Elori Saxl—The Blue of Distance

This debut LP from multidisciplinary artist Elori Saxl elegantly balances the sensory and conceptual. The album is ambient, if you want to pigeonhole it, but often feels too active to be constrained by this label. Rather than standing on the precipice of something, The Blue of Distance creates tension by repeatedly diving in and climbing back out. When not juggling discrete melodic and amelodic sections, it slips into the kind of in-betweeny spaces of Terry Riley, Philip Glass, Pink Floyd; any number of tape-looping pioneers.

Saxl does not lean on these established sounds, using them instead as skeleton to support some stunning chamber orchestra arrangements. The oboe of Erin Lensing particularly impresses, repeating hypnotic phrases which transform into the heartbeats of tracks. Found sounds are folded into the mix, too. The most confronting example comes in ‘Wave II’, whose looped beat sounds like a little boat eternally hitting the same jetty. It’s one of many invigorating moments of trance-meets-concrète.

It’s not a surprise to learn Saxl has a background in film. The Blue of Distance is colourfully imagistic, and has some parity with Clint Mansell or Nicholas Britell in its blending of classical/electronic styles. For an album, The Blue of Distance is very visual. It would be impossible, even lacking track titles, not to associate this LP with water, memory, distance. The language Saxl uses is nonverbal, but as precise and intentional as a scalpel. The Blue of Distance uses some more superficial filmic vocabulary too in ‘Blue’, which boasts a desolate and monumental midsection that feels ripped out of a Western score.

The album’s grandness is tempered by a wobbly “information film” vibe. This hip, ultra-analogue hauntology isn’t lip service to a zoomer listening base. It interacts with—and enhances—the album’s themes of memory loss and nostalgia, while ensuring its more grandiose sections never succumb to schmaltz. Saxl is a thoughtful musician whose work achieves transcendence by never trying to force it.

The centrepiece of The Blue of Distance is ‘Memory of Blue’. This 11-minute track is constantly in flux—but it never digresses from or abandons its own fundaments. The track keeps switching things up, and is packed with ideas and experimentations. The tracks juxtaposing styles somehow stay complementary throughout. Its continuous development is impressive, and feels like watching someone play Jenga against themselves, stacking their tower impossibly high. ‘Memory of Blue’ also functions as a vertical slice of the album as a whole. Just as we inspect and distort our own memories, the track is in a beautiful sort of cubist argument with itself, dwelling on a single point from several contradicting perspectives. Its title forms a cheeky—probably unintentional—homage to Vangelis’ Blade Runner track, itself about the falsehood and distortion of memory. Forty years later these concepts still compel and puzzle us. This is a tremendous album whose conceptual richness will keep you coming back for a very long time.

The Blue of Distance is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Grandbrothers—All the Unknown

Electronic duo Grandbrothers’ rich sound isn’t quite new age—but it’s on the first steps of a pilgrimage there. Grandbrothers use minimal, computer-controlled piano arrangements to chalk subtle elaborations into a blueprint that has brought success to the likes of Nils Frahm, Bonobo and The xx. And just like those bands, Grandbrothers’ music is unashamedly insubstantial, bolstering its calculated straightforwardness with exceptional mixing and mastering and an elegant purity.

Contrary to Frahm et al. in All the Unknown is its pastoral cosiness. One often gets the impression such “beautiful” minimal acts seek fluidity in the concrete structures of urban spaces; they try to make neon spill from its own glass tubes. Artists cling to the cool and the urbane, insincerely repurposing new age tropes for city-dwellers. Conversely it feels as though Grandbrothers are finding the concreteness in nature and—in a way which recent events have made feel vital—welcoming the outside in. The result is an album which, if asked where it lived, would more likely be a neighbour to XTC’s Skylarking than its immediate musical family—a suburbanite with a dog and herb garden.

While Grandbrothers are far more concerned with timbre than melody, it must be mentioned that they can stretch ideas beyond breaking points. Many of this album’s thirteen tracks follow a near-identical compositional formula and, given this singular approach, you can’t help but wonder if they were all necessary. It is difficult to justify all fifty-eight minutes of an album’s runtime when so many of them are spent underlining and re-underlining a single point. All the Unknown isn’t quite as rapturous on a macro scale as it is when you dive into all of its itty-bitty details.

There has been some attention given to structure. Tracks take turns to imperceptibly ratchet things up—and the second half of All the Unknown is more dark and grand than its first. ‘Black Frost’ would feel incongruous and displaced at the opening of the album, but it fits its place in the tracklist perfectly as an escalation of everything that came before. This precision and control is worth complimenting but may well be responsible for why the album feels a static and staid at times. If this is the case, the album is wonderfully subtle in a way I cannot bring myself to fully appreciate.

All the Unknown felt best when railing at the edges of its own box. ‘Auberge’ is noteworthy for being perhaps the album’s slowest-and-lowest track, and its diminished energy slightly breaks with formula in a way that’s effective and memorable. It’s smartly walloped in the album’s centre and feels like an incorporeal aside; a sabbatical in which we visit windy Himalayan peaks, replete with chimes and proud swells of synth. ‘Silver’ goes the other way, and accelerates things until they feel self-interrupting and wildly energised. The prepared piano actually feels prepared in this track—but not in a way I can put my finger on. These stretches into sublimity fulfil the rest of the album’s promise and—while the full hour doesn’t quite sustain their highs—they elevate All the Unknown beyond the rest of the crop.

All the Unknown is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Casper Clausen—Better Way

Better Way, which sees Efterklang alumnus Casper Clausen going solo for the first time, is an inoffensive collection of soft-edged indie jams which mimics its myriad influences with pride.

While it’s arguably redundant to say any post-2000 rock project has a Radiohead influence, similarities in this case are both too numerous and direct to ignore. Clausen’s soufflé-light voice is as versatile and lazily beautiful as Yorke’s—and sometimes finds itself subjected to identical delay effects. Instrumental elements regularly play parrot too. ‘Feel It Coming’ ascends into the same Warp-lite territory as the Radiohead of In Rainbows or The King of Limbs, patterned with irregular, krautrock-y percussion. Clausen’s style as a lyricist isn’t a million miles from Yorke, either. He favours imagistic or associative song subjects over a concrete narrative, and often repeats them like a chant, through which they accrue mystery and weight.

Clausen achieves moderate success with these techniques. He further elevates Better Way with some transformative production work, imaginatively incorporating some recognisable sounds. ‘Dark Heart’ features autotuned vocals which could be from a Poliça or a Travis Scott track, but places them so far in the background of its mix that they take on a fresh, whispery quality. These light touches—acousmatic drones under ‘8 Bit Human’, bubbling tape decay in ‘Little Words’—are the album’s best quality. In sheer lightness and musical understatement, Clausen has almost everybody in his genre beat. Better Way is as close as indie rock gets to ASMR.

Ultimately, the vocals are the kicker. Clausen’s voice has been compared to Bono—and by extension he sounds a little Chris Martin-y. The squeaky-clean male tenor isn’t as fashionable as it was fifteen years back, and may turn some listeners off completely. This is a shame, as Clausen is actually a very strong, tightly controlled vocalist. He brings the bashful Chris Martin of Parachutes Coldplay to mind; not the shouty-man of their new line of mum-pandering weepie anthems. Either way, he just ain’t Tom Waits.

This sounds facetious, but speaks to a larger problem. For something called Better Way, this album doesn’t strive to do much new. There is very little sense of danger. Not every album should reinvent the wheel, but most would benefit from bolder and more risky decisions. This is no exception; a little unsure of its own identity to get away with so fully incorporating others’ styles. Better Way is strongest at its most minimal—with standout tracks ‘Little Words’ and ‘Ocean Wave’ both built on quiet loops. This maybe reveals the album is at its best when it plagiarises least. Better Way is intricately crafted and compelling, but you may feel you’ve heard it a few times already.

Better Way is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Shygirl—ALIAS

For the last decade or so, pop has engaged in a masochistic relationship with its own excess. I’m sure there’s some socio-economic cause which can be argued—that post-2010 society’s ubiquitous obsession with responsibility and shame can be traced to the credit crunch, as we try to guilt-trip roofs over our heads in absolution for our past excesses. I’ll leave that all to someone cleverer than me, though.

Whatever the reason, the naïve millennial optimism of LMFAO’s ‘Party Rock’ has crumbled—first giving way to Danny Brown’s ‘Dip’, then Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Swimming Pools’, and now Billie Eilish’s ‘When the Party’s Over’ and The Weeknd’s ‘Blinding Lights’. It is now imperative for pop music, and mass culture in general, to engage in self-flagellation. Deviations from this formula are quite often dismissed as gaudy or selfish—though there are exceptions in the likes of 6ix9ine and Cardi B. If you’re sceptical, try listening to Skrillex’s ‘Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites’ now without wincing. You can’t, because you don’t really want to party anymore. You’d rather stand outside until the party’s finished, then help clean up while ‘lofi hip hop radio – beats to relax/study to’ plays.

This context makes Shygirl’s ALIAS doubly impressive. She’s a member of NUXXE, a label/collective of four like minds who buttered their bread by celebrating excess, and throwing less-than-sanitary oozy wonders of the human condition into sharp relief. ALIAS doesn’t break that mould. The seven-track EP turns its sights on sex and relationships—and seduces at the same time as making you want to get a top-up HPV jab “just in case”. It seems to admonish and admire casual sex in equal measure, elevating the act to monumental, quasi-narcotic status. Sex gratifies—but just as it turns you on, it can turn on you, and become consumptive.

Shygirl herself becomes the personification of this—a praying mantis-esque character whose self-proclaimed sexual availability and prowess feels as parodic as it does appealingly dangerous. Shygirl can “go all night” and continually asks “can we throw it down again?”. Nowhere is this GFOTY-style fulfilment of male fantasy made clearer than in ‘LENG’—a track which features the line “so wet that I drown”; a raucous escalation of the year’s biggest hit, ‘WAP’.

Despite going doubling down on the rudeness, ALIAS is ultimately far more empowering than ‘WAP’. Shygirl doesn’t indulge in Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s self-commodification or earnest vapidity in which your pussy is bartered as social currency. Behind the posturing and naughtiness is a half-ironic and deceptively sentimental release, which sneaks vulnerability and depth in behind its own boldest elements.

‘TASTY’ is an oasis of sweetness at the album’s exact midpoint; detailing the rush of optimism and confusion that heralds a new relationship. And ‘BAWDY’ double-hands strength and weakness, framing sex as an act which can crystallise and intensify our deepest feelings, permitting grander heights of emotional bliss. 2020 be damned: ALIAS has the buoyancy and joie de vivre of a Cakes Da Killa release—and it’s twice as smutty.

ALIAS is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Mica Levi—Ruff Dog

Over a decade ago, Mica Levi released Filthy Friends on MySpace—a mixtape the Observer called ‘a shortwave transmission from the year 2020’. Well, 2020 just came and went, and very little on the radio even came close to it. In the past decade, Levi’s work continued to look forward, habitually pushed its own boundaries, and garnered an Oscar nomination and Golden Globe win in the process.

Levi has always erected a cordon between their modern classical and avant-pop sensibilities. The former, award-friendly stuff, has always released under Levi’s birth name; the latter under an alias, Micachu. Ruff Dog is the clearest confluence of these two styles, and Levi’s first non-soundtrack solo LP. In the context of Levi’s career this is a significant moment, like an artistic self-shedding or actualisation. No longer the collaborator or the craftsman, Levi has seized an opportunity to leap into unfettered, uncompromised creativity.

Ruff Dog, at a slim 25 minutes, straddles every style of Levi’s career. Centrepieces of the album are shoegaze monoliths which stretch the extremities of overdrive. ‘Wings’ is as captivating as anything put out in the genre’s heyday, a mellow piece awash with slow, mesmerizing oscillations of noise. Elsewhere ‘Pain’ captures the spirit of Xinlisupreme, a brutal track which climaxes in the album’s sole moment of excess and extravagance; Levi shredding their pipes as the music collapses into ecstatic chaos.

Elsewhere, Levi gathers loosely-associative sounds into dense, dial-twiddling electronica which would’ve felt right at home on Magic Oneohtrix Point Never. ‘One Tear’ is the clearest example; a cutlet of Heart FM that someone forgot to put in the fridge, patterned with colourful but dangerous-looking blooms of mould. Little production grace notes belie precision behind these tracks’ looseness. The most overt case is ‘Chains Baggy’, which supplements its uneasy atmosphere with a cheekily-deployed iPhone alarm tone.

And it’s not all bells and whistles. ‘Cold Eyes’ and ‘Ride Till We Die’ are minimally-arranged, emotive and stripped-back sketches that feel like a fulfilment of the promise of early Liz Phair. Vocals are still obfuscated in post-processing, though. Wouldn’t want to take all the mystery out of it.

Appropriately for the last year, Ruff Dog feels quite lonely and cobbled together. You can imagine recording time being snatched between periods of restricted movement, downpours of bad news, mastering taken place in a dark bedroom. But the album soars, free from any concessions to creative partners, and benefits from the unpredictable jitteriness that made Micachu a name all those years ago.

Ruff Dog is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe