#roz milner

[dustedmagazine]

Listening Post: Gastr Del Sol

Photo by James Crump

Gastr Del Sol was the convergence of two individuals who had not spent their youths like anyone else and were on their way to lives quite unlike most lives. Between 1991 and 1998 David Grubbs and Jim O’Rourke made a sequence of records that simultaneously pointed out what a lot of music listeners were missing and where music might go next if it was really interested in being interesting. Grubbs came from Louisville, Kentucky’s hardcore scene; he played in Squirrel Bait while he was in high school, and took Bastro with him to college. Jim O’Rourke grew up tracking down recordings from the far reaches of every fringe and then setting about making his own place within each method he learned. Before he was out of college, he’d already made connections with Henry Kaiser, Derek Bailey and the folks at Ina GRM. Each was a guy who knew what the other did not, and their collaboration pushed both to make music that they would never make again with anyone else.

Gastr Del Sol began when Grubbs decided to let Bastro get quiet, and made one LP before O’Rourke came aboard. Their first album together, Crookt, Crackt, Or Fly, was assembled from miniaturized poetry, elongated post-punk riffs, frozen improvisation and fluid, texturally-focused compositions. Their last, Camofleur, is a droll pop statement completed just weeks prior to the collapse of the duo’s relationship. The acrimony between them took a couple of decades to die down, but around the same time that they buried the hatchet, a live recording of their final concert surfaced. We Have Dozens Of Titles shuffles together that performance plus every compilation, single, or EP track that Gastr Del Sol released outside their core Drag City discography.

Intro by Bill Meyer

Jonathan Shaw: I have admired Gastr del Sol from a sort of distance. I like “At Night and At Night,” from the terrific Hey Drag Citycomp; I know Upgrade & Afterlife quite well and dearly love “Dry Bones in the Valley...”, the Fahey cover collab with Tony Conrad. The first song on this new-ish record sidles in alongside those wooden textures, but is a more anxious affair. I like that it never quite boils over or takes its propulsive energies to catharsis. It’s sort of a complement to the conversation with the French kid blowing up firecrackers at the track’s close: it can’t quite move forward, in spite of all of the things that want it to.

That’s also a handy metaphor for my relationship to the music. When I have listened to Crookt, Cracked..., I get the sense that these are really, really smart folks, doing some smart stuff, but I haven’t quite connected with and moved into the sounds. They can be forbiddingly remote. So, I am glad for this record, and its invitation to revisit the band’s trajectory.

Bill Meyer: Each record is so different that I can easily see someone liking one and not likening others, and if you held a gun to my head, Upgrade & Afterlife is the one I would name as my favorite. Which makes it all the more interesting that this collection spans their existence from O’Rourke’s first presence (the Teenbeat single — and it’s pretty amazing that they ended up on that label) to the very last concert (that trip is probably when the encounter with the Francophone child occurred, since the concert was in Quebec).

By virtue of its length and timespan, We Have Dozens Of Titles shows more sides of Gastr Del Sol than any other record.

Bryon Hayes: I think that’s one of the band’s traits that I find appealing, that their sound and approach shifted from record to record. “At Night and At Night” was my introduction to the band, and it also seems to encapsulate multiple faces of Gastr Del Sol in a single track: a drone intro, followed by a guitar/poetry passage, and then a dollop of minimalism accompanied by backwards cymbal splashes. I bought Hey Drag City for Pavement, Silver Jews, and Smog but was introduced to some new and intriguing sounds across the whole of the comp. That track, and Gastr Del Sol as a whole, always felt like a riddle or a logic puzzle to me, albeit one that continuously changed, so it wasn’t possible to “solve” it. But I actually like that fact: the thrill of the act of investigating is pure enjoyment itself.

I never did get to experience Gastr Del Sol in a live setting, so those tracks on We Have Dozens of Titles are particularly revelatory for me. I like the more stripped-down setting of “The Seasons Reverse,” for example. Maybe even more than the version on Camofleur. I’d also bet that the field recording of the kids came from Victoriaville. The town is far enough into Quebec that it’s likely there was a language barrier between O’Rourke and the local youth at the time. Also, the drawn-out version of “Blues Subtitled No Sense of Wonder” feels much fuller and richer in the live setting than it does on Camofleur. I’m not saying I dislike that album, but I too would pick Upgrade & Afterlife as my favorite...

Bill Meyer: Because I lived in the same town as Gastr Del Sol, I was fortunate to see them a lot. The concerts were pretty different from one another, and didn’t always sound much like the most recently released record. When they played with John McEntire, things could be more rock-ish, and I have one fond memory of them getting pretty wild with the feedback. Afterwards O’Rourke seemed embarrassed, like he’d lost control and done the wrong thing. There was room for spontaneity, but they were not an improv act. In 1997 they did lock into the two guys with two acoustic guitars thing for a while, probably because they had a fair number of out-of-town gigs in their later years; they didn’t necessarily want to lug a lot of gear around.

Another aspect of living in the same town with them was seeing the other things they had going. O’Rourke could often be seen accompanying someone whose work he championed (ex: Rafael Toral), and they both played with Red Krayola (although O’Rourke bailed for a while and Grubbs kept going), Edith Frost, and Arnold Dreyblatt.

Jonathan Shaw: Never saw the band, and the live material on this comp is what’s impressing me most. Given my proclivities toward their work with acoustic guitars, I am most compelled by “Onion Orange,” which works a space between gentle and tense to very satisfying effect. The repetitive sequence of notes in that initial six-or-so minutes is really engaging; it invites anticipation, flirts with letting that become apprehension. I can imagine that would be even more powerful in a real room, with the players really making the noises in front of you. But even here, via the mp3 I am playing on a device, it’s strong stuff.

Bill Meyer: I still need to a-b that with the original on Grubbs’ solo album.

That album, Banana Cabbage, Potato Lettuce, Onion Orange, seems not to be on Bandcamp, and Table of the Elements is long defunct. I’ll have to pull out my CD and play it. On the original edition, Grubbs plays everything, but O’Rourke recorded two of the album’s three tracks. I remember it being very still, a Grubbs take on Morton Feldman. What you hear in this live performance, Jonathan, is probably what makes me think I like this new version better than the original. There’s a management of tension that probably comes from two people playing it together in real time.

The way that We Have Dozens Of Titles is sequenced, with live tracks littered throughout the collection, makes it easy to forget that we’re hearing a complete set here.

Ian Mathers: There’s a relatively well-known tweet (for those of us that are too online, at least) where a guy who’s only ever seen one movie sees a second and immediately compares it to his only experience. As someone who’s never heard Gastr del Sol before (although they’ve lingered somewhere on my impossibly long “get to this someday” list) and only really knows Jim O’Rourke’s work via his Bad Timing album, I had my own “Getting a lot of ‘Boss Baby’ vibes from this...” moment playing the opening live version of “The Seasons Reverse.” The guitar playing there immediately put me in mind of Bad Timing, which isn’t a bad thing! I was slightly relieved when this compilation pretty immediately shows off different aspects of his and Grubbs’ sound, even in the other live tracks.

And while I did enjoy all of We Have Dozens of Titles, enough so that I’m wondering based on the comments here which of their albums I should check out next, the live tracks do feel like a cut above everything else. I’m probably going to try listening to just them, and while I respect the choice to scatter them throughout this release despite being one show (do we have any idea if they preserved the order of the setlist, or jumbled that up as well as splitting them up?) there is a part of me that wishes it was a separate release. Which is kind of silly, I know — absolutely nothing is stopping me from just playing the live stuff whenever I want, and I’m very glad to have the rest of the material here. My first question for those more knowledgeable: is the album version of “Blues Subtitled No Sense of Wonder” as amazing as the live one here, and should I make that my next stop?

Bill Meyer: If you like the live version of “Blues Subtitled No Sense of Wonder,” you definitely need to check out the studio version. For that reason, I’d point you to Camofleur and then suggest that you work your way backwards through the catalog.

Bryon Hayes: The album version has beautiful vocal harmonies with lyrics that are dryly humorous; the title of the box set is derived from them, actually. The music on the box set version feels fuller and louder than that on the album, the electronics bolder and noisier, accompanied by rich organ tones. Also, that interlude of shouted movie dialogue (or whatever it is), is not in the Camofleur version. Both are appealing, but I enjoy the live version slightly more. If Grubbs sang on the live version, it might be the clear winner for me.

Ian Mathers: Interesting, thanks for the tips! If I’m remembering correctly, there’s no vocals on this collection for at least a while, and I was slightly nonplussed when they came in; not bad, certainly, but it felt slightly out of place with the music. (I was working while listening, which might be the culprit there.) I’ll be interested to A/B the two versions and see what I think.

Bill Meyer: I just drove past the Lyon & Healy building at Lake and Ogden, which prompts the question — what do you make of “The Harp Factory On Lake Street”?

Jonathan Shaw: I sort of like it when there are vocals — in part because of the poetic nature of what’s sung (see “Rebecca Sylvester” on Upgrade & Afterlife), in part because it feels grounding in musical contexts that frequently get very abstract.

Bill Meyer: I like the way you frame that, Jonathan. Grubbs’ words do have a way of anchoring part of the music, bringing a sonic fixedness that contrasts with the music around them, but also introducing an uncertainty of their own because of their sometimes-oblique content.

Roz Milner: I’ve just been lurking this thread. I’m not familiar with this group, although I do like what little Jim O’Rourke’s music I’ve heard (Bad Timing, Happy Days). Any recommendations on where to start with them?

Tim Clarke: I’d start with Camoufleur, which is easily their most accessible album. I have a bit of an uneasy relationship with Gastr Del Sol. I got into them soon after I became obsessed with Jim O’Rourke’s Eureka, but it was quite a shift in tone from that album. I do enjoy Camoufleur a lot, and the album versions of “The Seasons Reverse” and “Blues Subtitled No Sense of Wonder” are, in my opinion, far superior to the live versions on We Have Dozens of Titles.

Gastr Del Sol are quintessentially experimental, in that much of their music sounds so open-ended, as though O’Rourke and Grubbs are constantly wondering what x would sound like played at the same time as y, whether it’s an open, suspended acoustic guitar voicing alongside a sour synthesizer drone, or some piano with some field recordings or samples. Upgrade & Afterlife actually freaks me out! The first time I listened to it after buying it from Rough Trade in London, I couldn’t venture past the opening track as a massive gnarly insect flew in through my open window while I was listening to it on a spring evening. It scared me so much I don’t think I’ve revisited the album since. There are moments on We Have Dozens of Titles that are truly magical, so I think I’ll have to get over my fear and revisit Upgrade & Afterlife after all this time.

Christian Carey: The timing of this release is interesting. David Grubbs was just appointed Distinguished University Professor by CUNY, the highest faculty distinction possible. In addition, he was just awarded the Berlin Prize, and will be in residence there next year. Wonder if the awards might have helped to fund the recording project.

Jonathan Shaw: Distinguished Prof at CUNY — pretty swell. Makes sense. Some of Gastr del Sol’s headiest stuff has the feel of the “experimental,” and in ways that engage the connotations of knowledge and concept in that term (which often gets used lightly and lazily, IMHO). That might have something to do with why I like the live tracks so much. There’s an organic quality to them. Still thorny and challenging music, like the ebbs and flows that make “Dictionary of Handwriting” disorienting and strange. But it’s happening. It’s made, not just thought or assembled.

Jennifer Kelly: Once again, not super immersed in this band, though I had a copy of Crookt, Crackt or Fly at one time, which I can’t find and don’t remember very well, though I’m listening to it on YouTube right now, and the combination of Grubbs’ wandering vocals and aggressive, stabbing guitars seems familiar-ish. So, coming to this a bit cold, though I’ve enjoyed Grubbs’ more recent work with Ryley Walker and Jan St. Werner — and there are definitely some common threads. Nonlinearity, an elastic sense of key and rhythm, a haunted room kind of aesthetic.

I found this track-by-track exposition at the Quietus, which I was trying to read as the songs came up and it’s quite good. I especially liked the paragraphs about “The Bells of St. Mary’s,” written for what sounds like a truly bizarre Christmas comp with Merzbow and Melt Banana on it. Gastr del Sol’s lone concession to the holiday form was sleigh bells, though Grubbs says the main reference was to “I Wanna Be Your Dog” not “Jinglebells.”

Anyway, you might enjoy this.

Tim Clarke: In addition to the Quietus piece, this recent podcast interview is also very enlightening in regard to the history of the band. A rare opportunity to hear Jim O’Rourke chat lightheartedly too.

Having spent more time with the album now, I realize that my listening gets derailed by a couple of Grubbs’ and O’Rourke’s tendencies with this music. The first is when Grubbs does a kind of scat singing that follows the spiky contours of the acoustic guitar parts. And the second is when they retreat into near silence.

Bill Meyer: Near-silence is an O’Rourke strategy to make sure that the volume is set high enough when you get to the loud part.

Christian Carey: I’m curious what connections to later projects people hear in the recording. As TJ mentioned, there are some mannerisms that seem to forecast avant moves by both Grubbs and O’Rourke, with greater assuredness in the idiom. The post-rock vibe is unmistakable, and I am finding the songs with connections to Tortoise et. al. to be the most compelling music-making here.

Bill Meyer: Re: similarities with Tortoise, it’s worth keeping in mind that John McEntire of Tortoise was also a member of Bastro and a key non-member contributor to Gastr Del Sol. Re: the term post-rock, I appreciate the irony that Gastr Del Sol was actually O’Rourke’s entree into rock following years of intense work in improvisation, musique concrete, etc. with people like Henry Kaiser, Eddie Prevost, Christoph Heemann and Illusion of Safety. It was his “I’m almost ready to rock" project.

Ian Mathers: Roz, if you still haven’t settled on a way to check out Gastr del Sol, I was in a similar position to you and honestly, I found this compilation a pretty welcoming (and broad-ranging) introduction! I haven’t moved on to checking out any of their albums yet, but I have played We Have Dozens of Titles a number of times, and while I’m still experiencing it more as a gestalt than I am picking out specific elements (so I’m not sure how I’d answer Christian’s question at the moment, for example), I find the time just slipping away when I do. I was reading Steven Thomas Erlewine’s newsletter recently where he was discussing this collection and he described Gastr del Sol as “music that changes the temperature of the room,” and I keep coming back to that as an apt description of what I’m experiencing.

Bryon Hayes: I read somewhere that Grubbs’ The Plain Where the Palace Stood is his solo album most similar to his work in Gastr Del Sol. I’m listening to that record now and it actually reminds me of the little Bastro that I’ve heard along with parts of The Serpentine Similar.

Bill Meyer: Gastr Del Sol’s existence corresponded with Grubbs’ time at University of Chicago, where he was getting his PhD. I believe it was in poetry, and the words he wrote for the band’s songs reflect that study.

Christian Carey: I've been having fun poring over David Grubbs’ trilogy of books and guessing which stories might be about Gastr del Sol. He's excellent at being covert, but I would be surprised if they weren't featured in some of his writing.

[doomandgloomfromthetomb]

Frank Zappa - Olympic Auditorium, Los Angeles, California, March 7, 1970

Over on Aquarium Drunkard, Roz Milner wrote up the latest archival Zappa haul — Funky Nothingness — which is kind of a lost Hot Rats follow-up. Kind of! As a bonus, Roz passed along this eeeeeessential bootleg from the same period. Take it away, Roz!

After breaking up the Mothers in 1969, Frank Zappa spent a few months away from the road. He sat in with a few bands — Captain Beefheart, Pink Floyd, Archie Shepp — but didn't play any gigs until Feb. 1970, when he put together a pickup band and played a show in San Diego. About a month later, he road-tested a group he'd been recording with in the studio: Max Bennett, Aynsley Dunbar, Sugarcane Harris, and Ian Underwood. They played a set of mostly new, mostly blues-based material: "Chunga's Revenge," "Directly From My Heart to You," and "Sharleena." These would all get released later in the year. But "Twinkle Tits," a waltz built around some themes he's repurposed for other songs, fell through the cracks. With a name like that, it's not hard to see why Reprise balked. But it's a nice vehicle for Zappa and Harris to stretch out on — it's too bad this one's got a tape flip right in the middle of Frank's solo. 

A few weeks ago, UMe released Funky Nothingness, a look at this period and an unreleased record that sat on the shelf for over 50 years. But for almost that long, the only glimpse fans had of this band was this audience tape. Indeed, I've heard it was the first Zappa bootleg — and there's more than a few of those. It's got a lot of ambience and with headphones, you feel like you're right in the room. Make sure you stick around for the encore — a (Beefheart-less, alas) jam on "Willie The Pimp."

[ancillary-review-of-books]

Weird Bodies in Flux: Roz Milner reviews INVAGINIES by Joe Koch, out now from Clash Books

[translitsupplement]

Welcome to the Trans Literary Supplement, a new space for writers to share work and literary views, particularly those relating to trans literature of all sorts. Or, in other words, Roz Milner writing fiction and reviews until other people feel like this is a space worth contributing to

[dustedmagazine]

Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention — Whisky-A-Go-Go 1968 (Zappa Records/UMe)

Photo by George Rodriguez

In late July 1968, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention brought a three-ring circus to Los Angeles’s Whisky-A-Go-Go nightclub. They had some history at the club. They had played there early in their careers, but by this point they were an established act: they’d toured Europe, released four records and Zappa was in the process of starting his own record label. This July evening was a showcase not just for the Mothers, then, but also for acts he’d signed: The GTOs, a group of singers who doubled as groupies, street musician Wild Man Fisher and Alice Cooper. The show was recorded for possible release.

That album never materialized in Zappa’s lifetime, but some 56 years later this evening’s events are here on Whisky-A-Go-Go 1968. It’s not the full night, just the Mothers sets, boiling down a five-hour show to just under three.

As far as live Zappa albums go, Whisky-A-Go-Go 1968 is a mixed bag. There's moments where Zappa guitar shows him growing into a compelling soloist and there’s few songs here that never made it onto a previous Zappa record. But when compared to something like The Ark or Ahead of Their Time, this never quite gels: there's a sense of hesitation or maybe the band wasn’t having a good night. It’s interesting and occasionally really good, but it’s not as exciting as you might hope.

The first half of the set wavers between free-form jams and the Mothers goofing on 1950s doo wop: “Oh In the Sky,” “Memories of El Monte,” “My Boyfriend’s Back.” Zappa did have a genuine admiration for this kind of music, but between Roy Estrada’s strangled falsetto and Zappa’s deadpan delivery on these, it’s hard not to read these as the Mothers goofing around. It’s definitely more for hardcore fans. The improvisations are fine, too, with the little flourishes that pop up on Mothers records: stomping rhythms, vocal shouts, harsh bursts of sounds.

Some moments you had to be there for. “Della’s Preamble” incorporates audience participation that doesn’t come through on record. During moments of jamming you can hear shouts and yells and Zappa calling people up on the stage to dance. There’s even a bit where he’s presented with a pair of wings.

As the first set winds down, the band starts to stretch out on instrumentals and flex their muscles. “King Kong” has some wild blowing from the band’s brass section and lets both Zappa and Preston stretch out for solos before the band deftly segues into Edgard Varese’s “Octandre” and more improvisations.

The second set is more focused on the Mothers instrumental side: two takes of “The Duke” (actually an early version of “Little House I Used To Live In,” not the similarly named “Duke of Prunes'') that have Zappa taking completely different guitar solos, then the band moves into “Khaki Sack.” It’s a loose R&B groove with lots of room for solos, showing the band’s chops extended to far more than just goofy rock pastiches. Then the band moves into a lengthy performance of “The Whip,” where Zappa’s guitar playing takes on a nice psychedelic tinge, before the band moves on into some extended jamming for “Whisky Chouflee.” Finally, the disc ends with a nice treat: the first live performance of “Brown Shoes Don’t Make It,” from 1967’s Absolutely Free. It’s a little rough and the way it jumps around exposes some of this group’s limitations on stage, but the band pulls it together when they go back to the theme on “Brown Shoes Shuffle.”

In some ways, it’s best to compare this to 1974’s Roxy and Elsewhere, another live record that was recorded basically like an on-stage recording session. There, Zappa played several shows with the same set list with the intent of editing the best bits together for a live record; it’s similar to the approach Zappa refers to on here occasionally. But that project never materialized in his lifetime. One small excerpt came out on Uncle Meat, another on You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore Vol. 5. Was he unhappy with this session? It’s impossible to say at this point. But this set documents a pretty significant occasion for the band, both as a homecoming and as a nice audio document of this group. Indeed, there’s not much live material from this early in Zappa’s career, let alone in this high quality sound.

Hardcore Zappa fans should consider Whisky-A-Go-Go 1968 an instant buy, but more casual ones may find the first half a little bulky. Those who enjoy the live bits of albums like Burnt Weeny Sandwich or Weasels Ripped My Flesh will find a lot to dig into here.

Roz Milner

[dustedmagazine]

Ivo Perelman and Nate Wooley  —   Polarity 3 (Burning Ambulance)

Polarity 3 is hard to parse. Saxophonist Ivo Perelman and trumpeter Nate Wooley have recorded two previous albums as a duo, both pushing at the boundaries of free jazz and improvisation.  

Their latest collaboration, Polarity 3, runs just over an hour and offers ten different performances. There’s no songbook, no standards, not even a set of chord changes tying them together. These performances vary in length from just a couple minutes to a ten-minute improvisation that closes the record.

The record showcases the chemistry they’ve developed as a duo over their past records. They bounce phrases and ideas off each other, constantly pushing each other in new directions. Sometimes they come together to play in sync before spinning off in their own directions. It’s like a dance, though one without a lot of rules.

“One” opens with both artists playing long notes but soon they switch to short, wavelike patterns and circling around each other, eventually moving up and down the scale. Over eight minutes, they feel each other out: they take turns, then slowly start to play at the same time and eventually find some common ground in the last third of the track.

For the first part of the record, they move slowly, as if trying to set a tone for the evening: “Two” is a mood piece with its long, drifting notes. In “Three,” they experiment with the ranges of their instruments, quickly building up the pace and energy. The track ends with both blowing harsh bursts of sound, like a tape reel running into a burst of static.

Polarity 3 starts to come together on “Four” as they work in tandem, sometimes playing a base for the other, sometimes moving around the same ideas. When Wooley plays a rising phrase of notes, Perelman follows with one of his own, or vice versa. By the end of the performance, Wooley is playing low, buzzing notes and Perelman’s getting a nice, full-throated tone out of his tenor sax.

“Six” is another standout. They start with quick, darting movements around some high notes and eventually their playing gives the impression of two musical lines that are twisting and bending around each other, like ivy growing along a trellis. Soon the notes take on a harsher edge, with Wooley’s starting to buzz and Perelman's getting a rough, airy tone. But eventually they work back to common ground and play some bright notes in harmony.

Polarity 3 is full of moments like that and it’s tempting to say it’s like one is setting puzzles for the other to find their way out of. But that doesn’t seem quite right — this is not a partnership that feels combative or at odds. It’s more like two people working together on putting together a puzzle or shaping a piece of art. It feels collaborative in the sense that each is building on what the other’s doing, of them trying to find a shape for ideas running through their mind.

Sometimes shapelessness gives way to a feeling of sparseness and open space. The horns echo and the brief moments of silence fill the room. At others, the similarity of their two voices left me wishing they mixed it up somewhat, for instance, with Perelman switching to a different kind of horn. But then there are moments where Wooley changes the timbre of his trumpet or where Perelman works right at the lower registers of his sax, giving things a boost of color. On “Eight” he uses a mute and gives his trumpet a decidedly Miles-like tone, even if he’s playing in a radically different style than Miles ever did.

Free jazz records like this have the potential to come off as self-indulgent, with the feeling of the musicians noodling endlessly. Thankfully that’s not the case here: these two engage with each other enough that the music never feels like it’s settling down. It might be a little hard to grasp for someone new to either one, but the kind of listener who’s familiar with any of Perelman’s previous free records (Tuning Forks, The Whisperers) will like what they find here.

Roz Milner

[dustedmagazine]

Cecil Taylor Unit — Live at Fat Tuesdays, February 9, 1980 (First Visit Archive)

Over the weekend of Feb. 8-9th, 1980, the Cecil Taylor Unit rolled into Fat Tuesday’s, a jazz club at 190 Third Avenue in Manhattan. Four sets were recorded over the weekend by Swiss producer Werner X. Uehlinger, probably some four hours of music. The next year, one of these sets was released by Uehlinger’s label HatHut. And now, over 40 years later, another set has been released as Live At Fat Tuesdays, February 9, 1980, the first record on Uehlinger’s new label First Visit Archive.

This release consists of one long, untitled composition by Cecil Taylor, split arbitrarily into three tracks, and is a little over an hour of intense music: at turns it threatens to boil over, could seem at home on a classical record, or has the shouts and claps of a revival meeting. It’s not the most accessible of Taylor’s records, but then his most interesting ones never are.

The set opens with Taylor on piano, gently exploring while the percussion duo of Sunny Murray and Jerome Cooper provide a sparse backing. Soon, alto saxophonist Jimmy Lyons enters and he and Taylor go back and forth for a bit. As Taylor’s playing grows faster and more percussive, Lyons starts working on variations of the same phrase, adding little flourishes here and there. As the pace continues to build, Taylor’s energy rises and about four minutes in, he launches into his first solo of the set. You can hear him exploring ideas, sometimes going back to a passage or two between bursts. This isn’t just free jazz, but something with a larger structure in mind. Taylor’s piano occasionally bursts into fragments of sound, his energetic playing seeming to swirl around the other players and pushing him to the forefront. After a little bit, violinist Ramsey Ameen enters, sounding like he just walked in off an Albert Ayler record, his tone thin and shrill. He adds a nice dissonant streak to Taylor’s music, a counter to the pumping, rhythmic piano.

Not far into the second part, Taylor changes tack: his playing slows down and settles into a slow, almost classical style. He’s not exactly playing it straight — there’s little signature flourishes between phrases here—  but he’s almost showing that he can play like Keith Jarrett if he wanted to. As his playing once again picks up and grows fragmented, Lyons reenters and trades licks. Together they build a flurry of notes, the rhythm section trailing just behind.

Later in the evening, another wrinkle emerges: someone starts to vocalize overtop of the music, almost speaking in tongues, as opposed to the poetry Taylor sometimes mixed into his music. As the tempo slows down, there’s layers of voices and hand claps and percussion, taking the music into another dimension. And as the set winds down, the voices grow stronger and more rapid, little bursts that almost mimic Taylor and Lyons playing. And finally, Taylor slows things down almost all the way, closing an intense hour of music with some slow, melodic playing.

Throughout Live at Fat Tuedsays Taylor’s playing isn’t just a mere accompaniment to his band. He never just guides things along with a well-placed chord here or there. His forceful, driving playing could be a band all in itself and acts almost like a bed for the rest of the musicians to work on top of. He occasionally guides them with a burst of playing or pushes someone forward with a low rumble from his left hand. But one could strip away everything else to just focus on him and they’d still have an engaging record.

With so many moving parts here, like the interplay between Taylor and the string section of Ameen and Alan Silva (bass, cello), or the way Lyons seems to effortlessly glide between Taylor’s flurry of notes, it can be easy to get overwhelmed on first listen. Thankfully, one can go back and relisten: an ability the audience this night at Fat Tuesday’s wasn’t able to have.

To think that this short-lived lineup was able to play with this kind of telekinesis and energy on any of these nights is almost breathtaking and makes one wish the two unreleased sets were also available to listen to. But until then, this is an essential and exciting addition to Taylor’s discography.

Roz Milner

[dustedmagazine]

Fay Victor — Life Is Funny That Way (TAO Forms)

Photo by Deneka Peniston

If Herbie Nichols is remembered at all, it’s as a jazz composer and a pianist, not as a songwriter. In the decades since his death he’s carved out a small legacy with musicians like Roswell Rudd, the Clusone Trio and Misha Mengelberg recording albums with his material. These are the records that do the heavy lifting in carrying his music on; Nichols own The Complete Blue Note Recordings (Blue Note, 1997) is a bulky three-CD set that's out-of-print and goes for a premium on the secondary market.

Never a recording success in his short lifetime, Nichols paid the bills by working a variety of gigs: he taught piano, penned articles and poems for magazines, and accompanied singers. Throughout this he was writing music at an almost frantic pace: about 170 compositions, some with lyrics. And even if you don’t know Nichols’s name, you’ve probably heard his most famous one: “Lady Sings the Blues,” a song that Billie Holiday turned into a standard. When Nichols died in 1963, writer AB Spellman noted he’d never had a year where he supported himself solely on his own music.

In recent years, New York based jazz singer Fay Victor has developed her interest in Nichols music with her Herbie Nichols SUNG project. Life Is Funny That Way is the result of these years of work: she’d added lyrics to a set of Nichols’s songs, fleshed out arrangements on others. Over 11 performances, she’s backed with a jazz quartet and brings this music — some of it never recorded in Nichols’s lifetime — to life.

It opens with “Life Is Funny That Way,” a song starting with Victor and sax player Michaël Attias together. When they get to the chorus the band joins in with a nicely swinging groove. Immediately you can hear the chemistry between Attias and Victor: they almost play in unison, his notes mirroring her singing. The other players (Anthony Coleman on piano, Ratzo Harris on bass, and Tom Rainey on drums) create a nice backing for Attias and Victor to branch out on.

Conversely, Coleman and Harris are all but absent on “The Bassist.” It opens with an understated drum solo by Rainey: light rolls, gentle cymbal taps. He builds up until Victor and Attias join in together, again acting as two leads that are mostly playing in sync. But when Victor starts scatting, her and Attias start trading riffs and playing off each other.

Occasionally, the band slows things down to a crawl, giving Victor a chance to stretch out and sing a slow ballad. “Bright Butterfly” has Harris bowing his lines, giving a thick and fuzzy background for Attias and Victor. “The Culprit Is You” has a similar approach, but with Coleman’s sparse piano and little pushes by Rainey’s drumming. It lends this performance a nice smoky, late-night vibe where you can almost see the spotlight closing tight onto Victor as she stretches her notes. And on “Lady Sings the Blues,” Victor’s voice has a bright, almost warm quality as she leans into Billie Holiday’s lyrics.

The band occasionally gets a chance to shine too. Late in the record, they play “Twelve Bars” as a slow mood piece, with Coleman bouncing around his piano as the rhythm section whips up a swirl of noise behind him. It’s one of the more angular pieces here, showing Nichols’ more outside style. He wasn’t just a straight ahead bop pianist.

Life Is Funny That Way offers a nice primer on Nichols: music that’s alternately challenging and straight ahead, close enough to the tradition to seem familiar with enough twists it can catch you off guard. It’s a good way to dive into his music. Let’s hope Victor’s project isn’t a one-off.

Roz Milner

[dustedmagazine]

Ginger Root — SHINBANGUMI (Ghostly International)

Photo by Cameron Lew

The latest Ginger Root record has multi-instrumentalist Cameron Lew diving deep into retro sounds, drawing inspiration from Paul McCartney, Yellow Magic Orchestra and other pre-internet vibes. It’s a well-constructed LP and one with the flow and pace of a concept record, but it’s also one that sticks to a formula.

Things kick off with “No Problems,” a slice of McCartney-esque pop with warm keyboards, touches of strings, and a thin guitar tone that twangs like a rubber band. Lew builds an emphasis on the McCartney II, early 1980s ambience: the analog synths, the way everything sounds like it’s been built by overdubbing one instrument at a time, or how it feels like it’s old without actually being old. This sort of not-quite-nostalgia is all over SHINBANGUMI, and “No Problems” does a great job of setting the scene for listeners.

Lew’s a musician who wears his influences on his sleeve, and throughout the first half of the record you can almost make a checklist of what he likes by the way each song sounds: “Better Than Monday” has a slinky, almost mechanical funk groove that recalls Yellow Magic Orchestra, while “All Night” has a driving, bass-led groove straight out of a vintage city pop record by Tatsuro Yamashita. And “Giddy Up” throws in a vaguely tense sort of energy that lands somewhere between solo McCartney and Todd Rundgren. When Lew’s at his best on songs like these, he makes music that’s engaging and fun.

But when he errs, it grinds the album to a halt. “Kaze” is a curveball that sounds like an odd, almost-listing sort of lounge music. Tonally it doesn’t really match what else is happening here: there’s little rolls of percussion and it builds into an uneventful climax. It feels like it’s from a completely different record and it disrupts the flow he’s been building up.

Throughout SHINBANGUMI, Lew hides his voice behind filters and it’s occasionally hard to make out his lyrics when he’s shoved to the back of the mix. He isn’t a strong singer or especially a wordsmith, but his singing almost feels incidental to the music here. This is a record that’s big on pop hooks and funky basslines. And perhaps a plot of some kind, too. Lew’s released a series of connected videos for this that suggest it’s a concept record following a TV executive in 1980s Japan making his own network. The plot feels loose and sort of incidental to the lyrics, but the way this album flows does have a feeling of a storyline, right down to a climax on “Show 10” and a coda on “Take Me Back.” Those two close the album out with more lush city pop grooves, touches of sax and strings, and carefully placed splashes of keyboards.

The thing about a record like this is that you almost know the game plan from the album’s lead single. Lew sets the template early: lots of old sounding keyboards, basslines that move all over the rhythm, and a vocal template that keeps his voice almost buried. Aside from a couple of curveballs and a few short interludes, he never really strays from that model. It’s an album that if it catches you right away, it’s probably one you’ll enjoy all the way through. But if you’re expecting it to build into something or for him to explore a wide palette of sounds you’ll be left wanting. As they say on TV: viewer discretion is advised.

Roz Milner 

[dustedmagazine]

James Kaplan — 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool (Penguin Press)

There are two or three jazz albums almost everyone seems to have: Dave Brubeck’s Time Out, John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, and Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue. The first two records were well received on release, but not so much Davis’s. It wasn’t only a departure from the kind of music he played at the time, but seemed out of step with what everyone else was doing, too. And yet it’s taken on a life of its own, becoming if not the most talked about jazz record ever, then certainly the best-selling.

Enter James Kaplan, a biographer best known for his two-volume book on Frank Sinatra. In 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool he turns his focus onto Kind of Blue and the confluence of three jazz icons: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans. However 3 Shades of Blue doesn’t live up to its potential and ultimately feels like an unnecessary retread of familiar material.

Kaplan opens the book in the 1980s, with Miles Davis playing auditoriums and ordering Wynton Marsalis off his stage. Kaplan himself enters, a young journalist for Vanity Fair, who lands an interview with the trumpeter, and two hit it off. From there he goes back in time to Davis’s early years and then mixes in Coltrane and Evans — but it’s Miles who is the book’s center. This has its benefits and drawbacks: he’s a more compelling figure than Evans and he lived longer than the book’s other two principals. But he’s also the most written about, too, and Kaplan has a hard time bringing anything new to light. So instead we get the familiar stories about him gigging with Charlie Parker, getting in trouble with the law and spending the late 1970s getting high in his brownstone. Same with Coltrane’s obsessive practicing and dental woes, and Evans’s heroin addiction.

Possibly the only new information comes from Kaplan’s suppositions about his subject’s inner feelings. For example, Kaplan suggests that Davis was sexually interested in Evans: “his all-American good looks and professional intensity were attractive to women — and to Miles Davis.” Why? Because Davis once put his arms around Evans while he played piano, a move Davis also pulled on Red Garland. Kaplan doesn’t think Davis felt similarly with Garland.

Indeed, 3 Shades is sloppy. It could useanother once-over by an attentive editor. Kaplan occasionally derails his narrative with odd asides about Frank Sinatra or by repeating points he made earlier in the book. At one point he goes off on a tangent about a 1980s photo of Davis in a section set some 30 years previous. Elsewhere he’s careless about sourcing quotes: on one page he quotes pianist Jon Batiste on Evans’s use of touch, then inserts a lengthy block quote about Evans’s playing. But the second quote isn’t Batiste. It’s from a biography of Evans by Peter Pettinger, a fact readers would only notice if they search Kaplan’s endnotes.

In some ways, 3 Shades feels like a rush job but one without a specific anniversary in mind. In others, it feels overlong and rambling: one doesn’t need a garish description of Davis in the late 1970s in a book nominally about a record from 1959. In others it feels more like him remembering his encounters with Davis, both on record and in person, than a proper biography of any of these three musicians.

But it’s not so much that the book doesn’t know what it wants to be, it’s that it doesn’t need to be here at all. People new to Davis, Coltrane or Evans will find a lot of information here, but those who already know them won’t find anything not already in other biographies by Ben Ratliff, Pettinger or Quincy Troupe. And newcomers will find those a more linear, less convoluted read to boot.

Roz Milner

[dustedmagazine]

Chris Forsyth — Plays Love Devotion Surrender (Bandcamp, 2024)

The golden anniversary of John McLaughlin and Carlos Santana’s 1973 record Love Surrender Devotion passed last year without much fanfare: no deluxe reissue or archival release from a short-lived supergroup of sorts. It instead remains one of the lesser explored chapters of McLaughlin’s long career.

Which isn’t to say it’s overlooked or under appreciated. The jam-heavy album of hard driving fusion has found fans over the decades, most notably guitar hero Chris Forsyth. At last fall’s Philly Music Fest, Forsyth headed a band that replayed the album in full for a packed crowd at Solar Myth. He was joined by guitarist Nick Millevoi, a rhythm section of Douglas McCombs, Mikel Patrick Avery and Ryan Jewell, plus Brent Cordero on electric organ. And not too long ago he made this set available for purchase on his Bandcamp.

Throughout Love Devotion Surrender, Forsyth and company don’t stray too far from the original. It’s the same material, roughly in the same order: the last two tracks are flipped, but it works to give this record a bombastic finale instead of the muted coda on the original.

It opens with John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” and a burst of sound before the band settles into Coltrane's familiar intro. Forsyth’s guitar has a sharp tone that squeals and sounds like he’s pushing his amp to its limit. His playing is fluid and moves between longer notes and quick little flurries — a departure from McLaughlin’s machine gun-spray of notes on the original. Meanwhile Millevoi chugs along on rhythm guitar behind him with a choppy, wah-heavy tone. After a while they trade off and Millevoi steps up for a solo of his own, the two of them building up into a frenzy of dueling leads playing off each other. After about ten minutes the pace slows down a bit and they both settle into playing the iconic Coltrane riff. It’s an effective way to open the record, grabbing your attention and setting the mood of a night of guitar frenzy.

The band then moves into “Niama,” another Coltrane number. But this is the first step away from the record: where McLaughlin and Santana played this acoustically, with a bit of a Latin tinge, this band plays it a slow electric blues. The guitars draw the emotion out of this one as Cordero’s organ gives them a bed of sound to work on top of. It segues nicely into McLaughlin’s “A Love Divine” which builds up slowly from Cordero’s droning organ and bursts of percussion from Avery and Jewell. Both the guitarists slowly work their way into this one but before long they’re playing a flurry of notes as the rhythm section builds up the tension by playing the beat faster and faster. The whole band works itself up into a lather, finishing this one with blasts of cymbals and squealing guitars while McCombs keeps them on track with his bass.

Next comes the second wrinkle of the night: the band swaps the order of “Meditation” and “Let Us Now Enter the House of the Lord” while also changing the first to another slow electric blues from a sparse acoustic theme. With Cordero’s organ and McCombs bass holding the groove down, both Forsyth and Millevoi take their time to play around the chorus and trade off short solos. It’s actually one of the set’s more approachable moments and wouldn’t feel out of place on a Solar Motel record.

They finish the evening off with “Let Us Now…” which is a fitting bookend with “A Love Supreme.” They’re both lengthy performances where the guitars trade off riffs and are played something like spiritual jazz fusion opening with flurries of notes and drum rolls. It evolves into a vaguely Latin groove for the two guitars to solo over and eventually to jam in unison together.

The thing about a record like this is that for all the guitar heroics it doesn’t quite have the same spark as the original. There, both Santana and McLaughlin were going for a spiritual vibe, playing hard and fast like they were trying to lose themselves in the music and push into something spiritual. Indeed, bootlegs of this band on their short tour show them regularly pushing songs past the 20-minute mark. That was a group reaching for ecstasy.

By contrast, you never get the same feeling from Forsyth and company here. As good as their playing is, you know they’re playing tribute to a record instead of trying to catch the same religious feeling. It’s not really a bad thing, it just means they’re playing it a little safer and closer to the vest even when they work themselves up into a frenzy.

As far as tributes go, Plays Love Devotion Surrender doesn't mess with the gospel and anybody who loves guitar-heavy jamming will enjoy this. While it might not completely work for people unfamiliar with the original record or those without the patience to sit through long guitar workouts, fans with worn out copies of the original will have a lot here to chew on.

Roz Milner

[dustedmagazine]

Paul Paccione and Apartment House — Distant Musics (Another Timbre)

Is Apartment House too prolific? As Another Timbre’s house band, they’re on about 40 releases. Do we really need another record of theirs, especially one focused on a lesser known composer? It seems like a fair question. And yet Distant Musics is a welcome addition to the catalog. Across five pieces the ensemble plays in a variety of configurations and introduces listeners to Paul Paccione’s music. He’s a composer and educator who taught between 1981-2018 and has been composing for over 40 years. But his discography has been sparse, making Distant Musics a good introduction.

Musically, Paccione is deeply influenced by minimalist composers like Morton Feldman and John Cage’s Number Pieces. His music is dominated by long notes played on stringed instruments and his pieces slowly unfold over five to ten minutes, if not longer. “Exit Music” opens this record with a string trio playing slow droning passages that surround the listener, pulling them along in a slow drift as the textures overlap and shift. It’s similar to the feeling Kali Malone evokes in her organ dirges and the way they envelope you in a warm space of sound.

Meanwhile “Gridwork” adds a wrinkle by introducing clarinet and piano into the mix. It starts with small plinks of piano as the strings create an eerie background texture. Heather Roche’s clarinet has a thin, wiry tone that feels like it’s a piano string pulled tight. Soon, sounds start to mesh and move around between short pauses, giving this one a lattice-like feeling of intersecting lines or a sliding tile puzzle.

“Distant Music” has a similar instrumentation - two clarinets, a violin, a viola, and a cello - and instead of the short phrases, this one is built around overlapping lines: as soon as one instrument takes a pause, two more spring up in its place. At times it’s like watching waves crashing on the shore, one after another.   

Key to this record is “Violin.” Both the longest piece here and the only one written for only one kind of instrument (four violins) this one goes deepest into his influences. Between its tense, thin opening and the way the violins overlap, it builds tension by both stretching the notes as far as they can go and emphasizing the slight dissonance between the four players. The music creaks and groans, droning like a set of bagpipes, and settles into an unsettling, otherworldly ambience.

As noted above, Paccione wears his influences on his sleeve, so one should approach Distant Music with that in mind. There’s no bombast or marches here, just five pieces of slow, sometimes atonal music. Those who’ve been keeping up with Apartment House will find this one compares well to their Number Pieces or Naiads records. So yeah, we did need another Apartment House record.

Roz Milner

[dustedmagazine]

Janel & Anthony — New Moon in the Evil Age (Cuneiform)

Washington DC based musicians Janel Leppin and Anthony Pirog have been working for a while, both as a duo and separately. Pirog’s part of the Messthetics and recently cut a record with James Brandon Lewis, while Leppin played with both Marissa Nadler and Oren Ambarchi, and leads the Ensemble Volcanic Ash. And together they released Where Is Home a little over a decade ago. Now they’re back with a new record: New Moon in the Evil Age. It’s split between two discrete halves: one is built around quiet moments and interplay, the other leans towards indie rock.

“New Moon” opens the first half with Leppin’s atmospheric bowed cello lines and Pirog layering guitar lines over top of each other. It builds up into a swirl of sound before quickly dissipating like a puff of smoke. It’s an approach they go back to on other pieces here: “Bells Ring In the Distance” adds a bit of echo to the mix to give them a wider sense of ambience and a slowly rising riff that’s played in unison slowly gives way to Leppin’s cello. The ideas are traded fast between them as they return to the theme for a quick ending.

Elsewhere the two play with a folksy feel. The gentle acoustic guitar on “Boom Boom” wouldn’t sound out of place on a fingerstyle record and Leppin’s cello comes in for a nice counterpart. But the piece takes a quick shift when Pirog enters with a clean, jazzy electric tone and some fluid lines up and down his fretboard. As it closes, there’s an interesting, mellotron-like sound that enters the mix, a nice wrinkle that draws back to 1970s progressive rock and gives listeners a bit of a curveball: what exactly is this record? It’s not the first such stylistic turn here.

A piano kicks off “Fog Curls Around the Cypress,” giving the piece a tonal shift from the string-led songs elsewhere. The slow riff pushes this piece forward as a guitar chimes in as the lead voice with gentle, precise playing. Leppin’s cello enters to finish off the piece and ends it on a darker feeling as her instrument buzzes and fills the space.

But the biggest chance finishes off the first half of this set: “Crystal Wish” dives full on into New Age territory. It opens with an analog-sounding synth riff and Pirog’s thin, piercing guitar tone. While the way he slides around and bends his notes harkens back to earlier on this record, the way it gives to a synth’s wide splash of sound catches one off guard. Suddenly we’re in a different ballpark. From the way his guitar pops in but has enough echo to make you think he’s playing deep in a cave somewhere to the outer space ambience of the keyboards, it feels like something Constance Demby might have whipped up, a kind of music it’s easy to imagine playing over footage of a spaceship cruising between planets. It's quite an effective way to end the first half and almost makes you wish there was more in this style before it, but then maybe it wouldn’t have the same power.   

Through the first half, the duo makes music that draws on several genres while never quite confining themselves to one. There are touches of New Age, American Primitive, Post Rock, and more, but they never quite confine themselves to just one at any given moment. Where similar duos like Mary Halvorson and Bill Frisell’s 2018 record The Maid with the Flaxen Hair kept closer to one style, this one sees Pirog and Leppin pushing at each other’s boundaries and keeps listeners off balance.

The second half, however, is a different beast completely: when “Surf the Dead” kicks off with a rock rhythm and Leppin’s singing New Moon in the Evil Age has stepped back from post rock to a quirky sort of indie. The grooves sound thin and wiry, propelled by tinny sounding drums, and the vocals give way to a squealing synth solo. Indeed, throughout the second half the group - at separate points they’re joined by bassist Dev Hoff and percussionist Dr. Ali Analouei - the group mines various styles of indie rock. Both “Sweet and Sour” and “Dream Come Alive” have slow, woozy synth patterns and an ethereal vibe that recalls dream pop; the sparse instrumentation, layered vocals and poppy rhythms on “Evil Age” sound a little like Tennis.

In some ways this second half feels like a mirror reflection of the first: where before the focus was on the instruments and the interplay, this one builds on the similar sounds and textures but instead puts the emphasis on rhythms and vocals. At the same time, it never feels like a fleshed out version of the first half, but more like a complimentary part that shows them exploring pop hooks and a shared interest in indie rock.

But its inclusion here is also a slight tell: the music on the second half feels like it couldn’t stand on its own. Constant slow tempos and heavy use of synths betray the music’s weightlessness: instead of being its own thing, it sounds like a collection of music inspired by the first half. The two halves work in conversation and show a duo that’s attempting to straddle a fine line. Still, it’s sequencing as two related but separate discs helps to play up the first side’s strengths while also showing the weaknesses of the second.

Those who enjoyed the recent Gastr del Sol compilation or the acoustic discs that Tzadik’s been releasing will find a fair amount on the first part to enjoy. And even if the second half does drag occasionally, it does showcase a different side of this duo.

Roz Milner

[dustedmagazine]

Various Artists — Eccentric Soul: The Shoestring Label (Numero Group)

Alton, Illinois based Howard Neil has been active in music for over 70 years as a drummer, singer and producer. But he’s worked on the fringes of popular music, never quite getting the spotlight to himself, except for a period in the late 1970s and early 1980s when Neil ran a small record label: Shoestring Records. It lasted for all of seven releases, most of them 7” singles.

On the latest volume of their flagship Eccentric Soul series, Numero Records assembled a ten-track record that takes a little bit of everything that Neil had his hands on with Shoestring: slick disco, Prince-inspired 80s pop, slow R&B jams. The result’s something of a mixed bag but the highlights showcase Neil’s strengths as an arranger and producer.

The Shoestring Label opens with The James Family’s "We've Got It Made,” a fairly typical disco number with splashes of horns, driving piano and layered vocals. It’s a nice, if unremarkable, groove until the bridge when Neil brings in weird synth sounds that sound like bombs dropping. From there the horns take over, leading the song into a nice instrumental back half. It’s a strong opening for the record.

Indeed, throughout The Shoestring Label, Neil builds off this basic formula: disco rhythms, horn riffs, little bursts of keys. The songs here seem largely meant for the dancefloor and if the lyrics are something of a weak spot (“move to the left, move to the right / keep on dancing with all your might”) that’s a feature, not a bug, of this era’s dance music.

However as this record goes on, it shows Neil adapting with the times. Both sides of a Pete and Cheez single betray a definite Prince influence: drum machines, tinny synths, slap bass. The almost mechanical groove sounds light years away from this label’s earlier singles, but a closer listen shows Neil simply changing his approach: synths replace horns, sure, but the emphasis on rhythm remains the same.

None of the names here went on to anything much: Pete & Cheez seemingly only put out one single before vanishing back into obscurity, while Jimmie Green and Carletta Sue had one-offs on other labels. But Neil gets the last word with “You’re All the Woman I Need,” a slow jam with a stop-start keyboard pattern and a nice percussion motif backing him singing his heart out. It’s a remarkable single: too bad it didn’t lead to anything much.

With not a lot of material to work with, and maybe a misfire or two, The Shoestring Label isn’t the strongest or most revelatory volume in this long-running series, but it’s outweighed by dancefloor fillers and sultry grooves. Anyone who liked Numero’s dance oriented releases or wants to add a curveball to a mixtape will find this enjoyable.

Roz Milner

[dustedmagazine]

Friends & Neighbors — Circles (Clean Feed)

It’s fitting a band named after an Ornette Coleman deep cut draws influence from the edgier side of jazz: Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, Charles Mingus. On Circles, the Scandinavian jazz group Friends & Neighbors draws on these figures and adds its own take.

“Cecil” opens the record up with a blast: the rhythm section of Jon Rune Strøm on bass and drummer Tollef Østvang freely move around between stabs by pianist Oscar Grönberg before André Roligheten and Thomas Johansson enter on alto sax and trumpet, respectively. Grönberg’s solo has a slanted, almost fractured quality that draws on Taylor’s percussive approach, while Roligheten’s solo sounds like he’s fighting with his horn from the way he draws out screeching, squiggly notes. The piece winds down to a quiet finish, but by then it’s got the listener’s attention.

Throughout Circles, the group enjoys paying tribute to their influences. “Ghost March” has the two horns playing in unison, a la mid period Ayler, while the punchy, quick lines of “Charles” sound steeped in late Mingus’ records like Changes. And one hears shades of Don Pullen in the way Grönberg plays: quick bursts of sound, then slower melodic passages.

But they aren’t just going through the motions or aping their heroes. The title track has a nice, slow groove, and plenty of space for the horns to play lines that bob and weave through each other. When Johansson steps up for his solo, he gets a bright and brassy tone, going between quick runs up and down and some longer, more mellow notes.

Key to this record is Grönberg’s playing. His piano keeps the leads going, gently pushing them along with his comping, but also keeps things from getting too far out there: at times he’s answering their lines, at others putting a well-placed chord here and there. When he gets to stretch out, like on “Son,” he plays with gusto, even gently guiding the group into a Latin-style groove.

With Circles, Friends & Neighbors show both confidence and chops. For those new to them, it’s a good place to get on board, and anyone already familiar with them will find this one enjoyable.

Roz Milner

[dustedmagazine]

Dust, Volume 10, Number 7

Obsessed with Congo Funk in this month's dust

Without getting too deep into American electoral politics, let’s just say that we’ve been distracted lately.  We’ve been mired in the slough of despair, frantic in our bargaining with god and lately, a feeling fresh breeze of optimism—it’s been so long, we hardly recognized it.  But despite all that, the records keep coming, and we do our best to deal with them, not always with a fulsome 300-400 word review, but sometimes briefly, as here, in another edition of Dust.  This month, we cover the run of it, from fictional characters that somehow participate in bands, to guitarists on synth holiday to vintage Swedish death metal reissued and more.  Participants this time out include Jennifer Kelly, Byron Hayes, Bill Meyer, Jonathan Shaw, Christian Carey, Andrew Forell, Roz Milner and Ian Mathers. 

Apifera — Keep the Outside Open (Stones Throw)

Four Israeli jazzmen take a jaunt through psychedelic rock and prog, incorporating trippy vocals and squalling synth runs into a space-age fusion.  The musicians— Nitai Hershkovits on keyboards, the beatmaker (and evident link to Stones Throw) Yuvi Havkin, drummer Amir Bresler and guitarist Yonatan Albalak—have spent their careers crossing jazz with funk, hip hop and rock.   Here they push it even further with vocal tracks that hardly sound like jazz at all.  Trippy “Iris Is Neil,” for instance, delivers the title phrase in a keening vocal chant, as explosions of percussion go off like firecrackers on a string.  Squiggles of synth, arcs of electric guitar reach for the epic, but in a manner more like Yes or ELP than Return to Forever.  “Lucky Zoe” delves further into psychedelic pop, its wavery keyboards framing fanciful whimsies a la “Lucy in the Sky.”  “Theodor Marmalade” thumps a funky beat behind flourishes of keys and vocal narratives about desert fauna.  “Don’t you want to see the floating lights?” the cut inquires, and yes, I can just about make out strange, glowing objects in the sky. The instrumental pieces have a more conventionally jazzy feel; “I Love ECM” makes it case with light-fingered syncopations on rims and cymbals, liquid loops of bass and ice-chilled runs of electric keyboard.  “Sera Sam,” at the end, brings on the trumpeter Avishai Cohen for a lyrical turn.   

Jennifer Kelly

Majesty Crush — Butterflies Don’t Go Away

(Numero Group)

Butterflies Don't Go Away by Majesty Crush

A double LP or digital download from Detroit’s own Majesty Crush, the motor city’s answer to the sounds coming out on 4AD. With dreamy vocals by David Stroughter about being an obsessive fan or about bad relationships and a rhythm section kicking up a swirl of noise around him, Majesty Crush brings to mind about a dozen English bands without feeling particularly in debt to any specific group. Occasionally the guitar makes a really cool, almost crunchy sound, but mostly the music moves in the fog, blanketing the vocals in layers of distortion. They lack the fey lyricism of the Cocteau Twins or the dreamy harmonies of Lush but guitarist Michel Segal holds his own against Kevin Shields’s sheets of sound. Meanwhile, they invoke David Hinckley on “No. 1 Fan,” wake up with a bottle and a cigar in hand on “Brand” and dip into ambient spaces on three small interludes. The first half is made of their lone album Love 15, while sides three and four contain an early EP and singles, putting pretty much their entire catalog into one handy set. These Detroit guys seem unjustly forgotten, but thankfully Numero’s made their music easy to find.

Roz Milner

Dennis Callaci & Heimito Künst — First Light (Pass Without Trace)

Heimito Künst is one of many characters in Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, a tangled multi-narrative epic. The enigmatic Italian musician who produced the sounds underpinning First Light has adopted Heimito Künst as his pseudonym, likely in reference to the knotty soundscapes he builds from organs, synths and field recordings. On paper, Dennis Callaci’s lyrics and vocals seem like an odd pairing for Künst’s oblique audio collages. Callaci is half of the long-running lo-fi pop project Refrigerator and has helmed the Shrimper label for over three decades. His signature mid-range nasal utterances, more spoken than sung, populate the extraterrestrial ecosystems of Künst like strange seedlings peeping up from beneath loamy soil. First Light serves as a bridge between the mysterious and the familiar, another worthy entry in Callaci’s discography and a port of entry into an unknown artist’s body of work. 

Bryon Hayes

Buck Curran — The Long Distance (Eiderdown/Obsolete)

Buck Curran is a guitar devotee. He’s a fluent player, a custodian of historic instruments, a chronicler of esteemed players and a compiler of albums that pay tribute to others. But sometimes a guy just needs a change of pace; enter The Long Distance. Mostly competed in a single night, it’s Curran’s holiday from the guitar. Instead, he plays analog synthesizer, layering sweeping tones and helicopter-rotor cadences into something rather like a lost Tangerine Dream album. Curran explains in the album notes that each piece is connected to a memory of a person or place, which may explain the melodies’ intimations of yearning and melancholy. But if you’re not Curran, they might evoke other associations; this music could easily be repurposed for film soundtracks.

Bill Meyer

Rhodri Davies — Telyn Wrachïod (Amgen)

Back in the mid-20th century, kids motorized their bikes with clothes pins and playing cards. The customization might not have yielded much additional propulsion, but the sound was cool. It turns out that they were simply following in the footsteps of 16th century Welsh harpists, who attached brays (slips of wood) to their strings to get a loud, buzzing sound. Rhodri Davies has explored the harp’s options in all manner of settings — Fluxus happenings, minimalist compositions, rock bands, free improv ensembles, the list goes on. Recently he’s commissioned speculative recreations of instruments from centuries ago, which he then uses to play the sort of short, wheels-within-wheels pieces that he formerly played with instruments amplified to a Konono No. 1-level of distortion.  On Telyn Wrachïod he turns to the bray harp, which sounds rather like a cross between a banjo and a sitar. Each of its 12 tracks is spiky but so engrossing that you might find yourself hitting repeat a few times before you move on to the next one.

Bill Meyer

Desultory — Darkness Falls (The Early Years) (Darkness Shall Rise)

The repackaging and re-release of underground metal’s extensive archive of hyper-obscure demos and records continues apace. Darkness Falls (The Early Years) collects three demos from Swedish death metal outfit Desultory, originally independently issued on cassettes between 1990 and 1992. The record’s principal interest is its documentation of the sonic flexibility that informed the term “death metal” in the early 1990s; there’s just as much lightning thrash in these songs as there is moldering morbidity, especially the four engaging tracks on the band’s first demo, From Beyond (1990). The title track is especially pleasurable, in its sprinting, bludgeoning fashion — and this reviewer notes the added benefit of the title’s reference to an excellent H. P. Lovecraft story (is that you, Cthulhu?). Swedeath completists take heed. For the rest of us, it’s a fun release, and of some historical interest. Its relative necessity is open to debate — but hey, we didn’t really need that reissue version of Pig Destroyer’s Painter of Dead Girls on “black ice with metallic silver glitter” vinyl, either. Maybe Darkness Shall Rise should get some points for only releasing four different product versions of Darkness Falls….

Jonathan Shaw

Devouring the Guilt — Not To Want To Say (Kettle Hole)

Devouring The Guilt is a Chicago-associated (meaning two members live there and one moved away but remains connected) improvising trio. The line-up is pretty classic — Gerrit Hatcher on tenor sax, Eli Namay on bass, Bill Harris on drums. And so are the trio’s roots. Hatcher summons a burly tone, steers mostly clear of extended techniques, and gives occasional nods to free jazz heroes like Archie Shepp, Frank Wright and Frank Lowe. These familiar parameters establish a framework to display their collective originality, which lies in the personal vernacular they’ve fashioned. Namay is an alternately pithy and seething presence, plucking spare, structure-defining figures or bowing a maelstrom of woody sound. Harris pushes back against expectations that the drums should push the music forward by punctuating his clearly articulated attack with lots of negative space. Hatcher situates lyricism in long, understated tones and vigorously masticated phases, but also navigates unpredictably through the tight corners and sudden gaps that the other two set up.

Bill Meyer

Carol Genetti / Peter Maunu — Gleaners (Amalgam)

No matter how you approach it, Gleaners will stretch your mind. Just what are Carol Genetti (voice, electronics) and Peter Maunu (guitar, violin, mandolin) gleaning? Not other people’s music, that’s for sure. Maybe the languages of long-extinct species, confidences exchanged between dusty appliances that come to life after the staff leaves the thrift shop, ideas about what instruments might sound like if you see them in pictures. Even when Maunu resorts to rock-ish fuzztones or Genetti exhales an unspooling coo, their co-creations are resolutely sui generis.  Their partnership has been honed through years of regular performance, often with other Chicago-based musicians, which likely explains the brisk confidence that this resolutely abstract music exudes. Genetti is a ceramic artist as well as a musician, and the physical manifestation of this album comes in two forms. She made ten one-of-a-kind clay cases that you can mount on a wall; the regular CDs come in a folio adorned with close-ups of the art edition.

Bill Meyer

Dave Douglas — GIFTS (Greenleaf Music)

GIFTS by Dave Douglas

With sizzling guitar lines and a frontline horn duo of Douglas and James Brandon Lewis, you’d think it would be easy for this to be a mere blowing session. But it’s not. The music is frequently introspective and has a very ECM kind of ambience: it has this wide-angle sonic clarity where each instrument has room to breathe and let their notes slowly linger. The suite of Strayhorn songs in the middle doesn’t feel tired, either. Rafiq Bhatia’s chugging guitar keeps “Take the A Train” moving while Douglas and Lewis move in sync for the theme. When they stretch out, they’re sometimes playing against each other but always seem like they’re on the same page. Meanwhile Bhatia’s playing draws on Bill Frisell, making up for the lack of a low end with well-placed chords and sonic textures. These four make the music their own and it’s one of the year's most rewarding jazz records. 

Roz Milner

Samara Lubelski & Marcia Bassett — Indexical/Rhizome (Relative Pitch)

Samara Lubelski and Marcia Bassett are both well-established members of the U.S. scene that engendered the moniker “new weird America” back in the early aughts. Both have CVs that stretch on for miles. Lubelski is best known as a star in the MV&EE solar system, while Bassett churns out murkier sound pools in a variety of projects, such as Double Leopards and Hototogisu. The pair have a long-standing partnership unfurling phosphorescent drone webs through guitar and violin. This is their eighth recording, and it presents two extended string seances that coax electric spirit whisps from unseen worlds. “Indexical” is the lengthier of the pair and features zoned out but controlled guitar howl from Bassett alongside Lubelski’s rapid bowing. The undulations intertwine to become a radiant lattice of sound. Alien timbres infect “Rhizome,” which sways between a noise-drone wall of sound and hushed electronic whispers. Both are live recordings, showing off the raw magic that this pair of string sirens can conjure.

Bryon Hayes

Joe McPhee With Ken Vandermark — Musings Of A Bahamian Son (Corbett Vs. Dempsey)

Joe McPhee’s been toting folders full of poems and brief musings to gigs for years, but in recent years they’ve assumed an increasingly prominent place in his performances. Now, he’s finally put 28 of them on record, punctuated with nine short soprano sax/clarinet interludes that he improvised with Ken Vandermark. Oppression gets defied, history acknowledged, but most of all, love gets its due. McPhee muses about folks from the neighborhood, jazz heroes that inspired him, old friends now gone, and the balm and galvanization imparted by music itself. Abstract but tender, the interludes amplify this sentiment, showing by example how much appreciation for life and fellowship can be invested in a few tones.

Bill Meyer

Kate Nash — 9 Sad Symphonies (Kill Rock Stars)

On 9 Sad Symphonies, Kate Nash leans into her musical theater background, with skillfully crafted arrangements that incorporate classical orchestrations reminiscent of the film musicals from the 1930s-1950s.  As on most of her albums, she tweaks her sound and musical partners, here working with producer Frederik Thaae. There is a sauciness to her lyrics, which even go so far as describing lunch breaks in toilets. All is not a lark. Nash seeks to exorcize personal demons on “Vampyre” and “My Bile '' is a bracing assessment of a broken relationship. 9 Sad Symphonies may have a bucolic surface, but the singer-songwriter ventures down dark pathways where stars of the Silver Screen would have likely feared to go.

Christian Carey

Occulta Veritas — Irreducible Fear of the Sublime (I, Voidhanger)

Occulta Veritas plays an avant-garde variety of black metal, long on complexity and idiosyncratic compositional sensibilities. It’s abrasive and disorienting, and not especially fun to listen to — which yes, that’s the point, but there’s a huge amount of this sort of thing circulating through the metal underground at any given point, and deliberately distancing music from listeners’ parameters for pleasure can be a tough prospect in that oversaturated context. For this reviewer, the record’s engagement with the theoretical concepts of Jacques Lacan (big-deal psychoanalyst, post-structural Daddy and important player in France’s academic politics of the mid-20th century) helps Irreducible Fear of the Sublime stand out. It’s pretty great that one of the songs is called “Metonimia,” since Lacan’s projection of metonymy along a diachronic axis of spatio-temporal relations fits the music’s tortured snarls and chaotic, off-kilter arrangements. The utterances want to go somewhere, but the structures those utterances are trapped in make meaningful progress a near impossibility. It would be even better to have a lyric sheet, to get more than just the tantalizing engagements with Lacan provided in song titles (“The Mirror Stage,” “Bound to Incompleteness” and so on). There’s an overheated quality to the record that’s additionally compelling: This is your brain; this is your brain on Lacan. But it would be useful to know what specific ideas accompany specific sounds and turns in the music’s syntax. Or is it all just sound and fury, signifying nothing?

Jonathan Shaw

J. Pavone String Ensemble

Reverse Bloom by Jessica Pavone

The current edition of Jessia Pavone’s String Ensemble is reduced to essentials. There are just three players including Pavone, who plays viola, Aimée Niemann on violin, and Abby Swidler switching between those two instruments. The language is likewise paired down on Reverse Bloom. The first two pieces (of four) emphasize long tones that hiss and sigh at a deliberate pace, evoking an uneasy state. “Obstructed Current” pushes against the prevailing vibe with jolting, energetic phrases that move joltingly out of synch. The closing piece, “Embers Slumber,” likewise explores contrasting elements, which resolve by settling into a deliberate, belly-breathing rhythm. The album charts a course towards a grounded state that’s not so much a happy ending as a sonic enactment of the honest word that gets you through.

Bill Meyer

Keith Rowe / Gerard Lebik — Dry Mountain (Inexhaustible Editions)

Dry Mountain by Keith Rowe / Gerard Lebik

Despite having his name on the spine, Keith Rowe did not play on this record. However, he did originate the process of sound (re)imagining that it presents, and his cover image of a wiggling digit raises the question — how deep does a fingerprint go? The score of Dry Mountain originated from the imprint Rowe’s gear left on a sheet of paper. Rowe and Gerard Lebik interpreted that score and then handed a recording of their performance to three visual artists, who created their own scores based on what they heard. These scores were then played by the group of electronics, string, and percussion players heard on this album while listeners drew responses to the music, which they then handed to the musicians, who played them on the spot. The further you get from the first piece heard, the further the music gets from Rowe’s sound world; in a reversal of Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting In A Room, the music gets segmented and defined.

Bill Meyer

D. Sablu — No True Silence  (Yes We Cannibal)

No True Silence by D.SABLU

D. Sablu is a New Orleans punk lifer, late of Casual Burns and Feverish, but forced (or inspired or motivated) by COVID to strike out on his own.  No True Silence is Sablu’s first full-length, and it’s a killer, a slaughterhouse frenzy of punk /garage/ hardcore and a little metal, all chopped up with chainsaws and spraying all over the walls.  Indeed, you’ll have to stand well back from the player when you first put the record on, because it leads with “Bomber Stomp,” a two-minute assault of lumbering, heavy punk that sways noticeably as it comes down on the ones and twos.  Sablu lets off a howl near the end that raises the hairs on my neck, because it’s so sulfurous and tortured.  “69 Forever” lights a new wave hook on fire with a blowtorch; it’s catchy as hell but blows you back with sheer volume and aggression.  The brief “World Peace” is pure, adrenalized chaos, drums galloping wildly, guitars flaring, bass buzzing and Sablu screaming “World pee-eeea-eace!” like a banshee.  Fun stuff.  Turn it up.

Jennifer Kelly

Mark Sims — Take Me Faster (Carousel Horse Records, Old 3-C Label Group, Anyway)

Take Me Faster by Mark Sims

Deindustrialization has hollowed out the Midwest’s economy, leaving shuttered factories and empty main streets all across the central American states.  Mark Sims, a bricklayer when he’s not performing, sings with the soft, wry melancholy of a man left behind by tectonic shifts, finding solace in well-turned melodies and plain-spoken turns of phrase.  It was fashionable half a decade ago to interview Ohioans in diners about their economic circumstances; Take Me Faster provides the same sort of snapshot of dislocation and disappearing opportunity.

For instance, in “Hold On To Me,” the narrator is driving long-distance to a job somewhere, trying to find a song on the radio and thinking about home.   “Money comes and goes so quickly/I could work a million hours/and still be broke when I die,” Sims confides, against a radiant lattice of picking. The song is unassuming, and kind of perfect, a distillation of the struggle to stay connected and human in a low-wage high-uncertainty economy.

The songs are simply arranged, a mesh of Sims’ dusky, resonant voice and acoustic guitar, mostly, with a little synth in the background for texture.  And yet, this is more than enough, as on the haunting “I’m Always by Your Side,” where Sims’  voice lifts up through the sadness, fluttering soulfully in the upper registers before drifting back to earth.  These songs don’t pull any tricks or do any somersaults, but they’re satisfying all the same. 

Jennifer Kelly

Jason Stein / Marilyn Crispell / Damon Smith / Adam Shead — Spi-raling Horn (Balance Point Acoustics/Irritable Mystic)

spi-raling horn by Jason Stein, Marilyn Crispell, Damon Smith, Adam Shead

The trio of Shead, Stein, and Smith first convened with the former two’s duo shared a bill with Smith. They recognized in each other a common aesthetic intent, a shared wish to improvise within a particular set of parameters; there’s no predetermined material, but a collective intention not to be confined to jazz. They’ve all listened closely to the great 20th century European free improvisers, and part of what they’ve taken from them is an intent to fashion their own language. There’s no soloing here, although occasionally someone will drop out if that’s what the music requires. And when they invite a fourth musician into the action, they participate as an equal contributor, not a featured guest. Marilyn Crispell’s associations with musicians as disparate as Barry Guy, Anthony Braxton and Joe Lovano reveal her to be an artist similarly concerned with fluent exchange, not ego-boosting display. But she’s also a stern bringer of velocity and complexity on this recording, which is the studio half of a single brief encounter which took place in Chicago in the middle of 2023. Dense assertion, abrasive texture, and bursting co-existence cohere into a seven-part sequence of collaborative invention.

Bill Meyer

SUSS — Birds & Beasts (Northern Spy)

Birds & Beasts by SUSS

Gorgeous hovering tones of pedal steel, guitar (with e bow), keyboards and synths coalesce in these cuts, each a glowing, vibrating meditation on the beauty and fragility of the natural world.  SUSS, from New York City, explores many of the same haunted textures as Chuck Johnson and Pan*American, letting sustained notes linger in shimmering layers of slow-moving sound.  “Overstory” encases picked acoustic notes in a translucent amber of pedal steel arcs and violin, letting the sound grow as slowly—and as enormously—as old growth forest.  “Flight” follows a more pronounced rhythm than other cuts, its steady pulse of strumming beating like wings on a long trip south.  The disc is not all sunshine, however.  “Prey” lurks in ominous buzzes and hums of feedback, building threat into dark-toned dissonance and animal screeches into wails of guitar.  The long closer, “Migration,” pulls taut with anticipation, its beat like a metronome, its melody unfurling in the wheeze of harmonica and the shifting twang of pedal steel.  SUSS often gets tagged as cosmic country, but which country?  Unearthly, luminous and beautiful. 

Jennifer Kelly

Their Divine Nerve — Return of the Lamb (Staalplaat)

The Return of the Lamb by Their Divine Nerve

Dmytro Fedorenko and Jeff Surak have been collaborating for about 20 years now, but this first album as Their Divine Nerve appears to be the first time the self-described “Ukrainian-American noise duo” have collaborated on record at length. But right from the churning, thumping 14+ minute opener “The Infinity Book” here it’s clear that their long association has led to a certain sympatico comfort with each other. Whether on the more overtly aggressive shredding (not guitar riffs, actual shredding) of “Glowing Skulls” or the more pensive, droning likes of “Dignityphobia,” here the pair have arranged a rich, expansive (71 minutes on CD, plus about another half hour in bonus material on digital) feast for anyone looking to add some variety to their noise diet. By the time the CD thunders and shudders to a half with “Civilization Was Never Civilized” the listener may not know anything more about the titular lamb, but it’s clear its return is momentous indeed.

Ian Mathers

Various Artists — Congo Funk: Sound Madness From The Shores Of The Mighty Congo River (Kinshasa/Brazzaville 1969-1982) (Analog Africa)

Congo Funk! - Sound Madness From The Shores Of The Mighty Congo River (Kinshasa/Brazzaville 1969-1982) (Analog Africa No. 38) by Analog Africa

Mobutu Sese Seko was a murderous tyrant, but he changed African music forever when he invited James Brown to play Zaire 74,  the three-day musical festival put on alongside George Forman and Muhammed Ali’s epic Rumble in the Jungle.  American funk transformed an already vibrant musical scene like a chemical catalyst setting off an explosion of electrified, psychedelic soul in Kinshasa and Brazzaville.  Congo Funk! collects 14 incendiary cuts from the 1970s and 1980s — culling from an original haul of over 2000 sounds — not a dud in the bunch and more than a couple of revelations.  M.B.T’s eponymous “M.B.T.’s Sound” is one of the best on this two-disc set, all brassy swagger and intricate polyrhythmic percussion, as is Orchestre National du Congo’s full-throated celebration “Ah Congo!” with its wild call and response, feral sax play and unhinged drumming.  Lolo et L'Orchestre O.K. Jazz’s “Lolo Soulfire,” sets up a Stax-like groove and lives in it, slouching and swaggering like Booker T in a fever.  Fire.

Jennifer Kelly

Ricki Weidenhof — Church (We Be Friends)

Church by Ricki Weidenhof

A member of Pittsburgh avant-collagists Sneeze Awfull, Ricki Weidenhof examines a life of religious ambivalence and search for identity on their solo album Church. Working through a range of styles that illustrate and amplify those themes, Weidenhof produces an emotionally rich and sometimes challenging fractal mosaic. The wonderfully titled suite “Raptured in Formal Violence” contrasts liturgical solemnity and a babel of religious voices with jittering house to capture that mixture of dread and ecstasy the Church so often induces. At the other of the scale “Dreary Field” is an Arthur Russell inspired idyll of acoustic guitar and cello as Weidenhof singsof the past “I finished that game of hide and seek long ago/Only it was still at play/I remember the last place I had hidden.” “Extinction Meditation” begins in a similar vein, the religious and personal entwined with vivid imagery, before a chaos of multi-tracked vocals, distorted beats, and razor strings. A powerful, heartfelt record that deserves a wide audience.

Andrew Forell

Wormed — Omegon (Season of Mist)

OMEGON by Wormed

It’s hard to say anything meaningful about Wormed — pretty much everything about the band is absurd, or at least verging on it. To identify some key elements of the absurdity: the “vocals” of Jose Luis Rey Sanchez (appearing on Omegon, as always, under the appropriately throaty appellation Phlegeton — Sanchez is likely referring to the mythic river, but all I can think of is phlegm…), for whom the unappetizing term “throat fart” might have been coined; the sheer nuttiness of the band’s tech death wankery, which the band has actually moderated a wee bit for Omegon; the fact that Wormed have been at it since 1999, mostly developing a continuous narrative of a fictional cosmos, full of conflict among evil extraterrestrial forces, multiple timelines and a protagonist named Krigshu (some song titles from this record are indicative: “Aetheric Transdimensionalization,” “Gravitational Servo Matrix,” “Virtual Teratogensis”). You figure it out. Beyond the music — more tech than slam, but still seeking some sort of apotheosis of that quality death metal freaks name “brutality” — what’s most engaging about Wormed is the band’s ability to sustain the absurdity and to seem absolute serious about it. Maybe that makes the Spanish band especially well-suited to our times. Or maybe we just haven’t gotten the joke yet.

Jonathan Shaw