Monolith Cocktail Blog

DOMINIC VALVONA’S ESSENTIAL NEW MUSIC REVIEW ROUNDUP

Welcome back after the Christmas holidays to the inaugural 2018 edition of my TOF reviews; plenty to get through, so without further ado let’s have a quick run through of this month’s releases.

In a blaze of transmogrified 80s inspirations, Merrill Garbus kicks off 2018 with a honed and vibrant new Tune-Yards LP, I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life, and Danish artist Soho Rezanejad poses a striking celestial and throbbing distressed staccato shimming opus on gender, roots and futurism politics with her debut LP Six Archetypes. From the new Spanish imprint, Insane Muzak, we have an extensive collection of diy style cassette tape recordings and mayhem from Spain’s burgeoning underground scene of the 80s. Making their debut on Ian Button’s cottage industry Kent label Gare du Nord, Estuary trio The Cold Spells offer up their first incantation style psychedelic and folk long player. With an already packed schedule of new release and bands planned for 2018, Stolen Body Records kick off the year with the space rock garage and shoegaze of Detroit’s Moonwalks, and before they plow forward with a busy roster of new releases, I take a look at the last two albums of 2017 from the Greek ‘boutique’ label, Sound In Silence: a heavenly ascendant ambient drone collection from A Lily and an emotional classical meets Baroque and electronica suite from Jason Sweeney.

Tune-Yards   ‘I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life’
4AD,  18^th January 2018

Reassembling the alternating lowercase and capital letter typography of her polygenesis nom de plume for a less rambunctious mnemonic on this latest offering, Merrill Garbus refines and pars down the kaleidoscopic Haitian and bubblegum neo-geo pop of 2015’s Nikki Nack triumph for something more attuned to the post-Trump epoch. Still under the Tune-Yards banner, officially billed as a duo, Garbus is back with her longtime collaborators and foil Nate Brenner on this ruminating dance album.

Also still clattering with a glimmer of those Hispaniola and African rhythm, I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life mines that most popular of decades, the 80s, for its inspiration. Highly sophisticated and always inventive Garbus and Brenner bounce amorphously between Chicago House, electro, ESG and the merest hints of Lodger era Bowie – the feel and melody of African Nite Flights instantly springs to mind when listening to Colonizer. Dub scales and ponderous bass guitar, kinetic beats, lamenting trilling saxophone, modern pop R&B and synthesized whip cracking percussion are added to this colourful mix of dynamics.

Vocally and lyrically flexing Garbus’ voice throughout, from lullaby to bordering on gospel, the hot topics of the last two years are inwardly auspice and conveyed via repetitive sloganist repose, lines from personal experience and augers; much of which features a MPC transmogrified robotic vocal effect – Garbus says this is to counter the sincerity, though it adds an often warbled warped reverb and manipulation (trapped in the machine) to her voice, it odes little to diminish the emotional pull and anger.

Race, politics, ‘intersectional feminism’, and environmental concerns – a very apt burning California analogy appears on the nursery rhyme damnation ABC 123 – are all run through the vibrant, soulful electro fantasia of Tune-Yards most psychedelic pop signature. Clever, sharp, indicative of a weary worried section of outsider, I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life sounds like Grace Jones mixing it up with Deerhunter, St.Vincent and the LCD Soundsystem at the foot of Trump Towers.

V/A   ‘Golpea Tu Cerebro: Spanish Underground Cassette Culture 1980 – 1988’
Insane Muzak,  15^th January 2018

‘Rock music is dead. It’s absolutely repulsive.’ – Arturo Lanz (Disco Actualidad) 1981.

Unleashed in the dying embers of Franco’s dictatorial epoch, Spain’s generation X screamed and riled with an unchecked geyser like gush of industrial, avant-garde, noise and lo fi analogue electronica experimental defiance. Still confined to the outsiders underground status, Spain’s new guard, inspired by the punk and post developments of the UK and especially – as you’ll hear aped throughout this collection – Cabaret Voltaire, Psychic TV, Throbbing Gristle and SPK, let loose with a torrid of primal, often maniacal, and extreme sonic and vocal transmogrifications.

Set into motion by early pioneers of the scene such as Esplendor Geométrico (from Madrid) whose first single in 1981 and ‘fabled’ EGO 1 cassette release from ‘82 are both considered worthy exponents and torchbearers for the underground scene, a golden period is documented by Alex Carretero of Guerssen Records in a generous – if exhausting and challenging an experience – double album set; complete with scholarly liner notes and research.

Honing in on the cassette tape phenomenon especially, the platform medium of choice for a generation with scant resources any only the most basics of recording equipment, Carretero’s choice favourites track the key developments in a diy scene originally spread via fanzines and the burgeoning ‘free’ radio stations that began to pop up in the aftermath of Spain’s fascistic past.





Imbued by both Spain’s instigation of Surrealism, and to an extent its predecessor Dadaism, and by George Maciunas’ ludicrous Fluxus movement of 60s/70s America, including composers Nam June Paik and George Brecht, the cassette kids – and many of the artists behind these tracks were just that when they started out – channeled the absurd, the madness, into their political, often hostile, sound manipulations.

Be warned. Many of these tracks can test the patience: my neighbours must have thought I was torturing some poor screaming unfortunates next door, such is the agonizing distressed screams that feature heavily in these uncompromising mind fucks.

Fucked-up reel-to-reel and squealing tape manipulations abound as abstract white noise and obscured voices bark, pant, shrill and cry for help from beyond the void (check out an extract from Brigada Nadie’s Sin Título and Bulbo Raquídeo’s Cuando Me Entra El Teléle for starters – the translation of the later offering a surreal metaphorical description, ‘when the telephone enters me’).

Strangulated daemonic entities squeal in terrifying reverb madness (Línea Táctica Ambient Music For Empty Congress), a Tangerine Dream alien invasion force oscillates in orbit above Earth (Iéximal Jélimite La Noche De Las Vísceras Palpitantes), and a primal yodeling Tarzan is devoured by his own companions (ZusammenWachsen Sin Títule) on what is an often harrowing mix of experimental pain and lunacy.

Constantly fuzzy and distorted, there are however the odd signs of relief as Casio keyboard melodies, Kosmische style drones and swells and post-punk riffs prop up: for example, Oh-Casio-Ón (as the moniker suggests) switch on the Yellow Magic Orchestra accompaniment preset on Anuncios Pur Palabras, and El Coleccionista De Poliedros scrape together cutlery and what sounds like a churning washing machine drum to produce a Stone Age techno beat on Golpea Tu Cerebro. There’s even the tinkling of a transmogrified piano, a slurred and speeded-up Flamenco song and banshee singing hidden in amongst the gabbling tape spool fuckery.

From the primordial soup to the paranormal, the industrial to hallucinogenic. The pummeling punishment of a pneumatic drill to white noise ambience, there’s a constant reverberating atmosphere of distress and forbade; a sonic Guernica, a political howl from deep transduced via homemade equipment on the cheapest of mediums.

The inaugural release on Alex Carretero’s (appropriately named) new label, this extensive collection shines a fanzine style obsessive light on the Spanish underground, illuminating one of the country’s most avant-garde envelope-pushing decades of musical exploration and sonic pain. Not for the faint of heart.

The Cold Spells   ‘S/T’
Gare du Nord,  2^nd February 2018

Strange bucolic manifestations linger on the outskirts that divide East London and the border of Essex; the bedroom pastoral psychedelic troupe The Cold Spells, the latest group of Estuary dwellers to join Ian Button’s Kent label Gare du Nord, lurk on the edges like ghosts looking in.

Not so much a reference to weather fronts as an illusion to magic, the Morse code styled typography structured to resemble a traditional ‘Abracadabra’ incantation. Esoterically gentle and wistful, the trio’s debut long player is a gauze-y organic and ambiguous (to a point) affair of undulating ‘moss covered’ circuitry, folk, quintessential English psych, paisley patterned hallucinogens and Kosmische.

Communing with the ether, connecting with the psychogeography of their chosen environment – from the soft Wiccan with forebode travail of Thomswood Hill to the alluded to abandoned mental hospital waste ground near Hainault -, a host of spirits tune in and out of the continuous, though (as we’re told) not in a linear order, flowing suite of laudanum imbued Victoriana lyricism and Beatles-esque melody.

At any one time you can expect to hear not only the warping reversal effects and Magical Mystery Tour and transduced Eleanor Rigby lonely lament musicality of The Beatles but also shades of Nico, Robert Wyatt, Kaleidoscope, Shirley Collins, Cluster and Martin Carthy – The Ghosts Of Them What Didn’t Make It sounds like a WWI Western Front Jona Lewie.

Meanderingly evoking the age old themes of death, love and everything via the 60s halcyon embrace of Lewis Carroll and his strange acid dazed literary chums, a “painted wooden horse” both resembles the magical Freudian symbolism of Leonora Carrington’s children’s rocking horse and the Trojan tragedy Greek gift horse as a metaphor for escaping pressures and misunderstanding: mounting a most sad immobile steed, going nowhere.

As I’ve already stated, The Cold Spells is a quintessential English record, with its daemonic countryside – a place of beauty but atavistic surreal dangers and magic too – and seafaring rich tapestry of analogy. Channeling an age of ghostly memories, the ancestors inhabit the band’s present to address the here and now concerns of a troubled, unstable world. A most brilliant, magical if troubled album.

Moonwalks   ‘In Light (The Scales In The Frame)’
Stolen Body Records,   January 26^th 2018

At least geographically close to the spirit of the Motor City, if generations apart, Detroit’s Moonwalks brood in the shadows of the counterculture doyens that made it such an infamous breeding ground for snarling attitude garage, psych and acid rock in the 60s and early 70s.

Transitioning, so we’re told, from ad hoc abandon warehouse performances as a diy glam psych rock troupe to experimental space rock stoners, spiraling in a vaporous gauzy vortex of 80s British Gothic and acid shoegaze influences, the Moonwalks make a certain progression on their second full length album, In Light.

Throwing up a wall of multilayered, almost continuous, twisting reverb and phaser effect guitars and motorik to ritualistic totem heavy drumming the feel of this, the group’s first international release, is that of a controlled interstellar maelstrom. Taking flight on the grinding trebly oscillating opener, A Little Touch Of Gravity, the lunar imbued group head into a musical vacuum of Hawkwind space rock influences. But by the Cultish esoteric Dust Is Magic we’re plunged dreamily into BRMC or The Black Angels on a Scorpio Rising kick territory.

Sometimes they sound like a black magic rites Byrds and at others like a doomed The Glass Family on a bum ride. Their curtain call, The Joy Of Geraniums, is the most odd vignette of all; taking the Moonwalks into a whistling led peyote-induced trip to the Mojave Desert.

Vocally malaise with only the odd lyric picked out by myself, the voices wafts between Siouxsie Sioux, Bauhaus’ Peter Murphy and Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell. Of course it fits the nebulous cosmic doom and dreamy psych style of the group perfectly, ambiguous, drifting through magical rites and petulant as it is.

Bringing one of Detroit’s burgeoning underground acts, hopefully, to a wider audience outside their home state, the most brilliant Bristol label Stolen Body Records kick off the year on a high with another worthy addition to their roster. I’ll be keeping an eye on the band’s progress for sure.

A Lily  ‘Ten Drones On Cassette’
Sweeney  ‘Middle Ages’
Both available now through Sound In Silence

From the fag end of 2017 a pair of cinematic ambient suites and emotionally yearned songs from the collectables boutique Athens label, Sound In Silence.

The purveyors of limited edition experiments and works of sonic art, the Greek label’s roster of artists has recently been boosted by the addition of the Brighton based musician James Vella, better known as A Lily. A member of the post-rock outfit Yndi Halda, Vella has also carved out a name for himself producing a mix of ambient, folktronica and classical releases for a myriad of labels, including Dynamophone, Fierce Panda and Love Thy Neighbour.

Navigating solo into heavenly ambient spheres, Vella’s first album for the label (his first full length record since 2011) is a subtle minimalist collection of cinematic drones that ascend and ebb between the mysterious and ethereal. Each track – inspired by or named after a specific person – on this cassette tape conceptualized album serenely hovers above the clouds. Atmospherically encircling smoky valleys (Hildur) or hauntingly mimicking angelic choral breaths (Jas), Vella’s sonic imaginings are mostly majestic, spiraling in a dappled intriguing light. There are however slightly denser evocations and signs of alien forbade: for instance, the otherworldly tubular and humming gateway to a parallel dimension soundtrack, Miles, and the Zeppelin engine leviathan gliding Konstantin.

A collection of pulchritude drone currents with ascendant and subtle gravitas, Ten Drones On Cassette is surprisingly melodic in places. Neither warm nor cold, but just right, it is a quality ambient experience, and cinematic in scope. Limited, as are all Sound In Silence releases, to only 200 handmade and hand-numbered copies – better than its original release, confined to just one copy of each track on a separate cassette – you can thankfully access it via the label’s Bandcamp page. And it rightly deserves a wider audience.





Complimentary but quite different, the second release from the label is a neo-soul classical tumult of emotional suffrage and mythical yearning love from the Adelaide musician, interactive artist and composer Jason Sweeney.

Recording for the last two decades under a stream of solo guises (Panoptique Electrical, Simpática) and with friends in various groups (far too many to name, but includes Pretty Boy Crossover, Sweet William and Par Avion), Sweeney pours his heart out, making use of his back catalogue and wider projects producing work for galleries and theatre, on his latest romantic heart-wrenching album, Middle Ages. As the title suggests – though could also be a reference to a middle age crisis – this album features a sort of Medieval trace of the choral; a hymn-like venerated beauty of yore. You could say it had a timeless quality, blending as it does the classical with subtle electronica elements, including misty and peaceable synth.

With collaborators Jed Palmer and Zoë Barry providing plaintive, accentuate and pining string arrangements (though they both also offer bass, guitar and accordion accompaniment) to Sweeney’s elegant melodic piano and mournful, Antony Hegarty meets James Blake, vocals, there’s a real elegiac quality to this mix of suffused Baroque poetry and sophisticated dramatic malady.

Thematically an album about men, or rather the spurned or requited love for them, but also a commentary on man’s place in the world, both old and contemporary, from birth to eventual death – check the morbidly curious full-circle-is-complete leitmotif of the curtain call, Burial. Beautifully sung, Sweeney exudes a sort of worshipped love for the Man Of Dreams on one of the album’s most tender enchanting paeans: Sweeney’s object of affection conjurer’s up a Greek warrior from the side of an earthenware vase. A love carried across an ancient timeline, there’s Talk Talk like odes to goddesses (Oh Goddess), Scott Walkeresque poetry (End Of Men) and swelling orchestral chamber pop diorama (Night At Spirit Lake).

Tender and fraught, moving and at times deeply sad, Middle Ages is a mature literary rich and mythological cerebral highlight from a musician at the top of his game.

Soho Rezanejad  ‘Six Archetypes’
Silicone Records,  19^th January 2018

Impressive in all its striking celestial and throbbing distressed staccato shimmer the experimental Danish artist Soho Rezanejad’s ethereal but equally futurist dystopian ambitious new LP, Six Archetypes, is a bold exploration of identity politics.

Interplaying six of the major character symbols (The Guardian, The Orphan, The Seeker, The Russian, The Idealist, The Prostitute) from the Tarot with Carl Jung’s Psychological writings on the collective and structured reality, Rezanejad weaves the complex contemporary themes of gender liquidity and self-discovery into an amorphous mix of electronica, darkwave and Gothic pop suites.

Though not always audible, Rezanejad’s untethered vocals – vaporous and often ghostly undulating in an aria style – whisper, coo, lull, pant, wrench and shout throughout the shard majestic and multilayered intricate backing of synthesized, programmed, modeled sounds. It’s a striking voice too. At times, such as the beautiful but serious stellar flight of the navigator, Bjork meets Chino Amobi, rotary opener Pilot The Guardian, she sounds like Nico. And at other times, such as the lush Bowie/Sylvian synchronicity, Soon, her vocals sound like a mixture of Jesus Zola and Lykke Li.

Whilst lyrics float, linger and carve through the microtonal melodies and ambient visages, we have to wait until the Actor’s Monologue to hear, in almost clarity, Rezanejad’s stark phaser modulated rapid flowing message of protest: advocating an escape from the restrictions of the body you were born into; that the mind is all; and that normality is suppression.

Fluidity musically as well as lyrically and thematically, there’s echoes of space-age darkness Massive Attack on the “moonless world” cry of the plaint Reptile, scuttling panoramic metallic techno on the heartbeat-based pulse of Intermezzo, and transmorphic avant-jazz on the broody romantic December Song.

Returning to the soil, so to speak, Rezanejad saves her most heartfelt yearn until the end; lovingly but starkly impassioned, singing in her ancestral tongue of Farsi – Rezanejad is the daughter of first generation Iranian immigrants – the National Council Of Resistance Of Iran’s alternative national song in protest against the state’s heavy-handed ideology. With its Middle Eastern exotic forbade and plaintive beauty, Elegie speaks of exile and proves to be a perceptive song to include in these anxious times as the world (well unlikely figures such as Trump at least) watches to see what happens next with the small but significant current demonstrations in the country that began last month in 2017 – calling for jobs and an end to economic failures, a movement of protest has spread throughout Iran and been met with strong resistance; though at the time of writing this review, at least 20 plus protesters had been killed and thousands arrested.

An ambitious debut opus of dark beauty and ominous despair, Six Archetypes is a highly impressive cosmology of gender, roots and futurism politics and narratives, perhaps already a 2018 creative highlight.