REVIEWS/PREVIEWS ROUNDUP
WORDS: DOMINIC VALVONA
Not that I ever mean to do it, but this month’s roundup does have a tenuous theme of sorts, or rather many of the releases in this, the 52nd edition of my eclectic revues, are more or less all experimenting with the electronic music format in one way or another. The sagacious counterculture totem and beatnik poet of renown, John Sinclair leads the charge this month, his vivid jazz lyricism recitations put to an evocative soundtrack by Youth on the mini-album Beatnik Youth Ambient. Jono Podmore’s recently re-launched label, Psychomat, follows up on the inaugural release with another electronic peregrination – this time far more melodic and dreamy –, from the mysterious Reason Stendec. Working in isolation and apart, never meeting in person, the Room Of Wires duo release their third EP of otherworldly and atmospheric techno and downtempo beats, Black Medicine. And an assortment of artists from the ambient, trance, electronica fields contribute towards the One String Inspiration project, highlighting and collecting money for the Syria Relief charity effort.
We also have the latest and it seems final album of outsider New York slacker pathos from Charles Griffin Gilson, otherwise known as CHUCK. Calling it quits on his alter ego, due to a multitude of reasons, Gilson records his sincere CHUCK swan songs collection, Frankenstein Songs For The Grocery Store, for the Audio Antihero label.
Read on for full analysis and review…
John Sinclair ‘Beatnik Youth Ambient’
Ironman Records, 28th July 2017
Synonymous for steering and kicking out the jams in his short role as manager of Detroit’s renowned rebel rousing motherfuckers The MC5, renegade poet, scholar, activist and establishment rattler John Sinclair is also remembered for his free radical zeal and dalliances with the law.
Even too hardcore for the MC5, Sinclair’s foundation of the anti-racist socialist White Panthers, and his countless associations with equally revolutionary counterculture players and shakers, marked him out; leading as it did to the now infamous drug bust for marijuana possession in 1969. Whilst his love for the herb and gesticulations, whether through poetry or diatribes, is in no doubt, the way this particular bust was set-up (for what was a very insignificant amount of drugs) is considered heavy-handed and unjustifiable. Handed an initial ten-year sentence, Sinclair’s status in the “heads” and political agitators communities had singled him out as a poster child for deterring the like-minded boomer generation from stepping out of line. Fortunately (to a degree) this sentence and media furor galvanized support and sympathy and reduced that ten-year stretch to two, with Sinclair emerging from jail in 1971.
Keeping his hand in so to speak, but taking up residency in Amsterdam – a much safer bet -, the beatnik jazz sage continued, and as you can hear on this latest recording, continues, to record and perform in a host of setups with a multitude of contributors and backing bands.
The appropriately (in every sense) entitled Beatnik Youth Ambient mini LP is a foretaste, and as the title implies, ambient treatment version of material from a full-length album, due to be released later on in September. The “Youth” of that title refers of course to the Killing Joke bassist turn in-demand producer Martin Glover. Arguably one of the most consistent producers over the last few decades in the UK, Glover, under his Youth alter ego, has taken on more or less most forms of music and worked on both commercial and underground experimental projects. But he’s perhaps better known for pushing the boundaries of dub through his own productions and with a number of other artists; notably setting up the WAU! Mr. Modo imprint with fellow Orb band member Alex Paterson in 1989.
He now provides Sinclair’s “literary synthesis” with a suitable “beatnik ambient” soundtrack: a serialism quartet of turmoil, turbulent jazz and dreamier trance.
Split into two sides, Sinclair’s sagacious burr recitations are left to flow with only an occasional echo, reverb or metallic ominous effect added for atmosphere or to reinforce the sentiment and hallucinatory philosophy. The opening history lesson, Do It, which enthuses this generation to once again upend the status quo, turns Sinclair’s cerebral lyricism into a quasi-dance track rallying cry: the lingering reflective melodic and amorphous synth chorus in the first half of the track gradually joined by an Orb-like cloud-bursting trance beat.
Running through a vivid purview of postwar counterculture, bringing to life the energy and excitement that writers such as Kerouac (who gets referenced a lot) captured when seeing the Bebop jazz revolution and its great proponents perform, Sinclair delivers a magical enthusiastic experience on the next peregrination and nod to Thelonious Monk’s 1957 LP of the same name, Brilliant Corners. Titans of American beatnik and psychedelic literature lineup, Burroughs, Ginsberg and Neal Cassady (“…had the ability to park a car anywhere”, just one of his talents alongside his status as the “human bridge between the 50s and 60s.”), rubbing shoulders with jazz music’s new guard Lester Young, Byrd and Gillespie; immortalized by Sinclair to “head music” cosmos of jazzy lamenting woe, ghostly squawking and hooting saxophone and swirling mirages.
The greatest “head trip” however is saved until last. Sinclair channeling Captain Beefheart delivering the most “high” meandering TED talk ever, translates, or rather makes a reification of the almost impossible to articulate spark and feelings that kick started the whole boomer generation of beatniks, on the spiritual jazz voyage Sitarrtha. Sitars shimmer, an electric guitar twists and contorts, snares are played in a military, misty revolutionary reveille style, and the saxophone battles on as Sinclair implores us to grasp his message: a return to the real.
A eulogy of a sort, certainly homage, fellow renegade and jailbird, the late convivial Welsh sage Howard Marks reads out a befitting War On Drugs. Part epistle, part rambling thoughts, Marks, the cosmic prophet, weaves between the nonsensical and profound, the intimate and enraged. An obvious candidate and fellow drug evangelist, Marks makes a welcome addition to Sinclair’s congregation.
If anything, Beatnik Youth Ambient leaves the listener pining for a lost age; Sinclair’s evocative prose and delivery lifted (and cradled at times) by Youth’s congruous seething tensions and floaty dream-like production, which enthrall me to once again get stuck in to the “beat generation” and spin those Savoy label jazz totem recordings again. A prompt for the present times, the zeal of the postwar “baby boomers” (those with a soul anyway) counterculture not necessarily translating to generations X, Y and Z, even if it is needed; Sinclair’s language is nevertheless just as powerfully descriptive and energizing now as it was over forty years ago.
Reason Stendec ‘Impulsion EP’
Psychomat, 17th July 2017
Wingman to Can’s Irmin Schmidt and the late Jaki Liebezeit, on both a myriad of band legacy projects and various collaborations over the years; solo electronic music composer, and professor to boot; and in the last few years, part of the analogue manifesto enthused trio, Metamono; Jono Podmore has just recently, in the last two months, after a twenty year hiatus, re-launched his 90s Psychomat record label. The aim being to release, in both physical and digital formats, a cerebral experimental run of electronic music 7”s.
Featured on the Monolith Cocktail in June the inaugural extemporized Podmore & Swantje Lichtenstein partnership of serialism amorphous avant-garde backing and exploratory spoken word, Miss Slipper/Lewes, and subsequent series of remixes that followed, laid down the foundations and signature ascetics of the label. Record number two, Reason Stendec’s Impulsion EP, congruously keeps up the momentum: just as shrouded in mystery; every bit as challenging, but this time around for more melodic and flowing, and on Podmore’s (under his Kumo persona) remix treatment transforms the original material into a bubbling Roland TRs acid techno (reminiscent of Waveform Transmission era Jeff Mills and Derrick Carter) thumper.
An interesting story lies behind that Reason Stendec moniker, which helps to reinforce a sense of mystique. “Stendec” was the last, and as it turned out confounding, word of a Morse code message sent by the crew of the doomed Lancastrian flight between Buenos Aires and Santiago on August 2nd 1947. Turning into a conspirator dream factory of ever outlandish, convoluted theories, including the obligatory alien abduction angle, the Stendec saga had to wait 51 years to be finally laid to rest. It certainly had all the right components for a conspiracy or unworldly mystery, disappearing completely as it did, with no signs of wreckage, no bodies and the most cryptic of messages left to unscramble. But as it turned out the plane crashed, the impact as it hit one the looming mountain ranges triggered an avalanche that buried and entombed the plane and passengers for decades in an area known as the Tupungato glacier. As it thawed over those years, the plane was exposed and finally discovered by mountain climbers.
With this in mind, Reason Stendec cast a spell of otherworldliness; wafting along on a ghostly visage of Pan-European and Arabian sounding influences: like a breeze over an imaginary sand dune landscape, heightened by knife-sharpening percussion.
Like Grace Jones’ Parisian tango en vogue dalliances and contralto husky romantic burr crossed with a restrained Diamanda Galas, the vocals on this track follow the sonic contours; switching from an opening chant to English, French and German. A Vocal Mix version of the same track manipulates, pitch-shifts, bit-crushes, and refashions the voice into various forms: ominous and cybernetic, ritualistic and floating; one minute quivering towards the operatic, the next, in an incantation style.
A languid, lingering and sophisticated turn, the Impulsion EP is another electronica adventure and move in the right direction; both befitting the Psychomat label’s raison d’être yet cerebrally drifting off into more melodic, flowing directions.
CHUCK ‘Frankenstein Songs For The Grocery Store’
Audio Antihero, 18th August 2017
Bowing out (or bailing out) on a high note with another signature collection of pathos rich idiosyncratic slacker anthems and plaints, Charles Griffin Gilson calls time on his alter ego CHUCK. Stating a number of reasons for this closure, including his recent marriage, hitting thirty and honestly feeling he just hasn’t got it in him anymore, Gilson releases his final swansong, Frankenstein Songs For The Grocery Store, on the perfect home for such a maverick artists, Audio Antihero.
A most generous offering it is too: fifteen observatory songs and instrumentals of wistful, often of a despondent, bent, with ruminations on diets, exercise, work, love, TV and animals – more in the metaphorical sense.
An outsider of a kind, originally upping sticks from his Massachusetts home to New York, Gilson’s CHUCK persona whimsically, though often stirringly sad, looks at the foibles of living in the metropolis. This is exemplified in the most direct way on the bubbly knockabout (tongue-in-cheek) tribute to New York and its citizens, New Yorker, which lists a number of postcard landmarks made (in)famous in song and reputation (from Rockaway Beach to Hipster Williamsburg), and the personal traits, such as their stereotype brash offensive manner, of many of its residents: “Get the hell outta my way/Now go and die.”
Though just as domineering theme wise is the ‘social media’ constraints and context of a wider world, encroaching upon (as much as deriving from) these New York musings. This can be heard on the millennial blues trysts Becky and Bodies, which both feature a number of references to our obsession for validation in the online world. The pains of never growing up, streaming lives through a never-ending feed of updates and memes, Gilson encapsulates in his slightly nasal lo fi emo meets Tom Petty, Jonathan Richman, Clouds and Daniel Johnston waking up late in a Williamsburg bedsit style of delivery the regrets and anxieties of a generation growing up in a society that’s never offline: one that conducts its love affairs over a smart phone.
There’s a real sadness to many of these relationship-themed laments; the modern travails of long-distance love in an ever-connected but alienating world, and as with the Dylan-esque flowing turn pizzicato Arcade Fire rousing Caroline, an almost resigned to fate, shrugged, relationship with the ill-suited cavalier subject of the title: “My friends say you’re wasting my time/Baby I don’t mind.”
Whether dreamily drifting along to tropical palm swaying alluded notes, lasers, synthesizer presets and fanned phaser effects, Gilson sings of both unrequited love, gaining and regaining love in a languorous candid manner: removed but betraying a real fragility and care for his characters.
And so we bid fond well to CHUCK, though whether that means a more grown-up post-millennial with commitments Gilson emerges in its wake remains to be seen and heard. I only know that it’s a real shame that he’s decided to call time on his creation. Frankenstein Songs For The Grocery Store is a fitting swansong.
Various Artists ‘One String Inspirations’
So much has happened on the international stage since the April release date of this benefit for Syria album, yet the bitter catastrophic Syrian civil war still rages on unabated by talks and the erosion of ISIS in the country and bordering regions (especially more recently, Iraq). Now in its seventh year with no sign of ending anytime soon, the ensuing humanitarian tragedy throws more desperate Syrian refugees to the mercy of people smugglers and their cadre. Entangled with a never-ending flood of those escaping the devastation of this conflict and with those escaping poverty and violence from across a wide area of the Middle East, Asia and Africa, the Mediterranean has, even this summer, seen huge numbers desperately making the crossing to Europe.
Statistics are staggering: the Syria Relief charity website, which all funds from this release go towards, refers to 6 million children inside the warzone currently needing urgent humanitarian assistance, alone. With this glaring travesty in mind, the 28-track One String Inspiration compilation offers a stirring collection of poetic (and not so poetic: see the bish bosh no-nonsense punk raging Hostile Skies by 3 Chords & A Lie) indictments and bleak instrumental soundtrack atmospheres. The premise of which, alluded to in some ways via the title, challenges each artist to feature either a found or self-made instrument in their composition. Not that any of the results sound restrictive, even if it means some artists have had to move outside their “comfort zones” in the process.
Most of the contributions could be classed in the ambient or experimental sound and mood categories: The opening tabla rattling, spinning travail Night Journey To The Coast by Bowmer Holmes setting the right scene of magical Middle Eastern promise and reflection. Serene veiled drones and obscured leviathan movements follow with the Melodic Energy Commission’s Hole In Timeless and the transmogrified Animal Waves, by Can, put through a wobbly switched-on Bach treatment Budget Airlines from Detlev Everling – which shows a certain sense of humor and offers a kooky respite from the moodier material.
Tribal futurism, ratchet-y workshop mechanics, Transglobal Underground laments and duck quacks abound until reaching the stark folksy plaintive lyricism of Anna Knight’s unapologetic indictment on the refugee crisis, With His Lifejacket. Following the fateful plight of one poor unfortunate child, drowned like so many others crossing the straits to Europe, Knight somberly mourns but also attacks the inhumanity and cruelty of it all.
Full-on warping drum’n’bass and techno (courtesy of the tetchy Kitchen Sink Drama by Glove Of Bones) at its most lively, tapping an object to produce a serial environmental accompaniment at its most minimalist, and whistling to a wood shavings itchy dub track at its most strange, One String Inspiration features a diverse and generous range of wonders; many of which evoke the Warp (early on in its creation), Leaf and First World labels.
A few months on and just as vital, the collection in its own small way keeps the crisis in the spotlight, as more and more artists do their bit and make sense of such chaos.
Room Of Wires ‘Black Medicine’
Section 27
For a duo of sonic experimentalists that have never met – working apart in total isolation -, the Room Of Wires partnership, no matter how seething with ominous twists and turns, is a complimentary synchronized meeting of minds.
The rather anonymous, faceless downtempo and in industrial techno composers manipulate, churn and whip up a mysterious combination of futuristic atmospheres and inner turmoil on their third, most recent, EP Black Medicine.
Beginning as they mean to progress, the kinetic chain snaking opener Game Over builds gradually, weaving touches of Kraftwerk, Basic Channel and Mike Dred to a rhythmic soundscape of harmonious discord. Undulating spheres, radio waves, obscured broadcasted voices and stretching creaks and expanding steel structures move overhead on the following space journey Protected Space, whilst Temple Run juxtaposes lumbering bit-crushing monolith punctuations with a haunting Oriental siren chorus.
Unsettling and sonorous in places, yet able to lift the miasma and darkness with lightened breaks of more serene, glowing synth waves, Room Of Wires constantly offer glimmers of humanity and nature: even if the voices, transmissions sound lost and ebbing away like ghostly visages. A mouthful of Black Medicine that won’t do you any harm.
Playlist: The Monolith Cocktail Social #29
July 21, 2017
A PLAYLIST FROM OUR IMAGINARY RADIO SHOW OR ‘SOCIAL’
Chosen by Dominic Valvona
In danger of repeating myself, but for newcomers to the site here’s the premise of my playlist selections. Previously only ever shared via our Facebook profile and on Spotify our regular Monolith Cocktail Social playlists will also be posted here on the blog itself.
With no themes or demarcated reasoning we pick songs from across a wide spectrum of genres, and from all eras. Reaching edition #29 and still as eclectic as ever, this latest playlist chosen by me, Dominic Valvona, features Canadian Hollywood tipping rock glory from Neil Merryweather, the funk, the whole funk and nothin’ but the funk from Bernie Worrell, Afrobeat garage from Wells Fargo, beautiful flighty jazz transmogrifications of The Beatles via Ramsey Lewis, and experimental peregrinations of fantasy from Nicole Mitchell. There’s also tracks from Monomono, Gurumanix, The Stepkids, Trane, Leland, Sensations Fix (a regular at the Monolith over the years), Syrinx and many more (see full tracklist below).
Tracklist:-
Neil Merryweather ‘Hollywood Blvd.’
Birth Control ‘Hope (Single Version)’
Sensations Fix ‘Substance Of U’
Bernie Worrell ‘Woo Together’
Soul Explosives ‘Tryin To Get Down’
Rim Kwaku Obeng, The Believers, KASA ‘I’m A Song Writer’
Tee Mac ‘Nepa Oh Nepa’
Shintaro Sakamoto ‘死者よ’
Tommy Mcgee ‘Come On’
Peace ‘I Don’t Know’
John Holt ‘Help Me Make It Through The Night’
Buckley ‘My, My, My’
The Beach Boys ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’
Peter Giger ft. Trilok Gurtu, Family Of Percussion, Archie Shepp, Wolfgang Dauner and Albert Mangelsdorff ‘Trans Tanz’
Goran Kajfes Subtropic Arkestra ‘Dokuz Seki/Esmerim’
Marco Di Marco ‘Le Mors Aux Dents’
The Last Poets ‘It’s A Trip’
Wells Fargo ‘Love Of My Life’
Monomono ‘Get Yourself Together’
Jesse Davis ft. Eric Clapton ‘Washita Love Child’
Gurumaniax ‘Voodoo Touch’
Min Bul ‘Champagne Of Course (Instrumental)’
Ramsey Lewis ‘Black Bird’
Ahmed Malek ‘Les Vacances De L’inspecteur Tahar’
Joe Maneri ‘Paniots Nine’
Shirley Nanette ‘All Of Your Life’
Eduardo Araujo and Silvinha ‘Sou Filho Deste Chão’
The Stepkids ‘Sweet Salvation’
Autumn ‘Goblin’s Gamble’
Pretty ‘Mustache In Your Face’
Trane ‘Still Burning Bright’
Hard Stuff ‘Jay Time’
Leland ‘I’ve Got Some Happiness’
Boots For Dancing ‘Salt In The Ocean’
Family Fodder ‘Savoir Faire (Single Version)’
Gabor Szabo ‘Song Of Injured Love’
Nicole Mitchell ‘Dance Of Many Hands’
Syrinx ‘Syren’
THE ESSENTIAL HIP-HOP REVIEW
WORDS: MATT OLIVER
Prodigy, Mobb Deep, 1974-2017
The clickbait-certified Rapture & Verse has been keeping its cool by ducking into reissues of old skool watersheds from Boogie Down Productions, Special Ed, Run DMC, Del tha Funkee Homosapien and Souls of Mischief, and noting Main Source are on their way to London for a 25th anniversary ‘Breakin Atoms’ tour. Everywhere else, the heat has been melting minds and addling brains, what with 90s legends found sporting socialite attire, the honourable Ugly God cornering a battle rap niche by slagging himself off, Chance the Rapper in a supposed trademark dispute with a pastry chain, and of course Jay-Z releasing a new album, belatedly working out what to do when life gives you lemons.
Singles/EPs
Confucius MC and Mr Brown are all about ‘The Artform’, a straight up seven track EP radiating heat from an undisclosed location. Rhymes retort with polar-level poise to beats turning the screw, and both send the temperature rising until it becomes an interrogation tactic. In ‘The Garden of Eden’, Benaddict stays true, a leisurely stroll allowing his thoughts to roam freely and find their target with finely detailed accuracy. ‘I Arrived Late’ announces Verb T, but you’ll forgive his tardiness when the chipper yet advisory rhymes and bubbly organ-pushed beats of Pitch 92 get you out your seat. Not quite a fascist regime and requiring little instruction, Too Many T’s’ ‘God Save the T’s’ bounces on through, mics attached to wrecking ball elastic.
To an itchy, tripped out beat from BBS, Lost Identity cuts through the haze on ‘Plaque’, spitting hard and unperturbed by the shadows inching up towards him. New York-Yorkshire monopoly Madison Washington show the power of non-conformity on the ‘Code Switchin’ EP, a half dozen shake up where Malik Ameer and thatmanmonkz keep their cool when mixing rolling funk and flows, and creating scenes with arch alchemy. Spectacular Diagnostics gets close to the edge, so don’t push him – ‘Rambo Bars’ a big boom bap deal thrashed out by Conway the Machine, Chris Crack and Nolan the Ninja. With Apollo Brown barely cueing a fusty, unsteady piano loop, Planet Asia and Willie the Kid reveal ‘Dalai Lama Slang’ to put the peace firmly in its place.
Four tracks from DJ Shadow, including his recent collaboration with Nas and a typically steamin’ performance from Danny Brown, bugged out electro boom bap and cinematic cyber engineering, make ‘The Mountain Has Fallen’ an EP with plenty of chameleon behaviour. Simultaneously spacious and claustrophobic, Grieves precedes a new LP by trying to hold back encroaching walls on the eerily gracious ‘RX’. Crowning the ‘Samurai Killa’, Big Bob reading up on how to create a dynasty involving nunchucks and ancient scriptures is enough for five hungry combatants to vie for the belt. John Reilly is a sure shot smoothly cocking back when ‘High Noon’ comes around: simple as.
Albums
Fresh from his fine Frankenstein project fusing Nas and Madlib, David Begun introduces Eminem and Pete Rock to his bootleg laboratory. Suffice to say it’s unsettling to hear the cartoon capers and savage psychosis of Slim Shady smoothed out by The Chocolate Boy Wonder, but that’s the essence of ‘Marshall and The Soul Brother’ for you. Fresh from redressing ‘The Symphony’, the posse cut’s posse cut now found wearing daisy chains, maverick soundsmith Will C sets out to ‘Bless the Beats & Children’ with his hip-hop hot take on The Carpenters. Tastefully calibrated instrumentalism is the pleasing result to get all cynics onside.
For the hardcore head nod faction, Tone Chop and Frost Gamble make a good case for the fact ‘Respect is Earned Not Given’. New York honour is defended through raspy chew ups and spit outs, unequivocal titles such as ‘Get Beat Down’, ‘Walk the Walk’ and Guillotine Chop’, and producer process that cools down and wades in once his vocalist finds his lane. Chop and Gamble land their punches as a safe bet. Though a different beast from his old man, the one and only Big Punisher, the ‘Delorean’-riding Chris Rivers is super lyrical, coming on hardcore while still leaving plenty of room for the clubs and the ladies. Although prey to the age old quandary of attempting to nail every modern hip-hop convention, Rivers’ photo is never found fading, a good quality, next generation endorsement of capital punishment.
A drop of ‘Dopp Hopp’ a day will keep the haters away, The Doppelgangaz keeping you on your toes despite placing their worth on the cusp of a spiralized trip. The lyrical NY jabs and way of thinking from beneath superhero/clergy robes will have this creep up on the button marked ‘repeat’ until it progresses to heavy rotation. By design or otherwise, everything feels summery, completed by the G-funk themes of ‘Roll Flee’ and ‘Beak Wet’.
A free download for a limited time celebrating 30 years of shutting ‘em down, Public Enemy’s ‘Nothing is Quick in the Desert’ keeps fire in its belly, can still shred an axe and dismissively fires off messages that still can’t be argued with (particularly with social media giving them a whole new profile to blast at). Street struck off some back alley black magic are LMNO and Twiz the Beatpro. Either riding the bull into the red rag as ‘Cohorts’ or found twitching under the influence of the illusionary, there’s an unseen pull making it an album that offers more than just tough-tipped, rough lipped beats and rhymes.
More smooth criminal masterminding from that man Giallo Point, this time with the sure and spiky Smoovth leading operations, makes ‘Medellin’ a mob merry-go-round reaching out to a varied cast (Sonny Jim, Vinnie Paz but two on call) of cold hearts applying heat. Actually quite a relaxed listen, transporting you to a world of mythological opulence while secretly measuring you for concrete shoes. Vince Staples’ negotiation of fresh house, garage and twists on trap veers between foot down force and playing suitably vacant for the club’s benefit. With the miscellany of ‘Big Fish Theory’, come for the rebel, stay for the rhythms.
Mixtapes
A daunting reconstruction of peace out of crumpled MPCs and repurposed trap, Clams Casino’s ‘4’ gets industrially scalded hip-hop beats to smash into post-dubstep introspection, stirring a beast raging inside abstract beauty, and making you nod into a complex but satisfying headspace. Though it’s long understood there are six million ways to die, Royce da 5’9” has got the next six million trademarked with the incredible show & prove of ‘The Bar Exam 4’, destroying vernacular establishment for 28 tracks and 90 minutes at a frankly preposterous level of breaking mics down to their very last compound.
Come and watch Datkid turn the world inside out, a face-off between Tyler and A$AP Rocky, and The Mouse Outfit’s latest uprising.
Our Daily Bread 253: Hidden Musics 4: Abatwa (The Pygmy) ‘Why Did We Stop Growing Tall?’
July 11, 2017
REVIEW/FEATURE
WORDS: DOMINIC VALVONA
Various Artists ‘Hidden Music Volume 4: Abatwa (The Pygmy): Why Did We Stop Growing Tall?’
Glitterbeat Records, 18th August 2017
Renowned producer (and author of some note) Ian Brennan, yet again probing the furthest, most inhospitable and outright dangerous places in the world to record marginalized voices, journeys to the post genocide borderlands of Rwanda on the latest volume in Glitterbeat Records illuminating Hidden Musics series.
Taking the unmarked, haphazard, road (less traveled) to the edges of Rwanda, avoiding the animosity and embers of vengeance that still burn and remain between the country’s minority Tutsis and majority Hutu communities, Brennan visited and recorded for posterity the Abatwa tribe’s seldom heard lament, anger and incredible soulful, if raw, blues.
Though not directly involved in the ensuing genocide that followed on from the country’s apocalyptic civil war in the mid 90s – officially and despite much skeptical revisionism over the years, this genocide was started by the Hutu and carried out with terrifying savagery upon the Tutsis, the population of which, depending on the source you use, was decimated by up to 70% (that equates to between 500,000 to a million murdered, all within a matter of three months) – the Abatwa both lost around a third of its own tribe and carried out some of the attacks.
If the Abatwa name is remains mostly unknown outside Africa, that’s because, due to their limited growth, we know them better as the ‘Pygmy’. A derogatory name loaded with infamy, yet preferred by the very people it derides, the tribe rather that put-down than (as Brennan puts it) “the official PC mouthful/post-genocidal replacement: The people who were left behind because of the facts of Rwandan history.”
In part, those size limitations have were shaped and made worse by the fact that traditionally the tallest women in the Abatwa attracted outside attention, and were taken as wives by other tribes – one answer to the album’s rhetorical title, “Why Did We Stop Growing Tall?”
Local comedian Simbuvara photo by Marilena Delli
In this environment – described in linear notes with the signature frank, un-PC, highly informative and entertaining Brennan travelogue style – peppered with teenage breakdancers that ‘could out-battle any South Queens sidewalk challenger’, a enervated surreal ‘tag-team lounge duo playing an off-key Bob Marley medley’, and plenty of anecdotes to dispel a rafter of myths and assumptions – the hands-off field recorder finds both inspiring and veracious acts of endurance and survival.
Patrick Manishimine photo by Marilena Delli
There are a number of themes that run through both this, volume four in the series, and the previous three documentations, Hanoi Masters, Khmer Rouge Survivors and Paul Chandler’s phenomenal Every Song Has Its End: Sonic Dispatches From Traditional Mali (all of which made our albums of the year lists): including the saving of traditions and voices of communities under attack from the onslaught of modernism and erosion of cultures outside the mainstream; and drawing attention to the legacy of problems arising from war and insurrection. But there is also similarities sound wise between all four volumes; namely a form of atavistic, primal, and in my opinion the best kind, of blues, that is eerily echoed in what is one of the genres birthplaces, Mali, but can also be found ringing in the deltas of Cambodia.
Sitting in for, and one of the progenitors no doubt to the six-string, are the ragtag assembled instruments of tradition: the one-string ‘Umuduli’ and eleven-string ‘Icyembe’. Practitioners of these two stalwart attenuate instruments can be heard on the scratchy, tangled spring-y Rwanda Nzizza (Beautiful Rwanda) paean by the great soulful voiced Emmanuel Hatungimana, and the caressing, peacefully played Ihorere (Stop Crying Now) duet lament by the wife and husband duo Emmanuel Habumuremy and Ange Kamagaju.
A kind of boxed canoe turn surfboard with strings the icyembe stands almost as tall as those who pluck its reverberating, sharp spindly quiver. It’s umuduli counterpart, both far less cumbersome and mobile, does despite only having the one string and repetitive scratchy twang, provide a suitable, evocative rhythm.
Emmanuel Habumuremy (husband) & Ange Kamagaju (wife) photo by Marilena Delli
Make no mistake; this is performance in its most deconstructive raw form. Devoid of embellishments and overbearing production, recorded in situ with only the rudimentary elements and atmosphere for company, it sounds great.
And so you hear some of the most stripped and revelatory of performances that make their equivalents back in the West sound sterile and bloated in comparison. Artists such as the 19-year-old female rapper Rosine Nyiranshimiyimana who improvises vividly on the stylophone clickety-buzzing sassy, take-it-to-the-yard R&B Umwana W’umuhanda (The Child From The Streets), and the sublime but humble Beatrice Mukarungi, who leads her ‘sons’ on the spiritual chorus plaint Urwanikamiheto (War Song), perform somehow different and askewer fresh takes on the music we find familiar.
Battery powered electronics and rusty, ramshackle dusty instruments come together in hybrids that evoke ritual, the ceremonial but equally the blues, soul and hip-hop; all played with an undeniably emotional Rwandan verve and lilt.
Once again Brennan highlights the forgotten musical legacy and voices of a traumatized community – alcoholism and depression rife in their isolated communities; allusions made by Brennan that draw similarities with the pre-casino era American Indian reservations -, recovering in the uneasy truce of one of the 20th century’s worst genocides – and as we are all aware, it had some stiff competition in those stakes.
Hidden Musics has become an unmissable and equally important series; field recordings of hope and recovery in the face of despair.
Our Daily Bread 252: Hajk, Goodwood Atoms.
July 6, 2017
REVIEWS
Words: Ayfer Simms
Goodwood Atoms ‘Place EP’
I can breathe in the ocean, where the water is the thickest; I can breath in space where the density is unbreakable. I can float where we walk because there is no gravity and there is nothing holding me down. I can dance when the mood is poisonous. I can swear when you love me.
The Goodwood Atoms are in love.
Because the melodies break the silence of dawn with an irresistible sensuality, explorers of a lunar land, with no aspiration of returning, the machine in the sky stays, afloat, splendid in its romantic attire, devils of slow motion: What instruments do they use?
Ethereal baggage, because of festive shadowy souls, the Plan EP is a joyous temptation, a fluid motion toward a vast desert full of enslaving tracks, which traps and travels to the very edges of you.
Hajk ‘Hajk’
Jansen Plateproduksjon
Breezy, strong, confident, cleverly assembled, intricate with the different styles married together, Hajk brings the coolness of the north and with it, the freshness of the eighties, revisited modernized and digested for good.
The music is as comfortable to ride as a summer pop tune and leaves the listener in a state of glow with the fiery melodies launched in a bright sky, opening up to an imperceptible distant star. There, high above, the purity we long for appears, and with it, serenity, composure, temperance, youth and intelligence.
Hajk’s music whispers the distant memories of three decades ago. And our sleeves are up like in a cheesy TV series from the 80s, and love is induced with a romantic shield, the texture of which is a wonderful brewery of styles. Each song, stamped with the bands lightness of being sends us back to the years where the inadequacy of our teenage-hood were for some – most, perhaps – paralyzing, Hajk rewrite that period by removing the oddness.
Top gun’s jets carries our innocence, swirl it around the sky and brings it back to our old adolescence room where Hajk’s music plays, delivering us from timidity, touching the future ever so slightly with great promises.
Ayfer Simms is a Franco-Turkish author, Agatha Christie obsessive, martial arts practitioner and contributor to the Monolith Cocktail who lives in the ancestral family home of Üsküdar-old Scrutari in Istanbul, Turkey with her husband and daughter. Ayfer currently works for the Institute Francais in Istanbul; a role that has recently involved her organising musical soirees and helping to bring Mali’s desert blues doyans Tinariwen to Turkey. Ayfer is just putting the finishing touches to her debut novel.
NEW MUSIC REVIEW
WORDS: DOMINIC VALVONA
Featuring: The Bordellos, Diagnos, Eberhard Kranemann & Harald Grosskopf, Lucy Leave, The Telescopes and Terry.
More eclectic sounds from across the whole spectrum and from around the world in this edition of Dominic Valvona’s ramshackle reviews roundup, including the disarming snappy punk and cool pop of Melbourne’s scenester gang Terry, Oxford’s elastic new wave funk and math rock trio Lucy Leave, the pastoral pagan psychedelic and folky Kosmische Swedish duo Diagnos, St. Helen’s most dysfunctional lo fi rock’n’roll gods, The Bordellos, paragons of the (rather missive termed) Krautrock epoch, Eberhard Kranemann & Harald Grosskopf, and sonic vessels of the void, The Telescopes.
Terry ‘Remember Terry’
Upset The Rhythm, July 7th 2017
The Terry gang is back in town. The disarming world-weary punk and quirky pop touting quartet of Melbourne scenesters, banding together under the ubiquitous titular moniker, follow up a prolific run of 2016 EPs and their debut LP with another acerbic witted, snappy melodious release of profound disenchantment and wistful “wish fulfillment”.
Continuing with the shared girl/boy dynamic of lulling, placeable idiosyncratic vocals and flexible punk, country and new wave bubblegum backing, Terry look to expand their repertoire on Remember. The combined musical savvy and experiences of band members Amy Hill (of Constant Mongrel and School Of Radiant Living), Al Montfort (UV Race, Dick Diver, Total Control), Zephyr Pavey (Eastlink, Russell St Bombings and also Total Control) and Xanthe White (Mick Harvey, Primo) push the quartet into all kinds of nonchalant mischief. The gang embraces nonplussed French new wave chanteuse vibes on the brilliant breezy, mosey country lilting, Toy Love meets Serge Gainsbourg Take Me To The City (one of the tracks of the summer), and snappy, bouncy indie synth pop on Rio. At their most raucous, rough and ready to tumble, Terry softens the edges of The Damned on both their keystone kops rave-up Start The Tape and spiky frazzling Give Up The Crown.
Suggesting nothing more rebellious than a cheeky smoke behind the bike sheds, the group’s knockabout catchy hooks and charm cloak a personal profound response to the political and personal anxieties and dramas of the times. And they do this with a certain aloof coolness and adroit ear for a great tune, making this a most melodious and catchy album of knowing pop slanted punk.
Lucy Leave ‘The Beauty Of The World’
15th June, 2017
Venting opprobrious discourse at the result and ongoing shambles of Brexit – though I’m waiting for creative responses from the “leave” camp to materialize – the burgeoning Oxford trio Lucy Leave put forward an ennui fit of 80s downtown white funk and erratic polyrhythm bendy protestation on their latest EP’s opening diatribe, Talk Danish To Me.
Written whilst on holiday in the Danish capital, this discordant yet highly elastically funky number is as complicated as it sounds; the group reflecting the Brexit vote of 52% for leave with irrational dissonance and a whole tone scale flourish. Yet, despite this, that opening tumultuous track is surprisingly flexible and even melodic; tracing a path back through The Rapture, Liquid Liquid, ESG, A Certain Ratio, American alt rock, grunge and Oxford’s own synonymous – well made famous by – “math rock” scene.
The press one-sheet may have other ideas on where the trio’s influences lie, citing Deerhoof, Tortoise and The Minutemen. But on songs such as the spasmodic disjoint title track they channel PiL (the bass lines most definitely deftly sliding and dipping towards Jah Wobble), and, of all groups, the Red Hot Chili Peppers (though don’t hold that against Lucy Leave, as they sound a whole lot more credible), whilst it’s the floating semblances of Pink Floyd coupled with the slacker mumblings of grunge in the ascendance on Josh. Their appetite for sounds is as omnivorous as it is pliable.
Lucy Leave’s siblings Pete (on drums) and Mike Smith (guitar), and Jenny Oliver (bass and occasional succinct saxophone jazz gestures) all take it in turns to sing. Each bringing a subtle distinct tone and phrasing, especially Oliver who sounds like a submerged Vivian Goldmine or Dominique Levillain of Family Fodder, on the watery reggae gait and psychedelic swelling car crash inspired NIGHTROAD.
Hurtling without a map but a studious head for music theory and figures through The Beauty Of The World, Lucy Leave produce a magnificent bendy chaos. Without a doubt one of the most interesting new bands and among the most unpredictable releases of 2017 for me.
The Telescopes ‘As Light Return’
Tapete Records, 7th July 2017
After thirty years of tuning in and out of the void The Telescopes – or rather the only founding member to have endured this sonic travail, Stephen Lawrie – suggest there might be a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel on their ninth drone behemoth album, As Light Return. Don’t get your hopes up just yet though. The miasma caustic discord still hangs like a millstone around Lawrie’s neck; a heavy weight that all but keeps him from clawing out of the vault towards the surface for air: the shoegaze melodious elements and audible vocals of yore all but dissipated and recondite.
If there is any kind of let up in this latest album’s unrelenting sustained waves of abrasive and searing feedback then its very subtle one. Whilst not quite daemonic and not quite as bleak as the visions of Sunn O))), As Light Return is still unyieldingly dark.
Relief is hard won, with any emerging semblances of a Mogadon induced Spector motorcycle gang doo-wop and Spacemen 3 redemption – most notably on the opening lament You Can’t Reach What You Hunger – being obscured and dragged under the ominous efflux of guitars. Just as the fuzz, squalls and unflinching bed of drawn out drones resemble anything moodily melodic they meet a stubborn indolence of gnawing white noise. As usual Lawrie’s vocals remain cryptically veiled in the gauzy production: detached in a stupor as the overpowering seething vortex of layering consumes all.
Using a revolving door policy of guitarists and continuing to change set ups, though Lawrie once again indoctrinates band members from St Deluxe on this album, As Light Return shares much musically, within the perimeters of anyway, with the previous drone suite album, Hidden Fields. However, the tone is even darker and serious, despite the light referenced title; sonically turning the cursed ashes of unheeded augurs into an atmospheric malaise and sound experience.
Diagnos ‘Diagnos’
Control Kitten Records, July 14th 2017
Building on an initial music project stemming from Marcus Harrling’s filmskills (one half of the Diagnos duo) this extended eponymous soundtrack of concomitant mystical ambient electronica, folk and psych is the perfect accompaniment for an imaginary 1970s set pagan horror: a kind of Scandinavian Wicker Man if you like.
Harrling, a graduate filmmaker of The Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, originally developed Diagnos with Per Nyström to score a number of his super 8 camera shot travel films. Both stalwarts of their native Swedish independent music scene; members of The Concretes, Monsters, Mackaper, and Sons Of Cyrus; the duo ask a number of compatriots to contribute to their debut (proper) album. The roots of which first emerged in 2009 when Daniel Fagerström of The Skull Defekts arranged a “one-minute-festival” show for them; a performance that led to the creation of the incipient radiant synth and swooning incantation When The Sun Comes Up: a full version of which now closes this album.
Made up of instrumental passages, vignettes and cooing, psychedelic folky vocal tracks, Diagnos uses a backing of suffused sampled sounds, keyboards, purposeful attentive drums and guitar loops to create the right dreamy esoteric and folkloric atmosphere. Guest collaborators Nadine Byrne, Tove El, Maria Eriksson, Niek Meul, Oscar Moberg and Felix Unsöld add wafting, swaddled saxophone, lulling and supernatural pastoral lush vocals and hallucinogenic inducing tones to this magical journey.
Floating between flute-y synthesizers, primal tribal reverberation percussion and more drawn-out, but softened, drones, this suite weaves progressive and Kosmische influences into a gauze-y bed of spiritual and ominous layers; recalling the dissipating echoes of early Popol Vuh, Kluster, Ash Ra Tempel, Sonic Youth, Land Observation, Air, and on the languid trip-hop like Reflections, the soundtracks of Basil Poledouris.
Eberhard Kranemann & Harald Grosskopf ‘Krautwerk’
Bureau B, 28th July 2017
Stalwarts of Germany’s influential late 1960s and 70s experimental transformative Kosmische and Krautrock music scenes, Eberhard Kranemann and Harald Grosskopf join forces to celebrate a legacy. Representing two of the country’s most important epicenters and incubators of electronic music, Berlin and Dusseldorf, the duo glide and ponder through all the various iterations from that era on the pun-intended Krautwerk album.
Provenance wise Grosskopf drummed on a number of early Klaus Schulze albums (reverberations of the legendary electronic composer can be found throughout) and recorded thirteen albums with the Ashra incarnation of the iconic acid transcendental Ash Ra Tempel originators (again, traces of which can be heard here). Kranemann’s travails in Krautrock took the usual course, studies in more classical music at the Dortmund Conservatory and art at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf (studying under the behemoth of European conceptualism, Joseph Beuys), followed by a baptism of fire, propelled into the earliest developments of German electronica, co-founding such giants of the scene as Kraftwerk, Neu! and Pissoff.
In the aftermath of that most important decade in German music history both artists went on to release numerous solo projects. Their paths however didn’t cross until 2016, and by chance; both solo artists booked to perform at the very same music festival, where they planned this melding of minds project.
Two schools of thought and conceptualism, Krautwerk is a sophisticated, sagacious sextet of analogue (featuring of all things an Hawaiian guitar and, not so surprising, a cello) and synthesized peregrinations and moods. Channeling a wealth of experience and influences this congruous partnership combines the graceful transience and stirring futuristic ambience of Cluster and Tangerine Dream with the tangled, industrial guitar playing of Manuel Göttsching and the progressive kinetic beats of the Pyrolator and Kraftwerk. Clandestine romanticized reflections captured at midnight appear alongside mystical cello etched beasts in the Tibetan mists, on the Deutsch Nepal trail, and more nonsensical Japanese phonetic silliness to cover a swathe of Dusseldorf and Berlin inspirations.
Though there’s also a strong nod in the direction of the musical styles that evolved from and ran parallel to Krautrock/Kosmische with Moroder style arpeggiator propulsion and 80s drum machine percussion on the vortex sucking and reversed hi-hat Basic Channel transmogrified Be Cool, and Jeff Mills cerebral techno on the Tresor club turn Banco de Gaia trance journey Happy Blue.
Every bit as erudite as you’d expect; finely tuned and considered, Kranemann and Grosskopf celebrate a full gamut and heritage. Yet sound relatively contemporary at times and fresh despite the fact that these musical genres were created in the 60s. Fans of Kosmische and electronica music in general will lap it up.
The Bordellos ‘Life, Love & Billy Fury’
Recordiau Prin, 16th June 2017
Prolific, if haphazardly, dropping albums upon the unsuspecting, and quite frankly undeserving, public, St. Helen’s greatest dysfunctional family bring us one of their most ambitious collections of cynical derision and honest yearned anxiety yet: a kind of Joy ‘de vive’ Division.
More or less The Bordellos love songs collection, this latest lo fi affair – that makes even The Fall sound professional – is a raw opening of the heart, and in some cases, the veins. Transmogrifying Spector’s voices of the beehives (The Crystals to The Ronettes), the Spacemen 3, The Cure and, of course, The Velvet Underground, The Bordellos eulogize the nearly man of British rock’n’roll, Billy Fury, craft (perhaps) one of their most beautiful ballads, Starcrossed Radio, and pen a “speeding train” metaphor themed ode to breakups.
That signature mumbled and pained expression of malaise and the miserable backbeat and tambourine jangled foundations, we Bordellos fans love and find so endearing, prevail but are joined by meandered detours and passing fancies of inspiration: on the heavily medicated Secret Love it’s a touch of (would you believe it) Lee Hazlewood and Nick Cave, on the breezier “what’s cooking” kitchen sulk Brief Taste it’s a conjuncture of Siouxsie Sioux’s Banshees and The Clean, and on the Adriatic wooing Signomi, Arketa!, I can hear Talk Talk beating out a military tattoo rhythm on Adam and the Ants Burundi drums.
Romancing the stoned, the life, loves and failures of rock’n’roll are laid bear and as usual, ignored by an unsympathetic, disinterested public. But despite mostly alluding recognition and validation (because that seems to be all that matters in the social media age: affirmation from the echo-chamber of peers), The Bordellos mope and grind on, producing some of the most important diatribes and, in this case, scuzzy, dirge-y and primal garage band spirited love-pained grievances.
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