Ergo Phizmiz PLC: Nibiru!
Ergo Phizmiz, sometimes also known as Dominic Robertson, is one of those musical chameleons who straddles the line between poppy and really, really weird. His newest offering, a psuedo-radioplay about the end of the world called Nibiru!, is definitely in the latter camp. Part spoken word, part sound collage, with several samples from YouTube conspiracy theorists, somehow Nibiru! is a magnitude stranger than Phizmiz's legendary 15-hour The Faust Cycle. Nibiru! is dense and inscrutable, an album that demands your full attention, and one that keeps revealing layers the further down the rabbit hole you go. We're in strange times, and Phizmiz may be the facilitator we need to worm our way through the flotsam of real life.
Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith: The Kid
Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith commands a shocking array of synthesizers, and she has used them to make a cosmic soup in The Kid. Similar to Radiohead's masterful (and similarly-named) Kid A, The Kid dabbles in no small amount of naivete, with passages that recall nothing so much as incidental music for rotting '70s classroom programming. Smith's synths bubble and shimmer and her sweet voice belies a certain innocence, a lack of range that enhances her art rather than detracts from it. Smith's melodies are hidden by her innocence, but with repeated listens they raise up from the richness of the instrumentation and she shows herself to be a much stronger tunesmith than you may have realized at first.
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