Published on
January 10, 2025
Category
Features
Essential weekend listening.
This week’s rundown is by VF contributors Annabelle Van Dort, Emily Hill and James Hammond.
Various Artists
Hua Hua Plays for You, Vol. 1
(Hua Hua)
The new year has started with a kaleidoscope of feelings and what better way to work through them than digging through the eleven tracks compiled by John Mekon Of Psychic TV/ Coil? The highly sought-after compilation was originally released in the summer of last year to kick off Mekon’s label Hua Hua. Featuring music from Renegade Soundwave through to Primal Scream mainstay Bobby Gillespie and a series of reworks by the English big beat legend Mekon himself, this is a hot tip for post-industrial fans. – EH
Ahmed Essyad
Moroccan Electroacoustic Music 1972-74
(Subrosa)
With Paris as an invariable hub of electroacoustic music, Ahmed Essyad set up base in the city in the 1960s and set about crafting works that were firmly grounded in his Moroccan identity. Taking inspiration from Amazigh folk music, war songs and oral traditions, this collection looks at Essyad’s work in the early ’70s that he made in the S.M.E.C.A electro-acoustic studios. On a mission to “open an imaginary space where another modernity can exist outside the largely Eurocentric framework of avant-garde music”, these works show the breadth of Essyad’s sonic investigations. – JH
Coki
Goblin
(UKF)
2024 gave us 15 years since the dubstep classic Goblin was released by one-half of Digital Mystikz, Coki. An absolute monster of a tune that has reverberated across dance floors from basements in the UK to festivals along the Adriatic, this repressing of the track is accompanied by a 2024 remaster and rework by Hamdi. Ready to be part of your collection now. – EH
Various Artists
Call Me Old Fashioned
(Numero Group)
Call Me Old Fashioned is the latest Numero release from the mysterious Lou-Wayne Moody Pictures vault, joining the delightfully noirish You’re Not From Around Here (2023) and the melancholic Americana of They Come in the Night (2024) to form this stellar tripartite of previously unissued soundtracks. Full of crooning, lounge-ready ballads with tinges of exotica, Call Me Old Fashioned is like a Shirley Temple topped with maraschino cherries — saccharine and bursting with nostalgia. – AVD
Brown Spirits
Cosmic Seeds
(Soul Jazz Records)
On their adventurous second album for Soul Jazz Records, the Melbourne psych-rock outfit dials up the funk, infusing their spacey, lo-fi jams with Liebezeit-esque rhythms and jazz-inflected grooves. Bold from the outset, Cosmic Seeds launches into gear with a rip-roaring, ten-minute lysergic odyssey on the epic opener, “Fault Lines”. Followed by exhilarating lead-single “Mind Rocker” — an album highlight which recalls the playfulness of early King Gizzard — Cosmic Seeds reaches peak energy early on. This initial burst gives the band room to excavate deeper terrains on the album’s latter half, best exemplified by the celestial textures of “Winter Solstice”: a mellow, Moog-filled closer that melts into the distant, sun-drenched horizon beyond. – AVD
Various Artists
Bliss Out For Days
(Numero Group)
Numero Group have long been on a mission to reissue key works of private press New Age music and, with this compilation, they present a distillation of their crate-digging efforts in the genre to date. A perfect place for the unfamiliar to acquaint themselves, Bliss Out for Days’ 18 tracks features the likes of Laraaji, Iasos, Joana Brouk and a host of other like-minded conveyors of the smoothest of frequencies. – AVD
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