Hello!
No lengthy gaps this time, I’m back in the saddle ready to hit self-imposed deadlines properly (he says, in earnest). I think I’m also going to include more than just music recommendations from now on as well. Anyway…
Oneohtrix Point Never
AGAIN
Warp
I couldn’t work out what I thought about this record. Daniel Lopatin’s tenth as Oneohtrix is stuffed full to the brim with interesting concepts, but I wasn’t sure how coherent the whole package was. It feels like a collection of vignettes, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In his own words, Lopatin says the album is in part “a speculative autobiography” as well as a “meditation on his musical identity during young adulthood from the perspective of middle age”. Quite. There’s a level of whimsy plastered all over ‘Again’, the abstract melodies across all track a signature of the OPN sound. Chaos shudders on ‘World Outside’, the aural equivalent of a black hole swallowing a star, while the title track arpeggiates between cosmic fairground radio transmission and a car alarm falling down a cavern. Some of the best tracks appear towards the end of the record, like ‘On An Axis’ and ‘Ubiquity Road’, the former’s strings building with a post-rock ferocity, the latter featuring swelling synthlines that disintegrate into sharp electronic textures. Maybe not for everyone, but there’s more here than meets the eye.
Teeth Of The Sea
HIVE
Rocket
“Step inside ‘Hive’, if you dare,” taunts Teeth Of The Sea, of their sixth LP. This record really grabbed me by the brain and wouldn’t let go. Influenced by Frank Herbert’s 1973 sci-fi novel ‘Hellstrom’s Hive’, ‘Hive’ is a cinematic, kaleidoscopic, psychedelic trip of an album, which draws on everything from krautrock, electronica, and synthpop. And it never holds back. ‘Liminal Kin’ starts off like something Vangelis wrote for ‘Blade Runner’, before glitching into a Throbbing Gristle-esque electro-industrial banger. Three tracks here, ‘Apollo’, ‘Æther’, and ‘Artemis’, were part of a commission for London’s Science Museum, and are imbued with a heady mix of floating jazz melodies and haunting ambient synths. But it’s ‘Megafragma’ that’s worth the price of admission alone, a nine minute experimental titan of drones, growls and echoes, rumbling like something you’d hear in the lowest room of a Berlin club. Step inside the hive? I’ll be here for a while thank you very much.
Polypores
MULTIZONAL MINDSCRAMBLE
DiN
I’ve lost count of how many albums in we are when it comes to Stephen James Buckley, but I do know this is his second for DiN, the Sunderland-based ambient label run by analogue synth aficionado Ian Boddy. ‘Multizonal Mindscramble’ is like being allowed access to the most psychedelic parts of Buckley’s brain. Synths oscillate, melodies and counter-melodies grapple for dominance, and electronic textures overlay, tessellate, and ricochet off each other in this kaleidoscopic expedition. Buckley must have visited the universe where insects are the dominant species for ‘Hexagram’, mandibles chittering alongside synths that trill like membranous wings, buzzing off into the ether. Take a journey on the internet superhighway with ‘Adventures In The Super-Spectrum’, its electronics swelling into bright synth whines that spiral into echoes; ‘Diverging Reality Tunnels’ is almost meditative in its delicacy, a fluttering rhythm bathed into wah-ing groans; and ‘Hyperdata’, a snip at 59 seconds, is like Buckley retuning his very own TARDIS, glitching static that builds with an angry growl. Does this man ever stop? No, but I’ve no complaints.
Field Lines Cartographer
PHASES OF THIS AND OTHER MOONS
Castles In Space
Those of you who are not familiar with Field Lines Cartographer are doing yourselves a disservice. His otherworldly soundscapes hit an ambient sweet spot that’s like someone piping music from untouched alien planets directly into your brain. The man who in the real world is known as Mark Burford says that ‘Phases Of This And Other Moons’ was made over a period of a few weeks using only a Buchla 208C Easel Command, and evoked imagery such as “standing on the surface of one of the moons of Jupiter, or perhaps observing a satellite of Uranus transit across its host planet”. And it’s very easy to see why. The bleeps and whirs of ‘Transit Of Ariel’ sounds like they could be plucked strings; a station trying to pick up a signal, echoing across a desolate alien landscape. The dark atmospherics of ‘A Black Moon Tide’ are far more sinister, a radio wave that decays into a burble, taking you to a planet where life is long-dead. Like his contemporary Polypores, Field Lines Cartographer sure knows how to wield a synthesiser.
Kevin Abstract
RUNNING OUT
RCA
“This Kevin Abstract track reminds me of blink-182,” is not a sentence I thought I’d write. And yet. There seems to be a subtle (and in some cases Olivia Rodrigo, not so subtle) revival/renaissance, of 00s pop-punk and when it’s done well, it really hits all the right notes. This is a deviation from what I expected from Kevin Abstract, particularly now Brockhampton is over. But this veer into more rock-y waters has paid off well if ‘Running Out’ is anything to go by. ‘Blanket’, Abstract’s first solo LP since 2019’s ‘Arizona Baby’ is out at the end of this week, and it’ll be interesting to see how much of it has foregone hip hop (the single of the same name features Abstract’s breathless vocals over heavy slabs of guitar and an anthemic screech).
That’s it for this time. As always you can find my ramblings elsewhere in both print and online in Electronic Sound. You can also follow me on Threads or Bluesky.
But a few bits before I go…
I am starting to feel like the internet is no longer fun. It’s been an ongoing plot point of these Substack newsletters, but it’s something that has really hit home in the last year and since the decline of Twitter. Ryan Broderick in Garbage Day, which I’ve referenced many times, covered this in a recent edition and spoke about how author and technologist Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to describe when a platform deteriorates and becomes more lazy and closed off. It’s something that Kyle Chayka touches upon in his New Yorker article Why The Internet Isn’t Fun Anymore (it’s well worth a read). I don’t really have anything of worth to add, apart from the fact that it’s felt like the internet has been in a weird transitional flux for a while now (and that it’s turning everyone insane). My own internet habits have been relegated primarily to Instagram, Discord, and Reddit, but even that has taken a hit since the API changes earlier this year. I don’t know where things go from here, but it increasingly feels like the age of the social internet is coming to an end.
My excitement is immeasurable and my day is saved; ‘It Follows’ is getting a sequel. No concrete details on plot have been released, but ‘They Follow’ will feature the return of Maika Monroe as Jay Height, as well as David Robert Mitchell back in the directing and writing chair. I think there’s been a big enough gap since the first film for it to be genuinely good. Just bring Disasterpeace back on soundtrack duties (and the clamshell e-reader) and we’re good to go.
It’s Halloween, so I have two spooky, dread-building film recommendations for you. The aforementioned ‘It Follows’, if you haven’t already seen it, but also
‘Talk To Me’, an Australian indie film about possession which came out earlier this year. I watched it the other night after it generated a huge amount of buzz on release. It’s great, and is available on Netflix in the UK.
Apple caught my attention Monday night using OPN - Again to open their keynote
Keep Happening- an excellent and informative five minutes of my life.