“What are some of the possible musics on this planet at this time?” Jon Hassell asked in 1980, trying to imagine a decidedly Western bridge between the global North and South. The essay that the US trumpeter and composer penned to accompany his collaboration with Brian Eno, Fourth World, Vol.1: Possible Musics, would later be as influential as the album itself. Yet, the music of the future that they had tried to imagine never quite arrived. Fast forward several decades and the opposite has happened: capitalism played its commodifying, ossifying card. Hassell and Eno’s heady fusion of jazz, ambient, and minimalism, which borrowed from various traditions and serious composition, thus became a cornerstone of questionable New Age philosophies and unquestionably awful corporate taste. Now, Mexico City’s Aaron With and Milo Tamez aka Pidgins turn the style on its head.
While Dialect’s wonderful 2024 album, Atlas Of Green, looked to the distant future to rethink Fourth World aesthetics stripped of their baggage, Pidgins revel in the dull eccentricities of the present, splashing vibrant colour over its greyness. Listening to Refrains Of The Day, Volume 2 back-to-back with Volume 1 reveals an almost seamless transition, as knots of effervescent percussion (mbiras, hand drums, steelpans, gongs, shakers, chimes – the lot!) and clouds of MIDI-triggered samples orbit around amusingly threatening corporate jargon.
On ‘Getting Things Done’, a shuffling, rustling percussive texture is caught mid-dialogue with metallic scratches and With’s voice mangled beyond recognition. “Getting things done,” he intones, repeatedly. Syllables grow farther apart and escape him, as if caught in a time-dilation bubble. Yet, even given infinite time, the work is never done. ‘Things To Do’ reinforces this reality with a very productive, very motivating cascade of clave hits and watery gurgles descending on harmonised, out-of-phase mantras.
Here, the electronically processed singsong resembles an unlikely tête-à-tête between the Beach Boys and Sun Araw. Rhythms rule over tunefulness, but the album’s loveliest moments, such as this one, are pure melody. After a jungle’s flora and fauna come alive on ‘Speculative Fiction’ – strange found sounds brought together for an authentic exotica experience – the foreboding hinted at in the earlier tracks becomes much more palpable. Trigger phrases like ‘Tax Paradise’, ‘Special Economic Zone’ and ‘Underdeveloped Nations’ guide us through uncomfortable, normalised socioeconomic horrors under a façade of feigned joy. The vocal lines, synths, and percussion grow increasingly jittery, with a concertina’s abrasive texture enveloping With’s now anxiously elongated lines and Tamez’s frenetic polyrhythms.
By the time we reach the delirious closer, ‘Result Oriented’, we have surely lost our collective minds. With’s voice is pitch-shifted into a falsetto, exclaiming “oriented, oriented, oriented!” with rapture. Meanwhile, Tamez’s percussion becomes ardent and almost celebratory, as if asking, “Aren’t you happy to have contributed to the bottom line?” Whether intentional or not, this final track sounds like something that could echo through the sterile hallways of the severed floor from the TV show Severance. Music of the future? More like music of the eternal present.
