The Perusal #36: Liraz, Tau & The Drones Of Praise, Can, Montparnasse Musique, Carl Stone…
October 6, 2022
Dominic Valvona’s Reviews Roundup
A Glitterbeat Records Double-Bill:-
Liraz ‘Roya’
(Glitterbeat Records) 7th October 2022
With one foot on the nostalgic dance floors of, a pre-revolutionary, Tehran, Cairo, Beirut and Tel Aviv, and another, sweeping a fantastical Persian landscape, pop princess Liraz oozes passionate yearns and diaphanous delivered protestations on her third album, Roya. In the adopted Farsi-tongue that title translates as ‘fantasy’. And this latest harmonious Israeli-Iranian traverse has plenty of it; swirled in vaporous whispers, veils and the airy across matinée romantic swoons and the yearning.
It’s a fantasy in the fact that Liraz has once more recorded an album in a clandestine manner, with musicians from Iran in Istanbul – a flavor of that city’s age-old cultural wellspring is evident in the music. Out of the shadows of Tehran’s secret police and having to remain anonymous, this form of fantasy imagines peace throughout the Middle East and good relations specifically between Liraz’s ancestral Iranian and adopted Israeli homes. The daughter of Sephardic Jews who left Iran at a time of cordial relations with Israel, in the time since, both countries have locked horns in a both cold and hot war. Although being Jewish in what was once the heartlands of the atavistic Persian Empire has never been exactly easy, with persecutions going back generations and a millennia or three. And so the ensemble cast of ‘tar’ lute, wasp-waisted wooden Iranian flute, viola and violin players and voices have taken a big risk in fraternizing and making an album with an Israeli citizen; especially one of Jewish heritage. It probably doesn’t help that Liraz also starred as a Farsi-speaking Mossad operative in the semi-successful Apple TV espionage series Tehran. And in light of the tragic death of Mahsa Amini, demonstrations and civil unrest is being met with extreme violence and subjugation by the state. We could even being seeing the catalyst of regime change, with talk of what comes next, power and administration wise, daring to be aired and seriously challenged by a more liberal generation of young Iranians: such has been the outcry.
As an actor, now in the role of her life, Liraz builds bridges across those barriers as she imagines and retells in song the stories and yearnings of women silenced in Iran, banned from singing. A union is formed between a life and ancestry she can only be a part of in the Iranian diaspora.
Musically this translates into exotic sweeps, bouncy and retro disco zapped pop with a Middle Eastern suffusion of familiar panovison framed fantasies. With a swell and weeping of moving strings it could even be a musical reference to the classical strained beauty and lament of the Eastern European Jewish community – although Liraz’s ancestry is connected to the Iberian Sephardic Jews.
The album’s bookended by two versions of the title-track. The first is a lifting of veils Arabian Kate Bush, galloping up that hill of sand, the second, a tearful, stripped of electronics traditional and classical-bowed farewell. Between those points there’s an incredibly voiced stirring of disco, pop, psychedelic and Middle Eastern fusions; the near-halcyon against retro throwbacks to more liberated freer times in the region. Yet all thoroughly invigorated, refreshed and given a suitably contemporary electric feel.
Contouring the piques and lows there’s a dance of disco-funk (with even the fuzz whacker-whacker buzz of Fred Wesley & The J.B.s) and kitsch Franco-Arabian pop, soulful longing and Moroder-esque synth-electro pop. Liraz is all the while the perfect enchantress or moving vocalist, with a beautiful voice, cadence and articulation.
By far Liraz’s greatest adventure and sound, this is a fantasy with an all too real, alarming undercurrent of suppressed voices, forced to go underground in the act of creating some magical pop music. Please venture further than the myopic pop cliques and commercial output of the UK, America and Europe, as Roya is a stunning, sublime electro-charged album imbued with a myriad of forbearers from the Iranian, Egyptian, Turkish disco, psych, funk and balladry scenes of better times.
Tau & The Drones Of Praise ‘Misneach’
(Glitterbeat Records) 21st October 2022
The second in a Glitterbeat Records double-bill and another fantasy-inspired spell of ancestry and magic, Seán Mulrooney’s led Tau & The Drones Of Praise band reconnect with their Celtic roots.
A return to an Ireland of myth, fables, enchantment and allurement, Mulrooney and his core of foils Robbie Moore (who also recorded this, the band’s third album, at the Impression Studios in Berlin), the Tindersticks’ Earl Harvin and Iain Faulkner (who ‘helmed additional recording at the Sonic Studios in Dublin’) are bolstered further by a large cast of musicians and voices. None more congruous and influential to the overall Celtic feel as the new age misty Irish veiled Clannad, who lend Damien Dempsey and Pól Brennan to this ensemble piece of folk and beyond theatre and reconnection.
Like a Mummers troupe, a merry procession, this harmonious bunch pay reverence to the tree spirits; homage to the ancestors; and fall at the feet of enchantress muses. With a concertinaed air of Breton, a Men Without Hats vibe and a singer who sounds like an Irish Michael Stipe or Alasdair Roberts, they invoke nature’s children making amends with the evergreen sprites on the opening, and brilliant, chorus call of alms, ‘It Is Right To Give Drones And Praise’.
From then on in we’re pulled into a world and across timelines: from atavistic Ireland to the Medieval, Georgian and Present. Old traditions via the folk-psych of The Incredible String Band, Pentangle and Sproutly Smith merge with the already mentioned misty-mystique of Clannad – but also their former ethereal siren Enya too –, The Polyphonic Spree, Flaming Lips and Octopus. Although the group’s lasting message and finale, ‘Hope’, reminded me of both Echo And The Bunnymen and The Mission. An atmosphere of bucolic wistfulness and idyllic idling prevail as the rhythm and soft marches change between the dreamy and courtly, the folksy and anguished. Always melodious in whatever realm, there is however a moment on ‘The Sixth Sun’ when the beautiful if longed female choral voices swim against a more wild, dissonance of noise. But that is the exception. Yet despite the challenges, the history Misneach (from the Old Irish lexicon, it translates as ‘courage’ and ‘spirit’) is a fantastical wilding, droning mélange of Celtic influences, the psychedelic, ancient and folk. And at its heart is a story of reconnection and an environmental yearn.
And A We Jazz Double-Bill:
Carl Stone ‘We Jazz Reworks Vol.2’
(We Jazz) 21st October 2022
Three years on and out the other side of the pandemic, my favourite contemporary jazz label is releasing a second volume of “reworks”.
The Helsinki label, festival and magazine has once more opened up its back catalogue to reinvention/transformation, inviting in the reputable and noted American artist/electronic composer Carl Stone to work his magic on another chronologically ordered stack of ten albums from their growing discography. Inaugural guest Timo Kaukolampi of K-X-P fame conjured up an ambiguous cosmic mix of We Jazz’s first ten albums on Volume 1 of course. And now Stone likewise takes familiar phrases, riffs, rhythms and performances somewhere entirely new and out there. Although both exciting and equally daunting, overwhelmed by a sizeable chunk of material at his disposal, Stone favoured intuition and feel over everything else. That process (re)works wonders as the already experimental and brilliant music of acts and collaborations like Terkel Nørgaard (his album with Ralph Alessi), OK:KO (Syrtti), Jonah Parzen-Johnson (Helsinki 8.12.18) and traces of 3TM, Ilmiliekki Quartet, Peter Eldh and Timo Lassy & Tappo Mäkynen are sent out towards the stars, expanse or morphed into gauzy states of untethered freeform hallucinations.
The opening circular-wafted peregrination ‘Umi’ is more like a mirage of snozzled and snored saxophone cycles, undulated piano and space vapours: Pharaoh Sanders, Donny McCaslin transmogrified by Brown Calvin on the edge of the Milky Way.
A suffusion of drifted, woozy and more hysterical horns, submerged double-bass runs and noodling sporadic and more rhythmic rolling, crescendo drums and ghostly tinkled, hazed piano is handled differently on each track. On the quickened to slow counterbalance timed skiffle and stuttered ‘Sasagin’ Zorn and Haas skit-scat and dream with Tortoise on the NYC underground jazz scene of the 80s, whereas the strange ‘Hippo’ sounds like some kind of Baroque holy ritual piece as reimagined by some kosmische act on Sky Records.
The action is often chaotic and in freeform discourse: like Chat Baker on speed or Oscar Peterson running out of notes. Yet somehow these transformations keep moving in the right direction; finding a rhythm and even a touch of melody on occasions. Avant-garde, free jazz, the cosmic and electronic converge on another alternative vision of the We Jazz catalogue. Stone creates some incredible, even beautiful, experiments; probing the ether, void and hyper-stellar realms of his imagination.
Say What ‘S-T’
(We Jazz) 7th October 2022
Shrouded with a certain mystery, the second We Jazz label release this month is tight-lipped in the information department. There’s very little to go on other than that this was a never to be repeated, existing just at that specific time in that arena (Austin, Texas’ Sonic Transmissions festival), performance, the trio’s defacto leader and saxophonist luckily names his bassist and drummer partners on this wild, contorted free jazz with a punk and no wave attitude recording. The Black Myths partnership of Luke Stewart and Warren ‘Trae” Grudup III join forces with our unnamed saxophonist across riled, spiritual funking, post-rock and avant-garde frenzy growled, swinging and dynamic performances. Taking no breaks, but sorted into seven Roman numeral marked tracks, the obviously versatile/talented trio turn our idea of jazz music inside out.
With the welcoming pleasantries out of the way we’re straight out smacked-up with a badass merger of Miles’ The Last Septet whomp, the sinewy rage of a wrangled Fugazi and the whelp, wail and manic expressive experiments of Roscoe Mitchell doing ‘Ornate’ doing Ornate Coleman, Sam Rivers and The Chicago Underground. That’s only the opening number. It gets even more free range and hysterical with Stewart’s blurred bass slides, crazy frictions and thick-stringed scuttles and slippery entanglements up against Grudup’s splashes, crescendos, tight rolls, slips and smashes all growing ever more experimental and probing.
Track ‘III’ finds a sort of strut and attitude with sax toots, trills and stresses over a busy drums and gnarly bass. It changes from a warped Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Zappa to something approaching the spiritual. That spiritual, almost oboe-like sax carries over into track ‘IV’, like some kind of Pharaoh Sanders Egyptian odyssey. But then Stewart descends his instrument like a scratching spider, sliding in tandem with Grudup’s quickened drumming until both synchronize in a quivered blur before imploding.
With some of these parts running to well over thirteen minutes in length, it’s an incredible energy that keeps the gig continuously moving and bursting into the purely psychical. Say What enters and exits on a high; an energetic, moody and powerfully adroit expression of riled-up tensions, rage and the explorative. One of the best slices of jazz you’ll hear all this year.
Aucoin ‘Synthetic: A Synth Odyssey Season 1’
19th October 2022
Given an enviable access to The National Music Centre in Calgary’s extensive archive of rare and historically iconic synthesizers, Rich Aucoin as artist-in-residence models the first chapter in an ambitious seasonal project.
A Synth Odyssey Season 1is the maverick composer’s latest magnum opus; a four-part work released in six month intervals over the next two years.
Such ventures have been tried before, although a decade ago with his debut album proper, the orchestral rocking We’re All Dying To Live, which included untold collaborators. Ten years on with a grand project interrupted by the Covid pandemic, the first fruits of his synth palace residency are about to be released.
Originally conceived and let loose in 2020 on a synth collection that features such prized and cult apparatus as the Supertramp-owned Elka Rhapsody 610 String Machine, the ARP 2600, Selmar Clavioline CM 8 and Oxford Synthesizer Company Oscar (analogue boffins’ wet dreams), the pandemic restrictions, lockdowns and such put the project on hold. In the meantime, Aucoin carried on producing film scores, most notably for the No Ordinary Man documentary about the trans-masculine jazz musician Billy Tipton. Picking up again in 2021, he was finally able to finish this wonderful synth cosmology.
No doubt enthusiasts will know every waveform, arpeggiator, knob-tweaking signature but as a handy guide of a sort, some of the tracks on this inaugural seasoned album are named after the synths used in the process. It all starts with the multitimbral polyphonic analogue synth, the TONTO (or ‘The Original New Timbral Orchestra’). On the opening suite it turns from a moody kosmische shimmer into a more upbeat Orbital acid dance track. During that transformation you can pick up the German New Wave, early Warp and R&S Records.
A bit later on and it’s the turn of a Buchla Electronic Musical Instruments company synth – named after its Californian innovator Don Buchla. In this capacity it sounds suitably retro-futuristic, crossing towards a cosmic void on fanned rays, orbiting bit-crush handclaps and bobbing synth tom rolls.
Elsewhere Aucoin slips into, or surges towards moments of EDM euphoria, Vangelis peregrinations of gravitas, simmered techno, electro and House music – especially on the female vocal N-R-G club track ‘456’. However, the vapourous, prowled and cinematic ‘Space Western’ theme teleports a Moroder vision of the Blood Meridian to a venerated chorus Arrakis.
Sophisticated and well crafted throughout, these aren’t so much experiments or synth showcases as hopeful and more moody traverses and cerebral dance tracks. Iconic synths are given a contemporary feel both playful and adroit, a balance of both serious knowledgeable musicianship and welcoming levity. I look forward to next season’s accomplishments in the field synth escapism.
Montparnasse Musique ‘Archeology’
(Real World Records) 7th October 2022
What was a chance encounter on the busy Montparnasse-Bienvenüe subway interchange has led to a far wider Pan-African sonic adventure. From Paris to mother Africa, the sophisticated dance music production of South African House DJ Aero Manyelo and his foil, the French-Algerian producer Nadjib Ben Bella, transforms the street cultural electronic and more traditional sounds of the continent for a congruous fusion of collaborative polygenesis energy and warmth.
Wiring into the various electrifying movements of the D.R.C. and South Africa, the burgeoning duo met and worked with the leading lights of Kinshasa and Johannesburg. Members from such trailblazing combos and collectives as the Kasai Allstars, Konono No. 1, Mbongwa Star, Bantou Mentale and Kokoko weave, bob and express themselves over and to the attuned but deeply felt synthesized House beats, Acid burbles and squelches, polygon Techno evocative vapours, and pulsating dance music.
The familiar sounds of Congolese rock-blues-soul guitar, voices both earthy and pure, the lilt of sunny joy and a constantly moving assemblage of African percussion meet synthesised, sub-bass throbbing and zapping electronica in a almost perfect synchronicity.
At times it reminded me of Khalab’s similar African productions, at others, like a remixed Francis Bebay, some Clap! Clap! and Four Tet. The Menga Waku featured ‘Makonda’ evoked the early Detroit House and Techno scenes of a toned-down Kevin Saunderson, whilst the following, more moody, piped and experimental ‘Plowman’ (featuring the voice of Cubain Kaleya) had me thinking of Black Mango. However, all things change on the sand dune Arabian fantasy score ‘Chibinda Ilunga’, which moves to Northern African and a romanticised, mysterious Bedouin court; the music more like a film score, or Finis Africae traversing a trinket-percussive and synthesised Arabia.
Whatever the methodology the results are as welcoming as they are entrancing, with a pathway formed towards the dance floor. Archeology is neither an ethnography-type dig or revived language of sonic forms, but a lively and inviting great fusion of Congotronics, more traditional sounds and the European club scenes. Definitely an album for the end of year lists.
CAN ‘Live In Cuxhaven, 1976’
(Mute/Spoon) 14th October 2022
1976 the year of the bandy reggae waltzing, discothèque probing Flow Motion album, and CAN’s only bonafide hit, ‘I Want More’. It’s also a treasure trove year of bootleg material if Youtubes anything to go by, with countless live dates across Europe and the UK.
Almost two albums into their 1975 contract with Virgin, recording wise, the Cologne band were loosening up with a sound that moved ever closer to world music fusions and even the commercial: well, of a kind. Not universally a welcoming move with diehards and the head community however, the results were mixed at best. Performance wise, in concert, CAN still riffed off an admirable, innovative and experimental legacy, right up until the end of that year.
Although no gig is the same, you can find transformed, explorative version jams of material that stretches right back to the Galactus sported Monster Movie debut. Popping up like a signature anthem, ‘Dizzy Dizzy’ from the 1974 space-programmed trip Soon Over Babluma appears as a staple groove and prompt on the latest, and third, CAN Live album. Officially sanctioned by the band’s Spoon and Mute label custodians, this previous sneaky bootlegged recording captures them on stage in the German (Lower Saxony to be exact) seaside town of Cuxhaven, on the North Sea coastline – as a bit of useless trivia, its twinned with, amongst others, the English port town of Penzance.
I don’t think this time, like previous bootlegs, it was recorded by the sadly, recently, departed Andrew Hall, who’s handed over a bounty of such material to CAN’s sole survivor Irmin Schmidt and producer/engineer René Tinne to be brushed-up and mastered to acceptable aural pleasures. But why the need for this bootleg series? Well, as I lay out in previous CAN Live reviews, the band were always victims of bad luck when attempting to record any sort of official, legitimate “live” album performance. Gremlins in the works – once failing to record someone’s entire part – the technical glitches meant that there was never a proper live CAN record as such. Mind you, this was a band that more or less played live in the studio setting, making albums out of countless hours of extemporised or improvised sessions. And, as I’ve already said, CAN never quite played the same thing twice, let alone an entire set.
Here on the ’76 special you will hear a once more transformed, in-the-moment vision of tracks from Future Days (‘Bel Air’), Soon Over Babluma (‘Dizzy Dizzy’, ‘Splash’, ‘Chain Reaction’) and Landed (‘Full Moon On The Highway’). There may very well be even traces of Tago Mago, and the yet to be released, Flow Motion albums too in that heady mix.
Across four Germanic-numerical sections it’s the lunar, wailed, bendy, squalling whacker-whacker guitar contours, licks, chops and phrases of Michael Karoli that win out. Ten Years After blues meets the whomp-whomp of Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew live band and the psychedelic, Karoli transforms familiar album cut riffs into fuzz-scorched, garbbled, loose and seared cosmic acid rock magic.
Other live performances from the same year include far more vocals, with Karoli having to take over after the departure of the mushroom haiku incanting Damo Suzuki after Future Days. Here his barely audible enervated whispers can just about be detectable during one bout of locked-in grooving.
Keyboards chopping aviator Schmidt offers up another suitable chemistry of the celestial, tubular and avant-garde, going as far as to start laying down something approaching gospel, or Southern Blues on the first track, ‘Eins’. As always, Jaki Liebezeit keeps that human metronome ticking, holding flights of fantasy, tangents and spacey ascendance all together with his impeccable sense of rhythm and time. Dare I say, he ventures into funk at times, and during part of track ‘Drei’ bobs and rattles out a tin and bottle percussive Latin-soul passage: the sort Santana would happily embrace.
Unfortunately I couldn’t hear all that much of the designated bassist Holger Czukay; it’s there but very much lost against a louder Karoli, Schmidt and Liebezeit, the frequencies a bit foggy.
Still, this is yet another example of a band in total synchronicity, no matter how wild or off the beaten tracks the direction taken. Though to be honest, this is nowhere near CAN at their wildest or avant-garde, nor most dynamic and interesting. In fact the performances are a little more composed and tight. Not disappointing, just not so amazing.
A different time, a different version of CAN, Live In Cuxhaven offers yet another side to the feted band; a bridge towards Flow Motion for a start. It will be interesting to see what follows: my own particular interest being their expansion of the lineup and the Saw Delight album period.
Puppies In The Sun ‘Light Became Light’
(Buh Records)
A slow release of maximalist energy and cosmic explosions the Puppies In The Sun duo conjure up a big sound on their debut album, Light Became Light.
Buddies since childhood back in Peru, but serendipitously crossing paths a longtime later in Barcelona, Alberto Cendra and Cristóbal Pereira made base camp together in Rotterdam. But despite the European-wide travelling it’s the great universal void and expanses of space that they’ve chosen to sonically navigate and transcend, with just the use of a drum kit, apparatus of synths and open mind.
The notes, quotes however mention the duo’s noise rock credentials, which despite a lack of any guitar or bass is nevertheless present on these peregrinations, vortex hyper-drives and odysseys.
Locked in to each track of starry wonder and languorous crescendo, the pace of direction is often in slow motion. Dissipated crashes and rolls, slow dives and frazzled oscillations head towards the explored and unexplored realms of Mythos, Embryo, Adam’s Castle, LNZNDRF, Angels Die Hard and the Secret Machines. Although the N-R-G pumped ‘Raging’, They Came To Dance’ sounds more like Cabaret Voltaire and FSOL at a space cowboy hoedown.
Space is deep, as Hawkwind once aggrandised. And so it is too on this light travelling discover of a big-sounding kosmische. Krautrock, prog and controlled noise rock score.
Spelterini ‘Paréidolie’
(Kythibong) 4th October 2022
Named in honour of the 19th century Italian tightrope walker, Maria Spelterini, who’s death-defying stunts included numerous handicapped (blindfolded, manacled or with weighted peach baskets strapped to her feet) walks across the Niagara Falls, the quartet Spelterini pairing of Papier Tigre and Chasusse Trappe members do a bit of their own tightrope walk on this new peregrination and driving motorik long form performance. Keeping balanced whilst straddling modes, chapters and movements, Pierre-Antoine Parois, Arthur de la Grandière, Meriadeg Orgebin and Nicolas Joubaud embrace kosmische. Krautrock, psych and the esoteric on a continuous, thirty-five minute opus.
After the phenomenon in which the brain creates optical illusions of familiar faces or shapes where there is only abstraction, “Paréidolie” progresses from hymnal drones and rays to something far more haunted, uneasy and razored – the notes reference the Lynchian (think the most recent Twin peaks series return mixed with The Land Of Ukko & Rauni era live documented Faust). And so, incipient and building from the kosmische and reverent ambient the direction begins to drive towards rhythmic and totem ritualistic evocations of both Embryo and ‘Rainy Day’ and later Just Us/Is Last Faust (them again). This in turn sees a real physical weight start to embody the hypnotising knocks, hi-hat scuffs and beat.
Elements of The Velvets, avant-garde, France and Neu! all get drawn into the pummeled march before the portal opens up a far more ominous world of shadows, metallic abrasions and bestial industrial squalls. It’s Bernard Szajner holding a cosmic séance with Emptyset and Jóhann Jóhannsson if you like.
That alien leviathan suite passes as a reverberated cacophony of percussion shimmers and splashes away until a final crescendo-like beat of a thousand butterfly wings.
Spelterini mystify and invoke a locked-in rhythm across a half hour of probed illusion, disillusion and inter-dimensional abstraction. Imbued with krautrock they magic up an impressive drum and drone journey.
No Base Trio ‘II’
(Setola di Maiale) 14th October 2022
It’s a port we at the Monolith Cocktail have seldom sailed to, but Puerto Rico boasts an impressive contemporary jazz scene; one that the adroit and accomplished No Base Trio endeavor to export to the global community.
In the field for twelve years as a unit, horns and EWI practitioner Jonathan Suazo is flanked by the versatile guitarist Gabriel Vicéns and drummer Leonardo Osuna on another intuitive, fully improvised work of free jazz, jazz rock, fusion and beyond.
A grandiose, nigh two hour extemporized septet of performances – recorded the day after a highly successful concert at the El Bastión in Old San Juan – work II finds the trio in perfect synchronicity ready to probe and venture forth with atonal, tactile and juddered rhythmic explorations.
Across passages that last over twenty minutes in length, the recognisable jazz elements are stretched, repurposed and entangled in various bendy mirages and naturalistic atmospheres as ascending and descending patterns and more serialism type abstract musicality takes shape.
Suazo moves between flighty flute and windy spiraled alto/tenor saxophones like some sort of expressive natural force, caught up in mysterious soundscapes that evoke both fertile environments and more arid landscapes. Vicéns guitar accents, twangs and nimble finer work reminded me a little of the South American jazz guitarist Rodrigo Tavares, and on ‘ST 4’, a little bit of Ry Cooder articulating a mysterious psychedelic desert setting. Osuna’s drums meanwhile, sound out the tribal, spiritual and freeform, often sophisticated, quiet and spindled, or, taking time to find a rhythm. In action, all together, the trio varies the mood from the more abstract and avant-garde to built-up dynamic tumultuous climaxes: that translates as croaked and plectrum scratched guitar and industrial detuned sounds on ‘ST 2’, and a Hobby Horse meets head-on with Irreversible Entanglements in a rock-jazz crescendo squall on ‘ST 5’.
Each track is like a score in itself, cast adrift of a subject, theme or visual inspiration; a mix of jazz with various percussive influences and sources that swings between Buh label outsiders to the ACT label, Donny McCaslin, an avant-garde Americas and Ornate Coleman. It’s an impressive album of synergy that manages to probe the wilds without bombast and total dissonance; kept together at all times with the most intuitive of unsaid musicianship and deft foresight.
Our Daily Bread 464: Forest Robots ‘Horst & Graben’
August 24, 2021
ALBUM REVIEW/Dominic Valvona
Forest Robots ‘Horst & Graben’
(Elm Records) 1st September 2021
Subscribing to the ambient version of the National Geographic (though I might christen this particular style as ‘Notional Geographic’), arduous cross-country and mountain trekker Fran Dominguez once more sonically contours the landscape and the pondered philosophical quandaries that it evokes.
Under the Forest Robots alias, nature’s son has found a peaceable, if at times dramatic, escape from the divisive stresses of the last four years by taking to the great American outdoors; finding not only solace but various Taoist posed metaphors of a simpler, ideal life spent in unison with nature.
The music might be slow, purposeful, but Dominguez isn’t one to rest on his laurels having released a number of top quality ambient map readings during the pandemic. The geological entitled Horst & Graben (in case you need to know, or if sitting your geography tests, ‘Horst’ is a raised block of the Earth’s crust that has lifted or has remained stationary whilst land either side has subsided, and ‘Graben’ is a depressed block of a planet or moon’s crust bordered by parallel faults) is his second minor opus this year; following on from the March released Amongst A Landscape Of Spiritual Reckoning.
Still imbued by a litany of ambient and neo-classical forbearers, the new traverse is perhaps Dominguez’s most out and out kosmische sounding album yet. Navigating fauna, chasms, peaks and allegorical waters the soundtrack pays homage to Cluster, Harmonia and solo Roedelius, and Eno and Bowie’s ‘Moss Garden’ in the ‘Neuköln’ neighborhood. To these ears there’s also a touch of Andrew Heath’s (who coincidently collaborated with Roedelius) lower case form of sparse and serial piano playing.
But this particular touching, often moving album is also imbued by the award-winning examinations of the acclaimed biologist and author David George Haskell; most notably his 2017 book, The Songs Of Trees, which looks at our innate connection with tree. Dominguez uses the author’s stories as a diving board for his own existentialist contemplations, reflections and spiritual peace of mind, but also prompts a lot of hard thinking on the hot topics of the last few years too: can we, for example, reconcile our differences, ideologies and work together on solving climate change?
Every philosophically poetic entitled track finds a balance between glades of natural light, organic paced reveals and more cosmic, elevating spells: the most stunning kosmische blaze of them all is left until the end, on the Harmonia redolent mouthful, ‘In The Aftermath Of Rain No Grain Of Sand Remains Unstirred’. It’s a subtle affair with enervated moments of a polygon windows Richard James, but mostly the Forst secluded stirrings of the whole Cluster and Harmonia experiment (especially that triumvirate of Rothar, Roedelius and Moebius); all transformed through Dominguez liquid droplets, vapours, clean and beautifully descriptive filters. Here’s hoping those calm quandaries will rub off on the angry, riled masses, because we could sure do with a healing balm of musical inspiration right now.
Hi, my name is Dominic Valvona and I’m the Founder of the music/culture blog monolithcocktail.com For the last ten years I’ve featured and supported music, musicians and labels we love across genres from around the world that we think you’ll want to know about. No content on the site is paid for or sponsored and we only feature artists we have genuine respect for /love. If you enjoy our reviews (and we often write long, thoughtful ones), found a new artist you admire or if we have featured you or artists you represent and would like to buy us a coffee at https://ko-fi.com/monolithcocktail to say cheers for spreading the word, then that would be much appreciated.
Our Daily Bread 418: University Challenged ‘Oh Temple!’
January 11, 2021
Album Review/Dominic Valvona
University Challenged ‘Oh Temple!’
(Hive Mind Records) 29th January 2021
A cosmic couriers union of transcendent, experimental and Kosmische scions the University Challenged play-on-words entitled trio of Ajay Saggar, Oli Heffernan and Kohhei Matsuda make their 2021 debut on the adroit and carefully curated Hive Mind imprint. Synonymous for its eclectic output of global releases, with albums by the late doyen of Moroccan gnawa music, Maalem Mahmoud Gania (and his son, Houssam Gania) plus volumes dedicated to Indonesian Jaipongan and the Atlas Mountains electric music of Moulay Ahmed El Hassani, Hive now expand their already amorphous perimeters to include this expansive cosmic egg of an opus.
Bringing together the holy guitar trances and dreamwave of Bhajan Bhoy and Deutsche Ashram instigator Saggar, the prolific maverick behind Ivan The Tolorable, Heffernan, and the Japanese nosieniks Bo Ningen band member Matsuda for a convergence of ambient, entrancing, dubby, psychedelic, shoegaze and Krautrock inspired drifting suites. Nailing the performances of their 2019 shows in Holland, the Oh Temple! album saves on wax the cerebral space music triumvirate’s untethered wanderings: both inwards and out.
It begins with the post-rock phaser waves and skying transcendental furnished reference to the 4th century Greek-Christian martyr “Serenus”; a pious unfortunate known widely for his horticultural skills, fitted up for an affair he never had. That poor saint was immortalised for his stoic commitment to the Christian faith in the face of death: he was duly decapitated for his troubles. Whatever the use is here, the trio set out sonically on a vaporous ascent that reimagines the purposeful neo-classical renderings of Qluster and the Kosmische tarot mysticisms of Walter Wegmüller, whilst channelling Spiritualized’s venerations.
Closer geographically to Heffernan’s base of operations, ‘On The Banks Of The River Swale’ washes in the atavistic waters of a tributary that’s played host to a history of settlements dating back as far as Mesolithic times. Probably on Archdruid Cope’s monolithic tour, certain stone assemblages and formations lie near to the Swale. Here, we experience the running and whispery waters and psychogeography of place, as sounded by Eno, The Velvet Underground and Ash Ra Temple.
A strange sizzled and fluty resonating crispy buzz is joined by a vision of Peter Green fronting Pink Floyd on the languid cricketing termed ‘Reverse Swing’. I’m not sure what the trio were attempting musically, but to these ears it evokes a semblance of a lunar Ry Coder floating over a tropical island in space.
Another real location, mapped out this time by a dubby bubbled ghostly fog of Cousin Silas And The Glove Of Bones, Alan Vega, The Orb and The Cosmic Jokers, the Jamaican beach resort (constantly rated, I found out, as one of the world’s ten most desired beach fronts) of “Negril” (‘Choppers Over Negril’) is immortalised with a both hallucinogenic and gauzy soundtrack. Famous for featuring in Ian Fleming’s The Man With The Golden Gun bond caper as a location for a meeting with the arch-villain assassin-for-hire Scaramanga, Negril (the “little black one” when translated from the Spanish) was named by the Spanish transgressors, who it’s believed were referring to the abundance of black eels that were found in its waters. The chopper of that full title is represented by a rotor like enveloping guitar, which in cyclonic mode fans a vapourous Rastafari atmosphere of toaster call outs and adulations.
Black Lives Matter seems to have prompted a number of tracks on this mesmeric and reverberating album epic. Reference wise anyway, with certain undertones in some titles to black culture, history: Negril perfectly happy enough no doubt without the intrusion of 15th century Spanish colonists. The Cluster arpeggiator and lunar Theremin spoke-y radient synth zapped ‘Shibboleth’ even features an interview with Malcolm X; one that focuses in and out, masked by a crackled wavy wash of effects. If I’m not mistaken (by the content) this was a pivotal moment, caught not long before his assassination in 1965. Though the eloquent orator he always was, Malcolm’s life was made a hell of a lot more dangerous as he left the anti-Semitic and arguably racist divisive Nation Of Islam, who (allegedly) carried out his murder (most of the gun men involved were members of the NoI, though some were acquitted later and the waters remain muddied as to who organised it). Moving away from the Nation’s rhetoric towards a more inclusive message, his staunch faith and protestations no less diminished, this captured dialogue is really about the failure of America in dealing with the question and freedom of its black citizens. The space drifters send this message into a celestial Kosmische, leaving interpretation and a lost moment in time out there in the universe. I could be reading too much into it all, but this track is followed by the enchanted Thomas Dinger and Cluster (again), with tonal evocations of the Spacemen 3 and The Telescopes, encrypted ‘Black Smoke’, which seems to carry over some of the mood from ‘Shibboleth’.
An efflux of dream realities, marked places of interest, histrionics and astral planning, the exclaimed Oh Temple! elevates as much as it distorts and warps the Kosmische fashioning’s of this congruous union. Consciousness floats free in a universe of expansive liquidity, on a mirage of space and ether probing trance music. Top quality and depth all the way; already a highlight of 2021 for me: expect to see this opus reach the choice end-of-year features. (Dominic Valvona)
See also from the Monolith Cocktail Archives:
From the same label:
Houssam Gania ‘Mosawi Swiri’
Moulay Ahmed El Hassani ‘Atlas Electric’
Rodrigo Tavares ‘Congo’
From Kosmische/Krautrock sphere:
Cluster ‘1971 – 1981’
Ash Ra Tempel ‘Ash Ra Tempel’
Can ‘Lost Tapes’
Hi, my name is Dominic Valvona and I’m the Founder of the music/culture blog monolithcocktail.com For the last ten years I’ve featured and supported music, musicians and labels we love across genres from around the world that we think you’ll want to know about. No content on the site is paid for or sponsored and we only feature artists we have genuine respect for /love. If you enjoy our reviews (and we often write long, thoughtful ones), found a new artist you admire or if we have featured you or artists you represent and would like to buy us a coffee at https://ko-fi.com/monolithcocktail to say cheers for spreading the word, then that would be much appreciated.
Premiere: (Video) Giacomelli ‘The Best Of Both Possible Worlds, Part II’
September 17, 2020
Premiere
Words: Dominic Valvona
Giacomelli ‘The Best Of Both Possible Worlds, Part II’ taken from the upcoming album suite Cosmic Order released by Somewherecold Records, 9th October 2020
Beamed across the Atlantic by the North American hub Somewherecold Records, we have a most grand spanning opus from Silicon Valley composer Steve Giacomelli, who releases his triple CD expansive series of cosmic ordered suites for the experimental ambient and electronic label next month.
His fourth such album of ambient minimalism for the label, this celestial and evolutionary mined impressive ARP Odyssey synth birthed album of thirty-six ascendants, refractions, pulses and gravitas inspiring space music uses a number of techniques to accomplish an overall sound of forgotten Sky Record maestros (think Asmus Tietchens, Wolfgang Riechmann), Tangerine Dream, early Cluster, Vangelis, Tomat and solo Roedelius. This synthesized vision – that can sometimes err towards the ominous forebode and mystery of Kubrick – synthesis of the abstract, deep space, the inner mind, nature and the heavenly is accomplished with an apparently limited pallet and the use of counterpoint sequences, the generative and a method, favoured by Frank Zappa, called “xenochrony” – that is the extracting of a solo or other part from its original context and placing it into a completely different song/composition. These techniques make for a most impressive traverse of the astral planes, new age transcendence, theorems, gases and topographic ebbs and flows.
From that three-hour epic, the Monolith Cocktail is premièring the geometric patterned and busy algorithm Kosmische junction of nature and technology, ‘The Best Of Both Possible Worlds II’. Personally I’m hearing a cross serenity and pulse of Kraftwerk, Eno and Cage, but see what you think as we share this sweeping analogue soundtrack.
The 3XCD and digital download Cosmic Oder album is released by Somewherecold Records on the 9th October 2020
Hi, my name is Dominic Valvona and I’m the Founder of the music/culture blog monolithcocktail.com For the last ten years I’ve featured and supported music, musicians and labels we love across genres from around the world that we think you’ll want to know about. No content on the site is paid for or sponsored and we only feature artists we have genuine respect for /love. If you enjoy our reviews (and we often write long, thoughtful ones), found a new artist you admire or if we have featured you or artists you represent and would like to buy us a coffee at https://ko-fi.com/monolithcocktail to say cheers for spreading the word, then that would be much appreciated.
Our Daily Bread 387: Gunther Wüsthoff ‘Total Digital’
July 13, 2020
ALBUM REVIEW/DOMINIC VALVONA
Gunther Wüsthoff ‘Total Digital’
(Bureau B) Album/10th July 2020
Attuned to the signals and broadcast traffic chatter of a very different kind when serving out his military service as a naval radio operator, the one-time Faust instigator and soloist Gunther Wüsthoff tapped into that formative training to search and tune-in to more imaginative and alien frequencies when set loose from the tumult of post-war Germany.
As the legend goes, Wüsthoff’s pathway towards sonic experimentation was laid out in art school, where he met future Faust comrades Rudolf Sosna and Jean-Hervé Peron. All three musical malcontents came together in the late 60s to from the band Nukleus. It was during this point that former leftist mouthpiece publication Konkret editor turn ad hoc record producer and scout for Polydor Records, Uwe Nettelbeck (through his filmmaker contact Helmut Costa) was introduced to the trio. Nettelbeck was handed the task by the label’s A&R honcho Kurt Enders, to find a German version of The Beatles, but also to tap into the burgeoning “Krautrock” scene that was emerging. What they got was something far more revolutionary and avant-garde: at their most confrontational and hostile they made Throbbing Gristle sound like The Beach Boys. As opposed to their compatriots Can, Faust excelled at breaking things.
The musical trio was merged with members of another Hamburg band, Campylognatus Citelli, whose ranks included Werner “Zappi” Diermaier, Hans-Joachim Irmler and Arnulf Meifert. Instead of a Teutonic Fab Four, Polydor were delivered an unruly fist full of industry dissonance and barracking noise. Wüsthoff for his part would play both synthesizer and the saxophone during his time with the often-fractious group; lasting through Faust’s most important and influential run of records during the first half of the 1970s (from the X-Ray iconic sleeved debut to the only album Wüsthoff would design the cover for, Faust IV).
Following his departure, Wüsthoff would take on roles at both Studio and Filmhaus Hamburg; but also take further studies in editing so that he could work freelance. Continuing his musical practice however, Wüsthoff’s sonic experiments became more and more informed by the aleatory.
Looking for imperfections and friction in the increasingly repetitive and slick production of the Western canon, he found that in explaining his theory to those accustomed to playing music in the doctrinal fashion, and against the intuitive grain of human instinct that the machine might be better placed to his musical methodology and motto: “Due to previous but also temporary excesses of mainstream consumption and the omnipresent, repetitive emissions of the western world’s music industry, devoid of contours and as slick as possible, we are faced with an indissoluble weariness. A criterion for music one can listen to today is, for me, that an element of friction is present: temporally, metrically, rhythmically, tonally or harmonically. Or that somewhere, something is somehow imperfect. Only then can music be truly alive.”[Gunther Wüsthoff 2005]
“Today I would add: Regardless of whether it is created by man or machine.”
And so, becoming a “music machinist”, Wüsthoff relinquished the idea of virtuosity for good, handing over a major part of the process to the machine. A compositional counterbalance between the synthesized and the human touch you could say: not “total digital” but getting there.
Collected in this retrospective compilation is a scattering of tracks from a twenty-year time span; from a trio of solar orbiting ‘TransNeptun’ suites to a number of more rhythmic erratic dashes and tubular metallic chimes. Tuning into planetary waves, the three-part (‘Anflung’, ‘Ankunft’ and ‘Begrüßung’) ‘TransNeptun’ traces the tones and contours of cosmic satellites with a sonic generator palette of lunar delay, arpeggiator, whining dialed squiggles and hums. Through this off world broadcast, Wüsthoff traverses the Kosmische, hints of Bernard Szajner, a dance of binary languages and ominous prowling shadowy dwarf planets.
In a different direction the avant-garde ‘Dragon Walking’ sounds like a convolution of Populäre Mechanik and Reich; with touches even of Eno’s off kilter Warm Jets. Going through numerous cycles, from post-punk to robotic ballet, instruments are introduced in stages: a real sounding drum kit, hand drums, marimba (I think) and pizzicato notes. ‘Alien Crosstalk’ is a strange one. Bagpipe type bellows and concertinaed sounds are integrated with fucked-up House music, out-of-time piano and titular’s “crosstalk” of obscured voices. Though far too sophisticated as to sound distorted or a mess, the elements all seem to fit together in the end. And even when erring towards the disturbing and dark, seems less chilling but mysterious.
Wüsthoff’s philosophical driver, the “transitory nature of life”, is evident in the fleeting presence of those random generated sonics and instruments, which pass through an evanescent process.
Perhaps Wüsthoff doesn’t enjoy the profile of some of his former Faust comrades, but if your only knowledge of his experiments were from that period then make time to explore the solo work. A good place to start will be with this handy compilation, from a label that seems to act as a hub for members from that group’s subsequent work.
Faust Faust, So Far, Faust Tapes’
Faust ‘j US t’
Hi, my name is Dominic Valvona and I’m the Founder of the music/culture blog monolithcocktail.com For the last ten years I’ve featured and supported music, musicians and labels we love across genres from around the world that we think you’ll want to know about. No content on the site is paid for or sponsored and we only feature artists we have genuine respect for /love. If you enjoy our reviews (and we often write long, thoughtful ones), found a new artist you admire or if we have featured you or artists you represent and would like to buy us a coffee at https://ko-fi.com/monolithcocktail to say cheers for spreading the word, then that would be much appreciated.
Tickling Our Fancy 079: Aziza Brahim, The Mining Co., Alex Stordiau, Karkara, Compro Oro, Xylouris White, Invisible System, Rafiki Jazz.
October 11, 2019
Album Reviews
Words: Dominic Valvona
Photo Credit: Aziza Brahim taken by Ana Valiño
This week’s recommendations and reviews (for the most part) share a musical hunger for the polygenesis; combining and merging a cornucopia of international sounds and cultures to spread a message of universal suffrage. A case in point, the ever-evolving North-of-England assemblage of migrants and refugees, Rafiki Jazz feature voices and musicians from all over the globe: from Arabia to India. Their fourth and upcoming captivating album, Saraba Sufiyana, is featured in this roundup. Channeling a mystical Maghreb, the French trio of Karkara goes heavy and transcendent on their new acid-doom-rock epic, Crystal Gazer. The Belgium outfit Compro Oro manages to circumnavigate a myriad of international destinations without leaving the suburbs of their native home on the new dance jazz LP Suburban Exotica, and UK producer Dan Harper, under the Invisible System title, once more transforms the traditional and courtly music of Mali, on the new album Dance To The Full Moon. Closer to European shores, Xylouris White, the Hellenic framed project of Dirty Three drummer Jim White and Greek lute player Giorgos Xylouris, release a fourth installment of their Cretan soundscapes, The Sisypheans.
Leading the charge this week though is the encapsulating soulful Aziza Brahim with her upcoming new album, Sahari. Born in the hardened landscape of a Saharawi refugee camp on the border of Algeria and the Western Sahara, the beguiled vocalist now lives in a state of exile in Spain. Her latest album continues to draw attention to not only that plight but also that of all refugees on an album that tries some a little bit different musically.
Something a little different, and away from this general thread of global initiatives, Belgium composer Alex Stordiau releases his inaugural album of Kosmische imbued neo-classical visions, Poking Your Imagination, for Pure Spark Records.
Preview/Feature
Aziza Brahim ‘Sahari’
(Glitterbeat Records) Album/ 15th November 2019
Bringing the message of the displaced Saharawi people to the world stage, Western Saharan musician/activist Aziza Brahim follows up both her critically rewarded 2014 album Soutak, and the no less brilliant 2016 serene protest of poetic defiance Abbar el Hamada album with her third for Glitterbeat Records, Sahari.
Born in the hardened landscape of a Saharawi refugee camp on the border of Algeria and the Western Sahara, beguiled vocalist Aziza embodies the wandering spirit of her people; their settled, though often borderless and disputed lands, previously claimed by Spain, were invaded in 1975 by Morocco. Though made up of many tribes with many different goals the Saharawi people mounted a fight back. It was in this climate that Brahim was hewed. Exiled in effect, her travails have extended to Cuba, where she was educated as a teenager, and Barcelona, where she now resides and makes music.
Imbued as ever with the desert soul of that disputed region, the latest record, with its visual metaphor of optimism in even the most desperate of backdrops and times – dreams of growing up to be a ballerina proving universal – attempts to marry the beautifully longing and heartache yearns of Brahim’s voice to a number of different styles and rhythms: A subtle change towards the experimental.
Previous encounters have channeled the poetic roots of that heritage and merged it with both Arabian Spain and the lilted buoyancy of the Balearics. Working with the Spanish artist Amparo Sánchez of the band Amparanoia, Brahim has chosen to add a congruous subtle bed of synthesized effects to the recording process: before performing live in the studio, but now recording in various places, the results collected together and pieced together in post-production. This methodology and sound furnishes Brahim’s longing traditional voice with certain freshness and, sometimes, shuffled energy. Songs such as the loose and free ‘Hada Jil’ lay a two-step dance beat underneath a desert song drift. Later on there are dub-y rim-shot echoes and undulating waves of atmospheric tonal synthesizer underpinning that blues-y startling timbre. However, the most surprising fusions to be found on Sahari are the Compass Point reggae-gait ‘Las Huellas’ and the Arabian soul channeling Fado ‘Lmanfra’. There’s even room for a piano on the balladry ‘Ardel el Hub’; a song that plaintively conveys the “impossibility of returning home”, a sentiment the activist Brahim is only too familiar with – denied entry or the right of return, effectively in exile.
The sound of the Sahrawi is never far off, despite the technological upgrade. That most traditional of handed-down instruments, the “tabal drum”, can be heard guiding the rhythm throughout; rattling away and tapping out a beat that changes from the threadbare to the clattering. Brahim’s vocals are as ever effortlessly enriching, captivating and trilling. I dare say even veracious.
Articulating a broader message of global suffrage, Brahim once more encapsulates the sorrows of the exiled and stateless on a sumptuous album, The wanderer and Saharan siren invites new dynamics without changing the intrinsic character and message of her craft, yet ventures beyond those roots to embrace bold new sounds. A most fantastic, poetic songbook that will further cement Brahim’s deserved reputation as one of the deserts most serene artists.
Reviews
Compro Oro ‘Suburban Exotica’
(Sdban Ultra) Album/ 18th October 2019
Illuminating Belgium suburbia with a cornucopia of entrancing and limbering sounds and rhythms from across the world, Compro Oro transport the listener to imaginative vistas on their latest album of jazz imbued exotics. Making waves as part of a loose jazzy Benelux scene, the troupe have even managed to rope in the help of Ry Cooder’s accomplished scion, the multi-instrumentalist talent Joachim Cooder, who adds an “effects-laden” mbira and percussion to a trio of imaginative tracks.
Like their comrades on that scene, Black Flower, the Compro sail into various melting-pot rich harbors, soaking up the atmosphere and embracing what they found, weaving the multilingual sounds into a vibrant soundtrack of tropical new wave pop, dance music, alt rock ‘n’ roll, Turkish-psych and Ethno-jazz fantasy. Cal Tjader, Mulatu Astatke and Marc Ribot are all cited as inspirations, their indelible mark suffused throughout this LP. Add to that trio a strange interpretation of Herbie Hancock (on the Somalia ease-up ‘Mogadishu’; imagine the Dur-Dur Band floating on a kooky jazz cloud above the tumultuous city), Soulwax (on the palm tree Latin dance funk ‘Miami New Wave’) and a rewired Modern Jazz Quartet (that will be the often twinkly and trickling use of vibraphone, but also the marimba too). The curtain call thriller ‘Kruidvat’ even evokes the darker stirrings of later period Can, and the wafting ambiguous snuffles of Jon Hassell.
For the most part dreamy and under a gauze-y veil, Suburban Exotica sashays and drifts across a musical landscape of Arabia, Anatolia, Eastern Africa, The Caribbean and Hispaniola without setting foot outside of their Belgium front door. The more you listen the more you discover and get out of this brilliant dance album of borderless jazz. What a treat to the ears and feet.
Invisible System ‘Dance To The Full Moon’
(ARC Music) Album/ 25th October 2019
An apt hand in transforming the traditional sounds of Mali, the British producer Dan Harper’s experiment in this field stretches back two decades; set in motion by the rudimental laptop-produced Acid Mali project he created whilst working as a Capacity Builder for a local Malian environmental NGO. So taken was Harper with the country, he ended up not only meeting his future wife there but setting up home and a studio in the capital, Bamako. His wife, Hawa, would introduce Dan to childhood friend and renowned guitarist Bandjougou, who in turn would bring in tow the dusty soulful rich vocalist Sambou koyaté to sing for him. Both artists appear on this new album alongside the griot siren Astou Niamé Diabaté, who as it turns out sang at Dan and Hawa’s wedding.
Taken from the same recording sessions as Dan’s previous album, Bamako Sessions, his latest transportive exploration under the nom de plume of Invisible System, once more lends an electrified and synthesized pulse to the spiritual soul of Malian music. Originally put together in a more languorous fashion with a variety of musicians coming and going, jamming in a mattress proofed room in a rented house in the capital, Dance To The Full Moon took shape at the end of a tumultuous and violent period in Mali’s history. Experiencing firsthand (literally on Dan’s own doorstep) the terrorist attacks that followed in the wake of a, finally curtailed, Islamist insurrection and the ongoing war between Mali’s government in the West and the Tuaregs of the North and Eastern desert borders, fighting to set-up an autonomous region, known as the Azawad. Though a certain stability has returned in part to Mali, attacks still occur sporadically; the effects of which permeate throughout the work of the country’s artists, the majority offering a conciliatory tone with the emphasis on unity and understanding. With that in mind, Dan’s album is rich with passionate expressive longing and intensity; the varied juxtapositions of the griot tradition and less rural, more urban vocals combine to deliver some startling performances.
The gently resonate accents and fanned waft of the Malian guitarist’s Kalifa Koné and Sidi Touré accentuate the brilliant vocal parts; a gathering of powerful griot acolytes, singers and even a rapper (Mali rap star Penzy) that includes the already mentioned trio of Bandjougou, Koyaté and Diabaté spiral between the sweetened and intense, the hymnal and physical. Dan boosts and filters those strong performances with a production of techno, modern R&B, dub and futuristic post-punk that sonically weaves in echoes of Massive Attack, Daniel Lanois, King Ayisoba and Dennis Bovell.
Nothing can ever truly improve upon the roots and soul of the traditional courtly music of Mali, its desert blues and Bamako rock of course, but you can push it into exciting directions. Dan’s rewired buzz and pulse does just that, giving a kick and lending an attuned production to the Mali soundscape.
Alex Stordiau ‘Poking Your Imagination’
(Pure Spark) Album/ 30th September 2019
Enticing former label mates from Edinburgh’s Bearsuit Records to his burgeoning venture Pure Spark, Tokyo electronic wizkid Ippu Mitsui welcomes the Brussels based composer Alex Stordiau to the ranks. Featuring alongside House Of Tapes Yuuya Kuno, Stordiau also previously appeared on the Mid Lothian Bearsuit roster – mentioned on this very blog for his standout Vangelis-style voyager waltz into the cosmos ‘Fulfilling Eclipse’, from the label’s The Invisible And Divided Sea compilation.
Like a missing neoclassical Kosmische suite from the Sky Records vault, Stordiau’s inaugural album for Mitsui’s imprint is a serene, though often dramatically stirring, exercise in sculpting retro-electronic soundtracks.
With a classical background, studying at various Belgium conservators, Stordiau combines elements of cascading, romantically accentuated piano and suffused strings with synthesized and computer programmed sine waves, glassy tubular glistened percussion and vaporous sweeps.
The Belgium visionary often works with Bristol musician Lee Williams, who plays, among other things, both electric guitar and bass, and sometimes drums. It sounds as if Williams is present once more, on hand with warm ponderous bass and the odd bit of wilder kooky lead guitar.
Track titles on Poking Your Imagination only go so far in describing each composition’s route on an album of undulating mood pieces. The opening descriptive ‘In The Tepid Shine’ is pure escapist air-bending; crafting vague echoes of Jean Michel Jarre with Roedelius’ more beautifully spherical elevations. Most of these tracks waver over the course of duration; changing or pausing between parts, starting off like the Blade Runner neon skyline lighted ‘Tree Healing’ with a darker, theatrical classical grandeur but suddenly joined by drums and a touch of Vangelis sci-fi. Elsewhere you’re bound to identify the space peril looming shadow of Tangerine Dream and the more popcorn kookiness of Cluster amongst the Baroque cathedral and gravity arcing visions.
A panoramic, mostly cosmic soundtrack of classical Kosmische and humanized electronica, Poking Your Imagination is an assiduous suite of the mysterious, scientific and dreamy.
The Mining Co. ‘Frontier’
Album/ 25th October 2019
Not that you can detect it from his lilted peaceable, if hearty, Americana burr, or the Western-alluded nom de plume that he goes under, but singer/songwriter Michael Gallagher was born in Ireland. Obvious now you’ve read his actual name I know, but just sound wise, it is difficult to hear that Irish bent. In a similar vein to such luminaries as Simon Bonney, the County Donegal troubadour subtly channels a timeless vision of the lyrical, pioneering old West (and South for that matter) on his new LP, Frontier.
Via a Nashville, Texas and New Mexico panorama, Gallagher tailors personal anxieties of disconnection, dislocation and growing pains with familiar old tropes on a songbook of “hangdog” country fare. A romantic album at that, with shades of a pining Josh T. Pearson, The Thrills, Lee Hazlewood, Tom Petty and the Eels, Frontier showcases the artist’s most tender swoons and yearnings. This is a soundtrack of purposeful blues, skiffles and mellow gospel, all softly laced with a subtle echo of Mariachi horns and tremolo twang.
Various memories of a childhood back in Ireland (the night Elvis died sounding a special resonance on the lilted lap-steel rich ‘The Promised Line’) and phobias (a rational fear in my book of flying inspiring the country-prayer ‘Empty Row’) are transported to wistfully articulate American musical settings; a landscape and sound it seems Gallagher belongs.
The third such album from his The Mining Co. alter ego, Frontier is full of romantic intent and stirring candid cathartic heartache; a shuffling songbook handled with care and tenderness that will unfurl its charms over time.
Xylouris White ‘The Sisypheans’
(Drag City) Album/ 8th November 2019
Less a Greek tragedy, more a kind of acceptance of one’s fate (or, play the hand you’re dealt and make the best of it), the Hellenic inspired collaboration project of Giorgos Xylouris and Jim White take their lead on the purgatory fate of boulder carrier Sisyphean from Albert Camus: to a point.
The absurdist doyen once wrote a famous tract on that Greek fella’s predicament: Punished by Zeus to roll a large boulder up a mountainside in Hades, each time he reached the top the boulder would roll right back down to the start. And so the process began all over again: An endless, thankless trudge and metaphor for all the all too real daily grind of life outside the mythological imagination. Or so you’d think. Camus however saw it not has a pointless waste of effort and slow punishing meaningless task but as a challenge: noble even. That Sisypheans’ repeated burden should be seen as an achievement, that the struggle should be enough to “fill a man’s heart”. Sisyphean has accepted his it and so should you, or, words and sentiment to that effect.
Of course, even deeper contentions can be found in Camus’ essay; how our tragic figure confined to a limited limbo landscape created in his mind a whole universe from it. Xylouris and White themselves pondered how he might experiment with carrying that burdensome rock; alternating hands, carrying behind his back and so on. Essentially though, this is about experiencing, seeing and discovering anew each day with a concentrated mind the things you take for granted: especially your surroundings. The duo initially turn to the atavistic in conveying these ideas and sentiments; using the suffused blown stirrings of the Greek flute (Aulos) and vibrato resonating spindly fanning tones of the laouto (a long-necked fretted scion of the lute family). In addition to these two lead instruments, the scene is set with shrouded misty and soulfully yearned voices, Giorgos’ son Nick on cello and on the serialism waning moodscape second track a ‘Goat Hair Bowed’ instrument. And so a sweeping, mournful at times, traverse that takes in dancing Grecian figures, wedding celebrations, bewailed lament and travels to the furthest reaches of the Greek borders: sailing at one point into the tumultuous mysterious vision of the much-disputed and fought over ‘Black Sea’.
However, the both taught and freeform, skittish experimental percussion and breaks of Dirty Three drummer White adds another dimension to the rootsy and earthy feel. Always tactile and congruous, White lifts or underpins certain tracks with avant-garde taps, clutters, rim rattles and jazzy frills and crescendos. A touch of progressive jazz, even Krautrock, that sends this project into more contemporary climes.
Between the chthonian and ethereal, the philosophical and viscerally dreamy, The Sisypheans minor epic is an extraordinary musical peregrination worth exploring: Music for the cerebral and the senses.
Rafiki Jazz ‘Saraba Sufiyana’
(Konimusic) Album/ October 2019
It’s no idle boast to suggest that the North of England based Rafiki Jazz could be one of the most diverse groups on the world stage. Testament of this can be heard on the troupe’s previous trio of polygenesis albums: an untethered sound that simultaneously evokes Arabia, the Indian Subcontinent, Northern African, the Caribbean, South America and Balkans.
With representatives from nearly every continent, many of which have escaped from their homelands to find sanctuary in the UK, Rafiki Jazz is an ever-evolving ensemble of migrants and refugees alike coming together to produce sweeping divine borderless music.
Their latest visionary songbook is a filmic panoramic beauty, no less worldly and stirring. The opening diaphanous spun ‘Su Jamfata’ encapsulates that perfectly; mirroring the group’s musical freedom and spiritual connection; lilting between a myriad of regions with stunning vocals that evoke both Eastern Europe and the Middle East. The following floaty and ethereal well-of-sorrows ‘Azadi’ even features a Celtic and folksy air (one that is repeated later on). This is in part due of course to the guest performances of both the English fiddle extraordinaire and songwriter Nancy Kerr and traditional Gaelic singer Kaitlin Ross. A third vocal addition, Juan Gabriel, can be heard lending a guttural throated underbelly to an already eclectic chorus of singers.
Buoyant tablas and spindled kora sit in perfect harmony with Arabian oud, tropical steel drums, the Brazilian berimbau and the varied voices of Sufi, Hebrew, Hindu, Egyptian-Coptic and Islamic, without ever feeling crowded or strained.
Saraba Sufiyana translates as “mystic utopia”, a title that epitomizes the group’s curiosity and respect for other culture as they build a brave new sonic world of possibility. One that takes in all the dramas and woes of the current international crisis and the lamenting poetry of venerable hardship – the final quartet cycle of prayer and spiritual yearning, ‘My Heart My Home’, beautifully conveys a multitude of gospel and traditional religious plaint, ending on the stirring Hebrew field song ‘Shedemati’. Twenty years in and still improving on that global remit, Rafiki Jazz delivers a magical and rich fourth LP. Devotional music at its most captivating and entrancing.
Karkara ‘Crystal Gazer’
(Stolen Body Records) Album/ 25th October 2019
There’s a hell of a lot wind blowing throughout the mystical and spiritually Toulouse trio of Karkara’s Crystal Gazer epic. North African wind that is; the exotic charms and mystery of the Maghreb on a swirling breeze, flows through and introduces each incantation heavy communal transcendence.
The mirage-shimmery title-track vignette even features a sirocco echo of ghostly enervated Tuareg desert guitars, whilst the electrified speed freak ‘Zarathoustra’ doesn’t just allude to Nietzsche’s infamous Thus Spoke but astrally heads back to the founding father of that mystical Persian faith via an eastern Link Wray and Gothic soup of Krautrock jazz and acid rock.
The counter flow breathes of another desert also permeate this LP, the sound of a veiled didgeridoo constantly present in building atmosphere and mysticism. Loud and physical, though not without some sensitivity, the trio chant, howl and pray their way through a vortex of flange and fuzz as they soar over a fantastical landscape that takes in the southern constellation star of “proxima centauri” and the gates of the Tunisian Medina, ‘Jedid’.
Allusions to seers, mystics and Gothic romantics abound, whilst the musical inspirations fluctuate between heavy space rock (Hawkwind) and Krautrock (Xhol Caravan, Embryo), post-punk (Killing Joke) and baggy (Stone Roses on a bum ride), and spooked, sleazy rock’ n ’roll (Alan Vega).
Transcended Tangier trips, Karkara aren’t exactly the first group to occupy this space, but they do it with volume and dreamy élan.
Review & Recommendations Roundup – Dominic Valvona
Kicking off 2019 this inaugural edition of Dominic Valvona’s eclectic roundup of new releases includes the new, and only second solo, autobiographical framed album from art/sex/music icon Cosey Fanni Tutti; the dual-album celebration of Germany’s Station 17 collective (originally formed as a musical therapeutic experiment between a Hamburg group of mentally handicapped residents and musicians), marking thirty years of experimental sonic sculpting and collaboration; the dazed jingle-jangle shoegaze from the London outfit Deep Cut – releasing their first album for the Gare du Nord label –, a new album from Tim Presley’s White Fence of soft psychedelic, new wave, fragile troubadour and yearning off-kilter analogue electronic bulletins; a single-type release of bewitching romantic morose from the Uruguay duo Clovvder and a real bona-fide 7” slice of vinyl from legendary English psychedelic luminary Twink and the Gare du Nord label’s unofficial house band all-stars, Papernut Cambridge and Picturebox.
Chasing up releases from the fag-end of 2018 I also take a look at the repackage appraisal of the rare and much sought-after 1978 Celtic-folk album from Flibbertigibbet, Whistling Jigs To The Moon, and a collection of previously unreleased recordings from the obscure 60s/70s, genre spanning Paraguay duo JODI, plus delve into the mind of the music composer artist Garrett N., who follows up (tens year later) on his debut album with an ambitious progressive suite of high quality-produced hard rock, funk, sound collage, Hip-Hop, psych and astral synth, Let’s Get Surreal.
Albums
Cosey Fanni Tutti ‘Tutti’
(Conspiracy International) 8th February 2019
After five decades at the cutting edge of subversive performance, conceptual art, and with pushing the envelope of cerebral industrial electronic music there’s no sign of stopping the grand dame icon of the leftfield Cosey Fanni Tutti from continuing to deconstruct and contextualise the limits of the sonic abyss.
Even in recent framed ‘autobiographical’ years, Cosey could hardly be accused of languishing on past glories; the results of a pinnacle year in retrospection revitalized and worked to produce this, Cosey’s only solo album since 1982’s Time To Tell. It could be said that the controversially open artist’s – who has all but laid herself bare physically and sexually in the pursuit of pushing the boundaries of morality, taste and censorship – practice is wholly autobiographical; Tutti being no different in that respect.
Originally created as a soundtrack for the Harmonic Coumaction film as part of a wider COUM Transmissions retrospect (the Dadaist, and to an extent, Fluxus inspired enfant terror group of which Cosey, alongside Throbbing Gristle’s Genesis P-Orridge, co-founded in 1969) that opened the Hull, UK City of Culture celebrations in 2017, the caustic but often vaporous diaphanous eight soundscapes that make-up this latest album can be read as a continuum of Cosey’s biography (published in the same year) and on-going assessment.
Untethered to any particular place or time, spanning the decades to inform both present and future, Tutti is meant to be both an extension yet ‘stand alone document’. Transformed, manipulated and re-processed in the ‘now’, the various abstract perspectives and past incarnations are presented as a sophisticated soundtrack of mostly serialism shifting moods and evocations.
Nuanced and subtle, Cosey refines a legacy that includes Throbbing Gristle and various Chris Carter partnerships to produce a minimalist Techno with ominous otherworldly atmospherics, wafting esoteric style jazz pines and both inner and outer minded cosmological elemental style conceptual album. The title-track itself layers lingering mysterious exotic lingers of jazzy saxophone over distant pounded kinetic beats, cutting tetchy subdued mechanics and suffused drones that touch upon that sonic legacy.
Elsewhere on this series of suites pattering beats cloak alien avian squawks on the wilderness of ‘Drone’; hollow winds blow through metallic rotations on the wizened alluded ‘Sophic Ripple’; Cosey’s veiled apparition lulls drift amorphously in liquid reverberations on ‘Heily’; and leviathans pass over a bending Tangerine Dream like expanse on ‘En’.
Those more familiar with Cosey’s history might recognize title references, sonic prompts, and the use of atavistic arcane spiritual language (the album’s cascading crystalized mirror, ‘Orenda’, using and channeling the Iroquois group of Native American tribes’ name for the spiritual power inherent in people and their environment; the force behind divination, prophecy and soothsaying, amongst others), yet Tutti is a deconstructive breakdown of that same past, built back-up and put together to offer a new dialogue and visage going forward.
Not so much a revelation as ‘continuum’, Cosey’s first solo album in over thirty-six years is a clever atmospherically mysterious and sagacious soundtrack that transmogrifies a lifetime of ‘art, sex and music’ into a most recondite purview of effective electronica.
Station 17 ‘Werkschau’ & ‘Ausblick’
(Bureau B) 1st February 2019
Growing and developing way beyond the initial perimeters of a social experiment between the mentally handicapped residents of a Hamburg community and the independent musician Kai Boysen, Station 17 (as they would become known) has made a sizable and influential mark on the German music scene. From humble beginnings as a stimuli therapeutic project in 1989, the always evolving collaborative group has blossomed into an internationally acclaimed touring band, released over ten albums of eclectic experimentation and worked with an enviable cast of cross-generational artists: from members of the old guard such as Can, Faust, Tangerine Dream and Neu! to more contemporary Techno and electronic artists as DJ Koze, Datashock and Kurt ‘the Pyrolator’ Dahlke.
Spontaneous throughout, the constantly-changing lineup behind Station 17 effortlessly merge and rework Krautrock, Kosmische, Pop, Post-Punk and Techno music into something unique and, above all, democratized: the varying disabilities of the collective’s cast inevitably feed into the process, yet offer no barrier to creativity.
Celebrating thirty years of such experimental and inspired music exploration and performance, on the 1st of February Station 17 will both pause to take stock of the back catalogue, with the retrospective collection Werkschau, whilst looking forward to new sonic horizons, with the release of their eleventh LP proper, Ausblick – a companion piece to last year’s Blick (which made our albums of the year features). The first of these albums – sporting a homage to Can’s Landed album cover art – Werkschau crisscrosses the group’s cannon; from the 1990 self-titled debut album right up to the already mentioned 2018 triumph, Blick.
Certain albums gravitated towards the trends and zeitgeist of the times, but tracks, often a decade or more apart, sit together well with no discernable difference in quality or production. The first trio of tracks for instance, stretch across three decades; moving between the panted, mooning and gasped vocal free-form post-punk of ‘Feeger’, from the Debut LP, to the industrial drum’n’bass, Kraftwerkian meets NIN ‘Budemeister’, taken from the 2006 LP Mikroproffer, and the shimmery bossa electro-pop of ‘Techno Museum 2’, taken from the 1997 LP, Bravo. Elsewhere there are shades of limbering DFA Records-sign-Populare Mechanik, on the 2011 Fieber album track ‘Uh-Uh-Uh’; Bowie oozing over the Art Of Noise on, what could be homage to the Hamburg district and city’s infamous pirate insignia football club, ‘St. Pauli Der Hat Heute Geburts Tag’; and the luminous lunar bound’s of Can’s ‘Dizzy Dizzy’ can be heard permeating another 2011 track, ‘Zuckermalone’.
Guest appearances/collaborations being Station 17’s forte this retrospective includes an abundance of them; including the gangly-Hip-Hop Fetter Brot match-up ‘Ohne Regen Kein Regenbogen’ and the slick sonar reverberated Yellow Magic Orchestra hued, Michael Rothar travelling ‘Bogie Bogie Báka’. (Both tracks of which are taken from the collaborative dedicated 2008 album, Goldstein Variation). It also neatly ties-in with the group’s upcoming album rather well, featuring as it does Station 17’s bridging collaboration with Andreas Spechtl of Ja, Panik! fame, ‘Dinge’, taken from the last album Blick: The upcoming Ausblick conceived in the PR spill as that record’s congruous twin. A companion piece, it shares more or less the very same lineup of guests, featuring once more the mischievous faUSt instigators Zappi and Jean-Hervé, new wave pop appropriator Andreas Dorau, the power-up Düsseldorf and Berlin straddling duo of one-time Ashra and Klaus Schulze drummer Harald Grosskopf and former Kraftwerk, Neu! and Pissoff journeyman Eberhard Kranemann, Tangerine Dream convert Ulrich Schnauss, contemporary electronic artist Schneider TM and of course, Spechtl.
Though this time around tracks seem to be far more expansive on the whole, loose and cosmic, especially the Pyrolator team-up ‘Geisterstunde, Baby’, which bounds and bends to a craning Jah Wobble-esque elasticity, and the Soon Over Babaluma galactic dusting ‘Un Astronaut’, which features both Schneider and old Krautrock hand, founder of GAM and echo guitar pioneer, Günter Schickert.
Wafting aromas of Eastern mystery, free-form jazz and liquid serialism permeate this album as Techno meets with Industrial, post-punk funk and My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts era bass lines; resulting in one of Station 17’s most sophisticated, mature and thoughtful albums yet. A Teutonic odyssey, Ausblick’s enviable guest list certainly helps, yet it is the enthusiasm and spirit of the collective’s ‘wohngruppe’ that enrich and offer a distinct perspective.
Not resting on their laurels, Station 17 simultaneously looks back whilst cosmically being propelled forward, releasing both their new and retrospective albums on the same day. Thirty years in, those humble origins far exceeding expectations, Station 17 continue to produce the goods.
White Fence ‘I Have To Feed Larry’s Hawk’
(Drag City) January 25th 2019
The unassuming maverick artist Tim Presley paints outside the lines; his idiosyncratic applied coloring-in like a double vision of kaleidoscopic floating blurriness. Deeply felt yet softened and often languid in practice, Presley’s off-kilter musings blend lo fi psychedelia with quirky troubadour sadness, jilting punk, library music, and early analogue synthesized music, and on this latest album of sweetened, hazy malady, the Kosmische, to create the most dreamy of soft bulletins.
Wise in his choice of associations, Presley has in recent years formed a fruitful bond with fellow American maverick Ty Segall – their latest collaboration, Joy, was released back in the summer of 2018 -, and Welsh artist Cate Le Bon – pairing up to form the odd lolloping DRINKS. It was whilst bunking down at Le Bon’s grotto in the Lake District in the winter that he wrote the songbook that would eventually become I Have To Feed Larry’s Hawk; the admittedly rudimental skilled Presley, sat crafting ideas on Le Bon’s piano whilst she was out adding another string to her already stretched polymath bow, designing wooden furniture at night school.
Once back in the States, imbued even further by his recent move from L.A. to San Francisco, Presley called upon fellow lo fi graduate and face of Lazy Magnet, Jeremy Harris, to help mold and transform his halcyon transatlantic sketches. Harris is credited as the all-round talent that learnt and then, more or less, played and recorded this curious collection in the San Fran located studio of former Bees founder and producer, Paul Butler.
Amorphously wafting between the bucolic and tragic psychedelic whimsy of England, the Warm Jets era of Eno, the fragility lament of Nilsson and the cerebral lurch of The Swell Maps, Richard Hell and David Byrne, Presley’s bendy vulnerabilities sound understated and lo fi but dream big. The title-track, with postmodernist élan, embodies this spirit perfectly; merging the magical if unsure twinkle of Willy Wonka with Pete Dello, Syd Barrett and a slacker Ray Davis. Suffused venerable organs, monastery-like intonations, and the lightest of washes all sit well with the gangly disjointed lolloping guitars and the woozy drug-induced new wave rock’n’roll longing of such tragic mavericks as Johnny Thunders, who Presley dreamt appeared before him, from beyond the grave, with a message of encouragement: “To be honest and simple”. Opening up to a point, Presley’s sighed, understated vocals deliver lyrics swaddled in psychedelic analogy and lazed daydreaming resignation.
Closing the album, the final two-part suite of Ham Reductions, is an experiment in perpetual arpeggiator analogue-electronics. Split in to ‘A: Morning’ and ‘B: Street & Inside Mind’ bookends, these pleasant retro-futurist never-ending instrumentals both evoke the familiarity of Cluster and Eno. Reconfiguring a binary computerized language, each piece is probed and piqued by glistened but more caustic harsher interruptions flows and the sound of the traffic: The inner workings of Presley’s mind transduced into calculating, ruminative passages from another era.
Tethering a multitude of ideas and influences to something more concrete and solid can’t have been easy, but I Have To Feed Larry’s Hawk captures those blurred reimaging’s within the amorphous boundaries of a successful off-kilter album of dreamy magnificence and wonky indulgences.
Flibbertigibbet ‘Whistling Jigs To The Moon’
(Sommer) December 5th 2019
JODI ‘My Espontáneo’
(Out-Sider Music) December 5th 2019
Feeding an insatiable hunger for obscure (sometimes for good reason) missives and forgotten links in the chain of music history, the Spanish Guerssen hub of multifaceted labels dishes up an abundance of rarities from around the world, and across time. Two such rare finds have piqued my interest this month, the first from the Paraguay duo JODI, and second, a reissue of the fleeting Celtic lunar imbued Flibbertigibbet album, Whistling Jigs To The Moon.
Faithful to the name, the Out-Sider Music imprint digs out a hotchpotch of previously unreleased recordings from the Wenger brothers, Joem and Dirk. Gathered together under the Pop Espontáneo title – a title that only goes so far in describing the duo’s highly diverse styles and influences – this compilation captures the brother’s at their most experimental, as they graduated from the schoolmates band The Rabbits to the sibling duo JODI and later still, after signing a contract with EMI-Argentina, IODI.
Isolated to a degree in their Paraguay homeland, cut-off to an extent from their peers, an unburdened and unpressured JODI relentlessly recorded an abundance of genre-bending songs and instrumentals at their 8-track studio in Asunción. The results of which, in the main, were self-financed and released in very small numbers privately.
Early adepts of the Moog, which they use with a cosmic relish throughout the majority of these recordings, the Wenger’s could be said to have been innovators in South American psychedelic boogie and space-age disco rock. Aggrandizing the brothers further, the PR spill and accompanying linear notes hold them up as pioneers; diy and lo fi doyens whose sound was ahead of its time. To be fair, at times you think you’re hearing the kernel of Ariel Pink or R Stevie Moore, but far from humble beginnings, the Wenger’s certainly had the cash to spill, owning as they did a state-of-the-art studio, a mellotron, moog and clavinet, which were hardly cheap or even easy to come by at the time of their late 60s and early 70s flowering.
If you’ve already heard Out-Sider’s repackage of the duo’s 1971 album, Pops de Vanguardia – possibly, as claimed, the first lo fi diy garage-psych album to be produced on the continent – you’ll be familiar with their method of blending Santana-like Latin rock with clavinet croaking heavenly funk and psychedelic garage to produce melodious pop. Digging deeper into the archives and stockroom, their ‘sound-alikes’ collection unearths such hidden gems as ‘Change Your Mind About Me’, which pitches soft American 70s rock with phaser-guitar and tropical percussion; the Steppenwolf-in-leather bastardized Beatles riff at the discotheque Glam-rocking, ‘Take Me Higher’; the Brian Auger rock’n’roll meets psych sermon, ‘Sunburst Of Bees’; and The Monkees harmonize over The Smoke, ‘I Will Wait For You’. But you’re bound to hear smatterings of Bolan, Mick Ronson, Sensations Fix, Amen Corner and The Kinks on this crisscrossing compilation.
Technically proficient they use all kinds of tricks, effects and overlays to skewer their visionary rock music pop. And if this kind of thing interests you, then you’ll be pleased to hear that the booklet describes all these various methods and the instruments used in great detail – guitar wise, the brothers showed a penchant for the Fender Jaguar and Jazz bass. Unfortunately enervated by the pressures of recording for a major label, the German-Paraguay brothers were forced to record more commercially viable hits. And so these recordings are only seeing the light of day forty odd years later, after the JODI heydays of the mid 70s.
This is a worthy collection and obscure curiosity that could lead to revival of forgotten treats from 60s/70s Paraguay; the sons and daughters of the German diaspora that ended up there, sharing an unconscious link to similar pioneering musical innovations back in the Krautrock homeland.
In a different direction entirely, the Sommer imprint revival of the critically well-received but commercially poor Whistling Jigs To The Moon album by Flibbertigibbet looks to place the Celtic-South African troupe in the upper echelons of prog and psych-folk greats.
Formed after the break-up of the earlier cult Irish group Mellow Candle by band members Alison O’Donnell and David Williams, after an unsuccessful 1972 album release for the Deream label – Swaddling Songs despite the attention and band’s reputation, failing to revive the Candle’s fortunes -, the prevailing Flibbertigibbet was born in the immigrant and local communal houses and clubs of the South African folk scene. Leaving the Emerald Isle after that Candle’s light went out for good, O’Donnell and Williams hooked-up in South Africa with ex-pats Barrie Glenn and Jo Dudding to form the earnest, romantically lamentable band of well-travail(ed) musicians.
From initial live performances in a homely community, the obviously gifted and talented group of like-minded folk lovers were soon patronized; their admirer and facilitator, Prof. David Marks soon offering them the help to record and release, what would be, their debut LP. Expanding the ranks further with classical first violinist Francesco Cignoli, jazz bassist Dennis Lalouette, string-bassist Nippy Cripwell, flutist Colin Shapiro and fiddle player Dave Lambert, they recorded an attentive songbook of beautifully lulled traditional folk sagas.
Taking old Irish standards, but also weaving their own deft tapestries, they dance jigs in drunken stupor to the moon cycles and swoon like the French Lieutenant’s Woman, waiting on the smugglers cove for loved-ones to return. They do this with the most understated of lilting charm, evoking the subtlest hues of Fairport Convention prog and the softest of psychedelic rock influences.
The stalwarts of bucolic and coastal folk are all present and correct – from English Oak and seafaring analogies to the protestations of the oppressed working classes -, as Flibbertigibbet travel back and forth across timelines. Special mention must go to O’Donnell’s voice, which is diaphanous and longing, channeling Sandy Denny, Linda Ronstadt and The Poppy Family as she woos and sighs over both the perfectly administered acoustic and electrified backing – itself a mix of the Trees, American country-folk rock, Fotheringay and Fleetwood Mac, but also a faithful interpretation of far older, more bodhran frame drum led, traditional forms too.
Saved hopefully from obscurity and the clutches of record-dealers – the original 1978 album fetching a pretty price online, if you can indeed find a copy – this repackaged appraisal of a folk rarity should be well-received by the folk and head music communities. Beautifully crafted storytelling from a band with much to offer, Whistling Jigs To The Moon is an enjoyable and stirring treat for the soul.
Deep Cut ‘Different Planet’
(Gare du Nord) January 25th 2019
As if Ian Button isn’t busy enough already juggling a multitude of projects, he’s not only the drummer in the London-based Deep Cut band but also facilitating the release of their third LP, Different Planet, through his very own Kentish cottage industry imprint, Gare du Nord (a good time to mention that labels impressive showing in our albums of the year list).
Formed around the dreampop shoegazing indie pop songwriting of the group’s founder, Mat Flint, and Emma Bailey, Deep Cut could be said to appeal to the Gare du Nord label’s penchant for nostalgia. Squeezing plenty of mileage out of The Byrds (8 Miles of it in fact on the track ‘Washed Up’), Lush, My Bloody Valentine, Jesus And Mary Chain, Throwing Muses and Ride, they inhabit another decade – though considering how bloody popular the 80s and Britpop eras both are, they’ve probably hit upon a winning formula.
In a spirograph haze of jingle-jangle paisley hued fuzz, drifting lingering cooing vocals and attitude power pop, the former Revolver frontman and Death In Vegas bassist Mat adds shades of his previous bands sound to the make-up; pitching up with trip-hop indie beats on the baggy-candour ‘Spiraling’, and switching on the Fujiya And Miyagi version of the motorik, on the early pulsing Sheffield electronic ‘Alarm Button’.
Playing with that lush signature of cracking indie pop, Emma (shadowed on backing vocals and harmony throughout by Mat) can at any one time channel Tanya Donelly, Sonya Madan and Miki Berenyi simultaneously. Though as breezy and shrouded in vapours as it is, Emma has a certain swagger and attitude that manages to pierce the daze.
The backing meanwhile shifts between all those already mentioned reference points, but can also throw up a few surprises, especially with vague passing influences such as Cabaret Voltaire, Ringo Deathstarr, Teenage Fanclub, Altered images and the Happy Mondays all swirling around.
A decent sound with plenty of variation, subtitles and energy, Deep Cut refine and breathe life back into the yearning shoegaze and Britpop of another era. With conviction, well-crafted songwriting and a captivating lead singer, they manage to stand apart from their influences just enough to avoid cliché and a reliance on the nostalgic.
Garrett N. ‘Let’s Get Surreal’
Channeled into an eclectically blended opus of a showcase, in a sense a purview of Garrett’s tenure as a composer and sound designer creating incidental music and soundtracks for a litany of American networks, the pun-tended riff entitled Let’s Get Surreal runs through the full gamut of its creator’s skillset and tastes. In the decade since his first and only other album thus far, Instrumentals And Oddities, there’s been a hell of a lot water-under-the-bridge, and Garrett’s album at times seems like one out-of-sync with its time: Leitmotifs and themes, including a growing cacophony of multiple George Bush Juniors reading out his infamous address to a nation speech on the eve of the second Gulf War (overlapping and twisted until the word “terrorism” echoes like a broken mantra), are evoked on the WMD condemnation, undulated by a Kubrickian menacing drone, ‘Saddam/Espace’ – just one example of a subject overtaken by a catalogue of equally destructive and important events; the incessant hunger for stimulation, reaction and validation of 24-hour news feeds quickly replacing world events at such a rate as to make anything longer than a few years back seem ancient history.
The sound quality indicates a talent for production: Garrett N. is attempting to bring hi-fidelity and a verve of polish back to music production; arguably a lost art in so many ways, especially in an era when availability and convenience is valued above audio quality, and when music is accessed, predominantly, through compressed digital streaming platforms on smartphones. If nothing else, Let’s Get Surreal sounds good in its bombast; loud when it needs to be, clean and crisp when more thoughtfully meditative and ambient. It makes a refreshing change to hear it.
The music itself is epically framed, following a concept that errs towards progressive rock and beats opera; there’s even an ‘Overture’ to kick things off, part of a triple suite of tracks that (surreal indeed) morphs Michael Caine’s anecdotes about gay slurs and allusions to a changing musical landscape of 70s Floyd, ethereal synth work, hues of heavy Muse prog guitar gestures, brighter shades of MGMT and psychedelic pop and Todd Rundgren. Continuous with recurring hooks, bridges and fades connecting each track on this hour plus filmic soundtrack, Let’s Get Surreal blends lofty noodling with longing composure as it confidently zaps and fuses the cosmic with Hip-Hop instrumentalism, library music with 80s flange rock, 8-bit robotics with conga funk, and low-riding RNB with the psychedelic.
A curious album from an obviously talented music producer and musician, this ambitious suite does seem like a home-studio project from a bedroom maverick, dressed-up as a resume, yet remains an impressive expansive astral oddity of constantly progressive and twisting musical tastes: An album where nothing, quite literally, is spared!
Singles
Twink ‘Brand New Morning/ Dream Turn into Rainbows’
(Gare du Nord) February 1st 2019
A match made in halcyon nostalgic haven, quintessential English psychedelic journeyman Twink (the nom de plume of former Pretty Things, Pink Fairies, Tomorrow, and the fleeting Stars instigator, Mohammed Abdullah John Adler) breaks bread with Ian Button’s Gare du Nord label’s unofficial house bands, Papernut Cambridge and Picturebox, on his latest bucolic single.
Taking a while to materialize on wax, the Gare du Nord lineup of Button, Robert Rotifer, David Woolf and Robert Halcrow first worked with Twink back in 2017; backing one of the doyens of early psych for a series of ‘rare’ shows, which included a guest slot at Kaleidoscope’s 50th anniversary Tangerine Dream jamboree.
Essentially Twink’s spotlight, the (traditional) A-side, ‘Brand New Morning’, was co-written with Picturebox main man Halcrow. A genital kind of vicarage Baroque-chimed harpsichord period Syd Barrett dream capsule from psychedelic rock’s back pages, this earnest Village Green enchanted ditty breaths in the optimism of a sunny-side-up kind of day. The more interesting companion B-side, ‘Dreams Turn Into Rainbows’, is a flute-y and mellotron dreamy romantic yearned number. Building from folky psychedelics echoes into a diaphanous Moody Blues fantasy, Twink’s repeated sentiment of, “I still dream about you/ But dreams they turn into rainbows”, is carried on the currents and vapours of his backing troupe’s melodious lush lingers.
Ever expanding the catalogue of nostalgic and halcyon age signings, Ian Button’s label dissects the past but lives in the present, whether it’s the 60s, 70s or even 80s (see the label’s Deepcut LP, which also features in this roundup): The metaphors and analogies proving timeless, even if the music isn’t. Twink is an obvious fit and addition to a label so endeared with England’s less celebrated mavericks.
By the time this review reaches you, the limited-to-200-copies vinyl single should be available via the shared Twink Bandcamp page. A digital copy for streamers is also being made available.
Clovvder ‘Traits’
November 13th 2018
Invoked during an ‘astral winter by the seas’ of the Uruguay port city they call home, Montevideo, the Gothic atmospheric conjurers Clovvder and their most recent couplet of eerie and poetically forlorn bewitching drones (Traits) merges the ominous with the ritualistic diaphanous surrealism to unsettling, spiritualist effect.
Channeling the unconventional morality of the celebrated surrealist Uruguayan-born French writer/poet Isidore Lucien Ducasse’s Les Chants de Maldoror, ‘old gods’, magik and hermetic beliefs, the duo’s Tanky and CO3RA personal peer dramatically into the void as they navigate the aloof philosophical quandaries of existence and self: The second of the two tracks, ‘Solipsismo’ can be translated as both ‘alone’ and ‘self’, a prompt in this case to the eternal downer that the ‘self is all that exists’.
Tar black waters, swirls of minimal dark majesty, resignation, and wispy apparitions posing descriptive esoteric longing lyricism (“Black abysses, swirling/I felt born in me”) materialize in waves across both of Traits haunted soundtrack evocations. A sad melancholic beauty and glints of escapism however lift the mood of the drowning-in-the-River-Styx vibe.
Relatively obscure, with only a handful of singles online, Clovvder may well dissipate back into the ether that they appeared from; their non-linear visions and dark arts sorcery poetic minimalism (imbued in part by the genius experimental cinema of Russia’s exalted Andrei Tarkovsky: Scenes from his loose amorphous interconnected autobiographical movie The Mirror are used to accompany ‘Hydrophila’) demand total absorption and the time to take hold.
Difficult to place; neither electronica, field recordings, drones or that dismissive ‘Witch’ prefix trend, Traits is closer to the perimeters of occult soundtrack magic realism poetry and despondent esoteric romanticism.
Words – Dominic Valvona
Albums of 2018: Part One: Idris Ackamoor to The Moonwalks
December 3, 2018
Selected by Dominic Valvona, Matt Oliver and Gianluigi Marsibilio.
The decision making process:
Being the exhaustive and eclectic set of features our (choice) albums of the year are, we know you probably don’t need to or want to dally about reading a long-winded prognosis of our judgement process. But here it is anyway.
Continuing to shy away from fatuous rating systems and ‘best of lists’, the Monolith Cocktail endeavors to offer a more visceral and personal 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 numbered spot than another.
With no hierarchical order, we’ve lined our album choices up alphabetically; split into two features – A (Idris Ackamoor) to M (The Moonwalks), andN (Thomas Nation) to (Thom Yorke) Z.
All of our favourite new and reissued albums and EPs from 2018 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 2018: even if that might be true. Instead our list is an indicator of our amorphous tastes, rounding up another 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.
All selections have been made by me (Dominic Valvona), Matt Oliver and Gianluigi Marisibilio.
A.
Idris Ackamoor and The Pyramids ‘An Angel Fell’ (Strut Records)
Serving a worthy musical apprenticeship from and imbued by the masters Coltrane, Rahsaan Roland Kirk and Cecil Taylor, the polymath musician, activist, director of The Pyramids ensemble and torchbearer of spiritual and Afrofuturist jazz, Idris Ackamoor once more makes holy communion with the cradle of civilisation on the lamentable An Angel Fell. Imploring a unified message, a connectivity, a reminder that we can all trace our ancestry back to the same place, Ackamoor follows up on ‘We All Be Africans’ with an epic sweeping album of Afro-jazz 2-Step ‘Warrior Dances’ and plaintive primal jazz catharsis.
Walking through the Valley of The Kings; sailing aboard Sun Ra’s Arkestra; conducting the empyrean; evoking Kuti’s Lagos Afrobeat jive; Ackamoor and his troupe traverse the mismia of a broken, corrupt world, delivering cries of anguish and auguers aplenty. Whether penning requiems to the gunned-down black victims of the US Justice system (‘Soliloquy For Michael Brown’), or in radiant prayer (‘Sunset’), they effortlessly and wondrously summon forth the leading lights of each musical genre they inhabit. Afrobeat, gospel, spiritual, funk, blues, future-past-present all come together in one of the year’s most important, enlightening and defining opuses.
(Dominic Valvona)
Ammar 808 ‘Maghreb United’ (Glitterbeat Records)
Throwing the traditional unwieldy Maghreb, before it was demarcated and split into colonial spheres of influence, back together again in the name of progress and unity, Sofyann Ben Youssef fuses the atavistic and contemporary. With past form as one half of the Bargou 08 partnership that gave a modern electric jolt to the isolated, capitulating Targ dialect ritual of the Bargou Valley on the northwestern Tunisia and Algeria border, Youssef under the moniker of Ammar 808 once again propels the region’s diverse etymology of languages, rhythms and ceremony into the present, or even future: hopefully a more optimistic one.
Jon Hassell’s ‘possible musics’ meets Major Lazer, the traversing adaptations from the Gnawa, Targ and Rai traditions and ritual are amorphously swirled or bounced around in a gauze of both identifiable and mystically unidentifiable landscapes. Mixing modern R&B, dub, electro effects with the dusky reedy sound of the evocative gasba and bagpipe like zorka, and a range of earthy venerable and yearning vocals from Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria artists, Youssef distorts, amps up or intensifies a resonating aura of transformative geography and time.
Nothing short of visionary. Full review…
(DV)
Angels Die Hard ‘Sundowner’ (Jezus Factory Records)
Admittedly taking some time to grow on me, the Angels Die Hard combo’s Monsterism Island meets Les Baxter ethnographic phantasm of a remote Southeast Asian archipelago instrumental concept album, Sundowner, has finely unfurled its full magic: just in time to be included in the annual albums of the year features.
Imbued with a legacy of progressive, alt-rock, psych, exotica and post-punk influences plus Julian Cope’s Krautrock compendium, the Angels transduce and channel a cornucopia of styles once more as they soundscape the tropical island of Andaman. An environmental clarion call as much as a progressive rocking exotica, Sundowner is dedicated, at least partially, to the environmental tragedy of the plastic-strewn oceans.
Beachcombing a radioactive luminous landscape of musical opportunity, from bummer downers to mind-expanding space rock jams, these Angels expand their horizons (literally), on the band’s best album to date. Some ideas work better than others of course, but when they do get it right they produce some fantastic opuses of amorphous abandon. Full review…
(DV)
Any Other ‘Two, Geography’ (42 Records)
The story of Adele Nigro (Any Other) is made of beautiful songs originating from a desire to subvert a rather conservative musical culture, just like the Italian one.
2018 has given us many beautiful pieces, of the most varied atmospheres, but to find a compact and complete album in each of its parts, touch refuge in Two, Geography (42 Records).
The numerous collaborations that Any Other has collected, as a musician, in recent years, have been invaluable to develop, refine and embellish her poetics.
The sonorities of the album are very distinct, and at the same time loquaciously soaked by all the experiences brought on stage (or in the studio) during the year that is inexorably past.
With Two, Geography, however, there is more, Adele coming out with her head held high, they are not only beautiful pieces that stand out for their immediacy and vitality, but also the international character of the project.
Any Other’s work was immediately presented as something else, for depth and acuity, starting from that ‘Roger Roger, Commander’ or from the same singles who announced Two, Geography.
The simplicity in intertwining linear arpeggios, bright rhythmic lines and a voice, both delicate and particular, makes us immediately think of the disc in a different way, we immediately understand that such a sound must be appreciated with attention and in its various nuances.
Since the first bars of ‘Silently. Quietly. Going Away’ (the first work of Any Other) you could see her skill in shaping a song form as a real opportunity for musical and textual speculation.
The song ‘Capricorn No’ is a monument of modernity that comes on, not only for its immediate and deep style, but because it plays with the atmosphere that you can hardly expect from an Italian artist.
The work as a whole is a challenge, a part of a musical resistance, a progressive push in the sea magnum of ideas that too often settle down, even in brilliant artists.
Any Other is the 2018, the beautiful and fundamental face to make us remember that, all in all, this year went well.
(Gianluigi Marsibilio)
B.
Anton Barbeau ‘Natural Causes’ (Beehive/Gare du Nord)
Ian Hunter via Robyn Hitchcock via Luke Haines via Julian Cope, wrapped inside an enigma, the Sacramento born, Berlin-based, Anton Barbeau changes his style of delivery repeatedly yet always maintains an idiosyncratic ingenuity in whatever he does. The results of an aborted project under the Applewax banner, made in the run up to the 2016 US elections, Natural Causes is the reflective, more open antithesis to what would have been a far darker and mournful proposition. Richly melodious and halcyon, this most brilliant new collection finds Barbeau both transforming some of the back catalogue (for the better) and penning new glorious sounding maverick pop songs: The quality of which are cerebral, memorable, melodic but also adventurous and inventive.
Barbeau and a congruous cast of guests lend a touching caress to a songbook of contemporary surreal lyrical musings and love songs. Unrushed, even breezy in places but hardly lacking intensity, there’s an air of nostalgia in homages to the radio stations and DJs that first sparked interest in the young Barbeau on the Hunter fronts Tom Petty band finale Down Around The Radio. And with a nod to one of the music cannons greatest ever records, The Beatles Sgt. Pepper kaleidoscope, a stab at a popsike hit (a missing link from one of Strange Days magazines 80s halcyon compilations) is made with a song that was originally written to be recorded at the venerated Fab Fours’ inner sanctum of Abbey Road, with the quirky Disambiguation.
Fans of Barbeau will be once again charmed by his unique songwriting abilities, and those still unfamiliar with the inimitable generation X artist of renown will find much to love about his psychedelic pop genius. Full review…
(DV)
MC Paul Barman ‘Echo Chamber’ (Mello Music Group)
“Potent politics, funky lounge lizard off-the-tops and bizarre hypotheses, burrowing its way through the toughest of leather bound volumes to have you picking the bones out for weeks on end” RnV May 18
In many ways this is the consummate Paul Barman album, but it bears repeating straight off the bat, while trying super hard to not sound incredulous, that ‘Echo Chamber’ features production from ?uestlove, DOOM and Prince Paul (funky/sidekick status, from stoop to playground), with additional contributions from Mark Ronson (upping the ludicrousness with a tweak of The Ronettes’ ‘Sleigh Ride’), Masta Ace and Open Mike Eagle. That’s some serious string pulling from an explicitly cult concern only reinforcing his standards in lewdness and a smart Aleck riot act both downplaying and toadying a racing IQ (his relocation to Mello Music Group keeps him in his own lane as well). Ridiculous as ever with the dictionary and remaining a brilliant observer – see ‘Youngman Speaks on Race’, and ‘Commandments’ going one better by taking the Decalogue to Sesame Street and Biggie’s Bed-Stuy – Barman carries on making the longest of long shots with battle raps that’ll bamboozle and WTF one-liners that Jackanory or congress will sadly never benefit from. Bigger, better and geekier than ever.
Bixiga 70 ‘Quebra Cabeça’ (Glitterbeat Records)
Translating as the ‘puzzle’, Bixiga 70‘s latest album is a full 360-degree panoramic evocation (both joyful and lamentable) of their homeland’s African roots. Translating those roots, an ancestry that runs through many of the band members (some individuals descended from the Africa-Caribbean religion of ‘candomble’ for instance), Bixiga are also inspired on this journey by some of the highly talented artists they’ve shared various stages with over the years. Artists such as the Ghanaian highlife singer Pat Thomas, the Nigerian sublime traversing saxophonist legend Orlando Julius and Brazilian octogenarian star João Donato. Incorporating the lot they merge their brass-y signature carnival funk and shaking Afrobeat sass with cosmic voodoo, Afro-jazz and sloping funk.
The quality as always shines through on every track, with the visions and evocations of both Africa and Bixiga’s city home of Sao Paulo articulated by an energetic but also ruminating soundtrack of the tribal, funky, cosmic, tropical, gospel and ritual. The slave portal of Benin, further outlying deserts of the sub-Sahara and busy rhythmic bustles of Nigeria are channeled via the melting pot hubs of Brazil on the group’s most epic, ancestral and geographical straddling album. It only remains to see just how great it will sound live on stage. Full review…
(DV)
The Bordellos ‘Debt Sounds’
Brian Bordello ‘The Death Of Brian Bordello’ (Metal Postcard Records)
In a parallel universe the Jesus And Mary Chain never left East Kilbride; Julian Cope never formed the Teardrop Explodes; and Brian Wilson was in fact born in St. Helens in the late 1960s, and recorded all his opusus on a Tascam four-track, inspired by Mark E Smith. This alternative world is one the dysfunctional family circle The Bordellos inhabit. Probably the best lo fi rock’n’roll-meets-post-punk-meets-the-Spaceman 3 hapless band you’ve never heard of, the prolific group, headed by the patriarchal masthead Brian Bordello, have been luridly, sinisterly, laughably and pessimistically knocking-out their brand of disgruntled alternative yearnings for a decade or more with little attention from anyone other than us loyal fans – who probably need our heads examined in all honesty. You either get them or you don’t. And you could find some of their more confrontational dark humour (songs about the BBC killing John Peel, still loving the musical cannon of Gary Glitter, and on this album, Debt Sounds, some sinister predatory sexual allured shclock about Rolf Harris) too unsettling, even perverse.
Debts Sounds, in the manner of a Half Man Half Biscuit play-on-words, is The Bordellos low cost Pet Sounds. That may not be initially obvious. But stay with me on this one. Fashioned and realised by Brian from the band members and even affiliates, girlfriends and whatnots various outpourings and late night sessions into a most epic song book of unrequited love, sick love, obsessed love, compromised love, salacious love, and even some tender love – they excel themselves on the laid bare and touching ‘Spirograph’ and quasi-Beatles ‘My Life’ meets the hardened north romanticism of ‘I May Be Reborn’ (Take this for a line: “Every smoking chimney my Statue of Liberty”), Debt Sounds is full of great maverick performances and songwriting, made in a period of crisis, anxiety and manic depression. Ok…so more Don Van Vliet than Brian Wilson, but still a valid comparison.
Whereas will you hear odes, homages and eulogies to Jimmy Campbell and Faron’s Flamingos to a back track featuring vague indifferent shades of Thom Yorke, Cope, Velvet Underground, Red Crayola, Joy Division and the The Seeds? Nowhere that’s where. Brian Bordello’s Track-by-track breakdown…
Knocking out records on a whim, it seems inconceivable that the leader of the Bordellos has never actually released a solo effort until this year (and only a few weeks from the end of 2018). Paring down, enverated, Brian Bordello steps outside the family unit on his debut solo, The Death Of... Not expecting many flowers on that graveside elegy of a album title, Brian takes a sort of reflective pause and looks back on a litany of tropes that have come to encapsulate his resigned fatalism. With only a clipped, rough and unguarded acoustic guitar and his trusted Tascam for company, Brian pays tribute to rock’n’roll icons Eddie Cochran (again) and Mark E Smith (who Brain thinks should be canonised as a saint); wears his heart on his sleeve cooing songs about lingering memories of bunk-ups, unrequited wooing gone wrong and lost kitchen sink romances; and languishly but candidly weary sonnets on depression.
As lo fi as it can get, Brian’s most intimate, personal performances yet strip away all the caustic dissonance and fuzz to reveal his most brilliant songwriting. The Death Of is an often beautifully morose songbook that lays bare the talents of a true uncompromising outsider.
(DV)
Brace! Brace! ‘S/T’ (Howlin Banana)
Producing gorgeous hues of softened psychedelia, new wave, Britpop and slacker indie rock, this young but sophisticated band effortlessly melt the woozy and dreamy with more punchier dynamic urgency on their brilliant debut album.
Squirreled away in self-imposed seclusion, recording in the Jura Mountains, the isolation and concentration has proved more than fruitful. Offering a Sebastian Teller fronts Simian like twist on a cornucopia of North American and British influences, Brace! Brace! glorious debut features pastel shades of Blur, Gene, Dinosaur Jnr., Siouxsie And The Banshees (check the “I wrecked your childhood” refrain post-punk throb and phaser effect symmetry guitar of ‘Club Dorothée’ for proof) and the C86 generation. More contemporary wafts of Metronomy, Mew, Jacco Gardner, the Unknown Mortal Orchestra and Deerhunter (especially) permeate the band’s hazy filtered melodies and thoughtful prose too.
A near-perfect debut album, an introduction to one of the most exciting new fuzzy indie-pop bands of the moment. Full review…
(DV)
Apollo Brown & Joell Ortiz ‘Mona Lisa’ (Mello Music Group)
“Rugged but always smooth, reflective with a forked tongue…there’s a lot of comfort to be taken from the union of two opposing authority figures exercising supreme quality control” – RnV Nov 18
This duo’s mutual will to only work with the elite – Joell Ortiz as a member of Slaughterhouse, Apollo Brown extending his collaborative run after shared albums with Skyzoo, Ghostface Killah, Ras Kass, Planet Asia – is head start number one. Yes these are extremely experienced experts in their field who shouldn’t drop the ball, but 12 tracks, one emcee and one producer, two guests maximum, and everything absolutely finely tuned is still the best advantage to press home. A steadiness to both performances has BPMs instantly finding their sweet point so instrumental richness can build, settle, simmer and seduce, and vocals slip straight into the pocket housing an imperceptible line between recognition and vengeance. The introspection of ‘Mona Lisa’ pays respects with a feeling that it doesn’t pay to dwell, that while everything may be upbeat and secure – visuals of sauntering down a street and coloured in something like a high definition sepia – slippery slopes, with ‘Cocaine Fingertips’ the album’s most rotten apple and situations like the bittersweet resonance of ‘That Place’, are always around the corner. Another win for the seemingly indefatigable Mello Music Group as well.
(Matt Oliver)
C.
The Cold Spells ‘S/T’ (Gare du Nord)
Esoterically gentle and wistful, The Cold Spells debut long player is a gauze-y organic and ambiguous (to a point) affair of undulating ‘moss covered’ circuitry, folk, quintessential English psych, paisley patterned hallucinogens and Kosmische.
Communing with the ether, connecting with the psychogeography of their chosen environment – from the soft Wiccan with forebode travail of Thomswood Hill to the alluded-to abandoned mental hospital waste ground near Hainault -, a host of spirits tune in and out of the continuous, though (as we’re told) not in a linear order, flowing suite of laudanum imbued Victoriana lyricism and Beatles-esque melody.
A surprise package, quietly unassuming, the trio’s encapsulation of an age of ghostly memories – the ancestors inhabit the band’s present to address the here and now concerns of a troubled, unstable world – is magical and gently lamentable; a perfect evocation of aicd folk and pastoral esotericism, as beautifully plaintive as it is ominous. Full review…
(DV)
D.
Die Wilde Jagd ‘Uhrwald Orange’ (Bureau B)
Fashioning a mysterious ‘Clockwood Orange’ world of Gothic and ominous dreamscapes, inspired by and named, in part, after the studio it was produced in, and by both the 17th century menagerie paintings of the Flemish artist Frans Snyder and the collected devotional Medieval period songs of the Llibre Vermell De Montserrat artifact, Die Wilde Jagd’s Sebastian Lee Philipp takes us on an eerie, cosmic and slinking travail through a throbbing sophisticated earthy electronic soundtrack. His musical partner on the group’s adroit debut self-titled experiment, producer Ralf Beck, is excused from the follow-up but lends out his extensive racks of vintage analogue synthesizers to Philipp, who transforms and obscures their banks of sounds into ghostly permutations, shadowy creatures and lurking, dancing and honking sonorous cries from a murky wilderness.
Uhrwald Orange is a classy imagined score, balancing cool, gleaming and aloof German electronica with menacing, nocturnal earthiness, yet also reaching for the celestial. One minute imbued with hints of Bauhaus, Killing Joke, Eno, Cluster, and Faust, the next slinking on to the Tresor club or Basic Channel dancefloor. In short: a most impressive album. Full review…
(DV)
Dur-Dur Band ‘Dur Dur Of Somalia: Volume 1, Volume 2 And Previously Unreleased Tracks’(Analog Africa)
A highlight in a catalogue of outstanding reissues from the Analog Africa label, intrepid crate digger Samy Ben Redjeb reprises the first two volumes of Somali fusion funk music from the legendary 1980s outfit, the Dur-Dur Band. Embodying a period in the decade when Mogadishu could boast of its cosmopolitan reputation – notably the European chic Via Roma stretch in the Hamar-Weyne district, a colonnade for café culture, cinema and of course music – the hybrid Dur-Dur Band moped up the polygenesis fever of their native city with effortless aplomb during their short heyday.
Saved from ‘tape-hiss’ and ‘wobbles’, remastered to sound the best they’ve ever sounded, these curious but above all loose-limbed nuggets successfully merged a myriad of Somalia traditions with a liberal smattering of disco, reggae (via the northern part of the country’s ‘Daantho’ rhythm style; an uncanny surrogate for Jamaica’s number one export), soul and funk. Mirroring a similar fusion thousands of miles away in New York, the Dur-Dur languidly produced an electrified no wave-new wave melting pot.
Split up across a triple LP and double CD formats the Dur-Dur Band’s first two albums proper, Volumes 1 and 2, and a couple of unreleased tunes feature on this, the first in a promised series of re-issues. Released originally in 1986, the first of these and the band’s debut album, Volume 1, has a rawer unpolished but snazzy sound that saunters, skips and grooves along with aloof coolness to sweltering laidback funk; opening with the wah-wah chops and a fuzzy organ stunner, ‘Ohiyee’ , which lays down a sophisticated but explosive spiritual dance floor thriller. Volume 2 by contrast seems a little brighter and tropical; beginning as it does with the dub echoed, Trenchtown pirate radio broadcast ‘Introduction’.
Going further than most to bring the sounds of Africa to a wider audience, the Dur-Dur Band release proved to be one of the label’s most difficult, as Redjeb tackled the geopolitical fall-out of a country devastated by civil war to bring us a most unique sounding and essential collection. Full review…
(DV)
E.
Elefant ‘Konark Und Bonark’ (9000 Records)
Emerging from the Belgium underground scene, with members from a myriad of bands, each one more obscure than the next, the Elefant in this room is a twisted agit-post-punk, boiler come forensic team suited troop of noise peddlers. Lurking around basement venues for a while now, the sludge metal and gallows Krautrock merchants have released a slurry of EPs but never a fully realized album until now.
For an album that grapples with Marilyn Manson, Swans, Killing Joke, Muse, industrial contortions and Germanic experimentation, Konark Und Bonark is a very considered, purposeful statement. Though things get very heavy, implosive and gloomy and the auger like ghosts in the vocals can sound deranged, there is a semblance of melody, a tune and hint of breaking through the confusing, often pummeling, miasma of artificial intelligence armageddon.
A seething rage is tightly controlled throughout, the sporadic flits and Math Rock entangled rhythms threatening to engulf but never quite reaching an overload, or for that matter, becoming a mess. Elefant’s prowling and throbbing sound of creeping menace and visions of an artificial intelligent domineering dystopia is an epic one. Arguably the band have produced their most ambitious slog yet and marked themselves out as one of Belgium’s most important exports of 2018. Full review…
(DV)
Bernard Estardy ‘Space Oddities: 1970-82’ (Born Bad)
‘Fragmented D’une Empreinte Magnétique: Rares 1966-2006’ (Gonzai Records)
Because sometimes you just can’t decide, I’ve chucked in two reappraisal celebrating compilations of the odd, curious, thrilling and kitsch flights of fantasy musical fragments/sketches/soundtracks/compositions from the late and most gifted venerated French composer Bernard Estardy. I can’t even claim that these are great collections, let alone the best albums of the year, but they’ve kept me smiling all year.
Nicknamed ‘The Baron’, the founder of the CBE recording studio (which he set up in 1966) collaborated with a host of famous French icons in his time (arranging, producing or sound engineering for Johnny Hallyday, Francoise Hardy, Nino Ferrer, Michel Sardou and Jean Guidoni amongst others), but found an unleashed creative freedom as the master of consoles on his own excursions and dream flights of curiosity. Enjoying a resurrection of a sort in 2018, in part down to his daughter Julie Estardy‘s biography ‘The Giant’, Bernard’s eclectic back catalogue, from the realised to cutting room floor, is being reissued or rediscovered by a new generation through a number of different labels, both in France and internationally.
Two such compilations swept me up in their bombast; the first an album that couldn’t be described any better than the title it comes with, Space Oddities, and the second, Fragmented D’une Empreinte Magnétique, a Gauloises hotbed of weepy venerated organ romanticism and salacious sleek soundtracks. The first takes library music to the stars and beyond on a sassy opulent voyage of esoteric cosmic discovery. Jazz meets deep space on a drum-heavy collection of mysterious thrillers, phantasms and exotic awe. Tracks such as the more romantic, flute-y glide in space blues ‘Slow Very Slow’ sound like they could have made it to the ears of Goldfrapp or Greg Foat. The second of the pairing frequents more Earthy realms, pitching gospel with Bacharach yearnings, sentimental laments (the torn love soliloquy ‘It’s A Lovely Day To Die’ sums it up perfectly) and the strangest of deep-chested sung French cowboy soundtracks (A very Parisian journey to buy your ciggies, ‘La Route Au Tabac’, is rerouted through a lonesome pine trail). Both are as brilliant as they are audacious; a refreshing escapism and proof of a unique talent.
(DV)
Evidence ‘Weather or Not’ (Rhymesayers)
“From the moment he draws first breath on ‘Weather or Not’, Evidence embarks on a masterclass” – RnV Feb 18
A meteorological masterpiece showing that it’s rarely sunny in LA, whenever it rains it pours, and that Evidence is always bringing the weather with him. Ever laconic but whose economy of words is always wisely directed and word association seems slight but cuts deep, Ev walks the streets with collar up and hands dug into pockets, seemingly always in search of a contentment whose elusiveness he’s fine with. This prolongs a character pairing the enigmatic with a spokesman calling it straight down the line (“things I never thought about, trying to be elusive in the process, get forgot about”), a wallowing wanderer with whiplash in the tale and forever in control of his destiny (feel the tempered triumph of the concluding ‘By My Side Too’). A spread of AM band forecasts, a splash of psychedelic epiphanies and head nodders that buck like a bronco from Premier, Nottz and Babu, plus some Step Brothers espionage from Alchemist, allow the Dilated Peoples man to find you: because ‘Weather or Not’, you can’t run, you can’t hide.
(MO)
F.
Flora Fishbach ‘À Ta Merci’ (Blue Wrasse)
The French music press we’re told have fallen hook, line and synth for the alluring contralto voice of Flora Fishbach, who’s 80s revisionist pop twist on chanson oozes with such sophistication that its difficult not to embrace. Fishbach picked up the album révélation award at the Le Prix des Indés for best independent debut LP, winning high praise and plaudits galore ever since. Looking to make a similar impact across the Channel, the ‘bohemian darling’ has just released a deluxe edition of her electro pop requiem À Ta Merci. That decision is more or less echoed in the album’s title, which translates as, “at your mercy”.
Featuring the original running order and a bonus septet of gorgeous live recordings, this aloofly chic, yet theatrical, and especially when performing, animated album recasts Françoise Hardy as a disco pop and electro swooned crooner. Effortlessly channeling the vaporous dreamy pining of Kazu Makino on the moon dust sprinkled fantasy title-track and ambient textured, synthesizer bass bubbling yearned lament ‘Un beau langage’, and a Gallic Alison Goldfrapp on the opening ice-y cool malady ‘Ma voie lactée’, Fishbach adds a French nuance and sensibility to the synthesized pop ascetic: a signature you could say that despite the revivalist backing of electronic drum pads, post-punk sass, Moroder arpeggiator, Rococo harpsichord and hi-energy is unmistakably contemporary and French.
With the momentum already building in France and with the recent runaway success of music press darling Christine And The Queens (who I personally find utterly dull) I’m sure the UK will embrace this sophisticated chanteuse. This is overwhelmingly a better, more fun record than Christine’s (or the name she’s now adopted, Chris). Fishbach has certainly impressed me enough – what’s not impressive about referencing the philosophical aloof quandary that is Rimbaud’s “Je est un autre” (“I am another”) on a tropical slinking crystalline pop song, Un Autre Que Moi (“Another Me”) – to recommend her as one to watch in 2019. Full review…
(DV)
Fliptrix ‘Inexhale’ (High Focus)
“‘Inexhale’ masters the art of knocking you down with a feather: the pugilistic psychoanalysis is untouchable” – RnV Sept 18
It’s a little disingenuous to say Fliptrix became the High Focus main man this year, given he’s the driving force behind the label and already has a back catalogue of textbook pen and pad amplification. What with the label’s ever bubbling pool of talent seeing Ocean Wisdom blazing all and sundry, Jam Baxter expanding his cult appeal and two late night smokers from Coops, ‘Inexhale’ could’ve played the holding role and sat in the pack. But with breath control putting a copyright on the title and not a single word wasted, it’s an album that will leave you levitating. Be that from his street level strain of spirituality – letting the sharp end of something herbal work him over, or thoroughly aware of the rights and wrongs of his surroundings – or from the velocity of what’s spat (‘Inside the Ride’ doesn’t and won’t ever flop). Then flipping what the surroundings suggest, and never getting lost in the haze even with eyes at the reddest, Fliptrix finds the perfect medium between headphone moments and smacks to the head.
(MO)
Fofoulah ‘Daega Rek’ (Glitterbeat Records)
Bustling onto the transglobal London and Bristol scenes in 2014 with their earthy and urban bombastic fusion of Wolof African culture and dub electronica rich debut LP, the Fofoulah ensemble laid down the template for the a unique adventurous sound. Though taking its time to materialize, four years on, the follow-up album hasn’t just moved on but supersonically zoomed into the experimental void; even an esoteric, spiritual one at times.
Daega Rek, ‘the truth’ when translated from the Wolof language of coastal West Africa, sees Fofoulah’s saxophonist, keyboardist and producer Tom Challenger transmogrify the original Gambian talking drum of the group’s shamanistic rapping lead Kaw Secka and the accompanying percussion and propulsive drumming rhythms of his band members. (All of which were laid down at the Real World studios). Secka would then reappear in post-production to record his half spoken/half-rapped protestations and observations; the results all re-shaped into a ricocheting lunar-tropical bounding dub cosmology.
Skipping and skittish in motion; pushing the envelope as they pay tribute to lost brothers (‘Kaddy’ pays 2-Step rhythmic eulogy to the late photographer Khadija Saye who died in the Grenfell Tower disaster), the visceral taste of home (‘Chebou Jaine’ dedicated to Secka’s cousin, who cooked the best national Gambian dish) and search for the truth, Fofoulah lunge into the electrified dub ether of sonic adventure. Full review…
(DV)
G.
Goatman ‘Rhythms’ (Rocket Recordings)
An amorphous exploration of world ‘rhythms’ as transduced by one the mysterious Scandinavian GOAT band members through a an arsenal of filters, modulators and oscillations, the debut Goatman suite blends its polygenesis inspirations perfectly.
Offering up magical and scintillating rhythms galore, from Kuti’s compound Afrobeat to a tremolo and laser bouncing variant of RAM’s Haiti vibe, you can expect to hear the venerable tones of gospel, jazz, reggae, psych and pure ethereal acoustic Kosmische on this sonic flight of fantasy. Earthy yet light enough to soar, this impressive experiment side-project channels its influences perfectly to conjure up new musical ideas. Echoes of GOAT are never far away of course, yet this imaginative take feels more natural, more organic, and above all, more soulful. A fantastic debut.
(DV)
H.
Jack Hayter ‘Abbey Wood’ (Gare du Nord)
Bringing light, or at least opening up a psycho-geographical narrative dedicated to the very edges of a largely ignored London postcode – so far out on the South Eastern outskirts as to be part of Kent –, an earnest Jack Hayter composes a yearning lament to Abbey Wood on what is his first solo album in fifteen years.
Hayter’s deftly played, with twangs of bucolic and Baroque folk, blues, synthesized atmospherics, Americana and reverent chamber music, multilayered songbook connects with the psychogeography of his chosen location. From songs about the Abbey Wood diaspora and its position as a gateway to the world to laying cooing elegiac wreaths to those unfortunate victims of the WWII Arandora Star passenger ship tragedy, Hayter produces a lived-in musical novel, rich with references, landmarks and peopled by those who left an indelible, if at times fleeting, mark upon this much forgotten or passed over postcode: their ghosts, no matter how small the part they played in its story, never inconsequential; remembered and written about with a certain gravitas by the erstwhile troubadour, who performs the most accomplished and brilliant of testaments. Full review…
(DV)
Homeboy Sandman & Edan ‘Humble Pi’ (Stones Throw)
“A banquet of slaps that will become one of your five a day, and ultimately year” – RnV Oct 18
If seven or so tracks are good enough for Pusha T, Kanye etc, then they’re an ample fit for this elite underground swashbuckler of a showdown brought to us by the matchmaking Gods. Having flitted around the periphery for what seems forever, Edan returns with some of his best, ear-piercing archaeology to date as he shifts the B-boy-psych continuum once more; and Homeboy Sandman, both revelling in getting in the thick of it and firing off missives as he’s swept along for the ride, gets off the wall (“see me looking photogenic in the Book of Genesis, waving off medicines”), yet reels off some of the realest in recent times (it’s still, and shall remain, all about ‘Never Use the Internet Again’, which stylistically is actually a bit of a left-turn). The feeling pervades that the pair are proudly gladiatorial, indulging in friendly, unspoken competition as much as fighting the good fight as anointed hip-hop saviours. Let’s hope the sub 30-minute running time means the door is open for a second bout some time soon.
(MO)
J.
Juga-Naut & Sonnyjim ‘The Purple Door’ (Eat Good Records)
“Their usual, indomitable personas on the mic never skimp on Michelin-starred quality, and they still aren’t the ones to test if you think they’re pushing their luck” – RnV Aug 18
It’s an album largely based on elitist boasts, expensive trinkets and accessories and some pretty outlandish claims, but hey, these boys done good. Larger than life and living the playboy lifestyle making the ludicrous seem obtainable – you too can be a ‘Purple Door’ gold card holder – Juga-Naut and Sonnyjim transform the Midlands into St Tropez with a load of gala funk to make a red carpet entrance to, with just a hint of a twinkle in its eye like a felonious exile that has everyone’s backing. That said, you can’t live the life of a Rat Packer if you ain’t got the gab, and these two are no novices: the great suitability of their top table rhyme personas – Juga-Naut will have you believing every word he spits, Sonnyjim coming in dry and stonefaced yet smelling (and producing) like a million bucks – shares a love of all things gastronomic on the likes of ‘Duck Season’ that comes sweeping down a spiral staircase, while ‘Look Around’ takes a moment to act more tactfully, pledging family honour like a good fella. It might not be dining etiquette, but these two are pulling chairs from under the competition.
(MO)
Park Jiha ‘Communion’ (Glitterbeat Records)
Circumnavigating the globe to bring much-needed exposure to new sounds, Glitterbeat Records imprint tak:til gives a second wind to a suite of acuity serialism from Southeast Asia. Released originally in South Korea in 2016, the neo-classical musician/composer Park Jiha’s debut solo album Communion is given an international release by the label.
Inspiring what we’re told is a burgeoning Korean music scene (well, an alternative to the K-Pop craze), a chief progenitor of the movement Jiha alongside collaborative partner Jungmin Seo originally melded the country’s musical heritage with an eclectic range of contemporary sounds as the 숨[suːm] duo in 2007. Releasing the highly influential regional albums Rhythmic Space: A Pause For Breath (2010) and 2nd (2014), Park and Seo crossed the time zones to perform at both WOMAD and SXSW. Congruously putting the duo on hold to explore a more ‘personal’ and minimalistic ‘musical vocabulary’ as a solo artist, Jiha dexterously balances the air-y abstract breathes of the ‘piri’ double reed bamboo flute, the searing twang of the ‘saenghwang’ mouth organ and the softly paddled patter of the ‘yanggeum’ hammered dulcimer in what is a dialogue between a dulcet calm, the meditative and an entangled dissonance.
Transforming Korean traditions into a more experimental language that evokes the avant-garde, neo-classical and jazz yet something quite different, Park Jiha’s tranquil to entangled discourse evocations reach beyond their Southeast Asian borders both musically and metaphysically into something approaching the unique and amorphous. Full review…
(DV)
John Johanna ‘I’ll Be Ready When The Great Day Comes’ (Faith And Industry)
More a mini-album, even 12″ to be contrary, the beautifully cooed, warbled and ached venerable I’ll Be Ready When The Great Day Comes is nothing less than an afflatus anointed paean to a higher purpose. Informed by the mystical cosmology of the Eastern Orthodox Church, John Johanna‘s spiritual blues-y and gospel rock’n’rock hymns are both diaphanous and mesmerizing, even hypnotic; recalling visages of Morricone, Fleetwood Mac, Terakaft, Dirtmusic and Wovenhand as it wanders a picturesque but troubled soundscape.
On the devotional pilgrimage, the troubadour of the most evocative, stirring country burr, switches between aching falsetto yearning to lovelorn cowboy on the Andes romanticised cooing, and from the ethereal to fraught, as he makes communion.
No two songs are quite the same, as the wooing rustic sits next to (what can only be described as) the holy desert rock fusion of Native Indian and Afro-beat title track, and Bossa shuffle meets Yonatan Gat raindance. It all congruously comes together in one most divine service. A minor masterpiece.
(DV)
M.
Marlowe (L’Orange & Solemn Brigham) ‘Marlowe’ (Mello Music Group)
“Both excel in never revealing what’s steaming around the next corner, even when you’ve grabbed your toothcomb for the umpteenth time” – RnV July 18
Another yearly round up, another L’Orange inclusion. North Carolina stands up as latest collaborator Solemn Brigham rhymes his ass off: weirdly, without necessarily feeding off what the producer is trawling, and helping create something of an odd couple match made in heaven. L’Orange sets the scene, usually a funky hoedown, a sample-heavy brouhaha anticipating a stand-off or a psychedelic neck-snap. As is his wont, there’s a narrative to be spun, or some simple time-travelling to be done where no two bops are the same. Brigham on the other hand, blurbed as “summoning the holy spirit of Big L” without getting sucked into the danger zone, just jumps in with a garrulous B-boy stance and goes for it. Without L’Orange surrounding him in a world of imagination, give Brigham a park bench and a ghettoblaster and the results would be the same. What he does guarantee is that you’ll be going back to what he has to say, and whatever the variables, the energy and entertainment (grounded surrealism?) never dips. L’Orange may have found himself an emcee to keep on retainer.
(MO)
Hugh Masekela ’66-‘76’ (Wrasse Records)
A most poignant and timely reminder of one of the true greats, the mammoth 66-’76 collection shows a multifaceted Hugh Masekela: The exile. The trumpet maestro. The bandleader. The activist. The colonial revisionist. The angry young man. But also the conciliatory. These are just some of the many faces of the South African titan of jazz and African musical fusions that can be found inside the latest essential collection of the late great polymaths’ back durable catalogue.
Put together especially by Masekela and his good friend, producer and collaborator on a number of projects together, Stewart Levine, just before he passed away at the beginning of this year, the three disc spanning collection features key tracks from many of his most iconic and experimental albums (two of which are included in their entirety). But what makes this especially appealing to collectors and fans alike, is that many of these albums were never officially released in the UK and Europe before. Progressing in the chronological order they were recorded, we follow Masekela’s journey not just musically but politically across his most formative decade and his partnership with Levine and collaborations with such legendary ensembles as the Hedzoleh Soundz combo. From the combined jazz and Township fusions of The Emancipation Of Hugh Masekela all the way to criss-crossing the transatlantic slave routes on Colonial Man, this collection is a sheer joy. Full review…
(DV)
(MO)
Brona McVittie ‘We Are The Wildlife’
With the lightest, most deft of touches, Irish songstress and harpist Brona McVittie embarks on a voyage of ‘psycho-geographic’ inspired encapsulations of a mysterious, magical landscape and history on her debut album, We Are The Wildlife.
Tracing the sonic contours of London’s urban fringes and the rural landscapes of Mourne, McVittie pitches her fluttery diaphanous harp-led songbook somewhere between post-folk and the cinematic – helped along in part by the drifting trumpet evocations of film composer Hutch Demouilpied, who’s contributions sound at times like Miles Davis Dingo transported to an Irish peat bog.
Her ephemeral harp melodies and phrases often feel like a breath or just the merest hazy lingering presence of the instrument, which might in some ways be down to McVittie’s technique of playing them all on the guitar first before transcribing over. It certainly offers a different perspective and technique. And it certainly takes this heavenly traditional instrument into even more mystical, accentuate abstract realms, helped of course by an accompaniment of meadow flute (Keiron Phelan), sad bowed delicate strings (Richard Curran), searching fleeting slide-guitar and shuffling to full-on breakbeat drums (Myles Cochran). All of which amorphously pushes the often-ancient feelings and geography towards John Martyn and Bert Jansch one minute, towards the Incredible String Band or trip-hop the next.
Played with the lightest of touches, McVittie’s wildlife and Celtic inspired filmscape subtly crafts tradition into a cerebral suite of neo-classical and ambient folk. We Are The Wildlife is the most inviting and unique of debuts. Full review…
(DV)
Minyeshu ‘Daa Dee’ (ARC Music)
From the tentative first steps of childhood to the sagacious reflections of middle age, the sublime Ethiopian songstress Minyeshu Kifle Tedla soothingly, yearningly and diaphanously articulates the intergenerational longings and needs of belonging on her epic LP, Daa Dee.
Minyeshu left her native Ethiopia in 1996, but not before discovering and then learning from such acolytes as the doyen of the country’s famous Ethio-Jazz scene, Mulatu Astatke, and the choreographer Tadesse Worku and singers Mahmoud Ahmed, Tilahun Gessesse and Bizunesh Bekele. First moving to Belgium and then later to the Netherlands, the burgeoning star of the Ethiopian People To People music and dance production has after decades of coming to terms with her departure finally found a home: a self-realization that home wasn’t a geographical location after all but wherever she felt most comfortable and belonged:“Home is me!”
Evoking that sense of belonging and the theme of roots, but also paying a tribute and lament to the sisterhood, Minyeshu conveys with a sauntering but sorrowful jazzy blues vibe not only the burden and grind of daily life for many of her compatriots back home in the tumultuous climate of a fragmented and often chaotic Ethiopia, but also the joy of song and togetherness.
Not only merging geography but musical styles too, the Daa Dee LP effortlessly weaves jazz (both Western and Ethiopian) R&B, pop, dub, the theatrical, and on the cantering to lolloping skippy ‘Anteneh (It Is You?)’, reggae. Piano, strings and brass mix with the Ethiopian wooden washint flute and masenqo bowed lute to create an exotic but familiar pan-global sound. Minyeshu produces a masterful heartwarming, sometimes giddy, swirling testament that is exciting, diverse and above all else, dynamic. Her voice is flawless, channeling various journeys and travails but always placing a special connection to and emphasis on those special roots. Full review…
(DV)
Moonwalks ‘In Light (The Scales In The Frame)’ (Stolen Body Records)
At least geographically close to the spirit of the Motor City, if generations apart, Detroit’s Moonwalks brood in the shadows of the counterculture doyens that made it such an infamous breeding ground for snarling attitude garage, psych and acid rock in the 60s and early 70s.
Transitioning, so we’re told, from ad hoc abandon warehouse performances as a diy glam psych rock troupe to experimental space rock stoners, spiraling in a vaporous gauzy vortex of 80s British Gothic and acid shoegaze influences, the Moonwalks make a certain dynamic progression on their second full length album, In Light.
Sometimes they sound like a black magic rites Byrds and at others like a doomed The Glass Family on a bum ride. Their curtain call, The Joy Of Geraniums, is the most odd song of all; taking the Moonwalks into a whistling led peyote-induced trip to the Mojave Desert.
Vocally malaise the voices waft between Siouxsie Sioux, Bauhaus’ Peter Murphy and Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell. Of course it fits the nebulous cosmic doom and dreamy psych style of the group perfectly; ambiguously drifting through magical rites and sulky pretensions aplenty. Full review…
(DV)
Our Daily Bread 283: Qluster ‘Elemente’
October 15, 2018
Album Review/Dominic Valvona
Qluster ‘Elemente’ (bureau b) November 2nd 2018
Transforming through the decades, as contributors to the Hans-Joachim Roedelius and (late) Dieter Moebius navigated unit have joined and left, the Kluster/Cluster/Qluster arc has taken on various forms over the last five decades. A founding pillar of the Kosmische sound in the late 1960s and early 70s, originally taking shape from experimental performances at the legendary Berlin club they helped found, the Zodiak Free Arts Lab, the first incarnation of this amorphous partnership featured Joseph Beuys disciple and electronic music progenitor Conrad Schnitzler; the music, almost dark, Lutheran and hymn like, an early modulation of piano, organ and guitar, fed through an array of homemade effects, that made its debut on a label sonorous for its stoic church organ music.
Many ‘head music’ fans will be enamored or at least familiar with the second phase, as Kluster interchanged its capital letter to a C and Schnitzler left (for the first time). Releasing some of the most sublime peregrinations and odd candy coated pop electronica under the Cluster banner, their most formative period during the early to mid 70s remains their most famous and influential. This brought plenty of admirers and fellow sonic travelers to their Forst located woodland glade studio retreat. Most famously Brian Eno and Michael Rothar of Neu! Both of which would join Roedelius and Moebius to form the (a)side project supergroup Harmonia.
Apart from a dormant period during the 80s, as Roedelius and Moebius pursued both solo and collaborative careers (many of which would overlap), Cluster survived well into the next century. Finally calling it a day in 2010: For this version of the partnership anyway. Dropping the C for a Q, Roedelius found a new collaborative partner in the sound installation artist and like-minded sonic explorer keyboardist Onnen Bock. After a number of albums together the duo expanded to a trio when bass player virtuoso and (another) keyboardist Armin Metz joined the ranks. In the last few years the Qluster trio have been drawn to Roedelius’ neo-classical piano compositional improvisations and sketches; the previous suite Tasten was built around a trio of them, and the more electronic offering Echtzeit, though far less so, also seemed informed by it.
In many ways following on from the last album together, making a return to the warmth and traversing heavenly space sounds we have come to associate with all things Kosmische, the golden epoch of that genre fills our ears once more on Elemente. Once again meeting in the unassuming hamlet of Schönberg to perform an unhurried series of improvisations, later distilled to shorter passages with the odd melody, beat and effect added in post-production, the instrumentation has changed to accommodate sequencer triggered loops for the first time. The piano is enervated, removed almost entirely, replaced by the wondrous sound of the ARP2600, a Farfisa organ and Fender Rhodes, all of which are filtered through various lunar and otherworldly effects. The results of which are both expansively mysterious and often diaphanous in their celestial transcendence.
As the title suggests, the opening continuum ascendance of ‘Perpetuum’, and forevermore gliding spacescapes of ‘Infinitum’ both promise an unending voyage into the interiors of the universe and mind. The first of which recalls the Tangerine Dream and the Baroque cosmos of Sky Records, the second, the dreamy visions of Novalis. The possibilities of these arpeggiator style space-dusting, aura-anointed bookend tracks seem endless.
When not echoing through deep space Qluster, using that dream-melody maker, the ARP 26000, float close to the Adriatic cascades and mirages of Vangelis and Xaos on ‘Zeno’ (a reference I assume to the Greek philosopher and his confounding paradoxes); lift the lid up on the inner workings of a piano and pluck out a Japanese like sprung-y melody on ‘Xymelan’; and introduce a flattened beat to the Techno-bordering-on-Acid ‘Tatum’.
Tubular droplets, rapidly calculating algorithms and chemical elements interplay with overlapping, transformed organ and electrified piano melodic wafts throughout this most thoughtful sound map. The reification, the feelings of awe-inspiring expanse and discovery are subtly set in motion and made visceral. On the cusp of his 84th birthday, Roedelius shows no signs of retiring let alone resting as he leads his troupe to infinite possibilities.
Quarterly Playlist Revue: Part Three: Idris Ackamoor, Stella Sommer, Mac Miller, White Denim, Simon Love…
September 26, 2018
Playlist: Chosen by Dominic Valvona & Matt Oliver/ Curated by Dominic Valvona
Priding ourselves on the diverse, pan-global playlists we collate for your aural pleasure and indulgence, the Monolith Cocktail Quarterly Revue series is the eclectic behemoth of them all. With no demarcation of any kind or rules we mix the harrowing and gothic with beckoning polyrhythmic dancefloor screamers, flights of panoramic fantasy with raging protestations, and the most sublime peregrinations with experimental cries from the wilderness.
Everything you find on this playlist has either featured on the site over the last three months or been in our general orbit (the sheer volume of music we get sent means there is inevitably issues of space and time, and so some great tracks just don’t make it; this is our chance to feature those lost tracks). Below you will find a full track list, including links to reviews.
Tracklist:-
Malawi Mouse Boys ‘Hunger (Hymn)‘
Spike & Debbie ‘Strike – Compilation Version‘
Dur-Dur Band ‘Yabaal‘
Goatman ‘Jaam Ak Salam’
Mac Miller ‘Party On Fifth Ave.‘
Parquet Floors ‘Wide Awake’
LCD Soundsystem ‘Oh Baby – Lovefingers Remix’
Papernut Cambridge ‘The Hobbledehoy‘
Yuzo Iwata ‘Gigolo’
Soft Science ‘Undone‘
Stella Sommer ‘Dark Princess, Dark Prince‘
Mehdi Rostami & Adib Rostami ‘Delight‘
Yiddish Glory (Loyko, Alexander Sevastian, Sophie Milman) ‘Shpatzir in Vald (A Walk In The Forest)‘
Yazz Ahmed ‘The Lost Pearl – Hector Plimmer Remix‘
John Coltrane ‘Impressions – Take 3’
Thelonious Monk ‘Nutty, Pt. 2’
RAM ‘Dambala Elouwe’
Vaudou Game ‘Tata Fatigue’
Derya Yıldırım, Grup Şimşek ‘Uc Kiz Bir Ana’
Idris Ackamoor & The Pyramids ‘Land Of Ra’
Bixiga 70 ‘Quebra Cabeça‘
Etuk Ubong ‘Black Debtors’
Ayalew Mesfin ‘Hasabe (My Worries)’
Ippu Mitsui ‘Shift Down‘
Otis Sandsjo ‘Teppich‘
Nyeusi ‘Jupiter’s Giant Red Spot’
Angels Die Hard ‘Acid Beach‘
Mothers ‘PINK’
Rat The Magnificent ‘Up The Street‘
American Nudism ‘Future 5-0’
Dead End, M, Second Son ‘Let The Music Talk‘
Tenesha The Wordsmith, DJ Khalab ‘Madea’
CRIMEAPPLE, Big Ghost Ltd. ‘Your Love’
The Last Skeptik, Mikill Pane, Allana Verde ‘Rules Of Engagement‘
Beans, Sam Fog ‘The Black Chasm’
Bronx Slang ‘Rushing The Stage‘
Wordburglar ‘Rental Patient‘
Gunshot ‘Sulphur‘
Stringmodulator ‘Betwixt & Between‘
Laure Briard ‘Janela’
Brian Bordello ‘Eddie Cochran’
Simon Love ‘God Bless The Dick Who Let You Go‘
Picturebox ‘The Vicar’s Dog‘
Atmosphere ‘Make It All Better Again’
Daniel Rossen ‘Deerslayer’
White Denim ‘Good News’
La Luz ‘Mean Dream’
Kammerflimmer Kollektief ‘Action 3: Thoughtless, Hamburg‘
Previous Quarterly Revues From 2018
Monolith Cocktail Blog 