Still navigating the quixotic charms and cavernous obsessions of Charles Baudelaire, whose insatiable lusts, death whorls and sometimes rhapsodic depictions of the lives of rag-pickers and blind men, prostitutes and gamblers scandalized the tree-lined boulevards of nineteenth-century Paris, this week the Danish chanteuse Susanna scales up her distinctive settings of the French bohemian poet’s classic texts with lavish accompaniment from KORK, the Norwegian Radio Orchestra. Elaborating on the stripped-back solo reveries of Baudelaire & Piano plus the strange alchemies of Elevation, which saw the singer and pianist aided and abetted by the keys, woodwinds and cassette tapes of Delphine Dora and Stina Stjern, the eleven carefully enunciated songs of Baudelaire & Orchestra cap the communion between artists, conducted by Christian Eggen from arrangements by Jarle G. Storløkken and Jan Martin Smørdal, with vocal backing from Stjern and Anita Kaasbøll and production from the depths of the Audio Virus LAB courtesy of Susanna’s longtime collaborator Deathprod.
Guided by the paradox of an anxious mind on POP 6 SUSURRUS, his acclaimed debut outing on the Slovakian label Mappa Editions, now the Finnish composer, sonic explorer and sound designer Atte Elias Kantonen lands on Students of Decay for a path with a name, an immersive audio guide through a mossy diorama overflowing with delicate polyphonic detail. Described as ‘a meditation on the vertigo of our existence’, on Quelque chose s’est dissipé the Parisian poet and composer Audrey Carmes spins breathy vocals over evolving layers of synthesizer buoyed by celestial reverberations on the bass guitar, vibraphone and flute.
Before she released three extended plays in the waning days of 2018, the artist formerly known as Ms. Indie Pop had nurtured an early relationship with music through classic bands like The Beatles and The Carpenters from her parents’ generation, a teenage obsession with the yearning melodramas of Dawson’s Creek, and a budding fascination with the radio, which she listened to every day. On Circle, Square and Triangle these influences manifested in a widescreen whimsy with a synth pop sheen, where glitching electronics, mournful keys, gossamer reeds and the tremulous reverberations of her vocals might call to mind early Grimes and Kedr Livanskiy or Julee Cruise, Angelo Badalamenti and the Cocteau Twins. Then a week before she was scheduled to start performing, she began to suffer from a mysterious illness which culminated in an undisclosed surgery. Adopting the stage name mioriii, on Nature’s Way the Japanese musician constructs an ode to healing, foregrounding her voice on the opening and closing tracks while three instrumentals float with a sinuous shimmer, sometimes submerged and sometimes carbonated, echoing the walks along riverbanks and through nearby parks which during her convalescence have become part of her daily routine.
A syllabic script with elongated strokes and fine lines, adapted to better fit embroidery patterns, Nüshu which developed among the rural women of Jiangyong County has been described as ‘the most revolutionary and thorough simplification of Chinese characters ever attempted’ and ‘the world’s only script designed and used exclusively by women’. Coming to fruition in the eighteenth century when the women of Jiangyong County were largely confined to the home, the script was passed down through generations of female family members and friends, concealing a hidden patchwork of letters or used for writing biographies, sending glad tidings, and singing songs of heavenly yearning and earthly lament, its lingering remnants a source of inspiration for novelists and symphonists, linguists and anthropologists, with the Chinese government in 2006 designating Nüshu as part of the country’s intangible cultural heritage. Rethinking the notion of women’s work through the push and pull of metered notation, communal improvisation and indeterminacy, on Clamor the composer and violist Jessica Pavone titles three movements after historical innovations by which women sought to circumvent the checks on their freedom. In two parts at the heart of the record, ‘Nu Shu’ features the solo bassoonist Katherine Young in bristling and staggering dialogue with the ensemble.
On 15 January 1965, the Soviet Union conducted the first and largest of what would prove 124 detonations in its Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy program, whereby supposedly peaceful nuclear explosions would serve to shift the earth, making space for artificial lakes, harbours, and canals. Carried out like the bulk of Soviet detonations at the Semipalatinsk Test Site and given the code name Chagan, around twenty percent of the nuclear device’s fission products escaped the blast zone, with a small radioactive plume detected as far away as Japan. The blast forged a crater 400 metres wide and 100 metres deep, and was filled by water from the Shagan River, with the resultant lake known as Chagan or Balapan but often referred to colloquially as the Atomic Lake, because it continues to be radioactive, with locals fishing there despite warnings from the authorities that doing so is hazardous. Such tremors and landmarks are the focus of Polygon by the Kazakh-British producer and violinist Galya Bisengalieva, whose unyielding drones tell the story of forty years of cultural and ecological devastation on the steppe south of the valley of the Irtysh.
The guitarist Leo Takami bathes the sharp geometries of jazz rock in limpid pools of kankyō ongaku. Borne entirely from improvisation, as Nite Bjuti the jazz trio of Candice Hoyes on vocals, Val Jeanty on electronic percussion and drums and Mimi Jones on bass weave impromptu stories around such themes as Haitian folklore and the black womanly divine. Upending the hierarchy, Aho Ssan figures the subterranean stems and creative multiplicities of Deleuze and Guattari, serving as a node of collaboration on Rhizomes which was commissioned by Other People, Donaufestival and Ina GRM and features an abundant cast including Rắn Cạp Đuôi, Angel Bat Dawid, Nyokabi Kariuki, Nicolas Jaar, Moor Mother, Valentina Magaletti, Kassel Jaeger and Richie Culver. From a garage studio under lockdown marked by solitude and introspection, the vocalist Aditya Prakash explores the weight of privilege and the boundaries of the Karnatik tradition, while from Awhaỳ and the unceded traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, the Kaifeng-born and Vancouver-based sound artist Yu Su strains to shape another Earth.
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Galya Bisengalieva – ‘Balapan’
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Jessica Pavone – ‘Nu Shu (part 1)’
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Aho Ssan – ‘Till The Sun Down’ (feat. clipping. & Resina)
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Audrey Carmes – ‘Une recherche’
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Susanna – ‘Alchemy of Suffering’
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