First Impressions 043: Listen to music while the world caves in.

Initial vibes on new music

Hello,

I hope the new year season has been good to you all, especially through a time of uncertainty and overwhelm for so many of us. First Impressions can’t change the world but music, be it making it or listening to it, is a form of resilience. It is a hopeful space. It is agency.

The first newsletter of the year is a catch-up of sorts on some music I’ve been listening to from the start of the year. That’ll run into the next one as well.

You may have noticed news on the oncoming retirement of Longform Editions after our February edition is released next week. (the lineup is at the bottom of the newsletter) The kindness and feeling we have seen over the past week has been both surprising and warming. The Hearing Things article covers it well, but to quell some of the curiosity around this, quite simply it's the right time for us to not do it. Both Mark and I are keen to lock into new loops that better reflect our lives. 'What's next/' has been a question that has a ring of inevitability around it. I'll be looking to engage in more activity with the Longform Editions community that can further some of the ideas the platform was built on. I'd love to entwine this newsletter more deeply to that end but anything new will need to be tight and right, so I'll be taking my time to ensure that.

For now, I'll enjoy sharing music I've been listening to along with other thougths I may have on the state of music things, and I hope you'll stick with me as I do. First Impressions may not always be weekly, but it will remain free and hopefully, worthy of your time.

Thank you.
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OK, let’s go:

Hometown Girl – U.e: Ulla Straus has made bringing the blur of inner experience into clear focus the signature of her idiosyncratic ambient music. As soft and billowy as it can be, there is nothing narcotised or dissociative about her work — it’s this very blur that acts as a moral code, turning subterfuge and mystery into a magnet. Under her new alias, Ulla returns to the all-acoustic direction of her piece for Longform Editions. These raw, mostly guitar, saxophone, and piano pieces, recorded for cocooning feeling, with outside sounds intensifying their sense of space, feel like odes to vulnerability and hope. Quietly buoyant, Hometown Girl drifts closer to post-rock’s frequent detours towards bedroom indie, tracing the emotional core of a song without ever quite arriving at it, and doing so deliberately. As Ulla keeps finding new ways of making music, we’re drawn to seek how to find our way in.

Heavy Metal – Cameron Winter: “I’m feeling for a pipe to go down.” An evangelist for the absurd, Cameron Winter’s Heavy Metal is both an amulet and a gut punch for the Young Person’s Guide to Existential Songwriting. High on romanticism through filters of irony and defiance, Winter’s vocal sits in fragile repose atop a brittle amalgam of gospel, soul, and folk. Once you get past the slacker conceit, you realise that Leonard Cohen is more a touchstone than Beck. This is dead serious, though more hell is funny than funny as hell. Held together by a deep, weird energy, a better ode to modern transience may not arrive for some time.

Area Silenzio - eat-girls: The Lyon trio’s post-punk feels something akin to a dream of Anita Lane and David Lynch taking turns trickling ice water down your spine. Not so much a blank feeling as ‘blank’ and ‘feeling’ working in perfectly weird harmony, eat-girls’ songs grind away with Mogadon melodies made from reverberating, wiry threads of guitar and synths, with rhythms so skeletal they might have come from flicking the drum machine on. The songs are thick with life, though— a cool, magnetic mess of emotions running untethered from their deadpan core.

HEAL - Pavel Milyakov & Lucas Dupuy: NTS resident Pavel Milyakov, aka Buttechno, takes the wobble and clatter of his techno productions into looser realms in this collaboration with the UK’s Lucas Dupuy. HEAL is named for its main inspiration—90s to 2000s new age tapes—though, gladly, I can’t hear the resemblance except for its velvet fog of synths. Darker hues are afoot, with spooked percussion and spacey guitar echoing through, undercutting any sweep of serenity. The luminous tint the pair cast across it all isn’t quite reaching for a higher power, but it does make it ultimately something gorgeous to nestle into, even as it ruffles and frays in motion.

Aesthesis - Thorn Wych: Based in the UK’s Lancashire, Thorn Wych creates exquisitely crafted instruments from tree branches, many of which you can hear on this debut full-length. Describing her favourite sounds as “brambles scraping on your jeans as you wade through a blackberry patch” or “the squelch of sodden ground under your boots,” you can hear how Wych transforms these natural textures into a kind of pastoral ecstasy. Her sound unfolds like a mantra, played out on buzzing, bubbling drones, dissonant string scrapes, raw rhythmic stomps, and larking flute. This could have easily emerged from the underground flurry of global activity in the 2000s—short-run CD-Rs of psych-folk ruminations that reinvested in past energies sparked by spontaneity and a reach for transcendence. Yet Wych’s music calibrates more to the raw, mesmeric intensity of Henry Flynt’s self-described ‘hillbilly minimalism,’ drawing on more earthly coordinates to reach one higher.

Grandma Loves You – Sicu: Recorded across five years primarily on the piano in this Naarm composer's family home, these subtly rich pieces flicker with whimsy and a sepia-like haze, swirling like the mist of memories that play out forever in the present. It’s a welcome waft that I love coursing through the start of my day – perhaps an apt soundtrack to the quiet bliss domestic life can offer, oblivious to the outside world.

And, as meniotned above, the lineup for the conclusion of Longform Editions. Out next week!

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