A LOOK AT WHAT’S OUT THERE/
Dominic Valvona’s Roundup
ALBUMS/LONGPLAYERS
El Khat Aalbat Alawi Op. 99’
(Glitterbeat Records) 25th March 2022
First off, this is an incredible album; an incredible energy and an incredible elliptical disjointed clattering and snozzled, heralded horn blown fusion of the music carried out of the Yemen, the greater Middle East and North Africa. The Eyal el Wahab led Arabian swirled and rhythmic jolted El Khat (named after the popular chewed drug) are simultaneously diy, even punk whilst also creating a bombastic and hypnotising dynamism.
In the melting pot of Tel Aviv-Yafo and in the more isolated – cut-off from the digital and online world – deserts the self-taught cellist (despite not, at the time, being able to read music, managing to join the Jerusalem Andalusian Orchestra) El Wahab and his band use both regional instruments and reconstituted junk to make a wild border traversed sound like no other. A collage of influences, initially sparked off by the Qambus electric sampler of traditional music from the 1960s (the ‘Qat, Coffee & Qambus: Raw 45s From Yemen’ compilation to give it the full title), the group’s second album rewires its Yemen roots and faint, distant musical memories with the psychedelic, garage-rock, gnawa, Ethio-jazz and the raw.
A fondly, missed and remembered culture lies at the heart of this album. Throughout the tensions in the Arabian Peninsular in the last century, and ever since the formation of the Israel state in the aftermath of WWII, Yemen’s Jewish population (which was considerably large), but many others too, were forced to leave their homes for sanctuary. And so many, through no fault of their own, have found themselves decamped, living in Israel like the El Khat band – some for a generation, others for at least three or more. This is where that fusion meets at the crossing; one that sounds like Lloyd Miller conducting a Cairo marching band kicking a tin can down the Kasbah, or, a melodic rattled chaotic brilliance of Zafer Dilek, Salah Rageb, Bargou 08, Yontan Gat and nimble Tuareg guitar soloing. I’d even suggest that they’re bedfellows of their Glitterbeat Record label mate’s blk/JKS: a merger of the atavistic and something entirely exciting and fresh.
The album title itself shares this undertaking of piecing together in a new way, their influences. The “alba” part of “Aalbat” references a small tin box that can contain ‘many treasures’, the “Alwai” is a homage to the popular late Yemeni singer Faisal Alwai, and the “Op. 99” bit intended to give the compositions “the same respect as Western classical music”.
Despite the impact of Covid restrictions in Israel, forced to record separately (although during an easing of those rules, El Wahab was able to usher a chorus of seven people into his living room) and delayed by a self-imposed offline retreat into the expansive desert for six months, it all comes together like a live, unpredictable performance.
Familiar Middle Eastern spices, dances, celebrations and string-frayed bowed and rubber-band like elasticated rhythms are layered with staggering, sometimes drunken stomped, bounced, bounding drums. Mergia organ dabs sit alongside beautiful and swimmingly trilled vocals as hazed connections to the Yemen homeland drift in and out of focus. Some of the distinctive sounds can be traced back to El Wahab’s carpentry skills, building unique instruments from thrown-away scrapes of metal, wood and plastic: hence at least a partial diy, homemade ascetic. Although he’s long since left that Jerusalem orchestra, El Wahab conducts, leads his very own clever ramshackle vision fit for a world in turmoil, of mass emigration. Aalbat Alwai Op. 99 builds a bridge between past longings and a chaotic future of sonic possibilities and polygenesis crossovers. Turning throwaway trash into a freeform expression of vitality, importance but also the social-political, El Khat turn the humble tin can into a resonator that sends out shockwaves across the globe.
Tone Of Voice Orchestra ‘S-T’
(Stunt Records) 11th March 2022
What do you get if you cross radio hall, echoes of Jazzmeia Horn, Solange and Middle Eastern vocals with folk music, sea shanties, the woody stretched bounce of Henri Texier and swoons across the Turkish border? I’ll tell you. You get the soulfully lush, quasi-classical transglobal collaboration between the Danish indie singer-songwriter Trinelise Væring and award-winning saxophonist Fredrik Lundin; helped by an expanded cast of singers and eclectic musicians.
Although this is a Danish enterprise the Tone Of Voice Orchestra evokes a myriad of influences; from the Celtic to Eastern Europe; from India and beyond with their debut album offering.
Vocally, in unison throughout, the lyric book is straight from the R&B and soul songbook; with yearned and wistfully lush ditties on female empowerment, broken down relationships and moving on, plus the foibles, frustrations of living in the modern epoch. All of which are diaphanous, light yet powerfully delivered. The opener, ‘He Loves Her For It’, kind of skewers that modern feel with voices, words and music more in keeping with some hurdy-gurdy churned droned timeless folky shanty. At times this open-ended fusion sounds like a Nashville En Vogue dropped off in a chain dragging Anatolia soundscape (‘You Saw Yourself Out’), and at others, like a yearned pondered Arun Ghosh caravan (‘Kom Hjemtil Mig’).
For his part, Lundin oozes jazzy saxophone sophistication with straight-up circling breaths, some smooching and then more abstract feelers for time, landscape and mood: on one occasion seeming to mimic a harmonica!
Gypsy encampments, meanders across the Balkans, lingering’s of old Iberia and Rajasthan, and exotic camel-motioned creeps through jungles beckon on an album of slinking and rolling beautiful mooching, swells and gravitas. A very impressive start to a multifaceted dynamic to seems to easily sit between the contemporary and past.
Kristine Leschper ‘The Opening Or Closing Of A Door’
(Anti- Records) 4th March 2022
A rekindled lush, if somnolent with yearns and longing, affair with the things that really matter, Kristine Leschper absolutely wows on her sublime new album rebirth.
Detached from the post-punk Mothers, Kristine has given herself the space to reassess, to reconnect and importantly create something anew and utterly spellbinding.
Despite a complexity of thematic strands, imbued in part by the poetry, activism and essayist statements of the late iconic writer June Jordan, Kristine adopts a languid, sensory wonderment that’s almost childlike. More natural, organic than synthesized – although there’s a suffusion of atmospherics, light arpeggiator and electronic waves that congruously boost the mood, or, give certain songs an almost outside-of-itself cosmic push – this gorgeous sounding album beautifully meanders, glides and drifts through a fluted and willow-whistled woodland of first-rate multi-layered arrangements and emotional pulls.
Within that magical world there’s glimmers of Eerie Wanda, ‘Uncoiled’ Diva Moon and Mazzy Star against the imaginative Panda Bear. Songs like the opening semi-pastoral ‘This Animation’ take time to build and change; growing naturally (that word again) from a pipped forest introduction to a slow-release of buoyant bass and more grand drumming drama. It grows stronger and more delightfully surprising as it goes on. Importantly, Kristine is looking at a rafter of emotions, sentiments in a less than ideal, imperfect world, and so rather than progress in a linear fashion, songs, lyrics, feelings all circle back around and offer tangents; especially musically with the funkier DFA Records laxed disco-yearn, almost resigned, ‘Blue’.
Hallowed organs, hand claps and bottle-like tapping percussion, gentle lingers of piano and a general sense of airiness and space are just a few elements that permeate this parchment of woodwind concertos, folk, intricate electronica and dreaminess.
The lyrics themselves are poetic, vulnerable and constantly loving: none more so than on the album’s final, stripped to just a piano and voice ‘Thank You’, which brings down the house with a sweetened gesture of thanks to those who’ve helped keep Kristine afloat in trying times. The fleeting, like “moonbeams”, empirical words, scenes are given weight, tethered in voice and sound with a real depth that seems in practice too be lightly administered. But that’s the genius of this whole album, a laid bare language of great importance made so lushly engaging as to sound like the very opposite; light enough to float off into the expanses.
I’m probably making a right hash of this review, fumbling around to show it in the right light, but The Opening Or Closing Of A Door is difficult to capture. A new chapter in the life of a highly talented musician, composer, this delightful album is one of the best I’ve heard in 2022. There’s no doubt in my mind that this move has been creatively a success, and it will take some beating to be knocked out of the final year lists.
The Lancashire Hustlers ‘Big Ask’
(Steep Hill) 25th February 2022
It’s a half full cup of ‘pukka’ brand tea kind of attitude that unfurls in a disarming manner on The Lancashire Hustlers sixth studio album proper: Big Ask. As always melodically ambrosian and nostalgic the Southport duo harmoniously sound simultaneously reassuring yet defeated on a songbook of ‘bittersweet melancholy’ and softly rolling lover’s paeans; love letters to the 60s and early 70s.
Between them Ian Pakes and Brent Thorley fill the space of a mini studio band and orchestra; sharing a myriad of eclectic instruments, many of which can found adding both exotic and psychedelic chimes, afterglows and bell rung eastern delights.
Like a Neil Finn led Honeybus or Revolver era Beatles breaking bread with Emitt Rhodes, this, now 25-year spanning, partnership washes through societal and romantic disenchantment, but also praise those muses, lovers that make them better people. In the first of those thematic camps the almost pleaded melodious ‘Your Cool Reactions’ finds the lads frozen out, unable to read that love interest’s face, whilst a harmony of The Kinks, solo McCartney and a reminiscent ‘Out Of Time’ tune accompanies a beautifully resigned vocal. The esoteric in comparison, and filmic even, malady ‘Surrender’ sees the lads “wavering” on the brink of giving in. Still, songs like the Slim Chance painted gypsy caravan amble along a blooming hedgerow landscape ‘Bluebell Panther’, and the lost See For Miles label compilation nugget, via Robert Wyatt and a happy-go-lucky Velvets, ‘Happiness On A String’ seem to suggest more sentimental declarations.
There’s also fleeting moments that lead to a lifetime of unsaid connective destiny and bliss (the universal spark, glassy bulb troubadour paean ‘We Knew It Though We Do Not Know’), and feelings of missing out as time slips away (the cowboy booted stirrups jangling southern blues organ imbued ‘No Patience’).
Dreamily and at times in a soulful slinking mood, echoes of Labi Siffre, Roger Bunn, John Compton, Bacharach, Jimmy Campbell and Fleetwood Mac permeate this comfortably light songbook of well-crafted, instantly memorable tunes. Everything, in a true distinctly English way, sounds and feels better over a cup of tea, and I’ll enjoy my ‘organic’ ‘peace’ labelled teabag gift supplied with the lad’s album: thanks for that Ian and Brent.
The Lancashire Hustlers once again, like a northern England Every Brothers, harmoniously and with a real sense of melody read the tea leaves to create a cherished collection of lovelorn malady and magic.
Koma Saxo w/ Sofia Jernberg ‘Koma West’
(We Jazz) 18th March 2022
A pleasant change in direction (of a sort) from the contorting saxophone heavy (hence the name) Koma Saxo as the dynamic ensemble expand their ranks and conjure up a sort of Scandinavian version of Ornate Coleman’s concerto American suite, as remixed by J Dilla and Leafcutter John.
The core sax brethren once more transform and disguise a suffusion of alto, soprano, tenor and slide, and double-bassist, pianist, percussionist, sampler Petter Eldh leads. Only now we have the addition of the aria-like and lucid ethereal voice of Sofia Jernberg permeating evocations of Linda Sharrock and airy diaphanous airiness to enjoy. Which works extremely well in offering some vocalised lulls, waves, syllables, vowels and intonation to the reworked jazz sounds.
Koma West as the name might indicate, references a conceptual geographical theme; the West part marking a soundtrack inspired and imbued by Petter’s west coast Swedish roots. To be specific, the formative years spent in the town of Lysekil, which sits at the southern tip of the Stångenäs peninsula, at the mouth of the Gullmarn fjord. A magical untethered purview of that landscape’s outstanding beauty, drum breakbeats converge with woodwind sprites, a skiffle simmer of jazz, the orchestrally classical and homegrown folk on an album suite of the organic and electrified.
Leitmotifs of a Scandinavian Bernstein and Prokiev can be heard in tandem with flowery levitations and a shadowy reverberation of a tune-up on the opening ‘Lo Ve Ko Ma’. Pastoral sounds, the transparent fleeted appearance of some concerto and room full of voices weave in and out of a woody and tinkled piano passage. It’s at this point that Koma Saxo sound almost like an entirely different group; nearly wholly acoustic, in a mirage of the dreamy. ‘Croydon Koma’ (strange change of location) sees the familiar Mo Wax-esque breaks return as Petter stretches the thrummed double-bass strings and a chorus of saxophone hoots and rasps.
An ode to the flowery landscape feature ‘Kaprifol’ finds this ensemble conjuring up a soulful R&B and Lee Dorsey-like classical puppetry; a lushly decorated wander amongst the fauna that takes on a Southern states of America backbeat feel. Talking of the south, there’s a hint of New Orleans on the high rising sax peppered, rattled double-bass Swedish jazz bolero ‘Koma Fred’.
Mother nature’s son collaborates with the incredible, lofty and airy meandered lyricism and utterances of Sofia to conjure up dolphin echoed coastlines, a menagerie of instrumental evoked bird life, the local folkloric traditions and something approaching a starry cosmic ceiling. Keeping it rooted in a childhood home, Petter’s “momvillian” mum, Kiki, is drafted in to play a repeated shortened concertinaed accordion riff on the hip-hop(ish) attitude ‘Ostron Accordion’.
A family affair, return to nature and a cosmic whole, the Koma Saxo with more than a little help from their friends (the highly thought of and lauded Kit Downes on piano, plus Maria Reich on violin and Lucy Railton on cello) take a pleasing and innovative turn in the road to match their often freshly chaotic jazz, elements of John Zorn and Alfa Mist, and the lofty. A contemporary woodland orchestra and untethered voice falls in with exciting, often broken-up, staccato jazz to musically score an inspiring Swedish topography. The spirit of collaboration lives on.
Kick ‘Light Figures’
(Anomic Records/Dischi Sotterranei/Sour Grapes) 16th March 2022
A dissected grind and more dreamy investigation of love’s opposing forces, we have the rubbered-up, sadomasochistic, the materialistic and the wanton lamented kinds as backdrop for Kick’s new album Light Figures. The Brescia ‘sweet noise’ makers duo, beefed up by a number of guests, and ‘curated’ production wise by Marco Fasolo, dig into a number of complementary opposites as they reach out to the dark side of our personalities and various wept augurs about self-destructive behaviour.
Despite the sometimes serious, dark nature and the brilliantly broody post-punk menace and industrial slicing, Chiara Amailia Bernardini’s vocals ache a certain melodious lushness; cooing and swooning occasionally like she’s fronting a 90s alt-rock or shoegaze band: a bit of Throwing Muses, Breeders. Often it recalls a leather-strapped Ravenettes and their version of knowing 60s backbeat girl group crushes. Chiara’s voice however, is more in keeping with a scorned, provocative PJ Harvey on the BDSM flange-affected ‘Rubberlover’, which also features a/lpaca’s Christian Bindelli aiding a salacious repeated “punish me” mantra about power versus submission. Over her trebly, Banshees and Ester Poly like basslines Chiara is more tauntingly alluring on the mythical allegorical ‘Sirens Never Sleep’; these Greek tempests luring sailors on to the deadly rocks through their mystical hypnotic voices sitting in for their all-too-real dangerous counterparts on the Internet; coaxing us all down misdirected rabbit holes and leading us astray.
Contorted guitar string scrapes from Chiara’s foil Nicola Mova bolster the cold steel grist, the gnarling and gnawing sinister spells, the piercing feedback that often seeps into the gothic. Yet by the album’s third track, ‘Eleven’, the mood evokes an acoustic and spindly chimed accompanied Renaissance set piece; a haunted pastoral dreamy romanticism, though the language (swapping between English, their Italian mother tongue and a completely made-up cadence) is thoroughly modern. ‘Viole’ is another one for the dreamers, featuring as it does a Prokofiev like fluted fairy tale wind instrument contribution from C’mon Tigre and Calibro 35’s Beppe Scardino, and a Shacks-esque languid float-y-ness. Sleepwalking into a climate apocalypse, the finale ‘Atlandtide’ features a doomy gnawed bass, yet seems to waltz towards its fate. It must be said that the duo and friends sound better when the bass and guitar growl, wails and sounds cool-y detached than in hallucinatory, languorous mode; when the fuzz and gristle have an unsettling mood, a leaning dread of Giallo post-punk. Light Figures seems to balance that bruised, scarred heart with the wispy and drifting, baiting and cooing protestations and resignation all the while. If bands like Peter Kernel are your crush then get a load of Kick; they’ve converted this critic.
Pjusk ‘Sentrifuge’
(Somewherecold Records) 18th March 2022
Shaping washed-out, layered abstractions of thoughts, time, moods and places from out of the “modular system” apparatus and what sounds like the air itself, the Norwegian electronic artist Jostein Dahl Gjelsvik tries something a little different with his newest Pjusk release.
Subtly sculpting ambiguous, mysterious ambient worlds that never quite settle – traversing as they do the dreamy, otherworldly, fabled and cosmic planes -, Jostein’s inaugural release for the crazily prolific Somewherecold imprint favours slow builds and reverberated undulations that merge the organic and mechanical; a soundtrack in which the reedy rasps of an obscured instrument can conjure up Tibetan mystique whilst pondering a cloudless, incandescent blue evening sky, or, convey kosmische-like space freighters travelling towards alien paradises.
Modulations, sine waves, chinked and chimed bottles, metallic purrs and burns, zip-wires, liquefied shapes, solar winds, mirrored reversal effects are used to create visions of a propeller-propelled leviathan machine hovering over beautifully rendered landscapes. The tinkling of a buoy on a topographic ocean; a patchwork of firework stars; ethereal cosmic sirens; places in which gravity doesn’t exist, Jostein’s centrifugal motioned ship glides across and lands amongst some magnificent contemplative and stirring scenes.
Occasionally a quiet synthesised beat, some drum pad rhythm adds a semblance of direction and propulsion. Traces too can be felt, heard of distant radiowaves, broadcasts; the drifted resonance of voices and music caught in the atmosphere. Shades of neoclassical Roedelius, some of Tim Story’s piano touches, a little bit of Mapstation, Edgar Frosse, Air Liquide and early Aphex spring to my loosened mind, on what is a really impressive slow-moving modular and tonal piece of escapism.
Anthéne & Simon McCorry ‘Mind Of Winter’
(Hidden Vibes)
“In the bleak mid-winter”, or not as the case maybe, as the considered partnership of Monolith Cocktail regular, the cellist polymath, Simon McCorry and guitar manipulator Brad Deschamps contour a wintery soundtrack of beauty and meditation.
Inspired by the late American modernist poet Wallace Stevens and his ‘epistemology’ school of sublime poetics ‘The Snow Man’, both experimental artists come together to draw an abstract atmosphere and landscape around that poem’s counterbalance mind set of beautifully described coldness and existential feelings of ‘nothingness’.
Although produced during the pandemic, events have been overshadowed in recent weeks by the heinous invasion of Ukraine, and so the fact that this ambient winter’s tale has found a home on the Ukrainian label Hidden Vibes seems to now carry more weight and resonance. But this incredible merger of obscured, veiled cello and effected guitar, field recordings and occasional bobbing tongue-drum knocked beats describes a season of evocative shaped electric-charged cumuliform and nimbostratus clouds, faraway glimmers of the Spring light and melted snow; the very opposite of a nuclear winter auger – which considering the despotic madman behind the button is Putin, doesn’t seem that far-fetched.
Under his Anthéne alais, Brad perfectly matches, under rides and envelopes Simon’s subtle arches, long drawn sustained bows and tonal gauze with threaded, drifted guitar notes, phrases, flange-like reverberations and radiowaves. In this Winter sky static crackles and piped metallic whistles signal dense clouds brushing against each other, whilst on the ground primordial hazy stirrings evoke both the mysterious and foreboding.
Serenity follows in the wake of more concentrated forces; field recordings of climbing over rocks and footsteps across wooden floors mark the presence of human interaction in this atmospheric space. There’s a real gravity to this poetic imbued soundtrack, an essence of the elements and movement. The Mind Of Winter is nothing less than a sublime turn and adroit piece of ambient conjuring from the congruous collaborators.
THE SHORTS
A ‘FOR UKRAINE’ SPECIAL:
As Imperialistic Putin makes good on his ten year plus campaign of lies, deceit and conquer, with the invasion of Ukraine, the millions watching on in despair have been unanimous in their support of that nation’s struggle against a Tsarist despot attempting to rewrite history. Whilst it is still uncertain just what heinous crimes he’s plotting – whether it will stop at the Ukraine, continue into former conquered Tsarist or Soviet territories, or manifest in a corridor to the Balkans -, our friends in the whole of Europe, Britain, North America and beyond have been rallying to the cause (a staggering £100 million has so far been raised in the UK, as if of the 7th March). Musicians have been among the first to turn-around projects, release special records, compilations in aid of the many charities working to help the immense refuge crisis; to bring the essentials to those fleeing and those trapped in cities and towns under siege. Here are just some of those good souls, donating the proceeds to this cause.
Note: unless dated, all release available from now.
Various ‘I Won’t Give Up’
A dramatic outpouring of grief and horror at the heinous events unfolding in Eastern Europe, the #iwontgiveup project brings together over twenty Czech, Ukrainian, Russian and Belarusian musicians to express opposition to the war in Ukraine; sending a clear message to the world that “we are all in this together”.
A combination of the well-known songs ‘Obijmi’ (Hug me) and ‘Bez boj’ (Without Fighting) by the cult Ukrainian rock band Okean Elzy this new version was produced by the Czech Republic-based producer and musician Igor Ochepovsky. It features a cross Eastern European cast that includes the studio drummer and singer David Koller, actor and singer Igor Orozovič, singers Monika Načeva and Lenka Dusilová, guitarists Michal Pavlíček and Nikita Krein, accordionists Aliaksandr Yasinski and Roman Zabelov, guitarist and balalaika player Kirill Yakovlev, double bassist Taras Volos, violinists Vartui Saribekian and Natalia Lisniak, cellist Simon Marek, violist Jan Forest, domra player Kateryna Vatchenko and pianist Olesya Ochepovskaya.
“For Ukrainians, Russians and Belarusians these are absolutely iconic songs that we all know well. Our nations and lives are connected not only by the melodies, but also by the themes of love, hope, courage and determination. The musicians involved are some of the finest artists I know. Apart from our love for music, we are also united by our dissenting attitude towards current events,” says Igor Ochepovsky, explaining the background of the project.
The recording of the song took place on Monday, 28th February, four days after the start of the war in Ukraine, in Boris Carloff’s Soundevice studio.
“When my wife Alena woke me up on Thursday morning with the news that the war had really started, I was shocked. I immediately wondered what I could do. We sent money to charities, I called all my friends in Ukraine and Russia, and checked to see if I could help at the borders. However, I am a musician, I speak to people through music. So Alena and I sprung into action and within two days we had everything arranged. Those involved cancelled their original plans to support the project, for which they deserve a big thank you,” says Ochepovsky.
Escupemetralla ‘Maldacena Duality’
(Single Track also featured on Side-Line Magazine’s Face the Beat 7: Session 7 compilation)
Mad, bad and dangerous to know, those dark purveyors of obscene twisted experiments, Escupemetralla are back with a hadron collider of regurgitating, churned science fiction mania and buzzing occult unease; a vortex trip down a Black Hole.
Appearing on its own merits via their own dark arts platform, ‘Maldacena Duality’ also appears for a good cause on the latest Face The Beat compilation from Side-Line Magazine. 129 tracks, listed in alphabetical order, the seventh session of menacing, scarred darkened sub genre electronica sees the proceeds go towards various charities plus the humanitarian crisis in Eastern Europe.
Solidarity ‘Blue And Yellow’ & “Yellow And Blue’
(Binaural Space)
The effort made during the last two weeks has brought a tear to my eye, with so many artists bonding together over the Internet to quickly turn-around projects like this one to raise money for various charities and the relief effort in Ukraine. Everyone deserves a pat on the back, they really do. Featuring another enviable cast of electronic, neoclassical and experiment artists, the Prague-based label/artist Binaural Space has released two Ukrainian flag colour coordinated compilation stunners.
Familiar to regular Monolith Cocktail readers/followers, volume two (Blue And Yellow) favourites like the polymath cellist Simon McCorry (who appears with Anthéne in one of my album reviews above), the ever-brilliant Whettman Chelmets and lower case minimalist genius Andrew Heath amongst the likes of Jad Baron, Dirk Jacobs, Greg Nieuwsma (another MC featured review in 2021) and Selvedge. Volume One of this moiety features MC regular Toxic Chicken and SEODAH, alongside Ash Electric, XENNON and Kodomo. Buy them both now.
The Post-Everything Collective & Friends Present: ‘Ukrainian Relief Compilation’
(The Post-Everything Collective) 31st March 2022
We did post this one up directly onto the FB page last week, but in case you missed it, another impressive compilation of eclectic finds and nuggets from the Post-Everything crew.
A staggering 60-track behemoth of a compilation, so chances are there will be something to suit every taste. A lot of stuff on here I’ve never heard of, so will enjoy digging. 100% of the profits are going towards the Save The Children foundation for Ukraine.
Various ‘Music For Ukraine’
(We Jazz)
Our favourite European jazz imprint/festival/shop We Jazz has pulled it out the hat with an enticing compilation of previously unreleased goodies. If you have followed us over the years you’ll know just how much the blog rates this jazz label; probably reviewing, featuring three quarters of their entire catalogue at some stage.
No highlights, as they are all worthy great selections from the label roll. There’s some really great material on here, enviable in fact. So sort it out and get handing over that cash.
100% of all proceeds go towards humanitarian aid in Ukraine via verified charity sources. All donations will be announced.
Various Artists ‘Pacification’
(Chitra Records) 18th March 2022
American ambient specialists Chitra Records is putting out a twenty-track compilation next week. Some great names on this one, including Federico Balducci & fourthousandblackbirds, who’s last collaboration received a favourable review from me. Pulling no punches, they’ve contributed the ‘Up To 15 Years in Prison And Fines Of Up To 5 Million Rubles’ track; reference to the recent passed laws of stamping out all protest and revulsion at Putin’s grand plans of conquest. Starring alongside them are Sebby Kowai, Adrian Lane and FlownBlue.
All proceeds from the digital sales of the compilation on Bandcamp for the first two weeks from the release date (until March 21, 2022) will be sent to the Red Cross Society of Ukraine.
Our Daily Bread 501: Sweeney ‘Stay For Sorrow’
March 8, 2022
ALBUM REVIEW/Graham Domain
Sweeney ‘Stay For the Sorrow’
(sound in silence)
This is the fourth solo album by Jason Sweeney (based in Southern Australia) and what a great record it is; a forlorn song cycle of break-up, sadness, mental illness, loneliness and the pursuit of love.
The influences are many – Mark Hollis, Talk Talk, Cousteau, Ian McCulloch, David Sylvian, Scott Matthew, Galaxy 500, David Ackles, Max Richter, Oren Lavie, John Grant, Perfume Genius, Scott Walker, to name a few, but Sweeney somehow manages to rise above them all and produce a great album that sounds like himself.
The first song ‘Lonely Faces’ reminds me of Cousteau in the vocal phrasing – a plaintiff, mysterious piano with a nice melody. On the chorus his vocals take on an Ian McCulloch vibe (circa Heaven Up Here – A Promise) as he cries …Be Alone. A great track. The next song, ‘The Break Up’ has echoes of early Talk Talk and Mark Hollis with its icy programmed synths and electronic drums. While ‘Home Song’ is a moody slow song with descending piano chords and string synths. Here, all hope seems lost as he mumble-sings ‘saved from this Hell outside’ before the song ends with the forlorn repeated plea to his lover to please come home…
‘Fallen Trees Where Houses Meet’ has a very David Sylvian like title but sounds vocally somewhere in-between Galaxy 500 and David Ackles. The music is a programmed keyboard pattern repeated with icy siren synths as Sweeney sings ‘You tell me there’s no moon tonight’ and other oblique lines creating a fairly atmospheric song that fades out too soon, before it has a chance to progress. ‘You Will Move On’ meanwhile, sounds like a semi-robotic hesitant alien computer trying to communicate. I would have liked to listen to this song again but the link blocked me – such is technology! It reminded me of the great, forgotten, Phillip Jap, atmospheric, a cry for help! ‘Years’ has echoes of the emotional Scott Matthew (the Australian, not the Scott Matthews from Wolverhampton) as Sweeney sings …the fear of life, the fear of death… dreams of life, dreams of death …years go by – the anxiety eventually giving way and opening up to summer birdsong at the end (the light at the end of the tunnel)!
The stand-out song, for me, is ‘Anxiety’ – a lilting piano song, almost upbeat, catchy like Covid, cheerful like Tommy Steel with bipolar, as he sings ‘I may die from anxiety, I can feel it killing me, gnawing inside painfully’. It is actually a beautiful song of sadness, mental illness and slow recovery.
‘Dear Friend’ finds a tired half-asleep drum machine talking to a drunken string machine as a Bryan Ferry song plays at the wrong speed on the jukebox. Reminiscent again of Talk Talk or perhaps even Icehouse. The only miscalculation on the album is the song ‘To Be Done’. Lyrically it’s like a song Stuart Staples might write but is ruined by a middle part that is a direct steal from David Sylvian’s ‘Maria’ – so obvious, he should have scrapped it! The final song ‘I Will Be Replaced’ finds the singer replaced in a relationship by another man, while he despairs to know why? A sad George Michael Careless Whisper saxophone plays to heighten the misery.
Overall, a very good, deep album of songs about sadness, loss and the continual search for love. It is an album where the sadness and struggle are somehow inspiring and uplifting. Highly recommended.
ALBUM REVIEW/Dominic Valvona
John Howard ‘LOOK! The Unknown Story Of Danielle Du Bois’
(Kool Kat Musik) 11th March 2022
Depending on how you measure success of course, you could view John Howard’s career in two ways: the artistic kind (which is really the only one that counts at the end of the day) and the stardom kind. Failing in the later stakes after the damp squib that followed in the wake of the piano-player-songwriter’s 1975 debut on a major label, Kid In A Big World, John’s career hit the rocks; restricted on various occasions by a both idiotic and sympathetic cadre of managers, publicists, producers, labels and well-wishers. All to no avail.
However, through a myriad of anecdotal relayed projects (all written down by the raconteur troubadour, so far, in three volumes of entertaining autobiography) continued across the 70s and 80s, John had to wait until the noughties to finally pick and choose his projects, and to work with whom he wished: on his own terms. Arguably more successful and creatively on fire now than he ever was in the heady heydays of the 70s, he’s enjoying himself; able at last to bang out a concept album without the merest hint or resistance or scoff.
Personally, I’m still holding out for a sequel to the longform cerebral Across The Door Sill album from 2016, and a cover album of Beach Boys maladies, but until then, here’s John’s latest opus; arriving off the back of a rich prolific run of records.
Although billed as a musical concept songbook based on the fictional transgender character Daniel Wood, later to transition into the Paris cause célèbre Danielle Du Bois, LOOK! The Unknown Story Of Danielle Du Bois is a barely veiled sympathetic magnum opus to the late April Ashley. Perhaps amongst the first men to go through sex reassignment surgery at a time when it was so taboo that you had to fly out to a clinic in Casablanca, April’s own life story mirrors that of John’s fictional creation. But I also detect something of, parallels with, John’s own story of escape and search for identity; only allowed to live out his true homosexual spirit when moving away from home to London, where he thrived.
And so, this is a story of identity, rebirth and the lengths someone is willing to go to accomplish their dreams; to transition and discard a previous life, even if it comes back to haunt them: which it does. However, the projection of Daniel Wood is different to that inspired biography, with the boy wonder, despite various travails, a bullying WWII veteran father and a puzzled mother, making it big in the burgeoning music scene of the late 50s and early 60s. With his hit carousel and theatrical harpsichord furnished ‘Every Day A New Adventure’ wowing both national and international audiences alike, the bucks and offers come flooding in. There’s even talk of a Hollywood movie biopic. But Daniel’s journey ends here, as Danielle’s begins: the young pop star leaving it all behind, bound for that reassignment appointment at an exclusive clinic in Paris.
As Daniel is left behind to be dredged back up as a “whatever happened to?” salacious redtop exposé decades later, a new belle hot foots it around the Paris cabaret circuit, struts it out in style through the salons of the exclusive bohemian and arts set; later adored as a sensation and heroine of the LGBT plus community. In another age, able to live as they always wanted, the final deathbed dream sequence reimagines, in theatrical staged pomp, the school daze that never were; played out to a camp rock ‘n’ roll and glam musical accompaniment, a dying, fulfilled Danielle is whisked away by guardian angels to a fantastical classroom of the 1950s to perform an upbeat cast number as the woman she always knew she was.
Despite being of the times and almost overtly on-trend, this album feels like unfinished business; more the ambitious follow-up to Kid In A Big World then a follow-on from his recent catalogue. Musically too, this seems a 70s conceptual piece – not that there’s anything wrong with that – with shades of early Elton & Bernie, Gilbert O’ Sullivan, Bruce Johnston, pre-disco Bee Gees and even a tint of Russell Meal vocally.
In the linear story’s feather boa panache and garish swished parades through the French capital (and even namechecked alongside a soiree of French stars that includes Brigitte Bardot, Gainsbourg and references to the intelligencer: see Jean Genet) there’s a decadent air of Charles Aznavour. And although of course musically at opposite ends, there’s The Who’s Tommy mirror symbolism (both to gaze into but ultimately smash) going on, and the bookend framing of an overture and a reprise. ‘Last Night He Woke Up Screaming’ is the overture of a kind, moving through a slightly ominous nursey rhyme, a sorrowful church organ service, and a lushly swooned backstory; the reprise, ‘A Place In Time (After-ture)’ repeats that dissonant lullaby whilst revisiting musical passages, refrains and touching melodies from the entire album.
John does however evoke a more contemporary Rufus Wainwright on songs like the descriptive left banke accordion wafted goodbye plaintive ‘Good Day Daniel’, and on the cabaret celebration in the face of mortality and aging ‘Still Gorgeous’: a raunchy anthem that ‘brings down the house’.
Filled with brocade and gilded sentiment, chamber orchestrated swells and stage musicals, LOOK! The Unknown Story Of Danielle Du Bois shows a full gamut of variety; a showcase for John’s musicianship, arranging skills and song writing. A perfumed, lush songbook fit for the stage, John’s homage to his late friend shines a sympathetic light on not just April’s travails but those transgender trailblazers (and I’d put the late Jan Morris in that list) that struggled, and still do, to lead the life they should without recrimination and prejudice. All very platitude inducing, but correct nonetheless. John Howard once more has that magic touch, seemingly in his elements, the sagacious polymath enriching us all with his best work five decades on from his initial break. Not many artists can do that.
The Monolith Cocktail Social Playlist #64: The Fall, Your Old Droog, DakhaBrakha, The Jam…
March 4, 2022
PLAYLIST/Curated by Dominic Valvona
The Monolith Cocktail Social is one of two long-running playlist series on the blog. Running in tandem with the Monthly Revue, which represents all the new music both I and the MC team have been listening to and writing about during the month, the Social is a cross-generational, eclectic imaginary radio show, where anything goes: featuring tracks from the last 50 or more years.
Volume #64 features tracks from a number of anniversary celebrating albums. Kicking off proceedings, ‘Jawbone And the Air-Rifle’ is plucked from The Fall‘s 1982 Hex Education Hour, and from the same year, I’ve picked ‘Just Who Is The 5 O’Clock Hero’ from on The Jam‘s swansong The Gift, and the title track from Sparks‘ Angst In My Pants. There’s also the title cut from The Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy‘s 92 special, Hypocrisy Is The Greatest Luxury, a gospel inspired southern roller from The Rolling Stones 72 opus Exile On Main Street and the title track from Faust‘s incredible So Far album.
In solidarity with our Ukraine friends, going through hell-on-earth at the hands of a raving despot, intent on reconquering the collapsed Soviet Union empire and a bit of Peter The Great’s grandiose plan, plus building a corridor to the Balkans, I’ve chosen some venerable, traditional and more contemporary tracks from the country’s artists (and choirs). Step forward the National Choir Of The Ukraine, Your Old Droog, Oleska Suyhodolyak and DakhaBrakha. I could resist including the Bee Gees beautified ‘Odessa‘ too.
Mingling amongst that lot are eclectic tracks from Pugh Rogefeldt, Dennis The Fox, Wau Wau Collectif, OKI, Solid Space, Life Pass Filter, Jim Ford and many others…
THOSE TRACKS IN FULL ARE:::
The Fall ‘Jawbone And the Air-Rifle’
The Jam ‘Just Who Is The 5 O’Clock Hero’
Pugh Rogefeldt ‘Love, Love, Love’
Dennis The Fox ‘Piledriver’
Yesterday’s Children ‘Sad Born Loser’
Rarelyalways & Hanni El Khatib ‘Manic’
The Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy ‘Hypocrisy Is The Greatest Luxury‘
National Choir Of The Ukraine ‘Sviatyj Boje’
Cold Specks ‘Winter Solstice’
The Rolling Stones ‘I Just Want To See Your Face’
Wau Wau Collectif ‘Yaral Sa Doom’
Sven Wunder ‘Magnolia’
Georgia Anne Muldrow ‘Ayun Vegas (Ft. Ayun Bassa)’
Your Old Droog ‘Odessa (Ft. Billy Woods)’
La La Lars ‘Haxa’
Heshoo Beshoo Group ‘Emakhaya’
Fabrizio De Andre ‘Primo Intermezzo’
Sparks ‘Angst In My Pants’
Oleska Suyhodolyak ‘Gutsul Kolomyika (Dance-Song)’
OKI ‘Yaykatekar Dub (Love Dub)’
John Lurie ‘AI AI AI AI’
Sourakata Koite ‘Kano’
Solid Space ‘Radio France’
The Primitives ‘The Ostrich’
DakhaBrakha ‘Vynnaya Ya’
Mike Cooper ‘Boogie Boards And Beach Rubbish’
Robert Wyatt ‘Heaps Of Sheep’
Lua ‘Pozzanghere e Sigarette’
Life Pass Filter ‘Queen Ghat’
Faust ‘So Far’
Lonnie Holley ‘Crystal Doorknob’
The Blue Angel Lounge ‘Bewitch My Senses’
palliatives for dirty consciences ‘breakthrough’
Brigid Dawson And The Mothers Network ‘Ballet Of Apes’
Jim Ford ‘Point Of No Return’
Bee Gees ‘Odessa (City On The Black Sea)’
ALBUM REVIEW/Graham Domain
Simon Grab And Francesco Giudici ‘[No] Surrender’
(-OUS)
[No] Surrender is a Dark Masterpiece, a seething cauldron of anger and an uncompromising aural assault on social injustice and the underlying, ineffective and corrupt systems of power prevalent in modern societies. The greedy, self-serving officers of power protecting and abusing their positions of trust while condemning the community they are meant to represent and serve!
The music, or detailed aural atmospheres, created in the work, inhabit interior worlds of unease, suffocating terror, blackness, claustrophobic darkness, inescapable fear and the closed dark prison of the mind.
‘I Leave’ begins the chilling journey. The music surrounding you like an angry mob. Closing in, the one thought, to escape. But like a nightmare, you cannot move, cannot run, cannot scream, cannot breathe. Silent tears choke and bind the voice box. Suffocating dark sadness. The taste of death, like candy in your mouth.
In ‘Forest Spirit’ a sense of unease pervades, an atmosphere redolent of the 1970’s film The Warriors – trying to make your way home down ill-lit paths, potential violence around every corner! The music unbalanced, static and feedback, like walking through a crumbling dead city of dark looming buildings, cries and wails in the distance, carried on the wind. The blood stains of forgotten terrible murders visible in the moonlit sheen, droning chaos, sweat pouring down a white stretched face, mouth open in silent terror!
In ‘Sirens’ tuneless stalking feedback and footsteps of death echo back along the dark paths of a mind closed down. Hidden. A black wall erected to block out the alien landscape of dust and intermittent sirens. Moonlight seeping through black cloud, the awful bitter taste of death, no saliva in the mouth, sheer panic. A drill pressed hard against exposed nerve, deep wound, cut to the bone! Unsettling disquiet!
In ‘Wolves’ alien insect noise, disturbing, all-consuming smothering sound. High haunting feedback. A noose of sound, pulled tight, gasping for air, submerged in deep water, screaming out blackness. The final thought, terror, confusion, helplessness. Awaiting execution. The merciless look in dead eyes. The waiting, the not knowing! Buried alive, shallow breathing. A crescendo of abject fear.
The last track, ‘Aftermath’ slowly reveals its’ charms of rolling dust, thunder, high pitched feedback and static. Extreme weather engines, the constant pulse of machines, electricity burning through bodies, smoking flesh. The throb of a cold dead hell, insects crawling over the silence. The eternal unremitting high-pitched silence.
[No] Surrender then is the sound of pure evil disguised as benevolence, the helping hand withdrawn for your own good, replaced with the gift of poverty, starvation and death, awarded with a knowing wink and a dazzling smile. Photogenic devastation. Social Injustice has never looked so shiny and bright.
The Album is out now on the –OUS Label as a vinyl album and download album.
ALBUM PIECE/SAMUELE CONFICONI
In a synergy between our two great houses, each month the Monolith Cocktail shares a post (and vice versa) from our Italian pen pals at Kalporz. This month, a purview of the new Big Thief album, Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You by Samuele Conficoni.
Big Thief ‘Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You’ (4AD)
In the throes of a creative fire that has accompanied them for years and which is embodied notably in that of their leader, Adrianne Lenker, epicenter of the extraordinary harmony that the band has achieved since its excellent sophomore album, Capacity , a whirlwind of talent that has given life to the great UFOF and Two Hands and to the equally exceptional songs / instrumental , the solo album that Lenker released in the autumn of 2020, Big Thief proceeded to new lands by not limiting their range of action in any way and making treasure of the experiences accumulated so far. Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You, their fifth album in six years, is the one that Lenker and associates, guitarist Buck Meek, bassist Max Oleartchik and drummer James Krivchenia – here for the first time also as a producer – are now and that shortly they may no longer be, ready for yet another unpredictable and authentic leap forward. The twenty songs on the album are yet another precious piece in the unstoppable and crackling growth path of one of the fittest and most inspired bands of recent years.
Elusive and changeable by nature, the American quartet has long been one with its own music. In fact, it is both what its members “hide” inside, a blanket of fog that somehow brings out the artistic act and makes those who produce it almost disappear, and what gives consistency to the very existences of four, because there is no note or sound that is not the result of their amazing understanding, a sort of competitive trance – to use a metaphor borrowed from the world of sport – which sees the Big Thief making the songs they create and perform. This is why it is in the music itself that they show themselves and that they are blurred, without there being any contradiction in this. In this sense Dragon, in its eighty minutes, it is a daring and decidedly won bet in the course of which the Big Thiefs explore dimensions that they had never explored yet, despite having traveled and described so many, and so different from each other, previously.
It is precisely the brotherhood between the four members of the group and their so clear-cut community of ideas and vision of things that makes everything that the Big Thief bring to life together spiritual and earthly. Here the branches of the cosmic and spiritual element of UFOF and the earthly and terrestrial element of Two Hands intertwine for the first time, condensed seamlessly, and if Dragon lacks conciseness and synthesis – lato sensu – which characterised its two illustrious predecessors is only because its strength lies precisely in its splendidly chaotic organisation, perhaps the best oxymoron that could describe the album, a sort of very personal White Album within the artistic path of the group. That “dragon in the new warm mountain” named in the text of the wonderful “anything” present on Lenker’s songs album now becomes the mysterious and pulsating presence around which this exceptional musical path takes shape and grows.
Driven by the need to give vent to a creative fire that for some years seems to really have no limits and by the need to base this on a sense of artistic freedom that is in no case negotiable, the four sew solid folk episodes on and for themselves, country rides, revealing ballads, psychedelic pop, electric rock blasts, smoky trip-hop hangover and amazing electronic hikes with nothing out of place. It is precisely this poikilía that holds the whole project together with a disconcerting clarity, and it is the allusive art that the band puts on its feet, with elegant and subtle quotes to John Prine and even Portishead, to name only two names, that weaves the fil rougevery fragile yet foundational that runs through the work, fundamental in the understanding of this magnum opus , magnum both in depth and in length. It is for this reason that episodes such as “Flower of Blood”, sharp and irrepressible, whose obstinate rhythm and whose wall of sound are almost unique in the production of the group, which goes in an electronic and distorted direction at other times, can sprout. of the record, the pertinacious “Heavy Bend” and the suffocating “Blurred View”. Even more difficult to describe is that hurricane of Proustian and Joycian images that is “Little Things” , sublime almost psychedelic pop rock that arises from an immersive and all-encompassing amalgam of vocals, guitars, bass and drums.
Dragon is obviously an extraordinary open window on Lenker’s songwriting qualities, in fact for several years she has already become one of the most popular composers in the American music scene. His about her sbragís about her and her own conception of writing emerge almost everywhere in the course of the unfolding of Dragon. A constant in Lenker’s writing, for example, is to try to approach something potentially human that perhaps, however, is not human, and to do it as if one were alien to (and alienated from) it. “Simulation Swarm” is the most perfect realisation of this design: the discomfort in perceiving one’s own corporeality or in not being able to harmonize it with that of others makes one instant weak and suddenly invincible in the immediately following instant; you are on the verge of giving in and letting yourself be overcome by the tumultuous chaos of life until a moment later you are ready to fight even with your bare hands to survive and try to make contact with the creature you are approaching. It is a feeling that can be read in some passages of the Memorial by Paolo Volponi or in some poems-fragments by Giuseppe Ungaretti. Lenker always manages to find a point of balance before the fracture becomes irremediable: the magic of his songs lies above all in this.
The themes that the songs touch are many and fundamental. Lenker’s writing, as we know by now, somehow envelops any nuance of the world, of the existing and the non-existent. In “Certainty”, the only song on the record that, in addition to Lenker’s signature, also carries Meek’s, the pure linguistic game and the desire to concretely represent something that cannot be touched by hand interpenetrate: “Maybe I love you is a river so high / Maybe I love you is a river so low ”, Lenker sings, words that in their apparent simplicity betray an allegorical meaning that is impossible to exhaust in a few verses. Thus, we remain clinging to the passing epiphanies that the piece, through its solid gait built around a captivating melody, disseminates like crumbs of bread in a very dense and dark forest. “Sit on the phone, watch TV / Romance, action, mystery”: it is as if, as Lenker lists them, those actions and names suddenly materialise in front of us, and also the things that once seemed to us more natural and banal now they are part of a primeval and sincere cosmos and therefore take on an inestimable value. And also in “Spud Infinity” the horror vacui of the situations that the song paints us in front of our eyes becomes a statement of solid and highly original poetics, a true instruction manual on how to strike in the depths of the soul through irony and fantasy.
Another element that makes Dragon in part different from its predecessors is the strong collaborative aspect that characterises it. In reality, the external musicians involved are not numerous, but it is the band’s sound that is even wider and more multicoloured than the already very deep and composite one of the twin albums released in 2019. Those represented the akmè of two complementary world-views, and the focus rigorous and centered that they pursued is inevitably and rightly avoided here, shunned from the beginning, in the very conception of what has become Dragon. To make the disc’s nuances even more diversified and iridescent is, for example, the rural fiddle that goes wild in the joyful “Spud Infinity”, whose marked irony actually hides deep and disturbing reflections between the lines, as usual, as revealed by the same Lenker in a recent interview with Pitchfork , and in the romantic “Red Moon”, with a bubbly rhythm. There are also dazzling and bewitching purely folk moments during which Lenker is alone with her voice and guitar, as happens in the enchanting “The Only Place”, one of the most breathtaking moments of the record. “The only place that matters / Is by your side”, Lenker sings as a flame consumes her, as if carried away by her own song.
The mischievously messy appearance that Dragon seems to have betrays an extremely careful and precise organisation. The determination of the group is impressive and James Krivchenia’s production is versatile and detailed and is emblematic of the group’s choice to record the album in four different locations, Massachusetts, New York, California and Arizona, which in part follows what had happened. for UFOF and Two Hands , the first, dreamlike and ecstatic, recorded in the Seattle metropolitan area, the second, pungent and direct, recorded between California and Arizona. In Dragon coexist an even greater number of places and people encountered in this musical and geographical journey. To connect the dots is the Lenker’s excellent songwriting is his voice, warm and enveloping, and that kind of spell that seems to kidnap the quartet every time he starts playing, a quartet that, owned by some daimon , is ready once again to amaze us.
RATED:: 80/100
(Samuele Conficoni)
The Monthly Playlist: February 2022: Animal Collective, Future Kult, Che Noir, Your Old Droog, Orlando Weeks…
February 28, 2022
PLAYLIST SPECIAL
An encapsulation of the last month, the Monolith Cocktail team (Dominic Valvona, Matt Oliver, Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea and Graham Domain) chose some of the choicest and favourite tracks from February. It may have been the shortest of months, yet we’ve probably put together our largest playlist in ages: all good signs that despite everything, from Covid to the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, artists, bands everywhere are continuing to create.
65 tracks, over 4 hours of music, February’s edition can be found below:
That exhaustive track list in full:::
Animal Collective ‘Walker’
Modern Nature ‘Performance’
Gabrielle Ornate ‘Spirit Of The Times’
The Conspiracy ‘Red Bird’
Cubbiebear/Seez Mics ‘All Friended Up’
Dubbledge/Chemo ‘Itchy Itchy’
Dirty Dike ‘Bucket Kicker’
Future Kult ‘Beasts With No Name’
Lunch Money Life ‘Jimmy J Sunset’
Ben Corrigan/Hannah Peel ‘Unbox’
Uncommon Nasa ‘Epiphany’
War Women Of Kosovo ‘War Is Very Hard’
Ben Corrigan/Douglas Dare ‘Ministry 101’
Sven Helbig ‘Repetition (Ft. Surachai)’
Ayver ‘Reconciliacion Con La Vida’
Lucidvox ‘Swarm’
Provincials ‘Planetary Stand-Off’
Wovenhand ‘Acacia’
Aesop Rock ‘Kodokushi (Blockhead Remix)’
Junglepussy ‘Critiqua’
Tanya Morgan/Brickbeats ‘No Tricks (Chris Crack) Remix’
Buckwild ‘Savage Mons (Ft. Daniel Son, Lord Jah-Monte Ogbon & Eto) Remix’
Che Noir ‘Praises’
Koma Saxo w/Sofia Jernberg ‘Croydon Koma’
Medicine Singers/Yontan Gat/Jamie Branch ‘Sanctuary’
Black Josh/Milkavelli/Lee Scott ‘Die To This’
Funky DL ‘I Can Never Tell (Ft. Stee Moglie)’
Mopes ‘Home Is Like A Tough Leather Jacket’
ANY Given TWOSDAY ‘Hot Sauce (Ft. Sum)’
Split Prophets/Res One/Bil Next/Upfront Mc/0079 ‘Bet Fred’
Nelson Dialect/Mr. Slipz/Vitamin G/Verbz ‘Oxford Scholars’
Immi Larusso/Morriarchi ‘Inland’
Homeboy Sandman ‘Keep That Same Energy’
Wax Tailor/Mick Jenkins ‘No More Magical’
Ilmiliekki Quartet ‘Sgr A*’
Your Old Droog/The God Fahim ‘War Of Millionz’
Ramson Badbonez/Jehst ‘Alpha’
Ghosts Of Torrez ‘The Wailing’
Pom Poko ‘Time’
Daisy Glaze ‘Statues Of Villians’
Orange Crate Art ‘Wendy Underway’
Seigo Aoyama ‘Overture/Loop’
Duncan Park ‘Rivers Are A Place Of Power’
Drug Couple ‘Linda’s Tripp’
Ebi Soda/Yazz Ahmed ‘Chandler’
Brian Bordello ‘Yes, I Am The New Nick Drake’
Psychedelic Porn Crumpets ‘Bubblegum Infinity’
Steve Gunn ‘Protection (Ft. Mdou Moctar)’
Jane Inc. ‘Contortionists’
Black Flower ‘Morning in The Jungle (Ft. Meskerem Mees)’
Jo Schornikow ‘Visions’
The Goa Express ‘Everybody In The UK’
Pintandwefall ‘Aihai’
Thomas Dollbaum ‘God’s Country’
Crystal Eyes ‘Don’t Turn Around’
Glue ‘Red Pants’
Super Hit ‘New Day’
Legless Trials ‘Junior Sales Club Of America’
Monoscopes ‘The Edge Of The Day’
Alabaster DePlume ‘Don’t Forget You’re Precious’
Orlando Weeks ‘High Kicking’
Carl Schilde ‘The Master Tape’
Bank Myna ‘Los Ojos de un Cielo sin Luz’
Park Jiha ‘Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans’
Simon McCorry ‘Interstices’
The Perusal #26: Jane Inc., Nova Charm, Ismabard Khroustaliov, Houseplants, Bank Myna…
February 25, 2022
A LOOK AT WHAT’S OUT THERE/DOMINIC VALVONA
FIRST RESPONDERS: SINGLES/VIDEOS/TRACKS
Jane Inc. ‘Contortions’
(Telephone Explosion Records)
Pretty enamoured with Toronto music scene instigator Carlyn Bezic‘s most recent incarnation, Jane Inc., the debut fruits from that solo endeavour, last year’s Number One album, made our ‘choice albums of 2021’. Something different, escapist even from Carlyn’s musical partnership with Amanda Crist in the synth pop duo Ice Cream, and her roles as a foil to Meg Remy in U.S. Girls and Darlene Shrugg, the Jane persona pouts as much as agonizes under a glitter ball, the rays of light that sparkle from its mirror reflective spins turning into needle sharp cuts at topics that include the harmful effects of social media, our sense of self worth, and the soul-sucking results of gentrification. On a similar but different wave, Carlyn ups the sparse pop and Moroder-esque arpeggiator ratio (with what sounds like a feint echo of Chaka Khan) on her new Jane Inc. single ‘Contortion’. Label mate Dorothea Paas (of U.S. Girls, Badge Epoque Ensemble fame) offers ethereal like backing vocal on an anxious sentiment about time.
The second Jane Inc. album, Faster Than I Can Take, is release by Telephone Explosion on the 22nd April 2022. Keep an eye out for our review.
Širom ‘Grazes, Wrinkles, Drifts Into Sleep’
(Glitterbeat Records)
Declaration time. Yes, I did write the press release, words for this exceptional imaginative folk and avant-garde Slovene trio. And so it does feel a little odd recommending it, but here we go. From the dream-realists new and most epic, transportive long form album yet, The Liquified Throne of Simplicity, the incredible scenic, illusionary and pastoral ‘Grazes, Wrinkles, Drifts into Sleep’.
For the first time the trio ignore the normal time constraints of a standard vinyl record to fashion longer, more fully developed entrancing and hypnotising peregrinations. This new, amended, approach results in 80 minutes of abstract and rustic folklore, explorative intensity and cathartic ritual. And within that array of realms there’s evocations of Jon Hassell’s Fourth World experiments, visions of Samarkand, the esoteric mysteries of Tibet, an unplugged faUSt and pastoral hurdy-gurdy churned Medieval Europe.
The Liquified Throne of Simplicity will be released via Glitterbeat Records on the 8th April 2022.
Crystal Eyes ‘Don’t Turn Around’
(Bobo Intergral)
Thankfully not a god awful version of Azwad’s hit, but something far more promising: hazed psychedelic and 80s alt-rock dream propulsions. Yes, the Alberta band are back with a new softened pummel of gauze-y moodiness. Guitar riffs communed from Joy Division, Simple Minds and U2 ring out and are held over a live drum loop, and C86 via shoegaze wafted, and almost howled, Anita Lane reminiscent vocals. ‘Don’t Turn Around’ is taken from the upcoming album, The Sweetness Restored, released via Bobo Integral on the 22nd April 2022.
PTČ ‘LP’
The second track/video from Slovenia this week, couldn’t be more different. The Ljubljana based duo of PTČ must be part of one of the smallest minority genres in Europe: Slovenian Hip-Hop. That aside, they’re really good, and this is the second track we’ve covered – last summer it was the duo’s ‘PAPAGAJ’ single, which featured fellow compatriot and rapper Vazz (check him out on youtube).
New single-video ‘LP’ (that tile refers to the Slovene abbreviation for yours truly) takes us through some of the Slovenian capital’s hidden gems to the sound of experimental Massive Attack like break beats, long moody synth, and a deep sense of unease.
THE ALBUMS AND EXTENDED RELEASES
Houseplants ‘II’
(Win Big Records) 4th March 2022
It’s a difficult task, keeping up with the highly prolific Oli Heffernan. Another season, another alias and moniker. This time around it’s a return to the Houseplants collaboration, a relatively short exchange with only one previous release to its name (a debut cassette from 2016).
Six years on, arriving in the wake of a multitude of projects (King Champion Sounds, University Challenged) and after a long run of Ivan The Tolerable releases, Oli is back with oft foil Leighton Crook (of Country Teasers, Arndales and Badgewearer infamy) to put the world to rights on the succinct entitled II hallucination. To further the dreamy, languid cause, the ranks are swelled by Neil Turpin’s (of Bilge Pump, Objections and Yann Tiersen providence) live drums and Robbie Major’s (of Benefits) synths. All together they traverse a despondent broken land and trawl the Internet of shame, with Leighton drip-feeding a deadpan and disdainful “eat dirt and die” form of gonzo and street philosophy poetry over swimmingly dubby, krautrock and psychedelic waves of music.
With a wide net cast the influences are unending; the beat and spoken word delivery of ‘The Barrows’ evoking Renegade Soundwave, Dan Tracey, Ian Dury, Jah Wobble, the Untied Knot and a droopy Spaceman 3. ‘I Want To Drive You Home’ could be a lost Silver Apples communion with a relaxed motorik Klaus Dinger; perhaps even Fujiya & Miyagi caught in a vortex with Unlimited outtakes Can and the 13th Floor Elevators. ‘Half A Monkey Loser’ sounds more like The Specials on the mosquito coast – though one repeated echoed sound evokes the thawing out dripping of icicles. Lyric wise a pretty vacant haze of dystopian capitalism and online miasma is delivered over that semi-tropical backing: “I am a new Nostradamus, an old school rapper, your best friend online, and your favourite stripper. I have one million dollars and a soul like a crater.”
By the end declaration the musical mood is more Alan Vega and the Stardust Cowboy; a gauzy, druggy malaise that contrasts the gammon faced insults of the lyrics.
My take is a cosmic, lava lamp acid trip with lax post-punk and krautrock inspirations, laid down for a rich if defeated narration and poetry reading summary of a miserable world filled the nouveau riche, online influencers, greedy avarice, unbalanced capitalism (take that has a given), the shambolic decisions taken at Westminster, Brexit (another given), fake news misinformation and the stirring up of division: did I miss anything? We are but apes wearing ties, caught up in the maelstrom; locked into the vacuous unimportance of trivia: something like that anyway. Make room in the house for these, anything but innocuous, plants, you won’t regret it.
Nova Charm ‘Bracelet’
(Pain Management) 4th March 2022
Scanning a desolate opioid-dependent wasteland of mental stresses in the tent cities of a one-sided, unbalanced, unkind and failed economic strategy, the dissonant union of both the candid, chronic and near-hysterical wordsmith Die The Monk and skull-crush industrial beatmaker N.O.I.S.E.W.I.Z.A.R.D. grind and drill on their opening salvo debut, Bracelet.
The inaugural pummelling and paranoiac statement from the duo marks not only their first furore but introduces us to this partnership’s ambitions as a self-starter label collective, which promises a host of like-minded, bruised and battered by the system artist releases throughout 2022, all under the Pain Management umbrella. Spilt personality psychosis and millennial Salinger echoes of phony-ism, corruption and the pressures of a 24/7 connective online lifestyle are wrapped up in a part scowled, part resigned, part seething style of trap and industrial rap. This is delivered over and around a concentrated, heavy menace of underpass grime, sinister NIN-like beat tortures, the hyperventilated and the most caustic of noises. Together it sounds like a brilliant pneumatic headache of Death Grips, Ghostemane, IC3Pack, Nick Blackos, Nukuluk, Gizmo and Cadence Weapon. On the strength of this, I’d say this union and collective look very promising.
Deepak Pandit & Pratibha Singh Baghel w/the Budapest Symphony Orchestra ‘Inheritance’
(Sufiscore) 14th February 2022
The idea, to breathe new life into the 19th century Indian romantic poems and melodies known as “thumris”, is certainly all correct and proper. Yet the collaboration between the acclaimed composer/violinist Deepak Pandit, the diaphanous voiced Hindustani singer Pratibha Singh Baghel and the post WWII established Budapest Symphony Orchestra proves pretty timeless.
Sentimental, romantic and plaintive poetics from an age of tumult, including the exiled (by the British Raj) last king of Awadh, Wajid Al Shah’s morning Raga-inspired and much cherished ‘Babul Mora Najhar Chhooto Jaye’ (reconfigured and shortened to ‘Babul More’: “oh father of mine”), are indeed given a beautifully dramatic lift and swoon.
Pratibha channels her Bollywood cinematic grounding, a suggestion of stage, theatre to reach softly undulated ethereal heights and to reflect various states of emotion: longing, yearning and heartily romantic. Her incredible voice floats or fluctuates over the brassy resonating drones, fluttered and tapped table and the orchestral swells, spirals and moving punctuations.
Deepak’s twenty-year spanning work with the late “ghazel” vocal legend Jagit Singh puts him in good stead for composing the right tones and arrangements for his foil of five years; especially on the adapted ‘Hamari Atariya’ (“come to my balcony”). This lyrical landscape analogy thumri waivers beautifully between Raga, jazz, the classical and balletic. The latter is hardly surprising, as this 19th century form is also associated with dance and dramatic gestures (mind eroticism too!), the name deriving itself from the Hindi verb “thumakna”, which means to “walk with dancing steps so the ankle bells tinkle”. There’s plenty of that going on by the way; shaking, chimed and shimmered danced trinkets and bells.
All of which is augmented and lifted even further by the Daniel Boico led Budapest Symphony Orchestra, those signature Indian sounds and gestures given a greater atmosphere and rousing sense of gravitas. This collaborative merger sounds positively cinematic on the aching, sorrowful mused ‘Saiyaah Bina’, and almost starry on the ascending strings-rich ‘Lakhon Ke Bol’.
It’s a match made in heaven; a passing of the baton to another generation who’ve managed to capture the poetic forms courtly and romantic sensual origins whilst expanding the musical scope and delivery. Inheritance is a lovingly, vocally outstanding, crafted vision of that extraordinary language and art.
Ismabard Khroustaliov ‘Shanzhai Acid’
(Not Applicable Recordings) 4th March 2022
The award winning, far too qualified, electronic and sound composer Sam Britton is at it again, fusing humankind with the machine in yet another A.I. type project; this time around interacting with modular synthesizers to create some very ‘granular’ fizzled and whirred space oddities.
A serial offender in this department with the notable Long Division and Fake Fish Distribution experiments and through collaborations with such lauded operators as the Aphex Twin (via the Remote Orchestra project) and Matthew Herbert (New Radiophonic Workshop), Britton, under the Ismabard Khroustaliov alias, lets automation, through some guidance, once more lets digital do the talking and thinking. The results of which prove simultaneously quaintly amusing, galactic, supernatural, scientific, haywire and messed up.
Both signals from Geiger-counters and Fortean Times spirit detectors click across a rewired kosmische bed of raspberry blowing electronics, propeller powered leviathans and slithered fuzz on the first few ‘cybernetic’ experiments. After that it’s all disjointed beeper communications, cosmic feedback, flutters, zips, bity-ness, squints and accelerating loop-da-loops.
The notes mention Autuchere and Fennesz, which seems fair, but you can also add a touch of Faust’s synth oscillating maverick Gunter Westhoff’s solo work, maybe some Kluster (when Conrad Schnitzler was in tow) and even some µ-Ziq to that list.
Of course, all electronic music in some degree is autonomous, and has certainly made it easier to replace, make humans surplus to requirement. But in this instance, I’m assured humans won’t be replaced anytime soon. Still, a very interesting project.
Bank Myna ‘Volaverunt’
(Araki Records/A La Dérive Records (CA)/Stellar Frequencies/Duality Records/Cold Dark Matter Records) 25th February 2022
Highly atmospheric invocations of Gothic, doom and incense-burning Byzantine dark arts are conjured up by the French trio of Bank Myna on their debut multilingual album, Volaverunt (which translates as “they flew away”).
Composed in ‘one go’, an almost seamless five-act singular soundtrack, this mystical suffused esoteric turn is a slow-burning candle lit covenant of wafted ethereal siren vocals and sustained skulking acid-folk, psych-magick and krautrock. A gradual build-up of the Telescopes and Godspeed You! Black Emperor drone sculpting, the entrancing scores of early Popol Vuh and Tibetan evoked meditations of Ash Ra Tempel slowly hit a swelled, dramatic climax of scaling, squalling and heavy-loaded doomy drums as the trio stir the cauldron and cross the Styx. With an assemblage of chiming clocks and noise box effects alongside more traditional instrumentation and summoning vocals (though sometimes they sound like a very removed All About Eve) Bank Myna mix Greek tragedy with the industrial and Acid Mothers as they open up the doors of perception for an epic, progressive score that’s part dread, part allurement, but all very mystifyingly serious.
Neuro…No Neuro ‘Faces & Fragments’
(Audiobulb Records) 2nd March 2022
Transducing an organized bauble of fizzled, blurred and decaying memories and recollections into a crisper hallucination of mostly clean tubular icicles, crystal bulb arpeggiator, primal pops and liquids, and a general cosmic oddness, the arid-plane based Tuscon, Arizona synthesist, drummer and artist Kirk Markarian delivers an electronic mirage with his new album, Faces & Fragments.
Under the binary Neuro…No Neuro alias Kirk, we’re told, ‘illuminates fragments of memory and speech, as they wander out of focus in the growing aperture of time’. This translates into 12 tracks – the final track and thirteenth, ‘And The Energy Goes Back To The Ground’, is the one exception (relatively a sci-fi ambient etude with orbiting synthesised waves) – of gate-clipped and interrupted Mouse On Mars bleeps, Sakamoto’s most far-out early 80s experiments on his new computer, cult library music, a futuristic scoring Vangelis and slurred, slowed down voices from inside the machine.
Fragments then of fuzzy hive buzzes, cartoon sounds and sub-bass grumbles flicker in and out of Kirk’s mind. A trip switch makes sure that the flow is, although mostly liquefied and spongy in sonic shaping, constantly stopped: Just as one detuned loop, Forbidden Planet power source, blob-y collection of notes, clicks and retro computer calculus appears it’s soon cut off. A strangely disrupted soundtrack appears like a futuristic dream from a broken feed. Kirk does however shine, illuminate with certain clarity on the most clean if weird of radiating abstract electronic navigations.
It’s as much down to his painter’s eye as it is his ear that these electronic episodes prompt the ‘synesthete’ in me: a mix of pastel-shaded pink oblongs and washed-out red cylinders and round bottomed shapes if you must know; not unlike Kirk’s album artwork itself. Colours, shapes, memory chips have never sounded quite so interesting.
Le Pietre Dei Giganti ‘Vetie e Culti’
(Overdub Recordings) 25th February 2022
The Florence quartet find runes, mystical masks and portals to other worlds instead of love seats or lovers initials craved into the trees of the esoteric forest they traverse on their second album, Vetie e Culti (or in English, “vetoes and cults”). For this is album is an atmospheric balance of dark arts and the light: the dreamy too.
Almost organic, naturel, a bridge between the surreal and magical characters of the artist alchemist DEM and us humans, this album proposes a sort of ‘co-existence’ between the Chthonian and Apollinarian: with all its crushing doubt dread and escapism. Latin deamonic and primal rituals meet on the forest pathway; the wild, barely tamed caravan of romanticists and philosophy bookworms invited to take leave of their hangups for a both supernatural and dramatic musical journey of highs and lows.
Le Pietre Dei Giganti embark on a successfully well-planned, thought out epic of Medieval romance, the classics, Dante’s Inferno, woodland folklore and grinding bestial black magic – like a doom-metal version of Aphrodite’s Child ala 666.
If a Gothic Piano Magic led by a Tarot card fatalistic Mighty Joe Moon era Grant Lee Buffalo ever existed on some imaginary plane, this is what it would sound like. That and a spell of Soundgarden, Audioslave, Royal Blood, Muse, Mazeppa, Wovenhand and Pink Floyd. Actually, a lot of Floyd, albeit one lurking under dark forest canopies, ritualistically reaching out to the underworld, rather than setting the controls for the heart of the sun.
Progressive then in parts, dragging a leaded coffin over crushed bones in others, this heavy vision also offers ambiguous monastic throat singers, timeless interludes, poetic Jeff Buckley vocal highs, shimmers of radiance, and on ‘Polvere’ (“dust”) even a brief glimpse of soft, languid hazy Bacharach trumpet.
I wouldn’t call it a masterpiece, but Vetie e Culti is a powerful grinded and enlightened fantasy from the Italian group; serious, pained yet open to far more optimistic escapism.
Gidouille ‘Zineogenesis’
(Wormhole World) 25th February 2022
It’s been a long since I’ve seen a Marshal McLuhan quote, let alone hear a record inspired by the media Cassandra. My own knowledge is rusty (it was over twenty years ago, in my formative years at art school since I studied him), but I’m surprised the 20th century philosopher’s soothsayer pronouncements haven’t gained more traction in a world he had foreseen; especially his good old maxim that ‘The medium is the message’ one-liner.
Falling out of style perhaps, his tracts on the future of media, its delivery, aren’t even disputed. Here, on Gidouille’s new release, Zineogenesis, his ‘laws of media’ are cut-up into quarters and represented through the prism of the ‘fanzine’; the physicality, attachment of which kept the avant-garde group going during the lockdowns.
Each heading (Enhance, Flip, Retrieve and Obsolesce) is discussed, treated across an experimental, atmospheric and often kosmische or krautrock art school sound and talked collage. From the mouths of four chosen fanzine heads, thoughts and documentary style encapsulations of the whys and wherefores of producing the tangible in the Internet age (a place in which long term relationships with creators is scarce and where the transient, surface is overpowering anything more meaningful and deeper) are merged with sound-effects and streams of consciousness music. In an era of click validation, the art of small interest fanzines reminds us of what we’ve lost; the ease, democratization (to a point) of blogging having mostly replaced those cottage industries. And so, it’s refreshing to hear such dedicated ventures, immortalised as they are on this homage (of a kind).
Invited to offer their perceptions, processes, self-awareness is TQ Zine’s Andy Wood, Letomagic Zone’s Jan Stöver (who also produced the artwork for this album), Curious British Television Zine’s Ben Ricketts and Breath Like The Trunk Of A Tree and a myriad of illustrative zines creator Jean McEwan. Their words are looped, often obscured, and melded with a highly experimental soundscape of constant Xerox photocopier printing, analogue bubbled pops and clicks, Morse and Geiger counter signals, lingering’s of saxophone and flute, and coarse electrode scratches. Distant suffusions of the heavenly, supernatural and mechanical appear throughout on four pieces of strange abstract curious devices; a meeting of underground figures in an ether of Cage, Froese, Ilhan Mimaroglu, Faust, Throbbing Gristle and the Italian and Spanish agit-political tape cultures of the 70s and 80s.
A celebration of that whole zine culture then, each participant in this exploration echoes, in their own inimitable fashion, McLuhan’s principles, augurs. In a nutshell, that every form of media ‘enhances’ something, can ‘flip’ it, ‘retrieves’ something from the past and makes something ‘obsolescent’ – the end process of the obsolete, outdated and no longer used. That final marker hasn’t quite come to fruition, as these zinesters are still hard at it, sharing their thoughts, writing, and producing art through a physical format: though Andy Wood brings up the idea of maybe creating a PDF version of his zine, already using the ‘flip’ principle by producing a CDR copy of a “virtual gig”. Jean McEwan for her part describes a whole list of reasons why she produces zines, seeing it as “a real valuable way of processing an experience”, of “exploring a thought”, “communicating and idea”. But also, as a diary, a space in which to process and reflect.
Thank god such tactile souls exist. Ironically this review appears online, but the sentiment remains, as Homeboy Sandman and Edan once rapped in unison, “never use the internet again”. Down with the empirical and fatuous and viva the fanzines, because even in the face of an ever-growing screen-obsessed society these guys are fighting back with something far more tangible.
Park Jiha ‘The Gleam’
(tak:til/Glitterbeat Records) 25th February 2022
Into a fourth year partnership with the instrumental, exploratory tak:til label – a sister act to Glitterbeat Records – the adroit South Korean musician Park Jiha turns attention to the light on her third international solo album The Gleam.
The light in question, from the first gleams of sunrise to the last gleam of light that dies away as the day turns to night, is captured by Jiha who transduce’s the changeable, fleeting patterns and impressions of that source on a number of textures both naturalistic and coarse.
Previous albums have featured a number of collaborators, but this time around Jiha flies’ solo with a contemplated octet of suites; taking up a solitary position as a light gazer, recording what we often take for granted, the play, the natural geometric shapes of light and they way it indicates, measures time.
Unsurprisingly Covid had a lot to do with the manner in which The Gleam was fashioned: pushing back a performance of the ‘meditative improvisation’ ‘Temporary Inertia’, destined for a bunker-like designed space by the architect Ando Tadao. This frayed minimalistic encapsulation of daylight from the artist/observer brings this emotive, transporting album to a close, but it acts as a leitmotif, thematic inspiration for the rest of the album’s considered performances.
Jiha’s transformative sound is created by the use of a distinctive sounding ‘piri’ double-reed bamboo flute, the soaring twanged ‘saenghwang’ mouth organ, softly paddled ‘yanggeum’ hammered dulcimer and the glockenspiel. Played separately, in couplets or together these mostly southeast Asian instruments can sound very exotic, and always atmospheric: ‘At Dawn’ evokes a sonorous, sometimes piercing, roused from sleep scenery that’s ancient and serene, whilst searing ray-lit mirrored ‘Sunshine; A Song Of Two Humans’ (originally created as a live soundtrack for the black and white movie of the same name) is almost venerable with the light pouring in through a stained glass window.
Park Jiha successfully and intricately conveys a sprawling, fanned and also singular evanescent light source that never quite falls upon the array of surfaces or in the spaces that the artist instinctively reflects, in the exact same way twice.
Something we often take for granted – painter’s aside – is made melodically and sonically eternal on yet another highly tactile, resonate album that pushes the boundaries and our understanding of South Korean music in the 21st century.
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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.
Premiere (Video): Ben Osborn ‘Are We The Flood?’
February 24, 2022
WORDS/Dominic Valvona
Artwork by Andrea Huyoff
Ben Osborn ‘Are We The Flood?’
Video/Single 24th February 2022
In the months that have passed since the last “global emergency” climate summit, in my home city of Glasgow, the far from clear solutions to this looming threat disappeared in a quagmire of crisis: take your pick the from the Omicron wave to the cost-of-living, energy and Russian invasion of Ukraine emergencies. As a prompt, the modern day renaissance man Ben Osborn offers up a timely reminder of the impending, and now almost irreversible, consequences of failing to plan and tackle an ecological disaster.
Less Biblical, the singer-songwriter, poet-troubadour, Theatre composer, sound-designer takes a both wistful and melancholic line, delivered with a considered melodic acoustic-electronic and neoclassical score, on his latest single and video. Ahead of the new “transdisciplinary” EP collaboration with his Nonostar label hub foil of the last few years Alex Stolze and visual artist Andrea Huyoff, the posed ‘Are We The Flood?’ song expresses the grief and a persuasive indictment of the politics that has ignored a “planet in danger”.
Both the enormity and absurdity of the situation is represented by Huyoff’s video, premiered on the Monolith Cocktail today. In that video a rather placid performing Ben is enveloped by screens within screens of flickers and more colourful explosive images, video games, symbols and disasters, whilst performers Anneka Schwabe and Kira Kirsch hold up wave scenery props and interrupt a silent scream of tumult in the face of an overwhelming destructive flood.
Photo by Matthias Lüdecke
Beautifully, if tragically, described images (“We’ll be saved, if the waves rise up, over the land/We’ll build our nest on the chimney, out of driftwood and crushed aluminium cans”) are decried, yet kept almost hushed in a Leonard Cohen-like husk. Subtle wooden sounds, instruments creak and stretch and a light flurry of delicate laced notes are all that’s needed to convey the sentiment at first; only later introducing more rhythmically jazzy-swing trip-hop drums as Ben plaintively delivers the real hurt in the plumes of poisonous smoke, the debris and mud that has entombed a lifetime of mementoes.
The Oxford, now residing in Berlin, polymath continues his creatively rich and enduring collaboration with the German star, violinist, producer and record label owner Alex Stolze; once again releasing a flurry of taster “studies” singles in the run-up to a new multidisciplinary EP project of performance, video, poetic pop songs and a series of lectures on Alex’s Nonostar. Previous releases for that label include Ben’s critically received debut album Letters From The Border.
Ben is a director of the Open Music Lab, an activist-led musical cooperative and collaborative learning space for refugees, immigrants and other marginalised communities; many of which have been forced to make the dangerous crossing into Europe because of the effects of climate change. Now focusing on the greatest threat this planet has had to face, Ben poetically sets alarm bells ringing as the flood waters come crashing inland: an augur, signal that we may very well have run out of time already.
Our Daily Bread 498: Carl Schilde ‘Europop’
February 23, 2022
ALBUM REVIEW/Graham Domain
Carl Schilde ‘Europop’
(Fun In The Church) 4th February 2022
The album title is very misleading – suggesting perhaps, an album of Eurovision synth pop! This may lead to a number of people ignoring this great record! In reality, the title refers to Carl Schilde’s country of origin, being born and raised in West Berlin, Germany in the 1980s but now living in Toronto, Canada. Involved in other musical ventures, this is his debut solo album and very good it is!
The first song ‘Top 40’ sets out the sound of the record, a mixture of sublime 70s soft rock and southern soul augmented by analogue synths and keyboards. The vocals sounding most like Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner (albeit in a higher register). The first song features Chris Isaak-like tremolo guitar licks adding to the laid-back vibe of the music.
By song number 2, ‘John Stamos’, we touch on a theme of the record, the struggle of the unknown artist to be heard, with Carl ‘trying to find my place in the world where everything has been done before.’ The theme continues into the third song Road-worn, with musicians soon giving up their dream of musical success to get a proper job – but still keeping hold of their road-worn instruments, just in case! Another song ‘Phase’ details the delight of the unknown artist to receive a mention, a review or even an acknowledgment of their existence, either physically in a magazine or in an internet blog! Such encouragement can mean a lot to the individual and spur them on!
Meanwhile, the song ‘The Master Tape’ begins with soothing piano arpeggios and acoustic guitar, but soon takes on an air of sad resignation as self-doubt creeps in (and a recording session ends in tears) with Carl singing ‘It’s impossible, I know, to recapture a feeling … it’s impossible, like trying to remember a dream … let’s break up the band … I keep breaking up the band’
Elsewhere, In the song ‘Soft Dads’ we get wry lyrics reminiscent of Bill Callahan (Smog) ‘remember when the 80’s still felt like the 70s’ … ‘when shit gets real, I’ll be the first to fall’. The lovely laid-back tunes continue throughout, at times sounding not unlike Sam Dee’s 1973 album The Show Must Go On while at other times touching on a kind of Stuart Staples or Tindersticks vibe.
There is sublime accompaniment throughout by the talented James Yates on drums, while Laura Gladwell provides excellent girl group harmonies, most notably on the wonderful instrumental ‘Landline Pt 2’ where she sounds like a mermaid sighing in the ocean or perhaps a siren singing a ship and its crew to their doom!
The final song ‘Credits’ sees the singer and his lover enjoying the simple things in life, having the same values, staying for the credits at the end of a film, not caring about money, not being materialistic. Lovely arpeggiated keyboards come in towards the end of the song lifting the music up into a revered state, like a shift in consciousness. It ends with the sound of wind chimes blowing in the wind! All cares gone, for now. The full moon lighting up the night bringing a sudden clarity of thought.
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