OUTFIT – New Air
Liverpool quintet Outfit announced their sophomore album Slowness and shared the lead single “Genderless” three weeks ago. The follow-up, “New Air,” is a capacious beauty, slowly unfurling like a blooming rose. The video is just as bare, leaving cavernous space for the mind to wander and explore. Slowness was recorded while the members of Outfit were scattered across different countries and cities, and though distance can doom a project, that physical space has translated well audibly and visually. Director Lucy Hardcastle captured the movement and texture of ferrofluid, a liquid easily manipulated by magnetic fields, to create peculiar visuals that are just as entrancing as the song. Man is this video fixating.
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Antonio Williams // Kerry McCoy – Changes
Here’s an intriguing combination: Noisey reports that San Jose cult-rapper Antwon has teamed up with Kerry McCoy, guitarist of the awesomely expansive and ambitious metal band Deafheaven, to record a whole project called 25th St. Sessions. (They’re releasing it under the name Antonio Williams // Kerry McCoy.) The first thing we’ve heard from it is basically a bittersweet punk rock song. Over a ringing guitar line and a delicate synthetic bed, Antwon barks about a lost love. It doesn’t sound much like anything that either of these guys has ever recorded, and it could portend something very cool.
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Julie Byrne – Natural Blue
On “Natural Blue,” the singer-songwriter Julie Byrne points to what is majestic in the formless and infinite. Solemn and serene, it is four minutes of collected energy, with subtle fingerpicking, weeping strings, and just Byrne’s deep voice as an anchor. There’s nothing unusual about her tale of touring through familiar southwestern towns, of changing scenery and endless fields, but her images evoke the life-affirming feeling of catching the sun glare through a car window; when something typical becomes monumental and you are suddenly quieted in awe. “When I first saw you,” the chorus goes, “The sky it was such a natural blue.” It’s one of those perfect junctures of reality that always seem to disperse upon arrival. So with not a little melancholy, Byrne steadily repeats this mantra, as if to never forget it, or to become it.
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Kodie Shane- Sad Feat Lil Yachty
When Kodie Shane leapt off the screen during the video for Lil Yachty’s “All In,” the posse cut from his July mixtape Summer Songs 2, it wasn’t hard to see that she oozed charisma, personality, and fun. The 18-year-old swung her hair in tune with her bars, flashed the grill in her mouth, danced with carefree swagger—she’s the video’s highlight. What might have been difficult to estimate in that moment, however, was her capacity for the layered, mature “Sad,” a song about teenage emotions sung with the pathos and patience of an adult. “I just wanna be sad,” the wistfully bold hook goes, “I just wanna be sad for a minute.”
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Winter featuring Kathy Acker – Peter Gordon & David Van Tieghem
After furnishing us with a hefty vinyl pressing of Gordon’s “Symphony 5”, London’s Foom imprint dig deep into the New Yorker’s archives to turn up this previously unreleased treat. Featuring vocals from post-modernist punk poet Kathy Acker, these recordings come from Gordon’s first ever sessions with his Love of Life Orchestra partner, and fellow Arthur Russell collaborator, David Van Tieghem, dating from 1978. Peter Gordon and David Van Tieghem’s first record, Love of Life Orchestra’s “Extended Niceties”, provided a fresh perspective on dance music when it was first released in 1979. More recently, it has had an ongoing presence on playlists around the world, influencing artists such as LCD Soundsystem, Blood Orange and others. “Winter Summer” is the immediate precursor to the Love of Life Orchestra sessions and, like the aforementioned, sounds remarkably fresh. Gordon and Van Tieghem play all of the instruments and electronics, overdubbing on a 1” 8-track recorder in a small studio in a colonial era farmhouse 6 hours north of New York City. The result is intimate and vulnerable, yet ice cold and edgy. On the A-side, “Winter” throws angular shapes somewhere between cold-wave and proto-techno, bashing you round the head with reverb heavy drums, buzzing bass synths and serrated melodies while Acker’s ghostly spoken vocal transports us into the midst of the witching hour. In other words, a post-punk disco smasher then. “Summer,” in contrast, is a lyrical and romantic instrumental. With Van Tieghem’s drumming laying down the bedrock, the acoustic piano and varispeeded marimba take turns drifting in and out of the foreground. Packaged in a sleeve featuring two newly created drawings by Laurie Anderson, and pulling together minimalism, disco, art-punk and performance poetry, this may well be the most New York record ever made.
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