THE MONTHLY DIGEST OF ACCUMULATED NEW MUSIC; THE SOCIAL INTER-GENERATIONAL/ECLECTIC AND ANNIVERSARY ALBUMS CELEBRATING PLAYLIST; AND ARCHIVE MATERIAL.ALL WRITTEN & CHOSEN BY DOMINIC VALVONA
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Leah Callahan ‘Curious Tourist’
29th April 2024
Still channeling The Glass Set’s The Sundays and My Bloody Valentine vibes, Bostonian singer-songwriter Leah Callahan continues the musical journey under her own name. The fourth album since leaving behind the group she once fronted in the mid 2000s, Callahan works hand-in-hand with foil Chris Stern of The Sterns fame. A fan of Callahan’s former band, Stern’s congruous contributions including co-writing, arranging, producing and playing a number of instruments on Curious Tourist: a title that more or less sums up both partners on this songbook’s exploration and revival of various music scenes and sounds; like a re-energized flick back through the record collection, picking out and giving a contemporary take on the new wave, power pop, C86, alt-synth-pop, shoegaze and Britpop genres.
Callahan’s voice has already been compared to a female Morrissey, whilst the flange reverberations and chimes of Johnny Marr’s guitar riffs can be heard ringing out across a number of the tracks on the newest album. But I also detect more modern echoes of the Sparrow & The Workshop’s Jill O’ Sullivan and a touch of LoveLikeFire. However, every track seems to take a different turn from the one before; from the cathedral organ intro that soon turns into an indie anthem of languid yearned vocals and strings – evoking both Lush and Echobelly – ‘Nowhere Girl’, to the indie-country espionage merger of Howling Bells, Interpol and Blondie ‘No One’. Those Western twangs are made even more obvious and atmospheric on the next song and title track, with rattle snake tambourine shakes, cinematic vistas and melting heat mirage guitar bends and tremolo – imagine a more subtle Heartless Bastards. Taking yet another turn on the highroad, ‘Ordinary Face’ was written as an answer to the Bronski Beat’s ‘Smalltown Boy’, but I’m picking up Beatles and early Floyd, mixed with 90s Dubstar, light psych-pop vibes.
Often such pick ‘n’ mix attempts can sound incoherent and incongruous, but Callahan and Stern make each excursion their own; keeping a momentum and signature that is all theirs. I hope Callahan stays “curious”.
Sarah/Shaun ‘It’s True What They Say?’
(Hobbes Music)
A sprinkled stardust statement of heartbreak and yearned romanticism from the Edinburgh wife and husband team of Sarah and Shaun McLachlan, making their debut on the Scottish capital’s leftfield electronic (and beyond) label, Hobbes Music. Shaun’s previous highlights with Delta Mainline (a band we have reviewed in the past, comparing them to an angelic Jesus And Mary Chain, OMD, Wilco and Spiritualized) put him in good stead, working arm-in-arm with Sarah on their duo’s first EP, with that band’s expansive epic ambitions and big horizons carried over into this more cosmic alluded project.
The lovelorn voiced pair, who duet together or back each other up harmoniously throughout and play and arrange a multitude of instruments between them, are joined by complimentary friends and foils Jaguar Eyes (a band mate of Shaun’s in Delta Mainline, contributing guitars and synths and arranging strings, programming drums and on engineering duties), Darren Coghill (of Neon Waltz fame, providing some percussion and drums, effects and, rather strangely, credited on “fire extinguisher”), Daniel Land (The Modern Painters’ instigator helps out on guitar), Chris Dixie Darley (the oft Father John Misty guitarist offers touches of slide guitar), Bruce Michie (brass) and Gavin King (the longtime collaborator and pal provides keys, and offers his pre-production and engineering skills). Altogether, this ensemble cast open up the sound: dreamily in a shoegaze fashion, but big.
With an affinity for the ending of the Star Man movie, and its romantic allusions, but in particular the score, Sarah and Shaun paly star-crossed lovers across a constellation of diaphanous synth and dream pop, of waned country music and Sarah Records influences. Imbued with memories, the almost impossible to describe feelings of everything from hope to family and community, the EP changes course from soft electronic pumped reminisces of the 80s to star-gazing from a range in the old West. Lulled, soothed and other times almost lamented, the vocals voice lyrical fancies of love but also heartbreak and concern at veiled loss and breakups.
Musically, sonically, the duo and their contributing partners touch upon Beach House, Ladytron, The Sundays, The Mining Co., The Field Mice, Sparklehorse, Duke Spirit and Cocteau Twins. From moseying across the open plains to following vapour trials; from electronica to starry strings arranged dreamy indie; and from the filmic to the personal; the scale is epic and feels nostalgic. I’m looking forward to more from this duo over the coming year: if only to see how expansive and enveloped in twinkled space dust it can get.
Nicolas Cueille ‘Curiositi’
(Un je-ne-sais-quoi)
As that title – one amongst a number of phonetically broken down prompts and descriptions of the artist’s headspace, direction of travel – translates, the French composer and multi-instrumentalist Nicolas Cueille let’s his curiosity run loose on the first album he’s ever released under his “birth” name.
A magical, and as stated, “discombobulated” realm of field recordings, digital and analogue synths, Cueille’s gentle succinct vocals settle amongst a wonderment of strangely constructed yet organic wildernesses and liquid primordial cup-poured and water-mill turning exotic atmospheres. The voice is almost soulfully indie (like a cross between Douglas Dare and Panda Bear) compared to the synthesized springy and sprung oddities, the textural transmogrified tin and string stretched sounds, rustles in the undergrowth, ambiguous workshop tools and machinery and waves of arpeggiator.
Abstractions of Walter Smetak, Fabbrica Vuota, David Slyvian (his music not voice in this instance), Heiko Maile, Eno, The Books, abstract works era Aphex Twin, µ-Ziq, neo-romantic synth and Library Music inhabit this quirky see-saw balance of softly put questions and emotions. The sounds of a cup-and-ball, knocks, nocturnal wildlife, plops and cheek slapping are transformed across Cueille curious musical terrains, his yins and whims and inquiries, to create something quite unique: the machine integrating with the biosphere.
Alexander Stordiau/The Stordiau Revolution ‘Skin Of Salt’
Breathing in the coastal airs, conversing with the local seagulls, and ruminating about such existential enquires as the circle of life and the still lingering traces of those loved-ones that passed on, the Belgium-based electronic composer, DJ and producer Alexander Stordiau returns with his revolutionary-suffix moniker to provide a new soundtrack to the motions and questions circling around in his consciousness.
Featured on the Monolith Cocktail over the years, through his partnerships with the Edinburgh label Bearsuit Records and Tokyo label Pure Spark, Stordiau has been constantly evolving his sound into various categories, split into the fields of ambience, trance, analogue sounding early electronica, minimal techno and kosmsiche. All of which are now enacted on his newest release, Skin Of Salt; a sophisticated retro soundtrack of fluctuating synthesized, arpeggiator movements and wave forms both shooting through the galaxy and articulating matters closer to home.
Covering millenniums, as humanity left the “salty water” and primordial soup to live on land, and articulating the abstract, almost impossible to describe traces and sounds left behind in the family home after parents pass away – the comforting sound, in this case, of fond memories of mum opening drawers in the corridor cupboards -, Stordiau uses a sound palette of Roedelius, Vangelis, Tangerine Dream, Sky Records, Jarre, Schulze and stripped back techno to build his thematic tracks. Alpha waves and knocked beats pass by the Twilight Zone, as theremin-like kooky waves evoke the lunar and supernatural on what sounds like a soviet era space programme documentary soundtrack on the opener ‘Fear Merges Easily’, whilst the title-track travels back to the dawn of time and back in state of near transcendental mystique of cathedral Tangerine Dream and retro-synth dramas.
Over four tracks the electronic fields vary, with even moments of 303 hi-hats and claps that wouldn’t sound out of place on early Ritchie Hawtin records, and there’s always a touch of Library music to be found in the more quirky parts. Supernatural breathes, lunar spells, the vaporous and visitations are all involved on this sophisticated electronic sound suite, as Stordiau transduces his environment and thoughts into another class retro-synth journey.
Distropical ‘Jaguarundi’
19th April 2024
As diverse and numerous as their globally sourced sounds and field recordings, the new EP from the Milan duo of Govind Singh Khurana and Stefano Greco borrows from nature, the landscape and ethnographical. Taking inspiration from an amorphous map of possible worldly fusions, the electronic partnership warp, effect and morph the sounds and vegetation of India, South America, the Far East and Africa, merging them with sophisticated dance beats, bounced bass, and diamond crystalized synth rays – there’s also an effect that sounds like the slow reassembling of broken glass.
From Asian monkeys (‘Astral Langur’) to the tiny Japanese town that hosts a remarkable small shrine (‘Birds of Toi’) and a famous Venezuelan cacao-producing village that can only be reached by boat (‘Chuao Chuao’), reference points on the compass are brought to sonic life. Traditional sounds and in-situ recordings from these navigated locations are amplified and given a House, Psy-Trance and Techno spin. Rainforest raves meet clattering tribal rhythms in the dense lush undergrowth, whilst futuristic tech is overgrown with the fertile vines. Chuffed blows from Castaneda’s fantastical shaman are pumped along by a combination of Basic Channel, Anteloper, Lion’s Drum, Bonobo, Ammar 808 and Mr. Ozio. Authenticity – from the recordings of Afro-Venezuelan drums to the unforgettable South American sounding acoustic guitar used on the wild ‘cougar-esque’ feline referenced title-track, ‘Jaguarundi’ – is still at the root of these electronic propulsive transformations; two worlds, two histories, coming together in a congruous dance-fueled exotic combination.
Empty House ‘Bluestone’
(Cruel Nature Records) 26th April 2024
The megalithic period “cromlech” (frequently interchanged with and referred to a “dolmen” too) construction of large stone blocks that stands within the borders of the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park, in the village of Pentre Ifan, acts as a gateway to the imagination for the Blackpool-based musician Fred Laird, who goes under the moniker of Empty House.
Theories as to the purpose, significance of these stones vary: A monument perhaps? A communal burial chamber, maybe? Or perhaps an elaborate demonstration of its builders’ skills? Whatever that purpose, in the right light, the right season this atavistic assemblage evokes the mysterious, mystical, and otherworldly. Even the stones’ geological make up, providence is used as a soundboard; the album title of Bluestone even references it – one now long debunked theory suggested that the local bluestone was used and carted all the way to build Stonehenge. That same bluestone is thought to have been hewn and moved from Pembrokeshire’s Preseli Mountains (also often referred to as the less imposing “hills”) region which surrounds the cromlech at the centre of this complimentary partner album to February’s “brighter sounding” The Golden Hour – recorded in a similar fashion, but during the Spring/Summer of 2023. Its “lunar sister” (recorded last November) is a field trip of atmospheric psychogeography; an empirical soundtrack that channels the emanating signals that either exist or remain mere fantasy.
It’s one of Wales’s most impressive and largest structures of that age and kind (we’re talking more than 5000 odd years ago here). If it could talk/communicate, what stories it could tell. Laird gives it a suitable antiquarian, new age and megalithic ambient go anyway; telling or implying and evoking a veiled timeline of Druidic initiations, of magic, of pagan rituals, of long dead spirits invoked, of Medieval pastoral processions, and of the more ominous and near doomed.
Traversing and absorbing various elements, from the supernatural to Wiccan, the ancients to the kosmische music of the 70s, Laird uses sonorous guitar drones, sustained e bow feedback, suitably evocative synthesized melodies, the pastoral spindled movements and folk sounds of the Irish bouzouki (an adopted version of the original Greek long-necked and pear-bottomed shaped plucked instrument, introduced to Irish music in the mid 60s, most notably by the Sweeney’s Men folk group), tinkled piano notes, a crackling fire and subtle bellows to magic up a soundscape illusion. Introduced into that sphere, Nick Raybould and his West African rope-tuned goblet drum, a djembe, make a guest appearance on the fire-lit crackled hybrid ‘Fires At Midnight’ – a scene that merges the relaxed hand drum patters of the djembe with kosmische oscillations, a Fortean transmitter and hints of sci-fi.
Avalon mists descend across a communication with the landscape, whilst shriven archaic reenactments stir-up the hallucinatory and esoteric. Old vacuums of air blow through the spaces in between the stones as a haunted geology shrieks, howls, mourns and swirls. And a wispy passage of monastery choral voices carries on the wind as children giggle and the neolithic generator revs up vibrations and pulses from the afterlife. The Incredible String Band makes merry with Julian Cope; Steve Hillage joins Ash Ra Tempel; and Affenstunde period Popol Vuh invokes ghostly parallel histories with Xqui and Quimper on a tour of Ley lines. Atmospheres and scenes from a long history of settlement, of the spiritual, envelope the listener on a most subtle but rich field recording trip.
___/THE SOCIAL PLAYLIST VOLUME 85\___
Continuing with the decade-long Social – originally a DJ club night I’d pick up at different times over the past 20 plus years, and also a café residency from 2012 to 2014 – playlist, each month I literally chose the records that celebrate anniversary albums, those that I’d love to hear on the radio waves or DJs play once and while, and those records that pay a homage and respect to those artists we’ve lost in the last month.
Anniversary picks this month include a big 60th shoutout to The Rolling Stones debut (see a little piece on my thoughts further down the page), 50th call outs to jazz-funk-soul greats Calvin Keys (Proceed With Caution!) and Weldon Irvine (Cosmic Vortex (Justice Divine)), Funkadelic (Standing On The Verge Of Getting It On). Moving into the 80s, REM’s Reckoning is unbelievably now 40 years.
Pulp’s His ‘N’ Hers LP, and Britpop’s near zenith with it, reaches the 30th milestone. An album that couldn’t be more different from the same year, Nas’ decade defining Illmatic is also 30 this month.
We now reach the unfortunate part of the playlist selection: the deaths or death in this case of the one of the last mavericks, John Sinclair. Synonymous for steering and kicking out the jams in his short role as manager of Detroit’s renowned rebel rousing motherfuckers The MC5, renegade poet, scholar, activist and establishment rattler John Sinclair is also remembered for his free radical zeal and dalliances with the law.
Even too hardcore for the MC5, Sinclair’s foundation of the anti-racist socialist White Panthers, and his countless associations with equally revolutionary counterculture players and shakers, marked him out; leading as it did to the now infamous drug bust for marijuana possession in 1969. Whilst his love for the herb and gesticulations, whether through poetry or diatribes, is in no doubt, the way this particular bust was set-up (for what was a very insignificant amount of drugs) is considered heavy-handed and unjustifiable. Handed an initial ten-year sentence, Sinclair’s status in the “heads” and political agitators’ communities had singled him out as a poster child for deterring the like-minded boomer generation from stepping out of line. Fortunately (to a degree) this sentence and media furor galvanized support and sympathy and reduced that ten-year stretch to two, with Sinclair emerging from jail in 1971.
Keeping his hand in so to speak but taking up residency in Amsterdam – a much safer bet -, the beatnik jazz sage continued to perform, write, and record. I’ve chosen a mere smattering of his recordings.
I always sprinkle a few newish tracks into the cross-generational mix. This month it’s the turn of the Neon Kittens, Mick Harvey, Nduduzo Makhathini and Forest Swords.
The rest of the playlist, well, it’s just tunes I played out, own or just rate. In that vein, there’s Mary Wells, Nefertiti, The 3, The Mad’s, Okay Temiz, Danny Arakaki, Ilous and more….
Calvin Keys ‘Aunt Lovey’
Weldon Irvine ‘Love Jones’
Jean Wells ‘Somebody’s Been Loving You (But It Ain’t Me)’
Funkadelic ‘Sexy Ways’
Nefertiti ‘Miss Amutha Nature’
3 Melancholy Gypsys ‘The 3’
Nas ‘It Ain’t Hard To Tell’
John Sinclair ‘When Will The Blues Leave’
The Mad’s ‘Feels Like Love’
The Rolling Stones ‘Little By Little’
Eulenspygel ‘Menschenmacher’
Okay Temiz ‘Galaxy Nine’
The Monkees ‘Time And Time Again’
Donnie Fritts ‘Prone To Lean’
Danny Arakaki ‘All Thanks’
Samadi ‘La Luna Llena’
Coumba Sidibe ‘Djagolla’
Ilous ‘Chanson Chagrin’
John Sinclair ‘Ain’t Nobody’s Business’
R.E.M. ‘Little America’
Neon kittens ‘Schrodinger’s Party Animal’
Virna Lindt ‘Shiver’
Pulp ‘Joyriders’
The Twilights ‘Sorry, She’s Mine’
Mick Harvey ‘When We Were Beautiful & Young’
Clancy Eccles ‘I Need You’
Gerardo Manuel & El Humo ‘Where Did You Go’
Nduduzo Makhathini ‘Libations: Omnyama’
Forest Swords ‘Torch’
John Sinclair ‘Sitarrtha’
__//ARCHIVES\\__
50th Anniversary to Guru Guru’s Dance Of The Flames and a staggering 60th to The Rolling Stones’ Debut.
Guru Guru ‘Dance of The Flames’
(Atlantic Records)
Trawling around Europe – and wherever they found a door that was laid open to them – like a ragtag gypsy caravan convoy, Guru Guru took their 1973 album, Don’t Call Us (We Call You), out on the road. With most of their monies funneled into purchasing a solid and heavy monolithic ballsy sound-system, they bled dry the ears of many a ‘head’.
The trios imbued in sonic genius and omnivorous lynch-pin guitar gunslinger, Ax Genrich, somehow managed to disappear from this mad procession, leaving the group and heading into nigh obscurity. His difference of opinion on which direction the ennui band of lunatics should progress resulted in a split, with Mani Neumaier hell bent on creating improvisational material against Genrich’s more delineate structured compositions – though it must be made clear that Genrich always threw himself unwieldy into every track, regardless of who wrote it or what form it took. For a scene that produced an abundance of over-qualified, sickeningly gifted, innovative, and erudite guitarists – West Germany spewed them out like an ever-efficient Volkswagen production line – it was, you could say, a job to stand out from the mighty throngs of erudite axe welders. Yet Genrich with his re-wired Hendrix and deconstructed rock’n’roll space licks, managed to leave an indelible footprint in the Krautrock canon, and hall of fame.
To plug this gaping chasm, and before embarking on the next LP, the one-time member of the progressive jazz outfit Eliff and exotically named Houchäng Nejadepour – half German, half Persian – joined the one-album veteran Hans Hartmann and founding father Neumaier to become part of Guru Guru mark III. Talented in many disciplines including guitar and sitar, alongside both compositional and technical production skills, Nejadepour added a more Popol Vuh-esque flavour to the band’s sound, lending Guru Guru a Balearic and far eastern quality. Such was his contribution – though this could also be partially down to Neumaier’s lack of new material – that the well-talented troubadour composed half of all the tracks on their next album, Dance Of The Flames. Unfortunately, that listless and cold-footed obligation to move on, led to Nejadepour’s departure soon after the LP’s recording in the Spring of 1974 – his replacement was Gila axe man Conny Veit, who himself only managed a short sojourn of a few months.
Dance Of The Flames, the second release on Atlantic, not only saw a wider and more cosmopolitan influence and catchment, but it also grew fat on a robust hard rock sound, which at times plunged into the dark recesses of Gothic heavy metal. Andalusian vistas and South American themed Sambas cut the collection of eight-songs into two camps. Neumaier, as chief patriarch, tends to either brood on or veer towards folly. Take the opening grandstanding ‘Dagobert Duck’s 100th Birthday’, a paean ode to Donald Ducks tight-beaked Uncle Scrooge, that could also be a reference to the last Merovingian king of the Franks, but then maybe not. The track features a display of fatuous duck-call kazoos and outlandish gestures of both The Edgar Winter Bands ‘Frankenstein’ and King Crimson, on showboating duties. But then there are also ethereal opuses, such as the romanticized ‘The Girl From Hirschhorn’ – a lament to the mysterious figure of affection, who resides in the nearby German town of the title – to balance it all out.
Production values are high, and slickly executed with every note, no matter how drenched in echo, reverb, or fuzz, all audible and separated apart. Those erratic rolling time signatures and unruly voracious drum solos of Neumaier are all still in evidence, as usual, as are the dependable assiduous bass runs and jazz riffs, favored by Hans Hartmann who’d joined the Guru Guru family the previous year. The high-plain astral traveler, preparing us for a meeting with visitors from beyond the stars, is almost erased from the groups original founding musical manifesto, replaced by a sturdier rock and, world music, agenda.
From the start:
Kazoo twitching gonzo trumpets announce the extravagant goof-off rock opus that is ‘Dagobert Duck’s 100th Birthday’ party anthem. This flitting Alice Cooper muscling rocker features a jovial, if under the surface portentous, ode to Donald Duck’s disparaging money grabbing capitalist Uncle Scrooge – known in Germany as Dagobert. Macho feats of savage and squalling guitar solos brand scorch marks across the stonking, stalking monster backing track; Nejadepour hurtling through the scales at a rabid rate of knots, hoping to erase the hovering presence of Ax Genrich, with his own blistering blurry-eyed fret work. Gratuitous and highly ridiculous in equal measure, this slab of over-cooked mega prog, is used as some kind of showcase, just to prove their mettle.
An inexorable ethereal and lightly laid-back gallop of a groove rolls into view over a harmonic pinpoint sweeping introduction. The diaphanous love pinning tryst, ‘The Girl From Hirschhorn’ – placed highly in my all-time top 100 Krautrock tunes, just in case you were wondering – floats in on the dreamy breezy melody. Hans Hartmann builds up a repetitive pounding bass line, as a gliding quivering lead guitar preens and majestically swoons along to the rousing pleasing and drifting backing. After seven-minutes of proto-Amon Düül II Wolf City era bliss, and dashes of love-in Acid Mother Temple – you can see why Neumaier went on to work with them – a vocal relief sublimely transcends the soundtrack, as Neumaier exhales joyfully –
“I can’t stop thinking of you.
Where could you be, little babe,
Why I am gently playing this song for you?”.
With his querying display of lament finally let out, the band hyper-drive towards a lunar wah-wah stop/starting outré; shimmering in reverb and slipping into a jazz-rock sporadic free-for-all, that spills over and onto side one’s closing track, a bombastic spasmodic odyssey.
‘The Day Of Time Stop’ is Sun Ra, Beefheart and Santana all sharing a pleasure voyage to the 5th Dimension. Staccato timings create a jump and off-kilter raging loop, that acts as a cyclonic spiraling blast for Nejadepour to launch another blast of light-speed attacking pomp, searing from his bewildered guitar. Stumbling drums and octave hurling bass brew up a right shitstorm before the trio use the Arthur. C. Clarke galactic elevator to the stars, disappearing into some distant cosmological whirlpool of depravity. Like Edger Winter, our maddened guitar alchemist, runs wild, flipping through key changes and reeling off utterly fanciful and one-fingered licks – total filth.
Side two begins with the album’s title track. Neumaier promptly rattles off a smashing cymbals introduction, as Hartmann slaps his bass around some bending rhythms. Everything is coated in a strange reverberated and, reversed effect, flipping backwards and forwards, stretching out the instrumental and whipping it into a twisted carcass of a song, with the very air itself sucked out into some kind of vacuum.
A taste of the Samba is up next, albeit an Hieldberg etymological version of the sun-kissed exotic dance. Nejadepour’s sprightly jazz-tinged composition sounds like a happy-go-lucky Yes, twinned with the be-bop indulgences of Herb Albert. Hartmann twangs and bounces along on the contra bass, as a cheerful Neumaier taps away on the congas, each of them enjoying the succinct distraction that is ‘Samba Dos Rosas’ – just one of Hejadepour’s Balearic enthused joints that make up most of side two’s track list.
‘Rallulli’ is cast from the same mold, but steers closer to home, as the musical accompaniment melds together fits of acoustic jamming and hidden-in-the-attic sound effects. Tablas, congas, and a trapped jar of hornets produce a strange old avant-garde miss-mash, the final word going to a flushed toilet – perhaps a critique of the track, or more of that Neumaier humor.
Those Andalusian plains and mountains come a calling, as pranged delicate harmonies add to a pained melancholic mood-piece entitled ‘At The Juncture Of Light And Dark’. Hemmingway-esque Death In The Afternoon allusions are cast, with resplendent flamingo flourishes and a suspense filled air of Spanish mystery – file under evocative musical narrative.
Bringing the album to a dramatic close is the doom lit curtain call of ‘God’s Endless Love For Man’, a Gothic heavy metal droning and throbbing prowling instrumental that stabs a fork in the eye of the creator. More like an attempt to soundtrack the works of Bosch then a hymn to the divine, this bubbling cauldron of a stonker takes over from Amon Düül II’s Phallus Dei quest and drags Black Sabbath through the killing fields. This is indeed some scary shit: Guru Guru on a fuck-rock satanical crusade, summoning up some kind of end-plan Armageddon. Interspersed in the mire, bursts of rapid-fire jazz rich breaks and tangled glorious guitar solos add a glimpse of hope to this one-way helter skelter ride into the abyss.
The Rolling Stones ‘S-T’
(Decca) 1964
Those sulky near petulant straight-faced punks stare out from their dark shadowed album with a look that means business. Made-up almost entirely of cover versions, grabbed from the patron black blues and r’n’b characters of Chicago, The Mississippi and Tennessee, the debut LP is almost an exalted tribute to their heroes.
Rambunctious and loud, the pure rawness and bleed over of the instruments (something that no-one seemed concerned about in the studio at the time; encouraged by their manager Oldham) as they filled each other’s space, was a mixture of giddy adulation and blue-eyed indecorous rebellion. From the frayed, proto-punk amateurish sound of ‘Route 66’ to the gospel ye-ye of ‘Can I Get A Witness’, this album shambles along and offers up some convincing attempts to sound like Jimmy Reed, Willie Dixon and Slim Harpo. Of course, they fail but the results are better than the intention in many ways; the vital kick start to a whole scene and call for a generation. Can it really be sixty years old this month?!
CHOICE ALBUMS/EPS OF 2017 PART TWO: M – Z
SELECTION/WORDS: DOMINIC VALVONA, MATT OLIVER and AYFER SIMMS
M – Z : Mazzi & SOUL Purpose to Msafiri Zawose.
Welcome to part two of our mega ‘choice albums/EPs of 2017’ feature. If you haven’t already checked it out, have a good perusal of part one, as the second part is a continuation, carrying on in an alphabetical order from where we last left off.
The decision making process:
Continuing to shy away from fatuous rating systems and ‘best of lists’, the Monolith Cocktailendeavors to offer a more eclectic spread of worthy ‘choice’ picks, with no album dominating or holding any particular numbered position – unlike most of our contemporaries lists stuck with the ridiculous task, for example, of explaining why one album is more deserving of their fatuous number 32 spot than another.
Lined up in alphabetical order then, our favourite new and reissued albums and EPs from 2017 are of course considered to be the most interesting, vibrant and dynamic of the year’s releases. But the best? Granted, to make this list you have to have made some sort of impact, but we’d never suggest these entries were categorically the best albums of 2017, even if that might be true. Instead our list is an indicator of our amorphous tastes, rounding up a year in the life of the Monolith Cocktail, and we hope, introducing you to titles and artists/bands that may have dropped below the radar or got lost in the noise of more commercial better promoted releases.
M.
Mazzi & SOUL Purpose ‘The Building’ (SOUL Purpose)
“A towering B-boy document gives familiar samples new life and piles banks of bricks and mortar beats and rhymes you can always back to do the business”. RnV, Feb 17
The Building by established New Jersey movement Mazzi & SOUL Purpose is built on two levels and ends up a skyscraper, to a specification of telepathy that works from close range or miles away. Mazzi as emcee rhymes his ass off for fifteen tracks without leaving you behind (“love what you’re doing and you’ll never have to work a day in your life”) and not without addressing the state of the world, relationship complexities and being prepared to fight (with the listener playing the twelfth man).
The SOUL Purpose movement begins with a mash-up of every essential hip-hop break known to man, going on to cover cavernous, fusionist swells of sound, B-Boy skippers, deep cover gangster business, and samples found in Boots adverts/Sugababes singles and on Madonna tours. That the album was also helping do its bit for good causes added an extra layer to the album’s complete package status. Matt Oliver
Nicole Mitchell ‘Mandorla Awakening II: Emerging Worlds’ (FPE Records)
Taken from a 2015 live performance commissioned by the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, the erudite American jazz flautist, composer, bandleader, educator, scion of Afrofuturism, former president of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and a founder of The Black Earth Ensemble, Nicole Mitchell’s outstanding Mandorla Awakening II: Emerging Worlds conceptual suite, straddles two evocatively imagined contrasting worlds: the tumult of a patriarchal world, called The World Union, in decay against the egalitarian desire of the advanced utopia called Mandorla, where technology and nature, freedom and tolerance are in ultimate synchronization.
Set in the year 2099 this multimedia project, which includes a short novella, blurs the line between philosophy, mysticism, modern art, science fiction and radical political critique on what is both a diaphanous and moody groundswell soundtrack of contorting confusion and beautiful flute accompanied polygenesis magic. To suggest this album of instrumental peregrinations and odysseys and poetically conscious soulful lectures and passionate, Last Poets meet Pharaoh Sanders, declarations – courtesy of Avery R Young – can be simply classed as a jazz is to ignore how amorphous the musicality of Mitchell and her reconfigured Black Earth Ensemble is in transcending the genre. With an expansive range of instruments and sounds, including Kojiro Umezaki on shakuhachi, Renée Baker on violin, Tomeka Reid on both cello and banjo, Alex Wing on electric guitar and oud, Tatsu Aoki playing bass, shamisen and taiko, and Jovia Armstrong handling percussion, the paradise versus dystopia exoticism of the ‘awakening’ simultaneously evokes orientalism, fantasy, nature, the classical and the atavistic.
At its heart, articulating the nervous but adventurous, pinning but diaphanously elevating characteristics of the narrative, Mitchell’s flute performances are stunning and spiritual throughout, even gracious. And the direction of travel is never quite certain, but always impressive and questioning.
As a frame for this conceptual suite, Mitchell asks: “What would a world look like that is truly egalitarian, with advanced technology that is in tune with nature?” We may never know, but the tumultuous journey towards it certainly sounds magnificently ominous and beautifully experimental. Dominic Valvona
N.
Nolan the Ninja ‘Yen’ (Left of Center)
“Aggressive, eyeballing rhymes to get you bouncing, and beats strategically picking their punches”. RnV, Oct 17
In his bid “to retire before I’m 35” and “trying to see a million before I go to sleep”, Nolan the Ninja absolutely busts a gut to get his rhymes hurrying up his pension plan. Landing haymakers on dosed up vintage Queensbridge and clatters of muddy kicks and snares that can call up a posse from miles, the Detroit dragon slayer also knows that living by an all-or-nothing mindstate means every single syllable has to have the clarity to rightfully shatter ciphers.
Getting Royce 5’9” to guest on Calisthenics is a smart move in seeing whose chest is first to tighten, and Chess is the least civil checkmate recorded as everything threatens to spin of control. The album actually decelerates – or likelier, gives the music a chance to catch up – to show that the go-for-mine Nolan can manage the throttle when soulful drops start clearing the debris. MO
O.
Open Mike Eagle ‘Brick Body Kids Still Daydream’ (Mello Music Group)
“Maintaining his rightful place in the line of ghetto superheroes”. RnV, Aug 17
Two tracks define the multi-talented emcee’s latest intricacies and humour, cosmopolitan accessibility and underground elusiveness. Open Mike Eagle draws himself from his shell by completely rewriting the rules on what it means to be hard in hip-hop on No Selling. Despite the Dark Comedy compère being a nostalgic peacekeeper for a lot of Brick Body…, capable of bringing up an argument about which condiment is king of the kitchen to prove a greater point, the album’s political piece de resistance, My Auntie’s Building, fights for what he believes in with tangible rage, a housing project held close providing the album with an explosive conclusion that might have got lost further up the album sequence.
We disagree that “everything is better when you don’t know nothing” – everyone needs Eagle in their corner – but can certainly vouch for the confirmation of “I promise you, I will never fit in your descriptions”. MO
P.
Hermeto Pascoal ‘Viajando Com O Son (The Lost ’76 Vice-Versa Studio Session)’
(Far Out Recordings)
Thankfully surfacing forty odd years after the fabled ’76 sessions at Rogério Duprat’s São Paulo Vice Versa studio, the extemporized jazz performances of Hermeto Pascoal and his impressive Paulo troupe sound every bit as fresh and dynamic as the day they were recorded.
Held in high esteem, in the upper echelons of experimental traversing exotic jazz pantheon, anointed by a hyperbolic Miles Davis who called him “the most impressive musician in the world” after catching him play live, Pascoal’s transcendent voyages from Brazil have become the stuff of legends. Crate-diggers and jazz or indeed even world music aficionados have always salivated at the prospect of such material being found and released, and the missing Viajando Com O Son session is up there with the most desired.
Unburdened by such trivialities as time and composition, this four track suite shimmers with the celestial as it dreamily saunters through a tropical rainforest groove on the opening Dança do Pajé; quacks and quivers through a percussive bending bright organ peregrination on Mavumvavumpefoco and mysteriously and surreptitiously explores an exotic landscape, tip toeing and lovingly serenaded by magical flutes, on Natal. However, the main, twenty-six minutes long, expansive highlight, Casinha Pequenina, follows on from the previous tracks with similar leitmotifs played out and taken into ever more experimental directions: from Miles Davis to Guru Guru.
The Lost ’76 Vice-Versa Studio Session is a lush tropical jazz odyssey from the Brazilian maverick and genius that’s well worth every penny. DV
Piano Magic ‘Closure’ (Second Language Music)
Calling time on a twenty-year career with one last swansong, the Anglo-French Baroque indie dreamers Piano Magic echo the sentiments and themes of their 2000 song No Closure on their final majestic and profound album, Closure.
Drawn to a despondent melancholy, a most diaphanous one at that, the sagacious founder member and songwriter Glen Johnson is aided in his last ever enterprise by Franck Alba (guitars), Jerome Tcherneyan (drums, percussion), Alasdair Steer (bass) and the band’s original drummer from their debut gig at the infamous Wag Club, Paul Tornbohm, now providing keyboards. Wounded and troubled as ever by the lingering traces and ghosts of past relationships and liaisons, Johnson’s resigned poetics attempt to meet head-on those feelings he just can’t seem to lay to rest: as Johnson calls it, the “mythical formal conclusion”, the need to “move on” from broken relationships is not so easy. And so he croons, “Let’s get this thing sewn up” on the Morricone meets Ry Cooder cinematic title track, knowing full well that “…you never get closure.” The supernatural echoes of a lost love, channeled through a dusty answering machine message séance, on Landline leave the singer’s voice paled and weakened; lamenting loss form the far side of the ether. Marooned as a passive onlooker to the goings-on in the backstreets of his southeast London neighbourhood, a voyeuristic, removed Johnson (in Talk Talk mode) vanishes almost completely before our very ears. The song’s sad lyrics it must be said are a most beautiful kind of misery.
Magnificent in their despair, the musicianship poised, purposeful and subtly stirring, Piano Magic’s last ever fling is one of the band’s most accomplished, and definitely one to savour. As near perfect as any Piano Magic suite can be, Closure proves that you can perhaps after all find a satisfactory ending. DV
R.
Reverse Engineer ‘Elusive Geometry’ (Floored Music)
Both in the moniker by which the Edinburgh-based ‘sonic experimentalist’ Dave House is known by, and deduced from the title of his latest album, Elusive Geometry, we can view the sound-artist’s music as a restructuring of sounds and mechanics.
House unravels, strips and inverts his apparatus of field recordings and sampled instruments to reconstruct new, often mysterious and at times foreboding soundscapes; some of which recall Jon Hassell’s Fourth World Musics explorations: a trace of the Javanese or Malay can be heard like a veil hanging over the uneasy densely packed traverse of cascading crystal droplets, marimba and tubular echoed Proto, and a similar, familiar yet obscured sense of place can be heard on the bamboo shuttling Insider, which also features the bobbing and dipped percussion and tablas of sound-designer and producer Pete Vilk.
A transformation of House’s themes of ‘transition, self (re)discovery and moving on’, the precise chemistry of his compositions and use of collaborators – the already mentioned Vilk is joined by the jazz vocalist Matty Eeles, harpist Esther Swift and BAFTA award-winning cellist Atzi Muramatsu – sends these explorations off into numerous nuanced, but untethered, atmospheres. Masked looming leviathans, honked saxophone like probes, coils and springs, stone and vegetation, the odd guitar strike drift over or interweave through sophisticated minimalist beats and breaks – the most abstract and discordant drum break of which features on the hallucinatory Decoherence -, with the mood fluctuating between both controlled uncertainty and more deconstructive chaos.
Elusive Geometry will tease out and reveal its textures and intricacies slowly, each listen drawing your attention to some other interesting interplay and sparse sound. House has in short created a brilliant album of thoughtful, moody transitions and discovery. DV
S.
Miles Cooper Seaton ‘Phases In Exile’ (Ascension Hall Recordings)
This music is a cinematic poetic recitation, an eloquent art object; sticking to the blurry lines of your shadow while you float through this existence, this street, this town-deserted-or this day, mundane. That dreamy music with the aura of a long lost ocean is the sound of the beyond: you will see, in a cloud, half stunt postures of people trying to deal with mourning. Their eyes wide open yet unsure of how to breathe. And while they exhale, the music pours as if descending from a kind heaven, nested in peace, cooing for drenched figures of the earth.
Miles Cooper Seaton is the ghost who reaches out, entrusting us with a sensation of hope and relief, tranquility, a loophole, mindfulness. Forgive and forget. In the morning dreamers try to get a hold of their visions, trying to catch a glimpse of that faint reality; Miles’ music is lingering too. It tinkles and echoes with a slowness. This is how the rhythm goes, lingering among a field of green, yellow barns, with an horizon of blue and grey shades, some drops sweep the face of a child who understands it all. The clamorous pearls are just from the fierce-y wind. Inside he is all right. The album is dense and tortured. Inside he is all right; the child has grown, and given us these notes. Ayfer Simms
Sentidor ‘Am-Par-Sis’ (Sounds And Colours)
A most congruous if challenging futuristic Rio de Janeiro psychogeography remix of sounds and ideas, built around the transformed cut-up samples and influence of one of Rio’s most famous sons, Tom Jobim, and his post-bossa nova peak leftfield experiment Passarim, fellow compatriot and burgeoning experimental music star João Carvalho creates one of the year’s most haunting and magnificent lush ambient suites, Am-Par-Sis.
Synonymous and celebrated for bringing bossa nova to the world, Jobim’s explorations outside the genre had gone largely unnoticed. Under his alter ego, Sentidor, Carvalho sheds new light on the legendary artist’s innovative experiments whilst also drawing on the drone, ambient, trance, funk carioca, classical and plunderphonics styles to create a uncertain multi-textured augur for future generations to ponder over.
On, what is the most traversing of ambient and collage concept albums, he poses a number of questions, such as: How would Jobim’s record be interpreted by a new generation whose connection with the past and the rest of the world has been cut? How would the record be used in creating new rituals? How can art be reorganized and rebuilt democratically? It also questions the very ideas of what constitutes as the public domain in the modern world and whether something sacred should be preserved or rather gather dust and slowly turn into something else.
Via the power of a seamless, amorphous soundtrack of ethereal pulchritude, cascading veiled piano, ether Panda Bear like voices and song, atmospheric manipulations, transmogrified melodies, whispery winds, Neu! boat trips, reversed samples and magic Carvalho sets out to mull over and articulate these questions. DV
Shadow ‘Sweet Sweet Dreams’ (Analog Africa)
For the first time branching out towards the Caribbean Islands, Africa Analog turn their attention to one of Trinidad & Tobago’s most enigmatic music stars, Winston Bailey, better known as Shadow.
Previously marooned on a desert island of obscurity, panned by critics at the time and failing to sale, Bailey’s bouncing scintillating Soca-boogie and Calypso hybrid lovesick dance floor tracks were ahead of their time. Unlike anything coming out of the islands at the time, these often bright, swaying pop love spurned and springy ballads took the island’s sound into the cosmos.
Bailey started out in the mid 70s reinvigorating the Calypso genre, adding a slick production to the atavistic roots sound that made its way across the Atlantic via the slave trade, and giving it panache and a slinky radiating candour. Though originally used as a tool for social commentary, the synonymous rhythm of the Caribbean is channeled into a number of space age love songs. But despite the lamentable aspects, Bailey’s vocals are sunbaked with ripe swoon and lilting soul, fit for the dancefloor.
A missing masterpiece waiting to be (re) discovered, Sweet Sweet Dreams is simply a beautiful pop album. DV
John Sinclair & Youth ‘Beatnik Youth Ambient’ (Ironman Records)
Synonymous for steering and kicking out the jams in his short role as manager of Detroit’s renowned rebel rousing motherfuckers The MC5, renegade poet, scholar, activist and establishment rattler John Sinclair is also remembered for his free radical zeal and dalliances with the law – leading to a short spell in the slammer. Keeping his hand in so to speak, but taking up residency in Amsterdam – a much safer bet -, the beatnik jazz sage continued, and as you can hear on this latest recording, continues, to record and perform in a host of setups with a multitude of contributors and backing bands.
The appropriately (in every sense) entitled Beatnik Youth Ambient mini LP is a foretaste, and as the title implies, ambient treatment version of material from a full-length album, released a couple of months later. The “Youth” of that title refers of course to the Killing Joke bassist turn in-demand producer Martin Glover. Arguably one of the most consistent producers over the last few decades in the UK, Glover, under his Youth alter ego, has taken on more or less most forms of music and worked on both commercial and underground experimental projects. He now provides Sinclair’s “literary synthesis” with a suitable “beatnik ambient” soundtrack: a serialism quartet of turmoil, turbulent jazz and dreamier trance.
Running through a vivid purview of postwar counterculture, bringing to life the energy and excitement that writers such as Kerouac (who gets referenced a lot) captured when seeing the Bebop jazz revolution and its great proponents perform, Sinclair delivers a magical enthusiastic experience on another track, evoking Thelonious Monk’s 1957 LP of the same name, Brilliant Corners. Titans of American beatnik and psychedelic literature lineup, Burroughs, Ginsberg and Neal Cassady (“…had the ability to park a car anywhere”, just one of his talents alongside his status as the “human bridge between the 50s and 60s.”), rubbing shoulders with jazz music’s new guard Lester Young, Byrd and Gillespie; immortalized by Sinclair to “head music” cosmos of jazzy lamenting woe, ghostly squawking and hooting saxophone and swirling mirages.
If anything, Beatnik Youth Ambient leaves the listener pining for a lost age; Sinclair’s evocative prose and delivery lifted (and cradled at times) by Youth’s congruous seething tensions and floaty dream-like production, which enthrall me to once again get stuck in to the “beat generation” and spin those Savoy label jazz totem recordings again. A prompt for the present times, the zeal of the postwar “baby boomers” (those with a soul anyway) counterculture not necessarily translating to generations X, Y and Z, even if it is needed; Sinclair’s language is nevertheless just as powerfully descriptive and energizing now as it was over forty years ago. DV
Širom ‘I Can Be A Clay Snapper’ (tak:til/Glitterbeat)
With an unspecified, but as the name suggests, emphasis on the “tactile”, Glitterbeat Records new imprint label gives a welcome platform to entrancing experimental tonal performances and sonic polygenesis traverses alike. In the latter camp is this Slovenian peregrination suite from the landlocked, Alps nestling country’s visceral sonic conjurors, Širom.
Evoking memories and feelings, both real and imagined, with a soundtrack thick with atavistic connections, the trio of punk and post-rockers turn experimental folk and acoustic instrumental cartographers convey a personal relationship to their homeland, on their second album together under the Širom banner.
Yet whatever the backgrounds, traces of North Africa, the Adriatic and the Middle East, the performances sail scenically through a dreamy otherworldly representation of Slovenia: Oriental, alien and Balkan visions permeate the plucked, malleted, chimed and purposefully played compositions, which subtly and rather cleverly build up complicated layers and various overlapping time signatures during the course of their journey.
Theremin like siren voices drift in and out, enacting the myth and seraph, whilst on the watermill turning Everything I Sow Is Fatal Sun Ra travels with John Cale and Pharaoh Sanders on a pilgrimage to Samarkand. The most recurring sounds however pay testament to the Balkans ghosts. The folkloric stirrings, lulls and yearning of Slovenia’s past bordering both a pan-Europa of migration and grief – stretching back a millennia – are transduced into often haunted vistas and metaphysical passages.
A most impressive and expansive inaugural Balkans travail; different from the previous two releases on this burgeoning new imprint, yet keeping to the tactile, accentuate and imaginative remit, whilst conjuring up mystical new soundscapes. DV
Solo Collective ‘Part One’ (Nonostar)
Gathered together in a congruous union under the Solo Collective umbrella, the Anglo-German partnership of virtuoso performers/composers Anne Müller, Seb Reynolds and Alex Stolze take turns in the spotlight and provide supporting roles with a cast of additional collaborators on the chamber pop meets traversing evocations suite Part One.
An interconnected triangle of familiar themes and musicality, with each musician also individually experimenting and creating their own solo pathway, in their respective field, all three artists have crossed paths and worked together previously on a variety of projects; some of which, in alternative neo-classical stripped versions, appear on this album. For instance, the original pizzicato acoustic-electronic Don’t Try To Be, from the violinist Stolze’s 2016 EP, Mankind Animal, now features Müller’s yearning emphatic cello, and is striped of its synthesizer electronics in favour of woodblock percussion and doleful low bass notes to create a more tragic and sad version.
A showcase for a particularly harmonious partnership of individuals with a pan-Europa vision of collaboration and crossing sublime musical boundaries, Part One – of what I hope will be a continuing venture – proves to be a stirring neo-classical ambient collection of solo and ensemble performances; each artists sharing and pooling their obvious talents to find a common interplay and a bond to create a challenging but mostly beautiful album. DV
Sparks ‘Hippopotamus’ (BMG)
Bombastically pitched as a “comeback” album, unseasonal followers and those not so familiar with the maverick siblings Sparks career may have been under the impression that the much-hyped Hippopotamus marked some kind of return from an imagined sabbatical, a retirement or an emergence from the wilderness. It was nothing of the sort of course, their last official Sparks albums may have been released in 2008 (Exotic Creatures Of The Deep) and 2009 (The Seduction Of Ingmar Bergman), yet they also went on to collaborate with Franz Ferdinand in 2015 for the mighty team-up FFS. Three albums in seven years isn’t bad, considering the rate most groups knock out records these days, and considering Ron Mael is in his early seventies and brother Russell is only a few years behind.
Maybe what the media meant was a return to form. Admittedly – apart from FFS, which made our albums of the year in 2015 – the music hasn’t quite matched the quality of their 70s output or indeed the 2002 triumph Lil’ Beethoven and the 2006 follow-up Hello Young Lovers. Hippopotamus I can thankfully say is very much Sparks at the top of their game.
The Gilbert And Sullivan of cerebral pop music takes the form to ever-new intelligent heights of absurdity and revelation. Daring to merge intellectual ideas and themes into an art form; yet never laborious, condescending or aloof, every song on this latest theatrical rock and pop suite features an infectious melody, satirical but heartfelt clever lyricism and the usual Noel Coward piano witticisms (updated for the modern age of course).
Communicating both the frankly bizarre and the almost insignificant of contemporary foibles (from the middle class anxiety of stylish furniture design, on the Kierkegaard ponders Scandinavian Design, to the difficult to usually rhyme with anything in any song, surreal assortment of metaphorical, or very real, items and figureheads tormenting Russell in his room on the title track), the Mael Brothers frame all their ditties within a melodramatic often plaintive setting of levity.
Minor concertos and pop triumphs abound, as Sparks use the usual assortment of figureheads, including Edith Piaf and an ambiguous French film director auteur, to articulate their feelings on an assortment of theatrical and operatic (the almost aria style domestic imaginings of The Macbeths on the Living With The Macbeths duet) anthems – though of course, Piaf “always said it better”.
Cleverly creating social and political satire and commentary without the rage, finger wagging and virtue signaling, Sparks remain one of the most consistent bands – or duos if you like – in music history; five decades on and still producing epic pop, the likes of which has seldom been equaled. DV
Strange U ‘#LP4080’ (High Focus)
“#LP4080 has a deftness that allows it to be daft; a first class bizarre ride to and from the far side”. Our Daily Bread 234, Feb 17
It’s always fun and games when King Kashmere/The Iguana Man/Lord Rao starts spraying jocular, juvenile sci-fi syllables and delirious, crowd-pleasing hooks at will. When he hits hyperspace, he’s an unstoppable force of nature few can compare to – “you enjoy buying trainers, a person like me enjoys firing lasers” – though his intergalactic court jester act belies the wicked yarns he spins about our alien overlords and fantastical set-plays (environmental health, relationships, politics) that are closer than you think.
Helming a future primitive craft with Dr Zygote, mechanic to an 8-bit jalopy with head knocks and funky splutters aplenty, Strange U float through the cosmos as an entertainingly erratic two-man crew. Despite being recorded in a studio far, far away, LP#4080 has got its head screwed on with attention to the fundamentals – the MC-producer combination, prime beats and rhymes, a concept that works, and a spectacle promising multiple revisits. MO
T.
Tamikrest ‘Kidal’ (Glitterbeat Records)
Still without a homeland, though liberated from their draconian partners, the Tuareg are once again left, as wanderers in their own lands, the unofficial guardians and custodians of the Saharan wilderness. For now only a dream, best realized and protested through music, the rock’n’roll Bedouins Tamikrest emerge once more from the barren landscape with a message of “power and resistance”, on their fourth, equally entrancing, album Kidal. Paying homage to the strategically and spiritually important cultural trading town of the title, the highly-acclaimed (and rightly so) Tamikrest exude both the sadness and suffering of the dispossessed people who cling to the southwestern Saharan hub that is Kidal: a town which has seen its fair share of fighting, fought over, conquered and reconquered over time, it remains a symbolic home to the Tuareg. This is after all the town that nurtured them and where it all began.
Preserving an increasingly endangered ancestral culture and language, Tamikrest’s cause cannot be separated from their music. Yet, rather than protest with bombast or angry rhetoric, they articulate their woes with a poetic, lyrically sauntering cadence. Oasmane Ag Mosa’s earthy lead vocals resonate deeply, even if his timbre maintains a stoic dignified pitch. Backed by Aghaly Ag Mohamedine and Cheick Ag Tiglia on backing and duets, a lulling sweetness transcends, which on occasions adds a certain romanticism to the impassioned struggle. Swaying effortlessly between the meandering and up-tempo, the accentuated dynamics of Mosa and Paul Salvagnac’s entwined, untethered and contoured guitar work, Mohamedine’s “gatherer” Djembe rope-tuned goblet drumming, Nicolas Grupp’s askew backbeats and Tiglia’s smooth, free-roaming bass lines transport the listener to the mystical topography of the desert.
Assiduous, confident and articulate, the musicianship shows not so much a progression as a balance between the meditative and rock’n’roll spirit of the Tuareg musical resistance. Tamikrest are as brilliant as ever musically, and Kidal is, despite its plaintive and lamentable subject woes, a beacon of hope in an ever-darkening world of uncertainty. DV
Tanzania Albinism Collective ‘White African Power’ (Six Degrees Records)
In so many respects a “spiritual follow-up” to the acclaimed producer Ian Brennan’s Grammy Award-nominated Zomba Prison Project and follow-on from the equally evocative and raw Hanoi Masters sessions, White African Power attentively and respectfully draws out the repressed voices of the Albino community in Tanzania. Brennan’s productions often serve as a kind of hands-off form of creative counseling and healing; helping people to overcome trauma, such as the survivors of Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia. He’s renowned for being the most inconspicuous of in the field and on location producers, letting the atmosphere and elements, the moment if you like, and even serendipity bleed into the performances he captures for posterity. And the production methodology used for this latest project, recording the songs of the Standing Voice Community of Ukerewe, is no different.
A safe haven, Ukerewe, where Ian travelled to in 2016 to document their plight, is the largest inland island in Africa, only reachable by a four-hour ferry ride. Its community is, hardly surprising, haunted by their experiences. Self-conscious, avoiding eye contact, it proved a difficult task for the producer to encourage his subjects to open up. But open up they did, and the results are often surprisingly melodious, poetic, and diaphanous if raw and emotional. Far from a harrowing catalogue of despair and pity, the 23 recordings on this collection prove illuminating.
Fitting no obvious style, these amorphous performances do however resonate both with the delta blues of Louisiana and the stark, stripped down and earthy blues of South East Asia. Touches of raw African dusty tradition do appear, ascending and descending alongside gospel and soulful voices, naturally echoed, sighed and open-heartedly sung with a pure vulnerability. They’re accompanied either by stark lo fi electric guitar performances, that range from scratchy, straggly proto-punk to slower scrabbly emotive twangs, or an acoustic backing of rubber-band and bottle shaking percussion. Standing out production wise though is the classical – imagine Brahms on harpsichord transferred to East Africa in the 80s – reverberating cradling deep soulful ballad, Never Forget The Killings.
Ian Brennan coaxes another startling, eye opening, set of recordings from the victims of trauma; one that proves every bit as impressive as it does plaintive and sad. The collective will astonish, if not surprise listeners, those suppressed voices, thankfully released and given an international platform, sound emotionally honest and revelatory. DV
Terry ‘Remember’ (Upset The Rhythm)
The disarming world-weary punk and quirky pop touting quartet of Melbourne scenesters, banding together under the ubiquitous Terry moniker, follow up a prolific run of 2016 EPs and their debut LP with another acerbic witted, snappy melodious release of profound disenchantment and wistful “wish fulfillment”.
Continuing with the shared girl/boy dynamic of lulling, placeable idiosyncratic vocals and flexible punk, country and new wave bubblegum backing, Terry look to expand their repertoire on Remember. The combined musical savvy and experiences of band members Amy Hill (of Constant Mongrel and School Of Radiant Living), Al Montfort (UV Race, Dick Diver, Total Control), Zephyr Pavey (Eastlink, Russell St Bombings and also Total Control) and Xanthe White (Mick Harvey, Primo) push the quartet into all kinds of nonchalant mischief. The gang embraces nonplussed French new wave chanteuse vibes on the brilliant breezy, mosey country lilting, Toy Love meets Serge Gainsbourg Take Me To The City (one of the tracks of the summer), and snappy, bouncy indie synth pop on Rio. At their most raucous, rough and ready to tumble, Terry softens the edges of The Damned on both their keystone kops rave-up Start The Tape and spiky frazzling Give Up The Crown.
Suggesting nothing more rebellious than a cheeky smoke behind the bike sheds, the group’s knockabout catchy hooks and charm cloak a personal profound response to the political and personal anxieties and dramas of the times. And they do this with a certain aloof coolness and adroit ear for a great tune, making this 2017’s most melodious and catchy album of knowing pop slanted punk. DV
Vieux Farka Touré ‘Samba’ (Six Degrees Records)
A studio recording with a difference, played out and developed live in front of just fifty lucky people in Saugerties, N.Y., Vieux Farka Touré’s latest album blurs the boundaries between performance and the processes of making an album.
Ever the consummate maestro and backed by an equally accomplished band of musicians, there was some initial apprehension on Touré’s part about allowing an audience into the studio. Though we have the finished product, free of any mistakes, restarts and disagreements, it seems this audience far from unnerving the band, egged it on, with the results sounding effortless and natural. There were overdubs of course and one of the songs was recorded back home in Mali – the calabash driven Ni Negarba. But far from cutting corners or relying on the back catalogue, Touré has fashioned an entirely new songbook of vocal and instrumental material for Samba. Some of which amorphously touches upon unfamiliar influences, including reggae on the unapologetically roots-y swaying Ouaga.
Touré is as the Songhai title of his new album Samba translates, the second son of the late Ali Farka Touré, a doyen of the Mali music scene himself who left an indelible mark. If we expand on the title’s meaning, “Samba” is a byword for “one who never breaks”, “who never runs from threats, who is not afraid”. It is even said that those adorned with the name are “blessed with good luck.” Inspired by his ancestry, imbued with three generations, Touré’s album is suffused with special tributes to his family. Outside the family sphere, Touré confronts both Mali’s recent Jihadist takeover – only stopped and defeated by the intervention of the country’s former colonial masters, France – on the radiantly rippling, chorus of voices, funky blues number Homafu Wawa, and environmental issues on the dexterously nimble-fingered bluesy rock, Nature.
The almost never-ending efflux, the constant lapping waves of textures that Touré plays, which offer a cyclonic bed on which to add the deftest licks, have never sounded so sagacious and free flowing. This ain’t no Saharan Hendrix at work, this is something else entirely, and better for it. This is the devotional, earthy soul of Mali, channeled through a six-string electric guitar. DV
V.
VVV ‘Bozo Boyz’ (VVV)
“The trio take apart prowling club beats powered by the high beams of an 80s sportscar”. RnV, Nov 17
Preceded by Apocalypse Trent poking fun yet completely understanding modern hip-hop’s rules, the Nottingham trifecta of Vandal Savage, Cappo and Juga-Naut are a heavy rotation of individual voices.
Rhymes and word associations – pop culture, mind’s eye observations, opaque battle bars covered in enough 80s hairspray to tear the ozone layer a new one – jut out at free-flowing, at times unworkable angles, yet are held together by undeniable dope infused with a carried over drop of cheek.
Flicking VVVs at club beats, a slim line 80s synth chassis is rolled out to maximum effect (an evolutionary eye-opener for East Midlands rap fans – this won’t be their usual milk and two sugars). Both chilled and chilling, sonically Bozo Boyz lives an alternate life of soundtracking a slasher movie making a wrestler’s entrance to the ring. One of the more idiosyncratic hip-hop picks on this list, it’s VVV for victory. MO
Various ‘Hidden Musics 4: Abatwa: Why Did We Stop Growing Tall?’
(Glitterbeat Records)
Ian Brennan, yet again, probing the furthest, most inhospitable and outright dangerous places in the world to record marginalized voices, journeys to the post genocide borderlands of Rwanda on the fourth volume of Glitterbeat Records illuminating Hidden Musics series.
Taking the unmarked, haphazard, road (less traveled) to the edges of Rwanda, avoiding the animosity and embers of vengeance that still burn and remain between the country’s minority Tutsis and majority Hutu communities, Brennan visited and recorded for posterity the Abatwa tribe’s seldom heard lament, anger and incredible soulful, if raw, blues.
The Abatwa name remains mostly unknown outside Africa, that’s because, due to their limited growth, we know them better as the ‘Pygmy’. A derogatory name loaded with infamy, yet preferred by the very people it derides, the tribe rather that put-down than (as Brennan puts it) “the official PC mouthful/post-genocidal replacement: The people who were left behind because of the facts of Rwandan history.”
What you get from this community is battery powered electronics and rusty, ramshackle dusty instruments coming together in hybrids that evoke ritual, the ceremonial but equally the blues, soul and hip-hop; all played with an undeniably emotional Rwandan verve and lilt. Make no mistake; this is performance in its most deconstructive raw form. Devoid of embellishments and overbearing production, recorded in situ with only the rudimentary elements and atmosphere for company, and it sounds great. It is nothing short of revelatory; field recordings of hope and recovery created in the face of despair. DV
Various ‘Pop Makossa: The Invasive Dance Beat Of Cameroon 1976-1984’
(Analog Africa)
The latest in a tenure adventure of excavating lost treasures from the African continent; Analog Africa’s main man Samy Ben Redjeb once more digs deep, sifting through a daunting mountain-size pile of records and recordings as he draws the spotlight on Cameroon’s Makossa scene of the 70s and 80s.
Originally the traditional rhythm and funeral dance of Cameroon’s Sawa and Essewé peoples, later transformed in the country’s cities as it collided with everything from merengue and rumba to Highlife and disco, Makossa, which means, “to dance” in the Cameroon Douala language, is a highly loose and adaptable style: as you will hear on this twelve-track collection of hits and rarities from the golden era of pop makossa.
Honing in on the period when makossa rubbed-up against funk and disco, this balmy dance beat compilation’s pulse is luminous and fluid and most importantly, funky. This is in major part down to some of the most smooth, bouncing, slick and relaxed but constantly busy of bass lines – Cameroon’s bass players rightly revered as among the best throughout the world – and the constantly shuffling hi-hats, tom rolls and splashing drums.
Every bit as “invasive”(and infectious) as the extended album title suggests, the classy pop massoka sound – once considered the unofficial national sound of Cameroon – is waiting to be rediscovered and let loose once again. In what seems like a recent shift in direction at the Analog Africa label, with the emphasis on the late 70s and 80s – from last year’s Space Echo collection from Cape Verde to reissues of Trinidad & Tobago star Shadow’s Sweet Sweet Dreams and the Benin solo singer Vincent Ahehehinnou’s Best Woman – this latest survey continues to unearth musical treats from the same era, albeit in different geographical settings, yet sharing many of the same production and trends traits. In short, another classy sun-basking exposé of the most sauntering, scintillating African pop from one of the top labels in the field. DV
Vukovar ‘Puritan’ (The Brutalist House)
Following in the tradition of their three-syllable sloganist album titles, Vukovar’s fourth LP drums home the Puritan mantra and analogies; a cleansing if you will of the status quo, a year zero, and perhaps also a return to the roots and communal deliverance of protest in music – not, I hope, the ‘puritanical’ steeple hat and buckle shoe wearing bible bashing of zealots, burning heretics at the stake, nor the bloody zeal of so many badly turned-out revolutions that end up creating just as terrible a reign of tyranny. The only fires here are the metaphorical kind; a funeral pyre of mediocrity, a bonfire of vanities, the-bland-leading-the-bland towards a conversion of raw intensity, dangerous, shamanistic performed anarchistic rock’n’roll: well I think that’s the idea.
As the band’s previous album, Fornication showed, Vukovar have at least listened to many of the right bands; released at the start of the year, this amorphous, transmogrified covers style collection featured reconfigured homages to a host of iconic luminaries including David Sylvian, Coil, The Monks, The Birthday Party and Neu!. Cultish in a manner, the band’s influences and manifesto statements of propaganda intent, plus allusions to cultural regicidal and ability to shrink from publicity – even self-sabotage any signs of success or promotion – suggests a band that takes itself very seriously. Yet even with countless references to history’s outsiders, philosophers, discontent mavericks, revolutionaries and demons throughout their previous trio of albums, and the elegiac resignation that shadows them, they waltz sublimely (for a majority of the time), rather than rage in romanticized contempt, as Olympus slowly grumbles.
Between the Gothic skulking and crystalline rays of shared 80s synth new romanticism Vukovar wander transfixed in a nightmare state of both despair and indolent antagonism; with stark lyrics more descriptively visceral than forced down the listener’s throat. Donning the vestiges of the Puritan, the front man, an amalgamation vocally of both Ian Curtis and Bernard Sumner, sets the scene (“I am a sinful man, yet an honest man”) to a backing track of slung low growled bass, Jesus and Mary Chain’s bastardize Spector drum death knells and the miasma threat of Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds on the opening inflicted and gradually ascendant Nietzsche propound Übermensch.
The most complete and best produced encapsulation of Vukovar’s sound and venom yet, balancing both their experimental raw and ritualistic live performances with melancholic post-punk, and even brooding new romanticism pop, Puritan offers a travail through the dirge and gloom of our (end) times with all its sinful and cleansing, often biblical, connotations and language. Though it also often sounds like some kind of personal tortured Nick Cave love requiem, unfolding in the midst of chaos, looking over the edge into the abyss, the heretics taking over the asylum. DV
Y.
Your Old Droog ‘Packs’ (Fat Beats)
“Working a number of hustles and stakes-high dice games, with a penchant for humour and words to the wise on a varied album with no time to waste”. RnV, Mar 17
Your Old Droog’s crowning glory pays the utmost attention to album constructs. Packs is 11 tracks all vying to be the jump-off, featuring skits that help rather than hinder, and guests like Danny Brown and Edan giving the action a hot cameo.
In running his own Grand Theft Auto route through New York (if there’s ever a Baby Driver sequel, or Marvel need a new street hero, surely Droog’s your man), storylines find time to dispense worldly wisdom that you’d be foolish to leave unheeded, and punchlines show that firing from that borderline meh mouth of his, is always smarter than letting off a few from the trigger finger. A 30 minute car chase always in complete control, cool with wrenching the steering wheel off-road before resuming its day-to-day cruising, and whose crucially compact composition makes it a red letter day for the rewind button. The Nas comparisons are now ancient history. MO
Z.
Msafiri Zawose ‘Uhamiaji’ (Soundway Records)
Handing on the baton, so to speak, to another generation, the late great Gogo Tanzanian musician Hukwe Zawose’s equally talented son Msafiri takes up the reigns on his latest album for Soundway Records, Uhamiaji.
From the heartlands of Tanzania, Msafiri in collaboration with the much-respected Santuri platform – enablers and promoters for a much neglected East African music scene – and SoundThread’s Sam Jones has created a vibrant and sauntering, drifting adventure in dub and Afrofuturism jazz from the gogo traditions. Building to a degree on his father’s own 2002 experimental collaboration with ambient electronica producer Michael Brook, on the album Assembly, Msafiri takes his heritage into new and expansive sonic territories whilst intrinsically sounding African.
Buzzy, bright, hypnotic and at times trickling like watery vibes, this amorphous album is an odyssey of the lilting, danceable, meditative and peaceable. A peregrination of mystery, a journey across acoustic and electric frontiers musically and vocally, Uhamiaji is both a most beautiful and imaginative album. DV
Quarterly Playlist of 2017: Part Three: Tony Allen, Chino Amobi, Liars, Nicole Mitchell…
September 28, 2017
PLAYLIST
Selection: Dominic Valvona, Matt Oliver and Ayfer Simms
An encapsulation of the Monolith Cocktail’s tastes and a showcase to reflect our very raison d’être, the ‘quarterly revue playlists’ feature an eclectic selection of tracks from artists and bands we’ve enjoyed, rated highly or believe have something worthwhile to offer. Chosen by Dominic Valvona, Matt Oliver and Ayfer Simms this latest collection includes both recordings featured on the site, and a few we’ve either missed or not had the room to include.
Though we try to offer the best listening experiences, ordering tracks in a certain way for highs and lows, intensity and relief, we don’t have any particular concept or theme in mind when putting these playlists together. Yet by accident we have selected quite a few moody, meditative and often contemplative tunes this time around; from the most brilliant (corners) exposition and vivid experimental jazz suite and beat poetic descriptions of John Sinclair and Youth‘s recent Beatnik Youth Ambient team-up, to the Slovenian peregrinations of Širom. We also include however more upbeat, if in protest, Afrobeat flexing from the Chicago Afrobeat Project (featuring the original rhythm provider legend Tony Allen, who as it happens appears twice on this playlist, on both the Chicago collectives What Goes Up collaboration and on his own solo album debut (proper) for the illustrious Blue Note label, The Source); and at opposite ends of the spectrum, the cool kids aloof post punk of Melbourne’s mini supergroup Terry. We also include tracks from the sauntering laxed smouldering grooves of Africa Analog’s Bro. Valentino reappraisal Stay up Zimbabwe, Hive Mind Record’s debut re-release of Maalem Mahmoud Gania‘s Colours Of The Night, and a host of ‘choice’ hip-hop from The Green Seed, Skipp Whitman, The Doppelgangaz and Tanya Morgan.
Circumnavigating the globe and beyond, the third playlist of 2017 is as eclectic as ever and also features music from India, South America, West Africa and Sweden. See below for the full tracklist and links.
TRACKLIST –
Chicago Afrobeat Project & Tony Allen ‘Race Hustle’ Review
Golden Teacher ‘Sauchiehall Withdrawal (Edit)’
Msafiri Zawose ‘Chibitenyi’
Tony Allen ‘Moody Boy’
Bro. Valentino ‘Stay Up Zimbabwe’
Hypnotic Brass Ensemble ‘One Hunit’
Chino Amobi ‘BLACKOUT’
Nosaj Thing (ft. Kazu Makino) ‘How We Do’ Review
Beans (ft. Elucid, That Kid Prolific) ‘Waterboarding’ Review
The Green Seed ‘Revolution Ok’
Tanya Morgan ‘Truck Shit’ Review
Skipp Whitman ‘Downtown’
Room Of Wires ‘Game Over’ Review
Sad Man ‘Birman’ Review
Tyler The Creator (ft. A$AP Rocky) ‘Who Dat Boy’ Review
Open Mike Eagle ‘My Auntie’s Building’ Review
The Church ‘Another Century’
Co-Pilgrim ‘Turn It Around’
Martin Mânsson Sjöstrand ‘Waiting’ Review
Vukovar ‘The Clockwork Dance’ Review
Liars ‘Cred Woes’
Candice Gordon ‘Nobody’ Review
Hajk ‘Magazine’ Review
Gary Wilson ‘You’re The Girl From The Magazine’
Terry ‘Take Me To The City’ Review
Pale Honey ‘Get These Things Out Of My Head’
Trudy And The Romance ‘Is There A Place I Can Go’
CHUCK ‘Caroline’ Review
Modern Cosmology (ft. Laetitia Sadier) ‘C’est Le Vent’
Diagnos ‘Reflections’ Review
Sebastian Reynolds (with Anne Muller, Mike Bannard, Jonathan Quin and Andrew Warne) ‘Holy Island’
Teonesse Majambree ‘Umuyange’
Maalem Mahmoud Gania ‘Sadati Houma El Bouhala’ Review
Nicole Mitchell ‘Timewrap’
Clutchy Hopkins & Fat Albert ‘Mojave Dervish’
Širom ‘Just About Awake’ Review
Deben Bhattacharya ‘Raga Bageshri In Teentaal’ Review
Yazz Ahmed ‘Bloom’
Hermeto Pascoal ‘Casinha Pequenina’
John Sinclair ‘Sitarrtha’ Review
A Lover & Cairo Liberation Front ‘Level 1’
The Doppelgangaz ‘Beak Wet’ Review
Ill Move Sporadic & Big Toast ‘Do Wat Sunshine?’ Review
The Menagerie (Professor Elemental & Dr Syntax) ‘Only A Game’ Review
REVIEWS/PREVIEWS ROUNDUP
WORDS: DOMINIC VALVONA
Not that I ever mean to do it, but this month’s roundup does have a tenuous theme of sorts, or rather many of the releases in this, the 52nd edition of my eclectic revues, are more or less all experimenting with the electronic music format in one way or another. The sagacious counterculture totem and beatnik poet of renown, John Sinclair leads the charge this month, his vivid jazz lyricism recitations put to an evocative soundtrack by Youth on the mini-album Beatnik Youth Ambient. Jono Podmore’s recently re-launched label, Psychomat, follows up on the inaugural release with another electronic peregrination – this time far more melodic and dreamy –, from the mysterious Reason Stendec. Working in isolation and apart, never meeting in person, the Room Of Wires duo release their third EP of otherworldly and atmospheric techno and downtempo beats, Black Medicine. And an assortment of artists from the ambient, trance, electronica fields contribute towards the One String Inspiration project, highlighting and collecting money for the Syria Relief charity effort.
We also have the latest and it seems final album of outsider New York slacker pathos from Charles Griffin Gilson, otherwise known as CHUCK. Calling it quits on his alter ego, due to a multitude of reasons, Gilson records his sincere CHUCK swan songs collection, Frankenstein Songs For The Grocery Store, for the Audio Antihero label.
Read on for full analysis and review…
John Sinclair ‘Beatnik Youth Ambient’
Ironman Records, 28th July 2017
Synonymous for steering and kicking out the jams in his short role as manager of Detroit’s renowned rebel rousing motherfuckers The MC5, renegade poet, scholar, activist and establishment rattler John Sinclair is also remembered for his free radical zeal and dalliances with the law.
Even too hardcore for the MC5, Sinclair’s foundation of the anti-racist socialist White Panthers, and his countless associations with equally revolutionary counterculture players and shakers, marked him out; leading as it did to the now infamous drug bust for marijuana possession in 1969. Whilst his love for the herb and gesticulations, whether through poetry or diatribes, is in no doubt, the way this particular bust was set-up (for what was a very insignificant amount of drugs) is considered heavy-handed and unjustifiable. Handed an initial ten-year sentence, Sinclair’s status in the “heads” and political agitators communities had singled him out as a poster child for deterring the like-minded boomer generation from stepping out of line. Fortunately (to a degree) this sentence and media furor galvanized support and sympathy and reduced that ten-year stretch to two, with Sinclair emerging from jail in 1971.
Keeping his hand in so to speak, but taking up residency in Amsterdam – a much safer bet -, the beatnik jazz sage continued, and as you can hear on this latest recording, continues, to record and perform in a host of setups with a multitude of contributors and backing bands.
The appropriately (in every sense) entitled Beatnik Youth Ambient mini LP is a foretaste, and as the title implies, ambient treatment version of material from a full-length album, due to be released later on in September. The “Youth” of that title refers of course to the Killing Joke bassist turn in-demand producer Martin Glover. Arguably one of the most consistent producers over the last few decades in the UK, Glover, under his Youth alter ego, has taken on more or less most forms of music and worked on both commercial and underground experimental projects. But he’s perhaps better known for pushing the boundaries of dub through his own productions and with a number of other artists; notably setting up the WAU! Mr. Modo imprint with fellow Orb band member Alex Paterson in 1989.
He now provides Sinclair’s “literary synthesis” with a suitable “beatnik ambient” soundtrack: a serialism quartet of turmoil, turbulent jazz and dreamier trance.
Split into two sides, Sinclair’s sagacious burr recitations are left to flow with only an occasional echo, reverb or metallic ominous effect added for atmosphere or to reinforce the sentiment and hallucinatory philosophy. The opening history lesson, Do It, which enthuses this generation to once again upend the status quo, turns Sinclair’s cerebral lyricism into a quasi-dance track rallying cry: the lingering reflective melodic and amorphous synth chorus in the first half of the track gradually joined by an Orb-like cloud-bursting trance beat.
Running through a vivid purview of postwar counterculture, bringing to life the energy and excitement that writers such as Kerouac (who gets referenced a lot) captured when seeing the Bebop jazz revolution and its great proponents perform, Sinclair delivers a magical enthusiastic experience on the next peregrination and nod to Thelonious Monk’s 1957 LP of the same name, Brilliant Corners. Titans of American beatnik and psychedelic literature lineup, Burroughs, Ginsberg and Neal Cassady (“…had the ability to park a car anywhere”, just one of his talents alongside his status as the “human bridge between the 50s and 60s.”), rubbing shoulders with jazz music’s new guard Lester Young, Byrd and Gillespie; immortalized by Sinclair to “head music” cosmos of jazzy lamenting woe, ghostly squawking and hooting saxophone and swirling mirages.
The greatest “head trip” however is saved until last. Sinclair channeling Captain Beefheart delivering the most “high” meandering TED talk ever, translates, or rather makes a reification of the almost impossible to articulate spark and feelings that kick started the whole boomer generation of beatniks, on the spiritual jazz voyage Sitarrtha. Sitars shimmer, an electric guitar twists and contorts, snares are played in a military, misty revolutionary reveille style, and the saxophone battles on as Sinclair implores us to grasp his message: a return to the real.
A eulogy of a sort, certainly homage, fellow renegade and jailbird, the late convivial Welsh sage Howard Marks reads out a befitting War On Drugs. Part epistle, part rambling thoughts, Marks, the cosmic prophet, weaves between the nonsensical and profound, the intimate and enraged. An obvious candidate and fellow drug evangelist, Marks makes a welcome addition to Sinclair’s congregation.
If anything, Beatnik Youth Ambient leaves the listener pining for a lost age; Sinclair’s evocative prose and delivery lifted (and cradled at times) by Youth’s congruous seething tensions and floaty dream-like production, which enthrall me to once again get stuck in to the “beat generation” and spin those Savoy label jazz totem recordings again. A prompt for the present times, the zeal of the postwar “baby boomers” (those with a soul anyway) counterculture not necessarily translating to generations X, Y and Z, even if it is needed; Sinclair’s language is nevertheless just as powerfully descriptive and energizing now as it was over forty years ago.
Reason Stendec ‘Impulsion EP’
Psychomat, 17th July 2017
Wingman to Can’s Irmin Schmidt and the late Jaki Liebezeit, on both a myriad of band legacy projects and various collaborations over the years; solo electronic music composer, and professor to boot; and in the last few years, part of the analogue manifesto enthused trio, Metamono; Jono Podmore has just recently, in the last two months, after a twenty year hiatus, re-launched his 90s Psychomat record label. The aim being to release, in both physical and digital formats, a cerebral experimental run of electronic music 7”s.
Featured on the Monolith Cocktail in June the inaugural extemporized Podmore & Swantje Lichtenstein partnership of serialism amorphous avant-garde backing and exploratory spoken word, Miss Slipper/Lewes, and subsequent series of remixes that followed, laid down the foundations and signature ascetics of the label. Record number two, Reason Stendec’s Impulsion EP, congruously keeps up the momentum: just as shrouded in mystery; every bit as challenging, but this time around for more melodic and flowing, and on Podmore’s (under his Kumo persona) remix treatment transforms the original material into a bubbling Roland TRs acid techno (reminiscent of Waveform Transmission era Jeff Mills and Derrick Carter) thumper.
An interesting story lies behind that Reason Stendec moniker, which helps to reinforce a sense of mystique. “Stendec” was the last, and as it turned out confounding, word of a Morse code message sent by the crew of the doomed Lancastrian flight between Buenos Aires and Santiago on August 2nd 1947. Turning into a conspirator dream factory of ever outlandish, convoluted theories, including the obligatory alien abduction angle, the Stendec saga had to wait 51 years to be finally laid to rest. It certainly had all the right components for a conspiracy or unworldly mystery, disappearing completely as it did, with no signs of wreckage, no bodies and the most cryptic of messages left to unscramble. But as it turned out the plane crashed, the impact as it hit one the looming mountain ranges triggered an avalanche that buried and entombed the plane and passengers for decades in an area known as the Tupungato glacier. As it thawed over those years, the plane was exposed and finally discovered by mountain climbers.
With this in mind, Reason Stendec cast a spell of otherworldliness; wafting along on a ghostly visage of Pan-European and Arabian sounding influences: like a breeze over an imaginary sand dune landscape, heightened by knife-sharpening percussion.
Like Grace Jones’ Parisian tango en vogue dalliances and contralto husky romantic burr crossed with a restrained Diamanda Galas, the vocals on this track follow the sonic contours; switching from an opening chant to English, French and German. A Vocal Mix version of the same track manipulates, pitch-shifts, bit-crushes, and refashions the voice into various forms: ominous and cybernetic, ritualistic and floating; one minute quivering towards the operatic, the next, in an incantation style.
A languid, lingering and sophisticated turn, the Impulsion EP is another electronica adventure and move in the right direction; both befitting the Psychomat label’s raison d’être yet cerebrally drifting off into more melodic, flowing directions.
CHUCK ‘Frankenstein Songs For The Grocery Store’
Audio Antihero, 18th August 2017
Bowing out (or bailing out) on a high note with another signature collection of pathos rich idiosyncratic slacker anthems and plaints, Charles Griffin Gilson calls time on his alter ego CHUCK. Stating a number of reasons for this closure, including his recent marriage, hitting thirty and honestly feeling he just hasn’t got it in him anymore, Gilson releases his final swansong, Frankenstein Songs For The Grocery Store, on the perfect home for such a maverick artists, Audio Antihero.
A most generous offering it is too: fifteen observatory songs and instrumentals of wistful, often of a despondent, bent, with ruminations on diets, exercise, work, love, TV and animals – more in the metaphorical sense.
An outsider of a kind, originally upping sticks from his Massachusetts home to New York, Gilson’s CHUCK persona whimsically, though often stirringly sad, looks at the foibles of living in the metropolis. This is exemplified in the most direct way on the bubbly knockabout (tongue-in-cheek) tribute to New York and its citizens, New Yorker, which lists a number of postcard landmarks made (in)famous in song and reputation (from Rockaway Beach to Hipster Williamsburg), and the personal traits, such as their stereotype brash offensive manner, of many of its residents: “Get the hell outta my way/Now go and die.”
Though just as domineering theme wise is the ‘social media’ constraints and context of a wider world, encroaching upon (as much as deriving from) these New York musings. This can be heard on the millennial blues trysts Becky and Bodies, which both feature a number of references to our obsession for validation in the online world. The pains of never growing up, streaming lives through a never-ending feed of updates and memes, Gilson encapsulates in his slightly nasal lo fi emo meets Tom Petty, Jonathan Richman, Clouds and Daniel Johnston waking up late in a Williamsburg bedsit style of delivery the regrets and anxieties of a generation growing up in a society that’s never offline: one that conducts its love affairs over a smart phone.
There’s a real sadness to many of these relationship-themed laments; the modern travails of long-distance love in an ever-connected but alienating world, and as with the Dylan-esque flowing turn pizzicato Arcade Fire rousing Caroline, an almost resigned to fate, shrugged, relationship with the ill-suited cavalier subject of the title: “My friends say you’re wasting my time/Baby I don’t mind.”
Whether dreamily drifting along to tropical palm swaying alluded notes, lasers, synthesizer presets and fanned phaser effects, Gilson sings of both unrequited love, gaining and regaining love in a languorous candid manner: removed but betraying a real fragility and care for his characters.
And so we bid fond well to CHUCK, though whether that means a more grown-up post-millennial with commitments Gilson emerges in its wake remains to be seen and heard. I only know that it’s a real shame that he’s decided to call time on his creation. Frankenstein Songs For The Grocery Store is a fitting swansong.
Various Artists ‘One String Inspirations’
So much has happened on the international stage since the April release date of this benefit for Syria album, yet the bitter catastrophic Syrian civil war still rages on unabated by talks and the erosion of ISIS in the country and bordering regions (especially more recently, Iraq). Now in its seventh year with no sign of ending anytime soon, the ensuing humanitarian tragedy throws more desperate Syrian refugees to the mercy of people smugglers and their cadre. Entangled with a never-ending flood of those escaping the devastation of this conflict and with those escaping poverty and violence from across a wide area of the Middle East, Asia and Africa, the Mediterranean has, even this summer, seen huge numbers desperately making the crossing to Europe.
Statistics are staggering: the Syria Relief charity website, which all funds from this release go towards, refers to 6 million children inside the warzone currently needing urgent humanitarian assistance, alone. With this glaring travesty in mind, the 28-track One String Inspiration compilation offers a stirring collection of poetic (and not so poetic: see the bish bosh no-nonsense punk raging Hostile Skies by 3 Chords & A Lie) indictments and bleak instrumental soundtrack atmospheres. The premise of which, alluded to in some ways via the title, challenges each artist to feature either a found or self-made instrument in their composition. Not that any of the results sound restrictive, even if it means some artists have had to move outside their “comfort zones” in the process.
Most of the contributions could be classed in the ambient or experimental sound and mood categories: The opening tabla rattling, spinning travail Night Journey To The Coast by Bowmer Holmes setting the right scene of magical Middle Eastern promise and reflection. Serene veiled drones and obscured leviathan movements follow with the Melodic Energy Commission’s Hole In Timeless and the transmogrified Animal Waves, by Can, put through a wobbly switched-on Bach treatment Budget Airlines from Detlev Everling – which shows a certain sense of humor and offers a kooky respite from the moodier material.
Tribal futurism, ratchet-y workshop mechanics, Transglobal Underground laments and duck quacks abound until reaching the stark folksy plaintive lyricism of Anna Knight’s unapologetic indictment on the refugee crisis, With His Lifejacket. Following the fateful plight of one poor unfortunate child, drowned like so many others crossing the straits to Europe, Knight somberly mourns but also attacks the inhumanity and cruelty of it all.
Full-on warping drum’n’bass and techno (courtesy of the tetchy Kitchen Sink Drama by Glove Of Bones) at its most lively, tapping an object to produce a serial environmental accompaniment at its most minimalist, and whistling to a wood shavings itchy dub track at its most strange, One String Inspiration features a diverse and generous range of wonders; many of which evoke the Warp (early on in its creation), Leaf and First World labels.
A few months on and just as vital, the collection in its own small way keeps the crisis in the spotlight, as more and more artists do their bit and make sense of such chaos.
Room Of Wires ‘Black Medicine’
Section 27
For a duo of sonic experimentalists that have never met – working apart in total isolation -, the Room Of Wires partnership, no matter how seething with ominous twists and turns, is a complimentary synchronized meeting of minds.
The rather anonymous, faceless downtempo and in industrial techno composers manipulate, churn and whip up a mysterious combination of futuristic atmospheres and inner turmoil on their third, most recent, EP Black Medicine.
Beginning as they mean to progress, the kinetic chain snaking opener Game Over builds gradually, weaving touches of Kraftwerk, Basic Channel and Mike Dred to a rhythmic soundscape of harmonious discord. Undulating spheres, radio waves, obscured broadcasted voices and stretching creaks and expanding steel structures move overhead on the following space journey Protected Space, whilst Temple Run juxtaposes lumbering bit-crushing monolith punctuations with a haunting Oriental siren chorus.
Unsettling and sonorous in places, yet able to lift the miasma and darkness with lightened breaks of more serene, glowing synth waves, Room Of Wires constantly offer glimmers of humanity and nature: even if the voices, transmissions sound lost and ebbing away like ghostly visages. A mouthful of Black Medicine that won’t do you any harm.
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