I Learned to Call You - Drumloop (2025)
Drumloop has been on my radar ever since her collaboration with the Rita. I Learned to Call You couldn't be further from the craggly formations of makeup application found on EYELINES, and I can't recommend it enough.
New York is a resonate title, not only for the opening track, but every expansive valley of sound that proceeds it. Of all the music that I bring with me to cities, whether it be gloomy jazz or the fluorescent bubbles of Deepchord, ambient such as this is may be the only that can encapsulate their transcendent essence.
I could never live in a city. But I enjoy visiting them. Condensed life and rampant size, the profoundness of knowing so many are around me in their own worlds, the roughness. Staring out at glowing buildings in darkness.
This album encapsulates that sensation, but it's also deeply intimate. Something close has been lost between people. Alex Zhang Hungtai mourns it with his saxophone. Unapologetic synths center themselves in the precipice of the enormity. Circumferences of spacetime, and the people who exist at either end.