100 words music reviews
quinn’s big successes have always been focusing on her components philosophically; on ‘quinn,’ the production has caught up. Despite the record’s consistent, lo-ist of lo-fi sheen, it belongs in a list alongside music from anarchist, diverse oddballs including Dean Blunt and 100gecs. The completeness of ‘quinn’ in the face of its manifold genres is more […]
Wu-Lu’s South London is being gutted: the vibrance that gave it a life is now filtered through unforgiving pipes of amoral opportunism. However, ‘LOGGERHEAD’ is a lone howl, not a rallying cry. It is the second storm that followed the first. The instruments embody this anxious, angular self-reflection, but Wu-Lu’s vocal performances are often swallowed […]
Camae Ayewa’s prolific album streak has not eroded her creative, chaotic, verve. The east-coast artist has always moved without a compass—on ‘Jazz Codes,’ she becomes a sailor of the mind. The unusually soothing jazz textures are nicely contrasted by her previous, more arresting work, seducing our ears before a poetic, political point. The foggy instrumentals amplify […]
One of the most important ‘summer-y’ releases of 2022 has dropped. ‘Beanna’ is elevator music for the soul. It follows in the quietly shuffling, lo-fi, ‘chill’ hip-hop rhythm, but diverts in innumerable microscopic ways to form a cohesive, fresh whole. The result is a cinematic, mid-century aesthetic that evokes sunken living room floors and the […]
Wordcolour holds an uncanny artistic ability to suspend order and blur familiar sounds. 2020’s ‘Juno Way’ EP was a carefully produced record about people in structural liminality, uncertain of relationships or situations. ‘TTWBATG’ transfers this superficial tumult onto a more natural canvas, where both human nature and non-human life forms are heard as fundamentally wandering, […]
The sounds at play on this EP are exceptional in their variation. Taken from the now-famous London jazz scene, ‘Shruti Dances’ is buoyed by the work of DJ and producer Auntie Flo, who props up the trance with narrow melodic changes. On Korwar’s side, the deeply personal influences form a straight line from the US […]
I first heard this record through cheap earphones on a walk in London—the noise from the city tore a hole in my cans and emptied itself in. Soon after the barking dogs and scraping bins fell into the slipstream of ‘Like Weather,’ they started to swim in it. Each unintentional sonic burst from outdoors sounded […]
For Saya Gray, ‘the listener’ is synonymous with ‘the confidante’. On her debut album, she employs off key tuning to sting erratic textures and quietly poignant lyrics. The revelatory, sensitive nature of the writing is a feat in itself: to have ownership of one’s feelings and spill them like jigsaw pieces. Gray’s mercurial sonic resources, […]
The early years of one of Britain’s most important electronic music labels marked a sonic shift from the tectonic bass of dubstep. Kode9 and his connectors emphasised wiry glitches, massacring samples and testing sounds in a way that upended what electronic music could be. It no longer necessarily orbited around dance or a summit of […]
100 words music reviews 