#1: Welcome to Reach!
In which our narrator reveals themself, the scenes are laid, and the first acts commence.
There's more than a few decent quotes out there about the difficulties of The First Step, the anguish of the blank page/canvas, and — especially within the creative world — about the need to just get things off the ground, and trust in yourself.
The idea for my own newsletter began as an idea in early 2022, as I was still writing as Deputy Editor for Inverted Audio, stemming from a hope for more ownership of the creative direction in my writing and to be more at liberty to follow my judgement on noteworthy or culturally important music.
However, beginning a personal newsletter in tandem with more than one part-time role in the same field proved too much of a challenge for a burnt out Freddie. After a year spent ruminating on this newsletter’s breadth and scope and proving the weight behind those romantic quotes about beginning things, a year spent questioning my confidence, capability, self-given authority to begin something like this, and to cut a long and boring story suitably short, we’re here now: the first post has finally arrived.
What will Reach be like?
It’s hard to say at this point. The overarching structure seems to be set on a monthly overview of recent and upcoming releases along with some more detailed reviews, and a further, far richer piece of content once per month seems to stick.
Everything else is likely to be in flux. I think most people are used to consistency in the media they consume, but I worry this eliminates confidence to try new things and test new ideas on a typically fickle readership (sorry). Since I’m not in the position of being a major platform, some ideas will be tested, and others might be fleeting or irregular. I’ve even flirted with idea of an associated podcast…
Such lucky readers, to be my guinea pigs! With that, let’s begin our guided tour:
Album Reviews
Hopefully I don’t need to spell out what goes on here. I’ll focus on releases that are worth a listen in their entirety, rather than being special in moments. I think it’s quite a powerful thing to extricate oneself from the Spotify-decreed listening habits of selecting specific tracks and ignoring the rest of the release, especially when making decisions about an artist’s calibre.
Exposition out the way, let’s dig in:
Emmanuel Mieville - Four Towers and a Bridge
Forms of Minutiae — 20/01/23
You'll probably hear a lot from me about Forms of Minutiae, as the label is really close to my heart. The label really affectionately bonds together field recordings and ambient releases — Diane Barbé's "A Conference Of Critters", released by FOM around October last year, was one of my favourite ambient albums last year thanks in part to its imperceptibly fabricated constructions within entirely natural and circumstantial recordings.
Mieville steps away from the fiction a little more than Barbé, but with equally powerful results. The tracks here are compositions of field recordings reworked into obscure shapes, and the attention to physical listening experience is strongly felt from the first piece, which is also my favourite. There’s a reformation in the second half of ‘the eiffel bridge to viana’ which rips me into tiny sonorous fragments each time I hear it.
Kult Koruth - Kult Koruth
Self Released via Bandcamp — 05/01/23
Very happy to be able to include this album, which spontaneously appeared on Bandcamp earlier this month, in the first edition of the newsletter. Kult Koruth is Prague-based, like me, and the duo’s self-titled debut is in fact a live recording of their set at the end of the summer listening sessions at Petrohradská Kollektiv (one of Prague's best offerings to music and culture).
Kult Koruth is Kult Másek (sounds and modular) and Koruth (painter, visual artist, and, here, predominantly vocals). I recently heard Koruth's live set, just prior to myself and a friend, in the ambient room of a New Year’s party here in Prague, and as much as I wanted to stay for the full set I had to frequently leave as it was so psychically powerful that it made my room spin.
That's basically the theme here, too: properly head-fucky ambient music that sounds like something shorn from an opium dream. Ultimately it's still beautiful listening music, and I expect it may not displace everyone’s sense of self quite as much as it does my own, but I find it utterly entrancing, and that it draws an uncanny and unique world.
Ani Zakareishvili - Fallin
Warm Winters - 09/12/23
I got familiar with Ani's music after an acquaintance tipped me off about 'Halfie', a stunning album by another Georgian musician, Anushka Chkheidze, and stumbled across a very arresting sound design piece by Ani called 'Dadga Kali' that I've been playing in many situations since.
So, when I saw Warm Winters, a nice ambient label based out of Bratislava, Slovakia, had released a new collection of tracks I was really happy for the fresh reason to dig in again. Likening 'Fallin' to The Caretaker in post coital glow is pretty low hanging fruit for the review, but the thought was quite hard to budge out of my mind: the synths here are so naturally warm they crackle, a softer version to Kirby’s distortion of sound.
Like with ‘Dadga Kali’, Ani's use of the human voice is quite prevalent, but there's many new fields of musicality explored here. To contradict my earlier comparison, ‘Fallin’ bleeds optimism as it connotes something sadder, the opposite weighting to The Caretaker’s music (for me). This seems like an ideal album for the inbetween moments, not one to override the mood so much that it's a burdensome emotional listen, but one that rewards thoughtful listening.
Ibukun Sunday - Mantra
Phantom Limb - 27/01/23
Around two years ago I caught Ibukun Sunday somewhere on SoundCloud and found myself really enjoying his combination of field recordings and ambient synth compositions. Despite that, two miniature albums, one for Phantom Limb at the end of October ‘21 and another self-released, missed me completely. I'm happy to rectify that with ‘Mantra’.
Ibukun is from Lagos, Nigeria, and (as mentioned) he deals a lot with incorporating field recordings into minimalist compositions. 'Mantra' is relatively light on the recognisable field recordings and much more focussed on his synthwork, with notable exception "Illusion" having a really fascinating and unnerving recorded start to the rather imposing track. 'Contradictory' is another highlight, staying true to the title and sweeping from entirely all-encompassing bass to pretty and light notes by its end.
Lamin Fofana - Unsettling Scores & Here Lies Universality
Peak Oil / Avian — 02/12/22 & 09/12/23
On the subject of undersung African ambient musicians finally getting their deserved credit, I really want to make at least some space for Lamin Fofana, who had TWO releases at the back end of last year which went mostly under the radar, at least by the admittedly small evidence I have gathered.
Hopefully this was only due to their shared proximity to each other and to the over-hyped mess that is End of Year Lists (who doesn’t love a good arbitrary ranking?! *ahem*), and not due to people actually not finding it worthy of listing, which both albums are.
Lamin, from Sierra Leone originally but now apparently in New York, has, like Ibukun Sunday, self-released a large part of their body of work (Hundebiss picked him up in 2018, and there’s a smattering elsewhere). Avian (an experimental label from British techno export Shifted) and Peak Oil come to do the good work and get more of his material out there.
Fofana demonstrates astronomical improvement from early work across both releases, which tease different ends of the ambient experimental spectrum: fittingly spacey and smoked-out for Peak Oil, and on-point broiling darkness for Avian. On both ‘Unsettling Scores’ [Peak Oil] and ‘Here Lies Universality’ [Avian], Fofana is more atmospheric, more loaded with inexplicable meaning, and more various in musicianship by many degrees.
Here, I’ve just posted two tracks in order to (rudely, sorry) condense two review/shoutouts into a single section, but please treat these as separate entities and check them both out thoroughly. It won’t be hard: both are truly excellent, sometimes containing echoes of the other in the music, but only ever as the artist’s own intonation, characteristics of his voice.
Bride - Alloy Choir
enmossed x Psychic Liberation — 25/01/23
enmossed and Psychic Liberation have been collaborating for quite a while now on some truly astounding tape albums, and their conjoined entity certainly stole my label of the year 2022 award (there was no ceremony or fanfare — see above lambasting of End of Year lists) thanks to their ceaseless and relentless schedule that somehow, despite the massive quantity of music, never put a foot away from brilliance. That the digital output of their entire collaborative series is Pay What You Like is just the icing on the cake, and I fully recommend diving in with a few quid (or more) up your sleeve for adding to your collection.
Arriving alongside a pair of live recordings from maestro Broshuda, Bride's 'Alloy Choir' is a big artistic leap forward from her release for Most Dismal Swamp, which was no bad thing in the first place. Transcendent harmonies seemingly extricated from long conversations with twisted sheet metal about the meaning of all things, battling with some more apparent and abrupt metallic screechings, 'Alloy Choir' is a fitting name and a brilliant follow-up, demonstrating a real reformation in her approach to sound.
Bride avoids the common pitfall of plateauing ambient music by creating more stop-start compositions that are nonetheless not so disjointed that listening becomes an arduous experience. The one outlier, ‘Darkenmoss’ and its 12-minute roll, still feints away from dull drone, in fact perfectly indicating her more selective approach towards sound and their correlation (or otherwise), and by its end you’re hoping for more.
Premium January/February music, chin just above Vitamin D-deficient pessimism, dreary at times yet frequently perforated with thoughtful elements.
Long Twins - Everyone In Water
Hidden Harmony Recordings — 20/01/23
This upcoming record on Tallinn's Hidden Harmony (who I’d thought were new to me, but I’ve just rediscovered their great Morita Vargas release) is a colourful burst of avant-pop in meeting with lots of other stuff. The Estonian tag recalled to me a recent find, Elizabete Balčus, whose charming weirdness and champion musicianship on ‘Hotel Universe’ [Mothland] really caught my ear. Balčus' and Long Twin's albums are a deep inhale of fresh air, and show that there's gold in them there hills up in Estonia which defies easy categorisation.
There's a folky aspect to these tracks, a genre I'm not usually particularly fond of especially in combination with overtly electronic music, but the album comfortably avoids kitschiness and is really closer to the sort of cosmic synth music you might expect to see dug up on Music From Memory or Stroom.
'Everyone in Water' manages to sound indebted to that music without sounding derivative of it, although I can't profess to be much an expert in that field. It's something in the way the lyrics are delivered, I think, that places it in this decade — 'Real Smoke' has a certain character, soul, and modern pop influence. Maybe it's the stone-circle dancing I'm picturing listening to 'Walking and Working', but it gives me a real hope for springtime.
Long Twins state this album was began in Synth Library Portland, which has a sister Library here in Prague where people, particularly women, trans* and non-binary people, can lay hands on top-tier electronic music equipment in a safe and encouraging environment. It's great to see people turning the free-access creativity these places offer into full releases, and such genuine music too.
Track Picks
This will be a regular feature type (bi-weekly or monthly I’m yet to decide) where I simply share some specific recent highlights, including some from the albums I review. I won’t keep to a specific theme but generally speaking you can expect about 15 tracks both old and new, venturing in a somewhat linear fashion from ambient music to the club.
These will be tracklisted at Reach’s account on the great Buy Music Club platform, where you’ll be able to listen to it as a consecutive playlist, but in the newsletter I’ll give a little more about why I like them, why you maybe should, and why they’re significant (or just really nice) examples of their field.
Tomáš Niesner - Andante [Warm Winters]
Emerging fresh on super nice blue vinyl, Tomáš Niesner's 'Bečvou' for Warm Winters combines his excellent guitar skills (hit up the Šimansky & Niesner LP for more of those) with his more elctronically-geared talents. He's got both in great amounts, this LP is totally mystifying and another example of the Czech ambient underground's underappreciated talents.
Imre Kiss - Theme IV (Ardour) [ EXILES]
Exiles are a simply great label from Budapest, slaloming from the craziest messed up dance music to brilliant ambient stuff at the flick of a wrist. This is the latter: great astro-travelling music, warm and lifting.
Nino Davadze - Geometry of Soviet Women [inklingroom]
A really great release from Georgian artist Nino Davadze for London’s inklingroom that shows a full hand of musical influences. This track combines arresting field recordings, doomy ambience and, once lifted, killer club production and some provoking spoken word manipulations. Hoping to hear more from Davadze very soon, if this is the precedent.
Strategy - Graffiti in Space [Constellation Tatsu]
Paul Dickow aka Strategy has been a firm favourite since I was an ickle greenhorn in Bristol many years ago. Strategy is still great, and these cuts on the great Constellation Tatsu work around the dub techno template without ever really stepping into it (which is quite typical of Dickow's avoidant style of music).
Action Sports - The Updated Core [Bandcamp]
Rarely popping out of the woodwork, Action Sports dealt their second offering via tape on Czech label Gin&Platonic, which I stumbled across in my old job as tape and record buyer at Noise Kitchen, a small synth shop in Prague. 'The Updated Core' takes a trancey saw synth with staggered delay and transposes it into a great piece of lightly subdued listening music.
Tau Contrib - Mirror Talk [Slagwerk]
Tau Contrib, as well as his previous alias, is one of my ambient favourites, so I was doubly happy to see new music, and that music arriving through perennial upstarts and clubby fun instigators, Slagwerk. This tasty little two-tracker is a bit like Ramzi for aspects of the sound and rhythm, but also because if you don't at least see the fun in it you're probably due a litmus test. Contrib's ambient mettle is proven in the impatience of the sound design microcosms flickering and bursting in your ears, but there's also a beat approach that the producer rarely shows.
dj bathtime - subzzero-_+ [Bandcamp]
Arad Acid turns in a great PWYL release via Bandcamp that sits between emo, shoegaze downtempo and classy trip-hop. This is one of the lurkier tunes, brooding and aching, bound to sound as great in slowly rising sets as it does standalone.
Sangre Voss - adjective + noun [SODAA]
Gonna put my hands up and announce my bias here: SODAA involves a group of London friends, but what they're seeking to do in the local music scene and the connotations for international communities is genuinely worth attention for people looking for new avenues in post-pandemic clubbing (and wider electronic music) culture.
Kinda nabbing Senyawa's idea to co-release their first compilation with other labels, these are the original goods set to be reworked by 7 other labels from around the world. There's a lot to pick from now, and more to come (looking forward to the Klahrk cut in particular), but I've gone with Sangre Voss' track so you realise I DON'T actually hate techno, I just like it to be creative enough to make me wanna dance — which virtually all of Voss' music does.
Maroki - Coldred [Flippen Bits]
Wonky techno instilled with dubstep drum hits? Flippen Disks launch their new digital-only sublabel with an EP from Maroki that shows great promise. A little heavy on the vocal chops at times, but if I know Flippen Discs then those remixes will be top.
Aa Sudd - Subspark [Midgar]
Midgar was always one of my favourite places to look for squelchy understated techno, and I'm really happy to see the label begin to blossom into something more omnivorous — the seeds were always there, from that rightly-famous 'Acid Mt. Fuji' repress, but lately the label has endeavoured that little bit harder to bring something different such as their last release from Ruff Cherry.
Aa Sudd's four pieces here are loaded with attention to the extraneous sounds between the driving elements, quite similar to the techno the label earned its name in. A batch of really innovative club gear that can find its way into just about any set.
Van Boom - Cruel (Deena Abdelwahed Remix) [Cease 2 Exist]
Kuwaiti Van Boom's LP for the Cease 2 Exist label at the end of last year was comprehensively sick, but the subsequent collection of reworks by some real gritty members of the international scene might steal the show. Check E-Saggila's offering also.
Flore - Primary Mineral [Bandcamp]
Yes, the digital files may be nearly a year old but it IS relevant as the lathe cut vinyl just arrived. Plus, this EP of music from the ruling French Queen of 160, Flore, deserved far more attention on its release. Flore states this is EP is about imagining new dance music in the wake of club culture's failure to reinvent itself in the wake of the pandemic, and I can't agree more with this philosophy. Out with the old, in with a whole lot more of this, please.
BASHKKA - DeFol [Umay]
For now we only get the one preview track from Bashkka's upcoming release but if the rest are anything like this one it's pretty safely going to be a brilliant EP. Inaugurating Nene H's label, which will focus SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African (not the Solid Waste Association of North America)) and QTBIPOC musicians, and "starts as a non-profit label sharing the revenue with its artists, an open critique against industry standards, crude label politics and the dominant music business model". All in, then. If you've enjoyed anything from the Copenhagen scene or the Mama Told Ya label, this'll be right up your avenue.
Vladislav Delay - In My Head [Ripatti]
I could fill a chunky notebook with my positive feelings toward Sasu Ripatti's music and still want more paper. Recently turning his hand to footwork, this new style of his is bold and danceable as it is swervy and entrancing. Really vibrant and ecstatic dance music, rooted in trying new things with templates that need a new lick of paint.
Oyubi - Ah FX [85 Acid]
85 Acid is a brand-new discovery for me and I'm fairly besotted. A lot of their recent stuff explores new takes on Footwork in much the same degrees of originality as Ripatti's newest cuts, and the Reidai EP from Oyubi does just that. Clippy and mega fun bootyshakers for laughing with your mates as you spill your drinks on each other dancing.
And there we have it! The first installment of Reach, after a year of dithering. I hope you enjoyed reading, and hopefully the listening side of this too. While it is on the bulky side of things and I can envisage splitting this amount of content into two mails somewhere down the road, this is a good taster for what is to come. Best to start strong, hey?
If you’re here, it means a lot to have your early support, however notional or fleeting. If you like what’s here I would greatly appreciate you sharing the newsletter with your friends, and even more appreciate a little note to share your thoughts on how it’s going. I made a basic Google form so you can do just that, which might be supplemented by polls, which I just discovered as a feature here on Substack while writing…
In fact, let’s give Polls a go:
I will eventually switch on paid subscriptions for the richest content, provisionally around March once I’ve got the knack of formatting, style, and getting the design to be as sexy as can be.
The track picks for BMC and short album reviews will remain free, but majority of “my bit” — longer reviews, features, that sort of thing — will disappear. I hope to make that part of the newsletter worth the money, but I don’t want to stop sharing the music even if it’s not something you’re willing or able to afford.
On the point of paid subscriptions, you may have noticed a page to “pledge” support when signing up. This is quite a new feature of Substack, it seems: from what I understand you’ll pay nothing until paid subscriptions turn on, at which point you’ll get a notification asking if you’d like to continue with the pledged amount.
Anyway, thanks again for being part of the journey, and see you next time!
Freddie // Reach