The Saturday after Friday: six picks from the wreckage of New Music Friday — including a Chandos finale that finally lets a forgotten Croatian composer finish the sentence Brahms started. 布拉姆斯學派的最後一句話，讓一位被遺忘的克羅地亞女作曲家來說

Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective — Brahms & Contemporaries, Vol. 3

Genre類型

Classical / Chamber / Piano Quartet

Label廠牌

Chandos (CHAN 20XXX)

Format介質

CD / Streaming / Hi-Res FLAC 24/96

Tom Poster and Elena Urioste have been working through Brahms's three piano quartets across this Chandos series, and the way they've done it tells you something about why the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective matters. Each volume pairs a Brahms piano quartet with a piano quartet by a contemporary you've probably never heard performed live — Heritte-Viardot in Vol. 2, and now Dora Pejačević on this final installment, whose D-minor Op. 25 anchors the disc alongside Brahms's late, gnarled C-minor Op. 60 and her Impromptu Op. 9b. Pejačević and Brahms had only twelve years of overlapping life, and the lineage shows: she absorbed the same harmonic language and bent it into something a little wilder around the edges. To program her not as a curiosity but as the closing argument of a Brahms cycle is the kind of decision you wish more chamber groups would make. That it's also wonderfully played is almost beside the point. [封面佔位 P1]

The Asteroid No.4 — In Praise of Shadows

Genre類型

Shoegaze / Goth / Indie Rock

Label廠牌

Little Cloud Records

Format介質

Vinyl (Indie Exclusive White + Translucent Grey) / Digital

The Asteroid No.4 have been doing this since the late nineties, and the title of their thirteenth album — borrowed from Jun'ichirō Tanizaki's slim 1933 essay on the aesthetics of dimness — is unusually load-bearing for a shoegaze record. Tanizaki argued that beauty in the Japanese tradition lived not in the well-lit but in the half-seen: lacquerware that gleamed only at the edges of candlelight, paper screens that softened the room rather than revealing it. The band has put that argument to work. The reverb is denser than on recent records but the mood is colder, more goth than dream-pop; for the first time the rhythm section sits inside processed drums rather than on top of them, and the result is a record that wears its shadows on purpose. It's a useful corrective to the genre's recent tendency to mistake brightness for beauty. [封面佔位 P2]

Brother Wallace — Electric Love

Genre類型

Soul / Gospel / Southern Soul

Label廠牌

ATO Records

Format介質

CD / Vinyl / Digital

Out of West Point, Georgia comes a debut that has the receipts to back up its ambition: produced by Dan Taylor of The Heavy, recorded at Peter Gabriel's Real World Studios in Wiltshire, mixed by Bob Mackenzie (James Blake, SAULT, King Krule). With that pedigree the danger is always the gloss outpacing the songs, but Brother Wallace — a piano-led singer trained in the church before he was trained anywhere else — has written thirteen of them, and the gloss never gets there first. "Who's That?" announces him in the first eight bars; harmonies stack the way they do on Sunday, not the way they do in a DAW. The album's risk is its sincerity, which is also its argument. [封面佔位 P3]

Deb Never — Arcade

Genre類型

Alt-Pop / Indie / Bedroom Pop

Label廠牌

Giant Music

Format介質

CD / Vinyl / Digital

The temptation, after a few well-received EPs, is to reach for the bigger-sounding studio. Deb Never has done the opposite. Romil Hemnani — best known for shaping BROCKHAMPTON's records — produced Arcade, but the brief was apparently to keep the bedroom in the bedroom: the songs began as guitar demos in her LA apartment, and most of them still feel like that, with vocal lines pulled forward and the production retreating to make room. boylife and Dominic Fike turn up as guests but neither sings lead. Twelve tracks, "How to Forget" closes; the loneliness her earlier EPs only hinted at is given more air here, which suits her. [封面佔位 P4]

Anastasia Kristensen — Bestiarium Sombre

Genre類型

Techno / IDM / Bleep / Jungle

Label廠牌

Intercept (INT 093)

Format介質

Transparent Yellow Marbled LP (Limited) / Digital

The Copenhagen DJ and producer's debut runs thirty-four minutes and nine tracks, each of them named for an animal — real (Black-Footed Ferret, Magpie) or imagined (Hydraulic Whale, Sulphur Mustang). She calls it Anthropomorphic Music; you might call it a medieval bestiary rebuilt out of UK bleep, jungle and dubbed-out IDM, with the kinetic vocabulary of someone who's spent years on the dancefloor rather than in a CDJ tutorial. The textures are bodily where so much current club music is data-driven; the album is closer in spirit to Roald Dahl than to Philip K. Dick. Worth particular attention if you've been waiting for someone to remember that bleep techno was always supposed to make you laugh as well as move. [封面佔位 P5]

L'Orange — Old Soul

Genre類型

Instrumental Hip-Hop / Boom-Bap / Sample-Based

Label廠牌

Old Soul Music

Format介質

Luxe Gatefold Vinyl (850 g/㎡ cardstock) / Digital