Last Year’s Micro Releases Today

Stewart Gardiner says goodbye to 2018 with a roundup of albums and EPs, ranging from the ambience of anxiety to haunted house music and pagan flutes

The future hasn’t arrived yet, so it makes sense to pull some of the recent past into the present. It wasn’t possible to cover all of the music that landed at Concrete Islands HQ near the end of 2018 before the year was out. There were some particularly interesting micro releases and I didn’t want them to disappear between the cracks. So I’ve created this space between for them to exist in instead.

New Orleans-based Elizabeth Joan Kelly restates the pleasing ambient calm of Brian Eno’s Music for Airports as a pervasive ambience of anxiety on her Music for the DMV album. “Club Clanger” takes a sonic scalpel to distant techno, offering hints and echoes, beats stripped apart before the track has begun. It’s that nightmare moment from 1990s clubbing relived: crouched in a cubicle as the ecstasy starts to take hold, the music from the main room muffled and wrong sounding. Wrong is of course good in this case. “Electropop Swimming Pool Gymno” is insistently gentle, evoking a brisk, chillier rendition of Air circa Moon Safari and radiophonic signals are sent out into space with “Weeks”. The keyboard classical of “Cool Air” channels Wendy Carlos for Kubrick, bright lines hinting at a violence that is always about to erupt, never actually erupting. There’s a magnetic joy to the track that is hard to resist.

Kl0ch4rd’s K701 (the melted tape) shakes off any residual anxiety and embraces the calmness of desert oceans. Subtly psychedelic in its approach, unobtrusive electronics and occasional cinematic samples take a supporting role to carefully played guitar. Tropicalia and jazz are present in moments throughout, with the latter being embraced via the Ronny Jordan vibes of “L’Oeil”. The final track, “Meremia”, is the most intriguing, somehow keeping in tune with what has preceded, while becoming a sped-up DIY and hip-hop-less Spanish vision of Massive Attack for the last minute or so. The anxiety of influence has rarely seemed so strange.

Apparently reality is thin between haunted electronic excursions and Chicago house. A discovery made and reported on by Young Hierophant. The Thin Place EP starts off as synth transmissions from the corridors of horror, a disused 1980s mood permeating the room on “Brogdon Wood”. The more urgent electro dispatch of “Sylvan Dread” plays against a montage of kids preparing to go up against creatures from the beyond. But it’s with “Hyssop and Licorice” that Young Hierophant steps through the door into a realm of his own making. It’s very much a track of two halves, separate realities infusing to create a third place. The John Carpenter-esque synths are sustained on the edge of events, but what could easily be its own thing is revealed as an extended intro. The track mutates into a squelching house number, which bleeps and punches its way out of the dark. “Kim Fathers” doubles down on the house elements, going harder and cleaner. The shimmering lines, increased BPM and satisfying beeps cast off the shadows and beckon in the morning. The programming of the tracks might suggest a journey out of darkness into light, yet it is more likely there’s a circularity at play. These four chapters are responses to the same conditions, caught between different realities in the same space. 

Hamburg resident Nilson’s News from Nowhere takes a gentler approach to the eerie, although it is no less haunted for it. English folk and public information films exert an influence, but the focus covers wider geographical and cultural territory. It’s an album lovingly haunted by Old Europe. “Colina” feels as if it exists in the edges of the world of The Wicker Man. “Remember how we used to fly a kite,” declares Nilson, the jaunty delivery belying lost childhoods. It’s about the strongest shadows out in the brightest sunlight and the flute is hypnotically seductive. “And from his blood, the crops would spring” employs the voices of British public service broadcasters and evokes the joy of pagan rituals in service to a Morricone-style anthem of the dispossessed. Whereas “The Dancing Plague” brilliantly re-casts Goblin’s Suspiria theme as pastoral ditty. Nilson pushes things in yet other directions with “Different Channels”, which is lopsided flute-led outsider pop with added electronic crackle. That these influences not only hold together, but form a convincing musical world is quite an achievement, particularly given that the album is over in less than thirty minutes. Time, it would seem, plays by its own peculiar rules.