Sometimes a wind blows and nothing rises. No plastic bags which remain wantonly discarded on the sidewalk filled with rainwater and city sediment, no helium mysteries or daydream fantasies or premonitions of love. On his third album the South London artist JQ finds frolic instead in a seam of cultural detritus, from overheard conversations to YouTube makeup tutorials, advertisements and public service announcements beholden to expert systems which distanciate time and space. Redolent of Objects for an Ideal Home by Opiate, here the playful use of samples, collected sounds, and synthesis blurs moments of intimacy and domesticity with a slick technological sheen, sometimes languoring and sometimes revelling in sheer mundanity, like the aisles of a Quick Save on a Monday or the taste of an ice rink Slush Puppie as the tongue clicks in the roof of the mouth from brain freeze.
‘At the house party on Saturday night Miss Cole boasted of catching rabbits. A trek ensued and she and Mister Carter, still in formal attire, set off spending three nights in the Wawayanda’ are the lines from a nineteenth-century society column which prompt the latest album by Frank Menchaca and Anar Badalov as Hourloupe, a treatise on time and listening, commingling and doubling which tramps steadily through the undergrowth while gazing rapt at a cavalcade of stars. Like lurching watchtowers Badalov’s synth lines scrape and bow sometimes deluged by celestial choruses over propulsive punk rock beats, which in their clubbier moments conjure the flickering celluloid walls of a spectral discotheque. Meanwhile the coruscating spoken word poetry of Menchaca summons a strange cast of fellow travellers, including miners and trappers, a young florist in a cream-coloured apron, and one man made of charcoal plus another made of chalk, concluding this triptych which takes the mode of a hidden night city with the collision of future and past and impending catastrophe, as hand in hand we walk.
Natalie Merchant and Abena Koomson-Davis implore the goddess Aphrodite. With the first salvo from their upcoming album Scaring the Hoes, the caustic collaborators JPEGMAFIA and Danny Brown fire off at Elon Musk, shout-out Busta Rhymes, Kanye West, and Diddy, and flex their inside knowledge of the squared circle while referencing the TikTok bodybuilder leanbeefpatty. Julian Lage doubles down with just the bassist Jorge Roeder on his addendum to the sweeping Americana of View With A Room, which features the swinging six-string of Bill Frisell plus Dave King on drums. And on the second extended play from his five-part Hide Behind The Silence series, Vladislav Delay embraces the disintegrating day, revving the engines of a motorik beat which seems terminally forestalled.
The hip hop producer Hprizm of Antipop Consortium deconstructs and patiently rebuilds the free improvisations of the bassist Brandon Lopez and drummer Gerald Cleaver for the 577 Records experimental electronic offshoot Positive Elevation. Awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant in 2022, the pioneering composer Ikue Mori reunites with the collaborative quartet KAZE featuring Satoko Fuji on piano, Natsuki Tamura and Christian Pruvost on trumpets, and Peter Orins on drums, for an album of breathy sighs, swirling keys, and plunking percussion which weaves together pre-recorded music and live elaborations from a concert in Lille. Through dancefloor aesthetics and the palpable strains of flesh and blood, the Peruvian producer Sofia Kourtesis pays tribute to a genderless concept of motherhood.
From a mobile studio which they carted through the villages and hinterlands of their native Russia, frequent collaborators Kedr Livanskiy and Flaty come up for air having mined a murky yet motley blend of nineties indie music, eighties distortion, psychedelic folk, trip hop, and electronica, with lyrics drawn from ancient folklore, Weimar Classicism in the form of a famous ballad by Goethe, and contemporary American poetry by way of J. Blake Gordon’s ‘so what’. The avant-garde composer and trombonist Peter Zummo revisits the snapshots of Deep Drive, taking the tone rows, serpentine squibs, and drawling intonations of the original from 2019 and diving headlong into balmier waters alongside The Docking Choir made up of Peter Broderick, Joe Carvell, Sebastian TK, and Mabe Fratti. Finally the duo of Sebastian Fäth and Jörg A. Schneider as Teen Prime combine free-form jazz with schlubby treehouse rock and kiss off with the smartest song in the building.
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Gerald Cleaver, Brandon Lopez, and Hprizm – ‘Mainsource A’
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JPEGMAFIA & Danny Brown – ‘LEAN BEEF PATTY’
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Natalie Merchant – ‘Come On, Aphrodite’ (feat. Abena Koomson-Davis)
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Julian Lage – ‘Double Southpaw’
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Hourloupe – ‘Postcard Found in the Woods’
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KAZE & Ikue Mori – ‘Rolle Cake’
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Peter Zummo – ‘Way Better Than I Expected’
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Vladislav Delay – ‘Reflections On The Failure’
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Teen Prime – ‘smartest song in the building’
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