Album Review/Dominic Valvona
Forest Robots ‘Amongst A Landscape Of Spiritual Reckoning’
(Wormhole Records) 2nd April 2021
Approaching the most restless of times with the most intuitive and peaceable of contoured ambient imbued and mapped albums, the composer and cross-country explorer Fran Dominguez – under his chosen Forest Robots alias – is gaining much attention and acclaim for his empirical sonic suites.
Making our very own choice albums of the year features in 2020 with the settled mood music of After Geography, Dominguez invited us all to join him on a timeless like reflective and meditative trek across an awe-inspiring landscape; a mindful excursion of mountains and natural phenomenon that sought to offer a safe space away from all the tumult.
His latest ambient and neo-classical tinged opus is full of similar deep connective sanctuaries for the mind. Amongst A Landscape Of Spiritual Reckoning, we’re told, explores the themes of spirituality, existentialism and ethics and ‘how each relates to [the] experiences of parenthood’: A sort of Zen and the art of parenting meditation if you will. There’s much more of course to digest, and outlined in the PR spill, but that’s the basic gist. Dominguez articulates these concerns in a Taoist like sagacious state, with an album of gently unfurled and revealed emotional washes: some of which literally do wash over you.
Dominguez is inspired musically by Jon Hassell (a given I’d say), Gigi Masin (most certainly), and Weather Report (not so obvious), but mood wise specifically by such Jazz maestros as Coltrane and his Love Supreme game-changer, and Pharoah Sanders’ exploration towards shorter peregrinations, the iconic Thembi album. The sensibility of those jazz traverses may linger, maybe traced in the efflux of this record; there’s certainly a suffused if fleeted drift of light saxophone to be heard downplayed in the fizzy vapours and swirled square waves of ‘All Great Things Must Grow Through Dirt First’.
However, for the most part the oft melodious philosophically proposed quandaries flow between the ambient, neo-classical and afflatus. Beatific stained glass piped organ evokes those spiritual considerations on the marimba twinkled ‘A Church Is Religion, A Tree Is Spirituality’ for example, whilst the Bamboo music, mallet chiming ‘Sustenance Comes From The Roots, Not The Height’ has its own rays of veneration to share. Some suites truly do ascend towards the heavenly, like the accentuated flange-fanned guitar and serialism piano elegant ‘We Only Die Once, But Can Be Grateful Every New Day’. But the guiding light is a beautiful if sad, yearned and cerebral one.
Twinkled baubles, quivered elbowed and frayed strings, plucked mibra tangs, and what sounds like a rustic oboe are just some of the instruments and sounds used to evoke, stir up the emotions. They also (to these ears anyway) evoke certain geographical suggestions: from the Orient to Appalachians. Amongst A Landscape Of Spiritual Reckoning is something to both contemplate and wind down with, an articulation of both old tropes and the contemporary, handled with the most sublime of organic touches. Its every bit as rewarding and moving as After Geography, and will no doubt cement Dominguez’s reputation as one of the most creative and interesting ambient music visionaries of the past few years. Take some time out to immerse yourself in his brand of panoramic escapism.
See also…
Forest Robots ‘After Geography’
Choice Albums of 2020: Part Two
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.
DOMINIC VALVONA’S REVIEWS COLUMN
Jane Inc. ‘Number One’
(Telephone Explosion) 19th March 2021
Despite the inner turmoil, anxieties and mental fatigue of keeping herself together in such worrying uncertain times, Toronto scene instigator Carlyn Bezic’s latest alias is disarmingly shimmery, radiant and sparkly.
As Jane Inc. Carlyn pieces together a dreamy, often languorous and woozy, collage of sophisticated space-age disco, indie and 80s pop music; below the often vaporous and translucent, seductive surface of which lies a questioning and frustrated plaint of vulnerability.
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.
Growing originally from a “one woman” show to expand into a group effort, Carlyn has brought in recording engineer Steve Chahley (Badge Èpoque Ensemble, Kathryn Williams), Tasseomancy and U.S. Girls drummer Evan J. Cartwright, saxophonist Nick Dourando of BUDi Band and Fiver, and Scott Harwood to play the Wurlitzer to play on the album. This ensemble bring a warmth and nice live feel to what is essentially a knowing synthesized pop album; one that often evokes the disco and electronic production and atmospherics of Moroder.
Imaging Prince was usurped by Wendy & Lisa, filtered through St. Vincent, Number One’s most striking, stunning (and easily one of the best pop records of 2021 thus far) 80s pop nugget is the power-dressed kiss-off to the eternal work/life balance conundrum, ‘Steel’. Almost as good as that decadence in free fall is the slinking, slowly unfolding and starry ‘Gem’, which comes on like a mix of the Midnight Juggernauts and Grace Jones’ Compass Point Allstars. The rest of the album is both a diaphanous mix of glassy synth-pop and cosmic retro-futurism; made all the dreamier by the revolving Wurlitzer swirls, ARP synth like rays and reverberated vocal effects.
Though the artwork reflects a fragmentation, a layering of how others see the artist, the music is a together, cool, aloof production of polished new wave pop: a thinking person’s pop at that. Going for the sparkle, glittering, but the hazy too, Jane Inc. proves yet another successful, scintillating and animated project for the Toronto artist.
Various ‘Edo Funk Explosion Vol. 1’
(Analog Africa) 26th March 2021
Many just know it as ‘modern Highlife’, others as a whole different brew entirely called ‘Edo Funk’: a more stripped and raw sheen-less and less slick version of the productions emanating from the nightclubs of 80s Nigeria. That scintillating signature Highlife groove and use of blazing but softened heralding brass remains, but this Edo Funk sound is in no rush, hurry to get anywhere soon; preferring instead to incorporate a quasi-reggae gait, rudimental 80s effects racks, William Onyeabor like synths and programmed percussive pre-sets and drums to create a light disco funk.
Born in the much fought-over Edo State capital of Benin City in the cosmopolitan region of Southern Nigeria, the Edo Funk phenomenon was a reductive alternative to the polished productions that dominated the scene, and one that delivered, in many cases, the same spirited protestations that Fela Kuti wrapped around Afrobeat.
Three of the genre’s greatest exponents and progenitors share the billing on this latest compilation from the house of Analog Africa. Each artist is represented by a quartet of tunes, all of which were hunted down and chosen by the duo of groove archeologists Samy Ben Redjeb (AA’s label boss) and Bela Patrutzi (of Tropical Timewarp). Setting out in 2018 to discover the ‘remaining traces’ of that transformed funk, they managed to produce a lively, if often sweetened, light collection of rare records from the trailblazers Sir Victor Uwaifo, Akaba Man and Osayomore Joseph. Each has a unique backstory, and something different to bring to the style, with the lordly Sir Victor favouring the synth, the lauded ‘philosopher king’ and ambassador of funky Highlife, Akaba, immersing himself in hypnotic trance rhythms, and the modernizer Osayomore bringing the flighty, gentle flute to a form synonymous for its horn sections.
Famed guitarist in his own right, Sir Victor (crowned the ‘king’ of Edo Funk no less) was already a star in his native Nigeria before building the now legendary Joromi Studios in his hometown of Benin City in 1978. Now broadening his horizons and production facilities, his new records on the cusp of a new decade would heavily feature pure synth sounds. With his tittering named Titibitis band, tunes like the playful ‘Tranm Tran’ took on a sort of synthesized spacy aquatic squelch, as flange-effect choppy and scratched guitars and organ dalliances sweetly wade through water. Those keyboards, whether real or not, can be heard at piercing levels on the more tropical, sauntering and swaying ‘Aibalegbe’, and they almost squeal with distortion on the busier, disco production ‘Obviemama’.
Joseph, appearing with either The Creative Seven, or The Uele Power Sound, and also in a solo capacity, was a ‘Lagos fixture’ we’re told, before settling back in Benin City in the mid 70s; just years after the Nigerian Civil War, when the Biafra fractions for a short few years occupied the city. On this compilation his fluted signature floats over the cradled traditional horn support and vibrant but lilted infectious sunny funk on the minor anthem ‘Africa Is My Root’; a disarming Kuti style swipe at westernized Africans, with what sounds at one point like some very dubious lyrics. Anyway, it’s got my vote, and has been on the Monolith Cocktail HQ playlist for weeks and weeks. He’s the “minister of peace”, and more sinister “follower of the devil” on the eased, slinking and disapproving ‘My Name Is Money’, and evokes Orlando Juluis on the jazzy and softly funky strut ‘Ororo No De Fade’.
Said to have been less overtly political, Akaba Man (here with the African Pride and The Nigie Rokets in tow) sure knew a thing or two about a sweet soulful groove. Again using a relaxed swing of Highlife horns (cornet trumpet by the sounds of it), he stumbled and elastically limbered along to a mix of reggae and lilted Soweto funk, whilst adding a concertinaed effect of Cabo Verde space echo synth rays on tunes like ‘Popular Side’. Some of his other contributions sound like the scintillated disco relatives of Nigeria’s The Money Man and Super 5 International in comparison.
There are some great discoveries to be found on this compilation for sure. The emphasis being on groove, feel and even happiness: no matter what the theme. The Edo Explosion arrives just at the right time, as spring emerges from an awful Covid long winter. Dance on into the season’s forgiving radiant blossoms with this rare funk special: go on, you all deserve it.
Cory Hanson ‘Pale Horse Rider’
(Drag City) 12th March 2021
Once more casting adrift off but remaining musically connected to Wand, Cory Hanson finds room to breath and some kind of solace from the current charged atmosphere of his divisive America homeland, retreating to a Joshua Tree like soul-replenishing desert with his band of campfire musicians.
The move to a earnest lifestyle and staple cowboy diet of ‘coffee and chili’, seems to have had the desired effect with Cory and ensemble exuding some deep affecting moods and pining reflection from the most relaxed recording performances: most of which proved the best versions on the very first take.
On the yearning pathway of cosmic cowboy country and Americana indie, Cory’s second solo songbook draws on the ‘Rio Grande’ rebel country dreaminess of his principle band Wand, yet goes further towards troubadour melodies and timeless songwriting. Always remaining gentle and brushed, except for certain tense swells and slowly grinded out electric guitar strains, each song has a certain hint of crafted familiarity; from Neil Young to Travis; Wilco to Big Thief.
Steel peddle wanes, Southern American strings and the desert mirage panorama scene-setting of Western soundtracks are all present and correct, as Cory scans the landscape of sighed revelations and daydreaming romantic plaint. It’s “revelations” indeed that permeate the album’s titular coddled voiced deliverance: Cory in a quasi-balladry Nick Cave mode evoking the revengeful stranger-comes-to-cleanup-and-purify-the-sinners archetype, as performed on screen so well by the pale rider Clint Eastwood.
The pale horse of that album title and song is itself a reference to the biblical fourth and final horseman (“death”), galloping over the apocalyptic horizon. It’s also the title of a book by the journalist Mark Jacobson, who uses the subject of the miscreant former navel intelligence worker Miles William Cooper and his infamous Behold A Pale Horse manifesto – a terrible blueprint that wove together every lunatic paranoid delusion and conspiracy theory going – to expose and look at the toxicity of fake news and America’s paranoia. This feeds into Cory’s own thematic reflections about the state of the nation. For this pale rider stalks not only the deserts but also wanders the concrete sidewalks of the artist’s more urban L.A. home: it’s as if the old West seamlessly blends in with the California metropolis. As I’ve already said, this deeply affecting songbook sees a relaxed Cory don the garb of American and country music effortlessly; adding a lilt of modernity to some timeless, brushed and hushed wrangling melodies.
Ensemble De Cadavres Exquis ‘The Warlock Tapes’
(Submarine Broadcasting Company) 3rd March 2021
Spanning the visual and sonic, the veiled Glove Of Bones’ latest project is a riff on the Surrealist “Exquiste Corpse” parlor game; a subversive collaborative drawing exercise in which each participant added whatever subconscious extension they could dream up to a chain of hidden images; the results of which when revealed could result in the most weird of oddities. With the likes of grand doyen of the form, and way beyond, Max Ernst taking part alongside Dali and Miró you might have big bird’s plumage next to the shapely naked crossed legs of a muse and tennis racket feet.
GOB’s version is, despite a whole host of participants all adding their own unique musical thumb prints, actually quite dreamily coherent: flowing even. With a renegade circle of Bandcamp mavericks, which includes Mark Fox, Jamie Munāriz, Rutger Van Driel, Volkar Bauland, Gordon Way and many others, GOB manages to steer his own “Cadavres Exquis” experiment towards a challenging but extemporized sonic journey that has a grasp of intrigue, interest and sensibility.
If regular readers can recall, we last featured GOB with his regular foil Cousin Silas in our choice album misadventures of 2020; the duo’s alternative ethnographic reality Kafou Avalonia reimagined an atavistic shift of tectonic plates: a sort of musical equivalence of Ernst’s own amorphous, sometimes by chance, post WWI alien landscapes and plaster-cast-on-board landmasses without borders configurations. The Surrealist raison d’etre of subversion (sometimes in poor taste, and at other times truly revolutionary) seems as inspiration on that brilliant album and this one. Cousin Silas, I might add, pops up on the woozy, fugal horn suffused, cryptic Einstürzende Neubaten transmogrifying ‘Revolution No.9’ numerical reading, ‘Bone Yard 391 Plus 119’.
Throwing his dice into the ring, the omnipresence of the late cult author George Cockcroft (passing away last November) is another inspiration for this project-in-lockdown. Under the pen name of Luke Rhinehart he infamously wrote the game-of-chance novel The Dice Man in 1971; a story in which the central protagonist – arguably a version of the author himself – based all life decisions on the throw of those said dice, to ever worrying, even criminal and heinous results. An enterprise of chance then, and yet seldom does The Warlock Tapes sound like a random voyage into dissonance and craziness.
Not quite “Dada Dada”, nor cosmic doolally neither, but an avant-garde matrimony of recollections, amorphous ethnic sounds, obscured prose and transformed post-punk dub. ‘March Of The Jackonapes’ has one layer of vortex blown cello sweeping across a ship’s bow, another layer of downtown NYC Arthur Russell electro-beats, a layer of Fluxus, and then one layer of dub-tronica: imagine The Orb, African Head Charge and Amorphous Androgynous. ‘Antofasto Vorahnung’ sounds like La Monte Young tuning up, and ‘Bliss And Willful Ignorance’ inter-layers hints of E.F.S. series Can with a vague Finis Africae in a primal soup wallow. Elements of neo-classical Eastern European sorrow blend with mysterious enchantments; Ash Ra Tempel and Dance Of The Lemmings era Amon Düül II with Jah Wobble aimless ghostly dub basslines; and ARP synthesized visions with John Carpenter and Tubular Bells exorcism.
Strange sonic matches indeed, yet the folded sound envelope between each imaginative rendering is blurred, softened so that at times this sounds more like a linear traverse then a unstable, jarring collision of incongruous mismatched ideas. Less a serial experiment, and more an experience in taking the listener on a surreal travelogue into the minds of its makers, which turns out to be a most inviting magical space to visit.
Mosquitoes ‘S/T’
(World Of Echo) 5th March 2021
The tight-lipped London-based Mosquitoes’ misadventures in subterranean dub and post-punk electronica, industrial music remain shrined in mystique. The lion’s share of their seven-year back catalogue has disappeared from sight: usually as fast as those records have materialized.
Resurfacing as a welcome 10” dub-plate style reissue (though limited to a vinyl run of 300 copies) is the trio’s eponymous 12” from 2016; originally released under the MOS-002 appellation, and arguably the “first iteration” of that said troupe of Dominic Goodman, Clive Philips and Peter Blundell.
Dub is the focus of this five track EP, albeit a very transformed and removed vision of it. Under cryptic shunted-together couplet titles the blood-sucking irritant moniker trio skulk around in a reverberated lumber of On-U-Sound meets Basic Channel; sometimes more like Populäre Mechanik on Shooters Hill.
Basement settings in a haunted house, where the pulse of an almost so low as to be near inaudible bass rumbles, await the listener. Apparition’s breath and huff, steely drums rattle and ricochet, whilst cut-up voices either drift or jump out of the echoed shadows. A friction scuzz of industrial gristly guitar wanes and a tattooist’s needle scratches away. Verging on a flock of bats escaping the dungeon and a paranormal experience, the spooked strung-out dub invocations on this EP are murky and unsettling, and extremely deep. Minimal yet striking, full of depth and effortlessly flowing between minor sonic suggestions, the Mosquitoes have brought dub together with the industrial, low level Techno and the alien on a record that sounds as thoroughly fresh now as the day it was conceived: incredibly on trend you could say, the dub sound system culture taken on a dark and mysterious alternative pathway.
Petrolio ‘Club Atletico’
(Depths Records) 5th March 2021
A sonic soundtrack reification of the fear, tortuous agonies and grim realities of Argentina’s near decade Dirty War in the mid 70s and early 80s doesn’t sound the most appealing of recommendations I grant you. Yet the Italian artist Enrico Cerrato has produced an immure experience of human suffering and trepidation akin to the late Scott Walker’s collaboration with Sunn O))).
With an impressive CV of solo industrial and noise recordings under the Petrolio alias, and a number of collaborations with artists such as Joachen Arbeit of Einstürzende Neubaten infamy, Fabrizio Modonese Palumbo and MaiMaiMai, Cerrato is ideally positioned to churn up a miasma of toxic history into a both mysterious and traumatic sound immersion.
Inspired by the movies of the Italian-Chilean director Marco Bechis, who helped draw an audience of witnesses to the horrific Argentinian military and USA sponsored war on socialist sympathizers (a net that took in those willfully backing South and Central American Communist guerilla groups to those who were just members of trade unions, students and those of the most tenuous of connections), Club Atletico is a dramatic at times concentrated force of uncertainty and horror: the uncertainty of when one’s torturers are about to appear; the uncertainty of place, time and disappearance in the often rudimental detention systems of the Fascistic ruling regime.
Often picked up, kidnapped, off the street and “disappeared”, as portrayed in Bechis’ Garage Olimpo film, these poor unfortunates ended up in the most grim meat factories of human suffering. A legacy that finally ended with the fallout of the Falklands War (ironically mounted by the increasingly shaky positioned government as a way to gain popularity and keep power), the Dirty War’s toll of victims could be as high as 30,000 or more. In the aftermath, many of those in charge have faced trial, been imprisoned, and Argentina has to some degree come to terms with its darkest hours.
Still, outside of Latin America this sordid destructive epoch is largely unknown. And so, using the infamous name of one such detention centre of torture (renamed ironically and cruelly with the name of famous football clubs), Cerrato sets out on an industrial chthonian vision: the chilling ambient and fatalistic shadow of waiting for interrogation and death.
Cerrato has researched his subject deeply, reflecting the ominous specter with caustic electronica shifts, reverberated death knell drum hits and cylindrical forces. There are chimes of Arp like synth-mirrored rays and even some melody to be heard, with the dark arts pronounced ‘El Silencio’ becoming quite spacey and trippy.
Club Atletico has a real soundtrack quality about it: perhaps an alternative score to the films of the director who has, in part, inspired such sonic forebode and trauma. It’s certainly an immersive experience with purpose, history and a deeply affecting message: a dark address of heinous political genocide.
Cementation Anxiety ‘In Continual’
(Somewherecold Records) 26th March 2021
Managing to escape a heavy density of neuroticism through the barely fleeting prisms of dreamy light that penetrate this caustic mass, Kyle Nelson in his Cementation Anxiety guise dares to take a glimpse at sanctuary.
Pretty much, whether intentional or not, reflecting recent times of uncertainty and mental fatigue, the former New Jersey hardcore punkster goes on a ‘futile’ search for solace. He may just have found it in the faded embers of this album’s curtain call, ‘He Forgets Not His Own’; hanging on in there through a counterbalance of both scuzz-y galvanized rippling discourse, distant thundered drums and fear, to reach a more ambient settled release.
Taking a very different path to his days in Bodiless, Kyle slowly unleashes a cathexsis of stiffening drones and course fuzz over six movements of varying invocation: from spiriting vague hints of the monastic, paranormal to the subterranean. Yet despite the creeping omnipresence of dark emotional forces, Kyle floats in flange-fanned processed guitar parts that evoke 80s post-punk and shoegaze influences. These dawdle, lightly dropped guitar notes and melodies both hang over and waft across the gravitas of mysterious ambient moody waves and pulsations to offer something almost translucent.
At his most pained and scary, he throws in a jilting driller-killer power tool scream out of nowhere, or dials into the Poltergeist TV set. That horror drill shock comes after a slowly creeping long passage of reverberations, and rhythmic knocks and thuds on a door that we can only hope offers salvation rather than opens Hell’s gateway. But then at its most relieved and escapist there are moments of less intensity, and an air-y, even Kosmische like, sense of the cosmic to be found. Nevertheless, it’s a thickening less desired sense of anxiety that hangs over proceedings for the majority of the time, on an album suite looking for a break in the relentless cycle of morass and despair.
Mecánica Clásica ‘Mar Interior’
(Abstrakce Records) 15th March 2021
Contouring an atavistic historiography and mythological Mediterranean with the most amorphous of tonal and Kosmische soundtracks, the Valencia outfit of Mecánica Clásica enact a sonic efflux that vaguely suggests the resonating presence of old civilizations on their new exploration, Mars Interior: a title that roughly translates into ‘inland sea’.
A visceral suite that’s imbued by the likes of Harmonia, Ariel Kalma and the ‘possible musics’ traverses of Jon Hassell and the Hellenistic Xaos, this topographic sea voyage blends hints of the Greek with the Anatolian and the Middle East coastlines of the Med. It’s a cosmic, often trippy affair that conjures up an acid wash of Minion, Phoenician and Arabian seafarers crossing a 70s electronica horizon of bobbing and radiating algorithm and arpeggiator synths, drifting flange and phaser effect guitar brushes and rattles, and translucent gauzy atmospherics. This all sounds like an entrancing conjuncture of Cluster, Mythos and the Cosmic Couriers on the opening ‘Litoral De Roca’, and like a subtle inter-layered lunar bed of the Tangerine Dream and a jamming Can on the more rhythmic ‘Hemeroskopeion’. The ethnic trance skylab beauty ‘Desade Mañana’ imagines Thomas Dinger in communion with Finis Africae. These flotsams and invocations conjure up a both veiled, magical past and otherworldly, alien terrain that seldom takes root; a wispy haze and ghostly trace of what used to be, and what is, never tangible nor concrete enough to hang on to. Soul-quenched columns of water ascend towards space, and gods can be found amongst the sand dunes on a most starry, divine and shimmered album of imaginative, transient tonality.
Timo Lassy & Teppo Mäkynen ‘Live Recordings 2019-2020’
(We Jazz) 26th March 2021
From the off, this is one phenomenal ‘out there’ jazz album. It has everything you want and can get out of just two principle instruments in the avant-garde field of jazz: the tenor saxophone and drums. It may take some time to reach the more dizzying, quickened, unbridled explosions of dynamic breaks and Sam Rivers style ‘let it go’ jamming, but it does get there: from a synthesis of incipient stirrings and shimmers.
In what looks to be the Helsinki hub’s penchant for recent live recordings, and following in the wake of last year’s Ateneum live album, We Jazz put out one of their finest releases yet; a suite of live performances that capture the celebrated and critically acclaimed masterful jazz contortions and rhythmically jumping vibrancy of Finland’s greatest jazz export Timo Lassy and fellow compatriot, the producer and drummer extraordinaire Teppo Mäkynen. In fact, the duo featured alongside both Alder Ego and OK:OK on that live showcase from the museum; performing a version of the snozzled, raspy and twinkled ‘Fallow’: another version of which also appears on this latest album. In perfect but limbering and exploratory synchronicity the pair let out a languid release of power over the course of ten varied performances: varied in mood, timing and energy across a number of festival appearances.
Timo and foil Teppo have built up an unspoken connectivity over the years that speaks volumes on this album of untethered staccato bleating, spiraling and bouncing spontaneous encouragement, and more shadowy, mysterious mood-setting trips down the spiritual jazz Nile; both forms of which are woven into avant-garde peregrinations. The ‘biggest jazz star’ to emerge from Finland has worked with Teppo when they were both members of The Five Corner Quintet troupe, and then later as the tenor saxophonist went out alone and assembled his own band. Here they manage to keep a signature sound together, even though these performances have been collated from a trio of different events, resulting in a journey that seems to somehow flow in its own idiosyncratic fashion.
Binker & Moses meets Gary Bartz, Marius Neset and Morten Lund on a set of atmospheric live recordings that splash around in the murky lagoons, race along like a harassed New Orleans brass band, swing like Cab Calloway in free fall, and rumbles, knocks and blurts in concentrated trade offs between the springy but torque drums and swallowed tenor articulations and shapes. Left to probe at and circumnavigate the original source material, the duo goes further and deeper. Too tight and just obviously brilliant to sound entirely extemporized this album is nonetheless both meditative and lively; showcasing the fall gamut of the partnership’s many collaborative projects and strands – and there are many of those. It’s an album that makes you really pine for the intimacy and excitement of live music: the anticipation too. Timo and Teppo cement their reputations with an impressive synergy of adroit experimentation: the complete ticket and one of the best jazz records you’ll hear all year.
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.
Our Daily Bread 430: Witch Camp
March 9, 2021
ALBUM REVIEW/DOMINIC VALVONA
Witch Camp (Ghana): ‘I’ve Forgotten Now Who I Used To Be’
(Six Degrees Records) 12th March 2021
The explosion in all things witchy amongst those desperate to find alternative ways of expression, lifestyle and also an alternative to scientific reasoning in the West has been fueled by a “so-called” hunger for female empowerment. Replacing last season’s trend for “green” living, with “green witch” profiles on tik tok that attract billions of views, and covens of middle-class converts hexing Trump (all done with a social media campaign logo of course), witching is big business – you can walk into most High Street book stores and buy books on spells and such.
In the divisive arena of revisionism, leftist puritanical evangelism, witches are celebrated, held up as paragons of virtue in the war against the patriarch. It’s true, men in power, to even just the neighbours next door, throughout history in the Americas and Europe have demonized, leapt on those poor unfortunates they’ve accused of witchcraft: whether it’s in spite, envy, because they were different, unmarried, even disabled or maybe had mental illness. Zealot trials continued, like a stain on our ancestor’s character, even throughout the entire “enlightenment”; and even in recent times the stigma still exists in some countries.
Arguably this hunger for witches is convoluted, muddled up with an array of issues: from the political to those pushing alternative medicines and opting to drop-out of the Capitalist society – to go off grid as it were. Despite the history, it’s very unlikely that you are going to be arrested, ducked in the millpond or ostracized for embracing it in the West in the twenty first century.
Compare this trend against the persecuted, living in fear women (and some men too) folk of northern Ghana’s guarded witch camps; the subjects of the Monolith Cocktail’s most prolific featured international producer Ian Brennan, and his partner in these recordings, the Italian-Rwandan filmmaker, photographer, author and activist Marilena Umuhoza Delli’s latest free-of-artifice, deeply connecting project, I’ve Forgotten Now Who I Used To Be.
Once more recording, capturing in-situ performances in as raw a set-up as possible, Ian and Marilena help to address, or at least draw attention to the oppressed and demonized women accused of witchcraft in Ghana. Forced to abandon their homes under threat of physical harm, even death, hundreds have found a less than safe environment in clandestine village like camps: eking out a living either selling firewood, working the fields and worse still, prostitution. Stigmatized as witches for little more than mental illness, blindness and physical disabilities, and as victims of certain conniving ruses in which land is stolen when their husbands die, these communities remain in a protective limbo – the Ghanaian government threatening to close such camps down.
Following on from similar ‘uncloying’ recordings in a post-genocide Rwanda (Hidden Musics 4: Abatwa) and Tasmania (drawing attention to the guarded albinism communities on the White African Power album), Ian and Marilena respectively assembled a hundred plus cast of women from across three camps for a earthy, soulful album of matter-of-fact entitled plights and plaints.
There’s a real connection between the two parties that comes across in these largely untouched performances, some of which capture the most truly raw of voices and expressed tragedies. Some of this is in some part a result of Marilena’s own tumultuous background, with her mother a widower from Rwanda, forced to seek a new life in one of Italy’s most conservative of regions. As an immigrant Marilena knows firsthand what prejudice feels and looks like, having also written two books on racism in her adoptive European home.
Recorded we’re told in just over six hours, with many of the participants in their seventies (an indictment on the treatment and casting out of the elderly), the twenty-tracks on this album vary in woes and joy (yes, joy). The heartbreaking titles (‘Hatred Drove Me From My Home’, ‘Everywhere I Turn, There Is Pain’) promise lament, yet mostly sound almost otherworldly: somewhere between the atavistic and unfamiliar. Down to its very roots and fibre, gospel, the blues and even folk music take on their original forms. Songs such as the pure-spirited vocal and percussive ‘I Must Build A New Home’ sound like a gamelan troupe came into town. It helps that these songs, and drumming circles are as far removed from a recording studio as you can possibly get.
Sagacious vocals, some in harmony with a group chorus, are accompanied by stringy, plucked rusty nylon-strung sounding guitar, clattery, stomp bounding hand drums and makeshift rhythmic objects on an album of intimate atmospheres. Away from suffrage there’s a lot of that joy I mentioned earlier to be found; an unbridled unshackled joy at that, with plenty of excitable handclapping, hollering and high yelps spontaneity. The environment and bleeding over of movement has a strange effect, resonance – a signature of all Ian’s recordings it must be said.
But this ain’t no witches coven dance around the cauldron, nor celebration of “alternative” cultural practices, or even an ethnographic study but the chance to hear outcast voices, living and breathing a desperate life, yet finding some release in pouring out song. The language, words and dialect might be phonetically alien, yet the sentiment, distress and plaint are universally understood.
Ian and Marilena once again dare to shed light on forgotten stories and trauma in many of the most dangerous settings, with music as enriching, new and different as it is healing. Thank god someone is.
You may also find the following posts of interest:
Ustad Saami ‘Pakistan Is For The Peaceful’
Tanzania Albinism Collective ‘White African Power’
Sheltered Workshop Singers ‘Who You Calling Slow?’
Various Artists ‘Hidden Music Volume 4: Abatwa (The Pygmy): Why Did We Stop Growing Tall?’
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.
Our Daily Bread 429: Chris Church, A Clean Kitchen Is A Happy Kitchen, The Salem Trials, Fatherfigures…
March 5, 2021
Reviews Galore/Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea
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 diatribe ‘Boris Johnson Massacre’ and just in the last couple of months the King Of No-Fi album, a collaborative derangement with the Texas miscreant Occult Character, Heart To Heart, and in just the last 24 hours a double-A side single, ‘Shattered Pop Kiss/Sky Writing’. He has also released, under the Idiot Blur Fanboy moniker, a stripped down classic album of resignation and Gallagher brothers’ polemics.
Each week we send a mountain of new releases to the self-depreciating maverick to see what sticks. In his own idiosyncratic style and turn-of-phrase, pontificating
The Singles/Tracks/Videos
Bloom De Wilde ‘Flying Carpenters’
(Dream Society Records) Song released 22nd February 2021/ Video Released 1st March 2021
The word bewitching was invented to describe not just this utterly beautiful song but also the lady herself. This is a song of hope and loss; a song to be embraced by all the outsiders: those who venture their own way through life, who will be called strange, called weird by all those who dress the same and like the same records and the same films because they are told to do so and are so scared of being themselves they do not know who they really are. This is not a call to arms for all the so-called weirdoes out there but a lullaby to sooth them gently to sleep, and when you hear Bloom sing the line, “When the morning rises up above, and I know that I’m alone, just a weirdo”, they know they are not alone. This is song of purity stripped down to the bone; a melancholic heart beating for you as your heart breaks.
New America ‘Hong Kong Free Press’
26th March 2021
I like this. It reminds me of when Paul Weller had spunk running through his veins in his days of the Jam and then it goes all Dinosaur Jnr on us. It has a rather wonderful melody and fine lyrics as well. This is so British sounding without the Rule Britannia bollocks and takes me back to the days of releasing politically motivated singles were not seen as a bad career move: How I miss those days of Costello and Bragg and the Redskins telling us how it is. New America should be congratulated for shooting a bit of oomph and passion into the sadly ever more beige sounding guitar band scene of today.
The Albums/EPs
Various ‘The Sound Of Northern Star’
(Northern Star Records) 1st March 2021
This is the first Northern Star Records compilation since 2014’s Live Revolution, and it’s the second release since the label made its comeback with the excellent Cult Of Free Love‘s Visions album – which actually made the Monolith Cocktail’s Choice end of the year features.
As one would expect from a Northern Star release this 15-track compilation takes you through all things psych tinged; such as the Ride like pop of The Nova Saints ‘Sugar Coated’, which has guitars that chime and a melody that reaches out to the stars, calling out to be played on your radio as you drive through the hills in your open top convertible; a song that gives you hope; perfect guitar pop if you like. And this album is worth getting for that track alone. But no, there are other gems among the 15 tracks, such as ‘Daydreamer’ by the Youngteam, a track that all you shoegazers out there will bop their merry heads off to: if Shoegazers allow themselves such frivolities. Or, the blisteringly harsh psych punk of The Electric Mainline a track so hard, dirty and hot it will both peel the skin from your ears and blister your walls; a song worthy of the genre Psych porn if such a genre existed.
This comp is certainly worth your investigation; and I haven’t even mentioned the feedback drenched Mary Chain like rock of The Lost Rivers or the country-tinged psych of The Carousels with their beautifully melodious ‘My Beating Heart’. There is not actually a bad track among this lot, and you will admit that is quite a rarity with comps on the whole. The Sound of Northern Star is released on the 1st of March and is free to download, and is a must have album to soundtrack your days as you wait for the day when lockdown is lifted, and after it is lifted, an album to give normality a touch of psychedelic bliss. I also may add this will not be available on Spotify so get your downloading boots on and do yourself a favour.
A Clean Kitchen Is A Happy Kitchen ‘2 PCS Chciken – Live In Staines’
(Jezus Factory) 1st March 2021
I will be honest with you, I can live without guitar freak-outs on the whole; I find them self-indulgent in the extreme, so when this album kicked off I thought here we go again technical proficiency over the lost art of melody, charm and originality, but I admit I was wrong: I actually quite enjoyed it. It does have guitar wig outs and is not the most original thing one will hear this year. I think everybody out there has heard The Fall and Nation Of Ulysses and the Birthday Party and all the rest; being someone who listened to John Peel throughout the 80s I have heard it all before, but if that is what you want to sound like, you may as well do it well and A Clean Kitchen Is A Happy Kitchen do it well indeed. And I know a whole lot of people who will love this album, so if this is your want…want away and enjoy.
The Salem Trials ‘No Waving’/‘File Under Concrete’
(Metal Postcard Records) 16th February 2021
The Salem Trials are a fine band. They could well be the finest guitar band in the world today. They are indeed a band well worth discovering. Last year the Trials released eight albums, so it comes as no surprise that they have decided to release two on the same day. As ever these two wonderful albums capture what is so magically strange about the band/duo: I previously described them as sounding like they are both of having separate breakdowns but in the same room and that still stands. It really is a bewitching experience, they really do not sound like they give a shit what the other is doing; Andy Goz with his fretboard wizardry, part Tom Verlaine part Keith Richards ploughing blink Erdly on, kicking up memories from post punk England and the no wave adventures of pre 80s New York whilst nailing a squirming jogger to a burning cross, and vocalist Russ spouting his sublime off kilter beat poetry like a modern day Don Van Vilet with a mouth full of cough sweets and a migraine.
These two albums have more of a live feel than the previously released eight; they have a great taped rehearsal/demo quality about them like they were recorded whilst waiting to be released from John Peels cellar where they have been surviving on remembered memories of rock n roll past whist waiting for the great man to let them out not realising the saint of alternative radio is no longer with us and is in fact channeling his past show playlists through the lips and hands of the chosen saviours of alt guitar land…so just another two albums of wayward post punk genius then.
Armstrong ‘Beechwood Park (**FREE** demo songs)’
16th February 2021
Armstrong aka Julian Pitt is one of the great undervalued pop singer songwriters of today; anybody who loves Prefab Sprout or Aztec Camera or the Beach Boys really need to get their listening gear onto this undervalued pop prince. And what we have here is a free to download comp of 4-track tape recordings that show off Julian’s talent for writing such beautiful heart tugging melodies. And the warmness of the tracks are added by the beauty and subtle warmness that recording on tape provides.
This eleven-track album is a lo-fi pop delight, from the guitar jangle of ‘The Sweetest Girl’, The Smiths like ‘Im Not Angry’, to the Blur meet Mary Chain sultry pop strut of ‘Slow Down’, to the beautiful ballads ‘Miles Away’ and ‘4Am Thoughts’. Beechwood Park is indeed a must hear album for all the lo-fi lovers out there.
Dare Above Nemo ‘Mimic’ EP
15th February 2021
If upbeat indie synth pop is your thing you could well like this fine three track EP, which at times takes me back flowing to the days of the 80s when music was the lifeblood of the teenager, songs oozed and flowed throughout their days highlighting the ups and downs: not a fucking phone in sight. Yes, this lovely three tracker is a fine release indeed. At times reminding me of Win other times the Human League. What the songs lack in length more than make up for in catchiness and melody. Who wants long pop songs anyway.
Chris Church ‘Game Dirt’
(Big Stir Records) 27th March 2021
The new album by Chris Church is an album of mature guitar-based pop like that of Crowded House before all the success, and Chris does it very well especially on ‘Fall’ which sadly is not an ode to the no longer with us band led by the also no longer with us Mark E Smith, but we will not hold that against it as it is a beautifully written ballad and those of all ages sometimes need to lose themselves in well played hummable odes to the sadness in one’s life. And this album is filled with the melancholy blighters, with ‘Gravity’ and ‘Trying’ also ploughing the same field of love and regret.
But all is not empty bottles of red wine and subdued flickers from the TV screen casting shadows of fallow worship to the great lady of the no longer with us, there are also songs of cartwheeling bar rock goodness that Nick Lowe and Dave Edmunds use to deal out with alarming regularity in the late 70s early 80s. With friends Rockpile the opening track ‘Learn’ being a prime example, and the countrified ‘Smile’ being another. Game Dirt is an album of well-produced well-played and well written guitar songs that lovers of such will indeed want to add to their album collection of well-produced well played well written guitar songs.
Futurafter ‘Ep A’
(Shoredive Records) 16th January 2021
If synth drenched dreamy pop music is what you are after well look no further, we have the very thing here supplied to us by those lovely chaps at Shore Dive Records. Yes, three beautiful slices of synth pop tinted shoegaze that the likes of Sarah Records occasionally served up via the Field Mice. These three tracks are interspersed with a communist quote in Russian, Macedonian and Albanian, which you may agree makes a welcome and unusual change, and as the say variety is the spice of life, which I guess they may also say in Russian, Macedonian and Albanian but with a more eastern European accent.
Fatherfigures ‘Any Time Now…And High Time To’
(Self-Release) 21st February 2021
I like this album, it takes me back to my alt 80s days, it has that certain intense life is shit let’s do something about it feel that at times reminds me of the wonderful JD Meatyard in his Levellers 5 days. It has the dense dark atmosphere of Joy Division and early Sister Of Mercy but without being Goth, just hinting at it, just at times having the same frivolities the same guitar peddles but also at the same time reminding me of the wonderful arch obscure angular guitar shenanigans of Cud/Wedding Present, even Carter. And the album screams, “Lets commit peaceful agro”. I can imagine being very entrained by these back in the day and probably now as well.
The Fatherfigures are a band that will certainly appeal to those once fond of going to their local venue bathing in the aura of stale piss and spilt beer. The good old days when we thought bands could change the world and to a certain extent, they did change many people’s world: mine included.
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.
Kalporz X Monolith Cocktail: A Minor Place Review
March 3, 2021
Words: Nicola Guerra
The Monolith Cocktail has been exchanging posts with our pen pal partners at the leading Italian music publication Kalporz for the last two years or more now; an exchange that continues unabated in 2021. This month Nicola Guerra introduces us to the Italian band A MINOR PLACE; a group who it seems leave smiles on the face with some well-chosen eclectic covers.
A MINOR PLACE ‘It’ll End In Smile’
(Self-Released) 29th January 2021
Sad songs to be happy, happy songs to sink into a miraculous nostalgia. It sounds simple in words, but who can really do it with notes? I have a short list, but it would be misleading in approaching It’ll End in Smile, the new double self-produced effort by the Teramo band A MINOR PLACE.
Let’s start from the end; in this double disc there are covers of Vic Chesnutt, Tom Waits and the Marine Girls songs (and two others that I won’t reveal): that’s ‘Splendid’ by Chesnutt, ‘In the Neighbourhood’ by Waits, and ‘Second Sight’ by the Marine Girls. How much happiness can you store in just three songs? I still cry with Chesnutt, but the tears have happiness written all over them between water and salt.
What about nostalgia? You may say, we have more right to be nostalgic now, thinking back to our disfigured normality. But here nostalgia is overloaded with love; the songs do not live in the present but neither do they regret the past. They are simply suspended, they are a snapshot immortalized in a precise historical moment, which each of us has been lucky enough to experience at least once in our lives.
Here comes ‘Love’ and we are reminded why we always need POP; why we need the soundtrack that will make us nostalgic for having been happy tomorrow. And that’s the secret; listening to songs that give you the feeling of being stuck in a timeless bubble, capable of bringing a smile to your face even when the situation doesn’t call for it. This is A Minor Place’s skill: distilling pure joy in three minutes, cutting out the essence and sticking it on posters that remind you that your happiness may not last long, but if you carry it with you it can replace any medicine.
Songs flow like credits and when you listen to them again you are almost moved, as if you were really the protagonist told in sunny songs like ‘Sunglasses’, romantic ‘Christmas in Summer (Greetings from Aldo and Derna)’ (one of my favourites, with doo-wop-like choruses and electric guitar to unhinge certainties at the end); or just perfect because they are tinged with strings and colours, as if it were the simplest thing in the world ‘Total Football’. But what is simple is only the ability to be a band that really believes in it. These days, believing in something is fantasy. To believe that a smile can change the world is something magical.
Ah, I’ll tell you; the other two covers are ‘For a Spanish Guitar’ by Gene Clark and ‘Capricci’ by Ban-Off (a garage-punk band from Teramo). You already have a smile on your face, don’t you?
ALBUM REVIEW/DOMINIC VALVONA
Various ‘La Ola Interior: Spanish Ambient & Acid Exoticism 1983-1990’
(Bongo Joe) 5th March 2021
“The inner wave”, La Ola Interior is a welcome survey of Spain’s post-Franco explosion in underground experimentation; the kind that soaked up Jon Hassell and Eno’s collaborative “possible musics” game-changer peregrinations on the cusp of a new decade, as opposed to the nosier, more industrial and provocative generation X screams of Alex Carretero’s curated Spanish Underground Cassette Culture compilation, released back in 2018. Both “waves” were lo fi, diy, and released in limited numbers, usually on cassette tapes, but one pontificated year zero intent, the other, opened itself to Hassell and Eno’s “fourth world” possibilities of amorphous ethnic-cultural blending.
As with that other redundant term “world music”, the fourth world title turn tag for a fecund of geographical sonic collages is, by perhaps those who are a little to sensitive, frowned upon for its connotations of post-colonialism: looking at anything outside the Western sphere as the “other”, “exotic”.
There’s a certain amount of that on this double album spread, put together for Bongo Records by Loïc Diaz Ronda. That is, weaving exoticism into the early development of post-punk electronic and ambient music. Some artists on this comp do that rather subtly; others bathe in its influence. And some do it rather well (sublime even), whilst others not so convincingly.
Mostly the preserve of the cultish and obscure, “Musica discrete” (as it’s referenced here) did also snare some iconic names, such as the ethno-transient trailblazers Finis Africae (probably one of the only names most people will be familiar with on this collection). Their utterly beguiling, entrancing and dreamy Popol Vuh mystical choral voices meet Talk Talk ‘Hybia’ and amorphous rain dance ritual ‘Hombres Lluvia’, are both borrowed for this sonic travelogue. Finis seemed much richer, more inventive as worldly musical travellers in an era when not many people could afford the luxury of physically visiting such exotic locations. Many artists made do with the traditional instruments of these cultural influences instead, bought in flea markets and such: used to various degrees of success on these interpretative and dreamt-up versions of seamless acid exotica.
Chronicling a movement that spring up in the dying embers of Franco’s regime, Ronda’s compiled world buffet of experiments features examples of early looping and sound sampling: sampling it must be said much of the sonic territories Hassell had already transformed on his own body of work. In that respect, tracks such as the compilation’s most fleeting vignette by Mecánica Popular (surely a twist on, or a knowing wink at the Teutonic sonic ensemble Populäre Mechanik) breathes in Hassell’s vague atmospheric blows across ambiguous map coordinates. Yet there’s also various Kosmische style riffing going on as well: Camino Al Desván, one of the only female sonic explorers to be featured in a male-dominated scene, oscillates mirror-y projections of Sky Records on the oft-trippy ‘La Contorsión De Pollo’ (or in translation, the rather odd “Chicken Contortion”); though her second contribution couldn’t be more different, ‘Fock Intimida A Gordi’ breaks out the industrial chemist set on a paranormal broadcast of neo-classical hauntings and static.
Notable mentions on an exhaustive collection (linear notes included) are as follows: The Conny Plank proto-acid flash, zaps and laser-bouncing ‘Última Instancia’ by Orfeón Gagarin (more early Techno experiment than “ethnic” traverse); the Jules Verne oceanic submersible iron-lung ‘20000 Lenguas’ by Victor Nubla; the filmic, timpani bounding Arabian drama ‘Sheikh’ by Esplendor Geométrico; and the Popol Vuh (them again) Andean haunting ‘Flu’ by Eli Gras (the only other female to feature). Bamboo music, garbled vague suggestions of gamelan, contoured bird-eye views of Morocco, flighty fluted soars and Indian swirls can also be heard, woven into ambient, trance and post-punk synthesised renderings on an album full of untapped forgotten traverses.
La Ola Interior is a well-researched and interesting compilation that fills in yet more of the electronic music story; especially in Southern Europe during the 80s. A worthy showcase of geographical transcendence and transformative immersions that deserves this curated effort.
You may also find the following posts from the Archives interesting:
Spanish Underground Cassette Culture
Notes From The Spanish Underground
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.
Monolith Cocktail Monthly Playlist Revue: February 2021
February 26, 2021
The playlist revue is our chance to pick out the choice tracks that represent the last monthly period in the Monolith Cocktail’s output. This includes new releases and the best of reissues, plucked from the team: that’s me Dominic Valvona, Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea and Matt Oliver.
February’s edition features another flight of African fantasy from The Invisible Session, a teaser from next month’s Edo Funk Explosion (released by Analog Africa), the post-punk, krautrock wrangling of Camera, Kabbalah C86 indie of Mazeppa, a stripped down in lockdown version of The Wedding Present, the third single from the Joy Division meets Smiths too-cool-for High School, and an array of essential Hip-Hop cuts from Strange U, Jam Baxter & Sumgii, Illman & Norm Oddity and Your Old Droog. In all, 40 eclectic tracks.
Tracks:-
The Invisible Session ‘West island’
Akaba Man & The Nigie Rokets ‘Ta Gha Hunsimwen’
Byard Lancaster ‘Jazz Lady’
Altin Gün ‘Sevda Olmasaydi’
Samba Touré ‘Tamala’
Baeshi Bang & Ip Koa Son ‘Guna Hae’
Camera ‘Kartoffelstampf’
Hifiklub & Eugène Chadboune ‘Torso Corso’
White Ring ‘Got U’
Hooveriii ‘Control’
Haich Ber Na ’87 Days’
Qwazaar/Batsauce/Hellsent ‘No Ghosts’
th1rt3en & Pharoahe Monch ‘Triskaidekaphobia’
Lion’s Drums ‘Music From Memories’
Mazeppa ‘Storm’
The Crushing Violets ‘Embers’
The Wedding Present ‘You Should Always Keep In Touch With Friends’
Dolph Chaney ‘Status Unknown’
Ocelot ‘Perhosia’
HighSchool ‘De Facto’
The Legless Crabs ‘Billy Joe (L)’
Strange U ‘Maybe’
Jam Baxter & Sumgii ‘Salsa Valentina’
Roc$tedy ‘Gemini (Heaven & Hell)’
Illaman & Norm Oddity ‘Ok!’
Your Old Droog & The God Fahim ‘The Dunking Dutchman’
Grant Shapiro & Kool Keith ‘42nd Street’
Nous Alpha & Christopher Bono ‘Fibonacci Failure’
Graham Costello’s Strata ‘Eudaimonia’
Lon Moshe/Southern Freedom Arkestar/Black Fire ‘The Hutch’
His Name Is Alive ‘Either’
Mapstation ‘No No Staying’
Obay Alsharani ‘Northern Lights’
Anansy Cissé ‘Nia’
Jah Wobble ‘Old Jewish East End Of London Dub’
Liz Davinci ’10:23’
Animal Collective ‘Sand That Moves’
Dom La Nena ‘Todo Tiene Su Fin’
Marianne Faithfull & Warren Ellis ‘She Walks In Beauty’
Matthew Sweet ‘Best Of Me’
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.
Our Daily Bread 427:Anansy Cissé ‘Anoura’
February 24, 2021
ALBUM REVIEW/DOMINIC VALVONA
Anansy Cissé ‘Anoura’
(Riverboat Records) 26th February 2021
We can’t blame the unfortunate Malian artist/guitarist Anansy Cissé for taking so long to release a new album. Originally started back in early 2017 but now only seeing the light-of-day (hence “The Light” translated title…to a point) four years later, Anoura was conceived in the turmoil of insurgencies, ethnic violence, droughts, the loss of a dear friend and collaborator on this record, and the on-going stand-off between the National Movement For The Liberation Of Azawad and Mali’s central government in Bamako in the fight for an autonomous state in the country’s northern, Saharan bordering regions. And that’s all before you throw in Covid-19 to the mix of sufferings and setbacks.
The catalyst however for Cissé hiatus from and pause in finishing this album was (ironically) an invitation in 2018 to a “peace and reconciliation” festival in his hometown of Diré. Situated on the left bank of the River Niger, and part of the greater Timbuktu region, Diré is a culturally significant centre but falls within the very areas fighting for independence. Originally this was a Tuareg-led struggle (one of many over the last century) that gained sizable traction in 2012, leading to whole swathes of Northern Mali and important towns such as Timbuktu itself being taken by the NMLA and other groups. To further muddy the waters, hardline Islamist groups, both emboldened by events in Syria and as a consequence in part of the volatile breakdown in Libya, hijacked the fight: working in part, in the beginning, with those rebels fighting against the Malian government before turning on them. Pushed on by Islamist militants, such as the Ansar Dine, this insurgency grew momentum, making its way south towards the capital of Mali before being met with force by the government and invited French troops. The Islamist insurgents were stalled, yet took to planning less audacious frontal attacks in favour of guerilla terrorism tactics. As it stands the toxicity and violence has been taken across the border into neighbouring Niger and Burkina Faso; those northern regions of Mali still tenuously controlled by the NMLA. A recent ethnic war in the central belt of Mali has concentrated a combined alliance of French and Malian forces, though of writing this piece that conflict has been brought to an end with a truce. The government itself was ousted in a military coup only last year, and in the last month, the usurpers have themselves stepped down.
It’s with all this upheaval, threats of violence and geo-political tumult that Cissé found himself in 2018 being dragged from the vehicle his band were travelling to that Diré festival in by an armed gang, who meted out beatings, destroyed their musical instruments and held them captive. Traumatic you’ll agree, this led to Cissé questioning the madness unfolding in his homeland. With no guarantees of safety and the freedoms of performing, travelling through Mali stifled if not deadly, the celebrated guitarist withdrew to his humble home studio to make sense of it all. Although already capturing the willowy, frayed rich sounds of the late souk master Zoumana Tereta, who contributed his accentuate and reedy single-string fiddle tones to the album tracks ‘Balkissa’ and ‘Talka’ just before his death in 2017, Cissé turned away from his own album sessions to concentrate on recording other artists, mostly an emerging pool of rap artists. Though making ends meet and at least keeping a hand in the business, it wasn’t enough. And so prompted by the birth of his first child, he found his mojo and resumed work on what would eventually be the light-bringing Anoura.
Despite the time period and turn of events, this album is concerned less with politicizing and more with the “here and now”. Yet there’s a couplet of songs, the opening desert blues sighing, trickling and falling notes and lines ‘Tiawo’ and brilliant, nurturing ‘Talka’ that “stress” the need for education and opportunity for the young in a desperate Mali reeling from constant upheaval. More personal reflections, dedicated to Cissé wife Bally (who adds a most diaphanous harmony and voice, alongside Oumar ‘Choubs’ Diara, on many of the album’s tracks) and their daughter Kady, sit congruously with sagacious reminisces of better times and a tribute to the family’s lineage of “murabouts” (religious teachers).
Brought up in the predominantly musically rich Muslim realms of Mali, Cissé roots and traditions merge seamlessly with atmospheric currents, echoing flange and a touch of desert mysticism. Songhai (the language Cissé speaks and sings in throughout this album) blues and traces of the legendary Malian guitarist Lobi Traoué breath and tremble alongside front porch dirt music, boogie swamp rock and even the psychedelic on a magical album of scene setting mirages and homages.
Encircled by sirocco winds, drawing contoured phrases and riffs in the sand, Cissé manages to traverse a sort of Tuareg Canned Heat meets Ash Ra Tempel on the spoon-percussive slapping, fanned electric ‘Mina’, and takes on a reggae gait dub feel of Ben Zabo on ‘Foussa Foussa’. Harmonically beautiful, the musicianship first class, gentle, forgiving, hanging in the air and hypnotising, Anoura is a wonderful and masterful album. The long wait has been well worth it.
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.
Our Daily Bread 426: Illman ‘Ugly Days’
February 23, 2021
EP REVIEW/MATT OLIVER
Illman ‘Ugly Days’
(Potent Funk) 18th February 2021
Should any global implosion occur – and right now that’s not a very big should – the mic will remain the sole property of Illaman. Of noted livewires Problem Child and Pengshui, Illaman, troubled and tightly wound before falling back, reaches a crossroads of riding out the apocalypse and wondering where it all went wrong; but where demons are treated like a pen pal and ignorance is a useful defence mechanism, he never lets on as to whether Ugly Days is catharsis, cry for help or just a shrug to deal with the matter. After all, there remain “so many questions, not many answers”.
Right-hand man Norm Oddity plugs into an electrified vista that those with the world on their mind and shoulders can take solace from, simultaneously triggering itchy souls into taking action, unblinking in the eye of the storm. For headphones and hoods under low light, “these emotions run rife when you’ve spent your whole life trying”, the breakbeats of ‘Everything Bless?’ stalking Illaman to scuttle down dark alleys. Unapologetic in its vulnerability and bruised introspection, the title track is aware that situations could slide even further, the guesting DRS providing an even more numb, dead eyed view as electronic shoots of optimism are shushed down.
On the nobility of ‘OK’, promoting a positive hook as doom takes a breather, Illaman boldly puts his backbone into it: a low-key rousing of the troops speaking up for the outsider (“make some noise for yourself fam, go celebrate your weirdness”), even if the message comes through gritted teeth. “I stay strong like ox, stay on course when you flop/cos all them little battles is what you remember at the top” is a lesson crossing the cipher into the real world, ahead of ‘Universe’ re-upping cause for cautious cheer. A lo-fi headswim with a montage of life lessons flashing before Illaman’s ears, it represents the EP causing and curing insomnia, and the orator’s substance intake both blocking the bigger picture and boosting confidence in a bleak midst.
The psychological profiling of eerie closer ‘Way Home’ is another to split itself: this time between self-help insight and unreachable scratch, Norm Oddity peers through the blinds in a sole instance of the producer perhaps losing faith while Illaman dismisses any fairytale ending. Austere and wide open, allowing for time to breathe and explore, Oddity represents the spaced out in both the extra terrestrial and mind-altering sense, offering unspoken yet meaningful encouragement that’s not without its moments of claustrophobia: take Illaman out of the equation and you have a rich half dozen of brain teasers before bedtime. The emcee’s forcefulness, conviction, anger and erudition, standing as the last man of reason out of hiding, makes him both untouchable (as both man and emcee) and as exposed as everyone else. Never proclaiming to be a saviour, it’s this everyman sharing of hopes and fears that moulds Ugly Days into a tome for all modern existence. Matt Oliver
Matt Oliver joined the Monolith Cocktail team over five years ago, contributing the leading Hip-Hop column in the UK. In recent years Matt has selected tracks for the blog’s Monthly Playlist Revue and written one-off reviews. You can see his professional practice as a dab hand at biographies and newsletters, blurbs long and short, liner notes and promotional texts, and putting words to the promotion of singles/EPs, albums/compilations, and upcoming/established artists/DJs/producers/events on his portfolio-style website.
Apart from the Monolith Cocktail Matt has written features & reviews in print and online for Seven/DMC Update, Hip-Hop Connection, Breakin Point, Rime Magazine (US), Undercover Magazine, One Week to Live, IDJ, Remix (US), FACT, Clash, BigShot (US), Mrblunt.com (US), Worlddj.com, Datatransmission.co.uk.
Dominic Valvona’s Reviews Roundup
The Invisible Sessions ‘Echoes Of Africa’ (Space Echo) 29th January 2021
The very first sounds you hear on the long awaited follow up to The Invisible Sessions last album in 2006 are those of an aircraft touching down on the runway, somewhere between a straddled geography of Lagos and Addis Ababa. From then on in those compass points of inspiration permeate the collective’s first album for the newly launched Space Echo imprint.
An odyssey across the motherland, The Invisible Sessions instigator Luciano Cantone (also the co-founder of the Schema label) is joined by the multi-instrumentalist and trombonist Gianluca Petrella, poet, rapper/MC, lyrist Martin Thomas Paavilainen, and a host of respected players on this respectful homage to African music, culture and consciousness. A congruous display of riches, from Egypt 80 Afro-beat epiphany to trinket shimmering spiritual jazz, the extended ranks of this group benefit from the stirring spindled and spun weaving of the Gambian kora maestro Jalimansa Haruna Kuyatech and the rhythm setting Ethiopian drummer and percussionist Abdisa “Mambo” Assefato.
In the intervening years, busy with other projects, running a label and sow forth, Cantone has taken note of all the world’s ills and woes, from BLM to the climate change emergency: two themes that dominate what is a loose drift, limped and brassy heralding strut through the continent’s rich musical heritage. Ethio-jazz, and more specifically, the vibraphone spells, reverberations of the iconic Mulatu Astake inspire tracks like the bandy, bendy guitar lolloping reggae gait motioned ‘Journey To The East’, the more quickened, sprouted ‘Breathe The Rhythm’, and the Addis Ababa version of The Shadows casting dreamy vibrato and twanged shapes over the city ‘Entoto’. Elsewhere it’s a fluency of Kuti and Tony Allen that is suffused throughout the simmering upbeat ‘West Island’ and funkier, skipping, knowing ‘Pull The Handbrake’. Both of which also evoke hints of Orlando Julius and The Heliocentrics recordings.
It’s soul music that sumptuously seeps into the tunes with either a conscious stream of narration or repeated silkily voiced enforced message of social commentary action. In that mode there’s the Issac Hayes in Africa, or even a touch of Curtis Mayfield and The 4th Coming, echo-peddle dreamy ‘Ideas Can Make The World’, the Undisputed Truth affirmation, horns rising ‘People All Around The World Can Make It’, and Gil Scott-Heron (at a pinch), earthly plaint ‘Mother Forgive Me’. Paavilainen is joined in his loose style of spoken wake-up calls, despair and half-sung laments by fellow stateside vocalist Joyce Elaine Yuille, who shadows, harmonizes and wafts along.
A conscious ark of funk, jazz and soul; a homage and thank you to a continent that has heard, inspired Cantone and his sparring partners, Echoes Of Africa is a travelogue of protestation, spiritualism and love performed by a most impressive tight unit of African music acolytes.
Don Cherry ‘Cherry Jam’
(Gearbox Records) 26th February 2021
On his way to becoming the restless musical nomad of jazz lore, the mid 1960s Don Cherry was already well acquainted with Scandinavia, especially Denmark. The burgeoning trumpeter and cornet star played in the country’s capital of Copenhagen in ’63 with Archie Shepp, and in ’64 with Albert Ayler before returning in the pivotal year of ’65 to record a quartet of original and standard performances for Denmark’s national radio station. Though often dismissed by cats like Miles Davis for a lack of technical proficiency, Cherry’s constantly evolving visceral style had gained him an envious apprenticeship, partnering up as a foil to a litany of be-bop, hard-bop and free jazz doyens: from Sonny Rollins to John Coltrane and Ornate Coleman, appearing in the pioneer’s groundbreaking Shape Of Jazz To Come quartet of ’59.
Just a short time from releasing his first album as band leader – the “landmark” Complete Communion for the prestigious seal-of-approval Blue Note – Cherry once more found himself in the northern European hub of jazz, collaborating in a jam session mode with the Danish pianist Atli Bjørn. It was this set up and communal that attracted local attention, leading to the session recordings that until recently lay dormant in the radio station vaults: only ever heard when first broadcast over the airwaves in ’65.
Those sessions was collected together as the Cherry Jam EP by Gearbox Records;originally for Record Store Day. Now in 2021 and to tie-in with the recent opening of offices in the land of the jazz obsessive collector, Japan, the label is making this record more widely and worldly available – previously part of the Japanese Edition series that GB launched exclusively for the far east.
Mastered from the original tapes and showcased in the label’s customary well-furnished style and linear notes, this four track EP is neither wholly rehearsed nor spontaneous in the way it sounds; capturing as it does a still reasonably tethered Cherry, yet to completely immerse himself in those out-there traverses and world fusions.
Working with the Danish quartet of tenor saxophonist Mogens Bollerup, double-bassist Benny Nielson, drummer Simon Koppel and the already mentioned, and future Dexter Gordon foil, Bjørn on piano, Cherry toots, pipes, trills and spirals through a trio of his own compositions and the Broadway legend Richard Rodgers alternative, sassy stage ballad ‘You Took Advantage Of Me’.
In an expressive, playful mood Cherry and his troupe provide a disarming, bluesy rendition of ‘The Ambassador From Greenland’ – written by Cherry in his youth. Too light to be bumbling, there’s a certain hang low like noodling, descending feel to this one. The sax and cornet almost override, bump into each other at certain moments, with even a few muffed notes and a piano style that moves between stage and striking, struck high notes.
The second Cherry original, ‘Priceless’, has a bop-like swing to its jamming candor. Duel horns contort, swan and blurt as the drums bounce and double-bass runs away with it. Everyone gets at least a spotlight opportunity on a track that sends the listener back to NYC. ‘Nigeria’ is the most obvious example of Cherry’s Marco Polo spirit of embracing international sounds: a more freely flowing bluesy performance that saunters along to Afro-Cuban influences.
To finish it off, the cover of Rodgers stalwart theatre number is soulfully handled, the playing like a sort of mating-call serenade: a dinner jazz sorbet.
There’s nothing especially dynamic about this captured performance, but as a lost recording chapter in the development of Cherry’s time in Denmark and his craft it is an intriguing link in the story; and a testament to the icon’s abilities in the run-up to his first album as a band leader.
Omar Khorshid ‘With Love’
(Wewantsounds) 26th February 2021
It seems there were few styles the dashing and tragic Middle Eastern hot-trotting Omar Khorshid wouldn’t weave into his Egyptian imbued guitar-led music; from the cinematic to rock and roll, Arabia to the giddy spindled Hellenic chimes of Zorba the Greek.
As it would seem in the land of his birth, most of Egypt’s stars diversified as matinee screen idols, singers, musicians for hire, and Khorshid was no different; pursuing a career in the film business before dying in a motorbike accident at the age of only 36, in 1981 – apparently speeding down Giza’s El Haram Street, his pillion passenger, the third of four wives, Dina miraculously surviving the head-on collision with a pole.
Born in 1945 and wasting no time in picking up the violin and piano, it would be a third instrument, the guitar that would make him famous. By the mid 60s he had attracted wide attention as part of the Western-influenced, pop(ish) act Les Petits Chats, invited to play with fellow compatriot and legend Abdel Halim Hafez, who in turn led him to the country’s most celebrated, accomplished and rated of divas, Umm Kulthum.
A new decade brought civil and international strife for Egypt and its neighbours: war with Israel, the oil embargo. Khorshid upped and left the homeland for the Lebanon in ’73, where he began recording records for the Voice Of Lebanon and Voice Of Orient labels. As peace was finally agreed between Egypt and Israel later that decade, the Egyptian president Anwar El-Sadet invited the roaming guitarist to play at the celebrations that came after the famous Camp David peace treaty, taking part at the White House. For a brief time during that same period he hopped over into Syria, where he acted and soaked up even more musical influences, before once again returning to his roots in ’78: the year that this instrumental classic, now remastered and reissued for the first time on vinyl by those Arabian specialists Wewantsounds, was originally released.
A rich tapestry of Egyptian and extended Arabian fusions, With Love offers up a serenade and desert-romance camel led caravan of transformed timeless cover versions from some of the regions greats. Mohamed Abdel Wahab’s ‘Ahwak’ in the deft hands of Khorshid sounds like some undersea enchantment with its mermaid-like sung aria high quivers and submerged production. But then just when you think you have this song pegged, this beautifully ethereal composition suddenly comes up for air in a sort of Joe Meek version of Egyptian rock and roll.
An interpretation of Farid El-Alrache’s ‘Hebbina Hebbina’ (a favourite we’re told of Eno), with its tambourine trinkets, heavy flange and galloping tremolo, could be an Arabian Shadows. Whilst the Rahbani Brothers’ ‘Rahbaniyat’ slides towards rattled hand drums, synthesizer laser bobbing Arabian disco.
I’ve already referenced that famous Greek signature evocation, ‘Zorba’, which Khorshid plays with dizzying skill, spindling that original into a sort of mix of Anton Karas zither and an old fashioned fairground ride. Unfamiliar as I am with much of the remaining material, ‘Habibati’ saunters and trots between romantic thriller and a Wurlitzer matinee soundtrack, and ‘Beyni Ou Beynak puts vibrato siren like spooks amongst cult Italian 60s cinema.
Almost at odds with the times it was made, yet ahead in adopting subtle hints of synth and Western musical influences, this gift from the Egyptian icon swoons in and out of the decades that preceded it. With Love is a dreamy fantasy of balladry, surf-y twanged cult rock and roll and film scores; an Arabian adventure amongst the sand dunes and Cairo discothèques that serves as a showcase for an artists able to flip between Mambo, music hall orchestration, the blues and even psychedelic. A tribute to an Egyptian musical innovator that can now, at last, be yours to own.
His Name Is Alive ‘Hope Is A Candle: Home Recordings Vol.3’
(Disciples) 12th February 2021
His Name Is Alive with the sound of beatific abrasive reversals on the third such collection of untethered incipient sonic renderings from Warren Defever’s creative process archives. Part of a much wider survey of the prolific HNIA appellation Detroit artist, producer, engineer and remixer that now includes (with this latest volume) a trio of albums of home-recorded developing material, Help Is A Candle features much of the nucleus of music that was duplicated on the “infamous” tape that first caught the ear of Ivo Watts-Russell, leading to a seven album run for the 4AD label in the 90s. Elements of which were reworked for the album Livonia: the title a reference to his birthplace in Michigan.
Circulated in a bootleg form for many years, Defever now showcases this archival scrapbook of sonic ideas in a new light; remastered from the original tape reels so that the quality now shines through.
Guides, impressions and slowly, gently unfolding, the candle light is never in danger of blowing out as atmospherics and ascending tones emerge from blessed post-punk ambience and industrial, coarser reverberations. You’re going to hear many comparisons to both This Mortal Coil and The Cocteau Twins, and that’s more than fair. But much of this material remains cut adrift of either example, neither dissonant nor vaporous. Traces and lingers of familiarity offer a semblance of Daniel Lanois, Eno, and the collection’s most caustic, sharpened knife cutting reversal of dark matter, ‘Halo’, evokes a vision of a fuzztone Hendrix as lead guitarist in The Telescopes.
Murky, lurking moods sit alongside tingled enchantments and even country music ragas, as hints of rattled, transformed hand drums, spindled zither-like spiritual crystal shimmers, slapped and crying, waning bass guitar and mechanical tic-tocking devices resonate.
Envisioned as his very own Reichian Music For 18 Musicians, though falling short at the first hurdle having few friends let alone 18 to enact such a grand scale performance, Defever instead contributed to developing a rafter of music scenes off the back of his 80s home recordings. You can hear the seedlings, inspiration in the work of artists as diverse as Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Dean Blunt, Inga Coupland and Land Observation. It’s no wonder he was on Bowie’s radar and playlist.
Following on from All The Mirrors In The House and Return To Never, and part of a greater light shedding exercise in evaluating, elevating Defever’s formative experiments, Hope Is A Candle is subtle and minimal. This album points the way to some of the more developed pieces in the series. It works though as a showcase for the visions to come; tracks that you can take a lot away from; tracks that evoke; tracks to mull over.
Camera ‘Prousthuman’
(Bureau B) 19th February 2021
Third, fourth generation disciples of Krautrock, the decade-old Berlin instigators of “guerilla” tactic performance art-rock Camera once more shed band members for a new intake (well, partly) of idea-bouncing reciprocators on the fifth studio album, Prousthuman.
With all the connotations and baggage that title’s titan of prose holds, the newest conception of the trio thrash, jerk, limber and lollop through familiar influences in the Teutonic cannon. Anchored by the only original, remaining, founding member Michael Drummer, Camera moves away from the dual keyboard dynamics of the previous album (Emotional Detox) for a more squealing, flange and phaser swirled new wave, psot-punk and even C86 guitar suffusion. Drummer, who unsurprisingly is the band’s drummer, but also weighs in on the guitar riffs, ropes in the composer and musician Alex Kozmidid as a six-string sparring partner. To finish this trio off and informally first joining Camera for their 2017 USA tour as a performance and video artist, Tim Schroeder unveils a talent for the synth.
Locked down in self-isolation for at least some of the recording sessions and jams for this latest Krautrock replica, the trio’s methodology and process has obviously been affected by the raging pandemic. Rather then claustrophobic, the latest chapter contorts or glides out of confinement in the search for space, room. Even when coming on like the sound of Island Records ’79 new wave meets the Gang Of Four, Wire and Neu! on the opening guitar squall and no-wave disco hi-hat action jam ‘Kartoffelstampf’ (that’s “mashed potatoes” in English).
They’ve already changed the timings and mood style by the album’s next track, ‘Alar Alar’; bounding to a stretched quasi-dub gait that also features the drifting melodies of something Egyptian or Turkish: plus loads of dial bending Kosmische fun.
It’s a soundtrack that weaves motorik Klaus Dinger with the solo Kosmische scores of his brother Thomas; the Au Pairs with Sky Records’ greats; Dunkelziffer with Holgar Czukay; and Faust radio broadcasts with Cluster and early 80s Tangerine Dream soundtracks. Though at its most spiky, wrangling and fuzzy, tracks like the buzzy ‘Schmwarf’ mash NIN with Kriedler and Can. Skying in synthesized harpsichord mirrored circles, grinding out a submerged woozy and gauzy dream envelope, and tuning into old frequencies, Camera emerge from their basement studio and the pandemic with a brilliant and knowing post-punk-krautrock-kosmische trip.
Mapstation ‘My Frequencies, When We’
(Bureau B/TAL) 26th February 2021
A second album on the Bureau B imprint roster this month that benefits from and taps into the Hamburg label’s ever-expanding catalogue of Kosmische and neu-electronica explorers: even some of the form’s progenitors, from Roedelius to his early foil Conrad Schnitzler. Both of these doyens can be heard permeating this, the 8th album under Stefan Schneider’s Mapstation alias, the former, prolific soloist and co-founder of the Kluster/Cluster/Qluster arc and mini Kosmische supergroup Harmonia, Roedelius even paired up with Schneider for an eponymous entitled collaborative album in 2011: A very congruous union as it turned out.
The Düsseldorf artist and label honcho (running the Tal label) channels that Kosmische first, and second, generation influence on a highly sophisticated minimalist traverse if Sci-Fi, futuristic and tubular metallic looping and warping environments. An album for the times we find ourselves in – at least methodology and production wise -, for the first time in years Schneider flies solo. This stripped down, undulated pulsing and rhythmic album is marked by an absence of collaborators and guests.
Simplification is key it seems, with Schneider aware that the intensity of some of his past productions may have got lost in the enthusiasm to add too many instruments and sounds. My Frequencies, When We then is very considered sparse production of lo fi futurism; rich with reverberations, signals, squelches and the chiming acid-techno rings of early Warp Records, 90s Seal Phuric and Kreidler; even touches of Matthew Dear and a stripped Boris Dzanck.
On the opening mused ‘No No Staying’ Schneider adds Eno-esque hushed voices to a pared down form of techno. Whilst tracks like ‘My Mother Sailor’ evoke images of Tangerine Dream standing in front of a large patch bay apparatus, plugging leads into various holes as gaseous and reversed loops swirl around them. Elsewhere you’ll hear the motor buzzing hum and throb of Affenstunde era Popol Vuh, synthesized bells, 808 drum machine pre-set percussion, slithered electronic magnetics and Schneider’s whispered underpass anxieties about the, now distant, movement, bustle of cities.
I’d suggest that Schneider has found a good balance in creating intensity, and setting moods with a more sparse, minimalist intelligent sound. Lean but just as expressive, this new Mapstation album might be amongst his most sagacious and sophisticated; a coming together of various strands in the electronic music sphere that soundtracks the current emptiness and unsure atmospherical moods of the present.
Julia Meijer ‘The place Where You Are’
(PinDrop Records) 26th February 2021
A consolidation if you like of recent singles and the self-titled song from the debut album, Always Awake, the Swedish singer-songwriter and guitarist’s latest EP seems a good opportunity to catch up with Julia Meijer’s tactile songbook.
From glacial enormity to the more intimate; the hymnal to indie-pop; Meijer has proved a very interesting artist over the last few years, and this showcase offers a full oeuvre.
The glimpse into a dream EP opener is sparse but full of depth and moving atmospherics. It’s a lushly conceived slice of folk and pop, with Kate Nash-esque tones and an air of Fairfield Parlour about it. Next we have the first of a couplet of singles to feature ex-Guillemot and regular foil Fyfe Dangerfield. ‘Under Water’ is submerged in a suffusion of both lulling and sighed harmonies, dreamy undulations (again) and splashes of cymbal. The song melts between two rhythm signatures on a snorkeling meditation beneath an aquatic expanse.
Scandinavian illusions are cast on the EP’s third song ‘Skydda Dig’; a song originally even more intimate, performed as a solo live that’s now given a steady and minimal augmentation by guests, guitarist Andrew Warne and bassist Jamie Morris, who actually turns to the keyboard for this recorded version. A protective plaint theme wise, Julia’s Swedish evocation resonates with haunted sorrow and almost otherworldly trembles as turns over a sort of late 80s, early 90s, American indie riff.
The finale, and second song to see Julie accompanied by Dangerfield, ‘The Place Where You Are’ expresses loss to an ebb and flow of subtle organ and Irish folk lament. Beautifully conceived as ever, flowing between a never world of dreams and indie guitar music reflections, Julia’s latest showcase serves her talent for experimenting without the loss of melody and songwriting craft well. I recommend you seek her back catalogue out.
Obay Alsharani ‘Sandbox’
(Hive Mind Records) 19th February 2021
Finding solace and escapism in equal measures in the colder Baltic air of Sweden, Syrian migrant and beat-maker Obay Alsharani, forced to leave behind the chaos of an imploding homeland, takes in the awe and beauty of his Scandinavian refuge on the debut album Sandbox.
For despite a background in composing lo fi productions of dusty Arabic samplers under the Khan El Rouch moniker, Obay now reaches out into more glacier tonal ambient soundscapes; finding sanctuary in icy snow-covered and woodland gladded environments on an album geographically remote from the heat and sandy horizons of the Middle East.
It’s good to hear a success story in the convoluted tumult of the Syrian crisis. A decade on from the civil war that has now engulfed almost the entire region, and grown into the most complicated of proxy wars, Syria’s ruling Bashar al-Assad regime may yet collapse due to an economic fall out prompted by neighbouring Lebanon and the catastrophic failure off its government and banking crisis. As it stands, and now with the global pandemic just another tier of burden upon a region and population that’s suffered beyond any of our imaginations, Russia now has that foothold it always wanted on the Mediterranean coastline of Syria; Turkey has widened its own borders, unopposed in threatening the Kurds in the south, who are fighting for autonomy; and ISIL have been all but beaten, with fragmenting survivors scurrying away to spread panic and their death cult into Eastern and Central Africa. Those resistance groups that grew from the oppressive clamp down by the Syrian government remain in small clusters, holding on, whilst Iran without its nebulous mastermind and death-bringer general Qassim Suleiman, remain in the area holding up Bashir’s regime.
The fallout has resulted in eye-watering numbers of displaced people, with more than six million Syrians forced into neighbouring safe havens or further overseas into Europe and North America. Obay gained a lifeline himself through a scholarship in Sweden, leading to an extended period of stay in refugee accommodation in the far north of the country. After finally gaining a permanent residency, Obay was able to resume his music, whilst also experimenting with visual art (providing the colourful-feedback cover art for the limited edition cassette format of his debut album).
Branching out sound wise, Obay now captures the breath-taking spectacle and calmness of his new home. Literally, those breath-chilled winds of the far north can be heard channeled through often majestic, gliding and crackled static textured ambient suites: all of which evoke a certain stillness and sense of spaciousness. Less sandbox and more Artic, frozen tubular and piped notes, haunted but lovely church music and icicle-like droplets drip, drift and are cast across a snowy pine-covered land as the Northern Lights shimmer and play with the refractive light overhead. ‘Release’ evokes a far breezier scene though, out on the porch of some woodland cabin, with birds chirping away in the noisy movement of branches and leaves. Added to this weather recording are glassy piercing bulbs of synthesized music and what sounds like a lingering electric-organ. From coarser static grains and blowing, to soft bellows and concertinaed wisps, and even a bestial landscape of unidentified wildlife, Obay subtly creates a moving scenic and reflective study of a very different horizon to the one that he was forced to abandon. It sounds as if the Syrian beat-maker turned assiduous composer has at least sonically found a semblance of solace and a safe environment in which to reflect and heal. Music almost as therapy, Sandbox without any context is really just a deeply affected fine example of minimal and ambient mood music: A most beautiful conception.
Hi, my name is Dominic Valvona and I’m the Founder of the music/culture blog monolithcocktail.com For the last ten years I’ve featured and supported music, musicians and labels we love across genres from around the world that we think you’ll want to know about. No content on the site is paid for or sponsored and we only feature artists we have genuine respect for /love. If you enjoy our reviews (and we often write long, thoughtful ones), found a new artist you admire or if we have featured you or artists you represent and would like to buy us a coffee at https://ko-fi.com/monolithcocktail to say cheers for spreading the word, then that would be much appreciated.
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