January feels like it’s been three months long. I made few resolutions. I will be writing half a book’s worth of words before my birthday at the end of March, which feels enough of a goal. I did pitch myself a target for reading (52 books) and wrote the word “FLOSS” in the front of my diary. It’s going to be a busy year, and it’s already in full swing, with releases already dropping that I feel are solidly in the running for my AOTY list, namely by the increasingly prolific Tashi Dorji, and the storytelling episodes of sound by Silvia Tarozzi.
These first weeks of the year included Late Junction recording. Catch this recent one on baile funk, and don’t miss the documentary that prompted the interview with GG Alberquerque. Terror Mandelão went up on YouTube at the end of last year, and follows DJ K, whose funk bruxaria sound pushes all production into the red, makes it noisy, makes it break down and embraces the “bad” recording for the chaos and energy it brings. The doc catches him at a watershed moment as his profile transitions from local scene hero to international touring musician, after he gets picked up by Nyege Nyege and tours Europe for the first time.
I also spent 36 hours in Paris recently, where I legged it to the Pinault Collection for 2.5 hours of Yoshi Wada’s Earth Horns With Electric Drone. It’s a long while since I’ve felt so sunk in an absorbing durational piece. The ways in which the acoustics and electronics drift and pattern give it a motion-filled sense of meditation. I came out of that concrete foyer having forgotten about the rigamarole of everyday life, feeling at once calmed and confused by the mental shift back to conversation, travel and the simple task of ordering a drink.
Before the gig I stopped into Dizonord and spent money I currently don’t have (thanks Samuel for the tips!). I snagged a load of Archie Shepp’s catalogue, some low-key Italian industrial music with a violin from 1985; a French folk compilation of hurdy-gurdy, pipes and accordion; Luc Marianni deadstock; and other bits and pieces. I left a lot behind because I wasn’t supposed to be buying anything at all, and I have of course spent the week regretting it. My regrets include: an LP of German garage-punk with a naked arse in chaps on the cover; a 1980s oddity from Reims; some Jean C. Roché birdsong recordings, and something labelled ‘Celtic gothic French folk’ that I dropped the needle on in the wrong place, judging that it was too cheesy. I looked it up afterwards, it was not.
Silvia TarozziLuccioleUnseen Worlds
An ideal one to begin a new year. This fleet-footed narrative patchwork arrives as a sequel to Tarozzi’s Mi Specchio E Rifletto from 2020. It opens with horns, moves through acoustic guitar songs, spritzes with computer music and scaffolds with songs infused with light; that rise in optimistic flourishes, folding textures together beautifully. These textures are plentiful: a Wurlitzer, turntables, theremin, bansuri flute, balafon, lashed together with violin, brass and voice, and cameos by a raft of musicians including Valentina Magaletti, and the Piccolo Coro Angelico, a children’s choir Tarozzi has worked with for over 15 years. Like Mi Specchio E Rifletto, the instrumentation is sparse and breezy, tending towards a resolving of chords, tones, tunes, all of which douse the record with a warm-spirited charisma and charm. It’s a record I just want to hang out with.
Tashi DorjiLow Clouds Hang, This Land Is On Fire
This hangs in the air like smoke. Like the idea of the aftermath. What kind of aftermath will be constructed in the ear of the listener. As such, it is not soothing, but stands up like a document of a moment when the electricity of an event lingers, dissipating but still present; when a heart rate begins returning to normal; when thinking slows and ears rise and we become freshly conscious of a scene or situation. You could think of this as a sequel to the more ferocious acoustic playing on last year’s We Will Be Wherever The Fires Are Lit, and as being acutely political, which is not a contentious reading given the explicit track titles: ‘Burn The Throne’ and ‘We Overflow The Streets And Squares Like The Sea In A Spring Tide… And That Very Instant The Tyrants Of The Earth Shall Bite The Dust’. What’s essential is this mood captured, the nuances of resistance and exhaustion; of knowledge of living under a different rule than before.
Regan Bowering Infant Tree
Five tracks and a live recording from London based drummer Regan Bowering on Rory Salter’s Infant Tree. Ostensibly difficult music made easy, in the capturing of a practice that is actually experimental, that sets up relationships between percussion, feedback and microphones and welcomes the challenges to control that these relationships impose. All are in the room, monochrome sketches that clatter when she wants clatter, that allow feedback to express itself, listening that manifests in recordings showcasing the simplest palette (the 43-second roll around a kit) and the fullest (the fifth piece’s micro-symphony).
GushGushHuntleys + Palmers
Saw this show live at Cafe OTO, didn’t know what I was in for. What I got was a crooner with a live drummer, backed by fuzzy electronics that are bedroom-cute but still swaggering and weird. I love the timbre of Steven Warwick’s voice, it has this thickness to it. Multitracked in songs like ‘City Fog’ it brings all the bass frequencies to these tunes. There are slugs of deviant pop: the chants on ‘Hieroglyph’; the oddball goth-dirge of ‘Naked In Netto’ and the centrepiece ‘I Am A Reissue’ which feels it could be built from an earworm in a novelty song that topped the charts in 1979. It’s the slower songs that do it for me – ‘Bodies’, ‘City Fog’, and the odd squirrely torque of ‘Face It’, whose electronics come from a palette that tickled a memory of this Dutch bubbling album.
Bono / BurratiniOra Sono Un LagoMaple Death
More drum kits here, this time with a Juno-60, by Italian duo Bono / Burratini, who are Francesca Bono (a vocalist also in the group Ofeliadorme) and Vittoria Burattini (percussionist, who also plays in the band Massimo Volume). Was sold on the first track of this, that comes on in drifts of arpeggiated synths from somewhere out in the Laurie Spiegel extended universe. Still digging in to the rest, which contains more density, chug, and more instruments-in-a-room, inspired by three films by Maya Deren (At Land, Ritual In Transfigured Time and A Study In Choreography For Camera).
Diatribes & Lise BarkasL’Apport: Apprendre La ManièreInSub
The latest in the L’ Apport (‘The Contribution’) series, this one called Learning The Way with Lise Barkas on hurdy-gurdy. The series is led by Diatribes, a duo of d’incise (Swiss artist Laurent Peter) on electronics and Cyril Bondi, the drummer who runs this Swiss label, but who might be best known to some of you as the current live drummer for France, and as a member of La Tène. ‘The Contribution’ is the name of the score used, and this is the fourth (but not the most recent) version to be recorded and released, with Barkas really dragging a grinding texture from the gurdy, in chunked-out hefts of sound that become staging a deathly bourrée for the feet to move to.
Enno VelthuysMusic From The Other Side Of The FenceStroom
One of my favourite genres is the spaceways of DIY bedroom synth music. The flippant comment made about this zone of music is that it’s all made by lonely men living in their mum’s houses, but in this case it is factual. Enno Velthuys was a Dutch musician who came out the wrong side of the psychedelic 60s and soothed his compromised mind by world-building a synth safe zone. I’ve only had a few days with this at time of writing, but it’s feeling sticky, sitting somewhere between ICR and the Berlin school, geographically but also sonically. It has some full-field, fairly glossy cosmic panoramas, and other moments of interiority in dinky, dirgey bedroom projects. A few of Enno Velthuys’ albums have been reissued, but this compilation on Stroom is put together by musician, composer and producer Hessel Veldman, who knew Enno his whole life.
AOB
MAI Mai – Winter Training
This was not in fact released in December as my feed was suggesting but came out last summer completely unbeknownst to me. It is well established that filmmaker and experimental musician MAI Mai does an excellent cover (did you ever hear his Beatles covers on Zoomin’ Night?) but this vocoder molasses cover of ‘Moon River’ is luminous and odd, a mood in and of itself: a yearning.
On the way next month is a reissue of Bim Sherman’s ‘Ghetto Dub’. A regular On-U Sound collaborator, Adrian Sherwood said about Sherman that: “His was like a voice from the wilderness, the lyrics and fragile power ensured that in every batch of imports I was looking out for a new Sherman record”.
There’s also a 2007 MHSB set gone up on Tori Kudo’s Bandcamp, and I know you can say this about lots of these sets, but this is a really good one, trust me.
When putting the baile funk show together, I went looking for an Akira Umeda track to playlist. I had no idea he uploads a new archival album to Bandcamp every few months. A new place to go digging.
