#quicksails

Irreversible Entanglements — Who Sent You? (International Anthem)

Aquiles Navarro & Tcheser Holmes — Heritage Of The Invisible II (International Anthem)

Moor Mother — Forever Industries (Sub Pop) 

Irreversible Entanglements as a collective of musicians have produced several records that have been on high rotation. Who Sent You?  is for me the most essential, electrifying and inspiring record of 2020. As I said in my review, it is an extraordinary statement both lyrically and musically which encompasses history, politics, religion, violence and most importantly how structures of power entrap everybody, warping both the oppressed and the oppressors, tainting us all with lies, complicity, delusion and self-censorship. 

The band’s trumpeter and drummer Navarro and Holmes’ release Heritage Of The Invisible II explores community and identity through a collaboration of deep empathy and music intelligence. Vocalist/lyricist Camae Ayewa AKA Moor Mother remains a vital voice fired by fierce intelligence and clear-eyed dissections of structural inequality. Her EP Forever Industries combines visceral poetry and experimental electronica in two short tracks. A mention also to bassist Luke Stewart’s Exposure Quintet for their eponymous album on Astral Spirits and Ayewa again twice for Circuit City and with Mental Jewelry as Moor Jewelry the rather excellent, punishing punk of True Opera both on Don Giovanni.

 Speaker Music — Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry (Planet Mu)

Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry by Speaker Music

Moodymann — Taken Away (KDJ)

SAULT — Untitled (Black Is) (Forever Living Originals)

Shabaka & The Ancestors — We Are Sent Here By History (Impulse!) 

Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry speaks directly to the Black Lives Matter with a coruscating collage of poetry, found sound jazz, and fractured techno; it is a summation of the darkness at the heart of the American experiment. Speaker Music seeks not to preach, not to salve but to show and by showing force us to listen and to see and to act.  

Moodymann, SAULT and Shabaka and The Ancestors dug deep into techno, funk, soul, gospel and jazz to produce outstanding albums that spoke to the Black experience here and in Britain.Taken Away is riven with betrayal and anger even as the music lifts with transcendent beats, voices and strings. Untitled (Black Is) is both direct and elliptical in its range of styles and voices but never less than compelling and We Are Sent Here By History is fire music for the 21st Century steeped in the lessons of Shepp, Coltrane and Fela Kuti.

Wire — Mind Hive (Pinkflag)

The Cool Greenhouse — The Cool Greenhouse (Melodic)

Fontaines DC — A Hero’s Death (Partisan)

Ganser — Just Look At That Sky (felte)

Kvalia - Scholastic Dreams Of Forceful Machines (Old Boring Russia)

Protomartyr — Ultimate Success Today (Domino)

Tvii Son — Tvii Son (MIC)

It’s been a good year for Post Punk and adjacent bands. Mind Hive arrived early and stuck through the year. As I said in February “35 minutes of Wire is enough to fuel a multitude of pretenders.” Not that the rest of this section are that. The Cool Greenhouse’s shambolic, rollicking, sarcastic songs will hit a chord with fans of Half Man Half Biscuit, Sleaford Mods and The Fall. Fontaines DC’s second album was an unexpected pleasure after Dogrel failed to excite. Ganser’s combination of exhilaration and enervation, Kvalia’s intense, industrial thump and Tvii Son’s bracing detachment hit different nerves but with inescapable precision. Protomartyr expanded their palette to create, as Tim Clarke said on these pages “a thrilling and brutally effective” album. Shopping, Las Kellies, Hypoluxo, Sweeping Promises, Peel Dream Magazine and Lunchbox also released records that held the ears.

Quicksails — Blue Rise (Hausu Mountain)

Blue Rise by Quicksails

Autechre — Sign (Warp)

William Basinski — Lamentations (Temporary Residence)

André Bratten — Silvester (Smalltown Supersound)

Oliver Coates — skins n slime (RVNG)

Dinorwic — Llyn Y Cwn (Cold Spring)

Davey Harms — World War (Hausu Mountain)

Fire-Toolz — Rainbow Bridge (Hausu Mountain)  

Hausu Mountain continues to release high quality, challenging experimental albums that are both immensely entertaining and thought provoking. Blue Rise is an amniotic oasis. World War and Rainbow Bridge are always on hand to jolt one out of the doldrums and focus the mind. On days when the temptation to drift with the passing time or succumb to darkness presses, the homeopathy of Basinski’s swoon, Bratten’s obsidian depth and Dinorwic’s environmental calm provided accompaniment, guide and consolation. Coates conjures bleak beauty from his enhanced and manipulated cello while Autechre untangle some of their knottier inclinations without letting the listener completely relax on a relatively straightforward return to the album format. 

 Archival releases and reissues:

Melt Yourself Down — The Complete Leaf Recordings 2013-2016 (Leaf)

Pole — 1,2,3 Box Set (Mute)

Pylon — Box (New West)

Rowland S Howard — Teenage Snuff Film (Fat Cat)

Stalker — Empire2020 (Ruf Kutz)

Thelonious Monk — Palo Alto (Impulse!)

Various Artists — Strum & Thrum: The American Jangle Underground 1983-1987 (Captured Tracks)  

When I last heard from Ben Baker Billington’s Quicksails project it was via the excellent Fleurs De La Lune LP, a very diverse and tough to pin down work that still sticks deep in my brain. Mortal is pretty much the perfect follow-up, in that it’s just as diverse and non-pinnable, but it also feels bigger, wider, more open, and more encompassing. There’s diversity that’s about carefully-chosen control and there’s diversity that’s about unrestricted adventure...and somehow Billington has mastered both of those qualities on Mortal.

For me, that makes the most exciting parts of the album the ones that are most about pure, free bliss. My favorite tunes, like the cycling bubble bath “Ambassador” and the sun-baked cloud “Dance of Eyes,” are perfectly happy to let their bright hooks run on and on, eschewing unnatural changes or pasted-on textures. There’s also a lot of density and complexity on Mortal, and no track is anywhere near predictable. But even the most abstract material feels loose and confident and just stresslessly content with existence. Maybe that’s what the album title’s about - this is music that gleefully accepts its fate, and isn’t really worried about the fact that it’s going to end.

– Marc Masters

BEN BAKER BILLINGTON on Mortal

There's a recurring dream/story that I've re-told in my head since I was a young teenager that paints a picture of what inspired a great deal of Mortal. The dream starts in the shadows of a banana tree with an overly ambitious but mature weasel named Fee. The weasel was a buddhist that hoped his religion would set him free, which he had seen happen with his friend Floyd the chimp. At some point Fee meets a beautiful gospel singer named Milly at a bar in Peru and quickly fell in love. Unfortunately his old friend Floyd had already hoped to have Milly as his companion and became quite jealous. Later on Floyd unexpectedly ran into Milly and Fee on a boat towards Canada, which led him to attack Fee with a broken bottle. Although a tiny being, Milly fought back and hit Floyd in the face with a nectarine. Floyd was stunned and fell over the side of the boat, then hanging on by only one finger. Milly was incredibly angry, so she took a piece of paper from her pocket and sliced Floyd on the chest so he'd lose his grip. He fell into the ocean and was swiftly torn apart by sharks. Despite the brutal occurrence, Fee and Milly were able to live happily ever after in love. Thanks to TA for the story and life inspiration at age 12; I owe you more than you know. 

Even at his most straightforward, Billington makes choices that take his music in unexpected directions. Bursts of celestial choir, free jazz drumming, stretches of meditative synth, muttering voices deep in the mix, arpeggiated house rhythms bubble out of the mix. A series of koans that revel in paradox, Surface is far more than an academic riddle or playful piss-take. What lies beneath are lines of connection across genre, juxtapositions that grind smooth contradiction and difference to create interstitial spaces where music exists as intrinsic. The chaos of “Chat Laugh” pairs bleeps and burps with a house shuffle that circles like a cantankerous, distracted AI generator confounded by human noise programs. It segues into “All of Alex” on which Shiroishi’s plangent tenor provides a deeply human presence amid the digital detritus. On “Piss + Moan” Billington rolls around the drum kit in free jazz mode as sheets of synth rise like dusk fog. “Hope Slide” is all twinkling synths, subtle percussion and Shiroishi stretching notes in the distance with a monk-like intensity. As the album progresses Billington brings his machines to leash, using them as structural elements supporting the emotional expression in his music. The title track, which closes the album, is a meditation on the struggle to overcome restive distractions that characterize many of the preceding pieces. The beats are sparse, conjuring the dripping water of a Zen garden fountain, the synth beds strive for the celestial amid pops and squeaks which one has to listen through in order to focus on the transcendent.

As Quicksails, Billington has tended to the ambient end of electronica without ever completely foregoing his interest in more extreme music. On Surface the balance seems more contingent than usual and this feels deliberate. In Shiroishi he finds a collaborator of great sensitivity and the three tracks they make together leave you hoping they have plans for future music. In the meantime, this is a record that bewitches if you let it.

“Cypress” begins with the kind of glitchy beats heard on numerous Mille Plateaux releases in the early 2000s over a vocal sample that may be an answering machine message or overheard phone soliloquy; chimes and squelchy synth lines fidget and jostle like impatient nightclubbers checking their gear before receiving the bouncers’ benediction. “Believe The Clouds” evokes a similar feeling of itchy anticipation before it resolves into long humid chords and a choir of wordless notes. 

Billington demonstrates his skill at subverting classic New Age tropes with judicious use of his rhythmic sense and ear for details. The pieces are restless rather than busy like so many of us in this age of confinement and they speak directly to distracted busyness and the lassitude of having things to do, avoidance activity and that combination of guilt and devil-may-care that overtakes us sometimes. Voices heard through walls, staring out the window, distant echoes of life out there and the louche joy of drifting through what ever day or hour it is as music embeds itself into your subconscious and sticks. 

Blue Rise is a collection of self-contained, three-dimensional jewels that reflect and refract. Pinpoints of light that illuminate without blinding, a tonic of delicacy and harmony in a crude world.