Recorded in 2018 at NEXT festival in Bratislava, Zwarte Vijvers is two side long pieces by Belgian singer-mangler Èlg, a consistently underrated musician who made my favourite release on Hundebiss records about ten years ago, and who collaborated with the late Ghédalia Tazartès and Jo Tanz as Reines d'Angleterre for a Bo'Weavil LP which also comes highly recommended. Sonically, Èlg and Tazartes are a good match – they operate in similar spheres of not-songs, with different geographical and generational touchpoints. Here, there's singing once removed, as if performing to an unknown audience neither in this world nor the next (despite it being a live recording to an audience in meatspace). There are murky (but not doomy) drum machines defiantly un-synced and off-beat, exploited for their percussive function but not their rhythm keeping capacity. There's a distinctive weft to his recordings, something dry and claggy and tangled, and a sense in which a performance of songs looms in a blind spot I cannot quite focus on.