In review: a world of sonic discoveries. Dominic Valvona
30 Door Key ‘Strangely Familiar’
(Disaster By Choice) 31st October 2026
The witching hour may have passed, but Alessio Bosco’s latest hauntology under the literary and filmic guise of 30 Door Key isn’t just for Halloween.
Though really, more or less, a completely redrawn sonic map of psychic energy, Fortean transistor hallucinations, apparitions and supernatural library music scenes, this latest album is billed as a strange bedfellow and companion to last year’s A Warning To The Curious album. The original formulation evolved, as Bosco welcomed in a host of both established and burgeoning Italian artists to either collaborate, remix or transform some of the original material and ideas; a kind of extension of the Sicilian electronic artist’s paranormal and esoteric sonic palette, developed by a company of foils, taken into various complimentary and more electronic spheres. Strangely Familiar is just that: we recognise but we are also aware that there’s something peculiarly different going on.
That name by the way, 30 Door Key, is a reference, I believe, to the film adaptation of Witold Gumbrowicz’s 1937 book Ferdydurke, put onto screen by the Polish film director Jerzy Skolimowski in 1991. In short, this cult story and film’s young protagonist faces a conflict between acting his age at the onset of WWII in his Warsaw home, or of regressing and relapsing back into childhood as an escape from it. The all too real horror of facing or avoiding the tragedy of war being just one layer threaded into these atmospheric fantasies and occultist peregrinations: some of which feature spoken narratives of a kind.
It would be a lot easier to approach this work as a new vision/invocation, starting with the opening ‘30 Door Ident, 30 Door Key’ transformation attributed to Ghostronica – I’m not sure if this is an artist or genre in its own right. Bulb-like bottled notes alight a 70s vague soundtrack, half Carpenter, half Gallo, as queer supernatural sounds pop out of paranormal analogue apparatus. ‘Folklore Impressionist – A Place Nobody Knows’ is as its title suggest, an impression of Amicus film studio folksy horror, whilst the Richard Sala ‘Deadly Anxiety Mix’ of ‘Testcard, Le Forbici Di Manitu’ (a reference I think to the Reggio Emilia experimental art-rock collective) sounds like Julian Cope in horror science matinee radio mode to the sound of John Foxx and the theremin quivers of spectres.
Some tracks reminded me of The Books trapped in the Hammer House Of Horrors, or pastoral mirages of Tigon scores. And then the Italian singer and producer Fabrizio Tavernelli’s ‘exploration’ of ‘Monolith In Bowler’ features vague ethnographic sounds collected from a spooked Arabia, bounded timpani and mizzles and horns: it also reminded me in part of Sum of R. Fellow Italian electronic producer and artist Flippo Diana turns ‘Getting Out A Gutter’ into a Chicago House mix for birds to nest; it begins however with the gibberish broken-up transmissions from the radio tunned ether. In collaborative mode, the American writer Justin Hopper regales a psychogeography of pastoral scenery connected to myth on the Tudor folk track ‘Skeleton Down’; the author narrates poetically and mysteriously enveloped by the magic of nature like a cross between Dr. Martin Shaw and Robert Jeffers.
The whole oeuvre reminded me of Roudi Vagou & Lauten der Seela’s work together, of Teisco’s Tuscan Castle and Country Seat, that and all those quintessential English library music aficionados like the Belbury Poly and The Advisory Circle, the cult KPM label, and various other old VHS and audio tape manipulators working in the field of hauntology. There’s some interesting immersive experiences, invoked rituals, occult disturbances and supernatural mystique to keep you both entertained and on the edge of your seat.
Anna Butterss, John Raymond, Ben Lumsdaine ‘Beginningless’
(Northern Spy) 13th November 2026
Collaborating over the years, running across each other’s creative tracks since all inhabiting, roughly around the same time, the same musical spaces in Bloomington, Indiana, the accumulative experienced individuals of Anna Butterss, John Raymond, Ben Lumsdaine pull together on their debut incipient Beginningless triumvirate project.
As the back story goes, bass player Butterss and drummer Lumsdaine originally met as students in 2010 at Indiana University in the city of Bloomington. Butterss left and moved to Los Angeles, whilst lauded trumpet player Raymond moved to Bloomington in 2017 to begin teaching at the university where he and Lumsdaine developed their own musical rapport through the weekly jazz series Call & Response: originally founded as a space for improvisation and visiting musicians by Lumsdaine. Raymond inherited the series when Lumsdaine, like Butterss, decided to also move out West to Los Angeles, in 2019. However, both Butterss and Lumdaine returned to the city together in 2024, where they took up this debut recorded project with Raymond.
Butterss is much in-demand for not only heading their own projects but collaborating and improvising with such notable names as Jeff Parker, Makaya McCraven, Phoebe Bridges and Jason Isbell. The Australian-born artist is a member of the evolving Small Medium Large super-quintet and has also toured as a member of Flea’s Honora Band. As International Anthem’s (pretty much) in-house sound mixer, the in-demand drummer and multi-instrumentalist Lumsdaine also appeared on Butterss’s incredible Mighty Vertebrate album back in 2024 – one of our albums of the year. Other credits include a decades-worth of experiences as a band member and improvisor, working with such luminaries and established artists as Jeff Parker, Walter Smith III and Sylvon Esso. Raymond has been aggrandised the “voice of a generation” label. He certainly has the CV and experience to back it up, with nine albums under the belt as a leader, collaborations with S. Carey of Bon Ivor fame, credits as sideman or the featured artist on over thirty other recordings: four Grammy-award nominated albums no less included. Plus, as I’ve already mentioned, he’s also a well-respected teacher in the field, with a “prestigious” role at the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University.
The pool of talent and experiences act as a foundation for this most intuitive, improvised and felt album. Whittled down from 400 minutes, with scant interference production wise – little in the overdubs department and presented “almost entirely” as it was played out in the studio -, this inaugural and self-contained collaboration seems to amorphously grow out of the extemporised and the trio’s former wealth of experiences.
A sort of jazz album from the Fourth World sphere of Fearless Jon Hassell (and his peers) that also scowls and prowls to hip-hop, drum and bass, post-punk and a removed form of soul and funk, there’s a melodic quality and a groove (of a kind) to be found amongst the mystique, the nocturnal skyline bluesy and post-industrial decayed scenery of a plaintive, bewildered or smoggy hidden city. Certainly, out there, with Raymond’s trumpet and flugelhorn both inhabiting Hassell and Cherry’s spirits, the movements seems to be as resonated as it does buoyant and bouncing across influences as diverse as Tomega, the Chicago Underground, Isotope 217, J Dilla, Four Tet and Tony Allen. As drumming and acoustic bass foils Lumsdaine and Butterss create a great foundation, whilst also leading through passages, often with the additional effects of the crinkled and vibrated.
From the hurrying rush of break beats to the more slumbered and the slowed, the range of ideas stay in that nocturnal film, yet tracks like ‘Faced Round’ sound like Ill Communication era Beastie Boys (when they experiment as a band) crossing the Fourth World threshold with Funkadelic and YAS-KAZ. This goes on a lot to be fair, sideways excursions and invocations of music outside the jazz spectrum, and a darkness or at least shadowy mysterious from the disused factory and wastelands reverberated into an electro-acoustic energy. But the trio are also it seems, in real time, feeling out the possibilities: surprising themselves when they lock into something resembling a tune or even a sort of loose instrumental song: then it gets really interesting and even leftfield groovy. There’s attentiveness alongside the controlled chaos and the resonating rhythms, with Butterss’s bass really low and seamless, yet every stretch and twist of the instrument is audible and used as part of the fabric. Actually, the trumpet is similar, from long sustains to hovers and near breathless drifts across the horizons that are conjured up out of seemingly nowhere.
Just as you’d expect, an interesting inventive use of all three musicians’ experimental reaches; a one-off or not, it paves the way I’d hope for more in the future: if stars align and all that. Promising then.
Heckle Chamber ‘Heckle Chamber EP’
(Slowfoot Records) 6th November 2026
Heckle by name, heckle by nature…the inaugural EP release (an album promised to arrive shortly) from the riled-up and volatile union of improvising agitators Jem Doulton, Roberto Sassi and Alex Ward is a hectoring and unloading experiment in letting it all out: therapeutic I’d imagine, kicking against the pricks and releasing the bile with such indignant malice and fun.
Yes, I said fun: and mean it. For even in the most doom-laden introspective parts this trio seem to be having plenty of it as they exercise demons and expel the rot. In truth: three guys fucking about with a large canvas of influences whilst drawing upon their own experiences, their collaborations and contributions to an enviable cast of avant-garde, experimental and no wave luminaires and bedfellows. And across all three tracks you’ll hear evocations of the trio’s past turns – either as foils, as chief instigators or as band members on recordings and on tours.
The dual guitars of the Italian-in-London Sassi and Ward in partnership with the drums and Doulton wrangle up everything from Bill Orcutt to Glenn Branca (who’s Orchestra project has featured Sassi), Fennesz and Sonic Youth (Doulton is the drummer for The Thurston Moore Group). Simultaneously repulsing as much as consuming hardcore, metal, heavy rock, poly-rock and malevolent gloom, this heckling trio manage to sound dangerous without breaking anything. There’s a balance, even muso articulation and control to the menace and rollicking hysterics. Nothing strives towards a complete cacophony of noise and violence. Its Black Flag meets Suicidal Tendencies with expert musical control. Or, around the Pere U(bend) with Black Hole Sun California hardcore precision and The Birthday Party. Incidentally, Ward has been playing with the surviving members of Pere Ubu since 2021 and is helping complete the seminal group’s final album.
It’s surprising and yet unsurprising that there isn’t more of the no wave signature on this debut EP from the trio, but then again, they seem to be having a lark fucking about with the rock vernacular, its punctuations and more drudgery mopes; perhaps attempting something different to their normally unnormal experiments and contributions. Hardcore it is then, with a nice twist and even sensibility; albeit Ward’s voice ranges between punky malevolence and the hysterical and raging, and the track titles seem to reference an ambiguous zoo of anthropomorphism.
I look forward to hearing what the trio can do on a larger scale with that promised album, and whether they stick to that signature rock transmogrification.
i4M2 ‘Swiss Banking Secrecy Laws’
6th November 2026
Using both the language and speak of finance and business, the dull innocuous surroundings of the office whilst suggesting the clandestine smoke and mirrors of international banking and its most opportune epicentre of obfuscation, the anonymous Oxfordshire-based electronic musician, guitarist and producer behind this coded i4M2 disguise builds up a beat bounding and dissonance of rhythmic dance music soundtrack with which to both indulge and escape from.
The third album into this more danceable experiment – the artist is also responsible for the overbearing landscape slabbed fizzled fissures and currents of the he didnt project -, Swiss Banking Secrecy Laws is a kinetic stimulation of techno, techno-dub, breakbeats, trip-hop, trance, and more; combing evocations of everything from the 80s to the 90s and the contemporary in the process.
From the very low registered dubby bass vibrations of the opener ‘Forward Motion Uh Huh’ to the acid burbled sequences of ‘Public Dissonance’ and the Arabic-like minaret lulled voice hovers of ‘Some Dim But Dim Sum’ you can expect to hear everything from Cabaret Voltaire to Black Dog and Natacha Atlas in the omens of electrified mystique and unfolding dramas.
The fizzled and febrile mix with components and wires across a sort of sci-fi soundtrack of the ominous and vapoured. Each track is different in this regard, with some leaning more towards the techno of early Warp and others towards the Two Lone Swordsman, Death In Vegas and the Chemical Brothers. And then you get passages that open out into cathedral atmospherics (‘AA Drone’) or invoke some sort of dramatic VHS sci-fi forbode (‘Permission’). Mostly, this album seems to be rhythmic and set for an unconventional dancefloor of acid techno wobbles, slabbed beats, breaks, machine code, twang effected and reversed electric guitar and bass, and filters.
No track outstays its welcome, with the next arriving pretty quickly on the tails of the next; a fluctuation on speed and rhythm on each, and yet it plays almost like a set or a filmic soundtrack. If you like retro intelligent techno and the beat providers of a previous age reenvisaged by Burial, Lukid and Oberman Knocks than this album is definitely an essential purchase. And if you’re looking for an album that doesn’t so much lecture but offer sonic discourse and mystery about the current age of dislocation, mundanity and technological encroachment, then this is for you.
JAWWAAD ‘Myth & Logic’
(Sonic Transmissions/Sound Mind Body Lab) 13th October 2026
Polemics balanced by introspection and the healing balms of soulful jazz and R&B, Young Mothers co-founder and Shape Of Broad Minds founding member JAWWAAD conjures up a cosmology of poetry, anguish, reliance, pleas from the heart, recovery and barely contained rage on the upcoming Myth & Logic album. In the making since the global shutdown epoch of the Covid pandemic, when minds were concentrated and the time was forced upon us to dig deep into our own souls and sanity (how things change, at the time many of us, me included, thought it would never end and this pandemic restrictive age was here for good), the sound artist, trumpet player and emcee developed a work of escapism, yet one that more than faced up to the challenges of the 2020s. As it happens, JAWWAAD was just returning home after spending time in Bogota, in Colombia when all this kicked off, describing it as overwhelming, and necessitating the urge to look inward for a “moment of clarity and spiritual growth”.
Moved to write, to sing, rap and play, JAWWAAD weaves a unique narrative that takes aim and reels off jazzy-hip-hop inspired shots at institutions and political targets whilst moving through and coping with the physical chronic pains of sickle cell anaemia – believe me I feel your pain, having diced with death myself this year after my kidneys packed in, a stroke from out of the blue, and my own daily battles with chronic muscle spasms and nerve pains. To have the energy to perform and write an album is no mean feat to even the unhampered, let alone those going through such illnesses. So, respect is due from the get-go. You can add a third dimension, as it were, with JAWWAAD’s exploration of sculptor: not just in sculpting sound but in the physical artform. The artwork for this very album is taken from Myth & Logic: The Geometry Of Sound, one link in a three-part series currently displayed at Acres Homer Neighbourhood library in Houston. Conceived, we’re informed by its creator, as a “sound emitting sculpture tied to a Creative Capital grant proposal that I was awarded in 2020.” The piece explores “how sound and frequency appear in a third or fourth density.” This applies a further layer to our artist’s thinking, their processes and objectives with textual and material concerns and by the use of sonic diffusions and the spread, thinking of how waveforms travel on this trek.
Almost produced on a sort of studio tour, with stopovers moving out from South Carolina to Houston and then to the Øra Studio in Trondheim, Norway, each environment was imbued by that location’s hive of budding musicians and artists, all bringing their very own contributions to an already eclectic sound palette – on the CV of note is JAWWAAD’s collaborations with the late iron masked MF DOOM and Carrie Mae. This also means that the cast is numerous, with a mix of players and additional vocalists on each track. Young Mothers foil Ingebrigt Håker Flaten pops up on bass duties alongside (and I’m guessing this was recorded on the Trondhiem leg of the journey) the Scandinavian troupe of Peder Overik Stuberg on guitar, Emil Bø on trombone, and Hans Hulbækmo on drums and percussion, on the Kam Franklin soaring vocal turn ‘War Strategies’. A fusion in its own right of Javanese metallic percussion and African drums, plucking tines, R&B and New Orleans spiritual vibes, the track moves like a procession of sorts through a Southern twinned with African savannah blues. The rap however, with its advocacy and controlled dissatisfactions, brings a contemporary relevance to the mood and the near languid jazz wistful tempo.
Some artists will appear with each other smattered throughout whilst others, appear less often. The ‘Toxic’ entitled opener features the multifaceted muso and composer Khari Lucas, under the Contour guise, on bass and vocals; the Houston-based singer-songwriter, pianist, composer Willis Branden, under The Biggest Brandon alias; and the New York tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis alongside their host on a soulfully jazzy joint and rap that recalls Gil Scott Heron (no “whitey on the moon”, but does mention billionaire rocket builders leaving us poorer less fortunate folk back on Earth to deal with the suffocation and destruction of our planet as they head off to the Moon or Mars), Donny McCaslin, Art Bleek’s Art Supplies album and for some reason, the 90s rap outfit Black Moon.
Jazz of a vintage class rubs shoulders with more off breaks, passages of controlled tumult, the noirish and Afrofuturism. Though JADWAAD constantly moves effortlessly between ideas and inspirations, with a certain signature, yet a change in direction on nearly every track. ‘Cowardice’ for instance could be a chip off the old John Legend, matched with a more desperate for change and pained rap. The horns are smoky and of that reputable Blue Note vintage; sympathetic and longed in contrast to the talk of holocausts and anguish. The soul of Sun-Ra can be detected on the closer, ‘Silver And Gold’, before the electric guitar is brought in for something more rocking and pained, and the horns rasp and bugle like elephants’ trunks being raised because they’ve been startled – the last one another configuration of the Norwegian set. I was picking up hints of the Freestyle Followship, Digable Planets and The Difference Machine hip-hop wise, the bulb shaped notes of Roy Ayers and the Jan Hammer Group fusion wise, and the guitar work of Fred Frith jazz wise.
But for a punchy shortened encapsulation: Try Afrikan Sciences meets Art Bleek in a soulful tumult of activism, resilience and cosmic escapist perseverance.
Dan Rosenboom, Tim Lefebvre & Caleb Dolister ‘high.low’
(Orenda Records) 6th November 2026
Although criss-crossing paths within the L.A. scene (which is where all three foils now reside) over the years, this extemporised, recorded in sequential order, performance marks Dan Rosenboom, Tim Lefebvre and Caleb Dolister’s debut together as a trio.
Drawing upon an enviable CV and depth of experiences, this triumvirate of foils have covered everything from jazz (in its many forms) to metal, the classical and Balkan imbued folk. First up, Dan Rosenboom, who alone could fill up this post with his credentials and activities. The trumpet player and producer, but also instigator and cultivator of untold groups and associations, is highly prolific, releasing more the thirty albums as both a soloist or bandleader and supporting around sixty different artists across 120 plus releases through his own Orenda Records label – the facilitator of this trio’s debut. Part of the Hollywood studio musician community, apt at providing his musical skills to untold numbers of films and TV shows, he’s also covered everything from the progressive to avant-garde, metal and experimental rock.
Popping up sporadically on this site over the years, I’ve written about bassist supremo and innovator Tim Lefebvre and his contributions to Julian and Roman Wasserfuhr’s Landed In Brooklyn album, his guest appearance on JZ Replacement’s Disrespectful album, and of course, and much more widely known, his part in playing foil to Donny McCaslin as Bowie’s collaborating backing band on Blackstar – the final curtain call and testament. Added to that, Lefebvre has appeared on over 700 recordings, and is currently the bassist for the acclaimed Michael Wollny Trio, Italian pop star Tiziano Ferro and the “unhinged” eclectic Whose Hat Is This?
Completing the lineup, Caleb Dolister is primarily a drummer of versatile expertise but can probably play a number of other instruments alongside his composing, audio engineering and producer roles. Returning to his California birthplace after musical excursions via Nevada and New York City, Dolister’s played in or been a central cog of The Kandinsky Effect, Dr MiNT and Rosenboom’s large ensemble project Coordinates, plus Analog Dreams and prefixed his own name to the Warren Walker duo.
In the improvised spirit of spontaneity, the trio have pooled their talents to both strike out and traverse, skulk and leap about in mysteriously shadowed landscapes of dark and freeform jazz, post-hardcore and cosmic mirages. Incipiently, with a clang of harmonics, gangly post-punk bass guitar string resonance and oscillations, this sequentially recorded journey opens with the near Arabian mystical Krautrockish and Don Cherry-esque trumpeted ‘high.1a’, and almost without interruption bleeds into passages of metal-jazz, fusion and sci-fi.
There’s so much going on at any one time – except when the trio calm the tempo and direction of travel down – that each track cans simultaneously invoke a multitude of influences and expressive themes. ‘high.1c’ for example, is really heavy and yet illusionary; there’s a maelstrom of reference points, from Funkadelic duking it out with late King Crimson, or Jacek Mazurkiewi caught at a Last Exit gig.
The bass is itself used in both familiar and very unfamiliar roles, from metallic post-punk growls and rumbles to echoes of Jah Wobble, and a removed version of funk as performed in Bowie’s Blackstar cosmos. On the finale, ‘low.2e’, it sounds more like a Neville Brothers or Curtis Mayfield bassline. It can be running after scales and runs that seem to accelerate, but also be colder, thumped and lunar-esque. Drums wise, this is every bit as experimental and diverse, offering rhythms and breaks and rolls, but also tapping around the kit, or using it like a metal lattice of percussive hits, punctuations, scuttles and atmosphere building. I think there’s spots of hand drums too in that improvised laboratory; maybe conjuring up visions of the Middle East, of Turkey and further afield, perhaps even Tibet. Between more burning heralds, the scope of Zorn, Cherry and Davis, Rosenboom’s trumpet surveys the horizons, squeals through effects shadowing and pitch shifts, and blows sustained melodics. This can often be either really attentive or really wild; rising and falling in a dramatic fashion; sketched and more solid or in friction with the atmospherics and undulations of resonance and reverb.
From flexes of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers L.A. to Weather Report, post Bitches Brew Davis, Krolestwo, Krononaut and metal machine music Sun Ra, high.low, likes it title, offers both sides of light and shade, or the heavy and more atonal and ambient-esque. Post-everything, and yet full of markers that any eclectic music seeker will recognise, the trio’s inaugural recording is an amorphous concentration of the sci-fi, the darkness, the brooding, the experimentation, and surprising.
SAD MAN ‘ART 2’
(Cruel Nature Records) 30th October 2026
Once again as if in a permanent flux between sonic transformations and guises, the singular maverick electronic and art-house boffin Andrew Spackman is back under his most prolific (I believe) and longest running SAD MAN alias. Oscillating and bounding back and forth, Spackman has previously taken on the mantle of the Duchampian inspired Chess move, the Nimzo Indian, Cars From The Future and the jazzcore experimental The Dark Jazz Project. That’s all without referring to his artistic pursuits and creative job roles as an artist, illustrator, and designer, not to mention his growing expertise as soundtrack composer, producing a (re)score for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari a few years back. There’s also been a track contribution to Matthew Herbert’s Accidental Records release, Antechamber Music 2, a NFTs collaboration with Holly Herndon, using Holly+, Herndon’s AI digital voice project, and remixes for Dorcha, Matters Band, Stealing Sheep, Lumpen Nobleman, Gemma Cullingford, Alex H Duncan, Scissorgun, The High Llamas and Vula Veil. Phew!
Well, that’s the resume out of the way, with the focus now on the follow up to 2025’s Cruel Nature release ART – a title that covers all suggestions, all bases. Coming in at perhaps release number one million (I joke, but Spackman has been so prolific over the last decade or more, releasing literally hundreds of pieces of music and untold albums), ART 2 continues to counter bombarded coarse beats and a vortex of metallic pins with the easing passages of the near reverent and vaporous.
With nothing title wise to suggest the source of inspiration, reference points or subject matter, Spackman uses a sort of Aphex Twin-esque code of non-descript reductionist numbers, all prefixed with, again, the less than descriptive title of “noise”. Almost like experimental batches pulled from a larger science experiment, and yet each track seems to exist on its own; often fluctuating during its course, changing up or down from where it originally started out.
‘noise 19d’ (is the “d” a reference to decibels?) for example comes on all Tresor and needle splayed sharpened early 90s techno, then with the introduction of flat beaten real played drums and thrashing electric guitar the track takes on a sort of hardcore dimension. And yet I’m hearing, albeit quite transmogrified, Basement Jaxx’s ‘Where’s Your Head At’ in all that density. The action eventually calms down to evoke what can only be described as a laser disc fantasy video game score of the 80s mixed with the dreamwave. Elements of Justice and the Ed Banger stable alongside Mo Wax crop up on the prickly sharp sputnik haywire hip-hop oddity ‘noise d’, whilst ‘noise 3d’ sounds like a volcanic collapsing in a crush of dissonance. There’s also moments that I can only describe as Kosmische, like the hints of Cluster on the metallic spoken, semi-classical documentary score ‘noise 13’, and Kraftwerk on the rhythmic and giant footstep industrial ‘Noise 2’.
I’m however immersed in a strange world of sci-fi; a soundtrack to a techno and coarse distorted alien universe, often spooked by supernatural forces and presence of a hidden Levithan. For heaven’s sake, can’t some filmmaker give Spackman a call, as his skills could make the blandest of sci-fi epics and horrors disturbing, agitated and exciting. ART 2 continues to support Spackman’s rise as the interesting mad boffin of electronic music; further evolving and always developing, taking on new sounds and constantly probing like a contemporary artist out on the fringes.
Giuliano Sorgini ‘Savana Selvaggia’
(Four Flies Records) 30th October 2026
Missing from the Roman columned pantheon of Italian cult composers, the Rome born composer and multi-instrumentalist of over a 1000 plus recorded tracks, Giuliano Sorgini is once again the focus of the Four Flies Record platform’s attempts to correct this slight. Although fusing and traversing everything from the classical to jazz, psych, funk, disco, electronica, beat groups music, and prog, a cult favourite of the horror and exploitation score communities – namely for scoring The Living Dead At Manchester Morgue -, and known for his notable collaborations with long-time friend Alessandro Alessandroni, Sorgini’s name remains relatively obscure.
Born in the mythologically created city just before war broke out in the late 1930s, Sorgini only just passed away last year. His legacy has been overshadowed by his more famous and celebrated peers. But this label has already tried to rectify that missive, namely years ago with a revival of the Africa Obscura LP. Eight years later, and it seems still needing that boost to the legacy and place on that pantheon, Four Flies has just put out a repackaged and remastered suite of Sorgini’s further adventures on the African continent – one that left, we’re told, a deep mark upon the composer.
Made up of previously unreleased music produced for various TV documentaries in the mid 70s, Savana Selvaggia is, it’s suggested by the label, borne in part from sessions for one of Sorgini’s most iconic and notable LPs, Zoo Folle. Perhaps in part, it accounts for the menagerie of colourful yipping, yapping, vibrato trilling and wing beaten mating ritual sounds that suffuse many of the tracks on Savana Selvaggia, helping to visualise an atmospheric savannah grassland teeming with wildlife that’s alive and about to leap out of the speakers at you.
A safari of ethnological sources fed through the imagination of someone who’s adapt at turning the ceremonial dancing sounds of the tumba drum into something even more exotic and mysterious; layering up various rhythms across the Serengeti and Arabian Africa with modulated and fluted Moog melodics, lounge-jazz and more holy, missionary church nave keys that almost touch upon the Kosmsiche. Some tracks shout crate digger sample and break beat – ‘Caccia Tropicale’ (or “Tropical Hunting”) could have easily made The Jungle Brothers Done By The Forces Of Nature LP – whilst others would appeal to the likes of European library music aficionados like Greg Foat – the near playful nature shoot of ‘Zebre’ for sure. ‘Arabian Safari’ by contrast, seems to straddle both vague romantic sand dune traverse of Egyptian music with an Ethio-jazz lilt, and ‘Alba Sulla Savana’ (“Dawn Over The Savannah”) matches old pal Alessandro Alessandroni with “Blue” Gene Tyranny.
Shuttled, rattled and even Afro-Latin flavoured hand drums meet acid-jazz, a bit of Afro-funk, the tribal and the cult European library scene on an album of Italian ethnographic scores. Hopefully it will encourage a deep dive into Sorgini’s extensive catalogue, and maybe make it onto a few hip-hop tracks – one of the best marks of respect.
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Annarella and Django ‘Jouer’
ALBUM (We Are Busy Bodies/Sing A Song Fighter)
Born from the Senegalese imbued and inspired hub built around Sweden’s Wau Wau Collectif, another cross-cultural project that embraces that West African nation’s (and its neighbours) rich musical heritage. Fusing the roots, landscape and themes of Senegal with those of Europe, the partnership of Swedish flutist Annarella and the Malian born ngoni master Django absorbs the very atmosphere of that westernmost African republic, transposing and transforming age old traditions with a hybrid of contemporary musical effects and influences and guest list of diverse musicians and voices.
But before we go any further, delve deeper into this partnership’s debut album, a little background information/ context is needed. A key member of Karl Jonas Winqvist’s Wau Wau Collectif gathering since 2016, making the motivational trip to Senegal that more or less inspired that group’s sound, network of collaborators and friends – a trip that also planted the seed for Winqvist’s Sing A Song Fighter label, a partner in the release of the this album alongside We Are Busy Bodies -, the Örebro born flutist Annarella, believe it or not, trained as a psychologist. Honed on woodwind, but able to play a variety of instruments, Annarella has chosen a more playful approach to her craft: an eclectic one at that.
Annarella’s musical foil, meanwhile, was born in Mali and brought up in the ancient griot tradition of storytelling. The family tree of which is impressive. His cousin was the late and great kora (a 21-string long-necked harp-like instrument crafted out of a gourd, covered in cow skin) virtuoso Toumani Diabaté, who famously partnered with another legend, Ali Farka Touré, for a duo of Grammy Award winning albums. And his uncle was the master balafon (one of Mali and Western Africa’s most recognised sounds, the balafon is a gourd-resonated xylophone) player Kélétigui Diabaté. It’s no surprise then that Django picked up the ngoni, a (normally) animal skinned wrapped canoe-shaped lute instrument synonymous for accompanying the griot storyteller: A tradition that, some say, dates back to the Malian Empire of the 12th century. Django however upped sticks and made the move to Senegal and the capital of Dakar many years ago. It’s a city that is abstractedly threaded into the very fabric of this album: immortalised alongside Annarella’s hometown on the album’s first single and this debut album’s third track.
Whilst on tour together as part of the Wau Wau, they found themselves wiling away the downtime hours by jamming. A spark was ignited. A project formed. But for a time, both musicians had to return to their respective homes, where it seems they set to work on composing and laying down tracks for each other, ideas and prompts to riff on.
The sphere of influence grew further, as both participants in this international peregrination invited in several musicians and artists to carry the music into articulate and more atmospheric new spaces. Joining the duo were of course Winqvist, as co-producer and a member of the filled-out rhythmal section that also includes Lars Fredrik Swahn and Pet Lager, the renowned Swedish folk musician and multiple instrumentalist Ale Möller, who provides not only trumpet but the Jew’s harp, accordion, melodica and the double-reed shawm, and Django’s wife, Marietou Kouyaté, on harmonical vocals.
Altogether, this circle of impressive talent conjures up an atmosphere of the willowy, mystifying, hazy, rhythmically shuttering, dreamy, ached and yearning. Because whilst uniting two cultures together in a most congruous sounding, melodious and beautiful union, there are both musically felt and more obvious appearances of social and economic protestation to be found.
After the fluted leafy pastoral airs and light nimble twine of the intro, the gentle hi-hat claps, Arabian-like shawm, whistles, chuffs and fluty blows of the Francis Bebey motion ‘Aduna Ak Asaman’, and the near Malian Turag camel drive with bird-like woodwind and Chet Baker mirage trumpeted ‘Dakar-Örebro’, there’s a short tunning-like, freely and spiritual jug carrying backed snippet of the American economist Richard David Wolff besmirching the virtues of capitalism on ‘No More’. A noted Marxist economist, part of the Rethinking Marxism movement, Wolff’s words chime with the rampart, unforgiving nature of what I would call a twisted form of capitalism; the ill effects felt no more so than on the scarred, mined lands of Africa and its people. Picking up the ‘Megaphone’, the style is more African with a soft Dirt Music backbeat, the voices more reminiscent of Amadou & Mariam. That vocal partnership can be heard again on the longed and languid sand dune contoured, flighty and reedy trill fluted ‘Sarajalela’.
Django’s home environment and the outlier around it seeps into and materializes like a dreamy haze across all the album’s tracks, as evocations of the classical, of jazz and the blues mixes with the local stew of diverse languages. Tracks like ‘Degrees of Freedom’ are more mystical sounding, near cosmic, as the band saunter like gauze under the moon and across the desert’s sandy tides. There’s the Arabian, the African, the otherworldly and fantastical all rolled into a seamless hover and spindle of enchantment and mystery. ‘Hommage á Dallas Dialy Mory Diabate’ however, is just a pretty, sentimental passage of loving tribute – the tune is very familiar, but I’m kicking myself to place it.
Jouer, which translates from the French into “play”, is just that, a lovely stirring union of the playful that seamlessly entwines the two musician’s respective practices with sympathy, respect and the earthly concerns of our endangered societies and world. Hopefully this collaboration will continue and grow over the years; there’s not been a better one since Catrin Finch teamed up with Seckou Keita.
Peter Evans ‘Extra’
ALBUM (We Jazz) 25th October 2024
A meeting of avant-garde minds to savour, the union of Peter Evans with Koma Saxo and Post Koma instigator and bassist Petter Eldh and New York downtown experimental rock and jazz drummer pioneer Jim Black is every bit as dynamic, explosive, torqued, moody, challenging and exciting as you’d imagine.
Heading this trio and making his debut on Helsinki’s We Jazz label-festival-magazine platform (one of the best contemporary jazz labels in the universe, certainly quality wise and highly prolific with it), the New York-based musician and noted improviser synchronizes and leads a constant movement of breakbeat drums and wood stretched, thumbing and busy bass on his small, higher octave pitched, piccolo trumpet.
A crossroads of separate entangled influences and backgrounds, legacies, with all three practitioners in this Evans-fronted project and their CVs stretching back a few decades, the avant-garde rubs up against the blues, hard bop, atmospheric set scores, hip-hop style breaks, the electronic and classical. By using both the piccolo and flugelhorn on this album, some passages sound like Wynton Marsalis playing over Mozart, or Alison Balsom lending classical airs to an Alfa Mist production.
The classical brass is however adopted and adapted to stir up a wind and tumult of uncertainty as to what’s coming next. For the action, the rhythm and direction is as tightly wound as it is loose and slowed down: the ‘Nova’ passage, this album’s shortest track, seems to lurk in a strange otherworldly atmosphere of mysterious thriller piano prompts and vibrated percussive and cymbal shivered resonance. The following track, ‘Movement 56’, starts off with the brass sounding like it’s being played through a cone, before buzzing and expanding, contouring a cosmic calculus performance of the alien, unsure, spatial and lunar. It finishes with a bended generator motored ripple and signal that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Bernard Szajner record.
Elsewhere the action blows and gallops between moods and intensity. The opening ‘Freaks’ has a busy rhythm section, yet tampered, the nearly skims along (imagine Ben Riley circa ‘The Bridge’, a recognisable sprouting of Art Blakey, and touch of Mingus) that evokes 60s NYC skylines (but no swing) and the downtown happenings of the 80s with something quite bluesy but very of the moment. Meanwhile, Evan’s short and longer cyclonic trumpet breaths recall Ralph Alessi, Tomasz Stańko and Miles Davis. On the staccato fashion prowl of ‘Boom’, it’s Chet sharing room with Kirk Knuffke over a slightly less erratic and menacing Last Exit.
There’s so much to love about Extra. A combo that has worked together before I believe, shows how to find a perfect challenging balance of the dashed, of action and the more tactile and explorative without losing that essential breakbeat and woody stretched body resonating and pulled spring bass rhythm and movement: that movement always being ever forward. Never dwelled on, nor really repeated, this feels like an improvised session without the need for analysis or instruction from its leader Evans. Possibly one of the best jazz albums you’ll hear all year, with a spot saved for the choice albums of the year lists, Extras is a thoroughly inventive and exciting dynamism of contemporary luminaries at the height of their skills and knowledge.
Yaryu ‘For Damage’
ALBUM (Ramble Records – AUS/ Centripetal Force – US/ Cardinal Fuzz – UK)
25th October 2024
Eclectic Japanese collective Yaryu, birthed just a couple of years ago, invite a host of peers and influential teachers from the country’s acid, psych, cosmic and astral scenes to sprinkle some magic on the new album, For Damage.
Led by bulb-note and caressing soulful electric pianist, wafted and concertinaed melodica player, atmospheric stirring autoharpist, synthesist and percussionist Hyzo, the group play host to members of Sundays & Cybele, Dhidalah and the freak out titans of the form, the Acid Mothers Temple. In all, at least seventeen participants, playing everything from the instruments of a conventional band set-up to woodwind, traditional Japanese and brass. Some of which also lend various forms of vocalisation, from the mewling to folky, strange and supernatural.
Fanning out and expanding the range of spiritual and emotional influences, the album starts out with a seamless continuation of elemental waters (trickles, pours, running streams to more settled, light refracting twinkles), the leafy and blossoming, diaphanous and glittery. The gentle opening introduction of ‘Up The Creek’ is a beautiful guide to this magical, enchanted, but simultaneously mystical and mystery balance of tranquilly and the otherworldly; sounding at times like Mythos connecting with Hiroshi Yushimura and Meitei, and existing in the same realms of Kankyō Ongaku, or “environmental music”. ‘Asobe’ (which I think means “not working”, but spelt slightly different, could be a reference to the Shinto priestesses that performed rituals that appeased the souls of the dead during the Heian period) drifts towards dry bone rattled, ceremonial caravan of Alice Coltrane, Bernie Maupin and Pharoah Saunders vibes.
But though keeping in that relatively subtle direction, ‘Nagare’ seems a little jazzier and more soulful as it follows the currents of running water. It features a cornet-like trumpet, some soft whistles, a near wafted Hawaiian guitar – think Makoto Kubota – and hand drums in the mode of Curtis Mayfield as it sets out some idyllic castaway plane. ‘Utena’ floats close to the Far East Family Band, but with a Fleetwood Mac bassline, constant metronome like ticking away and shimmering cymbals. But by the time we reach the atavistic sounding ‘Gandhara’ (the ancient Indo-Aryan civilization centred in what it is today present northwestern Pakistan and northeastern Afghanistan), the mood is far more mystical and shrouded; a Japanese Gothic-psych visitation from the psychogeography of the wailed and ghostly. ‘Sacrifice’ is noirish in comparison but begins with a sort of Cluster-like synth-pop rhythm, before shimmering and soulfully gliding into Greg Foat territory. It evokes sun-lounging attendees at the shrine on one of Japan’s most exotic, paradise island borders.
The album finishes on what in old money vinyl terms would be the whole side of an album, and the near twenty-minute “melody” suite ‘Shirabe’. A wilderness of trees and roots and creaking, croaking bird life is converged with tranquil jazzy evocations, woodpecker knocks, soft and low inviting sax blows and subtle funky guitar. As the peregrination continues, that sax goes into Donny McCaslin mode, and connects to the weird and cosmic.
Another name to add to the rich legacy of cult, psychedelia, folk, esoteric and cult sounds emanating from Japan, Yaryuand their distinguished guests connect with the elements, the spirits and sprites, and the roots of their magical astral plane on several levels to create a both earthly, supernatural and spiritual daydream. Tending the garden whilst offering up mysticism and languid stirrings of the elements.
The Tearless Life ‘Conversations With Angels’
ALBUM (Other Voices Records) 27th October 2024
Both a transference of souls from the now cremated – or laid to rest, depending on your choice of metaphorical ritual death – Vukovar plus a host of orbiting “other voices”, the make-up of The Tearless Life remains relatively, and intentionally, shrouded, obscured.
What we do know is that this new entity is a meeting of minds that have spent the last decade ploughing their own unique vision of hermetic, esoteric alchemy of synth-pop, industrial, post-punk, darkwave and a form of neo-new-romantism influences. And whilst they remained criminally overlooked – sometimes due to their own self-sabotage – they attracted such acolytes and luminaries of the genre as Rose McDowall, Michael Cashmore and the late Simon Morris, all of whom proved worthy foils on various Vukovar-headed collaborative releases.
Taking a while to materialize, The Tearless Life’s debut opus is both the announcement of new age, but also a bridge between this latest incarnation and the former Vukovar invocation – they are in essence, a band that continues to haunt itself. Old bonds remain, sound wise and lyrically, but with a new impetus of murky, vapoured, gossamer, mono and ether effected solace, tragic romanticism, pleaded and afflatus love, spiritual inspired yearning and allegorical hunger.
The void needs to be fed in a Godless world as they say, as addictions, troubled relationships, the longing for a special someone who remains aloof, untouchable and beyond reach, and the metaphysical coalesce with an all-consuming passion.
Talking to angels, conversing with both the seraph and the fallen, the daemons and spirits of the alchemist’s alternative dimensions, the group transduce the writings of that most visionary seer John Dee, the opium eater Thomas De Quincey, William Blake, and the far more obscure Samuel Hubbard Scudder, who’s 19th century, fairy-like, Frail Children of the Air: Excursions Into The World Of Butterflies publication of philosophical essays lends its title to a song of tubular airy manifestations, distortion, wisped spiralling piques and beautified touching emotional anguish.
Atmospheric at every turn, swilling around in the shrouds, a Victorian music box and toll of peeling bells can evoke the creeping, the mysterious and tormented. Psychological trauma, and physical pains roam the wards of a mental hospital; stained-glass rays anoint lovers; death’s touch is never far away; the talking of tongues and language of the shriven invokes fantasies; and the spectre of morose dines on the unfortunates to create an esoteric banquet.
Some of these songs will sound familiar to those missing Vukovar, but The Tearless Life seem to have integrated a duality of harmonies and vocals much better. The music is itself at least attempting to find the light at the end of the tunnel, touching upon snatches, vague influences of Nature And Organisation, Death in June, Jarboe, Brian Reitzell, the Pale Fountains, Scorpion Wind, Les Chasseurs De La Niot, Alan Vega, and on the pump organ-like remembrance of darkened soul mates, ‘The Mistress’, a combination of Purple Rain era Prince and Ultravox!
My only disappointment is in the production, which could be so much more dynamic and clearer, instead of being so murky. I think it loses some of its impact. But this is minor in comparison to the depth, quality and atmospherics of such an ambitious undertaking. For this album transfers poetry, the writings and fiction of the hermetic and the dreamers wonderfully, if plaintively. If the world was indeed not so bereft of celestial beings’ wisdom and advice as it is, it would rightly receive the critical acclaim it deserves. Conversations With Angels is epic; the first step in, what I hope, will be a fruitful conversation to divine enlightenment, curiosity, psychological and philosophical intelligent synth-pop.
i4M2 ‘Shut Up’
ALBUM (Drone Alone Records)
Whilst eliciting feelings of grand, sometimes overbearing, landscapes and a sense of movement from granular gradients, frazzled fissures, currents under the he didnt appellation back in the summer, the shrouded Oxford-based producer, guitarist and musician now ventures out under the new guise of i4M2.
Although similarly charged with electricity, white noise, static and magnetic filings Shut Up is a very different record indeed. Gone are, for the most part, the blocks of drones for a tubular metallic coursing of melodic music, found sounds and field recordings of captured voices from a city environment, and the mysterious near supernatural at times: or perhaps more unknown, hard to figure out, and maybe alien. Whilst recognisable glimpses of overheard and taped conversations, of a company of choral singers, and wobbled broadcasts of a kind suggest humanity, there’s much machine coded, synthesised and cybernetic surface noise and unnerving drama to be found.
Inspired in part by the “…pirate-radio noise the kids play on their mobile phones at the back of the bus in London.” And by the energy of all those “…cool beats and ideas”, this debut album channels those sparks of inspiration into a sophisticated construction of techno, electronica, the metallic, buzzing and fizzled. Beats arrive in the form of the rotor-bladed, the wing flapped, corrosive, spun, padded and sizzled. Together with those passages and undulations of melody and tune, it sounds like a mix of Nik Colk Void, early Tresor, The Pyrolater, Aphex Twin, Carter and Tutti, Oberman Knocks and Boards of Canada.
Both forms of the London scenester dropped in rural Oxford are great, but for me, I think this latest alter ego just about edges it. Seek it out.
Suumhow ‘5ilth’
ALBUM (n5MD)
You could consider the fifth album from the Belgian experimental duo of Suumhow as a sonic companion piece to i4M2’s ‘Shut Up’ (see above); fizzing as it is with electrical charges, frazzles and sculpted, purposed distorted crunches and metal filings, but balanced by a certain sensitivity and pull towards hazy, gauzy light forces. For there is melody, a tune to be found amongst the bristled blizzard effects and slabs of static buzzing, the corrosive and outright “filthy”. That last one being especially prominent in both the language and text used to promote this album, and in the distorted joy of sonic bombardment and bracketed vibrated grimy, glitchy drilling.
5ilth is by nature a counterpoint of distressed post-industrial techno, the leftfield, the pneumatic and ricocheting, which then opens out into calmer, more reflective ambient passages and square waves; sometimes floating or maybe drifting above the clouds, and other times, ascending towards the light. Far from brutal, despite the rasping scrunched beats, and chain clinked synthesized percussion, the mood is mostly mysterious and dreamy, with some parts akin to gliding in the stratosphere – see the obliquely, not giving anything away, entitled ‘F’. Like rips and tears in the fabric, yet somehow harmonically compatible, the duo’s work craftily spins a harsh, ratcheted and crackled abrasion of sounds and effects with ambient stirring evocations of thought, quite wanderings and reflection.
I hate to repeat myself, but as with the last review, I’m hearing Aphex Twin, but this time in the company of Petrolio, Room of Wires, Emptyset and Forest Swords. Which I think is a very inviting proposition.
Rich God ‘Unmade’
ALBUM (Somewherecold Records) 31st October 2024
The third such album of static-charged dissonance and fizzles, sculpted to and rendered to provide the sound, score and expression of the concrete this month, the pairing of Blake Edward Conley, who regular readers will recognise as the droneroom, and Jason T. Lamoreaux, who goes under The Corrupting Sea appellation, will appeal to those who like to read the abstract messages and gauge a sense of place, time and mood from industrial noise and corrosive electricity.
Mainstay and founding artist of the experimental label, Somewherecold Records, Jason teams up with one of his most prolific label singings to sculpt meaning from the frazzled generated noise, crunched barrages of drums and the sifting, fizzled and warped rhythms. Conway’s usual signature of minimal alt-country and drone cowboy electric guitar tracings, brushes, hovered notes and sun-cooked melting vistas is absorbed and sometimes crushed almost by Jason’s industrial effects and mettalic needling.
With nothing to go on, theme wise or explanation wise to the album’s seven titles, it is left to us the listener to make what we will of this union. But my reading is a transmogrified vision of post-industrial rust belt horror and trauma. There’s certainly prompts in the use of samples taken from broadcasts, perhaps the TV – which often sounds like a flickering portal set to the paranormal and Fortean -, with some guy’s diatribe against the banks or stock exchange/Wall Street (“If money is evil, then that building is hell!”) and a radio phone-in exchange about some horrific psychosomatic condition (the words murder scene and suicide both pop up).
In what sounds like a psychogeography of old machinery, the apparatus of production and a troubled society, Unmade whips up a blizzard of crickets on a sweltering day on the road towards a run-down and foreboding field of decay; conjures up the empty silos, rusted conveyer belts of a desolate wrecked farming community; and uses the needle scratches of a polygraph test and the resonance of steel mill saws to channel a recognisable fear.
Whipped and industrialised, yet also showing less harsh and abrasive fragments, pauses in the rippled tears of the bestial, spooky, alien and caustic, Unmade is like a distortion of Bleaeck, Raime, Atsushi Izumi, Cabaret Voltaire and IDM influences. Not the easiest of listens, and certainly challenging, but worth the effort, as two experimental artists combine their signature qualities into a heavy loaded sonic statement for the times we find ourselves in.
Andy Haas ‘For The Time, Being’
ALBUM (Resonantmusic)
Time has never sounded so warped and amorphous, bereft of reference in a space that morphs into serialism, the surreal, the painful, the otherworldly, paranormal, conceptual and indescribable. Yes, once more the experimental saxophonist Andy Haas ventures into sonic territories seldom explored with his latest (I believe either 19th or 20th release for the Resonantmusic label) album of abstract trauma, avant-gardism, playfulness, and physicality. For this album is indeed a physical experience, focussed as it is on the Andy’s unique method of strapping a small tremolo box to his leg so that he can control the depth and the rate of extreme panning whilst playing the sax, and manipulating slowly spun vinyl records.
The discombobulating, shrieking, sonorous diffusions and effects hit hard at times, leaving a real sense that the soundwaves have penetrated the listener’s body and senses: To get the full effect, Andy stresses that For The Time, Being is experienced best on a system with better low end response: laptop speakers just won’t cut it.
Out on the fringes for at least five decades (and counting), with a brief period of commercial success as a founding member of the Canadian new wave band Martha And The Muffins (leaving the group after three albums to pursue more adventurous pathways in the New York underground scene of the early-to-mid 80s) , Andy’s original sparks of inspiration and catalysts for picking up the saxophone (his first instrument being one he rented for $5 a month in the 70s) were jazz avant-garde supremos Anthony Braxton and Evan Parker, who he witnessed playing together in concert at an early age back in the 70s. Both icons of the form permeate much of Andy’s work, including this newest experiment. But you can add a channelling of such diverse company as John Zorn, Marc Ribot, Zeena Parkins, Ikue Mori, Thurston Moore, Keiji Haino and Fred Firth, all artist’s Andy has worked with since the 80s, to that sound palette.
In more recent times, during the late nineties and the noughties, he’s collaborated with stringed-instrumentalist Don Fiorino on three extraordinary albums (American Nocturne, Don’t Have Mercy and Accidentals), toured and recorded with the Plastic Ono Band-esque reinvention of Meg Remy’s U.S. Girls, and been a member of Matt ‘Doc’ Dunn’s The Cosmic Range. Again, feeding into an already expansive field of influences.
But here, in solo mode, the perimeters, experiences are all reset and transmogrified into an intense, frightening and sometimes near cartoonish world of spatial manipulation and hallucination. This is jazz at its furthest boundaries, the avant-gardism of Fluxus, of Monty Young, Alan Sondheim (specifically T’ Other Little Tune LP), Richard Maxfield, David Tudor and Takehisa Kosugi combining with the dry, bristled and trilled raspy reedy blows, plastic tube-like sucks, flapped air and wind, the hinging and the movement of valves and atonal resonance, and the more melodic flutters and mizmar-like drones of Braxton, Parker, Roscoe Mitchell, Ornette Coleman, Marshall Allen and Oliver Lake.
Each track varies between unseen sources of accelerating motors, hovering drones overhead, the disorientating, the wounded, the near sci-fi and triggered, with signals and codes manipulated like slowing and speeding reel-to-reel tapes. Reality is questionable and the sense of time (although there is a parenthesis “nocturne” reference on one track) akin to a fever dream. Andy produces a unique physically effective sound experiment that is impossible to define; his saxophone simultaneously recognisable and yet parping, droning and in a cycle that pushes that instrument towards the tactile and spatial.
___/PLAYLIST: THE MONOLITH COCKTAIL SOCIAL VOLUME 91
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 91 is as eclectic and generational spanning as ever. Look upon it as the perfect radio show, devoid of chatter, interruptions and inane self-promotion.
First up the LP anniversaries, starting with 50th nods to Sparks Propaganda (in my estimates, the double-acts’ best 70s album), Redbone’s Beaded Dreams Through Turquoise Eyes, Yumi Arai’s Misslim, and The Rolling Stones It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll – see below in the archives section for my little summary, if dismissive, piece on the album.
Released this month forty years ago, there’s tracks from The Fall’s The Wonderful And Frightening and Cabaret Voltaire’s Micro-Phonies. Jumping forward another decade, and I’ve also included a track from the Digable Planets’ 94’ released Blowout Comb. Another leap forward and I’ve chosen to also mark the tenth anniversary of Scott Walker’s collaboration with Sunn O))), Soused – you can read my original piece on the album in the archive below; one of my finest hours I reckon.
Whilst the Monolith Cocktail’s Monthly Playlist is all about the newest music, I miss things or just don’t have room to feature everything. And so, the Social offers room to some of those newish, recent releases that missed out. This month there’s choice tracks from Heyme, Waaju and Majid Bekkas, The Bordellos, Reverand Baron and Calvin Love, and Paten Locke.
You’ll also find, from across the decades, borders and genres, a smattering of musical choices from Heltah Skeltah, Lowlife, Samuel Prody, Gilli Smyth, The Sun Also Rises, Michel Magne, Debile Menthol, Lita Bembo, Art Zoyd, Tudor Lodge, Tommy Keene, The Silver Dollar, Vince Martin & Fred Neil, Yoch’ko Seffer, Male and Mahjun.
TrAcKlIsT iN fUlL
Michel Magne ‘Cine qua pop’
Debile Menthol ‘Tante Agathe’
Samuel Prody ‘She’s Mine’
Tudor Lodge ‘The Lady’s Changing Home’
Tommy Keene ‘My Mother Looked Like Marilyn Monroe’
The Rolling Stones ‘Dance Little Sister’
Cabaret Voltaire ‘James Brown’
The Bordellos ‘King Of The Bedroom’
The Fall ‘2 X 4’
Male ‘Bilk 80’
The Jazz June ‘Silver Dollar’
Mahjun ‘L’un dans I’autre’
Art Zoyd ‘Alleluia’
Yochk’o Seffer ‘GONDOLAT’
Waaju and Majid Bekkas ‘Fangara (Live Edit)’
Yumi Arai ‘On the Street of My Home Town’
Lita Bembo ‘Muambe’
Digable Planets Ft. Guru ‘Borough Check’
Paten Locke ‘Widdit’
Heltah Skeltah ‘Clan’s, Posse’s, Crew’s & Clik’s’
Redbone ‘Cookin’ with D’Redbone’
Heyme ‘Downtown Train’
Reverend Baron & Calvin Love ‘Famous Feelin’’
Scott Walker & Sunn O))) ‘Brando’
Lowlife ‘Again And Again’
Citymouth & People’s Palms ‘Singlecycles’
Gilli Smyth ‘Shakti Yoni’
The Sun Also Rises ‘Wizard Shep’
Vince Martin & Fred Neil ‘Morning Dew’
Sparks ‘Bon Voyage’
/ARCHIVES_____
This month, I’m reviving my archived pieces on The Rolling Stones It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll, which is fifty years old this month, and the late Scott Walker’s unholy alliance with Sunn O))), Soused, which reaches its tenth anniversary in October.
Relax, It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll. The Stones ’74 LP is 50 this month. (Appearing originally in my four part potted history of the group).
The basic premise of the Stones 12th album was to give their critics, especially the punctilious music writer Lester Bangs, the bird-finger.
Bangs’ condemnation at the paucity and profligate decline of the group was particularly scathing – quite justified in some respects – and only increased with each new release.
Incredulous at the growing derision and, as they viewed it, over-the-top analyses of their music, this album makes no bones about its regression back into the rock ‘n roll womb: albeit a version of that initial scene performed by a languid miscreant bunch of lolloping posers reprising oldies from the blues-R&B-r’n’r cannon.
The self-titled track and single from It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll (And I Like It) was strangely – so it’s claimed by Richards – conceived by a testy Jagger and recorded with his new “soul mate” Bowie as a rough demo. Such was the internal drift between the Stones creative partnership that Jagger often composed and thrashed out ideas away from his Glimmer Twins foil. During this break in communications, Richards was hanging out with The Faces lead guitarist and crow-haired sporting Ronnie Wood at his London studio. Wood had begun recording a solo LP and had asked along both Richards and Mick Taylor to add a touch of sleazy blues. Whilst at one of these relaxed sessions, Jagger dropped in and cut a version with Woods and, Small Faces/Faces drummer, Kenny Jones, but also produced another version with his comrades at a later date (Woods again played on this, contributing the rhythm guitar part on the 12-string). Regardless of who had their paws on it, It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll (And I Like It), is a stereotypical Stones pruning swaggered anthem, one that leans very heavily upon the strutting glam-rock pout of T-Rex.
Geographically separated, and as usual, sabre-rattling with the establishment, the band pushed-on, even though by now Richards’s increasing drug-fuelled skirmishes looked certain to scupper any attempts to successfully record.
To top it all, Taylor’s growing resentment at the lack of credit and acknowledgement for his contributions set the ball in motion for his resignation from the band a year later. Yet despite his disgruntlement, Taylor hung-on in there, playing on a majority of the albums ten-songs but not the title-track single; even though he appears in the video.
Without their due-diligent and overseeing producer, Jimmy Miller, the production fell to the aggrandising pairing of Jagger & Richards. Miller, a stalwart member of their inner circle and sometimes sobering force for good, had finally succumbed to his drug habit (picked-up whilst working with the band) and left, leaving the pair to take control for the first time since Their Satanic Majesties Request. And we all know how that turned out!
Scott Walker + Sunn O))) ‘Soused’ – Harrowed by thy name.
The usual rolled-out cliché of criticism that always greets every Scott Walker release, charts the enigmatic artist’s pop light to experimental morose career arc; from the teen swoon idol heady days of the Walker Brothers, via monastic alienation and Jacques Brel inspired crooner of esoteric idiosyncrasies, to existential avant-garde isolation.
Inhabiting the darkest recesses of humanity and history for at least half of that time, we should be used to this morbid curiosity, worn with earnest pride by Walker, who peers into the abyss on our behalf. Confronting with a meta-textural style the barbarity and failings of humanity for at least thirty odd years then, any developments in the Walker peregrination, shouldn’t really surprise anyone: at least the critic.
In what was met with certain trepidation or surprise by many, his unholy union with the habit adorned disciples of hardcore drone Sunn O))) is actually a very shrewd and congruous partnership; a 50/50 immersive experience, with both parties seemingly egging each other on. Walker for his part lyrically less cryptic, the Sunn chaps pushed to produce one of their most poetic and nuanced beds of sustained drones yet, and on this occasion, even cracking out various wild shortened, punctuating and unyielding riffs – verging on full metal and heavy rock riffage. Letting rip with a resonant field of sustained one-chord statements and caustic stings that bend or longingly fade out into a miasma, trying to find a meaning in these drones is akin to an Auger interpreting symbols and signs from the entrails of a wretched, just slain sacrificial beats. Yet it does work, and the bare minimal, fuzzy and wrenching bed of murmuring, primal guitars perfectly set up the intended atmosphere.
Once again, Daemonic forces have conspired. The result, a five act guttural opus, entitled Soused – in this instance the title is to be taken as a plunging or submersion into liquid or water, rather than a slang for hard liquor intoxication (though if it were, the brew on offer would be hemlock!).
What starts out and continues as a sort of proxy chorus (the nearest you’ll ever get to one on a Walker outing), the introductory crystallised, even dreamy, sense of melodic relief that introduces the album’s first musical tome, ‘Brando’, is soon corrosively despoiled by the menacing first strikes of a signature Sunn O))) chord and bullwhip.
A rather odd theme for Walker to build a threatening tower of misery from, the song alludes to the obligatory sacrificial martyrdom of the title’s Marlon Brando. Whether as self-flagellation, Brando had a penchant for taking on or even bringing (off his own back, so to speak) the act of taking a brutalised beating to his roles: from vigilante beatings in The Wild One to feeling the sharp end of a Elizabeth Taylor horse whipping in Reflections In A Golden Eye. Brando’s fatalistic characters were either the naïve well-intentioned disaffected (Terry Malloy in On The Waterfront) or assassinated disenchanted mavericks (Colonel Kutz in Apocalypse Now). The repeated lashings of a bull whip in this instance, however, refer to his role as the conniving bank robber Rio in the western One Eyed Jacks; one of the movie’s most memorable scenes being when Rio is administered the whipping of his life by a disgruntled and wronged former criminal partner, Dad Longworth (played by Karl Malden), in front of the towns people.
Perhaps this series of observations, first set off by watching One Eyed Jacks, from Walker is over-played, but it is remarkable as you play back through the actor’s movie catalogue and find a connective theme of taking the blows and even death on the chin. Probably reading too much into now and Walker does have a history of wry and acerbic wit, but Brando could be said to be offering his body up to the mortal sins as a punch bag (taking method acting literally) or was just masochistic (Last Tango In Paris M’lud). You decide, it makes for one reason or another a most apocalyptic soundtrack, mixing as it does, doom with Walker’s almost uplifting, visionary vocals to a flaying cycle of whip happy bullies.
Biblical in more ways than one, the standout mega-bestial centrepiece must be the harrowing ‘Herod 2014’; an atavistic disturbing chapter from the Roman occupied Middle East, it alludes to, what many historians say, is a wholly fictional tale of King Herod’s decreed infanticide of his kingdom (allowed by the Roman occupiers to reign over Judea and surrounding areas). Bathed in a sonorous reverberation of fearful discordance and a distressed unworldly cry of danger, this twelve-minute opus is stalked by the harangued forces of malcontent and revved-up torturous drones. The conceptual allusions, which can’t help but echo through time to the present, are far bigger than this baby cull, the region has, after all, always been awash with both the fabled and all too real episodes of death and misery for thousands of years. Yet despite this, the song is itself one of Walker’s best and even most melodically poetic, sitting happily with the material on his last two albums, The Drift and Bish Bosch.
Lyrically traumatic, but almost beautifully hewn from the English language, the opening lines bellow a nuanced scene-setting intellect, more novelistic pyschogeography than song: ‘She’s hidden her babies away. Their soft gummy smiles won’t be gilding the memory.’ In setting up the horrid event and psychological primal emotions that resonate with his audience, Walker goes on to mention two of the most famous painters to depict this crime, Nicolas Poussin and Rubens, who both fashioned their own (setting it in their own time) Massacre of The Innocents.
Herod 2014 straddles the LP like a monolithic titan. A real horror show, both wrenching yet also surprisingly compelling.
You would perhaps be fond of some relief after sitting through all that, but Walker won’t let you off that easily; summing another Sunn 0))) crackled, anvil- beating, industrial chorus of esoteric dread. ‘Bull’ is fraught with tension, languidly striking with stabbing guitars and post-industrial riffs one minute, sinking into the mire of silence and emerging like a troubled crooner monk the next. Heavy and brooding with mechanical timepieces, crowing shadows and subterranean spirits moving amongst the low buzzing presence of a pant-messing sustained drone, the Bull is unsettling to say the least, like a game of tag in the Labyrinth of the Minotaur. And the song with the longest outré of all; Walker finishing off his cryptic lines halfway through, leaving the last four minutes to his comrades to play out.
‘Fetish’ as it may already suggest is a sadomasochistic affair. A soundtrack set to some cannibalistic or serial killer shocker, where the action is carried out entirely on a Mona Hatoum barbed wire bed in a meatpacking factory. Thrashing around and violently piqued by a harassed beak like attack, the backing is a maelstrom of dentist drills, panting shakers and eerie hanging silence, until it breaks out with the album’s first drum break and rhythmic holy chorus. Throughout, Walker swoons in resignation, dropping lines like, “acne on a leaper”, and “glim away little brute”, in a disjointed narrated sombre tone that gets more dangerous as the song churns to its climax. A ritualistic metaphor, the song’s central tool of terror, the blade or scalpel, is held as an abstract reference point to gleam some meaning, whether it pertains to the cosmetic, life-threatening surgery, torture, the sexual or even tattooing, Walker and Sunn O))) build a nuanced layer upon layer of industrial buzzing queasiness to a trope.
Be under no illusion with the finale to this Dante inferno, the ‘Lullaby’ tones on offer here in no way promise a good night’s sleep. This is after all Walker’s crooned eulogy to assisted lullaby suicide, and the sound of death’s hallucinatory vibrations, gradually taking hold.
Interpreting the song in her own enigmatic way, Ute Lemper bravely grappled with the song for her 1999 album, Punishing Kiss, but Walker now takes back what he at first giveth, converting it into an even gloomier anthem with his monastic brethren.
You can almost hear the percussive ticking of a Newton’s cradle: the mortal clock running out as the drugs take effect; comfort is not an option. The whole thing sounds like a seething hotbed of psychological thrillers and horror, played out remorsefully until the final bleep of the life support signals the end. Walker never nails home his own social or political solutions, and so this, very much a topic debated in recent years and ongoing, is more a diorama set piece, which neither condones nor condemns assisted suicide.
Disturbing throughout, this unnerving suite is obviously not to be recommended to those already on the knife-edge or for those who stay clear of the news or anything that may remind them of human suffrage. You also need stamina and plenty of nerve to sit through this uncomfortable 49-minutes of music at its most challenging. Not so much hostile as shredded by a repeating rotor blade cutting action that piques and prods, even the quietest passages are threatened by an unseen presence of danger. Hell knows (literally) how this album would go down live, the option tentatively hanging in the air, depending on its reception; a possibility that could see the maverick auteur and theatrical seven-day avant-gardist performing for one of the first times in eons.
Both parties in this experiment prove their mettle, reinforcing their reputations but producing an album that is not only accessible to the devotees and followers but also those who’ve previously skirted around taking a walk through the catacombs of the bleakest recesses of a conflicted mind.
