A deep dive into the history of Greenwich Village spurred the author and lyricist David Hajdu to begin a song cycle in ode to a single building, an otherwise nondescript four-story brick townhouse at 64th East 7th Street in bustling New York. Built in 1889 as the parsonage for St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, home to the Reverend George Haas whose family died in the General Slocum disaster, the building subsequently served as the headquarters of the Russky Golos and saw the arrest of the Communist journalist Alexander Brailovsky, hosted poetry readings by the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky as the beatnik coffeehouse Les Deux Mégots, birthed the first macrobiotic restaurant which counted a young Yoko Ono as one of its waitresses, and became a neighbourhood bookstore patronised by Lou Reed and Marianne Moore. Eventually handed over to the fashion set as a couture consignment shop before being gutted and sold as a single family townhouse in a sign of the sterilised times, Hajdu enlisted two singers, an instrumental ensemble, and eight composers to realise each phase of the building’s cycle, starting this week with samples of Ginsburg and the scatological rock band The Fugs on ‘Translation, Two Cigar Butts’ by Ted Hearne.
The South London artist Shygirl’s debut proper Nymph already boasted a slew of upstart producers, with BloodPop, Sega Bodega, Arca, Mura Masa, Vegyn, and Danny L Harle adding jungle breaks and mutant reggaeton to the heady blend of sultry spoken word and shapeshifting falsetto over 2-step garage and trap beats. Now for the deluxe version of the critically acclaimed album, Shygirl ups the ante with a full-length of remixes featuring original contributions by Björk, Fatima Al Qadiri, Erika de Casier, Sevdaliza, Eartheater, Deto Black, and Tinashe.
From sinuously surreal woodwinds played with live signal processing to glorious Midwestern vistas and rocky ragas summoned through the strains of hammered dulcimer and guitar, the trio of Jen Powers, Cole Pulice, and Matthew J. Rolin combine for their own cosmic blend of atomic Americana. Drawing upon Swahili proverbs and field recordings of water in different states, Nyokabi Kariuki conjures the fractured quietude of a long illness on her diaphanous new album FEELING BODY, adding ‘I am ever in awe of our bodies, and how they keep going, despite and in spite of all the pain we go through in life’.
In the first throes of lockdown, the saxophonist Aaron Leaney and drummer and Le Quatuor de jazz libre du Québec co-founder Guy Thouin crossed paths in Montreal, with Leaney continuing to explore his Indo-Caribbean heritage aided by the West African fulani flute and Zimbabwean mbira while Thouin bore the fruit of years of tabla study in India for an ode to free improvisation and generational connectivity despite an age gap of four decades. Separated by the pandemic before they were invited to perform at the BMW Welt Jazz Awards in Munich, the trio of Anat Fort, Gary Wang, and Roland Schneider covered eighties classics, Jewish liturgicals, and a Great American Songbook standard by Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern, paid tribute to the late percussionist Take Toriyama, and recited ‘The Jain Suite’ which Fort wrote inspired by the Himalayan art of the Rubin Museum all as part of an intimate yet freewheeling session in Berlin.
The percussionist Tony Lugo and saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi become metal machines on the latest for Superpang with mastering by Lasse Marhaug. Flora Yin Wong unveils Doyenne with a focus on indigenous rituals, animism, and the divine feminine, a do-it-yourself publisher and record label whose first salvo arrives through the haunting refrains and Dabke-inspired aesthetics of Susu Laroche. Angela Seo and Jamie Stewart split singing duties amid the industrial throbs and post-classical thrums of the latest Xiu Xiu album, an aesthetic examination of grief and trauma described as the culmination of ‘twenty years grappling with how to process, to be empathetic towards, to disobey and to reorganise horror’. Tianzhuo Chen transmits the latest iteration of Trance Band from a three-day ceremony at the Kampnagel theatre, adding the sonic distortions of Dis Fig, Gabber Modus Operandi, the guitarist and engineer Felix-Florian Tödtloff, MC Kim Khan, and the percussionist and producer City to the cacophonous mix.
Through moss-green shutters, translucent curtains, and the smell of conifers and summer rain, Spektral Quartet and Julia Holter unfold the strange somnambulism of ‘Jolene’ at the climax of a song cycle by Alex Temple, which blends elements of indie pop, Weimar cabaret, and 19th-century Romanticism set between such disparate locales as an eerie science park and transformative masquerade ball. Cécile McLorin Salvant harnesses the story of Mélusine, figured as a combustible gaze which begets a fire-breathing dragon, Jon Collin channels the Tunguska meteor air burst through his spare scorched blues, and the trombonist Kalia Vandever murmurs in mirrored solitude on the second single from her upcoming album, amid a bumper week for new music which also saw stellar efforts in the form of Pitch Blender by Zoë Mc Pherson, Tekvision Volume 3 by Traxman, Cociage by PÖ, WOW by Kate NV, L’Oiseau Magnifique by Alice, and glim by KMRU.
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Jen Powers, Cole Pulice, and Matthew J. Rolin – ‘Melted Honey’
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Tony Lugo & Patrick Shiroishi – ‘Landscape, Day Scene’
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Susu Laroche – ‘Hold Yr Tongue’
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Shygirl – ‘Heaven’ (feat. Tinashe)
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Aaron Leaney – ‘Turtle Island’ (feat. Guy Thouin)
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Xiu Xiu – ‘Esquerita, Little Richard’
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Kalia Vandever – ‘Mirrored Solitude’
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Cécile McLorin Salvant – ‘Mélusine’
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Theo Bleckmann, Alicia Olatuja, Dan Tepfer, and David Hajdu – ‘Translation, Two Cigar Butts’
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TRANCE BAND – ‘Soft and Black’
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Spektral Quartet, Julia Holter, and Alex Temple – ‘Jolene’
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