After graduating with a degree in musicology in 2014 and self-releasing the acclaimed albums Njoum and Arb’een (40), dialogues between vocals and oud which explored loops in time and modes of narrative storytelling, the Lebanese composer Youmna Saba left Beirut and settled in Paris, where her research project Taïma’ led to a slew of collaborations and the first sound residency at the Musée du Quai Branly, during which she observed and unsheathed the micro-sounds emitted by the museum’s glass tower of some 8,977 dormant instruments. Now signed to Touch, her upcoming album Wishah وِشاح unfolds as a composition in five stages, informed by rigorous research into the sonic properties of sung Arabic phonemes and their role in the shaping of synthesized sound, while employing a digital extension for the oud which expands its audible range, amplifying fingerboard frictions and other concealed resonances.
Hoarding songs as she toured and waited two years for Pripyat to be released, an album of choral trills and cascading production effects inspired by Carnatic music as she swapped the conservatory for the computer, this week Marina Herlop releases the live staple ‘La Alhambra’ as the first single from Nekkuja. Armand Hammer test the limits of Siri and grope for the heaving embonpoint over production by JPEGMAFIA on the second discursion from We Buy Diabetic Test Strips.
Born in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian composer Girma Yifrashewa began his musical life on the krar, a bowl-shaped lyre long associated with secular song and the wandering Azmari, before being introduced to the piano at the age of sixteen. After joining the Yared School of Music, he completed his studies at the Bulgarian State Conservatoire in Sofia across two stints either side of the fall of the Communist regime. A preeminent soloist, now Yifrashewa returns to his old stomping grounds alongside Bulgarian musicians and the Sofia Philharmonic Orchestra for a new album of Ethiopian classical music which blurs the boundaries between African and Western traditions, with the track ‘Union’ at once a winsome pastoral and a rollicking anthem with the grace and sweep of a ‘Home on the Range’.
In 1994 the soprano vocalist Svitlana Nianio, a conservatory graduate and key component of the Kyiv underground scene who had formed the cult band Cukor Bila Smert’ with their ethno-gothic chamber pop and nonsensical vocals, struck out solo in the form of a collaboration with the Cologne-based dance group Pentamonia. Directed by the choreographer Isabel Bartenstein as Niano improvised on voice, harmonium and piano, the dance theatre production which ensued shrouded in the dynamic interplay of shadow and flashing lights premiered at the former gallery space Urania in Cologne before moving to Aachen. His interest piqued, the producer Michael Springer subsequently invited Nianio to his Phanton studio where she gave shape to seven compositions now finally released in full, where Ukrainian folk melodies and Baroque choral motifs seem to meld and merge with a twentieth-century canon of overlooked outsider art by the likes of Connie Converse and Vashti Bunyan.
Arriving on Black Truffle following recent collaborations with Laurie Tompkins, Yoni Silver and Ashley Paul while running the gamut from dankest funk and muggiest R&B to jazz fusion and drumless dub techno, Otto Willberg abounds in squelchiest bass on his burbling and recumbently pedalling solo long-play The Leisure Principle. Uplifting the downbeat and extolling the avarice of the drug trade, Smoke DZA and Flying Lotus hook up with Black Thought on the rollout of their collaborative extended play Flying Objects.
The modular synthesist and visual artist Jeremiah Chiu explores the idiosyncrasies of the Vintage Synthesizer Museum in Los Angeles, with the twelve easygoing improvisations of In Electric Time recorded direct to a Tascam 388 over the span of two days. Following up on the viral success of her 2021 street anthem ‘Kuku Corona’, the Nigerian rapper Aunty Rayzor assembles a diverse array of producers for her tongue-lashing debut on Hakuna Kulala, with the Japanese chiptune and gabber veteran Scotch Rolex, the São Paulo-based arrocha and kuduros DJ Cris Fontedofunk, the young Ugandan innovator Ill Gee, and the Kenyan avant-pop futurist Kabeaushé among those plying the beats as Rayzor spits syllables in Yoruba and English to capture the energies and synergies of life in contemporary Lagos.
Oneohtrix Point Never illuminates a barely lit path with orchestral contributions from Robert Ames and the NOMAD ensemble, whose music video directed by Freeka Tet features fuzzy dice, a submerged succession of backseat board games and jigsaw puzzles, and a backwoods escape or a sort of star gate through a thicket whose crude assemblage of metal parts mirrors in heft and riveting affect the nineties heyday of Björk and Chris Cunningham. And breaching Puget Sound or hearkening memories of the Bering Strait, the experimental producer Dominick Fernow as Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement harbours the echolocations of killer whales through sub-bass drones, pulsing rhythms and the evocation of dorsal scars on an album described as a surprise before the migration to cooler waters.
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Youmna Saba – ‘Akaleel أكاليل’
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Svitlana Nianio – ‘Episode II’
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Otto Willberg – ‘Shadow Came Into The Eyes As Earth Turned On Its Axis’
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Armand Hammer – ‘Woke Up and Asked Siri How I’m Gonna Die’
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Aunty Rayzor – ‘Tobaya’ (feat. Ill Gee)
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Smoke DZA & Flying Lotus – ‘Drug Trade’ (feat. Black Thought)
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Jeremiah Chiu – ‘In Electric Time’
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Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement – ‘Breaching Puget Sound’
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Oneohtrix Point Never – ‘A Barely Lit Path’
