Billed as an ‘illogical period piece’ after time spent meditating on his musical identity during young adulthood, on his latest album Daniel Lopatin constructs a garden of forking paths which mines his own canon as much as the bricolage of seventies prog or early-nineties slacker rock, from the syrupy chopped and screwed eighties samples of Eccojams, which set the template for vaporwave, to the organ arpeggios, Omnisphere choral chatter and keening Americana of R Plus Seven and the scuzzier outcrops of Garden of Delete. Now with strings attached, through a dizzying plethora of static movements as Lopatin completes the semi-autobiographical trilogy which started with Garden of Delete and Magic Oneohtrix Point Never, the track ‘Krumville’ serves as an early highlight of Again where sloshing water, strummed guitar and vocal gabber forced out of the audio cleanup tool Adobe Enhanced Speech give way to quizzical sighs, loping riffs and a gaseous funk comedown as Lopatin, backed by Xiu Xiu, discusses a lost friend and cast off stones, centering feeling poignantly on the perch of one Catskills street.
Each an epic in its own right, exploring African-American history with a liberatory bent while named after the freed slave and pioneering Louisiana businesswoman Marie Thérèse Coincoin, on the fifth installment of their Coin Coin project the saxophonist and mixed-media artist Matana Roberts turns to the timely issue of reproductive rights, telling the story of a woman in their ancestral line who died following complications from an illegal abortion. Steadily unspooling the ‘old dusty saga’ through spoken word passages, squalling free jazz, solo saxophone reflections and Mississippi fife and drum blues, Roberts is joined for Coin Coin Chapter Five: In the Garden . . . by the violinist Mazz Swift, the alto saxophonist Darius Jones, the clarinetists Matt Lavelle and Stuart Bogie, the percussionists Mike Pride and Ryan Sawyer, the smoky pianist Cory Smythe and the Alicuanta vocalist Gitanjali Jain.
From the opening figure in ‘ebony brown, bucket brown eyes a wandering’ and the affirmation ‘the women in my line whispered truth’, the narrator of In the Garden . . . who describes herself in passionate, downcast and bitterly ironic terms as ‘electric, alive, spirited, fire and free’ tells of her two ‘love bit boys’, an adulterous partner and the machinations of his family, who view her variously as an outcast and jezebel, her own fulfillment denied and her accomplishments ‘forever under review’. After finding herself again with child yet failing to sate the suspicions of her partner, she surveys ‘possible futures’ and winds up throwing herself down a long flight of library stairs, as dreams combust, sparkling eyes waver and voices splinter and sworl before being carried off on the gallop of equine feet. Then a wind chime commences its rattle, and spirituals become hauntologies, lullabies or requiems for the dead even as the act of remembrance opens up hidden pathways and portals, one woman’s voice unlike wagging tongues with the power to shape and reshape our present futures.
Inspired by the yellowing fantasies of the French symbolist painter Odilon Redon, the pianist Sylvie Courvoisier unveils her latest chimaera in the company of the lyrical trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, three stalwarts of the New York scene in the form of Drew Gress, Nate Wooley and Kenny Wolleson, and a wild card in the Austrian producer and guitarist Christian Fennesz, whose ambient textures serve to round out the sextet. Darius Jones turns his distinctive tone on the alto saxophone – described by The New York Times as ‘widely dilated, yet so rough it could peel paint’ – loose on a radiant manifesto to freedom, creating a Fluxus kit for anywhere art in four movements alongside Jesse and Josh Zubot on violins, Peggy Lee on cello, James Meger on bass and Gerald Cleaver on drums as part of a commission for Western Front, an artist-run centre in Vancouver.
On a record which skews long, Animal Collective bring some of their recent penchants and interests – Panda Bear’s proclivity for drumming, Deakin’s tinkling on the old ivory keys, and Avey Tare and Geologist’s burgeoning fondness for the hurdy gurdy whirs and gilded polyphonies of Renaissance music – to bear in miniature on ‘Broke Zodiac’. Pitching herself as both scavenger and hustler, the inveterate punker Haru Nemuri issues an ode to destruction as the lead track from her new extended play. And on vocals, synths and the hand-pumped harmonium, the Pan-Asian couple itta and Marqido together with their son RAAI infuse psychedelic drone songs with the spirit of their annual pilgrimages, offering a milky-eyed ode to the all-encompassing Mongolian sky god with a ‘restart’ of sorts on their latest album as TENGGER.
From Mexico City the avant-garde cellist Mabe Fratti, the composer and vocalist Camille Mandoki, the sound artist Concepción Huerta who specialises in synthesizers, tape manipulation and field recordings, and the classically trained violinist Gibrana Cervantes bring their withering wit and years of experimentation to fruition, reuniting in the forest haven of La Pitahaya in Zoncuantla for their debut album as Amor Muere. Laden with an array of self-crafted instruments made from soda bottle caps, straws, house keys and terracotta pots plus field recordings of birdsong and walking textures, the percussionist Berke Can Özcan leads listeners on a serpentine trek along the Lycian Way, inflamed by the volcanic magnitude of its Twin Rocks while on trumpet and sax Arve Henriksen and Jonah Parzen-Johnson provide added lustre.
Still representing the backwoods boroughs of New York, on their first album for Fat Possum the duo of ELUCID and billy woods as Armand Hammer drop the trauma mic and reference the exposed bust of Bathsheba over the junk percussion and pungent production of DJ Haram, test the limits of Siri and grope for the heaving embonpoint over beats by JPEGMAFIA, and pay homage to the jazz poet Gil Scott-Heron on a line from ‘The Gods Must Be Crazy’ which credits their Def Jux forebear El-P, mythmaking and ruminating with a steely glint across the trans-continental breadth of We Buy Diabetic Test Strips as kindred spirits like Moor Mother, Shabaka Hutchings, Willie Green, Pink Siifu and Kenny Segal help round out the features.
Described as the central panel of a triptych which also includes BLUD and SKEEN, both previously released on Graham Dunning’s Fractal Meat Cuts imprint, on BOWN the acclaimed turntablist Mariam Rezaei leans into a slew of carefully selected collaborators, blurring the lines in sometimes bludgeoning fashion between the wild pop of Gwilly Edmondez, the dramatic soprano of Alya Al-Sultani, and the gusty reeds and fissured surfaces of free jazz, asking the question ‘How can I make the turntable sound as extreme as Roscoe Mitchell or Peter Brötzmann?’ to which one answer alongside Teresa Winter and Bobby Glue is the shatterproof climax of ‘GLASS BASTARD’. And for the sixtieth release on SVBKVLT, the club producer ABADIR who hails from the old Heliopolis suburb of Cairo absorbs a childhood routine of churchgoing as his parents took him on Sundays and feast days to the holy places of Egypt’s various Eastern Christian sects. Fascinated by their choral music, for Ison the producer used segments and field recordings from Coptic, Syriac, Maronite, Greek Orthodox and Catholic choirs to present his own vision of fresh hymns or fictional chants, comparing the record to his last release with the suggestion that if Mutate was made to make the dancefloor burn, Ison instead ‘is intended to cure last night’s hangover’.
* * *
* * *
* * *
* * *
Berke Can Özcan & Arve Henriksen – ‘Snake Behind Valley’
* * *
Oneohtrix Point Never – ‘Krumville’
* * *
Animal Collective – ‘Broke Zodiac’
* * *
Matana Roberts – ‘predestined confessions’
* * *
* * *
Mariam Rezaei – ‘GLASS BASTARD’ (feat. Teresa Winter & Bobby Glue)
* * *
Armand Hammer – ‘The Gods Must Be Crazy’
* * *
* * *
