First Impressions 026: Dub dirtboxes, doomed dream-rock, piano apparitions and more.

Initial vibes on new music

Hello,

A day later than normal, but here we are! (if a smidge shorter than usual)

To those who have asked - I am seeking out a recording of the set for The Mars Volta I mentioned a fortnight back. If it holds up, I’ll post t!
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OK, let’s go:

Everything Is Simple – Zelienople: Zelienople’s music isn’t so much hazy as it is slippery, with liquid revelations of song and atmosphere. Propelled by the hypnotic presence of Mike Weis’ African and Korean-influenced percussion, the quiet fizz in the arrangements on this first album in four years signals the life in Matt Christensen’s lyrical charge, frozen in a space between doom and dream. Cast exquisitely by the probing instrumentation of that percussion alongside guitar, synth, woodwinds, and bass, Everything Is Simple represents an awakening of thoughts from the wellspring of night’s dead air, where Zelienople continues to dwell and find resonance.

Drifts and Surfaces – Elori Saxl: Composer Elori Saxl is keen to explore where we seek energy and how we absorb it into our lives. Two of the three works here are built from the same 10-second snare roll, processed to transform that sound source into something approximating the feel of a rattling wind chill. Their unfettered whir is the push and pull she creates between digital manipulation and real-world feeling, a drama she has cited as living within during her time recording this on a remote Canadian island. The final piece, Surfaces, is contrastingly languid, offering relief from the previous duo’s hum and burble with its floating tangle of strings, saxophone, and percussion. At 27 minutes, this is a magnetic telling of nature’s constant turning and atomising in the face of our digital culture.

Damaged – Ghost Dubs: The latticework of dub, drone and techno is sure back in leftfield music currency’s conversation right now. A newer outing for German producer Michael Fielder, Ghost Dubs live up to their name, not only in sound but in not opting for anything fancy in these scrubby dread pulsations. The early work of Adrian Sherwood and On-U Sound System would be a touchstone for the way Fielder’s rhythms shuffle and spring through dirtbeds of sound detritus and seemingly random, minimal flourish. Loosened up by not towing to techno pomp, Fielder’s work finds that energy at the margins can pop as much as any beat, giving weight to the weightless for a distinctly heavy lean.

A constant state of undoing - V.N. Lucarelli: There’s not a great deal of ambient music coming out of Australia’s Northern Territory. Maybe its wide open space, bushland and natural beauty offers enough similar stimulus. I’ve been tipped for a while to the work of Mparntwe (Alice Springs) resident Vito Lucarelli, whose offerings of spacious longform works, bobbing with beautifully balanced tone floats mollified In a very cool state of hang time. Lucarelli’s approach has a disarming gentility that leaves you happily neither here nor there, also stretching into zones where it’s not all bounce and bubble. Breaking into warping glitch-house and glassy, spaced-out synth melodies teeming in faster particle formation, if this is how Lucarelli maps our collective undoing, it’s a great way to raise our consciousness.  

Songs of the Sea – Andrew Chalk: A fortnight ago, I mentioned the industry around solo piano and its florid, fast grab to raise easy emotion. England’s Andrew Chalk almost reverse engineers the formula with the unmoored presence of his compositions. These two extended pieces could essentially fold into one long work of slowed and spacious playing, each note an apparition, rising to form barely-there clusters of a reverie for the fog of time.

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