Usually navigating the nooks and crannies of South London through smeared and distanciated sound collages which wrap together windswept, late night street recordings, organ drones and smudged tomes of R&B, for her latest album Klein blows the doors open by trading her liminal stock-in-trade for the rawest and scuzziest sheathes of guitar feedback.
Harmattan delivered an off-kilter and arms-length take on contemporary classical music, Cave in the Wind summoned up spectres from the furore over the repeal of Roe v. Wade, with the lengthy ‘Faith in a Minor’ foregrounding media snippets before tautly whirring strings, the dying fall of steam train whistles and a smatter of church bells elided the sacred and the secular while the evocative vamps of ‘top shotta’ wound up in a blackened aether after first wheezing all of the way into the red, and touched by an angel bore its cherubic aspect through a diverse scrap bag of sodden gospel and keening soul, inspired by the nineties CBS television drama with features from kindred spirits in Matana Roberts and Khush.
For a few seconds marked seems in keeping with some of these records, as ‘winner’s clause’ opens through a twinkling of bar lounge keys, yet instead of a warbling croon and just as wind instruments would seem to elevate the ambiance, a distorted guitar comes barrelling out of the murk. On the standout ‘gully creepa’ those shards are honed to a point, with mauling and lacerating feedback over the revving of motor engines giving way to a carnivalesque throb of power chords, and on ‘Blow the Whistle’ industrial spurts with foghorn blasts in the middle distance are overawed by pummelling drums, which land somewhere between skittering electroclash and the bark of power electronics.
The album intersperses lengthier blasts with brief interludes like ‘afrobeat weekender’, whose vocal spatter and craggy strums are subsumed by spooky swirls of Mellotron-like synthesizer. From squealing guitar and the enveloping static, ‘(breaking news)’ repeats its title at various pitches, chopped and screwed over a caterwaul of faux-radio chatter which sounds like a broadcast department being flushed down the toilet, carving out enough space for a cavernous and stomping brand of rock and roll which turns the titular phrase into a mere front-of-the-T-shirt slogan, a scrolling chyron shorn of any informational content as Klein pounds her kick drums and wailing distortions through a wall of concrete. When the dust settles an automaton repeats the phrase ‘breaking news’ again as though in an echo chamber, while a sniffly voice underneath whimpers the line like an addict despairing as to the whereabouts of their next fix.
‘season two’ boasts a rockabilly swagger, and ‘nightwatch’ buries a pleading vocal which ponders ‘what’s the meaning?’ over a screeching yet forestalled metal riff. Rounding the mid-point of the record, on ‘more than like’ plunging and waterlogged keys signal a dolorous downpour without ever approaching the emotional tonic, and with a disquieting whir on the margins of the track, while ‘enemy of the state’ layers its menace, leaning back into dark ambient and the industrial depths.
Lost down the back of the sofa or in a Stygian chasm somewhere between The Verve and ‘Take Pills’ from Panda Bear’s looped classic Person Pitch, the track ‘drugs won’t work (like mother like son)’ moves with a spectral stagger and ‘frontin’ contains a warbling yet heartfelt vocal which wonders (through deep sighs) the reason why. Then ‘ruthless (amnesia cleared)’ threatens to really go off the rails, a rambunctious blurring of genres which loiters somewhere between death metal growls, trap beats and the dembow before finally sputtering out.
‘the gift of sofiat’ lingers momentarily in the charred remains before ascending the firmament, sounding like a godly invocation, a summoning or some other interstitial rite before Klein reveals herself as the wizard behind the curtain. On the curt ‘neek’ featuring La Timpa the pair sing ‘everybody wants to be the cool kid until they get’ with a clap, before marked draws to an inspired close with the semi-autobiographical ‘exclusive’, which repurposes lyrics from the celestial touched by an angel opener ‘black famous’ and is carried by a couple of amplified and distorted main cries as Klein spits over scudding beats.
For the deluxe edition of The Great Bailout, a dissection of displacement where Moor Mother hones in on the legacies of British slavery, particularly with regard to the hefty package of financial compensation which was awarded to 46,000 former slave owners upon the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, the sound sculptor and spoken word poet reimagines three tracks from the album with orchestral accompaniment, as the Kazakh-British violinist Galya Bisengalieva joins three members of the London Contemporary Orchestra in the percussionist Ric Elsworth, the pianist Katherine Tinker and Alison D’Souza on the viola, with the musicians given plenty of leeway to improvise after Moor Mother and Uèle Lamore worked up the arrangements.
The third movement ‘Liverpool Wins’ returns us to the port city which is now best known for The Beatles, the Merseyside derby and its plethora of museums and art galleries, yet whose streets still bear so many slave traders’ names. The composition opens through broad strings which especially in this context are redolent of the more pastoral works of Edward Elgar, the largo from Antonín Dvořák’s famous New World Symphony which is beloved by Brits for its use in a Hovis bread commercial, and even traces of the tune from ‘Danny Boy’ or its original setting in ‘Londonderry Air’.
A looped snatch of football commentary declares ‘Liverpool triumphant!’, and when Moor Mother joins the fray to echo the cry with a gasping refrain of ‘Liverpool wins!’, the effect is almost comic as ecstasy blends with sheer triviality, while also calling to mind one of the great moments in football history, the thrilling irony of the Liverpool captain Steven Gerrard falling flat on his face, costing his team the Premier League title, shortly after gathering his teammates and attempting to rally them with the fateful words ‘We don’t let this slip!’.
Any levity though soon dissipates as those same strings and Moor Mother’s quavering voice begin to stretch out the composition, her snapping admonitions of those ‘taxpayers of erasure’ and the terse question ‘did you pay off the trauma?’ giving way to the creaking echoes of one covetous ‘sound’ as she briefly explicates the violence of the slave trade, its long aching aftermath and some of the relevant locales.
The tang of her voice remains but her tone becomes less accusatory, no more a snarling riposte as her words are left to hang and crash like those big soundless waves out at sea, with this prolonged orchestral version of ‘Liverpool Wins’ becoming more spectral and indeed haunting as the violin of Bisengalieva starts to splinter, D’Souza’s viola arcs deeper into a submerged and portentous drone, and plaintive piano keys emerge from plunging wails of static which lash against the administrative shuffle of the percussion as Moor Mother strives to untangle truth amid the last whirring of the strings.
Over two long sides the Samara Lubelski and Bill Nace duo shred their violin and two-string electric taishogoto into a series of fathomless and hallucinatory drones, the first summoning up the white light and heat of ‘Sister Ray’ plus the stygian guitar of underground contemporaries like Bobby Would, while the second piece sounds more vaulted and spectral, like a phantom train screeching perpetually to a halt, the driver cranking the break in the manner of pipe organ works by Charlemagne Palestine and FUJI|||||||||||TA.
Like those frequent collaborators, Laura Cannell and Lori Goldston also share a purview which takes in liminal drones and other windswept or brackish melodies, stretching from Doggerland and its submerged patchwork of beaches and lagoons, saltmarshes and mudflats to the Salish Sea or the bluffs and beaches of seaport Seattle. After working together on Cannell’s remix project Echolocation, the medievalist and experimental musician who has carved out her own niche on recorders and her signature overbow violin and the rigorously detrained cellist finally united in Norfolk, which is Cannell’s home base, for a record which was completed in a matter of days within the fourteenth-century undercroft of St Olave’s Priory in Great Yarmouth and astride the empty aisles of St Andrew’s Church in Raveningham.
On her new album Rosenhagtorn, a suite of short pieces for violin, piano and voice, Isabell Gustafsson-Ny moves deftly between the sort of liturgical airs and interstitial drones which are the stock-in-trade of Cannell and jazzy vamps which heave a sultry heat and sweeping darkness. There are folk melodies and traces of the continuous composer Éliane Radigue, before the final track springs a surprise through the dirge of a Nico-esque vocal. The trio of Eric Fratzke, Dave King and Michael Lewis return to the fray as Happy Apple, for a ‘Vanity Plate’ which is defined by Fratzke’s turbid and taciturn bass. And the Battle Trance leader Travis Laplante offers a piece of gilded pastoralism, as his yearning tenor saxophone unfurls over percussive cascades and the natural arpeggios of Charles Overton’s harp, which is a constant and babbling companion.
From the dried gourds of West Africa and clay pots of the Indian subcontinent to the washboards of jazz, zydeco and skiffle, or from the ‘little instruments’ which the Art Ensemble of Chicago brought and used in bulk to the truck stompers and clapped thighs of Fiona Apple, there is no shortage of music made with found or otherwise makeshift percussive instruments, but on the Australian artist and HTRK founder Jonnine’s latest album she makes a ‘Rococo’ in all of its intricacy solely out of a cascade of kitchen implements and a few other household sounds, from the clinking of cutlery against cups and saucers which serves to ground the rhythm, keeping a kind of askew time, to water being poured, objects being put down and a series of indistinct scratches and rattles, a few loose gongs and a drilling noise which sounds like a naturalised and domesticated woodpecker.
Otherwise her skeletal rhythms make space for apparitional vocals which loiter at the intersection of choral music and the sort of muffled non-lexicals which one might overhear from behind the shower curtain, with ‘Ornament’ a piece of cod-reggae in the manner of ‘Redondo Beach’ as though heard through a toaster, and signal flutes or marching fifes colouring the foreboding air of ‘Wrong Instinct’.
In fact that recorder which blares out on ‘Wrong Instinct’, embedded within another world of context, evokes nothing so much as a series of windy and reedy hip hop classics from the Pharcyde by way of Quincy Jones on their signature tune ‘Passin’ Me By’ to the sample of ‘Prison Song’ on Future’s much parodied ‘Mask Off’ or the pan pipes of ‘Praise the Lord (Da Shine)’ by A$AP Rocky and Skepta. Meanwhile amid the gongs, the church and shop bells and the chugging and cawing of ‘Spring Deceit’, her vocals sound like Julia Holter’s at their most transient.
Jonnine portrays Southside Girl as emanating from an apartment by the suburban seaside, describing ‘A pact with the ocean, popping candy, night trains, the lethargic limbo of summertime from Boxing Day to New Year’s Eve’. The opening track captures some of that hangover, with the lapping water and bird calls of ‘December 32nd’ scrambled by a layer of crackling static which sounds like leftover party sparklers. ‘Star Anise’ features lilting wind chimes and a prying bass, and ‘Poochie’s Pies’ seems to dwell inside the walls of a mute diner.
Through piquant fragments of personal history, the title track manifests the keening undertow of much of the record as Jonnine repeats the lines ‘I’m a southside girl / I grew up on the seaside / as I spent my youth / listening to secrets of seashells / as they told me / hold onto your mother’s pearls’ before juxtaposing her mother’s furtive nights out, at least from the perspective of a child, with the gaping maw of the ocean. The album was captured offhand on a portable 6-track, and as her voice washes back and forth in the mix it carries the staggered quality of an incantation.
Southside Girl is a breezy daytime record which drifts from domesticity into the unknown. ‘Shell Cameo’ washes off a bit of salt and spume while ‘Sea Stuff’ returns us to the seaweed and the waves, an oyster riddle over ramshackle percussion, some of which comes courtesy of the Melbourne-based drummer and Maritz collaborator Maria Moles. Then the album draws to a close with ‘The Bells Chime’ whose laden keys and cooing swells are redolent of Grouper, as those shop door peals continue to jingle and jive now with more of a spectral portent.
Forced inside by the coronavirus pandemic, on ‘Sound Sculptures’ the composer Simon Knighton meticulously edits strings and winds in a blurring of the borders between concert performance and installation art, then explores the shimmering world of chime percussion over the three movements of his ‘Dynamical Systems’, building his own bells from sheets of brass to contort the multilayered percussion of the third act.
Finally there is something gravelly as well as grassy about Žaltys, the latest album by Raphael Rogínski who returns to the hills and forests of his youth by invoking the venerable grass snake spirits of the Lithuanian border. Working with the Warsaw-based musician and producer Piotr Zabrodzki to develop a sound which he calls ‘guitar piano’, on Žaltys his penchant for folk motifs and primitivism retains its grit while also evoking the limpid pools and cloudy airs of Loren Connors, as Rogínski is accompanied on a couple of tracks by Indrė Jurgelevičiūtė, who sings and plays the kanklės, a Lithuanian plucked string instrument or chordophone which is closely related to the zither.
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Laura Cannell & Lori Goldston – ‘Vaulted Echoes’
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Samara Lubelski & Bill Nace – ‘Gravity Drains’
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Simon Knighton – ‘Dynamical Systems No. 1’
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Raphael Rogínski – ‘Borbašo Gvazdikas’
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Isabell Gustafsson-Ny – ‘Ur Flöde’
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Travis Laplante – ‘The Golden Lock VII’
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