I stumbled upon Hybrid Palms while tripping through Bandcamp, my favorite place for adventurous music. I scrolled until I came to this album, listed brightly and warmly: Pacific Image. To be brutally honest and superficial, the cover art beckoned first. I read the title and heard a few minutes of the opening track and that was it. I needed this. I needed to hear more and I needed to know what it was.
It’s well into 2016 and suddenly The Field is back with another album in the exact same format as his earlier work, right down to the album art – what began as eggshell almost a decade ago is now a darker shade of black. Same bag of tricks, shuffled around. What surprise could there be? What’s the point?
The point, it turns out, is that he’s actually getting better at this, and has been for a while.
This week, the sun finally cracked through and warmed Michigan a little. I finally rode my bike to work again after months of winter blues. I also helped send off winter by finally watching The Revenant.
I also listened to a lot of great new music. Let’s see what happened:
Andy Stott just announced his followup to best of 2014 album Faith In Strangers, and it’s coming super soon. Too Many Voices will drop April 22, not even four weeks from now. I was already excited at the news, but when I heard the first single, I lost my shit.
Here’s the video for Butterflies:
One of the biggest pleasures in music is the feeling of hearing an artist sprout new wings, soar over new territory, doing something completely unexpected. We love to chart trajectories and project the future onto the nearest wall. We love to dissect an artist, especially an up-and-coming one, to see what makes them tick. But despite all indications that they’re going to swerve right, they sometimes veer left. Some are left grasping for nothing; I’m excited to chase through unknown places.
Arcology is a huge leap for the sound artist, real name Ryan McRyhew, after 2014’s hypnotic but oppressively dark Death After Life, which made my best of the year list. Instead of scaling up even larger, he’s taken his process apart and rebuilt it with more nuanced, texturally rich pieces. What once felt like dizzying vertigo is now a sprawling maze.
Sometimes I fall so hard and so fast for a new artist that, when their meager output has been exhausted, I don’t know what to do. The sound is perfect, but there’s only so much of it. This is what happened with beat scientist Bullion. How do I keep up with a guy who may or may not release something in the next year, next few years? The honest answer is that enthusiasm wanes and I start to forget.
But it all comes rushing back the moment I hear there’s new material: the hunger, the excitement, the unabashed shouting from the hilltops for all to listen. This just happened again.
Optimistic Underground 