First Impressions 018: Dismantled dream-pop, symphonic maximalism, cosmic wandering and more.

Initial vibes on new music

Hello,

Recently I sat at a dinner table with some people who variously worked at Spotify and Live Nation, all with senior positions. I don’t often get the chance to break bread with anyone on that side of the fence, and I could not let the occasion go without challenge. I asked for Live Nation’s position on festivals, considering the raft of cancellations in Australia. ‘They’ve lost their mojo,’ was the response, along with the economic rationalisation that a young person could (at least from our part of the world) spend their considerable festival dollars on a trip to Bali: ‘Nothing lasts forever, Andrew’. With a recent tour from Taylor Swift and one upcoming from Billie Eilish, everything was fine. I now had the knowledge that ‘mojo’ is an integral component in the business model of the world’s biggest live music player. Festivals are a place for people to commune and celebrate music with the many feelings it offers. Of course, much of the programming plays out for the collective group hug, but any such gathering of people is coded with deeper foundations. Now that’s mojo, but from a financial perspective, it’s better to bottle it into one act being the beacon for that possibility. Sell out, maintain the interest, as the song goes. By the way, I was also told that Spotify’s decision to not account to any artist whose releases reach less than 1,000 streams over a year has been widely misunderstood. I’d need more time to unpack the accounting speak that kicked in, but make no mistake with these metrics – when it comes to artists, 1 and 999 are both the new numbers of the beast.
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OK, let’s go:

Mirrored Hope - Reign of Ferns: With a fevered dream take on Jon Hassell’s humid fusions of transient sound and place into new world orderings, Ryan J Raffa and Andrew Weathers’ hypnotic debut is all fizzing texture and pulse melting into gorgeous liminal zones. Raffa has talked about his early morning runs as inspiration, and along with the percussive throb coursing through, the low and silvery light permeating through dawn time resonates as a moodsetter. So does the element of mystery at the break of any oncoming day before rising into something approaching quiet revelation.

Laundry – Kevin: The debut from New Yorker Ben Bondy and Kansas City Iggy Romeu – aka Mister Water Wet – feels like a slow exhalation. It begins with the kind of lulling acoustic guitar picking Elliott Smith used to anchor his pain threshold, setting it under stream of tonal pattern residue and dazed vocals for dismantled dream-pop to detune into and drop out. Melting in its soft buzz is one of the year’s warmest weird pleasures.

Does It Still Matter - Noémi Büchi: In what she describes as her final exploration of 'symphonic maximalism,' Noémi Büchi casts a tense but thrilling ballet from the ballistic style of her production approach. Buchi’s beats sound like they were fired out of a rifle, kicking against whipping and whirling electro-acoustic synthesis with an orchestral mindset for melodrama. Embracing the push and pull of emotions in her slamdance of sound, the command and precision she applies throughout is an energy harness, directing the force of her work towards something quite moving within the maelstrom.  

Lost – For Annie - Natalia Beylis: In this solemn telling of economy over ecology, Natalia Beylis’ compositional lens is to make it a tale of inevitable ritual. It begins with the air-clearing sound of birdsong before feet under branches walk towards the wheels of industry, captured in organ riffs that crank up like doomy chainsaws. In reflection of overstepping the bounds of our encroachment into nature, Beylis plays out her instrumentation like an intervention, the industrialised hum of alienation shrouding these familiar and warm field recordings in this abstract but acute observation of rural horror. Including interviews with people involved in maintaining one of Ireland’s countryside curios, the overarching feeling of loss is one Beylis renders poignantly.

Shadows Lifted from Invisible Hands – James Hoff: James Hoff has taken four ubiquitous classics from bygone eras of pop — Blondie’s Heart of Glass, David Bowie’s Space Oddity, Madonna’s Into the Groove, and Lou Reed’s Perfect Day — and composed these works by tracing their ambient resonance. This means it’s an imagining of how popular music can linger in the back of our minds in fully realised musical form. You might need to be a ghost trainspotter to work out which is which, as Hoff inverts the high of a pop hit with the faded glory it leaves once the party’s over. Arranged with a grand but slow orchestral sweep and seeping digital buzz, Fennesz did something similar moons ago, connecting the emotional currents in his own music in explicit homage, though here, Hoff’s vision mainlines into pop culture’s comedown and melancholic afterlife.

Walking After Dark – Mountain Movers: The ninth album from a band that’s new to me, such is the depth of the America rock underground – or my ignorance. Kicking off sounding like Robert Forster fronting Beat Happening, drawling guitars play out widescreen scenes from imaginary dim lit streets set in the mind’s eye of existential fug. In amongst the déjà vu of bus stop dread and internal world-building wordplay are long and cosmic instrumentals with more than enough hang time to mark the stars by as you’re waiting on the last night ride.  

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