we’re made of gold
من ذهب
Chewlie – Die Berge, Sie Schweigen (Alan Johnson Sunder Remix) [YUKU/Bandcamp]
Chewlie – Slow Love (DJ Strawberry remix) [YUKU/Bandcamp]
The latest album from Swiss producer Julia Chewlie Häller, Transforming Matter, came out in 2024. But 2022’s Creature already showed her sound design and experimental bass music talents, and it’s that album that’s now the subject of a 9-track remix album from artists chosen by YUKU and Chewlie. As she comments herself, the remixes are by-and-large more dancefloor-oriented than her originals, and span everything from dubstep/grime through techno to drum’n’bass. In fact UK duo Alan Johnson‘s remix traverses all those BPMs through its 8-minute runtime, switching up every time it drops back and restarts. Turkish producer DJ Strawberry is usually found doing experimental takes on Chicago footwork, but his remix here is full to the brim with jungle breaks.
DJ DIE SOON – Intro ft. Kiki Hitomi [Drowned By Locals/Bandcamp]
DJ DIE SOON – Unfinished ft. Kiki Hitomi, Franco Franco [Drowned By Locals/Bandcamp]
DJ DIE SOON – Botu [Drowned By Locals/Bandcamp]
Daisuke Imamura uses the awesome alias DJ DIE SOON, which is both a reference to his own name and to the great jungle producer DJ Die. But DIE SOON’s beats rarely venture into jungle or drum’n’bass, partly because they rarely resemble traditional beats at all. He was the perfect collaborator for avant-garde Japanese rapper MA on their DIEMAJIN project last year, and now he returns to Jordanian label Drowned By Locals for a solo album, My Brother the… no wait, My Brothel The Wind. Yep, dude likes his wordplay. On this album he’s joined by various fellow travellers in experimental genres, including Rully Shabara of Senyawa and experimental vocalist/sound-artist Sara Persico. But oftentimes the vocals are somehow blended into the whole mash of sound, like Kiki Hitomi‘s voice in the Intro track or the mysterious MC Schlumbo who’s credited in a few spots. The second track is one of the more song-like, with rapping from Hitomi and Italy’s Franco Franco, but even so, the beats seem to be on their own timetable compared to the vocalists… Very excellent, very strange music.
Tutu Ta – Papillon Riddim (Ft. Feral Is Kinky) [Tutu Ta Bandcamp]
Tutu Ta is a UK producer otherwise known as “Nomad the Shadow Dancer”, and nothing more identifying as far as I know. His(?) music is often dub or dubstep/grime/jungle based, but just as much can float towards some kind of arcane folk or postpunk jazz thing. An 8-track album, Pepper, is out this coming Friday, and one of the singles is this quasi-grime post-dancehall track featuring English ragga toaster Feral Is Kinky aka Caron Liza Geary.
Nick Sylvester – Clyde [smartdumb/Bandcamp]
Nick Sylvester – Hisham [smartdumb/Bandcamp]
It’s a little bit wrong for these next tracks to appear during the beat-driven section of the show, because you’d be hard-pressed to dance to this. And yet, all the tracks on Nick Sylvester‘s Stereo Music for Breakbeats and Samplers are made from glitched drum breaks and modular synths. The LA-based producer has worked with the likes of Yaeji and studied with the best – Drew Daniel & MC Schmidt of Matmos, Keith Fullerton Whitman (whose early work as Hrvatski pretty much defined breakcore while also connecting it with musique concrète and modular synthesis), then James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem… That’s quite the name-dropping, and oh hello! Each of the tracks here is also the name – the first name, anyway – of a famous drummer. Some are admittedly easier to scope out than others – Yoshimi of Boredoms, Jaki Leibezeit of Can, Moe Tucker of The Velvet Underground… Our first track here is Clyde Stubblefield, who played with James Brown and is immortalised in one of the most famous breaks of all time. One presumes the second is Hisham Bharoocha of Black Dice, Kill Alters etc. I have to say, the drum fuckery here sounds a lot like what you could get out of the legendary destroy fx Buffer Override DSP plugin (still available!). Super fun stuff anyway.
Manslaughter 777 – Child Of (featuring MSC) [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
Manslaughter 777 – Silk Barricade [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
When I played Manslaughter 777‘s first album I couldn’t resist referring to it as “metal heads doing Metalheadz”, and that’s no less true of their second masterpiece, God’s World. The duo are The Body drummer Lee Buford and longtime collaborator Zac Jones of MSC/Braveyoung, who’ve collaborated a lot over the years. Compared to their other bands, Manslaughter 777 is stripped entirely of the metal trappings, focusing on live and manipulated beats & samples, drawing on their love of dub, hip-hop and drum’n’bass/jungle. Working again with engineer Seth Manchester at Machines With Magnets, they’ve layered rhythm upon rhythm, pushed the bass up to 11, switched BPMs whenever they feel like it, but mostly it’s two continuous sides that would keep the right kind of dancefloors pumping all the way. Brilliant.
Sudden Debt – SMS [New Weird Australia/Bandcamp]
Sudden Debt – RAM [New Weird Australia/Bandcamp]
Great to have some new artist albums back on New Weird Australia! We did hear Sudden Debt back on the Collapse Theories compilation in 2022. The Naarm/Melbourne trio’s modus operandi was already clear: minimalist postpunk bass & drums, with vocals through tightly slapping delay effects. Around this, noise guitar solos are also fed through the delay. It’s a winning formula – not to suggest that it sounds at all formulaic. Album opener “SMS” is martial in its rhythmic drive, while the guitar smashes out chords that are caught in infinite delay feedback. In contrast, the album’s closer “RAM” feels elegiac as the warm bass holds and slides, and the drums pick out little more than kick, hi-hat, kick, hi-hat. There’s something of early HTRK and My Disco in here, in an idiosyncratic way. These bleak tableaux are strangely touching.
Bonniesongs – Weightless [Impressed Records/Bandcamp]
It’s a joy to have the second album from Irish-Australian singer/songwriter/guitarist/drummer Bonnie Stewart finally out. While Stewart has been involved with lots of improv & experimental acts for a few years, her songs as Bonniesongs are catchy, cheeky, sometimes a little disturbing, drawing from indie rock, grunge, punk and folk, prog and jazz… The songs don’t take the expected path structurally, but they’re driven along by the inventive arrangements and great musicianship of not just Bonnie Stewart but fellow travellers like cellist Freya Schack-Arnott (and *koff* me on cello on the opening track), bassist Thomas Botting, drummer Tully Ryan on a few tracks and guitarist Rhys Motley. Bonnie is expert at winding melodies and odd phrase lengths that sound totally natural, but lend the songs a gorgeous strangeness (not for nothing is the album called Strangest Feeling). The album was co-produced in two parts, some with Alyx Dennison & David Trumpmanis (who produced & engineered her debut Energetic Mind), and part by renowned local producer Tony Buchen (who also donates some electric bass). This really should be heard wide & far.
Patrick Shiroishi – There is no moment in my life in which this is not happening (feat. otay::onii) [American Dreams/Bandcamp]
The prolific Japanese-American musician Patrick Shiroishi has been mostly known to me as a saxophonist – see his incredible solo album Hidemi from 2021 – and working across jazz & improv to noise & punk. But he’s credited nowadays as multi-instrumentalist and composer, as indeed he is. So his latest album Forgetting is Violent may not be as heavy on multi-tracked saxophone as his previous, but it shares with them the thematic background: racism & discrimination, particularly the experience of Japanese people in the USA. During World War II, Japanese Americans – Shiroishi’s grandfather among them – were imprisoned in what were effectively concentration camps because Japan was the “enemy”. On this new album, Shiroishi is joined by many additional musicians, mostly drawn from the metal & punk scene, including SUMAC/Old Man Gloom/ISIS’s Aaron Turner and his wife Faith Coloccia of Mamiffer, as well as Savages’ Gemma Thompson and BIG|BRAVE’s Mathieu Ball. The first single, “There is no moment in my life in which this is not happening”, features the distinctive vocals of Chinese musician otay::onii aka Lane Shi Otayonii of Elizabeth Colour Wheel, who has experienced America’s racism herself at first hand. This is a moving track, both ambient and confronting.
Isambard Khroustaliov & Ben Carey – Closer! Closer! Alien UFO! [Not Applicable/Bandcamp]
Another saxophonist, focused on other instruments, now: Eora/Sydney musician Ben Carey is an expert modular synthesist, and here he joins London producer Sam Britton aka Isambard Khroustaliov on an album of electronic abstraction titled Field Recordings From Other Constellations. Britton also has a Sydney connection as he’s the cousin of Ollie Bown, now based here, with whom he formed drum’n’bass and experimental electronic duo Icarus in 1997. There are no beats here, but it’s also not as daunting as one might guess. Carey is brilliant at coaxing beguiling, quasi-organic music from his modular synths, and Britton frequently performs with jazz musicians as well as some postpunk legends. More xenoanthropology to come as this is released in September.
Ryan Packard – GV II [Dinzu Artefacts/Bandcamp]
From LA experimental label Dinzu Artefacts comes a dizzying album made of mostly a singular instrument on each track. Ryan Packard is primarily a percussionist, and the instruments are mostly percussive: amplified bass drum or amplified snare drum, each augmented with triangles (but nothing else), amplified bell plate (a hanging metal sheet), and for the finale, amplified cymbal, speaker cone and snare drum. There’s a hint at what Packard’s doing here: each sound source is amplified, and it’s the way these sounds ring & resonate that Packard is interested in as he modulates their sound over each repetitive track. It’s trancelike sound-art, utterly engrossing, but the piece I’ve chosen is the odd one out in that it’s not an object being struck. What sounds uncannily like a revving engine is an amplified bullroarer – an instrument used as a long-distance communication device by First Nations people in Australia and the Americas, as well as in ancient Greece, Scandinavia and elsewhere. But heard amplified here, the full brunt of this object as it’s swung round & round is felt inside us.
Teddy Abrams – The Scream [New Amsterdam Records/Bandcamp]
There’s an element of the uncanny about our last piece too. Teddy Abrams is a Grammy Award-winning classical conductor, clarinettist and pianist. On Preludes he’s wearing his composer hat as well as that of the pianist, but these short compositions have been overlaid with a variety of production techniques by Abrams alongside Gabriel Kahane and Casey Foubert. Sometimes it’s just a delay, tastefully extending the tail of the piece, but elsewhere it’s quite overwhelming. On “The Scream”, multiple takes are layered and, among other things, sidechained against a kick drum which does not itself appear in the mix, creating a disorienting, smudged effect. These are lovely pieces (which you can buy the sheet music for!), and the studio approach makes for a unique listening experience.