Play For Today: special summer bonanza edition Part One

 

It’s been ages since I’ve posted a playlist, so I thought I’d change the format slightly. Background: I write about music a lot for various publications, but as a music journalist I also receive hundreds of promo type emails every week and, when something looks interesting I download it and save the release in a folder marked with the month, to be properly checked out later (sometimes much later). So I thought ‘going forward’ (I hate that phrase, what did people used to say?) that at the end of each month I’d go over the items of interest and see if they really were interesting, and write a little bit about them.

Now is as good a time as any to start, but to get it rolling I thought I might as well do a look back over the summer, which I think I did years ago on my old website. Anyway, let’s get on with it.

Going right back to the beginning of June, an album I really liked and have kept listening to is…

C Joynes & The Furlong BrayThe Borametz Tree
Thread Recordings

This vinyl-only release is the brainchild of acclaimed folk guitarist C Joynes, aided and abetted by a starry ensemble consisting of the Dead Rat Orchestra, plus fellow experimental guitarist/multi-instrumentalists Nick Jonah Davis and Cam Deas. The Borametz Tree takes its name from the fabled “Vegetable Lamb of Tartary”, a tree supposed to produce sheep as its fruit (also the title of one of the album’s best songs) and it’s a suitably exotic and otherworldly collection of tunes. Otherworldly is perhaps misleading; in fact the multi-textured music here is very much of this earth, often many different corners of it at once. The album opens with the richly reverberating “Triennale” which sets the scene with its atmospheric, droning combination of elements from different western, eastern and African folk music traditions; but which all gel beautifully to make a familiar yet alien whole. It’s incredibly elusive; the aforementioned “Vegetable Lamb…” begins sounding perhaps Scandinavian or even Scottish, but strangely could equally be Arabic; and this kind of melange characterises the whole album, somehow encompassing everything from bluegrass to the music of the steppes. Mysterious, wild and invigorating.

Also in June (actually 31st May)…

Cellista – Transfigurations

Transfigurations is interesting, an album distilled from a multifaceted performance art project, it’s part experimental (but relatively orthodox) songs, albeit with the cello as the central instrument, part sound-collage, part social commentary, part spoken word performance. The album kicks off with ‘Rupture 1’ (the album is punctuated by five politically-charged Ruptures) featuring an excerpt from an old news report about the Black Panthers in the May Day protests of 1969, beginning a theme of civil unrest that runs through the whole album. At various times it reminded me of the mini-album Jarboe and Helen Money made together a few years ago; kind of an obvious comparison, but to me this was more satisfying. Although less indomitable than Jarboe’s, Cellista’s vocals are more melodic and the songs (or at least the handful of more conventional ones like ‘Confessions‘ and standout, ‘Look Homeward, Angel’ featuring Dem One)  are straightforwardly affecting. The actual cello playing reminded me less of Helen Money than of the fantastic Julia Kent; atmospheric and (that word again) mysterious. The album is, deliberately, very timely (Cellista explained while promoting the work that “Transfigurations is a response to the world we inhabit. It is meant to allow us all, singularly and as a community, to see the ruptures that punctuate our place in the present”), but the framing of our time (specifically 2017 in fact) as a time when always-present tensions have risen to the surface reinforce the idea that the issues of our time are the issues of all time. It’s a good album.

Elsewhere in June, I quite liked…

Wasuremono – Are You OK?
The Wilderness Records

Quite liked it in small doses, at least. It’s very nice and all, but taken as a whole its slightly twee and fragile retro, sometimes synth-pop indie style made me think of Philip Larkin on The Beatles; “like certain sweets, they seem wonderful until you are suddenly sick. Up till then it’s nice, though.” Philip Larkin, All What Jazz, Faber & Faber, 1970, p. 102

Speaking of retro (and what would pop culture in 2019 be without the ghosts of the 80s and 90s hanging over it?) I quite liked K. Michelle DuBois’ “summer single” ‘Waves Break’ which sounds weirdly like Jan Hammer producing The Cure c. Japanese Whispers but with the Bangles doing the vocals. I seem to quite like K Michelle DuBois against my will; I checked out her album Harness last year, decided it sounded like the kind of music you get on Buffy style teen soaps, ie not my cup of tea, but then ended up listening to it quite a lot anyway. Not at all sure about this video though.

One of the problems with promos is they are sometimes sent out so far in advance, for understandable reasons, that you tend to listen to and then forget about them before the release date is even near. The example that led to this observation is the unpleasant but extremely powerful new album by Margaret Chardiet’s industrial project, Pharmakon. The promo has been with me since June, the album itself (Devour) is out on August 30th via the reliably great Sacred Bones Records.  I’m not sure I’d say I ‘like’ Devour, but it’s a hypnotically ugly record, paradoxically chaotic and controlled, emotional and yet kind of blank and icy. More tuneful than I had expected though; if you don’t like the single ‘Self-Regulating System’ then you probably won’t like any of it.

end of part one!

Weekly Wafflings

 

For a variety of reasons, it’s been far longer than intended since I last posted anything here. So this is now the first of my weekly updates, which will mostly, I hope, be posted every Friday.

It’s been a funny summer; a house move, a lot of nice weather interspersed with a lot of rain, and (ongoing) the most unsettling national/international situation I can remember living through, which has involved are-evaluation of what I believe in politically and so forth – but I have a bigger summer review type thing in the pipeline at some point, so this is just a quick note until I have something more substantial to post. Onwards!

Current listening

I’ve heard a lot of good music recently, both old & new; in regular rotation have been: Egor Galcest_kodama_coverrushin’s beautiful Once and Domenicano, Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention’s Burnt Weenie Sandwich  and Uncle Meat, The Beau Brummels (who are never quite as good as I want them to be – ie not as good as The Lovin’ Spoonful) but have some really good songs, Kenny Drew & Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen’s Duo, Bessie Smith, a really interesting album called Stations by i am rhino and ruin  which I’ll write about in more detail at some point, the wonderful Annette Hanshaw, John Baizley, Nate Hall & Mike Scheidt’s Songs of Townes Van Zandt, Louis Prima & Keely Smith, Maki Asakawa, Myriam Gendron’s Not So Deep As A Well, Japanese Breakfast, Alcest’s Kodama, Nick Jonah Davis’ House of Dragons, The Pastels, everything I could find by the brilliant Stupid Daikini, the new Wardruna album, Yurei’s Night Vision, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ Skeleton Tree, Madder Mortem’s Red In Tooth And Claw (which reminds me in some ways of the amazing Jingo de Lunch album Perpetuum Mobile) and Rachel Mason’s forthcoming and very addictive Das Ram, among other things, which brings me to…

Albums of the Year

kristin-hersh-wyatt-at-the-coyote-palace-book-coverI haven’t started making an actual list yet, but it’s that time of year when some albums have firmly earned their place in the AOTY list and others are looking likely. It would be nice if Prophets of Rage released an album, but oh well. I’ve no idea how long the list will be, but I can say at this point that it will certainly include Bowie’s Blackstar, Iggy Pop/Tarwater/Alva Noto’s Leaves of Grass (not really an album but I’ll make an exception), Darkher’s Realms, Emma Ruth Rundle’s Marked For Death and Kristin Hersh’s amazing new book/double album Wyatt at the Coyote Palace.

*coincidence of the week!*

there are currently two lovely & sad (though otherwise not alike) songs called ‘Guadalupe’ regularly visiting my ears; one by the aforementioned Kristin Hersh and the other by Esmé Patterson.

Current Reading

I read Gail Carriger’s The Custard Protocol books way too fast and then spent the summer reading other things, notably Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood which was just as gripping and vivid and horrible as I remembered and Michael Moorcock’s two Corum trilogies (now on the last volume) which have been surprisingly comforting, not just because they are old favourites, but because of the rational but not backwards-looking philosophy that underlies Moorcock’s writing, even when the books are at their most corumtypically ‘heroic fantasy’/swords and sorcery in their stories and action:

“Do you know that you dream of these gods – that you are stronger than they – that when you are fearful, why then you bring fearsome gods upon yourselves? Is this not evident to you?”

“Everything may exist for a short while – even justice.  But the true state of the universe is anarchy. It is the mortal’s tragedy that he can never accept this.”

Other forms of entertainment

Grim times call for light entertainment (sometimes anyway); and I have watched and enjoyed an inordinate amount of Columbo and M*A*S*H in recent weeks/months; which suggests that war and murder are more soothing than one might expect. Less ephemerally, I have been looking at lots of art, mainly online inevitably, and am especially liking Awol Erizku at present for his re-framing & questioning of art history. So here’s his lovely Girl With A Bamboo Earring:

vermeer_bamboo_600

 

Until next week…