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Hungry Shells documents the meeting of two remarkable avant garde spirits. In 2018, Pekka Airaksinen presented Ka Baird with Buddhist parables that had been revealed to him in a mediative state. The result is a glorious recording, as the collaboration dissolves their individual states, their voices, flutes, and synths, into an organic harmonic discord.
In the history of both these artists are signs which led here. From 1967-70 Airaksinen composed as a member of infamous performance group The Sperm, who fell foul of Finnish obscenity laws. After devoting his 1970s to Buddhism, Airaksinen returned in the '80s with a system for translating the names of Buddhas into mathematical forms and then into musical compositions. Ka Baird, under her own name and as an integral part of Spires That In The Sunset Rise, always makes an intriguingly cathartic and genuinely skillful racket. Like a whirling dervish tramp emerging unscathed after an instinctive blindfold dash through a forest of rocks and bogs, she has incredibly never put a foot wrong. Baird's signpost is perhaps STITSR’s concept album Mirror Cave based on a blend of Italo Calvino’s (very) short story ‘Sword of the Sun’ and Shinkichi Takahashi’s After-Images: Zen Poems. The lyrics of "Hungry Shells" also bear a resemblance to elements in that Calvino story.
Araksinen has said "I think making art must be some form of madness." The album starts with "Big Stone Small Stone," a calm piece of spoken word floating amidst cascading piano notes and buzzes and bleeps which are frantic to the point of relaxation. "Syzygy" picks up the pace in a relentless flowing river of Baird’s singing, blip and boom percussive beats and synthesized flute. Should anyone be balking at the mention of flute, here is a—hopefully unnecessary—reminder that Florian Schneider’s flute powered some of Krafwerk’s finest recordings
Elsewhere the music resembles morse codesque throbs, occasional synthesized muted car horn blares, breath rhythms, a radio being tuned quickly across twelve stations, and metallic twanging the likes of which I have not heard since seeing the Gas Tank Orchestra perform live in New Orleans. "Grey Body" has sound fragments perhaps not unlike an Arabic market, then swells with what seemed like the dwarf from Twin Peaks talking backwards, but reveals as Airaksinen revisiting Baird’s "big stone small stone" recital from the first track. It ends in a storm of creaking, swirling, synth gusts snorting like the breath of a demon… before Airaksinen says the very Zen words "not very special."
The warbling, weaving "Roseclouds" is a blended voice duet with babbling synth-flute and chants such as "fragrance filled the earth" over popcorn beats. The peak track is "Variable Star," with a buzzing, quivering, intro and outro, bone-rattling percussion, and narcoleptic vocals. In a way this bleeds into the title track, which ends the record. Almost a mini concept album in itself, this longer piece plunges into darker fluid tones like a underwater organ played backwards as Baird narrates a poetic tale of transformation, with shells gobbling pearls, retreating undersea and suns melted together shining underwater; all reminding me of Hendrix fleeing a dying planet in a futuristic mini-sub during "1983 A Merman I Should Turn to Be."
Pekka Airaksinen passed away on May 6. The Wire magazine ran a great photograph of him which resembles the picture of Geronimo on Roy Harper’s Lifemask album. For this review I spent time, like a demented peasant gathering crops before the storm, with the Spires That In The Sunset Rise back catalog. Their music is a startling combination of technique and belief, dark and weird clock stopping sounds, strangely healing time-reversing incantations, cathartic frenzy, breathless waves of heady operatic gibberish and wildly bent, looped, layered, and reversed flute, and should not be missed. I may just develop an unhealthy obsession and review all their albums in order.
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His story is somewhat legendary in the noise/power electronics scene: recording as MB, Bianchi put out a slew of albums in the early 1980s that helped to define the genre during its nascent days. Then, in the middle of the decade, he left music for personal reasons (rumoredly he became a Jehovah’s Witness). He reappeared in the latter part of the 1990s, with work I had been told (either directly or via a place like alt.noise) resembled a more avant garde Yanni. Needless to say I avoided it. Once this album was available, something told me to check it out and, while not in the same league as his early work, it channels enough of it to still be an interesting listen.
Early MB albums such as Aktivitat and Symphony for a Genocide are ranked as high water marks in the early industrial, noise, and power electronics genres, and for good reason. While his early sound was intentionally mired in a lo-fi analog murkiness, it worked. While contemporaries such as SPK and Whitehouse were using their work to push the boundaries of volume and extremity, MB was far more restrained and dour, but in a way that worked. It was very depressive and dark, but never falling into clichéd territory.
The first two tracks on here really had my hopes lowered for this being an album worthy of being filed next to the two ArcheoMB box sets on my shelf. "Ortni" is reverb battered drone, with deep tremoloed scrapes, almost strings-like, met with some rudimentary layering and variation. "The Inflammatory Sesor" follows a similar pattern, switching the strings for church organ like textures that are a bit more compelling, but the texture is also just a bit too bland. While it wasn’t along the lines of Yanni, I was feeling this like a rejected Cold Meat Industries demo tape circa 1996.
Once "Oigada" hit its stride, a bit of the old Bianchi began to shine through. The overtly flanged rudimentary rhythms and complex layering, matched with sci-fi like beeps and tones in the background channeled that old school industrial style he was pioneering some 25-plus years ago. The best part is, it never sounds like an imitator, it just sounds like MB, even without the protection of analog fuzziness.
"Ogral" pushes deep mournful tones into slow reverb, which swells in volume to reach a stride that is purely harsh electronic noise, but done sparingly as to not become too contrived. "Evarg" sounds as if it’s based upon decaying tape recordings of symphonic music, all leaning into the higher frequency end of the spectrum. Like the track before, it isn’t shy about pushing into grinding harsh noise territory, but never excessively so.
The closing "The Plain Elanif" is a fitting coda for the album: music-tinged tones swirl up to the surface, but are kept in an industrial swamp. Perhaps this is where the “converted” MB shows up: while the music is superficially just as bleak and depressive as the best of his early work, there’s an underline sense of hope and positivity that shines through. Never annoying or new-agey, it just feels like a stream of light piercing through the otherwise hopeless track. It is a pleasant conclusion for a surprise of an album.
After the first two pieces on here, I thought my instinct was wrong in seeking this disc out. It wasn’t John Tesh goes isolationist, but it was just too overwrought. Once it hits its stride though, the album does demonstrate its pedigree and shows that, regardless of his personal life, MB still can compose an appropriately dour industrial symphony worthy of his past discography.
samples:
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This is one of those kind of albums that is impossible to pigeonhole in any sort of specific genre. There’s some drone elements, but those are mostly overshadowed by tribal drumming. There’s dubby production, but also layers of noise and mutated psychedelic rock. All the while there’s a little bit of metal here and there. Named for a giant squid, this Italian project certainly has its tentacles entangled amongst themselves to create an unclassifiable blur, but it’s a compelling racket.
"Untitled No. 1" opens the album with heavy cavernous guitar feedback and tribal drumming echoing from the deepest parts of the sea, locking into a repetition that never stagnates. The drums speed up into more intricate, chaotic patterns before the entire mix collapses under the weight of itself, devolving into a primordial muck of sound. "We Dream the Seashore" almost literally uses its title as a jumping off point, with pegged out field recordings creating a noise bed that crashing waves of noise and jackhammer rattling and junky percussion sales upon, the full proceedings sounding a junk metal noise band freaking out by the sea.
Sandwiched in the middle of the album are a series of tracks that show a hint of 1960s psychedelic rock shining through. "Cephalopedie" features swirling rock guitars with mutated gamelan percussion and far eastern strings, resembling that era’s penchant for mixing eastern and western sounds, but with an entire doomsday cult’s stash of LSD. The title track uses a similar sonic clash, but with swirling tablas and a noisy bed of electronics, like the MC5 playing through a busted PA in the middle of Riyadh, with occasional intrusion of Xenakis and his noisy compositions. For all its chaos, the end hides beautiful melodies amidst the darkness.
The massive "Another Kind of Blue" combines tribal tabla playing and junk percussion at the opening, treating all of it with dubbed out echoes that would make Lee Perry even madder than he already is before launching into full on noise territory via waves of feedback and guitar squalls. Once the noise retreats, what remains is anemic guitar and tortured psychedelic rock, later met by shortwave radio loops of lost vocal transmissions. The entire track then goes into sharp, banging metallic rock before falling apart at the end.
"Bbroke" continues the more obtuse side of Rex’s sound, with a muffled, aquatic guitar squeal that channels the best of black metal with massive sustain, but is actually one of the most sparse tracks here, allowing the ugly guitar to stand on its own. The closing "Untitled No. 2" takes clattering metal percussion but puts it alongside warm, fuzzy organ drone and other unidentifiable elements that are somewhat musical, creating an inviting closer to the album that is the perfect metaphor for returning to the surface after a deep, frightening dive.
The aquatic imagery in both the band and album names comes through in the sound, as it all has that dark, murky quality of a deep sea dive. The tracks are dark and obscured, with only the most minimal of light shining through to show unknown creatures and organisms. Architeuthis Rex has a very unique sound and concept that I definitely want to hear more of in the future.
samples:
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The Tapeworm
The Tapeworm’s aesthetic is a fundamentally shaky one to build a label upon and one that is engineered to be dogged by inconsistency. While other tape labels focus on releases from the more obscure fringes of noise/post-industrial culture, The Tapeworm’s decision to embrace more established artists creates a unique problem for them: someone like Stephen O’Malley is probably not going to release their best work in a limited edition of 100 or 250. Fortunately, some artists (Stefan Goldmann, for example) are more than happy to release their more startling and adventurous experiments in such a fashion, and the format is perfect for enigmatic collaborations as well. Consequently, the label’s oeuvre has been a strange and unpredictable one thus far and that is unlikely to change (and therein lies its charm). Also, it takes some guts (and insanity) to try to market spoken-word tapes of Derek Jarman and Jean Baudrilliard in 2010 (a gamble that actually worked, incidentally).
The most daring and unexpected of these four tapes is by German techno producer Stefan Goldman, whose Haven’t I Seen You Before is culled entirely from guitar improvisations. By his own admission, Goldmann is not a particularly skilled guitarist. However, he was inspired to attempt a guitar album long ago when he heard a story about a bass player from the Berlin Philharmonic that paid an engineer to edit hours of aimless improv into a coherent jazz album. Relying on his own studio wizardry, Stefan finally got an opportunity to attempt a similar feat, cutting and looping his own noodlings into a very meditative and likable suite of avant-garde guitar sketches.
Sweden’s Lief Elggren (Sons of God) attempts a similarly left-field endeavor with his All Animals Are Saints, but does not fare nearly as well. His tape consists of two pieces that combine spoken-word and music, both of which were taken from live performances. The first is a reading of a story about the souls of plants, occasionally punctuated by interludes of crackling noise. The flipside is a story about an organ that Swedenborg owned, followed by a very repetititive, wheezing organ performance. Unfortunately, Elggren’s stories are somewhat dull and weirdly paced (a situation that is not helped by his dry, thickly accented delivery), and the music is far too sketch-like and one-dimensional to justify the lengthy build-up and contextualization. The whole exercise seems very academic and sterile.
The Tongues of Mount Meru, a collaboration between Thorns’ Jon Wesseltoft and Jazzkammer’s Lasse Marhaug, is much more in line with what other cassette labels are releasing. Nevertheless, there is a certain degree of strangeness about The Delight of Assembly. The duo play very sine wave-centric drone music, but it is surprisingly shrill and dissonant. Also, it is quite static: just an endlessly quavering, clashing buzz with only very small-scale variations. I managed to make it through the entire tape once, but it was a hugely annoying and headache-inducing endeavor.
The last of these four tapes is also probably the best. Autodigest’s A Compressed History Of Every Bootleg Ever Recorded gives exactly what it promises, but does so in a mesmerizing, ghostly way. Tape hiss, crowd noise, screams, and distant badly recorded music are all smashed together into a roiling cascade of complex noise. The second side of the tape initially loses some of that momentum, but soon evolves into a similarly twisted (though less aggressive) soundquake. The anonymous members provide a very erudite theory behind their releases (this is actually their fourth installment) that references Baudrilliard’s theory of hyperconformism and explains that their music is created to provide “a space for the analysis and allegory of the catastrophic state of contemporary social and cultural structures.” Usually such a mission statement is a harbinger of very, very bad music to come, but not this time- Autodigest manage to expertly balance their high-concept philosophical roots with an unexpected amount of humor and raw, visceral power. That doesn’t happen very often, but it is a convergence that has found the perfect home.
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Newly reissued with different artwork, Porter Ricks' second album is a fitfully compelling and somewhat perplexing mixed bag that I somehow managed to never hear until now. My befuddlement is largely due to the fact that the first Porter Ricks album (Biokinetics) is an all-time dub techno classic, so I would have expected Andy Mellwig and Thomas Köner to expand further upon the formula that they had perfected to great acclaim. Instead, the duo took a more stylistically fluid approach, occasionally returning to Biokinetics-style dub, but also dabbling in dark ambient and some unexpectedly funky strains of house music. That said, it is probably wrong to view Biokinetics and this album as intentional statements or clearly delineated phases of a linear artistic evolution, as both releases are compilations of singles and EPs and Biokinetics got all the great Chain Reaction ones from 1996. This one collects all the Force Inc. EPs from the following year, so these pieces could be anything from Chain Reaction-era outtakes to stylistic experiments to a stab at greater accessibility (though that is hard to imagine, given the cold bleakness of Köner's solo work). In any case, there are still enough strong pieces to make this an enjoyable album, but anyone hoping for the focus and distinctive vision of Biokinetics will probably want to moderate their expectations a bit before diving into this one.
This uneven and eclectic collection of songs makes a lot more sense if one considers how they were originally released, as the album is essentially four stand-alone singles and their flipsides. And in classic dub fashion, the B-sides tend to be variations of the raw material from the A-side, so there are basically four separate thematically unified clusters of songs here. There is one notable exception, however, and it is the album's longest and strongest piece: "Scuba Lounge." I do not believe it ever surfaced on a single before appearing on this full length (the Trident EP featured a different "Scuba" piece), but it definitely sounds like it should have been on Biokinetics. It opens in deceptively formless fashion, elegantly blurring together burbling scuba sounds and ominous industrial ambiance, but soon coheres into a killer menacing groove of gurgling bass and seething, slow-motion crunch. The other pieces closest to the Biokinetics vein are "Redundance" series from the Vol 1 and Vol 2 EPs. My favorite of the lot is "Redundance 3," which combines the relentless forward motion of its shuffling beat with an impressively gelatinous and gnarled sounding synth motif. The remaining four "Redundance" pieces are a surprisingly varied lot, taking roughly the same themes in very different directions, as Köner and Mellwig alternately veer into hissing, coldly futuristic ambient ("Redundance (Version)"), a sensually kitschy vintage burlesque show groove ("Redundance 5"), and—weirdest of all—a Bo Diddly beat ("Redundance 6"). Similarly wrongfooting are the pieces from Explore/Exposed and Spoil/Spoiled. For example, "Explore" sounds like a New Jack Swing groove augmented with a very insistent wah-wah guitar theme, which the flip resembles guitars from The Church mashed together with a hypercaffeinated, percussion-heavy, and out-of-control strain of synth pop. That said, "Spoil" is inarguably the biggest shock of the album, as an unrelenting house thump barrels along with a very in-your-face funk bass line and some jangly guitars. It sounds far more like a purposely ham-fisted house remix of an A Certain Ratio single than anything I would expect from Porter Ricks. The smeared, hallucinatory, and submerged-sounding flipside ("Spoiled") is right up my alley though, approximating a building-shaking rave as heard from a neighboring alley. While I wish I loved more than a handful of songs here, I am delighted that this reissue called my attention to a few old classics that were new to me, as Porter Ricks has a tragically lean discography for an influential project that has now spanned a quarter century.
Samples can be found here.
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This latest collaboration between Nurse With Wound’s Colin Potter and guitarist/Twenty Herz label-head Paul Bradley is an experiment in returning to an earlier, less complicated way of making an album: only two guys in a studio with some instruments. Despite that, it is not a stunning or radical departure from either musician’s past solo work, though it bears a stronger resemblance to ambient’s early days than usual. It was an inspired move in theory, but the end result suggests that making music the complicated way might be a still better idea.
The premise of The Simple Plan is an appropriately simple one: record an album in real-time using real instruments with virtually no aid from computers or digital processing techniques. For this purpose, Bradley and Potter employed an array of analog synthesizers, guitars, and effects pedals. The challenge of this endeavor was further enhanced by the fact that Paul Bradley had never played a synthesizer “live” before. He seems to have managed just fine, however.
The album opens with the delicate, shimmering swells of “Embrace,” a piece very much in the vein of Eno’s pastoral early ambient works. It is “ambient” in the truest sense of the term, as it is very easy to forget that it is even playing due to its slow-moving subtlety and consonance. Nevertheless, I found it to be quite a beautiful piece once I gave it my full attention. While overtly it is simply a slowly drifting cloud of sound, there is quite a bit of action taking place in a small-scale way: the timbres and volumes of tones shift, disquieting passing tones wander in and out, and the notes smear and bleed together to yield slight dissonances and oscillations.
As it turns out, ”Embrace” is a bit of an aberration. It is by far the most placid and nuanced piece on the album, as the remaining four songs tweak its template with an increased focus on low-end and density. Also, while “Embrace” contentedly floats along for the entirety of its 18-minute duration, the remainder of the tracks merely use that as a starting point before snowballing into something more hefty. The differences between the songs are not huge, but they effectively serve to differentiate them. The title track, for example, leans much more heavily on a central droning tone and gradually escalates in power while maintaining a faint swaying pulse. Also, it ends with the unexpectedly melodic bloops and bleeps of a static-washed coda. The longest piece on the album, “Gloaming,” places even more emphasis on rhythm, coalescing into a heavy throb while Bradley’s guitar loops glisten above it. It is also one of the most intense pieces on the album, as the loops gradually mass to form a thickly layered and somewhat distorted middle section. The piece that follows it, “Alta Mesa,” achieves a similar display of power by gradually swelling to an engulfing roar.
The intended purpose of this project was to “create a simpler, more organic piece of work.” In those regards, it is a mixed success. While certainly restrained, the ebbing and flowing interplay between notes in “Embrace” sounds vibrant and alive. However, the actual sounds are still very artificial: the guitars rarely sound like guitars and very few sounds are less organic than analog synthesizers. Also, while the recording process itself was simple, the music is actually quite a bit busier and less spacious and intimate than much of Paul Bradley's solo work. When the process is taken out of the equation, what is left is merely a decent, albeit somewhat regressive, ambient album. Several other artists could have made an album like this: Bradley and Potter’s plan, while admirable, was either too simple or not simple enough to betray much personality or uniqueness.
(Note- the currently sold-out limited edition of this album came with a bonus disc (Accreation) of reworked versions of the songs made without any limitations at all. It is significantly better than The Simple Plan, which makes its unavailability perplexing.)
Samples:
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- Anthony D'Amico
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One of the many surprises of the last few years has been the current pipe organ renaissance unfolding in the experimental music world (your days are numbered, modular synths!). Thankfully, we still seem to be in the honeymoon phase of that phenomenon, as the vanguard of Kali Malone, Sarah Davachi, and Lawrence English are all fairly consistent in exclusively releasing strong and/or interesting albums. This latest release is English's second (after last year's Lassitude) to focus entirely upon pieces composed on an 19th century organ housed in Brisbane's The Old Museum. This is a very different album than its predecessor, however, as Lassitude was comprised of homages to Éliane Radigue and Phill Niblock. On Observation of Breath, English instead derives conceptual inspiration from Charlemagne Palestine's "maximal minimalism" as well as the mechanics of breathing (quite relevant when pipe organs are involved). There is one more favorable similarity to Lassitude, however, as this album also features one stone-cold masterpiece that spans an entire side of vinyl.
As English amusingly notes in his album description, Observation of Breath was composed and recording during a soft lockdown in which he "spent many days playing to an empty concert hall." He also states that he considers these four pieces a collaboration between himself and the pipe organ, which is not intended a mere nicety, as he viewed their interaction similarly to the mind/body dialogue of breathing (hence the album's title). In essence, English was consciously "breathing" for the pipe organ, as he strove to achieve a compelling balance of power (exhalations stacked in unison) and "elegant uncertainty" (the moments when breath becomes unsteady and fading). Knowing all of that failed to fully prepare me for the harrowing "The Torso" though, as English unleashes deep bass drones augmented with plenty of hiss, industrial ambiance, and nightmarish whine (I especially enjoyed the parts that sounded like a seasick air raid siren). The following "A Binding" is considerably less radical, lying somewhere between "textbook drone done well" and "multiple drones with differing oscillation patterns ingeniously intertwined." To my ears, it is the least strong piece on the album, but I still like it. And I love “And A Twist,” as it feels like a hallucinatory organ mass that keeps tying itself into murky knots of dissonance. Sadly, it clocks in under three minutes, but is easy to imagine an extended version rivaling Catherine Christer Hennix’s The Electric Harpsichord for the crown of "best album that sounds like a vampire on hallucinogens blasting out a sinister solo in his lonely mountaintop castle."
Fortunately, the closing title piece makes a great consolation prize for that missed opportunity. "Observation Of Breath" initially sounds like a viscous fog of dread oozing across a deep sustained drone, but English gradually enhances that with more harmonic color as the piece glacially unfolds. The truly inspired part comes when English begins to "explore the sonic qualities of different frequency spectra," however, as the piece blossoms into an all-enveloping and seismic drone juggernaut that feels like it is tuned to the resonant frequency of the earth (or at least of my apartment walls). As such, the primary appeal of this release for me is that it contains one of the greatest drone pieces ever recorded, but it is a damn strong album as a whole too. English is in peak form here.
Samples may be found here.
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In 1992, 8-bit samplers were cutting-edge gear. This reissue of Chaleur Humaine by French siblings Danielle and Didier Jean, shows Didier's use of a sampler to reshape and project his sister’s voice into a memorable, magical-sounding dream world with barely discernible hints of doom under the glossy enveloping surface. At times it is reminiscent of the tracks "Alsee," "Criminie," "Bruma," and " Wask," on Nuno Canavarro’s Plux Quba (1988). Very different albums in some senses, but in a wildly imperfect analogy, the recognizable voice parts on Plux are like Elizabeth Fraser hiccuping through tubes in an Yves Tanguy surrealist painting whereas Chaleur resembles Virginia Astley and Sheila Chandra harmonizing with helium-high hedgehogs in a symbolist landscape by Marc Chagall.
A poem recurs throughout Chaleur Humaine in a variety of languages, including English, Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, and Vietnamese: "It’s this force, almost animal, warm, like a kiss, fresh like the morning dew, that we call human warmth" but not even that can derail this sultry cinematic music. Wordless vocalizing is used as glitchy percussive punctuation and haunting backdrop. Spoken word combines with splashes of metallic synth, angelic and robotic gibbering, as Didier digitally accelerates, delays and reverses sound sources to create an ambient landscape across which the imagination may travel. I felt I was in a futuristic sound sauna one minute and the next was at the wheel of a car, filmed from above, speeding across deserts, gliding over bridges, and easing through streets ablaze with neon nightlife.
No parts of this album should be skipped, and I’m not picking highlights here so much as listing examples. At just over six minutes "Memoire Vive" is perhaps the cornerstone of the recording, the proof in the pudding, meringue light/spotted dick substantial. It is as sleek and sensual as Air and Brigitte Bardot collaborating for a Bond movie theme. Other songs are brilliantly brief (the icy eroticism of the title piece runs at just 1.40). I think of this record less in terms of rainforest and meditation and far more as a bright yet brooding sci-fi soundtrack. God knows it would have livened up the dull as fifty shades of dystopia Blade Runner 2049.
Didier uses spare flourishes of piano and brass to great effect, and the combination of strings with his treatment of Danielle's voice at the start of "Human" have an aching melancholic overdrive similar to more recent compositions by Max Richter. Soon enough, though, UMAN ditch that for a breezy, pseudo-swing, like elevator music for an elevator capable of rising out the top of a building into the clouds.
The melody of "Cordes Sensible" flickers like low setting sunlight in a car driver’s eyes, then the track glides into a propulsive rhythm and drops in a deeper bass sound. It’s almost in Moon Safari territory. "Maelstrom" has reverse breathing which I like to imagine sucks the lazy "New Age" music tag into a cup and throws it out of that speeding car. Since the duo are environmentally conscious let's also imagine it lands neatly in a recycle/reuse bin.
Surely no one will trot out a list of more recent artists and claim that Chaleur Humaine evolved music (that cannot even seriously be argued for Plux Quba), but it truly is a strange and lovely milestone on the analog-digital road. UMAN call themselves "harmony architects’ and while they have created a fine musical structure here, part of their original inspiration may have been to encourage planet-wide unity. This is not possible through overt messages, but keep in mind the subliminal effects of music. Parts of the album gave me a daydream of Kubrick’s evolved planet-sized baby at the end of 2001 and I reimagined the mega-infant sweetly warbling a dreadful warning. Yes, it was only Didier manipulating his sister's voice on a forgotten recording. Our planet has changed since 1992, and while human warmth is one thing, global warming is quite another. If Earth now resembles a vehicle pulling onto an irreversible road to hellish heat death, this beautifully innocent and irrelevant record can be a heavenly note in the glove-compartment of that prophesy. And if there are to be water wars, then (to misquote a hit man from the film In Bruges) "if UMAN have got the Vietnamese, I’m definitely fighting on their side."
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In my review of Cantus Figures Laurus last month, I half-jokingly noted that Sarah Davachi's creative arc seems unavoidably headed towards composing a full-on Mellotron-driven prog rock opus. While she has not quite reached that dubious culminating achievement yet, Antiphonals is arguably another significant step in that direction, as it is very Mellotron-centric and the vinyl release features a sticker comparing it to a prog album with everything removed except the keyboard parts. For the most part, however, the change in instrumentation did not inspire any particularly dramatic stylistic transformations, as Antiphonals mostly picks up right where Cantus, Descant left off, which is somewhere best described as "like a blurred, stretched, and deconstructed organ mass." In keeping with that theme, both an electric organ and a pipe organ are featured (along with plenty of other instruments), yet the resemblance to an organ mass is more spiritual than overt this time around. In more concrete terms, that means that Davachi's sound palette has broadened a bit from Cantus, but she is still very much focused on somberly meditative moods, glacial melodies, bleary drones, and subtle harmonic transformations.
As was previously the case with Cantus, Descant, Antiphonals' title plainly states the compositional theme of the album. The term is usually applied to liturgical or traditional choral music and roughly means that two choirs are singing different themes that interact with each other. While there are not any choirs here, the album’s overarching aesthetic seems to be sketchlike compositions in which Davachi brings together two simple motifs to rub up against one another in interesting ways. I say "sketchlike" because she does not seem particularly interested in crafting strong melodies or complete compositional arcs for most of these pieces, opting to instead zoom in closely on harmonies and textures that tend to come to an abrupt end when a piece has run its course. That said, the album does feature one (somewhat) fully formed and melodic centerpiece ("Gradual of Image") that combines minor key acoustic arpeggios, a quietly gorgeous organ melody, and fluttering, dreamy layers of Mellotron. That is Davachi's most "prog" moment and it executed beautifully. For me, however, the album’s zenith is the ghostly drone of "Magdalena," which sounds like a spectral brass ensemble conjuring slow motion waves of aching melancholy. It is a masterful slow burn, gradually revealing shifting patterns and warm harmonies. In fact, it may be one of the most perfect pieces that Davachi has composed to date, so the album's primary allure is "one killer drone piece and a very promising prog detour," but a couple of the remaining pieces are compelling as well. For example, "Border of Mind" initially sounds like a murky tape of a small string ensemble trying their damnedest to acoustically replicate Sunn O)))'s gnarled and blown-out drones, but it quickly dissolves into a hallucinatory coda of smeared flutes and uneasily dissonant harmonies. Elsewhere, "Rushes Recede" takes the opposite route, as bleary flute-like Mellotron drones gradually blossom into something resembling a sublime organ mass. For me, "Rushes Recede" feels like the third and final highlight of the album, yet fans who are more enamored with Davachi's recent indulgently minimal "ancient cathedral" direction will likely find Antiphonals to be a worthy successor to Cantus, Descant. While this is admittedly not my favorite side of her work, I can still very much appreciate the way she is slowing down and burrowing deeper, as though she is tenaciously peeling away layer after layer of craft to get to the pure essence of her vision.
Samples can be found here.
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- Albums and Singles
This is purportedly the final album in Soundway’s excellent Nigeria Special series (a fact that causes me no small amount of pain), but at least it is concluding in fine form. While some of the previous albums may have hit higher highs, the breezy, laid-back songs collected here might be the most consistently strong and listenable batch yet (though without entirely forgoing eccentricity). This will likely be the soundtrack for my summer.
It is difficult to believe that most of the tracks compiled here have been out of print for over three decades, as this album is packed with memorable melodies and lazily infectious grooves from the very beginning. The ridiculously titled “Psychedelic Baby” kicks the album off perfectly with a languorous rhythm, sultry horns, and a pleasingly bittersweet chorus, setting a standard of excellence that does not waver until the album ends. Notably, "Psychedelic Baby" features one of my favorite soul music tropes: a spoken word monologue/confessional addressing a possibly fictitious woman (a move that only becomes more charming with the addition of heavily-accented, difficult-to-understand English). Sadly, none of the other 18 artists included here takes some time to break it down for the ladies, but they manage to hold my attention pretty well anyway. On a related note, I am also a huge fan of absurdly grandiose and unwieldy band names, an appetite that this album satisfies admirably (“Commander In Chief Stephen Osita Osadebe & His Nigerian Sound Makers” being my favorite, despite stiff competition).
There is no noticeably weak or even average material here, but there are a number of stellar tracks strewn throughout the album that stand out from the rest. Two of the best are by so-called “progressive” bands: Tunji Oyelana & The Benders and The Nkengas. In this case, however, that term has no relation to its oft-unfortunate Western connotations- instead, both bands are merely more ingenious and resourceful than their peers. Oyelana’s “Iwo Ko La Dami” features jazzy sax leads and a minimalist guitar vamp that are similar to many of the other acts from that era, but bolsters them with incredibly tight, funky, and virtuousic drumming. As for The Nkengas, their “Anyi Bundi Igbo” boasts a brilliantly space-riddled and compartmentalized production that sounds like it was filtered through Martin Hannett.
Curator Miles Claret seems to have deliberately opted for more uniformly relaxed and spacious feel with this album, eschewing the more aggressively funk-influenced and heavy-handed strains of ‘70s Nigerian music for a strong emphasis on Highlife. Nevertheless, he still snuck in some moments of oddball experimentalism. For example, “Totobiroko” is based on a hypnotically repeating bass pattern and a weirdly erratic xylophone motif, but manages to maintain an extremely cool tribal groove in the process. The album’s closer (by Joy Nwoso and Dan Satch) is still stranger, as it uses an endlessly repeating two-note bass line and languid brass hook to hold together a lurching beat and bizarrely operatic female vocals. Both tracks are certainly disorienting and outré when heard alone, but they are sequenced in such a way as to fit quite seamlessly with the less boldly ambitious surrounding material. Also, a great beat goes a long way towards making indulgent weirdness palatable.
Nigeria Special Volume 2 is an excellent place to start for anyone curious about African music. While the ‘70s birthed a lot of brilliant and vital music in countries like Nigeria, Benin, Ghana, Senegal, and Lagos, that era was also characterized by rampant clutter, over-enthusiasm, structurelessness, and bloated song-lengths. Claret is much better at sifting through it all than most, resulting in an album packed with short, hook-filled songs and killer rhythms, but without sacrificing rawness or immediacy. This is, simply put, great music. I am sad to see this series end (especially so soon after the Panama! swansong), but I am sure Miles and Soundway have something equally compelling looming on the horizon.
(The triple LP version of this album features three extra songs not covered here)
Samples:
- The Nkengas - Anyi Bundi Igbo
- Fubura Sekibo - Psychedelic Baby
- Commander In Chief Stephen Osita Osadebe & His Nigerian Sound Makers - Onyebu Chi
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