#33: Tidy up

This week’s new music:
Spotify
Apple Music

Listening notes

• I’m still catching up from all the personal mayhem earlier this year, and the playlist here is more of me cleaning out the crawlspace of some of my favorite listens of the past month or so.
• The vintage string and choral backing tracks on Bill Orcutt’s How to Rescue Things (Bandcamp), “clipped from an RCA easy-listening disc” feel a little ironic, but they’re also very beautiful and serene, and behind Orcutt’s manic guitars, it all just works. If I manage to pull together an albums list this year, this one’s on it.
• Similarly, Felicia Atkinson’s Space as an Instrument (Bandcamp) was a favorite in 2024, and specifically the inventive ways field recordings creep into the edges of the songs. It feels like ambient recorded as ambience, the way the music subtly—and sometimes not so subtly—bring in the sounds of a person who may in fact be hearing the same music while drawing a bath or taking a walk on a windy day.
• “If July” from His Name Is Alive is hardly new, and is from at least as far back as 1990, but bubbled up this year as part of How Ghosts Affect Relationships (Bandcamp), a box set of the band’s 4AD recordings from the early to mid-’90s. The string-forward track included on this playlist isn’t the same as the vocal version I first heard when the band’s debut album Livonia came out, but it feels like an equal to that song, which is such a personal favorite that I had to include this newly unearthed version here.
• “Red Moon Tide” (Bandcamp) from Rafael Anton Irisarri and KMRU underscores something I’ve been thinking about the back half of the year: Some of my favorite recent music has been the product of a collaboration between a pair (at least) of artists who were already among my favorites. At a closer read, I’ve been taken with how identifiable their individual contributions seem in the resulting music. I’m not going to pigeonhole either Irisarri’s or KMRU’s style, but the ethereal nature of the former and the intense gravity of the latter are what make “Red Moon Tide” specifically the product of these two artists.
• Likewise, “Other” from the Otherness EP (Bandcamp) is another recent KMRU collaboration, this time continuing his work with Kevin Martin Richard (aka The Bug), with whom he released the excellent Disconnect (Bandcamp) back in June.