#justin cober-lake

[dustedmagazine]

Listening Post: Kim Gordon

Kim Gordon has long been one of rock’s female icons, one of a tiny handful of women to get much play in Michael Azzerad’s underground-defining Our Band Could Be Your Life and a mainstay in the noise-rock monolith Sonic Youth. It’s hard to imagine that quintessential dude rock band without Gordon in front, dwarfed by her bass or spitting tranced out, pissed off verses over the storm of feedback.

Yet Gordon’s trajectory has been, if anything, even more fascinating since Sonic Youth’s demise in 2011. A visual artist first — she studied art at the Otis College of Art and Design before joining the band — she continues to paint and sculpt and create. She’s had solo art shows at established galleries in London and New York, most recently at the 303 Gallery in New York City. A veteran of indie films including Gus van Zant’s Last Days and Todd Haynes I’m Not There, she has also continued to act sporadically, appearing in the HBO series Girls and on an episode of Portlandia. Her memoir, Girl in a Band, came out in 2015.

But Gordon has remained surprisingly entrenched in indie music over the last decade. Many critics, including a few at Dusted, consider her Body Head, collaboration with Bill Nace the best of the post-Sonic Youth musical projects. The ensemble has now produced two EPs and three full-lengths. Gordon has also released two solo albums, which push her iconic voice into noisier, more hip hop influenced directions. We’re centering this listening post around The Collective, Gordon’s second and more recent solo effort, which comes out on Matador on March 8th, but we’ll likely also be talking about her other projects as well.

Intro by Jennifer Kelly

Jennifer Kelly: I missed No Home in 2019, so I was somewhat surprised by The Collective’s abrasive, beat-driven sound though I guess you could make connections to Sonic Youth’s Cypress Hill collaboration?

The more I listen to it, though, the more it makes sense to me. I’ve always liked the way Gordon plays with gender stereotypes, and “I’m a Man” certainly follows that trajectory. What are you guys hearing in The Collective?

Jonathan Shaw: I have only listened through the entire record once, but I am also struck by its intensities. Sort of silly to be surprised by that, given so many of the places she has taken us in the past: noisy, dangerous, dark. But there's an undercurrent of violence to these sounds that couples onto the more confrontational invocations and dramatizations of sex. It's a strong set of gestures. I like the record quite a bit.

Bill Meyer: I'm one of those who hold Body/Head to be the best effort of the post-Sonic Youth projects, but I'll also say that it's very much a band that creates a context for Gordon to do something great, not a solo effort. I was not so taken with No Home, which I played halfway through once upon its release and did not return to until we agreed to have this discussion. I've played both albums through once now, and my first impression is that No Home feels scattered in a classic post-band-breakup project fashion — “let's do a bit of this and that and see what sticks.” The Collective feels much more cohesive sonically, in a purposeful, “I'm going to do THIS” kind of way.

Jonathan Shaw: RE Jennifer's comment about “I'm a Man”: Agreed. The sonics are very noise-adjacent, reminding me of what the Body has been up to lately, or deeper underground acts like 8 Hour Animal or Kontravoid's less dancy stuff. Those acts skew masculine (though the Body has taken pains recently to problematize the semiotics of those photos of them with lots of guns and big dogs...). Gordon's voice and lyrics make things so much more explicit without ever tipping over into the didactic. And somehow her energy is in tune with the abrasive textures of the music, but still activates an ironic distance from it. In the next song, “Trophies,” I love it when she asks, “Will you go bowling with me?” The sexed-up antics that follow are simultaneously compelling and sort of funny. Rarely has bowling felt so eroticized.

Jennifer Kelly: I got interested in the beats and did a YouTube dive on some of the other music that Justin Raisen has been involved with. He's in an interesting place, working for hip hop artists (Lil Yachty, Drake), pop stars (Charli XCX) and punk or at least punk adjacent artists (Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Viagra Boys), but nothing I've found is as raw and walloping as these cuts.

“The Candy House” is apparently inspired by Jennifer Egan's The Candy House, which is about a technology that enables people to share memories... Gordon is pretty interested in phones and communications tech and how that's changing art and human interaction.

Andrew Forell: My immediate reaction to the beats was oh, The Bug and JK Flesh, in particular the MachineEPs by the former and Sewer Bait by the latter. Unsurprisingly, as Jonathan says, she sounds right at home within that kind of dirty noise but is never subsumed by it

Jennifer Kelly: I don't have a deep reference pool in electronics, but it reminded me of Shackleton and some of the first wave dub steppers. Also, a certain kind of late 1990s/early aughts underground hip hop like Cannibal Ox and Dalek.

Bryon Hayes: Yeah, I hear some Dalek in there, too. Also, the first Death Grips mixtape, Ex-Military.

It's funny, I saw the track title “I'm a Man,” and my mind immediately went to Bo Diddley for some reason, I should have known that Kim would flip the script, and do it in such a humorous way. I love how she sends up both the macho country-lovin’ bros and the sensitive metrosexual guys. It's brilliant!

This has me thinking about “Kool Thing”, and how Chuck D acts as the ‘hype man’ to Kim Gordon in that song. I'm pretty sure that was unusual for hip hop at the time. Kim's got a long history of messing with gender stereotypes.

Bill Meyer: Gordon did a couple videos for this record, and she starred her daughter Coco in both of them. The one for “I'm A Man” teases out elements of gender fluidity, how that might be expressed through clothing, and different kinds of watching. I found the video for “Bye Bye” more interesting. All the merchandise that's listed in the video turns out to be a survival kit, one that I imagine that Gordon would know that she has to have to get by. The protagonist of the video doesn't know that, and their unspoken moment in a car before Coco runs again was poignant in a way that I don't associate with her work. And of messing with hip hop!

Tim Clarke: “Bye Bye” feels like a companion to The Fall’s “Dr Buck’s Letter.”

Bill Meyer: From The Unutterable? I'll have to a-b them.

Tim Clarke: That’s the one.

Jonathan Shaw: All of these comments make me think of the record’s title, and the repeated line in “The Candy House”: “I want to join the collective.” Which one? The phone on the record’s cover nods toward our various digital collectives — spaces for communication and expression, and spaces for commerce, all of which seem to be harder and harder to tell apart. A candy house, indeed. Why is it pink? Does she have a feminine collective in mind? A feminine collective unconscious? The various voices and lyric modes on the record suggest that's a possibility. For certain women, and for certain men working hard to understand women, Gordon has been a key member of that collective for decades.

Jennifer Kelly: The title is also the title of a painting from her last show in New York.

The holes are cell phone sized.

You can read about the show here, but here's a representative quote: “The iPhone promises freedom, and control over communication,” she says. “It’s an outlet of self-expression, and an escape and a distraction from the bigger picture of what’s going on in the world. It’s also useful for making paintings.”

Gordon is a woman, and a woman over 70 at that — by any measure an underrepresented perspective in popular culture. However, I’d caution against reading The Collective solely as a feminist statement. “I'm a Man,” for instance, is told from the perspective of an incel male, an act of storytelling and empathy not propaganda. My sense is that Gordon is pretty sick of being asked, “What's it like to be a girl in a band?” (per “Sacred Trickster”) and would like, maybe, to be considered as an artist.

It's partly a generational thing. I'm a little younger than she is, but we both grew up in the patriarchy and mostly encountered gender as an external restriction.

As an aside, one of my proudest moments was when Lucas Jensen interviewed me about what it was like to be a freelance music writer, anonymously, and Robert Christgau wrote an elaborate critique of the piece that absolutely assumed I was a guy. If you're not on a date or getting married or booking reproductive care, whose business is it what gender you are?

There, that's a can of worms, isn't it?

Jonathan Shaw: Feminine isn't feminist. I haven't listened nearly closely enough to the record to hazard an opinion about that. More important, it seems to me the masculine must be in the feminine unconsciousness, and the other way around, too. Precisely because femininity has been used as a political weapon, it needs imagining in artistic spaces. Guess I also think those terms more discursively than otherwise: there are male authors who have demonstrated enormous facility with representing femininity. James, Joyce, Kleist, and so on. Gordon has always spoken and sung in ways that transcend a second-wave sort of feminine essence. “Shaking Hell,” “PCH,” the way she sings “I Wanna Be Your Dog.”

Jennifer Kelly: Sure, she has always been shape-shifter artistically.

The lyrics are super interesting, but almost obliterated by noise. I’m seeing a connection to our hyperconnected digital society where everything is said but it’s hard to listen and focus.

Bill Meyer: Concrete guy that I am, I’ve found myself wishing I had a lyric sheet even though her voice is typically the loudest instrument in the mix.

Andrew Forell: Yes, that sense of being subsumed in the white noise of (dis)information and opinion feels like the utopian ideal of democratizing access has become a cause and conduit of alienation in which the notion of authentic voices has been rendered moot. It feels integral to the album as a metaphor

Christian Carey: How much of the blurring of vocals (good lyrics — mind you) might involve Kim’s personal biography, I wonder? From her memoirs, we know how much she wished for a deflection of a number of things, most having to do with Thurston and the disbandment of SY.

Thurston was interviewed recently and said that he felt SY would regroup and be able to be professional about things. He remarked that it better be soon: SY at eighty wouldn’t be a good look!

Andrew Forell: And therein lies something essential about why that could never happen

Ian Mathers: I know I’m far in the minority here (and elsewhere) because I’ve just never found Sonic Youth that compelling, despite several attempts over the years to give them another chance. And for specifically finding Thurston Moore to be an annoying vocal presence (long before I knew anything about his personal life, for what it's worth). So, I’m in no hurry to see them reunite, although I do think it would be both funny and good if everyone except Moore got back together.

Having not kept up with Gordon much post-SY beyond reading and enjoying her book, I wasn’t sure what to expect from this record. After a couple of listens, I’m almost surprised how much I like it. Even though I’m lukewarm on SY’s music, she’s always been a commanding vocal presence and lyricist and that hasn’t changed here (I can echo all the praise for “I’m a Man,” and also “I was supposed to save you/but you got a job” is so bathetically funny) and I like the noisier, thornier backing she has here. I also think the parts where the record gets a bit more sparse (“Shelf Warmer”) or diffuse (“Psychic Orgasm”) still work. I've enjoyed seeing all the comparisons here, none of which I thought of myself and all of which makes sense to me. But the record that popped into my head as I listened was Dead Rider’s Chills on Glass. Similar beat focus, “thick”/distorted/noisy/smeared production, declamatory vocals. I like that record a lot, so it's not too surprising I'm digging this one.

Jennifer Kelly: I loved Sonic Youth but have zero appetite for the kind of nostalgia trip, just the hits reunion tour that getting back together would entail.

Jonathan Shaw: Yeah, no thanks to that.

RE Christian's comment: Not sure I see deflection so much as the impossibility of integration. We are all many, many selves, always have been. Digital communications interfaces and social media have just lifted it to another level of experience. Gordon sez, “I don't miss my mind.” Not so much a question of missing it in the emotional/longing sense, more so acknowledging that phrases like “my mind” have always been meaningless. Now we partition experience and identity into all of these different places, and we sign those pieces of ourselves over, to Zuck and the algorithms. We know it. We do it anyways, because it's the candy house, full of sweets and pleasures that aren't so good for us, but are really hard to resist. “Come on, sweets, take my hand...”

Bill Meyer: I would not mind hearing all of those SY songs I like again, can’t lie, although I don’t think that I’d spend Love Earth Tour prices to hear them. But given the water that has passed under the bridge personally, and the length of time since anyone in the band has collaborated creatively (as opposed to managing the ongoing business of Sonic Youth, which seems to be going pretty well), a SY reunion could only be a professionally presented piece of entertainment made by people who have agreed to put aside their personal differences and pause their artistic advancement in order to make some coin. There may be good reasons to prioritize finances. Maybe Thurston and/or Kim wants to make sure that they don’t show up on Coco’s front door, demanding to move their record or art collection into her basement, in their dotage. And Lee’s a man in his late 60s with progeny who are of an age to likely have substantial student loan debt. But The Community is just the kind of thing they’d have to pause. It feels like the work of someone who is still curious, questioning, commenting. It's not just trying to do the right commercial thing.

Justin Cober-Lake: I’m finding this one to be a sort of statement album. I’d stop short of calling it a concept album, but there seems to be a thematic center. I think a key element of the album is the way that it looks for... if not signal and noise, at least a sense of order and comprehensibility in a chaotic world. Gordon isn’t even passing judgment on the world — phones are bad, phones are good, phones make art, etc. But there’s a sense that our world is increasingly brutal, and we hear that not just in the guitars, but in the beats, and the production. “BYE BYE” really introduces the concept. Gordon’s leaving (and we can imagine this is autobiographical), but she’s organizing everything she needs for a new life. “Cigarettes for Keller” is a heartbreaking line, but she moves on, everything that makes up a life neatly ordered next to each other, iBook and medications in the same line. It reminds me of a Hemingway character locking into the moment to find some semblance of control in the chaos.

Getting back to gender, there’s a funny line at the end: one of the last things she packs is a vibrator. I'm not sure if we're to read this as a joke, a comment on the necessity of sexuality in a life full of transitory moments, as a foreshadowing of the concepts we’ve discussed, or something else. The next item (if it’s something different) is a teaser, which could be a hair care product or something sexual (playing off — or with — the vibrator). Everything's called into question: the seriousness of the track, the gender/sexuality ideas, what really matters in life. Modern gadgets, life-sustaining medicines, and sex toys all get equal rank. That tension really adds force to the song.

Coming out of “BYE BYE,” it's easy to see a disordered world that sounds extremely noisy, but still has elements we can comprehend within the noise. I don’t want to read the album reductively and I don't think it's all about this idea, but it's something that, early on in my listening, I find to be a compelling aspect of it.

#dusted magazine #listeningpost #kim gordon #the collective #jennifer kelly #jonathan shaw #bill meyer #andrew forell #bryon hayes #tim clarke #christian carey #ian mathers #justin cober-lake

[dustedmagazine]

Dust Volume 10, Number 1

Finnoguns Wake

Wow, it’s been 10 years since we started Dust, our monthly collection of short reviews. During that time, we’ve covered hundreds of records that might have otherwise slipped through the cracks — from obscure CD-Rs handed off at live shows, to long-lost reissues dug out of attics and basements, to the maniacally focused output of the micro-labels we love to even, occasionally, semi-major releases.  Our conclusion: It may be hard times for music criticism, especially the paid variety, but it’s an excellent era for listening to music.  Here’s what we’ve uncovered to kick off the next decade.  Contributors include Bill Meyer, Jennifer Kelly, Ian Mathers, Andrew Forell, Justin Cober-Lake, Bryon Hayes, Patrick Masterson, Alex Johnson and Christian Carey.

Dave Bayles Trio — Live At The Uptowner (Calligram)

Good things are happening around Milwaukee. That’s where Dave Bayles practices his crafts as a jazz drummer and educator (actually, he teaches in Kenosha). This recording documents his foray into band leadership, which was hosted by the Uptowner, a neighborhood tap that’s been serving drinks since the 1880s. The recorded evidence suggests that despite it being the kind of place where you can holler at the Packers on a screen, when the music’s playing, people listen. Bayle, trumpeter Russ Johnson and bassist Clay Schaub justify their attention throughout this collection of mostly original, bop-aligned themes, which they execute with a little early-Ornette flexibility and healthy servings of direct, swinging lyricism. Johnson in particular does yeoman’s work, drawing out nuanced, patient solos that are likely to induce you to forget to open your mouth, just like the audience on this entirely ingratiating live recording.

Bill Meyer

Cy Dune — Against Face (Lightning Studios)

Very late on Seth Olinsky (from Akron/Family)’s dance/noise/punk experiment, but holy wow, what a belching, squelching, head-whipping sharp turn it is. If Akron/Family took gentle folk songs right off the rails, Cy Dune starts in chaos and ends in angsty cyber-age freefall. The trip typically takes one or two minutes, though the unironically named “Don’t Waste My Time” extends for three. Within that time frame, bass note bobble, snares snap, guitars twist and Olinsky shouts in terse syncopation, breaking occasionally for non-Jude-like “na-na-na-nahs.” “Against Face” wallops hard and fast, pounding toms tethering wild squalls of guitar. “No fun, no fun, no fun,” howls Olinsky periodically, but it definitely is. Fun.

Jennifer Kelly

Dual Monitor — HARD19 (Hardline Sounds)

Say what you might about Rinse FM, the station’s leadership (read: they of the coffers) continues to do a service to the UK’s ecosystem of independent radio by way of keeping afloat other institutions. One such example was its buyout and relaunch of the old pirate station Kool FM; another was its unshuttering of beloved Bristol station SWU.FM last April. Part of the latter’s reinvigorated lineup is the duo of Fliss Mayo and Zebb Dempster, aka Dual Monitor, and their latest release caught my ear for its attention both to percussion amid propulsion and to its high-grade bass weight. “Level Up” might be the winner for me, but the pitch-black plunge of “Left/Right” and “Quattros Oxide” are grooves to behold, too. The airy D&B twist of “Switch It” is also unmissable, a lovely bit of work to close out the four-tracker. Good for a run of 200 from a label worth watching, it looks like you’re still not too late if you do a little running of your own to go grab it.

Patrick Masterson

Eluvium — (Whirring Marvels In) Consensus Reality (Temporary Residence Limited)

Matthew Cooper has made and released plenty of music since 2016’s False Readings On (much of it under the Eluvium name) but in some ways the compact, masterful (Whirring Marvels In) Consensus Reality feels like the first capital A Eluvium Album since that one. As with 2007’s Copia, it leans into the orchestral side of Cooper’s work (this time remotely collaborating with various musicians over the last couple of years), resulting in everything from the phantasmagorical choral/vocal work on “Void Manifest” and the dense arpeggios of “Vibration Consensus Reality (for Spectral Multiband Resonator)” to the solo piano miniature of “Clockwork Fables” and the whirling swells of the closing “Endless Flower.” At this point Cooper’s work is often too varied and colorful to be described as drone, and too active and involving to really be ambient; it’s just Eluvium music, and it’s wonderful to have more of it.

Ian Mathers

Finnoguns Wake —Stay Young EP (What’s Your Rupture)

Stay Young is a debut four-track EP from Australian songwriters Shogun and his mate Finn Berzin who rejoice in the name Finnoguns Wake. You’ll find no knotty linguistic experiments but for lovers of energetically melodic indie guitar bands, there are joys to be had. The pair, who share vocals, guitar and lyrics, meet somewhere between the concise attack of Shogun’s former band Royal Headache and the anthemic end of Britpop. The first three songs zip by with guitars abuzz, the rhythm section driving hard and the voices high in the mix. “Blue Sky” manages to feel satisfyingly loose atop its rigid drumbeat. “So Nice” reconfigures the riff of Husker Dü’s “Terms of Psychic Warfare” to good effect, with Berzin sounding tonally like young Dylan. “Lovers All” moves along like a rougher version of The Buzzcocks. The one misstep “Strawberry Avalanche” aims for Britpop grandeur with the misguided self-belief of late Oasis. Shogun takes his “melting ice cream” metaphors as seriously as Liam treats even his most absurd attempts to top big brother. Thing is you can picture the song working for an audience, so hats off. Stay Young is a promising introduction from a band that feels it like has more and better coming.

Andrew Forell

Lamin Fofana — Lamin Fofana and the Doudou Ndiaye Rose Family (Honest Jon’s)

New York-based producer, DJ and visual artist Lamin Fofana had a big 2023, with two releases on the famed Honest Jon’s imprint and a third for the illustrious Trilogy Tapes in addition to a Resident Advisor mix. That second Honest Jon’s album came in the form of this collaboration in early December with the Doudou Ndiaye Rose Family, an mbalax group of some notoriety in Senegal and descendents of the Dakar drummer, composer and band leader best known as master of the sabar drum family. It fits, though the exact nature of the collaboration is unclear — this is very much a percussion workout of the highest order with only a deft tinge of Fofana’s electronics providing light, cosmic buoyancy to the music, a quartet of meditations ranging between four and 12 minutes long. The most frenetic of them, at least for a spell, is “Bench Mi Mode III: Spectrum,” but even that one has its share of field recordings to lend a more immersive, consuming quality to the listen than pure rhythmic impulse. If you’re unfamiliar with any of the parties involved, you’ll thank yourself in short order for giving this a go.

Patrick Masterson

Fortunati Durutti Marinetti — Eight Waves In Search Of An Ocean (Quindi (ITA) / Soft Abuse (USA))

Dan Colussi’s latest release under the Fortunato Durutti Marinetti moniker, Eight Waves In Search Of An Ocean, is eminently listenable, engaging and, if paid proper attention, engrossing—although not always comfortably. His vocals never stray far from sprechgesang and the instrumentation tends towards warped mid-tempo. There are bright washes of keys; flute and string inflections; careful, elastic bass lines with steady, shoulder-danceable drum patterns. It’s easy to be lulled by the rosy, if somewhat baroque settings, until an ascendant burst of synthesizer or dramatic pause intrudes to break the spell. You may find yourself unsure, rewinding to find out what you might’ve just missed. In this way, the experience of the album can feel akin to a single, continuous performance with brief variations, rather than a straightforward collection of songs.

One such variation, adding perhaps the most friction to Eight Waves… is “Smash Your Head Against the Wall,” which, while not concussive, does make your ears perk up at its clawing guitar chords and the stark imagery that Colussi nearly spits out: “it’s a nest of vipers pissing on each other…and anyone else who’s around/would love to fuck you over if they can/and this community’s request/for the presumed benefit of all/is smash your head against the wall…a delta of corrosion/disorder/and decomposition.” I quote at some length, but there’s plenty more. Though a sonic departure from its surroundings — think Bill Callahan’s “Diamond Dancer” dropped into Destroyer’s Kaputt — “Smash Your Head…” is emblematic of a record that rewards the delayering effect of multiple listens.

Alex Johnson

Ghost Marrow — earth + death (The Garrote)

There is a patience to the songs on Aurielle Zeitler’s third record as Ghost Marrow, but it’s the patience of a predator stalking its prey. All seven songs here started as improvisations on the Juno-60 synthesizer, but by the time they’ve been arranged into these shapes (almost entirely by Zeitler, who adds effects and guitar as well as her voice) they feel focused and intent on the listener. The Bladerunner-esque sweep of “mother of the end” and the increasingly un-gentle blasts of static breaking into the title track both land somewhere between unsettling menace and a kind of holy severity. By the time the closing, ten-minute “microcosm” erupts into clouds of guitar and distant screaming, suddenly sounding a lot more like Sunn O)))’s Black One than the rest of the LP might make you expect, it’s clear that Ghost Marrow is intent on honoring both sides of her title.

Ian Mathers

Brian Harnetty — The Workbench (Winesap)

Composer Brian Harnetty has created memorable work by digging into cultural archives. Shawnee, Ohio (2019) uncovered layers of memory from Appalachia, while last year's Words and Silences drew on recordings of Thomas Merton for sustained contemplation. For his brief EP The Workbench, he takes a different approach, mining deeply personal moments for a individual revelation. He begins with items that his father had repaired — a watch, a radio — and adds in voicemail messages, all in conversation with an evocative quartet. Eventually he ends the piece with his father's breathing as he sleeps in hospice, a quiet outro that finds mournful but understated peace.

The 11-minute track moves so smoothly that singling out key moments almost misses the point; it's a single movement to honor a relationship while reflecting on the brevity of time and the artifacts that persist amid mortality. When a repaired music box overtakes the musicians for the final lift, it feels natural, because of course the reparations done in life will outshine our ability to articulate their meaning. Harnetty's compositions before that never falter. His use of bass clarinet (here played by Ford Fourqurean) provides the essential gravity. Violin and cello weave through the piece with his own piano lightening the composition as needed. A reworked instrumental track allows for a wordless exploration of the same topics. An accompanying video covers the workbench itself, the artifacts presented in themselves, a tangible and visual part of the legacy. It's a short statement from Harnetty but one that lasts.

Justin Cober-Lake

 Nailah Hunter — Lovegaze (Fat Possum)

Nailah Hunter plays lots of instruments on this lush and twilit debut full-length, but two define its sound. Her voice, to start, is cool and effortless and strong, prone to flowery embellishments and capable of soaring crescendos without strain. She might remind you of Sade, in the poised, unruffled quiet bits, but she can belt, too, filling cavernous sonic spaces with bright untethered flourishes. The other instrument is the harp, more common certainly in classical music but not as unusual as it once was in rock and soul. But unlike Joanna Newsom who laces her tunes with folk-echoing arpeggios or Mary Lattimore who finds a celestial drone, Hunter employs the harp to scatter pizzicato shards of crystal in velvety nocturnal textures. The harp litters her moody atmospheres with star light, cold, glimmering pinpoints of sound. It contrasts in a striking way with the warmth of her voice and the pulsing, irregular syncopations of dance-like drums. These are oddly shaped elements that ought not to fit as snugly or as wondrously as they do, but they do.

Jennifer Kelly

Ernesto Diaz Infante — Bats In The Lavender Sky (Ramble)

Bay Area guitarist Ernesto Diaz Infante has always been a restless sort. Nonetheless, this album feels like a bit of a curve ball, albeit a welcome one. The improviser ensconced himself in a San Francisco recording facility named Next Door To The Jefferson Airplane Studios, but did not take the trip you might expect given a choice like that. Instead of a west coast psychedelic vibe, he has gone natural, nocturnal and New Zealand-ish. Put another way, this album mines territory similar to Roy Montgomery’s mid- to late-1990s work, with a little bit of user-friendly Mego thrown in. Repetition leads to contemplation; this music won’t move you at bat velocity, but if you happen to be floating on a slow-moving air mattress while they fly overhead, it’d make just the right soundtrack.

Bill Meyer

Joy Orbison — “Flight FM” (XL)

flight fm by TOSS PORTAL

Getting married and having a kid really seems to have opened Peter O’Grady up over the past few years. After starting his own label in 2017, he came out with an album (2021’s Still Slipping, Vol. 1), has dropped a handful of singles exploring various strains of UK dance music, and even mined the archive of his glory days for a comp of loosies long thought lost or forgotten (last year’s Archive 09-10). Far from the reserved, elusive producer he broke so big with “Hyph Mngo” as, Joy O has instead blossomed into an approachable, seemingly well-adjusted guy who just wants you to enjoy music the way he does — and what better way to do that than with this heavyweight cruiser that rolls as deep as his best material from the SunkLo days. Concocted in a car on the way to a festival, it took some badgering from Four Tet (who has some unreleased work of his own to wrap up, while we’re on the subject) for him to finish it… but thank goodness he did. The best part about this is that we skipped the Aliasizm radio rip and the endless speculation on what it was called and got straight to the release. A simple, speaker-wrecking ode to the pirate station from which it takes its name, you couldn’t start 2024 (or 2012) any better. Variation on an oft-repeated refrain lately: It’s a shame Fact isn’t around to report on it.

Patrick Masterson

Matt Krefting — Finer Points (Open Mouth)

Finer Points by Matt Krefting

Students of the northeastern U.S. freak scene know Matt Krefting for his endeavors both written and aural. His critical ear has spilled ink across the pages of The Wire magazine and Byron Coley’s Bull Tongue Review, and his sonic exploits harken back to the turn of the millennium with the studied quietude of Son of Earth. These days, Krefting makes surprisingly musical constructions using cassette decks and other tape-adjacent curios, coaxing murky melodies from spools of ferric material. Finer Points comprises layers of dusky fuzz, sandblasted environments and warmly lit instrumental passages. A lonely organ features prominently across many tracks, its doleful moan warbling slightly as Krefting’s malfunctioning tape deck motors strain to maintain a constant speed. Standing out from the nocturnal scenery is “A Double Request,” in which multiple plucked string instruments coalesce into a swampy dirge. There’s a sense of evolution at play as the parts cycle through, forming melodies that shift and tumble before falling apart entirely. This is a common theme throughout Finer Points: Krefting subtly and gradually alters the scenery. The slow unfolding creates an intoxicating glow that permeates the entire experience.

Bryon Hayes

Thomas K. J. Mejer / Uneven Same — Saxophone Quartets 1 2 5 6 7 (Wide Ear)

Uneven Same – Saxophone Quartets by Thomas K.J. Mejer

If you’ve heard of Thomas Mejer, it’s most likely because he is a rare specialist in the contrabass saxophone. In that capacity, he’s contributed tonal heft and textural complexity to the music of Phill Niblock and Keefe Jackson. But for this album, which was mostly performed by the all-female saxophone quartet, Uneven Same, he applies a nuanced comprehension of the potentialities of other saxes founded upon the advances made by improvisers to composed music that operates that is carefully textured and glides more than it grooves. Manuela Villiger, Eva-Marta Karbacher, Vera Wahl and Silke Strahl realize his long, layered lines and carefully buffed sonorities with exquisite poise. Mejer also uses overdubbing to realize four more pieces, all part of a series entitled “Resonating Voids,” on his own. By turns rough, thick, and aquatic, its elemental earthiness balances Uneven Same’s more airborne performances.

Bill Meyer

Melted Men — Jaw Guzzi (Feeding Tube)

Melted Men are an enigma that no amount of online sleuthing can crack. The only information about them online is their Discogs page and a live show review from 1997. In that bizarre performance, Melted Men was a duo from Athens, Georgia. Apparently now, 25 years later, they’ve swollen their ranks, even roping in members from as far afield as continental Europe. With Jaw Guzzi, the anonymous outfit offers up a pair of side-long audio head trips. Warped, heat haze-distorted cassette detritus sidles up to blown out exotica and disjointed Martian funk beats. There’s a hefty dose of collage on display, with mutant vignettes that serve as rickety bridges between more tuneful passages. It’s these doses of song form that will extract bobbing heads and wobbly bottoms from the most adventurous listeners. Melted Men imagine a world where the jump cut jumble of Seymour Glass intersects the ethno-punk chaos of Sun City Girls and the junk shop proto-industrial bleat of early Wolf Eyes. It’s a world that this writer wouldn’t mind visiting frequently.     

(Note: Melted Men are such a mysterious bunch that they’ve asked Feeding Tube not to post any audio on Bandcamp or elsewhere on the internet.)

Bryon Hayes

Nehan — An Evening with Nehan (Drag City)

Nehan is all-star Japanese noise/drone/experimental ensemble led by Masaki Batoh and drawing members from Ghost, Acid Mothers Temple and the Silence. The disc in question presents two side-long improvisations which use as a starting point the 9hz brain wave emitted from a test subject. You can get a sense in the video above of how the experiment worked, as a dancer’s synaptic impulses feed into an elaborate synthesizer set up, turning whatever was in her head into long, pulsing drones. It’s a bit austere in its pure form, but the record elaborates, adding percussion, especially gongs and bells, and a wizened-kazoo-like wind instrument, something that might be a bagpipe and other sounds. It’s not entirely clear how much of what you hear comes from the brain waves and how much comes from the free interplay of the musicians, but maybe it doesn’t matter. The result is slow-moving and mysterious, with dramatic surges of drums and wandering threads of blown sound. The human brain is a notoriously mysterious organ but who’d have thought it could general all this instrumental turmoil? If you’d told me this music was sourced from sun storms or tidal currents or tectonic shifts, I’d have believed that, too.

Jennifer Kelly

Colin Newman and Malka Spiegal—Bastard (Swim ~)

Colin Newman’s Bastard created quite a stir in 1997 when first released. This nine-track, all-instrumental album, leaned heavily on a still mostly underground drum ‘n bass aesthetic and was a far cry from Wire’s terse, melodic outbursts. It also was Newman’s first project after Wire went on hiatus, billed as a solo effort, but actually a close collaboration with his partner Malka Spiegel. This expanded reissue gives Spiegel due credit and fills out the context with 12 additional contemporaneous tracks.

The original album still sounds fairly austere, with clean, clipped drum cadences, locked-tight guitar loops and abstract surges of synthesized sound. The amusingly named “Slowfast (falling down the stairs with a drumkit)” allows the use of distorted guitar, but only in quick, percussive blots. The guitar sound becomes an element of percussion, but not the important one—an antic skitter of drum machine dominates the cut. “Spiked” strips a funk riff down to cubist blocks, a bass sliding woozily between sharp-cut breakbeat drums. None of this is so surprising now, in the wake of techno, house and all its variants, but people weren’t expecting it, least of all from a post-punk progenitor, in 1997. The reissue adds a bunch of other tracks, many of which hew much closer to how you probably think of Wire. “Automation” adds a sinuous, down-in-the-mix vocal to its pop-locked rhythms. “Voice” bristles with guitar dissonance and bobs with dubby bass. “Tsunami” floats euphorically on sawed-down guitar feedback, a good bit like My Bloody Valentine but dancier. And “Cut the Slack” sounds like a Wire song, deadpan chants running into shouted aggressions and layers of guitar shimmering around undeniable hooks. The extra tracks make Bastard sound less like a 100% departure and more like a gradual evolution—and they are very much worth hearing all on their own.

Jennifer Kelly

Ethan Philion Quartet — Gnosis (Sunnyside)

Gnosis by Ethan Philion Quartet

Here’s a welcome surprise. As a rule, bebop-rooted jazz is not the place to look for excitement in 2023, but the rules change when Ethan Philion is on stage. On this record, his second as a leader, the Chicago-based bassist helms a quartet that combines high energy with rhythmic grace and a thorough commitment to the mechanics of the music being played. The latter point might not sound so thrilling, but it is key, since it results in performances that can be appreciated for their cohesion as well as their outward-bound vibe. Philion’s debut was a tribute to Charles Mingus that felt a little too polished; this time, the soloing by all parties (alto saxophonist Greg Ward, trumpeter Russ Johnson, drummer Dana Hall) evince both vigor and rigor.

Bill Meyer

Rick Reed — The Symmetry Of Telemetry (Elevator Bath / Sedimental)

The Symmetry of Telemetry by Rick Reed

The Symmetry Of Telemetry is Rick Reed’s pandemic album. Methodologically, it’s hard to say how much that matters, since the Austin-based electronic musician’s practice already involved patiently collecting and sifting through shortwave broadcasts and then combining them with performed electronics. But the slow-motion uneasiness of “Dysania,” the alternately abraded and bulked-up bumps that introduce “Leave A Light On For Tony,” and the disconsolate, fizzling tones that occupy most of “Space Age Radio Love Song” certainly feel like that time felt. But there’s more to this music than downer vibes. Reed knows how to layer and arrange sounds so that an apparently static passage yields event upon event anytime you decide to listen into his compacted constructions. He also knows how to make waiting pay off, and while it would be spoiling things to tell you what he does, suffice to say that if you listen, you’ll know it when it happens.

Bill Meyer

Jason Roebke Quartet — Four Spheres (Corbett Vs Dempsey)

Four Spheres by Jason Roebke

When bandleaders like Mike Reed, Jorrit Dijkstra and Jason Adasiewicz have needed a bassist who could toggle easily between swing and abstraction, they’ve called Jason Roebke. Such calls, along with everything else a person has to do to maintain a life, mean that years might pass between Roebke’s turns as a leader. But when he does, you can count on them to be deeply considered and not quite like anything else going around. This quartet applies his trademarked fluidity to investigations of the tension between fixed and changing elements. Cassette recordings of electronic noise and metronome beats form nodal points within these pieces around which Edward Wilkerson Jr’s reeds and Marcus Evans’ drums surge and churn in overtly expressive fashion while pianist Mabel Kwan and Roebke shift their weight between fixity and flow. The sound is occasionally reminiscent of the more skeptical, interrogative side of the AACM, and particularly Roscoe Mitchell, but Roebke’s points of inquiry are purely his own.

Bill Meyer

Ned Rothenberg — Crossings Four (Clean Feed)

Crossings Four by Ned Rothenberg

This is some understated, shape-shifting stuff. On clarinets and alto saxophone, Ned Rothenberg matches a tone that’ll make you want to let your ear linger to phrasing sufficiently fluid to motivate them to get up and follow the music. The other three musicians in his Crossings Four are Mary Halvorson on guitar, Sylvie Courvoisier on piano and Tomas Fujiwara on drums. They and Rothenberg are well-matched in attitude, since everyone has chops to flex, but no one flashes them gratuitously. Although this is the quartet’s first recording, there are decades of shared experience and a myriad of interconnections between its members. This enables them to realize a variety of improvisational approaches, from droll and grooving to fractured and abstract, with ease. The moments when a signature lick pops out tend to be lures, inviting the listener to follow them as they disappear into matrices of brisk, nuanced interaction.

Bill Meyer

San Kazakgascar — Too Many People (Lather)

Too Many People by San Kazakgascar

The album title augurs misanthropy, but that’s not borne out by the sounds. This Sacramento seven-piece spares little time for sonic bleakness, and the sounds they choose to make reveal a robust curiosity about the music of other places. Disciplined west coast psych guitars converge with skronk-willing, souk-conscious reeds upon rhythm frameworks that suggest someone’s spent some quality time listening to Gary Glitter, the Meters and wherever it is that Chris Forsyth bottles his choogling spirits. The lack of vocals keeps them from saying anything you really wish they’d take back, and the commitment to a steady groove makes this a record you’ll want to hear on the go, so cash in that download code! But there are also lulls founded upon dust-blown acoustic picking, making this just the record to play when your Firestick won’t load and you’re back to watching that all western, all the time station, but you can’t stand to hear that bullshit cowboy dialogue anymore. Yeah, make up a Western in your own mind where the land defenders win and finish the day celebrating to the tunes of “Crockett Creek.”

Bill Meyer

Secret Pyramid — A Vanishing Touch (BaDaBing!)

A Vanishing Touch by Secret Pyramid

Amir Abbey often writes songs, but on A Vanishing Touch, he composes ambient music inspired by J Dilla’s Donuts. The two seem like strange projects to associate, but it is more the inspiration of Dilla’s jabbing beats that Abbey reconceptualizes to enliven the texture. The best track, “Whim,” is built around soaring textures amid just such rhythmic punctuation. Abbey also moved away from the long gestation period afforded his songs to greater immediacy. There is an improvisatory sensibility here that, rather than moving Secret Pyramid sideways, seems like a useful development.

A Vanishing Touch includes a wide range of synth sounds and doesn’t stint on yearning dissonance. As the ambient revival long exceeds its initial incarnation, it is up to artists like Abbey to reconceive it. Mission accomplished.

Christian Carey

Setting — At The Black Mountain College Museum (www.settingsounds.com)

at Black Mountain College Museum by Setting

Setting is Jaimie Fennelly (Mind Over Mirrors), Nathan Bowles (Pelt, Black Twig Pickers) and Joe Westerlund (Megafaun, Califone), and At the Black Mountain College Museum is the trio’s ultra-quick follow-up to their debut album. Recorded at the end of the brief string of dates that celebrated its release, it dives deeper into their blend of propulsive grooves and not-too-plush, not too rough textures in almost aquatic fashion. This music moves a bit like an otter might, drifting when the current does the necessary work, and then pointing head down with a vigorous kick into deeper and more turbulent eddies. The three multi-instrumentalists stick together, sonically speaking, so that you’re less likely to tune into their interactions than into the place the sounds take you.

Bill Meyer

Strinning & Daisy — Castle And Sun (Veto)

Castle and Sun by Strinning & Daisy

In a sax and drums duo, there’s nowhere to hide. If a musician lacks ideas, stamina or reciprocity, a duo will lay their deficit out for all to hear. Alternately, if they have what it takes, tuned-in listeners will know. The latter scenario is the case here. Swiss tenor saxophonist Sebastian Strinning and Chicagoan drummer Tim Daisy have known each other since 2019, when the former resided for a spell in the latter’s city. But they don’t have a lengthy shared history, so there’s an element of trying things on for size in this session’s dynamic. Each musician draws upon his diverse approaches in a series of mix-and-match explorations as tumbling lines meet steaming forward energy, hushed, textured tones part a curtain of metal sounds, and animal utterances confront circuitous patterns. Captured with three-dimensional palpability and spaciousness by engineer Nick Broste, their exchanges connect with both mind and gut.

Bill Meyer

Tiger Valley—The Celebration (Hausu Mountain)

The Celebration by Tiger Village

Cleveland based producer Tim Thornton’s latest album Tiger Village album, The Celebration, collects ten cheerfully constructed pieces capturing the chaotic joy of domestic life and music making under a feline regime. Random cat energy infuses Thornton’s music; languid relaxation gives way to manic activity, while parcels of affection turning into aloof, spiky demands for attention proffered with claws and cries. Both “Cat’s Up” and “Cat Chew” celebrate the beasts’ mercurial nature. The former is an insinuating strut constantly distracted by random shiny objects, sudden noises and those odd moments of fixation upon unseen emanations. The latter slinks about, looking you in the eye as it knocks your stuff off the desk and tramps across your keyboard. Across the other eight tracks, Thornton juxtaposes eight-bit squiggles, snatches of ambient melody, treated samples of his daughter’s voice, techno beats and machine detritus into a sometimes delirious delight. Quite lovely, though prone to scratching.

Andrew Forell

True Green — My Lost Decade (Spacecase)

My Lost Decade by True Green

Nine clever, loosely strung songs from Minneapolis novelist Dan Hornsby buzz and rattle like lost cuts from Pavement or Silver Jews. “My Peccaddilloes” is especially slanted and more than a little disenchanted, a rambling picaresque of guitars, drums and wheedle-y vocals. The chorus, if that’s what you call it, hits hard, though, “It’s a dog eat dog/said the dog with the taste for dogs/every man for himself/said the man for himself.” The music dissolves in your ears, mess of things that sting and bash and hum, but the lyrics are sharp and packed with reference. “You’re a hopeless diamond, and it’s rough,” yowls Hornsby in his kicked dog tenor, and that about sums it up.

Jennifer Kelly

Michael Zerang & Tashi Dorji — Schiamachy (Feeding Tube)

Sciamachy by Michael Zerang & Tashi Dorji

Sciamachy is named for the practice of fake fighting; if you make it to theater school, you might be able to take a class in it. The cover image augurs metal, but this mock battle between Tashi Dorji and Michael Zerang is improvisational to the hilt. What else can one do when faced with an instrument that’s one of a kind? Zerang is generally known as a percussionist, but on this occasion, he played something called Queequeg’s Coffin, which was devised to be both instrument and prop for a puppet theater performance of Moby Dick. It is a coffin-like box with a crank on one side, somewhat like a hurdy-gurdy without keys. It’s not precise, but it kicks up a great, raw racket of higher and lower pitches that sound like someone sawing open said coffin. Dorji’s response is to lean into texture, complimenting the coffin’s abrasive protests with Sonic Youth-like chimes, chain-in-the-skillet clanks and blinking feedback cadences. This music will have you picking imaginary splinters out of your clothes for the next week; how many records do you own that can make a similar claim?

Bill Meyer

#dust #dusted magazine #dave bayles #bill meyer #cy dune #eluvium #ian mathers #finnoguns wake #andrew forell #ghost marrow #brian harnetty #justin cober-lake #nailah hunter #ernesto diaz infante #thomas k.j. mejer #melted men #bryon hayes #nehan #colin newman #malka spiegel #ethan philion #rick reed #jason roebke #ned rothenberg #San Kazakgascar #secret pyramid #setting #christian carey #sebastian strinning #tim daisy

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Sonic Youth — Live in Brooklyn 2011 (Silver Current)

Photo by Eric Baecht

Few people would have known it at the time, but in August 2011 at Brooklyn's Williamsburg Waterfront, Sonic Youth played its final significant show. After 30 years together, the band would split up that November. The concert has been available for a while, but this release of Live in Brooklyn 2011 gives it a proper mastering job, and the sound quality is exceptional. The setlist was an odd one, seemingly prompted by Steve Shelley's whim. Rather than pull from recent albums (though The Eternal was two years old at that point), the band dove deep into its catalog, going not only far into the past but looking for surprising picks. The show has the feel of an alternate-universe career overview, tying recent releases into the group's earliest days while being almost constantly surprising and (not surprising) consistently intense.

The show starts off with a pair of tracks from 1985's Bad Moon Rising, “Brave Men Run (In My Family)” and “Death Valley '69.” Nothing feels retro or nostalgic about the cuts. While Sonic Youth continued to innovate throughout their career, the early material stayed fresh and of a piece with later work. The opener sets the tone for the show and stands out as a highlight, the mix of a heavy riff, the shift toward noise rock, and Kim Gordon's vocals make it a strange sort of classic. The band transitions smoothly into “Death Valley '69,” almost as if the two songs were parts of a suite (they were released together on a single a couple decades ago). That “Brave Men” hadn't been performed live since the mid-'80s makes it all the more impressive as an opening number.

From there, the group never lets up. Sonic Youth doesn't necessarily sound tight, but they do sound inspired, whether inspired by the novelty of the song selection or the finality of the show or, most likely, they just reach the heights they often attained as a live act. The joy of the album doesn't like simply in the rarities. The band played “Drunken Butterfly” a couple hundred times over their career, but it hits just as hard here as always.

After that, the band does a couple encores, breaking out “Flower” (another of the five Bad Moon Rising songs) and “Sugar Kane” for the first one. The second encore has the weirdest song choice of the night, Thurston Moore's solo piece “Psychic Hearts.” It's an odd shift to a song that's not particularly overwhelming nor connected to anything else the band's doing (though it fits in fine). They finish the show with “Inhuman,” going all the way back to debut album Confusion Is Sex. The song disintegrates into noisy static as the band takes its final leave from the city it's been so long associated with. The wails and feedback suit the moment, as if nobody wants to leave. Moore says, “With the power of love, anything is possible,” and with that Sonic Youth is effectively gone.

The group did play more, ending their career with a festival in Brazil that fall. Fans have, accurately or not, considered this Brooklyn set to be the group's finale, and it's certainly a powerful one to go out on. Fans will consider the show essential for its historical significance and the quality of the setlist, but the album's energy pushes it beyond a completist live album, making Live in Brooklyn 2011 a wonderful cap to one of experimental rock's greatest discographies.

Justin Cober-Lake

#sonic youth #live in brooklyn 2011 #silver current #justin cober-lake #albumreview #dusted magazine #rock #noise #guitar #live #bad moon rising #finale #Youtube

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Listening Post:  John Coltrane/Eric Dolphy’s Evenings at the Village Gate

In 1961, John Coltrane was reaching a wider audience via his edited single version of the Sound of Music classic "My Favorite Things.”  He was also, although it seems trite to say given the trajectory of his career, in a state of transition. Moving away from his "sheets of sound" period to exploring modality, non-western scales and polyrhythms which allowed him to improvise more deeply within the constraints of more familiar Jazz tropes.

His personal and musical relationship with Eric Dolphy was an important catalyst for the development of his sound. Dolphy was an important presence on Coltrane's other key album from 1961, Africa/Brass and here officially joins the quartet on alto, bass clarinet and flute. Evenings at the Village Gate was recorded towards the end of a month-long residency with a core band of Coltrane, Dolphy, Jones, McCoy Tyner on piano and Reggie Workman on bass. The other musician featured here, on "Africa,” is bassist Art Davis.

The recording captures the band moving towards the more incandescent sound that made Live at the Village Vanguard, recorded just a few weeks later in November 1961, such a viscerally thrilling album. The hit "My Favorite Things" and traditional English folk tune "Greensleeves"  are extended into long trance-like vamps. Benny Carter's 1936 classic "When Lights Are Low" showcases Dolphy's bass clarinet and in the originals "Impressions" and particularly "Africa"  the quintet hit almost ecstatic grooves. Dolphy's solos push Coltrane further into the spiritual free jazz that so divided later audiences. Dolphy's flute on "My Favorite Things" and especially his clarinet on "When Lights Are Low" are extraordinary, particularly the clarity of his upper register.

The highlight for me is the 22 minute version of "Africa" that closes the set. The two basses, bowed and plucked, Tyner's chordal work and solo, the slow build from the bass solo where the music seems to meander before Jones' explosive solo heralds the return of Dolphy and Coltrane improvising together on the theme, spiralling up the register, contrasting Coltrane's long slurries with Dolphy's staccato bursts which lead to the thunderous conclusion. 

As an archivist, sudden discoveries in forgotten basement boxes never surprises and the excitement never gets old. The tapes of Evenings at the Village Gate were recently unearthed in the NY Public Library sound archive after having been lost, found and lost again. Recorded by the Village Gate's sound engineer Rich Alderson these tapes were not meant for commercial use but rather to test the room's sound and a new ribbon microphone. As Alderson says in his notes, this was the only time he made a live recording with a single mic and, yes, there have been grumblings from fans and critics about the sound quality and mix particularly the dominance of Elvin Jones' drums. For me, one the best things about this is that you hear how integral Jones is not just as a fulcrum for the other soloists but as an inventive polyrhythmic presence, playing within and around his bandmates. I know that many of the Dusted crew are Coltrane fans and would love to hear your takes on the music and whether the single mic recording affects your enjoyment in any way. 

Andrew Forell

Justin Cober-Lake: There's so much to get into here, but I'll respond to your most direct question. The single-mic recording doesn't affect my enjoyment at all. I understand (sort of) the complaints, but I think they overstate the problem. More to the point, when I hear an archival release, I really want to get something new out of it. That doesn't mean I want a bad recording, but there's not too much point in digging up yet-another-nearly-the-same show (and I have nearly unlimited patience for Coltrane releases) or outtakes that give the cuts the same basic idea but just don't do it as well. I was really looking forward to hearing Coltrane and Dolphy interact, and nothing here disappoints. Having Jones so dominant just means I get to hear and think more about the role he plays in this combo. It would sound better to have the other instruments a little more to the fore, but it's not a problem (and actually Tyner's the one I wish I could hear a little better).

I think your topic suggests ideas about what these sorts of recordings — when made publicly available — are for. Is it academic material (the way we might look at a writer's journals or correspondence)? Is it to get truly new and good music out there? Is it a commercial ploy? Is it a time capsule to get us in the moment? The best curating does at least three of those with the commercial aspect a hoped-for benefit. This one probably hits all four, but I suspect the recording pushes it a little more toward that first category.

Bill Meyer: I’m playing this for the first time as I type, and I’m only to track three, so my (ahem) impressions could not be fresher. 

First, I’ll say that, like Justin, I have a lot of time for Coltrane, and especially the quartet/quintet music from the Impulse years. The band’s on point, it sounds like Dolphy is sparking Coltrane, and Jones is firing up the whole band. Tyner’s low in the mix and Workman’s more felt than heard; the recording probably reflects what it was like to actually hear this band most nights, i.e. Jones and the horn(s) were overwhelming. 

How essential is it? If you’re a deep student of Coltrane, there are no inessential records, and the chance to hear him with Dolphy, fairly early on, should not be passed up. But if you’re big fan, not a scholar, then you need to get The Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings box and the 7-CD set, Live Trane: The European Tours, before you drop a penny on this album. And if you’re just curious, start with Impressions. This group is hardly under-documented. The sound quality, while tolerable, is compromised enough to make Evenings At The Village Gate less essential than everything I just mentioned. 

I’m only just now starting to play “Africa,” so I’ll check in again after I play that. 

“Africa” might be the best reason for a merely curious listener to get this album. It’s very exploratory, the bass conversation is almost casual (not a phrase I use much when discussing Coltrane), and they manage to tap into the piece’s inherent grandeur by the end. 

“Africa” is a great example of this band working out what they’re doing while they’re doing it. 

Andrew Forell: On Justin’s points about the function of archival releases, I’ve been going back and forth on the academic versus time capsule/good music uncovered question. There is a degree of cynicism and skepticism in these days of multidisc, anniversary box sets in arrays of tastefully colored vinyl which seemed designed for the super(liquid)fan and cater to a mix of nostalgia and fetish. Having said that specialist archival labels have done us a great service unearthing so much "lost" and under-represented music. On one hand I agree with your summation and to Bill’s point, yes this quintet has been pretty thoroughly documented and yes the Vanguard tapes would be the place to start. But purely as a fan I am more interested in live recordings than discs of out- and alternative takes. I’m thinking for example of the 1957 Monk/Coltrane at Carnegie Hall and Dolphy’s 1963 Illinois concert especially his solo rendition of “God Bless the Child," recordings that sat in archives for 48 and 36 years respectively.

By contrast, the other recent Coltrane excavation, Both Directions at Once is wonderful but I’m not listening to it as an academic exercise, taking notes and mulling over the different takes, interesting as they are. I approach Evenings as another opportunity to hear two great musicians, in a live setting, early on in their short partnership. As Justin says, this aspect doesn’t disappoint. I agree with Bill that the mix is close to what you would you hear in the room, the drums and horns to the fore. All this is a long way to a short answer. A moment in time, a band we’ll never experience in person and when all is said and done, 80 minutes of music I’d otherwise not hear.

Jonathan Shaw: As a relative newb to this music, I can't contribute cogently to discussions of this set's relative value. Most of the Coltrane I've listened to closely is from very late in his life, when he was playing wild and free--big fan of the set from Temple University in 1966 and the Live at the Village Vanguard Again! record from the same year. None of that is music I understand, but I feel it and respond to it strongly. The only Dolphy I've listened to closely is Out There. So I'll be the naif here.

I need to listen to these songs another few times before I can say anything about them as songs, but I really love the right-there-ness of the sound. I like being pushed around by the drums and squeezed between the horns (the first few minutes of "Greensleeves" are delightful in that respect). Maybe I'm lucky to come to the music with so little context. It's a thrill to hear the playing of these folks, about whom there is so much talk of collective genius. Perhaps because my ears are so raw to these sounds, I feel like that talk is being fleshed out for me.

Jim Marks: I think that this release has both academic and aesthetic (if that’s the right word) significance for Dolphy’s presence alone. I am more familiar with the original releases than the various re-releases from the period, but it’s my impression that there just isn’t that much Dolphy and Trane out there; for instance, I think Dolphy appears on just one cut of the Village Vanguard recordings (again, at least the original release). In particular, I’ve heard and loved various versions of “Favorite Things,” but this one seems unique for the six-plus-minute flute solo that opens the track. The solo is both brilliant in itself and creates a thrilling contrast with Coltrane when he comes in. This track alone is worth the price of admission for me.

Marc Medwin: I agree concerning Dolphy's importance to these performances, and while there is indeed plenty of Coltrane and Dolphy floating around (he took part in the Africa/Brass sessions that gave us both Africa and a big band version of "Greensleeves") his playing is really edgy here. Bill is right to point toward the sparks Dolphy's playing showers on the music. Yes, the flute on "My Favorite Things" is really stunning. He's all over the instrument, even more so than in those solos I've heard from the group's time in Europe.

Jon, I'd suggest that there's a strong link between the albums you mention and the Village Gate recordings we're discussing, a kind of continuum into which you're tapping when you describe the excitement generated by the playing. The musicians were as excited at the time as we are on hearing it all now! It was all new territory, the descriptors were in the process of forming, and while Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra and a small group of kindred spirits were already exploring the spaceways, they were marginalized. That may be a component of the case today, but it's tempered by a veneration unimaginable at the time. That's part of the reason Dolphy lived in apartments where the snow came through the walls. Coltrane had plenty to lose by alienating the critics, but ultimately, it did not stop his progress. These recordings mark an early stage of that halting but inexorable voyage. With the possible exception of OM, Coltrane's final work never abandoned the tonal and modal extremes at which he was grabbing in the spring and summer of 1961.

Jennifer Kelly: Like Jon, I'm not well enough versed in this stuff to put it context or even really offer an opinion. I'm enjoying it a lot, and I, also, like the roughness and liveness of the mix with the foregrounded drums. But I think mostly what I am drawn to is the idea that this show happened in 1961, the year I was born, and that these sounds were lost for decades, and now you can hear them again, not just the music but the room tone, the people applauding, the shuffling of feet etc. from people who are almost all probably dead now.  It seems incredibly moving, and I am also taken by the part that the library took in this, in conserving this stuff and forgetting it had it and then rediscovering it.  In this age of online everything-available-all-the-time, that seems remarkable to me, and proves that libraries are so crucial to civilization now and always, even as they're under threat.  

Marc Medwin: A real time machine, isn't it? We are fortunate that we have these documents at all, and yes, the story of the tapes resurfacing is a compelling one! To your observations, audience reaction seems pretty enthusiastic to music that would eventually be dubbed anti-jazz by prominent members of the critical establishment!

Bill Meyer: I can imagine this music being more sympathetically received by audiences experiencing its intensity, whereas critics might have fretted because it represented a paradigm shift away from bebop models, so they had to decide if it was jazz or not.

It is amusing, given the knowledge we have of what Coltrane would be playing in five years, that this music is where a lot of critics drew a line in the sane and said, "this is antijazz."

Jon Shaw: Yes, Bill, that seems bonkers to me. I am particularly moved by the minutes in that 1966 set at Temple when Coltrane abandons his horn altogether and starts beating his chest and humming and grunting. Wonder what the chin-stroking jazz authorities made of that.

Given my points of reference, this set sounds so much more musically conventional. But the emotional force of the music is still immediate, viscerally present. Beautifully so.

Andrew Forell: In retrospect, all those arguments seem kind of crazy. Yesterday’s heresies become tomorrow’s orthodoxies but what we’re left with is, as Jonathan says, the visceral beauty of Coltrane’s striving for transcendence and his interplay with Dolphy’s extraordinary talent which we hear here working as a catalyst for Coltrane. As Marc and Jen note the audience is there with them..

Come Shepp, Sanders & Rashid Ali, the inquisitors’ fulminations only increased and you think what weren’t you hearing?

Marc Medwin: I was just listening to a Jaimie Branch interview where she's talking about her visual art, about throwing down a lot of material and finding the forms within it. I think that might be another throughline in Coltrane's and certainly Dolphy's work, a gradual discarding of traditional forms and poossibly structures based on what I hate to call intuition, because it diminishes the process.

Then, I was thinking again about our discussion of the critics. I see their role, or their assessment of that role, as a kind of investment without reward, and yeah, it does seem bonkers now! Bill Dixon once talked about how the writers might spend considerable time and expend commensurate energy learning to pick out "I Got Rhythm" on the piano, and they're suddenly confronted with... well, the sounds we're discussing! What would you do, or have done, in that situation? It's really easy for me, like shooting fish in the proverbial barrel, to disparage critical efforts of the time, especially in light of the ideas and philosophies Branch and so many others are at liberty and encouraged to play and express now, but I wonder how I would have reacted, what my biases and predilections would have involved at that pivotal moment.

Ian Mathers: The points about historical reception are really interesting, I think. There's a famous (in Canada!) bunch of Canadian painters called the Group of Seven, hugely influential on Canadian art in the 20th century and still well known today. In all the major museums, reproductions everywhere, etc. They were largely landscape painters, and while I think most of the work is beautiful, it's so culturally prominent that it runs the risk of seeming boring or staid. I literally grew up with it being around! So it was a delightful shock to read a group biography of them (Ross King's Defiant Spirits: The Modernist Revolution of the Group of Seven, if anyone is hankering for some CanCon) and see from contemporary reviews that people were so shocked and appalled by the vividness of their colour palettes and other aesthetic choices that they were practically called anti-art at the time. It's not surprising to me that this music would both attract similar furore at the time and, from the vantage point of a new listener in 2022 who loves A Love Supreme and some of the other obvious works but hasn't delved particularly far into Dolphy, Coltrane live, or this era in jazz in general (that would be me), be heard and felt as great, exciting, but not exactly formally radical stuff.

I don't think I would have noticed much about the recording quality were people not talking about it. "My Favorite Things" seems to have the overall volume down a bit, but still seemed pretty clear to me (agree with the assessments above; Coltrane, Dolphy, and Jones very forward, others further back although even when less prominent I find myself 'following' Tyner's work through these tracks more often than not), and starting with "When Lights Are Low" that seems to be corrected. It actually sounds pretty great to me! Although I absolutely defer to Bill's recommendations for better starting places for serious investigations, I can also say as a casual but interested fan who tends to quail in the face of box sets and other similarly lengthy efforts this feels from my relatively ignorant vantage like a perfectly nice place to start. I like Justin's rubric for why these releases might come about (or be valuable), but if I hadn't heard any Coltrane and you just gave me this one, my unnuanced perspective would just be something like "wow, this is great!" But maybe I'm underthinking it. And having that reaction doesn't mean that others aren't right to recommend better/more edifying entry points, or that having that reaction shouldn't lead one to educate oneself.

Jonathan Shaw: Maybe it's a lucky thing for me to be so poorly versed in Coltrane's music, not just in the sense of having listened to precious little of it. I am even less familiar with the catalog of music criticism, which in jazz seems to me voluminous, archival in scale. But even with music I'm extensively engaged with — historically, critically — I try to understand it and also to feel it. I can't imagine not feeling what's exciting in this music, energizing and challenging in equal measure.

Like Marc, I don't want to recursively impugn the critical writing of folks working in very different contexts. But I don't like it when the thinking gets in the way of the music's emotional and aesthetic force, which to me feels unmistakably powerful here.

Ian Mathers: Yeah, maybe that's a good distinction to draw; I can imagine in a different time and place feeling like the music here is more radical or challenging than it sounds to us now. But I can't quite imagine not getting a visceral thrill out of it.

Marc Medwin: And doesn't this contradiction get at the essence of what we're trying to do? Those of us who've chosen to write about music are absolutely stuck grasping at the ephemeral in whatever way we're able! How do we balance the ordering of considerations and explanations in unfolding sentences with the  spontaneity of action and reaction that made us pick up a pen in the first place?! We add and subtract layers of whatever that alchemical intersection of meaning and energy involves that hits so hard and compels us to write! In fact, the more time I'm spending with these snapshots of summer 1961, the more I decamp from my own philosophizing about critical relativity to sit beside Ian. The stuff is powerful and original, and the fact that so much of what we're hearing now is a direct result of those modal explorations and harmonically inventive interventions says that the dissenting voices were fundamentally, if understandably, wrong! It could be that the musician can be inclusive in a way the writer simply can't.

I'm listening to "Africa" again, which is for me the disc's biggest single revelation in that it's the only concert version we have, so far as I know. How exciting is that Jones solo, and how much does it say about his art and the group's collective art?!! He starts out in this kind of "Latin" groove with layers of swing and syncopation over it, he goes into a melodic/motivic thing like you'd eventually hear Ginger Baker doing on Toad, and then eases back into the groove, all (if no editing has occured) in about two minutes. He's got the music's history summed up in the time it would take somebody to get through a proper hello!! Took me longer to scribble about it than for him to play it!!

Justin Cober-Lake: I'm not sure if Marc is making me want to put down or pick up a pen, but he's definitely making me want to listen to "Africa" again. (Not that I needed much encouragement.)

Andrew Forell: Africa/Brass was the first jazz album I bought. Coming from post-punk, I found it immediately the most exciting and challenging music I’d heard and it set me off on my exploration of Coltrane, Dolphy, Coleman and their contemporaries. This version of “Africa” is a highlight for me also for all the reasons Marc, Ian and Jon have talked about.

Bill Meyer: Yeah, "Africa" is quite the jam! 

A thought about critical perspective — our discussion has gotten me thinking, not for the first time, about the impacts of measures upon experience, and the limits of critical thinking when I’m also an avid listener. If I’m listening for “the best” Coltrane/Dolphy, in terms of sound quality or most focused performances,  this album isn’t it. But if I’m looking for excitement, this album has loads of it, and that might be enhanced by the drums-forward mix. 

#listening post #dusted magazine #john coltrane #eric dolphy evenings at the village gate #jazz #reissuemmc #mccoy tyner #reggie workman #derek taylor #art davis #new york public library #andrew forell #justin cober-lake #bill meyer #africa #jonathan shaw #jim marks #mark medwin #jennifer kelly #ian mathers #Youtube

[dustedmagazine]

Dust, Volume 9, Number 11, Part 2

Eli Winter

We only get ten audio clips per post now, so we've split the Dust in two. Check out the early alphabet entries here.

Colin Miller — Haw Creek (Ruination)

Colin Miller’s songs come from far away, from a physical, temporal, emotional remove, like bits of colored memory or the line from a book that meant something once, but you now can’t quote exactly. The North Carolina-based multi-instrumentalist and home taper is connected to the Wednesday orbit, having played on and produced MJ Lenderman albums and produced Wednesday’s I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone. His own music is softer and more indefinite, but very fine. It is less like listening and more like being enveloped by a cloud. “I Don’t Love You Anymore,” for instance, has all the elements of an indie rocker: strummy guitars, punched out drums, and a catchy, tuneful melodic line. And yet it drifts in through the window like a warm breeze, gently stirring your attention as it moves the air around you. “Paper Roof,” too, buzzes with feedback and blistered bass tones, but very softly. What you notice, first, is the high yearning singing, shaded by the fuzz of lo-fi production. You wonder what these songs would sound like with clearer, more commercially viable sonics, whether they’d land with more impact or less. But here they are, gently pushed forward for you to appreciate best after repeat plays, and they are really quite good.

Jennifer Kelly

Niecy Blues — Exit Simulation (Kranky)

The reason the ol’ “this band is like x meets y” trope is both kind of reviled and yet impossible to wipe out is that as a formulation it’s both weak (unless you’re the person the comparison occurred to, chances are good you won’t hear it) and strong (how else to try and describe something as elusive as music than with something so slippery and paradoxical?). It might be better to imagine a kind of topographical map. Then you could try and chart the impossible hinterlands out where the territories of (say) Grouper, trip hop, and Kelela might converge, and somewhere around there you might find Niecy Blues’ first record. Like all such comparisons though, the intent is not to suggest Exit Simulation is mere pastiche or reducible to parts found elsewhere, but to indicate the heady and diverse contemporaries it shares an atmosphere with. Whether it’s the extended reverie of “U Care,” the hazy float of “Violently Rooted,” or the droning shuffle of “The Architect” the result is a debut of striking assurance and depth. Comparisons fail at some point; you really just have to give it a listen yourself and figure out your own map, like Blues has.

Ian Mathers

Bänz Öster and the Rainmakers — Gratitude (self-released)

This quartet consisting of Europeans Bänz Öster on double bass and Javier Vercher on sax and South Africans Afrika Mkhize on piano and Ayanda Sikade on drums delivers spiritual jazz rooted in the gentler music of Coltrane and Ra. The six long (eight to 12 minute) originals, well-recorded before an appreciative but fairly restrained audience, are uplifting and replete with sophisticated soloing, especially by Mkhize. These guys don’t break any new ground, but the grooves are infectious, and what is described in the liner notes as the “high-voltage connection between North and South” contributes to the good vibes.

Jim Marks

Pile — Hot Air Balloon EP (Exploding in Sound)

In case February’s All Fiction didn’t make it clear, the handful of songs from the same sessions that comprise the Hot Air Balloon EP should drive the point home that Pile is a band at the height of its powers. Recent live shows incorporating a few of these songs into setlists only go to further serve that the distinction between what made the cut for their latest full-length and what got left behind is virtually indistinguishable; some of Hot Air Balloon’s fun is in finding where these songs would’ve best worked their way into All Fiction’s track list. The knotty time signature changes and unexpected rock moments still weave and burst forth, and Rick Maguire’s addictive, meandering pathos carries moments you’ll be left thinking about long after it’s over; me personally, I can’t unlodge the descending chorus of “Exits Blocked” or the very specific line on “The Birds Attacked My Hot Air Balloon” where he sings, “I could see your house from here if I’d bothered to look.” It’s these stories in miniature, like Fitzgerald in The Crack-Up or Felix Feneon, that leave their mark most potently — if, of course, you’re inclined to that sort of thing.

Patrick Masterson

Taiko Saito /Michael Griener /Jan Order — WALD (Trouble In The East)

Free improvisation may be a creative space where an instrument’s baggage can be dropped, but this is easier for some than others. Given its limited and highly distinct sound, the vibraphone’s particularly hard to untether from expectation, but Taiko Saito gives it her best shot on WALD. The Sapporo-born, Berlin-based mallet-wielder, who has worked at length with Silke Eberhard and Satoko Fujii, does not totally play against expectation, but she does keep her instrument’s stylistic mandates at bay by shifting between time and no time, swing and no swing, and steering a middle course between the big wall of sound you might expect from, say, Jason Adasiewicz, and the bebop-derived suppression of resonance pursued by an earlier resonance. This CD documents her first encounter with bassist Jan Roder and drummer Michael Griener, who constitute Die Enttäuschung’s rhythm section, and that association will tell you more about their commitment to the moment than what they actually play. Each of the album’s four spontaneously realized tracks is a world unto itself in which chaos is courted, swing cultivated, or slipstreams ridden. These are woods to get lost in.

Bill Meyer

Skyphone — Oscilla (Lost Tribe Sound)

Lost Tribe Sound has been on something of a jag this year with their Maps to Where the Poison Grows series. This new installment by Danish trio Skyphone is an absorbing and succinct 32 minutes in which attention to detail, texture and instrumental interplay account for a lot. Ideas are introduced then carried through to their natural culmination, with each of the three players sounding present and laser-focused in their creative process. Live drum kit, bass, synths, piano, acoustic guitar, and a whole host of other instruments blown and struck are used to bring vivid color. Think early Mum, Opsvik & Jennings, and Kiln. Six of the seven songs here feel just right (centrepiece “Arbonaught” is especially good). It’s only on final track “Will to Change” that the introduction of heavily effected vocals knock things out of balance and breaks the spell. Elsewhere this is masterful and hypnotic stuff.

Tim Clarke

Stella Siebert/Nat Baldwin — 1.30.22 (Notice Recordings)

This live improvisation set from Stella Siebert — mixer, turntable, objects — and Nat Baldwin playing double bass celebrates special techniques and advanced sampling with chaotic jubilation. Sections are taken out of order (we never get to hear the opener), sculpting the set from free play to intentionality. The recording opens with abrupt samples alongside repeated string pressure. “4” has a bit too much piercing sine tone for my taste, but especially diverting is “9” which features crackling vinyl and ostinatos right at the edge between pitch and noise. The concluding track, “2,” is a 23-minute-long session in which Baldwin plays extended techniques against ostinato samples and handmade percussion. The previous material coalesces into an edgy opus that remains varied and imaginative throughout.

Christian Carey

Tar Of — Confidence Freaks Me Out (sound as language)

Tar Of makes music in brief, bubbly spritzes. Heavy on the keyboards, with giddy abstracted vocal parts, these cuts dance across your field of vision and disappear from view. “Ey Vaay,” the single, adds a bobbling saxophone line to the mix, caroming in from the margins as a dizzy pulse of “ba-ba-ba-ba-bas” push the track forward. “Cardinal” clicks and rattles and swells with wordless counterparts. You’ll need to take a breath when it clatters to a halt. The title track is somewhat more song-shaped, with its stabbing snare beat and woozy woodwinds; it seems to be taking on conventional verse-chorus structure when it breaks apart into vibrating, shimmering atoms. The band is a duo from Brooklyn, made up of two oddball artists—Ariyan Basu and Ramin Rahni—but the tracks have the ecstatic density of large ensemble baroque pop. More is always going on than you can really absorb, and you don’t get a lot of time to get acclimated. Blink and these tracks are over. So, don’t.

Jennifer Kelly

Håvard Wiik / Tim Daisy — Slight Return (Relay)

When pandemic protections canceled all the gigs, Tim Daisy proved particularly resourceful. He turned to musicians like Ikue Mori and Vasco Trilla to respond remotely to his drumming, recorded either before or during lockdown, and realized some intriguing music that demonstrated how improvisation is not just an aesthetic stance, but a way to address life problems. But when the shots came out and the numbers went down, he returned to stages and studios, and his relish at being able to tune into an old friend is evident throughout Slight Return. The album’s name acknowledges that Daisy and Berlin-based pianist Håvard Wiik have been together before; ten years ago, to be precise. There’s a charge to this reconnection that affirms the drummer’s excitement at being able to make new music with old acquaintances once more. It sparks a restless vibe, as the two musicians shift fluidly from restrained exploration to unbridled, jointly generated fracas.

Bill Meyer

Eli Winter — A Day Behind the Deadline (Three Lobed)

Guitarist Eli Winter's latest release continues a changing path in his musical career. His early work (meaning “from four years ago”) worked through a blend of Pauline Oliveros theory and Jack Rose solo playing. He's been steadily expanding his sound since then, working with other like-minded artists to produce music that applies the same sensibility to a bigger palette. A Day Behind the Deadline gives listeners a run-down on this movement, collecting five live tracks from fall 2019 through this spring. Winter's typical intricacy in composition now brings in drummer Tyler Damon and pedal steel guitarist Sam Wagster. The collection mostly moves away from Winter's roots aside from the closing solo acoustic “The Time to Come.” The trio tend to stretch out into odd takes on rock or even Americana (though that has more to do with the pedal steel sound that with the actual song structures). A Day Behind doesn't settle as a proper album (and isn't intended to), even if it does cohere. Instead, it plays like a photo album: here's Winter in transition from his acoustic roots to something else. He comes across as restless, looking for something new, and this release fills the gap while he finds that next thing he's looking for.

Justin Cober-Lake

99Letters — Zigoku (Phantom Limb)

Osaka producer Takahiro Kinoshita AKA 99Letters returns with a new collection of industrial techno built from unrecognizable samples of traditional Japanese music. The word Zigoku evokes “Jigoku” the Japanese Buddhist hell and whilst this album is not as dark sounding as its predecessor Makafushigi, Kinoshita says its main theme is death and the afterlife. At times you recognize the tropes of the early 1980s when elements of industrial music crossed over into early electronic dance music often with global world influences, think 23 Skidoo and Clock DVA. Occasionally the cadences of Japanese music appear, a ghostly presence of traditional, folkloric myths. But in the main, Zigoku exists in its own hermeneutic world interrogating both its sources and its environment. The contrast between modernity and tradition gives Kinoshita’s music a particular tension that is constantly building as he probes cultural and philosophic cracks, seeking to capture those small wavering shafts of hope.

Andrew Forell

#dust #dusted magazine #collin miller #jennifer kelly #niecey blues #ian mathers #Bänz Öster and the Rainmakers #jim marks #pile #patrick masterson #Taiko Saito #bill meyer #skyphone #tim clarke #tar of #Håvard Wiik #eli winter #justin cober-lake #99letters #andrew forell #stella siebert #nat baldwin #christian carey

[dustedmagazine]

Dust Volume 9, Number 11, Part 1

Niecey Blues

Where did the year go?  Seems like only a week or two ago, we were scraping together a list of albums we had somehow missed out on in 2022.  Now we’re about to do it again, I suppose, and the number of misses seems to grow larger every year.  Still, we’re still shoveling away at what 2023 has brought so far—nouveau shoegaze and Vangelis synths, Michigan rap and free-improvised vibraphone.  Check out this month’s Dust, the next to last for 2023, for music you might have overlooked.  Contributors include Jennifer Kelly, Bryon Hayes, Ian Mathers, Bill Meyer, Andrew Forell, Ray Garraty, Justin Cober-Lake, Alex Johnson, Jim Marks, Christian Carey, Patrick Masterson and Tim Clarke. 

Like last month, we'll be doing this in two parts, here's the second one.

Bedroom Eyes — Turned Away (Ala Carte)

Bedroom Eyes, from Boston, balance the churn and drift of shoegaze. This fourth LP (the last was in 2019) floats cool, slow-moving melodies over rackety barrages of feedbacked guitars and drums. Whether cuts like “Around” are still or in furious motion is an open question. It depends on where you focus. The title track manifests itself out of the slow buzz of feedback, bits of singing, guitar and percussion taking form out of a vibrating soup. It sounds, to me, like Simply Saucer or maybe the Telescopes, submerged by fuzz, suggested rather than stated. “Brood” runs harder, the guitar notes bending with volume like MBV’s did, but the singing remains untouched and serene. If it’s calm on the surface, that’s because Bedroom Eyes is paddling furiously underneath.

Jennifer Kelly

Cherry Cheeks — CCLPII (Total Punk)

Cherry Cheeks, from Portland, Oregon, crank a wired, anxiety-ridden garage punk, the short, sharp shock of guitar stabs running through nattering bass lines and the tremulous whinge of keyboard sounds. This second LP captures their rattled energy with more force and clarity than the debut. You can hear the negative space between bursts of aggression. And yet, the sound is much the same, an aura of dread punched up until it seems to dance. “Switch” is maybe the best cut here. It cuts and jabs in antic motion, organ dopplering off from a sing-along chorus. “Explode” is nearly as pop-slanted, hopping up and down on speed, but catchy. Cuts like “Data” and “Ad Shark” make fewer concessions to anthemic-ness, but prickle and clamor with antsy sarcasm. The future is bleak, but maybe kind of fun?

Jennifer Kelly

Buck Curran — The Long Distance (Obsolete Recordings)

Buck Curran is so interconnected with the guitar, it’s easy to forget that he plays other instruments. The Long Distance shows off his skill as a synthesist. Sweeping, Vangelis-like melodies are the focus of these poignant hymns, which rest upon a foundation of sizzling analog modulation. Emotions run deep on these recordings. Leveraging reminiscence as his muse, Curran called to mind familial and foundational memories, channeling them into these moving passages. Particularly effective is “Morning Song with Lucia,” on which he adds a lovely guitar melody inspired by his daughter. The pieces are relatively short, but Curran beefs up the length of the album by offering alternate versions of some tracks. Each take offers a unique emotional angle, and the subtleties evoke an echo-like effect. The Long Distance is a surprisingly pleasant shift in oeuvre from this talented instrumentalist.  

Bryon Hayes

Great Lake Swimmers — Uncertain Country (Pheromone Recordings)

It is a very white Canadian thing to wonder whether our regional equivalent of Americana should be called Canadiana or just folk (or maybe folk rock? indie folk?). Regardless of our typical dithering over local identity, Tony Dekker’s Great Lake Swimmers have been a mainstay and exemplar of the form for 20 years now. They’d be forgiven for resting on their laurels (or around here… pinecones?) but the restless, quietly gorgeous Uncertain Country doesn’t take anything for granted. Whether adding choral vocals on the graceful “Moonlight, Stay Above” or whipping up a surprisingly dense churn on the title track, the band’s eighth album is a showcase of what they do well. The effect is perhaps most powerful on songs like “Riverine” and “Swimming Like Flying” that feel equally at home in the concert hall or sung en masse around a campfire.

Ian Mathers

The Invisible Hands—The Big Minute (Abduction)

The Big Minute, the third official release by the Invisible Hands, comes a full eight years after its predecessor. Yeah, that is one big minute. Blame it on COVID, a revolving drummer’s chair, and the fact that Alan Bishop, the one American in this Cairo-based band, has a lot of other irons in the fire. The LP’s crisp, slightly trippy sound, and wide-open but particular repertoire establishes the Invisible Hands as the biggest fish in a very small pond; can you name any other Egyptian psychedelic garage bands from with a thing for 50-year-old soundtracks? I thought not. While Bishop’s aesthetic clearly points the way, this is a band. For every one of his signature moves, there’s also a moment when it’s Cherif El Masri’s encyclopedic guitar licks, Ayawasqa’s scrappy Arabic singing, and Adham Zidan’s arrangements and production that sells the song. If you have read this far, yeah, you should give it a minute. 

Bill Meyer

The Inward Circles — Before We Lie Down in Darkness (Corbel Stone Press)

Scottish composer Richard Skelton’s previous work as The Inward Circles involves subjecting clean recordings of strings to all nature of electronic and physical destruction to portray decay and environmental collapse. On his first album in six years, Skelton manipulates a six-second fragment of Baroque recorder music taken from the run-out groove of a battered 50-year-old vinyl recording. From this already degraded source he builds haunted soundscapes that to tap into something primordial and timeless. To call them drones does a disservice to the depth of nuance and detail in Skelton’s music. He captures something elemental within layers of sound built like geological strata trapping a record of growth and death, of destruction and recovery. Before We Lie Down in Darkness is a powerfully evocative elegy to the earth and warning to its inhabitants.

Andrew Forell

Lando Bando — Family Business (The Hip Hop Lab Records)

The Hip Hop Lab’s CEO Lando Bando brought together Michigan rappers close to his studio for this tape. Family Business showcases the state of things in Michigan. That state is not great, by the way, but it’s not bad either. Quite a lot of clumsy rapping on here, and a few cuts should have been left out. Still, it shows that all three ShittyBoyz members are in excellent shape, and Lando deserves our highest appreciation for scoring not one but two Rio da Yung Og’s verses. The highlight here is “Dirty Pop,” an unexpected collaboration between Rio and StanWill on a Danny G beat.

Ray Garraty

Lau Nau – Aphrilis (Beacon Sound/Fonal)

Finnish composer Lau Nau (also known as Laura Naukkarinen) tends to make slow-moving music, but, this year at least, she makes it fast. Aphrilis marks her second release of the year, following spring's 5 x 4. She spent years developing that release, focusing on equipment (Buchla 200 modular synthesizer) and time-signature (5/4). With Aphrilis, she returns to a meditation on time and place (something her past field recordings have captured so well) through mostly acoustic instrumentation. The album opens with “April,” as both instruments and vocals suggest the opportunities of that month's bright beginnings. The mood continues into “Kielet on viritetty tuuleen,” with Hermanni Yli-Tepsa's violin providing the linear guide through the accessible yet intricate composition. The album builds off these initial expressions, settling into a sense of home that remains expansive, the unusual instrumentation — including celesta and jouhikko among other unnamed “various instruments” — maintaining a very specific sound. Múm's Samuli Kosminen produces, and the fit makes sense even as Lau Nau captures a melodic ambience in a specific setting, adding flow while mixing synthetic and acoustic sounds. The album closes with “Seitsemäs taivas,” which might mean “seventh heaven” but sounds more like the start of autumn, tracing an emotional arc throughout Aphrilis. The belief in hope lingers, the brightness reshaped into an iterative composition that finally yields to something colder but never foreboding.

Justin Cober-Lake

MJ Lenderman — And the Wind (Live and Loose!) (Anti- )

Not exactly starched and buttoned-up to begin with, Jake “MJ” Lenderman and Co. come out even more ragged and rangy on the new live album And The Wind (Live and Loose!). The 15 tracks, recorded at gigs in Chicago and Los Angeles, are drawn almost exclusively from last year’s Boat Songs and 2021’s Ghost of Your Guitar Solo, and aren’t so much reimagined in front of their audiences as revved up and deepened. A few telling moments: Lenderman’s voice finds a lower pit of wistfulness in the sighing line “I know why we get so fucked up/I do” from “TLC Cagematch”; “Knockin” – in its third recorded iteration – gets an extra few roaring seconds and snarling decibels added to its big, heart-on-sleeve conclusion; the heavy drum fills and pugilistic blasts of guitar that end “SUV” veer closer to chaos. The band’s showcase, though, comes near the end on an extended jam of “You Are Every Girl To Me,” where the players, led by the points of light spinning off of Xandy Chelmis’ pedal steel and shredding lead guitarist Jon Samuels, rip out any remaining seams before easing back down for Lenderman to make introductions. And if you haven’t met them yet, And The Wind is a good place to start.

Alex Johnson

Mac J – I  Shoulda Been Dropped This (TrueStoryEnt)

Mac J’s been lazy lately. His recent tapes sound as if he’s only put one third of his talent in his music. I  Shoulda Been Dropped This, sadly, is no exception. He’s desperately trying to make his sound more mainstream and less street. Instead of crazy punchlines, witticisms and gritty reality, we get banalities and half-assed street ballads with Mac J on Auto-Tune almost on every song. It’s a wonder how “Engine Ina Trunk,” his track with another California resident Philthy Rich, even made it to this tape. It’s the old good rapping-his-ass-off Mac J, hungry for rhymes and punching you in the guts with every line. Except for this song, he shouldn’t been dropped this. 

Ray Garraty

#dust #dusted magazine #bedroom eyes #jennifer kelly #cherry cheeks #great lakes swimmers #ian mathers #the invisible hands #bill meyer #the inward circles #andrew forell #lando bando #ray garraty #lau nau #justin cober-lake #mj lenderman #alex johnson #mac j

[dustedmagazine]

Susan Alcorn — CANTO (Relative Pitch)

Susan Alcorn's interests range far. She began, as many pedal steel guitar players do, in country bands, playing the instrument like you might expect, but she soon traveled far from Texas, exploring jazz and classical music as well as some world influences. It's a heady approach that's produced a couple decades of compelling and distinct music, but she still might be restless. New album CANTO comes from Chile, where Alcorn assembled her ensemble Septeto del Sur for a new blend of sounds crossing generations, continents and politics. The record's loveliness has an edge to it, producing a memorable new take on still-vibrant traditions.

The initial interaction, that between pedal steel and violin, makes sense, at least in theory. Both instruments (as long as you call one of them a fiddle) have long partnered in country music, but nothing here sounds like a honky tonk. Alcorn and violinist Danka Villanueva blend their sounds as if they've made a career of it. The feeling begins with the somber “Suite Para Todos,” in what feels like a controlled composition breaking into a freer section of invitation before regaining its composure (in both senses).

Much of the rest of the album belongs to the three-part “Canto,” a distinctly political suite that draws on chants from the Pinochet era. Alcorn and the septet oscillate between morning for the lost (the “disappeared”) and finding anger in the situation. These are folk musicians more interested in bending their tradition than in reinscribing it; the nueva canción sound comes in and out of focus but its revolutionary spirit guides the entire section.

“Mercedes Sosa” sounds more folk-based. Alcorn primarily provides the textures for her bandmates to play over, offering a change of tone from her own solo version for 2000's Uma. After the challenges of “Canto,” the shift brightens the album while incorporating elegaic moments into the piece. Claudio "Pajaro" Araya turns loose on the cuatro to release some of the tension in a flurry. Alcorn's own playing as long been subsumed into the larger endeavor, making the experience transporting, far less about the blend of musical cultures than about the straightforward immersion into a time and place.

The record closes with an unplanned rendition of “El Derecho de Vivir en Paz,” featuring bassist Amanda Irarrazabal on vocals and something approaching rock guitar (the quena does not approach rock flute, and that's not a complaint). The sonics turn surprisingly heavy, and the anti-Vietnam War song reminds us that resistance continues. Alcorn's latest release hits clear political beats, but it does so with an artistry driven more by curiosity and warmth than by polemic, making CANTO a beautiful and personal meeting of musics and cultures.

Justin Cober-Lake

#susan alcorn #canto #relative pitch #justin cober-lake #albumreview #dusted magazine #jazz #Septeto del Sur #pedal steel

[dustedmagazine]

Listening Post: Souled American

Souled American arose in the context of the roots-influenced alternative rock scene of the mid to late 1980s that included “cowpunk” bands such as Rank and File, Green on Red’s acid country and the more refined sound of the Jayhawks. This nascent Americana movement built on the tradition of Dylan and the Band etc. and fed into the No Depression scene associated with Uncle Tupelo in the 1990s.

The first Souled American release, Fe (1988), is in this larger tradition—kind of. “Magic Bullets,” “Make Me Laugh,” and “Going Home,” in particular, have a fairly conventional country rock sound, with rattling drums, twangy guitar, and heartfelt nasal singing, and “She Broke My Heart,” is all weepy country. Some of the other tunes, though, point in a different direction. “Notes Campfire” sets the mood with acoustic strums and a classic country set-up (“I heard about your love/so you’re alone today”) but soon becomes unintelligible (“Slavic notes campfire”?) and introduces odd harmonies somewhere between the Byrds and the Holy Modal Rounders. The distinctive elements of the band sonically begin with the bass of Joe Adducci, which is up front in the mix, shows the influence of his time playing reggae, and is unique in the genre. Equally important are the restrained percussion of Jamie Barnard, the atmospheric playing of guitarist Scott Tuma (who has maintained a solo career), and the voices of Adducci and guitarist Chris Grigoroff.

Everything comes together on Flubber (1989), which starts off with a suite of five tunes on side one that are, for me, 15 of the best minutes of music in the genre in any period. If you’re looking for an entry point with SA, this is it. The blend of burbling bass, acoustic strums, keening electric accents, and atmospheric harmonica is full of emotion and mystery. The sound is simple but layered, making the whole so much more than the parts. The harmonica serves, not to punctuate the vocals, as in Dylan, but to fill the space often filled by accordion, fiddle, and keyboards (e.g., “Wind to Dry”). The lyrics don’t really make sense, but the atmosphere that they create perfectly matches the sound. Characters emerge, such as the lonely woman at a bar in “Mar’Boro Man,” and images such as the canvas punching bag in “All Good Things,” while “Drop in the Basket” hints at an America coming apart at the seams (“this church is on fire/the sirens scream . . . searching every alley for patches for holes”). The other tunes are less immediately compelling but equally rewarding as an early example of slowcore. On “You and You Alone,” “Over the Hill,” and “Zillion,” the band slows to a crawl and the percussion becomes vestigial, pointing forward to the space that has since been inhabited by artists ranging from Will Oldham to SUSS. Flubber creates something new out of well-worn parts, a kind of Old Weird Americana that is neither ironic, overly earnest, nor beholden to the rock tradition. The reissue well includes the mission statement (originally only available on cassette) “Marleyphine Hank” — i.e., the band is made up of equal portions of Bob Marley (that bass), morphine (the slow tempos), and Hank Williams (of course).

Around the Horn (1990) includes tracks every bit as strong as those on Flubber and Fe — the title track, “Second of All,” “In the Mud,” and an inspired take on Little Feat’s “Six Feet of Snow” — and continues the move toward slowcore country, especially on the epic “Rise Above It.” It also represents a major inflection point. The three subsequent releases (which were only available in the U.S. as European imports) double down on the slowcore approach (facilitated by Barnard’s departure in 1991). Sonny (1992) consists mainly of covers of country and traditional songs and instrumentals that are a lot like those on previous records. It’s pleasant enough, but the bass has receded into the background, the harmonicas are rarely in evidence, and there’s a sense that the band was running out of ideas. Frozen (1994) and Notes Campfire (1996) both consist of originals played at the characteristic molasses tempo. There are some great songs, especially “Before Tonight” and “Heyday,” but, at the time, there was simply no market for this kind of music, and the band fell largely silent. Even diehard fans may find these releases challenging, and the place to start for newcomers remains the three remarkable records released from 1988 to 1990.

So, I’m wondering how those who were there at the time think these songs have aged (I think they hold up really well) and how they strike those who are hearing them for the first time.

Jim Marks

Fe by Souled American

Bill Meyer:  I first heard Souled American around the time of Flubber. I had people telling me how wonderful they were, and when I listened at the time, I didn't hear it at all. The music sounded kind of cartoony to me. I decided to take the albums in sequence, and I am currently halfway through. I no longer hear the vocals as caricatures. They seem like a natural synthesis of the group's interests and aptitudes.  And the arrangements, which I once merely registered as kind of annoying, now sound highly idiosyncratic. I gather that the bassist, Joe Adducci, played in ska bands. Instead of toning down his assertive rhythm plus counterpoint approach to suit country-rock convention, the playing jams his style into the tunes. I haven't decided whether I like it any more, but I get how singular it is in a way that I didn't 30-odd years ago. So, I guess that listening to this music again is acqauinting me with evidence of how I've changed as a listener.

Justin Cober-Lake:  I'm one of those hearing them for the first time, and I'm drawn to the early albums (probably Fe the most) for the same reason I'm drawn to artists like the Band. The music slips between time periods, between genres, between whatever else. If you'd told me that Fe was recorded 20 years earlier, I'd have believed you. It's a very earnest approach to a certain sort of country rock that came before, and I can even hear some inflections of cosmic country. I don't think Souled American fits the alt-country narrative very well at all, beyond the fact that everyone probably listened to Gram Parsons.

The "slowcore approach" that Jim mentioned definitely sets them apart from their alt-country cousins, and it feels like an element of their music that does slot into the early '90s more so than their instrumentation or influences. By the end of the discography, it begins to feel predictable -- it's hard to think, "What *is* this?" after six albums -- but until then it's very striking, and gives the first few albums a very distinctive flavor. One of the connections I wonder about is how this music connects to the current wave of ambient country (or similarly named music). We're hearing more and more music that uses pedal steel and other country instruments for non-traditional music. I'm thinking of acts like SUSS or Luke Schneider's various projects. I'm not sure there's a throughline at all here, but that gets me back to my first point about what attracts me to this music. It sort of fits into a whole bunch of places without really having a proper home.

Flubber by Souled American

Christian Carey: Timing is so important in the record industry. A band can make great music that would have gained wider currency if only they had released it when the Zeitgeist was in their favor. I think this is the case with Souled American. Imagine if the band’s first album had been released in 1996, the date of their last LP, Notes Campfire. Souled American might have fit in well in the No Depression era. Instead, they struggled with labels and sales and, perhaps inevitably, stopped releasing records. As they matured, so did Chris Grigoroff’s vocals; the earlier releases have twang and warble that are a bit too on the nose. So too did the band’s sound, moving from more straightforward production to experiments one might consider proto Wilco. Fe morphs their sound in this direction, and the songs themselves are more experimental in construction. Notes Campfire has a gloomily valedictory quality. My understanding is that Souled American still plays the occasional gig. It would be nice to see what they would do in the studio today.

Jennifer Kelly:  I remember reviewing a really lovely Scott Tuma solo album for Dusted during the Otis years, and it looks like we did a couple of others as well. 

This is the paragraph that addresses what has Scott been up to since Souled American.  

It’s been roughly a decade since Scott Tuma played guitar in Souled American, the cultish alt.Americana outfit whose unstrung country blues inspired, among other things, Camden Joy’s “Fifty Posters About Souled American” project (and a cameo in Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City). Since then, Tuma has contributed to the ambient explorations of the Boxhead Ensemble and, with members of Zelienople, to Good Stuff House. He has also released four solo albums that warp familiar, organic sounds into strange dream-like shapes.

Bill Meyer:  As far as I know, he still lives in Chicago, but I haven't seen Tuma in years. He has continued to make albums, and discogs says that a cassette came out on Emmett Kelley's label, Haha, last year. I've heard a lot of them, and while each has its own character, they're all loose, slow, and more inclined to communicate via tone than words. While there was a time in the early aughts when you could see him reasonably often, he performed out significantly less in the years before the pandemic.

Jim Marks:  Yes I gave Tuma's records short shrift in the intro. They're uniformly excellent, taking the slowcore in another direction, and I've actually listened to them more over the years than the Souled American records.

Justin Cober-Lake:  Now I'm detouring into Tuma's discography, and he does something quite different. It's still in some sort of Americana-based slowcore whatever, but it doesn't sound like Souled American. I don't want to dwell on the band's decline or dissolution, but is there any connection between his changing sound and the end of Souled American. The band runs out of either steam or ideas for its last couple records, but Tuma hadn't. "Untitled 2" on The River 1 2 3 4 beautifully develops the broader aesthetic, with both a classic loveliness and innate weirdness that could have continued to drive the band (which I realize had been broken up for seven years at this point).

Sonny by Souled American

Bill Meyer:  I’m only up to Sonny, which I’ve just heard for the first time ever, so my thoughts my change as I play through the final two. But on Sonny, what stands out about Tuma’s playing is the extent to which it doesn’t sound like him as I got to know him later on; instead, he plays what the music requires in order for it to be Souled American Music. This feels like the point where they drew their line vs. the rest of the world. We’re going to play so slow, our drummer quits on us. We’re going to make an album of classic country songs, and make them all sound just like us. They really double down on slow tempos and a style of singing that emphasizes emotional and locational signifiers (quavers, elongations, that rural drawl), but seems to drain them of emotion, and locates them in a place that probably doesn’t exist beyond the four walls of their rehearsal room. They seem very determined to be themselves, for better or worse pursuing some ideal form of Souled Americanness.

I should clarify, the drummer left after this record was done. At the time that record came out, their manager had a form letter responding to all Souled American queries, and in it he said that the drummer quit because he got married. Interestingly, the letter says that it took eight months to record Sonny; apparently, these guys were slow in more ways than one.

And as I s-l-o-w-l-y drawn to the conclusion of album number five, Frozen, the Tuma solo connection starts to materialize. With its more drawn-out tempos drawing everything within gravitational reach towards a strange state, this is the first record to sound anything like solo Tuma, albeit fuller and more polished than anything he did on his own. Chris Grigoroff’s singing sounds less engaged than ever with country-rock convention, and more like this one weird guy from the country singing. He sounds more emotionally invested in these songs than he did in the covers on

Sonny

, which reinforces my notion that Sonny is the record where they decided to show the world, "this is how it must be done," and they used those songs to do it. 

I think this might be the record I like the most out of the five that I’ve heard.

Notes Campfire by Souled American

Jim Marks:  Nice to see the later Souled American records getting some love. They were ignored or scorned at the time (I remember a particularly scathing review of Notes in the Austin Chronicle) despite having, among other charms, great accessible tunes like "Heyday" and "Before Tonight." Bill has it exactly right: this is uncompromising outsider music.

Jennifer Kelly:  I am belatedly getting into all this.  Have to say that I failed to make much of a connection with Fe, but I am liking Flubber a lot better, especially the parts where the country blues haze parts and you get some soul-ish vamps as on "True Swamp"  and "Cupa Cowfee."  

At its best, this stuff is very trance-y and transcendental, but sounds deeply rural, which makes me wonder how these city boys came to this type of music.  Also, it's reminding me of some of the weirder backwoods psych we have around here, like Sunburned and Tower Recordings and MV and EE.  Is there a line of influence there?  

Am I right that these are just straight reissues--no extra tracks and so forth? About to tackle Around the Bend, more later.

Bill Meyer:  I have never heard of a band claiming Souled American as an influence. My recollection is that in the 1990s they had a critical buzz. I believe that Mike Krassner of Boxhead Ensemble was a fan, and this influenced the decision to recruit Tuma into Boxhead in the late 1990s.

Bryon Hayes:  I'm also late to the party with respect to Souled American proper.  My induction into their orbit was via the series of releases that Scott Tuma recorded with members of Zelienople.  Jenny's comment about trance-y and transcendental really applies to those records, but I also definitely hear it in the latter Souled American releases, especially Notes Campfire.  It's my favorite of the lot; the unhurried tempos and melancholic atmospheres really resonate with me.

I'm wondering if the connection to the northeastern US backwoods psych scene has to do with the band's affiliation with Zelienople. Even though they were also from Chicago, that band seemed heavily aligned with that psychedelic folk scene. I know that Time-Lag released the first Good Stuff House recordings.  That project included Tuma alongside Mike Weis and Matt Christensen from Zelienople.  I'm unclear whether any of the other Souled American band members were aligned with that other band, however.

Jim Marks:  Just for the record, "Tall Boy Blues," "True Swamp Too," "Torch Singer," and "Marleyphine Hank" did not appear on the original vinyl releases but were cassette- and CD-only tracks. The only thing missing from the reissue that I know of is a (fairly straight) cover of a Kris Kristofferson song that appeared on an early 2000s tribute to Kristofferson.

Around the Horn by Souled American

Chris Liberato:  Something clicked for me in the last couple of weeks and I've been enjoying the heck out these records! I haven't digested them all yet, but Fe, Flubber, Frozen and Notes Campfire have all been doing it for me. Flubber is the only one that I was familiar with prior. I bought a used copy in the early aughts (at Twisted Village, rest in peace), but I couldn't get into it at the time and ended up letting it go. Like Bill, I remember being turned off by the vocals. Now I'm hearing shades of Curt Kirkwood from the Meat Puppets, Will Oldham and a little bit of Jay Farrar in the vocals -- all folks whose voices I like a lot, and who I was familiar with long before I heard Souled American. I don't know what my problem was back then.

I'd like to stay on the Meat Puppets comparison for a second because they're the band that Souled American might remind me of the most. Not in their choice of tempos, of course, but in many of the ways we've already touched on: the prominent, burpy bass (flubbery is actually is a  great word to describe it's sound); the spacey, interweaving guitar lines; the cryptic and occasionally profound lyrics. Both bands have this way of blending (many of the same) genres to create something not easily classifiable. And they take a similarly unselfconscious approach to performance, especially in the vocal department. I poked around to see if the Meat Puppets comparison was a common one, but only found a couple mentions. One was in a recent Raven Sings The Blues feature with Eric Johnson of the Fruit Bats where he described Frozen as sounding like Meat Puppet's Up on the Sun but with the tape slowed WAY down." I think that's a pretty accurate description, and one that could be applied to many moments in their catalog.

Jennifer Kelly:  Huh, Meat Puppets, good call, though I think of them as more rock and less Americana.  

I've been listening to the live Strapping Fieldhands from the early to mid-1990s lately and hearing some commonality there as well.  Also very weird and kind of offputting vocals.  

#dusted magazine #listening post #souled american #jim marks #justin cober-lake #bill meyer #christian carey #bryon hayes #chris liberato #scott tuma #zelienople #meat puppets

[dustedmagazine]

Dusted’s Opinionated, Non-Consensus Guide to the 1990s

The Fatima Mansions

The 1990s. Some of us lived through them. A few formed our musical selves during this pivotal decade. We watched hip hop emerge and swell to vast commercial proportions. We wondered what indie meant…and if it meant anything at all. We pondered whether lo-fi was charming, or just made it harder to hear the flaws. And mostly we listened to records that moved us, a few of which turn up on the decade-defining consensus lists, but most of which don’t. Here are a few albums that made us who we are. We chose one each and refused to put them in numerical order (they’re alphabetical by artist). Feel free to add your own in the comments. Everybody’s 1990s were different, after all.

Contributors include Tim Clarke, Jennifer Kelly, Andrew Forell, Bryon Hayes, Christian Carey, Bill Meyer, Jonathan Shaw, Ian Mathers and Justin Cober-Lake.

Bark Psychosis — Hex (Circa/Caroline)

Perhaps most famous for prompting music writer Simon Reynolds to coin the term “post rock,” Hex by Bark Psychosis still sounds oddly timeless — and certainly unlike many bands who would come to be described by the phrase. While legions of post-rock bands would emerge during the late 1990s and early 2000s with a lamentable dependence on dramatic shifts in dynamics, Bark Psychosis used rock instrumentation in more subtle and unique ways. Hex has more in common with bands such as Talk Talk and The Blue Nile, who prized atmosphere and texture over more direct songcraft. As a result, the album’s seven tracks take a long time to go nowhere, elegantly prowling around in the shadows like a stray cat. While Graham Sutton is far from a conventional singer, his disaffected vocals sound right at home in these ink-black, urban expanses. “Absent Friend” is perhaps the album’s most dub-influenced track, dappled with melodica and pinned to terra firma by a stubbornly simplistic bassline. “Fingerspit” is an eerie jazz nightmare, as if the players in some subterranean club have forgotten to play their instruments, so instead resort to hammering away at a single chord. The band’s commitment to maintaining a desolate tone makes the moments of levity all the more gorgeous, such as the woodwind textures on “A Street Scene” and “Eyes and Smiles.” The magnificent instrumental closer, “Pendulum Man,” eventually delivers some lasting reprieve from the gloom.

Tim Clarke  

The Bevis Frond — Son of Walter (Flydaddy/Reissued on Light in the Attic)

Son Of Walter by Bevis Frond

Already a decade into his run as the Bevis Frond, Nick Salomon pulled back from the full-band, studio-produced aesthetic that culminated in New River Head. He recorded Son of Walter by himself, at home, but “bedroom pop” this is not. It sprawls. It rears. It rages. It surges in inexorable waves on the strength of spiralling guitar solos and delicate, folk-derived melodies. From the opening blare of fuzz in “Plastic Elvis,” through the wistful jangle of “Goodnight from the Band,” I love every song on this album. Sure there are highlights, the blistered, caterwauling romance of “Red Hair,” the Neil-Young-into-Jimi fireblast of “Barking or False Point Blues,” the lilting, surprisingly earwormy chorus of “Raining on TV,” but it’s really all good. As a young mom in the late 1990s, I found solace in spidery “Forgiven” about a love sanded down by life (“She’s always…exhausted”). The tune is worn down to a thread but still lovely, and it leads right into the black hole swirl of “All Hope Is Going Without You.” Spare beauty and psychedelic overload, cheek by jowl and wonderful.

Jennifer Kelly

 The Fatima Mansions — Valhalla Avenue (Kitchenware)

On The Fatima Mansions’ 1992 album Valhalla Avenue, songwriter Cathal Coughlan (who passed this last May), sets his sights on corruption, religious extremism and human stupidity like Flann O’Brien’s furious younger brother. Moving between a Scott Walker croon and the coruscating intensity of a barroom preacher with Ministry on the jukebox, Coughlan and his bandmates create moments of poetic beauty (“North Atlantic Wind,” “Purple Window”) and maelstroms of indignant chaos (“1000%,” “Go Home Bible Mike). The fierce irreverence of their musical juxtapositions — lounge, industrial, sampling — and their no-fucks-given attitude remains singular today and Coughlin’s intense romanticism, mordant wit, political satire and apocalyptic imagery marks him as one of great lyricists of his time. Valhalla Avenue spent a week at the low end of British album charts, was not released in America and made nary a dent in Australia. Thanks to an Irish workmate in Germany who ceremoniously presented me a cassette of their early singles “Only Losers Take the Bus” and “Blues for Ceausescu”, Valhalla Avenue is still on regular rotation round here.

Andrew Forell  

  Flying Saucer Attack — Further (Domino / Drag City)  

Flying Saucer Attack was the flagship band of that other 1990s Bristol scene, the one that didn’t revolve around trip hop.  David Pearce and his friends favored a blend of coruscating noise, delicate drones, and airy folk over downtempo hip hop beats. With its DIY aesthetic, FSA championed home recording and a “less is more” attitude to music-making, paralleling that of contemporary acts such as Windy & Carl.  Further was the band’s sophomore release and stripped away much of the razor wire-laced bombast of its debut.  FSA, which at the time was a loose collective centered around Pearce and then-girlfriend Rachel Brook, began to incorporate more acoustic guitar into their songs, and took a measured approach to noise and feedback.  Pearce allowed his deep and resonant voice to drift above the misty haze of the music; Brook uncharacteristically emits rays of vocal sunshine on “Still Point”.  The resulting album is one of raw grace, a careful balancing act between tranquility and chaos.  Further is as bleary and beautiful as its cover art, and it stood out elegantly amidst the various frayed threads of 1990s underground music.

Bryon Hayes 

John Hiatt — Walk On (Capitol)

John Hiatt’s 1995 recording Walk On is an under sung masterpiece. Two collaborators that he would continue to keep in his band, until they were purloined for more lucrative gigs, multi-instrumentalist David Immerglück and bassist Davey Farragher, join drummer Michael Urbano and several backing vocalists, Bonnie Raitt noteworthy among them, to support Hiatt and supply versatile arrangements. “Cry Love,” “You Must Go,” and the title track provide a kick-off of catchy singles. Deeper in the release, Raitt and Hiatt duet on “I Can’t Wait,” a song that, if there were any justice, would have charted higher. Hiatt is prescient about the endless investigations and rise of militia groups during the second term of the Clinton administration in “Shredding the Document” “Native Son,” and “Wrote it Down and Burned It.” A hidden track hearkens back to the height of CD distribution. 

Christian Carey

 Peter Jefferies — The Last Great Challenge In A Dull World (Xpressway/Ajax/De Stijl)

In retrospect, the musicians who joined forces to form the Xpressway collective can be recognized as aesthetic game-changers. Not only did they unleash the forces of sonic resistance in their native New Zealand, raising clouds of gilded splinters as they pushed against the grain; they issued a permission-granting challenge to every subsequent wave of refuseniks determined to freely fuse noise, rock, and anything else at hand. But their success was by no means a given when Peter Jefferies made The Last Great Challenge In A Dull World on borrowed gear in a drafty old house on the edge of a container port at the end of the southern winter of 1989. At the time, the Xpressway crew were just the losers who were left behind when Flying Nun Records chased the brass ring north. Jefferies, like Alastair Galbraith, the Dead C, Peter Gutteridge, David Mitchell and the Terminals, had given Flying Nun some great music, and subsequently found himself ignored. A gifted multi-instrumentalist, singer, and sound recorder, he became the scene’s four-track documentarian, and he called on key associates to help make what he then felt might be his last testament. On Last Great Challenge he synthesized Cale-derived balladry, early Ubu rock, and post-This Heat sound manipulation into a singular statement of intent and reproach so acute that it, and everyone associated with it, could not be ignored. The album, which has been issued by three different labels, is currently out of print, but not that hard to find. It remains a stern condemnation of every lazy record out there that can’t be bothered to reach past the sky.

Bill Meyer  

 Nausea — Extinction (Profane Existence)

More and more, metal is moving out of its subgenre-specific silos and beyond its backward-gazing obsessions with hidebound traditions. But from its start, crust was a hybrid form, combining the politically motivated anti-aesthetic of anarcho-punk with metal’s swaggering muscle. It makes some sense, then, that this influential American crust record emerged from the Lower East Side, where hardcore punk was already cross-pollinating with metal; see Cause for Alarm (1986), the second LP by Agnostic Front, a band dominated by Roger Miret, then husband of Nausea’s singer Amy Miret, nee Keim. By the time Nausea made Extinction, its only LP, Al Long had joined the band, filling out the dual-vocal, female-male attack in a nod to Crass. And while “punk” usually follows the word crust in discussions of the style, Extinction is crucially informed by metal: “Butchers” owes much to Motörhead; “Clutches” rumbles like early Saint Vitus; the opening minutes of “Blackened Dove” could be from a Witchfinder General record. For this reviewer, “Inherit the Wasteland” is the key song, full of dystopian dread, replete with an enormous breakdown section and Vic Venom’s enthusiastic shredding. It’s an unhappy, unstoppable blast. Other metal and metal-adjacent sub-sub- and microgenres had formed by 1990: goregrind was already a thing, and the Slap a Ham crew was busily birthing powerviolence. Bandana thrash was just over the horizon. But few of those modish musical notions have had the substance (grimy, grotty and grave as it might be) and staying power of crust. Exhibit A: Extinction. It still stinks up the joint.

Jonathan Shaw

 Readymade — The Dramatic Balanced By (No Records)

By 1997 shoegaze had ebbed back significantly from whatever high tide mark it had attained, and nobody was particularly looking towards Vancouver for it, if they were looking at all. And yet out of what sounds like a combo of ennui, political unrest, movies (particularly, from the cover on down, Mean Streets), “taking speed in Germany,” drum machines, insomnia, rain, power grids, airports, four-track recorders, windows, and urban sprawl, enigmatic trio Readymade created one of the great lost epics of the era and genre. They didn’t stop here, absorbing members of the sadly even more obscure Pipedream and producing two excellent, gleaming and ambiguous records in the next decade, but only on The Dramatic Balanced By was their rougher, fuzzier, more expansive side given free reign. The result, whether the craggier, more anthemic likes of “Bloomsbury Boxcutter” and “Dreamt I Fled,” the crepuscular trudge of “Following a Typewriter to Sleep,” or the mournfully lambent “Hamburg,” holds together as a great example of the kind of record that forms its own world, one you can get lost in. That record climaxes with “Head Falls to Shoulder,” one of the most overwhelming storms of sound and feeling anyone was making in 1997. The band may be long gone in 2022 (although blessedly for anyone wanting to check them out, all three LPs can be streamed), but their expansive opus of city-bound alienation endures.

Ian Mathers

 Spaceheads — Spaceheads (Dark Beloved Cloud)

Spaceheads by Spaceheads

On first listen, Spaceheads' self-titled 1995 album can feel like a throwaway. The record contains a fair bit of silliness and didn't come about as a deeply theorized piece of art. Trumpeter Andy Diagram and percussionist Richard Harrison had been playing in various jazz bands together when they started recording some duo improvisations and playing with the tapes. Early release Ho! Fat Wallet sounds as indebted to 1980s hip hop as anything, and its mix of brass and beats would still make for great backing tracks. Spaceheads followed with a weird twist on, well, just about everything. It can sit not uncomfortably on an EDM shelf, but that term doesn't accurately capture what they were doing. Stretches of the album are funky without being funk or industrial without being industrial. Some moments are abstract enough to be almost incoherent while others could play in a Hollywood soundtrack; “Down in Outer Space” sequencing into “Joyriding” provides all of that in a short burst. Spaceheads sound like a group that could have been any number of things or that could have floundered with pointless fiddling and experimentation. Instead, they pursued the only thing they seem to have any interest in being: exactly themselves. In doing so, they created an album with quirks and surprises that continue to provide as much joy and listening pleasure as anything going on around them (whatever that field might be).

Justin Cober-Lake

#dusted magazine #1990s #bark psychosis #tim clarke #bevis frond #jennifer kelly #the fatima mansions #andrew forell #flying saucer attack #bryon hayes #peter jeffries #bill meyer #nausea #jonathan shaw #readymade #ian mathers #spaceheads #justin cober-lake #christian carey #john hiatt

[dustedmagazine]

Dust Volume 9, Number 3

Emergency Group

As AI takes over the creative professions, it may seem pointless for actual, struggling human beings to sit down to listen to music made by other human beings, to think about what they hear and to string together sentences about how they felt about that music and what it means. But, in a sense, Dusted has always been a bit pointless, as have many of the under-heard, under-loved musics we follow. Still, since there’s no money in it, we can’t be starved out. We may not win an us-against-the-machines battle, but there’s no reason to surrender. And so, this month, we gather our low-tech resources to consider another batch of excellent, under-the-radar releases from folk artists and metal thrashers, jazz improvisers and pop craftspeople. Contributors include Bill Meyer, Ian Mathers, Jennifer Kelly, Justin Cober-Lake, Jonathan Shaw, Tim Clarke, Bryon Hayes, Margaret Welsh and Andrew Forell—not a robot in the bunch.

Joseph Allred — What Strange Flowers In The Shade (Feeding Tube)

What Strange Flowers In The Shade by Joseph Allred

We’ll be dealing with the pandemic’s fallout for years to come, but some consequences are lined with silver. Locked up in a grad school apartment, Joseph Allred spent a lot of time getting acquainted with the less-handled items in their sizable collection of instruments. Best known as a mystical acoustic guitarist of the Takoma school and a spiritually astute singer, they also have a lengthy, if less documented, history of appreciating and performing plugged-in music. What Strange Flowers Grown In The Shade arose from Allred’s deep dive into the delights of effects pedals and a Fender Jaguar guitar. Bolstered by remote contributions by the Rolin-Powers Duo, Magic Tuber Stringband, and others, Allred set the sound-mixer for slow stir and the spotlight for the center of the resulting thick swirl. The outcome sounds a bit like Mike Cooper might if you packed him off to a cold, damp clime with nothing to play but choral recordings, and he embraced the circumstances (don’t try this at home, folks; Cooper would be more likely to embrace your neck with an asphyxiating grip if you did him such a disservice).

Bill Meyer  

 John Atkinson — Energy Fields (AKP Recordings)

It may have taken John Atkinson just two weeks on a residency in Wyoming (surrounded by the sounds of coal mines, wind farms, oil refineries, and hydropower plants) to get all of the field recordings he microedited into the four tracks that make up Energy Fields, but it took him another two years to figure out how to stitch them together. In that time, his longstanding interest in both the manipulation of found/sourced sound and in climate issues haven’t exactly dated. On the industrial rumble of “Black Thunder” and the galvanizing drones of “Spiritual Electricity” you can practically see the extractive machinery Atkinson was surrounded with, whereas the record’s second half moves to a calmer, more meditative and even hopeful place. The results are evocative and sometimes troubling soundscapes deeply rooted in our current ecological moment.

Ian Mathers

 Emergency Group — Inspection of Cruelty (Island House)

Inspection Of Cruelty by Emergency Group

Two side-long slabs of fusion-y free improvisation are led by long-time Dusted favorite Jonathan Byerley (Plates of Cake and Anti-Westerns), with seasoned jazz players Robert Boston and Andreas Brade in tow. WFMU DJ, writer and bassist Dave Mandl rounds out the foursome. A 1970s futuristic cool hangs over the whole enterprise, in its chugging rhythms, its radiant runs of electric keyboards, its motorific jams. You are meant to sniff out hash-scented whiffs of Silent Way into Jack Johnson-era Miles Davis (despite the lack of brass) in all this, but Return to Forever is a closer match, and maybe CAN, too. There’s an underpinning of jazz, but it wigs way the fuck out from there. I’d give the edge to urgent, driving “Part 1,” nearly half an hour long but constantly evolving, ever fascinating. “Part 2” is shorter, but not by much, but also less visceral, more of a head piece. It dozes deep into a psychedelic dream, where fairy dust keyboard notes drift down from pastel skies, sparkling all the way, and deep pulses of bass power the machinery that makes the illusion work. I’ve never loved keyboard-heavy fusion but I like this, go figure.

Jennifer Kelly 

 Tomas Fujiwara's Triple Double — March On (self-released)

March On by Tomas Fujiwara's Triple Double

When percussionist Tomas Fujiwara convened his odd sextet a few years ago for their second album (2020's March), he had them record some extra material intended as segues between tracks. He decided the session warranted its own album, and new digital-only release March On centers on the 30-minute titular improv. The freedom of the set should suit fans of the artists involved (including Gerald Cleaver, Mary Halvorson, Brandon Seabrook, Taylor Ho Bynum and Ralph Alessi). Each of those musicians write and perform surprising, free-sounding music, but with careful composition structuring the adventures more carefully than might be expected. “March On” puts them in full improv mode, a task that succeeds largely because they've learned to interact so well with each other in a variety of ensembles over the past decade or so.

The Triple Double structure still holds, offering surprises in one level simply by changing configurations. The band's name suggests basketball, and the group plays a never-stagnating motion offense. We move from a horn duet to a guitar battle to a drum-guitar-trumpet trio with ease. Given the crowded space, each musician stays out of the others' way while still finding moments to become a focal point. The album closes with Halvorson and Seabrook briefly partnering for “Silhouettes,” 45 seconds of weird tone an unsettling conversation. It closes the album well, hinting at more mysteries within an ongoing conversation.

Justin Cober-Lake

 Full of Hell and Primitive Man — Suffocating Hallucination (Closed Casket Activities)

Suffocating Hallucination by Full of Hell & Primitive Man

A glib assessment of this collaboration between noisy grind band Full of Hell and the doomy monster that is Primitive Man might note: it’s 26 seconds of Full of Hell and 34 minutes of Primitive Man. For sure Suffocating Hallucination is dominated by the agonizing assaults of volume associated with Primitive Man’s excoriating, magma-paced music. But folks should recall just how adventurous the last few Full of Hell records have been, replete with excursions into hair-raising harsh noise and muscular hardcore. Open your ears to the textures of the record’s first two tracks (the sublimely titled “Trepanation for Future Joys” and the aptly titled “Rubble Home”) and you’ll hear both bands at work, responding to each other’s force and fury. Is that good? Depends on your appetite for unhappiness. This reviewer is compelled by the record’s final 18 minutes, in which the haunted factory sounds of “Dwindling Will” leach into the perversely magisterial “Tunnels to God.” As novelist Stephen Wright once observed, “If you can’t ascend, you might as well descend.” This music will get you there.

Jonathan Shaw

 Drew Gardner — The Return (Astral Spirits)

The Return by Drew Gardner

Folks following American “don’t call it primitive” guitar music have likely noted Drew Gardner’s redoubtably picking in Elkhorn, where he handles the usually-electric, six-string side of their bases-covered attack. Most folks don’t get to sound so sure in a minute, and it turns out that Gardner is a man with a past. He has been multi-instrumentalist since the 1980s, and during the mid-1990s he was an active participant in San Francisco’s free jazz scene. Around the same time, saxophonist John Tchicai had a teaching gig in Davis CA; he retained Gardner as a drummer, and when Gardner had a chance to record at Guerilla Euphonics in 1995, he returned the favor. Also on board were Church of John Coltrane alto saxophonist Roberto de Haven and, on one track, Marco Eneidi, also on alto. Gardner and bassist Vytas Nagisetty stoke the furnace, alternating a full head of steam with more judiciously applied rumblings, and the twinned reeds give Gardner’s themes a distinctly pre-electric Ornette feel. No doubt there’s a good reason why this music didn’t come out at the time, but it wasn’t on account of the music’s quality.

Bill Meyer

 Hourlope — Three Nights in the Wawayanda (self-released / Tymbal Tapes)

Three Nights in the Wawayanda by Hourloupe

Hourlope is a collaboration between Anar Badalov and Frank Menchaca, and Three Nights in the Wawayanda is the third part of an ambitious trilogy that began with Future Deserts, continued on Sleepwalker, and reaches its fantastical culmination here. Hourlope pair elusive electronic backing with Mechaca’s measured spoken word delivery, and the results are frequently beguiling. It feels like music from another time, both harking back to the origins of ambient electronica in the 1990s and reaching forward to imagine fresh new musical forms. The album’s finest moments are the more abstract, beatless pieces, such as the Fennesz-esque “Thumper,” and centerpiece “Green Navy/Rain,” a stunningly evocative two minutes in which Menchaca’s words perfectly complement the eerie atmosphere of the music.

Tim Clarke

Brett Naucke — Cast a Double Shadow (Ceremony of Seasons)

Cast A Double Shadow by Brett Naucke

Wine, beer and spirit clubs are not new, but the Asheville-based VISUALS winery is taking the concept beyond liquids with its Ritual of Senses club. It’s pairing rare, locally fermented products with components meant to delight the other senses. Packages are meant to arrive at the solstices and equinoxes and include a seasonally appropriate auditory component. Brett Naucke’s Cast a Double Shadow is included in the club’s winter solstice edition. Having spent most of his life near Chicago, the sound artist is now based in Asheville, hence his participation. Naucke blends a sonically diverse array of genetic material into a recombinant organism well-suited to survive the longest and coldest wintery night. Icy synths and brittle samples are bolstered by a lushness that carries a kernel of warmth inside of it. Bubbling arpeggios create the illusion of motion, and since a moving liquid cannot freeze, Naucke’s compositions remain lively amid the pervasive frostiness of the hibernal season. Those lucky enough to pair these ice-melting sounds with VISUALS’ liquid accompaniment will surely enjoy a synaesthetic intoxication. Imbibe responsibly, folks.

Bryon Hayes    

 The Natural Lines — S-T (Bella Union)

Matt Pond may not be Matt Pond PA anymore, but he’s making the kind of clever, earnest indie rock as always, with some of the same people, notably Chris Hansen, his longtime guitarist and co-producer. This self-titled full length follows on the 2022 EP First Five, revisiting pensive, string-soothed “Spontaneous Skylights” and adding ten new warbly gems. “Monotony” feels like a COVID song, specifically a song about a musician’s experience of COVID, its clamped guitar stuttering as Pond sketches adapting to a smaller world. “When you start to think about the way you breathe, it doesn’t mean you believe in monotony,” he observes in a wavering voice that struggles to remain upbeat. But the music swells and with it, Pond finds his footing. “Climb the drums to feel the fall, stab the strings to feel anything,” he sings. Later, “A Scene That Will Never Die” turns moody introspection into bell-clear, chiming triumph. Pond’s voice is always bruised, rueful, real, but the music surges in waves of joy. If you’re still climbing out of the last couple of years, take heart. Matt Pond is, too, and he’s got a new band and an album to help.

Jennifer Kelly

 No Cosmos — you iii everything else (Lighter Than Air)

You iii everything else by No Cosmos

Montrealean jazz trumpet player Scott Bevins inhabits a fluid convergence of jazz, electronics and R&B in this eight-song debut, drawing out languid, lucid melodies in brass and roughing them up with a battery of percussion from drummer Kyle Hutchins. Bright, reiterative bell-tones frame “kindergentlepatient” in Reichian pointillism, but the trumpet rings out a long-noted, clarion melody, a little echo clinging to it like a shadow, flickering underneath. “Almost Lost You,” an early single, slaps a slinky downtempo beat onto musing post-Miles cool, and floats traceries of soul vocals over its slouching groove. Less overtly accessible, but ultimately more rewarding, “0 to me to me to me,” ruptures its Rhodes-chilled serenity with continual explosions of drumming. I like it best when Bevins lets the chaos slips into his stylized precision.

Jennifer Kelly

Party of the Sun — Capsule III EP (Trailing Twelve)

Capsule III by Party of the Sun

Backwoods psychedelia springs up like mushrooms in the wilder parts of northern New England. Party of the Sun, an acid folk trio from the Monadnock Region (where yrs truly also resides), made these gently expansive tunes on a working sheep farm, following in the muck crusted footsteps of MV+EE, Sunburned and Akron/Family. Akron/Family, admittedly, hailed from New York, but the resonance is strong anyway, especially to that first slow-burning album, where the creak of rocking chairs, the rumble of thunder, seeped into translucent, transcendent melody. Here, “See Space” is all murmur-y, sunlit radiance, guitar and keyboards picking out glittering patterns under Ethan McBrien’s soft, considering tenor. “Forget Me Knot” coalesces out of a cloud of buzzing sonics, warm, widely spaced guitar chords emerging like the emerging light of morning. Harmonies swell, in a natural way, and drums thump up a climax, as the song balloons from quiet contemplation to something epic. “Smoke Bush,” with its subtle thread of female harmonies, eddies and swirls and lilts like a lost 1960s folk off-take. These tunes grow naturally out of reverie and solitude, but they don’t stay that way. They invite you in.

Jennifer Kelly

 Anastassis Philippakopoulos — piano1 piano2 piano3 (Edition Wandelweiser Records)

2020 was a rotten time for too many things to count, but it was a great time to stop and settle into some new music. That opportunity could not have been on anyone’s mind when Elsewhere Music released Anastassis Philippakopoulos: piano works mere weeks before the lockdowns began, but it was a perfect response to the moment. The Greek composer’s compositions, as performed by Melaine Dalibert, were distillations of reflection and deliberate action. This album, which contains earlier works performed by a different pianist, exchanges pith for elongation, but in other respects it’s a continuation of Philippakopoulos’s poetic dialogue between profound silence and unassumingly beautiful sound. Each note bears the weight of consideration, as though the composer carried out a moral inventory before committing to its placement in moderate proximity to another one, and the restrained touch of Serbian pianist Teodora Stepančić honors the music’s austerity.

Bill Meyer 

 Sif — Darkstalker (Self-released)

Darkstalker by Sif

Nuthin’ fancy here, folks, just 25 minutes of satisfying blackened doom. Richard Murphy has been making records as Sif for a few years, and the project has gotten progressively heavier, shifting from bummer drone meditations to this current thumping and crunching incarnation. The tape’s opening track “Kingseeker” slowly morphs from a repetitive churn to a sludgy groove, which situates the sounds in Louisiana’s long metal tradition (just what goes on down there?). It’s beautifully paced and just recalcitrant enough to insist on returning to the opening riff, rather than seeking any sort of catharsis. The title track spends some time foregrounding Murphy’s chops on bass, with the sort of heaviosity-worship one associates with Conan. Tremolos and more varied textures eventually cut into the song, with some heroic intent. But mostly Murphy wants to wield tone like a mace to your forehead. Hit me again, man. It’s good.

Jonathan Shaw

 Ultrabonus — El Gimnasio en Casa (Kitchen Leg)

EL GIMNASIO EN LA CASA VOL.1 by ¡ULTRABONUS!

Recorded a lifetime ago (well, in 2020, same difference) and released this past December, the unprocessed immediacy of El Gimnasio en Casa bears no left-in-the-can staleness. Berlin-based, multi-national four-piece Ultrabonus offers brief, melodic garage-punk tunes delivered with crisp, swaggery style by Argentina native Ignatz B. The title charmingly translates to “the home gym,” and the sunny lo-fi psychedelia is appropriately threaded through with calisthenic noodling. Nothing groundbreaking here, but Ultrabonus does what it does very well. Fun, cool stuff.

Margaret Welsh

  99Letters — Makafushigi (Disciples)

Makafushigi by 99LETTERS

Japanese producer Takahiro Kinoshita’s companion piece to his 2022 Kaibou Zukan (Anatomy Picture Book) takes his concept of gagaku techno into a seamy, industrial and far darker direction. Makafushigi (Mystery Tape) is, like its predecessor, built on samples of traditional instruments and vocal styles used in Japanese Imperial Court music. Introduced from Chinese and Korean sources, Gagaku music has continued under Imperial patronage since the 10th century. As 99Letters, Kinoshita fuses these ancient sounds with modern electronic music in ways that are as malevolent as the demons of mythology and as sinister as the underbelly of organized crime and ultranationalism in contemporary Japan. The tracks on Makafushigi are washed in a seamy mix of grit and clamor, a grim, grimy world of back alleys, dingy bars and low-tech manufacturing. It’s a haunted netherworld as alienating as it’s compelling. Fans of Haxan Cloak & Demdike Stare will find much to like here.

Andrew Forell

#dust #dusted magazine #joseph allred #bill meyer #john atkinson #ian mathers #emergency group #jennifer kelly #tomas fujiwara #justin cober-lake #full of hell #primitive man #jonathan shaw #drew gardner #hourlope #tim clarke #brett naucke #bryon hayes #the natural lines #no cosmos #party of the sun #antastassis philippakopoulos #sif #ultrabonus #margaret welsh #99letters #andrew forell

[dustedmagazine]

Margo Price — Strays (Loma Vista)

Photo by Alysse Gafkjen

Margo Price first appeared in mainstream culture as a throwback country singer. Debut album Midwest Farmer's Daughter talked about the family farm and Nashville with more than a little honky tonk. With each album since then, Price broadened her sound, mixing in R&B, rock, and pop, even getting some shiny production for a big theater presentation. With new album Strays she takes a big step in that expansion, aided by psychedelics and the easiest confidence she's ever captured on record. The sound shouldn't be a surprise, given the developments of her discography, the revelations of recent memoir Maybe We'll Make It, and years of live shows. Price has always had this sort of record coming, traceable back to her Buffalo Clover days. Even if the record had been inevitable, it didn't have to be so engaging; fortunately, it is.

From the opening moments, Price leans into her cosmic country sides, pushing past Gram Parsons toward harder psychedelic rock. “Been to the Mountain” deploys that sound as a focused Price delineates all the things she's been even as it's all her (tl;dr: she contains multitudes). Along with all the true facets of her life, she's “been called every name in the book,” making her impervious to current hate. “Mountain” stands as a statement of strength and self-realization, and a memorable one at that. 

Price has little time for such self-considerations, though, as the confessionalism of past writing largely disappears on Strays. “Lydia” looks at a woman struggling with thoughts of abortion, embattled by societal strictures (like lack of health care). Price doesn't preach to either side of the issue, developing a narrative voice that empathizes with its own sort of hurt. “Hell in the Heartland” deals with the complications of a slow separation, neither laying blame nor accepting guilt. Price's writing tends toward the empathetic and complex, welcoming both with and to vulnerability. 

None of that means the album gets too heavy. Price knows how to mix tone and emotion as well as she does sound. One of the album's highlights, “Radio” brings in Sharon Van Etten for a simple escape, tuning out the world's stressors so that “the only thing I have on is the radio.” “Light Me Up” is the sex song (though even here Price layers the feelings of the track). “Anytime You Call” (with Lucius) offers clear support and gratitude. “We're not as stable as we seem,” the singers admit, but that becomes a point of contact rather than a weakness. Price writes through hell and hate but doesn't linger in the dark places. 

The album does, however, close with “Landfill,” a countryish number about deserted dreams, garbage, and catastrophe. “I made love and love made me,” Price sings, “but only love can tear you apart.” The record ends, then, with a scattering. The artist hasn't settled and it's fitting that Strays ends with a soft wandering and sense of loss. Price lets herself ascend on this album, but she always stays grounded enough to keep her eye on the details. Heartbreak remains part of what she surveys, and while that might sound like a country song, it touches more than just country. It's practically universal, almost cosmic. 

Justin Cober-Lake

#margo price #strays #loma vista #justin cober-lake #albumreview #dusted magazine #cosmic country #country #psychedelia

[dustedmagazine]

Dust Volume 8, Number 8

A few of us have been struggling with life lately—illness, job turmoil, elderly parents, money problems—so we’ve been, perhaps, a bit less prolific than usual. This Dust is the shortest one in a while, but let’s not let brevity be a turn-off.  Here are polished vault raps, acoustic guitar blues, classic jazz, ear-busting metal, African desert dreams, indie pop and nouveau grunge records, mostly enjoyed, mostly recommended by Jennifer Kelly, Patrick Masterson, Bill Meyer, Jonathan Shaw and Justin Cober-Lake.  

03 Greedo and Mike Free — “Drop Down (Feat. KenTheMan)” (Alamo)

The best we can hope for is that 03 Greedo gets out in 2023 on good behavior, but the man born Jason Jamal Jackson isn’t thinking about shortcutting his 20-year sentence stuck in a Texas prison like that. In the space where you thought 2018’s God Level would be a coup de grâce and his legacy forever relegated to jail phone freestyles and unfinished Instagram snippets, Greedo — or the people he’s entrusted to be him in the meantime, anyway — has found ways to keep his name in the game via a steady stream of projects (including Kenny Beats and Travis Barker collaborations) that will shortly include fellow Angelino Mike Free, DJ Mustard acolyte and co-producer of Tyga’s “Rack City,” among others. “Drop Down,” which also features the flavor of Northside Houston rapper Ken TheMan, is one of those earworms that self-evidently shows why the streets still scream the new album’s title. Say it loud, say it proud: Free 03.

Patrick Masterson

Botch — “One Twenty Two” (Sargent House)

And there etched into Tacoma’s forest timber read the words last touched in 2002: Set apart, great divides… but as with so much else culturally two decades later, not so great that mathcore luminaries Botch couldn’t reunite for this one-off born out of quarantine frustrations and snowballing what ifs. It’d be a mistake to look at this as anything more than impermanent, a glimpse through a keyhole of another world full of satisfying returns and flooding nostalgia, but anyone old enough to recognize the significance of “One Twenty Two” should appreciate it for existing at all. It’s a little slower, a little lurchier than you might expect from the Washington quartet, but Dave Verellen’s scorched vocals retain their power and the energy is there. Some days you wonder why it is you keep waking up to an orb falling apart; some days you get an answer back from the cosmos urging you not to throw in the towel just yet. It’s good to have them back for a fleeting moment, anyway.

Patrick Masterson

D.C. Cross — Hot-Wire the Lay-Low: Australian Escapist Pieces for Guitar (Self-Release)

Hot-wire the Lay-low (Australian escapist pieces for guitar) by D.C Cross

D.C. Cross has a lilting, breezy way with the acoustic blues guitar, his tunes unspooling with a lightfingered (and light-footed) grace. It’s fitting then that he wrote those songs during an itinerant year crisscrossing New South Wales during the second year of COVID. The place names, then, are a little different from the usual—Cootamundra and South Albury instead of Memphis or St. Louis—but sound will resonate with fans of Jack Rose, William Tyler and Glenn Jones. These are traveling songs in love with motion. “Stolen Police Car Down the Great Western Highway” has a fluid, onward rushing bravado, its flurries and forays of picking offered in service of a wide-horizon groove. “At Night Those Mountains Disappear” turns ruminative, leaving space for introspection as the dusk falls. Cross didn’t stay for long in any single place, but he let the essence of each locality seep into himself and his music. “Birthday Dread” is maybe the loveliest of a lovely bunch, its quick bursts of picking erupting out of serene melody, just touched with melody. The crossroads has always held a place in the way we imagine the blues, but no one which crossroads, did they?

Jennifer Kelly

 Miles Davis Quintet — Live Europe 1960 Revisited (Ezz-thetics)

It’s possible to assess this album without hearing it. If you’re a more than casual fan of the Miles Davis-John Coltrane partnership, you probably already have this music, either on Volume 6 of the Legacy Bootleg Series or on actual bootlegs. And if you’ve been paying attention he last few years, you probably already have taken a position on the Ezz-thetics label’s practice of taking post-bop and free jazz masterpieces from the mid-20th century, repackaging them with new art, new annotation (respect to Dusted’s Derek Taylor for his work on this volume), reorganized track listings, and giving the sound the most presence-enhancing buff that the 21st century can currently provide.

But what’s the fun in not listening? This music, taken from the beginning and the end of the tour that would put a full stop on that epic alliance, is a torch lit by aesthetic tension and blazing with the diverse passions that fired said tensions. Miles, abetted by most of his band, was going into a slick phase, presenting his modal ideas in streamlined fashion. And Coltrane was ready to take that concept as deep as it could go. They were both right, but no stage could contain their contradictions for long. Framed by versions of “So What,” played at a pace similar to the original on Kind Of Blue, this five-track collection distills the tour’s drama quite irresistibly.

Bill Meyer 

 Grotesqueries — Haunted Mausoleum (Caligari Records)

Haunted Mausoleum by GROTESQUERIES

Nuthin fancy, folks — just 17 minutes of rip-snortin’ Metal ov Death, with one ear on the Swedish old school and another on early British speed metal’s tough and dirty tonality. That’s an appealing combination, and Grotesqueries are clearly having a good time with it, in spite of their songs’ titles: “Flesh Prison” sounds like a long night with bad gas, “Gortician” sounds like an obscure species of squash (until you catch the pun). And so on. Drummer Yianni Tranxidis is the band’s principal force and provides the gruesome aesthetic vision, and this reviewer has to note that his skills with beating the skins outstrip his banal, horror-culture-derived enthusiasms for gross-out violence and human depredations. If you can put up with the exhausted and “evil” themes, the songs are fast, thumping and vicious. Check out the opening minute of “Gortician,” which shifts gears a few times without losing its headlong quality or the layer of fetid ditchwater that covers it. Pretty stinky, dudes. More, please.

Jonathan Shaw

 Hellrazor — Heaven’s Gate

Heaven's Gate by Hellrazor

Given how important they seemed at the time, it’s a little puzzling how few bands really sound like Nirvana. Hardly anyone gets the alchemy that Cobain & co. worked with the combination of careening, unhinged but tuneful melodies, noise-blistered guitars and assaultive bass and drums, though the constituent parts are everywhere. But here’s one. Hellrazor the nouveau grunge outfit led by Michael Falcone (drummer for Speedy Ortiz and Ovlov, but here on guitar) gets a lot of that wild, manic-depressive sweetness, that obliterating guitar force right. Heaven’s Gate is the band’s second full-length, after a raft of singles, EPs and cassettes stretching back to about 2016, and it is fuzzily, annihilatingly glorious, i.e., it smells a lot like teen spirit. The best cuts are the super-heavy, feedback bending “Landscaper,” which swaggers like a giant metallic beast, and “Jello Stars” which runs MBV’s guitar blurs into shimmering walls of noise-y mayhem, then parts the curtains for slack shoegaze-y song-ful-ness. There are some goofy spoken word bits bracketing the music, but the songs speak for themselves from the Sonic Youth-riffed (and appropriately named) “Big Buzz” to the Roboto-funked, cartoon voiced “All the Candy in the World.”

Jennifer Kelly

 Jones Jones — Just Justice (ESP-Disk’)

Just Justice by Jones Jones

The search engine-stymying name of this trio obscures, among other things, the formidable proliferation of instrumental skill and improvisational understanding gathered under its banner. Bassist Mark Dresser (Anthony Braxton Quartet, Trio M,), sopranino / tenor saxophonist Larry Ochs (ROVA Saxophone Quartet, Maybe Monday, Spectral), and drummer Vladimir Tarasov (Ganelin Trio, Moscow Coposers Orchestra) each pull together the full package an individual sound, an encyclopedic grasp of past musical advances, and a capacity to tune into the moment’s action. They also possess a decade and a half of collaboration, which assures that what you hear on their fourth album isn’t just the sum of their sounds, but an integrated ensemble concept in which microscopic details enhance evolving sonic narratives. This is music that wears its heaviness lightly.

Bill Meyer  

 Rokia Koné & Jackknife Lee—BAMANAN (Real World) 

Rokia Koné sings with a little sand in the corners, her burnished Malian blues runs scratched up, just a little with a hitch here, a rasp there, so that she sounds both unearthly and very real. Koné once backed up Angelique Kidjo in Les Amazone D’Afrique, and vocally, she shares some of that legendary tribe’s strength. BAMANAN, recorded remotely during the COVID year, pairs her with Jackknife Lee, an Irish producer now living in California, known for shaping the work of U2, Taylor Swift, the Killers and R.E.M. The two never shared physical space while recording this album. Given the two principals, it not surprising that contrast and contradiction is built in. Koné has an elemental, soulful presence; Lee specializes in the sheen and aura of big-time arena pop. So in “Bi Ye Tulonba Ye” the singer calls out lines that could have been written before the industrial age, that would sound perfectly comfortable echoing over miles of empty dunes, while Lee frames her in a shimmering, surreal bed of synths that could have come from The Joshua Tree. The songs vary in their mix of indie pop and afro-blues with “N’yanyan” coming closest to a western-style quiet storm ballad, and “Anw Tile (It’s Our Time)” sounding most undilutedly Malian. “Kurunba” is the club banger with infra-red blasts of synth bass and intricate patterns of hand drums, and an exhilarating communal call and response between Koné and her singers. Lee makes every sound reverberate, especially the drums, which have that Phil Collins-esque, gate-reverbed, realer-than-real punch, creating an uncanny valley for this powerful vocalist to preside over.

Jennifer Kelly

Man Made Hill — Mirage Repair (Orange Milk)

Mirage Repair by Man Made Hill

Unsuspecting listeners, prepare yourselves for a hefty helping of petri dish funk, a sonic concoction as infectious as bacteria, but far less gross. Pop miscreant Randy Gagne – the man behind such bizarre tunes as “Hot 4 Sloth” and “My Accoutrements” – is back with another collection of ectoplasm-flecked ditties. The Hamilton, Ontario-based one-man purveyor of retro-futuristic sleaze is determined to reel you in with his phantasmagoric take on R&B, dance, and lounge music. If this all strikes you as insane, don’t be scared. Gagne has an enticing sense of charisma, so it's best to give in. What you’ll find beneath the faux-sordid exterior is an altruistic family man raised on televised wrestling, Full Moon Entertainment VHS tapes, and other cultural oddities. He's a noise musician with a quirky sense of humor, who’s always had a soft spot for pop music. A freak coincidence brought Gagne into the orbit of Jeremy Greenspan (Junior Boys), and Mirage Repair is the result. The producer gives Man Made Hill’s freaky funk a glistening wax job, polishing away the possibility for any rough edges. Give it a listen and you’ll have Gagne’s earworms penetrating your grey matter for weeks to come. Imagine the stares you’ll get when you sing lines like “take a look at what I brought from the plasma zone / every time you go / you take a piece of meat with you” to yourself in the subway. Doesn’t that image make you smile?

Bryon Hayes

 Mystic Charm — Hell Did Freeze Over (Personal Records)

Amsterdam’s Mystic Charm may be a sort of missing (or at least sorely overlooked) link, between doom metal progenitors like Cirith Ungol and Saint Vitus and the stoner-occult, fuzz-and-snarl antics of Electric Wizard. By the time Dopethrone (2000) put that latter band on the mass cultural map, Mystic Charm had flamed out, disappearing into a smoky (ahem) haze. This new compilation LP includes five tracks from a tentative 2017 comeback session, for which Mystic Charm rerecorded tunes from the planned 1999 Hell Did Freeze Over LP; additionally, you’ll hear five songs from a session in the early 1990s, which issued in the “Lost Empire” 7” single. The tunes and tones all sound pretty familiar now, given the sheer number of occult doom records that have been released, the persistence of Electric Wizard’s dope-infused template and the many imitators that followed in that band’s wake. This record indicates that we should reconsider just whose wake that is. Mystic Charm matches distortion with punch, and check out Rini Lipman’s vocals. She growls and howls with appealing menace. It almost makes you miss the Clinton years.

Jonathan Shaw

Old Million Eye — The Air’s Chrysalis Chimes (Feeding Tube/Cardinal Fuzz)

The Air's Chrysalis Chime by Old Million Eye

When most of the band lived in the Bay area, the psychedelic combo Dire Wolves generated recordings at a rate that another Dusted scribe characterized as “dizzying.” But now that key players are scattered from coast to coast, that rate has slowed to a pace that won’t dent your store of Dramamine. But that doesn’t mean they’ve all just quit. While Jeffrey Alexander courts heads on the east coast, synthesizer and bass player Brian Lucas is keeping the torch lit out west under the guise of Old Million Eye. The seven songs on The Air’s Chrysalis Chimes strive for an effect that condensation achieves naturally in rural meadows on early autumn mornings. They’re light and gauzy, and the harder you look, the more they fade away. But they never disappear; they’re just luring you into an unknown zone. Lead on.

Bill Meyer

Salim Nourallah — See You in Marfa (Palo Santo)

Salim Nourallah spent much of the pandemic releasing a string of EPs, eventually collected in his the World's Weakest Man box set. It seems like the songwriter would be due for another full-length, but he continues his extended play ways with See You in Marfa. This release has a strange origin, coming out of sessions with The Church's Marty Willson-Piper (the two do, in theory, have an LP coming out at some point). One of their collaborations, “Hold on to the Night,” makes an appearance on this EP, an emblematic marker of Nourallah sounding re-energized. It's a wry sort of party anthem, continuously pushing the dawn away. “Not Back to Sad” offers a surprise collaboration between Nourallah and his brother Faris, which should please long-time fans of the pairing (as should the electric guitar tone on this one). The disc's title track marks its other highpoint. It's a straightforward and catchy love song that Nourallah wrote for his girlfriend seven years ago (further evidence that there's a great album hidden among this string of EPs, though that probably doesn't matter in the digital era). See You in Marfa might be a little bit of a stopgap release, continuing the EP procession, but it doesn't sound tossed off. Nourallah might not have put out an album in four years, but he hasn't lost his momentum during that time either.

Justin Cober-Lake

  Julie Odell — Autumn Eve (Frenchkiss)

Julie Odell has a big strong belt, a kicking band and a way with the giant pop climax, so I’m struggling to figure out why I’m so lukewarm on this album. The Louisiana native borrows the accessible parts from her swampy homeland’s legacy, dotting indie confessionals with blues-y slides, country hiccups and even a few cajun dance moves. Maybe it’s the way she stuffs every factor she can think of that sends big pop songs to the rafters into suitcase-sized songs. Take “Cardinal Feather,” for instance, which combines a thundering, Arcade Fire-style beat, a sauntering blues verse, a flexible, variegated vocal attack and some significant mood changes into its five-minute length. It’s all aimed, clearly, at the feel-good, hands-in-the-air, ecstatic end of the pop spectrum, but it seems like too much thought went into how it would be perceived and too little into how it felt and what it meant. Every one of these songs feels like a late show banger, but you don’t really want a whole album of these. Why not let a few of them just be?

Jennifer Kelly

 Plastic Bubble — Enchance (Garden Gate)

Enchance by Plastic Bubble

Plastic Bubble is a giddy, goofy, lo-fi psychedelic pop band out of Kentucky, one that started as a vehicle for Matt Taylor’s solo material but has lately grown into a more collaborative effort. Only two of the 13 tracks on Enchance give him sole songwriting credit. The rest are mostly joint or group efforts, with one solo composition by Elisa McCabe, who joined the band in 2012. These are, generally, keyboard-wheedling, drum-machine pounding, exuberant songs, tinged with a euphoric weirdness, but eminently hummable. McCabe’s “Point the Way,” for instance, hitches dreaming, melancholic melodies to a motorik pump of drum machine, with spiraling curls of several different kinds of keyboards jetting off the main tune. Taylor’s “Listening to Genesis” is barer and more wistful, just a sketch in electric piano and mechanized beat. I hope no one takes this the wrong way, but “Water,” reminds me of Daniel Johnson, with its wide-eyed, whatever-blinks-into-my-head lyrics and muscular, buzzy guitars. It is a little insane, but totally committed to it, which makes all the difference.

Jennifer Kelly

  Caitlin Rose — “Black Obsidian” (Pearl Tower)

You’d be forgiven at this point for thinking the look Caitlin Rose is giving over her shoulder on The Stand-In’s cover was her way of saying goodbye, but “Black Obsidian” suggests the seven-year quiet period between that look and the recordings of her forthcoming and oft-delayed Cazimi was only space with which to live darkly a little. With a sweeping flourish not unlike Echo & the Bunnymen’s “The Killing Moon” outro, Rose skirts gothic decadence in spinning the tale of what she terms an “impossible puzzle,” a corroded relationship where one person’s overworking to show the other what could be with no success. “Is it that you haven't got it in you, or that you just don't want to?” she sings, letting the final word lilt and float like a blown bubble. But we know the same way she does how inevitable obsidian feels in the spaces no one else can see: If you have to ask the question, a sad and terminally pining part of you already knows the answer.

Patrick Masterson

 Wolfbrigade — Anti-Tank Dogs (Armageddon)

Anti-Tank Dogs EP by WOLFBRIGADE

The long-running Swedish crust outfit rolls on with this new 7” EP — and “long-running” doesn’t justly represent Wolfbrigade’s stamina and staying power. Jocke Rydbjer, Erik Norberg and the rest of the band are well into their third decade of decrying social injustice and destroying amps. If you haven’t been paying attention, the semiotics of a Nordic hardcore band invoking wolves and martial organization might give you pause, but you should know that in the late 1990s, they changed their name from Wolfpack to avoid any confusion with or perceived support for a Neo-Nazi prison gang using the same moniker. And sure, there’s some cognitive dissonance in a song that takes on the depredations of warfare by alluding to anti-tank weapons. You can hear some echoes from Ukraine, and the West’s provision of lots and lots of Javelin missiles to the Ukrainian military. It’s ambiguous: Putin’s adventurism is repugnant and brutal, but Raytheon and Lockheed Martin are sure raking in the cash. Wolfbrigade has never been particularly interested in subtlety, and like the band, this EP is a blunt instrument. If you’re interested in muscular d-beat with more than a passing interest in death metal’s burly buzz, here’s your late-summer soundtrack.

Jonathan Shaw

#dusted magazine #dust #DC Cross #jennifer kelly #miles davis #bill meyer #grotesqueries #jonathan shaw #hellrazor #jones jones #rokia kone #jackknife lee #mystic charm #salim nourallah #justin cober-lake #julie odell #plastic bubble #wolfbrigade #man made hill #bryon hayes #03 greedo #botch #caitlin rose #patrick masterson

[dustedmagazine]

Bill Callahan – YTI⅃AƎЯ (Drag City)

The initially frustrating title of Bill Callahan's new album YTI⅃AƎЯ suggests that the songwriter holds up some kind of mirror to the world. The dozen songs themselves do nothing so direct. Callahan has his own way of processing the world, and while that way might be different than it was in his Smog days, it still has as much to do with refraction as it does reflection. On YTI⅃AƎЯ, Callahan looks at domestic life – among other topics – with this bent, in-and-out-of-a-dream world as he inscribes an imperfect but wondrous actuality.

“First Bird” begins the album with a few languid guitar chords before Callahan provides the album's setting. “And we're coming out of dreams,” he sings, “as we're coming back to dreams.” Callahan's awakening leads to glimmers of a hoped-for reality: two healthy kids, one flying above the ground because “everybody wants to carry her around.” There's a beauty here, siblings connected, real life not dissimilar to a good dream. We can't relax, though, as the following track, “Everyway,” begins with Callahan singing, “I feel something coming on / A disease or a song.” The mirroring and the dreaming provide only loose anchors in an unsteady world.

That instability shows up in “Naked Souls,” one of the album's longest and most disorienting tracks. The track starts calmly, sleepily. The lyrics track people who isolate themselves to avoid encountering other people in true and revealing ways. That approach to life tends toward disfigured thinking and ultimately to violence. The song starts to become more unhinged with the introduction of more instruments and more aggressive percussion as Callahan sings, “God destroy these naked souls.” The tension rises when his characters clamor for destruction; the one thing people can come together on is the need to kill others.

Threat continues in “Coyotes,” in which predators creep at the edge of a domestic scene. The family dog, a descendant of wild canines, sleeps unaware of the risk, in a nesting-doll part of Callahan's dream world (reality spun around yet again, but not exactly mirrored). Callahan recognizes the danger but can't quite get out a signal. The best he can do is to remain a “loverman,” not just now but throughout time, somehow holding the pack together with the power of heart.

Callahan won't settle on a clear line; the message isn't something trite about domestic bliss or familial love, as much as those themes color the album. He's still taking in information (“Two million years of data / Humans still in mode beta”) and still wary of crises. In sorting through this mess of life, he finds very meticulous arrangements to embody these waking dreams. The album seems like a simple, straightforward work, yet every song carries fitting surprises within its construction.

By the time the disc closes, Callahan accomplishes the strange feat of sounding comforting and unsettling at the same time. You can settle into these numbers and think about a bright future even while he pictures burning buildings and terrible situations. It's the singer's own version of reality, but it probably isn't that far from whatever's actually out there. If it's a little bent and a little brighter at the same time, it somehow only feels truer.

Justin Cober-Lake

#dusted magazine #justin cober-lake #albumreview #bill callahan #YTI⅃AƎЯ #drag city records #singer songwriter #rock and roll

[dustedmagazine]

Listening Post: Wadada Leo Smith

Regular Dusted readers probably require no preamble or primer when it comes to Wadada Leo Smith. A stalwart leader, innovator and educator in creative improvised music across six decades, Smith ascended to octogenarian status on December 18th of last year. The Finnish TUM imprint prefaced that momentous occasion with a series of physical releases organized around instrumentation and collaboration, with colleagues both longstanding and comparatively recent to Smith’s voluminous sound world.

Four were released in 2021, including the solo Trumpet, Sacred Ceremonies teaming Smith in duos and trio with Milford Graves and Bill Laswell, The Chicago Symphonies composed for his Great Lakes Quartet, and A Sonnet for Billie Holiday with Vijay Iyer and Jack DeJohnette. Production delays prevented the release of the final two entries until June 2022. Emerald Duets engages Smith in diverse dialogues with a revolving roster of drummers that includes DeJohnette, Andrew Cyrille, Han Bennink, and Pheeroan akLaff. String Quartets Nos. 1-12 delves deeply into an under-documented side of his oeuvre in featuring pieces for two string ensembles and a small cadre of guest soloists.

In sum, it’s a massive and magisterial amount of material, gorgeously recorded and lovingly presented. A fitting tribute to Smith at this milestone of his life and work and a noble case of “giving him his flowers while he’s still with us.” Dusted writers participating in this Listening Post were understandably daunted the prospect of digesting and discussing so much music. Smith’s sustained artistry and imagination were instant agents in assuaging and even allaying such fears. In the interests of expediency and economy our ensuing conversation focuses on the final two sets in TUM’s series, starting with Emerald Duets.

Intro by Derek Taylor

Derek Taylor: Precedence was on my mind a lot when listening to these discs. Trumpet and drums still aren’t a common combination. As far as I know, the first recorded example dates to Roy Eldridge and Alvin Stoller, who recorded a trio of duets while waiting for other players to show up at a Benny Carter studio session on March 21st, 1955. A fourth track featured Eldridge on overdubbed piano. They still sound striking today in their vibrant collisions of melody and rhythm. Smith’s most certainly intimately familiar with them.

Of the six releases in the 80th Birthday series, Emerald Duets and Trumpet feel the most allegiant to and resonant with the arc of Smith’s career from start to present. Percussion in the tradition of the AACM’s “little instruments” has been part of his personal palette from the beginning, featuring prominently in his solo Kabell projects from 1972 and 1979. Dialogues with drummers were a natural progression. There are a handful of recordings in that format that predate this set and show off Smith’s predilection for picking partners ready to go all in on the conversations. I’m really curious to learn what others have gleaned from many highlights of these meetings.  

Bill Meyer: Duos in general, and duos with percussionists in particular, are an important facet of Smith’s work. While some recent efforts, such as Ten Freedom Summers, use larger ensembles to make grand artistic statements, the duos can be very personal encounters; personally, I find their intimacy very appealing. I remember reading somewhere that Smith said he thinks it is important to break bread with a duo partner, even when their dietary habits are very different than his. At the time, he was talking about Anthony Braxton. Of all the times I’ve seen Smith perform, the one that affected me most was a duo concert with the German percussionist, Günter Baby Sommer. They have decades of rapport, and it showed in the ways they supported each other making really poetic, beautiful statements. Besides Sommer, the drummers he has previously recorded duets with include Ed Blackwell, Adam Rudolph, Jack DeJohnette, Milford Graves, Sabu Toyozumi and Louis Moholo-Moholo. Emerald Duets enlarges that number by three. He’s worked in many other settings with Andrew Cyrille and Pheeroan akLaff; I’m not informed about Smith's history with Han Bennink. John Corbett did an interview with Smith in 2015 for Bomb magazine where Smith mentions seeing Bennink play, but I don’t know if he’s ever played with him before. 

Marc Medwin: If he has worked with Bennink before, I've not heard of it either. I heard about the food symbiosis from him directly, and yes, relating to Braxton, about 15 years ago. Performative intimacy has long been paramount to Smith, as we hear as far back as the Creative Construction Company material and the Kabell Years retrospective. What fascinates me is that, like Bill Dixon, even when Smith works in duo, his take on that intimacy can be quite malleable. The sound can be large, sometimes monumentally so. Maybe it's something about the space and dynamic range in his playing, or maybe it's simply the way the instrumentalists react and interact in the environment Smith has created via the score. Just as a point of comparison, on Coltrane's Interstellar Space, I do not hear that huge sense of physical space as much as lines in intersection. Each piece on The Emerald Duets sounds very spacious to me, in a physical sense.

Michael Rosenstein: This series celebrating his 80th birthday has been a treasure trove of interesting work. What's particularly interesting about this batch of duos with drummers is how they draw on musicians he's had a longstanding association with. I can't find specific documentation but it seems likely that Smith and Jack DeJohnette crossed paths in Chicago in the 1960s as part of their activities with AACM if not at the Creative Music Studio in Woodstock, NY in the 1970s. Smith's 1970s collaborations with Pheeroan ak Laff are better documented including a set from Studio Rivbea as part of the Wildflower series and as part of and early New Dalta Ahkri lineup from New Haven. I'm not sure if Smith and Bennink ever played together, but they were both part of Derek Bailey's Company 6 and Company 7 recordings from 1977 so they were at least traveling in the same circles. The earliest documentation I can find of his collaborations with Andrew Cyrille are from the late 1990s playing in a group assembled by John Lindberg. But it seems like their paths might have crossed earlier in New York.

That's a lot of collective experience in this set!

Bill Meyer: DeJohnette moved to NY from Chicago in 1966, and Smith came to Chicago after being in the army in January 1967. But it’s fair to suppose that Smith knew of him from the 1960s on, given DeJohnette’s involvement with Miles Davis as well as his Chicago roots. George Lewis mentions in his AACM study, A Power Stronger Than Itself, that DeJohnette was a frequent presence at Creative Music Studio. 

Derek Taylor: Smith and Sommer have an excellent disc on Intakt, Wisdom in Time, from 2006 and the trio they shared with Peter Kowald from a quarter-century earlier is one of the touchstones of the FMP catalog. So much rapport and mutual listening on display, as Bill notes, and congruous willingness to go pretty much anywhere with the music. It’s a common thread in Smith’s work and I love the “food symbiosis” descriptor as a synopsis of the intentional cultivation of differences-intact cause and effect.

Among these duets, I had the greatest anticipation for the session with Bennink. I’m not aware of any earlier recordings of the two outside the Company disc that Michael mentions and Bennink’s singular brand of intensity, levity and piebald swing feels like a novel foil for Smith. It doesn’t disappoint in that regard. Smith’s penchant for verbose dedicatory titles is in florid bloom and there’s a fascinating emphasis on naming individuals and locales across time and space. Familiar figures (Louis Armstrong, Ornette Coleman, Albert Einstein) are named alongside others (Dorothy Vaughn, Mary Jackson) that had me referencing Google. The open dynamics that Marc notes are on full display with Bennink reigning in his more extravagant impulses. It's like an extended meditation with strong, sharp teeth occasionally bared.  

Bill Meyer: Derek, your point about the titles that Smith gives to the music draws attention to one of the things that I think Smith has in common with Braxton or Dixon: he doesn’t just want to play, he wants to put out a lot of information. The immensity is part of the point. In Smith’s case, this involves spiritual, cultural, sensate, social, scientific and aesthetic concerns. But this can coexist with an attention to tonal and gestural detail; the music asks you to think both big and small. At its best, the music does both, and so far, I find that in the encounter with DeJohnette, where there’s an evident, cooperative give and take between the players, and also titles that reference rarified experiences and interdisciplinary inquiry. 

I say so far because I’ve only listened to the duos once or twice each, and I think that the choice to package several full sessions in a box corresponds to a request to consider this music’s messages for a while now, and also for a long time afterwards. One spin is just getting started. On my first listen, the duo with Bennink sounds like two skilled musicians having some fun playing together. 

Derek Taylor: Bill, I like your observation about immensity as intentionality and the comparison to output of Braxton and Dixon. The latter’s Odyssey set (five discs of mostly solo trumpet and flugelhorn and a sixth with spoken exegesis of the same) is a spiritual precursor to Smith’s Trumpet and a similarly deep, transportive dive. That kind of fecundity runs the risk of feeling like listener homework when engaged beyond a sampling, but I think Smith largely sidesteps the issue in the breadth and allure of these sets. Even with the economy of instrumentation on Emerald Duets, there’s a wealth of variety and interplay that’s consistently satisfying.

DeJohnette gets the most time with Smith over two complete sessions and I agree, there’s a very productive workshop feel to their encounters that goes well beyond that of a casual conclave. One of the dates is also set apart in that both men double on pianos (acoustic and electric). These are the discs I’ve spent the least time with so far, but that’s primarily because of a desire for repeat visits to the Bennink and Cyrille sessions.

Getting back to meaning-rich titles, the Cyrille has a canny mix of dedicatory pieces and refreshingly political ones. Jeanne Lee, Donald Ayler and Mongezi Feza get the shoutouts and “The Patriot Act, Unconstitutional Force that Destroys Democracy” (a piece also interpreted on the first DeJohnette session) leaves no equivocation as to Smith’s political and humanist sensibilities. Gratifying to see local Representative Ilhan Omar garner a piece on the Cyrille session. It makes me wonder if she’s heard it, and if not, invites the temptation to drop a copy off at her office in downtown Minneapolis. 

Jennifer Kelly: I know a lot less about Smith than most of you, though once, on a trip to Chicago, I met up with Bill Meyer at the University of Chicago to see him play and accept some kind of award?  (Bill do you remember the details?)  It was an incredible evening, very warm and welcoming.  I remember one of his grandchildren running around, and everyone very tolerant of that, kind of a family vibe. I think I had already heard a little bit of his work, maybe Ten Freedom Summers? 

In any case, I am also enjoying the drummer duets and finding that I really like Smith's trumpet tone, which is full of air and seems softer and less piercing than other players.  It's very ruminative and evocative to my ears.  We've been talking about him primarily as a composer, which, fair enough...but what do we think about him as a performer and interpreter of his music?  

I've also been dipping into the string quartets and wanted to draw your attention to a piece in the New York Times, which talks about his unusual notation ...one of the reasons that this material is not performed very often.  

The difference between his drummer duets and these very lush, romantic classical string is really striking.  What do you guys see as the common thread? 

Derek Taylor: Jenny, I agree about the inviting nature of Smith’s brass tone(s). There’s clarity and elasticity to it across time that’s extraordinary. He can play harsh and discordant with a mastery of wide array of extended techniques. Although more often there’s a sonorousness suffusing his phrases that’s disarming, but also direct. He found his instrumental voice early and has shaped it to so many different settings to the degree that he’s pretty easy to single out, no matter the ensemble size. A similar singularity informs his architectures for strings, which I was initially surprised by, but then realized I probably shouldn’t have been.

Separating Smith’s composing and playing is difficult for me. There seems to be so much overlap and interaction between the two disciplines. That’s true of many improvising musicians, but it feels particularly so with Smith. The Duets are an excellent example of this intersectionality with each drummer confidently bringing their individual tool kits to bear on the cues and structures, which don’t just encourage, but entreat such interplay.

Probably an unfair and perhaps unanswerable question, but is there a drumming partner amongst the four that resonates most with folks? 

Bill Meyer: Jen, I think we saw him play in October 2015 with a version of the Golden Quartet, with (iirc) Anthony Davis on piano, John Lindberg on bass, and Mike Reed on drums. I don’t recall an award, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. That concert stood out to me because I felt like Smith was kind of playfully messing with Davis and Lindberg.  Most times, Smith has a kind of esteemed elder air about him. They were playing some of his graphic scores, and I particularly remember Davis seeming a bit flummoxed.

Smith has incorporated elements of classical instrumentation and forms for decades; on the Spirit Catcher album, which was recorded c. 1979, he performs with a harp trio, and on Ten Freedom Summers, the four-disc work that was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 2013, the music switched between the Golden Quartet, a ten-piece chamber ensemble, and a merger of the two. I haven’t dipped too far into the string quartets yet, but in general I really value the presence of Smith as a player in his music. His trumpet brings things into focus for me. 

Marc Medwin: I love the description of the quartets as Romantic! In a very fundamental way, they are, not that they sound like Mahler or Tchaikovsky. I'm listening to the 9th quartet as I type, and harmony's this wonderfully open and malleable thing, certainly not atonal! The more I think about it, I hear the duets as pretty Romantic as well, and I mean that in the sense of size, as we've been discussing, and in the sense of fluidity as one event melds with another, forms and spaces in which boundaries aren't so much transgressed as disappear. Smith's trumpet tones can sound like that. One pitch can take on many shades and even…what, characters?  

Christian Carey: The duets are so captivating. Without a harmony instrument (except the few places when piano is introduced, which I particularly liked), it is up to Wadada Leo Smith to fill in the implications of harmony with single trumpet lines, which he does with a keen sense of progression. That said, the duets are primarily about Smith's soaring melodic style and the sharing of rhythmic ideas between him and the various drummers.

There is a bridging of the gap between duet partners. Smith plays differently with each of the drummers, acknowledging their musicality. All of the drummers bridge the gap as well, doing a fine job of arriving in Smith's orbit. I was particularly struck by how Smith and Han Bennink met in the middle, with the drummer discarding some of his more manic incursions to truly inhabit Smith's compositions.  

Bill Meyer: Yeah, Bennink eschews both the antic side of his late free approach and his pre-bebop swinging brushes approach.  He meets Wadada where he’s at and just plays. 

So far, my favorite duets are the ones with DeJohnette. I think they share an inclination to compose in real time, which leads to their music having an especially patient, thoughtful quality. 

Smith’s notation system is called Ankhrasmation. Here’s an interview that includes some discussion of it. https://bombmagazine.org/articles/wadada-leo-smith/ 

Derek Taylor: Smith elucidates influences on his string quartet writing in the set’s accompanying book, starting with Ornette’s Town Hall 1965 piece “Dedication to Poets and Writers” and moving through the works of Bartok, Beethoven, Debussy, Webern and Shostakovich. Alongside a broad list of African American composers from Scott Joplin to Alvin Singleton, he weaves in B.B. King, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and John Lee Hooker. Smith also parcels his compositions into four temporal periods. The dozen pieces documented in the box comprise three of these periods, with a fourth consisting of three more compositions as yet unrecorded corresponding to 13th, 14th, and 15th Constitutional Amendments ratified during the Lincoln Presidency.

In Smith’s words: “My aspiration was to create a body of music that is expressive and that also explores the African American experience in the United States of America. My music is not a historical account. I intend that my inspiration seeks a psychological and cultural reality.”

He continues, “I therefore construct a music that relies on non-traditional components and concepts that allows a shared responsibility for the horizontal flow of the music, including the creative ability to reshape recurrences of   musical moments both with interpretations and expressions, to introduce new and different languages into a single work and use that language as a form of expansion and not as a development.”

Lots to unpack and ponder there, and titles once again become dedicatory guideposts in signifying inspiration. The four movements of the first quartet correspond to four African American composers. The two movements of the ninth are named after Ma Rainey and Marian Anderson, respectively. The first movement of the twelfth is for Billie Holliday.

The guests that join the Redkoral Quartet on four of the 12 pieces obviously break with the conventions of the string quartet format. Christian, given your experience as a composer and theorist, I’m curious how you see Smith aligning with and diverging from the lineage of this instrumentation.

Just a side note on the presentation of these sets. As with the earlier releases in the series, the physical packaging and contents of theses final two entries are superlative. The price point is steep, but TUM spared no expense in covering the curatorial and annotative bases. It’s all appealing, from color photographs and reproductions of accompanying artwork to detailed and diverse essays and a sturdy, handsome cardboard exterior. Even interior sleeves within sleeves for the discs. As a collective 80th birthday present to an American treasure, it’s a homerun. 

Justin Cober-Lake: Catching up after a few days away, I hope I don't derail things by looping back. I'm most interested in his duets with Pheeroan akLaff, mainly because America’s National Parks was my entry into serious consideration of Smith's work. akLaff told me at the time that there's an "ethos connecting the player and the score.” Listening to these duet combinations in parallel (especially given the recurrence of "The Patriot Act" allows for some thinking on that topic. How does a player connect to these complex scores, and how does that change among players? How do a pair of artists connect to each other over the same score in different ways. akLaff's work on "The Patriot Act" is my favorite of the batch, but maybe only because I feel a certain resonance there. DeJohnette seems to have more freedom; while he certainly has more time, I may be reading into the collaborative nature of that performance. I'd be curious to learn more about the process. In this case, how does Smith — who composed the piece — adjust his playing to his duet partner? Does he have something different in mind ahead of time, knowing who he's playing with (he knows these artists well) or is approach more reactive?

Derek Taylor: Thanks for linking to your piece, Justin. Even more grist to chew on. The duets feel different from Smith’s ensemble pieces to me on several fronts. Most obviously, they’re dialogues, so the material is geared towards dyadic interplay interlaced with solo expression. Something cellist Ashley Walters notes in your piece seems germane to the differences, too: “Wadada’s music is not completely fixed nor completely free: it lies somewhere in the middle where parts can slide across each other or align depending on the performance. In this way, performing with [his] ensemble is the ultimate chamber music experience: you know each part so well that you can react and create music with each other in real time.”

Each of these drummers is a deft and experienced improviser. Smith recognizes and relies on that throughout, according ample latitude to their decisions and contributions. Bennink’s a great example of that trust placed paying off in an unexpected way. Certain of his more idiosyncratic percussive trademarks are left absent in the service of preserving the tenor and poise of Smith’s compositions. It’s still identifiably Bennink behind the kit, but magnanimously attenuated to Smith and vice versa. 

Justin Cober-Lake: The idea of magnanimity remains crucial to Smith's work, in various ways. His titles, his inspirations, and his culture statements make that clear in one way, but his way of interacting with his collaborators always seems to be one of clear conversation and generosity. He has very specific ideas in his compositions, but even those lend themselves toward further communication, between him and other artists and between the artists and the audience. Ankhrasmation and graphic scores are complex, academic concepts, but they're also languages that let people speak to each other in new ways while encouraging a certain amount of improvisation (Watlers' point is certainly relevant). His partners have to study this language, and part of the fun is recognizing what new sorts of ideas come out of conversation within a new discourse community. Listening to the duets lets us see that paired down to its most essential qualities.

This may point to a separate rabbit trail not worth following, but I tend to think of him working on a grand scale, taking on ideas like the national park system or the Civil Rights Movement, and the duets seem to me to be a distillation of how he works. Another way to approach them would be to start with his solo pieces (like the Monk album) and see how he builds into something with a duo, trio, strings, etc. Or maybe the solo work is just totally different, more of him as a player and less as a composer.

Marc Medwin: I would venture that the solo work, or rather I should say his solo work in particular, straddles the lines you draw. The solo set in the birthday series, Trumpet, contains compositions that also speak to all of the issues, political or otherwise, that have formed the substance of our discussion. I am drawn again and again to the inculcation of a moment's implications in Smith's work, which all of us have been mentioning in one way or another, whether in recording or performance.

There is something of the elder's wisdom in what Smith says or plays, a distillation of the spiritual and cultural continua that we often separate for convenience, and he brings similar modes of thinking and construction out of his collaborators. I find the idea of chamber music being such a huge part of the music we're discussing so close to my own thinking! He loves the term "Research," to which he refers quite a lot when discussing his work, and as those who've spent any time with him or read his interviews know, he can bring in wildly disparate notions of science, art, literature and politics at a moment's notice but somehow unify the entire discussion around a concept, opening up terminological meaning beyond expectation. So, I keep thinking, what is chamber music anyway?! What is a symphony, a string quartet, and who gets to delineate those boundaries?

 Derek Taylor: Marc, I really like this passage of yours, “there is something of the elder’s wisdom in what Smith says or plays, a distillation of the spiritual and cultural continua that we often separate for convenience, and he brings similar modes of thinking and construction out of his collaborators.”

It’s an assignation that could be applied to a number of Smith’s peers. I’m thinking Henry Threadgill, Roscoe Mitchell, Braxton… even William Parker to a degree. Although magical realism and extrasensory erudition as often informs Parker’s cross-cultural cosmology isn’t really an emphasis in Smith’s perspective. Smith seems more interested in existence and reality as shaped by and expressed in tangible historical manifestations. His themes and cues transcend temporal boundaries, but they’re still grounded in factual people, places, events, etc. although not limited to those. They’re also tools in deconstructing and reconstructing or replacing established and hierarchical terminology and ideas. Chamber music in Smith’s conception feels much more inclusive and holistic than the Western classical definition, for example. 

The String Quartets are customary string quartets in the sense that the members of the RedKoral Quartet play instruments associated with the  conventions and traditions of that format, but how they play them and the soloists that occasionally join them resist and redefine that codification. 

Marc Medwin: Yes! Threadgill and Mitchell exhibit a similarly inclusive historical bent, though you're spot on regarding Smith's spirituality, a layered tradition he takes very seriously. With Mitchell, we have transmogrifications like the semi-autobiography of Bells for the South Side, while Threadgill transfigures creative music's history with a degree of earthiness that Smith tends to eschew. An overstatement to be sure but I hope useful!

Bill Meyer: Yeah, Smith works with the sound possibilities and historical associations of the string quartet, but he certainly isn’t bound by them, any more than he’s bound by the conventions  of the modern jazz combo format in the Gold Quartet. 

Marc Medwin: One of the most fascinating things about Smith's music is how often he broke with those conventions, going way back to that first trio with Braxton and Leroy Jenkins when they recorded those gorgeously transparent compositions The Bell and Silence!

Derek Taylor: Smith's placed himself in so many fertile contexts over the years that I often lose track of the taxonomy. The pioneering work with Braxton that you mention, Marc, but also straight up free jazz dates with Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre, Marion Brown, Frank Lowe, and others, although he would likely call such idiomatic pigeon-holing unnecessary and reductive. The Yo Miles! fusion projects with Henry Kaiser and various encounters with John Zorn offer additional avenues. And Michael mentioned the Company conclaves earlier. Even the formats and assemblages he returns to (solo, duo, Golden Quartet...) share an enviable trait of retaining freshness. 

Christian Carey: Others have touched on this, but the duos are primarily between musicians in their eighties. So many musicians, from Marshall Allen to Roy Haynes, have shown us that music keeps you young thinking and acting.

Wadada Leo Smith’s 80th Birthday Celebration from Wadada Leo Smith on Vimeo.

Derek Taylor: Definitely true of Wadada, Christian. His beaming visage looks easily 20 years younger than his octogenarian age would suggest. 

Michael Rosenstein: Sorry to have been lurking on this for a bit but July was a bit of a hectic month. It’s intriguing to note that the duos with akLaff, Cyrille, and DeJohnette were all recorded within a fairly short period of time — the duo with Cyrille in September 2019, the duo with akLaff in December 2019 and the two discs with DeJohnette in early January 2020. (The duo with Bennink is from 2014, so quite a bit earlier.) The proximity of the sessions, the pieces he assembled and the history Smith had playing with each of his collaborators provides a certain through-thread to the set. But each of his partners bring their own sensibilities which comes through in each of the sessions. In the liner notes, Smith talks about wanting to see how he would respond “in each situation with a new drumming philosophy.” Interestingly, the recording session with Bennink in Amsterdam in 2014 is what kicked off Smith’s idea to put together this recording project of drum duos. Bill references how Bennink “eschews both the antic side of his late free approach and his pre-bebop swinging brushes approach.” But, of all the sessions, not surprisingly based on his musical roots, I hear Bennink’s playing digging in most deeply to the jazz drum traditions. Of course, he extends and abstracts them, but hearing this session, I think back to hearing Smith play with Ed Blackwell (a fantastic meeting that Smith ended up releasing on Kabell.) Listen to the simmering snare rolls he calls up in “Louis Armstrong in New York City and Accra, Ghana” which swings like mad and elicits searing retorts from Smith. While more angular and pointillistic, “Ornette Coleman at the Worlds Fair of Science and Art in Fort Worth, Texas” also digs into those free-bop tendencies and Smith responds in kind. It’s also worth noting that, on this disc, in contrast to the rest of the boxed set, most of the tunes are collective improvisations credited to both players. AkLaff’s playing is imbued with a free sense of pulse, bringing out Smith’s meditative. The name of their disc, “Litanies, Prayers and Meditations” comes through in the pacing and a markedly spare sensibility. Take the evolving miniatures of  “Rumis Masnavi: A Sonic Expression” where the drummer parries with Smith’s soaring introspection. On “A Sonic Litany on Peace,” Smith’s piano playing is pared back in both is placement of notes and his choice of damping the strings to minimize the sustain of the instrument against AkLaff’s feints and bobs. Cyrille is a much more open player, often placing cymbals in the fore of his approach to the kit. On a piece like “Donald Ayler: The Master of the Sound and Energy Forms,” that metallic sizzle drives Smith to some particularly heated playing, with a burred edge to his tone. “Mongezi Feza” is a poignant ode to the South African and the tinge of reverb of the recording brings a sense of reverence. Smith’s declaratory playing meshes really well with Cyrille’s tuned kit. The two discs with DeJohnette are more expansive and seem to reveal much more of a compositional bent, though that may be a more extensive use of the harmonic richness of keyboards. It’s been a while since I’ve listened to the duo’s Tzadik release where neither musician used keyboards so one wonders what inspired the use of keyboards on disc 4, particularly the inclusion of a piece like the lush, contemplative “Meditation: A Sonic Circle of Double Piano Resonances.” That said, the choice is quite effective both on its own and as a complement to the overall boxed set. The five-part “Paradise: The Gardens and Fountains” which comprises the final disc is an astute close to the set, giving the two the time and space to explore Smith’s considered, lyrical form. This disc deserves more time than I’ve been able to devote so far but I know I’ll return to it often. Derek rightfully points out the deluxe packaging of the box and it is fantastic to see a label so deeply devoted to presenting Smith’s music. Of all the sets comprising this 80th celebration, the solo trumpet set edges out to the top. But The Emerald Duets comes up as a close second.  

Derek Taylor: Michael, thank you for this astute summation/annotation of Emerald Duets. It captures details of each dialogue and knits them together with some insightful holistic observations. I hadn't even considered the import of the Bennink encounter as the impetus for the others and agree that it limns the more familiar aspects of a jazz-rooted duet between trumpet and drums without sounding the least bit conventional or rote. And Bennink does swing doesn't he, inimitably!

I want to express gratitude to everyone who participated; I definitely learned some things and enjoyed the opportunity to collate and communicate thoughts of my own. For an artist who’s already brought a literal library of music into the world, we have much to look forward to from Wadada Leo Smith. The unrecorded string quartets were mentioned, but I’m sure his robust relationship with TUM will yield other aural treasures. In the meantime, the 80th Birthday Series and its last two entries are here to tide us all over. 

#wadada leo smith #listeningpost #emerald duo #string quartets #dusted magazine #jazz #classical music #jack dejohnette #hans bennink #Pheeroan akLaff #Redkoral Quartet #derek taylor #bill meyer #michael rosenstein #marc medwin #justin cober-lake #jennifer kelly #christian carey

[dustedmagazine]

Wilco – Cruel Country (dBpm Records)

The title of Wilco's new album, Cruel Country, carries tension in its meaning. The band refers most immediately to a nation, presumably the United States, but the title also hints at the genre of music. While Jeff Tweedy and his previous band Uncle Tupelo played a major role in the alt-country movement, Wilco hasn't really touched the genre in the last few decades. The album ostensibly marks a move into country, but don't let the steel guitar fool you. The country influences show up, but it's a Wilco album, focused on tight country rock, and more indebted to Woody Guthrie than Jim O'Rourke, but certainly one that comes far more from modern Chicago than old Nashville.

The Guthrie influence – the most we've heard since the Mermaid Avenue albums – shows up early in the songwriting. Tweedy doesn't have to circle around in his lyrics (though he still enjoys doing so). The title track features the lines, “I love my country, stupid and cruel/ Red, white, and blue.” Tweedy feels the paradox, and he means that first clause. At the same time, he has to address the world around him. The album came together quickly this year, the whole process governed by pandemic issues and the band's excitement at finally being together in a room. Writing music in the neighborhood of old country brings feelings like these to the fore.

The following track “Hints” sounds like a protest song without an immediate target. “There is no middle when the other side / Would rather kill than compromise,” Tweedy sings, yet he still holds the hope of American expanse. That hope dims here and there. In “All Across the World,” Tweedy considers the suffering he sees and asks, “What's a song going to do?” Yet the band still assembled and recorded a double album's worth of standout material. The question doesn't need answering anymore than it needs asking.

If it were to be answered, Wilco might do it musically as well as lyrically. That quick writing and recording process – Tweedy talks about the experience as feeling “urgent” – ostensibly limited the band to simple structures and ideas that they could record easily. That's a relative point for a band with long familiarity and unusual skill. “Bird Without a Tail / Base of My Skull,” for example, lets the musicians stretch out without feeling jammy. These songs are carefully finished; there's none of the energized-but-rushed sense that often marks albums with this sort of backstory. Everything fits neatly, but Wilco, sticking to that country/folk sort of tradition, doesn't let it get so pristine that it loses traction. Nels Cline's steel guitar might steal the show, but Cline knows when to pull back, and everyone else knows when to add a flourish or an electronic texture, all in the service of melody.

The double album runs to 77 minutes and could probably use a trim, although trying to pick tracks to chop makes that suggestion feel a little silly. The record finishes on a bit of a down note, with Tweedy trying to be happy for someone else “in a sad kind of way” and then waiting out his boredom on “The Plains.” The final lines offer a twist: “There isn’t any point in being free / When there’s nowhere else / You’d rather be.” Tweedy lets the darkness in him play a little, but his resolution overcomes it in a satisfying moment, a perfect finish to one of Wilco's most satisfying albums.

Justin Cober-Lake

#dusted magazine #album review #justin cober-lake #wilco #cruel country #dbpm #country music #rock music #woody guthrie

[dustedmagazine]

Mary Halvorson – Amaryllis / Belladonna (Nonesuch)

Mary Halvorson is usually doing something novel. In this case, it's not just that she's releasing a pair of albums that simultaneously stand alone and sit in conversation with each other. It's also that she now writes for string quartet (plus guitar, of course). Amaryllis and Belladonna, the two new albums, mark the next step in her ever-expanding interests. Her idiosyncratic guitar remains unmistakeable, but she doesn't rely on old habits. Even if some of her regular tricks crop up, the new context helps shape an innovative approach, leading to two records that move outside her regular sound without making a complete break.

You can take the albums in whichever order you like. Amaryllis always shows up first in listings, and it utilizes a more standard jazz lineup, at least for half of its run. It probably makes a better starting point. Listening to Belladonna, though, will aid in understanding its partner, so the real key – as probably all concerned would prefer – is to move back and forth between the two, appreciating them on their own while listening to see how each informs the other.

Amaryllis features a jazz sextet for its first three tracks. Regular accomplice Tomas Fujiwara shows up for percussion (pretty much anything with both Fujiwara and Halvorson is gold), but Patricia Brennan takes up vibraphone duties. Brennan released her own solo debut just last year, but her ties to some of these artists, including trombonist Jacob Garchik, go back at least to Michael Formanek's Kolossus Ensemble from a few years back. The group, which also features Nick Dunston on bass and Adam O'Farrill on trumpet, might not have had a ton of time together, but they're familiar enough to be comfortable, and uncomfortable enough to find new ground.

The first three tracks essentially reach that point. Halvorson doesn't stand out in the group, and the music is more accessible that some of her work, but it fits the sound of a new music-sort of jazz group. It's energetic and impressive, as you'd expected from a Halvorson release, but it hasn't escaped the wheelhouse. When the Mivos Quartet shows up for the second half of the album, it becomes something distinct. The strings provide new contours for the jazz players, who respond with verve. “Hoodwink,” for example, exchanges patterns within a cinematic setting, each musician pushing forward while the strings corral them into a steadiness. Halvorson's approach to jazz remains recognizable while sounding foreign.

Belladonna increases the shift by including only the Mivos Quartet and Halvorson on guitar. With horns and, in particular, percussion gone, Halvorson drifts a little more; she's never sounded so dreamy. Even so, she remains focused, guided more by linear progression than looping interpretation. “Moonburn” provides one of the most compelling moments by setting her weird guitar tone within a soft string cushion. Other numbers, such as the title track, pull the quartet into attack mode. Somehow the disc ends up being both luxurious and dangerous.

Listening to that album changes the experience of Amaryllis, which now sounds like both a realized vision and a piece of foreshadowing. There's likely no dramatic larger narrative – Halvorson started on violin before switching to guitar as a kid. She wrote the arrangements because she had time during the pandemic – and at this point the pair of albums might be a final destination on this point or they might be a starting point. Either way, the interaction between the two of them delivers enough movement in itself.

 Justin Cober-Lake

#dusted magazine #album review #justin cober-lake #mary halvorson #amaryllis #belladonna #nonesuch #jazz #guitar music #mivos quartet