Monolith Cocktail Blog

A WORLD OF SONIC/MUSICAL DISCOVERIES REVIEWED BY DOMINIC VALVONA
(Unless stated otherwise, all releases are available now)

(Photo : Zara Saraon @zarasaraon)

Luce Mawdsley ‘Northwest & Nebulous’
(Pure O Records) 29^th March 2024

Over several years now the former Mugstar guitarist Luce Mawdsley has progressively shorn the more predatory slurred spoken-word mise-en-scenes and lurid, sleazy torturous self-harm from their music; gradually removing the “verbasier” programmed-like demonic effects from their voice and freeing themselves from a circled abyss of sonnets.

During that time Luce has also gravitated ever nearer towards a self-described “queer” vision of the Western soundtrack. This can be especially felt and heard on the last solo album to be featured and premiered on the Monolith Cocktail, Vulgar Displays Of Affection, which showed the Liverpool-based artist/musician moseying to a removed, transported alternative version of this Western re-imaging: a culminated merger of Morricone, Blood Meridian, Crime And The City Solution, El Topo and Hellenica.  

Now onto their sixth studio album proper, Luce not only fully embraces that Americana influence but also now joins it with echoes of the English pastoral tradition and chamber music.

Another alternative score, and another progressive step in Luce’s well-being and journey of self-discovery and identity, all traces of their voice have been erased to escape an unhealthy cycle of unhappiness. In penning those disturbed and candid poetics and morbid descriptions, Luce wasn’t released from their torment, but instead locked into a spiral of reinforced misery. Breaking free from that process, Luce has found sanctum with their latest journey-like score, Northwest & Nebulous – the first to be released on Luce’s own label imprint, Pure O Records. Through a “non-human lens” the often amorphous, sometimes ambiguous, landscapes of this new record seem to let nature take its course: wherever it may lead.

Under the auspices of a Grade II listed Scandinavian church in Liverpool, and with chamber pairing of Nicholas Branton on clarinets and Rachel Nicholas on viola (making another appearance after adding something of the ethereal to the Vulgar Displays Of Affection album) at Luce’s side, a magical bucolic spell is unlocked. The music and atmospheres are mysterious in part, yet more natural and placeable, invoking landscapes, lakesides, and woodlands simultaneously quintessentially English and yet also American – think the Catskills, the Appalachians, and the Deep South. Within that tapestry the wildlife is mimicked with pecking and swanned charm – on the cockerel evoked ‘Roosting’, you could imagine a Jemima Puddle-duck like character waddling across the barnyard, albeit to a reimagined vision of bluegrass music composed by Vaughan Williams.   

An holistic record that rescores the English scenery and places held near for Luce, the unfolding stages are both beautifully conveyed and hallucinatory in equal measure; a retold fairytale without any prompts, and without a human cast; a window in on the enchantments but also non-hierarchical, non-binary and free nature of the wilds and geography: a metaphor for Luce’s struggles to find an identity that feels natural, safe and unburdened.

One part classical, one part Americana, and one part folksy (a touch of the Celtic too) there’s still a very modern twist to what we may identify as the familiar: imagine Prokofiev on an acid trip, or Ry Cooder (all the melted, bendy, twanged, picked, tremolo guitar work down to Luce, who also provides the organ and percussion) in an English pasture laying down breadcrumbs for Hampshire & Foat. And then again, there are echoes of the occult, a little Wicca, and the occasional wilder sound of the clarinet harking like Anthony Braxton. The Moody Blues, Between, Jade Warrior, Federico Balducci, Andrew Wasylyk all appear on the horizon of this earthly paradise and portal. Luce might just have found their sanctuary amongst the unencumbered undergrowth; beside the refracted light inspired lakes, the gentle versants, and valleys of Northern England. Luce’s imagination is certainly in a better place, the organic nature of their music proving creatively successful in counterbalancing two great and much inspired landscapes together to produce something very beautiful and magical. 

Ivo Perelman, Chad Fowler, Reggie Workman and Andrew Cyrille ‘Embracing The Unknown’  (Mahakala Music) 29^th March 2024

A true “cross-generational” (with two of the participants born in the 1930s) coming together of avant-garde, freeform and hard bop talent, the ensemble quartet of Ivo Perelman, Chad Fowler, Reggie Workman and Andrew Cyrille  “embrace” experiment. You could call it an extemporized gathering, with no prior arrangements and not much in the way of dialogue. And you called also say it was an intentional sounding collaboration, taking in, as it does, the Brazilian roots of the tenor saxophonist Perelman and the American roots (from Arkansas to Memphis, Philly and New York) of stritch (a large straight sax or alto sax without the curved bell) and saxello (a unique soprano sax with a curved bell and neck that lets out a distinctive sound) player Fowler, bass, saw and percussionist Workman and fellow percussionist Cyrille.

Released on Fowler’s own imprint, this circle of acclaimed and proficient artists/musicians brings a wealth of experience to the studio, performance space. Workman’s CV alone is incredible, knocking around with such gods of the form as Coltrane, Blakey and Monk, whilst drummer Cyrille had a long-standing association with the free jazz pianist-poet luminary Cecil Taylor. For their parts, Perelman has a prolific catalogue of albums stretching back to his debut in 1989 (moving from his native Sao Paulo that same year to New York), whilst the multi-instrumentalist Fowler has played on and produced everything from soul to R&B and jazz recordings.    

From the titles alone this pooling of experiences, from across 70 plus odd years, Embracing The Unknown takes an undefined freeform journey of the mind; the references to “self” to “reflection” and “introspection” obvious, prompted and described, in a fashion, by the tones, pitches, entanglements, wails, strains and blasts of intensity. An expulsion of expressive query, and maybe a lighthearted leap from the psychiatrist’s couch the self-exploration of the mind and soul combine to evoke shades of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Marshall Allen, Pharoah Sanders, John Zorn, Barney Wilen, Roscoe Mitchell and Sam Rivers. The inner self is landscaped with the skylines of New York, but a semblance also of a transported South America and New Orleans in the untethered mix.

The various saxophones often resemble a gaggle of geese, or squeak, shrill, squawk, and squeal to the rafters. Hysterics of a kind are met with the giddy and more soul-searching passages. And then you get almost apparition-style spells: more playful than scary. Those horns can pierce but also serenade wistfully, as they do on the measured and near soliloquy sonnet, and Coltrane-light ‘Self-Reflection’. The percussive elements and drums can also be varied, with more springy “boings”, metal and tin cup scuttles and rattles, and the dusting, sieving of drum skins. Those same drums break out at times into a pattern of a kind; sometimes in an almost freeform swing fashion and at others, almost hitting hard bop. It’s hard to describe or even get across what I mean, but certainly the finale, ‘Self-Contemplation’, has the spindled and tinny semblance of something approaching Latin America.   

Making the abstract seem even more so, yet somehow conveying mood, emotions and self-expression, this descriptive and totally improvisational master class in free-thought-jazz somehow captures the internal struggles and reflections of the mind during an age of high anxiety, rage, divisiveness and unease.   

Arushi Jain ‘Delight’
(Leaving Records) 29^th March 2024

Rejuvenation, reinvention and reenergized, the melodious form of the Ragga Bageshri is adopted by the polymath artist, musician, composer, vocalist, engineer and ‘modular synthesist’ Arushi Jain on the follow up to 2021’s well-received Under A Lilac Sky album. Undergoing various changes, imbued with, and surrounded by, the wildlife, light, and art of an empty house on the seaside, that original romantic Indian ragga of longing conveyed the feelings of a lover waiting to reunite with their beloved, but Jain now replaces that devotional love with invocations of “delight”: or as Jain puts it, “…to instill belief in the ever-present nature of delight…assert[ing] the need to actively seek it when not readily found.”   

Jain also transduces and transforms the arrangement and the essence of that tradition into something very futuristic, artful, and ethereal sounding; the main sound, sonic and instrument being that incredible voice, which can be as sonorous as it can be vaporous. Across nine highly atmospheric tracks of the astral, celestial, ebbing, beatific and technological, that voice is built upon with layers of tonal lulls and coos or, in stark but reverberated contrast, sings to the heavens, the higher learning. Yet there are also assonant utterings that call to the “void”; propelled forward on a Basic Channel, Jeff Mills-esque chopper-like minimalist techno beat. At times those effected vocals and wafted harmonies are morphed into synthesized waves and lines (at one point almost monastic), and at other times are left to convey the sentiments of the theme – the quasi-remix like ‘You Are Irresistible’ being the clearest example; a mix of club, modern warbled R&B and hypnotizing cosmic dream spells.

Underneath, undulating or attentively in unison with that magical voice there’s a sophisticated envelope of light-giving arpeggiator and algorithms, and the distilled, transparent, and warping. The environment is itself, as I mentioned earlier, transduced into an artificial metallic menagerie, with the sun’s rays and beams gently radiating and penetrating the dreamy new age and trance-y ambience. Notes fall, cascade, and drop like crystalloid bulbs, whilst a synthesized symphonic orchestra pipes up with a whistled and fluty spring and bounce. I can hear a semblance of marimba, or something very much like it bobbling about on ‘Our Teaching Tongues’, which also features a building chopper, rotor-bladed circulation of minimalist electronic. And there seems to be some sort of mizzle-like seepage of a horn too in places.

Every element is put together wonderfully as a softened balance is sort between the soaring and suffused, insularly reflected and the amorphously never-ending. And through it all “delight” is sort out, courted, embraced and enraptured in a futuristic retelling of sagacious Indian arts, wills and universal feels; producing an extraordinary and diaphanous biosphere. 

Ill Considered ‘Precipice’
(New Soil) 22^nd March 2024

Despite the hurry to lay down this stripped-down improvised vision of the jazz ensemble – recorded in a day, with no overdubs; mixed the following day –, the refreshed Ill Considered trio exercise a new verve and itch to reassemble, recreate and reignite without sounding in a rush. Back to a core triumvirate lineup of Idris Rahman on saxophone, Liran Donin on bass and Emre Ramazanoglu on drums, the very much lauded UK jazz collective set a new course free of augmentation and effects; an invocation of the great trios of jazz’s golden age through a modern lens, with all the history and development that comes with it.

Away from the dramatics of the album’s “precipice” title, this is a group in flux, reconnecting perhaps with the basics in an act of renewal (a lot the “re” going on I know); starting over you could say, but nothing so year zero as that. The dynamics and interactions of which are balanced: the wild with a certain tightness, and an abstractedness and playfulness that never quite breaks out into the freeform. Whilst Rahman’s saxophone penetrates and shrills, sometimes bristles and trills more fervently, you can always recognize it – a more melodic hybrid of Sam Rivers, Jonah Parzen-Johnson and Alex Roth. His foils on drums and bass seem pretty anchored as they lay down the various rhythms and feels. Donin seems to cross post-punk, no wave (there’s a particular Liquid Liquid spin on the Arthur Russell goes downtown ‘Linus With The Sick Burn’) and, of course, jazz bass lines, repeated prods, probes and elasticated wobbles, whilst Ramazanglu plays with breakbeats, drills, rattled spidery sticks and more percussive sounding scuttles.

Whether the titles came later, or were used as prompts, reference points, they do go some way in describing the performances: to a point. Name checking mythology, repair and the natural world, improvisations like ‘Vespa Crabro’, as in the European hornet, does have a real spikey buzz and sting to it; the bass like a rubber band being pulled and twanged in a busy manner, whilst the sax honks and cuts right through like the angry said wasp darting from one direction to the next. The fire ants, ‘Solenopsis’, that lend their name to the ninth improvisation on this album evoke West Africa; a desert farm setting in which the drums seem to work off the metals, the cattle bells and water troughs as the sax pecks bird-like, or flits about on the dry earth. ‘Kintsugi’ feeds into the thinking behind this slimmed-down chapter of the group; referencing as it does the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with slow-drying ‘urushiol’ based lacquers, dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver or platinum. The philosophy of which is that you treat breakage and repair as part of that objects history, rather than try to disguise it. Sound wise, the trio seems to touch on splayed Afro-rhythms and hip-hop, as the bass bounces in the spaces and skips, and the sax reverberates and drifts. ‘Katabatic’ on the other hand, takes a chthonian journey into Greek myth with a tunneled sax circulating in an underworld atmosphere of mysterious probes and J Dilla breaks. 

Ill Considered in trio form is neither reductive nor compromised, managing instead to transform and amplify the basics into a concentration of promising new material. Laid down in the moment, feeding off of each other’s energy but sense of control and direction too, they open up their horizons with a riff on the jazz trio idiom.    

Alison Cotton ‘Engelchen’
(Rocket Recordings)

In the wake of the barbaric terrorism of Hamas on October 7^th, and the ensuing destructive retaliation/ obliteration of Gaza by Israel since, there seems little room – let alone nuance and balance – on the debate; battle lines have been drawn and divisions sowed. And so this inspired tale of ‘derring-do’ (originally performed live at the Seventeen Nineteen Holy Church in Sunderland) performance suite from the Sunderland composer Alison Cotton is a most timely reminder of dark history, but also of altruistic acts of kindness.

Scoring the story of the innocuous Cook sisters, Ida and Louise, and their incredibly brave rescue attempts to save the lives of twenty-nine Jews from occupied Europe during the build-up and eventual outbreak of WWII, Cotton ties in the modern plight of refugees escaping similar persecutions: the album’s reprised neo-classical pained and suffered leitmotif, and a capella style stirring voices, are used on the finale, ‘Engelchen Now’, to draw attention to a female Kurdish “teacher/activist”, making a similar passage and aided by similar “angels” over eight years later.

Originally from Cotton’s hometown, the Cook sisters moved on to London, with jobs in the civil services, and remained largely innocuous until their obsession for opera took them to Germany during Hitler’s rise to power. In an age when international travel was still very much the preserve and enjoyment of the upper echelons of society, the sisters managed to visit many of the famous opera houses on both the continent and across the Atlantic. Over the course of many years they built up friendships with such well-known and respected figures as the Austrian conductor Clemens Krauss and his wife, the Romanian opera singer Viorica Ursuleac, whilst also hobnobbing with such stars of the form like Rosa Ponselle and Ezio Pinza. Through sending boutiques to dressing rooms, requesting autographs and photographs with the stars, the Cook sisters would build up a network that would prove vital in saving Jews from the Nazi purge.

Almost like characters from an Ealing Comedy or Hitchcock movie, the sisters surface naivety and eccentricity proved a good cover; the sisters managing to bluff their way past SS guards on a few occasions, and remain undetected even when smuggling through those escapees furs and jewelry. Unflattering, but both sisters were described as being “plain” and “gawky”, their clothes made from magazine patterns by Ida. And so they were often dismissed: under the radar as it were. They used this to their advantage, and in so doing saved many lives in what was a most dangerous climate.

For their kind acts they were anointed as “Engelchens” (“angels”), and given the honorific title of Righteous Among the Nations: a title used by ‘Israel to describe all of the non-Jews who, for purely altruistic reasons, risked their lives in order to save Jews from being exterminated by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust.’

Despite this, the Cook sisters’ exploits have remained relatively obscure: although Ida did pen a memoir, We Followed Our Stars, in the 1950s (reprinted as Safe Passage in 2008), and there is a possible film adaptation in the works. (Ida incidentally wasn’t the only writer, sibling Louise, going under the pen name of Mary Burchell, had a sideline in writing romances for Mills & Boon). Through their connection with Cotton’s Sunderland hometown, that story is now picked-up and relived: reimagined through the use of strings and voice by a dedicated composer.

Less a morbid, dark soundtrack to the evils of the Nazi regime and Holocaust, Cotton instead conveys the enormity and the danger of the Cook’s enterprise through slow tidal movements, tones, intonations and changes in the atmosphere. Throughout it all a prevailing presence and emotional pull can be felt: The mood music of grief, the plaintive and sorrowful cumulating in a beautifully played series of arrangements and suites that are as somber as they are beautiful and moving – reminding me in parts of Alex Stolze, Anne Müller, Simon McCorry and Aftab Darvishi.

Both wordless Hebrew hymnal lulls and sung poetics hold and swim in the haunted ripples of time, as the story unfolds in bellowed and concertinaed breaths and to the bowed strains of strings. There are subtle drums too on occasion, either brushed and sieved, or marching like a softened military drill – prompting that danger I mentioned, militaristic Germany, the warning of a firing squad and peril.   

Some movements have a squeezebox, almost folk and near Celtic, saltiness that evokes the sea; none more so than the album’s first single, ‘The Letter Burning’. Pulled, drawn from obfuscation, the correspondence that was burned by Louise from that time, are ruminated upon to the strike of the gong and an organ-like (could be a harmonium) tide of simultaneously haunting and dreamy a capella remembrance and woe. Sung references are made to those “saved”, and the location where news of their plight was first discussed. Whilst the intentions behind the erasure of these letters are unknown, Cotton interprets Louise’s actions as a gesture of remorse at all those poor souls the sisters couldn’t save: literally haunted by the thought of their fates. Perhaps it was an attempt at moving on with their lives, to not dwell on such tragedy, and instead look to more hopeful times. The world was moving on, quickly forgetting, even aiding and abetting many former Nazis. After the anger and some justice, initial worldwide broadcasted trials soon vanished from the public psyche. Many perpetrators, facilitators of that regime were soon forgotten.

In the wake of another tumultuous, scary period of anti-Semitism, but in a more general manner, with hostility at an all time high towards to the refugee community, it is such stories and projects as Cotton’s Engelchen that remind us of the cost of our loss of humility and humanity. With so many layers to the Cook sisters’ story (let alone the obvious there’s a strong feminist angle to raise) and connotations for our own time, this score, soundtrack, performance comes full circle: the fates of 1930s/40s Jews in Germany tied to those of Kurds and other persecuted ethnic groups in the 21^st century.      

Andrew Heath And Mi Cosa de Resistence ‘Café Tristesse’
(Audiobulb) 16^th March 2024

Composer of “lower case” minimalism Andrew Heath and his willing foil on this collaboration, the Argentinian ambient composer Fernando Perales (under the guises of his Mi Cosa de Resistence alias), slow down time to convey abstract disquiet and a sense of the plaintive on their first proper album together – the pair previously worked together on A Speechless Body, but this is their first actual fully shared collaborative immersion. For the title translates from the French as “a state of melancholy sadness”; an encapsulation of a mood made famous and iconic by the lauded surrealist and poet Paul Éluard who in turn inspired his French compatriot Françoise Sagan to pen the 1954 novel Bonjour Tristesse, which went on to spawn a movie adaptation. Obviously the “café” part if that album title needs less explanation or inquiry, evoking as it does the legacy of ruminating whilst measuring the passage of time sipping on a cappuccino or knocking back espressos: The café as centre of every movement worth mentioning in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, especially in Europe where this sort of almost resigned and wistful contemplation.

Having built up quite the reputations and CVs (Heath no stranger to this blog, with his last solo album, Scapa Flow making our “choice albums of 2023” lists) both participants bring much adroit subtlety to this dreamy drifting traverse of feelings that cannot be described so much in words or song. Perales’ main job seems to be in picking out the right atmospheric guitar notes, the right motifs and bended mirages, which in turn either linger or float over Heaths vapours, ambient scapes and wafts. Across strange refractive sun-lit Western vistas, near ethereal visions and rain swept European boulevards, those synthesized and tremulous, gently plucked and pinged instruments – a signature presence too of Heath’s translucent and more dulled piano is also in attendance – somehow manifest images of the French waiter taking his break in-between services, taking a drag perhaps on a cigarette to unwind from the tensions, stresses as he or she watches the comings and goings on the street outside: Time seems to be suspended during these moments of contemplation.

And yet there are moments that, to me, suggest an almost Vangelis-style Blade Runner kind of pathos (especially the ambient vision ‘The Absentee’). There’s certainly the air of mystery suffused throughout this album of musical novellas. If the guitar work of Fererico Balducci and Myles Cochran enthuse merging perfectly with invocations of Eno, John Laneand Roedelius enthuse you then this perfectly matched collaborative affair of the heart and cerebral feels will very much impress.

NAH ‘Totally Recalled’
(Viernulvier Records) 15^th March 2024

Not so much disjointed or a clattering collision but more an “overlapping” controlled chaos of influences, sounds and beats, the drummer, producer and visual artist NAH rebuilds and shuttles a polygenesis set of rhythms into a noisy assemblage of broken beats, cosmic effects, repurposed House and Rave music, removed jazz, hip-hop, d’n’b and Techno. 

Releasing this latest experiment, propelled from an effects pedal embellished drum kit, on the Ghent, Belgium art center of Viernulvier’s label (Use Knife, Youniss and Hieroglyphic Being), NAH’s sonic immersion is, when seen in the live environment, complimented with visuals. But I wouldn’t call this a art project as such, more an experiment in combining the chaos, constant generated overflow of information in a world in which technology encroaches ever more upon our understanding of being human: tying in with NAH’s balancing of the acoustic and synthetic.  

This latest album “serves headphones submersion” but is better “witnessed live in all its decibel meter breaking glory.” It’s certainly full of noise and constantly on the move, shuttling, galloping and barreling around, or in pneumatic fashion, drilling those beats into the conscious. A jumbled cacophony at times of J Dilla, People Like Us, Plug, Wagon Christ, Bugz In The Attic and Cities Aviv (who is just one of many artists NAH has collaborated with over the years, since his debut in 2011) with transmogrified and more clearer vocal samples (many of which seem to have been borrowed off soul and R&B records), Totally Recalled is like an inner rolodex of logged breaks and snippets pulled together to create “alternative” movement of musical ideas, dynamisms. And so you might hear an alternative version of Tony Allen drumming on R&S Records in the 90s, or, Kosmische-like star gate synthesized space takeoffs as envisioned by Tomat. Some tracks seem to discombobulate hip-hip, d’n’b and hardcore Techno in one go; clattering together in the same space without sounding a mess, but somehow making perfect sense – imagine Madlib working with Jeff Mills. There’s even, what sounds like, a beat made out of a typewriter at one point.

Looped, remodelled, recharged and rebuilt, NAH’s methodology and processes continue to wrong-foot and drum up invigorating or overloaded rhythmic, percussive accelerations into immersive and exciting uncertainty.    

Various ‘Africamore – The Afrofunk Side Of Italy (1973-1978)’
(Four Flies Records) 22^nd March 2024

Shedding ever more light on Italian curiosities of a certain vintage and status, the Four Flies Records label digs out of the vaults another selection of cult finds; building on a rich archive catalogue of Italian film composers, personalities with a compilation of African and Afro-Caribbean inspired nuggets from a mixed bag of mavericks, entertainers, obscure bands and producers.  

Covering a five-year period and the advent of the disco era, this showcase explores the Italian music industry’s fascination and adoption of African music and sounds in the 1970s, from the most sampled and covered African track of all time, the Cameroon saxophonist Manu Dibango’s ‘Soul Makossa’ – covered in this instance by African Revival (whoever the hell that was), who take it via the grasslands into Peter King and Fred Wesley territories -, to the imported vodun spells of Hispaniola – the Italian-Eritrean singer, entertainer, impresario and record producer Silvana Savorelli (who went under both the Tanya and, in this instance, the Lara Saint Paul aliases) works her kitsch magic on ‘The Voodoo Lady’; the sort of fake swamp mist effected Afro-Caribbean tropical lilt, with chuffing woodwind, that you might expect to hear in an episode of Miami Vice (and to think Savorelli was once produced by Quincy Jones, and this particular track, featured on her winning, commercially successful 1977 LP Saffo Music, amazingly enough featured The Pointer Sisters on backing vocals).  

Prompted and influenced by what was developing across the Atlantic in the States, with the already mentioned Dibango classic picked up by such impresario DJs on the New York scene as Dave Mancuso (mentioned in the liner notes to this compilation) Italy gratefully received the Afro-funk, Afro-beat and Afro-Latin sounds. The infectious groove that would propel a boom in nightclubs, these sounds, tribal rhythms were both fired up and exploited in equal measures; although the Italian husband and wife duo behind Chrisma (made up from the couple’s names of Maurizio Arcieri and Christina Moser; later on in the new wave era renamed Krisma) has the legendry Ghanaian-British Afro-Funk band Osibisa providing the rhythm section on their delicious, tropically-lilted, semi-Gainsbourg mating dance, ‘Amore’ (produced, extraordinarily, by Nico Papathanassiou and his more famous sibling Vangelis), and the Jamaican actress, model, presenter, singer and, of all things, aphrodisiac cook book author Beryl Cunningham fronts the hand drum heavy, ocean side view cabaret ‘Why O’ – Beryl, who famously starred in the Italian erotic Le Salamandre drama before shooting to semi-fame in such films as The Weekend Murderers and The Black Decameron, sounds like a cross between Marva Broome and Miriam Makeba.

Expanding on that international field, there’s even room on this collection for the Indian percussionist Ramasandiran Somusundara, who offers up his “bean smuggling” single from 1973. A member at one time or other with Bambibanda E Melodie, Maya and New Trolls Atomic System (is that even real?!), his musicality in this regard seems to combine bush whacker rituals with Black Level on a classic Italo-funk record.  

Returning to the Euro fold, Luca D’Ammonio mixes NYC Latin soul with Joe Baatan and Cymande on his white boogaloo mover ‘Oh Caron’, whilst the film composer (The Bronx Warrior, Our Man In Bagdad, The House By The Cemetery) Walter Rizzati rustles up a quasi streets of San Fran action thriller score on ‘L’unica Chance’: a paler shade of Black sounds, with a soft scuzz on the whacker guitar, some chuffing Jeremy Steig flute, and a touch of cool jazzy-funk organ and claves (the sort of music lapped up by Sven Wunders and Greg Foat at one time).      

The strange pairing of The Real McCoys and Italian composer, arranger and TV personality Augusto Martelli (famous for his Il Dio Serpente theme, which topped the charts and set his career in motion) come up with the collection’s most unusual track, ‘Calories’, which seems to marry Nino Ferrer and the new wave in a limbo of libido thrusts and alluring promises of coquettish sexual desires. Covering everything from Saravah Records to the Jorge Autuori Trio, Idris Muhammad, Drummers of Burundi, Mongo Santamaria, Paulo Ferrarai, Bruno Nichols and the disco era, this compilation of cultish singles and album tracks is more Dr. No than Shaft In Africa – I’m almost detecting Iron Butterfly’s most famous riff on the more flowery, slick but wild ‘Africa Sound’ track by the duo of Jean Paul and Angelique, who were a woodwind/strings and guitar combo of note, originally making records together under the Elio & Angelique moniker. But then I’m being too harsh, as there are some right stonkers and infectious dancefloor fillers amongst the kitsch and enervated Afro influences. And many better known tracks and composers (see Albert “Weyman” Verrecchia) already finding an audience in the crate digger and vinyl aficionado communities. But if you thought you’d heard it all on the Italian music front, then Africamore will give succour to new discoveries, and fill in some of the history.  

Hi, my name is Dominic Valvona and I’m the Founder of the music/culture blog monolithcocktail.com For the last ten years I’ve featured and supported music, musicians and labels we love across genres from around the world 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. 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 buy us a coffee at https://ko-fi.com/monolithcocktail to say cheers for spreading the word, then that would be much appreciated.