Up and down, round and round. In out, shake it all about, or actually, try not to. Get tested, don’t get tested. Eat out but stay in. Do whatever you like so long as there’s a card machine. I don’t know whether I’m coming or going, as my mother likes to say. One thing I can control is where my fragile income is going.
In case the news had passed you by, tQ is now running subscriptions for about the price of a fancy pint once a month. It’s made me think about other outlets I want to see continue, particularly in the increasingly fragile world of music writing and live music. I am now a paid up member of Oto, and I’ve been buying magazines off the newsstand in WH Smith like it’s 1999.
I have also been on a record buying spree that really has to stop. The LP shaped post is so frequent I’ve been having extended chats about music with my postman. He likes heavy metal. I also had a few days searching out fanzines, mainly to get out of a discovery rut but also to join the dots a bit better in the outer limits of The Zone. Check out this thread for some great recommends.
Finally, I’ve been putting things out in the world as well as taking them in. As well as Arc Light I also co-run an occasional label with Kevin McCarvel (Nyali Recordings) called Good Energy, and we’re finally releasing History Of Sleep, a duo of Richard Youngs and bagpipes player Donald WG Lindsay, who has since moved to the remote Ascension Island. It’s gorgeous, if I do say so myself.
Harry Pussy – Superstar
(Harry Pussy)
15 songs on one 7" by one of the greatest bands ever, Harry Pussy. These feral half-songs were recorded around 1993, and are all spikes and squalls and twangs – quick cuts between fury and space; groove and guts – totally life-affirming and completely fucking brilliant. Superstar includes a track called ‘Robert Ranks Reed (alphabetically)’, where Adris Hoyos screams and each Lou Reed album is given an A+ to C rating. The Blue Mask comes top. Essential.
BBB & BBB – Hu Nian An Yu
(Old Heaven Books)
Old Heaven Books is a label and bookshop operating out of Shenzhen, China that I’ve been chasing in the last year or so. There’s all sorts on the label, from the doomy emo-ish strains of a band called Puppet to music like this. BBB & BBB is a duo of Ben Bo Er Ba and Ba Bo Er Ben – aka Lao Dan and Li Daiguo. This suite of pieces are contemporary improvisations on traditional instruments including a pipa (a traditional Chinese instrument resembling a lute) a duduk (an Armenian double-reed flute) along with prepared piano, saxophone and vocals. It’s often sparse, with surprising handbrake turns into ferocious outbursts (see end of ‘Part One’). It can be hard to get hold of physical copies (Oto occasionally stocks them), but it’s worth it. Failing that, there’s loads on Bandcamp.
Legowelt – Unconditional Contours
(Legowelt)
I am always ready to hear new music by Dutch oddball Danny Wolfers. The tracks here were recorded at the Swiss Museum for Electronic Music Instruments, on some odd and obscure synths, many of which were essentially failures, like the EVS-1 Evolution, which is apparently, the ‘shittiest rompler ever made’ (a rompler is like a sampler, but where the sounds are pre-loaded). The title track’s pretty swoony, and after that it gets a lot odder. I read on Wikipedia that Legowelt describes his own music as "a hybrid form of slam jack combined with deep Chicago house, romantic ghetto technofunk and EuroHorror Soundtrack", and I reckon that’s more accurate than anything I’ll come up with here.
Ustad Saami – Pakistan Is For The Peaceful
(Glitterbeat)
Surti master Ustad Saami’s God Is Not A Terrorist from 2019 was a release I came very late to, so happy to be picking this one up on time to mention it. It’s not really rum music at all though, it’s traditional music that dates back to the 13th century and is sung in a 49-note microtonal scale by Saami, who is the last living surti master, a form that predates qawwali. However, Surti is nothing like the celebratory sound of qawwali, it turns slowly on its axis, a dance in slow motion, accompanied by harmonium, tambura and tablas. It’s luminous, and because we don’t have a column for 700-year-old traditional music I thought I’d better pick it up in here before it passes us by.
Luo Fei – Kunming Record During Covid-19
(Flaming Pines)
At around ten minutes on this collection of one minute long field recordings on Kate Carr’s Flaming Pines label by Chinese artist Luo Fei, is a car horn symphony I could loop and listen to for hours. An exaltation of auto horns are joined by a siren that swoops in the back, over a solid drone that sounds like hundreds of heads on steering wheel horns. It is a micro-symphony for fatigue and frustration, around which are other minute long snippets of private and public life in Kunming, China, during lockdown, including a hummed Happy Birthday, as a guide for washing hands. The structure really works for this material, feel more like short acts in a drama than diary entries, creating their own contrasts and relationships as the recordings move through time.
Bunita Marcus – Lecture For Jo Kondo
(99 Chants)
Bunita Marcus is a composer I should know, but has been sidelined and forgotten since she began writing her post-minimalist music half a century ago. She was an affiliate of John Cage and Morton Feldman, but like so many women around that time didn’t get her dues. ‘Lecture For Jo Kondo’ was originally written in 1985 and it was later recorded in 2012. That 2012 recording is the basis for this release, to which Marcus adds her own voice, reading words taken from Nico Vassilakis’ poem ‘Lowered And Illuminated’. The text floors me – the verses sound like aphorisms but don’t land in concrete meaning, and instead remain poetically suspended in mid-air. Piano, strings, flute and percussion breathe in response – there are tense exhalations of violin and the anxious rattling of a glockenspiel (or maybe marimba). Side B is a deconstruction by David August, which disintegrates the lecture with tape hiss, adds drone and echo, and at one point takes it outside into siren filled streets. There’s a big interview with her in The Wire, which in parts makes for grim but important reading.
Meridian Brothers – Cumbia Siglo XXI
(Les Disques Bongo Joe)
The starting point for these jaunty cumbias is a 1980s future-facing cumbia group Cumbia siglo XX, taken to its next imagined iteration by Bogota group Meridian Brothers. ‘Son Of A Preacher Man’ (‘Cumbia Del Pichaman’) is a bit wacky, I’ll admit, but the rest of the album’s digi-DIY cumbia, with off-kilter oofs, peeps and boings means this is fairly out there. Instruments are more often than not out of sync, slightly out of tune, cutting their own Short Circuit groove, giving it a really irresistible naive charm that means I’ve listened to it a lot. Crucially, it actually makes me feel good and its goofy energy is pretty infectious – everyone sounds like they’re actually having fun.
Gavsborg – Jamaican Drum Machine
(Equiknoxx Music)
Gavsborg is a member of Equiknoxx, a Jamaican collective reliably pushing distorting the edges of dancehall can be. Mainstream and chart dancehall is getting ever more syrupy, while Equiknoxx are mutating the form. These skeletal productions are sprung like a mattress but with all the stuffing pulled out. ‘Bees Love Ackee More Than Dogs’ sounds like garage classics being sung by Asimo, and ‘Please Forgive Me For Sampling Shanique’s Song’ has the earwormy fast chop & hype of a stripped back DJ Rashad on a Sunday morning.
Bill Wells – The Viaduct Tuba Trio Plays The Music Of Bill Wells
(bison)
My first gig reviewing music was for a Manchester site called Angry Ape, for whom I reviewed electronica (it was big then, ok?) and experimental music. I never met anyone who worked there. Most of the promo CDs I got rid of, but one that I still have is of Bill Wells and Maher Halal Shash Baz. The naive brass scrambled the way I thought about how good you had to be at playing an instrument to make it sound truly moving. Flash-forward to now and Bison records releases this, an album of Wells’ music played by a tuba trio of Antony Hook, Danielle Price and Mark Reynolds, who formed in 2018 to perform in the lee of the Glenfinnan Viaduct as part of the Loch Shiel Festival. It’s really going to be my feel good hit of the Autumn, and opens with a number so festive I’ve cued it up for Christmas already. The pieces are full of character – parpy and playful in parts, and mournful and moving on compositions like ‘Chorale 4K’.
AOB
This arrived just before deadline, so squeezing it in before it gets lost in the deluge – a release of music for dance made by Ellen Fullman, sans Long String Instrument this time. There’s a CD/DL of some early Guru Guru stuff out. It’s pretty shitty quality so really one for the maximum heads, but it is sourced from a 45-year-old cassette so give it a break. Special mention for best artist name and title for this one that’s just dropped on Avon Terror Corps – Let’s Get Lhysicap by Olivia Mutant John And Wrong Travolta.
