Back after a week off, just in time for (the last? Probably? Hopefully!?) Bandcamp Friday. There was a lot more music I was hoping to get to this week (well, I listened, but couldn’t put enough of a coherent thought together to include here), but I do want to give a special mention to the recent tape batch on Dasa Tapes – all three releases from Savvas Metaxas, Elia Piana, and Manja Ristić are well worth your time. An amazing label all around. Maybe I’ll have a little more on those in this week’s Patreon round-up on Saturday. There’s a new album from The North Sea coming on Friday via The Jewel Garden, too. It’s an album I wasn’t sure I’d ever release because of how different and intensely personal it is, but some encouraging words from Nina Dante shifted my thinking (if you subscribe to The Jewel Garden, you already have it (plus a new Ajilvsga release for subscribers today!))
Be sure to check out this week’s Songs of Our Lives with three-time James Beard Award finalist, pastry chef, and writer Natasha Pickowicz. When I was developing Songs of Our Lives, a focus was bringing non-musician/music people into the Foxy Digitalis world, and it’s such a great platform for it. Natasha wrote a couple pieces for FD back in the day, so she was always at the top of my list, and the episode was so much fun. In the coming months expect some filmmakers, cartoonists, a vintner/brewer, and more. Plus, a ton of rad musicians.
All right, how about these tunes?!
Mbuso Khoza Ifa Lomkhono (Ropeadope)
South African vocalist and composer Mbuso Khoza transcends space and time on Ifa Lomkhono, wrapping us in delicate moments that hang in the balance of eternity. Spacious compositions cast a celebratory air across rich timbral intersections and melodic catharsis, opening pathways beyond our known world. Khoza’s voice is the warmest, shiniest of beacons, and his words, sung in his native Zulu language, express multitudes. There’s a permanence woven in this music’s fabric, as though these melodies and sounds have existed for all time, and Khoza has tapped into that endless cosmic thread to pull them into this world. Stunning, essential listening.
First Tone 1 (modemain)
Duane Pitre and Turk Dietrich return and bury themselves in slow-moving sonic landscapes. Rich, resonant tones are steeped in feelings of longing, as though they’re searching for remnants of a past life adrift in a sonorous haze. Layers build into mountainous echoes, rising higher and higher until they can pull stretched, dulcet tones from the sky. “Ex Conceit” is weightless while still bathed in grievous melodicism. By harnessing these unhurried repetitions, Pitre and Dietrich build a transient and immersive sound world, a space that can morph into whatever we need it to be. Subtle shifts in timbre keep or focus forward, adding an elemental interest beneath the fluid aural waves. First Tone’s newest excursion feels like the beginning of something much larger.
Claire M Singer Saor (Touch)
History and impermanence melt together to create a moving collection of emotive songs. Inspired by journeys into the Cairngorm mountains in Scotland, Singer harnesses the ancient spirit woven into the land on this stunning music. Beauty spills through wistful cracks in the billowing organ overtones, lithe cello echoes, and from the space between soft, distorted chord progressions. A gentle cadence is warming while still propelling us ahead, a slow dance below rising-and-falling aural shadows. There’s a feeling of something hanging over us, just out of reach throughout Saor, heightening the searching feeling coursing in the sonic foundation. Even when Singer adds sharp electronic textures, as on “Above and Below,” a dreamy wistfulness lurks in the margins, looking for a way into the frame. Saor overwhelms our emotions in moments, but these passages are filled with familiar haunts that continue guiding us home. An incredible album from start to finish.
Andy Cartwright A Kind of Reset (Self-Released)
Midnight glows around the margins of A Kind of Reset, saturating the minimalist, saturnine arrangements with a maudlin spirit. Electronic detritus clouds the viewfinder, a counter to the sonic field’s engaging harmonics. Cartwright strips away each piece until only the barest, most potent traces remain. Melodies are skeletal but never sterile, always focusing the sharpest remnants into something memorable. There are invisible tendrils stretched across liminal spaces, and Cartwright taps into those in-between worlds with expressive drones buried inside melancholic silhouettes. A Kind of Reset only gives so much, leaving us to fill the rest of the pages. Beautiful and haunted.
Teresa Winter Proserpine (Night School)
A visceral realness permeates Proserpine as Leeds-based Teresa Winter strips the world for parts. Looping vocals empty confined spaces until they’re hollow, waiting to be explored by hazy resonances and immersive aural shadows. Purring cats not only warm our bodies from the cold electronics, but the sonic vibrations add a tactile layer to the ephemeral tonal structures. Winter builds Proserpine like a narrative, guiding us into unknown zones where unfamiliar patterns dance in darkness, before revealing this music’s ancient core. Reverberant expanses hold the flames at a distance, as though we’re hearing this music through glass; so close, but still out of reach. Its warmth draws us closer, but the incandescence, though quiet and gentle, can still overwhelm us. Timelessness threads itself in the echoes and between the rhythmic cadence, unlocking ingrained aspects of ourselves so elemental they’ve been forgotten. Highest recommendation.
Jackson Greenberg The Things We Pass On Through Our Genes (cmntx)
Every listen-through of Jackson Greenberg’s The Things We Pass On Through Our Genes leaves me feeling spent. Taking these dramatic string arrangements and tearing them apart, scarring their melodic foundations, and then re-contextualizing them into something familiar yet broken is intense. Greenberg used recordings of a string quartet he composed for his senior thesis a decade ago and reworked the piece using a variety of effects and guitar pedals, resulting in a stirring treatise on the ways familial trauma echoes across generations. Sharp electronic shards cut through resonant stretches, turning them into flailing, burning ribbons. Lilting melodies become wrecked sonic ghosts grasping for something to hold onto. The Things We Pass On Through Our Genes progresses forward anyway, unmoved by gravity, determined to outstrip the path laid out before us. This is so moving and memorable.
m. geddes gengras dual optics (self-released)
The all-encompassing sonic landscape of dual optics is pristine, opulent even. Layered crystalline patterns search through the vapors left behind after moments of clarity and reflection, finding speculative melodies etching messages in glass timbres. Gengras dives into swirling maximalist nodes with gleaming arpeggios and resonant chord progressions, all of it coalescing through ruminating synth leads coiling in our periphery. Moments of beauty are dissected by a melancholic air. A gentle force skirts the edges of fervor, holding an ocean behind a churning, electronic web of sparkle. Joy is hidden in the details, in the shadows of spiraling sonic reverie simply waiting to be unlocked. This is the ultimate dream world. Absolutely incredible.
IEOGM dolphins in cornwall (Molt Fluid)
I love an album where my overriding thought about it is, “What the hell is happening here?” IEOGM fits that bill perfectly. Manipulated voices take on a cryptic bend when paired with crackling, high-frequency drones from another dimension. Dissonance breaks and falls apart, dropping electric garbage into a stewing pot of aural gray chum. The world isn’t as it should be throughout dolphins in cornwall as IEOGM captures the overwhelming confusion of ending up in a polluted, alien swamp when all you want to do is ride the ocean waves. Hiss mars crystalline blips turning them harsh and opaque. Eventually, we clink our way into the ether only to find it’s another vat of nothingness. This is fucken great.
Euphoria Echoes of Inotai Time Tomb (XION)
Cryptic narratives unfold, drowned in a churning electronic swamp. Time Tomb is rife with textures fused to melodic streams and looping undercurrents. Aqueous passages ripple across interjacent surfaces like woozy phantoms with no spectral balance. Everything is out of whack, but it just makes this wild sound world all the more engaging. Stoic voices block out the view to other dimensions while bass runs glom to blackened surfaces, bullying the harmonic ooze into empty chambers. The story builds, obscured by foggy chord progressions and pierced through its heart with sharpened leads. In the end, we’re all frozen with tension, hung in the air by glossy tonal patterns spelling out our names in smoke. Time Tomb travels far and wide, gathering relics on the journey to bring back where it all began. Awesome album.
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