Clara Engel – ‘Their Invisible Hands’
“I’m not writing the same song over and over so much as writing one long continuous song that will end when I die.” – Clara Engel Recorded entirely at home / solo, “Their Invisible Hands” presents 13 tracks of subtle dream-like beauty, from the Toronto-based artist. A mystical work, mixing classical and dark folk wanderings with misty soundscapes, which creates an abstract, new world atmosphere. Self-released in April as digital and CD, Cruel Nature are proud to give it a cassette release.
Score – ‘Now Here’
Score is the solo project of Chris Tate, known for his work with d_rradio; producers of a number of notable atmospheric electronica cuts from the early 2000s, along with One Key Magic and Anglo-American band, Salisman. ‘Now Here’ is his sixth album for Cruel Nature and moves through a fusion of different musical styles, while gently rising and falling in waves of energy and mood, within individual tracks and also across the whole album. There is an undercurrent of oscillating or undulating waves – reflecting life’s ups and downs and the temporary nature of all things.
Todeskino – ‘MMMiniatures’
Following his first album ‘Debutante’, which was praised as “melancholic, cinematic ambience somewhere between Sixteen Candles and Twin Peaks“ (Electronic Sound Magazine), Peter Lersch (Todeskino) returns with this latest release for Cruel Nature. Here, Todeskino reaches out to the cute, bleepy and playful excursions of electronica. A potent mix of ambient and electropop orchestrated by sugarcoated chords, bursting bass lines and squelching synth leads – each track creates a musical microcosm of highly unusual sounds. Spiked with Todeskino‘s typical ingredients of cinematic melancholy, listeners will be carried away into a mellow, colourful world. Would sit nicely in the Warp Records 90s catalogue, alongside the likes of Polygon Window
POUND LAND – ‘Defeated’
‘Defeated’ is the third album by the Stockport (UK)-based duo POUND LAND (Nick Harris and Adam Stone). Recorded in most part over the first half of 2022, ‘Defeated’ comprises eight intense tracks spanning forty minutes, opening with the visceral doom-realism of ‘Violence’ and ending with the post-punk audio-travelogue of ‘Zones’. Pound Land push their post-industrial kitchen-sink drama preoccupations even further on ‘Defeated’, exploring the dark comedy of everyday life in the dismal land of eternal recession. Sometimes the vision expands out of shitty Britain too, ‘Drone’ recounting the wearied observations of an electronic device as it traverses the globe. You’ve got to laugh, because if you don’t you’ll kill yourself. Or somebody else.
Lunt – ‘Remember We Were Waiting For The Snow’
Žils Deless-Vēliņš (Lunt) has held a mystical relationship to sound and music since he was a child, and his crafting of music can be compared to a construction kit game, where music as a whole is more than the sum of sounds. For him, sound has a kinship with the concept of pneuma in Stoician philosophy. Sound expects to be found to become music, lying there in an intuitive background. ‘Remember We Were Waiting For The Snow’ is about what is called “solastalgia” : our anxiety, our concern, our sadness to see some natural phenomenon disappear. Written 5 years ago, after Žils relocated to Latvia, it is a collection of exquisite reflective moving guitar-driven ambience drawing from same the sonic well as soundscapers like Jim O’Rouke.
