MIDORI JAEGER — EXASPERATE

'Exasperate' feels like a heist. It's the way cellist midori jaeger plays her instrument in a syncopated dance of pizzicato swirl, body-popping its way through a what might as well be a tangle of red lasers and tip-toeing through shadows. It's fitting, given that jaeger says the song is centred on the "overpowering urge to break away from old patterns, to so desperately want the new at any cost, but to feel overwhelming regret for things lost." It makes sense that we have this sense of minimal noir jazz, like a break-in, except this is a break-out — from the old and what no longer serves, but to what, and at what cost?

"I’ll leave this door wide open / To remember how you filled my days, oh but now / I want something unfamiliar, unpredictable" she sings, amidst a lyrical labyrinth delivered in jaeger's cool tones and tumbling vocal style.

On a broadly jazz-inflected canvas, the London-based composer paints a bristling blend of organic and artifial, with icy reverb on her woody cello lines and understated synth gently blooping alongside intricate clattering percussion (provided by co-producer Felix Higginbottom). It feels earthy yet augmented, an idiosyncracy that more or less reflects the song's raison d'etre: restlessness, the desire and constant push for newness. Though sonically harmonious, this cocktail of living instruments and the synthetic figuratively creates the tension inherent in an unnatural pairing, a desperation like a tree wanting to uproot and sprint off into the sunset.

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• 🔔 'Exasperate' is taken from (Un)planted (due out 9th March), the result of ten days of recording in Lisbon. It's the first in a pair of upcoming EPs by midori jaeger.
• 🔔 Another track has already been released from the EP, namely 'dark green' — gentler and warmer than 'exasperate', but with a similar minimalism and that same characteristic stamp of living-and-breathing crossed with buttons-and-waveforms.
• 🔔 The EP's confessional cover art (as seen above) is the work of Glasgow-based photographer Inigo Blake.

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🐣 QUARTETTO MINIMO — ATLANTICO

⌾ LISTEN TO QUARTETTO MINIMO, ATLANTICO⌾ RPG meets jazz in 'Atlantico', a sandswept soundscape from Madrid-founded, Paris-based band Quartetto Minimo. With a guitar melody – composed one summer in southern France – that summons a kind of intrepid videogame castle exploration and sparkling harp that harks back to faraway dark-wood-panelled rooms fable baroque (let's talk E.M.M.A's 'Mindmaze') a time and place, nowhere concrete, gets a bold, impressionistic illustration.

"It's funny that you said it sounds like baroque," guitar player Nicolas Arzimanoglou Mas tells us over email, "because for the past 2 years the bass player and I have actually been playing baroque music, with different instruments and bands of course."

Combine it with organic rough textured bass that feels noir and fantasy, and drums that give it pace and intrigue, and there is excitement, the urgency of jazz merging this into the battle music, penultimate level themes; in terms of real videogame comparisons, it sounds much like the 'Gerudo Valley' theme from Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

The medieval-summoning chamber aesthetics with kinetic energy of improvisation and quick tempo gives it that VGM dynamism. A new jazz release that crosses boundaries and conjures a world away from the traditional; it's chamber jazz.

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• 🔔 This track is taken from the album of the same name, Atlantico by Quartetto Minimo. Feel free to stream and/or download it on Bandcamp.

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🐣 SHAWN KINGSBERRY — INTO TOMORROW

The smoothness of this track lies not only in its late-night jazz style, the softer dimensions of noir, the aching limbs at the end of the day feeling, the starless sky and the angular buildings of a nameless city – ‘Into Tomorrow’ is undeniably smooth, carved into its twinkling lounge shape by musician Shawn Kingsberry. The saxophone plays a languid melody; the long drawn-out notes are the motif of the track, like a lone voice chanting a wordless song. Piano trickles in, adding structure and opulence to the satin soul of the sax, its keys rich and robust yet light and chiming. But all that soothing sound would be for nothing if it weren’t for the beat and bass, a sparse rhythm like a slow walk upstairs, or the empty feeling of watching blurred city lights from the rainy window of a taxi: space, and room to think.

But as with much that effuses noir sentiment, there is a darker side. ‘Into Tomorrow’, even in its name, suggests that wherever this gentle soundscape is located in time, it is night, pathetic fallacy creeping in with the danger and ignorance of the dark and nocturnal activities – but at least it seems to be signifying a transitory moment, as the melody reaches gradually upwards, as uplifting as it is the sound of sinking into exhaustion and despair. Where there is hope, there is a reason to hope.

Kingsberry himself describes the track’s origin: “2017 was a year of reflection on where we are today,” he writes. “As we wake up every day watching the news, listening to the radio, or reading the news feeds, we cannot escape the sadness, negativity, and violence surrounding us.” Though hopeful, though relaxing, these truths leave their mark on the worn soul, the warm emptiness, of this music.

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• 🔔 ‘Into Tomorrow’ is taken from Shawn Kingsberry’s current album, Peace Love and Happiness, which you can purchase here. “Peace Love & Happiness is my attempt to escape the world by creating a place of music, soul, and happiness to bring joy to my listeners.”
• 🔔 Interestingly, Shawn Kingsberry is actually VP, Digital Government and Citizen Services, at global IT company Unisys, where he “[guides] public sector consumers to adopt cloud computing, data analytics and other digital government platforms​.”

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🐣 WILD & FREE — FERNS AND STUFF

The groove piledrives through this track, the glossy dancefloor sparkles its glitter and the lights cut through the dark and dust. But mainly let's address that groove: bass guitar seems to somersault and cartwheel, it's an acrobatic full-bodied bass, tinged at the edges with metallic pugilism, something thudding about the way it curls like a snake covered in scaly armour around the bumping beat, the kick and abrasive handclap. Groove lies at the heart of this one, powers it, propels it forward.

LA duo Wild & Free, aside from these disco-summoning rhythmic patterns, also inject some faraway sense of darkness, of faded neo-noir, into 'Ferns and Stuff'. Stuttering synth arpeggios blip and boop twinkling in the air, and gradually there are these high pitched string sounds fluttering around this one particular note and effusing a sort of ambient tension with that soft persistence it has; and with wide sweeping chords that wobble with wonky progressions there is the guitar, half-surf half-late night jazz, distorted and starkly angled against its foundations. Vocals seem to speak from all sides, from beyond the vanishing point, a thin ghostly croon adding human intrigue to the dance steps painted boldly all over this one.

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• 🔔 'Ferns and Stuff' arrives courtesy of Lisbon-based label Discotexas, and is taken from Wild & Free's album Shapes on Shapes, which is out now also on Discotexas. You may purchase it via this hyperlink.

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🐣 TD_NASTY — WHERE U WANNA BE FEAT. CLARA LA SAN

There is a majestic languor in this track that suggests a lack of full wakefulness and somnolence equally, a crepuscular pre-morning wash of hazy colours before the sun climbs up over the horizon and yawns at the wide open open sky, a twilit post-day swirl of burning flavours, the mystical feeling of this neither-day-nor-night mirage evident in the glittering shoals of sound that gently glint and glimmer glorious as the glamour of Clara La San's vocals gleams with graceful detached R&B sultry vigour, its layers and harmonies tantalising in the totality of room-to-breathe that this song exudes, everything seeming to have its moment to carve out its own shape on the nothing noir of the song's quiet spaces.

The creator of this vessel of lounging emotion is the Manchester-based TD_Nasty fka Trap Door, who like a modern day electronic underground Janus two-headed watching yesterday and tomorrow simultaneously in a crystal ball of formless shapes materialises the preened parchment of the past with the retro-facing chords and their marginal complexity – these classic progressions of familiar slow-jam songwriting, the clunking percussive keys – and distills the amorphous future into drinkable clatterings of percussion and pummelling spacey beat blent experimentally alongside various qualities of digitised sound rounded and glassy glistening, far-flung futuristic hollow synths, all the while this synthetic backdrop frames the humanistic aching vocals, so at once this is assuredly recognisable at the same time as being so wonderfully alien exotic.

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• 🔔 Fiona Jane Burgess (of London band Woman's Hour) directed the video for the song, which stars Dutch dancer Naomi Weijand in an improvised performance shot in one take on 35mm.
• 🔔 The Clara La San-featuring 'Where U Wanna Be' is taken from the recent TD_Nasty EP, released via collective Gang Fatale. For just a fiver you can be a digital owner of this 6-track project, or you can listen to it for free, on their Bandcamp.

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🐣 IMONI — MONEY

In a world of swirling neo-noir, a place of hazy soft synth chords modulating subtly, London singer IMONI weaves her vocal amidst the offbeat stutters of a drumtrack that swings with nocturnal cool, thudding kicks and sumptuous clacking snares and the sharp popping hi-hats that skip and skitter alternately. 'Money' verges on melancholic, a moody whirl of music that utilises the chilled and stifled nature of the muffled synths to conjure a breezy sort of seriousness, whilst bass with electric bounce exercises its future-leaning sound on the atmosphere for stark colour against the gloom, spots on neon-pastel on a near-black charred grey void, a stark sense of being by yourself in vast space.

"I was always in the habit of writing sad songs, but recently I’ve started writing about what makes me feel good and it’s been empowering for me," explains the musicmaker in a press release. "‘Money’ is about me not letting other people’s negativity affect me, being care-free and focusing on myself as I begin my music career." There is certainly an aloof feel to IMONI's vocal, the lilting soul acrobatics switching between a crooning voice in the dark and spoken word calm in full control: "think i'm gonna settle down / boy don't mess around / it's about time that i let you down a little bit / but can you handle it." Reverb drips from the words, whether creaking and colloquial or singing out emotive and fluttering, giving the track a sense of expanse, of endless possibilities, the apprehensive but hopeful feeling of the first step on a journey, the brink of a waterfall.

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• 🔔 IMONI is currently working on her debut Serendipity EP.

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🐣 MIKE LIGHTZ — DISTANCE

The resounding fluidity of this track suggests a sense of relaxation, the chimes that ring out into the air, the constant breezes of ambience, but there is something more heartfelt at work here than simple chillment. The tone of those chiming chords, their gradual subtle agitation in indistinct arpeggios, the occasional sweep of guitar, that sharp chord leaning to the more lonesome side of noir, and you realise you are in a whirlwind of icy flavours, of emptiness, of lamenting, of exactly the eponymous state of the track itself: 'Distance'.

North Carolina musicmaker Mike Lightz claims in a short pitch about the track, "I had to give up my year long relationship in order to make this." Accordingly it is in this track that there is heartbreak, the idea of distance emanating from the reverbing sounds of the track, stretching out between two individuals and separating into searching tendrils that search in vain. The beat, disjointed and clacking, creates a sense of dislocation, popping in the sludgy whirl of sounds, the liquid swirl and gentle sounds like muffled glass breaking and the low looming rumble below, becoming more frustrated as the hi-hats begin to tick with the insistence of passing time. The expansive nature of the track, its almost pastiche noir moments, hint at a positive side, an optimism, in the midst of glimpsing fretfully into a fissure of despair.

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• 🔔 Mike Lightz is a part of Fayetteville, North Carolina collective, The Social Contract, via which he has released his latest album, Love Is Blue. Listen to it on SoundCloud.

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