Four years in the making, for her first full-length on New Amsterdam Records the composer and vocalist Mingjia Chen presents a collection of through-composed songs which still carry the discursiveness and formal spontaneity of recitative or more melismatic arioso, as half-scrawled thoughts and ribbons of reflections stack together in a manner at once reminiscent of the opera or Broadway, chamber pop with a folkish whimsy or something still more mundane, where collaged samples and passages of improvisation vie with the strictures of orchestration to produce an aleatoric music. Written for herself and the thirteen-piece Tortoise Orchestra, on the track ‘Saint’ buttressed by an eight-strong choir Mingjia warily probes and offers earnest entreaties to Santa Maria as she swings her thurible, chows down on curried chickpeas and contemplates an unholy tryst, the centrepiece of a record which draws inspiration from Chinese mythology and magical realism while weaving stories which are ‘truer than the outcome, little bubbles that are all their own. The story does not merely arrive at the truth, the story itself becomes the truth’.
Following up her acclaimed albums Amaryllis and Belladonna, the angular guitarist Mary Halvorson returns to Nonesuch Records with her Amaryllis sextet featuring Patricia Brennan on vibes, Nick Dunston on bass, Tomas Fujiwara on drums, Jacob Garchik on trombone and Adam O’Farrill on trumpet. The eight songs of Cloudward were each written in 2022 when in Halvorson’s own words air travel had resumed and ‘things started moving forward. This band, for me, was quite simply working, both musically and personally, and the main thing I felt while writing the music was optimism’. From Mexico City the avant-garde cellist Mabe Fratti, the composer and vocalist Camille Mandoki, the sound artist Concepción Huerta who specialises in synthesizers, tape manipulation and field recordings, and the classically trained violinist Gibrana Cervantes bring their withering wit and years of experimentation to fruition, reuniting in the forest haven of La Pitahaya in Zoncuantla for their debut album as Amor Muere.
Back in the autumn of 2014, the multi-instrumentalist and Tombed Visions label owner David McLean pushed out the second effort under his Aging monicker, which had grown from a solo piano and reverb project referencing the likes of François Couturier, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Misha Alperin into a two-piece as he partnered up with the drummer Andrew Cheetham. Described as a ‘suite of noirish balladry and bar room dirges, painting a murky portrait of a man under the influence’, on Troubles? I Got A Bartender slow-strummed guitar, wailing saxophone, melancholy loops and dissolving effects were buttressed by skittering drums as McLean and Cheetham pored over an emptying pint glass, savouring and languishing in the precious last drop. Now for Reworks (Rewoven) the Berlin label Vaagner have handpicked a series of artists to revamp the five tracks of Troubles? I Got A Bartender, with Laila Sakini tackling the album closer ‘Keening & Crying’ by swapping its slow and specious tread, trailing saxophone urges and fog of Fender Rhodes and organ for some spectral post-bar chatter which lingers on the precipice of the sidewalk. Yoking the horns which strain and falter through the murk, in Sakini’s hands ‘Keening & Crying’ is suspended mid-air, rendered as a sort of smudged plainsong.
After moving from Bangkok to Porto before eventually settling in Berlin, the producer Pisitakun Kuantalaeng offers a wild and homesick ride through Thailand which celebrates the country’s fiery food and spirited festivals while poking wry fun at international eateries and the political machinations which give The Land of Smiles its lopsided grin. Mining the archives of Folkways Records, the insatiably curious duo of Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt as Matmos dice, loop and stretch a litany of non-musical sounds from mud dauber wasps and Japanese beetles to developments in artificial voice creation after the removal of the larynx, after so much bubble and toil with a few coffee breaks and sustained detours as they descend the musty corridors of their source material finally sinking down heavily towards slumber as a sheathe of noise beckons them to sleep.
As the golden age of Ethiopian music drew to a close and the Derg regime began to crack down on all manner of artistic expression, one group continued to carry the mantle for local jazz and funk. While the capital’s nightlife crumbled under a citywide curfew and the Derg swiftly censored a previously booming penchant for vocal jazz, the keyboardist and arranger Hailu Mergia and the Walias Band embarked on the recording studio after years of honing their act in Addis Ababa’s upmarket hotels and clubs. Influenced by the jazz organist Jimmy Smith and harnessing their driving polyrhythms for a slightly mellower groove, Mergia and the Walias released the instrumental album Tche Belew in 1977, whose idiomatic appeal helped to spur a tour of the United States. But in the aftermath of the Red Terror back home, Mergia and three other members of the Walias opted to stay in America, with the keyboardist turning his hand to the accordion, studying music at Howard University, and releasing the solo album Hailu Mergia & His Classical Instrument in 1985 while continuing to perform around the Washington DC area with his Zula Band.
Struggling to garner any sort of following outside of his native Ethiopia, in the nineties Mergia opened a soukous bar before falling into work as a taxi driver around Washington Dulles International Airport. It was not until 2013 that Brian Shimkovitz who ran the blog and fledgling record label Awesome Tapes From Africa came across Hailu Mergia & His Classical Instrument among a stash of tapes, whose reissue prompted a European tour, a show at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn and a feature on the front page of The New York Times. Back performing ever since, finally Awesome Tapes From Africa bottles Mergia live from a show at Pioneer Works in 2016 where he played alongside Alemseged Kebede on bass and Kenneth Joseph on drums, as swinging original compositions like ‘Yegle Nesh’ sit happily alongside the traditional Ethiopian melodies of ‘Tizita’ and ‘Anchihoye Lene’.
For cosmic club workouts with added wriggle, Kindergarten Records returns to pressing vinyl to mark the thrilling debut album of the self-taught producer Ayesha. Lawrence English serves as the intermediary for Eugene Carchesio and Adam Betts, whose roiling rhythms like dubwise resolutely off-kilter sound like the discovery of liquid matter on Mars. Drawing upon a serendipitous encounter with the Australian urban exploration group Cave Clan, the composer Lisa Lerkenfeldt explores lost chambers and underground histories with a sense of kinship and community as well as a shared spirit of defiance through piano and cello, tape loops and playback artefacts, with the result described as a landscape of manipulated textures as earthy and chalky as the tunnels and their subterranean air. The mesh quartet of Ambra Chiara Michelangeli, Francesco Diodati, Francesco Guerri and Stefano Calderano return to Superpang as tellKujira, the Paralaxe Editions founder Dania assembles a contemporary pantheon of electronic and experimental musicians on behalf of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the work of Médecins Sans Frontières, while among the surfeit of new music this week it’s imperative to also check out the stellar new albums by Chrisman, William Eggleston, Christine Ott, Sarah Davachi, Adela Mede, Camila Nebbia and Sparks Quartet.
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Matmos – ‘Injection Basic Sound’
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Hailu Mergia – ‘Tizita’ (Live at Pioneer Works)
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Eugene Carchesio & Adam Betts – ‘Q’
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tellKujira – ‘Interior sketch’
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Aging – ‘Keening & Crying’ (Laila Sakini Rework)
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Lisa Lerkenfeldt – ‘Amulet of sweat’
