You can see RVNG’s output as a seasonal rotation, and to that end a pair of albums this autumn make perfect sense. Released this September as a follow-up to her 2018 breakout Anticlines, Colombian sound artist Lucrecia Dalt’s No era sólida plays like a set of hibernation hymnals, the textures crackling like leaves underfoot and stark atmospherics reminiscent of evening chill setting in. And arriving in October, master cellist (and Radiohead muse) Oliver Coates’ skins n slime evokes the grandeur of a flock of birds departing south. The stop-in-your-tracks beauty of the album’s five-part ‘Caregiver’ suite feels especially resonant in this of all years, where the nature of care is critically essential yet under sustained attack. As well as beauty, Coates unleashes anger from his bow swoops, a cloak of drone and doom portending the grave unease of winter to come.
Earlier this summer, Kate NV took an opposite approach on Room For The Moon, her sound undergoing an evolutionary leap from the fringes to the pop centre. The Moscow artist landed on an eccentric bric-a-brac of songwriting in Japanese, Russian and French, and music which mined a middle ground between Tom Tom Club, Kate Bush, TV game shows and the breeziness of Haruomi Hosono, Shigeru Suzuki & Tatsuro Yamashita’s 1978 album Pacific. Room For The Moon's cheer, charm and giddy refusal to be pigeonholed secured it as one of the most outright fun albums of a year in sore need of it