Rum Music for June Reviewed by Jennifer Lucy Allan

Speaking of phrases that resurface in the mind regularly, some almost nonsensical lines from John M. Bennett’s ‘Cake’ from A Flattened Face Fogs Through also flutter up to the surface regularly (something about the delivery of the line “when he cemented the basement drain I knew the house was lost… and you’d better start baking!” just sticks). Blanksmanship is a repress from the 1990s, and sees him accompanied by the occasional hollow whistling of shakuhachi, flute, and the chimes of bells. Where A Flattened Face Fogs Through felt like a wild sketchbook of surreal earworms, Blanksmanship has more of a literary persona: a near-narrative vaunt into some bastard form of epic poetry; a journey in the reduced language of The Inheritors in American suburbia.

Charmed by this odd record, the first of two I’m covering from the flourishing French underground. Like the duo Nina Harker, Jean-Marie Mercimek is also not a single person, but a duo, of Marion Molle and Ronan Riou and this is their second LP on Aguirre. I’m getting a translation that says it’s called ‘In The Marguerite Duras Truck,’ as in, haulage lorry. It pitches itself as a soundtrack of sorts, formed as a patchwork of loose French sung/spoken texts, backed with the pleasantly weird gloss of keyboards doing impressions of brass and woodwind that land on the right side of the uncanny valley. These clumpy keys and spoken word are interrupted only by a very incongruous middle interlude ‘A La Pêche O Crevetes’, which I’m presuming is a time-for-an-ice-cream cinema interval, and sounds more like the music that comes on the main menu in a resort hotel TV. 

A second expulsion from the French underground, this one of a poetic rather than cinematic bent, from the label/family that gave us the excellent Turner Williams Jr record a couple of years ago (and who calls on Flaming Tunes for his write up of this release). Los Pélieu Lovers are a sort-of iteration of Les Disques Omnison label head Tom Val‘s Orion Music Workshop, with Maximilien Douche (writer for Double magazine and the blog Oedipe Purple), and Magali Genuite (also of Double magazine), making a record inspired by French beat poet and artist Claude Pélieu. A line from Pélieu: “the grammatical teats/of nostalgia were pissing sulfur”. Yes! Pélieu worked in tandem with partner Mary Beach, and together they were prolific translators of beat poetry into French, translating Burroughs, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti and others. Here, there are bits of piano and drone; some kind of organ; whispered spoken word through a delay; recorders looped and layered; some birdsong better suited to a giallo than a sunrise. You know the score – a bit of this and bit of that all coagulating into space-holding atmospheres and/or soundtracks. Excellent. 

Clunking somatic percussions that come on particularly loose and clanging in the latest live missive from Crystabel Efemena Riley on London label Infant Tree. Objects on drumskin surfaces buzz in resistance; swallow reverberance; mute or alter each hit. There’s some extra tricks going on contorting the whole thing, too. I like to watch her play, in her dance around floor toms on the round, and that active live space translates here as the in-the-room sounds of audience whoops, which seem to egg her on to add density; pressure; pace. It’s all about skin and bodies. Riley is also a make-up artist particularly concerned with the organic, recycled, or reused (in the noughties she did drums, electronics and make-up in Maria & The Mirrors). Another yes from me. 

More high-octane minyo and chanting from Kasai, a Japanese care worker, binman, father and hobbyist farmer on Chinabot. It’s that chanting that brings it. The lyrics are on banal but brilliant subjects, such as the final song, which translates to ‘Piling-up Garbage Song’ and is about taking care with the bins. There’s a sense of randomness to the way sounds occur in these productions. Often a clap, shuffle or bong comes out of nowhere and settles into its own groove that’s just about out of whack with most of the rest of the tune. Either that or they’re all just totally off the beat. Whatever the tactic, we are definitely off the grid here. It means the productions have this curious idiosyncratic sort of animism, where each ping, ding or shuffle seem to be coming from sentient players trying to keep up and failing. It’s wonderfully naive, a tiny bit daft and incredibly likeable. Hands down the friendliest record in this edition of Rum Music.  

Out back in March but after the last column came out, and there’s been no better album opener than the hyper-bpm sonic boom boom boom of ‘Je Mitsiko Ro Mokotse’ (which translates to ‘Those who talk dirty behind your back tire themselves out for nothing’). Wow, that guitar! A king-size Catherine wheel on putt-putt-puttering drums with vocals that ride the lightning into the red. It’s sung by Mamehey and written by one of the vocalists, Bodida, one of the most popular tsapiky singers to have ever done it. Tsapiky is a form from Southwestern Madagascar, played at mandriampototse ceremonial parties that take place to mark various rites of passage, and Bodida’s track was a massive hit in this scene in 2022. Drick’s ‘Dance Of The Rich’ has a similarly screwface pace: high energy in low fidelity from a strapped together soundsystem, where other tracks include Songada’s acoustic track on breathy flutes and jangling drums and the high, clear a capella duo of Meny and Ando singing a song called ‘Don’t Be Surprised’. Cheers to Gabe for the tip!  

The gathered voices on Piriforms take flight, accessing high atmospheres and heavenly spaces; airy planes of sound rooted in thoughts around medieval singing in monasteries and questions of how hours of liturgical singing might affect the singer’s sensitivity to sound and space. I find a comparison in Yoshi Wada’s Singing In Unison, but where Wada’s album is heavily grounded, this reaches skywards and to the sacred. “The demonic energy is in between things, the sounds cast shadows upon each other,” Steenberge writes. Vowels loop and repeat (the reference being Swedenborg’s angels, who sing in vowels) as harmonies gather and fall away. There is very little augmentation with delay or other effects, which lends it immediacy and presence. It’s a stellar choir, too, comprising Catherine Lamb, Julia Holter, Yannick Goudon, Evelyn Saylor, and Rebecca Lane (who also adds some bass flute).

You know the drill here: romantic indie-ish male vocals; sounds from obscured sources through much delay; guitar strummed by someone who only knows a few chords, and the whole recording sounding as if it was made on a four-track dredged from a canal. That’s right: it’s more reissued gunk from the endless sea of the 80s tape underground. The shelves are full of it, and yet, I lap it up. Write ups elsewhere admit the same, but actually I believe I have snagged on this one for good reason. Perhaps it’s the vocals, which lean a little Graham Lewis, or whatever that tin foil drum machine is that my ears favour so much, I like the industrial grok interludes, and that have successfully straddled form/lessness meaning tracks come off with an ideal song-ishness. Whatever: I’m in for this German duo from Leer. This album compiles tracks from three early unobtanium self-released split-release tapes, all originally out on their own label One Last Dream. 

This one will shift your synapses if you listen with care and attention. Without wanting to throw around any loosey-goosey notions of something being proto-techno, side B of this tape genuinely sounds like Mika Vainio’s Metri played entirely with the sounds of water droplets. It’s a macro lens but a minimal (techno) sound, made by Masaaki Takano, who began his career in sound effects, but lost faith in it and began recording natural sounds, later moving into making his own naturalistic instruments when he couldn’t capture the wind in the way he wanted. Shizukutachi is conceptually rooted in the suikinkutsu, the principals of which informed the creation of his own self-created ‘suikinchiku’ instrument (which means water harp bamboo). Side A is a little more meditative, but still rhythmic, and these rhythms lend a transient architecture to the work; imbue it with human teleology. A suikinkutsu is sometimes fairly irregular, relying on water seeping through the ground or dripping from a pipe, but this instrument effectively sequences sound in beautifully resonant percussive patterns that say: this was made, not found. It’s worth noting his other album I’ve come to off the back of this, which translates to Soundscapes Of Awakening And Sleeping. It reminds me in parts of Annea Lockwood’s For Ruth, inits buzzing of insects and sloshing water, but also has sections that hone in with head-nodding repetitions of clunking farmyard machinery that sit somewhere in between early P16.D4 and Swiss Mountain Transport Systems, only with more cows.