First Impressions 029: Classical gas, shoegaze art-damage, foamy ambient, psychedelic leans and more.

Initial vibes on new music

Hello,

A recent article in The Guardian titled "Subdued, Sleepy, and Despised by Snobs: How Minimalist Piano Eclipsed Classical Music" examined the rise in popularity of minimal piano works. It highlighted this trend with the enormously high uptake of streaming playlists featuring the music and discussed the alleged dismissal of these works by those entrenched in the traditional classical music sphere and its surrounding industry. As the headline states, the collective term for these people—not that any are cited with their thoughts—in this article is ‘snobs’. Naming the likes of Nils Frahm and Joep Beving as figureheads in what’s also known as the neo-classical movement, the article points out that such individual artists also have phenomenal streaming rates. Nils Frahm has 1.4 million monthly listeners on Spotify! Joep Beving has 1.8 million monthly listeners on Spotify! Ludovico Einaudi ‘boasts’ 8.1 million monthly listeners on Spotify!

The point is made thus: the people have spoken, and this music should be revered every bit as much as their supposed older counterparts. Only these artists aren’t modern-day versions of Brahms or Bach simply because their approach to the piano connects to specific passages of play, such as arpeggios, sustained tones, and subtle variations, found across the entire classical and/or minimal canon. These artists do not need the association with, or indeed the affirmation, of classical music or its champions. The piano is, of course, an expressive instrument that crosses more musical zones than most, if not all. It’s not an instrument that solely belongs in the classical domain, only to make brief cameos here and there elsewhere, like, say, a flugelhorn. (I have not seen any solo flugelhorn playlists) Many interviews with artists lugged under the term neo-classical firmly reject the term. Yet, in the streaming economy argument, the bigger the number, the higher the status. Status has transformed into some kind of moral value, making one set of people right and one set wrong. This is why the article headline refers to this nebulous group of naysayers as ‘snobs’. This is why fans of mega-artists goad and troll other artists, ushering in an axis of inferiority and superiority to the point of ridicule. And crucially, this is how the algorithm has hacked into music criticism. Not to suggest these artists can’t make moving music, let alone should be ignored, however, surely its worth should not be quantified and codified this way. Importantly, the Ukrainian composer Lubomyr Melnyk is the first to be named in a list of artists who have overtaken household names on streaming platforms’ numbers game, yet his music does not appear on any Spotify Chill playlist, clearly because its fast-rolling intensity does not suit the brief. When streaming reframes the conversation around music to suit its business aims, with a knock-on effect happening in major broadsheets, we really need to address the larger cultural conflict overwhelming music, not Brahms vs. Frahms.
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OK, let’s go:

Realistic IX - Belong: I didn’t know you could buy a Kevin Shields sample pack, but here we are with a new album from Belong that makes their shoegaze influences a true sucker punch and primal urge. Cutting across its rumbling rhythmic drive, guitars are wrung out with equal parts space and spit, eventually shattering the template to blaze a more logical extension—not so much of My Bloody Valentine, but of Suicide’s wllful art damage, rewired to burn baby burn, not dream baby dream.

The Red Valley – Elkhorn: After Elkhorn member Drew Gardener’s minimal solo excursion last week, this is the fourth album of the year from the New York duo, reaching widescreen visions of expansive folk expression on a psychedelic lean. The heady exhilaration in this pair’s symmetry comes from the search for grace from abandon in their playing - an inner ceremony jubilantly rolling outwards towards all-encompassing splendour. Through the stirring turbulence of their interplay an electric heat, there’s a humility and reverence at the heart of Elkhorn towards music’s higher power to ride through and embrace any storm.    

Steamroom 62 – Jim O’Rourke: While it’s true there’s never been an overarching narrative across any of Jim O’Rourke’s work to hang onto, for someone who’s been on record as saying he has no interest in expression, he can’t escape the melancholic trudge deeply imprinted across it. I’ll assume he wouldn’t continue to make it if it didn’t evoke something for him. His Steamroom series is a trove of recordings largely based around his Serge modular synth. Number 62’s crumpling tones feel like that weird nuzzle when you’re falling asleep but don’t necessarily want to - the slow oncoming of going. O’Rourke has said making music is a daily need for him. I wonder if it’s a portal to getting outside himself in a way no other vice ever could. We are blessed with these releases, that give us the same chance.

Selkie Reflections - Alliyah Enyo x Angel R: Sitting between a split release and collaboration, Edinburgh-based Alliyah Enyo presents a long, weaving work of distant vocal cries, bobbing untethered within a foamy stew of their coiling detritus. Enyo’s scattered auras are compelling in their slow and crooked circling for light. Under a new alias of Angel R, Zeisig then locates their yearning to recast them with a hymnal presence in cosier, liquefied warm climes of brighter ambience, towards the blissful coordinates of any happy ending.

Sleepwalkers – Ekin Fil: Turkey’s Ekin Fil has long been conjuring drone works oscillating around feels of billowing clouds and puffs of thick, black smoke. Sleepwalkers fogs up her bifocal lens and expands her palette for a work of tingling euphoric states. Melodrama continues to be the disquieting element to her elegant poise, and her distinct sense of melody is bright, broad and sharp, contrasting the emblem of dark shading. Further accenting a new emotional core from raising her vocal tones to ring like a bell above Sleepwalkers’ sedate pacing, Fil’s precise extraction of tones into her cool web has found a new dimension.

Skull Dream – Dave Harrington: Harrington is part of the long spanning collectivity in American art’s imagination to draw fertile ground from desolate landscapes. Skull Dream is all about the spell of possibility, the means of escape. In its sweep of jazz, rock and psychedelia is an ode to the beauty of a hidden America and the menace in that fantasy, similar perhaps to the surreal undertow of something like Where The Wild Things Are.  As a musician, Harrington makes a fine cinematographer with a kitbag of special effects deployed exquisitely. He gives his game up with titles like ‘Acid Western’, but all the same he sure can play it as he says it.  

And: Longform Editions 39 came out yesterday, featuring four artists exploring ideas of transition:

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