There's a dance scene in Tadeusz Konwicki's Kafkaesque 1965 drama film 'Salto' that lodged itself in Przemysław Jankowiak's head while he was conceiving'Everything Always Changes, For We're Truly Here'. The film plays like a dream and the dance works almost like the payoff, a haunting, poignant moment that subtly references the title itself, which loosely translates as 'leap'. "I like listening through images and seeing through sound," explains Jankowiak, who's better known as 2K88. His music has always been cinematic, but this album in particular, made alongside acclaimed British artists Lauren Duffus, Rainy Miller and Bianca Scout, plays like slow cinema, meditating on themes that smolder evocatively without ever fully igniting. It's best described as hypnagogic R&B, a reverie of affecting vignettes pieced together from unexpectedly vivid elements: sensual vocal hooks, free-flowing raps, submerged rhythms and rough, craggy atmospheres. The four contributors pass sounds and memories back-and-forth, imagining melancholy sci-fi hymns, inverted pop songs and neo-trip-hop outlines that melt away at the edges, falling into a captivating rhythm of their own.

The project was originally commissioned by Unsound in an effort to match up Polish and British artists. Jankowiak had already released 'SHAME', an album that reflected on the impact of Polish rap in the late 1990s and early 2000s, juxtaposing these elements with the aesthetics of UK club music, so presented himself as the obvious figurehead. Miller, Duffus and Scout were at the top of his wish list of collaborators and before long, the quartet were on their way to his home city of Gdynia for a residency, where they began to figure out the harmony between their respective approaches. It was planned as a live performance at first, with 2K88 overseeing and corralling the ideas from each of his allies. Miller, who is widely acclaimed for his unique fusion of rap, noise and ambient music on albums such as last year's 'Joseph, What Have You Done?', would add poetic, inclement contemplations; Duffus, whose weightless, genre-blending productions have seen her release on AD93 and tour with indie rap heavyweight MIKE, provided cloudy but self-assured vocal hooks; while Scout, a producer and performer who shivered between gothic pop and medieval ambiance on 2023's 'The Heart of the Anchoress' offered haunted textures and desolate chorals.

"I think in the back of all our minds was a possible release if the collaboration worked out well," laughs Unsound's Mat Schulz. "And of course it did." After the live performance in Kraków, the four artists turned the dream into a reality, projecting the same ideas onto 10 fully developed tracks. And on the opener, 'Everything Always Changes', the concept solidifies, with coarse noise rubbing against Scout and Duffus's airy vocal tones and booming analog bass provoking tension before Miller's familiar voice cuts through the clouds. "There's a war where the sea meets the sky," he sibilates, "where the lines blur into fantastical dissonance." His imagery matches Jankowiak's faded soundscape, bringing to mind a half-remembered, long-promised history lost to time and politics. "It's trapped in this romantic haze," says Miller. "It conjures images of fictional seaside towns, ghosts of past grandeur living through imaginary romances in the present." And his voice returns on 'Creeping Thistle', AutoTuned to curve gracefully around sparsely populated, burned out terrain: ominous synths, wailing police sirens and reverb that seems to swallow everything around it.

On 'The Quiet's Song' familiar R&B hits and stabs are isolated and surrounded by ominous negative space that Scout impedes on with her reserved incantation. Loose, casual piano themes wisp through the frame like smoky exhalations and those sirens still groan away somewhere in the distance. The various threads are knotted into a more legible form on 'Poetic Fallacy', when Jankowiak's decelerated beats overlap with heartbreaking half-speed melodies and Duffus's elegant hooks. Scout takes the mic for a moment and a broken de-tuned guitar picks out the remnants of a riff. But it's the aptly-titled 'Salto' that gives the album its nucleus, fixating on Jankowiak's all-important visual reference and using its imagery to power a genuine pop miniature, a gauzy, abstract modern R&B anthem that's as impressionistic and suggestive as Konwicki's's film.

TRACK LISTING

TBA

Rainy Miller is at the forefront of UK electronic music and loosely spinning around the axis of storied Salford club The White Hotel.

Having established himself at the forefront of the new sound of the UK, spearheading the boundary-less scene of alternative music, and gaining continued critical acclaim over the past few years, Rainy Miller presents his most personal project, the culmination of five years of work. The release follows on from his breakout album 'Desquamation' (2022) and follow up, collaborative full-length 'A Grisaille Wedding' (2023).

Initially inspired by the 2003 documentary ‘Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus’, an exploration of the intersection between Christianity and country music in the American South, Rainy became entrenched in the parallel similarities between the stories in the film to the stark realities of his own surroundings, the North of England.

Internalizing these connections, and reflecting on his own lived experiences, Rainy created ‘Joseph’ in an aesthetic he coins the Northern Gothic, a quasi anthropological British pastiche of the American Southern Gothic realm of the early 20th century.

Visually, the project references the forgotten notion of storytelling and the feeling of community that is prevalent amongst everyday life in the post-industrial North of England. In its bleak and often antiquated surroundings, Rainy explores the inherited pragmatism and resilience of its inhabitants, interjecting his own struggles and conciliations.

TRACK LISTING

1. Mud In My Mouth. (Predetermined Definitions)
2. Toddbrook Dam, 2019.
3. An Obsidian Lake Spews Out Of Me.
4. Vengeance.
5. Marked, 2020.
6. An Angel! This Way Comes,
7. Then Casts Shadows, From Afar (A6 - Pendleton).
8. Please, Don't Walk Away Too Fast.
9. Chrome, Hallowed Be.
10. To Grieve A Man, Is To Grieve A Man Twice.
11. Mary Magdalene, As A Home.
12. The Fable / The Release.
13. Joseph, What Have You Done?

Fixed Abode label head Rainy Miller met Space Afrika through regular nights he runs at Salford’s The White Hotel, a hub for leftfield electronic music. What started out as an idea for a collaborative EP between Rainy and Space Afrika turned into a longer form project, with features from Mica Levi, Coby Sey, Richie Culver, Voice Actor and Iceboy Violet - amongst others.

A Grisaille Wedding is an immersive experience that fills the space these artists have come to dwell in during their creative journeys. It not only pushes the boundaries of music but also bridges regional dialects within the conversation of contemporary electronic music.

Rainy Miller: “A Grisaille Wedding is a project based in the personification of the semi-fictitious world that Space Afrika have come to build over the years. Using musique concrete and British soundscapes, I wanted to fuse the sonic with both noise and the contemporary.”

Space Afrika: “The record’s title figuratively describes the marriage of two similarly motivated perspectives, each affected by a common backdrop and familiar ground tread amongst the scrimmage of urban sprawl, sombre, a boisterous landscape and clouds of uncertainty.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Summon The Spirit / Demon
2. Maybe It's Time To Lay Down The Arms
3. 00-Down / Murmansk, 12
4. Sweet (I'm Free)
5. Shelter
6. HDIF
7. The Graves At Charleroi
8. 1-2-1
9. Let It Die
10. I Believe In God, When Things Are Going My Way