Mucho Flow

bloodsports sounds more like the consequence than like the action preceding it. Their post-hardcore dissonances exist through Newton’s third law of motion and in spite of the first two, with all the tension of straightforwardness and distortion being channelled through a contained pace, gazing melodies and dramatic chord progressions. All their most hardcore intents do happen in sudden bursts of fuzzy guitar lines, with over-the-top melodic resolves that replace the vocal stillness of calmer moments. It feels like looking in a mirror after a particular violent moment.

Dread is rarely a studio effect, it is a compositional decision, and Dumbhead made it early. Beneath almost everything the Melbourne trio records runs an operatic chorale, liturgical and displaced, as though a mass had been carried down into a basement and fed through a sampler. It anchors a trip hop with no appetite for nostalgia: Maayan Barnatan builds the beats and the guitars, Zach Salmon folds the whole thing into live dub and delay from a Tascam desk, and Billie Raffety, jazz-trained, moves across the pieces with a voice that hovers and holds at once. Trumpet opens the sound out towards the cinematic, the low end closes it back onto the body. Somewhere between downtempo and IDM, Dumbhead write songs that only fully declare themselves loud and in the room with you.

There is something outright peculiar about Hong Kong born, UK-based gyrofield: although her sound is deeply rooted in the 90s uk bass scene, with drum and bass taking the biggest influence toll, the music is very much defined for what is now, and still yet to come. The up-and-coming producer draws from any electronic genre to create layered and complex approaches to break beat, breaking them even further and diligently avoiding harmonic and melodic commonplaces. Both as a producer and as a DJ, the result of her practice is a wormhole between eras, simply folding and warping time between yesterday and tomorrow, and creating new melodic routes for drum and bass. Nothing less than exciting.

There is always a certain expectation that the language of folk, or of any kind of folklore, is the language of simplicity. Not that it holds true, but there are limits imposed on acoustic instruments that trade complexity for a catchy melody, a metrically flawless lyric and a message rounded off at the edges. The American Hannah Frances honours the whole canon, then adds back the freedom that was stripped from folk over the decades: there are unexpected progressions, elaborate arrangements and life beyond the song format in her music. And of course there is a commanding voice, harmonies clearing the way for melodies that move you, and all the aesthetic motifs that delight any troubadour, and their listeners. We will sway together in Guimarães, and the soundtrack is Hannah Frances.

The tonic on every chord Jana Horn strikes is not exactly melodic, but conceptual and lyrical. Her parallel activity as a fiction writer complements her artistry of songwriting wonderfully, covering each word with thoughtful meaning and ideally placed for her velvety voice. It is quite the combo: voice empowered by delicate projection and soft melodies, over pastoral Americana folk that projects spirits towards never-ending journeying. Her concert will remind us of the indelible power of a good song, and moving it can feel.

Kavari is a sonic collection of schisms and negations, sculpting a musical body of really specific but still culturally immersed sound. Of each trait, aesthetic detail, and canon that the Scottish producer takes from their sound, the identity of their musical ability grows more uncanny, balancing ambient expressions with club techniques seamlessly. This leads Kavari to build a body of work that derives from the familiar but rather explores the uncanny, surprising us with melodic solutions more expected from non-electronic latitudes, propelling us into wonderful unknowns. It is club, alright, but is it one that we have been invited to inhabit, or that was just created by Kavari?

Nothing looked at against the light gives its face back. That is the condition of Contre Jour: image does not accompany sound, sound does not serve image, both occupy the same body and fight over its outline until only silhouette is left. Lee Ranaldo and Leah Singer have inhabited that friction for over three decades, he dismantling the guitar down to whatever in it is not a note, she running, jamming, folding and burning film in real time. At some point the guitar is let go into the air and begins to swing above the room; what comes out of it has stopped being performance and become gravity, distance, and the feedback that distance manufactures. With every pass the pendulum erases one part of the projection and ignites another. We stay underneath, in the gap, watching what the light takes from us.

Liim is the chosen incarnation of the 5th generation of rapper, one that captures perfectly the contemporary aligned with the canon and not in spite of it. His bars are melodically imbued, as most pop rappers nowadays are, but without dropping the responsibility of building intricate lyrical duties. Balancing words and melodies carefully, the New York native demonstrates why being from the land of hip hop may prove to be an advantage, channelling the OG vibes, looking towards trap and sounds alike, and spicying it up with some RnB softness. We will hear a lot about him in the future, but you listened to him first at Mucho Flow.

All euphoria is a deferred promise, and trance understood that before any other genre: it is built towards a moment that exists only while it is still on its way. Lorenzo Senni took that promise and refused to honour it. The Italian producer kept the ascent, tore out the fall, and from the supersaw, a timbre that should be worthless from overuse, drew an entire vocabulary: stacked points of light, arpeggios that never resolve, tension that declines to convert itself into relief. He called it pointillistic trance, released it on Warp, and through Presto!? dragged a whole scene towards the same lyrical abyss. Listening to him means being held in the antechamber of the dance floor, where bodies already know what to do but have been given no signal. The ecstasy does not arrive. That is the point.

Ambivalence is very seldomly a word used to describe any music, but Mandy, Indiana are deserving of a singular description: half british, half french, equally divided between electronic sounds, punk bursts, connected by dissonance and a weird harmonic sensitivity. The guiding line between screeching and distinctive guitars, synth deep basses and impetuous drums is the vocals, a place of solace in chaos, and the agitator in more melodic scapes. Their sound is definetly free, so should be your bodies to express themselves during their concert.

We just found out that there is a thin conceptual line separating a break beat from a blast beat, and its all thanks to the trio of colossi from the UK electronic scene merging into Microplastics. Their sound is both extreme for rock and metal terms, hyper for pop and song concepts, and maxxing for all wits and skills without being obnoxious. It sounds surprising, sure, but it is exactly what one ought to expect from an outfit comprising aya, 96black and Jennifer Walton. You can expect moving melodic bursts with the ever urgent rage of blast beats with delicate vocals. You can expect everything, but also save room for surprises. You will want to go through both.

Milkweek are just bearers of the weird folk flag. The sound of the Irish duo is in constant tension between tradition and contemporary materiality, unearthing them from overtly Celtic expressions and creating a singular, familiar sound for almost all corners of the globe. Their folk expressions seem to go so far back that micro context of geographical limitations seems unfit to describe the origins of sound, almost demanding the listener to think of more ancient terms and civilisations, from Indo-European backgrounds. It does sound ancient, yet we see all that we use to create in their hands. This alien juxtaposition of sound and performance defines the Milkweed experience and how unmissable it is.

Machines do not dream, but they long ago learned to feign it, and it is in that useful lie that this meeting takes place. Mother Jupiter is the alter ego of Kevin Pires, a Porto-based musician and sound designer who treats psychedelia less as a genre than as a method: sound that narrates, displaces, occupies space and then draws close enough to whisper, always with the listener’s imagination as its final destination. Framed Nemesis, an anagram of Serafim Mendes, is the designer whose visuals neither illustrate nor accompany but react: controlled in real time and, at the same moment, controlled by the music. In The Age of Spiritual Machines the two mediums enter a closed circuit, each feeding and corrupting the other, until mechanical reality and organic dreamscape can no longer be told apart. This is not accompaniment. It is symbiosis.

When black midi came to a hiatus, Cameron Picton followed in a completely new direction. His My New Band Believe moniker is an unfixed ensemble whose only constant is his voice and guitar, and where, considering the new record advances, emotion sets the tone. Steering away from dissonance and anger, the album lives on elaborate and dramatic chord progressions, full of narratives, building tension, resolving it and creating a perfect, almost-baroque pop setting for lyrical pop confessions. If you expect distortion, you will be pleasantly surprised with piano melodies, string arrangements and beatitude.

upsammy has a very unique approach to electronic music, with space and absence playing an essential role in her production. Melodic ideas seem to be formed with small specs of possibilities, elements popping up but not taking over whole progressions, leaving the vacant space to be filled by expectation, and not imagination. That belongs entirely to upsammy, who manipulates silences masterfully. This is where the ultra-prolific and hyper-talented Magaletti comes in, turning all expectation into realities and inhabiting all the right spaces, without taking over. The duo’s first album does not sound as a collaboration, but rather as a unit. It is hard to keep both talented creators from taking over, and yet they made it sound so easy.