First Impressions 021: Slow-rolling electro mosaics, drone dissolves, oddball folk-pop, hip hop capers and more.

Initial vibes on new music

Hello,

Again, just the reviews for this week. (this could become a habit) I could make a joke about the flu here, but I hope you wouldn’t get it. In any case, having been bedridden gives this week’s batch a darker hue than usual, but hey, darker is better, togther, right?
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OK, let’s go:

Resort – Skee Mask: Skee Mask has smashed out so much work in short, sharp bursts since his third full-length, Pool, in 2021 that this new 60-minute longplayer comes as a different kind of shock to those supreme bustle-pulse blasts of techno-electro-breakbeat damage. The way he chases a feeling on Resort is more widescreen than ever, it’s nimble and tripping flow constantly evolving on the move. Pulling here for atmosphere first offers a slower-rolling mosaic of liquid melodies floating starward against the gorgeous zig zag of his rhythms, cast with the joyful swerve of a gamer who knows they’re well on the way to a higher level. Resort is Skee Mask in optimal pursuit, and so it is for you, too.

Disconnect – KRM & KMRU: Two artists across two generations carpooling with doom and decay, letting it rip very slowly and very loudly. It’s heavy in here, as Kevin Richard Martin and Joseph Kamaru find common ground in submitting their dark drone fields to a queasy dissolve both bleak and eviscerating. Martin’s patented bass throb is a shadowy presence at times, flickers of movement that lock in the dread set deep within Disconnect’s claustrophobic blur. When a sound like toiling bells ring in towards the end alongside reverberating vocal dangles, Disconnect begins to sound like an awakening – a call to arms in the name of possibility.    

Darning Woman – Anastasia Coope: As free and giddy as the birdsong she frequently weaves throughout her new album, New Yorker Anastasia Coopes manages a tightrope balance of intricate oddball pop and lo-fi folk, soaring high on her multilayered vocal flights of fancy. To have songs about the possibility of waking up with no feet that are no less curious and charming is quite the feat: Coopes’ trick is to distil her wilful weirdness through the current-day commonplace mindset of a quirky TikTok video. That’s no slight, just a way of saying that Coopes’ arrangements tickle at the emotions through many left turns from easy familiarity to make you want to relive the thrill of her delivery over and over.

Silhouettes, Spires - Gretchen Korsmo: Tipped to this by claire rousay, who knows an individual display of fragility and bravado when it steps into earshot. Korsmo’s playing across pianos, clarinets, percussion is sparse, plaintive and set at an almost-liturgical pace towards a mesmeric crumbling point, before enigmatic whispers and field recordings heighten the atmosphere with the intrigue and sealed-in fortitude of dream logic. Korsmo’s solitude becomes strength in the way she allows her compositions to be open-ended to intuit their path, and ultimately, their way to sensation over fixed sentiment.

Hommelen – Penelope Trappes: Longform Editions alumni and Brighton-based Australian Penelope Trappes continues her trajectory further into finding an expanse within the crevices of the beautifully eerie dronesong she’s developed over three albums.  Using the Halldorophone, a cello-like string instrument that generates feedback for the artist to direct, then taking her trademark dark coo to call into its open-ended, creaking resonance, these four pieces manifest somewhere between spirit possession and a kind of killin’ floor blues for any diehard experimentalist.  

Bazuko – Crimeapple & Big Ghost Ltd: After the foggier lens of his second album for 2022, LETHIMCOOK, the Colombian-born New York rapper is back with a third before the financial calendar year ticks over. Even though he says he’s a nobody – "nobody’s perfect," get it? – obscurity is not on Crimeapple’s list of life goals, hitting higher marks every couple of months with his output. Teaming up with Big Ghost Ltd, a producer collective and company headed by Ghostface Killah, gives rise to his Wu-Tang party-of-one fantasy, where he coasts through the seamy underground with a presence larger than strife. This supremely agile set plays out like a smoked-out, surreal gangster film with low-slung soul and high-end sass, every track announces Crimeapple as a man for all capers.

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