Following the steady exhalations and springtime exultations of Regrowth, animated by Immanuel Wilkins on the alto saxophone, Lee Meadvin on guitar, Paul Cornish on keys, Nick Dunston on bass, and Connor Parks on drums and released on New Amsterdam Records as one of the best jazz albums of the past year, this week the trombonist and composer Kalia Vandever announces her solo debut We Fell In Turn. Recorded over the course of three days in Upstate New York and rooted in an habitual process of improvisation through a stark sound palette of ‘solo trombone, voice, effects, and little more’, Vandever unveils the album with the stately yet luminous ‘Temper the Wound’. Due out at the end of March on the experimental hub AKP Recordings, while We Fell In Turn might connect the dots between early Grouper and the billowing guitar loops of Forfolks by Jeff Parker, inspired by childhood memories, her Hawaiian heritage, and the intangible feeling of life as it stirs from a vivid dream, ‘Temper the Wound’ finds a sonorous bridge between cosmic jazz in the devotional vein of Turiya Sings by Alice Coltrane and ‘The Anchor Song’ by Björk, shafts of light stretching homeward to dispel the tenebrous gloom.
Described alternately as a process of sieving or forestation, the composer, turntablist, and visual artist eRikm turns his hand to the acousmographe, a software tool devised by Ina GRM for the graphical representation and analysis of electroacoustic music and other sound spectra, including those outside the field of human auditory perception. Scanning a diverse array of field recordings, including the sounds of cetaceans and amphibians recorded during trips to Australia and Tasmania, through the acousmographe before transposing them into musical notes and handing both parts to a group of outstanding musicians, the result is splayed as a kind of Fata Morgana, a superior mirage comprised of stackings and distortions of the original image. Encapsulated by the smudged strings and fraying electronics of ‘Ambre Gris’, on Fata Morgana the renowned collaborator teams up with members of the Dedalus Ensemble from Toulouse, including Didier Aschour on guitar, Amélie Berson on flute, Thierry Madiot on trombone, Christian Pruvost on trumpet, and the acclaimed duo of Silvia Tarozzi and Deborah Walker on violin and cello.
Through an augmented reality of acoustic instruments, the composer Evgueni Galperine manifests a theory of becoming for the ECM New Series, which on ‘Don’t Tell’ incorporates childish sighs, sunken bass, and a plaintive whistling while envisaging a backwards scramble for freedom through the suburban scrub. Still exploring the chasms and peaks of the six-string, Julian Lage with Jorge Roeder, Dave King, and Bill Frisell offers a staggered companion to View With A Room. Unspooling one of the threads which served to characterise Medieval Femme, a decadent suite of songs inspired by the classical poems of Arab women, the producer Fatima Al Qadiri pairs up with her fellow Kuwaiti vocalist Gumar for an homage to lamentation singing. From restive shadows eloquent airs ruminate and coalesce around the theme of unrequited love, with ‘Mojik (Your Waves)’ the first outing from an extended play which is also titled Gumar, a rendering of the Arabic word for ‘moon’.
Jane Ira Bloom, Mark Helias, and Bobby Previte complete a series of conversational improvisations carried out as a form of call and response in an outgrowth of the pandemic. The experimental guitarist Dustin Wong and bristling saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi release a duo recording whose monthly proceeds will go to the Monterey Park Lunar New Year Victims Fund. A master of Hindustani classical forms with the distinction of playing the clarinet, on Guldasta which is the Punjabi word for bouquet Jaffar Hussain Randhawa unfurls raags on a foggy winter afternoon from the rooftop of his house in Shahdara. Aided by an exuberant array of fellow travellers, the Kochi-based multi-instrumentalist Seljuk Rustum erects Cardboard Castles as a series of joyous first takes, struck dumb by some divine object of infatuation, Yves Tumor gilds ‘Echolalia’ with the unsolicited repetition of words and other purring or lip-smacking vocalisations, Orbital set to work with Brighton siblings Penelope Isles, while drafted into the march of progress, from the scabrous margins of the New York rap scene Skech185 and the producer Jeff Markey prove kindred spirits on He Left Nothing for the Swim Back for Backwoodz Studioz.
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Kalia Vandever – ‘Temper the Wound’
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Evgueni Galperine – ‘Don’t Tell’
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Patrick Shiroishi & Dustin Wong – ‘が砕けて‘
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Jaffar Hussain Randhawa – ‘Thumri Pahadi’
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Seljuk Rustum – ‘The Dancer Is Seen Not Heard’
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Ensemble Dedalus & eRikm – ‘Ambre Gris’
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Jane Ira Bloom, Mark Helias, and Bobby Previte – ‘Where The World Went’
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Fatima Al Qadiri – ‘Mojik (Your Waves)’
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Orbital – ‘Are You Alive?’ (feat. Penelope Isles)
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Skech185 & Jeff Markey – ‘Western Automatic Music Part 1’
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