The Digest for October 2026: New Music/Halloween Playlist/Archives

October 8, 2026

The Monthly Digest includes a clutch of accumulated new music reviews, this year’s Halloween Playlist selection, a piece from the Archives and jukebox selection of anniversary celebrating LPS.

Photo Credit: Seismes photographed by Flavie Herbreteau

___/NEW MUSIC REVIEWS____
(All Entries in Alphabetical Order)

Brian Bordello ‘Who Killed Kurt Cobain’
(Metal Postcard Records) 6th October 2026

So, I was wondering with such a propounded rather than questioning title (the ? being missing from the title) if Brian Bordello was going to join in with the ghoulish online obsessive conspiracy set who cry foul play, nee murder about their iconic martyr, or, was going down the same vivid but multilayered route as the artist Sandow Birk and his gruesome, near cartoonish, depiction of Kurt Cobain’s death. Brian has gone for something even less clear, disarmed by the manner in which he’s recorded his first single in a long while, and more than a bit muggy and muddy.

Birk’s The Death of Kurt Cobain, Seattle oil on canvas artwork, painted not long after Cobain’s suicide in April of 1994, leaves little to the imagination – a riff on, and inspired by Harry Wallis’s 1856 painting of The Death of Chatterton, an even younger poet who famously committed suicide. Sensationalist even, Birk, brought up on the punk surf culture and street life of Southern California in the 70s and 80s, was influenced by the docudramas and the intrusive TV of the times. Brian doesn’t so much as follow this line but is candid and does play on the obsessions of fans who just can’t accept the most simple or plausible answer to their musical idol’s death: contrary to all the evidence.

Cobain’s fatalistic choices seemed inevitable after untold overdoses, and several earlier suicide attempts (according to Courtney Love). It’s a convoluted history, filled with contradictory accounts: inevitably coming to Netflix soon. And leaves room to doubt Kurt’s intentions. Though the facts as they stand support Kurt asking his old pal Dylan Carlson to obtain the shotgun that finally did him in, but for “self-protection” purposes. Whatever the motivation, a shotgun is some statement to make; the police photos, some only released to the public gaze decades later, are horrific and vivid; the effects of shooting your face off only too sickening to gawp at. Such a violent dispatch for a sensitive soul; perhaps knowing that there would be no way to turn back, and a small chance of survival, after already taking various concoctions of pills only to be saved by medics, and on one occasion, with an injection of naloxone by Love. And yet, it seems such a nasty way to go: the shock and cleanup for those he must have known would eventually find him denotes either an incredibly twisted fucked-up mind or someone making a disturbing and callous statement. It must be noted the police had been called on another occasion, confiscating both pills and a gun from Kurt: though Kurt vehemently denied he was trying to commit suicide.

It’s said via so many sources that Kurt was on the verge of splitting the band, pulling out of that year’s Lollapalooza, and yet Michael Stipe was adamant that Kurt was formulating a new Nirvana LP and direction, only to cancel the making of a demo – Stipe, from what I’ve read, seems to stick with the suicide narrative; almost finding it inevitable with the person he not only saw as a peer but friend.

On that tragic day in 1994, Kurt was found by an electrician who’d come to the house to install a security system. A note, addressed to his imaginary childhood friend Boddah, was found amongst the mess, part of it shared on Wiki and elsewhere stated that Kurt had not “felt the excitement of listening to as well as creating music, along with really writing…. for too many years.” Plausible…a statement that the creative will, and the love had run dry. It didn’t help that Kurt was only 27 when he died, feeding into the whole infamous “27” death cult of stars conspiracy.

Choosing a sad chapter from grunge rock’s front pages with which to make a solo return – Brian’s day job family band of a sort, The Bordellos recently released the ‘Oh Nora’ single, reviewed on these pages earlier this month – ‘Who Killed Kurt Cobain’ is yet another lower than lo-fi home recording on rudimental apparatus. The production, part of its charm and rawness, threatens to distort or break down at any second, as Brian’s Daniel Johnston meets John Shuttleworth vocals, Half Man Half Biscuit wit and wordplay, and the C86 jangled guitar prove both lamentable and shitty. It starts off well if you like, almost in sympathy (“Was he killed by too much love?” as one line goes, could be read with a double meaning: a clue, the Love part, the generic word or name of a certain suspect put forward by the naysayers), before eventually and near dreamily declaring the whole affair wasn’t a suicide at all, dialling into the whole conspiratorial discourse. And yet as I’ve already said, there’s a touch of sweetness and a lull to the coarser and dissonant aspects of this recording.

A difficult figure to sympathise with I grant you, but poor old Love comes in for the harshest criticism, her name as one of the most favoured candidates in a bizarre hotbed of murderous plots; although herself a heroin addict and right handful, staving off attempts to take their child into care because of their actions and drug dependency, Love come out alive and flourishes even despite setbacks and her poor behaviour, whilst arguably the real talent (and so the narrative goes) and golden ticket Kurt ends up with a blown-off face, dead at just 27 years of age. Perhaps he really was just drained, lacking the will to go on, stuck in a cycle of melancholic tragedy.

Sceptics will never be satisfied their idol left them high and dry and will never be happy with the manner of Kurt’s death or the investigation that surrounded it. And with no end of armchair experts, analysts – the boon of the internet age – on hand to refute and counterclaim against the evidence, Kurt’s suicide will remain forever suspicious. (I happen to not care but can’t see why Kurt wouldn’t just pull the trigger on his life and hurt from everything I’ve read; from the music I’ve experienced and the hectic fuss and self-destructive nature of his life).  

Brian promises or threatens (depending on your view) to release a full songbook at some point in the near future; this time through the Cruel Nature Records label as opposed to dropping from out of nowhere with no fanfare nor any publicity at all, on Metal Postcard Records. Expect a full review when the time comes.

The Clean Crime Scene ‘Raw Cuts’
(Blank Verse/Brothers Club) 30th October 2026

Finally arriving after years of cultivation, the debut album from John Simek’s scuzzed and fuzzed and purposely muddied produced The Clean Crime Scene project is here. From its earliest foundations during the summertime family vacations of childhood reminisces on the Jersey Shore in 2021, where John recruited fellow Richmond, Virginia musicians Jay Wilder (the lead guitarist of this outfit, who also offers up some bass chops and plays keys) of Contraption and The Venus Explosion note, Ralph Nicastro (playing drums and some bass) of Sam Tropez, wreaths and Sparks Fly From A Kiss, and Colin Carhart (sharing drumming duties) also of wreaths, to the follow up recordings involving his wife Diana Simek, who layed down vocals back home in their own studio, and further contributions on violin and keys from Will Pattie (of The Fossil Collection note), Raw Cuts took some time to formulate and mold into its final shape.

Even then, with ‘fatigue’ setting in, during 2024-2025 John enlisted the help of John Trainum, whose eclectic credits include Kayne West, Kate Bolinger and Destructo Disk. Credited however, with providing keys on this album’s second track, ‘Elevator To Nowhere’, it was Trainum’s more professional Spacebomb studio in Richmond that provided the space needed to boost this vision. But this was still not quite done, and earlier this year John ‘relinquished’ the job of mastering to the Grammy Award winning engineer Alan Douches; quite the coup, as Douches’ own CV of credits includes some staggeringly incredible names from the noughties renaissance of indie and dance music – the LCD Soundsystem to Animal Collective and Sufjan Stevens – alongside established bands of previous decades – like Misfits and Motorhead. As I mentioned already that production has a muddy film that envelopes the sound in almost mono-like lo-fi quality, one that fuzzes and buzzes and murkily adds something creepy, dungeon-like, drudge-like to the ambitious indie-grunge-garage-rock-punk-shoegaze chemistry of the band’s songs.

With all that in mind, the album’s reference points, contacts mention everyone from Ty Segall to the Brian Jonestown Massacre and Mazzy Star: all good calls…no arguments from me. But I’m not sure if it is intentional or not, but nothing is made of the band’s almost fuzzed-up country-rock sound, with songs like the already mentioned ‘Elevator To Nowhere’ reminding me of a more spiky Long Ryders – albeit sharing the stage with the leather clad biker chic The Raveonettes and a less languid and needle sharing Royal Trux (especially vocal wise, when both John and Diana are either in a sort of grunge-y duet or calling and responding to each other’s lines). The flick-knife back-alley opener, ‘Backstabbers & Moneygrabbers’ reminded me in part of Neil Young’s Crazy Horse revival of the 90s and modern day, mixed with a subtle bit of R.E.M., the Throwing Muses and the two Kim’s (that’s Kim Deal and Kim Gordon).

A full-on grunge-y mood fest of relationships, street level grime and more sinister creepy material, Raw Cuts goes on to evoke PJ Harvey and The Pixies (‘Black Ice Blackout’), Some Girls era Stones and candy indie-country rock (‘In The Ground’), an Iggy fronting The Dandy Warhols (‘Don’t Mind At All’) and at many other times, the Spacemen 3.

The group mange to reconcile the dirge-y and gnarl with the more softened female tones of Mazzy Star and their ilk to slumber and indolently find some balance between the chalk outlined forensic scars of our ungovernable times and hushed voiced requited love reciprocations. Dirty as much as it is dreamily gazing at the criminal enterprise that is modern life, Raw Cuts is a simultaneously mucky and melodic surprise.

August Cooke ‘On The Line’
(Poets Studio) 20th October 2026

It might have taken a while (three years to the date…well, almost) to follow up the “sublime” (as I called it at the time) debut EP, Like Rivers, from the obviously talented London-based cellist, singer and composer August Cooke, but the wait has been more than worthwhile.

Studied and yet brilliantly dreamy in its echoes of theatre, of matinee movie scores, of the post-classical, of the psychedelic and diaphanous, the On The Line EP further plunges into a magical soundscape and musical songbook of the yearned and vulnerable. But before we go any deeper, a little background info is warranted, and a brief note on the EP’s participants and foils:

The nom de plume of one George Cooke, the August moniker was debuted back in 2023.  Before that, Cooke trained as a cellist and completed his undergraduate degree in music at St. Peter’s College, Oxford University in 2013. Further studies in 2015 led to Cooke completing a post-graduate degree in Musical Performance from the Royal College of Music. Alongside this formal training he formed and toured with his inaugural band, Marvellous Medicine. The press release goes on to inform us that he was mentored by such luminaries as the cellist Alexander Chaushian in London and sarangi maestro Sarwar Hussain in Kolkata.

Cooke is joined on his second release by the versatile musician, producer and composer Felix Higginbottom (who works across both the jazz fields and the TV/Film scores landscape), clarinet player Benjy Sandler and the bassist and composer Daniele Gulino. Mostly appearing on the odd track but providing additional scope and attentive rises and falls to Cooke’s overall mastery of filmic quality set pieces and maladies. Benjay offers a classical swell on the Animal Collective communes with Dhani Harrison ‘Nila’. In the dreamy mode, this small epic sets off with filtered echoes of gamelan of something more Indian in source, but languidly chuffs to piped-like rhythms. I may be off, but I thought the title reminded me of something more mythological, so I looked it up. Nila is Sanskrit in etymology, the name of a Vanara (usually represented as monkeys, apes or forest dwellers) chieftain in the army of the Hindu deity Rama, who appears in the Hindu epic poem Ramayana, leading in battle against the malevolent supernatural rakshaska and King Ravana of Lanka. Whatever this has to do, allegorical, metaphorical or story wise is anyone’s guess, but I’m sure that its Indian influence is there.

Gulino meanwhile, offers a heavy but lovely dubby-style bass to the Panda Bear soft bulletin drama ‘Mountain Down’. There’s elbowed intense cello that reminds me of Fran & Flora, maybe Alison Cotton too, and an overall sound that recalls C Duncan.   

The rest of the EP is magnificent in its diaphanous and near foggy mystery, with the title-track quavering through a magic picturesque forest of psych-folk and Parachute era Pretty Things, and Fearless era Pink Floyd. But then you suddenly catch a strange resemblance of the Lynchian in the form of a voiceless Twin Peaks-like score. The finale, ‘Gasoline’ could be an Italo-Arabian dream match between Jack Nietzsche and David Arnold but reproduced by The Music Tapes. It has, well like most of the EP, a cinematic quality, but then again it all sounds intimate despite the scale that’s softly revealed.

Possibly one of my favourite listening experiences of 2026, A most pleasant if stirring, even near elegiac in places, immersion into the lucid feelings and poetically clothed metaphors of memories, recalls and reminisces that threaten to tear apart or break. If the current timescale is repeated, expect the next EP, or an album indeed, in October of 2029: I joke of course, we’d like something far earlier please. Still the burgeoning star of his own project, Cooke breaths life into familiar sounds and genres, yet seems to hold up well as he offers something uniquely individual and introspective.

Josh Johnson ‘Animative’
(International Anthem/Nonesuch) 23rd October 2026

A second release from a member of the International Anthem family this month (albeit in conjunction with fellow congruous label partners Nonesuch), the saxophonist, composer, producer, synthesist, sideman and collaborator Josh Johnson, in “animative” style, draws in a reputable and enviable cast of guests on his latest untethered experiment in both the synthesised and electroacoustic.

Whilst dropping in from time-to-time on the Monolith Cocktail for analysis and review – his 2023 collaborative trio with Gregory Uhlmann and Sam Wilkes made my choice albums of that year -, I’ve hardly touched upon Johnson’s resume: which includes being also part of Jeff Parker’s ETA IVtet, the  Small Medium Large ensemble; on the production side he’s credited with producing the singer-songwriter, poet and outstanding bassist Meshell Ndegeocello’s Grammy Award-winning The Omnichord Real Book album, as well as Chilli Pepper Flea’s Honore project. As it happens, the eclectic traversing Ndegeocello makes an appearance on this new album; lending a fat quivery bass line that crosses between soul, funk and R&B to the Herbie Hancock vibed ‘High Step’ (from my own backyard and days of making music in the backwaters of the Isle of Wight, it also reminded me of Paul Butler’s early Pnu Riff experiments, Herbie being a major influence on that project). That near conventional, when laid alongside the rest of the album (though I don’t mean that in a bad or disrespectful way), funky jazz track also brings in the talents of both the multi-instrumentalist, audio engineer, mixer, highly prolific producer and International Anthem stalwart Ben Lumsdine and the drummer, programmer and producer Brandon Combs on the, near flat-like, filtered drums. Lumsdine gets another chance before that on the near fuzzy tubular Chicago skyscape musing of ‘Reece’. Beneath Johnson’s saxophone – which has a kind of spray effect and spiralling frequency to it -, Lumsdine splashes on the cymbals and plays another kind of flattened nice roll of a beat.

Whilst we are talking about those guests, yet another talented drummer and percussionist, Aaron Steele, is credited with additional production chops and samples on the reverberated piano focused, flat tubular paddled, and vaporising bass purred ‘Mill’; a near 80s-like TV score of lament and mystique that, later on, features a turn towards the Latin percussive and rhythm wise. The second appearance this month (see Jeremiah Chiu’s album review nearer the beginning of this column), Chicago jazz trumpeter, composer and bandleader Marquis Hill can be heard alighting fourth world like trumpet to the golden jangly cosmic ‘Upstairs 2021’ – staircase to the spiritual? The universal? The inspired? Extending the roll call, IA label artist Macie Stewart (the multi-instrumentalist has worked with everyone from Rob Mazurek to Bex birch and Damon Locks, and partners up with Lia Khol in a duo project) floats violin on the Ariel Kalma and Phillip Glass-like circulating and filtered sax blown ‘It Can Be Everywhere’.

Yet another one of the multi-tasking polymaths involved on the album is the Grammy Award-winning arranger, bassist, composer and producer Paul Bryan, who applies subtle bass to the old spiritual swanned bluesy and Egyptologist jazz stirred ‘Close’ – think Leon Thomas via the Pharoah and Kahil El’Zabar. Joining Bryan and Johnson is the drummer, engineer, producer and bassist of some repute, Marlon Patton, who sloshes and jangles around on shuffled bop-style drums. 

Covering most of the album already with those guest spots, Johnson is credited as the solo performer on four tracks, his multi-instrumental palette extending from sax to synth, sampler, piano, Rhodes keys, percussion and bass clarinet. The opener, ‘Idiofone’ – I’m not sure if this is a reference to the triangular vibrated idiophone -, sets the Reich/Glass/Gasper tone of hollowed tubular rhythmics and gated lopped saxophone, a distillation of Chicago electro-jazz and house music – more of that later on -, and the aquatic. ‘Jazz Chord Possession’ sounds like a transmogrified Kraftwerk via Mantronix and the Information Society, and ‘Aughts Hymnal’, just like its title, is a Penguin Café hymn of futurism and the spiritual.

Animative is a great word for this album’s rhythms of life and musings, its cross-germination of art music, jazz, trance, minimal techno, house and electronica; the fuel for which namechecks the late great Eddie Harris and Mal Waldron amongst the sagacious conjured and “transportive” teachings of the genius Wayne Shorter, and the West African philosophical writings and non-Western ideas of time and being of Dagara diviner, teacher and author Malidoma Patrice Somé, and, most surprisingly, the “dreamlike fiction” of Italo Calvino. This indicates a real depth at play, and yet this music is so accessible and inviting indeed, animated. A successful culmination of influences and personal growth, wisdom and the measuring of time by an artist simultaneously as experimental as they are immersed in musicality and encapsulating an abstract feel.

Ocean Moon & Silver Ley ‘Prismatic Fields’
(Open Universe) 16th October 2026

A benevolent union and blossoming of organic meta and foliage from Jon Tye and Bethany Ley; both appearing under their respective guises of Ocean Moon and Silver Ley for a diaphanous and dreamy abstract articulation of both untethered and more functional traverses of nature and the ‘metaphysical’.

Under the descriptive encapsulation of Prismatic Fields, the two foils travel freely, floating ideas and congruously head towards sparkles of light on a most beautifully constructed album. 

The seeds were planted for this collaboration between the Cornwall-based artist and multi-tasker Tye and the Bristol-based producer, composer, harpist and vocalist Ley when the former was invited to ‘envision a series of releases for the German production music library Sonotan.’ That same platform then launched the experimental outlet and subsidiary label, Ocean Universe: of which this is its ‘inaugural release’, I believe.

They’ve interestingly dedicated the album to the botanist, author, and former director of the Centre for Native Peoples and the Environment at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry Robin Wall Kimmerer; taking a leaf (excuse the pun) from her writings and teachings on her propounded Traditional Ecological Knowledge approach – which, according to Wiki, ‘she describes as a “way of knowing”.’ TEK is described as ‘an empirical approach based on long-term observation and relationship.’ Which also includes those cultural and spiritual considerations often marginalised by the Western scientific community.

In almost heavenly realms, crossing between the bamboo and lotus music of Asia, and drawing (especially) upon Ley’s talents of merging classical studies and learning with the electronic, floated Fourth World musical evocations prove gauzy manna for watery cascades, glistened harp, circulated, wafted, cooed, lulled and dabbed luminous vocals, and softened rhythms of life and fauna organic beats.

On a spectrum that takes in everything from the Future Sound of London and Amorphous Androgynous to Cuushe, Laaraji, Catrin Finch, Susumu Yokota, Sakamoto and Zoe Polanski, magical mulled moments and amorphous horizons converge to build an inviting oasis of the lunar and goldenly cascaded, a world of both rainbows and enervated mystery and exploration.

Qualm ‘Let’s Find Those Parrots In The Clouds’
(Zinnober Records) 23rd October 2026

Despite the unease and doubt that’s suggestive of this undefined troupe’s name, there’s next to no qualms about the direction of travel: free form jazz that probes at, and in a toppling fashion, freefalls towards poetic descriptive cerebral and more sky bound inquires.

Recruited from a number of criss-crossing and shared bands, including members of the Horse Lords, DRNTTCKS and ZEMENT, Qualm is an ever-developing project of players pulled from both America and Europe. Founded and steered (if that’s the word in a thoroughly democratic lineup of amorphous unfixed improvisors) by saxophonist, guitarist, synth operator and vocalist Philipp Hager, the group has seen various changes since its formation in 2020. This however is Qualm’s debut ‘full-length’ album; a showcase of their signature improvised form, given the time and the breadth to unfurl a menagerie of imbued metaphorical open-ended entitled “qualms”.

Across a quartet (quintet if you purchase the digi versions) of medium and longer form pieces/performances all recorded in a one day session, composer, saxophonist and sound artist Andrew Bernstein, drummer and percussionist Christian Büdel and electronic musician and bassist Sebastian Dyrschka draw upon their respective resources and influences to evoke everyone from the Pharoah to Peter Brotzmann, Sam Rivers, Nucleus, the Flow Trio, Polish free-jazz of a Biblical nature (see the near esoteric , wisped and vibrato-like breaths saxophone haunted ‘It Takes Not Much To Light The Fuse On The Powder Keg, Which We’ve Built Ourselves, Just To Avoid Dealing With Our Own Demons’) and Robert Dick’s Third Stone From The Sun LP.   

As I described earlier, and on the opener, the group literally topple forward, splishing and splashing through a free-spirited vision of Iris Ackamoor style Afro-jazz as they sun worship The John Batsch Society and Prince Lasha whilst contemplating analogies to uncompromising zebras. That introduction track runs to twelve minutes in length and picks up various ideas as it moves constantly forward in a hurried flustering fashion: shooed percussive parts, changes to the drums from rattled sticks across rims to scrapes and brushes across deadened metals, a touch of Embryo krautrock and the Pharoah piping. But there’s a distinct recall of swing on the second performance, ‘A Sudden Qualm Of Sickness Overcame Us, While We Were On A Tub Riding Down To The River To find A Place To Dream’ (I’ve read shorter poems than that title), which also features, later on, more hysterical piques of Brotzmann and Mats Gustafasson.

‘Holy Smoke, It Flies High In The Sky’ reminded me in part of a Hugh Masekela vibe, but the swanned, bird-like flights of Wayne Shorter and an overgrown with wildlife and foliage boardwalk dance of 60s New York City jazz. Bonus track, ‘Sometimes You Have To Cut Things Here And There’ has a more willowy, greenery touch of the whistled and fluted, the fluttery and vibrating as the saxophone’s brass materials are coaxed and blown in a more Andy Haas fashion. Eventually, after both moments of theatre and dissonance, the synthesized vapours and rituals probe towards something like the new age, pagan and cosmic.

We may just have found those parrots of the title, floating up there in a dream-like suspended animation, as the Qualm quartet and friends let their skills do the metaphorical and allegorical talking. A great debut full of ideas and a well-balanced show of improvised musicianship from the free-form school of experiment and dynamics.

Séismes ‘SeùlSeùl’
(Carton) 30th October 2026

Without upsetting anyone’s preferred pronouns, I’m assuming that its ok to state this is an all-female sextet working within – but very loosely – the free jazz and fourth world fields of experimentation and both magical and mysterious abstractions. And it shouldn’t be the case in 2026, but this is extremely rare.

Felt via healing balms of the near new age and exotic, and by passages of intensity, the Séismes (translates as “earthquakes”) lineup of Mélanie Loisel (on double bass), Tatiana Paris (guitar), Léa Ciechelski (saxophone, flute), Aline Bissey (also on flute), Yurie Hu (keyboard, viola) and Marine Flèche (drums) also all contribute vocals and electronic effects to an improvised recorded debut album that combines both European and Korean influences and cultural sources.

Encouraging the geographic, scenery and projections of dramatic introspection and bathos, the “alone” aspects of the SeùlSeùl album title describe both standing amongst the exotic foliage and moving in unison with the rhythms of nature: at peace and yet also animated and fidgety. The troupe’s scope of influences and improvised exploration draws (to these ears anyway) upon Jon Hassell, Roberto Musci, Nicole Mitchell, Laraaji, Alice Coltrane and Walter Smetek, but delves even further and broadly to conjure up some surprises along the way. In practice this means nature’s rustles, the air and breeze act as a backdrop to the group’s atonal wind and brass instrument huffs, chuffs, hinges, dreamy drifts and articulations; to the scratchy, textural, scrapes and chinks of the tin and metal percussion; and the flexed but also sensitive combination of scuttled stick rolling and more rhythmic drums. And then you have the electronic aspects – that’s various oscillations, generator like Fortean crackles and plastique resonance – and the voices, which can be either in a singing fashion or delivered through the duet of flutes and the saxophone – sometimes sounding very vocally cooed and at others like some odd cuckoos.

There’s much to pick out from this imaginative and stirring assemblage performance; the familiar recall of Max Andrejewski’s Hutte & Guests take on Robert Wyatt on the Nordic-sounded and deliciously blurry fresh look at the world ‘Glasses’, and the near Krautrock momentum built up on the plastic pipped and Metheny guitar harmonics tweeting, percussive shaking and intense climatic ‘Du Jaune’ (“yellow”). There’s a John Zorn dimension to the title-track, and a mix of Franco-Hawaii, the magically rural, and the Balkans on the vocoder-effected vocalised ‘Pasteque’ – the parting vocals sound very folksy, almost Celtic. And you could almost suggest a touch of Staraya Derevnya on the poetically abstract ‘Cheveux au Vent’ (“hair blowing in the wind”).    

All in all, an impressive debut of the ecological vibed, the organic fused with the electronic pulses and generators of modernity and dreamy lofty aspirations of untethered free sonic, atonal and rhythmical experimentation. Deerhoof meets Tortoise and Sam Rivers in a hinterland balanced somewhere on the astral panes between France and South Korea. In other words: this is for those who wish to immerse themselves in new soundscapes and visions.

_____/HALLOWEEN PLAYLIST FOR 2026____

Something different this month on the Digest, as I suspend the Social Playlist until November for this year’s Halloween Playlist: Manly P. Hall’s Secret Jukebox. Hoots and larks aplenty alongside psychic sonic defences and the disturbed.

This year’s gruesome track listing in full:

White Reaper ‘Friday The 13th’
Wovenhand ‘Dead Dead Beat’
Shriekback ‘Nemesis’
SHITNOISE ‘Whine In A Coffin’
Electric Sandwich ‘Devil’s Dream’
The Breedling ‘Torn Asunder’
Peter Evans ‘Witchcraft’
Sum of R ‘Waltz Of Death’
Dry Ice ‘Mary Is Alone, Pt. 1’
Dr. Doom ‘Body Bag’
Super Grupa Bez Falszywej Skromnosci ‘Satan’s Concept’
Bernard Szajner ‘Execute’
Wjerstean ‘Creature’
The Tryp ‘The Lizard Sheds It’s Skin’
The Flatliners ‘Gravelinerz’
Okay Temiz & Johnny Dyani ‘The Night – Gece’
From Nursery To Misery ‘The Fatal Bite’
Nolan Potter’s Nightmare Band ‘Bad Vibes’
Dyr Faser ‘Taste Of Blood’
Sonic Youth ‘Death to Our Friends’
Double Happys ‘Moss Monster’
Schizo Fun Addict ‘Tease Murderess’
Society of the Silver Cross w/ Blood And Sun ‘Unraveled’
Xqui w/ Lynn Gerrard ‘From The Crypt’
Cowboy Junkies ‘Me and the Devil’ Trifle ‘Devil Comin’’

And if you’re still not satisfied; totally wound up still, here’s a smattering of past sacrileges:

___/ARCHIVES____

Again, something different this month, and due to a suspension of the long running Monolith Cocktail Social Playlist series, a chance to still share choice tracks from those artists and bands celebrating particular LP anniversaries this October.

Sixty this month:

A live free form vision of Cecil Taylor’s ‘Steps’, originally released on record in 1966 as part of the jazz pianist luminary’s Unit Structures LP.

A supposedly live version of ‘Fire Engine’ by the acid freak 13th Floor Elevators. The original of course appears on their 1966 LP the Psychedelic World Of…, which is also sixty this month.

Let’s have some fun now, as we celebrate The Monkees self-titled debut LP, released this month back in ’66. A version of ‘Last Train To Clarksville’ by the Damnation of Adam Blessing.

And…a TV show mimed ‘Sweet Young Thing’….

Fifty:

Lester Bangs might not have had a kind word for it, but Patti Smith’s 1976 follow up to Horses, Radio Ethiopia undeniably has its moments. Right? Anyway, I’ve gone for the opener, ‘Ask The Angels’ which may or may not reinforce your prejudices.

Nearing the end (or over the finishing line) of CAN’s creatively pioneering epoch, 1976’s Flow Motion LP of cod-reggae lilted undulations is rarely held dear in even the heads hearts. Never mind that it was perhaps most people’s introduction to the band, through that album’s preening flux-disco hit single of ‘I Want More’. Personally Saw Delight, released just the next year, recovered their global traversing credentials and reputation – though many will argue with me on this, I think it’s one of their best late albums after Future Days.

In celebratory mode, and originally featured on the 1997 released triple remix album Sacrilege – various hip and Mute related and imbued artists taking turns to turn in and out, transmogrify and pay humble respect to CAN’s back catalogue – Air Liquid did a visitation transference remix of the Flow Motion title-track.

The modestly prolific Sparks nearly always have some anniversary or other, having straddled and released LPs during every decade from the 70s onwards – the Gilbert & Sullivan of pop are still at it over fifty years later, still recording and still out on the road. From 1976’s Big Beat LP, a live rendition of ‘Nothing To Do’, taken from the Lil Beethoven album tour, of which the Mael brothers also released a DVD – essential purchase!!!

Forty:

Something very Oar(ish) Skip Spence and the Jefferson Airplane about this. Yes, believe it or not, and despite its 60s sound, the Cowboy Junkies ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’ and the White Off Earth Now!! LP it appears on is forty years old!! This debut announces the Canadians-do-midwestern-esque drowsy drugged-up new country indie group to the world.

Thirty:

From the Wu-Tang Clan’s dojo of adjacent extended solo member headed albums, careering on to a scene that needed refreshing in ’96, Ghostface Killah’s Ironman shadow superhero persona. The obligatory team-up ‘Daytona 500’ features both Raekwon and Cappadonna keeping the Wu signature going.

Also this month, plucked from the Archives, my October 2016 review of Orkesta Mendoza’s Mexican deep dive ¡Vamos A Guarachar! album.

Orkesta Mendoza ‘¡Vamos A Guarachar!’
LP released by Glitterbeat Records on the 7th October 2016

A scion of the Calexico-Giant Sand-Xixa axis of Arizona/South and Central American cultural exchange, Okestra Mendoza keep the faith in these tumultuous times. Whilst President Trump certainly seems a possibility, thankfully the blowhards proposed border control wall is presently only a threat. Not that that will stop the Galexico band member and co-producer Sergio Mendoza from inhaling the intoxicant thrills, exotica and voodoo of Mexico and beyond. The multi-instrumentalist bandleader grew up in the “hinterlands” of Arizona after all, listening to the sounds emanating from the Mexican AM/FM radio stations. This heady mix of cumbia, mambo, mariachi, big band orchestras and the salacious swaggered ranchos was eventually channelled into a cornucopia of collaborative projects and bands. Merging these traditional forms with tremolo twanged rock’n’roll, psychedelia and electronic vibes Mendoza has created a timeless junction between neighbours on both the previous Orkesta LP (Mambo Mexicano) and the latest ¡Vamos A Guarachar!

Inhabiting a supernatural imagination of the cactus-strewn borderlands, where the otherworldly amorphously interchanges with ritual and reality, ¡Vamos A Guarachar! is both mysterious and fantastical yet equally kitsch. Imbued with the cumbia rhythm, which has enjoyed an electrified renaissance over recent years, Mendoza weaves both the dance styles sauntering hip swivel and more galloping raciness into the rich melting pot. ‘Cumbia Volcardora’ is a perfect example of this; wafting in the southern breezes with its cantina serenaded horns, ? And The Mysterians style ghost house organ, theatrical voodoo narration and Spanish vocals. A similar pattern of cross-pollination continues throughout the album: on the two-speed ‘Redoble’ the band fluctuate between a more up-tempo chase to Brazilian rocksteady and evoke both the feverish Mambo of the title but also a Balkan polka on ‘Mambo A La Rosano’.

Between ages with a penchant for a strange nostalgia, as seen through an esoteric lens, ‘Misterio’ is a curious tango crooned matinee that sounds like a lost theme tune from the 1950s. There is a Mexican film of the same name from 1980, which starred Juan Ferrara as a TV star who blurs reality with the plot of a soap opera he’s filming. It’s quite conceivable that this could be the band’s inspiration, the lamentable enchantment a good fit for the movie’s fantastical waltzing premise.

Though the esoteric and alien quivering magnetism atmosphere casts a spell over the album, there’s a host of quirky turns and a lot of fun to be had. For a starter there’s a kooky homage, or augur, to the spirit of the racoon on ‘Mapache’, and the zappy, rock guitar gnarling candy treat ‘Caramelos’. The times may be changing for the worse in Mendoza’s backyard, but the Orkesta put a raucous, colourful and upbeat shine on the political miasma, defending and celebrating the “honest cultural exchange” between both sides of the divide with relish and a certain oddness.

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.

Posted by domv
Filed in Uncategorized ·Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Leave a Comment »

The Digest for March 2026: New Music/The Social Playlist

March 9, 2026

The monthly Digest includes a clutch of accumulated short new music reviews and the social inter-generational/eclectic and anniversary albums celebrating picks.

Image: Credited to the Asian Arts Initiative

Something a little different this month after missing February’s Digest deadline. In case readers/followers and those new to the site haven’t heard or seen on some of the blog’s social media platforms, I’ve been in the wars, spending a lot of time this year in hospital. Earlier this year after being ill for a while, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune kidney disease, but then was struck down, out of the blue (and totally unrelated) by a minor stroke. This has meant untold tests, appointments, and treatments, of which I’m merely just beginning to get my head around. I won’t lie, and whilst the stroke is still a mystery with no actual diagnoses as to why I had one yet, it has been a very frightening and confusing time. This will affect the site and my writing going forward, so I ask for some patience and understanding.

I’ve gathered together a number of reviews, pretty much completed before much of this happened for the new(ish) releases section. And for the archives and social playlist have decided to share videos of tracks taken from those albums enjoying various anniversaries this month (or thereabouts), from those dear artists/producers that have left our mortal realm.

___THE NEW (All those latest & upcoming releases in brief) ___

Camille Baziadoly ‘Skin On Fire EP’
(PinDrop) 6th March 2026

Somehow simultaneously intimate yet panoramic and universal, a whole emotive register of vulnerabilities emanates from the both aria-like cutting and yet also diaphanous breathed voice of the French-born, but Oxford-based, singer-songwriter Camille Baziadoly. The new EP, following on from last year’s favourably reviewed and received Fifteen album, opens with the former single and title-track, and from there, unfurls its beauty, its reverence and pained prangs of fragility across a quartet of newly written songs in the key of slowed-trip-hop-crunching-and-mechanized-winding dreampop and Gothic cinematic allurement.

Skin On Fire EP feels like a score; the soundtrack to what’s lyrically alluded to, an abstract feeling of recovery, therapeutic healing and self-care. From the very first line of declaration (“Skin is all I am”) to the loss and grief, the despondency and aches of the transfixed beatific yearned ‘Trial’ and the even more reverent, steamed and mirrored beat cranked ‘Under Water’. The former reminded me of a little of the dreamy, veiled music and voice of Celestial North, but the synths of Chromatics, whilst the latter, recalled the production of Julee Cruise and the submersible aquatic poetry and voice of Nino Gvilia and the atmospheres of This Mortal Coil. The final act, ‘Around You’, is perhaps the most tenderly if plaintive song of them all. Whether stepping outside and removed from this particular relationship, looking in from the ether and from behind the most minimalistic of backings, or lamenting someone else’s, Baziadoly fills the vapours with a real yearning. 

Despite the care, gentleness and its subtleties in the use of both instrumentation and the electronic (from minimal but no less evocative piano and organ to various well-placed effects), the production has an air of gravitas and drama about it: of scale too if you like, and of ambition. Much of this is down to the highly prolific (and a constant presence on the Monolith Cocktail) Sebastian Reynolds, who in a producer’s role articulates, emphasis whilst also allowing Baziadoly’s voice to shine, resonate and breath. That production can at any time invoke the influence of Beach House, Air, and the Cocteau Twins.

It is the voice that truly makes this EP however, and its ability to soar towards the birds but also navigate the harsh realities, troubles and traumas of life, love and hurt. Baziadoly brilliantly and cerebrally emerges from the other side having shown such vulnerability and sang such heartaches of balladry to claim another transfixing success.

Márcio Cunha ‘Imaginary Soundtrack’
(Nostril Records) Released 8th January 2026

A sonic showreel collating a year’s worth of recordings made throughout the period of 2019 and 2020 – just as the world lurched fatally over the cliff edge of Covid -, the Portuguese experimental musician, composer and multidisciplinary artist Márcio Cunha’s newest release is a CV of possibilities. As a calling card and sampler of his obvious eclectic and omnivorous influences and talents, this generous thirty-six track work mines, traverse and explores a portfolio’s worth of stand-alone ideas, passages, vignettes, filmic scores, cosmic mirages and electronic motions, and comes together as one loose soundtrack.

Either submerged and muffled or clean and crystal, the overall atmosphere and sound is one of familiar Earth-bound electronica, instances of tangly and strung-out guitar and marching snares, and the buzz, fuzz and static generator force field charges of machines and the alien. For Cunha projects towards the stars, but often toward unseen, mysterious forces beyond our reaches.

Within that universe and orbit you can expect to hear techno, d ‘n’ b, kosmische, all kinds of beat-bouncing electronic, various mechanics, the more tribal, vapour waves, a roll of hand drums, liquidated electro, oscillations, the plastique, Basic Channel, Room Of Wires, Aphex Twin, Mouse On Mars, Sven Vath, Conrad Schnitzler, the industrial, music of the spheres, lunar indolent shimmies, wonky bell-ringing, the burbling, and the tubular. Some come with an added drama and celestial voiced airs, whilst others almost recall the post-punk. But there’s a general signature to be found throughout, connecting all these numerous experiments together; a sort of oeuvre with a general purpose and theme, guided or inspired by the unknown elements of the cosmos.

You’re bound to find something interesting, absorbing or able to send you off on some space adventure from this veritable CV of electronic experiments. A prolific range that will keep you invested for an hour or two.

The Early ‘I Want To Be Ready’
(Island House Recordings) 27th February 2026

Transposing a newly invested language of sonic, musical and extemporised ideas over the last five or six years together, the most recent version of an idea that was formed back in 2004, imbued by many of the Chicago undergrounds’ most enduring post-rock and post-jazz doyens (Tortoise being the most obvious glowing influence), sees guitarists and synths operator Alex Lewis and drummer and electronics manipulator Jake Nussbaum take inspiration from improvised dance.

Taking a lead from the central tenets of the choreographer, researcher and author Danielle Goldman’s 2010 published work I Want To Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom, the duo enact the book’s outlined “state of readiness for whatever’s to come”. As repeated and lifted from Goldman’s study, “A skilled improviser will be intimately familiar with her habitual ways of moving, as well as the shifting social norms that gives these movements meaning. Then, on a moment-to-moment basis, she figures out how to move.” This is a distillation of course, whittled down from years and acres of research enquiry. But as a starting point for The Early foils, this demonstratable exploration of improvisation proves a successful prompt to investigate or just let a feel lead the various forms of instrumentation towards interesting, tactile, multilayered and stirring spaces and horizons; some that melt, others that are near otherworldly or like mirages. 

From the cluttering to reverberating and shuttering, the off jazzy breaks to post-rock mirages of wrangled, melting and spikier guitar entanglements and loops, meaning is transcribed via the caresses, the resonated touches, scuffs, the subtle streaks of movement up and down the nickel guitar strings, moments of melody, the drifted, the bending and various generated waves of electronica effects. Time itself falls freely in this space, the passing of it almost suspended for the duration as the duo feel their way with a kind of musical telepathy. From Tortoise-style blues to the Fourth World and the redolent explorations of Pacha Wakay, the sound of The Cosmic Range, the Zacht Autommat, of Daniel Lanois, the guitar work of Jeff Parker, Yonatan Gat, Steve Gunn and Christopher Haddow, and the pendulous near swung and thumping drumming of Werner ‘Zappi’ Deirmaier (especially on the Faust-like ‘SandClock’), there’s vague echoes of ethnic sounds and dreamt landscapes. It reminds me of a relatively obscure duo called Pidgins, and the way they stir up such familiar and yet almost unique soundscapes, horizons and atmospheres built from a stream of always evolving sources. And yet, once in the space, once together with the feelers spreading out, can magic up both dreams and the mysterious with equal skills. The non-musical and serial join together with passages of the rhythmic and melodious on an album that will unfurl its full creative expanses and oeuvre over numerous plays. A scion of the Chicago hothouse of such experiment, even if it was made in Philly, The Early pick up the baton and run with it.

MMBTUPM ‘Meditation Music Beyond The Unsleeping Psychopathic Mind’
(Hidden Harmony) 28th February 2026

Directed or merely amorphously suggested a direction by the multi-instrumentalist (mainly focused on the alto sax, the drums and synths, but I guess generally can get a sound out of anything) and prolific instigator Davin Brahja Waldman, the newly brought-together Meditation Music Beyond The Unsleeping Psychopathic Mind troupe of like-minded twisted and untethered artists/musicians invoke various apparitions, paranormal, spiritualist and new age vibrations from the Fortean transmitter on their inaugural session together. 

Drawing from an ensemble that includes a triple-threat of saxophonists covering all the tones (Devin himself on alto of course, joined by Adam Kinner on tenor and Conner Bennett on soprano), another triple bill of keys, synth and vocalists (Annie Shaw, Sarah Good and Devin tour mate Nadah El Shazly), and various guitarists and drummers (Vicky Mettler and Alexei Orechin in the former camp, Daniel Gélinas and Philippe Melanson in the latter), Devin stirs up an improvised smog and hauntology of a both damaged and solace-finding bluesy psyche.

From stoking up supernatural atmospheres to charging up meditative pulsations fed through various generators, the atmosphere is heightened by a simultaneously feeling of unease and the unknown in equal measure. Redolent wafts, dried exhales and the pipe strains of jazz and such saxophone luminaries as Julius Hemphill, the Pharoah and Donny McCaslin are woven into a fabric of old RKO ghost scores, the wails, soars and apparitional otherworldly evoking vocal expressions and mewls of Matana Roberts, the synthesized calculus and data of esoteric technology, the brainwave experiments of Nehan, and the body movement mechanism rhythms of David Ornette Cherry. And even within that framework of the extemporised you’ll hear what can only be described as passages of New Orleans dockyard smog and procession, and a near child-like apparatus of ghost house toy instruments on the march.

A peculiar place and vibe are envisioned from an enviable pool of talent (Devin alone has performed with or played foil to Patti Smith, Thurston Moore, Lydia Lunch, his famous poet aunt Anne Waldman, and Malcom Mooney, but also steered his own Brahja band and been a member of Heroes Are Gang Leaders and Land of Kush) on their first outing together. A baptism of strange no wave jazz, the séance, the transcendental and paranormal cross streams in an improvised state awash and circulated by bellowed and wooden mechanised movements, bellows, roulette-like spins of bearings and the spellbound.   

Phew & Danielle de Picciotto ‘Paper Masks’
(Mute) 20th February 2026

Whilst unassumingly stuck out in the hinterlands of experiment and electronica, a collaboration between Phew and Danielle de Picciotto proves an unmissable and intriguing phenomenon to experience and savour.

Phew’s own entry into this field of explorative and manipulated investigation and inquiry started with the instigation of the Osaka psychedelic-punk group Aunt Sally in 1978, which she fronted until their brief but influential burnout just a couple of years later. During the next decade Phew would work with an enviable cast of experimental doyens including Ryuchi Sakamoto, DAF’s Christo Haar, and, as if to tie in with this latest union, Danielle’s husband and foil Alex Hacke of Einstürzende Neubauten fame. Fast-forwarding to the noughties and the underground pioneer has performed live and recorded with The Raincoats’ Ana Da Silva, Jim O’Rourke and Ikue Mori and Yoshimi of the OOIOO/Boredoms/Saicobab arc of ensembles. Her solo work tends to err towards amorphous sonic sensibilities that exist both in the metallic gauze of space and in more concentrated earthly reverence.

Danielle meanwhile, is the co-founder of the Love Parade, the lead singer of the Space Cowboys, for a longtime, a stalwart member of Crime And The City Solution and member of Ministry Of Wolves. But for the last nine-years Danielle has been making some her most sublime and interesting work together with her husband Hacke under the “symbiotic” coupled Hackedepicciotto banner – standing at five albums thus far. Mixing anything from heightened snatches of beauty, romance and drama to a backdrop of the Biblical, cinematic and ominous, the Morricone, the Weimer and heavy meta, their sound and performances have proven as captivating as they are dream-like, Gothic and otherworldly.

Produced “quietly” we’re informed over the course of five years, the futuristic, alien and sci-fi contextualised, discombobulated and manipulated Paper Masks finds Danielle’s vocalised and spoken interests, stories, observations, fairy tales and inquisitive announcements transformed via Phew’s various apparatus of effects and minimalistic

Drawing on decades of experience whilst always responding to the now, both partners in this latest enterprise combine forces to create a unique space and soundscape; a cyber ecological plane of archaeology filled with the ghosts, traces, messages, and cerebral memories. Phew envelopes, wraps or places a factory of unseen mysterious alien machines and tech, acid squiggles, looming piercing arcs, code and high pitches and frequencies around, above and under Danielle’s both surreal and evocative wordage. From furry philosophers and ghosts to the tundra and fog, and the flights of whispered thoughts that are prompted by personalised memories and incidents, a transformed language of mewls, phrases, narration, song, the untethered and unshaped is now woven into a dialect both humanly distorted and droid-esque, mournful and ominous. And yet, at times, it feels or sounds like a fairy tale transposed to off-worlds and the age of technological symbiosis.

Simultaneously as haunting and mysterious as it is Intelligent and challenging, Paper Masks wears its many faces well to straddle the worlds of art, theatre, electronica, the spoken word and cyber. A signature Mute experiment and listening experience, and yet something very different and original. Let’s hope the two partners bring their talents together more often in the future.

Toshi Tsuchitori and Ryuichi Sakamoto ‘Disappointment–Hateruma’
(WEWANTSOUNDS) 27th February 2026

Whether it was building a unifying electronic music post-war future with the Yellow Magic Orchestra, building Bamboo houses of colour with David Slyvain, scoring the harrowing tragedy of war with Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, or winning gold at the Oscars/Grammys for his innovative soundtrack work, Ryuichi Sakamoto reworked neoclassical and electronica into a most influential new language – not totally at odds with its past, yet constantly evolving and probing at the edges of the undiscovered. But rewinding back further, to the incipient days of the early and mid 70s, whilst still a student at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music and a contributor to such influential outliers as Transonic Magazine, Sakamoto was navigating his way freely and untethered as a member of the multimedia group Gakushudan alongside future collaborative percussionist and ethnomusicologist Toshi Tsuchitori.

Crossing paths in those burgeoning days, the pair quickly worked upon their obvious musical/sonic chemistry to release a new language and interacted experience devoid of solid foundations and free of boundaries. Tsuchitori had recently returned from New York having imbued himself and embraced the philosophy of free form jazz luminary Milford Graves. For those unfamiliar with Graves natural fused approach, he drew upon Indian, African and Asian rhythms, playing with and for such icons as Sun Ra, Albert Ayler and Anthony Braxton. And if you have been following my Monolith Cocktail Social playlists over the years and months, will perhaps recognise Graves as the drummer totem alongside Arthur Doyle and Hugh Glover in the obscure but highly influential Children of the Forest trio.

Breaking from convention, the duo transmogrifies Shinto spirits and traditions and various other Japanese forms from across the centuries into a hurtled, collapsing, often racing and wild convergence of Western avant-garde forms, abstract-classical, free form jazz and the ambient. Certainly not music in any serial or familiar sense, these experiments, improvisations or whatever you wish to demarcate them are mostly devoid of rhythm and form; more expressive unyielding clashes and quietened passages of air, skying and the wind – passed through vents and metallic contraptions. Taking up a whole side, the opening ‘綾 (Aya)’ is one such climatic acceleration of drums, percussion and running, dashing and scuttling piano that recalls Graves and Billy Cobham stirring up voodoo spells, rituals and an entanglement of scrapes and rattles.

Later on, there’s what sounds like the marimba, the steel drums and more zippy prangs and hinged springs of piqued percussion. ‘a / Φ (musique differencielle 1°)’ however, sounds like something you’d expect to hear on an early Richard James album, and seems almost hypnotic: an early attempt in my mind at combining minimalist techno and mysticism. Playing with their lips and tongues at times, especially on the finale, ‘∫ / 𝔷 (musique differencielle 2°’, there’s another attempt to break away into something highly experimentally weird as, and I’m not sure who it is, puffs, shoos, exhales steam-like breaths and swats whilst the sticks roll across skins and rims, or sometimes fall imaginatively across an apparatus of world drums and percussive tools. 

Released for the very first time on vinyl, this original 1976 LP (put out by the notable producer Yukio Kojima on his equally notable imprint label ALM Records) will find room with fans of Sakamoto, but also those craving something highly avant-garde and experimental, just with enough touches of African/Afro-Cuban/Asian and free form jazz drumming. Sakamoto wouldn’t dwell long on this phase of exploration, of breaking entirely from tradition and form, so get your fix whilst you can as I’m sure this highly sought-after vinyl package from the guys at WEWANTSOUNDS (one of my favourite such platforms over the last decade) will fly.

/ALBUM ANNIVERSARIES SECTION_______

No playlist this month, but video selections tied to those albums celebrating anniversaries this month (and some from February too). Starting with demigod jazz sublime progenitor Coltrane and his 1966 LP Ascension.

Placebo meets Radiohead on the peripherals of Britpop, one of those unique bands form the period that should have been much bigger than they were: accumulating plaudits but not the sales and fame. Subcircus delivered one of the better LPs of that era with their debut Carousel.

Sparks Hello Young Lovers reaches its twentieth anniversary. The Gilbert And Sullivan of cerebral pop music takes the form to ever-new intelligent heights of absurdity and revelation. Daring to merge intellectual ideas and themes into an art form; yet never laborious, condescending or aloof, every song on this theatrical rock and pop suite features an infectious melody, satirical but heartfelt clever lyricism and the usual Noel Coward piano witticisms (updated for the modern age of course).

Time to rip it up with the screamin’ tantrum boom of The Sonics; Garage band proto-punk miscreant royalty, the band’s era defining Boom LP is unbelievably sixty years old.

One of Cope’s muthafuckers and idols, the Arthur Lee led Love dared to dream bigger with their Baroque flourishes, jangles and lamentable love requests. The tapestry songbook that is Forever Changes is also sixty years old this month.

Fast-forwarding to the 90s, and Howie B‘s influential LP, Music For Babies is thirty this month. In that Mo Wax trip hop way, here’s one of my faves, the title track:

Prince time. Parade is forty in March. And here’s my fave of all time video and track, Mountains. The man was incredible. How do you make the shakers effortlessly cool? Or running on the spot in Casanova Rose of Texas gear look cheekily sexy and sassy? Could be naff in anyone else’s hands, but works in the hands of such a singular talent. I miss the conceptual planning, the whole effort from pop stars today as AI does the heavy lifting, and most artists seem totally devoid of ideas. “Guitars and drums on the one!”

Mock 21st century terrordome meets art-punk new wave. Does anyone remember Sigue Sigie Sputnik? Well Flaunt It is forty this month, an LP perhaps ahead of its time or maybe not.

Something more cerebral and experimental now with a live version of the title cut from jazz guitarist progenitor Pat Metheny’s 1976 LP Bright Size Life. Still going strong, with recent releases, we hail back to the 70’s era of fusion-jazz.

__THE DEARLY DEPARTED/___

Pete Dello: Baroque scrolls and flourishes of yearned love, Pete Dello is best remembered as the lead singer of Honeybus during the 60s and for the hit single I Can’t Let Maggie Go. Which is enough in itself to be inducted into great hall of fame and pantheons. But growing up in my household it was Pete’s remarkable And Friends effort Into Your Ears that really resonated and led to my appreciation of his songwriting talents. Quintessentially English, forged from the worlds of Lewis Carroll and T.H. White, this cultish psychedelic Baroque folk songbook uses various characters (including the knightly earwig Harry) to imagine disarming songs of regret, the lovelorn, yearned and fantastical. If in raising a glass to Pete you explore any of his work, this is a great place to start.

John Maus: You got to feel for poor old Maus. Any other vocal pop group of the 60s era may have seen his rep fly. But unfortunately for Maus, he shared the stage with the genius baritone Scott Walker, who’s tones better suited the arrangements and the sense of scale and moodiness of sullen unrequited and dramatic love affairs. Both changed their names to better fit their newly formed Walker Brothers aggrandisement with third member and garage band royalty Gary Leeds (a former Standell no less). But whilst despite his own self-inflicted sabotages, Scott’s star rose, John’s merely fizzled out. And despite attempts to go solo after the Walkers first split in the late 60s, the trio in mosey mode donned cowboy denims and reformed in late ’74. Staying together until the dawn of the next decade before finally drifting aimlessly apart, they did manage to produce the coveted and extremely influential Nite Flights LP, which though unsuccessful in terms of sales is critically up there. In between regular jobs John knocked out the odd recording, but never returned to the heady days or success of the Walkers triumphant period in the 60s. And never really connected with his old foil Scott.

Simon Harris: Almost going unnoticed, but not to an old Britcore Hip-Hop head like me. Producer and Music of Life founder Simon Harris passed away last month. Its’ his highly influential and memorable comps from the 80s that cement the rep for me; platforming early raw tracks from the Demon Boyz, She Rockers, Derek B, Asher D & Daddy Freddy, Hijack, M.C. Duke and many others: part of the original stable of UK talent that fought back against the US wave of hip-hop, giving it a distinct UK twang and even harder edge at times. A real progenitor and leading light in the scene that deserves our full respect.

Country Joe McDonald: I couldn’t not mention counterculture figurehead Country Joe, who literally died in the last couple of days (as I write this). Obvious choice, but his famous crowd-led rendition of THE Vietnam protest song at Woodstock in ’69 – at the age of 17 he enlisted in the US Navy, stationed over in Japan. The Boomer journals will go in overdrive, so I’m not wasting time with obituaries or list of accomplishments. But suffice to say, Country Joe released a hell of a lot of quality protestations, rebellious yells, most notably with his The Fish comrades. Go seek out.

Posted by domv
Filed in Uncategorized ·Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Leave a Comment »

THE DIGEST FOR OCTOBER 2024: New Music/The Social Playlist/And Archives

October 22, 2024

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.

____/THE NEW

Annarella and Django ‘Jouer’
ALBUM (We Are Busy Bodies/Sing A Song Fighter)

Born from the Senegalese imbued and inspired hub built around Sweden’s Wau Wau Collectif, another cross-cultural project that embraces that West African nation’s (and its neighbours) rich musical heritage. Fusing the roots, landscape and themes of Senegal with those of Europe, the partnership of Swedish flutist Annarella and the Malian born ngoni master Django absorbs the very atmosphere of that westernmost African republic, transposing and transforming age old traditions with a hybrid of contemporary musical effects and influences and guest list of diverse musicians and voices.

But before we go any further, delve deeper into this partnership’s debut album, a little background information/ context is needed. A key member of Karl Jonas Winqvist’s Wau Wau Collectif gathering since 2016, making the motivational trip to Senegal that more or less inspired that group’s sound, network of collaborators and friends – a trip that also planted the seed for Winqvist’s Sing A Song Fighter label, a partner in the release of the this album alongside We Are Busy Bodies -, the Örebro born flutist Annarella, believe it or not, trained as a psychologist. Honed on woodwind, but able to play a variety of instruments, Annarella has chosen a more playful approach to her craft: an eclectic one at that.

Annarella’s musical foil, meanwhile, was born in Mali and brought up in the ancient griot tradition of storytelling. The family tree of which is impressive. His cousin was the late and great kora (a 21-string long-necked harp-like instrument crafted out of a gourd, covered in cow skin) virtuoso Toumani Diabaté, who famously partnered with another legend, Ali Farka Touré, for a duo of Grammy Award winning albums. And his uncle was the master balafon (one of Mali and Western Africa’s most recognised sounds, the balafon is a gourd-resonated xylophone) player Kélétigui Diabaté. It’s no surprise then that Django picked up the ngoni, a (normally) animal skinned wrapped canoe-shaped lute instrument synonymous for accompanying the griot storyteller: A tradition that, some say, dates back to the Malian Empire of the 12th century. Django however upped sticks and made the move to Senegal and the capital of Dakar many years ago. It’s a city that is abstractedly threaded into the very fabric of this album: immortalised alongside Annarella’s hometown on the album’s first single and this debut album’s third track. 

Whilst on tour together as part of the Wau Wau, they found themselves wiling away the downtime hours by jamming. A spark was ignited. A project formed. But for a time, both musicians had to return to their respective homes, where it seems they set to work on composing and laying down tracks for each other, ideas and prompts to riff on.

The sphere of influence grew further, as both participants in this international peregrination invited in several musicians and artists to carry the music into articulate and more atmospheric new spaces. Joining the duo were of course Winqvist, as co-producer and a member of the filled-out rhythmal section that also includes Lars Fredrik Swahn and Pet Lager, the renowned Swedish folk musician and multiple instrumentalist Ale Möller, who provides not only trumpet but the Jew’s harp, accordion, melodica and the double-reed shawm, and Django’s wife, Marietou Kouyaté, on harmonical vocals.

Altogether, this circle of impressive talent conjures up an atmosphere of the willowy, mystifying, hazy, rhythmically shuttering, dreamy, ached and yearning. Because whilst uniting two cultures together in a most congruous sounding, melodious and beautiful union, there are both musically felt and more obvious appearances of social and economic protestation to be found.

After the fluted leafy pastoral airs and light nimble twine of the intro, the gentle hi-hat claps, Arabian-like shawm, whistles, chuffs and fluty blows of the Francis Bebey motion ‘Aduna Ak Asaman’, and the near Malian Turag camel drive with bird-like woodwind and Chet Baker mirage trumpeted ‘Dakar-Örebro’, there’s a short tunning-like, freely and spiritual jug carrying backed snippet of the American economist Richard David Wolff besmirching the virtues of capitalism on ‘No More’. A noted Marxist economist, part of the Rethinking Marxism movement, Wolff’s words chime with the rampart, unforgiving nature of what I would call a twisted form of capitalism; the ill effects felt no more so than on the scarred, mined lands of Africa and its people. Picking up the ‘Megaphone’, the style is more African with a soft Dirt Music backbeat, the voices more reminiscent of Amadou & Mariam. That vocal partnership can be heard again on the longed and languid sand dune contoured, flighty and reedy trill fluted ‘Sarajalela’. 

Django’s home environment and the outlier around it seeps into and materializes like a dreamy haze across all the album’s tracks, as evocations of the classical, of jazz and the blues mixes with the local stew of diverse languages. Tracks like ‘Degrees of Freedom’ are more mystical sounding, near cosmic, as the band saunter like gauze under the moon and across the desert’s sandy tides. There’s the Arabian, the African, the otherworldly and fantastical all rolled into a seamless hover and spindle of enchantment and mystery. ‘Hommage á Dallas Dialy Mory Diabate’ however, is just a pretty, sentimental passage of loving tribute – the tune is very familiar, but I’m kicking myself to place it.

Jouer, which translates from the French into “play”, is just that, a lovely stirring union of the playful that seamlessly entwines the two musician’s respective practices with sympathy, respect and the earthly concerns of our endangered societies and world. Hopefully this collaboration will continue and grow over the years; there’s not been a better one since Catrin Finch teamed up with Seckou Keita. 

Peter Evans ‘Extra’
ALBUM (We Jazz) 25th October 2024

A meeting of avant-garde minds to savour, the union of Peter Evans with Koma Saxo and Post Koma instigator and bassist Petter Eldh and New York downtown experimental rock and jazz drummer pioneer Jim Black is every bit as dynamic, explosive, torqued, moody, challenging and exciting as you’d imagine.

Heading this trio and making his debut on Helsinki’s We Jazz label-festival-magazine platform (one of the best contemporary jazz labels in the universe, certainly quality wise and highly prolific with it), the New York-based musician and noted improviser synchronizes and leads a constant movement of breakbeat drums and wood stretched, thumbing and busy bass on his small, higher octave pitched, piccolo trumpet.

A crossroads of separate entangled influences and backgrounds, legacies, with all three practitioners in this Evans-fronted project and their CVs stretching back a few decades, the avant-garde rubs up against the blues, hard bop, atmospheric set scores, hip-hop style breaks, the electronic and classical. By using both the piccolo and flugelhorn on this album, some passages sound like Wynton Marsalis playing over Mozart, or Alison Balsom lending classical airs to an Alfa Mist production.

The classical brass is however adopted and adapted to stir up a wind and tumult of uncertainty as to what’s coming next. For the action, the rhythm and direction is as tightly wound as it is loose and slowed down: the ‘Nova’ passage, this album’s shortest track, seems to lurk in a strange otherworldly atmosphere of mysterious thriller piano prompts and vibrated percussive and cymbal shivered resonance. The following track, ‘Movement 56’, starts off with the brass sounding like it’s being played through a cone, before buzzing and expanding, contouring a cosmic calculus performance of the alien, unsure, spatial and lunar. It finishes with a bended generator motored ripple and signal that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Bernard Szajner record.

Elsewhere the action blows and gallops between moods and intensity. The opening ‘Freaks’ has a busy rhythm section, yet tampered, the nearly skims along (imagine Ben Riley circa ‘The Bridge’, a recognisable sprouting of Art Blakey, and touch of Mingus) that evokes 60s NYC skylines (but no swing) and the downtown happenings of the 80s with something quite bluesy but very of the moment. Meanwhile, Evan’s short and longer cyclonic trumpet breaths recall Ralph Alessi, Tomasz Stańko and Miles Davis. On the staccato fashion prowl of ‘Boom’, it’s Chet sharing room with Kirk Knuffke over a slightly less erratic and menacing Last Exit.

There’s so much to love about Extra. A combo that has worked together before I believe, shows how to find a perfect challenging balance of the dashed, of action and the more tactile and explorative without losing that essential breakbeat and woody stretched body resonating and pulled spring bass rhythm and movement: that movement always being ever forward. Never dwelled on, nor really repeated, this feels like an improvised session without the need for analysis or instruction from its leader Evans. Possibly one of the best jazz albums you’ll hear all year, with a spot saved for the choice albums of the year lists, Extras is a thoroughly inventive and exciting dynamism of contemporary luminaries at the height of their skills and knowledge.    

Yaryu ‘For Damage’
ALBUM (Ramble Records – AUS/ Centripetal Force – US/ Cardinal Fuzz – UK)
25th October 2024

Eclectic Japanese collective Yaryu, birthed just a couple of years ago, invite a host of peers and influential teachers from the country’s acid, psych, cosmic and astral scenes to sprinkle some magic on the new album, For Damage.

Led by bulb-note and caressing soulful electric pianist, wafted and concertinaed melodica player, atmospheric stirring autoharpist, synthesist and percussionist Hyzo, the group play host to members of Sundays & Cybele, Dhidalah and the freak out titans of the form, the Acid Mothers Temple. In all, at least seventeen participants, playing everything from the instruments of a conventional band set-up to woodwind, traditional Japanese and brass. Some of which also lend various forms of vocalisation, from the mewling to folky, strange and supernatural.

Fanning out and expanding the range of spiritual and emotional influences, the album starts out with a seamless continuation of elemental waters (trickles, pours, running streams to more settled, light refracting twinkles), the leafy and blossoming, diaphanous and glittery. The gentle opening introduction of ‘Up The Creek’ is a beautiful guide to this magical, enchanted, but simultaneously mystical and mystery balance of tranquilly and the otherworldly; sounding at times like Mythos connecting with Hiroshi Yushimura and Meitei, and existing in the same realms of Kankyō Ongaku, or “environmental music”. ‘Asobe’ (which I think means “not working”, but spelt slightly different, could be a reference to the Shinto priestesses that performed rituals that appeased the souls of the dead during the Heian period) drifts towards dry bone rattled, ceremonial caravan of Alice Coltrane, Bernie Maupin and Pharoah Saunders vibes.

But though keeping in that relatively subtle direction, ‘Nagare’ seems a little jazzier and more soulful as it follows the currents of running water. It features a cornet-like trumpet, some soft whistles, a near wafted Hawaiian guitar – think Makoto Kubota – and hand drums in the mode of Curtis Mayfield as it sets out some idyllic castaway plane. ‘Utena’ floats close to the Far East Family Band, but with a Fleetwood Mac bassline, constant metronome like ticking away and shimmering cymbals. But by the time we reach the atavistic sounding ‘Gandhara’ (the ancient Indo-Aryan civilization centred in what it is today present northwestern Pakistan and northeastern Afghanistan), the mood is far more mystical and shrouded; a Japanese Gothic-psych visitation from the psychogeography of the wailed and ghostly. ‘Sacrifice’ is noirish in comparison but begins with a sort of Cluster-like synth-pop rhythm, before shimmering and soulfully gliding into Greg Foat territory. It evokes sun-lounging attendees at the shrine on one of Japan’s most exotic, paradise island borders.

The album finishes on what in old money vinyl terms would be the whole side of an album, and the near twenty-minute “melody” suite ‘Shirabe’. A wilderness of trees and roots and creaking, croaking bird life is converged with tranquil jazzy evocations, woodpecker knocks, soft and low inviting sax blows and subtle funky guitar. As the peregrination continues, that sax goes into Donny McCaslin mode, and connects to the weird and cosmic.

Another name to add to the rich legacy of cult, psychedelia, folk, esoteric and cult sounds emanating from Japan, Yaryuand their distinguished guests connect with the elements, the spirits and sprites, and the roots of their magical astral plane on several levels to create a both earthly, supernatural and spiritual daydream. Tending the garden whilst offering up mysticism and languid stirrings of the elements. 

The Tearless Life ‘Conversations With Angels’
ALBUM (Other Voices Records) 27th October 2024

Both a transference of souls from the now cremated – or laid to rest, depending on your choice of metaphorical ritual death – Vukovar plus a host of orbiting “other voices”, the make-up of The Tearless Life remains relatively, and intentionally, shrouded, obscured.

What we do know is that this new entity is a meeting of minds that have spent the last decade ploughing their own unique vision of hermetic, esoteric alchemy of synth-pop, industrial, post-punk, darkwave and a form of neo-new-romantism influences. And whilst they remained criminally overlooked – sometimes due to their own self-sabotage – they attracted such acolytes and luminaries of the genre as Rose McDowall, Michael Cashmore and the late Simon Morris, all of whom proved worthy foils on various Vukovar-headed collaborative releases.

Taking a while to materialize, The Tearless Life’s debut opus is both the announcement of new age, but also a bridge between this latest incarnation and the former Vukovar invocation – they are in essence, a band that continues to haunt itself. Old bonds remain, sound wise and lyrically, but with a new impetus of murky, vapoured, gossamer, mono and ether effected solace, tragic romanticism, pleaded and afflatus love, spiritual inspired yearning and allegorical hunger.

The void needs to be fed in a Godless world as they say, as addictions, troubled relationships, the longing for a special someone who remains aloof, untouchable and beyond reach, and the metaphysical coalesce with an all-consuming passion. 

Talking to angels, conversing with both the seraph and the fallen, the daemons and spirits of the alchemist’s alternative dimensions, the group transduce the writings of that most visionary seer John Dee, the opium eater Thomas De Quincey, William Blake, and the far more obscure Samuel Hubbard Scudder, who’s 19th century, fairy-like, Frail Children of the Air: Excursions Into The World Of Butterflies publication of philosophical essays lends its title to a song of tubular airy manifestations, distortion, wisped spiralling piques and beautified touching emotional anguish.

Atmospheric at every turn, swilling around in the shrouds, a Victorian music box and toll of peeling bells can evoke the creeping, the mysterious and tormented. Psychological trauma, and physical pains roam the wards of a mental hospital; stained-glass rays anoint lovers; death’s touch is never far away; the talking of tongues and language of the shriven invokes fantasies; and the spectre of morose dines on the unfortunates to create an esoteric banquet.

Some of these songs will sound familiar to those missing Vukovar, but The Tearless Life seem to have integrated a duality of harmonies and vocals much better. The music is itself at least attempting to find the light at the end of the tunnel, touching upon snatches, vague influences of Nature And Organisation, Death in June, Jarboe, Brian Reitzell, the Pale Fountains, Scorpion Wind, Les Chasseurs De La Niot, Alan Vega, and on the pump organ-like remembrance of darkened soul mates, ‘The Mistress’, a combination of Purple Rain era Prince and Ultravox!  

My only disappointment is in the production, which could be so much more dynamic and clearer, instead of being so murky. I think it loses some of its impact. But this is minor in comparison to the depth, quality and atmospherics of such an ambitious undertaking. For this album transfers poetry, the writings and fiction of the hermetic and the dreamers wonderfully, if plaintively. If the world was indeed not so bereft of celestial beings’ wisdom and advice as it is, it would rightly receive the critical acclaim it deserves. Conversations With Angels is epic; the first step in, what I hope, will be a fruitful conversation to divine enlightenment, curiosity, psychological and philosophical intelligent synth-pop.

i4M2 ‘Shut Up’
ALBUM (Drone Alone Records)

Whilst eliciting feelings of grand, sometimes overbearing, landscapes and a sense of movement from granular gradients, frazzled fissures, currents under the he didnt appellation back in the summer, the shrouded Oxford-based producer, guitarist and musician now ventures out under the new guise of i4M2.

Although similarly charged with electricity, white noise, static and magnetic filings Shut Up is a very different record indeed. Gone are, for the most part, the blocks of drones for a tubular metallic coursing of melodic music, found sounds and field recordings of captured voices from a city environment, and the mysterious near supernatural at times: or perhaps more unknown, hard to figure out, and maybe alien. Whilst recognisable glimpses of overheard and taped conversations, of a company of choral singers, and wobbled broadcasts of a kind suggest humanity, there’s much machine coded, synthesised and cybernetic surface noise and unnerving drama to be found.

Inspired in part by the “…pirate-radio noise the kids play on their mobile phones at the back of the bus in London.” And by the energy of all those “…cool beats and ideas”, this debut album channels those sparks of inspiration into a sophisticated construction of techno, electronica, the metallic, buzzing and fizzled. Beats arrive in the form of the rotor-bladed, the wing flapped, corrosive, spun, padded and sizzled. Together with those passages and undulations of melody and tune, it sounds like a mix of Nik Colk Void, early Tresor, The Pyrolater, Aphex Twin, Carter and Tutti, Oberman Knocks and Boards of Canada.

Both forms of the London scenester dropped in rural Oxford are great, but for me, I think this latest alter ego just about edges it. Seek it out.  

Suumhow ‘5ilth’
ALBUM (n5MD)

You could consider the fifth album from the Belgian experimental duo of Suumhow as a sonic companion piece to i4M2’s ‘Shut Up’ (see above); fizzing as it is with electrical charges, frazzles and sculpted, purposed distorted crunches and metal filings, but balanced by a certain sensitivity and pull towards hazy, gauzy light forces. For there is melody, a tune to be found amongst the bristled blizzard effects and slabs of static buzzing, the corrosive and outright “filthy”. That last one being especially prominent in both the language and text used to promote this album, and in the distorted joy of sonic bombardment and bracketed vibrated grimy, glitchy drilling.

5ilth is by nature a counterpoint of distressed post-industrial techno, the leftfield, the pneumatic and ricocheting, which then opens out into calmer, more reflective ambient passages and square waves; sometimes floating or maybe drifting above the clouds, and other times, ascending towards the light. Far from brutal, despite the rasping scrunched beats, and chain clinked synthesized percussion, the mood is mostly mysterious and dreamy, with some parts akin to gliding in the stratosphere – see the obliquely, not giving anything away, entitled ‘F’. Like rips and tears in the fabric, yet somehow harmonically compatible, the duo’s work craftily spins a harsh, ratcheted and crackled abrasion of sounds and effects with ambient stirring evocations of thought, quite wanderings and reflection.   

I hate to repeat myself, but as with the last review, I’m hearing Aphex Twin, but this time in the company of Petrolio, Room of Wires, Emptyset and Forest Swords. Which I think is a very inviting proposition. 

Rich God ‘Unmade’
ALBUM (Somewherecold Records) 31st October 2024

The third such album of static-charged dissonance and fizzles, sculpted to and rendered to provide the sound, score and expression of the concrete this month, the pairing of Blake Edward Conley, who regular readers will recognise as the droneroom, and Jason T. Lamoreaux, who goes under The Corrupting Sea appellation, will appeal to those who like to read the abstract messages and gauge a sense of place, time and mood from industrial noise and corrosive electricity.

Mainstay and founding artist of the experimental label, Somewherecold Records, Jason teams up with one of his most prolific label singings to sculpt meaning from the frazzled generated noise, crunched barrages of drums and the sifting, fizzled and warped rhythms. Conway’s usual signature of minimal alt-country and drone cowboy electric guitar tracings, brushes, hovered notes and sun-cooked melting vistas is absorbed and sometimes crushed almost by Jason’s industrial effects and mettalic needling.

With nothing to go on, theme wise or explanation wise to the album’s seven titles, it is left to us the listener to make what we will of this union. But my reading is a transmogrified vision of post-industrial rust belt horror and trauma. There’s certainly prompts in the use of samples taken from broadcasts, perhaps the TV  – which often sounds like a flickering portal set to the paranormal and Fortean -, with some guy’s diatribe against the banks or stock exchange/Wall Street (“If money is evil, then that building is hell!”) and a radio phone-in exchange about some horrific psychosomatic condition (the words murder scene and suicide both pop up).

In what sounds like a psychogeography of old machinery, the apparatus of production and a troubled society, Unmade whips up a blizzard of crickets on a sweltering day on the road towards a run-down and foreboding field of decay; conjures up the empty silos, rusted conveyer belts of a desolate wrecked farming community; and uses the needle scratches of a polygraph test and the resonance of steel mill saws to channel a recognisable fear.  

Whipped and industrialised, yet also showing less harsh and abrasive fragments, pauses in the rippled tears of the bestial, spooky, alien and caustic, Unmade is like a distortion of Bleaeck, Raime, Atsushi Izumi, Cabaret Voltaire and IDM influences. Not the easiest of listens, and certainly challenging, but worth the effort, as two experimental artists combine their signature qualities into a heavy loaded sonic statement for the times we find ourselves in.   

Andy Haas ‘For The Time, Being’
ALBUM (Resonantmusic)

Time has never sounded so warped and amorphous, bereft of reference in a space that morphs into serialism, the surreal, the painful, the otherworldly, paranormal, conceptual and indescribable. Yes, once more the experimental saxophonist Andy Haas ventures into sonic territories seldom explored with his latest (I believe either 19th or 20th release for the Resonantmusic label) album of abstract trauma, avant-gardism, playfulness, and physicality. For this album is indeed a physical experience, focussed as it is on the Andy’s unique method of strapping a small tremolo box to his leg so that he can control the depth and the rate of extreme panning whilst playing the sax, and manipulating slowly spun vinyl records.

The discombobulating, shrieking, sonorous diffusions and effects hit hard at times, leaving a real sense that the soundwaves have penetrated the listener’s body and senses: To get the full effect, Andy stresses that For The Time, Being is experienced best on a system with better low end response: laptop speakers just won’t cut it.

Out on the fringes for at least five decades (and counting), with a brief period of commercial success as a founding member of the Canadian new wave band Martha And The Muffins (leaving the group after three albums to pursue more adventurous pathways in the New York underground scene of the early-to-mid 80s) , Andy’s original sparks of inspiration and catalysts for picking up the saxophone (his first instrument being one he rented for $5 a month in the 70s) were jazz avant-garde supremos Anthony Braxton and Evan Parker, who he witnessed playing together in concert at an early age back in the 70s. Both icons of the form permeate much of Andy’s work, including this newest experiment. But you can add a channelling of such diverse company as John Zorn, Marc Ribot, Zeena Parkins, Ikue Mori, Thurston Moore, Keiji Haino and Fred Firth, all artist’s Andy has worked with since the 80s, to that sound palette.  

In more recent times, during the late nineties and the noughties, he’s collaborated with stringed-instrumentalist Don Fiorino on three extraordinary albums (American Nocturne, Don’t Have Mercy and Accidentals), toured and recorded with the Plastic Ono Band-esque reinvention of Meg Remy’s U.S. Girls, and been a member of Matt ‘Doc’ Dunn’s The Cosmic Range. Again, feeding into an already expansive field of influences.

But here, in solo mode, the perimeters, experiences are all reset and transmogrified into an intense, frightening and sometimes near cartoonish world of spatial manipulation and hallucination. This is jazz at its furthest boundaries, the avant-gardism of Fluxus, of Monty Young, Alan Sondheim (specifically T’ Other Little Tune LP), Richard Maxfield, David Tudor and Takehisa Kosugi combining with the dry, bristled and trilled raspy reedy blows, plastic tube-like sucks, flapped air and wind, the hinging and the movement of valves and atonal resonance, and the more melodic flutters and mizmar-like drones of Braxton, Parker, Roscoe Mitchell, Ornette Coleman, Marshall Allen and Oliver Lake.

Each track varies between unseen sources of accelerating motors, hovering drones overhead, the disorientating, the wounded, the near sci-fi and triggered, with signals and codes manipulated like slowing and speeding reel-to-reel tapes. Reality is questionable and the sense of time (although there is a parenthesis “nocturne” reference on one track) akin to a fever dream. Andy produces a unique physically effective sound experiment that is impossible to define; his saxophone simultaneously recognisable and yet parping, droning and in a cycle that pushes that instrument towards the tactile and spatial.        

___/PLAYLIST: THE MONOLITH COCKTAIL SOCIAL VOLUME 91

The Social Playlist is an accumulation of music I love and want to share, tracks from my various DJ sets and residencies over the years, and both selected cuts from those artists, luminaries we’ve lost and those albums celebrating anniversaries each month.

Running for over a decade or more, Volume 91 is as eclectic and generational spanning as ever. Look upon it as the perfect radio show, devoid of chatter, interruptions and inane self-promotion.

First up the LP anniversaries, starting with 50th nods to Sparks Propaganda (in my estimates, the double-acts’ best 70s album), Redbone’s Beaded Dreams Through Turquoise Eyes, Yumi Arai’s Misslim, and The Rolling Stones It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll – see below in the archives section for my little summary, if dismissive, piece on the album.

Released this month forty years ago, there’s tracks from The Fall’s The Wonderful And Frightening and Cabaret Voltaire’s Micro-Phonies. Jumping forward another decade, and I’ve also included a track from the Digable Planets’ 94’ released Blowout Comb. Another leap forward and I’ve chosen to also mark the tenth anniversary of Scott Walker’s collaboration with Sunn O))), Soused – you can read my original piece on the album in the archive below; one of my finest hours I reckon.

Whilst the Monolith Cocktail’s Monthly Playlist is all about the newest music, I miss things or just don’t have room to feature everything. And so, the Social offers room to some of those newish, recent releases that missed out. This month there’s choice tracks from Heyme, Waaju and Majid Bekkas, The Bordellos, Reverand Baron and Calvin Love, and Paten Locke.

You’ll also find, from across the decades, borders and genres, a smattering of musical choices from Heltah Skeltah, Lowlife, Samuel Prody, Gilli Smyth, The Sun Also Rises, Michel Magne, Debile Menthol, Lita Bembo, Art Zoyd, Tudor Lodge, Tommy Keene, The Silver Dollar, Vince Martin & Fred Neil, Yoch’ko Seffer, Male and Mahjun.

TrAcKlIsT iN fUlL

Michel Magne ‘Cine qua pop’
Debile Menthol ‘Tante Agathe’
Samuel Prody ‘She’s Mine’
Tudor Lodge ‘The Lady’s Changing Home’
Tommy Keene ‘My Mother Looked Like Marilyn Monroe’
The Rolling Stones ‘Dance Little Sister’
Cabaret Voltaire ‘James Brown’
The Bordellos ‘King Of The Bedroom’
The Fall ‘2 X 4’
Male ‘Bilk 80’
The Jazz June ‘Silver Dollar’
Mahjun ‘L’un dans I’autre’
Art Zoyd ‘Alleluia’
Yochk’o Seffer ‘GONDOLAT’
Waaju and Majid Bekkas ‘Fangara (Live Edit)’
Yumi Arai ‘On the Street of My Home Town’
Lita Bembo ‘Muambe’
Digable Planets Ft. Guru ‘Borough Check’
Paten Locke ‘Widdit’
Heltah Skeltah ‘Clan’s, Posse’s, Crew’s & Clik’s’
Redbone ‘Cookin’ with D’Redbone’
Heyme ‘Downtown Train’
Reverend Baron & Calvin Love ‘Famous Feelin’’
Scott Walker & Sunn O))) ‘Brando’
Lowlife ‘Again And Again’
Citymouth & People’s Palms ‘Singlecycles’
Gilli Smyth ‘Shakti Yoni’
The Sun Also Rises ‘Wizard Shep’
Vince Martin & Fred Neil ‘Morning Dew’
Sparks ‘Bon Voyage’

/ARCHIVES_____

This month, I’m reviving my archived pieces on The Rolling Stones It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll, which is fifty years old this month, and the late Scott Walker’s unholy alliance with Sunn O))), Soused, which reaches its tenth anniversary in October.

Relax, It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll. The Stones ’74 LP is 50 this month. (Appearing originally in my four part potted history of the group).

The basic premise of the Stones 12th album was to give their critics, especially the punctilious music writer Lester Bangs, the bird-finger.

Bangs’ condemnation at the paucity and profligate decline of the group was particularly scathing – quite justified in some respects – and only increased with each new release.

Incredulous at the growing derision and, as they viewed it, over-the-top analyses of their music, this album makes no bones about its regression back into the rock ‘n roll womb: albeit a version of that initial scene performed by a languid miscreant bunch of lolloping posers reprising oldies from the blues-R&B-r’n’r cannon.

The self-titled track and single from It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll (And I Like It) was strangely – so it’s claimed by Richards – conceived by a testy Jagger and recorded with his new “soul mate” Bowie as a rough demo. Such was the internal drift between the Stones creative partnership that Jagger often composed and thrashed out ideas away from his Glimmer Twins foil. During this break in communications, Richards was hanging out with The Faces lead guitarist and crow-haired sporting Ronnie Wood at his London studio. Wood had begun recording a solo LP and had asked along both Richards and Mick Taylor to add a touch of sleazy blues. Whilst at one of these relaxed sessions, Jagger dropped in and cut a version with Woods and, Small Faces/Faces drummer, Kenny Jones, but also produced another version with his comrades at a later date (Woods again played on this, contributing the rhythm guitar part on the 12-string). Regardless of who had their paws on it, It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll (And I Like It), is a stereotypical Stones pruning swaggered anthem, one that leans very heavily upon the strutting glam-rock pout of T-Rex.

Geographically separated, and as usual, sabre-rattling with the establishment, the band pushed-on, even though by now Richards’s increasing drug-fuelled skirmishes looked certain to scupper any attempts to successfully record.

To top it all, Taylor’s growing resentment at the lack of credit and acknowledgement for his contributions set the ball in motion for his resignation from the band a year later. Yet despite his disgruntlement, Taylor hung-on in there, playing on a majority of the albums ten-songs but not the title-track single; even though he appears in the video.

Without their due-diligent and overseeing producer, Jimmy Miller, the production fell to the aggrandising pairing of Jagger & Richards. Miller, a stalwart member of their inner circle and sometimes sobering force for good, had finally succumbed to his drug habit (picked-up whilst working with the band) and left, leaving the pair to take control for the first time since Their Satanic Majesties Request. And we all know how that turned out!

Scott Walker + Sunn O))) ‘Soused’ – Harrowed by thy name.

The usual rolled-out cliché of criticism that always greets every Scott Walker release, charts the enigmatic artist’s pop light to experimental morose career arc; from the teen swoon idol heady days of the Walker Brothers, via monastic alienation and Jacques Brel inspired crooner of esoteric idiosyncrasies, to existential avant-garde isolation.

Inhabiting the darkest recesses of humanity and history for at least half of that time, we should be used to this morbid curiosity, worn with earnest pride by Walker, who peers into the abyss on our behalf. Confronting with a meta-textural style the barbarity and failings of humanity for at least thirty odd years then, any developments in the Walker peregrination, shouldn’t really surprise anyone: at least the critic.

In what was met with certain trepidation or surprise by many, his unholy union with the habit adorned disciples of hardcore drone Sunn O))) is actually a very shrewd and congruous partnership; a 50/50 immersive experience, with both parties seemingly egging each other on. Walker for his part lyrically less cryptic, the Sunn chaps pushed to produce one of their most poetic and nuanced beds of sustained drones yet, and on this occasion, even cracking out various wild shortened, punctuating and unyielding riffs – verging on full metal and heavy rock riffage. Letting rip with a resonant field of sustained one-chord statements and caustic stings that bend or longingly fade out into a miasma, trying to find a meaning in these drones is akin to an Auger interpreting symbols and signs from the entrails of a wretched, just slain sacrificial beats. Yet it does work, and the bare minimal, fuzzy and wrenching bed of murmuring, primal guitars perfectly set up the intended atmosphere.

Once again, Daemonic forces have conspired. The result, a five act guttural opus, entitled Soused – in this instance the title is to be taken as a plunging or submersion into liquid or water, rather than a slang for hard liquor intoxication (though if it were, the brew on offer would be hemlock!).

What starts out and continues as a sort of proxy chorus (the nearest you’ll ever get to one on a Walker outing), the introductory crystallised, even dreamy, sense of melodic relief that introduces the album’s first musical tome, ‘Brando’, is soon corrosively despoiled by the menacing first strikes of a signature Sunn O))) chord and bullwhip.

A rather odd theme for Walker to build a threatening tower of misery from, the song alludes to the obligatory sacrificial martyrdom of the title’s Marlon Brando. Whether as self-flagellation, Brando had a penchant for taking on or even bringing (off his own back, so to speak) the act of taking a brutalised beating to his roles: from vigilante beatings in The Wild One to feeling the sharp end of a Elizabeth Taylor horse whipping in Reflections In A Golden Eye. Brando’s fatalistic characters were either the naïve well-intentioned disaffected (Terry Malloy in On The Waterfront) or assassinated disenchanted mavericks (Colonel Kutz in Apocalypse Now). The repeated lashings of a bull whip in this instance, however, refer to his role as the conniving bank robber Rio in the western One Eyed Jacks; one of the movie’s most memorable scenes being when Rio is administered the whipping of his life by a disgruntled and wronged former criminal partner, Dad Longworth (played by Karl Malden), in front of the towns people.

Perhaps this series of observations, first set off by watching One Eyed Jacks, from Walker is over-played, but it is remarkable as you play back through the actor’s movie catalogue and find a connective theme of taking the blows and even death on the chin. Probably reading too much into now and Walker does have a history of wry and acerbic wit, but Brando could be said to be offering his body up to the mortal sins as a punch bag (taking method acting literally) or was just masochistic (Last Tango In Paris M’lud). You decide, it makes for one reason or another a most apocalyptic soundtrack, mixing as it does, doom with Walker’s almost uplifting, visionary vocals to a flaying cycle of whip happy bullies.

Biblical in more ways than one, the standout mega-bestial centrepiece must be the harrowing ‘Herod 2014’; an atavistic disturbing chapter from the Roman occupied Middle East, it alludes to, what many historians say, is a wholly fictional tale of King Herod’s decreed infanticide of his kingdom (allowed by the Roman occupiers to reign over Judea and surrounding areas). Bathed in a sonorous reverberation of fearful discordance and a distressed unworldly cry of danger, this twelve-minute opus is stalked by the harangued forces of malcontent and revved-up torturous drones. The conceptual allusions, which can’t help but echo through time to the present, are far bigger than this baby cull, the region has, after all, always been awash with both the fabled and all too real episodes of death and misery for thousands of years. Yet despite this, the song is itself one of Walker’s best and even most melodically poetic, sitting happily with the material on his last two albums, The Drift and Bish Bosch.

Lyrically traumatic, but almost beautifully hewn from the English language, the opening lines bellow a nuanced scene-setting intellect, more novelistic pyschogeography than song: ‘She’s hidden her babies away. Their soft gummy smiles won’t be gilding the memory.’ In setting up the horrid event and psychological primal emotions that resonate with his audience, Walker goes on to mention two of the most famous painters to depict this crime, Nicolas Poussin and Rubens, who both fashioned their own (setting it in their own time) Massacre of The Innocents.

Herod 2014 straddles the LP like a monolithic titan. A real horror show, both wrenching yet also surprisingly compelling.

You would perhaps be fond of some relief after sitting through all that, but Walker won’t let you off that easily; summing another Sunn 0))) crackled, anvil- beating, industrial chorus of esoteric dread. ‘Bull’ is fraught with tension, languidly striking with stabbing guitars and post-industrial riffs one minute, sinking into the mire of silence and emerging like a troubled crooner monk the next. Heavy and brooding with mechanical timepieces, crowing shadows and subterranean spirits moving amongst the low buzzing presence of a pant-messing sustained drone, the Bull is unsettling to say the least, like a game of tag in the Labyrinth of the Minotaur. And the song with the longest outré of all; Walker finishing off his cryptic lines halfway through, leaving the last four minutes to his comrades to play out.

‘Fetish’ as it may already suggest is a sadomasochistic affair. A soundtrack set to some cannibalistic or serial killer shocker, where the action is carried out entirely on a Mona Hatoum barbed wire bed in a meatpacking factory. Thrashing around and violently piqued by a harassed beak like attack, the backing is a maelstrom of dentist drills, panting shakers and eerie hanging silence, until it breaks out with the album’s first drum break and rhythmic holy chorus. Throughout, Walker swoons in resignation, dropping lines like, “acne on a leaper”, and “glim away little brute”, in a disjointed narrated sombre tone that gets more dangerous as the song churns to its climax. A ritualistic metaphor, the song’s central tool of terror, the blade or scalpel, is held as an abstract reference point to gleam some meaning, whether it pertains to the cosmetic, life-threatening surgery, torture, the sexual or even tattooing, Walker and Sunn O))) build a nuanced layer upon layer of industrial buzzing queasiness to a trope.

Be under no illusion with the finale to this Dante inferno, the ‘Lullaby’ tones on offer here in no way promise a good night’s sleep. This is after all Walker’s crooned eulogy to assisted lullaby suicide, and the sound of death’s hallucinatory vibrations, gradually taking hold.

Interpreting the song in her own enigmatic way, Ute Lemper bravely grappled with the song for her 1999 album, Punishing Kiss, but Walker now takes back what he at first giveth, converting it into an even gloomier anthem with his monastic brethren.

You can almost hear the percussive ticking of a Newton’s cradle: the mortal clock running out as the drugs take effect; comfort is not an option. The whole thing sounds like a seething hotbed of psychological thrillers and horror, played out remorsefully until the final bleep of the life support signals the end. Walker never nails home his own social or political solutions, and so this, very much a topic debated in recent years and ongoing, is more a diorama set piece, which neither condones nor condemns assisted suicide.

Disturbing throughout, this unnerving suite is obviously not to be recommended to those already on the knife-edge or for those who stay clear of the news or anything that may remind them of human suffrage. You also need stamina and plenty of nerve to sit through this uncomfortable 49-minutes of music at its most challenging. Not so much hostile as shredded by a repeating rotor blade cutting action that piques and prods, even the quietest passages are threatened by an unseen presence of danger. Hell knows (literally) how this album would go down live, the option tentatively hanging in the air, depending on its reception; a possibility that could see the maverick auteur and theatrical seven-day avant-gardist performing for one of the first times in eons.

Both parties in this experiment prove their mettle, reinforcing their reputations but producing an album that is not only accessible to the devotees and followers but also those who’ve previously skirted around taking a walk through the catacombs of the bleakest recesses of a conflicted mind.

Posted by domv
Filed in Uncategorized ·Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Leave a Comment »

Monolith Cocktail Social #57: CV Vision, Guru Guru, Falle Nioke & Sir Was, Greentea Peng, Sparks…

July 7, 2021

Dominic Valvona’s Eclectic/Generational Spanning Playlist

An imaginary radio show, a taste of my DJ sets, the Monolith Cocktail Social is a playlist selection that spans genres and eras to create the most eclectic of soundtracks. Among the international and generational spanning selection of the old and new, is a smattering of tributes to anniversary celebrating albums (Guru Guru Hinten, Poor Righteous Teachers Pure Poverty, Sparks Whomp The Sucker, Super Fury Animals Rings Around The World).

Tracks:

Poor Righteous Teachers  ‘Methods Of Droppin’ Mental’

Greentea Peng  ‘This Sound’

Little Annie  ‘I Think Of You’

Lives Of Angels  ‘Imperial Motors’

Kit Sebastian  ‘Lady Grinning Soul’

CV Vision  ‘Should I Tame Me Endless Mind’

The Groupies  ‘Hog (I’m A Hog For You Baby)’

Sam Gopal  ‘Escalator’

Guru Guru  ‘Bo Diddley’

Glass Beams  ‘Taurus’

Nicole Paquin  ‘Dis Lui Que Je L’Aime’

Sparks  ‘Suzie Safety’

Magic Castles  ‘Lost Dimension’

Darker My Love  ‘What A Man’s Paris’

Jose Mauro  ‘Rua Dois’

Khruangbin  ‘Right’

George Harrison  ‘Run Of The Mill (Session Outtakes And Jam)’

Super Fury Animals  ‘Juxtaposed With U’

A Cooper/Emerald Web/S. Mcloughlin  ‘Hexagons Above Dovestones’

Ìxtahuele Xenia Kriisin  ‘The Lion’

King Just  ‘Warrior’s Drum’

Krack Free Media  ‘Difference Dealer (Spot The Difference Pt. II)’

The Awakening  ‘Mode For D.D.’

True Loves  ‘First Impression’

International Harvester  ‘Kuk-Polska’

Trader Home  ‘The mixed Up Kind’

Mário Rui Silva  ‘Kazum-zum-zum’

Falle Nioke & Sir Was  ‘Wonama Yo Ema’

Caroline  ‘Skydiving Onto The Library Roof’

Hans Koller & Wolfgang Dauner  ‘Adea’

Mazaher  ‘Yawra & Rekousha’

DM Bob & The Deficits  ‘Into My Own Thing’

Real Live  ‘Pop The Trunk’ Riz Ortolani  ‘Riti e Folklore’

Posted by domv
Filed in Uncategorized ·Tags: , , , , ,
Leave a Comment »

Quarterly Playlist: Part Four: U.S. Girls, TootArd, Sparks…

December 18, 2017

CHOICE TRACKS OF 2017: PART FOUR
SELECTION: DOMINIC VALVONA, AYFER SIMMS, MATT OLIVER





Wrapping up 2017 with the final part of our quarterly playlist revue, Matt Oliver, Ayfer Simms and Dominic Valvona have chosen another eclectic genre spanning collection of ‘choice’ tracks from the latter end of the year. From the Golan Heights (TootArd) to the cantons of Switzerland (Ester Poly), from weaponised disco pop (U.S. Girls) to attacking vibrant Curaçao electro protest (Kuenta i Tambú), from Gilbert and Sullivan cerebral pop (Sparks) to unearthed lost golden 60s nuggets (Cymbeline), this last curtain call of the year playlist reflects our tastes and opinions, and reflects what has been an anxious, unsettling twelve months.


Tracklist:

Mark Barrott  ‘The Pathways Of Our Lives’
Snapped Ankles  ‘Hanging With The Moon’
Kuenta i Tambu  ‘E Kalakuna’
TootArd  ‘Laissez Passer’
Mustafa Ozkent  ‘Kasap’
Los Camaroes  ‘Mbembe Ndoman’
The Movers  ‘Kansas City’
U.S. Girls  ‘Mad As Hell’
Destroyer  ‘Cover From The Sun’
Wild Ones  ‘Invite Me In’
The Moth Poets  ‘The Shabby Gentlemen’
Ester Poly  ‘Dienstag’
Alpine Those Myriads  ‘Mail Order Doom (WHWGH)’
L’Orange  ‘Cooler Than Before’
Danny Watts & Aye Mitch  ‘Young & Reckless’
Evidence  ‘Jim Dean’
Thavius Beck  ‘Akhenaten’
Ocean Wisdom  ‘Eye Contact’
Antiheroes, Lee Scott & Salar  ‘No Sleep Till Mars’
Psycho & Plastic  ‘Boojum’
Alexander Stordiau  ‘Fulfilling Eclipse’
Solo Collective: Anne Muller & Alex Stolze  ‘Solo? Repeat! (Live)’
Audiac  ‘Gospels Unreal’
Bjork  ‘Arisen My Senses’
Miles Cooper Seaton  ‘I Am That’
Gwyneth Glyn  ‘Tanau’
The Cornshed Sisters  ‘The Message’
Girl Ray  ‘Preacher (Radio Edit)’
Wesley Gonzalez  ‘Piece Of Mind’
Cymbeline  ‘Strax Nedenfor Tomen’
Martian Subculture  ‘Chewing Gum’
John Howard  ‘From The Morning’
Sparks  ‘I Wish You Were Fun’

Previous Quarterly Playlists from 2017:

Part 3

 

Part 2

 

Part 1



Posted by domv
Filed in Uncategorized ·Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Leave a Comment »

Our Choice Albums/EPs of 2017: Part Two: Mazzi & SOUL Purpose to Msafiri Zawose.

December 11, 2017

CHOICE  ALBUMS/EPS  OF  2017  PART  TWO:  M – Z
SELECTION/WORDS:  DOMINIC  VALVONA, MATT  OLIVER and AYFER SIMMS




M – Z : Mazzi & SOUL Purpose to Msafiri Zawose.

Welcome to part two of our mega ‘choice albums/EPs of 2017’ feature. If you haven’t already checked it out, have a good perusal of part one, as the second part is a continuation, carrying on in an alphabetical order from where we last left off.

The decision making process: 

Continuing to shy away from fatuous rating systems and ‘best of lists’, the Monolith Cocktailendeavors to offer a more eclectic spread of worthy ‘choice’ picks, with no album dominating or holding any particular numbered position – unlike most of our contemporaries lists stuck with the ridiculous task, for example, of explaining why one album is more deserving of their fatuous number 32 spot than another.

Lined up in alphabetical order then, our favourite new and reissued albums and EPs from 2017 are of course considered to be the most interesting, vibrant and dynamic of the year’s releases. But the best? Granted, to make this list you have to have made some sort of impact, but we’d never suggest these entries were categorically the best albums of 2017, even if that might be true. Instead our list is an indicator of our amorphous tastes, rounding up a year in the life of the Monolith Cocktail, and we hope, introducing you to titles and artists/bands that may have dropped below the radar or got lost in the noise of more commercial better promoted releases.

M.

Mazzi & SOUL Purpose  ‘The Building’  (SOUL Purpose)

“A towering B-boy document gives familiar samples new life and piles banks of bricks and mortar beats and rhymes you can always back to do the business”.  RnV, Feb 17

The Building by established New Jersey movement Mazzi & SOUL Purpose is built on two levels and ends up a skyscraper, to a specification of telepathy that works from close range or miles away. Mazzi as emcee rhymes his ass off for fifteen tracks without leaving you behind (“love what you’re doing and you’ll never have to work a day in your life”) and not without addressing the state of the world, relationship complexities and being prepared to fight (with the listener playing the twelfth man).

The SOUL Purpose movement begins with a mash-up of every essential hip-hop break known to man, going on to cover cavernous, fusionist swells of sound, B-Boy skippers, deep cover gangster business, and samples found in Boots adverts/Sugababes singles and on Madonna tours. That the album was also helping do its bit for good causes added an extra layer to the album’s complete package status. Matt Oliver


Nicole Mitchell  ‘Mandorla Awakening II: Emerging Worlds’  (FPE Records)

Taken from a 2015 live performance commissioned by the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, the erudite American jazz flautist, composer, bandleader, educator, scion of Afrofuturism, former president of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and a founder of The Black Earth Ensemble, Nicole Mitchell’s outstanding Mandorla Awakening II: Emerging Worlds conceptual suite, straddles two evocatively imagined contrasting worlds: the tumult of a patriarchal world, called The World Union, in decay against the egalitarian desire of the advanced utopia called Mandorla, where technology and nature, freedom and tolerance are in ultimate synchronization.

Set in the year 2099 this multimedia project, which includes a short novella, blurs the line between philosophy, mysticism, modern art, science fiction and radical political critique on what is both a diaphanous and moody groundswell soundtrack of contorting confusion and beautiful flute accompanied polygenesis magic. To suggest this album of instrumental peregrinations and odysseys and poetically conscious soulful lectures and passionate, Last Poets meet Pharaoh Sanders, declarations – courtesy of Avery R Young – can be simply classed as a jazz is to ignore how amorphous the musicality of Mitchell and her reconfigured Black Earth Ensemble is in transcending the genre. With an expansive range of instruments and sounds, including Kojiro Umezaki on shakuhachi, Renée Baker on violin, Tomeka Reid on both cello and banjo, Alex Wing on electric guitar and oud, Tatsu Aoki playing bass, shamisen and taiko, and Jovia Armstrong handling percussion, the paradise versus dystopia exoticism of the ‘awakening’ simultaneously evokes orientalism, fantasy, nature, the classical and the atavistic.

At its heart, articulating the nervous but adventurous, pinning but diaphanously elevating characteristics of the narrative, Mitchell’s flute performances are stunning and spiritual throughout, even gracious. And the direction of travel is never quite certain, but always impressive and questioning.

As a frame for this conceptual suite, Mitchell asks: “What would a world look like that is truly egalitarian, with advanced technology that is in tune with nature?” We may never know, but the tumultuous journey towards it certainly sounds magnificently ominous and beautifully experimental. Dominic Valvona


N.

Nolan the Ninja  ‘Yen’  (Left of Center)

“Aggressive, eyeballing rhymes to get you bouncing, and beats strategically picking their punches”.  RnV, Oct 17

In his bid “to retire before I’m 35” and “trying to see a million before I go to sleep”, Nolan the Ninja absolutely busts a gut to get his rhymes hurrying up his pension plan. Landing haymakers on dosed up vintage Queensbridge and clatters of muddy kicks and snares that can call up a posse from miles, the Detroit dragon slayer also knows that living by an all-or-nothing mindstate means every single syllable has to have the clarity to rightfully shatter ciphers.

Getting Royce 5’9” to guest on Calisthenics is a smart move in seeing whose chest is first to tighten, and Chess is the least civil checkmate recorded as everything threatens to spin of control. The album actually decelerates – or likelier, gives the music a chance to catch up – to show that the go-for-mine Nolan can manage the throttle when soulful drops start clearing the debris.   MO


O.

Open Mike Eagle  ‘Brick Body Kids Still Daydream’  (Mello Music Group)

“Maintaining his rightful place in the line of ghetto superheroes”.  RnV, Aug 17

Two tracks define the multi-talented emcee’s latest intricacies and humour, cosmopolitan accessibility and underground elusiveness. Open Mike Eagle draws himself from his shell by completely rewriting the rules on what it means to be hard in hip-hop on No Selling. Despite the Dark Comedy compère being a nostalgic peacekeeper for a lot of Brick Body…, capable of bringing up an argument about which condiment is king of the kitchen to prove a greater point, the album’s political piece de resistance, My Auntie’s Building, fights for what he believes in with tangible rage, a housing project held close providing the album with an explosive conclusion that might have got lost further up the album sequence.

We disagree that “everything is better when you don’t know nothing” – everyone needs Eagle in their corner – but can certainly vouch for the confirmation of “I promise you, I will never fit in your descriptions”. MO


P.

Hermeto Pascoal  ‘Viajando Com O Son (The Lost ’76 Vice-Versa Studio Session)’
(Far Out Recordings)

Thankfully surfacing forty odd years after the fabled ’76 sessions at Rogério Duprat’s São Paulo Vice Versa studio, the extemporized jazz performances of Hermeto Pascoal and his impressive Paulo troupe sound every bit as fresh and dynamic as the day they were recorded.

Held in high esteem, in the upper echelons of experimental traversing exotic jazz pantheon, anointed by a hyperbolic Miles Davis who called him “the most impressive musician in the world” after catching him play live, Pascoal’s transcendent voyages from Brazil have become the stuff of legends. Crate-diggers and jazz or indeed even world music aficionados have always salivated at the prospect of such material being found and released, and the missing Viajando Com O Son session is up there with the most desired.

Unburdened by such trivialities as time and composition, this four track suite shimmers with the celestial as it dreamily saunters through a tropical rainforest groove on the opening Dança do Pajé; quacks and quivers through a percussive bending bright organ peregrination on Mavumvavumpefoco and mysteriously and surreptitiously explores an exotic landscape, tip toeing and lovingly serenaded by magical flutes, on Natal. However, the main, twenty-six minutes long, expansive highlight, Casinha Pequenina, follows on from the previous tracks with similar leitmotifs played out and taken into ever more experimental directions: from Miles Davis to Guru Guru.

The Lost ’76 Vice-Versa Studio Session is a lush tropical jazz odyssey from the Brazilian maverick and genius that’s well worth every penny. DV


Piano Magic  ‘Closure’  (Second Language Music)

Calling time on a twenty-year career with one last swansong, the Anglo-French Baroque indie dreamers Piano Magic echo the sentiments and themes of their 2000 song No Closure on their final majestic and profound album, Closure.

Drawn to a despondent melancholy, a most diaphanous one at that, the sagacious founder member and songwriter Glen Johnson is aided in his last ever enterprise by Franck Alba (guitars), Jerome Tcherneyan (drums, percussion), Alasdair Steer (bass) and the band’s original drummer from their debut gig at the infamous Wag Club, Paul Tornbohm, now providing keyboards. Wounded and troubled as ever by the lingering traces and ghosts of past relationships and liaisons, Johnson’s resigned poetics attempt to meet head-on those feelings he just can’t seem to lay to rest: as Johnson calls it, the “mythical formal conclusion”, the need to “move on” from broken relationships is not so easy. And so he croons, “Let’s get this thing sewn up” on the Morricone meets Ry Cooder cinematic title track, knowing full well that “…you never get closure.” The supernatural echoes of a lost love, channeled through a dusty answering machine message séance, on Landline leave the singer’s voice paled and weakened; lamenting loss form the far side of the ether. Marooned as a passive onlooker to the goings-on in the backstreets of his southeast London neighbourhood, a voyeuristic, removed Johnson (in Talk Talk mode) vanishes almost completely before our very ears. The song’s sad lyrics it must be said are a most beautiful kind of misery.

Magnificent in their despair, the musicianship poised, purposeful and subtly stirring, Piano Magic’s last ever fling is one of the band’s most accomplished, and definitely one to savour. As near perfect as any Piano Magic suite can be, Closure proves that you can perhaps after all find a satisfactory ending. DV

Full review…


R.

Reverse Engineer ‘Elusive Geometry’  (Floored Music)

Both in the moniker by which the Edinburgh-based ‘sonic experimentalist’ Dave House is known by, and deduced from the title of his latest album, Elusive Geometry, we can view the sound-artist’s music as a restructuring of sounds and mechanics.

House unravels, strips and inverts his apparatus of field recordings and sampled instruments to reconstruct new, often mysterious and at times foreboding soundscapes; some of which recall Jon Hassell’s Fourth World Musics explorations: a trace of the Javanese or Malay can be heard like a veil hanging over the uneasy densely packed traverse of cascading crystal droplets, marimba and tubular echoed Proto, and a similar, familiar yet obscured sense of place can be heard on the bamboo shuttling Insider, which also features the bobbing and dipped percussion and tablas of sound-designer and producer Pete Vilk.

A transformation of House’s themes of ‘transition, self (re)discovery and moving on’, the precise chemistry of his compositions and use of collaborators – the already mentioned Vilk is joined by the jazz vocalist Matty Eeles, harpist Esther Swift and BAFTA award-winning cellist Atzi Muramatsu – sends these explorations off into numerous nuanced, but untethered, atmospheres. Masked looming leviathans, honked saxophone like probes, coils and springs, stone and vegetation, the odd guitar strike drift over or interweave through sophisticated minimalist beats and breaks – the most abstract and discordant drum break of which features on the hallucinatory Decoherence -, with the mood fluctuating between both controlled uncertainty and more deconstructive chaos.

Elusive Geometry will tease out and reveal its textures and intricacies slowly, each listen drawing your attention to some other interesting interplay and sparse sound. House has in short created a brilliant album of thoughtful, moody transitions and discovery. DV

 Full review…


S.

Miles Cooper Seaton  ‘Phases In Exile’   (Ascension Hall Recordings)

This music is a cinematic poetic recitation, an eloquent art object; sticking to the blurry lines of your shadow while you float through this existence, this street, this town-deserted-or this day, mundane. That dreamy music with the aura of a long lost ocean is the sound of the beyond: you will see, in a cloud, half stunt postures of people trying to deal with mourning. Their eyes wide open yet unsure of how to breathe. And while they exhale, the music pours as if descending from a kind heaven, nested in peace, cooing for drenched figures of the earth.

Miles Cooper Seaton is the ghost who reaches out, entrusting us with a sensation of hope and relief, tranquility, a loophole, mindfulness. Forgive and forget. In the morning dreamers try to get a hold of their visions, trying to catch a glimpse of that faint reality; Miles’ music is lingering too. It tinkles and echoes with a slowness. This is how the rhythm goes, lingering among a field of green, yellow barns, with an horizon of blue and grey shades, some drops sweep the face of a child who understands it all. The clamorous pearls are just from the fierce-y wind. Inside he is all right. The album is dense and tortured. Inside he is all right; the child has grown, and given us these notes. Ayfer Simms

Full review…


Sentidor  ‘Am-Par-Sis’  (Sounds And Colours)

A most congruous if challenging futuristic Rio de Janeiro psychogeography remix of sounds and ideas, built around the transformed cut-up samples and influence of one of Rio’s most famous sons, Tom Jobim, and his post-bossa nova peak leftfield experiment Passarim, fellow compatriot and burgeoning experimental music star João Carvalho creates one of the year’s most haunting and magnificent lush ambient suites, Am-Par-Sis.

Synonymous and celebrated for bringing bossa nova to the world, Jobim’s explorations outside the genre had gone largely unnoticed. Under his alter ego, Sentidor, Carvalho sheds new light on the legendary artist’s innovative experiments whilst also drawing on the drone, ambient, trance, funk carioca, classical and plunderphonics styles to create a uncertain multi-textured augur for future generations to ponder over.

On, what is the most traversing of ambient and collage concept albums, he poses a number of questions, such as: How would Jobim’s record be interpreted by a new generation whose connection with the past and the rest of the world has been cut? How would the record be used in creating new rituals? How can art be reorganized and rebuilt democratically? It also questions the very ideas of what constitutes as the public domain in the modern world and whether something sacred should be preserved or rather gather dust and slowly turn into something else.

Via the power of a seamless, amorphous soundtrack of ethereal pulchritude, cascading veiled piano, ether Panda Bear like voices and song, atmospheric manipulations, transmogrified melodies, whispery winds, Neu! boat trips, reversed samples and magic Carvalho sets out to mull over and articulate these questions. DV

See exclusive track feature…


Shadow  ‘Sweet Sweet Dreams’  (Analog Africa)

For the first time branching out towards the Caribbean Islands, Africa Analog turn their attention to one of Trinidad & Tobago’s most enigmatic music stars, Winston Bailey, better known as Shadow.

Previously marooned on a desert island of obscurity, panned by critics at the time and failing to sale, Bailey’s bouncing scintillating Soca-boogie and Calypso hybrid lovesick dance floor tracks were ahead of their time. Unlike anything coming out of the islands at the time, these often bright, swaying pop love spurned and springy ballads took the island’s sound into the cosmos.

Bailey started out in the mid 70s reinvigorating the Calypso genre, adding a slick production to the atavistic roots sound that made its way across the Atlantic via the slave trade, and giving it panache and a slinky radiating candour. Though originally used as a tool for social commentary, the synonymous rhythm of the Caribbean is channeled into a number of space age love songs. But despite the lamentable aspects, Bailey’s vocals are sunbaked with ripe swoon and lilting soul, fit for the dancefloor.

A missing masterpiece waiting to be (re) discovered, Sweet Sweet Dreams is simply a beautiful pop album. DV


John Sinclair & Youth  ‘Beatnik Youth Ambient’  (Ironman Records)

Synonymous for steering and kicking out the jams in his short role as manager of Detroit’s renowned rebel rousing motherfuckers The MC5, renegade poet, scholar, activist and establishment rattler John Sinclair is also remembered for his free radical zeal and dalliances with the law – leading to a short spell in the slammer. Keeping his hand in so to speak, but taking up residency in Amsterdam – a much safer bet -, the beatnik jazz sage continued, and as you can hear on this latest recording, continues, to record and perform in a host of setups with a multitude of contributors and backing bands.

The appropriately (in every sense) entitled Beatnik Youth Ambient mini LP is a foretaste, and as the title implies, ambient treatment version of material from a full-length album, released a couple of months later. The “Youth” of that title refers of course to the Killing Joke bassist turn in-demand producer Martin Glover. Arguably one of the most consistent producers over the last few decades in the UK, Glover, under his Youth alter ego, has taken on more or less most forms of music and worked on both commercial and underground experimental projects. He now provides Sinclair’s “literary synthesis” with a suitable “beatnik ambient” soundtrack: a serialism quartet of turmoil, turbulent jazz and dreamier trance.

Running through a vivid purview of postwar counterculture, bringing to life the energy and excitement that writers such as Kerouac (who gets referenced a lot) captured when seeing the Bebop jazz revolution and its great proponents perform, Sinclair delivers a magical enthusiastic experience on another track, evoking Thelonious Monk’s 1957 LP of the same name, Brilliant Corners. Titans of American beatnik and psychedelic literature lineup, Burroughs, Ginsberg and Neal Cassady (“…had the ability to park a car anywhere”, just one of his talents alongside his status as the “human bridge between the 50s and 60s.”), rubbing shoulders with jazz music’s new guard Lester Young, Byrd and Gillespie; immortalized by Sinclair to “head music” cosmos of jazzy lamenting woe, ghostly squawking and hooting saxophone and swirling mirages.

If anything, Beatnik Youth Ambient leaves the listener pining for a lost age; Sinclair’s evocative prose and delivery lifted (and cradled at times) by Youth’s congruous seething tensions and floaty dream-like production, which enthrall me to once again get stuck in to the “beat generation” and spin those Savoy label jazz totem recordings again. A prompt for the present times, the zeal of the postwar “baby boomers” (those with a soul anyway) counterculture not necessarily translating to generations X, Y and Z, even if it is needed; Sinclair’s language is nevertheless just as powerfully descriptive and energizing now as it was over forty years ago. DV

Full review…


Širom  ‘I Can Be A Clay Snapper’  (tak:til/Glitterbeat)

With an unspecified, but as the name suggests, emphasis on the “tactile”, Glitterbeat Records new imprint label gives a welcome platform to entrancing experimental tonal performances and sonic polygenesis traverses alike. In the latter camp is this Slovenian peregrination suite from the landlocked, Alps nestling country’s visceral sonic conjurors, Širom.

Evoking memories and feelings, both real and imagined, with a soundtrack thick with atavistic connections, the trio of punk and post-rockers turn experimental folk and acoustic instrumental cartographers convey a personal relationship to their homeland, on their second album together under the Širom banner.

Yet whatever the backgrounds, traces of North Africa, the Adriatic and the Middle East, the performances sail scenically through a dreamy otherworldly representation of Slovenia: Oriental, alien and Balkan visions permeate the plucked, malleted, chimed and purposefully played compositions, which subtly and rather cleverly build up complicated layers and various overlapping time signatures during the course of their journey.

Theremin like siren voices drift in and out, enacting the myth and seraph, whilst on the watermill turning Everything I Sow Is Fatal Sun Ra travels with John Cale and Pharaoh Sanders on a pilgrimage to Samarkand. The most recurring sounds however pay testament to the Balkans ghosts. The folkloric stirrings, lulls and yearning of Slovenia’s past bordering both a pan-Europa of migration and grief – stretching back a millennia – are transduced into often haunted vistas and metaphysical passages.

A most impressive and expansive inaugural Balkans travail; different from the previous two releases on this burgeoning new imprint, yet keeping to the tactile, accentuate and imaginative remit, whilst conjuring up mystical new soundscapes. DV

Full review…


Solo Collective  ‘Part One’  (Nonostar)

Gathered together in a congruous union under the Solo Collective umbrella, the Anglo-German partnership of virtuoso performers/composers Anne Müller, Seb Reynolds and Alex Stolze take turns in the spotlight and provide supporting roles with a cast of additional collaborators on the chamber pop meets traversing evocations suite Part One.

An interconnected triangle of familiar themes and musicality, with each musician also individually experimenting and creating their own solo pathway, in their respective field, all three artists have crossed paths and worked together previously on a variety of projects; some of which, in alternative neo-classical stripped versions, appear on this album. For instance, the original pizzicato acoustic-electronic Don’t Try To Be, from the violinist Stolze’s 2016 EP, Mankind Animal, now features Müller’s yearning emphatic cello, and is striped of its synthesizer electronics in favour of woodblock percussion and doleful low bass notes to create a more tragic and sad version.

A showcase for a particularly harmonious partnership of individuals with a pan-Europa vision of collaboration and crossing sublime musical boundaries, Part One – of what I hope will be a continuing venture – proves to be a stirring neo-classical ambient collection of solo and ensemble performances; each artists sharing and pooling their obvious talents to find a common interplay and a bond to create a challenging but mostly beautiful album. DV

Full review…


Sparks  ‘Hippopotamus’  (BMG)

Bombastically pitched as a “comeback” album, unseasonal followers and those not so familiar with the maverick siblings Sparks career may have been under the impression that the much-hyped Hippopotamus marked some kind of return from an imagined sabbatical, a retirement or an emergence from the wilderness. It was nothing of the sort of course, their last official Sparks albums may have been released in 2008 (Exotic Creatures Of The Deep) and 2009 (The Seduction Of Ingmar Bergman), yet they also went on to collaborate with Franz Ferdinand in 2015 for the mighty team-up FFS. Three albums in seven years isn’t bad, considering the rate most groups knock out records these days, and considering Ron Mael is in his early seventies and brother Russell is only a few years behind.

Maybe what the media meant was a return to form. Admittedly – apart from FFS, which made our albums of the year in 2015 – the music hasn’t quite matched the quality of their 70s output or indeed the 2002 triumph Lil’ Beethoven and the 2006 follow-up Hello Young Lovers. Hippopotamus I can thankfully say is very much Sparks at the top of their game.

The Gilbert And Sullivan of cerebral pop music takes the form to ever-new intelligent heights of absurdity and revelation. Daring to merge intellectual ideas and themes into an art form; yet never laborious, condescending or aloof, every song on this latest theatrical rock and pop suite features an infectious melody, satirical but heartfelt clever lyricism and the usual Noel Coward piano witticisms (updated for the modern age of course).

Communicating both the frankly bizarre and the almost insignificant of contemporary foibles (from the middle class anxiety of stylish furniture design, on the Kierkegaard ponders Scandinavian Design, to the difficult to usually rhyme with anything in any song, surreal assortment of metaphorical, or very real, items and figureheads tormenting Russell in his room on the title track), the Mael Brothers frame all their ditties within a melodramatic often plaintive setting of levity.

Minor concertos and pop triumphs abound, as Sparks use the usual assortment of figureheads, including Edith Piaf and an ambiguous French film director auteur, to articulate their feelings on an assortment of theatrical and operatic (the almost aria style domestic imaginings of The Macbeths on the Living With The Macbeths duet) anthems – though of course, Piaf “always said it better”.

Cleverly creating social and political satire and commentary without the rage, finger wagging and virtue signaling, Sparks remain one of the most consistent bands – or duos if you like – in music history; five decades on and still producing epic pop, the likes of which has seldom been equaled. DV


Strange U  ‘#LP4080’  (High Focus)

“#LP4080 has a deftness that allows it to be daft; a first class bizarre ride to and from the far side”. Our Daily Bread 234, Feb 17

It’s always fun and games when King Kashmere/The Iguana Man/Lord Rao starts spraying jocular, juvenile sci-fi syllables and delirious, crowd-pleasing hooks at will. When he hits hyperspace, he’s an unstoppable force of nature few can compare to – “you enjoy buying trainers, a person like me enjoys firing lasers” – though his intergalactic court jester act belies the wicked yarns he spins about our alien overlords and fantastical set-plays (environmental health, relationships, politics) that are closer than you think.

Helming a future primitive craft with Dr Zygote, mechanic to an 8-bit jalopy with head knocks and funky splutters aplenty, Strange U float through the cosmos as an entertainingly erratic two-man crew. Despite being recorded in a studio far, far away, LP#4080 has got its head screwed on with attention to the fundamentals – the MC-producer combination, prime beats and rhymes, a concept that works, and a spectacle promising multiple revisits. MO


T.

Tamikrest  ‘Kidal’  (Glitterbeat Records)

Still without a homeland, though liberated from their draconian partners, the Tuareg are once again left, as wanderers in their own lands, the unofficial guardians and custodians of the Saharan wilderness. For now only a dream, best realized and protested through music, the rock’n’roll Bedouins Tamikrest emerge once more from the barren landscape with a message of “power and resistance”, on their fourth, equally entrancing, album Kidal. Paying homage to the strategically and spiritually important cultural trading town of the title, the highly-acclaimed (and rightly so) Tamikrest exude both the sadness and suffering of the dispossessed people who cling to the southwestern Saharan hub that is Kidal: a town which has seen its fair share of fighting, fought over, conquered and reconquered over time, it remains a symbolic home to the Tuareg. This is after all the town that nurtured them and where it all began.

Preserving an increasingly endangered ancestral culture and language, Tamikrest’s cause cannot be separated from their music. Yet, rather than protest with bombast or angry rhetoric, they articulate their woes with a poetic, lyrically sauntering cadence. Oasmane Ag Mosa’s earthy lead vocals resonate deeply, even if his timbre maintains a stoic dignified pitch. Backed by Aghaly Ag Mohamedine and Cheick Ag Tiglia on backing and duets, a lulling sweetness transcends, which on occasions adds a certain romanticism to the impassioned struggle. Swaying effortlessly between the meandering and up-tempo, the accentuated dynamics of Mosa and Paul Salvagnac’s entwined, untethered and contoured guitar work, Mohamedine’s “gatherer” Djembe rope-tuned goblet drumming, Nicolas Grupp’s askew backbeats and Tiglia’s smooth, free-roaming bass lines transport the listener to the mystical topography of the desert.

Assiduous, confident and articulate, the musicianship shows not so much a progression as a balance between the meditative and rock’n’roll spirit of the Tuareg musical resistance. Tamikrest are as brilliant as ever musically, and Kidal is, despite its plaintive and lamentable subject woes, a beacon of hope in an ever-darkening world of uncertainty. DV

Full review…


Tanzania Albinism Collective  ‘White African Power’  (Six Degrees Records)

In so many respects a “spiritual follow-up” to the acclaimed producer Ian Brennan’s Grammy Award-nominated Zomba Prison Project and follow-on from the equally evocative and raw Hanoi Masters sessions, White African Power attentively and respectfully draws out the repressed voices of the Albino community in Tanzania. Brennan’s productions often serve as a kind of hands-off form of creative counseling and healing; helping people to overcome trauma, such as the survivors of Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia. He’s renowned for being the most inconspicuous of in the field and on location producers, letting the atmosphere and elements, the moment if you like, and even serendipity bleed into the performances he captures for posterity. And the production methodology used for this latest project, recording the songs of the Standing Voice Community of Ukerewe, is no different.

A safe haven, Ukerewe, where Ian travelled to in 2016 to document their plight, is the largest inland island in Africa, only reachable by a four-hour ferry ride. Its community is, hardly surprising, haunted by their experiences. Self-conscious, avoiding eye contact, it proved a difficult task for the producer to encourage his subjects to open up. But open up they did, and the results are often surprisingly melodious, poetic, and diaphanous if raw and emotional. Far from a harrowing catalogue of despair and pity, the 23 recordings on this collection prove illuminating.

Fitting no obvious style, these amorphous performances do however resonate both with the delta blues of Louisiana and the stark, stripped down and earthy blues of South East Asia. Touches of raw African dusty tradition do appear, ascending and descending alongside gospel and soulful voices, naturally echoed, sighed and open-heartedly sung with a pure vulnerability. They’re accompanied either by stark lo fi electric guitar performances, that range from scratchy, straggly proto-punk to slower scrabbly emotive twangs, or an acoustic backing of rubber-band and bottle shaking percussion. Standing out production wise though is the classical – imagine Brahms on harpsichord transferred to East Africa in the 80s – reverberating cradling deep soulful ballad, Never Forget The Killings.

Ian Brennan coaxes another startling, eye opening, set of recordings from the victims of trauma; one that proves every bit as impressive as it does plaintive and sad. The collective will astonish, if not surprise listeners, those suppressed voices, thankfully released and given an international platform, sound emotionally honest and revelatory. DV

Full review…


Terry  ‘Remember’  (Upset The Rhythm)

The disarming world-weary punk and quirky pop touting quartet of Melbourne scenesters, banding together under the ubiquitous Terry moniker, follow up a prolific run of 2016 EPs and their debut LP with another acerbic witted, snappy melodious release of profound disenchantment and wistful “wish fulfillment”.

Continuing with the shared girl/boy dynamic of lulling, placeable idiosyncratic vocals and flexible punk, country and new wave bubblegum backing, Terry look to expand their repertoire on Remember. The combined musical savvy and experiences of band members Amy Hill (of Constant Mongrel and School Of Radiant Living), Al Montfort (UV Race, Dick Diver, Total Control), Zephyr Pavey (Eastlink, Russell St Bombings and also Total Control) and Xanthe White (Mick Harvey, Primo) push the quartet into all kinds of nonchalant mischief. The gang embraces nonplussed French new wave chanteuse vibes on the brilliant breezy, mosey country lilting, Toy Love meets Serge Gainsbourg Take Me To The City (one of the tracks of the summer), and snappy, bouncy indie synth pop on Rio. At their most raucous, rough and ready to tumble, Terry softens the edges of The Damned on both their keystone kops rave-up Start The Tape and spiky frazzling Give Up The Crown.

Suggesting nothing more rebellious than a cheeky smoke behind the bike sheds, the group’s knockabout catchy hooks and charm cloak a personal profound response to the political and personal anxieties and dramas of the times. And they do this with a certain aloof coolness and adroit ear for a great tune, making this 2017’s most melodious and catchy album of knowing pop slanted punk. DV

Full review…


Vieux Farka Touré  ‘Samba’  (Six Degrees Records)

 

A studio recording with a difference, played out and developed live in front of just fifty lucky people in Saugerties, N.Y., Vieux Farka Touré’s latest album blurs the boundaries between performance and the processes of making an album.

Ever the consummate maestro and backed by an equally accomplished band of musicians, there was some initial apprehension on Touré’s part about allowing an audience into the studio. Though we have the finished product, free of any mistakes, restarts and disagreements, it seems this audience far from unnerving the band, egged it on, with the results sounding effortless and natural. There were overdubs of course and one of the songs was recorded back home in Mali – the calabash driven Ni Negarba. But far from cutting corners or relying on the back catalogue, Touré has fashioned an entirely new songbook of vocal and instrumental material for Samba. Some of which amorphously touches upon unfamiliar influences, including reggae on the unapologetically roots-y swaying Ouaga.

Touré is as the Songhai title of his new album Samba translates, the second son of the late Ali Farka Touré, a doyen of the Mali music scene himself who left an indelible mark. If we expand on the title’s meaning, “Samba” is a byword for “one who never breaks”, “who never runs from threats, who is not afraid”. It is even said that those adorned with the name are “blessed with good luck.” Inspired by his ancestry, imbued with three generations, Touré’s album is suffused with special tributes to his family. Outside the family sphere, Touré confronts both Mali’s recent Jihadist takeover – only stopped and defeated by the intervention of the country’s former colonial masters, France – on the radiantly rippling, chorus of voices, funky blues number Homafu Wawa, and environmental issues on the dexterously nimble-fingered bluesy rock, Nature.

The almost never-ending efflux, the constant lapping waves of textures that Touré plays, which offer a cyclonic bed on which to add the deftest licks, have never sounded so sagacious and free flowing. This ain’t no Saharan Hendrix at work, this is something else entirely, and better for it. This is the devotional, earthy soul of Mali, channeled through a six-string electric guitar. DV

Full review…


V.

VVV   ‘Bozo Boyz’  (VVV)

“The trio take apart prowling club beats powered by the high beams of an 80s sportscar”. RnV, Nov 17

Preceded by Apocalypse Trent poking fun yet completely understanding modern hip-hop’s rules, the Nottingham trifecta of Vandal Savage, Cappo and Juga-Naut are a heavy rotation of individual voices.

Rhymes and word associations – pop culture, mind’s eye observations, opaque battle bars covered in enough 80s hairspray to tear the ozone layer a new one – jut out at free-flowing, at times unworkable angles, yet are held together by undeniable dope infused with a carried over drop of cheek.

Flicking VVVs at club beats, a slim line 80s synth chassis is rolled out to maximum effect (an evolutionary eye-opener for East Midlands rap fans – this won’t be their usual milk and two sugars). Both chilled and chilling, sonically Bozo Boyz lives an alternate life of soundtracking a slasher movie making a wrestler’s entrance to the ring. One of the more idiosyncratic hip-hop picks on this list, it’s VVV for victory. MO


Various   ‘Hidden Musics 4: Abatwa: Why Did We Stop Growing Tall?’
(Glitterbeat Records)

Ian Brennan, yet again, probing the furthest, most inhospitable and outright dangerous places in the world to record marginalized voices, journeys to the post genocide borderlands of Rwanda on the fourth volume of Glitterbeat Records illuminating Hidden Musics series.

Taking the unmarked, haphazard, road (less traveled) to the edges of Rwanda, avoiding the animosity and embers of vengeance that still burn and remain between the country’s minority Tutsis and majority Hutu communities, Brennan visited and recorded for posterity the Abatwa tribe’s seldom heard lament, anger and incredible soulful, if raw, blues.

The Abatwa name remains mostly unknown outside Africa, that’s because, due to their limited growth, we know them better as the ‘Pygmy’. A derogatory name loaded with infamy, yet preferred by the very people it derides, the tribe rather that put-down than (as Brennan puts it) “the official PC mouthful/post-genocidal replacement: The people who were left behind because of the facts of Rwandan history.”

What you get from this community is battery powered electronics and rusty, ramshackle dusty instruments coming together in hybrids that evoke ritual, the ceremonial but equally the blues, soul and hip-hop; all played with an undeniably emotional Rwandan verve and lilt. Make no mistake; this is performance in its most deconstructive raw form. Devoid of embellishments and overbearing production, recorded in situ with only the rudimentary elements and atmosphere for company, and it sounds great. It is nothing short of revelatory; field recordings of hope and recovery created in the face of despair. DV

Full review…


Various  ‘Pop Makossa: The Invasive Dance Beat Of Cameroon 1976-1984’
(Analog Africa)

The latest in a tenure adventure of excavating lost treasures from the African continent; Analog Africa’s main man Samy Ben Redjeb once more digs deep, sifting through a daunting mountain-size pile of records and recordings as he draws the spotlight on Cameroon’s Makossa scene of the 70s and 80s.

Originally the traditional rhythm and funeral dance of Cameroon’s Sawa and Essewé peoples, later transformed in the country’s cities as it collided with everything from merengue and rumba to Highlife and disco, Makossa, which means, “to dance” in the Cameroon Douala language, is a highly loose and adaptable style: as you will hear on this twelve-track collection of hits and rarities from the golden era of pop makossa.

Honing in on the period when makossa rubbed-up against funk and disco, this balmy dance beat compilation’s pulse is luminous and fluid and most importantly, funky. This is in major part down to some of the most smooth, bouncing, slick and relaxed but constantly busy of bass lines – Cameroon’s bass players rightly revered as among the best throughout the world – and the constantly shuffling hi-hats, tom rolls and splashing drums.

Every bit as “invasive”(and infectious) as the extended album title suggests, the classy pop massoka sound – once considered the unofficial national sound of Cameroon – is waiting to be rediscovered and let loose once again. In what seems like a recent shift in direction at the Analog Africa label, with the emphasis on the late 70s and 80s – from last year’s Space Echo collection from Cape Verde to reissues of Trinidad & Tobago star Shadow’s Sweet Sweet Dreams and the Benin solo singer Vincent Ahehehinnou’s Best Woman – this latest survey continues to unearth musical treats from the same era, albeit in different geographical settings, yet sharing many of the same production and trends traits. In short, another classy sun-basking exposé of the most sauntering, scintillating African pop from one of the top labels in the field. DV

Full review…


Vukovar  ‘Puritan’  (The Brutalist House)

Following in the tradition of their three-syllable sloganist album titles, Vukovar’s fourth LP drums home the Puritan mantra and analogies; a cleansing if you will of the status quo, a year zero, and perhaps also a return to the roots and communal deliverance of protest in music – not, I hope, the ‘puritanical’ steeple hat and buckle shoe wearing bible bashing of zealots, burning heretics at the stake, nor the bloody zeal of so many badly turned-out revolutions that end up creating just as terrible a reign of tyranny. The only fires here are the metaphorical kind; a funeral pyre of mediocrity, a bonfire of vanities, the-bland-leading-the-bland towards a conversion of raw intensity, dangerous, shamanistic performed anarchistic rock’n’roll: well I think that’s the idea.

As the band’s previous album, Fornication showed, Vukovar have at least listened to many of the right bands; released at the start of the year, this amorphous, transmogrified covers style collection featured reconfigured homages to a host of iconic luminaries including David Sylvian, Coil, The Monks, The Birthday Party and Neu!. Cultish in a manner, the band’s influences and manifesto statements of propaganda intent, plus allusions to cultural regicidal and ability to shrink from publicity – even self-sabotage any signs of success or promotion – suggests a band that takes itself very seriously. Yet even with countless references to history’s outsiders, philosophers, discontent mavericks, revolutionaries and demons throughout their previous trio of albums, and the elegiac resignation that shadows them, they waltz sublimely (for a majority of the time), rather than rage in romanticized contempt, as Olympus slowly grumbles.

Between the Gothic skulking and crystalline rays of shared 80s synth new romanticism Vukovar wander transfixed in a nightmare state of both despair and indolent antagonism; with stark lyrics more descriptively visceral than forced down the listener’s throat. Donning the vestiges of the Puritan, the front man, an amalgamation vocally of both Ian Curtis and Bernard Sumner, sets the scene (“I am a sinful man, yet an honest man”) to a backing track of slung low growled bass, Jesus and Mary Chain’s bastardize Spector drum death knells and the miasma threat of Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds on the opening inflicted and gradually ascendant Nietzsche propound Übermensch.

The most complete and best produced encapsulation of Vukovar’s sound and venom yet, balancing both their experimental raw and ritualistic live performances with melancholic post-punk, and even brooding new romanticism pop, Puritan offers a travail through the dirge and gloom of our (end) times with all its sinful and cleansing, often biblical, connotations and language. Though it also often sounds like some kind of personal tortured Nick Cave love requiem, unfolding in the midst of chaos, looking over the edge into the abyss, the heretics taking over the asylum. DV

Full review…


Y.

Your Old Droog   ‘Packs’  (Fat Beats)

“Working a number of hustles and stakes-high dice games, with a penchant for humour and words to the wise on a varied album with no time to waste”.  RnV, Mar 17

Your Old Droog’s crowning glory pays the utmost attention to album constructs. Packs is 11 tracks all vying to be the jump-off, featuring skits that help rather than hinder, and guests like Danny Brown and Edan giving the action a hot cameo.

In running his own Grand Theft Auto route through New York (if there’s ever a Baby Driver sequel, or Marvel need a new street hero, surely Droog’s your man), storylines find time to dispense worldly wisdom that you’d be foolish to leave unheeded, and punchlines show that firing from that borderline meh mouth of his, is always smarter than letting off a few from the trigger finger. A 30 minute car chase always in complete control, cool with wrenching the steering wheel off-road before resuming its day-to-day cruising, and whose crucially compact composition makes it a red letter day for the rewind button. The Nas comparisons are now ancient history. MO


Z.

Msafiri Zawose  ‘Uhamiaji’  (Soundway Records)

Handing on the baton, so to speak, to another generation, the late great Gogo Tanzanian musician Hukwe Zawose’s equally talented son Msafiri takes up the reigns on his latest album for Soundway Records, Uhamiaji.

From the heartlands of Tanzania, Msafiri in collaboration with the much-respected Santuri platform – enablers and promoters for a much neglected East African music scene – and SoundThread’s Sam Jones has created a vibrant and sauntering, drifting adventure in dub and Afrofuturism jazz from the gogo traditions. Building to a degree on his father’s own 2002 experimental collaboration with ambient electronica producer Michael Brook, on the album Assembly, Msafiri takes his heritage into new and expansive sonic territories whilst intrinsically sounding African.

Buzzy, bright, hypnotic and at times trickling like watery vibes, this amorphous album is an odyssey of the lilting, danceable, meditative and peaceable. A peregrination of mystery, a journey across acoustic and electric frontiers musically and vocally, Uhamiaji is both a most beautiful and imaginative album. DV


Posted by domv
Filed in Uncategorized ·Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
8 Comments »

Quarterly Playlist Revue: Part 2: Sparks, Shabazz Palaces, Faust, Vieux Farka Toure…

June 27, 2017

PLAYLIST
SELECTIONS: DOMINIC VALVONA, MATT OLIVER AND AYFER SIMMS





The second quarterly revue of 2017 gathers together a faithful purview of the last three months of reviews and articles on the Monolith Cocktail. Myself, Matt Oliver and Ayfer Simms have chosen a mere smattering of our favourite music from that period; featuring both tunes from albums/singles/EPs/collections we’ve reviewed or featured on the site and some we just never had the time to include.

Our customary eclectic playlist features synthesized peregrinations and quirky electronica from Ippu Mitsui, AXL OTL and Swamp Sounds; forlorn desert blues and experimental polygenesis traverses and bombast from Ifriqiya Electrique, King Ayisoba, Tanzania Albinism Collective and Songhoy Blues; a smattering of choice cuts from Matt Oliver’s Rapture & Verse hip-hop review, including Raekwon, Prozack Turner, Brother Ali and Shabazz Palaces; plus pop makossa vibes from Cameroon, aria electric guitar cosmological paeans from Anna Coogan, heavy doom psychedelia from the Black Angels and much, much more. In all: A sense of anxiety. A sense of angst. A sense of unease. And a sense of wonder.



Tracks:

Ippu Mitsui  ‘Bug’s Wings’  (review)
AXL OTL  ‘Ondes Beta’
Swamp Sounds  ‘Skull Disco’  (review)
In Flagranti  ‘Sidewalk Salsa’
Flamingods  ‘Mixed Blessings’
King Ayisoba (ft. Wanlov da Kubolor & Big Gad)  ‘Africa Needs Africa’  (review)
Ifriqiyya Electrique  ‘Arrah arrah abbaina-Bahari-Tenouiba’  (review)
Tanzania Albinism Collective  ‘Tanzania Is Our Country, Too’  (review)
Vieux Farka Toure  ‘Bonheur’  (review)
Tanzania Albinism Collective  ‘Mistreated’
Colin Stetson  ‘Spindrift’
Uncle Pops & The Dumbloods  ‘Harry Smith’s Paper Planes’  (review)
Raekwon  ‘Crown Of Thorns’
BocaWoody (ft, Blu Rum 13)  ‘At It Again’  (review)
The Last Skeptik (ft. Scrufizzer, Mikill Pane, Dream Mclean, Al The Native)  ‘Drumroll Please’ (review)
DJ Format & Abdominal  ‘Still Hungry’  (review)
Prozack Turner  ‘Obsession’  (review)
Danger Mouse & Run The Jewels  ‘Chase Me’  (review)
Ramson Badbonez & DJ Fingerfood  ‘Hypnodic’  (review)
Jehst (ft. Eric Biddines & Strange U)  (review)
Brother Ali  ‘Own Light (What Hearts Are For)’  (review)
Shabazz Palaces (ft. Thaddillac)  ‘Shine A Light’  (review)
El Michels Affair (ft. Lee Fields & The Shacks)  ‘Tearz’  (review)
Alex Stolze  ‘Don’t Try To Be’  (review)
Earlham Mystics  ‘Truth’
Andrew Wasylyk  ‘Under High Blue Skies’  (review)
Bill Loko  ‘Nen Lambo’  (review)
Vincent Ahehehinnou  ‘Best Woman’
Songhoy Blues  ‘Bamako’
The Black Angels  ‘Hunt Me Down’  (review)
Faust  ‘Lights Flicker’  (review)
Oiseaux-Tempete  ‘Baalshamin’
Anna Coogan  ‘The Lonely Cry Of Space And Time’  (review)
Sergio Beercock  ‘Jester’  (review)
Sparks  ‘What The Hell Is It This Time?’
Der Plan  ‘Lass die Katze stehn’  (review)
Arcade Fire  ‘Creature Comfort’
Lucy Leave  ‘Talk Danish To Me’
Vassals  ‘Sea Spells’  (review)
Mount Song  ‘Nothing’  (review)
Carlo Mazzoli  ‘Avalanche Blues’  (review)
Happyness  ‘Tunnel Vision On Your Part’  (review)


Posted by domv
Filed in Uncategorized ·Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Leave a Comment »