A multidisciplinary artist and curator who has spent the last few years producing exhibitions, developing documentaries and directing music videos and short films, Violaine Morgan Le Fur dips more than a toe into the sometimes murky waters of music production with her debut album as Violence Gratuite, adorning an aluminium tail as her siren vocals sound out from a rickshaw of barebones gqom and trap, slippery kuduros and misty French chanson.
Playing around with music software a mere matter of weeks before she decided to dub her record, it is no surprise that Baleine à Boss bristles with ideas yet with a deft hand Violence Gratuite manages to sculpt all of her source material into a shapely and buoyant whole. Le Fur grew up in the sprawling suburbs of Paris and channels much of her personal history on the record, compelled by her Breton mother and Cameroonian father, her mother’s film archives and her own footage which she captured on the high plateaus of Bamiléké land for the sake of the autobiographical documentary À L’ouest back in 2017.
There are echoes too of some of her formative listening experiences, like the crude funk and self-styled Maasai shuffle of the no wave singer Lizzy Mercier Descloux, whose first album Press Color followed dalliances with Patti Smith and Richard Hell in New York City and second album Mambo Nassau was bankrolled by the Island Records chief Chris Blackwell at Compass Point Studios, before Zulu Rock blended African folk rhythms with contemporary French pop stylings as Descloux foreshadowed Graceland and became one of the pioneers of worldbeat, or like the spectral trip hop of Tricky’s debut album Maxinquaye.
For all of its multiplicity, at heart the music on Baleine à Boss is rooted in a combination of hand drums and balafon mallet percussion plus sawing, droning or wobbling synths, often trance-inducing and sometimes accompanied by other found or faux-naive elements like starter keyboards, scats and whistles and field recordings of street noise or what sounds like screeching cats. Its winding and repetitious melodies are cut through by ramshackle drum breaks and given a sense of polish and whimsy by Le Fur’s cooing vocals, smooth and sultry and ready to draw the listener in while remaining embedded within the centre of the mix.
While the album opener ‘Iséo’ makes a splash over grimey synths and bottle cap percussion, ‘Olive’ foregrounds handpan or steel tongue drums plus shakers over insidious alien loops, with Gratuite who sings mostly in French embellishing the sense of skittering and propulsive motion with a swooning and scatting refrain of ‘come on baby’ in English. ‘L’hiver avec toi’ plays a nauseous fairground melody next to murmuring choral vocals, and beyond its evocation of Sade, the track ‘Smooth Operation’ clearly reclaims the refrain from the ‘Soul Makossa’ of the Cameroonian songwriter, saxophonist and vibraphonist Manu Dibango.
Sometimes misheard as referring to the ‘side of a mountaintop’, the stuttering Duala scats of ‘Soul Makossa’ were interpolated without Dibango’s permission by Michael Jackson on his post-disco classic ‘Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin”, with the matter settled out of court in the mid-eighties only for the controversy to rear its head once again, years later upon the release of Rihanna’s Jackson-sampling 2007 hit ‘Don’t Stop the Music’. Violence Gratuite then skirts the conversation, reasserting the musicality of the refrain while waving a flag for her Cameroonian heritage.
Flapping like a fish out of water before swaying with a skeletal swagger, that sinuous blend of choral vocals and hand drums reemerges on the title track to Baleine à Boss as the conch-blowing mermaid unites with the Ugandan percussionist Maganda Shakul. And as the sound of wailing felines and wop-wop helicopters plus nascent strings and reeds fades from view, the album shifts gears from the Neptunes-like clopping percussion of the R&B-styled ‘Une Ouf’ to the reggae-sprach of ‘Ragga Nieztches’, and from the queasy aerophones of ‘Cristal’ to the ricocheting nocturnal dembow of the record closer ‘Bad à Bras le Corps’, with the Nyege Nyege offshoot Hakuna Kulala ultimately describing Baleine à Boss as like a ‘variety show’ which is ‘as comfortable in the club as it is at a fest noz’.
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.
Skee Mask languors in a summer haze on his latest spellbinding set for Ilian Tape. J. Albert who neatly marries the dubby minimalism of Basic Channel and its co-founder Moritz von Oswald with the slacker gestures of Pavement while citing Bill Evans as one of his major stylistic influences, calling the jazz pianist a ‘master of reduction’, returns with his latest batch of spectral low-slung techno. And from juke derivations to the liquid arrangements, louche jazz or nagging drum and bass of Luke Vibert’s mid-nineties aliases to the celestial squiggles of Orbital or traces of Drexciyan submersibles, keeping his head defiantly above the tide, μ-Ziq unloads Grush with an ebullient sentimentality which glosses the past without giving way to nostalgia, through a set of propulsive dance-oriented beats which summon the thrills of the old Windsor Safari Park and his own Magic Pony Ride or Lunatic Harness, structured around the wayfaring gauze of reticulums a-thru-c.
After returning last month from a three-year hiatus with two new songs ‘Ice Grass Underpass’ and ‘Feline Wave Race’, the Nova Scotia quartet Nap Eyes set the ‘Demons’ of Alexander Pushkin to glimmering synths and the drift of their six-strings, basing their text on an English rendering of the poem by the prolific Pushkin and Anna Akhmatova translator D. M. Thomas. Presaging both Nikolai Gogol and Fyodor Dostoevsky with his penchant for the fantastical and grotesque, Russia’s national poet figures a moonlit sleigh ride which threatens to stagger into some ‘damned ravine’, as a master urges on his increasingly troubled coachman, forced to contend with a howling blizzard and something glinting beyond the trees.
Widely acclaimed when it appeared in the final edition of the literary almanac Northern Flowers in 1832, a couple of quatrains from ‘Demons’ would later serve as an epigraph to Dostoevsky’s novel of the same name. But when Thomas’s translation was published in The Bronze Horseman: Selected Poems of Alexander Pushkin in 1982, a review in The New York Times criticised him for dispensing with the guidance of two earlier translations, arguing that:
by materializing the demons and making them plainly visible in the third stanza, instead of at the end of the poem, as Pushkin did, Mr. Thomas wrecks the whole point of the poem, which is the traveler’s doubt as to whether he is seeing the blizzard or something supernatural.
Nap Eyes stumble into no such bother across their setting of the text, managing to maintain an air of suspense while taking the sting out of the devil’s tail, still brandishing whip and reins but wearing them ever so slightly and amping up the sense of fireside ribaldry which is inherent to the poem as they explore their antic surrounds with a rapt gaze and a worriless careen.
Following up on Narrow Sea with Dawn Upshaw and Gilbert Kalish, a setting of text from the Sacred Harp which won the Grammy for best contemporary classical composition, and Let The Soil Play Its Simple Part which scoured the poet Anne Carson, the shape note composer Albert Brumley and the disco harmonies of ABBA and The Pointer Sisters for shared roots and stems, for their next album Caroline Shaw and Sō Percussion pored over the pages of late eighteenth century, nineteenth century and early modernist poetry before selecting lyrics by William Blake, Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti and Gertrude Stein.
Meanwhile at the midpoint of Rectangles and Circumstance the old Scottish traditional ‘The Parting Glass’ – apparently the most popular parting song in all of Scotland before Robert Burns wrote ‘Auld Lang Syne’ – gets an airing through rubbed crystal and an inverted chord progression from Johann Sebastian Bach’s chorale ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’. And the Eric Cha-Beach-penned ‘Who Turns Out the Light’, described as an expression of ‘the loving but exhausted thought patterns of a parent trying to coax and calm a young child’, possesses a spacious and starry, slow-padding and anticipatory quality, like Björk somewhere between the music boxes and glitch electronics of tracks like ‘Aurora’ and ‘Sun In My Mouth’ from Vespertine and the kismet of ‘Desired Constellation’, a steadfast Medulla highlight.
The alto saxophonist Alfredo Colón who has played alongside a steady stream of provocateurs like Henry Threadgill, Christopher Hoffman, Amirtha Kidambi and Joy Guidry while featuring regularly abreast the trombonist Kalia Vandever describes his studio debut Blood Burden as ‘a meditation on the interplay of Dominican folklore and Catholic imagery’ and ‘an ode to his immediate family members in the face of intergenerational trauma’. Steeped in the blues, those familial ghosts come to bear on the album closer ‘Doomknocker’, a live staple over the past few years where his burnished horn bumps against the brushes of Connor Parks while Steve Williams jabs at his upright bass and Lex Korton plays a winding, sometimes plaintive melody on the piano, screeching out a fiery lament as strings, keys and skins cascade then pause on the cusp of a doleful nether.
Colón’s saxophone also appears this week in one of the three modular chamber groups assembled by Spencer Zahn for the exploratory music series Unheard in Brooklyn, whose sets ran the gamut from seventies spiritual jazz to eighties fusion to nineties ambient electronics. And through a low-to-the-ground commingling of wheezing organ drones, impishly plucked strings, tinkling bells and wispy or ferrying reeds, the mysterious Helsinki-based artist nenúhîr unfolds a love story for bugs on the moulting yet thoroughly beguiling charms/curses.
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Giovanni Guidi, James Brandon Lewis, Thomas Morgan and João Lobo – ‘Cantos Del Ocells’
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Caroline Shaw & Sō Percussion – ‘Who Turns Out the Light’
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