First Impressions 040: Full moon resting, folding universes, milk baths, sketch 'n flex funk and more.

Initial vibes on new music

Hello,

Wouldn't it be more fitting if Drake and Kendrick Lamar had a fencing duel? These two are expanding the masculine archetype as much as Fitzgerald and Hemingway did. Inching forward with ideas, creativity, and influence seems stifled by the endless loop of history, where at the highest level, nothing has changed. It is endlessly tiresome.
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OK, let’s go:

Phantasy & Reality – Lynn Avery & Cole Pulice: Lynn Avery tweeted thusly on her latest collaboration with Cole Pulice: "Ye olde mirror glade, sitting by the bonfire, watching the clouds pass over the full moon, resting." Whatever the jest, I get the gist. All those pursuits are surely best shared, and for me, this record is one of togetherness. Working grand piano, wind synth, saxophone, clarinet, field recordings with the delicate reverence of a glassblower into puffs and swirls of abstract shapes and anchoring melodies, the hues lent by upright bass and trumpet features trace a kind of jazz melancholy as a defining presence — the comfort of pressing the soul into a quiet state of longing. There’s also a similar simpatico to Harold Budd and Brian Eno, though Eno was still in study mode with his collaborators and Avery and Pulice have well ripened into one gracefully warm thing.

Trellis - Lifted: Lifted’s music is both a tightrope walk and trance vision. While previous albums saw jazz and techno massaged and mulched into thrillingly percolated discombobulations, Trellis shakes and rattles with an uneasy roll, cracking open the post-rock template and cooking it into a charred, melting husk. Crisp with low-key guitar melodies weaving through dub corridors, crashing rhythm clusters, and a kind of ravaged ambience, the pair of Matt Papich and Max D manipulate their sounds through CD-Js to suggest a universe of sound folding in on itself. Trellis is the sound of a higher dimension kept low to the ground.

Recollection – Earthen Sea: I’ve read plenty about how this latest offering from the project for Jacob Long stemmed from a long snuggle with the ECM back-catalogue. I’m curious which works particularly resonated with Long for Recollection, which, for all its hum and swing, feels like a solitude state rather than the label’s signature collective energy. Perhaps Long has discovered that ECM listening is generally best done alone, and that’s the reach he seeks. Recollection feels smaller against the vast fields of prior albums, though never slight; its sparse, starry, jazz-slung loops are hemmed by gorgeous, elastic bass bobbing—tickled with rippling nuance to hover somewhere between doomy and dreamy. In the space he creates, Long shows another ECM trait he must have picked up: many of their records just hang with a feeling you can’t immediately locate but are happily saturated in.

Naya - Dawuna: With the longest song clocking in at just over three minutes, Naya feels like a case of sketch n’ flex – but what a flex. Prince is an easy namedrop here in the way Dawuna’s (Ian Mugwera) funk can slink low and loose but shine with light. Though with its four-track, freeform trawl through funk, soul and gospel with both abandon and respect, Sly Stone at the point of feeling clapped out by peace, love and harmony but still wanting to live the dream has to be a touchstone and wellspring. (there’s also a distinctive nod to Paul McCartney’s lo-fi solo albums and their spongy melodies on Miss Thang) May he never scrub up.

VL_Stay – Fan Club Orchestra: This Belgian group is content to roll out slowly, having gone unsighted since 2013, though active since the '90s. That spaced-out timeline also checks out on VL_Stay, a zone of permanent dawn comedowns where guitar, bass, and trumpet are warmly processed but coolly delivered. It’s exquisitely buzzed, and when real-time playing from each member slides under its post-rave fog, carefully whittled elements of Americana and Euro-jazz fusion form part of its treacle flow.

Strange Meridians – upsammy: This latest from Dutch producer Thessa Torsing rests close to the endlessly airy climes of Hiroshi Yoshimura’s work - ambient music that reflects the environment as a living organism. So many adjectives don’t land in the space she creates. Just when you think it’s bouncing or bubbling, it’s not. Fluttering or rippling? Not quite, but it’s not exactly still, so what is it? It’s impossibly soft, yet precise in effect for any sense of waft or wobble. Then, techno elements are reduced to shimmers of suggestion, until they’re not, bumping up proceedings with some extra kick, if only for a short time. I feel like a milk bath now.

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