First Impressions 054: Life's a glitch.

Initial vibes on new music

Hello,

It is getting late on the Sunday evening of a long weekend. On nights like these, when my muscle memory still feigns impending responsibility (work on Monday), I tend to do very little - most of that in small increments in which my mind wanders. In this strange confluence of non-events, I have just consecutively watched videos for the new Sabrina Carpenter song Manchild (it’s no Espresso, she’s been Antonoffed) and the new video for Talking Heads’ Psycho Killer, a song now 50 years old, with Saoirse Ronan chewing up the scenery. Both videos are a steady stream of jump-cut sensations, each with its own sense of the surreal. Carpenter goes through a series of dud hitchhiking rides with men that keep getting stranger, while in Psycho Killer, Ronan bursts out in flurries of facial tics and bodily contortions in response to being dudded by daily routine.

It struck me that in both videos — for songs released 50 years apart — female agency in absurd situations is depicted as performative, cracking open behavioural norms as a way toward something more genuine. While the scenarios differ — Carpenter’s is comical, Ronan’s mordantly grim — and sure, these videos are highly stylised, but we are also meant to connect with them in some way, and the idea of kicking against the pricks, authenticity, survival might just be the throughline for both. Which is more real for today?

It really is time for bed. Have a great week.

Andrew

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OK, let’s go:

Quilted Lament – claire rouay & Gretchen Korsmo: Longtime friends and first-time collaborators, what claire rousay and Gretchen Korsmo share is an attraction to raw, sparse sounds adrift in the everyday, turned warm and intimate in their vision. Their elusive choices from the field are magnetic — a random pulse that tingles in its expert placement - while guitar and piano chords anchor everything in a wistful melancholy, somewhere between emo and post-rock. When their voices come together in harmony, it feels like they’re singing to the sounds themselves, as a mother might to a baby, to make them feel loved. That’s also to say these pieces are never wilfully strange despite their configuration - theirs is a kind of DIY experimentalism forged in tenderness, which makes the title feel especially fitting. rousay has long been open about her internal struggles, recently posting online that she is one year sober. I wonder if her recent work and choice of collaborators reflect a stage of healing. If so, I look forward to how she continues to map that liberation into sound.

Faith – Purelink: Purelink upends the dub-techno template on Faith by making an album full of suspended, drawn-out moods you’d typically hear on a closer. It’s one big comedown, a downward arc of golden synth ripples and beats that thrum over throb until Circle of Dust arrives, exuding rhythm like steam escaping from a manhole at night. Unlike their oft-mentioned forebears, Vladislav Delay, Pole, Oval to name a few, there are clicks but no cuts, no transmission glitches to remind you of their laptop energy. When poet Angela Nonaj and Loraine James offer voice and text, they confirm the fragility secreted deeply within Faith, bypassing crystalline digital ecstasy to serve as its emotional current.

Obscure Blood & Love – Imryll: Taiwan artist Imryll has shared that Obscure Blood & Love was borne of a difficult and deeply lonely time in her life. The fast roll of her digital synthesis - rumbling, spattering textures - moves like a mind cracking under the frenetic pace of detail it can never fully grasp. Conversely, Imryll uses her voice like sunlight breaking through the audio mulch, creating a humid, hot mess of vocal apparitions and minimal piano melodies that rise above the disquiet. Its pulse and poise come together as oppositional forces, embracing as one. Life’s a glitch.

Stone Mineral Metal Memory Metaphor - Houser : Weathers: Wyche: A first time outing for this trio, bearing two longform gifts from a day of impromptu jams. The reverberating tone in Wyche’s sparse guitar play is a ballast for the overall upwards swirl of Weathers’ electric piano, with its fluttering cascade of notes, and Houser’s trumpet, set on delay, emerging from cloudy and warm beginnings into slow-burning squalls. The trio never settle, and the effect is like configuring post-rock cues into eddies of free improvisation — drifting toward imaginary netherlands.

Among Lunar Glaciers – Spectrical: Timothy Allen treats the natural environment and otherworldly possibilities as the same space. It’s there in the title of the Perceptual Tapes founder’s new solo offering, Among Lunar Glaciers. Accordingly, his approach to drone is both dissonant and dreamy, a continual surge towards somewhere never quite reached. By processing acoustic guitar, violin, and analogue noise for these pieces, Spectrical carries an unmistakable frosty tenor, like the bite of wind that laps around us in winter, but here tapped with an ominous beauty long associated with Fennesz. Lunar Glaciers slips between the vastness of imagined oceans and the night sky to imagine new spaces for stillness.

fig tree long walk 6am - felt body: Another Zen diagram between acoustic hushfaring and digital frippery boosting the case for noughties laptop revisionism, Naarm (Melbourne) artist Hunter Reyne is content to let their work wander. That they do so with cradling touch is the charm in its idling – the sound of someone feeling their way around, tender in their regard for the course their field recordings take. And it’s those field recordings that carry the particular drift of Reyne’s piano and guitar notes, responding to the oncoming of a perfectly aimless day that may unfold to mean more than first thought.

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