Tracks of the Week 13.07.24

Antonina Nowacka’s third solo album opens as though suspended between elements, with gossamer-thin oscillations and glimmering harp glissandos offset by a reedy ocarina which seems to defy wind speeds and barometric pressure, staying the course and keeping everything on an even keel. The song, which is titled ‘Moth Spins’, quivers between helium ascents and a precipitous crumpling, while droning synthesizers shift in and out of focus, echoing the acoustic instrumentation which includes Catia Lanfranchi on the organ, accented from the halfway point by a few plucks of zither.

The vocalist and sound artist makes music which sounds like a pebble tossed into vast oceans of water, which charts its own spritely course more nymph than selkie after the first few agile hops and skips. Yet after drawing inspiration from Javanese caves and Polish fortresses, the swirling melodic structures of Hindustani classical music and early Cumbia rhythms from Mexico and Peru, the nine tracks of Sylphine Soporifera are pulled out of the aether, named after an imaginary species and the lands they inhabit, roused by the writings of the Austrian esotericist Rudolf Steiner who conjured spirits of the air, the Latin word ‘sopor’ which indicates a deep sleep and might implicate some form of intoxication or drowsiness, the ‘unreal desert landscape’ of the Paracas Peninsula with its pottery and candelabra and the treeless peat moors of the Outer Hebrides.

Warbling and glossolalic, her voice emerges on ‘Odrracir’ over the low drones of the ocarina, and is described in the album notes as both haunting and alien, transpiring as though from beyond the veil. Speaking of a strange symbiosis, Nowacka says that:

‘The voice is the most beautiful and resonating instrument. When I sing I feel I create a field in between myself and the air in front of me. It is not just that I’m singing – something in the space in front of me is happening, and I merge with this sphere.’

Elsewhere on Sylphine Soporifera the frolic is less aerated and more spectral, with sounds winding down long corridors or filtering through the walls of the next room, like with the winnowing flute of ‘Nite Vision’, which is one of three features by Oskar Karski who repeats the gesture on ‘Field Vision’ and on ‘Transit’ leans heavily into the bass guitar. Lavishing its tale of discovery, ‘I Found You in the Cloud’ is shimmering and summery with steady vocals and a bucolic mise-en-scène, while the percussive rebound of the zither on ‘Transit’ as it capers over Karski’s sustained bass conjures a sort of spartan thoroughfare and wide-eyed optimism which is redolent of the Low instrumental ‘A New Career in a New Town’.

While her vocals cut between crystalline sharpness and a tremulous, folksy charm, Nowacka’s embrace on Sylphine Soporifera of a diverse instrumentational palette – with the ocarinas from the terracotta town of Budrio in Italy, whistles from Mexico, synthetic Hawaiian sounds squeezed out of a vintage organ and simple bamboo flutes from Nepal – gives the record an air of fourth world experimentalism beyond the trappings of freak folk or anodyne new age.

Limpid harp illuminates ‘Light Light’ and on ‘Turning into Dolphins’, sine tones place their submerged whistles and pulses in conversation with Nowacka’s vocals, ocarinas and twinkling chimes. The burbling electronics of ‘Field Vision’ sound like the whipping and flickering ends of a deep sea cable, half-buried beneath a sandy layer of flute, and on the briefer still ‘Transit II’ chirping birds over a gamelan-like accompaniment spiral and then faintly begin to swarm. Finally the album closer ‘Time Vapour’ seems to look out upon a deluge of rain from some private vessel or chapel, with a choral aspect to the vocals as low chimes like a pattern of orbs coagulate and flick upwards in a final gesture of transport.

Taking her cue from the radio, choosing select moments as she flicked between stations from an otherwise incongruous blend of weather reports, talk show segments, advertisements and musical interludes which she recorded out on Vashon Island in Washington State, the experimental cellist Lia Kohl curates transitory quivers on her diaristic new album The Ceiling Reposes, which intersperses her bowed strings and radio missives with snatches of birdsong, gushing waves and layered instrumentation on synthesizers, kazoo, concertina, piano and wind machine.

Colin Stetson’s circular breathing technique is in full effect on a track which swaps his swashbuckling manner and swirling eddies of sound for a starkly industrial backdrop and a series of repetitious foghorn blasts. The second salvo from his upcoming album The love it took to leave you, which was recorded over the course of one week at Fonderie Darling, a former metalworks facility in Montreal, the muscular and even brutish aspect of the piece matches the main room’s architecture of raw brick, concrete and steel, with Stetson adding:

‘One of the first songs I wrote for this record, ‘The Six’ is a vengeful strut. Played on solo bass saxophone, this one’s big and mean with long arms and a toothy grin.’

Tempering the bass recorder, the prolific brawler Laura Cannell makes a secular offering to the sacred music of the twelfth-century philosopher and herbalist, composer and mystic Hildegard von Bingen, whose monophonies continue to inspire both terror and wonderment, serving alternately as shrouded agitator or soothing balm. The cellist and sound artist Lia Kohl is one of the few musicians around who not only strives but dares to capture the essence of mundanity, without imbuing every moment with a noncommittal gauziness or epiphanic thrust, as the first track ‘Car Alarm, Turn Signal’ featuring Ka Baird from her upcoming register of Normal Sounds already evokes with equanimity the Opiate glitch classic Objects for an Ideal Home.

The lukeme master and legendary Langi griot Ekuka Morris Sirikiti steps into the studio for the first time to recalibrate his long archive of missives, some scabrous and some instructive, about daily life in northern Uganda. Nilüfer Yanya is caught in a riptide, buffeted between love and shame and those other flame-red or soft burgundy passions on the latest single from My Method Actor, a transitional record which sometimes skirts the surreal. And 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 lush yet dizzying new album Wulansih.

The guitarist and composer Patrick Higgins, who is probably best known for his work as a member of the Brooklyn avant-garde band Zs, continues to fuse an inveterate punk ethos with restrained contemporary classicism, skirting the borders of free jazz and chamber music, unfolding a dark brand of minimalist techno and dwelling beneath sheathes of industrial noise. His new album Versus abounds in strange machinations, shaky metallurgies and liminal pulses, from the murky liturgical airs which open ‘Antinome’ and take an elevator to the overground, in a verdant clearing relaying a kind of fractured trip hop as though aliens with their long spindly fingers are tentatively learning the rudiments of the form.

With the versatile percussionist Bobby Previte – who has played with everyone from the Beat father and cut-up artist William S. Burroughs and the ramshackle bluesman Tom Waits to the downtown improvisers Elliott Sharp, John Zorn and Wayne Horvitz while establishing an enduring partnership with the soprano saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom – the twanging ‘Sirocco’ plays out like a series of movements, beginning somewhere between the desert rock of the Sahel and a spaghetti Western before easing towards the angular forms of post rock or math rock bastions like Shellac and Gastr del Sol. The piece even flirts with the primitive guitar of Robbie Basho and John Fahey with a few flamenco or bolero flourishes in its percussive rhythms and the echoes of castanets, eking as though effortlessly towards popular music with a late section redolent of The Cure and the extended coda to ‘Pictures of You’.

From the leaning and disorientating stabs of ‘Faceless (pulse)’, the expansively titled ‘The Outside Doesn’t Dream of Itself’ embodies a fraying Americana which through a process of machine learning begins to artificially regenerate in a way both insular and portentous, sometimes garbled and slow-moving then sounding by the end of the track like the thrashing of a mechanical snake which eventually gorges on itself. The aching trumpet of Chris Williams emerges through the staticky chimes of ‘Little One’, and scabrous barrages of noise define the rhetorical space of ‘Aporia’, the album’s closing track.

But it’s the title piece and record opener ‘Versus’ which receives the most attention, where Higgins who performs on guitar and keyboards, synthesizers, drums and by laptop programming over the course of the album layers a roiling and shifting wave pattern with fabricated blips and beeps. Drumrolls so keenly rendered that you can hear every movement of the sticks detach from the arms of the drummer, moving nimbly mid-air, soon giving way to synthetic oscillations on a track which calls to mind the 20 Jazz Funk Greats of Throbbing Gristle and the dub master Moritz von Oswald from his early days as one half of Basic Channel to the choral abstractions of last year’s standout Silencio. Guiding the direction of his album, which has been years in the making, Patrick Higgins premiered ‘Versus’ at the spatial venue MONOM in Berlin, where he devised a configuration for seventy-five surround sound speakers.

Federico Durand taps into an otherworld frequency, ascending the astral plane with his antennas wide open as he drifts through the aether or retreating to some honeyed and pine-scented Arcadia, where he erects a ramshackle log cabin and listens to his ringer from a few countries over through the low hum and static of his patched-up transistor radio. Whether inundated by bird calls, showing his work in progress as attentively he applies hammer to nail, echoing the bronze and brass of a far-off marching band or falling as if buoyed by a hammock into the tender arms of a lullaby, the relationship which develops across the five tracks of Té De Flores Silvestres is always simpatico, wires never crossed.

Introspective and eager for that spark of delight, from La Cumbre a small valley town in the heart of Argentina the ambient collagist Durand is responding to the work of Michael Roemers, who began his photographic career by documenting the bands of the Belgian underground as they careened across Europe, before devoting himself to a more personal project, exploring themes of identity, memory and community as he captures the landscapes and traditions of his Wallonia home.

Based out of Brittany, the IIKKI project solicits dialogue between visual artists and musicians, with each result dispatched in the form of two limited-edition physical imprints, a fine art book accompanied by a vinyl record or compact disc. The label project has been on the go since the autumn of 2016, with Té De Flores Silvestres part of a latest drop which also places the electroacoustic pastoralism of Tomotsugu Nakamura in conversation with the pictures of Simone Kappeler, while highlights over the past couple of years include Shadow’s Praise by Akhira Sano and Kurayami by Akira Uchida, where buddhist chants and bristling atmospherics played on the clavichord, saxophone, sutra and shō engaged in moonlit discourse with the gelatin silver prints of Yamamoto Masao.

Conjuring a narrative landscape which is wrought through misty fairytales and far-flung dispatches, the song titles on Té De Flores Silvestres begin with the faux-native ‘Once Upon a Time’ and include messages from the North Sea, names etched into fogged-up glass, the dream of a silk moth and an ode to wildflower tea. Durand lists some of his own predilections as music and gardens, the Romantic poetry of John Keats, stamp collecting and Earl Grey with its rindy bergamot accent, while on the album he plays and triggers a series of analogue synthesizers, tape delay units, radio frequencies, cassette recorders and samplers including the iconic ARP Odyssey and Roland Space Echo, the Korg MS-20, Moog Prodigy and Strymon El Capistan.

The pianist Giovanni Guidi’s musical partnership with the bassist Thomas Morgan and drummer João Lobo now stretches back more than a decade, with the frequent Enrico Rava collaborator emerging alongside the contrapuntal bass of Morgan and the soft-brushed percussion of Lobo on the 2013 album City of Broken Dreams, his first as a leader for ECM.

Remaining on the label, his 2019 effort Avec le temps swelled in the middle section through the addition of Franceso Bearzatti on the tenor saxophone and Roberto Cecchetto on guitar, yet for his latest release Guidi felt that a more fixed association with James Brandon Lewis could help the group dialogue develop towards ‘more abstract, open and improvisational approaches’. With this fresh gaze A New Day opens through a rendition of ‘Cantos del Ocells’, the traditional Catalan Christmas song which was made famous by the cellist Pablo Casals and in turn by the folk singer Joan Baez on her 1966 record Noël. After a careful introduction the trio are joined by Lewis, who sublimates the beefier approach of his recent uptake with The Messthetics through suspended smears of saxophone which waft alongside piano arpeggios, rumbling percussion and limber bass.

With a background in gospel music before his turn to jazz wrought such fine albums as Jesup Wagon, his critically acclaimed tribute to the agricultural scientist George Washington Carver, and For Mahalia, With Love which he described as a three-way conversation between the gospel icon Mahalia Jackson, his grandmother and himself, both of which were performed by his Red Lily Quintet, while his quartet’s fourth album Transfiguration swung into view earlier this year, James Brandon Lewis is more than adept at changing things up and choosing his moment.

He appears on four of the tracks from A New Day, with his tone on the tenor becoming a little more soulful and strident following the burnished and plaintive notes of ‘Cantos del Ocells’ where he plays at some remove from the scattered plunk of Lobo’s drums and Morgan’s dexterous, tensile bass, evoking especially on ‘Only Sometimes’ and ‘Wonderland’ the manner of two spiritual forebears in Charles Lloyd and John Coltrane.

Playing with tender restraint as a trio, on ‘To A Young Student’ the bowed groans and stretches of Morgan’s bass stand out over the trills and tremolos of Guidi’s keys, while after a watery opening preparation ‘Means For A Rescue’ builds tentatively with Lobo’s percussion striking the time like an old and unruly grandfather clock, as piano and bass circle one another warily.

Improvised by the quartet on an album which otherwise features five Guidi originals and one standard, ‘Only Sometimes’ is more bluesy and gospel-flecked, beginning with what is effectively a long bass solo furnished by the odd drum roll and cymbal patter then briefly interrupted by a winding melody on the keys, before from the halfway point the piece foregrounds Lewis on the sax as he offers a raindrops-on-windowpane perspective, shifting modes and stirring elegies as the keys and sticks grope to keep up with his flurries.

‘Luigi (The Boy Who Lost His Name)’ maintains the sombre and even somewhat lugubrious but nevertheless refined and restrained atmosphere, with an even balance between the percussive spurts, shimmering keys and tilting bass before Lewis comes in as the others pick up the tempo. Showing the group’s penchant for subtle rubato, in the closing moments of the track they seem to slough off any lingering air of resignation, opening up a pathway ahead.

Then an ardent rendition of ‘My Funny Valentine’ plays with the harmony of the show tune by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, inventive and romantic, offering no fireworks but a steady kindling of the fire. There’s a strange rasping and rickety end to the track, before A New Day closes with a luscious ‘Wonderland’ where the tenor saxophone gains lustre, building up to a whinnying run in the second half as the percussion resonates and Guidi’s piano imbues the piece with a verdant glow.

And bundling up to brace herself against an emotional blizzard, sipping warm cocoa and reclining atop animal skins in a subarctic ice hotel as she blanks your calls, or turning the air conditioning on to full blast even as she dips a toe beneath the bedsheets, Tink the toughest and sultriest R&B singer of her generation returns with more breathless and faltering dynamics for the fifth iteration of her iconic Winter’s Diary series, which now stretches back some twelve years.

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Laura Cannell – ‘The Cosmic Spheres of Being Human’