#bill meyer

The original Indian Talking Machine might not have changed how we understand our world, but it did provide reliable transportation to a couple of them. First, it enabled a listener to steep in the sounds of musical traditions that had been around for centuries, but had not yet been transformed by capture and reproduction. Second, it introduced its audience to the surviving Indian 78 rpm culture. The album came as a 245-page hardcover book that presented both reproductions of sleeves, labels, gear, advertisements, and ephemera from back in the day, and color photos that Millis had taken of the places where you can still find them and the people who make that possible. It was possible to treat its two CDs tucked into pockets in the cover as accessories, which was a shame given the musical riches they contained.

That won’t happen with Indian Talking Machine Part Two. It contains the same number of sides as the first volume, this time on two LPs. The transfers subdue most of the 78s’ noise without compromising the sounds of the instruments. While it does include a booklet with a dozen pages of images of records, players, and the animal byproducts used to make shellac, the annotation is much more bare-bones, conveying only the names of the artists and the instruments featured on each track.

And what music! By narrowing the focus to instrumentals, Millis has foregrounded two elements of Indian music of the early 20th century. One is the concentrated power and beauty of the music that made it to disc. Reproducing hour-long ragas and other musical forms that had evolved ungoverned by the small amount of music that a 78 could contain was out of the question, so these tracks capture foundational themes and climactic moments; just the good stuff. The other is the spectacular virtuosity of the playing and the easy but focused rapport between the musicians (usually just a couple per performance); in a culture where music was made mainly by people playing every day, they got really good at playing it.

Indian Talking Machine Part Two is not a musicological enterprise, and anyone looking to be told anything about what they’re hearing will be disappointed. This volume presents the music as something you listen to, period.

But while the rate of change and destruction of antique sounds has likely accelerated, the transformative processes aren’t exactly new. Every person who ever learned a song orally has had the opportunity to change it, after all. One could also approach this music from another angle; it’s just what Ratta had the opportunity and motivation to collect. And that’s where Sublime Frequencies comes in. The label’s been circulating personal perspectives on locations far from the USA and Europe since 2003, starting with a compilation of songs culled from cassettes that Alan Bishop (Sublime Frequencies co-founder and singer for the Sun City Girls, Dwarfs of East Agouza, etc.) picked up in Sumatra in 1989. The LP under consideration is just one more in a long line of records that share with the world what some obsessive far from home heard and knew in their heart was the real good shit.

Given this writer’s limited acquaintance with Vietnamese music, you should not take the rest of this review as a deeply informed response, but rather one informed by a few other records. That said, its contents are an intriguing and pleasant surprise. You won’t hear any wild and wiggy licks on a dan bau (a monochord that, in the right hands, sounds like the missing link between the delta blues and Henry Kaiser), nor sophisticated court music ensembles. Instead, there’s a lot of music made on instruments — spike fiddles, tube zithers, jaw harps, bamboo xylophones — that reflect the limited resources of people living up in the hills and away from the big cities. Some of it sounds superficially familiar on account of the non-virtuoso technique of the players, who are more interested in strumming or beating out a good tune than they are in flexing instrumental muscle. And some of it’s just similar; no matter where you’re from, if you have the facility to jam on a jaw harp, you’re gonna go boing. Either way, this music is direct and appealing, more than justifying whatever trouble Ratta went through to share the good shit.

Double Reality Beyond Space And Time further attests to the SJO’s spirit of adventure. It is a collaboration with keyboardist Ståle Storløkken, who has been a prominent figure in Norwegian jazz and improvised music for decades. You might know him from his membership in Supersilent and Elephant9, or his work with Terje Rypdal and Motorpsycho. He wrote the album’s six compositions, played most of the keyboards (Eyolf Dahle is also credited with piano), coproduced it with the SJO and mixed it into a finished form that neither party could have accomplished on its own.

For Storløkken, one supposes that the lure of this project is the chance to write for a stylistically flexible big band with a nine-piece horn section. That’s a lot of potential color, and over the record’s course he splashes a lot of it around. Maybe splash isn’t the right word, since he happily avails himself of the orchestra’s ability to execute complex charts with careful precision. His own playing is barely audible on certain tunes, which are given over to melodic exchanges between woodwinds and brass and tonally mutating statements of themes. At other points, he threads a sequence of reed voices through his chilly synthesizer melodies. For the SJO, on the other hand, one draw for working with Storløkken is his store of sounds more often associated with 1970s prog rock and fusion jazz. He has quite a store of vintage keyboards and knows just how to get those old sounds. When his Hammond organ and Dahle’s piano trade emphatic figures over a bobbing field of flutes on “Orbital Merry Go Round,” you might find yourself thinking a bit of Larry Young. And on “Anti Dark Blue Matter Mash Up,” a burly punch-up between different parts of the horn section led by Johansson and trombonist Mats Äleklint gives way to a passage of abstract organ burps that erupt from a field of broken rhythm. The field of prog-conscious big band records has never been crowded, but in these times, this is the one to beat.

Raised in Colombia but based in Huddersfield, UK, Vélez has been releasing editions of his sound art, sometimes working alone and at other times in collaboration with Bruno Duplant, Pedro Chambel, and others, since 2007. His raw material is field recordings, which on Capsicum are combined with singing, speech, and played instruments to form a sound essay about food, colonialism, and emigration. If you lay hands on the compact disc edition, you also get a booklet that presents images of hot peppers and a written essay that acknowledges the complicated matter of immigration, colonization, and food ingredients. Part of the reason Europeans got into the colonial project in the first place was to get their hands on spices, which then moved along trade routes from one subjugated country to another. It was the Portuguese who brought hot peppers from South America to Asia. When immigrants from the East and West Indies came to the UK, they took guff for the smells of their spicy food, but also found a way to make a living and to neutralize hostility; after all, if you’re at least semi-human, you gotta respect a good curry. And who can deny the balm that good home cooking applies to homesickness?

Vélez is joined on Capsicum by six musicians and cooks; some other parties are credited with shouting. Like a skilled chef fashioning a multi-course dinner, Vélez balances the sounds of sonic exploration, remembrance, and documentation into a sequence of pieces that invite you to think, feel, and savor. The first track, “When,” begins with cook Ruchi Singh relating the affective impact of hearing a train. Her voice gives way to the groan and toll of bowed metal, and prepared piano, which are compelling on their own, but can also represent the decaying memories of locomotives heard long ago. Then comes “Adaptation,” another brief piece on which the album’s other cook, Sandra Allen, recalls the turbulence of a childhood spent code switching and traveling.

On the longer tracks that follow, speech yields to the collected sounds of food preparation and marketing, which are combined with cello, piano and percussion. Supriya Nagarajan, who sings in an unidentified Indian language while accompanied by low pitched strings and a continuously morphing environmental backdrop, ties things together with an appeal to all that a gorgeous voice can unlock. Sometimes a song works as well as a fragrant plate at knocking back the exile blues — or any other blues for that matter?

You could say that the trio comes from Copenhagen, since that’s where they first convened in 2023, but only one of them lives there. That would be Gintė Preisaitė, a Lithuanian musician who plays electronics in some contexts, but sticks to piano in Treen. Tenor saxophonist Amalie Dahl is Danish, but she lives in Norway. Although she’s currently based in Oslo, she studied in Trondheim and most of her other ensembles include players with Trondheim roots. And drummer Jan Philipp is from Cologne, Germany.

Given their geographical scatter, it’s worth remarking that this is not a trio that rehearses. When they get together, they make music. It is not scattered or haphazard; as improvised music goes, it’s pretty cohesive. Each piece has a hovering quality, with a patient rate of change that might be perceived as forward momentum, but could also be experienced like a patiently scanned vista. Within each mass of sound, there’s plenty of change to keep the listener engaged.

While one might call it atmospheric, it also has bulk and sandpapery grit. Preisaitė holds first responsibility for that impression of substance. On “Ridenuos,” she keeps up a steady rumble at the keys, imparting a massive but differentiated presence shot through with twisting streams of sound. Elsewhere, she uses preparations that give each key strike a muted, tolling quality, which morph into twisting, repetitive melodies. Philipp usually keeps a couple streams of sound going, one on drums, the other on cymbals and other metallic items. Dahl’s short, flickering utterances and longer, lower brays seem to hover above the fray, giving each of the album’s four pieces a looming vertical dimension. Her tone has a plushness that feels more connected to mid-20th century balladry than the Scandinavian free lineage, but she also brings a sandpapery grit that keeps the music from getting too diffuse. This is not music that will quickly wear out its welcome.

Aoki is a bassist, shamisen player and filmmaker who has lived in Chicago since the late 1970s. Originally drawn to the city by the opportunity to study experimental film, he soon fell in with musicians associated with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. His current projects include the Miyumi Ensemble, which combines jazz with Taiko drumming; the more tradition-conscious Tsukasa Taiko Ensemble; and a steady stream of occasional associations with Francis Wong, Jeff Chan, Drazek Fuscaldo and others. Hunsinger is a multi-instrumentalist who earns her crust as a professional oboist, but who also played single and double reeds and stringed instruments in theatrical, experimental, country and rock settings. Around a quarter of a century ago, she and Aoki worked together in the original line-up of Miyumi Ensemble, a duo that went unrecorded at the time, and a trio with Art Ensemble of Chicago veteran Joseph Jarman. Hunsinger gravitated to work in southern states and vanished from the Chicago experimental scene until the 2020s.

Robbie Lynn Hunsinger and Tatsu Aoki Vol 1 picks up a long-dormant thread, but it does not sound like the work of two strangers. Recorded in one day at the AIRMW Cultural Hub, a performance and rehearsal space that Aoki founded for Asian Improv Records, it feels more like a patient working through of possibilities. For Hunsinger, that means moving from instrument to instrument. On oboe, she draws out non-repeating melodic lines which periodically pull into dense knots, and then unwind with ease. When she switches to saxophones, tin whistle and double reeds, the progress slows and the line doesn’t break; color and vibe predominate. And when she picks up the violin, a raw, folky texture smudges the precision she favors on winds. In free settings, Aoki toggles easily between conventional and extended techniques. He tends to advocate for pulse, but he obtains it in a variety of ways, from plucking a springy groove to beating intricate figures on the strings. He also matches Hunsinger scrape for bowed scrape. Some improvisers battle it out; Hunsinger and Aoki are more respectfully collaborative. The result is music that moves freely between formal methods, but gravitates to form.

Whilethat ensemble’s transformations of form took place over extended durations, the eight pieces on this recording are more concentrated and cohesive. Each develops from a beginning tempo and vibe with such certitude that breaks in line and attack, such as the switch from coarse breath and darting right-hand forays to open-horn bursts and pivoting shapes on “Vireo Bellii” feels quite logical. As on Chimaera, colors manifest, dispel, and reform. Courvoisier matches Smith’s variations in muting with string preparations that extend the piano’s breadth and density of tone, and he pirouettes with immaculate grace around her bigger, blockier sounds.

But while the displays of agility impress, it’s the emotional weight of these performances that lingers after the CD’s over. Smith extracts maximum meaning from subtle gradations of texture, which Courvoisier amplifies with bold but highly attuned gestures. Even if Angel Falls was the only thing that Smith did all year, his 2025 would be pretty great.

Two members of Flowers We Are live in Vienna, Austria. Matija Schellander generally plays double bass and synthesizer in composed settings; in this improvising trio, he plays drum machine and sampler. The cellist noid’s (aka Arnold Haberl) work encompasses sound art and overtly musical practice, using both electronic and acoustic means. The third member, Marina Džukljev, is a keyboardist from Novi Sad, Serbia, who has made a couple splendid recordings this past year with Christian Weber, Michael Griener, and the group TiTiTi that span the free jazz spectrum.

Each practices some form of restriction on this recording. Džukljev plays prepared piano on one track and electric organ on the other, and keeps her technique on a tight leash throughout; Schellander not only eschews his usual instruments, but manages to make his drum machine steer clear of beats; and noid sticks mostly to long, quiet sounds and textures. There are moments where it’s hard to say who is doing what, as each works in parallel, and even when their sounds are distinct and identifiable, the heat-lightning shimmer of their collective efforts is what registers most strongly. Them rubbing of fingers against the cello’s body resonate with the swell of piano strings being vibrated from inside the box; misfiring electronic blurts tumble in time with drizzling piano notes; a bowed string pulses in sympathy with two voltage-generated drones. The cumulative effect is immersive, and paradoxically as ecstatic as it is controlled.