Until recently, Riya Mahesh’s biography nailed nearly every beat of all-American academic achievement, following a familiar arc from early piano lessons to being crowned prom queen, like Olivia Rodrigo’s well-adjusted Wario. But after hitting a snag and failing to get into Juilliard (happens…), the musician regrouped during the pandemic with a SoundCloud account, a trial run of Logic, and nothing to lose.
As Quiet Light, the Texas-born, Boston-based producer has gone on to release multiple albums of increasingly accomplished art pop, along the way nabbing opening spots for Nilüfer Yanya, Chanel Beads, Ana Roxanne, and Hovvdy. Naturally, she’s managed all this while also powering through medical school.
Category: art pop
Fans of the darker side of modern musical forms, particularly Swans, have Jarboe somewhere in their minds and surely in their music collections. As a solo artist, Jarboe has made a series of career-defining recordings, 15 in all, before Sightings, her latest. Yet, it took her some eight years between The Cut of the Warrior (2018) and her latest offering, so what is there to expect?
Well, the musical direction is the one Jarboe followed from the beginning of her career, and in that respect, there’s nothing new to report. Yet, what did change is that the quality of her songwriting and performance has grown for the better as time passes. There is a sort of assurance that comes along with experience that exudes here, with practically no lapses in…
Florian T M Zeisig is one of contemporary ambient music’s preeminent shapeshifters. The Berlin-based producer first made waves in late 2020 with You Look So Serious, a compilation of Enya edits that distilled the singer’s voice down to a distant emanation. Since then, he’s set his talents to throbbing neurodrone, skunky spiritual jazz, West Mineral tropical unease, and a fantastic album about working at a nightclub that sounded like a party heard through the wall. His latest endeavor is a rotating collective with a name so florid it makes Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 seem like a perfectly modest moniker, and the theme this time is rock music, stripped of orthodoxy.
Zeisig assembled The Thinking of the World Began Pounding in Our Ears the Moment We Hit Shore…
Poetry and song are related, but they’re not kissin’ cousins, more first cousins at one remove. Composers of art song in the 19th and 20th centuries turned to poets for their song cycles, and rock-era lyrics have often been hailed as poetry, but what happens when a poet – a page poet, albeit adept at performance – combines with musicians and lyricists and adds his own voice to the mix; his reading voice, not a singing one.
In the case of Simon Armitage, Poet Laureate, former probation officer and resident poet with LYR, he’s fortunate in his collaborators, singer-songwriter Richard Walters, with his fine and distinctive lyrical vocals, and multi-instrumentalist and producer Patrick J Pearson, who with Armitage work up a broad palette of…
Wendy Eisenberg has evidently always been a fan of the rhetorical question, but perhaps never more so than on Wendy Eisenberg. “You are the oldest you’ve ever been,” they intone, sweet and clear, on the opening track: “Did you feel yourself change?” Whos, whats, wheres, whys, and hows abound: see “Who was I becoming?” (“Meaning Business”), “What gave me that idea?” and “Where was I when that happened?” (“The Ultraworld”), “Why did I try? Did I try?” (“Will You Dare”), “Is that how I wound up here?” (“Another Lifetime Floats Away”). But, as with all rhetorical questions, there are no answers expected. The asking — or, more specifically, the spacious, open silence that follows in the question’s wake — is the point. After all, absence is itself a kind of presence. Those gaps…
St. Vincent has released Live In London!, a new digital album capturing her acclaimed orchestral performance at Royal Albert Hall.
Recorded during last year’s BBC Proms, the album documents a unique collaboration between Annie Clark and conductor Jules Buckley, backed by a 60-piece orchestra. The performance saw St. Vincent reimagine material from across her career, transforming fan favourites and deeper cuts into sweeping, cinematic arrangements.
Spanning 19 tracks, Live In London! draws from a catalogue that stretches from her 2007 debut Marry Me through to 2024’s All Born Screaming, showcasing the evolution of one of modern music’s most inventive artists. Songs including Digital Witness, Los Ageless and Slow Disco are given…
Following no floor, a remarkable instrumental collaboration with claire rousay that focused on pastoral electro-acoustic soundscapes, more eaze remained with Thrill Jockey for her vocal-based solo effort sentence structure in the country. The album’s lyrics, often delivered through Auto-Tune but occasionally left unaltered, explore intimate moments and frustrating situations, reflecting on jealousy, apathy, and the difficulties of trying to succeed as a musician.
Fragile vocals and bubbling, twinkling synthesizers adorn the patient opener “leave (again),” while ambient pop gem “bad friend” is propelled by a gently blipping pulse and softly crying steel guitar. Another of the record’s more accessible tunes, “the producer,” also contains…
When the London jazz festival ran online only in 2020, an enthralling livestreamed performance by Swiss harpist Julie Campiche’s avant-jazz ensemble was a startling highlight, introducing UK audiences to a virtuoso instrumentalist and composer who was already turning heads in Europe. Campiche plucked guitar, zither and east Asian-style sounds from the harp, mingled with vocal loops, classical music, Nordic ambient jazz and more. You might call her soundscape magical or otherworldly if it didn’t coexist with a campaigner’s political urgency on environmental and social issues. But Campiche is too much of a visionary to overwhelm the eloquence of pure sound with polemic, as her new album, the unaccompanied Unspoken, confirms more than ever.
Gloom, glorious gloom, permeates the musical catalogue of singer-songwriter Fågelle (Klara Andersson), and new album Bränn min jord overflows with it. There are screams, cries, and field recordings. There is a sense throughout that we are swinging between mourning and desperation. Most importantly, there is Fågelle, coolly confident and unpredictable as a composer and performer. Even in the record’s most sedate moments, there is always something simmering within her. As Bränn min jord moves from start to finish, it’s thrilling to find out what those somethings are and how they burst forth from the depths of Fågelle’s mind to the sonic surface.
As the album begins, it is slow, stark. Beneath a sparse piano line and Fågelle’s tense…
Nate Mendelsohn’s skills in the studio are legendary in New York’s indie music world. The multi-instrumentalist, producer and engineer has collaborated with the likes of Yaeji, Frankie Cosmos, Phony Ppl, Dougie Poole, Office Culture, Adeline Hotel, and many more. For more than a decade, he’s also been releasing his own music under the moniker Market. His style is eclectic and often beautifully bizarre, but always seems anchored, sometimes tenuously, to sophisticated pop structures. As idiosyncratic as his latest Market project can get, Cleanliness 2: Gorgeous Technologies has something to offer everyone, even as it travels along its own unique path.
The press materials for Market explain that Mendelsohn was influenced by hip-hop…
Being a composer in a modern sense of the term has gone way past a singular artist sitting down (or standing up) next to their main composing instrument and music staff paper, writing down the notes. The creative process is, these days, enriched by so many other tools available to music creators that enable them to go beyond what was possible in previous centuries, decades, even days. At the same time, the composing process doesn’t limit itself to what is considered classical music as such, but moves into other musical genres, as far as the imagination of the author can take them.
Take the example we have here – Claire Dickson and her third album Balance. A Metropolis Ensemble commissioned composer, Dickson is working mainly as a vocalist and…
The lyrics for Diagonale des Yeux’s debut album were written in the style of an exquisite corpse game, with members Laurène Exposito and Théo Delaunay taking it in turns to patch together ephemeral thoughts and themes in a mix of French, German, English and Spanish. The bizarre, multilingual stories that emerged match the French duo’s ramshackle, home-recorded sound, which features everything from toybox percussion to farmyard sound effects.
Their whimsical approach is anchored in the outsider pop and post-punk of ’80s Europe, which embraced discordant instrumentation and disaffected vocals. These 12 tracks are charmingly lo-fi, built around rudimentary synth and guitar melodies that often careen into…
Mary Ocher’s leftist politics have always been baked into her art. Her first record was called War Songs, and she has continuously interrogated militarism, capitalism, and nationalism across subsequent works, including her 2017 breakthrough, The West Against the People.
Recently, she’s even taken to performing karaoke-style renditions of some of her new repertoire live to avoid using backing tracks or laptops on stage, something she has described as “a wonderful icebreaker” and a “really, really great opportunity to talk about broader political subjects with the audience.”
In short, Ocher is a multi-hyphenate outsider artist who wraps sharp geopolitical reflections in peerless avant-pop packaging, as her latest…
Anjimile (ann-JIM-uh-lee) Chithambo has forged a distinctive musical path characterised by unflinching introspection and deep honesty. Emerging from Boston’s vibrant indie scene while studying at Northeastern University, Anjimile captivated audiences with earnest songwriting, delicate sonic textures, and performances that felt like prayer and celebration.
Critical acclaim quickly followed; 2020’s Giver Taker, hailed by Rolling Stone as one of the year’s best albums, positioned him as a compelling voice exploring enduring themes of spirituality, identity, and liberation. With The King (2023), Anjimile intensified his examination of Black and trans existence amid personal and societal turbulence, reaffirming his courageous…
Bliss is the kind of record AI would make if it were actually what its most delusional adherents say it is: Not a pathetic, thought-terminating, and uncanny imitation of human creation but a beguiling alien intelligence capable of wringing new forms out of a near-bottomless archive.
Listening to it, it’s easy to imagine its maker (Alice Gerlach, erstwhile cellist for claire rousay and Tomberlin) as a strange cyborg locked inside a spacious chamber, worming their way through clusters of instruments with preternatural curiosity and mathematical precision. Across four tracks, each clocking in at exactly ten minutes, Gerlach assembles soundscapes from witchy ambient tones, buzzy drones, field recordings of birds chirping and muffled conversations, and…
Annie Hogan is something of a quiet icon of goth and post-punk. A longtime friend of Marc Almond, she put on early Soft Cell shows and played with his dark cabaret side-project Marc and the Mambas. She appears on Barry Adamson’s seminal Moss Side Story and has worked with Lydia Lunch, Nick Cave, and several members of Einstürzende Neubauten. She’s also been releasing evocative solo music since the late 1980s, the latest of which, the six track album Tongues in My Head, strikes an elegant balance of light and shade.
Opening track ‘Alles Ist Verloren’ is measured but bleak, a taxonomy of a post-apocalyptic landscape peopled with faith healers, wilting trees and “shaking bones of the dead”. The bones of the track are also bare – a simple chord…
Long before Rosalía’s operatic theatrics broke the internet, Colin Self was injecting joy into the artform via an experimental trans-feminist opera project called Elation. Launched in 2011, the series consisted of multiple parts with 2018’s Siblings followed by Orphans in 2019. Self re-emerged five years later with the lemniscate EP, after enduring a particularly challenging period marked by “loss and uncertainty.”
Originally released last February, respite ∞ levity for the nameless ghost in crisis became the follow-up to lemniscate and the third full-length album for the U.S.-born composer, producer, choreographer, and multidisciplinary artist — a record described in the press notes as “a greeting after years of conscious exile.”
Ten thousand years ago, a man died in what would become Somerset. His bones waited in a cave until 1903, when they were discovered and given a name: Cheddar Man. Now he’s the subject of a song by Voka Gentle, who use his story to contemplate what we’re doing to the places where people have lived for millennia. “Let’s say the sea levels rise and we lose north Somerset, which, by the way, is looking increasingly likely…” William J Stokes’s voice is dry, conversational, with the studied neutrality of a local news presenter. Beneath it, the music shuffles and twitches, glassy and off-kilter; post-punk refracted through Laurie Anderson’s deadpan intelligence.
The album circles power from multiple angles: a photoshoot, a Greek tragedy, a preacher…
Hen Ogledd’s Discombobulated is in the radical mould of music that tackles the now. Unconcerned that references may go out of date, the timelessness of their sound comes in documenting the present, rather than in seeking to transcend (or ignore) it. Lyrically, Discombobulated celebrates dissent with all the force of the protest tradition in folk music; musically, the album glues together sounds and genres to evoke the chaos of today.
Hen Ogledd is the project of Dawn Bothwell, Rhodri Davies, Richard Dawson and Sally Pilkington. The first releases were just Dawson and Davies; since then, with the addition of Bothwell for 2016’s Bronze and then Pilkington on 2018’s Mogic, Hen Ogledd have grown both more complete and more porous. Complete, because…
Labeling any music as spiritual can play as a (fiery) double-edged sword for any artist involved, and if that is your debut full-length album, like is the case with Brooklyn’s multi-media artist AnAkA, and her album Crisis of the Concrete, those edges just might get a bit sharper, and those edges might spew just a bit more fire either way.
Of course, that spiritual element that the artist might be trying to evoke could have more or less openly religious content (less in AnAkA case here), and it can involve a number of musical elements and/or genres, and AnAkA certainly goes that multi-genre route here. Very often, the best music with that spiritual element was done with quite a few jazz elements, and AnAkA certainly doesn’t shy away from bringing them in,…