Monolith Cocktail Blog

A world of sonic/musical discoveries reviewed by Dominic Valvona. All entries in alphabetical order.

Image Credit: Jonathan Herman

Andy Haas ‘In Praise Of Insomnia’
(Resonantmusic) Released 1^st February 2026

I’ve been saddled with insomnia for years, but unlike the highly talented and explorative, and curious saxophonist Andy Haas, I’ve found it difficult to put those waking hours to good use creatively; let alone on the auspicious seasonal occasion of the Winter Solstice, the date on which all these recordings were played and then saved for posterity. I must say, since the double whammy of a kidney autoimmune disease and a minor stroke, my own personal problems of insomnia have pretty much disappeared – I don’t recommend it however! But put to good use here, Andy ushers in the light changes, the almost religious and spiritual emotions and feels of the environment. His sax mirrors the fluctuations and expressions of playing without the hindrance, burden or weight of expectation; just one guy expressing himself and current moods, his experiences of life in the moment on a special day.

Whilst not wishing to repeat myself, I struck up an online and postal friendship with Andy after first writing about the highly experimental saxophonist, trick noise maker and effects manipulator’s turn 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 ever since. Some have been in the solo mode, others with friends, foils and collectives. In Praise Of Insomnia is free of artifice and augmentation; the sound of a singular saxophone and circular breaths (the only other apparatus or consideration is Andy’s stereo manipulations of each track once its finished) alive with a language that admirers and followers of such luminaries as Sam Rivers, Jonah Parzen-Johnson, Evan Parker and Roscoe Mitchell will recognise. It has history and roots, but exists in the now with its squalls, shrills, the fluted, drones, curves, peaks and reedy vibratos that often sound like a mizmar – in fact I sometimes pictured minarets when closing my eyes and just letting the playing transport me from my boring surroundings at home in a dreary, wet Glasgow.

Free and wild, and yet also thought through, almost considered and concentrated, each track (prompted by descriptive and personalised titles) shows purpose; the subject matters often plaint, questioning or disheartened at the metaphorical darkness of the age, but also noting the artist’s own mood changes, and his battles with insomnia itself. It would also make a great soundtrack.  

Benjamin Herman ‘The Tokyo Sessions’
(P-Vine Records in Japan/Roach Records & Dox Records the rest of the world) 27^th March 2026

Though this is possibly the first time I’ve ever featured the London born but Netherlands raised alto-saxophonist Benjamin Herman on the site, his influence across the European arena of jazz looms large. With over fifty albums and untold thousands of the live gigs (either as a solo artist or as the frontman of the New Cool Collective troupe) to his name during the last thirty or so years, Herman has pretty much convincingly expanded his talents to play foil, collaborator and instigator to projects that span the musical and creative genres – from hip-hop to poetry, to rubbing alongside pop stars and embracing everything from Afrobeat to Latin and film, to the more anarchic and wild.

Venturing out to the far East with double-bassist Thomas Pol and drummer and producer of this album Jimmi Jo Hueting, Herman and his musical partners absorbed everything that was on offer from the eclectic Tokyo hothouse districts of Shimokitazawa and Koenji. Expanding the ranks to include a rich ensemble of guest from the Japanese jazz scene and beyond, they recorded these inspired sessions at the well-known “recording sage” Akihito Yoshikawa’s equally famous Studio Dede hotspot.

Paying homage, spiritual recognition and cultivating the mystique and mystery of Japan’s landscape, its culture, its traditions and abundance of talented jazz players, there’s haywire-like chops of floppy disk experimental Sakamoto, the shrouded misty sounds of Shinto and fluted and blown bamboo music amongst an abundance of reference points from elsewhere. With accomplished musicians like Ko Ishikawa on the Sho (a mouth organ), Tomoaki Baba on sax and Shinpei Ruike on trumpet (bringing a blue shade reminisce of Miles Davis sadness to the studio referenced ‘Dede’)  there’s tributes to the Japanese scene and one of its capital’s most famous jazz nightspots, the NRFS abbreviated “no room for squares” – as borrowed from Hank Mobley’s iconic Blue Note released LP of 1964, and more than an inspiration here I believe.

But amongst those cultural appeals, a distillation of the Japanese scene and environment, there’s literal blurts of no wave and post-punk jazz, the noirish and cinematic, show tunes, swing, funk, the wired, colourful, willowy and many examples of mirages and swamp-like veiled mysterious.

At any one time then, you can expect to hear a free flow and agitation of downtown NY, the city skyline jazz scenery of the 50s and 60s, Last Exit, Snapped Ankles, John Zorn, Biting Tongues, Mats Gustafason, Donny McCaslin’s work with Bowie, Jimi Tenor, Comet Is Coming, the Nordic school of jazz, Tong Allen, Lalo Schifrin and John Barry! (in the closing moments of the spy soundtrack does Blue Note ‘Tokyo Moon’ you can hear what sounds like a riff on the 007 theme). Yes, I think we can agree a lot to take in. But with a generous offering of 13 great tracks and no fillers, this Tokyo session is going to appeal to many.

Ombrée ‘Calvaire’
(I Shall Sing Until My Land Is Free) Released 2^nd February 2026

Seemingly apt if in an entirely different geographical setting, far from the torn-up battlefields, this album is tied via its facilitator to the Ukraine supporting I Shall Sing Until My Land Is Free label, and its founders own sonic manifestations of doom-laden scared environments: In the case of both Dmyto Fedorenko and Kateryna Zavoloka it’s their native and brutalised country, now in its fifth year of defensive action against the barbaric invasion forces of Putin’s Russia. Meanwhile, coming to terms with their own loss, Ombrée uses a similar soundboard and apparatus of industrial noise, metal machine music, sonorous bass guitar frequencies and slabbed vibrations and crackled pylon charges to process the death of his father, who passed away in February of 2025.

Prompted or set in motion by the sounds of the surroundings and the village’s church bells, Calvaire invokes memory through both field recordings and expressions of death’s many manifestations. Ombrée’s father, we’re told, would have probably hated this musical invocation, illusion and dark meta-built encapsulation of that mourning process, but for its creator and us the album is both a guttural and sophisticated response to its subject.

To the distant echoes of tolled bells and a Gothic atmosphere of an older rural France – the toil of the land, the echoes perhaps of old wars and tragedies still very much of the everyday scenery and psyche – Ombrée scratches the needles of detectors and equipment over the terrain to produce a death noise industrial slab of static, the paranormal, the razored and ghostly. Apparitions in the shadows at every turn; the venerable sounds and atmospheres of the funeral and wake; the coarse fibres of broken electricity and magnetic forces; the Fortean radio set tuned into the afterlife; and the dark materials of trauma uncovered by the plough and spade all come together in one suitably unsettling memorial.

Rocé ‘Palmier’
(Hors Cadres) Released 20^th March 2026

With a softer and more melodious flair for an ever-widening use of music references and inspirations, the French-international hip-hop veteran Youcef Kaminsky (better known as Rocé) seamlessly blends new compositions of Latin, French, Italian, North African and South American flavours with modern spells of R&B, rap and electronica on his incredible new album Palmier (“Palm Tree”).

On a disarming pathway, Youcef taps into his roots and his mixed heritage (born in Algeria with his formative years spent in Paris) to rap, sing, report and recall with both emergency and poetic conscious fluidity. And whilst learning of his parents own extraordinary stories and backgrounds – his dad’s history within various anti-colonist resistance movements around the world (Adolfo Kaminsky, as that family name may suggests, are Russo-Algerian French in origin), and his checkered career as a photographer and master forger – and the depth to Youcef’s own studies and extensive recording output, this album has less of a revolutionary zeal and more a sense of real warmth and beauty to it. Listeners will find a sound that’s just as open to the embrace of Morricone as café society jazz, Issac Hayes, cool classical French maladies and American vocoderised soul. In other words: pure class. And yet there’s still an edge to it, a realism and sense of suspense, of the shadows, of current concerns in the search for balance, harmony and identity.

There’s seldom been much like it; the attempt to merge so many cultural markers and ideas and experiences; to recall those innocent and important feelings and places that matter – not in hip-hop anyway. The musicianship and contrast between rapping and a band of jazzy and classical or chamber musicians did remind me a little of Marcelo D2 & SambaDrive ‘Direct-to-Disc’ LP from a couple of years back. But it remains rather unique, crossing over as it does into so many classy and fully lush genres. 

You can certainly, even if you don’t understand the French dialect and language, gauge the emotion and the intensity, the themes and scenes conjured out of the notebook and from each instrument. It also helps that guest vocalist, the worldly, Natacha Atlas does much to soothe and dreamily invoke a certain romantic plaint of North Africa to the deft electric piano-like tinged ‘La Voie Laactee’. And whilst we are at it, a shout out to Nathalie Ahadji’s dreamy, wafted and mizzle-like saxophone; to Cisko Delgado’s soulful and light jazzy cosmic keys (though also credited with bass and on arrangements); and to Samy Bishi’s sweeping, near cinematic in places, violin – Youcef can be heard himself picking up the violin on one of the album’s airy mirage-like interludes.

Compositions and songs are mapped out like a personal cosmology of jazzy suites, neighbourhood reportage, frank discussion and more sympathetic articulations and dreams. A great album in short that entertains as much as it educates and impresses. 

Nicolas Remondino ‘Hieratico’
(OOH-sounds) 27^th March 2026

Scrapes, shavings, rubs, carvings, tangles of tin and metal; various percussive and drum apparatus timbres, textures along with the unidentified sound of spokes are all used to illuminate crepuscular observed moments and experiment in a soundscape of almost silent disturbances, shadows and observations on Nicolas Remondino latest album. Filed under the solo name this time around, Hieratico includes a host of cameos and an appearance from one of the many groups he’s founded over the years, the Dròlo Ensemble. Many voices and musicians join the fold, appearing often for a brief moment, or suffused amongst the avant-garde, explorative and minimalist passages, churns, circular brushing movements of a simultaneously venerable, supernatural and esoteric nature.

Appearing, I believe, for the very first time on the site, Remondino studied under the improvising luminary of classical and jazz piano, Stefano Battaglina. Remondino appears variously under the LAMIEE moniker when in the solo guise but also founded the Tabula Rasa and Silentium ensembles. There’s also been an extensive list of collaborations, some of which appear on this album. And as if to reflect these various foils and their homelands, track titles seem to be in multiple languages: Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Corsican, but also as far away as Japan. There are some solid names with renowned reputations on the abstract, avant-garde and musique concrète fronts, including the highly respected and experienced musician and vocalist Limpe Fuchs, who’s mantric “no formalism” approach to soundscaping and fluctuated peaks and meandered twisted spoken words can be heard on the strange ching and chimed gamelan-esque ‘Blue Hymn’. The trio of Pierre Bastien (perhaps best known for the Meccano machine Mecanium orchestra), Massimo Silverio (singer-songwriter and composer) and Marco Baldini (a Florence-based composer) manifest some unease amongst the low tuba-like Close Encounters calls and cathedral organ permeation of ‘Tombal’. You could call it an inter-generational balance of ideas, or just feeling out the right sound, the right atmospheres.

Dialects traced back to the time of the Romans, with the Carnic region of the Alps, can be heard in abstracted forms alongside mountain goat trails into, what sounds like, the various ranges that surround Tibet and a reification of the I Ching. Sounds like felt and various materials are wrapped or brushed over the mic, and bottles are rattled, sheets of metal wobbled to resemble a strange thunder, and spoken passages, poems of s sort are pronounced with both wistful resignation and disturbing disquiet.

At times it reminds me of cLOUDEAD and at others of Walter Smetek, but also a whole load of experimental Italian contemporaries too. But at its heart, the album seems unique in its surroundings and processes; the atmosphere and mood personal yet dealing with abstract ideas in a nocturnal climate of freedom and textural experiment. That’s a recommendation by the way!

Snake De ‘Alla Sorrentina’
(Kythibong) 27^th March 2026

The results of emptying out an assemblage of hard drives, Dictaphones, mobiles and other assorted devices and units of storage, the collaborative duo of Maxime Canelli and Aymeric Chaslerie put together a less linear and more abstracted, surreal and sci-fi album of eroded fragments, passages, extemporised hauntings and sci-fi interiors.

With a bilingual language of prompted and descriptive titles, each piece seems to have manifested from the ether or the recalled. Like La Monte Young playing exquisite corpses with the Olivia Tremor Control, Basic Channel and a host of kosimsiche innovators, Alla Sorrentina merges the concrete with the tubular, the kinetic, the alien and avant-garde: and many points between. There are touches of the melodic and tuneful amongst the collage and the fragments of data, voices (even continental laughter), static, cosmic bells and the varied jingles and jangles, the hanging and scrapes of the Zodiak and Swiss Cabaret Voltaire art-theatre percussion.

An enervated Faust Tapes perhaps, the album also reminded me in places of playful Cluster and Roedelius. The remnants of near church-like keys are placed with the alpine, the galactic and spells of hallucinatory dream weaving. You could catch something Japanese, something of the Fluxus composers and those working in early electronica as the carousal of sonic ideas and influences circulates. And you can read a lot into the oscillations, the staccato signals, hums, harmonic pings, the indigestive-like masked voices, and the metallic visions of extraterrestrial life. 

It’s the sound of liquid bowls; it’s a world both underwater and luna; an hallucination of accumulated sounds, atmospherics, field recordings, tunings, hidden percussive objects, whistled and blown tubes, a baby’s cry and removed surroundings. Something a little different anyway, worthy of investigation and absorption.   

Gregory Uhlmann ‘Extra Stars’
(International Anthem) Released 6^th March 2026

The innocuous, those meandered thoughts, incidents and gestures magnified, and the noted observations witnessed of nature and its interactions are transformed into a unique musical language by the composer and guitarist (though should really say multi-instrumentalist at this point) Gregory Uhlmann.

A rightly celebrated and held in esteem regular of the L.A scene and constant presence on the rightly revered and much liked International Anthem label, with turns in the collaborative SML collective, a foil to both Perfume Genius (who appears on this album) and to Josh Johnson and Sam Wilkes (last year’s Uhlmann Johnson Wilkes album made my choice release of the year roundup) and to fellow label mate Anna Buterss (anther collaborator who makes an appearance, popping up on bass), Uhlmann has finally found time to go solo with an enriching synthesis of luminescent and ruminated quandaries, descriptions and serendipitous wonders.

Extra Stars inhabits a familiar if now made dreamy, lunar, sometimes oddly and beautifully world and environment; some of it used as prompts and reference points, like Lucia, which refers to the lodge where both Uhlmann and his partner stayed out on the famous Cabrille Highway that runs between San Francisco and Santa Barbara. Less an innocent Beach Boys-like celebration of Big Sur culture and more a tine’s ticking and Mulatu Astatke and Getatchew Mekurya embraced mizzled and snozzled hum of languid unease, the field recorded waves that crashed all around during that stay appear more like tape hiss and noise and point towards the “unnerving”. Though, with Alabasters deft wistful and near serenaded touches it is a beauty of a track. Actually, there’s a feel of that near Ethiopian influence, mixed with something further east and oriental on the beautifully Matmos does cosmic Joe Meek and Django ruminating Days – what a dreamer of a lulled tune that one is.  I’m hearing the composition and playing of Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru too, but a lot of the calculus of flutters, bulb-like notation, cascades, harmonic twangs, numbers and multi-layered techniques of such luminaries as Riley, Cage, Reich and Spiegel; all made that more appealing, magical, sparkled, lunar and dotty!

There’s a good and transformative use of the guitar, the mellotron and organ, amongst other expanded instrumentation. And even a use of the voice, with guest Tasha Viets-Vanlear’s “bah” voice put through different pitches and sequences on Voice Exchange.

This really is a most delightful and imaginative album, a whirly trip of modulations, sequences at ease, quirks and warbles. Touching on everything from new age avant-garde to the kosmische (some hints of Cluster and their peers), the American school of pioneering electronics, the post-whatever it is that bands like Tortoise do, echoes of Sakamoto at his most loose and experimental, ambience and cosmic shimmered atmospheres. It makes for an intriguing, often woozy and dreamily transformative listening experience.  

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If you’ve enjoyed this selection, the writing, or been led down a rabbit hole into new musical terrains of aural pleasure, and if you able, then you can now show your appreciation by keeping the Monolith Cocktail afloat through the Ko-Fi donation site.