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Let the music do the walking, never mind the editorial bit at the top, same thing, different week. Another five slices of music things and however you slice it and of course it was fishy and here comes the introduction that heralds the latest Five Music Things feature thing. Five? There’s something rather compelling about five. Cross-pollination? Five more? Do we need to do the editorial bit again? Is there another way? A better way? A cure for pulling flying pigs out of the clouds? Is there a rhyme? Is there a reason? Was there ever a reason? What do reasons make? Five more? Snake oil? Everything must go and same as last time (and the time before that) five, and no, we never do and the proof of the pudding is in that proof reading. When we started this thing, oh never mind, it doesn’t matter why we started this thing and like we asked last time, does anyone bother reading the editorial? Does anyone ever actually look down the rabbit hole or is it all just method acting? We do really try to listen to everything that comes in, we do it so you don’t have to, we are very (very) very very picky about what we actually post on these fractured pages or about what gets played on the radio or indeed what we hang in a gallery. Cut to the chase, never mind the editorial, there’s loads of music further down the page, well five or so pieces of music that have come our way in the last few days and cut cut slash and cut it, who needs an editorial or words or worms in general? What’s Wordsworth? Just facts and links and sounds then. Here you go, play the music, grab your five, eat your greens, go eat some art, go eat some dirt and don’t forget whatever it was we said last time…

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1: Lankum – Now this looks and sounds magnificent… “Hot off the heels of selling out their show at the Barbican with us Lankum return with an eerie new single (‘Go Dig My Grave’) from their stunning new album (‘False Lankum’, Rough Trade, March 24th) and a massive show at the Roundhouse in December too, way to go! – Upset The Rhythm & Parallel Lines present Lankum. Wednesday 13 December, Roundhouse, Chalk Farm Road, London, NW1 8EH” said yer man from Upset. What is he on about? December?! We can’t be thinking about gigs in December! It registered as an old post, must be talking about December 2022 surely? No, yer man from Upset wants us to be thinking about the end of the year when most of us can’t be thinking about the end of February quite yet. How good is this new massive slice of Lankum! Here’s the link to the December gig

Meanwhile Lankum themselves said at they let loose this damn fine video that goes with this damn fine piece of music; “Our 4th album False Lankum will be released on Rough Trade Records the 24th of March 2023″. More details of the album via the link you just passed or via the Dublin band’s Bandcamp page. More from us soon I expect…

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2: Febueder have a new release, a new single, a track, a whatever these things are called, a piece of music called Dire Science from the new album ‘Follow The Colonnade’ that is to be released, 10th of March. We haven’t heard from Febueder for quitea while, they’re sounding as left-field and self-challenging as ever, we like that, they never have been the kind of band that just releases another song, there’s always more that that about them…

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3: Amen Seat – A first taste of a new album, a debut album, due out in late February. bang, there you are, a Deathbomb thing, find it on Bandcamp

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“Amen Seat is music for anyone’s inner insane teenaged girl. This duo project from MCB & Wobbly (of Negativland), presents a wide pallet of agreeably disorienting sounds that lunge, shriek and panic their way into song-like shapes. If one must dance for a living, this is the album to set yourself on fire to, music to break up with yourself over — a message in a bottle from vocalist MCB’s younger self, reflecting the deeply personal and universal truths about the patriarchial institutions which shape our lives. Flutes, percussion, choral vocals and musique concrète flow together here to stare down the myths of the last two to five thousand years. The duo are joined by Jonathan Snipes of Clipping. (Sub Pop), Drew Daniel of Matmos (Thrill Jockey), Corey Fogel of Julia Holter’s ensemble (Domino), Zeena Parkins, Craig McFarland, and Dominique Leone. This is Amen Seat’s first album”.

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4: Lisel – From Lisel’s album Patterns For Auto-tuned Voices and Delay, out 17/2/23 on Ba Da Bing Records and here’s the Bandcamp. We did already feature LA-based singer and experimental musician Eliza Bagg (aka Lisel) a couple of weeks back, guess we kind of like what we’ve heard of the album so far?

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5: Kate NV has a new single, it ocomes from here soon to be released album, WOW. Here’s the video, the press release with all the info or the hype or whatever it is, is down there underneath the video, you don’t really need anything else from us do you?

“Meow Chat is the latest single from Kate NV’s forthcoming album WOW. In spite of, or part and parcel to, the song’s assemblage of sonic artifacts of the physical world—a car engine struggling to turn over, a bawdily wet and protracted chef’s kiss, a sword being unsheathed—“meow chat” remains exuberantly abstract, dominated by small sounds that last for split seconds. Instead of verse structures, the track fills up space with sheer quantity, like an auditory neon ball pit.

As with much of WOW, it eschews a first person human perspective, and the only lyrics are a split second sample of someone saying “my,” or perhaps “meow,” pitched up and down and triggered repeatedly with the manic glee of a child plunking the keys of a Yamaha keyboard. The percussion is a mix of synthetics and samples of lip-smacking plosives and tongue clicks, a nod to NV’s proclivity for jumbling all kinds of sounds—acoustic instruments, synthesizers, and the funny tiny sounds made by physical objects—into one joyful and irreverent palette that she uses to paint candy coloured pictures.

Kate NV’s WOW will be released on March 3, 2023 on vinyl, Japanese Import CD, and digital formats. ​​On behalf of Kate NV and RVNG, a portion of the proceeds from this release will benefit War Child, an organization that supports children and their families impacted by conflict, and working to build sustainable peace for generations to come.

WOW is Kate Shilonosova’s fourth full-length release as Kate NV in six years, and third for RVNG Intl. Her prolific musical output aligns with a highly attuned aesthetic and a deep commitment to visual world building. WOW is one of many of these worlds in which music is fully saturated with color, deeply tactile and textural. Shiny, sproingy, plastic. Where Room for the Moon embraced structure (abstractly speaking) and veered pop, WOW happily abandons conventional song shapes, parsing the experience of musical time into ecstatic fragments.

It’s difficult to imagine a more fitting album title: pure exclamation, an organic pitch of delight leaving the mouth, with no clear etymological links. On Room for the Moon, Shilonosova’s voice was layered and lyrical, with sweeping and urgent melodies. WOW finds her as a peripheral purveyor of high jinks, peeking out from the corners, commenting on her surroundings in non-verbal, and arguably non-human, utterances. Instead of employing lyricism, Shilonosova steps outside of language, and rewards us with a gum ball machine of textures: soda fizz and wind-up teeth and scraps of bubble wrap become comically huge, as if heard from an insect’s perspective. Words are tasty plosives, onomatopoeias, percussive chirps and one-liners, and singing serves as another form of what Shilonosova refers to as “funny tiny sounds.”

WOW skews and skitters, trips over its own feet and laughs about it, plays out of tune on purpose, tilts and leans like a top-heavy flower. Shilonosova is a longtime user of Found Sound Nation’s Broken Orchestra sample pack, a sound catalog of over one thousand dilapidated instruments sourced from Philadelphia public schools. These perfectly imperfect instruments are tightly spliced into WOW’s patchwork of synthesizer and reworked snippets of Shilonosova’s friends playing clarinet, flute, and marimba. It’s central to the record’s internal logic: a disregard for what is, and isn’t, broken, what is, and isn’t, a sentence or a song. A commingling of subject and object, with a firmly new wave sensibility.

Shilonosova has long had an unusual relationship with inanimate objects (citing her bicycle as her best friend), as if the joys they evoke for her are personality traits of the objects themselves. On WOW, she evinces a kind of inverted anthropomorphism: she shrinks her voice and becomes an object among multitudes, toylike in size and perspective, cohabitating with sedentary, indifferent roommates. This pursuit of childlike perspectives is a thread that runs through much of her catalog, and places her work on a plane with that of her personal hero Nobukazu Takemura, who for decades has treated his music as a portal to childlike curiosity, both in subject matter and tone.

With an invitation to pursue this curiosity, WOW further confirms Kate NV’s deeply inventive, fluid and technically dizzying artistry. By refusing constraints and rules, Shilonosova embodies a profound freedom, allowing objects, sounds, and processes to unfold organically; or, as she puts it, a commitment to “accepting randomness.” She succeeds terrifically at a breed of auditory defamiliarization that is all her own, and the rewards for listeners are many: through her lens, the small becomes monstrous, the abstract becomes sensorial, and the old becomes new”.

And while we’re here, here’s some footage of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum at Rock In opposistion in 2010….

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