Happening Again #55
The Ambient Issue
Hello!
I’ve accidentally made this issue an ambient issue, although I guess it could be argued that a lot of these are strictly “ambient” issues (note for next time: stop saying “issue”). Music journalists and their genres, eh?
I’m back reviewing in the new issue of Electronic Sound, whose star this month is the mighty Cabaret Voltaire. The cover feature is excellent, written by some guy called Neil Mason. No, I’m not sure either.
You can also find my words (for the next 26 days!) on Rival Consoles excellent ‘Persona’ album on Cantilever. Personal bias aside, I really do think Aaron is building something quite special with this streaming service. Despite the fact I’m often on the hunt for new music, I’ve found myself looking forward to what is coming up on the service, as well as all the extra bits that come with the music. Do give it a try if you haven’t already (especially if you’re sick and tired of the usual suspects).
Anyway, here’s what I’ve been spinning recently…
Are you a musician? Do you have a certain band or artist you think I should be listening to? Drop them into the Happening Again inbox: wearehappeningagain@gmail.com
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Midlum
UNDER STILLHET
Bandcamp
Sometimes, it’s not just Bandcamp or my inbox that brings in the goods. I found Dutch musician Midlum via Substack. ‘Under Stillhet’ is the first release from a series titled ‘A Soundtrack For Paintings’, a collaborative project with fellow Dutch artist Christiaan Kuitwaard. You can read the story behind the work, as well as view the online exhibition here, but the focal point of this entry is a house in Denmark in midsommer. Via expansive ghostly textures and delicate key work, Midlum translates the shades, the colours, and the space of the painting aurally into a melancholic, beautiful slice of neoclassical. The way it builds with those swelling electronics reminds me of Jóhann Jóhannsson’s work. I’m very interested to see where this series goes, especially if the rest is as good as this entry.
Dylan Henner
BART VS THE WORLD
Bandcamp
I promised in the last issue (that damn word again!) that I’d have more on Dylan Henner’s ambient ‘Simpsons’ album, and don’t you worry, I’m a man of my word. Having already dazzled me with his plunderphonic portal ‘Star Dream FM’, he apparently wanted to appeal even more to my tastes and released ‘Bart Vs The World’. At first glance this might seem a bit gimmicky, but there’s actually quite a lot of interesting world-building going on here. ‘The Simpsons’ has always had a really visually interesting method of representing darkness; the way the animators use blues, purples, and teals gives Springfield at night-time a dreamlike quality. Whether it’s Bart getting up at four a.m. to look at a comet, Lisa and Nelson gazing at the town from the top of a hill, or Homer sat on the bonnet of his car, staring up at the stars - it conjures up a hazy, almost illicit feeling that’s hard to describe. And yet Dylan Henner has managed to translate these feelings into music. Using a mix of electronic textures, choral pads, and field recordings (along with suitably long titles that Henner is known for), ‘Bart Vs The World’ really does feel a stroll through Springfield in the wee hours. Haunting ambience shifts like mist on ‘A Single Pool Of Light Illuminating The Corridor Outside Marge And Homer’s Bedroom’. ‘An Abandoned Industrial Building In Downtown Springfield’ starts off exactly like the show’s opening, a choral note that extends, and is gradually accompanied by a looping, dissipating glockenspiel melody. It’s a track that feels like it bleeds melancholy - a contrast to the spry synthesiser stabs of ‘Barney’s Bowlerama Car Park At Night’. ‘The Simpsons’ sometimes feels like a cheat code to get the attention of a certain type of person. And an ambient concept album based around ‘The Simpsons’ could have been a cheap gimmick. In the hands of Dylan Henner, it’s anything but.
OHYUNG
IOWA
Bandcamp
I was deeply and immediately taken by this album, which is always good sign. OHYUNG is the alias of Brooklyn-based artist and composer Lia Ouyang Rusli. She has an impressive CV, having scored Eva Victor’s award-winning ‘Sorry Baby’, as well as Salvadorian comedian Julio Torres’ HBO series ‘Fantasmas’ and his surreal comedy film ‘Problemista’. ‘IOWA’ is OHYUNG’s ode to the US state of the same name where she lived for 11 months, and is also an homage to Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Nebraska’. Whereas Springsteen’s voice is the driving force behind that album, OHYUNG uses a sonic palette that includes hissing tapes, soaring chorus, warped found sounds, and blossoming synths. It’s pretty poignant stuff, and there’s an unease that runs through the entire record. ‘Purgatory’ sounds exactly how I imagine it to be - bassy growls, muffled scratches, twinkling tones, and a hazy chorus so thick you can almost feel the condensation. ‘Driftless’ ebbs and flows, making as mush use of negative space as it does its chatter of found sounds. But the highlight for me is ‘Christofascism’, that ever-present chorus taking a sombre turn, dark synth chords sighing, drones and percussion building with a sudden sense of optimism, before it all fades to silence. An interesting, evocative album from an interesting, provocative artist. And if that wasn’t good enough, all vinyl and Bandcamp sales from ‘IOWA’ will be donated to the Iowa Trans Mutual Aid Fund. Great music for a great cause.
KMRU
KIN
Editions Mego
“‘Kin’ is a record to be played slow and LOUD,” it says on KMRU’s Bandcamp page. KMRU is Kenya-born, now Berlin-based electronic composer Joseph Kamaru. He’s a sonic menace, having produced around 20 albums between 2017 and 2020, while his double album ‘Peel’ was made in two days. ‘Kin’ was initially conceived as a vague sequel to ‘Peel’, with Kamaru starting work on it in Nairobi in 2021 before life, death, the universe (and likely the pandemic) got in the way. I really like how dense this record is; it’s as though Kamaru carved ‘Kin’ from stone. Thick synthlines oscillate with warmth on opener ‘With Trees Where We Can See’, while ‘Maybe’ drifts glacially, yawning drones swirling with a flickering intensity. ‘They Are Here’ is a standout - nails on a chalkboard is an often tired metaphor, but this is a steel girder dragged along concrete, ominous vibrations constantly building with intensity, slowly joined by decaying squeals. It really is a tune that you should be playing slow, and loud.
Caterina Barbieri / Bendik Giske
AT SOURCE
Light-Years
An Italian synthesist and a Norwegian saxophonist walk into a bar. Well, they don’t. But they do make an EP together. What started as an artistic residency at Milan’s ICA in 2021 has flourished into an EP, in which the pair join forces to create their own cosmic sound worlds, wielding their preferred weapon of choice. It’s a genius pairing, and while analogue meeting electronic is nothing new, the way these two musicians interact with each other makes for very dynamic listening. On ‘Intuition, Nimbus’, Giske’s saxophone flutters like a brass butterfly across the winds of Barbieri’s airy electronics, that start off all floaty and then soar bright and loud. The 11-minute ‘Impatience, Magma’ is a real banger - the panicked, processed sax quivering against growing analogue loops, ricocheting off each other before everything churns like a vortex, Barbieri and Giske each taking turns to pull focus. It’s great to see these two artists not only flex their composition muscles, but mesh so well together. Essential listening.
That’s it for this time. As always you can find my ramblings elsewhere in both print and online in Electronic Sound. I am going to tentatively dip into the world of microblogging again, so follow me on Bluesky if that’s your sort of thing.
But before I go, here are some things from across the internet that have caught my eye…
// I must be terribly naïve, and also sound like a luddite, but I was pretty shocked when I saw a writer and journalist I highly admire asking which LLM was more accurate for asking questions. I don’t understand why you wouldn’t just… research something yourself.
// Any child of the 90s will know that, regardless of what games console or gadget you might have been messing around with, to your parents it was always “the Nintendo”. Even if it was a PlayStation. Well, they may have been onto something because the National Videogame Museum in Frisco, Texas has managed to get hold of the mythical Nintendo PlayStation that never made it past the prototype stage. It’s a amazing piece of video game history that was thought to be lost to time. This Sony MSF-1 is the earliest known system of its type, and was planned as a CD attachment for the Super Nintendo.
// On the subject of video games, I thought it was interesting that GOG, the PC storefront that specialises in retro games, reports that ‘Heroes Of Might And Magic III’, a strategy game from 1999, is their top-selling retro game with half of buyers under 25. This, they say, is due to younger generations growing up with games like ‘Minecraft’ and ‘Roblox’, games where graphical fidelity takes a backseat. I’d argue that graphical leaps are less severe than the jump of, say, the Super Nintendo to the N64. Regardless, it’s a marked change from pouring hours into a microtransaction-laden live-service games.
// Put the headphone jack back on phones.