The Monthly Playlist: April 2022: SAULT, Nduduzon Makhathini, Lyrics Born, Ed Scissor…
April 28, 2022
PLAYLIST SPECIAL
The sounds that have piqued the team’s interest, filled their hearts, fucked with their heads, or just sent sauntering towards escapism, the Monthly playlist gathers together all the music we’ve featured over the last month. We’ve also picked some of those tracks that managed to evade us and some we just didn’t get the time or room to exalt.
Our eclectic as usual mix starts in Tel Aviv with the Şatellites and moves across continents to take in Rwanda’s The Good Ones, Sao Tomé and Principe’s vintage África Negra, the Georgian choir Iberi, and one of Scandinavia’s principle jazz ensembles, OK:KO.
There’s plenty of more, with a freshly produced diaphanous, slow knocking beat gauzy treatment of the burgeoning pop enchantress and dystopian muse Circe’s ‘Mess With Your Head’ – now transformed into ‘It’s All Over’ under the Secret World Orchestra guise -, and a rafter of choice hip-hop cuts from Billy Woods, Dabbla, Lyrics Born and Lunar C with Jehst. Pop, jazz, electronic, dreamwave, psychedelic and post-punk are all represented. And there’s even a track from our very own Brian Shea and his cult dysfunctional family band The Bordellos.
The Monolith Cocktail team, corralled into action by me, Dominic Valvona, currently includes Matt Oliver, Brain ‘Bordello’ Shea, Graham Domain and Mikey MacDonald.
Those Tracks In Full Are:{
Şatellites ‘Zuhtu (Live)’
Melody’s Echo Chamber ‘Personal Message’
IKE (Ft. Sera Kalo) ‘What Then’
Dana Gavanski ‘Indigo Highway’ Crystal Eyes ‘Wishes’
Pete Rock ‘Brother On The Run’
Steve Monite ‘Only You’
África Negra ‘Vence Vitoria’
Samora Pinderhughes ‘Holding Cell’
Izzi Sleep & Rat Motel ‘Good Going Down’
Mercvrial ‘Look Inside’
The Bordellos ‘I Hate Pink Floyd Without Syd Barrett’
Peace De Résistance ‘Boston Dynamics’
The Legless Crabs ‘Boo Hoo Hoo’
Otoboke Beaver ‘YAKITORI’
Papercuts ‘Palm Sunday’
Kloot Per W ‘Le Pays’
Nicole Faux Naiv ‘Moon Really’
Liz Davinci ‘Daisy’
Julia Holter, Harper Simon & Meditations On Crime ‘Heloise’
Amine Mesnaoui & Labelle ‘Bleu Noir’ Billy Woods ‘Wharves’
Professor Elemental ‘Inn At The End Of Time (Remix)’
Dabbla ‘Alec Baldwin’
Nelson Dialect & Mr. Slipz ‘Association’
SAULT ‘June 55’
Nduduzo Makhathini ‘Amathongo’
Rob Cave & Small Professor ‘Respect Wildlife’
Lyrics Born (Ft. Rakaa Iriscience, Shing02, Bohan Phoenix, Cutso) ‘Anti (Remix)’
Kino & Sadistik ‘The Earth Was Empty’
Aethiopes (Ft. El-P, Breeze Brewin) ‘Heavy Winter’
Laddio Bolocko ‘Nurser’
Novelistme ‘Never’
Astrel K ‘Maybe It All Comes At Once’
David J ‘(I Don’t Want To Destroy) Our Beautiful Thing’
Jörg Thomasius ‘Okoschadel’
Ed Scissor ‘Dad’
Violet Nox ‘Eris’
Moscoman ‘Dalmar Is Back And It’s Final’
Grandamme, Claudia Kane & Bastien Keb ‘Nirvana’
FloFilz (Ft. Dal) ‘Levada’
Chairman Maf ‘Gammon Island’
Moon Mullins ‘Welcome To Tilden’
IBERI ‘Arkhalalo’
Papé Nziengui ‘Gho Boka Nzambé’
The Good Ones ‘Happiness Is When We Are Together’
OK:KO ‘Vanhatie’
Ubunye ‘Our Time’
Shrimpnose & BLOOD $MOKE BODY ‘Beyond The Villian’
Justo The MC & Remulak ‘Knockturnal’
Lunar C (Ft. Jehst) ‘Any Given Wednesday’
Qrauer ‘The Mess’ Circe/Secret World Orchestra ‘It’s All Over’
Brianwaltzera ‘tracing Rays [reality glo]’
Kota Motomura (Ft. Akichi) ‘Flower’
ALBUMS AND EXTENDED RELEASE REVIEWS/PLUS A SPECIAL LITTLE SOMETHING/Dominic Valvona
SPECIAL LITTLE SOMETHING
IFRIQIYYA ELECTRIQUE ‘Nafta Naghara’
From the 25th March 2022
From our friends IFRIQIYYA ELECTRIQUE, a mesmerizing, loud and incredible dynamic fusion of unworldly chthonian elements, Sufi trance, spirit possession performance and post-punk electronics; recorded live in the last month at La Casa Musicale in Perpignan, France.
Originally formed in the Djerid Desert, a coloration between field-recordist and veteran guitarist of the politically-charged Mediterranean punk and “avant-rock” scenes, François Cambuzat, and bassist Gianna Greco – both of which occasionally join forces with that livewire icon of the N.Y. underground, Lydia Lunch, to form the Putan Club – and Banga musician Ali Chouchen – joined in the live theatre by an expanded cast of fellow voices, krabebs and Tunisian tabla players from the community, which has featured Tarek Sultan, Yahia Chouchen and Youssef Ghazala – the lineup has fluctuated over two stunning albums and live dates.
Performing a track from their second album Laylet El Booree (released back in 2019) ‘Nafta Naghara’ sees both Syna Awel and Dyaa Zniber (on both voice duties and percussion) change the dynamic once more as they join Greco (voice & bass) and Cambuzat (on guitar, choir & computer) for breathtaking communal.
ALBUMS
Jane Inc. ‘Faster Than I Can Take’
(Telephone Explosion Records) 22nd April 2022
Although the musical DNA was there from the start, through her dance pop duo Ice Cream with Amanda Crist and contributions to Darlene Shrugg and Meg Remy’s ever growing U.S. Girls ensemble, Carlyn Bezic effortlessly shimmied towards the disco, dream-pop dancefloor with last year’s Number One album debut as Jane Inc. – one of my choice albums of 2021.
Bearing all the strains, vulnerabilities but shorn of pity, Carlyn makes good on that previous congruous change with a both disarming fantasy and more heartbreaking plaintive songbook, fit for the age of high anxiety, self-doubt and connection through the computer, smart phone lens.
Life just never feels right, and time…well, time seems to have sped up, hijacked by those seeking to consume all our precise use of it, concentrated down the portal of a constantly changing feed of attention grabbing, virtue competiveness and narcissistic obsessions. Without the space to breathe, process, to take it all in, we’ve been mostly reduced to vacuous, fleeting well-wishers; meaningful, deep connections just for a few, because whose got the time to offer anything lasting. Ok, I’ve gone slightly off the rail, but our epoch, lurches from, but then forgetting, one crisis to the next: though in recent months that carousal has swung from the climate emergency to Covid to the cost-of-living and Ukraine. Who wouldn’t be anxious, drained mentally under such an onslaught?
On the album’s opener, and first single, ‘Contortionists’ Carlyn sings about the effects of time anxiety, of being both trapped simultaneously in the past, present and future, all in the same moment. Transfiguring a 80s musical palette, this crystalized arpeggiator emotional pull dances through softened shades of n-r-g, robotic soul pop, fitness video music and disco: with a certain echo of Chaka Khan thrown in. Fellow Toronto collaborator Dorothea Pass adds a touch of ethereal cooing to a vulnerable but danceable highlight.
Although a mostly synthesized, electro affair, Carlyn finds the human soul, a connectedness throughout. No more so then on tracks like ‘Human Being’ (for obvious reasons), which explores isolation, the requirements of instagram, and that always living your ‘best life’ crap, in an online world to the dualist Giallo glitterball pop, and suggestions of the Juan MacLean and St. Vincent (via Wendy & Lisa). Dreamy realism meets with a haunted reflection, with another signature mirror turn. In a similar lamentable disconnect, the four-to-the-floor, Vogue era Madonna ‘Dancing With You’ projects a romantic embraced dance at the Paradise Garage, but is really a dance for one in front of the computer screen in a bedroom.
Amongst the glitterball emitting lasers Carlyn expands the musical scope, sauntering down to Rio like a 70s Joni Mitchell sharing a fantasy with Seu Jorge on ‘Picture The Future’ – which actually, despite its accompaniment of soft-paddled samba moves, describes a calendar rota of metaphorical growth. ‘An Ordinary Thing’ takes an acoustic direction towards the troubadour sorrow of Evie Sands or Catherine Howe on a cathartic, candid Baroque turn of resignation. The close, ‘Pummeled Into Sand’, features strains of both reversed phaser and Brian May guitar licks, hints of Aldous Harding and Eleanor Friedberger on the Mexican border.
I’m drawn however to the gorgeous if heartbreaking ‘Every Rip’. A Diplo remixed Vangelis patterned lush ache of vulnerability, this dream-wave pop lament will bring a tear to the eye.
The absence of the physical (love, friendship) echoed through the full spectrum of emotions couldn’t sound more effortless. Even if the artist feels fragile, this second album under the Jane Inc. flag couldn’t be more assured in pop brilliance. Taking the familiar tones of disco, pop, new wave, fitness video n-r-g, Carlyn takes a more carefree, danceable approach to deeper feelings in an era of rapid change and disorientation. You won’t hear much better.
Birds In The Brickwork ‘Recovery’
(Wayside And Woodland)
The first in a promised series of multimedia releases from Benjamin Holton’s latest inspired alias, Birds In The Brickwork, the Recovery album contours a both faded and quintessentially damp English landscape; as seen through Holt’s photographic lens.
A concomitant partner to the gauzy, washed guitar and synth music of epic45, his longstanding duo with foil Rob Glover, Holton once more plugs into a familiar, if far more dreamy and beautifully languid, mode.
Before we dive in though, a little background to this newly adopted moniker is needed. Sympathising greatly myself with this, Holton was forced to give up work due to a ‘massive flare-up’ with his back. During a time of recovery (hence that title) the Staffordshire native attempted to document the period with the tools-at-hand. This included that already mentioned guitar (both acoustic and electric by the sounds of it), a camera and computer.
Finding all life’s answers, pathos and bathos in the natural typography and its artificial markers, structures, the focus of this project is on the landscape; something that could be seen as a reoccurring feature, theme in much of his work, especially the pylon straddled haze and nostalgic glaze of My Autumn Empire.
Capturing the ephemeral through various instrumental traverses, Holton sculpts magical, mysterious radiating versant slopes, hills and the ghostly pastoral visage of a village hall, as he wells up a mood board of the wondrous, universal and cerebral. Evoking a languorous Land Observations without his bass notes, the descriptive and higher-purposed guitar playing of Craig Ward, Spiritualized Jason Pierce and Myles Cochran, Holton evokes the halcyon, conversational, the empirical.
Through lingered, floated, finely attuned guitar work, synthesized washes and waves, pitch-shifts and attentive drums he gently encompasses the fields of post-rock, the psychedelic, shoegaze, acid-country and kosmische; whether that’s unveiling the enormity of the great expanse or in solitude, waiting to get back out into the world of small wonders: ‘small glimmers’, the ‘old blossom’ and the reconnected resonance of ‘people talking’. All things missed and now documented with a lightness of touches.
The inaugural visions of a geography taken for granted, barely noticed, comes to life in the first Birds In The Brickwork audio setting. With art prints, DVDs and postcards still to come Recovery puts down the marker for a fruitful new musical horizon: even if it was borne out of pain.
Kota Motomura ‘Pay It Forward’
(Hobbes Music) 22nd April 2022
Although it’s been a few years, the experimental Tokyo artist Kota Motomura makes good on his previous free-floating, swimmingly jacked-up House and Balearic flowed EP for the Hobbes Music imprint with a just as tropical, eclectic album.
Pay It Forward once more sees Kota reunited with his foil Mutsumi Takeuchi on reeds. Later on, with this album’s paradise plaint closer, ‘Flowers’, a second guest, Akichi, joins the twosome, adding a wistful but dreamy Balearic acoustic guitar accompaniment, sat under a canopy of heavenly bird song and humid tropical heat. That curtain call is the most placid, scenic track on the whole album, with the rest destined for the club environment: albeit set in the rainforests or in some futuristic vision of 80s Tokyo.
The actual entitled ‘Paradise’ features Mutsumi’s snozzled jazz-house toots, spirals and drifted hazy rasps and Kota’s detuned, almost distorted, piano stabs over a sort of Japanese 80s new wave pop production with shooting lasers: imagine a bit of Haruomi Hosono shaking it down with Yasuaki Shimizu.
A change in style, ‘Tropical’ sounds more like an ethnographic sampled lost treasure from Byrne and Eno or, the sort of no wave experiment Basquiat would have been throwing down in ’82. Native voices, pneumatic drilled samples, shuttled sticks and hand drums evoke the veldt, the Maasai, as remixed by Coldcut and the 900ft Jesus.
‘To Be Free’ is an upbeat number of Farley Jackmaster Funk’s Chicago grooves, handclap beats, arpeggiator patterns and funk, whilst ‘Emotion’ sees Mutsumi on flute, blowing merry suffused charms over a pumped N-R-G meets New Orleans Mardi Gras House music groove.
The highlight for me though is the constantly changing, evolving percussive and drumming relay, ‘Rhythm’. It could be a Brazilian Samba band, the African diaspora or even a Cuban rhythm section on a coked-up Miami night, but the beats just keep rolling and rattling, even galloping.
Pay It Forward is essentially a well-crafted, fun experiment in dance music genre hopping. It’s House and Techno music with a spirit of adventure that’s never idol and always up for taking the audience across a movable dance floor.
OK:KO ‘Liesu’
(We Jazz) 15th April 2022
Named after its drummer-composer/bandleader Okko Saastamoinen, the Finnish OK:KO quartet have been accumulating fans and acclaim alike over the last five years. Now onto their third album with the leading Euro jazz label and festival hub (and now quarterly magazine) We Jazz, they once more show-off a signature sound that’s imbued by the roots of hard-bop, free jazz and the more explorative, envelope pushing of a small tight combo. The notes sum up that style perfectly as, ‘adventurous but accessible’.
In practice that means Coltrane and Harden on the Savoy label, Charlie Parker, the Bill Evans Trio, Nate Morgan and Sonny Stitt taken on a scenic, poetic ride across the Finnish pastoral. Mikael Saastamoinen’s double-bass on the most naturalistic composition, ‘Kirkkis’, even manages to emote an oaken tree spreading its branching: The bass actually begins to sound like a cello against a wooded stretch of rim rattles and brushes. Later on, with that same composition, the quartet moves towards both the blues and luxuriant swing; beamed and trained on 60s NYC.
Bandleader Okko’s drums follow a constant leitmotif of splashed cymbals and rolling maelstroms that never quite penetrate the sea wall defenses, as Jarno Tikka goes high with flighty spirals and lower register rasps and descriptive lulls, and Toomas Keski-Säntti plays piano with a sense of both freedom and emergent-gestured melodies.
Tunes vary between expressive dances and erudite scene-setting emotions. The opener, ‘Anima’, goes for a visceral encapsulation of that title’s Latin origins – the breath, soul, spirit of vital forces -, whilst ‘Arvo’ pushes into more serious, noirish directions: like a bluesy but mysterious sassy accompanied skulk in a 1950s stripe joint. Throughout this album were constantly drawn back to the sea; both a very real Baltic one but also a metaphorical one of choppy emotions and swelled intensities. There’s drama yet nothing that ever proves too frantic, fierce, as this quartet keep it all in check, constantly flowing no matter how high those waves get. I love it, and still think Finland is producing some of the best contemporary jazz in not only Europe but beyond that. OK:KO’s reputation is save and broadening on the strength of this third album of the lively and emotive.
Kloot Per W ‘Arbre A Filles’
(Jezus Factory) 22nd April 2022
Despite doing it all so well, the maverick Kloot Per W, as a Belgian from the other side of the multi-linguistic quandary that is Belgium, apparently should be frowned upon, snubbed for singing in the French vernacular. In a culture, historical battle I’m unwilling to get drawn into, there’s a whole legacy of political backlashes against those with the Flemish mother tongue singing or speaking in the much-guarded French language: Jacques Brel aside. Actually that’s a terrible example, as Brel’s Flemish family actually dropped it to adopt the French language.
Anyway, the seven-decade spanning journeyman Kloot has decided to give it another bash, following the success of his inaugural Francophone EP, Nuits Blanches, from last year. Like the already mentioned Brel, and because of a history of reinvention, sagacious wit and self-depreciation, the Flemish cult artist dons a gauloise smoking jacket with élan and a certain fuck you attitude on his new songbook, Arbre A Filles (or the odd phrased “girl tree”).
A sort of intergenerational project, again, Kloot calls upon the production, collaborative help of Pascal Deweze: a full twenty-years Kloot’s junior we’re informed. And swinging by the studio, repeat offender foil, guitar-slinger for hire and ex dEUS band member Mauro Pawlowski and his collaborative partner Randy Trouvé add a bit of (middle-age) youthfulness; a taste of contemporary alt-rock to the songs. Keen Monolith Cocktail followers will of course remember (hopefully) that Marco and Kloot brought out their very own dysfunctional, knockabout White Album, called Outsider/Insider, a while back (making our choice picks at the time).
A road well-travailed, Kloot’s numerous musical changes – stretching back to the late 60s and early 70s as a bassist for The Misters and as a guitarist for The Employees, to a solo spell and the JJ Brunel produced Polyphonic Size – have lent the music a wise ring of authenticity; a life well-lived and experienced. And on this new songbook themes range from such timeless concerns as facing one’s mortality and more contemporary fare like Internet conspiracy theorists, cultural divisions. This is a grown-ups album then: despite the reference to Kloot’s worries on his cock size, though thankfully not a French speaker, I have no idea where this obsession springs-up on the album, as it’s only pointed out in the accompanying notes.
It all begins with the opening fuck you attitude of the French new wave, via Lou Reed, Mick Harvey and Anton Barbeau, styled ‘Tu Me Troubles’ (“you disturb me”), which has both bristle and sophistication, coquettish doo wop female backing singers and a touch of Britpop melody. ‘Le Pays’ (“the country”) moves the action towards a smoky blend of the Jazz Butcher and the Bad Seeds, as satellites’ twinkled communications blink over a psychedelic starry, starry night café scene. A spooked Morricone creeps around on the vibrato, cooing female-voiced backed ‘Girl On The Phone’, but it’s Blixa Bargeld fronting the Os Mutantes in a haunted jazz lounge on the title-track.
Raspy, grizzled and also mooning when not crooning, Kloot’s lyricism is fitted with a movable backing of both salon and Muscle Shores piano, strokes of beat music, glam, rock ‘n’ roll, radio city music hall, a touch of Cohen, and on the “lalala” flittered ‘Super Likeus’ a hint of both rebel country and the paisley underground. Yet everything is still contained in the French vogue, if from a unique perspective.
There’s a lot to like about this album, and it goes someway to Andrew Bennett (Jezus Factory’s one-man cottage industry founder) aggrandisement that Kloot is “Belgium’s best kept secret”. If there was any justice in the world (you’re kidding, right?!) this album would reach a wide audience and shine a light on, certainly, one of Belgium’s great talents. It’s also a killer French language songbook that proves the Flemish can indeed sing the Frenchman blues.
Jörg Thomasius ‘Acht Gesänge der Schwarzen Hunde (Experimenteller Elektronik-Underground DDR 1989)’ (Bureau B) 15th April 2022
From the steel curtained side of the Berlin Wall, a second GDR dedicated showcase of electronica from the noted Jörg Thomasius. At various times an artist in his own right (under the Tomato moniker), but also a member of the Das Freie Orchester, a radio show presenter, author, boiler man and exhibition technician, the East German maverick knocked-about with the likes of Andreas Grosser, Lars Stroschen and Conrad Schnitzler – working with the last two to set up the Tonart label.
It was the former, the renowned technician Grosser who opened up a whole world of electronic exploration, and instigated a train of events that led to Jörg meeting Terry Riley: freely handing out LSD at the time. Whilst under the authoritarian grip, Jörg still managed to connect with the burgeoning scene in West Berlin. And his experiments, collected together here from three different sources, easily fall into the greater Kosmische and new wave brackets.
Acht Gesänge der Schwarzen Hunde brings together diy explorations, peregrinations, sketches from his 80-85 documented Schwarze Hände (“black hands”) cassette, his own Kröten Kassetten label’s Gesänge der Komparsen (“songs of the extras”) 89 release, and the 90s After Eight – released again on another of his own label hubs, just after he left Das Freie Orchester.
Across the majority of this collection each modulated, oscillated, effected idea weighs in under the three-minute mark; glimpsing at, vanishing clips of what could be more expanded, drawn-out scores. The opener, ‘Besen Im kopf’ (“broom in the head”), seems to feature a strung-out, deconstructed orchestra of the avant-garde, classical and even Fluxus kind: Low ship horns sound, the inner workings of a piano resonate with a brassy metallic spindly sound. ‘Okoschadel’ (“eco skull”) and ‘Erste Himmelsmelodie’ (“first heavenly melody”) have more than a hint of early computer tech sampling; the kind Sakamoto was experimenting with in the early 80s. A mix if synthesized cut-ups, tubular bell percussion and staccato fashioned splurges.
‘Küss Mich Mien Liebchen’ (“kiss my love”) features (I take it) Jörg’s vocal ravings over a squiggled loon of underground tape culture, post-punk, Faust and Populäre Mechanik weirdness.
Ghosts in the machine, aerial whirled chattering space birds, slapped beats, timpani and lo fi computerized effects permeate the first nine oddities on this compilation. The tenth and final track however is an expansive twenty-minute plus sun rays ‘Meditation’. In that languid, relaxed time frame, Jörg astral-planes hints of Popol Vuh, Frosse, Ocean Of Tenderness Ash Ra on a new age equinox of spiritual alignment.
The Hamburg label Bureau B continues as custodians of Germany’s past and present electronic, experimental, Kosmische and new wave genres with another intriguing showcase come reminder of East Germany’s part in the underground music scene that defined a generation. Fans of those musical fields will find this an interesting addition to that story.
Qrauer ‘Heeded’
(Nonostar Records) 22nd April 2022
The most electronic signing yet to Alex Stolze’s burgeoning Nonostar imprint, the congruous fit of Christian Grochau and Ludwig Bauer coalesce their respective disciplines once more as the Qrauer duo.
With Christian’s percussionist, production and remix and Ludwig’s pianist, multi-instrumentalist and composing skills, Qrauer’s latest EP is a sophisticated shift of layered electronic body movement techno and reverberated spells both on and inside a neoclassical attuned piano. In the former camp, the EP’s first trio of tracks includes the subtle air-pinched filtered, cybernetic convergence of Four Tet, Carl Graig and trance style techno ‘The Mess’; the tinkling, translucent bulb mirrored short ‘Stardoll’; and the more clean-cut beats meets mysterious and gauzy wooed ‘No Sh.Left’, which features the wafted, ghostly and vaporous vocals of the German singer Sea Of Love.
Taking a slightly different path, the title-track is a sort of experiment in scoring a mini electroacoustic soundtrack. ‘Heeded’ is highly atmospheric, with the echoed resonance of a piano’s guts being touched by various textured materials, and a moving melody of both singular and a more uninterrupted flow of notes played from the keyboard itself. Almost a seamless follow-on, ‘Lustend’ features staccato cut-up samples of a voice and piano, but soon, in a relaxed fashion, bobs along to jug-poured and steel drum reverberated techno effects – like a calypso Phylyps on Basic Channel.
Sounding in many ways like a remix of chamber piano work, with all the original elements washed-out, the Heeded EP is a cerebral version of techno, trance and electronic dance music for people who hanker after more than just a four-to-the-floor beat and repetition.
Astrel K ‘Flickering I’
(Duophonic Super 45s Mail Order) 29th April 2022
Like one long mirage, a psychedelic tinged wavy trip inside the preoccupations of Rhys Edwards, the newly imagined Astrel K set-up sees the one-time Ulrika Spacek member swim in solo Scandinavian waters.
Although a solo platform, a moniker under which to pursue his songwriting, Astrel K does in fact include an array of local musicians from Rhys new(ish) home of Stockholm. We should of course name them at least: Lili Holényi, Milton Öhrström, Niklas Mellberg and Thomas Hellberg; all of whom make it possible for this hallucinogenic musical world to float.
Leaving behind the now defunct Spacek music factory, KEN, in (one of my old stomping grounds) Homerton, Rhys finds inspiration in the Swedish capital. Via the mail order label, Duophonic Super 45s, his debut Astrel long-player (the first single, the wobbled, languid and quivered Beatles and Velvets jangle, ‘You Could If You Can’ sold out rapidly on vinyl) swimmingly and with a gauzy lushness balances hazy winding L.A. scenery detective and romantic movie scores and tinkled ray-shining Library music with somnolent Floyd, Edward Penfold and Flaming Lips psychedelic pop, dreamwave and distant lingered, suffused trails of saxophone. All elements that come together across golden slumber cooed songs and shorter Stereolab and KPM like instrumental interludes.
Actually, one of the album’s best tracks is the expanded burnished and sax-swaddled ambient score ‘Forwardmomentum’ – reminding me of the Canadian school of such astral peregrinations, Matthew ‘Doc’ Dunn’s work.
Whimsy, wistfulness and druggy stupors hide pressing matters in the real world: the anxieties of the environment and online worlds especially. Certain paradoxes and idiosyncratic observations, plaints are dreamily wooed to a most fluid and softened backing of light and shade. Occasionally there’s a touch of fuzz, a little electric grind, but it’s mostly a lunar and tropical affair of psychedelic pop, enervated soundtrack strings, quirky changes, knowing easy-listening and beautifully conveyed, soulful songwriting.
No matter what the themes are, Flickering i is a languorous, swell and trippy bubble of a place to sit and reflect.
Sinnen ‘Hawk Moth Man’
(Hreám Recordings) 11th April 2022
I’m going to be honest with you all. I’m going in blind with this slow-release of pent-up energy; woes and guitar pedal effects sustain contouring.
Released on the always intriguing, and reliable, Hreám Recordings, Sinnen’s latest drudge and cymbal-splashed resonated traverse has an esoteric menace running throughout its gnawing and yearned core. A psychogeography of darwave, grunge, slowcore, the industrial, doom and the dreamy, the sword and sorcery title referencing Hawk Moth Man reimagines Mike Cooper fronting Sunn O))). Well, at least some of the time.
Shafts of soulful despondency, a release of abstract imagings languidly emerges from a slow-motion dissipation of shimmy and halftime beaten drums and amplified hums, drones. After one of those amplifier-contoured lead-ins, the first expanded track proper, ‘Painting Daisy’, grinds through a sludge of Codine, Fritch and Dinosaur Jnr.; a haze of the occult and that already mentioned grunge sound.
As the title would suggest, the next slow driven gruel, ‘Bury Your Regrets In Frozen Ground’, drags the listener across a harrowed soundscape. By contrast, a brief pause, an interlude of a sorts, ‘Shifter’ is an ambient (almost) vignette of holy orders as preached by Popol Vuh and Vukovar.
Personally I’m hearing shades of Outside Bowie on the very strange and curious ‘Hill’: a creeping sense of menace, trauma that seems to reach back into civil war period England. But it’s the semi-epic slowcore and flange wave, force field vibrating ‘Se Boda’, which sounds like Michael Stipe singing with The Telescopes, in some alternate universe, that I especially love.
There’s much to untangle, demystify from the heavy atmosphere of suspended pain, discord: one being, why the reference to the swordsman character from the 80s cartoon adventure, The Black Cauldron, ‘Taran’? What’s that all about then?
In all that slow dissonance there’s still some light, and so it never feels too dark, too much to bear. Having never crossed paths with the band/artist before, this could be their stock-in-trade signature: or not of course. Anyway, it gets a recommendation from me.
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 075: 75 Dollar Bill, Meursault, Simon McCorry, Camino Willow, Manu Louis, Dhoad Gypsies Of Rajasthan…
June 20, 2019
REVIEWS ROUNDUP
Words: Dominic Valvona
Another eclectic roundup of recommendations from Dominic Valvona, with recent and upcoming albums and EPs from the polygenesis amorphous traversing NYC band 75 Dollar Bill, cellist sound-sculptor of ambiguous environments Simon McCorry, oddball Belgian Manu Louis, the Dhoad Gypsies Of Rajasthan, Dictaphone welder Joe Posset and improvise experimental cellist, Charlie Ulyatt, and Balearic expletory House and Techno artist Kota Motomura.
Building their own ambitious universes Camino Willow releases his debut electronic vision Monotopia and Edinburgh artist Neil Scott Pennycook, under his Meursault alter ego, launches a move into fiction with his latest masterpiece Crow Hill. I also take a look at two special cult favourite reissues, the first from the Venezuelan legend Chelique Sarabia – his transformed psych vision of the country’s traditional music, ‘Revolución “Electrónica” en Música Venezolana’ – the second, from the Anglo-French troubadour Nick Garrie – the late 60s debut psychedelic and folksy opus The Nightmare Of J.B. Stanislas.
75 Dollar Bill ‘I Was Real’
(tak:til/Glitterbeat/Thin Wrist Recordings) 28th June 2019
Via Glitterbeat’s burgeoning specialist imprint tak:til and Thin Wrist Recordings, a second album of uncharted transient instrumental performances, passages and traverses from the polygenesis sophisticated NYC troupe, 75 Dollar Bill. Headed, though by no means controlled or dictated, by multi-instrumentalists Rick Brown and Che Chen, the amorphous group expands its ranks accordingly to feature a highly talented lineup of musicians and fellow experimentalists.
Previously making a subtle impact with their long-winded staccato entitled Wood/Metal/Plastic/Pattern/Rhythm/Rock album a few years back, Chen and Brown travelled a listless pan-global terrain; a fourth world Hassell imbued sonic geography of possibility.
Extending the perimeters and cast – expanding to a double album release this time around –, I Was Real features a variety of instrumental and sound manipulated combinations on a mix of performances, jams and studio created “fragment” sound collages. One of which, the opening sextet performed ‘Every Last Coffee Or Tea’, is a rearrangement of the same entitled song that originally appeared on the debut album, Cassette, whilst the “ghost inverted” follow-on of that opener, ‘C or T (Verso)’, references their cassette tape release of the same name. The former of these atmospheric peregrinations features a haze of wafting baritone sax and suffused viola and guitar lines, set to a “classic 3 against 2 rhythm”; a effortless but technical transportative soundtrack that evokes both the shrouded mystery of a Tibetan shrine and waking up to the sound of cattle herders in Mali. The reversal mirage of the latter of these two tracks sucks that opening suite backwards through a transmogrified Captain Beefheart prism.
The title-track, on what is an album that often uses past material to build anew, is itself a regular 75 Dollar Bill live set closer. Often building up a momentum that could run to thirty minutes, ‘I Was Real’ is more like a springboard; never quite repeating itself, always performed in different settings and taking in not only more recognizable instruments but also the surrounding environment. By contrast this seventeen-minute studio version is considered relatively “short”, though no less extemporized, as it takes in similar concrete reverberations, hums and drones.
The “impromptu” unruly avant-garde blues jam ‘There’s No Such Thing As A King Bee’ is one of my favourites. A “rebuke” to the titan of the form, Slim Harpo, and his famous raw blues-standard, this scuzzy, flange-effect overload boogie hoedown (with furious hi-hat bashing from Carey Balch) is wild: even primal.
Cleverly bending, no matter how free and improvised they might be, complicated timings and adroit microtonal notes to their will, 75 Dollar Bill turn elliptic and compound rhythms, undefined adventurous playing and collaged fragments into either 21st century desert musing blues or futuristic swamp music. As re-inventive as ever, I Was Real transforms the familiar to roam the borderless.
Simon McCorry ‘Border Land’
14th June 2019
Strange escapist environments and spaces materialize from the gauzy wanes and gestures of Simon McCorry’s cello on the ambiguous atmosphere-building Border Land. The third such ambient album of field recording manipulations from the classically trained cellist, this latest highly evocative work of the otherworldly transforms the recognizable into something mysterious, even on occasion, the supernatural.
Cloaked in echo and various effects, even the wind whistling through the rustic metal gate to an Orkney lighthouse can suddenly become a strange spooked siren song of countless memories; the sound of lost souls from beyond the ether perhaps: suggestible much?! One of a duo of similar recordings made on a road trip to the Island of Westray – the other windy projection being the Ambient Works era Aphex Twin influenced ‘Sacred Geometrics’ – the fog enveloped ‘Not One Thing’ channels the psychogeography of the environment in which it was recorded to create an entirely new imaginative soundscape.
Remnants and traces of McCorry’s principle instrument can be heard mournfully and achingly guiding the listener towards the skylight: Towards a warm glimmer on the haunted chilled rising ‘Awake A Moment’, and towards the aura of an orbiting astral object of serene desire, on the Tangerine Dream like ‘Spheric’.
Traversing detuned descending aerial arcs, dusty particles, gaseous clouds and corridors to constellations without actually remaining locked to any particular sound or atmospheric mood, the sonic possibilities seem endless: the ambiguity too. And although much of this album is mysterious and uncertain, so untethered, as it is to anything concrete and tenable, McCorry is really exploring the ideas of “stillness”; finding something approaching it anyway, a purposeful pause and break from the chaotic overload of our intensive and intrusive technologically-connected modern world.
Border Land reframes its sources, masks its frayed and bowed cello articulations to produce an often vivid transient amorphous series of intelligently improvised environments and horizons: both inward and outward.
Meursault ‘Crow Hill’
(Common Grounds) 21st June 2019
An ambitious literary-enriched album with a loose story and range of perspectives that will unfold further in comic book form and through live performance, Neil Scott Pennycook’s Crow Hill diorama delivers a whirlwind of dark emotions; many of which feel like a punch to the heart.
Announced as a new chapter for Pennycook’s alter ego Meursault, released as the launch album for the new independent Common Grounds label (set-up and run by the Edinburgh Chamber Studios owner and engineer Graeme Young; the location for the recording of this album) Crow Hill marks a move into fiction for the Edinburgh artist. An “urban horror” of vignettes, each song on this album represents twelve chapters of plaintive and lamentable grief and broken promises from the imagined town’s inhabitants, set to a constantly beautifully aching soundtrack that either builds and builds towards anthemic crescendo or despairingly gallops towards the flames: in the case of the brutal punishing ‘Jennifer’, a discordant scream of anguish, on what could be a crime of domestic abuse.
Gazing into the dark souls of his cast with tales of inner demons and the like, Pennycook can be as ominous as he can be achingly vulnerable. Especially on the heartbreaking psychiatric episode title-track, “She sees me with kindness in my eyes/And tells me she still loves me” being just one of many poignant lines.
Though constantly impressive in the past, his characteristic Lothian burr quivery warble and tumult-pained vocals have never been delivered with such depth and profound elegiac maturity. Still channeling Clap Your Hands Say Yeah with a penchant for country, an Indie-Americana feel and banjo rhythm permeates throughout most of the album. There’s even a campfire version of Audrey Williams gospel-country teary ‘I Heard My Mother Weeping For Me’, a venerable hymn made famous by Audrey’s tragic cowboy husband Hank no less. With the pinning hurt and travails of such an icon ringing in his ear, Pennycock’s own lonesome trail is unmistakably honed in austerity Britain.
Apart from the country influences – as filtered through the Scottish East Coast –you may also pick up echoes of Adrian Moffett, Talk Talk, Radiohead era The Bends, and even Bowie on the increasingly hostile, whipped and thrashed ‘Art School’ fuck-off.
An outstanding album full of both heartache and brilliance, Crow Hill is a vivid, richly and descriptively revealing minor-opus; the first chapter or part of a much grander multimedia universe that crosses songwriting with veiled fiction, illustration and performance. As first stabs go, Pennycook has shown an encouraging erudite skill for writing, which translates well when put to music. This will be an album in many end-of-year lists.
Dhoad Gypsies Of Rajasthan ‘Times Of Maharaja’
(ARC Music) 28th June 2019
Proud custodians of the courtly music of the Maharajas, Rahis Bharti and his brothers Amrat Hussain, Teepu and Sanjay Khan continue a family tradition that can be traced back over seven generations. Handed-down through their gifted great grandfather Ustad Rasool Buxkhan and his equally talented grandson Ustad Rasool, the sibling troupe practice the travelling Khan Saheb style that originated amongst the Romani population who left India over a thousand years ago. It is a special musical caste and title bestowed upon these followers by the bejeweled rulers, in an era when opulence was king in Rajasthan.
The court house band so to speak, these most exhilarating musicians provided both the ceremonial, celebratory and entertaining accompaniment to religious and public events; marking everything from births to marriages and even the arrival of the rain season. Times Of Maharaja is a brilliant showcase to that grand tradition; a tradition that comes alive through dynamic virtuoso playing and the just as complex, remarkable vocals.
Already a well-established and acclaimed group, playing notably for a host of world leaders, the Queen and even at Mick Jagger’s birthday, the Gypsies gallop and giddily swirl through an effortless songbook of paeans and majestic longings as they wind back the clock to the palace epoch.
The jubilance of a new born prince is buoyantly celebrated on the brassy-resonant sumptuous ‘Sona Ra Button Banna’, whilst the “dream wedding” is given a yearned, pondered – later hurriedly – accompaniment on the processional ‘Dhanraj Sahebji’. An album of solid showmanship throughout at every turn, with the flickering, fluttering tablas almost catching fire at times, such is the blurry rapidness of the playing, Times of Maharaja is a rich regal tableau of romantic exultations, elephant lolloping sways, suffused drones and bobbing rhythms. No longer in the service of those legendary kings and queens of India, this travelling band spread their music internationally as both an educational tool and of course as entertainment. They prove that the legacy is, without doubt, in good hands.
Camino Willow ‘Monotopia’
(Willow Music) 28th June 2019
Exploring the post-millennial epoch burgeoning Bedford-based producer and songwriter Maximillian Newell explores both the anguish and potentials of an ever intrusive and dominant Internet. Sharing and connecting more than ever yet simultaneously feeling more lonely and vulnerable, the benefits outweighed by a Pandora’s Box of unfiltered anger, validation causing anxiety and discord, Newell represents generation smartphone; a generation working out individual expression in a “collective consciousness”.
Further tied conceptually to “an adventure in a cult-like city in the sky where the main characters embark on an epic journey into the desert”, Newell’s ambitious debut album has a wide scope thematically and sonically. Creating his own universe of both the plaintive and euphoric, the inward and expansive, under the Camino Willow moniker – a world that will be extended to the medium of graphic novel in the future – he circumnavigates modern-day suburban Britain; escaping boredom and constriction of uncertainty and depression for moments of languid hypnotics and blasts of neo-pop ascendant electro anthems.
Throughout, Monotopia is full of light and shade, despondency and hope, with passages and more full realized tracks (some featuring soulful vocals, some purely instrumental) flowing into each other almost uninterrupted. And with a nuanced balance that is musically imbued by Dean Blunt one minute, Django Django the next, even Fuck Buttons and Liars, Newell sounds like Everything Everything signed to Ninja Tunes as centrifugal drums meet breakbeat, the ambient meets dreamy blissful psych-pop and R&B, the romantic meets sophisticated cynicism.
There’s a lot to be excited about as Newell’s visions take shape. Though cast as a project of despondency and uncertainty, reflecting the state of the author and his subject’s mental health, there’s plenty of emergent dreamy efference and diaphanous light to be found on this escape from the suburbs. Monotopia is a glittering start to an ambitious career.
Posset/Ulyatt ‘A Jar Full’
(Crow Versus Crow) 7th June 2019
It won’t come as any surprise to find that the most unlikely of experimental pairings, between a sporadic and garbled Dictaphone operator and frayed, friction-stretched cellist, offers up the strangest of results.
The first set of recordings from this peculiar avant-garde union, released digitally and on (very) limited cassette tape, features both uninterrupted serialism pieces, knocked back and forth between Dictaphone welder Joe Posset and cellist Charlie Ulyatt, and extemporized live performance.
Side A of this revived physical format version posts the results of a remote exchange; both artists’ providing first-take experiments for their counterparts to further improvise over. With no advance preparations and neither artist interfering, not even peremptorily listening to the results, the final versions of ‘At This Lost Hour’ and ‘A Reasonable Remedy’ are as surprising to them as they are to us. Squiggly, warping, real-time and rewound slurred and more fidgety recognizable voices emanate from Posset’s overworked Dictaphone as the strung-out quivers and free-roaming plucks and prods of Ulyatt’s creaking cello amorphously wanes away. The first of these odd couplings (think Faust Tapes meets Fluxus and The Books in Tony Conrad’s Dream Factory) features almost demonical voices and obscured snatches of dialogue as the cello meanders, yet also offers at least a small string of plucked notes. The second of these tracks has a harsher edge, with the violent tape spool cutting and horsehair bow carving away at its prey.
Previous to these exchanges, both artists performed an impromptu set together at a venue in Posset’s hometown of Nottingham. Inhabiting a shared space of mention in a magazine, Posset invited Ulyatt to play a one-off collaboration. Only meeting for the first time a few hours before the show, with no rehearsal or preparation the pairing performed, as the second side of this tape bears out, a haunting environmental invocation. Using the whole cello, especially its wooden body to evoke the uneasy sound of unsettling movement (like spirits making their presence known by knocking, kicking a box down some steps and scraping large objects across the floor), Ulyatt conjures up sounds you wouldn’t believe possible as Posset, attuned to the same esoteric mood, triggers just as ominous sounding supernatural elements from the ether.
Mysteriously tangled, surreptitious voices and creaking atmospherics abound on both these live tracks, ‘High Head’ and ‘At The Angel’, and on the mini-album as a whole. Perfectly in keeping with the Crow Versus Crow house style of such sonic and tape-collage experiments, A Jar Full is a strange avant-garde proposition worth your attention: It sounds both mad and fucked-up, but also paranormal.
Manu Louis ‘Cream Parade’
(Igloo Records) July 2019
At the heart of the Belgian artists Manu Louis’s second album lays a disenchantment with society’s dependence on technology; the Internet of these visions rightly examined through the medium of, often, odd-ball unrequited serenades and cybernetic jazz elegy. Kooky throughout, Louis and his guests – which include the versatile London-based singer Heidi Heidelberg shadowing Louis or channeling an automated staccato vessel on a series of quasi-duets, and fellow Belgian and virtuoso saxophonist Greg Tirtiaux adding strung-out blues-y and romantically pining horns – roam freely across a number of musical genres in their quest to articulate that unease.
After the initial opening introductory futuristic smoky cocktail lounge horn suffused waft of ‘Saxophone’, Louis traverses Yello, Kreidler and Jack Dutronic on ‘Internet’, and on the clack-y percussive (down to another guest, Brazilian percussionist Nylo Canella) skip and pulse ‘Efface’, Stereo Total meets Einstürzende Neubauten. Technology’s electronic presence comes up against more traditional, if masked, instrumentation on what is, despite the anxious themes, a mostly bouncy, goofy and cool affair: A cynical Louis perhaps, even lampooning his own idiosyncratic European heritage, laying-it-on-thick vocally on the album’s part-homage, part despondent finale ‘Tardigrade’; increasingly losing the plot with a loopy aria as he yearns about the peculiar, near-immortal, microscopic ‘water bear’ of the title; an animal whose resilience to environmental extremities is second to none: Perhaps the only other living thing kicking about with cockroaches in a nuclear aftermath.
Vogue chanson crosses paths with Station 17, Sparks with Dean Blunt and Stereolab on an album that fuses the Belle Epoch with Tresor, Euro-kitsch pop with St. Vincent. However odd, colorful and unique these aloof visionary tales and yearnings might sound they are meant to be dystopian and serious in nature – partly inspired by Samuel Beckett’s own literary depictions of a “postmodern world of obsession and social and existential disorientation” outlined in his Unnameable and Molly novels. A pilotless journey in fact, into the all-consuming matrix, an augur alarm before it’s all too late and the Internet’s strangulating tentacles cut off our air of free will forever. It just so happens to be fun.
Chelique Sarabia ‘Revolución “Electrónica” en Música Venezolana’
(Pharaway Sounds) 29th May 2019
A welcome distraction from the current political tumult in Venezuela, the whacked-out flange and reverb-drenched visions of the country’s legendary polymath José Enrique “Chelique” Sarabia arrive just in time as a reminder of that South America’s cultural legacy; from a period when the country enjoyed a renaissance in arts and music, partly fueled (as we will see) by the oil boom of the 1960s and 70s.
Going through a number of incarnations, originally released exclusively as part of a Christmas gift package for employees and customers of Shell in 1973, under the title of 4 Fases del Cuatro-Música Venezulana desarrollada Electrónicamente por Chelique sarabia (translating as 4 Phases of four – Venezuelan Music Electronically Developed By Chelique Sarabia), the retitled and repackaged 1971 Revolución “Electrónica” en Música Venezolana has been dusted off once more and given a new lease of life.
An example of when an established composer/arranger takes a sudden leap into the unknown, the “electronic revolución” that Chelique created was one that transformed the traditional folkloric music of the country into an exotica space-age trip. Already established and renowned, notably for penning the famous ‘Ansiedad’ and for a substantial back catalogue of standards, Chelique took a gamble, plugging himself into the psychedelic mainframe and going wild with a troupe of adroit musicians in an effect-mad studio. Using we’re told, “especially developed equipment (M.R.A.A.), based off of the principles of the Moog”, the now very experimental minded maverick filtered more traditional instruments – such as the local variant of the four-string Spanish folk guitar, the “cuatro”, and pear-shaped chordophone “bandola Llanera” – through cavernous echo, tape delay and synthesized frequencies to create a resonating mirage.
The source material of signature cantina and mountainside folk, via flourishing Flamingo and Spanish Catholic liturgy, is consumed and removed so that only veiled watery and ghostly traces remain: vapours even.
Hardly created in a vacuum, this musical quartet themed album often saunters up to the chic open-top driving music of Italian and French soundtrack composers, to the breakbeat psychedelics of David Axelrod, kitsch-jazz and pop. It could also fall into the cult Library Music missive; an oddball South American fusion of hallucinatory reimagined traditions.
You don’t necessarily need this LP in your life, but it’s plenty of fun and worth a punt out of curiosity if nothing else. Viva la electronic revolution.
Nick Garrie ‘The Nightmare Of J.B. Stanislas’
(Tapete Records) 29th June 2019
Worthy of a proper release, resurfacing for the first time in 2005, but finally receiving a full revival by Tapete Records, the poet-troubadour Nick Garrie’s lost debut album of 1969 is remarkable for a number of reasons. Provenance alone being one, recorded as it was at the studios of the Parisian label Disc AZ with Eddie Vartan and his full orchestra on swelling gravitas duties (even if Garrie wasn’t exactly happy with the results; much preferring, as the demos bear out, a more stripped acoustic intimacy). Remarkable still, despite being the weary and worldly restless traveller that he was, Garrie was only nineteen at the time.
The son of a fiery turbulent union between a Russian father and Scottish mother, living for a time in England (long enough for Nick to be dragged through the boarding school system; his peers evidentially, because of his Russian ancestry and original Miansarow family name, assumed he was Jewish and so meted out plenty of bullying punishment) before being forced to take up French citizenship with a move across the channel, Garrie was always too British for the French, and too French for the British. However, whilst making roots in France, Garrie studied European literature – the inspiration and foundations of his music starting out as an exercise in Surrealist automatic writing. Dodging the compulsory French requirement for national service (two-years service from the age of eighteen), he went on the run; taking his guitar and gift for considered poetic evocation with him. He would soon turn up in Brussels, where he soon renounced that French citizenship, auditioning for the fated Disc AZ label boss Lucien Morisse: “I got my guitar out and played ‘Deeper Tune Of Blue’. He pulled out a contract and said ‘signez, monsieur, signez!’”
Given a great opportunity, especially so young, to record an album, what would be the Anglo-French artist’s debut was lavished with sumptuous orchestration; a pomp that gave Garrie’s more stripped originals an air of the string-grandeur of Nirvana, The Herd, Love Sculpture and pre-progressive Aphrodite’s Child. Fate unfortunately struck on the eve of its release, with the suicide of Morisse, which sent everything into chaos for the label and Garrie. His debut suite would end up in limbo, with only a few copies making it out of the factory before deletion. Gaining an instant cult status, this lost treasure has only officially seen the light of day on a couple of occasions since.
The ‘nightmare’ of both this album title’ and the all-too-real one of seeing a burgeoning career curtailed, is the backstory and theme of this properly sanctioned re-release. The collection and original ‘nightmare’ entitled standout, is also a rousing minor-opus to finding identity and belonging. Weaving that Russian heritage into a George Harrison-esque guitar motif, swirling strings rich globetrotting fantasy, inspired by that literary learning and penchant for automatic writing, Garrie laments about his own self as an alter ego, finding out and unveiling his true ancestry: much to his dismay. ‘The Nightmare Of J.B. Stanislas’ is an anthem to wrap the rest of this songbook around, with few tracks matching its gravitas and scale as a Psychedelic and folk pop opus.
Featuring the full running order original, both sides of Garrie’s ‘Queen Of Spades’ single and a septet of demos, this showcase captures the torn troubadour in youthful escapism. It also shows an artist finding his niche, a checkered songbook of Bacharach-like pastoral romance (‘Can I Stay With You’), the spiritual and filmic (‘David’s Prayer’), Mike Nesmith Monkees (‘The Wanderer’, ‘Little Bird’) and The Moody Blues adrift a Turkish flying carpet (the 1968 demo ‘Stone And Silk’). Scattered amongst these redolent love-serenades and brooding pathos is the more curious coach trip ‘Bungle’s Tours’ (an air of sniffy snobbishness and Magical Mystery Tour showhall scorn about mass-tourism – then in its infancy of course – and package tours that sounds like the Bonzos and Simon & Garfunkel are at the wheel) and lampooning country-gal hoedown ‘Queen Of Queens’.
The most elegiac bit of inevitable pathos is saved for the original album’s swansong, ‘Evening’. A highly descriptive nocturnal diorama unfolds as it reflects a metaphorical end to all our days, this plaintive spell is as sad as it is poignantly beautiful.
As a debut from a fairly young aspiring artist poet, The Nightmare Of J.B. Stanislas’ is quite impressive and ambitious, if not quite original or unique enough to stand-out from his peers that did make it, on either side of the Channel. Yet, there’s some interesting experimentation and lyricism at play to make this a worthwhile purchase; a curiosity of a lost album from an unparalleled epoch.
Kota Motomura ‘New Experience’
(Hobbes Music) Vinyl/Stream: 14th June 2019, DL: 13th September 2019
Free floating on a moistened tropical air that blows between the rainforests and the Balearics, Tokyo artist Kota Motomura makes an impressive debut on the Hobbes Music imprint with his new exotic EP suite. Motomura moves fluidly but deeply through a myriad of House, Techno and electronic sub-styles to produce an often sauntering, bobbing cornucopia of lush entranced dance music.
Via proper study, learning the aural/pitch/sight-reading method of Solfege under the tutelage of Master Masahiko Muraoka, and a penchant for the music of Japanese Techno legend Ken Ishii, Motomura has been steadily, if without much fanfare, building a reputation for his unique experiments.
But this release nearly never happened. Originally sending demos to Hobbes as far back as 2017, and agreeing on a release, the line went dead for more than six months. It eventually transpired that Motomura had been taken ill, and so dropped off the radar. Better late than never, and back in contact, New Experiences- is now finally seeing the light of day.
The four-track, expanding to six on the ‘download’ version, EP first touches down in a sonic paradise on the lapping tidal, glistening tranquil opener ‘Aboy’, and then dreamily travels inland to a greenery of bird calls, frogs and insect choruses on the bopping 808 beats chiming electro-pop progression ‘Yes’. Melting swaddled and wafting jazzy-lilt saxophone (courtesy of Mutsumi Takeuchi) and veiled diaphanous vocals (Sawako Yanagida) with deep beats and Chicago House style piano motifs, Motomura plays around merging Bossa Nova with orgasmic slow-fucking samples on the shaking ‘Status’, and weaves echoes of early Moby, Carl Craig and Felix da Housecat into an increasingly warping Morse code slice of classy dance music on ‘Cry Baby’. Of the bonus tracks, ‘Satellites’ (as you’d expect from its title) features a Sputnik circumnavigating orbit of transduced lunar broadcasts and submarine sonar bleeps, which gets more piercing and mad as it goes on, whilst ‘Return’ has an otherworldly X Files vibe to it.
In all a great showcase of the exotic, lush and more mysterious that propels the origins of House and Techno into curious, mostly subtropical directions.
Words: Dominic Valvona
Monolith Cocktail Blog 