Before heading into the final stretch of 2016, we’d like to once again share our favorite releases from the last few months. This list features a little bit of big (Frank Ocean, Nick Cave) and a little bit of small (Foodman, N-Prolenta), flanked with sonics both blistering (serpentwithfeet, Valerio Tricolo) and blissful (M. Geddes Gengras, Ian William Craig), pure (D/P/I, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma) and contaminated (Arca, Elysia Crampton), with comebacks (Gucci Mane), comedowns (Fennesz/O’Rourke), and comeups (Princess Nokia). There’s maybe even stuff for the kids (Macula Dog??)!
As always, these quarter lists are a bit less formalized than our year-end features, so vibe with its fluid sense of “favorites” and be sure to check out the shortlist before the list proper. <3
Shortlist: Tristan Perich’s Noise Patterns, Les Halles’s Transient, Blood Orange’s Freetown Sound, Lil Yachty’s Summer Songs 2, DJ Earl’s Open Your Eyes, Noname’s Telefone, Zomby’s Ultra, Angel Olsen’s My Woman, Vatican Shadow’s Media In The Service Of Terror, SunPath’s SunPath 2, Cousin Stizz’s MONDA, The Nativist’s Various Options, Delroy Edwards’s Hangin’ At The Beach, and WWWINGS’s Phoenix.
Arca
Entrañas
[Self-Released]
Entrails. Arca’s image is the spill-over vessel, one that tips over when filled to the brim, then rights itself. Small strands of water escape the container and flow out; each stream finds its own channel, fertilizing earth, bringing everything into becoming. The vessel could refer to the body that is spontaneously filled with illuminated music. The music finds meaning-channels spontaneously, according to the language-state of the listener. Then the vessel pops upright and is filled again, and each day it overflows. It’s a chaotic process — but one from which something always comes into being — a body of bodies — Pérdida, Girsasol, Sin Rumbo. The trauma of this is found in the melancholic timbre of the subject, located brutally between the vessel’s overflow — its spillage and fulfillment — a body spilling over itself into constant new forms. As such, there are pipes and flutes that differ in length, their various notes differing in pitch. Hence, the multiplicity and complexity of long and short, low and high tones. Although tones vary in a thousand ways, the principles of their endowment is the same. The music of nature is not an entity existing outside of things. The different apertures, turnt pipes and flutes — the snakes, the torero, the vicars — in combination with all living beings, are Arca’s sound.