It’s a bit of a light week at Foxy Digitalis as I’ll be traveling until the weekend, but there’s still plenty of goods. This week’s Songs of Our Lives is a treat. If you enjoyed the oral history of D/A/D’s “Love Will Make You Stay,” (or you’re a fan of Cobra Kai or Weird: The Al Yankovic Story) then definitely check out the episode with Zach Robinson. We had a blast.
Otherwise, The North Sea’s Somewhere Between Something & Nothing is still fresh and ready for your ears, and I’m sharing the composition of “The Sound Leaves” over on Patreon today. Things to consider.
With that, here are this week’s capsules.
Flora Yin Wong Cold Reading (Modern Love)
Fleeting memories are in the air above the sonic world of Flora Yin Wong’s beguiling Cold Reading. String passages lament the impermanence of dreams, showering our minds with emotive echoes, throttled percussive textures, and wistful melodies buried in fog. Voices rise through ephemeral harmonics, transected by sharp timbres and focused rhythms, all moving through a harsh, resonant sheen. Cold Reading is visceral at its core, but Wong arranges hidden patterns into a kind of temporal aural glow that softens the sharpest edges. Shaded pop forms swirl in the distance before they’re crowded out by the next moment on an illuminated path revealing itself. Sound moves at impossible angles, and Wong builds obtuse, beautiful shapes from intersecting fragments. While being singular and exploratory, Cold Reading leaves the answers up to us, leading us to a place where possibilities are just being revealed. The next steps remain a mystery.
Nabalayo Her Garden (Self-Released)
Nairobi’s Nabalayo transcends beyond the cosmic divide on her third album, Her Garden. Swirling vocal layers embody the otherworldly spirit stitched into this music’s fabric, holding our focus skyward as fanciful synth melodies and propulsive rhythms dance in the ether below. Shades of neon creep into the transitory pop structures, adding a liminal sheen to the engaging sonic movements. Nabalayo’s voice is the flame we all seek as she sings about the divine feminine and Bantu spirituality. Her Garden flies well beyond the horizon through its emotive electronic patterns and ambient swells, but the timbre of her vocals stills these songs with an earthy sheen. Another incredible entry in an ever-impressing discography. Huge recommendation.
Oui Ennui Excessive Moderation (Self-Released)
A couple days before Excessive Moderation was released, I kept seeing pictures of the building featured on its cover (it’s part of the Arulmigu Meenakshi Sundaraswarar Temple). I don’t know that it means anything, but it briefly stopped me in my tracks when Oui Ennui’s release announcement appeared in my inbox. I jumped. He’s been putting out bangers left and right for the last few years, but Excessive Moderation has stuck like nothing else. Maximalist sonic excursions built on flittering synth melodies, tropical mantras, and sparkling arpeggiations sing like mechanized birds. Every layer and surface is tarnished, covered with textural debris, melting into field recordings as though we’re painting our memories across the vivid landscape. Bubbling remnants become golden skyways, disintegrating geometric designs with every overwhelming turn. Every time I want even more, Excessive Moderation obligs. It’s not all movement and spackle, though, as emotive harmonics rise from the ether like a clear-eyed sonic embrace. This music is larger than life; all-encompassing.
Hilary Wood Acts of Light (Sacred Bones)
Hilary Wood takes a series of inward-facing reveries and paints them all black, plunging Acts of Light into a staring void. Strings stretch across the infinite divide and take on resonant forms. This music drowns in texture, as though the caustic drones are trying to hide in plain sight beneath layers of intricate sonic detritus. Using simple and effective repeating patterns, Wood lulls us into a hypnogogic state. Phantasmic choirs lurk behind shadows, filling in the negative spaces with an ethereal whisper. Even with a gentle, forward-moving cadence, Acts of Light is grounded by an intense, intertwining gravity, as though this music exists beyond space and time. Woods creates a world that feels simultaneously deserted and endless. She scrapes darkness and recontextualizes it as these gentle reminders of what it feels like to glow. Stunning.
Anthony Pirog The Nepenthe Series Vol. 1 (Otherly Love)
As soon as The Nepenthe Series Vol. 1 begins, it’s like a glass curtain has been pulled back to reveal an intricate, enchanting sonic universe. Full of immersive guitar textures and floating sound capsules, Pirog enlists an incredible host of collaborators from Nels Cline to Luke Stewart, Wendy Eisenberg, and more. Arpeggios glow with a moody stillness caught beneath the lights, backed up by churning electronic bass, emotive steel stretches, and mangled textural cocoons. On one of my favorite pieces, “Glowing Gesture,” Janel Leppin turns the pedal steel into a floating cosmic body wrapped around Pirog’s searching leads. Each song explores a distinct field of view, but Pirog’s recognizable compositional framework is the blocks that build it all together. Inside groaning, midnight voids harmonies grow on discarded electricity. Nothing here is static.
Strategy The Wet Room (Community Library)
Paul Dickow always delivers the goods. The Wet Room, Strategy’s 20th album, unearths countless grooves, glosses them with with subdued, cool palette, and sends us gently spinning through interstellar radio waves. Shadows coalesce into fractured beats saturated with tropical remnants and aqueous undercurrents. Dickow gleans arpeggiations from bisected hiss fragments, cutting tunnels into concrete sound blocks where the next dancefloor floats above an inviting void. Even when things seem dark and ominous, joyful grooves pop through as ecstatic silhouettes bounce in time with the underworld’s cadence. The Wet Room shaves all the excess leaving focused rhythms and expressive, saccharine soundscapes at the fore, staring us down until we melt into the aural sea. Nobody cracks a neon mountain like Strategy.
Retrato O Enigma de um dia (Transfusão Noise Records)
Sometimes, especially as winter nights begin to creep up, I just need some 60s-infused neo-psych jams to warm me through. Brazilian quintet Retrato obliges with an infectious blend of fuzzed-out grooves, improvised jammers, and imagined soundtracks to UFO sightings. Blanketed by a layer of a tape hiss, and ground into fireworks, O Enigma de um dia pushes all those trips into a hazy matrix where saturated melodies seep out the other side. Vocal hypnosis whispers through cavernous reverb, spaced-out and blazed-out like cryptic messages from the other side. It all digs in, though, covered in gauzy atmospheres, lilting its way beyond the sunkissed landscape into forever. Guitar solos gild the lively basslines while electronics beam down from outer space. This is such a jam.
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