Today’s edition of The List features some new and sorta-new releases: The Lurker soundtrack, Tiffadelic, Matt Goodluck, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Mikael Ögren (Johan Agebjörn collaborator), Discovery Zone & John Moods, SLOPE114, Darling Black, and the Relay score.

It’s a somewhat diverse offering, sonically, but I know you, dear reader. You’re open to these kind of things. Enjoy.

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Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith — Gush

KAS creates some of the best, most revelatory music out there. (She was on Vehlinggo’s favorite music of 2022 list for a reason.) Her vocal and instrumental manipulations are often staggeringly inventive and always beautiful. Back in 2020, when I was ostensibly a better writer, I described her Ghostly-released album, The Mosaic of Transformation, as follows: “I find the depth and breadth of her audacious creative choices to be just a stunning display of artistic courage.” New album, the cinematic and varied Gush, somehow both embodies and exceeds that assessment five years later. (She can go from one track that reminds one of a cross between Flying Lotus, Metavari, and Suzanne Ciani to one driven by chiptune in a snap.) Available now on vinyl and digital (and streaming, of course).

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Kenny Beats — Lurker (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Kenny Beats’ score for director Alex Russell’s new film. Lurker, is a vibrant blend of  score cues and impeccable pop songs, the latter integral to the story of a pop star with a creeper in the mist. Archie Madekwe (Saltburn, Midsommar), who plays the musician in question, provides some powerful vocals over inventive, kinetic numbers. (Interestingly, there are many moments when the songs present serious latter-day, R&B-infused Bon Iver vibes.) Beats’ instrumental passages naturally blend seamlessly with the vocal cuts, but they also exist in a more experimental world. Orchestral purists — those who still rail against Reznor and Ross — are sure to hate this music, but I find it refreshing. I like it when a score composer tries to mix it up a bit, such as when Beats surprises us with a shift from bass-heavy synthesis to an ecstatic, traditional strings quartet.

The Connecticut-born Beats (real name Kenneth Charles Blume III) is a DJ of some note but he also went to Berklee School of Music in Boston, the source of many of our contemporary score composers with a creative lean. The end result is someone as comfortable with more traditional, symphonic expressions as he is shaking the concrete foundation to pieces with massive, well, beats. Pretty cool dynamic if you ask me. The soundtrack album is available now via Milan Records.

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Tiffadelic — “Dead Weight”

This hauntingly gorgeous new single from Detroit-based darkwave artist Tiffadelic features production by Voyag3r’s Steve Greene. The arrangement is minimal but packs a robust punch, and Tiffadelic’s borderline-nihilist refrain  — sung with gorgeous presentation — will stick in your head for days. The song is brimful of emotion, humanity, nuance, and intrigue. I can’t wait to hear the full album, Retrosynthesis, which releases on Sept. 18. You can buy the digital download via Tiffadelic’s Bandcamp, where I imagine the album will find itself next month.

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Matt Goodluck — Portals

Australian Matt Goodluck’s latest album, Portals, is a triumph. The largely instrumental release is laced with the kind of mind-altering soundscapes you’d find on a Berlin School release (think Tangerine Dream or Ashra), an Eno journey, or a modern, electronic-centered score for film or television. (On that note, Together and Talk To Me score composer Cornel Wilczek mixed and mastered the album and provided some Pink Floyd-esque bass to the finale.) A lot of the composition involves the ambient electronic and the progressive — synthscapes ebb and flow with great color from which extended synth leads and guitar atmospherics chip the paint. However, throughout is a tight and deliberate rhythm section and pacing that underscore that this isn’t mere noodling into the self-indulgent. It would be brilliant for some director or producer to engage Goodluck to adapt this record as the score to a film (like, well, what Tangerine Dream used to do). (Hat tip to Goodluck for incorporating some great quotes and samples: Paulo Coelho, Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley, and a NASA doc.) You can get the album on Bandcamp.

 

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Mikael Ögren — “Air”

Ordained priest Mikael Ögren, known in Vehlinggoland for his brilliant ambient work with Sally Shapiro producer Johan Agebjörn, has released something more classic this time around. The Swede’s interpretation of “Air” has an ethereal quality to it that sits somewhere between sleep and awake, no doubt living up to the promise of the title. Ögren released the single last month to coincide with the anniversary of the death of the song’s original composer, one Johann Sebastian Bach.

“To me, not only as a producer but also as an ordained priest, Bach’s work has deeply touched me in a profound, spiritual way,” Ögren said in a press release. “Throughout the years, hearing ‘Air’ [during] the numerous funeral services I’ve officiated, I’ve sensed a deep desire of interpreting this masterpiece.”

It’s out now on your favorite streamers.

 

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Discovery Zone & John Moods — “Change Into One Another”

I’ve enjoyed the music of Discovery Zone (AKA JJ Weihl) since I first heard her 2020 album, Remote Control. (Curiously, all of these years I was under the impression I formally reviewed that album, but I was wrong!) This recent collab single, “Change Into One Another,” with John Moods, is yet another reason to enter the Zone. It’s laced with late-1960s Beatles vibes and modern experimental pop, stacked with catchy hooks, Weihl’s enchanting vocals, engaging soundscapes, and aural enigma. Out now via Berlin-based Mansions and Millions.

 

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Tony Doogan — Relay (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

For Relay, the latest from Hell or High Water director David Mackenzie, Glaswegian composer Tony Doogan provides an intriguing array of foreboding, mystery, and even whimsy through a blend of acoustic and electronic sounds in deeply resonant atmospheric and catchy, melodic contexts. It’s a great complement to the story, which according to the press release, is about “a world class “fixer’ (Riz Ahmed), who specializes in brokering lucrative payoffs between corrupt corporations and the individuals who threaten their ruin. He keeps his identity a secret through meticulous planning and always follows an exacting set of rules. But when a message arrives one day from a potential client (Lily James), needing his protection just to stay alive, the rules quickly start to change.”

Notably, Doogan, who has scored several of Mackenzie’s flicks, is an affiliate of such marquee acts as Belle and Sebastian, Mogwai, and Teenage Fanclub. The score is out now via Lakeshore Records.

 

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SLOPE114 — “Notes”

Monty Luke favorites SLOPE114, out of San Francisco, are back with the latest in a long line of compelling house cuts that offer deeply meaningful and inherently human iterations of a genre that can suffocate comprehensively in the wrong (typically corporate) hands. On “Notes,” the duo of Elise Gargalikis and Dmitri Ponce unleash a tempered array of liquid synths atop a muted but robust rhythm section. Gargalikis’ soulfully kinetic vocals glue everything together. (For gear heads out there, among the instruments they use is a Serge modular synth.)

 

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Darling Black — “Deep Down In The Ground”

I recently went to Baker Falls in NYC to see my friend Andrew White (AKA Andy Diamond of Diamond Field) play bass in one of the many bands of which he’s a member — this was the killer post-punk outfit London Plane. One of their openers was the fascinating Darling Black (AKA Lulu Lewis’ Dylan Hundley). She was on stage solo with a guitar, synths, and other various machines and unleashed some of the most bizarrely beautiful sounds I’ve heard in a while, and her voice is a can’t-miss. A lot of her most avant-garde material is on her debut EP from 2020, It Wasn’t Supposed To Be Like This (with the impeccable title track long living inside my head) at this point. So “Deep Down In The Ground,” released in June, is one of her most accessible songs. It’s got this tight, mid-tempo strut over which a bubbly synth bass, minimal synths, and Hundley’s unforgettable vocal qualities leave you feeling endlessly intrigued and wanting so much more. It’s available now on Bandcamp and elsewhere.