Three years ago, Breton producer Émilie Quinquis decided, for pragmatic reasons, to learn to sail solo. Living on Ushant, an island with a landmass of six square miles off the cost of Brittany, she wanted to be able to come and go as she pleased. As she grew more confident at the helm, she graduated to travelling further out – to the Irish Sea, around islands off Scotland and north to the Faroes. These journeys, a sense of Quinquis placing herself at the mercy of the elements and being amidst a world that ebbs and flows, rises and falls, came to shape her music. Eor is thus an album you can hear as a collection that reflects the sea’s different moods. To take just one example, ‘The tumbling point’ has a gathering urgency so that the middle of the song becomes…
Category: art pop
Angel Deradoorian doesn’t make boring records, each one takes her core competencies — amazing voice, sharp-eyed lyrical acumen, highly developed musical skills — and gives it a small twist. Eternal Recurrence was the most drastic swerve as it did away with drums entirely; 2025’s Ready for Heaven‘s approach is less dramatic, yet the changes are palpable. She adds more electronics to the mix and stakes a claim on disco territory on “No No Yes Yes”, but the biggest difference here is the confidence and overall strength of both the songs and her performance. It feels like her previous albums have been leading to this, a powerfully, intense record that features her vocals at their best while also stretching out her musical muscles in new ways. Every song takes a different…
Kenji Kariu’s songs land oh so lightly. The lyrics (in Japanese) are barely breathed. The melodies waft through gentle arrangements like dandelion fluff. The songs refer quietly to other songs — opener “And Then There Was Light” has the ineffable bossa nova lilt of, say, “The Girl from Ipanema,” while breeze-y, beachy “Umbrella,” borrows a sing-song-y tea dance tune from 1920s Broadway — but don’t over rely on them.
Keyboards twinkle, percussion shuffles, the artist croons, and all is weightless, well-lighted and faintly unreal.
This is Kariu’s fourth album, following a stint in OWKMJ. It feels a bit less fragmentary and experimental than 2021’s Sekai, with stronger melodies and lusher (though still quiet)…
Claire Molek’s voice has always been a little spooky, a clear art-pop soprano wandering through subterranean caverns of echo. She sounds a bit like Beth Gibbons, which is to say, a fragile spirit trapped in machine landscapes, and though she can unleash a powerful, gutsy belt, there’s something oddly disembodied about her vocal trills and flourishes. That’s truer than ever on this third Friend of a Friend album, recorded with partner Jason Savsani in a haunted house not far from their Chicago stomping grounds.
Beatique.net tells the story this way. Molek and Savsani booked an Air BnB for their recording sessions, a Victorian house in rural Illinois. They didn’t know, at the time, that the house been a gathering place for spiritualists or that it had…
Norwegian musician, artist and novelist Jenny Hval release her new album, Iris Silver Mist. Iris Silver Mist is named after a fragrance made by the nose Maurice Roucel for the French perfume house Serge Lutens. It’s described as smelling more like steel than silver. It is cold and prickly, soft and shimmering, like stepping outside on an early, misty morning, your body still warm from sleep. A perfume, with its heart notes and scented accords, shares its language with music. Both travel through air, simultaneously invisible and distinct.
Rather than begin with music, Iris Silver Mist began with the absence of it. As the pandemic led to no live music, the smell of cigarettes, soap, and the sweat from warm stage lights and shared bathrooms was replaced by unphysical…