Getintothis’ Patrick Clarke‘s weekly search for the best in new music takes him from Denmark to Poland, with a brief stop for some superlative Algerian desert rock in this week’s Unknown Pleasures.
We begin this week’s column with the new one from Algerian desert rockers Imarhan. The six-piece have been a band for over a decade, though their self-titled album released next month is to be their first, on which they stand as the breathtaking new generation of musicians from the Tuareg regions of North Africa.
Imarhan‘s self-titled debut album finally drops on April 29, with Assossamagh from the record streaming in our playlist below. A more refined four minutes than the relentless, heady sandstorm of last June’s percussive debut single Tahabort, the track beguiles with mesmeric grooves and spellbinding vocals from frontman Sadam.
In Copenhagen, meanwhile, Choir of Young Believers‘ principle creative force Jannis Noya Makrigiannis has shared the fruits of three years’ worth of creative reinvention on Perfect Estocada, cut from the project’s first release since 2013, Grasque, which appears on February 19.
Burnt out by the end of a hectic touring schedule after his last LP, Rhine Gold, Makrigiannis took time out to reconsider his approach, and after a few days in exile on a Swedish farm returned with the 10 hours of material that would be whittled down to his new album. Perfect Estocada is a delectable early taste, a rich, heavily textured sweep of deep, dark, envelope-pushing electronics.
We end this week’s journey in Poland, and with the astounding recent work of Polish producer unitr∆_∆udio. In general, I try to avoid remixes in this column, yet his vivid, wide-screen rework of David Bowie‘s Lazarus is too potent to be ignored. Here the original’s squalls of saxophone bubble with menace at the surface, backed by an inky xx-esque reimagining of the track’s desolate guitar line.
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