Around the turn of the seventies, the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad was the place to be as a hub of industrial development meant to furnish the needs of a thriving independent state, a pioneering educational centre conceived along Bauhaus lines which emphasised learning by doing and drew such luminaries as John Cage, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Louis Kahn and Charles Eames, and according to a new compilation released this week, the home of some deliriously off-kilter electronic dance music. The release of The NID Tapes: Electronic Music from India 1969-1972 shines a spotlight on a hitherto overlooked corner of the world, more famous for its textile mills and the ashrams of Mahatma Gandhi, suggesting that while Indian forms suffused the Western world from the jangly pop of The Beatles and The Byrds to the raga swirls which influenced Don Cherry, Robbie Basho, La Monte Young and Terry Riley, the institute at Ahmedabad was plying away at the forefront of early developments in analogue synthesis.
Founded with support from the New York composer David Tudor, who set up a Moog modular system and tape machine in the autumn of 1969, the electronic studio at the National Institute of Design would remain in operation for three years as experiments in synthesis, tape collage, field recording and voice captured a moment of self-discovery where trends in Western drone and minimalism segued with the avant-garde offshoots of classical Indian music. Following years of research by the installation artist Paul Purgas which disclosed 27 reels of archival tape, the compilation presents pieces by the musician and poet Atul Desai, the teachers and technicians I.S. Mathur and S.C. Sharma, the pakhavaj percussionist Gita Sarabhai and the young architectural student Jinraj Joshipura, stretching from the pulsating hallucinogenic ‘Dance Music’ of Sharma’s tracks one-through-three to the cooing oscillations and metallic birdsong of his ‘Electronic Sounds Created on a Moog’, the percussive coils of Desai’s posited ‘Recordings for Osaka Expo 70’, and the industrial buzz of Mathur’s wryly biographical take on ‘Once I Played a Tanpura’.
Shorn of the trappings and specificities of place where once stood weary industries and tallgrass prairies, the local fete of Casimir Pulaski Day, UFO sightings, serial killers and the notorious fatherless of Ypsilanti, on his latest album Javelin the inveterate troubadour Sufjan Stevens traces love in all its shapes on a winning and sometimes pungently heartfelt return to singer-songwriter mode which comes dedicated to his late partner Evans Richardson. In the gloaming Mary Lattimore swims against the tide as Roy Montgomery licks with dark lustre before his guitar roils rise to a crest, with the harpist paying homage to the heady passage of time and drawing inspiration from such disparate sources as dilapidated Croatian ballrooms and patinaed chandeliers, Julee Cruise, the Velvet Underground and Big Bird from Sesame Street, gazing in from the Adriatic all the while on her evocative new album Goodbye, Hotel Arkada.
Between winter’s days, springtime snows and roads somehow attenuated to sustain only the vital signs, leaving wanderers in a heightened state suspended under the glimmering stars and rows of looming cypresses, Leo Takami braids prog fantasias with limpid jazz and the underfoot crunch of kankyō ongaku, capturing the spirit of the season as we brace against the cold snap of autumn. October also proves the perfect month for the latest batch of home recordings by the Lebanese musician and puppeteer Yara Asmar, who channels her home in Beirut through synthesizers and the warm drone of her grandmother’s Hohner Marchesa accordion.
Back in August the announcement of Daniel Villarreal’s latest album Lados B seemed to herald the height of summer, with the track ‘Sunset Cliffs’ lingering in a twilight groove as Jeff Parker’s lilting guitar played off Anna Butterss’ arcing bass, which descended like a knife through the proverbial cream stuff. Instead the record – culled from the same sessions which produced Panamá 77 as Villarreal, Parker and Butterss gathered for the first time during the pandemic at Chicali Outpost in the fall of 2020 – proves a more sombre and reflective affair still animated by the frolic of playing free, as the drummer draws from the Latinate funk of Fania Records and the otherworldly trance of Brain Records. Meanwhile the Parisian composer Aho Ssan pairs with Blackhaine to scram the early morning streets and survey the post-industrial decay of salubrious Preston, one of the nodes of collaboration on Rhizomes which also features Richie Culver, Rắn Cạp Đuôi, Nicolas Jaar, Nyokabi Kariuki, Moor Mother, Valentina Magaletti, Kassel Jaeger and Angel Bat Dawid and was commissioned by Ina GRM, Other People and Donaufestival.
Saddled with field recordings from her home in the desert of El Djerid plus tombak and modular arrangements from the Franco-Iranian percussionist Cinna Peyghamy, the Tunisian dub and transe practitioner Azu Tiwaline opens The Fifth Dream with the apparition of a golden dawn, an enveloping start to an album of celestial planes, shifting tectonics and entheogenic rave rhythms. Jay Glass Dubs keeps us on that same bass-heavy trip, whose woozy rhythms and deftly padded breaks padded drums linger in the porous space between dream pop and dubtech as the writer and scholar Louis Chude-Sokei leads a slew of features, intoning ‘I’m not who I was, but I’m always what I did’ with a lust for escape and a self-accusatory glint before a keening horn drops the anchor on a wave of slender ritualism.
Figuring the ecstatic sprawl, harmolodic funk and cosmic spiritualism of works by Ornette Coleman, Pink Floyd and Sun Ra, laying lush wind instrumentation over electronic subcurrents and a bed of textured percussion, the quintet of Daniel Carter, Patrick Holmes, Matthew Putman, Hilliard Greene and Federico Ughi return for another masterclass in improvisation on Electric Telepathy, Vol. 2. For her debut on Touch the musicologist Youmna Saba unfolds a composition in five parts, informed by rigorous research into the sonic properties of sung Arabic phonemes and their role in the shaping of synthesized sound, while employing a digital extension for the oud which expands its audible range, amplifying fingerboard frictions and other concealed resonances. Finally for her third long-play on the dance bastion Príncipe, the Lisbon-born and Bordeaux-based producer Nídia returns to her roots in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, giving freedom fighting a paradisiacal bent as she shuttles between frenetic batida, syrupy tarraxinha and futuristic Detroit beats, blowing the doors off genre delineations like a gale force or a wily zephyr.
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Sufjan Stevens – ‘A Running Start’
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Mary Lattimore – ‘Blender in a Blender’ (feat. Roy Montgomery)
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Jay Glass Dubs – ‘Innocent Again’ (feat. Louis Chude-Sokei)
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S.C. Sharma – ‘Dance Music II’
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Youmna Saba – ‘Al khayal الخيال’
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Yara Asmar – ‘three clementines on the counter of a blue-tiled sun-soaked kitchen’
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Aho Ssan – ‘Cold Summer Part 1’ (feat. Blackhaine)
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