THE MONTHLY DIGEST OF ACCUMULATED NEW MUSIC; THE SOCIAL INTER-GENERATIONAL/ECLECTIC AND ANNIVERSARY ALBUMS CELEBRATING PLAYLIST; PLUS CHOICE PIECES FROM THE ARCHIVES.
CREDIT: Bhutan Balladeers Dorji with drumnyen by Marilena Umuhoza Dell
___/THE NEW____
Bhutan Balladeers ‘Your Face Is Like The Moon, Your Eyes Are Stars’
(Glitterbeat Records) 28th July 2024
Cosmologically poetical in title, the latest production in the highly prolific catalogue of in-situ authentic recordings by Ian Brennan (joined on each expedition by his partner and foil the Italian-Rwandan photographer, author and filmmaker Marilena Umuhoza Delli), finds the acclaimed producer, musician, writer and violence prevention advocate scaling the peaks of the world’s highest nation of Bhutan: a still largely unknown and relatively mysterious culture built around thousands of years of Buddhist conversion and a prohibitive geography, with some of its Himalayan heights remaining unclimbed.
Wishing to draw attention to this small nation’s culture and music (its stats too: more or less ‘zero homicides’, and the ‘first carbon neutral country’ on the planet) Brennan brought together the Bhutan Balladeers of intergenerational voices and musicians to pour out their pining and always melodiously incredible allegories, folklore, storytelling and passed-down songs of localized heartache, woes, proverbs and losses – both national and personal.
Recorded up a mountain with no name, in a stunning hilltop forest location overseen by largest sitting Buddha in the world, outside the capital of Thimphu, various combinations of male and female singers, in both choruses and solo channel the complex extended, counter-flowing vocal tones of the classical 17th century form of Zhungdra. Thanks to the PR notes on this one, the form is derived from “Sanskrit, and the Choekey language (“dharma language”) used in Zhungdra songs is said to be indecipherable to most Bhutanese apart from Buddhist monks.” And is one of the two predominant folk music forms in the realm; or as Wikipedia puts it: “…an entirely endemic Bhutanese style associated with the folk music of the central valleys of Paro, Thimphu, and Punakha, the heart of the Ngalop cultural area.”
Accompanied in various combinations by the Drumnyen (a lute with 3 double-strings, also sometimes known as Drangyen), the Chiwang (a 2-string, bowed fiddle), and the wooden flute, or in the case of the only female participant to accompany herself, Lemo, on the spindly brassy chimed beauty ‘Turning Inauspicious Days Good’, the Yangchen (which is a hammered dulcimer).
From the rarest of elder songs to those dedicated to “our friend” the horse, optimistic augurs and more plaintive tones, the various, mostly a capella performances have an almost otherworldly presence – especially the opening yearned ‘The Day You Were Born’, which seems to have some flange-like vortex effect on the choir of women’s voices that almost sounds spacey, astral and a little Arabian. Like many of Brennan’s global expanding recordings, there’s always something connective; something that sparks evocations of sounds from cultures that aren’t, on the surface, obviously connected. The accompaniment to me sounds at times almost like Moroccan Gnawa, or like a banjo, the voices meanwhile, lean towards Vietnam, China and even India. Always beautifully melodious, harmonic and tunefully struck with a note of quiet romantic heartache.
Powerful whilst unstitched from a silk canvas, or gently contouring the hidden valleys of this green and mountainous world below from a lofty position, the Bhutan Balladeers ensemble makes a four hundred year old form sound very much alive, refreshing and utterly captivating. File under yet another fine example of ears-open-to-new-sounds-you-never-knew-existed-before, as Brennan exposes us to a hidden land of authentic discovery.
Floating World Pictures ‘S-T’
(Lo Recordings)
A vague Swami gauze of bellowing and synthesized waves permeated with field recordings taken from immediate and more exotic-sounding surroundings, the second expanded work from Chestnutt (producer and member of Snapped Ankles) and Raimund Wong’s (graphic and sound artist) Floating World Pictures’ communal expands vaporous horizons once more.
As an amorphous re-juxtaposition and transformed vision of their self-described ‘loud ambient’ peregrinations on the previous debut album, The Twenty-Three Views (released in May of 2022), a connection is maintained with the extended ‘continuous’ four-track suite ‘Look Now For The World Is Shining Bright’, which is suffused with elements from it and its numerous collaborators.
With third wheel foil Ocean Moon also on hand to offer up his Cornwall located studio and additional musical/compositional skills, that culmination of signatures, leitmotifs, wild menagerie and mystique is further transported and remolded to create something like a movement of spiritual risings, searing Laraaji golden divine styled rays, Jason Pierce-like woozy mantras, holy drones and Ariel Kalma-esque saxophone drifts.
Channeling Moon’s (the nom de plume of Jon Tye) coastal studio and the environment outside, another of the ‘continuous’ extended tracks, ‘Have You Met Your Maker’, was recorded by the trio one day last August. With the outdoors bleeding over into the various traversing and reverberating phases, the mood progresses from the ominous to searching then hallucinated.
Variations on the light and shade vibe prompt imaginative landscapes of water replenishing gratitude and lyrically obscured songs of praise, evaporations, oscillations, alien craft and the astral.
At any one time I was picking up Ajay Sagar, Bitchin Bajas, Iasos John Lane, Ambient Works 2 Aphex Twin, Syrinx, Mythos, FSOL and Ivan The Tolerable’s Linthorpe Crepuscule Volume 2 album.
As the name implies, the trio envision spiritual and exotic floating world pictures from out of the sky; pushing ambient music and field recordings in the process until they threaten to get amplified into loud swells of forbade and drama. Seek out intrepid curious listeners, for there are sophisticated and improvised ideas that stretch the imagination and karma to be found.
Miles Otto ‘Desynclined’
(Subexotic)
Miles Otto feeds an absorption of early electronic influences, the kosmische, avant-garde explorations from another age, minimalist techno and cult soundtrack synth music into an analogue apparatus and filters until whole new tangible, tactile and rhythmic patterns emerge.
From sequencer-triggered “chaos” and more ominous sci-fi warped and enveloping threats of particle beam overload, a sense of cosmic floating, of thoughts and contemplation in a both retro-futuristic and machine age, Otto finds space to embrace some removed version of beauty and the melodic. A balance of a kind is struck, with the percolated frazzled raspy and apparitional alien music of Bernard Szjenner and Günter Wüsthoff converging through opening up and turning dials with Delia Derbyshire and Asmus Tietchens. In addition to those references there’s the tight-delay tribal percussive plastique techno of Richie Hawtin going up against the Kubrickian and the more springy soft play of Carmen Jaci.
Noisy dissonance, zip and zaps, rotor-bladed choppy rhythms and ripples in the fabric, the sound of whirly cosmic birds and more obscured creatures; a space walk of ruminated gravitas; vampiric galactic soundtracks, tubular paddled beats; space angels; squiggles, squirms and fizzes. This is the fluctuating, dissipating liminal sound world that is forged from years of study.
Otto’s inaugural fully realized album is said to mark a change in direction from previous EPs – described in the PR notes as ‘inhabiting the margins of dance music and metronomic rhythm’. And if that is indeed so, then this ambitious full canvas of analogue electronica is going to surprise many with its myriad of sources and influences, sound-alikes: everyone from Tangerine Dream to Cluster, Analogue Bubblebath Richard James, Richard H. Kirk, Basic Channel, Michael Kamen and Belbury Poly. Searching for balance and harmony amongst the universal hubris, Otto takes flight into ever more expanding horizons.
Jeff Bird ‘Cottage Bell Peace Now’
(Six Degrees Records)
Imagine a 130-year-old pump organ in the hands of Roedelius, Iasos, John Cale or Florian Fricke and you’d be at least halfway to describing or getting a hold on the amplified bellowed drones, curvatures and sustained hazy beams of light that build up a thoughtful quintet of movements on Jeff Bird’s most recent project.
Cottage Bell Peace Now is an almost sedate, near hopeful title, its architect perhaps finding some kind of relative peace in the polarized, tumultuous times through the curiosity and repair of this latest acquisition.
A long-time foil within the Cowboy Junkies circle and multi-instrumentalist performer with an enviable list of notable artists over the decades, the founder member of the Canadian folk band Tamarack sure has a rich CV to draw upon and channel.
Already mastering an eclectic range of instruments he now gets to grips with the grand imposing pipe organ; a gift that he refurbished over time. Less stained-glass pastoral and reverent in Bird’s hands, the pumped waves and layers emote spatial lenses, dusted beams of light, the concertinaed, ripples and spells of near uninterrupted cycles of abstract soul searching and peaceful inquiry.
However, ‘Peace, You Know You Want It’ introduces stone-chipped percussion to the various pitched and bassy drones and what sounds like croaking crows. The suite also sounds a little Southeast Asian, especially with the traffic and moped-like horns that smatter this busy background interchange as if it were a window in on Saigon or Calcutta.
Working with so many different musicians and artists over time, Bird’s contact book and network is filled with talented foils to call upon. And so he invited the Korean activist, traditional percussionist scion, composer and vocalist Dong Won Kim to lend voice to the spiritually connective, stripped-back yearned ‘Peace Heart’. Soulfully authentic in poetic hunger and assonant tones, Kim’s turn proves transportive and stirring in merging the Eastern with the low and soft organ. Second guest spot goes to the drummer Sam Cino, who offers a sort of post-rock Tortoise and Daniel Lanois drum beat and splash of cymbals to the mysterious seascape melted and Flyodian ‘Peace Today, Peace Tomorrow’.
From just the suffused and shorter reverberations and rises Bird presents soaring, sonorous and recollected expressions that defy easy categorisation; the venerated, attuned and tonal tuned to a very different moving ambient frequency and gravitas.
Modern Silent Cinema ‘Anemic Music’
(Bad Channels Records)
The fourth album in an eventual six album cycle of new and archival recordings from Cullen Gallagher’s long-running Modern Silent Cinema project, Anemic Music reverberates, resonates and shakes to a range of psychedelic, post-rock, krautrock, scuzz and fuzz influences across a myriad of soundtrack-like instrumentals.
Marking the twentieth year of this celluloid, art and avant-garde inspired nom de plume, the collection of guitar-led tunes and shorter experimental studies and passages merges melody with abrasions, the coarse and near distorted; often fusing a eclectic catalogue of international influences, from Michio Kurihara to Bill Orcutt and the Sun City Girls with Thruston Moore, Yonatan Gat, Günter Schickret, Bill Frisell. What starts out with a hint of 90s indie rock or grunge soon transforms into the hallucinogenic, with wobbled, theremin-like sci-fi sounds from old Soviet silent era space movies.
Two of the tracks from this album of previously misplaced but now retrieved recordings (falling within the perimeters of 2008 to 2014) were written to soundtrack two very different if similarly aged, short and silent films. Inspiring the album title, the doyen of conceptual art Marcel Duchamp’s Anemic Cinema, a collaboration with Man Ray and Marc Allégret, features both spinning, whirling circles of optical hypnotizing art and text, which when read aloud suggests scatological and obscene erotic scenarios, puns and alliterations.
A more naïve charming alternative, Winsor McCay’s famous Gertie On Tour animation features a lolloping brontosaurus encountering the, then, modern world – sat next to a beaver and playfully knocking a train off its tracks as if it were a mere kid’s train set. The former is given a suitably quivery and swirling soundtrack of apparitional and hypnotist strangeness, whilst the latter is wobbly and metallic, queer and mirage-like – reminding me of Broken Shoulder, the Gunn-Truscinski Duo and Frank Black for some reason.
Elsewhere there’s flat-of-the-guitar-body like beaten rhythms, a repeating endearing piano, a transmogrified echo of 60s go-go garage band music, a krautrock vision of distorted amp Louisiana blues, and heart of darkness mystery. Modern interpretations and experiment make for some intriguing and interesting, nearly always melodic, soundtracks, vignettes and open-ended probing. Those archives, stored and often forgotten about tunes and ideas prove a valuable insight worth hearing.
__/THE SOCIAL PLAYLIST VOLUME 88__
The Social Playlist is an accumulation of music I love and want to share, tracks from my various DJ sets and residencies over the years, and both selected cuts from those artists, luminaries we’ve lost and those albums celebrating anniversaries each month.
Running for over a decade or more, Volume 88 is as eclectic and generational spanning as ever. Look upon it as the perfect radio show, devoid of chatter, interruptions and inane self-promotion.
As always, each month I select choice cuts from albums that have reached certain milestone anniversaries. This July (or thereabouts) that selection includes an alternative version of the lead anthem from The Beatles A Hard Day’s Night LP (60 this month!) plus choice tracks from Robert Wyatt‘s Rock Bottom (50 years old this month), Hieroglyphics crew member Casual‘s Fear Itself (30), Above The Law‘s Uncle Sam’s Curse (also 30), King Creosote‘s Commonwealth Games soundtrack From Scotland With Love (10), The Cambodian Space Project‘s Whiskey Cambodia (also 10 this month), and Land Observations The Grand Tour (another 10 year celebration) – see also my original review of that album in the archives section below.
The inevitable nod to those dearly departed, I’ve chosen a sketch from the king of deadpan delivery, the comedian and actor Bob Newhart, who passed away just last week. I can still hear his sketches played repeatedly at my parents’ house when I was a kid in the 80s. The routine I’ve picked was actually riffed on and off by Joel Maisel in the ridiculously popular and incredible Marvelous Mrs. Maisel – trying to pass it off as his own, he stank, and so ended a short-lived side hassle, his marriage and the rise and rise and rise of his belated wife.
I’ve added a sprinkling of newish tunes too; picking tracks I didn’t get the time or room to feature in the Monthly Playlist Revue. That list includes Chris Corsano, The God Fahim, Hifiklub with Marion Brunetto, and Kid Acne and foil Cappo remixed by Tom Carnuana.
That just leaves choice music from my collection (some records I’d love to own too) by Matthew David, Peter Blegvad with John Greaves and Lisa Herman, Cressida, Radio Stars, Malcolm Catto, Ottla, Linkopii, Abdel Aziz El Mubarak and so very much more.
Track list:::
Dionne Warwick ‘A Hard Day’s Night’
The Cambodian Space Project ‘Longing For The Light Rain’
Abdel Aziz El Mubarak ‘Tahrimni Minnak’
Hifiklub w/ Marion Brunetto ‘Rompe Cul’
Chris Corsano ‘The Full-Measure Wash Down’
Malcom Catto ‘Rock’
Radio Stars ‘No Russians In Russia’
Diagram Brothers ‘Those Men In White Coats’
Linkopii ‘Linkopii’
Walter Branco ‘Luar do Sertao’
The God Frahim w/ NicoJP ‘Diamonds’
Casual ‘You Flunked’
Above The Law ‘Concreat Jungle’
Sam Dees ‘Black Tattler’
My Solid Ground ‘The Executioner’
Robert Wyatt ‘A Last Straw’
John Greaves, Peter Blegvad and Lisa Herman ‘Catalouge Of Fifteen Objects And Their Titles’
Ginhouse ‘And I Love Her’
Cressida ‘Survivor’
Matthewdavid ‘No Need To Worry/Mean Too Much (Suite)’
Kid Acne w/ Cappo ‘Healthy Normalz (Tom Carunana Remix)’
Ottla ‘Duck’
Modulo 1000 ‘Lem. Ed. Ecalg’
Land Observations ‘Return To Ravenna’
Hama ‘Ataraghine’
Guitar Red ‘Disco From A Space Show’
Kahil El Zabar’s Ritual Trio ‘Sweet Meat’
Bob Newhart ‘Gettysburg PR’
Zane Campbell ‘Fucked Up On Jesus (Live From The Fort At Sidewalk Cafe)’
Jack Grunsky ‘Is It Worth All The Pain’
__/ARCHIVES____
From the vast archives of the Monolith Cocktail, two choice picks from July of 2014: Land Observations Grand Tour album for the Mute label, and Wah Wah 45s’ special One More Step album showcase of Haitian boogie pianist Henri-Pierre Noel.
Land Observations ‘The Grand Tour’
(Mute) July 2014
Revisiting the Romans industrious road network, artist and guitar sculptor of meta-textural travelogues, James Brooks once again soundtracks a peregrination that begins with the familiar surroundings of his London address and proceeds across Europe to the one time important capital of the Western Roman empire, the Italian city of Ravenna.
On his previous excursion, Roman Roads IV – XI, Brooks meticulously planned journeys, however minimal and delicate, exuded the beauty of motion: Gently progressing or chugging along in harmonic contemplation, each section of his placable road trip moves on ever forward to a final destination.
Continuing to absorb those landscapes and some new ones, with a cycle of both looped trebly and pronounced bass notes, plus a bed of subtly picked congruous melodics and resonating chimes, Brooks takes the pastoral equivalent of the motorik route. Whereas the Autobahn travelled celebrations of kraftwerk or the repetitive hypnotism of Michael Rothar’s backward bending psychedelics and choppy guitar licks pointed towards the future, The Grand Tour treads a well-worn man-made and historically rich highway: It could be said that Brooks has a foot in both eras: the past and present simultaneously if you like.
The musical accompaniment is only part of the Land Observations methodology, Brooks by extension incorporating a show of postcard inspired artwork – which can be seen further extended in the featured Phil Coy video – and geometric network visuals, all inspired by the layouts and routes of the journeys he maps out aurally.
There are some detours on this return trip of sorts, as Brooks cycles through the ‘Flatlands And The Flemish Roads’ of the lowlands – the flattened layout of Belgium reflected in the strident, though, serene pace of the methodical rhythmic time keeper -, ascends one of the highest mountain routes in the Swiss Alps, on the gently applied rocking motion of the magnificent climb, ‘From The Heights Of The Simplon Pass’, and waltzes through the Austrian capital, on the sacrosanct Baroque ‘Ode To Viennese Streets.
For those accustomed to Brooks multilayered loops and adroit deft touches, there are also the odd piqued moments, usually introductions, of gnarled, almost post-punk, strutting. But these are fleeting and though they never break with convention enough to burst out into song.
For everyone else, newcomers alike, the Grand Tour is pleasing and timeless, if not picturesque, journey through the South East of England and Western Europe.
Henri-Pierre Noel ‘One More Step’
(Wah Wah 45s) July 2014
The fault lines may run deep, and the humanitarian crisis resulting from tropical storms may have wreaked utter destruction, but the Haitian people continue to endure. Synonymous since its bitter fought independence from the French in 1804 with the vivid ominous local voodoo culture, and later on with the brutal rule of the infamous Duvalier dynasty, Haiti has fortunately been cast in a far more favorable light over the last few years, drawing the global music tourist into its feverish, infectious web.
In the last year alone Haiti has imbued, beguiled and charged albums by The Arcade Fire (who have an ancestral connection to the island through Régine Chassagne) and tUnE-yArDs, and paired-up local poet/writer legend Frankétienne with experimental Scottish guitarist Mark Mulholland for the Chaophonies collaboration. Already granted very favourable reviews elsewhere, including an entry on the Quietus’s reissues of 2014 selection, Strut Records Haiti Direct compilation treats the island’s 60s and 70s music scene with reverential celebration; echoing the revitalisation and celebratory musical archeology of Analog Africa, Soundway and Jazzman et al, who similarly revere music, previously presumed lost, from the African and South American continents.
With this in mind the Wah Wah 45s label has recently re-issued the polygenesis pianist Henri-Pierre Noël’s classic, One More Step; originally released as a limited pressing in the 80s. Moving from his home to Canada, the former émigré would go on to create a Haitian hybrid of the Kompa Funk and sauntered Latin grooves with North American jazz and disco to produce light breezy and diaphanous gilded dance floor gold.
A moiety, congruous to the previously rediscovered and also re-issued by Wah Wah 45s, Piano suite (released in 2012), One More Step attunes the classicism and amps up the funk and soul with a chorus of rasping horns and spiritually meditative Hammond organ. With an omnivorous craving, Noël loosely crosses over into a range of appetizing styles; sweetly caressing gospel and narrating in a Barry White-esque deep, husky burr, on the love lost lullaby ‘Will Come A Day’, and moseying into Stax, lamps-turned-down-low, balladry on ‘Bluesy Mood’.
Silky smooth with the odd rough and dirty edge, Noel’s swanky sonorous chops splash and spray across the ivory, sliding up and down the scales until they find a neat spot to rattle of the most melodically twinkly solo.
Mother Africa can’t help but shine through; Haiti’s own indelible roots stamped on every track, played and teased with by the composer. None more so than the opening tributary ‘Afro-Funk Groove’, with its feverish pattered congas and polyrhythm shuffles, or the sweltering Funkenstien, doo-wop female backed chorus line, ‘Funky Spider Dance’. Elsewhere the musical net is cast wide and far, merging samba with jazz (‘Latin Feeling’ and ‘Back Home…Sweet Home’) and weaving a new kind of tropical island classical symphony (‘Roller Skate Rhapsody’).
Of all the various Haitian themed, flavoured and re-examined releases in 2014, One More Step is the grooviest and slickest by far; a sweet and cool (very cool) Caribbean breezy accompaniment to our own present heat wave.
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
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