Milk Chocolate Motorik and More

Shiver me or go home. Startle me or make way! Awe me or ignore me.

That’s what I ask of music. Extremes of noise and silence; simplicity and invention; the obvious and the exotic. Move me by inventing alphabets or even simply reminding us of the ones from childhood we thought we forgot.

With great joy, I am here to tell you about three extraordinary new(ish) records. I do not grow tired of allowing grace, originality, power, the lush-lands of strange and strangely familiar beauty into my life; and even if you are not aware of these albums — or these artists — they are water to me, manna to me, air to me, objects of grace that I am so delighted to welcome into my day.

This trio of extraordinary art an’ delight are: WTF?? by Immersion, the magical ambi-kraut buttermilk & tension group created and curated by Colin Newman and Malka Spigel; EUROPOLIS by the exquisite, intense, extraordinary and sensitive Swedish pianist Maria Lettberg; and Firedove by the English organist and choir master Anna Lapwood.

All three complement each other in a curious way, which is to say they are all exotic yet utterly accessible, artistic but not arty, and gorgeously loaded with grace, space, and originality. These albums are full of every type of sky, every spire and of city and tile of subway and pine cone of country and alpine trail, and every bloody thing in between. Oh yes.

Since 1994 (but steadily for the last nine years), Brighton’s Immersion has been releasing some of the most compelling, sensual and sensory-rewarding art rock of our time. (Not hyperbole, the goddamn work bears this statement out.) All of their releases have also been consistently, well, lovable, which is to say it’s not difficult, no, not at all, though it is touched by joyous ingenuity and surprise. Generally, but especially on the new album, Immersion’s music is straight down the Autobahn chime and star-spray seascapes and cityscapes (with touches of bubblegum and music concrete), sort of like Stereolab via Morton Feldman with grandpa Roedelius babysitting the kids. Note to reader: If you’re not, uh, hip to Immersion, you’re missing one of the great art rock bands of our time.

Immersion’s lovely, pulsing, intimate, emotionally rich new album, WTF?? is their first album since 2018 not to be built around a collaboration with an outside artist (these collaborations, most recently released under the Immersion/Nanocluster moniker, have resulted in — literally — some of the most essential albums of the century. Am I kidding? I kid you not). WTF?? is the most slavishly (and lovely) krautrock-dusted album of Immersion’s krautrock-dusted career; and if it lacks some of the curious sharp angles and over-caffeinated/over-benadryl’d extremes of some of Immersions’ other work (all — and I mean ALL — of which is worth bathing in, investigating, luxuriating in, pondering),  WTF?? makes up for it with an even, hypnotic, sweet yet deep, bubbling grace. This is milk chocolate motorik, omigod, how simply wonderful it is to listen to this! WTF?? Is shot-through with a kind of four-to-the-floor that brings us back not only to the most glorious days of Neu!/Harmonia et al., but also the pulsing, thumping, simple but exotic majesty of Wire. And here we state something which is obvious to anyone who has followed Immersion: They are not a side-project of Wire (who are arguably — nah, make that inarguably — one of the greatest bands of all time); Immersion are another utterly brilliant, utterly essential band that happens to feature Wire’s Colin Newman. Side Project, sir and/or madam, it is not. Listening to this album is like hearing your favorite motorik-derived artrock wrapped in fur; WTF?? chimes, soars, streams, sluices through the night and through the day like a Streamliner Dreamliner; you know how when you drive through the low, green hills of the Adirondacks or the Berkshires on a perfect wet gray day,  it appears that the hills are steaming clouds, like there is a cloud factory coming off of the hills? That’s what WTF?? sounds like: a sweet, strange, persistent, melodic cloud factory.

WTF?? has a stellar quality that it shares with the two albums I will briefly discuss below, EUROPOLIS and Firedove: It’s simply a delight to listen to, artistic but not artsy, painless and seductive to the utter novice but full of endless originality and depth. (I know I used the phrase “artistic but not artsy,” or something like it, earlier in this piece, but it’s a great way to shorthand the vibe of all three of these records.) True: the other two albums I want to profile today would generally be filed under “classical,” but delight transcends classifications, doesn’t it?

EUROPOLIS, by Swedish pianist Maria Lettberg, is, more than anything else, present: It is the sound of delicate, sometimes complex, material presented with grace, space, and presence, and it is present — as in it is in us, always with us waiting to be revealed, as if it is made for our ears and our hearts. I’ve been a fan of Lettberg for a while; her interpretations of Scriabin and Erkki Melartin are essential, and everything she plays, she plays as if she was listening to the spaces, listening to her heart, as if she was full of hope and fear (my god, I love people who play the spaces, not just the notes). EUROPOLIS, a 27-song, 80-minute collection made up largely of familiar, melodic, and emotional material, is touching, effective, and draws the listener in to a place where we both attend and unwind. Like a great pop record, it involves and engages, and takes the listeners through moods, movements, moments of simplicity and complication, the exotic and familiar. Listen, listener: If you’re only going to get one classical piano album this year, EUROPOLIS is the one.

Anna Lapwood is a mainstream classical star in the U.K., with a significant cult here — she is one of the world’s premiere organists and choirmasters, and she’s a prominent media personality in the U.K., too — but we are going to ignore that, since it’s likely she will be a new name to most of our readers.  Firedove — built largely around her extraordinary skills as an organist, choir arranger, interpreter and morpher of styles — is one exquisite fucking album. It has the effect of Dark Side of the Moon, or some really first-rate 1970s Dead live album. Which is to say it’s a gorgeous and emotional and riveting and moving trip through time and space, and asks the listener to ask their own heart questions! How do these gorgeous diamond drops and pearl ropes of music make me feel, what books in the library of my heart do they reach for? Absolutely loaded with space, volume, silence, tension (my god, my god, what an album), Firedove moves from the seismic, near-silent lower-reaches of the organ to hushed choir pieces that make sculptures out of our tears. Oh and “Make You Feel My Love,” performed by the Chapel Choir of Pembroke College, Cambridge (under Lapwood’s leadership), may be flat-out the most original and heart-stopping Dylan cover you’ve ever heard (and, after Tom Jones’ “Not Dark Yet,” one of the best Dylan covers of all time). Get this fucking album (and that’s without even discussing the vastly original and shiver-inducing organ cover of Robbie Williams’ “Angels.”) Lapwood reaches for the mainstream, but hits the Milky Way on the way there, or rather, shows that the two are wholly compatible.

Now, these following words apply to all three of these albums, and they may seem extreme, but the more I listen to Immersion’s WTF??, Lettberg’s EUROPOLIS, and Lapwood’s Firedove, the more I feel this kind of language is earned: Music is the language of chills the poetry of the wordless heart.

Imagine if music was the David that existed inside every block of Carrara marble, yet only the most skilled (or the most innocent, or the most imaginative) of humans could release it in its’ truly effective, emotive, and empathetic brilliant, original, and aboriginal forms. What if the most graceful and heart-breaking/heart stimulating music was always there, waiting, for a million and more years, to be revealed by the most sensitive or terrifying seers; and then: it is released by grace. It is released by joy. It is released by need. This kind of music would be beautiful to extremes; it would shake with beauty. And then realized, when released, It invites us, joyously, easily, to consider ways of seeing, ways of hearing.

On these extraordinary new records, Immersion, Lapwood and Lettberg achieve that: This is the starlit and heart-thumped music of the Lotus Born and the Gologotha pierced, which is to say, it is holy pop, easy on the ears and running laps around the heart.

Treat yourselves, bring some aural luxury into your life: Spend some time with WTF??, EUROPOLIS and Firedove.

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Tim Sommer

Tim Sommer is a musician, record producer, former Atlantic Records A&R representative, WNYU DJ, MTV News correspondent, VH1 VJ, and founding member of the band Hugo Largo. He is the author of Only Wanna Be with You: The Inside Story of Hootie & the Blowfish and has written for publications such as Trouser Press, the Observer and The Village Voice. Learn more at Tim Sommer Writing.

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