FROM OUR WAVE TO YOURS BY COMMON DIVISOR

WAV’s ‘FROM OUR WAVE TO YOURS’ is a various and ever-expanding selection of favourite tracks, albums, labels, artists and more, put together by the WAV team and family.

You can call them charts, or staff picks, but we like to refer to them as WAVES, connecting us to you and back.

We love music, we want to share what we love, but we don’t assume that sharing should be at the expense of the artists.

That’s why we link all our WAVE-lists to the bandcamp pages of the artists or labels (if they have one), and that you can view our evolving selection on our WAV’s Buy Music Club Page.

If, in doing so, we can raise more awareness about properly compensating the music makers, then we consider ourselves a little closer to riding the perfect WAVE.

Parallel pairings from NYC and Melbourne. Long drip-feeding insane productions via their NTS Radio residency, Blazer Sound System materialise ‘Tanka Riddim’. The slow burner menacingly slithers like a serpent coiling its prey; its victim praising the reality-dismantling guitar delay and exuberant roots of the afterlife. CS + Kreme’s flipside mystics summon ‘Crushed Cream’ from the forest floor. Neck-snapping hypnobeat that was seeded between their dual Total Stasis initiations – the prelude to an untouchable streak on The Trilogy Tapes. White label 10” with hand stamped motifs by Thomas Jeppe.

The highly anticipated follow up to her 2018 debut, 박혜진 Park Hye Jin will release her new EP “How can I” on 12” and digitally on Ninja Tune.

Recently hailed as “one of the breakout stars of the past year” by Mixmag, “How can I” comes off the back of an incredible 18 months that have seen 박 Park (surname) 혜진 Hye Jin (first name) go from releasing her debut EP to playing shows at legendary venues such as Berlin’s Panorama Bar and Ibiza’s DC-10, with bookings at big international festivals like Primavera, Dour—a particular highlight for her, Melt, 88RISING’s ‘HEAD IN THE CLOUDS’, and a personal invite to play alongside Jamie xx in London last year. With additional praise from Pitchfork who described her music as “an ocean of subtle feelings and delicately complex club music”, and with further support from the likes of Bandcamp, i-D, Hypebeast, Boiler Room, FADER, Dazed and as one of the ‘Best New Artists: 2020’ by OnesToWatch, 박혜진 Park Hye Jin is poised to establish herself as one of the new key players in electronic music throughout 2020 and beyond.

The six tracks on “How can I”—completed over the course of 2019, primarily in transit as she travelled for the first time across Europe, North America and Australia—showcase the multitude of styles and influences that have come to be encapsulated in her output to date. On ‘Like this’ she pairs her own vocals over dream-like pads and grainy, driving rhythms. Elsewhere, the moody techno of ‘NO’ and footwork inspired ‘How come’ demonstrate an artist who is comfortable with pushing her own boundaries and moving definitively beyond any notions of categorisation. No matter in which direction they move, the tracks on “How can I” are imbued with subtlety and emotion, “I love you, and I fucking hate you // can you be my babe?” she sings on the upbeat ‘Can you’, before lowering the tempo with title track ‘How can I’, and rounding-off the EP off with the bright synth melodies of the mostly instrumental ‘Beautiful’.

Written as it was in 2019, it would have been impossible to conceive the circumstances in which this EP would come to be released. For Hye Jin though, it was important that she release the music as soon as possible, noting, pragmatically: “who knows if I might die tomorrow, but at least if that happens, I’ll die really happy.” Marking her first solo output since that 2018 debut, she was also acutely aware of the expectations of her fans, leaving them with a simple message, “Thank you for waiting. I appreciate you.”

A mother was explaining on the telephone how difficult it was to understand the unreality she felt toward her young daughter. She said that even when she kissed the child goodnight, she felt she was kissing her in a dream. While she was talking, I heard a commotion in the background. Suddenly the mother shouted, ‘Be quiet, Jean!’ I pointed out that she had just experienced a very real moment of exasperation. She saw the point, and also understood when I explained that she had many such moments with her daughter but was so used to them that they hardly registered. The frightening moments of unreality blotted out the real moments. In her sensitised state, her fear of the feeling of unreality was so great that it soon replaced any peace my explanation brought. Tape recordings were essential to keep her reassured.

Downtown Castles Can Never Block The Sun” is as much a ‘greatest hits’ as it is a ‘debut album’ for Ben LaMar Gay. It’s a collection of music composed, performed & produced by the anomalous Southside Chicago-born, sometimes Brazil-residing artist, compiled from 7 albums he made over the last 7 years but never made the effort to actually release.

With its title taken from the mantra Ben repeats across several tracks on “Grapes” (1 of the 7 aforementioned albums), “Downtown Castles Can Never Block The Sun” is our effort to channel the rainbow of sonic expressions, art & poetry beaming from the ark of his unreleased catalogue into a cohesive & communicable compilation. It’s as good of an introduction to Ben LaMar Gay as we could fit onto a single LP. To call it “eclectic” would only scratch the surface. This music is everything.

Parasols (Ali Renault) applies ABS to the bpm with the new beat friendly ‘Diaz’; a slasher disco stalker prowling the lower east side of somewhere deep in your residual nightmares. Red Corner thwacks hard and duskylike a dustbin full of grit. Now your as giddy as the time you had your first bucket. The mutated commentary that underpins this clash of pans melts woozily into ‘Sacrifice’, which comes on all Baldelli inspired like some Rimini horror fest where Benetton and Timberlands frug it out amongst shadows in the Mediterranean dusk. Bursting with energy the finalimente of this accomplished brace of toons is possibly the standout, ‘Cesana Learning’ leers and lurches with weird gut belches that are both melodic and disorienting at the same time; shifting gears midpoint into some glorious electro chimes that will strike a chord with fans of other post techno luminaries such Ed DMX. Get some of this, enjoy flagellate and try to stay conscious!

Cruise the city in a night ship, dressed to kill in the Seville. Float down waterfalls and fountains, reclined on some pimp shit. The time zone ghost returns to paint a picture that echoes through infinity. The sun is put to rest, the soliloquy is killer bee. A diamond purpose lying beneath the surface. Nothing is ever what it seems, but forever is the theme. It’s time. Shabazz Palaces are back with yet another classic of divine mathematics design. More dazzling Afrofuturist sutras to illuminate distant constellations with sacred abstractions. Enter The Don of Diamond Dreams, raw and uncut, but glowing with 10,000 karat shine.

Even though the construction of the album is meticulous, it’s a startling masterpiece of improvisation and instinct. It’s both cerebral and automatic, with Butler jotting down phrases and ideas in his phone and eventually shaping them into amorphous abstract expressionist canvasses. If anything, their latest illustrates Butler’s gift for being a conduit of sounds and experience. It’s partially shaped by his own reflection on being a parent and watching his son, Jazz, become internationally renowned as the artist, Lil Tracy. If you listen closely, you can hear the interplay between father and son, as Butler does what is impossible for most veteran artists: he absorbs the sounds of today’s youth, but filters it through his own fractured lens, spitting back convex poems with wild cadences, freestyling with the wisdom of age and the frenetic passion of someone still trying to show and prove. It’s confident and suffused with the thing that defines almost all great art: the willingness to risk attempting something new.

The city of Detroit/USA has always been an engine of new innovative ideas related to music, art, dance, poetry and all other arts.

The project started when Mills reached out to one of Detroit Techno’s founder and legendary DJ/Producer Eddie Fowlkes. Though the two are known and connected to Detroit Techno and knew each other for decades, they never worked together. Mills wanted to find a third person for the project, one that was from Detroit, but not a musician. His idea and theory was that by engaging two other creative thinkers would most likely produce something unique as emotions would become linked together to find that common, but higher level. Mills discovered the Detroit-born poet Jessica Care Moore. Struck by her words and the energy she mastered to say them, Mills knew immediately that she would be the perfect artist to approach for this creative venture.
As with most artists that grew up in Detroit, they immediately opened up the links in their past, present and future outlook. He presented the case and explained to her how he thought it might work. She liked the idea and agree to join.

THE CRYSTAL CITY IS ALIVE. (A phrase extracted from Moore’s words), puts the Detroit, America and the World on notice. The alarm has sounded and it is now time to mobilize all creative units to the frontline.

“I’ve always loved the cover song aspect of live performance. Most musicians are fans first and covers are a way for bands to show this. They can add an improvisational tone to an otherwise rehearsed feeling set, and give a sense that songs are owned not only by the people who write them but by the fans that know them and the other musicians that take influence from them.

About three years ago we started playing cover songs on stage, and a couple of unforseen things started happening. First off, people would ask me – not knowing it was a cover – when the new songs they heard were coming out on an upcoming Black Marble LP. Sadly, I’d have to tell them that a) I didn’t write the song, and b) me playing this new material was not evidence of the impending new release they were hoping for. The other thing that would sometimes happen is people would come up to me who already knew the songs I was playing. These people were stoked to hear an old favorite worked into our set, but again they would often wonder if they could ever hear them outside of the live setting.

After awhile it became obvious that we eventually wanted to record the covers we’d been playing live for the fans that wanted to hear them. Also, we’ve played a lot of shows in the past three years. We crossed the full U.S. several times and met a lot of great people and this covers EP is a cool way for us to remember that time as well.

As far as process, I recorded and mixed this one myself shortly after, and as a way to come down from, the process of writing and recording the Bigger Than Life LP. I took some of the mixing and arranging things I was working through for a year on Bigger Than Life and was able to apply to this record fairly quickly and easily, so I think from an engineering perspective this recording is the culmination of that way of thinking about presentation before I move on to the next phase.”

Originalitos is the second album by Frankie Reyes (aka Gabriel Reyes-Whittaker). The album is eight original compositions created on the analogue Oberheim synthesizer. This follows Boleros Valses y Mas, an album of popular Latin standards reworked by Reyes with the Oberheim.

Antwerp’s Stadspark: a once-thriving triangular cruising ground,
and still an occasional recreation site. These days, however,
the only flash you are likely to get is that of a police badge.
Linger on a bench too long and brave the consequences; to fester
at home is best. But the animals just proliferate. Unwanted domestic
pets – gerbils, rabbits, mice – dumped in the night in Logan’s Run;
no one knows how and when this unsavoury practice was begun.
To his astonishment, The Administrator once reported seeing
a raven swoop clean from the trees and scoop up a guinea pig in
its claws. The guinea pig was not heard from again. Reborn real
estate: in the bushes, militant structures don sportswear shades,
and a club scuppered by arson emerges as a generic phoenix –
the Grand Café Capital. That chip on the shoulder of second cities.
Not to deny the park its stately airs: fin-de-siècle street lamps,
precious steel suspension bridge and the whole beguilingly
prehistoric as seagulls soar and light irradiates the lake.
Desiccated one summer, pumped artificially after protest, sans the
resident black swans. A former fortress now offering fourteen
hectares of jogging excellence. The playground is cordoned off
with crime tape.