First Impressions 032: Universal frequencies, smeared choral collage, sitar breezes, post-punk hymnals and more.

Initial vibes on new music

Hello,

I’ve just returned from a week interstate at an Australian music industry conference. My main takeaway from the various sessions I attended, was that authenticity is vital for artists to maintain as they navigate the essence of their creativity and advance in their careers. Arguments about what authenticity exactly means were waged through the typical dot points - how to present yourself on social media and what your music actually means. (No, I don’t know either.) The latter was often accompanied with the fortified belief in many quarters that no computer will ever connect more than a person with an acoustic guitar and their special kind of personal expression. “Let’s get back to more of that!” was the championed comment. To that end, I’ll always plug for Kraftwerk over Ed Sheeran, but this time around there was a bigger player in that old chestnut: AI. Regulation and fair use of AI are necessary discussions, though they were woven into the authenticity debate as marks of virtue for the path forward. A lot of artists and industry representatives, here are concerned about AI, not just for the potential theft factor, but also, begrudging towards any artist who could conjure a string section without the money to do so.

On one level, AI is simply a logical extension and reflection of modern-day content creation: you can project anything you want to, whenever you want to, because we have the technology. It is another way to clamour within the crawlspace of recognition, on the endless engagement chase created by capitalist mass-media and streaming platforms. It’s a logic trap that has completely reorganised musicians to be actors. Popular music is no longer about fostering authentic human connection - it is about the profoundly unreal concept that people can be supernovas. And in the reductive space of a music industry conference where young artists have notepads they hope will contain all the answers by the time it winds up, everyone is encouraged to reach for the stars and work hard. In that hard equation, the only thing authentic just might, ironically, be the most abstract concept of all, hope.
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OK, let’s go:

Endlessness - Nala Sinephro: A quick shout for Sinephro’s mixes for NTS, which appeared before her debut album, Space, exquisitely mapping her own dreamweaving of post-Coltrane jazz, minimalism, and new age meditations. I mention the mixes because Sinephro is clearly unafraid to reach for the same greatness they contained, with a grandness of vision seen through both the soft-focus sightline of an old soul and the wide-eyed invention of an exciting newcomer. Sinephro possesses a rare ease in how she pours everything at play into these compositions with sublime fluidity and nuance. On Endlessness, she leads its song cycle with a continually arpeggiating synth as both a centre of gravity and a means for lift-off. The balance and measure cast toward a raft of instruments – Sinephro’s own harp and piano, drums, horns, and a 21-piece string ensemble – create a dual dimensionality of blissful air and intricately etched expressions coming together in fleeting infinity.

Normal Sounds – Lia Kohl: Chicago cellist and composer Lia Kohl knows silence is an illusion. As Catherine Christer Hennix said, “the universe is on.” Kohl must wake every morning to the day’s rush of vibrations and frequencies in the same way a child might be excited about the infinite possibilities of slime. Reckoning a vibrancy from what we see as nothingness, Kohl never seeks to harness these sounds for her own ends; rather, it’s their untamed presence she’s compelled by, allowing their wildcard spark to be a true collaborator. Accordingly, she rolls high and low with her interplay, from rapturous cello to dinky pop melodies from a cheap keyboard. Detailing them here would only serve to further their typically cast mundanity—the song titles make a list if you want them—and upend Kohl’s premise of the weird thrill they can bring in a heightened space. Normal Sounds is a merry dance of the chance and canny.

Kurpark - Günter Schlienz: I once saw this prolific synth artist perform a set in a cramped Berlin basement. After some fevered adjustments on his self-made modular set-up, he lay on his back, rolled a cigarette, and made smoke clouds that joined his ambient cumulus. That horizontal lean continues on Kurpark, though Schlienz may have given up the darts, considering this was produced on site at a day spa. Kurpark is full of bobbing and looping synth lines in various states of swell and fade, running water motifs, and nature sounds. Two radiant longform pieces (one with improbably soft German spoken word) curl out with the lullaby-like feel that’s a trademark of his delicate weave towards a sound that feels like the slow oncoming of stars at dusk.

Die Reise zur Monsalw​ä​sche - Läuten Der Seele: In this transfixing cross-stitching of sounds running both backwards and forwards, Christian Schoppik from the German trio Brannten Schnüre offers these two extended works that stretch and warp both The Caretaker’s decaying nostalgia and Babe, Terror’s digitally smeared apocalyptic visions. Fusing classical and choral music into elegantly distended collages with a trickster’s wink, Schoppik imagines a world where high society is crumbling and the fall is spectacularly epic and fittingly weird..

Dhara / Jaya – Maxton Hunter: Sitar music from California could well be all pomp and patchouli, but Maxton Hunter plays it out here like an unpretentious piece of breezy West Coast guitar work. Warm and feathery, Hunter’s tones resonate with the same open sense of yearning as any Tim Buckley song where the sun could claim a songwriter’s credit. Building on or stripping back the two originals to make a six-track EP only furthers the presence Hunter creates, which is understatedly captivating.

Rain Without Rain - Razen: Recorded in an abandoned tunnel somewhere in Düsseldorf, Razen have summoned spooked hymnals, cutting a space where primal post-punk pulse meets the icy embrace of European jazz. Leaking a manic but ritualistic energy as sounds drone, spill, and crackle out, their self-described electro-folkloristic intensity boils on an oscillator, a recorder, a guitar amp, and the surrounding reverberation. The tunnel was angry that day, my friends.

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