![]() Balmy as spring and soft as snowfall, Sculpturegardening sets the watery blips of contemporary IDM against meditative sounds evocative of singing bowls and steel hand drums, while Arp’s signature polyrhythms bring an element of surprise. Producer and Human Pitch label co-founder Tristan Arp brings a similar sense of modernist play to Sculpturegardening, an album of elegant, organically inspired synth compositions informed by the funk and techno he grew up with near Detroit and the leafy environs of his current home in Mexico City. In August 1969, Robert Moog hosted the first-ever live performance of his Moog synthesizer to a packed house at MoMA’s Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden in Manhattan. Wisdom Teeth Tristan Arp: Sculpturegardening But spend some time with it, and an unusually empathetic, open-hearted album snaps into focus. “I realize that I’m not the nicest person in the whole world, you know what I’m saying,” says an unidentified woman, haltingly, on “Preparing the Perfect Response~.” “It’s like, I have a good heart, but it’s like, I tend to shut people out a lot-it’s like, I’ll let you come so close, but that’s it.” In its muted colors and abstract forms, it seems at first like Honest Labour is doing something similar. ![]() The album’s songs are short and largely formless swirls of backmasked synths, tape hiss, and field-recorded atmosphere punctuated by the occasional searching vocal sample. On Honest Labour, they turn intimacy into similarly uneasy listening. Space Afrika’s 2020 mixtape hybtwibt? flew in the face of Brian Eno’s dictum that ambient music should be as ignorable as it is interesting: Filtering the experience of racial oppression and urban anomie into captivatingly bleak soundscapes, they practically dared listeners to treat the soundtrack of their lives as mere background. Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal Once upon a time, horizontally inclined records like this were branded as “comedown albums,” but this year, released while clubs were still shuttered, Blush proved substantial enough to be the main event in its own right, no matter how supine. Nodding to dub techno, ambient jungle, and even nu-jazz, its grooves seem to hover a few feet off the ground. His debut album, Blush, showed how much he’s evolved in a relatively short amount of time: Where just last year he was still doling out late-night floor-fillers, Blush is aglow with whisper-soft synth pads and glancing beams of light. Wisdom Teeth co-founder Facta has his roots in the sparse, shadowy strains of bass music of the early ’10s, but in recent years, both he and his label have been exploring a comparatively lush, colorful sound, trading post-dubstep’s skunky haze for a more melodic style shot through with fresh air and sunlight. Yet for all its turbulence and contrasting emotions, it is a remarkably focused sound, sure in its purpose as it carves a twisting path to the stunning finale of “NTHNG FKS U HRDR THN TM,” a 12-minute descent into some of the headiest, most introspective dark ambient of the year. Elements of techno, acid, industrial, rap, and synth pop collide and combine, spinning off fractured beats into uneven time signatures and flurries of post-classical melody. ![]() Created on iPads and Ableton Live, the album flows like the output of a machine with a mind of its own. It took him years to develop a compositional method adapted to his disability, and it’s tempting to say you can hear that gestation in his debut solo album, Nerve Bumps (A Queer Divine Satisfaction), which overflows with ideas. His solo discography in all that time might have been more voluminous, had a 2005 van accident on tour not left him paralyzed from the torso down. Ultra’s esteemed underground concept RESISTANCE announces inaugural U.S.Dark Entries Dax Pierson: Nerve Bumps (A Queer Divine Dissatisfaction)Ī former member of Anticon-affiliated groups Subtle and 13&God, Dax Pierson has been involved in the Bay Area music scene since the early ’00s.Ultra Music Festival unveils star-studded Phase 2 lineup featuring more than 100 additional acts.
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