First Impressions 047: It’s often beautiful inside this black hole.

Initial vibes on new music

Hello,

Nothing here to say except new billy woods single.

That is all.

Andrew
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OK, let’s go:

Moving Through Light - Daniel Bachman: Daniel Bachman’s evolution in approach over his last few albums is marked by a shift in his consciousness – and his conscience, too. Bachman spent considerable time exploring the weight of heritage in his early albums, showcasing exquisite fingerstyle guitar. American history was entangled in the notes and chords, as were notions of authenticity. Like those early works, Moving Through Light is the sound of one guitar. Bachman describes it as a fingerstyle guitar record, but it’s a fingerstyle guitar record that represents the current state of America: strangled, screaming, and unable to let go of its past. That past here manifests as a haunting presence leaking into the present, with Bachman playing it out through apocalyptic blasts. His guitar is dissected into spluttering glitches, stretched to looming drones, and mulched into sodden rhythmic thumps. When he shifts from jump-cuts and collage back to finger sliding, it feels like a sound striving to escape its muggy confines. If you follow Bachman online, you’ll see that he is a committed student of local history in his home state of Virginia, with a deep interest in preserving the folk songs that document it. I see this album as an extension of that work, expressing the tension between preserving tradition and confronting the realities of contemporary America.

Pink Must – Pink Must: If you’ve ever heard the crisp, inventive pop tilt Wendy & Lisa gave to Prince and The Revolution, along with their duo works (or even think The Ballad of Dorothy Parker is the best Prince song ever), miss the no-studio, candlelit era of early Elliott Smith, or think it’s sad that autotune came too late for the post-rock era – and all of the above needed more lo-fi beats – well, do Pink Must have the record for you. There are a lot of vibes to saddle with on this debut album from More Eaze and Lynn Avery, contained in a cosy bedroom vortex of top-tier imagination and pop music reverence. I’m here for all of them. Pink Must’s songs swing low but ride high on the pair’s shared thrill for the possibilities of a song, rendered here with a warmth that glows from their instincts in how it all holds together. It also has the kind of intimacy lost in indie pop over time, thanks to technology and fragmented music communities. So good.

Treadwater Fury - Poppy H: I’ve never quite put a pin on it, but I’ve always heard a stoic sort of composure across much British music. I’m thinking of Harold Budd, Penguin Café Orchestra, The Durutti Column - even somewhere in the Cocteau Twins’ emotional ballast. There’s a dignity in these artists that comes from not giving too much away, while still tapping into feeling as a kind of air to breathe, not something laden with the baggage of sentiment. The music of Poppy H emanates from this curious strain that’s hard to get right, across a growing catalogue of works patchworking field recordings and instrumentation recorded on an iPhone. This latest is his clearest statement yet, not just for the crisp distillation of its parts, but in removing the smoggy pallor from his sound, its tender sense of solitude is stark and more devastating. Treadwater Fury is like parlour music for bedsits. As H moves from gentle, acoustic ruminations that seem as though they could crumble at the beep of a car horn or dog barking, to electric pieces that reverberate with creaking echoes, Treadwater Fury captures a vulnerability folding in on itself, to emerge reaching out for something, anything, always.

Greyhound Days - Patrick Shiroishi & Piotr Kurek: This is a lovely pairing that reflects the duo’s shared intuition for reconfiguring the coolly familiar into idiosyncratic mosaics of sound, infused with a sense of new wonder and warmth. With deep attention to the moment and not their individual range, Shiroishi and Kurek exchanged ideas for each other to improvise from, continuing like this for a couple of weeks. Both allow the fluttering qualities of their compositional style time to roam and respond in kind to the breezy immediacy rising from the interplay of Shiroishi’s saxophone and the vibes-like feel of Kurek’s digital piano. Kurek’s interest in revisiting trained classical voice as texture has a faint presence, as does some sprightly microtonal tinkering, cast with a gentle whimsy that never feels like new tricks in the mix.

Speaker Rotations – Nickolas Mohanna: Nickolas Mohanna has been on my radar for a long time, having released two fine works on the Preservation label. Mohanna’s gift lies in assembling restless sonic patterns – often influenced by the frantic sensory buzz of his New York base – shifting from an unnerving, existential flux to more ruminative states. Speaker Rotations revolves around guitar, piano, and trombone, with sparse percussion adding a tingling edge. Mohanna transforms these pieces (which function continuously as one) from whirlpools of dissonance swirling with feedback into something closer to a ragged jam band riffing on The Necks’ steady course of slow tonal shifts and coalesced urgency. It’s often beautiful inside this black hole.

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