First Impressions 007: Patched atmospheres, liquid guitar, foggy folk, smoked beats and more.

Initial vibes on new music

Hello!

I’ve been reading this long piece on Sir Lucien Grainge, the chairman and C. E. O of Universal Music Group, the biggest music company in the world. Grainge believes there is too much music allowed onto Spotify and “getting in the way of real talent and real songwriters”. If artists are clogging up the system he essentially greenlit, just like Sony inventing the CD-R, it’s the gatekeepers who have let what they consider to be a virus out of the lab. In the article, he suggests he doesn’t want to stifle technological advancements in pursuit of better industry outcomes. It’s clear, though, he doesn’t want independent artists, especially those without broad commerical potential, to be able to access or exploit those changes, too.

This reminds me of a conversation I had last year at BIGSOUND, Australia’s biggest music industry conference. I bumped into a fellow called Scott Cohen, founder of JKBX, a song investment platform. In simple terms, with JKBX you buy songs like you would shares and as they earn from various revenue streams, you do, too.  

Scott didn’t likely notice my stricken face as he went on to suggest we would all be better off as a society if there was a single curator telling us all what TV shows and films we should watch, and which music we should listen to. When I countered that mass idolatry can be problematic, even dangerous - think Elvis Presley, think Michael Jackson - he paused, then said it was nice meeting me.

In this optimising, corporate-minded argument of oversupply and demand, there is not an inch given to creativity. Artist development is not artistry. And while there will never be a perfect modern-day consumption mechanism for music, we should never consider it to ever be in oversupply.
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OK, let’s go:

Lucha Libre – Valentina Magaletti: More from the unstoppable Italian drummer/composer that follows the murky, moody line of her dark piece for Longform Editions. Once again, Valentina uses her solo work to deploy rhythm as a texture outside of the group format, so the dynamism we know from her time in Tomaga, Vanishing Twin and V/Z is largely absent, replaced with pause and silence. In these fuzzy, patched atmospheres, it’s as though Valentina is exploring ways to break her own ingrained patterns when it comes to making music, embracing the random before occasionally bursting out with the cool, ominous throb that frequently defines her rhythmic pull.

Astral Gold – Dean McPhee: Last week, I mentioned the lone, wandering guitar style of Adrian Miles’ album as more under the radar these days. England’s Dean McPhee didn’t immediately come to mind, though he has been recording his singular live and undubbed guitar compositions steadily for some time. McPhee’s playing is on a different plane - more charged and towering in its vast expanse – and his creative light remains undimmed on album number eight. The liquid movements across each track here variously shimmer, coil and spiral, beautifully steered by McPhee’s well-honed intuition, always on course towards the stars.   

Lava - Panghalina:  An inspired assembly of Melbourne explorers, working quiet but full-blooded inprovisation with a chemistry unveling a deep and special emotional core. Helen Svoboda (voice, double bass), Bonnie Stewart (voice, drums, percussion) and Maria Moles (synth, drums, percussion) approach their trio format as a constantly evolving state of overlapping duos for an unfolding real-time oddysey that creaks and tiptoes with an otherworldly presence. You ears may naturally seek reference points, maybe avant-jazz, sound-art or ambient, however Lava’s music is individually marked by sensation, not style. There’s such an intriguing, hermetic sense of communication here and I hope they continue to let their collective subconscious state play out for us to witness.

Breathing Landscape – Leslee Smucker: These tingling solo explorations from the Dutch violinist play out in a call-and-respond fashion, setting her playing against the resonances of a disused water tank in rural Colorado. The tank’s natural reverberations become her collaborator to bring the dead space alive, probing it by scraping strings and tapping the body of her instrument in a bristling evocation of forsaken ground.

Castelo d'​Á​gua - Grimório de Abril:  São Paulo artist Veridiana Sanchez says that for this third album under her alias, "the composition atmosphere was far from the metropolis". Sanchez produces an upended, uneasy kind of folk through a lo-fi electronics setup. Her songs move eerily with thudding, reverberating percussion and layered vocals, cutting like static through a fog of glitching guitars and keyboard overload. Somewhere between mutant and medieval, we are far from British folk’s vision of reaching Eden and more possibly trapped in the suffocation of our present, searching for a way through.

If You Feel Like a Lost Soul: Spectacular Diagnostics: If a lost soul is the theme for this album, we know where it went: it’s been cooked up and shot into space. The new album from the Chicago producer curls out with mid 90s-like sci-fi haze, with narcotic beats dialled up on dub filters and mystery movie snatches. It’s slow and unashamedly blunted – if DJ Shadow stripped the stadium grabs out of his production game, timewarped back to the bedroom and took a very large chill pill, it might sound like this.   

Gully Music – Bushranger: Eora (Sydney) producer Eli Murray’s newest alias is a deep, ongoing meditation on the land, water and its creatures, morphing these elements into a sharp set of heightened perceptions. Rich in its detailing, Murray seems patently aware that his communing with nature is an intrusion of sorts, reflected in the stark, mechanised pulses grafted onto the dark undertow of his aural illusions. In the throb and grit of his synthesis, he leaves plenty of space for subliminal discharge. No two bushwalks are ever the same.

Thanks for reading.
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Andrew Khedoori is the curator of Longform Editions.
First Impressions visual by Mark Gowing.