‘Where your attention is, that becomes lively’ is just one of the quotes or aphorisms which David Lynch tends to fall back upon whenever he is asked to explain the nature of ideas or creativity or in his own inimitable helium-winged Midwestern way, the consuming happenstance of ‘catching the big fish’. Lynch with his longtime collaborative partner Chrystabell are just two of the artists on this long list of the year’s best records, which stretches to a little over one hundred albums plus a few snippets. While the creativity is all theirs, as a listener and critic I will probably never again get through so much music over the course of a single calendar, though the hope is to become a better listener, bridging that seemingly impossible gap between open-minded and circumspect. While the list offers a broad spectrum of my habits over the past year, for the benefit of the reader it is also colour-coded, with ten of my favourite projects bathed in azure while thirteen of the most quizzical or provocative pieces are emblazoned in orange.
أحمد [Ahmed] – Wood Blues & Giant Beauty
The opening minutes of ‘El Haris (Anxious)’ from the Fylkingen festival capture something of a peacock’s proud strut, with Pat Thomas’s piano leading a staggered march as the bass and drums of Joel Grip and Antonin Gerbal wobble and shimmer and the staccato of Seymour Wright’s alto saxophone splays like the furling and unfurling of a train of covert feathers. As the title suggests, the playing evinces a certain anxiousness, an iridescent display which stands in wont of a response as the band are forced to plough their own furrow. Soon muddied and roiled, they never let up until breathless saxophone and scattered drums are joined around the 15-minute mark by cascading arpeggios as Pat Thomas plots another devious course, jolting ahead like a raft down a wild water rapid. Amid the clangorous din, أحمد [Ahmed] renew their sense of swing. The 27th minute marks a shift to triple time and a sort of backslide characterised by the whinnying of Wright’s saxophone, and by the 33rd minute a short and ominous piano motif is leading the piece but nothing stays on top for long as ‘El Haris (Anxious)’ constantly shifts shape, its players pushing and pulling each other along while always ready to instigate another rumble. Then in the closing moments the track falls into a tango rhythm, before quavering tremulously to a halt.
Alex Weiser – in a dark blue night
A plangent, plunging bass line and the traipsing and frolicking of Spiegelberg’s clarinet introduce the titular ‘Coney Island’, which in rhapsodic terms describes a day at the beach without adults or limits, whose highlights include such quintessential fare as a hot dog at Nathan’s and a frozen custard, which in the recollection of Weiser’s grandmother was habitually dropped on the boardwalk by her friend. The plainspoken and digressional quality of his grandmother’s reminiscences make for pliant and whimsical vocal lines against the swirl of the ensemble, which in Dionne, Coleridge and Yang comprises the three founding members of the critically acclaimed Merz Trio. More they imbue Coney Island Days with a beautiful ache, the sublimation of nostalgia which doesn’t merely trade in wistful memories of a burnished past but sketches out and daubs with watercolour old and sometimes long-forgotten places and summons as if traced by a caressing finger the faces of old friends, infusing them with all of the vim and vigour of the present. That allows moments of unvarnished sentiment to really place you in their choke, as when Weiser’s grandmother caps her day at the beach with the lines ‘I had good times. All my family was loving to me’ as between the clinking of change and splashing of water the ensemble glides to a halt.
Alice Zawadzki, Fred Thomas and Misha Mullov-Abbado – Za Górami
On their debut outing as a trio the vocalist and violinist Alice Zawadzki, the pianist Fred Thomas who plays discursions on the vielle and percussion and Misha Mullov-Abbado on the double bass fuse folk idioms with an operatic flair and beguiling interplay, as Zawadski’s voice soars over a riverbed of keys and bass. Inhabiting the rarefied space where love calls and birdsongs go aflutter then swooping to encompass the forlorn strains and anguished cries which accompany betrayal and other losses of faith, on Za Górami they blend ladino traditionals and the Polish folk song of the title track with compositions by Gustavo Santaolalla and Simón Díaz plus a new setting of a poem by James Joyce.
Allan Gilbert Balon – The Magnesia Suite
On the opening song ‘Stella Maris’ from his debut long play, the artist and composer Allan Gilbert Balon offers a cloistered procession of organ and voice which feels both evocative and utterly self-contained. The music of the piece bears comparison with the sustained notes and partial tones of works for organ and carillon by Charlemagne Palestine, but where the self-styled ‘avant-garde Quasimodo’ has hewed towards the secular through the celebration of his soft divinities, his cherished pile upon pile of plush toys, here Balon retains a more liturgical air, where it seems possible to trace every dust sprite as it arches and circles a vault or filters out from nave to transept.
Allen Lowe & The Constant Sorrow Orchestra – Louis Armstrong’s America
While the orchestra pay the requisite attention to the likes of Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Lester Young, there is also a revisionist streak to Louis Armstrong’s America as Lowe seeks to recuperate such names as the Reverend Utah Smith, who he describes as the ‘greatest guitar evangelist’ and an unheralded forebear of rock and roll (and who chaired a ‘Negro revival meeting’ where he delivered religious messages with the aid of his electric guitar as one of a series of ‘Coffee Concerts’ at the Museum of Modern Art in the spring of 1941), plus James Reese Europe, the New York City bandleader of the 1910s, who Lowe hoists up as ‘the first great black musical liberator of the 20th century’.
Amirtha Kidambi’s Elder Ones – New Monuments
With a jazzy dolorousness, a Carnatic swirl and finally the triumphal march of so many African American spirituals particularly as they have been revised within the improvisational canon, Amirtha Kidambi reformulates her Elder Ones ensemble for the sublimated sighs and transactional quivers of ‘Third Space’. Written in response to the Atlanta spa shootings of 2021, which killed eight people and gave rise to the movement to Stop Asian Hate, and inspired in part by the writings of the postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha, who defined the ‘third space’ as a disruptive site of discourse and identification where two cultures – often a colonial power and subaltern or outsider culture – interact, the piece with its throbbing polyrhythms and repeated refrain is described as a cross between ‘Albert Ayler’s love cry, Don Cherry’s eternal rhythms and the fortissimo fearlessness of Kidambi’s late friend and collaborator Jaimie Branch’, to whom New Monuments is partly dedicated.
Antonina Nowacka – Sylphine Soporifera
The vocalist and sound artist makes music which sounds like a pebble tossed into vast oceans of water, which charts its own spritely course more nymph than selkie after the first few agile hops and skips. Yet after drawing inspiration from Javanese caves and Polish fortresses, the swirling melodic structures of Hindustani classical music and early Cumbia rhythms from Mexico and Peru, the nine tracks of Sylphine Soporifera are pulled out of the aether, named after an imaginary species and the lands they inhabit, roused by the writings of the Austrian esotericist Rudolf Steiner who conjured spirits of the air, the Latin word ‘sopor’ which indicates a deep sleep and might implicate some form of intoxication or drowsiness, the ‘unreal desert landscape’ of the Paracas Peninsula with its pottery and candelabra and the treeless peat moors of the Outer Hebrides.
Some of this built-up tension is resolved in ‘Whiskey’, a faintly falling Irish brogue about over-drinking and the resultant sagging of heavy heads, which droops delicately through Jamey Haddad’s soft-brushed percussion, the supple and pungent and slightly dolorous support of Linda May Han Oh’s bass and the algal blooms of Gilchrist’s harp, with flamenco-like guitars and castanets plus TimaLikesMusic on piano and Juno endowing the track with a celestial shimmer. Conjuring a composite image of cypresses under starry skies, ‘Whiskey’ is all about tumbling into another person, to change libation for a moment like one of those old adverts for Guinness or some other stout where the head plunges into the glass before swimming to the surface. Implausibly it may be the most romantic song in Aftab’s repertoire, the wilting ardour of the line ‘We’ll fade into the night’ accompanied by quick transportive glissandos of harp plus muscular bass and supple piano runs as the singer bows and bends, headily and wantonly engaged in some after-hours thrill-seeking.
Ava Mendoza & Dave Sewelson – Of It But Not Is It
Of It But Not Is It opens with the sloshing turbulence of ‘Mangrove Sea’, a piece composed by Mendoza, before William Parker pries open a cask of turnip wine, interrupting the torrents and currents of free jazz with a sage outpouring of the sweet and peppery stuff. Singing the song with a Waitsian swagger if not quite the same level of gruffness, Sewelson offers a pliant and careening interpretation of Parker’s lyrics over Mendoza’s stonking guitar chords, woozy yet formidably headstrong. Requesting just a ‘sip’ of the ‘old turnip wine’, the singer in the spirit of libation imagines an end to all war and rows of soldiers returning home for a big hoedown come Saturday night, his head screwed on tight as a bit of down-home fermentation greases the wheels that would divide men and nations, Parker’s text ending the song on a note of quasi-Freudian transfiguration as ‘all the girls will turn into trumpets, and all the rifles into trombones’.
bela – Noise and Cries (굉음과 울음)
At the heart of Noise and Cries (굉음과 울음), the compelling debut album by the South Korean artist bela, the track ‘풀이’ for ‘explanation’ also carries an Enya-like refrain but layered to create a dervish or dense whorl of fog over staccato drum beats. Developing the album in Seoul before moving to Berlin, where they are presently based, Noise and Cries (굉음과 울음) stirs guttural death metal growls, the throbbing hiss of industrial music and the cybernetic maximalism of the contemporary queer club together with a couple of well-known pansori arias plus aspects of hwimori and dongsalpuri, two jangdan or traditional Korean folk rhythms.
Bill Frisell, Andrew Cyrille and Kit Downes – Breaking the Shell
It is the reedy and billowing sounds of the pipe organ which make Breaking the Shell stand out as something unique, as Downes from the outset on ‘May 4th’ layers a low drone with winding and watery flute rushes. At other times that drone gives way to sputtering stops or short phrases which chime like sine waves or celestial transmissions, while from the middle of the record Downes begins to emit these wafting organ chords which he allows to dissipate or simply hang, as Cyrille and Frisell get to work shaping and shading the eleven compositions. At its most cosmic or refined Breaking the Shell can evoke the utopian minimalism of Promises by Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra while the record also shares rhythmic similarities with Owl Song by Ambrose Akinmusire, a limpid clearing where the saxophonist was also joined by Frisell plus the drummer Herlin Riley.
Bill Orcutt – How to Rescue Things
Its success prompted a vogue for string recordings, which would grow to encompass Clifford Brown with Strings and Nina Simone with Strings, the suite Focus by Stan Getz and Desmond Blue. For his own take on the form Orcutt indulges in syrupy strings, plangent harps and cherubic choruses, which were mostly clipped from an RCA easy listening disc, cutting through the saccharine yet heartwarming gloop with his trenchant guitar lines, like on ‘Not Reconciled’ where instead of ‘O holy night’ and its familiar nativity scene a dulcet voice croons ‘O my God’ more in the spirit of Jamie Stewart and Xiu Xiu, as through breaking riffs and pulls with their foamy overtones he emerges as a surf santa of sorts, riding the waves and piling up stockings along the way.
Roiling and chafing the riverbed of these compositions, on ‘Item 1a’ and the album closer ‘Residue After 60mesh’ a more pronounced and sometimes vagrant guitar is offset by incessant bell chimes which sound like the rattling of keys on a chain or flutes which play as mottled and muffled pan pipes. As the title suggests, against a backdrop of fabricating guitar and other industrial electroacoustic effects the mbira of ‘Water Soluble Matter’ sounds especially limpid. The long ‘Degree of Dispersion’ elaborates all of these toots and chimes, these discursions and abrasions to expose the meditative heart of the record, while ‘Item 1b’ seems to channel trumpet lines from Sketches of Spain, muted and carried here with a kind of forlorn triumphalism, stretching them out and transposing them to far-flung locales be it a Turkish bazaar or the Chihuahuan Desert which surrounds the artistic hub of Marfa, Texas where Mazurek at some elevation keeps his experimental studio.
López on the other hand turns her gaita inside out, often managing to bend and tame the harsher resonances of her instrument for liturgical refrains, slowly sustained drones and the plummier depths, from the prologue ‘Cando a pena me mata, a alegría dame alento’ whose winding uplift is redolent of the pipe organ to the baroque epilogue ‘Inflorescencia’ where stardust and short spurts from her chanter give way to a buzzsaw drone and a forking melody which play out in ominous counterpoint. Elsewhere the first of four movements ‘I. QÚE? A Betty Chaos’ opens with the odd faltering breath and the static sound of air passing through the hide bag, taking on a slight winnowing quality before breaking out into a brackish drone, a shanty which might look out over the Cantabrian Sea or the Atlantic before a final gust of horns, as López casts about indiscriminately in search of a place to anchor.
Caroline Shaw & Sō Percussion – Rectangles and Circumstance
Meanwhile at the midpoint of Rectangles and Circumstance the old Scottish traditional ‘The Parting Glass’ – apparently the most popular parting song in all of Scotland before Robert Burns wrote ‘Auld Lang Syne’ – gets an airing through rubbed crystal and an inverted chord progression from Johann Sebastian Bach’s chorale ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’. And the Eric Cha-Beach-penned ‘Who Turns Out the Light’, described as an expression of ‘the loving but exhausted thought patterns of a parent trying to coax and calm a young child’, possesses a spacious and starry, slow-padding and anticipatory quality, like Björk somewhere between the music boxes and glitch electronics of tracks like ‘Aurora’ and ‘Sun In My Mouth’ from Vespertine and the kismet of ‘Desired Constellation’, a steadfast Medulla highlight.
Catharine Cary – AIR CAKE and other summery occupations
Her three young characters Leila, Grecian and Manu get up to all sorts on their holiday, thrown flat on their backs in fields full of daisies, weaving leaves while the other children are away at camp, giving lettuce green manicures to red squirrels with an imaginary friend named Clementine, or climbing the Larrun mountain at the western end of the Pyrenees which crosses the border between France and Spain, weighing the perils of island building in the Atlantic Ocean, and whipping delectable cakes out of sea foam, clouds and compressed air. Too pungent to be cloying and too briskly imaginative to pass as mere whimsy, moving always with a poised yet staggering sense of swing, AIR CAKE and other summery occupations perfectly encapsulates the idle fancy of childhood summers, that mix of balmy and somehow weighty indolence mixed with a boundless and time-warped sense of possibility like dandelion pappus wafting in the breeze, until Cary leaves us confections in hand with a conundrum about the flavour of the frosting.
Charles Lloyd – The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow
Charles Lloyd the visionary saxophonist succeeds as though effortlessly his Trio of Trios – where he dolefully interpreted the dying ballad of Billy Strayhorn and took cues from the ocean as he evoked West African and Hindustani classical music on tracks like ‘Kuti’, ‘Tales of Rumi’ and the meditative ‘Nachekita’s Lament’ – courtesy of his majestic new album The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow, for which he is accompanied by the pianist Jason Moran, the bassist Larry Grenadier and the drummer Brian Blade. Still dancing on many shores as he celebrates his 86th birthday, you will hear nothing sweeter this year than the stunning close to the album, which recapitulates the opening ‘Defiant, Tender Warrior’ through a final flourish entitled ‘Defiant, Reprise: Homeward Dove’.
After adorning old robes and playing the diva, Brat proves a tight little raver whose labour-intensive fifteen songs belie a shifty minimalism. Turning back the dial on some of her own past experiments as well as the club music of her youth, the album revisits electroclash and French house in the vein of artists like Peaches and Alan Braxe while also evoking both lyrically and sonically the insular scabrousness of My Teenage Dream Ended by Farrah Abraham and Yeezus.
Chrystabell & David Lynch – Cellophane Memories
Take the opening song ‘She Knew’ for instance which seems to fracture around the repetition of the line ‘She had been swimming’. An otherwise straightforward depiction of a chance encounter as eligible eyes meet from across opposite sides of the pool, with a sad departure and the emotional rupture of a connection foregone and the thought of never seeing that person again, something seems to flicker as the singer recounts in the past perfect tense that swim and falters over the half-eaten remains of ‘a lunch she had brought from home’. Something more furtive is underfoot as Badalamenti’s synths swell and a sense of knowing, through cooing repetitions and ellipses, gives way to the endless tears of a timeless cry, the act of stepping out of the pool as though playing on loop as covert lovers beckon in their absence.
Colin Stetson – The love it took to leave you
With his distinctive sound on the saxophone, a pulsating and oscillating rush of brass which in epic Odyssean fashion evokes at once the threshing and winnowing of wheat chaff and the inescapable propulsion of waves out at sea, Colin Stetson unveils the title track of his latest album The love it took to leave you. Billed as both his first full-length solo outing since 2017, following the collaboration-heavy swirls and eddies of last year’s When we were that what wept for the sea, and as a sort of narrative prequel to the New History Warfare trilogy which cemented his swashbuckling reputation, the album was recorded over the course of one week in early 2023 at Fonderie Darling, a former metalworks facility in Montreal with a voluminous main room which still maintains its raw architecture of brick, concrete and steel.
Darius Jones – Legend of e’Boi (The Hypervigilant Eye)
Soon enough however Jones manages to cut through the woozy clamour, managing to attain on his alto saxophone a great clarity of tone, which is briefly redolent of John Coltrane and his A Love Supreme opener ‘Acknowledgement’, so clear in its purpose and emphasis that it almost strikes a slightly shrill and piercing note. The moment passes and more generally ‘We Outside’ plays like a fine neighbourhood groove, with Jones possibly surveying the ambiance in the manner of Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window or joining Lightcap and Cleaver for a brisk jaunt around town. They take in the odd park and saunter down a few sidewalks until the leader unveils a more furrowing saxophone with around a minute to go, as Jones taps into these bold tremolos at the climax of ‘We Outside’, really blowing the fuzz out of his horn.
Elaborating on the patterns of his last album Rhododendron, the Montreal producer d’Eon offers a synthesised take on chamber music, with the twelve tracks of Leviathan sounding typically labyrinthine, as though he has introduced baroque down-bow and contrapuntal techniques to the 16-bit waterlogged ruins of a fabled Sonic the Hedgehog zone. Less claustrophobic than sailswept and swashbuckling, Leviathan is a quasi-epic high sea adventure redolent as much of the odorous ambergris which has floated to the surface as those sperm whales which click and burble in the vast below.
Devon Welsh – Come With Me If You Want to Live
Now after several cycles of bulking and cutting, the veiny troubadour reemerges with a do-it-yourself action adventure, paying homage to both Jimmy Ruffin and The Terminator as he stands over the burning wreckage with clenched fists on the lead single from Come With Me If You Want to Live. Over clattering breakbeats, on ‘That’s What We Needed’ he brings the ruckus with an ode to knotty self-determinacy, and on ‘Best Laid Plans’ he takes the purple powder and crawls down the toilet hole of self-doubt while seeking succour in friendship and the reverberating embrace of his father, the actor Kenneth Welsh who died a couple of years ago at the age of 80, and was addressed with both poignancy and a sense of foreboding on the Dream Songs track ‘Summer’s End’.
DJ Anderson do Paraíso – Queridão
In contrast to the histrionics of bruxaria, his take on Belo Horizonte funk is a phantom, bearing an aspect of skeletal minimalism through mineral electronics and classical wisps, from the slowed-down Boléro-esque strings and loose keys of ‘Se Faz de Santinha’ and the aching violins of ‘Aula de Putaria’ to the spectral soprano backing vocals and smushed triangle of ‘Quarentena Cheio de Odio’ and the timpani used as a snare drum in ‘Blogueira Que Virou Puta’. Using his debut for Nyege Nyege Tapes as an eerie and sinister showcase, on Queridão – which is Portuguese for ‘dearest’ and serves as one of Anderson’s nicknames – the artist blurs at the borders of baile funk through a style which is both baroque and decidedly modern, yanking the drapes behind a slew of local emcees.
For the uniformly great Lisbon record label Príncipe, the producer DJ Nigga Fox reworks batida from the inside out, especially on ‘Má Rotina’ from his latest album Chá Preto, a gaseous and spacious yet slightly queasy affair which skews towards the slowed-down syrupiness of tarraxinha while eschewing its sexiness for something more piquant. Plaintive and pungent yet strangely propulsive, on the standout track from a stellar album vaporous synth pads, clip-clopping percussion laden with effects and a destabilising undercurrent of woozy and wobbling sub-bass introduce a solitary chant whose subsequent layers and digressions imbue the beat with a sense of uplift.
Railing against power dynamics which his art would subtly shift, and relaying both personal travails and doomsday scenarios as the tracks increasingly navigate science fiction terrains and crackling cinema soundscapes, his poetry is like barbed wire as each moment and each headspace seems to snag on the next stacked image. On pieces like ‘Voice 2 Skull’ and the standout ‘Ikebana’ which is named after the Japanese art of flower arrangement, he describes daily itineraries which are burdened with unanswered questions and the blinding gaze of another sunrise on the way. Yet on ‘Bad Pollen’ with billy woods the duo broach the tenacity of parenthood and moments of marital intimacy while on ‘Huspuppies’ the narrator breathlessly strives to fulfil the Friday ritual of fried fish, finding succour as well as a sense of purpose in everyday family life, on a record which plows through the murk to come out hopeful or at least still broadly intact if not quite smelling of roses.
Eri Yamamoto Quadraphonic – Fly with the Wings
The album notes draw a comparison with Mose Allison for his idiosyncratic blend of blues and jazz. On the title piece Fowler’s flute imitates both the patter of birdsong and the lofty patterns of birds in flight, with Yamamoto playing spritely and sparkling runs or dramatic chord clusters. ‘Peach’ is a fleshy ballad with fine brush work, a pronounced bass and a horn which in the first few moments of the track seems to stir itself out of a brooding dolefulness, while ‘Cheer Me Up’ is a bar room jive with a rambunctious breakdown as the percussion sprawls and careens to provide a safety net for the rest of the cast or else to add moments of crashing emphasis.
There’s a bit of the Lizard King about ‘Work Song For A Scattered Past’, the opening salvo from the latest Fire! album Testament, with its souped-up swagger and whiskey-soaked, careening strut redolent of everything from the ‘Alabama Song’ and ‘Back Door Man’ to ‘Wild Child’, the ‘Roadhouse Blues’ and ‘Been Down So Long’ which serves as a loaded riposte to ‘Love Her Madly’. On all of those Doors albums that sound came courtesy of Ray Manzarek’s keyboard bass and a slew of session musicians, including Larry Knechtel and Doug Lubahn, the jazz bassist Leroy Vinnegar, the blues rock pioneer Lonnie Mack and Elvis Presley’s last bassist Jerry Scheff of the TCB Band, but on Testament the burden falls squarely on the shoulders of Johan Berthling, who adds a saunter and a slide to that old walking bass, proud and brash, leering and a little bit glassy-eyed as it cuts a swathe right from the outset of the composition. For their eighth album as a trio Fire! spurn all the accoutrements of flutes and electronics, extras and special guests, recording live in the studio to analogue tape with Berthling’s bass suspended by Mats Gustafsson’s squalling and chafing sax, cut through by Andreas Werliin who keeps up an incessant march behind the drum set.
Back on shore, ‘M-2’ finds FUJ||||||||||TA engaging in a gasping and palpitating ritual chant, a kind of stratified or sublimated panic attack which evokes the manner and patterns of Inuit throat singing. Since 2009, the artist has been recording almost exclusively with his hand-built pipe organ, hitherto comprised of eleven pipes and a fuigo box bellows of a kind which was traditionally used in Japanese swordsmithing, but on MMM his organ’s hand-operated air pump was swapped out for an electric version which freed up the composer’s fingers and wrists. So the chugging rhythms of ‘M-1’ were wrought by a gun microphone waved close to the pipes of his organ, while ‘M-2’ features the inhale and exhale of his ‘third voice’ singing technique, cultivated over the past decade alongside the whinnying cries of his organ without keys.
During the pandemic Matthew Sage became a father, with the poignant and fraying ‘Light in the Annex’ his attempt to capture both the wonders and tensions of parenthood through the creation of his first standard on the piano. As the violin of Chris Jusell takes up the melody, ‘Light in the Annex’ plays like a piece of glacial chamber music until Shiroishi’s saxophone drops in and turns those free-sailing floes into capillary waves, which ripple outwards before his vocals, languid and flowering, offer a return to the Pacific key, like the wind-down after a luau. The track closes through the static of a baby monitor, added as a coda by Chaz Prymek who had surreptitiously recorded Sage shushing his child gently to sleep.
Giovanni Guidi, James Brandon Lewis, Thomas Morgan and João Lobo – A New Day
‘Luigi (The Boy Who Lost His Name)’ maintains the sombre and even somewhat lugubrious but nevertheless refined and restrained atmosphere, with an even balance between Lobo’s percussive spurts, Guidi’s shimmering keys and Morgan’s tilting bass before Lewis comes in just as the others begin to pick up the tempo. Showing the group’s penchant for subtle rubato, in the closing moments of the track they seem to slough off any lingering air of resignation, opening up a pathway ahead.
Goran Kajfeš Tropiques – Tell Us
The first tempered tones of Tell Us are given over to the elegant strains of Runsteen and Sander, whose bowed strings cut across one another slantwise and with curlicued ends, providing a little bit of torque and tension like the solemn shifting of household furniture, before wafting up into the aether as layered synthesizers and organ keys come in. As the strings and Holmegard’s brushed percussion take on watery tones, Berthling’s bass begins to rumble away in the background, like a boulder being shunted slowly from a tomb. Holmegard’s tumbling drum patterns encourage the ensemble to slip into a sumptuous groove, with the trumpet of Kajfeš rising last to make an appearance over the ebullient wash of synthesizers, playing an ascending sequence which is somewhat redolent of the fiery yearning of Donald Ayler and the world fusion of Don Cherry, with echoes of Miles Davis and John McLaughlin on Sketches of Spain, Bitches Brew and Mahavishnu as strings and brass elaborate their deft interplay. While drum rolls serve to cap Holmegard’s encompassing patter and the strings of Runsteen and Sander also take on a percussive character, Zethson’s keys strike a woozy note through pitch bending and rubato, as Goran Kajfeš Tropiques straddle the surf in a silvery swoon.
Hayden Pedigo – Live in Amarillo, Texas
Those silences and those long, flat plains never labour as Pedigo unfolds a stark but variegated landscape. Through his guitar and via his onstage patter too he possesses a rare capacity for making fine and even pretty statements which sound totally unvarnished. With a couple of medleys, the songs on Live in Amarillo, Texas draw mostly from his past two albums, Letting Go and last year’s The Happiest Times I Ever Ignored, whose title comes from a note penned by the National Lampoon co-founder Doug Kenney shortly before his mysterious and untimely death. Schooled in primitive guitar, moments of the recording evoke Matthew J. Rolin’s more ragged and raga-inflected approach, the unsparing folk recuperations of Myriam Gendron and the sandstone Americana of Julian Lage, while as the album notes suggest, redoubtable classics such as Live at the Old Quarter by Townes Van Zandt and The Great Santa Barbara Oil Slick by John Fahey lie well within Pedigo’s wiry reach.
On his best songs Helado Negro plies a trade in a sort of hazy and bucolic nostalgia with poignant undertones and a contemporary stylistic twist, as though hovering somewhere in the middle distance then suddenly appearing right in front of our eyes, transported through his softly sloshing, gently loping melodies on zephyr winds. The South Florida native, born to Ecuadorian immigrants who several years ago swapped his longtime base of Brooklyn for the milder climes of Asheville, describes his latest album PHASOR as both an homage to the outdoors world of warm breezes, moist lips and sun-kissed skin plus his tightest collection to date, thematically akin to This Is How You Smile from back in 2019 before pandemic constraints prompted the Laraaji-inspired beatitudes of Far In. Coiled and shimmering through up-front drums, wobbly bass, slow-strummed guitar and tremulous reverb, switching once more between Spanish and English, on PHASOR the artist indulges in fond reminiscences and uncorks his most ardent fantasies even in the moment of their realisation, always finding his way back home or thereabouts, even where that means standing on a well-manicured lawn and gazing in fondly through the front window.
How To Dress Well – I Am Toward You
The album opener ‘New Confusion’ serves as a bucolic summation of How To Dress Well’s sound, with its penchant for propulsive and sometimes scurrying percussion plus sweeping synthesizers, the plinth-like verticality of his layered vocal harmonies tilting in the wind as they peer out from an unbridled morass or runaway castles of low-slung clouds. As someone who can remember Krell back in the heyday of Tumblr posting sleek and ebullient R&B, dance-pop and house-oriented mixes while eulogising Visions of the Country by Robbie Basho, Clear Moon by Mount Eerie and R Plus Seven by Oneohtrix Point Never, the second track ‘Contingency/Necessity (Modality of Fate)’ with its juxtaposition of dates and terms feels like the keynote of the piece, contrasting the German words ‘Gesicht’ for face and ‘Geschichte’ for history, and the euphoria of a Mount Eerie concert at the Masonic Lodge at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles with a more downcast memory of taking psychedelic drugs in the shrine room of a Buddhist monastery, as Krell underwent a period of ‘clandestine and occult meditation’ which included two weeks of total silence.
Isaiah Collier & The Chosen Few – The Almighty
The saxophonist Isaiah Collier seeks to summon a divine energy on The Almighty, which features the drummer Michael Shekwoaga Ode, the pianist Julian Davis Reid and the bassist Jeremiah Hunt as his Chosen Few, a quartet further sanctified on the album closer and title track by an eleven-piece ensemble known as The Celestials. On the surging and uplifting ‘Compassion’, the young saxophonist whose work has frequently paid tribute to John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders and Sun Ra plays alongside his longtime mentor Ari Brown, the horns of the kindred Chicagoans resounding in a sort of celestial echo over roiling drums and bell chimes, with the percussion becoming more plosive as the piece swells to a climax, supernovas and shooting stars which accompany the readvent of creation.
Ivo Perelman – Messa Di Voce & Vox Popoli Vox Dei
On the other hand the third track from the album is more hushed and only faintly babbling, like an aria being performed out at sea. Then on the final movement of the first side, the short squibs and squeals of Ivo Perelman’s tenor sax splay out over a supple mesh of bass and drums, from rattles and creaks to whirlpools and eddies as the musicians gather momentum before grinding or yawning to a halt. Over the second side of Messa Di Voce the phrases are more sustained, the melodies are both sparer and more pronounced and Fay Victor’s vocals are more breathy and bluesy when they do appear, with the fifth movement through operatic recitative reaching a final wailing denouement.
Ivo Perelman & Matthew Shipp – Magical Incantation
This is their umpteenth collaboration, stretching by my count to more than forty records in all formats since Cama de Terra with William Parker and the duo album Bendito of Santa Cruz back in the mid-nineties. Shipp, who would know better than most, regards Magical Incantation as one of their best yet, adding ‘This record is a major major statement in jazz history. It is the height of the work I’ve done with Ivo and the height of what can be done in a duo setting with piano.’
Jacob Wick Ensemble – Something in Your Eyes
His new album Something in Your Eyes is even more eye-catching and eclectic as Wick and his ensemble draw out songs by Emmylou Harris, Alice Coltrane and Kylie Minogue before settling in on that intoxicating classic by Billie Holiday, one long last sip of sparkling burgundy brew. Over the tumbling of Andrade’s percussion and a surging drone of violin and guitar which captures a distinctive country ache, their take on ‘Rough and Rocky’ from Emmylou’s traditional turn on Blue Kentucky Girl immediately foregrounds Wick’s vocals, a kind of staccato baritone which sometimes carries the intonation of a coarser Stephin Merritt, as he barrels in his doleful and expressive monotone right into a tale of choppy heartbreak. The song reaches its climax through a tortuous tangle of brass and strings, careening into the emotional morass which defines the lyrics, its wide waters and chasms fathoms deep.
Jake Xerxes Fussell – When I’m Called
Yet as Fussell pores over the past and pulls equally from broadsides and field recordings, the centrepiece and title track of When I’m Called stems from a more contemporary scrap. Probably the most striking piece on the album, the lyrics for the song were committed to memory by his friend Chris Sullivan, an artist with a penchant for found poetry who once published a zine called The Journal of the Public Domain. Culled from a gallery exhibit or some other collection, Fussell remembered his friend’s ditty, which originally went ‘I will come when I am called, I will not breakdance in the hall, I will not laugh when the teacher calls my name’, and began to use it as a placeholder as he worked up a song with the title ‘Look Up, Look Down That Lonesome Road’, the lines standing in during live performances for what Fussell thought would eventually emerge as a first verse.
Jakob Bro, Lee Konitz, Bill Frisell, Jason Moran, Thomas Morgan and Andrew Cyrille – Taking Turns
There are bent notes and harmonics, the tarrying of Morgan’s bass and plaintive yet pleasantly tart plunks of piano all working crosswise and playing counterpoint for a woven effect. It is perhaps one of the busiest explorations of placidity you might hope to find, before the closer ‘Mar del Plata’ with its sloshing rhythms and bronzed melodies summons up fond memories for Bro of touring through Argentina and especially the resort city on the Atlantic coast. Well worth the wait, Taking Turns is lowkey one of the most interesting albums of the year, whose hint of the seaside and the tropics serves as welcome respite now as we head into the wintry season.
Succeeding the tentative keys, rushing winds and garbled English-to-German translations of ‘Fallaway Whisk’, an exploration of reticence, in bumbling Quixotic fashion the ten movements of ‘Quire’ sound like a chase through winding corridors, the portative organ on a wispy run from the serpentine coils of a machine, which is voiced by a naif artificial intelligence, the combined effort described as somewhat of a departure for Rushford, who works in traces of the Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel member and prolific kosmische pioneer Klaus Schulze, plus aspects of concrete poetry and ars subtilior, an extension of the polyphonic music of the fourteenth century which was characterised by its rhythmic and notational complexity, flourishing in the French cities of Paris and Avignon before stretching to parts of northern Spain.
Jessica Ackerley – All Of the Colours Are Singing
If all of these manoeuvres appear to be building towards something more definitive, the grand finale proves no less open-ended. All Of the Colours Are Singing closes with a ‘Conclusion: In Four Micro Parts’ which features spiky and angular minimal rock in the manner of Shellac plus the smudged bass lines and strained or incandescent strings of Ackerley’s background in free jazz, as she burbles away on the guitar and a few claves mark ragged time in the middle section. A late turn embraces contemporary classical pastoralism and there is still just enough room for one final lapsed shimmy, bumping into walls and rushing towards that which cannot be divined as the quartet catch on their heels with a leery glance back over their shoulder.
Jessica Pavone – What Happens Has Become Now
The open strings of the violin family can strike listeners and performers alike as shrill and unruly beasts scant left to chance, but the violist Jessica Pavone has made them a staple of her solo work over the past two decades, whether harnessing the intensity of that sound, sometimes with the aid of electronic effects to add grittier textures to her staggering bows, or allowing the natural resonances of her instrument to ring out untrammelled. Between the intrepid baroque airs, creaking doors and sputtering engines, on the second gasping and spectral track from her latest record What Happens Has Become Now, she plays the Sword Viola which is one of the artist Ken Butler’s hand-crafted Hybrid Visions.
Like the track ‘Speed of Darkness’ which sets a template for the album, Akoma is not short of four-on-the-floor bangers but some such as ‘Summon’ are smothered in a tensile mesh or show a more balletic restraint. ‘Iris’ with its coiling synths is more interested in sci-fi terraforming, and ‘Open Canvas’ lurches forth with a syrupy swagger and the sting of a hornet’s nest. A high school science teacher with a penchant for mathematics, while the sound here is more refined and its alchemies more pure, the eleven tracks of Akoma are never academic but always closely attuned to bodies in motion, with seamless transitions and the dancefloor stretching into view as the logical endpoint.
Jonnine portrays Southside Girl as emanating from an apartment by the suburban seaside, describing ‘A pact with the ocean, popping candy, night trains, the lethargic limbo of summertime from Boxing Day to New Year’s Eve’. The opening track captures some of that hangover, with the lapping water and bird calls of ‘December 32nd’ scrambled by a layer of crackling static which sounds like leftover party sparklers. ‘Star Anise’ features lilting wind chimes and a prying bass, and ‘Poochie’s Pies’ seems to dwell inside the walls of a mute diner.
Julia Holter – Something in the Room She Moves
‘Sun Girl’ opens the album as a summer incantation, dappled and playful over the soft-hued psychedelics of the ensemble, which for Something in the Room She Moves includes Maia on the flute and piccolo, Chris Speed on the saxophone and clarinet, Dev Hoff on fretless bass and double bass, Sarah Belle Reid on the trumpet, Beth Goodfellow on drums and other percussion and Holter’s partner Tashi Wada on synthesizers and bagpipes. Freely associative, after the first burst through the florist’s door the track foregrounds Maia’s woodwinds and Goodfellow’s tripping percussion supported by Hoff’s bass. In the meantime Holter begins to adapt her familiarly woozy Moog and Mellotron plus her grandfather’s old lap steel guitar and Wada plays the bagpipes and Oberheim OB-X8 plus field recordings, for a heady bouquet which finds a moment of clarity in the singer’s echoing refrain ‘My dreams as I dream in golden yellow’, upon whose first permutation she unfurls a canvas smudged and daubed as the band refuel and set out for their next picnic spot. As an ode to a buff and citrusy warmth, ‘Sun Girl’ unfolds as one breath.
On the title track of his latest album Speak to Me the full-throated sonority of Julian Lage’s six-string shimmies and sighs with a little extra skronk. One of the highlights on a set of original compositions, the record was produced with a mind for song structures and narrative storytelling by Joe Henry, with the saxophonist Levon Henry and keyboardist Patrick Warren rounding out the usual trio of Jorge Roeder on bass and Dave King on drums. A sterling follow-up to the wide and engraved vistas of The Layers and View with a Room, here Lage finds another rich seam for his unique talent as the guitarist ‘delights in the deliberate crossing of wires’ between gospel hymnals and the rural blues.
Kahil El’Zabar’s Ethnic Heritage Ensemble – Open Me, A Higher Consciousness of Sound and Spirit
Open Me, A Higher Consciousness of Sound and Spirit throws strings into the mix, with James Sanders on the violin and viola and Ishmael Ali on the cello adding new timbral dimensions to their shared cacophony and staple swing. The record opens with a winsome cover of ‘All Blues’ by Miles Davis, a twelve-bar blues which was the penultimate track on the modal classic Kind of Blue, and a piece which El’Zabar previously tackled on a 1989 duo album with David Murray. Rearranging the context of the song, jettisoning its distinctive bassline and slowing the tempo down to a trot, here the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble’s version is steeped and contemplative but still with a sense of fun, as El’Zabar hums and thumbs his kalimba and Sanders twines his strings like a fiddle, while Corey Wilkes’s bucolic trumpet runs bring the track to a languishing close.
The durational maestro Kali Malone returns to the pipe organ for a more song-like collection of liturgical chants and steeped polyphonies, performing alongside the Ideologic Organ co-founder Stephen O’Malley on the historical meantone tempered pipe organs of Église Saint-Françoise de Lausanne, the Orgelpark in Amsterdam and Malmö Konstmuseum. Composing in fractal patterns through splinterings and other iterations of her harmonic themes, the album All Life Long marks a shift for Malone who introduces the earthy tones and nubby forms of choir and brass by way of the Macadam Ensemble conducted by Etienne Ferschaud in Nantes and Anima Brass dug out from The Bunker Studio in New York City. Meanwhile she pulls her lyrics from a couple of influential aestheticians, including the homo sacer philosopher Giorgio Agamben and the symbolist poet and critic Arthur Symons.
Hailing from the small community of Papunya northwest of Alice Springs, an artistic hub which has gained international renown for the ‘dot paintings’ of the Papunya Tula collective in the seventies, Nelson is a visual artist who paints in that same Western Desert style. Having gathered a collection of private poems about hearth and home, love and loss and the lasting bonds of family, he was encouraged to begin singing them after encountering Matsumura at the Papunya Tjupi arts centre. In turn the duo were inspired by the strong local gospel scene and reggae beats which passed around the community via USB sticks, with their eight searing and haunting tracks appearing last year on the Nipaluna tape label Altered States before being picked up by the venerable Mississippi Records for this wider release.
For a few seconds marked seems in keeping with some of these records, as ‘winner’s clause’ opens through a twinkling of bar lounge keys, yet instead of a warbling croon and just as wind instruments would seem to elevate the ambiance, a distorted guitar comes barrelling out of the murk. On the standout ‘gully creepa’ those shards are honed to a point, with mauling and lacerating feedback over the revving of motor engines giving way to a carnivalesque throb of power chords, and on ‘Blow the Whistle’ industrial spurts with foghorn blasts in the middle distance are overawed by pummelling drums, with the result landing somewhere between skittering electroclash and the bark of power electronics.
Laura Cannell – The Rituals of Hildegard Reimagined
Hildegard collected her cycle of seventy-seven liturgical songs under the title Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum or Symphony of the Harmony of Celestial Revelations. With a nod to that phrase, the opening track from The Rituals of Hildegard Reimagined plunges us straight into a swooning and beckoning darkness. Carried by the plangent tones of the bass recorder, these ‘cosmic spheres’ are portals of self-discovery and they go where we might fear to tread. There is a blackness as well as a sense of solace to the pieces on this album, with Cannell noting that she tends to revisit Hildegard’s own compositions ‘at times when I feel overwhelmed, or when I need to reset my inner musical dialogue’, but ‘See the Moon and the Stars’ is more rustic and folksy, with a percussive element nestled between the layers of bass recorder through her fingerings and the resultant vibratos.
Laura Cannell & Lori Goldston – The Deer Are Small And The Rabbits Are Big
On the third piece ‘Devil White Flowers’ the cello sounds like a plucked bass as Cannell sings over the top with a wish-you-well, apparently taken from an eighteenth-century collection of East Anglian proverbs and folk sayings which the duo used as a graphic score or prompt. ‘They Roamed The Summer Tundra’ opens with the stridency of a bugle call before settling after a couple of minutes into something more aching and languorous, while ‘The Underground Passage To The Castle’, another longer entanglement, carries the same sort of roving quality but with a rapt gaze and a bulwark of stone at either side and underfoot.
Crossing the equator, Amelia Earhart makes do in the torrid heat as the swooping arcs of Anohni’s voice juxtapose with Anderson’s more plainspoken word, capturing in tandem with the low end of all those strings everything from red skies and sunset shifts to the flashing contours of the Electra. After the slinky percussion of ‘Waves of Sand’, in arch tones Earhart outlines a curious letter which is addressed to Arab tribesman in case of disaster, then presses on to India as the plane makes landing at Dum Dum Airport in Kolkata, having passed over hazy mountains and the many mouths of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers. ‘Boats below are fishing for pearls’ Anderson as Earhart explains, ‘Shipped the parachutes home today, shouldn’t need them anymore. No we shouldn’t need them, not over the open ocean where there’s no place to land’, a phrase which repeats and begins to ascend as the propellers roar, wafting until it circles the aether.
Even profound, as the cellist and sound artist Kohl is one of the few musicians around who not only strives but dares to capture the essence of mundanity, without imbuing every moment with either a noncommittal gauziness or an epiphanic thrust. She says that in focusing on otherwise unnoticed or under-documented sounds, she hopes to live more in the moment, engaging in ‘a practice of trying to be more alive’. The conceit and the resulting atmosphere of Normal Sounds reminds me of Thomas Knak’s turn-of-the-century glitch classic Objects for an Ideal Home, though the sound palette here is more organic.
Luciana Bass – Desatornillándonos
Take the fifth improvisation ‘Manos de Cromo’ for instance, which translates as ‘Chrome Hands’. On this track the Argentine guitarist manages to wring extraordinary percussive textures out of her instrument, from Latin American icons like the conga, güiro or cajón to the washboard or frottoir and even the metallophones and kendang of Indonesian gamelan music. From the brisk hand drums and mallets of the opening section the piece moves more or less seamlessly through all manner of zydeco, skiffle and countryfied fiddle. Then ‘Canción para el Che y para Charlie’ starts out spare only for its plaintive and lingering guitar lines to snag and turn into dense patchworks of fraying overtones and crackling distortions which Bass manages to harness in the field, with the spindly quality of a theremin player or the coarse hands of a trick roper who somehow manages to lasso a lasso.
Where last year’s Dog Dreams (개꿈) swapped molten piano instrumentals and text-to-speech snippets for a staccato of saliva sounds and a more fulsome embrace of pansori – from the suffocating codependence, gushing tenacity and operatic thrust of the title track to the woozy drama and reiterating horror of her take on the Vernon Duke jazz standard ‘April in Paris’ and the romance of ‘Fold The Horse’ – her latest theatre piece is framed as an audition for the role of K-pop idol, whose opening gambit is interrupted by a transposed coughing fit before the aspiring artist is chastised by two music executives for singing English lyrics with a Korean accent, which in their own words gives the audience a sense of ‘second-hand embarrassment’ by crudely circumventing the emotional heft of the song.
From gaseous science fiction terrains to neon-clad dancefloors, the New York producer AceMo follows a couple of early-year standouts in Moblu and Save The World by bringing his wriggling basslines and far-out techno on tour through the itinerant bounce of his latest long-play Inter-Transit.
J. Albert – I want to be good so bad
J. Albert – who neatly marries the dubby minimalism of Basic Channel and its co-founder Moritz von Oswald with the slacker gestures of Pavement while citing Bill Evans as one of his major stylistic influences, calling the jazz pianist a ‘master of reduction’ – returns for his latest batch of spectral low-slung techno.
The Detroit rapper and Bruiser Brigade member J.U.S. teams up with the Oakland-based producer Squadda B of Main Attrakionz for the throbbing beats and late-night atmospherics of 3rd Shift.
Loren Connors & Alan Licht – The Blue Hour
There’s a real lustre to the second side of The Blue Hour by Loren Connors and Alan Licht, as the tenebrous and waterlogged chords of Connors who makes a rare outing on the piano are joined by the weighty strums of Licht’s guitar, a ballast which steadies the course while channelling the forgotten bluesman Jackson C. Frank’s lilting and spectral ‘Just Like Anything’. Read the Review
Matt Mitchell – Zealous Angles
Matt Mitchell sets his longtime trio to wax, with Zealous Angles a description of method as the pianist alongside the bassist Chris Tordini and drummer Matt Weiss breach Mitchell’s melodic lines from all sides, finding meaning in multiplicity and a sense of freedom through repetition.
Melissa Aldana – Echoes of the Inner Prophet
With dedications to Wayne Shorter and the veteran recording engineer James Farber, the Chilean tenor saxophonist Melissa Aldana unveils eight original compositions which harness the dynamic interplay of her quintet, as smouldering solo features from the pianist Fabian Almazan, the bassist Pablo Menares, the percussionist Kush Abadey, and the guitarist and album co-producer Lage Lund serve to elaborate a personal odyssey.
Stepping out from under the banner of RS Produções through a series of cathartic cold cuts and shimmering romances, Nuno Beats radiates the best of the summer on Sai do Coração for the Lisbon batida stalwart Príncipe.
Inspired by traditional wayang kulit shadow puppetry, Central Javanese court poetry and the ghazals of Rumi and Hafez, the Indonesian composer and performer Peni Candra Rini incorporates gamelan singing, Balinese chant and the stringband music of the sixties on her lush yet dizzying new album Wulansih.
On her first extended play to feature her own compositions, the classically trained bassoonist Rebekah Heller juxtaposes skronking and bluesy free jazz with wry odes to anxiety, like the lissome and ironic ‘My voice’ whose cooing chorals boast of her conservatory training while betraying a fraught strive for perfection and a fear of being seen, as Heller struggles to detach her own musical expression from a litany of influences. Read the Review
Xiu Xiu – 13” Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto with Bison Horn Grips
After relocating to Berlin in a bid to ‘stay ahead of disaster’, Xiu Xiu unsheathe their latest album 13” Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto with Bison Horn Grips through the dashing opener ‘Arp Omni’, which still manages to summon up a few past indiscretions, while the trio unite through the spectre of the common loon, on a track which Jamie Stewart describes as a ‘boogie embrace for queer perverts across the multiverse’.
Mabe Fratti – Sentir que no sabes
‘Kravitz’ opens the album, an apparent ode to Lenny whose hit song ‘It Ain’t Over ’til It’s Over’ has been singled out by Fratti for its slinky Philadelphia soul. Yet beyond the bass-led groove, the track offers stalled marching band batteries and a smeared trumpet fanfare, all very deliberative and intentional until the horns and keys distend and her vocals quaver, imbuing ‘Kravitz’ with a sense of creeping anxiety to boot. Less than surreptitiously observed the song is about being endlessly nudged, compelled to form an opinion and react to the barrage of suggestion as the frets of the world refuse to be kept at bay. The lead single ‘Pantalla Azul’ is more pliable with an eighties synthetic sheen and a nocturnal air, the singer’s melatonin suppressed as the blue screen of death evokes both a sapphire retreat and sleeping disorders in a dank and ill-lit room.
What distinguishes his playing as Desert progresses is his capacity to weave all of these influences into something truly his own, plus the sheer ferocity and extremity of his instrument, which breaks apart over the course of fifteen tracks into so many splinters and shards, scurrying between the punkish thrashings and caterwaulings of early Boredoms shows and the outer margins of free jazz, both punctured and interlaced throughout by the strains of ear-piercing feedback. It is difficult to imagine a rowdier or harsher record being released this year, even as rippling distortions bury his harmonies while swirling raga motifs are discernible on the long tenth track, before after all of this white light and white heat, after scampering over so much hot sand, Mamer rests his singed feet as Desert closes with one lengthy burnout.
María Grand, Camila Nebbia, Marta Sánchez, Kanoa Mendenhall and Iago Fernández – Altered Visions
‘You have come to my house bearing a heavy burden’ Grand sings casually enough, and ‘Pain, who have come to my doorstep, pain who brings me closer to love’. Discussing matters of hearth and home, there’s a liminal quality to Grand’s vocals on Altered Visions which in content and phrasing briefly evoke the Lynchian dream pop of Julee Cruise, but more steadily recall Phil Elverum of the Microphones and Mount Eerie, whose bilabial nasals and plosives give an atmospheric moistness to his plainspoken words. In the same vein there is a bit of e e cummings to the poetry here as Grand extols ‘the clumsy beauty of humanity’, with twinkling keys struggling to stay afloat as Mendenhall’s bass exerts an undertow before tugging back towards the surface.
Marta Warelis & Andy Moor – Escape
In the split second before words form and colours and shapes have a chance to cohere, when the briefest of glances suggests only a congealed paint palette of daubed greens, lurid and seasick, both offset and accentuated by flashes of neon red, I think that I know what I see when I’m looking at the cover for the new album Escape by Andy Moor and Marta Warelis: the windshield of a car viewed from the interior, with something aflame in the rearview while the window looks out onto a pallid highway, perhaps stormy or at the very least rainswept, not quite the witching hour but an inverted sort of gloaming. Bathed in the same light, the dashboard too reflects a shade of queasy bottle green.
Following up her acclaimed albums Amaryllis and Belladonna, the angular guitarist Mary Halvorson returns to Nonesuch Records with her Amaryllis sextet for an album whose mottled blend of surface interests tend steadily in the direction of billowing uplift. From the anxious and endlessly mutable percussion of Tomas Fujiwara to the lively Patricia Brennan whose vibraphone abounds in piquant plunks and overtones to Adam O’Farrill’s burrowing trumpet, buttressed all the while by Jacob Garchik on the trombone and Nick Dunston’s buzzsaw bass, on Cloudward which also features the bristling violin effects and glissando arcs of Laurie Anderson, blues jukes and post-bop with Latinate flair play out with a widescreen bravura, while the closing track ‘Ultramarine’ stretches beyond sea or sky for a fittingly expansive yet tenacious and cohesive climax.
Mekit Dolan Muqam Group – Bayawan
Following the Azerbaijani mugham and the Iraqi maqam, classical forms which are characterised by melodic development and the use of traditional instrumentation, the Uyghur muqam of Xinjiang were added to the Unesco list of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2005. The Dolan muqam or Bayawan diverges from the mainstream through its plucked and bowed string instruments, a hoarse vocal style where words are less sung than chanted or ‘shouted out’, lyrics which are drawn from folk songs and an oral poetry tradition, but perhaps more than anything for its enveloping and freewheeling commitment to the groove. After performing in May of 2023 at the seventh Tomorrow Festival in Shenzhen, the bookstore and record label Old Heaven Books invited the Mekit Dolan Muqam Group to a recording session at Liu Ying Studio, where they captured the rugged beauty of their muqam as well as a couple of instrumental passages, showcasing too a wiry delicacy where every pluck seems to land with a plangent grace.
Meshell Ndegeocello – No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin
The first half of No More Water is defined by juxtapositions both signal and sonic, from private despair and fiery indignation to calls for a closer and more encompassing community. ‘Raise the Roof’ is immediately followed by a country-hued spiritual in ‘The Price of the Ticket’ and the bronzed neo soul and bass harmonics of ‘What Did I Do?’, which calls back to Plantation Lullabies and other genre-defining works of the nineties by the likes of D’Angelo and Erykah Badu, then climbs through rousing handclaps to become a sort of torch song in the manner of Irving Berlin’s near namesake, candlelit and anthemic, carried by the elliptical yet spellbinding voice of Justin Hicks.
‘For what it’s worth, I guess it’s wrecked’ intones the Galway songwriter Olan Monk on the opening track of the new Moin album You Never End, and if wrecked sounds like the kind of music you enjoy best then Moin and company will have plenty to offer. Anybody who has ever felt anything thanks to the scoured underbelly and splintering forms of nineties alternative rock will be utterly captivated by You Never End, whether we are talking about grunge icons like Nirvana and the Smashing Pumpkins at their most groove-oriented and grungy, The Breeders and other indie acts gone large, the distorted textures of My Bloody Valentine and their shoegaze precursors and successors, the emergent slowcore of Slint, post-hardcore of Fugazi, slacker rock of the Pavement variety or the minimalist rock-cum-math rock or concrete music of Shellac and Gastr del Sol.
Moniké – A Guide to DJ Hobby Horsing 02
Jockeying his disc in a planche position, the post-club collagist Moniké brings all of his sinewy suppleness to bear on a second Guide to DJ Hobby Horsing, which invokes such imagery as shetland ponies grazing in the barren terrain of the enrichment centre from the video game Portal and shuttlecocks being shunted down the chute of large hadron colliders or else into the gaping maw of black holes, as its dubby atmospheres and shuffling subtropical backbeats offer surreal whimsy or play out like a louche equestrian take on Venus in Furs.
Moor Mother – The Great Bailout
The penultimate track ‘South Sea’ featuring Angel Bat Dawid and her fellow Sistazz of the Nitty Gritty serves as a recapitulation of Moor Mother’s major themes, as she intones ‘We in the present are constantly injecting ourselves into the past. The gaze of history shapes it. Crystallises it. Collapses it upon the linear timeline’. Amid the humming swarm, cutlery rattles and pots whistle and woodwinds briefly suggest other dalliances before bubbling under, forced into a repatriation of sorts as they cohere like a clandestine orchestra submerged beneath the sea. ‘When and where do the ancestors speak for themselves’ she asks, to which T. S. Eliot looking out over London Bridge retorts ‘I had not thought death had undone so many’, as The Great Bailout proves less a history lesson than a séance, a summoning of spectres and the visceral sensation of shared trauma, wondering aloud whether and how it can ever be paid off.
After a chugging opening waltz, the near twenty-minute ‘blanking intervals’ is a swathe of Americana which features the fullest ensemble on lacuna and parlor, with Jade Guterman on the acoustic guitar plucking away at a string in a manner which is strident yet marks the steady passing of time, as the electric axe of Wendy Eisenberg paints shapes in the background accompanied by Alice Gerlach on cello and Nick Zanca on the organ. Meanwhile through languid vocals more eaze conveys the faltering hesitations and cinematic dissolves of a heedless summer, as Gerlach’s cello begins to elevate the piece into a blissed-out reminiscence replete with staticky surges, a recursive pattern of celestial tremors and wafting organ smears.
Sometimes like on the song ‘Non-Metaphorical Decolonization’ it is as though Elverum is covering his own back catalogue, swapping out limpid cascades or golden-hued crescendos for a craggier brand of instrumental post-rock. Then the lyrics arrive and we are back inside ‘the Place I Live’ underneath a Clear Moon, with the world now more populated and therefore more grounded as this new interpretation steadily eschews what many fans might think of as Elverum’s distinctive though foggy depiction of place or mise-en-scène. The timing of the album’s release seems pointed as he states with a vigorous plainspokenness in one of those clearings which he erects out of some harmonious conflagration of wilderness, detritus and mire ‘This America, the old idea, I want it to die’. In the process he crumbles any lingering dichotomies about territorialization and deterritorialization, noting that nothing needs to be seceded or confederated or even reconstructed as in the night air every gulp of breath is native and every surface ripe with dew.
From juke derivations to the liquid arrangements, louche jazz or nagging drum and bass of Luke Vibert’s mid-nineties aliases to the celestial squiggles of Orbital and traces of Drexciyan submersibles, all the while keeping his head defiantly above the tide, μ-Ziq unloads Grush with an ebullient sentimentality which glosses the past without giving way to nostalgia, through a set of propulsive dance-oriented beats which summon the thrills of the old Windsor Safari Park and his own Magic Pony Ride or Lunatic Harness, structured around the wayfaring gauze of reticulums a-thru-c.
Mayday by contrast is furnished with a little more warmth as Gendron is joined for several songs by the fuzzy guitar and drums of the improvisational stalwarts Marisa Anderson and Jim White, the bassist Cédric Dind-Lavoie who shares her penchant for lacing traditionalism with the avant-garde, the looped-and-screwed guitarist Bill Nace and the Appalachian tenor saxophonist Zoh Amba, whose Ayleresque horn gets the last word on the album. Even the instrumental opener ‘There Is No East Or West’ captures a little bit of that lamplight sound, as though emanating from a cosy porch or played around a crackling hearth, but Gendron still knows just when and how to pull the rug as her songs – mostly originals sung once more in a mixture of English and French – often carry an air of wistful melancholy, sometimes veering in the directions of free jazz or primitive guitar, with her voice plucking and chafing against a time-honoured melody.
Kullhammar, the leader of the group on stage and the composer of three of the eight songs on Peaceful Piano, explained while wearing a three-tiered cake on his head that Nacka Forum were ready to provide their audience with a meditative and stress-free evening. They commenced proceedings with the Peaceful Piano opener ‘Graden på Moset’ before ‘Othello’ bridged the gap between the bal-musette and an arabesque, with Berthling’s walking pattern on the bass both swaggering and retreating. Kullhammar played artfully the piccolo flute and bell chimes made for a glistening close to the piece. Elsewhere the Don Cherry riff ‘A Crank of Mu’ barrelled out of the gates with Osgood letting off firecrackers from behind the drum kit, bursting through a draft of winds as Kullhammar and Kajfeš took turns airing out their saxophone and trumpet.
So on ‘Continuum 2’ we segue as though effortlessly from a trio to a quintet as Wakili’s cymbals open up a reverberant space for twinkling piano runs and the burnished strains of Maurice-Grey’s flugelhorn. The rich tones of Nubya Garcia’s tenor sax commence a deepening through the second half of the track, opulent and multifaceted before the first flush of Sinephro’s harp dissipates any gloom through its blithe and spritely arpeggios. ‘Continuum 3’ finally foregrounds that harp – which Sinephro learned clandestinely as she sought respite from more formal instruction in such diverse instruments as the fiddle and bagpipes – although with a zither-like counterpoint and a top line of synthesizer which approaches cooing vocal registers.
Produced by Weston Olencki – who recently took a sojourn into the staggered heart of Cajun isolation for Longform Editions and sees the blues in every colour from ramshackle steel fabrications to deep azure – COLLA VOCE is full of fractured choruses, sub-operatic swoons and jowly or creaking glottis as the four vocalists use each outcrop and every inch of their orifice, from an inlet and aerated larynx to the tongue as a motorcycle ramp and snarling or puckered lips, often shaping the mouth for its percussive possibilities. Meanwhile crisply articulated strings steadily congeal into fraying and ominous drones, a fledgeling tornado which gathers dust with a rasping sound as it begins to gust and swirl.
Nilüfer Yanya – My Method Actor
Nilüfer Yanya might be a proud Londoner but with My Method Actor she has made one of the best slacker rock records of the year, faded and jaded, summoning both the sweep of Americana with its russet and sandstone valleys and the sun-kissed and surfeited, room for vibes only sultriness of the Balearics. In between those slinky beats, warm if somewhat arid guitar tones, plush strings and restless dynamics one might find echoes of Pavement or more contemporary anthemic fare by Enumclaw, the iconic Nashville sound or closer to home the tempered and pint-sized confessionals of Tirzah, while the centrepiece ‘Mutations’ plays out like a compressed and palpitating eighties power ballad. Sometimes she styles herself as a runaway as through real anguish but a woozy dream logic she seeks to outrun her problems, and other times she is caught in a riptide, buffeted between love and shame and those other flame-red or soft burgundy passions, on a soulful record which casts life in a moment of transition and occasionally skirts the surreal.
The selection of rappers become part of the tapestry, with the staccato lurch and woozy bass of ‘Amager’ featuring the Backwoodz head billy woods giving a little bit of Madvillainy, as he unpacks what must be the keenest depiction of airport security yet recorded to tape, beginning with the intrusive lines ‘Colourblind drug dog flopped on the floor, head on his paws / The customs palm my clean drawers’. The distant horn and dank shuffle of ‘The Dive’ bears another Brooklynite in maassai, while fresh from his studio rebirth on Different Type Time the transient philosopher Cavalier arrives late over the industrial beats and synth vamps of ‘Kdance 92’, before Rasmussen uncorks the bottle. Then the clave patterns and limpid saxophone runs of ‘Onwards (keep going)’ cede to a street carnival of pan flutes and chimes as ØKSE revel in their album’s closing moments.
Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling and Andreas Werliin – Ghosted II
Back on the trail with their duffle bags and nets like a gang of nocturnal lepidopterists, the trio of Oren Ambarchi on guitar, Johan Berthling on bass and Andreas Werliin on drums pick up pretty much where their first Ghosted album left off, replacing its kosmische chug and post-rock fabrics with something a little more spectral. Switching out the Roman numerals for Berthling and Werliin’s native Swedish, ‘en’ opens Ghosted II with rattle-stick percussion, drags of bass and the shapeshifting smears of Ambarchi’s guitar, which over the course of the album morphs and twists to mirror gossamer strings and all manner of eighties synthesizers. Settling into a tremulous spread of guitar over a strident bass line, the bass and drums work together to establish a tensile mesh which undergirds the careening course of Ambarchi’s strings, like a car whose tail keeps spinning out as it barrels down the highway, its rear lights flashing in the gloaming. Werliin’s drums seem to gain momentum through the final passage of ‘en’ as the guitar winds down to a quaver.
Pablo’s Eye – The light was sharp, our eyes were open
Echoing the obscure languor of the film, on The light was sharp, our eyes were open ambient synth washes lurch with a wiry portent and slide guitar stretches out quixotically pensive soundscapes which from the Aeolian Islands to cobbled Sicilian streets and the Tiber which runs through the Italian capital shift from the sea to rain-soaked urbanity and back again, all the while viewed through a cracked window and a fluttering, diaphanous curtain with the prevailing mood enunciated through smears of soft-spoken word.
Patricia Brennan Septet – Breaking Stretch
Her marimba training comes in especially handy during the second half of Breaking Stretch. The sixth track which is entitled ‘Five Suns’ proves especially jaunty, with Herrera working out another Latin groove amid the loose time-keeping of the claves and Shim’s playing on the tenor saxophone, as Brennan’s marimba adapts a funk bassline before she switches over to the vibes at about three minutes and forty seconds. The standard vibraphone has a three-octave range whereas a classical marimba stretches out over five octaves, giving the marimba a lower bottom end so that like the horns it can masquerade as a bass instrument. Here it is those horns which stay on top as the ensemble surges in staggered fashion towards a climax, then slumps in a weary heap like a jumbled pile of clothes, the players worn out from all of their exertions.
With the versatile percussionist Bobby Previte – who has played with everyone from the Beat father and cut-up artist William S. Burroughs and the ramshackle bluesman Tom Waits to the downtown improvisers Elliott Sharp, John Zorn and Wayne Horvitz while establishing an enduring partnership with the soprano saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom – the twanging ‘Sirocco’ plays out like a series of movements, beginning somewhere between the desert rock of the Sahel and a spaghetti Western before easing towards the angular forms of post rock or math rock bastions like Shellac and Gastr del Sol. The piece even flirts with the primitive guitar of Robbie Basho and John Fahey with a few flamenco or bolero flourishes in its percussive rhythms and the echoes of castanets, eking as though effortlessly towards popular music with a late section redolent of The Cure and their extended coda to ‘Pictures of You’.
Those ancient bronze bells, gurgling sounds, muffled kicks, vague sines and whooping shreds of static are accompanied by a pastoral field recording on the album opener ‘sur’ where someone appears to be tending to lowing cattle with milk pails in tow, perhaps with a wooden yoke draped over their shoulders as a dog barks in the distance. And after the whisperings and murmurings at the end of ‘deza’, the third track ‘sepula purm’ dabbles in shoegaze then sounds vaguely Celtic, like a petri dish Enya or Sinéad O’Connor warming up for ‘Mandinka’, or perhaps Antonina Nowacka whose spectral moans and nymphic vocals have traversed Polish fortresses and Javanese caves, as Perila layers her voice in the flickering air.
pigbaby – i don’t care if anyone listens to this shit once you do
The recollection of a stalled romance by turns glibly absurd – as when the singer in his conversational intimacy admits ‘I sat and watched her suck some guy’s gigantic dong. I didn’t expect to fall so quick’ – and searingly poignant, the text is accompanied by the wordless sean-nós melismas of a tenor with peals of giggling laughter and Michael Jackson-esque hee-hees as pigbaby warms to his subject, before hope frays and the fantasy turns sour. On a sodden bike ride from Bed-Stuy over the bridge into Manhattan on Christmas Day, the narrator listens through his Bluetooth speakers to Aphex Twin, whose . . . I Care Because You Do is cannily referenced in the album title, and to Tirzah’s soothingly downbeat ‘Fine Again’. But as ‘Texas Girl’ itself swirls to a crescendo and pigbaby dwells on a sense of loss and lessons learned, the piece evokes something of Paul Simon at his most quizzical, on Graceland tracks like ‘Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes’, fittingly so given some of the shared themes and locales while switching out its zephyr optimism for something more rainswept and threnodial, or ‘Gumboots’ and ‘I Know What I Know’ whose chorus and dynamics have been mined across whole songs and albums by Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, another far-flung spiritual kin. Closing on a bit of music hall with harmonium and fiddle, i don’t care if anyone listens to this shit once you do is a record that’s easy to dismiss but very difficult to shake, a sentiment of a piece with the title, a promise made and held dear.
There is something gravelly as well as grassy about Žaltys, the latest album by Raphael Rogínski who returns to the hills and forests of his youth by invoking the venerable grass snake spirits of the Lithuanian border. Working with the Warsaw-based musician and producer Piotr Zabrodzki to develop a sound which he describes as ‘guitar piano’, on Žaltys his penchant for folk motifs and primitivism retains its grit while also evoking the limpid pools and cloudy airs of Loren Connors, as Rogínski is accompanied on a couple of tracks by Indrė Jurgelevičiūtė, who sings and plays the kanklės, a Lithuanian plucked string instrument or chordophone which is closely related to the zither.
Samuel Goff – This Is My Body, This Is My Blood
Cutting a swathe through the contemporary landscape with a scorched penchant for Southern Gothic and Appalachian Horror, the Cacophonous Revival Recordings founder Samuel Goff structures his new album This Is My Body, This Is My Blood around three vignettes of his upbringing in a fervently religious household, with a charismatic father who was both pastor and snake handler and a disagreeable if well-meaning mother, who in a blood-strewn rage rips out chunks of the family Bible when her husband shacks up in a traveller’s motel with his brother’s wife, even though that selfsame Bible was one of the few fancy things they possessed.
Sarah Davachi – The Head as Form’d in the Crier’s Choir
Embarking on a fresh voyage, Sarah Davachi drones out at sea on ‘Possente Spirto’ from The Head as Form’d in the Crier’s Choir, her latest collection for solo performers and chamber ensembles. The title of the piece alludes to the ‘Possente spirto, e formidabil nume’ of the opera L’Orfeo by Claudio Monteverdi, an aria which captures the moment when the bard Orpheus strives to convince the ferryman Charon to allow him to pass into Hades, from where he hopes to recover his wife Eurydice, who has died and gone into the underworld after being bitten by a snake. In this rendering, which is regarded as one of the high water marks of the late Renaissance and early Baroque period, the elaborate yet heartfelt aria lulls Charon to sleep and Orpheus crosses the Styx, with Davachi’s piece capturing the wash and spume and the staggered descent of the journey, written for sustaining continuo and duos of string and brass, with Davachi performing on Mellotron and synthesizers with tape delay while Andrew McIntosh plays viola and Mattie Barbier adds plaintive appeals on the trombone.
The last Shellac album lands with almost shockingly poor taste just ten days after the untimely death of Steve Albini, which in a perverse way makes it rather apt. Albini may have renounced the ‘edgelord’ tendencies of his youth, accepting that ‘I and others of my generation have not been held to task enough for words and behaviour that ultimately contributed to a coarsening society’, but on To All Trains he and his bandmates Todd Trainer and Bob Weston are typically scabrous. If their sixth and unexpectedly final release is poignant only in the somewhat archaic sense of pungent to the smell, piquant or sharp, still the suggestively-titled To All Trains is a fitting cap to a formidable career, preoccupied with death and summarising some of his lifelong bête noirs, while even the cover photograph from the waiting room of Chicago Union Station, rendered in black and white, captures the sense of a terminus with an air of still bristling anticipation.
Housebound and offered up as a space for connection, a shared meditation on the body in a transformative state of rest, the nine lengthy tracks of Cocoon were captured whenever Hollis felt able, tender and careful improvisations named in diaristic fashion after their recording dates. Her winding voice and variegated instruments sometimes summon medieval organum as plainsong splintered into the first strains of polyphony, as on the third track of the album, which is dated ‘February 16’. Sometimes her songs sound like warped ragas, where twining woodwinds saunter over distended synthetic drones, and sometimes they conjure the Japanese environmental genre of kankyō ongaku, which might be embedded within nature but can also encode a detached looking out. ‘March 30’ highlights the kalimba while ‘April 7’ might echo the cooing vocals of Elizabeth Fraser as filtered through a contemporary loop machine, and ‘April 13’ briefly recalls the rebounding pluck of the harp on the foundational Joanna Newsom track ‘Bridges and Balloons’.
Sisso & Maiko – Singeli Ya Maajabu
There’s a frantic and slightly unhinged yet breezily carefree, pitch-shifted buoyancy to Singeli Ya Maajabu as Sisso and Maiko drive the jerky rhythms of singeli rotor blades spinning up through the atmosphere. The record kicks off with ‘Kivinje’ as a sort of plastic playhouse version of the ubiquitous Kingsmen classic ‘Louie Louie’. The music video for the track shows Sisso and Maiko upside down as they play pat-a-cake and hammer away at their Yamaha PSS-170 and MacBook keyboards, a disorientating image which is hard to shake as over the course of the album melodies seem to be cut up and stuck back together in the manner of a collage as beats squelch and ping from all directions.
Snowdrops – Singing Stones (Volume 1)
The first of two long pieces on Singing Stones (Volume 1), preceding the crunchier timbres and howling drones of ‘Arctic Passage’, on the near twenty-minute ‘Crossing’ the duo traverse everything from ambient jazz to baroque electronics through rolled chords and percussive treatments, delicate porch chimes and the spurting reed-like sounds of the hurdy gurdy plus that eerie theremin-like ondes Martenot, which elicits alien transmissions or the yawning dread of a Munchian scream beneath blood-red skies, just one of the colours in sight as they rev the engine of their snowmobile and set out flanked by snot or emerald green in search of the wonders of an aurora borealis.
Squanderers – If a Body Meet a Body
If a Body Meet a Body seems to be framed by the drawn drapes and dimmed lights of the cinema, but I was only dimly aware of that fact when I first pressed the play button. With the Gastr del Sol founder and Drag City stalwart Grubbs duetting with Eisenberg on the guitar while Kramer – an influential producer and New York City noise rocker who is best known for his various associations with Galaxie 500, Low and Butthole Surfers – adds shapeshifting bass and drones, the opening track to my ears carried the wiry rattle of a classic Western sometimes with a coiled or sinuous tinge of espionage, cynical and clandestine with a slight twitch at the corner of one’s mouth, like the seventies and eighties glut of British spy dramas which were largely inspired by the novels of John le Carré.
There is something passive and impersonal yet tactile, generous and closely observed with Crump whose Slow Water we first follow as it traces its way haltingly downstream. Inspired by the book Water Always Wins by Erica Gies, which in the face of widespread drought, raging floods and perilously rising water levels spoke with scientists, ecologists and anthropologists, activists and indigenous communities to chart a course for a more resilient future, Crump assembled a stellar sextet of new music and jazz players whose wellspring runs deep and flows free. With his frequent collaborator Patricia Brennan on vibes, Joanna Mattrey on viola, yuniya edi kwon on violin, Jacob Garchik on trombone and Kenny Warren on trumpet the interplay is steady and patient, more ebb than flood, from the tentatively resolved morass of ‘Bogged’ to the slouchy communal barge journey of ‘Eager’ and the turbulent mixed sediment of ‘Hyporheic’, where the strings of Mattrey and kwon strain to reach the surface. ‘Dusk Critters’ carries some of the scampish liveliness of Hayao Miyazaki’s susuwatari, famous from My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away and otherwise known as soot sprites or dust bunnies, here led by the spry droplets of Brennan’s vibraphone which are offset by the hapless, smudged pursuit of Garchik and Warren’s brass. Letting his talented ensemble set the scene or stir up sand and silt, Crump is never afraid to sit back and wait for the particles to settle.
Armed with Clippy EM272 stereo microphones and undisclosed instrumentation, the South Korean sound artist Suk Hong elides the boundaries and ellipses between the performed and overheard on his new album Pedigree for the Otoroku label. Reedy synthesizers, pipe organ drones, oscillating sine tones and percussive static rippled through by a late burst of mallets seem to merge steadily with the litany of sounds which he captured as he walked and commuted around Seoul, his microphones all the while hanging from his backpack.
Sylvie Courvoisier – To Be Other-Wise
Despite her distinctive sound – at the nexus of chamber jazz from her upbringing in Lausanne and the more groove-oriented downtown scene of New York City which has been her home for a quarter-century – the twelve compositions of To Be Other-Wise play out as a series of vignettes, with Courvoisier incorporating everything from the wobbling strings and gamelan-like percussive elements of the opening track ‘La descente des alpages (for Julian Sartorius)’ as she works through various treatments to the glistening and rippling or more compact clusters of ‘Hotel Esmeralda’ for the comic book artist Hugo Pratt and ‘Scooting’ for one of her musical inspirations in the form of the organist and ornithologist Olivier Messiaen.
Talib Trio – Aap ka number hai?
Adding to a lineage of influential Sindhi musicians which includes his uncle, the famous kafi singer Muhammad Juman, as a youngster Muhammad Talib inherited a tambooro from his father, before studying under the benju master Ghulamu and learning composition from the prolific television, radio and film composer Niaz Ahmed. On his new album for the independent Pakistani label honiunhoni, he plays two experimental instruments, a fretted tambooro of his own making and an electric bulbul, which is a variant of the benju. By adding frets to the long-necked lute and electrifying his keyboard-fitted zither, Talib furnishes resonant drones with flowing melodies and chords while his music abounds in piquant overtones. The ten tracks of Aap ka number hai? – which loosely translates to ‘Is this your number?’ and serves as Talib’s pet phrase or motto – shift seamlessly between original compositions and those of his uncle Ustad Juman, reinterpretations of Sindhi and Balochi standards, plus two popular Pushto songs, with Muhammad Khan on the dholak and Shahid Ali on the harmonium playing accompaniment while the vibrant and ardent city of Karachi provides a steady background hum.
Tashi Wada – What Is Not Strange?
On the other hand ‘Subaru’ asks what if the one-night stand suggested by the sleek body and nimble chassis of a little red Corvette was not swapped out but sublimated by a model of Japanese reliability? Summoning the Pleiades star cluster and gliding with a little more drag, the song features a throttled drone and the tethered straying of Ezra Buchla’s viola, with a mezzanine of fairground synthesizer before Julia Holter’s warped and layered vocals wonder aloud whether it might be best to turn around and go home before everybody winds up a little bit carsick.
Beginning with the title track, Born in the Wild abounds in juxtapositions of her life before fame and a success which is not material but coded instead as something personal and hard won, a steady and enduring process of self-realisation. Rife with both longing and defiance, the record carries echoes of the 13-year-old girl who fancied the calling of music but couldn’t see the path, and was beset by the sort of expectations and doubts and personal and financial insecurities typical of any young woman, especially growing up in a socially conservative country like Nigeria. Her voice, a model of resilience which it would be impossible to replicate, shifts easily between those dolorous tones and a tender butteriness, while her lyrics often take the guise of a dialogue which is really a form of self-address, wary yet philosophical and praiseful without being over-proud.
The second phase of a trilogy, on Quantum Baby once again Tinashe seems so far ahead of the game that she might be mistaken for a heat haze or even a mirage. But her proposition is simple enough: all of your fantasies made real, which means romance with responsibility and sex with strings attached. From the heady revelry of ‘Getting No Sleep’ to the slinky get down of ‘Thirsty’, and from the topsy-turvy or vacillating sentiment which cuts through ‘Red Flags’ and ‘Cross That Line’ – whose racing car imagery is undergirded by a kind of celestial space wobble then grinding bass – the singer makes R&B sound more visionary, more propulsive and more seductive than it has in decades, which owes something to the direct intimacy of her songs even as she steadfastly refuses to settle, while the ubiquitous social media icon ‘Nasty’ is as good a candidate as any for track of the year.
Bundling up to brace herself for an emotional blizzard, sipping warm cocoa and reclining atop animal skins in a subarctic ice hotel as she blanks your calls, or turning the air conditioning on to full blast even as she dips a toe beneath the bedsheets, Tink the toughest and sultriest R&B singer of her generation returns with more breathless and faltering dynamics for the fifth iteration of her iconic Winter’s Diary series, which now stretches back some twelve years.
There’s a rubbery quality to the strings of the Tomeka Reid Quartet on the centrepiece of their latest suite, entitled ‘Sauntering With Mr. Brown’, especially to the guitar of Mary Halvorson, who sashays and careens with a surreal suppleness and bendy legs as Reid on the cello plays a circuitous loop pizzicato. Halfway through the piece the ensemble comes together, supported by drum rolls from Tomas Fujiwara and Jason Roebke’s burgeoning bass, as Reid’s angular bows become an amorphous cloud, dragging her bandmates along as the spokes show from their upturned umbrellas. Another quick break on the guitar and Halvorson and Reid reverse roles, with Halvorson’s six-string taking the loop and Reid – who incorporates electronics on 3+3 after previously sticking to acoustic preparations – playing long fraying arcs as the quartet ramble in search of a destination.
Memory and identity and the fecklessness or unreality of both are constant themes. Tomu DJ appends I Want To Be with a long quote from the autobiographical novel The Lover by Marguerite Duras, which discusses buried facts and feelings, clear periods ‘on which the light fell’, the vanity and void but seeming necessity of writing, and a life both conducted and conveyed which has no centre or through line and quite simply by way of an opening conclusion therefore ‘does not exist’.
Trance Map – Horizons Held Close
Their new album Horizons Held Close on the other hand is the first time that Parker and Wright have teamed up as Trance Map unfettered since their self-titled 2011 debut. Comprised of the two long twenty-five minute pieces ‘Ulaanbadrakh’ and ‘Bayankhongor’, which reference Mongolian provinces, on Horizons Held Close the soprano saxophone of Parker sounds like a series of bird whistles and duck calls as Wright on turntables and live processing catches hold of them in mid-air and sets about repurposing them with an eerie sympathy which is hard to fully trust.
There’s an alluring and decidedly old school vibe to the new project by Xu Feng and Liu Min, two veterans of the Chinese indie rock scene who have banded together as TrembLe MiX almost a quarter century on from their first acquaintance, with Feng behind the boards while Min handles lyrics and vocals. For their self-titled debut, Feng develops his interest in Japanese experimental and electronic music while Min sings in a cracked and emotionally candid English, with the result especially redolent of Japanese house with its pronounced low-end, wonky synths and skittering beats, the roiling dubbiness of trip hop and downtempo, and so much Scandinavian synth-pop with its serpentine choruses and whispering intimacies, at moments like Soichi Terada mixed with The Knife or ‘Lovefool’ by The Cardigans squished and stretched through a deep house filter.
Trygve Seim & Frode Haltli – Our Time
Trygve Seim and Frode Haltli share sustained notes and drones on their new album Our Time, which is sometimes redolent of the bal-musette and other times more misty or far-flung like on ‘Arabian Tango’ and ‘Improvisation No. 2 / Shyama Sundara Madena Mohana’. The accordion might sound like a distant train whistle but the mood here is never mechanical, like a phantom steam engine with billowing features that moves as though suspended from its tracks, before wafting up into the air in one thick curlicue of smoke. Sometimes those two sides, vaporous and fanciful, come together to magical effect like through the short puffs and tremolos at the close of ‘Improvisation No. 1 / Fanfare’ where Seim’s soprano saxophone soars to aching heights.
Vijay Iyer, Linda May Han Oh and Tyshawn Sorey – Compassion
A judicious selection of material – including a lyrical homage to Chick Corea by way of Stevie Wonder, a circumscribed take on the incendiary ‘Nonaah’ of Roscoe Mitchell, and the ‘Free Spirits’ of John Stubblefield as performed by Mary Lou Williams together with a reprise of Geri Allen’s ‘Drummer’s Song’ from their last album Uneasy – rounds out a typically piquant set of originals from the pianist Vijay Iyer, back with his trio for Compassion which once more features Linda May Han Oh on the double bass and Tyshawn Sorey behind the drum kit.
At the centre of his new album Dark Times, the track ‘Étouffée’ is a sultry example of the type of thing which Vince Staples does best, at once yanked along by a loping beat and stage managing the whole enterprise with a wide purview and a tight grip, as though stranded in the intersection and commandeering a pair of battle ropes. The name for a Cajun dish of shellfish over rice, the rickety sway of the drums and synths serves as a perfect backdrop for his voice, which is both expressive in its world weariness and deadened from anxiousness, generating that pervasive sense of alienation which characterises his work and is ensconced in the chorus to ‘Étouffée’ when he sings ‘In the ghetto, I’m a martian’ in chorus with himself. A potted personal history as Staples chronicles his own headspace and surveys our prevailing social atmosphere, on ‘Little Homies’ he says ‘Life hard but I go harder’ as both summary and vow before Santigold proffers a sun-kissed pantheism.
Violence Gratuite – Baleine à Boss
While the album opener ‘Iséo’ makes a splash over grimey synths and bottle cap percussion, ‘Olive’ foregrounds handpan or steel tongue drums plus shakers over insidious alien loops, with Gratuite who sings mostly in French embellishing the sense of skittering and propulsive motion with a swooning and scatting refrain of ‘come on baby’ in English. ‘L’hiver avec toi’ plays a nauseous fairground melody next to murmuring choral vocals, and beyond its evocation of Sade, the track ‘Smooth Operation’ clearly reclaims the refrain from the ‘Soul Makossa’ of the Cameroonian songwriter, saxophonist and vibraphonist Manu Dibango.
William Parker, Cooper-Moore and Hamid Drake – Heart Trio
From the outset there is a tender quality to Heart Trio, as Parker, Cooper-Moore and Drake play with the heft and resonance of spiritual jazz yet the intimacy of a chamber ensemble, the album opener ‘Atman’ already a soothing balm. And on ‘Five Angels by the Stream’ they dip their toes a little deeper, bracing themselves for the moment of total immersion. Setting aside their signature instruments, William Parker picks up his doson ngoni or hunter’s harp, the traditional West African griot medium, plus a variety of reed instruments and flutes, including the Japanese end-blown shakuhachi, an Armenian bass duduk, a Serbian frula in the key of F-sharp and the ney flute which are constructed by turns in bamboo, cedar and walnut. Cooper-Moore comes in on two of his earliest self-devised instruments, the ashimba which is an eleven-note xylophone made from discarded wood and his horizontal hoe-handle harp, while Hamid Drake plays a frame drum alongside his regular drum kit.
William Parker & Ellen Christi – Cereal Music
Then the album centrepiece ‘Do Dreams Sleep’ incorporates the hooting cacophony of birds as his ‘gentle melody’ grows ever more prismatic and metaphysical. ‘I want to live in between the rainbow’ he begins as a spectral statement of intent, pondering the circadian rhythms of dreams while professing ‘Never thought the air would bleed. Never thought the sky would give me a look’. Squirrels scurry up trees with a whimper as his philosophical inquiries take on the troubled yet whimsical and somehow utopian air of Rat from the ubiquitous Martin Bell documentary Streetwise, which chronicled the lives of homeless kids on the streets of Seattle, as Parker’s own field recordings from a park in Brooklyn are curtailed by a curious passerby, with the bassist discussing his practice before observing that the birds do indeed appear to be ‘getting down today’.
Following a couple of records which handled themes of misogynoir and yearned tenderly for the bounty of an indiscriminate kind of love, Yaya Bey exits the north star as like a midnight ocean rippled by the gravitational force of the moon she embraces a life full of flux. Compiling a type of contemporary R&B which is almost a form of deep listening practice through its commitment to everyday mundanity, whose deep grooves, prevailing air of acceptance and sometimes wistful prose play out like iterations on a theme, Ten Fold is spurred by a bit of Motown and a little bit of Laurel Canyon, soft-spoken sixties vamps in the style of Dusty Springfield and psychedelic effluence in the manner of Minnie Riperton with smidges of boom bap and new jack swing.
Zeena Parkins – Dam Against the Spring Tide
The five pieces of ‘Past Turned Space’ which open Dam Against the Spring Tide find Brett Carson on piano and organ and the percussionist Winant on vibraphone, crotales and harmonica harbouring deftly a series of vignettes, as their piano clusters and sometimes clangorous mallet percussions batten down the hatches for a brief appearance by Joan La Barbara while Parkins jams her elbows into the piano and adds more intimate moments through a few select field recordings. Benjamin’s archives contain a wealth of images and artefacts in addition to commentaries, fragments and other written material, with coloured symbols and other signa serving to illuminate his literary principals as well as his hopes and dreams, but the composition ‘Past Turned Space’ focuses keenly on the philosopher and cultural critic’s memories of his childhood, which are ripe with a fondness for and lingering emotional attachment to material things.
