Nicole Miglis "Myopia"
From Sargent House Records:
Nicole Miglis, the multi-instrumentalist and voice behind revered indie pop band Hundred Waters, has announced her debut solo album Myopia is set for release August 23rd on Sargent House and shared the song “Autograph,” an unrepentant electronic earworm that surges out of the gate with infectious syncopation amid pleas for presence and authenticity. The song is an apt demonstration of Miglis’s mesmerizing ability to synthesize experimental production, pop melodies and classical form into a musical language completely her own. Throughout Myopia, Miglis crystallizes interwoven states of obsession, love and loss alongside an eclectic array of sounds, both organic and digital, while expounding on the album’s theme of being unable to look past the immediate in favor of the bigger picture. “There’s the myopia of desire, love, obsession—the feeling of only being able to see that one person in everything, everywhere,” she explains. “There’s also personal myopia of not seeing your potential or your power, of not zooming out; limiting beliefs.”
Brian Gibson "Thrasher"
Brian Gibson is an artist and composer whose career is defined by uncompromising creativity. As the bassist for legendary duo Lightning Bolt or as a composer and artist on video games, Gibson consistently tests boundaries by injecting wonder and excitement into his singular body of work. Gibson’s 2016 release Thumper, produced by Drool, was an award-winning smash hit game and soundtrack. Thrasher is Gibson’s triumphant return to VR, a fantastical whirlwind co-created with Mike Mandell via their partnership Puddle. The soundtrack harnesses Gibson’s otherworldly visions with bright musical clarity, trading the “rhythmic violence” of Thumper for expansive and sublime atmospheres punctured by cascading, serpentine arpeggios embodied by otherworldly creatures.
Gibson and Mandel call the game “a mind-melting arcade action odyssey and visceral audiovisual experience.” The game was designed as an immersive virtual reality experience following a kind of evolving space centipede from “crawling from the depths of primordial gloom to the heights of celestial bliss, culminating in a heart-pounding reckoning with a cosmic baby god.” Gibson’s start in game designing began at Harmonix working on tentpole titles like Guitar Hero and Rock Band. Thrasher breaks from Gibson’s history in rhythm-centered games. Arpeggiated synths and undulating textural loops mimic the segmented art style of the centipede, as well as the game’s more open and nuanced emotional core. Through these intricate sequences, Gibson imbues the soundtrack’s ceaseless propulsion with melodic mystery and tensions. The crystalline twirl of “Magenta Machine” expands and contracts like a living, breathing biosphere. Tracks like album opener “Metal Maze” and “Mica” harken back to the trance-inflected movements of Lightning Bolt’s Hypermagic Mountain. The existential dread of Thumper carries over to pieces like “Timekeepers” and “Mad Moon,” but across the album Gibson infuses that dread with an equal share of awe.
Throbbing Gristle "The Third Mind Movements"
Formed in 1975, Throbbing Gristle, aka Chris Carter, Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson (1955-2010), Cosey Fanni Tutti, and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (1950-2020), fully delivered on punk’s failed promise to explore extreme culture as a way of sabotaging systems of control. Their impact on music, culture, and the arts has been immeasurable and still felt today.
Having reformed in 2004, Throbbing Gristle’s The Third Mind Movements initially emerged as an exclusive release only available on the band’s last ever American tour in 2009, before they split again in 2010. The tour, which saw them perform in the US for the first time in 28 years, included their first shows in NY and an appearance at Coachella festival. The Third Mind Movements album, recorded during the Desertshore sessions at the ICA, London several years earlier – a series of six live recordings from the ICA attended by an attentive audience – journeys through manipulated, time-stretched and distorted samples, with rhythmical breakbeats and hypnotic oscillations of electronics.
The Third Mind Movements is released alongside TGCD1 – both vital additions for dedicated Throbbing Gristle and industrial music fans.
Quivers "Oyster Cuts"
Oyster Cuts, the Merge debut of Quivers, finds the Melbourne, Australia–based outfit awash in the kind of emotions people tend to fear losing themselves in. Finding love after grief, the outsized guitar pop of Quivers gleams like the surface of an ocean, beneath which lies a reef that is at turns beautiful and painful, its features alien and sharp enough to wound. Propelled by melodies that at times recall Galaxie 500 and The Pretenders, Quivers make music that is tender and tough, compelling the listener to dive in again and again, each song a new angle on all of your feelings.
The losses and loves that have informed Quivers’ music since their inception—the sudden loss of a brother in the cracked optimism of We’ll Go Riding on the Hearses (2018) and the life in and after grief of Golden Doubt (2021)—ripple into Oyster Cuts, which is committed to moving forward while accepting that some feelings, like grief, are a cycle. Crucially, Quivers committed to moving forward with each other. Paring away the choir and strings of its predecessor, Oyster Cuts is a showcase for what’s still possible when four people—Sam Nicholson (guitars), Bella Quinlan (bass), Michael Panton (guitars), and Holly Thomas (drums)—make music together.