ISSUE #22

The Means Whereby Lovers Are Waylaid

by Telefon Tel Aviv

The Means Whereby Lovers Are Waylaid is a jet black pool of water in the middle of the night. It violently ripples with every hit of the bass drum, yet delivers a sense of disturbing tranquility.

Telefon Tel Aviv has unveiled a new track today as part of Lapsus' upcoming compilation album QUINZE in celebration of their 15th anniversary. From their bandcamp page:

"Lapsus celebrates its fifteenth anniversary with the launch of a new compilation comprised of today’s most compelling, experimental and ground-breaking electronic music."

They're not wrong.

Courtesy of Telefon Tel Aviv

Joshua Eustice continues to evolve. With this new track, he builds upon the heady dreamscape of ambient fantasies and the nightmarishly industrial tones of 2019's Dreams Are Not Enough. It's amplified ten-fold. Combining soothing vocals, ethereal synths, and a deafening drum beat, The Means Whereby Lovers Are Waylaid is Telefon Tel Aviv's most focused piece of music yet. He's honed in on his signature sound since becoming the sole member of Telefon Tel Aviv in 2009 and we can't wait to see what future TTA output sounds like.

Keep an ear out for the release of QUINZE on March 20, 2020. You can listen/pre-order the album below!

Have a solid weekend, babes.
💕 Armando

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græ: Part 1

by Moses Sumney

Moses Sumney is an enigma, a strange comet rising quickly and none too quietly into the stratospheres of creative genius. At the core of his music flutters a voice as flexible and dynamic as molten mercury, but the multi-instrumentalist has brought in a menagerie of sound on the first half of his latest LP: græ: Part 1. Utilizing loops, strings, unorthodox percussion and a razor-fine falsetto, this album expands Sumney’s already eclectic sound to explosive new horizons, refusing categorization at every turn.

Moses was raised in San Bernardino, but moved to Ghana with his parents at age 10. Already thoroughly Americanized, he struggled to adapt, writing a cappella music to express himself in an unfamiliar culture. It wasn’t until he was 20 years old that he learned to play an instrument, but he took to them quickly, incorporating them into his creative writing major at UCLA. Sumney recorded his first EP on a 4-track recorded gifted to him by producer Dave Sitek - Mid City Island was intentionally unfinished, and Sumney would go on to say that he considers his music to be performance-based, with many songs coming into fun fruition in the moment as opposed to on the recording.

Moses Sumney. Image courtesy of Pitchfork.

We’re a long way from that first artistic foray into produced music - Aromanticism (2017) is a tender, surging album that pulls the listener in close with whispered passages and sends them soaring with celestial choruses, but græ: Part 1 expands even further, keeping those delicate wings but exploding outwards in a flurry of overlapping colors and textures. Sumney grabs from jazz, rock, blues, r&b and classical, even incorporating distorted spoken word poetry and race theory into the album. 

If it sounds like a lot, it’s because it is - but it works. The universe brought into being on græ is cohesive once you listen a few times - and I’ve realized it’s because it documents the inside of a human being - Moses Sumney to be specific. Wild artistic genius is being harnessed and put on display for the audience, but each leg of this surreal sonic journey is enclosed within 28 years of experience, emotion, alienation and inspiration.

Our favorite tracks are hard to pin down, as the album flows from track to track like cosmic magma or a waterfall in slow motion - but if I had to pick, I would say the alien vocal collage and heavy guitars of Conveyor or the classical/funk collision that is Neither/Nor. This album demands a listen from front to back however, so don’t cheat yourself.

Sumney performing with multiple microphones and a loop pedal. Image courtesy of Consequence of Sound.

græ: Part 2 is due in May of this year, so you’ve got plenty of time to try and digest the bizarre masterpiece we’ve been given this week.

As always, thank you for reading! Keep it cosmic.

🌚 Zach