Catharine Cary trained as an economic diplomat, in her own words ‘selling German steam boilers to Asian sweatshops’, working on urban development and infant dehydration projects in Africa and leading the restoration of the New Amsterdam Theatre for Walt Disney at the southern edge of Times Square, before relocating to Paris in 1997 at the age of 36 to pursue a career in painting. Her work has been displayed at Art Basel Miami, Art Chicago and the Foire internationale d’art contemporain, and in 2011 her installation WHISPER described as ‘a dress of silk organza sewn with 80 envelopes filled with essential elegant ephemera’ was featured at the Venice Biennale, yet following the death of her partner she changed tack once again, taking dance improvisation classes and eventually establishing the What IIIF? improvisational festival plus a platform for instant composition in dance called Instant Pudding! with Marie Desoubeaux and Marguerite Papazoglou.
Her debut recording AIR CAKE and other summery occupations brings a dash of all these things to bear, as Cary sets a series of playfully surreal stories which she originally created spontaneously for her young nephew to the sputtering wheezes and other jazzy concoctions of the veteran Montréal players Ivan Bamford on drums and Eric Lewis on cornet and bass clarinet. Diving into their respective toy boxes, the result resonates across all ages even though it might be aimed at kids, as Cary with the impressionistic vigour of Katherine Mansfield or a sometimes Nabokovian languor and linguistic relish, or like A. A. Milne with a dollop of Haruki Murakami depicts a summertime vacation by a small French beach.
Her three young characters Leila, Grecian and Manu get up to all sorts on their holiday, thrown flat on their backs in fields full of daisies, weaving leaves while the other children are away at camp, giving lettuce green manicures to red squirrels with an imaginary friend named Clementine, or climbing the Larrun mountain at the western end of the Pyrenees which crosses the border between France and Spain, weighing the perils of island building in the Atlantic Ocean, and whipping delectable cakes out of sea foam, clouds and compressed air. Too pungent to be cloying and too briskly imaginative to pass as mere whimsy, moving always with a poised yet staggering sense of swing, AIR CAKE and other summery occupations perfectly encapsulates the idle fancy of childhood summers, that mix of balmy and somehow weighty indolence mixed with a boundless and time-warped sense of possibility like dandelion pappus wafting in the breeze, until Cary leaves us confections in hand with a conundrum about the flavour of the frosting.
Apparently taking his cues from the electric chair with an oblique reference to a Catholic funeral service whose riverrun procession might nevertheless flow down the Ganges or the Mekong, the Liffey or most probably the Mississippi, adorning his cover with images of Pennywise the clown and the serial killer John Wayne Gacy who turns out died by lethal injection, a deviant Prurient squats atop the mercy seat as Destroyed Electricity is subsumed by sheathes of noise amid the ripples of a rare melodicism. From the church bells and stratified lyricism of the opening tracks ‘December ’78’ and ‘Dark Flower Bloomed At Night’, ravaged yet ravishing, ‘Return To Necrophilia’ is more wiry and ‘Smoky Bridge Between Men And Boys’ is more aerated than the title makes it sound, with the helical spurts of ‘Books To Stimulate Victims’ implying the alien and intergalactic.
Bookended by a couple of caterwauling screams, on ‘Slay The Handcuff Dragon Inside You’ the current goes into overdrive, sparks flying and wires recoiling as everything erupts through an envelope of pure static. By contrast there is a nocturnal and soothing, guileless sort of lullaby quality to ‘Tollway’ as the stirring of sine tones sounds like clarion bells on an archway to heaven. Then the organ chords of ‘Des Plaines Confidence’ – whose title evokes the Illinois town and the waterway which bridges Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River valley – are steadily overwhelmed by pummelling waves of fuzz and feedback.
Hard on the heels of The Magic City, which was compered by Meshell Ndegeocello for release in April, and last year’s incendiary pulling apart of ‘Nuclear War’, the nonprofit Red Hot which combats AIDS and promotes equal access to healthcare through pop-culture collaborations unleashes the most jam-packed volume to date in its ongoing series of reinterpretations of works by the great Sun Ra.
Through loose covers and a few inspired original compositions, Kronos Quartet assemble an accomplished yet furiously ragtag band of interstellar time travellers for Outer Spaceways Incorporated, from the raspy compulsions of Georgia Anne Muldrow and the celestial squiggles of Laraaji to the synthetic trumpet fanfare which introduces the footwork pioneer RP Boo and the backwoods hip hop duo Armand Hammer, plus three cuts by the formidable performance artist Laurie Anderson and the longtime Arkestra leader Marshall Allen, before the renowned minimalist Terry Riley and his self-styled disciple Sara Miyamoto string us out with a rejoinder to ‘Kiss Yo’ Ass Goodbye’.
Henry Birdsey leads a dubious band of fellow travellers on banjo, pedal steel, bagpipes and resonator guitar as the spectral drones of Old Saw continue to tug at the borders of country and Americana. Stepping out from under the banner of RS Produções through a series of cathartic cold cuts and shimmering romances, Nuno Beats radiates the best of the summer on Sai do Coração for the Lisbon batida stalwart Príncipe. The Cleveland-based Afrofuturist collective Mourning [A] BLKstar headed up by RA Washington, LaToya Kent and Jah Nada unveil their seventh studio album, while the trio of Ryan El-Solh, Carmen Quill and Jason Burger summon up a bit of Bill Frisell and his recent collaborators Julian Lage and Ambrose Akinmusire on their impending live outing from the Owl Music Parlor as Scree.
Between coughing fits and fractured narratives which touch upon themes of family trauma, gender distortions and other cycles of abuse, tangled keys, the odd whinnying trumpet or harp glissando, submerged references to some of her favourite popular music and a discomforting scat of aahs and oohs, Lucy Liyou frames her latest theatre piece as an audition for the role of K-pop idol, with ‘visual (hey girl)’ the most song-oriented piece on +82 K-Pop Star by some margin, as amid such breathy lines as ‘It’s like a kiss and a burden in the mouth’ and ‘You look better fucked up’ the track lands somewhere between the wispy R&B of the FKA twigs mixtape CAPRISONGS and the shrugging industrial trip hop of Björk from the Post album opener ‘Army of Me’.
Figuring both the onerousness of dogma and the sheer heft of divine revelation, the contemporary music ensemble Wild Up dig deeper into the oeuvre of Julius Eastman and discover that when the archangel Michael and his retinue of saints choose to speak through you, there attends the ringing of church bells, a rending of the clouds and very possibly a splitting headache. Focusing on the act of enunciation while eliding the words themselves, the ensemble are joined by the acclaimed bass-baritone singer Davóne Tines for a rendition of Eastman’s sonorous ‘Prelude to the Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc’, which encourages the medieval heroine and subsequent queer icon to ‘speak boldly’ before Seth Parker Woods honours Clarice Jensen’s painstaking transcription through the staggering tenacity of a ten-part cello solo.
And while Marta Warelis and Andy Moor might portend a conventional piano and guitar duo, they shift shapes and sometimes blur into one another as they wreak extraordinary textures from their instruments across a set of seven improvisations from the Amsterdam alternative bastion Zaal 100. Somewhere between the warbled chimes and motorised strums, the habitually disordered toolset of screwdrivers and wrenches, flanges and pistons, the enveloping pressure of the sustain pedal and the teased and torqued strings of a splintering piano as Warelis tangles with the guts of her machine, the lengthy ‘Imbue’ is more ruminative and circumspect before the exhaust sputters once more and the pair scamper off under a skyway of bottle green.
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Mourning [A] BLKstar – ‘Literary Witches’
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Prurient – ‘Dark Flower Bloomed At Night’
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RP Boo & Armand Hammer – ‘Blood Running High’
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Marta Warelis & Andy Moor – ‘Imbue’
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Lucy Liyou – ‘visual (hey girl)’
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Wild Up – ‘Prelude to the Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc’
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