First Impressions 020: fourth world for slackers, cinematic hazes, vibrational energies, modern medieval and more.
Initial vibes on new music
Hello,
Just the reviews this week, due to a long weekend and short illness. Being time poor reminds me to thank you all for taking some of your valuable time to read First Impressions. It’s something I never take for granted.
-
OK, let’s go:
Statik – Actress: Filing the idiosyncratic club dynamics of his work down to an ice-cool minimalism gives this new work from Actress the feat of stillness inside the whir and chug of his prowling rhythms. Like dust particles hovering within a beam of light, the sounds on Statik intersect then splinter variously into micropatterns and foggy drifts, surrounded by tones far more opaque and ominous. Statik is a set of wicked seduction – a centrifuge of subterfuge spinning into a web of magnetic vibrational frequencies.
Movie Candy – Lia Kohl and Daniel Wyche: Both these Chicago artists share a love for composition that reinvents nostalgia for a fractured present. On this new tape, the pair offer a piece each, with one reworking the other on the flipside. Spurred by those snatches of cinema you can never quite place but hang onto you with an allure like a key to deeper meaning you’re desperate to grasp, Kohl and Wyche fashion these pieces from the melodramatic and mysterious features of film. Kohl’s spooked sound design is given a supernatural air with cello loops set to stir through a whirlpool of field recordings, electronics, and synth. Wyche is both experimental and sentimental as anything, offering a curious but soft emotional core as digital rubble makes haze while the sun shines through his lovely guitar lines. Together, they have created a fabulous dreamplay of consciousness and feeling.
An Echo Of Something I Don't Remember - Daphne X: There’s an eerie sense of dislocation on this work from Greek Anatolian artist Daphne X, her distant vocal escaping like a gas emission from out of a barely bubbling aural ooze. Suspended in a space between beauty and tension, X begins by reducing both drone and choral music to faint notions before a rumble of sounds from our everyday tease out a deep listening experience touching on the nexus of our internal being and the external world.
I Sigh, I Resign - Annelies Monseré: Monseré’s songs posit themes of power dynamics and interpersonal toxicity into matrices of medieval song, blanketed with cranking industrial rhythms. Hypnotically compelling and unsettling, within this setting of lavish despair is Monseré’s rich voice, rising above with strength to leaven the tumult with soothsaying traits to give this work its oxygen and vital energy.
Here’s Where You Understand It’s Only Dreaming: Shelter & Orion: Four extedned jams from this French duo. It's too earthy for space music but it plays out like the pair are just about ready for the cosmos, with its casual pulse and low-lit textural fizz. They're lullabies before lift off, you might say, roughly hewn as primitive, couchbound psychedelia that could be the first example of fourth world music for slackers.
Cleats – FIN: I feel like I’m inside a giant clock listening to this album of constantly ticking, clattering synth-pop from the New York based Canadian. Nervy jangles of approximated church bells are the core signal for a work in thrall to higher powers alongside jump-cut vocal loops and low-level tone warps. Glitching her pop framework to coarser ends conjures a disembodying feel that might be fight or flight for some, but holds an intrigue for me to sit somewhere in between.
Thanks for reading.
Longform Editions 38 came out yesterday! Take time with these exceptional works from four unique artists we are thrilled to have take part:
Wadada Leo Smith
Susan Alcorn
Sarah Hennies
Yvette Janine Jackson
-
Andrew Khedoori is the curator of Longform Editions.
First Impressions visual by Mark Gowing.