Lots of speedy beats tonight, whether underpinning grime vocals, post-classical synths, postpunk agitprop or… you name it. Plus contemplative guitars & strings, shoegaze and indie-jazz-pop.
Postcards – I Stand Corrected [Ruptured/Bandcamp]
We’ve heard a lot of brilliant experimental music from Lebanon in recent years, a lot (although by no means all) of it courtesy of the Beirut-based Ruptured label (now partly run out of Montréal). Among the highest of highlights are the songs of Julia Sabra, both with Fadi Tabbal as Snakeskin, and solo. But Sabra’s first band was Postcards, an indie rock/shoegaze band that’s among Beirut’s longest-lived, going back to 2012. So we’re fortunate to have an actual new album from the band, produced though it was (as always, by Fadi Tabbal) under the very dark cloud of Israel’s regional aggression. As the opening song recites: “Destroy, rebuild, you know the drill / Destroy rebuild, repeat and kill”.
Snapped Ankles – Dancing In Transit [The Leaf Label/Bandcamp]
In the words of novelist Alice Walker, quoted by UK postpunk ravers Snapped Ankles, “hard times require furious dancing. Each of us is proof”. And their latest album, named from the quote, is perhaps their most dance-oriented – riffing on single-oscillator “log” synths, dancing away the madness of the modern times (in case, in 7/8, making Venetian Snares proud).
Use Knife – Demain Sera Mieux [VIERNULVIER/Bandcamp]
Following last year’s remix EP Peace Carnival, Belgian-Iraqi trio Use Knife have released their second album État Coupable. With the heavy electronics of Belgian musicians Kwinten Mordijck and Stef Heeren and the vocals and percussion of Saif Al-Qaissy, this is urgent music of the moment. Here they’re telling us that “tomorrow will be better”, but to be clear: only if we make it thus. Oh, and this is in 10/8 I guess – two groups of 5, bouncy!
Eartheater & Shygirl – Dolphin [Chemical X/Eartheater Bandcamp]
Unexpected team-up? Here’s Alexandra Drewchin aka Eartheater bringing UK queen of bass/rap/club, Shygirl, on two of her tracks. Suitably, there’s a UK tilt to the production, with PinkPantheress-esque jungle beats pushing “Dolphin” along through the waves…
OHYUNG – 5 strings {lake} ft. J. Fisher [NNA Tapes/Bandcamp]
OHYUNG – crush [NNA Tapes/Bandcamp]
Lia Ouyang Rusli is a film composer whose 2022 album imagine naked! was a collection of beautiful minimalist ambient tracks, but her new album as OHYUNG takes a very different tack. You Are Always On My Mind combines glitch & post-rave beats with often-processed vocals (and a guest rap from J. Fisher), and it’s a kind of conversation between her trans self and her pre-transition self, powered by a collection of generic string samples found in online sample packs.
aya – Time at the Bar [Hyperdub/Bandcamp]
aya – droplets [Hyperdub/Bandcamp]
No longer requiring “fka LOFT”, aya brings us her second album on Hyperdub, but it’s still as full of angst as im hole was, just in different ways. Here, aya is concerned with addiction, as it often is, indelibly twisted around trauma. The themes are carried by her always sardonic vocal delivery (this time round there are no other guests, except James Ginzburg of emptyset/Subtext Recordings helped out with the mixing), and to be clear, the music can be really claustrophobic and discomfiting. Or it can be cathartic. It’s also funny that aya tends to keep the more straight drum’n’bass or other dancefloor styles off her full albums – which makes sense as they’re more conceptual affairs, imagined as a full-length work, and showcasing her incredible talent & skills. Prettttty damn impressive.
Kalabash – Major ft. Jelani Blackman (Radio Edit) [Tropopause Records/Bandcamp]
UK singer and rapper Jelani Blackman brings out the grime in this new track from London-based collective Kalabash, who are slowly gearing up to release their Decompression Tapes Vol. 1 later this year. At 4:10, this “radio edit” feels fully formed, so I’m curious what the full length track will sound like. Blackman’s lyrical prowess is on show here, over a high-paced beat and production that seems to draw from all over. Also noting that their 2-track single from earlier in March showcases two other sides: “Decompress” is tough jungle-techno with a cinematic interlude, while “Concrete” is a tense 4/4 number.
Rivet – Patitur Butcher [Editions Mego/Bandcamp]
Rivet – Sacrosanct [Editions Mego/Bandcamp]
Swedish producer Mika Hallbäck is perhaps best-known for his industrial techno as Grovskopa, drawing from the likes of Surgeon & Regis but mixing in a love of contemporary classical and experimental music. So it shouldn’t have been a surprise when he arrived on Editions Mego in 2020 with On Feather and Wire. While Hallbäck’s production had widened in scope since his adoption of the Rivet name in 2011, On Feather and Wire allowed him to diverge entirely from the techno template at times, verging into mutated pop and beatless (not rhythmless) synth excursions. Now Peck Glamour, his second album following the tragic and traumatic death of Editions Mego’s Peter Rehberg, expands in further experimental directions, whether it’s weird polyrhythms or percussive bass-adjacent music with disembodied sampled vowels(?) It’d be a shame if this was relegated to the category of experimental oddity, as it’s fun, creative and always engaging.
JANKA – Ale To Ty Dzwonisz Dub [outlines]
The two members of JANKA are longtime members of Poland’s electronic music scene; Daniel Szlajnda made DJ mixes as Daniel Drumz from the mid-’00s, and his own beats later on; Piotr Kaliński is better known as jazzy electronic producer Hatti Vatti, as well as being half of cinematic post-classical/bass duo Nanook of the North. As JANKA, it’s all about the dubs; last year they released three longform ambient glitch-dubs on YUKU with Japanese experimental artist CRZKNY. Earlier this year they contributed an excellent dub to the incredible remix album for REIFSMA on Polish post-footwork label outlines, and now they’ve got an album on outlines sublabel guides. “But You’re The One Calling” is the translation of tonight’s selection, where bubbly dub techno meets footwork with an almost jungle/d’n’b energy.
Gloorp – Angggry [JOLT Music/Bandcamp]
Forthcoming on New York’s JOLT Music is the second (and perhaps final?) album from Philadelphia’s Garrett Burke aka Gloorp. Burke is a purveyor of finely crafted breakbeats and gloopy electonic textures, which feel to me like they have a direct heritage from US electronic labels like Schematic or Tigerbeat6. What’s really notable about this jungle-adjacent new track and the album it comes off (deftly titled Gloorp ‘Em Up is that there’s very little sequencing involved – it’s played live on sampler or acoustic instruments. Keen to hear how the rest of the album shakes out.
RAVL – Smart Fella [[re]sources/Bandcamp]
[re]sources is one of the best bass labels coming out of France at the moment, and on the occasion of their 10th birthday they’ve released their fourth compilation, Club Hexagon IV. There’s influences from footwork, uk garage, grime and jungle, and the particular high-speed beats here from Marseille’s RAVL fit with a new kind of jungle-footwork-techno hybrid that’s being expressed in different ways around the globe at the moment. Excellent.
Insignio – Thinking About It [Yanked Beats/Bandcamp]
Insignio & LowfatiK – Roses Somewhere [Yanked Beats/Bandcamp]
Case in point re jungle-hybrids, Afonso Silva as Insignio, one third of Portuguese label Yanked Beats, whose new album Lost keen is jungle/d’n’b with a marked footwork influence that doesn’t always rely on breakbeats. I played the remix of single “Everytime” by Barcelona’s A.Fruit recently, and here tonight we also heard a collab with another member of the Yanked Beats collective, LowfatiK.
Pugilist & Tamen – ESS [Samurai Music/Bandcamp]
How about some proper jungle? Well actually… Naarm/Melbourne’s Pugilist & Tamen are well familiar with jungle breaks and other forms of bass music, and here debut together on Berlin’s Samurai Music, pioneers of a more tribal, stripped-down form of drum’n’bass but also digging into the nu-jungle sphere. Finding themselves on Samurai, Pugilist & Tamen have crafted a somewhat more minimalist, moody version of their jungle rinse-outs, albeit still fuelled by clattering breaks. Exhilarating.
Harry The Nightgown – Bell Boy [Leaving Records/Bandcamp]
A band that call themselves Harry The Nightgown are just gonna be an art pop kind of affair, right? For their debut album the LA band were engineer/producer Spencer Hartling aka tp Dutchkiss and sound engineer/singer/guitarist/etc Sami Perez, but they are now joined by Luke Macdonald, who tours with one of Perez’ bands, Cherry Glazerr. There’s no way of telling who played or programmed what, but the first single from Ugh (an album with a title for the times if ever there was one) is complex & melodic, segueing comfortably out of our jungle segment, with a sped-up funk bassline and lopsided maybe-sample, skittering into groovy synth chords that could come from an early James Blake track. It’s glitchy, catchy and super-cool.
goat – Quest [Latency/Bandcamp]
Referred to as goat (jp) to differentiate from the Swedish psych rock behemoth, this goat are experts are precise rhythmic patterning. Boomkat described them as “math rock”, which I find misleading because there’s precious little postpunk angularity with goat – and especially so on Without References / Cindy Van Acker, a highly percussive album created for Belgian choreographer Cindy Van Acker and released on the exclusive, unpigeonholeable French label Latency. It’s maximinimalist stuff, and the band is intensely tight in all their cross-rhythmic glory.
Ah! Kosmos & Hainbach – Shelter [FUU]
Turkish electronic producer Başak Günak aka Ah! Kosmos first teamed up with fellow Berlin resident and fellow electronic production nerd Stefan Goetsch aka Hainbach for Blast of Sirens in 2023. Their second album is on the way, and from the singles so far, no track will be the same. “Shelter” is powered by skittering percussive sounds that sound like they could be deconstructed footwork in a different context, with bright synth melodies floating on top. There is something comforting about this music, despite the tumbling beats and the lovely low-end surges that grow through the second half.
Homeward – A Cloud On A Dream [Styles Upon Styles]
New Yorker Philip Tortoroli co-runs Styles Upon Styles, which is a record label and also a radio show. On his own label he’s just released the mini-album Odes under the name Homeward. Styles Upon Styles is unsurprisingly very eclectic, with a close interest in UK bass music among other things, but Odes harkens back to the trip-hop of the ’90s (rather than New York’s brief Illbient scene). It’s a nostalgic sound, all the moreso for “A Cloud On A Dream”, which Tortoroli describes as “an ode to love in the rear view”.
Jerome Blazé – Over Salzburg [Jerome Blazé Bandcamp]
Jerome Blazé – Rosella Blessing (with Beryl, Hannah McKittrick and Kathleen Frances) [Jerome Blazé Bandcamp]
Eora/Sydney musician Jerome Blazé is engaged with music across multiple dimensions: as a producer, live keyboardist, songwriter and academic. Last year’s Living Room album was a home-recorded album combining influences from soul, neo-classical and dance music. The album put collaboration up-front, with instrumental and vocal collaborators from across the Sydney music scene as well as songwriting collaborations and a fully-credited list of sampled artists (and birds!) taking in local friends and international influences like BADBADNOTGOOD, Punch Brothers, Al Green and more. The album’s being given a vinyl deluxe edition this year, expanded through reworkings of each track (which he seems to be doing in reverse order) that open up his music to deeper collaborations. Here, the bright “Rosella Blessing” – originally driven by interlocking piano and drums with bird samples and a simple vocal refrain – is up-ended. It begins with the closing piano, to which verses by folk duo Beryl, Naarm/Melbourne singer/songwriter/broadcaster Hannah McKittrick and Bristol singer/songwriter Kathleen Frances are added, bringing a lush wistfulness and expanding on the theme of birds and blessings. It’s a very special piece of music that gains depth if you know the original.
Daniel Bachman – Tight tangles of being intersecting in every direction [Daniel Bachman Bandcamp]
In the last few years, “American primitive” folk guitarist Daniel Bachman has been deconstructing his traditional acoustic music using digital technology, as a response to climate change and as an exploration of his musical heritage. His latest album, self-released, is Moving Through Light, and it’s perhaps the most abstracted yet. Other than some drum machines, everything is collaged and adapted from his own guitar playing, but it walks through noise and glitch to make it home – here and there – to fingerstyle guitar picking. It can be challenging music, but it rewards deep listening.
Aidan Baker – Drowning Not Waving [Gizeh Records/Bandcamp]
BOW & Aidan Baker – DE 1 [Cruel Nature Records/Aidan Baker Collaborations]
There are many facets to Aidan Baker‘s art. The Berlin-based Canadian guitarist may be best known for his doomgaze band Nadja with his wife Leah Buckareff, but he’s been making minimalist, ambient, experimental music since before that band existed, and collaboration has always sat at the core of his work. Still, a solo Aidan Baker record can be a gripping listen too, especially his patient slowcore songs, so I can highly recommend & You Still Fall In for this vein of music. Amp buzzes, guitar gestures, dull thumps. Lovely. One of Aidan’s recent collaborative projects documents two performances with Belgian contemporary/experimental string quintet BOW. Their aesthetic is finely matched with Aidan Baker’s, to the extent that you can’t always tell what are string drones and what are guitar loops. But there’s a remarkable amount of beauty captured in these recordings, worth tuning into on a quiet night.