THE DIGEST FOR MARCH 2024: New Music In Brief/The Social Playlist/Archives
March 19, 2024
THE MONTHLY DIGEST OF ACCUMULATED NEW MUSIC, THE SOCIAL INTER-GENERATIONAL/ECLECTIC AND ANNIVERSARY ALBUMS CELEBRATING PLAYLIST, AND ARCHIVE MATERIAL CHOSEN BY DOMINIC VALVONA
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Jonah Parzen-Johnson ‘You’re Never Really Alone’
(We Jazz)
The soloist is never alone it seems, when on stage. And the highly prolific, serial collaborator and in-demand Chicago born, but Brooklyn-based, alto and baritone saxophonist and flutist Jonah Prazen-Johnson (regular followers will recognize the name from his trio partnership appearance with the Lycia inspired Berke Can Özcanon the Twin Rocks album from late last year) stands in the spotlight reacting to, feeding off of, and giving it all back to his audience and the wider community: hence the “We made this together” statement included on the album cover.
In the age of high anxiety, division and unwilling compromise, Jonah finds both the space to let go of the strains on the mind, the worries and concerns. In a nutshell, with just the use of his polytonal saxophone holds, wanes and drones (between higher trills and deeper bass-y vibrations; often together simultaneously) and willow-y, natural blossom garden flute, he projects invocations of regret and rumination whilst offering support, and even “courage” to see through the worst of it. To the undulating waves, near bristled distortions and more melodious tones, to the didgeridoo-like circles, fog horns, honks and drawn-out, Jonah evokes melodic traces of his native home (Chicago), the avant-garde, explorative and pastoral. If names and luminaries such as Sam Rivers, Marshall Allen, Coltrane, Roscoe Mitchell (especially his partnership with Anthony Braxton), John Zorn, Peter Brötzmann and Jeremy Steig grab you, then make the commitment and purchase a copy a.s.a.p.
ZA! + Perrate ‘Jolifanto’
(Lovemonk) 22nd March 2024
Bonding together on one Dadaist inspired transmogrified cross-pollination of sonic and musical ideas, the Spanish collaboration of the duo ZA! (No strangers to this blog; first featured in my highly popular Spanish Underground piece from more than a decade ago) and the experimental vocalist Perrate come together on an extraordinary album of sound assaults and hybrids that turn Iberian traditions and cultures on their heads.
Both partners in this enterprise have spent two decades or more transforming the traditional music of their native land; the critically applauded Perrate exploring the “outer edges” of Flamenco, his identity and heritage entwined with the age-old Gitano Iberian Romani community of which he is descended – a culture abundant with the stars and progenitors, innovators of Flamenco -, and ZA! often crazily and imaginatively merging a variety of Spanish styles, folk music, with anything from the African beats to the psychedelic, electronic, Balinese polyrhythms, thick distortion, free jazz and the shepherds of Tuva.
Taking the first word from Hugo Ball’s exhaustive Dada recited ‘Karawane’ phonetic poem, “Jolifanto” is packed with ideas and flights of fantasy; yet never loses its Iberian foraged roots, with plenty of recognizable Flamenco guitar frills and intimate quivery entwined attentive and descriptive accompaniment – sometimes sounding like a cross between Raül Refree and Jeff Buckley. You can also pick up the atmospheric settings of the dance, the performance throughout the album. The original performance of that poem, performed at the famous iconic Cabaret Voltaire, put Hugo in a trance; the captivated audience compelled to rush up on stage before the Dadaist luminary was dragged away. A certain lunacy, this spirited experimentalism and performance is transcribed to a lot of ZA!’s music, but it somehow makes perfect sense when combined with the poetic longing calls, mewling, whoops, mantra, assonant and almost muezzin-like vocals of Perrate. At any one time you are likely to hear echoes of Moorish Andalusia, oscillated dub, elephant horns, percussive scuttles, krautrock, Vodun invocation, post-punk, no wave and Afro-Cuban, and pick out bursts of Jah Wobble, Anthony Braxton, Zacht Automaat, CAN, Greco and Cambuzat, African Head Charge, the Reynols, Mike Cooper & Viv Cooringham’s ‘A Lemon Fell’, Harry Belafonte (I kid you not), Sakamoto and the Gypsy Kings.
From the cosmic and unsettling to near terrifying, there’s a lot to process in this slightly madcap collaboration. And yet in saying that, this album has soul and a seriousness about it in revaluating, pushing at the boundaries and ideas of what Iberian culture means in the 21st century; finding connections across the borders with music from as far away as Arabia, South America and the original roots of the region’s Romani communities. A great work of art and brilliance from the partnership that will excite, wrong foot and entrance in equal measures.
Leonidas & Hobbes ‘Pockets Of Light’
(Hobbes Music)
Expanding upon their sonic partnership with a debut album of epic cosmological proportions, Leonidas & Hobbes reach further than ever before into both the cerebral and outer limits of space to channel a litany of anguish woes.
Between them, this pairing of like-minded curious and lauded electronic musicians/DJs/club night instigators, cover the capitals of London and Edinburgh with their enviable CVs and provenances in everything from house to techno, the ambient, Balearic and dance music genres. Making good on previous EPs (2017’s Rags Of Time and 2021’s Aranath) they now face the philosophical quandaries of humanity, technology, climate change, extinction and metaphysics across thirteen movements, dance grooves, soundtracks and celestial symphonies.
A self-proclaimed ‘lockdown album’, the pandemic and stretches of time spent apart from socializing and giging, have had a deep impact on both artists; combine that with becoming parents and breakups, and you’ll find a pair of minds concentrated on finding the ‘light’ in a universe of emptiness and apocalypse. With effected dialogue snatches of ground control communications and alternative pseudo drug escapes from authoritarian mind control and conditioning speeches, and broadcasted weather reports from the eye of the storm (in Charleston, North Carolina to be exact) smattered throughout, the concerns, enquires and philosophies of both partners on this odyssey are made clear.
Like one long set, a voyage of peaks, beats and more trance-y and contemplated ambient pieces, this album goes from literal takeoff to drifting untethered in the void and back to the inner mindscape. Production and style wise there’s retro-space and kosmische hints of Vangelis, La Dusseldorf, Iasos and Klaus Schulze next to more acid zapping old school evocations and breaks of Wagon Christ, Orbital, Luke Slater, Mo Wax and Howie B, plus a Balearic vision of The Orb and echoes of the 303 drum sounds of Mantronix and Man Parrish. Vapours and wisps mystify certain suites, whilst others bounce along on more kinetic waves as mindscapes are mixed with technology, science and the sci-fi. Pockets of Light channels Leonidas and Hobbes’ worries and prophecies into a reflective existential soundtrack.
Their Divine Nerve ‘The Return Of The Lamb’
(Staalplaat)
A second inclusion this year for the Ukrainian trick noise maker Dmytro Fedorenko, his last Variát collaborative venture with Masami Akita (under his Merzbow alias), Unintended Intention, was featured in this year’s inaugural Digest. A brutal, scarred abrasion of twisted steel and concrete that same atmospheric heavy set of dark META electronica is now stripped almost entirely of the human touch for something altogether more esoteric and alien.
With the Washington DC experimental artist Jeff Surak (who has a CV far too numerous and varied to list here, but in brief, he made his first tape manipulations in the 80s under the 1348 moniker on his own Watergate Tapes imprint, lived in Russia in the early 90s, and after returning home, directed the annual Sonic Circuits Festival of Experimental Music in DC for thirteen years…the list goes on) as his foil, Dmytro finds yet another vehicle for expelling demons, the bestial, the apparitions in the machines and unearthly. Under the afflatus/supernatural imbued Their Divine Nerve title both accomplished participants retune the Fortean radio set for a corrosive, fizzled, buzzing unholy noisy embrace of the pained, hurt, mystical and chthonian.
Generous with the amount and duration of the material, this is a serious set of discordant and more hermitic vibrations, spread over ten (thirteen tracks if you buy the “bonus” version, which does actually include the title-track) post-industrial strength hauntings of the soul and psyche. The action varies, however, from invocations of early Richard H. Kirk to Basic Channel, Bernard Szajner, SEODAH, Coil, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain score, and Spain’s underground tape culture in the 80s. And within that sound-off board, portals and channels open up to the slithered tentacles of the Cthulhu and other leviathans from the depths, as dark matter is resourced to build a haunted factory of unidentified operative machinery and tools. Phantoms are everywhere in this fuckery of scrunched marches, square bladed sawing, needle sharp scratches of surfaces and iron materials.
Axes to grind, metaphors for the growing unease and trepidations of unimpeded violence, the continuing evil invasion of Ukraine, you could easily read the sonic tealeaves on this immersive experiment. All I know is that the biblical inspired The Return Of The Lamb offers analogies to the Christian symbol of sweetness, forgiveness, meekness, gentleness, innocence and purity, but it’s also a representation of both Christ himself and that of a sacrificial animal – when depicted with the Lion it can mean a state of paradise. Make what you will of that liturgy, but hope and salvation might yet arise from the distresses and savagery. In short, Their Divine Nerve is a successful debut in noisy art forms, horror, alien visitations and mystery.
Dave Harrington, Max Jaffe and Patrick Shiroishi ‘Speak, Moment’
(AKP Recordings)
An enviable trio of acclaimed and highly prolific musicians pulls together their talents and experiences for an improvisational album of both suffused gazing/reflection and wilder, unbound avant-garde extemporized entanglements. Dave Harrington, Max Jaffe and Patrick Shiroishi’s CVs, appearances and collaborations are lengthy and varied: far too numerous to list here anyway. But suffice to say this triumvirate of contemporary jazz explorers covers more or less all avenues of that genre’s legacy and penchant for change, experiment – from the more pliable to wielding and addressing the abstract evocations of trauma.
In the spirit of improvisation, all three players dashed this recording off in a single afternoon (as it happens, a couple of years back in an LA studio on the 25th October, my birthday!) having only met that same day for the first time. Astonishingly, Speak, Moment is a very sophisticated, cohesive album that gels together perfectly: even during its more untethered and intense passages of abandon.
The performances move loosely from the near ambient undertones of Jaffe’s incipient and resonating textural cymbal and sieved-like snare washes, the subtle twangs and psychedelic mirages of Harrington’s guitar, and the lilted tonal flutters and more tuneful rises of Shiroishi’s saxophone, to the near cacophony of staccato breaks of later tracks like ‘Ship Rock’ – a sort of stormy tempest rock-jazz fusion that sounds like The Jim Black Trio tied to a maelstrom tossed raft with Chris Corsano, Pat Metheny and the Red Crayola.
The traversed dreamy opener, ‘Staring Into The Imagination (Of Your Face)’, seems to allow the trio all the time and space needed to eloquently and in a more gauzy manner, express a soliloquy to the processing of feelings, environment and the unsaid – Harrington’s guitar reminding me in part of Fernando Perales and Myles Cochran, whilst Patrick Shiroishi’s sax has touches of Dexter Gordon, Roscoe Mitchell and Sam Rivers. Talking of Harrington, I did read that his own influences range from Bill Frisell to John Zorn and Jerry Garcia. The latter is very much channeled on the spiritual percussive trinket rattled and leviathan looming ‘How To Draw Buildings’, with guitar parts that sound almost late 60s Woodstock acid-rock in inspiration (almost Hendrix-like in his more restrained and meditative mode). You can also hear the aria-theremin higher voice-like notes of Sonny Sharrock amongst the wilderness and mizzle and sizzled resonance of Jaffe’s drums on that same track.
The next track, ‘Dance Of The White Shadow And Golden Kite’, reminded me of Ariel Kalma – that and Ornate Coleman in an exotic Afro-jazz bobbing dance with the Art Ensemble Of Chicago.
The atonal sensitivities shift amongst the ambiguous presence of other forces and introspective moods across a quintet of spontaneous explorations on an accomplished gathering of talented musicians. If you have an ear and like for the Cosmic Range, Tumi Mogorosi, Yonatan Gat and the Gunn-Truscinski Duo then you have to own this traversing improvised experiment.
Twin Coast ‘To Feel’
Back with another enveloped in guitar feedback sculpted and layered vision, the Chicago shoegazers and noiseniks Twin Coast get pulled into a paranormal alternate dimension: A static TV set cell that seems to be at least languidly comfortable and dreamy. Almost numbed to the whole sorry state of it all, the duo lose themselves in an unholy hallucinogenic white noise of static fuzz and crystal shimmers and flange reverberations. I’m calling erased apparitional shoegaze.
The traditional B-side as it were, is handed over to diy electronic artist Isaac Lowenstein, aka Donkey Basketball (a EDM project that apparently started off a joke but quickly grew into a very real act, mixing and merging everything from acid to jungle and techno). Isaac, a fellow Chicago resident, transform the original into a kinetic, machine and mechanics switching, twisting, ratcheting and spring-loaded minimalist techno percussive tunneled and vaporous space-trip. I’m hearing a touch of Mike Dred, Mouse On Mars, Ritchie Hawtin, Basic Channel and Autechre added to the mere essence of the original shoegaze immersion from the ether.
___/THE SOCIAL PLAYLIST: VOLUME 84\___
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.
Anniversary spots this month go to the Style Council’s ’84 special Café Bleu (I’ve chosen to kick the whole playlist off this week with the more dance-funk, WAR impressionist ‘Strength Of Your Nature’, from an album that slips mostly into more Post-MOD, Jazz Café piano), RUN-DMC’s self-titled holler from the same year and Scott Walker’s menacing, out-there Climate Of The Hunter masterpiece. From a decade before, I’ve added a glam pop-gun tune from T. Rex’s Zinc Alloy And The Hidden Riders Of Tomorrow – the LP that must have been on Bowie’s mind when recording Young Americans. Leaping ahead twenty years and there’s a smattering of ’94 releases from the Hip-Hop royalty Gang Starr (Hard To Earn), Main Source (Fuck What You Think), The Auteurs (Now I’m A Cowboy) and the Aphex Twin (Selected Ambient Works 2; so good I’ve included two tracks). From more recent(ish) times, there’s a choice track from the late metal face don of leftfield Hip-Hop MF Doom and the equally revered Madlib, under their partnership guise of Madvilliany – I’ve chosen the Sun-Ra anointing ‘Shadows Of Tomorrow’, which pulls in the aardvark Quasimoto. And, as featured below in this month’s archive spot, a track from the Ministry Of Wolves ensemble cast of fairytale weavers album Republik Der Wölfe: subtitled ‘A Fairytale Massacre With Live Music’, a joint enterprise between the Dortmund Theater’s production director Claudia Bauer and musical director Paul Wallfisch, with the unholy musical alliance of Bad Seeds co-founder and adroit solo artist Mick Harvey, one time Einstürzende Neubauten, Crime And The city Solution grizzled maverick and one half of the Hackedepicciotto duo Alexander Hacke and fellow Crime and the City band mate, Berlin Love Parade co-instigator and the better half of that Hackedepicciotto partnership, Danielle De Picciotto, providing the suitable nursery grime soundtrack.
We can’t pass the month without marking the sad death of Karl Wallinger, the master songwriter behind hits for others, but also sole instigator of World Party – after leaving The Waterboys in the mid 80s. I guess ‘She’s The One’ will be rotated extensively, but I’ve chosen the just as popular and more soulfully blusy ‘Ship Of Fools’.
From the new to old past gloires, missives and curiosities, making up the rest of the playlist are tracks from Fat Francis, Dalla Diallo, Alamo, Trips And Falls, De La Soul, Heldon, MIZU, Gary Clail, Incentive and more….
TRACK LIST IN FULL:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
The Style Council ‘Strength Of Your Nature’
Vampire Rodents ‘Trilobite’
Gang Starr ‘Code Of The Streets’
Run-DMC ‘Hollis Crew (Krush Groove 2)’
Madvillian (MF Doom/Madlib FT. Quasimoto) ‘Shadows Of Tomorrow’
Dalla Diallo ‘Sinde M’bobo’
T-Rex ‘Painless Persuasion V. The Meathawk Immaculate’
Metamorfosi ‘Caronte’
World Party ‘Ship Of Fools’
Walpurgis ‘Disappointment’
Fat Francis ‘It’s Not Rock and Roll’
Alamo ‘Got To Find Another Way’ We Cut Corners ‘Three People’
In Time ‘This Is Not Television’
The Wizards From Kansas ‘Hey Mister’
Eyes Of Blue ‘Largo’
Trips And Falls ‘I Learned Sunday Morning, On A Wednesday’
Kevin Vicalvi ‘Song From Down The Hall’
The Auteurs ‘Chinese Bakery’
Scott Walker ‘Rawhide’
The Ministry Of Wolves ‘Rumpelstiltskin’
MIZU ‘prphtbrd’
Heldon ‘Ballade Pour Puig Antich, Révolutionnaire Assassiné en Espagne’
Aphex Twin ‘#24’
Stringmodulator ‘White Noise’
Aphex Twin ‘#12’
Liz Christine ‘Two Seconds’
Heldon ‘Ouais, Marchais, Mieux Qu’en 68’
Incentive ‘Time Flows Beyond You’
Gary Clail ‘A Man’s Place On Earth’
Okay Temiz ‘Galaxy Nine’
De La Soul ‘What’s More’
Main Source ‘F*CK WHAT YOU THINK’
___/ARCHIVE\___
TEN YEARS OLD THIS MONTH: THE MINISTRY OF WOLVES ‘MUSIC FROM REPUBLIK DER WÖLF’
The Ministry Of Wolves ‘Music From Republik Der Wölfe’(Mute) 10th March 2014
Pre-dating the Viennese totem of the subconscious but already a Freudian labyrinth of analogy, metaphor and augury, the Gothic fairytale fables of the Brothers Grimm have just got a hell of a lot more unsettling and personal. Given a Pulitzer Prize winning overhaul by the esteemed award winning, self-confessional American poet Anne Sexton in her 1971 book ‘Transformations’, these same tales were brought back into the realm of the adults. Her candid, revisionist take, from the point of view of a ‘middle-aged witch’, on these standard stories is a beat poetic vivid survey on human nature: those all too familiar idiosyncrasies and failures set to a contemporary (for its time) miasma of inner turmoil.
Proving to be just as poignant forty odd years later, those reinterpretations are revitalized in a brand new multimedia stage production, debuting at the Theater Dortmund. To be performed tonight (15th February 2014) the Republik Der Wölfe, subtitled ‘A Fairytale Massacre With Live Music’, is a joint enterprise between both the Dortmund’s production director Claudia Bauer and musical director Paul Wallfisch, with the unholy musical alliance of Bad Seeds co-founder and adroit solo artist Mick Harvey, one time Einstürzende Neubauten and now Crime And The city Solution grizzled maverick Alexander Hacke and fellow Crime and the City band mate and Berlin Love Parade co-instigator Danielle De Picciotto, providing the suitable nursery grime soundtrack. Detached however from the visual spectacle, that very same soundtrack is due its own inaugural release next month; its loose narrative a series of congruous chapters, easily followed without any other stimulated aide to guide you.
Original characters that we’ve grown to love, hate, revile or recoil from, are transposed into the darker parts of our psyche. Those parable like lessons and auguries of danger get kicked around in a quasi-junkie Burroughs nightmare of cynicism and surreal terror. Tucked into a all too knowing grown ups world of jealousy and greed, Picciotto plays the part of storyteller – in this case switched, as I’ve already mentioned, from the usual young, naïve heroine into a middle-aged witch – on the opening account, ‘The Gold Key’. It’s followed by the Teutonic heavy drawling gusto of Hacke’s ‘Rumpelstiltskin’; played up to full effect, as the poisoned dwarf is revealed to be our doppelganger, ‘the enemy within’, and the spilt personality waiting to cut its way out of all of us. Sounding quite like a missing Amon Duul II number from the Hi Jack era, the song’s maligned and mischievous protagonist elicits a kind of sympathy: ‘No child will ever call me Papa’. Condemned to play the part of cruel interloper, poor old Rumpelstiltskin exists to remind us of our demonic, primal nature: a nagging inner soul tempting us to commit hari-kari on restraint.
The fabled ‘Frog Prince’ is a slithery customer, made to sound like an odious creep pursuing his very turned-off love interest. Mick Harvey moons and croaks with relish in recalling the bizarre tale of doomed romance; the moral, though dark and disturbing, can be summed up as: be careful what you wish for, the law of averages doesn’t exist and in this case turned out to be a dud, the frog was certainly no prince.
Happy endings become even more blurred with the triumvirate of leading ladies ‘Cinderella’, ‘Rapunzel’ and ‘Snow White’. ‘Cinders’ is a Casio pre-set piece of waltzing lullaby, dreamily led by our protagonist chanteuse, whilst Rapunzel and Snow White are given a fluid pained Leonard Cohen treatment. The latter a roll call of ‘seven’ inspired symbolism and metaphor, the former an idolised plaintive requiem to the exiled and ill-fated American dancer, Isadora Duncan – forced to leave the States for Europe because of her pro-Soviet sympathies, Duncan died rather ironically at the hands of the famous scarves she used to so great an effect in her dances, after one become entangled around the open-spoked wheels and rear axle of a car she was travelling in, breaking her neck.
Other notable tales of woe include the opium-induced, somnambulist ‘Sleeping Beauty’ – literally a languid sleepwalk through some Tibetan flavoured labyrinth – and lurid Harvey sung ‘Hansel & Gretel’ – the apparent naïve, saintly, twins getting the better of a cannibalistic old crone. But its ‘Little Red Ridding Hood’ who inhabits the most contemporary street hustling environment, transported from the danger lurking Black Forests into a world of creeps, junkies and ‘transmorphism’. The levels of macabre are amped up and the underlying psychosis adroitly delivered with atmospheric relish; our cast of ‘make-believe’ characters all too fallible human traits and sufferings enriched with a Murder Ballads style makeover, part Gothic part horrid histories.
FIFTY YEARS OLD THIS MONTH: T-REX ‘ZINC ALLOY AND THE HIDDEN RIDERS OF TOMORROW’
T-REX ‘Zinc Alloy And The Hidden Riders Of Tomorrow’ 1st March 1974
Whilst we are, or should be, aware of Bowie’s flirtatious lifting of Marc Bolan ideas, it’s the Zinc Alloy And The Hidden Riders Of Tomorrow: A Cream Cage In August album’s experiment with soul, a full eighteen months before the Thin White Duke’s own Young Americans, that proves to be the most obvious example of this latent influence (or if you want to be less generous, theft).
Swelling the ranks with the seductive, sumptuous tones of Gloria Jones – who evidently became Bolan’s love interest and partner till he died in 1977; a relationship that resulted in the birth of their son, Rolan – Bolan’s music opened out into yet greater velvety, blue-eyed soulful panoramas; a mix of plastic R&B, glamorous strutting and quasi-New York candy pop. From the bomp and shoop of the Gloria(fied), ‘Truck On’, to, in Bolan’s mind, one of T.Rex’s most ambitious singles, ‘Teenage Dream’, there’s an almost salacious knowing sophistication at work.
Already being regarded in some circles as washed-up, the ‘Zinc’ alter ego was an attempt to concentrate resources on the UK, as he’d spent considerable time attempting to crack the US market. He would continue to adapt the soul train, jingle-jangle sound with various other ‘boogie-woogie’ styles, including swamp rock; as he demonstrates with zeal on the poorly received LP, Bolan’s Zip Gun – at this point he may have thought seriously about sticking that ‘zip gun’ to his head as the album didn’t even chart.
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