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’
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’
____///ARCHIVES\\\____
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.
Tickling Our Fancy 093: epic45, Iklan, Aquiles Navarro & Tcheser Holmes, Sebastian Reynolds…
October 20, 2020
Reviews Column
Dominic Valvona
Regular followers may have picked up that my Tickling Our Fancy roundup is mostly an albums heavy affair, and that I’ve tried to post (quite sporadically) a separate singles, EPs, videos and one-offs style column (the Perusal) in the past. Due to the demand and fact that I’m just knackered keeping up, I’m going to try out a new format of sorts, to include everything in one place. With that in mind, there’s new singles from HighSchool, Sebastian Reynolds, and Escupemetralla. And both a performance excerpt and EP from the Jerusalem sludge rock outfit Andarta.
Albums wise we have the long-player debut from agit-soul-punk ensemble Iklan, epic45 ruminate with a wash of rural House indie and nostalgic gauzy tones on their new album Cropping The Aftermath; a most experimental overlap of Afro-Caribbean and Panamanian jazz from the dynamic Aquiles Navarro & Tcheser Holmes union (a side excursion to their part in the Irreversible Entanglements quintet); and John Lane, as the menagerie A Journey Of Giraffes, soundtracks a mindful escape on his latest suite for Somewherecold Records, Sunshine Pilgrim Map. Also, we have Spacelab on a mission to delve through alien soundscapes and mischievous foolery on their new oeuvre Kaleidomission, and Blang Records celebrate fifteen years in the business with another label compilation of maverick antifolk, punk, indie and underpass soul.
Singles.
Escupemetralla ‘I Always Reivindico El Nail Art’
3rd October 2020
You can try to describe and explain the crazy that is the organism, organization, the fiendish underground hub of the disturbing avant-garde and experimental, the makers of sound bites and broadcasts, the damned hub that is Escupemetralla (Spanish we’re assured for “spits shrapnel”) but no one can quite put it like those anonymous miscreants themselves. Just take a gander at this following description for the nail painting muse single ‘I Always Reivindico El Nail Art’.
“Our new track benefits from the wonderful collaboration of the sublime, immeasurable and chiripitifláutica plutonic artist known as Rosalía, muse of surrealism since Salvador Dalí walked her half dressed in Granollers (province of Barcelona) on the back of a giant plastic camel in one of his well-known happenings of the ‘60s. After her glittering appearances in corpore glutinoso at the Latin-Chichimeca Kilogrammy Awards and her yelling participation in some plumbeous works by illustrious rappers, trappers, folk singers and flamenco artists of every moral and amoral nature, our singer blesses us with her archangelic presence in this melodic song by Escupemetralla, with whom she has signed an exclusive contract for the next four or five years.
Ever since Dalí roared that famous mantra, “Booterrflaí, booterrflaí” [that is, “Butterfly, butterfly” as pronounced by a Spaniard not trying to sound British] live on TV, only Rosalía managed to condense so much chestnut-flavored Spanglish into a single sentence: “I always reivindico el nail art” [that is, “I always vindicate nail art”]. With this phrase she revealed to us once and for all the sources from which she draws the inspiration with which she commits her outrages: Fu Manchu, Freddy Kruger and Edward Scissorhands.”
I don’t believe a word of it. But who cares when such disturbing Fangoria nightmarish hallucinatory surrealisms sound this great. A perfect fantasy in time for Halloween.
Sebastian Reynolds ‘Diving Board’
(Faith & Industry) 9th October 2020
In the run-up to next year’s Nihilism is Pointless EP (released 29th January 2021), the highly prolific Oxford-based polymath keyboard player, pianist, producer and label owner Sebastian Reynolds is releasing a number of singles from this evocatively sweeping and sophisticated multi-layering suite during 2020. The first of which is the semi-classical quivery swelled spatial drama with moments of grinded and sparked dissonance ‘Diving Board’.
Following on from his recent The Universe Remembers EP – a philosophical, religious and metaphysical cosmological junction of dystopian literature and Buddhist Eschatology – and the incredibly personal stand-alone single ‘Heartbeat/My Mother Was The Wind’, Reynolds once more sends out the mind-expanding frequencies, channeling, as he puts it, “…the altered states of consciousness experienced through meditation, cold water exposure and prayer, it represents the deep breath before taking the plunge.”
Nihilism is Pointless and the new single are being released via producer Capitol K’s Faith & Industry label, the release platform for Capitol K’s output as well as John Johanna, Blue House, Thomas Nation (all three of which have featured on the MC and made our “choice” albums of the year) and Champagne Dub.
Expect a full review in due course next year.
See also…
Sebastian Reynolds ‘The Universe Remembers’ (here..)
HighSchool ‘New York, Paris And London’
(Dalliance Recordings) 16th October 2020
After making a splash with their debut broody bounced and hazed Joy Division meets The Cure debut single ‘Frosting’, the effortlessly cool Melbourne duo have signed to the UK label Dalliance Recordings for the aloof triple-cities of culture entitled follow-up, New York, Paris And London. Exuberating a kind of bonus-of-youth with states of indolent dependency, the post-punk naval gazers explore the “pendulum that swings between social anxiety and elation” on this languorous new single that bares hints of The Smiths, Strokes and, again, The Cure.
The single was recorded by noted engineer Naomune Anzai (Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, Cash Savage and the Last Drinks, The Teskey Brothers) and mastered by Mikey Young (Eddy Current Suppression Ring, Total Control) – the Total Control reference there making perfect sense when you listen back to New York, Paris And London. Anyway I think they’re bloody great; and I’m quite excited about what they’ll release next.
See also…
HighSchool ‘Frosting’ (here…)
Andarta ‘Live at Studio Straus (an excerpt)’
‘ST’ EP
More miscellaneous then single/album whatever, I just had to share this incredible dark, grinding, thrashing lumbering concentration of dragging doom from the holy center of the impending Biblical Armageddon, Jerusalem. Andarta, which sort of means memorial statue in Hebrew, is a causal union of friends corralled by local label honcho and drummer Itai Anker. Here I’ve included them in live mode and the link to their most recent EP. The spoils of one of their most recent ritual interactions are expressed as a weaponized vision of morbidly curious early Bad Seeds, Swans and dark metal sludge.
ALBUMS..
Aquiles Navarro & Tcheser Holmes ‘Heritage Of The Invisible II’
(International Anthem) October 23rd 2020
Channeling a combination of Panamanian and Afro-Caribbean heritages, the trumpet and percussionist duo of Aquiles Navarro and Tcheser Holmes come on like an abstract Latin version of the Don Cherry and Ed Blackwell union with their experimental jazz partnership. A side excursion, exploration from the duo’s membership of the burgeoning freewheeling avant-garde quintet Irreversible Entanglements, the Navarro-Holmes combo brings a partnership that began and took root when the two were studying at the New England Conservatory back together for an untethered gyration, contortion of “existential joy”. For this is a sort of escapism from the Irreversible mood of political angst and dissonant freefalling for something approaching improvised “jubilance”.
Navarro and Holmes feed off their polygenesis upbringings and travails with a sound imbued by the luminaries of the Panama jazz and Latin scenes, the experimental doyens of America’s Mid-West and East Coast, and the Caribbean; all of which sprung or progressed from Africa. Navarro, who’s principle instrument is the trumpet but also proves a deft touch on the upright piano (like a saloon style Oscar Peterson), Moog and Juno synths, was born in Toronto; his family uprooted from their Panama home during the murky Manuel Noriega chapter, the fall out of which saw America invade the Central American canal corridor in the late 80s. He proved a real talent, studying with compatriot trumpeter and Fania All Stars luminary Victor “Vitan” Paz and composer, saxophonist Carlos Garnett. Holmes meanwhile was born into the Pan-African community of Brooklyn; revolving around the spiritual Ausar Auset Society and his family’s Bennu Auser Dance Company. The blossoming energetic drummer, percussionist was encouraged to study by his cultural arts programmer mum and classically trained pianist uncle (and this is where the two crossover) from Panama. Both future explorers of contemporary jazz would meet in Boston whilst studying, forming a congruous union that holds together an amorphous dynamism of the strung-out and incipient.
Sparring at different intensities, speeds and signatures the duo keep various off-the-grid tangents, visions, together; combining acoustic improvisation with overdubs of synth, vocals, additional instrumentation and recurring snatches of musing conversations. Some of this comes from a guest list that includes the Spanish poet Marcos de la Fuente, pianist Nick Sanders (who plays a Thelonious style jazzy blues mosey on the album’s honky-tonk and Savoy label roll back ‘M.O.N.K (Most Only Never Know)’), Panamanian “mejuranero” (a folkloric five-string chordophone carved from a single block of wood) player Ricardo de León, and the soulful tripping vocalist Brigitte Zozula. A further guest spot arrives in the form of an Autechre-crosses-streams-with-DJ Shadow acid gauzy Techno transformation from the Philly-based composer and electronic artist Madam Data. A barest semblance of the duo can be heard in a repeating loop to infinity that echoes throughout a wobbly warping dance mix of pulsing futurism.
The rest of this album features profound poetics reverberating in a play-off between Holmes thrashing rolling tight breaks, cymbal splashes, rattles and twills and Navarro’s blurts, spirals, airy ascendancy and short, repeated bursts. The opening meditational reading pitches Gurumanix and Kosmische undertows of slithery acid-synth against “unstructured” Cecil Taylor. And on the “celebration of life” framed optimistic augur of hope and unity, ‘Pueblo’, a lilted Latin Herb Albert teams up with Don Cherry. It’s a constant shifting balance of falling and less chaotic, more rhythmic sparring.
Empirical memories and reverberations of recognizable voice, instrumentation in the most abstracted passages merge with tightened pliable performances. Technically brilliant; pushing at the perimeters without losing the listener, the duo have an exceptional feel and relationship, guiding as they do, each other towards such recondite extremes of experimentation and articulation.
Lending the language of the avant-garde jazz of their heritage, the “invisible” people whose contributions to the form and beyond go largely unnoticed, emerge to inspire this impressive album; a sort of Clouddead of jazz every bit as progressive and interesting as their contributions to the Irreversible project. Whilst that unit’s live tour has been put on hold, a pandemic-imposed reality has concentrated the minds of the duo and given them space to experiment and follow a different path: A really clever one at that.
epic45 ‘Cropping The Aftermath’
(Wayside & Woodland Recordings) 23rd October 2020
From those stuck-in-the-sticks bedroom music dreamers epic45, another expansive gauzy soundtrack of translucent gazing and pastoral electronica dance music with whiffs of nostalgia and ruminations on the, all too quick, passing of time. Yes, Ben Holton, Rob Glover and long-term collaborator James Yates articulate an abstract longing for less dreadful times with a wash of diaphanous atmospherics, radiant House music sparkles, Bloc Party indie breakbeats and trance.
Framed, at least in the promotional email, as a kind of trip back down memory lane, the roots, blossoming of epic45’s inception – a creative escapism from the boredom of life in the middle-of-nowhere – in the 90s starts the ball rolling with reminiscing tones. Musically the lads evoke a redolent soundboard of 808 State, Bowie’s more downbeat moments on Earthling, the softened lingering’s of the Durutti Column guitar, shoegazing and the Aphex Twin. That’s some spread, and one that’s wrapped up in a lush dreamy drift of both the audibly and more hushed whispered, reverberated meanderings and heartened sensibilities of the vocalized sentiments.
The second project from epic45 in 2020, Cropping The Aftermath continues with the sonic scenic illusions of their We Were Never Here photo book; snapshots and longer gazes from the past, entwined with moods transduced into shimmery mirages and rainstorms. Feeling at times like another summer of love, there’s a real sense of that late 80s club and indie sound so beloved of Madchester: radient-House you could call it. ‘Garage Days’ actually sounds like the band remixing themselves on an acid-soaked glide of oceanic techno, ghostly vocal traces and electronic bobbing toms. Those Bloc Party-esque indie breakbeat drums busily work away (sometimes venturing into d’n’b and even jazz) throughout the album as the washes and gossamer synthesized orbiting shimmers and sweeps waft around in the foreground. There’s a moment when it even all evokes a kind of Ibiza indie mirage; the sort Tim Burgess has been found to swim around in.
In between we have those lingered pastoral sets. As the name obviously suggests, ‘Waking Up In A Field’ is full of chirping morning bird choruses and the dewy sounds of, well, a field, but interspersed with fleeting reversal effects and a synthesized come-down.
The passing of time and the profound acknowledgement of reaching middle age with all its realizations is a right inevitable bastard to wrestle with. But few manage to fit it in such a picturesque soundtrack of gauzy, hazy yearnings. As that old adage goes: don’t grow up, it’s a con (or words to that affect). epic45 have come a long way since those bedroom music making days, yet that early wonder, hunger and camaraderie in hasn’t diminished one bit; the lads pushing the envelope as ever with a flair for producing minor rural electronic yearnings of profound veiled beauty.
Iklan ‘Album Number 1’
(Soulpunk) 19th October 2020
Despite the attitude and volatility, this assembled cast of pissed-off musical malcontents sounds surprisingly controlled and soulful when chucking a proverbial Molotov into the current incendiary mix of division and pandemic.
Under the collective platform of Iklan, Mercury Prize winning producer and four-decade-plus stalwart of the underground music scene Timothy London, singer-nurse Law Holt and, on backing vocals, 90s one-hit wonders Jacqui and Pauline Cuff (aka the Leith Congregational Choir and before that “Hippychick” hitsters Soho) come together to fire off sonic and verbal broadsides at the current shower. For his part, London brings a sophisticated edgy production of tetchy, piston tapping Trip-Hop, House and both synth-pop and synth-sinister to the mix, whilst Holt brings fire and soul in equal measures; switching from meandrous spiky R&B to rap. Accentuating or punctuating those vocals, the Cuffs offer a suffused chorus that sometimes borders on dark cyber-gospel.
The name of the label for this venture coins the group’s sound well: “soulpunk”. It certainly has the spirit of punk (and post-punk for that matter), and is extremely, despite the rhetoric ad flippant birdfinger “fuck u”, delivered with a soulful wandering pitch. Despondent as much as incandescent with rage, Iklan come across as a kind of subtle TV On The Radio. Better still, Young Fathers – which isn’t surprising as Law has appeared with the Edinburgh group on a number of occasions and is part of that capital’s much-talked about scene. You could also throw in FKA Twigs, Tamar Kaman (of the Van Allen Belt), Tricky and even a wallowing, more foreboding version of tune-yards to that list. Though the Iklan sound is a mostly ominous one, full of futuristic dystopian warpings and woozy despondency; wrapped up in a subtle deep groove and staggered sound bed of meticulously techy beats, buzzes, sirens and metallic percussion: A record that looms large in the stairwell of a broken estate, yet shakes, dances and thumps with a f-bomb littered fury that proves far more articulate and rhythmic than you’d expect.
Law struts as much as riles in encapsulating her daily life experiences as a young black woman and nurse in the increasingly hostile environment of a pandemic gripped city – there’s even lyrical references to a shooting. It’s antipop in a way; the message delivered in a velvet gauntlet of R&B infused rioting. An album fit for the times we’re living through.
Also see..
Iklan ‘Suffer 2’ Single (here…)
A Journey Of Giraffes ‘Sunshine Pilgrim Map’
(Somewherecold Records) 23rd October 2020
From the very beginning of the Monolith Cocktail a decade ago, the career of the sonic explorer John Lane seems to have tied in with our own development: from the very first Beach Boys lo fi seashell bedroom symphonies of John’s first submission to the blog under the Expo moniker, through to his ever more experimental peregrinations under the menagerie A Journey Of Giraffes, and his most recent blossoming releasing music with the Somewherecold label.
His homage love Haiku to Susumu Yokota Kona album and ambitious atavistic Caucasus purview Armenia probably two of his best ambient oeuvres both arrived with little fanfare in the last year. His fourth, and diaphanous, album for that label is no less impressive: an “archipelago of the mind” evoking sunshine pilgrimage, soundtracked by the tropics and fantastical.
Drifting across a translucent ocean to a virtual oasis, John lures the listener away from the pandemic suffocation of reality. As castaways in our own thoughts, pilgrims to, perhaps, an as yet unspoiled island, we’re submerged in a gently unfurled soundscape of mystery; an ambient wash of mirror-y love letters to Bamboo music and Sokamoto, metallic industrial scored dramas and weather reports. It’s a microcosm of Japanese referenced sparks of inspiration, profound philosophical island paradise references and contemplation; a world in which idiosyncratic oriental art forms (“Kintsugi”, the art of replacing broken pottery of all things) and fortune cookies crumble into a Bermudan dreamy islet, probed by a Kosmische accompanied submersible dive into the depths of the cerebral.
Pitched between the golden radiance of Laraaji and the more mysterious ghostly soundtracks of Brian Reitzell, there’s also a nod to John’s Brian Wilson influence, with a transformed vision of Pet Sounds acid-tropical tremolo, vibrato and shaking percussion signature on the album’s finale, ‘Asana The Giant’.
Tunneled drones, submerged obscured marine life, oriental chimes, crystallizations, rain patters on metal surfaces, moist droplets, cyclonic vapours, rolling storm clouds, glassy scribbles, insect chatter all converge to form a most subtly mindful safe zone: a hideaway from the real world. How John can continue to be overlooked in the world of ambient and experimental music is beyond me. He seriously deserves recognition, support and above all else, credit. I can only help continuing to spread the word. Get on the Sunshine Pilgrim tour and discover for yourselves.
See also…
Expo ‘She Sells Seashells’ (here…)
A Journey Of Giraffes ‘Sandy Point’ (here…)
‘Kona’ (here…)
Spacelab ‘Kaleidomission’
(Wormhole Records/HREA-M Recordings) 16th October 2020
A sort of Faust Tapes of out-of-context dialogue samples, fucked-with drum breaks and Kosmische otherworldliness, the new experimental album from Spacelab runs through a thirty-nine spanning track list of fleeting incipient ideas and the strange. Some of which last less time than it takes to pronounce the title. There’s even tracks that seem to exist purely for their visual mirrored effect on Soundcloud: The piques of the reversed then switched back around ‘Goodbye’ creating a nice symmetrical image.
“The soundtrack to an extra-terrestrial journey from a time unknown”, Kaleidomission runs and also peruses a both thoughtful and more oft-hand exploration of minimalism, ambient and cosmic dreamy space music. Early traces of Popol Vuh (before the heavens parted era), Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream, Mythos and, well, a Kosmische(olgy) of inter-dimensional travellers can be heard permeating this galaxy quest. There’s even a title nod to those miscreants of Krautrock and beyond, Faust (‘We Love Faust’) that kind of orbits their sphere of magic box sonic experimentation: Spacelab’s homage features a repeating timeless acoustic guitar motif that echoes against a rising and falling away ambient field of melodious illusions.
Those titles more or less sum up the intention behind each of these acid tripping film dialogue snatches, majestic floats through the heavens, crystal mirages and more cartoon scores. Some act as a breather, whilst other leaps out of a mystique void. There are also spells of a supernatural kind (an obvious one, ‘Trick The Devil’) to be found in the album’s darker recesses.
From lunar caves to magic woods, astral gateways and the fatuous, Spacelab prove sonically creative and mischievous in producing a cosmology of investigation worthy of attention. It’s Kosmische music but not quite as we know it.
Various ‘Scratchcard’
(Blang Records) 16th October 2020
An anti-establishment of malcontents and those without a musical home, the Blang label, as purveyors of the “antifolk” scene, has offered sanctuary and comradeship for cross-generational bands and artists like the psych rock ’n’ roll maverick Tav Falco and cult London troupe David Cronenberg’s Wife.
Fifteen years on from their inaugural heralding release, the 2005 compilation Fruit Machine, Blang celebrate with an anniversary year that includes a takeover of Soho Radio, an “outsider music” documentary bio and compilations. One of those compilations, Scratchcard, marks the label’s most recent five-year plan, from 2016 to a laborious pandemic 2020.
Not quite the punt ad promise of riches that go with that scratchcard title, this fifteen-track collection offers an amble through the modern austerity shitshow equivalent of a dole queue 80s British underground music scene: a bit of sneering; some snot rock; doses of despondent naval-gazing indie; post-punk dislocation; rebel country attitude; and kitchen sink estate dramas. The sort you’ll find on David Cronenberg’s Wife’s introductory opener ‘Suli’s House’: a wrangling Link Wray guitar led ditty that disarms with its country sway and twang a sorrowful step-by-step guide to shooting up heroin.
Originally an extension of Blang’s infamous monthly nights at the now defunct London Westend spot, The 12 Bar Club, and inspired by the NYC East Village antifolk scene of Moldy Peaches and Jeffrey Lewis (a scene that sprung from the also now defunct Sidewalk Café), the label has become a much cherished and liked platform. That antifolk raison d’etre has since expanded to include anything the Yorkshire hub sees fit to give an airing; anything that is which falls beneath the DIY ascetic, or rather as they call it (in broad Yorkshire accents) “DIT”: “Do it thissen”.
I’ve personally featured quite a few of their roster; though only a handful considering the size of the catalogue (a 100 plus release so far). Many of which feature on this compilation, including the already mentioned DCW with their despondent and sardonic witty rich The Octoberman Sequence in 2018. But there’s also the agit-rabble of Sergeant Buzfuz, whose horrible histories Pope bashing Go To The Devil And Shake Yourself opus made my choice albums of 2012. Here they offer a Parisian staged modern tale of deceit and resignation with the XTC meets Richard Hell in Montparnasse ‘Fill In The Blanks’.
Popping up back in February of this year on the blog, Extradition Order delivered a musical vision of the Oppenheimer story with their American Prometheus album (a definite pick for this year’s choice features). From that impressive mini-opus, the Warrington group is represented by the Tamela Motown channeled Style Council and B52s swooning lament, ‘Baby, What Have You Done For Me Lately?’
The Awkward Silences in a different guise appeared on the blog back in 2016 with the brilliant white-funk no wave Outsider Pop album. Here they are closing the collection with a transmogrified Talking Heads (if played by The Futureheads or Bloc Party) blast of narrated self-realization and a poignant tale of death, mourning.
Joining that lot are the Joan Jett attitude stomping and rattling, former Fall members outfit Brix & The Extricated (‘Something To Lose’); an idiosyncratic Casio chiming, pulsing Yoni Wolf like Seth Faergolzia (‘Wait For The Beep’); the do “fuck all” all day bandy Deptford post-punk meeting of a roguish Blockheads, geezer Renegade Soundwave and Dandy Warhols Jack Medley’s Secure Men (‘Taking Care Of Business’); and the Graham Greene reimagined as an end of a seaside holiday midlife crisis, played out by a noir Squeeze and Turtles, Trailer Crash (‘Brighton Rock’).
Other worthy mentions include the all-round cult talent and already mentioned in my opening paragraph, Tav Falco, who gets his drugstore cowboy Sir Douglas Quintet version of the Stax soul-snap ‘Tramp’ (retitled as ‘Tram?’) on the comp: A grizzled, cool fuck you of unrepentant redneck swagger. If the promise of miscreant, social political upstarts making fucked-up country, folk, indie and punk (and even badly-lit underpass soul; courtesy of Milk Kan’s ‘My Baby’s Gone Viral On The Brain’) grabs you, then get a load of this concentration of disgruntled reprobates. Raise a toast, better still buy the bloody CD or download it you tight ungrateful urchins. Here’s to another fifteen years of true musical independence!
See also…
David Cronenberg’s Wife ‘The Octoberman Sequence’ (here…)
Sergeant Buzfuz ‘Go To The Devil And Shake Yourself’ (here…)
Extradition Order ‘American Prometheus’ (here…)
Paul Hawkins And The Awkward Silences ‘Outsider Pop’ (here…)
Hi, my name is Dominic Valvona and I’m the Founder of the music/culture blog monolithcocktail.com For the last ten years I’ve featured and supported music, musicians and labels we love across genres from around the world that we think you’ll want to know about. No content on the site is paid for or sponsored and we only feature artists we have genuine respect for /love. If you enjoy our reviews (and we often write long, thoughtful ones), found a new artist you admire or if we have featured you or artists you represent and would like to buy us a coffee at https://ko-fi.com/monolithcocktail to say cheers for spreading the word, then that would be much appreciated.
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