The city of Johnstown, around 57 miles east of Pittsburgh in southwestern Pennsylvania, since being settled in 1770 has borne three historic floods. The Great Flood of 1889 after the catastrophic failure of the South Fork Dam killed 2,209 people, whereupon the relief efforts of a team of volunteers led by Clara Barton helped to establish the American Red Cross. Following a deadly altercation between a black man and several police officers, in 1923 the mayor Joseph Cauffiel urged all African American and Mexican residents who had lived in Johnstown for less than seven years to leave the city for their own safety. More fatal flooding deluged Johnstown in 1936 and 1977, while the decline of the local steel industry meant that by the early 2000s, national census data showed that Johnstown was the least likely city to attract newcomers across the entire United States, a circumstance ameliorated by strong health care and defense sectors, the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown which brings thousands of students to the area, the annual Flood City Music Festival and Thunder in the Valley, a major motorcycle rally held on the fourth weekend of June.
Stranded on an island, wading through the debris, or erecting her own private fort out of the flotsam and jetsam left over from a series of floods, the Johnstown producer Tatiana Triplin has hitherto helmed the internet label HRR, which specialises in web folk and nightcore, pitch-shifting the hardcore techno subgenres of breakcore and gabber plus club outpourings from Detroit and Chicago in the vein of juke and ghettotech to produce eerie refrains and a sort of somnambulist pressure, designed with a hyperpop sheen while deriving much of its imagery from Japanese anime and otaku culture. Now as Nondi_ for her debut album on Planet Mu, the artist pays skewed homage to the poverty and disintegrating history of her city, embracing the genres of footwork, breakcore, and Detroit techno from the impervious remove of small-town Pennsylvania, using the internet and her dreamlike imagination to fill in the gaps. On the twelve pieces which make up Flood City Trax the result is at once unique and redolent of a twenty-first century electronic curvature, from the glitchy warmth and slow-wound music box melodies of the Icelandic outfit Múm to the atmospheric onslaught of Vladislav Delay, from the dizzying percussion and hyperreal Chicago-adjacent fabrications of Jlin to the Afrohouse mutations, skeletal rhythms, and sticky tarraxinha tempos of the Congolese club sensualist Chrisman.
David Hajdu and Theo Bleckmann doff their nightcaps and pour one out in memory of Lou Reed, who was very well read between writing all of those songs about giving good head and shooting up heroin. The future Velvet Underground and Coney Island Baby crooner studied poetry at Syracuse University under the diligent daydreamer and rapier conversationalist Delmore Schwartz, and in the seventies frequented a neighbourhood bookstore called Books ‘N Things at 64th East 7th Street, whose owner would regale interested parties with tales of the songs he sang in the back garden of the establishment alongside his friend Iggy Pop and the modernist wit Marianne Moore. In the back room singing old harmony tunes, equal parts Wallace Stevens and ‘Walk on the Wild Side’, the climax of ‘Lou Reed Was Very Well Read’ arrives as the onrush of history nears a pivot point, part of Hajdu’s ode to an otherwise nondescript four-story brick townhouse which serves to capture in miniature the vanishing themes and cultural cycles of life in New York.
The prolific producer and Fusion mes Couilles founder Emma DJ strays towards naif melodies, ego trip verses, and autotune smear on a seamless blur of 27 songs for UIQ Records, which feature contributions from Parisian noisemakers and multidisciplinary artists Yves Ciroc, Eugène Blove, Low Jack, and Simo Cell plus the Tel Aviv troubadour shyweek, the aquiline ambient soundscapes of Torus, the cutecore lullabies of lil rhiz0me, and the soulful sighs and emotional peaks of Preston’s own Rainy Miller. Diffusing the sound of so many cloud rap pioneers, on g0drm2 the Finnish native sounds like nothing so much as Frank Ocean sloshed through deeply submerged transatlantic fiber optic cables. From the Swedish high coast to the Finnish lake district by way of Polaroid-friendly Athens, brimming with reverb, crushed kicks, and the lingering echoes of café chatter, the producer Civilistjävel! excavates early Enya and the foggiest outpourings of nineties trip hop in the company of the clandestine vocalist Cucina Povera.
Named after the most popular beach in Lima, on Agua Dulce the duo of Ale Hop and Laura Robles dust off the colonial legacy of the cajón, a percussive instrument cultivated from upturned fruit boxes and shipping containers during the nineteenth century as stretches of slavery roiled coastal Peru. The native sound of Afro-Peruvian music which later infused everything from the encompassing blend of música criolla to the Spanish flamenco, Cuban rumba, and Mexican zapateado, on their electrifying debut Ale Hop and Robles harness the cajón as a symbol of defiance and transformation, reinforcing its physical character through recorded improvisations and a live performance at the Heroines of Sound festival, where they were accompanied by the dancer and choreographer Liza Alpiźar Aguilar.
Self-recorded entirely from the confines of her bedroom closet, built up through layers of overdubbed improvisations plus processed audio samples, tape loops, and ornamental synths, on Distant Intervals the Juilliard-trained cellist Issei Herr unspools distant dreams and bristling personal memories with a glistening potentiality. Assembled in response to the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, responding discretely to atmospheric guitar pieces shared as musical prompts, the composer and producer Alex Roth pulls together synth drones, piquant strings, saturated beats, and plangent trumpet melodies as the leader of the MultiTraction Orchestra, a fluid lineup of experimental musicians which in its current guise features Arve Henriksen, James Allsopp, Kate Ellis, Rhodri Davies, Ruth Goller, and Jon Scott.
Alexander von Schlippenbach marks his 85th birthday with four hands on the piano alongside his wife Aki Takase, while the harpist Brandee Younger braids Dorothy Ashby classics with a spate of originals to herald new life like the bounty of spring. Through junk electronics and screaming feedback Merzbow performs catalysis as a means to multiply the profundity and prosperity of black cats, Keba Robinson spawns and wilts on the video for the Another Blue single ‘Automatic’, and the swashbuckling saxophonist Colin Stetson blows swirls and eddies as he unveils the title track from his forthcoming album When we were that what wept for the sea. Finally the Psychic Ills keyboardist Brent Cordero and Sunwatchers bassist Peter Kerlin sublimate madness in the company of a stellar cast of collaborators, including Daniel Carter, James Brandon Lewis, Jessica Pavone, Aaron Siegel, Ryan Jewell, Jesse DeRosa, Chares Burst, and Adam Amram as Ryan Sawyer provides a steady hand behind the drum set.
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Nondi_ – ‘FCD (Floaty Cloud Dream)’
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MultiTraction Orchestra – ‘Reactor One, Part II’
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Aki Takase & Alexander von Schlippenbach – ‘Stoneblock 1’
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Issei Herr – ‘Prelude (An Eternity of Light)’ & ‘Aubade (The Farewell Is a Beginning)’
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Brent Cordero & Peter Kerlin – ‘Freedom Jazz Dance’
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Civilistjävel! – ‘Louhivesi’ (feat. Cucina Povera)
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Brandee Younger – ‘Running Game’
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Ale Hop & Laura Robles – ‘Defensoras del morro’
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Colin Stetson – ‘When we were that what wept for the sea’
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David Hajdu & Theo Bleckmann – ‘Lou Reed Was Very Well Read’
