Rum Music for August Reviewed by Jennifer Lucy Allan

Love these two delicate albums for kantele, a Finnish traditional instrument that is a type of zither or psaltery which is plucked, but still has a comparable texture and palette to the hammered dulcimer of Dorothy Carter, or Michael O’Shea with a lighter touch. In the Kalevala, the Finnish creation epic, it is said to have been made by Väinämöinen, the story’s hero, who fashions it from the jawbone of a giant pike, and who plays music on it that is so beautiful the goddesses draw up to listen. The Death Is Not The End release here is a reissue of a little-known album from 2021, which intertwines wax cylinder recordings from 1917 of a blind kantele player called Teppana Jänis, with 21st century recordings by researcher and kantele player Arja Kastinen and the late Finnish folk musician Taito Hoffrén. It’s done so sympathetically, where some tunes are performed in double the new over the degraded wax cylinder recordings, it is as if Kastinen and Hoffrén are undergoing an explicit act of restoration through these overlaps. The impression left is music that is still alive not preserved on wax never to be touched, but something which might change or develop. The Ektro reissue does a different sort of reinvigorating of the kantele, renewing not recordings but the type of music played on the kantele. It is perhaps in a broader lineage with musicians like Rhodri Davies, although there is a different sort of modernism at play here than in, say, the La Novia collective. This ‘New Music’ for five string kantele doesn’t look to totally crowbar it into a new context, but welcomes in influences from minimalism and modern composition, and engages the instrument in more expansive compositions that tumble along in clouds of plucked notes like a drift of dandelion clocks. In her notes for the CD, Hannu Saha says this record should be listened to quietly, and the lightness in the recording gives it a glistening sound, lending itself to low playback for late-night shimmer.  I kept finding myself singing along to it in wordless accompaniment. It is only on CD right now, with no streaming, but is available here.  

The second album (previously unreleased) by 1980s Hungarian band Trabant, who only released one official single while they were still operational, but who would pass their tapes around the scene out of sight of the state-controlled record labels. I have ended up meeting both Trabant albums at the same time, as I’d ignored the digitals of the first and waited for the repress. I don’t know why it took me so long. I love them. They have a looseness I adore; an easy naivete but smarts in the songs. I love the tinny little drum machine, the dour drawling female vocals from Marietta Méhes. They deliver what is at some moments a sort of sombre Eastern Bloc post punk, then in others it falls in lineage with bedroom out-pop projects à la Williams and Currie. In others still there is something more like private press outsider folk albums like Maria Monti, and then there are glimpses of bigger ambitions, orchestral snippets or grander arrangements than tapes and small flats and rehearsal times ever allowed. 

I now arrive at any release from the Discreet expanded universe thinking it’s 50/50 that it’s another Gustaf Dicksson side project. At first I thought this was Dicksson, as there is so little info on Post-Tragic Man (except the statement he is Danish). There is a picture of him (or someone, anyway) on the sleeve, but I have become so sceptical I wondered if this was the artist or just a photo of a random bloke. Right now, I think Post-Tragic Man probably exists, and that he is probably not Gustaf Dicksson. Either way, this record is great. I was drawn into it by the free-flowing solo piano (an instrument I have a fresh enthusiasm for after years of largely disliking it) interlaced with tracks of body tapping (the kundalini bit). This rhythmic tapping has a thudding sort of resonance and stands in perfect contrast to the looseness of the piano. Cumulatively the album becomes somehow calming despite the stark shifts in sound sources. All 200 covers (am sure there are exactly 200) come hand-painted, although it seems *someone* ran out of paint colours when they did mine as it has only a swirl in red and no artist, title or other ornaments. I’m not salty about it at all. Despite the unfinished sleeve, this is by far my favourite Discreet-related album I’ve heard lately, and has been on the heaviest rotation of anything this month. 

Big bagpipe drone smeared into Eleh-grade electronics in this album by Glasspack, which was out on Czech label Stoned To Death a couple of months ago. That label has put out a clutch of stuff I adore, including France’s Do Den Haag Church (a desert island disc), Saito Koji, Jon Collin, Emily Robb, and this underrated fingerpicking record made in the back of a warehouse. Glasspack are a duo of Henry Birdsey and Ian McColm, both are part of the New Haven scene, around which there many threads and releases to unspool. Birdsey plays pipes in Tongue Depressor and pedal steel in Old Saw (thanks to S for playing the latest TD, it’s great). McColm plays in Center and Heart Of The Ghost, among others. The thickness of the electronics, so meaty, makes the sound fat and muscular when butting up against the cutting tone of the pipes. It is smothering and heavy, gloopy with a slight move towards resolution at various points, with shifting planes of sound that open up enough space for the ear to move around inside in a way more similar to Yoshi Wada than Erwan Keravec.   

I have been waiting for this to be released for months. Willem Nyland trained as a chemist, then got turned on to Gurdjieff, becoming one of his key students and going on to co-found The Gurdjieff Foundation of New York. He set up a community around a barn in Warwick, New York, where he held Friday night music nights, playing ‘improvised’ piano on a specially tuned baby grand. He released 16 private press albums of his recordings, and this is just one of them, chosen for reissue simply because it is the one he recommended to the photographer Anselm Adams. Some of the pieces are heavy handed with a brutish elegance, others enact a tumbling dance across the keys. It doesn’t feel like someone playing joyously and freely for pure pleasure, nor is it restrained or indeed cathartic. It is an idiosyncratic sort of automatic playing, drawing on familiar progressions, chords and muscle memory. It sometimes feels like playing to exorcise a day at work; an exercise in shedding something without beginning from scratch. Nyland apparently said this music wasn’t meant to be ‘liked’ but taken in and digested, as a sort of relaxation, which is how I encountered it before reading that instruction. It is strangely compelling and I return to it often. It is not ‘good’ piano playing, you understand, but if that was a condition of entry you would not be reading me here.   

Speaking of which, I must mention Tall Grass, a label I have been listening to after doing some work scoping out all the Ché-Shizu that exists, run by the artist on this new release, Yonju Miyaoka (who has played with Chie Mukai and other luminaries of the Japanese underground, and reissued a Ché-Shizu live album). If you like to hear someone play their instrument well, look away now. If you liked My Bloody Sex Party and would have liked them to do a folk album, this is for you. It’s about as close to the bone of non-music as you can get while still nibbling off bits of flesh and song. A real art brut of a thing, it might be best to listen to it backwards, as the standout track is the bonus and will get you on side, dedicated as it is to the one and only Michio Kadotani (one half of Rotting Telepathies with Asahito Nanjo, and who made one of my favourite ever PSF albums, also called Rotting Telepathies). The first quacking, honking missive on the other hand, is fairly perplexing. By track three a hurdy gurdy arrives, haltingly, and something is ground out of it. The longest piece, which translates to ‘August, if you think it’ll happen again’, is sweetly naive and charming in tentative strummed guitar and missed repetitions, like Tori Kudo covering early Richard Dawson.      

Feel like I cover a lot of Lori Goldston on this column, proportionally speaking, particularly given the amount of music flying off the presses at any one time, so I thought about putting this in AOB, but I figured that would just be doing it a disservice. Goldston’s releases are always so solid, so good, but often released with little to no fanfare and easily missed. I was walloped here with a toothy roar coming from just her cello, amp and distortion pedal, all recorded in one sitting. That pedal really gives it a bite; is muscular and strong and she rides the tones, harnessing, restraining and releasing; sometimes letting it flow loose and wild, at others drawing back to steady the galloping drones. No notes.