Monolith Cocktail Blog

A WORLD OF SONIC/MUSICAL DISCOVERIES REVIEWED BY DOMINIC VALVONA
(Unless stated otherwise, all releases are available now)

Various ‘Ghana Special 2: Electronic Highlife & Afro Sounds In The Diaspora 1980-93’ (Soundway Records) 10^th May 2024

The first decade of the new millennium proved a fruitful period for (re) discovering Africa’s rich dynamic and explosive music heritage, with both (through their various Afro-funk and Afro-psych compilations) Soundway Records and Analog Africa (in particular their influential African Scream Contests) spoiling connoisseurs and those with just a curiosity alike to sounds rarely heard outside the continent. The former’s original five album Ghana Special spread was one such indispensable collection from that time; a perfectly encased box set survey of one of Africa’s most important musical junctions.

Now, unbelievably, a full twenty years later Soundway have followed up that “highlife” triumph with a second volume; moving the action on into a new decade. Crossing over, just, from the inaugural edition’s 1968 to 1981 span, Ghana Special 2: Electronic Highlife & Afro Sounds In The Diaspora picks up in the 80s as Ghana’s signature highlife phenomenon went through yet another evolution, incorporating the tech of the time: from drum machines to synths. From marching big bands and tea dances in colonial times to the explosive embrace of wailing R&B and funk, highlife kept on moving through the decades. And as that helpful title makes clear, this eighteen-track survey hones in on the electronic enhanced, augmented phase of that genre’s development during a period in which many of Ghana’s most promising music stars had been forced to leave for Europe and further afield.

The diaspora in this case a result of a particular authoritarian period in Ghana’s post-colonial history. Following Ghana’s promising independence from Britain in the late 50s the political landscape tossed around between the rule of military coups and civil governments: the only constant, Ghana’s impressive musical pedigree and its influence across the continent. In light of particularly damaging and disastrous economic policies in the late 70s, and with the quelling and censorship of musicians – previously so popular that their support or protestations could prove vital in a political leader’s survival – there was a mass exodus of talent.

As the new decade beckoned Ghana became a hostile environment for its artists, many of whom would join the migratory caravan of workers leaving to find jobs in an increasingly welcoming West Germany (a booming economy and desperate need for workers resulted in a relaxation of the immigration laws and work permits). The cities of Berlin, Hamburg and Dusseldorf were havens for this influx of Ghanaians; proving a fruitful network for a new musical fusion between the locals and their new arrivals called “Bürger life”, named after the German word for “citizen”. A hybrid of German new wave, post krautrock loosened dance sounds and modern tech, Bürger life transformed the original Afro-musical trends through such progenitors of the scene as George Darko and Charles Amoah. Both artists feature here, Darko with his sun-hazed fusion of Masekela, Sunny Adé, the Phantom Band and Lounge Lizards ‘Kaakyrie Nva’, and Amoah with the 80s modern R&B pop steal and whistled and tingled starry ‘Fre Me (Call Me)’. Of a similar ilk, Starlife’s cosmic suffused ‘Amoma Koro’ sounds like a tropical soca infused Flow Motion (and Out Of Reach) era CAN at times.

Speaking of soca (the “soul of calypso” shorthand), that Afro-Caribbean style can be found on the funky disco sauntering, “wahoo”, opener ‘Ebe Ye Yie Ni’ by The Godfathers, and on Pat Thomas’s swayed plea ‘Gye Wani’ – the highlife horns all still in attendance, blazed but subdued and more relaxed. The Gold Coast vocalist and songwriter (Ebo Taylor foil to boot) Thomas had previously worked with the iconic Marijata trio back in Ghana, but emigrated to Berlin in 1979, like so many artists on this compilation.   

A standout tune (of many) and extensive workout (like many tracks on this compilation, more like a 12” dance mix in duration), the Pepper, Onion, Ginger & Salt ingredients named obscurities turn out a smooth crossover of downtown NYC (think Don Cherry produced by Ramuntcho Matta), Osibisa and the Lijado Sisters – there’s even a sort of quasi-loose rap vocal at one point. Another standout name (as it were), the revitalized in recent years Ghanian icon Gyedu Blay Ambolley is famous for his breakout hit ‘Simigwa-Do’ and early adoption of hip-hop – fusing it with highlife to form the highly influential and inventive “hiplife” genre. Ambolley appeared on the original Ghana Special by the way. But on this occasion, in a new decade and phase, he picks up hints of Grace Jones and Herbie Hancock on the Island life funky ‘Apple’.

At this point I can’t not mention Dadadi’s fun ‘Jigi Jigi’ track, a soca-light flight from Accra to Havana in the mode of a carnival celebrating Kid Creole.

Synthesized and programmed, the old highlife rhythms/percussion is just about audible as the smother 80s technology rounds out much of the rougher signatures, replacing some traditional instruments and sounds with keys and keytar, slap bass and wobbly effects. But the sleekness can’t hide those vibrant roots, even when embracing reggae, boogie and the new wave. Ghana Special part two is a refreshing map of the diaspora fusions and hybrids that spread across Europe during a time of movement and turmoil from Ghana’s hotbed of influential stars and musicians. In highlighting the stories and journeys of Ghana’s émigrés, and in introducing us to those sounds, movements that remain either forgotten or just not as celebrated, Volume 2 will become as indispensable as the first. If you were fortunate enough (and without rubbing it in, I was lucky enough to purchase the original on its release) in acquiring that first box set then this latest compilation will sit beside it very nicely. And that is my way of saying that you should buy a copy.         

Bab L’ Bluz ‘Swaken’
(Real World)

An embodiment of the Moroccan “Nayda” (“up”) youth movement for change in the Arab World, the fuzz-toned electrified Bab L’ Bluz launched their debut album in a tumultuous political climate; just as COVID gripped the global newsfeeds and moved the focus away from the fallout from the Arab Spring.

Fronted and built around the playing energy and voice of Yousra Mansour, this female-led troupe embraces the influences of rock-blues gods Led Zeppelin and Morocco’s very own version of The Rolling Stones, Nass El Ghiwane, matching it with a myriad of Arabian sounds and traditions from North and Western Africa; all of which are transformed from their conservative and male dominating roots into a feminist-strong message of empowerment.

Mansour’s protestations for equality – in everything from inheritance laws to the gender wage gap and roles in society – rung out in the wake of civil unrest, governmental crackdowns and censorship to the buzz and clattering/rustled rhythms of acid-garage-blues-psych-rock and Morocco’s age-old Gnawa tradition of spiritualist invocation and trance. Previously the sole (more or less) preserve of the patriarch, and against the odds, Mansour learnt to play many native Moroccan styles: standing out especially for studying the “guembri”, a three-stringed bass-like lute that is then electrified.

That debut album set a blaze, evoking Arabia’s own experiments in the 1970s with rock music fusions, the psychedelic and prog-rock whilst, like a tornado or whirling dervish, spinning through the region and absorbing everything on offer, from Mauritania Griot and Hassani to Chabbi and the Islamic dances, poetry and exalted music of Morocco itself. This same hybrid of sounds continues on the group’s newest album, Swaken, a title that when translated from the region’s Darija dialect (the main language of the Nayda movement) encompasses the transcendent rituals of Morocco’s spiritual possession ceremonies.

Invoking visitations and a dialogue with the past, Bab L’ Bluz (made up of Mansour and band mates Brice Bottin, Ibrahim Terkemani and Jérôme Bartolome) open up their signature edge and buzz to even more influences than usual. After honing their performances on an extensive tour schedule, they’ve taken on a far rockier, even heavier sound. Led Zeppelin at both their loudest and also most acoustic permeate this album’s eleven tracks spread – that and early 70s The Who, especially on the closing roused and riled ‘Mouja’. And with the whistled and airy peul flute making an appearance, there’s even a hint of progressive folk too.   

The scope then is wide, taking in echoes of Liraz-style pop, the Sahara and North African desert song of Aziz Brahim, the blowing piped Sufi music of Bargou 08, the evolved Gnawa music of Houssam Gania, trills of Griot, Modern R&B and evocations of Nahawa Doumbia, Dimi Mint Abba, Baba Zulu and Noura Mint Seymali. The lyrical messages sung across the Berber trails, in the cities and in the shadow of the sand dunes are just as varied: anger at inaction and lament for the growing number of suicides and cases of depression in Morocco being just two such subjects.

Bab L’ Bluz scale new heights whilst also reflecting with passages of more acoustic downtime as they once again amplify and kick into touch conformity and restraint. New vices twist and transport Arab traditions and the spiritual communions for a both rock-heavy and electrifying new wave album of polemic, the mystical, cosmic and the blues. Nothing less than an essential album from an essential band built for our times.  

Liraz ‘Enerjy’
(Batov Records) 17^th May 2024

It’s hardly surprising that with the ongoing conflict between the nefarious Iranian regime and its neighbours, and with the continued oppression of its own population, that attempting to show the Middle Eastern titan in a good light is frustratingly difficult (an understatement in itself). Especially when you’re Jewish and part of that atavistic empire’s age-old Jewish community that stretches right back to Persia’s Biblical entry in the Old Testament: A community originally bound in chains, the spoils of conquest marched into slavery in 727BC, but eventually granted citizenship and even given the right of return to build a new temple in Jerusalem by the more enlightened Cyrus in the 6th century BC. Or that one of your most famous roles on screen is playing a clandestine Mossad agent on a mission to infiltrate the Iranian air defenses so that Israel can disable a nuclear reactor (the Apple+ series Tehran). But the actress, dancer, and electronic pop siren Liraz Charhi was willing to give it a good go, covertly recording several cinematic lensed Middle Eastern fantasies with a myriad of Iranian musicians under the radar of the ayatollah hardliners, over the internet. 

In a climate in-which tolerance is scarce, and with most creative forms and freedoms of expression attracting, at the very least, suspicion, and at the worse, imprisonment, even death, trying to make a record with a strong feminine message seems an almost impossibly dangerous task: Liraz’s collaborators on the album’s Zan and Roya remain anonymous indefinitely for their own safety.

Liraz’s family were forced to escape during the tumultuous upheavals of Iran’s revolution in the 70s; setting up home in Israel’s capital, Tel Aviv, a safe haven for those escaping an ever-authoritarian Islamic regime. That city has grown to become an artistic community of foreigners, living cheek-in-jowl with both an older Israeli population and diaspora of Jews from around the globe. Liraz however, still feels bound to that Iranian heritage. And it seems when listening to her evocative soothed and lush bright vocals, she is the latest in a long line of strong outspoken women from that community. A baton has been handed down you could say.

Feeling adrift, Liraz upped sticks to become an actress in L.A. Little did she know that the city would open her eyes to another concentration of Iranian émigrés, including many from the Iranian-Jewish community. Whilst starring in major productions such as Fair Game and A Late Quartet, Liraz would find comfort and a sense of belonging in that diaspora. She’d learn much absorbing both the ancient musical traditions and the pop and disco that filled the clubs in a pre-revolutionary, pro-miniskirt Tehran, including such famed Iranian acts as Googoosh and Mahasty.

It was much in part down to the courage of the women in this astoundingly large community (so large that L.A. is nicknamed “Tehrangeles”) that emboldened Liraz to take up singing. She would record her debut Persian imbued album Naz in 2018, inspired by those whose only outlet and determination of self-identity and freedom was through music. Two years later and once more ingrained in that atavistic land’s richly woven musical history, she enacted a clandestine connectivity between cultures on the “second chapter”, Zan.

Prompted by the death of Mahsa Jina Amini in the custody of the authorities in 2022, an ensuing battle of ideals and freedoms from the women and a new generation in Iran threatened to topple the tyranny. However, the regime has pushed back harder than ever and with an almost unprecedented violence started executing (mainly men so far, with the rapper Toomaj Salehi only just in the last week or so sentenced to death for criticising the regime) supporters and activists on trumped up, tortured confessional charges of treason. Women are routinely taken off the streets by the so-called morality police and raped, whilst only in the last year school age girls from all over the country were poisoned.  But even in the face of this bloody repression history is on the side of Iran’s younger more liberal generations. However, with the barbaric, evil attack on Israel by Hamas on October 7^th 2023, Iran has weighed in with various proxy attacks. In the last month – after Israel attacked their consulate in Syria – Iran has escalated its campaign, launching, in one night, a 300-plus missile/drone attack on Israel itself. In a less dramatic tit-for-tat, Israel launched a retaliatory missile at the Isfahan region inside Iran.

The unfolding horror in the wake of Hamas’s emboldened sickening attack last year, has seen the IDF level Gaza to near rubble and dust; the casualty and deaths, whether you believe Hamas’s figures or not, are impossible to justify. Battle lines have been drawn across the world; protest marches have now become part of the daily routine.

One of the most scary and depressing consequences of this conflict has been with the record-breaking growth of anti-Semitism across Europe and North America. Division has been sown down political lines of grievance: you either stand with Palestine or Israel it seems, with no room for nuance, the complexities let alone balance. The sheer mindlessness and oblivious lack of decency by many is staggering; with opinions cast, placards held, and slogans shouted by people without the faintest clue or knowledge of what they pontificate. You can quite rightly rile against or denounce both parties in this escalating conflict, but to only take one side is disingenuous at best, at worst, deplorable. Yes, the catalyst argument is trotted out every time, but if we want history lessons and context, we should go back not just 70-odd years but a thousand, two thousand.

It’s with this in mind that Liraz has become just one of the voices behind the #MeTooUnlessYouAreAJew campaign that grew in the face of complete silence and inaction from the world community when Hamas murdered and eviscerated and raped its Israeli victims on that fateful day – they continue to use sexual violence as a weapon against the female hostages that were taken on that same day, a number of which remain in and around Gaza, yet to be handed back. Those hostages that have been freed, made it out alive and been rescued by the IDF, testify to such heinous crimes. Feeling betrayed and abandoned at the lack of any outcry or even a recognition of these events at the UN, in international circles, and on International Women’s Day, a movement was born. Liraz was recently invited to represent that movement at the UK’s House Of Lords, where she read out a poignant, personal (as with so many citizens of Israel, Liraz lost members of her own extended family and friends that day) statement.

“I suffer terribly from all the human pain in this war on both sides. I wish for the abducted to return to their families in Israel. I want the suffering of the innocent Palestinian people to end. I am praying for peace and justice for all.”

And so, her latest EP of dazzling Middle Eastern and Arabian disco and fuzz toned psychedelia arrives with a message of hope, reconciliation. The message: “Now is the time to change the energy (or “Enerjy”) frequency”.

After releasing a couple of albums for Glitterbeat Records, the Persian-Israeli star takes up residence at the Middle Eastern grooves promoting Batov label – perhaps Liraz’s natural home. Working with the highly prolific Israeli singer-songwriter, guitarist & musical producer, Uri Brauner Kinrot, who’s groups include Ouzo Bazooka and Boom Pam – both of which can be picked up across all four tracks on this fantastical dynamic empowered EP – Liraz probably reaches her zenith as a feminist siren of The Levant, balancing pure Egyptian-Moroccan-Lebanese-Israeli glitterball zappy nostalgic exotic disco and pop with Anatolian psych and feminine strength.

Once more in the Farsi language, she sings equally from a position of power and yearning; like an Iranian chanteuse swooning and swirling, mystical and soulful. Liraz bangs the tambourine to Arabian-futuristic grooves, cosmic rays, vapour swirls, wisps of mirages and some of the most danceable music to have left the region in years. Within that framework I’m hearing shades of Altın Gün, Elektro Hafiz, and a host of equally charismatic singers from the Arab world.

You really can’t fault the quality and production, the songs and delivery. The emotional charge, the anguish and lament are unmistakable, even at its most lush and upbeat. Liraz disarms a powerful statement with elan and skill to produce an incredible lively and danceable record of pop excellence.

Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti & Frank Rosaly ‘MESTIZX’
(International Anthem X Nonesuch)

Transformed and remoulded for a more progressive age the “MESTIZX” title of this partnership’s debut album takes the Spanish term for “mixed person” (namely, a union between those indigenous people in the Latin conquered territories of South America and the Spanish) away from its colonial roots and repurposes it on an album of dream realism duality.

With the multimedia performer and singer Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti’s Bolivian and the jazz drummer Frank Rosaly’s Puerto Rican heritages, the pre-colonial history of South America is woven into a contemporary revision of magic, organic forms and ritual rhythms mixed with elements and a suffusion of Chicago post-rock, post-jazz and alternative Latin leftfield pop.

Without repeating the storytelling liner notes and various quotes, the duo explore their “outsider”, “other”, status as the ancestors of that mixed ethnicity: neither wholly a part of the atavistic nor Spanish (and to a point, as they crossover into Brazil, Portuguese) lineages they both feel detached, and to some degrees, uprooted from their legacy, and yet take advantage of it to weave such worldly creative perspectives. In a state of certain flux, between worlds, the music and song on this imaginative and explorative album balances the mystical with invocations and the calls of nature. They do this, enabled by an extended cast of friends from both within and outside the International Anthem label community; merging congruously the skills and voices of Matt Lux, Ben LaMar Guy and Bitchin Bajas’ Rob Frye (to name just a few of the many contributors) to expand the remit beyond the Amazon, the Bolivian tin-mined mountains and landscapes to take in mirage evocations of the alien, the sci-fi and naturalistic.

This is music that draws you in; unfurls its depths over time. The vocals are simultaneously beautiful yet split on occasions into a spirit shadow form; a near apparitional invocation that’s separated from its sister, a guide that takes us back to the old phantasmagoria of pre-colonial conquest, when Bolivia was yet to be demarcated, owned and named after its European conquistador’s ancestor and was still separated between the Incas and various independent tribes in the country’s northern and southern lowlands. That voice carries and yet seems at times almost lulled and translucent beside the water carrier percussion, the attentive and descriptive drums (only occasionally breaking out into, well…a sort of jazz breakbeat of a kind) and rainforest canopy of either mimicked or real bird life and exotica. This is a world in which the Afro-rhythms of Höröya, the psychedelic nature of Caetano Veloso and Paebiru find room next to the Sao Paulo Underground, Ale Hop, Cucina Povera, Jaimie Branch, Art Ensemble Of Chicago, Don Cherry’s Organic Music Society and Tortoise. And from that reference pool, you can tell that the lineage goes back far: all the way to the original rituals and folk music of the people that first trod on those sacred grounds.

There’s much to admire in this world of the untamed and wild, with new perspectives, mixed histories and the largely melodious reverberations of the lost exercising a new language of ownership. Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti and Frank Rosaly perfect and expand their organic explorations, bewitching messages and oracles on an intriguing, moving and dreamily trippy debut album.

Goran Kajfeš Tropiques ‘Tell Us’
(We Jazz)

Through various developments drawn together over the last decade and more, the Croatian heritage Swede trumpeter, composer, producer and bandleader Goran Kajfeš once more sets in motion another “hypno-jazz” opus under his Tropiques exotic moniker.

Those who know, who might recall, the name will have perhaps already heard this branch of his expanded guided ensemble: going since 2011. But there’s also his equally praiseworthy absorption of jazz ideas troupe, the Subtropic Arkestra, and a myriad of other set-ups, including both the Fire! Orchestra and Angles 9. 

Goran has an impressive CV as a session player to boot, playing with such luminaries of the form as Lester Bowie, who’s influence rings out on the latest Tropiques’ odyssey.

The first of those groups (and indeed the second) acts as a crossover, a recruiting ground for the Swedish-based make up of Goran’s ensemble; his pianist and keys foil Alexander Zethson, acoustic bassist Johan Berthling and violinist Josefin Runsten all served in the Fire! Orchestra. Runsten was brought in with fellow adroit strings maestro and cellist Leo Svensson Sander to expand the sound and bring a feel of uplift to the dynamics, in so doing, expanding the ranks from a core quartet to a sextet. Each band mate brings with them a convoluted family tree of intersected and separate gigs in other groups, from Trondheim Jazz to Dungen, Oddjob and Sven Wunder. And between them, this sextet covers everything from award-winning jazz recordings to composing for film and the stage.

With a sense of movement and openness that seems to organically unfold, and to unfurl and grow like winter buds opening in the first weeks of spring, the Tropiques’ latest album together is a thing of synthesis and nature balanced with the messages, hopes and celebration of conscious spiritual jazz from another age.

It all begins with the incipient classical feels of Riley and Nyman and an air of sympathetic bowed and “possible musics” Širom-esque Galicia and the Balkans before flowering into those spiritual Alice Coltrane vibes. Goran’s almost drowsy trumpet awakens on this deep dived scene of Afro-spiritualism; it’s sound evoking hints of the already mentioned Lester but early Don Cherry and Jaimie Branch. Meanwhile, Zethson’s tinkled sensations, runs and liquid scales flow reminded me of Nduduzo Makhathini and the keys found on Bobby Jackson recordings. Runsteen and Sander’s violin/cello partnership slowly grows and blloms into a lush light orchestral spell.

But it’s the influence, as stated in the accompanying PR notes, of John Coltrane’s Crescent LP – the incredible luminary’s quartet on that iconic recording including such notable icons as McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones – that stands out; a spot-on absorption of that mid 60s record vital, the building blocks of which can be heard being riffed on and off of.

The middle movement, ‘Magmatique’, seems to perhaps take its inspiration from the kosmische instead, starting as it does with the piano ambience of Popol Vuh’s Florian Fricke. The trumpet sounds almost cupped as the bass quietly stretches and mumbles away. That is until the drums take on a more breakbeat style that stirs up the influence of hip-hop. The strings, however, go from muted Skies Of America Ornette to the more drawn and flighty influence of Michael Ubriank. There’s also a certain progressive or sort of post-rock feel; like Radiohead making a jazz album under the tutorage of Ill Considered and the Chicago Underground duo.

On a slow boat to China, or perhaps sailing across the east China seas to land somewhere on blossom canopy Japanese shores, ‘Prije I Posle’ (translated from the Croatian, “before and after”) dreamily embraces Far Eastern signatures; at times, on the wind, replicating near zither-like strokes and brushes, and the bulb-shaped notes of some kind of Oriental glockenspiel. The drums though take on an almost d’n’b rhythm, whilst the kabuki theatre unfolds, and Goran’s trumpet exhales Chat’s woes and sad romantic illusions of yielding yearns. As summer takes hold, this odyssey fades out with the vague caresses of Alice Coltrane and Dorothy Ashby; and a cycle is completed.

Amorphously travelling on an eclectic pathway that includes all kinds of jazz styles, the transcendental, kosmische, lush, classical and the ensemble’s own Swedish homeland’s adoption of prog and pysch, the Goran-led Tropiques prove their mettle with a deep “slow music” rich journey in three movements. Environment counterbalanced by open-ended developments and the inner cerebral make for an impressive opus that proves so easy to take in and enjoy.    

Jake Long ‘City Swamp’
(New Soil) 17^th May 2024

Stepping out on his own but once more backed by the same who’s who of contemporary UK jazz musicians that formed the eclectic lineup on previous recordings under the Maisha title, the drummer, composer and producer Jake Long conjures up a Bitches Brew of funk, soul, spiritual, Afro and fusion jazz on his debut as a solo artist.

From a pool of talent that includes Nubya Garcia, Binker Golding, Tamar Osborn, Shirley Tetteh, Artie Zaite, Amané Suganami, Al Macsween, Twm Dylan and Tim Doyle – many of whom have crossed paths with each other on projects outside the sphere of the Long led Maisha ensemble – a both cosmic and despairing suffused odyssey of the intuitive and electrifying is formed. In the ruins of societal decay and riled-up division, looking out across an increasingly soulless gentrified London (where all these artists and musicians reside) lost to corporate greed and a breakdown in community relations, Long and his troupe tread the uncertain pathways of the primal city swamp and sift through the “ideological rubble” of dystopian collapse – a term absorbed and borrowed from the political theorist and lecturer in digital media and society Alex Williams, echoed in Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative.

Reassembled at a later date from a series of extended recordings at the Lightship 95 studios in the capital, made during 2019, that landscape and decay has only got worse with the further loss of public spaces and supportive networks, arts spaces and music venues. And yet this album is not so much a raging polemic nor untamed and unruly cry from the soul – well, it has its moments of course but nothing so abstract and tortured as to sound angry. In fact, for most of the time golden percussive threads, floated bulb-like organ notes, a mantra trickle and shimmer of Alice Coltrane and spiritual jazz vibrations indicate escapism for the lunar and astral: the spiritual balance much needed in such dire times of avarice, social media validation and the pursuit of fame. But then, as the action picks up, we’re into the territory of Maggot Brain phase Funkadelic, Owen Marshall, Herbie Hancock, Bernie Worrell and Miles Davis’ Lost Septet. An extra thread, or layer, arrives in the form of King Tubby, African Head Charge and the On-U Sound label reverberated and echoed dub; often taking the jazz elements into the hallucinatory and dreamy.

Within those spheres of influence you can also pick up hints of Byard Lancaster, Joe Henderson, Marion Brown, Last Exit, (very specific) Slow Foot era Norman Conners, the Pharoah, and Bobby Hutcherson and Harold Land’s simmered down partnership as the music moves between the strange JuJu vodun Orleans spell of ‘Swamp’ to the more melodious, almost romantically, played horns evoked soul-jazz-on-the-streets-of-70s-NYC vibes ‘Silhouette’ – I’m also hearing signs of The John Betsch Society on this one. With time on their side, movements, passages and direction of travel is performed and assembled without distraction and limits; with some tracks breaking the ten-minute barrier to move through various fluctuations of light and shade, squalling and smashing crescendo and more near ambient vapours and mists of mysticism and reflective soul-bearing.

It’s impossible to pick out any one contribution, any one performer, as the entire ensemble interweave and act as parts in a much greater expansive world of metaphorical expressions, descriptions and atmospheres; all feeding into a haunted magical entwined statement on the symptoms of urban decay and the nightmare of a post-capitalist society with little to offer, little to give and little in the way of answers to all our ills. A Bitches Brew for our end times.       

Morgan Garrett ‘Purity’
(Orange Milk Records) 17^th May 2024

Daemonic wrenches, caustic slabs of derangement and Fortean paranormal invocations grind against chemically poisoned alternative grunge-country indolence and the unraveling clusterfuck morose mind of Morgan Garrett on his latest collection of both menacing and playfully disturbing experiments. 

A “culmination of over a decade’s worth of collaborative and relentless” discombobulations and harrowed heavy-set-to-lo-fi-and-no-fi resignations, torn dispersions and traumatic-drawn cries for help, the Purity album is a troubled trip across a morbidly hallucinated inner and outer landscape, with the age of anxiety, COVID, war, record level cancers, environmental catastrophe, cost of living crisis, societal and generational division, governmental incompetence, lawlessness, drug dependency and technological/AI capitulation being just some of the topics, grievances and stresses to unpick.

Garrett’s status in the American experimental scene is in no doubt as he mines a lifetime of pain and transmogrifies both his own work and that of Scott Walker’s, the Sun City Girls, Swans, Daevid Allen, the Boredoms, Dean Blunt, Fugazi, the Putan Club and others. Within that scope of references expect to hear Garrett speaking in slithery tongues, transmitting from Mina Crandon’s spiritualist parlour whilst twanging away like some scarred deeply troubled and vicious figure from Blood Meridian on LSD, and somehow twinning a fucked-up Pavement with a paranormal screamed Skip Spence. Hell’s fires lap away as nu-metal, the industrial and heavy mental/heavy meta crush all resistance and resolve and those country/American leanings. There’s sure enough a soul in that there slumbered and more beaten-up hallucination; a pained maverick clawing their way out of a opioid languish, stripped of dignity and resilience, across a battlefield they once called home. Then again, I could be reading too much into it all. 

Malini Sridharan ‘Tombuex’
(Birdwatcher Records) 10^th May 2024

Death is a fairytale, a fantasy, a mythological poetry that’s navigated with almost diaphanous and playful devotional curiosity by the Brooklyn-based composer and multi-instrumentalist Malini Sridharan on her new album Tombeux.

With a title that derives from the French plural for “tomb” or “tombstone” but also refers to a musical commemoration style of composition that was all the vogue back in the 16^th century – originally in poet form but later musically transposed with the accompaniment of lute and plucked instruments -, Sridharan assails Ursula K Le Guin’s Earthsea cycle of fantasy novels, the Greek-Roman ideas of Hades, the venerated devotions of the celebrated Indian Hindu mystic poet Mirabai, and the loss of those nearer to home. For this chamber/classical set of vocalized suites deals with that unavoidable fate: death. But with such a lucidity and magic, and candidness that it never seem too elegiac of morbid. Only skirting the chthonian, the suites and song on this album turn more towards yearns of the pastoral, bucolic and courtly: Closer to the fairy-like tapestry weaved folk of Joanna Newsome and the brass-y more sweetened trunk-like low bass-y tones of the euphonium and woodland and bird-like flutiness of Prokofiev, of Elgier and Vaughn Williams.

The mini stories that make up Tombuex are almost shorn of melancholy and mournful dirge. This is both down to Sridharan’s shared entwined influences of both India and Michigan roots, and her diverse range of literary, historical sources – the Indian classical strains that you hear are in some part from her father, and the curiosity for history, archeology and Medieval music that permeates this album, from her mother. And so the brassy resonance of the sitar, twinkles of vibraphone, duck-billed sound of the bassoon and shake of bells (all played by Sridharan) merge perfectly with a full Western-sounding classical woodwind and brass ensemble to elicit the tearful and dramatic, the fantastical and regal, whilst weaving a tale of bereavement in its many forms.

The lasting resting places of both Greek-Roman myth (Hades) and the speculative-fiction writer Le Guin’s Earthsea afterworld (The Dry Land) are invoked by a filmic-like score and Sridharan’s modern day Bhajans and Medieval-style rounds. And through it all, she creates a soft wellspring of personal connections, longings and a sense of loss: A remembrance that exudes lovely dreaminess and certain majesty in the face of pain.

Tombeux is an ambitious work of the classical that bridges both time and worlds to address in its literary, literal and poetic forms the spectre and history of death and how to face it without spiralling into the void. Nothing less than a very impressive work that expands Sridharan’s ambitions further.

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 or love. If you enjoy our reviews (and we often write long, researched and 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.