Monolith Cocktail Blog

A WORLD OF SONIC/MUSICAL DISCOVERIES REVIEWED BY DOMINIC VALVONA

Jonah Brody ‘Brotherhood’
(IL Records) 11^th April 2025

What a genuine polymath talent the West Country singer-songwriter, composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist Jonah Brody really is. His solo debut album, unassuming in places, gentle in others, but then able to emotively pull on all the right strings and adopt a diverse musical and sonic musical palette, encompasses aspects of his theatre background, his ethnographic studies and career curveball into psychotherapy.

Blissful and poignant club, ambient, trance music and noughties indiepop with a cerebral edge, Brotherhood channels and takes on a range of personalities in an attempt to articulate, feel out and process the personal tragedy of loss, the philosophical quandaries of encroaching tech and AI and its relationship to creativity and the very existence of humanity, and the more mundane aspects of living in a frightfully anxious century. Starting with the more personal of those subjects, Jonah is inspired to collect his thoughts and somehow capture his feelings when tackling the death of his brother Tomo, who passed away in 2020. On the ghostly folk yearn ‘The Ancestors Are Feeling Gentle’, Jonah’s fragility is channelled via Oar era Skip Spence from the ether. Lyrically touching and yet almost dreamy, its simultaneously painful and yet also somewhat abstract in its renderings and vocalised suffering. But beautiful too, and somewhat psychedelic and therapeutic.

That word, therapeutic is important. Jonah, as I briefly mentioned, has trained and works in psychotherapy, specialising in psychedelic therapy. And it shows: in a good way. Whilst combating the fallout and loss of his brother, plunged into the deep end, Jonah weaves psychedelic influences, elements of the new age rave scene and alt-lifestyles into the swimming, often ambient and near cosmic (so cosmic as to be Kosmische) soundtrack (and I mean soundtrack, with spells of the near cinematic). Effecting his voice, alt-monologues, burning the midnight oil type fringe radio show announcers and what can only be described as a character who sounds like a cross between the beatnik countercultural White Panther and weed advocate John Sinclair and disgraced Richard Nixon, Jonah offers various forms of that therapy; of feeling through and processing not only death but the questions of our seemingly dark uncertain times. Sometimes this is done through the theatrical, and the discipline of acting, of wearing a disguise: Whether that through the twisted trailer park Southern Baptist turn kool-aid poet protagonist conjuring up psychedelic visions of buffalo herds searching for gold in the permafrost from a filthy shower, on the Redneck LCD Soundsystem transmission ‘The Computers Are Cleaning’, or the fucked-up, identity crisis fever dream AI voice on ‘The Singularity Has A Dream Too’.

Jonah’s was after all awarded the young theatre composer of the year accolade in 2016. And he couldn’t resist to throw in at least one reference, namechecking in a playful way that titan of reinvented musical theatre Stephen Sondheim on the Floydian meets Terry Riley and Panda Bear-esque gentle cascaded and Vangelis heralded electronic neo-pop score ‘The Ancestors Are Feeling Sondheim’. Sondheim has become a byword, part of the lexicon, and a shortcut to encompassing a whole style of musical theatre, of writing and performance: addressing darker elements of the human experience through the traditional cannon. I’d suggest that is in evidence on not only this track, which you could rightly imagine as some futuristic stage score, but throughout the entire album. 

There’s a sampled extract from the sock puppet relationship counselling therapy of Marshall Rosenberg, the noted nonviolent communication innovator, on the languid Basic Channel plastic tube synth drums meets Beloved ‘The Ancestors Are Taking Workshops’. It’s not entirely clear, and by the sounds of that title, if such liberal mediations are encouraged or read as part of the contemporary yin for therapy.

This is a world in which OK Computer is anything but OK. A period in which the spectre of singularity is both encouraged and dreaded. A soliloquy over drowsy mirages, passages of wispish despondent indifference, contemplation and escapism. The songs and music move beautifully and movingly between soulful machine pop, a removed form of cult status 70s singer-songwriters, Balearic and 80s/90s club sounds, indie-dance, art-pop and exotic, bird enriched canopy, trance. I’m picking up Laurie Anderson one minute, Harold Grosskopf and Iasos the next, or, a touch of Matthew Dear, Tom Rosenthal, K. Leimar and Arthur Russell.

An incredible album that unfurls its sophistication and depths over repeated plays, Brotherhood deals with harsh realities and loss in a most imaginative and soulful way; the human in the grip of AI and computer learning, making a last stand before singularity becomes reality and the alt-bros of technological supremacy make us all redundant and surplus to requirements. Already in my end-of-year list as one of the finest albums I’ve listened to in 2025.

Pidgins ‘Refrains of the Day, Vol. 2’
(Lexical Records) 4^th April 2025

Making good with 2023’s inaugural volume of daily refrains, the Mexico City collaboration of electroacoustic multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Aaron With and drummer/percussionist Milo Tamez return with an ever-expansive sound and “pidgin” coined language of the abstracted, amorphous and redirected.

The term “Pidgin”, used to name this duo’s project, is a grammatically simplified means of communication that develops between two or more groups of people that do not have a language in common: typically, its vocabulary and grammar are limited and often draws from several languages. Here, it’s used to describe an improvised form of worldly influences transformed to create an unburdened escape from classification and a history dominated by Colonialism and grotesque skewered technology. In another way, and as referenced in the titles of the album’s first couplet of tracks, ‘Getting Things Done’ and ‘Things To Do’, it’s used to free us from the pressures and mundanity of checklists and exercises, or as the duo describe it, the “involuntary, detached feelings of the mechanical productivity mindset”.

With some self-imposed limitations to their methodology and freedoms, the improvised focus is on a single element in each performance. In most cases, the rhythm, which they say is often neglected within improvised music. Tamez more then makes up for this, changing between a wide spectrum of percussive and drumming apparatus and instruments, and from across the world: includes West Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America and beyond. Talking drums, slit drums, gongs, guiros and Mexican ayayote seed ankle shakers all form various rhythmic shapes, patterns and amorphous tribal, ceremonial and abstract exotic forest and jungle dances. Combined with warbly, cybernetic, gargled and more harmonious hermetic effected vocals that sound like a cross between Eno, Panda Bear, Battles and Laurie Anderson, and the sounds of whirly tubes, an Australian frog, the gourd resonated balafon and something called an electric “alimbas”, linguistic and worldly sources either merge, react or play with each other to make a new musical dialect and interaction.

Reference points include both Tamborileros del Barrio de Yalcoc of Chiapas and the Senegalese Bougarabou drumming of Casamance, but I think you can add Ale Hop’s collaboration a few years back with Laura Robles, Afro-Latin influences, Terry Riley and Alabaster DePlume. Whilst the atmospheres conjure up the imaginings of atavistic Mexican civilizations, Vodoun, Shinto and Tibetan ceremony, Balinese gamelan and a strange transmogrification of Indian worshipping George Harrison.

A continuation of Volume One’s peregrinations of strange tongues and obscure colloquialism, explorative and inter-dimensional drumming rhythms, whirly circled windpipes, tines and metallic chimes, Volume Two expands the horizons and visions further; lifting the listener once more out of the ethnographical constraint, and freeing up the mind to travel unbridled through a new language of improvised experiment.  

Manu Dibango ‘Dibango ‘82: La Marseille December ‘82’
(WEWANTSOUNDS) 4^th April 2025

Although the series of enviable icon performances organised by Christian Ducasse in the French cultural and polygenesis melting pot of Marseille in the early 80s wasn’t labelled at the time or since as a showcase for the great and good in saxophone lore, the lineup was certainly dominated by saxophonist deities and innovators. The inaugural season of shows kicked off with two of jazz music’s most free, unburdened luminaries, Archie Shepp and Sam Rivers. A year later and the headliners were Stan Getz and Georges Adams. But sitting between both sets of accomplished saxophone legends, taking to the Théâtre La Criée on the 22^nd December 1982, was the Cameroon-Parisian saxophonist, multi-instrumentalist, bandleader and titan of African fusion Manu Dibango, his famous eight-piece band and, for at least part of the performance, his world traveller nomadic foil, Don Cherry.

Released for the first time on vinyl (I believe), in partnership with INA and Dibango’s own legacy label Soul Makossa, that concert receives the full WEWANTSOUNDS label treatment with remastered tracks and linear notes by both Graeme Ewens (who was there in the flesh on that night) and Ducasse – who also shot the photo that now blazes the cover. The project’s original intentions to “leave a mark” on the French port’s cultural landscape was admirable. Through the combined Association Concert Promotion in Marseille and Cri du Port association, Ducasse drummed up an incredible series of events that showcased a wealth of talent.

Championed as one of the pillars of African music internationally, the late Dibango left his Cameroon birthplace of Douala (the economic and arguably cultural capital of the country) for his adopted home of Paris as a young man to study piano, before taking up the saxophone. All the while imbued by his roots, during the early 1960s Dibango joined the first international African dance band of its type, the Congolese rumba band African Jazz. Exceptionally talented, and proving every bit a leader and innovator, he quickly became a key player on the scene, going on to form his own signature band, and collaborate with a diverse range of other notable stars and virtuoso performers such as the Fania All Stars, Fela Kuti, Herbie Hancock, Bill Laswell, Bernie Worrell, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, King Sunny Adé and Sly and Robbie. As a result, his sound expanded beyond the traditional roots of Cameroon and its neighbours, fusing together combinations of funk, soul, boogie, and jazz. His influences ranged from Congolese rumba to Sidney Brecht, Coltrane and King Curtis.

Most will be familiar with his mega hit ‘Soul Makossa’, which brought a Cameroon genre defined by a strong bass rhythm, brass and regular 4/4 time to a global audience in the early 70s – said to be the most sampled African track in history. It seemed that success brought its own artistic drawbacks, as Dibango’s inquisitive nature and natural versatility struggled to break free from the “makossa” label: although it must be pointed out, Dibango named his own label after it.

By the time of this performance in 1982, Dibango was once more channelling his homeland, bringing the sentimentality, love and authenticity of African village life and traditional music to the stage and mixing it with contemporary 80s sounds, technological advancements and production. Much of the material that made up this concert would be taken from his most recent LP of the time, Waka Juju, which drew upon the Yoruba traditions and rhythms of West Africa, the heavy beat dance and call-and-response singing “Bikutsi” form, and the various drums that accompanied such rituals, celebrations and magical invocations. A pivotal year for Dibango and that awfully inefficiently categorised “World Music” sound generally, the Cameroon star would be asked to artistically direct a showcase box set of his fellow country stars. The Fleurs Musicales Du Cameroun compilation would prove a winner, and most iconic, influential showcase.

Such was Dibango’s charisma, his musical skills and ability to adopt so many influences from not just Africa but Europe and beyond, he became something of a national treasure in France; years later fronting his own regular popular show Salut Manu on one of the country’s main channels, and more or less claimed by the French as their own.

At this conjuncture, in 1982, Dibango’s “Makossa Gang” of virtuosos and noted musicians/artists included stalwart guitarist and fellow Cameroon expat and composer Jerry ‘Bokilo’ Malekani, a founder member of the famous Le Ry-Co Jazz group, who joined Dibango’s ensemble after his disbanded in ’72. In a group that’s drum and percussion heavy, there’s the  “three-piece rhythm section” of Brice Wassy (another member of the Cameroon camp, anointed the king of the 6/8 rhythm, and foil to Mali’s Afro-pop legend Salif Keita), Valery Lobe (composer and arranger to boot, who has worked with far too many artists to name here) and Jean Pierre Coco (who I have to admit, I know next to nothing about). Harmonising beautifully, soulfully and earthly is the “choral pairing” of Florence Titty Dimbeng, a Cameroon icon, working internationally with Dibango but also sharing stages with the likes of Miles Davis and Nina Simone, and Sissy Dipoko, the singer, athlete and catwalk model. The set-up was completed by bassist Hary Gofin, who you will hear a lot of, and keyboardist Del Rahbenja, a one-time member of Jef Gilson’s cult Malagasy group in the 70s.

Sharing the bill as part of a ten-day tour of France, trumpeting nomad Don Cherry joined the ensemble for a second act; incorporating his own worldly wonderings within Dibango’s equally expansive and eclectic journeying. He’s not featured on this LP, but WWS have told me that there will be a future release of Cherry’s performance with Dibango: waiting in the wings.

On that night, the entire ensemble ease into the performance with an audience encouraged clapping rendition of the Eastern Cameroon folk song, ‘Migilbawe’. A spiritual village scene rich with subtle harmonizing and the constant stick rattling beat, authentic roots and soul mingle for a hymnal start.

A shimmer of sparkled percussion brings in a familiar Afrobeat groove as the band smoothly slip into a lively version of ‘Africa Boogie’. Appearing originally on the already mentioned Waka Juju LP that same year, the best track Fela Kuti never wrote, is full of heralded African pride and solo spots that take in funk, fusion music, jazz, Congolese and Cameroon influences – sounding like a love-in between Tony Allen, New Air, King Curtis and Peter King. The elements of sustained 80s synthesized production certainly place this eleven-minute live version, which seems to slip and slide, bounce and saunter to several tempo changes, bouts of simmering down and then intensity.

“Side one” ends with the percussive, near Afro-Brazilin inspired ‘Ashiko Oumba’. Keeping a constant rhythm throughout, rattling a bottle and blowing the odd whistle, whilst building us a picture – talking to the crowds in the role of storyteller and educator – Dibango takes this one down a notch. Both serenades and fluted leaps of Afro-jazz and Afro-R&B sax, the choral soulful voices of his backing singers, and an incipient band holding back make for something buzzing with anticipation, before finding that funky carnival groove.

Flipping over to “side two” and there’s a contiguous three-part breakdown of the Waka Juju LP title-track, split into various tempo changes, various combinations of instruments, but thoroughly dominated by African percussion and drums. Again, with the carnival, almost samba-like feel, there’s passages of smoother electric-piano-like soulful simmering, saxophone doused Afrobeat, the tribal, the village voice, and sleigh bell shaken 80s fusions. The original motif, riff is all present and correct but led through a both relaxed and shuffling display of love and pride.

This is roots music played at its best by a Dibango and his band of virtuoso foils. The quality of the recordings themselves – remastered from the original tapes we’re told – is top notch, and it does feel, if you turn it up loud enough, like you could be right there in the front row. But I’m looking forward to hearing Don Cherry’s section at some point – I’m anticipating Hugh Masekela vibes. A legendary performance is brought back from the vaults, and rightfully given a new airing as Dibango’s legacy is once more, rightly, celebrated.

Bernardo Devlin ‘The Night Before The Space Age’
(stereo-b) 25^th April 2025

Having so far alluded my radar, and without reading the PR briefing, my first thoughts on investigating this grownup existential songbook were of a Benelux Leonard Cohen – complete with those rising near heavenly beatific choral backing voices -hungdogging it in a bleak Lutheran Northern Europe. To my surprise, and with all the intonations, cadences of the German school of such downcast troubadourship, a touch of the shrugged French masters of the form, and even a hint of morose Scott Walker, the veteran artist and composer Bernardo Devlin is actually Portuguese. A revelation you could cry, as Bernardo channels an international cast of voices and influences, from Waites to Nico, Michal Gira, Bowie (‘Dome’, to these ears, has an air of David’s 2000s period, but especially ‘The Loneliest Guy’ song from his Reality album) and Heyme on his latest album, the anticipated with baited forlorn and resignation, The Night Before The Space Age.

Alongside those referenced voices, and even further away from his Lisbon-base camp, the music is itself a brilliant and perfectly paced combination of post-punk, gothic, Brecht, Walker-esque, Swans, Sylvian and near challenging balletic mature avant-garde influences. Definity not what you expect from a sun-baked Portugal.   

Sci-fi of a very plaintive, lurking and shadowy kind, our sagacious lyrical host lumbers, drags and in a more nostalgic mood of reflection, draws us into his magnetic pulled heart of darkness. Drama at a slow pace, with depth and despondent weariness, controlled denunciations and signs of reminisced breaks from the mire of this hellish futuristic mindscape of the worn-down and bedraggled, each song is a stage-set, the act in a pondered and propound philosophical sigh or emotive stirring of unease and longing.

Most of these songs could easily soundtrack a European noir thriller, murderous plotted psychological drama or morbidly curious film. Of course, no surprises there as Bernard has written for the screen on numerous occasions during his five-decade career; proving an adroit hand at stirring up the right moods and atmospheres, and selling an idea, an image and encapsulation of the emotional.

That CV also includes Osso Exótico, which he co-founded in the late 80s, and collaborations with the English composer and pianist Andrew Poppy and the Swedish-American multi-instrumentalist Helena Espvall, who now appears as a foil playing both lead and rhythm guitar and providing some of those lulling, near devout, on a majority of the album’s ten tracks. Without listing everyone else, there is a host of other contributors, especially on the backing vocals sides, that help create the right mood of despondency and haunted balladry and more up-tempo reverberations of phaser-like piano iterations and redress.

Themes vary in this both lugged and more menacing suspension of alternative space age ushering uncertainty; musings, we’re told on limitless power (step forward Elon and bro pals, the autocracy of unelected masters and leaders), of gene inheritance trauma, dread and reflections on finding a momentary senses of solitude and peace in the early hours (in this case, the ungodly hour of “5:45”). Whatever the topics, there’s a worrying sense of fate and dispassionate inevitability throughout; pessimism in an age that threatens to explode for good. Idiosyncratic, despite me naming all those reference points, Bernardo has a unique character and voice to share with us, making this an intriguing and successfully absorbing, embracing album of music and sagacious lyricism. Again, think Cohen wandering the aftermath of a future dystopia. 

Wolfgang Pérez ‘Memorias Fantasmas’
(Hive Mind Records) 18^th April 2025

As the name might indicate, with the most German of German names and most Spanish of Spanish names, Wolfgang Pérez’s heritage, his “casta”, is a mix of the two nationalities.

Based in Essen, the industrial hub of the Ruhr, the songwriter, arranger, guitarist and artist has previously released albums that draw upon this linage: especially last year’s Spanish language AHORA album, the follow-up to the debut Who Cares Who Cares from 2021. Within that scope of influences there’s a musical embrace of everything from pop to chamber music and jazz.

The latest release, facilitated by those keen folk at Hive Mind Records, once more draws from Pérez’s Spanish genes with a transmogrification of the beautified coos and voices, and the melodious traditional accompanied music of his family singing in church. Part memories placed in new sonic surroundings, part mirage/hallucination and “phantom” inhabited, recordings taken by his grandfather Fernando on a cheap piece of “shitty” recording equipment in a church in the historically famous Spanish city of Segoiva are rendered otherworldly and near supernatural.

Taped back in 1982, straight from the family audio photo album, Catholic liturgy and traditional benediction is both filtered through and hindered by crackles, static, staccato breaks in the flow, fizzes and ground shaking sonorous propeller and pneumatic style bass. Rubber band plucked instruments of a fashion, unoiled pulleys and squeaks of hidden tools and objects and antenna signals interrupt those wooed and diaphanous choral communions. The old foundations of that prized Castille & Leon regional city, with its intact 2000-year-old Roman aqueduct, popular Medieval castle of Alcázar, and abundance of Latin churches, is returned to new frequencies, both haunted and unreal.

Reminding me in places of both the Spanish underground tape culture of the 1980s (Felix Menkar, C – 307 and Neo Zelanda) and the contemporary Spanish maverick manipulators and instigators Escupemtralla, Memorias Fantasmas is transmitted from an amorphous ether of repurposed memories. Inter-dimensional tweaks and feeds offer a strange and experimental take on the family archives, a sense of place and time.

This three-track EP is a gift from the artist, a precursor of a full album, which will be released in the summer by the same label. I’m not sure if Wolfgang Pérez will be heading in the same direction or once more, trying something new and different, but his roots will play some part on that upcoming release. Keep an eye and ear out for it.

Note: Pieces will all be premiered on Radiophrenia Glasgow sometime between April 7th and April 20^th.

Pacha Wakay Munan ‘El tiempo quiere cantar’
(Buh Records) 25^th April 2025

Brought to visionary life, the ancient instruments of pre-Hispanic colonised Peru are revitalized in a conversation, invocation of the ancestors by the duo of Dimitri Manga Chávez and Ricardo López Alcas. A scholarly, musicologist and archaeological rich project transformed into a mysterious, mystical and both tonal and melodic atmosphere and musical quartet of imaginative mythology, discovery and atavistic ritual and ceremonial performances, El tiempo quiere cantar (which I believe translates loosely as “time wants to sing”) tunes into the vibrations and winds of the old North Peruvian kingdom of Chimú, the more southern coastline Nasca civilization and the revered sacred site of Huacca Aliaga, located in the Peruvian capital of Lima.  

Concentrated on whistling vessels, ceramic and cane panpipes and seashell horned trumpets from these sites, valleys and regions, new life is breathed and chuffed into an assortment of discovered instruments previously either undocumented or left out of the history books. Voices, chants from a veiled Andes and Peru are not so much found as finally given a respective hearing; the duo and friends not just noting an absence but reconnecting proudly with a once rich and complex culture, fatally destroyed by the Spanish in the early 1500s. A point of note is that the Chimú kingdom succeeded the even older Moche; flourishing between 900AD and the late 1400s, but first conquered by the Inca emperor Topa Inca Yupanqui and then later the Conquistadors.     

But, as I’ve or more or less suggested, this is anything but an exercise in ethnomusicology and preservation, as the notable musicians, pulled together under the Pacha Wakay Munan title, seem to conjure up new horizons, fourth world experiments and evocative marches, processions and dances that lie somewhere between Medieval folk and the otherworldly. This culminates in spells in which spirits and ghostly visons of magic are carried across an exotic canopy of twittery and fluted whistling, low heralded announcements, and conch shells blows across the ocean; a sonic and atmospheric world in which the ‘El Taki Onkoy’ or “sick song” chant of the Culina language, first documented by the famous German-Peruvian composer, teacher and musicologist Rodolfo Holzmann, is voiced by singer, choir director, composer and artist guest Ximena Menéndez to evocative and dreamy but also more wilder and moaned effect.

Another guest, and musicologist, Chalena Vásquez Rodríguez appears as part of the improvised session ‘Mundo Posible’ (“world possible” I believe), here reinterpreted as a matchmaker between classical and freely played South American piano, a touch nearly of Tango, and sea shanty-like piped music. Third foil, Peruvian flutist, composer, sound artist, researcher and educator Camilo Ángeles lends a light wind and air of nearly obscured misty breaths and blows on the two stage‘Qinray Tema’. With an essence, breathing cycles and whistles of the horizontally held metal transverse and the pelican bone flutes merge with frame drum-like folk-style joy.

Sometimes this all sounds like a world of communication between the ancestors and the aliens of Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods, with the supernatural woven into kazoo-like marches and astral projections. Living, breathing artefacts reborn and taking their rightful place in the history of Peruvian culture.  

Synthetic Villains ‘Cosmic’
(Flood of Sound) 31^st March 2025

As a fellow child of the 1970s and 1980s like me, Richard Turner’s informative years were soundtracked and visually and imaginatively accompanied by an explosion in sci-fi on the big and small screen. During a magical era, roughly between the late 1960s and early 80s, there was (as Turner himself outlines) an abundance of both optimistic and darker sci-fi wonders, thrillers, mysteries and gravitas awed spectaculars, including Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Dr. Who, Lost in Space, E.T, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Gerry Anderson’s puppetry productions Fireball XL5, Captain Scarlet and Thunderbirds. That’s without delving into cinema. And here again Turner references, possibly the greatest sci-fi movie ever made, 2001: A Space Odyssey, alongside Dark Star, Silent Running, THX1138, Blade Runner, The Black Hole and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Of course, there has to also be a mention of those films, concepts that made that later era possible: George Melies’ A Trip to the Moon, Flash Gordon and Forbidden Planet for instance.

In an age yet to be totally ruined by the internet and social media, space, its exploration and discoveries seemed far more optimistic and a touch naïve: which wasn’t a bad thing. Unfortunately, that soon turned sour in an age of mutually assured nuclear annihilation. And despite the spectacular progress, from the invention of flight to jet engine and landing on the moon all within less than a hundred years, we are yet to replicate achievements made in the 60s and 70s. Humanities clamour and dreams to travel beyond Earth are now decided upon by tech billionaires; altruistic attentions more or less replaced by commercial agents and idealistic supremacists.

As a homage of a kind to the spectacular, the theatrical, the analogue age of experimentation, Turner, under the Synthetic Villains alias, conjures up a cosmic soundtrack of short sound-effects-like pieces, celestial suites, mysterious and thriller-type cult scores, library music incidentals, and kosmische-style hallowed universal awe. Whilst mentioning in the press release info a love for the Stones’ psychedelic-space trip ‘2000 Light Years From Home’, Pink Floyds’ ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ and Hawkind’s ‘Space Is Deep’, the music and sounds here are of a more Radiophonic Workshop, cult, estranged clavichord, or celeste, played Baroque celestial kind.

For this is the space dreams and drama of childhood refigured by a cybernetic, metallic voiced Focus Group, Broadcast and Jez Butler. A countdown, thrusters engaged, sliding doors and haywire circuitry lunar exploration of uncertainty, cathedral-celestial bathed solar rays and winds, and chthonian moon base atmospherics that border on the supernatural and alien, this album evokes hints of Vangelis, Tangerine Dream, Daphne Oram, The Advisory Circle, Greg Foat, Alain Gorageur, Michael Legrand, Bitchin Bajas and the Douglas Grindstaff, Jack Finlay and Joseph Sorokin trio of Star Trek sound guys.  

Fun, suspense, nostalgia, wisps and vapours of alien constellations and heavenly bodies all merge to score an era of awe, wonder and impending sci-fi dread on a novel album of lunar bird sirens, clandestine chimes, library sounds and the analogue tunings, signals and vibrated, transformed robotic voices, commands and countdowns. Press play and settle back into a much better age.  

Kannaste4 ‘Out Of Self and Into Others’
(We Jazz) 25^th April 2025

Sounding like a Finnish amalgamation of Connect 4 and Canasta, Jussi Kannaste’s quartet showcase a display of various jazz forms and moods on the much-anticipated album, Out Of Self and Into Others. I say anticipated, as this is the gifted and much admired, in-demand tenor saxophonist’s debut album as a bandleader. And what a nascent announcement it is too.

But before that we must mention the troupe he has headed for some time; a live ensemble that has made its mark but only now puts that exciting dynamism, that channelling of jazz history and variety on wax. Appearing alongside the brass expert, sideman and educator (the head of the department of jazz at the respected Sibelius Academy in Finland) Kannaste is joined by trumpeter, composer, educator and bandleader in his own right Tomi Nikku (also of the Bowman Trio fame), drummer extraordinaire Joonas Riippa (who plays in a myriad of groups on the scene, including, alongside Kannaste, the notable Antti Lötjönen quintet) and We Jazz label stalwart, the Swedish bassist Petter Eldh (the grand instigator of the Koma Saxo and Post Koma ensembles, and part of the Y-OTIS set-up). 

Together they form an intuitive bond, infusing nine original compositions with a freshness, attentiveness and sensitivity, but leaping into action as they change up the mood music from swing and screen to the blues, smokestack NYC jazz of the 50s and 60s, the freeform and experimental. With twenty plus years of experience in the bag, the scope and range of influences, the skill set is wide and international, with echoes of Lalo Schifrin, the New Orleans vibe (on the Mardi-Gras blues ‘Different Worlds’, which by the end feels like the band have lifted off their shoulders a heavy burden), Ornette Coleman, early Miles, Lester Young, Harold Land, Jimmy Giuffre, Andy Haas and Anthony Braxton (both the latter on the short avantgarde remembrance piece of supressed trombone-mimicking squeezed and thin-lipped dry spitted ‘Elegy’)

From circular heralds and brightened blasts to vibrato bristles in which every fibre of breath is made audible on the album’s vignettes of pauses and reminisces, the horns duo of Kannaste and Nikku interweave, shadow or form a duet together over the effective rattled, resonated springy and loose splayed double bass crabbing and calmer mused pulls of Eldh and the textural brushed, dusted, sieving and tighter rhythmic drumming of Riippa.

Each member of the band is given ample opportunity to step out on their own within the framework of these compositions, but not as virtuoso show-offs, but as integral passages, lead-ins and incipient introductions to both stretched out and tighter performances that mix flurries of the excitable and flexing with dashes, walks, serenades, crooning and the subdued and hushed. As a debut for Jussi Kannaste as a bandleader, this album is an exceptional, commanding show of vibrant, lively and mulled bluesy jazz with a history and legacy.    

Now For The Pleading:

Hi, my name is Dominic Valvona and I’m the Founder of the music/culture blog monolithcocktail.com For the last ten years both me and the MC team have featured and supported music, musicians and labels we love across genres from around the world: ones that we think you’ll want to know about. No content on the site is paid for or sponsored, and we only feature artists we have genuine respect for /love or interest in. If you enjoy our reviews (and we often write long, thoughtful ones), found a new artist you admire or if we have featured you or artists you represent and would like to say thanks or show support, than you can now buy us a coffee at https://ko-fi.com/monolithcocktail