Listening diary: week 45, 2025

The lovely new claire rousay record is a return to her trademark palette of quotidian sounds, conversational snippets and ambient washes, to a degree that might appear formulaic if it wasn’t so emotionally affecting. The magic of her music lies in the sense that you’re never quite sure what she’s up to, only that she’s doing it with astonishing precision.

Every six months or so, I text my friend Gareth a Bandcamp link with the caption “Is electroclash back??”. (We’re both hoping the answer will be yes.) New York offer not just the requisite octave basslines, but also the dislocated weirdness previously found further down the tracklist of a Fischerspooner album.

Vaporwave is often weaponised nostalgia; I don’t like the idea of nostalgia but I’m often moved by it anyway. I was completely transfixed by metra.vestlud’s pitch-perfect evocation of the Wii menu screens, until a baffling porn sample in one of the later tracks broke the spell.

The Ensemble Basiani album was selected entirely at random from an Apple Music search for Georgian polyphonic singing, after reading Steve Hauschildt’s description of it in a recent interview with Philip Sherburne and wanting to know what it sounded like. I was absolutely flabbergasted by this.

To have Leslie Keffer back - and on such excellent and prolific form - is a joy.