Croak Dream
Puma Blue, Elijah Minnelli, Hania Rani, Greg Foat & Sokratis Votskos, Manja Ristić, RIP Éliane Radigue & Willie Colón.
Hello all, hope things are going fine!
This newsletter now reaches 1043 people. In the age of algorithmic delivery, and regarding the somewhat underground content, I think it’s not bad. I simply wonder when I see posts reaching thousands of readers (on x or instagram, which I can proudly say that I don’t have on my phone anymore since the start of the year) how massive the power of the algo / networks is. Anyway, I’ve got some great music lined up, and the reach of this depends on you guys sending it to your friends, if you like anything!
Onwards!
♩PUMA BLUE (Electro Pop, Trip-Hop): This was punted to me by my wife last month when my first instinct was to think it was a Khruangbin clone like Glass Beams or whatever. But of course I was wrong!
Puma Blue is dubby, almost trip-hoppy electronic pop, and it isn’t a band (at least in production from what I gather) but it was Jacob Allen‘s follow-up to Holy Waters built from tape loop sessions at Peter Gabriel‘s Real World Studios. He describes it as “the longest and heaviest thing I’ve ever put out” — smoky R&B vocals, indie-jazz guitar, lo-fi dub production, and a second half that gets noisy and disorderly. The title Croak Dream comes from a term for a type of prophetic dream of one’s own death, originated in Adventure Time, and more importantly the question of what to do with that information. The video to the title track is a doppelganger video game animated by an artist called Quill.
♩ELIJAH MINNELLI: (Dub, Reggae, Electronic) I heard of the Bristol-based DJ and producer thanks to a post by The Bug on bsky and of course with a pseudonym like this, I was bound to check it!
Operating inside a fictional English village called Breadminster with its own institutions and its own archive, Elijah takes folk songs and translates them into reggae with four dub remixes on the b-side for Perpetual Musket (one featuring the amazing Little Roy). 2025’s Clams As A Main Meal goes further. Rather than reworking existing material, he invents the archival source itself. Although it’s not one of the “invented” ones, I cannot stop listening to this Welsh(?) cover of Joan Baez’ Donna Donna, which itself is a cover of a song from a Yiddish play from the 40s.
♩HANIA RANI (OST, Ambient, Instrumental) Hania Rani’s original score for Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value (which I haven’t watched) which won the Grand Prix at Cannes. And in turn, the classically trained Polish composer picked up the EFA Best Composer. Subtle and pensive neoclassical piano soundscapes, enriched by a reverb-drenched, jazz noir feeling. She composed the soundtrack from the script before the film was edited, yet the field recordings are taken from the actual building in Oslo where the film takes place. RIYL Goldmund, Library Tapes, Nils Frahm.
♩GREG FOAT & SOKRATIS VOTSKOS (Jazz, World): The prolific British jazz pianist Greg Foat teams up with the hitherto unknown to me Greek multi-instrumentalist Sokratis Votskos - who works the border between jazz and Greek and Eastern European folk. Accompanied by The Giorgos Pappas Trio with oud, bass & drums. Nine tracks of Greek folkloric jazz with field recordings throughout, and with titles like "In the Cave of Pythagoras" it does sound like a trip to Samos or Northern Greece.
♩MANJA RISTIĆ (Field Recordings, Ambient) I got this one from a bandcamp link I got from Manja herself on bsky. The Belgrade-born sound artist and violinist recorded this one during walks through Lisbon in April 2024, built from field recordings processed through the Deep Listening practice of the late composer Pauline Oliveros. Seven tracks, one incorporating an excerpt from António Caramelo’s public performance AIR PROTEST. Self-released.
👀 Something I’ve mentioned here on this newsletter before, Ireland’s basic income for the arts scheme has become permanent. In a world that has gone insane with soaring rent, exploitative capitalism, AI taking jobs, wars, religious fanaticism and madness galloping on all fours, kudos to Ireland (and Spain!) for trying to hold it together.
The scheme recouped more than its net cost of €72m through increases in arts-related expenditure, productivity gains and reduced reliance on other welfare payments, according to a government-commissioned cost-benefit analysis.
Peter Power, a member of the National Campaign for the Arts steering committee, said it was a real-world test of what happened when people were given stability instead of precarity. “Artists on the scheme spent more time creating and less time trapped in unrelated jobs just to survive, and many became better able to sustain themselves through their work alone,” he said. (The Guardian)
I mean it’s a rhetorical question, but could this be in any way related to the boom in Irish music? I’m following the wonderful Anois, Os Ard newsletter which focuses on Irish music, and I’m stunned by the talent (even excluding crowd favourites Kneecap, Fontaines DC. et al)
👀 Also this on the Independent Wuthering Heights is just another example of the poshification of the arts – does Ireland have the answer?
The creative sector cannot live by middle-class talent and ideas alone, and the arts employment market won’t solve the lack of access on its own.
First proper edition of the Terminal Optimism playlist with music I’ve listened to in the first two months of this year. New releases from UK bandleader and composer Shabaka (Sons of Kemet etc.), NYC rapper Roc Marciano, new material from veterans The Orb and UK’s SAULT alongside 2025’s second reissue of Green Cosmos material (lo-fi jazz noir) makes the first part a bit more soulful and noir, but the second half has more in that regard from Chilean sax player Melissa Aldana’s new album, one from an underrated Jobim classic from his later period (1987) that I can’t stop listening; modern gospel disco from Arp Frique, a piece from Coco Maria’s fantastic compilation Club Coco: New Dimensions in Latin Music, Sly & Robbie’s Make ‘Em Move from the anomalous 80s album Language Barrier, and we wrap up the dancy bits by going ambient with Hekla and Valentina Goncharova. As always, I think there’s a nice progression if you listen in this order but you can randomize it to your heart’s content.
Here it is in all its Apple Music glory too, unfortunately I still can’t embed it here as a player.
📖 Why Albums drop and movies launch (New Yorker).
A good essay explaining how digital streaming services are killing the album.
A key reason why it’s now more complicated to promote an album than, say, a theatrically released film, is the ephemeral, immaterial nature of contemporary music consumption. One no longer purchases an album—one purchases a subscription service that grants access to basically every album and song ever made. When a new album comes out, a representative single is featured on an editorial or algorithmicized playlist alongside a hundred other new songs. If a listener likes what she hears, she can further explore a record, then relegate personal favorites into her own customized playlist, turning the album into a menu instead of a meal.
The more that art exists only online, in the ether of the digital abyss, the less vital it starts to feel, and the more dispensable it becomes.
👀 Is this the best art direction / song + video of 2026? Is Richard Dawson the great British eccentric after Robert Wyatt?
🪦 RIP Éliane Radigue
As written eloquently by Drew Daniel of Matmos / Soft Pink Truth, the French electronic / ambient and musique concrète pioneer Éliane Radigue has passed away at the age of 94.
Born in Paris in 1932, Radigue learned piano as a child, but hearing the electroacoustic compositions of musique concrète godfather Pierre Schaeffer on the radio in the early 1950s unlocked something new, setting the course for her own studies in sound. After meeting Schaeffer by chance in the French capital, she worked an assistant for the composer.
“I was just cutting, splicing and editing tape,” she told the Guardian in a 2011 interview. “Of course, at that time the universe of electronic music was totally male, but I was pleased to do anything they asked of me.” The Guardian
Check her obits at The Guardian and The New York Times
🪦 RIP Willie Colón
Another one of the original salsa gang, the Puerto Rican trombonist and bandleader, the one and only Willie Colón has sadly passed away last month. He has an inimitable back catalogue but I’ve always loved one of their original team-ups with Hector Lavoe that I wanted to share.
Obituary at The Guardian.