Mica Levi—Ruff Dog

Over a decade ago, Mica Levi released Filthy Friends on MySpace—a mixtape the Observer called ‘a shortwave transmission from the year 2020’. Well, 2020 just came and went, and very little on the radio even came close to it. In the past decade, Levi’s work continued to look forward, habitually pushed its own boundaries, and garnered an Oscar nomination and Golden Globe win in the process.

Levi has always erected a cordon between their modern classical and avant-pop sensibilities. The former, award-friendly stuff, has always released under Levi’s birth name; the latter under an alias, Micachu. Ruff Dog is the clearest confluence of these two styles, and Levi’s first non-soundtrack solo LP. In the context of Levi’s career this is a significant moment, like an artistic self-shedding or actualisation. No longer the collaborator or the craftsman, Levi has seized an opportunity to leap into unfettered, uncompromised creativity.

Ruff Dog, at a slim 25 minutes, straddles every style of Levi’s career. Centrepieces of the album are shoegaze monoliths which stretch the extremities of overdrive. ‘Wings’ is as captivating as anything put out in the genre’s heyday, a mellow piece awash with slow, mesmerizing oscillations of noise. Elsewhere ‘Pain’ captures the spirit of Xinlisupreme, a brutal track which climaxes in the album’s sole moment of excess and extravagance; Levi shredding their pipes as the music collapses into ecstatic chaos.

Elsewhere, Levi gathers loosely-associative sounds into dense, dial-twiddling electronica which would’ve felt right at home on Magic Oneohtrix Point Never. ‘One Tear’ is the clearest example; a cutlet of Heart FM that someone forgot to put in the fridge, patterned with colourful but dangerous-looking blooms of mould. Little production grace notes belie precision behind these tracks’ looseness. The most overt case is ‘Chains Baggy’, which supplements its uneasy atmosphere with a cheekily-deployed iPhone alarm tone.

And it’s not all bells and whistles. ‘Cold Eyes’ and ‘Ride Till We Die’ are minimally-arranged, emotive and stripped-back sketches that feel like a fulfilment of the promise of early Liz Phair. Vocals are still obfuscated in post-processing, though. Wouldn’t want to take all the mystery out of it.

Appropriately for the last year, Ruff Dog feels quite lonely and cobbled together. You can imagine recording time being snatched between periods of restricted movement, downpours of bad news, mastering taken place in a dark bedroom. But the album soars, free from any concessions to creative partners, and benefits from the unpredictable jitteriness that made Micachu a name all those years ago.

Ruff Dog is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Yosa Peit—Phyton

Yosa Peit’s LP Phyton is one prong of her multi-disciplinary project based in Berlin. Peit corralled local artists for what she calls an ‘interspecies garden’; an installation incorporating ceramics and even costume, set to become a sound garden in 2021. This, for some, no doubt frames the LP as window-dressing for the project’s more tactile elements—the way techno becomes background noise for fashion shows. Thankfully, Phyton is a colourful, direct and inventive album which stands confidently on its own two feet.

Since long before Bjork’s Biophilia, there’s been a desire among producers to incorporate natural processes into their work; to more closely enmesh machines and biology than before. And that urge still exists. Leland Kirby simulated misfiring neurons for his generative opus Everywhere at the end of time. Venetian Snares’ and Hecate’s Nymphomatriarch is comprised entirely of samples of the two artists performing sex acts on one another. Phyton takes a more conceptual (and less gimmicky) approach by incorporating plant and organic matter into its physical spaces, and an exploration of growth and process in its sonic spaces.

This idea of growth takes many forms. Early in the album we are presented with ‘Serpentine’, a track which unfolds to reveals itself more throughout its duration. The track begins slowly, with the clamour of a forest canopy and sparse synth arpeggiations. But you soon get the sense that it has flowered from these unassuming shoots as it becomes more beat-driven and energetic. ‘Leaf I’ and ‘Leaf II’ feel like the sketches of a lost track—and as their name suggests, they feel like some incomplete piece of a larger structure from which they’ve come unstuck.

Most surprisingly, the conceptual rigor of Phyton coexists with some great pop songwriting. ‘Curls’ and ‘New Stars’ have the warm timbre and catchiness of Paul Simon’s Graceland—but, like a jpeg copied a thousand times, they boast some intricate and almost profane distortions; distortions which are beautiful in their own right. They drag their 1980s pop sensibility into a screaming present which conceptualises science far beyond the remit of what anyone though possible four decades ago.

Phyton feels utopian. It predicts a prosperous and inclusive future, in which we find harmony with nature—and ourselves—through the reconfiguration of our own structures; in which growth and construction are synonymous, and the development of culture enriches the world rather than gutting and burning it piece by piece. The great success of Phyton is to make that future convincing—and to say that everyone is invited, especially you.

Phyton is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

BABii—iii

It won’t surprise any listeners to learn that Margate-based producer BABii has, in the past, co-created an album with Iglooghost (xyz): a familiar clanging chaos litters her new EP, iii, one hole-punched by hollow-sounding, quasi-Noh percussion. But where Iglooghost’s music is like a hyperactive DnB mix produced by CBBC, BABii grounds iii with big-hearted explorations of closeness and distance.

It’s oddly fortuitous, given the circumstances. In the cloistered, claustrophobic togetherness of self-isolation, we’re prompted to discuss what it means to share space with someone. It’s all too easy to transpose the three tracks presented on iii to reflect our current situation—a situation they have no awareness of. This, in a way, reveals the broadness of their appeal; the universality with which BABii is speaking.

Opening track ‘BEAST’ is the most overt example of these themes—though iii is far from furtive with their presentation throughout. The longing of long-distance relationships is contrasted with loveless close-quarters ones. Essentially, the idiom ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’ is unravelled and unpicked across the course of four minutes. ‘BEAST’ features some lyrics which are gorgeous in their simplicity (standouts include: “your distance is distance/ but I still feel close to you”; and “I wanna love you/ whenever I want to”). It also does great work in laying beat-driven foundations for what follows.

‘SNAKE’ and ‘RGB’, the EP’s final two tracks, are incrementally more complex and ambiguous. ‘SNAKE’ details a damaged relationship with a toxic (literally “venom” producing) person who’s been given one too many chances. It comes at the point of excision, where closeness is unviable and distance must be established. A snake is an almost comically clichéd metaphor to use, but it gives the song directness and a kind of counter-bitchiness all of its own. And ‘SNAKE’ climaxes by breaking its own grimy tension in a beautiful percussive rush.

‘RGB’ uses the primary colours to symbolise jostling dynamics in a relationship. It’s gently hugged by celestial synths, which underline in form the song’s content: a hug should be an embrace—to hold but not hold in place.  ‘RGB’ is a track is conflicted and ambivalent as the others on iii—and this is to the EP’s great credit. It’s the little complexities—in both its lyrics and production—that ensure iii is such a blast; never schmaltzy, constantly surprising. Grab it and keep it close.

iii is available for purchase and streaming pre-order here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Hilary Woods—Birthmarks

With Birthmarks, Hilary Woods joins the increasing number adopting the musical guise of witchhood. The kinship makes sense; witches were misunderstood, inventive, strong-willed, and intelligent women whose mode of expression chimed discordantly with that of broader society. People like this still exist. Now, we call them “artists”; their conjuration “art”. Woods also tackles her own pregnancy: the greatest feat of alchemy a human being can achieve.

‘Tongues of Wild Boar’ kicks off knee-deep in this alchemy. Woods’ voice is swaddled by plods of funereal timpani and dark, longing cello; a nightingale whistling through the thick canopy. Birthmarks recalls Hawthonn’s Red Goddess (of this men shall know nothing)—a similarly Romantic and pagan LP—but offers a good deal more variety, and is far thicker with texture.

In fact, some tracks here serve little purpose beyond servicing this texture. ‘Lay Bare’ is an atmospheric interlude between the album’s first and second halves which further charges the air with fog. Equally effective are second-half efforts ‘The Mouth’ and ‘Cleansing Ritual’. The former stacks hissing fissures of air and voiceless bilabial trills, which succumb in glorious exhalation to its string outro. The latter is infective; an insectoid brass buzz combining with a hiss of little wings to deeply unnerving effect.

This is not an abject or a disgusting album, though. It is rich with beauty and tenderness. ‘Orange Tree’ finds Woods both summoning and shrinking away from their internal power; the knife’s edge of excitement and anxiety which accompanies a new baby. ‘Through the Dark, Love’ reads like a PJ Harvey song banged on the other side of the wall by a ghost—touching, bittersweet but deathly (“Down, down, down…”). And closer ‘There Is No Moon’ is a quiet but tense conclusion, one that allows space for listeners to absorb the packed album it caps off. Birthmarks is a dark thicket to get lost in—but it teems with life.

Birthmarks is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Katie Gately—Loom

Katie Gately’s Loom arranges some disjunct experiments beneath a pleasing umbrella of bizarre balladry. Raw materials of concrète and noise are here refined, reshaped, and given a new life as sturdy foundations for tightly-structured melodic pieces.

‘Ritual’ establishes the album’s tone; a sweep of processed, half-distorted vocals and synthesisers which chatter like sealife. It earns its title, seeming to raise the album from nothingness, conjure it from the air either side. It’s also deceptively complex, layering vocals atop each other in a harmonic stack which feigns simplicity through how well each vocal line complements its peers.

‘Allay’ throws a new element into the mix, with Gately’s maximalist lyrics. Her pedigree as a songwriter and producer for (among others) serpentwithfeet is as clear in these dramatic lyrical lines as the off-kilter production which supports them. Gately leans in even harder on ‘Waltz’; a song which elevates its emotive power through what sounds like the pageantry of a medieval court, but infected nonetheless with a kind of nervous energy. ‘Waltz’ wouldn’t be out of place on Richard Dawson’s Peasant—the disquieting itchiness of thorns surrounds a big red heart.

The album’s centrepiece is ‘Bracer’, a ten-minute single which escalates from almost-whimsical reeded sections to a bludgeoning conclusion. Like most other tracks on Loom, it stands at the threshold of being “too much”. But it’s a threshold Gately seems to relish standing at. The level of control she displays in production, and track’s textural and melodic invention, allow it to sidestep becoming self-important crescendo-core.

‘Bracer’ signals a transition from the album’s first half to its second, which begins with ‘Rite’. A conscious mirror of ‘Ritual’ before it, this track quietens things again with some ramping down that, Disasterpeace-style, could be the glissando of some profane orchestra. It’s a beautiful track which is full of apprehension.

This apprehension is carried through into ‘Tower’, a funereal march which describes digging a hole “you would fit right…into”. The contrast drawn between a coming-together and lowering into a hole lays bare that in any relationship—with any attachment—we invite not only connection but inevitable loss into our lives.

The album is rounded off with ‘Rest’, a piece which holds itself in stasis. Loom leaves us uncertainly wavering at the gate of heaven, as one chord is sustained through three minutes of angelic arrangement. Whether the track is defiant, anxious, accepting, depends on who’s listening. But what’s certain is its reflection of Loom as a whole: as work which confronts death in hope, trepidation, thankfulness and with great power.

Loom is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe