Hainbach & My Panda Shall Fly—Borrowed Water

Borrowed Water, a collaborative LP between Hainbach and My Panda Shall Fly, is a project of two distinct sides. The best way to discuss it, then, is to deal with these sides separately.

The first—a futuristic, public information film-esque set of joyful ambient tracks—recalls the optimism and clarity of the early 1970s. But there’s some grit provided in analogue tape decay; fizzes and screeches which show the other face of the era. The rumble of impending nuclear armageddon, the first awarenesses of climate change. These tracks are touted as “an alternate soundtrack to Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running”—a description which, while apposite, does not incorporate the album’s earthliness.

The squeak of synthesisers on Borrowed Water is like an aviary. Natural sounds take flight amidst concrete and cavernous textures. This music is practically a guided tour of the Barbican centre. It's stolid, urban, colourless, but full of both light and life all the same. Brian Eno’s Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks explored an extraterrestrial landscape, in total solitude, marked by an absence of life. Borrowed Water is its opposite—work that’s grounded, deeply terrestrial, and that bursts with pleasant chatter.

The second side announces itself with ‘The Half and the Whole’, a track which makes striking use of negative space. Compared the what’s come before, it is alarmingly placeless. The track seems to stutter in and out of existence like a dodgy transmission. It's the gasp of a server room trying to compile its information into something soul-shaped. The coldest and most barren track on the album, this heaves meekly as an iron lung. Masterful and memorable, this track provides outstanding contrast at the perfect time.

The turning point signalled by ‘The Half and the Whole’ continues through a fractious and frictional second side. For the duration of the side, there is no floor—in direct opposition to the first, everything is without shape, unstructured. Use of disintegrated tape is much more extensive and a feeling of decay-decline is muscled to the foreground. Tracks resolve to absence and silence, exhausting themselves in their playing. This side is described as “stretch[ing] out through other dimensions”, but it’s lonely enough to stretch from the perspective of Bowie’s Major Tom. The loneliness reaches its zenith in ‘Glory’, an otherworldly coda which rounds out the record in a smattering of bells and garbled speech.

The contrast that Borrowed Water establishes between its sides prevents either of their approaches becoming belaboured. The record is a balanced experience which explores just about as far as you’d ever want in two opposite directions. A very pleasing cocktail of the domestic and the alien.

Borrowed Water is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

Poliça—When We Stay Alive

The 2010s were defined by retrospectivity. A wave crashed on itself; churned a froth of remixes, re-imaginings, and reinterpretations of already-haggard ideas. But even this perpetual break was nothing new—merely the extension of a facsimile of past artists.

On When We Stay Alive, Poliça continue a pattern of being greater than the sum of their parts. Language may be well-worn, its clauses played-out. But Poliça exact such a successful blending of influences that those influences dissolve completely. This is not some kitschy nostalgia-act or Julee Cruise-a-like. When We Stay Alive constantly presents new ways to inflect old sounds.

The most immediate appeal of Poliça’s music, especially when compared to that of their dream-pop contemporaries, is its muscularity. Tracks are punchy, compact, concise. There is an appealing ugliness to When We Stay Alive. Radiohead’s Thom Yorke once criticised his vocals as being ‘too pretty’. This proves not to be a problem for Poliça vocalist Channy Leaneagh. She balances the natural delicacy of her own voice with a potent, almost frightening conviction of delivery—even if half the time it does still sound like she’s singing through a desk fan. Absent is the bubblegummy self-infantalisation and waftiness that made Grimes’ Art Angels such a chore.

Ryan Olson, on production duties, grounds Leaneagh’s work. When We Stay Alive has the feel of a Daniel Lopatin project; full of tenderness despite an artificial, sucked-up-through-a-straw feel and some inhumanly brawny bass. An array of sounds can be heard, but—as with their corralled influences—Poliça combine these into something which feels both singular and complete. It’s the most confident the band have ever sounded.

The title of When We Stay Alive supposedly refers to Leaneagh’s rallying from an accident which had left her gravely injured, and left her on the brink of shelving music altogether. A renewed awareness of her mortality (and a lot of time off work) inspired the construction of half of the tracks on this LP. But the title speaks to a broader kind of survival, too. Poliça were always more than the fashions around them—on When We Stay Alive, they’ve proved it. Let’s see if another wave comes up behind them.

When We Stay Alive is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

Macintosh Plus—'Sick & Panic'

Ramona Andra Xavier has adopted many personas throughout her career. She is most prolific as Vektroid, but those with a more casual interest will know her as Macintosh Plus. In 2011, Xavier presented Floral Shoppe under this moniker, an album which enjoys status as the definitive work in the genre of vaporwave.

The world of 2011 was at the threshold of a general cultural shift. Apathy and self-deprecation are so entwined with millennial culture it’s hard to remember what came before. But the most successful meme of 2011 was Nyan Cat—something which, now, is unimaginably earnest. While baby Yoda has enjoyed some recent success, the current meme-sphere is almost invariably a more detached, surreal place now than that of a decade ago.

Floral Shoppe half-anticipated, half-engendered the swelling detachment of its time. In clear terms, it parodied the seductive shallowness of mass culture, the emptiness behind the face of everything. The supreme irony of Floral Shoppe is that its enduring appeal is the result of its assimilation into mass culture. Its aesthetic was cribbed by advertisers, bastardised, turned “cool”. Floral Shoppe became every bit as vapid and redundant as it was shooting for.

Millenials have since been supplanted by zoomers as the most prolific meme builders. Zoomers are considerably braver, more openly satirical and politically-charged in their humour. Occasionally some empty surrealism will slip through the net (anyone remember “they did surgery on a grape”?)—but young people now are generally more open, self-assured, and self-righteous. The rallying call of climate change helps, of course. Aside from in some virulent sects of neo-conservatism, the world is being repositioned as a good place—there's a fight, and it's worth fighting once again.

Xavier finds herself similarly emboldened on ‘Sick & Panic’—her first release as Macintosh Plus in nine years. It’s more forceful than anything before it, Autechre-like in its brutal stochasticity. 'Sick & Panic' is so ambitious, so stuffed with ideas, that anyone still saying vaporwave is “80s music but slowed down” looks even stupider than they did before.

The work is no longer diffuse, hazy, or rambling. It is combative and fervent. On ‘Sick & Panic’, Xavier takes more inspiration from her contemporaries PC Music, brostep, and the acousmatic experimentations of the 1970s than the Muzak of Floral Shoppe. To describe this work as vaporwave is both reductive and inaccurate—but what’s new there? Vaporwave is a label which, since its conception, has had artists labouring to shed it.

Instead, ‘Sick & Panic’ is work which exists outside of genre. It is indefinable because it responds to a society which we have yet to define. But that’s the thing with vaporwave—even when it was “80s music but slowed down”, it was at the cutting edge.

‘Sick & Panic’ is available to purchase and stream here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

Quirke — Steal a Golden Hail

The flush of synth strings which opens Quirke's Steal a Golden Hail is so arid it’s cracking to pieces. Sat at the beginning of opening track 'Luxury Red Pence', it’s the first of many nasty flourishes which grant the album such unique character. Bright to the point of blinding, Quirke’s sound recalls everything and nothing at once. It’s as if the snowy blizzards of Skee Mask’s Compro were replaced by nuclear ash. The warped corpses of rave classics, barely distinguishable behind a near-opaque wall of distortion and decay.

‘Se Seven 7S’ adds momentum to Golden Hail with a solid beat — though that, too, soon falls into stuttered, but controlled, confusion. The track has an intentional sag in the middle, tumbling wilful listeners into a second-act sinkhole that’s seductively chaotic. It sets a trend for the rest of the album, too; a long but justified runtime, buoyed on the back of a trance-inducing timbre.

‘Sample Devon’ is a little more scrutable; a shameless throwback driven by intense breaks and slow, beautiful chord progressions. It comes off like a jungle remix of Bobby Krlic’s ‘Attestupan’; a continuation of Quirke’s ‘too-bright’ sound in how it recollects the score to a horror film staged at blinding midday. Like Krlic’s composition, it is inert but hypnotic.

Golden Hail has a generally eerier second half, with ‘Xultext Cradle’ an alien transmission that carves an open space through the album’s centre. It is an expansive cavity that fills itself with sonic texture. And, while more terrestrial in its approach, ‘Maybe Again, Crawl Through’ unsettles as well. It’s a pretty but unexperimental wander into wafty ambient territory, disconcerting for its jarring placement in the album’s tracklist.

Quirke saves the best for last with ‘Spinhaunt Coil’. The entire salvo of Steal a Golden Hail is held in balance. It’s a track somehow hard and gentle, brutish and playful. It’s a perfect capstone to the material it follows, doing the impossible and distilling this album’s many qualities into one concise package.

Steal a Golden Hail is available to purchase and stream here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

Moor Mother — Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes

With 2016’s Fetish Bones, Moor Mother (Camae Ayewa) announced herself as a radical experimental musician. At once worldly and otherworldly, Fetish Bones dragged listeners through the corpse of history. It picked up noise, field recordings and spoken word passages along the way. It ruffled feathers, rankled as many as it thrilled, but left no listener untouched. Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes is a refinement and refocusing of its thematic and compositional qualities.

Ayewa’s ideas are still desperate — so is the world — but they coalesce into a more coherent argument than before. And Analog Fluids is as much a compositional patchwork as any of her previous work. In its scattered form, the album is something like Tanya Tagaq’s Retribution. Noise elements screech over conjurations, chants, and spoken-word polemic. But these contrasting elements produce a compelling whole, rather than a busy mess.

Analog Fluids is a set of dissonant sketches which dissect history in all its deathly weight. Moor Mother’s conceit of time travel is her ace-in-the-hole. She collides afrofuturism with the brutal past that necessitated it; the cold earth it grew from. By casting herself, a black American, as time-traveller, Ayewa asks the uncomfortable question: where can I go? And, if the past informs the future — what future do I have?

‘The Myth Hold Weight’ is the centrepiece of Analog Fluids, smashing the past into a present which mirrors its cruelty. Grains of modernity, sloganeering and dark comedy recall Gil Scott-Heron's 'The Revolution...'. This throwback style gains prescience when you remember that in Moor Mother’s world, nothing is new. The cruelty of the past is repeated by the present, because cruelty lies in the modern world’s foundation. When it all ends, Moor Mother will already know what’s coming.

Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe