Between the portrait of the gay rights activist Marsha P. Johnson which adorns the cover of the record and the sliver of ice ecstatically recalled in memory of her friend and mentor Lou Reed, the burnished guitar lines of Leo Abrahams and Jimmy Hogarth, elegiac strings of Rob Moose, and drums and bass of Chris Vatalaro and Samuel Dixon who provide a rhythm section by turns febrile and sinuous, and the duelling identities of the hapless scapegoat and guilty party or otherwise witless receptacle of hate, on her first album in seven years ANOHNI channels the soulful grooves and ecological anxieties of Marvin Gaye and his 1971 classic What’s Going On. Seeking succour for those on the front lines of contemporary environmental activism, on the penultimate track of My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross the singer offers nothing recuperative but only the barest of testimonies in a bid to signpost freedom for a world under duress.
The instrument builder and multi-instrumentalist Akira Uchida was a working saxophonist until 2007, when he came under the tutelage of Satoshi Yoshida and began turning both hands to the piano with a penchant for tuning which carried him across Japan and far overseas. From 2015 he learned to make clavichords under the guidance of Masahiro Adachi, and in 2021 he constructed one of the instruments out of the aged hinoki cypress which once comprised the Kiyomizu-dera temple’s main stage. A popular stunt during the Edo period when the practice amounted to an aspiring leap of faith, the expression ‘to jump off the stage at Kiyomizu’ still carries resonance in Japan as a euphemism for risk-taking, with Uchida debuting his own clavichord as part of a dedicatory performance in the famed Buddhist temple’s main hall.
Collaborating with Kosaka Osho on the sutra drum and Tono Tamami who plays the seventeen slender bamboo pipes of the shō, this week Uchida brings all of his instrumental expertise to bear on a journey through the enchanted darkness for IIKKI, a project based out of Brittany which fosters dialogue between visual artists and musicians, with each release furnishing two physical imprints in the form of a fine art book plus LP or CD. For the two long sides of Kurayami, the bristling atmospherics and Buddhist chants proffered by Uchida draw inspiration from and engage in moonlit discourse with the photographs of Yamamoto Masao, who specialises in the medium of gelatin silver print and has exhibited from San Francisco and New York to Moscow and São Paulo.
For their first compact disc, The Trilogy Tapes present a studio recording of Solo for Cello by the Manchester composer Jack Sheen. Exploring his interest in mictrotones and written specifically for Anton Lukoszevieze, the artistic director of Apartment House who have won renown for their renditions of work by John Cage, Jim O’Rourke, Pauline Oliveros and Morton Feldman, throughout the piece the cello is retuned and prepared with a heavy metal mute, thinning out its sound by dampening the instrument’s natural resonance. Played predominantly on harmonics, whose light touch fills the musical space with glitching and ghostly reveries, Solo for Cello features rapidly descending arpeggios and splintered, pointillistic isorhthyms, cutting a tenebrous swathe from the polyphonic masses and motets of the fourteenth century to the seventeenth-century viol suites of Marin Marais, from the systemic spasms of Mark Fell to the radiant whorls and glacial shivers of Éliane Radigue. Bathed in a wash of background electronics, described by Lukoszevieze as like a ‘moto perpetuo’ of extreme intensity and delicate beauty, the 35-minute piece premiered to acclaim last October at Wigmore Hall.
The saxophonist and Sound & Fury member Jorma Tapio with Jukka Orma, Ulf Krokfors and Ilmari Heikinheimo as Bread For Soul play compositions by the great Finnish drummer and bandleader Edward Vesala. Plucked with an ecological bent, the avant-garde guitarist Heikki Ruokangas continues to weave traditional Finnish harmonies into his experimental jazz constructs. Collaborating as a quartet for the first time on Shine Hear, the improvisational icons and 577 Records stalwarts Daniel Carter, Leo Genovese, William Parker and Francisco Mela pay tribute to the interminable motion of life in New York City. Finally scraping off the excess following the scuzzy guitars and chopped samples of Paste, the post-hardcore band Moin uncork four more outsider jams as Fritz Welch of Peeesseye adds vocals to the wiry beats and jazzy squalls of Joe Andrews, Tom Halstead and the percussionist Valentina Magaletti.
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Daniel Carter, Leo Genovese, William Parker and Francisco Mela – ‘Intertext Salute’
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ANOHNI and the Johnsons – ‘Why Am I Alive Now?’
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Moin – ‘Will I Have Enough Grapes’
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