First Impressions 049: Conscious existence in the digital age.

Initial vibes on new music

Hello,

Just music this week—but it’s never just music, right? There’s a really great set of listening here. I hope something finds you where you need to be.

Andrew
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OK, let’s go:

no floor - more eaze & claire rousay: Knowing that the latest work from this pairing stems, in part, from a shared love of Stars of The Lid is a sweet bit of intel for the wide-open spaces it so wonderfully evokes. While more eaze has explored the atmospheric expanse where American minimalism forms the foundation for a hypnotic spin on Americana, with rousay, she enacts something more like intrusion than fusion. no floor cuts into a vision of a fabled America, with the pair’s own understandings and experiences of their homeland. Perhaps that’s finding signs of independent life in new-age thrift store cassettes, the fizz of technology, and random urban sounds. String sounds and pedal steel unfurl like velvet curtains, giving way to glitch ruptures, soft piano steps, and urgent electronic undercurrents. This brilliant set is a fevered meditation on living inside your head as much as the outside world – conscious existence in the digital age.

Flora – Hiroshi Yoshimura: Now highly storied and romanticised, Hiroshi Yoshimura’s music—call it ‘environmental,’ ‘ambient,’ or ‘new age’—has a simplicity that sparked a long chain of imitators who could only approximate its wistful cheerfulness and the deep joy in his touch. Flora is one of his more outwardly lavish works. It brings to mind the pastoral winsomeness of Virginia Astley’s synth-pop albums, where the biggest influence may have been the breeze of a spring day and its freeing effects. In the liner notes, Junichi Konuma says its intention was to create a kind of drift that courses through you, like the scent of a small flower. Precious, yes, but Yoshimura turns Flora into a perpetual motion of intimate moments to be magnified and savoured. And when, in our current real-time, such possibilities feel all too fleeting, Flora becomes a delicate, sumptuous charm.

Gift Songs - Jefre Cantu-Ledesma: This is an album with a vision that makes no demands. Like the title suggests, it is all about offering, or surrender. That ideal frames The Milky Sea, the epic opener where micro-level interactions make a macro-level lush tapestry. Shifts are gently found, not urged, with each player - Omer Shemesh (piano), Joseph Weiss (bass), Clarice Jensen (cello), and Booker Stardrum (percussion) - creating a hanging presence that feels like a protective canopy. Ledesma cites falling deeply into the possibilities of piano and percussion in this setting, and to that end, a kinship with The Necks is a pleasant happenstance. A following trio of shorter pieces for piano and chaplain - an instrument often called a field organ that has the drone-like quality of a harmonium - are softly solemn, quietly echoing both the rigour of Indian devotional music and the agency of chance. In the final River That Flows Two Ways, long, winding tones drawn from Hammond B3 and pump organ suggest that Ledesma’s work is a search for grace and riding on its flow.

A Cooler World – Strategy: Paul Dickow has consistently intersected ambient, dub, and techno in his long-running Strategy project, making not so much a melting pot as a throbbing state of dissolve. Each recording is a tightrope walk of sorts, mostly capturing solitary takes into a single two-channel file. Even with A Cooler World approaching stillness more than typical Strategy releases, it’s that edge of tension that Dickow loves to ride with his instincts, magnified by using one old, very limited keyboard sampler to produce it. These pieces tilt ever so slightly towards vertigo, their slipstream of serenity in a slow crumble, like old magnetic tape. Even at this loping pace, A Cooler World has enough grain going to rupture the meditative reach it has at surface level. And for Dickow, that’s perfectly chill.

Up Late With – Dumbells - I love how guitar pop these days can be a fantasy amalgam of past glories but remain a raw thrill of tight invention. Sydney’s Dumbells are a triumph of the imagination to both ends, filtering the soulful strains of Royal Headache through the psychedelic, spiky pop essence of The Soft Boys. High on souped up jangle and pushed out with a punk gut-punch, Dumbells’ songs are a blast of smarts, swagger and on the right side of arch. Their jumpstart energy may be hard to top on this front, this year.

Defiant Life - Vijay Iyer, Wadada Leo Smith: The second duo recording from trumpeter Smith and Iyer (keys, electronics) was, in Iyer’s words, “conditioned by our ongoing sorrow and outrage over the past year’s cruelties, but also by our faith in human possibility.” I've always found the particular beauty in Smith’s sound to come from its unwavering spirit. Here, it’s mournful, yet its steely tone resonates with a fortitude that has defined the deeply human essence of his work for decades. Iyer is a brilliant foil—his keys and electronics gently weaving around Smith with shifting presence, moving from more muted emissions of static and microdrone to the starry twinkle of his Fender Rhodes and lilting piano notes. Defiant Life feels more like a discharge than a performance, though it’s tempered by the wellspring of space and patience the pair give each other in its healing course. It serves as a reminder that ongoing dialogue is a means to arrive somewhere new.

https://ecmrecords.com/product/defiant-life-vijay-iyer-wadada-leo-smith/

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