Lorenzo Gómez Oviedo — Cielo

Cielo is a rapturous upward journey. In its treatment of death and ascension it takes notes from Eliane Radigue's seminal Trilogie De La Mort. Both works tug in movements so slow as to be near imperceptible. Both produce an illusory perennial tone; a note which feels singular but is in constant flux. When change is present it is gradual, even glacial. It serves the purpose of feigning changelessness.

Cielo may be passive and unshowy. But it offers much to be unpacked. Like a canvas painted one solid colour, it grants more the longer it is considered. Gómez Oviedo's rumbles, scrapes and drones both fill and offer space at the same time.

Drone can in its minimalism engender a wandering mind. Cielo, no exception, invites technical consideration in its quietest moments. Listeners may try to identify the sounds from which Cielo was manipulated into being. They may venture to guess the processes those sounds underwent. This springs not from disengagement but an attempt to apprehend the album's striking production. And it never swamps the emotive force of the album. Cielo balances between a contemplative mode and experiential, Dionysian bliss with ease.

Violin work from Valentina Spina dances over the surface of Gómez Oviedo's drones like notonecta glauca, a trill which fades airily in and out of the mix. Like so much of what works in Cielo, it's a tiny but vital element elevating the whole.

Drone is so often about balancing these elements — light but not bare, empty but not hollow. Removal or addition of the smallest element crumbles the tower. Cielo strikes a superb balance, looming high amongst its peers.

Cielo is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

Pharmakon — Devour

Margaret Chardiet's adaptation of Pharmakon to a studio setting pits the project against itself. Lauded for live shows which crumble the audience/performer boundary, Chardiet seems an unlikely recording artist. Pharmakon presents as a project living under specific circumstances, in specific spaces. It's physical, confrontational, instinctual; all the irreplicable beauties unique to live music.

Though recorded in a different room and time, Devour proves brutal enough to invade one's spiritual space. Your headphones, or speakers, become the profaned stage. Chardiet the apparition, diluted in the inches above your skin, raises goosebumps with her ferocity.

Devour owes this to a shaken-up recording process, with each side of the album committed in a single take. Room is permitted for beautiful imperfections, and Chardiet remains whole, not chopped to bits in the edit. This contributes an organic flow to the album. Tracks nudge up so naturally it's near-impossible to listen to them in isolation. The album succeeds most as constructed, in one piece. Inescapable once met, it grips like a vice then lets you go.

The downside is that previous LPs’ scaffolding is bared, their fury rendered somehow clinical. But it was a wise decision to step back. Any more bombast than present on 2017's Contact could initiate collapse into self-parody. And an emphasis on variety over volume in Devour prevents Chardiet erupting over the windshield into a sonic dead end.

Devour renews hope for a project which, in less extraordinary and committed hands, would have long since expended itself. Chardiet reaffirms her talent with a forceful sonic ejection right into her fans' faces.

Devour is ready for consumption here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

Sui Zhen — Losing, Linda

In Losing, Linda, Sui Zhen probes animism in the immaterial world. 'Linda' is the subject of the album's cover, a grotesque and rubberised approximation of Zhen. She impresses a dark, half-formed online identity — the ghost that we, the living, assemble to leave here. This is something marketers tellingly call a 'presence'.

Behind the mask is choreographer Megan Payne, in a further explosion of identity. Identity crises are no new ground in music, but Zhen explores them with refreshing contemporaneity. If Death Grips were the first post-internet band, propelled upwards by memes and ARGs, Zhen goes a step further. She is among the first to so fully discuss the internet’s Derridean spectrality, its power to fragment the individual.

Opener 'Another Life' gets the most often-discussed existential terror of the internet out of the way. It's a slow, ethereal, exploration of the innate FOMO of the online experience. Its chorus hook, 'all I see are things that I could be missing / all I know are things from another life', ought to hit home for any one of facebook's 2.41 billion monthly active users.

The effects of this phenomenon extend into the real world, too. Gig attendees will be familiar with the obsessive documentation of the 21st century. They've either craned their neck around a hovering device, its bright screen a smear of the world, or filmed a performance on one. Whatever one's perspective on this practice, it has inarguably altered our relationship with the present. This is epitomised in the sinister online aphorism 'pics or it didn't happen'.

And throughout Losing, Linda, Sui Zhen emphasises this incorporeal floatiness that physical reality has caught. 'Different Places' is a wistful, dub-inflected piece that feels adrift in the air. It lives in and explores distances between people, with koan-like lyrics that reveal as much as they mystify. 'I Could Be There' is a ballad with one foot in the past; like a strange, sorrowful piece of city pop remixed by Clams Casino. It feels like something that would stalk the quiet halls of youtube, awaiting the day it’s recommended to millions, heaved back from the forgotten past into new life.

Anti-natalism and biodegradable coffins betray a modern desire to leave no physical trace. Yet we are increasingly commemorated by our online presences, doppelgängers which will breathe as long as the servers do. Losing, Linda is, then, a ghost story for 2019; the story of our collective self-haunting. It's a generous work which deepens in meaning and grows in beauty with every listen.

Pre-order and stream tracks from Losing, Linda here. Album due September 27th.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

Not Your Friends — Constructing a Mental Breakdown

Constructing a Mental Breakdown traverses the knife's edge of the abject and ecstatic. It's loud to the point of extremity, but not 'heavy' in a traditional sense. The power of this sound is in its invigorating lightness. Where others would mimic a lion's roar, Not Your Friends adopt the acidic hiss of snakes.

Like a mathcore-inflected Nails, this band perform with an absurd level of aggression. Nails' machismo is here, however, subbed out in favour of a brutal feminine howl. This inversion is actualised in the lyrics of 'Abort', the album's opener. 'Abort' aims for both a spiritual and physical castration of male bullshit merchants. If the English language had a word without the judgement inherent in shrew, harpy, hag, or witch, it would be embodied here.

In its first half, Constructing a Mental Breakdown heaps on the distressing content. It's corporeal, caustic, and draws in images of abuse, violence, and bodily fluids and functions. There's a stop off to the town of Twin Peaks with 'It Is Happening Again', exploring the show's darkest and most arresting scene, in which a character is driven into Missoula, Montana. That the song manages to recreate this scene's horrific lack of staginess, while retaining its tact and sympathy, is hugely impressive.

And from 'Sebastian No' onwards, the album's tone lightens. Violence is still present, but it's exaggerated; played for laughs. And the two penultimate tracks, especially when contrasted with what comes before them, are both incredibly sweet. The tail end of this album is like a decompression chamber. Not Your Friends let you sink to the bed of depravity and avoid nitrogen sickness on the ascent.

Constructing a Mental Breakdown is available for streaming and purchase here. Proceeds of every album sale to Pittsburgh Action Against Rape. Donations can also be made to this worthy cause at paar.net.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

sirWas — Holding On To A Dream

sirWas' Holding On To A Dream, in its titling and its first few moments, threatens forty minutes of mawkish cheese. The album, out of the gate, has an easy affability, with unchallenging compositions. But it's not long before that surface slips.

A wave of melancholy recontextualises the album's title. ‘Holding On To A Dream’ isn't a faux-inspirational Instragram truism. It's the sigh of someone at the end of their tether, ready to leave the dream outside, shake themselves dry of it, and move on.

The album's arrival at the end of summer enriches its doleful beauty. The beach barbecue is over. This is for the last dying embers under the grill, lonely beacons in the sunset. Holding On To A Dream is uncommonly self-aware. The album's suggestion it will soon fade, crumble, and be erased by time is, ironically, the very thing that keeps it stuck in your head.

It shares DNA and gloom-driven grooviness with Frank Ocean's blond. Stand-out track 'Somewhere' features some distorted vocals reminiscent of blond's 'Self Control', in a liminal space between voice and guitar; between two sets of strings running down two necks, the organic and the artificial. 'Somewhere' has a refreshing sense of progression and hope that many of the static jams of Holding On To A Dream lack.

Holding On To A Dream is a work both personable and personal. Its lyrics are confessions, and like many confessions they are obscured behind qualifiers, distractions, bids for approval and friendliness. But that doesn't make them any less compelling. It just makes them easier to hear.

Holding On To A Dream will be released on September 20th. Pre-order and stream tracks here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe