Weekly Report #1

Recommendations for the week of August 4, 2025: Olli Aarni, Madeleine Cocolas, Sunik Kim & more!

As announced in my half-year review, I’m finally kicking off Weekly Report, a (hopefully) regular feature of new and notable albums focused on stuff that’s likely to fly below the radar elsewhere. The first, fashionably late batch of recommendations covers releases from the past two weeks. The selection leans towards the abstract and the heavy (in all senses), but I promise there will be plenty of lighter music in upcoming editions!

For more recommendations, go over to PopMatters, where Spyros and I picked July’s best metal releases. And if that’s still not enough, for the new issue of The Wire I wrote about Cabaret Voltaire’s influence in 1980s Yugoslavia, penned the Avant Rock column (feat. stunning new albums by Giant Claw and Marissa Nadler), and reviewed albums by Merzbow, Bruch, Phew/Erika Kobayashi/Moebius, and Flower Travellin’ Band. Buy a magazine!

On to the music!

Olli Aarni - Dimension Scrolling (Mondoj)

Dreamy, vaporous post-post-internet miniatures fashioned out of spoken word (narrated by Mia Tarkela) and luminous, fragmented pop elements. Like Dialect’s Atlas Of Green, Finnish musician Olli Aarni’s Dimension Scrolling suggests a sort of music archaeology from the distant future, an attempt to retrieve past ephemera to create a better, idealistic tomorrow.

Madeleine Cocolas - Syndesis (Room40)

Whereas Madeleine Cocolas’s previous two albums, Bodies and Spectral, explored the world without in the present, Syndesis sees the Australian composer reaching within and into her past. Using field recordings from a visit to her ancestral home in Greece, Cocolas augments her usually disquieting ambient expressions with deceptively warm sounds, the comforting buzz of cicadas heard on a warm summer day drifting amidst a swell of windswept, glazed textures. Her memories and the sentiments they elicit take form as Cocolas navigates through them, until the images become almost palpable, ready for us to jump in.

Concepción Huerta & Jiyoung Wi - Concepción Huerta & Jiyoung Wi (Aurora Central)

Hague-based artists Concepción Huerta and Jiyoung Wi join forces on a decidedly abstract collaboration, but one whose sonic complexities possess a stable inner rhythm, a sort of purposeful blueprint for its progressions to trace. Following the music’s breadcrumbs – unaccountable sounds of live and recorded provenance, prickly strings swimming in electronic reverberations – then becomes akin to deciphering a puzzle, feeling around every twist and turn in the search for the centre of the maze. What awaits there remains unclear, but the journey sure is thrilling.

Sunik Kim - Formenverwandler (Feedback Moves)

Los Angeles-based musician and writer Sunik Kim operates on the bleeding edge of sound and music, often dismantling the boundary between what is and what could be. In this latest work, Kim digs deep into her knowledge of American-Mexican composer Conlon Nancarrow, extrapolating the concept of the tempo canon into cascading electronic shapes that appear at once known and unknowable. Studiously researched and conceptualised, it’s the sheer aural brunt of the music that leaves the longest-lasting impression.

Malthusian - The Summoning Bell (Relapse)

Death metal should, by definition, be gnarly and harrowing and soul-crushing, with emotional dangers lurking beneath the riff-laden surface. Yet, even in this context, Dublin’s Malthusian appear to have a particular knack for imbuing their music with a heightened sense of discomfort, black metal edges and hints of dissonance elevating what is already an excellent death metal basis into a jagged, chaotic whirlwind of tremolos, blast beats, and growls. This sensation of standing, frozen, in the middle of a collapsing tower feels particularly vivid when experienced live, but the group’s sophomore LP, The Summoning Bell, is as good an approximation as any to enjoy at home. Eyes closed. Sweaty hands gripping armrests.