THE MONTHLY DIGEST OF ACCUMULATED NEW MUSIC; THE SOCIAL INTER-GENERATIONAL/ECLECTIC AND ANNIVERSARY ALBUMS CELEBRATING PLAYLIST; AND ARCHIVE MATERIAL.ALL WRITTEN & CHOSEN BY DOMINIC VALVONA
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Leah Callahan ‘Curious Tourist’
29th April 2024
Still channeling The Glass Set’s The Sundays and My Bloody Valentine vibes, Bostonian singer-songwriter Leah Callahan continues the musical journey under her own name. The fourth album since leaving behind the group she once fronted in the mid 2000s, Callahan works hand-in-hand with foil Chris Stern of The Sterns fame. A fan of Callahan’s former band, Stern’s congruous contributions including co-writing, arranging, producing and playing a number of instruments on Curious Tourist: a title that more or less sums up both partners on this songbook’s exploration and revival of various music scenes and sounds; like a re-energized flick back through the record collection, picking out and giving a contemporary take on the new wave, power pop, C86, alt-synth-pop, shoegaze and Britpop genres.
Callahan’s voice has already been compared to a female Morrissey, whilst the flange reverberations and chimes of Johnny Marr’s guitar riffs can be heard ringing out across a number of the tracks on the newest album. But I also detect more modern echoes of the Sparrow & The Workshop’s Jill O’ Sullivan and a touch of LoveLikeFire. However, every track seems to take a different turn from the one before; from the cathedral organ intro that soon turns into an indie anthem of languid yearned vocals and strings – evoking both Lush and Echobelly – ‘Nowhere Girl’, to the indie-country espionage merger of Howling Bells, Interpol and Blondie ‘No One’. Those Western twangs are made even more obvious and atmospheric on the next song and title track, with rattle snake tambourine shakes, cinematic vistas and melting heat mirage guitar bends and tremolo – imagine a more subtle Heartless Bastards. Taking yet another turn on the highroad, ‘Ordinary Face’ was written as an answer to the Bronski Beat’s ‘Smalltown Boy’, but I’m picking up Beatles and early Floyd, mixed with 90s Dubstar, light psych-pop vibes.
Often such pick ‘n’ mix attempts can sound incoherent and incongruous, but Callahan and Stern make each excursion their own; keeping a momentum and signature that is all theirs. I hope Callahan stays “curious”.
Sarah/Shaun ‘It’s True What They Say?’
(Hobbes Music)
A sprinkled stardust statement of heartbreak and yearned romanticism from the Edinburgh wife and husband team of Sarah and Shaun McLachlan, making their debut on the Scottish capital’s leftfield electronic (and beyond) label, Hobbes Music. Shaun’s previous highlights with Delta Mainline (a band we have reviewed in the past, comparing them to an angelic Jesus And Mary Chain, OMD, Wilco and Spiritualized) put him in good stead, working arm-in-arm with Sarah on their duo’s first EP, with that band’s expansive epic ambitions and big horizons carried over into this more cosmic alluded project.
The lovelorn voiced pair, who duet together or back each other up harmoniously throughout and play and arrange a multitude of instruments between them, are joined by complimentary friends and foils Jaguar Eyes (a band mate of Shaun’s in Delta Mainline, contributing guitars and synths and arranging strings, programming drums and on engineering duties), Darren Coghill (of Neon Waltz fame, providing some percussion and drums, effects and, rather strangely, credited on “fire extinguisher”), Daniel Land (The Modern Painters’ instigator helps out on guitar), Chris Dixie Darley (the oft Father John Misty guitarist offers touches of slide guitar), Bruce Michie (brass) and Gavin King (the longtime collaborator and pal provides keys, and offers his pre-production and engineering skills). Altogether, this ensemble cast open up the sound: dreamily in a shoegaze fashion, but big.
With an affinity for the ending of the Star Man movie, and its romantic allusions, but in particular the score, Sarah and Shaun paly star-crossed lovers across a constellation of diaphanous synth and dream pop, of waned country music and Sarah Records influences. Imbued with memories, the almost impossible to describe feelings of everything from hope to family and community, the EP changes course from soft electronic pumped reminisces of the 80s to star-gazing from a range in the old West. Lulled, soothed and other times almost lamented, the vocals voice lyrical fancies of love but also heartbreak and concern at veiled loss and breakups.
Musically, sonically, the duo and their contributing partners touch upon Beach House, Ladytron, The Sundays, The Mining Co., The Field Mice, Sparklehorse, Duke Spirit and Cocteau Twins. From moseying across the open plains to following vapour trials; from electronica to starry strings arranged dreamy indie; and from the filmic to the personal; the scale is epic and feels nostalgic. I’m looking forward to more from this duo over the coming year: if only to see how expansive and enveloped in twinkled space dust it can get.
Nicolas Cueille ‘Curiositi’
(Un je-ne-sais-quoi)
As that title – one amongst a number of phonetically broken down prompts and descriptions of the artist’s headspace, direction of travel – translates, the French composer and multi-instrumentalist Nicolas Cueille let’s his curiosity run loose on the first album he’s ever released under his “birth” name.
A magical, and as stated, “discombobulated” realm of field recordings, digital and analogue synths, Cueille’s gentle succinct vocals settle amongst a wonderment of strangely constructed yet organic wildernesses and liquid primordial cup-poured and water-mill turning exotic atmospheres. The voice is almost soulfully indie (like a cross between Douglas Dare and Panda Bear) compared to the synthesized springy and sprung oddities, the textural transmogrified tin and string stretched sounds, rustles in the undergrowth, ambiguous workshop tools and machinery and waves of arpeggiator.
Abstractions of Walter Smetak, Fabbrica Vuota, David Slyvian (his music not voice in this instance), Heiko Maile, Eno, The Books, abstract works era Aphex Twin, µ-Ziq, neo-romantic synth and Library Music inhabit this quirky see-saw balance of softly put questions and emotions. The sounds of a cup-and-ball, knocks, nocturnal wildlife, plops and cheek slapping are transformed across Cueille curious musical terrains, his yins and whims and inquiries, to create something quite unique: the machine integrating with the biosphere.
Alexander Stordiau/The Stordiau Revolution ‘Skin Of Salt’
Breathing in the coastal airs, conversing with the local seagulls, and ruminating about such existential enquires as the circle of life and the still lingering traces of those loved-ones that passed on, the Belgium-based electronic composer, DJ and producer Alexander Stordiau returns with his revolutionary-suffix moniker to provide a new soundtrack to the motions and questions circling around in his consciousness.
Featured on the Monolith Cocktail over the years, through his partnerships with the Edinburgh label Bearsuit Records and Tokyo label Pure Spark, Stordiau has been constantly evolving his sound into various categories, split into the fields of ambience, trance, analogue sounding early electronica, minimal techno and kosmsiche. All of which are now enacted on his newest release, Skin Of Salt; a sophisticated retro soundtrack of fluctuating synthesized, arpeggiator movements and wave forms both shooting through the galaxy and articulating matters closer to home.
Covering millenniums, as humanity left the “salty water” and primordial soup to live on land, and articulating the abstract, almost impossible to describe traces and sounds left behind in the family home after parents pass away – the comforting sound, in this case, of fond memories of mum opening drawers in the corridor cupboards -, Stordiau uses a sound palette of Roedelius, Vangelis, Tangerine Dream, Sky Records, Jarre, Schulze and stripped back techno to build his thematic tracks. Alpha waves and knocked beats pass by the Twilight Zone, as theremin-like kooky waves evoke the lunar and supernatural on what sounds like a soviet era space programme documentary soundtrack on the opener ‘Fear Merges Easily’, whilst the title-track travels back to the dawn of time and back in state of near transcendental mystique of cathedral Tangerine Dream and retro-synth dramas.
Over four tracks the electronic fields vary, with even moments of 303 hi-hats and claps that wouldn’t sound out of place on early Ritchie Hawtin records, and there’s always a touch of Library music to be found in the more quirky parts. Supernatural breathes, lunar spells, the vaporous and visitations are all involved on this sophisticated electronic sound suite, as Stordiau transduces his environment and thoughts into another class retro-synth journey.
Distropical ‘Jaguarundi’
19th April 2024
As diverse and numerous as their globally sourced sounds and field recordings, the new EP from the Milan duo of Govind Singh Khurana and Stefano Greco borrows from nature, the landscape and ethnographical. Taking inspiration from an amorphous map of possible worldly fusions, the electronic partnership warp, effect and morph the sounds and vegetation of India, South America, the Far East and Africa, merging them with sophisticated dance beats, bounced bass, and diamond crystalized synth rays – there’s also an effect that sounds like the slow reassembling of broken glass.
From Asian monkeys (‘Astral Langur’) to the tiny Japanese town that hosts a remarkable small shrine (‘Birds of Toi’) and a famous Venezuelan cacao-producing village that can only be reached by boat (‘Chuao Chuao’), reference points on the compass are brought to sonic life. Traditional sounds and in-situ recordings from these navigated locations are amplified and given a House, Psy-Trance and Techno spin. Rainforest raves meet clattering tribal rhythms in the dense lush undergrowth, whilst futuristic tech is overgrown with the fertile vines. Chuffed blows from Castaneda’s fantastical shaman are pumped along by a combination of Basic Channel, Anteloper, Lion’s Drum, Bonobo, Ammar 808 and Mr. Ozio. Authenticity – from the recordings of Afro-Venezuelan drums to the unforgettable South American sounding acoustic guitar used on the wild ‘cougar-esque’ feline referenced title-track, ‘Jaguarundi’ – is still at the root of these electronic propulsive transformations; two worlds, two histories, coming together in a congruous dance-fueled exotic combination.
Empty House ‘Bluestone’
(Cruel Nature Records) 26th April 2024
The megalithic period “cromlech” (frequently interchanged with and referred to a “dolmen” too) construction of large stone blocks that stands within the borders of the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park, in the village of Pentre Ifan, acts as a gateway to the imagination for the Blackpool-based musician Fred Laird, who goes under the moniker of Empty House.
Theories as to the purpose, significance of these stones vary: A monument perhaps? A communal burial chamber, maybe? Or perhaps an elaborate demonstration of its builders’ skills? Whatever that purpose, in the right light, the right season this atavistic assemblage evokes the mysterious, mystical, and otherworldly. Even the stones’ geological make up, providence is used as a soundboard; the album title of Bluestone even references it – one now long debunked theory suggested that the local bluestone was used and carted all the way to build Stonehenge. That same bluestone is thought to have been hewn and moved from Pembrokeshire’s Preseli Mountains (also often referred to as the less imposing “hills”) region which surrounds the cromlech at the centre of this complimentary partner album to February’s “brighter sounding” The Golden Hour – recorded in a similar fashion, but during the Spring/Summer of 2023. Its “lunar sister” (recorded last November) is a field trip of atmospheric psychogeography; an empirical soundtrack that channels the emanating signals that either exist or remain mere fantasy.
It’s one of Wales’s most impressive and largest structures of that age and kind (we’re talking more than 5000 odd years ago here). If it could talk/communicate, what stories it could tell. Laird gives it a suitable antiquarian, new age and megalithic ambient go anyway; telling or implying and evoking a veiled timeline of Druidic initiations, of magic, of pagan rituals, of long dead spirits invoked, of Medieval pastoral processions, and of the more ominous and near doomed.
Traversing and absorbing various elements, from the supernatural to Wiccan, the ancients to the kosmische music of the 70s, Laird uses sonorous guitar drones, sustained e bow feedback, suitably evocative synthesized melodies, the pastoral spindled movements and folk sounds of the Irish bouzouki (an adopted version of the original Greek long-necked and pear-bottomed shaped plucked instrument, introduced to Irish music in the mid 60s, most notably by the Sweeney’s Men folk group), tinkled piano notes, a crackling fire and subtle bellows to magic up a soundscape illusion. Introduced into that sphere, Nick Raybould and his West African rope-tuned goblet drum, a djembe, make a guest appearance on the fire-lit crackled hybrid ‘Fires At Midnight’ – a scene that merges the relaxed hand drum patters of the djembe with kosmische oscillations, a Fortean transmitter and hints of sci-fi.
Avalon mists descend across a communication with the landscape, whilst shriven archaic reenactments stir-up the hallucinatory and esoteric. Old vacuums of air blow through the spaces in between the stones as a haunted geology shrieks, howls, mourns and swirls. And a wispy passage of monastery choral voices carries on the wind as children giggle and the neolithic generator revs up vibrations and pulses from the afterlife. The Incredible String Band makes merry with Julian Cope; Steve Hillage joins Ash Ra Tempel; and Affenstunde period Popol Vuh invokes ghostly parallel histories with Xqui and Quimper on a tour of Ley lines. Atmospheres and scenes from a long history of settlement, of the spiritual, envelope the listener on a most subtle but rich field recording trip.
___/THE SOCIAL PLAYLIST VOLUME 85\___
Continuing with the decade-long Social – originally a DJ club night I’d pick up at different times over the past 20 plus years, and also a café residency from 2012 to 2014 – playlist, each month I literally chose the records that celebrate anniversary albums, those that I’d love to hear on the radio waves or DJs play once and while, and those records that pay a homage and respect to those artists we’ve lost in the last month.
Anniversary picks this month include a big 60th shoutout to The Rolling Stones debut (see a little piece on my thoughts further down the page), 50th call outs to jazz-funk-soul greats Calvin Keys (Proceed With Caution!) and Weldon Irvine (Cosmic Vortex (Justice Divine)), Funkadelic (Standing On The Verge Of Getting It On). Moving into the 80s, REM’s Reckoning is unbelievably now 40 years.
Pulp’s His ‘N’ Hers LP, and Britpop’s near zenith with it, reaches the 30th milestone. An album that couldn’t be more different from the same year, Nas’ decade defining Illmatic is also 30 this month.
We now reach the unfortunate part of the playlist selection: the deaths or death in this case of the one of the last mavericks, John Sinclair. Synonymous for steering and kicking out the jams in his short role as manager of Detroit’s renowned rebel rousing motherfuckers The MC5, renegade poet, scholar, activist and establishment rattler John Sinclair is also remembered for his free radical zeal and dalliances with the law.
Even too hardcore for the MC5, Sinclair’s foundation of the anti-racist socialist White Panthers, and his countless associations with equally revolutionary counterculture players and shakers, marked him out; leading as it did to the now infamous drug bust for marijuana possession in 1969. Whilst his love for the herb and gesticulations, whether through poetry or diatribes, is in no doubt, the way this particular bust was set-up (for what was a very insignificant amount of drugs) is considered heavy-handed and unjustifiable. Handed an initial ten-year sentence, Sinclair’s status in the “heads” and political agitators’ communities had singled him out as a poster child for deterring the like-minded boomer generation from stepping out of line. Fortunately (to a degree) this sentence and media furor galvanized support and sympathy and reduced that ten-year stretch to two, with Sinclair emerging from jail in 1971.
Keeping his hand in so to speak but taking up residency in Amsterdam – a much safer bet -, the beatnik jazz sage continued to perform, write, and record. I’ve chosen a mere smattering of his recordings.
I always sprinkle a few newish tracks into the cross-generational mix. This month it’s the turn of the Neon Kittens, Mick Harvey, Nduduzo Makhathini and Forest Swords.
The rest of the playlist, well, it’s just tunes I played out, own or just rate. In that vein, there’s Mary Wells, Nefertiti, The 3, The Mad’s, Okay Temiz, Danny Arakaki, Ilous and more….
Calvin Keys ‘Aunt Lovey’
Weldon Irvine ‘Love Jones’
Jean Wells ‘Somebody’s Been Loving You (But It Ain’t Me)’
Funkadelic ‘Sexy Ways’
Nefertiti ‘Miss Amutha Nature’
3 Melancholy Gypsys ‘The 3’
Nas ‘It Ain’t Hard To Tell’
John Sinclair ‘When Will The Blues Leave’
The Mad’s ‘Feels Like Love’
The Rolling Stones ‘Little By Little’
Eulenspygel ‘Menschenmacher’
Okay Temiz ‘Galaxy Nine’
The Monkees ‘Time And Time Again’
Donnie Fritts ‘Prone To Lean’
Danny Arakaki ‘All Thanks’
Samadi ‘La Luna Llena’
Coumba Sidibe ‘Djagolla’
Ilous ‘Chanson Chagrin’
John Sinclair ‘Ain’t Nobody’s Business’
R.E.M. ‘Little America’
Neon kittens ‘Schrodinger’s Party Animal’
Virna Lindt ‘Shiver’
Pulp ‘Joyriders’
The Twilights ‘Sorry, She’s Mine’
Mick Harvey ‘When We Were Beautiful & Young’
Clancy Eccles ‘I Need You’
Gerardo Manuel & El Humo ‘Where Did You Go’
Nduduzo Makhathini ‘Libations: Omnyama’
Forest Swords ‘Torch’
John Sinclair ‘Sitarrtha’
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50th Anniversary to Guru Guru’s Dance Of The Flames and a staggering 60th to The Rolling Stones’ Debut.
Guru Guru ‘Dance of The Flames’
(Atlantic Records)
Trawling around Europe – and wherever they found a door that was laid open to them – like a ragtag gypsy caravan convoy, Guru Guru took their 1973 album, Don’t Call Us (We Call You), out on the road. With most of their monies funneled into purchasing a solid and heavy monolithic ballsy sound-system, they bled dry the ears of many a ‘head’.
The trios imbued in sonic genius and omnivorous lynch-pin guitar gunslinger, Ax Genrich, somehow managed to disappear from this mad procession, leaving the group and heading into nigh obscurity. His difference of opinion on which direction the ennui band of lunatics should progress resulted in a split, with Mani Neumaier hell bent on creating improvisational material against Genrich’s more delineate structured compositions – though it must be made clear that Genrich always threw himself unwieldy into every track, regardless of who wrote it or what form it took. For a scene that produced an abundance of over-qualified, sickeningly gifted, innovative, and erudite guitarists – West Germany spewed them out like an ever-efficient Volkswagen production line – it was, you could say, a job to stand out from the mighty throngs of erudite axe welders. Yet Genrich with his re-wired Hendrix and deconstructed rock’n’roll space licks, managed to leave an indelible footprint in the Krautrock canon, and hall of fame.
To plug this gaping chasm, and before embarking on the next LP, the one-time member of the progressive jazz outfit Eliff and exotically named Houchäng Nejadepour – half German, half Persian – joined the one-album veteran Hans Hartmann and founding father Neumaier to become part of Guru Guru mark III. Talented in many disciplines including guitar and sitar, alongside both compositional and technical production skills, Nejadepour added a more Popol Vuh-esque flavour to the band’s sound, lending Guru Guru a Balearic and far eastern quality. Such was his contribution – though this could also be partially down to Neumaier’s lack of new material – that the well-talented troubadour composed half of all the tracks on their next album, Dance Of The Flames. Unfortunately, that listless and cold-footed obligation to move on, led to Nejadepour’s departure soon after the LP’s recording in the Spring of 1974 – his replacement was Gila axe man Conny Veit, who himself only managed a short sojourn of a few months.
Dance Of The Flames, the second release on Atlantic, not only saw a wider and more cosmopolitan influence and catchment, but it also grew fat on a robust hard rock sound, which at times plunged into the dark recesses of Gothic heavy metal. Andalusian vistas and South American themed Sambas cut the collection of eight-songs into two camps. Neumaier, as chief patriarch, tends to either brood on or veer towards folly. Take the opening grandstanding ‘Dagobert Duck’s 100th Birthday’, a paean ode to Donald Ducks tight-beaked Uncle Scrooge, that could also be a reference to the last Merovingian king of the Franks, but then maybe not. The track features a display of fatuous duck-call kazoos and outlandish gestures of both The Edgar Winter Bands ‘Frankenstein’ and King Crimson, on showboating duties. But then there are also ethereal opuses, such as the romanticized ‘The Girl From Hirschhorn’ – a lament to the mysterious figure of affection, who resides in the nearby German town of the title – to balance it all out.
Production values are high, and slickly executed with every note, no matter how drenched in echo, reverb, or fuzz, all audible and separated apart. Those erratic rolling time signatures and unruly voracious drum solos of Neumaier are all still in evidence, as usual, as are the dependable assiduous bass runs and jazz riffs, favored by Hans Hartmann who’d joined the Guru Guru family the previous year. The high-plain astral traveler, preparing us for a meeting with visitors from beyond the stars, is almost erased from the groups original founding musical manifesto, replaced by a sturdier rock and, world music, agenda.
From the start:
Kazoo twitching gonzo trumpets announce the extravagant goof-off rock opus that is ‘Dagobert Duck’s 100th Birthday’ party anthem. This flitting Alice Cooper muscling rocker features a jovial, if under the surface portentous, ode to Donald Duck’s disparaging money grabbing capitalist Uncle Scrooge – known in Germany as Dagobert. Macho feats of savage and squalling guitar solos brand scorch marks across the stonking, stalking monster backing track; Nejadepour hurtling through the scales at a rabid rate of knots, hoping to erase the hovering presence of Ax Genrich, with his own blistering blurry-eyed fret work. Gratuitous and highly ridiculous in equal measure, this slab of over-cooked mega prog, is used as some kind of showcase, just to prove their mettle.
An inexorable ethereal and lightly laid-back gallop of a groove rolls into view over a harmonic pinpoint sweeping introduction. The diaphanous love pinning tryst, ‘The Girl From Hirschhorn’ – placed highly in my all-time top 100 Krautrock tunes, just in case you were wondering – floats in on the dreamy breezy melody. Hans Hartmann builds up a repetitive pounding bass line, as a gliding quivering lead guitar preens and majestically swoons along to the rousing pleasing and drifting backing. After seven-minutes of proto-Amon Düül II Wolf City era bliss, and dashes of love-in Acid Mother Temple – you can see why Neumaier went on to work with them – a vocal relief sublimely transcends the soundtrack, as Neumaier exhales joyfully –
“I can’t stop thinking of you.
Where could you be, little babe,
Why I am gently playing this song for you?”.
With his querying display of lament finally let out, the band hyper-drive towards a lunar wah-wah stop/starting outré; shimmering in reverb and slipping into a jazz-rock sporadic free-for-all, that spills over and onto side one’s closing track, a bombastic spasmodic odyssey.
‘The Day Of Time Stop’ is Sun Ra, Beefheart and Santana all sharing a pleasure voyage to the 5th Dimension. Staccato timings create a jump and off-kilter raging loop, that acts as a cyclonic spiraling blast for Nejadepour to launch another blast of light-speed attacking pomp, searing from his bewildered guitar. Stumbling drums and octave hurling bass brew up a right shitstorm before the trio use the Arthur. C. Clarke galactic elevator to the stars, disappearing into some distant cosmological whirlpool of depravity. Like Edger Winter, our maddened guitar alchemist, runs wild, flipping through key changes and reeling off utterly fanciful and one-fingered licks – total filth.
Side two begins with the album’s title track. Neumaier promptly rattles off a smashing cymbals introduction, as Hartmann slaps his bass around some bending rhythms. Everything is coated in a strange reverberated and, reversed effect, flipping backwards and forwards, stretching out the instrumental and whipping it into a twisted carcass of a song, with the very air itself sucked out into some kind of vacuum.
A taste of the Samba is up next, albeit an Hieldberg etymological version of the sun-kissed exotic dance. Nejadepour’s sprightly jazz-tinged composition sounds like a happy-go-lucky Yes, twinned with the be-bop indulgences of Herb Albert. Hartmann twangs and bounces along on the contra bass, as a cheerful Neumaier taps away on the congas, each of them enjoying the succinct distraction that is ‘Samba Dos Rosas’ – just one of Hejadepour’s Balearic enthused joints that make up most of side two’s track list.
‘Rallulli’ is cast from the same mold, but steers closer to home, as the musical accompaniment melds together fits of acoustic jamming and hidden-in-the-attic sound effects. Tablas, congas, and a trapped jar of hornets produce a strange old avant-garde miss-mash, the final word going to a flushed toilet – perhaps a critique of the track, or more of that Neumaier humor.
Those Andalusian plains and mountains come a calling, as pranged delicate harmonies add to a pained melancholic mood-piece entitled ‘At The Juncture Of Light And Dark’. Hemmingway-esque Death In The Afternoon allusions are cast, with resplendent flamingo flourishes and a suspense filled air of Spanish mystery – file under evocative musical narrative.
Bringing the album to a dramatic close is the doom lit curtain call of ‘God’s Endless Love For Man’, a Gothic heavy metal droning and throbbing prowling instrumental that stabs a fork in the eye of the creator. More like an attempt to soundtrack the works of Bosch then a hymn to the divine, this bubbling cauldron of a stonker takes over from Amon Düül II’s Phallus Dei quest and drags Black Sabbath through the killing fields. This is indeed some scary shit: Guru Guru on a fuck-rock satanical crusade, summoning up some kind of end-plan Armageddon. Interspersed in the mire, bursts of rapid-fire jazz rich breaks and tangled glorious guitar solos add a glimpse of hope to this one-way helter skelter ride into the abyss.
The Rolling Stones ‘S-T’
(Decca) 1964
Those sulky near petulant straight-faced punks stare out from their dark shadowed album with a look that means business. Made-up almost entirely of cover versions, grabbed from the patron black blues and r’n’b characters of Chicago, The Mississippi and Tennessee, the debut LP is almost an exalted tribute to their heroes.
Rambunctious and loud, the pure rawness and bleed over of the instruments (something that no-one seemed concerned about in the studio at the time; encouraged by their manager Oldham) as they filled each other’s space, was a mixture of giddy adulation and blue-eyed indecorous rebellion. From the frayed, proto-punk amateurish sound of ‘Route 66’ to the gospel ye-ye of ‘Can I Get A Witness’, this album shambles along and offers up some convincing attempts to sound like Jimmy Reed, Willie Dixon and Slim Harpo. Of course, they fail but the results are better than the intention in many ways; the vital kick start to a whole scene and call for a generation. Can it really be sixty years old this month?!
A WORLD OF SONIC/MUSICAL DISCOVERIES REVIEWED BY DOMINIC VALVONA
(Unless stated otherwise, all releases are available now)
Tabu Ley and African Fiesta National, 1970 (Copyright – Analog Africa)
Various ‘Congo Funk! – Sound Madness From The Shores Of The Mighty Congo River (Kinshaha/Brazzaville 1969-1982)’ (Analog Africa)
A tale of two cities on opposites sides of the same river, the Congo, the latest excursion for the Analog Africa label celebrates and showcases an abundance of dynamite, soul and funk tracks from the two capitals of Kinshasa and Brazzaville.
The roots of both are entwined and yet very different. The mega city of Kinshasa only adopted its name during independence (but not without interference from its former brutal colonial masters Belgium, and also the West, and in more recent times, China) in the 1960s, a product of the “authenticity”, or “renativizing”, policies of Joseph Désiré Mobutu. The largest city and capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo – itself, renamed over centuries depending on who controlled it, but for a twenty-six year window between 1971 and 1997 known as Zaïre – the constantly expanding Kinshasa was founded in the late 19th century by Henry Morten Stanley, who was in the employ at the time of the Congo’s most disastrous barbaric ruler, Leopold II. Named in his honour, it stood for half a century or more as a hub for Belgium’s rape of the gargantuan central African country’s natural resources, minerals and people. Once free (only to a point) of European mastery its name was changed to reflect a hunger for authentic African heritage: named in fact after what was once a humble village on the same site.
On the northern side of the Congo River stands the capital of the Congo Republic, Brazzaville. It too was originally founded by a European, the Italian-born – but later granted French citizenship – explorer Pierre Savorgnan Brazza, who took it as a prize for the French Empire. The name stayed, but after greater independence this city became a thriving hive of activity for the burgeoning music scene: designated by UNESCO in 2013 as a “city of music” no less.
Circling back on its regional neighbor, Kinshasa became a seat of power for the dictatorship of Mobutu (the Belgium and US-backed usurper who took power after the assassination of the promising Black Nationalist, but Soviet-favored, Patrice Lumumba). Famously drawing a global audience in 1974, the world tuned into the legendary, iconic titanic grudge match between Ali and Foreman: aka the “rumble in the jungle”. Instigated by the boxing promoter and hustler Don King off the back of Ali’s full “motherland” endorsed conversion, Mobutu saw the potential in not only raising his own profile but that of his country by vouching for and putting on this great boxing spectacle in a revitalized Kinshasa.
History would later prove Mobutu to be a tyrant and thief, but for this shining moment of self-publicity the American stars of the fighting game and music/entertainment scenes were lured to the city. Seen in various documentaries since, but favouring the American stars of R&B, soul and funk – including the anointed godfather of soul himself, James Brown – the African artists and musicians that took part in a three-day festival of music around the main event included a rafter of local talent too. Competing to gain the spotlight, dominated by the likes of B.B. King, Bill Withers, The Pointer Sisters and The Fania Latin All Stars, were two of the Congo’s most famous icons: the bandleader, honed pioneer of an attacking repetitive guitar style that tore up the local dancefloors and airwaves, Francois “Franco” Luambo, and rival Pascal-Emmanuel Sinamoyi Tabu, aka Tabu Ley, the leading light of African rumba and one of the continent’s most influential artists. Franco fronted the TPOK Jazz troupe at that music extravaganza, a band with a lot of history: famous for their part in spreading Congolese rumba.
The event’s musical organizers, Hugh Masekela and Stewart Levine, gave Franco free reign as a creative guide, but it’s said that Tabu stole the show. It’s a convoluted backstory, but the band that Franco fronted, the TPOK, actually changed their name from the O.K. Jazz band a decade or more after forming in the mid 50s – even more confusing, you will see the name written down in various forms, sometimes with the abbreviated dots. Both this troupe and Tabu make appearances on this Congo Funk! showcase – the funk being only one part of a both dynamite electrifying and more riverside lilted set of Afro-rock, soul, R&B and more localized serenading sweetness. Tabu for his part, leading the Et L’ Orchestra Afrisa, moves to a forgiving soulful rumba-esque groove (Congolese rumba being a signature, often dominate, movement honed in the region by such luminaries as Tabu and the famous Verckys) on the sun-blazed horn serenaded and buzzing guitar licked ‘Adeito’. With their L’ Orchestre additional name, O.K. Jazz makes an appearance under the Lolo affixed title (I will readily admit I have not read the liner notes this time around, and so have no idea if this is an artists or just a reference to one of the villages in the area) on the funky raw Booker T/Stax steal ‘Lolo Soulfire’, and holding the full limelight, go for some “humph” and laughter on ‘Kiwita Kumunani’.
As with much of the collection’s roster, less established acts and groups outside the major label networks (many subsidiaries of Western labels) struggled at first to get heard or raise the prohibitive sums needed to record. The PR notes briefly describe what happened, but to fill the void, a number of pioneering entrepreneurs entered the market to levitate the costly process. The likes of smaller, more independent labels such as Cover No.1, Mondenge, Editions Moninga and Super Contact could take a punt on newly emerging younger artists; those who were influenced by the “rumble in the jungle” festival of sound, going on to cut their own hybrid versions of American soul and funk, of which this compilation is filled. Pumped out across the airwaves of Radio Brazzaville or beamed out by Télé-Zaïre and RTV du Zaïre – the TV shows of which were apparently so huge that the president ordered the latter to put out daily concerts because they were found to quell unrest and criminal activities during transmissions. Arriving at the opposite end of this compilations window, released in 1982, the opening salvo, ‘Sungu Lubuka’ by Petelo Vicka Et Son Nzazi, seems a likely candidate for this change. Sounding like the heralding horn section from a Dexys track and homage to Jackie Wilson and his peers, before slipping into a Latin-like groove, this track connects two worlds: as influenced by the Fania All Stars as it is by disco funk. It’s certainly a blazing start to a cracking collection, and obvious single choice. It’s followed by the Afro-rock and Kuti horns simmering ‘Mfuur Ma’ by the Groupe Minzoto Ya Zaïre; yet another single showstopper that seems to echo the Pazent Brothers and J.B.’s. And another worthy punchy tune, the closing ‘Ah! Congo’ by the Orchestre National Du Congo, proves the perfect, high energy R&B, bookend to a brilliant compilation.
Tracks like Les Bantous De La Capitale’s ‘Ngantsie Soul’ just roll on and on like a 12” disco mix; a funky but not erratic groove that pulls you in with a constantly fluid moving soul riff and clopping percussion. Next to that, Les Frères Soki Et L’ Orchestre Bella-Bella’s ‘Nganga’ shuffles and scuffles down the train tracks to a fit of horns in a workout that lasts nearly nine minutes.
Congo Funk in all its many variations is put under the spotlight, with an outstanding set list of fourteen tracks (whittled down from a container’s worth of singles) that will enthral and educate in equal measures. Essential dance floor fillers await.
Fran & Flora ‘Precious Collection’
(Hidden Notes) 12th April 2024
Arriving just months after Alex Roth’s new Cut The Sky project’s Esz Kodesz debut and Alison Cotton’s Engelchen, Fran & Flora release their own European Jewish culturally and historically inspired album. Addressing similar passages of loss and commemoration to the absence and tragedy of the Eastern and Central European branches of that community’s heritage, they also respond to its most joyous, strengthened traditions, transforming in a sophisticated, adroit and knowledgeable way the music of the Ashkenazi: otherwise known as “Klezmar”. And whilst those mentioned albums by Roth and Cotton channel different aspects of history – the former, covering the same Ashkenazi communities, but in Galicia, and the later, telling the story of the English Cook sisters who helped to save fleeing Jews from Germany during WWII -, the first overlaps this duo’s emotive and stirring story of lineage by overcoming tumultuous times to preserve a culture in a part of the continent that ruthlessly eradicated it’s identity and people.
For as Roth channeled past barbarity and conflict in what is now Ukraine for a harrowing and incredible abstract reaction, Francesca Ter-Berg and Flora Curzon (to give them their full names) also tread the same lands, but also across into Romania – as the album’s second track, the beautifully but moodyily and mysteriously described Eastern-European fairytale ‘Romanian Fantasies II’ makes abundantly clear (imagine the strings aspects of The Holy Mountain soundtrack meets Širom and Gypsy music, whilst a didgeridoo-like sound blows away).
I might be reading too much into it, but the duo’s Precious Collection suite closes with what, over time, has become a formal greeting in the Jewish community: “Sholem Aleichem”. Translating from Hebrew etymology to mean “[May] peace [be] upon you”, it was also the nom de plume of the famous Yiddish author and playwright Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich, whose stories of Tevye the Dairyman were the source for the Fiddler On The Roof musical. Born in the old Tsarist Russian conquered and subjected shtel of Voronkiv in what is now central Ukraine, Rabinovich experienced the pograms firsthand; escaping to the USA at one point, but in doing so promoted the often looked-down-upon Yiddish culture and language. Also, and not surprising when facing the marauding savagery and alienation of the Russian Empire’s genocidal actions, and the Anti-Semitism and ruinous policies of the Austro-Hungarian empire too, that he also advocated the return of his people to the Holy Land as a member of the Hovevai Zion (lovers of Zion) cause. Hounded out of his homeland when alive, a Putin era Russia erected a monument in his honour in Moscow, whilst Ukraine paid homage throughout its many cities and even issued stamps – ironically or not, many of those cities have been bombed relentlessly by Russia in the past two years. Whether this is a mere coincident or not, it’s a useful connection and part of the history of the region covered on this album; especially as the place where Klezmer was born or at least fashioned – that loose confederation of dance tunes, ritual melodies and “virtuosic improvisations” is made up of influences from the Jewish diaspora, from Ottoman Greece and Romania to the Germany and Slavic countries. The “Klei” part of that form means “tools, utensils or instruments of” and the “zemer” translates as “melody”, an assemblage if you like, of different musical threads but rooted in the faith. Klezmer was, and of course still is, played at weddings and other social functions, but more importantly it is a bond and hand-me-down language, poetry and litany of their heritage and story.
Drawing upon this legacy and knowledge the duo of cellist Fran and violinist Flora (both also cover the vocals and electronic elements) both interpret traditional material and compose new arrangements that simultaneously evoke classical music and the atmospheric, with echoes of folktronica, the avant-garde resonance and atonal essence of hidden metallic and instrumental sources and fantastical – imagine Walter Smetek conducting a Eastern European chamber ensemble. There’s even a removed hint of jazz and near breakbeat drums at one point, when they do get to sustain a rhythm. The drumming circle is courtesy of guests Ursula Russell (of Snapped Ankle and Alabaster DePlume fame) and Simon Roth (Chris Potter, Alice Zawadzki, Adrian Dunbar on his CV), plus, what the PR notes call, the appearance of a Ukrainian Poik style marching drum – my research has drawn a blank on this one I’m afraid.
Some pieces of music directly reference Jewish culture, history, with the stripped and plucked diaphanous but haunting ‘Nign’ a unique take on the traditional religious vocal song of the same name. Largely improvised, sung in groups, Bible verses or classical quotes from other Jewish texts are repeated to form what’s know as a “nign”. Sometimes a lamented prayer, and at other times out of joy or victorious, this contemporary vision sounds like beatific and ethereal sirens uttering assonant mystique and worry from behind a translucent covering. But the vibrations, melodies even amongst the most abstracted, near non-musical parts still carry, forming as they do, evocations of landscapes and time. Sympathetic and attentive at all times, the music encompasses wild playfulness and abandonment on the opening running freedom of ‘Nudity’, and nature’s call on the Caucuses imbued, choral lulled ‘Feygele – Little Bird’.
Woven at times like a tapestry, and at other times, near esoteric, the beatific merges with the plaintive, pleaded and mysterious, and folk music is effortlessly weaved with folk-rock, the experimental and the classical. Within that framework traditional dances and songs are wrapped up in a meticulously crafted otherworldly suite of experimental strings and minimalistic electronica. The Klezmer source material is held on to but transformed with a contemporary expansion of ideas and experimental composition, all of which flows lucidly and in a most stirring manner to create an exceptional album.
Herandu ‘Ocher Red’
(Hive Mind Records) 26th April 2024
A second release on the Hive Mind label to feature Misha Sultan, or rather the true face behind that guise, Mikhail Gavrilov, the Herandu debut is a new project and new sound for the Siberian artist and his brother Evgeny (who has his own alias of Dyad).
The siblings, caught between the Covid pandemic and invasion of Ukraine by Russia, put this latest vehicle in motion during trips back home to Siberia’s most populous city of Novosibirsk in 2022. The so-called “Chicago of Siberia”, Novosibirsk is situated on the banks of the Ob River, a crossing point of the romanticised and legendary Trans-Siberian Railway and historically an important flashpoint during the Russian civil war and engine of post-revolutionary Russian industry. Originally founded in 1893 and christened with the Tsarist Imperialist title of Novonikolayevsk after Emperor Nicholas II, the Communists gave it the current name of “New Siberia” in 1926. Geographically sitting between the Ural Mountains and Northern Asia, touching the Pacific in the East, Siberia isn’t just the infamous exiled atelier of record and literature but a beautifully diverse Eurasian landscape.
As on Mikhail’s Misha alias Roots album, released by Hive Mind back in the late Spring of 2022 (as it happens, that marvelous album also included a cameo from his brother, under his Dyad moniker), that famous industrial transport capital and its outlying regions are once more transduced via the soundboard and imagination to articulate and convey backdrop set moments of rumination, of particular captured interactions and moods, and an essence of place and time – the industrial set against the more plush shades of nature. Informing and inspiring a new direction, the label has described the brother’s collaboration as sounding like Metalheadz meets Weather Report; or to my ears, Plug plays around with the music of the Mahavishnu Orchestra using the production of 80s Miles Davis records whilst hauling in later 70s and 80s Herbie Hancock on cosmic ray beam keys and what sounds like a keytar.
Actually, with a mix of warmer sounding live instrumentation (from Stanley Clarke-light jazzy-funk slap and picked bass guitar and Greg Foat-esque electric-piano to pinning, floating and sizzled reedy saxophone – courtesy of friend and musician Vladimir Luchansky) and more programmed synthesized breakbeats, chops and atmospheres, the brothers branche out into all kinds of international genres, with evocations of the Caucasus, Tibet and both East and North Africa merging with photons and clap-drums. Jazz-fusion and world music hybrids from the Silk Road and Samarkand cross paths with Jimi Tenor, Amorphous Androgynous, Rip Rig & Panic, Transglobal Underground and The Pop Group. And yet that only goes so far in describing the subtle but cross-pollination of influences on show. The timpani bounds of ‘An Incident At The Theater’ play up the title’s stage drama, but soon break out into those Weather Report references, and the misty vaporous ‘Downtown Street’, heads off in the direction of both Hansa studio and later Outside period Bowie and 80s Scott Walker.
Trance is spun with bass noodling, Ethio-jazz, post-punk funk, Moroccan and Arabian cassette culture, retro space age keys, no wave dance music and the Aphex Twin to create an interesting explorative zap, skip, playful, mysterious and dreamy vision that mirrors the brothers feelings of their native landscape, and the episodes of life, the shaping of their creativity, born in that setting.
Kira McSpice ‘The Compartmentalization Of Decay’
12th April 2024
Nature’s compartmentalized reactions to injury and decay (via the studied description laid down by the pathologist and biologist Alex L. Shigo) are drawn upon, referenced and used as a metaphor for Kira McSpice’s own coping mechanisms; the American singer-songwriter and musician dealing with trauma by channeling both desirable and undesirable energy into working through the darkest, most fearful physical and mental strains of painful morose.
Almost like therapy, although bad dreams plagued McSpice throughout the writing process, the troubled chanteuse of the self-coined “freak folk” sound faces blow after blow of gothic lament and harrowing despair. And yet there is a beauty too, with passages of the near ethereal, beatific and afflatus ebbing over chthonian mourning and distress. In fact, the suffused nocturnal atmospherics, whilst hiding allegorical esoteric nightmares and spirits, are like a strange fairytale set filled by operatic and theatrical characters and life.
It’s the voice that draws you into that visionary world however; an apparitional-like calling, lulling, assonating and hurting vocal that soars past the contralto-bass to reach near aria like heights. With an obvious keenness and deep knowledge of the craft, McSpice artfully constructs inter-layered choral circles and marooned, mournful and cut-to-the-marrow pained releases, which as the album progresses gradually seem to find the gauzy light – ‘Photosynthesis’ facing that light source and growing in a somnolent fashion sounds almost like a daydreaming Mazzy Star. The welling and plaintive, sometimes struggling, voiced woes and pathos is enveloped with heightened atmospherics, suffused and smothered hazy horns (what sounds like a tuba, but also oboe, clarinet and maybe a saxophone of a sort), a Goth acoustic air of All About Eve, and Tilt-period Scott Walker eerie, stark and heart of darkness style electric guitar. All of which has a very distinct sound: pitched somewhere between haunted chamber music, the operatic and baroque and obscure, hermetic prog-folk. Slowly removing a metaphorical armour. McSpice arises from the symbolic mists and fogs to forge a shaken, knocked but hard-won identity. The rooms and spaces maybe dark, but through McSpice’s cleverly poised and escalating vocal chills and more beautifully heartbreaking, fraught processes there is a clearing of the miasma and the promise of a reprieve. Nothing short of an extraordinary album.
Pando Pando ‘S-T’
(Not Applicable) 12th April 2024
With enviable experience and CVs with incredible depth and variation, all three participants in the Pando Pando project tantalize with the prospects of their experimental explorations. The names of trumpeter, electronic musician, engineer and producer Alex Bonney (performing with Leverton Fox, Scarla O’ Horror, Brass Mask, the list goes on), drummer and percussionist Jem Doultan (played in Róisín Murphy’s band for seven years, drummed in The Thruston Moore Group and is one part of the Too Many Things duo) and fellow drummer/percussionist Will Glaser (a stalwart of the UK jazz scene, teacher and foil for an impressive roster of bands and artists including Soweto Kinch, Kit Downes, Yazz Ahmed and Sly And The Family Drone) will be familiar to many on the contemporary improvisational scene.
All three crossed paths through the New River Studios arts space in London, forming a trio off the back of a series of improvised gigs in the capital. In partially describing their evolution and process they’ve named themselves after one of the natural world’s largest single living connective organisms, or in its scientific terminology, “a clonal organism that represents an individual male quaking aspen that spans 106 acres and is the largest tree by weight and by landmass.” This breathing, living behemoth of plant life is, in case you were interested, located in the District of Fishlake National Forest, between Colorado and South-Central Utah.
Growing in a quasi-organic abstract fashion, the drum and percussion heavy avant-garde movements and stirrings on the trio’s debut album take electroacoustic probes, prods and tumultuous splashes into the depths as a foundation to build otherworldly atmospheric workouts, prowls and freeform breakouts. Recognizable instruments and electronic elements, effects are used to evoke the most unusual and sometimes esoteric. An assemblage of trinkets, bells, finger cymbals, metallic textures, pots and pans and tubular scaffolding are used alongside the drum kit to evoke the influence of such luminaries of the form as the Art Ensemble Of Chicago (mentioned in the PR notes that accompanied this release), but to my ears, also the E.F.S experiment extractions from Can’s Limited/Unlimited LPs, Valentina Magaletti, Krononaut, Mani Neumeier and, on the weird d’n’b veiled clanged and distorted ‘Fluffy Wires’ like Matthewdavid warping a samba band of drummers. However, the peculiarly named ‘Eno’s Bathroom’ is not what I would imagine the ambient doyen’s bathroom to sound like at all; less scented candles, sandalwood and eco-friendly, fair trade handmade soap and more krautrock and ghost freighter Tibetan lurking mind-bended weirdness.
Titles, like much of the music, is on the disturbing side with references to marine deaths (the windbreaker flapping prowl into the ocean abysses ‘The Graveyard Of Sharks’ and incipient sonar signaled, dub-y ricochet thrash around in marooned waters ‘Dolphin Suicide’) and blamed birds (the final wing-flapped primordial squelch, and mystical gongs, bowls and tool brushed and sifted ‘It Must Have Been The Magpies’ –our common English garden visitor has a bad rep for a variety of things, from the old adage about bad luck to stealing anything that glitters, and for savagely protecting its nests).
An evolving organism of their own making, breaking out of, growing and expanding the perimeters of improvised electroacoustic experimentation, the Pando Pando trio make unsettling tones and sounds, rhythms and serialism for ecologically climatic times.
Audio Obscura ‘Acid Field Recordings In Dub’
(Subexotic Records) 26th April 2024
Drifting in and out of post-op drug-induced recuperation, Neil Stringfellow (aka Audio Obscura) laces his dreamscapes and stupors with signature 303 acid squelches and dial releases, frequencies, snatches of broadcasts and bubbled liquids; much of which is transformed or made out of the archive of sounds he’s built up over the last twelve years, from a recurring flock of chirping birdlife to the innocuous, taken for granted and missed, sounds of the streets outside and daily interactions between, in this case, hidden sources of dialogue and conversation, even child’s play.
Take all that and expand the mystery, the unease and esoteric with a wafted reverberation and echo of dub and you have a real hallucinogenic experience, the ebbing of the consciousness between passages of the recognizable and distorted. That roosting menagerie of birds that Neil could hear from his hospital bedside, out of the window on one humid day in 2022, now resembles the acid-dial-turns of Mike Dred, a street cleaner’s broom, banging against his cart as he wheelbarrows it down a hill in Norwich, suddenly mimics a dub snare drum when added with plenty of On-U Sound echo.
The gravity fields, cartography, the memorable (through a soporific haze of painkillers) passages of a day and the unidentified coastline take on otherworldly dimensions through this mirage-inducing lens as elements of Air Liquide, The Orb, Amorphous Androgynous, Cousin Silas And The Glove Of Bones, FSOL, Andrew Wasylak and Cabaret Voltaire pass through – the latter is unsurprising, and not for the obvious reasons that CV are just one of the all-time most influential and inspired electronic groups of all time but because the Cabaret’s Chris Watson hosted a field recording introductory week that Neil attended.
Field recording adventures in sound, under the dreaded sirens of a nuclear winter and apocalyptic distress, this album is a lucid acid wash of near-remembered haunted piano melodies, various sonic yips and yeeps, bulb-shaped notes, recalled melodica, lost transmissions half-heard, radioactive effects, the atonal and prowling. Paranoia meets the languorous and medicated on a productive experiment in acid-dub and sound art.
Khôra ‘Gestures Of Perception’
(Marionette) 19th April 2024
Ambitious in scope and influence, Matthew Ramolo’s Plato-coined Khôra vessel overlaps the afflatus with the mythological, hermetic and philosophical across a double-album spread of peregrinations, processions and transcendental mysticism. References abound from opened seals, with nods to branches of Buddhism, astronomy, the Hellenic, Tibetan, Heliopolis and atavistic: all the way back to the creation myth. Literally from the ground up (the Dzogchen concept of “rigpa”, which subscribes the qualities of purity, spontaneity and compassion to the primordial ground), Ramolo, using an apparatus of international instrumentation, drums-up simultaneous visions of the new age and alien. Name checking the Latinized, the Orient and spiritual Asia in its many forms, but also cosmic projecting, the alchemy at play on this opus vibrates with evocations of ksmische, Jon Hassell’s “fourth world musics” explorations, trance, magnetic electronics, courtly and ceremonial.
The central sounds are percussive in nature; from those Tibetan stirrings of bowls, tubular bells, wind chimes and movements that sound like the turning of a mani wheel, to claves, what sounds like stones, a scaffold of pans and tubes, and frame, hand and other more rhythmic drums. Other elements include electronic vapours and waves, the springy and plucked, divine radio and satellite transmissions, occasional bellowed wafts and bulb shaped notes of light. Yogi talks to, well…the world, as nirvana is opened to all on this trip of dial up meditations, explorations and mysterious off-world atmospherics. The echoes of Syrinx, Kalacakra, Bhajan Bhoy, Ariel Kalma, A.R. & Machines, Sergius Golowin and Iasos wrap themselves around an epic suite of spiritual and mystical excursions in the pursuit of navigating a formless, third way through new envisaged worlds: or something like that. Eastern spiritual music is often abstracted in this world, merged with hidden sources to produce something familiar yet a bit different.
Esbe ‘La Serenissima’
(New Cat Music)
Inhabiting each world she enters as if it were a past life, another reincarnation, the gifted singer-songwriter Esbe steps right out of the times, the locations and scenery as if she was born to it. From atavistic Egyptology to classic songbook reinterpretations, from across the ages and genres, Esbe seems to belong to whatever setting she channels.
Proving consistent in every endeavor and prolific, she now releases her ninth album of magical revue; once more interpreting the old, but also conjuring up original compositions and arrangements that congruously feel like part of the traditional cannon. Sweeping into the city of duality, Venice, or rather the 17th century anointed “La Serenissima” as it was once known, Esbe channels its famous history, literature, art and architecture; from a secret rendezvous on a canal bridge to masked balls, painted scenes from the late Renaissance and cinematic sweeps that move like the tidal currents out of the city and carry on towards the exotic and cosmopolitan hubs of this city-state’s once expansive empire of trading routes. I say duality, because this is both the city of love and center of much political and stately intrigue during the Medieval period, when what we now know as a unified Italian geography was split into various warring and competing Papal states; the port cities being amongst the strongest, carrying more weight with their navies and trading fleets, able to negotiate or bring in allies from abroad to support their claims of dominance.
Mentioned as an inspiration, Shakespeare’s The Merchant Of Venice – or rather its most famed locations within the city – throws up all kinds of Anti-Semitic stereotypes; the city’s Jewish ghetto appalled a conquering Napoléon centuries later: commanding the French forces that occupied Venice in 1797, the as yet to be emperor would famously end the ghetto’s separation from the rest of the city, removing barriers and renaming it the Contrada dell’unione. But Esbe is tapping into the city’s mystery, its art and majesty, whilst casting yearns outbound from the harbor to old trading routes in the Med and further abroad: see the heart-wrenching, diaphanous soaring operatic ‘Palazzo’, a Thomas Newman modern Bond-esque filmic score that evokes Istanbul, passionately sung in the Turkish language.
The very embodiment of a certain style of Venetian art, Canaletto’s iconic (though many disparage it as mere chocolate box art) cityscape dioramas are referenced within the PR briefing; a inspiration, jump off point for magical lyrical and musical painting and storytelling imagination. Almost a feature of a certain time back in England, my late grandfather like many of his generation, had a print on the wall – of Italian decent himself, his one and only actual visit to the homeland was as part of the Allied forces making their way up through Italy to capture Rome during WWII, and even then, he never managed to get to Venice. You can now imagine Esbe, one hand trailing in the canal waters or “sighing” over a romantic set bridge gazing at the light play on the surrounding architecture; dreamily envisioning a bygone time as she sings and coos about imagined liaisons, and characters that could have walked straight off a Medieval tapestry.
As with most of her work, Esbe balances the atavistic and traditional with more modern electronic vapours and wisps of the esoteric, haunting and spellbinding. Sounding somewhere between Dead Can Dance, Maria Callas, the Baroque, folk and Arabian, she can turn a foggy apparitional mystique into an aria, an expelled breath into a whole act, or story. Her most obvious talent is with that already described voice, which is as dramatic and theatrical as it is ethereal and subtle; delivering a suspenseful Latinized lulled and desired vocal on the Catholic regal service ‘Te Amo’ – luring us towards a steeped in mystery and serious alter -, and lending a near dreamy tidal pulled entranced performance on the romantic vision ‘Amarilli, Mia Bella’ – a reinterpretation of Giulio Caccini’s operatic love song, written for the 1602 Le Nuove Musiche collection of monodies and songs for solo voice and basso continuo.
Classical styles feature heavily, but are veiled or gauzily enveloped to sound more haunting, atmospheric and even like a mirage in some cases. Throughout it all the instrumentation, from chamber to synths, guitars and the sound of bubbling waters, are artfully suggestive and stirring; scoring the drama, downcast lament of a returning army from one of the Papal wars, or in emoting misty-eyed overtures to mysterious subjects.
Esbe once again breathes life into her surroundings, this time around playing with and choreographing an inspired songbook of Venetian evocations; absorbing the lagoon and canals of this impressive, iconic city and its forbearers to envision something that’s simultaneously magical and hauntingly surreal.
Hi, my name is Dominic Valvona and I’m the Founder of the music/culture blog monolithcocktail.com For the last ten years I’ve featured and supported music, musicians and labels we love across genres from around the world that we think you’ll want to know about. No content on the site is paid for or sponsored and we only feature artists we have genuine respect for /love. If you enjoy our reviews (and we often write long, thoughtful ones), found a new artist you admire or if we have featured you or artists you represent and would like to buy us a coffee at https://ko-fi.com/monolithcocktail to say cheers for spreading the word, then that would be much appreciated.
Our Daily Bread 615: Sahra Halgan ‘Hiddo Dhawr’
March 26, 2024
ALBUM REVIEW: DOMINIC VALVONA
Sahra Halgan ‘Hiddo Dhawr’
(Danaya) 29th March 2024
Few artists from the disputed region of Somaliland could qualify better than the singer, freedom fighter and activist Shara Halgan to represent their country’s musical legacy. As an unofficial cultural ambassador and symbol for female empowerment Halgan’s journey is an inspiring one: Forced out of her homeland during a destructive civil war – in which she played a part in nursing and “comforting” fighters from Somaliland’s secession movement, sometimes alleviating suffering through song –, Halgan had to flee abroad to “survive” hardships and dislocation in France, but eventually, a decade after the overthrow of Siad Barre’s ruling military junta, returned home to motivate and promote proud in Somaliland’s cultural heritage.
It was during her time in France, removed from her roots and homesick, that Halgan would meet the musicians that went on to form her studio and touring band: step forward percussionist and founder of the French-Malian group BKO Quintet, Aymeric Krol, and the guitarist and member of the Swiss ensemble Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp and L’etrangleuse, Maël Salètes. Both appear on the latest, and third Halgan album, alongside newest recruit Régis Monte, who adds “vintage organ” and “proto-electronic embellishments” to the heady and fuzzed mix.
Before we go any further, a little insight, context is called for, as Halgan’s themes, messages are wrapped up in the history, turmoil and ambitions of this disputed region on the Horn of Africa. Firstly, Somaliland is an independent state within the greater scope of a troubled geography, neighbour’s to Somalia, Djibouti and Ethiopia. Going back to the 7th century, this land’s tribes were swept up in the great Islamic conversion, but by the 14th century, as power shifted between states and kingdoms, they came under the suzerainty of the, then, Christian Ethiopian Empire. Islam would always remain integral, through not only its teachings but poetry too. Fast-forward to the late 1800s and the arrival of the British, who established the troublesome protectorate of British Somaliland; joined in the region by the ambitions of Italy. Although this forced state lasted up until independence in 1960, there would be a number of rebellions and breakaway movements – most notably, the Dervish State revolt set up by Sayyid Mohamed and the poet Salihiyya Sufi in the late 1800s and early 1900s; a convoluted story that needs far more space and depth than I can offer, but that’s goals were to essentially reestablish the Sufi system of governance and independence; this period would eventually lead to the establishment of the state of Somalia, but also war amongst the colonial powers and neighbouring Ethiopia.
When independence did arrive in 1960, there was a brief blossoming for Somaliland, the “de jure” unrecognized breakaway part of Somali. Existing for a mere five years as a “sovereign entity”, it was gobbled up into the greater Republic of Somalia. But it is said that this fleeting state was economically and artistically fully independent and burgeoning before “internal tensions and violent repression” took its toll; leading later to the already mentioned civil war that kicked off in 1981, finally ending with the overthrow of Siad Barre and his military junta in 1991. Somaliland currently remains a fully functioning, near stable, state, one of the safest in the region despite all the turmoil and civil war over the border in Ethiopia, the turmoil of Somali and greater dangers of Islamic insurgencies, and now the extended crisis taking hold in the Middle East.
Since her return to the homeland in 2005, Halgan has helped nourish and cultivate a female-led scene by setting up the capital’s first music venue in the more tranquil surroundings of downtown Hargeisa – the once atavistic trading hub and watering hole for the local tribes, growing into a successful city over time, it’s also the de facto governing capital of Somaliland. The name of which, Hiddo Dhawr (which the PR notes translate literally as “promote culture”), now lends its name to this new album of eclectic fusions and Somaliland traditions. A hybrid if you will, Halgan and her group really open up to an abundance of influences and atmospheres whilst retaining the unmistakable sound of the environment and legacy; from the wild trills to griot storytelling poetics and general effortless sounding buoyancy and contoured sand dune rhythms and feel.
But first, the lead single and opening track, ‘Sharaf’ bounds in on a semi-garage, semi-Glam-rock and semi-swamp-boogie backbeat. A “love song and hymn to the importance of human dignity”, this electrified, fuzzy scuzz guitar licked desert rocker has both afflatus and loving intentions; Halgan’s voice nothing but lifting and softly commanding. By the second track, ‘Laga’, a “tender love song” is transported to both Egypt and Bamako in Mali, via the organ prods and radiant suffused keys of both Question Mark and the Mysterians and Hailu Mergia.
Melodious examples of the “modern style” of Qaraami can be found transformed on bluesy and wrangled dirty guitar, trinket jingling, and rocking accompanied title-track, and the soul-beat, hand-clapped giddy ‘Diiyoohidii’. Whilst that age-old form’s subject matter is love, Halgan replaces it with a love for her people, the culture and fertile land itself. Both are beautifully, emotionally conveyed, with a semblance of both pop and rock ‘n’ roll – I’m hearing both The Artic Monkeys and Dirt Music with a touch of Les Amazones d’Afrique.
Some songs change vocally between the lyrical and the narrated, or the spoken. ‘Lilalaw’ features the later, an address to a near two-tone beat fusion of the spacy desert trance, twirled and trundled African percussion and swamp blues pedals fuzz. The finale, ‘Dareen’, is almost entirely stripped back to allow a longing unimpeded curtain call from Halgan; only the suffused subtle keys of a Muscle Shoals-like organ across the swept vistas is needed. Talking of atmospheres, the Malian blues and dried bones and beads shaken ‘Hooyalay’ features cosmic desolation and misty mysterious vibes and winds, making it the album’s most experimental song.
Enriched soul music with a edge and buzz, Halgan and her troupe strike a balance between the heartfelt and empowered on electrifying album; that focal voice sounding so fresh and young yet wise and experienced, able to encapsulate a whole culture whilst moving forward.
A WORLD OF SONIC/MUSICAL DISCOVERIES REVIEWED BY DOMINIC VALVONA
(Unless stated otherwise, all releases are available now)
(Photo : Zara Saraon @zarasaraon)
Luce Mawdsley ‘Northwest & Nebulous’
(Pure O Records) 29th March 2024
Over several years now the former Mugstar guitarist Luce Mawdsley has progressively shorn the more predatory slurred spoken-word mise-en-scenes and lurid, sleazy torturous self-harm from their music; gradually removing the “verbasier” programmed-like demonic effects from their voice and freeing themselves from a circled abyss of sonnets.
During that time Luce has also gravitated ever nearer towards a self-described “queer” vision of the Western soundtrack. This can be especially felt and heard on the last solo album to be featured and premiered on the Monolith Cocktail, Vulgar Displays Of Affection, which showed the Liverpool-based artist/musician moseying to a removed, transported alternative version of this Western re-imaging: a culminated merger of Morricone, Blood Meridian, Crime And The City Solution, El Topo and Hellenica.
Now onto their sixth studio album proper, Luce not only fully embraces that Americana influence but also now joins it with echoes of the English pastoral tradition and chamber music.
Another alternative score, and another progressive step in Luce’s well-being and journey of self-discovery and identity, all traces of their voice have been erased to escape an unhealthy cycle of unhappiness. In penning those disturbed and candid poetics and morbid descriptions, Luce wasn’t released from their torment, but instead locked into a spiral of reinforced misery. Breaking free from that process, Luce has found sanctum with their latest journey-like score, Northwest & Nebulous – the first to be released on Luce’s own label imprint, Pure O Records. Through a “non-human lens” the often amorphous, sometimes ambiguous, landscapes of this new record seem to let nature take its course: wherever it may lead.
Under the auspices of a Grade II listed Scandinavian church in Liverpool, and with chamber pairing of Nicholas Branton on clarinets and Rachel Nicholas on viola (making another appearance after adding something of the ethereal to the Vulgar Displays Of Affection album) at Luce’s side, a magical bucolic spell is unlocked. The music and atmospheres are mysterious in part, yet more natural and placeable, invoking landscapes, lakesides, and woodlands simultaneously quintessentially English and yet also American – think the Catskills, the Appalachians, and the Deep South. Within that tapestry the wildlife is mimicked with pecking and swanned charm – on the cockerel evoked ‘Roosting’, you could imagine a Jemima Puddle-duck like character waddling across the barnyard, albeit to a reimagined vision of bluegrass music composed by Vaughan Williams.
An holistic record that rescores the English scenery and places held near for Luce, the unfolding stages are both beautifully conveyed and hallucinatory in equal measure; a retold fairytale without any prompts, and without a human cast; a window in on the enchantments but also non-hierarchical, non-binary and free nature of the wilds and geography: a metaphor for Luce’s struggles to find an identity that feels natural, safe and unburdened.
One part classical, one part Americana, and one part folksy (a touch of the Celtic too) there’s still a very modern twist to what we may identify as the familiar: imagine Prokofiev on an acid trip, or Ry Cooder (all the melted, bendy, twanged, picked, tremolo guitar work down to Luce, who also provides the organ and percussion) in an English pasture laying down breadcrumbs for Hampshire & Foat. And then again, there are echoes of the occult, a little Wicca, and the occasional wilder sound of the clarinet harking like Anthony Braxton. The Moody Blues, Between, Jade Warrior, Federico Balducci, Andrew Wasylyk all appear on the horizon of this earthly paradise and portal. Luce might just have found their sanctuary amongst the unencumbered undergrowth; beside the refracted light inspired lakes, the gentle versants, and valleys of Northern England. Luce’s imagination is certainly in a better place, the organic nature of their music proving creatively successful in counterbalancing two great and much inspired landscapes together to produce something very beautiful and magical.
Ivo Perelman, Chad Fowler, Reggie Workman and Andrew Cyrille ‘Embracing The Unknown’ (Mahakala Music) 29th March 2024
A true “cross-generational” (with two of the participants born in the 1930s) coming together of avant-garde, freeform and hard bop talent, the ensemble quartet of Ivo Perelman, Chad Fowler, Reggie Workman and Andrew Cyrille “embrace” experiment. You could call it an extemporized gathering, with no prior arrangements and not much in the way of dialogue. And you called also say it was an intentional sounding collaboration, taking in, as it does, the Brazilian roots of the tenor saxophonist Perelman and the American roots (from Arkansas to Memphis, Philly and New York) of stritch (a large straight sax or alto sax without the curved bell) and saxello (a unique soprano sax with a curved bell and neck that lets out a distinctive sound) player Fowler, bass, saw and percussionist Workman and fellow percussionist Cyrille.
Released on Fowler’s own imprint, this circle of acclaimed and proficient artists/musicians brings a wealth of experience to the studio, performance space. Workman’s CV alone is incredible, knocking around with such gods of the form as Coltrane, Blakey and Monk, whilst drummer Cyrille had a long-standing association with the free jazz pianist-poet luminary Cecil Taylor. For their parts, Perelman has a prolific catalogue of albums stretching back to his debut in 1989 (moving from his native Sao Paulo that same year to New York), whilst the multi-instrumentalist Fowler has played on and produced everything from soul to R&B and jazz recordings.
From the titles alone this pooling of experiences, from across 70 plus odd years, Embracing The Unknown takes an undefined freeform journey of the mind; the references to “self” to “reflection” and “introspection” obvious, prompted and described, in a fashion, by the tones, pitches, entanglements, wails, strains and blasts of intensity. An expulsion of expressive query, and maybe a lighthearted leap from the psychiatrist’s couch the self-exploration of the mind and soul combine to evoke shades of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Marshall Allen, Pharoah Sanders, John Zorn, Barney Wilen, Roscoe Mitchell and Sam Rivers. The inner self is landscaped with the skylines of New York, but a semblance also of a transported South America and New Orleans in the untethered mix.
The various saxophones often resemble a gaggle of geese, or squeak, shrill, squawk, and squeal to the rafters. Hysterics of a kind are met with the giddy and more soul-searching passages. And then you get almost apparition-style spells: more playful than scary. Those horns can pierce but also serenade wistfully, as they do on the measured and near soliloquy sonnet, and Coltrane-light ‘Self-Reflection’. The percussive elements and drums can also be varied, with more springy “boings”, metal and tin cup scuttles and rattles, and the dusting, sieving of drum skins. Those same drums break out at times into a pattern of a kind; sometimes in an almost freeform swing fashion and at others, almost hitting hard bop. It’s hard to describe or even get across what I mean, but certainly the finale, ‘Self-Contemplation’, has the spindled and tinny semblance of something approaching Latin America.
Making the abstract seem even more so, yet somehow conveying mood, emotions and self-expression, this descriptive and totally improvisational master class in free-thought-jazz somehow captures the internal struggles and reflections of the mind during an age of high anxiety, rage, divisiveness and unease.
Arushi Jain ‘Delight’
(Leaving Records) 29th March 2024
Rejuvenation, reinvention and reenergized, the melodious form of the Ragga Bageshri is adopted by the polymath artist, musician, composer, vocalist, engineer and ‘modular synthesist’ Arushi Jain on the follow up to 2021’s well-received Under A Lilac Sky album. Undergoing various changes, imbued with, and surrounded by, the wildlife, light, and art of an empty house on the seaside, that original romantic Indian ragga of longing conveyed the feelings of a lover waiting to reunite with their beloved, but Jain now replaces that devotional love with invocations of “delight”: or as Jain puts it, “…to instill belief in the ever-present nature of delight…assert[ing] the need to actively seek it when not readily found.”
Jain also transduces and transforms the arrangement and the essence of that tradition into something very futuristic, artful, and ethereal sounding; the main sound, sonic and instrument being that incredible voice, which can be as sonorous as it can be vaporous. Across nine highly atmospheric tracks of the astral, celestial, ebbing, beatific and technological, that voice is built upon with layers of tonal lulls and coos or, in stark but reverberated contrast, sings to the heavens, the higher learning. Yet there are also assonant utterings that call to the “void”; propelled forward on a Basic Channel, Jeff Mills-esque chopper-like minimalist techno beat. At times those effected vocals and wafted harmonies are morphed into synthesized waves and lines (at one point almost monastic), and at other times are left to convey the sentiments of the theme – the quasi-remix like ‘You Are Irresistible’ being the clearest example; a mix of club, modern warbled R&B and hypnotizing cosmic dream spells.
Underneath, undulating or attentively in unison with that magical voice there’s a sophisticated envelope of light-giving arpeggiator and algorithms, and the distilled, transparent, and warping. The environment is itself, as I mentioned earlier, transduced into an artificial metallic menagerie, with the sun’s rays and beams gently radiating and penetrating the dreamy new age and trance-y ambience. Notes fall, cascade, and drop like crystalloid bulbs, whilst a synthesized symphonic orchestra pipes up with a whistled and fluty spring and bounce. I can hear a semblance of marimba, or something very much like it bobbling about on ‘Our Teaching Tongues’, which also features a building chopper, rotor-bladed circulation of minimalist electronic. And there seems to be some sort of mizzle-like seepage of a horn too in places.
Every element is put together wonderfully as a softened balance is sort between the soaring and suffused, insularly reflected and the amorphously never-ending. And through it all “delight” is sort out, courted, embraced and enraptured in a futuristic retelling of sagacious Indian arts, wills and universal feels; producing an extraordinary and diaphanous biosphere.
Ill Considered ‘Precipice’
(New Soil) 22nd March 2024
Despite the hurry to lay down this stripped-down improvised vision of the jazz ensemble – recorded in a day, with no overdubs; mixed the following day –, the refreshed Ill Considered trio exercise a new verve and itch to reassemble, recreate and reignite without sounding in a rush. Back to a core triumvirate lineup of Idris Rahman on saxophone, Liran Donin on bass and Emre Ramazanoglu on drums, the very much lauded UK jazz collective set a new course free of augmentation and effects; an invocation of the great trios of jazz’s golden age through a modern lens, with all the history and development that comes with it.
Away from the dramatics of the album’s “precipice” title, this is a group in flux, reconnecting perhaps with the basics in an act of renewal (a lot the “re” going on I know); starting over you could say, but nothing so year zero as that. The dynamics and interactions of which are balanced: the wild with a certain tightness, and an abstractedness and playfulness that never quite breaks out into the freeform. Whilst Rahman’s saxophone penetrates and shrills, sometimes bristles and trills more fervently, you can always recognize it – a more melodic hybrid of Sam Rivers, Jonah Parzen-Johnson and Alex Roth. His foils on drums and bass seem pretty anchored as they lay down the various rhythms and feels. Donin seems to cross post-punk, no wave (there’s a particular Liquid Liquid spin on the Arthur Russell goes downtown ‘Linus With The Sick Burn’) and, of course, jazz bass lines, repeated prods, probes and elasticated wobbles, whilst Ramazanglu plays with breakbeats, drills, rattled spidery sticks and more percussive sounding scuttles.
Whether the titles came later, or were used as prompts, reference points, they do go some way in describing the performances: to a point. Name checking mythology, repair and the natural world, improvisations like ‘Vespa Crabro’, as in the European hornet, does have a real spikey buzz and sting to it; the bass like a rubber band being pulled and twanged in a busy manner, whilst the sax honks and cuts right through like the angry said wasp darting from one direction to the next. The fire ants, ‘Solenopsis’, that lend their name to the ninth improvisation on this album evoke West Africa; a desert farm setting in which the drums seem to work off the metals, the cattle bells and water troughs as the sax pecks bird-like, or flits about on the dry earth. ‘Kintsugi’ feeds into the thinking behind this slimmed-down chapter of the group; referencing as it does the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with slow-drying ‘urushiol’ based lacquers, dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver or platinum. The philosophy of which is that you treat breakage and repair as part of that objects history, rather than try to disguise it. Sound wise, the trio seems to touch on splayed Afro-rhythms and hip-hop, as the bass bounces in the spaces and skips, and the sax reverberates and drifts. ‘Katabatic’ on the other hand, takes a chthonian journey into Greek myth with a tunneled sax circulating in an underworld atmosphere of mysterious probes and J Dilla breaks.
Ill Considered in trio form is neither reductive nor compromised, managing instead to transform and amplify the basics into a concentration of promising new material. Laid down in the moment, feeding off of each other’s energy but sense of control and direction too, they open up their horizons with a riff on the jazz trio idiom.
Alison Cotton ‘Engelchen’
(Rocket Recordings)
In the wake of the barbaric terrorism of Hamas on October 7th, and the ensuing destructive retaliation/ obliteration of Gaza by Israel since, there seems little room – let alone nuance and balance – on the debate; battle lines have been drawn and divisions sowed. And so this inspired tale of ‘derring-do’ (originally performed live at the Seventeen Nineteen Holy Church in Sunderland) performance suite from the Sunderland composer Alison Cotton is a most timely reminder of dark history, but also of altruistic acts of kindness.
Scoring the story of the innocuous Cook sisters, Ida and Louise, and their incredibly brave rescue attempts to save the lives of twenty-nine Jews from occupied Europe during the build-up and eventual outbreak of WWII, Cotton ties in the modern plight of refugees escaping similar persecutions: the album’s reprised neo-classical pained and suffered leitmotif, and a capella style stirring voices, are used on the finale, ‘Engelchen Now’, to draw attention to a female Kurdish “teacher/activist”, making a similar passage and aided by similar “angels” over eight years later.
Originally from Cotton’s hometown, the Cook sisters moved on to London, with jobs in the civil services, and remained largely innocuous until their obsession for opera took them to Germany during Hitler’s rise to power. In an age when international travel was still very much the preserve and enjoyment of the upper echelons of society, the sisters managed to visit many of the famous opera houses on both the continent and across the Atlantic. Over the course of many years they built up friendships with such well-known and respected figures as the Austrian conductor Clemens Krauss and his wife, the Romanian opera singer Viorica Ursuleac, whilst also hobnobbing with such stars of the form like Rosa Ponselle and Ezio Pinza. Through sending boutiques to dressing rooms, requesting autographs and photographs with the stars, the Cook sisters would build up a network that would prove vital in saving Jews from the Nazi purge.
Almost like characters from an Ealing Comedy or Hitchcock movie, the sisters surface naivety and eccentricity proved a good cover; the sisters managing to bluff their way past SS guards on a few occasions, and remain undetected even when smuggling through those escapees furs and jewelry. Unflattering, but both sisters were described as being “plain” and “gawky”, their clothes made from magazine patterns by Ida. And so they were often dismissed: under the radar as it were. They used this to their advantage, and in so doing saved many lives in what was a most dangerous climate.
For their kind acts they were anointed as “Engelchens” (“angels”), and given the honorific title of Righteous Among the Nations: a title used by ‘Israel to describe all of the non-Jews who, for purely altruistic reasons, risked their lives in order to save Jews from being exterminated by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust.’
Despite this, the Cook sisters’ exploits have remained relatively obscure: although Ida did pen a memoir, We Followed Our Stars, in the 1950s (reprinted as Safe Passage in 2008), and there is a possible film adaptation in the works. (Ida incidentally wasn’t the only writer, sibling Louise, going under the pen name of Mary Burchell, had a sideline in writing romances for Mills & Boon). Through their connection with Cotton’s Sunderland hometown, that story is now picked-up and relived: reimagined through the use of strings and voice by a dedicated composer.
Less a morbid, dark soundtrack to the evils of the Nazi regime and Holocaust, Cotton instead conveys the enormity and the danger of the Cook’s enterprise through slow tidal movements, tones, intonations and changes in the atmosphere. Throughout it all a prevailing presence and emotional pull can be felt: The mood music of grief, the plaintive and sorrowful cumulating in a beautifully played series of arrangements and suites that are as somber as they are beautiful and moving – reminding me in parts of Alex Stolze, Anne Müller, Simon McCorry and Aftab Darvishi.
Both wordless Hebrew hymnal lulls and sung poetics hold and swim in the haunted ripples of time, as the story unfolds in bellowed and concertinaed breaths and to the bowed strains of strings. There are subtle drums too on occasion, either brushed and sieved, or marching like a softened military drill – prompting that danger I mentioned, militaristic Germany, the warning of a firing squad and peril.
Some movements have a squeezebox, almost folk and near Celtic, saltiness that evokes the sea; none more so than the album’s first single, ‘The Letter Burning’. Pulled, drawn from obfuscation, the correspondence that was burned by Louise from that time, are ruminated upon to the strike of the gong and an organ-like (could be a harmonium) tide of simultaneously haunting and dreamy a capella remembrance and woe. Sung references are made to those “saved”, and the location where news of their plight was first discussed. Whilst the intentions behind the erasure of these letters are unknown, Cotton interprets Louise’s actions as a gesture of remorse at all those poor souls the sisters couldn’t save: literally haunted by the thought of their fates. Perhaps it was an attempt at moving on with their lives, to not dwell on such tragedy, and instead look to more hopeful times. The world was moving on, quickly forgetting, even aiding and abetting many former Nazis. After the anger and some justice, initial worldwide broadcasted trials soon vanished from the public psyche. Many perpetrators, facilitators of that regime were soon forgotten.
In the wake of another tumultuous, scary period of anti-Semitism, but in a more general manner, with hostility at an all time high towards to the refugee community, it is such stories and projects as Cotton’s Engelchen that remind us of the cost of our loss of humility and humanity. With so many layers to the Cook sisters’ story (let alone the obvious there’s a strong feminist angle to raise) and connotations for our own time, this score, soundtrack, performance comes full circle: the fates of 1930s/40s Jews in Germany tied to those of Kurds and other persecuted ethnic groups in the 21st century.
Andrew Heath And Mi Cosa de Resistence ‘Café Tristesse’
(Audiobulb) 16th March 2024
Composer of “lower case” minimalism Andrew Heath and his willing foil on this collaboration, the Argentinian ambient composer Fernando Perales (under the guises of his Mi Cosa de Resistence alias), slow down time to convey abstract disquiet and a sense of the plaintive on their first proper album together – the pair previously worked together on A Speechless Body, but this is their first actual fully shared collaborative immersion. For the title translates from the French as “a state of melancholy sadness”; an encapsulation of a mood made famous and iconic by the lauded surrealist and poet Paul Éluard who in turn inspired his French compatriot Françoise Sagan to pen the 1954 novel Bonjour Tristesse, which went on to spawn a movie adaptation. Obviously the “café” part if that album title needs less explanation or inquiry, evoking as it does the legacy of ruminating whilst measuring the passage of time sipping on a cappuccino or knocking back espressos: The café as centre of every movement worth mentioning in the 19th and 20th centuries, especially in Europe where this sort of almost resigned and wistful contemplation.
Having built up quite the reputations and CVs (Heath no stranger to this blog, with his last solo album, Scapa Flow making our “choice albums of 2023” lists) both participants bring much adroit subtlety to this dreamy drifting traverse of feelings that cannot be described so much in words or song. Perales’ main job seems to be in picking out the right atmospheric guitar notes, the right motifs and bended mirages, which in turn either linger or float over Heaths vapours, ambient scapes and wafts. Across strange refractive sun-lit Western vistas, near ethereal visions and rain swept European boulevards, those synthesized and tremulous, gently plucked and pinged instruments – a signature presence too of Heath’s translucent and more dulled piano is also in attendance – somehow manifest images of the French waiter taking his break in-between services, taking a drag perhaps on a cigarette to unwind from the tensions, stresses as he or she watches the comings and goings on the street outside: Time seems to be suspended during these moments of contemplation.
And yet there are moments that, to me, suggest an almost Vangelis-style Blade Runner kind of pathos (especially the ambient vision ‘The Absentee’). There’s certainly the air of mystery suffused throughout this album of musical novellas. If the guitar work of Fererico Balducci and Myles Cochran enthuse merging perfectly with invocations of Eno, John Laneand Roedelius enthuse you then this perfectly matched collaborative affair of the heart and cerebral feels will very much impress.
NAH ‘Totally Recalled’
(Viernulvier Records) 15th March 2024
Not so much disjointed or a clattering collision but more an “overlapping” controlled chaos of influences, sounds and beats, the drummer, producer and visual artist NAH rebuilds and shuttles a polygenesis set of rhythms into a noisy assemblage of broken beats, cosmic effects, repurposed House and Rave music, removed jazz, hip-hop, d’n’b and Techno.
Releasing this latest experiment, propelled from an effects pedal embellished drum kit, on the Ghent, Belgium art center of Viernulvier’s label (Use Knife, Youniss and Hieroglyphic Being), NAH’s sonic immersion is, when seen in the live environment, complimented with visuals. But I wouldn’t call this a art project as such, more an experiment in combining the chaos, constant generated overflow of information in a world in which technology encroaches ever more upon our understanding of being human: tying in with NAH’s balancing of the acoustic and synthetic.
This latest album “serves headphones submersion” but is better “witnessed live in all its decibel meter breaking glory.” It’s certainly full of noise and constantly on the move, shuttling, galloping and barreling around, or in pneumatic fashion, drilling those beats into the conscious. A jumbled cacophony at times of J Dilla, People Like Us, Plug, Wagon Christ, Bugz In The Attic and Cities Aviv (who is just one of many artists NAH has collaborated with over the years, since his debut in 2011) with transmogrified and more clearer vocal samples (many of which seem to have been borrowed off soul and R&B records), Totally Recalled is like an inner rolodex of logged breaks and snippets pulled together to create “alternative” movement of musical ideas, dynamisms. And so you might hear an alternative version of Tony Allen drumming on R&S Records in the 90s, or, Kosmische-like star gate synthesized space takeoffs as envisioned by Tomat. Some tracks seem to discombobulate hip-hip, d’n’b and hardcore Techno in one go; clattering together in the same space without sounding a mess, but somehow making perfect sense – imagine Madlib working with Jeff Mills. There’s even, what sounds like, a beat made out of a typewriter at one point.
Looped, remodelled, recharged and rebuilt, NAH’s methodology and processes continue to wrong-foot and drum up invigorating or overloaded rhythmic, percussive accelerations into immersive and exciting uncertainty.
Various ‘Africamore – The Afrofunk Side Of Italy (1973-1978)’
(Four Flies Records) 22nd March 2024
Shedding ever more light on Italian curiosities of a certain vintage and status, the Four Flies Records label digs out of the vaults another selection of cult finds; building on a rich archive catalogue of Italian film composers, personalities with a compilation of African and Afro-Caribbean inspired nuggets from a mixed bag of mavericks, entertainers, obscure bands and producers.
Covering a five-year period and the advent of the disco era, this showcase explores the Italian music industry’s fascination and adoption of African music and sounds in the 1970s, from the most sampled and covered African track of all time, the Cameroon saxophonist Manu Dibango’s ‘Soul Makossa’ – covered in this instance by African Revival (whoever the hell that was), who take it via the grasslands into Peter King and Fred Wesley territories -, to the imported vodun spells of Hispaniola – the Italian-Eritrean singer, entertainer, impresario and record producer Silvana Savorelli (who went under both the Tanya and, in this instance, the Lara Saint Paul aliases) works her kitsch magic on ‘The Voodoo Lady’; the sort of fake swamp mist effected Afro-Caribbean tropical lilt, with chuffing woodwind, that you might expect to hear in an episode of Miami Vice (and to think Savorelli was once produced by Quincy Jones, and this particular track, featured on her winning, commercially successful 1977 LP Saffo Music, amazingly enough featured The Pointer Sisters on backing vocals).
Prompted and influenced by what was developing across the Atlantic in the States, with the already mentioned Dibango classic picked up by such impresario DJs on the New York scene as Dave Mancuso (mentioned in the liner notes to this compilation) Italy gratefully received the Afro-funk, Afro-beat and Afro-Latin sounds. The infectious groove that would propel a boom in nightclubs, these sounds, tribal rhythms were both fired up and exploited in equal measures; although the Italian husband and wife duo behind Chrisma (made up from the couple’s names of Maurizio Arcieri and Christina Moser; later on in the new wave era renamed Krisma) has the legendry Ghanaian-British Afro-Funk band Osibisa providing the rhythm section on their delicious, tropically-lilted, semi-Gainsbourg mating dance, ‘Amore’ (produced, extraordinarily, by Nico Papathanassiou and his more famous sibling Vangelis), and the Jamaican actress, model, presenter, singer and, of all things, aphrodisiac cook book author Beryl Cunningham fronts the hand drum heavy, ocean side view cabaret ‘Why O’ – Beryl, who famously starred in the Italian erotic Le Salamandre drama before shooting to semi-fame in such films as The Weekend Murderers and The Black Decameron, sounds like a cross between Marva Broome and Miriam Makeba.
Expanding on that international field, there’s even room on this collection for the Indian percussionist Ramasandiran Somusundara, who offers up his “bean smuggling” single from 1973. A member at one time or other with Bambibanda E Melodie, Maya and New Trolls Atomic System (is that even real?!), his musicality in this regard seems to combine bush whacker rituals with Black Level on a classic Italo-funk record.
Returning to the Euro fold, Luca D’Ammonio mixes NYC Latin soul with Joe Baatan and Cymande on his white boogaloo mover ‘Oh Caron’, whilst the film composer (The Bronx Warrior, Our Man In Bagdad, The House By The Cemetery) Walter Rizzati rustles up a quasi streets of San Fran action thriller score on ‘L’unica Chance’: a paler shade of Black sounds, with a soft scuzz on the whacker guitar, some chuffing Jeremy Steig flute, and a touch of cool jazzy-funk organ and claves (the sort of music lapped up by Sven Wunders and Greg Foat at one time).
The strange pairing of The Real McCoys and Italian composer, arranger and TV personality Augusto Martelli (famous for his Il Dio Serpente theme, which topped the charts and set his career in motion) come up with the collection’s most unusual track, ‘Calories’, which seems to marry Nino Ferrer and the new wave in a limbo of libido thrusts and alluring promises of coquettish sexual desires. Covering everything from Saravah Records to the Jorge Autuori Trio, Idris Muhammad, Drummers of Burundi, Mongo Santamaria, Paulo Ferrarai, Bruno Nichols and the disco era, this compilation of cultish singles and album tracks is more Dr. No than Shaft In Africa – I’m almost detecting Iron Butterfly’s most famous riff on the more flowery, slick but wild ‘Africa Sound’ track by the duo of Jean Paul and Angelique, who were a woodwind/strings and guitar combo of note, originally making records together under the Elio & Angelique moniker. But then I’m being too harsh, as there are some right stonkers and infectious dancefloor fillers amongst the kitsch and enervated Afro influences. And many better known tracks and composers (see Albert “Weyman” Verrecchia) already finding an audience in the crate digger and vinyl aficionado communities. But if you thought you’d heard it all on the Italian music front, then Africamore will give succour to new discoveries, and fill in some of the history.
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 Revue: February 2024
February 29, 2024
ALL THE CHOICE MUSIC FROM THE LAST MONTH
Let’s keep this short and get straight to the action, with the musical journey we’ve created for you. From the Monolith Cocktail TEAM (that’s me, Dominic Valvona, plus Matt Oliver and Brian Bordello Shea) all the choice music from February on one exceptional, eclectic playlist.
:::TRACKLIST:::
Bab L’ Bluz ‘Imazighen’
Liraz ‘Bia Bia – Reeperbahn Festival Collide Session’
Trio Rosario ‘Cuande Me Muera’
Masta Ace & Marco Polo ‘Certified’
Your Old Droog w/ Roman Streetz ‘Northface With The ACGs’
clipping. ‘Tipsy’
Bostjan Simon ‘Bebey’
Vatannar & G.A.M.S. ‘Aminat Pt. 4’
Will C. ‘Colossal Pound Cake Break’
Yamin Semali ‘Boo Boo The Fool’
Juga-Naut ‘Shampain’
Revival Season ‘Chop’
Willie Evans Jr. ‘Bargaining’
Nowaah The Flood & Giallo Point ‘No Speculation’
Black Milk ‘In The Sky’
mui zyu ‘The Mould’
Ariel Kalma, Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer ‘Stay Centered’
OdNu + Umlaut ‘Kaizen’
Louis Carnell & Wu-Lu ‘Eight’
Madeleine Cocolas ‘Bodies II’
Otis Sandsjo ‘OOMY’
David Liebe Hart & Jason The Cat ‘I Believe In The Unknown’
Kahil El’Zabar’s Ethnic Heritage Ensemble ‘Open Me’
Confucius MC, Pitch 92 & Jehst ‘Days Hours Minutes’
Dr. Syntax & Gotcha ‘The Urge’
Sly Moon ‘Aces Baby’
Reef The Lost Cauze ‘Umar’s Revenge’
Renelle 893 & Bay29 ‘Art Thief’
Kingmakers Of Oakland ‘Too Long’
Kemastry, Jazz T & Ramson Badbonez ‘Apocalyptic Flows’
Dyr Faser ‘Bronze’
Ryann Gonsalves ‘Lost & Found’
Oliver Birch ‘On Our Hill’
BMX Bandits ‘Time To Get Away’
DAAY ‘Follower’
Maria Arnqvist ‘Rubies And Gold’
The Children’s Hour ‘Dance With Me’
The Pheromoans ‘Faith In The Future’
Boeckner ‘Euphoria’
epic45 ‘Be Nowwhere’
James jonathan Clancy ‘Black & White’
Flowertown ‘The Ring’
twin coast ‘Forget To Know’
The Legless Crabs ‘Stuckist Manifestos In The Western World’
The Deli, Moka Only & Baptiste Hayden ‘Fivefourthreetwoone’
Ol’ Burger Beats ‘For The Family FT. Awon’
Da Flyy Hooligan, D-Styles ‘Gallery Oasis’
Spectacular Diagnostics ‘1000 Heartbeats’
Our Daily Bread 612: Kahil El’Zabar’s Ethnic Heritage Ensemble ‘Open Me, A Higher Consciousness Of Sound And Spirit’
February 26, 2024
REVIEW/DOMINIC VALVONA
PHOTO CREDIT: TRIO SHOT BY CHRISTOPHER ANDREW
Kahil El’Zabar’s Ethnic Heritage Ensemble ‘Open Me, A Higher Consciousness Of Sound And Spirit’ (Spiritmuse Records) 8th March 2024
I need little persuasion to review this latest album from the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, having already subscribed and danced to the Kahil El’Zabar rhythm for some time now. I must also declare that this same label invited me a couple of years back to provide the liner notes to the Kahil El’Zabar’s Quartet’s A Time For Healing LP; one of now six such collaborative albums the Chicago doyen has released on the Spiritmuse platform in the last decade – arguably his most prolific period, in a career that stretches back across more than five decades as a willing foil sideman, bandleader and collaborator.
Hot-housed in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (the mid-1960s nonprofit organization instigated by Muhal Richard Abrams, Jodie Christian, Steve McCall and Phil Cohran in Chicago, which El’Zabar himself once chaired) incubator, El’Zabar’s percussive, drumming rhythms for the mind, body and soul, channeled the windy city’s rich musical lineage of jazz, blues, R&B, soul, Godspell and what would become house and dance music. Within that influence, you can hear the inspiration, pioneering spirit of Louis Armstrong, Jellyroll Morton, Sidney Bechet, Benny Goodman, and trace the beating language of the talking drums of the motherland. Even in that company of such acclaimed innovators, El’Zabar’s style, choice of instrumentation was remarkably unique.
Paying his dues under the mentorship of such deities of the form as Eddie Harris, the multi-instrumentalist and composer went on to found his most enduring troupe, the EHE, in 1974. And so hence the 50th anniversary release date of that group’s Open Me, A Higher Consciousness Of Sound And Spirit LP; a celebratory healing balm of both revisited originals and transformed classics that also coincides with Black History Month and the ensemble’s North American tour. Originally in quintet form, the EHE soon slimmed down to a trio by the time of their first official album release in 1981, the cut-to-the-chase, no explanations needed, entitled Three Gentlemen From Chicago. Whilst the lineup has changed over the ensuing decades (numbering the likes of Light Henry Huff, Kalaparusha Maurice Macintyre, Joseph Bowie, Hamiett Bluiett, and Craig Harris at any onetime over that timespan), in recent times El’Zabar has corralled the well-respected Chicago trumpet player and bandleader Corey Wilkes to his steady ranks, and invited in the Detroit-born baritone saxophonist Alex Harding, who he’s knocked about with since the beginning of the 2000s: both playing together in Joseph Bowie’s Defunkt. But in a change of direction, he’s brought in the evocative and wilder strings of the Chicago-based violin/viola player and leader James Sanders (notably leading the Latin ensembles Conjunto, and Proyecto Libre), and the cellist, improviser and composer Ishmael Ali. This partnership adds a yearned, timeless and sorrowful Michael Urbaniak-esque layer of folk, Catskills country, the classical and wilder sympathies and stirrings to the eclectic range of horn styles and percussion, which also includes a full drum kit by the sounds of it – coming in handy when evocating the busy, always moving splash, bounce and rolling crescendos of drumming demigod Elvin Jones, on the McCoy Tyner burst of restless, near North African, energy, the ‘Passion Dance’. Jones famously appeared alongside Joe Henderson and Ron Carter on the title-track from the jazz pianist Tyner’s Real McCoy Blue Note release in 1967; a classic that has been picked up by El’Zabar on his latest EHE album.
THANKS TO CHRISTOPHER ANDREW FOR THE IMAGE
Following on from last year’s Spirit Gather tribute to Don Cherry (which featured the worldly jazz icon’s eldest son David Ornette Cherry shortly before his death) this latest conscious and spiritual work channels El’Zabar’s legacy whilst once more worshipping at the alter of those icons, progenitors and idols that came before; namely, in this instance, Miles Davis, Eugene McDaniels and the already mentioned Tyner.
It’s a version, of a kind, of Davis’s ‘All Blues’ (with an added “The” from the EHE) that opens the album. Originally the opening suite on Side 2 of the gold standard Kind Of Blue opus, this twelve-minute example of modal blues in G mixolydian piece is, thanks to Wikipedia on this score, ‘a twelve-bar blues in 6/8 time signature’, of which, ‘the chord sequence is that of a basic blues and made up entirely of seventh chords, with a ♭VI in the turnaround instead of just the usual V chord. In the composition’s original key of G this chord is an E♭7.’ On this sympathetic take, an air of the pastoral, of country folk and Southern roots is merged with smokestack smoldered city skylines, skonk baritone sax, turning-over kalimba tines-plucked harmonics and a constant timekeeping jangle of bells. It’s still very much a part of the blues idiom, but there’s a new soul and relaxed murmur of close-eyed healing that takes it someplace else.
A favourite of El’Zabar’s father, Clifton Blackburn, Eugene McDaniels’ stalwart protest song ‘Compared To What’, is given a fresh workout by the ensemble; that original 60s polemic to hypocrisy (taking in the Vietnam War, LJB and inequality), made famous on record by Roberta Flack in 1969 but also given an outing by Les McCann and Eddie Harris at the Montreux Jazz Festival in the same year, is now shuffled along to what can only be described as an acoustic house music beat and elephant trunk lifting heralding honks and jangled bells. Almost riffing at a leisurely pace throughout, El’Zabar channels Gil Scott-Heron vocally on this enriched street level shakedown.
And as with most El’Zabar led projects, there’s always a tribute or two, a homage and laying down of fealty of a most respectful sort, to one of the old guard: the pioneers. And so why not pay it to one of the deities of the form, the free jazz demigod himself, Ornette Coleman. Although neither in the Science Fiction nor Skies Of America modes, the ensemble revise that esteemed innovator’s legacy with what can only be described as a slinky soul-funk and hip-hop groove and untethered flight of Ornette-style brass.
From across the back catalogue, there’s a smattering of original compositions reenergized and given a new impetus. From his 1998 Bright Moments LP collaboration with saxophonists Joseph Jarman and Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre, bassist Malachi Favors and pianist Adegoke Steve Colson, the titular album and track title ‘Return Of The Tribe’ is like a concrete safari strutting from swing Chicago to hot-stepping New Orleans and Latin Quarters NYC with Cab Calloway, the Art Ensemble Of Chicago and La Monte Young in processional tow.
From the same decade, albeit the opposite end of the 90s, another album and track title take, in the form of the EHE’s ‘Hang Tuff’, is given an airing. Stepping in for the originals, Edward Wilkerson and Joseph Bowie, Corey and Sanders raise their horns skywards, whilst Harding and Ali wildly entangle themselves at a busy junction of avant-garde folk-country and Mondrian age crosstown traffic jazz. From the Ritual Trio’s (that’s El’Zabar with Ari Brown and Malachi Favors; a group that lasted over fourteen albums, right up until 2014) Conversations LP partnership with the venerated Archie Shepp, there’s also an off-kilter, early 60s inspired version of ‘Kari’. Obviously, now featuring the wiry and scribbled addition of cello and violin, the original composition has a new feel and direction of travel.
Elsewhere, ‘Can You Find A Place’ swings from the vine into a spiritual wilderness and swamp of sorrowed cornet blues, whilst ‘The Whole World’ finds El’Zabar channeling Bill Withers, the Isley Brothers and righteous Last Poets on a street side hummed liturgy of godly universal benevolence and unity. But the title-track that brings down the curtain on this conscious elevating rhythm provider evokes both Davis and Coleman, heading out east on an Afro-Latin percussive prayer and house music style primal beat.
El’Zabar’s once more heals, opens up minds and elevates with another rhythmic dance of native tongue and groove spiritualism: a balm for the mind, body and soul. The ancient roots of that infectious groove and the urgency of our modern times are bonded together to look back on a legacy that deserves celebrating. After fifty years of quality jazz exploration and collaboration, El’Zabar proves that there is still much to communicate and share as he and the EHE recast classics and original standards from the back catalogue.
Please help if you can to keep the Monolith Cocktail afloat in 2024:
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 DIGEST OF ACCUMULATED NEW MUSIC, THE SOCIAL INTER-GENERATIONAL/ECLECTIC AND ANNIVERSARY ALBUMS CELEBRATING PLAYLIST, AND ARCHIVE MATERIAL CHOSEN BY DOMINIC VALVONA
Continuing a series that started in 2023, the Digest is my one-stop column of the new and the old; a secondary home to all those releases I missed out on or didn’t get room to feature in either my Perusal reviews features or singular Our Daily Bread posts, plus a chance to celebrate timely anniversary albums and dip into my own record collection with the a special anything goes playlist, and to, finally, dip into the Monolith Cocktail Archives.
The New: this will be a briefing of a sort, with a short outline, thoughts and reactions to a number of recent albums from my inbox – currently a 1000+ releases a month on average!
The Social Playlist: choice music collected from across the ages, borders and genres, with a smattering of tracks from choice anniversary celebrating albums of worth and cult status. Consider it my unofficial radio show. The Archives: self-explanatory, but each month I chose past pieces from the extensive Monolith Cocktail back pages that have a timely ring to them.
___/NEW\___
Mohammad Syfkhan ‘I Am Kurdish’
(Nyahh)
To do justice to the backstory (one that’s filled with tragedy and yet musically inspiring) of the Syrian-Kurdish surgical nurse and musician-artist Mohammad Syfkhan, I’d need far more room. But in brief, the heralded ‘bouzouki’ (a round bodied, with flat top, long-necked lute with resonating and sharp metal strings strummed and picked with a plectrum, that was brought to Greece from Anatolian refugees) maestro and singer was forced to abandon his family’s home in the city of Raqqa during the senseless apocalyptic Syrian civil war. As various fractions fought against the Assad regime, Islamist’s most feared and brutal cult, ISIS, swooped in and proclaimed that atavistic Euphrates located city their capital: the centre of operations and a new sickening, destructive caliphate. As a minority Kurd, Syfkhan was already in danger, but when one of his son’s was murdered by the terror group, they had to join the growing diaspora of Syrians fleeing the country and region to escape persecution (by not only ISIS but Assad too); splitting the family between Germany and Ireland, where Syfkhan, his wife and young daughter were kindly taken in.
Poured into his debut album (although he started his own band The Al-Rabie Band decades ago back in Syria; and a very popular, sought-after troupe they were too) that loss and upheaval is balanced with certain joyous and romantic gusto. Longing for home mostly certainly, and yet making a new life in his adopted Leitrim sanctuary on the River Shannon; in the moment, spreading the traditional and more contemporary music of his Kurdish and Syrian roots whilst also collaborating with those native musicians and those that have also made that same Irish village their home too (including on this stunning album the composer, improviser, sound artist and saxophonist Cathal Roche, and the composer, improviser and cellist Eimear Reidy).
Like a ascending stairway, or flowing and resonating with evocative melodies magic, lute stirring ruminations sweep over Arabia and surrounding regions; referencing anonymous, collective and some original-penned compositions and dances to Islam’s ‘golden age’ of fairytale (‘A Thousand And One Nights’), Kurdish pride in the face of repression (the title-track of course) and its peoples’ struggle for independence and respect (‘Do Not Bow’), lovelorn enquires (‘Do You Have A Lover Or Not?’), and the missed daily activities, interactions of life back home in Raqqa Across it all the hand drums tab, rattle and roll; the cello arches, weeps and bows in sympathy; and the bouzouki lute swoons and rings out the most nimble and beautiful of ached and more up-tempo giddy tunes. There’s a real weight and energy at times, balanced out with slower emotional reflections; but when they go, they go! All the while you can trace the lineage, the scope of the sound back to the Middle East, to old Anatolia, more modern Turkey, and even the Hellenic; and from weddings parties to the courtly, to the caravan trails and souk. I couldn’t recommend this album enough; already sitting as it does in my favourite choice releases of 2024.
epic45 ‘You’ll Only See Us When The Light Has Gone’
(Wayside And Woodland)
With enervated and evaporated applied washes, and drifting along with a certain despondency, Ben Holton and Rob Glover’s long-running – but due to circumstances beyond their control, interrupted – epic45 project finds much to cover; from Brexit to the lunacy of the housing ladder; the parental cliques of the school gates to the death-by-a-thousands-cuts decline of England’s rural and seaside towns.
Already, unbelievably, four years since the last album (finding a favourable audience at this blog) Cropping The Aftermath (released during the height, more or less, of the Covid pandemic), You’ll Only See Us When The Light Has Gone arrives in the wake of setbacks – from the repercussions of both Brexit and Covid on touring (with the band’s Japanese tour cancelled, but also, Europe for us Brits, no longer part of the free-movement agreement, becoming a major pain-in-the-arse to circumnavigate) – to the on-going issues of Holton’s severe back problems.
But persist they did, and went away to produce this idiosyncratic take on the modern life is rubbish (and expensive) idiom. This is a resigned but rallying push back against life in, what they call, the ‘edgleland’, the ‘nowhere places’; pushed out onto the peripherals of society and inclusion. The very English preoccupations of owning a home permeate, from the ill-planned ‘floodplain’ sites that many are forced to accept, to the grander housing development promises of ‘stepping stones to country homes’. But this is a wider statement on a nation in crisis, and the pressures of keeping heads and minds above the crushing effects of unceasing disillusion; ‘dignity’ in the face of narcissistic cultural and political vacuous, the cost of living and bad health.
A very different record from its predecessor, Holton and Glover bring songwriting and vocals to the forefront; from the near forlorn shoegaze-y and woe of late 80s and early 90s indie, to what I can only describe as higher scale soulful indie and more modern effected R&B aches. But the music hasn’t exactly taken a back seat, with vapours of ‘Oh So’ period Charlatans, Neon Neon, Seefeel and The Last Sound, touches of soft power rock from the 80s and 70s, and the appearance of their former live, and My Autumn Empire, drummer Mike Rowley powering the breaks with evocations of Bloc Party at their most subdued and building a soft momentum when the drive is needed to escape the wispy drifting. Within that framework there are other nice little touches too: the glimpse of surface, environmental ambience and dialed-out conversations, a touch of folksy Iberia guitar here and there, and veil-like chime of the celeste.
epic45 somehow manage to retrieve hope and possibility from the ether of debilitating tiredness on an album that sees them move in more melodious and vocalised direction.
Boštjan Simon ‘Fermented Reality’
(Nature Scene)
Glitches in the cerebral; a coming to terms with the current age of high anxiety and alternative realities of a world in turmoil and flux; the debut solo turn from the Slovenian saxophonist and various electronic apparatus experimentalist Boštjan Simon puts the former instrument through a process of external effects to sound a surprisingly rhythmic vision of explorative jazz, broken beats, breakbeats, library music, kosmische and fourth world music.
Regular readers of the blog might recognize the name as part of the Slovenian trio of Etceteral, but Simon’s CV and involvement also runs to the groups Velkro and Trus!, plus a duo with the percussionist Zlatko Kaučuč. But now, stepping out on his own, he creates a soundboard and environment from a modified sax fitted with sensors to enable the triggering of oscillators in a modular system setup, using a new experimental interactive module called Octosense.
The results of which combine abstract blows, holds and wanes with more melodic and fluty vapours of sax, and Eastern German space programme oscillations with primal lunar bobbles and Asmus Tietchens popcorn. Taking the Jazz Messenger Jackie Mclean’s famous “saxophone is a drum” as a prompt, that instrument is reshaped in the style of Alex Roth and Andy Haas to explore new quadrants and feels of the keen and untethered: remarkably very melodious and tuneful in places, with some beats sounding like Madlib or Farhot at the helm. You can add Thomas De Pourquery to that list of reference points, but also Frédéric D. Oberland, Otis Sandsjö, Laurence Vaney, Joe Meek, Bernard Estardy (the last three in relation to the more playful, retro sounding bobbly liquids and satellite communication moments) and, on the near new age disorientated dance of ‘Gmnoe’, Ariel Kalma. That should be enough to go on for now. A solid, or not so solid but more open-ended and explorative, start to the solo career, Fermented Reality is a unique album of saxophone evocations and environmental probes.
Poppy H ‘Grave Era’
(Cruel Nature Records)
Zombie medication, zombie blades, zombie government: what a world to be dragged into. As the always awake screen lights up another terrible, distressing notification, or yet another crisis to weigh on the mind, the multi-instrumentalist, field recordist and producer Poppy H holds a phone up to society and openly records the decay, the innocuous and fleeting interactions of a world on standby as Rome burns to the ground all around them. Coping for many – and it’s neither their fault nor ours – is to keep keeping on with the daily grind; the one highlight of the day, picking up that mundane “flat white”.
All the commonality and evaporated stains of modern Britain are played out across a simultaneously creepy, lo fi bucolic, planetary, industrial and Fortean soundscape of café orders, snippets of conversations and crackles of interference. The Grave Era is certainly haunting and gray at times, and yet has a sort of reverberation of Andrew Wasylyk and the Cold Spells’ hallucinatory pastoral rusty piano, and a dreamy filter of piped church organ music – there’s even a sort of spell of what sound like the courtly music of Medieval or Tudor England at one point. For the most part, this is an album of chemical and more obscure prompts; a window in on the radioactive, plastic and technological flitching and glitch fabric of a fucked-up culture in turmoil and decline, yet far too inoculated through drugs (both the legal and illegal kinds) and the social media validation cult to face it or indeed change it. The sounds, production and vapours, visitations reminded me in equal parts throughout of the Sone Institute, Belbury Poly, Walter Smetek, Fiocz and Boards Of Canada, but go far further outside this country’s borders on tracks like the drifted passing melodious ‘Shaid & Irfan’, which could be a recording, as the traffic and daily business of others carries on in the foreground and background, of musicians from anywhere in North Africa, the Middle East, Afghanistan or Pakistan.
A country haunting itself, this is England in the dying embers of climatic, societal and political change; scored by a unique theme of recordings that masterfully encompass the erosion of action, living and hope in the “grave era”.
Meiko Kaji ‘Gincho Wataridori’
(WEWANTSOUNDS) 23rd February 2024
Heralding the transition of the cult Japanese actress-singer Meiko Kaji’s move to recording artist in the early 1970s, the vinyl specialists at WEWANTSOUND, in partnership with Teichiku Records, continue to reissue the leading star of B-movie and “ero guro” movie franchises’ back catalogue of influential albums. Following in the wake of last year’s Hajiki Uta LP, and reissued for the very first time, Tarantino’s crush (no Kill Bill’s bride without Kaji’s groundwork as the avenging Lady Snowblood; one of her most iconic roles) and untold influence for many over the decades, the star of many infamous Japanese schlock and brutal revenger horrors and violent killings sprees’ debut LP, Gincho Wataridori is up next in the roster.
Originally coaxed into the studio environment to sing the songs that would appear in and accompany a list of movie franchises (from Female Prisoner Scorpion to Blind Woman’s Curse and Stray Cat/Alleycat Rock), Kaji’s songbook repertoire expanded to include the Enka (a performative traditional form that often carried masked messages of political texts, later on, stylized with modern pop sensibilities in the post-war period), psych rock and Kayokyoku (a Japanese pop style with simple melodies and lyrics easy to play and sing along to).
The first of five albums recorded between 1972 and 1974 for Teichiku, the inaugural songbook in this run features a quartet of softly lush and Vaseline camera smeared dramatic fatale yearns and spindled, gently mallet(ed) funk-whacker and tremolo fuzzed dramas from both the Wandering Ginza Butterfly and Blind Woman’s Curse films – both Yakuza and Bōsōzoku themed revenge twists on the genre. The rest of the songs comprise of signature Oriental riffs on Axelrod, Bacharach, 60s French and Italian pop sirens and smoky cocktail cabaret jazz. Keji’s accompaniments are masterful, if light, and do the trick as her alluring, coquettish and often longed vocals rise to the occasion. Sven Wunder seems to make a Mosaic out of it, and a multitude of Hip-Hop artists have sampled it, but Gincho Wataridori remains a cult album ripe for reevaluation and attention.
Ap Ducal ‘U’
(Weisskalt Records)
Visioning a saturated spectral display of waveforms, moving bass lines and acid turned dials Camilo Palma (under his twelve year running project alter ego Ap Ducal) manages to blend kosmische and early synthesizer music with the German New Wave and post-punk genres, and various other cosmic electronics on his new succinct, minimalist entitled album U.
Collaborating with the Chilean musician Sebastián Román (otherwise known as Persona RS), Palma unites two sounds, two crafts to a fizzled, metallic filament cold wave soundtrack that moves between soft deep curves on the radar to the motorik and interstellar. Amongst the analogue electronics, the synthesized algorithms, the oft four-to-the-floor beat, and the paddled, rotor-bladed and tubular rhythms there’s echoes of Bernard Szajner, Sky Records, Heiko Maiko, Ulrich Schnauss, Michael Rothar, Eat Lights Become Lights, Basic Channel and Leonidas. ‘UUUU’ is a little different however: reminding me a bit of a Goblin Italo-Giallo horror soundtrack merged with the icy distillations and peregrinations of Edgar Froese; a bit of mystique, the occult and cold airy vacuums folded within the cold wave calculations.
Cosmic Couriers of a kind, the sonic partners on this forward propulsion make kosmiche and krautrock influences dance to a filter of tape music and minimalist techno. I’d say it was a successful conversion of all those inspirations/influences; making for a roaming and hypnotic experience.
____//THE SOCIAL VOLUME 83\\____
Continuing with the decade-long Social – originally a DJ club night I’d pick up at different times over the past 20 plus years, and also a café residency from 2012 to 2014 – playlist, each month I literally chose the records that celebrate anniversary albums, those that I’d love to hear on the radio waves or DJs play once and while, and those records that pay a homage and respect to those artists we’ve lost in the last month.
February has been a harsh harbinger of death, taking away from us both the mushroom incantation haiku experimental artist Damo Suzuki and motor city muthafucking jam kicking guitar-slinger antagonist Wayne Kramer. As a front man of a sort for Can during perhaps their most creatively fertile and influential period, from Soundtracks through to the Future Days opus, Suzuki also fronted numerous collaborative projects, his own “network” and “band”, whilst also knocking about with the post-punk-kruatrock legends Dunkelziffer. Tracks from more or less all of these ensembles appear here, alongside a couple of homages to the former MC5 rebel Kramer – ‘Ramblin’ Rose’ from the defining live rallying call for a generation Molotov Kick Out The Jams, something from his Citizen Wayne solo affair, and, just to be different, a track from his drug-addled hangout with Johnny Thunders, ‘They Harder They Come’.
Anniversary spots this month are taken up with covers of songs from Bob Dylan’s 1964 LP, The Times They Are A-Changin’, something off Amon Duul II’s less than celebrated, but much loved by me, Hijack LP from ’74, and tracks from Aretha Franklin’s Let Me In Your Life (50 this month), Mick Ronson’s Slaughter On 10th Avenue (another 50th celebration), Tangerine Dream’s Phaedra (see my archive piece below), Julian Cope’s Fried (40), Pavement’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain (30) and Down South’s Lost In Brooklyn (also 30 this month).
Scattered throughout are tracks I just love or dig from across the spectrum of time and genres, and, just recently loaded up onto streaming services and let out of the vaults, the title-track performance from the goddess of sublime mediative vibrations, Alice Coltrane’s Shiva-Loka Live album.
Tracks In Full:::::
Damo Suzuki ‘Wildschweinbraten (Single)’
Amon Duul II ‘Mirror’
Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and Damo Suzuki ‘Please Heat This Eventually Pt. III’
Wayne Kramer ‘Stranger In The House’
Hunger ‘Portland 69’
Aretha Franklin ‘Let Me In Your Life’
Damo Suzuki’s Network ‘Manager Cinderella’
CAN ‘Moonshake’
CAN ‘Don’t Turn The Light On, Leave Me Alone’
Johnny Thunders & Wayne Kramer ‘The Harder They Come’
Pavement ‘Elevate Me Later’
Dunkelziffer ‘Network’
Odetta ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’
Down South ‘Sitting Here’
Julian Cope ‘Me Singing’
Matt Donovan ‘Black Crow’
MC5 ‘Ramblin’ Rose’
Supersister ‘She Was Naked’
Mick Ronson ‘Growing Up And I’m Fine’
Billy Childish ‘Ballad Of Hollis Brown’
The Yankee Dollar ‘Live & Let Live’
Alice Coltrane ‘Shiva-Loka (Live)’
Tangerine Dream ‘Movements Of A Visionary’
Lee Hutzulak ‘Behind The Singing Bush’
Limber Limbs ‘Golden Rust’
James Quell ‘The World Got Taken Over By Billionaire Scum’
Arti & Mestieri ‘Saper Sentire’
PTC ‘Freestyle Na Vrtaci’
CIX ‘Clitor’s Eye’
CAN ‘I’m So Green’
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Tangerine Dream ‘Phaedra’ Reaches 50 (From my original piece for the now sadly defunct London electronic music and architectural journal Vessel, nearly 14 years ago)
Phaedra the tragic mythological love-torn, and cursed wife of Theseus has lent herself to many plays, poetic prose, operas and even an asteroid. This rebuked siren from Greek tragedy is immortalised for a new epoch as part of the West Berlin synthesizer group’s re-textured sweeping experiments. Covering the entirety of side one, on this their first LP for Virgin, Phaedra is like an acid-trance choral eulogy of incipient multilayer motifs and arpeggiator modulations. The sounds of a ghost ship’s switchboard interlaced with twisting metallic reverb both gravitate and loom over a meandering pan-European work-out on this improvised track, which unintentionally, but rather pleasingly and to great effect, fluctuated in tone and tempo-atmospheric changes that played havoc with the analog equipment. Edgar Froese and his ever-rotating line-up of fellow freethinking cohorts had moved on from their so-called ‘Pink Period’ on the German Ohr label, to a more transcendental and ambient approach on the burgeoning Virgin imprint. Phase three in the Tangerine Dream life cycle saw them showered with, almost, unlimited funds and full use of the famous Virgin Manor Studios in Oxford – where fellow compatriots Faust recorded their IV album, a few months before. Flanking Froese on this adventure were the ex-Agitation Free drummer Chris Franke, and Peter Baumann; who’d already left the trio once before, returning just in time to record this musical suite.
Phaedra would be an album of firsts for the band with the introduction and use of sequencers and the MOOG. Franke would adopt DR. Robert Moog’s invention as a substitute to the bass guitar on the visionary soundscape ‘Mysterious Semblance At The Stand Of Nightmares’ – surely the catalyst and influence behind Bowie’s ‘Warszawa’. The polyphonic Mellotron, used to elegiac effect on the very same track, is tenderly coaxed and teased by Froese, whilst the VCS 3′s battleship pin board decked oscillation generator glides and bubbles throughout the four musical vistas of heavenly orchestrated electronica. Baumann explores the use of tape-echo and filtered effected flute on his own paean composed passage, ‘Sequent C’; a short wistful and haunting soundtrack to some imagined eastern elegy.
Released simultaneously in both Germany and the UK on the cusp of 1974, this album more than any ever by the Dream team cemented their reputation. With scant publicity and sporadic underground radio play, it sold in excess of 100,000 copies overseas and entered the top twenty album charts in Blighty, changing the fortunes of the Virgin label forever. However these prophets failed to drum-up the same exultation and adulation back in their homeland, barely shifting 6,000 records. Considered a sea-change in style and dynamics; a marked departure from their classic ‘Alpha Centauri’, this New Age themed cantata pitches itself somewhere between pantheism, mythology and a nebula traversing flight.
The Perusal #52: Meril Wubslin, Maria Arnqvist, Ghost, Otis Sandsjö…
February 13, 2024
A WORLD OF DISCOVERIES REVIEWED BY DOMINIC VALVONA
(Unless stated otherwise, all releases are available now)
Maria Arnqvist ‘Mary Rose And The Purple Quintet’
(Sing A Song Fighter)
An incredible, adventurous concept (of a sort) album from the Swedish multi-instrumentalist and composer that not only showcases a breadth of ideas but also draws upon a wealth of worldly musical escapes and travels, Mary Rose And The Purple Quintet! is an ambitious statement.
One half of the self-professed “voodoo punk, art rock and psychedelic” Swedish duo Siri Karlsson, Maria Arnqvist weaves and sows the seeds for her own solo idiosyncratic fantasy on this character-driven songbook of piano-led or prompted quality vocalized and instrumental evocations.
Classically trained on the ivories, the source of this album’s deeply felt, keen and artfully beautiful material springs forth or subtly flows with an ever-moving cascade; a torrent; a disturbed pool or undulation of waves. Arnqvist proves highly talented in this regard; a near maestro of the instrument in fact, with certainly familiar echoes of what has come before – everything from the obvious classical strains and accentuated touches to the avant-garde of the name-checked Philip Glass and feels of quintessential balladry – but made a new when effortlessly merged with such instruments as the West African kora, an air of the folkloric and strange. Sousou Cissoko plays that kora incidentally, spindled melodically and woven beautifully – it reminded a little of the harpist Catrin Finch’s collaborative partnership with Seckou Keita.
There’s also a sort of Flyodian-progressive and Afro-jazz throaty and more float-y saxophone on a couple of songs. Add chamber-like and dramatic symphonic strings to that soundtrack – every track on this album could be a score in itself – and you have something very special and different and (that word again) worldly: at least transportive. You’ll be unsurprised to learn that Arnqvist has traveled abroad a lot, with stays absorbing the local sounds of instruments in Ouagadougou in Burkino Faso, and Boston in the States. When pulled together the results are both sophisticated and playful; the mood and balance shifting between the oddball theater of late 19th century barrel organ stoked Wild Western saloon japes and shoreline yearned morning choruses to the elements. In fact, this could be an alternative Western, with the unsympathetic roasting sun shimmers and hoofed giddy-up momentum of ‘I Caught You Runnin’ evoking some kind of amalgamation of David Carradine’s Kung Fu, the Mongolian song of Namger, and Sakamoto’s piano – a pursuit across a mirage salt plains perhaps?
At other times the mood is more folksy-classical; although the enchanting opener (a sort of overview overture) seems to reflect a restless spirit, spinning between timeless tones, West African dances and the drama of Mick Harvey’s more stirring sober scores.
The vocals are sung in English when recognizable, as Arnqvist also lyrically and with a melodious air also just swoons or coos the tune, thoughts and descriptive vowels. And the lyrics build up a poetic picture of dramas, emotional ties, scenery and acts, whilst never really making anything explicit as such. Natural elements are left to speak, as Mary Rose and that Purple Quintet meander, fluctuate up and down the scales, quiver and ride the tumultuous softened waves of this loose story.
An enchanting and softening restless spirit is at work on this astonishing, well-thought out and enacted solo turn from the Swedish talent; an album that will gently unfurl its magic and depth over repeated plays and time: and for that, will only get better on each listen.
Lothar Ohlmeier, Rudi Fischerlehner & Isambard Khroustaliov ‘In The Glooming’
(Non-Applicable) 16th February 2024
From the perceptive, intuitive and often haywire minds of the applauded Lothar Ohlmeier, Rudi Fischerlehner and Isambard Khroustaliov (the nom de plume of one Sam Britton) trio, another exploration into the probed parts of the grouping’s psyche, art forms, inquiry and mischief-making. Thematically wise however, this is latest experiment at the edges of electroacoustic serialism and free-roaming is about the trio’s friendship, perseverance, trust and handle on being human: in a world of ever encroaching technological takeover I’d suggest.
Drawing on their myriad of respectable experience over the decades, with Ohlmeier bringing along his bass clarinet (a pretty deft and extraordinary saxophonist too), Fischerlehner on drums and percussive elements, and Khroustaliov rewiring his electronic apparatus, all three participants pull from the “gloaming” (an expressive word taken from Irish lexicon that describes the “twilight”) a strange sound world and performance of avant-garde jazz, Fortean supernaturalism, the alien, odd and indefinable,
Recorded over in the former Cold War walled East Berlin – make what you will of that location -, melodious, almost at times sweetened and floated, clarinet wafts and occasionally strains amongst the clicks, reversals, signals and oscillations of circuitry and transmogrified data language. All the while sifted, brushed, hinged and more bell shaken percussive instruments often amorphously find a rhythm, a hit or timpani roll in the vagueness of an idea and direction. Unsettled and yet never really hostile, totally maniacal or mad, this is a world in which ECM, Sam Newsome, Roscoe Mitchell, The Art Ensemble Of Chicago and Eric Dolphy merge with Walter Smetek (I’m thinking of his 1974 Smetek LP especially), Valentina Magaletti, Affenstunde Popol Vuh, Angelo Bignamini and Lea Bertucci. A track like the tracing of time, weirdly tweaked and near whistled ‘End Zone’ sounds positively sci-fi and a little ominous. Whilst, the classical unhinged toy workshop combination of elements on ‘Violet Weeds’ sounds like Prokofiev conducting Autuchre for a performance of Brian Aldiss’ Hothouse. And ‘Pixel Head’ re-engineers the matrix for an odd futuristic charge of static and cable disarray. Sharing is caring as they say, and this trio seems to deeply feel that connection and intuitive spirit of freedom in creating something challenging, but also in those very special interactive moments: moments inspired in a manner by that twilight hour between the dark and light. A curious, wild and untethered yet professionally made work that defies boundaries.
Meril Wubslin ‘Faire Cą’
(Bongo Joe Records) 1st March 2024
Taking their Mitteleuropa mummers vision on the trail to, of all places, Lewisham in southeast London, and the studio of Kwake Bass, the Meril Wubslin trio cast more hallucinatory hypnotic rhythms in new surroundings without leaving that signature mysterious dimension that hovers between French-speaking Lausanne and Brussels.
Bass (or to give him his full due and title, Giles Kwakeulati King-Ashong) has worked with a myriad of influential and explorative figures over the years (from MF Doom and Roots Manuva to Lianne La Havas and Kate Tempest), so carries more than a touch of class and cache of ingenuity and talent. And yet far from changing the sound, based a lot on repetitive rustic nylon-stringed-like guitar rhythms and both scrappy and dreamy spelled percussion, the producer has continued to aid in magic-ing up a strange rural mysterious combination of Rufus Zuphall, These New Puritans, The Knife, Goat, Holydrug Couple and Die Wilde Jagd.
When the dual male and female vocals – shared and in a strange harmonic symmetry – mistily arise from the mystique and often dreamy-realism of humming motored esoteric vapours and woozy oscillations, they evoke a very removed version of Chanson with Sister Dominique and the pagan song of Summerisle. In fact, there’s a quite a lot of esoteric and folksy-like references sound wise, from the processional to tribal. And a cross-timeline of influences that stretch back into the Medieval. On occasion those hypnotic rhythms and percussive scrapes conjure up Gnawa trance, or the herding of goats in the mountains during older, simpler, primal times. And yet, there’s also a semblance of the Blues, of Dirt Music, to be found amongst the glassy bobbled vibraphone wobbles, trippy drum breaks, pastoral drug lingers, vague visitations from another dimension, UFOs and surreal echoes.
A diaphanous and occult balance of the rural and otherworldly, of enchantment and suffused otherness, Faire Cą is yet another promising statement of headiness and entrancing spells from the trio.
Ghost ‘S-T’, ‘Second Time Around’ and ‘Temple Stone’
(Drag City Records)
Following in the wake of Masaki Batoh’s most recent of incarnations, the brain waves initiated Nehan project album An Evening With (reviewed last month in my Perusal column), Drag City are reissuing a triple-bill of vinyl albums from the Japanese acupuncturist, musician and apparatus building artist’s most enduring and long-running ensemble Ghost.
Tying in with the fortieth anniversary of that evolving, line-up-revolving group’s conception, and the tenth anniversary of its completion, disbandment, their first run of albums from the 1990s is being given another pressing by the label that originally repressed them in the first place, three decades before: that run quickly selling out off the back of Ghost’s Lama Rabi Rabi debut album release for the American Drag City Records imprint. Originally released by the Japanese P.S.F. label on CD, that triplet of records laid down the foundations for a nomadic commune trip of acid wooziness, otherworldly folklore, abandoned temple spirit communions and visions.
Hauntingly formed in Tokyo in 1984 by underground and head music stalwart Batoh, their existence and presence on the scene were as veiled, translucent and hermitic as their name suggested. Pretty much adapts of Amon Düül II (from Phallus Dei to Dance of The Lemmings) and Popol Vuh, but also the psychedelic and folk movements of the UK in the 60s and 70s (from the Incredible String Band to Third Ear Band, Haps Hash And The Coloured Coats and Floyd), and closer to home, such native acts as the Far East Family Band and Acid Mothers Temple, these hallucinatory seekers explored various forms of transcendental music and tradition – although, in the PR briefing they’ve been compared to Os Mutantes. All of those reference points can be heard over their self-titled debut (1990) and Second Time Around (92) and Temple Stones (94) albums; reissued here on appropriate psychedelic clear coloured vinyl for the first time in 25 years.
Recurring currents and vibrations can be found on all three albums; the last of which is slightly confusing with a lot of crossover track-titles from the previous two; it must be stressed however, that even though they use the exact same names on Temple Stones, they are different, produced it sounds like, from the same session, but either an alternative to or riff on the original source and tune, atmosphere. Starting with the demigod, deity or presence theme of the “Moungod” on the self-titled album, the ghostly visitations traverse misty-veiled shrines, mountainous trails to meetings with kite-flying yogis, Shinto ceremonies and holy cavern settings. Surprisingly avoiding any real freak outs – ok, the occasional build-up of acid rock thrashing, splashing and tumult, but relatively subdued on that part – the music and atmospherics are often drowsy sounding; spiritually wafting along and even traditional: imagine Popol Vuh, the Incredible String Band and Floyd meets Alejandro Jodorowsky on the Holy Mountain. There’s also a touch of Julian Cope and Jason Pierce, even The Cult amongst the Taoism and other venerated mysterious leanings and moss. And, something that will carry over onto all the albums, there’s a constant air of the Medieval, the courtly and a touch of psychedelic folksy parchment; from maypole dances to willowy recorders whistled and fluty pagan pastoral processions and merriment.
Second Time Around is produced in the same mold, but seems to also have a more progressive feel, and even an air of the Celtic about it; another occult folksy-acid journey through mythological and spiritual tapestries. ‘People Get Freedom’ introduces us to a spindled lattice of gong washes and harpist sound-tracked moss gardens; the stepping stones trip then extending out towards a culmination of talking to Yogi ADII, the Moody Blues and wistful waltzes on the title-track. ‘Awake In A Middle’ however, sounds more like Satanic Majesty’s era and ‘Ruby Tuesday’ Stones, a more doleful King Crimson and fiddly acoustic dreamy Yes. There are murmurings and the odd bit of mooning, spooky chanting, and mantras to give it that occult, otherworldly sound from the ether, the gods, and the transcendental planes.
Finally, the Temple Stone album suffusion of veneration and mystique wonders around those ancient alters like an apparitional collective of the Flower Travellin’ Band, Yatha Sidhra and The Mission. Disturbed mood music and background wails and shouts are balanced with strange primal vapours, acid-folk (again), downer almost shoegaze vocals (although, on the old and magical rural never-world of ‘Freedom’, it sounds like AD II’s very own Chris Karrer), Indian brassy resonance, paused thoughtful piano and overhead drones.
All three albums are brilliant at pulling you into the Ghost troupe’s world of mysticism, drifted travels, psychedelic projections and wanderings. And not one of them is any better than the other, quality wise. Together they form a near-linear bond, capturing a short period in the band’s early-recorded history – the first of these albums appearing six years after the group’s initial conception -, which lasted thirty years. If this introduction style purview and review does grab you, then be quick, as I suspect these vinyl editions will fly off the Drag City Records shelves.
Otis Sandsjö ‘Y-OTIS TRE’
(We Jazz Records) 23rd February 2024
Following up previous albums in the Y-OTIS series, part TRE continues to deconstruct, shape and rebuild in real time the untethered sessions of the Berlin-based, but Swedish born, tenor saxophonist/clarinetist Otis Sandsjö’s studio experiments. With what has been called a “mixtape-like DNA” methodology, Otis with his long-standing foil and Koma Saxo leader Petter Eldh, and keyboardist Dan Nicholls, plus changing ensemble of musicians, remix themselves as they go along; fracturing, stumbling, free-falling, flipping, enveloping, cutting-up and sampling their jams into freeform opportunities and ideas.
The third album is much in the same vein: albeit this time around sounding more like a transmogrification of 90s and 2000s R&B and soul, with echoes and reverberations of slow elongated and stretched breaks. In practice this results in passing moments of J Dilla, Jimi Tenor, Madegg, Gescom, Four Tet, Healing Force Project and Shabazz Palaces tripping-out on jazz, funk and the blues. But that’s only half the story, as hinged and sirocco winded brass and woodwind is flipped out and put with an ever-changing revolution of morphed d’n’b, broken hip-hop beats, vague memory reflexes of Gershwin and the Savoy label era, The NDR Bigband, Philipp Gropper’s Philm and the most wobbly.
Nothing is quite how it seems, as the fluctuations and changes in the groove, timings and direction of travel often end up somewhere different; take the horizon opening ‘orkaneon’, which begins with a Ariel Kalma-style sustained, trance-y new age sax but finishes on Herbie Hancock being vacuumed and flipped by Squarepusher. In short: another successful adventure in the kooky jelly mould of hip-hop-breakbeat-jazz and beyond.
Various Artists ‘Merengue Típico: Nueva Generación’
(Bongo Joe)
A new year and a new musical excursion for the Bongo Joe label; a first foray and survey of the Dominican Republic’s localized ‘frantic’ Merengue phenomenon.
Sharing its Hispaniola Island location with Haiti (a most tumultuous relationship that’s led to various periods of civil war and bloodshed between the two former brutalized European colonies), the Dominican Republic is well placed to absorb the surrounding cultures of both the Caribbean and Latin America, with Merengue being just one these genres. The style was originally tied-in with the Spanish invaders, taking root on the Island in the early 1800s and played on traditional European instruments like the ‘bandurria’ style guitar. As time went by (especially in the more modern ‘Típico’ era) some of those original instruments were replaced by the accordion (introduced via German trade ships), the güira and the more localized two-headed ‘tambora’ drum (salvaged from rum barrels).
Its Island bedfellow of Salsa might be more globally renowned but Merengue is far older and established; a national dance and music used at various points in the country’s history and fight for independence as a rallying call, a unified and shared common bond: although, in one of the more controversial periods, Merengue was pushed and promoted by the military commander turn dictator, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo (nicknamed “El Jefe”). This particular compilation covers the creative boom after Trujillo’s death in the early 1960s – assassinated after a bloody, brutal regime that resulted in the estimated deaths of 50,000 people, including a sizable number of Haitians, and a number of opposition figures overseas. As the reins, paranoia of oppressive rule dissipated, culture grew once more with optimism. Merengue got a new lease of life with contemporary modernizations and expansions to the sound: now featuring strings and the bass. Pioneering figures like the iconic female trailblazer (and one of the stars of this collection) Fefita La Grande helped take the style forward and broke down barriers in a largely male dominated scene. The Afro-Hispaniola influences remained, as did the signature ‘quintillo’ five-beat rhythm, but there was a new step, confidence and joy to the music, which you will hear on this selection of nuggets reissued for the first time ever, chosen by the Funky Bompa – the alias of crate-digger Xavier Dalve.
Ten showcase tunes of quickened concertinaed ribbing (‘picaresque’ style), dancing, sauntering and jauntiness await; music from such commanding artists as the already mentioned Fefita but also the reeling sweetened and passionate tones of the mysterious Valentin and the Trio Royecell. Scuffling and skiffled, with the güira sounding like a scraped metallic washboard or cheese-grater, groups like the Trio Rosario step to a upbeat squeeze of accordion and touch of the Creole on the fun opening ‘Cuando Yo Muera’. But even when the themes, lyrics are meant to be more plaintive, even bluesy like Aristides Ramierz’s ‘Los Lanbones’, the action is less cantina woes and more “amigo” friendly light-heartedness.
The reach, influences, carry far and wide with knockabout she-shanty bellows, folk and the sounds of Afro-Cuba, Haiti and Colombia ringing away to an infectious, speedy and constantly lively rhythm. As an introduction to that, Merengue Típico offers an insightful party album survey of a Dominican Republic phenomenon, in many cases, still unknown to the greater world outside the Latin community. Here’s an infectious invite to put that gap in the musical knowledge right.
The Corrupting Sea ‘Cold Star: An Homage To Vangelis’
(somewherecold Records) 1st March 2024
Mainstay and foundation artist of the label he created, somewherecold’s Jason T. Lamoreaux pays “homage” and fealty to his hero Vangelis on his latest outing as The Corrupting Sea.
Arguably the Greek titan of the electronic and soundtrack form’s most enduring and influential work in the field of cinema and sci-fi, it is the icon’s distilled acid-pin-drop-rain atmospheric waterfall of dystopian mystery noirish Blade Runner score that inspires Jason’s Cold Star suites of synth evocations. The North American composer does this by fluently channeling that data, language and mood music whilst finding rays of hope and chinks in the metallic ominous granular skies.
Track titles will be familiar with even those with only a cursory interest in the grim futurescape and philosophical quandaries of artificial intelligence and what it is to be human storyline, of this bleak but incredibly affecting and prescient film – even more so in light of the introduction of such gimmicky but frightening programs as ChatGPT, and the encroaching possibilities of AI’s applications in making much of what we do redundant: even in the creative fields. For example, the ‘Voight-Kampff’ empathy test used to weed out the “Replicant” from the human in the film based on Richard K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, is just one such obvious timely example; here, in this state, chiming with softened sleigh bells, shimmery starry waves and crisp little explosions of grainy fuzz bit-crushes.
But as I’ve already mentioned, Jason finds some levitated release of hope in the cogs of technological progress; see the tenderness and reflection that is applied to the short ‘Like Tears In The Rain’ suite, which references Rutger Hauer’s iconic replicant character’s last fatalistic scene and memorable quote of the film: “lost in time…like tears in the rain”. The femme fatale of the picture if you like, ‘Rachael’ (with all that name’s Biblical significance) is also a balance of sci-fi and carefully placed stirrings; the calls of the analogue, of Jarre, of arpeggiator cascaded notes and android data.
Tracks like the grainy chomping and zip-line rippling ‘Four Years’ – the programmed-in longevity of replicants, so they supposedly don’t get the time to achieve human emotions and to rebel from their servitude of heavy lifting and soldiery in futuristic off-worlds – are not so much unsettling, but do have detuned bends and an assailing sense of uncertainty and the alien about them.
‘Replicant Hunters’ which opens this album, is pure Vangelis, but also has a hint of the Klaus Schulze about it too; square waves and bobbed bulb-like notes pass like cruisers in the alt-future nights.
Incidentally, that album title, Cold Star, references the cosmological phenomenon of “failed stars”, or “brown drawfs” as they are also known; a star that doesn’t have enough mass to sustain nuclear fusion in their cores, and so is cold or tepid to the touch. But there is nothing cold or dying about this six-track score, as a final sanctuary of hopefulness in a hopeless bleak dystopia is found on ‘Refuge’ amongst the static-charges and last gasps of a ticking hi-hat rhythm. Corridors are built into these moments of escape and clarity, as Jason pays respect and comes full circle back to his original influence on first starting out in the world of electronic experimentation and mood music.
OdNu + Ümlaut ‘Abandoned Spaces’
(Audiobulb) 10th February 2024
Drawn together and what proves to be a deeply intuitive union for the Audiobulb label, the Buenos Aires-born but NY/Hudson resident Michel Mazza (the OdNu of that partnership) and the US, northern Connecticut countryside dweller Jeff Düngfelder (Ümlaut) form a bond on their reductive process of an album, Abandoned Spaces.
The spaces in that title alongside reference prompts, inspirations motivated by the Japanese term for ‘continuous improvement’, “Kaizen”, and the procrastinated state of weakness of self-will known as the “Akrasia Effect”, are subtly and dreamily wrapped up in a gentle blanket of recollection. The lingering traces of humanity, nature and the cerebral reverberate or attentively sparkle and tinkle as wave after wave of drifty and pristine bulb-like guitar notes hover or linger, and passing drums repetitively add a semblance of rhythm and an empirical and evanescent beat.
The word ‘meticulous’ is used, and that would be right. For this is such a sophisticated collaboration and a near amorphous blending of influences, inspirations and styles: for instance, you can hear an air of Federico Balducci and Myles Cochran in the languorous guitar sculpting and threading, and an essence of jazz on the brushed and sifting, enervated hi-hat pumping drum parts. On the hallucinatory title-track itself there’s a strange touch of Byzantine Velvet Underground, Ash Ra Tempel and Floyd, and on the almost shapeless airy and trance-y ‘Unforeseen Scenes’ a passing influence of Mythos and the progressive – there’s also the first introduction of what sound like hand drums, perhaps congas being both rhythmically padded and in a less, almost non-musical way, flat-handily knocked.
Tracks are given plenty of time to breathe and resonate, to unfurl spells and to open up primal, mirage-like and psyche-concocted soundscapes from the synthesized and played. And although this fits in the ambient electronic fields of demarcation, Abandoned Spaces is so much more – later on in the second half of the eight-track album, the duo express more rhythmic stirrings and even some harsher (though we are not talking caustic, coarse or industrial) elements of mystery, inquiry and uncertainty. Here’s hoping OdNu + Ümlaut continue this collaboration, as this refined partnership proves a winning formula.
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.
REVIEW BY DOMINIC VALVONA
Various ‘Wagadu Grooves: The Hypnotic Sound Of Camara 1987-2016’
(Hot Mule)
Shedding light on a rarely told story, the latest showcase compilation from the Paris label Hot Mule unfolds the backstory and “hypnotic” sounds of Gaye Mody Camara’s iconic label; a story that encompasses the West African Soninke diaspora and legacy. The entrepreneur turn label honcho and umbrella for those artists both from the mainland French migrant community and from across swathes of what was the atavistic kingdom of the Soninke ethnic groups’ Wagadu, Camara, through various means and links, helped create a whole industry of music production in Paris during the 80s, 90s and new millennium.
Playing the part of project facilitators Hot Mule now provide the platform for a selection of infectious and languidly cool hypnotic and dipping, bobbing tracks from the Camara back catalogue: all chosen by Gaye himself and with the assistance of Daouda N’diaye, one of A.P.S’ (Association pour la Promotion de la langue et de la culture Soninké) historical members – bringing this project into the sphere of support, with the intention of drawing attention to this community; many of which have suffered under migration laws and been shoved unceremoniously into poor served housing schemes (the liner notes go into far more detail and context than I have room for, but are a highly, illuminating read).
But before we dive in a little background is needed, starting with the Wagadu of that title, by all accounts – even for these times – an opulent kingdom at the centre of the ivory, copper, bronze and gold trade across Western Sahel and beyond: linking to much of the known world a millennia ago. Ruled by the Mande-speaking Soninke ‘ghanas’ (when translated this title means war chiefs or warriors), with its capital in Mauritania, and its people spread across what we now know as Senegal and Mali, this regal palatial kingdom impressed all those who visited it, including the Arab trader Al-Bakri who witnessed its abundance of riches firsthand: ‘Gold was everywhere: even the ghana’s dogs had collars of gold and silver studded with a number of balls of metal’ – thanks to Simon Sebag Montefiore’s The World: A Family History tome for that quote and enlightening information on the subject. He also witnessed the more dreadful practices of human sacrifice; victims intoxicated with fermented drinks buried with their dead ghana and his treasures. But as laid out in the opening to the compilation’s liner notes, the mythical blood ties of this community are linked to the legend of the hydra-like serpent Biida; paid for his protection of prosperity and the providential with the offering of the life of the most beautiful virgin in the kingdom. This practice lasted it is said, right up until the 13th century when one such feted sacrifice, Siya Yatabéré, was thankfully championed by her faithful love interest Maamadi Sehedunxote, who armed with a large sword and astride his stallion cut off the head of this serpent, from which sprouted seven great gold mines and a curse: “With my end begins a period of calamity for you and your people. For seven years, seven months and seven days, not a drop of water will fall on Wagadu and your gold will turn to dust”.
This serpent’s tale is a lesson, we’re told, on the pratfalls of decadence, but also a fable about the start of this community’s decline, as this was the period in which the Soninke people on mass abandoned the ancestors customs and worship for Islam. Well-placed for conversion, the word of Islam spread and indeed started by caravan traders on the Sahel routes, both by the constant engagement with and by the sword, the Soninke joined the Muslim sweep across Africa. Although, according to Montefiore’s account, by the 11th century the self-titled Amir al Muslim (‘Commander of the Muslims’), Abu Bakr had pushed south and broken Wagadu and its lineage of ghanas – I must stress at this point, Ghana is not to be mixed up with what would eventually be the country of Ghana, which is further south and east of this original empire. Bakr was however killed, lucky shot it’s said, by a blind Soninke warrior’s arrow. His nephew, and co-ruler, Yusef Ibn Tashfin finished of the job before famously going on to attempt a conquest of Spain – just his luck that a certain El Cid was his contemporary and rallying point for a staunch defense of the region.
Despite achieving such a status as rulers of a much envied and powerful empire – fielding, it’s believed, an army of 200,000 – they were very much a nomadic people, spreading, as I’ve already mentioned, across Senegal and Mali, but further afield too. Considered a hardworking if reserved body of traders and farmers, they formed a reliable workforce: especially for the French who centuries later would come to colonize much of Western Africa and the Sahel. Moving forward in time, the Soninke proved vital as laborers and soldiers for France and its ambitious programe of conquest. A number were recruited in 1857 to the “tirailleurs Sénégalais” (although many of course weren’t from Senegal at all), the first regiment of black riflemen in the French colonial army. In the 20th century at least 135,000 black Africans fought on European soil in the most brutal campaigns of WWI. Tens of thousands of would later go on to join the Free French Forces and Resistance in WWII. Not the most encouraging and congruous of situations to migrate, but many would settle in mainland France, with different flows back and forth over the ensuing decades; right up, that is, until the more restrictive and prohibited changes in the mid 70s, when this easy travel between Africa and France was made much harder. Before this time, it would be mainly the men folk of the Soninke that made the journey to find prospects and employment abroad, keeping their earnings saved up, and either returning home at intervals or sending it back to their families. A shift in migration policy would mean that now the whole family would repatriate to France, bringing in far more women and children to the mix.
Music would be the bond however, as pioneers such as Gaye Mody Camara, who lends his name to the successful label he set up in the French capital during the later 70s, built up their own little business empires amongst the diaspora communities. The story of his ascendance on the music scene is laid out in the liner notes, and far too lengthy to outline here in full. But during the course his stewardship Gaye would rub shoulders with various iconic figures (such as the internationally renowned Guinean musician and producer Bonkana Maïga and owner of the Syllart Records label and the main distributor of tapes at the time, Ibrahima Sylla) on the scene as he moved between originally buying releases from others to resale in his own chain of establishments to producing and setting up his own cassette tape production facilities.
In-house and a label in its own right, the Camara imprint broke new Soninke acts and artists from across a wide range of countries in the Western African region. And as you will hear, fanned a four decade period of innovation and trends whilst still maintaining the essential essence and roots of tradition. Each and everyone represented on this collection has a story to tell about how they were discovered or how they came to Gaye’s attention; from the migrant housing centre to hearsay, the word-of-mouth and the gentlemen who insisted that Gaye listen to his wife’s cassette tape recordings and take charge of her career. The latter was the husband of Halime Kissima Touré, who went on to have a ‘fruitful’ collaboration with the label; so popular and integral to the story as to have three (if you manage to buy the digital bonus track edition) tracks showcased. A kind of younger Aby Ngana Diop desert queen of pop and admonition, Halime has a powerful, but not loud, voice that carries over a sauntering 80s style marimba-like rhythm and fluty synth on the cool-as-you-like ‘Koolo Fune’; scorns those parents who’d interfere in the upbringing of their peers’ children to a more Tuareg sand dunes dipping caravan trial rhythm, and vaporous synth, on ‘Alla Da Fo Ña’; and rather fatefully, to a laidback funky-lite clean groove, reminds us all, in accordance with the values of Islam, that ‘all life will one day come to an end’ on ‘Duna’.
Another of the many incredibly female voiced artists on this compilation, the gifted Malian songstress Babáni Kone comes from a lineage of Griot storyteller-musicians. To a languid elliptic-like hypnotizing groove, she evokes both Mariam Amadou and Fatim Diabte Haute Gamme, soaring and lilting across another of those glassy bulb notes marimba bobbles, on the knocked and rim clattered ‘Soyeba’.
If not the lead singer, there’s usually a chorus of female harmonies accompanying the various male compatriots of the Soninke ancestry; especially the opening phaser-effected and threaded kora (I think it’s a kora anyway), smoke machine synthesized, 90s R&B-lite ‘Kori’. The unifying themed, effortlessly hip languorous funk-pop number finds the thankful (giving a nod to his mentor Camara in the lyrics) Mamadou Tangoudia on warbled-vibrato duties, backed by an Ljadau Sisters-style chorus of soothed female accomplices. Tangoudia was apparently introduced to his champion by his landlady in the Mauritanian capital of Nouakchott; ‘seduced’ no less by his singing skills, Camara financed a trip to the Malian capital of Bamako to record the burgeoning star’s eponymous album in 2007; and this is the ‘stand-out’ track from it (so good that the label has added the instrumental version as a bonus to the collection; a great way to fully take in and absorb the sophisticated and just cool production). ‘Kori’ is a brilliant shoehorn into the modern era Soninke sound and production; one that subtly merges a familiar African soundtrack with the trends and various available innovations of the times; from French new wave disco (I’d argue that Ami Traoré’s exotic menagerie of whistles and tweets spotted discothèque-light ‘Tenedo’ fits the bill in that regard) to synth-pop and reggae (Diobe Fode’s trumpet blared, Acayouman-esque ocean view slink ‘Yexu’). The old country is very much still a major part of the source and rhythm, with Naïny Diabaté’s soulful ‘Sankoy Djeli’ sounding like there’s nimble-fingered Seckou Keita on the track soloing to an R&B production; and the guitar (if it is indeed that; again could be a kora or lute) on Mah Kouyaté’s ‘Soso’ sounds not a million miles away from a bendy, turned-over and spindly Lobi Traoré solo – imagine if Niles Rodgers had camped down in Bamako instead of Studio 54.
The sound is at all times amazing, and the voices commanding; a mix of those inherited Griot roots, the club, pop and caravan trial. And yes, most importantly, Wagadu does have the eponymous ‘grooves’ of the title: the ‘hypnotic’ bit too.
Hot Mule and partners have produced an essential introductory showcase/revitalisation of Soninke sounds: the very epitome of ‘cool’ and enlightenment. And with it, shed that metaphorical light on a story that needs shouting about. I can’t really fault the collection. And so recommend you make room for it, add to your listening list, and better still, purchase a copy ahead of the rush: I’m anticipating it will sell out fast.
Hi, my name is Dominic Valvona and I’m the Founder of the music/culture blog monolithcocktail.com For the last ten years I’ve featured and supported music, musicians and labels we love across genres from around the world that we think you’ll want to know about. No content on the site is paid for or sponsored and we only feature artists we have genuine respect for /love. If you enjoy our reviews (and we often write long, thoughtful ones), found a new artist you admire or if we have featured you or artists you represent and would like to buy us a coffee at https://ko-fi.com/monolithcocktail to say cheers for spreading the word, then that would be much appreciated.
Our Daily Bread 608: Elea Calvet ‘Sinuous Ways’
January 29, 2024
SINGLE REVEAL – DOMINIC VALVONA
Elea Calvet ‘Sinuous Ways’
(Hyssop & Victoria Records)
With an intelligence and subtlety sadly lacking in much music these days, the Bristol-based (born in Canada and brought up for a time in India) worldly artist Elea Calvet reflects the sinuous of her latest single with a winding, pondered and almost sighed adroit wistfulness. A still piano, bowed and softly thumping bass with tremolo quivers and delightful wisp of melodious beauty, the duality of the human soul is laid bare to a most accentuated backing and feely atmosphere. There’s a real clever alchemy of lyricism, and a balance struck between the sorrowful and beautifully drifting, the bluesy and folksy, classical and wispy. Torment reigns all right, but the near haunting float-y but always present voice and music is as alluring as it is clever and deep: and again, that duality, somehow wafting along almost effortlessly.
A burgeoning star until a hiatus, Elea Calvet has been constantly compared to such idiosyncratic stars as Anna Calvi – and for good reason. But she reminded me of Raf Mantelli, a touch of our very own one-time collaborator and fellow Canadian, Gillian Stone, Amanda Acevado, and a more disarming Diamanda Galas. Songwriting and orchestration wise, I swear I’m hearing a touch of Bowie too!
This is vulnerability and strength heading in an intriguing, interesting and artful direction. I look forward to hearing more, with a full EP in March.
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