First Impressions 050: Reverent and reckless.

Initial vibes on new music

Hello,

Is it cynical to suggest that Ed Sheeran called his latest single Azizam for the searchability? Just last week, I was telling my drummer friend Alison that her band Smudge would get more visibility online if they were called Mudge. (now she’s in a band called Victoria). True, Ed Sheeran is easier to find online than gummies, but it’s the true dimensions of the narrative surrounding Azizam that need their own search party. Azizam means “my dear” or “my beloved” in Persian, and the song was reportedly influenced by its producer’s Persian heritage.

Team Sheeran would argue that Azizam introduces Persian music to a huge audience, and he has his champions in this regard. I’m wondering about the cultural exchange at play.

Released during Nowruz, the Persian New Year, it could also be bringing the Persian audience to Team Sheeran, with over 70 million Persian speakers worldwide, plus 50 million more speaking Persian as a second language. This creates a fog between inspiration and appropriation, compounded in the streaming era by the need for clicks. Sheeran’s last album was a failure by his standards, not reaching gold status in the UK.

Of course, reggae music has been a staple go-to for pop artists for many decades – a sound forged in collectivity and resistance that’s now a mainstream cool, seductive groove tailored for mass appeal. Dub is a production technique. What’s the IP on that?

And of course, much of the music you read about in this newsletter is decidedly non-homogenous, but I’d suggest in a positive, shared sense – marginal music where the exchange is found in the exploration of those margins. You see this in the various collaborations occurring in these spaces – a shared identity forged through sound. This is surely different at the mass level, where sales are key and the music doesn’t emerge from exploration and possibility.

“Finally, our culture gets to be the main character,” went one tweet. But if Ed is the true centre of proceedings here, the provenance of Persian culture is only unsettled, and its embrace is only transactional – until the next single.

Andrew
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OK, let’s go:

From Time To Time – Eggy: I saw Naarm (Melbourne)’s Eggy play last year. The members looked like they stepped out of a US 80s indie film – the awkward kids heading to prom in their fathers’ old trench coats. But, of course, they’re the most sensitive, talented, and righteous ones there, taking over the stage and rocking the house with the weird music they’ve been secretly cooking up. Eggy’s version would circle around a progged-up kind of chamber-pop, their sepia-toned tunes spun to spiral and groove but also crunch down, as if Stereolab had listened more to Lobby Lloyde and the Coloured Balls than Can. It is all so damn infectious as it motors and twists, yet simply always sweet and never pretentious. If you like your pop to be expertly contorted and full of giddy thrills, put all your eggs in this basket. (Yeah, I did that.)

Silent Dispatch – bambinodj: Scoped from Andrew Ryce’s excellent Futureproofing, where Andrew wrote about being gobsmacked by the sense of newness it invoked for him, bobbing well above the sea of club music in his purview. I can’t testify to the same, considering my limited reach there – I hadn’t even thought of it as club music – but it certainly is a glittering prize. Based in Berlin, bambinodj bends African music influences into his productions in a way similar to Aphex Twin’s approach with classical. The results aren’t outwardly spectacular, groundbreaking, or buzzing, but Silent Dispatch is ripe with elastic and inventive spirit. There’s a smooth 80s-style rush across Silent Dispatch, propelling its synthesised, syncopated guitar lines with lithe percussion and twinkling constellations of melody across mirrorball disco feels, electro-funk thrust, and celestial synth trills. Special shoutout to the slow dance of Jus Pull Up for putting a futuristic tilt on the not-so-humble hair ballad. Definitely the spongiest production I’ve heard this year.

New World, Lonely Ride - Michael Grigoni * Pan•American: Pan*American's The Patience Fader from 2022 suspended Americana's signature long, languid guitar glide into a mosaic of double meanings, where warmth became an existential sensation and its darker corners served as an omen to hope. With pedal steel and lap steel player Michael Grigoni (while Nelson handles guitar, mandolin, and synth), New World, Lonely Ride is more earthbound in its open-plain drift. However, these pieces could also lace the night sky. Though their impressionistic vision is at the fore, Nelson and Grigoni play together with a gentility that mirrors the unadorned spirit of country music – its humility and its reach for renewal - unlike any of their other ventures. It’s as if both decided that now’s not the time for loping along through the cosmos. This is music for staying close, cradled, and grounded to where you are.

Gitarra Onomatopeikoa II - Joseba Irazoki: Andrew Tuttle sent me a text on Monday with a link: “So, I realised how I wanted my abandoned solo banjo to sound . . . fortunately someone did it for me on guitar.” Yes, Basque guitarist Joseba Irazoki can cut a starkly lone sound and project solace like sunshine cracking across an empty room. However, Irazoki’s style also has an abstracted sense of whimsy and straight-up mirth making across the expanse of these solo improvisations. Imagine classic country-blues guitar played for wow and flutter feels, maybe with hints of static here and there and some post-punk dread. Irazoki leads a merry dance across rugged terrain with a skittish energy that wins over any pursuit for perfection. It’s no surprise to see Raphael Rogiński appear - both share an approach to tradition both reverent and reckless. Irazoki arrives at a meeting point between the two, scratching whatever itch happens to tickle his soul.

Did You Enjoy Your Time Here . . .? – PremRock: SharpKnel’s Nobody Leaving Here was one of hip-hop’s best in 2024, abstracting today’s urban horrors into an apocalyptic vision through a surreal montage of cut-and-paste beat collages that moved like an expertly staged theatre production. It was a balancing act pulled off with bone-rattling precision, guided by the sharp call-and-response flow of the duo’s PremRock and Curly Castro. PremRock doesn’t aim to maintain that expanse on his new solo venture, but he does keep the drama and twists high on this tight, soulful set. Sitting somewhere between classic boom-bap and Wu-Tang’s filmic noir, PremRock scrapes deep into the recesses of his thoughtlines and keeps his eyes wide open to light up the dark side in defiance of the constant state of disconnect that keeps us from bonding with anything real. (“It’s not my pleasure to report, I write what I see”) Perhaps one of the track titles sums it up best: Love Is A Battlefield Simulation. With help from a cast of cool collaborators in the orbit of billy woods’ BackwoodzStudioz label (including woods himself), to whom this territory is daily protein, it’s another stirring addition to modern hip-hop’s most compelling collective.

Silence Is Priceless – Helen Island: There’s a frantic edge to Helen Island’s fractured Euro-pop, smudging any slick pretence towards something far more ruddy and DIY. This new release plunges into a lush melodrama in constant disintegration. Synth loops rise and fall like squeals of yearning, clotted digital piano melodies buoy a sensual vocal that’s either sped-up or screwed, and rhythms tense and clatter. In its unsettling noir and heightened state, the emotional edge is sharper than the blur of its parts.

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