For the follow-up to her Grammy-nominated debut album Fanm d’Ayiti, a celebration of the unheralded female singers of Haiti which was recited and performed in collaboration with Spektral Quartet, the Haitian American vocalist and flautist Nathalie Joachim sought to fete those ties that bind, from romantic trysts and familial bonds to the semantic shifts and twisted etymologies of Haitian Creole, a contested mode of expression which can be lost as first generation Haitian Americans assimilate to life in the United States, and the sometimes tumultuous relationship which Haitians share with their native landscape. Returning to her family farm in southern Haiti where she was to write much of her album, Joachim bore questions of self-identity and ancestry, pondering the vagaries of a land whose bounty is increasingly racked by heavy rains, floods and hurricanes, while eager to reconnect with the Haitian women in her life from Vodou singers who continue to serve as models to her maternal grandmother Ipheta Bellegarde, whose late voice here sings a hymn of gratitude as part of a duet.
Over the ten tracks of Ki moun ou ye it is Joachim’s voice which provides the thread, sometimes crisp as the morning air as though singing sublimated clarion calls to freedom, sometimes full of a languorous and ardent yearning, from the moonlit reveries of ‘Zetwal’ to the reclamation of ‘Ti nèg’ and ‘Nan kò mwen’ which recounts cycles of abuse and trauma. Accompanied throughout by Yvonne Lam on the violin and viola and Jason Treuting of Sō Percussion on drums, suffusing acoustic instrumentation with electronic swatches and hitherto discarded vocal samples, Joachim says of her record’s title:
“Creole as a language almost always has a primary, literal meaning of what’s being said plus a secondary layer of understanding, and sometimes even a tertiary level. ‘Ki moun ou ye’ can be very simply asking, ‘Who are you?’. But it also means, ‘Whose people are you?’. And it can also mean, ‘Which person are you?’. For me, it led to, ‘Who am I actually?’. Not just on a performative level, but also as a Black person in spaces where I constantly have to code-switch. It’s a deep question. It isn’t casual.”
The saxophonist and clarinetist John Surman combines with Rob Luft on guitar, Rob Waring on vibraphone and Thomas Strønen on drums for an album whose title refers to the ineffable empathy and sinuous creativity of their first-time collaboration. The Príncipe standout DJ Nigga Fox reworks batida from the inside out on ‘Má Rotina’ from his upcoming album Chá Preto, a gaseous, spacious and slightly queasy affair which skews towards the slowed-down syrupiness of tarraxinha while eschewing its sexiness for something more piquant. Plaintive and pungent yet still strangely propulsive, vaporous synth pads, clip-clopping percussion laden with effects and a destabilising undercurrent of woozy and wobbling sub-bass introduce a solitary chant whose subsequent layers and digressions give uplift to the beat.
Fay Victor rides Chris Tordini’s acoustic bass all the way down in a dolorous homage to David Lynch, Peter Ivers and the chipmunk cheeks and squirrelly manner of the Lady in the Radiator, a calamity dance atop Vinnie Sperrazza’s tumbling drums while the twining reed of Charlotte Greve’s alto sax provides the tether. With dedications to Wayne Shorter and the veteran recording engineer James Farber, for her second outing on Blue Note Records the Chilean tenor saxophonist Melissa Aldana unveils eight original compositions which harness the dynamic interplay of her quintet, as smouldering solo features from the pianist Fabian Almazan, the bassist Pablo Menares, the percussionist Kush Abadey, and the guitarist and album co-producer Lage Lund serve to elaborate a personal odyssey whereby the artist learns to embrace their inner prophet.
Fresh from her forest excursion with Amor Muere, the tape manipulator and sonic explorer Concepción Huerta embarks on a deeper excavation of the earth in the form of ominously lurching drones and bristling low frequencies which were composed on the Buchla systems and Nord synthesizers of Elektronmusikstudion in Stockholm, before being processed via magnetic tape. The result is at once oppressively brusque and oozingly pungent with a few high-pitched tones described as like cracks in the earth’s core offering moments of lightness and levity as Huerta – abetted by Olivia Block who co-produced two of the album’s tracks, and Magaly Ugarte who photographed the cover on a shared trip to an obsidian mine in Hidalgo – scrabbles at the heart of our sunken matter.
Whether ‘Rich Baby Daddy’ bestows its nominal wealth on the father or the child, as a threesome Drake, Sexyy Red and SZA seek sustenance in the fresh air and a healthy dose of sweet loving. The archivist and ballpoint pen artist Normal Nada the Krakmaxter unleashes another barrage of blistering and mind-bending batida sounds, a fusion of future-facing Afro-Portuguese forms full of serrated synths, narcotic subs, woodblock snaps and syncopated toms which here prods in the direction of soca, ragga and G-funk by way of a gospel tribute to Nate Dogg, all certifying Nada’s claim as the pioneer of psychedelic African trance music.
And snarling and sputtering mouth mantras before stalking out their terrain, on the penultimate track from their impending eighth studio album the trio of Mats Gustafsson, John Berthling and Andreas Werliin as Fire! tramp a stealthy pass and stretch out into the big blue yonder, with Gustafsson’s achingly elegiac sax and Werliin’s brittle billowing drums charting the course, untrammelled as Berthling’s bass just keeps adding fences.
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Melissa Aldana – ‘The Solitary Seeker’
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The Choir Invisible – ‘In Heaven’ (feat. Fay Victor)
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Normal Nada the Krakmaxter – ‘Batida 31’
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Drake – ‘Rich Baby Daddy’ (feat. Sexyy Red & SZA)
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Fire! – ‘Running Bison. Breathing Entity. Sleeping Reality.’
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