bandcamp: album of the day 2024

评语：By Jennifer Kelly · December 06, 2024 Angel Olsen has lately honed a rarified, classic country sound, echoing greats like Patsy Cline on her marvelous Big Time, covering Karen Dalton’s throaty blues, and distilling heartache into its purest Laurel Canyon form in the spine-tingling Forever Means. However, Olsen is anything but easy to pigeonhole. In this first release on her Something’s Cosmic imprint, she scatters hints about what other kinds of music she might be interested in—new wave, synth pop, blues rock, and drone-y folk—showcasing five emerging, mostly L.A.-based artists with a guest track and a cover each. The first two tracks are the most surprising. “Glamorous” is from Poppy Jean Crawford, an artist Olsen calls “a rock ‘n’ roll Judy Garland draped in stars and ethereal, unyielding glamor.” Here, she builds up towering synth architectures that evoke dance pop, prog, and even hair metal, and careens through them in an echo-shrouded, Siousxie-style wail. Coffin Prick’s “Blood” leans likewise toward the inorganic, blowing out Ryan Weinstein’s home-recorded electronics into giddy, new wave proportions. All by himself, he calls up the bouncy synth-driven euphoria of Erasure, the booming gate-reverbed rhythms of Depeche Mode. On the second half of the album, Olsen interprets one song each from these artists. She finds the ghostly tremor running through Crawford’s pulsing, dance-y “Takeover,” careening up to the high notes in a manner guaranteed to send a chill up your back. Under her lead, Coffin Prick’s “Swimming” transforms from a viscous, synth-heavy soundscape into swinging 1960s-esque pop—no kidding, Olsen sounds a bit like Petula Clark here. The best cover is unexpectedly of Maxim Ludwig, a surprise since his track on the first side is so dull. However, Olsen’s version of “Born Too Blue,” is rich, full of feeling, and offers some of Olsen’s best singing on the disc. Olsen makes these songs her own, her voice full of curves and unpredictability and little trills that stand your hair on end. But she also saves room in her covers for what’s unique about the songwriters she admires. As a result, Cosmic Waves Volume 1 provides a fascinating glimpse at where Olsen is headed and what she’s interested in, both with her new label and, perhaps, in her own work as well.

评语：By Brad Sanders · December 05, 2024 Francesco Colonna was a Catholic cleric from Venice whose life spanned nearly a century of the Italian Renaissance. Little is officially known of his work in the church; Colonna lived part-time at the monastery of Santi Giovanni e Paolo, but he was apparently granted leave to move among Venetian society and preach at St. Mark’s Basilica. Today, he’s most famous as the presumptive writer of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, an allegorical romance that ranks among the wildest, most psychedelic texts published in the early days of Gutenberg’s printing revolution. In the Hypnerotomachia, whose title translates to Poliphilo’s Strife of Love in a Dream, the narrator pursues his beloved, Polia, through an Inception-like procession of dreams within dreams. The prose is, by turns, arcane and sensual, with Poliphilo ogling classical monuments and blushing nymphs alike in his quest to reunite with Polia. As for Polia, she’s not really a woman but an idea, the notion that things lost to time can never be held permanently—only fleetingly experienced, as in a dream. Perhaps because of the Hypnerotomachia’s transgressive erotic charge, Colonna wasn’t officially credited as its author. An acrostic formed by the first letter in each chapter spells out the biggest clue: “POLIAM FRATER FRANCISCVS COLVMNA PERAMAVIT,” or “Brother Francesco Colonna has dearly loved Polia.” The Italian death metal band Bedsore have always nursed a progressive streak. On their debut album, 2020’s Hypnagogic Hallucinations, they feinted and parried their way through twisty yet muscular compositions, frequently invoking Human-era Death and Orchid-era Opeth. The sound was fundamentally death metal, though, and their stylistic detours never took them fully outside of the genre. “Shapes from Beyond the Veil of Stars and Space,” Bedsore’s 16-minute contribution to a 2022 split with Mortal Incarnation, signaled bolder adventures to come. Like Blood Incantation, their U.S. analogues, they began to more fully embrace the sidereal atmospherics and warm synthesizer sounds of ’70s prog. Now, with Dreaming the Strife for Love—their album-length adaptation of Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia—Bedsore have effectively become a progressive rock band. The results of that metamorphosis are scintillating. Dreaming the Strife for Love opens with “Minerva’s Obelisque,” an instrumental whose six minutes cover more sonic ground than Bedsore’s whole prior discography. The song begins with a short guitar riff, but what’s remarkable is how quickly and happily it cedes the spotlight to the keyboards. That’s meaningful—Stefano Allegreti’s organs, Mellotrons, and synths are every bit as central to Dreaming as Jacopo Gianmaria Pepe’s frantic guitar work and expressive death growls. (So, for that matter, are the fretless bass of Giulio Rimoli and the nimble, Bruford-esque drumming of Davide Itri.) Italian prog, from Premiata Forneria Marconi to Goblin, has always foregrounded keys. With a humble intro track, Bedsore announce their participation in a rich tradition. As the band works through the rest of the album, a spirit of openness emerges. Compositions seem to progress according to an esoteric, intuitive emotional logic, not a theory-based roadmap. Parts appear and vanish into vapor. Soloists step to center stage and retreat to the shadows in a way that feels less indebted to metal than to jazz. (This effect is aided by guest saxophonist Giorgio Trombino, who also lent his sultry, Bohren & der Club of Gore–style playing to Messa’s Close.) Death metal, to the extent that it’s still present on Dreaming, is sidelined and obfuscated. Pepe’s riffs can be clanging and dissonant, but Robert Fripp wrote Red long before Immolation picked up their instruments. Itri can deliver a pummeling fill, but so could Phil Collins. Even more than a band like Horrendous or Tomb Mold, Bedsore seeks to collapse the distance between death metal and prog. They do a convincing job of it. The way that Dreaming moves, dreamlike, from song to song and scene to scene feels at least partly attributable to its source material. Like Colonna in his Hypnerotomachia, Bedsore introduce a parade of phantasmagoric imagery; the album’s centerpiece, “A Colossus, an Elephant, A Winged Horse; the Dragon Rendezvous,” just barely scratches the surface. Musical ideas pile up at a similarly overwhelming rate. The lyrics are in Italian, so non-native listeners will have to rely on translation tools to follow along, but disorientation seems to be part of the point. Who can be sure what’s really happening in the Hypnerotomachia, or on The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway? What prevails on Dreaming is the grand sweep of sensation, the otherworldly feeling that Bedsore have become so adept at supplying. Perhaps, like Poliphilo, their Polia has been lost, but they’ve learned render her in vivid color.

评语：By April Clare Welsh · December 04, 2024 There’s never been a better time for a new Fennesz record. Not only are the days getting shorter and chillier for many of us, but the resurgence of interest in blissful, bleary-eyed shoegaze naturally aligns the Austrian ambient maestro’s music with our collective mood shift. Christian Fennesz has been wielding the guitar as a tool for texture since the late ‘90s, collaborating with the likes of Ryuichi Sakamoto and creating path-blazing masterworks like 2001’s Endless Summer, bringing a human touch to the digital that debunks inaccurate stereotypes about the numbness of computer music. Mosaic, Fennesz’s first solo offering in five years, is held together by meticulously assembled grains of detail, much like the millennia-old artistic technique that gives the album its name. In order to make what the album notes dub his “most reflective album to date,” the producer-guitarist adhered to a 9-to-5 workday schedule that allowed for structure and routine, collaging the flotsam and jetsam of his sound design into a horizon-expanding vista that mirrors the meditative cover art. Mosaic consists of long, slow stretches of ambient drift that evoke a trance-like state; yet for all of its composure, it still teems with electroacoustic life. Listen carefully, and you’ll hear the echoey swash of water on opener “Heliconia”; hand-dryer-like squall and a distant siren on “A Man Outside”; and distortion-crusted footsteps on “Patterning Heart.” All of them contribute to a complex digital ecosystem of its own design. Headphones are a must. Fennesz buries the record’s varied influences and building blocks beneath intense washes of fuzz and jet-engine noise, rather than exposing them to the elements. “Personare”—which means ‘chant’ or ‘shout out’ in Latin—is influenced by ‘80s West African pop music while album closer “Goniorizon” transforms “six hard rock guitar riffs” beyond recognition, conjuring a bejeweled harmonic sequence that pops up like moss-covered stepping stones in a forest. For all his future-facing smarts, Fennesz is unafraid of filling his soundscapes with emotion. That tendency makes itself known on Mosaic standout “Love and the Framed Insects,” a decaying track blanketed in reverb and sporting an unusual time signature. Ringing out beneath the processed mulch is a crystalline melody that spreads like a shard of sunlight through parting clouds. Mosaic administers the ultimate antidote to dark nights and bleak times; it is music to get lost in.

评语：By Filipe Costa · December 03, 2024 You never quite know what to expect from Negro Leo. One minute, the São Paulo-based singer-songwriter is crafting scuzzy psych-rock tunes; the next, he’s spinning playfully experimental pop ballads for violão, scoring stark spoken-word segments for film, or twisting Latin pieces with breezy, sun-drenched grooves. It’s chaotic, thrilling, and bound by a thread of duality that runs through everything he touches. His latest album, RELA, is no exception. The word “rela,” borrowed from the small amphibian native to parts of Europe and Africa, also has a curious linguistic double life, straddling both the natural and the colloquial. Beyond its biological roots, it evokes the rhythmic chirping of crickets while doubling as a Brazilian slang for the relentlessly impertinent or talkative. Much like its amphibious namesake, RELA (the album) is indulgent, ribbiting, even poetic—an ambitious showcase of Leo’s talent for crafting tales of sex, lust, and body positivity, inspired by the fleeting highs and lows of app-driven intimacy. Leo has been circling this concept for a while. Desejo de lacrar was a powerful sonic jolt of sex and desire sketched out in jagged, experimental odes. His collaboration with MAY TUTI, also named “RELA,” explored similar terrain—sweaty bodies locked in lascivious tension, refracted through Leo’s vernacular lens of love in the modern age. With his latest work, he turns his gaze homeward, weaving a spellbinding web of narratives rooted in the traditional folk celebrations of Maranhão. Released via QTV Selo, the fast-rising hub for Brazil’s avant-garde, RELA lands alongside a fearless roster of boundary-pushers like Juçara Marçal, Mbé, and Kiko Dinucci, whom Leo enlists to elevate the album’s sound into new sonic realms. Like his peers, Negro Leo possesses an insatiable drive to disrupt and plunge headfirst into the unknown, transforming as he ascends back to the surface. That sense of change is clear from the opening track, which is built around a single, mantra-like verse delivered through a slurry vocoder. Swirling sax and dense layers of spectral voices locked in imperceptible dialogue set the stage for the track that ensues, “ME ENSINA A CASTIGAR,” a restless dive into jungle-inspired breaks and whirling untamed energy. A handful of tracks on RELA barely exceed a minute, functioning as fleeting sketches between more developed ideas. But RELA is proudly fragmented and directionless by design: “TCHA TCHUM NA XANA” is a prime cut of jagged, electrified nu-jazz; “GORDINHA CANIBAL” is a soulful sketch of modern bluesy psychedelia; “CULONA CANINOS DE LOBA” drifts like a hazy vignette of woozy saxophone and guileless keyboard patterns, lush and ragged in equal measure. By the time we reach the album’s closer, “OLHA O OUTRO DIA,” it feels like waking from a fever dream: half-remembered fragments of melody and rhythm colliding in a haze of abstraction. It’s a fitting conclusion for an album that thrives on the unexpected—a testament to Leo’s fascination with the body and the natural world, tethered by a deep connection to tradition and the esoteric.

评语：By Jim Allen · December 02, 2024 Here’s an experiment: Grab your nearest record geek, preferably one who’s been known to worship at the psych-folk altar. Drag them away from transcribing the commentary track of their Wicker Man Blu-ray and play them Only the Void Stands Between Us. Tell them it’s a recently reissued ultra-rarity recorded in a New Zealand cave by candlelight in 1971, originally released in a micro-pressing heard only by the artist’s immediate family. Maybe add that Julie Beth Napolin was a UFO tracker and self-styled mystic last seen camped out in a crop circle and never heard from again. The odds of your ruse being accepted as fact are overwhelmingly in your favor. Not because Napolin’s debut is operating in a retro sphere, but because it occupies a place that exists somewhere outside of time and space. It inhabits a musical continuum including the likes of ‘70s head trippers Comus and Popol Vuh; ‘80s outliers Opal and Dead Can Dance; and ‘90s ambient-folk adventurers Tower Recordings and Charalambides, where the cosmic, earthbound, ancient, and eternal meet. In fact, Charalambides guitarist Tom Carter pops up on the opening track of Only the Void, adding some liquid lead guitar lines alongside Napolin’s spectral murmur. The combo could spur images of Nico sitting in on a circa-’69 Grateful Dead “Dark Star” exploration. But a lot of the time, Napolin serves up plenty of atmosphere all by herself. On “Sawdust,” she slathers some effects on her acoustic strum, overdubs a deftly deployed flute drone, and lets her hazy, echoed vocals do the rest. For the impressionistic “Time Image” she bounces a couple of guitars off each other for a cosmic folk instrumental worthy of trippy, acoustic krautrock acts like Emtidi and Witthuser & Westrupp. “In the Dark” is one of the album’s most structurally straightforward tracks, but Napolin still manages to create an unearthly aura with just her voice, guitars, and an ocean of reverb. A meditative mood persists undisturbed throughout the album; there’s nary a drum to be heard, and hardly even any bass. But the arguable centerpiece actually started out as a slamming, sludgy hard rocker. “Pray for the Living” is a song by Baltimore’s Lungfish, first heard on their 1998 album, Artificial Horizon. But in place of their heavy-duty drone rock, Napolin offers a spooky psych-folk séance, harmonizing with herself over a calm but unceasing riff that ratchets up the track’s hypnotic, incantatory power. By the time closing cut “Heaven and Earth” comes around, you should be roughly equidistant between the two poles of its title, as Trevor Healy’s warm splashes of lead guitar glimmer around Napolin’s insistent acoustic rhythm. She intones the minimalist lyric at the nine-and-a-half-minute-track’s beginning and end, bookmarking the journey without returning to terra firma. If, as the title suggests, some metaphysical chasm separates Napolin and the listener, there’s also a bewitching soundtrack for traversing it.

评语：By Marshall Gu · November 27, 2024 In the late ‘60s, three men inspired by South African poet Keorapetse Kgositsile operating under the name The Last Poets took the words of the Black Art Movement and set it to funk rhythms. The cultural effect they had was huge: They would later be referred to as proto-rappers from the Civil Rights Era, and their songs have found their way into rap music through samples and features. At the same time that The Last Poets were active in Harlem, across the Atlantic Ocean in Nigeria, Fela Kuti was inventing Afrobeat—music that was similar in spirit to the Poets, with politically charged words set to a rallying drum beat courtesy of drummer Tony Allen. Before Allen passed away in 2020, he recorded drum tracks intended for use by The Last Poets, but further recording sessions were postponed due to the pandemic. After lockdown ended, Abiodun Oyewole and Umar Bin Hassan selected a handful of classic poems from their first two albums, The Last Poets and This is Madness, and breathed new life into the classic songs by injecting Allen’s signature propulsive polyrhythms. It would be a critic’s cliché to say that these words haven’t lost their power more than five decades later, but that’s because it’s true. When The Lost Poets first formed in Harlem, performing on the birthday of Malcolm X, their voices were passionate and their words were fiery, galvanizing Black culture. “You’ll know it’s revolution because there won’t be no commercials” remains a powerful line, despite Gil Scott-Heron’s more famous response, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” Meanwhile, their seething “ode” to New York plays on the word “new” but remarks upon how much remains the same, which is true to this day: “New love, same neurosis.” But whereas the first renditions of these songs could be considered “dry” in their vocal-and-drum-only, bare bones approach, Africanism fills out the sound with an entire band, including British jazz saxophonist Courtney Pine, Ezra Collective’s pianist Joe Armon-Jones, and multi-instrumentalist Kaidi Tatham. One might think these additional textures would take away from the lyrics by having the Poets share the spotlight, but this is not the case. Their words remain the focal point, the funky basslines, squealing saxophone solos, and fusion-y keyboards never taking anything away from the Poets’ voices.

评语：By Ted Davis · November 26, 2024 Peak Oil has settled into a remarkable stride as of late, evolving from cult favorite institution to celebrated electronic mainstay. The Los Angeles label—launched by multi-hyphenate producer and industry heavyweight Brian Foote and Dublab resident Brion Brionson—first appeared in 2012. It initially platformed block-y, dance-ish albums from the likes of hardware whiz Strategy, modular synth virtuoso M. Geddes Gengras, and the Lawrence English and Liz Harris duo Slow Walkers. Throughout the 2010s, Peak Oil releases remained fairly elusive. But in recent months, it has rolled out records at a steadier clip. Since 2023, it has been behind standouts including Wrecked Lightship’s sci-fi–laced Antiposition; Low End Activist’s breakbeat exploration Airdrop; and Purelink’s exceptional Signs, which served a key role in reintroducing dub techno to the conversation. Following this prolific, albeit extremely high-quality run, you might expect the label to return to the shadows for a well-deserved recharge. Instead, they’ve capped 2024 with a full-length from Washington, D.C.–area project Lifted. Made up of left-field house staple Andrew Field-Pickering (aka Max D) and avant-pop scene veteran Matt Papich (aka Co La), the pair found their footing on the labels PAN and Field-Pickering’s own Future Times. There is a strong ambient influence in Lifted’s output, yet it is as indebted to jazz as it is glitch. Lifted’s new album, Trellis, first sparked in 2021, during sessions at the Maryland studio Tempo House alongside Dustin Wong, Mezey, and Jeremy Hyman. It was patiently completed, and eventually rearranged within the context of CDJ jams. The end result is aqueous and glassy, calling to mind what might have happened if the members of Purelink had bonded over a shared admiration for In A Silent Way-era Miles Davis instead of Moritz Von Oswald. It is fitting that Lifted once cited Vladislav Delay and ECM as primary muses; the pieces on Trellis emerge from icy sheaths of effects, evoking glaciers forming in rapid motion. On “Warmer Cooler,” billowing pads crest atop clattering atonal textures. “The Latecomer” is carried by amorphous brushed percussion, which tiptoes beneath brittle, silvery chords. The most structured moment arrives towards the start of “Open Door,” when a melancholy piano noodles above a filtered boom-bap groove. The cut gradually disintegrates in a woozy flurry of echoes and half-time drums, pinpointing the shapeshifting nature that defines Trellis. Thanks to buzzy albums such as Nala Sinephro’s Endlessness and the Floating Points and Pharoah Sanders partnership Promises, ambient jazz has become increasingly popular in the 2020s. While records in this vein are typically stellar, Trellis is shrouded in an air of mystery that allows it to inhabit a singular lane. “The way we make music, we don’t play live shows or practice songs,” Field-Pickering told In Sheep’s Clothing in a 2022 interview. “It gets pretty separated from your muscle memory. It’s more, ‘We did that? What were we doing?’” This willful naivety palpably impacts Trellis, which expands and contracts, like the deep breaths of a sentient creature.

评语：By Jon Dale · November 25, 2024 Meaning’s Edge is producer Felix Manuel’s first release under his alias Djrum since the Hard To Say EP for R&S, back in 2019, and the absence was a curious one. Djrum had developed a head of steam over the preceding decade or so, with a stream of productions that took British bass pressure and tweaked it multiple ways—all the better to see how much tension it could take before everything started to crack and crumble. But he’s been busy doing other things: DJing, of course; collaborating and performing with the London Contemporary Orchestra back in 2022; doing the rounds of the festivals, including Glastonbury. It’s not exactly been a quiet time for the producer. He’s already released one new record this year: the 12-inch Basis, under his moniker Struction, on Ilian Tape. The four tracks on that EP are mercurial things, rich with energy, memories of IDM and braindance-scratching itches in its hyper-intricate production and deft percussive moves. It’s worth checking out as a taster for Meaning’s Edge, though the latter comes at things from a slightly different angle. The squirrelly acid squelch is still there on opener “Codex,” unsurprisingly; but now it’s entangled with rhythms that clank and clatter like an industrial wasteland in zero gravity. Whispered voices slur into the listener’s cochlea, insistent yet lost to language. The use of flutes is one of the points at which Meaning’s Edge takes flight. They’re threaded throughout the five tracks on this mini-album set, with synthesized versions taking up alongside classical flutes, bansuri, shakuhachi. The wind instruments gift the album an entirely different tone; they’re a lovely addition to Manuel’s palette and, in combination with the fidgety rhythms and the deep sense of dub space on tracks like “Codex” and “Crawl,” I’m taken back to productions like Boymerang’s remix of Wagon Christ from 1995. Meaning’s Edge isn’t a nostalgia trip, though. It simply works with similar frames of references to what was happening with jungle in the mid-‘90s. There’s dubstep in there, too, fleetingly and flickeringly. The nervous energy of the percussion on “Crawl” lends the track an urgent tension, all the more curious given how fleet of foot the synths and claps sound; the two parts of “Frekm” take Steve Reich and blitz his repetitive recitals with jazz cymbals and skittering beats. A most hallucinatory pleasure.

评语：By Ted Davis · November 22, 2024 Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith started her career following a resplendent ambient formula. In the 2010s, she partnered with Suzanne Ciani and landed on esteemed labels including Western Vinyl, RVNG. Intl., and Ghostly International. Her early music was conceptual and outdoorsy, cultivating a sense of inward-gazing serenity. In recent years, Smith has evolved. Her last full-length, 2022’s Let’s Turn It Into Sound, was doused in leftover ‘80s DayGlo. At the time, it was her most rhythmic effort to date. Neptunes—Smith’s new joint EP with Joe Goddard—ups the energy higher than ever, with Goddard leveraging Smith’s danciest tendencies to chic, rollicking ends. As a founding member of the band Hot Chip, Goddard spent the 2000s innovating rowdy strains of synth punk and indietronica, and Neptunes is similarly driving. The title track is pure, soaring energy; all arpeggiated twirls spilling over into squelchy drum machines, warbled voice snippets, and pummeling percussion building to a boisterous climax. Goddard’s fingerprints are obvious, but Smith’s talents for experimental sonic design also allow the cut to feel monumental and ambitious—a would-be summer festival banger released to an autumn backdrop of dusky lethargy. The rest of Neptunes maintains this propulsive feel. “Rapid Fire” is more Charli XCX than DFA Records, London artist Laima Leyton’s leather-smooth vocals deadpan above a choppy groove. Smith’s reworking is wonky, albeit uncharacteristically steady—cartoonish percussion underlines stoney bleeps and crunches, Leyton’s lyrics smeared to moody oblivion. Smith’s solo offering, “Around You,” is a slice of bloopy avant-pop peppered with subtle, clattering textures. In Goddard’s hands, it seamlessly morphs into stuttering house. In its abstract crevices, Smith adopts an unusually firm approach, as if to indulge Goddard’s affinity for pulsing, tidal grooves. Neptunes was sparked partially as a result of Goddard’s appreciation for Pharrell and Chad Hugo’s legendary R&B duo of the same name. Misconstruing the reference, Smith aimed to craft rushing cosmic sounds. From start to finish, Neptunes is in swift upward motion, technicolor chemtrails lingering in its wake. Even the EP’s lowest valleys seem suspended miles above sea level.

评语：By Maria Barrios · November 21, 2024 Colombian musician Julián Mayorga released a handful of EPs in his native country before moving to Spain to pursue a Masters degree in electroacoustics and algorithmic composition. Influenced by those pursuits, and blending his love for vanguardists such as Brazilian composer Tom Zé and American art collective The Residents, Mayorga has released, over the past decade, a series of compelling solo records and noteworthy, future-forward collaborations. His latest album, Chak Chak Chak Chak, is the crown jewel of Mayorga’s discography: An energetic, colorful, and refreshingly unpredictable listen. Chak Chak Chak Chak is a wild mix of surrealist poetry, borderless cumbia, and sinister-sounding experimental music. If you like The Residents’ influential album Duck Stab, you will find a home in Mayorga’s songs. The album opens with “No te comas las blanquísimas mofetas,” a dissonant march with a hidden (for those who don’t speak Spanish) message: Eat the rich. Narrating the story of a “ferocious rat with an esoteric last name,” Mayorga utilizes whistles, horns, and electronic loops to create an explosive introduction to a no less explosive tracklist. “La muerte del perro,” led by Mayorga’s raspy growl and accompanied by weirdly moribund, slightly offbeat percussion, is a slow-burn cumbia. Your tios might not quite “get it,” but it is easy to picture folks familiar with acts such as Meridian Brothers, El Guincho, or Son Rompe Pera, dancing to it. There is sancocho (Caribbean slang for “a big mix of things”) and a spirit of cambalache (colloquial for a swap, or a junk shop) throughout Mayorga’s Chak Chak Chak Chak. Rambling fables of avenging animals (“Sueño con culebras”) meet witchcraft (“El Vorrh”) and lyrics get elevated to become tongue twisters (“Tres tristes transeúntes”). Mayorga, like an eccentric master of ceremonies, shifts from electronic music back to cumbia for the humorous, anti-work “El trabajo yo para qué lo quiero?” Through backing vocals that echo an ambulance siren, a steady guiro, and tight hand drums, Mayorga sings of an all-too-familiar curse: Having a full-time job. Despite expatriating to Spain, the album still carries Mayorga’s approach to preserving the particularities of his Colombian Spanish (a mission that’s also present on his previous album, Cuando tengo fiebre veo la cabeza de un leopardo magnífico). Emphasizing the slang and accent he grew up with, Mayorga creates a flamboyant, nonstop cascade of words that illustrates Colombia’s rich multicultural history; away from the upper-class desire to erase indigenous patrimony and the popular class. Poetic, loud, and unruly, with Chak Chak Chak Chak, Mayorga carves his own path.

评语：By James Gui · November 20, 2024 In so-called Western art music, composition and improvisation have historically been posed as diametric opposites, with the former representing enlightened sophistication and the latter devalued as primitive. In his latest album Safa, Palestinian oud virtuoso Nizar Rohana brings together elements of both, bringing together taqsim (plural taqasim, a traditional Arabic improvisational form) and lyrical composed melodies for his first solo oud album. Culminating out of almost eight years of PhD research in what he calls “pre-composed taqsim,” Rohana challenges received notions of improvisation and composition by assimilating techniques from archival recordings of oud masters Riad El Sunbati (1906–1981) and Mohamed El Qasabgi (1898–1964). The tracks “Bayati,” “Mufradat Nahawand,” and “Rast” were composed as a part of Rohana’s doctoral dissertation at Leiden University—although taqsim is typically considered an improvised form, Rohana argues that taqasim (and Arab musics more generally) have always toed the line between improvisation and composition. “Bayati” is inspired by El Qasabgi’s 1928 recording “Taqsim Bayyati #2,” using the same maqam (melodic mode) and incorporating the finger-melting rhythmic techniques that El Qasabgi pioneered, including zīr-bamm—listen for how Rohana produces a drone with the higher tones while continuing a melody in the lower register. “Mufradat Nahawand,” on the other hand, draws from the patient modal development of Al Sunbati’s “Taqaseem nihawand.” “Rast,” for its part, is the most dynamic of the three, packing rhythmic and melodic elements from both El Qasabgi and El Sunbati into a compact display of nimble technique and maqam acrobatics. Other tracks on Safa represent Rohana’s unique upbringing. As Rohana writes in his dissertation, he started on the keyboards at age 10 and “played Arabic and Western music repertoires ranging from Arabic folk songs to Minuets by J.S. Bach.” On title track “Safa,” Rohana sprinkles in harmonics and guitar-like chords, incorporating new textures and harmonies on the traditionally melody-focused instrument. This is most prevalent in “Prelude,” where strummed chords as emphatic resolutions to phrases throughout the piece. “Mayadin” and “Madar Hijaz” are solo recordings of songs that first appeared on 2016’s Furat; without the double bass of the late Matyas Szandai (1977–2023) and darbuka rhythms of Wassim Halal, these tracks display more of Rohana’s raw energy. Dedicating the album to his father, who passed away two years ago, Rohana seems to feel harder on these solo oud versions. Safa, meaning purity, reveals an oud master reaching new heights. And although the sounds on the record are in one sense Rohana’s alone, he seems to play with an urgency supplemented by a collective Palestinian resilience on the world stage. As the genocide in Palestine accelerates, there’s a double erasure of Palestinian identity: one characterized by the destruction of life, and another by political overdetermination. Safa is an emphatic achievement that affirms Rohana’s individual proficiency even as it clarifies the necessity of art, forged in the crucible of politics, to gesture at something greater.

评语：By Elle Carroll · November 19, 2024 Even for semi-casual Anglophone music fans, Japan and its musical legacy tends to occupy a singular place among the East Asian countries. Japanese city pop, for instance, is no more exotic or unheard of within your average New York City DJ set than Italo disco or French jazz from the same decade; few phrases send true audiophiles into conniptions faster than “Japanese pressing.” (The packaging! The Obi strips! The quality of the vinyl! The silence!) Comparably outsize Western influence and consistent cultural import-export lines have sustained a warm Western reception over the last several decades for Japanese music, and created a Western appetite for Japanese rediscoveries and reissues. Maple Fyshh is just the latest, and destined for this same warm reception among dream pop fans. There’s not an overwhelming amount of information about Yuichiro Nakada, the songwriter behind Maple Fyshh. So the facts are as follows: Nakada lived and worked out of a home studio in Miyazaki, a city situated against the Pacific-facing coast of the southern island of Kyushu. Beginning in the late 1980s, he recorded a cluster of songs and eventually, in 1995, a pair of full-length records—Mariko and Dokitto Station!!—on his 4-track, which he self-produced and then released on his own Beat ‘n’ Garage Records. Now, thanks to Osaka-based EM Records, those full-length albums have been newly remastered and compiled into You Are Leaving My Mind: The “Mariko” and “Dokitto Station!!” Era. The music of the compilation is homespun but imaginative. Nakada’s lo-fi constraints lend themselves well to the scuzz and melancholia of pre-grunge ‘90s rock. Purportedly inspired by a poem submitted to a manga magazine, the compilation’s Markio-sourced A-side is melancholic and loosely constructed. “The Prelude” has a certain melodic, Mazzy Star-style drift to it; the roughed-up folksy swing of “You Are Leaving My Mind” turns crystalline for its reprise. Extraordinary name aside, “You are the Other Reality and I am This Reality (Okay, Okay, No More Scary Faces)” sounds like a wound-down, half-buried Spiritualized. If Sarah Records had had a Tokyo branch, they would have jumped at this. The Dokitto Station!! B-side, however, is where Nakada’s surf rock and Spectorian tendencies burst joyfully forth. Whatever clouds linger over Mariko part in spectacular fashion on the midtempo bouncer “Bells of Spring” and “Lipstick Boy,” which is nothing short of American hot-rod music, lovingly reinterpreted along daydream-y and DIY lines. “Love Gone to the Blue Sea (Once Again on the Seaside Path)”—another track name that simply couldn’t go unmentioned—is chock-full of girl group harmonies. (Speaking of which, does Quentin Tarantino know about this guy?) Compilation closer “Twistar Sister Pylot (Twinkle Star Patrol)” is perhaps the cheeriest of the bunch, with jingle-jangle surf guitar spritely enough to hula hoop to. Put together it’s beautiful, fun, lovingly made music, and still ever-so-catchy and delightful this far from mid-‘90s Japan.

评语：By Ted Davis · November 18, 2024 An air of restless mystery surrounds Ian Mugerwa’s output beneath the alias Dawuna. The Maryland-born, New York City-based artist emerged with a scrappy debut titled Glass Lit Dream in 2020 that arrived with little fanfare, but gradually built word of mouth organically. Impacted by the end of a tumultuous romance and living mostly at night, Glass Lit Dream painted R&B, ambient, and neo-soul in moon-kissed tones. It was eventually reissued by London label O__0, and was followed by a string of shorter endeavors. His second full-length, Naya, first appeared as a rough-hewn Bandcamp upload last year. It has now been remastered and pressed to vinyl, the first release for Mugerwa’s new imprint Sun Royalle. Naya expands on a shapeshifting quality that has been present in all of his music to date, seamlessly blending a host of contrasting flavors. These 12 curt tracks are at some moments funky and crisp; at others, brittle and atmospheric. Though Naya evades stylistic pigeonholing by remaining in constant flux, the album is still cohesive, united by a bittersweet, secretive essence; it’s as if your speakers are only allowing you to ingest it after swearing that you won’t share it with anyone else. This feeling of intimacy burns especially bright midway through “Miss Thang,” when a flurry of deep, panned voices conjure a cerebral swirl; for a moment, Naya becomes disorienting and immersive, before the song suddenly regains structure. On “Diaspora,” a trip-hop groove supports a fluctuating vocal melody, peppered with muted guitar. Synth-heavy “Old Head” pushes into beatless techno terrain, gliding into the understated, yet crinkly “Work.” Naya is misty and enveloping, like what might happen if steam was magically transformed into sound. It seems fitting that Mugerwa has cited D’Angelo as his greatest influence—they share a knack for dousing wah-wah–streaked psychedelia in a sensual glow. “I love the idea of having more direct pop songwriting juxtaposed against these dense, abstract sounds,” Mugerwa told Clash Magazine in a 2022 interview. Emotional confrontation and intense introspection inform Naya, every moment coming across like a hushed promise.

评语：By Dash Lewis · November 15, 2024 Twenty years on, with fresh eyes and a bit of lived wisdom, we can accurately say that 2004 was a banner year for hip-hop. The highlights were plentiful: Kanye began his storied run with The College Dropout, 9th Wonder and Murs dropped the bicoastal Murs 3:16: The 9th Edition, De La Soul roared back with The Grind Date, and Cam’ron hit a stride with his surreal opus Purple Haze. These records all left an indelible mark, providing blueprints for sounds that still resonate two decades later. But it was Daniel Dumile, a British-American rapper/producer with many stage names—Zev Love X, Viktor Vaughn, King Gheedorah, and MF DOOM—whose work that year arguably looms most prominently. The record shelf and DSP file list have a way of flattening time, reducing an artist’s discography to a small section through which to thumb. These days, an album cycle lasts a couple of months at best, so artists don’t really feel beholden to the production timelines of yore. We’re conditioned to expect prolificacy, especially from rappers on a hot streak; but in the early ‘00s, pulling it off was a remarkable feat. MM..FOOD was Dumile’s sixth project of 2004 (though three were editions of his instrumental series, Special Herbs). Madvillainy, his first of the year, paired him with kindred spirit Madlib for a telepathic blackout session. It was a generational, paradigm-shifting explosion that single-handedly saved Stones Throw Records from going under and cemented the artists’ legendary status. Dumile returned to his Viktor Vaughn alias for VV2: Venomous Villain, and though minor compared to the works that bookended it, it was a solid sequel to Vaudeville Villain. Dumile was a builder of worlds, a god emcee whose rhyme books and dusty samplers contained entire universes. Though many point to Madvillainy as Dumile’s crowning achievement, MM..FOOD stands tall in his discography. Super fans like to argue whether or not it’s his finest moment, but it doesn’t matter if the question is ever settled—he was at the peak of his powers, operating in a flow state he could never quite recreate. Close friend and collaborator Count Bass D called 2004 Dumile’s “creative zenith.” Instead of the oddball character studies or language manipulation exercises that marked his previous releases, Dumile charted a different conceptual path with MM..FOOD. A rap album about food—the title of which is a play on the artists’ name—seems a little silly initially; but closer inspection reveals a deeply considered and inventive examination of both hip-hop and society at large. Food is inherently political; it tells the story of a people and points to what a culture holds dear and what it will discard. In Dumile’s hands, it was a way to boast about his rhyme skills and a lens for examining violence and death, all delivered in his signature off-the-cuff style. The first verse of opener “Beef Rapp” sets the theme nicely, drawing a parallel between rappers’ ever-escalating feuds and a beef-heavy diet’s toll on one’s health. The deaths of Tupac and Biggie haunt the song’s margins, and it’s hard to listen to it in 2024 without thinking of the grim 2010s drill scene in Chicago, or the countless other rappers senselessly cut down by rivals in recent years. What’s perhaps most striking when revisiting MM..FOOD is how modern it feels. You can trace Dumile’s influence like the rings in a tree stump, each new generation discovering and internalizing some aspect of his art. The record feels held together with scotch tape, slathered in tape hiss, a warm lo-fi vibe many younger artists gravitate towards. You can hear him triggering drum samples by hand while off-kilter loops stumble over themselves; every hard “p” that hits the mic’s windscreen gives the record an endearing “first take, best take” quality. It has some of his most enduring, iconic moments. “One Beer” was originally recorded for Madvillainy, but works better in context here. Every few months, “Rapp Snitch Knishes” goes viral on a certain corner of TikTok, as kids diving into the classics discover MM..FOOD’s trippy genius. Without it, we may not have the twin cannon careers of Tyler, the Creator or Earl Sweatshirt, or the warped psychedelia of the Tase Grip collective. It was both ahead and outside of its time, a strange and beautiful masterpiece from one of rap’s greatest innovators.

评语：By Jared Proudfoot · November 14, 2024 Dennis “Blackbeard” Bovell is enjoying a much-deserved moment. Between the 2019 U.S. release of Babylon, which he scored; his track “Silly Games” anchoring the most talked-about scene in Steve McQueen’s 2020 Small Axe series; and a 2021 MBE appointment, his music is resonating with broader audiences than ever. This essential compilation captures the British reggae producer’s fertile 1976–1980 period. Long revered for his work with The Slits, Linton Kwesi Johnson, and as the architect of lovers rock—a uniquely British take on reggae steeped in romance—Sufferer Sounds pulls together 15 tracks from his early days as founder of the legendary Jah Sufferer Sound System. The dubs collected here are mainly “versions” engineered for Sufferer parties. More than being battle-tested, the backstory is that they emerged from intense pressures: Bovell’s widely publicized 1974 wrongful imprisonment following a police raid on one of his dances, and the UK reggae scene’s general refusal to market local productions. In the liner notes, he reveals how he would press records in Dublin with larger center holes to make them look like Jamaican imports, while releasing under various aliases like Dennis Curtis, African Stone, and The Dub Band. This compilation presents the full picture, piecing together his multiple personas as part of a larger artistic statement forged in defiance. Bovell’s signature sound draws from his gift for melodic hooks. Playing most instruments himself and experimenting with new technology like the Eventide Harmonizer, his production style emphasizes lyricism even in its most deconstructed moments. “Take Dub” reimagines Brubeck’s “Take Five” as a stripped back soul-reggae odyssey, while “Game of Dubs” launches Janet Kay’s soaring vocals into infinite echoes before snatching them away without warning. The hypnotic drums of Jah Bunny paired with Rico Rodriguez’s sweetly-haunting horn lines on “Suffrah Dub” exemplify how Bovell could craft militant roots music with a delicate touch. Restored at Berlin’s Dubplates & Mastering, this release–the culmination of six years’ work–serves as both historical document and living proof of Bovell’s enduring influence on the intersection of reggae, dub, punk, and British music culture. Long may his moment continue.

评语：By Mike McGrath-Bryan · November 13, 2024 It’s easier than ever lately to feel as though the clouds of a long, grey evening are being drawn over humanity. Whether we’re pulling our comforts closer from under a steady roof, or we’re trying to navigate past the madness of crowds to flickering waypoints in the distance, that same expanse above us is as uncertain as any of us are right now. Quebecois avant-garde trio Yoo Doo Right’s third LP, From the Heights of Our Pastureland, emerged from isolation and experimentation, beginning as a rolling document of a three-day session “in a remote cabin.” Opener “Spirit’s Heavy, but Not Overthrown” is a slow-burning tone-setter, a track that spends 13 minutes moving achingly, agonizingly from fuzz to brightness and clarity, to crystalline shards of melody, before heading away on a path of no-nonsense motorik action. “Ponders End,” which is similarly occupied with grouchy jangles and dread-laden staccato chords, bears its burdens with a certain swagger; and “Lost in the Overcast,” the lightweight of this LP at four minutes, provides a breather as warbling synths weave in and out. The album’s title track provides a fist-raising conclusion to a body of work preoccupied with humanity, memory, and the nature of creation in a moment of naked opportunism and exploitation. But it’s in “Eager Glacier,” an almost ceremonial summoning of drones, fuzz, and reverb—and charged with a resilient, wilful, cathartic energy—that’s the emotional center of a front-to-back listen. If From the Heights of Our Pastureland can lay any claims at this moment, it is that it may well become a waypoint for anyone who comes across it in difficult times. Its layers and variations in pace honor that certain kind of tumult and hurt that seems, sadly, all too familiar; but its players’ sheer tangible power, fury, and passion—and the love that informs those phenomena—reflects the innate instinct to endure, to survive, to live.

评语：By April Clare Welsh · November 12, 2024 Does the sound of a violin trigger a flash of forest green? Beyoncé, Charli XCX, Duke Ellington, and blockbuster composer Hans Zimmer have all claimed to see color when they hear music, a sensory phenomenon known as chromesthesia. This neurological term is the jumping-off point for a compilation of twisty Afro-diasporic club cuts inspired by migration, and curated by British-Egyptian historian Hannah Elsisi, a research fellow at Cambridge University and the co-head of an NYU research unit called Mangrove. Pulsing with triplet rhythms, Chromesthesia: The Colour of Sound Vol. 1 expands across four bodies of water—the Atlantic Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea, and the Red Sea—connecting sound and music not just to color, but also to human rights. Elsisi has rounded up a dream team of electronic producers spanning multiple countries—among them, Egypt, Kenya, Brazil, and South Africa—who pool their ideas for tracks that survey the “audiopolitics” of diaspora. At every turn, voices, rhythms, and traditional folk instrumentation converge, and sizzling new hybrid forms take shape. The result is in an intertextual deep dive that links reggaetón, baile funk, and an array of local and regional styles. Tunisian producer Deena Abdelwahed and Miami’s Nick León set the album in motion with “Mangrove,” a towering industrial fortress padded with Earth-shaking bass and percussive patterns that evoke guarachero. “Zamaleky” fuses log-drum-tapped amapiano and South African rap with Egyptian mizmar and mahraganat, incorporating bars from Egyptian duo Double Zuksh and award-winning South African rapper Sho Madjozi. (The latter fires off killer lines like, “I’m too fly for the flight attendant.”) On “Sucio,” Brazil-born rapper LYZZA and Venezuelan raptor house luminary Dj Babatr blend barreling drums with ear-splitting horns. “Tootsies,” a winding Auto-Tune-fueled flex from inventive Cairo-based producer 3Phaz, seemingly interpolates T-Pain’s “I’m In Love with a Stripper,” varnishing it with ladles of treacly Auto-Tune that adds to the track’s sweetly seductive delivery. Dj Babatr rolls up again in a speedy somersault with “Aje (Me llama la calle),” recruiting Venezuelan rapper and singer-songwriter Oshazs on vocals. The compilation’s emotional range extends to chiller moments, too. Things take a breather towards the end with three more tempered tracks that range from the brooding, dubstep-laced electronica of “In Time”—a link-up between goth-y experimentalist Gaika, Congolese multi-hyphenate Cõvco, and London-based multidisciplinary mainstay Lord Tusk—to the jazzy spoken-word collage “Dark Out” from Egyptian musician and composer Maurice Louca, Dominican reggaetón producer Kelman Duran, South African jazz drummer Asher Gamedze, and Elsisi herself. Closing the comp on an ambient note, on “Infinite:Regress Into Futures Past” experimental composer and producer Lamin Fofana pursues a ghostly synthline through a beatless soundscape, interrupted only by the spontaneous burst of a heartbeat-like throb. Fofana, who has previously explored themes related to migration in his own work, leans into spaciousness here, offering room for reflection on the LP’s themes. It’s a blissful send-off for a heat-filled compilation designed for ripping up the dancefloor—and the four-on-the-floor rulebook to boot. Indeed, as Elsisi herself demands in the album notes: “The rhythms of the mangrove world are held out to be blasted out LOUD.”

评语：By Peter Margasak · November 11, 2024 Ethiopian musician and composer Mulatu Astatke first began building musical bridges as a teenager, landing in London for studies in 1959 before moving to the U.S. in 1963, where he became the first African student to enroll at the Berklee College of Music. He’s widely credited as the progenitor of Ethio-jazz, transplanting the cycling grooves, pentatonic harmonies, and hypnotic melodies of his homeland with the swinging rhythms and the extended improvisation of American jazz. By the time he returned to Ethiopia in 1969, he’d amassed a world of experience and knowledge, and ever since he’s cemented his reputation as one of the most resilient, curious, and adventurous musicians not only from Africa, but anywhere else on the globe. His global career was revived by the influential Ethiopiques series from Buda Records, to say nothing of his prominent role on the soundtrack to the Jim Jarmusch film Broken Flowers (2005), introducing his rigorous but deeply pleasurable hybrids to new audiences. Even as he approaches his 81st birthday he remains a vital ambassador for Ethiopian music, touring steadily and engaging in an ever widening array of collaborations. He’s worked extensively with the psych-funk masters of the Heliocentrics as well as the adventurous American jazz group Either/Orchestra and Dutch post-punk experimentalists the Ex. He’s innately open-minded, driven, in part, by embracing surprising connections. The Hoodna Orchestra, from Tel Aviv, formed in 2012, devoted to Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat, but over time the group’s interests expanded, and considering Israel’s significant immigrant Ethiopian population, it’s no surprise they eventually found inspiration from Astatke’s smolderingly soulful sounds. They were able to invite him to Israel in early 2023 to perform and record, and, as luck would have it, Neal Sugarman, the tenor saxophonist in the Dap-Kings and co-owner of Daptone Records, was on hand to serve as producer. In this inspired pairing, the Hoodna Orchestra provides multivalent support for Astatke’s bittersweet jams, summoning the spirit of the Menahan Street Band—Daptone-universe mainstays, whose sonic palette fits the broad sweep of Astatke masterfully. While there are only faint traces of the Ethio-Latino fusion the Astatke pursued in the ’60s, together the two entities have found an easy, head-bobbing fit. All six tracks are steeped in the moody, heavy atmosphere of late ’60s/early ’70s Ethiopian music, where smoky, haunting melodies glide atop cooly propulsive grooves, here dominated by the stabbing, melancholic organ patterns of Eitan Drabkin. There’s the skittering moodiness of the title track, the skipping rhythms of “Major,” and the gloomy splendor of “Hatula.” The entire collaboration straddles an imperative to get down while acknowledging the heaviness of our current era. As usual, Astatke finds his way in yet another disparate collaboration, summoning a soulfulness that seems to lurk in every fiber of his being.

评语：By Michael J. West · November 08, 2024 Jazz is said to be the “sound of surprise”; London jazz, filtered through hip-hop and EDM, is even more so. Somehow that doesn’t prepare one for pressing play on Mr Loverman, by Speakers Corner Quartet–an eclectic but ultimately jazz-based band that came together as the house band for a South London spoken word series–and hearing “Proceed,” which sounds for all the world like an outtake from the French electronic duo Air’s chill-out classic Moon Safari. Starting off with such a curveball, though, does prime us for an album full of stylistic jolts. After “Proceed” comes the twitchy electro-funk of “Show Me How You Feel” (with children singing the lyrics). Later down the line comes odd-meter Afro-psychedelia (“Oldie but a Goldie”), Eno-like ambient (“Second Beginning”), ethereal vocals over dirty south hip-hop beats (“Maxine,” featuring singer Leilah), a multi-part neo-soul groove (“Into the Lions Den”) and ‘80s dance club pastiche (“Would You Come?”). How’s that for contemporary jazz? Because Mr Loverman is a score—for a BBC-TV show about Black LGBT life—the focus is on mood, as it must be. (And as you might expect from a quartet of Raven Bush’s violin, Biscuit’s flute, Peter Bennie’s bass, and Kwake Bass’s drums and percussion, though there’s a lot of uncredited synths here as well.) It also must be short, since these are cues; the album’s 23 tracks add up to less than 43 minutes, with the 3:14 ambient drone “Caught in the Act” as the lengthiest piece. These two characteristics seem incompatible at first, but these tidbits pack in an awful lot of serious mood, just as the number of tracks packs in serious variety. “Working It All Out” might be a mere 42 seconds, “Scorpion Yard” just 1:03, but the former’s quirky, squirt-y dance-pop and the latter’s postmodern chamber music (with guest Mica Levi on viola) thoroughly establish themselves within this realm. What does seem remarkably low-presence from this South London jazz group is improvisation. Some of that’s a function of the tracks’ brevity; yet it’s also a testament to the players’ thinking, compositional even when it’s spontaneous. The haunting piano on “In The Beginning,” for example, sounds written: it comprises a string of short, simple, discrete phrases. Yet on close inspection, you can hear the improv tells: the time is slightly off and jagged, the phrasing reiterative but never quite repeated verbatim. The same is true of Biscuit’s flute on “Proceed” and Bennie’s bass (quasi-)pattern on “Barry Left Alone,” and indeed one suspects of some full tracks on Mr Loverman. Surely the calm-then-sinister “Bottom of the Bottle,” with Bass’s snare and cymbal going from non-existent to angry and urgent, developed organically against the onscreen action. Ditto the hypnotic “Memories With You,” whose slow burn can’t hide its shifting layers and dynamics. Sometimes in jazz, it’s the musicians who surprise themselves.

评语：By Elle Carroll · November 07, 2024 Few people have done more to rescue some of the best and unjustly overlooked Venezuelan pop and jazz from the last century than Maurice Aymard, the one man behind the one-man operation El Palmas. On paper, the new self-titled compilation of Venezuelan new wave outfit PP’s fits right in with the label’s oeuvre. It’s a tight little package of excellent Venezuelan music from the ‘80s, nicely mastered and primed for rediscovery. And yet, something about it feels like a departure. It is predominantly Spanish-language Venezuelan music, and yet its primary influences are almost exclusively pulled from the Anglosphere. This record doesn’t so much wear its British and American influences on its sleeve as sew its entire wardrobe out of them. To put it another way: What would a Venezuelan kid fed a steady diet of Blondie, Bowie, a little Nina Hagen, and no small amount of Talking Heads would come up with? Probably something like this. The kid in question is Pedro Pérez, raised in Venezuela and educated briefly in Montréal before fleeing the Canadian cold to enroll in art school in San Francisco. With PP’s—a shortening of the band’s original name the Pedro Pérez Show—he recorded and released three albums through the early and mid-‘80s, selections from all of which are present on this compilation. It’s hard to undersell the sheer exuberance that runs through the entire project, surfacing in the glistening Wham!-level harmonies on the chorus of “Compañeros de por vida” and the scuzzy breakdowns of “Vida,” which plays like a space-rock-ified Clash outtake. “Escape” is punky and jittery and giddy enough to merit a DEVO comparison. Compilation opener “Mensaje De Amor” is pure Joy Division with its bass-forward production and scratchy percussion, and “Jesica” maintains a post-punk edge even as it cranks the brightness with a sort of Specials-inspired shudder. The liner notes credit PP’s with renewing Venezuela’s “musical panorama” in the early ‘80s, which tracks considering how panoramic the compilation feels just on its own merits. It’s plenty easy to play spot-the-influence listening to PP’s (down to how Pérez throws his voice like Bowie on the chorus “Yo so así”) but the real appeal is listening to how he tries on, trades out, and tangles those influences together. As a compilation, PP’s paints a picture of a band that didn’t evolve in a straight line but spent its career spinning like a pinwheel. The effect is a hell of a whirl.

评语：By Elle Carroll · November 06, 2024 Few clichés are as maddeningly played out as the description of a work of art, particularly a film or an album, as a “love letter” to a given place. The phrase is regularly lobbed at artworks associated with your standard-issue major metropolis, especially when it touches on said metropolis’s most retroactively glamorized era: Paris in the ‘20s, Rome in the ‘60s, New York in the ‘70s or, with increasing frequency, the early aughts. In fairness, the phrase is typically complimentary. But the trouble with love letters is that those not written by, say, Anaïs Nin or Franz Kafka tend to be interesting only to the intended recipient. And the trouble with writing a love letter to a city is that to truly understand a place is to feel more than just affection for it. In that sense, BaBa ZuLa’s latest LP, İstanbul Sokakları (Streets of Istanbul), is no love letter to Istanbul. It is too thoughtful and sprawling to merit the description, and certainly too critical. It’s also far closer to a conversation. İstanbul Sokakları lets the city speak for itself in extensive field recordings, beginning with the vintage Istanbul Express train announcement that opens the record. As usual, the longtime five-piece waste no time getting their churning, thudding, fundamentally Anatolian sonic locomotive moving. The album contains no fewer than three elongated psych-drone odysseys replete with a melodic insistence referential to Indian ragas. The longest, “Yok Haddi Yok Hesabı (No Limit No Calculation),” clocks in at just over 11 minutes and overflows with Turkish psychedelia’s murky, hypnotic allure. The boat horn and screeching seagulls that introduce the following track snap the record back to the titular streets; indeed İstanbul Sokakları seesaws between the real and the imaginary. It’s a harmonious slippage, and in that sense, İstanbul Sokakları is perhaps best described as an aural psychogeography of Istanbul—a record in which the objectively observed and the subjectively felt are braided inextricably together in a singular musical experience. The subjective feelings in question are no mere simplistic infatuation with Istanbul’s colors and flavors. On “Arsız Saksağan (Cheeky Magpie),” frontman Osman Murat Ertel unfurls a laundry list of legitimate grievances, including femicide, government suppression of press freedoms, environmental devastation (specifically luxury hotels built on fragile bays), and the imprisonment of activists courageous enough to resist. He punishes his electrified saz on “Yaprakların Arasından (In Between the Leaves)” over lyrics in which the sun is both a source of natural beauty and a suffocating force baking him into the concrete. İstanbul Sokakları throttles the listener in places. It’s trancelike as opposed to meditative. And then, in a wonderfully affectionate coda, the album finishes with Ertel plucking at his saz over a field recording of birds in his garden. Otherwise entirely preoccupied with Istabul’s public side, İstanbul Sokakları’s final note is deeply private and sentimental. In other words, to BaBa ZuLa, whatever multitudes Istanbul contains, it’s also just one thing: home.

评语：By Mia Hughes · November 05, 2024 The sound of glass shattering, sometimes accompanied by anguished yells, is interspersed throughout the tracks on Planes Mistaken For Stars’s new album, Do You Still Love Me? It sounds like unbearable, agonizing frustration: It sounds like a mistake that can’t be undone. This is the last album that the post-hardcore band made before their frontman, Gared O’Donnell, died of cancer at the age of 44—he was in treatment while they wrote and recorded it. It’s also the first one they’ve made since their founding guitarist, Matt Bellinger, died by suicide in 2017. Bookended by these two deaths, it’s an album that stalks the space between the irreversible and the inevitable. Since forming in 1997, PMFS always seemed to make music that was snarlier, sludgier and uglier than that of their contemporaries. The dire stakes surrounding this record only serve to vindicate that approach, as if to canonize their fatalism. We open on the plain-spoken pronouncement that “Matthew is dead,” on the track of the same name. The unshifting brute-force guitars, when combined with O’Donnell’s matter-of-fact delivery, lend the song a grim singularity that shifts it from a tribute to an omen. The rest of Do You Still Love Me? proceeds from that inescapable shadow. What’s stark about this record is the brutality with which O’Donnell crashes with his mortality. Here, impending death serves not to wrap up loose ends but to make final the unfixable messes of life. After all, for anyone to ask the question that serves as the album title, let alone a dying man, implies an uneasy answer. When he growls the titular plea on “Fix Me,” or when he imagines an “effigy of what we once weren’t and what we’ll never be” on “Arrow,” the ultimate futility of this self-awareness is implied. And yet the tone of this record is anything but defeated. Rather, its constant intensity—the breathless crash of instruments on rockier cuts like “Fix Me” and “Further,” or the gutting, unflinching creep of slow-burns like “Do You Still Love Me? No. 1” and “The Calming”—is a testament to their vitality, their resilience. The aforementioned sounds of shattering glass betray the overarching message: If you’re still angry about the unfair end you and those you love have been handed, it means you’re not dead yet—a priceless gift too many take for granted. Planes Mistaken For Stars rage against the dying of the light, and the result is a searing, galvanizing final transmission.

评语：By Meredith Lawrence · November 04, 2024 Perhaps the only work harder than getting to know and accept yourself is the work of continuing to do so. It’s from that state of flux that Haley Heynderickx writes her second album, Seed of a Seed. Inundated by messaging about self-love and self-care, Heynderickx points out that having too many voices telling you what to do can fence you in—no matter how well-intentioned they may be. Instead, she seeks out restoration through the natural world; Seed is packed with botanical imagery—“Seed of a Seed,” “Growing a Garden,” “Mouth of a Flower”—and the natural cycles of that greenery, their innate ebb and flow, serves as a parallel to Heynderickx’s own rising and falling “Well, I couldn’t believe what the water had told me/ That man and plant had used to talk,” she sings on “Redwoods (Anxious God),” “Man, I’d do anything to hear the Redwoods talk.” On album-opener “Gemini,” the zodiac twins become an alter ego, as Heynderickx dodges text messages, pulls over to look at a tiny purple clover, and ultimately learns the importance of slowing down. Seed of a Seed is as reverent of the natural world as it is skeptical of modern life. (“The food that I’ve been eating says that I am processed,” she quips in “Gemini,” an extension of the mantra, “you are what you eat.”) Mournful cello rolls in and out of the album, accompanying Heynderickx’s nimble, precise fingerpicking. Throughout, the questions keep coming: Are we doing it better than our parents? She’s not sure. Does aging suck? Maybe. Should you just buckle down and do the good, simple things that make you happy? Absolutely. Heynderickx returns to those small joys over and over: a good bed, a worn-in couch, a glass of wine, splitting a sandwich. In the end, the questions Heynderickx asks are intentionally open-ended; in that way, Seed of a Seed leaves space for both the discomfort of change and the relief of progress.

评语：By Jim Allen · November 01, 2024 The Invisible Road takes you through a country where the borders are fluid, the atmosphere is intoxicating, and music is the only native tongue. As its subtitle suggests, this collection gathers unheard works from a five-year span in Sussan Deyhim and Richard Horowitz’s shared journey. Multimedia artist Deyhim began as a dancer in her Iranian homeland. New York multi-instrumentalist and composer Horowitz assimilated free jazz, minimalism, electronic music, and international traditions during travels in Paris and Morocco. The pair’s partnership in life and music began in the heady crucible of the early ‘80s downtown NYC arts scene. Combining ancient cultural touchstones and cutting-edge technology, Deyhim and Horowitz filtered their experiences in Asia, Africa, and Europe through their avant-garde POV. The result is a hypnotic swirl of tones and tongues, evoking a constantly shifting roll call of intercontinental identities while creating a world unto itself. Rebooting ancient sounds with ultramodern tech was also on the agenda for ambient composer Jon Hassell’s Fourth World works. So, it’s not surprising that Hassell and Horowitz worked together several times. (Krautrock lovers might also find conceptual parallels in Can’s Ethnological Forgery Series.) But the new paradigm forged in Deyhim and Horowitz’s recordings is so bewitchingly vivid you might find yourself frantically scouring an Atlas in a fruitless search for a source that existed only in the duo’s minds. Deyhim’s frequently multi-tracked vocals stretch the boundaries of language and the human voice itself. Sometimes she sings in English, sometimes in Farsi, and sometimes in an invented language that feels fully fleshed out and might stir memories of Elizabeth Fraser’s DIY linguistics with the Cocteau Twins. Deyhim makes the recording process itself another element in her vocal arsenal. Overdubs make her a one-woman choir on “Siren and Secrets.” Her voice plays at multiple speeds on “Monkey See, Monkey Do,” sometimes dissolving into feral cackles and cries. On the title track she seems to transform into a tape-manipulated gang of ghosts. But even without electronic alteration, Deyhim’s nuanced, elastic voice slips into the cracks between notes and beats in endlessly surprising ways. Horowitz’s electro-acoustic ecosystems are a master class in contrast. Old world percussion bumps up against industrial-sounding synth bass in a surreal but sensuous bump-and-grind. The Eastern ney—a flute that’s among the world’s oldest instruments—floats across clouds of ambient electronics. Sequencers crank gamelan-style percussive patterns up to a bone-shattering speed. The Invisible Road delivers an ecstatic kind of cultural polyphony. Deadpan funk syncopation underpins Asian tonalities on “Craving Your Embrace,” evoking the David Sylvian/Ryuichi Sakamoto axis. (Horowitz and Sakamoto shared a 1991 Best Original Score Golden Globe for The Sheltering Sky.) The spare, foreboding “Bedouin’s Way” is like proto-dubstep wafting along on a dusty Moroccan wind. For pure trippy globalist mix ‘n’ match, the music’s closest spiritual kin might be My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by David Byrne and Brian Eno (both of whom Horowitz played with). Deyhim and Horowitz’s lives and work remained intertwined until the latter’s passing in April 2024. Together and separately, they amassed decades of daring music that remains sui generis, from multimedia installations to celebrated film soundtracks. The dreamy nuggets unearthed on The Invisible Road are an engrossing addition to the duo’s travelogue.

评语：By Daniel Dylan Wray · October 31, 2024 Palm wine is an alcoholic drink made from the naturally fermented sap taken from palm trees such as coconut and date. It is also a West African musical genre—known as maringa in Sierra Leone—that developed when docking sailors from places such as Portugal would hit the bars to drink palm wine; they brought their guitars and would infuse their playing style with local melodies and calypso. When YATTA, the Sierra Leonean-American vocalist, producer, and composer, was researching this album, they discovered their granduncle, S.E. Rogie, was a pioneer of the genre. However, while this album takes inspiration from the genre’s storytelling, lilting vocals, and proclivity towards ease, lightness, and play, it is not explicitly a palm wine record. Instead, according to YATTA, it is “the product of years of travel, reckoning, solitude, and troubling love alchemized into a joyful return to home, God, and clarity of mind.” Following their 2019 album of experimental poetry, WAHALA, along with collaborations with fellow sonic explorer Moor Mother, YATTA’s PALM WINE is a remarkably distinct and genre-evading piece of work. The opening “Circle,” which places YATTA’s gentle spoken word over humming, almost choral-like drones and simmering electronics, sets the tone for a record that is quietly yet immersively atmospheric, and is as rich in ideas as it is in approaches to production. The album is also more overtly melodic and pop-leaning than YATTA’s previous works. “Put Your Faith in God” is a wonderfully unpredictable piece of deconstructed electronic pop, while at the opposite end of the tempo spectrum, the gentle piano keys and stirring vocals that make up “Disappear” almost veer into Grouper territory, mixing sparseness with emotional punch. “Too Good” has a slick, almost R&B dance groove in its smooth flow, and tracks such as “Taxi” come closest to touching upon the sound of traditional palm wine music, with a subtle flash of calypso flair propping up the lilting vocals that glide through the track. This more pop approach is no doubt aided by some of the producers who appear here, among them Felicita, So Drove, Myles Avery, Carlos Truly, and Maxime Morin—who have worked with everyone from Beyoncé to Caroline Polacheck and Cupcakke. Despite that, PALM WINE feels like the work of an incredibly unique individual who is steering their own ship. Much like how those drunken sailors years ago began playing with locals to create a new type of music, on PALM WINE, YATTA is doing the same.