Our continuing partnership with the leading Italian culture/music site and platform Kalporz. Words by Monica Mazzoli. Translation by Dominic Valvona.
Each month the Monolith Cocktail shares posts from our Italian pen pals at Kalporz. May’s swap finds Monica Mazzoli introducing us to the Belgian-Iraqi trio Use Knife.
“You can’t separate politics from art. […] When we worked together with Saif, that was already a political thing”. With this clear and concise statement released to The Quietus in 2023, Kwinten Mordijck – one of the three minds that gave life to the Belgian-Iraqi trio Use Knife – emphasized the socio-political nature of the artistic project that he was setting up with Stef Heeren and Saif Al-Qaissy . Almost two years have passed and on March 28th, 2025 the second album under the name Use Knife, État Coupable, was released, but Mordijck ’s sentence now rings truer than ever.
The trio’s first album The Shedding of Skin (2022) was born from the meeting of Mordijck, Heeren and Al-Qaissy during a musical research residency at the cultural center of Gent Viernulvier: long sonic jams in which to confront the need to “feel the other’s point of view when making music”, and to think about how “someone from another culture reacts when making music with you” (words in quotation marks by Heeren – always – to The Quietus).
On one side two Belgian musicians who have abandoned their previous sound guise between alt-folk and electroacoustic music ( Kiss The Anus Of A Black Cat ) to experiment with analogue and modular synths and measure themselves against the rhythmic complexity of Arabic and Iraqi music (in this case), on the other, an Iraqi singer and percussionist who left his homeland (Iraq) to escape the war and gives voice to his experiences in music (read the lyrics of “Freedom, Asshole”).
Two distant worlds: neither of the two prevails over the other but a rhythmic magma with many facets is created between West and East. The opening track of État Coupable, the latest album by the trio mixed by Radwan Ghazi Moumneh (Jerusalem in My Heart), “Demain Sera Mieux” is paradigmatic in this sense. In the four and a half minutes of the piece, a 10/6 time signature (popular in Iraq but also in Armenian and Turkish music) is grafted onto a vortex of synths. Or again: the vibrations, the industrial beats of a track like “ Iraqi Drum Set ” are also ignited by the daf percussions (i.e. a frame drum that is part of the Middle Eastern musical tradition) and the chaos of words resulting from sampling the trio’s conversations about Iraqi instruments and their pronunciation.
The sound discourse of Use Knife (the name comes from a verse by Current 93, “the stars spell grammar or use knife”) is sharp and in media res: there are no preambles, we enter into the heart of an artistic creation that wants to become action. MM
Kalporz X Monolith Cocktail: Scoutcloud: Les Sons Du Cosmos: the cosmic routes of Will Miller & Co.
November 15, 2024
ALBUM REVIEW FROM OUR FRIENDS AT Kalporz
AUTHORED BY MONICA MAZZOLI TRANSLATED BY DOMINIC VALVONA
Continuing our successful collaboration and synergy with the leading Italian music publication Kalporz , the Monolith Cocktail shares and translates reviews, interviews and other bits from our respective sites each month. This month, and with a new facelift overhaul of the site (which we love by the way) Monica Mazzoli introduces us to producer and multi-instrumentalist Will Miller’s latest project Les Sons Du Cosmos.
Les Sons Du Cosmos: “the sounds of the cosmos” in Italian. A challenging name for the new group from producer and multi-instrumentalist Will Miller, already the mind behind the soul-jazz project (and much more) Resavoir, a member of Whitney (from 2015 to today always balanced between folk/country/soft pop) and a musician at the service of such notable names as A$AP Rocky (listen to “Back Home” in “At. Long. Last. A$AP”), Mac Miller (his trumpet on “Two Matches” in “GO:OD AM”) and SZA (keyboards, production and co-author of “Blind” in “SOS”).
COOLIDGE and LAUNDRY, the only two tracks under the name Les Sons Du Cosmos released thus far, are the result of a session from September 2023 by Will Miller with Eddie Burns (who already appears on a number of tracks on the latest Resavoir album) and William Corduroy. Miller & Co.’s studio in Little Village – a neighbourhood of Chicago – is the birthplace of two productions that never run idle, and move the coordinates of the Windy City jazz scene – as happens more and more often – into broader sound territories: the first single, released in August 2024, is the perfect combination of groove and flow, and features Semiratruth’s rapping on a track full of soul-funk-jazz textures; the second piece, also featuring Semiratruth, this time on the stylophone, is a two-minute instrumental with an enveloping rhythmic interweaving of cinematic/library (music) flavours.
Author: Monica Mazzoli
OUR FRIENDS AT Kalporz BRING OUR ATTENTION TO A NEW BAND
AUTHORED BY Monica Mazzoli – TRANSLATED BY Dominic Valvona
Continuing our successful collaboration with the leading Italian music publication Kalporz , the Monolith Cocktail shares and translates reviews, interviews and other bits from our respective sites each month. Keep an eye out for future ‘synergy’ between our two great houses as we exchange posts during 2024 and beyond. This month regular Kalporz scribe Monica Mazzoli reviews the newly released album, previously on hold, from the Austrian duo Nový Svět, DeGenerazione.
Nový Svět ‘DeGenerazione’
(Quindi Records)
Fifteen songs broken inside by dreams and nightmares, fragments of something that could have been, and wasn’t, degenerating: DeGenerazione by the Austrians Nový Svět, which features a framing of Nelly Bordon’s (Barbara Bouchet ) dance on the cube in Fernando Di Leo ‘s noir Milano Calibro 9 (1972) on the cover, is a work that rises from its own ashes.
The track recordings found on DeGenerazione were originally made in 2007 but abandoned for years. They were later recovered in extremis, ending up online not long ago, and published now, in 2024, on disc by the Florentine label Quindi Records.
Irregular, unfaithful wavering sound fragments with an indefinite and indefinable shape: a derailment from genres – neofolk, dark ambient, post-industrial…? – and consequently a caustic destruction of the latter. The album – we read on Nový Svět ’s Bandcamp – was supposed to be the final part of a Spanish trilogy that began with the 2004 conceived “Fin. Finito. Infinito.” However, deemed “too Spanish” it was put aside.
In reality, this album by the Viennese group is everything and the opposite of everything: an uncontrolled binge of sounds, noises. From the disturbing carillon of “Tibidabo” (with a video inspired by
Aldo Lado ’s 1971 Short Night of the Glass Dolls ) to the claustrophobic guitar loop of “Raja”, and from the alienating rhythmic delirium, lacerating cowbells of “Alarma” and “Tierra (Sanguine II / Noticias)” to the manipulated spoken word of “Torbellinos”.
Rated: 80/100
Kalporz X Monolith Cocktail: The imaginative slowcore of Bondo: interview with the band
March 8, 2023
EXCHANGE INTERVIEW FROM OUR ITALIAN PENPALS
By Monica Mazzoli
IMAGE: Bondo at Rick’s Drive In & Out, vicino al Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles
Continuing our successful collaboration with the leading Italian music publication Kalporz , the Monolith Cocktail shares reviews, interviews and other bits from our respective sites each month. Keep an eye out for future ‘synergy’ between our two great houses as we exchange posts during 2022 and beyond. This month, and featured in review on these very pages, Monica Mazzoli’s interview with the slowcore band Bondo.
Music often speaks in images. Los Angeles-based Bondo, first with the self-produced debut EP 77 (released in 2021) and then with the album Print Selections (released on February 24 by Florentine Therefore Records ), have succeeded with their imaginative slowcore in designing grainy sound scenarios, sandy: emotions, memories and thoughts become impressionist flashbacks shot in slow motion. A sound, that of the quartet, wavering, fluctuating which finds its emotional climax in minimalism: going beyond rock to embrace atmospheric music, an expression of the sound ideas that go round in the heads of the four members of the band.
We talked to the Bondos about their sound poetics, the group’s approach to composition and many other aspects that intrigued us:
Talking about the name of the band, the word Bondo has many meanings but it can be used to mean the people who live in the hilly regions of the Malkangiri district in southwest Odisha, India. Do you feel like an artistic unit isolated from the rest? What does the word Bondo mean to you?
Bondo in the United States is a product for repairing holes in cars, walls, metal, wood, etc. It is a chemical compound that hardens in 15 minutes and can be sanded. It is quite smelly and sticky, but very useful for its many uses.
The versatile nature of the bondo was part of the reason we thought it was a good name for our music. It is an “adhesive” paste, so it takes the shape you want and once it hardens, it keeps that shape permanently.
The choice of two songs like Egoizing and New Brain as singles doesn’t seem random to me. In my opinion, they represent the creative soul of the disc: the desire not to let the individual self and the mind of the single member prevail within a circle of people (as happens in the Egoizing video).
Sure. The lyrical content scattered throughout the two pieces is all connected by the theme of the dissolution of the individual self. As a band we are focused on collective expression: there is a happy chemistry that takes place within the group dynamics, and we do our best to allow all our different individual opinions to naturally come to a compromise on something again. “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts” or something like that.
The black and white covers of your EP and album are an interesting narrative choice. Is it wanted?
Aesthetically we always thought the music looked a lot like a Xerox printer, or the grainy scans you get in the library using older machines. I think these black and white photos also leave room for the music to speak for itself: when we make this music, we are completely focused on how it sounds in that moment and not how it will present.
As for the “Print Selections” cover, I enjoyed using Google Images to track down the source of the image. I didn’t succeed, but the results made me think. Among the corresponding images appear: “Alien antennas in the abyss”, “Ufiti, the ghost of Nkata bay”, “Twinkle of the sun”, and photographs of the sea by Mario Giacomelli. From a mysterious detail, the perspectives can be multiple. One can see many things in that piece of photo. I think this is an interesting fact, right?
The intention behind the cover image is for it to be very abstract and have a sort of Rorschach test feel. People tend to see different things but the image evokes something subtle on an emotional level. Something like music.
Many of the reference images for the album were black and white scans of UFO books, film photos with lots of light leaks, etc. All evoke similar feelings to what we experienced with music.
The image actually depicts light reflecting off water. We found it very fitting – some very simple things interact in a unique way that is momentarily appealing.
You have been compared to Acetone, and they are probably among the groups that inspired you, but what struck me in Bondo’s music, right from listening to the first EP, was the undulating development of the songs, as if the music were a wave to surf. There is a lot of emphasis on creating sonic atmosphere. The song that best represents this idea is “Pipecleaner”. I think it’s a distinctive trait of your music. What do you think?
I have a lot of respect for Acetones. To me they exemplify the ideal of a true band. Their piece Germs is perhaps the most successful piece ever written and performed. It evokes such a powerful feeling, such a unique and beautiful thing that only those three band members could achieve.
The sound atmosphere is very important to us. Our music (and maybe all music, you can say) has to do with creating an atmosphere, with feelings more than anything else. Feeling is such a subtle thing and to animate the different aspects of feeling one must be both intentional and flexible. That’s all we try to do when we make music, get closer to those sensations and sounds that we imagine in our head.
There are songs like “Container” and “Lo Tek” which, due to their short duration, seem like impressionist paintings: sound brushstrokes in freedom. I am wrong?
I think you are right. Little states of mind, little things that pass and give the sensation of movement without over stimulating.
I find the album title “Print Selections” to be appropriate: I see the songs as sound images printed on the vinyl record. I don’t know if my interpretation is correct.
Well said, I’d say I agree. The name comes from the mixing: our engineer Andrew Oswald sent us the final mixed files, some of which were sent to tape a couple of times and then digitalised again. One folder was titled Print Selections. It seemed to fit the songs well.
Special thanks to Quindi Records
Kalporz X Monolith Cocktail: [Scoutcloud] Metaphysical, dreamlike: the sonic surrealism of the mysterious Russian musician Mitka
February 7, 2023
Exchanging posts with our Italian penpals at Kalporz
For those new readers/followers in 2023, the Monolith Cocktail has collaborated with the leading Italian culture/music site and festival Kalporz over the last few years. Each month we exchange posts from our respective sites. This month Monica Mazzoli introduces us, via the long-running [Scoutcloud] series, to the “metaphysical” surrealism of Mitka.
An aura of mystery surrounds the biography of Mitka. The sound engineer and musician from Ekaterinburg who works mainly for the film industry, does not give live concerts and is absent from social media having an almost ascetic lifestyle, at least so the press release reads release of his record company DiG Records. The cover of her Sound2 record, by Alina Vinogradova is dreamlike, metaphysical; so much so that it could very well be a surrealist painting by Remedios Varo. The music of the Russian artist is equally so, all the five songs on the album traveling beyond six minutes and sounding like a sort of hallucinated, visionary folk music: it seems that Mitka, for example, has recorded the sounds of drums in the forest, and built his own guitar. Beyond reality: the sense of mystery/dream prevails.
COLLABORATION
WORDS: Monica Mazzoli
Over the last few years the Monolith Cocktail has been sharing a post each month with the leading Italian culture/music site Kalporz. This month Monica Mazzoli scouts out the sounds of the burgeoning artist, Leoni Leoni.
Bongo Joe Records of Geneva is one of those independent record labels (also a record shop) to always keep an eye on. In June 2022 a new release arrives that promises to be interesting and will make Leoni Leoni , musician, singer and producer from Bern better known to a wider audience: on vinyl and CD a collection dedicated to the Swiss underground artist who in recent years, between 2019 and 2021, produced a series of homemade cassettes: SUPER SLOW, EASY SLEEP, Yellow and Why, Drum Problems. The Bongo Joe compilation collects some of the songs already published on these cassettes where Leoni Leoni experiments with the deconstructed pop song form as if it were the memory, the dream of something else.
To discover.
Kalporz X Monolith Cocktail: [Scoutcloud] The outside-the-box funk-soul of Karate Boogaloo
September 9, 2020
New Music Tip
Words: Monica Mazzoli
Continuing with our collaboration with the leading Italian music publication Kalporz a short summer break, the Monolith Cocktail will be cosying up and sharing reviews, interviews and other bits from our respective sites each month. Keep an eye out for future ‘synergy’ between our two great houses as we exchange posts.
This month Monica Mazzoli scouts out the Melbourne indie-funk-soul oddities Karate Boogaloo.
It’s “retromania” times: we know that. There are those who, however, in referring back to the past manage not to expire in the most pedantic revival. This is the case of the Melbourne funk-soul scene, which revolves around bands like Surprise Chef, Karate Boogaloo, Pro-Teens and a small totally DIY record label – the College Of Knowledge Records – founded by Lachlan Stuckey and Jethro Curtin (guitarist and keyboardist of Surprise Chef respectively).
The sound is obviously analogue, of course, of tape recordings, but the approach to making music is out of the box: the already mentioned Surprise Chef and Karate Boogaloo – the two bands that are the soul of the label – collaborate, exchange musicians, record tracks in the home studio (even the artwork of the records), do everything by themselves. They have a mentality open to any sound contamination and unconventional writing. In other words, Carn The Boogers – the first Karate Boogaloo album released in May 2020 – comes after two mixtapes (KB’S Mixtape No.1 and KB’S Mixtape No.2) in which the band had fun reinterpreting songs that have been sampled in classic hip hop and pop (to be listened to absolutely “Tour de France”).
On the new album the songs are all autographed, but the wanderer spirit of the groove continues: in the new tracks – all instrumental (as usual) – the band dances like a juggler on rhythm, without ever falling, always on the piece. The five minutes of ‘Space Language’ are perhaps the apotheosis of this musical trip. A funk-soul with surfing in the heart.
Kalporz X Monolith Cocktail: [Scoutcloud] Brainstory
January 13, 2020
NEW MUSIC DISCOVERY
Words: Monica Mazzoli
Continuing in 2020 with our collaboration with the leading Italian music publication Kalporz, the Monolith Cocktail will be cosying up and sharing reviews, interviews and other bits from our respective sites each month. Keep an eye out for future ‘synergy’ between our two great houses as we exchange posts.
The first Kalporz post of the year is taken from the site’s [Scoutcloud] column; searching out and discovering new bands.
Here’s a little reminder of the Kalporz background:
Kalporz writes about music, with his own musical vision, since 2000.
Kalporz is a careful observer of news, trends, emerging scenes, but without chasing the dominant taste: he is in search of “beautiful things”. He hopes to publish articles well written and carefully, in an original way, without filters and, of course, independently.
The editorial project is under the Creative Commons regime (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 IT) and in 2018 it was voted as the best Italian music site by the Meeting of Independent Labels (MEI) and Musicletter (https://www.musicletter.it/index.php/2018/08/27/kalporz-e-reverendo-lys-vincono-la-targa-mei-musicletter-2018-premio-speciale-a-umbria-jazz-come-miglior-festival-musicale-italiano/).
The Kalporz family is composed of the founder Luca Vecchi, the editors Paolo Bardelli,Monica Mazzoli, Piero Merola, Enrico Stradi, Matteo Mannocci, Gianluigi Marsibilio, and about twenty other collaborators, as well as three photographers.
The collaborators are from all parts of Italy, even if the main base of Kalporz is between Reggio Emilia, a town near the “famous” Canossa, the Adriatic Sea and Florence.
Brainstory music has rhythm and heart. In a word: a groove.
Kevin Martin, Tony Martin and Eric Hagstrom – the three souls of the band – form a trio all soul, jazz and psychedelic. After two mini albums – Brainstory Presents: A Natural Phantasm (2015) and Brainstory (2017) – comes the band from Rialto’s (California) longplayer debut. Buck (2019), the band’s first release by Big Crown Records, the Californian line-up lays bare as never before, putting down its musical spirituality, naked and pure. “Buck naked”, on the other hand, means “naked as a worm” in English. The songs of Buck are all stripped of artificial frills; they are “pop”, directed to the point, to the soul of the melody and rhythm: Soul in spirit.
Monica Mazzoli
Kalporz X Monolith Cocktail: Interview with Tennis Club
June 19, 2019
Kalporz interviews Wilson Hernandez of Tennis Club
Words: Monica Mazzoli
Continuing our content swap with the leading Italian culture/music site Kalporz, the Monolith Cocktail is excited to be hosting Monica Mazzoli‘s recent interview with Wilson Hernandez of the burgeoning Missouri, USA band Tennis Club.
Elefant Records, an independent record label based in Spain, has given a most extensively considered production to guitar and electro pop music over the years.
In 2019 Elefant has already released the second – wonderful – album by the French band Le SuperHomard (entitled Meadow Lane Park) and the Attic Lights comeback album (Love in the Time of Shark Attacks).
Pink, the new mini-LP by Tennis Club was released on May 31th and will probably be on the same wavelength as the two great records I just mentioned. The band, which hails from Missouri (USA), features Wilson Hernandez (vocals, guitar), Tehya Deardorff (instead of Justin Akin – bass) and Sean O’Dell (drums). They have already released an essential nine-track cassette of great surf garage pop songs.
For the occasion of the recent album launch we had a chat with the Club’s guitarist/vocalist Hernandez – the interview was actually conducted just before the official release of Pink.
Q: In 2017 you released your first Cassette, a record that sounds like The Beach Boys, if they’d made a lo-fi album: surf-garage pop songs (and killer chorus) with a noisy, shoegazy attitude. Now your new mini Album, Pink, is going to be released soon on 31st May. The two tracks that are already available – ‘Pink Sweater! Pink Shoes!’ and ‘Mexico City (Rich Girls)’ – show a new approach: I mean, it seems to me that you’re going in new directions, the first single is the “old” Tennis Club sound; the second single is more jangle pop with the singing in Spanish.
A: Yes, we were going for a more pop sound on this album; our first album was very distorted and noisy and this record focused on a softer sound, sweeter lyrics and more focus on vocal harmonies like on the early Beatles albums.
Elefant Records, a Spanish record label, decided to release your new mini LP. How did it happen? From Missouri to Spain…
I started listening to a lot of Spanish music, my mother is from El Salvador so I speak it decently and I started looking into Spanish labels when I found Elefant and saw that they had such a great appreciation for indie pop that I thought we would fit in well. So I sent an early version of Pink to Luis at Elefant and thankfully he liked it!
We usually say, “Don’t judge a book by its cover”. But the cover, the packaging of Pink is so amazing, in a “twee pop way”, it reminded me of Jamboree by Beat Happening.
Yes, I agree! The album art is very twee and I think it fits the aesthetic of the album very well. It was made by friend Ela Hosp who has this very simple but one of a kind unique style: you can check out more of her art on Instagram @elahosp.
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