Tracks of the Week 23.09.23

Described as ‘a suite of sensual ambient jazz collages, designed to take the listener on a roadtrip through the subconscious’, for her debut release on Awe the composer and producer Laurel Halo drew from the fourth-world missives, sinuous jazz piano and drone minimalism of her monthly NTS radio show, the slow cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and a stint at the Ina GRM studios in Paris, gradually folding acoustic instrumentation back into synthetic textures with accompaniment from Bendik Giske, Lucy Railton, James Underwood and Coby Sey. Gesturing towards late night drives and accented Parisian neighbourhoods, on the ten blurred graphs of Atlas the result sounds like nothing so much as submerged fairground music, spectres frolicking on the cusp of a wave or sloshing like slubbed ballast against the shore.

Draped in the fullness of strings, through blazing horns and call-and-response vocals, Idris Ackamoor and The Pyramids condemn police brutality and issue requiems for their ancestors, summoning the science fictions of Octavia E. Butler and Samuel R. Delany, the interlocking Afrobeat rhythms of Fela Kuti, and the cosmic wanderings of Pharoah Sanders and Sun Ra while celebrating their own continuing growth as they mark their fiftieth anniversary.

Rat Heart and The Peanuts let us in on The Pamela Peanut’s Kitchen Sessions, bridging between the dub rhythms and wispy chamber melodies of Arthur Russell and the Styxian blues of Bobby Would before driting off into the ether with a Mancunian streetlamp vaporization of neo-soul.

Following his recent outing on the steel string alongside Anthony Pateras, who grieved the loss of friends over ‘a landscape of chiming tones and hovering clouds of resonance’ through just intonations and ominous piano preparations for the Shelter Press, the guitarist Stephen O’Malley reunites with another longstanding collaborator in the form of the electroacoustic musician and Ina GRM director François J. Bonnet, better known for his oozing organ drones, swamp operas and limpid Cristal Baschet tremors, field recordings and other concrète practices carried out under the pseudonym Kassel Jaeger.

With nods to Count Basie, Jimmy Rushing and Sufjan Stevens, who once conceived the writing of fifty albums for each of the American states, on ‘Chicago Blues’ the saxophonist Joshua Redman pays homage to the Windy City boosted by the breathtaking vocals of Gabrielle Cavassa, part of a celebration and critique of his country as the acclaimed composer and bandleader marks his Blue Note debut.

Teasing out the tensions and harmonies which exist between synthetic oscillations and the vibrations of the human voice, for his latest album on Tresor Records the dub techno mastermind Moritz von Oswald composed a series of pieces on classic equipment including the VCS 3 and EMS Synthi AKS, the Prophet-5, the Oberheim four voice polyphonic and the Moog Model 15. These pulsing abstractions were then transcribed to sheet music by the Finnish composer and pianist Jarkko Riihimäki and performed at the Ölberg-Kirche in Kreuzberg by the Vocalconsort Berlin, whose choral recordings were pulled back into the synthesized parts of Silencio as von Oswald sought those liminal spaces between dark and dissonant and light and ethereal.

From the staggered basslines and aperture loops, babbling sonic streams and free-flowing etymologies of his solo debut, JJJJJerome Ellis lets his piano do the talking on the longform improvisation of Compline in Nine Movements. Madison Greenstone explores wildness, recalcitrance and roughness through modes of resonance latent in the soprano clarinet. Galya Bisengalieva conjures the small village of Saryzhal in eastern Kazakhstan, one of the sites still haunted by forty years of Soviet nuclear testing on the steppe south of the valley of the Irtysh River. The Congolese club sensualist Chrisman issues his latest call to action as his serrated dancefloor mutations gain added momentum through the buzzsaw bars of his fellow countrymen Lebon BLS and Tshongo Le Magnifique.

Out now on Brownswood Recordings, the debut album by the Yoruba poet, harpist and alternative jazz vocalist muva of Earth abounds in limpid meditations, celestial affirmations and sonorous odes to healing. Fire and free, through squalling jazz, solo saxophone reflections, Mississippi fife and drum blues and spoken word passages, Matana Roberts readies an act of remembrance with the fifth installment of their Coin Coin project. And on the lead single from Faith Is a Rock over production by The Alchemist, the rappers Wiki and MIKE, two of New York City’s finest, call out Mayor Eric Adams, blowing off some steam from the heat of the summer before hunkering down for the long winter ahead.

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muva of Earth – ‘heaven hear me above’

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JJJJJerome Ellis – ‘Movements I & II’

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Madison Greenstone – ‘aeolian harp i’

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François J. Bonnet & Stephen O’Malley – ‘Rainbows’