Joe Hertz has already released one single (last year's At Your Touch) and has released a lovely remix for MØ, amongst others. Isolate is a tight electronic R&B number featuring vocals from Kaleem Taylor and is the first release from Joe's debut EP, due later this year. Check it out above.
Zebidiah
Zebidiah, real name Zeb Wayne, pulls together his love of varied genres into bizarre and kinetic debut release, Wabi-Sabi. Wayne is known to play both jazz and classical piano live yet also loves hip-hop, house and techno, and those varied influences come through on this release.
Having collaborated with Thomas Gandey on releases for Southern Fried and Nervous his work has been praised by Wolf & Lamb and Damian Lazarus, which is surprising once you hear Wayne's deep, soulful and sensual material.
Wabi-Sabi opens with a dubby collage of spoken vocals, chants and hollow bass that creates a heavily atmospheric piece that resembles a techno take on experimental jazz. Freeform components weave a complex structure around third-wall breaking vocals - "Do you want like a structure, or...?" - it is both surreal and captivating.
Second track Tengoku feels more conventional - insofar that it isn't pointing fingers at itself. Similarly warm, deep bass forms the foundation of the track building into a paranoid, post-apocalyptic sensation. The Soloist follows, melding soulful vocals around complex rhythms to create something that hints at a new twist on dubstep - funky yet alien.
Brassica provides a remix of Unpremeditated to round the EP out, and here the chaotic energy of the original feels even more alive. A driving 80s inspired electronic bass line and breakbeat form a punchy piece that loses a little subtlety but gains some legs.
Wabi-Sabi never stops thinking except where that cool Brassica beat comes in and you can imagine Zebidiah sitting right at home on Rebel Futurism or Clown & Sunset but right now Chasing Unicorns are fortunate to have him... Which is my way of saying: look out world.
Wabi-Sabi is out on 9 June through Chasing Unicorns. Preview via Soundcloud below.
Moullinex
Moullinex came to my attention almost a year ago when he provided the standout remix of Munk's MunkySound. Here he is back in the Gomma stable with his first new material since his Flora album.
Lisbon-based Moullinex has a lot on his plate, with this release, a new album in the works and a number of remixes lined up, including one for the currently hyped Röyksopp / Robyn collaboration... All this and he also runs the Discotexas label.
A two-track release, Love Magnetic opens with the title track and it pushes Moullinex's trademark sunny straight-up house sound. A sturdy beat backs up a track where the real fun is in the slight disco touches and Luis Clara Gomes' soulful vocal. It is approachable, funky and has summer printed all the way through... but sadly isn't quite as much fun as that Munk track.
And to be honest, neither is the second track - though it doesn't really try to be. In comparison to Love Magnetic, Time and Tide is a deep cut with throbbing bass and and muted pads that delivers on the cosmic front but never feels like it quite reaches the heights it aspires to.
Both tracks here do the job but neither feels quite fully realised - good, but not quite great, they will sit well in many DJ sets but you are unlikely to want to listen repeatedly at home.
Love Magnetic is out on 13 June through Gomma, pre-order from Amazon.co.uk on MP3 [affiliate link].
Chet Faker
I have long had a thing for slacker music. Pavement, Weezer. Bands whose best tunes seem to appear out of the haze of a hungover or stoned funk. Music that overflows and spills out of the speakers into the room like it would be more effort to turn it off than it was to create it in the first place. It is the dripping tap, the squeaky wheel. It feels effortless, yet intimate...
I am at my most emotionally transparent and open during the moments I emerge from a hangover. Missives of adulation applied to friends and loved ones in an insistent and rapid-fire fashion.
That is what Chet Faker is. These days on this blog I'm much more likely to be evangelising the latest indie R&B than anything you would find on a dancefloor... That is mainly because this music connects with me in a way not much else has in a while - lyrical depth combined with production chops. Chet Faker excels in both of these areas.
Chet Faker, real name Nicholas Murphy, is an Australian who applies a weird wonky folk sensibility to R&B. If Justin Vernon (best known in his Bon Iver guise) got in on the R&B game (not in itself unlikely), it might sound something like this.
Built On Glass is a lazy, funky, hungover in the morning kind of record. The meandering jazzy brass and stuttering rhythms of Lesson In Patience are seemingly thrown down as freestyle, despite the care and attention lavished on the overall (overtly-electronic) production here. There is a massive nod to the chaotic and off-kilter syncopated rhythms of D'Angelo's Voodoo throughout much of this record, and that is a glorious thing.
There are also brilliant songs and brilliant song-writing. Talk Is Cheap is sweet and endearing yet frank - the heart-felt words of a man three-beers down whose tongue is set free by the booze in his gut: "I wanna make you move with confidence, I want be with you alone" sings Murphy.
Track 1998 lays smooth electronic melodies in place amongst a bumping house beat to make an angsty post-breakup song short-skirted and sexy as much as it is heart-breaking. And Built On Glass peaks with the sparkling honesty and third-wall defying Cigarettes & Loneliness, a near-eight-minute folk-funk song about unrequited love. It's exactly the sort of genre-defying moment that highlights what a talent Faker is: blood pumping raw inside, funky on top.
Built On Glass is out now, listen via the Spotify player above or purchase on Amazon.co.uk on CD or MP3 [affiliate links].
It's Friday. Let's be fucking better. Whatever it is you do - take some time today and try and do it much better.
This cut from Dedication is their debut release for DFA and has actually been knocking around for a couple of months. Dedication is a collaboration of Japanese musicians and Western singers led by producer and DJ Felix Dickinson and Japanese designer Mikey Yamada.
I can't really figure out how much of this is new, and how much is just sampled from old disco records but if even the vocal is original then frankly this record is a testament to doing something fucking better. I wish there were artists out there with the same passion and attention to detail as the groups that made all those amazing old disco records.
Today: Don't phone it in... Let's make something amazing.