Music is our myth

I sometimes think that people claim music can do far more than it actually can, like it is more potion than medium, but this week I listened to two albums that truly altered my experience of time. Philosopher Susanne Langer wrote in 1942 that, “music is our myth of the inner life,” and I like this enormous proposal, that music doesn't serve feeling, that instead it's the form through which feeling becomes knowable at all. It stands wonderfully in opposition to the dreadful wellness-ification of music - playlists promoting calm, focus, energy; the passive idea that music is doing something to you. I prefer the idea that music is doing something with you, which must be the correct phrasing, or else we’d all be having the exact same reactions to the same pieces of music. . . The albums that presented my feelings to me this week were the gleaming Renascent by The Durutti Column and Bivabippabualukka, Sofie Birch’s frisky new release. One held time in suspense and one gave it a different shade, both were happy alterations.

On a more practical note: From next week I will be on holiday, traveling to London, Oslo and Lofoten, another happy alteration, and so will be pausing paid subscriptions for the rest of the month. If this is your main source for finding new music, and you feel bereft at the idea of not receiving any for the rest of the month, then I encourage you to also listen to the playlists that I work from, which I have started sharing alongside my weekly favorites playlists. They are essentially a dumping ground for every new release that crosses my path over the course of a week, and you might find things that I overlooked, or that I don’t have the musical vocabulary to really appreciate. I thought this about Arca’s new release, an album I want to like, that people whose tastes often align with mine, are enjoying, and yet about which I am, in an usual turn of events, speechless. Perhaps you will fare better!

Until September, happy listening!

I love this album and I love how much Vini Reilly looks like the gnarled root of a tree. The notorious recluse has for years spearheaded the project that is The Durutti Column and this album, whose apt title, Renascent, means showing new growth, or being reborn and reviving after a period of dormancy, is all shimmer and gleam. By the 2nd track on the album I had stopped doing anything else, I was pulled in and charmed into stillness.

Shannon Lay’s new album, Past the Veil, is full of sumptuous, jazzy arrangements, and this song in particular sounds like the more well-read sister of so many early 2000’s trip-hop lounge adjacent releases.

Created with her brother Alfred, Danish musician, Sofie Birch’s playfully named new album, Bivabippabualukka, is an ode to childhood that feels entirely infused with sunset pinks and the wash of gentle waves on a custard coloured beach. It’s a big move away from her more ambient work, an album that could make the world around you glow.

I feel like there’s an abundance of the flute in popular music atm. Here flutist Vivian McConnell creates a song that sounds like smelling a sweetly scented flower. Charming!

I do not think it is that wild that I assumed that this was sung by a sort of fey, willowy lady called like Lille. Well! Well! Well! This exquisite voice actually belongs to Sir Taegan C'aion Harris a singer-songwriter from Houston. At 18 Harris was homeless and trying to pursue a music career. He moved to California, and spent a summer trying to record a few songs. These songs caught the ear of Kevin Abstract who invited him to move in and work on Abstract’s album Blush. Fresh from that is Harris’ first album, LOVE IS THE LAW, a swooning and tender thing, worth listening to in its entirety.

It feels so good to be listening to Blonde Redhead again, their very particular blend of the bleak and the sweet, the minute and the epic. I always feel like their music makes everything glint with a sort of dreadful meaning. For example: me when I am making breakfast while listening to Blonde Redhead - “what is more private than this, an egg.* I devour it, I eat its secrets.”

*I wish i’d thought of this, but the idea belongs to M.K Fisher - “Probably one of the most private things in the world is an egg before it is broken.”

Marina Herlop’s upcoming album uses “the hero’s journey,” (the narrative framework popularized by Joseph Campbell in his book The Hero With a Thousand Faces) as its underlying structural framework and this, the latest single, marks the beginning of the journey. Featuring keyboardist, Adri Goor who Henlop refers to as “the co-pilot, the druid of this album,” alongside a dizzying rhythm section, video-game woodwinds and her spiky vocals.

Wavy harp and Dirty Projectors like vocals are at the core of this absolutely beautiful song inspired by memories of the winters of Murex’s Swedish childhood, when the departure of a nearby flock of swans announced the changing season.

Nepo babies are in the unique position of both having to work both harder and not hard at all for acclaim. Do we want them to succeed? In large part, no we do not! It is undeniable that Willow Smith is extremely talented, but this album makes it clear that she really cares about mastering her craft. The Thread, her self-described “devotional” album is the creation of a serious musician, a student of jazz and R&B, and this song is a particularly good showcase of her skills.

I came to this album knowing nothing about zayALLCAPS and I still know nothing about him except that this album is weird in an amazing way. It’s full of auto-tuned vocals and experimental hip hop meanderings, filtered through a lust filled relationship with R&B, which somehow comes out feeling something like a pop album.

I don’t think I put enough grime on these playlists. This song, with its jazzy stripped-down grime beats, is so sleek, it feels like gliding along a highway late at night, not an obstacle in sight.

There’s so much lightness in Rachel Chunouriri’s songwriting, her songs flutter like they have wings, she sings like she’s writing in cursive. Since it’s a song about working it out on the dance-floor I feel like this little melodic nod to Timbaland’s The Way I Are, a song I will be playing when I am the DJ, is quite fun. I’ve put them next to each other for you so you know what I’m on about! ⬇️

My favorite not-previously-known-to-me artist find of the year so far. Tracy Amare, named her project Portraits of Tracy after the Jaco Pastorius song, and her latest EP is full of equally unexpected and seemingly incongruous reference points. Listening to it feels like skipping through a Spotify algorithm gone rogue.

I am listening to this on repeat, it’s perfect. A sequel to the prior album’s “Beat Up Chanel$,” I’ve never heard Slayyyter sound so much like a pop star.

This week’s new music paylists as well as the full playlists containing every single new release I listened to this week are behind the paywall.