Rum Music for September Reviewed by Jennifer Lucy Allan

I did not know Amy Sheffer before this, and god, have I dropped the ball there. This came doubled with a strong recommend from Heather Leigh, which I do not take lightly. Sheffer plays piano, sings and paints. She has in the past called herself a “very untrained musician”, but “very trained artist”, who had LSD therapy with Mortimer Hartman (who dosed Cary Grant), became part of the 70s loft jazz scene in New York, developing a whole-life practice that involved painting, singing all day, and playing piano. She self-released a handful of albums on which Billy Bang and William Parker played, among others, and played with Marzette Watts’ ensemble alongside Patty Waters, which is notable as there’s a brief Waters-ish moment six minutes into ‘Where’s Your Home?’ just before the blood-curdling scream. ‘Sanctuary Mine’ also finds that sumptuous jazz zone Waters can get into, whereas ‘Quiet Land’ is deserving of a RIYL nod to Jeanne Lee. Sheffer’s voice might be difficult for some (a tenner says she was denigrated as a hysterical woman at some point) as her high vibrato can access fantastically wild and frenzied states, punching through into the immediate present in the way all the best free jazz does. Consider this an in progress report: my ears haven’t finished with it yet. Essential. For those stateside, alongside the box set there’s also an exhibition of her painting at White Columns in New York, running until October. 

Posthumous release here from Mika Vainio as Ø. These are part finished tracks for a new album that was not completed before he died in 2017. The label promises that at that point its 20 tracks were a distinct Ø album called Sysivalo – a Finnish neologism combining sysi, meaning dark or sinister with valo, meaning light – that was going to include several shorter ‘etudes’. To my ears there is some pretty raw material here, often sounding more like a folder of ideas that have yet to take shape, or pieces without a home. Structurally I have come to associate it more with the work in my notebooks than my first drafts, if I’m thinking about stages of gestation. The sounds can splash around styles, with echoes of Philip Jeck in a few crackly sampled moments. ‘Uusikuu’ and ‘Aine’ however seem more finished, with familiar troglodyte bass and crackling decay. ‘T Bahn’ has that marble-dropped-on-glass and the looping Metri bloops, lassoed by wet whip on a concrete floor, where a fingertip on a raw jack is rendered in hangar-sized sonic architecture. The people want more, I get it, but is this instance of mining the archive necessary? Does it dilute a catalogue which is otherwise so crisp and big in its vision?

Listened to this three times on a long train journey, couldn’t get enough of the tooth and drone of the strings on ‘Melopea’. Turns out these came out of an instance when Cuni and her partner Werner Durand superimposed Cuni’s dhrupad singing onto a performance of Éliane Radigue’s Occam River II (for violinist Silvia Tarozzi and cellist Deborah Walker). It worked so well they asked Tarozzi and Walker to collaborate properly, and the string players went off and made a new recording for Cuni. The result is a stunner, a hybrid of deep traditional vocal technique and the precision of strings players used to microtones and partials. ‘Bhoop-Murchana’ is a richer and more lyrical affair, expansive and fluid in its movements, with Anthea Caddy on cello and Werner Durand on soprano saxophone, and Cuni’s tanpura occasionally breaking the surface.  

Tip to my Late Junction producer Cat Gough for putting this my way. These are absolutely stellar improvisations by singer John Katokye with his protege Samuel Rujeru, rooted in cow-herding songs from Banyankore and Bahororo traditions from Western Uganda, which Katokye left home to learn when he was just a kid. The style he sings in is called ‘ekyeshongoro’, and the lyrics are improvised poetic lines, with a track in ‘ekyevugo’ style here too. Rujeru follows, repeats and overlaps, pushing the pitch upwards in songs that sing of women, cattle and home. I have loved these releases where Nyege Nyege step off the dancefloor, this one is all the more crucial for being what seems to be the only time Katokye has been recorded and released.

The breathy sounds that open this new album by Argentinian artist Aylu (aka Ailin Grad) are not calming but uncomfortable; a touch uncanny in the way they move around space, coupled with a sense of being intentionally muddled to make a potentially sweet album feel awkward and odd. She’s collaborated with Sun Araw, and I think that comparison is useful in getting to grips with her sound here, which comes minus his absurdist bent. I liked Profondo Rosa from 2022, but this album has a far stronger human presence, being, she says, about masking agoraphobia and claustrophobia, hence the sense of it being at odds with easy listening, while still conjuring a dreamy sense of zoned-out dislocation. 

Something elemental in the sonics of this first new album from OG NZ trio Surface Of The Earth in a few decades. I suspect this is taken from recordings they talked about making a few years ago “a week in another old wooden community hall in rural Hawke’s Bay”. It all sounds like fire, metal or water to me, and has a shifting, gnarled feel of driftwood: salt crust on the edges and whorls in the delay; a bleached solidity to its bones. Music for staring out of a window and thinking, it feels like an idea taking shape without words. 

Incidentally, the first person to release SOTE was Bruce Russell in the 1990s, and you could do worse than spend 20-odd minutes with this noisy, gnarly, badly recorded excellent live set by two thirds of the Dead C: drummer Robbie Yeats and guitarist Bruce Russell. Or maybe that should be “drummer” and “guitarist” if you’re more inclined towards traditional virtuosity or technique. Proclaiming itself a “mock-stereo Duophonic recording” it splices together a recording Bruce made at the amp with one made at the bar. It’s stomping and raw, the sound tops out and breaks down, but hey, what is a “good” recording anyway? 

Speaking of which, the last entry is the second quick-fix live release for the month, on Japanese label Tall Grass, which I mentioned in a previous column. This Ché-SHIZU recording was made in Osaka on 16 September and was up on Bandcamp two days later, under the artist name Kansai Ché-SHIZU (I’m not sure what that tweaked band name is about). The line up was a trio of the band’s stalwart founder Chie Mukai (lest we forget, a student of Takehisa Kosugi in that legendary stint that produced Marginal Consort and their precursor East Bionic Symphonia), alongside Tall Grass label head Yonju Miyaoka on guitar and Harry Terukina on drums. Characteristically loose and lovely for it, the set tightens up as it goes, Mukai’s er-hu (a Chinese two stringed fiddle) giving that tipsy lean as she swings around a riff, which is at its best on final track ‘葡萄園’ (‘Vineyard’) from 1993’s Nazareth.