First Impressions 053: Esoteric brutalism.

Initial vibes on new music

Hello,

It’s all a bit stark and dark this week, with a few bright spots, which feels like the world’s norm at present. This poem by Tarfia Faizullah, Wait Until It Grows Roots, landed in my inbox as I was reflecting on this week’s listening, and it seemed right to place it here, too:

The plant trimming requires no
less than its water to be changed weekly. I
ask my friend who gifted it to me: when will
I be able to transfer it into soil? She has never
told me anything but the truth. I don’t shut
the window blinds now; my Plant-Friend loves the
sun too much. I’ve been leaving the doors
open too; the spirits flit more freely now. Yes, of
course I’m afraid of death, but no less so my
own life. A friend can bring you back to sweeter senses.

Andrew

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OK, let’s go:

GOLLIWOG - billy woods: Home is where the horrors are. After drawing cartoon existentialism from the vagaries of touring and travel with Maps, billy woods’ GOLLIWOG moves beyond Maps’ relative insularity into reality’s icy chill. Utilising a host of previous collaborators, each track becomes an epic act contributing to a splintering whole of grotesquerie. Most productions shift the Bomb Squad’s high-pitched urgency for Public Enemy down to a murkier kind of menace, anchored by opening lines like “Sometimes it’s all you can do not to do it like Sylvia Plath,” deepening the tone beyond greyscale. The vibe dives into the heightened drama of post-war radio play dialogue and crumpled Depression-era jazz. Woods trawls the corners of history and the present with the obsessive relentlessness of an internet doomscroller though far from dispassionate — this bleakly rendered rap leaves no space for rapid-fire energy to drown out truthtelling curdling with dread. Liberation is out of reach in these tales, and together we must share in the oppression: “Scarecrow in a field, watching the spectacle / It's still no dessert ’til you finish your vegetables.”

Land’s End Eternal – Cole Pulice: Cole Pulice’s If I Don’t See You In The Future, I’ll See You In the Pasture was one of the Longform Editions pieces I turned to on a needs basis. There are times where it just strikes me that its blanketing, slow-building charge towards absolute, soul-freeing release can be the only way forward. I sometimes think Cole’s music is perfect when you feel neither here nor there, swaying you back into full being from that unnameable, abstracted feeling. Land’s End Eternal is both wide-open and close comfort, rich in space and dimension. The saxophone is an instrument that can take the lead from the first note blown, yet the pull of Cole’s playing is gentler, with long, pillowy streams of notes that echo movement not just as motion, but as force, energy, and sustaining essence. Their adding of guitar and piano across these pieces enhances their earthy resonance with glints of the magical, like how the sun sparks across a river. This is grounding music, buoyed by space to dream.

I Can Hear The Grass Grow – Celestial: This UK duo have kept things stark and simple across three releases now, their guitar and synth compositions carrying precision and presence in equal measure. The pace on I Can Hear The Grass Grow is disarmingly ambling – its gentle pastoral folk guitar lines looped to linger, often rendered radiant by milky synths that buoy the warm rise of each piece toward an endlessly dawning light. It could just as easily score the thaw of a UK winter, and I’d be lying if I didn’t picture large, burning candles, wax strands dripping in cool repose. Celestial let me embrace those visions without guilt or irony. They even get away with taking one of the most overused terms in new age, kosmische, or any wider circles of aural alchemy as their band name because they wear it very well.

Illusory Truths - Leyden Jars: The duo of Natalie Williams and Mark Courtney inhabit that curious thread of British music where the industrial treads on its strain of pastoralism, and as Leyden Jars, play it out for all its ongoing mystery. There are no clear lines on Illusory Truths – perhaps that’s where the title comes from – rather the pair capture the real-time thrill of sound exploration with fizzingly wayward elements of electro-acoustic collaging backed by cracked, skeletal dub clatter. Especially when Williams’ gorgeously spooked vocal drapes over it all, at times I think of Broadcast unanchored by pop melody as Leyden Jars awaken unconscious realms, eking out magical realism from banal, everyday fragments cast into slippery dissolve.

El Sol de los Muertos - Concepción Huerta: Working with electronics and tape manipulation, Mexico’s Concepción Huerta has the weight of history bearing down on her music. Her approach to drone here is to manifest its often ominous tones by invoking sorrow and resilience as a clash of forces. It makes for the seething, signature energy of this new release. Seeing the Earth to be in constant rupture has been foundational for Huerta, and on El Sol de los Muertos she aligns this vision with the work of Eduardo Galeano, a writer whose Open Veins of Latin America documented the pillaging of Latin America’s natural riches that ravaged the region and its people. El Sol de los Muertos’ urgency is also dislocating, in what feels like a whooping clarion call for full evacuation from the lingering burdens of the past.

Low Endings – Devin Sarno: Devin Sarno is a Los Angeles-based artist whose varied music career includes bass work with Thurston Moore, Carla Bozulich and Mike Watt, artists whose intensity and presence he matches in his own right. Low Endings’ relatively short timespan is upended by its cavernous and cinematic reach, collapsing into black holes of gravelled sonics as if Kevin Drumm had cracked open the tense beauty of Sakamoto, Noto and Dessner’s score for The Revenant and reshaped it through his own esoteric brutalism. It is as unsettling as it is compelling: no looking away from the dark, here.

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