Tshegue
LOFT
PTU
Pere Ubu
Ekin Fil
C Joynes & The Furlong Bray
Anthony Laguerre
Wormed
LINGUA IGNOTA
Metrist
E-Saggila
Robert Pollard

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Tshegue The Wheel
‘Tshegue are a Parisian duo born from pure musical joy. Their debut EP, 2017’s Survivor, was an intoxicating blend of Congolese guitars and garage rock, a cosmopolitan Afropunk where every note fizzed with energy and threatened to burst through the speakers. Partly, this was a nod to heritage; the clattering, rackety rhythms and head-spinning electro recall singer Faty Sy Savanet’s native Kinshasa, a vibrant, music-obsessed city where sounds blare constantly from shops and homes. But it was also born of their studio alchemy, where ideas are allowed to run riot and instincts indulged. “We do not tend to conceptualise music,” producer and drummer Nicolas Dacunha recently told i-D. “We just go to our studio and jam.”’ — Derek Robertson

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LOFT That Hyde Trakk
‘Despite working primarily with sounds devoid of human touch, LOFT is able to inflict a very human kind of malaise on her music. It turns out that pain, in all its complexity, in all its ineffability, lends itself well to the limitless potential of digital sound. Specifically, and departt strikes me as an attempt to articulate various sorts of bodily disturbance: the popping of joints and the tearing of flesh, delicate blips that prick against the skin like static shocks and huge gulps of bass that grow tight around the throat. On “That Hyde Trakk,” the musical surface blisters and cracks as if a virus were consuming it from the inside. The track is rooted in crushing breakbeats, but it struggles to contain them, as, measure by measure, they splinter off into polyrhythmic chaos and tear through the mix in a rash of static. While undoubtedly the best track on the project (as well as one of the best interpretations of “the break” I’ve come across all year), it’s also the most anxious. Plug your headphones directly into the chest of someone having a panic attack and I imagine you would hear something like this track.’ — James Knight

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PTU Over
‘PTU don’t just have any old ideas. They have great ones, packing Am I Who I Am with improbable sounds, intriguing blind alleys, and eyebrow-raising quirks. The wandering bass line and “Star Trek” door swoosh on “The Pursuit of a Shadow,” the cutlery rattle and chipmunk vocal on “Former Me,” and the ghostly spectre of polyrhythmic rave on “After Cities” are the work of two people in love with electronic sound. And yet this music is the opposite of a functional DJ tool. There’s nothing practical or workman-like about songs like “Over” and “Skyscript”; they are awkward, spiky, and strange, oddities held together by the kinetic energy of imagination.’ — Ben Cardew

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Pere Ubu What I Heard On The Pop Radio
‘It’s difficult not to take such proclamations as David Thomas’s claim to have been listening to pop radio nonstop prior to recording the album with a pinch of salt. Whatever the reality behind that claim, opening track ‘What I Heard On Pop Radio’ provides a fascinating answer to the question implied by its own title. Gagarin and Wheeler together provide a dense electronic backdrop that’s equally banging and decorated with idiosyncratic whooshes and whirrs, like sonic curlicues of analogue sound. Seeming to delight in his hard-earned curmudgeonly status, Thomas declaims: “Save the emotional garbage for someone who’s gonna’ pretend much better than I do” and warns “they got somethin’ they wanna sell you.” A cycle of repetitive guitar licks and sputtering high hat percussion weave their way around a queasy melodeon riff. It’s deceptively simple stuff packed with a high density of intriguing incidental details.’ — Sean Kitching

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Ekin Fil Episodes
‘Ekin Fil continues her quietly complex dream-pop oeuvre on Maps. For many years now, this Istanbul musician has been writing mysterious and haunting songs, rich in heavy-reverb effects and an introspective torpor. With each successive album, her songwriting has blossomed through broader instrumentation and more intricate melodic phrasing, though the somber atmospherics and ghostly manifestations remain a judicious constant. Minor-key, tear-stained notes of piano, organ, and guitar veer along elliptical orbits as a soft-whisper lilt of Ekin’s voice narrates more by emotive decree than by literary couplet.’ — Helen Scarsdale

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C Joynes & The Furlong Bray Triennale
‘The layers of guitarist C Joynes latest album take a little unpeeling. He plays with the Furlong Bray, assembled for the occasion by adding sound artist Cam Deas and guitarist Nick Jonah Davis to free folk ensemble Dead Rat Orchestra. The album is named after a hybrid animal/plant of Central Asian legend, and North and West African gusts blow through the music. Like Joyne’s previous album, Split Electric (also with Davis), The Borametz Tree is instrumental. But, while Split Electric was focused and spare, the new release is a storm of sounds. From the first notes of ‘Triennale’, with its sonorous finger-picked guitars, percussion, bells, and what seems to be a reversed, rattling sample, the music is complex and highly atmospheric, like a central European wedding dance.’ — Tom Bolton

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Anthony Laguerre MYOTIS//solo
‘Anthony Laguerre is a improvisational composer who does things a bit differently by using sound engineering through his drum kit to create some dynamic pieces of music and art.’ — Everything is Noise

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Wormed Cryptoubiquity
‘This Spanish band plays brutal death metal, a concentrated form of sonic ridiculousness distilled down from a style that’s already known for excess: insanely fast blastbeats, insanely low vocals, insanely offensive lyrics (typically about sexual violence and gore), and insanely heavy slams. Wormed check most of the boxes, with some modifications. Their catalog drops the squicky gore themes in favor of spinning a long, abstruse science fiction yarn based on (evidently fairly accurate!) astrophysics. And they’ve got an aural aesthetic to match — they supercharge the intense technicality of brutal death metal with a futuristic prog sheen, creating space for disorienting polyrhythms and even some genuine melody to creep in.’ — Doug Moore

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LINGUA IGNOTA Do You Doubt Me Traitor
‘Lingua Ignota, AKA Kristin Hayter, is a survivor of abuse who calls her hybrids of folk, spiritual, industrial and metal music “survivor anthems”. Two years ago, the San Diego-based musician self-released an album called All Bitches Die. Its emotional rawness – all anguished howling and spitting fury – paired with moments of melodic beauty give it an extraordinary power. She is unflinching in her descriptions of violence (“He beat me till my teeth were scattered / Like pearls across the red, red ground”) and her hunger for revenge (“I repay evil with evil”). Extreme music is overdue a reckoning with misogyny and violence – Hayter says one of her abusers was “a very powerful noise musician in the Providence community” – making her use of heavy music as a tool for catharsis even more remarkable. “A lot of my work comes out of extreme music and heavy music that’s in a misogynist context,” she says. “I’m trying to re-contextualise that phallocentric format for people who need it.”’ — Maya Kalev

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Metrist Closer The TV
‘Across the EP, production pyrotechnics are the star of the show. But elaborate and brain-tickling as they are, they’re an ever-present component of the music, which makes it difficult to keep things fresh. Luckily, Metrist finds ways to maintain the wow factor. “Closer The TV,” which uses voices as a main sound source, is a good example, deploying a relatable, human element to help the listener tune into how the sounds transform, even as they’re subjected to inhuman, impossible-sounding manipulation. It fits in nicely with other downtempo crawlers on Timedance, trudging along in a sort of no man’s land, but it’s also the sort of tune that’d spring quickly to mind after a long night of music.’ — Mark Smith

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E-Saggila Show You
‘Following on from last year’s album for BANK Records NYC, E-Saggila has put together something that addresses the club and the headphones in equal measure. Taking the approach of a documentarian of our virtual landscape, there’s a deep motive that underpins the heavy digital signal processing. With plenty of storming mechanical rhythms that embark from gabber’s chaotic neighborhood, the samples of voices, conversations, and phone calls, all wind the listener around the desperation that’s embedded in the digital world’s seamless mediation of our lives. Owing as much to power violence and industrial as to Rotterdam, E-Saggila’s affinity for the extremes is as conceptually critical as it is stylistically present.’ — Northern Electronics

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Robert Pollard Pain
‘I’m always pushing myself to come up with new techniques for creating art and writing songs. In the last couple of years I’ve actually developed a formula for writing songs, that’s a little too involved for me to elaborate on right now. The initial catalyst for me to write songs, I think, was to be an active participant instead of just a passive listener. To hear more of what I really like by writing them myself.’ — R.P.

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p.s. Hey. ** Shane Christmass, Hi, Shane. No, that Nuttall book is legendary, but I’ve never read it. I see it’s been reprinted. You into it? Recommend? ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. I haven’t seen ‘The Nico Project’ obviously, but, in theory, I have no problem with her or any figure being interpreted subjectively. The name of the show seems to signal that Nico is the source of a project. Based on that, I wouldn’t go in thinking I was receiving a definitive bioshow. But I don’t know. ** Bill, Hi. I love Derek White’s work. He’s so great. I haven’t seen anything new from him in a long time. Have you? ‘Queer California’: I’ll look its evidence up. DL-Alvarez and Jerome are a great start. Vinny Golia too! Jeez, seeing them both in close proximity sounds so sweet. Do let me know how the gigs are if you go. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi. Sadly it’s way, way out of print. I haven’t even seen pricey copies on eBay, etc. Yeah, like I said to David, I don’t think a show sourcing Nico (or anyone) needs to replicate her to be a strong work. ** Bernard, Oh, we should have a contest! Maybe that’s what we can do while I’m hiding out in your life-saving air-conditioned spot. ** Misanthrope, Hi. Enjoy it while he enjoys it. Like Kyler Ross-level enjoys it? Ha ha. I suppose I can go find out for myself. All the more reason to get that thing inside you disintegrated, assuming that’s doable. LPS: tsk tsk. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Nice to hear your positive report about the Tarantino. I’m a fan of his films generally, so I would see it anyway, but I like what you’re saying it’s doing. Good. Thanks a bunch. ** Right. I made another gig for you featuring things I’ve been into of late. Naturally I highly encourage you to forefront your curiosity and go on a musical adventure today, but that’s up to you obviously. See you tomorrow either way.

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‘Firework Studies is a book compiling photographs of fireworks in the night sky. By constraining nearly all tonal values to stark blacks and pure whites, the trails, explosions and clouds of debris are reduced to a series of simple repeated formal elements: arced lines, spherical bursts, and randomly dispersed particles. I made no effort to limit digital artifacts resulting from pushing the image files past their conventional range; the resulting noise becomes hard to distinguish from the texture of the fireworks themselves.’ — Pierre Le Hors

‘What happens if you drain the colour from fireworks? The sounds certainly don’t change. Pierre Le Hors decided to go with B&W; sketches for his Firework Studies and left them to their own abstract nature. The garish textures against a black background can now be anything they want: dandelions, galactic fog or palm tree tops. To some, fireworks have the same kitsch factor as sunsets. It may be fascinating when experienced live in person, wonderful and a song of colours. But the picture of it turns the moment into a sentimental, pathetic and unbearably inelegant instant. Yet, without the colours’ influence and by decontextualising the photographs from specific moments, locations or occasions, the light effects turn into self-contained visual sequences – full of magic.’ — Gosee

‘Firework Studies was published in an edition of 500 copies by Hassla books ($35, ISBN 9780982547151, New York City), an independent publishing company with a focus on art and photography. Hassla specialize in publishing small, low-run artist books that feature the work of both emerging and established artists, always working one-on-one with the artists to create a publication that evokes the very essence of the artist’s focus. This intimate process, coupled with Hassla’s simple aesthetic, allows for an interior view into the artist’s work.’ — get addicted to