This week the composer Alex Weiser follows up his Pulitzer Prize-nominated debut album and all the days were purple – which set poetry to music from the lider of Anna Margolin and her fellow Yiddish poets Edward Hirsch, Rachel Korn and Abraham Sutzkever to William Carlos Williams and Emily Dickinson who spoke on the transience of love and life, featuring the experimental musician and Roomful of Teeth member Eliza Bagg on vocals – with two song cycles which serve as a love letter to New York City, a teeming metropolis, an emblem of the immigrant experience and the place which the composer calls home. Passionately rendered, exploring the cosmopolitan thrum and bustling hubbub of the city as it glows beneath indigo moonlit skies, Weiser shines his lamp over two corners of New York City’s history, with the mezzo-soprano Annie Rosen accompanied by a seven-piece chamber ensemble, which includes Lee Dionne on piano, Yasmina Spiegelberg on clarinet, Brigid Coleridge and Lun Li on violins, Jordan Bak on viola, Julia Yang on the cello and Sam Suggs on double bass.
The first cycle in a dark blue night features five settings of Yiddish poetry which was written by newly arrived immigrants to New York City around the turn of the century, in the late 1800s and early 1900s. A dark lustrous reverie which moves with the sweep of a skirt over the sidewalk, buffeted by the bright lights of Broadway and gazing rapt at a cavalcade of stars, the cascading key rolls of Dionne’s piano on ‘Night Reflex’ close with a vibratory warmth and a held note by the mezzo-soprano, which segues into a sashay over the Riegelmann Boardwalk as the Cyclone, Wonder Wheel and radiating whorl of the Parachute Jump hover against the backdrop of a sunlit sky.
Coney Island Days delights in the adventures of Weiser’s late grandmother, who grew up in Brooklyn during the thirties and forties, living with her family in a single room behind their knish store while spending her summers buoyed by the entertainments of Coney Island. Capturing with a gilded fondness her carefree youth, Weiser says that ‘Hers was a multilingual world where she was taught English at school, but where her Yiddish-speaking parents could barely understand the language of their new land’.
A plangent, plunging bass line and the traipsing and frolicking of Spiegelberg’s clarinet introduce the titular ‘Coney Island’, which in rhapsodic terms describes a day at the beach without adults or limits, whose highlights include such quintessential fare as a hot dog at Nathan’s and a frozen custard, which in the recollection of Weiser’s grandmother was habitually dropped on the boardwalk by her friend. The plainspoken and digressional quality of his grandmother’s reminiscences make for pliant and whimsical vocal lines against the swirl of the ensemble, which in Dionne, Coleridge and Yang comprises the three founding members of the critically acclaimed Merz Trio. More they imbue Coney Island Days with a beautiful ache, the sublimation of nostalgia which doesn’t merely trade in wistful memories of a burnished past but sketches out and daubs with watercolour old and sometimes long-forgotten places and summons as if traced by a caressing finger the faces of old friends, infusing them with all of the vim and vigour of the present. That allows moments of unvarnished sentiment to really place you in their choke, as when Weiser’s grandmother caps her day at the beach, splashes of water, the inattentive Morty and Nathan’s hot dogs and custards with change from fifteen cents with the lines ‘I had good times. All my family was loving to me’ as the ensemble glides to a halt.
After elaborating the dynamics of the family knish store and a commercial pot which becomes both a receptacle of petty regrets and a container pennyfull of childish hopes and stubborn dreams, ‘Russian Bath’ through its winnowing clarinet takes us back in the direction of Coney Island this time with a more elegiac feel. The water of those baths might wet our toes and moisten the hairs on our forearms, which in turn bear the sweet cherubic plumpness of ‘Mother’ as Weiser’s grandmother describes a woman who squeezed herself into bespoke corsets and died of leukemia while still attending school in a bid to speak better English, and without ever celebrating her birthday or knowing her own true age.
The final two songs of the cycle are devoted to ‘Aunt Fanny’, who spurned Coney Island for the mountains, to whom the author in a sort of coda to Coney Island Days offers a tender word of lament. Having paid to add the names of her parents to The American Immigrant Wall of Honor at Ellis Island – the price today for a single-line inscription starts at $300 – Weiser’s grandmother regrets not having done the same for Fanny. Through her words, Weiser’s daring yet sensitive compositions and the breadth and swell of the ensemble, Coney Island Days more than makes good on the debt.
In different ways Hanno Leichtmann and Carme López summon the liturgical stillness of the pipe organ or even the clangorous hum of carillon bells, calling to mind recent albums by Miaux, who played the organ at St. Catherine’s Church in Hoogstraten, and Charlemagne Palestine the self-styled ‘avant-garde Quasimodo’, who hunkered down under the high ceilings of his home studio in Belgium for an ode to his ‘divinities’ in all of their motley plushness.
In fact Hanno Leichtmann – the Berlin-based producer and curator hitherto best known for his electronic music, through collaborations with Jan Jelinek and Valerio Tricoli and the deep house stylings of his Vulva String Quartett – tries his hand at the Villa Aurora Organ in Los Angeles, which was played routinely by the house owner Marta Feuchtwanger, Bruno Walther, Ernst Toch and Hanns Eisler before falling into disrepair, with the villa gaining a new lease of life as an artistic residence before the organ was fully restored in 2010. A product of the silent era which was built by the Artcraft Organ Company of Santa Monica in 1928-29, the Villa Aurora Organ consists of a pipe organ with an echo chamber, plus a wall-mounted marimba and a two-octave set of tubular bells, with Leichtmann managing to temper some of its theatrical flair in the name of minimalist repetition, strains of exotica and the spiritual heft of devotional music.
Meanwhile on her debut album Quintela, the composer Carme López wrings out all of the possibilities which inhere within the Galician bagpipe. Often overshadowed by the great Highland bagpipe, which has achieved a hegemony over hootenannies, the gaita galega has a conical chanter and a bass drone with a second octave and has seized life beyond the traditional repertoire through the playing of Carlos Núñez, who has performed alongside Ry Cooder and Sinead O’Connor, the multi-instrumentalist and educator Cristina Pato, a member of the Silkroad Ensemble which was established in 1998 by Yo-Yo Ma and continues to operate under the auspices of its new artistic director Rhiannon Giddens, and Susana Seivane who extends a family legacy while imbuing her bagpipe with the strains of folk-rock.
López on the other hand turns her gaita inside out, often managing to bend and tame the harsher resonances of her instrument for liturgical refrains, slowly sustained drones and the plummier depths, from the prologue ‘Cando a pena me mata, a alegría dame alento’ whose winding uplift is redolent of the pipe organ to the baroque epilogue ‘Inflorescencia’ where stardust and short spurts from her chanter give way to a buzzsaw drone and a forking melody which play out in ominous counterpoint, even more so as the song cradles to a halt. Elsewhere on Quintela, the first of four movements ‘I. QÚE? A Betty Chaos’ opens with the odd faltering breath and the static sound of air passing through the hide bag, taking on a slight winnowing quality before breaking out into a brackish drone, a shanty which might look out over the Cantabrian Sea or the Atlantic before a final gust of horns, as López casts about indiscriminately in search of a place to anchor.
With dedications to the family hounds and her grandparents, the second movement offers a more sustained drone whose electrical throbs and staggered overtones sound like a wobble board in slow motion, while the third movement proves more mellow. And on ‘IV: CACHELOS. A César de Farbán’ the composer – a performer, teacher and researcher of traditional oral music from Galicia, who for this project cites Éliane Radigue and Pauline Oliveros among her influences – outlines a pulsing drone with pebble percussion, a sonic improvisation made by the knocking together of her gaita’s reeds as Quintela slips beyond the shore.
Winsomely describing their sound as a sort of Black Flag jazz, which immediately summons that band’s make-do punk ethos, tempo shifts and screeching atonalism, the saxophone blaster and sonic manipulator Ayumi Ishito offers a curious mix of science-fiction textures, marching band batteries and Americana melodies on the first volume of Roboquarians, accompanied by George Draguns on shapeshifting guitar and Kevin Shea on roiling and scattershot percussion for a sound which is both quizzical and admirably far-flung. Ivo Perelman elides the labours of the day or as the title indicates, tentatively embraces the unknown on an album of soul searching and heedful reflection, playing alongside the Mahakala Music founder Chad Fowler on the stritch and saxello and a legendary rhythm section in Reggie Workman on the double bass and Andrew Cyrille on drums, as the wily tenor saxophonist leads a four-pronged assault on the senses in an atypically minor tone.
The Warsaw-based Brutality Garden collective completes the second phase of its operation with another volume of Spectra from ||ALA|MEDA|| who lean into the rhythms of batida, gqom and Afro-Caribbean music having left krautrock in the dust, with the first single from the album featuring the whirring contortions of the band and record scratches from DJ Paulo of Bydgoszcz up against the Durban futurists Phelimuncasi with their rapid-fire click consonants. Jockeying that disc in a planche position, the post-club collagist Moniké brings all of his sinewy suppleness to bear on a second Guide to DJ Hobby Horsing, which invokes such imagery as shetland ponies grazing in the barren terrain of the enrichment centre from the video game Portal or shuttlecocks being shunted down the chute of large hadron colliders or gnawed at by black holes, its dubby atmospheres and shuffling subtropical backbeats sounding like surreal whimsy or a louche equestrian take on Venus in Furs.
Laden with embellishments like piano and prepared piano, samples, bells and shakers, flutes, percussive instruments and a magic yellow bucket, plus the piccolo variant to add to his trusty trumpet, the abstractivist Rob Mazurek of Chicago Underground, São Paulo Underground and Exploding Star Orchestra stops off at the listener-supported Radio Popolare in Milan for a ‘one-man carnival of feverish ceremonial exorcisms’ which invokes the names of local journalists, structural engineers, art dealers and other creatives. The notes for the album, which was broadcast and recorded live last autumn, summon the painterly expressionism of Tōru Takemitsu, Kaija Saariaho and Morton Feldman, the Art Ensemble of Chicago with their painted faces and chattering ‘little instruments’, Don Cherry-esque horns, disassembled gagaku field recordings and the ramshackle fourth world exotica of his own São Paulo Underground, a bonfire of references which after the great conflagration of Milan leave a wispy trail of smoke.
From starlets like DJ Blakes and DJ Arana to the scene stalwarts Deekapz, Mu540 and MC GW, the global radio platform NTS unrolls an indelible primer to the baile funk of São Paulo. Having recorded much of Canoga to Ha’ikū in a single sitting besides Carlos Niño in the percussionist’s studio in California, the synthesist Jesse Peterson of Turn On The Sunlight departed for Maui, where with a borrowed Casio CZ-1000 surrounded by the sounds of children, birds, insects, lizards and frogs, goats, the wild trade winds and heavy rains he added the finishing touches to his songs. And with the cellist MIZU, classical guitarist Rick Modak, marimbist Payton MacDonald, saxophonist Samuel Newsome and flautist Annie Wu among the featuring artists, from under lilac skies the composer Arushi Jain adds a plethora of instruments to her stirring penchant for ambient synth ragas, this time drawing inspiration from the Raga Bageshri with its potent fantasies and themes of anticipation and ardent longing as through swirling mouth mantras she seeks portals of delight.
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Ivo Perelman – ’embracing the unknown’
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Rob Mazurek – ‘Bar Basso (for Corrado Beldi)’
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||ALA|MEDA|| – ‘um’khonto’ (feat. Phelimuncasi & DJ Paulo)
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Ayumi Ishito – ‘Mia Slavenska’ (feat. Kevin Shea & George Draguns)
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Mu540 & MC GW – ‘A Culpa Eh da Cachaça’
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Moniké – ‘Przygoda w Paludarium’
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Hanno Leichtmann – ‘Notteargenta’
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Arushi Jain – ‘Infinite Delight’
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