The Perusal #65: The Young Mothers, Inturist, Nickolas Mohanna, A Journey Of Giraffes…
March 5, 2025
A World of Sonic/Musical Discoveries Reviewed by Dominic Valvona
Photo Credit: The Young Mothers shot by Malwina Witkowska
The Young Mothers ‘Better If You Let It’
(Sonic Transmissions) 21st February 2025
Those (Young) Mothers of reinvention transform crate digging reminisces and nostalgic hummed melodies from the age of the Great American Songbook on their new album, Better If You Let It.
Whilst maintaining the freeform principles and eclectic range that has come to define them; cut loose from obligation, any burden, and so free to roam and extend their scope of influences as they please, The Young Mothers return after an interregnum of setbacks, relocation and both forced and unforced breaks: some of that time can be blamed on the global inconvenience of Covid and the resulting lockdowns.
Corralling such a loose configuration of able and notable musicians and artists together is no mean feat; especially with the diversity of schedules, with every willing collaborator and band member in such high demand or leading their own projects. But all six players managed to commune in 2022; coming together to record the group’s third album in Oslo, the capital of TYM’s founding instigator and electric/acoustic bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten. The group was actually first conceived when Flaten moved in the opposite direction from Norway – after sojourns with such noted groups as the Norwegian Ornette Coleman imbued trio Neon – to Austin, Texas, back in 2009. Not wasting much time, Flaten’s rich Nordic legacy of contemporary jazz met head-on with the arid Southern state’s burgeoning scene of experimental and leftfield polygenesis collaboration. But after a decade or more of improvising both live and in the studio, Flaten decided to move back home: hence the location of this new album.
But there is a secondary connection to the Nordic scene and homeland through the sextet’s vibraphonist, drummer, percussionist and voice Stefan González, who’s late father, the revered Texan jazz trumpeter Dennis González, recorded an album in Oslo together with some of Norway’s most notable musicians in the early 90s: By the way, that González musical legacy also includes bassist brother Aaron; both siblings play together in various setups, most notably as Akkolyte. Stefan and the group pay tribute to Dennis’s memory, that time and location, on the sombre and mysteriously whispery track, ‘Song For A Poet’. Taking a near esoteric, near Sufi mystical and wild turn with the use of collaborating voices from Klara Weiss and Malwina Witkowska, the mood is at first chthonian, shadowy and near foreboding until the tints and bulb-like vibraphone notes of Milt Jackson and the Modern Jazz Quartet tinkle and hover, and digeridoo-like blows merge with bristled reed breaths in an amorphous dimension of feeling-it-out-jazz and exploration of abstract commemoration and recall.
I must at this point mention the rest of TYM’s lineup, which includes a name Monolith Cocktail regulars will hopefully be familiar with, Frank Rosaly. The attuned, experimental drummer extraordinaire appeared alongside his foil the multimedia performer and singer Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti on last year’s enriching MESTIZX album – one of my favourite and choice albums of 2024. Sharing the drums with González, but also switching to electronic programming,he’s joined by the Shape of Broad Minds polymath Jawwaad Taylor on trumpet, rhymes and electronic programming, accomplished player Jason Jackson on both tenor and baritone saxophone, and Plutonium Farmer and Flaten regular sparring partner Jonathan F. Horne on guitar.
Between them, they cover everything from post-rock to freeform jazz, hardcore, hip-hop and death metal – I presume its González’s daemonic black metal-esque growling on the album finale ‘Scarlet Woman Lodge’, as he is credited in the liner notes with “voice” duties alongside drumming, percussion and vibraphone.
I think I’m right in saying that this is the first album in which all the participants share writing duties. The inspiration and source, a “whimsical” ballad, behind the opening title-track for instance, was first brought to the band by Jackson as a sort of tribute to the Great American Songbook. In turn inspired by rifling through old records from another age, this original idea, the melody, was transformed, deconstructed, reinvented and fused with the rap style rhyming of the Freestyle Fellowship, The Roots, Death Grips and Talib Kweli, the fuzz scuzz guitar of Monster Movie period Michael Karoli, the soulfulness and vibraphonic twinkle of Isiah Collier and the already referenced Modern Jazz Quartet, and the feels of old time Art Pepper, but all performed by Madlib remixing in real time Isotope 217 and Zu.
There’s a whiff still of nostalgia on the next track, ‘Hymn’, which recalls the Savoy label, the sound of Gillespie, but reconfigured by the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra. As that title suggests, this is a spiritual of a kind that twangs and stirs until reaching a climatic passage of buzzing, croaking, straining saxophone pleads. ‘Lijm’ glues together elements of Q-Tip, clipping., Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Trenchmouth and Sault, with the pulse and current this time being more tuned towards the electronic: flips, mechanical devices and data sit with and underneath the action and the activist coaching.
Engaging and embracing past influences and inspirations, the eclectic ensemble pushes further in stretching the boundaries. And despite the range and scope, the many musical threads, it all comes together quite congruously to produce the perfect rounded album of nostalgic and free jazz, hip-hop, no wave, hardcore and acid rock, and electronica. A definite choice album for March and 2025.
Inturist ‘Tourism’
(Incompetence Records) 14th March 2025
Engaging at the best of times with a wealth of regional cultural/musical/sonic influences and passions, the producer, musician, former Glintshaker instigator and multidisciplinary artist Evgeny Gorbunov continues to transform his various exiled travails and more pleasing creative pilgrimages into magical, playful and odd adventures under the Soviet era borrowed Inturist guise: itself a reference to the sole Soviet era tour operator and travel agency for foreign visitors to the country before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Sparked by an interest for Southwest Asia and North Africa, Gorbunov’s latest travelogue is a curiosity of mirages, bendy sun-bleached guitar, elastic and rubbery pliable plastic and tubular rhythms, morphed Salyut space programme soundboards, library music oddities and psychedelic primitivism. More attuned to the abstract and both vapoured and hallucinatory transformations of his travels beyond the Russian homeland to the Balkans and Israel than the geopolitical crisis of our times, the worldly sonic traveller finds a balance between the strange and bejewelled. An entire voyage of aural discovery awaits like an escape from the destructive carnage unfolding in real time, with Gorbunov caught between both the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s fight with Hamas.
Originally in forced exile, having left Russia as it menaced and then set in motion one of the most cruelling and horrifying conflicts of the age, Gorbunov moved to Belgrade, the capital of Serbia – a country fraught with its own history of war and the cracking down in recent times of civil liberties and a free media. However, there would be journeys made further afield, including the city of Tel Aviv (Trump take note, there is already a Middle Eastern Rivera of a kind, and this is it), where he recorded and produced some of the tracks on this fifteen-track travel guide. Luckily not on the frontline of the murderous Hamas insurgency that led to an ever-widening revenge of score-settling by Israel (they’ve been very busy, clearing up a lot of the mess for the West in the process; fighting on at least four different fronts; weakening Iran’s grip and influence; and eradicating much of that empire’s proxies in the bargain), the very last Tel Aviv studio session in 2023 took place on the fatalistic date of October 7th . But this is an album of intriguing, idiosyncratic peculiarities; of sound invention and engagement with a landscape both imagined and real.
Moving seamlessly across that map, influences from the avant-garde, kosmische, psychedelic, ethnic, new age, trance, otherworldly, tropical and no wave cross paths to form a novel retro-futuristic and transmogrified vision of exotic and folkloric ethnography and etymology. As part of that cosmopolitan project, there’s references to the Russian dance and driving-horses harness of “Troika” to the French dialect phrase for “winter landscape” “Paysage d’Hiver”. The former, and opener, is said to include a dance that mimics the prancing of horses puled by a sled or carriage. Musically there’s little to reference this, as the bandy ripping effects of lightly torn felt, the lunar effects of a Soviet era sci-fi movie and padded rhythms amorphous conjure up a movement and direction of a kind. The latter sure has some vague dull sun sparkle of light sharply hitting the wintery scape as a loose spring and twangy Charlie Megira guitar flicks over another cosmonaut lunar spell of retro-space sounds.
The Soviet underground meets Überfällig era Gunther Schickert and Finis Africae on the huffed and mewing voiced, valve opening effects twiddling ‘Special Offer’; and there’s something Malaysian, albeit very removed, sounding on the fluted, piped and tubular blown ‘Reminder’. But if you were looking to get a hold on the overall sound, which changes constantly as it vaguely picks up percussive and rhythmic, folksy and traditional hints of Afro-Brazil, the Balkans and Asia, then imagine Populäre Mechanik booking a surreal tour of those regions with Ramuntcho Matta, Gene Sikora, Sun City Girls, Ganesh Anandan, Moebius & Plank and Aksak Maboul in tow.
A great approach to sound collage and the transference of special held scenes, memories – especially those that offer nostalgia for the cold war period optimism of Soviet technology and the space programme – and trippy dreams, the Tourism album envisions oscillated, melting, animated and cult flights of fantasy that repurpose the terrain and topography. In short: one of my favourite albums of 2025.
Gregory Uhlmann, Josh Johnson, Sam Wilkes ‘Uhlmann Johnson Wilkes’
(International Anthem) 14th March 2025
Hot-housed in various creative incubators both in Chicago and L.A., the triumvirate gathering of guitarist, composer and producer Gregory Uhlmann, saxophonist, composer, multi-instrumentalist and award-winning producer Josh Johnson and bassist, arranger, composer and producer Sam Wilkes can all draw upon a wealth of experience and influences from the jazz world and beyond.
Crossing paths on numerous occasions – only last October both Uhlmann and Johnson appeared on fellow International Anthem artist Anna Butterss’ Mighty Vertebrate album –, all three exceptional musicians and artists congruously join together for an extraordinary attuned, sensitive and improvisational project that fuses the electroacoustic with a removed vision of chamber jazz, Americana and the experimental.
As a most tantalising prospect, this trio was conceived and set in motion by a couple of live shows – you’ll hear the polite but encouraging audience on the first two tracks – and a session at Uhlmann’s pad in L.A. And from that, a near organic growth of both attentive and stirring moods and ideas prompted an evocative language of harmonics, carefully placed twitches and plucks, sustained serenity, moving melodious hallucinations, strained misty breathes, subtle ambient and trance-y beds and wisps, vapours of synthesized effects, and plastique and pad pattered tubular rhythms.
With references to a brand of especially creamy and luxuriously textural toothpaste, the Armenian name for “sunshine” and a Mexican turnip, an international and abstract world of motivations is transduced into a mood music of the dreamy, introspective, soulful, ebbing and amorphous. From landscape gazing with Daniel Vickers, Myles Cochran and 90s David Sylvian (‘Unsure’) to floating in a warbling dreamy alien mirage (‘Shwa’), the performances, interactions effortlessly convey images, emotions as they both daintily and like a vapour of steam seem to drift or chirp along in an almost shapeless form.
In keeping with a theme of introspection, of the loner seeking a moment away from the onslaught of noise and distraction, the trio have chosen to loosely cover McCartney’s wistful break away from the idiosyncratic surreal, music hall and madcap rambunctiousness of the Magical Mystery Tour coach trip, ‘The Fool On The Hill’. It’s a lovely gesture; an indulgent mizzle and long exhaled alto sax breath of hazy and watery trickling finery that blends echoes of healing balm Alice Coltrane and Kamasi Washington with an ambient tremulous and beautiful haze. They’ve pretty much kept the signature melody but stretched it out and dispensed with the whistled flute and felt capped folksy magic for something more in the spiritual mode. A lovely finish to a sympathetically attentive and masterfully felt album that balances the unhurried with the prompted, playful and abstract.
A Journey Of Giraffes ‘Emperor Deco’
(Somewherecold Records) 7th March 2025
I’m taking it personal now. For after years and years of trying to sell the adroit, visionary ambient, neoclassical, electronic works of John Lane, and showcasing the American’s prolific catalogue of explorative opuses, he remains largely ignored: cast out on the fringes. Not that I give a shit about validation, but it would be nice if bandcamp at least wrote a feature, or that his work was played across the airwaves internationally and more regularly.
I’ve championed the unassuming composer since the very start, going back to the very inception of this blog fifteen years ago. From the early days of experimentation and the beachcomber bedroom transformations of Pet Sounds under the Expo guise to his various projects under the A Journey Of Giraffes moniker, I’ve pretty much covered everything John has ever transmitted. And after all this time, I find it bewildering that his music hasn’t managed to cut through.
Arguably John’s most enduring partnership in recent years has been with the North American label Somewherecold Records, who’ve released around eight of his albums, including this concomitant partner to 2023’s Empress Nouveau. There’s been other releases in between, but planned at the time, and now seeing fruition, is his masculine answer to that feminine album’s subtle and decorative qualities, Emperor Deco.
A change musically as he balances the tactile and the refined crafted filigree of that previous conceptual work, the curves and softer lines of Art Nouveau are now replaced by the geometric crystals, the harder light catching shapes and lines of Art Deco – there’s even a reference, title-wise, to famous the Bohemia makers/manufacturers of crystal Art Deco-styled glassware “Karl Palda”. Playing with those era defining art movements, in a literal and metaphorical sense but symbolically too, John now emphasis the noirish and bluesy, the brooding and remunerative.
For Nouveau, arriving during the Belle Epoque of a golden age that soon crumbled during the onset of World War I, its applied softened ideals and art is identified by John as feminine. Whilst Deco is synonymous with the roaring 20s: the feelgood period that despite everything was soon caught up in the Great Depression and then the rise of European Fascism. And this art form, from the design of products to architecture, is defined as masculine by John. Both now converge to form a whole.
Still very much in the ambient field of exploration. And still showing signs of the subtle craft and influence of John’s musical guru Susumu Yokoto. The mood music now embraces a soft layer of smoky, wafted, cuddled, strained, blown, accentuated saxophone and carefully placed synthesized drumbeats and rhythms: of a kind. For John has essentially created a removed version of a jazz album; something more akin to Alfa Mist or Jacek Doroszenko transforming the essence of Pharoah Sanders, Sam Gendel (both are referenced in the accompanying notes), Petter Eldh and Archie Shepp.
You could suggest there was also a “spiritual jazz” vogue to the sound, especially with the shake of trinkets, the amorphous echoes of bells and percussion that could be from the Far East, Tibet and North Africa, and of course the spindled sounds that could have been caressed and woven by Alice Coltrane or Laraaji. And that’s without mentioning the jazzy bulb-like electric piano notes and, what could be, the vibraphone, which has more than an echo of the Modern Jazz Quartet about it.
Add to this noirish, spiritual jazzy feel another subtle layer of Jon Hassell fourth world musics and a resonance of Nyman, Glass, Finis Africae and Sylvain and the perimeters are further expanded, his range growing ever more expansive. We can also hear the odd memory recall from those seashells collecting Brian Wilson-like Expo experiments of old, which when mixed with the jazz elements makes for a winning combination.
John inhabits this space at times like a mizzle, a gauze, effortlessly absorbing references, sounds and moods as he languidly and beautifully captures his concerns, moods and offerings of escapism from the full-on assault of the daily grind. There’s depth, a touch of sadness, but for the most part this is like a mirage or dream that repurposes the sound of jazz.
After last year’s long form Retro Porter (one of my choice albums of 2024) John’s deco-imbued, romantic and smoky album returns to the shorter track format with a generous offering of twenty-two musical pieces, experiences and evocations that never drag, seem indulgent or test the patience: You could say John has found the perfect length of time in which to express himself on an album in which each track is perfectly realised and executed; existing both as a singular moment, passage of time, and yet also forming part of a one whole experience of repeating signatures. This could (should) be the album that finally cements John’s reputation as one of the most imaginative and prolific artists working in this, or these, fields of compositional experimentation.
Nour Symon ‘I am calm and angry • e’
(Magnetic Ambiances) 7th March 2025
Nour Symon’s orchestrated and instigated reification of angst, rage and activism speaks just as much about the present decade’s movement against authoritarianism, the State commodification of education and health, and the erosion of civil rights as it does about this work’s main inspiration, the “Printemps érable” protests of 2012.
You could say that the expressions, the sonic and orchestral devices, the use of voices and poetry, of manifesto and barricade rattling are all just as prescient in the aftermath of the pandemic as they were thirteen years ago when a groundswell of support grew up around demonstrations against the proposed doubling of tuition fees in the province: increasingly expanding the remit, widening the disgruntlement, everyone from labour unions to environmentalists, leftists and marginalised groups ended up supporting a growing resentment, the ranks of which numbered around 250,000 at its peak.
Despite various setbacks – the lockdowns had a knock-on effect for this project, forcing an abandonment of the original plan to work with the Montérégie Youth Symphony Orchestra – the Egyptian-Quebec composer transforms the energy and directs an abstract despair into an avant-garde electroacoustic and experimental voiced theatre of the absurd, dramatic, expressionist and pained. In many ways a cross-generational grief and pull of despair, political activism and action, this album’s notable contemporary poet collaborator Roxanne Desjardin draws upon the 1980s and 1990s countercultural writings of the iconic Quebec poets Denis Vanier and Josée Yvon.
Ambitious and covering a multitude of disciplines from visual and text art (a graphic score was conceived to communicate the concept) to performance, orchestral transmogrification, opera and video, I am calm and angry • e uses a host of renowned, prize nominated poets, soloist musicians and ensembles; far too many to mention in detail here, but all integral to conveying the very real emotional maelstrom and rage of protest. Across six tracks, divided liberally into the Supermusique Ensemble and Collective Ad Lib groupings, mewling, contorting, accented, untethered, enunciated and experimental theatre-like voices circle and ride the contours, rises and quirks of a fusion between the classical avant-garde, experimental arts, Musique concrète, and, of all things, a removed version of freeform jazz.
Recognisable instruments from the wind, strings and brass sections join together with artistic impressionistic symbolism, percussion and electronic elements to evoke forebode, the unearthly, dramatic, mooning, unbalanced and abstract. Reference points within that overlapping sphere of influences and musical threads/connections includes (to these ears anyway) Charlie Morrow, Stockhausen, Cage, György Ligeti, Xenakis, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Don Cherry and on the heralded, whip-cracked and concertinaed collective agonised ‘I will die in a closed room’, a strange fusion of Alex North and The Drift era Scott Walker.
Unbalanced with the ground constantly shifting below, the tumultuous and agitated are invoked and revoked in a musical experiment of plummets, falls and rises. A mix of French, amorphous and descriptive languages is adopted in a successful attempt to merge the poetic arts with protest, manifesto and performance, whilst physically stimulating the emotions and trauma of such protest.
Nickolas Mohanna ‘Speakers Rotations’
(AKP Recordings) 7th March 2025
A study in time, of impermanence, this uninterrupted continuous work from the New York based artist/composer emits miraged rippling vibrations across amorphous futurist Americana panoramas; stirs up the presence of alien craft overhead; and cloaks mysterious voices and sounds in an ever-changing sonic reverberation and feedback of instrument transmogrification and effected loops and field recordings.
As each track merges into the next, this adroit and evocative survey of a concept both atonally and rhythmically conjures new worlds of fourth world music, the kosmische and shadowy. Mohanna breaths futuristic sci-fi propeller-like zip-lines and long drawn air into the trombone, evokes the guitar drones and hanging astral mind-scaping and astral mysticism of Ash Ra Tempel, and plucks and pulls subtly in a resonating echo the tines of some hidden stringy apparatus. Grand gestures of a kind are made as the visionary scope of fogged and gauzy inner and outer space manifestations sits on a liminal border between the Cosmic Jokers, Daniel Lanois, Faust, Chuck Johnson, the Droneroom and Bill Orcutt.
I’ve now sat through this album over three times, and fully appreciate its skills in evoking not just the hypnotic but the near ominous, and for the way it seems to seamlessly keep changing the mood and the stay intriguing.
Ships of many kinds prowl the metallic fissures and beds of guitar sustain, and the doomish rumbles of the leviathan elements resemble the Lynchian and Bernard Szajner’s alternative score for Dune. And as one sound, one wave dissipates into the ether, or is left behind a weather front, something even more curious, sometimes beautiful, emerges: the brassy saloon bar-like chiming, trembling and spindled piano that starts to take hold in the last part of ‘Hollow In The Rock’ and continues into the finale, ‘Past Light Cone’, reminded me of the heavenly Laraaji.
This is AKP Recordings inaugural release of 2025, and it is of the highest quality. An improvisational soundtrack that vaguely shapes imaginative terrains and textures via the art of speaker rotation, manipulation and the use of the electronic and tactile, this album merges the interplanetary looming hovers of UFOs and sound generators with the cerebral and mystical: the voices, if that is indeed what they are, equally evoking throat-singers and something more hermitic and paranormal. I’d happily recommend this album to anyone wishing to immerse themselves for three quarters of an hour and will be highlighting it as one of my choice picks from the month.
he didnt ‘Distraction Threshold’
(drone alone productions) 14th March 2025
After a sideways venture under the newly conceived guise of i4M2 last year, the mysteriously kept secret Oxfordshire-based electronic musician, guitarist and producer returns under his main he didnt moniker; a project he’s honed over the last few years and across several albums of granular gradients, frazzled fissures, currents and thick set walls of drones.
Creating a certain gravitas that demands more from the listener, his latest album of concreted contours, ripples, movements and metallurgical sonics opens with a fifteen-minute statement of noisy concentrated filaments and machine-made purrs and propellers. Not so much industrial as a longform immersion of drones and cryptic soundscaping, there’s elements of hallowed organ from the church of the Tangerine Dream and early Kluster meeting with the sustained guitar waves of The Spacemen 3 and The Telescopes.
An ominous rippling effect of sci-fi conjures up a frozen tundra ghost world on the album’s title-track. Carrying over that troubling set of propellers from an overhead alien presence or supernatural dimension, the mood is chilling. ‘I Realise Now How It Is Connected To My Youth’ is even darker and menacing; like Jóhann Jóhannsson’s soundtrack for Mandy sharing room on the ghost ship’s bow with Coil and Svartsin. Harrowing images of supernatural psychogeography are dredged up from the recall of the artist’s past on a troubled doom mission.
A little different sonic wise, ‘Luminescent Medium’ brings in a slow deadened drum and a semblance of repurposed dreamy synth-pop. A singular reverberated and echoed hit is all that is needed to change the mood here, as the Cocteau Twins meet the BoC, Cities Aviv and the Aphex Twin in a fizzled arena of helicopter-like rotor blades, Matthewdavid-like real and unreal transmogrified field recordings and broadcasts, and a most out-of-place gallop of horses. It is as hallucinogenic as it is churningly moody and serious.
Distraction Threshold is very much slow music for the masses hooked up to their devices, unable to concentrate for more than a nanosecond let alone make any sort of deep connection or form a relationship with the sounds emanating from their tinny speakers. The aural equivalent of finding profound prophecy and divination from entrails or seaweed, this heavy meta gloomed and movable pull of uncertainty, trauma and metal machine chills focuses the mind with answers and questions to our present and past disturbed natures, as it builds or prompts deeply felt and evoked images and moods. he didnt continues to mine for drone-inspired gold on yet another successful atmospheric work of both the abstract and vivid.
Sporaterra ‘Seven Dances To Embrace The Hollow’
(Präsens Editionen / La Becque Editions) 14th March 2025
Multimedia spheres of sound and performance art, of theatre, of sonics and various forms of music merge on this latest fully realised album from the Italian-Polish duo Sporaterra. Convening under this guise since 2019, artists Magda Drozd and Nicola Genovese roam the catacombs, the psychogeography, the halls and lands of a reimagined Europe and beyond to conceptualise a dream realism of mystery, invocation and intelligent aural archaeology. They uncover and then transform their curiosities and inquiry into something both hermetic and disturbing; old ghosts retrieved from across time, going back as far as the primal, through to ancient Rome, the Renaissance and Baroque époques.
The time-travelling Seven Dances To Embrace The Hollow album unveils itself over seven suites of Mummers parades, Dante imbued evocations, hauntings, mystical disturbing bestial gargles and snarls, and fairytale. Under that Sporaterra entitled partnership – a name that translates as “above the ground” –, the two artists inhabit some strange timelines as they dance to both the heralded and otherworldly manifestations of frame drummed and foggy sonorous cornu accompanied procession and arcane ritual (think Dub Chieftain and Sharron Kraus), the crystal cut dulcimer and glassy bulbs twinkled evocations of Southeast Asia (Park Jiha), the suffused and swaddled atmospheric sax tones of Colin Stetson and Donny McCaslin, and the stirrings of These New Puritans, Italian prog and Sproatly Smith.
Whether it’s the fate of the scaffold, reverberations from the coliseum, Medieval merriment, monastic choral drama, and vocal mewling and mooning, there’s signs of some esoteric presence to be felt throughout. Old lives and movements, actions conjured from beneath are brought to the surface, with the recognisable made anew and slightly estranged. In short: an electroacoustic sonic archaeological dig into the phantom layers of the conceptual, intuitive and imaginative.
Hi, my name is Dominic Valvona and I’m the Founder of the music/culture blog monolithcocktail.com For the last ten years I’ve featured and supported music, musicians and labels we love across genres from around the world that we think you’ll want to know about. No content on the site is paid for or sponsored and we only feature artists we have genuine respect for /love. If you enjoy our reviews (and we often write long, thoughtful ones), found a new artist you admire or if we have featured you or artists you represent and would like to buy us a coffee at https://ko-fi.com/monolithcocktail to say cheers for spreading the word, then that would be much appreciated.
THE MONTHLY DIGEST OF ACCUMULATED NEW MUSIC; THE SOCIAL INTER-GENERATIONAL/ECLECTIC AND ANNIVERSARY ALBUMS CELEBRATING PLAYLIST; AND ANNIVERSARY PIECES FROM THE ARCHIVES.
THE NEW\___
boycalledcrow ‘Kullau
(Mortality Tables)
A musical atmospheric hallucination and psychedelic dream-realism of a roadmap, the latest transduced-style album from Carl M Knott (aka a boycalledcrow) takes his recollections, memory card filled photo albums, samples and experiences of travelling through Northern India between 2005 and 2006 and turns them into near avant-garde transported passages of outsider art music.
Escaping himself and the stresses and anxieties that had been plaguing him since adolescence, Knott chose to pick up the road less travail(ed) after graduating; making new friends along the way, including the artist (known as James) who provided the album’s image.
If you are aware of the Chester-based composer’s work under numerous labels, and his experiments with weird folk music and signature revolving, splayed, dulcimer and zither-like guitar transformations then Kullu will – albeit more psychedelic and mirage-like – fit in nicely with expectations.
Place names (that album title refers to the village, an ancient kingdom, of ‘Kullu’, which sits in the ‘snow-laden mountain’ province of Himachel Pradesh in the Western Himalayas), Buddhist self-transformation methods (the extremely tough self-observation process of “non-reaction” for the body and mind known as “Vipassana”), Hindu and Jainism yogis (the “Sadhu”, a religious ascetic, mendicant or any kind of holy person who has renounced the worldly life, choosing instead to dedicate themselves to achieving “moksha” – liberation – through meditation and the contemplation of God) and language (the localized distinctive Kullu dialect and syntax of “Kanashi”, currently under threat) are all used as vague reference points, markers in this hallucinatory grand tour.
These captured moments and memories are often masked. It’s the sound of Laaraji stepping across such dizzying spiritually beautiful high altitudes and descending into the valley below; the brief sound of tablas and an essence of reverberating Indian stringed instruments suddenly taking on abstracted forms or reversed and melted into a hazy dream cycle. Nothing is quite what it seems; the imagination reminiscing freely and taking source recordings off on curious tangent. And yet it all makes sense, and somehow quantifies, soundtracks a landscape and period we can identify and experience. You can even work out that much of that plucked, cylindrical, pitch and speed-shifted string sound is coming from the £27 guitar that Knott bought whilst on those same travels (picked up in Dehradun to be specific).
But as with all of Knott’s peregrinations, queries, unrestricted gazes, the sound is very much his own. If you would like some idea of what we are dealing with, maybe Walter Smetak, Land Observation in colour, Fabbrica Vuota, Gunn-Truscinski Nace, and with the playfully strange psychedelic ‘Tuktuk’ ride, a merger of Tortoise, Yanton Gat and Animal Collective. Mind you, the vague echoes of piped church music on ‘Bear River’ (which “bisects” the valley region in which Kullu sits) are closer to the spiritual new age and kosmische – perhaps a hint of David Gasper. If Knott’s soundboard is anything to go by he did indeed find that much needed replenishment of the senses and escape from the mental and health pressures of stress that handicapped his progress. He’s created dreamy encapsulation of a time without burden and restriction; an experience totally free of worry and the strains of the material world out near the roof of the Earth. The results of which can be heard to have clearly been beneficial artistically. Kullu is another magical, strange and explorative soundscape/soundtrack from an independent artist quietly getting on with harnessing a unique sound and way of capturing the impossible.
Amy Aileen Wood ‘The Heartening’
(Colorfield Records)
Not in the literal sense, but the award-winning drummer, multi-instrumentalist, composer and engineer Amy Aileen Wood takes centre stage on her new album for the Colorfield Records label.
The supporting foil on a range of albums and performances with such notable names as Fiona Apple (more from her later), St. Vincent, Tired Pony and Shirley Manson, Wood was initially approached by Colorfield instigator Pete Min (the imprint that’s run out of Min’s Lucy’s Meat Market studios in L.A.) to lead her own solo outing. And although Wood’s stand-out tactile feels and descriptive drumming skills maybe on show and at the forefront, the L.A. based polymath, whilst also playing a wide worldly range of instruments, invites a number of in-demand session players and artists to collaborate, including Apple. An unsurprising choice seeing as Wood’s was not only a member of the recording band on Apple’s Fetch The Bolt Cutters album but also its co-producer. From that same circle, the “veteran” bassist Sebastian Steinberg provides pliable and subtly effective upright bass parts to a majority of the tracks on The Heartening. Apple, for her part, offers cooing “dadodahs” and assonant light dreaminess on the album’s opener, the womb-breached submersed turn Can Unlimited Klezmer ‘Rolling Stops’, and both sighs and giggles of ‘self-love’ on the gamelan cascaded self-help indie-wonk ‘Time For Everything’. Another one of the various guests’ spots goes to Kelsey Wood (relation?), who coos and ahs on the kinetic Alfa Mist-esque ‘Slow Light’.
The Heartening is essentially, if removed and discombobulated or enhanced by a palette of different styles and influences, a jazz album; especially with the addition of the L.A. based saxophonist (amongst other talents) Nicole McCabe, who pushes those personalized thematic exploratory performances and freeform expressions towards flashes of Ivor Pearlman, Alex Roth, Donny McCaslin (I’m thinking especially of his cosmic dissipations), Dave Harrington (funny enough, referenced in the PR notes) and Savoy label era Yusef Lateef.
But the musicality is far reaching, hopping around and landing at one point in Java, the next, in Eastern Europe (those stirring closed-eyes arches, sighs and solace style strings of the renowned Daphne Chen reminding me of Fran & Flora and Alex Stolze’s Galicia classical sympathies). You could also throw in breakbeats, the downtempo, the no wave and various fun fusions into the mix; everything from J Dilla to NAH, TV On The Radio, Arto Lindsay, John Zorn and Lucrecia Dalt.
Wood’s own style of drumming (though as I mentioned, the multi-instrumentalist, true to that title, plays everything from nostalgic iconic midi synths and drum pads to the West African balafon and twines flicked kalimba) is halfway busy and halfway intuitive: a mix of Valentina Mageletti and Emre Ramazanoglo.
Wood is certainly a talented player and full of ideas, as the action moves constantly between the natural and improvised. With a mix of trepidation and “intrigue” Wood’s proves an able leader and catalyst. I’d say this solo venture was the successful start to a new pathway and adventures.
Virgin Vacations ‘Dapple Patterns’
From a multitude of sources, across a number of mediums, the concentrated sonic force that is Virgin Vacations ramp up the queasy quasars and the heavy-set slab wall of no wave-punk-jazz-maths-krautrock sounds on their debut long player. With room to expand horizons the Hong Kong (tough gig in recent years, what with China’s crackdowns on the free press and student activists; installing authoritarian control over the Island) ensemble lay out a both hustled, bustled and more cosmic psychedelic journey, from the prowling to the near filmic and quasi-operatic -from darkened forebode to Shinto temple bell-ringing comedowns that fade out into affinity.
Operating in a liminal realm between the ominous and more mysteriously idyllic; changing mood, sense of place and the sound on every other track; the ensemble channel everything from the Hifiklub, Angels Die Hard and The Pop Group in a wail of bugle horns post-punk jazz (ala Blurt and a vocal-less Biting Tongues) to ‘Gomorrha’ CAN, the Dead Kennedys, film-score Sakamoto, Hawkwind and the Holy Family. That’s of course when they’re not orbiting the celestial jazz of Sun Ra merged with Herbie Hancock on the heavenly spheres and alien evoked ‘Jupiter’: even this track grows into a manic nightmare of broken distorted radio sets.
The trip is a cosmic range of ideas, some driven others far more dreamy, psychedelic and even erring towards the orchestral – there’s plenty of bulb-like note-twinkled glockenspiel to go around too. It begins with a krautrock expulsion of dark materials and ends on a Tomat-like – in union with the Acid Mothers – dissipation of enveloped interplanetary temple vibrations. This only touches the surface however, and Virgin Vacations take flights of fantasy regularly whilst maintaining a heavy-pulsation of uncertainty. Energy is channeled in the right direction, with a force that manages to tap into the anxious and radical whilst finding air to breathe and dappled patterns spread of the title.
he didnt ‘nothingness manifested’
(Drone Alone Records) 24th May 2024
Granular gradients, frazzled fissures and currents appear in the thick set wall of drones emitted by the Oxfordshire-based electronic musician, guitarist and producer’s new numerically demarcated album.
Reading into the monolithic slab sided scale and ambitions of he didnt’s manifestations, these, mostly, long walls of whined, bended, looped, abrasive and sustained guitar and electronic waveforms elicit the feelings of landscape: one that can feel simultaneously overbearing, grand but in motion. Metallic filaments or the pitter-patter of acrid rain, ‘nothingness manifestations III-V’ builds a sonic picture over its duration of some almost alien atmospheric enveloped weather front – reminding me of Hans Zimmer’s bits on Blade Runner 2049, His Name Is Alive, Fiocz and a venerated Tangerine Dream. ‘nothingness manifestations II’ is similar with its alien evocations yet near bestial and slithery too – I’m hearing vague signs of Faust, Sunn O))) and even Spaceman 3 for some reason. Perhaps picking up inspiration from one previous support slot, he didnt channels The Telescopes, minus Stephen Lawrie’s drudgery vocals, and a touch of the J&MC on that heavy meta hewed opener.
But there’s holes too in what is more like a mesh block of wielding drones, with a glimmer, a movement of light audible in the grainy textured fabric around the self-described “void”. In short, something from nothing, materialisations from patterns in the sonic concrete that may just evoke something much bigger.
Ziad Rahbani ‘Amrak Seedna & Abtal Wa Harameyah’
(WEWANTSOUNDS)
Vinyl reprisal specialists WEWANTSOUNDS, in-between reviving and offering remastered runs of cult music from Japan, Egypt and elsewhere, have been picking their way through the back catalogue of the Lebanese polymath Ziad Rahbani (musician, composer, producer, playwright, satirist and activist).
Following on from the crate diggers’ choice 80s Middle Eastern disco-funk-balladry-soul-jazz-Franco-Arabian classic Houdou Nisbi (released by the label in 2022), the Amrak Seedna & Abtal Wa Harameyah combined moiety of congruous theatre play soundtracks offers a generous helping of performance choruses, instrumental theme tunes, ad spots and variations of the main signatures.
Whilst the ongoing sectarian driven civil war (between 1975 and 1990) raged, there was a surreal duel existence of stoicism, the Lebanese people carrying on with life in the face of religious rivalry, unprecedented violence, and infamous acts of massacre (a 150,000 fatalities, maybe more). Importantly Lebanese artists, musicians continued to create – some from abroad as part of a mass exodus (estimates are that a million citizens left the country to escape the horror during that period). Disarming as the musical motifs, dancing rhythms and messages was, cultural idols like Ziad (famously the scion of the feted musician and national star Assi Rahbani and the legendary celebrated siren Fairuz) were fervently political. And among his many talents, Ziad would collaborate with the most vocal of them, including the pioneer singer-songwriter of Arabian political song, Sami Hawat, who appears alongside a whole cast of other notable vocalists on this double helping of stage performances.
Written by fellow Lebanese playwright and actor Antoine Kerbaji, the main acts and catalysts for Ziad’s inspired fusion of the Occidental and Middle East, speak of the times in which they were created. Originally released on the Beirut-based cult label Relaxin in 1987, the emotions run high as the streets outside were paved in bloody retribution along the lines of not only religion (the Christian minority’s rule of decades, and elitist nepotism finally coming to a crashing head as the country’s demographic shifted to a Muslim majority, inflated by two migrations and expulsions from Israel of sizable Palestinians populations in the late 1940s and 60s) but also Cold War divisions. The passion is evident in the various cast or male/female led choruses of yearning expression and more swooning allurement – sometimes almost reminding me of Bollywood, and the dance or romance, courtship between a male and female lead.
Musically however, this is a mixed assortment of near classical piano motifs, Arabian stringed instrumental segments, the new wave, disco and funk fusion and movie soundtrack influences. Glaringly an obvious steal, there’s the recurring use of John Barry’s 007 signature score across a large slice of these tracks. Adopting that most famous iconic mnemonic and its variations, Ziad seems to pinch it back from its own Western takes on the music from his country and the wider region. Marvin Hamlisch dabbled in this area for The Spy Who Loved Me – although his take was on Egyptian disco -, as to did Bill Conti – a mix of Med sounds for For Your Eyes Only. So much of this reminds me of both those top rate composers, especially the near thriller style production and clavichord MOR funky fusion sounds of ‘Al Muqademah 1 (Introduction 1)’. Later on it sounds like Ziad riffs on Hamlisch’s score for The Sting on the relaxed jazzy vaudeville saloon barrel organ reminisce ‘Kabbaret Dancing’.
Away from the 007 themes there’s hints of John Addison and Michael Legrand on the Franco-Arabian boogie musical number ‘Al Piano’, and Richard Clayderman on the beautiful romantic-esque flourish of piano scales, runs and lucidity ‘Slow’. The music slips into the Tango at will, or transports the listener back to the noir 1930s. Although, ‘Mashhad Al Serk’ is a strange one, resembling funky calypso transmogrified with reggae and the new wave. I’m at a loss on occasion to describe what it is I’m hearing, as the palette is so wide and diverse. But in summary, both albums offer a cabaret and theater conjecture of fluidity that takes in the Middle East and fuses it with Western classicism, movie and TV themes, funk and 80s production signatures. Previously only ever released in the Lebanon, WWS have done the decent thing and revived these stage play soundtracks, offering us all a chance to own these expressive and enlightening recordings.
THE SOCIAL PLAYLIST VOLUME 86\____
The Social Playlist is an accumulation of music I love and want to share, tracks from my various DJ sets and residencies over the years, and both selected cuts from those artists, luminaries we’ve lost and those albums celebrating anniversaries each month.
Running for over a decade or more, Volume 86 is as eclectic and generational-spanning as ever. Look upon it as the perfect radio show, devoid of chatter, interruptions and inane self-promotion.
In this edition I’ve chosen to mark the 50th anniversaries of Sparks Kimono In My House, Bowie’s Diamond Dogs, Slapp Happy’s Self-Titled – but referred to as Casablanca Moon, after the opening track -, and Popol Vuh’s Einsjager & Siebenjager albums. A decade closer, and into the 80s, I’ve included tracks from my favourite French new wave spark and cool chanteuse Lizzy Mercier Descloux and her Zulu Rock LP of ’84, plus a slightly different performance of Echo & The Bunnymen’s ‘The Killing Moon’ (the original single also included on the Liverpool’s band’s Ocean Rain of course). Another leap closer, and its 30th anniversary nods to the Beastie Boys ambitious double-album spread Ill Communication, Jeru The Damaja’s The Sun Rises In The East, and The Fall’s Middle Class Revolt. The final anniversary spot this month goes to our very own Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea, or rather the whole Shea brood and their might lo fi cult vehicle The Bordellos. The group’s summary of the world and music industry, Will.I.Am, You’re Really Nothing, is ten years old this month.
We lost even more iconic mavericks and leaders of the form this last month or so. Grabbing, quite rightly, the most attention is the loss of Steve Albini. The legacy is ridiculous, and to be honest, far too many people have already dedicated the space for me to now chip in – I will be frank, where do you start? And so I have chosen to give him a mention but not to pay the homage due. We also lost the last remaining member of the motor city five, Dennis “Machine Gun” Thompson, who pummeled and, quite literally, kicked out the fucking jams. I’ve already made note and selected tracks from their catalogue when poor old Wayne Kramer passed just a few months back, and also their manager – for a time between drug busts – John Sinclair. The Detroit misfits are no more. What a sad state of affairs.
I have however chosen to mark the passing of UK rap icon MC Duke and king of twang, and one of the most important, influential guitarists of all time, Duane Eddy.
There’s a couple of “newish” selections – tracks that I either missed or didn’t get room to include in the Monolith Cocktail team’s Monthly Playlists (next edition due in a week’s time) – from Masei Bey and Martina Berther which I hope will prove intriguing. The rest of the playlist is made up of a smattering of tracks from Tucky Buzzard, Prime Minister Pete Nice, The Bernhardts, Nino Rota, It It, Clive’s Original Band, The Four King Cousins and more.
TRACK LIST________
Sparks ‘Barbecutie’
Tucky Buzzard ‘Time Will Be Your Doctor’
Haystacks Balboa ‘Bruce’s Twist’
David Bowie ‘1984’
Masei Bey ‘Beat Root’
Beastie Boys Ft. Q-Tip ‘Get It Together’
Jeru The Damaja ‘You Can’t Stop The Prophet’
Prime Minister Pete Nice Ft. Daddy Rich ‘Rat Bastard’
MC Duke ‘I’m Riffin 1990 Remix’
Helene Smith ‘Willing And Able’
The Bernhardts ‘Send Your Heart To Me’
Tala Andre Marie ‘Wamse’
Lizzy Mercier Descloux ‘Dolby Sisters Saliva Brothers’
Orchestre regional de Segou ‘Sabu Man Dogo’
Slapp Happy ‘Casablanca Moon’
Nino Rota ‘L’Uccello Magico’
Duane Eddy ‘Stalkin”
Dreams So Real ‘History’
Echo & The Bunnymen ‘The Killing Moon – Life at Brian’s Version’
The Bordellos ‘The Gospel According To Julian Cope’
The Fall ‘Middle Class Revolt’
It It ‘Dream Joel Dream’
David Bowie ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll With Me’
The Bordellos ‘Straight Outta Southport’
Clive’s Original Band ‘Oh Bright Eyed One’
Jodie Lowther ‘Cold Spell’
Martina Berther ‘Arrow’
Fursaxa ‘Poppy Opera’
Popol Vuh ‘Wo Bist Du?’
The Four King Cousins ‘God Only Knows’
ARCHIVES\_____
When gracing the Monolith Cocktail with his very own column of reviews was still years away, Brian “Bordello” Shea was featured for his own music as part of the mighty lo-fi malcontents The Bordellos – Brian one of the co-founding Shea sibling forces behind that celebrated cult outfit. Still for my money one of their finest moments on record, the group’s Will.I.Am, You’re Really Nothing (released at a time when that annoying, talentless opportunist was all over the telly and in the charts in the UK) diatribe is ten years old this month. To celebrate, reprise that essential songbook, I’m once more sharing my original review from 2014. Every word of it still, unfortunately, still holds today.
The Bordellos ‘Will.I.Am, You’re Really Nothing’
(Small Bear Records) Released 31st May 2014
It was Blur, in one of their only true flashes of inspiration, who came closest to summing up the times with their dejected conclusion that, “modern life is rubbish”. That was the early 90s, but depending on how long in the tooth, worn-down and jaded you are, every age can be viewed with the same disappointing sigh of resignation.
Yet, surely the present times take some beating, at least to us, the self-appointed custodians of the past, who remember an age when the culture seemed…. well, at least exciting, linear and comprehendible, instead of appropriated without thought or context, screwed-over and manipulated for largely commercial results, and slotted in to a handy off-the-peg lifestyle choice. Pop has eaten itself, with the lifecycles of trends and music becoming ever shorter.
It is with all this in mind that The Bordellos set out their manifesto. Leveling their criticism at commercial radio and TV especially, they aim their guided missile attacks at the harbingers of the Ed Sheeran topped Urban/Black music power lists, and what seems more and more like the UK publicity wing of conservatism, the BBC. The St. Helens, via a disjointed Merseybeat imbued lineage, family affair replace the “happy-go-lucky” lightweight and deciding suspect womens rights champion, totem of Pharrell Williams, Will.I.Am and all his partners in floppy platitude pop, rock and folk with the arch druid of counter-cultural esotericism and miscreant obscure musical sub-genres (Kraut to Jap via Detroit rebellious and experimental rock) Julian Cope. Grinding out a dedicated epistle to Cope, the trio’s sermon ‘The Gospel According To Julian Cope’ prompts a road to Damascus conversion to the spirit of rock’n’roll, in all its most dangerous guises.
De facto idol, Mr.Cope, pops up again on ‘My Dream Festival’, which as the title suggests is a list of the ideal, once in a lifetime, free festival lineups of lineups; read out in a quasi-Daft Punk ‘teachers’ style bastardized litany to an accompanying Casio pre-set drum track and watery effects. The Casio rhythm pre-sets and occasional sound bites come in handy again on the jaunty, deadpan disco jolly, ‘Elastic Band Man’ – a transmogrified Human League meets John Foxx – and on the broken-up, Robert Wyatt emotional drudge, ‘Between Forget And Neglect’.
Despite going at it hammer and tongs on their anvil-beating Cope Gospel, The Bordellos latest long-player protestation is a forlorn and intimate downbeat record. They can still be relied upon to rattle off a list of grievances and opprobrious pun harangued song titles: from the LP’s play-on-words adopted The Smiths song, reworked to accommodate a big fuck-you to that irritable twat, Will.I.Am, to name-checking another hyperbole anomaly of our Youtube, Google, Facebook, Twitter masters’ bidding, the no less frustratingly lame ‘Gangnam style’ viral – joining the call from last year’s Bring Me The Head Of Justin Bieber EP, for another public execution.
But it’s with a certain lamentable introspection that they also tone the vitriol down to attend to matters of the heart: The kiss-me-quick, misty-eyed ballad to love on a northern coast seaside town, ‘Straight Outta Southport’, and the Hawaiian slide guitar country rock ode, ‘The Sweetest Hangover’, both, despite their tongue-in-cheek titles, bellow a fondness for lovelorn adventures and plaintive break-up regret; proving that despite the bellicose calls for the corporal punishment of the foppish elite and its commercial pop music stars, there is a tender side to the group.
Sounding like it was recorded on an unhealthy dose of Mogadon, Will.I.Am, You’re Really Nothing is a composed grumble from the fringes of a battered musical wilderness. A last cry if you will from the pit-face of rock’n’roll.
Also this month, Bowie’s repurposed Orwellian theatre production Diamond Dogs reaches its 50th anniversary.
David Bowie ‘Diamond Dogs’
(RCA) 1974
“As they pulled you out of the oxygen tent, you asked for the latest party…” And with that the future dystopian, biota canine, leapt from its slumber “onto the streets below”: howling for more.
Bowie never really wanted to be a musician as such: or at least not wholly a musical act. His destiny lied with the grease paint of theatre and allure of cinema. Diamond Dogs of course allowed him to create a spectacle, melding the two disciplines together.
Fate would force the original concept to morph into the achingly morbid and glam-pop genius we’ve now come to love: a planned avant-garde, ‘moonage’, treatment of Orwell’s revered novel 1984 was rebuked by the author’s estate.
Still those augural references to state control and totalitarianism are adhered to throughout – both lyrically and in the song titles –, but attached to visions of a new poetic hell!
The loose, all-encompassing, metaphysical language may promise melancholy and despair, yet it also knows when to anthemically sound the rock’n’roll clarion call too.
Decreed as the leading highlight’s of the album by the majority –
Diamond Dogs (single), Rebel Rebel (single), 1984
Pay attention to these often overlooked beauties –
Rock’n’Roll With Me (single), Sweet Thing
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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