Expand your taste in music. Based in Beijing, China.
It’s nice to indulge in a guilty pleasure on occasion. Growing up in Los Angeles, we were lucky enough to have a pretty good Industrial dance / EBM scene in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s. The clubs were amazing, the girls stunning, the beats driving.
Jettenbach brings some of these older bands of the era to mind. There are elements of Thrill Kill Kult, Skinny Puppy, and innumerable synth-pop bands. For purposes of nostalgia, this was quite good.
There’s not much to say about Matthew Halsall that hasn’t been thoroughly discussed over the past decade. He deserves the accolades, of course, but this live album is quite a treat.
This is really going to appeal to fusion fans, especially Bitches Brew and Live-Evil-era Miles Davis, as well as the More modern works of Paul Schütze’s more free form work. Brilliant, but I expect no less from such a giant.
For more info on this release, check out his Bandcamp page here.
Breton musician Thierry Jolif (who records as Lonsai Maïkov here) is a fellow Orthodox who also happens to make boomingly dark experimental drone music. It’s quite something to hear both worlds collapse into each other so violently, but if I could trust anyone to pull of such a feat, it is him.
This is an EP’s worth of music, time-wise, but genres covered include ambient, drone, noise, darkwave and there are spoken word elements which tie the album together well.
Peter Zinovieff passed away on June 23, 2021, but he left quite a mark on avant-garde music. The British-born son of Russian aristocrats, he sold his wife’s tiara for his first computer, and from there, he would work with some of the greatest bands of the 20th century including Pink Floyd and David Bowie, Todd Rundgren and a host of Krautrock groups before going into composing for computer on his own.
This compilation of artists pay homage to the little-known but highly respected performer. All this came together, apparently, as an idea to give Peter a proper sendoff on Facebook. The social media giant is hideous for many reasons, but in this case, their existence served a good purpose.
No matter how ardent a collector of music you are, there are going to be some brilliant artists and albums you will miss. One could say that that’s part of the fun of discovering music. Credit for our surprise gem of the day goes squarely to Bandcamp’s blog, where Ashawnta Jackson penned an article on soul jazz. One of the names mentioned was a lovely lady, Shirley Jackson, whom you see depicted in the cover art and her weapon of choice, a Hammond B-3 organ.
Jackson’s back story is impressive, as is how she came to focus on the organ. Let us let Ashawnta tell the story, quoting from her article which you can read in full here:
Organist Shirley Scott is another soul jazz pioneer. She played both piano and trumpet as a child (it was actually her trumpet playing that earned her a scholarship in the ninth grade), but switched to the organ at 18. After playing piano in clubs in and around her hometown of Philadelphia in the mid ‘50s, she began concentrating solely on the organ in 1955. As Scott told Janis Stockhouse and Wayne Enstice in the book Jazzwomen: Conversations with Twenty-one Musicians, the switch was very much a reflection of the times: “This is when Jimmy Smith and Bill Dogget were making the organ very, very special.” Organists like Smith, Dogget, and Wild Bill Davis were making an impact, not just on the jazz world, but on Scott’s trajectory. “I heard what they were doing with that instrument, [and] I wanted to play.” She would soon develop a sound that, while recognizing those influences, was solidly her own. Of Jimmy Smith, Scott noted that “his use of vibrato influenced my sound when I first started playing. […] We may have used the same registrations, but the thoughts are different, the improvisation is different.”
She is as good at improvising as Jimmy Smith or Wild Bill Davis, and I’d venture to say that her sound would eventually inspire bands like the James Taylor Quartet or Medeski, Martin & Wood. A true legend, and a fine reissue.
The spirit of Krautrock has spread well beyond the German-speaking world, and has for some time now. Primitive Air is an American collaboration between Drew Piraino, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma and Emil Amos reminds me of the more freaky (yet still gentle) parts of bands like Popol Vuh and modern bands like The Myrrors. This is a blissful little record, and it would have sit comfortably among the greats of German psychedelic music of the late 1960s and early 1970s had these folks been around during those heady days.
I’ve read over the years about Botswana having a very interesting metal scene, but I knew nothing about the local music. This might not be the purest form of regional music, but this disc by Duncan Senyatso (may his memory be eternal) and the Kgwanyape Band is pretty catchy and infectious.
There is a lot of horn work on this disc, and one can hear influences from South African music, and more pop-related artists like Paul Simon and others who were delving into ‘World Music’ during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Pleasant.
LeiLuo Studio is a small record label based in my former home of Beijing, China. The track reviewed today is a fusion of musics from Zhejiang from the She ethnic group. The label/band’s Bandcamp site explains further below:
This is a piece of new fusion single composed and arranged by the duo, Wang Lei and Yile, in February 2018. Aria of Yunhe is copyright Beijing Chuanzong Culture Development Ltd., Co.In mid January, the duo had participated in a field trip to Jingning County in Zhejiang Province, China. We were introduced to a type of local music that had existed for over one thousand and two hundred years. It is called “Music of She”. She, as one of the minority groups in south China, calls themselves as “Shanha”, meaning “Guests in the Mountain”. They relocated to the hilly areas of Guangdong as early as Qin dynasty, and started singing their own tune since then. We were very fortunate to be able to record vocal samples from elderly generations and group singers at their village in Jingning County during the trip, and these ancient melodies, narrating the ancestors’ stories of settling and mythes of creation, were so beautiful and surreal.With a very simple conga loop and fragmented bass line, our interpretation is to accentuate the sorrow and mysterious ancient tune, in the mid section of the piece we have invited Australian jazz trumpeter Toby Mak to improvise with his understanding of the She melody. The climax of the song features an ensemble of a group of local She female singers from Gangshi Village. We were honored to be invited to compose this piece, this was a rare opportunity to hear these ancient melodies from a thousand years ago, and we were even luckier to be able to bring these melodies back and reinterpreted to the world.
I can’t think of a music more joyful than ska. Jamaica’s finest export (next to reggae and its sub-genres, of course) is wonderfully represented on this compilation put together by the legendary Kingston-based record label Studio One. Lee Perry, Delroy Wilson and The Wailers feature prominently on this comp, and the tracks were produced by the inimitable Clement “Coxsone” Dodd. Pure joy, this one.
This Z Tapes release left me floored. Rapt are a folk band out of London who have an ethereal sound which reminded me of musicians like Nick Drake fronting a band on 4AD. Think, perhaps, of a more airy-sounding This Mortal Coil gone neofolk. The sound is folky without being stale, and adding elements like shoegaze and dreampop make for a rich, rewarding listen. I really like this.