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All Them Witches — House of Mirrors

2026-06-26T00:00:00Z

This is classic All Them Witches: House of Mirrors is unselfconsciously sinister, heavy riffs and desert rock, a little deranged.

Some of their recent albums had good stuff on them but weren't consistently incredible. Here they hit the theme end to end. The hard stuff is gritty and rough, exactly what I want to hear. The less hard stuff blends in seamlessly. It doesn't feel like filler, it feels of a kind, with perfect segues.

One of my favorites, "Starting Line", keeps popping into my head. Something perfectly desperate about this track. Maybe a reflection of the feeling of an intensifying and increasingly hopeless rat race that a lot of people experience these days. It could just as easily be a Depression-era ballad, the soundtrack to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, that sort of thing.

This album is a masterpiece. It's evidently very hard to accomplish an album that says something with this degree of consistency. Especially impressive that these guys are still doing it.

Chris SSG — Deep Breakfast Series 344

2026-06-19T00:00:00Z

Every Chris SSG mix is a banger, and this one is fantastic.

Strange way to describe these sets, since they're not loud or energetic. There's a lot of beautiful, intricate material being put out in this DJ-set form, broadly the minimal, ambient, atmospheric, quiet-instrumental category. Chris SSG, honestly, produces the most exquisitely constructed sets in this category. The way it all ties together, the consistency of the theme: absolutely beautiful.

The Deep Breakfast Series account and podcast looks like really high-quality stuff too. I'll be returning to this one.

llwll — ALEA IACTA EST

2026-06-18T00:00:00Z

I'm loving llwll's ALEA IACTA EST. I can't even pronounce the artist's name. I got to it through tokyona, one of their albums.

It's firmly in that breakcore, drum and bass category, rooted in that tradition. Like tokyona, it has a chaotic, frantic energy. There's something simultaneously hopeless about it, but it also feels like music you'd listen to while ascending to the supercomputer in the cloud during the singularity.

It evokes Neuromancer, the way the book keeps moving: it starts in a cyberpunk slum, then they're flying around the globe, then they're in space, and it ends up at Villa Straylight, where the Tessier-Ashpool family keep their AIs, Wintermute and Neuromancer. It all moves so quickly that it's like they're ascending.

What's a little different here is that it's darker. The heavy bass lines take it somewhere less whimsical than the tokyona album. Which is a weird thing to say, because that album is already pretty dark and a bit more serious.