‘Lush with a gentle, brackish breeze’ is how Jeremiah Chiu recalls the Åland Islands, an archipelago of around 6,500 skerries and islands which lie between Sweden and Finland at the entrance to the Gulf of Bothnia in the Baltic Sea. After visiting the islands to help set up the Hotel Svala, which would host workshop programmes and artistic retreats, in 2019 the designer and electronic composer and the violist Marta Sofia Honer performed a concert at the Kumlinge Kyrka on Åland, now adding their musical improvisations on the viola, organs, and synthesizers to field recordings and voice memos in the form of a meticulously crafted and briskly evocative postscript.
Molly Nilsson revels in the moment of success as she releases her passionate and anthemic tenth solo album. Hinako Omori combines inner healing and natural landscapes in an immersive cartography of the mind. The ambient poltergeist Johannes Schebler and surreal folklorists Katie Rich and Christian Schoppik join together as Freundliche Kreisel. And the lap steel guitarist Mike Cooper draws from field recordings and a glut of saxophones and strings on an album which challenges the colonial legacy while embracing the religious culture of India, conceived as an ocean of milk and treacle subject to a ceaseless and copious churn.
From Santiago by way of Brooklyn, the tenor saxophonist Melissa Aldana receives a warm welcome to the Blue Note Records family, while the pianist Ethan Iverson readies his own debut for the label alongside the bassist Larry Grenadier and the legendary drummer Jack DeJohnette. Binker and Moses add some free jazz action, while the Mexican outsider Tony Gallardo assembles his selected works. DJ Python, Tanya Tagaq, and Combo Chimbita ready their impending records with songs by turns spacious and scabrous, Susanna summons the strange alchemy of Baudelaire, FKA twigs rides the dragon, and EARTHGANG, yeule, and Shamir complete the best new tracks.
Playlists: Spotify · Apple Music · YouTube
* * *
* * *
Freundliche Kreisel – ‘Begegnet’
* * *
* * *
Binker and Moses – ‘Accelerometer Overdose’
* * *
Combo Chimbita – ‘Yo Me Lo Merezco’
* * *
Molly Nilsson – ‘Sweet Smell of Success’
* * *
EARTHGANG – ‘All Eyes On Me’
* * *
* * *
* * *
FKA twigs – ‘ride the dragon’
* * *
Tony Gallardo – ‘Plata o Plomo’
* * *
Ethan Iverson – ‘For Ellen Raskin’
* * *
* * *
Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer – ‘By Foot By Sea’
* * *
Susanna – ‘Alchemy of Suffering’
* * *
* * *
