Christoph de Babalon—Hilf Dir Selbst!

German electronic producer Christoph de Babalon has one of the most consistent discographies you could imagine. In a sense, the revered cult status of his ’97 album If You’re Into It, I’m Out of It is a shame. Its enormity dwarfs work deserving equal time in the spotlight, and can direct attention away from de Babalon’s still-vital contemporary stuff. Listeners need only investigate 2018’s Exquisite Angst—or this latest portion Hilf Dir Selbst!—for a first-hand understanding.

Hilf Dir Selbst! is frantic even by de Babalon’s standards. The EP is a dark set whose sound is saturated in primacy and mythic terror. It shares DNA with Gazelle Twin and NYX’s monstrous album Deep England; hooking itself into a twisted and archaic folk universality, then distorting things almost beyond recognition. The face of the past leers into the future.

It feels trite to compare de Babalon to a contemporary act—he as good as invented this sound. Unchanging through a storm of fickle fashions, de Babalon has weathered the years and gained recognition just by sticking to his guns. It’s like he could see the future when naming his trend-dodging If You’re Into It…, knew he simply had to lie in wait for the dummies to catch up. It doesn’t matter that de Babalon’s sound is largely unchanged from the early years; not when the sound is still so refreshing and inimitable.

It’s in this EP’s little touches. The drums of ‘Hung on a String’ move in marching-band mechanicality. Like a military drill, the track subtly gestures towards violence and death. ‘Cool Priest’ (whose title can’t help but make me think of The Fall) balances its tortured breakbeats and frightening vocal stabs over a bed of sweet legato pads. Soothing and crepuscular horror like this is de Babalon’s forte. Listening to it is like sitting between a neck and a vampire.

Hilf Dir Selbst! is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Grandbrothers—All the Unknown

Electronic duo Grandbrothers’ rich sound isn’t quite new age—but it’s on the first steps of a pilgrimage there. Grandbrothers use minimal, computer-controlled piano arrangements to chalk subtle elaborations into a blueprint that has brought success to the likes of Nils Frahm, Bonobo and The xx. And just like those bands, Grandbrothers’ music is unashamedly insubstantial, bolstering its calculated straightforwardness with exceptional mixing and mastering and an elegant purity.

Contrary to Frahm et al. in All the Unknown is its pastoral cosiness. One often gets the impression such “beautiful” minimal acts seek fluidity in the concrete structures of urban spaces; they try to make neon spill from its own glass tubes. Artists cling to the cool and the urbane, insincerely repurposing new age tropes for city-dwellers. Conversely it feels as though Grandbrothers are finding the concreteness in nature and—in a way which recent events have made feel vital—welcoming the outside in. The result is an album which, if asked where it lived, would more likely be a neighbour to XTC’s Skylarking than its immediate musical family—a suburbanite with a dog and herb garden.

While Grandbrothers are far more concerned with timbre than melody, it must be mentioned that they can stretch ideas beyond breaking points. Many of this album’s thirteen tracks follow a near-identical compositional formula and, given this singular approach, you can’t help but wonder if they were all necessary. It is difficult to justify all fifty-eight minutes of an album’s runtime when so many of them are spent underlining and re-underlining a single point. All the Unknown isn’t quite as rapturous on a macro scale as it is when you dive into all of its itty-bitty details.

There has been some attention given to structure. Tracks take turns to imperceptibly ratchet things up—and the second half of All the Unknown is more dark and grand than its first. ‘Black Frost’ would feel incongruous and displaced at the opening of the album, but it fits its place in the tracklist perfectly as an escalation of everything that came before. This precision and control is worth complimenting but may well be responsible for why the album feels a static and staid at times. If this is the case, the album is wonderfully subtle in a way I cannot bring myself to fully appreciate.

All the Unknown felt best when railing at the edges of its own box. ‘Auberge’ is noteworthy for being perhaps the album’s slowest-and-lowest track, and its diminished energy slightly breaks with formula in a way that’s effective and memorable. It’s smartly walloped in the album’s centre and feels like an incorporeal aside; a sabbatical in which we visit windy Himalayan peaks, replete with chimes and proud swells of synth. ‘Silver’ goes the other way, and accelerates things until they feel self-interrupting and wildly energised. The prepared piano actually feels prepared in this track—but not in a way I can put my finger on. These stretches into sublimity fulfil the rest of the album’s promise and—while the full hour doesn’t quite sustain their highs—they elevate All the Unknown beyond the rest of the crop.

All the Unknown is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Shygirl—ALIAS

For the last decade or so, pop has engaged in a masochistic relationship with its own excess. I’m sure there’s some socio-economic cause which can be argued—that post-2010 society’s ubiquitous obsession with responsibility and shame can be traced to the credit crunch, as we try to guilt-trip roofs over our heads in absolution for our past excesses. I’ll leave that all to someone cleverer than me, though.

Whatever the reason, the naïve millennial optimism of LMFAO’s ‘Party Rock’ has crumbled—first giving way to Danny Brown’s ‘Dip’, then Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Swimming Pools’, and now Billie Eilish’s ‘When the Party’s Over’ and The Weeknd’s ‘Blinding Lights’. It is now imperative for pop music, and mass culture in general, to engage in self-flagellation. Deviations from this formula are quite often dismissed as gaudy or selfish—though there are exceptions in the likes of 6ix9ine and Cardi B. If you’re sceptical, try listening to Skrillex’s ‘Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites’ now without wincing. You can’t, because you don’t really want to party anymore. You’d rather stand outside until the party’s finished, then help clean up while ‘lofi hip hop radio – beats to relax/study to’ plays.

This context makes Shygirl’s ALIAS doubly impressive. She’s a member of NUXXE, a label/collective of four like minds who buttered their bread by celebrating excess, and throwing less-than-sanitary oozy wonders of the human condition into sharp relief. ALIAS doesn’t break that mould. The seven-track EP turns its sights on sex and relationships—and seduces at the same time as making you want to get a top-up HPV jab “just in case”. It seems to admonish and admire casual sex in equal measure, elevating the act to monumental, quasi-narcotic status. Sex gratifies—but just as it turns you on, it can turn on you, and become consumptive.

Shygirl herself becomes the personification of this—a praying mantis-esque character whose self-proclaimed sexual availability and prowess feels as parodic as it does appealingly dangerous. Shygirl can “go all night” and continually asks “can we throw it down again?”. Nowhere is this GFOTY-style fulfilment of male fantasy made clearer than in ‘LENG’—a track which features the line “so wet that I drown”; a raucous escalation of the year’s biggest hit, ‘WAP’.

Despite going doubling down on the rudeness, ALIAS is ultimately far more empowering than ‘WAP’. Shygirl doesn’t indulge in Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s self-commodification or earnest vapidity in which your pussy is bartered as social currency. Behind the posturing and naughtiness is a half-ironic and deceptively sentimental release, which sneaks vulnerability and depth in behind its own boldest elements.

‘TASTY’ is an oasis of sweetness at the album’s exact midpoint; detailing the rush of optimism and confusion that heralds a new relationship. And ‘BAWDY’ double-hands strength and weakness, framing sex as an act which can crystallise and intensify our deepest feelings, permitting grander heights of emotional bliss. 2020 be damned: ALIAS has the buoyancy and joie de vivre of a Cakes Da Killa release—and it’s twice as smutty.

ALIAS 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

Camila Fuchs—Kids Talk Sun

More than forty years before the signing of the Paris Agreement, Douglas Trumbull released Silent Running. The film predicted a future in which spacecraft abandoned our dying Earth, hauling entire forests with which to terraform new worlds. The aesthetics of its setting, Valley Forge, continue to infiltrate public consciousness today. Geodesic domes, like astral snow-globes; a lonely Joan Baez score. Trees with a backdrop of steel and stars. These are more enduring legacies than the film itself. Silent Running was just one of a number of works that fused tech and nature, a vanguard of the emergent movement of bio-engineering. Nowadays, Neri Oxman’s MIT research group talk about growing buildings from seeds.

Lisbon-based duo Camila Fuchs’ Kids Talk Sun feels like a contemporary rescoring of Silent Running—a Joan Baez album for the age of bioinformatics. A number of stylistic quirks signify this. Some are playful and offhand (like the Strauss-y horns in ‘Roses’ which suggest a celestial setting). Others are more persistent and pervasive.

Camila De Laborde’s vocals—aside from recalling Baez herself—at times resemble Karin Dreijer and Julia Holter, in their balancing of folksy darkness and computer-aided transhumanism. In fact, Kids Talk Sun as a whole shares sensibilities with Holter’s Aviary. Both albums lean into a kind of tropical stickiness—but where the squawking birds on Holter’s album denoted an exterior space, squelches and soft thumps in Kids Talk Sun place us deep in the forest of the human body. Tree sap has been supplanted by warm blood.

To labour Kids Talk Sun with even more comparisons, it shares DNA with Orbital’s In Sides or Matthew Herbert’s Bodily Functions. Beats and production sound retrieved from the sonogram of an enormous animal, rather than composed; dominated by squelchy bass and hisses that mimic the rush of blood through veins. Camila Fuchs bounced between the sea, wilderness, and the studio throughout the recording of Kids Talk Sun—and these contrasting spaces have certainly informed the record’s colourful and varied palette.

Kids Talk Sun feels familiar in all the best ways. If you’ve ever imagined what being given a tour of DeepMind while on psilocybin feels like, it’s probably something like this.

Kids Talk Sun (releasing 13th November) is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe