First Impressions 031: dubstep-psych throbs, textural ticks, New Age for cold cream, rap-as-personal-development and more.

Initial vibes on new music

Hello,

Nothing to report here this week along with the reviews, however a note that the newsletter will take a break next week. (I need all my energy to queue for Oasis tickets) It’s always a good time when this space is relatively bare to thank you all for taking the time to read First Impressions and also be in touch with your thoughts and comments.
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OK, let’s go:

The Tumbling Psychic Joy of Now - Holy Tongue meets Shackleton: Where dub is a decades-long ghosted imprint on production techniques across music—popular or otherwise—could dubstep now be the same wellspring of possibility? It is for Shackleton, the UK producer throwing himself into a disparate number of collaborations where spooked atmospheres can spill out into technicolor rays, exuding forth with a club-like punch. This might be his best conjoin yet, as he mans the controls for a set of recordings sent to him by Holy Tongue, a trio featuring Valentina Magaletti, Al Wootton, and Susumu Mukai. Shackleton dilates Holy Tongue’s wild and woozy psychedelia for the jazz-fusion set into delightfully grotesque cartoon jams. Using Magaletti’s idiosyncratic rhythm ballast as the source code for both the precision and joyful fury at the heart of these pieces, the geyser-like rush of tribal percussion, phasing synths, and warping bass throb becomes a furnace glow of energy and heat in Shackleton’s continuing chase of new symphonies for improvisers.

Bitogaku – Unknown Me: If I start by saying this is like a cross between an 80s self-help tape and today’s synth-pop ambience, you might not give it a listen. The album sprouted from a commission by the Japanese cosmetic multinational Shiseido to fold music into their holistic approach to corporate wellness. Deep in its polished sheen and conceptual gambit of transposing nature through software (including using processed field recordings from Shiseido’s research division) lies the comfortable mask of modern beauty. It’s not too far from the recalibrated hip stance of the Total Blue album mentioned a few weeks ago, though it’s shorn of that album’s wry take on mechanised machismo. Instead, it offers a slick but soft centre with the crisp chill of a good cold cream. It whooshes over me, then rubs off.

California Sigh - Lee Underwood: Lee Underwood’s guitar playing opened the space for Tim Buckley’s innate sadness to inhabit an ambient-like space in his songs that ghosted the melancholic aura of his lyrics. Disarming, not quite breezy, his open-tuned guitar rolls refuse to succumb to a gentle New Age pander on this 1988 solo album, now reissued by Drag City. Underwood’s picking at the strings has a heft that tilts at the trademark Windham Hill atmospheric pull from blues and folk, along with sideways departures into slow flamenco flourish. Along the way, Steve Roach shows up with breathy and luminescent synth lines, and with pedal steel and soprano sax melts, the late afternoon glow caught in the album title comes into full view.

Tangled Goodbye - Evelyn Glennie, Owen Gardner, John Edwards, Bex Burch: A live document of an improvised evening at the venerable Café Oto in London during percussionist Bex Burch’s 2022 residency. Joining her were fellow percussionist Evelyn Glennie, contrabass player John Edwards, and Horse Lords’ guitarist Owen Gardner. Together, they conjure a kind of clattering minimalism, scratching around in a rubble of free jazz and the avant-garde, with movements akin to slacklining in the way the players stretch and bend within the tense spaces they generate. Across these five spontaneous pieces, the quartet never splinters into tangents, instinctively switching gears without halting—a remarkable feat for a first meeting where all are in raucous sync. Amidst their controlled chaos, there’s a delicacy at the heart of this assembly of musicians that’s more than beginner’s luck. While Burch was playing for the music of chance that night, she picked the right bunch to rumble with.

Veena – Heems: Whether as the class clown, political pundit, or rapper-in-pain, the erudite, self-deprecating Heems has gone unsighted for nearly a decade before surfacing with two albums this year. His latest is somewhat of a two-hander where fragility and bravado come together. It swings between a stoned soul picnic, aching with classic '70s singer-songwriter hurt, and a Bollywood spectacular, where he is the star, playing someone who’s now well-adjusted to how fucked-up they are. It’s a role he’s been reaching for his whole life, and on Veena he does it on his own, often hilarious, terms. Rhyming anti-depressants and lettuce with his blunt verve is typical of his self-knowing approach, making the marks of life’s absurdity feel both brightly ridiculous and real.

Thought Makes Music – gi: The debut album from Sydney producer Gigi De Lacy is a bracing electronic work that thrives on slithering, restless energy matched by razor-sharp focus. Textural ticks, aural ooze, and a rolling percussive kick contrast with her precise production style, and within the album’s continuous flow, everything teeters with a kinetic balance that’s hard to shake. In De Lacy’s vision, these dense breakbeats serve as a means to recalibrate and reclaim space within the ongoing abstract scream of our digital landscape that inescapably captures us.

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