Seventeen years removed from his last studio album, the former OutKast frontman André 3000 says that ‘sometimes it feels inauthentic for me to rap because I don’t have anything to talk about in that way’. Instead at the tender age of 48 the musician has embarked on a more fulsome embrace of the flute, with a chance encounter with the Los Angeles bandleader Carlos Niño at an Erewhon organic food market in Venice leading 3 Stacks right into the bosom of a still burgeoning celestial jazz movement.
Somewhere between shaman, community leader and interlocutor, André 3000’s surprise album New Blue Sun lies firmly within Niño’s orbit as the cast of players includes the multi-instrumentalist on bells, chimes, cymbals, drums, plants, percussion and gongs, his frequent collaborators Nate Mercereau, Diego Gaeta, Jesse Peterson and Mia Doi Todd, plus the drummer Deantoni Parks who has worked extensively with John Cale, Meshell Ndegeocello and Omar Rodríguez-Lopéz, and the keyboardist Surya Botofasina, son of the acclaimed harpist Radha Botofasina, who spent his childhood under the learning tree of Alice Coltrane listening to her daily bhajans at the Sai Anantam Ashram. Still it is André 3000 who grasps at the wind and gives shape to the improvisations of New Blue Sun, as he pays homage to the Dungeon Family and attempts to recapture the profundities and contortions of an ayahuasca trip in Hawaii through digital wind instruments, the contrabass and various wood or bamboo flutes, effects pedals and the self-purging growls which he calls panther toning, through it all revelling in a spirit of pure excitement and discovery which he likens to ‘watching a child see bubbles for the first time’.
Dissembling 160 beats per minute, for Hypnotized the surreptitious footwork stalwart and former DJ Rashad protege DJ Manny takes a romantic tread through laid-back and reflective rhythm and blues, whose deftly nocturnal pleasure-seeking by turns gives way to acid basslines, frantic dubstep numbers, jungle homages and passages of dark minimalist techno. The album opener ‘Hard Drive’ features the mixed-media artist SUCIA! while from the vault, ‘Ooh Baby’ is a previously unreleased Rashad collaboration which has knocked about via an old μ-Ziq mix from Rotterdam ContainerFest and a lakeside hoedown on YouTube, with ‘Turn Me Up’ described as something like Paul Johnson at his most wild and the penultimate track ‘Lost In Da Jungle’ depicted as a moment of ‘enjoyably hype daftness’ in the manner of early LTJ Bukem.
Hot on the heels of La Permanencia De Los Ecos and I was too young to hear silence, extended improvisations whose chasmic reverberations serve as odes to ancestors and meditations on learning and memory, the saxophonists Camila Nebbia and Patrick Shiroishi team up with the percussionist and Virginian noisemaker Samuel Goff to call for diminished borders on an album which is loosely based on the collection Spit Temple by the Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña. Yanking the curtain and pulling a face at the midday sun, on ‘Jenn’s Terrific Vacation’ the indomitable Danny Brown laments gentrification as Quaranta serves as a spiritual successor to XXX and bookends the rapper’s fortieth year.
Described as an experiment in immediacy, back in 2020 the Portland-based label Sahel Sounds doubled down on its commitment to the music of the Southern Sahara with its searing blend of psychedelic jams, crackling choral textures, roiling dub rhythms and boisterous desert blues. Familiar faces like Etran de L’Aïr and the Nigerien techno pioneer Hama plus newcomers from Bounaly to the Wodaabe guitar group Andal Sukabe were invited to record and send short sessions to Sahel Sounds via WhatsApp, with each performance hosted for one month on Bandcamp while all of the proceeds were wired directly to the musicians.
One of the breakouts from the series, the Malian guitar hero Bounaly marks his scabrous full-length debut through a mixture of regional favourites, traditional standards and original compositions recorded live on location in the capital city of Bamako for the northern diaspora at a Sunday wedding ceremony. Hailing from the riverside town of Niafunké, which was also home to the desert blues pioneer Ali Farka Touré, by the summer of 2012 groups of Tuareg separatists and Islamic jihadists had instigated a campaign against the national government, forcing thousands of displaced northerners to resettle in the Malian capital where Bounaly brings his loping rhythms, pounding kick drums and shredded six-string to bear as the nominal day of rest reaches a frenzied and upbeat climax.
Laura Cannell splits the difference between the chordal drones and winnowing tones of her previous solo albums, which have featured the composer on recorders, pipe organs and her signature overbow violin, and the moonlit electronics which she has embraced under the guise of the Hunteress, most recently on a set of ten synth-clad torch songs which drew inspiration from the destruction horizon left by the ancient Iceni queen and glorious burnout Boudica. Fit for the season, on Midwinter Processionals violin, overbowed violin, bass recorder and double recorders are joined by surging synths as Cannell adapts improvisations recorded from the nave of Norwich Cathedral, underneath its booming beams, ornate roof bosses and lierne vaults which form patterns of lozenges and stars along the ridge.
The New Jersey producer JWords and Brooklyn rapper maassai return as H31R for their latest release HeadSpace, through snapping bars and sci-fi spurts of electronica still boasting their old-school chops as the video for the lead single ‘Backwards’ references ‘Drop’ by The Pharcyde. Frequent collaborators Przemyslaw Krys Drazek and Brent Fuscaldo are joined by Hamid Drake, Tatsu Aoki, Thymme Jones and Joshua Abrams for a weaving and blossoming set of deep jazz grooves on Astral Spirits. The spontaneous arranger Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe issues his tactile and tenebrous score to Grasshopper Republic, which follows a team of intrepid insect trappers into the Ugandan forests as generators are hauled up collapsing mudbanks and chemically-treated bulbs cast a neon-green pall over the tree canopy, while from dankest Döblitz, through church organ, harpsichord, glass tubes and more the duo of Andreas Gerth and Carl Oesterhelt construct a geometry of rhythmics.
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Laura Cannell – ‘Memories of Stars’
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Samuel Goff, Camila Nebbia and Patrick Shiroishi – ‘Esperando Que Todo Desaparezca’
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Przemyslaw Krys Drazek, Brent Fuscaldo, Hamid Drake, Tatsu Aoki and Joshua Abrams – ‘Blossoming’
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Andreas Gerth and Carl Oesterhelt – ‘The geometry of rhythmics’
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Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe – ‘Daylight’
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Danny Brown – ‘Jenn’s Terrific Vacation’ (feat. Kassa Overall)
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DJ Manny – ‘Lost In Da Jungle’
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André 3000 – ‘Dreams Once Buried Beneath the Dungeon Floor Slowly Sprout Into Undying Gardens’
