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.
Image: Violet Nox artwork by Allison Tanenhaus
_/THE NEW___
Bedd ‘Do Not Be Afraid’
31st October 2025
After an initial break from the site – this is down to me, and not the band -, the Oxford bedd project led by singer-songwriter, composer and producer Jamie Hyatt has now appeared twice in the space of just a few months: firstly, back in the June Digest with a bridging style EP entitled Monday 10:55, and now, this month, with a full debut album called Do Not Be Afraid.
Repeating myself again, sometimes I excel myself with a descriptive summary, and with one of bedd’s most early singles, ‘Auto Harp’ (released during the lockdowns of 2020) I described the sound as “an understated breath of fresh air from cosmic suburbia”. This beauty of a single was followed at a later date, during Covid isolation, by a premiere of ‘You Have Nice Things’, which seemed to have continued with its small-town landmarked sense of isolation and sad detachment on the EP’s title-track, the very specifically timed capture of nocturnal plaint and heartache ‘Monday 10:55’.
None of the tracks on that EP feature on this debut album, but it does gather up a string of previous singles, stretching back over the years, including ‘Party On dude (Endless)’, which featured on Jon Spira’s The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee homage film in 2024. The track itself, is a two-parter of a sort, starting off with more haunted wistful piano tones, synthesized atmospherics and chemistry set sounds, before suddenly entering a party vibe of 80s old school hip-hop and electro samples and scratches and Chic-like funk: think Lovebug Starski meets Whistle and Doug E. Fresh in the graveyard. Jamie, the mastermind behind bedd and instigator of The Family Machine, The Desires and Medal trio of bands, has scored a few film projects over the years: most notably the Elstree 1976 documentary film that chronicles the making and legacy of Star Wars. You could say that this filmic quality and experience, a bit of scale and drama, has helped to lift much of the material, giving crescendo, a build-up and oomph to the mainly indie-rock and electronic-pop influenced sounds. Sometimes the near fatalistic tone of the voice and lyrics rises above the melancholy, malady and eulogy to twinkle and glisten with a big swell or sense of something much bigger: the universal perhaps.
Before going any further, I need to name the band that has formed around Jamie for this project, which includes “a range of celebrated local Oxford musical talent”. There’s bass player Darren Fellerdale and guitarist Neil Durbridge, both bandmates from Hyatt’s previous project The Family Machine, plus the guitarist Tom Sharp, electronic musician and producer Tim Midlen (aka The Mancles of Acid) and drummer Sam Spacksman. Together, they push the fragility and vulnerability towards the stars with music that sits comfortably between a traditional band set up and the electronic (much of which is atmospheric, rather than in the form of synth waves or bass lines and such; far more in the manner of the cosmic, of adding something more magical, of transmissions, the odd captured recordings of chatter and the environment); they sound on occasions vaguely Britpopish, a little like Radiohead circa Pablo Honey and The Bends, Jeff Buckley, Benjamin Shaw, and on the shorter saddened song track about expectations, of life and being left deflated ‘Bed Sheet’, like both Blur and Gene.
I’ve already used the word fatalistic, and with references to Bowie’s Ziggy period world ending calamity (‘Five Years’), and despondent impressions of our social media and self-obsessed culture and its ways of dealing with tragedy, death and loss (‘Gone’ and ‘I Whoo Yeah’), you’d be right to expect it. And yet, the candidness of Jamie’s lyrics, especially on the nostalgic and fragile eulogy ‘Everything’s Coming Around’, have lift and a quality of endurance as our protagonist pushes through a weight of memories. Cutting through beautifully the filters of an Instagram encased world, Jamie transforms real concerns, injury and failures into something very magical and full of memorable tunes, hooks and feeling. A great album from a fine project indeed.
Yusef Mumin ‘Journey To The Ancient’
(WEWANTSOUNDS) 31st October 2025
Continuing to unearth those both privately pressed and obscure recordings from a golden period of free from conscious and Black identity jazz, the reissue specialists at WEWANTSOUNDS have collaborated with the notable musician Yusef Mumin to bring some of his previously unreleased peregrinations and expressions to vinyl for the first time ever. Following on from last year’s extraordinary Black Artist Group ‘For Peace And Liberty, In Paris December 1972’ special (of which there are some musical parallels), the label has brought together a quartet of recordings from the multi-instrumentalist, co-band leader and pioneer’s personal archive. Bringing an expanded context, and a framing of the history, the relevance, the influences and sparks of inspiration, prominent jazz writer Pierre Crépon joins the dots with some insightful liner notes, making for a very desirable package.
Whilst I won’t just repeat Crépon’s studied but creatively written research and notes, a rough outline of Mumin’s career is needed before we go any further. Born Jospeh W Phillips on August 25th, 1944, the wartime baby grew up in Cleveland, a city that would prove a hub, crossroads for all kinds of societal, spiritual, radical and cultural activities. Drawn from a young age to such luminaries of the jazz form as The Modern Jazz Quartet and Yusef Lateef, but also classical pioneers such like Igor Stravinsky, Phillips would develop his own musical language, inspired by reading liberally a great many esoteric works: taking an interest in everything from Zen Buddhism to the Kabbalah, the Zohar, but eventually finding a calling from Islam. Cleveland during this time, as a growing epicentre of Black Nationalism, of Black self-preservation and worth, hosted such groups as the Nation of Islam (where they set up Mosque No. 18), a Moorish Science Temple and branches of the Ahmadiyya (an international Muslim movement started in India in 1889 by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, who purported to be divinely appointed as both the Mahdi and Messiah). I’m not sure when, but in the tradition of such Islamic faith conversations, Phillips adopted the Yusuf Mumin name – a reconnection with his African/Islamic roots, a rebirth if you like and shedding of a European-Christianised identity, the mark of ownership.
Taking up alto saxophone, absorbing a fecund of jazz sounds and developments taking shape in the 1960s – from Ornette to Sun Ra and Ayler (an artist he’d have a lifeline interest in, a praise for; his own art said to be a continuation of what the free form tenor saxophonist started), Mumin gravitated towards the trumpeter Norman Howard, who’s credentials included a stint with Ayler: namely playing on his iconic Spirits LP. They formed a group together for a fleeting passage of time before Mumin co-founded his most iconic partnership a year or so later, the Black Unity Quartet. The original quartet soon pared down to the now legendary trio of Mumin (on reeds), the cellist Abdul Wadud and drummer Hasan Shahid (weirdly, and I must point this out, when searching online for a bio or any details of this short-lived group, there are multiple versions of this lineup being shared, examples of misinformation: names spelt wrong, instruments attributed wrongly too.) They’re predominantly known for the cult status and rarity of their only LP, Al-Fatihah, recorded in the December of ’68. Privately pressed with no interference, but crucially no publicity or push from a label, it would take decades for this record to be re-issued and given a larger significant launch and place in free form jazz history – an interview with Mumin, and a playlist selection featured in the Wire magazine at the time of this release. Inspired by the afflatus and the opening chapter of the Quran – the first seven verses of prayer that gives guidance and mercy -, Al-Fatihah can be translated into English as roughly “The Opening” and “The Key”. Carrying on this journey, going on to collaborate with an enviable cast of jazz greats Charles Tyler, Horace Tapscott, Arthur Blythe and Butch Morris, Mumin built up an impressive archive of his own recordings; some of which are now finally seeing the light of day as the Journey To The Ancients album.
With only his Dan Nuby double-bass credited pseudonym and the drummer William Holmes (an “associate” we’re told of the blistering alto free form, modal and hard bop luminary Sonny Simmons) as company, Mumin’s quartet of recordings are brought together for a fitting showcase of spiritual, longed, radical free-play and searching, questioning roots jazz. Despite featuring different themes, it feels like a complete work: a missing act from the celebrated cannon that connects the spiritual and political quest for African American liberty with a hunger for the homelands, and unity under the crescent flag. As my reading goes, the short opening passage of Bakumbadei, is a divine song of longing, and an invocation. As both Mumin himself and Crépon’s make clear, the title “relates to power of definition, or new wine, as offerings to the fathers.” Playing the cello, both as a mark of respect to his former foil Wadud (rightly acclaimed as one its finest practitioners in the jazz and classical fields) and because it just sounds so evocatively deep and almost pained in expressing a majesty, a dignity, and classical strain of the atavistic, Mumin also sings with an equally deep, but not quite baritone, voice, repeating the title chant, spell.
The very next piece, and title-track, now opens the door into a more extensive world of ancient caravan trail jazz. Incipient stirrings, shakes of Kahil El’Zabar and drifted rasps of saxophone moodily conjure up a landscape of some dreamt-up vision of Arabian North Africa, of the Middle East and the Fertile Crescent, but also of something far more out there in an alternative plane or dimension. A spiritual, pining Afro-journey with classical traces and a touch of the New York Art Quartet, Jospeh Jarman, Maurice McIntyre and the James Tatum Trio Plus. An awakening you could say, its sets the pathway up for what’s to come.
‘A Distant Land’ is another of those searches, this time for a new Jerusalem or a land in the sky. What could be tablas set up a more bended and buoyant Eastern feel of the longed. The spaced-out bass notes, sometimes ponderous, make steps on this slow rhythmic trial as the flute now, half in the style of Llyod McNeill and half in the style of Jeremy Steig chuffs and blows its course across a deep dive of temples and jungle.
More unsteady, with Holmes’ improvised like and active minor tumults of free form drumming, ‘Diaspora Impressionism’ is a tumble and uneven keel expression of the misplaced people, but also a response to the pain, ancestral trauma and indignity, the travails of the Transatlantic slave trade legacy. At time Mumin is blowing almost dry, without any spit, in reaching that encapsulation of hurt and anger; there’s parts in which he is literally, or sounds like it, fighting with his instruments as the fraught sax mimics the viola and violin. And yet amongst the splashes and rolls, there’s passages of rhythms and melody to be found; a yearning moment or two in which the trials and tribulations find some sort of peace. But as this combo go at it, they perform a wild form of jazz that has parallels with the art of the Children of the Forest, Wayne Shorter, Evan Parker’s more far out material, Ayler, Sunny Murray and Dewey Redman.
An album of beauty and toil; of consciousness and the imagination; a balanced and congruous set of recordings that feels like a unifying statement of divinity, experimentation, hardships and free expression. WWS have done it again and retrieved a vital album from a key and pioneering artist/musician in the story of free form jazz.
NiCKY ‘with’
(PRAH Recordings) 28th October 2025
Broadening the scope and the queer landscape musically whilst inviting in some congruous collaborative bedfellows since their last outing, with the by EP in 2024, the London songwriter and performance artist simply known as NiCKY presents a new songbook of haunted, touching, tender and resilient balladry, theatre-esque numbers, behind closed doors masquerades and near heartbreaking drama.
From the very first brush of tambourine and affecting touch of late-night saloon poised piano on the opening beautiful, but hunting, declaration ‘I Saw You’, I was sold. Slowly charged with expressions of both vulnerability and lust, played out in the dimmed lit recesses of an after-hours drinking hideaway, with one eye in anticipation of the next affair, the next pick-up, yet desiring a special frisson and love, with the passing influence of Lou Reed, John Cale, Stephan Trask and Anohni, NiCKY reworks lyrics originally conceived by the queer Irish playwright and activist Colm Ó Clúbhán and the theatre group that he became a member of once immigrating from his native Ireland to London in the early 70s, the Brixton Faeries: their activities emerging from the noted Railton Road squats. In its original form, the song first featured in the “agit-pop play about cottaging” GENTS, but finds a new avenue of expression, disarmed with a different kind of poignancy and heartache, and now repurposed for a restaging of Ó Clúbhán’s Reasons For Staying play – an avenue for telling the marginalised stories of the Irish diaspora in the capital, centring on the lives of its queer characters, but also of those women seeking abortions. It’s a highlight for me on a generous EP of such “uninhibited” serenades, off-Broadway cabaret turns, and the requited.
Already off to a great start then, the second number, ‘The Fall’ features the iconic French chanteuse, writer (from the International Times to plays), one-time tightrope walker (taking to the high wire or rope for such diverse companies as COUM Transmissions and Jérôme Savary’s Grand Magic Circus in Paris) and celebrated underground icon (memorably appearing and performing in Derek Jarman’s Jubilee and also, apparently taking part in Andrew Logan’s Alternative Miss World gala) Hermine Demoriane, who’s circus skills come in handy, metaphorically speaking, on a song about emotional support. Providing a safety net, Dermoriane’s unmistakable unique voice (for some reason, reminding me of Isabella Rosselini when she tries on a French accent) spins circus analogies to a piano led ballad that reminded me in part of both Mark Kuzelek and Elton. You can also pick up the soft, near brushed and slipped, drums I believe, of another guest, the alt-jazz, R&B and soul multi-instrumentalist and artist Donna Thompson, and the squeezed subtle wistful saxophone of either Euan Hinshelwood (who also produces and plays some bass on the EP) or CJ Calderwood (the multi-disciplinary artist and composer, who you may recognise as a member of both Lol K and Good Sad happy Bad): sorry, it doesn’t specify which one played on this track.
I use the words torch song, but in a lazy fashion, and it might be out of place here: Though you could perhaps argue that the heartbreaking curtain call, the swan song of ‘Fool’s Convention’ is one such torch song; apparently, so the notes say, a fusion of Kylie’s ‘I Believe In You’ and Nat King Cole’s ‘Nature Boy’. But there is a held, restrained, emotional charge to each of these songs that is hard to put a finger on.
In a liminal spot between resolution and malady; between hurt and lovelorn celebration; the rest of the album falls between Bob Fosse imbued theatre-musical and the music of John Howard, the observatory songwriting of Soho night owls, and a contemporary vision of a wistfully voyeuristic Ivor Novello cataloguing the goings ons and affairs at private views and parties in the capital. Although, the piano riff on ‘LDN Wars’ did remind me for some reason of Bruce Hornsby.
Variations on the signature include both the longed American dreamy stage number ‘Pink Pony Club’, which finds NiCKY adopting more of a Jack Shears persona; carried over into the next track, ‘Private Glance’, which has a Brazilian carnival meets Latin Miami atmosphere, and sounds at any one time like a shimmy-chimmy parade of Grace Jones, Midnight Magic and Roxy.
A most excellent second EP from an artist with much to share and shed on the themes of queer identity, vulnerability and resilience; the craft is superb and affecting. Definitely a choice release this month, if not this year.
Pray-Pax ‘The Lolita Years’
(Zel Zele) 24th October 2025
You’ve got admire anyone who can riff on CAN’s ‘Chain Reaction’ whilst deliberating on sexual and material fancies in the style of Lydia Lunch, but this is just one such take-away from a compilation style overview of the pioneering sound and musical theatre of the 1980s French duo. Combing a Krautrock sample with speeding cars and snatches, manipulations of Musique concrète, they turn a play-of-words on ‘Can’t’ to something approaching no wave post-punk swing. And they do this fusion of the haywire, the silly, the maverick, the dadaist and modern throughout a collection that brings together a multi-disciplinary array of their “unearthed” pieces.
A moiety, a part of the expanded Lolita Danse collective of dancers, artists, set designers and musicians – both that and the name of this survey possibly the very worst thing to ever look up online; that French obsession and flirtation with the taboo and all that -, Pray-Pax provided the soundtrack to an organised chaos of individual expressions and contemporary dances: an act that takes in circus-like acrobatics, the anarchic, kinetic and contemporary. And as part of a greater reprieve of this ensemble’s work, from ’81 to ’89, the design studio Mestiza Estudo is set to publish the Lolita Danse archive at the end of the year. As the press release outlines: “The book features material drawn from a selection of more than 10,000 images that document not only the collective’s performances but the entanglement of their personal and professional lives. This will form a portrait of the collective in motion: sets, costumes, music, videos, drawings, rehearsals, and more. The archive extends far beyond the visual: travel journals, letters, sound recordings, press clippings, and videos trace the full sweep of their creative ecosystem.”
Herding a messy story, from an ensemble that performed either solo in duets or as a group, and one that managed to slip any form of easy categorisation – never unifying under one banner, nor outlying or defining any particular sound or style -, the Istanbul/London shared label and NTS radio show platform Zel Zele present a fourteen (sixteen in the case of the digital formats, with the extras being bonus material as such) track document of art-music and sound fusions.
Behind the Pray-Pax moniker lies the creative instigators Thierry Azam and Alain Michon. These very capable experimental musicians combined the cabaret of the absurd, the frightening and playful with a sound collage that warped, reversed, cut-up and transmogrified everything from no wave to Iberian classical guitar, jazz, the classical, Fluxus, the concertinaed music of old France, post-punk, alt-Catholicism, the mysterious, noirish and the work of Francois Bayle and Pierre Schaeffer – especially on the opening flippery of the vague Afro-rhythmic, marimba bobbled, transmission synching cut-up ‘Domani non c’e sarà più’ (or “tomorrow there will be no tomorrow”), which sounds like a concrete version Holger Czukay, David Byrne and La Monte Young sharing the stage together.
There’s a combination of ideas that run from the rhythmic, the vocalised (though also examples of the talked, narrated and pranked) and beat driven to those that are soundtrack-like or just really odd. Tracks like ‘Down in the North’ sound like a phantom haunting The Residents and Art of Noise, whilst ‘Prudnik Blues’ sounds like a no wave jazz bluesy noirish juxtaposition of Cecil Taylor, Ramuntcho Matta and John Laurie. ‘Le Harve’ imagines Moebius and Roedelius decamping to the Northern French coastline, ‘No Regrets’ seems to transform some silver screen score from the 1920s into a Mexican mule ridden clip-clopping and French serenaded exotic experiment from Sakamoto’s Esperanto album. But bells also chime, pool balls are pocketed, dogs bark, wisps of ether draw across the crypt, and the rain falls on a number of atmospheric pieces. And within those perimeters you can detect passing traces of Devo, The Flying Lizards, Cage, and Lizzy Mercier Descloux.
Your mind has to do the conjuring without the performances (although there is a video of ‘Can’t’), and for that these pieces of music prove very intriguing, imaginative and in some instances, convulsive and hip in that downtown NYC way. In all, a very interesting survey of musicians combining performance art, dance and sound for a snapshot of the French experimental 80s.
Violet Nox ‘Silvae’
(Somewherecold Records) 21st October 2025
Building new worlds, futuristic landscapes and intergalactic safe havens in the wake of vapour trails of laconic, hypnotizing new age psy-trance mysticism, Violet Nox once more embrace Gaia, Greek mythological etymology, astrology and science-fiction/fact on their latest album, the poetically entitled Silvae.
The Boston, Massachusetts trio of synthesists and electronic crafters Dez DeCarlo and Andrew Abrahamson, and airy searching siren vocalist and caller Noell Dorsey occupy a dreamy ethereal plane that fits somewhere between Richard H. Kirk’s Sandoz, Vangelis, Lisa Gerrard, Banco de Gaia and ecological revering dance music – though that trio has expanded its ranks, indeed very pliable, over the course of the last decade.
On their eighth album together (released via the highly prolific and influential North American label Somewherecold Records) the topics of identity, androgyny, resolution, self-discovery, self-love and resistance are lifted towards the stars, pumped and projected through the veils of ambience, trance, dub, EDM, rave, electro-pop, cold wave, techno and more. The trio dreamingly, and in the moment, explore new textures, dynamics and atmospheres, and perhaps, produce their finest work to date: certainly, in places, the sound is more electronic-pop, with vague traces of New Order, Propaganda’s Claudia Brücken and 808 State – their sort of melodica like flutiness especially.
With references, title wise and lyrically to ancient Greek named guardian stars (“Arcturus”, brightest star in the Boötes constellation, notable for its seemingly red colouring, and observed, described by Ptolemy and Chaucer) and the ghostly visages of deep space to the “crescent” shaped cartilage of the knee (“Meniscus”), the album’s themes explore protection, recovery and pain (both physical and mental). Through the beckoning, the near operatic at times scaling, and drifted vocals of Dorsey they find relief, a second chance, in an astrosphere of near organic and sophisticated synthesizer and electronic apparatus plug-ins, effects, pads and keys. And sounds at any one time like a merger between Tangerine Dream, LFO and Massive Attack.
Whether it’s journeying into the subconscious or leaving for celestial rendezvous, Violet Nox turns the vaporous into an electronic art form that’s simultaneously yearning and mysterious, cinematic and ready for the dance floor. Fizzing with techy sophistication and escapism, the American electronic group continue to map out fresh cerebral sonic visions on their new, and again, possibly best album yet.
___/The Monolith Cocktail Social Playlist Vol. 102___
For the 102nd 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.
A couple of months back I celebrated the 100th edition of this series, which originally began over 12 years ago. The sole purpose being to select an eclectic and generational spanning playlist come radio show, devoid of podcast-esque indulgences and inane chatter. In later years, I’ve added a selection of timely anniversary celebrating albums to that track list, and paid homage to some of those artists lost on the way. In the former camp this month, and to tie in with the Archive spots on Ryuichi Sakamoto ‘Esperanto’ LP from 1985 and, though I actually missed the original release date in September, U.S. Girls’ Half Free LP from 2015. Other anniversary albums this month or year include François Hardy’s L’amitie (60), The Who’s By Numbers (50), Sparks Indiscreet (also 50), Grace Jones Slave To The Rhythm (40), Shriekback Oil And Gold (40), Pulp Different Class (30 this month, which I find hard to believe), DANGERDOOM ‘The Mouse & The Mask’ (20), Super Fury Animals ‘Love Kraft’ (20) and Broken Social Scene self-titled LP from 2005.
On the radar but missing out on a place in the blog’s Monthly Choice Music Playlist, I like to include a number of newish releases – anything really from the last four or five months of 2025. In October this list includes something from the L.A. collective Human Error Club, Alejandrito Argenal, Tetsuo ii, and Connect The Dots Movement collaboration with Sol Messiah.
The rest of this month’s social is made up of tunes loved, played out from across the last 60 or more decades: LICE (that rap union between Aesop Rock and Homeboy Sandman, which just so happens to be a decade old this year), François Tusques and Noel Mcghie, Harold Alexander, schroothoup, Angel Bat Dawid, Sandii, Inherit The Moon…
That Full track list is…
François Hardy ‘En t’attendant’
The Who ‘Dreaming From the Waist’
Broken Social Scene ‘Ibi Dreams Of Pavement (A Better Day)’
Mordicai Jones ‘Son Of A Simple Man’
Steve Reid ‘Kai’
Harold Alexander ‘New York Sister’
Sol Messiah & Connect The Dots Movement ‘What Goes Around’
Lice (Aesop Rock & Homeboy Sandman) ‘Katz’
Sparks ‘The Lady Is Lingering’
SANDII ‘Drip Dry Eyes’
Grace Jones ‘Slave To The Rhythm’
Super Fury Animals ‘Frequency’
Great Speckled Bird ‘Long Long Time To Get Old’
Shriekback ‘Nemesis’
Ryuichi Sakamoto ‘A Wongga Dance Song’
François Tusque & Noel Mcghie ‘Va Et Viens’
Pulp ‘Live Bed Show’
U.S. Girls ‘Sororal Feelings (Live)’
Alejandrito Argenal ‘Apasionada’
DANGERDOOM ‘The Mask’
HUMAN ERROR CLUB ‘FROGTOWN’
Angel Bat Dawid & Naima Nefertari ‘Black Stones of Sirius’
Tetsuo ii ‘Praise the Sun’
schroothoop ‘Bilkschade’
Amadou Diagne ‘Freedom’
We All Inherit the Moon ‘When We Finally Fall Asleep, Pt. 1’
Possible Humans ‘Absent Swimmer’
Polyrock ‘Cries and Whispers’
Trifle ‘Old Fashioned Prayer Meeting’
Excepter ‘Maids’
___/Archives___
Ryuichi Sakamoto ‘Esperanto’
(Originally released October 5th 1985, and re-released by WEWANTSOUNDS in 2021)
Already riding the visionary synth waves with the Yello Magic Orchestra and through his inspirational projects with David Sylvian, Sakamoto went on to score success with the plaintive, harrowing Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence soundtrack. The sixth solo release in that oeuvre however was a return to his more leftfield, challenging roots: a marked change from the semi-classical emotional pulls of the film soundtrack. A kind of cutting-edge theatre and ballet, Esperanto was composed for a performance by the New York choreographer Molissa Fenlay with contributions from the Lounge Lizard’s experimentalist guitarist Arto Lindsay and the Japanese percussionist Yas-Kaz. You’ll have to use your imagination to how it all worked visually – though later on art luminaries Kit Fitzgerald and Paul Garrin turned this soundtrack into a conceptual video project.
Sounding very much of its time, on the burgeoning apex of dance music and early hip-hop, electro, this polygenesis experiment often evokes both the Art Of Noise and Herbie Hancock’s ‘Rockit’. Using a super-sized computer and state-of-the-art tech, Sakamoto merged futuristic Japanese theatre with a mechanical Ballets Russes, workshop shunts and huffs with the plastic, and electronic body music with Hassell’s fourth world music inspirations.
Snatches of voices, dialogue get cut-up and looped in a primal techno performance of mechanics, rippled and tapping corrugated percussion, synth waves and oscillations, serial piano dashes and rolls, and Japanese spiritual garden enchantments. At any one time you can pick up the echoes of the Penguin Café Orchestra, Phillip Glass, Stockhausen, Kraftwerk, Depeche Mode, Eno and Populäre Mechanik within the often mysterious, exotic performativity. Motoring, bobbing or in staccato mode, Sakamoto produces a futurist dance set of suspense and experiment, an omnivorous feast of programmed and real sounds. Though very dated by today’s technological wizardry standards, the electro workshop Esperanto remains an iconic, very much sought after work well worth its admission price and indeed reissue status.
U.S. Girls ‘Half Free’
(4AD) 25th September 2015
Beckoned to the label hotbed of deconstructive cerebral pop 4AD, the Illinois raised, Toronto relocated, polygenesis songstress Meg Remy continues to entrance with her latest U.S. Girls album Half Free. Transmogrifying the template evocation of Ronnie Spector and The Shirelles with a fresh perspective and penchant for glitter ball maladies, neon lit dub and glamorous scintillating bubblegum pop, Remy’s moiety of revisionary girl group backbeats and venerable candid highly unsettling laments address a myriad of issues, from disparity between the sexes to the growing pains of modern womanhood – cue the unsettling vignette ‘Telephone Play No.1’, which plays out as a phone call catch-up between siblings but then unnervingly reinforces a deep resentment on stereotype psychology.
Remy’s most dazzling, hypnotically eclectic album yet, both thematically and musically, Half Free is essentially a highly sophisticated and gracefully slick pop triumph: On a parallel, alternative timeline this could have been (stay with me on this one) a Camille Paglia championed Madonna era masterpiece from the mid 80s; her veracious sensual heartache and woozy dream like escapism is certainly evoked at various times throughout the album. Madonna aside, Meg takes on the mantle of various female personalities and vamps, but often desexualizes and reduces their carnal allure to a sense of isolation and discomfort. Her cast of troubled personas this time around owes a debt to the characters of John Cassavetes and Michael Ondaatje, and to the broken-down protagonist of a lost 70s plaintive disco classic.
Channelling the wallowing despair of Ronnie Spector, and loosely walking the line of the troubled Nora Bass from Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter novel, on the opening churning looped melodrama ‘Sororal Feelings’, Meg’s sisterly pleads of the broken wife yearningly progress through a Lee Hazelwood envisioned deep southern soundtrack: the strange fruit and methodology metaphorically replaced: “Going to hang myself. Hang myself from a family tree.” An emotional draining start, which grows on you with repeated plays, Sororal is followed up by the super-charged dub reggae hybrid ‘Damn That Valley’ – perhaps the most refreshing slice of on-message pop in 2015. Taking her cue from the acclaimed journalist Sebastian Junger’s Afghanistan front reportage War chronicles, Meg rages with a reverberating wall of sonic shrilling and grief as an imagined war widower riling against the futility and platitude sentiments of the government. Beating out an electro sound clash, part N.Y. City no wave of the early 80s, part Mikey Dread Jamaican sunshine dancehall, long-time collaborator and Toronto producer Onakabazien takes it to the next level.
Already aired, ‘Damn That Valley’ is the most colourfully vibrant of a trio of songs released since May in the run up towards the release of the LP. The second of these, ‘Woman’s Work’, closes the album. Extended from its more radio and video friendly version to a fading seven-minute plus requiem, the female gaze is sinisterly reproached by a Cindy Sherman posing façade and operatically Baroque gilded Moroder soundtrack. Amplifying the venerable atmospherics, Meg is joined by the siren sonic ethereal pitch of Ice Cream’s Amanda Grist – who can also be heard doubling-up on the Damn That Valley vocals – as they traverse an eerie veil of Catholic electro.
Released in more recent weeks, the last of this trio ‘Window Shades’ revives Gloria Ann Taylor’s original 70s unrequited disco ballad ‘Love Is A Hurting Thing’. Stumbled upon by Meg’s husband and DFA label signed artist Slim Twig (who contributes throughout the album); a touch of Madonna blusher and woozy glitter ball noir is added, whilst the universal theme is updated: apparently written after Meg watched the cod-autobiographical documentary Part Of Me, the meme circus spotlight on the life of Katie Perry that even with a soft coating of saccharine idolisation exposes the cracks and fatuous nature of celebratory.
Elsewhere on the album Meg appropriates the bubble gum glam of Bolan and the spikey punk beat of The Misfits on ‘Sed Knife’ (a minimal poem set to a bouncing backbeat, originally released as the B-side to 2012’s ‘Rosemary’). Whilst she offers an elegantly cool, misty oscillating sonorous bass-y air of mystique, – piqued by cold war jarred piano note suspense – clandestine variant on the spy thriller soundtrack with ‘New Age Thriller’: The actual battle it seems is between self-respect and male pressure. Red lipstick marks the collar of the churning, western guitar twanged, murky ‘Red Comes In Many Shades’, which itself borrows from the put-upon, downbeat beauty of Nancy Sinatra. Whether intentional or not, the song sounds like a slowed down version of New Age Thriller, and thematically dissects the struggles, and in this case, the betrayal of an affair.
Honing the darkness and plight of what was always celebrated as the innocent, teenage growing pains of adolescence with more gravitas, Meg’s robust themes swim amorphously through the dry-ice, crystal waves of the late 70s and 80s to produce a post-modern pop triumph. Progressing from the basement tapes and reverberated Spector sonic loops of the past to her latest incarnation as the pining pop artist, Meg Remy’s production values are highly ambitious: her previous work a precursor series of experimental outings. Without a doubt Half Free is her best, most mature, meticulous and glorious sounding collection of songs yet.
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