Records Of The Month(s)
October & November's best new music
Aesop Rock Integrated Tech Solutions (Rhymesayers)
Just utterly dazzling - I absolutely love how Rock has peppered this record with what he does best, using the syntax of the times to lambast these times, or at least to uncover the weird querulous ways the fiction of the present might fall apart. A concept album of sorts, but also a coruscating piss-take of ‘lifestyle- and industry-specific applications designed to curate a desired multi-experience’ and my god sonically this is one of the most glorious BANQUETS of sound hip hop will give us this year. Everything from apps to cavemen to Da Vinci to agriculture to atomic bombs, surveillance is covered here. Key phrase: “we cannot be trusted with the stuff that we come up with”. Tightrope-walking a unique line between the pleasures of 80s analogue funk, 90s boombap and 20s digi-decay this is perhaps THEE hip hop album of the year. The past and future and our weird present hovering between the two absolutely confronted, summated, even celebrated. Oh and the track about meeting Mr T in a restaurant (“100 Feet Tall”) has to be heard to be believed. LOVE this record.
AshTreJinkins It’s Trash Now (Leaving Now)
Older hip hop fans are performing a strange kind of amnesiac hypocrisy when they lambast the current days of mumble-rap - surely pissing off old-farts like us should be precisely the POINT of new hip hop for new listeners? What I dig about LA-based producer AshTreJinkins response to these debates and contradictions on ‘It’s Trash Now’ is how unpolemical and non-combative it all is. This is an album of electronic instrumental hip hop that serves not as an ‘argument’ for or against retroism in hip hop, rather it playfully and suggestively explores the terms of that debate in purely sonic, purely non-judgemental terms. The sounds he explores on tracks like ‘Myspace 2006’ will fire off both synapse memories but also future possibilities in hip hop production - as well as tracing those sounds back to sources you might not expect in techno and electronic music and even further back into afro-futurist jazz and dub. ‘Drug Depressed’ as a title seems almost summative of the past 15 years but also summons the lost spirits of Outkast’s ‘Aquemini’ and DC Basehead’s ‘Play With Toys’ before ‘You Were Not Space Base Approved’ (all the titles are killer) sees you starved of oxygen, flickering in and out of consciousness as music seems to come at you as a drowning dream, your heart rate skittering along with the beats, a last gasp. This is music that refuses to situate you even as it hints at so many lineages and lost threads - ‘Day One Archives’ and the title track have a glitchy IDM feel but seem as lit by the spirits of Laraaji and Dedekind Cut as they are by Jpeg Mafia or Dilla. Ashtre’s name is no accident - he calls himself a ‘connoisseur’ of grit - and it’s that frictive, dusty choking miasmic sense he’s after here, but it never becomes a mission of recovery or nostalgia. Rather he sets these weirdly quiet, clockwork rotations of mesmeric sound going like the wonderful ‘New Old Head (There For The Changes)’ and ‘Out The Way In The Mix’ and then with incredible subtlety morphs them into your consciousness, leaving room for way more repetition than hip hop currently allows, and a cumulative unhingement of your musical sense of place and space. The startling nine minute odyssey of ‘Levels To This’ is like moving through a five-floor club in which every room contains scenes of your past shame and possible paths to a new wide open musical future - far more than merely a hip hop track it forms a neat microcosm of the whole record and how it noncommittally sashays between both the music that hip hop has inspired but also the lugubrious antechambers of black sonic experimentation that birthed it. It’s that trifold tightrope between past, present and future that ‘It’s Trash Now’ walks and it's one that’s hypnotic to be held on. Recommended.
Pierre Bastien & Michel Banabila Baba Soirée (Pingipung)
Pierre Bastien is a composer and multi-instrumentalist with a background in French literature who has spent decades in the world of experimental sound with his self-built ‘mechanical orchestra’ Mecanium, a combination of traditional instruments and machines that play them, including sporadic audio-visual releases on Aphex Twin’s Rephlex imprint. Here, Banabila samples Bastien’s recordings - particularly his ‘prepared cornet’ playing, but also dulcimers, percussion and self-created sonic oddities - and weaves together the Macanium’s sounds into a ‘sonic tapestry’ that’s at turns querulous, surreal, dadaist and revelatory.
The duo’s veteran status is important - they don’t give a flying one about fitting in with our preconceptions let alone the orthodoxies of so much experimental sound and Bastien’s fondness for the juxtaposed playfulness of Dada, Fluxus and Situationism is clear throughout (the title Baba Soirée is an homage to Kurt Schwitters and Theo van Doesburg's "Kleine Dada Soirée" collaboration which took place exactly a century ago). You can imagine this music accompanying a masked-performance of sound-poetry in a Zurich cafe at some point between the wars but after a while you find yourself settling into something mesmeric and hypnotic because Banabila merges aspects of sound design and collaged samples with Bastien’s Don Cherry-esque improvisations into a true fusion of the ambient and glitchy. Baba Soiree is exactly the right title - this doesn’t hit you round the head with weirdness OR let you settle into a groove, rather you find yourself bearing witness to this strangely unplaceable mix of the live and the layered that’s unlike anything else. As ever from Pingipung, essential.
DJ Muggs & Dean Hurley Divinity Original Motion Picture Score (Sacred Bones)
That Muggs name got me intrigued - and yes, slavering for some smoky grainy weed-friendly beats - but delighted to report that the side of Muggs we see here is that one of restraint and doom that made so many Soul Assassins productions so essential, that discipline and unwillingness to rest on past-laurels that have made his most recent productions some of his best ever. Here Muggs bangs heads with frequent David Lynch collaborator Dean Hurley to craft the soundtrack to Divinity, a dystopian sci-fi odyssey directed by Eddie Alcazar and produced by Steven Soderbergh.
The results are somewhere between modernist sound-design and vintage giallo-friendly 8-bit symphonics and the sound-palette is a surprising one - much more informed by 80s electro and analogue-synth textures than anything else I’ve ever heard from Muggs. Some of the Wavestation synth stabs are so very 80s (check ‘Capture’ and try not to bodyrock) it’s as if Jan Hammer has been drafted in as engineer but the strings and choir effects that the duo blend in bring some dreamy cosmic vistas to life, especially on the ‘Main Title’ theme and on my personal highlight ‘Drone Interrogation’- beds of moody Silkworm-synth detuned into dank depths. ‘The Brothers’ and ‘Reflective Dreams’, though clearly hugely influenced by Vangelis’ Bladerunner work, manage to inhabit their own unique space of both epic scope and quantum ethereality. The closing credit music, ‘Divinity 2 Infinity: The Odyssey’ is another stand-out, Kool Keith spinning himself out into the nebulae with a typically twisted and mind-melting cameo over heavy, doomy, almost drill-like swerves of bass and minimalist beats. I want to see this film safe in the knowledge that if it’s rubbish I can just close my eyes and enjoy this fantastic soundtrack. Recommended.
Fantastic Twins Two Is Not A Number (House Of Slessor)
One of 2023’s most startling, deeply rewarding, yet instantly addictive transmissions. The album chronicles a pair of imaginary twins from their birth, through their life, to their death in a series of utterly enrapturing, thrillingly danceable experiments in electronic sound. That conceptual basis of ‘Two Is Not A Number’ isn’t just a post-operative explanation of what you hear - rather the twin-idea, the idea of dualities, of multiplicities and how they contradict the false adversarial oppositions of our consciousness and lives, threads itself deep into the sound of what you hear and the words Julienne Dessagne sings and intones. What you hear on the remarkable likes of ‘Sisters At Odds’ is an immediate unconventionality to structure but also a dissidence to sonic hierarchy - it’s as if everything is moveable, and rather than layers of sound which settle into a conventional places the music is composed of layers that shift tectonically over each other, a sound that always plays with the expectations of the listener. It’s utterly thrilling. Particularly fascinating is the place of vocals in her music - the habits of pop, and perhaps our habit as listeners, is to foreground voices, to see them somehow as something pure held up by the music but in Fantastic Twins, voices are another malleable instrument that can offer both tenderness but also coldness, Dessagne breaks her voice into shards, scatters it carefully amidst the other elements to contribute both rhythmically to the groove but also to the melodic detail, a production style that enables Dessagne to step between personas, to evanesce her ego. I’ve not heard vocals like it anywhere else in 2023.There’s a deeply lysergic - almost scary - feel to this music that utterly immerses you every step of the way because you never feel pushed or bullied by an ego. Dessagne’s work isn’t remotely a process of traditional artistic indulgence but an endless - and deeply emotional- tightrope-walk between sonic playfulness and conceptual discipline.That duality, that pull between creative freedom and creative anxiety is what characterises ‘Two Is Not A Number’ and makes it an astonishingly apposite album for our times and for all times, a record that takes all the binaries we’ve been tutored in our whole lives - others and ourselves, creation and destruction, death and life - and suggests a complexity of mutual dependence and simultaneity that’s utterly mindblowing. Let ‘Two Is Not A Number’ under your skin. Without judgement. Without a final word.
Honeydrip Psychotropical (Banoffee Pies Records)
Canadian-Bhajan DJ & Producer Honeydrip has gathered an all-star cast of vocalists including King Shadrock and Shanique Marie for her debut LP and it’s a delight throughout - as with Unkle G there’s a sense of playfulness with genre so we get dub, dancehall and sound-system heaviness across these tracks, especially on highlights like the electro-afro-step of ‘Sykotropik’ and ‘Wicked Dutty & Dreadful’s semi-aquatic dub.I’m reminded of Suzi Analogue’s sense of fusion and finesse and ‘Hardcore Continuum’ (replete with a stunning vocal from Shadrock) seems to blend Crystl-style beat manipulation with the kind of lunging low-end you’ve not heard since Zinc’s ‘Supersharpshooter’. Play loud.
PLF ParziFoooooooooooL (Ventil)
PLF are instrument maker/producer Peter Kutin, ‘sonic nomad’ vocalist Freya Edmondes aka Elvin Brandhi and drummer/producer Lukas König, who formed the trio after a spontaneous meeting at a show they were all performing solo. Their debut ‘DemoEP’ for Opal Tapes came out of a single day-long improv session and was one of 2022’s finest bolts of fury - here they’ve given themselves more time to confront each other, more time to come together and the results are even better. These are explorations of a darkly claustrophobic yet scarily open space and it’s Brandhi who becomes the centre of your listening attention cos she guides and populates these dank post-punk explorations with a sense of invocation and revenge. The band clearly despise fulfilling expectations in any sense so opener ‘Fast Looped Paradise’ is anything but - Brandhi’s voice a shocked anguished yelp akin to Blonde Redhead’s Kazu Makino, Kutin layering stratas of drone and shadow against Kutin’s implacable slo-mo beats. ‘Lucrative Pest Fest’ plunges a tribal thump like Rema Rema against doomy one-note bass while Brandhi gets multi tracked into a scarifying legion before the whole track fades into a seriously eerie coda of beatless creepiness. It’s bloody frightening music this, not because it’s so ‘other’ or out there, but because it feels so familiar, intimate, in here. ‘Produit Local Fini’ is like Einsturzende or early Birthday party shorn of ego or drive, an implacable eye surveying a devastated and trashed landscape, Brandhi driving each syllable out deep from within but seethed between the teeth. Where there is bass-heaviness here - as on the remarkable ‘Plastification’ - it’s always under threat of disappearance and the horror of what is then revealed in the trebles and mids is one of the records darkest delights. The closing track - a rearrangement of shards and wreckage from the session by Ventil alumnus producer Asfast - doesn’t remotely alleviate that sense of hopeless imprisonment you’ve felt from the moment the needle has dropped. Compelling music fit for a broken age.
PYNE Pum Pum Poetry/Karma Police Femmehall Version
(Equiknoxx Music)
Self-dubbed ‘Femmehall’ PYNE’s music attempts a ‘more feminine approach to dancehall production and performance’ and the Gavsborg/Equiknoxx produced ‘Pum Pum Poetry’ makes that clumsy formulation real, dancehall strafed with strange smears of neon texture, ‘Karma Police’ salvages a great song from the bores who wrote it, the structure played with and the textures transformed into a pulsating slice of 80s electro r’n’b and lovers rock. Not so much making dancehall weird again, but recovering a sense of exploration and idiosyncrasy.
Space Afrika & Rainy Miller A Grisaille Wedding (Fixed Abode)
‘Multi-hyphenate creatives’, ‘a penchant for curation’ - phrases I barely understand but that are guaranteed to put my back up pepper the bumf about this release so I swatted it away and listened without prejudice and I’m glad I did because as an exercise in sound design and collaboration ‘A Grisaille Wedding’ is exquisite.
What we have here is a meeting of SA & RM’s like-minds but also an open space for confederates like Coby Sey and Mica Levi to chip in on music that is self-proclaimed as experimental but that actually emerges like pop albeit a pop deliberately without propulsion, a floating, gaseous emanation of melodic ideas and textural play. ‘Maybe It’s Time To Lay Down The Arms’ is the first lift-off point - the kind of autotuned murkage that recalls Lil’ Yachty’s latest slathered across slo-mo Scorn-style breakbeats. It’s the structural playfulness and the sense that the album has this constant fuzzy ambience running behind it that’s gripping - as if the songs actually are enacted before that backdrop of backwards messiness that they occasionally tap into, occasionally foreground. ‘Sweet (I’m Free)’ builds Earthling-style hip hop out of tiny distorted whorls of reversed keys and vocoder, but it's a hip hop that gets stuck in its own febrile refractions, a wonderful sense of stoned inertia suffusing every cell. I dig the way the longer the record goes on, the more strung-out and indeterminate it gets - ‘Shelter’ is a pearlescent ambient wonder that recalls Stars Of The Lid, Coby Sey lends a fragility and emotional heft to ‘The Graves Of Charleroi’ and the gorgeous closing suite of ‘Let It Die’ and ‘I Believe In God When Things Are Going My Way’ enfold you in a bliss both amniotic and lysergic. Don’t believe the hype, just believe this music.
Unkle G An Honest Meal (Equiknoxx Music)
Unkle G is Equiknoxx’s Gavsborg’s MC alias, and this hugely engaging debut full-length explores his experiences in studios, lyrically laced with the rarely-considered perspective of a producer in the vocal-led Jamaican music industry. It’s by turns hilarious, mordant yet poignant and musically it’s a fascinating lattice of lush pristine bass and backdrops over minimal heavily d’n’b influenced beats. Think Krust or something off 31 Records but lit with Jamaican reimagining and crucially with that producer’s perspective on all manner of studio shenanigans - overly vigilant engineers, police raids, tech-thievery but also the generosity of mentors like Gussie Clarke, having riddims rejected by Popcaan, studio etiquette and studio absurdity. Fab.
Various Artists If There Is A Hell Below (Numero Group)
Dante Carfagna is a crate-digger supreme - I first saw his name in the production credits of a Professor Griff record from 1992 (“Two Minute War…ning”), then on a fab compilation called The Funk 45 Files in 2001, but it was his curation of the astonishing Chains & Black Exhaust mixtape in 2002 that really hipped me to his sonic thirst for the dirtiest, most psychedelic spirals of the Afro-American 70s’ underground. If There Is A Hell Below takes that Curtis Mayfield line as a spur to unearth some of the most hellacious, weirdest, smokiest thunks-of-funk, all awash with wah and fuzz and the kind of depressive downeredness somewhere between Zamrock’s heaviest moments and Funkadelic if Hendrix had lived and got on board alongside Eddie Hazel. It’s a Luciferian mindbomb.
Opener Three Days Ahead LPF’s ‘Rolling Love Part 2’ is a deceptively measured entree, but does hint at the dankness and darkness to come. It’s followed by the first absolute head-wrecker, the remarkable ‘It’s A Dream’ by Little Ed & the Soundmasters band, a track so slathered in horror it damn near drowns you in its abyssal depths, the guitar a belching drone of dread, the lyrics crushing the doom of wakefulness with the terror of nightmares in a way that’s truly chilling. The Basement’s ‘Funky Music (Messin' With My Mind)’ is an instrumental that sets Bonham-esque triplet-heavy funk against an organ line even Screamin’ Jay Hawkins might dismiss as too schlocky. Fab. Directory’s ‘World Of Creation’ is like the Persuaders or Chi-Lites but scarily populates its haunting soul groove with lyrics of pure doubt and nihilism, less a soul song than a song about encroaching soul-lessness, ‘the feeling of being left out’ in a ‘world so very hard to explain’. Similarly astonishing (and strangely proto-metal adjacent’) is Iron Force’s miraculous ‘Sweet Poison’ which you can’t believe the Alchemist hasn’t already sliced and diced under bars and rhymes, but every track here is a morbid, murky education in just how far out the funk got back then. Wonderfully addictive, bleakly redemptive, this is an essential collection.