We finish the mid-year feature with individual writers’ lists of favorite records from the first half of 2021. Check out our mid-year exchange part 1 and part 2 if you haven’t already.
Jason Bivins
Bisbaye — Le Sens de la Fin (Cuneiform)
Colin Cannon – McGolrick (Infrequent Seams)
Bruno Duplant — Paysages sans Ages III (Sublime Retreat)
Ben Goldberg — Everything Happens to Be (Bag Productions)
Georg Graewe and Sonic Fiction Orchestra — Fortschritt und Vergnügen (Random Acoustics)
Lingua Ignota — Agnus Dei (self-released)
Michael Gregory Jackson — Frequency Equilibrium Koan (Golden Records)
James Brandon Lewis Red Lily Quintet — Jesup Wagon (AUM Fidelity)
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Dusted Mid-Year Round-Up: Part 2, Dr. Pete Larson to Young Slo-Be
James Brandon Lewis
The mid-year exchange continues with the second half of the alphabet and another round of Dusted writers reviewing other people’s favorite records. Today’s selection runs the gamut from Afro-beat to hip hop to experimental music and includes some of this year’s best jazz records. Check out part one if you missed it yesterday.
Dr. Pete Larson and His Cytotoxic Nyatiti Band — Damballah (Dagoretti Records)
Damballah by Dr. Pete Larson and his Cytotoxic Nyatiti Band
Who Picked it? Mason Jones
Did we review it? No, but Jennifer Kelly said about his previous record, “It’s authentic not to some musicological conception of what nyatiti music should sound like, but to the instincts and proclivities of the musicians involved.”
Bryon Hayes’ take:
Judging from Jenny’s review, Dr. Pete Larson hasn’t really changed his modus operandi much since last year’s self-titled release. Well, he has appeared to have dropped vocalist Kat Steih and drummer Tom Hohman, who aren’t credited with an appearance on Damballah. Sonically, this album feels more polished than its predecessor. There’s a richness that was lacking before, a sense of clarity that Larson seems to have added here. He still hypnotizes with his nyatiti but doesn’t lose himself behind the other players. That sense of mesmerizing repetition of short passages on the resonant lute-like instrument is what sets the music of the Cytotoxic Nyatiti Band apart from other rock groups who play in the psychedelic vein. It’s easy to get lost in the intricate plucking patterns as the guitars and synths swirl about. The rhythms bounce cleverly against those created by the percussion, anchoring the songs to solid ground. Balancing the airy and the earthy, Dr. Peter Larson and His Cytotoxic Nyatiti Band create a cosmic commotion perfect for contemplation.
James Brandon Lewis / Red Lily Quintet — Jesup Wagon (TAO Forms)
Jesup Wagon by James Brandon Lewis / Red Lily Quintet
Who recommended it? Derek Taylor
Did we review it? Yes, Derek said, “’Fallen Flowers’ and ‘Seer’ contain sections of almost telepathic convergence, the former and the closing ‘Chemurgy’ culminating in Lewis’ spoken words inculcating the import of his subject.”
Tim Clarke’s take:
Tenor saxophonist and composer James Brandon Lewis demonstrates his control of the instrument in the opening moments of Jesup Wagon’s title track. Before his Red Lily Quintet bandmates join the fray, he alternates between hushed ululations and full-blooded honks, inviting the listener to lean in conspiratorially. Once the rest of the band fire up, cornet player Kirk Knuffke, bassist William Parker, cellist Chris Hoffman and drummer Chad Taylor lock into a loose, muscular shuffle. Their collective chemistry is immediately evident, and each player has the opportunity to shine across this diverse set’s 50-minute runtime. I’m particularly drawn to the rapid-fire rhythmic runs on “Lowlands of Sorrow,” the gorgeous cello on “Arachis,” and the spacious, mbira-laced “Seer.” There’s something about the mournful horn melody of the final piece, “Chemurgy,” that sends me back to first hearing Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman” — and, just like that, I’m excited about the prospect of exploring jazz again, for the first time in a long time. Great pick, Derek.
Roscoe Mitchell & Mike Reed — The Ritual And The Dance (Astral Spirits)
the Ritual and the Dance by Roscoe Mitchell & Mike Reed
Who recommended it? Derek Taylor
Did we review it? Yes, Derek wrote, “Roscoe Mitchell remains an improvisational force to be reckoned with.”
Andrew Forell’s take:
For 17-plus minutes, Roscoe Mitchell solos on his soprano with barely a pause, the rush of notes powered by circular breathing, as drummer Mike Reed’s controlled clatter counterpoints Mitchell’s exploration of his instrument’s range and tonal qualities in what sounds like a summation of his long career at the outer edge of jazz. It‘s an extraordinary beginning to this performance, recorded live in 2015. On first listen it sounds chaotic, but shapes emerge in Mitchell’s sound, and Reed’s combination of density and silence complements, punctuates and supports in equal measure. After an incisive solo workout from Reed combining clanging metal and rolling toms, Mitchell swaps to tenor and the pace changes. Longer, slower notes, a rougher, reed heavy tone and a lighter touch from Reed. Having not closely followed Mitchell’s work since his days in The Art Ensemble Of Chicago, this performance was a revelation and will have me searching back through his catalog.
The Notwist — Vertigo Days (Morr Music)
Vertigo Days by The Notwist
Who recommended it? Tim Clarke
Did we review it? Yes, Tim said, “The Notwist really know how to structure a front-to-back listening experience, and this is emphatically a work of art best appreciated as a whole.”
Arthur Krumins’ take:
In his review of Vertigo Days, Tim Clarke highlights the “multiple layers of drifting, shifting instrumentation.” It is an album that seems unbound by adherence to a set instrument lineup, and it moves quickly between moods both frenetic and contemplative. However, due to a careful mixing and an unforced approach to genre expectations, it is a surprising and varied listen that bears repeated scrutiny. The touchstones of the sound are at times the motorik beat of krautrock, at others the ethereal indie pop of their melodies and the quality of their singing. It feels like the perfect quirky coffee shop album, just out there enough to create a vibe, but tactful enough to take you along for the ride.
In one sense, it’s fair to say that Dorothea Paas’s debut album opens with a false start: A single note sounded and then retreated from, fingers sliding up and down the fretboard with the diffidence of a throat clearing. Yet what gesture could more perfectly introduce an album so marked by uncertainty, vulnerability, and naked self-assessment?
If Anything Can’t Happen is an open wound, it’s a wound Paas willingly opens: “I’m not lonely now / Doing all the things I want to and working on my mind / Sorting through old thoughts.” That doesn’t make the pain any less real — though it does make it more complex. “It’s so hard to trust again / When you can’t even trust yourself,” Paas sings on the utterly compelling title track, her gaze aiming both inward and outward. Elsewhere she admits: “I long for a body closer to mine / But I don’t want to seek, I just want to find.” Instrumentally, Paas and her bandmates manage to temper an inclination toward static brooding with propulsive forward motion, a balance that suits the difficult truth — or better yet, difficult truce — the album arrives at in the climactic “Frozen Window”: “How can I open to love again, like a plant searches for light through a frozen window? / Can I be loved, or is it all about control? / I will never know until I start again.” In the spirit of starting again, Anything Can’t Happen ends with a doubling down on the opening prelude, reprising and extending it — no false start to be found.
Dominic Pifarely Quartet — Nocturnes (Clean Feed)
Nocturnes by Dominique Pifarély Quartet
Who recommended it? Jason Bivins
Did we review it? No
Derek Taylor’s take:
Pifarely and I actually go way back in my listening life, specifically to Acoustic Quartet, an album the French violinist made for ECM as a co-leader with countryman clarinetist Louis Sclavis in 1994. Thirty-something at the time, his vehicle for that venture was an improvising chamber ensemble merging classical instrumentation and extended techniques with jazz and folk derived influences. The results, playful and often exhilaratingly acrobatic, benefited greatly from austere ECM house acoustics. Nearly three decades distant, Nocturnes is a different creature, delicate and darker hued in plumage and less enamored of melody, harmony and rhythm, at least along conventional measures. Drones and other textures are regular elements of the interplay between the leader’s strings, the piano of Antonin Rayon and the sparse braiding and shadings of bassist Bruno Chevillon and drummer Francois Merville. Duos also determine direction, particular on the series of titular miniatures that are as much about space as they are centered in sound. It’s delightful to get reacquainted after so much time apart.
The Reds Pinks & Purples — Uncommon Weather (Slumberland/Tough Love)
Uncommon Weather by The Reds, Pinks & Purples
Who picked it? Jennifer Kelly
Did we review it? Yes, Jennifer said, “Uncommon Weather is undoubtedly the best of the Reds, Pinks & Purples discs so far, an album that is damned near perfect without seeming to try very hard.”
Bill Meyer’s take:
Sometimes a record hits you where you live. Glenn Donaldson’s too polite to do you any harm, but he not only knows where you live, he knows your twin homes away from home, the record store and the club where you measure your night by how many bands’ sets separate you from last call. He knows the gushing merch-table mooches and the old crushes that casually bring the regulars down, and he also knows how to make records just like the ones that these folks have been listening to since they started making dubious choices. Uncommon Weather sounds like a deeply skilled recreation of early, less chops-heavy Bats, and if that description makes sense to you, so will this record.
claire rousay — A Softer Focus (American Dreams Records)
a softer focus by Claire Rousay
Who picked it? Bryon Hayes
Did we review it? Yes, Bryon Hayes wrote, “These field recordings of the mundane, when coupled with the radiance of the musical elements, are magical.”
Ian Mathers’ take:
In a weird way (because they are very different works from very different artists), A Softer Focus reminds me a bit of Robert Ashley’s Private Parts (The Album). Both feel like the products of deep focus and concentration but wear their rigor loosely, and both feel like beautifully futile attempts to capture or convey the rich messiness of human experience. But although there is a musicality to Private Parts, Ashley is almost obsessed by language and language acts, and even though the human voice is more present than ever in rousay’s work (not just sampled or field recorded, but outright albeit technologically smeared singing on a few tracks) it feels like it reaches to a place in that experience beyond words. The first few times I played it I had moments where I was no longer sure exactly what part of what I was hearing were coming from my speakers versus from outside my apartment, and as beautiful as the more conventional ambient/drone aspects of A Softer Focus are (including the cello and violin heard throughout), it’s that kind of intoxicating disorientation, of almost feeling like I’m experiencing someone else’s memory, that’s going to stay with me the longest.
M. Sage — The Wind Of Things (Geographic North)
The Wind of Things by M. Sage
Who recommended it? Bryon Hayes
Did we review it? No
Bill Meyer’s take:
Matthew Sage’s hybrid music gets labeled as ambient by default. Sure, it’s gentle enough to be ignorable, but Sage’s combination of ruminative acoustic playing (mostly piano and guitar, with occasional seasoning from reeds, violin, banjo, and percussion) and memory-laden field recordings feels so personal that it’s hard to believe he’d really be satisfied with anyone treating this stuff as background music. But that combination of the placid and the personal may also be The Wind of Things’ undoing since it’s a bit too airy and undemonstrative to make an impression.
Skee Mask — Pool (Ilian Tape)
ITLP09 Skee Mask - Pool by Skee Mask
Who picked it? Patrick Masterson
Did we review it? No
Robert Ham’s take:
Pool is an appropriate title for the new album by Munich electronic artist Bryan Müller. The record is huge and deep, with its 18 tracks clocking in at around 103 minutes. And Müller has pointedly only released the digital version of Pool through Bandcamp, adding it a little hurdle to fans who just want to pick and choose from its wares for their playlists. Dipping one’s toes in is an option, but the only way to truly appreciate the full effect is to dive on in.
Though Müller filled Pool up with around five years’ worth of material, the album plays like the result of great deliberation. It flows with the thoughtfulness and intention of an adventurous DJ set, with furious breakbeat explosions like “Breathing Method” making way for the languorous ambient track “Ozone” and the unbound “Rio Dub.” Then, without warning, the drum ‘n’ bass breaks kick in for a while.
The full album delights in those quick shifts into new genres or wild seemingly disparate sonic connections happening within the span of a single song. But again, these decisions don’t sound like they were made carelessly. Müller took some time with this one to get the track list just right. But if there is one thread that runs along the entirety of Pool, it is the air of joy that cuts through even its downcast moments. The splashing playfulness is refreshing and inviting.
Speaker Music — Soul-Making Theodicy (Planet Mu)
Soul-Making Theodicy by Speaker Music
Who picked it? Mason Jones
Did we review it? No
Robert Ham’s take:
The process by which DeForrest Brown Jr., the artist known as Speaker Music, created his latest EP sounds almost as exciting as the finished music. If I understand it correctly — and I’m not entirely sure that I do — he created rhythm tracks using haptic synths, a Push sequencer, and a MIDI keyboard, that he sent through Ableton and performed essentially a live set of abstract beats informed by free jazz, trap and marching band. Or as Brown calls them “stereophonic paintings.”
Whatever term you care to apply to these tracks and however they were made, the experience of listening to them is a dizzying one. A cosmic high that takes over the synapses and vibrates them until your vision becomes blurry and your word starts to smear together like fog on a windshield. Listening to this EP on headphones makes the experience more vertiginous if, like I did, you try to unearth the details and sounds buried within the centerpiece track “Rhythmatic Music For Speakers,” a 33-minute symphony of footwork stuttering and polyrhythms. Is that the sound of an audience responding to this sensory overload that I hear underneath it all? Or is that wishful imaginings coming from a mind hungry for the live music experience?
The Telescopes — Songs of Love And Revolution (Tapete)
Songs Of Love And Revolution by the telescopes
Who recommended it? Robert Ham
Did we review it? No.
Andrew Forell’s take:
Songs Of Love And Revolution glides along on murky subterranean rhythms that evoke Mo Tucker’s heartbeat toms backed with thick bowel-shaking bass lines. Somewhere in the murk Stephen Lawrie’s murmured vocals barely surface as he wrings squalls of noise from his guitar to create a dissonant turmoil to contrast the familiarity of what lies beneath. The effect is at once hypnotic and joltingly thrilling, similar to hearing Jesus And Mary Chain for the first time but played a at pace closer to Bedhead. A kind of slowcore shoegaze, its mystery enhanced by what seems deliberately monochrome production that forces and rewards close attention. When they really let go on “We See Magic And We Are Neutral, Unnecessary” it hits like The Birthday Party wrestling The Stooges. So yeah, pretty damn good.
Leon Vynehall — Rare, Forever (Ninja Tune)
Rare, Forever by LEON VYNEHALL
Who recommended it? Patrick Masterson
Did we review it? No.
Jason Bivins’ take:
I was amused to see Leon Vynehall’s album tucked into the expansive “Unknown genre” non-category. This is, as is often the case with these mid-year exchanges, a bit far afield from the kind of music I usually spin. Much of it is, I suppose, rooted in house music. Throughout these tracks, there are indeed some slinky beats that’ll get you nodding your head while prepping the dinner or while studying in earnest. There’s plenty to appreciate on the level of grooves and patterns, but he closer you listen, the more subversive, sneaky details you notice. The opening “Ecce! Ego!” isn’t quite as brash as the title would suggest, featuring some playfully morphed voices, old school synth patches and snatches of instrumentalism. But after just a couple minutes, vast cosmic sounds start careening around your brainpan while a metal bar drops somewhere in the audial space. Did that just happen? you wonder as the groove continues. Moments of curiosity and even discomfort are plopped down, sometimes as transitions (like the closing vocal announcement on “In>Pin” — “like a moth” — that introduces the echo-canyon of “Mothra”) but usually as head-scrambling curveballs. Startled voices or flutes or subterranean sax bubble up from beneath deep house thrum, then are gone in ways that are arresting and deceptive. I still don’t know what to make of the lounge-y closing to “Snakeskin – Has-Been” or the unexpected drone monolith of “Farewell! Magnus Gabbro.” In its way, Vynehall’s music is almost like what you’d get if Graham Lambkin or Jason Lescalleet made a house record. Pretty rich stuff.
Michael Winter — single track (Another Timbre)
single track by Michael Winter
Who recommended it? Eric McDowell
Did we review it? Not yet!
Mason Jones’ take:
Over its 45 minutes, Michael Winter’s 2015 composition slowly accelerates and accumulates, starting from an isolated violin playing slightly arrhythmic, single fast strokes. The playing, centered around a single root note, seems almost random, but flashes of melodic clusters make it clear they're not. After nine minutes other players have joined in and there's a developing drone, as things sort of devolve, with atonal combinations building. By the one-third mark everything has slowed down significantly, and the players are blending together, with fewer melodies standing out. Instead, it's almost more drone than not; and at a half hour in, most of the strings have been reduced to slowly changing tones. As we near the end we’re hearing beautiful layers of string drones, descending into the final few minutes of nearly static notes. It's an intriguing and oddly listenable composition given its atonality. The early moments bring to mind Michael Nyman, and the later movements summon thoughts of Tony Conrad and La Monte Young, but it's clearly different from any of them, and more than the sum of those parts.
Young Slo-Be — Red Mamba (KoldGreedy Entertainment / Thizzler On The Roof)
Who picked it? Ray Garraty
Did we review it? No.
Ian Mathers’ take:
The 12 tracks on Red Mamba fly by in a little over 27 minutes (not a one breaks the three-minute mark) but the result doesn’t feel slight so much as pared down to a sharpness you might cut yourself on. Stockon’s Young Slo-Be only seems to have one flow (or maybe it’d be more accurate to say he only seems interested in one) but he knows how to wield it with precision and force, and if the subject matter hews closely to the accepted canon of gangbanger concerns, Slo-Be delivers it all with vivid language and the studied, superior disdain of an older brother explaining the world to you and busting your chops at the same time. The tracks on Red Mamba all come from different producers, but Slo-Be consistently chooses spectral, eerie, foreboding backgrounds for these songs, even when adding piano and church bells (on “Asshole”), dog barks (“21 Thoughts”) or even Godfather-esque strings (the closing “Rico Swavo”). What’s the old line about the strength of street knowledge? These are different streets, and different knowledge.
Dusted Mid-Year Round-Up: Part 1, Obay Alsharani to Alina Kalancea
Dry Cleaning
The Dusted Mid-year exchange has become a beloved tradition for our writers. For at least a few of us, it is our favorite thing about Dusted, and it contributes to the feeling that there is something special about writing for this website. As far as we know, we are the only site that does this, and it is, as always, a testament to our writers’ open-minded-ness and respect for each other.
Just to review, it works like this. Writers nominated two of their favorite records for 2021 so far, and in a mostly random process, these albums were assigned to other writers.
Dusted has never had much use for consensus, but as in previous years, a few favorites emerged. Dry Cleaning captured the imagination of a couple of our punk/indie specialists—and won a convert in Jason Bivins, who is generally more interested in free jazz and experimental music. Bill Orcutt and Chris Corsano’s Made out of Sound got multiple nominations. James Brandon Lewis’ the Jesup Wagon did well among our jazz contingent (and also got a new fan in Tim Clarke), while Godspeed! You Black Emperor’s latest got multiple mentions and broke through to Derek Taylor, too. Ray Garraty, who mostly covers rap and black metal, found himself unexpectedly taken by the Nick Cave/Warren Ellis collaboration Carnage. This is, in a way, the whole point of the mid-year exchange, to get us out of our comfort zones and explore good music that we otherwise would not have heard.
We hope you’ll find a few that you missed here—and perhaps even in genres that you normally don’t listen to. We’re starting with the first half of the alphabet by artist name today. Tomorrow we’ll do the second half, and then on Monday, we’ll post lists from individual writers.
Obay Alsharani — Sandbox (Hive Mind Records)
Sandbox by Obay Alsharani
Who recommended it? Ian Mathers
Did we review it? Yes. Ian Mathers said, “But this is music that calls for listeners to steep themselves in it as much as anything else, and by even the first time Sandbox ends with the precisely paced 'Sleep', those more familiar will be able to tell that he has made a distinct and often beautiful addition to that body [ambient and drone music] of work.”
Mason Jones’s take:
Taking the title literally, the music on Sandbox is akin to a radio immersed in one, worn and staticky but in a pleasant way, electric organ groaning out a frayed but optimistic melody. The way everything sounds somehow antique, as if the recordings were from long ago, gives it a nostalgic flavor, as if you're a child listening to music at your grandparents' house. That organic, familiar feeling is the antithesis of the shiny, artificial instrumentation we're all exposed to so often. Which is not to say that I don't enjoy plenty of that, but these mysterious textures fully reveal the human hands behind them, and there's a real emotional resonance. The use of field recordings — birds, rain, random sounds — anchors the recordings nicely in the world. I suspect some might find this album melancholy, but I didn't feel that way. The dusty sounds hold bright melodies, albeit shrouded in a hazy feeling.
Amani — A Constant Condensation (Self-Released)
A CONSTANT CONDENSATION by 𝔞𝔪𝔞𝔫𝔦
Who recommended it? Eric McDowell
Did we review it? No
Jennifer Kelly’s take:
There’s not much on the web about Brooklyn’s Amani, an apparently solo-ish hip hop artist with broad, eclectic tastes and a smoldering delivery from way back in the pocket. “Came Through (I Already Did)” holds down a beat with just a series of soulful piano chords, as the artist navigates the sharp curves of his narratives in a sleepy, downplaying voice. “Strayaway” demonstrates an affinity with classic 1960s soul in its sweet choral sample, while wiggy, synth-freaked “TF2 99” tips its hat to Sun Ra. “The Craving” sidles into view on a quiet storm of sampled soul orchestra, a soft tenor crying “I need you by myself.” It’s a love song, sensual and gentle and radiating heat. “What law is there to say I got to like you?” asked a recorded voice in “War of Egos,” a syncopated shuffle that lasts just long enough for it to register that you do.
Arab Strap — As Days Get Dark (Rock Action)
Who picked it? Andrew Forell
Did we review it? Yes, Andrew said, “Arab Strap chronicle all the joys we seek and the catastrophes we make on what could well be their finest and most complete record.”
Ray Garraty’s take:
We haven’t heard from Arab Strap in a while. As Days Get Dark is their return after a long hiatus. These Scottish pub shoegazers do indeed bring something dark, as the title promises. Roughly half of the songs here are lullabies in the abyss, to the children than may never wake up. The other half is an attempt at social critique but these takes on flaws in social fabric almost always have an inward turn later. Arab Strap here step on Sleaford Mods’ territory, yet the music is too melancholic to fool anyone into thinking this is the second Mods. Moffat goes for spoken monologues in his catastrophic musings, and a lot of the times it reminds you a lonely bloke in a pub muttering something to himself. There is a strong urge to come up to him and ask him to be quiet: we don’t hear the music.
Blanck Mass — In Ferneaux (Sacred Bones)
In Ferneaux by Blanck Mass
Who recommended it? Ian Mathers
Did we review it? Yes. Andrew Forell said, “Dream logic rules this world, with periods of calm beauty, eruptions of noise and the sense that for every step forward there are delays, disruptions and detours that must be dealt with in order to proceed to a distant destination.”
Patrick Masterson’s take:
Though Ian and I seem to get each other’s records every year for this, it’s Andrew’s depiction of what we’re dealing with for Benjamin John Power’s seventh full-length (man, has it really been that long since Fuck Buttons?) that says things best, a dead-on account of what he describes as “an immersive soundscape that charts the grief and loss of the past year.” I could easily quote the whole review, so you’d do well to just read the thing linked above and come back, but with that kind of scope, immersion is inevitable — and when “Phase I” finally comes to life some four minutes in with a sweeping synth line fit for the highest drama, you know where you stand. There are field recordings bleeding into slow drones and choruses and piano and all kinds of light poking through the darkness, same as 2020. But perhaps what’s most interesting about In Ferneaux is how it contrasts with the live recording Mind Killer released after but possibly recorded before, at the outset of the pandemic last April: One relies on rhythmic intensity to get through the messy here and now, the other on a broader sonic palette to get through the hereafter. Like everything else right now, our answers may vary.
The Body — I’ve Seen All I Need To See (Thrill Jockey)
I've Seen All I Need To See by the body
Who recommended it? Jonathan Shaw
Did we review it? Yes, Jonathan said, “There may be an idea at the center of the record, but it’s overwhelmed by the sheer visceral quality of the songs. You listen and your guts shake. The whole room seems to shake.”
Tim Clarke’s take:
The title of The Body’s latest album suggests two things: shaking off one’s mortal coil with the satisfaction of leaving behind a life well lived; or feeling so disgusted with what life has put before you that you can’t take it anymore. Based on their aesthetic, the latter is probably what this sludge/doom metal duo were shooting for. I can make tenuous connections between some elements of this album and music that I’ve loved over the years. The thunderous, blown-out drums are akin to Stephen Drozd’s playing on The Flaming Lips’ The Soft Bulletin; the everything-in-the-red mix brings to mind Low’s heavily processed Double Negative; and the drum beat at the start of “Tied Up and Locked In” reminds me of Placebo’s “Nancy Boy,” of all things. Yet everything else about this record sends me reeling into the void, from Chip King’s disembowelled cockerel screech to the down-tuned roar of the guitars, split asunder by screaming feedback. There’s something utterly overwhelming about I’ve Seen All I Need To See that I find truly confronting and disturbing. Ultimately, such an admission feels beside the point, as that’s no doubt the creators’ intention; in fact, if you’re a fan of extreme music, that’s probably a high recommendation indeed. The Body don’t just rock, they shudder and roar and collapse catastrophically.
Colin Cannon — McGolrick (Self-released)
McGolrick by Colin Cannon
Who recommended it? Jason Bivins
Did we review it? No
Jonathan Shaw’s take:
McGolrick claims to be a soundtrack for an animated film — but I can find little evidence of the film’s existence, save for two record-associated music videos on Colin Cannon’s website. The animations in those videos (executed by Cannon himself) are lovely, sometimes impressionistic, sometimes more direct; the video for “Ing Right I” plays engaging montage games with some footage depicting early-20th-century urban life, on the street and in a theater. But those animations bear scant resemblance to the cartoonish images of children that stud McGolrick’s album art. The cartoon kids are expressionist in gesture, and in stylistic accord with some of Cannon’s explanations of the record’s genesis: his being plagued for years by the incessant screaming of the schoolchildren that play outside his Brooklyn apartment, and his sudden dread at the equally sudden onset of silence that filled the air during the pandemic. No more screams. Cannon’s music (which he wrote and performed much of himself) is also expressionistic in its volatility, its sudden swings from contemporary composition’s intricacies to bursts of beauty, to more exuberant passages infused with the sounds of contemporary Brooklyn — experiments with jazz traditions, suggestions of hip hop and melodic pop reverie. Animated, indeed. The production and playing is accomplished and slick, but the hyper-articulate careering from mode to mode, genre to genre, seems to want to produce (if not get under) other, less smooth and placid surfaces. Anxiety, despair, anger: those explosive and unhappy affects always seem to linger somewhere just adjacent to the record’s sounds. McGolrick’s title track, which arrives last, may be most successful at representing those feelings. Mostly the record is rather pretty, so invested in its accomplished aesthetic sheen that it doesn’t quite match the rawness of the children’s screams, their ecstasies, indignations, frustrations. But when McGolrick reaches for more uncomplicated joy, it shines like a sunny day in the Brooklyn city park for which it is named.
Nick Cave \ Warren Ellis — Carnage (Goliath)
Who picked it? Andrew Forell
Did we review it? No.
Ray Garraty’s take:
Cinematic has become a catchword for all types of music. Cave and Ellis’ Carnage is often described as such, yet it is hard to imagine a film where Carnage could be played as a soundtrack. It’s almost impossible to think of a way to cram all of Cave’s images into a single, conventionally narrated movie. Cave’s poetry is too modernist to grasp it as something that has narrative structure. Some lines can be imagined as stills but the whole album resists an easy paraphrasing. Cave himself changes masks on every song: on the opening “Hand of God” he’s a shaman caught in a ritualistic dance, on the finishing tracks he’s a lover and an intellectual. But his shining hour is perhaps “White Elephant” where he sings: “I am a Botticelli Venus with a penis \ Riding an enormous scalloped fan \ I'm a sea foam woman rising from the spray \ And I'm coming to do you harm.” A mighty song of elephantine power.
Chris Corsano & Bill Orcutt — Made Out of Sound (Palilalia)
Made Out Of Sound by Chris Corsano & Bill Orcutt
Who recommended it? Bill Meyer, for one
Did we review it? Yes. Bill said, “It’s not instant improvisation, but it’s certainly not letting the virus dictate the schedule, either. And it is an opportunity for the duo to court unpredictability, which is probably what they need most to get the creative glands secreting anyway.”
Patrick Masterson’s take:
By my accounting, this is the third full-length collaboration between human octopus with sticks Chris Corsano and six-string shredder and ex-Harry Pussy member Bill Orcutt, though there are plenty of other bits n’ bobs out there to prove this is no new duo. You won’t be shocked to learn the cover is a little misleading for an album recorded in the summer of 2020, a departure for the duo on COVID’s account: Orcutt overdubbed his guitars in San Francisco after Corsano sent him percussion tracks from back in Ithaca, New York. Even more than 2013’s The Raw and the Cooked and 2018’s Brace Up!, then, this is a record of intuition, not improvisation: You can hear Corsano grasping for space in a song like “Distance of Sleep,” while Orcutt’s study of his playing partner’s waveforms pays dividends on the frayed “Man Carrying Thing” as much as on the gently plaintive “A Port in Air.” There’s no way to read the room or one another and I detect an air of hesitancy to make more abrupt left turns in songs my man Meyer found unpredictability; funnily enough, though, it makes for their most even, concise record yet.
Devin the Dude — Soulful Distance (Coughee Brothaz Entertainment)
Who Picked it? Ray Garraty
Did we review it? Yes, Ray said, “He can sing a catchy hook (actually sing, no software involved), and he can write a slick verse. It’s a unique combination.”
Bryon Hayes’ take:
You’d be forgiven if in the past 25 years you’ve never heard of rapper Devin the Dude. What the Houston-based artist lacks in term of profile, he more than makes up for in prolificacy. As Ray states in his review, Soulful Distance is The Dude’s 11th solo record. Devin bounces between two distinct personae across this collection of rhymes: the sex-crazed womanizer and the weed-addled stoner. Ironically, he’s also incredibly witty and rife with wisdom. “Sometimes I gotta pinch myself to prove it’s not a dream / how I’m surviving in this non-thriving economy,” he raps in “To Each His Own” before he distances himself from those who choose to deal in vices to raise funds, exclaiming, “that’s not for me / I keep my nose, ears and eyes clean.” It’s likely to be a common theme for many lyricists this year, but Devin takes on the pandemic, his soulful croon morosely yearning on the title track for life to return to some sense of normalcy. Yet like the rest of us, he perseveres, promising that all we need to do to survive is to keep a “soulful distance.” That’s certainly a charming thought, and given Devin’s longevity, a strategy that perhaps we should all consider.
Dry Cleaning — New Long Leg (4AD)
New Long Leg by Dry Cleaning
Who recommended it? Tim Clarke (and Andrew Forell, but we made him find another to avoid dupes)
Did we review it? Yes, Andrew said: “Shaw’s kitchen sink dada monologues maybe an acquired taste for some but the foursome create a compelling and evocative soundscape in which the banal and the fantastic jostle for attention.”
Jason Bivins’ take:
Who knew that I absolutely needed Florence Cleopatra Shaw in my life? My overriding and unwavering impression of this marvelous record is that it’d absolutely have been on my mid-year list has I heard it prior to the swap. The basic sonic elements are very addictive, and come from a post-punk sweet spot I’ve long admired: Gang of Four, Wire, early PiL, and Magazine (and I’ll be damned if the great John McGeogh isn’t a hero to Dry Cleaning’s guitarist Tom Dowse). Spare, whipcrack rhythms, a gnarly bass tone, polymorphous guitar shapes extended over pulse. But of course, what really makes the band are Shaw’s wonderful documentarian lyrics, her wryly detached observations and seemingly disconnected impressions over driving tunes. Whether the tunes prowl menacingly like “Unsmart Lady” or bounce along confidently like “Leafy,” Shaw delivers line after no-fucks-given line that bowl you over and crack you up at once. While a line like “Do everything, feel nothing” might sum up something of the overall distanced, laconic vibe, her words can be dreamy, urgent, or absurdist. How about “A woman in aviators smashing a bazooka” or “Just an emo dead stuff collector” or “Te amo Manuel, alright then. Her hippo. Every day is a dick.” There loads of space in this music, too, and the grooves are creative and tight. And another word for Dowse, going from discordant on “A.L.C.” to blissed out sing-song on “More Big Birds” to the epic feedback on “Every Day Carry.” Given the way Shaw’s situated in the mix, you can almost let the words effect you like an instrument, the cadence of her voice letting them cascade over you without the need to follow what they’re saying. But then again, with fractured poetry of the quotidian this good, would you really want to miss lines like “Sherlock Holmes Museum of Breakups . . . Every one of them looks a tit . . . ” or “Would you choose a dentist with a messy back garden like that? I don’t think so.” Yeah.
Willie Dunn — Creation Never Sleeps, Creation Never Dies: The Willie Dunn Anthology (Light in the Attic)
Creation Never Sleeps, Creation Never Dies: The Willie Dunn Anthology by Willie Dunn
Who recommended it? Arthur Krumins
Did we review it? No
Jennifer Kelly’s take:
“The Ballad of Crowfoot,” is a ten-minute epic song, a sweeping, passionate recounting of the long struggle between settlers and natives. Willie Dunn, a folksinger, activist and filmmaker, wrote the song to accompany a documentary on the life of 19th century Blackfoot Chief who fought alongside Sitting Bull in the wars to keep the Dakotas in native hands. The video for the song, which incorporated footage from the documentary, is believed to have been the first music video made in Canada. The song is fine enough on its own terms, but especially remarkable for the forthright way it treats native history, this in 1968, when multicultural disciplines were hardly a glint in anyone’s eye yet. It’s as good a way in as any to the career of Willie Dunn, whose music is collected here for the first time on this two LP compilation. (Although you might have run into Dunn before on Light in the Attic’s Native North America which included “I Pity the Country,” “Son of the Sun” and “Peruvian Dream.”) The sound is fairly standard 1960s folk — gently lilting melodies sung in a fluid baritone to acoustic guitar — though Dunn does incorporate some Native American chanting in “Crazy Horse” and a bit of cajun fiddle in “Louis Riel.” The extended spoken-word “Oh, Canada,” set, oddly enough to the music from “My Country Tis of Thee,” works mainly as a period piece, leaden and self-righteous, but most of it holds up fairly well. It’s easy to relegate this kind of music to a distant 1960s heyday, but the news this week tells of 200 indigenous kids’ bodies found at a Canadian residential school. It’s good to remember this stuff. Willie Dunn can help you do that.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor — G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END! (Constellation)
G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END! by Godspeed You! Black Emperor
Who recommended it? Jonathan Shaw
Did we review it? Yes, Ian Mathers said: “How do you do anything but stare at the broken world? How do you make music now, in the face of that? Godspeed You! Black Emperor looks the asker dead in the eyes and responds: how did we ever? Like this.”
Derek Taylor’s take:
Blind spots are inevitable and inescapable in music. Godspeed You! Black Emperor was one of mine. Despite dozens of friends and acquaintances vociferously singing the band’s praises over the decades, I’ve never deigned to get on board. Clearly a case of me, not them. That moratorium made from passive ambivalence ends with G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END! assigned at random and vested with a roar that has my ears and the gray matter between them ruminating on what I’ve missed in the interim. The ingredients are familiar, even if the specific admixtures are not. Incremental drone accumulations of massed, distorted guitars, bowed strings, keyboards and drums rise and recede from slow and atmospheric sound clouds to dense and accretive cloudbursts with sampled snippets of elliptical dialogue shot through. There’s an insular portentousness to much of it that could perilously pass over into parody, but to the collective credit of the musicians, that never really happens. When context is preliminary, a natural inclination is to assign subjective analogues. I hear imperfect corollaries in a host of other bands I’m familiar with: Pink Floyd, Pelican, Bardo Pond and Heron Oblivion, etc. Godspeed (the apparently appropriate shorthand) operates on its own singular band of frequencies, as this album makes abundantly clear.
Cassandra Jenkins — An Overview on Phenomenal Nature (Ba Da Bing)
An Overview on Phenomenal Nature by Cassandra Jenkins
Who picked it? Jennifer Kelly.
Did we review it? Yes. Jennifer Kelly wrote: “This is music that wraps around you like a warm cloud and stills you. It’s going to be one of the best records of 2021.”
Eric McDowell’s take:
Is An Overview on Phenomenal Nature an album about absence or presence? False choice, suggests Cassandra Jenkins. On opener “Michaelangelo,” she uses a pile-up of metaphors to capture this slippery theme: “I’m a three-legged dog working with what I got / And part of me will always be looking for what I lost.” Even better, a little later: “I’m Michelangelo, and I carve myself out of marble.” If sculpture isn’t “just formed from penetration,” as the security guard who makes a cameo on “Hard Drive” posits, then perhaps the figure within the material has some agency over its own emergence as that material is lost. It’s a fittingly hopeful note to hit on an album characterized by Dusted’s Jennifer Kelly as “balm and solace for troubled times.”
The loss from which Phenomenal Nature emerges seems bigger than any one person, but David Berman, with whom Jenkins was set to tour, is a poignantly present absence for the many listeners devastated by his death in 2019. He’s there (“No matter where I go / You’re gone, you’re everywhere”) not just in the album’s explicit references to him but also in Jenkins’s skill with the pen, her lyrics full of striking images, surprising turns, and top-shelf wordplay, as in: “The poetry, it’s not lost on me /I’m left asking how it found me.” Across the album’s seven tracks, the appearance of many other people is a reminder that life does go on. Of course, that’s in part because of the support they provide, and this idea extends to Jenkins’s wide-ranging band, collaborators who are sympathetic enough to her vision that in extended closer “The Ramble,” her guiding voice can disappear altogether and we don’t doubt for a moment doubt that she’s still there.
Chuck Johnson — The Cinder Grove (Vin Du Select Qualitite)
The Cinder Grove by Chuck Johnson
Who picked it? Bill Meyer
Did we review it? No.
Arthur Krumins’ take:
The flow of Johnson’s melancholy ambient compositions tethered to pedal steel evoke grandeur, sombre reflection and sadness, if not despair. At the same time, this most recent work sustains complex and fragile beauty even as it emotes. The cascading effect of repetition wrapped in layers of evolving reverb-heavy phrases feels carefully laid out. The reverb used is apparently the result of reconstructing the ambiance of Oakland DIY spaces (extracted somehow from past recordings) as well as a redwood forest. Whatever the techniques, Johnson seems to have come into a powerful setting for his exploration of ambient ideas. The Cinder Grove is a worthy follow up to 2017’s Balsams, which prefigured many of the vibes and spaces that he delves into here, with equally transportative results.
Alina Kalancea — Impedance (Imprec)
Impedance by Alina Kalancea
Who recommended it? Robert Ham
Did we review it? No
Jonathan Shaw’s take:
The title track of Alina Kalancea’s Impedance does its job. It impedes; it’s hard to think about anything else when it sounds (and feels) like someone is repeatedly hitting you with low-level electro-shock and also running a cold squeegee over your exposed frontal lobes. Yikes. The punishing affect produced by the music is complemented by some of the recording’s other gestures: tracks are titled “Abandon All Hopes” and “Deranged Souls,” imbuing the proceedings with a Dantean vibe. Unlike Milton’s Pandemonium, Dante’s Hell is no fun at all, and these compositions have just as little interest in creating pleasure or fostering states of psychological health. The electronics are weirdly rubbery and warbly, full of snaps, crackles and pops — but there are no signs of impish elven presences and few impulses toward playfulness. Mostly Kalancea wants to bum out and oppress you. I listen to a ton of violently bummed-out music, so can get with that sentiment, but the synthetic quality of Kalancea’s sounds is tough for me to deal with. It drains the music of human presence. I hear the technologically impartial matrix of digital functionality at work, busily squeezing the life out of the lifeworld. The long track titled “Introspection” sounds especially soulless. Likely that’s the intent. In our digitally mediated age of endless connectivity and putatively “bottomless content,” there’s less and less room made for quiet interiority. As a thematizing gesture, “Introspection” is insidious, and so are the song’s sounds. But they’re perhaps a little too much in tune with the clinical precision of machine consciousness.
The whole country is snowed in and Texas is starting to look a lot like the Terrordome, and we can see how people might not be laser focused on music right now, especially if they’re cold or sick or out of food. But music continues to pour in, in great quantities and beguiling diversity, and a fair amount of it is very, very good. So, while we encourage you to take care of your brothers and sisters first (by donating to organizations like Austin Mutual Aid, Community Care — Mutual Aid Houston, Feed the People Dallas or the Austin Disaster Relief Network), we also present another collection of short, mostly positive reviews of new-ish records that have caught our attention. Writers this time around include Ray Garraty, Jennifer Kelly, Bill Meyer, Justin Cober-Lake, Eric McDowell, Bryon Hayes, Jonathan Shaw, Tim Clarke and Mason Jones.
Babyface Ray — Unfuckwitable (Wavy Gang)
On his new 7 song EP Unfuckwitable, thanks to his technical skills, Babyface Ray grinds through a great variety of trendy topics under a great variety of beats: from “not rap” rap to “bad bitch” rap to “we got it off the mud” rap. It’s all very professionally done, as you expect from a professional rapper, despite Ray’s claims that he’s not one. But midway through it, behind the misty fog of bouncy production and some lines catching the ear, you can clearly see at least two problems, with the EP and Babyface Ray. First, he doesn’t have anything to say (unlike some hip hop artists who ran out of things to say, he never had any in the first place). Second, he either doesn’t rhyme or goes for a lazy rhyming. The standout here is “Like Daisy Lane”, a catchy little song, with absolutely no substance behind it.
Ray Garraty
Bananagun — The True Story of Bananagun (Full Time Hobby)
The True Story of Bananagun by Bananagun
Ooh look, it’s tropicalia from Australia! The five-piece Bananagun hails geographically from Melbourne, but metaphysically from 1960s Sao Paulo or swinging London. Their first album swaggers like a long-haired hipster in wide-flared hip huggers, fingers snapping, funk bass slapping, keyboards and flutes gamboling in hot melodic pursuit. Multiple band members got their start in similarly 1960s-aligned Frowning Clouds, so the psych garage freakbeat elements are, perhaps, to be expected. But Bananagun runs hotter, wilder and considerably less Anglo. “People Talk Too Much” rattles the foundations with scorching funk percussion, big flares of brass and a vintage Afro-beat call and response chorus. “Mushroom Bomb” likewise heats up psychedelic apocalyptica with seething syncopations of bass and drums. Most of these tracks are a bit overstuffed, with a pawn shop’s worth of instruments enlisted in happy, dippy, everyone-get-in-the-jam exuberance, but am I going to complain about too much joy? I am not. Bring on the Bananagun.
Jennifer Kelly
Andrew Barker / Jon Irabagon — Anemone (Radical Documents)
Anemone by Andrew Barker + Jon Irabagon Duo
Some names tell you exactly where you stand, and others raise questions. Take the name of this record, for example; did drummer Andrew Barker (Gold Sparkle Band, Little Huey Orchestra) and tenor saxophonist Jon Irabagon (Mostly Other People Do The Killing, I Don’t Hear Nothin’ But The Blues) have the aquatic or land-lubber variety in mind? To get specific, is this record a buttercup, or a bottom-dwelling, plant-lookalike life form that waits for other aquatic species to come close enough for it to lance them, paralyze them with venom and chow down on their still-living bodies?
“Learnings,” the first of the album’s four tracks, is true to its name, being a distillation of instrumental tones and free jazz attacks that might remind you of moments from various Coltrane and Pharoah records. It feels familiar, but invigorating. The title tune comes next, and it’s a slower, more laconic performance, attractive enough to be either the sea or land variety. Then comes “Book of Knots,” which suspends an intricate percussive construction over slow-bubbling pops and barks. The record closes with “Branded Contempt,” a juxtaposition of pathos-rich blowing and restless brushwork. One can listen most of the way through this record without guessing whether it owes allegiance to Poseidon or Persephone, but the coarse intensity of Irabagon’s playing in the last minutes is the tell; this record packs a sting.
Bill Meyer
BBsitters Club — BBsitters Club & Party (Hausu Mountain)
BBsitters Club & Party by BBsitters Club
Label Hausu Mountain specializes in weird experimental electronics. Its release of a rare rock record might raise a few eyebrows. BBsitters Club, with the label's founders making up half the quartet, pulls off a tricky feat in becoming an arch rock band. BBsitters Club & Party has enough old-fashioned blues and psych-based rock to suggest a group taking itself seriously. Naming the opening track “Crazy Horse” immediately calls attention to its meta status, even if the track sounds more like Pink Floyd than Neil Young's collaborators (and there's a touch of hair metal in there, too). No group with songs called “Joel,” “Joel Reprise,” and “Joel Reprise Reprise” can take itself too seriously, and that kind of playfulness runs throughout the disc. At the same time, BBsitters Club does take its musicianship seriously. They avoid conventional forms, working in complicated structures full of surprising twists. The group can get a little proggy, but then twist it toward an Allman Brothers-style jam. If it starts to settle into the Woodstock era (see the clear nods to Hendrix and Cream), it jumps to the 1980s with an unlikely easiness. The band goes wherever they feel like rocking, with everyone invited to the party.
Justin Cober-Lake
Bitchin Bajas — live ateliers claus (les albums claus)
Bitchin Bajas - live ateliers claus by Bitchin Bajas
If we can all agree the pandemic has dealt musicians some dizzying blows, that’s hardly to say they had it easy before. Squeezed between tech platforms and spurned by a hostile federal government (speaking for the US, anyway), even on tour they had to contend with iffy financials, physical neglect and — because why not say it louder for those in the back? — literal theft. So Cooper Crain, Rob Frye and Dan Quinlivan found themselves over 4,000 miles from home in May 2018, playing Brussels’s les ateliers claus on borrowed equipment after having their gear stolen (twice) on a European tour in support of Bajas Fresh. “Um, we’re, ah, Bitchin Bajas, from Chicago ... Illinois,” one of the trio says over the set’s first tentative tones. “And thanks ... for coming. This is gonna be great, I think. Or, we’ll see.”
Perhaps it’s not a question of either/or but both/and, the cosmic “we’ll see” of COVID-19 only amplifying how truly great it is to receive this music in the unimaginable future of three years later. As ever with the Bitchin Bajas, there is pleasure in the subtleties, whether that’s an excited concert-goer whooping as “Jammu” picks up momentum or the way each turn of the musical kaleidoscope seems to bring out new hues. That the recording doesn’t represent any dramatic departure from what we hear on the studio album or during other sets on other tours is part of its appeal and part of its power as a balm. We don’t need any more startling revelations right now. In this sense, the whole live ateliers claus series is a reminder that this venue and these artists — from Michael Chapman (vol. 1) up through Will Guthrie (vol. 12) — are still here today. If we can help repay what’s been stolen from them, they’ll be here tomorrow, too.
This is the first time that Loren Connors and Oren Ambarchi have collaborated, despite the myriad ties that bind the two guitarists across the global exploratory music scene. Leone offers a trio of pieces arranged like overlapping globs of paint on a painter’s palette: the two artists each perform solo with a collaborative piece in between. “Lorn” is a side-long Connors piece with the guitarist in an experimental mood, hammering the reverb-drenched strings to create a glorious cacophony. Ambarchi’s “Nor” recasts the guitar first as a church organ and then as a subaquatic communications device. When the two pair up for “Ronnel,” it is a symbiotic meeting. Connors picks out notes around which Ambarchi weaves contrails of tone. It is a mesmerizing piece, and, we hope, just the first of many joint efforts from these two.
Bryon Hayes
Buck Curran — WFMU 'The Frow Show' Live Session (Feat. Jodi Pedrali) (Obsolete Recordings)
Buck Curran: WFMU 'The Frow Show' Live Session (Feat. Jodi Pedrali) by Obsolete Recordings
When we last caught up with Buck Curran, he was hunkered down at then ground zero for the COVID epidemic, socially isolating in Bergamo, Italy while recording the lovely acoustic-guitar-and-voice album, No Love Is Sorrow. Half a year later, still deep in the grip of a worldwide pandemic, he made this record, a duet with Italian keyboard player Jodi Pederali, revisiting one song from the previous album and adding three others. The tracks with Pederali fuse Curran’s electric blues with the bright, meditative melodies of Pederali’s piano. The two players interact and overlap in intoxicating dialogue. “Deep in the Lovin’ Arms of My Babe,” reprises the finger-picked folk of Curran’s earlier album, adding a glittering sprinkle of piano to its mournful, wistful melody. The set was recorded for Jess Jarnow’s show on WFMU and released on Bandcamp, and while not as long or as weighty as No Love Is Sorrow, it’s well worth hearing.
Jennifer Kelly
Jürg Frey — l’air, l’instant - deux pianos (Elsewhere)
l'air, l'instant - deux pianos by Jürg Frey
When you put two pianos together, there must surely be a temptation to see how much sound you can get out of them. Swiss composer Jürg Frey does the opposite on the two compositions that make up this CD. Each is so sparse that an inattentive listener might think they are hearing one patient pianist, when in fact they are hearing a pair of deeply skilled interpreters. The task assigned to Reinier van Houdt and Dante Boon is to place their notes in such precise relation to each other that they can influence each other’s pitches without interfering with them. Each musician is, as the title “toucher l’air (deux pianos)” (2019) suggests, inducing a slight disturbance in the atmosphere, lightly pressing transitory shapes into the silence that absorbs each note. “Entre les deux l’instant” (2017/2018) allows the two pianists to decide how closely they will match paces as they trade the roles of melodist and accentuator. Immune to gauche temptation, Frey seems drawn instead to see how much attention and how little sound it takes to accentuate the beauty of silence.
Bill Meyer
Chris Garneau — The Kind (The Orchard)
THE KIND by Chris Garneau
Chris Garneau’s lush, stunning art-pop swoops and whirls and flutters in wild arcs of drama. In this fifth album, the New York City songwriter works in a restrained palette of guitar, piano, electronics and drums, but colors way outside the box with his vibrant, emotional-laden voice, which flies up into a falsetto register with an ease not heard since Jeff Buckley passed. “I know you loved me truly, but we don’t love one way, do we?” he croons on the gorgeous “Telephone,” lofting up into whistle range without losing the purity or the trueness of his tone. Cuts like the title song and “Now On” are prayerfully simple, just framing piano chords and Garneau’s highly charged delivery. But others like “Not the Child” are more intricately constructed with a lattice of picked strings, an antic syncopated beat and staccato vocal counterpoints that dance around the main line. The Kind’s songs are deeply personal and rooted in Garneau’s experiences as gay man, but they’ll resonate with anyone who’s ever loved or longed or regretted.
Jennifer Kelly
Gaunt Emperor — Femur (Self-released)
Femur by Gaunt Emperor
Some would-be emperors may no longer have clothes (looking at you, Trump), but Gaunt Emperor is unabashed about wearing its influences on its sleeve. Femur is the first LP by this California project, and Sunn 0))) and the first few records released by Earth are large presences, looming hugely just behind the sounds Gaunt Emperor generates. If you’re familiar with those other bands, you get the essential idea: deep (really deep) notes and long (really long) sustain from loud (really loud) guitars, and not much else. That said, Gaunt Emperor has an aesthetic vision that seems to be attempting to survey its own territory. While compositions like “Slow Submersion” and “The Birth of Obsidian” work from the playbook established by O’Malley and Anderson, the textures of Gaunt Emperor’s guitar tone have their own sort-of-subtle qualities. They’re pretty good. “Conception,” the second track on Femur, expresses a similar inclination towards melody that Earth began to demonstrate on The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull (2008), but Gaunt Emperor retains an unrestrained relation to volume; you can feel the heat inexorably building in the overdriven amplifier stack. In any case, this is suitable music for pondering massive, ongoing phenomena, like the calving of icebergs off Antarctica’s coast or the steady disappearance of the Amazonian rainforest — not that Femur will make you feel any better about that stuff.
Jonathan Shaw
Luka Kuplowsky — Stardust (Mama Bird)
Stardust by Luka Kuplowsky
Soft jazzy reveries coalesce around this Toronto songwriter’s offhand, semi-spoken melodies. Little accents of acoustic bass, slide guitar, hushed harmonies dart in and out of focus, but the songs themselves come up on you obliquely, filtering in from the vents in evocatively scented clouds. Rhythms sway in undulant, bossa nova syncopations, while chords slide into resolution from slightly off center. A half-remembered jazz flute lick lick lofts through the window. At the center of it all is Luka himself, posing, but not insisting on koan-like observations. “Perfection is a noose,” he confides amid the muted wreck and roll of massed jazz sounds in “City by the Window,” but he seems unbothered by it. Perfection is an accident, and if you look at it too hard, it disappears.
Vento by José Lencastre / Hernâni Faustino / Vasco Furtado
Vento is the Portuguese word for wind, and the name conveys that combination of purposeful and chance operations that converged to make this record happen. The trio of alto saxophonist José Lencastre, double bassist Hernâni Faustino and drummer Vasco Furtado didn’t book a studio with the intent to record; they just wanted a place to play for a couple hours. But the engineers had just obtained some microphones and wanted to try out their new toys. Likewise, this improvisational trio did not bring an tunes to the session, but they play with a purposefulness born of shared aesthetic values. Whether are sailing a brisk clip, as on the title track, or gradually unwinding the music at low volume and velocity, as on “Ruínas,” they operate as a real time compositional cooperative, developing their music in linear fashion. While they share a direction, they also value contrast. For example, Lencastre’s breathy tone during the latter tune’s early moments balances Faustino’s pointed twang. Since remorseless microoganisms and anti-cultural politicians are each doing their best to keep live music down, records like this serve a necessary function in reminding us of the life force that motivates improvised music.
Bill Meyer
Lilys — A Brief History of Amazing Letdowns (Frontier)
A Brief History of Amazing Letdowns by Lilys
Kurt Heasley’s Lilys made some of the most ebullient and inventive guitar music of the 1990s. The best Lilys songs sound as though they’re flying apart and being put back together as they hurtle along, killer hooks tossed aside as quickly as they start to drag you in. Though they’re perhaps best known for their Kinks-indebted breakthrough Better Can’t Make Your Life Better, this was actually a sharp turn away from the dense shoegazey atmospherics of their first couple of records. Thus far, Frontier Records has reissued their first two albums, In the Presence of Nothing and Eccsame the Photon Band, both of which are superb. The A Brief History of Amazing Letdowns EP was originally released in 1994, a transitional period when Heasley was still exploring the textural joys of distorted guitars while starting to throw down pop hooks with aplomb. Opener “Ginger” hits similar pleasure centers as Weezer’s debut, released the same year, while on “Dandy,” Heasley’s vocal sounds uncannily like Stephen Malkmus. The previously unreleased “G. Cobalt Franklin” foregrounds searing guitar tones and bulbous bass, the bulk of the melodic layers sounding like they’re bleeding through from the next room, peppered with swirling flange and voice recordings. The second half of this expanded edition comprises songs originally demoed for Eccsame the Photon Band, and later released in 2000 on a split EP with Aspera Ad Astra. They’re decent enough, though feel like they’re missing the spark of the best Lilys creations. So, while this amounts to a far-from-essential Lilys release, it’s fascinating to hear Heasley in transition, working out how to reconcile his love for melody with his immersion in guitar noise.
Tim Clarke
Fred Lonberg-Holm — Lisbon Solo (Notice)
Lisbon Solo by Fred Lonberg-Holm
As befits a guy who has also recorded a “solo” record in the company of a Florida swamp full of frogs, Fred Lonberg-Holm picks his recording locations strategically, and location has a lot to do with how this album turned out. It was done at an old and well-appointed studio in Lisbon, Portugal, where he could be sure that the microphones would catch every creak, groan and polyphonic wail he might draw out of his main instrument. But he also knew, from prior visits, that he would have access to some seriously over-the-hill pianos. While most of the album is devoted to savagely bowed attacks, the odd digressions into detuned, radiant chimes deliver just enough respite to keep you off balance and on the edge of your seat.
Bill Meyer
Dan Melchior — Odes (Cudighi Records)
'Odes' by Dan Melchior
Dan Melchior is likely a recognizable name to Dusted readers; he has made quite a string of releases over the years. This cassette/digital release, recorded in 2016, is a subdued affair, nine songs for the most part following the same blueprint: a track of strummed or lightly picked acoustic guitar with a fuzzy electric lead layered on top. The foundational guitar tracks establish a calm, repetitive cycle, giving some of these songs an almost raga-like feel, in some cases through a hazy reverb: "Tybee" feels like you're sitting in the next room listening to him play through a closed door.
Calling the overdubs "guitar leads" implies the wrong feel. While played through fuzz or distortion, the mood is a woozy one, more opiated than energetic, but in a drifting, pleasant way. There's an over-arching melancholy throughout these songs, one person alone playing to satisfy a need. Knowing Melchior was facing the recent loss of his wife Letha certainly colors it, but even a listener ignorant of that back-story would feel the emotional resonance.
These nine ramshackle, loose instrumental pieces are personal, incomplete, and like having someone entrust you with private stories in song form.
Mason Jones
Mint Field — Sentimiento Mundial (Felte)
Sentimiento Mundial by Mint Field
Mint Field, from Mexico City, filters the feedback and noise of shoegaze guitars through a pensive screen, finding an aura of nostalgia in between and among blinding walls of scree. Estrella del Sol Sánchez contributes two of the band’s signature sounds, the dreamy, delicate vocals and the swirling masses of altered guitar. She is supported by Sebastian Neyra on bass and Callum Brown on drums. The volume level varies song to song, but it’s all mesmerizing and good. “Delicadeza” breezes in on the tenderest sort of sigh, the softest, most lyrical strummed accompaniment, but “Contingencia” digs in and pounds, drums cranking, bass thudding and guitars winging out in wild arabesques of distorted sound. The easiest comparison might be the similarly hauntingly voiced Lush, but there’s something special here in the soft, keening soprano calm at the center of even the most agitated cuts.
Jennifer Kelly
Roy Montgomery — Island of Lost Souls (Grapefruit)
Roy Montgomery 40th Anniversary 2021 LP Series by Roy Montgomery
In 2021, guitarist Roy Montgomery celebrates 40 years of music-making with the release of four new LPs, beginning with Island of Lost Souls. Though 2018’s fantastic Suffuse included vocals from artists such as Haley Fohr (Circuit Des Yeux), Julianna Barwick and Liz Harris (Grouper), Island of Lost Souls is entirely instrumental, comprising four pieces, each dedicated to a late artist (actor Sam Shepard, and musicians Adrian Borland, Peter Principle and Florian Fricke). Though wordless, Montgomery’s guitar speaks volumes, flickering and flowing with the liquid grace of a player intimately familiar with both his fretboard and the effects pedals at his feet, sending waves of tone cascading with delay and reverb. Plus, on the side-long, climactic “The Electric Children of Hildegard von Bingen,” Montgomery pitch-shifts his guitar so it really ascends to the heavens, where it takes up residence for 22 minutes. Fans of Windy & Carl, Flying Saucer Attack and The Durutti Column, take note.
Tim Clarke
Jon Mueller — Family Secret (American Dreams)
Family Secret by Jon Mueller
A family secret is usually a multigenerational skeleton in the closet that is either sorrowful or sinister. For percussionist and Volcano Choir member Jon Mueller, it is the former: a series of familial rifts that became the unlikely muse for this collection of reverberating drones. Mueller employs instruments that produce multiple resonant tones, such as singing bowls and gongs, to create rich pools of complex sound. Metallic hues brighten subterranean rumblings while enigmatic dapples of condensed steam coalesce into liquid shapes. The drummer conjures ghastly creatures through extending the vocabulary of his drum kit. Cymbal scrapes become banshee wails and scoured skins emanate uncanny whispers. With Family Secret, Mueller manifests his personal demons as phantom signals. He transmogrifies emotional strife into physical actions which then become ethereal. Ironically, the resulting sounds are actually soothing. Pain has never sounded so sweet.
Bryon Hayes
Primitive Motion — Descendants of Air (Kindling)
Primitive Motion is the Brisbane-based duo of Sandra Selig and Leighton Craig, and Descendants of Air is their seventh album, previously only available as a CD given away at live shows. You can immediately imagine what the album sounds like based on the artist name and album title alone: rustic yet cosmic, full of space and open to spontaneity. Recorded on the banks of the Enoggera Reservoir, these eight meandering pieces prominently feature the sounds of wind and leaves, plus the calls of raucous Australian birds, while Selig and Craig insinuate suggestions of melodies and chords on nylon-string guitar, woodwinds, and battery-powered keyboards, and gently massage the air with percussive patters. Though part of the appeal of the recording is its deliberate vagueness, the most affecting piece, and the shortest, is “True Orbit,” where a strident theme built around melodica, keyboard and voice seems to emerge fully formed from the aether.
Tim Clarke
Socioclast — S/T (Carbonized Records)
Socioclast by Socioclast
In heavy music’s current moment of endless genre-hopping and hybridization, it’s nice to hear a record that understands exactly what it wants to be. Socioclast is a grindcore record. Like Assück’s grindcore’s records. A lot like Assück’s grindcore records. You get all the high-velocity chugging crunch and guttural grunting — vocals so deep in the gullet that it’s pretty hard to pick up any lyrics. The song titles, however, suggest the ideological dispositions you might expect: “Surveillance, Normalization, Examination,” “Specter Signal,” “Psychodrone,” “Propaganda Algorithm.” There can be a fine line between paying tribute and being derivative, but Socioclast creates an homage rather than an outright imitation. This is 21st-century music. It sounds a lot clearer and slicker than anything Assück or the early Slap A Ham bands committed to vinyl. Like Slap A Ham, Socioclast is a California-based musical phenomenon, featuring dudes who have played in bands like Deadpressure and Mortuous; Colin Tarvin’s death-metal grooves are especially prominent on some of the record’s best tracks, including “Eden’s Tongue” and “Omega.” But this is assertively a grindcore record. Given that version of traditionalism (and yes, events have come to such a pass that grindcore has a tradition), it turns out that Socioclast isn’t all that socioclastic. So goes the strangeness of semantics. But the music is good.
Jonathan Shaw
Space Quartet — Under the Sun (Noise Precision Library)
Under the Sun by Space Quartet
Space is a persistent and multi-faceted theme in the music of the Portuguese electronic musician, Rafael Toral. And while his name is not appended to the Space Quartet’s, make no mistake, this is his band, playing his music. But it is a music derived from ideas that can’t be realized without the right people. So, while Toral has delved repeatedly into the sounds that people imagine they might make and that they actually find in outer space, and he has explored empty and variously filled spaces as starting points for his music, the point of the Space Quartet is to find the right people, and give them enough space to realize a new kind of jazz. Under the Sun is the combo’s second recording, made with a substantially different line-up than the iteration that recorded the self-titled debut for Clean Feed Records. Toral has sacrificed the all-electronic front line and switched drummers, but in doing so he may have found the right crew to take him where he needs to go. Across the album’s two 21-minute-long tracks, there are usually several ongoing dialogues taking place between the players, which manifest intriguing degrees of mutual challenge and support. But the way that Toral’s elongated feedback lines and Nuno Torres’ stuttering alto saxophone phrases flow around Hugo Antunes’ stark, elastic double bass figures and percussionist Nuno Morão’s lightly deployed, carefully modulated streams of textures and beats that extends a lineage anchored in the language that Cecil Taylor’s trio first released into the air at the Café Montmartre back in 1962.
Bill Meyer
Stinkhole — Mold Encrusted Egg (Mangel Records)
MOLD ENCRUSTED EGG by STINKHOLE
The name sort of says it all, but to clarify anyways: Stinkhole languishes in a slimy musical ditch, bottoming out somewhere between the No Wave skronk of Mars and the transgressive caterwauling of Suckdog. As was the case with both of those acts, the dissonance and the gross-out antics can obscure some interesting ideas. Clawing your way through the dense layers of yuck (or, depending on how you’re wired, enjoying it) is integral to the challenge posed by the experience. All the gagging vocalizations, primitivist drumming and semi-tuned bass whomps on Mold Encrusted Egg occupy prominent positions on the surface of songs like “Orange Juice.” But listen to Mold Encrusted Egg a little more closely: there are some rabid grooves, feral guitar breaks and a lot of impenetrably weird environments of sampled sounds, tape manipulations and unidentifiable scree. Is it fun? Does it sound good? Fuck no. The band’s name is Stinkhole. They write songs with titles like “Slippin’ on Slug Slime” and “Emancipated by Hair.” They roll with the whacko punk and noise bands that have congregated around the Berlin-based Flennen digital music zine and its accompanying label. Dig the stink. Rock has rarely been so richly rotten.
Jonathan Shaw
Styrofoam Winos — S-T (Sophomore Lounge)
STYROFOAM WINOS "S/T" by Styrofoam Winos
Stryofoam Winos brings together three old friends to swap songs in Nashville. You might recognize Lou Turner from her solo album, Songs for John Venn, a sly and subversion of the songwriter’s wholesome alt-country charm. Joe Kenkel is a kindred spirit, a folk rock singer with respect but not reverence for the certitudes of Southern life. Says Nashville Scene of his solo Dream Creator, “Kenkel, a sophisticated folk-rock songwriter, documents Music City’s idiosyncrasies on his debut LP, with acutely observant lyrics.” And Trevor Nikrant completes this anonymous all-star line-up; his 2017 debut caught the ear of Aquarium Drunkard’s J. Steel who called it “Oddball baroque psychedelia broadcasted from a basement on the east side.” The three kicked things off with a lo-fi and charming debut, Winos at Home, in 2017, but this self-titled LP takes things up a notch with songs that balance craft with eccentricity. “Stuck in a Museum” jangles and rambles in an antic, neurotically intelligent way, as the narrator finds himself entrapped amid the exhibits, staring fixedly at a teapot from the Tang Dynasty. “Roy G. Biv” turns contemplative—and twangy—as Turner sings plaintively about rainbows and colors, the way things change and how hard it can be to keep up. “Maybe More” glints with mandolin, but remains pared back, as a down-trodden singer (one of the guys, not sure which) sings about a life stuck in neutral, same book, same coat, same jokes, but beautiful. The disc has the feel of a warm, casual gathering, with friends jumping in on harmonies or picking up the bass. The songs are sharp and lovely without a lot of fuss.
In her talk at the 2013 Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching conference, art historian Jennifer Roberts describes the unusual task she puts to her students as they embark on their research projects: visit the artwork in question and spend no less than three hours looking at it. It’s an exercise situated at the intersection of patience and perception, designed to provide students “the permission and the structures to slow down” and help teach them what Roberts calls the “deliberate engagement of delay.” Through it, doubts like “How can there possibly be three hours’ worth of incident and information on this small surface?” are gradually displaced by an astonishing proliferation of observations, questions, and analyses as time exerts its force.
It’s the kind of practice that might appeal to a composer like Catherine Lamb, whose long, subtle works reward persistent listeners with an unexpectedly rich (psycho)acoustic experience. In fact, Lamb describes the transformative effects of her own engagement with Agnes Martin’s multi-panel painting The Islands: “At first my eyes are overwhelmed by the luminosity of white. Over time, I begin to see whole spectrums of color emerging to the surface, which may later become variations of grey.” Next to the “incident and information” contained in Roberts’s example, John Singleton Copley’s A Boy with a Flying Squirrel, the relative “blandness” of Martin’s or Lamb’s aesthetic only stresses the role the audience must play in any encounter with their work. For Lamb, intentional blandness may represent a resistance to the notion that “a piece of music must ‘take one somewhere’ or overwhelm the senses to be felt, rather than the listener having any responsibility towards it.”
What is the nature of the responsibility the listener owes to this music? Patience should not imply passivity. In “The Form of the Spiral,” her own Harvard lecture, Lamb draws on Maryanne Amacher’s suggestion that “the active listener is the experimenter.” A key component of this active, experimental posture is the rejection of “habitual musical thinking and terminologies.” These frameworks aren’t just limited or inadequate; proceeding by habit, we unwittingly choose received conceptions over true attention. In a sense, then, engaging with Lamb’s music by turning to well-worn labels like “microtonal,” “drone” or even “just intonation” and “timbre” is like going to a museum to skim wall copy. Doing justice to the music requires something more, something as sui generis as the piece itself. “I don’t believe in virtuosity,” Lamb tells one interviewer. “I believe in working over a long period of time, consistently and with love and attention.”
If Lamb is describing a kind of generous, sympathetic patience, these passing references to belief hint that she’s also describing something like faith: trust that earnest application will lead one safely into, if not through, doubt. With its title’s suggestion of things forever out of reach, Lamb’s latest from Another Timbre is a fitting venue for all these ideas. Muto Infinitas is also music of considerable ambiguity, at least on first approach. Just 20 seconds into the hour-long composition, the performers — Rebecca Lane (quartertone bass flute) and Jon Heilbron (double bass) — fall silent. After 10 seconds of silence, they resume their sustained breathing and bowing, only to pause again not quite two minutes later. The music proceeds in this fashion, its “global” structure troubling the distinctions between continuity and discontinuity, repetition and progress, event and nonevent. Similar puzzles play out on the “local” level as well, with each of the piece’s 30+ episodes inviting the listener to ponder the complex harmonies, tensions and acoustic phenomena occasioned by the instruments’ interactions — a true test of language (especially for those of us taking notes) as we search for words that can keep up with the minute distinctions and developments introduced after each silence. “Microtonal” won’t get us very far. Close attention only heightens the effect of the surprise that arrives in the piece’s final passages, as Lane’s breath lengths contract and a simple but affecting melody slowly emerges from harmony. Without committing to a conventional narrative structure, Lamb manages, in a sense, to dramatize Roberts’s “deliberate engagement of delay” and the process of discovery that grows out of it.
Ultimately, of course, that process — and the responsibility that underpins it — extends in varying proportions not only to the listener but also to the performers and the composer herself. “I have been slowly working on Muto Infinitas for 5 years,” Lane writes, characterizing the present recording less as an absolute statement than as a document charting one point in an even longer, perhaps infinite, effort of exploration and refinement: “So the piece is a framework into which Jon and I hope to go deeper and deeper. We look forward to performing it again and again and seeing how our interpretation and listening evolve further.”
Perhaps paradoxically, it may be Lamb’s role in this network of shared responsibility that is most opaque. Commenting on an earlier work, her words apply well here: “Fluctuations of bow or breath or tone may become little bits of expression, and I find those portions the most compelling,” she says of 2012’s three bodies (moving), also on Another Timbre. “This is humbling, because I really have nothing to do with them other than allowing them to occur.” In the case of Muto Infinitas, it may be tempting to trace that guiding hand in the definitive, if elusive, melodic turn in the composition’s final moments. It’s there, of course, in the fertile interaction of tone carried out by the flute and bass as well. But it may actually be the piece’s periodic silences that best mark the composer’s presence. Modest but firm, they open a space for recovery and refocusing, always bringing the music back to the place of richest possibility.
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Slept Ons: The Best Records of 2020 That We Never Got Around To
Tattoos and shorts! How did we miss the Oily Boys?
It happens pretty much every year. After much fussing and second-guessing, the year-end list gets finalized, set in stone really, encapsulating 12 months of enthusiastic listening, and surely these are the best ten records anyone could find, right? Right? And then, a day or a week later, someone else puts up their list or records their year-end radio show, and there it is, the record you could have loved and pushed and written about…if only you’d known about it. My self-kick in the shins came during Joe Belock’s 2020 round-up on WFMU when he played the Chats. Others on our staff knew, earlier on, that they weren’t writing about records they loved for whatever reason — work, family, mp3 overload, etc. Except now they are. Here. Now. Enjoy.
Contributors include me (Jennifer Kelly), Eric McDowell, Jonathan Shaw, Justin Cober-Lake, Bill Meyer, Bryon Hayes, Ian Mathers, Andrew Forell, Michael Rosenstein and Patrick Masterson.
The Chats — High Risk Behavior (Bargain Bin)
High Risk Behaviour by The Chats
Cartoonishly primitive and gleefully out of luck, The Chats hurl Molotov cocktails of punk, bright and exploding even as they come. They’re from Australia, which totally makes sense; there’s a sunny, health-care-subsidized, devil-may-care vibe to their down-on-their luck stories. Musically, the songs are stripped down like Billy Childish, sped up like the Ramones, brute simple like Eddy Current Suppression Ring. Most of them are about alcohol: drinking, being drunk, getting arrested for being drunk, eating while drunk…etc. etc. But there’s an art to singing about getting hammered, and few manage the butt-headed conviction of “Drunk & Disorderly.” Its jungle rhythms, vicious, saw-toothed bass, quick knife jabs of guitar frame an all-hands drum-shocked chant: “Relaxation, mood alteration, boredom leads to intoxication.” Later singer Eamon Sandwith cuts right to the point about romance with the couplet, “I was cautious, double wrapped, but still I got the clap.” The album’s highlights include the most belligerently glorious song ever about cyber-fraud in “Identity Theft,” whose shout along chorus buoys you up, even as the dark web drains your savings account dry. The album strings together a laundry list of dead-end, unfortunate situations, one after another truly hopeless developments, but nonetheless it explodes with joy. Bandcamp says the guitar player has already left—so you’re too late to see the Chats live—but it must have been fun while it lasted.
Jennifer Kelly
Oliver Coates — skins n slime (RVNG Intl)
skins n slime by Oliver Coates
2020 was a year of loss, of losing, of feeling lost. Whether weathering the despair of illness and death, the discomfort of displacement or the drift of temporal reverie, English cellist Oliver Coates creates music to reflect all this and more on skins n slime. Using modulators, loops and effects, Coates employs elements from drone, shoegaze and industrial to extend the range of the cello and conjure otherworldly sounds of crushing intensity and great beauty. Beneath the layering, distortion and dissonance, the human element remains strong. The tactility of fingers and bow on strings and the expressive essence of tone form the core of Coates composition and performance. If his experiments seem a willful swipe at the restrictions of the classical world from whence he came, the visceral power of a track like “Reunification 2018”, which hunkers in the same netherworld as anything by Deathprod or Lawrence English, the liminal, static bedecked ache of “Honey” and the unadorned minimalism of “Caretaker Part 1 (Breathing)” are works of a serious talent. skins n slime is an album to sit with and soak in; allow it to percolate and permeate and you’ll find yourself forgetting the outside world, if only for a while.
Tenor sax player Bertrand Denzler and drummer Antonin Gerbal released this duo recording last summer which slipped under the radar of many listeners. Denzler is as likely to be heard these days composing and performing pieces by others in the French ensemble ONCEIM, playing solo, or in settings for quiet improvisation. But he’s been burning it up as a free jazz player for years now as well. Gerbal also casts a broad net, as a member of ONCEIM, deconstructing free bop in the group Peeping Tom, or recontextualizing the music of Ahmed Abdul-Malik along with Pat Thomas, Joel Grip and Seymour Wright in the group Ahmed amongst many other projects. The two have worked together in a variety of contexts for a decade now, recording a fantastic duo back in 2014. Sbatax, recorded five years later at a live performance in Berlin is a worthy follow-up.
Gerbal attacks his kit with ferocity out of the gate, with slashing cymbals and thundering kit, cascading along with drubbing momentum. Denzler charges in with a husky, jagged, repeated motif which he loops and teases apart, matching the caterwauling vigor of his partner straightaway. Over the course of this 40-minute outing, one can hear the two lock in, coursing forward with mounting intensity. Denzler increasingly peppers his playing with trenchant blasts and rasping salvos, riding along on Gerbal’s torrential fusillades. Throughout, one can hear the two dive deep in to free jazz traditions while shaping the arc of the improvisation with an acute ear toward the overall form of the piece. Midway through, Denzler steps back for a torrid drum solo, then jumps back in with renewed dynamism as the two ride waves of commanding potency and focus to a rousing conclusion, goaded on by the cheering audience. Anyone wondering whether there is still life in the tenor/drum duo format should dig this one up.
Michael Rosenstein
Kaelin Ellis — After Thoughts (self-released)
After Thoughts by KAELIN ELLIS
To be sure, “slept on” hardly characterizes Kaelin Ellis in 2020. After a trickle of lone tracks in the first months of the year, a Twitter video posted by the 23-year-old producer and multi-instrumentalist caught the attention of Lupe Fiasco, quickly precipitating the joint EP House. It’s a catchy story from any number of angles — the star-powered “discovery” of a young talent, the interconnectedness of the digital age, the silver linings of the COVID-19 pandemic — but it risks overshadowing Ellis’s two 2020 solo records: Moments, released in the lead-up to House, and After Thoughts, released in October. It doesn’t help that each album’s dozen tracks scarcely add up to as many minutes, or that the producer’s titles deliberately downplay the results. And some, of course, will judge these jazzy, deeply soulful beats only against their potential as platforms for some other, more extroverted artist. “I’d like to think I’m a jack of all trades,” Ellis told one interviewer, “but in all honesty my specialty is creating a space for others to stand out.”
Yet as with all small, good things, there’s reward in savoring these miniatures on their own terms, and After Thoughts in particular proved an unexpected retreat from last fall’s anxieties. Ellis has a poet’s gift for distillation and juxtaposition, a director’s knack for pathos and dramatic sequencing — powers that combine to somehow render a fully realized world. As fleeting as it is, Ellis’s work communicates a generosity of care and concentration, opening a space for others not just to stand out but also to settle in.
Eric McDowell
Lloyd Miller with Ian Camp and Adam Michael Terry — At the Ends of the World
At the Ends of the World by Lloyd Miller with Ian Camp and Adam Michael Terry
Miller and company fuse the feel of a contemporary classical concert with eastern modalities and instrumentation. The recordings sound live off the floor, and give a welcome sense of space and detail to the sensitive playing. Miller has explored the intersection between Persian and other cultural traditions and jazz through the lens of academic scholarship and recorded output since the 1960s. With this release, the performances linger in a space where vibe is as important as compositional structure. The results revel in the beauty when seemingly unrelated musical ideas emerge together in the same moment, with startling results.
Arthur Krumins
Oily Boys — Cro Memory Grin (Cool Death)
Cro Memory Grin by Oily Boys
The title of this 2020 LP by Australian punks Oily Boys sounds like a pun on “Cro-Magnon,” an outmoded scientific name for early humans. It’s apt: the music is smarter than knuckle-dragger beatdown or run-of-the-mill powerviolence, but still driven by a rancorous, id-bound savagery. The smarts are just perceptible enough to keep things pretty interesting. Some of the noisier, droning and semi-melodic stretches of Cro Memory Grin recall the records made by the Men (especially Leave Home) before they decided to try to make like Uncle Tupelo, or some lesser version of the Hold Steady. Oily Boys inhabit a darker sensibility, and their music is more profoundly bonkers than anything those other bands got up to. Aggro, discordant punk; flagellating hardcore burners; psych-rock-adjacent sonic exorcisms — you get it all, sometimes in a single five-minute passage of Cro Memory Grin (check out the sequence from “Lizard Scheme” to “Heat Harmony” to “Stick Him.” Yikes). A bunch of the tunes spill over into one another, feedback and sustain jumping the gap from one track to the next, which gives the record a live vibe. It feels volatile and sweaty. The ill intent and unmitigated nastiness accumulate into a palpable force, tainting the air and leaving stains on your tee shirt. Oily Boys have been kicking around Sydney’s punk scene since at least 2014, but this is their first full-length record. One hopes they can continue to play with this degree of possessed abandon without completing burning themselves to down to smoldering cinders. At least long enough to record some more music.
Jonathan Shaw
Dougie Poole — The Freelancer's Blues (Wharf Cat)
The Freelancer's Blues by Dougie Poole
A cursory listen might misconstrue the heart of Dougie Poole's second album, The Freelancer's Blues. When he mixes his wobbly country sound with lyrics like those in “Vaping on the Job,” it sounds like genre play, a smirking look at millennial life through an urban cowboy's vintage sound. Poole does target a particular set of issues, but mapping them with his own slightly psychedelic country comes with very little of the postmodern itch. His characters feel just as troubled as anyone coming out of 1970s Nashville, and as Poole explores these lives with wit and empathy, the songs quickly find their resonance.
The album, though it wouldn't reach for pretentious terms, carries an existential problem at its center. Poole circles around the fundamental void: work deadens, relocation doesn't help, spiritual pursuits falter, intelligence burdens, and even the drugs don't help. When Poole finally gets the title track, the preceding album gives his confession extra weight, a mix of life's strictures and personal limitation combining for a crisis best avoided but wonderfully shared. The Freelancer's Blues comes rich in Nashville tradition but finds an ideal fit in its contemporary place, likely providing a soundtrack for a variety of times and spaces yet to come.
Justin Cober-Lake
Schlippenbach Quartett — Three Nails Left (Corbett Vs. Dempsey)
You might say that this record has been slept on twice. The second recording to be released by the Alexander von Schlippenbach, Evan Parker and Paul Lovens (augmented this time by Peter Kowald) was released in 1975, and didn’t get a second pressing — on vinyl — until 2019. So, Corbett Vs. Dempsey stepped up last summer, it had never been on CD. But this writer was so stumped on how to relate how intense, startling, and unlike any other free improvisation it was and is, that he just… slept on it. Until now. Even if you know this band, if you don’t know this album, well, it’s time you got acquainted.
Bill Meyer
Stonegrass — Stonegrass (Cosmic Range)
STONEGRASS by Stonegrass
Released on the cusp of a tentative re-opening for the city of Toronto after two months of lock-down, this slab of psychedelic funk-rock was the perfect antidote to the COVID blues when it arrived at the tail end of a Spring spent in near-isolation. The jam sessions that became Stonegrass were also a new beginning for multi-instrumentalist Matthew “Doc” Dunn and drummer Jay Anderson, who reignited a spirit of collaboration after a decade of sonic estrangement following the demise of their Spiritual Sky Blues Band project. Listening to these songs, you’d never know they spent any time apart. The tight, bottom-wagging jams on offer are evidence that these two are joined together at the third eye. Anderson’s grooves run deep, and Dunn — whether he’s traipsing along on guitar, keys or flutes — is right there with him. There’s enough fuzz here to satiate the heads, but the real treat here is the rhythmic interplay. Strap in and prepare to get down.
Bryon Hayes
Bob Vylan — We Live Here EP (Venn Records)
Bob Vylan flew under the radar in 2020 successfully enough that when someone nominated them for the best of 2020 poll in Tom Ewing’s Peoples’ Pop Polls project on Twitter (each month a different year or category gets voted on in World Cup-style brackets, it’s great fun and only occasionally maddening), most of the reaction was “is that one a typo?” Nobody had that response after listening to “We Live Here” — my wife also participates in the poll, so we just play all the candidates in our apartment, and Bob Vylan was the first time both of our jaws dropped in amazement; the song got played about ten times in a row at that point. Bobby (vocals/guitar/production) and Bobbie (drums/“spiritual inspiration”) Vylan’s 18-minute EP lives up to that title track, fireball after fireball aimed directly at the corrupt, crumbling, racist state that seems utterly indifferent to human suffering unless there’s profit in it. Whether it’s the raging catharsis of the title track or the cool, precise hostility of “Lynch Your Leaders,” Bob Vylan have made something vital and essential here, that very much speaks to 2020 but sadly will stay relevant long past it.
Ian Mathers
Working Men’s Club — Working Men’s Club (Heavenly Recordings)
It’s been evident these past few years that I’ve retreated from music and committed myself to the slower world of books as a way of giving my mind a break from the accelerating madness outside, but I could never really leave my radio family the same way I could never really leave Dusted. Another great example why: A fellow CHIRP volunteer played “John Cooper Clarke” in a December Zoom social I actually managed to catch, and I’ve been addicted to Working Men’s Club’s debut LP from October ever since. The quartet hails from Todmodren, a market town you won’t be surprised upon listening to discover is roughly equidistant between Leeds and Manchester; the album screams Hacienda vibes in its seamless integration of post-punk signifiers and dancefloor style. It’s easy to bandy about names from Rip It Up and Start Again or even The Velvet Underground in 12-minute closer “Angel,” certainly one of the most arresting tracks of the year, but the thing that struck me immediately is that this was the record I’d always anticipated but never got from Factory Floor — smart, aloof and occasionally calculated, yet still fun enough to play for any crowd itching to move. Until the community of a dance party or Working Men’s Club live set is once again possible, patience and a fully formed first album will have to suffice. You’ll have to imagine the part where I corner you at the party to rave about it, I’m afraid.
Most Bitchin Bajas records have one long — that is, really long — track. On Bajas Fresh, it’s “2303.” How long is “2303”? Twenty-three minutes and three seconds, of course. Initiating the back half of a superbly varied but balanced album, it’s perhaps the simplest piece of the seven, at least on the surface: a gently spreading pool of soft organ and synth drones, rounded out in places by warm brass. And as much range as the Chicago trio has demonstrated over the last several years’ full-lengths, EPs and collaborations, there’s a way in which “2023” epitomizes what they do best: get out of their own way to let the listener in.
Almost in the manner of Cage’s 4’33” — Cage being known for his attempts to mitigate the effects of his personality and artistic will on his compositions — “2303” and its neutral title invite the tautological observation that this music simply is what it is. What you hear in the specified duration, in other words, is best experienced as an in-the-moment(s) experience of listening, free of the influence of language. It’s stuff that doesn’t lend itself to description, summary or conceptual propping up. Well, that last may be one of the places Cage and Bitchin Bajas part ways, since the latter’s stoner persona corresponds to music more likely to bewitch the powers of attention than hone them, more likely to transport the listener to a deeper inner space than awaken them to the world around them. There’s nothing wrong with that, since either method could be argued as the key to finding a pure state of consciousness. And as Cooper Crain asks, “Doesn’t everyone want to find a pure state of consciousness?”
Lofty goal — just the kind scared off by active pursuit. That’s why the band comes at it sideways, putting the listener at ease with the album’s disarmingly silly title before kicking things off. “Jammu” bubbles to the surface with nimble science-lab synths, gradually solidifying into a moving-but-static Terry Riley motorik. “Circles on Circles” further exploits the polyrhythmic tendencies of pulse and arpeggio, building a jam with just enough detail — simple percussion, organ swells, fizzy synth adornments — to focus the listener without calling undue attention to itself. Even these shorter tracks hover around the 10-minute mark, but with good — which is to say not self-indulgent — reason: Extreme length (plus a fair amount of repetition) gives the music room to breathe and grow as if on its own, shifting the emphasis from “Look what these musicians created” to “Look what this music can do.”
The double album’s second side finds the group retreating further from the spotlight, in a sense. Though Bitchin Bajas has never been guarded about their influences — just in case you couldn’t sense Robert Fripp’s shadow on their Drag City debut, they named it Bitchitronics — they don’t often make the transmission of musical inheritance cover-version efficient. Their take on Sun Ra’s classic “Angels and Demons at Play” is wonderfully elongated and gauzily muted, almost as if beamed in from a far-away cosmos. The clanging, shimmering “Yonaguni,” on the other hand, finds the trio ceding prime sonic real estate to guest musicians Nori Tanaka and Masaki Batoh, whose contributions on percussion and guitar give the track much of its definition.
On the other side of the pacific expanse that is “2023,” “Chokayo” takes the idea of letting the music speak for itself almost literally, exploiting the vocal qualities of its wah-ing synths and cooing flutes to weave a kind of gently respiring instrumental chorus. Finally “Be Going” and its mildly exhortatory valediction, ends the album by setting Rob Frye’s fluttering, soporific sax against slowly churning organ and synth drones. Eighty minutes after Bajas Fresh started, it eases back into silence: a long album to be sure, but only exactly as long as it needs to be — no more, no less.
<a href="http://infrequentseams.bandcamp.com/album/mzm">MZM by Miya Masaoka, Zeena Parkins, Myra Melford</a>
Context matters: The difference between coming to MZM expecting music for piano, harp and koto and coming to it expecting music by Myra Melford, Zeena Parkins and Miya Masaoka may be the difference between loving and hating the album. Of course, Melford, Parkins and Masaoka are three major names on the creative music scene, and it’s not clear who would find themselves sampling out-there bassist/composer James Ilgenfritz’s Infrequent Seams label so innocently. But imagining the hypothetical experience of hearing it “out of context” may begin to capture how surprising, strange and slippery — even to ready ears — MZM is.
In any event, it’s impossible to really hear this music without shutting out all extraneous data, so intensely focused is the trio’s playing across these ten free improvisations. There’s nothing passive about the interplay, nothing assumed about the structural relationships. While no one’s doubting their usefulness in music, patterns and repetition have a way of teaching the powers of attention that sustained effort is a losing game; their absence here is what makes MZM such an exhilarating listen — and such an exhausting one. Not that the music suffers from indecision or even shapelessness: Averaging only five minutes apiece, each improvisation explores its own discrete mode, from percussive and dense to understated and gentle, leaving larger patterns of rise and fall to emerge via their sequencing. But anything less than a note-by-note accounting seems a distortion of, and a disservice to, this music, impractical as that would be to carry out. There’s no substitute for listening: True for any music worth its salt, but somehow truer here than usual.
But if this music takes the most risks on the small scale — or asks the most of its listeners there — it makes sense to zoom back in on what’s literally at the musicians’ fingertips: their instruments themselves. Again expectations fall short. Melford supplements her acoustic piano with preparations, Masaoka expands her koto from the standard 13 to 21 strings and Parkins plays an electric harp. Even if it’s true that prepared piano lost its shock value long ago, or that we’ve seen added strings before, don’t sleep on that harp. Beyond typographical aesthetics, it’s because of this chameleonic contraption that MZM makes more sense as a title than MMZ or ZMM. From buzzsaw distortion to placid horn, from slide guitar to steel drum, the extraordinary variety of sounds Parkins coaxes from her instrument is often crucial for locating the center of balance in each improvisation. Precarious as it is, at the end of the day this balance may be the only context that counts. Love it or hate it — just try to keep up.
