Matthew E. White - Broken Mirror: A Selfie Reflection - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Broken Mirror A Selfie Reflection is a timely callout to the power of collaboration, of kindred spirits connecting in crowded rooms. More important, though, is this collision of two profoundly Southern artists, meeting to shed expectations of generation and genre, scene and situation and exchange truth, wisdom, and energy. The real world is more complicated than a pretty digital picture, bowdlerized of blemishes. As Broken Mirror A Selfie Reflection reminds us, it can be more revelatory and transformative, too.These racks are balls of energized contemplation, Holley crooning grievances and observations above surrealist grooves so irrepressible and heavy that the words strike with the force of gospel. Holley strolls into InchI Cried Space DustInch as if he's wandered into the On the Corner sessions and offered unsolicited insights on true transcendence. InchI'm Not TrippingInch is an anthem of self-worth and self-enjoyment for a society mired in self-doubt, the words breaking like light beams through clouds of atomized drums and synths. And Holley begins the title track as a character mindlessly staring into a cell phone, captivated by his own image like Narcissus at water's edge. Holley ponders the egotism of projection over dizzying keyboards and guitars so jagged they conjure fractured glass. By song's end, he's mocking this infrastructure of pandering for likes, jeering us all above a savage bassline that dares you to differ.Holley and White may seem like unlikely collaborators, divided as they are by decades and disciplines. Holley, 70, first earned attention as a sculptor far removed from the fiefdom of fine art, using society's detritus to create curious bricolages that ferried deep narratives of ancestral pride, enduring pain, and eternal hope. His music-privately stowed on stacks of cassettes before he released his staggering 2012 debut, Just Before Music, a

Limited transparent red colored vinyl LP pressing. 2023 . Hardly The Same Snake is Skinny Pelembe's sophomore album, but his first fully embracing his artistic self. Visceral yet inherently soulful, Hardly The Same Snake is the sound of the Johannesburg-born, Doncaster-raised artist finally finding his voice - both literally and figuratively. In practical terms, that involved finding the courage to foreground his gravelly baritone in these gloriously genre-agnostic productions. But it also meant branching out beyond the safety net of his former tag - Gilles' Peterson's Brownswood Recordings - to figure out the artist he truly wanted to be. As Skinny puts it today, in his soft South Yorkshire drawl, InchThis album is what I would have created, first time round had I rated my own voice.Inch Determined that the album shouldn't sound like a band record, but equally mustn't feel Inchtoo button push-yInch, Skinny assembled songs by sampling instrumentation originally recorded live, including chopped and looped versions of the brilliantly complex beats played by Malcolm Catto of The Heliocentrics. It was a painstaking process that paid off, resulting in an album fathoms ahead of it's promising predecessor, and one that honestly reflects Skinny's creative evolution. The idea of forging your own path - and shedding skin, so to speak - is integral to Hardly The Same Snake. It's a defiantly outward-looking record contemplating family, religion and major life milestones, from parenthood to death.

A gleaner of the forgotten, Buck Meek tips over the familiar and turns the unknown into a companion. On The Mirror, the artist's fourth solo record and second released by 4AD, there's a tender power, countered by immutable vulnerability. With an uncanny curiosity, Meek conjures twin worlds to reveal the uniqueness in the mundane. Inviting in reflection as collaborator and demon as friend, The Mirror doesn't seek to know but to ask, looking to the shape of a question rather than the illusion of it's answer.Meek grew up in Wimberley, Texas, teenage protege to an old guard of mystic Texas songwriters and musicians. He later moved to New York where he met Adrianne Lenker. The two lived in a van while singing their songs across the country before forming Big Thief. The partnership of Meek and producer, James Krivchenia, emerged from a decade of work together in Big Thief. Conceptually, The Mirror emerged from the idea to combine Meek's band's live, kinetic energy with an oblique electronic world. The pair invited a collective atmosphere in which simultaneous experiment could occur-musicians responding to each other in real time, while their instruments triggered modular synthesizers and electronic magic boxes. The Mirror welcomed in friends, family, collaborators from ranging musical eras of life as vital co-creators. New creative partners and longtime friends like composer and ambient musician Alex Somers joined in on synthesizer, toy microphone, and piano, and Mary Lattimore brought in the sounds of her prismatic harp.Lexical mirrors are handheld, tactile, and kept close throughout the record-each one holding up a new truth. The Mirror embraces the unknown with an abiding curiosity and Meek continues to reveal his skill as translator of human feeling and it's endless portals. The Mirror looks for duality, finding it in the weeds and overgrowth.