Expand your taste in music. Based in Beijing, China.
Here is an impressively authentic-sounding ska coming to us from Los Angeles, California (my home town). The Western Standard Time Ska Orchestra boast of combining Jamaica’s greatest contribution to the world and a big-band sound. They pull this combination off flawlessly, and they must have one very impressive live act if their music is anything to go by.
A pleasant surprise comes from Australian record label The Round Table. Amancio D’Silva was a musician based out of India who mixed traditional music from his homeland with modal jazz, and the results are stunning. From the label’s Bandcamp site:
“Also recorded in 1972 although not released at the time was Konkan Dance, an unofficial sequel to Dream Sequence that further explored the unchartered possibilities of an Indian music-jazz fusion. Featuring many of the same personnel, this session also included support from Don Rendell and Alan Branscombe, two giants of the UK jazz scene who add serious credentials to D’Silva’s singular and intimate compositions. For reasons unknown the album was cancelled by Lansdowne at the time and never saw the light of day until being resurrected again in the 2000s. The Roundtable are pleased to once again showcase this important artist and present a new addition of this incredible and almost forgotten piece of the Amancio D’Silva story. Pressed on 180g vinyl and packaged in a custom 1960s-style flip-back sleeve.
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With the death of Richard H. Kirk last year, my hopes are dashed for new material from Cabaret Voltaire. However, Stephen Mallinder is carrying the torch of mid-period Cabs by combining a dark soundscape with rough electro-funk. From his Bandcamp website:
“Cabaret Voltaire co-founder Stephen Mallinder’s second solo outing for Dais further distills his signature fusion of minimal synth, oblique wordplay, and “wonky disco” into a riveting rhythm suite ripe for our age of escalation: tick tick tick. Channeling the temporal malaise of lockdown through a lusher palette of modular electronics and stereo strings, the songs embrace ambiguity and plasticity, loose systems of percolating circuitry and airless funk. Recorded across a handful of sessions at MemeTune Studios in Cornwall with frequent collaborator Benge (aka Ben Edwards), Mallinder cites no guiding aesthetic premise for the collection beyond “cowbell on every track, and entirely no reverb.””
Happy Mother’s Day to the readers of MYNTH!
As there are no reviews scheduled today, we instead link to a rather interesting article over at The Quietus, where legendary bluesman T-Bone Burnett has launched a company showing off a new hard media format he calls Iconic Originals, a format which blends the best parts of CDs and LPs together. I’ll have to see if it lives up to the hype, but the format is surely worth exploring. Sadly, the company doesn’t have a website presence yet.
Within the next few weeks, I will conduct an interview with pianist Alessandra Celletti, a dear friend and one of Italy’s most colorful musicians. This one is her latest, and its centerpiece is based on the Lemhi Shoshone teenager who not only led the American explorers Lewis & Clarke in their exploration of the Louisiana Territory but also became a symbol of women’s suffrage in the United States.
Some very happy news today, as Japanese acid-folk-psych band Kikagaku Moyo have given us a fresh album.
From their Bandcamp website:
“In many ways ‘Kumoyo Island’ represents the culmination of a journey for Kikagaku Moyo. While their decade-long career can be summarized as a series of kaleidoscopic explorations through lands and dimensions far and near, there’s a strong intention in each of their works to take the listener to a particular place, however real or abstract they may be. In that sense, the title and cover art for the band’s fifth and final album draws you into a magical mass of land surrounded by water—but the couch suggests that ‘Kumoyo Island’may not be a fleeting stop, but rather a place of respite, where one could pause and take it all in.”
In honor of Cinco de Mayo, we present you a new post-rock band out of Mexico City called A Shelter In The Desert. The band’s sound incorporates a lot of shoegaze sounds and has a cinematic vibe to it. Impressive, and worth exploring.
Italy’s Record Kicks has been releasing crime-funk, hip garage rock, deep soul, afro and boogaloo hits for 15 years so the label will be offering, as of May 15th, a compilation of some of their finest moments. Bands on this killer comp include The Tibbs, Calibro 35 and our favorite neo-soul diva, Martha Ren.
The Mossad are a project out of Lansing, Michigan, which reminds me of a slower, dubbier, late-period Tackhead or even Gang of Four with less funk, but far rawer. I haven’t heard a sound this crunch since the late 1980s, so for music ability and nostalgia, I give this single high marks.
Icelandic composer Valgeir Sigurðsson is a classical composer who has developed into the country’s leading light in terms of modern classical music.
From his Bandcamp site:
“Valgeir has become a master of sound to get lost in. Through his layering of his collaborators’ instrumental and vocal parts and a nuanced balance of electronic and organic sound, KVIKA is a perfect collection of moments that last only as long as they need before taking us elsewhere. After his award winning album Dissonance, it is a measure of his artistic inclinations that he looks to a shorter form of music making. Where Dissonance overwhelmed the ear with subterranean noise, sounds that seemed to last forever, KVIKA shimmers above the earth, fleeting and momentary.”