Rotating monthly from RA editors: Here are the albums, mixes and EPs we were feeling in June.

June's Best Music 2024

Honest Labour

Ny Interlude

Let's Start

Asma Maroof, Patrick Belaga, Tapiwa Svosve - The Sport of Love 
Label: PAN
Cat.No.: PAN 134
Release Date: 26 May 2023
Purchase: pan.lnk.to/TheSportofLove

In the late 18th century, reason and rational thought was idealized and viewed as the most progressive way to comprehend a rapidly industrializing society. The snap reaction was Romanticism, an artistic movement that prioritized emotion, imagination and intuition - things that can't be quantified but have sustained culture for millennia. Now in a digitally accelerated age where our lives are not only measured but distributed in binary, a similarly hot-blooded creative response is long overdue. On The Sport of Love, seasoned collaborators Asma Maroof, Patrick Belaga and Tapiwa Svosve consider the language, competition and contradiction of modern romance: its yearning, incomprehensible vastness and the inevitable darkness and fleeting fragility. For the trio, love is the emotion that propels all of us whether we acknowledge it or not, and its expression can be realized in many forms.

“I know my musical collaborators on an arguably more intimate level than many of the friendships that are exclusively born of word-based language,” says Belaga. The cellist and composer has been developing a relationship with Los Angeles-based DJ-producer Maroof (also known as Asmara) and Svosve, a Swiss saxophonist and electro-acoustic musician, for many years; the three are all part of Moved by the Motion, a "roving band" that also includes artist and filmmaker Wu Tsang, performer and dancer Tosh Basco and dancer Josh Johnson. As a three-piece ensemble, their interaction is fluid and physical, and with Svosve and Belaga on sax, flute, piano and cello, Maroof sculpts the sounds into textured, effervescent fantasies. “A lot of the songs were improvised and then I made sense of the madness," she explains.

The music emerged like smoke from the embers of soundtrack work they collaborated on in 2021. After finishing scores for Virgil Abloh's Louis Vuitton A/W 2021 collection film, Peculiar Contrast, Perfect Light and Bafic’s documentary short Sub Eleven Seconds, the trio were left with unanswered questions and excess energy. They considered the idea of creating an imaginary score to a romantic movie, using love to dictate its movement and narrative. So opening track 'G Major Kind of Love' is the intoxicating first blush, characterized by a drowned sax solo that sounds like a siren call from beneath the ocean. 'Delicate Distance Between Boulders' is quivering and hesitant, using gentle piano motifs against reverberating flute sounds and subtle, goosebump inducing electronic treatments.

Everything comes into sharp focus on the album's lengthy central piece 'The Stranger', that brings in additional instrumentation from harpist Ayha Simone and percussionist Mathieu Edward. The three friends saw this particular composition as a journey within itself, charting the anxiety, harmony and uncertainty of love. Shifting from gooey freeform jazz into gurgling noise and bleak ambient drone, it connects the dots between Dorothy Ashby, Arve Henriksen, Jon Hassell and Hildur Guðnadóttir while voyaging into parts unknown. It's a finale of sorts that wrestles with the complexity of the album's themes, returning to earlier refrains and prolonging their tension.

Fittingly, the record is tied together by artwork from the trio's friend Tosh Basco, and several tracks have already been used by Wu Tsang in a piece for SFMoMa. The Sport of Love is powered by physical connection in a digital world, and breathes a mysterious allure that's never been more urgent.

The Sport of Love 

Asma Maroof, Patrick Belaga, Tapiwa Svosve - Delicate Distance Between Boulders (PAN 134)

For seven months Russia has been waging a disgusting war in Ukraine. Constantly, we learn new horrific truths about what the occupiers have done on the land, that they proclaim is theirs. We believe Ukraine will be free again and rightful judgement will be brought upon those, who hide their violent, genocidal intentions behind the mask of lies.

With our first compilation - ‘Soteria’ - we want to aid the fight for freedom, that is still ongoing. We at Xpone stand strongly in support of the Ukranian people and against the Russian terrorist regime. We don’t acknowledge the new territories annexed by the occupier, nor the old, and condemn the blatantly fake "referendums" that took place from 23-27 September 2022 on the territories of self-proclaimed “DNR”, “LNR”, and the occupied Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions.

All proceeds from this release will go to Livyj Bereh — a volunteer organisation, which helps to rebuild the homes of those affected by the Russian invasion, as well as provides constant aid for the Ukranian military.

We thank everybody, who participated and all those, who are willing to support the cause.

Design by lovvlifer
Mastering by qwqwqwqwa

XCOMP01

mu tate - Almost Loosing Control

Jiyoung Wi is a multi-faceted artist from Seoul, Korea currently residing in The Hague, Netherlands. Jiyoung’s work can be situated within fictional literature, improvised music, field recording, with an interest in juxtaposing or disjointing these fields of practice through her sonic and literary methodologies. Jiyoung’s debut album 𝑨𝒄𝒄𝒆𝒑𝒕 𝑨𝒍𝒍 𝑪𝒐𝒐𝒌𝒊𝒆𝒔, is a concise body of work that punctuates a beginning point to her work within the 12” LP format. The recording serves as one of the two releases concluding the three year sonic endeavor that is the ENXPL (Enmossed X Psychic Liberation) series.

Having previously released recordings on compilations for labels like Mirae Arts, Eastern Nurseries, and Psychic Liberation, here Jiyoung hones a cinematic-like structure that exemplifies the biome within her craft. While presently Jiyoung is performing the systematic dismantling of a violin in her live improvisations paired with approachable boutique synthesizers, 𝑨𝒄𝒄𝒆𝒑𝒕 𝑨𝒍𝒍 𝑪𝒐𝒐𝒌𝒊𝒆𝒔 is a pairing of the inimitable Korg MS-20 and field recordings staged or captured by Jiyoung in Seoul and Busan, South Korea.

With three scenes per side, Jiyoung walks us through different geographical and spatial intimacies. Public spaces and intimate conversations are obscured and reconstructed. Glass elevators, an unknown hotel lobby piano recital, office toilet rants, windowside night bus travels, and multiple languages interplay with staged and unstaged conversations to transmogrify themselves into a world of Jiyoung’s view. Money, sex, relationships, and cultural parameters are at once idiosyncratic as well as disorientingly familiar to the listener.

As an extension of the series coined by Jiyoung as 𝘚𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥 𝘍𝘪𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯, the album feels crisp, pressurized, and at times funny, at other times melancholic. As language, space, and viewing perspective shift, Jiyoung’s succinct album invites the listener to an aural world uniquely of her own viewpoint. While collecting source material relying on the outside world (conversations, elders, the closing track featuring Sungeun Lee), we have a listening experience that deeply illustrates Jiyoung’s perspective. The disjointed experience of someone maneuvering internationally to further develop a practice is encapsulated brilliantly here by Jiyoung with 𝑨𝒄𝒄𝒆𝒑𝒕 𝑨𝒍𝒍 𝑪𝒐𝒐𝒌𝒊𝒆𝒔. Alongside Makoto Oshiro’s 𝑺𝒕𝒂𝒄𝒌𝒆𝒅, it is a perfect bookend to the ENXPL series.

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Jiyoung Wi is a writer and musician based in Seoul and The Hague. She writes fiction in-between institutional and non-institutional contexts, and works with sounds in-between clubs and art museums. Her methodology involves building and breaking sonic narratives by arranging and re-contextualizing disparate sound sources ranging from field recordings to fragmented anonymous dialogue.

She approaches sound and text as invisible experiences and phenomena, and is interested in the narrative symptoms that emerge when both are juxtaposed on the same axis. In a series entitled 𝘚𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥 𝘍𝘪𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯, she explores these symptoms operating within and without the art space. She has been co-organizing an experimental/leftfield listening event 𝘚𝘰𝘳𝘳𝘰𝘸 𝘊𝘭𝘶𝘣 𝘚𝘦𝘰𝘶𝘭 since 2019. 

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Voices by Windy Kim, Carl G., Schang09
Piano by Sungeun Lee
Audio finalized by Glyn Maier
Design by Dominique S

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Jiyoung Wi - Walking Tumor (ENXPL22)

LIQUEN

SAUCO

YATEI

You Said You'd Hold My Hand Through The Fire

Everything Ends With An Inhale

Flamessssssss. From the new DJ Birdbath tape on Theory Therapy.

https://theorytherapy.bandcamp.com/album/memory-empathy

Written & produced @djbirdbath
Mastered by @ikezwanikken

DJ Birdbath - Flamesss

@paramida brings together “past, present and future” sounds in celebration of 10 years of her @loveontherocks label

‘Sky Is The Limit’ is out 7th June. Listen to E-Talking’s sunkissed house heater ‘Mystere de l’Amour’.

More info: https://djmag.com/listen/premiere-e-talking-mystere-de-lamour

Premiere: E-Talking ‘Mystere de l’Amour’

Amnesia Scanner & Freeka Tet - Over
Label: PAN
Cat.No.: PAN 148S
Release Date: 17 July 2024
Purchase: pan.lnk.to/Over

Amnesia Scanner drops a schitzo pop anthem to celebrate the neverending cycle of us being so back – it being so over; boom vs doom; hyperoptimism vs hyperpessimism.

Freeka Tet also interprets, or cancels, Amnesia Scanner’s original on FT Over, where an active noise cancelation script reveals a hidden dimension of lowercase ambient sublime.

Written and produced by Amnesia Scanner
Mixed by Amnesia Scanner
Additional mixing by Enyang Urbiks
Mastered by Enyang Urbiks

Freeka Tet - FT Over (Active noise cancelling script)

Rest

"You ascend the walls you made, oh time it takes to make amends."

‘And Now You Stand Before The Sun’ is a culmination, a closing chapter of the journey that began with 2022’s ‘Like The Reformed’ and succeeded by last year’s ‘Oath (Soon The Storm Will Pass, And We Will Fly Again)’. The record sees Paavo Piekkari and Jonathan Engeldahl fleshing out the microcosm they call Hollowland, resulting in their most mature and fully realised work to date. Beyond the rapturous sonics, there is a deep melancholy woven into the very essence of Hollowland that is present through it all.

At its core the record is about the hope that anguish and sorrow will lead to something beautiful and pure, persistance shed of the often glorified scaly skin of martyrdom. Notions of departing from oneself, to be reborn and catch a glimpse of the coveted silver lining, are explored on tracks such as ‘Ov Your Own Image’, ‘Falls’ and ‘As You Stand Beneath It, The Light Burns Brighter Than Before’. On ‘In Open Arms’ and Purest Form’ the endless cycle reaches its inevitable conclusion of incarnation, chronicling the very moments of becoming. Consider it a sign of stillness, at least for now.

The passing storm won’t be the last, yet we embrace the fleeting moment of light beyond the clouds, using it to release all within.

Written by Jonathan Engeldahl.
Produced by Paavo Piekkari & Jonathan Engeldahl.
Additional production by Allison Laine & Nori Kin.

Mixed & Mastered by Nori Kin.

Artwork by Jonathan Engeldahl & Markus Watkins.

@hollowland-music

And Now You Stand Before The Sun

Hollowland - The Oceans Wait

"The aquatic is a concentric point of reflection within the latest release for Enmossed, procured as the split pairing of compositions by Finnish artists Kati Roover and J Koho. Both artists cull medial studies, collaborative processes, field recording, and geographically informed identitarian positionings in the audio works cultivated for cassette. Kati Roover’s aphotic meditations span across one side of the cassette, chiefly mirroring reflections on her Izhorian heritage, hydrofeminism thinking, and whale song captures. For the other side of the cassette, J Koho takes frameworks from Sound Studies paradigms to apply within his processed field recording efforts. Here, both artists service the latest edition of Enmossed’s ENMS catalog with mediated field recordings and sculpted isolatory liquidity formalism. Somewhere inside, the listener can be positioned enveloped in the dewy, aqueous sonorous realm of these two Finnish composers."

- Nick Klein

Kati Roover is a Helsinki-based, multidisciplinary artist. Her practice spans across the mediums of moving image, sound, photography, text and installations, draws upon and addresses a broad range of topics that are connected - from human, place and elemental interactions, mythopoetics, animisms and hydrofeminism, to the natural sciences and ecology.

J. Koho works extensively with sound and acts in many different roles in the field of sound art. Koho’s listening based artistic practice combines the methods, techniques and theories of acoustic, concrete, electronic, electroacoustic music and improvisation and simultaneously looks for meaningful and more sustainable ways to keep on working in this often technology-oriented and resource-intensive field. 

design template by RJM Vanderheyden
audio finalized by Glyn Maier for PLEN Audio
interview by Rob Goyanes

Split

J. Koho - Sijainteja [Excerpt] (ENMS-05)

Taken from the album 'Paradise 94', to be released by Modern Love on March 23rd, 2018. Cover Photo by Rebecca Salvadori.

Everything Ends With An Inhale

Iceboy Violet

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