Allen Lowe’s short bio says that the veteran saxophonist and guitarist ‘spans the history of jazz in his music in a way that few have’. While sharing bebop idioms and offering an especially gritty take on the avant-garde, some of his earliest records incorporated not only roots music in the form of nascent jazz and blues but tango theatrics after the innovator Astor Piazzolla, where Lowe was accompanied by the great alto of Julius Hemphill, while he tackled the catalogue of Satchmo for the first time with other frequent collaborators in David Murray, Loren Schoenberg and Doc Cheatham on Mental Strain at Dawn: A Modern Portrait of Louis Armstrong.
A music historian and specialist in sound restoration, Lowe has a unique ability to not only quote or echo but resuscitate the past in his work. On the first of two albums which he released last year, In The Dark found him surveying the worst time of his life, as he suffered from the lingering effects of peripheral neuropathy following surgery to remove a cancerous tumour in his sinus, with Lowe joking wryly about kicking the bucket and sloughing off the stupefying gaze of the morning sun as his rhapsodic airs, featuring Ken Peplowski on the clarinet, Aaron Johnson on clarinet and alto saxophone and Lewis Porter on the piano, paid various ode to old Jews, Jelly Roll Morton, The Big Easy, Eric Dolphy and peasant life through the earthy tones and nubby forms of early Vincent van Gogh.
Meanwhile on America: The Rough Cut he diagnosed the failing state of the blues, getting back to basics as he invoked the Funky Butt Hall of Storyville, the boisterous gyrations of the Holy Rollers and the attendant whoops and hollers of the Pentecostal church. Running through a ragtag blend of jazz, honky-tonk and gospel, minstrelsy, medicine show irony and one-chord ruminations which prefigured the blues, all of these strains came to bear on the album closer ‘At a Baptist Meeting’, where saxophone squalls snatched and chafed towards spiritualism, tethered by rowdy percussion and the brio of live performance as he captured a special moment on stage with his longtime friend and musical partner, the late trumpeter Roswell Rudd.
His latest undertaking is even more ambitious, a two-volume collection with his Constant Sorrow Orchestra which purports to pay tribute to old Satch. In fact Louis Armstrong’s America uses the trumpeter and vocalist as a kind of Derridean spectre, a gravitational force which remains tantalisingly and even tormentingly out of view, in the manner of Orson Welles as Harry Lime in The Third Man or Marlon Brando as Kurtz in the torrid reverse pilgrimage of Apocalypse Now.
Instead of tackling some of Armstrong’s most cherished tunes or offering riffs on his legacy, over a staggering sixty-nine original compositions Lowe touches upon everything that went into and came out of Armstrong’s music or else ran curiously alongside. He pitches us right into the ragtime and swing of the early twentieth century, when jazz was just entering into American life ‘as did almost all forms of American vernacular music, astride the ghosts of minstrelsy’, and winds a course through detours, jumping-off points and apparent irrelevancies, from Albert Ayler who described Armstrong’s music as ‘a rejoicing’ to oddities like Captain Beefheart and Steve Albini, the anti-corporate music producer and acerbic voice behind the minimalist rock band Shellac. Describing his everything and the kitchen sink approach, Lowe writes:
I think that Louis Armstrong may have been the first true post-modernist, picking and choosing between a hierarchy of personal and public musical sources and tastes, but without any concern for the way in which hierarchy acted on all of this in terms of class and even, ultimately, race (e.g. think of Armstrong’s reverence for opera and the way it effected his broad and classically expressive method of phrasing). So he fits all the definitions of post-modernism, even as a kind of anachronistic vessel for so much that was still to come not just in jazz but in all of American popular music, in particular but not only through the mediation of black life and aesthetics. Black song, vernacular and popular, is amazingly flexible in its ways and means of expression, lyrically, rhythmically and sonically.
Still no description of his goals or methods can capture the experience of listening to all of this music, which extends in all directions with a profligate and riotous force of will. The opening piece refers to the Jenkins Orphanage bands which nurtured the trumpeters Cat Anderson and Jabbo Smith and the swing guitarist Freddie Green, and already it seems to sway against the timeline of history, embodying a bit of ragtime and stride before prefiguring not only rock and roll but the overdriven amplifiers of the late sixties, then segueing into the brassiness of a marching band and settling into a staccato swing before the track returns to its opening vaudeville histrionics. ‘Aaron Copland Has the Blues’ features a twelve-bar progression on the bass, and Lowe with his ensemble then pays homage to ‘the truly great black rocker’ Bo Diddley.
On ‘Laughin’ with Louis’ he loosely transcribes what he portrays as a ‘stoned-out’ Armstrong solo, ‘weirdly boppish at times, yet basically a free improvisation’. There is a bit of compare and contrast as the band celebrate the cornetist Bix Beiderbecke, whose tempered melodies were often juxtaposed with his contemporary Armstrong’s full-throated approach, and Dave Schildkraut, here reified through a rendition of ‘Saints’, whose sound on the saxophone sometimes saw him mistaken for Charlie Parker.
While the orchestra pay the requisite attention to the likes of Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Lester Young, there is also a revisionist streak to Louis Armstrong’s America as Lowe seeks to recuperate such names as the Reverend Utah Smith, who he describes as the ‘greatest guitar evangelist’ and an unheralded forebear of rock and roll (and who chaired a ‘Negro revival meeting’ where he delivered religious messages with the aid of his electric guitar as one of a series of ‘Coffee Concerts’ at the Museum of Modern Art in the spring of 1941), plus James Reese Europe, the New York City bandleader of the 1910s, who Lowe hoists up as ‘the first great black musical liberator of the 20th century’.
In a similar vein we find the three-finger plucks and strummed resonances of Dock Walsh of the Carolina Tar Heels, an old time string band, and the ascent of Claude Ely, the Holiness Pentecostal preacher and recording artist whose tent revivals were attended by a young Elvis Presley. Yet at the same time when it is Steve Albini who is ascending the firmament, ‘at an angle of forty-five degrees like a shot off a shovel’, the opening cry of ‘One, two, one two fuck you!’ is redolent of The Ramones or Iggy Pop, who began ‘One, two, fuck you pricks!’ on a famous live rendition of his deliciously titled song ‘Cock in My Pocket’.
This is no tome of crabby historicism but a living and breathing record which has fun with all of its forms, and is willing to poke and prod or parody its targets even while embracing them as part of a shared culture. There is even what sounds like a reference to the ubiquitous ‘Baby Shark’ motif, which has itself been tied back to earlier twentieth century camp music.
The cast here includes some of Lowe’s recent collaborators like Aaron Johnson, Brian Simontacchi, Lewis Porter, Kreston Osgood and Ray Suhy, plus such standout names as Matthew Shipp, Loren Schoenberg, Ray Anderson, Marc Ribot and Ursula Oppens, with the leader playing tenor saxophone and piano. ‘Pleased’ channels the funk of James Brown, the thirty-sixth track ‘Apocalypse Next’ commences the second volume of the set with one of several interpolations of Jimi Hendrix, while ‘Dance of the Occupiers’ points its appendages towards the ‘Dance of the Octopus’ by Red Norvo and Benny Goodman, who combined according to the liner notes in 1933 to ‘present the very first jazz avant-garde’.
The ‘Middlebrow Blues’ which seeks to encapsulate William Grant Still ekes in the direction of DeBarge and Tupac Shakur, while ‘John Cage Turns the Page (Or 3:02)’ makes good on its title amid some snickering, bowed strings and plenty of rustling paper, and ‘Lewis Lewis’ traces a pathway from Richard Berry and The Kingsmen to the lustiness of Prince. ‘Sorrow Song: On the Cooling Board’ is a duet between Lowe and Matthew Shipp, with its burnished horn and sinking keys making for a lovely pastoral with blackened edges. Elsewhere Huntley McSwain provides a handful of winsome vocals.
Louis Armstrong’s America is about much more than jazz and its malcontents. B-movie actresses dot the parking lots and alleyways, LGBTQ icons like Gladys Bentley and Candy Darling also litter the scene and Lowe confides a personal pantheon of writers such as the Greenwich Village dadaist Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, the New York Intellectual vanguard Isaac Rosenfeld who for Lowe embodies both a distinctly linear brand of modernism and a Jewish sense of humour, which he locates as the conflux of compassion and ridicule, plus the Cleveland poet d.a. levy whose untimely death by self-inflicted shotgun wound is another of this record’s preoccupations.
As they approach a quarter-century of collaboration, it is a Frode Haltli composition which introduces the new album by the accordionist and the saxophonist Trygve Seim, with ‘Du, mi tid’ redolent of the bal-musette but more spectral and haunting as winding drones with their rippling overtones are offset by gusty horn cries then a few more whimsical grace notes. From Argentina to Portugal by way of Berklee and the avant-garde scene in New York City, the trio of Leo Genovese, Demian Cabaud and Marcos Cavaleiro return for Estrellero 2, with the pianist Genovese’s bright and buoyant ‘Suspendido’ stretching even farther afield as it borrows from the chaabi rhythms of the Berbers of North Africa.
Darius Jones follows up last year’s standout fLuXkit Vancouver (i̶t̶s̶ suite but sacred) with Legend of e’Boi (The Hypervigilant Eye), the seventh chapter in his expansive Man’ish Boy epic, as his alto’s stygian squawks on ‘Another Kind of Forever’ are matched by Chris Lightfoot’s plunging bass and Gerald Cleaver’s skittering then encircling percussion. Matt Mitchell sets his longtime trio to wax with Zealous Angles a description of method as the pianist alongside the bassist Chris Tordini and drummer Matt Weiss breach Mitchell’s melodic lines from all sides, finding meaning in multiplicity and a sense of freedom through repetition.
The prolific Ivo Perelman seems to have done it all, but in fact the free saxophonist and Matthew Shipp collaborator has worked with only two vocalists during the course of his long career: his compatriot Flora Purim who was already a Brazilian hero and a fusion icon when she brought her steep range and airy bossa nova and jazz stylings to his breakthrough albums Ivo and Children of Ibeji with their candomblé rhythms and folk motifs; and the Czech actress turned violinist and songstress Iva Bittová.
Now add Fay Victor to the mix, whose freeform theatrics proffer a rare match for Perelman’s own improvisational manner, her penchant for wailing scats and conversational chatter capable of meeting his upper-register squalls and trenchant though sometimes overcast lyricism, at least on paper.
Earlier this year Victor rode Chris Tordini’s acoustic bass all the way down in a dolorous homage to David Lynch, Peter Ivers and the chipmunk cheeks and squirrelly aspect of the Lady in the Radiator, a calamity dance atop Vinnie Sperrazza’s tumbling drums while the twining reed of Charlotte Greve’s alto saxophone provided the tether. And after that rendition of ‘In Heaven’ with The Choir Invisible, the vocalist with Michaël Attias on alto and baritone saxophones, Anthony Coleman on the piano, Ratzo Harris on bass and Tom Rainey on drums presented for the first time a full programme of lyrics for a selection of material by Herbie Nichols, the pianist and composer who remains best known as the co-writer of the Billie Holiday standard ‘Lady Sings the Blues’. A decade in the making, the Herbie Nichols SUNG project included a ‘Descent Into Madness’, the elegant though vampy and boozy ‘Tonight’, a swinging ‘Shuffle Montgomery’ and bluesy ‘Sinners, All of Us!’ and the album’s title piece ‘Life Is Funny That Way’.
Meanwhile the rapacious Perelman has been on a tear, though he took a more reserved and overtly lyrical bent on some of his latest works, eliding the labours of the day and tentatively Embracing the Unknown alongside Chad Fowler on the stritch and saxello with Reggie Workman on the double bass and Andrew Cyrille on drums comprising a legendary rhythm section, then slipping into a mellower groove with new collaborative partners Mark Helias and Tom Rainey for the samba-licked spiritualism of Truth Seeker.
That record on the Polish label Fundacja Słuchaj was squeezed between a rare outing with a larger ensemble on Seven Skies Orchestra and the trio album Ephemeral Shapes with Aruán Ortiz and Ramón López. Never out of the recording studio, there have been fresh duo albums with Nate Wooley, Elliott Sharp and the drummer Tom Rainey, an offshoot of those Truth Seeker sessions, while some of that renewed emphasis on melodicism was apparent on Water Music by the Ivo Perelman Quartet, before the saxophonist settled in with his favourite dance partner, the pianist Matthew Shipp for a Magical Incantation which no less an authority than Shipp himself described as:
a major major statement in jazz history. It is the height of the work I’ve done with Ivo and the height of what can be done in a duo setting with piano.
Messa Di Voce with Fay Victor, where the saxophonist and singer are accompanied by Joe Morris on bass and the drummer López, staggers and careens from its first moments as Victor engages in a tipsy then headlong display of scatting and vocalese, sometimes teeth chattering while Perelman’s tenor conjures the sound of air rushing out of a balloon. Divided into two sides or parts of four and then five movements, the second piece begins as a steeped ritual before becoming more rubbery and dizzying with a few rasping snarls.
The title refers to the singing technique messa di voce, a type of ornament whereby the vocalist executes a crescendo and decrescendo or diminuendo while carrying a long sustained tone. Described as a technique of swelling tones, Victor might approach the practise on some of the rowdier tracks from Messa Di Voce, where Perelman’s saxophone and her voice approach the same register, though her habit during these freakouts and breakdowns is for shorter phrases, sudden cutoffs, snarls and stabs.
On the other hand the third track from the album is more hushed and only faintly babbling, like an aria being performed out at sea. Then on the final movement of the first side, the short squibs and squeals of Ivo Perelman’s tenor sax splay out over a supple mesh of bass and drums, from rattles and creaks to whirlpools and eddies as the musicians gather momentum before grinding or yawning to a halt. Over the second side of Messa Di Voce the phrases are more sustained, the melodies are both sparer and more pronounced and Fay Victor’s vocals are more breathy and bluesy when they do appear, with the fifth movement through operatic recitative reaching a final wailing climax.
The ever prolific Laura Cannell describes first hearing the music of the composer and mystic Hildegard von Bingen around 1997 when she left rural Norfolk and embarked on the London College of Music for her undergraduate degree. Her uncle, a professor of microbiology with a keen interest in early music, played her the Canticles of Ecstasy by the long-running ensemble Sequentia, an album of Hildegard’s distinctive plainsong performed by a collection of female singers with Cannell writing ‘I confess I have been ‘borrowing’ the CD ever since’.
Sandwiched between her Year of Lore series and the Lori Goldston collaboration The Deer Are Small and the Rabbits Are Big, her new solo album reimagines the music of Hildegard, and is billed as both a secular offering and a call across the centuries while paying tribute to her uncle and processing what she describes as an anxiety disorder. Returning to the bass recorder which featured on her 2022 standout Antiphony of the Trees while adding a twelve-string knee harp, tuned in unequal temperament as a counter to the fixed pitch of the recorder, Cannell captured these twelve improvisations in single takes astride the vaulted ceilings and battered oak pews of a familiar haunt, the round-tower church of St Andrew’s in Raveningham.
Hildegard von Bingen spent her life as a Benedictine abbess in the Rhineland and from her early childhood reported a series of visions, which she called umbra viventis lucis or the reflection of the living light. Long recognised as a saint, in 2012 she was proclaimed by Pope Benedict XVI as only the thirty-fifth Doctor of the Church. She was a renowned philosopher and herbalist and even devised her own private language as a correlate to her spiritual work, yet she is perhaps best known as a prolific composer of medieval plainsong from hymns and antiphons to the Ordo Virtutum, which is recognised as the world’s oldest extant morality play.
From 1982 the Sequentia ensemble founded by Benjamin Bagby and Barbara Thornton committed to a complete edition of Hildegard’s works, beginning with the Ordo Virtutum and including their acclaimed bestseller Canticles of Ecstasy before concluding in 2013 with Celestial Hierarchy, which featured the flautist Norbert Rodenkirchen alongside a multi-generational ensemble of women’s voices and celebrated Hildegard’s formal canonisation of 2012.
Beyond the practitioners of early music her compositions have been interpreted by the filmmaker David Lynch and the musician Jocelyn Montgomery, the saxophonist and composer John Zorn and the producer and composer David Chalmin with the guitarist Bryce Dessner of The National, while the YouTube channel Hildegard von Blingin at least keeps her name in the cycle, devoted as it is to old-timey covers of popular songs featuring medieval instrumentation and Shakespearean pastiche.
Yet with her reputation as a modern day funnel of medieval forms, someone who with a naturalist bent can turn a potentially musty history of monophony and polyphony both liturgical and secular to contemporary ends in the vein of experimental folk and minimalist drone, there is nobody more suited to a crossover portrayal of Hildegard’s voice and work than Cannell, who brings a sense of real personal attachment to each of her many projects.
Hildegard collected her cycle of seventy-seven liturgical songs under the title Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum or Symphony of the Harmony of Celestial Revelations. With a nod to that phrase, the opening track from The Rituals of Hildegard Reimagined plunges us straight into a swooning and beckoning darkness. Carried by the plangent tones of the bass recorder, these ‘cosmic spheres’ are portals of self-discovery and they go where we might fear to tread. There is a blackness as well as a sense of solace to the pieces on this album, with Cannell noting that she tends to revisit Hildegard’s own compositions ‘at times when I feel overwhelmed, or when I need to reset my inner musical dialogue’, but ‘See the Moon and the Stars’ is more rustic and folksy, with a percussive element nestled between the layers of bass recorder through her fingerings and the resultant vibratos.
When the knee harp comes in on the third track its plucks and overtones carry a spectral quality which stretches beyond the title of ‘Earthly Music’, perhaps redolent of a spiritual yearning or simply a time when the course and matter of life was more proximate to death. ‘O Ignee Spiritus Reimagined’, from a hymn which the International Society of Hildegard von Bingen studies describes as so taut and sparse as to be one of her ‘less characteristic though no less poetic compositions’, to my naif ears has the quality of a festive carol, with a hint in the opening bars of the melody from ‘God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen’.
From the shorter spurts, almost like the puffs of a steam engine, which overlay the longer bass recorder drones of ‘The Rituals of Hildegard’ to the more restful yet watchful gaze of ‘Flying North’ and the cascading harp of ‘Everything is Hidden in You’, which carries the shape of a sitar in Hindustani classical raga, other songs on The Rituals of Hildegard Reimagined might call to mind such diverse fare as the Pharcyde’s reedy hip hop classic ‘Passin’ Me By’, the soundtrack including the song ‘Walking in the Air’ from the animated film The Snowman and the burgeoning, shedding harp and strings coda to ‘Go Long’ from Joanna Newsom’s triple album Have One on Me.
‘O Mater Omnis Gaudii’, perhaps a more inclusive take on Hildegard’s ‘O Pater omnium’, sounds humble and workaday, an accompaniment to life rather than a screed or salve, while ‘A Feather on the Breath’ evokes both Hildegard’s famous self-description and the 1982 album by the soprano Emma Kirkby and the British vocal ensemble Gothic Voices, an influential early music recording which was subsequently sampled by The Beloved and Orbital as a local scene for house and techno began to take shape. Cannell’s piece on the other hand blends a twinkling and lilting top line of harp with brassy spurts on the bass recorder, for a jazzy and bluesy sound which approximates the saxophone or horn and seems to utilise in a manner associated with the bass or alto of Colin Stetson a circular breathing technique.
There is a nice juxtaposition between these fuller and livelier tracks on the harp and the kind of purer sustained tones of the bass recorder. We get that mix again from ‘Ad Celestum Armoniam’ to the fountains and fireworks of ‘Everything is Hidden in You’, before the penultimate track ‘Remain Brave in a World that is being Shipwrecked’ wafts up from the hull and the closer resounds with the plaintive cry of a lone birdcall, as Cannell who has embodied the skies from rooks and crows to her spirit animal the raven signs off on Hildegard with the chug chug chug of ‘A Lost Nightingale’.
A chime introduces Jessica Ackerley’s new album All Of the Colours Are Singing, like a sublimated elevator call or shop bell, and then a couple more sound out at a lower pitch through the rustling of what might be beaded curtains before in the manner of a morning mist or smoke rising from peat, the drone of a viola and bass dispel the illusion. For we are not in a store but a clearing, as the slender crashes, rolls and other gestures of the drums nudge for a little space, the viola bows and bends or furiously splinters and violin arcs elegantly overhead as Ackerley’s electric guitar stays embedded within the centre.
The guitarist possesses great range and subtlety on her instrument as she explores the gradients of scuzzy noise and limpid nature, here for the most part harnessing her more extreme tendencies in pursuit of something more porous and classical. In that sense the record evokes the solo sketch Wave: Volume I, a kind of shelter from the storm as during a year in Honolulu she was inspired by the sinuous waves and pulsing frequencies of the Pacific Ocean, more than the searing improvisations of SSWAN or even the torchlight excursions and staggered Americana of her trio album All Hope With Sleeping Minds which she released with Chaz Prymek and Nick Turner earlier this year.
All Of the Colours Are Singing was recorded between Honolulu and New York City, with Ackerley feeling the pull of both locations as she assembled the core trio of her electric guitar with Walter Stinson on the upright bass and Aaron Edgcomb on drums while Concetta Abbate tracked the string arrangements back in Queens at the other side of a continent, playing the violin on the opening two tracks and imbuing the second side with the deeper and coarser tones of her viola.
Born in Alberta but making her name over the span of a decade in New York City, where she was drawn to the rock and noise scenes as well as the city’s enduring and ever revolving free jazz circuit, Ackerley moved to Hawaii to pursue a PhD. As she was producing All Of the Colours Are Singing her closest friend in Honolulu was diagnosed with cancer, which had a sobering effect on the rhythms of the record, adding to the sense of flux before the final masters were completed this past February. Her friend would pass away just one week later.
Hence all the colours between expectancy and anxiety, familiarity and uncertainty, joy and grief. ‘Forward motion is never a straight line’ treads a little bit warily and when it picks up speed, it does so with a start and a scamper rather than with any real sense of surety. Beyond the specifics the mood and tone might therefore recall the Cy Coleman standard ‘I Walk a Little Faster’ with its rumpled sandcastles and sturdy chin. The song becomes sparer in the middle section as Ackerley’s jerky plucks stagger across the scene, before meatier riffs and drum rolls, which include the sound of Edgcomb’s sticks rubbing together, race towards an inevitable corner, a crossroads or a checkpoint.
Maintaining the air of uncertainty, ‘To See Takes Time’ is short and specious but seems content to linger in this space if only for a brief while, before the composition warps and seems to play in reverse as it builds elliptically towards the title piece.
Little paint daubs in the form of dialup harmonics make for an elegant and variegated canvas on ‘All of the colours are singing’, which is also the record’s centrepiece. Ackerley’s electric guitar is accompanied by the lush strings of Abbate’s viola, as Stinson plays a triumphant and almost euphoric upright bass while Edgcomb pulsates behind the drum kit. More hopeful and verdant, it begins to gather and swell through the eager drum rolls and oscillating strings of the last minute. Yet on ‘The dots are the connections’ some of that positivity stalls, giving way to a circular piece which spins at moments like a Ferris wheel ride or those whirligig cups and saucers, but mostly feels like a heedless march down the sidewalk where the drifter or excursionist has already put up the shutters.
Defying the still life of its title, ‘Nature Morte: Time is Fleeting’ proves more cloudy and atmospheric but also more purposeful, as over droning strings and bass plus reverberating cymbals Ackerley puts on her hiking boots, making the ascent on foot by virtue of some judicious guitar tremolos. Then the sky breaks and we are suddenly walking on air, a rarified space of sweeping strings, walking bass, martial drums and Ackerley’s shapeshifting guitar as the ensemble play with a sense of grace and some celestial yearning. Just one lone quavering string serves as a sign of portent, before those familiar clouds cover over the scene, leaving our hiker thoroughly stranded.
If all of these manoeuvres appear to be building towards something more definitive, the grand finale proves no less open-ended. All Of the Colours Are Singing closes with a ‘Conclusion: In Four Micro Parts’ which features spiky and angular minimal rock in the manner of Shellac plus the smudged bass lines and strained or incandescent strings of Ackerley’s background in free jazz, as she burbles away on the guitar and a few claves mark ragged time in the middle section. A late turn embraces contemporary classical pastoralism and there is still just enough room for one final lapsed shimmy, bumping into walls and rushing towards that which cannot be divined as the quartet catch on their heels with a leery glance back over their shoulder.
The Shenzhen bookstore, record label and live venue Old Heaven Books releases a couple of solo recordings by Mamer, who performed on consecutive nights in the middle of June for the fifth and sixth installments of his ‘Imitator’ series.
Wildly different though both feature Mamer on the electric guitar, the first night is packed to the brim with fraying distortions and staticky repetitions over strapping backbeats. When droning and chant-like vocals make their presence felt on the second track from Underground Factory, the result is like Super æ crossed with Metal Machine Music, and as the live album embraces more of the trappings of industrial noise in its second half, the sometimes piercing feedback gives way to angular post-punk melodies and some of the funkier electronic ripples which were already latent in Kraftwerk before they were picked up by the Detroit techno pioneers, with the first part of the sixth and final track on Underground Factory redolent of the shimmying Trans-Europe Express standout ‘Showroom Dummies’.
The following night Mamer forewent the drum machines, the blips and beeps and more salacious shards of his most scabrous shredding, turning instead to a set of traditional Kazakh and Tatar folk tunes plus a few original compositions. The title for the performance is Imitate Sky but the record depicts a rapt gaze bounded by the noise of a crackling fire, or maybe just the last few smouldering embers. Slow and spellbinding and occasionally redolent of Americana or primitivism, the record blazes to life at the halfway point, at the tail-end of the track ‘蔓草 Trailing Plant / Xermawek’, but far from a cauldron of sound the second side of the album is even more spectral with a few heaters like on the stormy ‘黑云雀 Dark Sparrow / Kara Torgay’ before a searing denouement.
Trygve Seim & Frode Haltli – ‘Du, mi tid’
Darius Jones – ‘Another Kind of Forever’
马木尔 Mamer – ‘未知的旋律 Unknown Melody / Bêlgisiz aüên’
Leo Genovese, Demian Cabaud and Marcos Cavaleiro – ‘Suspendido’
Ivo Perelman, Fay Victor, Joe Morris and Ramon López – ‘II – Two’
Allen Lowe & the Constant Sorrow Orchestra – ‘Sorrow Song: On the Cooling Board’
Jessica Ackerley – ‘Nature Morte: Time is Fleeting’
