The Perusal #21: Lexagon, SAD MAN, David Lance Callahan, King Champion Sounds, Vapors Of Morphine…
October 11, 2021
A LOOK AT WHAT’S OUT THERE THIS MONTH/ALBUM & EP Reviews by Dominic Valvona
Lexagon ‘Feminine Care’
(Ratskin Records) Available Now
A most hypnotic, haunting release of built-up pressures, the release valve for the protestations and stresses of life under the Trump administration, the multidisciplinary artist Lexagon exhales a whole mini-epoch of frustrations on the incredibly atmospheric new album Feminine Care.
Through many ‘incarnations’ Lexagon roams, meanders and drifts across an amorphous soundscape, imbued by the spiritual longing of the black diaspora, the bayou and Deep South. Traces of trip-hop, new soul, the blues, gospel, early U.S. Girls lo fi, Francine Thirteen, Moor Mother, Tricky and, on the heavy breathing confrontation turn internalised soliloquy ‘Sugawata’, the Aphex Twin can be picked out amongst the environmental field recordings of wading through grasslands, bird song and more mysterious spheres.
With a title that both plays with and confronts the sanitized, compartmentalized named American drugstore aisle put aside for tampons and sanitary products, there’s nothing less at stake then the full gamut of feminine identity and language in an age in which held beliefs and constructs seem to be challenged to the point of destruction. Yet Lexagon’s themes grow even wider, taking in a panoply of events, from climate change to displacement.
Of the air and earth this most sensual, softly heaved gauzy and esoteric communal of veiled self-discovery draws you further and further into Lexagon’s vocalized, narrated and lulled sonic world. Serious when it needs to be, yet before you know it, the apparitional whispers and coos suddenly pay an almost sultry kink-poetic “lovesick ode” to female ejaculation on the finger clicking, sonorous bowl circling ‘Hurricane’: though this ghostly visitation exudes a slightly creepy vibe.
Lexagon’s voice guides us with scraps of journal entries, quiet diaphanous arias, woes, confessionals and transcendental “om” like spiritualism; winding, or embodying, the floated and wafted musical accompaniment of drifted Omni chord, train track rhythms, pattered and scrunched beats, warped curves and pumped hallucinations. The manifestation concerns of how it feels to be both literally and psychologically poor and without a stake in society; the tidal shifts of emotional insecurity and yearns for comfort; and the mental fatigue, exhaustion of a hostile environment are all channeled in the bewitching magic of this artist’s sensory rites of passage. Soul music from the ether, spiritual jazz vibrations from beyond this realm, Feminine Care is a woozy affair of true evocative brilliance: blues for the 21st century.
SAD MAN ‘5 Years Of Being SAD’
16th October 2021
The mind boggles at what motivates the humanoid behind the plaintive, despondent SAD MAN moniker. Whatever uppers, downers and madcap tomfoolery fuels Andrew Spackman’s electronic lunacy will remain an enigma.
Initially under the Duchampian chess move appellation of Nimzo Indian, Spackman has maintained various secret identities over the years, though the longest running alter ego, and most prolific, so far remains that SAD MAN guise. After 5 years, 18 albums and nearly 200 original pieces of music, the potting shed boffin-artist, composer and producer rounds up this “epic productive period” with a compilation of highlights and unconscious, untethered, streams of sonic confusion and madness (though Spackman has also celebrated his third anniversary with a similar compilation too).
To make it even more complicated in keeping track of his numerous outputs, Spackman has remixed his own original tracks across a trio of Indigenous Mix albums – some of his best work to date, and the reason that he’s selected four tracks from the most recent volume for this compilation. He’s also started moving into the soundtrack arena, recently collaborating with the Irish storyteller Francis Lowe on the narrative stream ‘Stories From An Island’ album for Cue Dot Records. Talking of soundtracks, a trio of oscillating, reverberating and more obscured breathing looped suites created to soundtrack Dimitri Kirsanoff’s lamented 1920s Menilmontant are featured on this anniversary showcase; proving if anything that it’s hard to pin this electronic and art school maverick down.
There are also selections from this year’s Music Of Dreams And Panic (the polygon space flight of ‘Tonefluffer’, spasmodic Sakamoto vs Autcehre turn Felix da Housecat dancer ‘The Piano Player Rises’, and a “revisited” version of the radiant exotic space birds and alien wildlife quirk, ‘Fra Fra’), The Man From SAD (the techno rotor bladed and magical Aphex Twin-esque ‘The Vulcan’ and moist, fanned phaser effect post-punk electronic dreamy and squiggled chimed ‘Finny Foot’), SOS (the bending mirage and gabbled techy ‘The Green Opal’, off-world Samba rhythmic tetchy break beat fantasy ‘Shark’, and the knocking beat glide inside the head of House Of Tapes ‘Neptune’), and Demo(n)s (the gargled acid burbled ‘The Split’, mechanical circular softened pneumatic prodded ‘Banished’, and floating apparitional percussive old movie ‘Swimming’) albums.
Featured on the Monolith Cocktail last year, both the trick noise making Daddy Biscuits and, warped vision of d’n’b, techno and more avant-garde, King Of Beasts albums are also well represented on this wild collection. From the former there’s the anything but somnolent ‘Sleeper’, which runs instead through a bastardize version of Herbie Hancock’s ‘Rockit’, 16-bit computer game coin-up prizes and hints of M-Plant Rob Hood and a crystalline dream magic. The rest is a mix of jolted Djax Techno, warped and bashed with shocks hints of Mike Dred, galloping 808s and mischievous Ed Banger electro funk. The latter, sees Spackman going for kicks, eyeing up the grooves on a album of both panel-beater workshop beats and modulated weirdness; an album for lovers of Warp, Leaf, early Jeff Mills.
Overall it’s a both madcap and revelatory tour-de-force of unhinged, madcap and purpose built apparatus electronica, unburdened and creatively free of any particular description (though I’ve tried!). Hopefully the moniker isn’t as sorrowful and depressed as it makes out, as we’d like to know there would be another five years of this extraordinary maverick’s experiments to come. With that in mind, here’s a raised glass to the fifth anniversary celebrations.
Further Reading…
SAD MAN and Francis Lowe ‘Stories From An Island’ (2021)
SAD MAN ‘Daddy Biscuits’ (2020)
SAD MAN ‘King Of Beasts’ (2020)
SAD MAN ‘S/T’, ‘CTRL’ (2017)
Nimzo-Indian ‘Nimzo-Indian’ (2014)
Dan Haywood ‘Country Dustbin’
(TakuRoku Records) Was Released on the 1st October 2021
Dan Haywood’s continuous one track rambled album Country Dustbin holds a torch up to illuminate the idiosyncrasies and misery of life at both the fag end of the 20th century and at the dawn of another miserable one. Generation X to Z are invited to throw all that crap and clutter baggage into the contemporary troubadour’s “bottomless pit”, “confessions booth”, and alchemist vessels.
Over a constantly loose jam of roving storyteller rock ‘n’ roll and enervated Leon Russell New Orleans style blues Haywood distils a lifetime and beyond of British poetry (from Ted Hughes to Robert Burton) and despondent prose for over fifty minutes of outsider pub-rollicking lovesick resignation, scoffed observational lyrics, iteration and warmer words of desire. The couplets and one-liners (far too many good ’ns to mention) continually flow over a forward (if slightly laidback) momentum. Those disheveled sulked encapsulation of life’s foibles, broken promises and dreams style lyrics, when they hit on something worth repeating, sometimes reoccur like some kind of reminder chorus: a rousing point of return.
Imagine Bob Dylan grew up in millennial Dalston, backed by the Alabama dappled organ sounds of Muscle Shoals supping up “California Chardonnay”, or, an Estuary twang Warren Zevon fronted 70s pub rock band, or, Anthony Moore gave Ian Dury a night-off from the Blockheads, and you still won’t come close to getting a handle on this unloaded conscious reckoning. A brave move that won’t be to everyone’s tastes, but this dustbin is a brilliant long jam of social and lovelorn splurging.
King Champion Sounds ‘Between Two Worlds’
(Hive Mind Records) 22nd October 2021
In danger of becoming difficult to keep tabs on, both the astral traveller Ajay Saggar and repeat collaborative offender Oli Heffernan have between them separately instigated the Deutsche Ashram, Bhajan Bhoy, Ivan The Tolerable and Heffernan projects. This year both longtime foils formed a cosmic courier bond with Kohhei Matsuda called University Challenged (reviewed by myself back in January this year). But it is in the guise of that partnership’s longest running venture, the Anglo-Dutch King Champion Sounds, which has now sprung up again: eight years after the loose confederation’s debut in 2013.
Once more with wafted and psychedelic oboe and no wave saxophonist Ditmer Weertman in tow, the KCS branch out with a myriad of guest appearances and an extended cast of voices, musicians to bemoan societal ills, and a lack of gnostic faith whilst unloading a lifetime of baggage.
Between Two Worlds indeed, flights of amorphous astral fantasies drift about with vague reverberations of post-punk, shoegaze, kosmische, krautrock, indie, baggy and the new age.
Throughout this grand expansive work the lingering mysticism of Deutsch Nepal meets with more earthy down ‘n’ dirty denunciations of city life and inequality.
Esoteric, mysterious with leanings of spiritual hanker come up against Tarot like augurs. On the motorik Klaus Dinger pummeled, with a transmogrified take of The Beatles ‘I Feel Fine’ riff, ‘Thou Hurricane’ sees the Mekons’ Sally Timms and Jon Longford with Eleventh Dream Day-trippers Janet Beveridge Bean delivering the “killers invade the citadel” omens in this case. Talking of guest spots, Mia Dai Todd cast a supernatural, almost chilled hint of the Dead Can Dance’s Lisa Gerrard, on the crept vapour and windswept ether ‘Remembering Easby Abby’, whilst the Super Fury Animals talk to bone shaker shaman as Augustus Pablo plays hallucinating melodcia album title-track features the former Teenage Fanclub(er) Gerry Love adding dreamy vocals.
Highlighting just how despondently real is the gap between those whose wealth is measured in the assets they hold and the enviable if soulless lifestyles they lead and the rest of us forsaken, put-upon proles, Glasgow poet Marieke McKenna narrates an episode of “stark contrasts” on the Ash Ra Tempel with acid burbles and bubbles ‘Seasick’. From the outside looking in McKenna experiences life aboard a super yacht as she fathoms how such extreme wealth flourishes in an age of apparent austerity; meeting a similar aged figure with “25 times my mandatory wealth to her name”. The rest of the album takes excursions to a psychedelic Tex-Mex dreamed border, as reimagined by The Coral (‘I Am A Horse’), an Amon Düül II and Floydian Indian bellowed and wind chime Tibet (‘Libra, Libra, Libra’), and features a young Shaun Ryder fronted no wave, no way, Fall like ramble about a “dirty, shitty, bitty city” (‘City In Wait’).
The resonance of screamed, trilled rituals (Haiti, Africa, who knows?) and amorphous cultures coalesce on an expansive grand astral mini-opus. Climb aboard a most eclectic flight across the gaps between worlds and let this sonic, wrangled protest melt your brain.
Connecting Posts:
University Challenged ‘Oh Temple!’ (2021)
Bhajan Bhoy ‘Bless Bless’ (2020)
Deutsche Ashram ‘Whisper Om’ (2020)
David Lance Callahan ‘English Primitive I’
(Ting Global Productions) 15th October 2021
From the heady malcontent days of the C86 Wolfhounds to the idiosyncratic 90s Moonshake, David Lance Callahan has always trodden a fairly unique proactive musical pathway. His latest album is no different.
The first of his two English Primitive declared works is a clever suffusion of buzzing and scuzzed West African (especially Mali) electronic guitar, Eastern, Arabesque and Indian delights and esoteric folk music. A “gumbo” in fact of worldly influences are poured into a somehow distinctly British pastoral hell that’s both weirdly timeless and yet very much of the times: If you did get lost the foibles, descriptions of self-obsession and politics soon drag you back into the present.
We start with a sort of plaintive gritted anthem to the Welfare State. A proud but nonetheless worried male and female dual vocal runs through the positives of growing up with free access to a number of institutions – now on the precipice and in the sights of privatization – to a sort of fluty union between The Beautiful South and David Cronenberg’s Wife. Moving on, the more mysterious commune, multicultural scene ‘Goatman’ sounds vocally like Simon Bonney accompanied by Samba Touré on guitar. It also reminded me of a very removed CSN&Y: even a strange corrupted 70s Fleetwood Mac.
A door is opened up to musical fantasies on the gnarled lyrical ‘Foxboy’, with its sloping tablas and resonated drones from India and scuzz guitar from psychedelic Anatolia. On this cross-border funnel there’s hints of Dirt Music and Warren Ellis’ harassed and heightened tsunami of elbowed violin.
Less honeyed odes are made to Callahan’s muse on the shaking and twine ‘She’s The King Of My Life’, but we’re back to “not seeing the signs” romantic inadequacy on the Mdou Moctar joins Bad seeds ‘She Passes Through The Night’.
Callahan really gets to the despondent crux of a relationship chasm on the epic kitchen sink lament ‘One Rainy September’. To an 18th century like classical and folky malady, two perspectives, one the returning soldier with a challenging return to civvy street, and the other, his put-upon unloved and isolated partner, play out on a dislocated tale of modernity: mobile phones and all.
Primitive in name only, beneath the dirt music and stripped pastoral backing this is a very clever, sophisticated album of weird and beguiling Britain; a snapshot trudge of a kingdom sliding into the abyss.
Angelo Bignamini ‘8 Doublings’
Miguel A. García ‘Aritie’
(both on the Kirigirisu Recordings label) Available Now
I have a double-bill of abstracted sonic experiments from the Japan-based label Kirigirisu this month. Out on the peripheral of sound art and conceptual methodology/process, Angelo Bignamini and Miguel A. García both obscure concrete objects and apparatus to produce something outside the usual description of ambient soundtrack, filed recordings or atmospheric exploration.
Italian musician, sound artist and label founder (of the “personal” Nausea imprint) Bignamini records various objects, whistles and percussion onto tape on a digital random sequencer. Interested in the relationship between music and failure, especially between sound and deterioration, his 8 Doublings of untitled (just numbered) tracks lead the listener into a minimalistic woodland of scratched and scored tape squiggles, amorphous pattered and tapped wooden quasi-beats and gamelan style garbled runs along skeleton bones. Bleeding in to this alien but just about identifiable world is an environment of hooted birds, insect chatter and foliage. #2 sounds like a looped staccato recording of someone clearing their way through the undergrowth, whilst banging sticks into the ground. Flinches of static, scrunched noises, distant drilled pulsations and mulch appear on a very peculiar, almost primal album of the strange.
Bilbao resident and artist García, who also performs under the Xedh guise (part of numerous group efforts too), brings us one long continuous track that changes over a span of 35 minutes through different built up sections. Based on certain complex textures of an analog origin (namely mixer feedback), which are then digitally manipulated, Aritie is based on insistence and repetition. Or as the accompanying PR notes put it: ‘superimposing sounds that are variations of those already proposed’. The accumulation of which leads to a climatic cyclonic swirl of noise and dissonance: it actually finishes with a long almost horror like high-pitched square wave like whine. Transformed scrapes of concrete and jangled sounds in the first section are replaced to a degree by rattled metal chimes and pans (which sort of beat out some kind of obscure rhythm) and tubular space signals. Chinks of long bell like percussion layer up with charged particles and a squelchy swamp of burbled and bubbling grayness. Another most strange recording that defies any sort of easy categorisation; out on its own in the abstract. Something out of nothing, nothing out of something: you decide.
Vapors Of Morphine ‘Fear & Fantasy’
(Schnitzel Records) 15th October 2021
It’s hard to keep up with the extensions and offshoots that materialized in the wake of Morphine’s retirement, coming as it did after the band’s front man Mark Sandman’s untimely death in 1999 (suffering a fatal heart attack live on stage). Carrying the torch, though for a longtime leaving past Morphine tunes and unfinished ideas alone, the surviving members in the noughties formed Vapors Of Morphine.
Now though, more than a decade on from conception, the VOM has seen a number of changes with only original Morphine founder and saxophonist Dana Colley remaining. Both Jerome Depruee and Billy Conway’s spirit permeates the new album, with one-side of it named after the former, who decided to drop out of the project. In their places comes the singer and multi-instrumentalist Jeremy Lyons and drummer Tom Arrey.
Knowingly reconnecting with Morphine’s final album, The Night, the Vapour’s Fear & Fantasy builds upon the cosmic swamp and psychedelic country vibes of that album whilst branching out with cover versions of Malian blues and dreamy despondency. The southern music influences remain, with echoes of Big Joe Turner, New Orleans blues, boogie and skiffle. ‘Ostrich’ blends all the above with wallowed moonshine and touches of Muscle Shoals Stones and Delaney & Bonnie.
Yet despite the bayou, front porch and Appalachian geography, Colley’s often wafted, drifted and honked baritone sax and the more progressive, psychedelic drums suggest hallucinatory and languorous visions of lunar terrain: like on the meandrous, reverberated knocking dub-country opener ‘Blue Dream’ and curved air bending sci-fi instrumental ‘Phantasos & Probetor’. The band also spread their wings into West Africa with cover versions of songs by Malian legends Ali Farke Touré and Baubacar Traoré. The first takes Touré’s spindled ‘Lasidon’ original along the Mediterranean coastline (could be ancient Anatolia, Greece or modern Turkey) with wheel spokes like guitar and what sounds like a mandolin; the second gives Traoré’s ‘Baba Drame’ a similar excursion swerve but also turns it into a strange country hoedown.
Those who were fond of the late Sandman’s burr will find the vocals in keeping with that low voiced trajectory. On the very 90s sounding and Eno serenaded ‘Irene’ the vocals sound like a mix of Crime & The City Solution’s Simon Bonney and Mark Lanegan, but like an experimental Michael Hutchence’s on the jazzy-country-blues trip ‘Special Rider’ and like some odd throwback to Steinbeck’s depression era on the Orleans’, via the Cotton Club, ‘Drop Out Mambo’.
Going full circle, the band pays homage to Sandman’s pre-Morphine incarnation, Treat Her Right, on the slinking and slide guitar double-entendre cheeky camping trip ‘Doreen’. It’s a comical moment of levity, much in keeping with the overall tone and mood of this album. The lyrics can be a tad resigned, moody, and fateful (delivered from a middle-aged perspective), but the music plays around with its key roots whilst floating off into the universe on an acid moonbeam. Fans of that Morphine legacy will be happy with the results; the connection still there yet moving into new creative streams.
Hi, my name is Dominic Valvona and I’m the Founder of the music/culture blog the Monolith Cocktail. 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.
Monolith Cocktail Social #61: The UMC’s, The Human League, Richard H. Kirk, Lael Neal, Sakamoto, Os Kiezos, Aphex Twin…
October 8, 2021
The leading eclectic and cross-generational playlist/Compiled by Dominic Valvona
An imaginary radio show (only without the waffling and interruptions), the Monolith Cocktail Social is a playlist selection that spans genres and eras to create the most eclectic of soundtracks. Dominic includes a bunch of tributes to those albums celebrating anniversaries this month (UMC’s, Human League, Black Sheep, Freestyle Fellowship and Aphex Twin) and raises a glass of dram to those who have sadly passed on (Richard H. Kirk, and more personally, punk, post-punk and rock journeyman and friend Shaun Newnham of Thin Red Line, who at one time included the famous Razzle in its ranks).
Alongside those tributes you’ll find a taste of Sakamoto (very much back in vogue these days, with new material pouring out of him), some Useless Youth, Pointed Sticks, Os Kiezos, Roscoe Mitchell, Lael Neale, True West and more.
TRACKS:
The UMC’s ‘Live Talk’
Andromeda ‘Andromeda’
Ryuichi Sakamoto & Robin Scott ‘THE LEFT BANK’
The Human League ‘Open Your Heart’
Pointed Sticks ‘Marching Song’
Thin Red Line ‘Holy War’ The Marked Men ‘We Won’t Talk About It’
Useless Youth ‘Tears’
William Doyle ‘And Everything Changed (But I Feel Alright)’
Os Kiezos ‘N’gola’
Roscoe Mitchell And The Sound And Space Ensembles ‘You Wastin’ My Time’
Black Sheep ‘To Whom It May Concern’
Freestyle Fellowship ‘Here I Am’
Clifford Jordan Quartet ‘Powerful Paul Robeson’
Marcel Khalifa ‘Tarffic Police’
Leo Nocentelli ‘Thinking Of The Day’
Heather ‘Morning Bells’
Sneaky Feelings ‘The Strange And Conflicting Feelings Of Separation And Betrayal’
Ohtis Ft. Stef Chura ‘Schatze’
Arte No Escuro ‘Beije-Me Cowboy’
Richard H. Kirk ‘Reality Net’
Aphex Twin ‘Vordhosbn’
Joseph Shabason ‘Q-13’
Lael Neale ‘Every Star Shivers In The Dark’
Cabaret Voltaire ‘Yashar’
Bondage Fruit ‘Minus One’
True West ‘I’m Not Here’
Last Exit ‘Zulu Butter’
Hocine Chaoui ‘Oued Ariouss’
Maxine Brown ‘Funny’
Reggie Workman, Andrew Hill and Sam Rivers ‘Estelle’s Theme’
Kalporz X Monolith Cocktail: [Coverworld] ‘This Strange Effect’ From Nine Perfect Strangers
October 5, 2021
SONG THREAD/NETFLIX: Paolo Bardelli
Continuing our successful collaboration with the leading Italian music publication Kalporz , the Monolith Cocktail shares reviews, interviews and other bits from our respective sites each month. Keep an eye out for future ‘synergy’ between our two great houses as we exchange posts during 2021 and beyond.
This month Kalporz head honcho Paolo Bardelli shares a recent instalment of the site’s [Coverworld series], which runs through the history of a cover song made famous or brought into the public sphere by a contemporary artist (in this case, the recent Netflix hit show Nine Perfect Strangers).
Amazon Prime’s new TV serial Nine Perfect Strangers has a really good theme song by Unloved, a Los Angeles-based soundtrack trio made up of Jade Vincent, Keefus Ciancia and David Holmes. It’s called ‘Strange Effect’ and it’s not an original song (otherwise we wouldn’t be in this column…). More precisely, it is a cover of a 1965 song that has been remade several times.
‘This Strange Effect’ (yes, the original has that extra ‘This’) is a song written by Ray Davies of the Kinks but was first released by singer-songwriter Dave Berry in July 1965. Unloved’s reworking of the song (featuring the voice of Raven Violet, Keefus Ciancia’s daughter) is in line with the dreamy, drug-soaked feel of the series, where Dave Berry’s original is drier and the riff is played by a simple acoustic guitar.
But the Kinks also played it, though they did not officially release any studio version: there is, however, a readily available live recording of it at the BBC in August 1965, which was published in 2001 as the BBC Sessions 1964-1977. The Kinks’ interpretation is essentially identical in arrangement, only the sounds change.
Since then, ‘This Strange Effect’ has received several reinterpretations, the most “famous” being Hooverphonic‘s 1998 rendition, which is consistent with the Belgian band’s typical orchestral arrangements. In its elegance, the violins obsessively repeat those two notes to create a particularly hypnotic suspension effect. Hooverphonic released it as a single (for their album, Blue Wonder Power Milk) and were the first to demonstrate the ‘soundtrack’ capability of the track itself: it ended up in the film Shades (1999), in the TV series Nikita and for the American TV commercial for a Motorola mobile phone in 2005.
The following year, in 1999, the Thievery Corporation thought it best to make a mix of the Hooverphonic version that was almost unrecognisable, with the typical Thievery drumming and Arnaert‘s vocals standing alone at first and then, towards the end, rejoining the musical base of the other two Hooverphonic’s while still with the addictive rhythm of the TCs underneath.
The “ugliest” cover is the one by Bill Wyman, who included it for his 1992 album Stuff: there’s an annoying piano and little sounds that don’t even sound like the country church organ.
While the 2006 version by the Finnish band The Others is practically useless, the dreamy version, between sitar and harmonica, by the British band Squeeze is very histrionic and was included in the deluxe edition of their 2015 album, Cradle to the Grave.
Glen Matlock of the Sex Pistols also approached the song in 1980, with his project The Spectres: the result is interesting, between sax and a ‘Peter Gunn Theme’ style bass line:
A finally electric variant is Steve Wynn‘s on his 1997 album, Sweetness And Light: here how the song starts and shows its multifaceted, and not only “melodious”, soul. One of the most beautiful covers.
‘This Strange Effect’, on the other hand, comes back persuasive in the 2017 version by the Shacks, which has the only merit of ending up as the soundtrack of the iPhone TV commercial, because it has an annoying vocal pitch change in the verse and an incomprehensible speed-up on the ending. The Shacks are an American duo made up of Max Shrager and Shannon Wise, whose Follow Me I recommend listening to, which is very nice.
All in all, the Unloved’s version, although not new (it also appeared in the third series of Killing Eve) is one of the best, and has the merit of having given us the possibility of going through all the epic of this beautiful song from the sixties that still speaks to us.
(Paolo Bardelli)
Our Daily Bread 472: David Ornette Cherry’s Organic Nation Listening Club (The Continual)
October 4, 2021
ALBUM REVIEW/Dominic Valvona
David Ornette Cherry’s Organic Nation Listening Club (The Continual)
(Spiritmuse) 15th October 2021
What providence. What two outstanding luminaries to live up to. David Ornette Cherry’s name marks the extraordinary point in time when his trumpet-pioneering father Don Cherry joined forces with jazz deity Ornette Coleman on the 1958 free jazz defining Something Else!!! LP. It was also the year the musical polymath David was born.
Thankfully taken under his father’s wing, nurtured with the same freewheeling ‘cosmic nomad’ spirit, this sagacious scion of an enviable lineage continues to tread a polygenesis pathway on his latest album of on-message peregrination and rhythmic dances. Attuned to the universal vibrations, channeling the ancients and both his father’s African-American and Choctaw roots, the Organic Nation Listening Club bandleader, prompter and navigator lays out an atavistic form of electronic body movement, echoes of Hassell’s amorphous ‘fourth world’ explorations, the astral and, of course, spiritual jazz on the parenthesis entitled The Continual journey.
David leads a fourteen strong ensemble of global instrument-playing musicians and voices, which includes his niece Tyson McVey (daughter of the no less famous musical sibling, Neneh Cherry) performing vocal soundscape harmonization and wandering siren duties on the diaphanous courtly Indian accompanied, part conscious, part mindfulness yoga session, ‘So & So & So And So’ (imagine Prince joining forces with Linda Sharrock and Brother Ah).
Almost meandering across continents, you’ll hear the resonated echoes, impressions, twine and spindled sounds of North and West Africa, the Asian sub-continent (a lovely brassy reverberation of sitar and the rhythm of tablas can be heard throughout), the Fertile Crescent and an 80s NYC melting pot on this spiritually enlivened trip. The keen-elbowed viola and tapping beat groove ‘Parallel Experience’, with its West African dun dun drum beat suggests that continent’s mood, yet also spreads its scope towards echoes of Farhot’s reimagined breakbeat visions of Afghanistan. The majestic mountain crust positioned ‘Eagle Play’ takes in musical views of not only the recurring spiritual Indian leitmotif but also Anatolia and Harilu Mergia’s Ethiopia (if put together by J Dilla that is).
Elsewhere David and his human, as well as nature’s chorus of ‘hummingbird’ singing cast embody the untethered soul of Don Cherry’s Om Shanti Om and Eternal Now works (and even a touch of the musical microbe calculus of building blocks and life that you’ll find on Don’s collaboration with Terry Riley, Köln). There’s also the fluted presence of Jeremy Steig, and with the more free jazz, almost improvised interactions between David and his drummer John L. Price, electric piano player Naima Karlsson and trumpeter Paul Simms, a touch of Sam Rivers and the Chicago Underground. Meanwhile, in what is an especially expansive field of instrumentation and influence, Gemi Taylor’s guitar straddles krautrock, jazz and drifted cries of a more ambiguous nature.
From the cosmos to the age of the Pharaohs, the garden of earthly delights to dancing through the tumult of our modern times, the rhythms of life merge with more avant-garde performances of serialism, free jazz and even the psychedelic.
All the while the mood is electric, both of the moment and the past; a both sporadic and flowing set of reincarnations existing in a timeless scene under the guidance of an outstanding musical traveller. Anchored in the history of jazz, but so much more beyond that, David lives up to the family name on another eclectic album of borderless healing and wisdom. Be sure to check in at the global retreat and take heed of the advice.
The Monthly Playlist: September 2021: The August List, The Felice Brothers, Blu, Jazzmeia Horn…
September 30, 2021
PLAYLIST: Dominic Valvona/Matt Oliver/Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea
The monthly recap and chance to catch up with all the most eclectic music that the Monolith Cocktail team has been listening to over the last four weeks (with a few additional tracks we missed back in August). Chosen by me (Dominic Valvona), Matt ‘Rap Controller’ Oliver and Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea, the September 2021 edition features a truly global lineup of the best and most interesting Hip-Hop, Electronica, Jazz, Nu-Soul, Krautrock, Post-Punk, Experimental, Pop and beyond, with musical waves from Africa, the Med, Americas, Europe, Far East and of course the UK.
TRACK LIST:::
The August List ‘Seams’
Monsieur Doumani ‘Astrahan’
Ex Norwegian ‘Thot Patrol’
The Speed Of Sound ‘The Day The Earth Caught Fire’
Motorists ‘Go Back’
The Crystal Casino Band ‘Waste My Time’
The Felice Brothers ‘Jazz On The Autobahn’
Timo Lassy ‘Orlo’
Blu ‘Everyday Blu(e)s’
DJ JS-1 ‘Spaghetti Park’
Lukah ‘THE WAY TO DAMASCUS’
Jazzmeia Horn And Her Noble Force ‘Where Is Freedom?’
Kondi Band ‘Everything That Sierra Leone Has’
Los Camaroes ‘Esele Mulema Moam’
Mopes ‘Facts Machine’
Solem Brigham ‘Couple Towns’
Gift Of Gab Ft. Vursatyl, Lateef The Truthspeaker ‘You Gon’ Make It In The End’
Gotts Street Park ‘Diego’
Hiero ‘Soil’
Showtime Ramon Ft. Illecism ‘Julius Erving’
Viktor Timofeev ‘Portal Of Zin II’
Variet ‘The Ancient Of Seconds’
Faust ‘Vorsatz’
Vilmmer ‘Fensteraus’
Late ‘Verbal Introduction’
King Kashmere & Alecs DeLarge ‘Soul Caliber’ Robert & SonnyJim Ft. Rag’n’Bone Man ‘Porridge’
Niklas Wandt ‘Lo Spettro’
Badge Epoch ‘Galactic Whip’
Dr. Joy ‘No Deal’
Ulrich Schnauss & Mark Peters ‘Speak In Capitals’
Psycho & Plastic ‘Wunsch, Indianer Zu Werden’
Sone Institute ‘Forget Everything’
Steve Hadfield ‘Ascension’
Headboggle ‘Skip Pop’
Forest Robots ‘Every Particle Of Water Understands Change Is Essential’
Wish Master & Illinformed Ft. Datkid and Gaza Glock ‘Chefs Recipe’
Dceased, Telly McLean and Unlike People ‘Rainey Day Relapse’
Nukuluk ‘Ooh Ah’
Boohoo ‘Forever’
The Legless Crabs ‘A Saucer Is Born’
Bordello & Clark ‘Dreams Of Rock And Roll Stars’ Santa Sprees ‘Save Yourself’
Birthday Cake! ‘Retrospect’
Salem Trials ‘No York’
Helm ‘Repellent’
Will Feral ‘The Minx’
Sun Atoms ‘The Cat’s Eye’
Simon McCorry ‘Flow 04’
Group Listening ‘Sunset Village’
John Howard ‘Dreamland’
Andrew Heath ‘The Healing Pt. 1’
Tara Clerkin Trio ‘Night Steps’
Color Dolor ‘Underwater’
Gina Birch ‘Feminist Song’
Esbe ‘Amazing Grace’
Our Daily Bread 471: (Track-By-Track) Bordello & Clark ‘Atlantic Crossing’
September 29, 2021
WORDS: Dominic Valvona/Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea
Self-promotional time now as the Monolith Cocktail celebrates the release of our very own Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea’s long awaited album partnership with 20th Century Tokyo Princess’s guitarist/singer Ted Clark: conveniently entitled Bordello & Clark.
Joining the blog a few years back with his own reviews column the erstwhile malcontent Brian Shea is the defacto leader of the lo fi, still believing in the power of rock ‘n’ roll, family band, The Bordellos, but also releases various humdrum aphorism’s under his own name. After various travails and hold-ups, the Think Like A Key label has somehow ended up releasing the much-delayed communion between the two nostalgically melancholy artists. I say nostalgic, but not in the watery-eyed sense of missed opportunity, rather disgruntled at how the 21st century has sucked out all the joy, muthafuckerness and humour of rock ‘n’ roll; leaving nothing but a pale imitation or join the dots karaoke pastiches. For this is a wistful contrary delivered songbook of obscured romanticisms, lost love, and the idiosyncratic measuring of time passing by; whether that’s through the lens of Brian’s overgrown garden of metaphors or the bygone kettle whistled tours of rock’s back pages and famous sites (‘Memories Of Denmark Street’) and the straggles of becoming a famous rock star.
Making Sparklehorse sound like a flash git, accompanied by ELO, the lo fi in this partnership’s observational love letters is about as sparse and minimal as it can get. Except that is for the Mekons spaghetti western like homage to The Wedding Present’s stalwart David Gedge, which seems a big score in comparison: a wistful one at that.
The ‘Mersey Beat’ sound is wallowed in the waters of Joe Meek’s cellar for the jingle-jangle sound of a past age; a mindset that rambles through the broken promises of memorabilia, the 2i’s café’s jukebox and a pile of C86 era tapes. This is a conjuncture in which you hear how the J&MC may have sounded with Spaceman 3 era Jason Pierce fronting it, where Del Shannon met Greg Boring decided to hang out together. This is a reimagined TOTP’s slot that drove The Bordellos and 20th Century Pop Princess to the topper most top of the pop charts. An album of such brilliant lyrical sadness and irony that yearns for the mythology of rock ‘n’ roll and glory of what could have been if the likes of Spotify and their ilk hadn’t been invented, and music really meant something: nothing less than a complete absorption.
Borrowing some familiar riffs from the 60s garage, post-punk, ramshackle outsider music, Atlantic Crossing brings two distinct yet wholly congruous lo fi seers together on a mostly magic album of loss and longing that channels the spirit of a bygone age.
We asked Brian to guide us track-by-track through the new album, which was released on the 24th September 2021.
Jingle Jangle is a song of remembering your childhood and all the innocence that goes with it, mixed with memories of old friends and lovers that you no longer see, and an ideal way to kick off an album with songs filled with regrets, hopes, and love lost and found.
Memories of Denmark St is what it says on the tin. A song about memories of holidaying in London with an old girlfriend, looking at the guitars you want but cannot afford, dreaming, thinking it is only a matter of time that some record company will snap you and make you a star. “I wanted a Gretsch, I wanted a vox, I wanted to be on Top Of The Pops” could well be the most heartbreakingly honest line I’ve ever written. This album is full of heartbreak and lost love and unfulfilled dreams and probably the album with most self-biographic songs I have released.
The Girl with Cadbury Purple Hair. I saw a girl when I was sat on the bus out of the window and she looked like she owned the world; she looked like the most self-confident person I have ever seen. She was in her late teens, had charity store clothes and had Cadbury Purple Hair, and radiated sunshine from her being. I only saw her for about thirty seconds and not seen her since. Maybe she was just a brief daydream and I imagined her? So I wrote a song of sex, lust, hope, and the magic of being young based around the sighting of this super being. Ted (Clark) did a fucking amazing job on this song making it sound like Marc Bolan preening himself in the mirror
Sunshine Rain Girl. A song about being in love with someone with problems and those problems bringing bigger problems, but in between the problems are moments of pure magic and underneath the darkness lies the hottest and brightest of suns. This was recorded as a ballad but Ted sped it up and gave it a strange George Formby like vibe. A strange pop track and if ever recorded as a ballad could be a big hit.
Handsome Jaques. Ah…memories of sexual shenanigans from ones past mixed with fuzzy framed nostalgia and advice to the youngsters out there. A song I originally wrote for Cilla Black to sing: and it would have been a right rum do if she had.
Dreams Of Rock N Roll Stars. I feel this is the finest song I have written, the centrepiece for the whole album, a song of looking back at the things you never achieved but recorded in such a magical way by Ted that it makes like regret has never tasted so good. Like Joe Meek doing a soundtrack of a Walt Disney film starring Woody Allen and Tony Hancock, and the perfect pop song. I always imagine the video to this being set in a beatnik bar with a party happening or a happening party, with cartoon French men shaking maracas.
Holy Love. Quite simply a short love song to an old dear friend who I have not seen in many years hoping that he has found the love and companionship he so craved and deserved.
Sixteen. A song celebrating first love and memories of it: all love, romance and soft tinted lust and regret. A chocolate box of a song.
Gedge. Entitled after the singer of The Wedding Present, this is a song filled with both lust self-hate and a yearning to reach the stalking like levels of writing that David Gedge has mastered. This is by far the most lo-fi recording on a very lo-fi album. The vocals I sent to Ted were distorted to hell and I am amazed he was able to salvage it and make it into probably the most difficult song to listen to on the album. But actually one of my favourites on it.
Lonely Henry. One of the catchiest and lively songs on the album inspired by a lonely old man who used to wander around my hometown of St Helens, who did used to carry a baby doll in his bag for company. The rhythm guitar on this track is quite spectacular, which I do not remember it being this good when I sent it to Ted, so I have the feeling Ted redid it.
Wrong Country Song. Quite simply, a simple pop song in an indie American pop sort of way. I could imagine the Mouldy Peaches or some other American indie pop act doing it. The sort of song that could have been on the Juno soundtrack. Very simple then, it’s made by Ted’s rather beautiful xylophone solo.
Watching The Garden Grow is maybe the darkest song on the album; a song about being saved unknowingly by your wife and children, dragging you back from the abyss of depression. A sad yet hopeful song.
You can find and purchase the album here…
ALBUM REVIEWS ROUNDUP/Dominic Valvona
Dr. Joy ‘Dr. Joy’
(Idée Fixe) 17th September 2021
As with most polygenesis imbued projects attributed to the highly prolific Matthew ‘Doc’ Dunn you’re in for an amorphous, unburdened trip of the cosmic and often exotic. Appearing under numerous guises, in various forms, Dunn has instigated the Cosmic Range Canadian super group and collaborated with everyone on that country’s ultra hip underground scene (from Slim Twig and Meg Remy to Andy Haas and Carl Didur). He’s become a catalyst for so much of the great music making its way out of Toronto in the last decade. For this communal smorgasbord of musical ideas he’s joined up with that city’s psychedelic troupe Dr. Joy.
Bonding over a shared love of art, philosophy, film and, of course, music, the mutually agreeable partners have produced an assemblage of tripping psych, prog, krautrock and cult soundtracks for their debut collaborative album. Though the emphasis, as indeed the attribution of the album, leans towards the Joy part of that partnership.
Just like the artwork, a collage of acid smiley badge headed comic book action heroes, an exploding planet, galactic skull and the grill of some olds mobile, the sounds are just as much a luminous scrapbook of congruous influences. The album opens with the prog-rock (with shades of Ariel Kalma and Mythos) melodica wafting prism of pastel colours, ‘Weeping Façade’, and is immediately followed by the languorous sung, dreamy song merger of The Bees, Mercury Rev and a psychedelic Pretty Things ‘No Deal’.
Vague echoes of global tuning, scales and ceremony can be heard throughout: spindled and tine thumbed touches of West Africa and the Orient.
Despite its trippy gauze and often-spiritual astral plane illusions, the partnership is often on the move musically. ‘Pale Satin’ for instance features a wept mirage of cosmic cowboy country, cult library music and Santana’s electric guitar – which sometimes sounds like a rearing horse! You could be in obscure psychedelic South America, or on a hallucinogenic Tex-Mex border. ‘Signed, The Body Electric’ rattles and shakes with mushroom ritual grooves that don’t sound a million miles away from The Stone Roses (via Can), and the mellotron-like trip ‘Midtown’ brought to mind Sakamoto & Robin Scott’s The Arrangement: if not a far more strung-out version. Curtain call, ‘River Story’, could be a magical union of Alice Coltrane, Laraaji and The Holydrug Couple.
Once more Dunn gets to let the sonic mind wander as Dr. Joy weave a rich tapestry of the spiritual and far out. It feels like an untethered pilgrimage in kool-aid drunken psychedelia; well produced assemblage of ideas and the imagination. And above all, seldom dull.
You may also like this:
The Cosmic Range ‘New Latitudes’ (2016)
The Mining Co. ‘Phenomenology’
(PinDrop Records) 1st October 2021
Floating his usual brand of country-laced cathartic heartache towards deep space, storyteller, singer-songwriter Michael Gallagher goes in search of a new musical direction on his new songbook, Phenomenology. That country ached burr persists but the Americana is now of an entirely different stripe: more cosmic cowboy then prairie troubadour abroad in County Donegal.
Sprinkling space dust over the pains and sufferings of the human condition, Gallagher leaves terra firma for a tender, drifting cinematic drama in the universal: What better way to escape the pandemic and ills of a hostile world then to leave it behind for the unknown in space. Well, to a point anyway. A loosely based concept album, Phenomenology is in part a lyrical narration, but also the alternative soundtrack to John Carpenter’s 1974 cult sci-fi movie Dark Star. That iconic film tells the story of a beleaguered crew looking to escape the tedium of their mission destroying unstable planets that could threaten the future colonisation of other stable, life-bringing ones. Now in its twentieth year, with weary crew of misfortunates, the mission is becoming increasing dangerous as the spaceship around them rapidly malfunctions.
During a period of such message-driven eco and philosophical quandary (see Douglas Trumbull’s 1972 debut, Silent Running), Dark Star featured a sort of return-to-the-stars-merged plot in which two of the characters, the Californian surfer buddy Doolittle and accidently jettisoned Talby, find their inevitable final resting places amongst the starry fabric when one of the planet-exploding detonators they use blows up the ship: Doolittle in silver surfer mode clings to a surfboard shaped piece of debris as he falls fatefully towards his maker, whilst Talby floats off towards the Phoenix Asteroids that he’s grown fond of from afar. That affinity and poetic death proves rich with metaphors; and so you have ‘Talby Drift’ (drifting proves to be just one of the leitmotifs on this album) and Talby at one with the cosmos, on both ‘Beatify’ and the ‘Universal Son’.
Yet amongst all the infinite space, Gallagher looks back occasionally at Earth’s lamentable cast of heartbroken and struggling characters. I believe there’s a second loose story that runs in tandem on songs like the opening car-crash meeting ‘Unexpected’.
To soundtrack this cosmic and earthly plaint, Gallagher experiments with a transfer to the electronic. Beautifully, occasionally ominous, the usual American is edged towards chillwave, new wave and yacht rock. Now usually played in a minimal and highly atmospheric manner, with accentuate and vaporous synths and only a little acoustic and electric guitar, this new direction proves very fruitful. Chromatics, Moroder, Marvel83 and The Cars converge with the Eels, Mike Gale, early to mid 70s Beach Boys (honestly, listen carefully), the Magnetic Fields and Lukas Creswell-Rost.
There’s drama, a certain languid inevitability of fate, chimed and twinkled rays and the odd bit of distortion (the album’s most heavy dark arts scowled ‘IWBHM’; the theme of which is about a child who dreams of being a heavy metal star that worships the ‘devil’) on a mostly free-floating songbook of brilliantly crafted songwriting. Gallagher, at least detached a little, remote a touch behind the Mining Co. guise, surprises with the electronic move; creating a whole new strata to showcase his craft. Phenomenology could yet be the storyteller’s best, most creative move and album yet.
Further Reading:
PREM: The Mining Co. ‘Long Way To Christmas’ (2019)
The Mining Co. ‘Frontier’ (2019)
Catherine Graindorge ‘Eldorado’
(tak:til/Glitterbeat Records) 1st October 2021
Travelling across both the harrowing and more aching ebb and flows of a European landscape in crisis, the violinist, violist and composer Catherine Graindorge measures the emotional tides of the pandemic epoch with depth and sophisticated articulation.
Creatively delayed by the death of her father in 2015, but also by numerous scores for films and theatre, collaborations with Nick Cave and Mark Lanegan, and various albums with her trio, and one with Hugo Race, the adroit Belgian artist is only just now, almost a decade later, releasing a follow up to the solo debut album The Secret Of Us All. A lot has happened in that time of emotional anxiety and stress. Channeling that well swell of emotions, touching upon her own experiences in regard to welcoming and helping to re-home those escaping both poverty and genocide, Graindorge’s effective new soundtrack features an exceptional atmospheric, sonorous, disturbing and plaintive cooed tribute to the survivors of the Rwanda genocide; ached expressive longings for “Eldorado”; and sorrowful haunted memories.
‘Rosalie’, the first of those evocative pulls, opens the new album of brooding chamber music and experimental suites with diaphanous apparition like voices and breathing, rippled buzzing harmonium and pained yearning. The title’s subject escaped the horror of Rwanda’s darkest hour with her husband in the mid 90s to find refuge in northern Europe. A connection was made however when she came into contact with Graindorge’s late lawyer father. The remains of her family killed in the raging bloodbath were lost until 2019, when Rosalie returned to her homeland to bury them. Three days after returning to her new home Rosalie’s “heart stopped”. This then is both a saddened form of remembrance, a process of marking that existence and trauma, but also meant as a celebration of a life: now immortalized in music. It’s a deeply moving testament to grief.
The album’s title conjures up all sorts of historical, fabled images of lost cities of gold; metaphorical, allegorical utopias and dreams, but also the foibles of chasing something that doesn’t exist. Drawn further and further on a fool’s errand into the South American interior, the magical, paved with riches city had eluded the Conquistadors, and continues to elude everyone since. Graindorge alludes to a more personal vision, which could be read as a far simpler analogy for escapism and a safe refuge in tumultuous times. Most ambitiously, this search is nothing less than the quest for a better world.
Graindorge and her producer John Parish, who also offers up a mix of stressed, wrangled and contoured guitar, scores a distraught wailed vision of that mythical goal, which at times – especially with the off-kilter ad hoc, feeling about jazzy and avant-garde drum kit of splashes, serial hits – reminded me of Tony Conrad & Faust’s Outside The Dream Factory union.
The only obvious reference, title-wise, to these unprecedented times and its effects is made on the harmonium droned and deep, bass-y foreboding ‘Lockdown’. Graindorge stuck in Belgium as the first lockdown took hold was unable to make it to Parish’s studio in London for the mixes. To “relieve confinement” Graindorge and her daughter would visit and play (social distancing and adhering to the rules of course) to an audience in various nursing homes. On this reification of that altruistic time there’s hints of Jed Kurzel, Anne Müller and John Cale to mull over.
Each instrumental (apart from ghostly woos and a French narration) will evoke personal imagery and scenes; the resonated traces of what was; and the reverberations of past dramas. Graindorge used slides from 1959 that she’d collected form her grandmother after she died as visual prompts for the album, so its no wonder. This is all achieved with much élan and with the desire to express the travails and darkness as well as the light through transportive moods and ghostly visitations.
As a nod to one influence in particular, the album closes with a dreamy Another Green World like tribute to Brian Eno. On a sea of ambient and ether drifts this curtain call is the album’s most serene piece of solace, contemplation on a work of harrowing and mysterious (bordering on the esoteric) stirrings.
Eldorado reimagines the scope, perimeters of the viola and violin on a troubled but also personal slow release of richly brooding and heart yearned memories. It’s nothing less than a completely immersive, intense soundtrack, and for that matter one of the year’s highlights: A real work of quality that leaves a lasting emotional effect.
Andrew Heath ‘New Eden’
(Disco Gecko) 17th September 2021
Across a venerable landscape of light emitting environments, the ambient and contemporary classical composer Andrew Heath reacts to unprecedented times with the most languid of soundtracks. Indeed, wherever light falls, whether that’s upon the pews in an empty church or in the derelict ruins of some glade, Heath captures it on his latest collection of suites for the Disco Gecko label.
Very much the experienced artist in the ambient arena, collaborating no less with Roedelius, the adroit composer takes his time in revealing peaceful states of mind on a journey of escapism. The destination is ‘eden’: or as near as sonically possible. Getting very close to that entitled destination, the opening suite grows in volume across ten-minutes of heavenly-spindled chimes and diaphanous warm fronts. Stained-glass light softly and slowly touches upon every part of a low humming church organ on ‘Faith’ – which we now need in droves if we’re ever to survive this current nightmare.
Though I may have made it sound as if these places are all devoid of company, ambiguous touches of laughter, movement and preparation together with nature’s chorus are absorbed into the subtle fabric of Heath’s incipient compositions.
Heath’s signature singular and serial style of light, minimalistic playing is all present and correct, but there’s some nicely alongside abstract guitar gestures, rings and drifts too. Just throwing it out there, but the guitar on ‘You’ reminds me a little of Myles Cochran.
Sometimes you get a vague sonic narrative, with tracks obscuring interactions and scenes. It sometimes sounds like Heath is playing the piano in the shower, or thumbing through yellowed parchments. There’s also a lot of walking about, mostly in tight leather stretched, creaking shoes, and across gauzy-laced fields. And so it does feel like a sort of gentle trek/journey away from the grey and towards a soft light. Once again the master of “small-case minimalism” quietly conjures up escapism and mystery, signposting the way to a “new Eden” of a sort.
Further Reading:
Andrew Heath ‘The Alchemist’s Muse’ (2020)
Toby Marks & Andrew Heath ‘Motion’ (2019)
Andrew Heath ‘Evenfall’ (2018)
Andrew Heath ‘Soundings’ (2017)
Roedelius, Chaplin & Heath ‘Triptych In Blue’ (2017)
Headboggle ‘Digital Digital Analog’
(Ratskin Records) 24th September 2021
Quite happy it seems transmitting the optimistic explorations of a retro-futuristic synthesized world into a contemporary age, Derek Gedalecia (the maverick human behind the Headboggle moniker) has immense fun exploring the possibilities of the iconic Prophet polyphonic synthesizer. Channeling two decades worth of mischief and invention, Gedalecia releases a most ambitious sprawling album of quirky and cosmic cathedral library music, kosmische and transmogrified electronic soundtracks for the Oakland based Ratskin Records imprint.
Making good and expanding upon the one-minute suites and vignettes of the previous Polyphonic Demo set, the Digital Digital Analog album (a reversed play on the conventional ‘shorthand’ method of originally producing and recording music for the CD format) stretches the perimeters further.
Whilst previously favouring a improvised method or arrangement, the outer limit oddities on this 24 track album are more refined. In practice that means being transported to a plastic popping acid squelched symphonic dream world in which Raymond Scott joined The Yellow Magic Orchestra; Bruno Spoerii was reborn as the Aphex Twin; and a GX1 era Rick Van Der Linden played classical piano for the Galactic Supermarket. This is a both mysterious and cheeky album of synthesised heavenly music, strange burbled soups, Atari ST and Amiga computer game music, preset libraries, Vangelis fanfares, reimagined Kraftwerkian melodies and weird warped stirrings of Sky Records peregrinations.
Cleaner lines and crystal, almost pure, sound waves sparkle amongst fuzzier, fizzled effects and sharper, sometimes piercing, angular rays. Sci-fi phantasm sits alongside visions of Fluxus avant-garde pianist’s programming a robot, off-world thrillers and psychedelic synth pinball machine music on an idiosyncratic collage of filed influences: Believe it or not the album was, in part, inspired by Gedalecia’s studies of ragtime and, the more believable, classical.
The Prophet synth has its work cut out as it’s sent into outer space, to more foreboding realms, and to trippy planes of kooky chimed warbled magic. A masterful sophisticated setting loose of expectations, Gedalecia’s screened Headboggle project playfully expands horizons and goes for broke in the synthesizer maverick stakes.
Niklas Wandt ‘Solar Müsil’
(Bureau B) 17th September 2021
Like most of us either forced or choosing to use the lockdowns as an opportunity to rediscover our immediate environments, to take a pause and appreciate the simpler joys in a restricted climate, drummer-percussionist, producer, radio journo and DJ Niklas Wandt suddenly found his hectic live schedule cut suddenly short.
With no choice but to take this break away from his preferred method of live improvisation, the musical polymath hankered down to accept this as a period of contemplation. However, though the idea of fixing any specific performance, series of compositions on a recording didn’t feel right at first. Despite this Wandt found a semi-improvised method, and way of working, for this new solo (though various friends on the scene help out) album. It feels anyway like a musical journey that could go anywhere: even travelling in directions that prove surprising for its creator.
Schooled in jazz, psychedelia and, later on, electronica, the host of the WDR3 Jazz & World music programme Wandt’s tastes could be considered eclectic. His CV includes live performances with Oracles and Stabil Elite, collaborations with Wolf Müller, and the Neuzeitliche Bodenbeläge duo with Joshua Gottmanns. With that all in mind you can expect the musical range to be wide.
A display of untethered, incipient and rhythmic breakouts on various drum and percussive apparatus travels through leftfield electronica pop, jazz-fusion, prog and the kooky; all through a sort of kosmische/krautrock lens on an album that seems to be constantly on the move. Even with a free-roaming mind and myriad of influences, this half-narrated journey is an enigma, a puzzle that takes on so many surprising turns. It’s a conceptual futuristic jazz album on one hand, Neue Deutsche Welle on the other. This is a world of the organic and synthesized; machine and dreamy cosmic traverses; starry visions and tubular moonbeams; percussive experiments and chamber string augmentation. The languages used change from German to English to Spanish and back again: the only voice I could understand was the sleepless wistful female English poetry on the hallucinogenic Cosmic Range funking-jazz turn mirror pop ‘Durch den Spalt’ (“through the gap”).
Satellites and refractive rays bounce around in a Faust and Gurumaniax cosmology on the album’s solar-flared ‘Der Gläaerne Tag’ (“the glass day”), whilst Wandt magic’s up a weird exotic quirk of the YMO and mid 80s Sakamoto on the progressive-lilt apparition ‘Lo Spettro’ (“the ghost”). In between both worlds and the sense, Wandt ‘drums up’ a most unexpected journey that defies categorisation on his Solar Müsil album; a sonic nomad just travelling where the spark of creativity, mood and improvisational ingenuity happens to take him.
Ulrich Schnauss & Mark Peters ‘Destiny Waiving’
(Bureau B) 24th September 2021
Completing an expletory trilogy that began a decade ago, the congruous sonic musical project that first brought the renowned electronic artist Ulrich Schnauss and the Engineers guitarist Mark Peters together on the Underrated Silence album in 2011, continues with a third installment: Destiny Waiving. Although it must be pointed out that the majority of the material, in part made up by improvisational sets played across London, Dublin and Birmingham (at the city’s St. James’ Church as part of the Seventh Wave electronica festival), was pretty much laid down and formalized back in 2017: the same year Peter’s debut acclaimed solo album, Innerland, was released. The final mixes weren’t however picked up and finished until last year, and though there’s nothing to suggest it the restrictions of the pandemic couldn’t have helped to get this album out into the world at large.
Those familiar with both musicians will know that their pathways have crisscrossed on various occasions, with Schnauss, a solo artist of great repute and a member of a rejuvenated Tangerine Dream since 2014, even going as far as to join Peter’s shoegaze indie band the Engineers. A voiceless, wordless extension in some ways of that band’s slow burning brilliance (I bloody love the group’s 2005 single ‘Forgiveness’), but totally unburdened by it, the music is expansive, dreamy and often beautifully starry.
Said to be the partnerships most focused and concise album yet, concentrated on some suites by the societal commentary referenced titles, Destiny Waiving still feels very much free to roam tonal and uncoupled evocative possibilities. Almost weightless in fact, despite some deeper guitar iterations and repeated synthesised waves.
Hints of Schnauss’ iconic German comrades in kosmische and soundtrack innovation, hints of Tangerine Dream can be heard in the cosmic sentiments of his melodic and arpeggiator palette alongside touches of Vangelis enormity, various polygons and quirks, and occasional kinetic beats. Peters on his part offers a subtle but effective array of trundled and spun electric guitar lines, and concentric resonated vibrations. I’m not sure what’s going on with the cosmological ‘Speak In Capitals’, but Peters seems to have borrowed some Talk Talk guitar melody: and why not?! They both create a rich mood board together that gently builds towards post-rock, neo-classical and dreamy kosmische type dramas and bliss. Searching for answers, expressing disillusion, this partnership escape by contouring open panoramas and the enormity of it all. It’s a real special album that captures both artist’s craft and sagacious low-burning deliverance.
Psycho & Plastic ‘Soundtrack 2: Pappel’
(GiveUsYourGOLD) Out Now
A welcome coalesce of past techno pop and kosmische investigations and grooves – from the International Pony dances with Der Plan aboard a space station Kosmopop album to the ambience of Placid House –, the second purpose-made soundtrack from the Berlin duo is their most remarkable progression and transition yet.
Commissioned by the award-winning author Dalibos Marković to create an original soundtrack for his debut novel Pappel, the electronic partnership and label co-founders Alexandre Decoupigny and Thomas Tichai rose to the challenge with a sophisticated, evocative and lower-case cinematic beauty.
Nothing less than a 150-year spanning journey’s worth of German history and a Kafka-esque tree-turn-human protagonist to use as inspiration, the possibilities could have been endless. Amon Düül II of course tried it, making a Krautrock opera out of a similar epoch – from the eventual founding of a united empire dominated by a victorious Prussia after the success of their war with France in the 1870s, to the hundred year long exodus of the German speaking population to the Americas, looking for a new Eden or escaping religious persecution, and the harrowing specter of the two World Wars. Soundtrack 2 couldn’t be more different. I’ve not had the chance to read the source literature, but its central character’s birth, life experiences seem to act as some sort of metaphor for that cannon of history.
‘Die Bäume’ (or “The Tree”) is the opener, the birth if you will of the story. Accented and attuned with a suite of field recordings and a progressive-kosmische score, we’re taken from under the forest canopy in which Pappel is born to realization. The very fibers and growth of the woodland is accompanied with an immersion of nature’s soundtrack and crisp fizzled cells; superseded later on by an almost supernatural vision of Sven Vath and Klaus Schulze – there’s even an elegant, nice dapple of Roedelius style serial piano at the end.
This moves into a half jazzy version of Nils Frahm joining forces with Manuel Göttsching on the dreamy ‘Wunsch Indianer zu Werder’ (“Desire to become a Indian”): a really lovely mysterious soundtrack into the heart of darkness. Passenger liner bound for ‘Amerika’ traverses an out-of-time plaintive and foreboding sea, whilst the pace, sound steps up into a semi-modern German version of Kavinsky’s Drive score and Moroder on the Euro-neon pulsed ‘Auf der Galeris’ (“On the gallery”).
Each track equating directly to a chapter in the book, sonically and musically tells a story, matching the scenes and atmospheres. A both intimate and outwardly searching soundtrack of intelligently placed techno, Cluster style ambience and beautifully descriptive melodies, this is, as I’ve already said, the duo’s most progressive if not best work yet. They build upon past excursions, experiments with a richer than ever palette, and prove that the soundtrack genre is very much where they should be.
Our Daily Bread 470: Dead Rituals & Francis Moon, Hits, Sun Atoms…
September 17, 2021
Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea’s Roundup
The cult leader of the infamous lo fi gods, The Bordellos, Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea has released countless recordings over the decades with his family band of hapless unfortunates, and is the owner of a most self-deprecating sound-off style blog. His most recent releases include the King Of No-Fi album, a collaborative derangement with the Texas miscreant Occult Character, Heart To Heart, and a series of double-A side singles (released so far, ‘Shattered Pop Kiss/Sky Writing’, ‘Daisy Master Race/Cultural Euthanasia’, ‘Be My Maybe/David Bowie’ and All Psychiatrists Are Bastards / Will I Ever Be A Man). He has also released, under the Idiot Blur Fanboy moniker, a stripped-down classic album of resignation and Gallagher brothers’ polemics.
Each month we supply him with a mixed bag of new and upcoming releases to see what sticks.
The Single.
Dead Rituals & Francis Moon ‘Tangled Up’
10th September 2021
This is actually quite a beautifully written pop song, and actually overcomes the awful bland production a lot of these indie pop songs have nowadays, the kind of production you hear on a song being played on an episode of Catfish when the person being catfished discovers that the hunk they thought they were talking to is in fact their best friends 80-year uncle who had a penchant for dressing like Touché Turtle and thrusting his pork sword at any passing stranger. This is a lovely well-written ditty and one if it came on the radio I would not turn off.
The Albums..
Hits ‘Cielo Nublado’
(Paisley Shirt Records) 17th September 2021
Why am I listening to so much indie pop this week?! Not that I’m complaining when it’s made with so much charm, melody and melancholia as this album by Hits; an album that brings back the golden days of K Records and the charm and beauty of a Sarah Records release back into my life, but with an added spice of sex and darkness which I am very taken with, especially on the slightly discordant ‘Flat Horizon’, which I have been listening to on a loop for far too long now for one’s own good and mental sanity.
But this is an album I think could well soundtrack the soon to be with us autumn evenings and bus rides to and from work. It has a certain feel like an old friend you have not seen in a long time giving you a hug and in that instant all those memories of what you shared between yourselves come flooding back, which you momentarily bathe and lose yourself in. Guitar jangle has not sounded so Revolutionary in such a long time, and not moved me so much in such a long time. Just guitar, bass and drums: Buddy Holly did not die in vain. This is an album to buy and cherish. And C+, it has a musical tribute to Alan Vega, which is short charming and catchy: as all indie pop should be.
ONETWOTHREE ‘ST’
(Kill Rock Stars) 15th October 2021
ONETWOTHREE are a three-piece post punk trio made up of three lady bassists from Switzerland, and the album is indeed a groovy post-punk delight. Obviously bass heavy with dashes of synth, guitar and a freshness that is welcome in this day of thawed out pre-frozen indie nonentities.
Instead of heart stopping originality and pop sass we are having music forced on us by those incapacitated with a grapefruit ear, but I’m happy to report that ONETWOTHREE have both a subtle originality and sprightly pop sass that has one sassing everywhere with indie pant shenanigans. They have tunes, melodies and a vocal charm that asks one the question, ‘why are we not hearing this on the radio more often?’ We need music with subtlety, charm and simple naive sexiness to soundtrack our daily life; the sort that ONETWOTHREE offer us.
Equinox x Xqui ‘External Combustion Tension’
5th November 2021
Music is an art form and this album by Equinox and Xqui is a work of art. It’s an album that takes poetry, spoken word and atmospherics into an almost sci-fi territory. Ambiance abounds, if ambiance can do such a frivolity. Imagine John Cooper Clark gusting gushing and guesting on an album by a stoned tired Add N To X.
This is an album to wipe away your afternoon contemplating life and losing yourself in the beauty and intelligence and humour, sadness and anger. This well written and produced original album offers you all this. It offers you so much, and it’s quite refreshing to listen to something not influenced by Chuck Berry and his duck walk, and something that is not scared to stick out its well stroked chin and make an album that screams out: “art is nothing not be afraid of”. And to adventure your way into a new listening experience is indeed not a bad thing, like growing as a human being is not a bad thing: one can never learn too much.
This album could be an antidote to the mediocre music that lacks originality soul and art that so spoils our radio. Oasis fans should be locked in a room and force fed this record through large speakers and then see if they have grown as human beings or at least learned to walk like one.
Hanrath & Way ‘Prismatic Illusions’
(Submarine Broadcasting Co.) 23rd August 2021
Another album of experimental atmospheric tomfoolery from the dyed in genius label that is Submarine Recordings; an album that is soaked in humour sex and repeated listening. Each listen is repaid with another view of life seen through an unwashed wine glass; experimental jazz-tinged vignettes of cinematic explosion rubbing shoulders with long journeys through the artic coldness of synth led melodrama: an album of illicit kisses of soiled and melted hearts drawn in the snow.
Junk culture and blindfolded Art viewing where the sunken ships are just the follies of the mediocre, this is an album of reawakening’s and unmissed opportunity, an album I recommend whole heartedly.
Sun Atoms ‘Let There Be Light’
1st October 2021
Once again I mention Wonky Alice in a review as this is what this album reminds me of, which let me tell you is a compliment as Wonky Alice were one of the finest psych influenced bands doing the rounds in the late 80s early 90s, and this album screams of late 80s early 90s guitar-based psych. And as an early twenty something I would have loved this album. Even as a 54-year-old I’m still enjoying this album for all the same reasons I expect, but I suppose with the added attraction of nostalgia attached. Not that this is an album of nostalgia, but an album of well performed songs that hover around the Psych genre, but with a touch of Leonard Cohen drama and dry humour strangely emerging, popping its head above the pulpit waving a floppy hat casting peace signs to the embers of a dying sun. Yes, this is indeed an enjoyable well produced well thought out pop listening experience with dashes, dare I say, of its own togetherness and originality.
Will Feral ‘Hellweb’
(Metal Postcard Records) 4th September 2021
Hellweb is a rather marvellous instrumental album, one that would make one hell of a horror film soundtrack. Will Feral could be the natural successor to John Carpenter, and one could imagine this easily being the music to the next Halloween movie, but one stuck sometime in the future in a nightclub maybe.
It is also an album that draws on past horror classics like The Sphinx, reminding me in parts of The Omen soundtrack, and at times the music from the already mentioned Halloween movies. John Carpenter is defiantly an influence. But also so is Moroder as there are definite electro dance vibes going on in some of the tracks without ever venturing into rave territory.
Hellweb is an album I would recommend to film score aficionados even if it is not a movie soundtrack. All this fine album is missing is a movie to soundtrack itself. And if this album was released on vinyl would sell like hotcakes.
Our Daily Bread 469: Esbe ‘Under Cover’
September 15, 2021
ALBUM REVIEW/ DOMINIC VALVONA
Esbe ‘Under Cover’
(New Cat) 17th September 2021
When not in a captivating mood as a Daughter of the Desert, and channeling a former life as an Egyptian deity, it seems that the gifted, hypnotically voiced siren Esbe desires to reinterpret the standards.
After a fare old work rate of five original albums in just under four years, Esbe is ready to leave her own indelible trace on a songbook of classics: a timeline that runs from the 1960s to the age of Gershwin and even further back. Almost as a rites of passage for artists, sharing the songs that have in kind inspired them, Esbe now does likewise on her new album Under Cover.
But what can anyone possibly bring to such old worn songs as ‘Yesterday’, ‘Amazing Grace’ and ‘The Sound Of Silence’? The last of those, and the second Paul Simon song from his partnership with Art Garfunkel, does have a particular affinity. Not only is Simon held aloft as the singer’s most respected songwriter but the lyrics of this malady chime with her own Jewish heritage. Esbe transforms it into something approaching the mystical. Accompanied by a synthesis of sampled strings (made by Spitfire Audio and recorded at Sir George Martin’s famous Air Studios in London no less), Vangelis sci-fi vapours and tablas, she wraps the original words around an ambiguous cosmological. Esbe’s rendition of another Simon song, ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, which in many artist’s hands turns to insufferable mush and a cloying dirge, sounds more like a tirp-hop vision of Lisa Gerrard in comparison.
Tapping into that traditional training and reimagining songs she would have undoubtedly learnt whilst studying, from the great American songbook Esbe takes on Gershwin and DuBuse Hayward’s languid ‘Summertime’, and the hymnal late 18th century Christian beauty, with words by the English Anglican clergyman-poet John Newton, ‘Amazing Grace’. One becomes a spiritual anthem, taken on by the African-American community, whilst the other, was influenced in turn by that same communities own musical journey and travails. Here, with Esbe’s methodology of approaching each song (pretending she’s never heard the music, only the lyrics), these well known standards float off into a plaintive trembled voiced ether of both swelled and fraught strings and bit-crushed echo, with only the most tenuous of the originals recognized melodies and feel.
Elsewhere Lennon & McCartney’s ‘Yesterday’ is rendered mysterious and wistfully wispy – like the Chromatics on the Twin Peaks set -, whilst ‘Eleanor Rigby’ sounds like its sung by the protagonist’s diaphanous heart yearned ghost. ‘A Taste Of Honey’ travels back in time to sound like a celeste plaintive weep from the 1700s as reimagined by Pentangle.
There are similar envisioned versions of the iconic lipstick-on-the-collar Billie Holiday weepy ‘Don’t Explain’ (handed a misty veil accompaniment of scale-y shaken percussion and dreamy vapours), and a synthesised vision of the old choral ‘Silent Night’ too on this explorative covers songbook. Under Cover succeeds in connecting us to the artist and to what makes them tick; what moves them, what inspires them. Coming at old standards from another angle, more or less discarding the original compositions, timings and rhythms, cadence, Esbe wraps and weaves her often cooed, apparition like hypnotising voice around songs that need reenergising; so common they’ve blended into the background. Esbe’s evocative process of spellbinding reinterpretations prompts the listener to take another look at, and to perhaps find something novel or new, in old recordings. The familiar suddenly becomes worth investigating all over again.
Further Reading:
Our Daily Bread 468: Santa Sprees ‘Fanfare For Tonsils’ 
September 13, 2021
ALBUM REVIEW/Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea
Santa Sprees ‘Fanfare For Tonsils’
There have been some pretty stunning albums released this year and Fanfare For Tonsils is one of them; an album that is both experimental and great pop music, and as I think I mentioned when reviewing last year’s excellent Sum Total Of Insolent Blank, they are the closest thing we have to the weird 60s Beach Boys: they have the same magic, the same on the edge of madness and sublimeness that few have the genius to pull off naturally.
Anthony Dolphin is quite simply one of the finest songwriters making music today. A man who wraps beautiful melodies to some simply stunning lyrics, writing about such strange characters and subjects and engulfing them in pure experimental musical wonderfulness that hints at their influences. Tom Waits, The Fall, Half Japanese, folk, soul, jazz and rock ‘n’ roll are all captured in their truly original sound. For the band take their influences and bend them into something refreshing and beautiful until it sounds like no one else but the Santa Sprees. Fanfare For Tonsils is simply unique in this day and age as it is the sound of a band not giving a damn. A band that knows what they are doing is truly magnificent: heartbreakingly magnificent. And there are few who can match their brilliance. This is the true sound of the underground. The soul and heart of the underground. This is the sound of the Santa Sprees.
Monolith Cocktail Blog 