The Perusal #42: Tobias Meinhart And Berlin People, Suki Sou, MultiTraction Orchestra, Brìghde Chaimbeul, Lunar Bird…
April 13, 2023
Dominic Valvona’s Reviews Column
MultiTraction Orchestra (Ft. Arve Henriksen) ‘Reactor One’
(Superpang) Available Now
A multiverse of musicians from troupes and bands that congruously intersect, the MultiTraction Orchestra draws in members from GoGo Penguin, Supersilent, Melt Yourself Down, Crash Ensemble, Sly & The Family Drone, Hen Ogledd and beyond. A stellar lineup you could rightfully claim, such talents as the multi-awarding winning saxophonist, clarinetist, composer and Alexander Technique teacher James Alsopp; the “Reductionist School” freeform harpist Rhodri Davis; gifted cellist Kate Ellis; bassist, vocalist, composer, environmentalist and Acoustic Ladyland instigator Ruth Galler; jazz drummer, Son Of Kemet, Jon Scott; and Krakow via London and Detroit composer, guitarist, producer and interdisciplinary collaborator Alex Roth are joined by the Norwegian trumpet star Arve Henrikson on this new project of remote syncopation.
The orchestra’s members, brought together by Roth, made this, their debut expanded work, across various distances; collaborating apart from each other from different locations: A fact that in no way impedes on the quality and harmony of direction; even in the most histrionic parts.
Reactor One may suggest some nuclear fusion, but this feels and sounds almost like an orchestrated gathering “reacting’ to and playing together in one space at one time. Across a set of six performances that ensemble stir the senses and picture a myriad of imaginative, mysterious environments and landscapes. Such eclectic communions unsurprisingly draw a mix of genres, from jazz to the classical, post-rock and soundtracks.
The opening soft and grainy rasped, snozzled saxophone gauzy ‘Reactor I’ has an air of John Cale and Simon McCorry adrift in a mizmar of India or Arabia: and yet, it also sounds rather esoteric and otherworldly. Suite ‘II’ has a sustained post-rock bed of scuzz guitar harmonics, drama and bluesy-droned horns, whilst ‘III’ features delicate rippling harped aria-like pitches and raspy, almost rusted, sax.
‘IV’ is a crepuscular piece of concentrated brow cello and wisped stirrings that build, eventually, into a cacophony of drum breaks and smashed rolls and cosmic articulations. The harps are back on suite ‘V’, but sound almost like the African kora. They’re joined by an elephant trumpeted sax, what sounds like Jed Kurzel’s intense carved-up bowed strings dramatics, and a synthesized sense of unease. The final piece in this moving, evocative odyssey sounds like Popol Vuh caught in metallic, whining hinge bracketed and bass-y resonance.
A serialism of intuitive tonal movements, the sense of an ambiguous geography, mood and time, the combined efforts of so many threads sounds anything but disjointed or disconnected. Instead, the MultiTraction Orchestra deliver a coherent, balanced drama of gravitas and mood music.
Suki Sou ‘Notes On Listening’
(Curious Music) Available Now
Gentle impressions in the modulated waves, ripples and drones, Suki Sou’s sophisticated analogue electronic pieces require a certain commitment.
Inviting a deeper listening experience, the intuitive self-taught composer and sound designer elicits subtle moods and evocations from a home studio apparatus of Moog, Arps and Buchla synths and MIDI controllers on the debut album, Notes On Listening.
Pitched somewhere between the nostalgic and electronic pioneered sounds of such luminaries as Suzanne Ciani, Sarah Davachi, Roedelius and Klaus Schulze and Library music, yet looking with opportunity towards the future, recollections of childhood out in the Far East are transported and fed into a symmetry of machine produced music and environmental, tactile humanism. There’s a soul within that multilayered network that works arppegiator, waveforms, algorithms and burbled and bobbed synthesized notes into genteel moving translations of abstract projections, feelings, places, even observed weather patterns.
Somewhere in the stratospheric ambient weightlessness of the ‘Kelvin-Helmholtz Clouds’ – the rare billowing wave pattern cloud phenomenon named after the professors of that title – and the moistened kosmische artificial splashes of ‘Velocity Of Water’, the distinctive memories of Sou’s journey from Macau to Berkshire, London and later, the Lake District, are transduced into ambient currents, melodies, languorous drifted spells, liquid flows and airy glides. It could be, as laid out in the notes, the reflections of listening to the Taiwanese pop star Teresa Tang in the rain at grandmother’s that is audible on ‘Petricher’. The outdoors is sealed off with the shut of a door or window in the studio on that one.
If JakoJako or the Warm Colours made an album with Metamono on Sky Records in the 1970s this could well be the result. Too minimal to be lush, yet beautifully, knowingly composed with room for serendipity, Notes On Listening brings warmth, and on the finale ‘Light Intervals’, a sort of pastoralist spiritualism to synthesised analogue electronica. Sou’s sources, influences make for an accomplished debut of subtly and purposeful ambience.
Lunar Bird ‘The Birthday Party’
(Supported by Help Musicians Do It Differently Fund 2022) 28th April 2023
Disarming malady and alienation with such vaporous gauzy diaphanous veils of dream wave, Lunar Bird with a myriad of fellow Italian artists and musicians weave vulnerability and fragility into the most purified of intoxicating pop songs.
Although making the move from their native home to take up residence in Cardiff a number of years back, founding members Roberta Musillami and Eliseo Di Malto evoke a Mediterranean and Adriatic light-giving feel of consumed holiday romance and of longing disconnection: the distance between lovers drawn apart.
Lingering in a lush synthesized haze, Lunar Bird (named after Joan Miró’s signature abstract bronze sculpture) once more ooze a subtle, sophisticated mirage of alternative European pop from the 80s with Beach House, Diva Dompe and Julia Holter. Although, rather surprisingly, the saddened, synth and piano-chimed, near psychedelic ‘Firestorm’ sounds like a collaboration between Kate Bush and The Beatles (Sgt. Pepper era), and the Giorgio Tuma and Riccardo Raho penned coastal Iberian, almost Latin-American percussive, twanged and fluted (courtesy of another guest, Marco Tuma) ‘Dreaming’ reminded me of the late Mandy; a touch too of a Hellenic Lee Hazelwood if you please.
From paradise to metaphorical plunges into the gauzy waters of the deep end, the group’s second album is one long extended languorous dream. The title-track opener both musically and lyrically glows. A slow release of Italo-electronica and strobe-lit soft aches, a near creeping buzz and hint of Numan-sampled Sugarbabes sits comfortably with breathless Beach House vibes.
Recent single-video ‘Creatures’ is a gilded, glistened and softly rippled enchantment, a call-to-arms of a kind for “misfits”, shone down on with certain radiance. The already mentioned Giorgio Tuma joins electro-siren Roberta in a translucent, almost hushed duet on the new wave ‘A Crow’. Another guest of many, Adriano Modica joins Roberta on the Abba-esque Eurovision grand opening ‘Driven By The Light’; Modica “learning to fly” over a blissful, heaven sent production.
Featured on the Monolith Cocktail a while back, another of the already released single-videos, ‘Venilia’ references the Roman deity of the winds and sea to an almost cinematic allurement that conceals a spell of restlessness in paradise.
The album’s bookended by another of those slowly released anthems, ‘Astronaut’. This time celestial fanned rays light up the ephemeral on a golden shimmer of 90s dream pop, as the intangible, the fleeting space dust and romantic allusions are captured and bottled for posterity.
Not so much dipping as submerged fully in that drowsy intoxicating dream vision, Lunar Bird entwine emotional pulls, anxieties with the most delicious, sumptuous of Southern European ethereal pop. The Birthday Party is a spellbinding songbook that subtly pushes the Italo-Welsh group into swimmingly new waters without losing the signature diaphanous bohemian sound we all love them for. There’s absolutely no reason they shouldn’t be much bigger, well known and successful with potential hits like this.
Tobias Meinhart And Berlin People ‘Dark Horse (Live At The A-Trane, Berlin)
(Sunnyside Records) 28th April
With an ever-widening international flavor, the Bavaria-born, but Brooklyn-based, saxophonist, composer and bandleader Tobias Meinhart picks up and infuses his sound with echoes of the NYC skyline, Latin America and Europe on his new album with the Berlin People ensemble.
Inspired by the dynamics of that set-up’s world tour – out on the road after storming onto the scene with the eponymous acclaimed debut –, Meinhart’s second album showcases a concept-bound live sound with performances from a two week spot at Berlin’s leading jazz club the A-Trane during 2021 and 2022.
Playing every night over the course of that period, encouraged by a respectful but appreciative clapping audience, Meinhart and his accompanying quartet of guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, pianist Ludwig Hornung, bassist Tom Berkmann and drummer Mathias Ruppnig shine both together and in the solo spotlight. And as that “dark horse” title suggests, each composition either finishes in a surprising way to where it started out or alludes to some hidden meaning. This might mean virtuoso skills in tandem with a mood, a groove and expressive breakout of dynamism.
With an air of Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers, Dexter Gordon, Mark Tornes, Albert Ayler and more contemporary touches of European jazz throughout, there’s still room for the Afro-Brazilian style of BRBQ and Spanish flair of Chick Corea on the smooth Latin styled turn scenic dalliance and bustled park activity exchange, ‘Luna Park’, and the guitar work of Zappa and Nir Felder on the subtle Lalo Schifrin accented and tumultuous title-track. That same track has (like the later ‘Sonic River’) its very own introduction part; an almost clarinet-like solo saxophone lead-in of subtle rasped resonance and fluted flight.
Pining serenades softly build into flexed and bounced expressions of free jazz as drummed breakbeats suddenly evoke a splash of Buddy Rich when moving through a set of reflections, mirages and busier performances. Each instrument guided by as much deft skill as spontaneity, but with Meinhart switching between tenor and soprano fusing lighter spiraled climbs with shorter, more pecked or peppered toots.
You can hear that a real fluidity exists between each member of this troupe, as no matter the mood, the surprise, these live actions prove wholeheartedly rhythmic, melodic and above all top quality. Meinhart, as do his bandmates, reinforces an already glowing reputation as a leading light on the contemporary jazz scene with this essential album. This record captures them live on stage turning out both an explorative and classy kind of jazz dynamism; showcasing thought and action in perfect synchronicity.
Ale Hop & Laura Robles ‘Aqua Dulce’
(Buh Records) Available Now
Although both artist-researchers in this debut union grew up on the Peruvian coastline and popular beach area of Aqua Dulce near Lima, it wasn’t until years later and thousands of miles away in Berlin that they crossed paths and decided to work together. With a shared geography and musical interests Alejandro Cárdenas, under the guise of Ale Hop, and her foil Laura Robles liberate and transform the Afro-Peruvian heritage of their homeland from its colonial history: namely the Spanish Imperial Viceroyalty of Peru.
With a legacy of greedy conquest and genocide that wiped out the indigenous Incas, and the heinous uprooting of the people of Western and Central Africa, transported to the Americas including Peru, the local cultures and traditions managed to survive through subversion. One of the most important focal instruments (played here by Robles), the wooden cart-like cajón, was one such traditional percussive form with ties to Africa that was banned by the Spanish. The origins remain blurred but its thought to have originated in the ports of South America as a means to keep that drumming heritage, connection to home alive. Using the wooden packing cases that innocuously carried fruit and other goods, in a rudimental fashion, these boxes were adapted to be played whilst sitting on between the knees with hands, sticks, brushes or mallets. The basic shape remains, but is now no longer banished of course. Instead, it’s a mainstay of such Afro-Peruvian and Colonial-indigenous fusions as the two-bar figure Landó, the Zamacueca, the festive energetic improvised dance of Festejo, the Sande Las Diablos and the Alcatraz. The last of those being an erotic dance in which the man follows behind his tissue-decorated “posterior” female partner with a lit candle!
On this album the cajón’s quickening, stumbling or slowly lumbered rhythms go up against a radical reshaping of the coastal Peruvian environment, with natural evocations synthesized and made alien, otherworldly and futuristic. Improvisations later edited and with additional electronics and more obscured electric guitar, the African-Spanish-Amerindian dance of ‘Son De Las Diablos’ (which according to the late Peruvian “reciter and ethnomusicologist” Nicomedes Santa Cruz, may have no links at all with African rituals) is thrust into a sound world of non-musical wooden mechanized objects, synth purrs, poured primitivism and the atavistic.
A natural canopy of parrots, insect buzzing chatter; the creaks of and expansions of woodland and vines; and humidity are all turned into sci-fi with various effects, lunar bends and metallic fizzes/splashes/tears/ripples. One such scene, ‘El Fenómeno De La Niña’ sounds like Richard H. Kirk mooning in the exotic undergrowth.
Radio tunings and high-pitched whines and frequencies permeate a variation of rhythmic peregrinations and avant-garde sound experiments that build bridges with Peru’s incredible breathtaking landscapes and its ancient forms. Yet, can also evoke such alien and cosmic ideas too. In fact, Aqua Dulce doesn’t really sound much like anything else, except for the hints of Jon Hassell’s fourth world traverses on the brushed cajón, liquid poured title-track. And so both experienced artists/composers create a new dialogue; a sonic soundscape language as they reimagine a Peru unburdened and lifted from its colonial past.
Issei Herr ‘Distant Intervals’
(NNA Tapes)
Liminal in more ways than one, the Brooklyn cellist-composer Issei Herr’s debut album is both imbued and led by a number of transformations. From a change in musical direction to gender transition, a new life is articulated with an incredibly studied, moving work of suites, forms and memories that exist almost simultaneously in the past, present and future.
Classical groundings and that forms language (the “Aria”, “Elegy”, “Toccata” etc.) act as a base from which to explore various states of emotions, but also imagined possibilities. Reminding me in parts of fellow cellist and experimental artist Simon McCorry, Herr’s instrument of choice is similarly processed, overdubbed and improvised with – recorded, we’re told, in a bedroom closet of all places.
Distant Intervals begins with the recent couplet single of ‘Prelude (An Eternity Of Light)’ and ‘Aubade (The Farewell Is A Beginning)’. The former brings forth that yearned light to a stirring classical air, textured drones and a blown, dusted resonance of sophisticated sighs; the latter, a dawn serenade Aubade – a love song to the early morning made famous by John Donne no less – sounds almost like an English pastoralist yearn of majesty, sympathy and love. There’s a certain bass note on that same piece that seems to mark time itself. Both are class acts on an extended captivating album of deeply moving, inquisitive emotional pulls.
The ‘Aria’ on this album is quite different from the operatic allusions that this word would normally conjure; Herr both gracefully playing triplets of bowed notes and churning a kid of dance to the washed-out memories of a busy swimming pool scene. The eve-song ‘Serenata’ – in parenthesis, “To A Hidden Moon” – features a plucked, spring cello, saddening arcs, a certain feeling that borders on a cry, and what sounds like gentle mallets hitting the strings. ‘Fugato (Night’s Transfiguration)’ has a touch of Johann Johannsson and a choral-like quality of both awe and serenity in equal measure. Vocalist Maria BC offers a subtle Dead Can Dance ethereal swooned gravity to the album’s finale, ‘Aveu (The Beginning In A Farewell)’. More or less translating as “confession”, the Aveu here is used as a soothing vehicle for heartache and vulnerability, yet also gives off a real mystery too.
A parting from one stage to the next, Herr’s debut conveys, serenades and also offers more forlorn eulogies to past lives, woes as the pathway illuminates to a better future. This is a confident and quite accomplished work from the burgeoning composer and cellist that will stand the test of time.
James Howard ‘Peek-A-Boo’
(Faith & Industry) 14th April 2023
To a languid soundtrack of bendy, dreamy blue Hawaii (relocated to Margate), and Tales Of The Unexpected and Third Man waltzes performed in a spoiled ballroom that Strictly Come Dancing couldn’t even revive, James Howard once again wanders wistfully across a worn, battered, disconsolate post-Brexit landscape.
Appearing from out of the guises of both the Norfolk recorded, bleached onto parchment septic Isle folk of Thomas Nation (Battle Of The Grumbles), and the Blue House collaboration (Gobstopper), Howard’s newest songbook pulls from both, as a felt, if forlorn, picture of modern lawless Britain unfolds over a eleven-song cycle of idiosyncratic craft: Who else can evoke Roddy Frame, 70s Scott Walker, The Bluebells, Pink Floyd and Hansa studio saxophones all on the same album?
In the middle of an undeclared English Civil War of ideologies, divisions have never seemed so deep: beyond reconciliation. The puritanical demagogues on both sides seem to have drawn on that tumultuous period of our history. The bloodshed of that era left indelible scars on the country’s psyche; putting paid to revolution as a consequence. The film director Ben Wheatly tried, rather surreally, to encapsulate that same age in his 2013 film A Field In England. With all the events – including the roles of the hermetic, of science, religion and kingship versus a limited democracy – all unfolding in a field microcosm, England’s trauma bleed out into a both hallucinogenic and ominous nonsense of dream-realism. In one scene, the old lullaby of ‘Baloo, My Boy’ is sung across the desolation. A version of this ballad and Civil War curio is beautifully delivered by Howard as a wounded closer on Peek-A-Boo. Allegedly composed by the Bishop of Orkney’s daughter, Lady Anne Bothwell, after being “jilted” by the Earl of Mar’s son, Alexander Erskine (though to be fair he did have an excuse, having been killed on the field of battle), this is the lament of an abandoned mother and child. Repurposed rather nicely, this same song becomes a disarming, weepy swansong that makes perfect sense in the context of the album’s themes and mood.
Because somehow, Howard straddles multiple timelines with beautifully evoked ghosts of the Civil War and the Georgian with life in a contemporary setting. Nothing does this better than ‘County Lines’; matching the cross-border drug dealing crisis of the Home Counties and small towns with a languorous alt-pastoral and Scott Walker-esque country (I’m sure that’s a touch of steep pedal guitar) wane musical accompaniment that seems quite timeless. Again, there’s a melodious, lovely disarming quality that hides the pain, tragedy and sheer arrogant selfishness of those involved in the drug’s trade.
I’m not entirely sure what Howard is saying on the Pulp-ish ‘Family Values’ about the “nuclear family” set-up, and the paranoia of Cold War mutual assured nuclear destruction. As a Generation X(er) (just!), growing up in the 80s, it must have seemed a pretty daunting prospect, going toe-to-toe with the “Russkies”. Whilst When The Wind Blows and public information films on hiding under the stairs or an upturned table seemed terrifying, they also seems bonkers in hindsight. I’m not sure; in fact I lie, as I do know, not many of my peers seemed traumatized by it, or have lingering anxiety from that time. And as it turned out, so many of those aggrandized boastful military displays across Red Square included missiles made out of wood; the Soviet powers couldn’t even afford the fuel to power most of their arsenal. I’m wondering if Howard is trying to draw parallels with the present battle lines between much of the West (though allies are everywhere around the world) and Russia over their heinous invasion of Ukraine; that and a side line of disgust at the once accepted nuclear family unit set-up.
Augurs of a reckoning; the sullied state of a septic Isle; an English seaside Ennio Morricone; just some of the feels and atmospheres all listlessly and longingly channeled into a well-crafted songbook (complete with leveling-up asides/intervals). Howard shields the hurt to an extent with his soft stinging observations, aphorisms and melodramas on yet another fantastic album; one of my favourites of 2023 already.
Brìghde Chaimbeul ‘Carry Them With Us’
(tak:til/Glitterbeat) 14th April 2023
Squeezing new life into the obscure double-note droning Scottish small bagpipes, the Isle of Skye artist Brìghde Chaimbeul explores fertile new atmospheres on her second album, Carry Them With Us. Although borne out of long-held traditions, a bird themed mythology and Western Isles folklore, the piped and circular avian-like suffusions transform old arrangements and tales into something altogether different.
A familiar Celtic air is improvised with, transcribed to sound like a bedfellow of India, the Appalachians and the dream-realism folk of Chaimbeul’s tak:til label mates Širom. Already an award-winner (BBC Young Folk and Horizon prizes), the native Gaelic speaker expands horizons further on this newest work of mysticism and stirring scenic evocations by collaborating with the visionary saxophonist/artist/composer Colin Stetson.
Initially exchanging tweets, with an invitation from Stetson for Chaimbeul to record something for a documentary he was involved with, in kind the explorative American came over for a visit in the summer of last year. Writing and recording with his Scottish host, this sonic partnership ended up producing the “organic” foundations of this nine-track fusion of folk, the neoclassical, new age and fourth world-like peregrinations. Stetson appears on six of those tracks; although its difficult to know where one individual instrument, contribution ends and the other one starts, as both the small pipes and saxophone pretty much meld together in a mizzle or sustained bed of droned impressions. Saying that, ‘Uguviu (II)’ with its almost fiddled dance reminded me in part of Don Cherry, and has more obvious stirrings of new age jazz. It also reminded me a lot of Ariel Kalma. Together on the traditional sourced ‘Órgn An Eich Uisge: Song Of The Waterhorse’ they take what sounds like a Jacobean Highland battle drum arrangement towards the minimalistic borders of Cage and Riley, and the more spiraling vortex cosmos of Frédéric D. Oberland.
This inspired musical partnership proves highly successful envisioning an almost hermetic synthesis of influences and geography; the opening ‘Pilliú: The Call Of The Redshank’ and ‘Tha Fonn Gun Bhi Trom: I Am Disposed Of Mirth’ proving extraordinary, evocative riffs on bird-flight and the ancient lore of the land.
Uncoupled from Stetson, Chaimbeul channels both the Celtic and a whiff of India mountains on the fluty, turn near polka dance, ‘Banish The Giant Of Doubt & Despair’ – a tragic old tale of a drowned, once marauding, giant succumbing to his fate through the alluring siren song of the King’s daughter. We actually get to hear Chaimbeul’s effective apparitional-like voice, singing in the mother tongue on the beautiful misty vaporous finale, ‘Bonn Beinn Eadarra: The Haunting’. Another string to the proverbial bow you could say.
An evolution and a response to the traditions of the Western Isles, Chaimbeul’s drones, bellows and piped vapours conjure up a whole new folkloric magic that sonically reaches beyond Scotland’s borders. This is an album that connects different worlds and centuries on an impressive textural, tonal soundtrack of the recognisable and more abstract forms of Gaelic, minimalism and the new age.
Tuzeint ‘Raixes’
(Extra Soul Perception/Worldwide Records) 21st April 2023
Returning to his roots, Tuzeint opens up his heart on his Latin-soul flavoured debut.
Marking not only the first expansion by the community-collaborative Extra Soul Perception platform into the Spanish language, but this soloist release also finds, for the very first time, Tuzeint singing in his native Mexican-Spanish tongue too; aided by an ensemble of musicians playing a number of localized Central and South American instruments with links back to Iberia.
Channeling a CV that includes stints as the motivational force behind Mexico’s 90s hip-hop legends Control Machete, as a producer, and a remixer for M.I.A., Run The Jewels and Vampire Weekend, the thirty year old Monterrey-based artist weaves together a lilting, sauntering merger of Veracruz region stringed guitar work serenades, Afro-Brazilian percussion, r’n’b and sophisticated breakbeat soul.
Unmistakably Latin but with some subtle, interesting twists and whiffs of 80s new wave, some hip-hop production and a touch of the dreamy, near psychedelic, Raixes is like a tropical bleached romance between Earth period Vangelis, D’Angelo, Manduka, the Buena Vista Social Club, El Michal’s Affair and Les Sins. Accompanied by the plucked, flanged, delicately woven Baroque and folk of Xinto’s nylon-stringed, narrow-bodied Jorana Jarocha (almost a guitar but much smaller), Vico Diaz’s lower-pitched, almost double-bass-like, four-stringed Leona, Lucio de los Santos’ bird-y flute, Alan Fajardo’s shortened tooting and more suffused trumpet and a combined percussive and drummed effort from Jorge Jimenez, Andres Jamie, Orestes Gomez and multi-instrumentalist Enrique Toussaint, Tuzeint sings with a soul-love yearn and lulling relaxed flair.
To echoes of light jazz, tropical mirages, Gulfstream beachside troubadour reminisces and sumptuous soothed croons, burdens and desires are shared equally with romantic, languorous élan. As relaxed and inviting as this music is, the emotional draws are deep and affecting. But its nothing less than a delightful, soul bearing and enjoyable album; a neo-soul delight.
Les Abranis ‘Amazigh Freedom Rock 1973-1983’
(Bongo Joe Records) 28th April 2023
Making good on Bongo Joe’s 2018 45s series showcase of Les Abranis tracks, this expanded compilation follows the eclectic Algerian group’s adoption of garage, psych, disco, acid rock and synth-pop during a decade period of their existence.
Proudly marrying an atavistic Kabyle heritage to Western sounds, Les Abranis were born out of a diaspora and mass migration to France: Paris especially. The Berber Kabyle from Algeria’s Northern region and Atlas Mountains moved in great numbers to escape cultural persecution, civil war and economic strife. This ethnic group’s reach is far, with iconic stars of the screen, music and arts, politics and sports all fully embedded in popular French culture (Zinedine Zidane being one such superstar with those Kabyle roots).
However, politically, as Les Abranis promoted, this million-plus community seek autonomy, self-determination in Algeria: the name of which is used in the “freedom” barricade breaching title, the “Amazigh”. That freedom, found in Paris of the tumultuous counterculture late 60s, was not just political but musically important. It gave a greater scope to the band’s sound, as they opened up the traditional signature rhythms of home with a fusion of genres; sometimes to the consternation of their fellow Algerians, as one highlighted anecdote regales. Performing both this compilation’s opening high-pitched Doors and 60s garage beat grooving ‘Athedjaladde’ (which actually, as it progresses, also pulls in a guitar pedal wah of Isaac Hayes and touch of 60s Zappa) and the Habibi Funk like, suffused Doors (again) organ and handclapped spin ‘Ayetheri A L’ Afjare’ on national Algerian TV in 1973, as part of the more traditional Festival of Modern Algerian Song, they cause a certain furor and were near booted off stage: their hippie, loose liberal interpretation deemed too radical it seems.
Originally crossing paths in one-such Maghreb rich hip Paris neighbourhood in 1967, Shamy El Baz and Karim Abdenour conceived the idea of merging the Western styles they both loved with home. Bassist Madi Mehdi and drummer Samir Chabane would fill out that first proper lineup, playing a form of garage, psych and North African acid-rock. By the time they reached the 80s they’d not only changed personal – recruiting the Corsican jazz drummer and rhythm provider for fellow Kabyle superstar Idir, André “Dédé” Ceccarelli – but their style too; fully immersing themselves in synth pop. A chunk of the choice tracks on this collection actually come from the band’s 1983 album N1; the sound of which is slicker, smoother and enveloped in the decade’s vapoured production of disco, new wave, pop and soft rock. Songs like the female swooned and male vocal caroused ‘Therrza Rathwenza’, and the synthesized wind swept, Sly & Robbie era Grace jones slinked reggae groove ‘Avehri’ are two such examples of this shift. ‘El Guoum Agui’ sounds a bit 80s Paisley Prince, albeit with that exotic Algerian production. The cool Persian discotheque number ‘Akoudar’ is almost Chic-esque. But from a previous chapter in the band’s development, the organ-poked ‘Chenar la Blues’ sounds simultaneously like early Can, Canned Heat, the Stones and the Easybeats shimmying in a Berber dance.
There are some quite incredible progressive fusions and more than enough Parisian-Algerian nuggets to make this a vital addition to the collection. Kabyle culture rocks out in the Western arena.
Kiji Suedo ‘Hosek (EP)’
(Hobbes Music) Available Now
Following up on a well received album in December (Riot) for the Edinburgh electronic label Hobbes Music, Osaka artist Kiji Suedo heads lightly towards the dancefloor with an EP of “working it” House and Techno numeral-loaded tracks.
Jacked-up and softly pumped with various shimmered and melodious wave forms, acid-washes, knocked beats and hushed languid soulful vocal prompts/actions, Suedo offers up a deeper dance music listening experience.
It’s an early House meets Electronic Body Movement and sparse Harthouse/R&S Techno kind of vibe, with additional spells of untethered bulb-like jazzy organ notes, scrapping kinetic marbles and a near constant motion of rotating, sliding, switching and turning synthesized mechanisms.
Good calls have already been made: Moodyman and Herbert on the press sheet, and someone else gave a shout for Theo Parish. I would add to that equation some Basic Channel, Dave Clarke, Mike Dred and a hell of a lot of late 80s/early 90s sounds too. But in short, and without sounding to gauche, this is dance music for the mind, body and soul from an artist on the rise.
Puce Moment ‘Epic Ellipses’
(Sub Rosa) Available Now
From out of Nicolas Devos and Pénélope Michel’s Puce Moment sound research lab (a French located incubator, inspired, well so it sounds on occasion, by the famous Kosmische Zodiak Club frequented by Moebius, Roedelius and Schnitzler) emerges another self-styled “climatic-noise” soundtrack of slow building drama and gravitas.
Existing somewhere between the forms of peregrination and studious composition, the duo finds conclusions, just the right end points through intuition and experience. Working together now for 15 years, across the arenas of fiction, documentary and virtual reality, both foils on this sonic explorative journey can be said to have found that perfect syncopation.
Their fourth album together, Epic Ellipses evokes both the alien (the sci-fi meaning of the word) and the ambiguous. Over four long organic and synthesized atonal but yet melodious and motored tracks, off-world data, the sounds of strange oscillating and looming craft merge with vague percussive rhythms that could have been sourced from the South Seas, South America or Africa. Not so much ethnography as the balanced but untethered construction of new worlds, ritual is transduced into near-cinematic suspense, thriller and the mysterious.
“Allotropia” sets out from an echoed chasm of sine waves and static-rips in the fabric, before a siren’s ethereal voice materializes from industrial ominous atmospherics and internal, heartbeat rhythms. ‘Skyli’ has robotic-like calculus, fed digital data, cosmic undulations and a distant singular knocking beat. Gradually those knocks turn into a slow beat, as strange noises and the corridor to some distant constellation opens up and guides us onto some new plane. ‘Motor’ reminds me of Hamburg label Bureau B’s output – that tie to kosmische and German minimalist electronica perhaps. Although the lulled voice and vague elements of faraway lands eventually end up sounding quite dramatic: lost in the ether. An air of very early Cluster and Popol Vuh’s Affenstunde debut can be detected alongside Cosey Fanni Tutti under the quietened surface veils of the womb-like ‘Taifuu’. From vaporous mists, waves and ambience a filmic, immersive soundtrack builds; one that entices and organically forms visitations, memories, feelings of time and place: destination. Epic Ellipses is a quartet of moods, emotional draws that ends up inventing environments and score to mysterious surface and horizons.
Carla Boregas ‘Pena Ao Mar’
(iDEAL Recordings) Available Now
Featured last year on the Monolith Cocktail, congruously in electroacoustic jazz-primitivism union with fellow Brazilian explorative sound artist Maurício Takara on the Grande Massa D’Auga peregrination, Carla Boregas now drifts out an ambient, both non-musical and more melodic-hinted sonorous waves with her debut solo offering.
Although already making a name for herself, both in native Brazil and in Europe (currently based in Berlin) with the Rakto trio (with Paula Rebellato and again, Maurício Takara) and Fronte Violeta duo (with Anelena Toku), and as the founder of the experimental AUTA venue and Dama Da Noite label, Boregas now expands on a subtle minimalistic palette of tape play, sonic assemblage manipulations, field recordings and hidden instrument sources.
Conduced to roaming and following the played and synthesized air and wind flows, as we reflect on the tenuous, fragile and complex nature of existence, Pena Ao Mar (or “pity the sea”) envelopes the listener within an ambiguous veil of sci-fi, mysticism and wooded menagerie, and drones that evoke the hermetic and a distant vision of India.
The opening ‘Acôes em Paralelo’ (“actions in parallel”) manipulates, plays with what sounds like a reel-to-reel machine; a reversed, crackled and hum drone mix of the avant-garde tape culture of underground Spain and Italy, with touches of kosmiche. Those early resonations of German cosmic music (from Kluster to Tangerine Dream and Gunther Wüsthoff) and “sisters with transistors” luminaries such as Suzanne Ciani can be heard permeating the title-track’s fanning geometric rays and refractions; the otherworldly harmonium church music gauzy ‘Grafia do Invisível’ (“invisible spelling”); and the robotic calculating, alien bird tweeting and box-of-tricks vibrating ‘A Cidade dos Outros’ (“the city of others”). ‘Current 2 Ventos’ (“wind and currents”) seems to gravitate more towards tubular-like blown droned instrumentation (a kind of transmogrified version of a serialism styled wind quartet, and a Jodorowsky feel, whilst ‘Sopro’ (“breath”), with its night creatures forest atmospherics, spoken word experiments and spooked piano, errs towards hints of Lucrecia Dalt and Xqui.
Along varied vapours, currents, waves and wisps of air, Boregas transports the listener to both evaporated and more tangible (but only just) environments and moods; realms of reflection and mysterious spaces that attempt to capture the abstract feelings of being alive in a most vulnerable state.
A Begging Bowl Request From Your Host:
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.
The April Digest 2023: Voodoo Drummer, African Head Charge, Marta Salogni and Tom Relleen, Social Playlist #75, Bowie, Sakamoto…
April 11, 2023
New Music on our radar, archive spots and now home to the Monolith Cocktail “cross-generational/cross-genre” Social Playlist
Words/Put Together By Dominic Valvona
A new thread, feed for 2023, the Digest pulls together tracks, videos and snippets of new music plus significant archival material and anniversary celebrating albums or artists -sometimes the odd obituary to those we lost on the way. From now on in the Digest will also be home to the regular Social Playlist (this month reaching its 75th edition); this is our imaginary radioshow, an eclectic playlist of anniversary celebrating albums, a smattering of recent(ish) tunes and the music I’ve loved or owned from across the decades.
April’s edition also features new music from the VOODOO DRUMMER, Peggy Seeger, Marta Salogni & Tom Relleen, Gabrielle Ornate, African Headcharge and Vukovar. And in the Archives there’s a trio of Bowie album celebrations; the 50th anniversary of Aladdin Sane, 40th of Let’s Dance and 30th of Black Tie White Noise (all released in the April of their respective years).
NEW MUSIC IN BRIEF
VOODOO DRUMMER ft. Blaine L. Reininger & Martyn Jacques ‘Aristophanes’ FROGS’
Inspired by he Ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes’ comedic play of the same title, Antiquity beckons on a new triumvirate set of movements from the Greek artist VOODOO DRUMMER and his contributing foils. On this Athenian mythological imbued single of neoclassical, the atavistic, avant-garde, theatrical and yet hopping playfulness, the drumming alter ego is joined by Stavros Parginos on cello, Blaine L. Reininger (of Tuxedomoon note) on violin and Martyn Jacques (Tiger Lillies) echoing the famous line from the play.
The microcosm style odyssey follows the liberating God Dionysus who, despairing of the state of Athens’ tragedies, travels to the underworld of Hades to bring the playwright Euripides back from the dead. And so we begin this adventure to the sounds of rattlesnake percussion, Hellenic pitter-patters, rolling drum rhythms and the plucks of 5th century BC Athens, before rowing across a splish-splashing pizzicato and majestically bowed lake (complete with a croaking frogs chorus), and a sort of Faust meets strangely quaint experimental late 60s vocal. The final movement strikes up a controlled tumult of screaming and harassed viola and “Afro-Dionysus” drums as Hades opens up and swallows whole. An inspired musical, sound experiment performance.
Peggy Seegar ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’
Of course they’ve all tried, some convincingly, others less so, but the rightly venerated doyen Peggy Seegar is the muse behind this iconic love yearn. And at the age of 87, with all the travails of age and loss, but wisdom and reflection it brings, Peggy reclaims this masterpiece for a new era. ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’ was originally written for Seeger by her then-estranged lover Ewan MacColl in early 1957. He sang it down a crackling transatlantic phone line to Peggy who had returned to the USA, unwilling to continue an affair with a married man. That was the only time he ever sang the song, but it went on to be covered by most of the greats, and become one of the great standards.
Simplistically stripped to just a piano accompaniment, Peggy’s gracefully works the magic.
Peggy says; I’ve had two life partners, one male and one female, and I have three children and 9 grandchildren. I’ve come to realise that the lyrics can be interpreted in so many ways. Ewan wrote the tune to mimic the heartbeat of someone wildly in love and I used to feel like a soaring bird when I sang this song. Now I’m grounded within it and that makes me happy.
The 2023 recording – released for the 67th anniversary of verse 2 (The first time ever I kissed your mouth…..) – arrives alongside the first segment of a new documentary about Peggy, Scenes From A Life, which details the history of the song.
Marta Salogni and Tom Relleen ‘Internal Logic II‘
A mirage; a twinkle of refractions and calling undulations; the alchemist’s stone drawing light through a filtered bendy lens. Yes, the surroundings found on the new sonic peregrination by Marta Salogni and Tom Relleen invite evocative visions, and convey ambiguous, mysterious settings, landscapes. ‘Internal Logic II’ is just one of a myriad of such electronic cartography inspired traverses from the duo’s upcoming album Music For Open Spaces (released 11th May 2023). If you don’t know the story, Relleen died from cancer just after recording this album, and so this is a posthumous tribute to the late experimental seeker, as a dreamy, deep listen showcase for his foil Salongi.
Conceived between the triangle of the reverent Joshua Tree shrine and desert, the Cornish coastline and London, award winning artist, producer and engineer Marta Salogni (Björk, Holly Herndon, Lucrecia Dalt) and the much missed musician and artist Tom Relleen (Tomaga, Oscillation) conjure alternative road trips, destinations and geography. The first track to be aired, ‘Internal Logic II’ ushers in a promising expanded work.
Gabrielle Ornate ‘Delirium’
Turning on the rawkish rock mode of St. Vincent, but in a 90s invoked musical setting of bohemia, the free-spirited Ornate is back with another full-on maximalist confident pop explosion of “delirious” empowerment. Delirium is just another strong dream spell statement from the versatile artist, who’s currently drawing attention through her Instagram account, the good old word-of-mouth and blogs like mine (although Ornate has also recently featured on the BBC Introducing platform). After a run of equally bestridden pop-rock gems, with hints of Prince and Christina Aguilera, Ornate must be contemplating that first album. I for one will be looking forward to that.
African Head Charge ‘Microdosing’
(On-U Sound)
Taking me back to the toking days of idle youth, splayed out around the Phibb’s house listening to the wafting smoking waves of reggae and dub emanating from Eric’s sound system, one of the most popular choice soundtracks to wile away those 90s hazed evenings was African Head Charge. Of course so very much more, and though generally in a languid intoxication from drugs or booze that iconic project had a lot going on, multilayered in the mix than we first appreciated: Proving highly influential in fact; that sound resonating with subsequent generations, regenerating my decade of the 90s.
After a twelve year layoff, the titans of that UK scene, On-U Sound, have announced the news of a new album entitled A Trip To Bolgatanga. That cult label’s instigator Adrian Sherwood once more joins AHC founding member Bonjo Iyabinghi Noah on another evolving, developing dubby-laden, amorphous Afro trip. Extending that partnership multi-instrumentalist Skip McDonald and fellow Tackhead co-conspirator Doug Wimbish. Drummer Perry Melius, whose involvement in the project dates back to the early 90s, adds a righteous rhythmic heft to a trio of tunes. In addition there are a number of notable fresh recruits. The horns and reeds of Paul Booth, Richard Roswell, and David Fullwood; Ras Manlenzi and Samuel Bergliter on keys; Vince Black on guitar. There’s additional percussion from Shadu Rock Adu, Mensa Aka, Akanuoe Angela, and Emmanuel Okine, strings from Ivan “Celloman” Hussey, plus the voice of the mighty Ghetto Priest. Very special guest, and one of Ghana’s foremost kologo players, King Ayisoba also provides vocals, and demonstrates his dexterity on the traditional two-stringed lute.
From that upcoming album (released July 7th) a taster of the album’s Ghanian roots odyssey, with ‘Microdosing’.
Vukovar ‘An Invisible Prison II/Eternally Yours’
And so the final death knell has been announced for Vukovar. After eight years – despite numerous wrangles and bust-ups, episodes of self-flagellation/self-destruction – the hermetic romantics of cold wave and all its musical bedfellows have signed their fate. The perron foundations are still strong however, with news of a new birth and direction (of a kind). This is a digest of course, so far too much water has flowed down the River Styx to cover in this brief feature, but I feel like a champion for this underground phenomenon – the Monolith has even played host to band members Rick and Dan and their various posts, serialisations over the last few years. And have pretty much covered near enough every release – which in that short period covers at least ten full albums, live ones too, singles and various other releases. And so I will leave you with links to the numerous reviews I’ve penned below.
Vukovar leave one last memento however: the final single, leaving present ‘An Invisible Prison II’ and a B-side of a sort, ‘Eternally Yours’. Treasure them both, as the funeral pyre burns, the alchemists of esoteric new wave are no more.
Vukovar/Michael Cash ‘Monument’
Vukovar ‘The Great Immurement’
Rick Clarke’s The Great Immurement
Rick Clarke ‘Astral Deaths & Astral Lights’
Dan Shea ‘Jukebox Lockdowns/Tribute to Simon Morris’
ARCHIVES/ANNIVERSARY
A trio of Bowie album anniversaries of one kind or another this April. The oldest of which, Aladdin Sane is unbelievably 50! Whilst Lets Dance is 40, and Black Tie White Noise is 30 this month.
Killing off Ziggy Stardust to assume the lightning anointed role of Aladdin Sane, Bowie’s split personality only partially moved on from its precursor. If Hunky Dory pretty much alluded to the USA from a distance, then Sane is living it.
From the scuzzed rock’n’roll chugging riffs to the Latin-Cuban styled piano flourishes and ‘give my regards to Broadway’, Bernstein/Brecht passing fancies (thank you Mike Garson on phenomenal pianist chops and theatrical duties), Bowie is cast adrift, absorbed in the aroma of the Americas as an unbalanced gender bending dame, trying to make sense of it all.
Fantastical, yet nostalgic in equal measure, the backlot of 50s drive-ins, Che Guevara styled revolution on the streets of Detroit and heart-crushing laments, effortlessly turn from tears to swaggered rock, with ‘Time’ hanging over proceedings as a monolithic reminder of death: the stereotype rock star death in particular, in the case of the New York Dolls‘ Billy Murcia, as immortalised in the song’s lyrics. That’s all without even mentioning the aching, plaintive malady of ‘Lady Grinning Soul‘; perhaps one of the best things Bowie had ever written to that point.
An ott full-on glamified version of the Stones‘ ‘Let’s Spend The Night Together’ signals Bowie’s intent, a precursor to his love letter to the British ‘beat group’ (1964-67) era, and the covers album Pin Ups – released later in the same year, as the final-finale death knell of Stardust and his alter egos. Glorious, one of Bowie’s greatest fantasies and never out if my top five, if occasionally making the number one spot.
Protesting his innocence, rather too strongly, the $17.5 million dollar-richer Bowie inadvertently struck commercial gold with his 15th studio album Lets Dance. The formative RCA years were replaced with an uneasy transition to EMI, whose pricey acquisition would at least boost the label’s coffers during the mid to late 80s.
Undervalued and inappropriately shafted, Bowie’s long-time collaborator Tony Visconti was dropped at the eleventh hour in favour of Chic’s Nile Rodgers.
What Rodgers brought to the table was a vibrant, polished, more swaggering sound. MTV friendly and able to rouse the masses to their feet – just listen to the infectious gilding that turned a simple backbeat and Kenny Logan-esque guitar lick into something way beyond pop on ‘Modern Love’.
Apart from a few well-meaning but dawdling numbers, this album was really a collection of potential, and in the case of ‘Cat People’, previously successful singles. A jumbled coherence of themes permeate however, as a faux-colonial, abroad in WWII backlit Singapore or Macao, mixed with sharp lemon meringue zoot suit, Bowie launched into a diatribe on domestic abuse, racism and oppression. Taking a special interest in the aborigines cause, he dedicated the eponymous title track to their struggle.
For every guarded metaphorical attack, there was a counterbalanced slide onto the dance floor – ‘Shake It’ one of the thin white duke’s less challenging but contagious soulful paeans to courtship. Presented as a ‘singers’ album, Bowie concentrated on honing his electric-blues vocal delivery, relinquishing the usual playing duties.
Despite selling six million copies and attracting a newfound audience, he resented the attention and increased pressure, especially as Let’s Dance was at odds with his original intentions. He’d blame Rodgers’ varnished production – though this never stopped them from working together again years later on Black Tie White Noise – for sending him in a commercial, but aridly dry artistic direction. However, it’s an impressive work of spritely charming and neon-glowing pop. Just the opening global hot-steeping trilogy of ‘Modern Love’, ‘China Girl’ and ‘Let’s Dance’ would be enough to justify Bowie’s tumultuous decade alone.
Bowie the glowing groom was above the trivial of platitude wedding vowels and practicing special moves for the couple’s signature last dance. For his marriage to Iman Abdulmajid, he composed a typically nuanced musical suite in lovesick tribute.
Part of this ceremonial accompaniment (the opening moiety of ‘The Wedding’ and bookended ‘The Wedding Song’) was integrated, in to what would be, his heralded solo comeback LP, Black Tie White Noise.
Meant as a representation of two entwined cultures, the vaguely eastern romantic saxophone and western backbeat were used as a leitmotif: seeping into a fair share of the album’s twelve tracks. Tied-in with a return to a city that had dominated his songbook with themes of isolation and drug addiction (from Young Americans to Lodger), L.A, would settle for Bowie’s take on the race issues of the day. Jetting in as the whole Rodney King episode sparked off an apocalyptic raging inferno, Bowie both scared and exhilarated, breathed in the toxic air for inspiration.
Eager to refrain from sounding too glib, he wrote the album’s title track as a counterbalance to the grinning, smug optimism found on the “United Colours of Benetton” billboards. Angling his wit at the ethnocentric MOR, Bowie himself liberally drops in slogans and motifs from Marvin Gaye, faux-reggae and New Jack Swing, as he duets with one of the scenes passing stars, Al B Sure!
Mixing it up in the ‘ghetto’, Bowie once again ropes in Niles Rodgers to add some funky gristle and sheen to the jazzy, soulful template. He also took notes from Miles Davis’s late 80s/early 90s adoption of street sounds and be bop; bringing in the revered former Art Ensemble of Chicago’s trumpet player, Lester Bowie, to blow the sort of signature-plaintive squeals and trapped bumble bee solos commonly found in Davis’s repertoire.
The influence works both ways of course, but the omnipresent Scott Walker has always forced Bowie to…well, improve himself. Not so much a competition – Bowie would never quite reach the stripped avant-garde morose of his American rival – the two artists nevertheless spur each other on. Paying back a favour, Bowie covers Walker’s 1978, traversing grown-up, ‘Nite Flights’ (attributed to The Walker Brothers, their last album together as a reformed trio), aping but doing it justice. Whether intentionally imbued by the Walker spirit, the original intended Tin Machine song, ‘You’ve Been Around’ (written with Reeves Gabrels) sounds even more like one of his than Nite Flights.
Former glorious foil, Mick Ronson is heard on the placid, smooth, cover of Cream’s ‘I Feel Free’ (instigated as a result of Ronson’s work on Morrissey’s Your Aresnal) and illusionary rich, autobiographical ‘Jump They Say’: the first time Bowie addresses his half-brother Terry’s suicide in the 80s, by equating his own metaphorical artistic leap.
The odd ‘pop-lite’ tune, Caribbean warbling karaoke ditty (‘Don’t Let Me Down & Down’) and garish, over-egged, rendition of Morrissey’s ‘I Know It’s Going To Happen Someday’ threw spanners into the works, yet Black Tie White Noise pointed towards a wider Bowie renaissance, as it triggered an impending tenure of solid, experimental releases.
Tracks and a few cover version surprises await on the Social Playlist below:
The Social Playlist #75
Anniversary Albums And Deaths Marked Alongside An Eclectic Mix Of Cross-Generational Music, Newish Tunes And A Few Surprises.
Just give me two hours of your precious time to expose you to some of the most magical, incredible, eclectic, and freakish music that’s somehow been missed, or not even picked up on the radar. For the Social is my uninterrupted radio show flow of carefully curated music; marking anniversary albums and, sadly, deaths, but also sharing my own favourite discoveries over the decades and a number of new(ish) tracks missed or left out of the blog’s Monthly playlists.
Volume 75 of this long-running playlist series pays a humble, but sizeable, elegy to the recently departed Japanese genius Sakamoto. Whether it was building a unifying electronic music post-war future with the Yellow Magic Orchestra, building Bamboo houses of colour with David Slyvain, scoring the harrowing tragedy of war with Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, or winning gold at the Oscars/Grammys for his innovative soundtrack work, the iconic composer reworked neoclassical and electronica into a most influential new language – not totally at odds with its past, yet constantly evolving and probing at the edges of the undiscovered. With over 50 albums, probably a lot more to pick from, I’ve purely chosen personal favourites from a mere smattering of his cannon.
As I mentioned in my Bowie archive spot, and part of this month’s anniversary celebrating albums selections, there’s a healthy dose of original versions and covers from Aladdin Sane, Let’s Dance and Black Tie White Noise. Joining the thinned white duke in the anniversaries are R.E.M. (Murmer is 40 this month), the Freestyle Fellowship (Intercity Griot‘s 30th) and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (Fever To Tell‘s 20th).
Recent editions to Spotify include Don Cherry and foil Jean Schwarz paying homage to the deity Ornette Coleman on the ’77 Live special Roundtrip, ‘Cat Nip‘ from Levoit‘s Sharav album, and butt end of 2022 tracks from Raw Poetics and Elizabeth M. Drummond. Plus a real catch of choice music from across the ages and genres by New Young Pony Club, Sunny & The Sunliners, Oswald D’Andrea, Fred Pallem, Sweet Tee, Shira Small and others.
THAT TRACK LIST IN FULL________
Octopus ‘Panic In Detroit’
David Bowie ‘Shake It’
New Young Pony Club ‘Hiding On The Staircase’
Ryuichi Sakamoto ‘Just About Enough’
Pralo Ormi e la sua Orchestra ‘Black Pipe’
Ryuichi Sakamoto ‘The Garden Of Poppies’
Leslie Winer ‘John Says’
HEC ‘The Prettiest Star’
R.E.M. ‘West Of The Fields’
Yeah Yeah Yeahs ‘Black Tongue’
Alejandro Bravo ‘Naranjita’
Lulu ‘Watch That Man’
Sunny & The Sunliners ‘I Can Remember’
Oswald D’Andrea ‘Bambou Jump’
Harold McKinney ‘Freedom Jazz Dance’
Freestyle Fellowship ‘Heavyweights’
Ryuichi Sakamoto ‘ADELIC PENGUINS’
Elizabeth M. Drummond ‘Congratulations’
Metro ‘Criminal World’
Terry Riley & John Cale ‘Church Of Anthrax’
Leviot ‘Catnip’
Don Cherry & Jean Schwarz ‘Tribute To Ornette (Live)’
Fred Pellam & Le Sacre du Tympan ‘Stratageme 34’
Ryuichi Sakamoto ‘ISLAND OF WOODS’
David Bowie ‘Miracle Goodbye’
Sweet Tee ‘On The Smooth Tip’
Raw Poetic & Damu The Fudgemunk ‘A Mile In My Head’
Joe Mensah ‘Happy Beat’
Shira Small ‘Lights Gleam Lowly’
David Bowie ‘Nite Flights’
Ryuichi Sakamoto & David Slyvian ‘Heartbeat’
Cheval Sombre ‘Time Waits For No One’
Ryuichi Sakamoto ‘Before The War’
Shukar Collective ‘Calling Tagomago’
Ryuichi Sakamoto ‘riot in Lagos’
Our Daily Bread 569: Ali Murray & Cornelius Corvidae, Foil, Conrad Schnitzler & Ken Montgomery, Silver Moth…
April 7, 2023
GRAHAM DOMAIN’S REVIEWS SUITE
__SINGLES/EPS__
Ali Murray and Cornelius Corvidae ‘Split EP’
(Dead Forest Records)
As the name suggests this is an EP split between two artists playing two songs each.
Ali Murray hails from the beautiful windswept Isle of Lewis and vocally sounds like a cross between Elliott Smith and Andy Shauf. On some of his other releases he harnesses a shoegaze-like sonic template. Here he adopts a stripped-back sound of acoustic and electric guitar and organ. Standout track is the beautiful ‘Wish the Bones Away’ with its poetic lyrics and melancholic gothic strangeness. ‘Spirit of Unknowing’ meanwhile, uses acoustic guitar to great effect on an atmospheric ballad that combines the phrasing of John Grant with the sadness of Elliot Smith. Two songs of beauty and wonder!
Cornelius Corvidae hails from Minnesota, USA and inhabits two songs of cosmic Americana. ‘Silver Flower (Kali’s Invitation)’ employs acoustic picked guitar on a bleak ballad, all dark imagery and campfire ghost-story shadow. ‘Shiva in the Blood Orchard’ meanwhile, uses picked acoustic guitar set against Tudor-like keyboard melodies (reminiscent of the Moody Blues) on a dark folk ballad. Two artists, four great songs!
Foil ‘Portal’
(Jolt Music)
Foil (AKA singer and producer Helly Manson) releases her new single this month. Taken from the upcoming album On the Wing, the song begins like Steeleye Span with multi tracked folkish female vocals before a synth plays the same pattern over and over again accompanied by a cowbell rhythm! It lasts just 1 minute and 33 seconds and sounds like a demo for a song not finished and barely started! Still, there’s nothing else quite like it!
Juppe ‘Fade’
(Soliti)
Juppe hails from Helsinki in Finland (the happiest country in the world)! Of the singles theme he says ‘it’s very hard to get a place to rent here in Helsinki if you don’t have good credit! It’s very easy to fade away.’ With two fingers up to the Man – Juppe looks like Bob Mortimer and harnesses the sound of the Devils music Jamiroquai!
Bitter Defeat ‘Terrific Effort EP’
(Bandcamp)
This is the second EP from the New Zealand indie rock band following last years Minor Victory EP. Comprising 4 songs of guitar pop-rock that sit somewhere between the Lemon Heads and late-period Buzzcocks! Lead song ‘Sugar Blind’ is a catchy guitar driven pop song complete with Cure-like background vocal refrain! ‘Falling Down’, meanwhile has shades of the Charlatans with its driving organ sound! One to watch!
Nivis ‘Into the Void’ EP
(6415 Records)
The EP features 4 songs of pop-rock from the German indie-pop band. Lead track ‘Rain on a Funeral March’ is a catchy pop song that resonates more with each play. All four songs are well-produced, commercial pop-rock that remind me of people like Cyndi Lauper or Nena (of 99 Red Balloons fame). It’s the sort of music that was popular in the mid 1980’s! Shiny but not new!
Neon Kittens ‘Loving Your Neighbours Wife’ b/w ‘Marilyn Mansion (Where Horror Lives)
(Metal Postcard Records)
The new single from Neon Kittens, combines the white funk bass-lines of A Certain Ratio with Eno / Byrnes My Life in the Bush of Ghosts to produce K-Funk – the crunchy funk sound of biscuits out of their packet! With these hot cheesy bread rhythms, even Lego figures with botox can learn to smile again! Set to produce a water slide of elastic-legged banana dancing up and down the country!
B-side ‘Marilyn Mansion’ employs the sound of Early Gang of Four with the attack of Wire and a deadpan female Einar (Sugarcubes) on a twisted tale of non murder locations and funking in cars!
Draag ‘Mitsuwa’
A wonderful summery single from the LA Electro-Shoegaze band, taken from their forthcoming album Dark Fire Heresy. Acoustic guitars and subtle synths give way to chiming guitars and organ with multi-tracked harmonic female vocals! It reminds me very much of Lush in their prime! One to watch!
_____ALBUMS_____
Conrad Schnitzler & Ken Montgomery ‘CAS-CON 11 Konzert in der Erloserkirche, Ost-Berlin, 3.9.1986’
(Bureau B) 12th May 2023
This is a live concert recorded in East Germany on 3.9.1986 where the music of German electronic experimental musician Conrad Schnitzler was mixed live by American collaborator Ken Montgomery. This was at a time when the Berlin Wall still stood and the GDR required the issuing of a special state permit for a live concert. This concert was promoted locally by word of mouth and went ahead illegally (without permit), where it was recorded and issued by an East German underground label on cassette.
Now fully restored, the concert has been issued for the first time on CD, Vinyl and as a Digital Download! Consisting of 6 tracks of austere serious yet playful experimental electronic music, it leaves little impression on first listen. With repeat plays however, the charms of the music reveal themselves, not so much in melody but in atmosphere and approach. It encapsulates the icy chill and drama of Delia Derbyshire, Bowie, Eno, Tomita, Cluster and early Popol Vuh! An interesting suite of music – one that becomes an essential listen the more you hear it!
FFO: Delia Derbyshire, Cluster, Popol Vuh, Tangerine Dream, Bowie, Tomita.
Volatile Youth ‘Post Falls, Idaho’
(Rummage Sale Records – Bandcamp)
The album begins with the song ‘California’ sounding like a strung-out Lou Reed if produced by Jesus and Mary Chain! ‘Love Like A Thousand Guns’ is superb low-fi Psychedelia with the backward vocal effect, once favoured by Siouxsie, that you don’t hear anymore since the onset of Digital! ‘She’s Starting to See the Flame’ is a country-tinged song sounding like Nick Drake if he had fronted the Byrds after they turned country-rock!
Overall, this is a fine album that is perhaps a touch too low-fi for its lofty ambitions! The songs are commercial and remind me of various bands and artists – among them Lou Reed, the Only Ones, the Byrds in their Gram Parsons era, Dennis Wilson and the gothic feel of Mazzy Star.
If it had been made by someone with a higher profile, say Bright Eyes, and recorded on decent sound equipment, it would undoubtedly have gained a wide audience. Hopefully it will be heard by many and receive the recognition it deserves.
Fhae ‘Sombre Thorax’
(4000 Records)
This is a wonderful album of ethereal, ambient, dream-folk-pop that ebbs and flows like the tides and inhabits its own world of subtle beauty. Sometimes, mists of the sea seem to creep into the music and the edges of reality become blurred, the music shape shifting into another dimension!
Fhae (20 year old Australian Ellena Ramsay) produces music in the vein of Julianna Barwick or Grouper – some of it lovely with multi tracked harmonies (like Barwick) and some of it (such as ‘Drain’ and ‘Man’) obscure in its strangeness (like Grouper)! There are some really beautiful and compelling tracks on the album, such as ‘Earth’, ‘Emergency’, ‘Love You’, ‘Comb’ and ‘Stuck’. A fantastic debut album, I can’t wait to hear more!
Stanley J. Zappa & Simo Laihonen with Suvadeep Das ‘Dance of the Moving Goal Posts’
(Ramble Records)
US saxophonist Stanley J Zappa (nephew of Frank Zappa) and Finnish drummer and percussionist Simo Laihonen recorded this album of 7 pieces of free improvised jazz live in Helsinki in 2018. The final track features Suvadeep Das on darbuka adding an extra percussive element!
It’s a lively set with the Sax sparring with the percussion throughout. If you enjoy free improv jazz, you may well enjoy this lively concert – give it a listen!
Nico Paulo ‘Nico Paulo’
(Forward Music Group)
This is a wonderful summery album of Bacharach-like melodies by the Portuguese-Canadian singer. A truly remarkable debut of ten self-composed wonderful songs that sound like standards.
Her voice is a bewitching combination of Judy Collins, Joni Mitchell and Natalie Mering (Weyes Blood). Musically it covers a wide spectrum of Tropicalia, Folk, Americana, Jazz and Pop. Her voice conveys real emotion and depth that is bounced off the beautiful melodies and lyrics.
There are so many fantastic songs on here that it’s hard to single out the standout tracks, but they include ‘Time’, ‘Lock Me Inside’, ‘The Master’, ‘Learning My Ways’, ‘Now or Never’.
A future classic that will undoubtedly have a far-reaching influence on stars not yet born! Is it too early to award it – Debut Album of the Year?
FFO: Weyes Blood, Aldous Harding, Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, Beach House, Rumer.
Silver Moth ‘Black Bay’
(Bella Union) 21st April 2023
Silver Moth are a one-off ‘band-experiment’ made up of 7 members from various bands drawn together post-lockdown by a strong desire to make music again and see what happens! The band include Mogwai guitarist Stuart Braithwaite, Elisabeth Elektra, Evi Vine and Ben Roberts.
The first track ‘Henry’ is 7 minutes of atmospheric shoegaze guitar music with a girl singer whose cracked voice here sounds like Beth Gibbons at her emotional best!
‘The Eternal’ follows, not the Joy Division song, but a bleak winter hymnal resonating like sacred music for the End of Times!
‘Mother Tongue’ follows suite with its cinematic drama and pagan prayer-like plea for reconciliation and survival.
Final track ‘Sedna’ has the same sacred vibe – like Dead Can Dance played by Fields of The Nephilim.
Cinematic tracks full of atmosphere and grandeur! 45 minutes of Bliss! It may become the holy grail of lost albums in future years – if it slips under the radar!
FFO: Slowdive, Pale Saints, Howling Bells, Daughter, Siouxsie & the Banshees, Fields of the Nephilim.
A Little About The Writer:
Manchester-based musician and artist Graham Domain joined the team in 2022. The offspring of Scott Walker and David Slyvian, Graham has charmed us with his plaintive adroit music for years; releasing music for the iconic cult multinational platform Metal Postcard Records.
Gillian Stone’s Monthly Reviews
Alice ‘L’Oiseau Magnifique’
(Bongo Joe Records) Available Now
At 23 songs ranging from 0:26 to 3:59, Genevan intergenerational micro-choir Alice’s L’ Oiseau Magnifique (“The magnificent bird”), released via Bongo Joe Records, is like one continuous, minimal folk symphony with 23 short movements.
Mother and daughter Yvonne Harder and Lisa Harder, along with Sarah André, juxtapose crisp, resonant harmonies with accompaniment on a thrifted synth, creating a sound that could be equated to a more lo-fi, European Mountain Man. The album is like sonically experiencing a family living room concert, with half-finished knitting out on the table and the smell of chicken stock simmering in a musty, 200-year-old home.
Despite its minimalism, there are moments L’ Oiseau Magnifique that take the listener by surprise: the jangly percussion, synthetic bird sounds, and unorthodox hand-to-mouth vocals on “Nous marchons”, the Gregorian chant atmosphere on “Deux mille trains”, and the field recordings of car sounds on “La santé”. The album starts and ends with the inclusion of mistakes, with the false starts and happy laughter on the second track, “Triste et tout seul”, and the last track “Rires”. Instead of taking one out of the moment, these instead are filled with personality, warmth, and a sense of inclusion in Alice’s process. Their moments of imprecision throughout are profoundly charming and imbued with a fearless humanness that makes L’ Oiseau Magnifique utterly unique.
Altın Gün ‘Aşk’
(Glitterbeat)
Conceptually multifarious, Altın Gün’s Aşk (Glitterbeat Records) is a manifold of ancient, vintage, and current. With their “Anatolian folk-rock sound”, the Amsterdam-based sextet interprets traditional Turkish folk song through the lens of psychedelic 70’s acid disco folk. Yet despite this sonic and conceptual complexity along with profoundly adept musicianship, the ethos of the 10-song album can be boiled down to something very simple: fun.
Beginning with the formidable energy of “Badi Sabah Olmadan”, the urge to dance is established right off the top. This continues with “Su Sızıyor” with its “The Guns of Brixton” bassline held down by Jasper Verhulst, and the jangly “Leylim Ley”. “Dere Geliyor” features wicked percussion by Chris Bruining, warbly guitar by Thijs Elzinga, and Merve Daşdemir’s smooth vocals. “Çıt Çıt Çedene” is classically groovy, while “Rakıya Su Katamam” is a brief foray into headbanger territory. The intro and breakdown of “Canım Oy” could be something off Santana’s Abraxas, while Daniel Smienk’s drums on “Kalk Gidelim” are both wild and sexy. Erdinç Ecevit’s beautiful microtonal vocals then soar over the Wish You Were Here feel of “Güzelliğin On Para Etmez”. The album ends strong with the disco feel of “Doktor Civanım”, reminiscent of Blondie in their prime. Throughout the record, Ecevit incorporates the saz, or bağlama, a lute used in Turkish folk music, staying true to Altın Gün’s influential roots.
In a rare feat, every song on Aşk is fantastic, equating to a conceptually profound, joyfully executed, “all killer no filler” vibe.
H. Hawkline ‘Milk For Flowers’
(Heavenly)
Starting out a certain way, where you think you know what you’re getting into, then taking you by surprise, is the thematic journey of H. Hawkline’s Milk For Flowers (Heavenly). So is lyrical vulnerability.
The first two songs on the Cate Le Bon-produced record, “Milk for Flowers” and “Plastic Man”, begin with a deep nod to Carole King, Paul McCartney and the Brill Building. “Suppression Street” is where the lyrics begin to encase the listener into a heartfelt sense of melancholy tenderness: “Grief is an encounter and I speak it/It carries like a shadow on the carpet”. It then transitions into the Neil Young vibe of “Suppression Street”, with none other than the great John Parish on bongos. The album then slams into the indefinable, stunning “Denver”, and suddenly Milk For Flowers takes flight, as if everything was leading up to this moment.
It continues to soar through “Athens At Night” with its dance-y palate of 80s sequenced synths and electric keyboards, George Harrison guitar riffs, and “Blue Monday” drum fills. The album lands back into being piano driven for “Like I Do”, and stays there for the remainder of the album. And it is here where the lyrics begin to shine again; on “It’s A Living” (“Old women/Young children/Can teach you everything you need to know about living”) and “Mostly” (“I wanna die/I wanna die/I wanna die happy”). True ballad “Empty Room”, with its form made up of two distinct sections, then takes out the album.
Milk For Flowers begins steeped in traditional songwriting, takes you on a breathless journey, then brings you back into a place of safety, where feelings can be acknowledged and processed.
La Faute ‘Water Colours’
Watercolours, the second single from Toronto, Canada-based La Faute’s forthcoming debut album Blue Girl Nice Day, is like the sonic representation of a slightly wilted bouquet of pastel-hued flowers.
Whispered, velveteen vocals softly weave into an atmospheric palette of dark, atmospheric folk that explores the liminal space between beauty and discomfort.
Thematically traversing the “feeling of infatuation bordering on obsession”, multi-instrumentalist and visual artist Peggy Messing speaks to the unpredictable and undivinable nature of watercolour paints as an allegory for “that desperate, slightly sickening feeling that love or obsession can bring”.
There is something sinister simmering under the surface of the track – a gentle violence that slowly rears its head from beneath wisps of gorgeous minimal lushness. Messing’s hushed vocals are a step away from cracking, like the quiet control of Watercolours could break at any moment. But it doesn’t, and the tension is stunning.
Joining the team earlier this year, Gillian Stone is a multi-instrumentalist and interdisciplinary artist originally from the Pacific Northwest and based in Toronto, Canada. Through her eponymous vocally-driven post-rock/drone folk solo project, she has released two singles, “Bridges” and “Shelf”, and her debut EP, Spirit Photographs. Stone holds a BFA in Jazz Studies from Vancouver Island University and an MA in Ethnomusicology from the University of Toronto. Drawing from her eclectic taste, she has worked with Michael Peter Olsen (Zoon, The Hidden Cameras), Timothy Condon and Brad Davis (Fresh Snow, Picastro), The Fern Tips (Beams) Völur (Blood Ceremony), NEXUS (Steve Reich), and visual artist Althea Thauberger.
Our Daily Bread 567: The Oldest Voice In The World (Azerbaijan) ‘Thank You For Bringing Me Back To The Sky’
April 3, 2023
ALBUM PURVIEW SPECIAL
Dominic Valvona
CREDIT: Marilena Umuhoza Delli
The Oldest Voice In The World (Azerbaijan) ‘Thank You For Bringing Me Back To The Sky’
(Six Degrees Records) 6th April 2023
There can be few remote corners of this well-traversed globe left unrecorded, yet the celebrated polymath and renowned in-situ recordist Ian Brennan and his wife, but most importantly partner on these sonic expeditions, the filmmaker and photographer Marilena Umuhoza Delli, have found one such spot on the Azerbaijan border with Iran. So remote in fact, almost untouched by modernity and technology, that the language spoken in this mountainous village is almost unintelligible to even those living in the valley below.
Settled by the atavistic Talysh people of this region, this outlier of naturalistic and hardened living is an ancient place with challenging origins shrouded in thousands of years of obscurity. Perhaps ancestors of the old Iranian tribe the Cadusii, this unique ethnic community, clinging and camped out on the southern mountains of Azerbaijan, is famous for its longevity; said to be the home of the oldest ever recorded human, at (an allegedly) 168 years old! But despite that remoteness, the ever encroaching dreaded Covid-19 pandemic found its way there, and by the time Brennan and Delli travelled to this outcrop, the number of centenarians had diminished greatly. As if the pandemic wasn’t tragic enough, our sonic explorers found that the living conditions for these elders were extremely harsh: no indoors plumbing, forced to sleep on floorboard mattresses. And so this project, just the latest in at least fifty recordings by Brennan, became an antidote of a kind to anti-ageism.
As dangerous places, states in flux and aftermaths of genocide go, compared to many of Brennan’s tour-of-duties (Rwanda, Vietnam, Cambodia, Pakistan etc.) Azerbaijan, on the surface, seems a far less hostile safer bet. However, that Southern Caucus region’s decades old fight with its western neighbor Armenia over the complicated and disputed landlocked Nagorno-Karabakh region (the Armenian’s refer to it instead as the Artsakh) reared its ugly head again in 2020; only brought to a conclusion (of a sort) by a trilateral agreement overseen by Russia in November of that year. In a window of opportunity Brennan and Delli made the trek in late 2021. Just months later, Russia would of course invade Ukraine.
CREDIT: Marilena Umuhoza Delli
What they both discovered and recorded for posterity is a most incredible document of elderly sagacious voices very much alive, yet all to aware of their own mortality. Surviving COVID but left to mourn those that didn’t, this should be a lamentable, saddening proposition. Far from prying in on a collective trauma, with a number of the performers obviously distraught and in a state of anguish at times, Brennan’s hand was indeed kissed by a long-since retired shepherd, who repeated his gratitude (giving the album its title in the process): “Thank you for bringing me back to the sky”.
This album could, like so many previous recordings in this vain, be said to act as a sort of therapy; a release. It certainly isn’t in the spirit of Lomax, saving old voices before they disappear; an ethnomusicologist exercise in Western preservation. As a subtle augmentation of elements are added, with some vocal performances, aches and talks further transported by a number of past Brennan collaborators (Kronos Quartet, Tinariwen, The Good Ones and Yoka Honda) on the bonus tracks.
For those new to Brennan’s hands-off approach, the set-up is as un-intrusive and natural as possible. The surrounding environment isn’t just welcome to bleed into each recording but invited. This translates into the creaking of a door; the crackled flames of a furnace; and in the case of the afflatus-touched ‘Lullaby’, what sounds like a rhythmic trudge through water.
Whilst most expressions, deliveries of earthy travail and more heavenly thanksgiving are pretty stripped back, soft but effective uses of mirrored and echoed reversals are used on the warped piano yearned ‘My Mother Lived To Be 110’, and the more avant-garde piano and spoken ‘The Young Men Are Sent To Die In Rich Man’s War’. This turns some recordings into portals to other worlds, others, like something from Zardoz, or even psychedelic and otherworldly.
Voices are effected on the reverberated, forewarned ‘Son, Don’t Go There, The Road Is Dangerous’, turning a couple of different vocals into something both giddy and esoteric. I haven’t asked or searched it out so do forgive my ignorance, but the poetic ‘You Are A Flower Yet To Grow’ sounds like it has some kind of accompanying bassoon blowing away on it; and ‘Pepe, Pepe (Donkey Song)’ features what I can only describe as a sort of primitivism jazz horn. There’s hand drums being respectively rattled and hit on the longer, lyrically melodious dance, ‘Bulbul (Nightingale)’ and the more Persian sounding ‘Screaming From The Mountain Top For My Son’.
CREDIT: Marilena Umuhoza Delli
Amongst the often more distressed offerings and terms of abandonment, wise advice to longevity comes in the form of the trolley-full-rattled-crockery (or so it sounds) accompanied heartfelt ‘The Secret To Life: I Was Loved’, and the acoustic guitar wobbled and bandy-stringed, talked ‘The Secret To life: I Worked Hard And Ate Butter’ – dairy lovers like me take comfort; although my work rate of honest craft and toil will have to be increased considerably if that’s the case to long life.
A quartet, as I mentioned earlier, of collaborative transformations have been added as “bonus” material. All those involved have at some point crossed congruous and valuable paths with Brennan in the field or studio, the first being the Kronos Quartet who lift a sorrowful Talysh mountain border voice with a treatment of neoclassical held and bowed strings and gravitas. Yuka Honda, meanwhile, evokes Die Wilde Jagd and The Pyrolator on the sophisticated electronic and minimalist Techno affected ‘Prayer Overheard’.
One of Mali’s Tuareg luminaries of desert rock and blues, the much lauded Tinariwen, cast a near Medieval and Oriental dream spell on ‘Ghosts’, and the Rwandan farming bluesman, The Good Ones, provide an elasticated, stringy and stripped backing for the female-voiced ‘A Lifetime Still’ – complete with a light chorus of birds.
Loss, bereavement, the wise observations of those uncomplicated voices, this latest recording from Brennan and Dilli (who records each project through her lens) encourages a dialogue and offers a unique angle on ageing, or rather, the abandonment and prejudice of growing old. In a time in which we’ve grown to distrust, cast off and denigrate old age in the pursuit of eternal youth (cosmetically and through the filters of Instagram), the old are looked on with embarrassment and as a burden; their deaths on mass, as they were shunted out of hospitals into care homes to spread COVID, until recently, seen as just a unfortunate result of the pandemic. We’ve come to see ageing as a reminder of our own unwanted mortality. As I’ve said, those voices come alive in the presence of Brennan, cutting through the pretence and bullshit with the most emotionally profound wisdom and anguish of the times. With such a skilled touch, Brennan loses none of the atavistic traditions yet transforms his hosts’ song into the “now” with a near-psychedelic, otherworldly and spiritual production of folk and the avant-garde. This is quite unlike anything else you’ve heard.
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.
Monthly Playlist Revue Of March 2023: Snapped Ankles, Tinariwen, Murs, ILLAMAN, Salem Trials, Anemic Cinema…
March 31, 2023
The Monolith Cocktail’s Monthly Playlist Of Choice Music
Picked By Dominic Valvona, Matt Oliver, Brian ‘Bordello’, Gillian Stone, Graham Domain.
Three and a half hours of choice music from March, the Monolith Cocktail Revue features tunes from our reviews and columns, plus the tracks we didn’t get room to feature. This month’s selection is courtesy of Dominic Valvona, Matt Oliver, Brian ‘Bordello’ She, Graham Domain and Gillian Stone.
____TRACK LIST____
Snapped Ankles ‘Planet You’
Sparkz ‘Overlord’
Spectacular Diagnostics ‘Political Monsters’
Anemic Cinema ‘Oneirophrenia’
ASSASSUN ‘Unfold On My Chest’
Man/Woman/Chainsaw ‘Back/Burden’
Salem Trials ‘Calculating R’
Ruxpin & Stafraenn Hakon ‘Unmapped Landscapes’
DJ Black Low ‘Thando’
Tinariwen w/ Fats Kaplin ‘Tenere Den’
Dur-Dur Band International ‘Wan Ka Helaa’
Adrian Younge/Ali Shaheed Muhammad & Lonnie Liston Smith ‘A New Spring’
Juppe ‘Fade’
Ramson Badbonez ‘Stir Fried (Remix)’
The Waeve ‘Kill Me Again’
Tilo Weber ‘Nacre Nacre’
Areia ‘The Deaf Man Three’
Sultan Stevenson ‘Summer Was Our Holy Place’
Chairman Maf ‘Deep Water’
Dub Sonata/BlackLiq ‘The B-Side’
Ali Farka Toure (Ft. Oumou Sangare) ‘Bandolobourou’
Philip Selway ‘Strange Dance’
Benedict Benjamin ‘White Noise’
Schizo Fun Addict ‘Over The Hill And Far Away’
Nivis ‘Rain On A Funeral March’
Saba Alizadeh ‘Nafir’
Frederic D. Oberland ‘Quatre Epaves d’Acier’
Qrauer ‘Foq (ANGRiDAD RMX)’
Carmen Jaci ‘I See’
Healing Force Project ‘Adrift In The Stratosphere’
Murs ‘Spaghetti At The Ghetty’
Efeks Ft. Breezy Lee & Steady ‘Grateful’
Rico James ‘All Candles’
Varnish La Piscine ‘NUBIAN FARLOW’
ILLAMAN Ft. Pitch 92 ‘Sometimes Relax’
AJ Suede/ Televangel ‘Terrible’
ILLAMAN Ft. Pitch 92 ‘Absolutely Tidy’
Che Noir/ Big Ghost Ltd. ‘Quiet Movers’
Niclas Tamas ‘Cosmology Mammal’
Tomo-Nakaguchi ‘The Starry Night’
Jman/The Argonautz ‘Dying Breed’
Farmabeats/Baileys Brown ‘They Live We Sleep (Pricks From The Thorn)’
Joel Harrison & Anthony Pirog ‘Critical Conversation’
Lukas Traxel ‘The Call’
Lucy Kruger & The Lost Boys ‘Heaving’
Smashing Red ‘Hot Sun’
Goodbye Karelle ‘Moonroad’
Halo Maud ‘Catch The Wave’
Night Noise Team ‘Little Shocks’
Ghosts On TV ‘Life In Plastic’
Salem Trials ‘Super Spreader’
$T33D$_uv-LUV ‘J.O.1.’
Première: Renato Fiorito ‘Medusa’
March 29, 2023
TRACK PREMIERE
Dominic Valvona
Renato Fiorito ‘Medusa’
Taken from the upcoming Lustra album, released on May 4th by Non Sempre Nuoce
A votive offering of gratitude and devotion to the city he calls home, Renato Fiorito’s personal vision of Naples is the subject of the upcoming symphony, Lustra.
Following on from the Neapolitan composer, sound artist, live performer and sound engineer’s site-specific sound installation ‘Straight/Wandering’, commissioned and premièred at the 2022 Le Guess Who?! festival, this new concept album pays a special sonic homage to both Naples’ rich afflatus and street musical theatre and the bustling lives of its people; merging and filtering collected field recordings from across the city with passing melodies, reverberations of fleeting song, exchanges and a production of stirring, congruous electronica.
Straddling the bay looking out towards the Gulf, a fertile fecund in part because of its precarious proximity to Mount Vesuvius, Naples has perhaps one of the most incredible histories of any important city: in fact, perhaps one of the oldest continuously inhabited legacies too, stretching back to its foundation by the Greeks in the first millennium B.C. Fought over in that time by untold invaders, part of a number of forced (and more welcome) kingdoms, the people have still maintained a strong independent identity: a unique marriage of turmoil, violence and the sublime. Fiorito calls it a “place of ashes, blood; place of flowers and wine”. Artistically and culturally ascendant whilst the undead still linger in catacombs below the streets, a busy modern society attempts to navigate an archaic metropolis.
With a saintly “voto” alter on every street corner; a shopkeeper’s aria and promenade serenade competing to be heard above the rigged mufflers of mopeds, Lustra, as its “illuminate” translation describes, lightens up Naples psychogeography, shining a lens on the daily sounds, the unplanned, uncloyed captured moments when the industrial and abstract comes into contact with the musical. This manifests as mere evaporations, mirages or vapoured airs of a time and place; mirages often suffused with the sound of the sea rolling ashore, a crackling fire or the non-musical rhythm of play, of tools working away on some project or other. Serialism woven into a fabric of engineered sine waves, refractions, ambience, metallic and minimalistic percussive beats, the familiar becomes mysterious, holy, even ominous; the ephemeral now caught and bottled for posterity.
From that album, the Monolith Cocktail is premiering the vaporous, patted-beat turn subtle circular wave ‘Medusa’. “Jellyfish” or a reference to the mythological gorgon immortalised by all the Italian greats, including Naples fleeting wanderer Caravaggio, there’s a sense of under-the-surface breathes beneath the building granular and lightly churned textures.
Released on May 4th Lustra sees Fiorito once more collaborate with his sonic partner and fellow Neapolitan Antonio Raia on the crackling fireside, faint melodic and reflective softly rasped saxophone memory ‘3694’. Fiorito and Raia previously created the similar conceived Thin Reactions soundscape during lockdown in 2021, for the same Naples boutique label Non Sempre Nuoce (a track from which we premièred). The album’s only other named guests, the notable Suonno d’Ajere trio, can be heard on the well-known transformed aria ‘Mmiez’ ‘o Ggrano’; emerging from a filtered dream like submersion, a ether of singing, wave forms and subtle beats, their signature serenade of Neapolitan song pulls focus on the city’s dignified street musician heritage.
A new language formed from the musical history of Naples; its loves, devotions, desires and day-to-day interactions take shape in a contemporary field of ambience and downplayed electronica. You can pre order it now.
Our Daily Bread 566: Swans, Halo Maud, Night Noise Team, The Mary Onettes, Heartworms
March 27, 2023
Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea’s Picks
/SINGLES/
Swans ‘Paradise Is Mine’
(Mute)
The taster track of the new Swans album is upon us and is a track of longitude, going on for nine minutes. Maybe going on is the wrong description. Maybe gently floating, drifting like a thought on the edge of a maelstrom of seduction and unease; a song that in noway outstays its welcome. In fact it kindly invites you in for tea and biscuits, offers you a choice of what you want to watch and then twiddles its moustache in a Dick Dastardly way when your back is turned. Yes, “Paradise Is Mine” is a crafty little bugger of a song. I wonder, have the Swans pieces of high quality art been described as “a crafty bugger”? Probably not. I would not describe it like that to their faces as they are a bit scary; as in fact is this seduction of unease.
Halo Maud ‘Catch The Wave’
(Heavenly Records) Available Now
‘Catch The Wave’ is a rather beautiful song, especially the Dawn Version, which is the same beautiful song with mostly just vocals and guitar and without the aural sugar coating of synths and vocal effects. The gift without the wrapping dear friends as Halo Maud really does not need any wrapping or enhancing: it is like putting eyeliner on the Mona Lisa, she really does not need it. She’s perfect as she is.
Night Noise Team ‘Little Shocks’
17th March 2023
‘Little Shocks’ is a delightfully beautiful slice of well-written electro pop; intelligent lyrics and beautiful melody with quirky catchy synth lines, which nowadays is indeed a bit of a rare thing. Yes indeed this in fact a song (did you notice I said song and not a track) that is worthy to be released and not dropped, which is sadly the modern way; in my old days the only experience of being dropped by a record label was when I was being kicked off their roster. But this is a lovely little release, and I expect if the Night Noise Team releases an album it will be equally as lovely.
Ghosts On TV ‘Sunshine’
(Soliti) Available Now
A palette wash of sonic endeavor; a throw away memory caught in the wish of a recurring dream, Ghosts On TV supply us with a brief glimpse of daylight in these dark times with the appropriately titled “Sunshine”. A Flying Saucer Attack like pop covered chocolate delight of sadness and hope; a whispered sweet nothing sound-tracked by heavenly feedback, this is a lesson in how to write alternative pop.
The Mary Onettes ‘Pearl Machine’
(Welfare Sounds) Available Now
The Mary Onettes have just released a new track and it is indeed a bit of a gem, a pearl in fact. Maybe it is why they have titled this Cure like stroll of instrumental solitude “Pearl Machine”, a work of beauty and retreat that promises great things for their forthcoming album.
bigflower ‘Anything’
(Self-Release) Available Now
Another month another slab of hypnotic dark dense guitar beauty from bigflower, and “Anything” is indeed a thing of great beauty; the sound of sinking hope; a soundtrack of loss and remembrance that once again screams out to be included in some movie blockbuster. For Ivor makes music that has such a wide cinemascope to it, that completely engulfs you, and leaves you in a state of blissed out bohemia.
Lucy Kruger & The Lost Boys ‘Howl’
(Unique Records) Available Now
I love this track. It’s an unhinged point of no return of a song. A track that is adventurous, sexy and is willing to argue its own point of view; song that takes great pleasure in poking you with a phallus shaped slice of no wave glamour. A track that will bewitch you and entice you into its lair, before happily hacking you to little bits with its pure originality and individuality. A gem.
Man/Woman/Chainsaw ‘Backburden’
(Big Richard Records) Available Now
Another blast of jerky punk rock: yes another. There seems to be a deluge of jerky punk rock coming my way lately, and 90% of it is very good. And this is one of the 90%, so I will indeed take the time out and cast my appraisal. Not that anyone really cares what I think. And why on earth should they, as everyone has their own musical taste, and me saying that I like it a great deal does not mean that you will. But I enjoyed Daisy Chainsaw and Elastica and The Slits and this is in the same ballpark – as an American would say. But with myself being British I will say Cricket ground. And this is very British and very quirky and lovely and punky, and I love it.
//ALBUMS-EPS//
Heartworms ‘A Comforting Notion EP’
(Speedy Wunderground) 24th March 2023
Have you ever watched a cat admire itself in a mirror and slowly become freaked out and scared of its own reflection, backing off as slinkily as possible, giving an air of nonchalant sexiness, purring seductively as it turns and leaves the room to go and make a kill in the cold and wintery back garden. You can do nothing but admire the blackness and beauty of nature unfurling its wonderous inner self; leaving itself naked and open. Well this four track EP is an aural equivalent; it’s dark, bewitching and beautiful, and leaves an uneasy tingling in your soul. The sound of Portishead visiting itself in an insane asylum, wonderfully unhinged, and unhingedly beautiful.
LMNOP (aka dONW7) ‘LMNO3’
Available Now
Everybody needs some lo-fi power pop in their lives. Well they do when it is simply as life affirming as this album is. 22 tracks of analogue tape beauty; songs that dazzle and twirl and make you remember the joy of a pop melody and the classic guitar riff, be it the “Heatwave” break of “Semi Circular”, or the Thin Lizzy like soloing on “Y”, or the Big Star worthiness of “Wanna Write A Letter To You”, truly a pop gem, and believe me this album is full of pop gems including the wannabe rock stardom of the excellent “Garbage”. LMNOP are truly a marvel of pop.
Smashing Red ‘II’ EP
(Metal Postcard Records) Available Now
Now when an EP is kicked off with a track that borrows a hybrid riff off Ringo’s “Back Off Boogaloo”, Warrants “Cherry Pie” and “Number 1 Dominator” by Top (remember them? An unsuccessful band from Liverpool once tipped for great things) you know it is going to be good. And indeed it is; five tracks that dip their toes in indie, folk and pop, at times making one think of the excellent Comet Gain, especially on “I Luv U” – a rather fetching song about trying to make in the music industry. And at other times, a mellow Kinks “Magic Garden” and the Ray Davies tribute “He’s No Angel”. So if you are looking for five well-written songs about life …please look no further.
$t33d$_uv_LUV ‘Ballads For Bros’
(Metal Postcard Records) Available Now
$t33d$_uv_LUV is maybe the worst band name I have ever come across. In fact, is not even a good password. Well, it is a good password safety wise, but one you have no chance in remembering and most bands want to be remembered; it’s not a name that will slip off the tongue of any alt DJs out there, and in fact could well put off blog writers writing about you as you really do not want to be typing that out in a review. Luckily I’m of sterner stuff and do not mind typing it out on occasion, and that is a shame, as Ballads For Bros is a good album and could actually gain some attention.
It’s an album I’ve listened to a number of times and is as strange as the band name. It’s not often an album starts with a AOR ballad; ‘Next To Me’ is quite lovely and is something that Lennon might have recorded for his Plastic Ono Band album if he had had a happy childhood, or something Todd Rundgren might have released in the early 70s. It’s a bit of a stunner.
The next track ‘Rock (Your City) Tonight’ is a delight of Royal Trux madness. It’s funny and it rocks. And those two stunners are the best two tracks on the album.
The third track ‘Brothers In Arms (Pt.2)’ thankfully does not sound like Dire Striates or have anything to do with their tastefully plucked guitars. But saying that, the track does actually have tastefully plucked guitars, and is another well-written ballad. Then the album gets a bit strange with music that could be lift music from Dr Who (‘D2TD’), and Add N To X like porn music for computers (‘Zoom On The Can’). So a strange and enjoyable listen overall and if they went down the AOR path further could be the next Journey or Chicago.
A word about the Author of these reviews::
Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea joined the Monolith Cocktail team in January 2019. The cult leader of the infamous lo fi gods, The Bordellos, has released countless recordings over the decades with his family band of hapless unfortunates, and is the owner of a most self-deprecating sound-off style blog. Far too many projects, asides and oddities to mention, but his latest album is Songs For Cilla Black (released on Think Like A Key Music) threatened to trouble some online alternative chart for a week on Amazon – so things must be looking up.
Each week we send a mountain of new releases to the self-depreciating maverick to see what sticks. In his own idiosyncratic style and turn-of-phrase, pontificating aloud and reviewing with scrutiny an eclectic deluge of releases.
Our Daily Bread 565: A Journey Of Giraffes ‘Empress Nouveau’
March 23, 2023
SUBLIME AMBIENT MUSIC REVIEWED BY DOMINIC VALVONA
A Journey Of Giraffes ‘Empress Nouveau’
(Somewherecold Records) 31st March 2023
Six albums into his partnership with the North American home of ambient and electronic music, Somewherecold Records, the unassuming composer John Lane once more peaceably reveals another finely-crafted, tactile album of subtle vision and beauty. His most successful conversion since swapping the beachcomber Pet Sounds imbued musical language of Expo (hinted at later on) to pick up the mantle of ambient and neoclassical composition under the A Journey Of Giraffes moniker, John has traversed various themes, from the love letter Kona album to Susumu Yokota to the Caucasus atmospheres of Armenia.
With various sonic, musical leitmotifs, a mystically suggestive title and references to the atavistic, to Iberian memories and delicate decorative tracery, the veiled, perfumed Empress Nouveau glides and sails, emerges and, just as subtly, disappears across dreamy spells of wistfulness, promise and the intriguing; a voyage, but not necessarily a linear journey.
Imbued by a suffusion of influences, most notably Harold Budd and Susumu Yokota (once more) but also Kazumichi Komatsu, Sakamoto & Sylvain, Andrew Heath and Eno, Lane spins, weaves and spindles the essence of place and time; stirring up dulcimer-like tones of the Orient, a hand-ringing school (could also be a call to prayer, or assembly point prompt, perhaps the intermission signal at the opera or theatre) bell, or softly evoking a South American wilderness.
Classical tones comfortably sit with the synthesized and crystalized as lightly patterned motifs, bulb-like notes and pizzicato strings resonate, and melodious flakes fall. Amongst that soft, occasionally chiming and sparkling, musicality you can detect the odd passage of saxophone, a diaphanous music box, burbled and wobbly bubbles, tine-like plucks of what could be a mbira, Mosquito Coast pan-piped mysteries, the Baroque and a chirping, chattering, knee-rubbing chorus of insects. With a surprising evocation of John’s seashells gathering Brian Wilson inspired Expo incarnation from a near decade ago, ‘Little Flowers On A Stone’ has a real touch of The Wonderments and Van Dyke Parks about it, albeit stripped of those lush vocal harmonies.
On an even keel throughout, whether that’s giving a soundtrack to the memories of traveling to the quaint Alicante city/municipality of Elda for instance, or, referencing the female chemist and Mesopotamian court overseer Tapputi, whose name can be found etched on a 1200 B.C. cuneiform tablet, Empress Nouveau remains an ocean-liner serenely floating across a milk sea and vaporous waves. But then there are also a number of allusions to the artisan craft of pottery and ornamentation (‘Bamboo Majolica’ and ‘Baroque Filigree’) to be found in the melodic ether and peaceful motions of this gentle traverse. This could itself be a metaphor for John’s own applied craftsmanship in carefully and artfully composing such effective quality ambient and neoclassical stirrings.
This is yet another essential album from one of the best artists working in this field of subtle, sometimes breathtaking and sublime, exploration – although this is experimenting without sounding like you’re experimenting, if that makes sense. It’s a joy to experience.
The John Lanes Files – Links To Previous Albums Featured On The Monolith Cocktail
A Journey Of Giraffes ‘Spool’
AJOG ‘Kona’
AJOG ‘F²’
AJOG ‘Armenia’
Expo ‘She Sells Seashells’
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.
Upcoming and recent albums in review
Dominic Valvona
Frédéric D. Oberland ‘Solstices’
(ZamZamRec) Available Now
An epic reverberated fusion of recondite apparatus and the mystical, spiritual music of Tunisia, the self-taught multi-instrumentalist Frédéric D. Oberland and his zoukra mizzle playing and ritualistic percussion foil Awlad Fayala, magic up a performative soundtrack of Solstices on this incredibly immersive album.
A journey into the cosmos, the co-funding instigator of such experimental projects as Oiseaux-Tempête, Fourde!, Le Réveil Des Tropiques and Farwell Poetry absorbs the environments, the alarmism of climate change and the spirit of improvisation to create an untethered work of wonderment, woe and mysticism.
The first quartet of atmospheric scores – an avant-garde soundtrack to the Discovery Channel – on this album are taken from a 2021 performance in Paris. Marking the tenth anniversary of Petit Bain, Frédéric chartered a course for space. The theory of alien DNA, organisms and bacteria from other planets and solar systems making its way via comets and meteoroids, unscathed in the depths of space, to land and spread life to another world, aka “panspermia”, is used as a title to the first of these peregrinations. The rumble of thrusters, of rocket fuel gases comes later but first a monologue from the late Cassandra of environmental doom, Stephen Hawking, who offers a cataclysmic assessment of humanity with little glimmer of hope (hey, at least the hole in the Ozone Layer is closing up). This is done to the sound of tingling and shimmery sounds, fizzing valves and a synthesized lunar choral requiem. University Challenged and Tomat spring to mind musically, sonically, on this warning from the genius of propound theories and quantum mechanics.
Those boosters are ignited at the start of ‘À Norte Nuit’ (“to our night”), but evolve into the kosmische feels of Cluster: that or some lost recording from the Sky Records catalogue. Within that rocketed atmosphere a zoukra or something like it can be heard blowing away like Colin Stetson’s saxophone, lingering and circulating in the foggy resonating loops. Moving on, ‘Quatre Épaves d’Acies’ (“four steel works”) sounds like a 80s VHS sci-fi, or horror, score made by Kavinsky and Klaus Schulze. Zodiac in the fourth house of the moon, or whatever, there’s a sense of both mysterious ceremony and heavens-like ascendency.
By the time we reach the more dramatic, electric storm of bounding drums and alien minimalist techno ‘Worst Case Scenario’ the Arabian radio waves of North Africa are growing stronger, caught up in a vacuum of constant building echoes whipped up by Frédéric’s transformed hidden sound sources.
The final movement, ‘Cosmos Bou Dellif’, is taken form another incredible live performance, this time in a Tunisian butcher’s market, part of the Gabè’s Cinema Festival. In contrast to the meat trade, Frédéric and Awlad get swept up into a cyclonic swirl of drones, piped and whistled atavistic Tunisian Hermeticism and machine oscillations. Occasionally it wonders into the veil of Tibetan esotericism, and at others, Walker’s partnership with Sunn O))). It’s almost chaotic, nearly unnerving, yet also strangely mesmerising with its architect entranced as he feeds the live elements in real time into loops and a synthesis of cosmic veneration. It proves a great visceral and universally mysterious way to finish a great sonic project of fusions; an alchemy of earthly propositions and the all-too real omens of destruction seen from the wonderment of space and beyond.
Carmen Jaci ‘Happy Child’
(Noumenal Loom) 30th March 2023
With knowing childlike wonder and curiosity the French-Canadian (based in the Netherlands) composer Carmen Jaci bounces through a soft play crèche portal into a day-glow surrealist rainbow of giddy disjointed harmony. I say harmony, because despite the discombobulated polyphonic orchestrations, the deconstructed zips, zaps and sporadic voices that pop up and the Esperanto era floppy-disc cut-ups of Sakamoto, every one of these experiments is fun, cute and surprisingly melodious.
Instead of friction, abrasion, there’s a softening; a dizzy lightness and sensibility that borders on pop: granted a strange, loose version of it.
A visual feast for the eyes too – a blusher of Kandinsky, Sonia Delaney and Léger pulled into a hyper-vivid geometric fantasy studio of contemporary abstraction -, Carmen has gone for a full immersive experience, taking time to place every acoustic, synthesized and vocal transduced sample in the best place to stimulate a kooky idiosyncratic mix of naïve (I mean in the best possible sense of the word) electronica, art and theatre.
This Happy Child climbs the arpeggiator stairway to slide back down into a bubble bath of illimitable alacrity, serrated rubbed vibes, manipulated assonant and aria-like voices and placeable collage. We’re talking a skipping pleasant feeling of sinfonietta, of Bauhaus ballet and a mix of Trans Zimmer & The DJs, Mira Calix, Der Plan and Coldcut. In one lush-coloured environment Stravinsky’s Rites Of Spring meets Prokfiev atop of a marshmallow beanbag; early Chicago techno bounces along to a saturation of Skittles; and MIDI timpani and harp orchestrate an ornamental garden of 80s Japanese electronic-pop.
A brilliance of candy-electronica and Casio symphonies, Happy Child is a clever work of unburdened, unpretentious, but indeed deliberate and well-crafted, kidulthood. Carmen’s magical, if occasionally straying into the mysterious, new album pings back and forth with humour and, above all else, playfulness. Not for the burgeoning artist (I say burgeoning, Carmen is quite the professional technician with some years of experience: you can even pay for one-on-one tuitions at her own studio) the sour-faced seriousness of many of her peers, this is electronic music with a taste of fantasy and fun recollections of childhood.
Boycalledcrow ‘Nightmare Folk Art’
(Subexotic) 31st March 2023
Despite the god awful, ungovernable times we live in, and after absorbing the alternative-future of a San Fran(sicko) class conflict of survival, as laid out in William Gibson’s dystopian sci-fi novel Virtual Light (stolen nanotech glasses ensue a caper of renegades, assassins and corporate foes), the Chester-based sound artist Carl Knott has found some sort of solace in a dreamy escapist vision of the pastoral on his latest album, Nightmare Folk Art. That title suggests some sort of dread, darkness, but in fact this is the sound of Knott’s home and extended county country-walks landscape transduced into a magic-realism and hallucinated version of outsider art and weird folk music.
Unsure in places, mysterious and often spun into a reverberating loop of interlayered nylon-stringed acoustic samples that can confuse, Knott, under yet another successful alias as a Boycalledcrow (previous incarnations include Wonderful Beasts and Spacelab), conjures up the unreal. Again, this is a dream state in which you’re never quite relaxed but never really thrown into a nightmare. There’s even a track named after the family dog (‘Sister Poppy Is A Good Girl’) for heaven’s sake! And talking of heaven, occasionally those various stringed instruments actually take on a harp-like beauty: that or a mandolin, a dulcimer and even the African kora.
Off-kilter in a resonated movement of picked, fanned, spindled guitar loops, metallic and whipped drums, constant echoes and rotor or flickered speed-shifted vapours, a distant essence of folk music can just about be detected. In fact it’s more Fripp and Eno (especially on the sailing ‘Be More Kind, Like Frank’), more Syrinx and Popol Vuh (on the diaphanous, hallowed and melodious ‘Sister Poppy…’) than idyllic or psychedelic folk. There’s a semblance of Cluster for instance on ‘Easy Tiger’, and the growl of a trebly amped-up post-punk bass on the reversed and breathing, Warp drums smacking ‘Beautiful Women’.
Sometimes a synthesis of guitar manipulations turn into something almost indescribable, hard to quantify; into an atmosphere or rhythm that stirs up a strange mood, environment far from the idylls of an English countryside or the abstract portals of family and emotions. From a deconstructive process something strangely weird and yet something that can be very emotive takes shape or merely dissipates into the ether. Boycalledcrow conjures up a phantom dream world in which the acoustic guitar iterations and looped bass-y rhythms of Land Observation are transformed into a mere echo and whisper of that folk seed.
Joel Harrison & Anthony Pirog ‘The Great Mirage’
(AGS Recordings) 17th March 2023
A cross-generational partnership of guitar virtuosos pull together their individual provenance and art for a showcase journey of atmospheric evocations of place and time, on a new musical mirage.
The longer standing senior partner on this enterprise, Joel Harrison, has an enviable CV and catalogue of 22 albums to his name. The Guggenheim fellow and polymath guitar language and technique educator, composer, arranger, lyricist and writer’s music has appeared on film (Southern Comfort and the Oscar-nominated Traffic Stop) and across a myriad of other stages (one such notable commission for Chamber Music America). His previous albums have featured some incredibly talented artists, including such luminaries as Norah jones and the contemporary jazz mover and shaker (and Bowie’s last recording foil) Donny McCaslin.
Harrison’s jazz-trained junior (in age only) partner Anthony Pirog has recorded and played in an eclectic lineup of projects over the years; from his collaboration with his life partner and cellist Janel Leppin to the harder-rocking New Electric quartet.
Both based in the Washington D.C. area, both students of jazz, their shared geography and musical interests crossover into the spheres of rock, country, prog, folk, psych and even, what I would describe as both post-punk and krautrock. This could all be wrapped up as fusion music. Fusion music, that is, with a roaming curiosity to redefine or at least play with stretching the capabilities of the guitar in the 21st century: good luck with that.
Harrison and Pirog are not alone on that venture, bringing in the talents of Stephen Crump on bass and Allison Miller on drums to widen the scope and bolster the sound; to give body, a drive and even groove too: Miller’s drumming skills, it must be said, can be just as free and loose as they can be in smashing, drilling and motoring along the compositions.
Unsurprisingly both highly competent guitarist technicians and creative of their craft are pretty good at conveying the mood, at building, expressing a sense of place whilst at switching on the Steve Vai and Pat Methany blazing fretwork soloing dynamics. On the title-track itself they fuse later 70s King Crimson with a certain aria-bending mystique, hints of that jazz learning and final biting fuzz bedding of Sunn O))). Later on with ‘Mortgage My Soul’ they rev-up that same fuzz and scuzz for a concentration of bashed-out heavy rock.
Easing the pace, compositions like the wistful, plaintive ‘There’s Never Enough Time’ and ‘Desert Solitaire’ take on a country music lilt of waning and bottleneck sliding, whilst the shorter vignette, ‘Last Rose Of Summer’, lingers beautifully in an rustic-acoustic charm of gauzy serenaded country-folk. ‘I’ll See You In The Shinning World’ starts off in a similar mode (reminding me in part of Myles Cochran) but then subtly moves through changes of funk, the jazzy and spacey.
Travelling south musically, ‘Clarksdale’ takes a pinch of Muscle Shoals and the blues to evoke a very American landscape, whilst at the other end of the scale, the no less evocative mood of ‘Critical Conversation’ feels like a tumult, a squirming tension of energetic discourse and guitar effects experimentation – post-punk, post-rock in sound, jazzy in channeling a certain angst.
Anything but a demonstration, this album is an impressive showcase of dexterity and virtuoso skill of composition and expressive playing. The Great Mirage stays constantly interesting as it moves between reflection and displays of whining and squealed guitar frippery. Never indulgent, the focus is always on merging a shared experience in which the guitar (both electric and acoustic) bends, molds and wields to its practitioner’s concept of free-expression. I’d suggest they’ve done quite well in mining their eclectic sources to shape that freedom and pushing of the boundaries in a modern age.
Bhajan Bhoy ‘To Love Is To Love (Volumes 1 & 2)’
(Cardinal Fuzz in the UK/Feeding Tube in the US) Available Now
Ajay Saggar once again travels the astral highway and byways as guru Bhajan Bhoy, across two volumes of transcendence, raga mantras and afflatus dreamwave psychedelia.
When not masquerading under the Deutsche Ashram title or acting the part of foil to Oli Hefferman and Kohhei Matsuda in the University Challenged trio, and again with Oli in the long-running King Champion Sounds troupe, Saggar channels his divine styles into this newish incarnation – the debut Bhajan Bhoy album, Bless Bless, was released in 2020.
Three years later, and out the other side of the pandemic, Saggar brings us “love” in abundance with a moiety of albums that channel previous projects: especially the intoxicating club beat, shoegaze, post-punk haze of his Deutsche Ashram duo with the gauzy-hushed Merinde Verbeck. Because sometimes amongst the radio waves of India and the brassy resonance of the sitar there is a hint of a transported and flange fanning Stone Roses, the Cocteau Twins, Jah Wobble and MBV. I’m not sure who accompanies Saggar this time around, but those similar airy vapours f ethereal vocals can e heard suffused across a number of peregrinations that have lyrics; these being utterances, vague chants and the sort of hippie new age speak of the 90s trance and rave scenes.
Volume 1 opens with the Mancunian acid dripped and Indian echoed mizzle of ‘The Guiding Light’; a both kaleidoscopic and druggy vacuum of Ash Ra Tempel, the Moon Duo and 80s neo-pop. ‘On A Higher Plain’, with concertinaed spells and reverberating tremolo twangs, envisions El Topo transported to the Indian subcontinent. ‘Raga Shanti’ as the name makes clear, fulfills the spiritual Eastern quota well with a spectrum of cosmic dialing tones, echoes of Amon Düül II-speaks-to-Yogi and the sound of Shankar. ‘Oh Seeker’ brings back those near-ethereal washy female vocals – reminding me a lot of the female tri-vocal led French psych group Gloria – across synthesized accelerating waves, flange-like guitar and entrancing drones.
Volume 1 ends however on the mystified, dreamy fairytale enveloped ‘Lovely Day For Cricket’. I’m not sure if there’s a hidden meaning – you can never be sure these days when even the most harmless or joyous innocuous activities can enrage or fuel discourse on the British Empire, who of course brought that sport to most of their colonies -, or, if it’s merely a celebration of this sport’s obvious mega popularity, cultural importance – the national game in India (and its neighbours too) more or less. Commentary and the crowd from a match is morphed and sent out gently into a sort of cosmic twilight zone.
Volume 2 follows on with the sequined bejeweled chimes of finger cymbals and bells and the fanned-out and spindled raga and kosmische trance of ‘Hari Om Sharan’ – Popol Vuh and Floyd meet Harrison for a daily devotional. That Popol Vuh sound, unsurprisingly, can be heard on the Aguirre-like Amazonian atmospheric dedication to that group’s cinematic soundtrack patron, Werner Herzog, on ‘Abshaku…The Ecstatic Truth’. The Vuh, in communion with late 70s/early 80s Tangerine Dream and Vangelis, traverse Herzog’s dream-realism and documented travels with vague panpipe blows, drifted Heart of Darkness guitar and the misty veils of Machu Picchu.
‘Accordi-Ohm’ meanwhile, sounds like a dub-y bellowing and concertinaed vision of Augustus Pablo on the trial of the crystal skulls: yeah imagine that! That leaves the finale, ‘Eliane’s Conch’, another of those vaporous dreamy and static-charged dreamwave echoed traverses that reminded, a little, of the Dead Skeletons’ hypnotic mantras.
Overall both albums flow, waft or linger across the cosmic, spiritual pathway of kosmische, krautrock, acid-rock, psych, shoegaze and beyond. The sound of India is taken to various planes within that spectrum, woven into a fabric of cultish, trippy and new age influences. Blessed be the search for love in an increasingly hostile, intense, divisive and mentally draining world; Saggar’s Bhajan Bhoy incarnation certainly has its work cut out. And yet, with his collected ensemble of musical partners, he creates a musical escape route on a purview of enlightenment and even fun transcendental spiritualism.
Healing Force Project ‘Drifted Entities (Vol. 2)’
(Beat Machine Records) 17th March 2023
The re-rebirth of cool in an ever-forward momentum of flux, Antonio Marini’s Healing Force Project once more tumbles across a broken-beat, jungle, free-jazz and cosmic spectrum of reverberating exploration and spliced assemblage.
Last year’s first Drifted Entities volume made my choice albums list of 2022 with its echoed washes of On-U Sound and elements of Basic Channel, Plug, Luke Vibert and The Mosquitoes; all bouncing and resonating with the contorted rasps and strains and inspirations of Albert Ayler’s Music Is The Healing Force Of The Universe –the title and source of this sonic untethered beat-sculpted project.
Volume 2 adheres to the same principles but is heavier on the beats and the percussion. Filtering, falling, paddled, sifting and shivered throughout this deconstruction-reconstruction are echoes of Miles Davis’ 80s soundtrack suffused trumpet blows and noirish winds, Jan Hammer and Greg Foat’s organ and synth held chords and bulb-like notes and Billy Cobham’s expletory drum kit. Constantly developing, in motion, each track throws up all manner of shuttled and skimming contortions. Brown Calvin, Thundercat, Roni Size, the Aphex Twin and the worldly musical adventures of Don Cherry simultaneously exist in Marini’s singular and off-kilter rhythmic quadrant of cosmic freefalling and electrified jazz.
A splashy mirage of effected, realigned beats and reframed jazz inspirations sent out into space, Volume 2 in this series continues the ‘spiritual music mission’ but offers something once more eclectic and boundless.
Areia ‘Stories’
Available Now
An album of stories imbued by various triplet-like references and cycles, the latest lightly executed work of chamber, neoclassical and explorative jazz from the guitarist and bandleader Siebren Smink is rich with descriptive wistfulness and reflection.
Inspired in part by the cause of the “three Marias”, whose feminist stance in the early 1970s against the fascist Catholic conservatism of António de Oliveira Salazar’s dictatorship in Portugal helped usher in the downfall of that regime, and by the near inscrutable scribed “language music” methods of the free-jazz luminary Anthony Braxton, these two influences converge in a balancing act of quiet thought and more expressive drama, dynamics. And so, rather than create an erratic exploration of Braxton’s cryptic drawings, plans of trills and brills, and the rage of those incensed by Maria Isobel Barreno, Maria Teresa Horta and Maria Velha da Costa’s struggle to fight the oppressive moralistic legal system of authoritarian Portugal, this album of mood suites manages to control those looser free-forming ideas with subtlety and sensitivity.
That Marias story was seen by Smink whilst visiting the Resistance Museum (a former prison for political prisoners) in Lisbon, and struck a chord. This trio’s crime was to publish a collection of unsigned essays, poetry, stories and letters that drew on the letters of a Portuguese Nun in the 17th century, obsessed as she was with a French soldier who abandoned her. The book proved a sensation, falling foul instantly of the regime’s censorship laws, quickly banned and destroyed. The actual court case that ensued – the penalty, imprisonment at the least – ended just as the country’s Carnation Revolution – so called because of the flowers the crowds gave to the soldiers who carried out the coup to replace him – helped topple Salazar’s rule. The penal code was especially discriminating towards women, treating them as second-class citizens, and so the odds of overturning the ban and escaping sentencing didn’t look good. But fortunately as the regime came crashing down, and with support from activists from around the world, the case was thrown out, the ladies collection even declared a work of art of the highest quality by the judge.
Sympathetic to that cause, chiming with the contemporary, Smink and his returning quartet of Adrián Moncada on piano, Antonio Moreno Glazkor on trumpet and Hristo Goleminov on tenor saxophone take musical cues from Pat Metheny and the Jimmy Giuffre 3, but the ACT label too, to produce music that hopefully doesn’t fall on deaf ears. Not that any of this is obvious, nor an on-message sound as such, but it is descriptive and resonates with a language of thoughtful yet roaming and loosened feelings.
Instruments interact or just fly off into opposite, but always congruous, directions of play. Harmonics ping, guitar strings softly accentuate or subtly climb the frets, and the tenor sax blows in both a suffused manner or in quicker circles, whilst the trumpet flits, spirals or holds a particular expressive note. The piano parts seem to drift or linger with a harder, starker prods or in a softened way evokes reminisces, aches and reflections. In parts the action accelerates with dotted notes, a little tension and even tumult: though nothing like a discourse, a cacophony or even crescendo. Sometimes just the mere essence of an instrument is all that’s needed to conjure up the mood, and sometimes just shortened prompts and small bursts of activity will speak volumes.
The Stories album is full of stirring moments and a melodious and not quite so melodious interplay, but also has a spirit of the untethered explorations synonymous with free jazz. Upsides mingle with deep thoughts, a flit of action and dialed down reflected sadness on an album that reveals more with every subsequent listen.
Above all, this album finds Smink and his Areia quartet vehicle on a refined journey of distilled and considered jazz; a balancing act that successfully weaves together freer interactions and the sort of expressive musical language that Antony Braxton would find very encouraging.
Lukas Traxel ‘One-Eyed Daruma’
(We Jazz) Available Now
The Swiss double-bassist maestro and composer Lukas Traxel is back with a new trio project prompted by an open invitation from the Moods jazz club in Zurich. With We Jazz label stalwart Otis Sandsjö on tenor saxophone and Moritz Baumgärtner on drums; Traxel creates a mysterious, plaintive, conscious and abstract environment out of avant-garde, free jazz and experimental counterpoints with this new turn. And the influences on this new project include Caroline Shaw, Colin Vallon’s trio, Gabriel Kahane, Sonny Rollins, Jimmy Guiffre and Keith Jarrett, but I’d add Sam Rivers, the late great Pharoah and the contemporary, mirroring Ill Considered trio.
Initially stumped, emotionally coming to terms with the death of his father, Traxel was suddenly freed from the dreaded writer’s block after noticing the mysterious-looking figure of an eyeless “Daruma”, starring out from the corner of his piano. In Japanese lore this harbinger of fate brings luck and prosperity. And as tradition dictates, you must first draw an eye on your daruma whilst making a wish; only adding a second eye if this wish comes true. It remains, for now, the ‘one-eyed daruma’ of the album title.
Conveying that loss and absence, but little bit of hope too, the trio build simmering, rasped and probing atmospheres from which subtle melodious ideas and feelings emerge; breaking out at points into either broken beats, break beats and cymbal splashes – the conscious jazz and elliptical rhythmic ‘The Call’ reminded me a little of Gescom. However, the album opens with the Rollins leads Floydian sizzled and brushed ‘First Times’: a balance of both thinly parched tenor and the wane, whine of hidden rusty metallic or brass instruments, gently prompted by the double-bass. The more chaotic ‘Nasty People’ stumbles and lurches through an Art Ensemble Of Chicago workshop and toy box. I’m not sure of the intention or the theme, but at one point a kid’s police siren whoops amongst the squiggles, shakes and craziness; and as it continues on, it feels like the drums are hitting out at, or being flung at, something/someone: A sort of venting of torque and tensions.
An act of flexing instruments and sounds to quantify expression and mood, Lukas Traxel’s sparsely executed showcases a theme of counterpoint – actions counterpointed by reflections, hinged and resonating, and by more recognizable holds and shortened toots of sax. The performances coalesce different tensions, speeds and articulations in the same track: for example, Baumgärtner’s drums moving at pace and drive whilst Sandsjö’s sax brushes the surface and Traxel’s double-bass plucks out singular notes.
Initially brought about by invitation, I wouldn’t mind hearing more from this successful trio experiment in the future. Their burgeoning debut an essential addition to the We Jazz catalogue and in turn, your record collection.
John Atkinson ‘Energy Fields’
(AKP Recordings) 15th march 2023
A reification of the hidden energy sources that power industry and the homes of America, John Atkinson’s atmospheric synthesized treatments lend a both morphed factory and more alien sound to both carbon and renewable technology on this new solo work. Uncoupled from his foil Patrick Taylor and their East Portal duo, Atkinson funnels the sounds of his 2019 residency at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming – the largest coal-producing state in the whole of America, and in recent times the hub of renewable energy and carbon capture – into a conceptual investigation and peregrination of transition. As much in awe as he is anxious about the shifting tides and changes (I’m guessing that transition isn’t fast enough) in that field, this quartet of ambient, electrified soundscapes evoke states of uncertainty and mystery; an otherworldly balance of machinery and a removed, transformed vision of nature living side by side in the shadow of a climate change emergency (depending on who you listen to).
Atkinson has skin in the game so to speak, having spent the last fifteen years writing about this energy shift in terms of policy, tech and economics, as a day job. And so that drive and interest is channeled into a sonic experience of shunting coal trucks, the swing and hinge movements of heavy bucketed tools and cranes, and the rotation of bladed turbines.
A static energy current ripples through a soundtrack of filaments, high-pitched steam and industrial thumps on the opening ‘Spiritual Electricity’ track. A coal-fired plant errs towards a strange stirring of the unfamiliar, recondite, as Atkinson gives sound to such abstract concepts. ‘Black Thunder’ delves into the furnace with what sounds like boxcars unloading their materials and the pressurized whistles of dials and valves. Cleaner, sonorous waves and purrs emerge from out of the industrial activity however, hinting at some kind of submerged mystery, unease.
Across a windy plain from atop of a wind turbine, ‘Casper’ features ambient drifts, glints of the outdoors and a suffusion of twinkles and chimes. A strange nature exists alongside those imposing machines and tech that borders on the supernatural; a snatch of passing traffic perhaps caught in a blowy gloom. The more implicitly entitled ‘World Wind’ features more of those natural elements – the mating call of bison perhaps – running side-by-side with slowly stirring neoclassical gravitas and the churning turns of rotor blades.
Atkinson captures an evocative and interesting enough theme, a necessity to understanding or relating to that which remains disconnected to us; the apparatus, resources that generate our lives at the flip of switch seldom considered. As fossil fuels remain the principle source in a global climate of war, fear and increasing authoritarian, post-pandemic insecurity, Atkinson draws our attention to the burgeoning developments in off-setting that reliance; an abstract propound proposition transduced into a fully immersive site-specific world of industry and field recordings.
Anthéne & Simon McCorry ‘Florescence’
(Oscarson) 31st March 2023
As stirring evocative ambient-neoclassical-kosmische partnerships go, Brad Deschamps – under the Anthéne signature alias – and Simon McCorry seem the perfect match of subtle expressive drone guitar contours and equally descriptive, majestic cello. These two stalwarts of their forms set out to capture the essence of the seasons again; honing in on the first light, slow blossoming of Spring for this, their third such, collaboration – the first to be released on vinyl.
The previous Wallace Stevens, The Snow Man, inspired, poetic Mind Of Winter (which made my choice albums of 2022 list) was a sublime reification of the beauty of a crystalized, snow-dusted soundscape; a gentle yet deeply felt album of Wintery suites. From out of winter’s minimal light, Deschamps and McCorry, with both serenity and a touch of mystery, blend subtle electronics and what sounds like non-musical objects with their chosen stringed instruments; the processes of their atmospheric methodology mirroring Spring’s process of flowering and blooming.
In practice this leads to abstract reflections, thoughts, moods and the near unquantifiable transduced into both scores of hidden and more familiar sounding instrumentation. No one manages to expand the cello quite like McCorry, but that bowed, hollowed resonating cello body often sighs or pines more melodious phrases alongside trembled or droning sustain. Likewise Deschamps both obscures and yet also casts recognizable phrases, lingering tracery and permeating drones.
Nature comes alive as the light begins to play across meadows, versants and an often more mystically veiled landscape in which ripples across a pool of water can musically evoke so much more than a simple observation of the environment: one that’s awakens from a seasonal hibernation. Although the majority of the time we’re in the same musical sonic sphere as Eno (even a touch of his late 70s partnership with Bowie on the mirrored mirage, ‘Reach Towards The Earth’), Andrew Wasylyk and early Ambient Works Richard James ‘Unreflecting Pool’, with its plucked tines, chimes and generally gauzy airy mood, evokes a sort of misty Avalon; the sort of Arthurian waters so beloved of the Pre-Raphaelites (I could be letting my own imagination run away with me here). A both hallowed and moving merger of seasonal changes, suffused with a certain gravitas and meaning, the pastoral is revalued and sent out on a voyage of reflection. Florescence is yet another minimalistic work of sublime quality from a collaboration perfectly in-synch with each other.
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.
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