The monthly Digest includes a clutch of accumulated short new music reviews, the social inter-generational/eclectic and anniversary albums celebrating playlist and a piece from the Archives.
Photo Credit: Marilena Umuhoza Delli
___/NEW MUSIC REVIEWS SELECTION___
al niente ‘al niente’
(Discreet Archive) Released 10th July 2026
Drawing upon a diverse range of experiences, experiments and study, the Italian quartet of notable players known as al niente form a bond and untethered atonal, mostly non-musical and avant-garde language together to produce this atmospheric performance of the improvised and text-based compositions. The latter of which includes an interpretation of the composer and cellist Stefan Thut’s ‘Some, 1 – 4’, which finds a suitable spot amongst the near-quiet of nothingness and stirrings of resonated, shaved and hinging brass, the dry rasps and the steam-like released whistles of the flute. A double-bass thumbs or plucks a one note prompt (or reaction) as the silence acts not so much as a pause but a repeated use of space and abstract tone in itself: an important, integral part of the whole response to the initial sounds that set each performance in motion.
You can find it on the Bandcamp description yourself, but Thut describes this rendering and process of his template thus:
“What remains here of traditional notation is the succession of two elements and the vertical arrangement as in a four-voice setting. At first glance the columnar image receives a liquefaction as it expands through the action of making sound. But the repeated actions of the four performers also bring it back to the static of the image yielding an impression.”
The reference to voices is interesting, and easy to imagine replacing the instruments and resonation on not just this track but the others: a removed form of vocals I’d admit, more, and chiming with the quartet’s signature, atonal in execution.
Comprising of Beatrice Miniaci on both flute and bass flute, Cosimo Fiaschi on soprano saxophone, Gabriele Pagliano on double-bass and Luca Venitucci on the accordion and what’s termed “objects”, the quartet work in a kind of avant-garde, non-musical mode that evokes the most minimalist fields of jazz and the avant-garde; sieving, shifting and stretching the possibilities of the elements of breath and instrumental textured experiment.
Within that expanse of light and shaded microtonal and held suffused progressions and dialogues there’s light refractions and various pitches interacting with the industrial sounds of the workbench, of mechanics and tools, or with near esoteric leanings and released steam. Mysterious and almost esoteric in places, recorded somewhere in the city of Rome where the quartet are based, they conjure up as much atmosphere as they evoke a certain skill of untethered musicianship and reaction. Windows are opened – literally sounding at times like the hinges being activated – on this abstract horizon swell and permeation of Anthony Braxton and his peers, the tradition of innovative atonal experimentation and the avant-garde in Europe, and Ariel Kalma.
The Breedling ‘A Straunge And Terrible Wunder’
(Wrong Speed Records) 4th August 2026
Sticking close to home with a horror show score of electronic dark arts and Satanic conjuring, Chris Spalton (under The Breedling guise) soundtracks the supernatural and folkloric psychogeography of his county by reviving the hell hound legend of the bedevilled Black Shuck.
To borrow from Rev. Abraham Fleming’s August of 1577 dated account of the infamous beast – as repeated orally and with just a sensational touch of exaggeration for publishing purposes -, the most dramatic legendary description, passed down through the generations, and obviously unsubstantiated, of the East Anglian miscreant is as follows:
“This black dog, or the divel in such a likenesse (God hee knoweth al who worketh all,) running all along down the body of the church with great swiftnesse, and incredible haste, among the people, in a visible fourm and shape, passed between two persons, as they were kneeling uppon their knees, and occupied in prayer as it seemed, wrung the necks of them bothe at one instant clene backward, in somuch that even at a momet where they kneeled, they stragely dyed.”
Or better still and heading the title of this latest album from the Norfolk-based artist, Fleming summarised this beast and its most notorious episode as a “Strange and terrible wunder”.
Sightings and accounts continue, and just like UFO sightings, each period in history is reflective of its own hangups, fears and cultural obsessions. But in this mode and time, recalling the late Tudor era’s own distresses and religious fervours and religious wars, the bestial hound is no dressed-up Baskerville masquerade but a symbol of the daemonic sent to rip out the throats of the metaphorical flock of Christianity, or at the very least to frighten the congregation into towing the right pathway. Then again, there’s not much defence when such sharp-clawed and blood thirsty imaginings are about to pounce on the unsuspecting.
Inhabiting a world not unlike that of Robert Eggers nightmares, with a dash of quintessential English rural occultism and weirdlore, a chill of spine-tingling Gallo Italian horror and an apparatus best described as industrial foreboding and sinister. And yet there’s a darkly rooted use of ambience too, and incipient quietened passages in which the wind, the atmosphere is held off just long enough to escape the doom-laden electronica, the NIN-esque squalls, steely guitar resonance and hammered, nail-gunned (like a brutal version of modern diy workshop crucifixion) and beaten drumbeats.
Entwinned with the bracken density and shadows of the English woodlands, oscillations and prowls are exchanged for the creaking floors of an old mill struck out in isolation in the wilds or the sound of tormented individuals being tortured and ripped limb from limb. And yet, you can detect a suffusion or perhaps just a passing influence of Haxan Cloak, Umberto, Ital Tek and Lucrecia Dalt amongst the hell’s gateway of snared, growling, almost gaggled and howling, biting hounds and dark bewitched invocations. There is however some gleam of relief in the dying embers of the finale, a sudden navigation of the rotated and circled esoteric environment turns up in the clearing to the sound of bird song and a reminder that none of this has been real: or has it?
Spalton delivers an immersive, ominous soundtrack of real quality; a dungeon doom and folkloric rural electrified reading of a timely legend that demands attention. |It would be good to see some director pick this up for a movie, but until then, let the sonic distress and mystery invoke its own images and story.
Himba Hymn Collective ‘Ghosts Of Namibia’s Skeleton Coast’
(Sublime Frequencies) Released 8th May 2026
Possibly the most featured producer and in-situ instigator of inspiring, exceptional and jaw-dropping recordings on the Monolith Cocktail since its inception, Ian Brennan’s highly prolific output (not just musically, he’s also an incredibly expressive and candid writer too, as demonstrated by his accompanying descriptive linear notes) most recent release completely slipped my notice: an unheralded release it seems by Sublime Frequencies.
Joined on each of his global expeditions, as always, by his partner and foil the Italian-Rwandan photographer, author and filmmaker Marilena Umuhoza Delli, Ghosts Of Namibia’s Skeleton Coast finds the acclaimed producer, musician, writer and violence prevention advocate practising what he preaches in recording the unheard voices and performances of some of the world’s most isolated, ignored, disadvantaged, and marginalized.
Described by Ian as the ‘Most disproportionate travel to recording time ratio we’d ever risked.’ With ‘Four days flight, four days driving (two entirely off-road) to record for a few hours’ Ian and Marilena travelled to the world’s driest and oldest desert (not atavistic but even older, back to prehistoric times) in Namibia, on the southwestern coastline of Africa to capture the unique voices of the age-old Himba people; perhaps one of the most objectified and photographed tribes in the world, yet until now rarely given the space or platform to perform vocally and musically. The muse of National Geographic and untold covers for their famous red-hued moisturised and decorated skin – a second skin and mix of animal fat and ochre powder, it is both used as a sort of sunscreen that protects them from the harsh and unforgiving sun and cosmetically – and eroticized state of undress – the women usually going about their daily lives and routines topless -, the females, but men too, celebrate beauty.
With their near unbroken ancestral traditions, the Himba live a still largely pastoral existence, eking out a living through their most prized possession: cattle. Sharing much with their fellow Namibian’s, the Herero (both originally migrating from elsewhere in Africa to settle in the most sparsely populated large country on the continent, the two groups also share a Bantu ancestry), every hamlet features a central ‘Kraal’ where the cattle and goats are herded for safety each night.
The Himba are smattered in and around the Namibia desert, which despite its arid and dry reputation lies along the cool coastal exterior of the country, with the ocean to its side. Stretching for 1200 miles and reaching up to 100 miles inland, this vast challenging landscape is famous for its trade routes and important movement of both minerals and fish. Relatively stable these days – in fact, one of the safest places in Africa – that same desert and the country as a whole has suffered from some very dark, tumultuous and violent periods; including what has been called the first genocide of the 20th century, when the Colonialist rulers of what was then German South West Africa carried out a heinous and ruthless execution of the Herero and the Namaqua peoples after a rebellion by Chief Samuel Maharero – started after decades of slavery, persecution, the confiscation of cattle and starvation. The Germans originally colonised the region in 1884; an act of occupation, a stemming or barrier to the British Empire who were expanding westwards. Anywhere from 50,000 to 65,000 people were killed during the bloody years between 1904 and 1907, but the Dutch originated settlers the Boars were also known to have had their conflicts and subjugations of the same people too. War has followed, both civil and from across the borders, but Namibia is a much changed and settled country, a favourite to backpackers and tourists alike.
But with a near unbroken tradition, the Himba continue to draw attention to their idiosyncratic way of life and exotic (if I’m allowed to dare use that word) look. But the focus here is on their songs and performances, with a requested amassed cluster of both women and men captured for posterity on tape by Ian and shared to an international audience. With a rudimental or striped down travel kit of apparatus, recordings are usually raw, caught in the very moment when something is about to happen; a spontaneity; a one-off for the conditions and environment in which it has been sealed.
Ian’s own descriptions make my job easier, and I could literally just copy and paste his insights, his descriptions and directness. He really manages to evoke the scene, the ardent journey to the middle of a most unforgiving desert location, conjuring up the smells, the atmosphere, the cast of various performers brilliantly. My personal favourite is when Ian manages to reference the reduced life expectancy figure for the region as sixty with a request that he’d made earlier for the Himba villagers to specifically put forward their elders for the recordings. When Ian and Marilena finally make it, they are met with a group of men who aren’t so much as elderly as near the same age as Ian himself (hardly queuing up just yet to get his pension), and so proving just how reduced that life expectancy really is in these harsh conditions.
Ian just as brilliantly describes what you are about to hear: a psychedelic vocal tapestry, esoteric even in parts. The use of what’s called the Cattle Gun (a rarefied found these days we’re told, expensive and coveted, this lengthy horn, taken from the Oryx antelope, is coated in mud, and can be described as kind of strange jazz horn come breathed rattle) and the way in which the Himba cup their hands to cover their mouths in order to create the effect of chorusing and flanging is extremely helpful in understanding what you are about to experience.
Let’s take the psychedelic description first. You can hear it permeating nearly every track as a strange effect of hallucination and mirage. But when you get to the stringy strummed ‘Friend’s Who’ve Passed’ its entwinned with a rootsy vision of Beefheart and the blues. The vocal (I believe attributed to lead vocalist Tjamburu) is near garbled and active in its elegiac act of remembrance.
Esoterically there’s the opening introduction to the tribe’s reenactment of lion attack upon its prized cattle. Summoning up the heaving chest exhales and sweat, the growling threat and devouring jaws and clawed menace of a predator, the group effort of interactions and overlayered voices is near supernatural and bestial in invoking such a carnage.
As with so many of Ian’s previous truly international recordings there’s so much to pick up, so many crossovers or reverberations with traditions and music from other regions. You could be mistaken for thinking the pleaded ‘Please Help Me’ was an ancient recall from the Mississippi voice of spiritual gospel to the motherland – there’s an odd, near unmusical, languid if indolent enervated accompaniment (if you can call it that) of metal or tin being occasionally scrapped and shaved in the background, which only makes the whole thing more happenstance and surreal. ‘Don’t Cry (Your Father & Grandfather Are Good)’ reminded me a little of the harmonious unions of voices heard across the border in South Africa, albeit in the hallucinogenic mode, and the trilling, rolled tongue echoes – accompanied by what sounds like a klaxon going off – and laughing gas inhaled-like octave change of voice into the realms of the childish and silly ‘Be Brave In The Face Of Death’ reminded me of a far-off recollection of dub crossed with King Ayisoba.
Vocally otherworldly and yet also drawing on physicality, justifiable grievances, the confrontational, there’s a balance of the soulful, the earthy and the impassioned; using breathing and various mouth pulled and loose lipped trills to express both the painful and the ritualistic; indignation and communication.
Not so much worthy as essential listening to everyone who really wishes to get clued up and experience the sounds, the joy, the spontaneity and passions of music and performance from outside the mediocre TikTok trending dominated scope of the West and its global markets. Uncluttered and truthful, catalogued not as a Lomax-esque curiosity, and uncoupled from that whole World Music cloying presumption of posterity and study – even though these recordings will reserve and keep account of the Himba and their performances -, these expressions are very much still alive and just as important as the songs sung by the ancestors.
Nicola Miller’s Living Things ‘SPIT!’
(Watch The Ends The Night) 7th August 2026
Bouncing through a lively Latin and French Quarters whilst throwing up reminiscent city jazz skylines of the 50s and 60s and chasing the dramas of Noir and feeding off the spirit of the Big Easy, renowned Canadian saxophonist and composer (also, as you will hear, a deft hand on the flute too) Nicola Miller and her quartet troupe send out lively and excitable free form vibes on their latest album together, SPIT!
Spit in its various forms, from the driest reedy evocations to the most spittle and flappy lipped experiments of actionist jazz and its avant-garde cousin, this extraordinary display of loose and dynamic performances swings on the jungle vine whilst promenading and heralding down the New Orleans streets, thumping along the San Fran pavements of Lalo Schifrin and scoring the chaos and bustle of the boardwalks.
And then again, such as through the three-part ‘Telecommunications’ suite, you get the brass resonating, woodpecker woody block percussive and rasped reedy sucked valve work, the bristling and brushed abstracts of such icons as Anthony Braxton and Rosco Mitchell, Mats Gustafason and Ivo Perelman. Throw in the blues, and the puddle duck, pastoral chamber classical familiars of Prokofiev and the whole deal gets even more interesting, expanded and ambitious.
Imbued by her Nova Scotia base (subtle hints on the smog bound shipping horns of Doug Tielli’s trombone, and a general feel of the maritime can be heard suffused throughout the album), and already collecting an enviable haul of plaudits for her craft following the release of the Living Things’ 2024 debut (released on fellow Canadian label Cacophonous Revival), Miller now amps up the “extrovert” in her and “fires” up the band to produce a both experimental and untethered album of first class jazz performance and musicianship.
With reference points to a whole history of such jazz explorations and freedoms, Satchmo meets Sam Rivers, Eric Dolphy and Peter Brotzmann on the opening city lights, blasted and blared, brassy and swung opener; Miller’s alto sax going through various phases of the winding, the strangled and vibrated whilst Tielli’s sliding and elephant trunk raising trombone recalls a mix of Phil Ranelin and Theon Cross.
The already mentioned ‘Telecommunications’ triptych passes through just as many phases, from the flapped and dried-up breaths and cuckoo-like knocks and steamed resonance of Part I to the 50s jazz sonnet, greenery and wounded cornet-like strange harks of Part II and the busier film score excitements and confusions of Part III.
‘Where’ The Line’ settles into a strange duck-clarinet (that will be clarinettist and second saxophone player Frank Gratkowski, a former mentor to Miller whilst she was studying for her Masters) described bluesy and dreamy lost world of the misty and mysterious; obscure renderings of foggy ship horns again, with a walking stealthy bass line courtesy of Nicolas D’Amato, plunge us subtly into a primal swamp or an old coastline, with obscure recalls of Gershwin and Bix Beiderbecke.
Though not wholly dedicated to the troupe’s versatile drummer Nick Fraser, the finale, as its ‘Drummers Are Bad’ title may indicate, neither scolds nor lets the sticks man hog the entire track. Fraser does get to scuttle, skittle and feel his way in the avant-garde vogue around his kit in the name of unrestrained quickened and fired up improvisation; his foils equally building towards the wild, and a duck-billed excitement of brass and cartoonish chases along a pastoral pathway left overgrown and blanketed by the mists.
An incredible album from a burgeoning project of gifted, experienced and still inventive players surrounding the main instigations and prompts of their leader Miller. One of the best jazz albums so far in 2026, and that’s about as good a recommendation as you can get from me.
Tristan da Cunha ‘Maris Stella’
(Boring Machines) Released 10th July 2026
Touched by the afflatus the Italian trio of Francesco Vara (using the guitar to imitate the strings), Luca Scotti (on drums), and Nicolò Vara (on viola) make neo-classical and ambient oblations to the titular “star of the sea”, the ancient allegorical and metaphorical Latin name given to the Virgin Mary.
A reification of faith and guidance perhaps, or the act of being saved from the troupe’s overriding theme and concept of “isolation”, Maris Stella is deep adagio, often elegiac and mystical, suffusion of subtle atonal and more melodic and dramatic suites and vignettes – the latter labelled “interludio” like moments of reflection and pause; the first being an ambient corridor of rough textual tension on the bow, and the second, more like a verset of hallowed evensong and pipped liturgy.
Pitched somewhere between Reich and Alison Cotton with the imbued influences of Arvo Pärt,Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Stars of the Lid in tow, the score, the minor opus and longer form suites encompass post-rock, chamber music, soundtracks/scores, and obviously the religious – hear the gentle genuflections of the viola and its companions, or the sanctified choral voices that appear from a Mediterranean chapel on the mysterious ‘The Veil’.
Sometimes burnished, often shimmery cymbals and the deadened hit of the drum conjure up images of stirred-up waves splashing against the hull of the trio’s boat; an invitation to navigate both slowly and supernaturally amongst the recondite tides of the serious and classy, the careful and subtly monumental. Searching woes follow melodious escapes, venerability and the venerated but make, apart from the title, no obvious references other than musically to the church, but Mary stands as the abstract lighthouse, a sanctuary and point of lifting transcendence in the silence of loneliness and detachment of the modern era.
Whatever the intentions, the island borrowed Tristan da Cunha named trio combine reverence, the blessed age old iconography of the Christian church, and the matriarchy with an experimentally skilful use of ambience and various classical ideas; changing the traditional setup of a chamber ensemble by replacing the strings (except the viola, which is used almost like a lead instrument here) with the guitar and drums to evoke a number of expansive musical concepts and ideas that lead into other disciplines.
A complete work of art and a beacon with which to draw upon in this moment of crisis and isolation.
___/THE MONOLITH COCKTAIL SOCIAL PLAYLIST VOL. 108____
Despite Spotify’s many attempts to piss me off and burry my numerus playlists, I’m still persevering. You may or may not have noticed holes and a smattering of said playlists suddenly disappearing. I’m pruning. And to be honest, after compiling over 300 of them since 2012 I’ve slowed down and fucked up my account to the point in which it has become tiresome to use. So, I’ve trimmed out those less popular playlists, and the ones with holes in them – various copyrights being either removed or now out of date, labels and those responsible for said artists and tracks either leaving the site or for some other reason taking down individual tracks from their catalogue without any explanation; luckily I’ve never, and I hope way too good at what I do to have ever included anything AI in my playlists over the years or recently, so that doesn’t hold as a reason.
In case you were wondering, or haven’t seen it on Reddit, social media posts or on notice boards, Spotify has at least decided to act by clamping down on AI created music, with some hilarious results as arbitrator of what constitutes the artificial and what doesn’t. There’s a methodology I’m told, which has unfortunately caught some true boba fide artists in the net. However, it was Spotify in the first place that was inventing and predominantly lifting up AI artists in their own playlists and on the platform as a whole.
By the way, if you are having trouble finding me on Spotify, I’m there under my name: Dominic Valvona.
I’m going to try and keep everything from the covid years onwards, but you may now see gaps in the back catalogue as I move forward. And so, we come to this month’s Social, and the same old template of new and old tunes, cult and anniversary celebrating album tunes alongside some more recent ones that didn’t make the site’s Monthly playlist.
Sadly, and inevitably, I also mark the passing of those we’ve lost. In this case, and just a week or so ago, the British jazz-rock-prog-fusion community lost keyboardist and composer Dave Greenslade. An incredible CV, wealth of experiences, Dave’s journey took him from the burgeoning bluesy/R&B scene of London to Casablanca, a stint with the Ram Jam R&B/soul revue troupe motivated and led by Geno Washington and the virtuoso boasting Colosseum, before forming the just as legendary doubled-up keys instigated Greenslade – as every obituary almost in disbelief repeats, a group that dared to dispose of the role of lead guitar: the audacity!
On the Anniversary LPs front, there’s one big Sixtieth birthday to The Byrd’s Fifth Dimension and a fiftieth nod to The Beach Boys’ 15 Big Ones. Another decade closer and its fortieth salutations to Doug E. Fresh’s Oh My God, 2 Live Crew’s The 2 Live Crew Is What We Are, R.E.M.’s Life’s Rich Pageant and the Spacemen 3’s Sound Of Confusion. Leaping through the decades, I’m also marking the twentieth anniversaries of TV on the Radio’s Return To Cookie Mountain and Thom Yorke’s Eraser. And as featured in this month’s archives below, a tenth nudge to Ed Scissor & Lamplighter’s Tell Them It’s Winter.
The rest of this list is made up of intergenerational reaching tracks from Alcatraz, Lapera, Bal Pare, Sophie Nzayisenga, Double Happys, Evil Weiner, plus more recentish tunes from Clementine March and J Sciende. Lots more of course, to make up the thirty tracks in the July social revue.
Track list in full:::
The Beach Boys ‘Susie Cincinnati’
TV On The Radio ‘A Method’
Clementine March ‘Upheaval (First Version)’
The Byrds ‘Captain Soul’
Colosseum ‘Three Score And Ten, Amen’
Okay Temiz & Johnny Dyani ‘I’m A Green Lamp – Yesil Fener’
Angry Angels ‘Apparent-Transparent’
Greenslade ‘Time To Dream’
Hopkins-Bradley ‘Funny, But The Way I Feel’
Evil Wiener ‘Koo Koo’
R.E.M. ‘Fall On Me’
Double Happys ‘Some Fantasy’
Colosseum ‘The Machine Demands A Sacrifice’
J Sciende & Opio ‘Krush Groove Kangol’
Doug E. Fresh ‘The Show – Oh My God! Remix’
2 Live Crew ‘2 Live Is what We Are…(Word)’
Himba Hymn ‘Who Is going to Welcome The White People?’
Sophie Nzayisenga ‘Story of Nyangezi’
heka & GG Skips ‘High Tide’
Spacemen 3 ‘Rollercoaster (Live)’
Bal Pare ‘Die Idioten’
Naomie Klaus ‘Can You Tell Me What Is Micronet?’
Thom Yorke ‘The Clock’
Thick Pigeon ‘Sudan’
Human Greed ‘Freeview’
Ed Scissor & Lamplighter ‘TTIW’
Lapera ‘Catarsi’
Alcatraz ‘Where The Wild Things Are’
Walter Daniels/Oblivians/Monsieur Jeffery Evans ‘It Don’t Take Too Much’
Greenslade ‘Siam Seesaw’.
___/ARCHIVES___
Ed Scissor & Lamplighter ‘Tell Them It’s Winter’
Released by High Focus Records, July 15th 2016
Emerging damaged and deeply troubled from the miasma underbelly of modern life, the congruous leftfield hip-hop partnership of wordsmith Ed Scissor and Glasgow-based producer Lamplighter convey a sad poetic beauty in their dystopian visions.
Much has been made of the duo’s caustic, and at times nihilistic, articulations and augurs. And their latest remote collaboration – the duo rarely share the same room as each other during the writing/recording process – Tell Them It’s Winter does explore familiar morbid curiosities, both musically and lyrically.
Yet, despite the travails, despite the gloom and all too real drudgery of an algorithm-driven society, Ed and his Lamplighter foil offer glimmers of light. Reminding us constantly of the universal infinite, Ed describes forces beyond the mundane. References to astrology, metaphysics and science flow like relentless streams of consciousness from Ed’s lips in a delivery style that shifts between rap, spoken word and, even, grime. Abstract elements of hip-hop and trip-hop mix seamlessly with the Shakespearean and biblical to produce the poetry, whilst tetchy minimal electronica and slow methodical beats layered over cLOUDDEAD expansive atmospheres and traces of neo-classical strings and looped recordings of old scratchy records create the backdrop to Ed’s winter of discontent.
Each track is free of demarcation and often floats off on different pathways before returning to focus once again on the central mood. There’s no room for prowess and flexing, Ed’s verses constructing a framework of unflinching honesty. Cormac McCarthy and Winterfell metaphors aside (the critics consensus analogies and reference points it seems for this album), the impending Machiavellian horsemen of doom bolted a long time ago. Tell Them It’s Winter is, if anything, a reminder that nothing has changed and that the central tenets of human suffrage carry on unabated in the 21st century.
Here’s the message bit we hate, but crucially need if we are to continue:
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.
Our Daily Bread 339: Thom Yorke Live In Rome
July 22, 2019
Live Revue
Words: Gianluigi Marsibilio
Thom Yorke Live
Rome 21st July 2019
The stage is an icon, Thom Yorke a mirror.
Here’s the consideration that a metaphysical set like this leads you to do, but there’s more and then I tried to make a small setlist of short and ramshackle thoughts about Thom Yorke live in Rome.
Thom Yorke is a genre in itself
Yorke moves with a cinematic attitude, and the movement on stage is an ode to the dance of Suspiria. This is a meeting of the many elements, developments and musical paths undertaken over the years. Thom Yorke’s live performance in Rome is the closing of a cycle and, at the same time, the opening of another. Thom is, finally, a multidimensional being, who can musically make genre by himself, expressing at best a crisis of many ideas and visions: some, even very different from each other.
The concert is an iconographic tale
You could follow the concert from an artistic point of view, and tell how the digital painting that moves on video walls is a condensation of an artistic research that also includes graphics and visual art.
We could play to tell the live in three paintings, I choose, in doubt, “Number 11” Pollock. The idea of graphic contamination has served.
Anima is a pure germ
The new solo album Anima is a real art-attack. A light and structured breath on a homogeneous and not confusing storytelling, Anima is a solo peak in Yorke’s career, because it has a whole series of elements that are perfectly connected with the idea of drawing songs in an extremely scenic, told and cinematographic way.
Suspiria was a blessing for Thom
So let’s close the film, consistent with the live set. The clear element is that: Suspiria has done well to Thom’s work and creativity. Being under creative and artistic pressure is a test that every artist has to undergo, the cinema is a machine that eats and incorporates but Thom has been stronger than on any other destructive push, and has pulled out a genuine music score. Calmness is the virtue of the dead, creativity needs chaos and the work with Luca Guadagnino, also built on the strong common vision, has helped Thom to build and solidify even better.
Quarterly Playlist Revue 2018: Part Four: Deerhunter, Jimi Tenor, Open Mike Eagle, Marianne Faithfull…
December 11, 2018
Playlist: Selected by Dominic Valvona/ Matt Oliver
Priding ourselves on the diverse, pan-global playlists we collate for your aural pleasure and indulgence, the Monolith Cocktail Quarterly Revue series is the eclectic behemoth of them all. With no demarcation of any kind or rules we mix the harrowing and gothic with beckoning polyrhythmic dancefloor screamers, flights of panoramic fantasy with raging protestations, and the most sublime peregrinations with experimental cries from the wilderness.
Everything you find on this playlist has either featured on the site over the last three months or been in our general orbit (the sheer volume of music we get sent means there is inevitably issues of space and time, and so some great tracks just don’t make it; this is our chance to feature those lost tracks).
We’ve also included the previous three playlists. And only leaves me to say on behalf of the Monolith Cocktail, thank you for supporting us during 2018.
Tracks:
Deerhunter ‘Death in Midsummer’
Psychedelic Porn Crumpets ‘My Friend’s A Liquid’
Brace! Brace! ‘Whales’
Slift ‘Fearless Eye’
Stika Sun ‘Psychedelic Three’
Jimi Tenor ‘Walzeth’
Fofoulah ‘Kaddy’
Paula Rae Gibson & Kit Downes ‘If You Ask Me’
The Alchemist ‘Mac 10 Wounds (Instrumental)’
François de Roubaix ‘Amour Sur Les Rails’
Homeboy Sandman & Edan ‘The Gut’
Thom Yorke ‘Suspirium’
Open Mike Eagle ‘Single Ghosts’
Westside Gunn & Benny ‘B.I.G Luther Freestyle’
Apollo Brown & Joell Ortiz ‘That Place’
Lyrics Born & Aloe Blacc ‘Can’t Lose My Joy’
Chuck D ‘freedBLACK’
Beans with ZVK & Dan Wenniger ‘The Ugly, The Ugly, And The Ugly’
Unloved ‘Love’
Marianne Faithfull ‘They Come At Night’
Ex:Re ‘I Can’t Keep You’
Masta Ace & Marco Polo ft. Pearl Gates ‘Still Love Her’
Damu The Fudgemunk ‘Fire’
MysDiggi ‘Evil Within’
Bixiga 70 ‘Primeiramente’
The Scorpios ‘Mashena’
Moulay Ahmed El Hassani ‘Lklam Lakhar’
The Rebels Of Tijuana ‘Erotique’
Cappo & Cyrus Malachi ‘Aqua Lungi’
Annexe The Moon ‘Full Stop’
Paul Jacobs ‘Easy (Warm Weather)’
Gloria ‘Heavy’
Deanna Petcoff ‘Stress’
David Cronenberg’s Wife ‘Rules’
Sunshine Frisbee Laserbeam ‘Running From My Ghost’
Insolito UniVerso ‘Vuelve’
François de Roubaix ‘Daughters Of Darkness Opening’
Vukovar & Michael Cashmore ‘Little Gods’
Cousin Silas & The Glove Of Bones ‘Saturn Incoming Dub’
Qluster ‘Lindow’
Refree ‘Tirania’
Society Of The Silver Cross ‘When You’re Gone’
Steve Gunn ‘New Moon’
Ben Osborn ‘Fast Awake’
Panda Bear ‘Dolphin’
Delicate Steve ‘O Little Town Of Bethlehem’
Part Three
Part Two
Part One
Albums of 2018: Part Two: Thomas Nation to Thom Yorke
December 6, 2018
Albums Selected By Dominic Valvona and Matt Oliver.
Welcome to Part Two of our alphabetically ordered best/choice/favourite albums of 2018 feature. You can find Part One here…
The decision making process:
Being the exhaustive and eclectic set of features our albums of the year are, we know you probably don’t need to or want to dally about reading a long-winded prognosis of our judgement process. But in short, here it is anyway.
Continuing to shy away from fatuous rating systems and ‘best of lists’, the Monolith Cocktail endeavors to offer a more visceral and personal 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 numbered spot than another.
With no hierarchical order, we’ve lined our album choices up alphabetically; split into two features – Part One: A (Idris Ackamoor) to M (Moonwalks); Part Two:N (Thomas Nation) to Z (Thom Yorke).
All of our favourite new and reissued albums and EPs from 2018 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 2018: even if that might be true. Instead our list is an indicator of our amorphous tastes, rounding up another 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.
All selections in PART TWO from me (Dominic Valvona) and Matt Oliver.
N.
Thomas Nation ‘Battle Of The Grumbles’ (Faith & Industry)
Fixed intently on the anguishes of identity in a post-Brexit voted England, yet bleaching his 1960s bucolic and 1970s lounge (erring towards yacht rock almost) imbued songbook with nostalgia, the lyrics themselves read as augurs yet embedded on parchment, Blue House front-man James Howard weaves a diaphanous if plaintively foreboding chronicle of the past and present.
Creating a whole new persona as Thomas Nation, his commitment to a hazy timeless sound, both rustic and ambitious, goes as far as using only his rough mono mixes; undeveloped and left in their most honest, purest form. You won’t be surprised to learn that Howard has also released his Nation moniker debut, Battle Of The Grumbles, on cassette tape.
Littered with references to this Island’s past (both at home and overseas), from the illustrated album cover scene of the 16th century ‘Battle of the Spurs’ (when the Holy Roman Empire teamed up with Henry VIII’s England) to more ambiguous stirrings and despondent yearnings that feature musical echoes from across that ages, Battle Of The Grumbles stands metaphorically at the precipice of the white cliffs of Dover awaiting Britain’s fate.
A gentle spirit, James Howard creates a pastoral nostalgic journey filled with augurs, despair and disillusion but always diaphanous. The first of what Howard hopes will be an annual ‘pilgrimage’, the Thomas Nation incarnation is a cerebral wonder through the essence of Englishness, questioning and probing the psyche as it meanders through the psychogeography and heart of the countryside. Full review…
(Dominic Valvona)
Tony Njoku ‘H.P.A.C’ (Silent Kid Records)
Bringing a very different perspective and life experience to the London avant-garde art and electronic music scene, the British-Nigerian producer with the earthy falsetto, Tony Njoku, articulates a most unique form of magical soul music on his stunning new album. Though undulated with an ethereal to malady suffused backing of sophisticated synthesized travails, Njoku’s vocals always seem to bobble and float above the choppy breaks and ebbing tides.
Adrift in so many ways, through his life experiences, transferring as he did at the age of fourteen to London from a life spent hiding his true personality in the toxic macho boarding schools of Lagos, the sensitive Njoku found at least one kind of solace; able to show a vulnerability and pursue the music career he really wanted having previously recorded a number of hip-hop albums (the first when he was only twelve) that proved entirely counterintuitive, but were completely in tune with Nigerian environment he grew up in. Yet in the arts community he joined in his new home of London, he found few Afrocentric voices or people he could identify with or relate to. From that isolation comes an album inspired by the ‘high art sonic’ forms of Arca and Anhoni, and by the metamorphosis nature of Bjork; Njoku’s own compositions feature a beautiful synthetic shuffle of Afrofuturism soul and more searing discordant synth waves that clash and distort on arrival but gradually sync and become part of the motion. From beauty to pain and release, and often back again, each track (and not in a bad way) seems open-ended; a constant flowing cycle of emotions, which can be healed during that moment, in that space and time, but will inevitably return: A calm followed by turbulence and hopefully the light.
Eloquently in a hymn like fashion between pained malady and the venerable, heavenly but also melancholic and turbulent, H.P.A.C is a futuristic soul album of delicate intellect. Full review…
(DV)
P.
Micall Parknsun & Mr Thing ‘Finish What We Started’ (Village Live)
“Mainstays trusted with hip-hop restoration…with all the answers for those exaggerating hip-hop’s downfall” – RnV July 18
Featuring “beats to make your eyebrow dip” and the flow of one of the UK’s most reliably disdainful when it comes to holding your own, Micall Parknsun and Mr Thing made the very good decision to turn 2017’s one-off ‘The Raw’ into a 40 minute non-apology for playing the game properly. With hip-hop mumbling its way to the dogs, this pair have fire in the belly for the unfashionable return to beats and rhymes designed to stick around and give a damn. Measured run-ups streaked with bluesy, soulful headspace occupancy (with drums front and centre each and every time), a crux of blockbusters and pure boom bap battery, all land like a two-footed tackle, Thing researching and sculpting ‘the real’ without making it a puff piece on nostalgia or announcing they’re here to save the world. Park-E does his utmost to remain an upstanding citizen, pushed to his limits by both Thing’s heavyweight kicks and snares and general scene lethargy. The emcee’s systematic, it’s on when I say so-flow, perfectly lands the elbow once the producer has left you staggering backwards.
(Matt Oliver)
Josh T. Pearson ‘The Straight Hits’ (Mute)
Changing his tune (literally) Josh T. Pearson, the lonesome blues Texan with a wagonload of baggage, heads out onto the range with a swag bag of more joyful, unencumbered ‘golden hits’ with his latest album for Mute Records.
Leaving behind the more apocalyptic gospel concepts of his work with the short-lived but acclaimed Lift To Experience, Pearson sets himself new parameters; adhering to a five-point rules system for transforming a “batch of tunes” he’d been working on for a decade. Earmarked originally for the ‘unrecorded’ Bird Songs album, the nine original songs on The Straight Hits are a lighter and as the title suggests ‘straighter’ attempt to change the mood.
Far from set in stone – the unwritten rock’n’roll law that all rules are written to be broken is invoked on the tender yearning A Love Song (Set Me Straight) – each song must at least try to follow Pearson’s self-imposed requirements: Number one, all songs must have a verse, a chorus and a bridge; two, the lyrics must run sixteen lines or less; three, they must have the word ‘straight’ in the title; four, that title must be four words or less; and five, they must submit to song above all else i.e. “You do as she tells you, whatever the song tells you”, “You bend to her, and not her to you.”
The Straight Hits is a most rallying rodeo that gives the Americana soundtrack a much-needed kick-in-the-pants; the themes of love, whether it’s the analogical kind, ‘take me right now’ kind, or lamentable kind, enacted across a varied but blistering songbook. Rejecting the stimulants and his demons, Pearson choses the good ol’ fashioned power and redemptive spirit of gospel ye-ye and country rock’n’roll. And don’t it sound just mighty fine and swell! Full review…
(DV)
Q.
Qujaku ‘Qujaku’ (So I Buried Records)
Occupying both the spiritual and cosmic planes, emerging from the gloom and holy sanctuaries of the dead, the brooding Hamamatsu-based Japanese band Qujaku wowed with their second album of operatic Gothic and psychedelic doom-mongering. Beginning as they mean to go on, the opening ‘Shoko No Hakumei’ suite, more an overture, is itself a full on Ring cycle (as conducted by Boris) that is dramatic and sprawling: running almost the entire length of a full side of a traditional vinyl album.
On a very large foreboding canvas, Qujaku build-up an impressive tumult across the album’s nine-tracks of prowling esotericism and galloping drum barrage immensity. Between crescendo-bursting three-part acts and shorter volatile slabs of heavy caustic drone rock, the group often evokes an Oriental Jesus And Mary Chain, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and Spacemen 3, or Nine Inch Nails when at their most enraged. Psychedelic in the mode of The Black Angels, but also straying at their most languid and navel-gazing towards Shoegaze, Qujaku’s dark spanning cacophony of throbs and trembles bear many subtle nuances and becalmed breaks amongst the masses and maelstroms.
On an epic scale, dreaming big and intensely, Qujaku perform the most dramatic of daemonic theatre. Full review…
(DV)
R.
RAM ‘August 1791’
Considering the tumultuous bloody revolution from which an independent Haiti was born, RAM leader Richard A Morse‘s “Our existence is a political statement” mantra is unsurprising. Named after the initials of their road well travailed founder, RAM perform an entrancing spectacle of the ritualistic. Morse, originally born in Puerto Rico but brought up in Connecticut, spent the 80s rubbing shoulders with the polygenesis New York art and music scene’s Jean-Michel Basquiat and Warhol’s factory. His interest piqued by the new wave’s adoption of Afro-diaspora rhythms and world music, Morse decided to travel to his native homeland to study the Haitian sound.
The son of Haiti folk legend Emerante de Pradine, Morse was already well aware of his ancestral roots, but had yet to indulge in or absorb the rich history of the island fully. After an initial short trip, Morse found himself it seems so seduced and inspired by Haiti’s culture that he decided to stay for good. Marrying local dancer and singer Lunise, he kick started the frenzied, rambunctious troupe, channeling the ideas he picked up on in New York and merging them with the signature instrumentation and sounds of the local Vodou belief, mizik-rasin and the drifting currents of the Caribbean and Africa.
This year’s odyssey, guided by the spirits and with dedications to the marternel and those that have helped (including the pivotal film director Jonathan Demme, who prominently featured one of their tracks in his or award-winning Philadelphia movie in 1994) shaped the band over the years, springs from Haiti’s enslaved population’s struggle for independence from its European masters. August 1791, the year and month of revolution (inspired by their colonial masters own revolution), frames this tropical fusion of tragedy and sauntering joy. Returning to the legends that sparked this fight, such as the ill-fated former slave turned leader of revolt, Toussaint Louverture (driving out the Spanish and British but captured and imprisoned under Napoleon’s regime; languishing in a cell at Fort de Joux until he died in 1803), and first Emperor of Haiti, Jean-Jacques Dessalines (assassinated by disgruntled members of the burgeoning administration), RAM evoke the spark that set in motion the first free republic of African heritage people in the Western hemisphere. Their seventh album not only pays tribute but features a musical accompaniment from that era; with a sound more or less, when stripped to its essence, that would be familiar to the Creole and African communities of the late 18th century.
Uniting in a busy percussive fusion the Americas with the roots of Africa, RAM bustle and hustle traditions to produce a paean to the Island they call home.
(DV)
Soho Rezanejad ‘Six Archetypes’
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.
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.
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. Full review…
(DV)
S.
Sad Man ‘ROM-COM’
Haphazardly prolific, Andrew Spackman, under his most recent of alter egos, the Sad Man, has released an album/collection of giddy, erratic, in a state of conceptual agitation electronica every few months since the beginning of 2017.
The latest and possibly most restive of all his (if you can call it that) albums is the spasmodic computer love transmogrification ROM-COM. An almost seamless record, each track bleeding into, or mind melding with the next, the constantly changing if less ennui jumpy compositions are smoother and mindful this time around. This doesn’t mean it’s any less kooky, leaping from one effect to the next, or, suddenly scrabbling off in different directions following various nodes and interplays, leaving the original source and prompts behind. But I detect a more even, and daresay, sophisticated method to the usual skittish hyperactivity.
Almost uniquely in his own little orbit of maverick bastardize electronic experimentation, Spackman, who builds many of his own bizarre contraptions and instruments, strangulates, pushes and deconstructs Techno, the Kosmische, Trip-Hop and various other branches of the genre to build back up a conceptually strange and bewildering unique sonic shake-up of the electronic music landscape. Full review…
(DV)
Otis Sandsjö ‘Y-OTIS’ (We Jazz Records)
Imbued as much by the complex language of North American and European modernist jazz as those who use it to riff on in the hip-hop and electronic music genres, the adroit Gothenburg saxophonist and composer Otis Sandsjö transmogrifies his own jazz performances so they transcend, or at least amorphously (like liquid) expand into polygenesis soundscapes.
Y-OTIS reimagines a musical union between Flying Lotus and Donny McCaslin, or better still, Madlib reconstructing the work of 3TM; the flow, if you can call it that, sounding like a remix deconstruction in progress as the rapid and dragging fills and staggered rolls of his group’s drummer Tilo Webber are stretched out, inverted and reversed into a staccato to dynamic bursting set of breakbeats and loops. Mirroring all the various cut-and-paste techniques of the turntablist maestros, Sandsjö and his dexterous troupe of keyboardist Elias Stemeseder, bassist Petter Eidh and Webber sound like a group being remixed in real time, live: And it sounds brilliant, as you’re never quite sure where each of these compositions is going to end up.
Sandsjö’s debut album, released via the Helsinki festival and label platform We Jazz Records, is a multilayered serialism suite of ideas and experimental visions. All of which, despite that complexity and blending of sophisticated avant-garde jazz, hip-hop, R&B, trip-hop and dance music, keep an ear out for the melody. If the ACT label, or ECM, ever converges with Leaf and Anticon, Y-OTIS might well be the result. Full review…
(DV)
Scran Cartel ‘Blue Plaque Candidates’ (Scran Cartel)
“A great, belt-loosening spread grilling you with much more than just a bunch of culinary one-liners” – RnV Aug 18
Brit grafters MNSR Frites (Granville Sessions) and Benny Diction (Corners) read you the specials for twelve fascinating tracks, packing foot-related rhetoric from the moment the dinner bell sounds. It’s quite an accomplishment to master such a particular angle without it being a gimmick, and easy to forget that ‘Blue Plaque Candidates’ is not specifically a concept album, just an expression of culinary love. These two really know their cookbooks and have a shopping list that you can’t check out quick enough, from cordon bleu menu toppers to bread and butter basics and young at heart sweetshop favourites, the Estuary English plating your three squares a day with the same near-apathy as they do exotic, forbidden fruit. The jazzy, funky beats are garnish to the duo cookery schooling everyone, indulging in one sub-grime moment on the E-numbered ‘Dundee’, and a cultural knowhow showing that greed isn’t always good, adds weight to their sprattish statement of “we write and record rap songs about food”. A chef fingers’ kiss for this one.
(MO)
Skyzoo ‘In Celebration of Us’ (First Generation Rich)
“Some of the smoothest psychology and concrete consciousness you’ll hear this year. One to be toasted over and over” – RnV Feb 18
Giving ‘In Celebration of Us’ the grown man rap label is a bit of a giveaway given Skyzoo’s opening skit of confiding in a pal about giving up the streets for the sake of his newborn. The Brooklynite and new father speaks a lot of sense, a flow that will express disappointment rather than anger and keep the titular celebrations modest, and attracts a captive audience when aiming at your head twofold, comprehensively ensuring the wateriness of neo-soul doesn’t just ebb away, or the dustiness of Detroit-style beats fugs your judgement. Picture a sometimes reluctant lecturer, as everyman as the tales you’ll familiarise yourself with, but giving you the full education once the mic in his hand. Not clinging to verse, hook, verse structure, Skyzoo doesn’t ramble, rather makes certain that he’s examined everything from top to bottom, very much schooled in knowing that if something’s worth doing, do it properly. Enough to make you feel warm and fuzzy – there are some undeniably slick, R&B moves crossing over as well – and rather more pensive when presented with the cold light of day.
(MO)
The Last Skeptik ‘Under the Patio’ (Thanks for Trying)
“An album simmering down the summer’s sticky restlessness: dusky beats that never fade to black, understated in their genre reach” – RnV July 18
Intense from The Last Skeptik, extremely well connected and arguably more well rounded since after a spell of paying extra-curricular dues. Surrounding himself with a boiling pot of hungry emcees gets a maximum return from teeth gritted, rapid fire, pound the road, witty unpredictables, all of whom casually playing down their iron mic grip. Synth-wired, at times spindly beats either host the back-to-mine session or storm the stage, perfect for its roll call – Bonkaz, Kojey Radical, Doc Brown, Scrufizzer but four headliners to pick from – to move through and dominate while playing the back, with motive or just willing daylight away. While originally noted for soundtracking summer humidity, ‘Under the Patio’ is decidedly not an album for office hours. Dabbling in shades of the exotic and skilfully soulful throughout for an album of rough edges, it’s the careful contrasts – the haunting ‘Hide & Seek’ featuring Matt Wills, the inexplicable but permissible ‘Calm Down’ inviting The Manor round for a knees up (there’s the versatility for you) – and Skeptik’s own version of ‘Deep Cover’ on posse cut ‘Oxymoron’ – that triumph in their cohesion to give TLS a massive W.
(MO)
Stella Sommer ’13 Kinds Of Happiness’ (Affairs Of The Heart)
In the vogue of an age-old central European malady, the dour romanticism that permeates the stunning solo debut album from the German singer/songwriter Stella Sommer is wrapped in a most beautiful gauze of melodious uplift and elegiac heartache.
Artistically, as the results prove, making the best decision of her career, Sommer steps out for a sojourn from her role in the German band Die Heiterkeit. Far from an extension of that group (though band mates Hanitra Wagner and Phillip Wolf both join her on this album), there are of course concomitant traces of it. Sommer however makes louder but also accentuates these traces and lingering relationships; her lived-in, far-beyond-her-years vocal more sonorous and commanding than before.
Possibly as perfect as an album can get, 13 Kinds Of Happiness is an ambitious, slowly unveiling album of diaphanous morose. Pastoral folk songs and hymn-like love trysts are transduced by a Gothic and Lutheran choral liturgy rich backing that reimagines Nico fronting Joy Division, or Marianne Faithfull writhing over a Scary Monsters And Super Creeps era Bowie soundtrack (especially on the galloping Northern European renaissance period evoking thunderous drumming ‘Dark Princess, Dark Prince’; just one of the album’s many highlights). I don’t use that Nico reference lightly: Sommer channeling the fatalistic heroine’s best qualities atmospherically speaking.
A curious Teutonic travail of venerable lovelorn despair and modesty, Sommer’s debut LP will take time to work its magic. But work its magic it will. A tremendous talent lyrically and vocally, serious and astute yet melodically enriching and lilted, her sagacious deep tones are starkly dramatic, but above all, rewarding. Here’s to a solo indulgence that I hope long continues. Full review…
(DV)
Station 17 ‘Blick’ (Bureau B)
With near enough thirty years of experience behind them and a changeable lineup of both musicians with and without various disabilities, the Station 17 collective once more shift their focus and sound; moving away from the all-out pop of the last album Alles Für Alle for a more improvised travail through the Krautrock, Kosmische and experimental electronica cannon.
Free of predetermined structures, lyrics and ideas they enjoyed an improvised freedom; inviting a host of German musical royalty to take part in what is a collaborative recording experience – something they’ve done in the past, having worked with icons such as Michael Rothar and the late Holger Czukay. And so each of the album’s tracks feature the signatures sounds and quirks of its guests: The writhing prehistoric Krautrock-jazzy Le Coeur Léger, Le Sentiment D’un Travail Bien Fait for example features the guiding avant-garde, ‘musique concrète’ presence of drum and bass partnership of Jean-Hervé Péron (the French title track I dare say his idea) and Zappi Diermaier; key founders of the reverent agent provocateurs Faust, who in recent decades have broken away to form their own iteration of the group under the faUSt banner. And, though only as part of its most modern regeneration, Tangerine Dream’s Ulrich Schnauss appears to gaze through a progressive Kosmische tinged explored ‘astronomical telescope’ on the album’s heaven’s gate opening finale.
From another generation, Dirk Dresselhaus, aka Schneider TM, appears both as an engineer, capturing these sessions and crafting them into a coherent album, and as a collaborator on the kooky bossa nova preset Die Uhr Spricht. Andreas Spechtl of Ja, Panik! infamy appears alongside Station 17 singer Siyavash Gharibi on the poppier, Der Plan-esque Dinge, and another Andreas, Andreas Dorau, joins the same upbeat, marimba like candour on what we’re told is an “enduring appraisal of post-capitalist perversion”, Schaust Du, whilst Datashock travel through the primordial soup into another dimension on the Acid Mothers-hitch-a-ride-aboard-the-Cosmic Jokers-spaceship Zauberpudding.
Turning the dial on an imaginary radio station, attuned to all the highlights from Germany’s most experimental if rhythmic decades, Blick confidently absorbs the influences and inspirations of its multitude of guests to produce social commentary and reflect on the here and now. Full review…
(DV)
T.
Rodrigo Tavares ‘Congo’ (Hive Mind Records)
The amorphous traversing post-rock and jazz travelogue from Brazilian guitarist/composer Rodrigo Tavares is filled with a sense of contemplation and meditation, and a yearn for the spiritual. The spiritual is represented in Congo’s genesis; the catalyst for Tavares soundtrack inspired, in part at least, by a visit to the controversial ‘spiritual healer’ John of God – a medium, psychic surgeon of dubious repute -, who lives in the remote central Brazilian town of Abadiânia. The meditative, in this case, runs throughout the suggestive instrumental passages and vignettes that ponderously drift, cascade and ebb across a real and imagined borderless global soundtrack.
Suffused throughout this album you’ll find lingering traces of the ACT jazz label, minimalism, Tortoise post-rock, Brazilian legends Joâo Gilberto, Dorival Caymmi and Tom Jobim, and removed by quite a few degrees, a hint of the free-form untethered to any easy classification, evolving guitar experimentation of the Sun City Girls – as it happens a show in a remote former gay bar in Brazil by the same band was one of the stopovers on Tavares ‘transformative road trip’; the fruits of which and experience laying down the creative foundations for Congo.
Truly transglobal, Tavares helps take Brazilian music – like his fellow compatriot Sentidor – into often trance-y, unburdened and unlabored directions. With few rough edges, this congruous soundtrack makes for a ruminating, thoughtful smooth journey. Full review…
(DV)
Samba Touré ‘Wande’ (Glitterbeat Records)
In a country abundant with guitar virtuosos, the highly genial Samba Touré still stands out as one of Mali’s most celebrated and accomplished; transducing the travails, heartache but also joy of his homeland through his signature articulate nimble-fingered style of playing.
His third album for Glitterbeat Records – the first, Albala, was the label’s inaugural release in 2013 – Wande is billed as a warmer homely songbook: previous releases were produced during the Islamist insurgency that swept aside and hijacked the Northeastern Tuareg communities’ battle for autonomy in the north eastern regions of Mali. Far from a complete break, the sadness endures on Wande; though Touré sadness is a most beautiful, cantering and lingering one. Especially when paying tribute to his friend and collaborator, sokou fiddle maestro Zoumana Tereta, on the spoken word with wavering drifty, almost dub-like echo-y effects tracks of the same name, which features the late musician’s spindly evocations from beyond the ether.
Recorded in under two weeks, allowing weekends for band members to scratch a living playing at weddings, sessions for the album were relaxed, performances captured on their first take with few overdubs. The lo fi production feel of the rocking blues ‘Yerfara/We Are Tired’ could be a lost inspiration for 80s period Rolling Stones with its almost transmogrified Start Me Up like Richards riff. ‘Goy Boyro/The Good Work (Well Done)’ even begins with a Taj Mahal, BB King reminiscent introduction hook, before dipping over the horizon. But whatever you do, don’t call this is a desert blues album, or even an African one; Touré correctly insistent that this is contemporary ‘universal’ rock music.
Not quite such a leap of faith or different to previous albums, an unpolished and laidback methodology has produced a slightly more sagacious, free-floating quality and another essential Touré masterpiece. Full review…
(DV)
Ty ‘A Work of Heart’ (Jazz Re:Freshed)
“Almost feels like a magic carpet ride over the capital’s skyline; come and spread your arms if you really need a hug” – RnV Mar 18
Soft focus viewed with the wisest of eyes cutting through life’s smokescreen: the eminent UK statesman preserves the essence of never getting too high or too low. Ty has long had that trustworthy delivery of a life coach who can pep you up – inspirational with quiet authority – and tell you to man up without raising his voice, any hints at vulnerability given the very British keep calm and carry on treatment (“when you smile with me publicly I’m wearing a mask, gritting my teeth, a wolf in a bundle of sheep”). The liltingly clean production is what might turn a few ears belonging to those thinking hip-hop’s not for them – right from the off it’s of a Ty-tracked, toasted cinnamon bun snugness, a concrete jungle paved with a yellow brick road heading towards promised lands, but with the plain sailing carrying some turbulence. ‘A Work of Heart’ sounds as good as when Jack Frost comes knocking, as much as when the summer’s hose pipes were forbidden fruit. And like the first blooms of spring. AND the first leaves of autumn falling too.
(MO)
U.
U.S. Girls ‘In A Poem Unlimited’ (4AD)
Featuring most of the Toronto cast of collaborators that propelled the first U.S. Girls release for 4AD records, Half Free, forward, but stretched and lushly flexed into space boogie and other equally eclectic grooves by the city’s multi-limbed collective The Cosmic Range, Meg Remy’s latest cerebral pop revision tones down some of the vibrancy for acerbic, sax-wailing pouted-lips resignation and introversion.
Moving across the border from the USA with her husband and musical collaborator Maximilian Turnbull, aka guitar-slinging maverick Slim Twig, long before Trump reached The White House, Remy has broadened her postmodernist transmogrification of bleeding hearts 60s girl group meets tape-loops signature to accommodate femme fatale disco and funk since making a new home for herself in Canada.
The momentum of this album fluctuates throughout, and compared to Half Free, takes a lot to bed in and flow – and I’m still not sold on the two skits -, starting as it does with the aching ponderous slow burner Velvet 4 Sale – perhaps Remy’s most dark fantasy yet, imaging (just imagining mind) a role reversal of power, as she implores a girl friend to buy a gun for protection, impressing that the only way to change men is for women to use violence. An unsettling twist played out to a dragging soul fuzz backing track, the song’s central tenant imagines a world where women take up arms against men, though Remy ‘deplores violence’ of course. It’s followed by an equally sensually nuzzling sax and yearned vocal performance, and take on the Plastic Ono Band, Rage Of Plastic, before picking up with the album’s most bouncy weaponized boogie, M.A.H. – a chic Ronnie Spector fronting Blondie style diatribe broadside aimed at the democrats venerated saviour Obama, who Remy condemns for the charismatic charm seduction that pulled-the-wool over many supporters eyes, hiding the fact that he presided over a covert number of unsavory drone strikes.
Hardly disarming then, In A Poem Unlimited deplores the present hierarchy with a seething checked rage, set to a challenging but melodious soundtrack of yearning no wave, scintillating chic disco, Plastic Ono Band soul, vaporous 80s pop and even jazz. The patriarch comes in for some scathing poetic justice; played out to some of the year’s best tunes and performances. Full review…
(DV)
V.
Vukovar ‘Infinitum’ (Le Recours Forêts Production)
Vukovar/Michael Cashmore ‘Monument’
Among the most prolific of bands, Vukovar have released two of their most stunning albums in just the last quarter of 2018 alone. Keeping to the signature three-syllable grandly entitled Gothic statements of malcontent, melodrama, aggrandizement and melconholy, both Infintum and Monument romantically encircle the void better and with more sagacious quality than previous records. Though only in existence for barely three years, and perhaps already splitting up, Vukovar are improving on every release. Both are included because…well, I can’t make my mind up about which of these recent opuses of despair and hermetic exploration I prefer. Hell….they’re both great. And here’s why:
The fifth LP in the malcontent’s cannon, Infinitum, pulls at the mortal coil of human misery in a murky quagmire. An endless backing track of reverberating delayed snare strikes, a rolling timpani bounding bass drum, esoteric stately sounding waltzes, unwieldy bestial guitar, resigned new romantic synth and escaped melodies muddily, and often amorphously, swim and oscillate around a combination of longing, if worn down and depressed, swooning vocals and Rimbaud-meets-Crowley-meets-Kant-on-the-edge-of-an-abyss poetic despairing narration, on what is a bleak if at times gloriously dark beauty of an album.
Bound-up in their own self-imposed limitations, these anarchistic dreamers go one further than the Hebrew code of law commandments by adhering to 13 of their own; each one a rule or restriction in the recording process that couldn’t be broken, at any cost. So strict were these conditions that even if the band were close to finishing the album, any infringement no matter how minor, would result in the entire sessions being abandoned. Mercifully they made it through to the end; releasing a troubled, bleak lo fi ritualistic romance of an grand opus.
Cut from the same cloth, but collaborating with an undoubted influence, the group’s sixth LP, Monument, traverses the void with Current 93 stalwart and producer/composer Michael Cashmore (appearing under the guises of his Nature And Organization nom de plume). A congruous in what is a melancholy harrowing romantic partnership with the morbidly curious Vukovar, Cashmore leads with a vaporous, industrial and often godly (whichever God/Gods they be) brutalist swathe of sagacious moodiness. Arguably inheritors of Current 93 and, even more so, Coil’s gnostic-theological mysticism and brooding venerable communions, Cashmore seems the obvious foil. Current’s The Innermost Light and Coil’s (and John Balance’s swan song as it were) The Ape Of Naples both permeate this conceptual opus.
From haunting melodrama to harrowing decay, unrequited love to radiant escape, the loss of innocence and youth to sagacious death rattles, Vukovar prove ideal torchbearers of the cerebral Gothic sound and melancholic romanticism. A meeting of cross-generational minds with both partners on this esoteric immersive experience fulfilling their commitments, Monument shows a real progression for Vukovar, and proves a perfect vehicle for Cashmore’s uncompromising but afflatus ideas to flourish in new settings, whilst confirming his reputation and status.
Whatever happens next, this ambitious work will prove a most fruitful and lasting highlight in the Vukovar cannon; one that’s growing rapidly, six albums in with a seventh already recorded; another ‘momentous’ statement that affirms the band’s reputation as one of the UK’s most important new bands. Full reviews…
(DV)
Y.
‘Yiddish Glory: The Lost Songs Of World War II’ (Six Degrees)
In light of the recent Tree Of Life synagogue shootings in Pittsburgh, the increasingly uncomfortable language and hostility from the far Left, and the rising tide of European wide anti-semitism, this most tragic songbook of WWII Soviet Union laments from the Jewish community that joined Stalinist Russia’s defence against the Nazis, is a timely reminder of persecution from the graveyard of history. 400,000 men and women signed up to fight Hitler’s forces in one of the most bloody and apocalyptic campaigns in military history. If gratitude was ever warranted, the fate that awaited many of the survivors was anything but; mistrust and resentment instead led to swathes of the Soviet Union’s Jews being imprisoned, tortured and murdered by Stalin’s regime, their sacrifice for the mother nation all but airbrushed out of existence – almost.
Thought lost in the annals of time; suppressed, if not destroyed, the tragic but poetic WWII testaments, made lyrical prose, of just a small cross-section of Russia’s Jews is given the richly evocative and adroit production showcase it deserves by a collective of professors, producers and musicians. Originally unified in an anthology by an ethnomusicologist from the Kiev Cabinet For Jewish Culture, Moisei Beregovsky, alongside colleague Rovim Lerner, hundreds of Yiddish songs written by Red Army soldiers, victims and survivors of the Nazi’s massacres were gathered in the hope of being eventually published and performed. Unfortunately at the very height of the Communist Party’s purges in the decades that followed the end of WWII, both these well-intentioned preservationists were arrested. Subsequently the project was never finished, the work sealed up and hidden away. But as it would later transpire, not destroyed.
Transcribing these laments and firsthand accounts of endurance (many of which included testament evidence to various Nazi atrocities) would take patience, skill but above all respect. The results of this this most tragic desideratum are underscored by the musical director and violinist Sergei Erdenko‘s conducted stirring accompaniment ensemble of classically trained instrumentalists and singers; all of whom were brought together by the producer, and overseer (one amongst a whole group of people that have perserved, shared and made this project possible over the decades) Dan Rosenberg.
Songs of heroism, stoic belief, and even more violently encouraging prompts to machine gun as many Nazis as possible, are brought back to life. But despite the materials obvious harrowing and tragic heart-wrenching nature, the music throughout is a dizzying, waltzing mix of Yiddish, Roma, Klezmer, folk and even jazzy cabaret that’s often upbeat. The band does a sterling job in giving voice to those suppressed individuals and the songs that were believed lost forever, destroyed by a regime that would treat its loyal Jewish community, many of which made the ultimate sacrifice and wholeheartedly believed in the socialist doctrine, little better than the Nazis they so valiantly overcame. Yiddish Glory is not just a reminder however, or even just a revelation, but a beautifully produced and evocative performance. Full review…
(DV)
Thom Yorke ‘Suspiria (Music For The Luca Guadagnino Film) (XL Recordings)
I’ve no idea of the inimitable Thom Yorke‘s methodology and process – whether he composed directly to a cut of Luca Guadagnino‘s remake, or, went away on the premise that…well, it’s Suspiria, and this iconic Gallo trip knows exactly what sort of a soundtrack it thirsts for, so I’ll just make it up in me head -, but whatever it is, his evocative harrowing soundtrack technique works; providing an eerie balance of spine-chilling tension and beautiful dreamy waltzes.
Elevating further the progressive and ritualistic treatment of the original 1977 Suspiria movie soundtrack by Italy’s revered Goblin, Yorke’s mirror-y hypnotised lingered vignettes and bestial guttural scares are treated with earnest seriousness.
If a film could be even more stylised than its original forbearers, this post-millennial disturbed take by Gundagino is an artistically knowing, conceptually aloof indulgence for the senses that receives the most stunning, richly esoteric of soundtracks. Compelling, alluring and plaintive; using many of the arty macabre’s signature tricks, atmospheric mood stirrers and prompts – from heightened Gothic choral aches to Carpenter meets Oldfield piano note and tubular chiming nerve tinklers – Yorke sets out his soundtrack somewhere between the perimeters of Kubrick, magic realism, psychological drama, Dario Argento, Francois de Roubaix and his very own solo work.
The proof is in the candle-lit shadowy mood induced eating of course, and sitting as I was in the daylight of the early afternoon, I couldn’t help but feel unnerved enough to check behind the curtains for murderous witchery dance troupe teachers, who’s intent was to embed a sacrificial knife into my skull. Yes I was spooked.
A frightful but often ethereal magical score, Yorke matches his Radiohead foil, Jonny Greenwood in the field of soundtracks: an artform all in itself. I’ve no doubt it will become a cult album; equal to the sacred Goblin score, if not, dare I suggest, an improvement.
(DV)
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