Monolith Cocktail Blog

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

Anna Butterss ‘Mighty Vertebrate’
(International Anthem)

Branching out once more to lead a company of long-time collaborators on an expletory journey of groove and rhythm (because no matter what the concept, the theory, the strategy, this album has both), bassist and composer Anna Butterss fuses the likely and unlikely into a new album of expressive possibilities, landscapes and feels.

The scope of wandering into new worlds, conjuring up new moods and peregrinations is large. Mainly a result of wanting to write music after a long period of extensive touring, Mighty Vertebrate is a refreshing outlet of ideas prompted by Oblique Strategy-like stimulations. Hardly restricting, as I’ve already laid out, these strategies spark creative trains-of-thought, of process, methodology and performance. So, for example, as Butterss describes, they are “…going to make a song where the bass doesn’t function in the role of a bass”, or, “…make a song that uses groups of three-bar phrasing”. And so on. Technical yet simultaneously vague and even open-ended, this amorphous set of rules merely acts as a starting point: not only for the in-demand bassist but their foils as well. And despite all that technical musical language and the range of influences, sounds, ideas, the bass guitar (sometimes Butterss switches to the upright) is mostly recognisable: sounding on occasion quite funky (think Bootsy Collins) and soulful, rather than avant-garde and deconstructed. 

Moving in the right-on circles in L.A., and very much in-demand for not only heading their own projects but collaborating and improvising with such notable names as Jeff Parker, Makaya McCraven, Phoebe Bridges and Jason Isbell, the Australian-born artist is a member of that city’s Small Medium Large super-quintet. Members of that same group now join their bandmate on their solo adventure, with both Gregory Uhlmann (on guitar) and Josh Johnson (on saxophone) contributing parts throughout alongside International Anthem’s (pretty much) in-house sound mixer, Call & Response concert series founder, in-demand drummer and multi-instrumentalist Ben Lumsdaine (acting as the album’s co-producer and percussionist). Added to that quality lineup, the L.A. based guitarist and composer, “prolific sideman”, oft member of the highly influential Tortoise and founding member of both Isotope 217 and the Chicago Underground, Jeff Parker offers up a special one-off turn on the electro 80s, Japanese new wave and jazz twiddling fusion ‘Dance Steve’.    

Hints and recalls from all the above’s own groups, ensembles and projects can be heard at one time during the duration of Mighty Vertebrate. And why not? This is one talented bunch of players and innovators, working in a very hot scene right now; encouraged by one of the most prolifically brilliant labels of recent years in contemporary jazz and beyond. And yet it feels like a culmination of musical threads being put together, whether intentionally or just going with the energy, the directional prompts of the moment.

Across many of the tracks there’s a balafon-like bobble and shuttering woody percussive influence of Africa (Mali, perhaps Kenya too), a simmered down Afrobeat rhythm ala Tony Allen in places, and the saxophone of Peter King. This fuses with a Tortoise, Yoshiaki Ochi and Ramuntcho Matta vibe on the opening ‘Bishop’, and merges with touches of label mates Jeremiah Chiu And Sofia Honer, Antibalas and LAGOSS on the fluted and smoky sax serenaded ‘Shorn’.   

The more gently inclined and peaceable ‘Ella’ reminisce takes a jazzier blues and American prog approach. And the following mirage shimmered ‘Lubbock’ (named after the Texan city with a famous son, Buddy Holly, and famously nicknamed “Hub City”) reminded me of both Daniel Vickers and Daniel Lanois. ‘Breadrich’ is a real mix, with its crunching more gnarly bass, Cobham fusion jazz inklings and Brides Of Funkenstein meets cosmic 80s Italian new wave vibes. And then at other times it’s more like Ariel Kalma, Chick Corea’s Elektric Band, Alfa Mist, Joe Zawinul, Coltrane, and Matthew Halsall. But regardless of all that, Butterss finds a near intuitive pathway of individuality that crosses borders, timelines, moods, musical signatures and structures to find rhythm and groove balanced by emotional pulls to important reference points and feelings in their life. I’m not even sure if you’d call it leading so much, but this solo gig proves a stimulating treasure trove of musical and sonic ideas with purpose and skill.       

TRAINNING + Ruth Goller ‘threads to knot’
(Squama Recordings) 18^th October 2024

Two connective forces in the experimental, inventive contemporary jazz scenes combine their experiences and art on this sonic and musical hybrid.

Although both participants have crossed paths previously, this is the inaugural adventure from the German drumming and saxophone combo of Max Andrzejewski and Johannes Schleiermacher and the serial UK jazz movement instigator Ruth Goller. Regular readers may have recognised the former pairing, both being synonymous with the HÜTTE name, an ensemble that began back in 2011, and featured on the Monolith Cocktail back in 2019 with their radical take on the music of Robert Wyatt. Born out of more recent rehearsals, the TRAINNING appellation has stuck for now, and it is in this form that they appear now – although that Northern European HÜTTE influence is hard to resist.

Goller’s CV is way too impressive and prolific to list in its entirety here, but the composer and bass player’s most notable credits include two of the most important and influential groups to set off a jazz renaissance in recent years, Acoustic Ladyland and Melt Yourself Down. Goller has also performed with such luminaries as Kit Downes, Sam Amidan, Marc Ribot and (Sir) Paul McCartney, and plays with both Let Spin and Vula Viel.

There’s enough threads, nodes and junctions in between to feed off, but both partners in this knotted tension and more spiritual, lofty, airy and aria-like ether Linda Sharrock “ah’d” fusion of influences and prompted sparks of inspiration read each other very well. Directed by, and riffing off, the “Exquiste Corpse” parlour game so beloved by the Surrealist movement, the trio of players expand beyond the jazz idiom into shadow worlds, the mysterious, supernatural, cosmic and near industrial.

Although popular in France amongst many circles, the Surrealists used the exquisite corpse game as a subversive collaborative drawing exercise in which each participant added whatever subconscious extension they could dream up to a chain of hidden images, the results of which when revealed could result in the weirdest of oddities. With the likes of grand doyen of the form, and way beyond, Max Ernst taking part alongside Dali and Miró you might have big bird’s plumage next to the shapely naked crossed legs of a muse and tennis racket feet. It’s used differently here however, generations on, and in musical form, with one of the players either writing bars or music, but then passing only the last bar, or sometimes only the last two notes, onto the next, then the same again to the next player and so on until a song’s skeleton was formed. 

Far from exotic creatures and humans of dreams and nightmares, the results are a mix of chaotic freeform, post-punk prowling, the down beat, the foggy and the fourth world experiments and suffused atmospheres of Jon Hassell.

Both the TRAINNING lads also play synths and guitars, and so the range of sounds and instruments is expanded even further than sax, drums, voice and bass: sometimes towards the electronic. There are oscillations, arpeggiators and synth lines that hint at the kosmische and early analogue sound: from Conrad Schnitzler to Kraftwerk and Schulze. The guitars meanwhile have more than a hint of Marc Ribot about them, especially in passages on the hovering, alt-country ritual of ‘Backlog’ – this one is as disturbing as it is mysterious and vague with its post-rock doom threads, singular thumped drum, shimmered hazy rattle shakes of percussion and harmonic picks and plucks.

Elsewhere, old as dirt, ‘Agelong’ walks in the shadows of Scott Walker and Krononaut; the bass guitar, gnarled and trebly in a post-punk fashion, lurking and shaking in an atavistic gloom. And the messy off-kilter escalation that grows out of the opening electronics of ‘Threadfin’ is more like Last Exit and Peter Brötzmann. But then as the track progresses the mood changes again, merging math rock and punk no wave with Ethio jazz, veiled gauzy voices and instances of a more soothed Ivo Pearlman in a spiritual communion with Matana Roberts. By contrast, ‘Finback’ reminded me of Tortoise in some parts, and Donny McCaslin in others, whilst the dotted cone-like electronics that bring in ‘Lineage’ change shape and form, breaking out into a spell of Ill-Considered jamming with Nocturnal Emissions.

Pretty much out on the peripherals of jazz, ascending, flexing, rasping, soothing and breathing iterations and more untethered expressions of freeform music, TRAINNING + Ruth Goller fashion organic fusions from a process that promises the wild, tumultuous, wrangled and strange, yet also provides the melodic and dreamy.

Niwel Tsumbu ‘Milimo’
(Diatribe Records)

So, what does it sound like when a Democratic Republic of Congo born and raised virtuoso guitarist brought up on that central African region’s homegrown Soukous, studies the classical, relocates to Ireland, and finds themselves recording their debut LP at Peter Gabriel’s famous Real World label studios with the assistance of the renowned engineer Dom Shaw. Well, it sounds almost courtly, Iberian, Baroque, intricate, studied, and bluesy with a jazzy lilt and underlying feel of the homeland. For such is the range of Niwel Tsumbu’s skills as a deft and expressively rich maestro of the nylon-stringed guitar that the blending of international inspirations and absorptions is near effortlessly merged to create something quite unique.

Outlined in the press blurb, Tsumbu’s music and direction of travel is as influenced by the classical genius of Bach as it is by the Spanish Flamengo maestro Paco de Lucía and jazz deity Charlie Parker. Match this with the inspirational sounds of François Luambo Luanzo Makiadi, aka the legendary “Sorcerer of the guitar” Franco, one of the most influential figures in Congolese music in the last century (one time leader of the mighty TPOK Jazz band), and Congolese Rhumba’s more up-tempo and brighter, more intricately played scion/offshoot, Soukous, and you have a real worldly fusion of cultures at play.

With not much more than a guitar, and on only one occasion, a voice that seems to follow that guitar’s versant and twirling patterns, you can hear legato, glissando and the “rubato” (from the Latin for “stolen time”) signature of expressing rhythmic freedom by slightly speeding up and the slowing down the tempo forms of those referenced inspirations. It’s de Lucía, with a little Sabicas too, on the opening ‘Rubato’ reflection, and on the entwinned gypsy classical, plucked and pricked ‘Polyphony’; Bach, with touches of courtly old England on the trio of ‘Etude’ shorts; and Parker, joined by Wes Montgomery, on the near romantic dappled and picked ‘Tirizah’. The open-ended finale of watery motioned notes, ‘To Be Continued’, could be Bach resurfacing during the jazz age of 1920s America. And the sliding intro title-track has a nylon buzzy toned resonation of Mali blues to it.

The album’s most experimental performance/composition, ‘The Silence Within’, takes a completely different turn. A resonation of harmonics, a shimmer and rung pluck of notes hangs and lingers in the echoed canyons of Tsumbu’s inner sanctum.

With both a depth and real intricate lightness of touch to the often rapid, near seamless phrases, runs, articulations and intonations on this solo offering, and with a foot in both Africa and abroad, a classical learning is blended with a contemporary ear and musically well-travelled soul to produce a modern guitar gem.

Donald Beaman ‘Fog On Mirror Glass’
(Royal Oakie) 25^th October 2024

The play and course of light, the recurring “phantom” and a beautiful subdued, nigh on elegiac poetry conjures up a simultaneous union of the beatific and longing on the latest solo effort from Donald Beaman.

Like a drifter’s songbook of subtle, intimate and home-recorded wanderings, metaphors and the like for yearned and plaintive romantic loss, fondness, the passing/measuring of time, and the urge to find comfort and solace, Fog On Mirror Glass uses memories of the weather, the way the light touched or dimmed at a given moment in time, and the smallest of witnessed movements/touches to evoke the right atmosphere of gossamer and sparsity.

Although backed on his previous four outings by a full band, Beaman has stripped right back, recording the bulk of the material in his own living room: where he sat and wrote most of the songs. Longtime stalwart Kit Land helped Beaman set up a makeshift studio of a sort, whilst also contributing bass and keys, and that room’s resonance and reverberated surface sounds can be heard throughout. It also gives the album sound an almost lo fi quality at times: in a good way. Yet despite that pared down approach, Beaman states that this album emerged from an idea he had to “present solo performances in conversation with full-band work”. And so, he brings in Michael Nalin on brushing and dusting light drum duties – occasionally those same accentuated, snare resonating rattled and languid drums gather some more pace and rhythm -, Jen Benoit to add a subtle and emotional touch of attentive backing vocals to the stairway of winding time, ‘Awhile’, and the yearned, disconsolate ‘Usual Phantom’, and Ken Lovgren on additional guitar for the slow-paced, fatigued title-track.

In a former life part of The Doubles band, and a mover on the turn of the new millennium New York City scene, Beaman has in one guise or another shared stages with a staggeringly impressive range of artists, from the late Jonathan Richman to Sharon Van Etten, Mdou Moctar and Marisa Anderson, and toured with an eclectic list of noughties influencers.

But his music, and in this instance, is like a Venn diagram of Cass McCombs, Bob Dylan, Bert Jansch, Jeffery Silverstein, Jake Xerxes Fussell, The Mining Co. and early Fleetwood Mac. However, the opening lovely trickled and drifted warmth and resonance of ‘Glass Bottom Boat’, formed in New York and finished once making it to his new home of North California, has an air of Robbie Robertson playing some Baroque or near Greek beauty on a mandolin about it – by the way, I don’t believe it is actually a mandolin being played on the record, just has that feel. A wanderer’s tale; an alternative aquatic floating road trip in the humid heat, it’s perhaps one of my favourite songs on the album.

Some songs also have almost a country and bluegrass feel to them, like the skiffle and shuffled “drawn by the light” ‘Old Universe’ – one of those themes of distilling the entire gravity of it all, the world, the universe, into a moment captured, a gesture, a turn or look in a very particular room, on the stairwell or in an idyllic but less than homely scene by a river. There’s also the inclusion of a church-like organ to add some kind of beatific bathed light on the Leonard Cohen-esque ‘Your Dreaming Eyes’. 

In all, a most impressive and understated songbook of honest quality and performance, themed largely around the way light falls upon any given metaphor, analogy, phrase, description and texture. Unadorned, the feelings are left to pull and draw the listener into a most intimate world. Each play reveals more, as the album really begins to grow on you. A fine record indeed.  

Rhombus Index ‘hycean’
(See Blue Audio)

Named after the hypothetical type of planet with liquid water oceans under a hydrogen atmosphere – in other words, a promising candidate for habitability -, Rhombus Index’s fourth album for the discerning introspective ambient and electronic label See Blue Audio reflects on the ever expanding, and encroaching, fusion of artificial intelligence and the organic. Sonically in wonderment, if near joyously radiant and positive in places, that relationship between nature and the digital is stimulating, regenerative and subtly hypnotically entrancing.

Back in solo mode after his collaboration with See Blue Audio label mate f5point6, the West Yorkshire artist and crafter of biomorphic worlds continues that “symbiotic” union by releasing his album on the same day as his foil. Both are similarly cut from the same kinetic ambient and electronic cloth it seems.

hycean however, has a certain life force of softly bobbing bulb-like notes, melodic wave forms, gentle ebbing synthetic tides, dancing atoms and dispersing playful pollen fizzes that builds towards insect wing fluttered and rotor-bladed itchy ticking techno beats. The natural shapes of geography are mapped out on a soundboard of the blanketed, submerged, the beaming and vaporous. In fact, the gentle ambient undulated ‘Coastal Curve’ uses a “sonification of coastal path measurement data” to evoke the desired effect.

Sometimes the beats are more active, like on ‘Flotsam’. Here they sound almost like some kind of transformed version of sticks or hand drums, or even tablas, tapping away in a near soft d’n’b style. ‘Digital Anemone’ (from looking it up, I’ve come up with “anemone” being the word for a genus of flowering plants in the buttercup family) doesn’t so much break out into but builds lovingly towards a joyful beaming dance of subtle techno and trance.

A musical photosynthesis; a sonic growth of fauna, flora and algae; hycean is both an audio and image generated fusion – see the videos and accompanying artwork – of crystallisation, the blooming and expanding: an image manifestation that shows nature in a very alien new light. Part Dr. Alex Paterson ‘Loving You Live’, part Seefeel, part eco trance, it will (excuse the pun) really grow on you with each new listen.      

Poppy H ‘Wadham Lodge’
(Self-Release)

Haunted invocations of past lives and half lost and half hallucinatory recalled memories swim around in the metallic filament ether of Poppy H’s imagination on the mysteriously veiled experimental artist’s latest release.

In “celebration” of the cassette format – the first physically tactile album in a while from the prolific composer -, all the foibles of that format are emphasised and played with; from the degradation in quality, changes in speed, and the signature surface sounds of tape itself, to the physical presses of the stop, pause and play buttons on a tape recorder. Finding its way onto tape culture, the expletory concept and processes used to conjure up Wadham Lodge – apart from the name of the semi-professional East London football team Walthamstow F.C.’s home ground, and the Tudor era Wadham patrons who founded an Oxford Collage, I’m not sure if this title is borrowed, meant to be based on a real place or a reference, or made up – are new. Physical recordings of his catalogue of work, both old and unreleased, were played and mixed live simultaneously, and accompanied by original live improvisation and compositions. This multilayered process was then captured and mixed, like much of his work, on to a mobile phone.

An interesting and novel concept that results in Fortean transmissions, mirages and vague traces of human activity, conversations and environment. Greyed out, filtered and often in a lo fi magnetic shroud that borders on the paranormal and apparitional, more melodic tunes, mechanised beats and sonic illusions manifest from the mystical fabric of reconstructed time.

Memories are fed into a cryptic model of visitations and sonic consciousness. Take ‘loosely based on grief’, which merges the familiar – albeit manipulated and filtered – sounds of industry and the train yard contact points – the iron scuffed and screeched sounds of a train moving down the tracks – with a Faust Tapes-like foreign broadcast. Or the woody mechanical slot machine-like sounds that merge with a mist of a supernatural Murcof and the Aphex Twin and tweeting bird life on the time measured ‘wild stab in the dark’. From these prompts, these maybe half lingered forgotten thoughts of scenes and the moving world around him, emerge visages and emotions.

It’s the sound of the Boards of Canada, Matthewdavid, Lukid and Oberman Knocks half reminisced, and captured on to ghost tapes. Another unique experiment from Poppy H that elicits new visions.     

The Galactic Cowboy Orchestra ‘Lost In Numbers’
(Independent) 11^th October 2024

Losing themselves in the mathematical technicalities, phrasings and time signatures of a tumultuous, but kind and melodious, jazz-prog-country-indie-alt-rock fusion, the highly talented Galactic Cowboy Orchestra run the numbers forwards, backwards and every which way their dynamic performances take them.

Originally founded back in 2009 by bassist extraordinaire John Wright, imbued and prompted by the music of such notable influences as King Crimson, Mahavishnu Orchestra and The Dixie Dregs, the quartet have since fashioned their own form of technically challenging music that expands beyond the fusion sphere into all kinds of genres and moods.

The most recent iteration of the group features John’s wife and electric violin/lead vocalist foil Lisi Wright, drummer/percussionist Mario Dawson and acoustic and electric guitarist Dan Neale (who also occasionally picks up the mandolin, in true prog rock instrument switching style). Across various themes they masterfully gallop, spike and pique, riding a constant shimmer and splash of cymbals and percussion, as they fuse a squalling Michael Urbaniak and Jessica Pavone with Arti & Mestieri, a noodling Jaco Pastoruis and King Crimson: and that’s just on the opening title-track. When Lisi sings however, the mood is more like The Charlottes or Belly, even Madder Rose, backed by Zappa or Rush – see the math rock prog and alt 90s female-led ‘Righteous’ and more enchanting lyrical winding ‘Faith, Peace, Hope’.

To further the sound and influences even further, the group mimic the speedy flourishes and scales of the Raga Piloo on ‘In Passing’ – entwinning the traditional Indian form with ariel-like violin and active busy drums -, and sound positively supernatural, otherworldly on, what I take to be a tamed riff on Coltrane’s even wilder, maddening ‘Ascension’.

The Galactic Cowboy Orchestra’s new album (their sixth I believe) is for those seeking something different in the jazz and rock-fusion worlds, something as melodic and tuneful as it is technically clever and complicated.

Groupe Derhane/ freddie Murphy & Chiara Lee ‘Batch #4’
ALBUM (Purplish Records)

When not in the company of the celebrated Tuareg musician-guitarist Mdou Moctar (in a roll that includes bass, guitar, backing vocals, drum machine and producing duties) Mikey Coltun runs his Purplish Records label, dropping unconventional releases in “batches”: a singing of which is the already mentioned Moctar. With this unique method, Coltun twin’s artists from completely different backgrounds, international zones and genres, in a double cassette package.

Volume #4 really attracts polar opposites, with albums from both the Niger Tuareg band Groupe Derhane, fronted by Issouf Derhane, and the Italian experimental partnership of freddie Murphy and Chiara Lee, who also go under the name of Father Murphy, channelling Catholic guilt through natural and synthetic manipulation.

What unites both participants is a shared reification of the concepts, atmospheres and geographies of deserts; Derhane, with the most exquisite camel motioned rhythm and with that signature desert blues and rock guitar resonance, contouring and paying respect, whilst also longing, for the south central Saharan region of Ténéré (which in the Tuareg language literally means “desert”), and the Murphy/Lee duo scoring the overwhelming nothingness of the white desert landscapes of Antarctica for fellow Italian film director Lorenzo Pallota. Both works find their creators embedded in the landscape, performing and extracting the mood of the place.

With a remarkable back story of travails and movement, Issouf Derhane started off life in the Tuareg (though it must be pointed out, depending on who you ask, that many from this community of freewheeling Beaudoin prefer the term Kel Tamashek instead of the later Tuareg colonial loaded name) encampment of Tidene in Niger, a hub as it turns out for exceptional musicians, including Omara “Bombino” Moctar. But he was quickly swept up, we’re told, and itching to travel, ending up in Libya where he picked up the guitar. As the horrific, destabilising shitstorm of that country’s civil war broke out, and the Gaddafi regime tumbled, Derhane was forced to move once again, returning to Niger and the city of Agadez, the “gateway to the desert”, in 2015. This is where he met a fellow guitar enthusiast by the name of Mohamed. A connection was made, fuelled by shared roots, and together they formed the Groupe Derhane band, which quickly became a bit of a sensation in Tuareg circles.

Channelling a tumultuous time in the Tuareg plight, with the fight still ongoing for autonomy within the regions that spread across Niger, Chad, Mali and the Sahel, the increasingly alarming over-desertification and effects of climate change, and preservation of their way of life, the Derhane group encapsulate a longing and paean for home and their roots that sounds entrancing, beautifully and emotionally charged. The clapped rhythms, motions of the camel trail and shifting sand dune contours, and constantly turning, brightly resonating and buzz of the guitar are close to the sound of such Tuareg icons of the form as Faris, Terakraft and Tinariwen. It’s not mentioned in the notes, but I take it that both the opening ‘Tamidtin’ and closing ‘Ténéré’ are both riffs on or covers of Tinariwen’s songs, albeit with a less bassy and low vocal, more echo and brightness.

There’s a subtle use of the synthesized and electronic, which makes the reverberating and buoyant ‘Khay Tamadroyte Tamacheq’ sound near cosmic and throbbing.  

The six-track showcase is an invitation to dig deeper, consume and absorb a burgeoning talent on the Tuareg scene.

Sharing this dispatches double-bill, the Torino-based sonic partnership of freddie Murphy (the lower case is intentional) and Chiara Lee channel a whole different kind of desert. More an isolated, white awe-expansive tundra, they transform the abstract forbode, mystery and overwhelming senses of vast Antarctica into a soundtrack for Lorenzo Pallotta’s experiences aboard an icebreaker. On his return from this field trip, the film director emphasised the shock of readjustment in a land where the sun never sets; where time has no meaning, or at least is hard to measure. Pallotta also described the vibrations, the breakage of the vessel as it cut through the ice, sounding like a constant earthquake.

All of this is fed into a soundtrack of the paranormal, primal, fogged, beastly and wonderous. Manipulated off-world readings, hums, surfaces noises, drones, dissonance and obfuscated voices provide the paranoid, the esoteric and a sense of movement through a world with no borders, nothing concrete but just space: lots of white space. Nurse With Wound, Throbbing Gristles, Gunther Westhoff and Szajner lost in the cold psychogeography, the Antarctic is as disturbing as it is a polar adventure vision of the Heart Of Darkness. But then the finale double of ‘Intermezzo + Closer’ sounds like an electronic kosmische scenery of Dinger and Cluster and cult Library music; the radiant magnetic lights of the southern hemisphere shimmy to a tubular dance.

Consider the mood set, the senses retuned.

Batch number four is yet another unique pairing of influences and sounds; two different geographies, different methods, yet both sharing a general theme of landscape and all the unsaid or unsayable abstract feelings, atmospheres that go with it. 

Pyramid Waves ‘Screaming Brain’
(Syrup Moose Records) 18^th October 2024

A cerebral haemorrhage; a blunt force of industrial sonics, caustic electronica and Fortean distress, the fifth work of traumatic discourse and dissonance from the French duo of Pyramid Waves drills into the four pillars of our dysfunctional modern society: that being, addictions, mental health, anxiety and cravings.

A bastard trauma of Front Line Assembly, Test Dept. and Merzbow, the Screaming Brain improvisations (recorded at their home studio) will leave you in no doubt as to the pained sufferings of its creators.

Demarcated into four parts of static white noise, analogue reverberations and interdimensional radio transmissions, crunch and crumbled beats, and echoed voices from some distant harrowing memory, doors to a tumultuous mind are opened to forces from beyond the mortal world. Because whilst the gristle for this album is all very real, the sounds grate, spin, switch towards a phantasm of the paranormal and alien. It’s as if a trapped psychogeography of echoing stresses and long dormant troubled episodes in the cortex has been wired into a supernatural apparatus of haunted and bestial sonorous severe disturbances.

Unsettling to put it mildly – especially the repeating dreamy melodic piano part that plays and meanders over a coarse bed of fearful distortion on ‘Trapped Underwater’ -, this uncomfortable but fascinating pull into the metal torture workshop of neuroscience squeals, slaps meat, drills and thumps its way to challenging and meeting its psychological demons.  

If Richard H. Kirk, Richard James and SEODAH invoked Cthulhu whilst all in a room together, hunched over an apparatus of transistors, generators, motors, tools, drum pads and effects, then this is surely what it would sound like. Screaming Brian by name and nature, Pyramid Waves dissect the psyche of our troubling times, and the battles faced by the individual screwed-up by the system with horror and hurt.

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.