Monolith Cocktail Blog

Dominic Valvona’s Eclectic Reviews Roundup (Unless stated otherwise, all releases are available to buy now).

The Holy Family ‘Go Zero’
(Rocket Recordings) 21^st July 2023

A convergence of the chthonian, Fortean, symbolist, magical and Biblical under the murky multilayered literary canopy of Brian Catling’s atavistic Vorrh forest, the newest work of hermetic density from The Holy Family feeds on the late creative polymath’s epic surreal-fantasy and on the “hypothetical” time repression theory of the group’s founding member, David Jason Smith.

The album title, Go Zero, was coined as a mantra; an incantation and leitmotif for Smith’s philosophical propound idea that “we are [all] continually moving forward into our past until we arrive at our birth-creation – the Tree Of Knowledge…or “Going Zero””. This idea is writ large across a monolithic three-part suite dedication. Although unmistakably part of the same dark materials, the family set in motion a different kind of supernatural manifestation and afflatus alchemy with this mini opus. It begins with tribal, tubular-paddled beats and vaporous voices before building into the helter-skelter of the double drumming (Smith in unison with the newest recruit Joe Lazarus, who takes on more of the rhythm and lumbered drumming duties – Smith handing over to concentrate on vocals and synth) centrepiece, ‘Part II’. Locked-in to an intense behemoth, Tago Mago period Can are thrown into a brilliant psychedelic-prog-free-jazz-post-punk hadron collider of The Sunns, Black Angels, Rema-Rema, Atomic Rooster, Hawkwind and whomping post-Bitches Brew Miles Davis. The grinded bass line reminds me of Liquid Liquid and Killing Joke. The final part ends on a oscillating, airy bed of more peaceable, dreamy and starry occult yearning and sighing; a misty conclusion of a kind to that return-to-the-Kabbalah-like-birth theorem.

The first half, or five tracks, of the album feature at least two pieces based on characters (recognized by those who’ve managed to unravel the heavy symbolist, surreal and often almost impenetrable prose of the author) from the late British author and artist Brian Catling’s The Vorrh trilogy. Evangelized by the equally heralded Alan Moore as “a Phosphorescent masterpiece”, and the first great literary work of its kind in the 21^st century (the magik imbued comic book titan turn novelist it must be stated, did write the forward for that same series), the alternative, colonialist, time-travelled series of books mixes facts and fiction, both real and imaginary people in a fantastical phantom world built around a sentient African forest, older than mankind and said to hold all knowledge. The forest is inspired itself by Raymond Roussel’s Impressions Of Africa, and that French writer makes an appearance as part of an expansive cast. The main protagonists include a hunter and his Cyclops sidekick, who attempt to penetrate (in every sense of that word and its various connotations) the off-limits dense magical forest.

Just as Catling saw no demarcated boundaries, lines in his writing and artistic practices, The Vorrh trilogy reflects an amorphous breakdown of barriers, liberties, language, prose and storytelling. Personally I’ve never read it: any of it. But the Family coven has used the voyeuristic sounding Watcher and creepy Chalky’s Eyes references. The former, a stained glass window light permitted and anointed pause in the doom-laden eeriness, the latter, a bad juju swirled apparitional voiced and jangled cart driven journey under occult pastoral skies.

Away from those inspirations, ‘Crawling Out’ summons forth the spirit world from a throb of Swans, John Carpenter and Mandy scoring Jóhann Jóhannsson evocations: it must be said that David’s voice is in ghostly form once more, mysterious and wispy and anything but “holy”. The track that follows, ‘Bad Travelling’, is more like a Satanic Royal Trux sharing the Ouija board with early Gary Numan and White Ring. ‘Hell Born Babel’, as the title makes quite clear, turns up the daemonic factor by ten. A Biblical scowl and squall of heavy meta(l) rock drums, doom and dark prog influences acts with evil intentions. Destruction, the toppling of totems, is unleashed in a cathexis pain of noise and chaos. 

A phantasmagoria of occult manifestations, conjured or drawn from out the old soil, from out of the ether, The Holy Family’s Go Zero album offers darkness with glimmers of light. The Holy of their name, taken from the controversial Angela Carter narrated documentary on Christ’s depiction in the Western art cannon, not so forgiving and Christian, but an open vassal for confronting and exploring the divine and ungodly. Guidance there is none, as the band unnerve, rush, grind or prowl across a mystical dreaded mind fuck of a world that mirrors our own mortal chaotic, ungovernable hell hole. In short, it’s a great dense trip with dramatic voodoo and accelerated velocity.

Various ‘Coco María Presents Club Coco ¡AHORA! The Latin Sound Of Now’
(Bongo Joe)

Sauntering into the summer with a second volume showcase of Latin flavours, the international DJ, crate digger, radio and soon-to-be online TV show host Coco María curates a lively, sometimes daft, party playlist of contemporary artists and groups transforming the sounds of Central And South America. Whilst the inaugural compilation – triggered in part by the Mexican-born worldly traveller’s burgeoning, if “discreet”, online radio show for Berlin’s Cashmere Radio and later, her takeover of Worldwide FM’s breakfast show, renamed the Breakfast Coco Club – honed in on the highly popular, and far-reaching, sounds of the versatile Cumbia and other such Latin-American styles, the second installment is framed as an alternative take on those original forms by a new generation.

Through innovation, transmogrification in some cases, and on occasion with eccentric playfulness, everyone on this compilation is taking those yesteryear inspirations forward, or on a wonky trajectory. However, that Latin sound, rhythm and infectious call to sway, swing and even hula, remains unmistakable.

With a truly international cast, our host María has found acts and individuals both scattered across Colombia, Peru and Venezuela and in Europe, as she facilitates the “Latin Sound Of Now”. As if to illustrate that music’s reach, and a unique take, the compilation begins with a swimmingly, dreamy spell of John Baker and Martin Denny-like near Polynesian vibes from the Israeli producer Raz Olsher, who evokes a mirage of Cumbia and gently scrapped and tinkled percussion in the waiting hours, on ‘Pacific Dreams’. This is bookended with Olsher’s light dance of Afro-Latin instruments (sounds like a Balafon, but I could be wrong) ‘Vamonos Cocos’.

After setting the scene, in the hours between the band setting up, relaxing with a beer at the bar, the tempos accelerated with the arrival of Colombia’s excitable proxy supergroup Los Pirañas. Well versed players from the Meridian Brothers, Chúpame el Dedo, Frente Cumbiero and Ondatropica Romperya fraternity congregate under the Bogota retro-futurist flag to unleash a signature warbled and fun, shaken and pots and pans rattled conga that evokes the Day of the Dead, the carnival, mambo and Joe Meek on that trio’s lively ‘Puerta del Sol’ kitsch quiver.

María, not content with a long list of creative outlets, can be heard singing on the next featured tune, ‘Sacudete’, by the Rotterdam-based of Venezuelan distraction combo Lola’s Dice. With a swirl of wispy allurement, María entices the listener to enter the hypnotic, trippy world of spooky synths and hazy sumptuous mystery.

Moving southwest of the Netherlands and into France, The Guess What duo have a personal connection to the selector; having encouraged and helped María to move from “tunesmith” to DJ. In kind, they get to share two doses of eccentric tomfoolery and knowing cult shenanigans. ‘Children’s Favourite’, as the title suggests, is a quirky squelch and warbled acid twist of Cumbia set to the background of kids playing in the background, and ‘Stickle Brick’ is a modular-sounding zap of breaks, Space, early Jan Hammer, Bernard Estardy and Ray Cathode, sunning it on the South American Pacific coastline.  

One name that immediately leaps out at you, from the running order, is that of the notable Acid Coco siblings of Paulo and Andrea Olarte Toro, who have been electrifying and fusing Colombian music for more than two decades. Bridging eras and legacies, their Latintronica blueprint can be heard next to the holiday fun vibes, modern R&B and finger dancing synth pads on the swaying ‘Seguimos Sonriendo’. 

But discoveries for me include the flange and chorus effects guitar accompanied, soulful, dream pop mixed with Iberian longing ‘Las Mijas’ by the Ronca duo, and Iko Chérie’s muffled and gauzy Pacific Island paradise of Finis Africae and Jon Hassell-esque vapours ‘Lepidopetra’. The latter, under the alter ego of the multifaceted French artist Marie Merlot, filters the Latin essence and a sort of Casio Bossa preset with surrealist and diaphanous veils of exotica. The former, I could imagine being performed with both accentuate plaint and vigor on stools by the duo, who seem to have conjured up a lovely piece of pop and neo-soul.

Another notable pick from the track list is that of the “mysterious” Peruvian producer known as Dip In The Dub. A keen listener we’re told of María’s show, this anonymous maverick without a single release to their name, reached out. And now, they’ve managed to appear on the Coco party line, putting forward an Arabian airways vision of the Cumbia sound with ‘La Cumbia Del Sufi Que No Sabía Bailer’. Tuareg rock is merged effortlessly with the Acid Arab, Omar Souleyman, the mizzle of North African Sufism and the sounds of Afro-Brazil and Colombia to create a real global fusion.

However, María digs out a popular set finisher from the 80s to more or less close on, pulling out Ronald Snijder’s 1985 hit ‘Off The Groove’. Hailing from the smallest sovereign state in all of South America, the former Dutch colony of Suriname, Snijder, and his trademark excitable flute skills, mixes his heritage with a melting pot of funk and disco on a smooth 12” groove of 80s tropical flavourings. Prince, Trouble Funk, Sly & Robbie and Stevie Wonder roll into one chuffed and rasped fluted boogie of slick and relaxed Latin-light perfection.

Coco María’s tastes prove inviting and also fun throughout this changeable saunter of transformations and hotfooted dance floor allurements. Within what is arguably a blurred definition of the genre, both regular followers and new listeners alike will find a scintillating array of artists and acolytes carrying the torch for an infectious groove into the 21^st century and beyond. The Latin Sound Of Now is an encouraging expansion of María’s original compilation, a spotlight on the developments of a scene full of new discoveries. Horizons will be opened.   

African Head Charge ‘A Trip To Bolgatanga’
(On-U Sound)

Dub-centric rhythm providers African Head Charge enter the sonic fray once more after a twelve-year hiatus. The four-decade spanning project, once arguably a driving force behind such eclectic, electric Jamaican and African peregrinations, is back with a simultaneously familiar yet evolving sound that’s inspired and imbued by the project’s co-founder steward Bonjo Tyabinghi and his Ghanaian oasis home for all those years, Bolgatanga.

Lying in the Red Volta River Valley in the east of the country, this melting pot of Ghanaian communities is an ideal junction of sounds; mostly the individual and almost unique in variation talking and rhythmic drums of the West African tribes that migrated to this southern terminus point on the ancient Trans-Saharan trade route. Initially bringing his Rasta Jamaican heritage to this basement conceived experiment – originally, alongside On-U Sound label instigator and foil Adrian Sherwood, recording in the basement of a studio in London’s China Town during the “dead” unwanted and cheap hours -, Bonjo now plugs into the creatively happy surroundings of his family-orientated Ghana home.

Adding to the herbalist dub, reggae, raga, electronica, bass culture ingredients there’s spells of kolo lute and exuberant “mah” and “bah” earthy vocal expressions: courtesy of the Ghanaian klaxon-sounding King Ayisoba. On his own records the King performs a guttural and howled vision of hiplife; a Ghanaian style of music that mixes rap and electric beats with more traditional rhythms. You can hear his scratchy, bandy two-string lute elastics and bawls on the album’s Lee Scratch Perry-esque, wah-wah phaser(ed) and excitable opening ‘A Bad Attitude’. The wise and consolable mantra of which is to take time to mend a negative, quarrelsome mindset: “A Bad attitude is like a flat tyre/You can’t go anywhere until you change it.” The self-anointed royal is back on the fluty-whistled, Upsetters-esque (ala Super Ape), light-footed, bounced hand-drumming ‘Never Regret A Day’; a call that’s as boastful sounding as it is vocal in “seizing the day”.

Ayisoba is not the only guest on this African-infused journey. On an album of abundant drumming, AHC stalwart Perry Melius makes a welcome return to the field (his drummer contributor stretching right back to the 90s), and a turn or two from the Ghetto Priest. On both drowsy fanfares and yearn wafted serenade (think Orlando Julius) horn duties, Paul Booth, Richard Roswell and David Fullwood add to the general languid, trippy mood. On the soft-gauzy, Adamski boards Banca di Gaia’s world trance express, ‘Accra Electronica’, it sounds like the reeds ensemble have picked up a clarinet or oboe, whilst a cornet trumpet nestles a suitable laidback line. But it’s blowpipes and snake-charmer oboe on the following jungle exotic soundscape, ‘Push Me Pull You’.  

Actually there’s far too many guests, players to list, but in the mix there’s strings, organ and a wealth of percussion being remolded, warped and ricocheted by Sherwood; an effects menagerie of wildlife, Augustus Pablo, Ammar 808, Future Sound of London, Jah Wobble, Transglobal Underground cosmic and reverberating dub from the On-U Sound founder and AHC co-conspirator. A twelve-year break without diminishing the vibrancy, AHC’s trip to Bolgatanga and Ghana has been rewarding and sonically expanding: An exploration with righteous cause that cements the project’s legacy.

Mokoomba ‘Tusona – Tracings In The Sand’
(Outhere)

It’s taken a while, what with an exhaustive tour schedule and the pandemic that engulfed and shut down the entire globe (near enough), but the Zimbabwe group Mokoomba have followed up on their 2017 album Luyando with another warm blast of sincere heartfelt celebration and disarming grief.

As a bridge to that previous album they’ve included a trio of reworked, or “remix”, versions of Luyando songs as part of the Tusona songbook. The “personal lament”, felt even back then, at leaving their inspired Victoria Falls and Zambezi River home to go on tour ‘Kulindiswe’ was originally acoustic, but is now given an uplift of hand drums, clip-clop gallop percussion, cheery horns, a smoothly upturned bass accompaniment and an Afro-jazz like kick. Meanwhile the original hunting song ‘Njawane’ has been completely rerecorded, sounding rock-like and bluesy to start with, before taking on a more commercial Zimbabwe pop sound. Both tracks, as well as the bobbled and balafon sounded Mukanda initiation (a bush camp for boys from the Luvale and Chokwe cultures to learn their heritage whilst transitioning into adulthood) and Makishi masquerade inspired ‘Kumukando’, feel totally congruous, in keeping with this new album’s overall direction and sound.

Whilst Luyando cemented the group’s ethnicity, their story, hopes and fears, Tusona emerges from the fallout of the Covid pandemic with personal songs of loss, love and the anguish, anxieties and sadness at being away from home. The music continues to draw from a fusion of traditional styles, soukous, salsa, township rock, soul and more contemporary street dance movements; at any one time evoking the music of Adewale Ayuba, Andy Brown & The Storm, Oliver Mtukudzi, Masekela and The Green Arrows.

There’s now an additional brilliance of bright softened rising and heralding Highlife horns too, courtesy of the Ghana octet Santrofi, plus experiments with plaint-delivered aching commercialized R&B, dance music and what sounds like emotionally weeping harp. Almost verging on Euro-dance music of the heartbreaking ballad kind, ‘Marina’ features the pained, suffering voice of the Zimbabwe House music artist Ulethu. Too saccharine for me, and the sentiments are indeed worthy (the pandemic likened to a flood, a pestilence unleashed on the world), but its probably the weakest song on the entire album.

Recent singles ‘Makisi’ and ‘Nzara Hapana’ are by contrast two of the album’s brightest and infectious tunes. The former, a “huge feast” ceremony and masked dance that brings together the entire Luvale community is unmistakably South African (Masekela and upbeat Township buzz), but also transports me to South America with its relaxed salsa rhythms and Cuba style piano. Despite the context – a man writes a letter of loving reassurance to his wife, letting her know that he will always provide, going as far as to write a will so she is taken care of -, the second of those singles is a soft-blessed romantic and busy signature of Highlife and South African influences.

Solar-rock fanfares to abundant harvests, extracts of Ladysmith Black Mambazo-like soothed harmonies and harp-tinged electronic undercurrents that plaintively build a picture of eulogy, Tusona is an album of equal grief as it is paean and homage: homage to the band’s Tonga and Luvale roots and the rituals, gatherings, initiations and practices that made them. But then, with a host of guests from both inside and outside Zimbabwe in tow, this is also an album that embraces a wide range of traditions, voices and sounds from the African continent. Their gift however is that they can turn hardship, the continuing crisis of Mugabe’s ruinous reign, and songs of loss into those of perseverance with an infectious horn glazed production that blazes brightly.

Celestial North ‘Otherworld’

Whilst focusing on the here and now, the diaphanous Scottish-born artist Celestial North channels an imaginative past of atavistic harmony and balance. As she wanders through the veils and mists of menhir and sacred stone marked landscapes on a mission to enchant, the wispy ethereal voiced siren offers disarming songs of empowerment, pagan alternative lifestyles and solutions to the “modern apocalypse” we call living in the 21^st century: a time of high anxiety, detachment, divisiveness and catastrophe.

Already coined by the artist as “pagan euphoria”, North seems to regress through past lives to an age before the Hellenic, and later on, Christian civilizations had taken hold over the old Britons and forbearers in the Celtic North and West. It’s as if the Bronze Age is suddenly sent hurtling in to the modern world.

Although, as I’ve already written about the graceful magic and dreaminess of the ambrosian homoeopathically, idyllic retreat imbued ‘Yarrow’, you can well imagine this Edinburgh fairy of folktronica and Gaelic wafted dreampop walking straight out of a Pre-Raphaelite diorama; or, inhabiting the same space as the Bloomsbury Group: bohemian in one sense, and child of nature in the other.

Relocating in recent years to the equally rural ideal of Cumbria, and the town of Kendal, the drifting spirit has befriended that county’s Sea Power natives; with the band’s “Woody” named as the producer of this Otherworld vision. There’s just a very mild influence of that band’s sound to be found on this album however; the building bassline and incipient stirrings on the half-narrated, poetic nature cosmology ‘Are You Free’, which has the Sea Power sense of mild anthemic epiphany. As a statement that outdoor theatre of “gypsy” freedoms and a celestial-lit wilderness – in which a camp side tent is turned into the temenos to a woodland temple -, is a beautifully conveyed paean to North’s upbringing and wholesale embrace of nature’s ways.    

Within the alchemy of ages, the wispy, and even often just an essence of cooed, lofted apparitional and seraph vocals, you can hear stirrings of Clannad alongside forward driven tribal ritualistic drums and dance beats: some Euro-dance, others closer to techno. This often sounds like a merger of Dolores O’ Riordan, Circe, Grimes, Rules and Kate Bush. Sharing bloodlines with one-time conquest invaders, The Vikings, the riled titans rousing ‘Olympic Skies’ reminded me of Lykke Lei. Whilst the almost Macbethian, hermetic ‘The Stitch’ reminded me of the Monolith Cocktail’s very own collaborator and artist, the Icelandic-Canadian Gillian Stone. You can hear some of that Scandi-synth influence on the atmospheric, legato piano spell ‘When The God’s Dance’. 

Surprisingly, although musically and performance wise quite at one with the album’s sound, there’s a cover of R.E.M.’s beautifully yearned ‘Nightswimming’. Originally appearing on a God Is In The TV (of which I’m a former alumnus) charity album last year, North’s take maintains much of the feels, sentiment, but offers a bewitching chamber-pop vision of a pagan Chromatics, and a plonk of the classical as a soft splash of cymbals crash and roll away.

Deeply felt, a reaction to the unstoppable progress of an encroachment of forces beyond any of our control, and the endless vacuous nature of an on-screen life spent craving constant validation, Celestial North finds sanctuary in the “otherworld” of her creation. Rousing messages of comfort sit with lightly administered reinforced messages against the god-like veneration of those undeserving of such praise and status. I’m sure there’s metaphors, analogies abound, a yearn for acceptance and a righteous crusade, but the translucent swept and cooed voice makes it all seem so vaporously misty and sweetly light. Who could forgive North for escaping the miasma and suffocation for dream worlds and pagan, Wiccan and old ideals: even if they never existed. An enriching and confidently striding album debut that will, or should, propel her into the spotlight.  

Jonny Wickham ‘Terra Bora’
(Fresh Sound Records)

Like most of us forced to readapt during the Covid lockdowns, the London-based composer and bassist Jonny Wickham turned to the Japanese world view of ‘wabi-sabi’, refocusing his efforts on a Afro-Brazilian inspired and imbued project as a creative outlet in a time of uncertainty.

That Japanese form, way of thinking is an artistic sensitivity as much as ephemeral feeling of beauty that celebrates the passage of time and its sublime damages. As the author Taro Gold puts it: “Nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect”. And so just accept and embrace it.

With that acceptance, a sense of “balance and intent” is found and a framework, a process by which Wickham can create with unburdened joy and playfulness. His debut album as bandleader is indeed a floated and lucid Afro-Latin fusion of South American rhythms that both melt and shimmer like mirages, or, work up a sweat to the rattled sounds of Samba and carnival repinique and tamborim drums.

With a CV that includes appearances with Caravela, Waaju, Samba Azul, The London Jazz Orchestra and Juanita Euka, Wickham speaks a polyglot musical language. And on Terra Bora, which translates as “good earth” (the name also of a fine Portuguese wine), a merger of Latin-jazz, Afro-Brazilian, Tropicália, neo-soul and blues music effortlessly flows together. It’s as if Quarteto Nova Bossa, Bei Mir Bist Du Shön Ramset Lewis, Cal Tjader, Teotima and Gilberto Gil were altogether in one studio; sauntering and in procession, absorbing all Rio’s delights, or languidly following the curved snaking roads that cling to the impressive valley heights above the city.

Drawing on a wealth of rhythms, patterns and dance forms, and with an impressive ensemble of musicians (from Waaju band mate Ben Brown on the drum kit to Jeremy Shaverin on an array of Brazilian percussive instruments, including the “reappropriated” frying pan frigideira and carnival drums), Wickham lays down a set of the shaking, reflective, mused and more loose. Recent single, ‘Space And Time’, is a fine example of this craft and the ease in which multiple styles come together for a harmonious hybrid. Perhaps one of the most modern-sounding tunes on the album, the cosmic-luminous ‘Space And Time’ uses a mix of African-originated dances used in both the Capoeira martial art and the Candomblé religion: the former, Maculelê, is performed in a circle (called a “roda”) using sticks or machetes, the latter, Ijexa and Maracato rhythms, are used in the ceremonies, processions of a religion that fuses the worship of African spirits and gods with the saints of Catholicism. Those lively traditions are then augmented with Stevie Wonder 70s clavichord, the spiritual and the contemporary relaxed feel of On The Corner records and neo-soul/R&B. The last of those styles especially when the relaxed contour floating voice of Irinin Arabatzi lightly levitates over the music; the multilingual international singer sounding like both Erykah Badu and Céu orbiting the Sun-Ra cosmos.

Arabatzi’s Greek heritage, stays in Brussels and eventual move to London give’s her voice a distinct lilt and range; positively meandering through the sun-ray-burnished and bleached pastel twists and turns of the Brazilian backdrop to poetic memories, ‘Mono No Aware’; and bluesy on the “nostalgic” serenaded and swooned jazzy cabaret, resigned forgiving love affair, ‘Neon Muse’. But that voice is almost perky and soaring, in a sort of jazzy doo-wop 60s way, on the Sunny King Adé meets soul revue Latin themed ‘Millennium Seagull’.

It sounds like that Japanese philosophy paid off, as Terra Bora is an exceptional fusion of cultures that gel together to create a special, intimate and loose, languorous vision, expansion of the Afro-Brazilian sound – a movement that is itself an amalgamation of abundant African and native South American music, ceremony, dances, religion and even martial arts. Jonny Wickham has a masterful, but subtle and light touch as bandleader on bass and a number of shaking, rattling and scrapped instruments. Each track is a dance of the romantic, the unrequited and descriptive that sets an imaginable Latin-American scene, perfect for the summer months ahead. Latin-jazz has seldom sounded so fresh and lucid. 

Ziúr ‘Eyeroll’
(Hakuna Kulala) 28^th July 2023

The experimental producer/musician Ziúr whips and pummels a cast of interdisciplinary collaborators into a vociferating, mewling and energetic release of pent-up rage, anxieties and stresses on the new caustic-abrasive album, Eyeroll. 

Out the other side of one pandemic and into the unfolding gloom of a cost-of-living crisis and war in Europe, the omens remain pretty bleak. In such dystopian times who better to have in your orbit than one half of the transmogrifying, compressed and distorting industrial-scarred noise makers Emptyset, the artist/musician/composer James Ginzburg. The corrosive, warped serial techno elements (just one part of the album’s make up) do actually remind me of Ginzburg and his foil Paul Paurgas’ force-field of dread: that and the industrial psychodramas and eeriness of Petrolio. Those futuristic-nihilist traits can be found with the dark sustained drones he provides on the tellingly entitled, ‘If The City Burns I Will Not Run’; a future shock from projected ruins that also features the recurring Middle East And North African-imbued “expressionist”, “chanter” (among other such attributes, an actor and composer too) Abdullah Miniawy, who’s unrelenting Arabic commentary is gradually distorted into the alien and demonic. Ginzburg also strikes a hallucinating lamentable freedom chord or two on the piano, for the other Miniawy-voiced, oil drum bounding, Middle Eastern toned ‘Malikan’.

The Egyptian creative polymath also plays the trumpet on both this unhinged exuberance of distress and tribal strung-out jazz and other tracks. It’s a reedy raspberry turn sour coarse drift and touch of Irreversible Entanglements on the former, but a rasped mizzle on the Iceboy Violet exasperated turn ‘Move On’, and blown in cycles like sirocco winds, bleated and screeched on the deranged ‘Nontrivial Differential’. The middle track of that trio invites the Manchester leftfield hip-hop inspired artist Iceboy to uncomfortably meander with disarming mental fatigue over a semi-Walter Smetek and Lamplighter squeezed cables production by Ziúr. The other is one of three tracks to feature the Welsh experimental noise artist Elvin Brandhi, who’s improvisational lyrics are often delivered in piques of hysterics and yelps, or, stretched out like a throaty human guiro.

Over cracked vodou histrionics, serial ethno drums and bashes of the Putan Club, Einstürzende Neubauten and Fofoulah, Brandhi stubs out a health warning pack of “shitty cigarettes” in a wail and flaying peppered manner of Poly Styrene and Nwando Ebizie. The mantra is that “patience is gold”, on another Brandhi spotlight, ‘Cut Cut Quote’; a winding, often violently yelled chaos of wrecked Afro-Haitian and scaffold beats.

That just leaves the interdisciplinary of interdisciplinary artists, Juliana Huxtable (writer, performer, DJ, Shock Value club instigator and model) who, “unburdened by the microscopic”, adds a dripping seduction of outsider poetics to an undulated lamented chant and buzz. Against a soundboard of Tricky, Rema-Rema, Cities Aviv, Rip Rig & Panic and Dog Faced Hermans there’s the odd (in a good way) left-of-even-leftfield turns like the bendy pedal steel mirage ‘Lacrymaturity’. Echoes of Charlie Megira melt into the trippy fabric of this harmonic-twanged cosmic cowboy finale. Ziúr’s sonic language overall is ambitious in dredging the debris of our ruinous mentally-fucked landscape; reconstructing from the carnage a more inclusive, impassioned if drilled and scratched queer vision of primal-industrial-tribal-techno-funneled and boundless malaise. Very exciting if dark and morose in places, Eyeroll is an incredible listening experience filled with energetic, but also dreaded rhythms, soundscapes and actionist provocation that takes techno music in new directions.   

Fat Frances ‘Oyster’

Disillusioned despondency and a touch of the roguish are filtered through softened hues of idiosyncratic lo fi beauty, as Fat Frances’ hardened, worn-down posterior reveals a heart-wrenching drip-drip pouring of poetic insecurity, dealt and languorous resignation.

Yet despite the wretchedness of the world, the austerity and the lawlessness and directionless malaise of our times, there’s a melodious magic to be found in this rough diamond’s (excuse the cliché) Northern lament. It’s as if Frances has somehow brought an air of Bonnie & Clyde folklore, or an enervated and far less violent Badlands to a West Yorkshire pastoral landscape. The curtain call, ‘Some Kid’, is a sentimental but rebellious tale of escape that’s accompanied by just an echoed, ballad-troubadour lush piano. Romantic allusions, that age old trope of running away with your partner in crime, disarmingly lets on to those roughish qualities I mentioned; a diamond ring, we can only guess, taken involuntary from the “some kid” of the title.

Frances hometown of Todmorden is twinned with the Appalachians in one way, but then distilled with mirage gauzes of Syd Barrett in another. He sounds positively Dylan-esque with a hint of Edward Penfold and Mike Gale on the tender, renewed yet broken and dour ‘Everything’: “Sometimes, days are just for getting through”.

An “oyster” emerges from the grit on the wistful Verve meets Steve Mason short, but an unassuming anthem in it’s own right, ‘No Consequences’; a moving if pissed-off and despondent call to live without “fault”, “forgiveness”. This is reprised on the Billy Bragg-like electric guitar spiked and buzzy ‘No Allegiance’; a bendy tremolo of Charlie Mergira turns into an anti-authoritarian folk tune of the wounded and anarchistic. And yet, again, it’s another sad declaration of the worn-down.

I hate to even mention him, but there is a slight hint of Jake Bugg; albeit the music is far more lush, melodic and interesting; less parochial even if the dialect and language is unmistakably Yorkshire in providence. Mind you, there’s some real surprises musically; a dreamy mirage of epic45 on the nature trail and parish reverent ‘The Worm In The Wood’; Talk Talk piano vibes and a semblance of 80s new wave and Robyn Hitchcock on the gauzy hex in the dales ‘Witches’ Mark’; and what sounds like an alternative 70s, not quite glam, ballad mix with touches of Corey Hanson and The Beatles, astonishing heartbreaker ‘Horses’: grander without losing that lo fi spirit, it’s one of the album’s most affecting and realized songs.

Piped church organ permeates the haze of a roughened but heartfelt drained tapestry of incredibly candid soul-searching. Travails of every kind are disarmed with a summery feel. Oyster has quickly become one of my favourite albums of 2023 – the balmy washes and heartache wistfulness drift of ‘Billy’, a worthy earnest but sublime song, being just one highlight. It should if life was fair, bring attention and plaudits to this artist, but I won’t hold my breath. If it counts for anything, I really appreciated it. Thanks to a certain Monolith Cocktail collaborator and Vukovar stalwart, this record made its way along the proverbial word-of-mouth network to me: and I’m grateful for that. Let’s hope I can in turn persuade you all to take a look at this hidden gem.

Daniel Alexander Hignell-Tully ‘I Hope They Let Us Hunt Like Men In The Next Life’ (Difficult Art And Music)

Between the blurred overspill of the academic, studied and explorative arts the composer, performance artist and PhD accredited researcher Daniel Alexander Hignell-Tully facilitates a site-specific (of a kind) imbued score of, barely musical, multimedia psychogoegraphy.

Originally performed at the Fort Process Festival in 2020, and now released in its improvised form by the experimental boutique label of note, Difficult Art And Music (rarely has a name been more appropriate), the two-part title track piece is a sort of translation of the Lewes composer’s graphic score of the squiggles, shapes and mapped free movements of a group of dancers, led through the scrublands and wilderness of an Italian landscape. Created during a residency at a repurposed candy factory, the surrounding environment offered not only the picturesque and a sense of mystery but danger too. For bordering this location are hunting grounds, where stepping over the line in the wrong place at the wrong time could potentially end up in a stray bullet or two hitting the curious bystander, walker and explorer.

Once marked that score was handed over to a group of musicians, which included Hignell-Tully (on synth and piano) and the violinists Kev Nickells and John Guzek, to interpret. I say musicians; the preface language used is “community”, with the “values” and “relations” of each mark and piece of text to be “assigned by mutual agreement among” that communal group. However, this is a “fixed score”, with each mark being an instruction rather than “gestural” stroke for “pitch, time and density”.

The results stir up a dance through the thorny brushed bushes, the winding and off-track pathways of a simultaneously ominous, wild and alien topography. Scratchy nailed and stretched fingers scrape and tear across both the violin’s strings and its wooden resonated body, whilst generated fields hum from the friction. A sheep-like “baa” and bleating can be heard as the atmosphere evokes distress and sharpened claws. And yet there’s also a semblance of Eastern European fiddled malady and a hint of the classical, even folkloric. As part one of this moiety continues – though not in a linear or progressive sense – the hovering sounds of lunar oscillations and ghostly warbles point to some sort of UFO or supernatural visitation. Something looms, hangs in the air like a mysterious presence; evidence of past events, lives and the history of this chosen site and surrounding areas; the danger too of a hunting ground soaked in bloody violence and trauma. Nickells and Guzek transform their double-act of abstract evocations with heightened plucks, weeping melody and various piercing stresses and pulls. The action, if you can call it that, slides, encircles and drags; yet it can also feel springy and light.

Part 2 is an expansion of the main body, but those moon-bendy, library music synth parts are more prominent and wobbly. And we can detect some kind of thumb cymbals percussive, and shaking instruments amongst passages of rustling, the fizzled and frazzled, and dissonance noise.

A third piece, ‘Percussive Piano As A Process Of Line Making’, offers another window in on the explorative research-like compositional methods of Hignell-Tully’s practice. An “early iteration of the composer’s line making score”, released at a later date under the ‘Lines’ and ‘Weaves’ titles via the Hallow Ground Records label, this solo piece fluctuates between spaces of breathed-like resonating chords and the more chaotic and struck. Taciturn with both a lightened and heavier-handed touch, the melodic and jarring, the almost off-key, follow the same direction. Submerged under some watery-like effect, singular notes and chords play like lapping tides on an experiment that can sound like a mix of Ligeti, Cage and Cale.

From factory and hunting grounds to the invisible crash and splash of an upright piano, all three pieces disturb, invoke or suggest an array of reactions to both a psychogeography and liminal process. Study and improvisation blur the lines with sound art and compositional exploration that pushes our understanding of the form. 

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.