The Friday Dispatch
Bells Larsen, Jenny Hval, Emily Hines, Cameron Winter and more
Bells Larsen is holding hands with the past
Bells Larsen has worked wonders. On his latest album, Blurring Time, the Toronto / Montreal-based artist blends his pre and post transition voice to create a spectacular effect: a duet album recorded with himself. The creative and emotional implications are many. It is, for one, a remarkably innovative vocal technique – if that’s even what one could call it – that has never really been explored in this way. The Canadian-born Larsen is careful to give credit to several social media creators who have recorded similar duets of themselves casually on the Internet over the years, but neither he nor I are able to pinpoint any label-backed, commercially ambitious project that dives into the concept to this degree. Emotionally, it’s rife with radical acceptance, documenting the seasons of a life marked by change with comforting empathy and bookending its most significant chapter to date.
“It was really important for me to document the before and after together, holding hands in the same song, because I have a lot of love for my past self, and I couldn’t be here without that version of myself,” Larsen tells me. Like his musical career, Larsen’s transition was also nonlinear. Understanding his transness was an iterative process. The full manifestation of his identity took time to reveal itself to him. Larsen wanted to capture that iterative process on this record, painting his transition more as a passing of the baton than a cut-and-dry cast off. He pays homage to these changes on "Might," the album's closer and one he says is his personal favourite. While he's usually a slow writer, taking his time and coming back to songs over weeks and days and occasionally years, he says that song poured out of him in an hour.
“Change is a universal human experience," he says. "I think that even someone who doesn’t understand who I am or what I’m singing about or have the life experience I have can be in agreement with me that change is something we all share,. I think that people fear what they don’t understand. And so I hope in this very, very dark time, the music can educate, unite, bring comfort, and be whatever people need it to be.”
This week, Car Seat Headrest returns with The Scholars; Blondshell drops If You Asked For A Picture; Jenny Hval plays with the senses on Iris Silver Mist; and Samantha Crain pulls at our heartstrings once again on Gumshoe. Also out now are Jensen McRae’s I Don’t Know How But They Found Me; Self Esteem’s A Complicated Woman; and Viagra Boys’ viagr boys.
Jenny Hval has left the building
“Sometimes I’ll remember very vividly the smell of dust on a microphone,” says Norwegian musician, artist, and novelist Jenny Hval, recalling different stimuli that transport her back to particular times in her musical life. Whether it’s the unmistakable and musty-sweet aroma of secondhand record shops, the pungent harbour of a used microphone, or – as Hval describes in recent single “To Be a Rose” – the smell of cigarette smoke drifting on stage from somebody in the audience, it has to be said: music stinks.
Scents of all kinds waft in and out of Hval’s new album Iris Silver Mist, which takes its title from the name of a fragrance made by French perfumer Maurice Roucel. The album sees smell both as a way of navigating the world sensorially – when mourning a pet on “You Died”, she observes “You almost died, but still smell alive” – and also in a Proustian sense.
“When I got into scents it took me a year to take it seriously, maybe because perfume doesn’t have many connections to other artforms, in my world and work-sphere at least. But I did realise after a while how serious I was about scent and how I needed to open up that compartment to get more excited about sounds. In a way, I felt like I was getting into smelling roses and jasmine bushes and incense in order to understand instruments and words, and maybe even the sound of my own body better.”
This aromatic epiphany also made her think about how art engages – or shuts off – certain senses. “I love the idea that art is a way of both closing off senses and opening them,” she says. “You close your eyes and listen to music more closely. You shut out conversation from your brain to better look at a video at an art gallery. Writing is, for me, a constant opening and closing of the senses, as well as a way of changing the feeling of time and space.”
Hval began thinking about weaving other senses into her latest album during a series of performances last year in her native Norway, as well as in the Netherlands and the UK, entitled I Want To Be a Machine. “The material I’d written was very much an essay on performing music and the stage as a communal, artistic space, so I wanted to fill that space with sound and other sensory material simultaneously. Using fabrics, textures, lighting and scent in the space to think about the sound gave me more freedom to play with composition and how compositions were performed.”
“It ended up being really interesting for me. I got new collaborators and friends along the way, who work with clothing design and perfume, and got to work with these facets in real time, in a room, with an audience. I feel like the album is very much influenced by that multisensorial work."
If Americana’s all the rage these days, 1985’s Desert Hearts might just be the blueprint. A queer Western for the ages, the film follows two unlikely lovers as they navigate age gaps and first times and the gossip of the town. It’s like Brokeback Mountain but, well, maybe even better. Oh, and it’s complete with a killer soundtrack that delights with needle drops from Patsy Cline, Kitty Wells, Johnny Horton, and more. This is particularly recommended viewing for those who haven’t stopped spinning Send A Prayer My Way from JB and TORRES.
The introduction…
Meet Emily Hines, a 25-year-old Nashville-based, self-described chronically sincere farm girl. She’s making waves in Americana right now as the latest gem of the Keeled Scales roster.
Hometown… Oxford, Ohio
Describe your sound… Half-feral horsegirl folk rock.
How you started making music… I wrote my first songs with my brother when our mom was sick. When I was 12, my mom brought home a guitar for dummies book and I picked up guitar for myself. As soon as I’d learned a few chords, I wrote a song about my crush. I guess I never stopped writing songs about my crush!
Where you write best… I love writing outside in my garden. Most of my song demos have bird song / random outdoor noise in them. Ideas just flow.
Something people don’t know but should know about farming… Growing food will radically change you, your relationship to your community and your environment. It roots you in time, in the cycle of life and death, in the interconnectedness of all living things. I enjoy my food so much more knowing where it came from and knowing who grew it. It takes food from this one-dimensional passive experience to something so loving, precious, and beautiful. It’s expanding my world. You don’t have to have a green thumb. You can fail a million times and try again. Sometimes you harvest food, sometimes you harvest lessons. Growing food is awesome!
Most underrated thing about the Midwest… Skyline Chili, the thrifting scores, and the wide open space.
Emily Hines will release her debut album, These Days, on 1 August.
Something Old, Something New
Every week, we share recommendations from the Best Fit community — one from the past, another from the present. This week, Editor-in-Chief Paul Bridgewater on Wild Nothing’s Gemini (2010) and Cameron Winter’s Heavy Metal (2022).
It’s 15 years since Wild Nothing’s debut Gemini came out, into a landscape of new music ruled by Hype Machine, Pitchfork and a handful of mostly-gone-mostly-forgotten music blogs. Jack Tatum’s trebly indie guitar pop wasn’t necessarily anything original at the time but amid a sea of C86-aping bands armed with a four track recorder and a love of Martin Hannet production, it stood out as an extremely fucking beautiful thing. Tatum made a sad album for sad boy and girls that was so achingly beautiful that P4k even used those (cursed) words to describe it (Best New Music with an 8.2). It might be hard to relate just why the record was so exciting back in 2010 — listening to it now, it really does sound like it was made in a Stockport recording studio in 1981 instead of Tatum’s dorm room at Virginia Tech. “It so perfectly encapsulates a certain time in my life that it honestly scares me a bit,” he said reflecting on the record’s tenth anniversary in May 2020. “It’s such a rare thing to have this kind of living document of your youth and I think that’s what Gemini will always be for me: a part of my life that is at once both so familiar and so unrecognisable.”
Cameron Winter's recent run of London shows brought a transcendent dimensionality to the Geese frontman's solo record from last year. Heavy Metal casts the 22-year-old Brooklynite as a 70s dive bar poet, channelling the more introspective moments of Cohen, Waits and Dylan in their more beatific eras. But played live, Winter reveals himself as a generational talent operating with immaculate musicianship and an almost incomprehensible — and thus insanely cool — patter. Heavy Metal dropped in December to little noise (aside from a Best Fit profile) and then found its audience at the start of this year. Six months on he's the hottest ticket in town with a Roundhouse show at the end of the year and the next Kenny Beats-produced Geese record presumably dropping ahead of that. Heavy Metal is somehow existentially spiritual — the sound of one man in a silent universe coaxing a deus ex machina, manifesting a god figure from the darkness. I haven’t heard a better record so far this year and it will take a lot to knock “Drinking Age” off my most-played.
Listen to the week in new music by following our Discovery playlist
Dropping at midnight every Thursday, follow our playlist for a taste of the best new music from the most exciting breaking artists. Leading the selection this week are new tracks from Westside Cowboy, Emily Hines, The Itch, Humour, Gelli Haha, and coverstar Jahnah Camille.
“Phish’s fans have been characterized—perhaps ungenerously—as burnouts who wish only to stand around in parking lots huffing nitrous oxide from balloons.”