This week at BIGSOUND I had sufficient people declare to me that they missed the halcyon days of sound doctrine blog so as it made me think that perhaps I should try to write a little more. And sure, I know I miss a lot of things that I’d long since stopped caring about when they ceased activity, but this comes with the added bonus of stamping a few more songs more permanently into the lineage of the blog, rather than in the ebb and flow of my spotty playlist. Twelve years of writing and I’m still pedalling these run on sentences like they don’t hurt the brain.

A record I’d most certainly have already written about if I’d been Doing Words lately is the new Babyface Mal. Man’s had a pair of mini-EPs this year as well as Daughters & Sons late last year, one of a fair few centred around a drill beat within his repetoir. Incidentally, it might have been the precursor to the Ya Rab since both sets of production are built around oud lines. Before we get into Mal, and we WILL get into Mal, we gotta take a moment for Ya Rab’s producer aywy. The production here is milk and honey, the right choices made from the oud to the hand drums to that thundering four to the floor release after the chorus. I’m itching to ring this one through car subs just to hasten the imminent demise of my hearing.

Mal though. Mal’s been threatening to elevate for a few years now, since the LP and many times since but this is the one that shows a different space for the Turkish / Egyptian rapper. He’s been making a name for himself as part of that 66 crew down Melbourne way but flag placed in the ground with this one, Mal’s upscaled bigtime. He gallops on this beat he was born in a saddle, confident and constant in flow and dashing between languages with absolute nonchelance. This lad can evidently hit just as hard in Arabic as he does in English and I’d be hoping that this is the start of more bilingual moments on his records ahead. Shoutout to the early French he dropped on Lancome but we’re not counting that here.

Rinse Ya Rab if you haven’t been doing that already this last month.

You ever hear a record that you feel fundamentally unqualified to write about? Well that’s me with every record, but especially this one. On a technical front it’s the chaotic ad-libs deep in the production, the driving drums, the visual imagery (“full moon, blazing, midnight, bleeding”) and the pulsing hearbeat of the track, hypnotic as it thuds on and on, thick with life. But then there’s the lived experience of E.T, real name Etima who was born in DR Congo to a father of significant political position, so much so that when regime change occurred, his life was thrown into flux. While just a child, Etima was captured by mercenaries while playing in the street and held captive for six days before rescue. He still doesn’t know what happened to his friend Aura, who was left behind.

He’s a self identified student of metaphysics and has been since birth, prodding and probing the experience of life, death and the afterlife having emotionally engaged with these concepts since birth. Later on he’d dive into the words of Frederic William Henry Myers and his book ‘Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death’ (peep the book in the music video) and found truth in them, in the idea that the soul continues on after the death of the body. Somehow, discovering this didn’t surprise me in the slightest having heard Psalm Ritual. Something about it reeks of both life and death with the repeated chorus “Nzambe ya ba Koko” – Lingala for “Ancestral GOD”.

Hopefully you’ll understand why I feel the effect of this song but don’t have the frame of reference, the frame of experience to pull it apart in any meaningful way. Similar to my experience though, hopefully you’ll find the chaos and transcendence of it pierce you much the same. Real special one!

Bangs.

We knew Anieszka had a great voice, but this new one just affixed that notion immovably in the cement, a singular tone light as oxygen. It’s unimaginably breezy but visceral as the 3am dew in the air, thick enough to feel on your skin and clinging with condensation afterwards. I could swim in it, should I wish to forego the new pool we’ve developed on our balcony, shoutout rainfall, shoutout floods. It’s not all Anieszka though with the guy Beso Palma (who gave us this Kaytranada type heater on his own recent project) producing this thing with subtle clanks and all the dimensional space that vocal needs to shine. Oh, and he puts some voice down too, before the twin vocals twirl together like rope. Hell of a record from the two Sydney siders that showcases what each of them have done so well on their separates.

Embedding from youtube? We hate to see it but unfortunately I couldn’t find this one on bandcamp and soundcloud and Unearthed doesn’t yet have an embedded player (that’s on me soz).

If you split Melbourne producer duo Close Counters clean down the middle, half of what spills out across the table is called Turbo Chook. Don’t let it get everywhere, get as much of it into a glad bag for safe keeping as you can because its a valuable commodity, this over-tweaked poultry. Kaytranada-esque grooves, delicate key lines and spliced chords are a wonderful goo, viscous and warm underneath the verses of Cruz Patterson. If you look back a good five years you might recognize Cruz as the vocalist from jazzy Perth act Koi Child that were a bit of a thing around their one and only LP in 2016. On his lonesome he’s done features for the likes of Shockone and SUPEREGO but this is my favourite of his collaborations to date. This is a prime rib hookup, two artists giving each other their best cuts.