First Impressions 041: Clubterfuge, worldbuilding breakbeat, cartoon cloud sounds, sci-fi glazing and more.

Initial vibes on new music

Hello,

Nothing much here in this space from me this week, except a request that you make it right down to the bottom where you’ll find the latest from Longform Editions. We’re thrilled to end the year with works from artists in new configurations and new ventures.

I hope you’re all feeling the wind-down towards the end of the year and some rest and repair awaits. The last First Impressions for this year weill be next week or the week after. I really appreicate everyone’s reading time and correspondence!

Andrew

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OK, let’s go:

Meaning’s Edge – Djrum: I want to imagine this is what Don Cherry would be doing if he dove into breakbeat, adding it to his list of fascinations and deep explorations. Felix Manuel’s use of flutes and shakuhachi in this cracking EP of slithery, thumping productions might make this seem like an easy grab (he is a student of ethnomusicology; Cherry learned by rote), but it’s not a stretch to suggest that Manuel’s approach mirrors Cherry’s in the elastic tension of rhythmic freefall that never snaps. Riding an abandon equal parts free jazz and jungle, Meaning’s Edge is supremely dub-wise, reverberating with the menace and urgency of an alarm sounding well into the dark of night. Calibrating the elements into a seamless set of thrillseekers, Manuel is a worldbuilder worth waiting for.

Scanner’s Plateau – King Softy: Ambient in '90s trip-hop productions was largely deployed to fizzle out a track from its high-end dynamics, though it’s no bit part for Berlin-based New Zealander King Softy, aka Amos Turner. Scanner’s Plateau strips its soul and hip-hop mapping for a muggy space of breaks, house, and techno mechanisms, cut through with swarming textures that move with dubby drift and sci-fi glazing. Swelling like a dream rising into bodily consciousness, Scanner’s Plateau's production style is what I’m calling 'clubterfuge.' Maybe Drew Daniel from Matmos can help me create a new movement.

Halki pilvien -Tomutonttu: Roughly translated from Finnish as "trough through the clouds," this latest excursion into playful digital psychedelia from the singular Jan Anderzén marks a gentler turn towards slow dissolve. These airy, whimsical pieces are Anderzén’s synthesized reactions to cloud patterns—liquid and twinkling, yet subject to his ongoing cartoonish delight in the properties of sound and movement. The concept suits his fluttering compositional style, both hypnotic and jolting, as well as sensitive, sweet, and weird all at once. Once again, Anderzén’s view of the world around us is a trip of open clarity, singularly altered.

Lovely Midget – Lovely Midget: The scant recorded catalogue of New Zealand’s Rachel Shearer hasn’t given her the same profile as her native noise contemporaries, like The Dead C, though her work as Lovely Midget echoes with the same crackle and buzz within its tightly held lo-fi realm. Sweden’s Discreet Music has plucked this 2000 release for reissue, processing bass, guitar, and keyboards into black holes of throbbing sludge, scraped to find crevices to fill. Grouper, a well-known NZ indie acolyte, may well have encountered this at some point. In contrast, Lovely Midget never approaches the form of a conventional song, though Shearer’s pieces find a glow in the murk to form her hypnotic void.

Mossed Capable Of Being Observant - Angel R: Florian TM Zeisig popped up earlier this year with a new alias, Angel R, to rework Alliyah Enyo's unmoored tape-loop and voice compositions. Angel R now returns with their own loop-based work, each piece a warm sensation cast in a static hold, only to be prised apart by jagged, grainy incursions and slugs of clattering percussion. These energy flashes can hit the flow of currents he creates are not quite a knife-in-socket effect, more the lingering threat of it. Just as with his reconstitution of Enya's Watermark, Zeisig's way is to refuse to believe in placid surfaces, but rather treat them as an illusion to slowly, and wholly, shatter.

Chiffons d'azur - Lamasz & Thme: This duo of Pier-Luc Tremblay (Lamasz) and Théo Martin (Thme) offer a short work of intimate vignettes that feel both windswept and sepia-toned in their pensive, melancholic gaze. Content to sway in its foggy shading, Chiffons d’azure comfortably lingers in a drone field expertly laid by the likes of Stars of the Lid, particularly in its wistful aim of going nowhere being an enchanting proposition. At this point, it’s a nostalgia piece for a fertile period of softly summoned flux.

Longform Editions 41 came out yesterday! Listen to these amazing works and support the artists who produced them:

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