Crooked words #23: Lael Neale, Nive Nielsen, Isik Kural

Lael Neale - Picasso's Wife

While everything I've heard from Lael Neale over the past few years has held its own unique and fascinating form, there are certain moments where her work pulls apart the fabric of the world and forces everything else – the tick of the clock, the flow of the day – to just cease.

It happens here on new single 'Picasso's Wife', a small, subtle, wavering song that is so strangely elegant, so laced with an inherent sense of melancholy, it holds you in the palm of its hand for two brief minutes before suddenly disappearing once more.

"If I could stare into the sun then I could look you in the eye," she sings, her voice flickering, immediately captivating. "I find the days so long, I’m like a child crawling on the kitchen tile. All of my friends feel far away." In many ways it feels like some kind of apparition; a sad, hollow dream you try and hold onto while the shapes and characters merge together and then dissolve, casting a quiet, spellbinding kind of magic that lingers long after it's vanished.

Taken from Neale's forthcoming new album ‘As Killers Do’, which is out in late November; I hope you get the chance to sit with it today.

Nive Nielsen and The Deer Children - My Mother's Name

I found myself up very early this morning. From that half-light, I decided to dig through the inbox for something new and quiet to spend those early hours alongside. Through that search, I stumbled upon My Mother’s Name, the forthcoming new album from Greenland's Nive Nielsen & The Deer Children – their first in 10 years.

Both new to me, and new in form (the album itself isn't released until October 9th, via Glitterhouse Records) there was a peculiarity to the shape of its opening song that felt gently enticing. Nielsen's voice is strange but captivating, always sitting slightly off-centre as a series of other voices and instrumentation gather in the space around her, everything always a little unbalanced.

The album's opening track, title-track, and lead single, 'My Mother's Name' is also a song that sings to the record's ethos, the fabric that runs right through the deep heart of My Mother's Name. Formed of 10 new songs, the album is a collection of songs that "explores themes of identity, socialization, and strength of female lineage" while also incorporating "the Greenlandic language and traditional elements into a modern folk sound that weaves in subtle tensions and the spirit of the times."

You'll have to wait a little while to find out how all those elements come together across the full record – they do so often and beautifully, in a rich variety of ways – but that aforementioned title-track is available to listen right now via the video below, via a live recording that sings to the nuanced, intricate, and often wholesome nature of the project, it's studied unravelling of tender threads.

Find more info and pre-order via Bandcamp here

Isik Kural - Under The Canopy

I moved out of Glasgow a few years ago now, but I've been missing it a lot recently. I'm still close enough to dip in and out of it on a whim, and have done so plenty of times this summer, but it I miss seeing its changes in real time, how the shape and size of it shifts in the seasons. All that strange power a city has to offer that I gave up for when I moved to this other little corner of the world, exchanging such things for open bodies of water, views of the hills. I'm lucky to have lived with both.

Such pining isn't helped by beautiful pieces of ambient music that arrive "set against a rain-soaked afternoon in Glasgow" but that's exactly what Isik Kural shares on one of the two brand new singles he's released from forthcoming album Motorcycles and Cherry Wind, which is released October 30th, via the ever-excellent RVNG Intl. label.

Drifting through four-minutes of scattered keys, subtle field recordings of rainfall and Scotrail station announcements, 'Under The Canopy' is opaque but beautifully engrossing; the hushed, endearing charm of just staying in one place as so many lives and movements and moments past just by and then disappear once more into the folds of the city, the hazy ether of the unseen.