First Impressions 046: Every hallucination has a heart.
Initial vibes on new music
Hello,
I’ve had a lot of questions around the closure of Longform Editons, so I wanted to share links to two comprehensive conversations I had with two excellent people with excellent Substacks: here’s one from Philip Sherburne’s Futurism Restated. It appears to now have moved to subscriber-only but there is a free trial option. The most recent comes from former Resident Advisor editor Andrew Ryce’s Futureproofing (so much futuring!), which also houses a great conversation with Room40’s Lawrence English. While it certainly was an odd feeling to try and capture a total sum of the values around LE and have them reflected back to me in a testimonial-like fashion, what it made me think about the existence of Substacks as a discursive space free from demands, if you don’t count requests for financial patronage. (they are online newsleters, really, but Substack has become their Uber) There is clearly a passion similar to the energy of volunteers in the community radio network I am working with here in Australia. However, unlike the critical mass of people you’ll find as the lifeblood of a community radio station, Substack newsletters miss the strength of collectivity, which, right now, the arts needs. Currently, 5.2 million people tune in to community radio in Australia each week, with a strong peercentage citing music discovery as a main reason to do so. There are nearly 450 community radio stations in Australia. Many share content and band together for initiatives to enhance their presence as a cultural or information hub in their local area. The power of the network, if you like. There are way more Substacks - over 50,000. People who already have a huge following are creating Substacks. The media companies who house them are cashing in: the top 10 Substack publishers together earn over $US40 million annually, largely from news and politics based content. It’s gone quite a distance from a disruptive tech start up. Can Substack land in any remotely similar way for music? Will music writers who have turned to Substack, hoping also for some recompense for their work where other avenues have dried up, get their slice? Can it be the space for music enthusiasm that grows into something vital and valuable for artists and audiences alike? Discovering a Substack that doesn’t speak to the major topics of the day with people who have leapt from one organising marketplace to another may be a litle like discovering a piece of music you might love - a combination of luck, timing and knowing where to hone in. In other words, there are a lot of variables before you hit that perfect beat. It’s a curious economy to step imto.
Just yesterday, Substack’s Catherine Valentine said in Newsweek: "The internet used to feel like a community. Instagram used to feel like a community. Facebook, especially group chats, used to feel like a community. Twitter - God! My best friends are on Twitter. I DM'ed my husband on Twitter after I met him in person the first time. It was a huge part of our love story. But that community, there's no place it exists except for Substack right now.” Catherine Valentine is Substack’s head of politics. The article also mentions Substack drives subscriber traffic through its “internal recommendation engine”. Sound familiar? The power of the network, indeed.
Thoughts welcome!
Andrew
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OK, let’s go:
Ghost/Spirit – Jules Reidy: Jules Reidy’s work is often marked by rupture, pricking at any dreamscape vision of their music with sharp textural shifts. Their first foray into song on this album is a logical progression for someone preoccupied with the push and pull of raw emotion and hyperreality. Reidy’s songs reflect the split layout of the title and the multilayered, fractured nature of presence and connection, weaving a complex tapestry akin to the curious beauty found in the hypnotic crash of sea waves. Within the bristle of Reidy’s approach - fingerstyle guitar, synth buzz and clank, and autotune vocals - lies the yearning of traditional folk, pop’s axis of communion and loneliness, and an experimentalist’s bottling of discordant states. Every hallucination has a heart, and Reidy has tapped into the throughline.
The Rush – J. WLSN: Dig if you will, the picture of the experimental artist as interloper. The Rush feels somewhat shrouded and covert—though perhaps that’s just the backstory talking. The source recordings for the Eora (Sydney) artist’s latest come from playing a high-end piano in a cavernous, underground space, placed there for a pop star’s artfully curated performances. The tenor of these pieces is both suitably tentative and subtly defiant. Notes hang with the same foggy resolve as the sepia blur of Andrew Chalk or The Caretaker, though WLSN undercuts them with a kind of time-lapsed drone-glitch energy and steely insistency, buoying them from their gravitational, quicksand pull towards astral planes. If time was a factor for WLSN in starting The Rush, the patience he found to capture its heightened, meditative space is its real point of genesis.
Flam: Gunn-Truscinski Duo: If you’ve listened to this pair’s recordings from the beginning, you might notice the tone continues to dial down in notches. More recently, Gunn has sought to crack his guitar playing open, seeking avenues away from the tightly carved, sun-dappled singer-songwriter style of his work with Matador. Still, no matter how loose or dark he gets, he can’t help but sound exquisite. With drummer Truscinski, he’s given space to roam, adding a fizzing presence to echo Gunn’s playing, together resembling not so much a slow burn as breathing on embers. They bring the noise around the halfway mark (the aptly-titled Conviction), but it’s a short-lived fit of fury. There’s a bit of a knees-up on Marine Place, but the final piece, For Ika, feels like the most glowing mark of quiet elation and revelation that defines the whole set.
Uncanny -Theodore Cale Schafer: claire rousay once said Theodore Cale Schafer’s music "exists without demands and keeps an open invitation". Schaefer has a gift for great emotional pull in his work without giving too much away. First committed to a small run of tapes, we have two 30 minute pieces here, layering cello, guitar and synth with the slow, precise measure of a repetitive drill. As ever, Theodore is manifestly patient in extracting his depth of field. I think weight of time is a weight of mind for Theodore’s compositions with music so foundationally tactile and abstract – just like his pal claire – but here distilled towards something approaching classic minimalism.
Little Lock – J: The Naarm (Melbourne) multi-disciplinary publisher begins 2025 with a work from its founder. It’s a lovely rendering of low-key, microtonal ambient fostering a kind of internal pastoralism with its airy, intimate way. There’s a spongy tenderness here that never quite feels fragile. Rather, this short collection feels somewhat stately – a stoic ode to the power of quiet.
Kroppskännedom - Kroppskännedom: The first solo work from this mainstay of Swedish experimental music constant distils his time in minimalist rock, tape and synth outfits into simmering hypnotic mantras. At some points, it’s as if Malm has mapped a sketchy outline of The Velvet Underground’s dronier side onto the psychedelic tilt of the New Weird America belt from the early 2000s, lurching forward with a lo-fi filter and primal pulse. Malm has his work inhabit a peculiarly clammy air, filled with noise and static to tip it into a space both unsettling and compelling.
And, Longform Editions released one final surprise work, a mammoth piece from Angel Bat Dawid:
Thanks for reading, and listening.
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Andrew Khedoori is the curator of Longform Editions.
First Impressions visual by Mark Gowing.