The mood is often the first thing to come over on a Julia Holter song, a bristling and tenuous warmth or a soft-hued light which stays for a moment between glimmering, on repeated listenings giving way to subtle gradations of texture and colour. On the third single from her upcoming album Something in the Room She Moves, the singer is caught hopelessly between the golden hour and the gloaming, as she repeats the lines ‘The dream is sweet’ and ‘Let’s not say it’s over just yet’, lingering languorously over but caressing for just one breath the face of a lover, a vespertine flower which blooms only in the evening, as spiralling and sometimes plangent clarinet, the enveloping clash of a ride cymbal and Dev Hoff’s ambling bass both burnish and sustain the frisson.
The genre of baile funk or funk carioca continues to evolve as it shifts between social media platforms and the street parties of its native Brazil, sometimes blending as though seamlessly with reggaeton, kuduros, gqom or amapiano to form border-hopping hybrids while local artists compelled by a daily practice continue to find ways to make their music both innovative and discrete. Drawing from samba soul, Miami bass and Latin freestyle, the chanted vocals and hybrid rhythms of Afrobeat, the first boasts of gangster rap and seminal tracks like ‘Planet Rock’ and ‘Nunk’ which created the short-lived template for boogified electro, in the nineties the sustained kicks and booming bass of the 808 drum machine which had previously defined the sound were offset by the sensual grooves of tamborzão. In the early 2010s as funk carioca became a global trend, back in São Paulo the aspirational sub-genre of funk ostentação gave way to funk mandelão, a more sinister and nocturnal form steeped in horror tropes, minimalist beats, booming synths and dizzying repetitions. That in turn paved the way for bruxaria, a term which translates to ‘witchcraft’ or ‘sorcery’ and is harsher still, full of eerie tones and rippling distortions, whose hallucinatory rituals where exemplified last year by DJ K and his high-pitched tuin, as the record PANICO NO SUBMUNDO marked his debut for the Kampala outsider bastion Nyege Nyege Tapes.
DJ Anderson do Paraíso started producing tamborzão beats back in 2012, using his bedroom as a makeshift studio, but his sound underwent a profound transformation a few years later when he began attending the Baile do Serrão, the street party in Aglomerado de Serra which is the largest favela in Belo Horizonte and one of the two or three largest favelas in all of Brazil. 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.
Part Moomins and part picaresque, for Mondoj the fabulist Staś Czekalski compiles new-age squibs and mossy manifestations, an organic enactment of an astral plane or future space habitation where spliced liturgical chants have to compete for the scant air with the sounds of plumbing works and other odd jobs. The searing saxophone of Ivo Perelman finds a mellower groove alongside first-time collaborators Mark Helias and Tom Rainey, whose supple bass and scattershot percussion stretch the canvas, allowing the tenor to furrow a course and pick up some steam on the title track from Truth Seeker, part of the latest drop from the Warsaw-based improvisational augurs at Fundacja Słuchaj.
Drawing inspiration from Jack Halberstam’s text The Queer Art of Failure, changing their compositions each night on tour while determining that ‘the process of the piece is the piece’, as a trio Sinonó give voice to a levitational song-poetry, with Henry Fraser’s tenebrous plucks of the bass and Lester St. Louis’s folk throngs and gliding accompaniments on the cello providing a shifting yet sustainable platform for the dolorous tones, soaring arcs and caught interjections of the composer and latinx vocalist Isabel Crespo Pardo.
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, Lage finding another rich seam for his unique talent as the guitarist ‘delights in the deliberate crossing of wires’ between gospel hymnals and the rural blues.
Dali de Saint Paul, the Viridian Ensemble vocalist known for her collaborations with Moor Mother and Valentina Magaletti, and the double bassist Maxwell Sterling unload the pungent and sometimes delirious fruits of their improvisational encounter for the vaunted BBC Radio 3 programme Late Junction, revealing the full session as an ode to dusky, trance-like repetition and a sort of whinnying worrisome birdsong.
On a bonus track from We Buy Diabetic Test Strips with vocals by Benjamin Booker and co-production from Kenny Segal, the duo of billy woods and Elucid as Armand Hammer survey the soft wet earth and stand fast if only for a moment. For his first album in six years, Ben Frost finds the melting point between mathcore or progressive metal and West Coast minimalism through steeply meditative shards of sound. And for her solo debut the violinist and interdisciplinary artist Leslie Ting steeps herself in therapeutic and other sensory practises from talk therapy, hypnotherapy and dreamwork to sandplay, somatics and reiki, commissioning new pieces from Rose Bolton and Julia Mermelstein while the percussionist Germaine Liu adds accompaniment from atop an amplified sandbox, on an album presented in two versions in both stereo and three-dimensional binaural sound.
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Ivo Perelman, Mark Helias & Tom Rainey – ‘Truth Seeker’
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sinonó – ‘qué estará pensando’
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Dali de Saint Paul & Maxwell Sterling – ‘Penumbra 3’
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DJ Anderson do Paraíso – ‘Se Faz de Santinha’ (feat. MC Maykin do BC)
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Staś Czekalski – ‘Dim Lounge’ (feat. uszko)
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Leslie Ting – ‘folds in crossings for solo violin & electronics’ (Stereo Version)
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