On her latest album as Slowfoam the curator and researcher, composer and sound artist Madelyn Byrd not only imagines but seeks to cultivate an idealised post-Anthropocene environment, where nature, technology and human autonomy might hold hands and the lines between organic and synthetic seamlessly blur. To this end she looks towards the ecofeminist, technoscientist and multispecies theorist Donna Haraway and the concept of ‘worlding with earth’, a kind of post-Heideggerian treatise on being and a post-Deleuzian process of becoming which views all human and non-human activity as intertwined and posits that by ‘staying with the trouble’, all of us critters and fabulists might be able to think our way through to a brighter tomorrow.
Blending electronic sounds with acoustic instruments including overdubbed saxophone and guitar, vocal snippets and fielding recordings gathered between Croatia, London and Berlin, on Worlding With Earth the ‘rich, mulchy sonic environments’ mixed up by Slowfoam are described as ‘the optimistic soundtrack’ to a successful realignment which subsumes ‘the human, natural and synthetic into one shimmering whole’. And the music might well be akin to ‘damp trundles across soggy marshlands and dripping green fern forests’, but one person’s mossy paradise or evergreen shuffle is another’s slick shuck or slippery skin.
At times Worlding With Earth sounds queasy in a way which evokes films like Safe and Ex Machina with their litanies of mental disorders, unspecified biological ailments, runaway artificial intelligences and leafy greens, a verdancy which becomes through osmosis nothing more than a cultivar of its anxious surrounds. Worlding With Earth too then is sometimes burdened by an excess of enlightenment, but fronds of hope and moments of up-close intimacy cut through the layers of scum and spume, like a more buoyant take on the wistful dioramas of her Mappa labelmate Atte Elias Kantonen whose pinpoint electronics conjure inundated propellers, mechanized bird noises, gargling throats and an agglomeration of suction cups.
From the loping percussion and strings of the opening variation, which threatens to break out into riotous techno but scarcely succeeds in jiggling the yoke after lending a little slack to its restraints, on New Songs & Variations the TLF Trio and Moritz von Oswald dabble in the sublimation of seduction, lavishing a taste before pulling the constraints. For their second release the trio of Cæcilie Trier on cello, Jakob Littauer on piano and Mads Kristian Frøslev on guitar once more delve into the realm of chamber music, before Von Oswald the Basic Channel and Rhythm & Sound mastermind pulps ‘Foyer’ into pure atmosphere, a quavering mass of overcast drone and dub.
Following the staggered basslines and aperture loops, babbling sonic streams and free-flowing etymologies of his solo debut, JJJJJerome Ellis lets his piano do the talking on the longform improvisation of Compline in Nine Movements. No less turbulent and by turns pensive or garrulous, the album, which was recorded back in December of 2017 in one long take, develops a theme from the Piano Tales which Ellis has performed in collaboration with James Harrison Monaco, a storytelling show which posits a woman on her death bed and invites the audience to choose which tales she will hear in her final hour by selecting a trio of objects from a small trunk.
It’s a tale of two halves on the latest release by Glimmen, for which Mark Mantel on vibes and an intermittent cast of bassists, guitarists and percussionists join the duo of Jörg A. Schneider on drums and Jason Witlispach on everything else but: the first half all build and the second a bristling and sometimes euphoric denouement, which splits the ground between squalling free jazz, Celtic bagpipe traditions and fife and drum blues. Tems follows up the philosophical quandary of ‘Me & U’, a sultry treatise on faith and substance, with a fallen ode to cutting one’s losses, pushing forward and knowing one’s worth.
The flautist Camilo Ángeles and violist Joanna Mattrey present an improvised set from the Ex Teresa Arte Actual, a former convent located in the historic centre of Mexico City. Recorded over the course of one weekend in Tilburg, the dark ambient and noise duo Zoul find an ocean drop of tranquility amid the buzzsaw bass and seasick synths. Julien Lheuillier, Richard Francés and Quentin Rollet braid electronica, free jazz and kosmische to winsome and sometimes dizzying effect on their latest deep dive as Pointe du Lac, named after the Parisian metro station. And the pianist Vijay Iyer caps a stellar year with a teaser yet more than a thimbleful of Compassion, his upcoming trio album with the bassist Linda May Han Oh and the drummer Tyshawn Sorey.
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Vijay Iyer Trio – ‘COMPASSION’
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Camilo Ángeles & Joanna Mattrey – ‘Lullaby’
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Tems – ‘Not An Angel’
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Slowfoam – ‘Relief Forged on Ancient Plateaus’
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Pointe du Lac – ‘Un narval mâle sur 500 possède deux défenses’
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Glimmen – ‘Tunneln Sie Einfach am Ende Des Lichts’
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