Expand your taste in music. Based in Beijing, China.
Neon Noodle mixes lo-fi noise with what sounds like horror soundtracks, touches of vaporwave and a bass line that reminds me of something one could hear out of an early 80s garage post-punk or experimental cassette demo. It’s crunchy, but interesting. I’d like to see how Neon Noodle develop as time passes.
Bassist Daniel Casimir is a young lion of London’s jazz scene. This is a one-off composition in preparation for a full album coming out later this year on Jazz re:freshed, and it features some of the best instrumentalists active today. Observe the names on this track. Each is leaving a huge mark on music these days, and will be lauded for decades.
Quintet
Daniel Casimir
Moses Boyd
Al Macsween
Nubya Garcia
James Copus
Brass
Sean Gibbs
Tom Dunnet
Rosie Turton
Andy Davies
Woodwind
Faye MacCalman
Samuel Rapley
Gareth Lockrane
Strings
Julia Dos Reis
Miranda Lewis
Rebekah Reid
Rhiannon Dimond
This has to be one of the most charmingly weird, frankly unclassifiable discs I’ve heard in a while. Andrew Paine & Richard Youngs manage to pull together a collection that should sound like a mess, yet it’s a rather enjoyable one. The music goes from lo-fi disco tracks (which for some reason, remind me heavily of the ur-supergroup Big In Japan) to outtakes from a later-era David Bowie session. This is a gritty gem of a disc. The only shame is that it took me six years to come across it.
Clara Engel is based in Toronto, Canada. Her work has been described as “Folk-Noir” or “minimalist holy blues,” and who am I to disagree? This takes the best elements of neofolk, stripped-down to just voice, cigar box guitar, electric guitar, melodica and harmonica, and it sounds like a rare self-pressed release worth thousands one could find on eBay, but living up to the hype.
Clara’s voice is a perfect match for the ethereal music supporting it. I have a feeling those who like the folkier elements of Current 93, Nick Drake, Shirley Collins and 70’s progressive folk are going to find this to be quite a treat.
Today is Saint Patrick’s Day for Western Christians, and is also celebrated by my fellow Orthodox, though his feast day on the Julian Calender is March 30. I thought I would share a bit of Irish music, but something not so common.
I’m sure a great many of you know the work of Ireland’s third-most famous export (after Guinness Beer and U2), The Chieftains. They have toured the world bringing Celtic music to the masses, even making a legendary appearance at the Great Wall of China in 1983. The band got their start after the members of the above band, led by the single most important man responsible for the Irish traditional music revival, Seán Ó Riada and featuring a young Paddy Moloney and other future Chieftains, who went on to develop a sound more reliant on Uilleann pipes.
Electroacoustic music inspired by painting and field recordings done in the Ryuku Islands off the coast of the Japanese mainland. This definitely caught my attention. Edições CN out of Antwerp, Belgium released this album in 2020, and it features the works of Japanese composer Hideki Umezawa and the Samarkand, Uzbekistan born resident of Berlin, Andrew Pekler.
The back story of this release comes to us from their Bandcamp site:
In 1958 the painter Isson Tanaka (°22 July 1908 – *11 September 1977) moved to Amami Ōshima, an island in the Ryukyus. There, in self-chosen isolation, he committed himself exclusively to his art until his sudden passing in 1977.
In 2018 Seiha Kurosawa, Kanako Azuma and Hideki Umezawa visited Amami Ōshima to create a video installation about Tanaka’s insular life. The work, entitled “Dokkyaku” (tr. The Lone Visitor), shifts between the texture and materiality of Tanaka’s paintings in relation to the natural world of Amami Ōshima and its people. The video invites viewers to understand—poetically—the artist’s sensitivity to nature and the expressivity of his works.
During his stay on Amami Ōshima, Hideki Umezawa recorded a lot of natural sounds to recreate a sort of simulated ecology of Tanaka’s mind – or: of the painter’s mind. On this long playing record these recordings are blended with electronically generated sounds. Next, Andrew Pekler, who has never actually visited Amami Ōshima, upon hearing Umezawa’s field recordings creates – in the spirit of Isson Tanaka – a complementary dreamscape of the island’s phenomena. Of what could be.
This is a work that doubts between site specific and creative imagination. With sounds echoing between the anecdotic and the imaginary. It is a sensitive and highly stylized interpretation of a world that Isson Tanaka had also carefully studied. A painter at work; a way of seeing.
So, after Christophe Piette’s ‘Six Tableaux de Quelpaert’, released by Edições CN in 2019, we again moore an island in the nautical footsteps of a painter. While Piette drew a story through – among other things – recording dialogues at his island home, at the restaurant table, et al. Pekler and Umezawa paint their pictures in a more musical fashion. Where natural sounds evaporate into electronic clouds of imagination.
Today is the Ides of March, once a day of celebration during Rome’s peak (and a deadline for settling debts), now remembered as the anniversary of the assassination of Julius Caesar. Former Siouxsie & The Banshees bassist Steven Severin makes available his ambient experimental work commemorating the event.
Tramp Records out of German is gaining quite a following because of their high-quality compilations. This one is a scorcher if you’re into funk-inflected disco. At least as I understand it, and I’m sure the label can correct any errors I make, the artists were from around the Akron, Ohio area, and it does blow my mind a bit that these artists weren’t bigger names in the 1970s. The music is a bit more lo-fi than the slicker top-40 fare of the day, but the bass grooves so hard in most of these tracks that it makes you forget that these guys were basically indie musicians of their day. Meaty, beaty and incredible.
Though I cannot say I know much about Fundacja Słuchaj’s background, I can say that their releases tend to be excellent, releasing some of the bigger names in improvisational music. This collection is no different.
The personnel on this four-disc set is pretty phenomenal: Rafał Mazur plays bass, Satoko Fujii plays piano, Guillermo Gregorio wields the saxophone, Natsuki Tamura and Artur Majewski perform on trumpet and Ramón López fills out this group on drums and percussion.
This one-track release was in my queue while I was doing some work, and when it came on, I assumed it was a track of Spanish cold wave from the early 1980s. Toronja, as it turns out, is a Chilean project from this year, and they manage to do a good job making a sound that is at once fresh and vintage.