Tracks of the Week 09.09.23

In 1948 the audio engineer and music publisher Moses Asch founded Folkways Records with a mission to put on wax not only traditional, secular and children’s music but poetry, language instruction, liturgical chants and field recordings from around the world. The earliest versions of ‘This Land Is Your Land’ by Woody Guthrie and ‘Goodnight Irene’ by Lead Belly were recorded for Asch, while in 1952 under the auspices of the filmmaker Harry Smith the still fledgling Folkways Records released the seminal Anthology of American Folk Music, which led to the rediscovery of such artists as Blind Lemon Jefferson, Mississippi John Hurt, Jim Jackson and the Alabama Sacred Harp Singers and proved a key influence on the folk revival and the sixties Greenwich Village scene.

Looking farther afield, on Folkways Records you could also find Angolan prison spirituals and Alpine yodeling, Babylonian biblical chants or the religious music of the Ethiopian Jews, traditional Peking operas and Polynesian dances, or Alfred Wolfsohn’s experiments in the extension of the human vocal range, speech after the removal of the larynx, Soviet satellite sounds including the audible heartbeat of the space dog Laika, studies of the ground-dwelling Australian lyrebird and the sounds of American frogs. In 1987 the label was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution, on the condition that each of its 2,000-plus recordings would remain forever in print regardless of sales. Now the dauntless electronic duo Matmos with contributions from Aaron Dilloway and Evicshen have diced, looped, stretched and otherwise recontextualised some of the non-musical sounds released by Folkways for their upcoming album Return to Archive, whose first offering ‘Mud-Dauber Wasp’ draws from the 1960 collection Sounds of Insects compiled and narrated by Albro T. Gaul.

(Did you know for instance that according to Dolbear’s law, as outlined by Gaul on the Sounds of Insects, you can count a cricket’s chirps for fifteen seconds and add forty to the total number to give you a close approximation of the current temperature in degrees Fahrenheit? Counting the number of chirps in eight seconds and adding five will give you a similarly accurate result for degrees Celsius!)

On their second collaborative album, the ritual trance maestro Sam Shackleton and the interstellar folk musician Wacław Zimpel link up with the young Hindustani classical vocalist Siddhartha Belmannu for an urge to transcendence. Films, the dark fantasy project formed by the instrumental band Anoice, return for their first record in seven years as two female vocalists shrouded in mystery sing in their own imagined languages, while the pianist Yuki Murata, praised by such luminaries as Ryuichi Sakamoto and Takeshi Kobayashi, adds her compositional prowess to each of the ten tracks.

The peerless Tinashe strips things back for the seven tight songs of BB/ANG3L. Taking a Sprechstimme approach to the material, drawing from the original notation for works such as The Book of the Hanging Gardens and Pierrot lunaire, the clarinetist Jeff Lederer unveils a new song cycle based on the early vocal works of Schoenberg and Webern with Mary LaRose on vocals, Patricia Brennan on vibes, Hank Roberts on cello, Matt Wilson on drums and percussion and Michael Formanek on bass.

In June the saxophonist and mixed-media artist Matana Roberts disclosed the fifth installment of their Coin Coin project, citing the conceptual approaches of John Cage and his fellow Fluxus alum Benjamin Patterson plus the compositional practices of Maryanne Amacher, who made extensive use of auditory distortion products, while introducing an all-new ensemble featuring the violinist Mazz Swift, the alto saxophonist Darius Jones, the clarinetists Matt Lavelle and Stuart Bogie, the percussionists Mike Pride and Ryan Sawyer, the smoky pianist Cory Smythe and the Alicuanta vocalist Gitanjali Jain.

An extended ode to reproductive rights where spoken word passages are interspersed with squalling free jazz, solo saxophone reflections and Mississippi fife and drum blues, on the opening tracks of Coin Coin Chapter Five: In The Garden… the artist began to unspool an ‘old dusty saga’ about a woman in their ancestral line who died following complications from an illegal abortion, with the narrator of ‘unbeknownst’ describing themselves in defiant terms as ‘electric, alive, spirited, fire and free’. Now at the crux of the narrative, on ‘a(way) is not an option’ with an eye roll and the weight of a world full of weariness the same voice repeats the refrain, after recounting a city sojourn with her young boys, an unwanted pregnancy and the gossiping of her extended family, then the ‘terrible pain’ which ensued after a deliberate tumble down a long flight of library stairs.

Ishmael Butler and his son Lil Tracy are Robed in Rareness as the experimental hip hop group Shabazz Palaces wake up inside of a dream. Recorded between the Czech Republic and rural Colorado, the duo of Aran Epochal and Anar Badalov conjure hazy memories of dusty homes and promised intimacies through tremulous bass lines, delicate piano melodies and soft-spoken word, issuing cowboy’s laments or gazing rapt at the Pleiades while brandishing a burnished ode to the Low drummer and soprano vocalist Mimi Parker, burdened by morning somewhere in the vast beyond scarcely nourished by the overnight stay.

I lived then in dusty Odessa . . .
There for a long time skies are clear.
There, hustling, an abundant trade
sets up its sails.
There all exhales, diffuses Europe,
all glistens with the South, and is motleyed
with live variety.
The tongue of golden Italy
resounds along the gay street
where walks the proud Slav,
the Frenchman, Spaniard, Armenian,
and Greek, and the heavy Moldavian,
and the son of Egyptian soil,
the retired Corsair, Moralí.

So wrote Alexander Pushkin in what he intended to be the eighth chapter of Eugene Onegin, published instead as fragments in an appendix to the main body of his novel in verse. Long seen as a gateway to Asia and a melting point between East and West, it was to Odessa and the Black Sea that the Polish guitarist and musicologist Raphael Rogiński was drawn as he composed his latest solo album Talán, an old Hungarian word with Scythian roots which translates as something like ‘maybe’. Writing and recording over the course of a couple of years as he sought to follow up his rangy and well-received takes on the music of John Coltrane and Henry Purcell, the guitarist explains his title as a comment on his compositional approach, adding ‘I take something in order to lose something else. It’s a constant process of achieving goals by getting rid of others and I’m fixated on this idea’.

The Congolese club sensualist Chrisman, who has headed up the Nyege Nyege and Hakuna Kulala studios in Kampala over the past few years, unleashes his fiercest statement to date in the form of 35 tracks of crossbreed trap and Afrohouse mutations, sticky tarraxinha tempos and skeletal club rhythms, drill, gqom, hardstyle and amapiano, drawing from deepest Durban and the Indonesian pressure of Raja Kirik and Gabber Modus Operandi while calling upon a team of like-minded collaborators including Tracey the Rapper, Blaq Bandana, Ratigan Era, Mc Yallah, Aunty Rayzor and Ecko Bazz.

Accompanied by his Red Lily Quintet featuring Kirk Knuffke on cornet, William Parker on bass, Chad Taylor on drums and Chris Hoffman on cello, the tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis follows his acclaimed tribute to George Washington Carver in the form of Jesup Wagon with a cherishing yet transformative take on some of the songs made famous by the gospel icon Mahalia Jackson. On the rumbling ‘Elijah Rock’, a traditional spiritual which bears some lyrical similarities to the civil rights bastion ‘Mary Don’t You Weep’, the tenor of Lewis and cornet of Knuffke twine around one another buttressed by the bounding bass of Parker and Taylor’s sinuous percussive swathes, turning chasms into bold edifices and smiting snakes in the grass.

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Shackleton & Zimpel with Siddhartha Belmannu – ‘The Ocean Lies Between Us’