Monolith Cocktail Blog

THE MONTHLY DIGEST OF ACCUMULATED NEW MUSIC, THE SOCIAL INTER-GENERATIONAL/ECLECTIC AND ANNIVERSARY ALBUMS CELEBRATING PLAYLIST, AND ARCHIVE MATERIAL CHOSEN BY DOMINIC VALVONA

Continuing a series that started in 2023, the Digest is my one-stop column of the new and the old; a secondary home to all those releases I missed out on or didn’t get room to feature in either my Perusal reviews features or singular Our Daily Bread posts, plus a chance to celebrate timely anniversary albums and dip into my own record collection with the a special anything goes playlist, and to, finally, dip into the Monolith Cocktail Archives.

The New: this will be a briefing of a sort, with a short outline, thoughts and reactions to a number of recent albums from my inbox – currently a 1000+ releases a month on average!

The Social Playlist: choice music collected from across the ages, borders and genres, with a smattering of tracks from choice anniversary celebrating albums of worth and cult status. Consider it my unofficial radio show. The Archives: self-explanatory, but each month I chose past pieces from the extensive Monolith Cocktail back pages that have a timely ring to them.  

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Mohammad Syfkhan ‘I Am Kurdish’
(Nyahh)

To do justice to the backstory (one that’s filled with tragedy and yet musically inspiring) of the Syrian-Kurdish surgical nurse and musician-artist Mohammad Syfkhan, I’d need far more room. But in brief, the heralded ‘bouzouki’ (a round bodied, with flat top, long-necked lute with resonating and sharp metal strings strummed and picked with a plectrum, that was brought to Greece from Anatolian refugees) maestro and singer was forced to abandon his family’s home in the city of Raqqa during the senseless apocalyptic Syrian civil war. As various fractions fought against the Assad regime, Islamist’s most feared and brutal cult, ISIS, swooped in and proclaimed that atavistic Euphrates located city their capital: the centre of operations and a new sickening, destructive caliphate. As a minority Kurd, Syfkhan was already in danger, but when one of his son’s was murdered by the terror group, they had to join the growing diaspora of Syrians fleeing the country and region to escape persecution (by not only ISIS but Assad too); splitting the family between Germany and Ireland, where Syfkhan, his wife and young daughter were kindly taken in.

Poured into his debut album (although he started his own band The Al-Rabie Band decades ago back in Syria; and a very popular, sought-after troupe they were too) that loss and upheaval is balanced with certain joyous and romantic gusto. Longing for home mostly certainly, and yet making a new life in his adopted Leitrim sanctuary on the River Shannon; in the moment, spreading the traditional and more contemporary music of his Kurdish and Syrian roots whilst also collaborating with those native musicians and those that have also made that same Irish village their home too (including on this stunning album the composer, improviser, sound artist and saxophonist Cathal Roche, and the composer, improviser and cellist Eimear Reidy).

Like a ascending stairway, or flowing and resonating with evocative melodies magic, lute stirring ruminations sweep over Arabia and surrounding regions; referencing anonymous, collective and some original-penned compositions and dances to Islam’s ‘golden age’ of fairytale (‘A Thousand And One Nights’), Kurdish pride in the face of repression (the title-track of course) and its peoples’ struggle for independence and respect (‘Do Not Bow’), lovelorn enquires (‘Do You Have A Lover Or Not?’), and the missed daily activities, interactions of life back home in Raqqa Across it all the hand drums tab, rattle and roll; the cello arches, weeps and bows in sympathy; and the bouzouki lute swoons and rings out the most nimble and beautiful of ached and more up-tempo giddy tunes. There’s a real weight and energy at times, balanced out with slower emotional reflections; but when they go, they go! All the while you can trace the lineage, the scope of the sound back to the Middle East, to old Anatolia, more modern Turkey, and even the Hellenic; and from weddings parties to the courtly, to the caravan trails and souk. I couldn’t recommend this album enough; already sitting as it does in my favourite choice releases of 2024.     

epic45 ‘You’ll Only See Us When The Light Has Gone’
(Wayside And Woodland)

With enervated and evaporated applied washes, and drifting along with a certain despondency, Ben Holton and Rob Glover’s long-running – but due to circumstances beyond their control, interrupted – epic45 project finds much to cover; from Brexit to the lunacy of the housing ladder; the parental cliques of the school gates to the death-by-a-thousands-cuts decline of England’s rural and seaside towns.

Already, unbelievably, four years since the last album (finding a favourable audience at this blog) Cropping The Aftermath (released during the height, more or less, of the Covid pandemic), You’ll Only See Us When The Light Has Gone arrives in the wake of setbacks – from the repercussions of both Brexit and Covid on touring (with the band’s Japanese tour cancelled, but also, Europe for us Brits, no longer part of the free-movement agreement, becoming a major pain-in-the-arse to circumnavigate) – to the on-going issues of Holton’s severe back problems.

But persist they did, and went away to produce this idiosyncratic take on the modern life is rubbish (and expensive) idiom. This is a resigned but rallying push back against life in, what they call, the ‘edgleland’, the ‘nowhere places’; pushed out onto the peripherals of society and inclusion. The very English preoccupations of owning a home permeate, from the ill-planned ‘floodplain’ sites that many are forced to accept, to the grander housing development promises of ‘stepping stones to country homes’. But this is a wider statement on a nation in crisis, and the pressures of keeping heads and minds above the crushing effects of unceasing disillusion; ‘dignity’ in the face of narcissistic cultural and political vacuous, the cost of living and bad health. 

A very different record from its predecessor, Holton and Glover bring songwriting and vocals to the forefront; from the near forlorn shoegaze-y and woe of late 80s and early 90s indie, to what I can only describe as higher scale soulful indie and more modern effected R&B aches. But the music hasn’t exactly taken a back seat, with vapours of ‘Oh So’ period Charlatans, Neon Neon, Seefeel and The Last Sound, touches of soft power rock from the 80s and 70s, and the appearance of their former live, and My Autumn Empire, drummer Mike Rowley powering the breaks with evocations of Bloc Party at their most subdued and building a soft momentum when the drive is needed to escape the wispy drifting. Within that framework there are other nice little touches too: the glimpse of surface, environmental ambience and dialed-out conversations, a touch of folksy Iberia guitar here and there, and veil-like chime of the celeste.

epic45 somehow manage to retrieve hope and possibility from the ether of debilitating tiredness on an album that sees them move in more melodious and vocalised direction.  

Boštjan Simon ‘Fermented Reality’
(Nature Scene)

Glitches in the cerebral; a coming to terms with the current age of high anxiety and alternative realities of a world in turmoil and flux; the debut solo turn from the Slovenian saxophonist and various electronic apparatus experimentalist Boštjan Simon puts the former instrument through a process of external effects to sound a surprisingly rhythmic vision of explorative jazz, broken beats, breakbeats, library music, kosmische and fourth world music.

Regular readers of the blog might recognize the name as part of the Slovenian trio of Etceteral, but Simon’s CV and involvement also runs to the groups Velkro and Trus!, plus a duo with the percussionist Zlatko Kaučuč. But now, stepping out on his own, he creates a soundboard and environment from a modified sax fitted with sensors to enable the triggering of oscillators in a modular system setup, using a new experimental interactive module called Octosense.

The results of which combine abstract blows, holds and wanes with more melodic and fluty vapours of sax, and Eastern German space programme oscillations with primal lunar bobbles and Asmus Tietchens popcorn. Taking the Jazz Messenger Jackie Mclean’s famous “saxophone is a drum” as a prompt, that instrument is reshaped in the style of Alex Roth and Andy Haas to explore new quadrants and feels of the keen and untethered: remarkably very melodious and tuneful in places, with some beats sounding like Madlib or Farhot at the helm. You can add Thomas De Pourquery to that list of reference points, but also Frédéric D. Oberland, Otis Sandsjö, Laurence Vaney, Joe Meek, Bernard Estardy (the last three in relation to the more playful, retro sounding bobbly liquids and satellite communication moments) and, on the near new age disorientated dance of ‘Gmnoe’, Ariel Kalma. That should be enough to go on for now. A solid, or not so solid but more open-ended and explorative, start to the solo career, Fermented Reality is a unique album of saxophone evocations and environmental probes.

Poppy H ‘Grave Era’
(Cruel Nature Records)

Zombie medication, zombie blades, zombie government: what a world to be dragged into. As the always awake screen lights up another terrible, distressing notification, or yet another crisis to weigh on the mind, the multi-instrumentalist, field recordist and producer Poppy H holds a phone up to society and openly records the decay, the innocuous and fleeting interactions of a world on standby as Rome burns to the ground all around them. Coping for many – and it’s neither their fault nor ours – is to keep keeping on with the daily grind; the one highlight of the day, picking up that mundane “flat white”.

All the commonality and evaporated stains of modern Britain are played out across a simultaneously creepy, lo fi bucolic, planetary, industrial and Fortean soundscape of café orders, snippets of conversations and crackles of interference. The Grave Era is certainly haunting and gray at times, and yet has a sort of reverberation of Andrew Wasylyk and the Cold Spells’ hallucinatory pastoral rusty piano, and a dreamy filter of piped church organ music – there’s even a sort of spell of what sound like the courtly music of Medieval or Tudor England at one point. For the most part, this is an album of chemical and more obscure prompts; a window in on the radioactive, plastic and technological flitching and glitch fabric of a fucked-up culture in turmoil and decline, yet far too inoculated through drugs (both the legal and illegal kinds) and the social media validation cult to face it or indeed change it. The sounds, production and vapours, visitations reminded me in equal parts throughout of the Sone Institute, Belbury Poly, Walter Smetek, Fiocz and Boards Of Canada, but go far further outside this country’s borders on tracks like the drifted passing melodious ‘Shaid & Irfan’, which could be a recording, as the traffic and daily business of others carries on in the foreground and background, of musicians from anywhere in North Africa, the Middle East, Afghanistan or Pakistan. 

A country haunting itself, this is England in the dying embers of climatic, societal and political change; scored by a unique theme of recordings that masterfully encompass the erosion of action, living and hope in the “grave era”.

Meiko Kaji ‘Gincho Wataridori’
(WEWANTSOUNDS) 23^rd February 2024

Heralding the transition of the cult Japanese actress-singer Meiko Kaji’s move to recording artist in the early 1970s, the vinyl specialists at WEWANTSOUND, in partnership with Teichiku Records, continue to reissue the leading star of B-movie and “ero guro” movie franchises’ back catalogue of influential albums. Following in the wake of last year’s Hajiki Uta LP, and reissued for the very first time, Tarantino’s crush (no Kill Bill’s bride without Kaji’s groundwork as the avenging Lady Snowblood; one of her most iconic roles) and untold influence for many over the decades, the star of many infamous Japanese schlock and brutal revenger horrors and violent killings sprees’ debut LP, Gincho Wataridori is up next in the roster.

Originally coaxed into the studio environment to sing the songs that would appear in and accompany a list of movie franchises (from Female Prisoner Scorpion to Blind Woman’s Curse and Stray Cat/Alleycat Rock), Kaji’s songbook repertoire expanded to include the Enka (a performative traditional form that often carried masked messages of political texts, later on, stylized with modern pop sensibilities in the post-war period), psych rock and Kayokyoku (a Japanese pop style with simple melodies and lyrics easy to play and sing along to).

The first of five albums recorded between 1972 and 1974 for Teichiku, the inaugural songbook in this run features a quartet of softly lush and Vaseline camera smeared dramatic fatale yearns and spindled, gently mallet(ed) funk-whacker and tremolo fuzzed dramas from both the Wandering Ginza Butterfly and Blind Woman’s Curse films – both Yakuza and Bōsōzoku themed revenge twists on the genre. The rest of the songs comprise of signature Oriental riffs on Axelrod, Bacharach, 60s French and Italian pop sirens and smoky cocktail cabaret jazz. Keji’s accompaniments are masterful, if light, and do the trick as her alluring, coquettish and often longed vocals rise to the occasion. Sven Wunder seems to make a Mosaic out of it, and a multitude of Hip-Hop artists have sampled it, but Gincho Wataridori remains a cult album ripe for reevaluation and attention. 

Ap Ducal ‘U’
(Weisskalt Records)

Visioning a saturated spectral display of waveforms, moving bass lines and acid turned dials Camilo Palma (under his twelve year running project alter ego Ap Ducal) manages to blend kosmische and early synthesizer music with the German New Wave and post-punk genres, and various other cosmic electronics on his new succinct, minimalist entitled album U.

Collaborating with the Chilean musician Sebastián Román (otherwise known as Persona RS), Palma unites two sounds, two crafts to a fizzled, metallic filament cold wave soundtrack that moves between soft deep curves on the radar to the motorik and interstellar. Amongst the analogue electronics, the synthesized algorithms, the oft four-to-the-floor beat, and the paddled, rotor-bladed and tubular rhythms there’s echoes of Bernard Szajner, Sky Records, Heiko Maiko, Ulrich Schnauss, Michael Rothar, Eat Lights Become Lights, Basic Channel and Leonidas. ‘UUUU’ is a little different however: reminding me a bit of a Goblin Italo-Giallo horror soundtrack merged with the icy distillations and peregrinations of Edgar Froese; a bit of mystique, the occult and cold airy vacuums folded within the cold wave calculations. 

Cosmic Couriers of a kind, the sonic partners on this forward propulsion make kosmiche and krautrock influences dance to a filter of tape music and minimalist techno. I’d say it was a successful conversion of all those inspirations/influences; making for a roaming and hypnotic experience.

____//THE SOCIAL VOLUME 83\\____

Continuing with the decade-long Social – originally a DJ club night I’d pick up at different times over the past 20 plus years, and also a café residency from 2012 to 2014 – playlist, each month I literally chose the records that celebrate anniversary albums, those that I’d love to hear on the radio waves or DJs play once and while, and those records that pay a homage and respect to those artists we’ve lost in the last month.

February has been a harsh harbinger of death, taking away from us both the mushroom incantation haiku experimental artist Damo Suzuki and motor city muthafucking jam kicking guitar-slinger antagonist Wayne Kramer. As a front man of a sort for Can during perhaps their most creatively fertile and influential period, from Soundtracks through to the Future Days opus, Suzuki also fronted numerous collaborative projects, his own “network” and “band”, whilst also knocking about with the post-punk-kruatrock legends Dunkelziffer. Tracks from more or less all of these ensembles appear here, alongside a couple of homages to the former MC5 rebel Kramer – ‘Ramblin’ Rose’ from the defining live rallying call for a generation Molotov Kick Out The Jams, something from his Citizen Wayne solo affair, and, just to be different, a track from his drug-addled hangout with Johnny Thunders, ‘They Harder They Come’.   

Anniversary spots this month are taken up with covers of songs from Bob Dylan’s 1964 LP, The Times They Are A-Changin’, something off Amon Duul II’s less than celebrated, but much loved by me, Hijack LP from ’74, and tracks from Aretha Franklin’s Let Me In Your Life (50 this month), Mick Ronson’s Slaughter On 10^th Avenue (another 50^th celebration), Tangerine Dream’s Phaedra (see my archive piece below), Julian Cope’s Fried (40), Pavement’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain (30) and Down South’s Lost In Brooklyn (also 30 this month).

Scattered throughout are tracks I just love or dig from across the spectrum of time and genres, and, just recently loaded up onto streaming services and let out of the vaults, the title-track performance from the goddess of sublime mediative vibrations, Alice Coltrane’s Shiva-Loka Live album.  

Tracks In Full:::::

Damo Suzuki ‘Wildschweinbraten (Single)’
Amon Duul II ‘Mirror’
Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and Damo Suzuki ‘Please Heat This Eventually Pt. III’
Wayne Kramer ‘Stranger In The House’
Hunger ‘Portland 69’
Aretha Franklin ‘Let Me In Your Life’
Damo Suzuki’s Network ‘Manager Cinderella’
CAN ‘Moonshake’
CAN ‘Don’t Turn The Light On, Leave Me Alone’
Johnny Thunders & Wayne Kramer ‘The Harder They Come’
Pavement ‘Elevate Me Later’
Dunkelziffer ‘Network’
Odetta ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’
Down South ‘Sitting Here’
Julian Cope ‘Me Singing’
Matt Donovan ‘Black Crow’
MC5 ‘Ramblin’ Rose’
Supersister ‘She Was Naked’
Mick Ronson ‘Growing Up And I’m Fine’
Billy Childish ‘Ballad Of Hollis Brown’
The Yankee Dollar ‘Live & Let Live’
Alice Coltrane ‘Shiva-Loka (Live)’
Tangerine Dream ‘Movements Of A Visionary’
Lee Hutzulak ‘Behind The Singing Bush’
Limber Limbs ‘Golden Rust’
James Quell ‘The World Got Taken Over By Billionaire Scum’
Arti & Mestieri ‘Saper Sentire’
PTC ‘Freestyle Na Vrtaci’
CIX ‘Clitor’s Eye’
CAN ‘I’m So Green’

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Tangerine Dream ‘Phaedra’ Reaches 50 (From my original piece for the now sadly defunct London electronic music and architectural journal Vessel, nearly 14 years ago)

Phaedra the tragic mythological love-torn, and cursed wife of Theseus has lent herself to many plays, poetic prose, operas and even an asteroid. This rebuked siren from Greek tragedy is immortalised for a new epoch as part of the West Berlin synthesizer group’s re-textured sweeping experiments. Covering the entirety of side one, on this their first LP for Virgin, Phaedra is like an acid-trance choral eulogy of incipient multilayer motifs and arpeggiator modulations. The sounds of a ghost ship’s switchboard interlaced with twisting metallic reverb both gravitate and loom over a meandering pan-European work-out on this improvised track, which unintentionally, but rather pleasingly and to great effect, fluctuated in tone and tempo-atmospheric changes that played havoc with the analog equipment. Edgar Froese and his ever-rotating line-up of fellow freethinking cohorts had moved on from their so-called ‘Pink Period’ on the German Ohr label, to a more transcendental and ambient approach on the burgeoning Virgin imprint. Phase three in the Tangerine Dream life cycle saw them showered with, almost, unlimited funds and full use of the famous Virgin Manor Studios in Oxford – where fellow compatriots Faust recorded their IV album, a few months before. Flanking Froese on this adventure were the ex-Agitation Free drummer Chris Franke, and Peter Baumann; who’d already left the trio once before, returning just in time to record this musical suite.

Phaedra would be an album of firsts for the band with the introduction and use of sequencers and the MOOG. Franke would adopt DR. Robert Moog’s invention as a substitute to the bass guitar on the visionary soundscape ‘Mysterious Semblance At The Stand Of Nightmares’ – surely the catalyst and influence behind Bowie’s ‘Warszawa’. The polyphonic Mellotron, used to elegiac effect on the very same track, is tenderly coaxed and teased by Froese, whilst the VCS 3′s battleship pin board decked oscillation generator glides and bubbles throughout the four musical vistas of heavenly orchestrated electronica. Baumann explores the use of tape-echo and filtered effected flute on his own paean composed passage, ‘Sequent C’; a short wistful and haunting soundtrack to some imagined eastern elegy.

Released simultaneously in both Germany and the UK on the cusp of 1974, this album more than any ever by the Dream team cemented their reputation. With scant publicity and sporadic underground radio play, it sold in excess of 100,000 copies overseas and entered the top twenty album charts in Blighty, changing the fortunes of the Virgin label forever. However these prophets failed to drum-up the same exultation and adulation back in their homeland, barely shifting 6,000 records. Considered a sea-change in style and dynamics; a marked departure from their classic ‘Alpha Centauri’, this New Age themed cantata pitches itself somewhere between pantheism, mythology and a nebula traversing flight.