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Marc Barreca — The Sleeper Awakes (Scissor Tail)

The Sleeper Wakes by Marc Barreca

Odd connections abound here. One might not expect the usually acoustic-oriented Scissor Tail Recordings to make a vinyl reissue of an electronic ambient music cassette from 1986, any more than one would expect its maker to currently earn his crust as a bankruptcy judge. So, let’s just shed those expectations and get to listening. Unlike so many lower profile electronic recordings from the 1980s, which seemed targeted for a space next to the cash register of a new age bookstore, this album offers a profusion of mysteries that compound the closer you listen to them. It’s not at all obvious what sounds Barreca fed into his Akai sampler. Japanese folk music? Church chimes? A log drum jam? Tugboat engines? One hears hints of such sounds, but they’ve been warped and dredged in a thin coat of murk, so that the predominant experience is one of feeling like you’re dreaming, even if your eyes are wide open.

Bill Meyer

Big Thief — “Little Things” / “Sparrow” (4AD)

Little Things/Sparrow by Big Thief

Who knows how much more music Big Thief might have released in the last 18 months if the pandemic hadn’t tripped them up? Given the creative momentum generated by 2019’s UFOF and Two Hands, it’s fair to assume the band have plenty of music waiting in the wings. “Little Things” and “Sparrow” arrive with no sign of a new album on the horizon, so are probably being released to promote Big Thief’s upcoming US and European tour. Both songs clock in at around five minutes and handle musical repetition in different satisfying ways. Reminiscent of Fleetwood Mac’s “Everything,” but hyped up on caffeine, “Little Things” feels like an exciting new direction for the band. It cycles through its whirlpooling, modulated acoustic guitar over and over, the frantic little sequence of chords never changing; the interest comes from the ways in which the rest of the instruments bob and weave in the ever-shifting, psychedelic mix. “Sparrow” is a more traditional Big Thief song, sparse and sad. Its melancholic sway is enlivened by some beautiful wavering vocal harmonies as Adrianne Lenker paints a picture of a Garden of Eden populated by sparrows, owls and eagles, culminating in Adam blaming Eve for humankind’s fall from grace.

Tim Clarke

Simão Costa — Beat Without Byte: (Un)Learning Machine (Cipsela)

Beat With Out Byte by Simão Costa

Piano preparation often makes use of modest resources — bolts and combs, strings or maybe just a raincoat tossed into the instrument’s innards. By contrast, Simão Costa’s set-up looks like took all of the entries in a robotics assembly competition and set them to work agitating a snarl of cables that met the pirated telecommunication requirements for an especially crowded favela. But whether it’s twitching motors or Costa’s own hands doing the work, the sounds that come out of his sound remarkably rich and cohesive. He stirs drifting hums, metallic sonorities, and stomping rhythms into a bracingly immediate sonic onslaught.

Bill Meyer

Cots — Disturbing Body (Boiled)

Disturbing Body by Cots

Disturbing Body is the low-key debut album by Montreal-based musician Steph Yates, who enlisted Sandro Perri to produce. Where the songs are pared back to mostly just vocals and peppy major-seventh chords on nylon-string guitar — such as “Bitter Part of the Fruit” and “Midnight at the Station” — comparisons with bossa-nova classics such as “The Girl From Ipanema” inevitably arise. Where the tempo is slower, the chord voicings are less sun-dappled, and Perri’s arrangements call upon a wider palette of instrumental colors, the songs venture into more interesting terrain, calling to mind a less haunted Broadcast. There’s an eerie sway to the opening title track, backed by rich piano chords and clattering cymbal textures. Fender Rhodes and the light clack of a rhythm track give “Inertia of a Dream” an uneasy momentum. And forlorn trumpet, percussion and piano situate “Last Sip” at closing time in a forgotten jazz club. There’s something evasive yet subtly intoxicating at work here, the album’s ten songs breezing past in half an hour, leaving plenty of unanswered questions in their wake.

Tim Clarke

Dry Cleaning — “Bug Eggs” / “Tony Speaks!” (4AD)

Bug Eggs/Tony Speaks! by Dry Cleaning

A few months on from the release of their excellent debut album, New Long Leg, Dry Cleaning have put out two more songs from the same sessions, which are featured as bonus tracks on the Japanese edition. For a band whose unique appeal is mostly attributed to Florence Shaw’s surreal lyrics and deadpan delivery, it’s heartening to hear further evidence that it’s the complete cocktail of musical ingredients — Shaw plus Tom Dowse’s inventive guitar, Lewis Maynard’s satisfyingly thick bass, and Nick Buxton’s driving drums — that alchemizes into their winning sound. The verse guitar chords of “Bug Eggs” are naggingly similar to New Long Leg’s “More Big Birds,” while the instrumental chorus has a yearning feel akin to album highlight “Her Hippo.” Maynard’s bass tone on “Tony Speaks!” is absolutely filthy, swallowing up most of the mix until Dowse’s guitar bares its teeth in a swarm of squalling wah-wah, while Shaw’s lyrics muse upon the decline of heavy industry, the environment, and crisps.

Tim Clarke

Flight Mode — TX, ’98 (Sound As Language)

TX, '98 by Flight Mode

In 1998, well before he started Little Hands of Asphalt, Sjur Lyseid spent a year in Texas at the height of the emo wave, skateboarding and going to house shows and listening to the Get Up Kids. TX, ’98 is the Norwegian’s tribute to that coming of age experience, the giddy euphorias of mid-teenage freedom filtered through bittersweet subsequent experience. “Sixteen” is the banger, all crunchy, twitchy exhilarating guitars and vulnerable pop tunefulness, its clangor breaking for wistful reminiscence, but “Fossil Fuel” waxes lyrical, its guitar riffs splintering into radiant shards, its lyrics capturing those youthful years when anything seems possible and also, somehow, the later recognition that perhaps it isn’t. It’s an interesting tension between the now-is-everything hedonism of adolescence and the rueful remembering of adulthood, encapsulate in a chorus that goes, “Well wait and see if there’s no more history/and just defend the present tense.”

Jennifer Kelly

Drew Gardner— S-T (Eiderdown Records)

S/T by Drew Gardner

Drew Gardner has been popping up all over lately, on Elkhorn’s snowed in acoustic jam Storm Sessions and the electrified follow-up Sun Cycle and as one of Jeffrey Alexander’s Heavy Lidders. Here, it’s just him and his guitar plus a like-minded rhythm section (that’s Ryan Jewell on drums and Garcia Peoples’ Andy Cush on bass), spinning off dreamy, folk-into-interstellar-journeys like “Calyx” and “Kelp Highway.” Gardner puts some muscle into some of his grooves, running close to Chris Forsyth’s wide-angle electric boogie in “Bird Food.” “The Road to Eastern Garden,” though, is pure limpid transcendence, Buddhist monastery bells jangling as Gardner’s warm, inquiring melodic line intersects with rubbery bends on bass. Give this one a little time to sit, but don’t miss it.

Jennifer Kelly

Hearth — Melt (Clean Feed)

Melt by Hearth

This pan-European quartet’s name suggests domesticity, but the fact that none of its members lives in the country of their birth probably says more about the breadth of their music. The closest geographic point of reference for the sounds that pianist Kaja Draksler, trumpeter Susana Santos Silva, and saxophonists Ada Rave and Mette Rasmussen’s make together would be Chicago’s south side. Their dynamic blend of angular structures, extended instrumental techniques, and obscurely theatrical enactments brings to mind the Art Ensemble of Chicago, even though the sounds on this concert-length recording rarely echo the AEC’s. But it is similarly charged with mystery and collective identity.

Bill Meyer

Klaus Lang / Konus Quartett — Drei Allmenden (Cubus)

Drei Allmenden (translation: Three Commons) treats the act of commission as an opportunity to create common cause. For composer and keyboardist Klaus Lang, this is a chance to push back against a long trend of separation and stratification, with musicians bound to realize the composer’s whim, no matter the cost. Invoking works from the 16th century, he penned something simple, flexible and open to embellishment. Then he pitched in with Konus Quartett, a Swiss saxophone ensemble, to get the job done. The three-part piece, which lasts 43 sublime minutes, amply rewards the submersion of ego. Lang’s slowly morphing harmonium drones and Konus’ long reed tones sound like one instrument, enriched by tendrils of sound that rise up and then sink back into the music’s body.

Bill Meyer

Lynch, Moore, Riley — Secant / Tangent (dx/dy)

Secant | Tangent by Sue Lynch, N.O. Moore, Crystabel Riley

Electric guitarist N.O. Moore is barely known in these parts. I’ve only heard him on one album with Eddie Prévost a couple years back, and the other two musicians, not at all. But on the strength of this robust performance, which was recorded at London’s Icklectick venue, it would be a loss to keep it that way. They combine acoustic sounds with electronics, courtesy of guitar effects and amplification, in an exceedingly natural fashion. Each musician also gets into the other’s business in ways that correspond to the one spicy suggestion made by one cook that elevates another’s dish to the next level. Susan Lynch’s clarinet and flute compliment Moore’s radiophonic/feedback sounds like two flashes of lightning illuminating the same dark cloud, and her vigorously pecking saxophone attack mixes with Crystabel’s cascading beats like idiosyncratically tuned drums. This is one of the first albums to be released on Moore’s dx/dy label; keep your eye out for more.

Bill Meyer

Maco Sica / Hamid Drake Tatsu Aoki & Thymme Jones—Ourania (Feeding Tube)

OURANIA by Mako Sica / Hamid Drake featuring Tatsu Aoki & Thymme Jones

Ourania is named for the muse associated with astronomy in Greek mythology, and the album has an aim for the stars quality. In 2020, Chicago’s Mako Sica lost not only the chance to play concerts, but one third of its number. Core members Brent Fuscaldo (electric bass, voice, harmonica, percussion) and Przemyslaw Krys Drazek (electric trumpet, electric guitar, mandolin) could have just hunkered down with their respective TV sets. Instead, they booked themselves three other musicians who make rising above circumstances a core practice. The duo convened at Electrical Audio with Hamid Drake (drums, percussion, Tatsu Aoki (upright bass, shamisen), and Thymme Jones (piano, organ, balloon, trumpet, voice, recorder, percussion), rolled tape for a couple hours, and walked out with this album. The 85 minute-long recording (edited to about half that length on vinyl, but the LP comes with a download card) exudes a vibe of calm, even beatitude, with twin trumpets and Fuscaldo’s echo-laden, nearly word-free vocals weaving though a sequence of patient grooves like migrational birds on the glide.

Bill Meyer

Mar Caribe — Hymn of the Mar Caribe (Mar Caribe)

Hymn of the Mar Caribe b/w Rondo for Unemployment by mar caribe

Some musicians burn to make something new; others generate attention-getting sounds designed to maximize the potential of their other earning activities; and others, well, they just want you to sway along with their version of the good sounds. Mar Caribe falls into that last category. This Chicago-based instrumental ensemble has spent most of the last decade maintaining a robust performance schedule, and it would seem that recording is pretty much an afterthought; a photo of the test pressing for this 7” was posted in May 2019, but the release show didn’t happen until August 2021. Sure, COVID can be blamed for part of the delay, but one suspects that mostly, these guys just want to play, and they didn’t bother to stuff the singles in the sleeves until they knew when they’d next be leaning over a merch table. The titular suspends anthemic brass and pedal steel over a swinging double bass cadence, and if there was a moment during the night when the band invited the audience to pledge allegiance to their favorite drink, this is what they’d be playing while they asked. Guitars lead on the flip side, whose busy twists and turns belie the implied laziness of the title, “Rondo For Unemployment.”

Bill Meyer

Mint Julep — In a Deep and Dreamless Sleep (Western Vinyl)

In A Deep And Dreamless Sleep by Mint Julep

These songs traverse a hazy, dreamlike space, diffusing dance beats, dream-y vocals and synth pulses into inchoate sensation that nonetheless retains enough rhythmic propulsion to keep your heart rate up. “A Rising Sun” filters jangly guitar and bass through a sizzle of static, letting tambourine thump gently somewhere off camera, as voices soothe and reassure. “Mirage” pounds a four-on-the-floor, but quietly, angelically, like a disco visited through astral projection or maybe a really rave-y iteration of heaven. There’s an ominous undercurrent to “Longshore Drift,” in its growly, sub-bass-y hum, but glittering bits of synth sprinkle over like fairy dust. This is indefinitely gorgeous stuff, ethereal but surprisingly energizing. Dance or drift, take your pick.

Jennifer Kelly

Monocot — Directions We Know (Feeding Tube)

Direction We Know by Monocot

Directions We Know is an LP of free-form freak-outs generated by an instrumental duo that includes one musician who you might expect to perpetuate such a ruckus, and one that you might not. The more likely character is drummer Jayson Gerycz, who may be known for keeping time with the Cloud Nothings, but has shown a willingness to wax colorizing in the company of Anthony Pasquarosa, Jen Powers and Matthew Rolin. The happy surprise is Rosali Middleman, whose singer-songwriter efforts have kept her guitar playing firmly in service of her songs. She doesn’t exactly abandon lyricism in Monocot, but the tunes serve as launching ramps for exuberant lunges into the realm of voltage-saturated sound. On “Ruby Throated,” the first of the record’s four extended jams, Middleman lofts rippling peals over a near-boil of  drums and churning loops. By the time you get to “Multidimensional Solutions,” the last and longest track, her wah-wah-dipped streams of sound have taken on a blackened quality, as though her overheating tubes have burned every note.

Bill Meyer

Obits — Die at the Zoo (Outer Battery)

Die At The Zoo by Obits

Few aughts rock bands held more promise than Obits. The four-piece headed by Hot Snakes’ Rick Froberg and Edsel’s Sohrab Habibion emerged in 2005 with a stinging, stripped-back, blues-touched sound. Froberg’s feral snarl rode a surfy, twitchy amplified onslaught, that was, by 2012 a finely tuned machine. I caught one of the live shows following Moody, Standard and Poor at small club in Northampton the same year this was recorded (so small that I was sitting on a couch next to Froberg, oblivious, for 20 minutes before the show), and what struck me was how well the band played together. The records sound chaotic, and that was certainly there in performance, but the cuts and stops were perfect, the surfy instrumental breaks (“New August”) absolutely in tune. At the time this set was recorded in the Brisbane punk landmark known as the Zoo, the band was near the peak of its considerable powers—and regrettably near the end of its run. Die at the Zoo is reasonably well recorded, rough enough to capture the band’s raucous energy, skilled enough so you can understand the words and hear all the parts. It hits all the highlights, blistering early cuts like “Widow of My Dreams,” and “Pine On,” the blues cover “Milk Cow Blues,” and later, slightly more melodic ragers like “Everything Looks Better in the Morning” and “You Gotta Lose.” The guitar work is particularly sharp throughout, its straight-on chug breaking into fiery blues licks and surfy whammy explosions. It’s a poignant reminder of a time when American rock bands played ferocious shows halfway across the world (or anywhere) as a matter of course and a fitting eulogy for Obits.

Jennifer Kelly

A Place To Bury Strangers — Hologram (Dedstrange)

Hologram EP by A Place To Bury Strangers

A Place To Bury Strangers returns with a new rhythm section and renewed focus on the elements that made its version of revivalism the loudest if not brashest of the New York aughties. Sarah and John Fedowitz on drums and bass join Oliver Ackerman on the five track EP Hologram which is the most concise and vital APTBS release for a while. For all the criticism of copyism thrown at the band since their early days, APTBS has always been as much about Ackerman’s production skills and feel for texture as musical originality and the songs on Hologram sound fantastic at volume. Beneath the sonic onslaught of fuzz and reverb, not a brick is misplaced in this intricately constructed sonic wall. True “I Might Have” is pure Jesus & Mary Chain and “In My Hive” a Wax Trax take on Spector but Hologram is an endorphin rush of guitar driven noise bound to make one forget the world, if only for a while.

Andrew Forell

Praises — EP4 (Hand Drawn Dracula)

Jesse Crowe’s work as Praises has been ongoing since 2014, but has shifted in tone, instrumentation and emphasis since then. While the first two EPs have more of a full, rock band feel, the third one and 2018’s full-length In This Year: Ten of Swords took things in a more electronic, sometimes industrial direction. It was an even better fit for the rest, probing creativity evident in Praises’ work, and 3/4s of the new EP4 are in a pleasingly similar vein. The echoing, ringing denunciations of “We Let Go” and “A World on Fire” are fine examples of Praises’ existing strengths, but the opening “Apples for My Love” is immediately captivating in a very different way. Gauzy and rapturous, it’s a reverie that keeps the satisfying textural detail of the other songs but turns them to different ends. It’s not something that was missing from Crowe’s work before — again, the other tracks here are also very good — but a reminder that what Praises has shown before is not the extent of what they can do.

Ian Mathers

The Sundae Painters — The First SP Single (Leather Jacket)

“This is a supergroup, is it not?” someone asked the Sundae Painters bassist Paul Kean on social media last year, to which he responded, “Some may choose that title. We prefer superglue.” Kaye Woodward, his wife and longtime bandmate in both The Bats and Minisnap, takes the lead vocal on “Thin Air,” one of the pair of A-sides found on their new band’s debut seven-inch. From the outset, Kean’s unmistakable bass playing and Hamish Kilgour’s (The Clean/Mad Scene) drumming lock into a psychedelic march, with the other instruments weaving like kites above, vying for position on the same breeze. “You fight your way down/You fight your way up/You wait for the dust to settle,” Woodward sings. A few gentle strums cut their way through the parade, and a guitar calls out gull-like from above, before everything trails off as if something potent has just kicked in. On the flip side, “Aversion” has an old friend-like familiarity to it, soundwise (if not lengthwise) sitting somewhere between VU’s “The Gift” and “Sister Ray.” Things begin a little stand-offish, though, like you’ve interrupted a guitar pontificating to a rapt audience — it turns its head to look you over, falling momentarily silent, before picking right back up where it left off. Kilgour’s spoken vocals join the conversation, as the song builds towards a groovy kind of fever pitch. “You look a little stoned,” he says, before responding to his own observation. “Well me I’m a little bit groggy/But it ain’t too foggy/I can see some way of getting out of here.” By this point, both guitars (played by Woodward and Tall Dwarfs’ Alec Bathgate) are full-on screeching and howling, and as the song sputters to a sudden finish, our man’s left waiting for someone to buy him “a ride out the gate.”

Chris Liberato    

Thou — Hightower (Self-released)

Hightower by Thou

Hightower is the latest in a string of digital compilations from Thou, most of which collect songs that have been previously released on small-batch splits, 7” records and other hyper-obscure media that briefly circulated through the metal underground. You might be tempted to pronounce that a cynical cash-grab, but Thou has posted Hightower (along with previous compilations, like Algiers, Oakland and Blessings of the Highest Order, a killer collection of Nirvana covers) on their official Bandcamp page as a name-yo’-price download. Thanks, band. Beyond convenience, Hightower has an additional, if a sort of inside-baseball, attraction. The band has re-recorded a few of its older songs with its latest, three-guitar line-up. Longtime listeners will recognize “Smoke Pigs” and “Fucking Chained to the Bottom of the Ocean,” which already sounded terrifyingly massive back in 2008 and 2007, respectively. The expanded instrumentation, new arrangements and better production give the songs even more power and depth, all the way down to the bottom of the effing ocean. Yikes. And there are a few additional touches, like K.C. Stafford’s clean vocals on “Fucking Chained…,” which provide an effective complement to Bryan Funck’s inimitably scabrous howl. Rarely has being pummeled and feeling bummed out been so vivifying.

Jonathan Shaw

Tropical Fuck Storm — Deep States (Joyful Noise)

Deep States by Tropical Fuck Storm

Fueled by exasperation as much as anger, the new album by Melbourne’s Tropical Fuck Storm rounds on the myriad ways in which the world has become a “Bumma Sanger” as leader Gareth Liddiard puts it on the eponymous song about COVID lockdown. A roiling meld of psychedelic garage garnished with elements of hip hop and electronic noise it’s close in method and mood if not sound to another Australian provocateur JG Thirwell whose Foetus project girded maximalist surfaces with rigid discipline. If the Tropical Fuck Storm sought to mirror current conditions, they succeed but lack of clarity in both production and intent makes Deep States a frustrating experience. Backing vocals from Fiona Kitschin (bass), Erica Dunn (keys and guitar) and Lauren Hammel (drums) leaven Liddiard’s blokey pronouncements and there are some good sounds and biting words but the band’s determination to overelaborate and underdevelop musical ideas makes this album seem like a lost opportunity.

Andrew Forell

Marta Warelis / Carlos “Zingaro” / Helena Espvall /Marcelo dos Reis — Turquoise Dream (JACC)

Turquoise Dream by Marta Warelis, Carlos "Zíngaro", Helena Espvall, Marcelo dos Reis

Turquoise Dream documents an example of an encounter that is a mainstay of avant-garde jazz festivals, in which out of towners mix it up locals that they may or may not know. This particular concert, which took place at the Jazz ao Centro Festival in 2019, is one such encounter that deserves to live past the night when it transpired. It featured three stringed instrument players who live in Portugal and a Polish pianist who is based in Holland. But they don’t sound like strangers at all. Violinist Zingaro, cellist Espvall, and guitarist dos Reis blend like flashes of sunlight reflecting off of waves, adding up to a sound that is bright and ever-changing. Warelis, who is equally resourceful with her head under the lid of her piano as she is at the keyboard, adding fleet but substantial responses to her hosts’ quicksilver interactions. The result is music that is resolutely abstract but closely engaged.

Bill Meyer

Wharflurch — Psychedelic Realms ov Hell (Gurgling Gore)

PSYCHEDELIC REALMS OV HELL by Wharflurch

Wharflurch is just plain fun to say — but there are at least two ways in which the name also makes sense for the band that has chosen it: it has a bilious, nauseous quality that matches the vibe of the pustulent death metal you’ll hear on Psychedelic Realms ov Hell; and if you separate the words, you can conjure a sodden, rotten wooden structure, swaying vertiginously over a marshy expanse of water, which is filled with alligators and decaying organic material. Imagine that sway, and that stink, and then imagine yourself collapsing into the viscous fluid, soon to be gator chow. Sounds like Florida, and that’s exactly from whence Wharflurch has emerged. Which also makes sense. Is Wharflurch’s music “psychedelic”? Depends on what you hear in that word. If you want to see hippies dancing ecstatically on a verdant, sun-drenched stretch of Golden Gate Park, then no. But if you have spent any time in the warped, dementedly distorted spaces that psychedelics can open (less happily perhaps, but very powerfully), then yes. Wharflurch likes to accent its meaty riffs and muscular thumps with weird flutters and electronic effects that frequently have a gastric, flatulent quality to them. The saturated and sickly pinks and greens on the album art do a pretty good job of capturing the music’s tones. So do the song titles: “Stoned Ape Apocalypse,” “Bog Body Boletus,” “Phantasmagorical Fumes.” Still game? I’m sorry. But I’ll also be standing right there next to you, on that wobbly, lurching wharf, watching the gators swim near.

Jonathan Shaw

Whisper Room — Lunokhod (Midira Records)

Lunokhod by Whisper Room

That the title of Whisper Room’s fifth album is taken from Soviet lunar rovers makes a certain sense, given how potentially frustrating it might have been for the trio to be working at such a distance. Generally their other records are recorded live, in one room, seeing Aidan Baker (guitar), Jakob Thiesen (drums) and Neil Wiernik (bass) exploring simultaneously, hitting whatever junctions of psychedelic/shoegazing/motorik sound come to them. With Baker in Berlin and travel understandably limiited, this time they recorded their parts separately, layering them together (and bringing in sound designer Scott Deathe to add the kind of pedal processing their sound engineer normally does live). The result certainly sounds as collaborative as ever, seven seamless tracks making up nearly an hour that makes the journey from the friendly, clattering percussion of “Lunokhod01” to the centrifugal ambience of “Lunokhod07” feel perfectly natural. Even though it explores just as much inner and outer space as Whisper Room ever have, there’s something very approachable about Lunokhod that makes it one of their best.

When Revolution, curated by Mark Powell (who also wrote the useful notes in the companion booklet), sticks to the task of unearthing rarely heard British rock from 1968, the compilation is by turns diverting and revelatory. At three CDs and 52 total tracks, it’s sure a lot to listen to. But can a collection including songs by Jethro Tull, Deep Purple, Genesis and other highly recognizable “classic rock” bands really, credibly sell itself as a document of “underground sounds”? It’s true that the version of Traffic represented on Revolution was still very much a psychedelic band, recording Dave Mason’s trippy whimsies; and Fleetwood Mac, whose terrific “Black Magic Woman” is included on the compilation, was then Peter Green’s magisterial, metaphysical blues-rock project. But 1968 is a fraught year to conjure with, when terms like “underground” and “revolution” had a particular sort of resonance. We use them casually at some risk.  

The lazy shorthand for describing British rock in 1968 devolves on the ostensible contrasts between two 7” records: the Beatles’ “Revolution” and the Rolling Stones’ “Street Fighting Man.” John Lennon and Co. derided “destruction” and Maoism and insisted that “it’s gonna be / All right, all right, all right,” while the Glimmer Twins disingenuously identified as “poor boys,” fantasized about regicide and then split for a tour of the U.S.A. The Stones made the better single, but neither of those options is all that attractive, culturally speaking. Neither is included on Revolution, and the compilation is surely useful for demonstrating the falsity of that limited choice. British music was a lot of things in 1968, varying from the overheated weirdness of the Crazy World of Arthur Brown (represented on Revolution by the amazing “Child of My Kingdom”) to the rigorous folk project Pentangle (represented by the excellent “Sovay”) to more heady, experimental rock. One of the best songs on Revolution is “Reality,” the title track for the first LP by Second Hand. The tune emerges on tensile, dissonant lines of symphonic strings. After a few minutes, mellotron and guitar surge into the foreground, and Ken Elliot’s raw, mournful tenor propels the song into dizzying forms. Some hear the emergence of prog rock in the record (an unfortunate prescription). For sure, the complexity and struggle of 1968 resonate through its remarkable, pained tones.  

In any number of ways, 1968 was a year of grim realities. The tumult of the American war in Vietnam and the radicalization of the anti-war and civil rights movements dominate historical narratives of a year that also included the horror of Biafra, the Prague Spring and the May uprising in Paris. In Britain, 1968 saw passage of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act, which sharply curtailed immigration flows to the island — legislation especially motivated by British (that is, white) anxieties about hundreds of thousands of Commonwealth citizens, most of them South Asian, being displaced by Kenya’s Africanization policy. It’s an important feature of the cultural and global contexts into which this music was released, including John Mayall’s terrific “Fly Tomorrow,” with its tabla-driven intro, and Blonde on Blonde’s “All Day, All Night,” with its shimmering passages of sitar. They’re both great tunes, and they’re both included on Revolution, but their blithe distance from the politics of their moment haunts the pleasures they create.  

Mayall’s song constructs a rock’n’roll elsewhere of tours, fame and plenitude. The lyrics glide along “way up in the sky,” and the band’s performance reaches for significant heights. “Fly Tomorrow” features guitar work by Mick Taylor, who would soon leave Mayall’s Bluesbreakers to participate in a storied run with the Stones. Like the Commonwealth citizens abandoned in Kenya, the Stones did some time as exiles. Strikingly unlike those thousands of South Asian men, women and children, the Stones’ reasons for staying abroad were strictly cynical and financial. None of that is Mayall’s fault, or that of “Fly Tomorrow.” But it’s hard to discount the weight of history when listening to this collection, and we shouldn’t want to. Hearing Revolution’s songs alongside one another is compelling, and troubling. For that reason, it’s worth ignoring the compilation’s facile claims about representing an “underground.” Bring the music back to the surface, and listen to what it tells us about where pop culture has been. We can learn something from it. That’s a pretty good thing to say about a bunch of rock records.  

Colin Stetson – “Spindrift”

I love the texture and magic he can create with this one instrument, and body. I remember the first time I heard people talking about Colin Stetson, we were in Norwich, it was a sound engineer friend who was telling me that he used something like 20 mics to bring out every detail, and ever since I have been fairly obsessed. It was great to play on the bill with him a couple of years back at London’s Convergence Festival.

E.E.K. Feat Islam Chipsy

This video is of the best live gig I’ve seen in years, the power of two drum kits and keyboard is incredible. Islam Chipsy’s electro-Shaabi is totally infectious. Energy and power and party is what this makes think and feel. I love the rhythms, note bending and no bullshit of this music. Taking Egyptian street music and making it epic.

Tempvs Fvgit

The first time I heard Corsican Polyphonic singing was when I was on a the bill at Urban Rituals in Brussels with this group. I just love it. Very elaborately ornamented and totally acappella. It’s really fiesty and raw live.

Hoofus – Original Soundtrack to The Edgelands

The Edgelands OST by Hoofus

http://hoofus.bandcamp.com/album/the-edgelands-ost This music is totally stand alone and atmospheric with or without the game, it’s really woozy and very evocative of sparse flatlands, woods and uses a palette which conjures up broken machines and oscillations. It’s weird and beautiful.

Alasdair Roberts, Amble Skuse, David McGuinnes – What News

“The Fair Flower of Northumberland”

I’ve recently been listening to this album on repeat, partly what I like it the simple piano style coming from David McGuinness, taking just the tune or a small fragment of the tune. He’s a harpsichordist and I think he marries up some of the early music harmony with this ancient song. The piano doesn’t make it contemporary music, but doesn’t make it ‘folk’ either. I like the minimal electronics and the ghostlike vocals which come in on some of the choruses. I love that the performance is minimal and a repetitive ballad yet the vocal inflections make it seem different each time.

Sequentia – Edda

Ed. note: We've embedded two video links, as neither appears to be accressible worldwide.

Medieval Icelandic Music. Sequentia have had an epic output of medieval music, including Icelandic, French and masses of Hildegard von Bingen. Their interpretations are edgier and more brittle that a lot of early music. It’s guttural and visceral. I love the close dissonant harmonies, I could listen to it forever but it puts me into another world so sometimes I have to come back.

Laurie Speigel – The Expanding Universe

I just love this album. 1970’s computer music from a composer and computer music pioneer. It’s totally magical. Her deepest influences are Bach and Traditional American Music. I love the early, traditional and contemporary influences throughout The Expanding Universe, even though that’s not what you’re hearing explicitly, I think that the connections are all there. It has roots but is not tied down.

Hildegard von Bingen / Sequentia – The Canticles of Ecstasy

Contemporary mass culture seems to understand the term differently. There’s an established referent, with a sort of regalia and a standardized affect: mohawks, spiked leather jackets and Doc Martens; angry, snotty and at least a little bit fucked up (and likely a lot more than a little). There’s an oft-noted irony in that: a subculture so focused on anarchy (albeit a superficial, sloganeering form of it) and on rebelliousness (more often in symbolic, gestural forms, than in organized political action) acquires a compulsory style, a uniform. In the mass cultural imaginary, “punk” most often conjures the image of a UK82 band, and “a punk” most often looks and behaves like Wattie Buchan. (A future entry of Punk’d History will consider why that should be.)  

As a sort of counter-measure, we might examine the term’s symbolic history. The list of meanings and examples below is woefully inadequate and partial—any number of meanings and especially significant iterations (in figures, songs and aesthetic manifestations) are missing.* That’s the point. In spite of our habits of language, punk doesn’t want to be contained. Punk is a kick in the teeth, and its myriad traces can be encountered in the innumerable fragments.  

Punk, a prostitute: this oldest traceable usage enters the language in the late 16th century. Shakespeare provides an excellent example in Measure for Measure (1623): in Act V, Lucio observes of Mariana, “She may be a punk; for many of them are neither maid, widow, nor wife.” This suggests that in Elizabethan England there were only four thinkable conditions for women not in nunneries—but that’s a different history of containment. In any case, it’s interesting to note that English’s rendition of “punk” starts here, with sex work and its fraught relation to appetites. It gives word to a form of labor, and to desires that evade and exceed the policing of institutions, like marriage and the church.  

So what do we do with this?

It’s Dee Dee’s song, and he had first-hand experience hustling in Manhattan’s Loop. But Dee Dee doesn’t issue musical memoir: he gives us a character, a vet back from Nam, damaged and pissed. His come-on is a confrontational hyper-masculine dare. The desire moving through the song is complex: the need to fuck, which is economically driven (“trying to turn a trick”); the need to fuck, which is denied (“You’re the one they never pick”); the violent attempts to recuperate the queerness (“no more of your fairy stories,” “I’m no sissy”). The song de-mystifies any romantic notions of sex work, even as it dramatizes familiar anti-institutional tropes (the pyscho vet, the fugitive, the oppressive forces of Law and Capital). All of that begs the question of where we locate our more current notion of “punk” in relation to this deepest of historical senses for its proper referent.  

Punk, a catamite: a related sexualized meaning, which is both more precise and more complex. It enters the language in the late 17th century, traceable to an anonymous broadside, “Womens Complaint to Venus” (1698): “The Beaus too… / At night make a punk / Of him that’s first drunk.” The poem was satiric, registering public worries about the increased visibility of queer sexual identity and practices in London. While the poem evinces unfortunate attitudes toward queerness, the stanza usefully points to the exclusively male sense of this usage, and its implication that the punk is made a bottom unintentionally or by force. A more recent, more specific extension of this usage is present in Alexander Berkman’s Prison Memoir of an Anarchist (1912): “A punk’s a boy that’ll…give himself to a man.” Berkman was friend and lover of Emma Goldman, and in 1892 he attempted the assassination of Henry Clay Frick; Berkman was caught and jailed in Pennsylvania Western Penitentiary, where he observed the prison’s extensive sexual economy, of willing partnerships, temporary relations of mutual benefit and rape. Punks in this sense occupy a range of positions, from consensual bottoms to victims of (frequently repeated) sexual assault. (This association with carceral power may have something to do with the usage of “punk” in modern American black culture, but that’s an even more complicated history.)  

The political meaning of being “at the bottom” frequently get confused with being a bottom, and contemporary punk has participated in the confusion:

Frank Discussion, front man for the Feederz and long-time practitioner of detournment, has repeatedly explained that the song’s discourse on submission isn’t meant to operate at the expense of queer sexualities—but the song’s easy appropriation of conventional ideas about marginal sexual practices seems way too easy. Of course, the Feederz aren’t the only punk and punk-related artists to present uncomfortably normative ideas about the politics of sexual submission, or about queer sexuality (I don’t really want to sully this essay by mentioning the Meatmen, but it seems necessary…). None of is meant to reduce punk’s attitudes toward queer sexualities as monolithically intolerant—that would be a stupid distortion. But the difficult, overlapping symbolic terrains of power, position and sex remain provoking.  

Punk, a petty thug, a despicable person of low or no account: this usage seems a lot less problematic, and enters the language in the late 19th century. Hemingway used it, in “The Mother of a Queen” (1933): the story’s Anglo agent accuses his profligate matador client, “You give fifty pesos to that punk and then offer me twenty when you owe me six hundred. I wouldn’t take a nickel from you.” Thomas Pynchon used it, too, in V. (1963): Benny Profane observes of the Playboys, a gang from Spanish Harlem, “There was nothing so special about the gang, punks are punks.” It’s interesting that both of those High Literary references invoke the specter of another social hierarchy: class difference. The idea of the person of “low or no account” can be accounted for through accounting—through the metric of money, or the lack of it: who can turn up his nose at twenty pesos, and who needs them to survive? Whose lives are relegated to tenement apartments and grinding struggle?  

So:

My aim is not to recruit the Tubes to punk—rather I want to foreground the lyrics’ engagement with “punk” as a sort of code for social class. In this usage, punk becomes a mobile quality, enacted by the lyric protagonist in his rich-kid malaise, which issues in a drug habit and the proposition that “the ghetto” and Pacific Heights are equally empty of value. In 1975, ahead of the international news media’s sudden and scandalous discovery of the Sex Pistols, the Tubes grafted “punk”—as a low-rent dalliance with cheap thrills and nasty influences—onto a glammed-up performance of exhausted excess: “Have to score when I get that rich white punk itch…” But in the Tubes’ rendition of punk, there’s always the parents’ chateau to retreat to.  

The suggestion of suspicions about glam rock’s adequacy as a discourse of resistance is insightful, so far as it goes. Glam in California was burdened by any number of problematic relations to postmodern industrial obsessions with surface value. Spandex, big hair, gratuitous pelvic undulations—in LA, the symbols circulated anxiously from the Sunset Strip to the Valley. Up north, things got a little thicker:

“You low down punk,” indeed. The Nuns’ performance is feral, a species of glam, of goth rocked up with a punk edge. This version of “Suicide Child” was recorded the night they opened for the Sex Pistols at Winterland—the Pistols’ last show. The Nuns’ set that night included songs like “Smoking Heroin,” “Child Molester” and “Decadent Jew.” Despicable songs, all. But “Suicide Child” stands out for its intensity. One wonders about their invocation of California’s cultural geography: “You went away / Back to LA.” Is that a retreat? A rejection? A response to the Tubes cynical punk slumming? Band founders Jeff Olener and Alejandro Escovedo (who went on to play with the excellent Rank and File) met in a film class at a San Francisco community college. A middle-class Jew and a son of Mexican immigrants—neither had money to “waste time at every school in LA.”  

By 1978, our current, dominant sense of “punk” had emerged, soaked in spit and covered in grime. Under the pressures exerted by class position and class struggle, punk’s petty thuggery has transformed into something else. Not a shallow guise of glamorous (but temporary) risk. But a sort of cultural armor. All of these valences of meaning remain, part of the resilience of that hardened surface and its livid, vivid way of being in the world.  

*Throughout I am indebted to the researchers and writers of the Oxford English Dictionary for their extensive work on “punk,” and to the Rohrbach Library at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. 

1. Door does impression of Miles Davis 

2. Max Neuhaus – Times Square

Since 1977 (with the exception of one lost decade from '92 to '02 when it wasn't running here), this Neuhaus installation has been producing these harmonic bell-like tones from below a subway grate on a pedestrian island in the middle of Times Square almost continuously. It's a strange moment of peace in the middle of all of the midtown chaos, but if you don't know it's there you might easily walk across it without a second's thought. As fleeting as it is beautiful if you don't stop to listen. I hate passing through Times Square most of the time but since I work only about five blocks from this piece, I sometimes like to visit it late at night to clear my head.

3. Greg Kelley – Live in Ghent, Belgium 5/2007

4. Tamio Shiraishi & Sean Meehan – Summer Concert 2013

Sean and Tamio used to do these annual outdoor sets. Hopefully it's something they'll pick up again. They'd pick an obscure location with interesting acoustics that played into their unique approaches to their instruments. And with a certain limited notice, they'd set up to play. After the sets, I remember Sean cutting up a watermelon to share among the crowd. My friend Barney posted this footage of their 2013 show which took place in the Willets Point neighborhood in Queens right behind Citi Field where the Mets play. Known as "The Iron Triangle" for all the auto-repair junk shops. Back then it didn't even have paved roads, sidewalks, or sewers. It's all been cleaned up now. Everything's been demolished and they're busy building up a new housing development. Part of it seems to have already become part of the ballpark's parking lot.

5. M.I.A. – “Borders”

To be completely honest, I've been listening to nothing but M.I.A.'s new album AIM since it came out a couple weeks ago. So. Here's the opening track from the current soundtrack of my life.

6. Vagina Dentata Organ – Un Chien Catalan (”Chant Septième”)

Jordi Valls and his Vagina Dentata Organ project were definitely my introduction to the concept of "antimusic"—maybe even (or especially) before I'd heard his work. When it was all abstract concept to me. This was a guy who had released records consisting of the (supposed) last moments of everyone's lives at Jonestown or a recording made in the middle of some annual festival at a small Spanish village where people violently beat thousands of drums nonstop for two days. Or records of just a growling dog. Or this one which was nothing but a howling Harley Davidson motorcycle. For Valls it was all about some kind of metaphysical brutal eroticism. And I could get behind that.

7. Damion Romero ‎– Idle

Nine years after a the above VDO album, Damion Romero decided to drop a little 3" CD-R of a car enginge recording. What I think makes this distinct though, and why it meant something very different to me when I stumbled on it, was that this time it clearly is about music. Not some erotic death drive or even engine roar as industrial noise. The deliberate long single take makes you focus on the fluctuating rhythmic patterns of the 1968 Plymouth Road Runner idling in the driveway. And even without layers of phasing patterns like a Steve Reich tape piece, it's totally hypnotic.

8. Lizzo – “Phone”

Before the current musical myopia that consists of listening to M.I.A. all the time, it was Lizzo and her album Big GRRRL Small World. But this new video just dropped more recently, and it reminded me I actually got to see her do this song live at a show at the Mercury Lounge a few months back. Just play it through and thank me later.

9. The Gerogerigegege – “1991年3月2日 川崎クラブチッタ”

Other people probably got into Gero for the short-track harsh guitar/drums/screaming grind-noise of most of the catalog. Seven-inches like Yellow Trash Bazuka. Five-second freakouts at a time. Then do it again. But I fell in love with the confusing ones. Like The Sexual Behavior in the Human Male EP where the titular centerpiece track is total dad rock overlaid with narration about Kinsey's research about male sexuality (followed by a recording of a prank call with Juntaro jerking off on the phone). Or the one this cut comes from: Live Greatest Hits. This track is almost nothing but one goofy drum machine preset speeding up or slowing down and a lot of orgasmic moaning that sometimes forms words I don't understand for 17 minutes followed by some equally cheesy Japanese pop song that blasts on and turns into a singalong. Or at least I assume it's probably actually a live set since there's audience cheering in the background. But they cut out a couple times too, so I don't even know that for sure.  

10. Gilius van Bergeijk – Sonate (1970)

I first discovered this piece on a compilation disc called International Live Electronic Music Incorporated released by the label X-OR. So, although the Youtube video doesn't have as much info, I can tell you it's a recording from June 6, 1970, at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague featuring the composer Gilius van Bergeijk on Cor Angalis, Dick Raaijmakers on electronics, and Annelies Dieudonné on piano. I wish I could see how the score is written out. It's a really wacky piece. In three distinct movements. All honking and thumping and banging and scraping around. Then suddenly piano-led, quite traditional and, frankly, quite pretty. Until someone starts breaking things again or setting off firecrackers or something. And it sounds like a door has been opened to let in the hubbub of a crowd outside the concert hall. There's even mid-movement applause from the distance while they play. And I wonder whether all of these crowd sounds are really coming from nearby or if they are triggered samples as part of the "electronics" in the work (noticing themes in my list yet?). Then the third movement kicks off like a wind tunnel and we're off again into a hybrid world of lovely piano arpeggios and angry honking reeds that sound like they're being run through the dirtiest ring modulator.

11. Runzelstirn & Gurgelstøck – Asshole/Snail Dilemma

I think the first time I heard this one, I had to listen to the whole thing all over again right away. And it's a 50 minute investment just to listen once. Like I knew I found something special but I hadn't been able to process it. It just overwhelmed my system. Needed to try again and understand why. But from the opening orchestral tune up into these rolling cinematic looping patterns (that my boyfriend referred to as my Philip Glass alarm clock when it woke us up in my stereo one morning) that's met with screaming wailing female vocals and the sounds of physical violence—objects being thrown around, something is slammed, a male voice declares, "pass the microphone!"—that just keeps getting increasingly ragged until its abrupt end. To the silence that follows (or near silence, as there's still someone shuffling around, breathing occasionally, in the dark) to the extended mysteries of repetitive off-sync looping of what sound like mostly human body noises and like comedy violence sound effects to the smashed piano chords that lead the listener to the album's final shotgun blasts. Younger me wanted to form a narrative; imagine a story being told. But I don't think there is any "understanding" this one. There's just letting it drag you through all the feels.

12. Vince Staples – “Lift Me Up”

I came to Vince Staples's Summertime '06 a little later than other people I think. Like I guess he'd been getting attention as a friend of Earl Sweatshirt's before this first album came out? So there was buzz and excitement. But I missed his prior mixtapes and the hubbub. So when this suddenly hit me, it hit me hard. This whole album is incredibly bleak. The lyrical content and its deadpan delivery as much as the beats. This is not a record that fills anyone with hope. It is a record that connects with your most repressed pain. And for that, I love it so much more.

13. Julius Eastman – “Stay On It”

14. Suzanne Langille & Loren Mazzacane Connors – “Wee Wee Hours”

There are no words left. But unless you love this CD as much as I do, you have probably never heard Chuck Berry covered like this.

15. Jeph Jerman's dancing finger feet

Marching Church—Telling It Like It Is CD/LP (Sacred Bones)

Telling It Like It Is by Marching Church

“Will the dust ever settle on us?” intones Elias Bender Rønnenfelt on “Let It Come Down,” the opening track on Telling It Like It Is. Rønnenfelt is better known as the decidedly intense lead singer for Danish punk band Iceage, but Marching Church represents a chance for him to explore his more contemplative side. The line’s a portent of things to come: there’s nothing bright or playful on Telling It Like It Is, even the slightly camp “whoo hoos” that he deploys on “Up for Days.” The singer’s voice is pitched somewhere between The Cure’s Robert Smith and Peter Murphy from Bauhaus, but you get the sense—and not just from the portentous lyrics with their imagery of doom and fatigue—that he’s aiming more for Nick Cave. The album’s melange of nocturnal post-punk and catchy folk-rock is certainly an echo of late-period Bad Seeds, and Rønnenfelt shares Cave’s taste for unusual song structures and dramatic subject matter. Fans of Iceage and Marching Church’s previous album, The World Is Not Enough, will find much to slake their thirst for angst and anger on Telling It Like It Is, but for the rest, the sense that Rønnenfelt, for all his talent, can’t quite shake his influences will persist. (https://www.sacredbonesrecords.com/)

– Joseph Burnett

David Maranha Ensemble—Salt, Ashes, Goat Skin LP (Roaratorio)

Sometimes a man’s just got to cut loose, and so it has been with David Maranha. The Portuguese multi-instrumentalist (organ, violin) has been exploring the sounds that escape when drones rasp against each other for some time, but recently he’s turned up the rock elements in his sound. On Sombras Incendiadas, his duo with cellist Helena Espvall, that involved the radiant amplification of savagely stroked strings, but the flow of energy reverses on this recording. Maranha, guitarist Filipe Felizardo, and drummer Diana Combo seem less unconcerned with progress or any other sort of outward-bound motion. Instead they bear down on the riffs and repeat the beats, pounding the music into a ground that’s shrinking and crumbling, drawn into a black hole core. Sure, feedback tendrils escape and swipe around like sea monster tentacles swiping hapless sailors off some old whaling vessel, but they’re inescapably drawn back into the deep. Imagine how White Light/White Heat might have sounded if Faust’s drummer had taken over the band, broken the vocal mics, and throw out all the songs, and you’ve got a pretty good idea of what this record is like. (http://roaratorio.com/)

– Bill Meyer

Lorelle Meets the Obsolete—Balance CD/LP/DL (Captcha Records)

Balance by Lorelle Meets the Obsolete

Starting as a guitar-drum duo, and now filling out their studio work with more layers, like the Gary Newman synth that drives the title track of Balance, Lorelle is band that makes garage hustle and heavy psych from certain angles. But if you want a perfect demonstration of the defining characteristics of shoegaze, check out the “tutorial” where they teach one of their songs. “We don’t really know how to explain this with chords,” says Alberto Gonzalez, while he plucks on an unplugged semi-hollow guitar. Dry, the riff ain’t too tremendous, and Lorena Quintanilla spends most of the vid nervously staring at her shoes. When they run it through a chain of stomp boxes it’s a different story, of course. This is their fourth album, with steadier, longer tracks than the haywire Chambers that preceded it. They really glide now. On “Eco Echo” the top layer of guitar is all moan, while more strums bleed into a marching snare. “It Must Be the Only Way” is a slow chant that builds a wall brick by brick, then tumbles on the turnaround. They’ve been one of the better artists working in oil-meets-watercolor. The chemical reactions demonstrated here make me think they’re one of the best. An unassuming nature means their bright lights can glow unnoticed. Until you fix your gaze upon them. Then you’ll be seeing spots. (https://captcharecords.bandcamp.com)

– Ben Donnelly

Erb/Adasiewicz/Roebke—More Dreams Less Sleep CD (Veto)

[no samples available]

Saxophonist Christoph Erb operates a cottage industry built around conclaves with like-minded improvisers. More Dreams Less Sleep marks the 12th such venture on his self-produced Exchange imprint through Veto Records, and one of the best to date as it reunites him with vibraphonist Jason Adasiewicz and bassist Jason Roebke. Recorded over a pair of days in Chicago last year at two separate studios, the disc’s five pieces are brimming with evocative and unexpectedly emotive extemporization that hinges on contrapuntal communication and keen attention to spatial dynamics. Adasiewicz’s sterling skills as a colorist are central, his bright passels of mallet-sourced clusters contrasting and commingling with Roebke’s filigreed string patterns as Erb alternates between extended techniques (multiphonics, circular breathing, and reed pops) and more conventional melodic interjections. Roebke’s scuttling pizzicato figures and Adasiewicz’s use of sticks on the lengthy “Bizate” approximate a percussion section. Later the bows come out and a cloud of whirring overtones surrounds Erb’s analogous reed creations. The results carry a kind of gravity-defying freedom comparable to historical antecedents like the Jimmy Giuffre 3, thoughtful chamber-style improv with a protean, yet prosperous pulse. (http://www.veto-records.ch/exchange/)

– Derek Taylor

Equiknoxx—Bird Sound Power 2LP (DDS)

Equiknoxx’s Gavin Blair and Jordan Chung take the broad DNA of Jamaican dancehall—the wide, echoing space, the deep bass, the aggressive vocals—and project it into a modern era I don’t think has quite formed yet. The 12 tracks that make up Bird Sound Power are both dancefloor-friendly and strangely foreboding, with bizarre sound effects and strange samples buffeting up against languid snare attacks and loping bass. It’s a sort of full-on sonic assault that will appeal to the most endurant dancers, but works equally well when swirling around like warm soup inside a set of headphones. Because beneath the barrage of clipped percussion, gut-aimed kicks, growled vocal snippets and fuzzed-out synths, truly elaborate and elegant melodies take form like hypnotic Rorschach patterns. Track titles like “A Rabbit Spoke to When I Woke Up” give an idea of the fuzzy, tripped-out vibe that takes hold as the album progresses, whilst the manic use of clatters and rapid-fire snares displays a keen ear for global musical trends, from footwork to minimal techno. Even with so much going on, the music on Bird Sound Power is above all hypnotic to the point being irresistible, a high-octane but richly infectious journey into the outer realms of dance possibility. (http://www.equiknoxxmusiconline.com/)

– Joseph Burnett

Fujiya & Miyagi—EP2 12” (Impossible Objects of Desire)

Interestingly enough, given that this EP makes up the middle installment in a trilogy that will eventually become a full album, EP2 is a bit of a marked contrast to the first part of the series. Whereas EP1 focused on the more bright, danceable aspects of Fujiya & Miyagi's sound, EP2 not only serves as the most pronounced showcase for David Best's guitar the band has made in a while (check out the move from microfunk licks to the storming, fuzzy climax of "R.S.I."), but quickly settles in as the darkly sardonic Empire Strikes Back of this particular triptych. The opening "Outstripping (The Speed of Light)" and duskily gorgeous "Swoon" (the intro of which features maybe the first real New Order homage the Brighton band has committed to wax) are just as openhearted as the first EP, but the closing "Extended Dance Remix" gives us the story of F&M and their continued, sometimes declining small-scale success in a form that sonically lives up to the title. But it is emotionally pitched somewhere between the wry self-mockery of late period self-reflective Pet Shop Boys and the genuine, banked fury of, say, Local H.

It's rare to see bands so honestly address the struggle to get heard and break past whatever narrative time, fans, and the press locks them into (in this case, at least partially falling between the two stools of rock and electronic music), but the tonal shift never feels jarring, possible partly because the grooves stay compelling. Musically, Fujiya & Miyagi are as strong as ever (and as skilled at operating in that area between full on EDM and rock, in a way that really shouldn't be hard for people to parse). Yet, if these EPs show anything, it's that they're getting more honestly emotional and less stylized with age. Even if you love "Ankle Injuries" (and we all love "Ankle Injuries"), it's a good look for them. (http://fujiyamiyagi.bigcartel.com/)

– Ian Mathers

Ashtray Navigations—To Make a Fool Ask, And You Are the First LP/DL (Blackest Ever Black)

To Make A Fool Ask, And You Are The First by ASHTRAY NAVIGATIONS

Even by the standards of the UK psychedelic rock-noise-folk-drone underground, Ashtray Navigations are obscure, revered by those who know or have played with them, influential beyond reckoning on the Yorkshire scene that is currently home to the likes of Vibracathedral Orchestra, Astral Social Club, and Skullflower, but never given even the relatively mild limelight that those acts have benefited from, despite (or perhaps because of) a discography that stretches into the scores of releases. For AshNav’s debut release on respected alt-everything London label Blackest Ever Black, bandleader and founder Phil Todd barely deviates from the cryptic formula he has mined over the last twenty years, although To Make a Fool Ask, And You Are the First is more succinct than, say, the colossal A Monument to British Rock 3LP and therefore perhaps acts as neat entry point to an unique discography.

On first listen, it’s a quirky, drifting mixture of kosmische synth exploration with added guitar mulch, more Harmonia than Popol Vuh, but as the tracks develop and unfurl, the use of mutated drum machines by Todd and his partner-in-music-and-life Mel O’Dubhshlaine adds a certain rhythmic aggression to proceedings and, as the synths soar more robustly, it’s clear that To Make a Fool Ask, And You Are the First owes just as much to the Acid Mothers Temple/Ramleh tradition of psych than pure retro-kraut nostalgia (opener “(Another) Hour of the Grubber” is a potent example of this tension). And in Todd they have a guitarist who, by his own admission, takes as many cues from the blues as he does psychedelia and folk, something that emerges gradually as you trace his intricate, soulful solos between the lines of synthesizer bliss. (https://blackesteverblack.bandcamp.com)

– Joseph Burnett

Matt Christensen—Honeymoons CD/LP/DL (Miasmah)

Chicago’s a pretty Catholic town, but even though Matt Christensen lives and works there he displays a Protestant work ethic that lives up to his Nordic surname. Not only does the guy successfully sustain membership in the band Zelienople, employment, and family life, he has issued upwards of a dozen albums on Bandcamp in the past year. Despite his appreciation for the lightness of digital publishing, he hasn’t abandoned the good old-fashioned LP just yet. Unlike the often casual, exploratory Bandcamp sets, Honeymoons is a top-to-bottom expression of a particular set of sentiments and experiences. Christensen has the sort of voice that would impart regret even if he were singing about ordering his favorite flavor of ice cream, and he puts that effect to good use on this six-song sequence of ponderings about sundered and regenerated bonds. All of these songs could have worked on a Zelienople record, and anyone who appreciates the way his liquid guitar leads curl around his voices on their last couple LPs will find the same forces at work here. But the settings are different. Instead of the band’s loping drums and bass there are icy synth textures that sound like they were culled form your favorite mid-80s 4AD recordings and sparse, unhurried drum machines that occasionally let slip the bounds of repetition to quietly protest the stately progress of Christensen’s melancholy melodies. (http://www.miasmah.com/)

– Bill Meyer

Axis Sova—Motor Earth LP/CS/DL (Drag City)

There’s a dedication to Stonesy two-guitar bramble that makes Motor Earth more down to earth than the riffs-and-nothing-but-the-riffs debut. They play over presets from a Crazy Eddie Casio, guaranteeing no one tries to boogie to this stuff. There are advantages to this, landing the knuckles of blues rock without having to fake the swing. But other times the click track puts them in a cage, like gibbons trying to bend the bars with lesser-ape fists. As with Ariel Pink, the tunes are thick with fantastic ideas captured through shorted out equipment. Here is the FM radio that plays in the cafeteria of Purgatory, so good going down, leaving you hungry twenty minutes later. (http://www.dragcity.com/)

– Ben Donnelly

Rats on Rafts/De Kift—Rats on Rafts/De Kift CD (Fire)

The collaboration between Rats on Rafts and De Kift could be seen as a Dutch torch-passing, but the self-titled album has too much energy and too much forward-looking in its tradition to actually feel that way. The younger Rats on Rafts have honed their post-punk sound, with last year's Tape Hiss marking a strong refinement of it. The elder band, with its decades of blending seemingly everything European has a more expansive sound, moving from punk roots to folk sounds to beer hall singing. The merging of styles (which aren't as disparate as might be expected) leads to an exciting middle ground. What could have been as simple as throwing horns over Rats' moody tunes becomes something more complex, with the each band energizing the other. In that sense, it's less a torch being passed and more a couple fires being lit. (http://www.firerecords.com/)

– Justin Cober-Lake

Iro Haarla—Ante Lucem CD (ECM)

Ante Lucem means “before the light,” which serves as, if not a concept, then at least a guiding principle of this ambitious suite for orchestra and jazz quintet by Finnish pianist, harpist, and composer Iro Haarla. Most immediately impressive is the way her compositions intertwine the orchestra with her smaller usual ensemble, so seamlessly as to make it tricky to see where one ends and the other begins. As befits a work focused on the nocturnal hours before the break of dawn, the arrangements are generally restrained and melancholic, although there are a few awkward moments when the strings and horns swoop a little too enthusiastically, as on “Songbird Chapel,” leading to a rather stereotypical “daylight is coming” coda. More effective are the tense shifts between quietness and vigor on “Persevering with Winter” and “...And the Darkness Have Not Overcome It,” the latter being the album’s real highlight. Equally impressive are the solos Haarla and her regular band, notably saxophonist Trygve Seim, embark upon at key moments, which simultaneously sound as perfectly-suited to an orchestral hall as they would a smoky jazz club. Whilst at times Haarla’s themes of winter and night get lost in the breadth of the orchestral arrangements and her focus seems to wander, the marriage of symphonic music and jazz is note perfect. (https://www.ecmrecords.com/)

– Joseph Burnett

Norberto Lobo—Muxama CD/LP/DL(Three:Four)

Norberto Lobo isn’t the sort of guy to make the same record twice. That’s a laudable quality in an artist, but induces a twinge of regret when he refrains from following up an excellent record with more of the same. The effortless flow of finger-picked melody and atmospheric bowing technique made his last solo LP, Fornalha, a standout in the crowded field of solo acoustic guitar records. On Muxama he opts for pith, offering nearly twice as many tracks in less time, and electricity. He favors a heavily processed, pedal-sculpted tone reminiscent of Eric Chenaux’s recent work, and applies it to deliberately paced themes that sound like they were learned from someone else’s singing. This vocal quality imparts a very different emotional quality. Instead of telling you things, he seems to be asking—for favors, for comfort, for warmth. While it’s hard not to miss Fornalha’s virtues, regard for them earns Lobo the indulgence to do something that is different and, in it’s own way, appealing. (http://www.three-four.net/)

– Bill Meyer

Tami Neilson—Don't Be Afraid CD/LP (Outside Music)

Canadian-born, New Zealand-based Tami Neilson may have roots in roots, but her new release Don't Be Afraid is much heavier on the soul and gospel. The circumstances around the album—the death of Neilson's father—might overshadow the accomplishments of the record if Neilson weren't so adamant throughout. “Don't Be Afraid,” a slow-building force, lies somewhere between the Biblical book of Joshua and a contemporary scene of parting. “Holy Moses” has the Saturday night romp with the Sunday morning plea. On an album full of faith and persistence and plenty of hurt (whether in the mid-20th century ballad of “Lonely” or the disguise of “Laugh Laugh Laugh”), that sort of big-voiced appeal finds the heart of the record. Neilson doesn't rely on emotion, though. She's a careful artist capable of well-phrased lines and memorable deliveries. Later tracks swing back more to her country tradition, but it's a smooth transition because she's never relinquished any of that sound. Neilson would have been comfortable on stage with Patsy Cline, but it's easy to imagine her singing with the Dap-Kings too. Mixing that breadth with strong melodies and potent lyrics, Neilson's done something special. (https://tamineilson.bandcamp.com/)

Here are some of the recordings we’ve been listening to. We could have talked about a lot of others, like the Jack Rose reissues or N. Rajam or Bird People or the live Van Morrison box or the Paul Bowles Morocco box—but for whatever reason, these rose to the top. We picked a bunch together, then we each picked a couple on our own.

1. Trio Puech Gourdon Brémaud – Puech Gourdon Brémaud & Jéricho – S/T

Puech Gourdon Brémaud by Trio Puech Gourdon Brémaud

Jéricho by Jéricho

You need to be listening to the music coming out of France’s La Novia collective, if you’re not already. These are two of the most recent releases, and both feature hurdy-gurdy-ist Yann Gourdon. On the trio album, he’s playing with bagpiper Jacques Puech and fiddler Basile Brémaud, while on the Jericho double LP, he and Jacques are joined by Clément Gauthier (another piper who shares vocals with Jacques) and banjoist Antoine Cognet. It’s hard to pick which of these is more compelling. Jéricho is maybe a bit more varied and tied to tradition, at least in the sense of its long vocal passages. A high point is the “Complainte d'Henriette et Damon,” which takes up all of side three with a mighty 32 verses. Take that, Richard Youngs. The trio LP is two driving, twisting side-long blasts that take elements of traditional bourrées and refracts them into ever-deepening patterns—an approach that shares much with that of the visual artist Jean-Marie Granier, whose work the trio found so revelatory they reproduce a thick sketchbook of Granier’s in the packaging of this album. We toured with Jacques, Yann and Basile in France last year and watched them absolutely throw down night after night. It was fantastic.

2. Kronos Quartet – One Earth, One People, One Love: Kronos Plays Terry Riley

No one can really hear enough Terry Riley. Lately we’ve been digging this set of Terry’s compositions that the Kronos Quartet commissioned over the decades and gathered to celebrate his 80th birthday last year. At its best, the music sort of turns into a monster version of Terry’s keyboard epics, with the various players each becoming an extension of one or two of Terry’s fingers.

3. Dave Bing & Ben Townsend – Tri-State Duets

Tri-State Duets by Questionable Records

Dave is one of the West Virginia fiddle chieftains and Ben is rapidly becoming one himself. Together they play a stripped-down, no-distractions set of deep, swift-flowing fiddle and banjo music that’s energetic and hypnotic and just great.

4. Longing For the Past: The 78 RPM Era in Southeast Asia

Beautiful, amazing, surprising, delightful—maybe the music we’ve listened to most in the past year, just an incredible window into a time and place that’s distant from us.

5. United Bible Studies – The Ale’s What Cures Ye

The Ale's What Cures Ye by United Bible Studies

Big shout out to our MIE labelmates. As far as we’re concerned, anything Dave Colohan touches is magic. Plus it’s really interesting to hear the UBS improvising spirit turned to the work of more traditional songcraft.

6. Nathan Bowles – Whole & Cloven

We know Nathan’s music well, of course, but first listens to this album surprised us with both the range of sounds Nathan assembled and with his growing authority as a writer. This is his best yet and we think a lot of people are going to like it.

7. Terry Riley – The Harp of New Albion

Did we mention that we can’t hear enough Terry Riley?

And a few individual picks:

8.Robbie Basho – Zarthus (Mike)

How have I missed this? It’s probably old stuff to many who’ll read this but I just stumbled over it. I love moments when I get reminded of how much great music, new and old, is out there waiting to be heard. Zarthus was a big deal to me this year because I’ve loved Robbie’s singing and never heard his piano playing—and here’s plenty of both.  And he, you know, plays some guitar.

9. Dwight Diller – O Death (Cara) 

Insistent percussion, moving old-man voice, compelling song choices, commanding banjo.

10. Peter Walker – Spanish Guitar (Mike)

I think Peter Walker is the single musician that I may have listened to the most in the past year—the CD has been in my car for at least that long, playing over and over and over. It reminds me of Jack Rose’s stories of traveling with Peter a decade ago, especially Jack’s description of his own antsiness during a lengthy detour Peter insisted they take. Jack’s usual travel mode was to finish a drive and get on to the show, so adding hours on the road drove him nuts. But listening now to Peter’s musical side trips, I hope his journey wanders on forever.

11. George Michael – Faith (Cara)