This month…
ABSTRACT CONCRETE
This Echo
STATE51 CONSPIRACY
8/10
Skronk-pop debut from This Heat man’s latest outfit
Charles Hayward of This Heat and Camberwell Now shows little sign of slowing down, continuing to perform, record and collaborate with impressive vigour. Abstract Concrete draws on the energy of his This Heat reunion with Charles Bullen, resulting in an experimental pop album that is full of complex time signatures and curious instrumentation without ever being anything other than fun, highly listenable and very charming. Hayward instructed his young, international band to play outside their comfort zones by switching instruments, confident he could hold things together on the skins – and the results are instantly rewarding.
PETER WATTS
ACTRESS
LXXXVIII
NINJA TUNE
7/10
Ninth album from London techno futurist
Darren Cunningham’s music as Actress embraces a certain cerebrality. LXXXVIII was inspired by the strategic machinations of game theory, with each track drawing its title from the squares of a chessboard. Luckily, Cunningham doesn’t let this kind of high concept get in the way of a good time. “Memory Haze (c1)” and “Typewriter World (c8)” are exemplary takes on modernist techno replete with unusual textural qualities: beats constructed from throbs of static, deep pools of reverb and echo. What really distinguishes LXXXVIII is its sense of soul: see “Its Me (g8)”, a lush slow jam that chops up diva vocals into something effortlessly seductive.
LOUIS PATTISON
ILYAS AHMED
A Dream Of Another
GEOGRAPHIC NORTH
7/10
Gently psychedelic ambient-blues ruminations
Though he may be best known for his membership of Grails, or for collaborating with Grouper, Ilyas Ahmed’s most lasting contributions to the recorded world will surely be his decades-long run of solo albums. A Dream Of Another is a perfect example therein; it is, at once, emotionally charged and strangely distant, as though everything’s played through fog, like the overamped ritual clang closing “Etched In Smoke”. But it’s Ahmed’s strung-out folk-blues guitar that’s often centred here, and on songs like “Twice The Memory”, the guarded intimacy of his playing is as hazy as Hisato Higuchi or Loren Connors.
JON DALE
AMBROSE AKINMUSIRE
Owl Song
NONESUCH
8/10
Kendrick Lamar-beloved trumpeter is joined by Bill Frisell for a new phase
“This is the cat!” the radical sax elder Archie Shepp exclaimed of Ambrose Akinmusire, seeing his Coltrane-like devotion to his sound. The Oaklander was on Kendrick’s To Pimp A Butterfly, and has employed hip-hop thinking on his own albums. Owl Song is, though, a bare, limpid distillation of his music, with Bill Frisell and Wynton Marsalis’s drummer Herlin Riley. His trumpet’s sustained, melancholic balm on “Owl Song 1” ends piercing high thin air, while on the aptly named “Grace” he turns repeated phrases round. On “Henya”, he whispers among the tune’s foundations and Frisell’s singing pulse. This is subtly profound music, full of meditative, focused beauty.
NICK HASTED
ALTERNATIVE TV
Direct Action
FOURTH DIMENSION
8/10
Five decades in, a concise avant-noise experiment
In many ways the uncompromising conscience of punk, Mark Perry’s Alternative TV are genuinely unpredictable still, and Direct Action is another leftfield gesture. There are precedents for this kind of improvised hum and clatter in Perry’s career – ATV’s Vibing Up The Senile Man, The Good Missionaries’ Fire From Heaven – so Direction Action is in good company. The cover references noise pioneers Whitehouse’s Great White Death, which suggests some of what to expect: blocks of abraded, stentorian noise that are, nevertheless, finely sculpted, marked with contained fury. Elsewhere, the meandering two-chord guitar rambles recall Vibing…, or The Shadow Ring.
JON DALE
MARIA BC
Spike Field
SACRED BONES
8/10
Fragile dream-pop from Oakland songwriter
Following their intriguing 2022 debut , Oakland-based songwriter Maria BC has signed to Sacred Bones and delivered a texturally richer but similarly fragile set of lo-fi psych-folk songs. These slight but beautiful tracks have gossamer-thin melodies and are held together by repetition, willpower, a creaky Steinway piano and some stunning vocals – Maria BC is a classically trained mezzo-soprano. But the magic ingredient here is restraint, as “Watcher” layers Maria BC’s voice like an angelic choir over a single stuttering chord, or they deliver “Return To Sender” and “Daydrinker” – fractured, whispered poems that slip in and out of focus
