Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea’s Reviews Roundup – Instant Reactions
The Pennys
Ayarwhaska ‘Dendritas Oscilantes’
Album (Buh Records) 11th April 2025
This album is noisy. It is chaotic. It is fun. It has an experimental vigour that should be applauded. The first track is called “XXX Speed Grindcore” and lasts 52 seconds and is the kind of thing John Peel would fill in 52 seconds of his show with. There are guitar riffs aplenty, ones that would make Billy Childish weep with joy. There are off-kilter vocal forays into electronic noise, feedback aplenty and the sound of someone clearing their throat. If this is what Peruvian Punk Rock sounds like please send me a Box Set.
NOTE: Presently no examples of the music available until release. Visit the Buh label bandcamp page.
The Conspiracy ‘Rainbow Prism’
Single (Metal Postcard Records) 13th March 2025
There is an old British psychedelic magic about ‘Rainbow Prism’ that should be celebrated by the current ever expanding psych fraternity. And the only reason I can think of why it isn’t, is because they have not heard it. For it has all the great qualities of British psych, and if this track was released on say Fruits De Mer Records, The Conspiracy would be all over Record Collector and Shindig and getting airplay from late night BBC 6 music: attention The Conspiracy deserves.
Elmer Gantry’s Velvet Opera ‘Elmer Gantry’s Velvet Opera (Remaster Reissue)’
Album (Think Like A Key Records) 25th April 2025
What we have here is not a new band. No, I have made an exception to the rule of only reviewing new music to review this wonderful reissue of the Elmer Gantry’s Velvet Opera’s self-titled, and only, album from 1968 (I think) reissued on the wonderful Think Like A Key Records.
It is quite a marvellous album full of mellotrons, sitars and screaming like psych rock guitars and a quite marvellously busy bassist that has to be heard to be believed. This is really a must have for any fans of 60’s psych or music lovers who want to get the aural feel of life in late 60’s swinging London.
NOTE: Presently no examples of the music available until release, but you can find or order the album here
Occult Character ‘Party Heaven’
Album (Metal Postcard Records) 4th April 2025
Party Heaven is an eight-track mirage of deranged emotional psychosis; a Party Platter of unhinged outpourings of electro-punk. Yes, Occult Character is back with eight short tracks that confuses and delights in equal measure; songs that captures the ugliness of modern life, painting a dark picture but with a huge pink lipstick smile scrawled all over it. Madness and Magic at its most extreme.
The Pennys ‘Say Something’
Track/Video
A song of pure sweetness and sadness; a lovely jangle guitar Odyssey of lo-fi home recorded indie bliss. A track worthy of the golden days of jangle pop when Subway supplied darn fine tooting slices of indie pop melancholy and not overpriced sandwiches. Album to follow this summer.
Poundland ‘Can’t Stop’
Album (Cruel Nature Records) 28th March 2025
You can lose yourself in a abattoir of current events, open the newspaper, open twitter or X or whatever it is called nowadays, read the news listen to the news watch the fucking news and you are overcome, overwhelmed with the sinking feeling of life in its most horrible reality. In this time of being on the brink of world war 3 and lost in the everyday mundanity of the 9 to 5 life or the hoping to get onto the mundanity of the 9 to 5 life just so you can get away from your bloody job coach and the latest nonstarter of training course you have to attend, its only three buses there and three buses back and there is a chance no matter how slight that they will keep you on in a full time position as a general dogsbody until they discard you when a much more viable and cost cutting option comes along. Poundland are the soundtrack to this life; they are the suppliers of the modern British folk song but not the hey diddly dee bounce your child on your knee with your finger in your ear type folk song, they are writing about street life for the everyday working class. They write songs about the everyday experience. They write about how the littlest thing can make a difference – like how the thought of the flapjack in your pocket can lift the mundanity of your working day – and the banality of tv, but not set to acoustic guitar and fiddle but the dense sound of noise or the simple drumbeat and the confusion, the feedback of the distorted guitar and bass: lo-fi punk at its best.
Poundland are one of the finest and important bands in the UK today, and capture the essence of true life in Britain in 2025 in all its ugly lack of glory.
Smellsofwitches ‘Bride of Fistula’
Single 28th March 2025
Brides Of Fistula is the debut release from new Wigan outfit, the wonderfully named Smellsofwitches. And it is a strange fish of a track, all experimental improvised glory but with a marvellously warm texture and feel. It may not have a melody that one can hum along to but is all the more fascinating and bewitching for that very reason.
SUE ‘Get Over’
Single
This is actually rather good, a throwback to those days of flannel shirts and The Late Show being dedicated to those pesky grunge bands from the good old US of A. And indeed, this track by Sue would not be out of place on that show: all angst vocals and heavy guitars. This could do very well, or would have 30 odd years ago.
Toxic Chicken ‘Mentally Sound’
Album (Earthrid) 16th April 2025
Let’s be honest, the only thing musically mentally sound about the great Toxic Chicken is the title of this album, as we in the know all know Toxic is one of the great musical eccentrics that live in the underground occasionally releasing mostly instrumental forays into the psych of electronica. And this wonderful album is an aural stroll through a strange Forrest as the sun goes down. Tracks that bewitch and amuse, entertain in equal measure. Songs that trip and drip through the mind, a relaxing frenzy of the old adage that a bird in the bush is a better than the bird in the freezer, or something similar that really is not too similar at all, and that is the perfect description of the works of The Toxic Chicken. For it sounds like electronica; it feels like electronica; but there is just something there that makes it much more. It has a slight dark ember of a twisted foray into the thinking of a musical maverick; an index into the mind of the closest thing the world of electronica has to Syd Barrett. Mentally Sound is indeed extremely sound but in the most magically unsound way.
Vesch ‘Passport’
Album (Incompetence Records) 11th April 2025
Art-Punk Cabaret is how Vesch describe themselves, and I’m not going to argue with that. For what we have is an enjoyable foray into a land where Xray Spex and The Teardrop Explodes and Lena Lovich rule the radio, as at different times the band remind me of all three. Maybe late seventies post punk and early eighties pop is what is in vogue in Russia at the moment, as that is where Vesch hail from.
Passport is an album made up of off-kilter and extremely enjoyable unusual inventive pop music. It may not be to everybody’s taste but is certainly to mine.
Tennyson In Space: The Violin Part 2
April 4, 2025
The Monolith Cocktail Serialises Andrew C. Kidd’s Tennyson Imbued Opus
Dabbling over the decade with showcasing exciting, sometimes improbable, intriguing work from new and aspiring writers, the Monolith Cocktail has played host to serialisations of stories by Rick Clarke (of Vukover and The Tearless Life infamy) and Ayfer Simms (the Franco-Istanbul writer was an integral member of the MC team for a good few years, offering various reviews and conducting interviews).
Furnishing the site since Covid with review pieces and the odd feature, Glaswegian-based writer Andrew C. Kidd now adds his name to this list, sharing his grand interstellar opus with the MC readers through an epic serialisation. Last month we published the Prologue and Part One of The Violin: the first chapter of this grand sci-fi story. We now continue with the concluding part of that inaugural chapter.
Andrew seeks inspiration from music and anything that chronicles the fantastical. And in Tennyson, he finds sentiment and solace.
Part 2
Half-aware in a half-dream, the young Commodore roused from her stupor. Tito was drifting silently beside her.
‘W-where… am I?’ Her speech was slurred.
Tito’s teeth took on a yellow hue through his white beard. He grinned inertly before his gaze slowly returned to the porthole.
‘Where are the other Commodores?’, she continued to enquire. ‘AURORA?’ Her voice ascended quietly.
‘Are you not able to hear their voices?’, Tito muttered after a short pause.
The young Commodore strained her neck forward, but a strap crossed over her forehead. She was being kept firmly supine on a board that had been secured to the living quarters wall. Her hair wafted around her head and face in zero-gravity.
Tito plucked at one of the thin cables on the box relic. His dry fingertips scraped against it in a coarse strumming motion.
‘They sing to us, melodiously!’ He laughed a little. ‘Listen…’
Loose hair hung limply from the straightened form of the longer relic.
‘P-please don’t!’, she pleaded upon realising that she was unable to raise her hands in self-defence. They were bound to the board she lay on.
‘Calm now!’, his voice rasped in command. ‘I implore you to listen–’
The straightened relic touched the box-like form which he had rested under his chin. A small clatter occurred when it touched a black board with cables that ran up its body. The young Commodore wondered if this was a simple circuit board. She had been trained in interstellar survival, yet nothing had prepared her for this. The pupils of her eyes remained pint-pointedly fixed on Tito. A mephitic musk clung to the air; it was nauseating.
The hair of the long relic made a wretched whispering sound as it glided across the cables on the box form. As he pressed down on these wires with his other hand, Tito uttered a sharp curse. Initially she wondered if this related to the indelible impressions the cables left on his fingertips. But she soon realised that another one of the hairs of the long relic had snapped. Its lithesome form collapsed over the box relic. Tito placed it down on a white surface next to where she lay. He floated thoughtlessly away into the darkness of the long passageway, mumbling indistinctly to himself.
* * *
During the earliest days of his depression, Tito did not eat. He remained unmoved in his living quarters for hours upon end, eventually only leaving his sleeping compartment when his bodily functions required servicing.
His muscles ached, and after a while, his body started to waste. His limbs disappeared. They flailed gently in his deep sleep like those skeletal satellites that floated endlessly in their tombs in the lower decks.
Long days became even longer months. AURORA had long been forgotten. Tito would have to service the ship and its systems manually.
Electrolysis, the running of electricity through water, had to be adjusted depending on the background oxygenation levels. Ambient temperature settings continuously altered according to the electromagnetism of his location. The wheelhouse manned to manoeuvre its circular form in the direction he wished to travel. These automated tasks had been inherited by Tito, yet he partook in none of these. The ship sailed onwards in its rudderless voyage.
Another cosmic storm had rocked the vessel on the day that he should have succumbed to his inadequate handling of the Pathfinder.
He lay face-down on the floor. The straps that held him vertically in his sleeping compartment had failed to secure him. He coughed into the pooled blood that blebbed around him. A scalp wound stung.
He managed to float to feel the narrow walls of the passageway that led down from his dormitory to the bridge. A red background light blinkered and hampered his vision. Critical warnings flashed in a lightshow of doom.
It had only been a matter of months since he had corrupted the machine learning algorithms of the murderous AURORA. Years of survival training on the mother ship kicked in instinctively. He went to the bridge and opened up a schematic view of the vessel. All systems were deemed ‘critical’.
His hierarchical assessment of what needed repairing made the reality even grimmer. The electrical circuitry would have to be salvaged. If he was without power, he was without life.
Next, the system that made oxygen from water. Finally, he secured the navigational platform upon which this hulking metal ship pivoted. This would come at the expense of other systems: radioactive protection; waste disposal; gravity.
All of the lights except one small lamp in the living quarters were switched off. This had been the blessing of a miswiring at the time of its creation.
The radio was kept disabled. He elected to keep the ship silent. The ambling and pregnant mother ship would have conceived and birthed his replacement by now. He or she would arrive in another 25-years, preserved in silence, ice-enshrouded inside their pod.
Relief pods would always find their respective Pathfinder. No storms or mutinies or mishaps could dislocate this tracking signal from the mother ship. The wandering Tito was aware of this. He also knew that once he had been located, a communiqué would be sent from the docked pod to its mother ship. This message would take years to reach her.
A few years passed after Tito had regained control of the now crippled ship. He had been gazing endlessly at the inky nothingness streaming past the vessel. He navigated himself in weightless movement to one of the store rooms located in the deck immediately below the one he inhabited.
It was a filthy space. He had been depositing his bodily waste in used ration crates. He wished to jettison these into deep space, however malfunctions in the air-locking system had meant that everything contained within the Pathfinder had been hermetically sealed.
Nothing could be released from the inside; the manual lever that opened the exterior doors was located on the outside.
Tito had stockpiled the soiled ration crates in various store rooms on this deck. As he navigated through the main passageway of the ship, the sickly fluorescence of his cabin light only provided faint illumination.
His eyes squinted into the tunnelling black. Using his fingers, he cautiously felt round the darkened hollow of the hatch that led down to the lower decks. He pushed himself off and let his body float weightlessly onto the next level.
Tito moved down the lower passageway to a new room which he had recently cleared to make way for more used crates. He laughed quietly at the irony in the microcosmic life cycle of these containers that had once contained his food.
As he entered the cleared store room to open a new crate, a smaller container floated into his field of vision. His attempts to catch it in the darkness had resulted in his arm striking it. His body leapt forward through the hatch to catch it before it floated down into the ghastly lower reaches of this vessel.
The old container felt like nothing he had touched before. It was old and bound in a taught hide. He was rendered fatigable after a mere few attempts to break open the latch to reveal its contents. The pulp of his hands had been long-wasted.
He eventually prized upon its lock after pressing it forcibly down on the corner of the one of the tables. This sudden downward movement had resulted in his palm catching its sharp edge. Life-blood spilled onto the casing of the old container which absorbed it immediately. He wiped the remainder of the blood onto his white spacesuit.
Tito peered down into its open contents. There, strapped down by two bands, was a box relic. White dust scattered across a black board that ran up its middle. An ornate headpiece curled at its peak.
The carbonised form matted against his bright torchlight. Unconsciously, his index finger pressed against one the cables that travelled up half the length of its ancient form. A catgut-sharp twang echoed even after its vibration had ceased.
He quickly closed the old container and took it to his living quarters.
Sound!
He had not heard a sound like that for a very long time. Deep in his cavernous subconscious, fragments of a melancholic G minor theme of an old canzonetta played out. He hummed it imaginatively in adagietto rather than its original andante tempo.
In the days that passed, Tito remained in a trance, a state away from the present.
Where have I heard this sound before?
He sought restorative retrospection, eventually finding an answer to his question.
He had been a child when he last heard this sound. It remained as distantly familiar as when he first heard it on his mother ship. Melodies played on box relics like this funnelled out through the many speakers during their teachings of the old ways.
Tito had never really listened to the mundane AI voices and their musings about these relics and those that played them. He had only ever cared for the melodious beauty of these ancient harmonies; they had echoed up the vast corridors of his mother ship as it carried him into immensity.
After this realisation, Tito had a joyous reawakening.
It can be played!
He re-opened the old container to find an accompanying stick-like longer relic. Its straightened form and taught hair could make the longer sounds, the sounds that floated endlessly in harmony. He remained awake for many days on end as he tried to work out how to recreate the sounds of his childhood.
It happened on the third or fourth day after his discovery of the mysterious container. He had been hovering out its form, plucking frustratedly at the cables. This blunt sound was one of two sounds that the box relic could make. He wished to forge the longer noise, a sound that would reverberate around this vessel.
That day, his hand had grasped at the end of the long relic. Having moved it towards the box relic, the languishing hairs accidently slid across its cables. Tito listened to the sound that levitated up from the box relic. They travelled into ethereal realms. He bore a broad smile under his dark beard as his tired eyes settled to close after his endeavours.
Finally, in this dark and desolate place, he had found light.
* * *
Outside the vessel, galaxies spiralled, contorting into moving mountains that hung in crownless majesty. She dreamt of conquests and bold discoveries; of bountiful life on planets similar to the one her ancestors had vacated. Light soon blinded her visions. She woke to a man’s voice.
‘We have a need to personify everything’, Tito mused rhetorically. ‘Take the so-called Caryatid. A hand reaching out to touch the untouchable – as told to me in my infancy.’
He grasped at the empty space in front of him.
‘Hah! It is a void, merely a star formation in a multiverse of cosmoi. An asterism in a sea of stars–’ his hand compressed into a ball ‘–a simple trick of blue and yellow light ceding into the altered infrared of viewing ports. But its comparison to a hand is baffling.’
He sighed loudly.
‘What could a human hand possibly reach, never mind grasp!’, he concluded animatedly.
The pulp of his closed fist thumped the white interior of the ship. His hand, having now opened up, slid slowly down to drop limply by his side. He moved away from the wall weightlessly. The volume of his voice decreased to a deep rumble. His eyelids were heavy.
‘What are you going to do to me?’, the young Commodore slurred helplessly.
‘Why – I shall play you more music…’
His voice continued to dwindle. The young Commodore saw that his eyes were now closed.
‘Without it’, he proceeded tiredly, ‘I was but a grey shadow of a man. Lo! Its compositional form, its notation, its beauty… it is quite simply transcendent… outshining the very light of the stars… within which we dwell…’
His eyelids remained shuttered. He mumbled some more.
‘But alas… we must wait a while before we can hear such harmony again–’
The thrum of the engine quavered in the background. Above this, a quiet snoring sound grumbled along in unison. Tito had fallen asleep.
The young Commodore woke to the stiflingly heat of the living quarters. Her lips separated to reveal a dry mouth. Many hours had passed since she had last had fluids.
Unsteadily, and sleepily, Tito was fumbling at the table in the far side of the living quarters. He rummaged around in a locked box, eventually picking up a sharp object. Unmistakably sharp edges gleamed in a sudden show of brilliance.
He approached her slowly. Having failed in his first few attempts to secure his thumb and middle finger in the obturating handles of the object, he now held this steady. She felt the steely coolness of its metal on her warm face. Sobbing loudly, her chest rose up in panic. She thrashed and thrashed within the confines of the taught straps secured across her head, torso and legs. Above the loud wailing and panic, a faint sound next to her right ear went snip.
Tito manoeuvred backwards.
Breathing hard, he leaned over her, presenting her with a lock of her own hair.
‘You see, it’s too short.’ His head shook.
‘This is why we have to wait–’
* * *
The young Commodore lay laxly, still bound. Her muscles had made their long retreat inwards, leaving only bones and skin that veiled thinly over her body. A languid greyness masked her once youthful face. She stared vacantly at the ceiling. Tito had captured not only her body, but, finally, her spirit.
He plucked at the cables on the box relic mournfully as the vessel sank deeper into the vacuum of space. His gaze remained fixed upon the porthole. Out there, time warped, so much so that light shifted red in the endless abyss. These were the colours of stars that bled out in a slow haemorrhage as they reddened in their journey to eternity.
It was here, in this space, in these ungodly living quarters, that Tito and his prisoner had conversed only a few months ago. The young Commodore had interrupted his same, senseless contemplation when she asked him if he was going to kill her.
Tito had looked reposeful, reverential even, as he held up the thread-bare longer relic that she had once observed him press against the cables of the ancient sound box. His face bore a gleeful grimace.
‘My dear, if I were to kill you, how would your tresses grow to the length needed to re-hair my bow?’
Andrew C. Kidd
A WORLD OF SONIC/MUSICAL DISCOVERIES REVIEWED BY DOMINIC VALVONA
Jonah Brody ‘Brotherhood’
(IL Records) 11th April 2025
What a genuine polymath talent the West Country singer-songwriter, composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist Jonah Brody really is. His solo debut album, unassuming in places, gentle in others, but then able to emotively pull on all the right strings and adopt a diverse musical and sonic musical palette, encompasses aspects of his theatre background, his ethnographic studies and career curveball into psychotherapy.
Blissful and poignant club, ambient, trance music and noughties indiepop with a cerebral edge, Brotherhood channels and takes on a range of personalities in an attempt to articulate, feel out and process the personal tragedy of loss, the philosophical quandaries of encroaching tech and AI and its relationship to creativity and the very existence of humanity, and the more mundane aspects of living in a frightfully anxious century. Starting with the more personal of those subjects, Jonah is inspired to collect his thoughts and somehow capture his feelings when tackling the death of his brother Tomo, who passed away in 2020. On the ghostly folk yearn ‘The Ancestors Are Feeling Gentle’, Jonah’s fragility is channelled via Oar era Skip Spence from the ether. Lyrically touching and yet almost dreamy, its simultaneously painful and yet also somewhat abstract in its renderings and vocalised suffering. But beautiful too, and somewhat psychedelic and therapeutic.
That word, therapeutic is important. Jonah, as I briefly mentioned, has trained and works in psychotherapy, specialising in psychedelic therapy. And it shows: in a good way. Whilst combating the fallout and loss of his brother, plunged into the deep end, Jonah weaves psychedelic influences, elements of the new age rave scene and alt-lifestyles into the swimming, often ambient and near cosmic (so cosmic as to be Kosmische) soundtrack (and I mean soundtrack, with spells of the near cinematic). Effecting his voice, alt-monologues, burning the midnight oil type fringe radio show announcers and what can only be described as a character who sounds like a cross between the beatnik countercultural White Panther and weed advocate John Sinclair and disgraced Richard Nixon, Jonah offers various forms of that therapy; of feeling through and processing not only death but the questions of our seemingly dark uncertain times. Sometimes this is done through the theatrical, and the discipline of acting, of wearing a disguise: Whether that through the twisted trailer park Southern Baptist turn kool-aid poet protagonist conjuring up psychedelic visions of buffalo herds searching for gold in the permafrost from a filthy shower, on the Redneck LCD Soundsystem transmission ‘The Computers Are Cleaning’, or the fucked-up, identity crisis fever dream AI voice on ‘The Singularity Has A Dream Too’.
Jonah’s was after all awarded the young theatre composer of the year accolade in 2016. And he couldn’t resist to throw in at least one reference, namechecking in a playful way that titan of reinvented musical theatre Stephen Sondheim on the Floydian meets Terry Riley and Panda Bear-esque gentle cascaded and Vangelis heralded electronic neo-pop score ‘The Ancestors Are Feeling Sondheim’. Sondheim has become a byword, part of the lexicon, and a shortcut to encompassing a whole style of musical theatre, of writing and performance: addressing darker elements of the human experience through the traditional cannon. I’d suggest that is in evidence on not only this track, which you could rightly imagine as some futuristic stage score, but throughout the entire album.
There’s a sampled extract from the sock puppet relationship counselling therapy of Marshall Rosenberg, the noted nonviolent communication innovator, on the languid Basic Channel plastic tube synth drums meets Beloved ‘The Ancestors Are Taking Workshops’. It’s not entirely clear, and by the sounds of that title, if such liberal mediations are encouraged or read as part of the contemporary yin for therapy.
This is a world in which OK Computer is anything but OK. A period in which the spectre of singularity is both encouraged and dreaded. A soliloquy over drowsy mirages, passages of wispish despondent indifference, contemplation and escapism. The songs and music move beautifully and movingly between soulful machine pop, a removed form of cult status 70s singer-songwriters, Balearic and 80s/90s club sounds, indie-dance, art-pop and exotic, bird enriched canopy, trance. I’m picking up Laurie Anderson one minute, Harold Grosskopf and Iasos the next, or, a touch of Matthew Dear, Tom Rosenthal, K. Leimar and Arthur Russell.
An incredible album that unfurls its sophistication and depths over repeated plays, Brotherhood deals with harsh realities and loss in a most imaginative and soulful way; the human in the grip of AI and computer learning, making a last stand before singularity becomes reality and the alt-bros of technological supremacy make us all redundant and surplus to requirements. Already in my end-of-year list as one of the finest albums I’ve listened to in 2025.
Pidgins ‘Refrains of the Day, Vol. 2’
(Lexical Records) 4th April 2025
Making good with 2023’s inaugural volume of daily refrains, the Mexico City collaboration of electroacoustic multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Aaron With and drummer/percussionist Milo Tamez return with an ever-expansive sound and “pidgin” coined language of the abstracted, amorphous and redirected.
The term “Pidgin”, used to name this duo’s project, is a grammatically simplified means of communication that develops between two or more groups of people that do not have a language in common: typically, its vocabulary and grammar are limited and often draws from several languages. Here, it’s used to describe an improvised form of worldly influences transformed to create an unburdened escape from classification and a history dominated by Colonialism and grotesque skewered technology. In another way, and as referenced in the titles of the album’s first couplet of tracks, ‘Getting Things Done’ and ‘Things To Do’, it’s used to free us from the pressures and mundanity of checklists and exercises, or as the duo describe it, the “involuntary, detached feelings of the mechanical productivity mindset”.
With some self-imposed limitations to their methodology and freedoms, the improvised focus is on a single element in each performance. In most cases, the rhythm, which they say is often neglected within improvised music. Tamez more then makes up for this, changing between a wide spectrum of percussive and drumming apparatus and instruments, and from across the world: includes West Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America and beyond. Talking drums, slit drums, gongs, guiros and Mexican ayayote seed ankle shakers all form various rhythmic shapes, patterns and amorphous tribal, ceremonial and abstract exotic forest and jungle dances. Combined with warbly, cybernetic, gargled and more harmonious hermetic effected vocals that sound like a cross between Eno, Panda Bear, Battles and Laurie Anderson, and the sounds of whirly tubes, an Australian frog, the gourd resonated balafon and something called an electric “alimbas”, linguistic and worldly sources either merge, react or play with each other to make a new musical dialect and interaction.
Reference points include both Tamborileros del Barrio de Yalcoc of Chiapas and the Senegalese Bougarabou drumming of Casamance, but I think you can add Ale Hop’s collaboration a few years back with Laura Robles, Afro-Latin influences, Terry Riley and Alabaster DePlume. Whilst the atmospheres conjure up the imaginings of atavistic Mexican civilizations, Vodoun, Shinto and Tibetan ceremony, Balinese gamelan and a strange transmogrification of Indian worshipping George Harrison.
A continuation of Volume One’s peregrinations of strange tongues and obscure colloquialism, explorative and inter-dimensional drumming rhythms, whirly circled windpipes, tines and metallic chimes, Volume Two expands the horizons and visions further; lifting the listener once more out of the ethnographical constraint, and freeing up the mind to travel unbridled through a new language of improvised experiment.
Manu Dibango ‘Dibango ‘82: La Marseille December ‘82’
(WEWANTSOUNDS) 4th April 2025
Although the series of enviable icon performances organised by Christian Ducasse in the French cultural and polygenesis melting pot of Marseille in the early 80s wasn’t labelled at the time or since as a showcase for the great and good in saxophone lore, the lineup was certainly dominated by saxophonist deities and innovators. The inaugural season of shows kicked off with two of jazz music’s most free, unburdened luminaries, Archie Shepp and Sam Rivers. A year later and the headliners were Stan Getz and Georges Adams. But sitting between both sets of accomplished saxophone legends, taking to the Théâtre La Criée on the 22nd December 1982, was the Cameroon-Parisian saxophonist, multi-instrumentalist, bandleader and titan of African fusion Manu Dibango, his famous eight-piece band and, for at least part of the performance, his world traveller nomadic foil, Don Cherry.
Released for the first time on vinyl (I believe), in partnership with INA and Dibango’s own legacy label Soul Makossa, that concert receives the full WEWANTSOUNDS label treatment with remastered tracks and linear notes by both Graeme Ewens (who was there in the flesh on that night) and Ducasse – who also shot the photo that now blazes the cover. The project’s original intentions to “leave a mark” on the French port’s cultural landscape was admirable. Through the combined Association Concert Promotion in Marseille and Cri du Port association, Ducasse drummed up an incredible series of events that showcased a wealth of talent.
Championed as one of the pillars of African music internationally, the late Dibango left his Cameroon birthplace of Douala (the economic and arguably cultural capital of the country) for his adopted home of Paris as a young man to study piano, before taking up the saxophone. All the while imbued by his roots, during the early 1960s Dibango joined the first international African dance band of its type, the Congolese rumba band African Jazz. Exceptionally talented, and proving every bit a leader and innovator, he quickly became a key player on the scene, going on to form his own signature band, and collaborate with a diverse range of other notable stars and virtuoso performers such as the Fania All Stars, Fela Kuti, Herbie Hancock, Bill Laswell, Bernie Worrell, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, King Sunny Adé and Sly and Robbie. As a result, his sound expanded beyond the traditional roots of Cameroon and its neighbours, fusing together combinations of funk, soul, boogie, and jazz. His influences ranged from Congolese rumba to Sidney Brecht, Coltrane and King Curtis.
Most will be familiar with his mega hit ‘Soul Makossa’, which brought a Cameroon genre defined by a strong bass rhythm, brass and regular 4/4 time to a global audience in the early 70s – said to be the most sampled African track in history. It seemed that success brought its own artistic drawbacks, as Dibango’s inquisitive nature and natural versatility struggled to break free from the “makossa” label: although it must be pointed out, Dibango named his own label after it.
By the time of this performance in 1982, Dibango was once more channelling his homeland, bringing the sentimentality, love and authenticity of African village life and traditional music to the stage and mixing it with contemporary 80s sounds, technological advancements and production. Much of the material that made up this concert would be taken from his most recent LP of the time, Waka Juju, which drew upon the Yoruba traditions and rhythms of West Africa, the heavy beat dance and call-and-response singing “Bikutsi” form, and the various drums that accompanied such rituals, celebrations and magical invocations. A pivotal year for Dibango and that awfully inefficiently categorised “World Music” sound generally, the Cameroon star would be asked to artistically direct a showcase box set of his fellow country stars. The Fleurs Musicales Du Cameroun compilation would prove a winner, and most iconic, influential showcase.
Such was Dibango’s charisma, his musical skills and ability to adopt so many influences from not just Africa but Europe and beyond, he became something of a national treasure in France; years later fronting his own regular popular show Salut Manu on one of the country’s main channels, and more or less claimed by the French as their own.
At this conjuncture, in 1982, Dibango’s “Makossa Gang” of virtuosos and noted musicians/artists included stalwart guitarist and fellow Cameroon expat and composer Jerry ‘Bokilo’ Malekani, a founder member of the famous Le Ry-Co Jazz group, who joined Dibango’s ensemble after his disbanded in ’72. In a group that’s drum and percussion heavy, there’s the “three-piece rhythm section” of Brice Wassy (another member of the Cameroon camp, anointed the king of the 6/8 rhythm, and foil to Mali’s Afro-pop legend Salif Keita), Valery Lobe (composer and arranger to boot, who has worked with far too many artists to name here) and Jean Pierre Coco (who I have to admit, I know next to nothing about). Harmonising beautifully, soulfully and earthly is the “choral pairing” of Florence Titty Dimbeng, a Cameroon icon, working internationally with Dibango but also sharing stages with the likes of Miles Davis and Nina Simone, and Sissy Dipoko, the singer, athlete and catwalk model. The set-up was completed by bassist Hary Gofin, who you will hear a lot of, and keyboardist Del Rahbenja, a one-time member of Jef Gilson’s cult Malagasy group in the 70s.
Sharing the bill as part of a ten-day tour of France, trumpeting nomad Don Cherry joined the ensemble for a second act; incorporating his own worldly wonderings within Dibango’s equally expansive and eclectic journeying. He’s not featured on this LP, but WWS have told me that there will be a future release of Cherry’s performance with Dibango: waiting in the wings.
On that night, the entire ensemble ease into the performance with an audience encouraged clapping rendition of the Eastern Cameroon folk song, ‘Migilbawe’. A spiritual village scene rich with subtle harmonizing and the constant stick rattling beat, authentic roots and soul mingle for a hymnal start.
A shimmer of sparkled percussion brings in a familiar Afrobeat groove as the band smoothly slip into a lively version of ‘Africa Boogie’. Appearing originally on the already mentioned Waka Juju LP that same year, the best track Fela Kuti never wrote, is full of heralded African pride and solo spots that take in funk, fusion music, jazz, Congolese and Cameroon influences – sounding like a love-in between Tony Allen, New Air, King Curtis and Peter King. The elements of sustained 80s synthesized production certainly place this eleven-minute live version, which seems to slip and slide, bounce and saunter to several tempo changes, bouts of simmering down and then intensity.
“Side one” ends with the percussive, near Afro-Brazilin inspired ‘Ashiko Oumba’. Keeping a constant rhythm throughout, rattling a bottle and blowing the odd whistle, whilst building us a picture – talking to the crowds in the role of storyteller and educator – Dibango takes this one down a notch. Both serenades and fluted leaps of Afro-jazz and Afro-R&B sax, the choral soulful voices of his backing singers, and an incipient band holding back make for something buzzing with anticipation, before finding that funky carnival groove.
Flipping over to “side two” and there’s a contiguous three-part breakdown of the Waka Juju LP title-track, split into various tempo changes, various combinations of instruments, but thoroughly dominated by African percussion and drums. Again, with the carnival, almost samba-like feel, there’s passages of smoother electric-piano-like soulful simmering, saxophone doused Afrobeat, the tribal, the village voice, and sleigh bell shaken 80s fusions. The original motif, riff is all present and correct but led through a both relaxed and shuffling display of love and pride.
This is roots music played at its best by a Dibango and his band of virtuoso foils. The quality of the recordings themselves – remastered from the original tapes we’re told – is top notch, and it does feel, if you turn it up loud enough, like you could be right there in the front row. But I’m looking forward to hearing Don Cherry’s section at some point – I’m anticipating Hugh Masekela vibes. A legendary performance is brought back from the vaults, and rightfully given a new airing as Dibango’s legacy is once more, rightly, celebrated.
Bernardo Devlin ‘The Night Before The Space Age’
(stereo-b) 25th April 2025
Having so far alluded my radar, and without reading the PR briefing, my first thoughts on investigating this grownup existential songbook were of a Benelux Leonard Cohen – complete with those rising near heavenly beatific choral backing voices -hungdogging it in a bleak Lutheran Northern Europe. To my surprise, and with all the intonations, cadences of the German school of such downcast troubadourship, a touch of the shrugged French masters of the form, and even a hint of morose Scott Walker, the veteran artist and composer Bernardo Devlin is actually Portuguese. A revelation you could cry, as Bernardo channels an international cast of voices and influences, from Waites to Nico, Michal Gira, Bowie (‘Dome’, to these ears, has an air of David’s 2000s period, but especially ‘The Loneliest Guy’ song from his Reality album) and Heyme on his latest album, the anticipated with baited forlorn and resignation, The Night Before The Space Age.
Alongside those referenced voices, and even further away from his Lisbon-base camp, the music is itself a brilliant and perfectly paced combination of post-punk, gothic, Brecht, Walker-esque, Swans, Sylvian and near challenging balletic mature avant-garde influences. Definity not what you expect from a sun-baked Portugal.
Sci-fi of a very plaintive, lurking and shadowy kind, our sagacious lyrical host lumbers, drags and in a more nostalgic mood of reflection, draws us into his magnetic pulled heart of darkness. Drama at a slow pace, with depth and despondent weariness, controlled denunciations and signs of reminisced breaks from the mire of this hellish futuristic mindscape of the worn-down and bedraggled, each song is a stage-set, the act in a pondered and propound philosophical sigh or emotive stirring of unease and longing.
Most of these songs could easily soundtrack a European noir thriller, murderous plotted psychological drama or morbidly curious film. Of course, no surprises there as Bernard has written for the screen on numerous occasions during his five-decade career; proving an adroit hand at stirring up the right moods and atmospheres, and selling an idea, an image and encapsulation of the emotional.
That CV also includes Osso Exótico, which he co-founded in the late 80s, and collaborations with the English composer and pianist Andrew Poppy and the Swedish-American multi-instrumentalist Helena Espvall, who now appears as a foil playing both lead and rhythm guitar and providing some of those lulling, near devout, on a majority of the album’s ten tracks. Without listing everyone else, there is a host of other contributors, especially on the backing vocals sides, that help create the right mood of despondency and haunted balladry and more up-tempo reverberations of phaser-like piano iterations and redress.
Themes vary in this both lugged and more menacing suspension of alternative space age ushering uncertainty; musings, we’re told on limitless power (step forward Elon and bro pals, the autocracy of unelected masters and leaders), of gene inheritance trauma, dread and reflections on finding a momentary senses of solitude and peace in the early hours (in this case, the ungodly hour of “5:45”). Whatever the topics, there’s a worrying sense of fate and dispassionate inevitability throughout; pessimism in an age that threatens to explode for good. Idiosyncratic, despite me naming all those reference points, Bernardo has a unique character and voice to share with us, making this an intriguing and successfully absorbing, embracing album of music and sagacious lyricism. Again, think Cohen wandering the aftermath of a future dystopia.
Wolfgang Pérez ‘Memorias Fantasmas’
(Hive Mind Records) 18th April 2025
As the name might indicate, with the most German of German names and most Spanish of Spanish names, Wolfgang Pérez’s heritage, his “casta”, is a mix of the two nationalities.
Based in Essen, the industrial hub of the Ruhr, the songwriter, arranger, guitarist and artist has previously released albums that draw upon this linage: especially last year’s Spanish language AHORA album, the follow-up to the debut Who Cares Who Cares from 2021. Within that scope of influences there’s a musical embrace of everything from pop to chamber music and jazz.
The latest release, facilitated by those keen folk at Hive Mind Records, once more draws from Pérez’s Spanish genes with a transmogrification of the beautified coos and voices, and the melodious traditional accompanied music of his family singing in church. Part memories placed in new sonic surroundings, part mirage/hallucination and “phantom” inhabited, recordings taken by his grandfather Fernando on a cheap piece of “shitty” recording equipment in a church in the historically famous Spanish city of Segoiva are rendered otherworldly and near supernatural.
Taped back in 1982, straight from the family audio photo album, Catholic liturgy and traditional benediction is both filtered through and hindered by crackles, static, staccato breaks in the flow, fizzes and ground shaking sonorous propeller and pneumatic style bass. Rubber band plucked instruments of a fashion, unoiled pulleys and squeaks of hidden tools and objects and antenna signals interrupt those wooed and diaphanous choral communions. The old foundations of that prized Castille & Leon regional city, with its intact 2000-year-old Roman aqueduct, popular Medieval castle of Alcázar, and abundance of Latin churches, is returned to new frequencies, both haunted and unreal.
Reminding me in places of both the Spanish underground tape culture of the 1980s (Felix Menkar, C – 307 and Neo Zelanda) and the contemporary Spanish maverick manipulators and instigators Escupemtralla, Memorias Fantasmas is transmitted from an amorphous ether of repurposed memories. Inter-dimensional tweaks and feeds offer a strange and experimental take on the family archives, a sense of place and time.
This three-track EP is a gift from the artist, a precursor of a full album, which will be released in the summer by the same label. I’m not sure if Wolfgang Pérez will be heading in the same direction or once more, trying something new and different, but his roots will play some part on that upcoming release. Keep an eye and ear out for it.
Note: Pieces will all be premiered on Radiophrenia Glasgow sometime between April 7th and April 20th.
Pacha Wakay Munan ‘El tiempo quiere cantar’
(Buh Records) 25th April 2025
Brought to visionary life, the ancient instruments of pre-Hispanic colonised Peru are revitalized in a conversation, invocation of the ancestors by the duo of Dimitri Manga Chávez and Ricardo López Alcas. A scholarly, musicologist and archaeological rich project transformed into a mysterious, mystical and both tonal and melodic atmosphere and musical quartet of imaginative mythology, discovery and atavistic ritual and ceremonial performances, El tiempo quiere cantar (which I believe translates loosely as “time wants to sing”) tunes into the vibrations and winds of the old North Peruvian kingdom of Chimú, the more southern coastline Nasca civilization and the revered sacred site of Huacca Aliaga, located in the Peruvian capital of Lima.
Concentrated on whistling vessels, ceramic and cane panpipes and seashell horned trumpets from these sites, valleys and regions, new life is breathed and chuffed into an assortment of discovered instruments previously either undocumented or left out of the history books. Voices, chants from a veiled Andes and Peru are not so much found as finally given a respective hearing; the duo and friends not just noting an absence but reconnecting proudly with a once rich and complex culture, fatally destroyed by the Spanish in the early 1500s. A point of note is that the Chimú kingdom succeeded the even older Moche; flourishing between 900AD and the late 1400s, but first conquered by the Inca emperor Topa Inca Yupanqui and then later the Conquistadors.
But, as I’ve or more or less suggested, this is anything but an exercise in ethnomusicology and preservation, as the notable musicians, pulled together under the Pacha Wakay Munan title, seem to conjure up new horizons, fourth world experiments and evocative marches, processions and dances that lie somewhere between Medieval folk and the otherworldly. This culminates in spells in which spirits and ghostly visons of magic are carried across an exotic canopy of twittery and fluted whistling, low heralded announcements, and conch shells blows across the ocean; a sonic and atmospheric world in which the ‘El Taki Onkoy’ or “sick song” chant of the Culina language, first documented by the famous German-Peruvian composer, teacher and musicologist Rodolfo Holzmann, is voiced by singer, choir director, composer and artist guest Ximena Menéndez to evocative and dreamy but also more wilder and moaned effect.
Another guest, and musicologist, Chalena Vásquez Rodríguez appears as part of the improvised session ‘Mundo Posible’ (“world possible” I believe), here reinterpreted as a matchmaker between classical and freely played South American piano, a touch nearly of Tango, and sea shanty-like piped music. Third foil, Peruvian flutist, composer, sound artist, researcher and educator Camilo Ángeles lends a light wind and air of nearly obscured misty breaths and blows on the two stage‘Qinray Tema’. With an essence, breathing cycles and whistles of the horizontally held metal transverse and the pelican bone flutes merge with frame drum-like folk-style joy.
Sometimes this all sounds like a world of communication between the ancestors and the aliens of Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods, with the supernatural woven into kazoo-like marches and astral projections. Living, breathing artefacts reborn and taking their rightful place in the history of Peruvian culture.
Synthetic Villains ‘Cosmic’
(Flood of Sound) 31st March 2025
As a fellow child of the 1970s and 1980s like me, Richard Turner’s informative years were soundtracked and visually and imaginatively accompanied by an explosion in sci-fi on the big and small screen. During a magical era, roughly between the late 1960s and early 80s, there was (as Turner himself outlines) an abundance of both optimistic and darker sci-fi wonders, thrillers, mysteries and gravitas awed spectaculars, including Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Dr. Who, Lost in Space, E.T, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Gerry Anderson’s puppetry productions Fireball XL5, Captain Scarlet and Thunderbirds. That’s without delving into cinema. And here again Turner references, possibly the greatest sci-fi movie ever made, 2001: A Space Odyssey, alongside Dark Star, Silent Running, THX1138, Blade Runner, The Black Hole and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Of course, there has to also be a mention of those films, concepts that made that later era possible: George Melies’ A Trip to the Moon, Flash Gordon and Forbidden Planet for instance.
In an age yet to be totally ruined by the internet and social media, space, its exploration and discoveries seemed far more optimistic and a touch naïve: which wasn’t a bad thing. Unfortunately, that soon turned sour in an age of mutually assured nuclear annihilation. And despite the spectacular progress, from the invention of flight to jet engine and landing on the moon all within less than a hundred years, we are yet to replicate achievements made in the 60s and 70s. Humanities clamour and dreams to travel beyond Earth are now decided upon by tech billionaires; altruistic attentions more or less replaced by commercial agents and idealistic supremacists.
As a homage of a kind to the spectacular, the theatrical, the analogue age of experimentation, Turner, under the Synthetic Villains alias, conjures up a cosmic soundtrack of short sound-effects-like pieces, celestial suites, mysterious and thriller-type cult scores, library music incidentals, and kosmische-style hallowed universal awe. Whilst mentioning in the press release info a love for the Stones’ psychedelic-space trip ‘2000 Light Years From Home’, Pink Floyds’ ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ and Hawkind’s ‘Space Is Deep’, the music and sounds here are of a more Radiophonic Workshop, cult, estranged clavichord, or celeste, played Baroque celestial kind.
For this is the space dreams and drama of childhood refigured by a cybernetic, metallic voiced Focus Group, Broadcast and Jez Butler. A countdown, thrusters engaged, sliding doors and haywire circuitry lunar exploration of uncertainty, cathedral-celestial bathed solar rays and winds, and chthonian moon base atmospherics that border on the supernatural and alien, this album evokes hints of Vangelis, Tangerine Dream, Daphne Oram, The Advisory Circle, Greg Foat, Alain Gorageur, Michael Legrand, Bitchin Bajas and the Douglas Grindstaff, Jack Finlay and Joseph Sorokin trio of Star Trek sound guys.
Fun, suspense, nostalgia, wisps and vapours of alien constellations and heavenly bodies all merge to score an era of awe, wonder and impending sci-fi dread on a novel album of lunar bird sirens, clandestine chimes, library sounds and the analogue tunings, signals and vibrated, transformed robotic voices, commands and countdowns. Press play and settle back into a much better age.
Kannaste4 ‘Out Of Self and Into Others’
(We Jazz) 25th April 2025
Sounding like a Finnish amalgamation of Connect 4 and Canasta, Jussi Kannaste’s quartet showcase a display of various jazz forms and moods on the much-anticipated album, Out Of Self and Into Others. I say anticipated, as this is the gifted and much admired, in-demand tenor saxophonist’s debut album as a bandleader. And what a nascent announcement it is too.
But before that we must mention the troupe he has headed for some time; a live ensemble that has made its mark but only now puts that exciting dynamism, that channelling of jazz history and variety on wax. Appearing alongside the brass expert, sideman and educator (the head of the department of jazz at the respected Sibelius Academy in Finland) Kannaste is joined by trumpeter, composer, educator and bandleader in his own right Tomi Nikku (also of the Bowman Trio fame), drummer extraordinaire Joonas Riippa (who plays in a myriad of groups on the scene, including, alongside Kannaste, the notable Antti Lötjönen quintet) and We Jazz label stalwart, the Swedish bassist Petter Eldh (the grand instigator of the Koma Saxo and Post Koma ensembles, and part of the Y-OTIS set-up).
Together they form an intuitive bond, infusing nine original compositions with a freshness, attentiveness and sensitivity, but leaping into action as they change up the mood music from swing and screen to the blues, smokestack NYC jazz of the 50s and 60s, the freeform and experimental. With twenty plus years of experience in the bag, the scope and range of influences, the skill set is wide and international, with echoes of Lalo Schifrin, the New Orleans vibe (on the Mardi-Gras blues ‘Different Worlds’, which by the end feels like the band have lifted off their shoulders a heavy burden), Ornette Coleman, early Miles, Lester Young, Harold Land, Jimmy Giuffre, Andy Haas and Anthony Braxton (both the latter on the short avantgarde remembrance piece of supressed trombone-mimicking squeezed and thin-lipped dry spitted ‘Elegy’)
From circular heralds and brightened blasts to vibrato bristles in which every fibre of breath is made audible on the album’s vignettes of pauses and reminisces, the horns duo of Kannaste and Nikku interweave, shadow or form a duet together over the effective rattled, resonated springy and loose splayed double bass crabbing and calmer mused pulls of Eldh and the textural brushed, dusted, sieving and tighter rhythmic drumming of Riippa.
Each member of the band is given ample opportunity to step out on their own within the framework of these compositions, but not as virtuoso show-offs, but as integral passages, lead-ins and incipient introductions to both stretched out and tighter performances that mix flurries of the excitable and flexing with dashes, walks, serenades, crooning and the subdued and hushed. As a debut for Jussi Kannaste as a bandleader, this album is an exceptional, commanding show of vibrant, lively and mulled bluesy jazz with a history and legacy.
Now For The Pleading:
Hi, my name is Dominic Valvona and I’m the Founder of the music/culture blog monolithcocktail.com For the last ten years both me and the MC team have featured and supported music, musicians and labels we love across genres from around the world: ones 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 or interest in. 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 say thanks or show support, than you can now buy us a coffee at https://ko-fi.com/monolithcocktail
The Monthly Playlist selection of choice music, plus our Choice Albums list from the last month.
A couple of months back we decided to change things a little with a reminder (if you like) of not only our favourite tracks from the last month, but also a list of choice albums too. This list includes both those releases we managed to feature and review on the site and those we just didn’t get the time or room for. All entries are displayed alphabetically.
Our Monthly Playlist continues as normal, with tracks this month chosen by me, Dominic Valvona, Matt Oliver and Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea.
A Journey Of Giraffes ‘Emperor Deco’
(Somewherecold Records) Review
MC Paul Barman ‘Tectonic Texts’
Elea Calvet ‘Seasons’
Inturist ‘Tourism’
(Incompetence Records) Review
Eiko Ishibashi ‘Antigone’
(Drag City)
Timo Lassy Trio ‘Live In Helsinki’
(We Jazz)
Nickolas Mohanna ‘Speakers Rotations’
(AKP Recordings) Review
Che Noir & Superior ‘Seeds In Babylon’
Alberto Novelle & Rob Mazurek ‘Sun Eaters’
(Hive Mind Records) Review
Andrew Rumsey ‘Collodion’
(Gare du Nord) Review
Schizo Fun Addict ‘An Introduction To…’
(Fruits der Mer) Review
Snapped Ankles ‘Hard Times Furious Dancing’
Sonnyjim & Kong Artisan ‘Effortless, Almost Dead’
(Noel & Poland Records)
Russ Spence ‘Phase Myself’
(Metal Postcard Records) Review
Macie Stewart ‘When The Distance Is Blue’
(International Anthem) Review
Gregory Uhlmann, Josh Johnson, Sam Wilkes ‘Uhlmann Johnson Wilkes’
(International Anthem) Review
The Young Mothers ‘Better If You Let It’
(Sonic Transmissions) Review
Previous Monthly Choice Releases:
And now, the tunes of the month playlist selection:
Snapped Ankles ‘Pay The Rent’
Psychedelic Porn Crumpets ‘Weird World Awoke’
MC Paul Barman, Donwill ‘Killinagame’
Jansport J, Airplane James, Sham1016 ‘T-Top’
Alessandro Alessandroni ‘Militari in allarme’
Black Mynah ‘Colleen’
Che Noir, Superior ‘Sovereignty’
Droogie Otis, Boldy James ‘Everything Designer’
Timo Lassy Trio ‘Rumble Outro – Live’
Gregory Uhlmann, Josh Johnson, Sam Wilkes ‘Marvis’
Takuro Okada ‘Howlin’ Dog’
Inturist ‘Special Offer’
Elea Calvet ‘Bad Joke’
Sweeney ‘Love Is A Waste Of Time’
Eiko Ishibashi ‘Antigone’
Meggie Lennon ‘Connexion Astrale’
Apollo Brown ‘Honestly Don’t’
The Moose Funk Squad ‘Cheetah Piss’
Black Josh, Lee Scott ‘Aw, Here It Goes’
Queen Herawin, Pretty Bulli, Illa Ghee ‘Denial’
The Young Mothers ‘Better If You Let It’
Lord Finesse ‘Habits of Desperation’
Sonnyjim, Kong The Artisan, Lord Sko ‘Idiot Savant’
clipping. ‘Polariods’
Macie Stewart, Lia Kohl ‘I Forgot How To Remember My Dreams’
Nickolas Mohanna ‘Past Light Cone’
Previous Industries ‘Adriana Furs’
Sporaterra ‘Unglued’
PremRock, Sebb Bash ‘Did You Enjoy Your Time Here…?’
Flying Tulpa ‘Signless’
Andrew Rumsey ‘The Memorial Service Orders of Friends’
Nick Frater ‘One Minute’
Honor Saint William ‘THE IDIOT’
Puce Moment ‘Bugaku’
Alberto Novello & Rob Mazurek ‘Ricochet Edge Verse’
El Leon Pardo ‘Viaje Sideral’
Mick Harvey & Amanda Acevedo ‘Juliette’
Hi, my name is Dominic Valvona and I’m the Founder of the music/culture blog monolithcocktail.com For the last ten years both me and the MC team have featured and supported music, musicians and labels we love across genres from around the world: ones 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 or interest in. 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 say thanks or show support, than you can now buy us a coffee at https://ko-fi.com/monolithcocktail
THE MONTHLY DIGEST INCLUDES A CLUTCH OF ACCUMULATED NEW MUSIC REVIEWS; THE SOCIAL INTER-GENERATIONAL/ECLECTIC AND ANNIVERSARY ALBUMS CELEBRATING PLAYLIST; AND CHOICE PIECES FROM THE ARCHIVES
(Cover Star Macie Stewart. Photo credit Shannon Marks)
_____/THE NEW____
Macie Stewart ‘When The Distance Is Blue’
(International Anthem) 21st March 2025
Perhaps one of the most prolific collaborators of recent years, across several mediums, the multi-instrumentalist, composer, songwriter and artist Macie Stewart has come to represent a flourishing, explorative contemporary music scene with multitudes of connections and threads. Apart from projects with choreographer Robyn Mineko, Sima Cunningham, and the Pacific Northwest Ballet, Stewart has become a stalwart of the International Anthem family, contributing and helping steering releases by Rob Mazurek – who literally appears below this review with his foil Alberto Novelle -, Bex Birch, Damon Locks, Makaya McCraven and Alabaster DePlume.
Another foil, featuring in the intimate ensemble that plays on this Stewart’s first solo album for the imprint – the actual debut solo LP, Mouth Full Of Glass came out a few years back on another label -, is Lia Khol, a cellist and sound artist who already collaborates with Stewart in a duo. There’s also the addition of both the equally versatile artist Whitney Johnson (credits include the Verma band and the avant-pop lo-fi Matchess alias) on viola, and Zach Moore on double-bass. This is where those inter-connections must end, as I could just carry on regaling all the various entries from the bio and dedicate this review piece to one of the most enviable of CVs in the music scene. But we must not get distracted, and instead now look at the album.
When The Distance Is Blue could be read as…well, perhaps blue in mood. But this is an album that slips poetically in and out of consciousness, inhabiting, ruminating over and in some cases writing the aural equivalent of a love letter to the spaces in-between the tangible and the environment, with background passages of field recorded interactions taken from public places. For instance, the famous Tsukjii district of Tokyo, near to the Sumida River (reclaimed originally from lowland marshes) is referenced as the title for an atmospheric piece of recorded street side, market interactions. It carries on over and bridges the reverberating, sifted, swept and delicately plucked and vibrated opening suite ‘I Forgot How To Remember My Dreams’ and the near atavistic recalled, apparitional haunted voiced ‘Murmuration/Memorization’. The former of which features Khol’s clean cello and Stewart’s meticulously struck piano notes in a near forlorn but beautifully evocative mood. It reminded me of both Cage and Reich, of the Japanese school of contemporary classical music, and even a little of Sebastian Reynolds work with cellist Anne Muller. The latter, which is named, in part, after the stunning synchronised patterns of large groups of starlings as they come together in flight, seems to dial into something old or timeless; an elliptical dance of Tony Conrad like bows, Hellenic-like spirit voices rising and falling like their avian subjects, and the neoclassical.
The album title, and the underlying theme, is inspired, imbued by the American writer and activist Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost book. I’ve unfortunately not read it, but the L.A. Times summarised the nine essay pieces that make up this work as: “An intriguing amalgam of personal memoir, philosophical speculation, natural lore, cultural history, and art criticism.” Elsewhere it’s been described as a wondering and lurching zigzag through history, politics and art, with the author described as a “Intellectual nomad” by The Guardian’s Josh Lacey when he reviewed it. But all can agree about the book’s themes of change and transformation. Of which Stewart taps into, recording the almost unnoticed; an essence of a particular time and place; a captured seasonal moment of rumination and episodes that left their mark. Across this a near perfect length album, a complete journey is sounded out through both attentive and deeply felt strings, piano, percussion, wordless voices and double bass. It’s a liminal sound that evokes Sakamoto, Cale, Alison Cotton and a sense of the Oriental slow movement, as it moves beautifully and moodily between pizzicato plucks, the cascaded, watered, resonated and bowed. I’ll say it again, as perfect a vision as you can get, everything about When The Distance Is Blue is just so right; every feeling, note, sensibility carefully pitched in a dreamy and ached, subtle and often mysteriously intriguing way.
Alberto Novelle & Rob Mazurek ‘Sun Eaters’
(Hive Mind Records) 28th March 2025
A moment in time; an afternoon’s encounter. The symbiotic alignment and then transformation of the improvised and layered, sonic and sound art foils Alberto Novelle and Rob Mazurek transduce timbral elements and textures into an amorphous act of existence on their collaborative release for the discerning internationalist label Hive Mind Records.
Created in a day, extemporised to a point, the Sun Eaters album, despite its rhythms, is a serialism of encounters and reactions to recognisable lines, soundings, echoes, flutters, melodic addresses, nature trial organic serenades, shakes, tingles, jangles and bleats from Mazurek’s trumpet, flute and percussion of bells. His partner on this exploration transforms these instruments into hallucinatory and playful electronic, modular and oscillated new atmospheres and ambiguous soundscapes that simultaneously evoke Jon Hassell’s Fourth World inventions, the collaborative work of Ale Hop and Laura Robles, the Aphex Twin, Carmen Jaci and King Champion Sounds.
When you address both participants extensive and envious CVs, you can only assume that together they will make something very experimental and unique, but not so academic and avant-garde as to create something dry, theoretical and impenetrable. Before we can any further, just a brief summary of the experience brought to the Dobialab studio that day in Northeastern Italy. I was only the other month referencing Mazurek in relation to Damon Locks and his List Of Demands LP. The cornetist and interdisciplinary innovator featured Locks in his Exploding Star Orchestra lineup, just one of the numerous groups the countercultural Chicago figure and influencer had instigated over the decades; most notably Isotope 217, the varied Chicago Underground ensembles, and one of my favourites, the Sau Paulo Underground offshoot. I could list umpteen other incredible collaborations (his work with Jeff Parker to name just one), and run-off a long list of influential labels that have carried his work (my friends at International Anthem for one) over the years, but you can get this all off the various bios circulating on the internet. His foil, Novello, often “repurposes found or decontextualised analogue devices to investigate the connections between light and sound in the form of contemplative installations and performances” under the JesterN guise – I borrowed that from his Bandcamp page by the way, hence the italics. He’s assisted such notable talent as Alvin Lucier, David Behman, Nicholas Collins and Trevor Wishart, and improvised with such luminaries as Evan Parker, Butch Morris and Karl Berger.
Combining these experiences, echoes of Don Cherry, Peter Evans and Miles casting shadows across an arid Latin sounded landscape are sampled and looped, turned into a language of abstract data, mechanics, transmissions, signals and pitch registers. There’s a buoyancy swimming below the synthesized beds that indicates a certain rhythm and movement. And yet at times the pair seem to be floating in the cosmos or lost in an illusion as they pull the AEoC through the mirror backwards and shake and rustle the cow bells of a herd heading for Tibetan shrines. Those bells by the way also ring out like tubular long pipes or like a sleigh ride into spiritual transcended. But I can’t help feeling there’s a lot of fun at play too on these peregrinations, especially on the Mexican wrestler referenced snake-rattled and mirage-esque ‘Luchadores Sudden Embrace’.
Taking a completely different direction, the fungi studied inspired finale, ‘A New Mycological Framework of Narrative’, is the sound of Richard H. Kirk’s wordless mewling and mantras, a touch of Kriedler and even Kraftwerk, and Finnis Africae being fed into a strange soundboard and apparatus of conductors.
A different kind of creation, this six-track reconfiguration seems to just be. Neither non-musical nor musical; neither avant-garde nor defined; the results are beyond simplified categorisation. Mood pieces? Sensory exploration? Textual exercises in ambiguity? Abstracted visions conjured out of an apparatus and range of acoustic instruments? All viable descriptions perhaps for an amorphous collaboration. Followers of both artists will be happy with the outcome.
El León Pardo ‘Viaje Sideral’
(AYA Records) 21st March 2025
A “sideral”, or celestial bodies related, “voyage”, the new inviting album from the Colombian brass, wind and multi-instrumental encompassing artist El León Pardo is imbued by pre-colonial Colombian magic and contemporary musical hybrids that fuse cumbia with the Afro-Caribbean and cosmic.
Noted for spreading the word and virtuosity of his chosen instruments and culture to the world through his work with Ondatrópica, Curupira and Frente Cumbiero, Pardo is imbued by the sound and symbolism of the “Kuisi” end-blown flute, and Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountain range in which its whistly trill echoed; the loose Colombian originated infectious rhythm of cumbia, which in more recent times has switched the European influence of accordion for electric guitar, but has been restyled and modernised throughout time to include the trends the day; and the ancient Pre-Colombian Zenu people of the Sinú River Valley and their atavistic flute.
Channelling all this to conjure up a dream realism peregrination, dance and wonderment, Pardo invites a number of Colombian foils to join him on a sometimes-surreal corridor to the stars. Taking up the offer is fellow eclectic polymath Edson Velandia, emcee N. Hardem of LNI and Soul Am Beats fame, and “nueva (“new”) cumbia” motivators Frente Cumbiero, who’s main instigator Mario Galeano is also a member of both the already mentioned Ondatrópicaand Los Pirañas groups. This trio’s contributions further expand the scope of influences and ideas, heading down into the lively Bogota barrios, or snake rattling and sauntering into a spellbinding oblivion of magic eye Colombia and the cosmos.
As the tile translates, there’s a relationship between the stars, the celestial spheres, playing out on Viaje Sideral. A both playful and deep immersion of universal mirages and dream states that simultaneously sound Andean and yet futuristic and cosmological, the album’s nine tracks use tradition and modern tech to build up an alternative reality. Analogue synths echo and modulate those space sounds: a representation of beamed astral planes and spectral rays, and travellers from other worlds landing in the mountain valleys of Colombia.
Whilst traditional instruments, the chuffed, short and longer, more drifting and circular convulsed flutes and pipes, both brassy and Latin trumpet, reference imaginative invocations of his homeland. Factor in some of that Afro-Caribbean influence and a touch of Mad Professor dub effects to this playful, inviting, danceable, percussive infectious, pop-y, soulful (there’s even some electric guitar parts that I would swear were Rhythm & Blues flavoured) and mystical, and you have a dreamt landscape brought to vivid, rhythmic life. El León Pardo isn’t however just about the magic, but by using the instruments he does, bonds with and sticks up for those pre-Colonial indigenous roots as a form of activism and conservation, education. This is nothing short of a great imaginative Colombian trip, equally at home under a menagerie canopy of exotic conjuring as it is in space.
Puce Moment ‘Sans Soleil’
(Parenthèses Records) 21st March 2025
Tuning in via the kosmische, new age, trance and ambient imbued modular electronic laboratory to the courtly and Imperial Gagaku tradition, the Puce Moment reconfigure purposeful Japanese ceremony, dance and music to conjure up an otherworldly, haunting and mystical soundscape under a “sunless” sky – if you directly translate that album title of “Sans Soleil”.
Travelling to the notable Japanese city of Tenri (the old capital of Japan, for a very brief period during the late 5th century rule of Emperor Ninken) in 2020 to record and work with the local Gagaku Music Society, the French duo of Nicolas Devos and Pénélope Michel recontextualised an old but continuous form originally performed for the elite. They expanded this exploration turn transformation further with the addition of the São Paulo born choreographer and dancer Vania Vanneau: furthering the soundscape project into dance, visual movement and performance art.
For those unaware of this Japanese form, Gagaku’s roots can be traced back to the 6th century, perhaps earlier, when Japanese delegates were sent to China to learn about its culture. They are said to have brought back a fusion of both Chinese and Korean music, instruments and dances to the Imperial court; to be performed at banquets for the elite. But some historical sources suggest that it was through the spread of Buddhism, making its way across from China to Japan. And one of the main dances, the “Bugaku”, involves the wearing of intricate Buddhist costumes and masks.
Familiar sounds of this form include the famous barrel-shaped wooden “taiko” drum, the “Koto” 13-string zither, the “Biwa” short-necked lute and the “Shō” wind instrument – used for one of the six titles of this peregrination and mood musical work. All of which, I believe, can be heard both in their recognisable form and morphed and woven into a modulated, generated, filtered atmosphere of electronic apparatus drones, fizzes, oscillations and amorphous mysticism.
Hinting at rips in the fabric, a misty geography and periods of historical meaning and reference, Sans Soleil summons ghosts, voices from the ether and the four winds and wisps of Jon Hassell, Hiroshi Yoshimura, Popol Vuh, Tony Conrad’s work with Jennifer Walshe and Ash Ra to magic up a sound world that sits on the border of the alien and cosmic, landscape and pure atmosphere: The word used is liminal. This convergence of trance-y, lucid synthesised sounds and voices on the air merges dreamily and spookily with Japanese tradition, ceremony and choreography to create something more akin to an experience, an immersion and dance.
Alessandro Alessandroni ‘Paesaggio Bellico’
(Four Flies Records) 18th March 2025
Like much of mainland Europe scared, brutally traumatised and worn out by WWII, Italy and its battle-ravaged population pretty much became risk adverse to war. Although eventually changing sides back to the Allies, the ill-fated bedfellows of the Nazi Axis alliance were, apart from the diehards/racists/antisemites/psychopaths, were always ill at ease goosestepping to the tune of Hitler. In fact, no matter how history has been warped, the Italians put down and made the butt of so many jokes, the country had some of the largest numbers of partisans fighting against the Fascist regime – percentage wise in all of Europe, Italian partisans were far more likely to be killed and murdered by the Nazis than anyone else.
Italy favoured internal civil war over the international: a war of ideologies, corruption, state and philosophy that rages to this day. Terrorism and organised crime concentrated the mind. But no one in Italy could turn away from the events that followed in the wake of WWII: the Iron Curtain and Cold War to Korean, Vietnam and so on. And that brings us to the work of the stellar talented and connected iconic and cult Italian composer Alessandro Alessandroni, who scored an impressive range of war themed documentaries and films during a career that spanned a good half of the 20th century.
Born on the release date of this latest battle, war and psychological collection (18th March), Alessandroni came of age during the rise of fascism and the events that would lead to the Allies invasion of first Sicily then mainland Southern and Central Italy, the horrific bloody battle of Monte Cassino and the brutal air raid bombardments that destroyed so much of the country – an agreement between both sides thankfully saved Rome and several other important cultural cities.
During a period between 1969 and 1978, the maverick and highly influential composer and multi-instrumentalist recorded a catalogue of scores and atmospheric pieces, suites that dealt with not only the military aspects but the trauma of war and its effects upon those who both fought and faced its wrath. After the smut and titillation of the Music From Red Light Films 1976-1980 collection, the Italian label Four Flies unearths an impressive and quality selection of these tracks, previously left dormant in the vaults.
A peer, foil, mentor and friend to such luminaries as Ennio Morricone, the Rome born maestro and artist first made a name for himself with his Spaghetti Western twang-y Duane Eddy signature guitar and whistling scores for the highly influential film director Sergio Leone. But Alessandroni also founded the wordless octet vocal group I Cantori Moderni (“The Modern Choristers”), which featured his wife Giulia De Mutiis, and went on to form the brief prog-rock-psych group The Braen’s Machine with fellow Italian cult composer Piero Umiliani.
During the late 1970s he was scoring more and more mondo trash, erotica and garish S&M horror – see Lady Frankenstein and Killer Nun. And yet, the quality of his work is never in doubt; often elevating such tawdry, amateurish affairs to cultish status by the music alone. Although far from serious, it seems Alessandroni’s craft is likened to playing with an amusement park of ideas, sounds and instruments: entertaining but also captivating in equal measures. With an ear attuned to the contemporary fashions, but the classical and traditional too, a lot of musical ground is covered in his compositions: from Italian folkloric standards to disco, library music and the salacious.
In turn, this package (the vinyl copy features 15 tracks, whilst the digital is expanded to include 29) channels much of that legacy, but with far more seriousness, artistic depth, emotion and compassion. Most of those familiar with his work will instantly recognise the signatures and the palette; from the spine-tingling chills and fears of his Giallo-like scores to the arpeggios, the twang and pick of his Wild West evocations – namely on the couplet of cloud hanging “Pattugliamento Aereo” (“Air Patrol”) pieces; although the second “Aereo” matches that with vague Alice Coltrane harp-like plucks and a subtle prog-esque organ.
Where sentimentality and a touching relief is needed, tracks like ‘Lettere dal Fronte’ (“Letters from the Front”) air towards Bacharach and Morricone, and feature that recurring Baroque chamber sound of harpsichord or clavichord that gives each occasion a sense of spindled timelessness. ‘I Sopravvissuti’ (“The Survivors”) is a lovely touching sentimental piece that evokes both the balletic scores of Aram Khachaturian (sounds uncannily like his suite from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey) and wartime period classical music. Talking of 2001, with the use of the I Cantori Moderni ensemble of wordless voices both appearing like apparitions and spirits of lost and dead souls, or like some removed version of ecclesial requiem choristers, there’s also a semblance of the stirring visionary ominous fears and otherworldliness of György Ligeti.
Quite rightly, the ‘Dachua’ suite should evoke an enormity of horror, but this score is more in the mode of supernatural horrors from the crypt than genocide shock. It sounds like some lost silent film theme of haywire Baroque piano: a combination of devilment and madness, with one hand delicately lacing the keys, and the other, hitting near off-key jarred and out-of-key notes. And whilst sounding the most terrible aspects of war, from execution to the shelled-out ruins of a psychologically destroyed mind, the music strikes up the military snare, playing it like a spraying machine gun, or, building up an unsettling drama of pain and anguish: all managed beautifully, even when dipping into Library music, the hallucinating, dreamy and psychedelic.
Military timpani and drills aplenty amongst the plaintive recall of the acts and dogs of war, this survey features supernatural forces, cold chills, suspense, loss, remembrance and hope.
The suites, atmospheric pieces, scores and signature found on this Paesaggio Bellico are all far too good to be left undisturbed, languishing in the vaults of cult obscurity. Fans, heads and even those with a cursory interest should investigate.
___/THE SOCIAL PLAYLIST VOLUME 95
The Social Playlist is an accumulation of music I love and want to share; tracks from my various DJ sets and residencies over the years; and both selected cuts from those artists, luminaries we’ve lost and those albums celebrating anniversaries each month.
Running for over a decade or more now, Volume 95 is the latest eclectic and generational spanning playlist come radio show from me – the perfect radio show in fact, devoid of chatter, interruptions and inane self-promotion.
Each month I mark the passing of those artists we’ve recently lost, and as this is the first opportunity to do so, I’ve included homages to the last “doll” David Johansen, the soul music’s Carol King, Roberta Flack, vibes innovator and jazz fusionist Roy Ayers and troubadour Bill Fay.
Anniversary albums wise there’s tracks from Herbie Hanock’s Maiden Voyage (celebrating its 60th anniversary this year), Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home (also unbelievably 60 years old), David Bowie’s Young Americans (50 this month; see my short analysis in the Archives section below), Parliament’s Chocolate City (also 50), Sonic Youth’s Bad Moon Rising (40 this month), Radiohead’s The Bends (30 years old this month), Gene’s Olympian (another 30th) and Edan’s Beauty And The Beat (where does the time go…seriously! How can this LP be 20 years old this month?!).
As usual, I like to throw in a smattering of cross-generational tracks and some more recent ones – those that missed out on the previous Monthly playlists of new music. In the latter camp, we have a resurfaced (so not strictly new) live version of Throbbing Gristle’s ‘Convincing People’ from Volksbühne, Berlin, recorded on New Year’s Eve in 2005; an imaginative reverberating study, peregrination from Dorothy Carlos; and some mirage grunge indie from Raisa K. In the former, a number of oldies from Krumbsnatcha, 21. Peron, Stanton Davis’ Ghetto/Mysticism, Gloria Jones, Flutronix, Berlin Brats, Pete Dello and more… Expect no substitutes. Expect no algorithmic replicants. Expect no AI bullshit. All playlists are compiled without any external influences, totally conceived by whatever I wish.
IN FULL:
New York Dolls ‘Private World’
Gloria Jones ‘Cry Baby’
Roy Ayers ‘Ain’t No Sunshine’
Roberta Flack ‘Compared to What’
Parliament ‘Ride On’
Edan ‘Promised Land’
Herbie Hancock ‘The Eye Of The Hurrican’
21. Peron ‘Bes’
Bill Fay ‘Dust Filled Room’
Radiohead ‘My Iron Lung’
David Johansen ‘Heart of Gold’
Berlin Brats ‘(I’m) Psychotic’
New York Dolls ‘Don’t Start Me Talking’
Sonic Youth w/ Lydia Lunch ‘Death Valley ‘69’
Throbbing Gristle ‘Convincing People Live’
Dorothy Carlos ‘Balm’
Raisa K ‘Affectionately’
Roberta Flack ‘Some Gospel According to Matthew’
David Bowie ‘Can You Hear Me’
Roy Ayers ‘Pretty Brown Skin’
Stanton Davis’ Ghetto/Mysticism ‘Space-A-Nova II’
Krumbsnatcha ‘Closer To God’
King Honey w/ Hezekiah, Gos and Chief Kamachi ‘Trinity’
Georges Bodossian ‘Punching Bull’
Flutronix ‘Crazy’
Meridionale des cayes ‘Zanmi femme’
Bob Dylan ‘Love Minus Zero’
Bram Tchaikovsky ‘Robber’
Gene ‘Olympian’
Pete Dello and Friends ‘Arise Sir Henry’
___/ARCHIVES
Each and every month, I use the digest as a good excuse to once more retrieve congruous and related posts from the archives. This month, to tie in with the 50th anniversary of David Bowie’s “plastic soul” period, a short piece on one of the soul crooning pale duke’s best album’s Young Americans – well, in my opinion top three.
And from this time, near enough, a decade ago, another chance to read my review of Glitterbeat Record’s Hanoi Masters: War Is A wound, Peace Is A Scar album, raw and therapeutic sessions recorded by Ian Brennan and released during March of 2015.
Disingenuous to a fault, the cracked actor’s ‘plastic soul’ conversion, raised more than a few pencilled-in eyebrows and frowns.
Totally free of his carrot-topped mullet crown, he now hotfooted across the Atlantic to Philly, intoxicated by the city of brotherly love’s sweet, lovelorn soul music.
A new face in town, the burgeoning ‘thin white duke’ employed a cast of ethereal backing singers (including an as yet famous Luther Vandross) and kindred musicians (notably Bowie’s new lead-guitarist foil, Carlos Alomar) on his cocaine-fuelled pursuit.
Calling in the favours, fellow alienated Brit in residence, John Lennon, helped write the cynical snide ‘Fame’ (he plays on the recording and adds harmonies too) and let Bowie cover his stirring cosmological trip, ‘Across The Universe’ – much maligned, but I really dig this version, and even play it regularly in my DJ sets.
Reflective, sophisticated, Bowie and his detractors may have labelled him with derogatory terms, yet there’s no denying it’s another successful musical adoption: truly up there with his best ever work; a complete showman chameleon transformation. Even one of his most infamous haranguers Lester Bangs couldn’t help but admire it: the only Bowie LP he ever gave him credit for.
Decreed as the leading highlight’s of the album by the majority –
Young Americans (single), Win, Fame (single)
Pay attention to these often overlooked beauties –
Somebody Up There Likes Me, Across The Universe
Various ‘Hanoi Masters: War Is A wound, Peace Is A Scar’ (Glitterbeat Records)
A side excursion, travelling due east to Asia and breathing in the evocative songs of Vietnam, Glitterbeat Records launch a new series of field recordings entitled Hidden Musics. Finding a congruous musical link with their usual fare of West African releases, the label sent Grammy-award winning producer Ian Brennan (credits include, Tinariwen, Malawi Mouse Boys, The Good Ones) to Vietnam in the summer of 2014 to record some of the most lamentable and haunting resonating war-scarred music.
Indelibly linked to what the indigenous population call ‘the American war’, the examples of both yearning and praise pay tribute to the fallen: delivered not in triumphant or propagandist bombast but in a gentle meditative manner, these survivors, forty years on from the end of the harrowing and catastrophic (the repercussion still reverberating in the psyche of the burned America and its allies) war still undergoing a healing process.
Tinged with an omnipresent lilting sadness these songs are imbued with battle scares (hence the albums sub-title War Is A wound, Peace Is A Scar), as the featured artisans and traditional music masters who had joined the cause, sometimes for the first time in years, allow` their voices to be heard once again. Brennan’s notes are littered with these various connections to the war: ‘…a thirteen year old whose job was to sing to the troops to boost morale and provide solace. Another was a former AK-47 issued village leader who had not sung in over forty years and proved to be the most dead-on vocally.’
‘Un-mediated’ and as raw as you’ll ever likely to hear these fragile, half-forgotten songs without being there yourself, played on the most obscure accompaniment of moon-shaped 2-stringed and zither instruments – including the strange K’ni, a plucked instrument clasped between the teeth, the local dialectic language spoken through the single string to produce a weird otherworldly vocoder like effect –, each documented performance is a lingering trace of an old world. Industrialisation and technology it seems has no respect for the past, increasingly infringing on even the most remote and relatively atavistic traditions in the mantra of “progress”, replacing those indigenous songs with the cultural imperialism of their south east Asian neighbours (Japan and South Korea) K-pop and karaoke genres. Here then, before they vanish forever, Vietnam’s victors speak; from the sweetly yearned Phạm Mộng Hải eulogy to departed souls For The Fallen to the dew dropping off the blossom love paean to her homeland, Nguyễn Thị Lân sung Road To Home, each purposeful – with the occasional clanging up tempo surprise – song is a revealing glimpse into loss, exile and resistance.
Considering the history and ill blood between cultures – though this has eroded as capitalism takes hold and the country opens up – it has in the past been difficult to investigate for the serene and attentive beauty of the Vietnam music scene, but this earnest and adroit study into a world seldom covered proves enlightening.
Hi, my name is Dominic Valvona and I’m the Founder of the music/culture blog monolithcocktail.com For the last ten years both me and the MC team have featured and supported music, musicians and labels we love across genres from around the world: ones 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 or interest in. 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 say thanks or show support, than you can now buy us a coffee at https://ko-fi.com/monolithcocktail
Our Daily Bread 638: Flying Tulpa ‘Forever Lost’
March 18, 2025
Album/Purview by Andrew C. Kidd
Flying Tulpa ‘Forever Lost’
(Stereoscenic Records) 28th February 2025
January 2021. My first introduction to Flying Tulpa, not as Flying Tulpa, but as Liam James Tulpa. Both are aliases of Liam Cassidy. The release was titled Confusion is the First Step Towards Clarity. It centred on ‘internal chaos’. Cassidy captured this in a clever and unfussy way. Three particular highlights on Confusion… were: 1. Finding Reason and Purpose – a piece full of life, with tones almost discernible, but not quite, creating a juxtaposition of familiarity and distance; 2. Between Chaos and the Cosmos and its synergy of synth pointillism and sweeping pads; 3. Trust the Path – organic piano notes that were chaotic and melodic in equal measure. Subsequent releases followed: Faith in the Absence of Certainty (March 2021); Rediscovered (October 2023); Things Come Together, Things Fall Apart (May 2024). Cassidy weaves a consistently common thread through his complex patchwork of sounds. It is tangible yet unreal.
His latest collage is Forever Lost, released on Stereoscenic Records in late February 2025, a label that also features the marvellous Poemme (Angela Klimek) and Ludvig Cimbrelius. Cassidy discusses his inspiration in the accompanying album notes. In effect, as we travel through life, we experience moments where we are lost and others where we ‘find’ ourselves. Through this we seek, and hope for, wisdom as a consequence. Each of the seven track titles serves as a narrative. What follows sonically is even more complex.
Forever Lost opens with the ambiguously titled Signless. Have we started at a crossroad? Or does this reference change occur in the absence of warning? Distant laughter echoes. Choppy synths dazzle. An anchoring bass plays, serving as a pivot so that the listener’s focus immediately shifts away from the syncopated waveforms to revel in a more cyclical form, one that revolves around changing subtly. It spirals hypnotically. Liminal Space follows and features Leif Wyn who Cassidy previously collaborated with on Positive Disintegration (September 2020). Despite its positive key signature, this piece imbues a disconcertedness; and yet, all the same, it is strangely reassuring, like a memory recalled in a sleep-state, evaporating light like molecules of oxygen exhaled after many breaths. Solemnly Staring Out the Window offers progression on this concept of dematerialisation. A sustained, rumbling pad plays under a static-heavy whorl. It is a short bridge, one that takes us into Accepting This Gift. The sound on this latter piece is fuller. It has more depth – more layers, even. A melody has started to surface. To Be Whole Again is suitably choral in form, Gregorian in stature, colourful in tone. Here, Cassidy has composed ambient plainsong. It is complex. It proliferates.
At this point I replayed the second piece on the album, From Place to Place (by doing so, the circle was of course broken, but then I think Cassidy perhaps intended this). Its organ-like, analogue keys seem to be forever-pressed in catharsis. The octaval switch in its final minute is almost celebratory. It is structurally (and audibly) similar to To Be Whole Again. Twice played, never reprised. Everything fades into the distance.
No Expectations is the conclusion. The coil that bound this album has now unravelled. It would be abstruse to claim that everything at this point has become cylindrical; however, the notation form has changed – it is no longer cyclical. Even the pads feel less dense and more metallic. The last couple of minutes are playful (and possibly improvised).
Forever Lost is paradoxically illusory and intelligible. It is also a much more spacious offering from Cassidy. Passages open to close, never returning. Formless swathes plume out endlessly. Yet, none of the pieces are longform (the longest track clocks in at 7-minutes). In the album notes we are offered a positive feedback loop, the outcome of which will be imperfect enlightenment. From becoming lost, to travailing, to achieving self-discovery (of sorts), there is perhaps an acceptance that even when we are unsheathed from the present, our pasts and futures still return to us as muted echoes. The path ahead is almost never predestined. We sleep-walk along it most of the time. These echoing reflections do not serve to awaken us, but rather, offer faint inklings of where to tread next. Andrew C. Kidd
Hi, my name is Dominic Valvona and I’m the Founder of the music/culture blog monolithcocktail.com For the last ten years both me and the MC team have featured and supported music, musicians and labels we love across genres from around the world: ones 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 or interest in. 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 say thanks or show support, than you can now buy us a coffee at https://ko-fi.com/monolithcocktail
Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea’s Reviews Roundup – Instant Reactions
ALL ENTRIES IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER
Dr Strangely Strange ‘Anti -Inflammatory’
Album (Think Like A Key) 12th March 2025
Anti-Inflammatory is the first new album from Dr Strangely Strange in decades, and it’s a bit of a beauty it must be said.
Ten songs of their own wonderful mixture of folk, Baroque pop and psych, and is at times extremely touching songs that deal with looking back on life and mortality but with a melancholy smile on its face. “Like Water Like Wind” is a simple and touching ballad worthy of Dylan, and the three instrumentals on the album are woven with a strange and magical inner calmness/serenity that one doesn’t have the pleasure to come across that often.
Dr Strangely Strange are now aged in their eighties and goes to show that both class and talent are two things that don’t wither with time.
Nick Frater ‘Oh Contraire!’
Album 28th February 2025
What we have here is a bit of a pop masterpiece. “Oh Contraire!” mixes baroque pop with sunshine pop and a healthy dose of late 70s power pop and early 80s New Wave, wrapped in a wonderful 70s radio friendly sheen. One could easily imagine any of these wonderful nuggets of pop emerging from your transistor radio on a hot summer’s day in 1976, or any year since.
Nick Frater is a quite wonderful songwriter and a melodian extreme. The twin guitar solo frenzy and fills and frills on “I Know you Know I Know” is worthy of Thin Lizzy at their finest, on a song that sounds like Bad Company covering the Knack (or vice versa) but is a gem of radio pop/rock glory. “Seraphim Called” brings to mind the wonderful Gilbert O Sullivan, Andrew Gold and Dean Friedman; “One Minute” is a fine old-style FM/AM pop rocker, and “All Roads Lead To Home” is a beautiful McCartney-like piano ballad. The whole album is an exercise in demonstrating the beauty and song crafting skill of Nick Frater, and an album that celebrates the magic of the pop song.
Honor Saint Williams ‘London Metal’
EP (Bour Records)
As everyone who reads this monthly outpouring of my ramblings about the new music that I get sent to pontificate poorly about knows, I have a soft spot for DIY lo-fi folk ramblings. And by rights I should really like this. In fact, I more than like it, I love it. I know I’m beginning to sound like Louie Walsh after spotting a banana in the lead singers of a boy bands pocket and kidding himself that he is just pleased to see him, but this is rather lovely. It has all the ingredients of what makes lo-fi alt folk so great and that is songwriting talent: “pissing on the fire in your eyes” is a fine line, and can be found on my favourite track on this fine EP. All four tracks are excellent lovely DIY lo-fi and makes this an EP that I wish was an LP, and one I had in my collection.
Takuro Okada ‘The Near End, The Dark Night, The Country Line’
Album (Temporal Drift) 7th March 2025
This is the first album by Takuro Okada outside his own country of Japan, and one wonders why when an album such as “The Near End, The Dark Night, The Country Line” is so beautiful and comes like a breath of fresh air when spending an hour or so sifting through the oh so similar and unexciting power pop, indie rock that is currently clocking up my email inbox.
Takuro had an amazing skill of crafting gentle beguiling jazzy songs/instrumental pieces with just that touch of invention. The subtle fuzz/distorted guitar on the wonderful shimmering “Shadow” is simply mesmerising. There is a beauty and experimental flair at work that one does not come across every day; jazz, field music and ambient works combine to make this collection such a deep and rewarding listen.
Andrew Rumsey ‘Collodion’
Album (Gard du Nord) 28th February 2025
“Collodion” is a rather beautiful album indeed. Nine short well written acoustic pastoral folk tinged songs. Yes pastoral folk by a paster, or Bishop in this case, for Andrew Rumsey is indeed the Bishop of Ramsbury: whatever next?! Anyway, it is a fine album of love, life, hope and regret.
The whole album lasts less than 20 minutes, and if you want to spend an hour or so relaxing just listen to it three times in a row. It’s not an album you can get bored of, as a well written song is a thing one can never grow tired of, and Collodion is full of them.
Schizo Fun Addict ‘An Introduction To…’
Album (Fruits der Mer Records)
There are bands that light up your life; bands that enforce the knowledge that music is the greatest of arts; bands that bewitch and beguile you with a God given majesty; bands that can turn your stomach into twisted knots of excitement and just as easily untwist them with a calming ease. Schizo Fun Addict are one of these bands. I should write groups, for I’m old enough to remember when people used to ask who is your favourite group, and you would reply, The Beatles or The Beach Boys or The Smiths or The Kinks. I mention this as Schizo Fun Addict are worthy to be mentioned in the same breath as all of those classic groups.
Just listen to the guitar chiming timbre of “Fate Chaser”, you are whisked away to the golden hills and valleys of the Canyon in LA in the days before Charles Manson cast his shadow of evil. Or the pop sussed magic of the Schizo’s version of “In The Long Run”, a song that proves nothing is impossible, for as perfect as the original version is by The Carrie Nations from the Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls film, Schizo Fun Addict somehow manage trump it and make the perfect pop song even more perfect. And to prove that this is no fluke they do the same with The Mamas And Papas classic “Dedicated To The One I Love”, a song they smother in a pure heavenly warmth.
This thirty-seven-track compilation, An Introduction To Schizo Fun Addict, is an album that is a must have for any serious music lover: whether you are already a fan of the band and lucky enough to have their mostly released on ltd vinyl back catalogue or never have been lucky enough to hear or own any of their releases. If you are the latter: well welcome to the sound of your new favourite band; in an ideal world a band that be played on a daily basis on the biggest radio stations around the globe and would make the world seem that bit more special a more magical place to be.
Russ Spence ‘Phase Myself’
Album (Metal Postcard Records) 27th January 2025
I really like this album; it reminds me of what Squeeze would sound like if Chris Difford sang all the songs and had been shot from a cannon to a planet where Bowie’s Scary Monsters album is performed on a daily basis by law to people who eat their cabbage with a plastic fork and wear ill-fitting satin flares with just enough tightness around the crotch. For the power of Russ Spence’s mind and thoughts is a strange and wonderous thing.
Russ is of course lead vocalist with the marvellous Salem Trials, and this album occasionally drifts into the Trials territory as Andy Goz from the band features on guitar on some tracks: “Yeah God” especially. This is the kind of album one can imagine developing into a bit of a cult album over the years; it has the aura of a cult album one that will not be played on radio or written about but will be stumbled over and raved about by those who hear it in the oncoming years – a little like Russ’ namesake Skip Spence and his mighty OAR album -; and will inspire more future artist’s to try and capture their own brand of madness and smother it with super market brand brown sauce.
Hi, my name is Dominic Valvona and I’m the Founder of the music/culture blog monolithcocktail.com For the last ten years both me and the MC team have featured and supported music, musicians and labels we love across genres from around the world: ones 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 or interest in. 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 say thanks or show support, than you can now buy us a coffee at https://ko-fi.com/monolithcocktail
Tennyson In Space: Prologue/Part One
March 10, 2025
The Monolith Cocktail Serialises Andrew C. Kidd’s Tennyson Imbued Opus
Dabbling over the decade with showcasing exciting, sometimes improbable, intriguing work from new and aspiring writers, the Monolith Cocktail has played host to serialisations of stories by Rick Clarke (of Vukover and The Tearless Life infamy) and Ayfer Simms (the Franco-Istanbul writer was an integral member of the MC team for a good few years, offering various reviews and conducting interviews).
Furnishing the site since Covid with review pieces and the odd feature, Glaswegian-based writer Andrew C. Kidd now adds his name to the list, sharing his grand opus with the MC readers through an epic serialisation: starting with the Prologue and Part One proper, as it were. Andrew seeks inspiration from music and anything that chronicles the fantastical. And in Tennyson, he finds sentiment and solace.
Prologue
His father disappeared as a smouldering reek on the funeral pyre.
Crimson copper and sallow gold glowed brightly against the stark stillness of the night. Flames fluttered and flapped, occasionally leaping up to touch the sky.
His transformation into light was peaceful – a crackling, fire-pop peace.
After the fire had dissipated, once the fuel had been burnt down to ashes, the heat of the pyre cooled. Nothing was left of his father and the wooden pile. The charred ground took on a vaguely rectangular shape. There was no indentation of the man who once was.
As his son gazed into the faceless sky, so many thousands of silent coruscations blinked down at him.
A rheumatic finger pointed unsteadily.
‘–ero…’ [Proto-Celtic: eagle]
Another figure nodded.
‘…next to it, gal-s-ā…’ [swan]
An arm reached out and held him. The grip was firm.
‘…and your father, kruttā–’ [harp]
The youth turned round and observed the Elders who smiled coldly.
He looked away again.
Branches wavered along the tree line. A breeze had descended.
There was rain in the air.
“Come, my friends,
‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world”
From Ulysses by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
The Violin
“Here at the quiet limit of the world,
A white-hair’d shadow roaming like a dream”
From Tithonus by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Part 1
Ascending into eternity, desolate colours were filling the deepest hollows of his sleep. Gas clouds whorled and pillared into evanescent apparitions that appeared and disappeared, only to reappear altogether different, endlessly anomalous, and utterly alien.
Galaxies spiralled, contorting into moving mountains that hung in crownless majesty. Their unceasing conquest was considered admirable, so much so that ships were sent to join them on their grand campaigns. These malformations of nature inhabited a place on a spectrum far beyond humankind’s understanding of what constituted that which is natural, and that which is not.
Tenebrae cedunt luci: darkness gives way to light.
The sickening fluorescence gradually absorbed into his eyes. He woke up in the same semi-circular space that he always had. Its luminescence infiltrated his consciousness, splitting him open in a never-ending diorama of brightness.
Peering into the inanimate tenebrosity, he caught the briefest sight of himself in reflection. He saw a long-beard and white hair that veiled to assimilate with his spacesuit. It partly hid his angular face, under which was a cavernous mask.
Osteoporotic, his thoracic kyphosis slowed his movement onboard this vessel. His fingers spindled out to latch on to the edges of surfaces to counter his weightless balance.
The ship had maintained its acceleration into the deepest extremities of the universe. The compressor coils of its engines hummed silently. This indefinite acceleration had made a mockery of maps, pushing humankind into cosmic peripheries.
Before the existence of nuclear fusion, travelling a mere 1.3-light-seconds had been considered to be a scientific advancement. Space shuttles took 3-days to reach our closest natural satellite only 384,400-kilometres away. Early iterations of fusion-powered projection had moved humankind to within 365-days of the Oort cloud. Alpha Canis Majoris would be reached in 1,800-days. Approximately 4,000 sunrises would pass on a voyage to Delta Pavonis.
In this age, anti-proton-catalysed pulse propulsion brought men and women to the very fringes of the known universe in times equating to under half their lifespan.
The destination of this fleet was GN-z11, a distance insurmountable to their ancestors. They had set a trajectory that was further than anyone from Earth had ever travelled to. The light from GN-z11 was 13.4-billion light-years away; yet, the distance that had to be traversed was much further than that, approximating 64-billion light-years. One light-year is 9.4-billion kilometres, so a gargantuan 6×1020 kilometres was being journeyed.
A voyage of this magnitude had one important caveat: those who embarked upon it would not be able to return home, for there would be nothing to return to. Humankind’s reign over Earth had come to an inevitable end. Humans had to extend their long limbs outwards in search of new conquests; they sought a contemporary kingdom.
Earth’s populace had launched great ships like this one in staggered succession. Hundreds travelled upwards to the unknown, each one having taken off behind the other in a sequential time-trial.
The first wave of ships that ascended were known as Pathfinders. These vessels would map the cosmos, informing their trailing compatriots of inhabitable places or forewarning danger.
The second wave of ships were mother ships – ‘mother’ in the most literal sense. Hundreds of thousands of children would be conceived onboard their towering decks. Their offspring would progress from childhood to adulthood and receive training in sub-disciplines to become pilots and soldiers, doctors and nurses, engineers, astrophysicists and heliophysicists.
The first Pathfinders had been captained by an artificial intelligence algorithm. But a series of disasters had led those in command of this colossal conquest to have each of these vessels inhabited by a man or woman. Known as Commodores, they were second-in-command to the AI.
These trailblazing ships were replenished with humans every 25-years. Small pods were dispatched from the mother ships, approaching velocities close to light-speed to rendezvous with their respective frontrunners. Each pod would deliver a new Commodore to replace the last.
This was a relay race of the ages. Every pod sent out was a life-sustaining baton. Each successful transfer was a victory for humankind in the fight for self-preservation.
The chest of the Old Man rose in breathless double time with the rhythmic thrum of the fusion engine.
He lifted a container from underneath the chair, unfastening the lock to remove a stick-like relic from inside it. As he lifted it up, a fine hair spindled down from its length. The hair eventually touched the gleaming white of the soft-padded seat, landing in weightless abandon. He remarked that it would have been equally unsubstantial on Earth.
The tips of his fingers pincered at the thread. This maladroit fumbling finally concluded with a wisp of it in his hand. He held it out in front of him; his eyes widened as he observed its organic beauty.
Hair, he thought. Strands of dead tissue growing from mammalian epidermis, hanging lifelessly from rooted follicles. In this blinding space, the fair-coloured strands of the stick-like relic appeared far from perished.
As his eyes tracked down the length of the relic, he eventually caught sight of his hand. It was scored and filled with broken lines. Age spots dotted on its dorsum. All these blemishes were enhanced by this infernal light. He hid his hand from view and moved his attention to what lay beyond the large window before him.
Lux facit tenebras. Light makes way for darkness.
As always and forever more, there was nothing to see except a characterless blackness. In aeternum.
He let the stick-like relic go so that it hovered gently beside him. A cloth that covered the separate box-shaped relic in the container was unravelled. He lifted it up carefully and eyed the depth of the infinite holes that were bored into its body. His eyes continued to track up the neck of the box relic to its fossil-like crown. The design was uniquely ornamental. Nothing compared to it on this ship.
As he leaned over to grasp the levitating long relic, a glint of reflected light in an adjacent window caught his attention. A small shuttle was approaching. Its thrusters had already started to brake silently. Many years had passed since the last one had docked. He smiled absently and continued to toy with the box and stick-like relics.
The pod approached the starboard side of his vessel. An automated gangway that would normally have connected these two craft did not reach out to it.
The inhabitant of the pod had traversed star systems to arrive at this point. Her radio transmissions had been met with silence. She sat waiting patiently for a connection. The exterior door of the much larger Pathfinder was within touching distance.
‘AURORA, I am ready to embark.’ She spoke confidently and steadily at the exterior convexity of the ship.
Nothing. Vacuity reigned.
AURORA, the acronym for the AUtomated Registered OpeRating Algorithm, captained the Pathfinder vessels. Each new Commodore would become acquainted with the operating system. Each had their own personalities. They would do all in their power to keep their human occupants breathing.
Her pod remained stationary.
‘Confirm command: embarkation.’
Silence was the reply. She detected impertinence.
Had the Pathfinder been compromised?
Her gloved hands slid across the air-tight door to feel for a potential opening. Her fists thumped dully against it.
‘You must pull the release lever’, a voice suddenly boomed into her headset.
The young Commodore was startled. A male voice? She had been trained to expect feminine tones from AURORA.
The lever was located at the base of the entranceway. She pulled it and the hatch opened.
After entering an antechamber, the internal air-lock lever was moved to a closed position. The pressure inside did not normalise as expected. She and everything around her continued to float.
A second door which led into the main body of the ship was opened. Using the wall grips, she hauled herself along a pitch-black passageway. It was as dark as the abyss outside. Pausing for a moment, she thought she could hear a high-pitched screeching sound. It seemed to be emanating from the end of the narrow passageway. As she got closer to the living quarters, the pitched heightened causing the hairs on her neck and arms to bristle.
Grappling with the wall grips, she manoeuvred down the passageway to locate its source, stopping abruptly. An emaciated and withered soul was levitating before her. He was wearing the same type of uniform as hers. She remarked internally that he must be over a hundred years old.
He held some form of relic – an organic box of sorts, as well as a longer relic made of the same material. They had a tokenistic quality. He was staring intently at her with blood-shot eyes; they were made even redder by periorbital pigmentation that served as a blackened mount to this thin-framed and frightfully hung portrait.
The young Commodore continued to scan her surroundings, moving youthfully through the labyrinthine spaceship, opening one hatch at a time. These vessels were meant to be cold, yet the heat she felt inside this one was immense.
‘Where is the Commodore of this ship?’, she enquired.
Her tone was not as confident as when she had barked at AURORA. She had taken on a feigned assuredness. Looking down at his worn identification badge, she could not determine its characters with certainty. It read: C—m–e –n T–o.
‘AURORA, where is the Commodore?!’, she enquired loudly, ignoring the apparitional figure next to her.
‘Please – please, you have travelled such a tremendous distance to be with me today. I must insist that you sit down. I shall prepare you a drink…’
‘Where is the–’
‘AURORA is currently rebooting’, the Old Man interrupted politely. ‘And this process will take some time. As such, she cannot answer you at the moment.’
He floated over to the culinary station.
‘Protocol stipulates that the Commodore assumes temporary command in such an event’, she dictated. ‘I shall ask you again – where is the Commodore?’
‘The impatience of youth’, he mused openly, sighing into a toothless smile. ‘I am the current Commodore, and as such, I am presently in command. And I only have one order for you… to please, sit down over here, and enjoy a cup of white tea with me.’
The young Commodore, sent ready in replacement, remained irresolute. She looked at him and thought that at least two generations must have passed for this man to be the age he was. Reluctantly, and under his playfully informal command, she made the decision to join him for tea, albeit on the far side of his malodorous living quarters.
* * *
Many years ago, a Commodore had decided that in to order to retain her sanity in this confined and cold place, she would do so by feeling the warmth and presence of something that could touch her soul. She requested that a relic, built an even longer time ago on Earth and handed down through her genetic line, be brought onboard this ship. It would remain with her as she carried out her 25-year mission, and this relic she would take with her in retirement.
On these Pathfinder ships, retired Commodores were unable to return to their respective mother ships that sailed behind them. The pods that had brought them here were long jettisoned. Their small fuel cells were such that they only had enough to transport them one-way.
Instead, in their autumn years, they were afforded a place in the lower decks of the vessel. Each brave spacefarers was gifted a private space in which they could live out the remainder of their lives in peace.
Shun Tito had taken over this vessel from a tall and ashen-haired Commodore. They had shaken hands and carried out the protocolised handover. The retired Commodore made her way to the lower decks. She took the relic with her.
The Pathfinder was now Tito’s for the next 25-years. He felt a great honour to have been given this role and quickly adapted to AURORA and her unique way of working.
It had been an eventless voyage in the first months. He had been alerted to minor malfunctions in the electrical system. AURORA’s algorithms had provided a prognostic summary. They were of low significance. Standard spacefaring issues. Something easily rectifiable.
When looking back in retrospect, Tito remarked that these herald events were the precursor to the near-fatal incident that occurred in his fifth month onboard the ship.
To this day, he remained unsure if it had been a divine intervention or sheer chance that had saved him.
A forceful electromagnetic storm had rocked him from sleep. Upon waking, the ship had been rendered powerless. AURORA was silent.
He remembered the survival principles of his training. An emergency protocol deviation would allow him to enter the lower decks of the vessel. He had quickly donned his anti-radiation suit and carefully descended the long ladder to locate the distribution board of the nuclear fusion-fuelled ship.
The system had been mostly intact, but its reset, and subsequent reawakening of AURORA, would take several hours. He made his way back to the bridge where he sat patiently.
A thought suddenly exploded in his head. The previous Commodore!
After making his second descent to the lower decks, he found the retirement deck. The communication system of the ship would remain ineffective until the reboot had finished. There was no way he could contact those who inhabited this deck.
Retired Commodores were to live out their lives in peace, the protocol stipulated. Post-retirement interruption was not compatible with this maxim.
Current Commodores, with the assistance of AURORA, were responsible for maintaining this peace.
Having secured his grip on the ladder, Tito used one hand to slowly thump at the thick door. Nothing echoed back in return.
The airlock which had previously sealed this section of the ship from the rest of its contents was unlocked. It required little effort in the absence of electricity and gravity to release the hatch.
Tito entered a dark room measuring five square metres. It opened up to reveal a small passageway with doors on each side. He entered the first door to his right. The name of the previous Commodore was emblazoned on it.
The photoreceptors of his shoulder torch which had been activated by the deepening darkness introduced a steady stream of revealing light. Tito reactively clambered back in horror.
There, circling in front of his glass visor, was the decomposing face of the previous Commodore. She hung in suspended weightlessness. A disappearing grimace revealed a partly moth-eaten mandible. Tendons and tissue unfurled in naked exodus. Her skin was departing.
Tito remembered that her white cap had remained aslant on her head. It was an act of silent protest. The body of the last Commodore continued to orbit as a putrefying satellite around the petrified Tito.
Failed attempts to secure the body had resulted in Tito manoeuvring awkwardly around this room. His shoulder struck the edge of a wall corner. He exited into another corridor. His fingers caught hold of the edge of the doorway and he pulled himself out.
Tito explored the multiple other rooms on this deck. Each contained skeletons of varying ages. They all levitated in disunity. He lamented that this was a truly macabre scene. These were not retirement quarters, but tombs. Mausoleums for those who had once manned this Pathfinder.
A frightened Tito sought refuse in one of these empty stellar sepulchres. His torchlight scanned the walls to look for sensors or apertures to point to a mechanism of death of these unfortunate spacemen.
Nothing.
All he could see were four plain walls with an air-tight entranceway.
Air-tight!
A cold wave of horror washed over him. The realisation that suffocation was the mode of death. A further nauseating wave struck him. His heart pulsed and jumped. This very room was his predestined resting place!
He clambered haphazardly up the ladder and back onto the bridge.
It was dark and cold. AURORA had still not been reactivated. Tito deliberated quickly. He would set himself a new mission: to commandeer the ship.
He refused to meet the same fate as those who preceded him. AURORA would be overridden. Disabled, destroyed if it had to be that way.
He spent hours reprogramming her algorithm, inserting innumerable stop sequences: blind ends in her maze of endlessly sinuous circuitry. Another hour would pass before the Pathfinder powered up again after its storm-imposed hiatus. This rare event of super-charged cosmic electromagnetism had been his salvation.
Yet the successful disablement of AURORA meant that a lifetime of functioning through algorithmic reliance would end abruptly, and albeit welcome, he would have to learn to live without her.
Tito set reminders as to when he should eat and drink. At times he gorged on his rations. There were other times when he almost starved.
Any injury sustained could be fatal. He took painful precautions to prevent this. His movements all but ceased on the vessel. He confined himself to his living quarters. Only on occasion would he venture to the bridge.
Months progressed to years.
Tito dropped the title of Commodore. Captain Shun Tito executed command of this vessel.
At first, he lived in relative comfort, and for the first time in his life, he felt warmth. Beta decay of tritium in the nuclear fusion engines produced helium-3. Although shadow shields around these great engines had absorbed most of its radiation, low-intensity ultraviolet light had started to seed into the compartments of this ship.
He designated safe areas after measuring the radioactivity on the ship; uncontrolled levels could quite easily shroud him in a blanket of cancerous death.
And so, Tito lived like this for many years. Yet, he felt a profound sense of isolation. It ate away at him slowly. AURORA and her systems had been designed to sustain their carbonised passengers. Without her mental stimulation and pseudo-intellectual interaction, he descended into a deep melancholy, and eventually, depression.
Andrew C. Kidd
The Perusal #65: The Young Mothers, Inturist, Nickolas Mohanna, A Journey Of Giraffes…
March 5, 2025
A World of Sonic/Musical Discoveries Reviewed by Dominic Valvona
Photo Credit: The Young Mothers shot by Malwina Witkowska
The Young Mothers ‘Better If You Let It’
(Sonic Transmissions) 21st February 2025
Those (Young) Mothers of reinvention transform crate digging reminisces and nostalgic hummed melodies from the age of the Great American Songbook on their new album, Better If You Let It.
Whilst maintaining the freeform principles and eclectic range that has come to define them; cut loose from obligation, any burden, and so free to roam and extend their scope of influences as they please, The Young Mothers return after an interregnum of setbacks, relocation and both forced and unforced breaks: some of that time can be blamed on the global inconvenience of Covid and the resulting lockdowns.
Corralling such a loose configuration of able and notable musicians and artists together is no mean feat; especially with the diversity of schedules, with every willing collaborator and band member in such high demand or leading their own projects. But all six players managed to commune in 2022; coming together to record the group’s third album in Oslo, the capital of TYM’s founding instigator and electric/acoustic bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten. The group was actually first conceived when Flaten moved in the opposite direction from Norway – after sojourns with such noted groups as the Norwegian Ornette Coleman imbued trio Neon – to Austin, Texas, back in 2009. Not wasting much time, Flaten’s rich Nordic legacy of contemporary jazz met head-on with the arid Southern state’s burgeoning scene of experimental and leftfield polygenesis collaboration. But after a decade or more of improvising both live and in the studio, Flaten decided to move back home: hence the location of this new album.
But there is a secondary connection to the Nordic scene and homeland through the sextet’s vibraphonist, drummer, percussionist and voice Stefan González, who’s late father, the revered Texan jazz trumpeter Dennis González, recorded an album in Oslo together with some of Norway’s most notable musicians in the early 90s: By the way, that González musical legacy also includes bassist brother Aaron; both siblings play together in various setups, most notably as Akkolyte. Stefan and the group pay tribute to Dennis’s memory, that time and location, on the sombre and mysteriously whispery track, ‘Song For A Poet’. Taking a near esoteric, near Sufi mystical and wild turn with the use of collaborating voices from Klara Weiss and Malwina Witkowska, the mood is at first chthonian, shadowy and near foreboding until the tints and bulb-like vibraphone notes of Milt Jackson and the Modern Jazz Quartet tinkle and hover, and digeridoo-like blows merge with bristled reed breaths in an amorphous dimension of feeling-it-out-jazz and exploration of abstract commemoration and recall.
I must at this point mention the rest of TYM’s lineup, which includes a name Monolith Cocktail regulars will hopefully be familiar with, Frank Rosaly. The attuned, experimental drummer extraordinaire appeared alongside his foil the multimedia performer and singer Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti on last year’s enriching MESTIZX album – one of my favourite and choice albums of 2024. Sharing the drums with González, but also switching to electronic programming,he’s joined by the Shape of Broad Minds polymath Jawwaad Taylor on trumpet, rhymes and electronic programming, accomplished player Jason Jackson on both tenor and baritone saxophone, and Plutonium Farmer and Flaten regular sparring partner Jonathan F. Horne on guitar.
Between them, they cover everything from post-rock to freeform jazz, hardcore, hip-hop and death metal – I presume its González’s daemonic black metal-esque growling on the album finale ‘Scarlet Woman Lodge’, as he is credited in the liner notes with “voice” duties alongside drumming, percussion and vibraphone.
I think I’m right in saying that this is the first album in which all the participants share writing duties. The inspiration and source, a “whimsical” ballad, behind the opening title-track for instance, was first brought to the band by Jackson as a sort of tribute to the Great American Songbook. In turn inspired by rifling through old records from another age, this original idea, the melody, was transformed, deconstructed, reinvented and fused with the rap style rhyming of the Freestyle Fellowship, The Roots, Death Grips and Talib Kweli, the fuzz scuzz guitar of Monster Movie period Michael Karoli, the soulfulness and vibraphonic twinkle of Isiah Collier and the already referenced Modern Jazz Quartet, and the feels of old time Art Pepper, but all performed by Madlib remixing in real time Isotope 217 and Zu.
There’s a whiff still of nostalgia on the next track, ‘Hymn’, which recalls the Savoy label, the sound of Gillespie, but reconfigured by the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra. As that title suggests, this is a spiritual of a kind that twangs and stirs until reaching a climatic passage of buzzing, croaking, straining saxophone pleads. ‘Lijm’ glues together elements of Q-Tip, clipping., Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Trenchmouth and Sault, with the pulse and current this time being more tuned towards the electronic: flips, mechanical devices and data sit with and underneath the action and the activist coaching.
Engaging and embracing past influences and inspirations, the eclectic ensemble pushes further in stretching the boundaries. And despite the range and scope, the many musical threads, it all comes together quite congruously to produce the perfect rounded album of nostalgic and free jazz, hip-hop, no wave, hardcore and acid rock, and electronica. A definite choice album for March and 2025.
Inturist ‘Tourism’
(Incompetence Records) 14th March 2025
Engaging at the best of times with a wealth of regional cultural/musical/sonic influences and passions, the producer, musician, former Glintshaker instigator and multidisciplinary artist Evgeny Gorbunov continues to transform his various exiled travails and more pleasing creative pilgrimages into magical, playful and odd adventures under the Soviet era borrowed Inturist guise: itself a reference to the sole Soviet era tour operator and travel agency for foreign visitors to the country before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Sparked by an interest for Southwest Asia and North Africa, Gorbunov’s latest travelogue is a curiosity of mirages, bendy sun-bleached guitar, elastic and rubbery pliable plastic and tubular rhythms, morphed Salyut space programme soundboards, library music oddities and psychedelic primitivism. More attuned to the abstract and both vapoured and hallucinatory transformations of his travels beyond the Russian homeland to the Balkans and Israel than the geopolitical crisis of our times, the worldly sonic traveller finds a balance between the strange and bejewelled. An entire voyage of aural discovery awaits like an escape from the destructive carnage unfolding in real time, with Gorbunov caught between both the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s fight with Hamas.
Originally in forced exile, having left Russia as it menaced and then set in motion one of the most cruelling and horrifying conflicts of the age, Gorbunov moved to Belgrade, the capital of Serbia – a country fraught with its own history of war and the cracking down in recent times of civil liberties and a free media. However, there would be journeys made further afield, including the city of Tel Aviv (Trump take note, there is already a Middle Eastern Rivera of a kind, and this is it), where he recorded and produced some of the tracks on this fifteen-track travel guide. Luckily not on the frontline of the murderous Hamas insurgency that led to an ever-widening revenge of score-settling by Israel (they’ve been very busy, clearing up a lot of the mess for the West in the process; fighting on at least four different fronts; weakening Iran’s grip and influence; and eradicating much of that empire’s proxies in the bargain), the very last Tel Aviv studio session in 2023 took place on the fatalistic date of October 7th . But this is an album of intriguing, idiosyncratic peculiarities; of sound invention and engagement with a landscape both imagined and real.
Moving seamlessly across that map, influences from the avant-garde, kosmische, psychedelic, ethnic, new age, trance, otherworldly, tropical and no wave cross paths to form a novel retro-futuristic and transmogrified vision of exotic and folkloric ethnography and etymology. As part of that cosmopolitan project, there’s references to the Russian dance and driving-horses harness of “Troika” to the French dialect phrase for “winter landscape” “Paysage d’Hiver”. The former, and opener, is said to include a dance that mimics the prancing of horses puled by a sled or carriage. Musically there’s little to reference this, as the bandy ripping effects of lightly torn felt, the lunar effects of a Soviet era sci-fi movie and padded rhythms amorphous conjure up a movement and direction of a kind. The latter sure has some vague dull sun sparkle of light sharply hitting the wintery scape as a loose spring and twangy Charlie Megira guitar flicks over another cosmonaut lunar spell of retro-space sounds.
The Soviet underground meets Überfällig era Gunther Schickert and Finis Africae on the huffed and mewing voiced, valve opening effects twiddling ‘Special Offer’; and there’s something Malaysian, albeit very removed, sounding on the fluted, piped and tubular blown ‘Reminder’. But if you were looking to get a hold on the overall sound, which changes constantly as it vaguely picks up percussive and rhythmic, folksy and traditional hints of Afro-Brazil, the Balkans and Asia, then imagine Populäre Mechanik booking a surreal tour of those regions with Ramuntcho Matta, Gene Sikora, Sun City Girls, Ganesh Anandan, Moebius & Plank and Aksak Maboul in tow.
A great approach to sound collage and the transference of special held scenes, memories – especially those that offer nostalgia for the cold war period optimism of Soviet technology and the space programme – and trippy dreams, the Tourism album envisions oscillated, melting, animated and cult flights of fantasy that repurpose the terrain and topography. In short: one of my favourite albums of 2025.
Gregory Uhlmann, Josh Johnson, Sam Wilkes ‘Uhlmann Johnson Wilkes’
(International Anthem) 14th March 2025
Hot-housed in various creative incubators both in Chicago and L.A., the triumvirate gathering of guitarist, composer and producer Gregory Uhlmann, saxophonist, composer, multi-instrumentalist and award-winning producer Josh Johnson and bassist, arranger, composer and producer Sam Wilkes can all draw upon a wealth of experience and influences from the jazz world and beyond.
Crossing paths on numerous occasions – only last October both Uhlmann and Johnson appeared on fellow International Anthem artist Anna Butterss’ Mighty Vertebrate album –, all three exceptional musicians and artists congruously join together for an extraordinary attuned, sensitive and improvisational project that fuses the electroacoustic with a removed vision of chamber jazz, Americana and the experimental.
As a most tantalising prospect, this trio was conceived and set in motion by a couple of live shows – you’ll hear the polite but encouraging audience on the first two tracks – and a session at Uhlmann’s pad in L.A. And from that, a near organic growth of both attentive and stirring moods and ideas prompted an evocative language of harmonics, carefully placed twitches and plucks, sustained serenity, moving melodious hallucinations, strained misty breathes, subtle ambient and trance-y beds and wisps, vapours of synthesized effects, and plastique and pad pattered tubular rhythms.
With references to a brand of especially creamy and luxuriously textural toothpaste, the Armenian name for “sunshine” and a Mexican turnip, an international and abstract world of motivations is transduced into a mood music of the dreamy, introspective, soulful, ebbing and amorphous. From landscape gazing with Daniel Vickers, Myles Cochran and 90s David Sylvian (‘Unsure’) to floating in a warbling dreamy alien mirage (‘Shwa’), the performances, interactions effortlessly convey images, emotions as they both daintily and like a vapour of steam seem to drift or chirp along in an almost shapeless form.
In keeping with a theme of introspection, of the loner seeking a moment away from the onslaught of noise and distraction, the trio have chosen to loosely cover McCartney’s wistful break away from the idiosyncratic surreal, music hall and madcap rambunctiousness of the Magical Mystery Tour coach trip, ‘The Fool On The Hill’. It’s a lovely gesture; an indulgent mizzle and long exhaled alto sax breath of hazy and watery trickling finery that blends echoes of healing balm Alice Coltrane and Kamasi Washington with an ambient tremulous and beautiful haze. They’ve pretty much kept the signature melody but stretched it out and dispensed with the whistled flute and felt capped folksy magic for something more in the spiritual mode. A lovely finish to a sympathetically attentive and masterfully felt album that balances the unhurried with the prompted, playful and abstract.
A Journey Of Giraffes ‘Emperor Deco’
(Somewherecold Records) 7th March 2025
I’m taking it personal now. For after years and years of trying to sell the adroit, visionary ambient, neoclassical, electronic works of John Lane, and showcasing the American’s prolific catalogue of explorative opuses, he remains largely ignored: cast out on the fringes. Not that I give a shit about validation, but it would be nice if bandcamp at least wrote a feature, or that his work was played across the airwaves internationally and more regularly.
I’ve championed the unassuming composer since the very start, going back to the very inception of this blog fifteen years ago. From the early days of experimentation and the beachcomber bedroom transformations of Pet Sounds under the Expo guise to his various projects under the A Journey Of Giraffes moniker, I’ve pretty much covered everything John has ever transmitted. And after all this time, I find it bewildering that his music hasn’t managed to cut through.
Arguably John’s most enduring partnership in recent years has been with the North American label Somewherecold Records, who’ve released around eight of his albums, including this concomitant partner to 2023’s Empress Nouveau. There’s been other releases in between, but planned at the time, and now seeing fruition, is his masculine answer to that feminine album’s subtle and decorative qualities, Emperor Deco.
A change musically as he balances the tactile and the refined crafted filigree of that previous conceptual work, the curves and softer lines of Art Nouveau are now replaced by the geometric crystals, the harder light catching shapes and lines of Art Deco – there’s even a reference, title-wise, to famous the Bohemia makers/manufacturers of crystal Art Deco-styled glassware “Karl Palda”. Playing with those era defining art movements, in a literal and metaphorical sense but symbolically too, John now emphasis the noirish and bluesy, the brooding and remunerative.
For Nouveau, arriving during the Belle Epoque of a golden age that soon crumbled during the onset of World War I, its applied softened ideals and art is identified by John as feminine. Whilst Deco is synonymous with the roaring 20s: the feelgood period that despite everything was soon caught up in the Great Depression and then the rise of European Fascism. And this art form, from the design of products to architecture, is defined as masculine by John. Both now converge to form a whole.
Still very much in the ambient field of exploration. And still showing signs of the subtle craft and influence of John’s musical guru Susumu Yokoto. The mood music now embraces a soft layer of smoky, wafted, cuddled, strained, blown, accentuated saxophone and carefully placed synthesized drumbeats and rhythms: of a kind. For John has essentially created a removed version of a jazz album; something more akin to Alfa Mist or Jacek Doroszenko transforming the essence of Pharoah Sanders, Sam Gendel (both are referenced in the accompanying notes), Petter Eldh and Archie Shepp.
You could suggest there was also a “spiritual jazz” vogue to the sound, especially with the shake of trinkets, the amorphous echoes of bells and percussion that could be from the Far East, Tibet and North Africa, and of course the spindled sounds that could have been caressed and woven by Alice Coltrane or Laraaji. And that’s without mentioning the jazzy bulb-like electric piano notes and, what could be, the vibraphone, which has more than an echo of the Modern Jazz Quartet about it.
Add to this noirish, spiritual jazzy feel another subtle layer of Jon Hassell fourth world musics and a resonance of Nyman, Glass, Finis Africae and Sylvain and the perimeters are further expanded, his range growing ever more expansive. We can also hear the odd memory recall from those seashells collecting Brian Wilson-like Expo experiments of old, which when mixed with the jazz elements makes for a winning combination.
John inhabits this space at times like a mizzle, a gauze, effortlessly absorbing references, sounds and moods as he languidly and beautifully captures his concerns, moods and offerings of escapism from the full-on assault of the daily grind. There’s depth, a touch of sadness, but for the most part this is like a mirage or dream that repurposes the sound of jazz.
After last year’s long form Retro Porter (one of my choice albums of 2024) John’s deco-imbued, romantic and smoky album returns to the shorter track format with a generous offering of twenty-two musical pieces, experiences and evocations that never drag, seem indulgent or test the patience: You could say John has found the perfect length of time in which to express himself on an album in which each track is perfectly realised and executed; existing both as a singular moment, passage of time, and yet also forming part of a one whole experience of repeating signatures. This could (should) be the album that finally cements John’s reputation as one of the most imaginative and prolific artists working in this, or these, fields of compositional experimentation.
Nour Symon ‘I am calm and angry • e’
(Magnetic Ambiances) 7th March 2025
Nour Symon’s orchestrated and instigated reification of angst, rage and activism speaks just as much about the present decade’s movement against authoritarianism, the State commodification of education and health, and the erosion of civil rights as it does about this work’s main inspiration, the “Printemps érable” protests of 2012.
You could say that the expressions, the sonic and orchestral devices, the use of voices and poetry, of manifesto and barricade rattling are all just as prescient in the aftermath of the pandemic as they were thirteen years ago when a groundswell of support grew up around demonstrations against the proposed doubling of tuition fees in the province: increasingly expanding the remit, widening the disgruntlement, everyone from labour unions to environmentalists, leftists and marginalised groups ended up supporting a growing resentment, the ranks of which numbered around 250,000 at its peak.
Despite various setbacks – the lockdowns had a knock-on effect for this project, forcing an abandonment of the original plan to work with the Montérégie Youth Symphony Orchestra – the Egyptian-Quebec composer transforms the energy and directs an abstract despair into an avant-garde electroacoustic and experimental voiced theatre of the absurd, dramatic, expressionist and pained. In many ways a cross-generational grief and pull of despair, political activism and action, this album’s notable contemporary poet collaborator Roxanne Desjardin draws upon the 1980s and 1990s countercultural writings of the iconic Quebec poets Denis Vanier and Josée Yvon.
Ambitious and covering a multitude of disciplines from visual and text art (a graphic score was conceived to communicate the concept) to performance, orchestral transmogrification, opera and video, I am calm and angry • e uses a host of renowned, prize nominated poets, soloist musicians and ensembles; far too many to mention in detail here, but all integral to conveying the very real emotional maelstrom and rage of protest. Across six tracks, divided liberally into the Supermusique Ensemble and Collective Ad Lib groupings, mewling, contorting, accented, untethered, enunciated and experimental theatre-like voices circle and ride the contours, rises and quirks of a fusion between the classical avant-garde, experimental arts, Musique concrète, and, of all things, a removed version of freeform jazz.
Recognisable instruments from the wind, strings and brass sections join together with artistic impressionistic symbolism, percussion and electronic elements to evoke forebode, the unearthly, dramatic, mooning, unbalanced and abstract. Reference points within that overlapping sphere of influences and musical threads/connections includes (to these ears anyway) Charlie Morrow, Stockhausen, Cage, György Ligeti, Xenakis, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Don Cherry and on the heralded, whip-cracked and concertinaed collective agonised ‘I will die in a closed room’, a strange fusion of Alex North and The Drift era Scott Walker.
Unbalanced with the ground constantly shifting below, the tumultuous and agitated are invoked and revoked in a musical experiment of plummets, falls and rises. A mix of French, amorphous and descriptive languages is adopted in a successful attempt to merge the poetic arts with protest, manifesto and performance, whilst physically stimulating the emotions and trauma of such protest.
Nickolas Mohanna ‘Speakers Rotations’
(AKP Recordings) 7th March 2025
A study in time, of impermanence, this uninterrupted continuous work from the New York based artist/composer emits miraged rippling vibrations across amorphous futurist Americana panoramas; stirs up the presence of alien craft overhead; and cloaks mysterious voices and sounds in an ever-changing sonic reverberation and feedback of instrument transmogrification and effected loops and field recordings.
As each track merges into the next, this adroit and evocative survey of a concept both atonally and rhythmically conjures new worlds of fourth world music, the kosmische and shadowy. Mohanna breaths futuristic sci-fi propeller-like zip-lines and long drawn air into the trombone, evokes the guitar drones and hanging astral mind-scaping and astral mysticism of Ash Ra Tempel, and plucks and pulls subtly in a resonating echo the tines of some hidden stringy apparatus. Grand gestures of a kind are made as the visionary scope of fogged and gauzy inner and outer space manifestations sits on a liminal border between the Cosmic Jokers, Daniel Lanois, Faust, Chuck Johnson, the Droneroom and Bill Orcutt.
I’ve now sat through this album over three times, and fully appreciate its skills in evoking not just the hypnotic but the near ominous, and for the way it seems to seamlessly keep changing the mood and the stay intriguing.
Ships of many kinds prowl the metallic fissures and beds of guitar sustain, and the doomish rumbles of the leviathan elements resemble the Lynchian and Bernard Szajner’s alternative score for Dune. And as one sound, one wave dissipates into the ether, or is left behind a weather front, something even more curious, sometimes beautiful, emerges: the brassy saloon bar-like chiming, trembling and spindled piano that starts to take hold in the last part of ‘Hollow In The Rock’ and continues into the finale, ‘Past Light Cone’, reminded me of the heavenly Laraaji.
This is AKP Recordings inaugural release of 2025, and it is of the highest quality. An improvisational soundtrack that vaguely shapes imaginative terrains and textures via the art of speaker rotation, manipulation and the use of the electronic and tactile, this album merges the interplanetary looming hovers of UFOs and sound generators with the cerebral and mystical: the voices, if that is indeed what they are, equally evoking throat-singers and something more hermitic and paranormal. I’d happily recommend this album to anyone wishing to immerse themselves for three quarters of an hour and will be highlighting it as one of my choice picks from the month.
he didnt ‘Distraction Threshold’
(drone alone productions) 14th March 2025
After a sideways venture under the newly conceived guise of i4M2 last year, the mysteriously kept secret Oxfordshire-based electronic musician, guitarist and producer returns under his main he didnt moniker; a project he’s honed over the last few years and across several albums of granular gradients, frazzled fissures, currents and thick set walls of drones.
Creating a certain gravitas that demands more from the listener, his latest album of concreted contours, ripples, movements and metallurgical sonics opens with a fifteen-minute statement of noisy concentrated filaments and machine-made purrs and propellers. Not so much industrial as a longform immersion of drones and cryptic soundscaping, there’s elements of hallowed organ from the church of the Tangerine Dream and early Kluster meeting with the sustained guitar waves of The Spacemen 3 and The Telescopes.
An ominous rippling effect of sci-fi conjures up a frozen tundra ghost world on the album’s title-track. Carrying over that troubling set of propellers from an overhead alien presence or supernatural dimension, the mood is chilling. ‘I Realise Now How It Is Connected To My Youth’ is even darker and menacing; like Jóhann Jóhannsson’s soundtrack for Mandy sharing room on the ghost ship’s bow with Coil and Svartsin. Harrowing images of supernatural psychogeography are dredged up from the recall of the artist’s past on a troubled doom mission.
A little different sonic wise, ‘Luminescent Medium’ brings in a slow deadened drum and a semblance of repurposed dreamy synth-pop. A singular reverberated and echoed hit is all that is needed to change the mood here, as the Cocteau Twins meet the BoC, Cities Aviv and the Aphex Twin in a fizzled arena of helicopter-like rotor blades, Matthewdavid-like real and unreal transmogrified field recordings and broadcasts, and a most out-of-place gallop of horses. It is as hallucinogenic as it is churningly moody and serious.
Distraction Threshold is very much slow music for the masses hooked up to their devices, unable to concentrate for more than a nanosecond let alone make any sort of deep connection or form a relationship with the sounds emanating from their tinny speakers. The aural equivalent of finding profound prophecy and divination from entrails or seaweed, this heavy meta gloomed and movable pull of uncertainty, trauma and metal machine chills focuses the mind with answers and questions to our present and past disturbed natures, as it builds or prompts deeply felt and evoked images and moods. he didnt continues to mine for drone-inspired gold on yet another successful atmospheric work of both the abstract and vivid.
Sporaterra ‘Seven Dances To Embrace The Hollow’
(Präsens Editionen / La Becque Editions) 14th March 2025
Multimedia spheres of sound and performance art, of theatre, of sonics and various forms of music merge on this latest fully realised album from the Italian-Polish duo Sporaterra. Convening under this guise since 2019, artists Magda Drozd and Nicola Genovese roam the catacombs, the psychogeography, the halls and lands of a reimagined Europe and beyond to conceptualise a dream realism of mystery, invocation and intelligent aural archaeology. They uncover and then transform their curiosities and inquiry into something both hermetic and disturbing; old ghosts retrieved from across time, going back as far as the primal, through to ancient Rome, the Renaissance and Baroque époques.
The time-travelling Seven Dances To Embrace The Hollow album unveils itself over seven suites of Mummers parades, Dante imbued evocations, hauntings, mystical disturbing bestial gargles and snarls, and fairytale. Under that Sporaterra entitled partnership – a name that translates as “above the ground” –, the two artists inhabit some strange timelines as they dance to both the heralded and otherworldly manifestations of frame drummed and foggy sonorous cornu accompanied procession and arcane ritual (think Dub Chieftain and Sharron Kraus), the crystal cut dulcimer and glassy bulbs twinkled evocations of Southeast Asia (Park Jiha), the suffused and swaddled atmospheric sax tones of Colin Stetson and Donny McCaslin, and the stirrings of These New Puritans, Italian prog and Sproatly Smith.
Whether it’s the fate of the scaffold, reverberations from the coliseum, Medieval merriment, monastic choral drama, and vocal mewling and mooning, there’s signs of some esoteric presence to be felt throughout. Old lives and movements, actions conjured from beneath are brought to the surface, with the recognisable made anew and slightly estranged. In short: an electroacoustic sonic archaeological dig into the phantom layers of the conceptual, intuitive and imaginative.
Hi, my name is Dominic Valvona and I’m the Founder of the music/culture blog monolithcocktail.com For the last ten years I’ve featured and supported music, musicians and labels we love across genres from around the world that we think you’ll want to know about. No content on the site is paid for or sponsored and we only feature artists we have genuine respect for /love. If you enjoy our reviews (and we often write long, thoughtful ones), found a new artist you admire or if we have featured you or artists you represent and would like to buy us a coffee at https://ko-fi.com/monolithcocktail to say cheers for spreading the word, then that would be much appreciated.
The Monthly Playlist selection of choice music, plus our Choice Albums list from the last month.
So last month we decided to change things a little with a reminder (if you like) of not only our favourite tracks from the last month, but also a list of choice albums too. This includes both those release we managed to feature on the site and those we just didn’t get the time or room for.
February’s tracks and albums were chosen by me, Dominic Valvona, Matt Oliver and Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea.
In Alphabetical Order, those Recommended Discoveries and Choice Albums from February:
Cumsleg Borenail ‘Alone Again’
The Bordellos (with Dee Claw)/Neon Kittens ‘Half Man Half Kitten’
(Cruel Nature Records) Review
Brother Ali ‘Satisfied Soul’
(Mello Music Group)
Noémi Büchi ‘Liquid Bones’
Christopher Dammann Sextet ‘If I Could Time Travel I Would Mend Your Broken Heart aka Why Did The Protests Stop’ (Out of Your Head Records) Review
Helen Ganya‘Share Your Care’
(Bella Union) Review
John Howard ‘For Those that Wander By’
(Think Like A Key) Review
Oksana Linde ‘Travesías’
(Buh Records) Review
Marshall Allen ‘New Dawn’
(Week-End Records) Review
Mirrored Daughters ‘S/T’
(Fike Recordings) Review
Phill Most Chill & Djar One ‘Deal With It’
(Beats House Records)
Sophia Djebel Rose ‘Sécheresse’
(Ramble Records/WV Sorcerer Productions/Oracle Records) Review
Salem Trials ‘Heavenly Bodies Under The Ground’
(Metal Postcard Records) Review
Various ‘Wagadu Grooves Vol. 2: The Hypnotic Sound Of Camera 1991 – 2014’
(Hot Mule) Review
Kaito Winse ‘Reele Bumbou’
Witch ‘N’ Fox ‘Outfox’
Review
Yellow Belly ‘Ghostwriter’
(Cruel Nature Records) Review
The Monthly Playlist of Choice Music::
Jupiter & Okwess ‘Selele’
Snapped Ankles ‘Pay The Rent’
Phill Most Chill & Djar One ‘Born To Rock’
Ramson Badbonez ‘The Great’
Cthree & Sa-Roc ‘Gold Tablets’
Brother Ali ‘The Counts’
Pacific Walker ‘Induction Ceremony (White Women in White Robes, Clapping)’
Marshall Allen ‘Angels And Demons At Play’
Helen Ganya ‘Share Your Care’
The Men ‘PO Box 96’
The Model Workers ‘Sorry Again’
Salem Trials ‘500 Knives’
The Awkward Silences ‘The Eugenicist is Calling’
AIMING ‘Brianiac’
The Conspiracy ‘White Winter Coats’
Yellow Belly ‘Other Half’
SUO ‘Arms of an Angel’
3 South & Banana ‘Temperance’
John Howard ‘The Man Who Was America’
Mirrored Daughters ‘Unreturning Sun’
Panda Bear ‘Ends Meet’
Extradition Order ‘Consider the Oyster’
Kaito Winse ‘Waabo’
DJ Design & Vermin the Villain ‘Un Chien Perdu’
Confucious MC & Bastien Keb ‘Eyes To See’
Roedelius, Onnen Bock & Yuko Matsuzaki ‘Moon Garden’
Mabe Fratti & Lucrecia Dalt ‘cosa rara – en la playa’
dis.tant, Boundary, Reptiles Reptiles ‘Pasaje Por La Montana (Pt.3)’
Karriem Riggins Ft. Westside Gunn & Busta Rhymes ‘Long Live J Dilla’
Black Milk & Fat Ray ‘ELDERBERRY’
Kungfoolish ‘Recognize The Real’
Forest Swords ‘Lines Gone Cold – Deconstructed’
Oksana Linde ‘Luciernagas en los manglares’
Christopher Dammann Sextet ‘No Hope At All Other Than I Don’t Want To Die Today Pt. 3’
Hi, my name is Dominic Valvona and I’m the Founder of the music/culture blog monolithcocktail.com For the last 15 years me and my various site collaborators have featured and supported music, musicians and labels from across the genres, and 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 Blog 