Somewhere Between Tapes

NEY

NEY

Somewhere Between Tapes

Lisa Fabian, Matt Robin and Eddie Brooks are NEY, and together they’ve made one of the most compelling debut albums of the year, formed around workshops at Glasgow's infamous Green Door Studio whose educational programmes have massively impacted the city’s cultural landscape. In the tradition of music born out of extended and improvised recording sessions - specifically Talk Talk’s ’Spirit of Eden’ - NEY shimmer and sway through thickets of atmosphere, drawing on elements of jazz, ambient, spoken word and desert blues for an hour of gorgeous dreamweaving we can’t recommend highly enough if you’re into anything by Mark Hollis/Talk Talk, Bark Psychosis, Grouper, Voice Actor, Svitlana Nianio or ssabæ. Glasgow’s Somewhere Between Tapes series has already introduced us to a trio of riveting new artists at the intersection of electronic experimentation and songwriting; with debuts by Alliyah Enyo, Chantal Michelle and Man Rei all requiring your full and immediate attention. NEY, however, leap into another realm entirely with a debut album so deep and fully realised that when we first played it in the office the usual din quickly descended into a deathly silence - followed by a clamour of interest in what the hell had just been playing. Glasgow School of Art graduate Lisa Fabian began work on the album by capturing her thoughts, dreams and memories in a series of sketches, field recordings and voice notes. Joined by percussionist Matt Robin and guitarist Eddie Brooks, the trio set about working Fabian's loose fragments into a more coherent...

Man Rei

Health

Somewhere Between Tapes

Estonian dreampop reductionist Kristin Reiman takes a poetic, crepuscular and weightless fusion of Cocteau Twins, Grouper, Delphine Dora and Enya for a ghostly, elegant spin for quiet times. Reiman's enchanted soundscapes have evolved considerably since their last album, 2020's foggy and experimental 'Cusp'. On 'Health', Reiman centers their vocals, singing dreamily through filigree nets of reverb and delay. It's easy to link these sounds to Grouper's cloudy, melancholy sketches, but Reiman isn't making ambient folk pop exactly, they're channeling older, more mysterious sounds that harmonize with Enya or Liz Fraser's Celtic memories. 'I don't want the money' is a beatless swirl of almost wordless harmonies that duck and dive across sustained synth drones, like a church choir singing Carnatic music. Misty and haunted, it's music that feels rich with history, using contemporary production techniques to smear acapella improvisations into half-heard lullabies. Reiman adds guitar on 'Mangeler', and obscures their voice even more, transforming it into waves of breath and tone over rhythmic delayed plucks. On 'Thirty', the album's stand-out track, the guitar is swapped for electric piano, and over its blunted lilt, Reiman's accented vocals are crystal clear. Charming and intimate, it sounds like pop music crafted for an audience of one, referencing Harold Budd's delicate pianowork on 'Just another let it die', like a new take on his Cocteau Twins collaboration 'The Moon and the Melodies'. Reiman's voice is reassuringly vulnerable, and while they use reverb liberally, there's precious little pitch correction, giving them the emotional space to toy...

Chantal Michelle

Broken to Echoes

Somewhere Between Tapes

Using an array of acoustic and electronic instruments alongside field recordings, Chantal Michelle conducts an anxious ensemble of sounds, inviting comparison to Lamin Fofana or Rachika Nayar. Her third solo album, 'Broken to Echoes' is Chantal Michelle's attempt to show how beauty can exist even as reality itself seems to disintegrate. She figures this out by offsetting traditionally pretty elements like the soaring choral vocals on opening track 'Departure of Light' with more unsettling instrumentation. 'Breathing Water' appears to grow from feedback and white noise, and vocals from Eliana Glass here sit awkwardly in the empty space, joined eventually by doomy strings and cavernous reverb. On 'Celestia', Chantal matches black metal-adjacent nursery rhyme synths with oscillating rainfall and distant woodwind blasts, playing up the album's theatricality. But she's keen not to let anything get too distracting - with any darkness there's usually light, and vice versa. 'Blue in Blue' is as refreshing as a fairy fountain in a Zelda game, and while 'Opening' is as dark as anything we've heard from Lustmord recently, the album's title track is comparatively sunny.

Alliyah Enyo

Echo's Disintegration

Somewhere Between Tapes

Edinburgh's Alliya Enyo takes inspiration from William Basinski's "Disintegration Loops" and choral church music on her first proper release - a fusion of transcendent, reel-to-reel damaged vocal drones and rumbling atmospheres. RIYL Grouper, Cucina Povera, Julianna Barwick. It was a 2021 performance at St.Mary's Episcopal Cathedral in Edinburgh that provided the jumping off point for "Echo's Disintegration". Multidisciplinary artist Alliyah Enyo envisioned the performance as two incarnations informed by the recording environment itself, using the reverb of the cathedral itself to bend the sound and envelop the vocals. The space didn't just aesthetically alter the sound of Enyo's music, the imposing building heightened each sound's inherent spirituality, bricking it into the architecture of culture almost by design. Later at Glasgow's Green Door Studio, Enyo re-imagined the performance as a sequence of discrete tracks, using reel-to-reel loops to damage the sound even further than was possible in the live space. The complete 43 minute cathedral recording in included here in full, alongside the studio extensions; unsurprisingly the material is very different - the live performance is delightfully reduced and low-key, meditating into Eliane Radigue-style drone at times, while the studio versions ring out with more clarity and separation. Our favorite moments are when Enyo's voice is distorted into a dreamy, wordless slop of saturation and harmony, like on the brilliant 'when my mind is quiet i drift 2 u water2wine', a track that almost sounds like Cocteau Twins at half speed. Tearjerking in the best way.