Sferic Downbeat | Electronica | Leftfield 5 Items

The Newcastle-born, south London-based dancer, musician and performer Bianca Scout follows solo releases, and collaborations with Space Afrika, Klein, Coby Sey, Mica Levi, Ben Vince and Elena Isolini, with a spellbinding new album. Heralding an age of gothic, technocratic dystopia, in ‘Pattern Damage’ Scout weaves a patchwork of narcotic vocals, blunted after-hours ambience, and chopped-n-screwed sacred music. “The name Pattern Damage flipped in my brain when I was thinking about people’s trauma and patterns of behaviour,” Scout explains. “It has a double meaning. It’s not just the pattern of damage that’s happened to you, the cycle of abuse; pattern damage can also mean the damage that you do to a cycle, to break the pattern.” We hear this pattern break throughout the record, in the cacophonous noise collage of ‘Intro,’ and the labyrinthine chops of strings and voice in ‘Lead Us’. It’s also present in the unadorned yearning and exquisite anger of the heart-rending vocals of ‘Forest Spirit’ and ‘Almost Nothing’, courtesy of Darkmarik, the musical alias of movement artist Malik Nashad Sharpe. Recorded as one-take voice notes sent to Scout while Sharpe took part in an artist residency deep in the forest, here, their voice pierces through melancholy gloam, another sad cycle broken. “As an album it does feel like a dance,” reflects Scout. “It feels like movement.” Calling back to her roots in dance, there is haunted choreography in ‘Chances’, a sultry instrumental elevated into an autotune prayer, punctuated by fits of dusty breaks and smothered percussion. In ‘Desert’ too, recorded by Scout and power electronics mainstay Martyn Reid under their Marina Zispin moniker, demure cold-wave pulse is picked out in Korg licks and Reid’s doom-laden voice, as he reads out an account of one of Scout’s dreams. Yet it’s ‘Passage / Reversal / Fortune’, a collaboration with another movement artist, Kendra Chiagoro-Noel, who appears here as Nwakke, that unfurls most like contemporary dance, with Scout flipping Allegri’s ‘Miserere Mei Deus’ into a whirl of vocal harmony that Chiagoro-Noel then remixes again, producing and writing the latter half of the song, casting both of their voices adrift on a shared ocean of sound. “There are spirits,” Scout asserts. “Nwakke and I have talked so much about what the difference is between a soul and a spirit.” Bianca has performed at Royal Academy of Arts, the Serpentine Gallery and Turner Contemporary for Mark Leckey’s ‘In The Offing’. She choreographed ‘The Heart Of The Anchoress’ at Southbank Centre, alongside music by Peter Broderick and Specimens. She recorded a BBC 6 Music Live session as part of Marina Zispin, whilst further radio action has come from BBC 6 Music, NTS, Resonance Extra, Noods, and Balamii. Press support for Bianca has included Fact, Crack, The Ransom Note, DJ Mag, Resident Advisor, Loud and Quiet and Inverted Audio.

sferic mark 5 years of operations with a special deep dive into ancient/modern Mediteranean culture by Giovanni Napolano, usually known for crankier industro-dancehall output as Nplgnn (Reel Torque, Youth) as well as programming the wonderful MBE label (Beatrice Dillon, Conor Thomas, Evol) - a proper Riyl Jay Glass Dubs, Christos Chondropoulos, Alan Lomax, DJ Screw, Coda Lunga.

Unfolding along two sprawling 15 min sides, Napolano stitches threads of chopped & screwed folksong with a discrete dub strategy, seamlessly leading the mind down labyrinthine ginnels of his imagination in a sort of uchronic regression session where the ghosts of the past inform the present. In the process it humbly speaks to Naples’ position at the frontier of the current migrant crisis, and necessarily takes a standpoint against Italy’s resurgent, nationalist fascism, revealing the beauty and energy of its indigenous mixture of peoples, rather than erecting borders between them.

Taking his native Naples as a locus of Mediteranean culture, Napolano plunges the port city’s palimpsest of energies embedded by successive waves of Greek, Northern African & Eastern migration to discover an underlying, rhizomic connection and commonality linked by dub and hip hop as a contemporary iteration of folk music.

Under its titular, mythical metaphor for the fall of Babylon, and usage in Rastafari culture, ‘Le Macerie Di Babilonia’ imaginatively examines a sense of self via a historic lens, drawing on Napolano’s upbringing in the chaotic port city and his autodidactic research into the rich mosaic of Napolitan heritage, to model how a folk class solidarity and shared character, with its own rules and rituals, has emerged from its syncretic milieu.

Variously a treatise on provenance; an impressionistic tale of the European north meets a global south; a dub-abstracted, allegoric, ethnomusicological collage; ‘Le Macerie Di Babilonia’ is a fascinating and immersive listen that presents its maker’s dilated world view at its most mesmerising.

sferic venture a new set of plasmic ambient entertainment systems by Jonas Wiese’s Tibslc, mining that slender but heady sweetspot between the earliest Vladislav Delay productions for Chain Reaction, Japanese environmental x architectural recordings and the sort of gear you’d hear from Move D & Jonas Grossmann at the late 90’s Source Recordings heyday. sferic pick up the mantle of late ‘90s-into-‘00s ambient with a new variant primed for the times. Following the themes of their ‘Decisive Tongue Shifts - Situation Based Compositions’ album of 2021, Tibslc (The International Billionaire’s Secret Love Child) distills their sferic debut into a crystal clear, hypersensitive set of eight tracks that slip seamlessly into each other’s space, recalling the amorphous end of Jan Jelinek’s ambient shimmers. Where Tibslc’s first album sprawled over two discs, this one relates to the same recording sessions, but glimpsed via more succinct windows of opportunity. In effect they’re like Hitchcockian, voyeurist snapshots of other lives in the urban complex woven into a melting emulation of the city at dusk, replete with infrasonic bass from streets below, and streaked with the wistful dream energy and fizzy optimism of a certain city life. In fleeting rounds of ephemeral shrapnel and synth pad washes, the eight parts evoke a sense of mental discombobulation, lending itself to ruminating on the unbearable lightness of being. Lovers of graphic sound craft, and that turn-of-the-century Ambient signature, this one’s for you.

Space Afrika follow last year’s heartbreaking x perception-bending mixtape “hybtwibt?” with an anxious patchwork of drill bass, reflective musique concrete and after-hours surrealism >> singular deep headspace exploration to file alongside Mark Leckey, Perila, Burial or Klein. Assembled to accompany a short film from Manchester-born visual artist, poet and filmmaker Tibyan Mahawah Sanoh, Joshua Inyang and Joshua Tarelle’s newest is a cinematic audit of identity and ancestry. In the film, Sanoh works hard to visually illustrate an honest and vulnerable picture of her soul. Inyang and Tarelle respond by doing the same with sound, collaging disparate elements together in a way that should be familiar to anyone who heard “hybtwibt?” or their jawdropping RA mix from earlier this year. Warped field recordings, overdriven rhythmic pressure, syrupy pads and disorienting vocals are cut and pasted over each other, generating a living, breathing study of the duo’s Northern working class Black British reality. Unlike the duo’s acclaimed “Somewhere Decent To Live” full-length, elements mutate and transform: mushy noise bends into street sounds, haunted vocals into echoing drill melancholia and muffled howls into shattered digital remnants. The main event is the full 10-minute soundtrack, that’s layered with Sanoh’s disorienting and deeply personal poetry and echoes Mark Leckey’s recent “In This Lingering Twilight Sparkle”. Then the EP is bumped up with three sketches from the same sessions, two of which never made it to the final mixdown. ‘Version 3’ is a particular highlight, pasting heartbreaking piano and blowtorched vocal loops over winding drill bass > sounds like Burial remixing Unknown T into pure syrup.

Sferic cruise the best coast with Jake Muir’s solo debut, arriving in pursuit of the immersive ambient-architextural themes which also influenced Space Afrika’s warmly received ‘Somewhere Decent To Live’ LP and Echium’s lush ’Synthetic Space’ side. Jake Muir is a sound designer and artist from Los Angeles, California, where he’s previously recorded and released albums under the Monadh moniker for Further Records and Dragon’s Eye Recordings, the latter of which recently lead to his inclusion on the Touch compilation ‘Live At Human Resources’, where he took part in a beautiful group tribute to Johann Johannsson along with a number of solo contributions.