Feedback Moves kicks off 2023 with a new record by @xcrswx and Lolina. @xcrswx are Crystabel Riley (drum-/human-skin) and Seymour Wright (saxophone), they released ‘Call Time/Hard Out’ on Feedback Moves in 2020. Lolina is an electronic and digital musician, who has previously released music as Inga Copeland and was a member of the band Hype Williams. Their collaborative relationship stems back to 2020. Lolina invited @xcrswx to contribute new work to a radio residency on NTS. They made 3 pieces played across 3 episodes. After these were broadcast, further ideas were exchanged which led to a collaborative audio-visual piece, streamed on Cafe Oto’s website in February 2021. They also performed as a trio live at Café OTO in 2022.The artists now present a split 10” vinyl. @xcrswx weave the above-mentioned pieces into a 10 minute piece titled ‘FIXES’. The duo strip their sound to bare components. Beginning with the sound of fireworks, the pair then work through stuttered snare shots and warbled, interplaying saxophone.Lolina presents ‘FM’; some of her strangest and most subtle work to date. Echoing and furthering the abstract turntablism found on previous records ‘Who Is Experimental Music?’ and ‘Fast Fashion’. We hear found sounds, close and distant, rhythmically gathered and dissolved in a swirl of dub tone and timbre.

Hot on the heels of last year's jerky "Fast Fashion" comes another confounding madness from Lolina, aka Inga Copeland. Less abstract than its predecessor, "Face the Music" hews closer to Lolina's Hype Williams-era songwriting, coating discernible songs in surrealist poetics and edgy pop subversion.  'Forget it Left Bank' is better yet, a brain-scraping rap-no-wave freakout that's lysergic and - almost -  catchy too. Lolina's deadpan half-rapped vocal is crucial: she sounds like 'Rapture'-era Debbie Harry but gives off a couldn't-care-less iciness of Tricky, slurring over a dollar bin hammond loop that's as perfectly skewed as anything on Leila's first couple of albums. Her tightrope walk is most visible here, as she teeters from pop coherence into freeform, reality-bending outlandishness, dropping the beat for lighters-in-the-air neo-psychedelia at almost random intervals. The pristine rap-not-rap atmosphere continues on the eerily polished 'Music is the Drug (Album Version)', a nu jack jammer that almost transcends its own strangeness. If you're not listening intently you might confuse it with pop music - Lolina's earworm chorus is catchy enough - but as always her touches poke the music just outside acceptable boundaries. This time it's dissonant jazz fusion blasts, and a prolonged outro that reverses the entire thing into a dragging solo shimmy.  It's an unwitting key to understanding "Face the Music", an album that on the surface might be the most straightforward set of songs Lolina has assembled - a virtual sequel to 2019's relatively nimble electro-pop influenced "The Smoke", but lurking in the shadows there's just as much seductive dissociation as the headmashing "Live in Geneva" or "Fast Fashion". Huge recommendation.