Shut up but not shutdown or vice versa, the music business gained succour from the margins in 2021 with so many lip-smacking delights from far-flung fields and hitherto unexpected quarters. Labels like New Amsterdam, Mappa Editions, Leaving Records, American Dreams, and Nyege Nyege Tapes put themselves on the map with a string of sterling releases, alongside solo undertakings and the usual sturdy fare from stalwarts like Anti and Hyperdub. This selection of the twenty best records of the year plus honourable mentions features everything from the avant-pop fireworks of Arca to the shamanistic trance of Raja Kirik and the austere folk of Myriam Gendron.
Arca hunkered down over the producer’s desk before dropping a seasonal sackful of music in the form of four albums from the KiCk series, which just like the festivities in her native Venezuela featured everything from the burst and sparkle of firecrackers to the sub-bass pulse of the furruco friction drum. Completing her arc as an avant-pop artist with razor-sharp teeth, the second and third installments in the series pieced together the splintered shards of ‘Mequetrefe’ with a focus on deconstructed club breakouts and maximalist reggaeton, while the fourth and fifth entries in the KiCk universe proved by turns tender and glacial.
On her third album Vulture Prince, the Brooklyn-based Pakistani composer Arooj Aftab drew from Sufi devotionals and odes to separation or unrequited love, cossetting her words in an intoxicating blend of locales and suggestive sound patterns, managing to seamlessly incorporate the improvisational sweep of the raga, the squelch and skank of reggae, and the encompassing arch of jazz. The result transcends borders and genres, even as Aftab became the first Pakistani woman with Grammy nominations for best new artist and best global song.
Languid and flowering, wistful and decadent in a way which feels restorative through the copious care of its patient sprawl, the record sees Aftab accompanied by a long list of collaborators including the harpist Maeve Gilchrist, violinist Darian Donovan Thomas, and bassist Petros Klampanis. ‘Last Night’ weighs and repeats the lines of a short poem by Rumi, ‘Mohabbat’ serves as the slinky centrepiece of the album, while ‘Saans Lo’ features words penned by her late friend Annie Ali Khan, a subdued and elegant drone piece which bubbles away restlessly between keys, straining at its corporeal bonds.
During the writing of the record, Aftab also lost her younger brother Maher, to whom Vulture Prince is dedicated. She likens the album and its opening track ‘Baghon Main’ to the dakhma or Tower of Silence, the Parsi raised funeral structure where the deceased are left to be consumed by vultures, preserving the soil while continuing the cycle of life. Singing mostly in Urdu, she says that Vulture Prince is ‘about revisiting places I’ve called mine, places that don’t necessarily exist anymore. It’s about people, friendships, relationships – some relationships that were unexpectedly short term, and how to deal with that’.
Arushi Jain – Under the Lilac Sky
Whether it was the strictures of lockdowns and other distancing regulations, concern for historical authenticity, or a growing appreciation for the sheer breadth of sounds still being performed on the world stage, one of the features of the past year in music has been the steady repurposing of traditional forms. Nobody accomplished that feat better than the composer and technologist Arushi Jain, whose ambient synth ragas encircled the listener like a sudden clearing or a windswept embrace.
The name for the melodic framework for improvisation native to Indian classical music, the word ‘raga’ is rooted in Sanskrit terms for dyeing and colouring, with each raga closely attuned to the prevailing atmosphere, environment, season, and time of day. Arushi Jain invites the listener to luxuriate in those sunset hours when the skies ‘turn into beautiful hues of purple and pink and everything in between’.
Singing the alap or sargam, the wordless sequence of pitches and notes which reveal and develop the musical characteristics of the raga, or sometimes burying her voice deep within the mix, on Under the Lilac Sky the composer compounds the tonic and iterative qualities of the classical form with the bleeps and twangs of her modular synthesizers, which sometimes cut like a buzzsaw right into the heart of the raga and sometimes function more like an overlay, wind-up birds heralding a futuristic and utopian dreamscape. Mostly though it is the deft use of analogue synthesizers to elaborate the sights and sounds of each raga which makes Jain’s practice both novel and unique.
On ‘Richer Than Blood’ sawtooth synthesizers and ethereal vocals transport us to the edge of the clearing, a gathering which swells in number as ‘Look How Far We Have Come’ brings rushes of colour and throbbing bass drones before the choral phaseout. ‘The Sun Swirls Within You’ basks in the moment, while by the onset of ‘My People Have Deep Roots’ the temperature has dropped. Finally on the title track and album closer the rapturous vision and rapid ascent of straying and wayfaring arpeggios give way as the sun dips below the horizon, leaving a darkened sky, chattering teeth, and warm blankets as we lend our own colours and visions to the night.
From the sheathed noise and strained elocution lessons of ‘somewhere between the 8th and 9th floor’, on im hole the London producer aya manifests a strange and somnambulant phantasm which plays out like the lost soundtrack to a Silent Hill movie. ‘Hello everyone, and welcome to the show’ she says at the end of the track, which winds up encompassing everything from the grimy sinkscapes of ‘what if i should fall asleep and slipp under’ and ‘Emley lights us moor’ to the woozy footwork of ‘once wen’t west’ and ‘dis yacky’, whose legwork runs on a treadmill behind the playground rattles and smothered panpipes reduced to elemental blips and beeps.
Again on ‘OoB Prosthesis’ her penchant for sound poetry crosses the rubicon between advertorial jargonese, self-help guidance, and psychoanalytic breakthrough. Sometimes aya herself delivers the societal diagnoses like caustic drippings from an acrid tongue. Life’s problems briefly seem soluble before the warped bass meltdown of ‘the only solution i have found is to simply jump higher’, while following the KerPlunk descent of ‘tailwind’, on ‘backsliding’ aya finally arrives at something like a communal mission statement, saying ‘It’s been four years now I’ve been trading places, evading faces, saving graces. Elegiac susserations bubble up but if we grip we set the pace’.
Honourable Mentions: Angel Bat Dawid – Hush Harbor Mixtape Vol. 1 Doxology • Armand Hammer & The Alchemist – Haram • Bridget Ferrill – Only • claire rousay – a softer focus • Eli Keszler – Icons • Ethel Cain – Inbred
Blackhaine – And Salford Falls Apart
Blackhaine commits to a startling double act on his second extended play And Salford Falls Apart, straddling the streets and moorlands of North West England like some monolithically long-limbed spectre and at the same time infinitesimally small, stranded and desperate amid the frayed hubbub of the city or shunted anonymously like a hospital patient through triage.
‘Only reason that I stay here cos I can’t give you pain’ is the refrain which haunts the record, from the dead-end jobs and city centre spiceheads of ‘Saddleworth’ to the nameless trysts of ‘Hotel’, where the onset of rigor mortis ironically coincides with a propulsive post-club breakout. Blackhaine cites a wide array of influences from the social-realism of La Haine to traditional Japanese butoh theatre, while his sound palette collides the best of British experimental and underclass music from punk and trip hop to grime and drill. On the title track with production by Rainy Miller, through the seesaw rhythms of ‘Let Me Know’, despair and degradation are cyclical and redemption remains the goal.
Caroline Shaw & Sō Percussion – Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part
In 2017 the composer, violinist, and vocalist Caroline Shaw wrote a piece in five parts for Sō Percussion, Dawn Upshaw, and Gilbert Kalish, setting a text from The Sacred Harp over a sonic palette which incorporated ceramic bowls, flower pots, and a piano played like a dulcimer by five simultaneous people. Several months on from the release of Narrow Sea, on Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part it was Shaw fronting up the experimental percussive ensemble for an equally spellbinding sequence of songs loosely bound by an ecological theme and a lightly borne eschatology.
Together Shaw and Sō Percussion seem to find the shared roots between contemporary classical music and choral trends in modern indie pop, betwixt the painterly brushstrokes of jazz and the driving disco-oriented harmonies of ABBA and The Pointer Sisters. The exquisite phrasing of Shaw sometimes stays at the level of a hum, and other times serves to unfurl dense passages of sound poetry, as on the title track which goes something like ‘Lyrically we seem to be simpatically derived from integers, insistent on a key, resistance, pen in hand you handed me your altogether, pen in hand you handed me your further, curling, further, finding curser, foiling, wrapped around this mortal coil…’
‘…let the soil’ which after all that toil is finally left on the prolonged puff of the last syllable to play its simple part. The album features settings of the poem ‘A Gradual Dazzle’ by Anne Carson and ‘Some Bright Morning’ by the shape note composer Albert Brumley, plus Shaw and Sō Percussion’s take on the Swedish pop classic ‘Lay All Your Love On Me’ which rises to a near-wordless crescendo alongside a stunning marimba peak. Exemplified by the breathtaking ‘Other Song’, this solo vocal debut for Shaw is supple and yearning, willing to trip headlong through all of the trepidation which is a necessary correlate of heartbreak and romance.
Fatima Al Qadiri – Medieval Femme
Fresh from her score for the award-winning Mati Diop film Atlantics, the Kuwaiti producer Fatima Al Qadiri returned to Hyperdub with an equally lush and decadent suite of songs inspired by the classical poems of Arab women. From the stately invocations of the album opener and title track to the serpentine curls of ‘A Certain Concubine’ and ‘Sheba’, on Medieval Femme the artist pushes at the boundaries between despondency and desire.
‘Vanity’ opens out onto the ornamental garden of ‘Stolen Kiss of a Succubus’, whose long decays and restive shadows suggest a scarcely concealed rot and squalor. Entreaties can also serve as stays of restraint, and on ‘Malaak’ and ‘Tasakuba’ the doubled vocals carry an air of admonishment as they play off the synthesized sounds of the tanbur and qanun, all cloaked in layers of reverb. That makes the closer ‘Zandaq’, the only piece on the album which uses a traditional Arabic scale, hopelessly lost somewhere between retreat and pastoral respite.
Styling herself as the ‘Walmart Marilyn Monroe’, the debut of the Los Angeles native Glüme stretched beyond period atmospherics and the neon-clad synth flourishes which are the Italians Do It Better stock-in-trade courtesy of a broad electronic palette and some keenly personal songwriting. Diagnosed at the end of a long line of therapists and cardiologists with Prinzmetal angina, a narrowing of the coronary arteries which tends to manifest over long nights and painfully muted mornings, on The Internet the singer gives a fresh twist to well-worn tales of heartbreak and disconnection.
Content dictates form through the spare entreaties and Wurlitzer keys of the opening song ‘Arthur Miller’, the full-frontal industrial throb of ‘Crushed Velvet’, and the submerged disco squelch of ‘Body’ which exposes the dualities and dichotomies of her condition. Videos with the saturated colours of ‘Nervous Breakdown’ and the tap-dance interludes of ‘Get Low’ only served to emphasise the characteristic which sets Glüme apart from the pack, a steely self-assurance which belies the blue eyes and genteel glamour.
Give These a Listen: Fire-Toolz – Eternal Home • Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders, and the London Symphony Orchestra – Promises • Indigo De Souza – Any Shape You Take • Jeff Parker – Forfolks • Julian Lage – Squint • Kajsa Lindgren – Momentary Harmony
Shade opens with the crackle of tape hiss as some saccharine theme song plays on a loop through an old cathode-ray tube television set. Unusually forthright, ‘Followed the ocean’ slips almost preemptively into the urgent strumming of an ‘Unclean mind’ which Liz Harris desperately tries to rearrange, only the patterns won’t match. The television set is just background noise, no more a part of the foreground than some far-off train running over familiar tracks, because in the other room someone is packing a suitcase.
The songs on Shade were recorded by Liz Harris over the course of the past fifteen years, between a residency at Mount Tamalpais and time spent living in Portland and Astoria. One of her most lyrical and cohesive albums, beyond the urgency of the introduction it features the same coastal atmospheres and half-sung lullabies, teetering as though tugged at by some ceaseless aqua undercurrent.
Songs like ‘Ode to the blue’ and Disordered Minds’ sound like submerged Pixies or Elliott Smith, while ‘Pale Interior’ calls to mind the emotional availability of another artist who described themselves as ‘amorous but out of reach’. ‘The way her hair falls’ and ‘Promise’ are painfully tender, as it remains unclear whether Harris is expressing her devotion and confiding in a lover or weighing her thoughts while they sleep. ‘Kelso (Blue sky)’ burns with a sense of loss and resignation, burdened with the pain and loss of a burgeoning tranquility upon the realisation that a destination has been reached.
JJJJJerome Ellis – The Clearing
On The Clearing the disabled composer, writer, and stutterer JJJJJerome Ellis seeks to frame speech dysfluency as a space for possibility, setting forth in the opening seconds of ‘Loops of Retreat’ his thesis which is that ‘blackness, dysfluency, and music are forces that open time’. On ‘Dysfluent Waters’ he runs through a series of watery etymologies, drawing from the sixteenth-century French poet Guillaume Bouchet and eighteenth-century abolitionist Olaudah Equiano to contemporary thinkers like Toni Morrison and Derek Walcott, noting for instance the sonic similarity between the Latin words ‘balbus’ for a stutterer or stammerer and ‘babulus’ for a babbler or fool.
Process and minutiae give way to the spectral utterances and staggered basslines of ‘Bend Back the Bow and Let the Hymn Fly’. Ellis weaves together passages of spoken word poetry, finding the poetry within what might otherwise scan as footnotes through the sheer eloquence and connectivity of his material, with electroacoustic patches rendered on the saxophone, piano, and synthesizer. Improvisation, counterpoint, and repetition by way of loops are the pillars of his sound. He hopes to offer the listener ‘some of what my stutter offers me: an opportunity to imagine new ways of being in time’. On The Clearing he fulfills the hope which is the very essence of music.
Conceived as a threshold between urban expanse and boundless forest, blending digital and analogue sounds, balancing the dizzying turmoil of contemporary life with some of the rhythmic ease of nature, for her third studio album Kedr Livanskiy sought to carry over some of the heady dancefloor atmospherics of her earlier work while embracing a newfound maturity as an artist. From the cherubic chatter, synthesized birdsong, and squelching breakbeats of the opening teaser ‘Celestial Ether’, on Liminal Soul the Moscow producer shows that she is on more than the right track.
Channeling her voice into operatic choruses, crystalline fragments, and soaring falsetto, on the single ‘Boy’ she sings for the first time in English, figuring separation through hallucination with the grain of predawn Moscow or Petersburg and the sunset gradient of the Balearics. On ‘Stars Light Up (Посмотри на небо)’ the sputtering house loop echoes the restless cycle of days. Alongside Flaty on ‘Your Turn’, the repetitious descent of the chorus bears witness to an aching resignation, before the cosmic squalls, foghorn sirens, and swirling vocals of the album closer ‘Storm Dancer’ signal a final break with our terrestrial bonds.
Laila Sakini – Strada & Princess Diana of Wales
While other artists blended their samples and field recordings with domestic sounds and other diaphanous home comforts, or drew inspiration from the act of sporadic or extended retreat, from the foothills of Melbourne by way of an unexpectedly desolate London, the producer Laila Sakini embarked on an endless highway. Two records released in the space of a month featured rustling and restlessly muted, low fidelity takes on jazz, dub, and trip hop.
Like two sides of a coin rubbed the same way between thumb and forefinger, on Strada the artist made fine use of a borrowed guitar, smeared samples, a whinnying saxophone, and barebones bass clarinet, even if the epic wandering was confined to the blank alleyways and shadowy streets of an enforced staycation. On ‘The Blue Room’ and ‘Stephens Secret’ we juke and dive between burnouts with a cyberpunk flair or listen as the cars rev their engines haplessly in the driveway, before ‘Towards The Opaline Sky’ cranks the scene back to life, a motorised whirligig which takes flight and soars through the skyspace.
As Princess Diana of Wales, Sakini donned a foulard marinière and the smudged garb of royalty for the Melbourne record label A Colourful Storm, foregrounding her vocals over plucked bass, slow-strummed guitar, and the roiling clip-clop of percussion. From the downbeat ‘Still Beach’ where the singer watches her future wash away for the sake of the moment, to the spare basslines and aching exhortations of ‘Swing’ and ‘Closer’, through the spectral sea shanty where ‘Fragments of Blue’ become ‘fragments of you’ in a queasy and flickering rumination, songs seem to arch towards choruses which never quite transpire, lost in the moment of exhalation.
You Might Also Like: Lana Del Rey – Chemtrails over the Country Club & Blue Banisters • Leon Duncan – Fuck a rosetta stone for my brain waves • Mabe Fratti – Será que ahora podremos entendernos • Mach-Hommy – Pray For Haiti • Mary Lattimore – Collected Pieces II • Matt Sweeney & Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy – Superwolves
Laura Cannell & Kate Ellis – These Feral Lands
Over the course of the past year, the violinist Laura Cannell and cellist Kate Ellis managed to produce twelve extended plays whose bold strokes marked the subtle gradation of the seasons. Supported by Arts Council England, playing a game of call and response mostly between a farmed valley in Suffolk and a studio shed near the coast of Essex, across These Feral Lands the duo swooped and swallowed to embrace the plant folklore and poetic fragments of spring and the ancient carols and snow crystals of winter.
The overbowing technique which is the signature of Cannell allows her to play several notes at once, giving a frayed and sonorous breadth to the lively cello playing of Ellis. Tracks like ‘Sea Tower’ sought solace through short phrases and swathes of existential dread, slowly giving way to the wary explorations of summer. Bowed and plucked strings dug into the heart of the season as the Renaissance crumhorn and Chinese hulusi were added to the mix, while a resonant ‘Arctic Drone’ found Cannell emanating warmth from the pipe organ. The pair were joined at various points by the harpist Rhodri Davies, the sound recordist Chris Watson, and the University of Glasgow Chapel Choir.
The prodigiously talented Tuareg guitarist Mdou Moctar is at the forefront of a fusion of blues and rock music, rooted in drought and displacement but now flowing ever more freely out from the arid landscapes of the Sahel. This year Les Filles de Illighadad brought their choral chants and tende percussion to Pioneer Works in New York City, while the stars of the Agadez wedding circuit Etran de L’Aïr offered listeners an insight into life in their desert metropolis as they embarked on their first major European tour.
On Afrique Victime the guitarist and his bandmates forego psychedelic experimentation for the full-throttle embrace of rock and roll, citing mainstream acts like Black Sabbath and Van Halen among their influences, while also drawing from the distorted punk and tempo shifts of Black Flag and the synthetic melodies and social consciousness of the dub reggae mainstays Black Uhuru. From the anthemic and freewheeling ‘Taliat’ to the more pensive and declarative title track, Mdou Moctar broaches colonial legacies and contemporary injustices, while ‘Ya Habibti’ and ‘Layla’ pay tribute to Abdallah Oumbadougou, who founded the genre which now ruptures the sky and signposts the form.
Moor Mother – Black Encyclopedia of the Air
‘This place’ is the phrase which Moor Mother intones across the opening track ‘Temporal Control Of Light Echoes’, facing the present head on over sinuous drum rolls and throbbing bass having cut a swathe through the thicket. On Black Encyclopedia of the Air the spoken word poet showcases her rapping chops over an earthy and apparitional blend of muted jazz, hollowed out rhythm and blues, and faltering percussion.
The grainy surface textures and slowed-down rhythms call to mind the genres of witch house and cloud rap while from Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra to Missy Elliott and the more class-conscious conceptualisations of Mr. Lif, the record once more finds Moor Mother breaking down the door of Afrofuturism. The gesture aims not to cultivate some groggy early-hours mindset or the sights and sounds of an earlier period, but rather to retune and reify time so that we might better understand the wielding of it.
‘Mangrove’ and ‘Race Function Limited’ conjure the spectres of war, slavery, and confederacy while with its warped music hall melody and shrugging backbeat, ‘Shekere’ sloughs off shared and personal legacies of pain and grief. ‘Obsidian’ and ‘Iso Fonk’ deal with surveillance states of mind at the global and neighbourhood levels, while ‘Tarot’ the longest track on the album whispers like a restless cycle of shop doors or windswept gardens, turning both sides of the playing cards and swirling the tea leaves in a sweeping meditation on memory.
‘Made A Circle’ is an ode to family and community on an album rich in collaboration, with Moor Mother holding hands with Nappy Nina, Maassai, Antonia Gabriela, and Orion Sun on the track which distills its message through the lines ‘Each generation heals from trauma a little more. They set the score, the precedent. They built the floor, the ceiling is irrelevant’.
Moor Mother also stood at the centre of two more of the year’s best albums, cleaving the sky with the free jazz collective Irreversible Entanglements as they pushed through the postcolonial debris with a call to Open the Gates, while partnering with Rasheedah Phillips as Black Quantum Futurism for the Mmere Dane: Black Time Belt archive, which mapped the displaced and destroyed black towns and freedom colonies which once dotted the United States.
Myriam Gendron – Ma délire – Songs of love, lost & found
On an album of trenchant lyricism and cultural cross-pollination, the singer Myriam Gendron reinterpreted traditional music from the United States, France, and Quebec. Reworking old folk songs with a contemporary resonance, combining originals with the half-torn remnants of the past, on Ma délire – Songs of love, lost & found her electric guitar and unsparing voice hold the centre, with contributions from the likes of Chris Corsano, Tonio Morin-Vargas, and Guillaume Bourque on drums, the Moog synthesizer, and bass clarinet.
Some of the songs rub up against the popular idiom, like the lovelorn opener ‘Go Away From My Window’ which was written by John Jacob Niles and quoted at the height of the folk music revival by Bob Dylan, before being covered by Linda Ronstadt and Joan Baez. Meanwhile ‘Poor Girl Blues’ combines ‘Poor Boy, Long Ways From Home’, one of the oldest songs in the blues repertoire, with the song of forced French Canadian exile ‘Un Canadien errant’. ‘What does it mean for me to sing these songs today?’ Gendron asked in an interview with Aquarium Drunkard, calling the ‘Poor Boy Blues’ a ‘lost paradise story, one of the oldest stories in the world’.
Switching freely between English and French, on ‘Au coeur de ma délire’ the snap and crackle of ambient sounds – chirping crickets, radio snippets, the clank and hiss of a boat repair shop converted from an old mill – give a cinematic quality to the setting, through which Gendron stoutly uncoils the traditional Quebecois tune. And on ‘Waly Waly’ she inhabits with staggering poise the song of Scottish origin, whose Canadian version tells a tale of heartache and longing amid the wide waters and beckoning seas. Love and passion or beauty and youth may wax and wane with the seasons, but like all great folk singers Gendron encapsulates the moment while charting new frontiers.
The Best of the Rest: Moritz Von Oswald Trio – Dissent • µ-Ziq & Mrs Jynx – Secret Garden • Penelope Trappes – Penelope Three & Mother’s Blood Edition • perila – How much time it is between you and me? • Rắn Cạp Đuôi – Ngủ Ngày Ngay Ngày Tận Thế • Skee Mask – Pool
Dedicated to the memory of his grandfather who passed away before he was born, with Hidemi the prolific composer and saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi delved deeper into the shared and personal experiences of life inside the Japanese American concentration camps of the Second World War.
Stacking up layers of alto, baritone, tenor, C melody, and soprano saxophone, the record opens with the siren calls and foghorn wails of ‘Beachside Lonelyhearts’ before the despairing squalls and labyrinthine trails of ‘Tule Lake Like Yesterday’ bray against the camps and their abiding horrors. Tule Lake was one of ten concentration camps which corralled nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans during the war, more than two-thirds of whom were United States citizens.
‘Jellyfish in the Sky’ and ‘What Happens When People Open Their Hearts’ take a more winding and circuitous approach, before Shiroishi touches upon some of the wider complexities of race with ‘Stand Up and Let Us Go and Witness This Ourselves’, which incorporates aspects of ragtime and swing, and ‘To Kill a Wind-Up Bird’, which references Harper Lee and Haruki Murakami, finding a throughline before its parts crash together in fiery denouement.
Snare brushes provide a sense of breathy hesitation to the solitary and pensive ‘Without the Threat of Punishment There Is No Joy in Taking Flight’, and the celestial squiggle and burnished glow of ‘The Long Bright Dark’ finally breaks on soaring choruses. Drawing inspiration from the Japanese concept of ‘gaman’, which means to endure the unbearable with patience and dignity, Patrick Shiroishi continues to stand up for the past while pushing at the borders of free jazz and solo improvisation.
In 1596 a Dutch expedition arrived at the port town of Banten, at the time the centre of a proud Islamic trading kingdom. By the time it returned home, the fleet had lost more than half of its men owing to illness, infighting, and repeated clashes with the locals, who had captured some of the officers and held them for ransom. But with 245 bags of pepper, 45 tonnes of nutmeg, and 30 bales of mace, the expedition still proved profitable enough for the Dutch, who used Java as their base as they sought control over Indonesia. When the trading posts of the Dutch East India Company went bankrupt in 1800, their possessions were nationalised as the Dutch East Indies.
For their second album Yennu Ariendra and J. Mo’ong Santoso Pribadi called upon centuries of cultural resistance in Java, which typically manifested in shamanic dances full of agile wit and crafty evasion. Some of these dances like the Bujang Ganong are part of the traditional Reog, while others like the Jaranan took on distinct forms as a way to symbolically counteract the Dutch colonial forces. Others still are the products of regional conflict and cultural diffusion, like the Barongan which Indonesians came to regard as plagiarised from the Reog, incorporating it back into the mainstream of their dance after the form flourished in eighteenth-century Malaysia.
Turning these shamanic dances and trance-like states to music, Raja Kirik produce a combustible and no-holds-barred blend of digital noise and Dutch hardstyle with traditional Indonesian percussion. Taking the microtonal clanks from their arsenal of homemade instruments and sheathing them in scabrous electronics, ‘Bujang Ganong’ abounds in dry heaves and contorted electroclash, while the ceremonial chimes of ‘Barongan’ steadily slip their moorings. Horns and gamelan multiply on ‘Kubro’ and ‘DOR’. The possessed horsemen of the Jaranan gain the ability to eat glass and endure whipping or hot coals, necessities now mastered on wax by Raja Kirik.
The Equiknoxx frontwoman Shanique Marie stepped out solo on Gigi’s House for a series of soft-spoken and mostly pastel-tinted swatches of smooth reggae and R&B. From the skeletal soul of ‘P3’ and neo-soul stormscape of ‘Druggin” to the impressionistic piano keys which instigate the plaintive ‘Ballad’, the singer opens up windows on all manner of romance. ‘Give Thanks (Smooth Take)’ and ‘Grow’ are gracious and thankful while still carrying a pensive air, while ‘Married Man’ is furtive but upbeat and hopeful, carrying over the one-drop rhythm from ‘Government Name’ where formality becomes a marker of intimacy.
Just when he thought he was out, Wiki returned to take his rightful place at the top of the rap game. Or as the opening track ‘Not Today’ puts it, ‘When it’s all dried up, all of a sudden here comes the flood’ as over street sirens and the crackling production of Navy Blue, the rapper bunkers down amid the bricks and skeletons of New York City, promising some tough love for all of those listeners who might have taken him for granted.
Wiki has more than a couple of things to say on Half God, which emerged from the citywide shutdown and cancelled shows of the coronavirus pandemic. With a quick shuffle and a scarcely shifted beat, on ‘Roof’ he takes a bird’s-eye view over the city, putting his priorities straight while carving out a little space for reflection. Between the three missing teeth, his cracked grin hints at a growing disillusionment as he feels pigeonholed by some of his peers and keeps fighting for scraps while surveying the brisk pace of change all around him. Yet ten years into his career, the half-Irish and half-Puerto Rican native of New York is also ready to embrace life as a wizened rap veteran.
He still boasts a youthful glint, and on ‘Ego Death’ he promises to keep his ears open, but on Half God the rapper is more steadfast than ever before as he renews his vows to the form, which he calls ‘akhi’ for ‘brother’. On ‘Never Fall Off’ he spins for the listener a tale of forestalled romance, on ‘Drug Supplier’ with the Woolwich rapper Jesse James Solomon he narrates the bedeviled nature of dealing, and on ‘Business’ he condemns gentrification from Bed-Stuy to the Lower East Side, between the juddering crunch snares extolling the old Mom and Pop stores while hoping to make life uncomfortable for the well-to-do settlers.
‘Can’t Do This Alone’ features the sole verse from Navy Blue and serves as an ode to collaboration, with the skateboarder-turned-producer likening the pair to Appa and Momo from Avatar: The Last Airbender. Through the course of the album, Wiki proves willing to lay bare some of his process, aided by adjacent rappers like Earl Sweatshirt, Remy Banks, and MIKE and a neatly varied sound palette. ‘Ego Death’ plays in waltz time, boom bap beatboxing provides the opening to ‘Home’, and ‘New Truth’ pays tribute to Nas and Biggie, while Navy Blue samples some deep cuts like ‘In The Garden’ by Johnnie Wilder Jr. which provides the rhapsodic close on ‘Grape Soda’.
‘All I Need’ samples the soulful guitar of Calvin Keys, with a sense of irony ‘Roof’ reads like an ode to some alone time while the sample finds William Bell at home and ‘Crying All By Myself’, and on several tracks Wiki imagines himself with children, piling up a multitude of offspring until he sits on the stoop of his neighbourhood now turned old and grey. With MIKE he slouches towards the promised land, well aware that the rest of the world can be fooled as long as New York knows your name. Wiki isn’t aiming to hog the spotlight but to stick around like the sunset, casting a long shadow and basking in the afterglow of a job well done.
