Back catalogue: Leftfield

Review: South Carolina singer and producer Niecy Blues describes her songwriting process like an undertow: "I feel a strange pull, and let it carry me, following swirling leaves/whole days roll by, forgetting about the body." Their full-length debut, Exit Simulation, captures this sense of deep-rooted divination, cycling between simmering ballads, ghosted r&b, downtempo gospel, and looped vocal improvisations - often within the same track. The title is taken from a science fiction novel she read during the purgatory of the pandemic, alluding to a dimensional ideation of departure - "the permission to imagine leaving." Recorded in her current home of Charleston, she characterizes the album's mood in terms both reflective and raw: an exploration of things suppressed, foundations beginning to crack, "talking myself off a ledge." The music of Niecy Blues transposes reverie and reckoning into emotive devotionals of keys, guitar, bass, synth, and bewitched voice, steeped in sacred atmospheres gleaned from a youth spent in a religious Oklahoma household: "My first experience with ambient music was church - slow songs of worship, with delay on the guitar - even if you don't believe, you feel something."

Review: A fresh, atmospheric sound is proferred by South Carolina singer and producer Nancy Blues in the form of her latest vinyl LP Exit Simulation, in which she cuts through the intertwined hazes of childhood memory and personal psychogeography to produce a veritably ultra-ambient dust cloud of sound in 13 tracks. At its core, the album trickles faintly forth from the watershed that is neo-soul - multi-layering her voice; harmonizing; pitting honest, raw rimshots-n'-crackles against contemporary stylistic cornerstones like lo-fi and night-bussy ambient electronica - all to evoke, convincingly, the mood of stasis in which she finds current solace in her current home of Charleston. Evocative of having found a newfound time and place to reflect, Blues conjures up the weekends of her youth, spent mesmerized at the ambient music of the slow-paced devotionals performed by the local Oklahoman church band.