Monolith Cocktail Blog

A WORLD OF SONIC/MUSICAL DISCOVERIES REVIEWED BY DOMINIC VALVONA
(Unless stated otherwise, all releases are available now)

Damon Locks ‘List Of Demands’
(International Anthem) 31^st January 2025

Connections, nodes and interplay. Someone should attempt to chart the family tree of influences that orbit and run through the International Anthem label hub, both those Chicago-natives and those drawn to the city from across America. Because in the grand tradition of Chicago beacons of influence, exploration and complex theory – from Chess to the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and the city’s post-everything, polygenesis, Tortoise led scene of the 1990s – that label platform has pulled in a some of the scene’s most inventive and critically hailed artists and musicians over the last five years. A convoluted history for sure, created organically and creatively, and of which all its players freely move between projects and collaborations, with some artists popping up prolifically in the role of unscripted, unofficial house band members.

And so, to Damon Locks who’s enviable resume reaches every corner of Chicago’s hot-housed underground. The visual artist, educator, musician, DJ, vocalist and, in this instance, leading poetic soloist’s CV goes back to the late 1980s as co-founder and de facto leader of the post-hardcore-punk quartet Trenchmouth. Fast-forward through the years, and Locks joins forces with one of the city’s leading luminaries of conceptualised, experimental jazz Rob Mazurek, as the vocalist for the cornetist, visual artist’s Exploding Star Orchestra. The highly prolific Mazurek will be familiar to those lucky souls that, like me, have raved about and absorbed the sounds of the various Chicago Underground formations and the more obscure (but my favourite) Sao Paulo Underground.

Locks will be familiar to many in recent times for the much-championed Black Monument Ensemble, a collaborative liberation that can now be felt to some degree on his “first foray into creating an entire album based off of his poetry and texts” billed List Of Demands. Essentially an orated, spoken and poetical reading of our end times, the aftermath of BAME and affiliated protests, the inaugural Locks named list is a hip-hop album without a rap in sight.

Poetic righteous threads of consciousness and more focussed statements of indignity and protestation fade in and out to a collage of samples snatched from street protests and podiums and the archives of activism, social consciousness and theory, put together in the style of Madlib or MF Doom, or even RZA at times.

But let’s dig a little deeper, for there’s a lot to take in, a diverse range of multilayered influences to connect with.

Imbued by a litany of voices, speakers and musicians, from Fred Morton to Stokely Carmichael, Angela Davis, Michael Smith, Linton Kwasi Johnson, Ruby Dee and Sun Ra, Locks both quantifies and lets loose a untethered reading of the situation facing those battling the ungovernable forces of decay, the autocratic and prejudicial. But the initial spark for this concept was lit when Locks was approached to “present” a new sound piece for an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. Encouraged afterwards by Alex Inglizian of the Experimental Sounds Studio to expand further upon this piece (Inglizian offered his services free as an engineer on the resulting sessions), Locks set to work on a much bigger, more encompassing work, taking in his work educating aspirational incarcerated artists through the Statesville Correctional Centre and the Prison and Neighbourhood Arts/Education Project.  Sometime last year, Locks’ class compiled a document of aspirational demands and beliefs. And at the end of the album’s title-track, he repeats those demands as “Beauty, form, destiny, love, time, future and light” to a collage of podium delivered unifying and resistance firing speeches, singing voices of endurance and quasi-Egyptian/North African shaken rhythms.

Joined in his endeavours by that International Anthem family and its close relatives of the form, there’s contributions from Ben LaMar Gay on cornet, Macie Stewart on violin, poet Krista Franklin and turntablist manipulator and drummer Ralph Darden (who also appears under the DJ Major Taylor moniker). The first two last appeared on this site through their contributions to Bex Burch’s There Is Only Love And Fear album, back in 2023. Here, Ben evokes a soft rendered feel of Miles Davies sketches and rich, sympathetic twills across the cinematic dramatic voiced supernatural samples, bluesy sentiment and hidden landscaped descriptive hues of environmental distress and darkly veiled analogy of ‘Holding The Dawn In Place (Beyond Pt. 2)’, and employs the use of a hallucinatory concertinaed melodica on the vague Thai-like sampled and El Michels affair-like pique of anxious, architecturally closed-in apocalyptic poetic distress and summary of the validation cult and tech giants garbage-feeding machines ‘Click’. Meanwhile, Macie’s empathetic sustained, hovering and warbled violin can be heard – like a mix of both Tony Conrad, John Cale and Michel Urbaniak – on the Hayes-like, requiem of voices snatched, cinematic turn hysteria screams of voices, whammy bar guitar and reversals ‘Distance’, and the Madlib & MF Doom skit soulful looping cosmic collapsing ‘Isn’t It Beautiful’. Krista, sounding a little like a cross between Tenesha The Wordsmith and Sarah Fabio Webster, offers a guiding light and the healing balm solution spirituals on the water replenishing, metaphorical seed planted dreamy ‘High Priestess’ – every now and then, from the parallel reality, a passage and stirring of activism, a squeal and churn of the upheaval brings us back into the world of hostile policing – , and Ralph drums a slow tumbled, near gravitational held break on the already mentioned ‘Isn’t It Beautiful’, and itches, scratches and slips and cuts the vinyl on his turntables for The Project Polaroid meets Afrikan Sciences “fiercely explosive” ‘Meteors Of Fear’.     

But this album is all about the words, the judgements, the poetry and call of swooned, soothed, irate, actionist samples clutched from an exhaustible source of political movements, resistance groups, street protests, the disaffected and disenfranchised. And Locks seems to channel a sagacious yet youthfully fearless reaction to the world around him with a spoken narration, unfurling of thoughts that’s one part Sun Ra, one part Brother Ah, one part Last Poets, one part Fred Moten and one part Carl Hancock Rux. Put together with a sound that could be Adrian Younge or Cities Aviv mixing up The John Betsch Society, Lamplighter, Lynx 196.9, Doug Hammond, Flying Lotus and Curtis Mayfield, it all makes for an impressive collage of demands and requirements hewn from the desperate forbode of a society kettled and hemmed in, distracted by the manna of a never-ending feed of content fixes. Locks poetically blasts the weapons of authority, the constant wearing down and stresses with a despondent but still fighting delivery of soul, hip-hop and post-jazz. A lot of people are going to be very happy that this inaugural project stands up, and that the quality is erudite as well as chaotically appealing, disturbed and agitated.

Robert Farrugia ‘Natura Maltija’
(Phantom Limb/Kewn Records) 17^th January 2025

Situated on the shallow shelf formed from the high points of a land bridge between its larger northern neighbour of Sicily and the North African continent, the Malta archipelago benefits from a diversity of fauna, flora and nature. Its position and geological formation at the centre of the Mediterranean is a godsend for a biosphere of beauty and diaphanous species, from octopus and turtles to birds and a rare weasel – the “Bellottra”, one of the smallest carnivores on the planet, is so beloved by the local population that they depicted this rarefied mammal on its coinage.   

There’s over 1000 species in fact, with a 130 of that number being endemic to the islands themselves. Unfortunately, due to the loss of habitat, the spread of invasive species and human intervention, many are on the endangered list. And as is the case everywhere, a general lack of education about the environment and biosphere has led to a further disconnection, and a concerning ignorance of the growing dangers. Whilst vital to the economy, Malta has also seen a massive increase in tourism over the decades; the numbers swelling in recent years, often outnumbering the local population by three-to-one, and some years as much as five-to-one.

Addressing the plight and ongoing struggle to accommodate these problems, plus the spectre of climate change and its effects, producer and director Saviour Bonnici has created an inspiring and actionist documentary series, Natura Maltija, or “Maltese Nature”. Combating the gap in the education system, Bonnici has captured the beautified, near sacred and yet also plaintive fears and majesty of marine and land life in and around this famous archipelago, with the tone pitched between the “wistful” and “celebratory”. Echoing those same emotions and capturing a real gravity but intimacy too, ambient/neoclassical/IDM artist and composer Robert Farrugia has been tasked with using his signature processes and balance of real acoustic instruments and subtle, attuned and voice-like electronic apparatus to score the perfect soundtrack for this series.

Lovingly in awe and sanctity yet composing a both magical and playful score, Farrugia corresponds each subject with a suitable suite of floated serenity, refracted light patterns on the shallow seabed and near soft choral and pastoral hinted organ-like gravity. As naturalistic and organic as possible, each theme is either explored, marvelled or accentuated with a venerable subtlety that draws out both a beauty and sadness. The (sort of) long-nosed tiny shrew-like “Bugeddum” of Malta has its furry movements transformed into a beautifully gleamed and shake of twinkled classical Prokofiev-like percussion and glockenspiel, and the “Bufula” bird is articulated by a both pastoral and electronic attentive air of concert hall classicism and a synthesis of waveforms. The “Gamiem”, which I think is another bird, is represented by a dappled light play of spherical bulb-like notes and tinkles and a glimmer of Jarre, Boards of Canada and Röyksopp.

Below the waves, submersed in an underwater kingdom of dreaminess and subtle ethereal voice-like hymnals, the rare freshwater “Qabru” crab is accorded a respectful plaint of lower-case piano notes, suspended floating atmospheres and spiralled pitch shift reversals. The “Qarnita”, or octopus, features what sounds like rattled and chinking bottles that somehow ape tentacle movements, whilst an enveloped serenity offers something near holy and yet alien.

The score is pretty incredible, a near perfect ambient evocation of nature in its habitat. Simultaneously familiar and yet offering an alternative vibe, cleanliness and enchantment that sets this biosphere in a sensory light, Natura Maltija sounds at times like Brian Wilson (at its most playfully twinkled and chimed), Cage, Tangerine Dream, Harold Budd and Andrew Heath composing a soundtrack for Jacque Cousteau in the bejewelled clear seas and on the drought-immune planted lands of a Mediterranean oasis. Hopefully it educates as much as it inspires, and immerses the listener, for this is already one of the best albums I’ve heard in 2025.

wjerstean ‘Raspad’
(NEN Records)

You’d be forgiven for the lack of attention paid to the former Armenian majority mountainous Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan and its fight to remain autonomous in the face of conflict. Located in the southern Caucasus, internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan but governed by the Republic of Artsakh for years, and secured by Russia, Nagorno-Karabakh was originally established in 1923 by the Soviet Union.

Subsequent events led to fighting between both Armenia and Azerbaijan, escalated by the regional legislature’s resolution in 1988 to join the Republic of Armenia. Old rivalries and disputes were bought to the surface and violence soon ensued, including ethnic cleansing atrocities. In 1994 Russia secured a ceasefire after six years of conflict.

Fast forward to 2023, and with the Ukraine invasion in full bloody flow, the Middle East at war, an emboldened Azerbaijan (enabled really by Russia) made a lightning offensive move, occupying Nagorno-Karabakh and forcing out roughly half of the two hundred thousand majority population of Armenians – many fleeing to the mother country. Officially dissolved, Azerbaijan has begun a diplomatic process of normalization, despite claims of ethnic cleansing and violence.  

Already suffering, perhaps, the first genocide of the last century, when forcibly marched, starved, massacred and deported from their lands by the Ottoman Empire during WWI, the Armenian people are unfortunately no strangers to trauma. You only need to see the physiological damage, the sunken lament of the subjects in some of Arshile Gorky’s paintings to register that grief and loss. In the aftermath, the Allied Powers recognized Armenia as a sovereign republic yet did nothing to aid it or stop its portioning by both Turkey and Russia.

Armenia would fight again when the Soviet Union collapsed in the late 80s and early 90s, and once more declare independence. And although life hasn’t been easy (see the  anti-government protests of 2018, billed as the Armenian Revolution), Armenia’s adopted market economy has led to improvement and cordial relationships with many of its neighbours, including Georgia, but also the EU and the Arab League.   

Tracing its history as far back as the Iron Age, with the traces of early civilization in the area dating to 4000BC, Armenia has survived various changes yet remained an identifiable independent state: even when gobbled up, strongarmed or forced into other empires and kingdoms. The first (I’m assured) state in the world to adopt Christianity as the national religion, retained now for 1700 years, Armenia’s arcane practices manifest on the debut cassette album from wjerstean, a solo artist living in the country since 2022. The guise of one Lisa Viktorova, this project mystically, harrowingly and esoterically channels the country’s atavistic psychogeography, its pains and peoples’ trauma to say, both obliquely and head on, something about the mental anguish, stresses and fatigue of the modern world. None more so than the millennial despondent Prozac Nation visit to the pharmacy ‘to take away’, a subdued but haunting Oriental-like accompanied indolent drawl of medicated grievances and pains.

Somewhere between darkwave pop, the post-industrial, the bleak awakening hours, the avant-garde, the religious and unearthly the Raspod album features an estranged commentary, yearn, resignation and lucid poetic decry delivered in both a recognisable and more amorphous language of utterances, swoons, wisps, and phonemes (the smallest unit of sound in a language that distinguishes one word from another). Some in English, others in a both a sullen and elusively shrouded and bloodied or fairytale manner, the songs are enveloped in a mysterious dreaminess that draws upon the esoteric, hermetic, apostolic and atavistic. And as an historical bridge for centuries before between the Roman, then Byzantium empires, and the Persian empire and tribes of the Steppes, the alchemy is eclectic in depth with traditional sounds woven into a mood music of dark materials, frayed eerie classicism, shadowed synthesized electronics and hidden sourced mechanisms, rachets, stretches, creaks and tools.

This is a chilling, though on occasion melodically stirring, fusion of Lusine Zakarian, Apokrifina Realnost, Coil, the Gazelle Twin, Psychic TV and Luis Pestana. There’s an almost courtly phantasm cover version too of 4AD goth signing Clan of Xymox’s slighted, spiteful and bloody ‘Creature’ from ’99 that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Leisure FM release.  

Pulled through the mirror backwards into a world of pain and historical/generational trauma, Viktorova both plays on and navigates the harrowing darkness victims old and new, of Armenia’s past and future destination and survival in face of such despairing upheaval and autocratic barbarity. An uncompromising debut of subterranean exhaustion and attuned degrees of experimental weathering, loss and illusion.

Emily Mikesell & Kate Campbell Strauss ‘Give Way’
(Ears & Eyes Records) 24^th January 2025

Naturally drawn together through their shared love for subtlety over displays of jazz virtuosity and indulgence, the New Orleans based duo of trumpeter, composer, arranger and activist Emily Mikesell and saxophonist, composer and educator Kate Campbell Strauss have produced a debut album that very much breathes in the now but harks back to a far more thoughtful, ruminated age of the emotionally charged and tender.

Early mild weathered strolls in the evening, castle shaped clouds, the calm paused reflections captured during the bustle, all are just some of the prompts and feels beautifully and organically articulated on these supple, giving and brassy suffused duets.

With the imbued spirit of Miles Davis and Gil Evans Sketches Of Spain (minus the castanets), Kenny Dorham, Chet Baker, Steve Lacy and Dexter Gordon flowing throughout, this brass double-act serenade, steadily climb and dance to a jazz sound swaddled in the blues, the seasonal classics, the romantic and the sentimental.

The opening number, ‘Cloud Castles’ eases the listener into this erudite and sweetly laced performance with echoes of Lester Young and what can only be described as a meeting of Chico Hamilton and Lalo Schifrin relocating a subdued soundtrack to the docks of New Orleans. It’s always a balance of the familiar and discovered, as the subtleties develop and place the action or emotion in a slightly more intriguing place, one minute drifting into a 60s film score or an episode of Colombo, the next, slowly rising and then relaxing to a sort of reggae-like signature whilst recalling The Godfather soundtrack! (check out ‘Recipe’ and tell me I’m wrong).

Mikesell and Strauss seem to place each reedy sustained and lingering exhale, deep bassy tone and shorter swanned and sharper circles perfectly; neither cutting in nor interrupting each other’s performances. Every note is audible, every feeling felt on an album of timeless quality and relenting ease. Forgiving with moments of happiness but introspection and the blues, Give Way is an exceptional jazz album from a pair of musicians that know their art and craft inside out. And for once, subtlety wins out against extremes, as these six tracks form a complete picture of beautifully emoted perfection.

30 Door Key ‘A Warning To The Curious’
(Subexotic) 31^st January 2025

In a retro knowing Fortean-Ballard-Wiccan-Thelema-Chthonian-cult atmosphere of abundant references the Palermo (oh how I wish to return to one of my favourite cities one day soon) electronic artist Alessio Bosco invokes an oddball, quirky and ominous prowling soundtrack of simultaneous dystopian futurism and past visitations from the spirit world on his new album A Warning To The Curious.

Where to begin in unravelling this vinyl-issued spread. Well, we can start with that title, borrowed from the genius crafter of idiosyncratic English ghost stories M.R. James’ famous tale of an antiquarian and archologist protagonist named Paxton who happens across one of the legendary three crowns of the East Anglia kingdom one day, whilst holidaying in the idyll of Seaburgh – meant, we’re told to be a “thinly disguised” version of Aldeburgh in Suffolk. Unfortunately for Paxton his curiosity gets the better of him, as in retrieving this trophy from the psychogeographic soil of a realm destined to one day be brought back into being as a sole defence against invasion, he invokes the crown’s supernatural guardian, who then precedes to hound and stalk him to a “woeful” death.

The nom de plume of 30 Door Key is a reference, I believe, to the film adaptation of Witold Gumbrowicz’s 1937 book Ferdydurke, put onto screen by the Polish film director Jerzy Skolimowski in 1991. In short, this cult story and film’s young protagonist faces a conflict between acting his age at the onset of WWII in his Warsaw home, or of regressing and relapsing back into childhood as an escape.

Both references are entwinned and bolstered by a whole list from the artist himself, who name checks an exhaustible roll call of literary, musical and filmic inspirations: some obvious, others, a bit of a surprise. And so, you can expect to anything from Broadcast and Belbury Poly to Sidney Sager, from a removed version of Kraftwerk to Harmonia and early Human League. Cult library music is woven into evocations of Boards of Canada, John Carpenter, Vangelis, Richard H. Kirk, Adolf Wertemann, Andre Tschaskowski, Gene Moore, Andy Votel, Caravan of Anti-Matter, Trans Am and Thomas Dinger across nineteen varied tracks of science fiction and fact, kosmische technological wonder, children’s 80s fantasy soundtracks, Italian horror scores, paranormal activities, spells and dreams states.

Being an enthusiast, historically and culturally, of Bosco’s Sicilian home, I was drawn immediately to the title inclusion of the stunning coastal perched Norman cathedral town of Cefalù – about an hour’s train ride east of Palermo on the island’s northern coastline. The “Lucifer of Cefalù” is, I’m pretty sure, a reference to occultist icon Aleister Crowley’s who set up a Thelema temple in one of the town’s lesser, more inconspicuous villas with his “scarlet woman” acolyte Leah Hirsig. Long after its demise and return to shambling unkempt beacon for generations of occultist fiends, groupies and the like, Kenneth Anger uncovered several of its dusty covered murals, which he filmed to make up his infamous, now lost, Thelema Abbey film in the mid 1950s. If walls could talk – so Anger hoped -, the exploits within this modest pile have inspired numerous anecdotes, literary scenarios and scandal. Musically in the now, this inspiration is given an odd Stereolab-like acidy bounce and blip score that’s more library music sci-fi than Sodom and Gomorrah (or as in the case of Crowley and his disciples, more like sodemy and gonorrhoea) and Satanic invocations.

With the Fortean transmitter channelling everything from Hitchcock, Ken Russell phantasm and The Legacy to the music of the Amicus and Tigon film studios, pastoral hallucinations and veiled break beats, Boscoe summons up a BBC workshop of quirky magik, Lovecraftian atavistic shadows, suspense and whispered apparitional calls and dialogue from the supernatural archives. If you dug last year’s Night Blooming Flowers album collaboration between Drew Mulhollandand Garden Gate on the same label, then you will lap this curio up, which comes out on suitably ghoulish transparent green vinyl (of course!).  

Trinka ‘S-T EP’
(Agogo Records) 24^th January 2025

The debut six-track EP from the newly coalesced trio of Brazilian singer and synthesist Dandara Modesto, Portuguese writer, producer and guitarist João Pires and Brazilian percussionist Juninho Ibituruna is a beautifully soulful mirage of Lusophone language and cultural Afro-Brazilian influences: a dream-realism, sometimes lilted plead from a both familiar and contemporary transformed Latin-America.

Under the Trinka banner, well-versed and experienced through several projects over the years, the trio saunter and march (in the most forgiving, lucid of ways) to a different drum beat and atmosphere, as they channel the magically beautiful and trilling like a songbird-of-paradise vocalist Modesto’s Candomblé practice with a flowing and sometimes shuffled collage of recognisable elements from Brazil’s rich musical heritage. Candomblé for the uninitiated, harks back to the 19^th century religion that developed in Brazil from the enslaved masses that were transported from West and Central Africa. On foreign soil the gods of the Yoruba, Bantu and Gbe come up against Roman Catholicism in a hybrid worship that venerates a whole host of “orixas” “inkice” and “vodun” spirits that serve a single all-powerful entity. The name of this religion translates as “dance in honour of the gods” and comes with its very own fusion of sounds and rhythms; and counts as just one aspect of this inaugural union of attentive, sentimental and spiritually giving souls

In this age, this landscape, Briela Oieda, Raz Olsher and Gabriele Viegas commune with Maria Toleda, LA LOM and the post-bossa triumvirate of Nana Vasconcelos, Mauricio Maestro and Joyce Moreno in a captivating dream of reimagined Afrocubism, Fado, Latin-jazz, folk and subtle synthesized effects.

Raising an emotionally diaphanous glass to yearning sentiments of spiritual recovery and healing, or in a dance through the exotic lush forests of Brazil, the trio are aided by a host of friends and like-minded artists, with Bianca Godoy, Jazzanova’s Stefan Merse Ulrich and Paul Kleber all pitching in throughout to further expand this lyrical, magical and stirring musical palette.

Soulful music for a world on the precipice of hate-filled autocratic destruction, the Trinka EP is a delightful and forgiving ray of beautified Lusophonic longing and movement. The future looks pretty promising for this trio; the sound exquisitely hankering for describing a loss of magic and spiritualism that can’t be ignored.

Memory Scale ‘Chapter Five’
(Audiobulb Records) 18^th January 2024

A sensory appeal of time, place, geometry and the spherical orbits of the cosmos permeate this latest sophisticated offering from the Bordeaux residing artist Memory Scale, otherwise known as the guise of one Arnaud Castagné. Measured complexities are suffused with a rich and subtle palette of IDM, Kosmische, electronic and most notably ambient inspirations; channelling at any one-time echoes of Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream, Boards of Canada, Eno, Seefeel, Speedy J, Ash Ra, Jarre and Peter Michael Hamel as the synthesized merges seamlessly with elements of effected guitar and the stained glass lit sounds of an organ and the lightened bulb noted Rhodes.

But even within that scope of influences, I can hear something approaching a more sedate paced track “#7” from the Aphex Twins’ Ambient Works Vol.2 on the windy synth breathing and atmospheric lead-in ‘Causes & Effects’, the kind of synth bass you’d hear on an 80s cult samurai soundtrack and the supernatural retro feels of Kyle Dixon & Michael Stein on the crisp crackled surface sounded and deep ‘A Late Reading’, and a both playful atom spirograph and roulette wheeled movement of 90s Warp roster mavericks on the obscured transmission ‘Epicycloid’. Altogether a quality of depth, feelings and softly prompted suggestions of various attuned and attentive musical instruments, of ruminating thought processes, and the historical instruments that measured celestial bodies of our universe.  

From the crystalized to the translucent the fantastical and moody, many bases are covered on a work that would suit a soundtrack of recalled and oblique memories.  

As that title denotes, this is the fifth album, and third for the unassuming Audiobulb Records label, and it’s a classy, cerebral but emotionally drawn experience that borders on the filmic, the magical, more reflective and near haunted. A truly immersive experience.

ZD Grafters ‘Three Little Birds’
Digitally released last November/Vinyl arriving sometime this February 2025

The decaying edifice of dead birds found in the hearth is transmogrified into a distortion of death, pestilence, mortality and contorted, hurtled and unwieldly post-punk-no-wave-freeform-jazz-skonk-doom-metal by the ZD Grafters trio on their most recent album. Released at the tail end of 2024, it just missed out on my last Perusal (December) column. And so, I’m making up for it now by including it in my inaugural Perusal roundup of 2025, but also because a vinyl version is set to be released in February – which you can pre-order now on the featured Bandcamp page.

The family unit of busy drummer Zac and fuzz-filtered throbbing growly bassist Dave Kavanagh are joined in this chthonian, morbid curio enactment of stresses, sickness and dark meta(l) by skeletal bird contorted invoked saxophonist Riddel Thomas, who seems to be channelling some blurted and heralding, death rattling hybrid of Mats Gustafsson, Marshall Allen, Larry Ochs and Gunter Hampel across a miasma of both menace, dirtiness and soot. And yet, whilst that trebly growled, throbbed and lo fi filtered bass – sounding like its being played in another room or even in mono, or just heard through the studio headphones – and bashed, smashed, splashing and in constant movement drums express dark energy, stirrings of the ungodly, and evoke the Black Horse of the Apocalypse, the trio basically sound like they had fun stoking the engines of doom.

I can’t improve on the Kavanagh’s self-coined “parole jazz” label – there’s a real sinister, prowling stalking vibe of expelled no-good forces at work that is perfectly summed up by it -, but can offer some markers: imagine Andy Haas duelling with Glenn Branca in an avian graveyard, or, Melt Yourself Down lashing out at Laddio Bolocko, or even, Last Exit joining up with Death From Above 1979 and Zu to dissect, poke at and read the bones of those crows trapped and rotting away in the Kavanagh family fireside.

Heavy in the best possible way, Three Little Birds is a wailing and physically demanding riotous and freeform expulsion of primordial dark, confrontational and bugled no-jazz that evokes a world of its own making.  

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