Buck Curran — Far Driven Sun (Obsolete/Echodelick/ESP-Disk)
Buck Curran’s latest record celebrates craft of all types. The craft of melody, of musicianship, of tone, of capturing and shaping sounds; of building the instruments themselves. A one-of-a-kind acoustic guitar, the 30-year-old, hand-built Butterfly, is presented in lush vistas, layered with stabs of counterpoint, gentle shades of reverb and the soft scrape of fingers on strings. Buck came up in the same freak folk circles as Jack Rose, and he is the guardian of Robbie Basho’s guitar. Despite these potent influences, Buck has found his own voice in steel string centered instrumental music. His playing is patient and pristine, but these assemblies of blended guitar owe as much to classic rock as they do to any other guitar soli tradition. The melodicism and accessibility of the songs on Far Driven Sun recall those notable tracks where rockers go Takoma style, or at least instrumental, and strike gold — think of Black Sabbath’s “Fluff”, Duane Allman’s “Little Martha,” even the delicate spaces of Fleetwood Mac’s “Albatross”—that’s the sort of dreamy, wide-open territory covered on the path to the Far Driven Sun.
Far Driven Sun asks listeners to pay attention to the guitar itself, the sound of its materiality, in a way that few records insist on. The opening track, which shares a title with the record, introduces the instrument with a sparse melodic figure, alone at first, then joined by a complimentary riff. The close, high-definition recording style admits creaks and the sounds of friction, but it also recreates the sustain and warmth of this rare construction of sacred, exotic wood. It’s a short tune, the star of the show stepping out from behind the curtain. Once introductions have been dispensed with, other possibilities are immediately explored. The propulsive “Unicorn Song” lays down a bed of strums over which a brass slide and an e-bow are used on the Butterfly to make sounds so sonorous and smooth you would swear it was the neck pickup on a Jazz Master being played through a vintage Fender Twin, not an acoustic guitar. Throughout Far Driven Sun Curran weaves guitars masterfully. Sheets of slide, sonic aurora, embed themselves between the hollows of patient fingerstyle arpeggios; waves of e-bow ambience crash against rhythmic shores, beauty resides in the spaces between sparse notes. Far Driven Sun is proof positive of the way in which a purposefully limited palette, instrumental in this case, can push creative boundaries.
There is an exception to every rule, however, and on the climactic cut “ILiad (Slight Return),” Buck brings a rhythm section to bear on a theme that was explored earlier on the album, a structural/titular reference to Jimi Hendrix’s unforgettable revisitation of “Voodoo Chile” that closes out Electric Ladyland. In “ILiad (Slight Return)” one can almost hear a future full band Buck Curran record. His rock-inflected playing works just as well with the advent of bass and insistent drums as it does with his own tasteful overdubs, but the deployment is so restrained: the textbook definition of leaving them wanting more.
Thematically, Far Driven Sun is a record about how the vast expanse and wonder of the universe is situated and experienced locally, in the carbon atoms of the wood of a singular guitar, or in the intimate human galaxies that are families. Tunes like “Unicorn Song,” which was named by Buck’s daughter and appears three times in different incarnations across the record, or “You Are My Sun” demonstrate that this creative cosmos revolves around children and partners, the closeness of the home hearth. “ILiad (Slight Return),” “Deserto Parallax” and the album’s title track show the cosmic and spiritual distances covered in this musical journey. Ultimately, however, much like the Odyssey, the classical companion to the Iliad invoked in the peak moment of Far Driven Sun, this is a record about returning home to the things that are essentially important. The cherished family and the perfectly crafted, one-of-a-kind tools that inspire the best work an artist can do. Buck might have taken a queue here from the legendary cuisine of his adopted home country, Italy. Just a few simple ingredients and a lot of love and intention produce a sublime result.
Melancholy but also uplifting folk visions from Buck Curran for your Bandcamp Monday this week. You may know Curran from his work with Arborea, or the excellent tributes for Robbie Basho and Jack Rose that he’s put together in recent years. There are traces of both Basho and Rose in No Love Is Sorrow, of course, but Buck has his own thing happening, too, managing to expertly balance ominous vibes with heartfelt devotionals. Very strong stuff. As detailed in this recent Pitchfork interview, Curran is currently in the thick of the COVID-19 crisis over in Italy and — like so many working musicians — has had much of his livelihood cut off for the moment. Buying No Love Is Sorrow is a win-win, then: you get to support an artist in need and you get some great tunes ...
New psych folk from Swiss based singer-songwriter-musician Adaya...streaming now @ Spotify via Obsolete Recordings....Adaya’s haunting debut album ‘The Other Side’.
Without getting too deep into American electoral politics, let’s just say that we’ve been distracted lately. We’ve been mired in the slough of despair, frantic in our bargaining with god and lately, a feeling fresh breeze of optimism—it’s been so long, we hardly recognized it. But despite all that, the records keep coming, and we do our best to deal with them, not always with a fulsome 300-400 word review, but sometimes briefly, as here, in another edition of Dust. This month, we cover the run of it, from fictional characters that somehow participate in bands, to guitarists on synth holiday to vintage Swedish death metal reissued and more. Participants this time out include Jennifer Kelly, Byron Hayes, Bill Meyer, Jonathan Shaw, Christian Carey, Andrew Forell, Roz Milner and Ian Mathers.
Apifera — Keep the Outside Open (Stones Throw)
Four Israeli jazzmen take a jaunt through psychedelic rock and prog, incorporating trippy vocals and squalling synth runs into a space-age fusion. The musicians— Nitai Hershkovits on keyboards, the beatmaker (and evident link to Stones Throw) Yuvi Havkin, drummer Amir Bresler and guitarist Yonatan Albalak—have spent their careers crossing jazz with funk, hip hop and rock. Here they push it even further with vocal tracks that hardly sound like jazz at all. Trippy “Iris Is Neil,” for instance, delivers the title phrase in a keening vocal chant, as explosions of percussion go off like firecrackers on a string. Squiggles of synth, arcs of electric guitar reach for the epic, but in a manner more like Yes or ELP than Return to Forever. “Lucky Zoe” delves further into psychedelic pop, its wavery keyboards framing fanciful whimsies a la “Lucy in the Sky.” “Theodor Marmalade” thumps a funky beat behind flourishes of keys and vocal narratives about desert fauna. “Don’t you want to see the floating lights?” the cut inquires, and yes, I can just about make out strange, glowing objects in the sky. The instrumental pieces have a more conventionally jazzy feel; “I Love ECM” makes it case with light-fingered syncopations on rims and cymbals, liquid loops of bass and ice-chilled runs of electric keyboard. “Sera Sam,” at the end, brings on the trumpeter Avishai Cohen for a lyrical turn.
Jennifer Kelly
Majesty Crush — Butterflies Don’t Go Away
(Numero Group)
Butterflies Don't Go Away by Majesty Crush
A double LP or digital download from Detroit’s own Majesty Crush, the motor city’s answer to the sounds coming out on 4AD. With dreamy vocals by David Stroughter about being an obsessive fan or about bad relationships and a rhythm section kicking up a swirl of noise around him, Majesty Crush brings to mind about a dozen English bands without feeling particularly in debt to any specific group. Occasionally the guitar makes a really cool, almost crunchy sound, but mostly the music moves in the fog, blanketing the vocals in layers of distortion. They lack the fey lyricism of the Cocteau Twins or the dreamy harmonies of Lush but guitarist Michel Segal holds his own against Kevin Shields’s sheets of sound. Meanwhile, they invoke David Hinckley on “No. 1 Fan,” wake up with a bottle and a cigar in hand on “Brand” and dip into ambient spaces on three small interludes. The first half is made of their lone album Love 15, while sides three and four contain an early EP and singles, putting pretty much their entire catalog into one handy set. These Detroit guys seem unjustly forgotten, but thankfully Numero’s made their music easy to find.
Roz Milner
Dennis Callaci & Heimito Künst — First Light (Pass Without Trace)
Heimito Künst is one of many characters in Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, a tangled multi-narrative epic. The enigmatic Italian musician who produced the sounds underpinning First Light has adopted Heimito Künst as his pseudonym, likely in reference to the knotty soundscapes he builds from organs, synths and field recordings. On paper, Dennis Callaci’s lyrics and vocals seem like an odd pairing for Künst’s oblique audio collages. Callaci is half of the long-running lo-fi pop project Refrigerator and has helmed the Shrimper label for over three decades. His signature mid-range nasal utterances, more spoken than sung, populate the extraterrestrial ecosystems of Künst like strange seedlings peeping up from beneath loamy soil. First Light serves as a bridge between the mysterious and the familiar, another worthy entry in Callaci’s discography and a port of entry into an unknown artist’s body of work.
Bryon Hayes
Buck Curran — The Long Distance (Eiderdown/Obsolete)
Buck Curran is a guitar devotee. He’s a fluent player, a custodian of historic instruments, a chronicler of esteemed players and a compiler of albums that pay tribute to others. But sometimes a guy just needs a change of pace; enter The Long Distance. Mostly competed in a single night, it’s Curran’s holiday from the guitar. Instead, he plays analog synthesizer, layering sweeping tones and helicopter-rotor cadences into something rather like a lost Tangerine Dream album. Curran explains in the album notes that each piece is connected to a memory of a person or place, which may explain the melodies’ intimations of yearning and melancholy. But if you’re not Curran, they might evoke other associations; this music could easily be repurposed for film soundtracks.
Bill Meyer
Rhodri Davies — Telyn Wrachïod (Amgen)
Back in the mid-20th century, kids motorized their bikes with clothes pins and playing cards. The customization might not have yielded much additional propulsion, but the sound was cool. It turns out that they were simply following in the footsteps of 16th century Welsh harpists, who attached brays (slips of wood) to their strings to get a loud, buzzing sound. Rhodri Davies has explored the harp’s options in all manner of settings — Fluxus happenings, minimalist compositions, rock bands, free improv ensembles, the list goes on. Recently he’s commissioned speculative recreations of instruments from centuries ago, which he then uses to play the sort of short, wheels-within-wheels pieces that he formerly played with instruments amplified to a Konono No. 1-level of distortion. On Telyn Wrachïod he turns to the bray harp, which sounds rather like a cross between a banjo and a sitar. Each of its 12 tracks is spiky but so engrossing that you might find yourself hitting repeat a few times before you move on to the next one.
Bill Meyer
Desultory — Darkness Falls (The Early Years) (Darkness Shall Rise)
The repackaging and re-release of underground metal’s extensive archive of hyper-obscure demos and records continues apace. Darkness Falls (The Early Years) collects three demos from Swedish death metal outfit Desultory, originally independently issued on cassettes between 1990 and 1992. The record’s principal interest is its documentation of the sonic flexibility that informed the term “death metal” in the early 1990s; there’s just as much lightning thrash in these songs as there is moldering morbidity, especially the four engaging tracks on the band’s first demo, From Beyond (1990). The title track is especially pleasurable, in its sprinting, bludgeoning fashion — and this reviewer notes the added benefit of the title’s reference to an excellent H. P. Lovecraft story (is that you, Cthulhu?). Swedeath completists take heed. For the rest of us, it’s a fun release, and of some historical interest. Its relative necessity is open to debate — but hey, we didn’t really need that reissue version of Pig Destroyer’s Painter of Dead Girls on “black ice with metallic silver glitter” vinyl, either. Maybe Darkness Shall Rise should get some points for only releasing four different product versions of Darkness Falls….
Jonathan Shaw
Devouring the Guilt — Not To Want To Say (Kettle Hole)
Devouring The Guilt is a Chicago-associated (meaning two members live there and one moved away but remains connected) improvising trio. The line-up is pretty classic — Gerrit Hatcher on tenor sax, Eli Namay on bass, Bill Harris on drums. And so are the trio’s roots. Hatcher summons a burly tone, steers mostly clear of extended techniques, and gives occasional nods to free jazz heroes like Archie Shepp, Frank Wright and Frank Lowe. These familiar parameters establish a framework to display their collective originality, which lies in the personal vernacular they’ve fashioned. Namay is an alternately pithy and seething presence, plucking spare, structure-defining figures or bowing a maelstrom of woody sound. Harris pushes back against expectations that the drums should push the music forward by punctuating his clearly articulated attack with lots of negative space. Hatcher situates lyricism in long, understated tones and vigorously masticated phases, but also navigates unpredictably through the tight corners and sudden gaps that the other two set up.
Bill Meyer
Carol Genetti / Peter Maunu — Gleaners (Amalgam)
No matter how you approach it, Gleaners will stretch your mind. Just what are Carol Genetti (voice, electronics) and Peter Maunu (guitar, violin, mandolin) gleaning? Not other people’s music, that’s for sure. Maybe the languages of long-extinct species, confidences exchanged between dusty appliances that come to life after the staff leaves the thrift shop, ideas about what instruments might sound like if you see them in pictures. Even when Maunu resorts to rock-ish fuzztones or Genetti exhales an unspooling coo, their co-creations are resolutely sui generis. Their partnership has been honed through years of regular performance, often with other Chicago-based musicians, which likely explains the brisk confidence that this resolutely abstract music exudes. Genetti is a ceramic artist as well as a musician, and the physical manifestation of this album comes in two forms. She made ten one-of-a-kind clay cases that you can mount on a wall; the regular CDs come in a folio adorned with close-ups of the art edition.
Bill Meyer
Dave Douglas — GIFTS (Greenleaf Music)
GIFTS by Dave Douglas
With sizzling guitar lines and a frontline horn duo of Douglas and James Brandon Lewis, you’d think it would be easy for this to be a mere blowing session. But it’s not. The music is frequently introspective and has a very ECM kind of ambience: it has this wide-angle sonic clarity where each instrument has room to breathe and let their notes slowly linger. The suite of Strayhorn songs in the middle doesn’t feel tired, either. Rafiq Bhatia’s chugging guitar keeps “Take the A Train” moving while Douglas and Lewis move in sync for the theme. When they stretch out, they’re sometimes playing against each other but always seem like they’re on the same page. Meanwhile Bhatia’s playing draws on Bill Frisell, making up for the lack of a low end with well-placed chords and sonic textures. These four make the music their own and it’s one of the year's most rewarding jazz records.
Samara Lubelski and Marcia Bassett are both well-established members of the U.S. scene that engendered the moniker “new weird America” back in the early aughts. Both have CVs that stretch on for miles. Lubelski is best known as a star in the MV&EE solar system, while Bassett churns out murkier sound pools in a variety of projects, such as Double Leopards and Hototogisu. The pair have a long-standing partnership unfurling phosphorescent drone webs through guitar and violin. This is their eighth recording, and it presents two extended string seances that coax electric spirit whisps from unseen worlds. “Indexical” is the lengthier of the pair and features zoned out but controlled guitar howl from Bassett alongside Lubelski’s rapid bowing. The undulations intertwine to become a radiant lattice of sound. Alien timbres infect “Rhizome,” which sways between a noise-drone wall of sound and hushed electronic whispers. Both are live recordings, showing off the raw magic that this pair of string sirens can conjure.
Bryon Hayes
Joe McPhee With Ken Vandermark — Musings Of A Bahamian Son (Corbett Vs. Dempsey)
Joe McPhee’s been toting folders full of poems and brief musings to gigs for years, but in recent years they’ve assumed an increasingly prominent place in his performances. Now, he’s finally put 28 of them on record, punctuated with nine short soprano sax/clarinet interludes that he improvised with Ken Vandermark. Oppression gets defied, history acknowledged, but most of all, love gets its due. McPhee muses about folks from the neighborhood, jazz heroes that inspired him, old friends now gone, and the balm and galvanization imparted by music itself. Abstract but tender, the interludes amplify this sentiment, showing by example how much appreciation for life and fellowship can be invested in a few tones.
Bill Meyer
Kate Nash — 9 Sad Symphonies (Kill Rock Stars)
On 9 Sad Symphonies, Kate Nash leans into her musical theater background, with skillfully crafted arrangements that incorporate classical orchestrations reminiscent of the film musicals from the 1930s-1950s. As on most of her albums, she tweaks her sound and musical partners, here working with producer Frederik Thaae. There is a sauciness to her lyrics, which even go so far as describing lunch breaks in toilets. All is not a lark. Nash seeks to exorcize personal demons on “Vampyre” and “My Bile '' is a bracing assessment of a broken relationship. 9 Sad Symphonies may have a bucolic surface, but the singer-songwriter ventures down dark pathways where stars of the Silver Screen would have likely feared to go.
Christian Carey
Occulta Veritas — Irreducible Fear of the Sublime (I, Voidhanger)
Occulta Veritas plays an avant-garde variety of black metal, long on complexity and idiosyncratic compositional sensibilities. It’s abrasive and disorienting, and not especially fun to listen to — which yes, that’s the point, but there’s a huge amount of this sort of thing circulating through the metal underground at any given point, and deliberately distancing music from listeners’ parameters for pleasure can be a tough prospect in that oversaturated context. For this reviewer, the record’s engagement with the theoretical concepts of Jacques Lacan (big-deal psychoanalyst, post-structural Daddy and important player in France’s academic politics of the mid-20th century) helps Irreducible Fear of the Sublime stand out. It’s pretty great that one of the songs is called “Metonimia,” since Lacan’s projection of metonymy along a diachronic axis of spatio-temporal relations fits the music’s tortured snarls and chaotic, off-kilter arrangements. The utterances want to go somewhere, but the structures those utterances are trapped in make meaningful progress a near impossibility. It would be even better to have a lyric sheet, to get more than just the tantalizing engagements with Lacan provided in song titles (“The Mirror Stage,” “Bound to Incompleteness” and so on). There’s an overheated quality to the record that’s additionally compelling: This is your brain; this is your brain on Lacan. But it would be useful to know what specific ideas accompany specific sounds and turns in the music’s syntax. Or is it all just sound and fury, signifying nothing?
Jonathan Shaw
J. Pavone String Ensemble
Reverse Bloom by Jessica Pavone
The current edition of Jessia Pavone’s String Ensemble is reduced to essentials. There are just three players including Pavone, who plays viola, Aimée Niemann on violin, and Abby Swidler switching between those two instruments. The language is likewise paired down on Reverse Bloom. The first two pieces (of four) emphasize long tones that hiss and sigh at a deliberate pace, evoking an uneasy state. “Obstructed Current” pushes against the prevailing vibe with jolting, energetic phrases that move joltingly out of synch. The closing piece, “Embers Slumber,” likewise explores contrasting elements, which resolve by settling into a deliberate, belly-breathing rhythm. The album charts a course towards a grounded state that’s not so much a happy ending as a sonic enactment of the honest word that gets you through.
Bill Meyer
Keith Rowe / Gerard Lebik — Dry Mountain (Inexhaustible Editions)
Dry Mountain by Keith Rowe / Gerard Lebik
Despite having his name on the spine, Keith Rowe did not play on this record. However, he did originate the process of sound (re)imagining that it presents, and his cover image of a wiggling digit raises the question — how deep does a fingerprint go? The score of Dry Mountain originated from the imprint Rowe’s gear left on a sheet of paper. Rowe and Gerard Lebik interpreted that score and then handed a recording of their performance to three visual artists, who created their own scores based on what they heard. These scores were then played by the group of electronics, string, and percussion players heard on this album while listeners drew responses to the music, which they then handed to the musicians, who played them on the spot. The further you get from the first piece heard, the further the music gets from Rowe’s sound world; in a reversal of Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting In A Room, the music gets segmented and defined.
Bill Meyer
D. Sablu — No True Silence (Yes We Cannibal)
No True Silence by D.SABLU
D. Sablu is a New Orleans punk lifer, late of Casual Burns and Feverish, but forced (or inspired or motivated) by COVID to strike out on his own. No True Silence is Sablu’s first full-length, and it’s a killer, a slaughterhouse frenzy of punk /garage/ hardcore and a little metal, all chopped up with chainsaws and spraying all over the walls. Indeed, you’ll have to stand well back from the player when you first put the record on, because it leads with “Bomber Stomp,” a two-minute assault of lumbering, heavy punk that sways noticeably as it comes down on the ones and twos. Sablu lets off a howl near the end that raises the hairs on my neck, because it’s so sulfurous and tortured. “69 Forever” lights a new wave hook on fire with a blowtorch; it’s catchy as hell but blows you back with sheer volume and aggression. The brief “World Peace” is pure, adrenalized chaos, drums galloping wildly, guitars flaring, bass buzzing and Sablu screaming “World pee-eeea-eace!” like a banshee. Fun stuff. Turn it up.
Jennifer Kelly
Mark Sims — Take Me Faster (Carousel Horse Records, Old 3-C Label Group, Anyway)
Take Me Faster by Mark Sims
Deindustrialization has hollowed out the Midwest’s economy, leaving shuttered factories and empty main streets all across the central American states. Mark Sims, a bricklayer when he’s not performing, sings with the soft, wry melancholy of a man left behind by tectonic shifts, finding solace in well-turned melodies and plain-spoken turns of phrase. It was fashionable half a decade ago to interview Ohioans in diners about their economic circumstances; Take Me Faster provides the same sort of snapshot of dislocation and disappearing opportunity.
For instance, in “Hold On To Me,” the narrator is driving long-distance to a job somewhere, trying to find a song on the radio and thinking about home. “Money comes and goes so quickly/I could work a million hours/and still be broke when I die,” Sims confides, against a radiant lattice of picking. The song is unassuming, and kind of perfect, a distillation of the struggle to stay connected and human in a low-wage high-uncertainty economy.
The songs are simply arranged, a mesh of Sims’ dusky, resonant voice and acoustic guitar, mostly, with a little synth in the background for texture. And yet, this is more than enough, as on the haunting “I’m Always by Your Side,” where Sims’ voice lifts up through the sadness, fluttering soulfully in the upper registers before drifting back to earth. These songs don’t pull any tricks or do any somersaults, but they’re satisfying all the same.
Jennifer Kelly
Jason Stein / Marilyn Crispell / Damon Smith / Adam Shead — Spi-raling Horn (Balance Point Acoustics/Irritable Mystic)
spi-raling horn by Jason Stein, Marilyn Crispell, Damon Smith, Adam Shead
The trio of Shead, Stein, and Smith first convened with the former two’s duo shared a bill with Smith. They recognized in each other a common aesthetic intent, a shared wish to improvise within a particular set of parameters; there’s no predetermined material, but a collective intention not to be confined to jazz. They’ve all listened closely to the great 20th century European free improvisers, and part of what they’ve taken from them is an intent to fashion their own language. There’s no soloing here, although occasionally someone will drop out if that’s what the music requires. And when they invite a fourth musician into the action, they participate as an equal contributor, not a featured guest. Marilyn Crispell’s associations with musicians as disparate as Barry Guy, Anthony Braxton and Joe Lovano reveal her to be an artist similarly concerned with fluent exchange, not ego-boosting display. But she’s also a stern bringer of velocity and complexity on this recording, which is the studio half of a single brief encounter which took place in Chicago in the middle of 2023. Dense assertion, abrasive texture, and bursting co-existence cohere into a seven-part sequence of collaborative invention.
Bill Meyer
SUSS — Birds & Beasts (Northern Spy)
Birds & Beasts by SUSS
Gorgeous hovering tones of pedal steel, guitar (with e bow), keyboards and synths coalesce in these cuts, each a glowing, vibrating meditation on the beauty and fragility of the natural world. SUSS, from New York City, explores many of the same haunted textures as Chuck Johnson and Pan*American, letting sustained notes linger in shimmering layers of slow-moving sound. “Overstory” encases picked acoustic notes in a translucent amber of pedal steel arcs and violin, letting the sound grow as slowly—and as enormously—as old growth forest. “Flight” follows a more pronounced rhythm than other cuts, its steady pulse of strumming beating like wings on a long trip south. The disc is not all sunshine, however. “Prey” lurks in ominous buzzes and hums of feedback, building threat into dark-toned dissonance and animal screeches into wails of guitar. The long closer, “Migration,” pulls taut with anticipation, its beat like a metronome, its melody unfurling in the wheeze of harmonica and the shifting twang of pedal steel. SUSS often gets tagged as cosmic country, but which country? Unearthly, luminous and beautiful.
Jennifer Kelly
Their Divine Nerve — Return of the Lamb (Staalplaat)
The Return of the Lamb by Their Divine Nerve
Dmytro Fedorenko and Jeff Surak have been collaborating for about 20 years now, but this first album as Their Divine Nerve appears to be the first time the self-described “Ukrainian-American noise duo” have collaborated on record at length. But right from the churning, thumping 14+ minute opener “The Infinity Book” here it’s clear that their long association has led to a certain sympatico comfort with each other. Whether on the more overtly aggressive shredding (not guitar riffs, actual shredding) of “Glowing Skulls” or the more pensive, droning likes of “Dignityphobia,” here the pair have arranged a rich, expansive (71 minutes on CD, plus about another half hour in bonus material on digital) feast for anyone looking to add some variety to their noise diet. By the time the CD thunders and shudders to a half with “Civilization Was Never Civilized” the listener may not know anything more about the titular lamb, but it’s clear its return is momentous indeed.
Ian Mathers
Various Artists — Congo Funk: Sound Madness From The Shores Of The Mighty Congo River (Kinshasa/Brazzaville 1969-1982) (Analog Africa)
Congo Funk! - Sound Madness From The Shores Of The Mighty Congo River (Kinshasa/Brazzaville 1969-1982) (Analog Africa No. 38) by Analog Africa
Mobutu Sese Seko was a murderous tyrant, but he changed African music forever when he invited James Brown to play Zaire 74, the three-day musical festival put on alongside George Forman and Muhammed Ali’s epic Rumble in the Jungle. American funk transformed an already vibrant musical scene like a chemical catalyst setting off an explosion of electrified, psychedelic soul in Kinshasa and Brazzaville. Congo Funk! collects 14 incendiary cuts from the 1970s and 1980s — culling from an original haul of over 2000 sounds — not a dud in the bunch and more than a couple of revelations. M.B.T’s eponymous “M.B.T.’s Sound” is one of the best on this two-disc set, all brassy swagger and intricate polyrhythmic percussion, as is Orchestre National du Congo’s full-throated celebration “Ah Congo!” with its wild call and response, feral sax play and unhinged drumming. Lolo et L'Orchestre O.K. Jazz’s “Lolo Soulfire,” sets up a Stax-like groove and lives in it, slouching and swaggering like Booker T in a fever. Fire.
Jennifer Kelly
Ricki Weidenhof — Church (We Be Friends)
Church by Ricki Weidenhof
A member of Pittsburgh avant-collagists Sneeze Awfull, Ricki Weidenhof examines a life of religious ambivalence and search for identity on their solo album Church. Working through a range of styles that illustrate and amplify those themes, Weidenhof produces an emotionally rich and sometimes challenging fractal mosaic. The wonderfully titled suite “Raptured in Formal Violence” contrasts liturgical solemnity and a babel of religious voices with jittering house to capture that mixture of dread and ecstasy the Church so often induces. At the other of the scale “Dreary Field” is an Arthur Russell inspired idyll of acoustic guitar and cello as Weidenhof singsof the past “I finished that game of hide and seek long ago/Only it was still at play/I remember the last place I had hidden.” “Extinction Meditation” begins in a similar vein, the religious and personal entwined with vivid imagery, before a chaos of multi-tracked vocals, distorted beats, and razor strings. A powerful, heartfelt record that deserves a wide audience.
Andrew Forell
Wormed — Omegon (Season of Mist)
OMEGON by Wormed
It’s hard to say anything meaningful about Wormed — pretty much everything about the band is absurd, or at least verging on it. To identify some key elements of the absurdity: the “vocals” of Jose Luis Rey Sanchez (appearing on Omegon, as always, under the appropriately throaty appellation Phlegeton — Sanchez is likely referring to the mythic river, but all I can think of is phlegm…), for whom the unappetizing term “throat fart” might have been coined; the sheer nuttiness of the band’s tech death wankery, which the band has actually moderated a wee bit for Omegon; the fact that Wormed have been at it since 1999, mostly developing a continuous narrative of a fictional cosmos, full of conflict among evil extraterrestrial forces, multiple timelines and a protagonist named Krigshu (some song titles from this record are indicative: “Aetheric Transdimensionalization,” “Gravitational Servo Matrix,” “Virtual Teratogensis”). You figure it out. Beyond the music — more tech than slam, but still seeking some sort of apotheosis of that quality death metal freaks name “brutality” — what’s most engaging about Wormed is the band’s ability to sustain the absurdity and to seem absolute serious about it. Maybe that makes the Spanish band especially well-suited to our times. Or maybe we just haven’t gotten the joke yet.
Various Artists — Solstice: A Tribute to Steffen Basho-Junghans (Obsolete Recordings)
Steffen Basho-Junghans
Solstice: A Tribute to Steffen Basho-Junghans by Various Artists
Steffen Basho-Junghans was a master of the steel string guitar, born in East Germany but finding a spiritual home in the geographically indeterminant blend of folk, blues and raga of the Takoma School. Like Robbie Basho, whose name he appended to his, Basho-Junghans could play in a spare, contemplative style or conjure eddies and cascades of orchestra complexity. His work was always crystal clear and precise, but it evoked something beyond the notes themselves, a mystery and transcendence.
Basho-Junghans died last December, and so Buck Curran, who is also a devotee and practitioner of the Takoma style, brought together an international group of guitarists to pay tribute. His Solstice follows the same format as homages to Jack Rose (Ten Years Gone: A Tribute to Jack Rose) and Robbie Basho (We are All One, In the Sun: A tribute to Robbie Basho and Basket Full of Dragons: A Tribute to Robbie Basho Vol II). These are not covers, but rather free-flowing meditations on Junghans-Basho’s art and influence, with different artists emphasizing different elements of his work.
Curran himself opens and closes the disc with two mournful, contemplative versions of “Winter Solstice.” He plays both cuts on a 12-string guitar that once belonged to Robbie Basho, and that, indeed, featured on all of his records from 1965 to 1986. The guitar, however, needs some serious repair. Curran’s slow, considering approach, where each bent note gets the space to hang and decay, may be partly down to the instrument. In an email, he confided, “[It’s] only possible to play the first few frets, open notes/open harmonics and play slide with it (as I did on my recordings).” The two cuts are, nonetheless, very beautiful, both excellent examples of the rewards of working within limitations.
Many of the other artists on this 22-track collection will be familiar to fans of this Fahey-influenced style of playing. Joseph Allred lets the mountain air (and a few birdcalls) into his exploration of Basho-Junghans’ raga blues in “An Upper Cumberland Raga,” while Isasa, from Spain, lets the space between notes speak in the lovely “Paseo por el Alto Tajo.” In “Every Blue,” Nick Jonah Davis finds tranquility in limpid slides, while Boston’s Robert Noyes rambles and jangles against a bowed note drone in “Surmises.”
The most revealing tracks, though, are the ones that depart furthest from what you expect. Henry Kaiser’s “Requiem for Steffen Basho-Junghans” jars a full set of strings into discord. It sounds like a piano after it’s dropped a couple of feet, ringing with disgruntled dissonance. E. Jason Gibbs plays guitar like a percussion instrument, letting abrupt squeaks and squawks mark out unsettling intervals of time. And Bhajan Bhoy’s “I Can See the Lights of Heaven” interpolates 78-record crackle, bell-like guitar cadences and actual bells, into a chiming, luminous soundscape that opens to the numinous just as Basho-Junghans’ work often did.
Altogether, it’s a lovely tribute, but also absolutely its own thing. It may help to know Basho-Junghans’ music, or to be familiar with the participating artists, but it’s not necessary. So, use Solstice to honor Basho-Junghans if you already admire him. Or put it on to explore how forward-thinking guitar players are extending his vision around the world. It’s also a way to help out since some of the proceeds from Solstice will go to Basho-Junghans family. All good reasons to check in. What are you waiting for?
Various Artists—Ten Years Gone: A Tribute To Jack Rose (Obsolete)
Ten Years Gone: A Tribute to Jack Rose by Various Artists
If you listen closely to solo acoustic guitar music made in this century, whether you know it or not, you owe a debt to Jack Rose. When the 21st century first lurched into motion, he was best known as a member of the Appalachian-drone-noise combo Pelt. But when a felicitously timed job loss coincided with a resolution to develop his fingerstyle guitar chops, Rose emerged from the proverbial woodshed (actually his apartment in Philadelphia) to become an early evangelist for the blues-raga-etc. synthesis that John Fahey, Robbie Basho and a few others first proposed in the 1960s, which came to be known as American Primitive Guitar. Pondering the articulated ambivalence of another guitarist to be so categorized, Rose told fellow standard-bearer Glenn Jones that that was exactly how he wanted to be known. He blazed through a series of developmental stages in fairly short order, investigating mystic free-form, rigorously emulated American folk forms and intensely social rags, playing six- and twelve-string guitars, investing all he played with a distinctively personal heaviness of tone and rhythm, during intense, mostly solitary tours and on a series of splendid LPs before dying drastically young in 2009.
Buck Curran is a guitar player and scholar who, during Rose’s meteoric run, was a member of the Maine-based duo Arborea. Presently a solo performer based in Bergamo, Italy, he undertook the task of assembling a tribute album honoring Rose, something Curran had previously done in tribute of Robbie Basho. The project was originally released by Tompkins Square as a download in December 2019, on the tenth anniversary of Rose’s death. But after a couple years, Curran took it back and augmented it; his own label, Obsolete Recordings, issued a new edition with four additional tracks in June 2022. The participants include people who played with Rose, moved in the same circles that he did, or were moved by his example to ride the vehicle of solo guitar exploration down their own road. Not everyone plays guitar: fiddler Mike Gangloff, of Pelt and the Black Twig Pickers, and cellist Helena Espvall, of Espers, are fellow travelers who use the keen of bowed strings to give vent to the enduring grief over a friend and comrade lost. Micah Blue Smaldone, Nick Schillace and Sir Richard Bishop, all fellow guitarists who shared stages and hospitality opportunities with Rose back in the day, play tunes that express their personal strengths.
A dozen tracks, including the four new ones, come from Curran and folks who to some degree picked up Rose’s baton. The consistency of the contributions is remarkably high. Newer American guitarists Joseph Allred and Prana Crafter cover the mystical end of the American Primitive spectrum, while Matt Sowell represents the rustic pole; Liam Grant, one of the late arrivals, spikes mystery with velocity. Other contributors show how far Rose’s signal has been broadcast. Simone Romei and Paolo Novellino represent Curran’s current country of residence, the former with some classic Takoma-style blues picking, the latter eschewing genre signifiers in favor of reverie. Argentine Mariano Rodriguez honors Rose with a stirring slide dirge. Welsh picker Gwenifer Raymond is every bit as energetic as Rose could be. Spaniards Isasa and Xisco Rojo both wax reflective, in their personal styles. Czech guitarist Jakub Simansky’s agile bluesiness is probably closer to Curran’s style than Rose’s, but that’s an observation, not a criticism. There’s just one caveat; Jack would have wanted to know where the vinyl was. Reportedly there’s an LP master ready to go, awaiting licensure, but until this compilation is available in a format that can tip a scale and be seen without voltage, the work is not done.
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.
Official video for Seadrift from Arborea's 2008 self-titled release. Film by Shanti Curran. Footage from Arborea's 2010 tour in Oregon and Northern Californi...
