Bernard Parmegiani & François BayleDivine ComédieRecollection GRM
Recollections GRM have blessed us with a couple of fantastic archival French releases this year: Pierre Henry’s Labyrinth ! from 2003 and this epic work from Bernard Parmegiani and François Bayle, which is the pair’s musical response to Dante’s Divine Comedy. Originally available on record with Parmegiani’s ‘Enfer’ (Hell) and Bayle’s ‘Purgatoire’, this reissue completes the set with the previously unavailable, nearly 22-minute collaborative piece ‘Paradis’. The multi-part ‘Enfer’ and ‘Purgatoire’ combine solemn spoken word with restlessly moody, ear-tweaking soundscapes while paradise is depicted through bright, clear tones, high-pitched twittering and tinkling and (I think) processed accordion. Frankly, it sounds almost as sinister as the other two places.
Michel MouliniéChrysalideWRWTFWW
Swiss label WRWTFWW (aka We Release Whatever The Fuck We Want) has dug up with sparkling, lone 1978 release from French multi-instrumentalist Michel Moulinié that was originally released on prog label Crypto, set up by French band Ange and their manager Jean-Claude Pognant. It has strong affinities with the lusher, folkier end of kraut (or choucroute) rock, all rippling 12-string, piercing electric solos, supple bass and what sounds like washes of synth but which may in fact be heavily treated guitar and violin. The gorgeous arpeggios and gentle electronic swells of ‘Lente Course’ are the highlight.
White NoiseAn Electric StormProper
In the summer of 1969, a most unusual album was released. The cover of White Noise’s An Electric Storm makes it look like an early heavy metal record. The mainstream view of this time is that this was the comedown, the collapse of hippy utopianism, with artists burned out from acid, shellshocked back into reality by Manson’s murderers and the horror at the Altamont Speedway. History is written not by the victors, evidently, but by squares. For this was the year of Stonewall and the ‘Black Woodstock’ in Harlem, the year of Trout Mask Replica, In The Court Of The Crimson King, Caetano Veloso, Karma, Stand!, Monster Movie, In A Silent Way, Mutantes, Moondog… an immensely fertile time of new weirdnesses, where nothing sounded the same, and thus a time not respected or recognised enough by those who thrive on categorisation. An Electric Storm seems, then, an outlier but also perfectly divergent for the times, and if the participants’ superficially buttoned-up BBC-ness seems incongruous in the age of Can or Sly and the Family Stone, it remains incredibly influential – the BBC Radiophonic Workshop being an endless mother lode for hauntological projects like Ghost Box.
CHBBCHBBSoulsherriff
There are rarities, and then there’s CHBB, originally released on a run of just four cassettes in 1981, and holding mythical status ever since.The project of Düsseldorf duo Chrislo Haas and Beate Bartel, which ran concurrently to the recording of their self-titled debut as Liaisons Dangereuses, this release collects all nine of the syrupy, sinewy, utterly brilliant proto-EBM cuts from that original cassette, plus 11 hitherto-unreleased tracks.
Bardo PondMelt AwayMatador
Hitting the shelves at the same time as the remaster of 1999’s epic Set And Setting was this equally necessarily rarities package from the untouchable maestros of heavy psych. Any Bardo Pond fan worth their salt knows that the group’s compilations and jam-sesh series are as equally majestic as their studio LPs proper. This one’s no exception.
KobruvīrsBudas piensSāpes Skaņas
Kobruvīrs is Riga, Latvia based painter, curator and musician Kaspars Groševs. His current projects include Figūras and the band Zolitude. Budas Piens is a compilation of tracks he made on Fruity Loops between 2004 and 2007. It’s a gleeful, sidewinding explosion of a compilation taking in frantic beats, glitch metal, warped IDM and all manner of surreal, mind-bending genre fusions. While some of the sounds used are undoubtedly tied to the aesthetics of the time it was made, the combinations are complete outliers. There’s also something which feels remarkably current in Kobruvīrs’ frenzied hyperactivity. As if we’re hearing Groševs pre-empt the hyperreal intent behind the more extreme ends of the Chinabot, Orange Milk and Hausu Mountain catalogues. It’s a thrill ride of lurid invention. An early, commercially available DAW approached with no preconceptions and pushed to do something it was probably never meant to.
Robert CahenLa nef des fousRecollection GRM
The archives of Paris’ Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) keep unveiling gems of groundbreaking electro-acoustic, musique concrète and computer music. Yet even by that institution’s heady standards, Robert Cahen’s La nef des fous is a particularly ear teasing, head-bending record. Cahen created these tracks at the GRM studios between 1971 and 1974. The record’s title translates to ‘Ship of fools’ (which, perhaps not coincidentally, is the name of a painting by Hieronymus Bosch). It’s one of the most direct releases from the GRM in terms of laying bare the sound, space and time tampering intent that unites the artists who’ve worked in and around the studio. Beginning with a yelp of strangled electronics it voyages through ghostly ambiences, babbling textures and abrupt jolts up and down in intensity. It hot-wires your ears into a way of listening which feels like it has as much in common with absorbing a particularly dense landscape painting as it does a musical composition. There’s always a temptation with unearthed works of early experimental electronic music to say they’re ahead of their time. That doesn’t quite apply to La nef des fous. It builds and exists within its own intriguingly peculiar little universe. A glimpse into a strangely grounded terrain apart from our own.
Tomo AkikawabayaThe Castle IIMecanica
Tomo Akikawabaya was a fairly anonymous Japanese synth musician working mainly in the 1980s, who released some music in Japan, became dissatisfied, tried to get signed in London, failed, and returned home. Little is known about him, and most of his releases feature the same model on the cover (who also worked with YMO). Minimal Wave released a 2xLP of his work in 2015, and Polish label Mecanica have picked up the thread this year with The Castle II, which is my most listened to release of the last month or two, settling in the cracks between genres so that it’s always a good time to listen. Much of it sounds like a Japanese new wave musician having a strange dream about Scott Walker’s future post-Drift releases. I enjoy the moments the vocals become a little overwrought, anchored by steadily chugging drum machines. Favourite track is the loop-it-to-the-horizon feel of ‘Machine D’Amour’.
Dagar BrothersBerlin 1964: The Lost Studio RecordingBlack Truffle
This came out around the same time as Charles Curtis’s residency at Cafe OTO back in the spring and the Terry Jennings piece Curtis played at the end of his run took me to a similar place: a kind of oceanic feeling, a timeless space in which sound becomes something like like a liquid. Nasir Moinuddin Dagar and younger sibling Nasir Aminuddin Dagar belonged to a family of dhrupad singers which stretched back into the eighteenth century. Their father Ustad Nasiruddin Khan Dagar spent ten years painstakingly inducting them into the family musical line after he had a premonition of his own death. At the time, the brothers were scarcely out of short trousers. This was one of their last sessions together, recorded while on a UNESCO-sponsored European tour. Accompanied by Moinuddin’s wife Saiyur on tanpura and Raja Chatrapati Singh on the double-headed pakhawa drum, it’s an extraordinary document, at once thrilling and hypnotic. It’s the kind of music you don’t ever want to end.
Various ArtistsUlyap Songs: Beyond Circassian TraditionsFLEE Project
“We must reject the conventional fiction of ‘unchanging human nature’. There is in fact no permanence anywhere. There is only becoming.” Those spoke the poet Alexander Trocchi in his 1964 sigma manifesto, ‘The Invisible Insurrection’. His text could be readily applied to some of the music heard on Ulyap Songs: Beyond Circassian Tradition, the latest double album from the young FLEE label. Trocchi was someone who often tested the limits of societal conformity, and one of the main strengths of this joyous, sometimes elusive release is the sense of devil-may-care autonomy heard in the on-location recordings. Despite these being the sort of artefacts you’d expect the dead hand of the curator to be all over, their core independence wins out.
Various ArtistsKiosque d’Orphée: Une épopée de l’autoproduction en FranceBorn Bad
This glorious collection brings together various examples of a particular kind of French ‘private press’ recording. The Kiosque d’Orphée in Paris, which was run by sound engineer George Batard from 1967 until 1991, was a place where budding musicians could get their acetates cut and request a limited vinyl run of anywhere between 50 and 500 copies. The delights compiled here encompass cosmic folk and synth tracks, psych rock and jazz, prog, funky fusion and even a very early recording from highly influential singer-songwriter Dominique A.
Catherine Christer HennixFurther Selections From The Electric HarpsichordBlank Forms
Is there a case to be made for Sweden’s Catherine Christer Hennix, who died just over one year ago aged 75, being the most brilliant of all the drone-oriented minimalist composers of the 1960s and 70s? If so, it’s encapsulated in this 47-minute recording, which eclipses the previously available version of her mid-70s piece The Electric Harpsichord by virtue of being nearly twice as long. Synths, tape delay and the Chinese pipe instrument the sheng combine to ecstatic, ecclesiastic effect.
Aerial MThe Peel SessionsDrag City
Accompanying an excellent new Papa M album, this archive release was another treat for fans of the great David Pajo. Don’t be fooled into thinking it’s a slimline set due to its three-song tracklist. The instrumental tunes are long, dense, delicate and detailed; virtually a masterclass in late-90s post rock.
WeenChocolate And CheeseRhino
Ween proved that posher production didn’t have to equal blandness or a relinquishment of their innate strangeness. ‘I Can’t Put My Finger On It’ and ‘Candi’ are slightly more sophisticated, multi tracked extensions of Ween’s earlier brownness. There were also the moments – some connoisseurs would call these the highlights – that could make you feel icky while, at the same time, marvelling at the sheer audacity of what you were hearing. Contrast is an important device in Ween’s toolkit. ‘Mister, Would You Please Help My Pony?’ is one of several songs with disease as its crux. Describing his animal’s various ailments, the narrator begs for help over an incongruously upbeat backing. Similarly, the verses of ‘Spinal Meningitis (Got Me Down)’, spoken in-character as a terrified child, are interspersed by its catchier Jesus-beckoning chorus.
Emma Ruth RundleSome Heavy DemosErrant Child
This vinyl-only collection of demos and outtakes from Emma Ruth Rundle’s classic debut Some Heavy Ocean is a real treat for longterm fans. These spectral bedroom recordings are endearingly raw – check out Rundle coughing mid-chorus during a hauntingly stripped back ‘Run Forever’ – but the strength and nuance of her song-writing shines through, imbuing these intimate recordings with a powerful vulnerability. The unreleased songs feel even more intensely personal, almost uncomfortably so on the stark, heartwrenching ‘Death Of A Friend’ and tearful closer ‘Forever, As The Setting Son’; the cover of Julie Miller by way of Emmylou Harris’s ‘All My Tears’, meanwhile, is worth the price of admission alone, with Emma clearly relishing making the song her own whilst really emphasising the latent darkness at the song’s core.
The Shadow RingThe Shadow Ring (1992-2002)Blank Forms
Vast and overwhelming box set whose contents will take you an entire waking day to consume, and lead to fitful sleep and discombobulation. The Shadow Ring came from the Kent coast, spent much of their time in the USA and made extraordinary, uncompromising music which broke with all recognised notions of convention. All of it has been out of print for decades and now, thanks to the Blank Forms label, it is not.
DJ MehdiEspion Le EPBecause Music
Franco-German channel Arte’s series DJ Mehdi: Made In France was one of the best music documentaries of the year, following his journey from prodigious beatmaker to electronic producer and key member of the Ed Banger crew. Reissued in the wake of the series’ success, Espion Le EP from 2000 was a calling card for his own Espionnage label and captures him with his fader poised between rap and club sounds. It ranges from to MC-focused tracks with long-time associates Rohff and Rocé to house tunes like Philippe Zdar collaboration ‘Naja’, but it’s all tied together by Medhi’s ear for a killer hook, warm bass and those ultra-distinctive, cushioned-but-kicking snares.
Regal86RecogniseDJ Mag
With little care for ambient intros or easing the listener in, this entry into DJ Mag‘s Recognise mix series by Mexican DJ and producer Regal86 is a dizzying joyride through speedy, loopy techno of the past and present. Across little more than an hour, he demonstrates why modern techno is in such good hands in North and Central America, showcasing the killer, forward-pushing sounds of US producers like MoMA Ready, 1morning and Kanyon, as well as cuts from Regal86 himself and his Mexican compatriot 1OO1O. Alongside that are older tracks by respected techno producers such as Steve Rachmad, Danilo Vigorito and Samuel L. Session, much of it mixed with a dynamism that calls to mind the chaotically exciting mixing style of Detroit DJs of the 90s. By the time the set comes to an end on the lo-fi hip hop sounds of DJ Screw’s ‘Sailin’ Da South’, you’ll no doubt be needing a breather.
Alice ColtraneThe Carnegie Hall Concert (Live)Impulse!
It doesn’t take long for the ensemble to lock into a rousing collective rendition, as the first abstract phrases coalesce into a walking bass line that spells out the main theme to ‘Journey In Satchidananda’. Things get busier from here on, but maintain an air of soft bliss and elation. Harp licks and saxophone yelps assemble around the main pulse, both riffing on the theme and taking detours into delightfully dissonant leads and solo spots, befitting of the stellar musicians performing them. ‘Shiva-Loka’ – also from Journey In Satchidananda – picks up where the first piece left off and shimmers away, carried by circling harp arpeggios and bouts of lovely plucked bass and drums interplay. The composition is punctuated by several standout solo spots courtesy of Shepp and Sanders who blow their saxophones into sky-high registers. It’s mesmerising to hear these particular takes for the first time as they show just how deeply invested, how certain, Coltrane and her collaborators were in the music and the devotional flow fuelling it.
Astrid SonneGreat Doubt EDITSEscho
Astrid Sonne’s Great Doubt was a work of intense intricacy, weaving experimental and pop songwriting, acoustic and electronic instrumentation, introversion and extroversion. On its follow-up, the likes of Valentina Magaletti, Blood Orange and Slauson Malone 1 are each invited to take this masterfully-crafted sonic machinery, strip it down to its constituent parts, add pieces of their own, and reassemble them into individual mini-masterpieces of their own.
