Juno Recommends Experimental: June 2022

Review: Tender-voiced crooner James Blacke dropped this EP of cover songs back in December 2020, but in time for Record Store Day it now gets a wax reissue. Lovers of sad songs rejoined at their mopey here tackling some of these tunes from artists such as Frank Ocean, Billie Eilish, and Beyonce. "It's been a joy to discover new music and new ways of playing songs I've already heard," he said at the time and it's just as nice for us to hear him working with different than usual source material.

Review: Moderat performed what they knew would be one of their last concerts in 2017 - at least, for a while, anyway. Having been in need for a hiatus, COVID restrictions kicked in and the pressure to juggle performing and music-making was off. Thus came 'MORE D4TA', an album that strove after connection and collaboration in an era where the potential for such was stunted. Now finally finished and polished, the album comes for all to enjoy, demonstrating some of the duo's most focused and pop-structured production and modular chops.

Review: Gothenburg-based duo Treasury of Puppies are back with their third album, and once again Charlott Malmenholt and Joakim Karlsson serve up superbly alluring downer music that might have a gloomy aesthetic but is also weirdly uplifting. This record has a more refined finish that previous works but still gas playfulness and lyrical poetry throughout. 'Jag sag ditt ljus' and 'Rotten Apples of Love' are two tunes that showcase the band's signature sound while the unique aesthetic of the sounds are a result of using old devices made for recording talk rather than music.

Review: If you're new to Arca then it's time to catch up. The Venezuelan instrumentalist, rapper, composer, singer, producer and DJ is nothing short of a tour de force, and has been blowing crowds away with a blend of experimental dance and electronic music since emerging in 2011. Packing beauty, attitude, and wild ideas into a seamless blend of noises, in live format you can expect sets to run the gamut from Neo-gabber to sleazy Latin trap, and we really do recommend experiencing that.

Kick II is the second instalment in a four-album odyssey that defines exactly what we're talking about, albeit stopping short of the breakneck beats she can unleash on stage. Nevertheless, the combination of avant-garde, reggaeton, pop, cumbia, smoky downbeat, and deconstructed club music is powerful and impossible to ignore. Not that anyone would ever want to.

Review: Cult French outfit Vox Populi! have already put out a subversive and superb album this year back in April on Touch Sensitive. Here it is the good folk at Emotional Rescue who snap up another one in the form of Aither, which has been remastered and repackaged 30 years after it first landed. We're told it is the first of many to come in 2022 and that's good news because it's class - numerous musicians played as part of the band and traditional instrumental paired with folklore vocals make for a majestic melting pot of sound from the world of dub, funk, soul, psyche and oriental.

Review: Following on from its first incarnation as an 'exhibition-performance' at the Tate Modern in 2019, Pan Daijing's 'Tissues' finally gets a physical and digital release in music-only form. A strange, hour-long, operatic dirge in four movements, the album hears Daijing's main modus operandi - her voice - breathe and expand through several ambient and modern classical movements. While the original performance saw Daijing's opera weave through a libretto sung in both English and Chinese - and deployed stange, glitchy visual elements made up of ballet dancers stationed against the brutalist backdrop of the Tate's Tanks - the music itself is foreboding and strange, blending unprocessed monk's mantras and droning ragas. A radical play on the opera form, set in a new electronic context.

Review: Pilgrimssanger is, we are told, the first of two new albums from Blod which take deep inspiration from the Swedish Christian parish culture. The songs are all centred about themes of human connection, a life built on faith, and solitude. They muse on exposure and anxiety and also the joy of believing while mostly being influenced by Swedish folk music, psalms and choral music. The album is heavy, but also has rays of light designed to uplift. Beauty emerges from often ugly contexts and Elin Engstromd and Anna Johannesson guest on vocals and percussion.

Review: Formerly known as Aerie, David Gate and Robert Andrews formed The Land Of Yrx in Shrewsbury in 1982, and were unquestionably light years ahead of their time. Apart from anything else, some of what we have here might be labelled chip music, owing much to video game soundtracks, the only problem being video games at that point didn't actually have soundtracks per se.

The pair would put out a slew of tapes between 1983 and 1993, before moving to self-released CD-Rs. This vinyl release compiles work from across that history and makes it clear more people should be aware of their efforts. Tacks like 'Annus Mirabilis 1984', for example, are staggeringly beautiful and inventive, 'And Damn The Consequences' could be proto-acid house, while 'The Crucial Suss Composition' is a blend of ambient drone resplendent with this subtly spiralling and emotive electronic symphony.

Review: Claire Rousay proves that ambient can be radical. Her sublime style and surreal sonic scapes take up two sides of vinyl here on this new album Everything Perfect Is Already Here. 'It Feel Foolish To Care' is awash with mellifluous harps and found sound recordings, shakers and distant sounds of nature. It's a beautiful place to be, wherever it is. The second side is another 15 minute gem, 'Everything Perfect Is Already Here' that again finds Rousay as arranger and bandleader. Her strings here are more tortured and pained to start with before falling away to reveal twitchy synthetic sounds and abstract electronic textures.

Review: Pauline Oliveros' Accordion & Voice album was originally released in 1982. It has not been available on wax since then but now it is but only in very limited quantities of 200. Oliveros lived in Kingston New York and was an electronic music pioneer, accordionist, composer and educator who wrote her music in a meditative way. That works both ways intuit it was meditative for her to write and for us to listen. It resulted in this most unique record which was her first as a soloist. Says the artist of its inspiration, "I followed the feelings and sensations of my many experiences of the mountain - the changing colours of the season, the breezes and winds blowing through the grasses and trees."