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DJ Plead, “Relentless Trills” (Boomkat Editions, 2021)

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Newly remastered by Rashad Becker and given a vinyl reissue, Relentless Trills first surfaced on cassette as part of Boomkat’s eclectic Documenting Sound series devoted to home recordings made during the pandemic. Given those origins, it makes sense that this full-length debut showcases a very different side of DJ Plead’s artistry than his impressive run of oft-killer EPs. 

Given that, curious listeners intrigued by the Australian producer’s unique blend of cutting edge UK dance subgenres with Middle Eastern influences like dabke and mahraganat should probably head to 2020’s Going For It EP first to experience the “out-of-control Lebanese wedding party” brilliance of prime DJ Plead before exploring this inspired detour. 

That said, this surprisingly experimental, stripped-down, and post-punk-adjacent departure from his strengths is quite a compelling listen in its own right. Boomkat’s description rightly tosses around adjectives like “humid” and “sensual” to describe this bedroom DIY fantasia of floating Middle Eastern melodies and languorously simmering grooves, but that does not paint the entire picture, as Relentless Trills also masterfully dips its toes in hazy psychedelia, plunderphonics, and a hauntingly beautiful beatless synth piece. The latter (“RT6”) unexpectedly steals the show, as Plead (Jarred Beeler) has a remarkably great ear for melody and atmosphere, yet this entire release is quite a singular, propulsive, and (of course) sensually humid experience from start to finish.

This album instantly won me over within the first moments of its endearingly weird opener, which ingeniously marries a very insistent and ’80s-sounding “funk punk” bass line with samples from some kind of Middle Eastern talk show. There is also a cool Arabic synth melody running throughout the song, but my favorite part is how the talk show keeps unpredictably being autotuned into ephemeral melodies. Talk show samples aside, “RT1” is fairly representative of the entire album, as nearly all of the sounds originate from the same Yamaha ‘Oriental’ keyboard. 

Beeler’s amusingly self-deprecating liner notes also state that he recorded lots of “self-indulgent melodic hooks” and initially set out to make a drum-less ambient album of sorts. At some point, he changed his mind and added some simple rhythmic accompaniment (“I’m praying that this tape doesn’t sound like Deep Forest”) and ultimately landed upon something that resembles Gang of Four backing a virtuosic Middle Eastern wedding musician. 

Notably, those “self indulgent” melodies are the best part of the album, as every song has some kind of wonderfully smoky, winding, or soulful hook that fluidly unfold over an obsessively repeating staccato groove (often dancehall-inspired, but more stark and thudding). That “staccato” bit was an odd choice given how adept DJ Plead has been at unleashing vibrant and complex rhythms in the past, but the songcraft is strong enough to make it work despite that (it feels akin to watching a boxer handily demolish an opponent with one hand tied behind his back). 

That said, “RT3” feels like an instant highlight primarily because the groove is allowed to flow a bit more than usual. Then again, the closer dispenses with a beat altogether to combine a dreamily fluttering melody with a pulsing chord progression that feels like a psychedelically deconstructed house classic and it is absolutely gorgeous. There is not a weak piece in the bunch though, as Plead’s melodic and songcraft instincts are remarkably unerring. I cannot even begin to imagine how great the resultant album would be if he ever figures out how to seamlessly combine this side of his work with his usual rhythmic intensity.

Samples can be found here.

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Kara-Lis Coverdale, “Grafts” (Boomkat Editions, 2017)

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This Montreal-based composer/producer/church organist has been quite hard to miss over the last several years, collaborating on Tim Hecker’s Virgins album, releasing a cassette on one of my favorite tape labels (Sacred Phrases), and garnering much critical praise with her 2015 collaboration with LXV (Sirens). For her latest release, she joins the Boomkat Editions series with this brief one-sided vinyl EP. 

I am not normally a fan of gimmicky vinyl formats, but that condensed format works wonders for Coverdale, as her earlier releases were a bit too uneven, fitfully pastoral, and diffuse to fully connect with me (even though they all admittedly featured some occasional flashes of brilliance). With Grafts, however, she distills all of the best aspects of her work into roughly 20 minutes of lushly melodic and dreamily multilayered sustained beauty. In fact, in some ways, Grafts feels like an inspired negative image of Virgins, reimagining that nerve-jangling opus as a languorous, sensuously flowing, and gently hallucinatory reverie of hazy drones and rippling pianos.

Grafts is ostensibly composed of three separate pieces, but the boundaries between them are so blurry that they seem largely inconsequential: this EP very much feels like a single longform piece that seamlessly blossoms into new shapes as it evolves. The initial motif of the opening “2c” sounds like an elegiac and occasionally stuttering processed piano melody unfolding over a breathy bed of organ. Each time it falters, however, it seems to restart with renewed depth and more complex harmonic coloration in the periphery. 

After effectively establishing the piece’s strange momentum, Coverdale launches into a distorted harpsichord-sounding solo. For a while, that arguably becomes the piece’s primary focus, but the backdrop continues to subtly and sneakily evolve, as the piano theme coheres into an obsessively repeating pulse as the organ chords shift around it. 

In some ways, it seems an awful lot like classical minimalism, but there is a surprising amount of emotional resonance in those repeating chords and the various other layers unfold with an appealingly kinetic and organic looseness that bears no resemblance to the rigidity of Glass or Reich at all. In one of her many great tricks, Coverdale repurposes their tools to weave something quite swirling and dreamlike. Unexpectedly, that idyll is briefly disrupted by a strange small-scale storm of dissonance before the blearily gorgeous smears of piano resolve into the more sharp-focused and almost harp-like interlude of “Flutter.”

With “Flutter,” Coverdale trades in her more drone-like impulses for an undulating tapestry of sweeping and rippling piano arpeggios. That is one just small part of a richly multilayered piece though, as muted organ chords quietly evolve in the hidden depths, pointillist single notes ring out in the foreground, mysterious fluttering textures creep into the periphery, and the air fills with hazy and angelic clouds of overtones and snatches of synth melodies. It is very much a feast for the ears, though admittedly a rather short-lived one, as the final “Moments in Love” gradually emerges from the dissipating fog. 

As it slowly takes shape, it becomes clear that “Moments” is quite a bit different from the swirling lushness that pervades the rest of Grafts, settling into a strangely simmering groove of shuffling snare and a tenderly played yet murkily blown-out-sounding organ melody. Vestiges of Grafts‘ earlier passages continue to blearily hang in the air as a lingering fog, so “Moments” has the feel of a half-sensuous, half-broken coda of wounded beats and lazy melodies drifting from ruined, half-submerged speakers. 

Such a simple and damaged-sounding outro feels weirdly appropriate after the rapturous and all-enveloping bliss of the earlier half, presenting itself as a well-timed come-down before heaven becomes numbingly predictable. Naturally, part of me is mildly exasperated that Grafts is over so quickly, but that part is easily drowned out by the part of me that feels that Grafts is an absolutely perfect EP and easily the finest work of Coverdale’s career. I genuinely feel that there is not a single wasted second here, as every single moment of this EP is either bursting with inspiration or seamlessly setting the stage for the next beguiling transition.

Listen here.