#mukqs

Mukqs — Eye Frame (Orange Milk)

Apart from the technical aspect of his live sample-based improvisation, Mukqs’ Eye Frame is like an aural version of Fantastic Voyage. It feels like you are travelling through the sounds of your own mind and body sometimes in reverie and sometimes into the eddies of anxiety at its core. As I said in my review “Mukqs moves his music seamlessly between light and shade, combining waves of sound with microscopic detail, using staticky glitch to enhance natural sound and recognizable new age tropes to ameliorate the unfamiliar.” Each subsequent listen has revealed further dimensions in Eye Frame and I’ve found myself returning to it more than other record this year.

Francesco Leali — Let Us Descend (Until Riots)

Francesco Leali and his collaborators create a disquiet world on Let Us Descend. Fascinated by the ideas of coercive control and psychological manipulation as the heart of modern society, Leali holds a scratched and tarnished mirror to our gaslit world. Using a minimal palette of electronics, percussion, and strings, this is some of the darkest and most distressed music of the year. An appropriate, and ironically, consoling response to the events of these too dread times. Leali creates moments of great beauty on tracks like “Catatonic Blue” and “Hexed” that provide glimmers of hope amongst the terrible mess. 

Arab Strap — I’m totally fine with it 👍 don’t give a fuck anymore 👍 (Rock Action)

It’s always a pleasure to hear Aidan Moffat’s exasperated, heartfelt poetry. Taking stock of the deleterious effects of social media has been a staple of the last few years but Moffat’s ability to combine scathing satire and emotionally resonant turns of phrase can stop you in your tracks. Behind him Malcolm Middleton moves from big beat to gruff Pet Shop Boys to lush Bacharach inspired orchestration to delicate acoustic guitar and string arrangements. Whether wielding scalpel or bludgeon, Moffat is at his windmill tilting best. A lovely rollicking ride this. 

Iceboy Violet, Nueen — You Said You’d Hold My Hand Through the Fire (Hyperdub)

Barcelona-based producer Nueen provides grainy washes and granular details that frame Manchester artist Iceboy Violet’s dissection of a lost relationship. The music slips from interstitial space, mercurial, shapeshifting. The voices weave though, now submerged in smoke and murk, now crystal close, expanding the liminal spaces between grief, loss, and lust. Violet processes their pain and regret in language that moves between poetic abstraction and breathtakingly specific detail. An album of real beauty and pain.  

KMR/KMRU — Disconnect (Phantom Limb)

On two lengthy tracks “Differences” and “Arkives”, Nigerian sound artist Joseph Kamaru AKA KMRU discusses colonial power, history, and identity over Kevin Richard Martin’s ambient dubscapes. On the first, more abstract piece, Martin layers KMRU’s voice so that it echoes like the oral histories so vital to the transmission of culture in his homeland. “Arkives” is an explicit and telling condemnation of the colonial obsessions with suppressing language and fetishizing the collection of artefacts. The pair then perform haunted deconstructions on both tracks. “Difference”, Differ”, “Ark” and “Arcs” work as shadow miniatures, reducing the words and music to ritual abstraction that work on a psychogeographical level as hypnotic invocations of knowledge and being. 

Sinaïve — Pop Moderne (ANTIMATIER)

French trio Sinaïve bring the cool. Looking like Warholian foundlings, all sharp edges, mod clobber, sunglasses after dark and an effortless way with a beat or a riff especially when they’ve copped it from a song you didn’t even know you loved. “Providence”, which sounds like Brigitte Fontaine over the tidal swell (and decelerated riff) of “Taillights Fade” and a rickety drum machine is a magnificent undulating slab of melodic sludge. “Dasein (Oder nie sein)” careens along the open road, all motorik drums, squalling guitar, and a thrumming bass riff. Pop Moderne never fails to provide an electric jolt. 

Some others:

Angry Blackmen — The Legend of ABM (Deathbomb Arc)

Being Dead — EELS (Bayonet)

Alan Braufman — Infinite Love, Infinite Tears (Valley of Search)

The Bug — Machine (Relapse)

Burial — Dreamfear/Boy Sent From Above (XL Recordings)

Camera Obscura — Look to the East, Look to the West (Merge)

Fin — Cleats (Hausu Mountain)

Damaged — Ghost Dubs (Pressure)

Daryl Groetsch — Above the Shore (self-released)

Drahla — angeltape (Captured Tracks)

Font — Strange Burden (Acrophase)

France Jobin + Yamil Rezc — Un diá en México (LINE)

Geotic  — The Anchorite (Basement’s Basement)

HAPTIC — Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions (LINE)

Kim Gordon — The Collective (Matador)

KMRU — Natur (Touch)

Marwan Allam — Bab Bhar (self-released)

Mick Harvey — Five Ways to Say Goodbye (Mute)

Neutrals — New Town Dream (Slumberland)

Nexcyia — Exodus (Haunter)

Patrick Higgins — Versus (Other People)

Reunion Island  — Night Words (Tall Corn)

Sandwell District — Where Next? (Point of Departure)

Skee Mask — D (self-released)

Umbrellas — Fairweather Friend (Slumberland)

Mukqs’ bass tones are immaculate. Welling eructations, wet-warm gut felt geysers. A rumbling presence through the opening track “Duralumin” beneath a formational conjugation of musical atoms that ebb and flow like algae blooming at water’s edge. They sit sustained beneath the hiss and crackle of “Concept Armor,” a shadow defining the points of light, ushering shimmering wraiths from within. The separation between the bottom end and foregrounded sounds produces spatial dimensions which situate the listener within the music. 

Occasionally you may find yourself soothed by the gentle sound of trickling water, the quiet nocturnal shifting of ancient landscapes, the thawing exhalations of ice-covered structures. There is something alive in haunted sounds of “Dot Life,” an awakening that continues in fusion influences of “Megabaa” with its vaguely Eastern strings, a shamisen perhaps, and tone pitched baroque woodwind sounds.

There are moments that evoke Kevin Richard Martin’s urban ambient works, others of the entropic environmentalism of The Inward Circles, 99Letters’ use of traditional Japanese sounds and Deathprod’s tectonic movement. Mukqs moves his music seamlessly between light and shade, combining waves of sound with microscopic detail, using staticky glitch to enhance natural sound and recognizable new age tropes to ameliorate the unfamiliar. With Eye Frame he creates a work as calm as some of his previous works are frenetic but no less impressive in concept and execution.