Our Daily Bread 522: Team Play, Legless Trials, Ghost Woman…

June 9, 2022

Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea’s Reviews Bonanza
(Unless stated otherwise, all releases are available now)

Singles

Cumgirl8 ‘Dumb Bitch’
(Suicide Squeeze Records)

If this song were a dick it would always be erect and ready for action. It is both sexless and sexy; a molten explosion of catcall frenzy. It is the way I wanted Wetleg to sound, instead of the pale imitation of white slacked disappointment that is made to appeal to the middle aged male wet dream fantasy of still being young and vibrant and with it. No, this is the real deal the real McCoy; this is the thing this is the sound; this is the true alternative.

Lucigenic ‘Joy’

I like this single. It sounds like a Blondie tribute band that has decided to start writing their own material. It is sassy tuneful and sexy, which all pop music should have at least traces of, and this is dressed head to toe in sass, so an enjoyable three minuets of post-punk pop.

Woog Riots ‘Beatnik’
(From Lo-Fi To Disco) 17th June 2022

I love this a wonderful fun cover version of The Clean classic ‘Beatnik’, a song of charm and distinction. And this is indeed a groovy rendition. In fact dare I say a version I prefer to the original? Yes, slowed down and jerky and quite simply charming with the wonderful organ riff, a true gem of a single.

Legless Trials ‘Dirt Bike/Failed Words’
(Metal Postcard Records)

Has groovy art rock ever sounded as groovy as this? The new single by the Legless Trials is a hep cat roll call of early sixties Cliff Richard twisting on a beach whilst a bikini clad Una Stubbs lies and suns herself looking heavenly. It is Mark E Smith drinking bitter bathed in flashing neon lights, flicking beer mats at a spinning disco ball. It is a psalm sang by a true believer in the spirit of rock ‘n’ roll; a bible of pent-up frenzy Jerry Lee Lewis salivating over the line of bobby soxers awaiting to pay homage. Yes, already one of the singles of the year.

Albums/EPs

Wolf Vanwymeersch ‘The Early Years’

Pop music for the introverted is a much under praised thing. Pop music for the introverted is indeed a thing, and it is well thought out and intelligently written. This album is such a thing.

It’s the kind of music that soundtracks the day in a life of a pop art vagabond, the kind of person who loves life but on the whole does not love them back. It’s music for NHS glasses wearers and charity shop fashion. Wolf Vanmeersch makes such art; he takes a melody and wraps it in a comfiness of a favourite old sweater, dipping into his musical influences and bringing out fond radio remembrances.

He might stroke the velvet collar of Bowie or a Billy McKenzie or Talking Heads; loving the glamour of 80s alternative pop remembering the days when music could change everybody’s life and was part of everybody’s life and not pushed into the dark underground. Music is becoming more and more of a minority art and Wolf Vanwymeesch understands that music is art and is indeed an artist, and the Early Years is an album that will appeal to those who still worship at the altar of art is music and music is art. 

Team Play ‘Wishes And Desires’
(Soliti)

This is quite a beautiful album: the soundtrack of the unpeeling of a nighttime wish; the subtle crush of valonia, the strange bewitching aftertaste of your lover’s kiss. Vocal and piano accompanied by the swelling of horns synths and organs and flutes this is music that is made to fall in and out of love to. Teamplay have produced an enjoyable musical journey through life’s rich tapestry touching on subjects and emotions we all in one time in our life will experience, both happy sad and truly bewitching moments. And that is the perfect description of this debut album: happy sad and truly bewitching. I as I’m forever mentioning in these reviews I’m a sucker for boy/girl duets and this album is full of the lovely blighters: A musical heart play. Has ears dropping over a stranger’s heartache ever been so richly rewarding.

Spygenius ‘Jobbernowl’
(Big Stir Record) 24th June 2022

This is a manic depression of an album. An album that at times is manically happy like ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’ on steroids but like manic depression, under the up, lies an enormous down: as the sun is most beautiful when you are stood in the shade.

It is an interesting and enjoyable listen. There is of course so many melodies and chiming guitars floating throughout, which of course you expect from an album released on Big Stir Records.

Spygenuis are from Canterbury it seems, and that makes perfect sense as this album sounds so lovely and English pastoral psychedelic. That they breath the same air as Soft Machine and Caravan comes as no surprise, as they take these sixties influences and cover them with a modern sheen, which at times reminds me of Green Day in their folk moments. With an injection of whimsy or Squeeze on psychedelics Jobbernowl is a rewarding listen and maybe one of my favourite releases on Big Stir.

Ghost Woman ‘Ghost Woman’
(Full Time Hobby) 6th July 2022

I like this album. I decided this as soon as the first bar of the first song started. There is something not quite like many of the psych rock albums that are sent for me to pour scorn and flick my love beads into the waste paper basket to. Or as I now call it: the waste love bead basket.

For the first song ‘All The Time’ reminded me of all people, the Everly Brothers; I can imagine the late Phil and Don doing a great version, and that really does not happen too often. Normally I get the ‘I wonder how many times these blighters have watched Dig’. Saying that the second track does show traces of the Dig disease but the lazy vocal stylings on ‘Do You’ somehow save it from a fate worse than psych fest.

This debut album is in fact an enjoyable listen; one that takes in the sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators, the Everly Brothers, the JAMC and Skip Spence, and add a wonderful western guitar twang and jangle that at times is quite life affirming and magical.

Rogers and Butler ‘Brighter Day’
(Think Like A Key) 24th June 2022

A Brighter Day is an album that lives up to its title. It has a wonderful sunny timeless feel to it, all radio friendly guitar pop/rock, that has me thinking of The Kinks and Warren Zevon and Bowie, and is a record filled with really well-written songs with beautiful melodies. But sadly, it could well be an album that gets overlooked, as albums of well-written songs are quite overlooked as at this time. The music industry is overlooking artistry for the search of the next big thing: the next big thing being two young ladies singing about their trip to Ikea.

Rogers and Butler’s lovely little album does not deserve to be overlooked though as songs of quality and style are always needed to be heard, and hopefully should rise to the top, fighting its way past less the deserving and an ideal album to relax to as you spread your self over your Chaise Lounge.

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Kalporz X Monolith Cocktail: Bob Dylan. The Mask and the Songwriter

June 8, 2022

ESSAY/Samuele Conficoni

From our penpals in Italy at the leading online culture magazine Kalporz, a deep read (footnotes and all) on the occasion of Bob Dylan’s 81st birthday. Samuele Conficoni, imbued loosely by the work Derrida and Artaud, looks at the theme of the mask in Dylan’s work.

“Bob Dylan. The Mask and the Songwriter.”

(The title of the essay is loosely inspired by the work Derrida and Artaud: the mask and the philosopher. [1])

To celebrate Bob Dylan‘s 81st birthday, we address an issue that has not been sufficiently studied within the singer-songwriter’s output: the theme of the mask. This long period of crisis and anomalies – two long years of masks in the West that have forced us to experience the other as veiled, and as the mystery increased so did the difficulty of knowing or recognising who was in front of us – has reminded us that we all often wear a mask. The 2016 Nobel Laureate in Literature, in the course of his very long career, has also written and sung about this, a theme that runs through him in art as in life.

1. “I’ve got my Bob Dylan’s mask on”.

“I’ve got my Bob Dylan’s mask on”: this is what Bob Dylan announced on stage at the Philharmonic Hall in Manhattan on 31/10/1964, on a particularly ‘heartfelt’ night for Americans, the night of Halloween, the masquerade festival par excellence. Bob Dylan, then on his fourth album in just over two years, was already at the time considered one of the most relevant songwriters of his generation. He had already released The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963), The Times They Are A-Changin’ and Another Side of Bob Dylan (both released in 1964), following his 1962 debut of the same name, and was on his way to becoming one of the most extraordinary figures of his time. In truth, that mask – assuming it is only one: director Todd Haynes, in his 2007 film I’m Not There, loosely inspired by the life and work of the singer-songwriter, let six different actors, for six different stages of his career, play him – had first been worn a couple of years earlier, when that promising and energetic young man, born in Minnesota, decided, perhaps also to rewrite his recent and so short past, to legally change his name, Robert Allen Zimmermann, to that of Bob Dylan.

1964. A US tour was underway that saw the singer-songwriter perform some of the most famous songs of his career, a few pieces he had written that had not been officially published, and some traditionals, in full consistency with the musical path he had taken. It should never be forgotten, in fact, that the undergrowth within which the singer-songwriter is formed is that of traditional folk music, of the oldest Anglo-American songs and of blues and gospel, which would remain, in addition to the very broad literary, philosophical and cinematographic influences, the blank page from which he gave life to his compositions. One thinks of the fact that in the 1990s Dylan would record two albums of covers and traditionals and in the 1990s no less than three albums, including a triple album, with reinterpretations of songs from the Great American Songbook, and that some traditional songs or songs from the Great American Songbook would be included in his live sets for decades. Having said this, it is clear that the sentence uttered by the singer-songwriter that night, accompanied by his own and the audience’s laughter, must be correlated with the creative universe that the author had just begun to give life to, in which the very genres he draws on as a source of inspiration serve as a mask, which the singer-songwriter uses to enhance and create his identity rather than to veil it. It is a necessity that has always accompanied the author, [2] when even before choosing the name Bob Dylan he was performing under other pseudonyms, such as Blind Boy Grunt or Elston Gunn.

What we are dealing with is an attitude, if not a forma mentis, that invests his production when, as is traditional in Anglo-American folk music, a certain melody is readapted and combined with new lyrics, written for the occasion, or when certain elements of the text are inserted into the new creation. This is how numerous compositions are born, with procedures that distance the outcome from the original source, sometimes even by a great deal, from “Blowin’ in the Wind”, which takes up the traditional “No More Auction Block”, to “I Was Young When I Left Home”, which looks back to “500 Miles”, from “Girl from the North Country” and “Boots of Spanish Leather” which are built around the chord sequence of “Scarborough Fair“, which “Girl from the North Country” also quotes in the lyrics, to “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” which explicitly quotes the ballad “Lord Randall”. This only partially affects his production, but it is a decisive and emblematic point in the author’s creative process. It is clear, therefore, that in Bob Dylan, the concept of wearing a mask, and in particular of wearing Bob Dylan’s mask, is primarily a ploy to shift the focus away from himself with the main purpose of foregrounding his art.

2. Su maschere e trasfigurazioni

In 20th century literature, an author who deals extensively with the theme of the mask is famously Luigi Pirandello. In the Sicilian author’s literary-philosophical system, form cages life: we all wear masks whenever we decide to expose ourselves to the world around us. [3] Appearing and being in this sense are in constant conflict; the mask represents a shattered self that adapts to the contingent situation. Only in very rare moments does life manage to emerge: in those moments the inhibitions and restraints imposed by the social context are removed and instinct prevails. Pirandello often identifies this in the moments of madness and compulsive mania that cross us from time to time, well exemplified by the famous lawyer and law professor who, in the short story The Wheelbarrow, has the fixed habit of making his bitch do the ‘wheelbarrow’ every day, when he is certain that no one sees him. [4] Similarly, a brief moment of authenticity is what Mattia Pascal experiences between the announcement of his (non-)death and the assumption of his new identity, that of Adriano Meis. The comparison with Pirandello, whose system seems to be in opposition to Dylan’s vision, can provide us with an important key to deciphering Robert Allen Zimmermann’s choice to take on a new name (and to adopt, in the course of his long career, many other pseudonyms, which we will discuss in a moment).

The mask placed on Zimmermann’s face since 1962, even before the singer-songwriter began to release official records and obtain engagements for prestigious shows, is a mask that, rather than stopping the flow of ‘life’, to use again a Pirandellian category, and caging it, aims at creating life itself, as if before this stage it were a piece of marble still unworked. It is in an interview a few years ago, which we will examine later, that Dylan argues that life is a journey in which one must create, not find, oneself. As Alessandro Carrera reminds us again, ‘during an interview with CBS [in 2004], Dylan admits that he could never conceive of himself as “Robert Zimmermann”, even before he became Bob Dylan’. [5] The celebrated autobiography Chronicles Volume 1, to date the only published tome of a hypothetical multi-book project, where the singer-songwriter only deals with certain moments of his career, can offer us some examples of self-creation. [6] It is Carrera again who comes to our aid: the scholar, in dealing with Chronicles and what Dylan may or may not have altered or invented in speaking of himself, questions the existence of certain characters or situations, such as that of Ray and Chloe Kiel, a couple of whom we know nothing about but who, according to Dylan himself, would frequently host the singer-songwriter in New York. [7] It is no coincidence that much of the greatness of Chronicles, a literary work of extraordinary value, lies, to quote Carrera again, in ‘what he keeps silent or refuses to say’. [8]

The mask Robert Zimmermann has chosen for himself, Bob Dylan, is the author’s true self. The ‘artefactual memories’ [9] that the singer-songwriter inserts into the work are in perfect harmony with the need to live the story at the moment in which he is writing or singing it and, in some way, partly rewriting it. It is a typical trait of Dylan’s masterful compositional talent, about which the academic and professor of Classical Literature at Harvard Richard F. Thomas has written about in his essays and discussed in an interview published in these pages, [10] a tendency that includes, for instance, again to quote a passage from Chronicles, the attribution to Sophocles of a treatise on the origin of the sexes that the Greek tragedian and politician never wrote and that more than a banal mistake seems to be Dylan’s hope, a ‘might have been’, a ‘would have liked to read it’.

It is impossible, at this point, not to mention, albeit very quickly, the ‘transfiguration’ that Bob Dylan mentions in an interview with Rolling Stone in 2012, on the occasion of the release of the Tempest album, a studio record released by the singer-songwriter in September of that year. [11] Even if transfiguration is not to be understood as a mask, it is still something that veils or completes one’s own nature, rewrites it, transmigrates that of another, makes it something other than it could have been. It is impossible to understand what Dylan really meant in that specific passage, when a certain Bobby Zimmermann of Hell’s Angel who died in 1961 is called into question. Dylan claims that he has transfigured himself into him and adds, addressing the journalist Mikal Gilmore who is pressing him: ‘I’m not like you, am I? I’m not like him, either. I’m not like too many others. I’m only like another person who’s been transfigured. How many people like that or like me do you know?’. Is there something of the ‘poor Bobby Zimmermann’ in Bob Dylan? Or is it a transfiguration that has no impact on who he is? It seems strange, then, that Dylan speaks of this with such transport. Dylan, however, is very reticent and his explanation a little confusing: there is no clear answer. I too, Dylan says, had a near-fatal motorbike accident in 1966. And so, we ask? Dylan advises us and Gilmore to read No Man Knows My History by Mormon Joseph Smith. The ‘mask’ Bob Dylan is telling us about the truths of faith, about eschatology, about being able to ‘fly above [the chaos]’: just like the masks worn by the actors in Greek tragedy, bearers of ultimate truths that the pólis was not to ignore, masks that had replaced face-painting, a feature that would characterise the 1975 Tour, which will be discussed. On the concept of transfiguration Dylan plays hide-and-seek: he veils and unveils without giving us clues, as he has done throughout his career, particularly with those who interview him. If you want to know more about transfiguration, he tells Gilmore and, perhaps, us too, “you’ll have to go and do the work yourself to find out what it’s about.” [12]

3. “Life is about creating yourself”

Some of the characters in Dylan’s musical and literary world also wear masks or are characterised by nicknames that somehow veil the identity behind the nickname. In “Like a Rolling Stone”,[13] for instance, Dylan decides to use some talking names that somehow qualify the characters by giving them a mask. The narrator sees the life of the interlocutor, called, in fact, Miss Lonely, fall into disgrace: Miss Lonely is a young girl who enjoys life and spends and spends her parents’ money until she ends up becoming like the ragged Napoleon (Napoleon in Rags) she once mocked. Both Alessandro Carrera, in reflections conducted in several places, in his non-fiction production on the singer-songwriter and in his translation and annotation of Dylan’s works, and Mario Gerolamo Mossa, author of a monograph with a philological slant on the song in question, [14] have dealt extensively with the song and this is not the appropriate space to take up their reflections. Whether it is the allegory of a girl from Andy Warhol‘s circle with whom Dylan had come into contact, or an alter ego of Dylan himself, or a literary invention that has no contact with the reality surrounding the author, the Miss Lonely ‘mask’ is a parádeigma of all those who, from a situation of success, prosperity and happiness, find themselves slipping into a tunnel of darkness and misfortune through almost no fault of their own. It is not wrong to say, in short, that if today we wanted to refer to a person who has gone through a similar vicissitude, we could undoubtedly call her ‘a Miss Lonely’.  Here Dylan, having put on the mask that made him himself many years ago, can now afford to sing these kinds of stories, which are absolutely unique in the world songwriting scene.

Ten years had passed since the recording and release of that song that changed history when, in 1975, Bob Dylan, having returned to live in the Village only a few years earlier and just a few months after the release of the sublime Blood on the Tracks, began to frequent the Other End, a venue where he performed frequently in the spring and summer of that year, and where Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, the late hip Bob Neuwirth, who died a few days ago at the age of 82 and who had been at Dylan’s side like a shadow between 1964 and 1965, Ronee Blakley and the then up-and-coming Patti Smith also took the stage. The singer-songwriter was in New York, where he was composing and recording the songs that would end up on Desire, which was to be released in early 1976. It was during these months that Dylan decided to create the Rolling Thunder Revue project, a bandwagon of artists that brought together Dylan himself, his accompanying band, which he called Guam, and other songwriters and artists who could vary according to the day, among whom were Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, the aforementioned Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Bob Neuwirth and, from time to time, even Allen Ginsberg, who would take turns on stage or, in Baez’s case, accompany Dylan in some of the songs of his two sets. Rolling Thunder I began in late October 1975 and ended in December at Madison Square Garden, where Bob was greeted backstage by Muhammad Ali and Bruce Springsteen. Widely studied by critics, Rolling Thunder has been the subject of in-depth coverage in a Bootleg Series, Vol. 5 (2002), a box set entitled The 1975 Live Recordings (2019) and Martin Scorsese‘s documentary released for Netflix in 2019 itself, Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese, which deals with the 1975 Tour and its preparations. Rolling Thunder II, on the other hand, took place in the spring of 1976, with different features and arrangements from the first but equally original and breathtaking.

In this period, the theme of the mask, and more generally that of hiding behind another self, is systematically and clearly covered ever since Dylan’s decision to appear on stage, in Rolling Thunder I, with his face painted white, a choice that was often accompanied by the wearing of a mask only during the first song of the set, ‘When I Paint My Masterpiece’, which was often sung with the aforementioned Neuwirth. It is a Dylan, that of ’75, who wants to reinvent himself once again. His marriage is in tatters; he has moved back to New York, is explosive and inspired, and has embarked again on extended tours only a year earlier with The Band. Something original and unsettling is what he needs to signal the new artistic phase he is going through. Here, then, in 1975 the mask returns, be it the real one he only wears occasionally in the opening track of his first set or the allegorical one of the face painted white, both covering the Bob Dylan mask he continues to wear. Perhaps it is metatheatre, perhaps it is the Brechtian actor’s estrangement that would become a systematic and increasingly complex and articulated modus operandi from 1988 to the present, in his so-called Never Ending Tour. It is in the interview with Scorsese for his aforementioned 2019 documentary that Dylan utters the phrase, a variation and extension of a gnome attributed to George Bernard Shaw, ‘life isn’t about finding yourself or finding anything: life is about creating yourself’, also mentioned above. This declaration of intent is the perfect manifesto to describe not only the adventure of the two-year Rolling Thunder period but the whole of Dylan’s life, not just his artistic one.

4. Masked and Anonymous

The film Masked and Anonymous, the title of which is already a statement of intent, was released in 2003, directed by Larry Charles and with a screenplay co-written by Charles and Bob Dylan. A first significant element lies in the fact that the two sign the script with fictitious names: Dylan assumes the Russian-speaking name of Sergei Petrov. The masquerade and anonymity intervene, therefore, right from the start, affecting even the most marginal aspect of the credits. In the film, set in a mysterious nation that seems to be located in a dystopian North or Central America and is ruled by a dictator, Bob Dylan plays Jack Fate, the dictator’s son and famous songwriter, who has been in prison for some time. He is released from prison and allowed to give a benefit concert. The plot is in some respects too cerebral, confused and not particularly gripping and the film is cinematically mediocre, but the importance of the work within the singer-songwriter’s ‘artistic context’ should not be underestimated. I use the expression ‘artistic context’ here to reiterate once again that Dylan is a river in flood and can only be (perhaps only partially) understood and understood if one follows, also and above all with a philological slant, every single aspect of his artistic production, in order to try, in this way, to capture his vision of the world and history. Returning to the film, it is appropriate to ask what this story means and what role it plays within Dylan’s musical production, which resonates powerfully throughout the film as Fate performs Bob Dylan songs and some traditionals. Carrera is again the first among Dylan scholars to grasp the centrality of this work, shoddy from a cinematic point of view but lucidly relevant, in the Dylan universe. In an article published online several years ago, [15] Carrera relates the film to Alexandre Dumas‘ The Iron Mask by the father Alexandre Dumas, showing the points of contact between the two narratives, but he takes a decisive step forward when, both in the online article just cited and in a much more recent essay of his own, [16] recalling the scene of the “very painful kiss” [17] between Jack Fate and Angela Bassett, who is his father’s lover but also Jack Fate’s lover, he realises that in Masked and Anonymous a much bigger and more crucial game is being played than a simple remake of The Iron Mask: a new chapter in the relationship between Bob Dylan and the African-American world, characterised by his fascination with black music and his frequentation of black women (he had married one in the 1980s, by whom he had a daughter), and of the complicated, and here impossible even to synthesise, relationship between his Jewish roots and the African-American universe, an issue that emerges in many of the songs he wrote between 1978 and 1986, poetic, hermetic and contradictory pieces that carry within them an obvious inner torment. Only through a new disguise could Dylan return to talk about that intricate and claustrophobic history. “The fundamental gesture behind Dylan’s œuvre is indeed the permanent construction and deconstruction of himself”,[18] writes Cristophe Lebold, and this film proves it once again, if ever there was a need. Despite the premises, Dylan fails to unravel the skein of that complicated story, but, as Carrera points out, “[he did not fail], because he tried, and nothing more than trying could he do”. [19] Finally, it should be remembered, en passant, that the name Jack Fate bears a striking resemblance to that of Jack Frost, another pseudonym behind which Bob Dylan always hides himself, who with this ‘cipher’ signs himself producer of all his studio albums from “Love and Theft” (2001) onwards, including the recent, splendid Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020). Jack Fate and Jack Frost represent yet another mask behind which the artist seeks new shelters.

Bob’s transformations clearly do not end there. Some time before the release of Masked and Anonymous, while playing in Newport on 3 August 2002, thirty-seven years after the famous concert at the Newport Folk Festival in which the singer-songwriter took to the stage accompanied by a band and strumming an electric guitar, Dylan wore a false beard and moustache, a unique feature that does not appear to be accidental, given the circumstances, namely his return to the place of the misdeed, in the same city where he had been booed and challenged by part of his audience decades earlier. In this game of the parts that seems to have no end and in which the Maestro seems to want to play catch-up with us, Shadow Kingdom, the film-concert recorded in May 2021 and released a few months later, in July, is also part of it. On a stage evidently inspired by the sets of Twin Peaks, sets that he would also adopt for the tours of 2021 and 2022, Bob Dylan performs some songs without spectators in front of him and performs others in front of an audience of ‘ghosts’ dressed in full ’40s or ’50s style, smoking, drinking and dancing; his musicians wear masks, an element that brings us back to the present; the audience that appears from time to time, and who seems to come from another era, does not: just as in his songs, the present, the past and the future are a single river, they all flow together, they mingle; the author has no need of ‘concrete’ masks as he always wears the one that makes him and not someone else. As Carrera writes, Dylan ‘does not even need to put on a mask: he has always had it on’. [20]

[1] Various authors, Derrida and Artaud: the mask and the philosopher, Medusa Edizioni, Milan, 2017.

[2] Among the many biographies of Bob Dylan, we recommend Anthony Scaduto’s Bob Dylan, Helter Skelter Publishing, London, 2001 (reprint of 1st edition Grosset & Dunlap, New York, 1971) and Robert Shelton’s recently reprinted and expanded Bob Dylan: No Direction Home (Revised Illustrated Edition), Palazzo Editions, Bath, 2021 (1st edition Beech Tree Books, New York, 1986).

[3] Of Luigi Pirandello see in particular the novels Il fu Mattia Pascal, published serially in the Nuova Antologia in 1904 and in a volume in the same year, and Uno, nessuno e centomila, published serially in La Fiera Letteraria in 1925 and in a volume in 1926, the play Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore, staged in a first draft in 1921, and the essay L’umorismo of 1908. It should also be mentioned that Pirandello gives the title of Naked Masks as the overall title of his theatre production.

[4] The short story, written in 1917, is contained in the Novelle per un anno.

[5] Alessandro Carrera, La Voce di Bob Dylan, 3rd revised and expanded edition, Feltrinelli, Milan, 2021 (1st ed. 2001; 2nd ed. 2011), p. 95. The 2004 interview for CBS can be found at the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOas0d-fFK8. Last accessed: 22 May 2022.

[6] Bob Dylan, Chronicles Volume 1, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2004. The Italian translation, edited by Alessandro Carrera, was published by Feltrinelli, Milan, in 2005.

[7] Alessandro Carrera, La Voce di Bob Dylan, cit., p. 95 and p. 386.

[8] Alessandro Carrera, La Voce di Bob Dylan, cit., p. 385.

[9] Alessandro Carrera, The Voice of Bob Dylan, cit., p. 392.

[10] Richard F. Thomas, Why Bob Dylan Matters, Dey Street Books, New York, 2017. The interview with Richard F. Thomas published in Kalporz in 2021 can be found at the following link: http://www.kalporz.com/2021/05/bob-dylan-at-80-interview-with-professor-richard-f-thomas-author-of-why-bob-dylan-matters/. Last accessed 22 May 2022.

[11] Bob Dylan Unleashed, in Rolling Stone, interview published on 27 September 2012 and available at the following link: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/bob-dylan-unleashed-189723/. Last accessed: 18 May 2022.

[12] Bob Dylan Unleashed, in Rolling Stone, cit.

[13] The song, whose officially released studio version was recorded on 16/06/1965, opens the album Highway 61 Revisited (Columbia, 1965).

[14] In Alessandro Carrera, La Voce di Bob Dylan, cit., passim, and in Bob Dylan (transl. by Alessandro Carrera), Lyrics 1962-2020, 3 vols., Feltrinelli, Milan, 2021, in the notes at the end of the first volume concerning the aforementioned song; Mario Gerolamo Mossa, Bob Dylan & “Like a Rolling Stone”: Filologia, composizione, performance, Mimesis, Milan, 2021.

[15] Alessandro Carrera, “The Torture of the Iron Mask. On Masked & Anonymous,” available at http://www.maggiesfarm.it/mascheradiferro.htm. Last accessed 22 May 2022.

[16] Alessandro Carrera, “Between the Shulamite and the Queen of Sheba: The Love Poem That Bob Dylan Could Not Write”, in Fabio Fantuzzi, Maria Anita Stefanelli, Alessandro Carrera (ed. by), Bob Dylan and the Arts: Songs, Film, Painting, and Sculpture in Dylan’s Universe, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, Rome, 2021, pp. 83-101.

[17] Alessandro Carrera, “The Torture of the Iron Mask. On Masked & Anonymous,” cit.

[18] Christophe Lebold, “A Face Like a Mask and a Voice that Croaks: An Integrated Poetics of Bob Dylan’s Voice, Personae, and Lyrics,” in Oral Tradition, 22/1, 2007, p. 63.

[19] Alessandro Carrera, “Between the Shulamite and the Queen of Sheba: The Love Poem That Bob Dylan Could Not Write”, cit. p. 101.

[20] Alessandro Carrera, “The Torture of the Iron Mask. On Masked & Anonymous,” cit.

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Our Daily Bread 521: Audiobulb Records Double-Bill: Jacek Doroszenko Ft. Ewa Doroszenko, Flavia Massimo

June 6, 2022

ALBUM REVIEWS
ANDREW C. KIDD

Jacek Doroszenko ft. Ewa Doroszenko ‘Bodyfulness’
(Audiobulb) 25th June 2022

It is May. I am penning this review when my tissue tethers to the touchscreen. My hands pixelate to dissipate into my keyboard. I centrifuge away on algorithms and platforms. My consciousness becomes collective. My flesh is cast aside. I am husked hollow and left as a digitalised hide. It is here in this virtual space that I encounter Bodyfulness.

I am met by art: first, a lenticular and lipless fleshy lower face; then, a predominance of pink and bluish blushes and hazy ribbon-like photographs pushed into position. There are prints of arms. I see hands handling hands. Are these the same hands that play the fluted-key flourishes on Landscape of Algorithmic Desire? They are husky and light. Ghostly background clicks are fleeting and apparition-like. They reappear as the gentle euphoria that blends into the pulsing syncopation of Generated Pleasures. Sub-bass melodies emerge, merge and exit reimagined. It is this symbiosis of the analogue and sounds from the natural world on Bodyfulness that fills me. Composed as a critique of digital intimacy, it is a distorting melange of imagery and music. At times there is opposition. For example, the opaque drones on the title track and depths of analogue on Night Masque contrast starkly with the clarity of the field recordings of water on The Molecule of Everyday Life. The album finale – Visible Dream Space – is dissonant. A slightly off-key synth sequence brims away into nothingness. It disconnects me from the melodia and fusion of what preceded it.

The Dorozenkos’ triumph though is their mid-album triptych. A dreamlike nostalgia weeps and stoops over the sun-kiss and splash of past summers on Get The Perfect Mental Surface. Bells are part-sung atop heavy production and dart around a Rhodes piano and subtle bass melody on Synthetic Skin. This complex symphony weaves and weaves some more until it is shocked into life by two clear bells. Oh these bells! How they sing! I could write poetry about them. They pitch high and are kept momentarily afloat by the fleeting breath of a string section that twists away into the earthy distance. Synthetic Nap is the entr’acte: analogue synths hum and thrum and bass and turn and twist and heighten and heighten higher to steeple and quieten and quieten further to silence to further silence and still.

Flavia Massimo ‘Glitch’
(Audiobulb) 8th June 2022

Classico-electonica is an atoll where music is bountiful. The ringed-islets and sandy spaces have surfaced as the result of the volcanism of the modernists and post-romanticists. A deep lagoon saucers in the centre. The turquoise-blue water quavers and trebles endlessly. Time is not continuous here. Varèse and Stockhausen had once inhabited the islets and moved on to become coral. This is the post-world of Moondog and Pierre Henry. This is the precursor to an unknowable futurism. This is the present day space where Frahm and Richter key quietly in the twilight. The reedy bass of Stetson offsets the lilting harp strings of Lattimore. The warmth of the cello-bowing of Coates radiates like the sun. Along the shorelines and sands, the horizon is momentarily interrupted by a dot that hazes gently in the distance. The dot blots and slowly comes into focus. This is Flavia Massimo. She is rowing across the calm sea. She will shortly arrive on the beach to play Glitch.

There is an innate delicateness to Massimo’s sound. Gentle gongs reverberate and pace-make on ‘Gagaku’. They bob like buoys in open water. She hits, strings and bows in triadic equipoise. The result is meditative. Here, Massimo beautifully blends these ritualistic traditions (Gagaku is an ancient form of Japanese court music) with the opposing turbulence (at points she channels the lightspeed of L. Shankar) and broad-stroke soundscaped minimalism that are idiosyncratic to modern ambienism. She approaches the beach.

‘Steps’ is balladic. The notes disembark and tip-toe around a pas de deux interplay of slapped pizzicato. This motif steadily repeats around the brooding narrative of tremolo and white noise and analog effects. It beguiles.

‘Data Transfer’ opens as a thrashing melee. Alive and anatomical, the piece builds into a pulsing polyphony. The vocals inhale and exhale. The held chords are choral. The 4-4 beat is plainsong steady. The élan vital here is Massimo’s mastering of the interstitium, i.e., the spaces between the tissue planes that she slowly electrifies and neon-ifies. She lets her attack-mode-driven pulses laser and spark. She stands steady with cutters and feeds wires into her classical instrumentation.

‘Oxygen’ is a journey of aerobic respiration. The oxygen enters our bodies through the measured adagio. The sforzando is the lifeblood: rubrous, iron-clad, heavy. Her legato bowing echoes the held synths of Vangelis. The beat is opaque. Through its structural complexities, and eventual degradation, we witness the metamorphosis of oxygen. We are left with energy, and water.

I envisage quiet rainfall on ‘Bit Pass’. The leggiero sings. High-pitched static are droplets on my window. The subtle percussive pops puddle on the periphery. The piece is endless, like precipitation. It is symphonic. It is beautiful. If Glitch was a symphony, this would be its adagietto. It simply glistens.

‘Chromosome Xx’ marks a departure from the organic. The machinations and collé bowing are rhythmically complex and the plucked-strings halo circumferentially in slow-motion to disintegrate into noisecore distance. The ending is subtle. It warps into quietude, like Tchaikovsky’s Sixth.

This is undoubtedly a strong debut from Massimo. She has set up camp on the atoll where her sound pools quietly in the lagoon. She offers us abstract minimalism. There is an off-set asymmetry to her sound. The tone is elegiac. She channels classicism but in measured doses. She appears to find joy in the uncertainty. To her, form appears unnecessary. Like the wavelets that milled through her cogwheeling oars in open water, she is strongest in the existential spaces that float around us.

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Our Daily Bread 520: Catrin Finch & Seckou Keita ‘Echo’

June 1, 2022

ALBUM REVIEW/Dominic Valvona

Catrin Finch & Seckou Keita ‘Echo’
(bendigedig) 27th May 2022

Marking a decade-long collaboration, the harmonic pairing of Welsh harpist Catrin Finch and Senegal kora player and vocalist Seckou Keita are back with the third in a trilogy of cross-lineage, cross-cultural and cross-border gilded rich albums.

Imbued by traditions that go back centuries, Finch’s legacy includes Celtic folklore, the classical and the harp’s age-old reverence – Finch was at one time the UK’s Royal Harpist to Prince Charles, a revered title revived at the turn of the millennium, last used during the Autumn years of Queen Victoria’s reign. Keita can trace his lineage back to a long line of Griot bards and kings, and through his father, right back directly to the Medieval Malian Empire’s founder Sunjata Keita.

Garnering much critical and creative praise for their previous SOAR (2018) and Clychau Dibon (2013) records, the duo, caught up like the rest of us obviously in the pandemic, suffered the travails of social-distancing to complete this latest shared experience of loss, reflection and hope. Unable to work this incredible, adroit collaboration of instruments remotely however, both partners in this international union managed to book a conference room in a hotel on the outskirts of Birmingham, in the UK. 

Possibly not the most inspiring of locations, both removed artists found themselves having to reconnect, as if from scratch, separated as they had been by distance, and of course with lockdowns: concentrating on those closer to home and pursing more localized projects. 

As sparks and prompts, accumulated projects as varied as a ballet score to TV commissions, festival collaborations and work-in-progress sketches offered a framework on which to build new ideas. It helps that both maestros of their disciplines have an enviable CV and plenty of experience, awards and concert performances (more than 200) to their names. And so this distance, break in the creative period couldn’t hold the partnership back from picking up on where they left off, pre-Covid.

The backstory to this partnership, a bringing together of musical spheres and instrumentation from, what looks on the surface unrelated, suddenly makes sense; a harmonious connection, fueled by the duo’s last two albums together. For the very first time, Echo welcomes the addition of a strings; a couple of violin, viola, cello and double-bass players from Cardiff. The initial idea was inspired by the partnerships work in 2021 with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. Here it offers a whole new layer, and a swell of moving classicism and a cinematic score quality to the weaved and enchanted sounds of the harp and kora.  

As always, each composition tells a story, is motivated by the personal and organically showcases a particular unique tuning and skill without losing sight of the melody. Devoid of soulless displays of virtuoso Echo draws the listener right into the moment.

Despite the horrendous last two years, the album actually starts with a peaceable, charmed and gliding display of hope. Originally the ‘overture’ score for the ballet Giselle, and a “scrap of a tune” that surfaced during a sound-check jam before a 2019 gig in Manchester, ‘Gobaith’ (which means “hope” in Welsh) us remolded, turned into a lushly blessed performance of subtle filmic strings, lilted lattice work kora and gently sparkling harp.

Lifting the emotional pull, the string ensemble-free ‘Dual Rising’ weaves a groove out of quickened caresses, flourishes and undulations. With a dash of the Latin, even some Greco antiquity, that liquid – with only some softened small stamps – rhythmic workout takes its inspiration from the duo’s past collaboration with the ‘breackneck’ speedy style of Edmar Castañeda’s Colombian harp.

In a display of the lightened and sweetened, ‘Tabadbang’ has a spring in its step, a sense of happy adventure. In keeping a restless kid busy, hanging around as the adults wish to discuss something far too important for prying ears, back in Keita’s homeland they’d send the youngsters on a wild goose chase of distraction. Here that memory is turned into a lifted, hummed-like lullaby amble.

A testament to this duo’s hybrid of languages, craft and inspirations the enervated pulse setting, spindled and soaring ballad ‘Jeleh Calon’ brings together the Mandinka work for ‘smile’ and Welsh for ‘heart’. It was actually sparked off by Finch’s NHS research into tinnitus, which led to investigating the yoga of sound and, in particular, – hence the heartbeat-like rhythm – the practice of synching one’s heartbeat to a specific timing, or ‘entrainment’ as it’s known.

Though every composition feeds on that hybrid and the counterbalance of cultures, the harmonious qualities of each artist’s particular instrument, ‘Julu Kuta’ challenges both, but especially the kora, with a tricky chromatic scale. As a tribute to innovation, inspired by Keita’s experiment in 2007 to construct a double-necked kora (which he managed to successfully pull-off with the help of his cousin), the Db to D to Eb to E to A scale sounds like a beautiful spell being unfurled. Despite being difficult, Finch’s heaven-calling brushes and waves and Keita’s dainty spirals and spins sound melodically reminiscent and very much at ease.

As a timely reminder of loss and remembrance, there’s the sweetly pronounced ‘Chaminuka’ dedication to Keita’s late friend and fellow musician, the mbira player Chartwell Dutiro. Instead of a mournful elegy, this is a beautifully sung (both in Dutiro’s native Zimbabwean dialect of Shona and in Keita’s own Mandinka) and soothingly played homage.  

The journey from West Africa to Wales has never seemed shorter; the difference in cultures never so close. Finch and Keita perform wondrous parallels together, further elevated by the subtle but evocative additional classical strings. Echo moves this combined strength further along the road, adding depth to the duo’s sound and showing that despite the hardships, distancing, everything still comes together in a unified brilliance of forms and shared experiences. 

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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The Monthly Playlist Revue: May ’22: Junior Disprol, Misha Sultan, Vera Di Lecce, Celestial North…

May 30, 2022

THE PLAYLIST
Dominic Valvona/Matt Oliver/Brian Bordello Shea

All the choice tracks from the last month, plus a few missed ones we’ve corralled from last month, the Monolith Cocktail team’s playlist revue is both a catch-up and showcase of the blog’s eclectic and mind bending tastes. Sitting in on this month’s selection panel is Dominic Valvona, Matt Oliver and Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea. 

TRACK LIST IN FULL IS:

Junior Disprol Ft. Krash Slaughta  ‘Rotund Shogun’
Deca  ‘Tuning’
Exterior  ‘Orthodox Dreams’
FAST DE  ‘Miss Trutti Finally Found Her Gem’
Pussy Riot Ft. Slayyter  ‘HATEFUCK’
Masai Bey  ‘Stanza X’
BITHAMMER!  ‘Make You Mine’
Flat Worms  ‘Into The Iris (Live)’
Salem Trials  ‘Vegaville’
Walker Brigade  ‘Disease’
Team Play  ‘Sunrise’
James Howard  ‘Baloo’ Adam Walton  ‘Mary Sees U.F.O.S.’
Joviale  ‘UW4GM’
Shabaka  ‘Black Meditation’
Kritters  ‘New York’
Ralph Of London  ‘Lys’
Ethan Woods  ‘Utopia Limited (Cuddly Tie-In)’
Staples Jr. Singers  ‘I’m looking For A Man’
Ramson Badbonez  ‘Rap Bio’
Mr. SOS & Maxamill  ‘War Criminal’
The Difference Machine  ‘Old Men’
Omega Sapien  ‘Jenny’
Mr. SOS  ‘Peace & Prosperity’
Jermiside & The Expert Ft. Tanya Morgan  ‘Crime Rule The City’
Quelle Chris  ‘DEATHFAME’
Wish Master & Billy Whizz  ‘THOUGHTS OF THOUGHTS’
Guillotine Crowns  ‘Killer’ Orryx  ‘Eldritch’
Celestial North  ‘When The Gods Dance’
Henna Emilia Hietamäki  ‘Protesti’
Lucrecia Dalt  ‘No One Around’
STANLAEY  ‘Fluorescent Fossils’
Your Old Droog  ‘Go To Sleep’
Tommaso Moretti Ft. Ben LaMar Gay  ‘A Call For Awareness’
Black Mango Ft. Samba Touré  ‘Are U Satisfied’
Avalanche Kaito  ‘Flany Konare’
Tomo-Nakaguchi  ‘Halation’
Private Agenda  ‘Splendour’
Sebastian Reynolds  ‘Four-Minute Mile’
Chouk Bwa & The Ångströmers  ‘Agwetaroyo’
Misha Sultan  ‘Nyepi’
The Master Musicians Of Jajouka  ‘Khamsa Khamsin’
Gustavo Yashimura  ‘Las Prendas del Corazon’
Stephanie Santiago  ‘Activa Tu Cuerpo’
Gabrielle Ornate  ‘Free Falling’
Black Monitor  ‘Xexagon77’
Borban Dallas & His Filipino Cupids  ‘Too Convenient’
Martha And The Muffins  ‘Save It For Later’
Super Hit  ‘Blink 182’
Reverend Baron  ‘Let The Radio Play’
Alas The Sun  ‘Distant Drone’
Jelly Crystal  ‘I Tryyy’
LINN  ‘Happiness Is Real’
Lenka Lichtenberg  ‘That Monster, Custom’
Brigitte Beraha  ‘Blink’
Vera Di Lecce  ‘Altar Of Love’
Francesco Lurgo  ‘I Am Already Far Away’



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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Our Daily Bread 519: Faust, Schizo Fun Addict, Martha and the Muffins…

May 24, 2022

Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea’s Roundup
Unless stated otherwise, all releases are currently available to buy.

SINGLES:

Schizo Fun Addict ‘Fate Chaser’

Schizo Fun Addict are one of the Magnificent Seven; one of the most important bands in the underground today: one of the seven bands that are making music as good as anything released in the history of rock ‘n’ roll.

Music wise they are a jack-of-all-trades and master of them all. They take musical genres and mix them with a cunning ease and panache that other bands can only stand with mouths agape wondering how they achieve such beauty and experimental originality. With this their new single they dip their toes into the magical myth that is the Laurel Canyon of the late 60s, and produce a song of supreme summer jangle. This is the sound of Michelle Philips combing her hair; the sound of Arthur Lee preening himself in front of a full-length mirror in the castle. This is pure nostalgia, a song of the summers we no longer seem to be blessed with; a tear stained memory of teenage romantic yearning.

bigflower ‘The Pill’

The dark world of bigflower once again is upon us with a lovely strange voyage of psyche and psychosis; an off-kilter journey where not everything seems to be where it should be, but strangely fits together perfectly. A song that strangely could and should last longer, which is indeed a very rare thing; an aural journey of a song with shuffling drum beat and beautifully simple strummed electric guitar led astray in a wave of vague drone solitude. Another winner from Ivor Perry.

Borben Dallas & His Filipino Cupids ‘Too Convenient’

I love this single. It starts off all scuzzed-up rock ‘n’ roll and dank and pringy and urgent, then in the middle goes all experimental and almost Beach Boys like. It gives one the impression that Borben Dallas has just found god or at least a God substitute. The post-finding-God section of the song goes back to the first but with an added pringiness that one can only bow their head or even shake it in a Status Quo like manner to. A spellbinder of a single. Originality is not dead it is alive and well and living in the essence of Borben Dallas and His Filipino Cupids.

Martha and the Muffins ‘Save It For Later’

The man who wrote this song is actually a bit of a fan of my band The Bordellos, calling me the natural successor to John Cooper Clarke. Maybe he meant I too am skinny and wear all black, but sadly my hair has long gone the way of my hopes and dreams completely out the window. But that man be the wonderful talented songwriter Dave Wakeling who of course was and is frontman of Ska Beat legends The Beat and this my dearest cherubs is a cover of their classic ‘Save It For Later’, and it’s not a bad version. It’s all post punk jangles and a melody no doubt one would hear emitting even echoing on a beach [see what I did there] from a tiny transistor radio this summer. Martha And The Muffins have indeed done a pop delight of a cover and has managed to put a smile on my face and a skank to my hips. [Please do not take that image to bed with you, I beg of you].

James Howard ‘Baloo’
(Faith & Industry)

As I sit mid Sunday morning writing reviews, this is pretty perfect listening; a song that takes and pulls in the art of traditional songwriting and wraps it around ones heart, squeezing tears and hope from your now moistened eyes. A track of pure beauty; a song I can imagine the great Elvis Presley performing with such gusto and panache extinguishing all the previous night’s demons.  James Howard could well be one to watch and I await an album with my breath somewhat baited. A true beaut of a song.

Fast De ‘Miss Trutti Finally Found Her Gem’
(Bloomer Records)

A lovely instrumental surprise of fuzzed-up pop grandeur, fuzzy synths get off my tail eloquence, and a sweet, so sweet scuzzy melody that it will not just rot your teeth as you chew on it, getting all the juicy goodness from the track, but your grandmas and her twice removed wannabe lovers teeth as well. Yes indeed it is times like this one can only sit back and enjoy the taste of adventure in music.

Pineapple ‘Trials’
(Metal Postcard Records)

Pineapple is a fruity little dish of a band, taking in post punk and talking in post punk sensibilities. It’s an EP of nostalgic splendor; one that takes me back to the days when the local punk band had to compete with the jukebox in the down at heel pub venue, we of a certain age all have played/frequented at some time in our lives. Yes, this is an EP of enjoyable guitar punky scrunge that takes in Billy Childish, Julian Cope and The Fall in equal measure, and ‘Snake & Ladders’ is one of the best songs about football I have heard in many a year.

Linn ‘Happiness is Real’

I love this track. I have listened to it a number of times in a row, and found it a song that is both utterly bewitching and quite disconcerting: imagine Jane [‘Its A Fine Day’ fame] being swallowed whole by early My Bloody Valentine on the sunniest yet saddest day of the year. I hope Linn has an album coming out soon as I think I’m ready to be seduced.

ALBUMs/EPs

Faust ‘Punkt’
(Bureau B)

Punkt is the lost album by Faust and everybody loves a good lost album. But in honesty many lost albums actually deserve to remain lost and never be found. They are lost for a good reason normally, the reason quite often being it is not very good, but years later are looked through rose-tinted nostalgic eyes and held to one’s collective bosom as a work of previously unreleased genius.

But there is always an exception, and like Shacks masterwork Waterpistol, Punkt is that exception. 

Punkt carries on where Faust IV left of, with a brief ear turned and tuned into melody where the industrial noise is swamped with psych-tinged song writing skill and invention. ‘Morning Land’ sounding very much like what Einstürzende Neubauten would make years later with great success. ‘Knochentanz’ is indeed a Chinese burn of a track, taking jazz and electronic noise to new extremes; like a melting corpse dripping into the eyes of the soulful bugler at dawn wondering whether alcohol will taste quite the same again, it is almost funky and after many spirit enhancing drugs could well be danced to and even at the length of 11.45 it never outstays its welcome. ‘Fernlicht’ follows as a short psychedelic interlude, again covering the noise and drone with a quite becoming melody. And that is a fair summing up of the album actually: the normal Faust invention of drone and noise but with a covering of instrumental beauty, as the quite breath-taking journey of a track ‘Schön Rund’ proves: the sound of Elton John slowly sinking into the ocean; a treat indeed.

So as a lost album this is indeed a found again treasure; one that all lovers of Krautrock will enjoy and stroke the chins over a martini to [or other tipples of choice]. 

Jelly Crystall ‘ILY’
(Smuggler Music/PIAS) 3rd June 2022

All said and done this EP is rather beautiful. The opening track reminds me of the beautiful Paul Quinn and the Spirit of Independence albums, which is indeed high praise. There is such a romantic 50s early 60s magic that those periods in time oozed with, and Jelly Crystal have captured the magic without being too retro.

This is music to be heard coming out of your radio whilst you slow dance with your significant other in the darkness, in the park with the cool evening breeze whispering sweet nothings…truly magical.

Alas The Sun ‘Wild Honey Inn’
(Taxi Gauche Records)

The beautiful sound of summer is what we have here; jangling guitars beautiful harmonies and well-written songs with heart and soul. Everybody who reads these reviews of mine knows I am a sucker for bands with boy/girl vocal duets, and Alas The Sun are indeed blessed with such a thing; both voices blending into a soft honey dew like substance that melts and makes you feel all warm inside.

Whether it be the jazzy ‘Distant Drone’ or the subtle ‘White Rabbit’ soft shuffling beat of ‘Love At Twenty-Two’, which is almost Prefab Sproutish in its texture and feel, Wild Honey Inn is an album of laid-back beauty; an ideal record to soundtrack sheltering in the shade on a too hot summer’s day, when lazing about relaxing is all one needs in life.

Black Monitor  ‘Snake Of My Heart’
(Ikarus Records)

Snake Of My Heart is an album full of tuneful joyful psychedelic pop, and lovers of such will indeed enjoy it. To be honest, there is nothing not to enjoy about it, as it is vibrant, wide space music made to fill the wide musical space in your life; an album taking in the influences of Pink Floyd with Syd Barrett, the Brianjonestown Massacre, early Blur and many other fine pop bands touching on c86 jangle, especially on the Sarah Records like ‘On A Wire’. But there is a slight difference as Black Monitor has a slightly dark edge to the music, a slight uneasiness that many bands that produce music of this ilk do not quite manage to achieve.

There’s a slight appealing wonkiness and depth to the songs that I think will draw me back to and explore more and more over the coming weeks, a quality that many fail to produce with alt radio friendly songs. This a quite lovely and rewarding listen.

Super Hit ‘Pocket Rock EP’
(Metal Postcard Records)

There is a beauty in lo-fi jangly guitar music that I cannot resist, and this seven-track mini album is full of the beautiful little blighters. Any one of the seven songs could quite easily fit onto the compilations Sarah Records released in their all too brief existence. Songs that beguile and charm in equal measure, songs soaked in DIY bedroom lack of glamour but steeped in a yearning and heartache and pure charm that really is hard to beat, and Super Hit is an artist deserving of more attention.

Spiral Of Silence ‘Landmark’
(Jezus Factory)

This is Spiral Of Silence’s first release in 20 years, a band I have not come across before, and described as the Belgian Joy Division – probably because they are from Belgium and have that Peter Hook/Cure bass thing going on and are quite dark and gothic. And despite all that I still enjoyed the EP.

It is nothing I have not heard before, but The Spiral Of Silence do the Joy Division thing very well and cover their darkness with layers of radio friendly melody, and I can see it appealing to the long black coat brigade [if they still exist].

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The Perusal #31: Jimi Tenor, Flat Worms, Lucrecia Dalt, Brigitte Berha…

May 19, 2022

Dominic Valvona’s Essential Roundup
Unless stated otherwise, all releases are available to buy now.

The Master Musicians Of Jajouka ‘Dancing Under The Moon’
(Glitterbeat Records) 13th May 2022

Truly atavistic, the Rif Mountain ensemble known as The Master Musicians Of Jajouka were once heralded by William Burroughs (no less) as, “the four thousand year old rock and roll band”.  Carrying a real mystique until more recent times this Moroccan outpost, holy mountain shrine located group claim descent from the venerable Ahl Serif tribe (which roughly translates as “the saintly”) and their sacred idol, the legendary Arab healer Sidi Hamid Sheich. And in an act of preservation they continue to keep the signature double reed Ghaita flute (an instrument almost identical to the Arabian Mizmar) and Lira (a fiddle-like instrument) led mesmerising, entrancing and leaping performative music that goes hand-in-hand with their devotion alive.

Until the last century Jajouka and music created there were virtually unknown. That was until the well-travelled artist and Burroughs foil Brion Gysin made the wild trip across an antiquity-rich African landscape to that remote village hideaway in the Jebala foothills.  Passing such incredible ancient relics as The Pillars Of Hercules, and the final resting place of Jean Genet at Larache, Gysin found real nourishment and something inspiring when introduced to a previous incarnation of the troupe. Making various connections after witnessing shaggy sheepskin adorned dancers bounding over a bonfire to ‘wooden trumpeted fanfares’, Gysin saw something far older, a cultural lineage that predated Sufi mysticism, going back further towards Pan-like Greek and Roman ritual and Persia.

Bringing back his own recordings to London at a later date in 1968, he’d turn on his old mucker and Rolling Stone Brian Jones to this ancient, but very much alive, trance. No stranger to picking up on and embracing world sounds and instruments, Jones would be inspired to make his own trip to Jajouka, taking the sound engineer George Ckiantz with him. God only knows what the locals must have thought of the pretty much strung out by now, hippie Jones, but they welcomed him into the fold nonetheless, introduced to the chief in that period and defacto band leader Abdeslam Attar. As was the custom, Jones and Ckiantz made a number of recordings during their stay. Released at a later date (posthumously for Jones) with added electronic phasing and cutting methods to encourage a more psychedelic montage effect, these tapes made up the first release on the Stones own label imprint in the 70s.

Pretty much blowing the lid of this isolated group, a succession of visitors made the journey pilgrimage; from jazz deity Ornette Coleman, who jammed with the ensemble for his 1975 album Dancing In Your Head, to Rolling Stone writer Robert Palmer and the American photographer Joel Rubines. The latter, who as it happened was fluent in the Darija Arabic dialect, made the now famous, and purist at that point, The Master Musicians Of Jajouka recordings. A decade on and the Stones came knocking for real this time with an offer of collaboration, followed not too soon by the explorative Bill Laswell.

Fast forward another couple of decades and the now Bachir Attar led group invited the Italian musician and engineer Jacupo Andreini to record the most comprehensive testament yet. What he captured is now in the hands of Glitterbeat Records, a double-CD spread of ten-minute plus adorations, romances, courtly music and processions.

A septet of heralding circular-breathing fluted horns, the quivering frayed twang and pluck of Liras, galloping drums and a unison of voices conjure up visions of mystery, rituals and moonbeam bathed dances. We could be atop of the holy mountains, but also anywhere along the antiquated Mediterranean coastline, to Moorish Spain.

Venerations to the master but also Islamic faith, including a flighty, swallow-winged wispy and willowy avian prayer to Allah, appear alongside the regal and lively. ‘Hlilya’ is something altogether different; a sort of ancient bounced progenitor of Breakbeat and 2-Step.’Khamsa Khamsin’ with its triple reedy drones and fanfare parade could even be said to have a hint of swing, even jazz about it. This processional, as well as the dancing ‘Opening The Gate’, would have, at one time, been the accompanying tunes for the Sultan’s walk to and back from the mosque.

Like a chorus of busy buzzes or a sustained mizzle, the sound of a trio of Ghaitas is a thing to behold. And when the frame-like drums appear it’s a both beautified and racing entrancing experience like no other. That weaved and bowed Lira has a great sound too; a twine and bandy tone that reminded me of the Appalachians.

Atonal, mesmerising and yet melodic the atavistic music of this holy anointed sanctuary has never sounded so intriguing. No wonder Ornette was so eager – they were even flown over to play at the science-fiction jazz innovator’s funeral. He heard, saw what you yourself can now enjoy, bathe in; music that doesn’t just travel back decades but a millennia, all the way back to the once great Persian empire and beyond. But this isn’t just artifact, an exercise in ethnography, but a living, breathing form very much alive and stirring.

Avalanche Kaito ‘ST’
(Glitterbeat Records)

Full disclosure time. Many of you maybe be aware that on occasion I’ve moonlighted to pay the rent as it were, working with various labels (Analog Africa, Spiritmuse, Pindrop) and artists (Kahil El’Zabar, Lost Colours, Hello Cosmos, Matt Donovan) over the last five or more years. In the last year I’ve been commissioned to write the inviting words for a couple of Glitterbeat Records projects, most recently Širom’s The Liquefied Throne Of Simplicity album. But I’ve also provided the words for the label’s Griot post-punk phenomenon Avalanche Kaito and their debut titular album. I’ve included it not so much as a promotion, but just because it’s a truly incredible record. Anyway, find my original draft-like review showcase below:

Emerging from an entirely original dimension in sound, the polygenesis Avalanche Kaito redefine what it is to talk with the ancients whilst leaping forth into a futuristic chaos of noise on their debut album journey. A palpable experience with each sonic blast, each layer a revelation, this simultaneously taut but expansive universe in which the oral traditions of the West African griot converge with Belgium post-punk, krautrock, math rock and the industrial exists in its own space.

Initialing colliding together as a duo, the Burkina Faso urban griot and multi-instrumentalist Kaito Winse and Brussels noise punk drummer Benjamin Chaval were joined by Chaval’s growling, grinded bassist sparring partner from a previous incarnation, Le Jour du Seigneur, Arnuad Paquotte on this specific line-up’s vision of ancestral proverb metaphors and dataist inspired technology. Although released this summer, eight months after the debut showcase EP, Dabalomuni, the guitarist from that extraordinary otherworldly session, Nico Gitto is now, going forward, part of the transformed setup; not so much replacing Paquotte as expanding the sound into another direction.

Aided by another influential cog in this wheel, Chaval’s previous band manager Michael Wolteche helped to shape this myriad of elements and strands, which coalesce into a dynamic, often intense yet unruly cosmic ritual and unlimited expression of change.

That previous EP was just a small window into a greater universe of animalistic symbolism poetics and allegorical stories wildly vociferated and loquaciously delivered under a rich exotic canopy or, echoed out into space, the ether. With the help of the visual language programme PureData (an open source apparatus for creating interactive computer music and multimedia works) and his pummeling, rattled drumming, Benjamin and his deeply trebly prowling, sinewy bassist foil Arnuad create an effective torque of post-punk-prog-tribal-free-jazz-industrial-electronic tumult for Kaito’s fluty rasped, bow quivered, messenger drums beating commune with his roots and life in a very different bush of ghosts. 

The message that underlines Kaito’s griot ancestry and the band’s motivation, spontaneity, was explained in a recent interview they did with Parisa Eshrati for the Trial & Error Collective site, with Michael’s onus on the ‘live’, opining that: ‘Today we see that everything is dematerialized, everyone is addicted to playlists and clicks on the Internet. When the moment of the concert comes, we forget all that, and we get back to the spirit of the ritual, of the interaction between flesh and blood people.’

Although created in a studio setting that live in the moment feeling and dynamism is authentically recreated on this album. In that same interview Ben outlines the process: ‘There was an improvised stage in the studio with Kaito and me, and then this material was worked on, it went into the digital mixer, to be enriched with computational sourdough.’

In practice that blows up and out into the interdimensional slackened bass stalk of ‘Sunguru’, the wilder, quickened hysterics and danger of the progressive deconstruction ‘Douaga’, the Jah Wobble throbbed esoteric and celestial manifestation ‘Goomde’, and the Scott Walker atmospheric gloom and earthy soul tumbling ‘Eya’. At any one-time snarling yet hypnotic, willowy but thickened with brooding menace, animal spirits from an African exotica come alive to a mysterious matrix that evokes but never settles on warped sparks of 70s era Zappa, Yontan Gat, Fugazi, Black Midi, A Clean Kitchen Is A Happy Kitchen.

Magnetic, straddling multiple worlds, universes Avlanche Kaito are metal and flesh, blood and biometrics, tradition and transition, all wrapped up on a chaotic road trip. The open road, pathway from Kaito’s village home of Lankoé in landlocked Burkina Faso to Brussels via a digital mill in Montpellier and Mount Analouge proves infinitely more important, radical and creative than the destination.  

Jimi Tenor ‘Multiversum’
(Bureau B) 20th May 2022

Continuing his “ikigai” (as it’s called in the press blurb) passion for diy home recording, the polymath Finn Jimi Tenor releases his third album for the Bureau B label this month. Following on from the catch-up retrospective NY, Hel, Barca and a collection of rarities, Deep Sound Learning, the multi-instrumentalist, nee “renaissance man”, now knocks out an album of originals that work around and off of drum machine beats and synth loops.

Multiversum channels the well-travelled and three-decade plus recording maverick’s eclectic tastes, but is also prompted by the label’s invitation to record an album based on Tenor’s basic live set-up of reeds and synth; a minimalist approach that he’s been using successfully for the past two decades. Proving no less effective, the scale of this enterprise is wide and deep; a brilliant run through a smorgasbord of musical styles and rhythms.

For an artist already renowned for his use of Afro-beat and jazz, and for his collaborations with the former’s beat provider doyen Tony Allen and other such luminaries as Kabu Kabu and Abdissa Assefa, Tenor once more draws on those founding genres to build up a mixed bag of dance and pop tracks, jazz-fusion peregrinations and nostalgic filmic and TV series theme tunes. Talking of which, Tenor’s ‘Slow Intro’ lead-in of cosmic flute, apparitional choral voices and passing satellites is part Les Baxter, part 70s soundtrack score.

A minute later (quite literally) and we’re properly transported to the multiverse with a touch of Greg Foat library music and shooting beam electro pop spiritual guided ‘Life Hugger’. Spells of floated, rasped sax and flute with beams of organ follow, on the acid-jazz bent ‘Jazznouveau’, and a trip-hop flighty fluted and whistled Cousteau dives languidly into ‘Uncharted Waters’ on the next fusion of sounds.

By the time we reach ‘Baby Free Spirit’ Tenor’s bobbing and bouncing down to a dance track of late 80s Chicago House and electronic body music: although the bass is extremely deep and menacing.

Showcasing more of his soulful, funky side, ‘Birthday Magic’ sends Marvin Gaye “skinny-dipping” down in West Africa. The Finale, ‘Bad Trip Good’, however, voyages seamlessly into both Jon Hassell and Desert Players era Ornette Coleman territories, to finish on a polygenesis sonic score, which also features an undulated low-level techno beat, sax lulls and coos and a soaring build-up of strings.   

Kutiman, Alex Puddu, Eden Ahbez, Jeremy Steig, Weldon Irvine can all be detected, though Tenor’s cosmology hardly waits around to land on any of them for long. Jimi Tenor, like his name (a convergence of teen idol Jimmy Osmond and the Finn’s favourite instrument, the tenor sax), could rattle off these kinds of hybrid fusions all day long. His sensibility errs towards electronic pop but also a knowing, sometimes tongue-in-cheek take on cult, kitsch composers too.

Fundamentally its all dance music of a kind with an injection of global tourism; a universal canvas for omnivorous playtimes.

And if you can’t get enough of Tenor this month, a new Omniverse survey, almanac of his second great passion, photography, is dues out in tandem with this album.

During a break in his musical exploits – well, more like hitting a brick wall of a kind, believing it to be over before it had even started -, in 1992 Tenor found himself upping sticks to live in New York, where he took a job photographing tourists at the Empire State Building.

Images taken during that heady frantic time, when Tenor was juggling work with late night drinking bouts at the local Dominican restaurants and cramming in a seven hour shift at (once more) making music, sit alongside his promo shots and album covers. Fellow tourist booth pal and Tenor archivist of a sort, Hitoshi Toyoda lends a helping hand, having squirrelled away some of those New York shots. For fans and completists alike, it will prove an essential addition; sound-tracked by that latest album. 

Lucrecia Dalt ‘The Seed’
(Invada Records) 20th May 2022

Lucrecia Dalt’s debut score deserves a better movie. Separated from the exclusive Shudder streaming service’s Sam Walker directed alien-horror trip The Seed, Dalt’s soundtrack proves a far more interesting, mysterious proposition of the otherworldly, esoteric and sci-fi.

The sound artist, musician and composer conjures up a pulsation of short evocations, stirrings and sinister presences fit for a Gallio horror, yet has to provide the atmospheric shocks and creeping menace for a millennial staycation under the stars: a narcissistic poolside monotony destroyed by an alien meteor shower. An E.T. body shocker, the visitor from another constellation proves both a helpless baby and yet alluring threat to the protagonists of this movie. All kinds of ugly, distressing impregnations follow as a seed is indeed planted: though it all could just be down to a particular grotesque trip.

Emanating from tape loops made through a Copicat tape delay, various digital synths and a Korg Monologue, the Biblical, mythological and cosmic all cross paths with sinister metallic forces. Rippled, purred tones, tubular mothership pipework, a frayed bow or two, drones and throbbing pulses are all that’s needed to convey the unsettling and alien. But there’s also plenty of bestial movements and some electronic beats to set the heart racing: the eyes flitting intently towards the dark corners of the room.

Set in a peculiar, bad mezcal tripping Mojave Desert, yet sonically without much in the way of a locational prompt, we could be in a macabre underground vault, bounding across lunar landscapes or aboard some Venutian spaceship. Diaphanous gravitas at the sight of astral phenomenon, concepts of E.T. contamination brought to Earth via meteors, ancient exorcism miracles and the fate of a penance-cursed Greek boulder pusher reference titles point to the action, drama unfolding on screen. The soundtrack growing gradually more warped as the characters lose their bodies, soul and minds.

Shades of Laurie Spiegel, Cliff Martinez, Bernard Szajner, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Pauline Oliverous and early Aphex Twin lurk amongst the considered, skilfully built soundscapes, zones, fears and wraith like stalking terrors. Saying that, there’s the odd ethereal voiced spirit, plus a springy catgut thumbed rhythm to be found on the mosey-down canter ‘Blob On The Lawn’. 

Removed from the movie itself, the 26-track (all of which are mostly under the three-minute mark) soundtrack for The Seed signals a promising start to Dalt’s filmic aspirations. Though saying that, we shouldn’t be surprised that the incredibly experienced, multimedia composer has taken to this quite comfortably. With great care and a handle on leitmotifs, sounds the polymath artist convincingly scores horror and sci-fi with a certain atmospheric élan, a depth and real sense of the ‘other’.

It seems we won’t have to wait long for the next score either. Just as this review goes out, word reaches us that Dalt’s soundtrack for the recent SKY/HBO comic-horror The Baby is due to be released next week (May 27th), by the same label. ‘A journey into motherhood through a new – quite unexpected – lens’, we’re told, ‘the central character Natasha (played by Michelle De Swarte of The Duchess fame) is landed with a baby after a life of doing exactly what she wants, when she wants. Controlling, manipulative and with violent powers, the baby twists Natasha’s life into a horror show.’ The series was created by Siân Robins-Grace (Kaos, Sex Education) and Lucy Gaymer, and directed by Nicole Kassell and is produced by SISTER (Chernobyl, Landscapers) and Proverbial Pictures. Here’s a sneak peek:

Brigitte Beraha ‘Blink’
20th May 2022

Barely tethered the second album from the incredibly voiced composer Brigitte Beraha and the Lucid Dreamers quartet captures the fleeting, the blink-and-you-miss-it moments, the intangible and abstract.

As the ensemble’s name implies, this is a must lucid and dreamy affair; an explorative jazzy spell that wonders into the avant-garde, minimal and classical, and evokes the free-flowing inspirations of a post Soft Machines Robert Wyatt, Talk Talk, Basil Kirchen and Steve Lacy.

Flanked and enveloped by George Crowley (on reeds and electronics), Aleyona Mick (piano and synth) and Tim Giles (drums, percussion and also electronics) Beraha’s ambled, cooed, fluid vocals are repeatedly morphed and transformed to sound like wisped siren calls and instruments; anything to give it all a congruous but experimental expression.

The improvised exploration tiptoe of post-punk-jazz meandering, ‘Doors’, features a spoken word journey that’s part Raincoats, part inanimate object fetish. A symbolic, conscious freedom that opens, sizes up and dances around the concept of doors and their wooden origins, suddenly takes in a philosophical sadness with spontaneous creaks and yucky yelps.

On the third improvised track, ‘Remembering’, Beraha’s voice takes on a phonetic transformation over a sparse, piano-plonky semi-classical accompaniment. The album’s most electronically charged of electronic compositions ‘Wait For Me’ almost merges that voice with the galvanized steel and zinc of Basic Channel techno sonics, squelches and tubular kinetics. Moans and coos blend with the emotional machine stimulator.

If we’re talking emotions then ‘Lullaby’ proves an evocative beauty of sadness and loss. Lyrically touching base with a father and daughter relationship, hints are conveyed of an eternal sleep, a resting place and conversations left unsaid. It has that Wyatt-like brilliance of lucid vulnerability. Swaned soothed saxophone, softened cymbal taps and plaintive piano offer the accompaniment. On another Wyatt enchantment, the title-track poetically articulates a yearn for the evanescent as trickles, washes and serenades flow into the cosmic-light territory of Donny McCaslin and Matthew Dunn.

Beautifully liquid, magical and unburdened Blink is a hazy brill and airy exhale of explorative jazz that will further cement the reputation of everyone involved: A most fantastic spell indeed.   

Various ‘Sharayet El Disco: Egyptian Disco & Boogie Cassettes 1982-1992’
(Wewantsounds) 3rd June 2022

Pulled from the tape cassette culture of 80s and very early 90s Egypt by the Amsterdam-resided Egyptian deejay, Disco Arabesquo (otherwise known as Moataz Rageb), the latest release from the Wewantsounds label showcases a city, country that embraced the disco trend but made it their own. 

Previously confined to what was a full-on endorsement of technology at the time, the majority of tracks on this compilation were only available on the cassette format. And so for the very first time those obscure and hard to track down Cairo tunes have now been made available on vinyl.

As one exotic, faraway oasis, North Africa (see Casablanca Records as only one of the most glaringly obvious examples) and especially a palm shaded Egypt has inspired and had the alluring effect on the original home of disco in the States. With its own special desert and Nile romanticisms and fantasies the Cairo scene was graced by a litany of stars from the not only the Arabian music world but stage and screen. Two such stars, actresses, Simone Philip Kamel (known simply as Simone on record) and Ninochka Manoug Kupelion (known professionally to adoring fans as Lebleba) make appearances on this boogie survey. The former, Simone, rests her signature soprano voice for Cairo Francophone chic and coquettish fun. ‘Merci’ could be a relative of the French female disco troupe New Paradise, only with a distinct Arabian dreaminess and matinee strings. Lebleba, who cuts a fun Egyptian version of a overflowing fruit hatted Carmen Miranda on the original cassette artwork, goes for a laser shooting disco heart-to-heart on the pop ‘Ana Alby Har Nar’. 

Removed to the land of the pyramids, hints of Boney M can be detected wrapped up in the matinee stringed female/male shared pop-funk ‘Hezeny’ by the popular Al Massrieen (who Habbi Funk dedicated a compilation to a number of years back), whilst Odyssey dances hand-in-hand with Hot Chocolate and the Hues Corporation on Dr. Ezat Abou Ouf And El Four M’s enervated laser sweeping glitterball pastiche ‘Genoun el Disco’ – the four M’s by the way is a reference to the family group’s fourtet of diaphanous voiced sisters, Maha, Mona, Mervat and Manal. 

Barely adopting the disco trend from across the ocean, no one could sound more Egyptian and less American than the famous singer/actor Eman el Bahr Darwish, grandson of the even more legendary ‘peoples’ artist Sayed Darwish. Eman shimmies across the bazaars to a souk funk of bellydancing percussion, rattling hand drums, willowed flute and a swirl of strings. It’s almost as if he’s stepping straight off a film set, delivering a number.

A disco exotica of cinematic romantic drama without the Studio 64 excess, the Sharayet El Disco compilation is a pop kitsch and seductive treat to the ears. Recommended for those seeking something a little special, cute from outside the myopic disco frontiers of the USA and Europe.

Sebastian Reynolds ‘Athletics EP’
(Faith & Industry) 20th May 2022

Not that the new athletics-inspired EP from serial polymath Sebastian Reynolds isn’t a motivator and driver, but you probably won’t be hearing it anytime soon pumping out of your gym’s speakers, or used in conjunction with the fireworks, pyrotechnic glitz of modern sport, as athletes emerge from the tunnel onto the track. No, for this is a far more layered, sophisticated set of electronic evocations to keep the loneliness of a middle-distance runner at bay.

Seb both celebrates and scores the euphoria, pressures and pains of running at an amateur and professional level on his latest labour-of-love project. As a blossoming runner in his own right, he combines his two greatest passions to create a sympathetic and subtle race through the emotions and trails. Athletics hasn’t always attracted the most nuanced of soundtracks. Lucky to have been front row at a number of championships myself, I can testify that it’s mostly all EDM and bombastic rubbish.

Vangelis had a good crack at it, thought admittedly for another age entirely, the dawning of the modern Olympics, with the onus on track and field. The score for Chariots of Fire remains the benchmark, and it informs, to some degree, at least one of the EP’s bookended world record breaker paeans, ‘Four-Minute Mile’. In tribute to the patron saint of middle-distance runners, Seb has transduced Sir Roger Bannister’s 1954 record breaking run – achieved really more through science, strength of mind and character, as our Rodger didn’t even train that thoroughly, balancing his amateur running credentials with a career as a neurologist – into a short electronic suite; part atmospheric broadcast, part dreamy synthesized joy.

Leap forward sixty plus years and it’s the Ugandan superstar Joshua Kiprui Cheptegei’s 5000M world record beating run that Seb turns into a swimmingly warm, almost semi-carnival celebration of human endurance. Paying certain homage to Cheptegei’s African roots the versatile acclaimed ‘reeds man’ Peter Fraser plays a semi-modern Afrobeat suffusion of sax whilst former Guillemot Grieg Stewart follows suit with vague African clattered drumming. It’s all actually quite club-y, quite trance-y too.

In between those two giants of the sport there’s a succession of dub-y electronica motivations, build-ups and workouts. Spurred on, ‘Final Push’ has a drive and motion, and a real sense of gravitas (even mystery): a struggle against the body’s fatigue, muscle aches and those burning lungs. ‘Dominance Hierarchy’ with its electro kinetics, knocking drums has an air of both Sabers Of Paradise and Boards Of Canada, whilst the gong resonated, mid-tempo swim ‘Hammering’ reminded me of The Future Sound Of London and southern dub Clap! Clap!

Seb quantifies the rush, the pulse, and expectations of his passion without slipping into the superficial exuberance of EDM bombast. Stereotypes are more or less missing from this athletic purview. This would make a great series of soundtracks for sporting documentaries, highlights. BBC Sport needs to get on the blower to our Seb now.

Flat Worms ‘Live in Los Angeles’
(Frontier Records) 13th May 2022

As introductions go, this smash and bash (but very much controlled) driving live showcase from L.A.’s garage-punk trio Flat Worms proves a compact baptism of fire. You could say it has roused my interest.

Admittedly I’ve never come across this tumult before now, so have no idea how the originals sound. I’d imagine the torque, grind, sustain and dynamism is ramped up with adrenaline, and is “in the moment” as they say. Though it has of course been recorded for posterity, hence why this isn’t a live review but a ‘live recorded’ album one instead.

Still, as live records go it’s a lively scowled, crescendo-packed, screwy and heavy trebly-loaded surge; a high velocity hammering of King Gizzard, Electric Eels, The Croissants, Salem Trials, The Damned and Ty Segall. The latter is hardly surprising considering the trio of guitar/vocalist Will Ivy, bassist/vocalist Tim Hellman and drummer Justin Sullivan have previously recorded with that singular talent at his home studio: Hellman has even been a Segall wingman at times.

We now pause for a succinct background check. Between them, members of this congruous L.A. union of garage, drudge-rock, punk and post-punk attack have played with Kevin Morby, The Babies and the Oh Sees. They formed this tight unit back in 2015 though, going on to release a clutch of singles, EPs and two albums, some, as I’ve mentioned, recorded at Segall’s HQ. In more recent times Steve Albini’s sat in that engineer’s chair: one hell of a vote of confidence boost.

They now make an impressive debut on the ‘seminal punk’ operators Frontier Records with this live demonstration. And just like all the best punk-garage records it both blasts and stutters through a short set: no breaks, just a couple of acknowledgments to the whooping, egged-on and goading (in the best possible way) audience.

It’s a thrashing, distorting yet melodic performance; sometimes like a butchered Modern Lovers ‘Roadrunner’, or a Heartbreakers turn at CBGBs. There’s a song in every performance, a tune that breaks out of the seedy back alley kickings and gnarled fizz. Neither dark nor a joy, this Zebulon gig is a great night out spent indoors, with the volume cranked up and curtains drawn. I look forward to now acquainting myself with the lads back catalogue. 

Francesco Lurgo ‘Sleep Together Folded Like Origami’
(Bosco Rec.)

Nothing quite concentrates the mind nor offers an unwelcome window of enforced reflection like a pandemic, especially one that grinded society to a standstill. Forced into confinement, with face-to-face socializing restricted like never before, many of us either broke down or found a distraction and chance to connect with life’s simpler pleasures. In the case of the Italian musician/artist Francesco Lurgo that was an exploration of the ideas of intimacy.

As a mood board that’s both a celebration and search of that intimate theme, Lurgo’s debut solo album is an atonal, sonic and stirred-up account of ambient, neoclassical and electronic suites. Formerly one half of the FLeUR duo, the now uncoupled Lurgo voyages through varied states; a flux of emotional pulls, draws that are backed up by literary and artistic sources, inspirations. The album’s title itself, Sleep Together Like Folded Origami, paraphrases an excerpt from Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends novel, and the artist Aurora Bertoli reflects the same motif of that sleepy realm of togetherness on the album’s sleeve.

Sailing through these emotions and nocturnal symbols, Lurgo’s ship drifts upon the rocks to the sound of an atmospheric fog and wafted vapours on the album’s penultimate timed ominous beauty ‘One Moment Before The Shipwreck’. As a couplet, recorded a minute later, the final suite has a disorientated feel of cut-up reversals and pieced together perspectives, memories. With shipping analogies, cast adrift metaphors of finding solid land, something less veiled and hidden, the rest of this dreamy swell and synthesized purred, rippled textured album evokes hints of Simon McCorry, Rhomus Index, Andrew Wasylak and on the light tubular score, ‘Carnation Bloom’, Vangelis.

Metals, low horn-like drones, a pressing slackened high piano note or two, a sense of gravity and depth, reverberations and subtle use of strings are all used to convey the languid, comforting at times, longed and cerebral nature of the album’s themes. Those origami folded comforts, embraces and thoughts ride out the stresses of the pandemic and signal an interesting, creatively enquiring start to a solo pathway.

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Our Daily Bread 518: Guillotine Crowns ‘Hills To Die On’

May 12, 2022

ALBUM REVIEW/MATT OLIVER

Guillotine Crowns ‘Hills to Die On’
(Uncommon Records)

Do not read between the lines: these crowns haven’t been made to sit comfortably atop underground sovereigns. Hills To Die On is an uprising as well as an upholding of 80s-made disaster, predicting a New York-Chicago futurism that’s actually right under your fingernails, dirt and all. In orators Uncommon Nasa, whose clipped bravado, capable of coiling ad infinitum until he’s constricting your windpipe, and Short Fuze, no less strident but a case of always having to watch the quieter ones in times of distraction, Guillotine Crowns fuck up the b-boy stance and the front rows they’re liable to jump into. Dystopia may be the easy catch-all term to apply to this album of margin-ignoring hip-hop, and these are no gilded garlands on display; but when added to its deeply rooted survivalist spirit, just being without ever seeking hero status, Hills To Die On becomes music to spray skyscrapers by.

As with the Monolith Cocktail-approved, 2019 Uncommon Nasa project City As School with Kount Fif, indie/leftfield hip-hop titans Company Flow and Cannibal Ox, both of whom are referenced in rhyme, are where yardstick parallels are drawn and which give the album a weird throwback status caught in forward thinking-retro fantasy-modern living crossfire. Throw this back to times of Anticon/Def Jux etc (in which Nasa earned his stripes) and you’re hopeful for the scene all over again, thrilled by the likes of ‘Horseman Armour’ and ‘Scope of the Guillotine’ spewing out abstract angles hiding as straight lines and taking no shortcuts in unseating speakers.  

The duo recognise the need to mobilise, but also the parameters of the friends/enemies axis. Whereas the resistance of ‘They Can’t Kill Us All’ is comparable to an all-for-one zombie outbreak, ‘The Product’ has Guillotine Crowns accepting the Sword of Damocles as both potential sealer of fate and a means of going for self amongst online/media minefields. Dense, dry and pretty unforgiving without being indecipherable, GC embark on “around-the-clock stakeouts to reset history” with enough ear catching references – Pelle Pelle sweatshirts, shouts to EPMD, Wu-Tang, DOOM and “Flava Flav with the 12Gauge” – to ease furrowed brows. The pertinence of their streams of consciousness will eventually emerge like a word balloon, forced into your eyeballs as a revision of the Clockwork Orange syllabus.

“My life is fast forward, while yours is a series of pauses” says the crushing headswim of ‘Rebel Crowns’, proposing the question of “do you want to be right, or do you want to be correct?” that through the wrong mic would just be look at me-level pretentious. And like any hip-hop act, underground or mainstream, the pair know the worth of a good hook that punters can take as gospel or make a tattoo of, acknowledging rap’s saviour-like status on the come up and pledging allegiance to the grind. The two leaders are joined on the mic by a bunch of street corner-dwelling savages slash town criers – Jyroscope, Duke01, Gajah, Tracy Jones, Skech185 a sometimes improbable cross-section of survivors and reinforcements to reroute the tide.

The sound of everyday anarchy is dominated by drum machines bullying backdrops like they’re about to cause the 80s music scene to splinter. Guitar chords are crowbarred if not sawn off, and holographic, peace-seeking synths become something more gothic and sinister, analogous to arcade machines becoming sentient. The programming of effects and percussion make tracks itch, irritating your inner ear. ‘Art Dealers’ sounds like ‘Brooklyn Zoo’ in a backpack. The scarily beautiful ‘Generosity’, with its damning hook sample, sounds jettisoned in space, while providing rhymes for the ages that measure the distance of returning to reality.

The dissonant ‘Bare Hands’ projects a robot uprising with the metropolis as its playground, whose hook of “I will destroy you with my bare hands…my power is limitless, you can’t come close to stopping me” both boosts and belies its Gotham-like setting, with ‘Hills’ providing a triumphant, comic book-coloured sci-fi fanfare and a chorus to leap headlong into for anyone needing a new manifesto. Rarely does the Hills… have time to check its pulse across 46 minutes; ‘Tape Deck’ tries to act dreamy, but can’t get no sleep. The industrial grind of ‘City Breathing’ is made for tank-as-low rider, and ‘Killer’, with Short Fuze calculating villainously, reaches the apex of the album’s claustrophobia living in a police state.

Hills To Die On is classic anti-socialism in the shock-of-the-new, ghettoblaster on full blast sense, though suffering the establishment, rather than just being anti-establishment, seems to be the Guillotine mindstate. All hail the Crown rulers setting standards from home to the Terrordome.

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