Back on the trail with their duffle bags and nets like a gang of nocturnal lepidopterists, the trio of Oren Ambarchi on guitar, Johan Berthling on bass and Andreas Werliin on drums pick up pretty much where their first Ghosted album left off, replacing its kosmische chug and post-rock fabrics with something a little more spectral. Switching out the Roman numerals for Berthling and Werliin’s native Swedish, ‘en’ opens Ghosted II with rattle-stick percussion, drags of bass and the shapeshifting smears of Ambarchi’s guitar, which over the course of the album morphs and twists through gossamer strings and all manner of eighties synthesizers. Settling into a tremulous spread of guitar over a strident bass line, the bass and drums work together to establish a tensile mesh which undergirds the careening course of Ambarchi’s strings, like a car whose tail keeps spinning out as it barrels down the highway, its rear lights flashing in the gloaming. Werliin’s drums seem to gain momentum through the final passage of ‘en’ as the guitar winds down to a quaver.
Softer and almost tantalisingly pellucid, ‘två’ opens with a smooth pattern of harmonics on the bass, which is soon accompanied by the light touch of Werliin’s percussion, with its parched and brittle feel like sticks and twigs dried out for kindling. Serving to accentuate the graceful arc of the bass, Ambarchi’s guitar and effects create a hazy top note which hangs suspended over the rhythm, tentatively plucking at what lies beneath, seeking out shared sympathies or alternatively feeding off the incessant, silvery and slightly loping beat as if summoning the succour to sustain a new life force. Berthling and Werliin are masters at laying out these sort of looping and sonorous rhythms following their work with Mats Gustafsson, with the recent Fire! album Testament offering the same sense of boundlessness while a little more agricultural, running with bison, stretching out under starry skies or pulling apart a bar-room blues. Ambarchi’s amorphous and sometimes ethereal guitar is perfectly capable of mining the canyon, but for the most part on Ghosted II it offers something markedly different from Gustafsson’s stonking saxophone, at once spare and richly evocative as the trio erect the first structures and share the first limpid sensations of a new world.
Through the subtly shifting signatures and polyrhythms of Werliin’s percussion, by the close of ‘två’ the guitar is holding a scratched sine tone among other spurts and coiled or stray votive patterns. And after thirteen minutes in this fragrant, quasi-mystical headspace, woodblocks in the dying moments of ‘två’ remind us that there’s time to keep after all.
By contrast ‘tre’ is much beefier, bounding through the saloon doors with a resolute swagger and then placing its order with the clink of a bell. Clip-clop percussion and a funky bass line allow Ambarchi’s guitar to roam and wander, retaining some of that amorphous quality while sounding a little more viscous, as though coagulating or triangulating between the other instruments. Then at just over the halfway mark, playing pizzicato, he begins to conjure these shimmering arpeggiated pools as his six-string takes the aspect of a lute or lyre, providing ‘tre’ with a trance-like quality redolent of Dorothy Ashby or Anoushka Shankar, classical Indian raga or even in its looser moments flamenco music. Adding shakers and chimes to his chopping percussion, Werliin alongside Berthling on the bass stay absolutely locked, keys left dangling, into an incessant back-and-forth groove.
Through a swelling drone and a simple ascending pattern, the opening seconds of ‘fyra’ conjure up images of sloshing waves and furtive undertows, before Werliin counts off and kicks in, with his percussion propelling Ambarchi’s guitar into an arms-and-legs-akimbo squat across the screen, as Berthling’s spry bass resounds in the distance. Eventually the drums regain control of the tempo of the piece, with the guitar settling into a series of smudged arcs with crimped edges over Werliin’s sketched minimalist repetition. And as the percussion finally lays out, with minimal support from Berthling’s bass the guitar hollows and wafts through the air like the smoke and floating embers of so many charred woodwinds.
What if the one-night stand suggested by the sleek body and nimble chassis of a little red Corvette was not swapped out but sublimated by a model of Japanese reliability? Summoning the Pleiades star cluster and gliding with a little more drag, the latest from Tashi Wada’s upcoming album What Is Not Strange? features a throttled drone and the tethered straying of Ezra Buchla’s viola, with a mezzanine of fairground synthesizer before Julia Holter’s warped and layered vocals wonder aloud whether it might be best to turn around and go home before everybody winds up a little bit carsick.
Following a couple of records which handled themes of misogynoir and yearned tenderly for the bounty of an indiscriminate kind of love, Yaya Bey exits the north star as like a midnight ocean rippled by the gravitational force of the moon she embraces a life full of flux. Compiling a type of contemporary R&B which is almost a form of deep listening practice through its commitment to everyday mundanity, whose deep grooves, prevailing air of acceptance and sometimes wistful prose play out like iterations on a theme, Ten Fold is spurred by a bit of Motown and a little bit of Laurel Canyon, soft-spoken sixties vamps in the style of Dusty Springfield and psychedelic effluence in the manner of Minnie Riperton with smidges of boom bap and new jack swing.
Arooj Aftab switches up her evocative Urdu and the late-night flowering of ‘Raat Ki Rani’ for a faintly falling Irish brogue about whiskey drinking and the sagging of heavy heads. Instead of an effulgent swirl, ‘Whiskey’ droops delicately through Jamey Haddad’s softly brushed percussion, the supple and pungent and slightly dolorous support of Linda May Han Oh’s bass and the algal blooms of Maeve Gilchrist’s harp, with flamenco-like guitars and castanets plus the shimmers of TimaLikesMusic on piano and Juno conjuring a composite image of cypresses under dark lustrous skies.
On his first album for six years, How To Dress Well sifts briskly through his back catalogue and regrounds his voice in the limpid R&B of his 2010 debut Love Remains, an era-defining record whose endless rains, suicidal ideations and hints of family trauma found a sonic middle ground between The-Dream and Grouper, submerged in fathoms-deep reminiscences of popular eighties and nineties radio acts like Ready for the World, Jodeci, SWV and Boyz II Men.
Paring back some of the textural and conceptual knottiness which characterised The Anteroom, since the release of that album Tom Krell got married and had a daughter, completed his doctoral studies in philosophy with a dissertation on the possibility of a non-nihilistic metaphysics and at the height of the pandemic assembled a crew of collaborators who would help him build towards his sixth solo undertaking, collecting snippets from the past decade while sloughing off some of the physical and emotional fatigue which marked a prolonged tour and the most intense music of his career to date.
I Am Toward You – whose title is the result of one of those portals of discovery otherwise known as a fortuitous mishap, with his wife mishearing the chorus to the Miley Cyrus song ‘Adore You’ – bears traces of all of his past work, from the phantasm loops and breathless prose poems of Total Loss to the open-ended addresses of “What Is This Heart?” whose moments of catharsis are carried by a propulsive, adult-contemporary sheen, and from the synthpop strains of Care which even dabbled in the vogue for tropical house music to The Anteroom whose sometimes crystalline vocal melodies were shrouded in post-punk dynamics, acid atmospheres and industrial sheathes. Yet through an array of soundscapes which run the gamut from sea-struck shoegaze to more rarified dream pop and from gravelly Burial-esque ambiance to angsty shards of nu metal, there is a contiguity through the opening tracks of I Am Toward You and a consistency to Krell’s falsetto which is most redolent of the pitched and piquant Love Remains.
The album opener ‘New Confusion’ serves as a bucolic summation of How To Dress Well’s sound, with its penchant for propulsive and sometimes scurrying percussion plus sweeping synthesizers, the plinth-like verticality of his layered vocal harmonies tilting in the wind as they peer out from an unbridled morass or runaway castles of low-slung clouds. As someone who can remember Krell back in the heyday of Tumblr posting sleek and ebullient R&B, dance-pop and house-oriented mixes while eulogising Visions of the Country by Robbie Basho, Clear Moon by Mount Eerie and R Plus Seven by Oneohtrix Point Never, the second track ‘Contingency/Necessity (Modality of Fate)’ with its juxtaposition of dates and terms feels like the keynote of the piece, contrasting the German words ‘Gesicht’ for face and ‘Geschichte’ for history, and the euphoria of a Mount Eerie concert at the Masonic Lodge at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles with a more downcast memory of taking psychedelic drugs in the shrine room of a Buddhist monastery, as Krell underwent a period of ‘clandestine and occult meditation’ which included two weeks of total silence.
Possessing a rare knack for writing intimately and inquisitively from other perspectives, on I Am Toward You he returns to familiar themes and concerns around family dynamics and some of the difficulties endured by his brothers, who have Asperger’s syndrome, trauma becoming the site of mystery not because it contains any juicy or gristly material but rather the resiny buildup of necessary things left unsaid. While there is a glitchy quality to several of the tracks, ‘Crypt Sustain’ reiterates Krell’s commitment to Coil-like imagery and post-industrial textures, with the artist citing the influence of an almost eschatological array of sources, from Mária Török’s work on crypts and ghosts in the intergenerational psyche, Georges Bataille’s collection of essays and lectures The Cradle of Humanity and Jasbir K. Puar’s The Right to Maim which critiques state control and its intersection with concepts of disability to the wall paintings of Lascaux and the heavy metal of Metallica and the old MTV staple Headbangers Ball.
Meanwhile the flashing bulbs of ‘No Light’ with its crackling vocoder and deceptively buoyant melody cut out to give ‘nothingprayer’ a requisite air of solemnity, Krell’s layered choral offering swept up by a rush of synthetic woodwinds, twinkling keys and gusty saxophone squalls before the song takes a country detour through the twanging of steel guitar, ambling down a misty old lane as I Am Toward You maintains a consistency of tone while swapping out the purgatorial murk of Love Remains for lofty entreaties.
‘On It and Around It’ centres on childhood traumas like moving home and the death of a young friend, whose picture at the barbershop prompts questions of identity, the long coda serving to complete the scene. As the title suggests, ‘Song in the Middle’ marks a break in the album, an arboreal field recording with stuttering drums and gospel hollering which briefly calls to mind Lester Bangs and his assessment that the Van Morrison record Hard Nose the Highway contained a second side of songs about falling leaves. Culminating in a clangorous peal of church bells, ‘Gas Station Against Blackened Hillside’ completes the shift with Krell’s voice in the lower register accompanied by the sort of plosive percussion which one might find on a Björk record.
‘A Faint Glow Through a Window of Thin Bone (That’s How My Fate is Shown)’ bears a flickering piano motif and a rumbling electronic close, with How To Dress Well managing to summon over the course of one track everything from Sufjan Stevens at his most plaintive to Robert Wyatt’s shifting naturalism, the recalcitrant Lou Reed of Metal Machine Music and tracks like ‘forever’ from Charli XCX’s how i’m feeling now era. ‘The Only True Joy on Earth’ is a chain-clinking spiritual about escaping the shackles of one’s own false self, while ‘A Secret Within the Voice’ closes I Am Toward You on a slinkier, soulful note, the repeated sample of the line ‘If there’s no wind in the sky’ turning all of these frayed ends in the direction of sustainable uplift.
Myriam Gendron’s last record Ma délire – Songs of love, lost & found played out like a scrapbook of ripped pages which had been recovered from a shipwreck, lusty and elemental as she reinterpreted traditional music from the United States, France and Quebec, including the roots revival standard ‘Go Away From My Window’ which was quoted by Bob Dylan before being covered by Linda Ronstadt and Joan Baez, the Quebecois tune ‘Au coeur de ma délire’ which was endowed with a cinematic quality through the snap and crackle of ambient sounds like chirping crickets, radio snippets and the clank and hiss of a boat repair shop which had been converted from an old mill, an emotionally laden take on the wide waters and waxing romance of ‘Waly Waly’, and a ‘Poor Girl Blues’ which combined ‘Poor Boy, Long Ways From Home’, one of the oldest songs in the blues repertoire, with the song of forced French Canadian exile ‘Un Canadien errant’.
Mayday by contrast is furnished with a little more warmth as Gendron is joined for several songs by the fuzzy guitar and drums of the improvisational stalwarts Marisa Anderson and Jim White, the bassist Cédric Dind-Lavoie who shares her penchant for lacing traditionalism with the avant-garde, the looped-and-screwed guitarist Bill Nace and the Appalachian tenor saxophonist Zoh Amba, whose Ayleresque horn gets the last word on the album. Even the instrumental opener ‘There Is No East Or West’ captures a little bit of that lamplight sound, as though emanating from a cosy porch or played around a crackling hearth, but Gendron still knows just when and how to pull the rug as her songs – mostly originals sung once more in a mixture of English and French – often carry an air of wistful melancholy, sometimes veering in the directions of free jazz or primitive guitar, with her voice plucking and chafing against a time-honoured melody.
There is even a little bit of Nashville Skyline about Mayday, with ‘Long Way Home’ carrying a similar chord progression to ‘Girl from the North Country’. ‘Terres brûlées’ is a chanson from a text written in classical French alexandrines, with Gendron’s rendition bearing a gothic quality which subverts the old epic or romantic form, described by the artist as a song which evokes the idea of a ‘ravaged landscape’. The sheer tonality of ‘Lully Lullay’ is redolent of ‘Waly Waly’ from Ma délire, while ‘Dorothy’s Blues’ pays tribute to her old amour Dorothy Parker, the caustic Algonquin Round Table wit whose poeticisms were the source of Gendron’s debut album Not So Deep As A Well.
And on the album closer ‘Berceuse’, the yearning and caterwauling saxophone of Zoh Amba cuts through the lullaby to suggest that this whole thing was a ruse: we thought that we were gathered round the hearth for some torch songs and chanson, but in fact all this while the room has been on fire, and Gendron through a flickering amber glow and the tenebrous gloom has been busy sending out a distress signal.
Taking his title from the ‘Desiderata’ of Max Ehrmann, whose prose poem solicits the reader to ‘Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence’, the Sō Percussion co-founder Jason Treuting summons the spirit of his 2006 album Amid the Noise, a twelve-part continuous suite which bridged the gap between Reichian minimalism, the contextual ambiance of Brian Eno, the folktronica of Four Tet and the dubby grandeur of the post-rock pillars Tortoise before gaining a new lease of life as a communal music-making project with flexible instrumentation. Carrying the same sense of whimsy through folk inflections and Eno-esque keys, the climax of Go Placidly With Haste emerges through flute and strings as a gusty and kaleidoscopic ode to Cocteau Twins dream pop, with the Puerto Rican composer, vocalist and frequent Sō Percussion collaborator Angélica Negrón providing the melody.
For the 2023 edition of the annual Week-End Fest in Cologne, the Argentine-Swiss painter Vivian Suter designed a ‘bedroom’ replete with some of her works which was to serve as a performance space during the course of the festival. Led by the local curator and sound designer Thomas Meckel, a balmy and sometimes beguiling seven-hour jam session inside the bedroom highlighted the Brazilian tamborim drum, with fellow artists and attendees like Ana Frango Elétrico, Josephine Stamer and Simon Waskew spontaneously attaching themselves to the setup, their naif melodies, occasional bursts of horn and the sneaky or serpentine polyrhythms of the tamborim stretching from extremely ambient jazz to tropicália, subterranean drone to world fusion all the while enfolded in the bristling surrounds.
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 album Wulansih. The kora master Ballaké Sissoko and the classical guitarist Derek Gripper – whose recent recordings have translated the works of legendary Malian musicians like Sissoko, Toumani Diabaté and Ali Farka Touré for the guitar – spent just three hours wordlessly improvising their first album together, which pushes beyond the borders of world music while stretching the horizons of jazz.
And with a nod to Adam Saroyan’s infamous poem ‘lighght’, the saxophonist Erin Rogers and vocalist Gelsey Bell extemporise over a set of variables, recording the same couple of pieces in two dissimilar locations, the Oktaven Audio recording studio in Mount Vernon and a small stone catacomb in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, whose spare acoustics adorned with skylights serve to illuminate the sheer materiality of their instruments, from the curvature of the horn and the vibrations of the reed to every strained ululation or faltering breath.
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Tamborim Dream – ‘Con Ana’ (feat. Ana Frango Elétrico & Janosch Pugnaghi)
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How To Dress Well – ‘Contingency/Necessity (Modality of Fate)’
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Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling and Andreas Werliin – ‘Två’
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Yaya Bey – ‘sir princess bad bitch’
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Arooj Aftab – ‘Whiskey’
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Ballaké Sissoko & Derek Gripper – ‘Moss on the Mountain’
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Jason Treuting – ‘Four Lines/Me Voy’ (feat. Angélica Negrón)
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Gelsey Bell & Erin Rogers – ‘Antelope Canyon’
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