First Impressions 037: Bleeding Necks, literate pop whimsy, guitar and synth levitations, orchestrated decay and more.

Initial vibes on new music

Hello,

I am all about the reviews this week, though just as I had wound up this week’s newsletter, I landed upon this interview with Mat Dryhurst, who, along with partner Holly Herndon, is one of the foremost crucial voices on AI, art (“creation is collective”), and what it means to be human in the digital age navigating ethics and innovation. It’s likely I will keep going back to this as there’s a lot to absorb and consider.
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OK, let’s go:

Bleed – The Necks: It may just be that The Necks are at their best when they are at their slowest, where each note is extracted like the careful pulling of a root from the ground. With Bleed, the trio never hits the idiosyncratic rhythmic stride that’s been a hallmark across countless extended improvisations and studio constructions. Instead, it presents a mood board of impressions narrowed down to shapes and textures, drawn with firm yet fading outlines. Bleed is a prolonged motion to devolve, leaving you suspended in an ominous throb of sound. Agitated by Chris Abrahams’ long, staggered notes and descending keyboard flutters, Tony Buck’s spooked percussion, and Lloyd Swanton’s spare bass thrum, it’s a slippery descent. Towards the rejuvenating final coda of soft guitar and piano filigrees, I felt as if I were being gently swayed inside a giant gong. As ever, The Necks’ music is hard to speak to. Then again, have you ever heard anyone talk at one of their shows?

Rong Weicknes - Fievel Is Glaque: The Brussels/New York outfit’s music is equivalent to long and involved sentences that both thrill and work beautifully. On this third album, they lovingly contort the complex yet airy arrangements of 1970s pop into something approaching hyperpop that’s made by jazz nerds who still pay allegiance to melody first. Whimsy is the breeze they blow by, as they allow their songs to blow in all sorts of directions like enchanting patterns of scattered, coloured confetti. When they ease up, it’s all crystal cool, with slow burn funk tautly poised at the point where 1979 is about to clock into 1980. This isn’t music you can easily put a lid on, but to end things here, let’s just call it a particularly lavish delight.

Enough For Me To Remain – DANIAILYAS: A transatlantic collaboration between two artists dedicated to summoning ascension from haze and subterfuge. Each artist’s solo work can be slowly spun and ponderous, coiling out moods that linger long and hang heavy. Together, they find a way into one another’s insulated space—Ahmed’s shadowy, sparse guitar lines nestle alongside Dania’s glowing vocal echoes and synth levitations, casting a spell not unlike the turning of a new dawn.

Pitch Dark and Trembling – Alma Laprida: The Argentinian sound artist isn’t wasting any words with the title of this live set from 2023 and the space it occupies. Laprida uses an ancient, triangular-shaped fiddle called a tromba marina to bow lurching, funereal sounds filtered through a subwoofer, adding electronics with glass, metal, and ceramic objects to have them variously crack, rumble, and rattle with a murky electricity. Anyone who loves the frisson and rush of feedback should investigate Laprida’s way with disquiet to stir unexpected life out of these combustible vibrations.

discerned in the fugue of streams – r beny: Inadvertently or otherwise, California’s Austin Cairns has long distilled the hushed symphonies of Arvo Pärt, capturing their atmosphere of stasis in his modular synthesis for the forces of nature, embracing its grace and evanescence. Cairns has long approached nature as an imagined entity by which to map the swings of his inner being. The movement of water and its tactility is a recurring motif, particularly in this work, playing on ideas of perception and connectedness as fluid, interlocking movements. Cairns offers no easy map to navigate by, but exquisitely considers the beauty of uncertain moments.

Movements – Samuel Reinhard: In what may be a great chaser to the new album from The Necks, every note and texture on Samuel Reinhard’s Movements feels as if they’re set to be frozen for posterity. These four pieces, all coming in at precisely 20 minutes each, tend not to unravel for you as form over you. Inspired by the onset of decay, Reinhard imagines sound as simultaneously living and dying, and while that’s not a revolutionary concept, he captures the essence of that juxtaposition to create compelling work. Using fragments of piano, harp, flute, sax, cello, and double bass, I’m reminded of the loping guitar abstractions in Oren Ambarchi’s Suspension in their tonal drift and the way they continually inch towards a stillness never reached.

Thanks for reading.
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Andrew Khedoori is the curator of Longform Editions.
First Impressions visual by Mark Gowing.