With the release of her debut album just days before her 29th birthday, Tems already feels like something of the grand dame of Afropop. Even more than Tiwa Savage, who provided backing vocals for the likes of George Michael, Mary J. Blige and Chaka Khan before graduating from the Berklee College of Music, it is Tems the self-starter with a little bit of gravel and bass to her voice who the current generation of crossover stars cite in reverential terms when they talk about things like transgression and influence.
Ayra Starr has been forced to fend off comparisons to Tems while handing the singer her flowers, and Tyla despite the barnstorming success of ‘Water’ last fall pushed back the release of her self-titled debut for the sake of a collaboration with Tems on the track ‘No. 1’, saying ‘Of our generation, she’s like the example. She’s been killing it and she’s been opening so many doors for us’.
It’s all the more startling then that Born in the Wild opens with a cracked voice over the downcast strums of a guitar. Unallayed and unadorned, brandishing her burnished voice even as she wilts in the heat of the sun, Tems laments incessant news cycles and her own wandering focus, slipping readily into the arms of memory as she sings ‘When I was young, young and dumb, I was always running away’.
Beginning with the title track, Born in the Wild abounds in juxtapositions of her life before fame and a success which is not material but coded instead as something personal and hard-won, a steady and enduring process of self-realisation. Rife with both longing and defiance, the record carries echoes of the 13-year-old girl who fancied the calling of music but couldn’t see the path, and was beset by the sort of expectations and doubts and personal and financial insecurities typical of any young woman, especially growing up in a socially conservative country like Nigeria. Her voice, a model of resilience which it would be impossible to replicate, shifts easily between those dolorous tones and a tender butteriness, while her lyrics often take the guise of a dialogue which is really a form of self-address, wary yet philosophical and praiseful without being over-proud.
When on ‘Born in the Wild’ she sings ‘I grew up in the wilderness, didn’t know much about openness’ she is talking primarily about being open with herself, and when she repeats ‘The world is mine, the world is mine’ she is no Tony Montana from Scarface, instead of emblazoning herself and her music with boosterist odes to free will and avarice seeking to carve out her own little plot of land and settle into it, aware that there are more things in heaven and earth, and that feelings of self-love and self-respect inhabit their own fragile ecosystem.
Inspired by traditional wayang kulit shadow puppetry, Central Javanese court poetry and the ghazals of Rumi and Hafez, the Indonesian composer and performer Peni Candra Rini incorporates gamelan singing, Balinese chant and the stringband music of the sixties on her upcoming albumĀ Wulansih. Squelching kicks and siren howls, Wurlitzer keys and throaty growls plus microtonal drums and gongs, woodblocks and bell chimes as part of a pummelling polyrhythmic percussion all characterise the self-titled debut by Takkak Takkak, a duo comprised of the prolific chiptune and gabber veteran Scotch Rolex and Mo’ong Santoso Pribadi, who is better known as one half of the Javanese trance spearmen Raja Kirik, with the wavering drones and circular breathing of the didgeridoo taking the lead on ‘Raung’, one of the album’s standout pieces.
Swapping slender strings and xenharmonic tuning systems for surreal song structures at the head of a fulsome ensemble, at the heart of Tashi Wada’s new album What Is Not Strange?Ā a swell of gusty reeds accompanied by sustained tones and his partner Julia Holter’s vocals congeal to sound a little bit like Phoebe singing over Ross’s rudimentary bagpipe playing on a famous blooper-ridden Friends credit sequence. If you ever watched that and found the noise in any way appealing, then What Is Not Strange? is a record that will probably work for you, but here the gesture is sublimated as the song develops over watery drones and Corey Fogel’s crashing cymbals, with Holter’s voice dipping in and out of the mix and eventually deepening as the light becomes more tenebrous, hefty riffs pervading the atmosphere until everything finally sputters out.
Pablo’s Eye draw their inspiration from Michelangelo Antonioni’s mysterious slow film classic L’Avventura, more specifically centring their vision through the eyes of the critic Richard Skinner, who in an essay entitled ‘Auteur of eerie angst’ summarised the plot:
A group of friends go sailing and one disappears. The others start searching for her, but it gradually becomes apparent that she won’t be found, so the friends return home one by one. Only the missing girl’s lover and her best friend remain. They have begun an affair. As the lovers come together the girl’s disappearance is all but forgotten.
Echoing the obscure languor of the film, on The light was sharp, our eyes were open ambient synth washes lurch with a wiry portent and slide guitar stretches out quixotically pensive soundscapes which from the Aeolian Islands to cobbled Sicilian streets and the Tiber which runs through the Italian capital shift from the sea to rain-soaked urbanity and back again, all the while viewed through a cracked window and a fluttering, diaphanous curtain with the prevailing mood enunciated through smears of soft-spoken word.
Beyond the aching centrepiece ‘The dog days are long gone’, the quintet which includes Skinner plus Marie Mandi, Luc Laret, Thierry Royo and Axel Libeert offer a litany of names on ‘The girls from Peoria’, as a play on the faceless ubiquitousness of the onetime stop on the old vaudeville circuit. The industrial ambiance of ‘Locked away’ lingers somewhere between Throbbing Gristle and This Mortal Coil, the brassy reeds and elegiac guitar strums of ‘Mysterious city’ are finally encompassed by an Angelo Badalamenti-themed Twin Peaks gloom, and the percussive rebound of ‘Sonar Vestapol’ opens up new portals as Pablo’s Eye drift in the gully of the blues.
The bassist William Parker’s easy capacity for trenchant lyricism has been displayed before, most recently on the Ava Mendoza and Dave Sewelson duo album Of It But Not Is It where he pried open a cask of turnip wine and imagined a scene of quasi-Freudian transfiguration where ‘all the girls will turn into trumpets, and all the rifles into trombones’, fancying an end to all wars before in similarly idealistic fashion describing a layabout who possesses an endless capacity for doing nothing.
Yet his upcoming Cereal Music with the singer and producer Ellen Christi will be his first ever album of spoken word, with the teaser ‘Do Dreams Sleep’ incorporating the hooting cacophony of birds as his ‘gentle melody’ grows ever more prismatic and metaphysical. ‘I want to live in between the rainbow’ he begins as a shimmering statement of intent, pondering the circadian rhythms of dreams and stating ‘Never thought the air would bleed. Never thought the sky would give me a look’. Squirrels scurry up trees with a whimper as his philosophical inquiries take on the troubled yet whimsical and somehow utopian air of Rat from the ubiquitous Martin Bell documentary Streetwise, which chronicled the lives of homeless kids on the streets of Seattle, as Parker’s own field recording is curtailed by a curious passerby, the venerable jazzman noting that the birds do indeed appear to be ‘getting down today’.
Composed in an extensive flow state, Actress’s muted, barely-there tenth studio album Statik unfolds through washes of dub and techno, sometimes offering suggestive traces of metallophones and minor-chord piano while at others adhering to a waterlogged ambiance whose melodic snatches run the gamut from Aphex Twin to Drexciya to the various aliases of Prurient, a fine fit for the Oslo label Smalltown Supersound which has released stellar works by Lost Girls, Anja Lauvdal and Bendik Giske with Darren Cunningham’s introduction coming by way of a one-track remix of Carmen Villain’s cosmic and jazz-inflected Only Love From Now On, described by Actress as his ‘impression of the album’.
The Sarajevo-born and Antwerp-based composer and synth virtuoso Miaux roots the spiralling ascents of Never Coming Back in a film score which she composed for the cult classic Carnival of Souls, which concerns a car crash and a young woman who emerges on a small bank of sand as the police dredge the lake, before she is irrevocably drawn into the bosom of an abandoned pavilion. Positioned squarely within a lineage of indomitable Japanese saxophonists like Kaoru Abe, Tamio Shiraishi and Masayoshi Urabe, ahead of his very first studio album Makoto Kawashima describes his alto as ‘the only instrument which becomes part of my body’, weaving together old spirituals and the blues through scolding eruptions, laden silences and a harrowing vibrato which echoes the dissonances and unities of Albert Ayler.
And on the penultimate track of her new album Brat, the pop iconoclast Charli xcx leaves the club behind for the bracing air of wintry Stockholm, where she meets a friend’s newborn baby for the first time, sending the singer into an existential spiral as she contemplates the practicalities and wider prospects of parenthood. The ‘same old clothes’ but a newfound glow might augur a fundamental shift in priorities as Charli ponders aloud to her partner ‘should I stop my birth control?’, before a reprise of the album opener and second single ‘360’ reels with more of an undertow as the singer dips a toe into early-thirties anxieties but at least for now keeps on bumping.
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Peni Candra Rini – ‘Jenang Gula’
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William Parker & Ellen Christi – ‘Do Dreams Sleep’
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Tashi Wada – ‘Flame of Perfect Form’
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Pablo’s Eye – ‘The dog days are long gone’
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Charli xcx – ‘I think about it all the time’
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MIAUX – ‘I have no desire for the close company of other people’
