Modern Love Downbeat | Electronica | Leftfield 6 Items

For 46 minutes Alex Zhang Hungtai punctures our perception of linearity, working like a conductor, encouraging percussive flurries to trip and fall over each other, sometimes tempered by contact mic feedback to help skewer the chronology. He’s assisted by three additional percussionists - Wet Hair’s Ryan Garbes and Shawn Reed, and Leonard King - while Signal Decay’s Nick Yeck-Stauffer plays trumpet, with each extra voice blurred into the middle distance, curling like pipe smoke into convulsive whorls. The piece is frankly astonishing in its grasp of the maelstrom. Initially tentative, searching, with higher register hits like moths butting lone lightbulbs in an abandoned apartment block, the distant, plangent peal of twin brass wafts between rooms to impart a distinctly floating, Oobe- like feel for space. The brass recedes while the drums’ low end thickens and roils like a gamelan tempest, blurring impressions of knackered buildings or the temple rituals of ancient epochs, with sounds wafting in from other rooms to mess with the stereo field like ghosts of worshippers doing their thing. Remarkably, it conjures a fever dream miasma of ricocheting, thunderous polymetric clatter and proprioceptive fuckry without ever losing its head. Hungtai’s canny use of contact mic feedback drone and cymbal saw gives the whole thing a sense of gauzy delirium that unites the grouches like mildewed grout and cobwebs, coarsely gelling the elements in a way that resonates with Pauline Oliveros and co’s Deep Listening band acousmagique as much as Basil Kirchin’s keeling ‘World Within World’ classic, the ghosts of Sun Ra’s ‘Nuclear War’, the possessed atmosphere of the cabin where Harley Gaber recorded ‘Wind Rises in the North’, and no doubt Harry Bertoia’s massive metallic sculptures, agitated at midnight. Humid, menacing, and wraithlike, the album’s’ sense of keening chronics belies a visionary hand at the tiller, here tightened by Rashad Becker’s mastering, which faithfully brings to light, and shadow, the depth of perception and wild but concentrated energies at play, sealing in place a truly staggering session for adventurous ears, cineastes and Lynchian acolytes alike.

Delphine Dora was nearing the end of a three-day prepared piano residency when a technician stepped in to tune her grand piano for her final performance. He removed the objects from the strings and fixed the pitch, leaving Dora with a freshly tuned instrument. Mesmerised by its new sound, she proceeded to switch on her recorder and pour out her soul, channeling, in her own words, “something greater than myself”. The result is some of the most unusual but elevated material the prolific composer, improviser and multi-instrumentalist has ever recorded, rooted in a deep understanding of European musical history but willing to push at its boundaries, questioning the earthly logic of life and death, asceticism and impiety. Baroque paradigms bleed into fragile, introspective mantras, expressed through a made up language of existential yearning and channeled through piano and voice. It’s music that caresses the sublime, made without any premeditation. Glistening imperfections lash ‘The Great Passage’ to the physical world, but Dora - seemingly possessed as she quivers in a fictional dialect - lets her fantasies intensify her spirit, lifting the music towards the heavens. It’s not sacred music, per se, but it is unashamedly mystical. On the luxurious, languid opening, Dora dissolves eerily familiar romantic piano motifs into an attentive ceremony, singing with charged emotion. Her words aren’t really decipherable, but their resonance vibrates beyond language; it’s striking to hear how confident she is in vulnerability. She lets the piano wrap into her voice, connecting us directly to a unique mode of emotional expression by urging us - the listener - to project our own meaning onto her abstracted words. As her songs blur in and out of focus, dipping from a hoarse croak to a choking wail, she places herself at the very edge of musical formality, questioning strictures put in place to suffocate self-expression. Her music has often been labeled “outsider”, but here she sounds intimate and interconnected, more self-consciously candid than anything traditional might have allowed. She conjures affecting, plainspoken poetry, like a bedside diary written in a hypnagogic, delirious state: a stream-of-unconsciousness, channelling the beyond. The album title connects to a book dedicated to French philosopher and activist Simone Weil, who famously pored over global religions to ascertain spiritual truths. To Weil, meditation was a passage to access mystical experience, or a bridge between humanity and divinity. In Dora’s hands, this idea is a corridor between herself and the listener, a liminal place where she’s able to address feelings without making anything explicit. The title, of course, also refers to life, its impermanence, finitude, and fragility, presenting the complex, multi- dimensionality of being through one of the most undiluted, unbridled set of songs imaginable.

Flora Yin Wong’s ravishing interiority finds lucid expression on an absorbing second album for Modern
Love, manifesting her instrumental storytelling in a syncretic bind of supernatural themes with hyperrealist,
concrète sound design.
Through ten parts, Flora crystallises the ennui that followed an uncanny, disorienting trip to East and
Southeast Asia.
“On an unexpected stopover in Hong Kong after five years away, my friends took me to a Bazi
reader one night - something I was curious about, but much of a ritual for them
- ” Flora recalls.
“My father
told me that when I was born, he had obtained an auspicious reading that since stayed like a guiding talisman
with me. It was almost past midnight but people were still lined up, rather shaken and visibly upset, to see
the old man. He had kind eyes and asked me why I was there and I said I was at a crossroads. He asked me my
time and date of birth, and told me to pick one of his four little white canary birds as a vessel for divination.
”
This was the final stretch of an ultimately aimless few months across the continent, including a 20 year
overdue return with her father to his adoptive family in his hometown Kuala Lumpur - for many reasons,
ended up as a strange and uncanny trip. She spent solitude in a haunted house during the quiet snowfall
of Kyoto, where she might have offended some spirit... and nights in mountain temples with South Korean
monks, and an equally strange feeling return to the Island of the Gods.
“It culminated in what felt like a final disillusionment with Asia - sudden deaths and a breakdown in beliefs
- somewhere I never really have or will be able to connect with. The process of the reading summoned a final
blow to my gut - an overwhelming sense of rootlessness, and understanding that all there is is emptiness and
entropy. No birth-divined protection, just a measurement of the night sky based off nothing and everything.”
Heavy with a sense of nightmarish dissociation and grief, Flora read about Giuseppe Tartini’s ‘Violin Sonata
in G Minor’, aka the
Devil’s Trill Sonata
, a notoriously tricky c.18th composition which attempted to transcribe
music heard in a dream, which the composer felt he could never fully bring into reality. It’s this soporific
motif that binds and underpins ’Cold Reading’, finding Flora chasing the dragon of fleeting fantasy through
passages of etched melancholy, pinched with hypnagogic jerks that linger in the memory.
From her use of the ‘Devil’s Trill’ Sonata in ‘All My Dreams are Nightmares’ through evocations of subtropical
humidity in the Bryn Jones-esque, resonant hand-played percussion of ‘Konna’ and ‘Banjar’, to a breathtaking
dreampop denouement ‘Nectar Dripping’ and the Enya-like lush of ‘Beautiful Crisis’, Flora blooms her ideas
with an openended ambiguity so often missing from so called Ambient music, ushering the listener into a
soundworld that disturbs and displaces, just as much as it calms.

When Laila Sakini's debut album ‘Vivienne’ arrived in 2020, it felt like the record we were waiting for to map out our tangled reactions to an uninvited reality. Never self-consciously strange, it revealed itself slowly and cautiously, like a shadow in the corner of the eye, or an alchemical symbol in a bowl of alphabet spaghetti. This time around Sakini has worked her unique world-building to an even finer point, forming six tracks around a theme that's so close to our heart it's almost beating in time. Initially inspired by Krzysztof Kieślowski's 1991 arthouse classic "The Double Life of Veronique", the cult Polish director's enduring modern fairytale that serves as a cosmic rumination on identity and choice. Detailing two identical women - both singers, both in love - the film lets one live as the other dies, forcing us to consider the implications of art and endurance in the face of life's myriad challenges.

Sakini takes Polish composer Zbigniew Preisner's influential score for the film and uses it as a jumping-off point for ‘Paloma’, bending the more grandiose moments into baroque awkwardness on opening track 'Fluer D'Oranger' and evoking the mood of scene-setting cues 'Weronika' and 'Véronique' on the recorder-led 'The Light That Flickers In The Mirror'. And while Preisner's score zeroed in on the musical virtuosity of the film's lead characters, Sakini reinterprets that as a metaphor for self-discovery. Playing piano, violin, glockenspiel, timbale, recorder, and occasionally singing, Sakini captures a mood of innocence that immediately transports the listener back to simpler times. Her music isn't self-consciously simplistic, but forcing herself to interface with instruments impulsively rather than studiously, her sounds are all heart, no filigree.

In spirit, it reminds us of cult Canadian album "The Langley Schools Music Project", a collection of 1970s recordings of school kids singing rudimentary renditions of pop songs in a school gymnasium. That album's genius was in the bottling of hope and innocence: the feeling of joy from hearing and wholesomely interacting with music that's known and loved without a sense of hierarchy or desire for cultural clout. Sakini subtly subverts this by evoking the amateur spirit in the most bewitching way; instead of sourcing her ideas from Bowie, Fleetwood Mac and the Beach Boys, her stock is the established art canon, and by reforming those sounds she makes an insightful comment on intellectualism and access. European classical music is all too often trapped behind the frosted glass of respectability and assumed skill - craft replaces spirit, and technique replaces soul. By approaching these gestures from a different angle, Sakini softens the edges sonically and intellectually, finding music that bubbles with emotion, and most strikingly - hope.

Her choice of instruments and the way she interacts with them allows us to feel as if we're not only listening but contributing. It's a bottom-up way of absorbing art that's traditionally been top-down, and a reminder that we're all part of the experience, whether we're humming along to the remnants of a theme as it dribbles out of an ear in the shower, or dreaming of spotlights in a parallel life that may or may not be real. Sakini's music is nostalgic in a sense, but nowhere near the buttered popcorn and high-fructose candy migraine of the Netflix/Spotify algorithm generation of regurgitated churn. She makes sounds that remind us of what time and experience may have stolen from us, and how we might recover it. We're gagged.

Tom Boogizm’s Rat Heart has already given us AOTY-worthy excursions into fizzing ambience, fritzed Arthur Russel-esque scuzz, flipped neo-soul and bleary-eyed bangers, always with those timeless hooks and wild-but-insular production. Never one to care much about fitting in with any one thing or another, Rat Heart evokes that golden stretch in the mid-late 80’s when heads got past the shine of new technology and started getting deep into the thing - you know the stuff - Thomas Dolby, Prince, Prefab, Scritti. In other words, Rat Heart is supremely well suited to the 45, giving sharp focus to his pop instincts, tightening the screws in a way that echoes contemporary work by Dean Blunt or Vegyn, you can imagine his thing properly going off too. In fact, you don’t really need to stretch the imagination too much with this one, the A side guided by the spirit of Sade via Prince in a slow love mode, Ben Vince’s Saxophone providing an added layer of moody romance. On the flip, it’s all Spanish guitar and broken (heart|)strings, just a solitary synth and that gutted vocal for company.