Hannya White—Who Put the Flowers In the Garden

Hannya White’s Who Put the Flowers In the Garden is a short but very striking release. It combines the attractive rigidity of post-punk with disordered analogue sensibilities that have come to define Staaltape as a label. Like the label’s other releases, Who Put the Flowers… is a gift in itself. It's enclosed in a tissue-paper chest which must be at least partially destroyed to reveal the cassette inside. Before you even put this in the deck, it’s thus imbued with a bristling sense of mystery.

While all this serves to heighten the intimacy and intrigue of White’s tape, it’s by no means a crutch. Her music is a treasure in and of itself, with molasses-thick synth textures and a beautifully understated tone. It’s rich with experimentation, too. Field recordings, White’s own unadorned non-sequiturs of spoken word, and prolonged periods of rich, tense stagnancy litter the tape.

These wild elements are corralled together by White’s unique and cohesive production. At one point, we hear a police siren—but even that cannot bloom from the tape’s tar-darkness. It’s chewed up and left sluggish; subdued by the toxic atmosphere. The extremities of sounds are severed, their edges are dulled, in service of a unifying bleakness.

Compositions are equally stark, their simplicity buckling to allow textural elements the spotlight. It’s not for lack of musicianship, though: what’s clear through this album’s fog is that White knows exactly what she is doing.

In the spirit of so much outsider music, this tape’s loneliness paradoxically grants it belonging. It’s so insular and introspective that we reward it with a contemplation of our own most private moments. Often, the work we find most intimate and connective is the one which shouts least for our attention—that which feels transmitted, skull-to-skull, between performer and listener. When reapplied to outsider art, the UK government’s cheesy COVID slogan “alone together” says it all.

Who Put the Flowers In the Garden is, inescapably, a work of extreme isolation. It may be grounded, worldly and characterful—but still a grim mystery dominates its soundscape. We are transported into a space of fumbling darkness, a dystopic art installation design to drive its visitors into confusion. But through this labyrinth of fuzzy feeling come occasional moments of clarity.

The album’s title track is, on the surface, like a COUM Transmissions for the twenty-first century—a piece which marches in taunting repetition, stopping sometimes to splash us with synthesised fizzes and bubbles. But its message is less obtuse, and more optimistic, than any work ever put out by COUM or associated acts. Hannya White offers a call to action; a koan instructing participation in the world. No matter how shadowed things are, we can still bring the everyday and the discarded generously under our gaze. Start with this innocuous little tape—who knows where it will take you.

Who Put the Flowers In the Garden is available for purchase directly from Staaltape here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

SØS Gunver Ryberg—Whities 030

Last year’s Entangled saw SØS Gunver Ryberg straddling the frontier between techno and noise. The release marked her expansion from transcendent noisemaker to something more rounded, incorporating melody and moments of yawning space. Ryberg's music was both more complex and accessible than ever. Her latest release, Whities 030, sees an even more comprehensive engagment with this mode. Intended to explore “the connection between destruction and creation”, Ryberg makes a graceful arc from order into chaos and dissolution, before hoiking us back by the end.

Opener ‘In The Core’ expands and compresses like a biomechanical lung. Its title and timbre suggest a gaping cavern with oil-slicked and artificial walls. Ryberg has soundtracked projects in the past (most famously for Playdead’s platform game Inside), but it’s still surprising just how visual her work can feel. Synthwork on Whities 030 feels in the tradition of 1980s horror maestros. Its sound carries video-nasty nostalgia, and a tension which suggests things may explode into violence at any second.

‘Solar Flare’ is even more oppressive; doused by foggy, thunderous washes of bass. A bright melodic lead eventually swoops in to puncture holes in the texture, but is itself doomy and heavy-legged. The air thickens, and path darkens, the track’s voice is fortified but forbidden to form words. By the end of ‘Solar Flare’, structure is so oblique as to seem absent.

Ryberg runs with this obliqueness in ‘Mirage of Spiral Wavelengths’. We experience further dismantlement and disintegration. To paraphrase Daniel Lopatin, we could be seeing the last known image of a song. Limping and injured, hissing steam from its fissures, the track stutters slowly through a post-apocalypse. Comprising dissolute, fragmentary elements, ‘Mirage…’ is just that—a mirage. Warping in heat haze, the track disappears before our eyes, and eludes understanding. But that makes it no less enticing.

‘Flux’ sees the return of the arrhythmic beats last heard in ‘In The Core’. It consequently can’t help but feel like some kind of return to baseline. With that said, we still walk in disordered territory. Ryberg’s drums are like Autechre procedural generations attempted on a decaying punch-card computer. They grab impotently for coherence but instead abandon to decay. The effect is unique and captivating. ‘Flux’ not only impresses on a visceral level, but is a technical stumper, too. It’s true: any sufficiently advanced music production is indistinguishable from magic.

Given its predecessors, ‘Velvet Dome Of Becoming’ is a curious closer. It’s anchored by a gorgeous drone—what sounds like the best didgeridoo simulation since Richard D. James went by ‘The’ Aphex Twin—and has one foot planted in a verdant organic world. After the toil of this depressive set of tracks, it’s a welcome surprise to end with contemplation, mystery and hope.

Those who recognise SØS Gunver Ryberg’s name won’t need a recommendation for Whities 030. They will already know her as an artist in a state of constant exploration—of sound, of the self, and world that huddles around our bodies. Her every release is outstanding in quality. Each builds on, and often subverts, what came before. Whities 030 does nothing to buck the trend, and reaffirms Ryberg as one of the best producers about. This is another worthy addition to her tremendous catalogue.

Whities 030 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

Sandunes—Spare Some Time

Sandunes’ Spare Some Time boasts almost as many vocal features as it does tracks. For some, this will be a red flag—there are just as many ‘purists’ in the sphere of electronic music as in jazz; listeners whose blinkers go up even at the suggestion of vocals—but they needn’t worry. Sandunes classily incorporates the intimate vocal performances on this EP with her summery, skilful production and flair for pop songwriting.

It is difficult to single out one specific performance as strong, but this isn’t to discredit Spare Some Time. Despite its slight runtime, this EP focuses on consistency; it eschews grandiose swells of emotion in favour of an immovable and seductive tone. Sometimes a producer’s skill is in their restraint, their control. Sandunes is an excellent example of this, refusing to sacrifice her project’s cohesion for a cheap chance to show off.

It’s hard to parse what’s quite so effective about Spare Some Time. Like the Ophelia figure on its cover, the EP feels isolated, heartbroken, but peaceful all the same. And, beneath its lake’s verdancy and floral brightness, there is a sense of excess and menace—menace which we could drown in like XTC’s “bug in brandy”. It’s what you might imagine being played at some dystopian summer fete—the cold crack of the coconut shie.

I suspect all this pastoral British imagery is my own projection—but maybe that’s testament to how open Spare Some Time is. Sandunes is a Mumbai-based female producer; which in a male-dominated space (is there even any other kind) many cannot ignore. Sandunes’ position in the sphere of alternative electronic music is something about which she is “prudent, but also celebratory”. This prudency gives Spare Some Time a universiality—a broad appeal which will maximise the number of listeners will find that piece of themselves, that connection, in it. But Sandunes makes sure to retain enough of her own voice to make sure all the confessional stuff lands.

So as far as I can say: Spare Some Time takes you to the beach, but you can’t get the sand off afterwards; it buys you an ice-cream that melts on your hands before you can eat it—but, hypnotised, you follow it around anyway.

Spare Some Time is available for pre-order and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Infant—Turning My Tongue Out

Turning My Tongue Out updates the transhumanist cool of Ghost In the Shell for 2020. It’s bio-organic suite where human voices are ever-present but distorted beyond reality, and notes shatter and fragment beneath trills of digital percussion.

At times it is starkly human—early track ‘child phalanx/apnea’ begins with the dislocating cry of a child at play, casting the relentless energy of kids into terrifying relief.  But moments like these are often supplemented with distance and inhumanity. Here, the track collapses into its ‘apnea’ section. A lumbering, mumbling instrumental ambience sputters in and out of existence until unprocessed human voices feel like a distant memory.

‘tracing myself’ travels with the opposite trajectory as in its tail end it becomes a spoken word piece. The words themselves are confessional, even a little trite, but their delivery and treatment adds intrigue. What’s ostensibly emotive personal information is rendered robotic and fractured—a contrast which, whether intentionally or not, engenders discussion on own fragmented, contradictory natures.

In fact, this theme seems to permeate the entire album. Is our desire for self-actualisation really the fear of a lack of self? Is identity something we just hang ourselves on; the umbrella we use to avoid describing ourselves as interlocking but only tenuously related collections of systems?

These vocals are, it’s worth stating, just one of many elements of Turning My Tongue Out which feel disintegrated and disparate. But it’s interesting how much emphasis artist Infant gives them. The result is something that feels like it was once a collection of ballads—but one that has been saved, deleted and recovered hundreds of times until it’s shot through with digital rot.  Like a Oneohtrix Point Never release, this feels like an relic of mass culture, dust-covered and dug up for future historians to try and piece together—our private moments seen through someone else’s eyes.

Turning My Tongue Out is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe