Radiating Light is the second compilation from Orchid Tapes, a sequel to 2014's *Boring Ecstasy. *Like the first, it gives you hope that people still make magic in their apartments behind closed doors.

Various Artists: Radiating Light: Orchid Tapes & Friends

Radiating Light: Orchid Tapes & Friends

Warren Hildebrand (who makes music as Foxes in Fiction) started Orchid Tapes six years ago in an apartment in Toronto. He was still in college, and the label was essentially an ad-hoc distribution method for his 2010 debut Swung from the Branches**. The label took its name from a 2007 Deerhunter song “Tape Hiss Orchid” (from Cryptograms)*, *and fittingly the song and perhaps much of Bradford Cox’s noisy somnambulism is hardwired into the label’s DNA. Eventually he connected with artists over Myspace, and the label started to serve as a platform for cassette releases of self-described “bedroom pop.” R.L. Kelly, Elvis Depressedly, Ricky Eat Acid, Alex G, and many more found homes at Orchid Tapes, and over the course of its existence it’s become one of the most successful cassette labels. It’s succeeded because of careful curation on the part of Hildebrand and the label’s co-manager Brian Vu, who Warren met when he moved to New York a few years ago.
The artists that work with Warren and Brian are quick to define the vibe of Orchid Tapes as familial and personal: Alex G even described the label as “a support group.” Two years ago, the label released its first retrospective compilation, *Boring Ecstasy: The Bedroom Pop of Orchid Tapes**, *which perfectly summed up the melancholic and handmade love that pulsated through the music that Orchid Tapes was sharing. The songs found within were rough, immediate, and refreshing as the cool side of a pillow. In *Radiating Light: Orchid Tapes & Friends, *the loose sequel to *Bedroom Pop, *the tricks start to run thin, and the inventive eccentricities once present have started to feel as safe as a day spent perusing Etsy.
This isn’t evident at first. The opener features a newer artist on the roster, Soccer Mommy, and her contribution, “Memories,” begins with an 8-bit jingle, making the very first second’s of the compilation feel like you’re entering an arcade game. It’s tactile and attention-grabbing, and what follows is about three minutes of bedroom pop, cleverly written, confessional, sincere, but allusive. The following song, Katie Dey’s (another newer artist) “Few Hours Later,” is diverse, messy, and dense with gnarled-but-inviting sounds. These two songs alone are tantalizing, and some of the best new work that Orchid Tapes has curated.
Veteran label members add equally vivid and interesting contributions to the mix. R.L. Kelly’s “Mad” is a nicely unadorned and relatable meditation on frustration and mental health. Ricky Eat Acid and Blithe Field's “It's Love” is a bittersweet and dreamy piece of electronic music. The off-kilter garage rock of Infinity Crush’s “Mirror” adds an element of bracing power to the album, and it's redolent of Mitski's recent work. Alex G’s  “July 27, 2015,” a ramshackle twee-house song, is the one moment of true risk and failed experimentation: Its lilting drum machine pitter-patter could easily fit somewhere in the world of internet house labels like 1080p.
Elsewhere *Radiating Light is muddled by a sense of dullness and repetition. There aren’t many risks, *and unlike it’s predecessor, it doesn’t tell a story or give a solid collective artistic statement. Benoît Pioulard’s “Layette [slow version]” is a pedestrian retread of a song he already released earlier this year. A cover of Elvis Depressedly’s “Weird Honey” done by Owen Pallett and Foxes in Fiction is overwrought, busy, and saccharine. These aren't adjectives that normally orbit the kind of music these guys make.
Overall, there are chunks of the compilation that feel anonymous or shapeless, yet it’s hard to hate this release: If you get one of the vinyl bundles, it comes complete with some guava candy, an Orchid Tapes tea bag, Polaroid photos, and a handwritten thank-you note. This kind of love and care that’s hard to beat. Perhaps after six years of innovating, Orchid Tapes is settling for what works. It might not make for an interesting collection of music, but there is something about *Radiating Light *that gives you hope: People still make magic in their apartments behind closed doors.


The smoldering collaborative album between the experimental singer-producer and ambient duo casts overwhelming emotions into stark relief.

Rainy Miller / Space Afrika: A Grisaille Wedding

A Grisaille Wedding

Grisaille, which translates from French as “greyness,” emerged centuries ago as artists grew frustrated by the lack of depth in their paintings. Starting with a light base, they would layer shadow and highlights using a monochromatic palette, building dimension so their canvas looked sculptural, as if chiseled from marble slabs. The austere technique serves as a guide to Rainy Miller and Space Afrika’s new collaborative project A Grisaille Wedding, a smoldering, overcast electronic album that casts overwhelming emotions into stark relief.
Miller and Space Afrika shape each composition around a single concept, slowly adding elements to fill the surrounding space. The songs, a blend of gossamer ambient pop and thunderous hip-hop, wrench at themselves, tugging between softer and heavier sounds. The bleary-eyed “00-down / Murmansk 12” employs the bleak winter boom of 2010s Chicago drill to tamp down a reversed melody line; “Maybe It’s Time to Lay Down the Arms” threads candlelit samples through a rickety trip-hop beat that constantly threatens to fall apart. “The Graves of Charleroi” would be a delicate, meandering folk tune if not for its crashing strings and reverberant vocal loops, crushing the air out of the guitars and inducing a sense of claustrophobia.
The vocals work more as texture than narrative advancement, but occasional glimpses suffuse the album with yearning. On “Sweet (I’m Free),” guest RezNiro proclaims that “life is absurd,” peeking out from the maelstrom of overdriven drones and feedback stabs; Iceboy Violet’s distorted, double-time flow is another spinning gear propelling the track to its explosive conclusion. The album holds space for both heaviness and hope: When Miller repeats “They told me” in the middle of “Maybe It’s Time to Lay Down the Arms,” he sounds flat and dissociative, as if parsing a truth that his brain won’t process.
The album’s most poignant song, “Let It Die,” moves from hushed beauty to total obliteration over the course of its six minutes. The sustained keyboards, slightly frayed at the edges, slowly accumulate; it’s hard to catch everything Miller sings, but even through the processing effects’ alien haze, it’s impossible to miss the ratcheting passion in his delivery. The reverb begins to yawn, swallowing everything, and noise serrates all the synths until the track peaks in an enormous, blistering swirl. It’s an IMAX screen of emotion, overwhelming and cathartic. As it winds down, you’re left drained—not hollow or empty, but cleared, ready for what’s next.


On Belle and Sebastian's first album in five years, the band has introduced a new wrinkle, writing a record filled with synthesizers and dance grooves to coax their once notoriously-staid live crowds to cut a rug.

Belle and Sebastian: Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance

Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance

Seven years is how long Belle and Sebastian lead singer Stuart Murdoch was afflicted with chronic fatigue syndrome, a debilitating illness with no easy cure. You’re tired all the time, but sleep doesn’t help; you can’t hold a job down, since you don’t have the energy to be anywhere. Murdoch developed the disease as a university student, when he was old enough to fully comprehend what he’d be forgoing should his symptoms endure. Family? The hope of fame, or fortune? Forget about it.
If you imagine for a second how Murdoch must’ve despaired, then you’ll understand why he calls "Nobody’s Empire"—the opener on Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance, in which he sings about the solitude brought on from his sickness—the most personal song he’s ever written. That’s not a small statement, considering Belle and Sebastian’s reputation. Their ethos was crystallized in the title of the first song on their first album—"The State I’m In"—and they’ve spent nearly two decades staking their claim as the most sensitive band in indie rock, patron saints for daydreaming boys and girls. Their early records sounded feather-soft, but over the years, they slowly put on weight and become a real band, translating their bedroom aesthetics for the festival set.
On Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance, they’ve added a new wrinkle by writing an album that attempts to be pop qua pop, filled with synthesizers and dance grooves to coax their once notoriously-staid live crowds to cut a rug. Even the artwork is different: This is their first cover that doesn’t use a monochromatic photographic still that directly references the Smiths, their emotional forerunner. The band hired outside producer Ben H. Allen III (Animal Collective, Washed Out) to punch up their sound, and he encouraged them to take more chances. The band is confident enough to step into pro forma P-funk on "The Party Line" and polka singalong on "The Everlasting Muse" without losing their penchant for bookishness: "The Power of Three" name drops Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty, while the jaunty "Play for Today" mixes in chants of "author! author!" as Murdoch and Dee Dee Penny of Dum Dum Girls trade harmonies.
"Enter Sylvia Plath" combines both worlds, with a brittle rhythmic backbone giving the band their first song that you might—might—hear in a club. "The Cat With the Cream" and "Ever Had a Little Faith?" are both classic Sebastian, softly spoken songs where Murdoch reminisces for rainy days and childhood wonder. The piano line that kicks in during the latter’s outro is a pleasant little melody that accentuates Murdoch’s ear for nostalgic detail. So does "Nobody’s Empire", which Murdoch wasn’t lying about. It’s a nakedly autobiographical song that’s verbose even by their standards, with Murdoch spitting rapid-fire verses over a sleepy melody before letting loose with what passes for a scream in the Sebastian-verse, which is a place filled with indoor voices.
In an interview with the Daily Beast, Murdoch said he would’ve loved to be "a young Carole King," working in the Brill Building where so many of pop’s yesteryear hits were written. "I see no reason why that music can’t be possible again, but I look around and don’t see it," he said. "Sophisticated, nuanced, melodious pop music, that sweeps you away." That Murdoch’s shining ideal of pop harkens back to a half-century ago goes hand-in-hand with a lot of the band’s dandier affectations, as does his casual dismissiveness of today’s comparatively hedonistic Top 40. It's also strange because, to many long time listeners, the band already took their shot at writing a pop album with 2003's Dear Catastrophe Waitress and 2006's The Life Pursuit, where they churned out romantic hook-loaded singalongs like "I'm a Cuckoo" and "The Blues Are Still Blue", both of which are catchier and more memorable than anything on Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance.
Besides, Murdoch is surely trifling if he doesn't think sweeping, sophisticated pop has a place on the charts: Adele and Sam Smith are two singers who've carved their niche by singing right to your parents. A flippant comment to Pitchfork about how listeners would rather lose themselves in Nina Simone than Beyoncé shows not just a flagrant misunderstanding of how people listen to Beyoncé, but to the artists they love. He means well, but it faintly stinks of snobbery that's gotten other indie acts in trouble when they've tried to explain their theory of pop with, well, a lot of theory. Tom Krell of How to Dress Well raised hackles when he told Pitchfork he wanted to be "pop, but not populist." But what's wrong with trying to appeal to as many people as possible?
Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance reminds me of another recent attempt from a high-profile indie band to change directions. Arcade Fire surprised fans with the Caribbean-influenced Reflektor, their attempt at writing a looser, more playful album. They sort of looked like a bunch of dorks, but it didn't matter. Eventually, everyone learns what children and merengue instructors know to be true: Dancing is fun, regardless of how well you move your hips.
Look at the video of the band cutting through "I’m a Cuckoo" from the 2013 Pitchfork Music Festival. Murdoch hams it up, casting flirtatious looks from side-to-side, dropping to his knees like Elvis. At one point, he loses the guitar, because you can’t dance while holding a guitar. He’s having fun. And if fun is what he wants to have after 19 years and nine albums anointing them as kings of coyness and crossed arms—it’s hard to begrudge that.
And, who knows: Maybe this is the album to teach someone about fun. If not, it’s still a perfectly respectable hour of Northern soul-influenced pop, even if it’s difficult not to hear the intention behind every song. (Or to shake the feeling that a band like Cut Copy is much better at this shambling soul revue style of music.) One of Murdoch’s imaginary women instructs him to "be popular, play pop, and you will win my love" on "The Everlasting Muse", which sounds like noble inspiration but ends up falling short. You don’t win anyone by simply playing a pop song, or by deciding to be pop. It takes something else, something that can’t be explained by a mission statement. For a band so well-loved for writing from their heart, it sounds like they got stuck in their head.


Moving from ambient washes of synth and samples to sludgy, pseudo-anthemic passages of throat-straining emotion, this band's debut brings to mind both early post-rock outfits Bark Psychosis and Disco Inferno as well as mid-70s krautrock.

Red Bloom of the Boom

Bear In Heaven's debut album doesn't automatically reveal itself to the listener. It's too abstract to get in one sitting, full of through-composed songs and strange ambient pieces. But while it may take several spins to get everything, something about the album's atmosphere grabs you the first time. Maybe it's just that the record's most tangible assets-- the vocal melodies and rhythms-- are being held just out of reach, ready for the taking with a bit of work, or it could simply be the inventive textures they create. Whatever it is, Brooklyn's Bear in Heaven have a way of drawing you into their world and making you feel like you belong in its alien landscapes.
In that regard, it reminds me a bit of the early-1990s UK post-rock outfits Bark Psychosis and Disco Inferno. Those bands had influences of course, but, like Bear In Heaven, they put together their sounds in such a way that it was hard to tell exactly what those influences were. This is a band that will go from ambient washes of synth and samples to sludgy, pseudo-anthemic passages of throat-straining emotion to minimalist beat-making to slippery, Eno-inspired indie rock in one song like it's no big deal.
This approach works better on some tracks than others, naturally. Opener "Bag of Bags" has an oddly appropriate title because of the fact that its various passages don't link seamlessly-- it's a piece of music full of smaller pieces of music. But the next song, "Slow Gold", is just the opposite. The fragments it's built from fit together like a jigsaw puzzle as it glides from a mysterious intro through a couple of hushed indie-rock verses to a hellish passage full of loud, repetitive vocal phrases sung/shouted in close harmony.
The most haunting track is also the most abstract, a long, spooky piece called "Fraternal Noon", which recalls Can's "Aumgn" with its patchwork of strange sounds. The wordless vocals sound as though they're trapped inside the synthesizer that provides the main texture, and the heavy echo and processing make the guitar sound like percussion and certain bits of percussion feel like tonal instruments. It's essentially formless, but still somehow memorable, like a nightmare just after it's awakened you with a start.
With seven songs in 43 minutes, Red Bloom of the Boom feels something like a 70s prog-rock or krautrock album-- a true cohesive work in an era when the album-as-art form appears to be slowly dying. It has a dreamlike logic to the way it flows, going from the reverb-heavy "Fraternal Noon" straight into the driest song on the album, "Shining and Free", which stutters along on an unadorned, straightforward drum beat but also includes a few totally unexpected bursts of dub echo and phasing. It ends with a spine-chilling drone that whispers the album to an unresolved close. It's the perfect dénouement for a record that defies easy description and never goes quite where you think it will.


The pop star returns with a grown-man, R&B album about domestic love that has all the glow and eroticism of an airport terminal.

Changes

At some point in the endless world tour supporting his 2015 album Purpose, Justin Bieber stared into a sea of fans and pleaded with them to quiet down. “When you guys are screaming... it’s hard for me,” he muttered, pacing in front of his own JumboTron double in the opening montage of his new promotional documentary Seasons. In 2017, he canceled the remaining 14 dates of his tour. His team cited “unforeseen circumstances,” and for a while, the Bieber machine fell eerily silent.
Now, as it fires back up again, his management is busily filling in the blanks. In one episode of the docuseries, Bieber discusses the severity of his former drug use; he smoked weed for the first time at age 13, he tells us, and by the time he entered his 20s, he had progressed to pills and lean: “My security... were coming into the room at night to check my pulse,” he admits. He also discusses his struggles with anxiety and his diagnosis of chronic Lyme disease. “No one’s ever grown up in the history of humanity like Justin Bieber,” his manager Scooter Braun adds.
At the center of this whirlwind lies Changes, his first album in four years. On it, Bieber returns to us a wiser man—the emphasis, here, strenuously, on “man.” As of 2018, he is happily married to Hailey Bieber, née Baldwin, model and daughter of Stephen. Bieber is newly sober, newly wed. Now is the time for stubbly beards stroked fondly, for wry smiles at the memories of youthful folly, for a sharp decline in public-urination incidents. But above all, now is time for sex. More precisely, for love-making, of the most grown-up and responsible variety—no giggling, constant eye contact. His fifth studio album is pitched as an invitation to bask in Bieber’s newfound domestic bliss, but while his contentment might be heaven for him and his managers, the resulting album has all the glow and eroticism of an airport terminal.
Bieber recorded Changes mostly with his main writing collaborator Poo Bear and Josh Gudwin, his trusted producer and engineer. Without the animating presence of someone like Skrillex (who helmed six songs on 2015’s Purpose), Changes settles into a middle-distance, stream-friendly murmur that is more sleepy than salacious. Its 16 songs (plus a remix) are all cold angles and frictionless surfaces, devoid of intimacy and heat. Married-sex songs can be some of the most provocative: see “Rocket” or “Partition” from Beyoncé’s self-titled album for a few minutes’ evidence. But the language here is off-putting and sanitized, and the music has none of the bright syncopation or rhythmic surprise of the Purpose singles.
Nearly every song on Changes resembles every other in tempo, arrangement, and often in lyrics, which seem to be sourced from the same 10 or 15 pastel candy hearts. Some lines would be fascinating in their distance from human communication (“Let’s get it in expeditiously,” he proposes on “Come Around Me”) if they weren’t so dull (“Shout-out to your mom and dad for makin’ you/Standin’ ovation, they did a great job raisin’ you,” he bleats on “Intentions”).
As that last line hints, there is a creepy patriarchal blankness to the devotion displayed here. In Seasons, Hailey is almost exclusively discussed in terms of what she provides for Justin: “She loves her man.... She’s so caring, so giving, so loyal,” says Braun. “If I could handpick a girl from the stars, it would be Hailey,” his manager Allison Kaye insists. That kind of anti-erotic ownership language permeates Changes and is never quite as pointedly apparent as when Bieber sings “Heart full of equity, you’re an asset” right after an ill-advised reference to “the kitchen” on “Intentions.”
Now, Hailey and Justin have entered into marital communion—and they’d like you to know that they enter into it eagerly, and often. If Bieber whispering “You got that yummy yum” doesn’t make you want to dart away like a cat up a tree, maybe his ecstasy over “the way you motion, motion in my lap” will do it. Changes is a baby-making album if you find Lil Dicky ogling underage girls on Instagram and rapping, “I’ll kiss your breasts all tenderly, what’s up,” stimulating. It is a celebration of marriage if you consider “Do you wanna look at me forever?” an acceptable proposal. On “Habitual,” Bieber sings, “Flowers open when they feel the sunlight,” a sentiment which is really only a few degrees removed from The Handmaid’s Tale’s dystopian catchphrase, “Blessed be the fruit/May the Lord open.”
In fairness, some of this language might result from the whittled-down phrasing, which seeks to emulate current pop/R&B trends. This truncated, staccato delivery generally suits outsized performers, who can fill a vacuum left by song structures with their personality, with their quirks, with their wit. Putting it mildly: personality, quirks, and wit are not Bieber’s strengths. He is a traditional entertainer, a people-pleaser who works best as the wholesome center of a wilder party. “Sorry,” his biggest-ever hit, placed a rowdy dancehall beat behind old-fashioned eight-bar melodies; the top line was as bright as it was sophisticated, and Bieber sounded at home. Lost in the midtempo grayscale of Changes, he suffers from a terminal wholesomeness that loops back around to unsettling.
Scattered bright spots come from guests—on “Forever,” Post Malone injects his destabilizing energy, singing with the urgency of someone in dire need of a bathroom. Kehlani’s appearance on “Get Me” enlivens the muted, Noah “40” Shebib-type beat. Otherwise, the only appealing moments appear in the last third, when Bieber sings over minimal accompaniment. “That’s What Love Is” features nothing but an acoustic guitar, capo’d high and twinkling like a music box. The words redefine “sweet nothings” (“Don’t nobody else deserve my eyes,” he avows) but they dissolve in the sunlight of Bieber’s falsetto. The way he capers between chest and head voice is effortless and dazzling, like watching a figure skater land triple lutzes, one after the other. For exactly two minutes and forty-five seconds, the joy he takes in his talent is palpable.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Released by UK bass scion Batu, this survey of cutting-edge club music is less a collection of voices than a shared statement of purpose, full of thrilling rhythms and textures.

Patina Echoes

The story of UK dance music is a story of mutation: of soundsystem culture and breakbeat hardcore colliding to create jungle and drum ’n’ bass; of American house that spawned its mutant UK garage; of the darkside 2-step that would morph into dubstep, that (briefly) world-conquering sound that rampaged like a world-conquering robot. But aside from a few exceptions—specialist subgenres like UK funky, drumstep, and bassline house, also sometimes known, fittingly enough, as “niche”—the UK hasn’t generated many new styles in the past decade. That doesn’t mean that the process of evolution has hit a wall; it has just diversified and diffused. Instead of yielding distinct, readily identifiable rhythmic signatures, club music’s innovations have become restless, reinventing themselves at every turn. Seeking new ground across an expanded array of tempos, cutting-edge club music has poured its energy into shape-shifting textures and timbres. It’s a tough time for those of a taxonomical bent, but a golden age for listeners who like to be surprised at every turn.
Smack in the center of this vortex is Bristol’s Batu (Omar McCutcheon) and his Timedance label. Timedance is part of a fresh generation of imprints—like Wisdom Teeth and Whities—that have come along in the wake of Hessle Audio, Livity Sound, Hemlock, and Idle Hands, whose idiosyncratic output helped usher the amorphous style known as “UK bass” to an even more unpredictable place. Timedance has been putting out 12"s since 2015, and Batu has also released on Hessle Audio and Dnuos Ytivil, a sublabel of Livity Sound. But this is the first album-length statement that Batu has released. Even though he doesn’t actually appear on his own compilation, his sensibility guides it. The record’s tracks are all over the place—some are slow, some fast and some entirely beatless—but their flow is more in keeping with the work of a lone artist than a group effort by nearly a dozen different musicians.
McCutcheon has spoken of his debt to UK styles like jungle, dubstep, and grime, and those roots resurface all over Patina Echoes—particularly jungle, whose knotty cadences can be heard echoing through many of these tracks’ snapping syncopations. House music’s influence looms in the background—particularly in the lovely “Soft Opening,” the lush, conga-driven offering from Mexico’s Nico—but almost nothing here gives in to the regularity of a four-to-the-floor pulse. Kick drums stagger, grooves swagger, and accents jerk and thrash. In rRoxymore’s “bRINGTHEbRAVE,” minimal techno’s icy chimes ring atop a shuddering pile-up of sub-bass and white noise. The lone exception is Metrist’s “Auld Flaurist,” which borrows its insouciant bounce from ghetto house and juke. But even here, nothing is played straight: The beat sounds like it’s been sampled from a pocketful of loose change, and in the breakdown, halfway through, a string quartet makes an unexpected appearance, as though a Morton Feldman concert had broken out in the middle of a coin-op laundromat.
Everything here is richly tonal. Not like deep house or dub techno, with their monochromatic chord stabs; instead, tones slip and stretch across the spectrum. The Bristol producer Cleyra’s opening “Naked,” (a debut), takes jazz-inflected chords and smears them, in the manner of Arca’s Mutant; Rae’s “Sleep Rotation” (another debut), bathes a tentative, clicking beat in dissonant shimmer; and Via Maris’ thrilling “Side Effects” balances glassy pinging with chords that twist like the northern lights. If there’s one thing that unites everyone here, it’s a shared interest in contrasting textures and timbres—draping synths like a strip of silk over a spiky beat, or exploding a cluster of fizzy tones like fireworks in the mist.
McCutcheon has said that Patina Echoes, although a compilation, is also intended to function as a coherent long-player. Its ambient bookends help give it shape, while beatless detours like Bruce’s mind-bending “Let’s Make the Most of Our Time Here” offer the chance to duck away from the dancefloor—like microdosing, perhaps, in place of nipping out for a smoke. (Chekov’s clattering “Stasis 113,” meanwhile, is the only real club anthem here, and it’s a corker; combined with his star turn on Lena Willikens’ recent Selectors 005, the Leeds newcomer looks to be a remarkably promising talent.) More than a collection of individual voices, Patina Echoes feels like a statement of shared purpose, and as such, it assumes the mantle of iconic UK label documents like Warp’s Artificial Intelligence, Mo Wax’s Headz, and Night Slugs Allstars Volume 1—all surveys of a landscape in flux, less repositories for an established sound than catalysts for a new upheaval.


The Los Angeles-based artist’s full-length debut uses Peruvian chicha, Congolese soukous, and Afro-Colombian percussion to explore both personal grief and the abiding melancholy of diaspora.

Malegría

Grief demands its own impossible language. To confront the death of a loved one (or the lingering melancholy of diasporic displacement), you have to bend the rules. It requires new idioms, new phrases, new forms of expression altogether. To contend with these feelings, the Los Angeles-based musician Fabi Reyna, aka Reyna Tropical, turns to the wisdom of a pithy neologism: malegría.
Borrowed from a 1998 Manu Chao song, the term mimics “bittersweetness” by colliding the Spanish words for “bad” and “happiness.” It’s a concept that captures the radiant emotional spectrum of Reyna’s debut full-length, released two years after the death of her bandmate, Nectali “Sumohair” Díaz, in an e-scooter accident. The record is an imaginative meditation on the possibilities of diasporic genre collage: Reyna, Díaz, and new collaborator Nay Mapalo collect hues of Peruvian chicha, Mexican zapateado, Congolese soukous, and a handful of other styles, glazing them over each other like a highly saturated watercolor painting. With its loose construction, inventive arrangements, and liturgical tranquility, Malegría is an incisive exploration of the porosity of diasporic life.
Reyna is a nimble guitarist, able to glide fluidly between genres and settle in the space in between. “Lo Siento” is built on a bare-bones lyrical refrain about carrying knowledge that is painful, but the looping soukous melody feels soaked in marigold-colored light, as if she’d harnessed apricity itself. “Conexión Ancestral” is a high-gloss stylistic detour with a punchy four-on-the-floor foundation. “Suavecito” is a beaming prayer for serenity, built on dapples of Afro-Colombian percussion and a galloping dembow riddim. The song features London producer Busy Twist and Franklin Tejedor, one-half of Colombian electronic duo Mitú. Tejedor comes from a long line of percussionists in the UNESCO-recognized town of San Basilio de Palenque, the first free Black village of the Americas. He lends his voice and drumming to the track, opening the song with a spoken intro in San Basilio’s creole palenquero language. With its shimmering guitars and clacking folkloric drums, “Suavecito” reflects Reyna’s most exploratory impulses, conjuring an indelible moment of tropical futurist magic.
The album is dotted with voice memos of conversations Reyna had with Díaz, doubling as a window into the pair’s creative process while also reflecting back on the album’s broader themes. In the interlude “Mestizaje,” an unnamed narrator speaks about the dangerous colorist racial ideology that has shaped her family and so many other Latin American ones, in which marriages with white partners are encouraged in order to produce “better-looking” children. Malegría succeeds, in part, because Reyna isn’t afraid to confront the ugly parts of Latin American culture, too.
Often, Reyna finds solace by attuning to the natural world. Field recordings of chittering birds or cresting tides offer the album a faunal and aquatic texture; it’s as if Reyna is humming a tune on the beach, or perhaps singing beneath the verdant rainforest canopy. Much of the album was recorded in these environments, a choice that feels like a conscious attempt to reconnect to the knowledge embedded in ancestral lands stolen by colonialism, exile, and displacement. For example, “Huītzilin,” named after the Nahuatl word for “hummingbird,” transforms grungy guitar streaks and scattered chirps into a slow ballad about welcoming life’s eternal transformations. Reyna’s diaristic and pictorial lyrics are often simple or repetitive, which makes them even more impactful, especially when she delivers them in her hushed vocal register. It’s as if you’re listening to a friend share their deepest secrets over an ASMR mic, their lulling tones offering the curative power of self-awareness.
There’s a familiar, if hackneyed, saying among Latin American diaspora kids: “ni de aquí, ni de allá” (literally, “not from here, not from there”). The phrase tries to capture the liminality of diasporic life, but inadvertently, it has glossed over significant differences in citizenship, race, and class, instead suggesting the experience is homogenous. Still, the maxim gestures at a very real sense of isolation, estrangement, and grief that is difficult to shake. It’s a feeling Reyna is acutely aware of, and one she speaks to directly on “Cartagena.” “Y así te sigues moviendo/Con la tristeza en tu cuerpo,” she sings, acknowledging the melancholy that inhabits diasporic bodies, even in moments of joy. In its summery melodies and impressive stylistic experimentation, Malegría asserts that the experience of diaspora can never be fixed to a single definition or affective state. You always exist in multiplicity, carrying the beauty and the sorrow together.


This collaboration between Arca and Shayne Oliver looks back at a scene where queer and trans artists of color birthed avant-garde club sounds that continue to hold sway today.

Greatest Hits ’88 - ’16

The duo of Arca and Shayne Oliver, founder of the successful fashion brand Hood By Air and the multidisciplinary creative studio Anonymous Club, WENCH is the musical collaboration of two club kids, who—in their kinetic alignment and disdain for the mainstream—became two of the most influential people in their respective fields during the 2010s. WENCH formed shortly after Arca, aka Alejandra Ghersi, met Oliver during the latter’s days as resident DJ and co-host of the prolific underground party GHE20G0TH1K—a queer punk/rave space founded by Venux X where artists like Total Freedom and Nguzunguzu came up, a space extremely formative to the trans clubscape of today. Their first stint working together produced the Swaggot Trilltape in 2013: a sample-heavy, 33-minute “goosebump pop” mixtape that jumped between hip-hop, industrial, techno, bass, noise, and more; they described it as “the sounds you remember after you exit the club on your way home.”
WENCH eventually produced more projects, including the HBA Galvanize soundtrack and Arca’s cult classic Sheep. They had plans to release a full-length LP, where they promised to capture a “hypercharged” sensuality, but that never came to light. A compendium of unreleased productions, Greatest Hits ’88 - ’16 marks the duo’s official debut, finally capturing the erratic energy that beatmaker Arca and vocalist Oliver fomented at the height of their partnership. Like much of Arca’s previous work, Greatest Hits ’88 - ’16 rejects normative forms in favor of an amorphous embrace of the abject. In its reproach of the mainstream emerges a celebration of the queer-of-color punk, industrial, and electronic sounds that dominated raves of the 2010s (and continue to do so today). Supported by Arca’s sludge-tinged explosions, Oliver interjects with ballroom-esque one-off phrasings that cement Greatest Hits ’88 - ’16 as a document of queer euphoric defiance, sexual emancipation, and sweaty club intoxication.
Sexually charged sound design and subject matter gives Greatest Hits ’88 - ’16 its bite. Elements of hardcore techno and digital punk excavate righteously horny revved-up representations of queer sex. “Fister” is a blown-out ambient-industrial track that’s as hard hitting as the act from which it gets its namesake. “Primal Pussy” hypnotizes, pairing Oliver's repetitions with droning alarm-signal synths: “Primal pussy/Got you oh so gushy, it’s so pussy.” On “Snake,” Oliver hisses, “Take my body like a snake, take my sss/Take my bussy, recreate,” against booming bass synths that evoke a humid, heaving dancefloor. The erotic mode they evoke—an act of relinquishing bodily and sexual control in the name of music—was birthed in the spaces that WENCH called home, and it continues today in quintessential trans spaces like Club Carry or For the Gworls.
Heard without context, WENCH might seem like a one-off collaboration. Much of the record sounds like sliced-up mutilations of Arca’s earliest work on Stretch 2 and &&&&&. But Oliver’s playful lyrics add a new dimension that, in retrospect, feeds into Arca’s earliest expressions of trans identity. In a 2016 Dazed interview, Shayne Oliver said that WENCH “started out as a sexually deranged music project that had a lot to do with tension, sexual identity and how to feel like a man having sex with the feelings of a woman and a man.” Through Oliver’s disdainful vocals and celebratory filth, the music teases at the carnal themes that Arca would express more explicitly in Arca and the KiCK series.
Greatest Hits ’88 - ’16 offers an essential retrospective look at the way WENCH and their peers birthed a fluid array of hard-hitting electronic music that is distinctly queer and trans in foundation. Yes, some of Greatest Hits ’88 - ’16 is messy—the vocal undulations on “Rocker Fish” are unpolished in an unflattering way—but much of that is intentional, because in its off-kilter design, it is distinctly queering sound, celebratory in its rejection of societal norms. Enticing in its popper-whiffing rush, it is punk and goth in blueprint, and an abundance of youthful euphoria (reflective of the time in which it was recorded) adds color to the record’s darkly lit worlds. On “Teen Spirit,” supported by arcade-game synths, WENCH capture the juvenile sound of queers of color coming into their identity with confidence. Album highlight “Sick” is among the album’s most comical songs: With its ballroom-inflected interjections and pitched-up laughter, the video chronicles a Black trans woman and Shayne Oliver kiki-ing around town, an endless vision of leisure and shit-talking.
While Greatest Hits ’88 - ’16 plays like a marker of GHE20G0TH1K’s success, it is just as much a sensually crafted love letter between Oliver and Ghersi. Arca has spoken tenderly about calling Oliver “mother,” while Oliver has detailed the two being physically affectionate with one another in private and public spaces. “Take My Hand” is a full-on display of their shared affinity. “Ba ba ba ba black sheep,” Oliver echoes from a distance, calling upon fellow outcasts to take his hand and seek solace within this music. It’s through songs like this that Greatest Hits ’88 - ’16 feels so representative of the creative and personal bonds that queer and trans artists of color often express. Behind the record’s gnashing synths and siren-like vocals is a broader, more emotive narrative on the ways that many underground queers survive and make art in the digital age.


In his first Fabric mix under his Daphni alias, Caribou’s Dan Snaith zigzags his way through an eclectic set of edits and original productions.

Fabriclive 93

Around 2011, Dan Snaith stepped away from his band, Caribou, to focus instead on the tricky mechanics of making dancefloors combust. As Daphni, he began moonlighting as a club DJ and releasing edits and drum-heavy remixes. Since then, Caribou itself have moved toward Daphni’s own gravitational pull: Our Love hewed more closely to leftfield house than to the sounds of his previous work. Meanwhile, Daphni’s beats have gotten tougher, trickier, a tad stranger.
Following Ricardo Villalobos, Omar S, and Shackleton, Snaith’s entry in the Fabric mix series is built exclusively out of his own tracks and edits, although delineating them as original productions versus edits isn’t quite right either. “It’s almost a category mistake,” Snaith recently told NPR. “Yes, it’s a continuously mixed piece of music, but I didn’t put it together by DJing and I didn’t put it together imagining that it would be played in Fabric.” Samples, loops, synth and drum patterns, and more all blur together to create an organic whole whose tracklisting breaks down into 27 smaller tracks. The mix includes a few insanely rare songs (like Pheeroan akLaff’s “3 in 1”) chopped up by Snaith as well as his remixes of contemporaries like Container and Jamire Williams; the rest of the set constitutes a trainspotter’s (and Shazam’s) worst nightmare. His Fabric mix minces disco, post-punk, EBM, R&B, rave, and free jazz, and stirs them together in a way that disregards conventional notions of genre. It doesn’t consistently inspire listeners to move, but it still reaches atypical peaks.
At their most effective, disco edits take the body-moving aspects of older songs and heighten their effect. In some cases, that means slicing away cheesy choruses or honing in on one dope passage and stretching it out to tantric lengths. Daphni’s approach is slightly different, as opener “Face to Face” shows. Rather than focus on the break itself, Snaith zooms in on that slack moment a few seconds before a beat tightens up. Tapped hi-hat, plucked bass, and shuffling snares run throughout “Face to Face,” and out of this minute measure, Snaith adds studio laughter and tambourine, dropping each ingredient in and out at his leisure before finally teasing in a falsetto loop of the title phrase. It’s the equivalent of finding a tasty dish in the offal of a track, rather than the prime meat, and few can pull it off like Snaith.
But Snaith never fully gives himself over to dance music’s pleasures; he’s always pulling back on the reins, fussing with other sounds and moving on to new directions. He takes the spare, drilling snares of Williams’ “Futurism” and adds ghostly voices and warm arpeggios, slowly morphing it into the prickly, dubbed-out drum machines of “Ten Thousand” (itself an edit of Nyrabakiga’s “Cor Corora”), and he lets the African tones of that track splinter into gentle kora figures before the stomping filtered house of “Medellin.”
“Hey Drum” and a looping edit of Luther Davis’ 1979 cut “You Can Be a Star” provide the mix’s first transcendent moment, as the looped refrain swells into a disco mantra. But nothing stays settled for long, and the mix soon shifts through more restlessly varied territory: glints of kora, Bollywood vocals, menacing acid lines, storming drums. It’s an impressive display, but it’s also slippery to dance to. “So It Seems,” with its cooed vocals and minor-key chords, even drops a false ending into the mix, some 23 minutes before the actual finale.
A surge of steel-drum-laced UK garage beats leads into the mix’s propulsive home stretch, though it’s not without its own quick detours. Snaith moves from the orchestral disco stabs of “vs” into the dubby house of “406.42 ppm” and on into the triple-time groove of “Always There” before peaking with the anthemic pianos of “Fly Away.” It’s deftly mixed, but it’s also a lot of ground to cover, and after that breathless sequence, it all lurches to a close with “Life’s What You Make It,” a woozy song whose title name-checks Talk Talk, yet whose chord changes more closely resemble Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time.” A snatch of laughter bubbles up, a burst of static obscures the music, and the final few seconds warble like a tape getting chewed up—a fitting metaphor for a set that’s all about scrambling listeners’ expectations about club music. The mix won’t convince diehards that Snaith is a dance music demiurge. At crucial moments, it sacrifices momentum for eclecticism. It’s less for club puritans than for adventurous Caribou fans who are willing to follow Snaith no matter which rabbit hole he dives down.


The debut album from the Canadian-born, St. Paul-based rapper stretches his stylings further than they’ve ever gone before. It’s an innovative study in individuality, as technical as it is passionate.

LINES

So much of Allan Kingdom’s work is about collapsing borders. He is a sing-songy rap alchemist turning signifiers across genres into something radical. His voice melts into slippery flows that seep into the cracks on any production. He was born in Canada, the son of South African and Tanzanian immigrants, and spent much of his life in Saint Paul and Minneapolis, shaped by a small creative community of “dirty, hippy artists…grinding in the middle of the forest.” His last project, Northern Lights, was a sporadic opus molded by the host of cities in which it was made, including the trip to London for the blacked-out BRIT Awards performance of Kanye West’s “All Day.” These cues give hints about the sprawl of his sounds, which rest at a nexus of the African diaspora and the modern rap internet. His work is fueled by spontaneity—sudden bursts out of pockets and slinky jumps in and out of compacting phrases. His unique milieu is a guide to his chameleonic sonic identity.
“I am from Canada, I am from Africa, I am from so many states,” Kingdom raps early on LINES, a debut studio record that stretches his stylings further than they’ve ever gone before. It is a project that goes a long way toward fleshing out the personality of the man behind these eclectic mixes. While exploring a wide array of compositions from collaborators like Cadenza, Dro, and Jared Evans, he offers appraisals of life after a Kanye co-sign, rap as a tumultuous path to escaping the middle class, and how being a nonconformist can be alienating. It’s a study in individuality, where the subject seeks a connection—or more specifically, to be drawn to something.
Aside from the literal “Feeling Magnetic,” which illustrates his pull and his longing to attract plainly, there’s a more subtle desire to bond throughout LINES. Loneliness, and the push for companionship have been constant themes in Kingdom’s songs, but many moments on this album examine coupling closely. The full-throated, crooned descender “Down for Me” requests undying devotion. On the watercolor-ish “Vibes,” he tries to close the distance with a lover, citing a shared energy. The island-flecked title track shares a similar sentiment. Conversely, the disgust in his voice is palpable when a clinger feeds on proximity to his celebrity on “Astounded.” He longs to be close to someone in a meaningful way, but can’t. The closer, “Loner’s Anthem,” feels like a rebuke of the rest of the album in that way: it turns inward, finding solace in his work.
Allan Kingdom cares deeply about craft; he wouldn’t open his debut with “Perfection,” a song about honing his skills amid slow payoffs if he didn’t. It explains why so much of his music is about originality, avoiding negative energy, and protecting his sound from the posers trying (poorly) to replicate it. But the latest entry into his ever-growing technique-sweating pantheon, “Leaders,” is an interesting twist on the series, conceptually and sonically. The flute-led, scuzzy-riffed jam is an everyman dispatch from an emerging phenom that asks peers and fans alike not to follow his lead, on account of his own personal demons. A great deal of the album plays out in a similar fashion: humanizing an eclectic artist who is often inaccessible. On “Questions,” he mentions an absentee father and lost friends as asides in a life recap, providing clues into a fragile mindset. Each cadence in each stanza is selected to strike just the right tone. With stringy flows and a voice that naturally carries melody, he puts into practice his distinctive mechanics.
Though it doesn’t quite reach the highs of its predecessor, LINES is constantly in motion, full of exhilarating lyrical exercises (“Feeling Magnetic”) and sweeping sound installations (“The Fusion”). Ideas tumble one after another, often overlapping at the joints, as on “Don’t Push Me”: “I’m from the land of the lakes/I knew that she wanted to fuck me and she fell in love when she saw me with Ye/I used to save all my shawtys when I was a shorty, I lost all the capes/Tony the Tiger but covered in apes/Back in the day no one thought I was great.” The cadences and inflections spring outward, widening the scope of his sound. With each passing breath, Allan Kingdom strives to expand his universe, creating safe spaces for outcasts in the process.


London-based Midwestener Karen Gwyer recorded her debut album on No Pain is Pop while pregnant with her first child. The result, which recalls Oneohtrix Point Never and Julianna Barwick, is a loosely finished collection that feels like entering a deeply private realm.

Needs Continuum

London-based Midwesterner and electronic music artist Karen Gwyer deals in abridged thoughts, often setting ideas in motion with barely any sense of form brought in to shape them. The intrinsic openness of her work differs rather strongly from Gwyer's recording process for the new album, which was undertaken in a great creative outpouring in the months leading up to the birth of her first child. Such rigorous circumstances haven't led to a work of great conceptual heft. Instead, Needs Continuum feels more like a gathering of sketches, a sense of letting loose ends stay loose just to see if the world can make sense of them. Gwyer might not be concerned with other people's opinions; her debut EP, released on Patten's Kaleidoscope label, was a cassette issued in an edition of 13 copies. (Though it's free to download from the label.) The step up to No Pain in Pop for the release of this debut LP draws the world in a little closer, even if it does feel like entering a deeply private realm.
Gwyer sometimes leaves her electronics dry and unprocessed; the percussion in "Some of My Favourite Lotions" even feels like a set of ancient Cubase presets set in motion, as do the handclaps in the opening "Sugar Tots". The rest of her sound palette feels thoroughly labored over, providing a depth that's easy to get lost in once Gwyer hits her stride. On "Sugar Tots" she triggers a soupy signature sound that hacks an appealing path through the track. She's at her best when setting repetitive rhythms in motion and layering ideas on top of them, occasionally approaching similar moods to the placid material Cluster produced circa Zuckerzeit. When she diverts into pop her vision is less assured. "Pikku Kokki" harks back to the orange half-light of Nite Jewel's Good Evening, a place so thoroughly mined for inspiration that returning there now feels redundant.
The bulk of Needs Continuum is shorn of traditional vocals, with hums and sighs occasionally buried in the mix. "Pikku Kokki" includes the album's only recognizable vocal, delivered in a series of whispered lines. Elsewhere, Gwyer uses her voice as an extra layer of instrumentation, simply letting spectral coos drift across tracks such as "Night Nails" and "Plan B". It’s a trick that works reasonably well, but it adds to a sense of hesitance and, at times, a lack of confidence about the project, especially coming off the back of that debut EP released in an edition of 13 copies. It makes Gwyer’s work feel like a secret that she’s reluctant to share, constructed in a place so private that she’s wary of letting anyone in. Perhaps such reticence is understandable considering the circumstances in which the record was made, especially as she has talked of wanting to make something that "measured up to the significance of the start of a new life". Occasionally she does approach such peaks. The coupling of the beautifully vacillating "Waukon" with the sobering "Jajja Uses Ancestral Spirit" is where the album reaches its apex.
This isn't a cohesive work by any means: There's a demo-y feeling to some of the pieces, coupled with a sense that this is an album with a decent amount of inspiration but just lacking in execution. Perhaps that's to be expected-- after all, Gwyer was working under extreme circumstances. It doesn't feel like it would take a great shift to give her work the kind of gravitas that Julianna Barwick's music often possesses, and the two certainly share a fondness for diaphanous vocal pining. There's plenty of potential in the electronics here, too, particularly when they form into the kind of supple globules that Daniel Lopatin constructed under his Oneohtrix Point Never guise around the time of Returnal. Gwyer's not there yet, but Needs Continuum contains some satisfyingly oblique turns.


Although recorded in the shadow of tragedy, the Brazilian singer-songwriter’s first album in six years is characteristically delicate in tone and full of charm.

Agora

Bebel Gilberto made Agora over three years of tragedy. In that time the singer lost her best friend, who suffered a fatal heart attack as Gilberto spoke with him over the phone, and her mother, the samba star Miúcha, who died of lung cancer. Then Gilberto’s father, Brazilian music legend João Gilberto, passed away in 2019. All the while she was at work on Agora, an album that raises the question: How might personal turmoil  have reshaped an artist whose music has been defined by its tranquility?
Since emerging as a solo artist in the mid 1980s, Gilberto’s music has been calming on the ear yet emotionally resonant. The 54-year-old’s smoky vocals and bossa-nova arrangements are the sound of stirred feelings; she can move the soul with the faintest brushstrokes. (When Nip/Tuck used the ghostly, gorgeous “Lonely” as its pilot episode’s theme song in 2003, it hinted at the wicked underside of beauty that the cosmetic surgery-themed show aspired to probe). Still, unlike Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Ghosteen, Agora does not pontificate on grief, nor does it trade in voyeuristic detail. Perhaps the most personal track is the moving “O Que Não Foi Dito” (“What Wasn’t Said”), a song Gilberto wrote for her father. Yet the words (sung, like the majority of the album, in Portuguese) are oblique, tender, and not overly explicit, with Bebel singing of the bond father and daughter shared: “I know you trust in me.”
Despite its unhappy origins, Agora mostly shares the polished feel typical of Gilberto’s albums, albeit with a few distinct flourishes from producer Thomas Bartlett, who helps color in the edges with understated electronic touches. The title track’s clattering beat nods to Fiona Apple’s penchant for unusual percussion, with a quirky feel complemented by Gilberto’s spoken-word delivery. On “Essence,” Gilberto’s soft touch is matched with twinking synth pop. Most striking might be “Na Cara,” a duet with fellow veteran Brazilian performer Mart’nália, where the singers playfully bob and swagger over a creeping double bass. As ever, Gilberto’s delicate melodies feel like they might not withstand a strong breeze.
This elegance helps carry the goofy but charming “Yet Another Love Song,” which walks the same path as Wings’ “Silly Love Songs.” Here, Gilberto looks at her beau and immediately feels inspired to write a romance tune—acknowledging, like Paul and Linda McCartney before her, that this is well-trodden ground:  “Now the world makes room for yet another love song.” she sings. Gilberto also toys with eternal songwriting truisms on “Cliché,” addressing her listeners directly: “For those who do not know/I’m singing this melody for you.” Unfortunately, her voice takes on an exaggerated wispiness here, bordering on frailty. There are a few other moments throughout the record when Gilberto and Bartlett’s instincts seem off: The lagging beat and wordless refrain of “Raio” feel half-hearted and out of step with the rest of the set.
But for the most part, Gilberto’s voice finds the pocket, and when she’s front and center, the arrangements expertly draped around her, Agora is a rapturous listen. It’s not the star’s finest work—for newcomers, 2000’s Tanto Tempo remains her most engaging set—but in a time of personal distress, Gilberto embraces the familiar comforts of her graceful sound.

Buy: Rough Trade
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In the hands of the master violist, this famous stretch of Bach’s music become body music, rooted in breath and wood and muscle.

Kim Kashkashian: J.S. Bach: Six Suites for Viola Solo

J.S. Bach: Six Suites for Viola Solo

There are as many ways to play Bach cello suites as there are to draw breath. You can treat these pieces as a map to anywhere you want to go. You can play them inexorably as if you are being mowed down like a holy instrument. You can play them as if you are being haunted by the memory of previous interpretations. You can play them like a series of private philosophical musings. Or, if you are Kim Kashkashian, you can play them on viola.
Kashkashian has been exploring the outer reaches of the viola for years, building up a dense thicket of recordings where she casts the instrument in a series of meaty roles: In Morton Feldman’s “Rothko Chapel,” her viola was a bony branch scraping a window, a voice calling out nervously into gaping silence. In Hungarian composer György Kurtág’s “Signs, Games, and Messages”, her viola filtered into blackness like vents peeking into a collapsed mine shaft. Her decision to tackle Bach’s cello suites is an ambitious one, but in the context of her career, it is just the latest audacious leap in an unbroken series.
The viola can never have the cello’s resonance, but it has a nearly-human tone that will always make it an excellent character actor—the aural equivalent of a lined, stern-browed face that grabs the camera. Kashkashian’s tone has a mournful, woody tang, dark and foreboding and ink-dipped, that makes it a beguiling Bach interpreter. There are moments in these pieces where the instrument’s peculiarities poke through—the string crossings in the opening of the famous Suite 1 are slightly stiff-legged—but they help give defining markings to pieces that might otherwise wear smooth from familiarity.
The most radical aspect of playing Bach is how exposed it leaves you. There are no obscuring pyrotechnics to dazzle with, nowhere to hide a moment of faltering uncertainty. Unlike a concerto, where a single instrument hurls itself up against the massed forces or the orchestra and beats it back, they offer no hero’s triumph to applaud. Solo Bach is inherently private music, insofar as truly holy experiences tend to be private, and for classical musicians, they are the most hallowed of proving grounds—you don’t turn to them to show the world how you play. You turn to them to show how you exist.
Kashkashian steps into this unforgiving spotlight with grace and poise. There is something very corporeal in her interpretations: In her hands, these works are body music, rooted in breath and wood and muscle. This relationship is underlined by the intimacy of the close mic’ing: You often hear her breathing in between phrases, the slight flutter of the string crossings and the dry rasp of the bow. The Courante movement of the G Major bristles with ungainly and infectious energy—the courante is a light-stepping dance, but Kashkashian turns it into an invigorating chorus of heavy-thudding peasant boots.
The mood of her interpretation is searching, earthbound, human—she doesn’t treat solo Bach like divine math out of reach of mortal understanding. Her tone is sumptuous, moaning, throaty, with a catch of ache snagged in the instrument’s midrange. Her phrasing in the Préludes always seems to be worrying away at a nagging question—you can feel urgency in the way she presses up against her own tempo slightly in the Prelude to the D Minor suite. Her Bach is furrowed-brow Bach, crisis-of-faith Bach, toiling Bach. Her instrument has never sounded lovelier or humbler than it does here.


The influential dance artist unveils his second act-- and first after blog house producers turned overblown feedback and digital grime into exhausting shtick.

Flashmob

Few 21st-century house/techno tracks have proven as oddly influential as Vitalic's 2001 "La Rock" and "Poney Part 1". Released when microhouse's delicate sound-sculpting was being touted as dance music's future, and strangely first claimed by electroclash fans during that trend's brief and ignoble peak, Vitalic offered speaker-frying synth-riffs (or sometimes just synth-squeals) to scare off wannabe aesthetes and IDM refugees, reaffirming the productive struggle in post-acid dance between funk and floor-clearing noise. But as "Poney Part 1" and "La Rock" reared their ugly heads again and again, showing up on one compilation after another during the next three years with little new Vitalic material in sight, fans who valued humor and nuance as much as focused brutality may have wondered if producer Pascal Arbez had exhausted his one distortion-drenched trick.
So it probably helped Vitalic's long-term career prospects that his 2005 debut album, OK Cowboy, included enough oddities (like "Wooo", with John Carpenter subbing for the oompah band at a local polka night) and slow jams (like "The Past", a rare non-unctuous trawl through 1980s synth-pop romanticism) to keep John and Jane Doe from tuning out after the 10th consecutive helping of fuck-you. Which is not to say Monsieur Arbez wussed out in the name of crossing over. The fearsome "Poney"-alikes far outweighed the goofball interludes, and if he'd released his second LP 12 months later, his rep as middlebrow dance music's premier scourge would have been secured. Instead, another three years passed between OKC and Flashmob, a period during which a horde of noisy, uncouth producers (many of them fellow Frenchmen in the Ed Banger orbit) popped up, turning overblown feedback and digital grime into exhausting shtick in record time. With the landscape glutted with punk-dance nobodies, Vitalic's mission-- to create deranged, over-the-top dance music that nonetheless honors disco's body-moving tradition-- became that much harder.
If he succeeds, and Flashmob proves that he does, it's because Vitalic's best productions have a near-psychedelic sweep, a sensuous appreciation for the way he can overlap often grating textures until they become both beguiling and disorienting, while so many of his contemporaries are happy to strangle the details right out of their tracks with volume. Even if he's unerringly loud, his weakness for buzzsaw mid-range obliterating the dub-influenced sense of space you hear in the best minimal and deep house, Vitalic offers sublime, spaced-out moments as crucial punctuation in even his least compromising tracks. Opener "See the Sea (Red)" is undeniably dominated by the fat, fuzzed-out riff that takes the place of a traditional bassline, but Arbez knows said riff will flatten listeners all the harder when it rears back up after a twinkly, almost Kompakt-ian breakdown. Justice, by contrast, would just let the riff build and build until you're begging for relief that never comes. Arbez obviously appreciates this no-mercy approach, but realizes that what's effective on a lone 12" gets wearying when repeated a dozen times in an hour.
This contrast-- between short moments of catch-your-breath beauty and the violence of riffs on the edge of pure noise-- has proven to be Vitalic's greatest weapon. Perhaps that's why Flashmob's slower, more even-keeled tracks feel like filler. Necessary filler, but nonetheless. "Poison Lips" is fine as post-Italo/hi-NRG pastiche goes, but it's too streamlined, too emotionally flat to feel like anything other than an interlude that got out of hand. Ditto "Allan Dellon" and its slow-motion electro-house, where Vitalic proves he can do straight-up, classically synth-driven beauty well enough, while lacking the melodrama of Flashmob's obvious highs.
But you also sense that Arbez knows these tracks are glorified breathers, and has sequenced the album very carefully. For instance, following the relatively low-key and carefully sculpted vocoders of "See the Sea (Blue)" with "Chicken Lady", Flashmob's most unrepentantly thuggish moment-- three minutes of Arbez dragging his knuckles around his studio as his melody-spurning machines groan and growl. Taken individually, neither is a jaw-dropper, but in tandem they mimic the one-two punch of his best work. Little of Flashmob could be described as "tender," or even traditionally catchy, but Arbez has enough of a pop instinct to know that drama results only from careful pacing. He also knows that when you're making big, potentially dumb, and definitely unruly dance music, a sense of humor and a lack of pretension is crucial. It's hard not to laugh when a robot tells you, "This is your disco song, made for you, for those rain days, to chase the shadows away," over a backdrop of mock-menacing see-sawing synth-grind.
That's why the best track here is "Terminateur Benelux"; it squeezes everything Vitalic does well into four minutes, a summary of Flashmob's well-crafted, winking brutalism and my pick for a single-serving download for the curious. It's hilarious and a little terrifying all at once, an unhinged homage to early-90s hardcore rave, with a clattering quasi-breakbeat that sounds like it's agitated itself into a fit, sampled "woo!"s and "ah-ha!"s straight off a 2 Bad Mice single, and the kind of freaky Belgian techno drone-riff that's probably ground zero for Vitalic's sonic signature. Listening, you don't know whether to giggle, run for cover, or start breakdancing. Like those first-wave rave producers, Arbez wants to have it all: to make listeners smile, shake their shit, and still walk away a little shaken by the music's intensity. Flashmob pulls off this near-impossible combo with more skill than even Vitalic's fans may have expected.


The tracks on the Florida rapper’s latest tape overflow with jubilant maximalism and have a proudly Southern bounce.

Big Baby Earnhardt

Ask a Southerner whether or not Florida is part of the South and the answer will vary, but the most common response might be that Florida is just Florida. It’s not not the South, but it juts out from the region both geographically and culturally. The Florida hip-hop continuum—from Miami bass to Trick Daddy to Rick Ross to Raider Klan—has never really fit neatly into the Southern rap tradition. Florida is somehow deeper than the Deep South and dirtier than the Dirty South.
As trap has become globally popular, it’s strayed from its regional roots, becoming a kind of common denominator rather than a local style. Tampa Bay rapper Big Baby Scumbag first caught my attention with “Dale Earnhardt,” which reminds you that trap is, above all else, a Southern thing. His music videos drip with regional flavor: sucking the juice out of boiled peanuts, shotgunning Bud Lights, stomping around the mud in a Ghillie suit, and stopping at Waffle House for an All-Star Special. As a born-and-bred Southern boy, I used to think Florida was an island all its own. After listening to Big Baby Scumbag, I’m not so sure anymore.
Big Baby came up in the same scene as rappers like XXXTentacion and Wifisfuneral, and he’s affiliated with Atlanta’s Awful Records, but his aesthetic diverges from both. The predominant sound of his work is throwback trap, 1017-style: organ swells, high-pitched synths, 808 bass designed to blow out car speakers. Big Baby’s profile is still relatively low, but he’s already hopped on instrumentals by heavyweights like Zaytoven and TM88, and last year’s Juvenile Hell mixtape was entirely produced by trap forefather Lex Luger.
Until Juvenile Hell, Big Baby’s discography was just a string of singles coated with pastiche, with cover art inspired by Pen & Pixel and track titles that tend to be proper nouns like Lil B: “Austin Powers,” “Metal Gear Solid,” “Tony Stewart,” “Major Payne.” Celebrity names and pop culture references generally provide a hook or central punchline, but they also give Big Baby a chance to play around with his persona, allowing him to embody different characters on different songs (a shagadelic playboy, a good ol’ country boy, etc). His colorful and cartoonish loosies are supported by a canny sense of marketing: He’s released a Trix-flavored craft beer and a line of condoms (take the “S” out of “Scumbag” and you’ll get the pun) and has even hinted at a Big Baby Earnhardt racing game.
Big Baby Earnhardt anchors the rapper in a central character: the Man in Black, the Intimidator himself, Dale Earnhardt Sr., the most controversial and canonized figure in all of stock car racing. Across the mixtape, Big Baby gives flex rap a new meaning: He’s not just showing off but working out. The album incorporates a wide palette of sounds, each one presented by a different part of Big Baby’s personality. On “Modelo Time (Bebe Grande),” his sensual side is accompanied by flamenco guitar, while he tells the woman of his affections that he prefers to be referred to in Spanish. He’s a lonely cowboy on the range with a country drawl on “Toy Story,” a vocal-fried white girl on “Nicole Ritchie,” an honorary Chopstar on “Til’ My Death.” His voice is malleable; he wears many different trucker hats.
The guests Big Baby recruits offer a similar smorgasbord of styles: SoundCloud legend sickboyrari (FKA Black Kray), emo rapper Lil Aaron, and underground kings like Project Pat and Lil B. Drain Gang and Sadboys-affiliated producer CadyCutThroat shows up for “N**GAS IN SWEDEN,” an instrumental interlude that marries trap and tropical house, and Meltycanon pushes Big Baby into math-rock territory with “Street Lights.” Big Baby’s flow is hard-hitting, with barely any space to breathe between bars, but here he expands his vocal range with vaguely country-western hooks that reveal a sensitive songwriter underneath the racing jacket.
Dale Earnhardt Sr. was an embodiment of the Southeastern U.S. He’s a walking, talking contradiction, a ruthless businessman with his name licensed to anything who still kept it authentically down-home. The legend of #3 endured because Dale Sr. proved the South didn’t have to be just one thing. He was the champion of a sport that most people think is for backwards chumps, but he hated the Confederate flag. He respected his forefathers, but he pissed off a lot of people with his driving. It’s like how Big Baby Scumbag’s music is proudly Southern, but it plays with tradition as much as it pays homage—the engine of a Tesla in the body of a stock car, with the trunk speakers of the most pimped-out, candy-painted Cadillac imaginable. The sound is classic, the structure is retrofitted and refurbished, but the eyes are squarely on the finish line.


Recorded in jail over a crackly phone line, Drakeo’s mesmerizing album is a remarkable feat: a stark rebuke of the justice system and an unparalleled achievement for a rapper and his producer.

Drakeo the Ruler / JoogSzn: Thank You for Using GTL

Thank You for Using GTL

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s department might see money from Drakeo the Ruler’s latest album before he does. Thank You for Using GTL was recorded over the phone from the county’s Men’s Central Jail using phone service from GTL (formerly Global Tel*Link), a company that controls about half of the market for telecom services in correctional facilities. Their exorbitant rates, which extort families’ access to inmates, have been under fire from politicians and advocacy groups alike, but persist largely because they cut sheriffs in on the scam. The company has guaranteed the L.A. County Sheriff millions of dollars each year in fees, providing plenty of incentive to keep the predatory systems in place.
This context is important because GTL is more than just a symptom of a corrupt capitalist corrections industry; on Thank You for Using GTL, it’s a passive collaborator. Drakeo quite literally could not have made it without them. He’s spent much of the last three years at the MCJ, first on a gun rap, then later on murder, attempted murder, and criminal street gang conspiracy charges. Acquitted of the murder charges, the District Attorney re-filed the conspiracy charges; Drakeo remains in custody without bail as he awaits a new trial. He released Free Drakeo earlier this year, a compilation mostly comprising remixes and previously released material. But with a depleted vault of verses and no access to a studio, any new material would have to be made from the MCJ.
That new material is a stunning depiction of what it means to be a gangsta rapper in 2020: constantly surveilled, presumed guilty until proven innocent, pressure applied from all sides. Producer JoogSzn paints the scene with a moody G-funk drum machine that perfectly matches the crunchy analog texture of Drakeo’s phone vocals, and his subdued mix leaves room for Drakeo’s verses and hooks to remain prominent. There’s a dissonant reversal of the flown-in producer tag; the interruptions of the GTL system’s automated messages (“This call is being recorded”) serve as a jarring reminder of the surveillance state in which his music is made—Big Brother is watching you. When JoogSzn’s actual tag gets dropped in, it feels more like an ad-lib. His touch is light, and the production so well-matched, that without the “Thank you for using GTL” interstitials it would be easy to forget this record was made on a jail phone.
And that fact is no small feat. There are a few ways to release an album while incarcerated: The cleanest requires some foresight, building up a backlog of verses and songs before entering custody that can be released while you’re incarcerated, like 03 Greedo’s recent, furious recording run before serving a 20-year sentence on drug and gun charges. C-Murder recorded his vocals for 2005’s The Truest Shit I Ever Said on a portable recorder during visits from his attorney. But the phoned-in method presents unique challenges. Despite the massive revenues they generate, prison telecom companies like GTL are notorious for providing dismal audio quality on their prison communications. And audio delays make it difficult to rap on beat; Gucci Mane’s producer Drumma Boy admitted that he had to chop up his vocals in order to make them fit the tempo of the beats on the Burrrprint (2) HD.
That Thank You for Using GTL overcomes these obstacles is a remarkable achievement from both rapper and producer. Drakeo’s flow is so laid-back it often sounds horizontal, but his internal metronome allows him to slide in and out of the pocket without ever losing the beat. And the aesthetic is crucial to the story. Drakeo didn’t choose to cut the record while incarcerated, but the jail, and his jailers, had a hand in how it was made, and how it sounds. It’s impossible to ignore, and each listen invites a closer read of its circumstances. (The irony of those circumstances is thick: The FBI investigated gangs within the Sheriff’s department itself, and the former L.A. County Sheriff currently sits in federal prison, found guilty of obstructing a different FBI investigation into abuse and misconduct in the county jails.) Still, Drakeo remains in the MCJ, where he’s lived for much of the past two years without ever being convicted of any crime.
Yet there’s not an ounce of desperation in his voice. A master at flipping classic one-liners into memorable hooks, Drakeo displays an uncanny ability to expertly wield repetition to create rhythm with the vocal track. His style is equal parts Snoop Dogg and Juvenile, smooth yet aggressive, oozing confidence and effortlessly expanding the English language with coded street slang. In one of the album’s few moments of levity, he decodes his shorthand for being unimpressed by large sums of cash (“300,000 in a duffel? Do a backflip or sumn, bitch”). The content mostly remains in line with his past work; rhymes about his namesake assault rifles, checking social media tough-talkers IRL, and his predilection for shopping at Neiman Marcus. If he was worried about rapping gangster shit while on trial for gangster associations, you wouldn’t know it until the album’s final moments.
And yet one of the more disturbing elements of L.A. County’s case against Drakeo is their repeated use of his lyrics as evidence of his criminality. It’s crucial to their case, which argues that the Stinc Team is a criminal organization, and therefore their music is indicative of their criminal intent. It’s one of the few specifics of his case referenced on record. The album’s closing track “Fictional” pokes fun at the DA’s obsession with his lyrics (“This might sound real, but it’s fictional/I love that my imagination gets to you”), pointing out that no other art form gets exploited like this in criminal court (“You’re not gonna hold Denzel Washington accountable for his role in Training Day”).
As cold as Drakeo sounds throughout Thank You for Using GTL, its strongest moment is its most vulnerable. The brooding bass and electronic snare on “Pressure” set an ominous mood, and Drakeo—in a rare move—admits the weight of the force applied against him. “I can’t think about my past, I got Alzheimer’s” he raps, his focus firmly trained forward, acknowledging that “Loyalty always comes with a price, it’s the life/just keep your mouth shut.” He knows the implications of the raw deal he’s been handed. But he refuses to buckle under the pressure.
Drakeo’s charges aren’t the result of his actions. His prosecution hinges solely on his associations—where he’s from, the people he grew up with, and the music that they make together. In a city where underfunded services languish while police budgets expand into the billions, it’s hard to consider the resources consumed by the county to prosecute Drakeo multiple times for the same incident and see it as anything other than a vendetta against a rap crew known to publicly disdain the police. He was forced to create the best album of his career from behind bars and, in a cruel twist, to pay his jailers for the privilege to do so. It’s likely the greatest rap album ever recorded from jail—an honor that will provide little consolation if the county’s vendetta is successful.

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The Cincinnati post-punks craft melodic, hard-driving pop in service of eerie, unsolvable riddles.

The Drin: *Today My Friend You Drunk the Venom *

Today My Friend You Drunk the Venom

The Drin make obscure, threatening post-punk that invites a kind of mental projection. When the Ohio six-piece light up their ambient gloom with a flash of in-the-red guitar or the thunderclap of a harsh snare, it can be as alarming as the sight of a shadowy figure through the trees. With a steady clip of releases over the past three years, the band has rapidly deepened and darkened its world, growing steadily more confident in its vision of rock as occult shadow play. On 2021’s Engines Sing for the Pale Moon and last year’s Down River in the Distance, where the group operated as a solo project of frontman and multi-instrumentalist Dylan McCartney, the music cast a pall that occasionally risked dampening its forward motion. On Today My Friend You Drunk the Venom, the Drin make small but impactful course corrections, wielding depth and shading as accents to their most effortlessly ominous statement yet.
The pleasures of Today My Friend are both immediate and obscurantist: melodic, hard-driving pop in service of eerie, unsolvable riddles. “Venom,” “Stonewallin’,” and “Walk So Far” are riotously straightforward garage rock in the tradition of Thee Oh Sees’ John Dwyer, propelled by muscular bass, clattering drums, and jagged guitar riffs. But for all its simple pleasures, the record also features wild chasms of noise. “Five and Dime Conjurers” roars to life off the back of a pummeling bassline and descends into a squall of tape delay and guitar feedback, while the deceptive “Peaceful, Easy, Feeling” foregrounds a relentless drumbeat against a backdrop of sulfurous reverb reminiscent of Throbbing Gristle’s “Six Six Sixties.”
On previous records, McCartney teased out fascinating musical threads, incorporating murky EBM and sticky, shambling guitar pop. He has a Liars-like approach to production, working from a punk blueprint but seeding his hooks with labored krautrock drumming and dissonant electronic flourishes. The Drin explore genre to especially playful effect on “Eyes Only for Space,” which incorporates the anti-gravity properties of dub to dramatize utter desolation: “The stars above are no match for the distance that I feel/When angels come to take me away and break me on the wheel.”
McCartney doesn’t sing his lyrics so much as intone them, and rarely at the front of the mix. From his vantage in the depths, he delivers cryptic pronouncements in a ragged drawl or croons over the beat with a corroded edge. He is an unreliable but evocative narrator, spelling out surreal, doom-laden imagery with eyes fixed on encroaching evil. His paranoid speak-singing recalls Kim Gordon on Bad Moon Rising (the Mike Ousley painting of a burning effigy that fronts the record even feels like a callback). “All the warning signs are there/Dogs that bare their teeth/Everywhere is seeming off/Sirens by the creek,” McCartney warns on “Five and Dime Conjurers.” Amid the nightmarish churn of “Peaceful, Easy, Feeling,” he sounds like the teen narrator of Harmony Korine’s Gummo when he suddenly announces, “Life is so amazing/Life is so fun.” But rather than dwell on the rubble and brutality of Korine’s Midwestern landscape, Today My Friend You Drunk the Venom is an album of cast shadows and lurking menace. It’s catchy enough to draw you into its dark center and disarming enough to make you question everything you hear.


On London producer patten's new EP, his Warp debut, his sound remains much the same—a pulverised form of electronica tempered with a subtle melodic glow. However, these tracks are a touch more incisive than those on his debut GLAQJO XACCSSO.

EOLIAN INSTATE EP

With the release of his 2011 debut LP GLAQJO XAACSSO, and the obligatory round of introductory interviews that followed, Londoner patten decided to do things a little differently. A Dummy interview showed him to be unafraid of tackling the big questions—What is music? How can we truly know ourselves?—while he repeatedly turned the tables on the interviewer, probing him for his views on the album, interrogating his language, and praising him when he asked a good question. In a Dazed  interview from around the same time, meanwhile, the producer’s responses to the boilerplate questions came in the form of links to a jumble of abstruse Wikipedia pages—on exergy, the Hum, the finer points of 5th century Sanskrit linguistic theory, and so on.
All of this points to a personality type that, if not entirely birthed by the web, certainly seems to be in plentiful supply in the internet age; a personality type that shone through on the album itself, too. Many comparisons were made between GLAQJO XAACSSO and golden era Warp, and though patten’s reference points were mostly contemporary—up-to-date strains of hip-hop, house, and techno—he displayed a similar urge to push the parameters of these styles to the edge of chaos, perpetually striving for greater density, volume, abstraction. (He has also spoken about trying to work “in a subliminal state between waking and sleeping,” echoing Aphex Twin’s notorious sleep deprivation method). The resultant music was fascinating and often highly inventive. But it could sometimes feel like the sheer intensity of it all was concealing a basic paucity of material—that, as with those Wiki links, what we were dealing with was a diverting but rather shallow engagement with the subject matter at hand.
Perhaps it’s just that patten’s music doesn’t benefit from prolonged exposure. Certainly, condensed into 23 minutes on the EOLIAN INSTATE EP, the producer’s signature style is far more palatable. The tracks on this, his debut release for Warp, are a touch more incisive, although in other respects it seems that little has changed for patten in the past two years. The sound remains much the same—a pulverised form of electronica tempered with a subtle melodic glow—and passing comparisons can still be made to Actress’ heat-warped techno, or Flying Lotus at his most fervidly psychedelic.
In places the familiarity is welcome. Opener "Aviary" starts out near-impossibly dense and heads upwards from there, patten piling on ever more layers of gauzy texturing. "Obsidian Alms (mid-saccade)", a bracingly abstract take on warehouse techno, pushes this logic even further. But elsewhere it becomes clear that, in spite of its brevity, this is not an all-killer package. There’s pleasure to be found in the subtleties of "Towards infinite shores", but as a whole the thing feels rather desultory. And "oea/Catalogue"'s steady accrual of material begins to feel workaday after about minute four, in spite of the peppy surface edits.
Fortunately, the loping "Sixth seven" shows that patten has a few new tricks up his sleeve. In this case it’s stripping things back. Given space to breathe, the vivid strangeness of each layer of material, and the way in which they fit together to form a single skewed mechanism, becomes all the clearer. Perhaps patten is learning, finally, that everything-all-the-time isn’t the only way to go*.*


Though heavily inspired by ’90s and ’00s R&B, the Portugal-born, Danish musician grows into a quietly commanding presence of her own on her second album.

Sensational

Erika de Casier found an escape in pop music when she was growing up. Born in Portugal to a Belgian mother and Cape Verdean father, she moved at the age of 10 to the tiny Danish village of Ribe, where she and her brother were some of the only mixed-race kids in school. Music became not just a refuge but a mirror: “MTV was the only place where I saw other Black people,” she would later recall. In high school, de Casier discovered the local library’s music section, checking out CDs by artists like Erykah Badu, N.E.R.D., and Destiny’s Child and playing them obsessively. After graduating, as de Casier taught herself music production in her bedroom, she learned to sing in a whisper, to avoid disturbing her flatmates.
De Casier is not the first singer to tiptoe into her preferred vocal register via the exigencies of cohabitation. But where Romy Madley-Croft’s tone on the xx’s debut album telegraphed a painful shyness, de Casier has put her breathy purr to different ends: seductive, playful, and sneakily powerful. It requires listeners to lean in and pay attention. That’s the effect that de Casier has on Sensational, her second solo album. Nestled within a bed of the featheriest R&B imaginable, she is a quietly commanding presence with a few tricks up her sleeve.
De Casier’s voice rarely rises above a hush on Sensational, and neither does the music. The album isn’t an expressly retro affair, but, like her 2019 debut, Essentials, it’s heavily inspired by ’90s and ’00s R&B. Sade’s Love Deluxe and Lovers Rock are obvious touchstones, along with Brandy’s Never Say Never and Craig David’s Born to Do It. Working with her frequent co-producer Natal Zaks (aka DJ Central, of Aarhus, Denmark’s Regelbau collective), de Casier employs the hallmarks of the era’s production: sparkling acoustic guitar, bone-dry shakers and rimshots, and, beneath it all, voluptuous sub-bass that mimics the wooziness of desire. She revels in the plasticity of synthesized woodwinds and sampled strings, and the high-gloss timbres of Café del Mar-style chillout, sticky as suntan oil. Occasionally, birdsong is faintly audible, giving the album the feel of an R&B holodeck.
There’s something almost vaporwave-like about the music’s hyperrealism, yet the record’s palette is also overwhelmingly tactile, full of sumptuous textures—plucked harp, brushed chimes—that emphasize the friction of contact, in the same way that the closeness of de Casier’s voice suggests the warmth of breath on skin. Lyrically, however, Sensational is rarely an explicit silk-sheets soundtrack. Instead, it’s something more subtle and often more interesting, full of the scenarios that play out in a racing mind late at night. De Casier scolds herself for being unable to rein in her worst impulses, revels in the glow of fresh infatuation, and tells off a lover who’s fool enough to leave her. Often, the men in her songs sound like real jerks. In “Polite,” her date is rude to the waiter; in “All You Talk About,” her clueless beau is obsessed with Versace and Fendi. “When you gonna see I’m bored outta my mind, babe/Put your hands on me,” she pleads. Worst of all might be the know-it-all cad in the languid “Insult Me,” a mournful highlight of the album, who straight up ignores what she has to say. “You insult me man/You insult me man,” she sings, her voice dissolving into a mixture of sorrow and contempt. It’s hard to imagine a chorus more witheringly succinct.
These songs amount to a kind of therapy for de Casier, an opportunity to get the upper hand after the fact. Her easy sense of humor makes these imagined victories feel all the more triumphant. In “Drama,” she balances self-recriminations with double-entendre promises of FaceTime sex; in “Better Than That,” a song about moving on after a betrayal, she shrugs, “I already watched that TED Talk on how to let go.” Even in the absence of explicit punchlines, the grain of her voice and the rhythm of her delivery often have all the nuance of a great comic actor. Underscoring the lightness of her touch, she peppers the lyric sheet with emojis, which lends the act of reading along the voyeuristic thrill of poring through someone else’s chat history.
De Casier often gives the impression that she’s in conversation with the music of her upbringing: The tossed-off line, “You go on and on, and on and on,” makes fleeting reference to the Erykah Badu song; elsewhere, she borrows Snoop Dogg’s slightly nasal, sing-song delivery, breezily tapping g-funk’s laid-back vibe. Occasionally she’ll dip into American vernacular, picking up the accents of those singers and rappers she studied so closely as a teenager. It’s a reminder not just of the worldwide sway that American pop culture holds, but also of the way that Black American popular culture offers a sense of belonging to Black people who feel estranged in other countries, too.
“I think the experience of being isolated and having a lot of time for myself meant that creating became a way of dealing with all these emotions,” de Casier has said. But while Sensational is fiercely interior, it never suffers from the pitfalls of navel-gazing: It’s sexy, self-assured, spirited, fun. All those qualities come to the fore in “Busy,” a punchy, retro UK garage anthem about a woman who’s too driven to find time for a relationship. Invoking the bubbly, bump-and-flex vibes of vintage MJ Cole and Artful Dodger, it could be a 2-step counterpart to Marie Davidson’s “Work It.” Sensational might have benefited from a few more songs in this vein (especially since De Casier shines in clubbier contexts), but that’s a minor quibble. De Casier’s got a soft voice but a big personality, and even at its most muted, Sensational radiates charm.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Stephen Malkmus' Beck-produced Mirror Traffic possesses a relaxed, spontaneous feel befitting the Pavement frontman's earlier days.

Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks: Mirror Traffic

Mirror Traffic

As we spend the next nine years critically dissecting and reassessing the 1990s, let's agree to make one historical revision: The lo-fi auteurs of the era-- your Malkmuses, your Pollards, your Elephant Sixers-- were not in fact "slackers," despite the prevailing label/insult of the the day. Truthfully, their lack of studio polish was not a matter of laziness, ironic aesthetic, or poverty, but a coping mechanism for the unstoppable torrent of melodies, words, and ideas exploding from each songwriter's brain. No time for getting that song exactly right-- on to the next one.
That first-draft immediacy can fade with success, creative fatigue, or that demon "maturity." In the case of Malkmus, the transformation took the flavor of just wanting to play his damn guitar-- a mid-life crisis where sports cars were replaced with extended solos, ornate riffs, and long songs that felt even longer. But if the recent rash of alt-rock reunions were meant to cash in on audience nostalgia, perhaps some happy memories ricocheted back onto the bandleaders as they revisited their ragged, spontaneous greatest hits. To put it plainly, Mirror Traffic is not the time travel back to Pavement's peak that is the futile wish of every 30-something indie dork, but it is a rewind to a less perfectionist Malkmus, packed with the most mischief and weirdness he's displayed since his eponymous solo debut. It also has the most songs since Wowee Zowee. Like that declaration of independence from the confines of a successful band, Mirror Traffic possesses a relaxed, spontaneous feel befitting his earlier days in NoCal.
Despite originally wanting to title the album L.A. Guns and putting the hard-rocking "Senator" forward as the first single, Malkmus largely lays off the Guitar Hero: The fretboard theatrics are used more sparingly and deployed to much greater effect on "Forever 28" where a "Mr. Blue Sky" bounce is interrupted by Thin Lizzy runs, or in the thrilling summertime riff of "Stick Figures in Love". Only three songs break the five-minute barrier, and these feel far less claustrophobic than the extended tracks on the last three Jicks records. "Share the Red"'s shambolic waltz, for instance, goes down easier than the 10-minute-long interlocking duets of "Real Emotional Trash".
Songs also move in unexpected directions, like the Go! Team-ish coda of "No One Is (As I Are Be)" or the slingshot tempo changes of "Spazz". Even a brief interstitial like "Jumblegloss"-- with cosmic guitars and unidentifiable auditory objects whirring by-- is a refreshing bit of spontaneity to rinse after the album's most Jicks-like rocker, "Brain Gallop". The less serious vibe better suits Malkmus' still intact sense of humor and menagerie of oddballs (opening here with a nudist in Birkenstocks and ending 15 songs later with a cousin "down with soft rap").
Happily, celebrity producer Beck doesn't employ the heavy hand he showed earlier this year on Thurston Moore's Demolished Thoughts, which re-enacted Sea Change with the Sonic Youth frontman on vocals. Here, Beck's fingerprints are lighter-- he plays enabler to Malkmus' quirks, leaving in mid-vocal laughs, adding subtle lap-steel on "Tigers" and "Long Hard Book", and fuzzing out the punkish "Spazz" and "Tune Grief".
Whether he likes it or not, Malkmus is the indie-rock version of a Dylan or Simon or U2, artists who will forever be blurbed as making "their best album since ____." Competing with his younger self is definitely not a priority for Malkmus, who went through Pavement's reunion tour like he was punching a clock. Any resemblance to earlier days is likely unintentional, but for the aging hipsters of the world, even an accidental flashback is a good contact high. Mirror Traffic tickles that nostalgia without sacrificing maturity, discovering that "playfully relaxed" is a valid third route between "slacker" and "manic."


Irish producer Davy Kehoe’s latest is a strange and exhilarating vision of electronic music, drawing from adrenaline-fuelled krautrock, slathered in harmonica and dub delay.

Short Passing Game

Your first thought, launching into the opening song on Davy Kehoe’s debut mini-album, Short Passing Game, may be that you’re listening to it at 45 instead of 33. It’s ridiculously fast, almost too fast: The drum machine tumbles in a syncopated, breakneck blur, shuddering like a washing machine at the furious peak of its spin cycle. The rhythm approximates krautrock’s motorik pulse but sped up until it throws off sparks. On electric bass, a one-note refrain is thumbed with such relentless determination you can practically see the blood spattered on the pick guard. Do not adjust your turntable; there’s nothing wrong with the playback speed. This is the Irish producer Davy Kehoe’s strange and exhilarating vision of electronic music, poised somewhere between Suicide and Neu!, slathered in harmonica and dub delay, and shuddering like a train about to go off the rails.
Kehoe’s album comes to us via Dublin’s Wah Wah Wino, a fledgling imprint that is only slightly less mysterious than Kehoe himself. Until now, the label has been known mainly for wonky, off-kilter electronic music that’s up to its elbows in haywire buzz and squelch. Its four ambiguously credited records so far have mostly been collaboratively produced by label heads Omid Geadizadeh, Olmo Devin, and Morgan Buckley, with assists from various friends, including Kehoe. Short Passing Game, which features input from Geadizadeh and Buckley along with Seán Mac Erlaine and Cloud Castle Lake’s Brendan Jenkinson, reinforces Wino’s rep as a home for strange sounds that don’t fit anywhere else. But it also introduces a new factor into play, something approaching a kind of virtuosity.
Kehoe’s music stakes a position halfway between studio constructions and live jams. His drum machine serves as the spine throughout, with rhythms that range from lunkheaded to sidewinding to svelte. Around that thrumming pulse, Kehoe and his collaborators weave electric guitar and bass, organ, hi-hat, bodhrán, mbira, harmonica, Korg MS-20 synthesizer, and an antiquated string synthesizer called the Siel Orchestra into a porous mesh of battered tones and slippery textures. Kehoe and his collaborators’ long, corkscrewing grooves have something in common with Cavern of Anti-Matter’s krautrock studies, but there’s an even more unhinged quality at work here, with dubbed-out yelps and wheezy harmonica blasts adding to the manic energy. It’s often hard to say with any certainty what instrument is making which sound: Focus your attention beyond the rhythmic handrail, and you’re immersed in a foggy field of crickets, shouts, creaks, drones, and squiggling sine waves. On “Happy Highway,” junkyard guitar riffs recall Horse Lords’ West African-inspired guitar work, while dissonant sheets of guitar feedback suggest Sonic Youth’s atmospheric influence.
On songs both fast and slow, it’s uniformly hypnotic; unlike a lot of music that thrives upon stoned repetition, however, Kehoe’s doesn’t shy away from emotional expression, particularly once the tempo slows down. In contrast to the exhilarating blues of “Happy Highway” and the white-knuckled freakout of “Short Passing Game,” the 10-minute centerpiece “Storm Desmond” is slow, meditative, and gorgeous. A brooding bass clarinet is run through electronic processing that resembles Jon Hassell’s ambivalent atmospheres; the dub-inflected rhythm steps around the mbira like a cat walking through high grass.
“Going Machine” is similarly enveloping, its organ and bassline warily circling each other while hi-hats flicker like a 16mm film projector. As the groove builds, a voice appears out of nowhere, speaking in riddles: “I think at mouth speed, but have my thoughts cancelled before speech.” A burst of rhythmic laughter, imposing as a Greek chorus, tears across the stereo field. You may wonder, What the hell just happened? Your guess is as good as mine; neither the voice nor the laughter makes a return appearance. It’s a testament to the entrancing power of Kehoe’s music that he can break his own spell without losing his hold on the listener. You’re left waiting for the other shoe to drop—Where’d the voice go? Who’s hiding behind the curtain?—while the drums dance nimbly across offbeats and upbeats, moving like a dream of flying, never so much as touching the ground.