Eschewing the dilated forms and performative lyrics of their debut album Menneskekollektivet, on their follow-up Selvutsletter the Norwegian duo of Jenny Hval and Håvard Volden dive headlong into the shared memories and distilled experiences of their youth, mining the nineties for shreds of old band practices and the digitised squibs and pixelated bits which made up the formative years of the internet, recalled through a nocturnal clamour of swooping melodies, smothered drum machines and rattling guitar. In their own words the title Selvutsletter edges towards a sort of self-effacement, variously recognised as self-erasure or ‘Someone who is cleaning out themselves. Performing exorcism. Or perhaps just getting older, less interested in their own present self’. The result is the rush of renewal and a skirting of the borders of genre, as together Hval and Volden weave and unweave their bodies through a careening and helter-skelter flood of music, hollowing out the plush halls of avant-pop.
Returning to the site of his conservatory studies on both sides of the fall of communism, the composer and pianist Girma Yifrashewa collaborates with Bulgarian musicians and the Sofia Philharmonic Orchestra to unspool his own brand of Ethiopian classical music, which runs freely from Amharic and Balkan folk traditions to the American plains in a winsome and rollicking act of creation. Lucy Liyou offers a distended eulogy to a grandparent, managing to profoundly blur the lines between gospel music, the theatricality and grieving catharsis of pansori, and the lurching spaciousness of Parade-era Prince.
Beyond such luminaries as Sonny Boy Williamson, Larry Adler, Tommy Reilly, Toots Thielemans and George Winston, the list of solo harmonica practitioners would appear vanishingly small, but the humble free reed mouth organ fares better across the mountains and valleys of eastern and southeastern Asia, from the polyphonic sheng and saenghwang used in Kunqu opera and South Korean courtly traditions to the lusheng, still characteristic of courtship rituals and seasonal festivals among the Miao, the khene which is the national instrument of Laos and the hulusi or gourd flute with its twin drones. Described as a master of dualities, for Two Harmonicas in the Jeweler’s Court the composer Henry Birdsey reworked his instrument from the inside out by accidentally flipping the reed plate of a diatonic harmonica, leading to the discovery of a hitherto impossible arrangement of pitches, unintended dissonances and dense polyphonies. Blowing past the usual connotations of the harmonica, best known as a bastion of the blues, in Bob Dylan’s hands as an emblem of the Greenwich Village folk revival, or the brailleur of Americana as it barrels down broken highways or sweeps across sandstone buttes, Birdsey describes his sound in geological terms as ‘like gazing at the side of a sedimentary basin’ as layers of slowly stacked strata linger and glimmer suspended in time.
The mountain massif of Degelen which overlooks the steppe of northeastern Kazakhstan was part of the Semipalatinsk Test Site complex during the Cold War. As many as 215 underground nuclear explosions were carried out by the Soviet Union before the dissolution of the complex in 1991, and when scavengers on the lookout for copper and iron threatened to come across stockpiles of undetonated plutonium, the Kazakh authorities in collaboration with Russian and American scientists worked for more than a decade to plug dozens of those horizontal tunnels bored into the mountain in a bid to secure the safety of the world to come. But radioactive contamination continues to blight the steppe, its flora and fauna and now mostly deserted villages, with some areas of Degelen now reseeded with perennial grasses, poplar, elm, Tatar maple and weeping birch in an effort to assess potential signs of recovery. On the closing track of her latest album Polygon, which tells the story of forty years of cultural and ecological devastation south of the Irtysh river valley, the Kazakh-British violinist and producer Galya Bisengalieva unfurls a spirit of hopeful defiance which gives way to neither reflection nor sublimation so much as a tautly-poised quietude in the face of horrors done.
Making light of a conspiracy theory which ties the federal reserve to the death of John F. Kennedy, the New York rapper Wiki boasts his staying power over a beat by Tony Seltzer with a trio of bravura verses on his sparkling new single ‘Golden Child’. Ahead of the release of the new phét phét phét album, the pianist and guitarist I. La Catolica and cellist and vocalist Mabe Fratti take the lead on Vidrio by Titanic, a loose and low-slung jazz album which features Jarrett Gilgore on saxophone and Gibran Andrade on drums.
Klein bears an angelic aspect as the shrouded South London producer drops her latest scrapbag of sodden gospel and keening soul, four years on from his last solo album, Danny Brown bookends his fortieth year through the cybernautics of Quaranta which boasts features from MIKE, Kassa Overall and his Bruiser Brigade buddy Bruiser Wolf, while the internet rapper Pink Navel and the producer Kenny Segal dabble in flash memory through the sunshine whimsy of How to Capture Playful. And the Congolese club sensualist Chrisman prepares his fiercest statement to date in the form of 35 tracks of crossbreed trap and Afrohouse mutations, sticky tarraxinha tempos and skeletal club rhythms, drill, gqom, hardstyle and amapiano, with the track ‘Unforgettable’ alongside Tracy the Rapper the latest blast from the depths of Dozage.
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Chrisman – ‘Unforgettable’ (feat. Tracy the Rapper)
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Wiki & Tony Seltzer – ‘Golden Child’
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Pink Navel & Kenny Segal – ‘Memory Card’
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