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Welcome to our first monthly roundup of music. January usually slouches out of the gate, everyone still nursing New Year's hangovers and flab from so many lists coming out from November to Christmas detailing the best of 2022. It’s a time where labels begin to tease us with the big releases that may not see the light of day for months, or when smaller artists try to use the relative quiet to get ahead of the curve. Thankfully, there was absolutely no waiting for a great album this year, with Ὁπλίτης (Hoplite) dropping Ψευδομένη on the 1st of January. The band’s origins and makeup are murky: it appears to be a one-man outfit based out of China, obsessed with an ancient Greek serpent cult. But mysterious backgrounds can only go so far (remember Ghost Bath?) you need tunes. And Hoplite has delivered a hellacious salvo to open the year. The album can generally be called black metal, but the albums it recalls have a lot less to do with its inherent sound and more with the emotions it brings up. The serpentine riffs that spiral inward over thunderous drums remind me of my own bafflement at Imperial Triumphant or Deathspell Omega and a smart decision to often eschew blast beasts and instead pummel the ears with an avalanche of more punk-ish drum work grounds even the most esoteric passages in a deliciously thrashy mood.
Another album that has little time for genre labels is 大団円-Ending- by SARI. Fluttering from atmospheric drum and bass, to house to spikey dancefloor anthems, -Ending- modulates around a center of electronic propulsion but is quite happy to break free and discard any previously used logic. Just follow it with your ears and heart, not your head. My complete inability to understand Japanese has SARI’s fluid vocals sounding like come-ons one moment and threats the next, which I think is the point.
Our final trip to Asia brings us 棲居在溪源之上 Seeking the Sources of Streams by Cicada. Sometimes you find a pretty album. And sometimes you find an album so beautiful you break down in tears. Taiwanese quartet Cicada play a heartfelt and heart wrenching style of chamber-folk, predicated on an gracious sense of restraint. Sly woodwinds, floating guitars, cascading pianos and graceful violins all egg each other on to become more gorgeous, more enthralling. Though many of these songs stretch out beyond the 9-minute mark, none of it feels overlong. If anything, it feels like life: so, so long and much too short.
And then sometimes you need some goddamn massive house music. In walks Strategy, aka Portland’s Paul Dickow, with Graffiti in Space, a cavernous record that hums and burbles at odd angles and echoes back through the headphones like misplaced sonar equipment. With the right earbuds, there’ve been few albums that reach the abyssal depth of Graffiti in Space, but there is also intimacy, with the warm, tactile ping-pong synths of “Daydream Space Graffiti” and the graceful textures Dickow etches throughout the album. This is less of a dancefloor barnburner and more of a cenote to dive into.
In the larger, blossoming genre I refuse to call “sexy ambient,” even though that is what it is, comes Low Chord and Scott Orr with a chiming, meditative and, yes, seductive series of songs produced with a deft, intimate touch. The dub influenced “But Challenges Will Inevitably Arise, With Reprieve” is given a golden melody through Murray Heaton’s gripping sax work and the deep respiration imposed by the twinkling synths on “And Then it’s Over When You Least Expect it” are as soothing as star watching.
Speaking of sexy, unlabelable music (but doesn’t the lack of genre tags always make it sexier?) comes Y Bülbül and Yumurta’s psychedelic post-dub hypnotism Not One, Not Two. Based off drum recording that range from radiantly warm to a clattering mess, the two musicians trade off taking the emotional spotlight with jabs of steely sound and walls of synth chords that follow their own playful, yet introspective logic.
Finally, Núria Graham’s Cyclamen is a burst of beautiful, quirky charm. Graham tiptoes across jazz influences, folk musings and outright surrealism, all delivered with a bizarre smile. The cyclical motions of “The Catalyst” or “It’s Me, The Goldfish!” are gleaming puzzleboxes to unlock over dozens of listens, all while they worm into the subconscious.