When a caterpillar has stored up enough energy and is ready to make the transition from larva to pupa, it begins to draw silk from the spinneret on the lower lip of its mouth and forms a small pad which it hooks into with its cremaster, attaching its hind end to the pad as a sort of anchor. Through contortions the caterpillar then winds silk behind itself, creating a sling or hammock. While some caterpillars proceed to shed their skin to reveal a hardened chrysalis, most moth caterpillars will continue to draw silk around themselves until they are encased in a cocoon, which might be hard or soft, opaque or translucent and from which they begin the process of metamorphosis.
The phenomena has given its name to an assortment of music, from the girdled pop rock-cum-electroclash of the Japanese singer Anna Tsuchiya to the staggered swing and blocky chords of the Thelonious Monk scholar Pandelis Karayorgis to the glitching breathlessness and swirling gorgeousness of Björk. Yet perhaps nobody has cultivated or inhabited the materiality and processes of a cocoon more than S. Hollis Mickey, who suffers from severe myalgic encephalomyelitis which is sometimes known as chronic fatigue syndrome, and sat within a specially arranged recording setup which included a lap harp, flute, harmonium, kalimba, toy piano and various effects pedals as she spun her latest album Cocoon day by day.
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’.
James Rushford’s new outing on Blank Forms includes a work in ten movements which was inspired by his study of the late medieval repertoire on portative organ, combining the interlocking winds and woodsy atmospherics of the instrument with crackles and glitches plus the vibrant yet vigilant sweep of the Yamaha CS-80, made famous by Vangelis as part of the dystopian soundtrack to the first Blade Runner film.
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, working in traces of the Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel member and prolific kosmische pioneer Klaus Schulze, 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.
‘Piqueo’, an appetiser from Kenny Warren’s upcoming album Sweet World which will drop next month on Out Of Your Head Records, finds the trumpeter and pianist alongside the cellist Christopher Hoffman and drummer Nathan Ellman-Bell drawing inspiration from the beloved Ethiopian nun and intrepid piano stylist Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou. The beautifully time-worn resonances of Lamasz might spur to mind Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the ritournelle, through which he portrayed music as a ‘creative, active operation that consists in deterritorializing the refrain’. And the writer, Phantom Limb founder and musician James Vella shapes ghostly reveries and spectres of the liminal everyday, setting an archive of Maltese home recordings over his raga-like synth oscillations, with snippets of recreational għana sent by emigrants to their relatives back home providing an intimate snapshot of the sacred and the mundane.
Unveiling what he describes as his life’s work, the third track from the first part of The Crop Circle Suite finds the trumpeter, clarinetist and composer Matt Lavelle indulging in a little bit of ripe pastoralism, over almost nine minutes which ripen on the vine, still sloughing off the shackles of the old world, at moments redolent of Porgy and Bess or the Pharoah Sanders side ‘Harvest Time’, especially in last year’s rendition by Kahil El’Zabar and his Ethnic Heritage Ensemble.
The concept dawned on Lavelle way back in the nineties, when he forsook the straight-ahead jazz scene and decamped for Upstate New York, finding a spiritual mentor in Stephanie Gouveia and succour in the sacred geometry of crop circles. The six tracks which make up the first part of The Crop Circle Suite – from an intended twelve, which Lavelle found time and space to write only owing to the ‘maddening methodology’ of the coronavirus pandemic – draw their time signatures, bar lines, melody notes, chord and intervals from their respective numbers, one through six, with Lavelle bidding to unite natural phenomena, the sciences and the arts in search of a deeper understanding. A frequent collaborator of William Parker, Daniel Carter and Sabir Mateen who started out with the swing veteran Hildred Humphries and studied for a period under Ornette Coleman, it was 2010 when Lavelle established his 12 Houses Orchestra, which here divided into groups representing the seasons and elements features Lee Odom, Charles Waters, Ras Moshe, Claire Daly, Matt Lambiase, Nicole Davis, Art Baron, Ben Stapp, Mary Cherney, Cheryl Pyle, Claire De Brunner, Christopher Forbes, Hilliard Greene, Jeremy Carlstedt, Jose Luis Abreu, Jack DeSalvo and his ‘favourite sound’ which arrives in the piece courtesy of Stephanie Griffin in her lower register on the viola.
Promising to expound New Concepts in Piano Trio Jazz, the dauntless improviser Matthew Shipp hammers classical refrains like Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major into the roiling textures of ‘Non Circle’, whittling a sedimentary heap, while after opening on a more plaintive air the album closer ‘Coherent System’ steers in the direction of baroque counterpoint, as Shipp and Michael Bisio trade lines before the bandleader’s staggered piano runs bring the piece to a resounding climax in the middle section. Elsewhere creaking bass and lurching keys characterise ‘Tone IQ’ while on ‘Brain System’ the bows and scrapes of Bisio’s bass sound like the crack and heave of bow and stern, physical heft catching up with a more cerebral turbulence, and ‘The Function’ unrolls as an offbeat blues, whose walking bass pulls apart the space for plangent piano runs and Newman Taylor Baker’s dextrous rat-a-tat-tat percussion.
With the dazzling urbanity, the honeyed mellifluousness and even the caustic sway of the greats, Fay Victor presents for the first time a full programme of lyrics for the compositions of the jazz legend Herbie Nichols, who continues to resonate while remaining best known as the co-writer of the Billie Holiday standard ‘Lady Sings the Blues’. A decade in the making, the Herbie Nichols SUNG project features Michaël Attias on alto and baritone saxophones, Anthony Coleman on the piano, Ratzo Harris on bass and Tom Rainey on drums.
Ravishing odes, ambient drones and moments of ardent longing, clarion calls swept out over choppy seas and transport hubs, the disorientating swell of a new place or terminus chatter are some of the things which characterise the stunning new album by the sitar player Anoushka Shankar. From the thriving cultural centre of Dar es Salaam, the duo of Sisso and Maiko offer a playful and experimental take on the breakneck taarab of singeli, punctuating its interlocking rhythms with beats of an Afrohouse, hardstyle and footwork persuasion. And the two Lopezes in Cecilia and Brandon draw out the illest frequencies of electronics and bass, reuniting for a third time with a buzzsaw ode to the complexities of citizenship.
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Matt Lavelle and the 12 Houses – ‘Crop Circle Three’
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S. Hollis Mickey – ‘Cocoon (April 13)’
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Fay Victor & Herbie Nichols SUNG – ‘Tonight’
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