Recommended
Home Listener // Wilted Woman
Chloe Frieda's 'Alien Jams' imprint presents Home Listener, the new EP from Wilted Woman. For the past five years, Alien Jams has been growing as a platform for "strange and beautiful sounds". First with their fortnightly NTS show and then a flurry of left-field 12"s, including music from Marreck, rkss and a split between Beatrice Dillon & Karen Gwyer. As the name suggests, Alien Jams presents dance music, grooves to "jam" to, but not as we know it. Each release holds an ethereal strangeness, which puts it right at the brink of dance-floor acceptability. The imprint synthesises the falsely-dichotomised 'brain-music' & 'body-music'. After all, we shouldn't have to choose.
I first encountered Wilted Woman at a SIREN showcase in February, hosted in the now closed '1 Silver Road', a former industrial water tank in Lewisham. The walls here are orange with rust and the air inside is dead and cold. It was a fitting venue for an artist who incorporates music concrète and static noise into her sets. Her music has a dead, bitter, hopeless quality. A sound she describes as "graveyard soundscapes" or “anxiety rhythm”.
This new EP continues this icy anxiety, and opens with the appropriately named 'Heating Problem'. Indeed, the 'Home' in Home Listener is far from the warmth of domestic familiarity. It is an alien place, closer to the home of E.T or the dreamlike surrealism of La Planète Sauvage. It sounds like a spaceship control panel gone awol. Synthesisers oscillate wildly and arpeggios accelerate into the next dimension. Even the artwork looks like some ambiguous Martian goo.
Alien Jams will be hosting the Home Listening launch party on November 11th at The Waiting Room. Tickets can be bought here.
- Published
- Nov 7, 2017
- Credits
- Words by Georgie_McVicar