Polish producer 2K88, known for dark, glitching tracks that honor his country's rap history and UK bass music, teamed up with British musicians Lauren Duffus, Rainy Miller, and Bianca Scout for a residency in Gdynia, Poland, last year. The collaboration, initiated by Poland's Unsound festival, led to a live performance in Kraków and has now developed into a 10-track album titled Everything Always Changes, for We’re Truly Here (Fixed Abode x Unsound).
Sound and Style
The record is haunting and vaporous, featuring glacial sound design, fragments of FX'd voice, and stabs of low end. The opening track Everything Always Changes sets the vibe with textural drones merging into Duffus's gauzy, looped vocals. Miller's elegiac spoken word adds grandeur to the ambience, an effect intermittently upheld by soaring synths on In Stardust Garden … (Empress Ballroom) and Purple Mauve.
There are also shades of leftfield R&B as Duffus coos sensuously around a rumbling Kelela-style hook in Salto, and in the slo-mo drum pattern underpinning Forevers Just Trust in Another Day. However, even these are filtered through a moody lens: beats are sporadically deconstructed and strewn with distorted sounds.
Critique and Highlights
At points, the breathy, amorphous production feels bland and interstitial rather than atmospheric. At others, it feels on the nose. On the closing reprise, Miller's earnest delivery verges on corny, especially when cut against an ethereal choral loop. But these taxing moments are redeemed by a handful of truly beautiful ones: the woozy, collage-like composition in A Random Introduction; Scout's whispered incantations on Poetic Fallacy. Here, the quartet's innovation shines through the fog.
Other Releases This Month
The first few seconds of Automation & Torso (Indefinite Boundary) by Twin Terminals could be mistaken for a jaunty nursery rhyme, but before long, things go west: “chaos poet” Ryan Lewis Walker monologues in his robotic Lancashire drawl, synths whorl, and ominous sounds clatter. This bizarre formula also coalesces with elements of post-punk and industrial noise on the duo's hypnotic debut.
Gūsū, the project of Xueyan Chen and Nicolas Balmer, was born from an improvised performance in 2022. Their second release, Inhabiting Me (Subject to Restrictions Discs), upholds this sense of freedom and intuition, with sporadic flickers of guzheng and modular effects bubbling over instrumentals that wander and build.
Created almost entirely on her own, Shadows, the new album from Los Angeles musician Cate Kennan, is a truly DIY project (Kranky). The homemade nature is made manifest in these beautiful, creaky vignettes which reflect on her home town after years away.
