Ride Waves

With their first records, Ride created a unique Wall of Sound that relied on massive, trembling distortion in the vein of My Bloody Valentine but with a simpler, more direct melodic approach. The shatteringly loud, droning neo-psychedelia the band performed was dubbed shoegazing by the British press because the bandmembers stared at the stage while they performed. Along with their initial influence, My Bloody Valentine, Ride stood apart from the shoegazing pack, primarily because of their keen sense of songcraft and dynamics. For a while, Ride were proclaimed the last great hope of British rock, but they fell from the spotlight nearly as quickly as they entered it.

A few years ago, Angel Olsen quietly formed somethingscosmic, a new imprint and a home for Olsen to have “the flexibility to release when and how I want to with the help from my longtime partners at Jagjaguwar.” Somethingscosmic’s second release, ‘Cosmic Waves Volume 1’ is a compilation reimagined as a dialogue; side A features artists chosen by Olsen, with each artist choosing their own song for the collection. Side B is a collection of songs from the same artists, but chosen by Olsen and recorded by her. Each song, unsurprisingly, illuminates a new artist Olsen finds spectacular. Hearing Olsen refract the artists’ songs back to them reveals the depth of Olsen’s imagination, while spotlighting multiple exciting artists at work.

The long-awaited new album by Jamie xx In Waves is the next chapter in the career of one of the most in demand producers of his generation. With In Waves, Jamie replicates the emotional crescendos and thrilling volatility of an almost mystical night out– one where you return home in the cigarette ash dawn, the specifics of the last eight hours already blurring, but aware that these feelings will remain a crystalline memory.

When originally assembled, Food was an avant-jazz quartet that experimented with sound. After five records with Feral and Rune Grammofon, they pared down to a duo of saxophonist Iain Ballamy and drummer/electronics wiz Thomas Strønen, signed to ECM, and enlisted guests to fill out their lineup. The one constant has been guitarist Christian Fennesz. Electronics are more central to the band's musical identity here, though jazz is still an important part of the mix. They craft something more akin to "songs," though improvisation remains. The basic recordings for This Is Not a Miracle were done in the summer of 2013. Strønen, Ballamy, and Fennesz cut a wealth of material live from the floor of engineer Ulf Holand's studio in Oslo. Strønen (with Ballamy's blessing) took the tapes and worked on them alone for five solid months, radically reshaping the music…

Coinciding with his fiftieth birthday, The View From Halfway Down signals a brand new chapter for Andy Bell thirty odd years into his career. The product of a gradual, four-year process and finished during lockdown, the album was entirely written and recorded by Andy, engineered by Gem Archer and mastered by Heba Kadry.