Tracks of the Week 18.05.24

With his distinctive sound on the saxophone, a pulsating and oscillating rush of brass which in epic Odyssean fashion evokes at once the threshing and winnowing of wheat chaff and the inescapable propulsion of waves out at sea, Colin Stetson unveils the title track of his upcoming album The love it took to leave you. Billed as both his first full-length solo outing since 2017, following the collaboration-heavy swirls and eddies of last year’s When we were that what wept for the sea, and as a sort of narrative prequel to the New History Warfare trilogy which cemented his swashbuckling reputation, the album was recorded over the course of one week in early 2023 at Fonderie Darling, a former metalworks facility in Montreal with a voluminous main room which still maintains its raw architecture of brick, concrete and steel.

Utilising an array of microphones including a dog-collar device attached to his throat and his virtuosic circular breathing technique, Stetson captured the eleven tracks of The love it took to leave you in single takes without overdubs or effects, casting his alto and bass saxophones and contrabass clarinet across the tarred walls and exposed beams of the main gallery with the same amplification which he uses for his live performances, saturating and no doubt unshackling the very foundations of the facility. Characterising the result as his most fully-realised work to date, Stetson says that the title track on solo alto saxophone ‘is a love letter to self and to solitude and to tall old trees that sway and creak in the wind and rain’.

Anybody who has spent any time on the internet is probably familiar with the impish, self-satisfied, contented and almost ineffably cute smile of the leucistic axolotl, a confirmed juvenile and one of the most famous types of salamander in the world with its pale pink hue, black eyes and plummy wisps for external gills. The composer and bassist Stephan Crump, who has the oddities and quiddities of the natural world on his mind following the brackish excursion of Slow Water, reunites his Borderlands Trio with Kris Davis on the piano and Erin McPherson on drums for their third album Rewilder, with the smudged bass and chiming far-off percussion of ‘Axolotl’ sounding like a day’s labour or a diminutive creature scrabbling beneath the murk until the keys of Davis slowly make their presence felt, building up to a tenuous shimmer whereby a bit of sunlight and levity cuts through the enveloping gloom.

The last Shellac album lands with almost shockingly poor taste just ten days after the untimely death of Steve Albini, which in a perverse way makes it rather apt. Albini may have renounced the ‘edgelord’ tendencies of his youth, accepting that ‘I and others of my generation have not been held to task enough for words and behaviour that ultimately contributed to a coarsening society’, but on To All Trains he and his bandmates Todd Trainer and Bob Weston are typically scabrous. If their sixth and unexpectedly final release is poignant only in the somewhat archaic sense of pungent to the smell, piquant or sharp, still the suggestively-titled To All Trains is a fitting cap to a formidable career, preoccupied with death and summarising some of his lifelong bête noirs, while even the cover photograph from the waiting room of Chicago Union Station, rendered in black and white, captures the sense of a terminus with an air of still bristling anticipation.

The sound from the first stabs of gnarly guitar is typically Shellac, a brand of lean, sinewy and acerbic post-punk which they have made their own over the course of three decades, ‘WSOD’ leading off with the line ‘I aspire to bronze, but I’ll settle for lead’ which is really a perfect summation of their dynamic, as Weston’s burnished yet fraying bass rubs up against the angularity of Albini’s guitar while Trainer’s pummelling drums land with a mechanised clatter. The track – which apparently stands for ‘World Series Of Dick-Sucking’ – carries a wiry, filmic quality which evokes the free-for-all drama of a spaghetti Western, but as usual the trio keep things curt as well as taut as they step up to collect their battered medals.

Weston shifts readily from walking bass lines to rapid oscillations like the rebounding of a cable with barely any slack, accompanied by the snarling twang of Albini’s guitar and Trainer’s elastic percussion, as To All Trains drips with a molasses-thick brew of caustic sarcasm and irreverent black humour. After scuttling a scene on ‘Chick New Wave’, another standout track ‘Tattoos’ queries ‘your urgent need to mingle’ and scans like a screed about influence, the illicit but time-honoured practice of copping someone else’s tunes, which is also a theme of the metal-pinching and ecologically-minded ‘Scrappers’ and the looser ‘How I Wrote How I Wrote Elastic Man (cock & bull)’, a tribute to The Fall and a bluntly elliptical account of the songwriting process. Tracks like ‘Chick New Wave’ and ‘Scrappers’ have been live staples as the band steadily ground out the follow-up to 2014’s monkey grip Dude Incredible.

The mesh girdle (or chastity cage) of ‘Wednesday’ ferries a folk melody, a sort of sea shanty about bent backs and the marital act, with brains splattered against the kitchen wall before daybreak on Maundy Thursday. And ‘Days Are Dogs’ charts progress through regret, a cowbell introducing a pulchritudinous yet punctuated groove before Albini broaches one of his favourite pastimes. He semi-famously once said that the first Shellac album At Action Park was all about baseball and Canada, and perhaps he would have found a kindred spirit or viewed as anathema the cult series Northwoods Baseball Sleep Radio, whose episodes entail fake broadcasts of sleepy small-town ballgames, because Shellac always laboured resolutely at their own pace.

After shuttering Big Black at the height of their success and embarking on a career as an audio engineer, Albini became synonymous with the alternative rock boom of the early nineties as he worked on signal albums by the Pixies, The Breeders, PJ Harvey and Nirvana. A proponent of analog recording who largely eschewed overdubs and effects, he excelled at capturing the intimacies of a live band whether they were playing full-throttle noise or something more ornate, aiding the likes of Will Oldham, Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Joanna Newsom up to and including his work on the trenchant Fire! album Testament from earlier this year.

A fervent critic of the music industry, his riposte lay simply in being true to one’s own vision and living in the moment. As the itchy, scratchy and sometimes gossamery ‘I Don’t Fear Hell’ yanks the cabin curtain on To All Trains, he ekes out a refrain which sounds like an apposite farewell, a skewed barb from the vast beyond, a bloodied grin as he butts heads with the grim reaper, to wit:

Something something something when this is over
I’ll leap in my grave like the arms of a lover
And if there’s a heaven, I hope they’re havin’ fun
‘Cause if there’s a hell, I’m gonna know everyone!

Yet if we’re looking for a night cap or coda to Steve Albini’s career it might as well come a few tracks back, on the driving and loaded ‘Days Are Dogs’ when he clearly enunciates ‘If I can’t take it with me, I’ll have it all now’. Judging by mistakes made, lessons learned and the quality of his output, that’s a job well done.

With interludes drawn from the novels of Herman Melville and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the poetry of Anne Carson and the text of the King James Bible, the composer Christopher Cerrone pays tribute to the beauty and elegance of the Beaufort scale, as the listener – almost palpably buffeted by high waves and their overhanging crests, the rolling seas and their patches of foam and spume – is left only to wonder whether the siren calls of the nine-strong Lorelei Ensemble augur or help to ward off imminent catastrophe, whether the capsizing of their vessel or structural damage and the uprooting of trees as the storm makes its way inland.

More tranquil, from the banks of the sleepy Senegalese fishing town of Podor which is home to the great Baaba Maal, the loping rhythms of the self-taught guitarist and folklorist Tidiane Thiam capture a golden hour while calling on his fellow travellers from the river valley and beyond to change old ways of thinking, adding ‘It’s time for Africans to take their destiny into their own hands’.

Back in 2017 as the label was busy finding its feet, the Kampala-based outsider bastion Nyege Nyege Tapes introduced the world to the Sounds of Sisso, whose upstart studio in the Mburahati ghetto on the outskirts of Dar es Salaam was pioneering the breakneck speeds and interlocking rhythms of singeli. Sounds of Sisso helped to put both the producer and the label on the map, establishing Dar es Saleem and its singeli scene as a hotspot for cutting-edge contemporary dance music.

By digitising the patterns of taarab – which originated on the island of Zanzibar as a fusion of Swahili tunes and Middle Eastern rhythms before Siti binti Saad and her successors brought the genre to popularity across the whole of Tanzania, and is traditionally played by acoustic ensembles with an accordion, violin, oud or qanun carrying the melody over tablah drums, maracas and claves and the sometimes dolorous tow of double bass or cello – and ratcheting up the tempo to more than 200 beats per minute, the singeli proffered by Sisso and his studio distinguished itself from both the hip hop-induced sound of bongo flava and the more pop-orientated stylings of early practitioners like Msaga Sumu. More than afrobeats, reggae or R&B, this radical singeli shares plenty in common with Chicago footwork and juke, the breakbeats of happy hardcore and the distorted kicks of gabber, Lisbon and Príncipe’s summatory batida sound which draws from kuduros, tarraxinha and zouk and modern fast-paced iterations of soca music.

Following the release of Sounds of Sisso, over the next few years Nyege Nyege Tapes returned to Dar es Salaam and Sisso Records to capture his fellow producers Bamba Pana and Jay Mitta, before hopping over to the neighbouring Pamoja Records for a game of compare and contrast by way of Duke’s punkish abrasions, temporal smears and diverse samples. More recently the dizzying cybernetics of DJ Travella have offered a new pathway for the sound, yet with Singeli Ya Maajabu the original honcho Sisso accompanied by Maiko on keys stakes his claim as still the form’s most deliriously intrepid innovator.

There’s a frantic and slightly unhinged yet breezily carefree, pitch-shifted buoyancy to Singeli Ya Maajabu as Sisso and Maiko drive the jerky rhythms of singeli rotor blades-spinning up through the atmosphere. The record kicks off with ‘Kivinje’ as a sort of plastic playhouse version of the ubiquitous Kingsmen classic ‘Louie Louie’. The music video for the track shows Sisso and Maiko upside down as they play pat-a-cake and hammer away at their Yamaha PSS-170 and MacBook keyboards, a disorientating image which is hard to shake as over the course of the album melodies seem to be cut up and stuck back together in the manner of a collage as beats squelch and ping from all directions.

From the sheer giddiness of ‘Kivinje’, the second track ‘Kazi Ipo’ carries the same dynamics but a more futuristic bent, the amateur reenactment of a gravity assist manoeuvre through spaceship blips and beeps, a ramshackle take on the stargate sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Almost inevitably on first listen the aural onslaught of rapidly oscillating synths and polyrhythmic kicks begins to bleed together, with different tracks taking on the characteristics of mashups and remixes as Maiko’s keys provide a bit of local colour, playing out like iterations on a theme, variously taking in the environs of Dar es Salaam from the gleaming high-rises and cable bridges of the rapidly growing financial hub to the grimier outskirts and densely-packed former squats of Tandale and Manzese, elsewhere its teeming port, fish markets, marine reserves and abundance of sandy beaches.

‘Uhondo’ evokes the darker atmospherics of baile funk, especially the witchcraft of bruxaria with its shrill whistling tuin, while the rapt tumbling of ‘Kiboko’ with its electric piano stabs, tight bass lines and manically clopping mallet percussion is described as a ‘frothy tribute’ to Billboard powerhouses The Neptunes. Slapped with a big grin, the ebullient synths and pounding drum rolls of ‘Timua’ seem to capture the joy of dance within a neon forcefield, ‘Mangwale’ offers a momentary breather through stretched, melismatic choral vocals, whale-like and redolent of the Cocteau Twins, and ‘Rusha’ is an overdriven take on afrobeats spurred on by guttural Maasai chanting.

The keyboardist Maiko grew up in eastern Tanzania, near the city of Morogoro which is colloquially known as ‘mji kasoro bahari’ or ‘the city short of an ocean’. Perhaps inspired by his new surrounds, after relocating to Dar es Salaam and linking up with Sisso his work seems imperceptibly drawn towards both interstellar oddities and the aqueous depths, with ‘Jimwage’ bubbling under and bleating like the sonar of a submersible. On the spectral and shadowy ‘Mizuka’ a watery static is pummelled by crunching beats and industrial terraforming before their cup runneth over. ‘Njopeka’ with its helicopter ascent sounds like a whistle-stop tour through the rest of Singeli Ya Maajabu, a recapitulation of themes before the blades whir to a halt.

With the spring of a pogo stick ‘Shida’ takes the listener on an acid-fuelled trip, and ‘Zakwao’ serves as a celebratory escalator ride back down to earth replete with balloons and ticker tape. That leaves ‘Ganzi’ which closes Singeli Ya Maajabu as a techno-laced thumper, far from retreating inward or taking a victory lap riding a hoverboard and pumping both arms as an alien voice repeats ‘this is the sound of speed’, before zipping off in search of new horizons.

From trippy pan flutes to throbbing bass swells and chopped-up breaks, the prolific Dj Manny and TCJ chart new territory as they glide down their pensive and dusky lost highway. Conceiving each track as an ecosystem, on Alisma the producer Clarice Calvo-Pinsolle as Lamina figures the divine proportions and floating or submerged frolics of water plantains. For his debut Garden of Ediacara the sound artist Ludwig Berger also unfolds an ecofiction, inspired by the soft-bodied organisms of his chosen geological period which he depicts as amorphous blobs without eyes or bones, plus hydrofeminism and related works like the science fiction novel A Door into Ocean by Joan Slonczewski, with the track titles written by Daisy Lafarge cohering as a poem:

what seed quests for a coralline mud slump
where the body’s distant arrivals
bake airwaves into symbols?
like aurochs who fraternized with syntax of the riverbed
we stop short, frothy, outdoing the grass
rake a song-gush from the outcrop
or the noun of naïve particles
leeching off the glow-work of organ rooms
we go candied in the marrow
grow dream-bark, a tree

And charting a course through the musical desert, Lars Bartkuhn returns to the sub-Saharan samples which characterised the singles ‘Nomad’ and ‘Massai’ from 2016, blending his deep house innervations with a longstanding interest in Latin jazz, world fusion and the seventies catalogue of ECM – from Jan Garbarek and Bennie Maupin to Terje Rypdal and Egberto Gismonti but especially everything related to Pat Metheny – while adding lashings of fourth world futurism and incorporating hand percussion, kalimba, piano, voice and guitars to his modular synthesizers for his most ravishing yet personal statement yet.

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Colin Stetson – ‘The love it took to leave you’