For each year's first three quarters, we celebrate by sharing a list of our favorite music releases. Unlike our year-end lists, these quarter features are casually compiled, with an aim to spotlight the underdogs and the lesser-heard among the more popular picks. More from this series
Young Thug
Barter 6
[300 Entertainment]
The syrupy zones inhabited by Young Thug on Barter 6 constitute the most fully realized peek into his psyche thus far. Thugger made it not through sheer market force alone, but chiefly by way of being so resolutely other. The memes, the virality, and the haters are addressed in a palpably self-aware manner, all in that same notorious, almost gender-fluid register that has proven to be the real fault line between his fans and detractors. Call him the naturalist’s rapper, one who operates from a distinctive paradigm while remaining somewhat grounded within his own socioeconomic reality. After all, unlike his idol, what is Young Thug but a human being? From friendship to fatalism, the modes are cycled with genuine emotion, even (briefly) straying into conscious rap with a tribute to Mike Brown on “Od.” With the 6, the linearity of the album — or rather, “retail mixtape” — format hasn’t impeded on Thug’s creative energies. Far from it; through the application of London On Da Track, Wheezy, and Kip Hilson’s airtight production, his craft has reached newfound levels of nuance and sincerity, more than the hoodwinking personification of the :P emoji could have ever let on.
Smurphy
A Shapeless Pool of Lovely Pale Colours Suspended in the Darkness
[Leaving]
Once, producers used the club’s physical space as an alchemical vessel, hermetically sealing their vibrations in a closed chamber, generating genre purity out of constricted locality. The club was an attractor for the energy of a city, and producers took that energy and pushed it into a specialized form, a form that would go on to shape the scene within the enclosed room, guiding the work that followed. But something is changing: the geography of the club has suddenly ruptured, spilling out sounds into a global laboratory, tainting the purity of site-specific scenes. Records like A Shapeless Pool deliberately undermine the club as a site, the scene as a closed party, the event as an exclusive moment. What’s most exciting about Jessica Smurphy’s opening of the club’s walls is her shaping of both local and global energies into new forms that move beyond the mere guidance of dance motions. These forms provide a larger range of more fluid possibilities for experiencing the spaces of the mind-as-club, the world-as-scene.
LIL UGLY MANE
THIRD SIDE OF TAPE
[Self-Released]
There’s a fairly good explanation of what THIRD SIDE OF TAPE is and why it exists already on Lil Ugly Mane’s Bandcamp. By way of loquacious monologue and esoteric quotes that will probably never be deciphered, LUM explains that his iconic project — an exercise in exploring the gradual devolution of music into an ephemeral, transitive commodity — is coming to an end. But trying to rationalize the whole thing would defeat the purpose of the tape. Though a vast array of hilarious, always engaging sounds, THIRD SIDE OF TAPE simply exists to take us through the mind of a creative and fearless artist, and we excitedly follow, no matter how deep into the rabbit hole he takes us. Which is far: With induced stomach pains, cold sweats, and extreme flashes of violent light appearing at the edge of the eye, we enter a sustained period of constant musical epiphany for up to 576 hours. That’s almost a month. The fever dreams, a side effect, lasts for about twice this amount of time.
Hafdís Bjarnadóttir
Sounds of Iceland — field recordings by Hafdís Bjarnadóttir
[Gruenrekorder]
Hafdís Bjarnadóttir assumes the role of a reporter on her latest collection of field recordings. Travelling from the southwestern part of Iceland up to the eastern fjords, she focuses on the aural planes that define her home country while avoiding any sound directly derived from human beings. As opposed to recording her journey, Bjarnadóttir details specific areas, where she takes a sonic snapshot of each location, depicting moments in time that are graceful and uninterrupted. This creates a curious disconnect between the recording and the physical terrain that Bjarnadóttir explores. The presence of wildlife appears reactive to the conditions the artist imposes upon each landscape, which makes for a desolate and foreboding suite that doesn’t play to audience expectation. Instead, it’s Bjarnadóttir’s arrangement — the continual sound of water and the wind-carved thuds, clicks, bubbles, and blasts — that make this such a fascinating album and a firm favourite from the Gruenrekorder catalog.
Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe & Ariel Kalma
FRKWYS Vol. 12: We Know Each Other Somehow
[RVNG Intl.]
Music that transports the mind to an abstract plane that betrays only slight reminders of human presence. Music that harnesses modern technology to sketch the outlines of an ancient world. Music whose meditative beauty embodies its own strain of nontheistic spirituality. Search the contemporary ambient underground and you will find short-run cassettes or unheralded LPs that promise such listening experiences, but none of them will deliver to the extent that We Know Each Other Somehow delivers. Its creators, brought together as part of RVNG’s FRKWYS collaboration series, have each explored the intersections of the electro-acoustic, drone, and minimalist traditions on their own time. Robert A.A. Lowe has reached the god tier of multi-instrumental polymathy. His intricate modular synthesis meshes here with his angelic voice and field recordings into stacked fine-grain strata. Ariel Kalma’s prophetic recordings from the 1970s and beyond continue to inspire new acolytes today. His flute, his sax, his keyboards, and his didgeridoo carry these sessions up above the treeline and into the firmament. Kalma’s final mixes, spatialized to an impeccable level of detail, drip from speakers in warm dollops of sustain and spectral melody. I have heard this record dozens of times, and I reckon that I can never listen closely enough to truly know it, but I will try.
For each year's first three quarters, we celebrate by sharing a list of our favorite music releases. Unlike our year-end lists, these quarter features are casually compiled, with an aim to spotlight the underdogs and the lesser-heard among the more popular picks. More from this series
