What on Earth Magazine October

Billy Porter is a Grammy, Emmy, and 2x Tony Award winner. Porter began his music career in 1997 with the release of his self-titled (aka Untitled) debut album which spawned the Top 10 "Bubbling Under" single, "Show Me," and the monster ballad, "Love Is On The Way," which also appeared at the pivotal moment in the film, "First Wives Club."

During the years 1994-1996 Time-Life produced a CD & Magazine called "Grooves". Veteran New York City DJ Vin Scelsa was given full control of the project, and a total of 14 wonderful issues were produced. They each highlighted Vin's selections of the best tracks from the best new albums/artists of the time. In addition, the last track on every CD was a bonus acoustic track by one of the featured artists recorded in the studio just for "Grooves". It was the next best thing to listening to Vin's radio show, "Idiot's Delight".

At first listen, The Practice of Love, Jenny Hval’s seventh full-length album, unspools with an almost deceptive ease. Across eight tracks, filled with arpeggiated synth washes and the kind of lilting beats that might have drifted, loose and unmoored, from some forgotten mid-’90s trance single, The Practice of Love feels, first and foremost, compellingly humane. Given the horror and viscera of her previous album, 2016’s Blood Bitch, The Practice of Love is almost subversive in its gentleness—a deep dive into what it means to grow older, to question one’s relationship to the earth and one’s self, and to hold a magnifying glass over the notion of what intimacy can mean. As Hval describes it, the album charts its own particular geography, a landscape in which multiple voices engage and disperse, and the question of connectedness—or lack thereof—hangs suspended in the architecture of every song. It is an album about “seeing things from above—almost like looking straight down into the ground, all of these vibrant forest landscapes, the type of nature where you might find a porn magazine at a certain place in the woods and everyone would know where it was, but even that would just become rotting paper, eventually melting into the ground.”

Get the balloons up! It’s the 100th issue of Electronic Sound this month and we’re heading into THE FUTURE with a special themed edition of the magazine. We are also bundling the issue with ‘FUTURISM’, a superb double CD featuring 23 tracks, 10 of them previously unreleased.