Music and Updates — Poetry Edition: Frances Chang, Erika Angell, Sunburned Hand of the Man
Post-Presidents Day; 10:30 PM EST. Racing bedtime.
There’s a spoken word / poetry lean to this evening’s single roundup. This wasn’t planned, but revealed as a nice tie-together coincidence.
There is a slight funk-lean to Frances Chang’s “Rate My Aura”, the last single from her newly release LP, Psychedelic Anxiety, that brings to mind ESG or Liquid Liquid. A perpetual and tumbling cluster of notes cycles behind Chang’s spoken stanzas, audibly losing clarity whenever the minimal bass riff and snare pattern emerge. The bass and drums come and go, visitations and almost immediate departures soon after. Sounds like this might be distracting, but fair attention gets paid to the backdrop, which doesn’t become grating thanks to the rhythmic components that pull the listeners attention. Or, I’m overthinking this. Either way, I enjoy the track.
Psychedelic Anxiety is currently available from Ramp Local.
Links:
Ramp Local — Official site
Frances Chang — Bandcamp
Links, knowledge, and sounds were handed over courtesy of Ramp Local:
“Psychedelic Anxiety,” as a mood, goes something like this: overwhelming, existential, vertigoic, arising when we stare into the void. Recorded by (Frances) Chang and engineer Andrea Schiavelli, and featuring some revered NYC DIY players, including Schiavelli (Eyes of Love) and Liza Winter (Birthing Hips), Psychedelic Anxiety (the album) is defined by this mood, charged by all things occultish, infusing artifacts of the mundane with otherworldliness. It also embodies an idiosyncratic genre Chang calls slacker prog — offbeat, but brimming with spiritual and emotional resonance, relishing the electricity of improvisation and balancing bleakness with humor. As the psychic twin and mirror image of Chang’s 2022 debut full-length Support Your Local Nihilist, its release makes the first chapter in a new cycle of creativity for Chang, a reset to zero.
As mentioned last month, Thus Owls singer Erika Angell is releasing a new album titled The Obsession With Her Voice, which will be out 3/8/24 via Constellation Records. “Up My Sleeve” is the latest offering from the album to surface, Angell’s avant-leaning performance evocative of both Laurie Anderson and Scott Walker. With both spoken and sung passages, Angell’s unsettling and lush arrangements move into clustered drum fills and heavy orchestration, complimenting the track’s overall lack of ease with some truly gorgeous moments. This is my favorite track from the album so far.
Links:
Constellation Records — Official site
Links, knowledge, and sounds were handed over courtesy of Rarely Unable / Constellation Records:
The ten tracks on The Obsession With Her Voice form a riveting collage, blending Angell’s searing and searching vocals with synths and electroacoustics (mixed brilliantly by Sam Woywitka), Jonathan Cayer’s mazelike string arrangements, and incandescent drum improvisations by Mili Hong. Songs like “One”, “Temple” and “Open Eyes” are poetic, through-composed song-sculptures, musing on identity and disagreement. “Never Tried to Run” evokes Angell’s childhood idol Nina Hagen, weaving a snaky, sultry portrait of change, while “Up My Sleeve” shivers with a vivid worldliness: the singer in a state of emergency, watching the flames climb higher. Angell never gives in to cold experimentation or the wilfully abstruse; even a song like “German Singer,” which narrates a concert over processed vocal snippets and a metronomic pulse, is fundamentally an invitation: a tribute to art’s value, to its power to seduce.
Throughout, Angell pushes and processes her voice, plunging overtop noise and percussion, tracing melodies of fearless complexity, instantaneity and conviction. Listen for echoes of Scott Walker’s The Drift, Jenny Hval’s Blood Bitch, Brigitte Fontaine’s Comme à la radio and Sidsel Endresen & Stian Westerhus’s Bonita. “I was interested in the meeting-point between being ‘in’ yourself, ‘in’ your own world, and when you meet the outside,” Angell says. “I’ve never forgotten my evening on the hill—singing freely, without judging myself. Sending my energy out into the air. When I’m able to do that, bridging that breaking-point, it feels like a good thing. For the world, and for me too—to remind myself, and everyone, that we can do it. That it’s allowed. We can hold all these real faces of ourselves, in front of each other, and show each other that attention.”
The Obsession With Her Voice is Erika Angell’s attempt to express a feeling: a windswept one, raw and unfeigned. Songs that explode, music that trembles like a vibration on a string—a singer sharing an insight and also a wish. “The sting above the heart…” she sings on “Let Your Hair Down,” “What does it mean? What is art?” And: “How can I be it?”
And this was a Bandcamp find…
Three Lobed Recordings is releasing a new album by Sunburned Hand of the Man called Nimbus. The title track is available to absorb. Sunburned fans should not be disappointed.
Links:
Three Lobed Recordings — Official site
Sunburned Hand of the Man — Bandcamp
Sincerely,
Letters From A Tapehead
