'Iconic Air' cuts in like a collage, part sample-led groove, part majestic soundscape, the twang of spaghetti guitar against soft synth and smooth bass. In short, it's a trip — a slice of space western meets ambient by the late Susumu Yokota, known chiefly as a proponent of the latter genre, with albums like Acid Mt. Fuji (1994) and Sakura (1999). Really, though, he created in various genres, from techno to house, under various monikers, and also had a career as a designer.
The track comes from an upcoming album, Laputa, named after the flying island from Gulliver's Travels. Yokota never released the album, but – as 'Iconic Air' deftly demonstrates – it is an expansive journey of sound, not a million miles from a videogame soundtrack, filled with mystique and forboding, told in all the shades of the music that marked Yokota's own musical journey through life.
✧
๐
Susumu Yokota's album Laputa is due out 8th April on Lo Recordings. You may pre-order it on Bandcamp, both in vinyl and compact disc formats (and digital also).
A chamber of screeching shoegaze immures you, the drone of guitars driven by relentless breakbeat snares circles and swirls, catching you in the tow of their whirlpool. You must look up to avoid drowning in it.
In their single ‘Cannibal World’, Philadelphia post-shoegazers Nothing explode against the eardrums with layers of refined noise. Those palpitating drums compel the continually bleeding guitars to flood outwards from singer Domenic Palermo’s oneiric vocal melody, creating a visceral body of sound.
Enveloped within this organism of unnameable noises, spilling through unnameable membranes, we are powerless but to grasp out at that unplaceable feeling — something “deeper than bone marrow”, as Palermo sings.
‘Cannibal World’ peels away its flesh to reveal a tender middle eight. Echoing vocals oscillate. Everything thickens and, for a moment, the drums disappear. It’s a peace that doesn’t hold. The song builds towards yet another geyser of sound with intimations of noise, a flashflood of pouring guitars and high-pitched, rhythmic judders. With an unsteady, staccato heartbeat, they whimper. And with this resolution, Nothing soars again.
✧
๐
'Cannibal World' is taken from Nothing's new album a short history of decay, which is out now and available on vinyl, cassette tape, compact disc and digitally. You may purchase it on Bandcamp.
Turkish sound artist Anadol (Gรถzen Atila) and French writer-musician Marie Klock have teamed up once again teamed up to create an upcoming album, Manivelles (May 15). The first single, 'Rentrer ร la maison', also arrives in video form, a wonderous home movie-style affair in grainy VHS quality that very much fits the vibe of the song — the drear brick walls of the suburbs; driveways and gardens; dad is washing the dog.
Klock sings of the trials we face when confronted with that most comforting yet most alienating of things: returning home. How far we come only to arrive home again! Whether it's Christmas or someone's birthday or popping over for a cup of tea, to sit around the same table and hear the same stories and feel the same way as the child version of you all over again — a bittersweet tragicomedy (or comitragedy?).
With characteristic Klock humour, the lyrics for 'Rentrer ร la maison', for the chorus at least, translate to
Whenever you go home
You start off with great intentions
And then, shove ‘em up your ass
Nice and deep, nice and deep
For some, I imagine that sounds about right. And with the vocal melody and the accompanying soundscape, the song has the melodic drone of a moralistic folksong or classic chanson, while during the verse the vocal skips over the lines like beat poetry.
Atila's instrumental work features time-worn analogue synth and thin drum machine beat, the kind of sounds that might emerge from a dusty childhood keyboard inherited from some uncle or another. It's as if the pair, one having accompanied the other to their parents' house, actively composed and recorded the song during such a visit, barricaded in a tiny time capsule of a bedroom and won't emerge until everyone has mercifully gone to bed.
✧
๐
The video for 'Rentrer ร la maison' was created by video artist and film-maker Timo Schierhorn and was produced by Hamburg-based filmmaker collective Auge Altona. Unfortunately we do not have a name for the dog. [Edit: The dog's name is Fips, and his owner was Schierhorn's grandfather; it's a special posthumous appearance from them both.]
How so much power exists in one minute and thirty-seven seconds of music! 'The Narrative (First Movement)' by Berlin composer and musician Mary Ocher exists in a state of defiance, atonal chords and stuttering staccato rhythms battling against a tide of silence, with such force exerted on the keys in some places that my own fingertips started aching.
An essentially minimalist piece, we move quickly from a conventional arpeggio into a frenzy of figuration, a simple melody exploded into frenetic collages of rapid-fire playing, notes cut up in a succession of glitching fractions of themselves, shifting between soft moments of surrender and violent fury — occasionally the left hand erupts in storms of thundering bass notes leaving a thick smoke of sustain in their wake.
We have a narrative, as intimated by the title of the piece. But in trying to spell out that narrative, in telling her story, Ocher jettisons the regulated ascending notes in triple time like a deadweight and takes the wheel, cutting through the void in sturdy acrobatics, siphoning her craft not to tell us listeners but rather show us the de-profundis-clamavi depths.
✧
๐
Mary Ocher's 'The Narrative (First Movement)' has also been visualised by artist Boris Eldagsen in video form. Using generative AI, the video depicts a psychically pained man merging with, and being destroyed by, a derelict piano that folds in on itself, falls apart and deposits ephemera among other things, kind of like a dream in which one's teeth fall out, in a series of monochrome vignettes. You can watch the video here.
๐
This piece of music is taken from her upcoming album Weimar which is will be released on 13th March 2026. You may, if you choose, pre-order the vinyl or digital form of the album on Bandcamp.
The hope of warmer days and uncertain love lies in the glittering chimes and laid-back guitar of 'fuimos electric' by New York band long. We start appropriately enough with an audio walk in the park, what with the spring reverb drums and allegretto bass, the sun-summoning bossa-esque guitar chords. Lilting vocals weave themselves in: “Fuimos al parque / para conocernos un poco mรกs...”¹
Lyrically (in Spanish, in case you didn't notice) the lines shift between statement-of-fact and figurative, such as “me mirabas como el rรญo”² — the poetic contents of the heart wrapped in city-flavoured indie pop packaging.
The song grows in vignettes parallel to the love story told by the vocals – meeting each other in the park, sharing a bottle of wine, not knowing what to say. Before long, we are in a triumphal block party crescendo, crashing cymbals and brass breezily lifting us up and out of the park, out of the moment, to look back on all that has been, joy and more joy still in the unknowable tomorrows.
✧
¹ We went to the park to get to know each other a little more ² You looked at me like the river
