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)
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.
It’s four in the afternoon and already getting dark, a foot of snow on the way. One year is nearly over — and yes, we’ve got some essays on that coming up after the holiday break — and another one is taking shape in our inboxes, mail chutes and hard drives. But for right now, let’s take another look at 2020, doubling back on the records that caught our ears without exactly fitting our schedules, the ones that almost got away. Here are the usual free improvisations and long drones, hip hop upstarts and cowpunk also-rans, a harpist, a cellist, a tabletop guitarist and at least one stellar punk record that has us hoping for sweaty live music again in 2021. Contributors this time included Bill Meyer, Bryon Hayes, Andrew Forrell, Patrick Masterson, Jennifer Kelly, Jonathan Shaw, Arthur Krumins, Ian Mathers and Ray Garraty, heck let’s call it a quorum, and see you again in the New Year.
Mac Blackout — Love Profess (Trouble In Mind)
Love Profess by Mac Blackout
Mac Blackout owes his surname to his membership in the Functional Blackouts. That’s a garage combo that was once the subject of an article about how they’d been banned from various venues on account of the destructive chaos of their live performances. But you can’t do that forever, and nowadays Mac’s a painter and solo recording artist. His latest sounds are unlikely to make anyone want to put a chair into the mirror behind the bar, but they might send you flipping through your record collection, looking for the sounds that you and he have in common. Love Profess opens with a burst of piano-pounding, sax-overblowing free jazz, but that lasts for about nine seconds before it gets swallowed by some John Bender-worthy synth throb. Give “Wandering Spheres” a couple more minutes, and Mr. Blackout goes full La Dusseldorf on us. By turns spacy, spooky and seriously compelled to vent nocturnal loneliness, this half-hour long LP is both as familiar and as unknown as a well-shuffled deck of cards.
Bill Meyer
Ross Birdwise — Perfect Failures (Never Anything)
Perfect Failures by Ross Birdwise
Vancouver-based electronic improviser Ross Birdwise rails against spatio-temporal norms. The concepts of tempo and rhythm are malleable in his universe. Architecturally, Birdwise is Antoni Gaudí, working in fluid lines to build incomprehensible structures. With Perfect Failures, he leaps even further away from the orthogonal grid of musical construction, dissolving beats into grains of sound. The warped rhythms found on Frame Drag are divested in favor of an approach that more resembles electroacoustic composition. As a matter of fact, the title track comes on like a digital recreation of a piece of classic musique concrète. Birdwise avoids venturing into purely ambient territory yet borrows some signifiers from the genre: keyboard melodies, elongated tones, washes of sound. He overlays these seemingly innocuous elements with crashes of noise, oblique jump cuts and hyperkinetic sequences, constantly forcing us to shift focus to make sense of his soundscapes. The febrile nature of the music is what intoxicates, but the discordant melodies are what enthrall.
Bryon Hayes
C_G — C_G (edelfaul recordings)
C_G by C_G
Belgium-based French electronic artist Eduardo Ribuyo (C_C) and Israeli drummer Ilia Gorovitz (Stumpf) join forces on C_G, a one-take collaboration of molecular machine noise and improvised percussion. It opens as a slow creep, Gorovitz playing minimal rhythms that sound like someone walking through the pre-dawn streets of an awakening city. Ribuyo accretes whirrs, cracks and electrical pops to evoke the dread of a night not over. On “Normalising Cruelty,” for instance, the discomfort builds, the drums tumble in flight, the noise intensifies. The relative conventionality of the percussion tracks seems intentional and serves to focus attention on the granular details Ribuyo conjures from his machines. Think the experiments of similarly minded Mille Plateaux and Raster Norton artists. When played through headphones at volume, its full queasy Room 101 buzz and grind squirms most effectively into the brain. Easy listening this is not, but if and when home gatherings resume this would be an ideal way to clear the house.
Andrew Forell
Che Noir — After 12 EP (TCF Music Group)
If you’ve been paying attention to hip-hop in the last few years, Buffalo’s Griselda camp has dominated the “old heads” conversation away from whatever the kids are vibing to on TikTok. But there’s life away from an Eminem partnership, and not just in the form of Benny the Butcher: Witness Che Noir, who has been on fire throughout 2020. After starting off the year with the 38 Spesh-produced Juno and following it up with the Apollo Brown-produced As God Intended, Che’s closing things out with this self-produced seven-song EP that covers a wide range of territory without dipping into tales of street hustling, just the age old struggle to get some respect. “Hunger Games” is an early highlight that shows her chemistry with Ransom and 38 Spesh, while she completely takes over in speaking to the times on “Moment in the Sun,” which is the clear emotional highlight of the EP. Amber Simone’s pleading chorus on closer “Grace” is another stylistic turn and closes things on a high note. The last words you hear are Simone’s as she sings, “Imma go get it”; the lingering effect is that you know Che Noir is already showing you as much. Miss this one at your own risk.
Frankie Teardrop rides again in this smoking synth punk single from Australia’s Cong Josie. “Leather Whip” is about as menacing and minimal as synthesizer music gets, braced by the hard slap of gate-reverbed drums and a claw-picked bass sound (maybe electronic?) and Cong Josie’s whispery insinuations. “Maxine” is just as stripped, with blotchy bass sound and swishing drum machine rhythms framing a haunted rockabilly love song. It’s very Suicide, but isn’t that a good thing?
Jennifer Kelly
Divine Horsemen — Live 1985-1987 (Feeding Tube)
Divine Horsemen “Live”1985-1987 by Divine Horsemen
With Divine Horsemen, Chris D of the Flesh Eaters had a brief but memorable run in vivid, gothic, country-tinged punk. This disc commemorates two red-hot live outings from 1985 and 1987, the first at Safari Sam’s in Huntington Beach, California, the second at Boston’s The Rat. A sharply realized recording shows how this band’s sound fit into the cowpunk parameters set by X, with strident guitar clangor and hard knocking rock rhythms (the ax-heavy line-up featured in this recording included Wayne James, Marshall Rohner and Peter Andrus on guitars, the Flesh Eater’s Robyn Jameson on bass). The secret weapon, though, was the ongoing and volatile vocal duel between the front man and his then-wife Julie Christensen, a classically trained soprano with an unholy vibrato-laced belt. You can hear how she transformed his art by comparing the Flesh Eater’s version of “Poison Arrow” with the one here. It’s as aggressive as ever, musically, and Chris D. is in full florid, echoey, goth-punk mode. Christensen, however, is molten fire, letting loose cascades and flurries of wild vibrating song. There’s a scorching, stomping romp through the vamping “Hell’s Belle,” and a lurid rendering of mad, howling “Frankie Silver,” and, towards the end, a muscular take on the Stones’ “Gimme Shelter.” Christensen later made a mark as one of Leonard Cohen’s favorite backup singers, and Chris D is still knocking around with a reunited, all-star Flesh Eaters, though there’s some talk of getting this band back together as well. I’d go.
Jennifer Kelly
Dezron Douglas & Brandee Younger — Force Majeure (International Anthem)
Force Majeure by Dezron Douglas & Brandee Younger
Harlem harpist Brandee Younger and bassist Dezron Douglas faced down New York’s early months of quarantine with a series of live broadcasts recorded in their apartment on a single microphone. This document of intimate resilience collects highlights of the Friday ritual. Younger and Douglas perform covers of spiritual Jazz, soul and pop songs as well as the delightfully titled original “Toilet Paper Romance.” The music is so close you feel the fingers on the strings and frets. Younger’s harp playing is a revelation, pianistic on John Coltrane’s “Equinox”, pointillist yet robust on his “Wise One” which they dedicate to Ahmaud Arbery. Douglas provides vigorous and sympathetic accompaniment and his solo rendition of Sting’s “Inshallah” is a tender tough exploration of his instrument. Along the way there are lovely versions of pieces by, amongst others, Alice Coltrane, Kate Bush and Clifton Davis. Douglas closes with the words “Black music cannot be recreated it can only be expressed” and Force Majeure demonstrates that the same goes for humanity and creativity.
Andrew Forell
Avalon Emerson — 040 12” (AD 93)
040 by Avalon Emerson
It’s been a big year for Avalon Emerson, who started 2020 prepping a move from Berlin to East Los Angeles and ends it back home stateside with an almost universally acclaimed DJ-Kicks entry to her credit. This three-song 12” for the label fka Whities is a nice way to close out a triumphant year, illustrating her penchant for bright melodies and percussive detail. “One Long Day Till I See You Again” is a welcoming slice of beatless percolation to close; “Winter and Water” leans heavily on rhythmic tricks in the middle. That makes A1 “Rotting Hills” the ideal lead as a balance between them. There may not be so obvious a gimmick as a Magnetic Fields cover, but that makes it no less valuable for showing what Emerson can do. Call it one more fluorescent rush.
Patrick Masterson
End Forest — Proroctwo (Self-released)
Proroctwo (The Prophecy) by End Forest
For some of us, the fusion of folk music forms with crust and metal mostly issues in obscenities like Finntroll (yep, a Finnish band that makes folk metal songs about…trolls) or in politically toxic, Völkisch nationalist fantasias. But some bands get it right; see Botanist’s remarkable work, and see also End Forest, an act just emerging from Poland’s punk underground. Singer Paula Pieczonka employs a traditional Slavic vocal technique that roughly translates to “white singing” — but before you get creeped out by any potential fascist vibes, please know that the “whiteness” at stake in the phrase is purely an aesthetic value. And her voice is really great, open and soaring. “Proroctwo (The Prophecy)” has the sweep and drama of a lot of contemporary crust, and all of the genre’s interest in symbolic violence. The lyrics envision a future wrought and wracked by social conflict, a coming conflagration of torn bodies and of piles of dislodged teeth housed in some horrific archive of viciousness (that’s quite an image). It’s harrowing stuff, big guitar chords accented by sitar and flute. The track is available on Bandcamp, along with several inventive remixes by Polish musicians and DJs, like Tomek Jedynak and Dawid Chrapla. End Forest indicates that a full record is forthcoming sometime in spring. Looking forward to it, y’all.
Jonathan Shaw
Lori Goldson — On a Moonlit Hill in Slovenia (Eiderdown Records)
On A Moonlit Hill In Slovenia by Lori Goldston
Goldson creates movement and tension in an arresting way with a rough-hewn approach to the cello. This could be a good entry point to her solo work, which is varied and bridges the gap between DIY attitude and elevated levels of musicianship and considered approach. The flow of her playing here evokes the almost brutal scrape of the strings, which gives a welcome texture to the melodic squiggles.
Arthur Krumins
Hot Chip — LateNightTales (LateNightTales)
The LateNightTales series of artist-curated mixes has seen a fair bit of variation over the years since Fila Brazilia first took up the torch in 2001, which makes a certain amount of sense; how we spend our late nights can differ wildly, of course. Hot Chip’s instalment in the series hits some of the expected notes (at least one cover, in this case a deeply moving one of the Velvet Underground’s “Candy Says” they’ve been playing since Alexis Taylor and Joe Goddard were in high school together; a closing story track, in this case Taylor’s father reading a bit from Finnegan’s Wake) and otherwise depicts the kind of late night Dusted readers might be more familiar with than most; one where a clearly voracious and eclectic listener is keeping their own private party going just for another hour or so, but always keeping things just quiet and subtle enough to not wake up anyone upstairs. The three other, non-cover new Hot Chip tracks all make for standouts here but there’s plenty of room for accolades, whether it’s for the smoothly groovy (Pale Blue, Mike Saita, Beatrice Dillon), the more avant garde (Christina Vantzou, About Group, Nils Frahm) to just plain off-kilter pop (Fever Ray, PlanningToRock, Hot Chip themselves). The result works as both a wonderful playlist and a survey of the band’s sonic world; and it does work best when everyone else is in bed.
Annette Krebs and Jean-Luc Guionnet recorded the three long, numbered tracks on Pointe Sèche (translation: Dry Point) over the course of three days at St. Peter’s Parish church in Bistrica ob Sotli, Slovenia. Location matters because this music couldn’t happen just anywhere; Guionnet plays church organ. Krebs was once part of the post-Keith Rowe generation of tabletop guitarists, but since 2014 she has abandoned strings and fretboards in favor of a series of hybrid instruments called konstruktions. Konstruktion #4, which appears on this record, includes suspended pieces of metal, a handful of toy animals, a wooden sounding board, vocal and contact microphones and a couple touch screens that manage computer programs. While both musicians have extensive backgrounds in improvisation, this recording sounds more like an audio transcription of a multi-media collage. Guionnet plays his large instrument quite softly, extracting machine-like hums, brief burps and dopplering tones that flicker around the periphery of Krebs’ fragments of speech, distant clangs and unidentifiable events. The resulting sounds resolutely defy decoding, which is its own reward in a time when so much music can be reduced to easily identifiable antecedents.
Bill Meyer
KMRU — ftpim (The Substation)
ftpim by KMRU
If you happened to catch Peel, Joseph Kamaru’s wonderful release on Editions Mego in late July, but haven’t paid attention before or since, early December’s half-hour two-tracker ftpim done for (and mastered by) Room40 leader Lawrence English is a Janus-faced example of the Nairobi-based ambient artist’s power. As Ian Forsythe put it in his BOGO review of both Peel and Opaquer, “Something that can define an effective ambient record is an ability to disintegrate the perimeter of the record itself and the outside world,” a line I think about every time I listen to KMRU now. “Figures Emerge” feels more immediately accessible to me as a relatable environment where the gentle, pulsing drone is occasionally greeted by sounds outside the studio, while “From the People I Met” is more difficult terrain, a distorted fog of post-shoegaze harmonic decay — no less interesting, but perhaps more metaphorical in its take on the outside world. (Or not, given how 2020 has gone.)
Patrick Masterson
Paul Lovens / Florian Stoffner—Tetratne (Ezz-thetics)
Enough years separate drummer Paul Lovens and guitarist Florian Stoffner that they could be father and son, and Lovens membership in the Schlippenbach Trio, and Lovens role as drummer in the legendarily long-running Schlippenbach Trio establishes him as an august elder of free improvisation. But the partnership they exhibit on this CD is one of equals committed to making music that is of one mind. Whether matching sparse string-tugging to purposefully collapsing batterie or burrowing sprung-spring wobbles to an immense cymbal wash, the duo plays without regard for showing us one guy or the other’s stuff. The point, it seems, is to how they imagine as one, and their combined craniums generate plenty of imagination. They operate in a realm close to that occupied by Derek Bailey and John Stevens, or Roger Smith and Louis Moholo-Moholo, but their patch of turf is entirely their own.
Bill Meyer
Mr. Teenage — Automatic Love (Self-Release)
Automatic Love by Mr. Teenage
Melbourne, Australia’s fertile garage punk scene has squeeze out another good one in Mr. Teenage, a Buzzcockian foursome prone to short, sharp riffs and sing-along choruses. A four-song EP starts with the title track, whose arch talk-sung verse erupts into rabid, rip-sawing guitar, like Devo meeting the Wipers. “Waste of Time” piles palm muted urgency with explosive release, with a good bit of the Clash in the crashing, clangor. “KIDS” struts and swaggers in a rough-edged way that’s close to the violence of early Reigning Sound or Texas’ Bad Sports. “Oh, the kids these days,” to borrow a phrase, they’re pretty good.
Jennifer Kelly
Nekra — Royal Disruptor (La Vida Es Un Mus)
Royal Disruptor by Nekra
Remember punk shows? Remember half-lit, dusty basements and fully lit, dirty kids? Remember your sneaker soles sticking to scuffed, gummy linoleum? Remember greasy denim battle jackets and hand-drawn Sharpie slogans? Remember warm beer (watery domestic suds in cans and cups) and cold stares (angsty bravado and bad attitude for its own sake)? Remember anarchists arguing with nihilists, and riot grrrls arguing with rocker boys? Remember people laughing and people smoking and people shouting and people spitting, all without masks? Remember the anticipation that crisps the air when the amps switch on? Feedback from the cheap-ass mic stabbing your ears? Beefy dudes elbowing through the press of flesh? That volatile, stomachy mix of happiness and truculence? Those warm-up thumps of the bass drum and the initial strums of crackling guitar? Remember all that? For the time being, in the United States of Dysfunction, here’s the closest thing you’ll get: an EP of feral, fast punk songs that sound like they’re happening live, right in front of your face. Thanks, Nekra — I really needed that.
Jonathan Shaw
Neuringer / Dulberger / Masri — Dromedaries II (Relative Pitch)
Dromedaries II by Keir Neuringer, Shayna Dulberger, Julius Masri
Yes, Dromedaries II is a sequel. It follows by three years a debut cassette which was sold in the sort of microquantities that 21st century cassettes are sold. So, it’s more likely that you have heard another of the bands that the trio’s alto saxophonist, Keir Neuringer, plays in — Irreversible Entanglements. While the two combos don’t sound that similar, they share a commitment to improvising propulsive, cohesive music that will put a boot up your butt if you get in the way. While IE focuses on supplying music that frames and exemplifies the stern proclamations of vocalist Camae Ayewa, the trio plays instrumental free jazz that balances individual expression with collective support. Neuringer, double bassist Shayna Dulberger and drummer Julius Masri play like their eyes are on the horizon, but each musician’s ears are tuned into what the other two are doing. The result is music that seems to move in concerted fashion, but usually has someone doing something that pulls against the prevailing thrust in ways that heighten tension, but never force the music off track.
Bill Meyer
Kelly Lee Owens — Inner Song (Smalltown Supersound)
One of the distinctive things about Kelly Lee Owens’ marvellous debut LP a few years ago, as noted here, is that it felt so confident and distinct that it could have easily been the work of a much more seasoned producer. That impression, of a deftly skilled hand at the controls and a keen artistic sensibility and taste shaping it all, certainly doesn’t recede on Inner Song, whether it finds Owens homaging the grandmother who provided support and inspiration (“Jeanette”), gently but firmly rejecting unhealthy relationships (the utterly gorgeous “L.I.N.E.”) or teaming up with John Cale to make some bilingual, deep Welsh ambient dub (“Corner of My Sky”). And that’s one pretty randomly chosen three-song run! Owens continues to excel at both crafting gorgeous, lived-in productions and maybe especially with her handling of voices (her own and others), and she’s comfortable enough in her own skin that if she wants to open up the album with an instrumental Radiohead version (“Arpeggi”) she will, and she’ll make it feel natural, too.
Ian Mathers
San Kazakgascar — Emotional Crevasse (Lather Records)
Emotional Crevasse by San Kazakgascar
You won’t find San Kazakgascar on any map, but give a listen and you’ll know where this combo is coming from. Geographically, they hail from Sacramento CA, where they share personnel with Swimming In Bengal. But sonically, they are the product of a journey through music libraries that likely started out in a Savage Republic and sweated in the shadow of Sun City Girls. They likely spent time in the teetering stacks of music collections compiled in a time when the problematic aspects of the term world music were outweighed by the lure of sounds you hadn’t heard before. More important than where they’ve been, though, is the impulse to go someplace other than where they’re currently standing. To accomplish this, twangy guitars, rhythms that straighten your spine whilst swiveling your hips, bottom-dredging saxophone and a cameo appearance by a throat singer who understands that part of a shaman’s job is to scare you each take their turn stepping up and pointing your mind elsewhere. Where it goes after that is up to you.
Bill Meyer
John Sharkey III — “I Found Everyone This Way” (12XU)
Has Sharkey mellowed? This early peek at the upcoming solo album from the Clockcleaner legend and Dark Blue proprietor suggests a pensive mood, with liquid jangle and surprisingly subdued and lyrical delivery (albeit in the man’s inimitable hollowed out and wounded snarl). But give the artist a power ballad if that’s what he wants. The song has a graceful arc to it, a doomed romanticism and not an ounce of cloying sentiment.
Sky Furrows don’t take long to match sound and message. As Karen Schoemer drops references to SST Records and Raymond Pettibone, bassist Eric Hardiman and drummer Philip Donnelly whip up a tense groove that could easily have been played by Mike Watt and George Hurley. Mike Griffin’s spidery, treble-rich guitar picking is a little less specifically referential, but does sound like it was fed through a signal chain of gear that would have been affordable back in the first Bush administration. The next track looks back a bit further; Schoemer’s voice aside, it sounds like Joy Division might have done if Tom Herman had turned up, pushed Martin Hannet out of the control room before he could ladle on the effects and instead laid down some space blues licks. Schoemer recites rather than sings in a cadence that recalls Lee Ranaldo’s; pre-internet underground rock is in this band’s DNA. The sounds themselves are persistently cool, but one drawback of having a poet instead of a singer up front is an apparent reluctance to vary the structure; it would not have hurt to break things up with some contrasting passages here or there.
Bill Meyer
Soft on Crime — “You’ve Already Made Up Your Mind” b/w “Rubyanne” (EatsIt)
7'' by Soft on Crime
These Dublin fuzz-punks kick up a guitar-chiming clangor in A-Side, “You’ve Already Made Up Your Mind,” which might have you reaching for your old Sugar records. Sharp but sweet, the cut is an unruly gem buoyed by melody but bristling with attitude. “Rubyanne” is slower, softer and more ingratiating, embellished with baroque pop elements like flute, saxophone and choral counterpoints. “Little 8 Track” fills out this brief disc, with crunching, buzz-hopped bass and a bit of guitar jangle under whisper-y romantic vocals. It’s a bit hard to get a handle on the band, based on such disparate samples, but intriguing enough to make you want to settle the matter whenever more material becomes available.
Jennifer Kelly
Theoxinia — See the Lapith King Burn (Bandcamp)
See the Lapith King Burn by Theoxenia
Students of Greek mythology will grasp it right away, but in the internet age, it doesn’t take anyone long to figure out that when you name your record See the Lapith King Burn, you’re casting your lot for better or worse with the party animals. The Lapiths were one side of a lineage that also involved the considerably less sober-sided Centaurs, and the two sides of the family had a bloody showdown at a wedding that has been taken to symbolize the war between civilization and wildness. Theoxinia is Dave Shuford (No-Neck Blues Band, Rhyton, D. Charles Speer & the Helix) and his small circle of stringed instruments and low-cost repeating devices. If you were to dig through his past discography, it most closely resembles the LP Arghiledes (Thrill Jockey) in its explicitly Hellenic-psychedelic vibe. But, like so many folks in recent times, Shuford has decided to bypass the expanse and aggravation of physical publication in favor of marketing this LP-sized recording on Bandcamp. If that fact really bugs you, I guess you could start a label and make the man an offer. But if fuzz-tone bouzouki, sped-up loops and unerringly traced dance steps that will look most convincing when executed with a knife between your teeth and the sheriff’s wallet poking mockingly out of the top of your breast pocket sounds like your jam, See the Lapith King Burn awaits you in the realm of digital insubstantiality.
Bill Meyer
Trees — 50th Anniversary Edition (Earth Recordings)
Trees (50th Anniversary Edition) by Trees
This boxed set presents the two original Trees albums from the early 1970s, The Garden of Jane Delawney and On the Shore, with the addition of demos and sundry recordings from the era. Here the band took the UK folk rock sound emergent at the time and drew it out into its jammy and somewhat arena rock guitar soloing conclusion. It’s good to have all of this in one place to document the myriad ways that Trees wrapped traditional material into new forms and with a bracing, druggy feel.
Arthur Krumins
Uncivilized — Garden (UNCIV MUSIC)
Garden by Uncivilized
Guitarist Tom Csatari presides over NYC-based large jazz ensemble known as Uncivilized, whose fusion-y discography stretches back a couple of years and prominently incorporates a cover of the Angelo Badalamenti theme from Twin Peaks. This 27-track album was recorded live at Brooklyn’s Pioneer Works space in 2018 with a nine-piece band, who navigate drones and dances and the multi-part Meltedy Candy STOMP, a sinuous exploration of space age keyboards and surging big band instruments. Jaimie Branch, who lives next door to Csatari and was invited on a whim at the last minute, joins in for the second half including a smoldering rendition of the Lynch theme. It’s damn fine (though not coffee). Later on, Stevie Wonder gets the Uncivilized treatment in a pensive cover of “Evil,” led by warm guitar, blowsy sax and a little bit of jazz flute.
Jennifer Kelly
Unwed Sailor — Look Alive (Old Bear Records)
Look Alive by Unwed Sailor
Johnathon Ford, who plays bass for Pedro the Lion, has been at the center of Unwed Sailor for two decades, gathering a changing cohort of players to realize his lucid instrumental compositions. Here, as on last year’s Heavy Age, Eric Swatzell adds guitars and Matthew Putnam drums to Ford’s essential bass and keyboard sounds. Yet while Heavy Age brooded, Look Alive grooves with bright clarity, riding insistent basslines through highly colored landscapes of synths and drums. The title track bounds with optimism, with big swirls of synth sound enveloping a rigorous cadence of bass and drums. “Camino Reel” is more guitar-centric but just as uplifting, opening out into squalling shoe-gaze-y walls of amplified sound. Ford, who usually leans on post-punk influences like New Order and the Cure, indulges an affinity for dance, here, especially audible on the trance-y “Gone Jungle” remix by GJ.
Jennifer Kelly
Your Old Droog — Dump YOD Krutoy Edition (Self-released)
Dump YOD: Krutoy Edition by YOD
American rapper Your Old Droog has been releasing solid music for years. He never had ups for the same reason he never had downs: he never left his comfort zone. Dump YOD Krutoy Edition (where “krutoy” stands for “rude boy” or “badass”) may be his breakthrough album. He always kept his Soviet origins in check, and here for the first time he draws his imagery from three different sources: New York urban present, Ukrainian folk and Soviet and post-Soviet past (even Boris Yeltsin makes an appearance). In this boiling pot, a new Your Old Droog is rising, among balalaikas and mean streets of NYC, matryoshkas and producers with boring beats, babushkas and graffiti writers.
A Year in the Life of a Mole: Arthur Krumins’ 2020
What a ridiculous year to try to sum up. The effects of the pandemic continue to be devastating to so many, both the virus itself and the isolation and weirdness of life with its effects. Time became a different element, and left the usual ways I counted the days to one side, in favor of a new routine. As I luckily worked from home, and tried to be a good parent to my one year old for most of the rest of my waking hours, the days took on a new rhythm.
I used to listen to a lot of new music on my hour-plus bus commutes to and from work. But now, I listen to it as background music with my work day at home, and more subdued old favorites in the early morning hours taking care of the baby for the morning shift. As well, because of all the changes and shifting realities I found myself turning to more calming and mostly instrumental works, although tempered with the occasional blast of cathartic noise or a pulse that inspires movement.
I paid more attention to pieces of music that create a sense of direction or flow, as they build on the particular highlights of each smaller moment they contain. I think in a sense, this was the year I truly entered middle age, for the good (reserving judgement a little more) and the bad (more aches and pains and an absolute need for coffee). Some records grew on me that initially seemed too sweet or even tempered to be true favorites. There’s also the pleasure in coming back to things that initially seemed interesting, but that I had left to one side in the course of the year.
Here’s the albums I ended up counting on, occasionally spurring me to write reviews, and often causing me to find a moment to be quietly thankful that they exist.
Records I listened to on the bus pre-shutdown, and that helped pull me through the work week:
Gil Scott-Heron and Makaya McCraven — We’re New Again (XL Recordings)
Earth Cult — NATCH 11 (Black Dirt Studios)
Jeff Parker — Suite for Max Brown (International Anthem)
The Giving Shapes — Earth Leaps Up (Elsewhere Music)
Settling into pandemic life, and letting my headspace get blasted and then soothed:
Temple of the Roses by Ash Brooks
Ash Brooks — Temple of the Roses (Flower Room)
Tough Age - Which Way Am I? (Mint)
White Poppy — Sound Meditation Vol 2 (Self-released)
Rootless — Docile Cobras (Flower Room)
Joan Shelley — Live at the Bomhard (No Quarter)
Matt Lajoie — Everlasting Spring (Flower Room)
Keeping me grounded as the pandemic just goes on and on:
Between No Things by Suso Sáiz & Suzanne Kraft
Suso Sáiz & Suzanne Kraft — Between No Things (Music from Memory)
Carlos Niño & Miguel Atwood-Ferguson — Chicago Waves (International Anthem)
Bessie Jones and the Georgia Sea Island Singers — Get in Union (Alan Lomax Archive)
North Americans — Roped In (Third Man)
I came to revisit things that I overlooked, or caught on to albums towards the end of the year reading the writing of others and now intend to keep listening to:
Strange Lights Over Garth Mountain by Gwenifer Raymond
Gwenifer Raymond — Strange Lights Over Garth Mountain (Tompkins Square)
Lisa/Liza — Shelter of a Song (Orindal)
Arthur Russell — Sketches for World of Echo: June 25, 1984 live at Ei (Audika)
With decades of American Primitive/Guitar Soli music to get lost in, it’s interesting to revel in the small details that distinguish new solo guitar music. For Eli Winter, the folky edges of the music win out over anything too noisy or convoluted in terms of experimental technique. The attack of his playing is sharp but not biting, and the strength of the playing lies in the unhurried composition, which stretch out and extend their ideas into three long pieces that fill that album. The way notes fall endlessly off the strings into ever changing variations is fascinating and complex. You always get a sense of direction and movement, which carries you with its contemplative mood.
The record’s 22-minute opening track “Either I Would Become Ash” makes full use of Winter’s range. It moves from tentative opening chords into cascading walls of more intense fingerpicked figures. The mood of the piece is bleak optimism, the resilience of gazing on a stark landscape and finding something beautiful still growing there. The performance is well executed and with a range of dynamics, with a feeling of purpose behind each note. At the same time, there’s a looseness that holds it all together and makes the lengthy nature of the piece feel natural.
A less overtly serious piece, “Maroon,” uses a different guitar tone, a clean six-string electric plus a small band (drums, pedal steel) to create a buoyant feeling. The tune’s cheery melody choogles along with a brushed snare drum keeping time and nylon string guitar lines being added into its upbeat mix. The cut evokes travel and movement, this time in a more plainly positive and joyful mood. The song doesn’t rush towards resolution, giving the musicians plenty of space to stretch out.
The record closes with a live recording, “Dark Light,” which uses improvisatory riffs in roundabout arrival at its main themes. Here Winter plays solo, exploring the tones and inflections of his instrument. He embellishes his melodies with jazzy harmonies and distorted hums, creating an expansive sonic spaces where the instrument’s sound rings through in full dimensionality. Winter weaves his compositions together with lighthearted ease, pushing traditional guitar sounds into fresh territories.
Dusted Mid-Year Exchange, Part 1: Activity to Jeff Parker
Irreversible Entanglements
Six years ago, newly moved to Tumblr, we looked for a fresh take on the mid-year best-of list idea, partly to be contrary, partly because some of us had no interest in writing about the same records over and over again. After some discussion — well, a lot of discussion — we decided to turn our mid-year feature into a sort of secret Santa exchange. We’d each nominate two records and each review two records, but, here’s the kicker, they wouldn’t be the same records. We’d trade with our fellow writers, and if it meant that we had to listen to music way out of our comfort zone, so be it.
Since then we’ve had smooth exchanges and rough ones – last year’s was especially testy, but what can you do with such an opinionated bunch—but it’s become a favorite annual event. This year was no different, except that no one was truly revolted by their assignments.
Unlike some years, there was no clear dominant pick, though Six Organs, James Elkington, Makaya McCraven/Gil Scott-Heron, Cable Ties and Irreversible Entanglements all got multiple votes.
We’ll split our individual album write-ups into two posts. Today’s covers records by artists from Activity to Jeff Parker. We’ll get to the rest of the alphabet tomorrow. On the third and final day, we’ll post writers’ lists. Participants included Tobias Carroll, Tim Clarke, Justin Cober-Lake, Andrew Forell, Ray Garraty, Jennifer Kelly, Arthur Krumins, Patrick Masterson, Ian Mathers, Bill Meyer, Jonathan Shaw and Derek Taylor.
Activity — Unmask Whoever
Who picked it? Tim Clarke
Did we review it? Yes, Tim said, “This music strains at the leash, held tightly in check by the motorik rhythms, while gaseous synths seek to permeate all corners of the soundscape.”
Ray Garraty’s take:
You wouldn’t know that it is a debut album, but then it’s a super band, so that doesn’t count. Vocalist Travis Johnson’s delivery reminds you a symbolist poet reciting some lines from his notebook, neither singing nor reading. Despite referring to violence in song titles and lyrics, this music is as far from violent as it can be. It’s too self-conscious to even carry symbolic violence but when on ‘Earth Angel’ the vocalist with the hook “I wanna fuck around” almost breaks into a scream, it turns into a whisper instead. It’s these small details that unmask the outfit’s postmodern disguise and show that Activity is the real deal, not a half-baked pastiche.
Decoy with Joe McPhee — AC/DC (OtoRoku)
Who picked it? Derek Taylor.
Did we review it? Yes, Derek said, “Decoy is a working group and a heady amalgam that recalls a dream fusion of Atlantis-era Sun Ra, Keith Jarrett’s marathon electric stand with Miles at the Cellar Door, and Larry Young circa his Blue Note moonshot Contrasts, while still relentlessly retaining its own flight plan.”
Jennifer Kelly’s take:
Wow. “A/C” is impressive enough with its wild unfurlings of trumpet and sax, its woozy meditations in bowed and plucked stand-up bass, its incendiary organ bursts, all rooted in jazz, but touching on the hot, experimental outposts of rock and soul and R&B, too. But the second side, “D/C,” is even more exciting, as the tumult of sounds gets more fevered and McPhee breaks out in song. Who can blame him? You want to join in. It’s a mind-bending swirl that boils up and over the edges, heady, excessive and exhilarating. So glad I got to hear this, Derek, and it reinforces the benefits of trading favorites, i.e. finding music that is way out of your normal circuit but, even so, exactly what you need.
Sandy Ewen — You Win (Gilgongo)
You Win by Sandy Ewen
Who picked it? Bill Meyer
Did we review it? No.
Andrew Forell’s take:
Experimental guitarist Sandy Ewen appears as much concerned with space as sound. On You Win, she treats her instrument as pure object to explore the minutiae of its potential. Patterns emerge like communications from distant galaxies or the gradual shift and warp of old buildings. The 5 tracks scrape and rumble as occasionally identifiable guitar sounds — feedback hum, plucked strings — flicker from the mix. Best heard through headphones, You Win demands concentration lest one misses the nuanced denaturing and subversion of Ewen’s work, which is as fascinating as it is challenging.
Fake Laugh — Dining Alone (State 51 Conspiracy)
Fake Laugh · Ever Imagine
Who picked it? Tim Clarke
Did we review it? Yes Tim said, “These sharp, funny, warm-hearted songs are immediately endearing, yet shot through with bracingly sour ingredients.”
Andrew Forell’s take:
Dining Alone, Kamran Khan’s latest album as Fake Laugh, is a collection of pastel Day-Glo bedroom pop songs that breeze by leaving barely a hair ruffled in their wake. Khan has an ear for a melody, a wistfully pleasant voice and a talent for arrangement that make this album an enjoyable listen but there is a nagging feeling that he is holding something back. Tracks like the finely wrought “A Memory” and Supertramp update “The Empty Party” stand out but Dining Alone feels like an intermediate step on which Khan tries out ideas and seeks a way forward although there is enough here to be optimistic about what might come next.
Field Works — Ultrasonic (Temporary Residence)
Ultrasonic by Field Works
Who picked it? Justin Cober-Lake
Did we review it? Yes, in a May Dust, Tim Clarke wrote that “Stuart Hyatt’s latest compilation in the Field Works series is an absolute beauty — and timely given it’s being released during a pandemic whose origins may be linked to bats.”
Derek Taylor’s take:
Most of the listening that I do in the service of reviewing music revolves around discerning who’s, what’s and how’s. Those sorts of taxonomic identifications feel superfluous, not to mention futile when navigating the music on Ultrasonic. Sources I mistook as aquatic (“Dusk Tempi,” “Echo Affinity,” “Music for a Room with Vaulted Ceiling,” and “Indiana Blindfold”) are subterranean, specifically the echolocation emissions of bats. Harp and piano sounds dapple “Silver Secrets” and “Sodalis” as instrumental signposts, but they’re outliers in a program that feels largely electronic and beyond the scope of scrupulous inventory.
The closest, if admittedly antiquated, genre descriptors I have for these ecology-minded creations are ambient and new age. A seraphic, celestial quality suffuses most of them with sweeping washes of tonal color layering over more definable rhythms and progressions. The combination curiously reminds me of a distant temporal relic that served as childhood gateway to this sort of territory, my father’s vinyl edition of Ray Lynch’s Deep Breakfast. It’s another feeble attempt at a compass point and evidence of how difficult it can be to escape the ingrained habits that influence personal musical consumption.
The Giving Shapes — Earth Leaps Up (Elsewhere)
Who recommended it? Arthur Krumins
Did we review it? Yes. Arthur said, “You feel like you’re being carried into a dream, familiar yet strange.”
Ian Mathers’ take:
There’s just something nice about a record where, a few minutes after putting it on, your partner suddenly remarks “you know, this is very calming”. It’s not that the work of Robyn Jacob (voice, piano) and Elisa Thorn (voice, harp) is soporific or somehow uninvolving, more that there’s a somehow centered kind of deliberateness with which they approach these songs that feels oddly reassuring. The way their voices often echo lines (or slightly altered lines) back at one another can feel vaguely Stereolab-ish, but rather than the coolly pulsing, layered grooves (and transient noise bursts) of that outfit, the simplicity of the arrangements here feels direct and clean and often comforting. But it’s the type of comfort that lets you see the difficulty you’re trying to tackle head-on, not the comfort that swaddles you away from having to deal with the world. It’s more bracing than lulling, in other words, and frequently beautiful at that.
Irreversible Entanglements — Who Sent You? (Don Giovanni/International Anthem)
Who recommended it? Andrew Forell.
Did we review it? Yes. Andrew Forell wrote, “Who Sent You? is an extraordinary statement lyrically and musically.”
Bill Meyer’s take:
I’m inclined to agree with Andrew Forell. When I first encountered the vocal-focused free jazz of Irreversible Entanglements in 2018, I was more taken by the band’s focused exchanges of energy onstage than I was by their self-titled debut LP as a listening experience. But its successor steps up their already powerful game by easing up just a bit. They’ve let more air and variety into the surging rhythms and interweaving horn lines, opening up space for vocalist Camae Ayewa’s words to land with even more impact and staying power. Ayewa, who also records as Moor Mother, is more of a poetic declaimer than a singer or rapper, and her expressions of cultural memory and existential survival in the face of remorseless racism and economic terrorism boom over the music’s ebb and flow with inspiring authority. While her words are always applicable, this record sounds like it was made to be heard in a time of plague and revolt; when people ask in years to come what record sounds like the middle of 2020 felt, a lot of people will hold up Who Sent You?
The Jacka — Murder Weapon (The Artist / EMPIRE)
Who recommended it? Ray Garraty
Did we review it? Yes. Ray Garraty said, “this album confirms Jacka’s status among the greatest fallen soldiers of hip hop.”
Tim Clarke’s take:
Despite being a posthumous release whose title refers to the artist’s tragic death by shooting back in 2015, Murder Weapon by Bay Area rapper The Jacka is a surprisingly cohesive listening experience, largely thanks to the lush palette of old-school samples employed on many of these tracks. From the aching strings on early highlight “Walk Away” via the swinging funk of “Can’t Go Home” to the children’s choir on “We Outside,” there’s a warmth and humanity to this sad story that honors the artist’s memory.
Ka — Descendants of Cain (Iron Works)
Who picked it? Ray Garraty
Did we review it? Yes, Ray said, “Descendants of Cain, Ka’s seventh album combines the epic bleakness of the Old Testament with Brownsville’s hopelessness.”
Tobias Carroll’s take:
Shamefully, this is my first exposure to the music of MC and producer Ka; it’s his sixth album overall, and I’ve got some catching up to do. For an album with a title and cover art that could just as easily fit on a doom metal album, what surprised me was how focused this all was. The album flows beautifully, with music that fits somewhere between sinuous soul and the art-damaged Americana heard on, say, Matmos’s The West — with a handful of cinematic samples topping it off. It’s a perfect match for Ka’s voice, which manages to be textured and beatifically smooth all at once. Some albums paint a picture for the listener; this one is wholly immersive.
Matt LaJoie — Everlasting Spring
Everlasting Spring by Matt LaJoie
Who picked it? Tobias Carroll
Did we review it? No
Ray Garraty’s take:
Matt LaJoie’s technical verbosity is on the spot here, as all the man-made sounds can be mistaken for something Nature produced out of its vast resources. Everlasting Spring is like a small water spring which flows and flows but can’t eventually flow into a river, being forever condemned to be just this spring. Everlasting Spring lasts almost for an hour (if we count a bonus track), and it’s six minutes for every string LaJoie’s guitar has. Not many men can admire nature for that long. The whole album has that New Age-ish feel, when you can start listening to it from any track, and nothing will change in your views on it.
Maybe it does give a good mimesis of what spring sounds like but we still need a change of weather from time to time.
Mamaleek — Come & See (The Flenser)
Come and See by Mamaleek
Who recommended it? Jonathan Shaw
Did we review it? Yes. Jonathan said, “Their dominant textures are still harsh and confrontational, vocals are still howled and shouted. But there are riffs. There are melodic structures.”
Justin Cober-Lake's take:
As black metal, Mamaleek would hold their own, but there's a persistent work to stretch boundaries here. Come & See keeps a core mix of sludge and anger, but the group's inventiveness keeps the album consistently surprising. The group finds brighter tones than anticipated, even while moving away from metal more toward alt-rock at times, and post-rock at others, and generally finding expressions that require a hyphen. An occasional breakdown touches on jazz or finds its roots in rock 'n' roll. “Cabrini-Green” functions like a suite — track the movements and break the track into its separate pieces — even as it avoids a sort of linear sequence. “Elsewhere” (and, indeed, much of the album) turns out a demented history of hardcore. The record probably won't find much of an audience outside of the metal scene, but listening past the obvious trappings reveals a wealth of influences and a complexity that makes for intriguing listening across genre strictures.
Jeff Parker — Suite for Max Brown (International Anthem)
Suite for Max Brown by Jeff Parker
Who picked it? Arthur Krumins
Did we review it? Yes. Arthur said, “Following the looped, electronic and eclectic New Breed, Jeff Parker’s latest album expands into an even greater range of off-kilter sonic experiments.”
Tobias Carroll’s take:
Before this year, my knowledge of Jeff Parker’s music came largely from his work with Tortoise. And that’s far from a bad thing; Tortoise is a fine band. But hearing Parker push further into the realm of jazz with Suite for Max Brown is its own form of delight, where precisely-played melodies meet instrumental virtuosity. It’s an eminently listenable album, and one where I’m still noticing new moments of subtle beauty in the mix.
We wrap up our mid-year feature with writers’ favorites from the first half of the year. If you missed them, check out Parts One and Two from earlier this week.
Tobias Carroll
SAULT — UNTITLED (Black Is) (Forever Living Originals)
Irreversible Entanglements — Who Sent You? (International Anthem)
Cold Beat — Mother (DFA Records)
African Head Charge — Drumming is a Language 1990 - 2011 (On-U Sound)
En Attendant Ana — Juliet (Trouble in Mind)
Positive No — Kyanite (self-released)
Helen Money — Atomic (Thrill Jockey)
Matt LaJoie — Everlasting Spring (Flower Room)
Xetas — The Cypher (12XU)
Alison Cotton — Zener_08 (Sensory Leakage)
Coriky — Coriky (Dischord)
Błoto — Erozje (Astigmatic Records)
Gerycz / Powers / Rolin — Beacon (Garden Portal)
75 Dollar Bill Little Big Band — Live at Tubby’s (self-released)
Slum of Legs — Slum of Legs (Splurge Recordings)
The Soft Pink Truth — Am I Free to Go? (self-released)
Tim Clarke
Activity — Unmask Whoever (Western Vinyl)
Alabaster DePlume — To Cy and Lee: Instrumentals Vol. 1 (International Anthem)
Drab City — Good Songs For Bad People (Bella Union)
Fake Laugh — Dining Alone (State 51 Conspiracy)
King Krule — Man Alive! (XL)
Owen Pallett — Island (Domino)
Andrew Forell
Irreversible Entanglements — Who Sent You? (International Anthem)
After a career that has spanned decades, almost a whole lifetime, Laraaji has covered a lot of ground. Thanks to reissues of his ambient and new age work from the 1970s and 1980s, and his own continued current output, his stature as an innovator with an extensive, if daunting, catalog is solid. His earlier work often featured electronic zither in long, processed passages (best heard on 1978’s Celestial Vibration, subsequently on the Brian Eno produced Ambient 3: Day of Radiance). Elsewhere he has used similar instrumental work with a more percussive, strummy, bent, as featured on the Numero’s reissue of Vision Songs, Volume 1. More recently he has released excellent contemporary soundscapes that follow an uplifting vibe. His last full album, 2017’s Bring on the Sun and its remix version Sun Transformations, flow in many directions at once, bringing the listener on for the ride.
Here on the latest “Sun” album, Sun Piano, Laraaji returns to the instrument he studied while learning composition at Howard University a lifetime ago. However, the approach of these solo piano pieces feels off the cuff rather than studied. Perhaps that’s more due to the performance, which was captured live in a Brooklyn church, than the compositions, which have set structures, with strong melodies, elements of repetition, mixed with a neoclassical romanticism. The pieces have a feel of nostalgia mixed with sadness, and moments of optimism and major key resilience. Because the playing is casual and relaxed, it comes across as confident and assured.
Another point of reference in many of the pieces is the staunch chording and sing-able melodies of church hymns. On “Shenandoah,” the gradually soaring lines of the right hand seem to echo an imaginary choir coming back to a well-worn refrain. This style at times gives a contemplative mood, as on “Hold On To The Vision”. Because the pieces are unadorned by accompaniment, the flow of melody that is tied together by a gentle approach washes over the listener like a single, powerful statement.
The album varies between affecting and emotionally resonant straightforward pieces, and at times moments that increase the level of abstraction and repetition into minimalism. On the lilting “Lifting Me”, the effect is like a much slowed version of his early zither work. The attack and speed of the playing are gone, but there remains a steadfast beauty and clear eyed delivery. Sun Piano is a meditative and elegiac set, yet points towards the possibilities of endless variation and reflection.
