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

Ohmme—Fantasize Your Ghost

Fantasize Your Ghost, the second album from Chicago rock duo Ohmme, contains both gentility and fearless invention. This contrast, and others like it, generate a good deal of the LP’s strength. By turns, it can sound muddy and psychedelic, yet clean and precise; anthemic but emotionally intimate.

Virtuosity and experimentation are ever-present, courtesy of bandmates Sima Cunningham and Macie Stewart. Their flourishes are not self-serving—they instead serve the band’s drum-tight songwriting. It's clear that Cunningham and Stewart are both superb musicians. But they have no desire to flaunt it, no performative swagger. Less focused, and more egotistical artists swamp or obscure their work in itself. This duo’s noodling usually supplements their songs’ thundering crescendos, nestled unobtrusively in the mix. There’s too much to cover here—but some squeals and pizzicato plucking in ‘The Limit’, and gentle panning drones in ‘Some Kind of Calm’, serve to elevate the material.

Opener ‘Flood Your Gut’ is a gorgeous piece somewhere between PJ Harvey and Syd Barrett, whose elements disperse, elongate, and entangle through its second half. ‘Selling Candy’ stretches the extremities of Ohmme’s sound still farther, with sweetly-sung close harmonies in a call-and-response with overdriven guitars.

Elsewhere, ‘Some Kind of Calm’ pulls of the rare trick of pretending it’s not doing anything. Like a duck whose legs thrash underwater, it glides past seemingly without effort. But a million subtly-deployed tricks in its playing and production ensure it heavies the eyelids seductively, lulling and soothing instead of boring.

And on the total opposite end of the spectrum is ‘Sturgeon Moon’, a jagged and raucous song where Ohmme wear their sense of play most proudly. In the song’s melodic angularity, and through the John French-esque drumming of Matt Carroll, the ghost of Captain Beefheart is revived. Perhaps its sturgeon is a distant cousin to the trout of Van Vliet’s mask.

Though a glib comparison, that Ohmme recall Beefheart speaks to their greatest credit. Ohmme are rare, in that they recall the genuinely interesting facets of classic psychedelia, sustaining and surviving its spirit rather than its barest and most superficial aesthetic qualities. In the soulless and commercial world of neo-psych, beacons of artistic freedom like Fantasize Your Ghost shine even brighter.

Fantasize Your Ghost, released June 5th, is available for streaming and purchase here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

People Club — Kil Scott

People Club's Kil Scott is a sharp, 15-minute injection of psychedelic pop. Like some whispy and autumnal mutation of The Police, it's defined by syncopated grooves so laid-back that at points they border on muzak. Given the industry's near-constant glut of lo-fi indie rockers, you might take this as a criticism. But the strength of Kil Scott is in this delicacy.

No idea, musical or otherwise, is forced. Lyrics' dry wit and sincerity are given breathing space, and melodic ideas are fully conceived and explored. This work is fascinatingly self-tempering; it clips its own wings on the verge of fledging. But it's not failure to launch, or toothlessness — it's balance, nuance, and control.

Kil Scott touches on imbalances of power, both social and inter-personal. Its four songs discuss, among more topics, sexism, homophobia, and destructive relationships. All the while, People Club keep a deft handle on everything, balancing the personal with the political. Subjects are filtered through a stark, emotive and confessional voice. But Kil Scott never loses perspective; it's pointed, but never didactic.

Its first and last tracks serve to illustrate this balance. 'Perfume', the opener, explores the paranoia, venom and defeat of a dying relationship. It's internalised and brooding. 'Who I Call My Baby', though, is an outward projection. It defies an undefined source of homophobia which would meddle in a couple's love. What's impressive is how People Club approach these two pieces from the same place — one of tenderness and compassion. By the time Kil Scott finishes, you'll wonder how they packed so much in.

Kil Scott will be available to purchase and stream on the 15th of November. Stream single ‘Perfume’ here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe