A chest infection notwithstanding, I spent a lot of time in March unpicking the Maher Shalal Hash Baz back catalogue. I got so tangled up by the manoeuvrings of Tori Kudo that I abandoned my plan to include mostly side quests and stuck to the main thoroughfare, with the exception of one or two things, including adding some pottery to the list.
Towards the end of this daunting task I became utterly stuck on a 54-second-long track called ‘King Of The North’ from Blues Du Jour, which I am listening to right now for the 20th plus time today. I love the stop start delivery of the lyrics so much I spent a few hours tracing the exact Bible translation the lyrics come from and what this might mean (it’s from the Book of Daniel). I have been feeling worried in recent years that I have lost my lust for sound; that I’ve been going through the motions in my explorations, but this dive suggests otherwise.
I have also listened a lot to this Jon Collin release from back in November, the opening track of which sounds like Appalachian weather, but otherwise the living room stereo has been dominated with Tori Kudo’s catalogue. However, I still found time for lots of new releases. Bar the lo fi Japanese post punk and some gamelan, it’s almost all strings in this edition of Rum Music. I must be feeling highly strung.
DD records was a 1980s Japanese post punk tape label. Most of said tape releases are now unobtanium of the highest order, although much of it has appeared on Bandcamp lately. Phantom Limb also released a collection of music by the label’s Koshiro Yoshimatsu last year called Fossil Cocoon, and are now following it up with this very welcome compilation. Nobody knows where label head Kamada Tadashi is now, and the assumption is he doesn’t want to be found, having ditched the music at some point and got on with his life, presumably getting a ‘real’ job. If you want to find out not very much more, there’s a really good feature on DD Records’ output here. I ended up getting stuck on a murky album called In The Fish which I can highly recommend. That artist doesn’t feature on here, but that’s no problem, there’s plenty to be getting into. The big ‘pop’ tune is called ‘Egg’ from the excellently named Young Hormones, which is giving me big Non Band energy, and there’s a clutch of low budget monochrome experiments and clatterings of the type usually plastered with the insufficiently specific post punk label, and which makes comps like the Home-Made Music For Home-Made People series sound really together. I like these odd experiments and the industrial roughness a lot, and I’d be lying if I said the mystery didn’t appeal.
Emily RobbLive At Jerry’sSelf-Released
Emily Robb’s gorgeous big fat guitar tone stomps through this live set recorded at Jerry’s On Front in Philadelphia, at the end of last year. She sounds like she’s riding a horse when she plays guitar, keeping a powerful animal under control, making it sing to her song. Her sound is always anchored to this rough, bloody low end, with a top line carving through the fuzz, like stallion hooves pulling up the dust on a lake bed. I missed an excellent seven inch single release from her back in December that comes on like a rising tide, as sirens sing to bring out your dead through rough waters.
Gamelan Salukat, Jan KadereitÁshiraOne World
Gamelan Salukat is a gamelan formed by composer Dewa Alit in 2007, which has a unique set of instruments designed by Alit specifically so that the group could perform his boundary-pushing gamelan compositions. It’s what sits at the root of this fresh, future-sounding album by Jan Kadereit and the gamelan. There are crisp rushes of sound; bells in impossible high def; tumbling waterfalls that ring in slow motion, the patterns of falling water revealed as if by slow-mo camera. The opener is a stunner, crisp twittering repetitions of high pitches that give way to crashing percussion. It’s like no other gamelan album I’ve heard. Alit’s work is the closest comparison, for obvious reasons, but there is a totally different sensibility powering each composer’s sound on this instrument.
Split ApexSplit ApexWorld Of Echo
Split Apex is Peter Blundell from Mosquitoes/Komare doing bass and vocals with a writer and translator of political philosophy called Jussi Palmusaari on guitar, electronics and percussion). Fans of the Mozzies will feel at home with the gloom and mutterings of opener ‘Fused Edge’, but elsewhere I feel the electronics and guitar get us into new territories via some vaguely brutalist arrangements and radiophonic sounds. The falling-apart bass and drums of ‘Only One Path’ are lashed together with a caustic monotone from an unknown source, short closer ‘Hidden Edge’ is a lost FC Judd workout, and the curious ‘Orphee’ comes off like Blundell’s version of an experimental radio play from the 1970s. More please!
Miaux, Lieven MartensThe Pels Organ And Hemony Carillon Of St. Catherine’s Church In Hoogstraten. Recording Of The Unveiling Of An Artwork By Joris MartensEdições CN
I’ve been ready to call a moratorium on organ albums for a while. After hearing Éliane Radigue’s Occam XXV for organist Frédéric Blondy in person, I began to doubt if it ever made sense to compress the huge architectural and spatial presence of a church organ onto a record. It seemed like trying to squeeze an octopus through a drainpipe: it can be done with the right approach, but it’s difficult, and perhaps unnecessary. Saying all that, though, this record caught me by surprise. Quite away from the usual dirges played on these machines, Miaux plays bright compositions to accompany people gazing at a tapestry by Joris Martens and chatting. This means it is a record of people doing something we cannot see: a record of people looking at art. It’s a record not just of the organ but of the space in which the organ was played. This perhaps is always the case, but it is writ large here in a way that just works. Perhaps it’s because there’s a folky sound to some pieces, where others are quite giallo, but perkier. Special mention for ’22h44′ which reminds me of the Twin Peaks theme.
Ultan O’BrienDancing The LineNyahh
Nyahh records follows up recent stellar comp of Slow Airs By Fine Fiddlers (reviewed in Patrick Clarke’s folk column here), with a full album from one of those featured, County Clare fiddler Ultan O’Brien. He plays an alto fiddle, set to his own tuning, which gives his tone that lower register, and a that rough timbre. He welcomes in the sound of the outside – field recordings from White Strand beach in County Clare, and there is some accordion from Martin Green in tunes that need more anchor or wallop like ‘Packie’s Pandemonium’. Percussion comes from the recorded sound of Nic Gareiss dancing, where the feet putter, stutter and swish with the reels, sounding like brushes on skins, as in ‘The Boyne Hunt’. For the final track, ‘Death Doula Meet’, the voice note of Leitrim dancer Edwina Guckian is coddled in soft drones as a lonesome fiddle croons in empty space.
Valentina Magaletti, Fanny ChiarelloGym DoucePermanent Draft
Reminding me why I don’t go to the gym, an album of percussion and spoken word by the duo of Valentina Magaletti and Fanny Chiarello on their Permanent Draft Imprint. ‘Reverse Fly’ is an oddball banger, a voice sunk in effects intones over unruly drum machine claps that flutter away on wings of delay. ‘Curtsy Lounges’ opens with naive piano but takes a handbrake turn into the manic repetitions of ‘shiny hair swinging in the air’, an earworm you won’t rid yourself of easily. Alternative gym music for the experimental music scene.
Valentina GonchorovaCampanelliHidden Harmony
Campanelli means bell ringer, which Gonchorova uses in the sense of a soundmark, that might peal upon our entry into, route through, and departure from this earthly life. I interviewed her around the release of this album recently and was surprised to find a definite spirituality at the heart of her music, which she says she doesn’t shout about because it would put people off. She’s often referenced as having some New Age vibes, but actually she encountered Buddhism in Mongolia in her 20s when the Soviet Union still stood, and considers herself a Catholic of sorts, with an interest in the Old Testament. This album is her first new material since her magnum opus Ocean, in 2022, and you might be asking why you should listen to this over that. I say this is beautiful, graceful, Tibetan bowls framing her violin melodies, which are always so resonant and distinctive. This comes partly from custom electrification and partly from her tunings. I love ‘Hut In The Mountains’, an a capella folk ballad for electrified strings, sung out over a forested panorama.
AOB:
Started reviewing this Irazoki record before realising it’s almost the same as the one released via Cafe OTO that I have already reviewed. That was digital, but this will have an LP pressing, via experimental Basque music label Hegoa Disk, which it absolutely deserves. He’s like a careful but voracious eater – all tooth and jaw but savouring each gluttonous mouthful. There’s contributions here from harpist Rhodri Davies and guitarist Raphael Roginski; the piece with Davies’s raw horse hair harp is a standout. Generally though, Irazoki has this subtle psychedelic bendiness and flutter to his playing, which gives each piece a hallucinatory shimmer.
On this note there’s also an amazing live recording of the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet just out on Hausu Mountain, if you’ve got this far and haven’t had enough guitars yet.
