THE MONTHLY DIGEST INCLUDES A CLUTCH OF ACCUMULATED NEW MUSIC REVIEWS; THE SOCIAL INTER-GENERATIONAL/ECLECTIC AND ANNIVERSARY ALBUMS CELEBRATING PLAYLIST; AND CHOICE PIECES FROM THE ARCHIVES.
(Photo by Todd Weaver)
___THE NEW___
Ingebrigt Håker Flaten’s (Exit) Knarr ‘Drops’
(Sonic Transmissions) 22nd August 2025
Growing, developing and expanding the remit from what was meant to be a one-off commission, brought together especially for the Vossajazz Festival, the troupe is now on its third titanic fusion rich studio album proper. Set in motion by Ingebrigt Håker Flaten (who also runs the Sonic Transmissions label, home to the ensemble’s recordings) a number of years back, the (Exit) Knarr now acts as the ‘main creative vehicle’ for the Norwegian bassist going forward it seems.
Settling with a reasonable lineup on this third chapter but inviting in a number of guests on the album’s statement piece, a transformed vision of jazz deity Wayne Shorter’s ‘Deluge’ piece from the revered and influential 1965 album release JuJu, on this outing the sextet takes prompt or inspiration from a more visual source. In the sphere of the Russian maverick abstract visionary and Bauhaus professor Wassily Kandinsky and Swedish mystic and abstract progenitor – some would say the true and first ever abstract artist, beating her peers (Malevich and Mondrian) to pure abstraction by a few good years – Hilma af Klint, a number of graphic scores have been used to foster untethered freedoms and play from a group already in the freeform mode. In one way, addressing perhaps the lack of knowledge, the place in which she should stand, there’s an unsaid elevation of Klint, an early adopter of the very spiritualism, Theosophy, that first led the way for Mondrian and many of his circle to dare to strip away every last visage, reference of the world for abstraction. Arguably Klint can be said to preceded Kandinsky and the others to this goal. And her work is filled with the iconic circular shapes, the colurs that would go on to inspire Sonia Delaunay and many others.
As a visual methodology, these scores go some way to painting a reification of a partly live studio performance and the ‘tweaked’ effected and transmogrified aftermaths.
Bringing together Amalie Dahl on alto, Karl Hjalmar Nyberg on tenor and electronics, Marta Warelis on piano and also on electronics, Jonathan F. Horne on guitar, Olaf Olsen on drums and of course IHF on what sounds like both electric and double bass, the album divides two longer form performances with a couple of shorter pieces. Speaking the experimental language of Anthony Braxton with garbled, hysterical and squeezed abandon, and inspired by the equally freeform pioneering Mats Gustafasson and his No Ensemble, the ensemble open with an already mentioned version of Shorter’s ‘Deluge’; taking the original’s more controlled bluesy swing style of simmering and serenaded and crooned sax for a tumultuous ride on the open seas of both discord and crested freefalls. It starts with twisted guitar wire grabbing and neck sliding and incipient tethered drums but soon develops into a recognisable, familiar feel before numerous swells and peaks resemble a fusion of the Henry Grimes Trio (cicra ‘Fish Story’ if we’re being specific), Rashied Ali, the Anthony Braxton Quartet, Keith Jarratt and Darius Jones. Wild in places, with the guitar going on to sound like a sci-fi dialect of tabbed beeps and switches, and the horns squeezed until the pips fall out, the action is shared out equally between all participants without losing a single instrument.: and that’s when you consider there’s also the guests, Mette Rasmussen on a second alto and a second drummer, Veslemøy Narvesen added to that untamed tidal wave experiment.
The album title is next. A change of a kind in tempo and thought this shorter composition articulates those droplets in various ways on a performance that sounds more open air than studio recorded. The sound of a dragon fly’s wings in rapid hovered form hangs around in a chamber-esque atmosphere of musing and pondering. Part JAF Trio, part ECM and part classical-minded jazz of a certain vintage, the gentle cascade of drips and drops fall very nicely and mysteriously on this Scandinavian ice float.
A second centrepiece if you like, ‘Kanon’ is dedicated to the renowned Norwegian drummer, composer and free jazz improvisor of note Paal Nilssen-Love. From his parents famous Stavanger jazz club located incubator to the capital and onto wide world recognition, Paal played with such notable company as Mats Gustafasson and Peter Brotzmann’s Chicago Tentet, before going on to set up his own All Ears festival. As an inspiration to a generation of Norwegians, Paal’s influence is huge. And in this mode, at this time, the sextet conjures up a semblance of his artform and free experimentation. But first, it all starts with some speaking panning of a curled up rattling drum roll, the quivers and quavers of the piano and what could be the attempt to match the sound of a buzzing bee. But it all soon develops into a wilder proposition of Masayuki Takayanagi, Eric Dolphy (I’m thinking specifically here of Out To Lunch!), Roscoe Mitchell, Andy Haas, Bill Dixon and Last Exit. It keeps changing; whether that’s in the action, dynamics between players, the tampering down parts that then peak into hysterical cries of squeezed, rasped and the burbled. A surprising passage of play even takes on a Lalo Schifrin vibe nearer the end.
The finale is left down to a performance that’s manipulated (or ‘tweaked’ as it’s written here), stretched out and elongated into a sci-fi hallucination. As if being treated and remodelled in real time, it sounds like the band is being pulled via a prism into the mirror backwards. It reminded me of the We Jazz label and their own retreated, remixed projects over the years. But stands as a more electronically led production that offers up a slightly off-kilter and magically alien version of their sound.
Ingebrigt Håker Flaten’s (Exit) Knarr colour new directions with an extended palette of ideas and sounds; heading towards breaking point before returning back to a recognition of the free form jazz movement that we can recognise. Source it out.
Andy Haas & Brian g Skol ‘The Honeybee Twist’
1st August 2025
Striking up an online and postal friendship since first writing about the highly experimental saxophonist, trick noise maker and effects manipulator when touring as a band member with Meg Remy’s Plastic Ono Band-esque U.S. Girls a few years before Covid, the former Muffin, NYC side man to the city’s attracted maverick luminaries of the avant-garde and freeform jazz, and prolific collaborator with Toronto’s most explorative and interesting artists, has sent me regular bulletins (and physical copies) of his various projects. Some have been in the solo mode, others with friends, foils and collectives.
Running off just a smattering of those releases (a majority of which have been with the highly obscure Resonantmusic imprint) from the last decade or so, and you have three extraordinary albums with the stringed-instrumentalist Don Fiorino (American Nocturne, Don’t Have Mercy and Accidentals), various appearances on records by Matt ‘Doc’ Dunn’s The Cosmic Range, the warped and discombobulating For The Time, Being solo act, and the avant-garde improvised performative triumvirate of SCRT with regular collaborator David Grollman and Sabrina Salamone.
Andy Haas now partners up with fellow Toronto native Brian g Skol for an unusual duet of saxophone and drums. Although it was recorded back in that city in 2024, the finished concentration and spatial experiment is now seeing the light with an official release via Haas’s own Bandcamp profile. I’m glad it hasn’t disappeared into obscurity, as it is one of the best, most radical but surprisingly rhythmic and pumped, worldly sounding album’s he’s made; much of this is down to the visual artist and percussionist/drummer Skol’s expressive and grasp/ear for international influences of rhythm, from both the Latin and Afro-South American to North Africa and the influence of Jaki Liebezeit.
The Honeybee Twist is a strange union between two instruments seldom pitted against each other; certainly not in this setting, with Haas once more wildly controlling the panning of his serialism style and both atonal and shrilling, bristled circular breathing sax and Skol combining hand drums, various percussive elements and drum kit breaks to provide a beat, a groove or more sporadic passages of the tactile, textures and tumultuous.
From nothing, reifications of the fire thief Prometheus, compounds, a vertical axis used in a 3-D space to show depth and elevation, self-assembly and play of words take some form of shape across an album of mystery, extemporization, and musing. Whilst stirring up these evocations, these reference points, both players traverse and kick around Arabian landscapes, Jon Hassell’e fourth world, the extremes of Eric Dolphy, Albert Ayler, Sonny Simmons, Andrew Cyrille and Evan Parker, and the factory. The opening mythologically entitled ‘The Eagle And Prometheus’, sounds like a sax and drums transmogrification of Battles; leaping straight in with beating drums, splashes of cymbal and that signature circular breathing technique. This is where I believe you can hear an echo of Saw Delight era CAN relocated to Egypt or the Arabian souk: Haas’s sax starts to sound more like a shrilling vibrating mizmar or even a zurna, and Skol’s drums could be mistaken for the daf and riz on occasion.
Against the near constantly moving, feeling and exploring drums and percussion, Haas’s effected sax goes from blues to freeform jazz, to reflections and colloquy and soliloquy. There’s a harshness and roughness at times to that instrument as it goes through various warbles, buzzes, rasps and drones.
Despite the title of ‘Maybe I’m A Machine’, there is no mistaking that this is a very human interaction between two highly experienced experimental artists circumnavigating any kind of easy label, demarcation. The notes of an abstract nature bristle, vibrate and trill to a near amorphous global rhythm on a most experimentally original collaboration. Please seek it out.
Maria Elena Silva ‘Wise Men Never Try Vol. II’
1st August 2025
As promised last month, the second volume in the Wise Men Never Try series from the near evanescent and relaxed but deeply effecting singer and musician Maria Elena Silva.
After previous releases, some of which featured such notable company as Jeff Parker and Marc Ribot, and after stripping back Bob Dylan’s courtly enigmatic dames to their most essential essences with interpretations of both ‘Queen Jane’ and a summoned bell rung ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’, the Chicago homed Maria has turned to readapting, revaluating and transposing various themed songbooks from America’s past. Volume I, reviewed in the July Digest, turned to the pages of the Great American Songbook with familiar standards made anew and enigmatic through the emotively ethereal, connective, almost otherworldly and with a real sense of depth and something approaching the tactile – especially instrument wise.
Under that same ‘umbrella title’ the second volume travels further back in time to the America Civil War period of rousing, rallying, sorrow, tragedy and hope sheet music; much of the material used to bolster a flagging campaign by the Union during the early and mid-years of that horrifying, destructive and divisive war – arguably never really settled, with suspicion still between the North and South of the country culturally, politically and economically. In fact, recalling songs from nigh on 160 years ago has never seemed more prescient; chiming true with the age we find ourselves in right now. A balance is struck, history revisited, propaganda resized, and the sentimental repurposed. But arguably, the emphasis in this case is on the music of the eventual winners in this five-year conflict; although a number of the songs and rallying calls for the Union were also adopted and adapted by the Confederacy after they’d seen the effect it had on boosting morale and symbolising the cause.
Once more in an intimate setting with just the accompaniment of Erez Dessel on piano, Tyler Wagner on double-bass, and Maria on guitar, the Civil War period is amorphously twisted into minimalist meanders and dreamily untethered shapes of the tactile, the avant-garde, and descriptive. At the heart of it all, Maria’s voice is relaxed and diaphanous; pitched somewhere between folk, the Celtic, the traditional and the jazzy. The tragically played out ‘Booth Killed Lincoln’ sounds a little like Joan Baez in parts. It certainly, in all its traditionalist lament, has an air of Dylan about it and the Laurel Canyon circle of female troubadours. Like a play in itself, the acts, steps that lead to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln on that fateful day, at that fateful performance at the Ford Theatre, Washington D.C., could be lifted off the sensational pages of that time’s broadsheets. Lincoln’s last breath, rather ironically to the last, is very much Dylan: “Of all the actors in this town, I loved John Wilkes Booth the best.” Musically, there’s but an essence of accompaniment, with the double-bass strings sounding more like a wooden set of spokes and a sort of dampened drum. The odd harmonic is twinged.
However, the album strikes a jarring chord of dissonance, a heavily pressed and free form piano opening gambit of Keith Jarrett and Thomas Schultz. Interpreting the American composer of romance and patriotism George Frederick Root’s most popular rallying call, ‘Battle Cry Of Freedom’, Maria seems to counterbalance Dessel’s passing storms, shades of forbode, salon bar upright tones, uncertainty, the abstract and discordant with disconsolate beauty. A second Root interpretation, the succour giving ‘Tramp Tramp Tramp’ (aka ‘The Prisoner’s Hope’, written in the later stages of the war) is sympathetic to the original, but more melodiously jazzy.
Some of the material leans towards country: albeit a version that exists in a fog of the Appalachians and Woodstock. There’s even a moment on ‘Abraham’s Daughter’ where either the double-bass or guitar resembles a banjo. And the album’s most unusual break from the formula (though to use that word is doing Maria and her foils a disservice), the finale ‘My Old Horse Died’, features a far more rustic, loosely and buzzier more carelessly strummed guitar and the sound of what could be some kind of replicated plucking/picking tines. I do love this song; it sounds like Dylan writing a filmic Western song to feature in Little Big Man or McCabe & Mrs. Miller. As far as I can hear, there isn’t much in the way of horses, but some ironic metaphor for loss, wistful financial and property woes: “Swallowed the place where my home stood. Mortgage guy came round, claimed the hole in the ground where my home once stood.” It almost sounds drunken this slice of Western music from the counterculture.
Remembrance, tragedy, the call to arms, and above all, the encouraging original lyrics of the abolitionist (one of the key themes, subjects of many of these songs) ring like wispy or beautified and pining poetry from the battle fields of America. Only, that same divisive rage, the splits, the distrustfulness and hunger for independence rages still to this day; a constant cry wolf of civil war is voiced whenever the political class weaponizes its losses, or failure to win an election. Handled with subtly, and a classy skill that stretches out the meaning, the lyricism, the mood and intention further, a new spotlight has been drawn upon these historical songs; taken into an avant-garde territory without losing sight of a melody, a form or shape, Maria and her foils create a rather unique and incredible atmosphere; bringing dusted off Civil War pamphlets, sheet music and the like to a new audience. Every bit as encapsulating and dreamy as Volume I. It will be interesting to see what Volume III offers, and where Maria goes next. An excellent, spellbinding series so far.
Saul Williams, Carlos Niño & Friends ‘Saul Williams meets Carlos Niño & Friends at TreePeople’ (International Anthem) 28th August 2025
An enviable collaborative union of talent from both the East and West coasts of an America on the eve (or thereabouts) of Trump’s inauguration, under the TreePeople canopy of righteous indignation at the state of a nation, gathered the totemic voiced poetic polymath Saul Williams, the divine styler, multi-instrumentalist, percussionist and producer of afflatus and new age conscious jazz and its many strands, Carlos Niño, and a host of congruous musical friends from a scene of ever-expanding inter-connections. You can’t get any more symbolic than this; setting up for an experimental – perhaps extemporized in part – performance beneath the black oak and walnut trees in Coldwater Canyon Park, L.A. Recorded at the time and now seeing the light (so to speak) eight months later into the new Presidency, this ensemble piece’s headlined foils and longtime friends since the 1990s, combine forces across an archaeological dig of free associations.
But before peeling back the layers of this psychogeography, a little about the artists involved in this part explorative, part free expressive, part oratory and part theatre. Not that Niño would boast, but the highly prolific producer, ‘expansive percussionist’, experimental composer, connector and communicator, has made albums as and with such notable luminaries as Ammoncontact, Build An Ark, The Life Force Trio, and others. And also overseen the Alice Coltrane protégé – the keyboardist, composer and actor – Surya Botofasina’s2022 devotional Everyone’s Children. All the while, leading or instigating his own loose ensemble of multidisciplinary artists and the & Friends banner. This time around, those friends include recurring foil Nate Mercereau (the solo artist in his own right’s skills include the guitar, composing, songwriting, live sampling and improvising), Aaron Shaw (the horn player has worked with such notable icons and names as Elijah Blake, Anderson Paak., Dave Chappelle, Herbie Hancock, and made music for TV and film), Andres Renteria (the L.A. percussionist/drummer and DJ has worked with an impressive host of artists over the year: Jose Gonzalez, Father John Misty, Flying Lotus and Nick Waterhouse), Maria The Artiste (hot-housed in the AACM of Chicago, the woodwind player, vocalist, vibraphonist, bandleader and composer is also a member of the late Horace Tapscott initiated, and now six decade running, Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra), Francesca Heart (the partial alias of Italian artist, researcher and electronic artist with a skill at playing the conch shell Francesca Mariano, who makes new age music of a kind on computers), Kamasi Washington (the saxophonist who’s profile has possibly been highest over the last twenty years, after ushering in a revival of a sort on spiritual, odyssey jazz, has picked up a number of awards and plaudits for his work and collaborations) and Aja Monet (the lauded and awarded contemporary poet, writer, lyricist and activist can be heard joining Williams with a forewarned and haunting poetic vision on ‘The Water is Rising/as we surpass the firing squad’).
Needing no introduction, but getting one anyway, American rapper, singer, songwriter, musician, poet, writer, and actor Saul Stacy Williams first came to attention during the late 1980s on the New York café poetry scene. The burgeoning innovator, mixing beat/poetics/slam and hip-hop, soon stood out. A big break came as the lead in the awarding winning Marc Levin directed movie SLAM in the 90s; the phenomenon of slam poetry, its reach via competitive performance outside academia, set free from the stiff studied branches of the elite institutions. The list of peers that Williams has performed with is incredible; from blast master KRS-One to illmatic Nas, The Fugees, beat poet Allen Ginsberg and Black arts movement luminary Sonia Sanchez. Williams has also been a driving force behind the Brooklyn Afro-punk movement, written a libretto for Ted Hearne’s LA Philharmonic produced oratorio PLACE and two symphonies by the late Swiss composer, Thomas Kessler, based on two books of Saul’s poetry, Said the shotgun to the head and The Dead Emcee Scrolls. The scope and range are wide indeed, with both Williams film roles and a stint on Broadway as the lead in the first hip-hop musical, Holler If You Hear Me – based upon the lyrics of Tupac Shakur – to consider. And on top of that a sextet of studio albums and quartet of poetry books, all translated into multiple languages. The self-titled album debut of which was produced by Rick Rubin. There’s so much more of course; a whole Wikipedia page in fact to delve into.
But what’s important is that the experience, creative richness and innovativeness of all participants in this movement of change is in no doubt. And when all brought together like this, the results have a real depth and breadth, weaving together so many connective threads of outrage and riled injustice and indignation. This is meta, an alternative, sometimes more felt than real, history toiled over until exposing the roots.
To distil this performance down to jazz would be an injustice in itself, as the ensemble and their two leads accentuate, ring and punctuate, and, without rhythm in most cases, build a spiritual, conscious and traumatic atmosphere around and bedded beneath the either peppered, prophesied, near uninterrupted flow of racial injury, of hurt, of rage and recourse. The musical and sound elements certainly recall some of the signatures of jazz; of artists such as Coleman, the Pharoah, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, of Don Cherry, The John Betsch Society, of Brother Ah and Idris Ackamoor. But nothing quite frames this performance, demarcated into four parts with an after show of appreciation and emotional final word sit-down with the audience. For amongst the collage of the atavistic and primal, as prehistoric beasts lift their heads disturbed by the stirring hands of the dig, and Edan’s wildlife emerges from the grasslands, and the sax sings a parched reedy song, the percussion mirrors the sounds of dry bones and beads, and the vibraphone’s bulb-like notes float like particles in the style of Jamal, Williams delivers omens and a associative thread of technological, economic, political, social ills. Williams sounds one part Quelle Chris, another part Amiri Baraka on that opening “land map”: that cradle of uncivilised repeal. Later on, as the poetics seem to be less interrupted or stretched, the style is more Watts Prophets; especially on ‘We are calling out in this moment’, which links together the origins of Manhattan and its stock exchange with the original Lenape peoples that once farmed it, cultivated it and called it home before the arrival of the Dutch and then the English. Origin stories connect with the occupy movement, Black Lives Matter in a flurry of redress; the financial epicentres slave trading roots almost matter-of-factly and shockingly mapped out.
Later on, Williams is joined by Aja Monet for the new age balm turn African wilderness haunting ‘‘The Water is Rising/as we surpass the firing squad’, who’s contribution amongst the vibraphone tinkles and dreamy serenaded saxophone wafts and lingers and pines, and the “insect gossip”, recalls Tenesha The Wordsmith passing the mic to the Last Poets, once Williams takes up his post in front of the said allegorical “firing squad”.
Sitting down with the audience at the very end of this astonishing performance – bordering on both the theatre, the counterculture, and the activist -, and after the stats, the re-purposed jargon, the rebalance of history as it was and is, a time of emotional pleading and reminder that there is still work to be done. But that message is one of community and the need to build and maintain networks of support in the tough times; not to wallow or give in. But as one stage in the fight this album marks a new enterprise and platform for greater harmony and a safe place for experimentation. International Anthem can do no wrong, as they continue to facilitate such creative sparks of inventive free play and poetry.
___/The Monolith Cocktail Social Playlist Vol. 100___
For the 100th time, the Social Playlist is an accumulation of music I love and want to share; with tracks from my various DJ sets and residencies over the years and both selected cuts from those artists and luminaries we’ve lost on the way and from those albums celebrating anniversaries each month.
Running for nearly 12 years now, Volume 100 is the latest eclectic and generational spanning playlist come radio show from me – the perfect radio show in fact: devoid of chatter, interruptions and inane self-promotion.
Here’s to the hundredth edition, which features a homage or two to Terry Reid and Howie Tee, who we both lost recently. Self-coining his own nickname, Reid’s voice was lionised as “superlungs” for his incredible vocal prowess. But as an all-round package, voice, guitarist and rock artist of universal repute – in any article or description, Reid is anointed as the ‘artists’ artist’ -, Reid could shake the foundations of blue-eyed soul and maximum R&B, blues rock and heavy rock. His name was touted around the 1960s, courted to front or join countless luminaries, from Led Zep and Deep Purple (he turned them both down). There’s many eclectic steps on the way, including a penchant for the Latin rhythms of Brazil (falling into his orbit during 1969, Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, recently exiled by the military dictatorship of Brazil, were helped by Reid’s attorney to come to London; they would go on to flank Reid at the seminal Isle of Wight Pop Festival almost a year later in 1970), a direction into introspective jazz, desert mountain commune living and session work for Don Henley, Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt – this came after Reid more or less decided to retire from his solo career. A rich life lived. So, in my selection I’ve gone for a smattering spread of tracks from the cannon, starting back at the beginning with the title track from the 1968 LP bang bang you’re Terry Reid plus ‘The Hand Don’t Fit The Glove’, ‘Rich Kid Blues’, ‘Live Life’ and ‘Ooh Baby (Make Me Feel So Young)’.
From a whole other sphere of the musical landscape, Howie Tee, the hip-hop and new jack swing hit maker of repute during the 80s and 90s. Born in the UK, but raised up in Flat Bush, Brooklyn, Tee’s (or the name his folks would recognise, Howard Anthony Thompson) musical protectory took flight with a break in the early electro crew CDIII. Already familiarising himself with the mixing desk and production tools, Tee quickly jumped ship to producing, his first success being in conjunction with U.T.F.O.’s Kangol Kid, with the commercially hot hip-hop group Whistle. At the same time Tee also put together the equally successful Real Roxanne collaboration, scoring with ‘Bang Zoom (Let’s Go-Go)’ – which as the name suggests, rides on the go-go phenomenon. There would also be production credits for records by Cash Crew, Seeborn & Puma, E.S.P. and Izzy Ice. Tee then became the in-house producer for the New Jersey-based independent label Select Records, producing relative hits for Special Ed and Chubb Rock. But it wasn’t all hip-hop orientated, for in 1991 he mixed and co-produced Color Me Badd’s ‘I Wanna Sex You Up’: a Billboard number one. And he also made remixes for such diverse acts as Madonna and Maxi Priest. I’ve chosen both Special Ed and the Real Roxanne, plus Chubb’s bromance cut, ‘DJ Innovator’.
In a celebratory mood, I’ve also kept up the monthly inclusion of anniversary album tracks, with 60th nods to The Beatles Help, Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited (I’ve gone for, what I hope, is two not so common of known cover versions from both) and Miles Davis E.S.P. There’s also 50th glass raisers to Cortex’s cult favourite, Troupeau Bleu, Don Cherry’s pioneering Brown Rice, and Eno’s Another Green World.
Every month I like to collect up some of the more newish or recent tracks that didn’t make the Monthly playlist selection – either for lack of space or I just forgot to include at the time. In that category there’s Elaine Howley’s diaphanous, translucent ‘Hold Me In A New Way’, Mike Cooper’s vague South Seas, Pacific exotic mirage ‘Eternal Equinox’, U.S. Girls’ Jane (Doe) Country and Plastic Ono Band funk ‘No Fruit’, the collaborative PAUER/Wolfgang Perez/Der Wandler/Magic Island union’s yearning ‘Falling Over You’, and Pons hi-energy 80s work-it no wave dance diatribe ‘Fast Money Music’. There’s also a track from the recently released, and featured, Woody at Home Vols 1 and 2 – Guthrie hanging round like Banquo’s ghost over Dylan, who’s Highway is revisited this month.
The rest of the playlist is made up of cross-generational from across the ages by Jaz-O, Baby Washington, Isan Slete, Vincent Over The Sink, Phantom Payn Days, Lynn Castle, Mad Walls, Massacre and more…
TRACK LISTING:
The Real Roxanne FT. Howie Tee ‘Bang Zoom (Let’s Go-Go)’
Pons ‘Fast Money Music’
Themselves ‘Roman is as Roman Does’
Waylon Jennings ‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’ Mariangela Celeste & Vangelis ‘Honolulu Baby’
Woody Guthrie ‘One Little Thing An Atom Can’t Do’
Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons ‘Queen Jane Approximately’
Terry Reid ‘The Hand Don’t Fit The Glove’
Baby Washington ‘The Ballad Of Bobby Dawn’
Terry Reid ‘Rich Kid Blues’
U.S. Girls ‘No Fruit’
Lynn Castle ‘You Are the One’
John Baldry ‘It Ain’t Easy’
Isan Slete ‘Lam Phloen’
Terry Reid ‘Bang, Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)’
Miles Davis ‘R.J.’
Jaz-O ‘Put The Squeeze On ‘Em’
Special Ed ‘I Got It Made’
Cortex ‘Automne – Colchiques’
Brian Eno ‘Sky Saw’
Furniture ‘My Own Devices’
Mad Walls ‘Lily’
Massacre ‘Bones’
Terry Reid ‘Live Life’
Mint Tattoo ‘Wrong Way Girl’
Terry Reid ‘Ooh Baby (Make Me Feel So Young)’
Chubb Rock Ft. Howie Tee ‘DJ Innovator’
Don Cherry ‘Degi-Degi’
Elaine Howley ‘Hold Me In A New Way’
Mike Cooper ‘ETERNAL EQUINOX’
Xul Solar ‘Sigh’
Vincent Over the Sink ‘Number Theory’
Phantom Payn Days ‘primitive chamber music phone call blues’
Woody Guthrie ‘I’m A Child Ta Fight’
Willis Earl Beal ‘Like A Box’
Marcos Resende & Index ‘Nina Nenem’
___/Archives___
From the exhaustive Archives each month, a piece that’s either worth re-sharing in my estimates, or a piece that is either current or tied into one of our anniversary-celebrating albums. From the former category, my original review of Willis Earl Beal’s nite flights soul harrowed and ached Noctunes album, released a decade ago this month.
Willis Earl Beal ‘Noctunes’
(Tender Loving Empire) Released 28th August 2015
Whether stretched beyond the realms of fact and fiction or not, the many travails of Willis Earl Beal fit the outsider artist profile perfectly. With more deaths/rebirths than the Dali Lama’s had reincarnations, Beal’s self-made and put-upon myth status as the Zorro masked articulate esoteric blues and soul poet, only reinforces the mystery that surrounds him. Hardly the result of an easy life – one that’s seen him grow up in a sort of odd isolation, plagued by both physical and mental health; a consequence in no small part of his injuries sustained when trying out for the army.
His musical epiphany arrived whilst down-and-out in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The untrained, and at one time homeless, but naturally gifted songwriter recorded the rawest of lo fi tracks, leaving them with his hand drawn cover art at various coffee shops around town, alongside flyers seeking a girlfriend with his phone number written on them. These unassuming offerings eventually made their way onto the cover of Found Magazine in America and from there, fell into the hands of XL Recordings Jamie-James Medina. Originally signing to the labels Bronx-based offshoot Hot Charity, releasing two well-received albums – his debut Acousmatic Sorcery in 2012 and Nobody Knows follow up in 2013 – Beal succumbed to either ennui, despondency or the pressures of suddenly being foisted into the music business and quit. Beal slopped off into a self-imposed exile in the backwoods of Olympia, Washington, and became the Noctunes crooner.
As the title suggests – a riff on nocturnes – these twelve nocturnal lullabies, paeans and plaintive ballads evoke the romantic nighttime meditations. Stripped to the barest of accompaniments, yearningly swooning with the occasional burst of a drawn-out primal scream, high notes and pained wallowing, Beal creates a haunted soundtrack. Part southern river ambient journey, part soul-baring soliloquy.
Once again dodging definition, he takes the mournful strings and suffused hymn like aspects of his previous recordings and ditches the bounce and R&B elements for minimalism. Still channelling Otis Redding with a side order of Bill Withers and echoing traces of TV On The Radio’s most dilatory maladies, Noctunes is, when prescribed in small doses, a visceral stirring experience. Choosing to say more with a lot less, lyrics, which if uttered by many other artists would sound like mere platitudes, are given a gut-wrenching and despondent leverage when leaving Beal’s lips.
Often draining, and at times laying it on a bit too thick, the album’s impact can be enervated when digested in one session. Lingering manifestations rather than epiphanies, it feels like our protagonist is unburdening his heart. A tough call on paper, yet the bare faint undertones of funeral parlour organ, stuttering jazz style drums, murmuring hums and synths lift the songs gently above morose and indulgence.
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THE MONTHLY DIGEST OF ACCUMULATED NEW MUSIC; THE SOCIAL INTER-GENERATIONAL/ECLECTIC AND ANNIVERSARY ALBUMS CELEBRATING PLAYLIST; AND CHOICE PIECES FROM THE ARCHIVES.
Photo Credit:: Shalev Ariel
THE NEW/
Apifera ‘Keep The Outside Open’
(Stones Throw) 21st June 2024
Pouring forth from hangout sessions at Yuvi Haukin’s studio (a member of the L.A. based quartet), the friendly, playful and jovial toking environment around Apifera’s second album inspires a constant change and lucid fluctuation between prompted musical fusions.
Near omnivorous in tastes and drivers, the often dreamy, hallucinating moods envelope a psychedelic, trippy palette of jazz-funk, disco, vapour synth music, the kosmische, the progressive, Euro chic scores and Indian influences. The later is can be heard via the cadence, almost meandered mantra vocals, of the album title (“keep the outside open”) on the opening Secret Machines-esque slow released, spacy ‘Iris Is Neil’ – a reference to the search for a missing cat called Iris, who was chasing a bat named Neil at the time of the feline’s disappearance.
Over the course of fifteen tracks (some mere vignettes in duration) Havkin, Nitai Hershkovits, Amir Bresler and Yonatan Albalak open minds and broaden horizons through various portals and mirrors; soaking up the cosmic rays whilst wistfully contemplating the universal, aching dreamily over infatuations and casting drug-induced allusions. Everything is pretty smooth and evened out, the changes in style rounded so as not jolt, but work in harmony together.
With a diverse and notable range of CVs, we have Havkin’s electronic-jazz alter ego Rejoices, Albalak fronting the post-rock-psych-jazz band Geshem, Bresler’s Afrobeat and jazz blended Liquid Saloon, and Hershkovits’s soloist piano outings for the esteemed ECM label. All of which is channeled and merged further with both suffused waves and shorter flashes of Sven Wunder, Wax Machine, The Future era George Duke, Greg Foat, Flying Moon In Space, The Flaming Lips, Jini Tenor, El Michels affair, Les McCann and The Fatback Band.
Extending the loose configuration of influences further still, the quartet invite the trumpeter and ECM signing Avishai Cohen to blow smokestack Miles Davis and more southern border bluesy expressions over the minimal vapors and gauzy airs of the finale, ‘Sera Sam’.
A smattering of made-up characters fashioned from “smoking jams” act as cartoon, psychedelic-like vehicles for sharing concerns, woes, but also for conveying a message of escapism from the increasingly divided, polarised suffocation of a hostile world at war. Advocating a return of a “wilder” untethered “freestate” of culture, music and life, Apifera leave the gateways permanently open, inviting us all to embrace, not fear, such anarchic freewheeling.
Herald ‘Linear B’
(Errol’s Hot Wax) 14th June 2024
If mid-70s Eno working his magic with Merriweather Post Pavilion sounds like a match anointed in heaven then Lawrence Worthington’s ridiculously long-delayed debut album is going to send you into a woozy alt-pop state of bliss. The latter partner in that ideal fantasy of influences is hardly surprising, with the Animal Collective’s “infrequent” co-founding member Josh Dibb (aka Deakin) playing the part of co-producing foil and soundboard. And although the eventual Linear B album was first conceived twenty plus years ago, when the Animal Collective and Panda Bear and a menagerie of congruous bands were building an alternative-psych-pop scene – the darlings (quite rightly) of Pitchfork and the burgeoning MySpace culture -, and when the musical palette of sounds is produced on cheap 90s Casio and Yamaha equipment, Worthington’s Herald nom de plume still resonates and feels refreshingly dreamily idiosyncratic.
And yet of its time, Linear B chimes, swims, shimmers, drifts and bubbles along to tubular and padded Casio percussive presets and both dream and coldwave patterned synths like it’s the late 90s and early 2000s.
The gap, after drumming his way through the 90s with The Male Nurse, Country Teasers and Yummy Fur, is due to such important affairs of the heart as marriage but also relocation and the pursuit of a useful trade – probably more important than ever, with the musician and artist’s plight never so woefully dire in monetary terms.
Picking up the ideas and partially written songs from that time at a much later date, Worthington met Dibb (a natural music partner if ever there was one) whilst (and here’s where that carpentry trade comes in not only useful but fatefully too) helping to build a recording studio. Getting on like the proverbial house-on-fire through a mutual passion for The Residents, Frank Ocean, Love’s Forever Changes, Portishead’s Third and J&MC’s Psychocandy, and spurred on by close friends, that pair set to creative work: Worthington would send his new friend demos until something struck, at which point Dibb’s would suggest booking time in the studio when the real fun began.
The results set a personal psychedelic language of feels and character-dotted whimsy to a maverick alt-synth-pop production: imagine Syd Barrett, K. Leimar and Edward Penfold backed by a Factory Records White Fence or Panda Bear. Unassumingly lo fi yet symphonic, you can hear hints of neo-romantics, colder synth spells, the post-punk, the Bureau B label’s cult German new wave and post-krautrock offerings, John Cale and a very removed vision of The Beach Boys – a stretch I know, but I swear I can hear them on the album’s closer, ‘SS Caledinghi’.
There’s much to love about this album of vapours, rays, waves, almost angelic-like moments of drifting coos. The quality, production is first rate, with each song opening up more of its subtleties and sophistication on every play.
If anything the passing of time, life hiatus, has helped in giving Worthington the space and wealth of experiences to develop and really make the album he always wanted to.
Sis ‘Vibhuti’
(Native Cat) 21st June 2024
“Vibhuti” means many things to many people; the etymology translated differently by a host of Indian cultures, spiritualists and denominations, and depending on which language, can be defined in a myriad of ways. In this case, Sis, the spiritual imbued recording guise of Jenny Gillespie Mason, uses the Sanskrit meaning of that title: “the divine spirit in the human body”.
Framed as a “roving document of spiritual awakening”, prompted by a series of “healing dreams”, the Vibhuti album channels new age motherhood, rebirth and the poetic output of the Indian mystic, nationalist and Noble Prize contender (nominated twice, once for literature and later, for peace) Sri Aurobindo and his partner in spiritual-literary learning and teaching, Mirra Alfasssa: Known as “Mother”, the French national was considered the equal partner of Aurobindo in every way – she would eventually join the maharishi at his Pondicherry retreat pursing a lifetime of philosophical and devotional learning.
An integral part of Mason’s lyricism, that iconic pairing’s message of humanity and the recognition of our divine origins and future ascension is mixed with environmental poetry, gratitude and the wonders of birth and love, love, love.
The musical vibrations are pretty surprising, helped in part by a guest list that includes the notable addition of Devendra Banhart providing subtle electric guitar lines and vibrations to a couple of tracks, but also Will Miller’s overall suffused Fourth World imbued Jon Hassell-like gauzy trumpet pines and snuggles. Longtime foils Brijean and Doug Stuart are also on hand once more to provide chimed, tinkled and trinket shimmer percussion, smooth basslines and production. But this is both a mirage and trance-like electronic alt-pop-jazz-soul-new-age-chill-wave spread of diaphanous and rainbow refracted vapours and more softly driven swells of yearned searching. One minute we’re in the realms of Alice Coltrane and Carlos Niño, the next, 70s Fleetwood Mac harmonising with Karen Vogt. And then there’s spells in which it sounds like a loose merger of Curtis Mayfield Roots period, EDM and the Tara Clerkin Trio. Beautifully sung, expressed and fluid throughout, the articulations and messages of self-healing prove artistically therapeutic and successful. Mason branches musical experimental and commercial to produce a melodious, memorable entrancing and devotional odyssey of discovery and Indian inspired philosophical mindfulness.
Neuro…No Neuro ‘Mental Cassette’
(Audiobulb) 14th June 2024
Charging up the neurons and memory receptors once more, the Tuscon, Arizona synthesist and electronic artist Kirk Markarian softly captures abstract feels and recollected scenes/evocations from his past. Under the binary Neuro…No Neuro nom de plume, Kirk’s bulb shaped translucent spaced-out notes, pips, bubbles and cloud gazing and horizon opening waveforms soundscape the subtle gauzy mental reminisces contained in the memory banks of a febrile mind.
On cassette form, with all its idiosyncratic tweaks and foibles – from a little hiss, the odd spell of bity granular surface noise and some staccato stuttered cuts and breaks in the flow – this latest hallucinogenic mirage of the tingled, arched, bended, warbled and languorous is like being blanketed in the soft play area of a psychoanalyst session.
Woozy ambience and delicate, rounded pollinations and mauve-coloured coated melodic minimal electronics and echoes of Library music conjure up such innocuous prompts as sticky tape, coaches and playground slides. This is like a watercolor version of fond recollections of innocence; an almost hypnotizing and dreamy abstraction of childhood created by a truly unique sound artist.
But changing the mood, the signature, there’s a longer remix treatment of ‘My words Come Out In Different Ways’ by Subgenuis – who, for all I know, might just be another disguise, alter ego of Kirk. This never quite hits its stride, filtering, as it does, in and out of a sort of vapoured psy and techno futuristic vibe; with a sample (I think) of some female writer/speaker communicating some theoretical address to an audience on the processes of something creative that involves dialogue, the sharing of one’s thoughts: and perhaps, repressed memories.
The Mental Tapes now could be said to archive, document for posterity those feelings and emotional states of regression therapy. Connecting with one’s childhood has seldom sounded so oblique and empirical.
Morio Maeda & All-Stars ‘Rock Communication Yagibushi’
(WEWANTSOUNDS)
As part of the vinyl specialist’s Japanese catalogue, WEWANTSOUNDS have thankfully found the time to reissue, for the first time internationally, the coveted jazz-funk-swing Rock Communication Yagibushi fusion by the renowned arranger, pianist Morio Maeda.
A beat-maker, DJ cut chemist’s and crate-digger’s delight, Maeda’s Americanized swung and Lalo Schifrin cop theme scored reinterpretations of age-old Japanese Islands folk songs and dances was originally released on the cusp of a new decade in 1970.
Using a similar formula to its precursor, This Is Rock (recorded in cahoots with foil saxophonist Jiro Inagaki), only this time replacing international hits with the traditional Shinto, the festive, the fisherman’s laments and romantically alluded handed-down songs and poetry of a diverse Pacific geography closer to home, this cult display takes many of its cues from the U.S. of A. – see the already mentioned Schifrin signatures, but also David Axlerod, a little Jerry Fielding, Jimmy Castor Bunch and Ahmed Jamal (I’m thinking specifically here of ‘Footprints’). That and a smattering of 60s Italian cinema and Library music – Armando Trovajoli springs immediately to mind.
The horns blaze and bristle, trill like a mounted curbside bust on the streets of San Fran, or swoon with lovelorn plaint in a similar West Coast location – a dockside romantic moment perhaps – as the more indigenous sounds and song from Yamageta, Kumamoto, the Island of Sado, Fukushima and Akita are transferred, given oomph and a funky showtime swagger. There are exceptions to that rule; the sake drinking seaman’s ode to love, ‘Sado Okesa’, seems to be channeling an Egyptian Hammond vibe and snake charmer’s oboe.
Largely self-taught – although it was with encouragement from his father, who taught him how to read sheet music – the 1930s born Maeda was quick to embrace jazz. Moving to Tokyo in the mid 1950s, the pianist-arranger joined the Japanese guitarist Shungo Sawada’s ensemble, and a little later, the saxophonist Konosuke Saijo’s West Liners band. In-between both those contributions and afterwards, he started his own group, the Wind Breakers, and founded We3 with the notable jazz players Yasuo Arakawa and Takeshi Inomata. He also penned music for the The Blue Coats, Tatsuya Takahasi and Nobuo Hara. The culmination of that provenance, Maeda’s All-Stars – two actual lineups make up that all-star cast, a quintet and a extended ensemble boosted by a larger horn section – Rock Communication Yagibushi adds a fuzz and twang of 60s guitar and jazz drum rolls, crescendos, a glassy-sounding marimba and sustained Dr. Lonnie Smith organ to the native heritage. Breaks aplenty, samples and fun await all those eager to get their hands on an affordable copy of a cult fusion from a revered artist on the fringes of jazz, swing, TV and film scores.
THE SOCIAL PLAYLIST VOLUME 87\__
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 87 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 June (or thereabouts) that selection includes tracks from LPs by Bob Dylan and The Band (Before The Flood, 1974), Jade Warrior (Floating Worlds, ’74), Arti & Mestieri (Tilt, ’74), Miles Davis (Decoy, 1984), Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds (From Here To Eternity, ’84) and Noura Mint Seymali (Tzenni, 2014, which is also featured below in the archives section).
There’s also a smattering of homages to the late French chanteuse of forlorn and sorrow, Françoise Hardy, who passed away just last week. An impossible choice, but I’ve picked out a quartet of interesting tunes and covers from different points of her grand sweeping career that spanned six decades.
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 roll call includes Chris Cohen, Ivan The Tolerable, Beak>, The Green Kingdom, and a cut from the recently released collection of ‘homegrown’, homespun songs from the much-overlooked troubadour Tucker Zimmerman.
That leaves room for an eclectic mix of intergenerational tunes from a myriad of genres: KMD, Twenty Sixty Six & Then, the Mo-Dettes, Howdy Moon, Drahla, TVEGC, Peter Principle, Bill Dixon, Tadalat and more…
TRACK LIST IN FULL\__________
Françoise Hardy ‘That’ll Be The Day’
Typical Girls ‘Girl Like You’
Meta Meta ‘Oba Ina’
Beak> ‘Ah Yeh’
Julian Jay Savarin ‘Stranger’
Arti & Mestieri ‘In Cammino’
Kante Manfila ‘Diniya’
Miles Davis ‘That’s What Happened’
Bill Dixon ‘Vecctor’
KMD ‘Popcorn’
Tadalat ‘Tamiditin’
Noura Mint Seymali ‘Hebebeb (Zrag)’
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds ‘Cabin Fever!’
Jade Warrior ‘Red Lotus’
Ivan The Tolerable ‘Supermoon’
The Green Kingdom ‘Softly Away’
David Gasper ‘China Camp’
Tucker Zimmerman ‘It All Depends On The Pleasure Man’
Françoise Hardy ‘Suzanne’
Bob Dylan & The Band ‘Up On Cripple Creek’
Twenty Sixty Six & Then ‘Time Can’t Take It Away’
Françoise Hardy ‘La Sieste’
Chris Cohen ‘Damage’
Howdy Moon ‘For Tonight’
Françoise Hardy ‘Et Voila’
Mo-Dettes ‘Sparrow’
Drahla ‘Second Rhythm’
The Victorian English Gentlemen’s Club ‘I Kick Higher Than A Child’
Peter Principle ‘Friend Of The Extinction’
Saecula Saeculorum ‘Radio no Peito’
ARCHIVES\_____
This month’s archive spots travel back a reasonable and recent decade ago, with the whirlwind dynamic griot star Noura Mint Seymali’s first album, Tzenni, for the Glitterbeat Records label, and Mick Harvey’s re-released consummate 2014 package of homages to Serge Gainsbourg.
Noura Mint Seymali ‘Tzenni’
(Glitterbeat Records)
The technicalities, pentatonic melodies and the fundamental mechanics aside, nothing can quite prepare you for that opening atavistic panoramic vocal and off-kilter kick-drum and snare; an ancestral linage that reaches back a thousand odd years, given the most electric crisp production, magically restores your faith in finding new music that can resonate and move you in equal measure.
The afflatus titular experience channeled with energetic passion and poetic lament, revolves around the whirling – and at its peak moment of epiphany, a fervor – dance. Performed over time under the desert skies and khaima tents by the Moorish griots, this cyclonic Hassaniya worded movement (which variously translates as, ‘to circulate’, ‘to spin’ or ‘to turn’) that enacts the orbiting solar system and with it all the elements (wind and tides) on Earth, is hypnotically invigorating.
From the German label, Glitterbeat Records, this latest Maghreb African transmission follows in the wake of the equally compelling electric transcendent desert blues of Tamikrest, Dirt Music, Samba Touré and the Bedouin diaphanous song of Aziza Brahim. Tzenni by Noura Mint Seymali and her accompanying clan make suggestive musical and social/political connections with all of these groups and artists.
Hailing from the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, nestled in between Algeria, Senegal, Mali and the Western Sahara, with the Atlantic lapping its shoreline, Noura keeps tradition alive in a modern, tumultuous, climate. Her homeland – run ever since a coup in 2008, by the former general Mohamed Ould Abdul Aziz, duly elected president in 2009 – was rocked by the immolation sparked Arab Spring and subsequent youth movement protests; all of which were violently suppressed by the authorities. Add the omnipresent problems of FGM, child labour and human trafficking to the equation and you have enough catalysts to last a lifetime. However, Noura’s veracious commanding voice responds with a dualistic spirit, the balance of light and shade putting a mostly positive, if not thumping backbeat, to forlorn and mourning.
Recorded in New York, Dakar and in the Mauritania capitol, Nouakchott, the album transverses a cosmopolitan map of influences and musical escapism. The original heritage still remains strong, yet the ancient order of griot finds solace with the psychedelic and beyond. Noura’s family linage is one of the regions most celebrated; her father, Seymali Ould Ahmed Vall, was instrumental in bringing Mauritanian music to the outside world, her late stepmother, who the whole nation mourned, was the great Dimi Mint Abba. Noura would serve an apprenticeship with Dimi, and later strike up an inspired union with her husband, the visionary guitarist Jeiche Ould Chighaly, whose dune-shifting amorphous flange-delivered licks and spindly fingered riffs create a kosmiche alien landscape, flirting with both rock and the blues. No less respected, the bass and drums combo of Ousamane Touré and Matthew Tinari bring the funk and groove.
Moving at a momentum and seamlessly across these musical boundaries, the band articulate a mostly uplifting exultation to turbulence and instability, steering through Amon Duul II and Ash Ra Tempel like field studies on the groups break out titular anthem, meditatively channeling the wah-wah delta blues on ‘El Mougelmen’, and paying homage to the prophet with an epic vocal note holding hymn to forgiveness on ‘Soub Hanallah’.
Noura Mint Seymali will undoubtedly follow Tamikrest’s success in reaching across the divide. The Northern Mali electric-blues Tuareg’s, in no small part brought to attention by the escalations in the country’s insurgency and later containment by the former colonists, France, last year wowed new, less keen world music fans. Though obviously a result of its own unique history and culture, Noura’s sound is congruous with that of both Tamikrest and Aziza Brahim – vocally. Like those artists, she will undoubtedly find a receptive, ever hungry for horizons new, audience.
Mick Harvey ‘Intoxicated Man/ Pink Elephants’
(Mute)
Creatively absent from sparring with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in 2013, fellow founding member and stalwart Mick Harvey missed out on the group’s mid-life opuscule, Push The Sky Away: an album that surely marks a pinnacle in meditative requiems.
Yet, since leaving the ranks, Harvey has enjoyed a fruitful run of his very own. Despite being ignored by the majority of press and blogs, his charmingly understated Four (Acts Of Love) album of afflatus paeans and lamentable covers and original numbers was wholly embraced by the Monolith Cocktail, the only blog, to our knowledge, to both critically endorse it and grant it a coveted place in a ‘choice LPs of the year’ list. In 2014, Harvey alongside Crime and the City Solutions’ Alexander Hacke and Danielle De Picciotto and musical director Paul Wallfisch, formed the nursery grime musical outfit The Ministry Of Wolves for a set of theater performances. By way of the Pulitzer Prize winning author Anne Sexton’s, even more, macabre revisionist take on the original Brothers Grimm fairy tales, the acclaimed stage production has also spawned a soundtrack LP, Music From Republik De Wölfe – reviewed favorably by us back in February.
And now, we have the re-release, accompanied by live tour dates, of Harvey’s homages to the late great, salacious Gallic maverick, Serge Gainsbourg to once again fall in love with. To coincide with the anniversary of Gainsbourg’s birth, Harvey’s 1990s moiety duo of tributes to the lecherous titan of cool, Intoxicated Man and Pink Elephants, were trundled out on April 2nd. The vinyl versions are earmarked for the 23rd June. As a precursor to this celebratory push, Harvey and his band performed a selection of songs at the Yeah Yeah Yeahs curated ATP festival back in 2013. Threatening to forever bring down the curtain on this tributary oeuvre, he has recently been back out on the road, performing in his native Australia, the UK and throughout Europe, nailing the lid shut on his Gainsbourg infatuation for good with the last date on the 14th June in Tilburg, the Netherlands: or so we believed.
Not without reservation, Harvey the ardent fan, was persuaded and prompted to record a whole catalogue of cover versions whilst working with fellow Antipodean Anita Lane, in the mid 1990s. The sleepy-eyed coquette singer/songwriter, object of desire for Nick Cave during The Birthday Party and burgeoning Bad Seeds days, Lane proposed to record the post-coital ‘Je T’aime…Moi Non Plus’ in English; originally performed of course by Gainsbourg and his English muse, Jane Birkin. Troubled by the inimitable quirks and idiosyncrasies, Harvey labored long and hard to translate the French into a less than preposterous English version: Je T’aime…Moi Non Plus as ‘I Love You…Nor Do I’ is no less steamy but Nick Cave, filling in for the nonplussed Gainsbourg, is a little too theatrical as the song takes on a less shrouded, more mooning, conversion.
Truly egged on, Harvey expanded his horizons and eventually recorded enough material for two albums and more: left over and unreleased at the time, the sociopath loony, ‘Dr. Jeckyll’ and soft focus love tragedy, ‘Run From Happiness’ have been bundled in with this re-release. But none of this would work without the quality of the supporting cast, who excelled. Channeling Gainsbourg’s leading ladies, Lane oozes that same knowing breathy sexiness, her entwined cooing dove vocals and comely sighs emulating the love nest fey Bardot and Birkin. Lane is joined in these misadventures by a qualitative backing of longtime collaborators, such as the already mentioned Cave, and newly appointed Bad Seed miscreant, Warren Ellis (both appearing on the 1997 Pink Elephants LP). Permeating and driving it all on are the lavish, though sumptuously tentative, string arrangements of French musician/composer Bertrand Burgalat and former Orange Juice bassist David McClymont.
The first of those suites, Intoxicated Man, doesn’t shy away from the hard truths, yet it is perhaps the lighter, popier and accomplished of the two records. Released in 1995, this hangover scoundrel of an album merges those blissfully unabashed dry-humping classics with its newly acquired 90s panache for European Yé-Yé, cutesy 60s nostalgia and, itself spurred on by reliving the golden decade, Britpop. However, Harvey also injects some of the more serious, Gothic-tinged, aspects of his infamous day-job band, into the pulchritude mix for good measure. Rather convincingly, Harvey’s intonations and impressions are quite good, and the English language versions of these iconic songs capture the Left Bank spirit: never availed of Gainsbourg’s ever-present genius, but nevertheless offering a fresh take.
Huskily delivered by our troubadour and caressed by Lane’s sultry enchantress tones, the deadpan Harvey begins as he means to go on, with the opening double-entendre chanson, ‘60 Erotic Year’. Flitting and flirting between erotically charged, metaphorical, pop and wanton lust, it proves the ideal introduction. Highlights are frequent, the chariot-to-the-gods, motorcycle riot, ‘Harley Davidson’, a petulant enough anthem of the ‘die young stay pretty’ variety – a rollicking union of Transvision Vamp and Saint Etienne -, just one of the many great three-minute bursts of rebel-rousing freedom. A predilection for auto-erotica persists with the arousing tribute to the Ford Mustang, and with the unfortunate plunge off the cliff road on the way to Monte Carlo, amusing ‘Jazz In The Ravine’ – “At dawn, they used a spoon to scrape up the remains.”
Harvey ups the ante on the carnival, rolling-conga fueled, ‘New York, USA’, and forlornly duets with Lane – stepping in for Bardot – on the fateful depression-era-most-wanted-on-the-run-Rom-com, and standout, ‘Bonnie And Clyde’. Bridget Bardot, whose fleeting but torrid affair with Gainsbourg left plenty of indelible marks, also inspired the album’s whirlwind, stabbing string, final affair, ‘Initials B.B.’: performed with brilliant understated morose.
Complimenting that first volume, the 1997 released, Pink Elephants, is a slightly darker proposition. It begins with the titular instrumental, a swooning cinematic teary-eyed lament, and is followed by the Massive Attack-esque, rolling trip-hop bassline and drum beat slinky, ‘Requiem’: Harvey with a Jarvis Cocker like contemptuous whisper, relishes the opportunity to sneer detestably, “You stupid cunt.” Continuing to echo Gainsbourg’s morbid curiosity and the allure of dysfunction Harvey tackles the pervy, voyeuristic ‘Hotel Specifics’; warns the kids to stay off the hard drugs (“don’t shoot-up that shit”) with wry cynicism on ‘To All The Lucky Kids’; and as Harvey imitating Gainsbourg imitating Jacques Brel, tells a sorry tale of repetitive boredom and depression, as the suicidal ‘Ticket Puncher’.
From the earliest incarnations via the various troubled and sexually heightened duets, Harvey cast his net wide, choosing a varied feast of delectable and lustfully spurned soliloquies and contemptuous exchanges between lovers. Mambo to disco-noir, each manifestation of the troubled, often objectionable and drunkenly debauched, flawed genius’s work is masterfully handled by the ensemble. Translating those quirks of language, phrases and cadence can’t have been easy, and though Harvey doesn’t exactly treat the source material with kid gloves or reverence, his dedication and love for Gainsbourg shines through every note and verse: It’s really quite an accomplishment; pretty much a resounding success.
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.
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