Conceived as an amorous response to the digital age, the steamy outpouring of soundtrack work for Virgil Abloh at Louis Vuitton and Bafic whose documentary short Sub Eleven Seconds poetically envisioned the Olympic quest of Sha’Carri Richardson, on The Sport of Love seasoned collaborators Asma Maroof, Patrick Belaga and Tapiwa Svosve unpick the yearning heart and flickering frailty of modern romance, where hot bodies surge to chafe or flash at the binary. Part of the roving band Moved by the Motion which also includes the artist and filmmaker Wu Tsang, the dancers and performers Tosh Basco and Josh Johnson, and the poet and essayist Fred Moten, as a trio the pensive airs, radiating whorls and tangled bursts of Belaga and Svosve on flute, piano, cello and sax are spritzed by Maroof into sparkling fantasies, from the intoxicating first blush of ‘G Major Kinda Love’ to the extended centrepiece ‘The Stranger’ which features additional instrumentation from the percussionist Mathieu Edward and harpist Ayha Simone, squaring the circle between the chiaroscuro work of Arve Henriksen, the fourth world splashes of Jon Hassell, and the minor grooves and glissando blues of the jazz greats Alice Coltrane and Dorothy Ashby.
Raised in the Baptist church and trained in the Vedic philosophy of Swamini Turiyasangitananda, inspired by a formative encounter with Pharoah Sanders in his youth, the saxophonist and bandleader Roman Norfleet and the Be Present Art Group share spiritual invocations and gale-force extemporisations, sailing on gossamer wings as Portland’s self-described practitioners of Great Black Music. Angel Bat Dawid pushes all the right buttons as the nonprofit Red Hot pays tribute to ‘Nuclear War’ by Sun Ra, concluding her Cosmic Myth Science Trilogy through a flurry of keys, crashing percussion and the trilling of celestial choir as part of a desperate collective bid to stave off a molten posterior. And with an exclamatory punkt, the longtime creative partners Damon Locks and Rob Mazurek introduce an eighteen-track suite which crackles like a boombox mixtape and carries the programmatic form of a pirate radio station for the people.
Borne of a single breath, the ambient troubadour Perila cracks a corner window and embraces the anticipatory hum of the headlong day, carving out a little space for reflection as part of a residency at Maison Salvan in the commune of LabĆØge near Toulouse. Buck Meek hunkers down atop the misty heights of his haunted mountain for a hyperballad of sorts, where folk reveries pool like so many drops of morning dew then gush and swirl as falls and eddies. With Sanford Biggers on vocals, Jeff Parker on guitar and Deantoni Parks on drums, Meshell Ndegeocello lays down her spear and flows with the current on the latest limpid offering from her upcoming Blue Note debut The Omnichord Real Book. And with a nod to the brisk melodies and tender cacophonies of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s Esperanto, the Australian synthesist Nico Niquo returns to Orange Milk Records for the first time in six years with another whirring blend of ghostly grime and New Age ambiance, in a manner previously described by the writer Emile Frankel as a ‘grimoire to stillness’.
Living up to their billing as the Elusion Quartet, the stellar New York improvisers Tony Malaby on tenor and soprano saxophones, Kris Davis on piano and Ches Smith on drums and vibes join the bassist Michael Formanek to bury the lede on the barnstorming opener to their second album As Things Do, which gives way to lyrical detours, funk-rock grooves, limber cooldowns and winsome abstractions. The chiptune and gabber veteran Scotch Rolex and former Skull Disco honcho Shackleton brandish dub effects and bristling polyrhythms, combining surrealist punk with bass-led psychedelia on their collaborative rocket Death by Tickling. The hermine chanteuse Ichiko Aoba sings a song for the space orphans, the Dabke rhythms of Susu Laroche find a fresh breeding ground in Persian poetry and the Earthsea cycle of Ursula K. Le Guin, and the know-nothing Kassi Valazza plays pretend with a stuck-on smile in the billowing silence all in the latest roundup of best new music.
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Asma Maroof, Patrick Belaga, and Tapiwa Svosve – ‘G Major Kinda Love’
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Michael Formanek Elusion Quartet – ‘Bury the Lede’
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Roman Norfleet & Be Present Art Group – ‘Cosmic Forces’
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Damon Locks & Rob Mazurek – ‘Yes!’
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susu laroche – ‘washing touch off’
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Scotch Rolex & Shackleton – ‘Deliver the Soul’
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Meshell Ndegeocello – ‘Clear Water’ (feat. Deantoni Parks, Jeff Parker, and Sanford Biggers)
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Buck Meek – ‘Haunted Mountain’
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perila – ‘Decision To Out And Onwards’
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Nico Niquo – ‘My Home In The Storm’
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