Deena Abdelwahed—Dhakar

Deena Abdelwahed’s Dhakar finds complexity through a stacking of simple beats and phrases. This EP follows the massive Khonnar, and continues that album’s tendency towards polyrhythms and atonality, which rumble beneath beefy lines of instantly gratifying club ecstasy. ‘Ah’na Hakkeka’, which opens this release, luxuriates in allowing its faces to coalesce—but when they do, it’s transportive; the same rush as a brostep drop. Abdelwahed achieves, through restraint, what has driven many producers to excess.

Two more coalescent pieces of Abdelwahed’s music are its contemporary and traditional methods. ‘Insaniyiti’ makes a spectacle of darkness; a compact cousin to Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s ‘Mladic’ which similarly hijacked the grandeur of traditional Arabic music and twisted it into something sinister. Abdelwahed does not deliver an insincere “fusion” that waters down the essence of traditional music for a global audience—she repurposes, recontextualises and transforms her samples, as any producer worth their salt should.

A separation between the two elements is maintained through some ingenious production. Bright drums, handclaps, and synths buzz like midges over a swamp of murky low frequencies. Dhakar is crisp, intricate and precise as a machine but keeps some of that handmade sloppiness that accompanies live performance. Where the boundary between these two styles sits is unclear; timbres blur in an inscrutable haze. But the overall effect is one of cloistered unity—like two rooms separated by glass, two yards separated by chain-link. The boundary is present but porous.

A growing portfolio of studio work and some stellar mixes have quickly established Abdelwahed as a pioneer in her field. She has a keen understanding of what makes a good set. But she also has a desire to expand far beyond that, stretching towards a future that she tightens focus on with every release.

Dhakar is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

haircuts for men—nothing special, nothing wonderful

There is a quintessential vaporwave sound, informed largely by Vektroid’s genre-defining Floral Shoppe, which non-listeners will forever associate with the genre. That nothing special, nothing wonderful (the new album from haircuts for men) fits this formula so snugly is not to its disservice. Rather, the album spools out like a virtuosic jazz cat playing standards.

The fundamentals—screeching saxes and looping, apathetic, and beat-driven funk riffs—are executed in great style here. Dreamy synth tones waver subtly below the surface of tracks, deepening their texture. Samples are selected and deployed well. The album keeps a bitter-sweet edge, rather than suffusing to sardonic, insufferable cynicism. Beats are littered with just enough frills, fills and flourishes to maintain interest for the duration of nothing special….

On tracks like ‘my wife is on tinder’, the combined effect of these elements is something that sounds like an MF DOOM beat. Funky, but a little jagged and misshapen. Rich, warm; shot through with the tension of balancing humanity and inhumanity. It also boasts a deep house feel which is continued throughout the album—something like Coil’s recent reissue of The Gay Man’s Guide to Safer Sex, and many a porn soundtrack of yesteryear. The track is sensual but oddly disengaged (something you could say about a fair few vaporwave tracks). It benefits from an unusually powerful mix, which emphasises some massive kicks without losing high-end clarity. It’s not the shopping centre’s tinny ceiling speakers—it’s a boombox across the street.

Elsewhere, ‘sweatpants’ combines its samba beat with vast reggae dub bass—a pool of sampling material almost unheard of in a genre defined by 80s pop and funk—to magnificent effect. And some soaring, disconnected vocal samples carry the album’s house throughline for some internal consistency.

nothing special, nothing wonderful attempts to nullify its own existence with that title. There’s nothing particularly groundbreaking or unfamiliar on the album. But if that’s what you came to vaporwave for, maybe you’re missing the point. As haircuts for men says, “everything is plundered.” But, as plundering goes, this is more of a casino heist than a drunken scrump.

nothing special, nothing wonderful is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

Shady Nasty—Bad Posture

With Bad Posture, Australian group Shady Nasty have produced an EP that feels like a bodily experience; one which strongly emphasises tone, power and rich production. Overdriven, half-distinguishable lyrics sail above bass which feels like it’s fracking brain juice from your skull. As a result, the (easy) comparison most will make is to New York punks Show Me the Body. But where SMTB’s lyrics border on the polemical, Shady Nasty’s pack a more confessional punch—and they prove that sometimes, by narrowing the scope, you can hit a target twice as hard.

There’s a natural desire to make reviews comprehensive, broad and detailed. But Shady Nasty nail the fundamentals so completely here, function so symbiotically, it barely needs to be said. Instead, I’ll waste even more words trying in vain to describe how gargantuan this EP’s sound is. Earlier this year, Abronia’s The Whole of Each Eye placed the deserts of desert rock—vacuums which demand legends—front-and-centre. Bad Posture feels like those same deserts, but crisped and shimmering in the haze of global warming; as hot as the hood of a car left sat in the sun. It’s that heaviness everyone is aiming for, the one you need to turn up and down in equal measure. If ears could squint, that’s what they’d be doing.

This is music which rejects genre labels, sprawled comfortably across multiple styles, for which “rap-rock”, “punk”, “post-hardcore” feel reductive—even insulting. Bad Posture is experiential, raw, technically faultless and impeccably recorded. As accessible as they are unfamiliar, Shady Nasty have established themselves as a band with hundreds of miles of road ahead of them.

Bad Posture will be released on Feb 21st. Listen to ‘Jewellery’ here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

Katie Gately—Loom

Katie Gately’s Loom arranges some disjunct experiments beneath a pleasing umbrella of bizarre balladry. Raw materials of concrète and noise are here refined, reshaped, and given a new life as sturdy foundations for tightly-structured melodic pieces.

‘Ritual’ establishes the album’s tone; a sweep of processed, half-distorted vocals and synthesisers which chatter like sealife. It earns its title, seeming to raise the album from nothingness, conjure it from the air either side. It’s also deceptively complex, layering vocals atop each other in a harmonic stack which feigns simplicity through how well each vocal line complements its peers.

‘Allay’ throws a new element into the mix, with Gately’s maximalist lyrics. Her pedigree as a songwriter and producer for (among others) serpentwithfeet is as clear in these dramatic lyrical lines as the off-kilter production which supports them. Gately leans in even harder on ‘Waltz’; a song which elevates its emotive power through what sounds like the pageantry of a medieval court, but infected nonetheless with a kind of nervous energy. ‘Waltz’ wouldn’t be out of place on Richard Dawson’s Peasant—the disquieting itchiness of thorns surrounds a big red heart.

The album’s centrepiece is ‘Bracer’, a ten-minute single which escalates from almost-whimsical reeded sections to a bludgeoning conclusion. Like most other tracks on Loom, it stands at the threshold of being “too much”. But it’s a threshold Gately seems to relish standing at. The level of control she displays in production, and track’s textural and melodic invention, allow it to sidestep becoming self-important crescendo-core.

‘Bracer’ signals a transition from the album’s first half to its second, which begins with ‘Rite’. A conscious mirror of ‘Ritual’ before it, this track quietens things again with some ramping down that, Disasterpeace-style, could be the glissando of some profane orchestra. It’s a beautiful track which is full of apprehension.

This apprehension is carried through into ‘Tower’, a funereal march which describes digging a hole “you would fit right…into”. The contrast drawn between a coming-together and lowering into a hole lays bare that in any relationship—with any attachment—we invite not only connection but inevitable loss into our lives.

The album is rounded off with ‘Rest’, a piece which holds itself in stasis. Loom leaves us uncertainly wavering at the gate of heaven, as one chord is sustained through three minutes of angelic arrangement. Whether the track is defiant, anxious, accepting, depends on who’s listening. But what’s certain is its reflection of Loom as a whole: as work which confronts death in hope, trepidation, thankfulness and with great power.

Loom is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

Lorenzo Gómez Oviedo—Hebra

Hebra is the latest in Lorenzo Gómez Oviedo’s quietly expanding catalogue. Like Cielo and others before it, Hebra takes the form of one track, reclining itself across a spacious forty-ish minutes.

Its beginnings are melodic, even ecclesiastical; what sounds like the ghost of a gospel organ, displaced in time, extends its notes to unnatural lengths. The timbre is unmistakably clerical. It’s music the church wall retains, soaked and stretched through its wood, when the congregation are tucked up at home. There’s a profound contrast between this quasi-religious mood, and the tree which decorates Hebra’s cover. Sounds rooted in the traditions of the organised church are repurposed for an almost pagan sense of immanence. The Mujica poem which accompanies Hebra speaks of naming absence—and what else, after all, is God? The wait; the silence; the space. Absence is where we locate divinity.

This all positions Hebra as ethereal, but it actually has a deeply-rooted relationship with the material world. Hebra finds its punch in concrete sounds; brushed cymbals, delicately controlled feedback, and (in the most overt intrusion of the material world) the sound of rainfall. Rainfall in ambient music is normally a signaller of the hokey side of new-age. But here, it’s ingeniously mixed so low you could mistake it for surface noise.

And Hebra is too dissonant for new-age ears, too; quietly wringing tension, exhausting the moment for everything it’s got. Chords argue over one another, sounds reach the point of feeding back before being halted in the nick of time. This dissonance is never uncomfortable, instead “seeking”, like a flâneur who pretends they’re going anywhere but the coffee shop. Hebra diverts, diverges, self-interrupts—but it knows what it’s doing, and it stays the course.

Hebra is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe