Drawing inspiration from the desert retreats of Georgia O’Keeffe and Agnes Martin, the life and death of Sylvia Plath, and the reflexive cinema of Jean-Luc Godard while working from La Becque on the shores of Lake Geneva and the windswept coast of her Normandy home, this week the French musician Félicia Atkinson explores a world of luminous interiors and reiterating landscapes through wispy vocal fragments and orchestral drones and dubs. The Hakuna Kulala and Nyege Nyege Tapes producer Chrisman tackles skeletal rhythms and electrified likembé melodies within the sticky, sultry confines of the tarraxinha, and the Dutch storyteller broeder Dieleman sings of farm life in the time before tractors, inspired by the Zeeuws-Flemish dialect writer Leo Bootsgezel and the cutout artist Jan Huijssoon.
The tenor saxophonist and flautist Chip Wickham turns from the cosmic funk of Lonnie Liston Smith to spiritual jazz excursions with a hard bop twist on his debut full-length for Gondwana Records. The quintet of Daniel Carter, Patrick Holmes, Matthew Putman, Hilliard Greene, and Federico Ughi issue more extemporaneous missives as they settle into life as the de facto 577 Records house band. And after revamping a batch of Blue Note classics plus the final album by the spoken word poet Gil Scott-Heron, the beat scientist Makaya McCraven returns to International Anthem for an epic suite of modern folk music alongside labelmates and collaborators including Jeff Parker, Marta Sofia Honer, Junius Paul, Brandee Younger, and Joel Ross.
On his latest album as Delmore FX the poet and artist Elia Buletti transmogrifies the balafon, rumba boxes, and kalimbas through myriad electronics for Artetetra, Communion, and Das Andere Selbst. The Philadelphia-based Wrecking Crew meet Oakland’s own Hieroglyphics as Casual hops on the opening single from Sedale Threat. Moor Mother seeks to break cycles of surveillance and violence with a chaos poem recited alongside the Saint Mela singer Wolf Weston, contributors from four continents converge on the Canary Islands for the first KingL Man album under the auspices of the fusion pioneer Dave Watts, and Rachika Nayar crash-lands on NNA Tapes with a burst of neon maximalism. Objekt returns with his first release in half a decade, while Tinashe, Channel Tres, Lucrecia Dalt, Kode9, and Brown Calvin complete the roundup of best new tracks.
Playlists: Spotify · Apple Music · YouTube
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Moor Mother – ‘BARELY WOKE’ (feat. Wolf Weston)
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Wrecking Crew – ‘Behemoth’ (feat. Casual)
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Brown Calvin – ‘P e r s p e c t I v e 44’
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Makaya McCraven – ‘Seventh String’
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broeder Dieleman – ‘De Eerste Knecht’
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Tinashe & Channel Tres – ‘HMU For A Good Time’
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Rachika Nayar – ‘Heaven Come Crashing’ (feat. maria bc)
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Félicia Atkinson – ‘The Lake is Speaking’
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Daniel Carter, Patrick Holmes, Matthew Putman, Hilliard Greene, and Federico Ughi – ‘The Hum Of Mum’
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KingL Man – ‘No Hay Pescado (Las Raíces)’ (feat. El Latigazo, Sidi I.B., and Mame Samba)
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