You probably realised this long ago, but the idea of people who write about music being some sort of omniscient analysts of the form is absurd. Theyโre rarely even that well placed to say their piece really, just sharp-elbowed / unjustifiably self-confident and know the important descriptive differences between โโฆin a blenderโ, โโฆon acidโ and โโฆfalling down a flight of stairsโ. Thatโs why Iโm here, anyway, but Iโm writing about Unrecognisable, Alina Astrovaโs latest LP as Lolina, because its watery worldbuilding hip-pop has wormed into my brain in the nicest way.
You might know Lolina as Inga Copeland and, with Dean Blunt, half of Hype Williams, which accounts for a fair-sized body of work over 15 years. I havenโt heard most of it, despite being in favour of Astrovaโs inscrutable prankster steez and unfiltered rhythm-stacking โ just too much stuff out there to hear everything, right. (This album has actually been online since spring, with a September vinyl release via the artistโs own label Relaxin.) I still believe myself to have shit-chatting authority in this instance, though.
Unrecognisable is a concept album, whose concept would be lost on me if it hadnโt been explained in writing (like nearly all concept albums), which finds Lolina taking on the roles of two characters, Paris Hell and Geneva Heat: style-conscious freedom fighters in a dystopian cityscape controlled iron-fistedly by the government. Built around attractive synth melodies, slo-mo rap drums and variously-pitched vocals spoke-sung with curious elan, this is an addictive 27-minute listen, though a consistently prickly one. You can pick out certain stylistic precedents along the way โ Sade-esque 80s soul on โMeet The Devilโ, coldwave on โDejavuโ โ but Astrova has fashioned something beyond genre here: a real keeper.
Artur Strekalov moved from Latvia to London, where heโs recorded music as Mu Tate since 2019. He also appears to have relocated to Berlin between the announcement of Wanting Less (Warm Winters), the third Mu Tate album, and its release, but you can prise this tenuous claim to nationality from my cold dead hands because this isolationist, field recording-embellished ambient dub session feels like nocturnal British city living to me. Would a track titled โNocturnalโ, with contributions from evident kindred spirit Rory Salter in his Malvern Brume guise, suffice to make my point? I can but hope.
Strekalovโs synths tend to drift and drone in a manner fans of Wolfgang Voigtโs Gas project will appreciate, while the extra layers he adds direct matters away from any threat of imitation. Surfaces crackle, voices glitch and beats betray an affinity with dance music but only occasionally approach danceability in their construction. Wanting Less is a headphones album par excellence, with seams of sub-bass running through cuts like โSporeโ and โBasementโ, and levels of sonic detail that I suspect only Mu Tate himself has the full scoop on.
Further adventures in nomadism with Isik Kural, a Turkish fellow settled in Glasgow after studying in a couple of other countries, and his doll-pretty new album Moon In Gemini (RVNG). Field recordings play their part here too, such as on โRedcurrantsโ and โGรผl Sokaฤฤฑโ, though their roles are relatively minor amidst Kuralโs generously tuneful keyboard fragments and guesting pals chipping in with various chamber instruments.
Most of the LPโs 14 tracks are under three minutes, which is fairly unremarkable in a pop or folk song context but makes them feel like wilful miniatures if considered compositional pieces. Certainly, thereโs a sense that Kural and co โ who supply piano, flute, harp, violin and clarinet โ could have created something grander had they wished, which is not to say that the results are anything but desirable.
Kuralโs own vocals (he sometimes passes the mic to Stephanie Roxanne Ward) are hushed and high-pitched โ the suggestion is that itโs mixed more prominently than on his previous two albums, yet an image of diffidence remains. His lyrics support this when read: written in lower case and often ending with an upbeat exclamation point, Iโve a hunch they were first conceived as written poetry. In the event, intrigue is plentiful on another album built for late nights with no distractions.
Alrighty, weโve got ourselves a couple of Theatre People here, and if Keir Cooper + Eleanor Westbrookโs first collaborative album is not theatrical exactly, it locates a peculiar expressive niche with no other occupants I know of. Titled Star Quality โ Speculations For Guitar And Voice (Discus), Cooper plays guitar on these ten pieces, which he says have been given substantial digital editing after the fact โ sometimes this is obvious, often it still sounds like a flowing piece of improvisation. You might think of Keith Rowe when Cooperโs guitar sounds least like one, Marc Ribot or Richard Dawson during folkier or jazzier periods.
This has been combined with the soprano vocal of Westbrook, whose operatic credentials are knowingly upturned by Cooperโs studio antics. It begins amiably enough, with a take on English folk song โThe Willow Treeโ, though we sense somethingโs afoot when Westbrook accompanies herself with a succession of blankly-recited non sequiturs. Thereafter, Westbrookโs vocal exhortations are wordless, still soprano in tone but reduced by Cooper to a patchwork of half-human, half-bird trilling and twittering. Meredith Monk and Maggie Nicols come to mind as antecedents of whatโs going on here, although Star Qualityโs vocals canโt be assessed independently of their production (or vice versa).
As Kitchen Cynics, Alan Davidsonโs output totals over 100 albums, dating back to the late 1980s. Indeed, thereโve been two dozen or so since NWB started over seven years ago, and only some have crossed my path, but Iโve found his latest โ As Those Gone Before (Cruel Nature), a collaborative cassette with Margery Daw โ to be right up my outsider folk alley. Marge, as Davidson refers to her, has a far smaller discography under this name at least: she essentially has no online footprint, but Iโd guess is of a similar age to Davidson (who was born in 1956) and possibly lives in Montrose, not far from Davidson in Aberdeen.
As Thoseโฆ is a long album at nearly 70 minutes, but there isnโt a sense of filler or obviously subpar material across these 14 songs, certainly if your favoured style of folk music is eccentric and psychedelic. The pairโs instrumentation is extensive and diverse: Margeโs melodica is ghostly and nautical on โSeagull Skullโ, backing her spoken narration; Davidsonโs clarinet like a watercolouristโs palette on โMerry Marianโ. Itโs clear that with either musician removed from the equation this album would be a wholly different proposition.
Semiconductor Taxidermy For The Masses is Scarla OโHorrorโs second album, with the four musicians having a previous collaborative history in London improv circles. Trumpeter Alex Bonney and electronics bod Sam Britton (going by alias Isambard Khroustaliov here), also co-run the Not Applicable label, on which this album is released. Its genesis, too, has a story: Bonney, Britton, James Allsopp (sax/clarinet) and Tim Giles (drums, more electronics) set up and played as per, with some synths recording this and making sounds of their own in response. Then Scarla OโHorror used this generative synth music as further direction in their playing.
Insofar as thereโs no real way for the listener to gauge the effect of this method, my reaction to such process notes leans towards โcool! What do I do with this info?โ Just write about the music, you sayโฆ well, that goes against all my principles, but okay. Itโs great! A sub-three-minute segment, โRaccoon With Woundโ, is followed by a near-20-minute one, โThe Rats Of Gillet Squareโ, where Scarla OโHorror get to collectively cook โ Bonneyโs trumpet first jagged and staccato, then fluid and relatively melodic, as Allsopp intermittently demands entry via bellowing tenor sax and Giles ceaselessly rolls towards freedom for the first seven minutes before pivoting to his gizmos. โErmine Chowderโ (14 minutes) is slow and crepuscular, its rhythms seasick and elusive and Bonney the focal point for large parts.
Harry Irvine, founder member of The Big Fuss Ensemble, also did the โrecord an album then up sticks before itโs releasedโ thing, though in this case from Bristol to Glasgow, ensuring its NWB eligibility is beyond question. The album is released by Ink, a new label set up by members of Warp Records postpunk types Squid, who exist somewhere above the underground the column serves to highlight โ but their leftfield tastes have been noted, and The Face Of Us, Smiling On Its Own is a sprawling tape of freeform skronk and energetic jamming.
A free jazz influence pervades โFlesh Makes The Computer Crazyโ and โBeautiful Play Old Boyโ, with cornet player Harry Furniss among the Ensembleโs lineup โ one of only three names I recognise from the list, along with Owen Chambers (previously reviewed as Carnivorous Plants) and percussionist Dan Johnson (sounding very much in his element here). Elsewhere, thereโs passages of muggy drone-rock, psychedelia at its least linear and, for a few minutes on โA Plagued Vision In Holy Fanfareโ, some deeply industrial-sounding goings-on: the album was recorded in the basement of Bristol indie venue the Louisiana, perhaps near a noisy air conditioning unit. Good gear overall, in the spirit of bands like Faust and Jackie-O Motherfucker, and hopefully a project with more juice in it.
Self Love, from Cambridgeshire, released their first tape album in 2017. Selected Ambivalent Works (PX4M) โ their third and latest โ sounds like, if not a different band entirely, then one with an entirely different approach. No, that debut with its appropriately teen-snotty title, is bass/drums rehearsal room noise rock; seven years on, Luke Baguley and Joshua Roland are synthesised, plugged-in (plugin-ed?) and hair-raisingly digital, with the result some fine post punk hyperpop thatโs arch and emo to equal degrees.
As its tepidly punning title sort of implies, Selected Ambivalent Works is a sort of compilation, with some of its 12 tracks re-recorded versions of older Self Love ones. It amounts to a cohesive statement, though โ or at least, the most jarring stylistic transitions are within songs rather than between them. โDeconstructed Doveโ is one loop of arpeggiated freshwater keyboard, another of gabber kicks firing like ack-ack guns, with some semi-whispered sadboi lyrics coming and going. โJust Marriedโ, first released on Self Loveโs second tape from 2021, returns as a โNightcore remixโ, which means itโs been sped up a bit with little or nothing else changed. A very 2020s set of productions in certain respects, Selected Ambivalent Works nevertheless makes me think of various pop-breakcore shithouses of yore from Kid606 to Gay Against You.
These dispatches are never complete without some proper biz for the ravers, and Imogen Richmond โ known to most only asย Imogenย โย has stepped up for October withย Metanoia, her second solo 12-inch.ย A techno DJ and producer, Southampton-raised but London-based, Richards has played plenty of big-potatoes clubs worldwide in recent years, and is resident at one of them, Tresor in Berlin. These six tracks (one digital-only) are released on Tresorโs label, whose towering techno legacy is upheld on a fierce, pacey EP.
Billed as a suite of mood music, inspired by Richardsโ varied emotional states and handling of situations in recent months, induced collective euphoria can still very much be had โ only quasi-ambient digital bonus โMelancholyflowerโ excepts that rule. โThe Way She Movesโ is a big-booted acid stomp, of a piece with that 90s/early 00s sound UK producers like Cristian Vogel and Dave Tarrida nailed; grimy Millsian electro number โSummer Kissโ is enlivened by backspinning and ear-to-the-speakers distortion. A malevolent cackle punctuates โTired Bonesโ, โGrowing In The Darkโ is metallic and thudding as a school bell, and โBreathe Againโ has some yearning melody and a trance ancestry, though maybe the boshier Rising High Records type stuff than anything that approached commercial success.
Wanted to give some shine to Black Hair Rolled In Dried Blood, a project founded some 12 years ago by Londonโs Carl Fleischer, off the back of a new CDR, Colder Stars. On closer inspection, it turned out Fleischer had four releases in the space of one month, as โthese typesโ sometimes do. Weโre talking noise music, as that memorable name mightโve hipped you to, but subtler, dank, bump-in-the-night industrialisms rather than blazing tone violence.
Colder Stars is comprised of ten similarly-titled tracks whose precise genesis is unclear, although a modular synth seems to be involved: the fifth, eighth and tenth parts are audibly what you might deem โelectronic musicโ, others rumble, gripe and murmur in decidedly more obscure ways. Itโs been followed up by Colder Stars XI-XXVIII & XXIX-XXXV, which continues the theme across two CDRs: I detect a greater affinity for dub spaciousness across this selection, notably on โXXIVโ and โXXXIIIโ, though itโs not like youโre going to find yourself shuffling to it on any dancefloor Iโm aware of (thereโs never been a BHRIDB live performance, either, as far as I know).
โSand In The Ointmentโ, digital-only (for now), is presented as a single 37-minute piece; its dronier moments verge on the beatific, its ruffer ones akin to the less shockjock-y end of Broken Flag-era industrial. That just leaves the debut of Electric Sheets Over Them, featuring Fleischer and Imogen Marks โ who is described as โa filmmaker who has never attempted to make a filmโ and whose stated contribution to this self-titled cassette (released via Human Geography) is simply โthe bounds of possibilitiesโ. Fleischerโs modular setup delivers more familiar analogue burbling here, for the most part, though with a runtime of almost 90 minutes ESOT is far from breezy listening.
