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Music Reviews

A Guide to the Birdsong of Western Africa [coll] – [Shika Shika]

aarbor   2/8/2023   CD, International

A Guide to the Birdsong of Western Africa is an album of music inspired by endangered birdsong. Each featured artist was challenged to make an original track using and inspired by the song of an endangered bird from their country. The album aims to raise awareness about the plight of these birds while raising funds for organizations that are working to protect them.

Ten diverse artists are featured. Guitarist Vieux Farka Touré and fellow Malian producer Luka Productions pair with the call of the Black crowned crane, which is found across the Sahel and is threatened by trapping for the pet trade. Senegalese group Wau Wau Collectif and kora maestro Lamine Cissokho, take the sound of the Yellow-casqued hornbill and integrate it into a flute-filled groove. Sierra Leone’s Refugee Allstars layer subtle chirping over the off-beat strumming of regional baskeda folk music to honor the Sierra Leone prinia. Buruntuma picks up the tempo with his clean Afro-house featuring the song of the Timneh parrot and Sensei Lo blends local electronic rhythms and melodies with sounds of the incredibly rare Ibadan malimbe. (tracks 5,7,9,10 are my favorites) AArbor

Cuba Meets Nepal (Jazz Fusion) [coll] – [Beautamous Loaf International]

aarbor   2/8/2023   CD, International

Victor Vidal Paz (who is also known as Django Mango) conceived of and produced this recording which fuses the music of Cuba and Nepal. I have to wonder why these quite different styles have not been fused before. Perhaps because it is a needless stretch. Whether or not this fusion is successful is up to the listener. Some tracks are more successful than others. The vocals are ok but IMHO don’t add anything. The Nepalese instruments add lovely color and texture. The drumming is fabulous. The piano, trumpet and sax are beautifully played. Tracks 4 and 6 are the most successful, the two styles are nicely balanced. Tracks 2 3, 8, 10 and 11 are good too. AArbor

Lvcifyre “The Broken Seal” [Dark Descent Records]

atavist   2/7/2023   12-inch, A Library

Banshee guitar squeals, blastbeat attack, London’s Lvcifyre redirect the bedlam in a split moment from one structure to the next in rapid succession on their third full-length. While some death metal contemporaries are lashing their guitars into some truly disquieting tones, in contrast Lvcifyre has a decidedly 90s vibe to this reviewer, a harkening back to older traditions. The technical mastery is there, so where does the band’s individuality begin to reveal itself? One indicator is “Headless Rite”, with a rhythmic structure that leans almost progressive. Partake of various depravities in the lyric sheet, soaked in devillust. Pretty consistent, track to track. With the closer, “Black Mass”, they set the table with a slow procession before lifting their knives to carve into this death metal corpse.

John-Pauls, The – “Bon Mots” – [Aagoo Records]

humana   2/6/2023   A Library, CD

This Texas band is quite catchy with its guitars and alternating male and female vocals that deliver quite pleasing post-punk rock ballads. The music made me think briefly of Modern English and the Dwight Twilley band, but The John-Pauls have their own fresh sound. This is pretty great stuff.

X.Y.R. – “Aquarealm” – [Not Not Fun]

humana   2/6/2023   12-inch, A Library

This is absolute analog synth heaven from Russia with love. Combined with field sounds, you are transported to the pulsing depth of the ocean. The vinyl is sea-green, and there’s not a track on here that isn’t mesmerizing in its fluid ambience–it’s almost like being transport to the womb, but with so much more room to float, swirl, and dream. I dare you to listen to this and not visualize the enchanting exhibits at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

Procer Veneficus “The Cold Gloaming” [Students of Decay]

atavist   2/6/2023   A Library, CD

Noble sorcery in the form of hyper-processed guitar drones, processed to the extent that nearly all traces of recognizable guitar sounds recede into the shadows. Reverb blankets the windward side of the Santa Cruz Mountains and spills over to the Bayside like a rolling host of wraiths. There is ritual intent here. The midnight hour set the scene for the original audio capture. Thus the sounds for summoning ghosts are properly prepared. Turn this up and feel their cold breath on your neck.

Thrift Bakery – “Hard and Sweet” – [Beautamous Loaf International]

karma   2/5/2023   A Library, CD

Fourth release by Thrift Bakery, founded in the 80s and regrouped in 2011. TB describes themselves as indie pop (with folk, rap, and shoegaze influence) and experimental rock vocals. Quarantine Pandemic Blues and Sending All My Love to You talk about the unique horrors of 2020. These songs, like the rest of the album, are upbeat and thought-provoking. It’s hard to think of a favorite track, but I would probably say the indie rock-based Sending All My Love to You (track 6), rap about a modern day Count of Monte Cristo (5), and indie-roots Arthur McBride and the Sergeant (track 11).

Backstabbers SJ, the – “Backstabbers SJ, the” – [Beautamous Loaf International]

karma   2/3/2023   12-inch, A Library

Punk rock from longtime Bay Area community members (drummer Vince De Leon is a friend of the station and runs an excellent barber shop in San Jose). This album gives me Dead Kennedys and MDC vibes. It takes you back to a Bay Area when there weren’t grass-fed kombucha bars on every corner and housing was actually affordable. As the band name would suggest, a lot of the songs are about betrayal, so I’d sleep with one eye open if I were you. That is, if you can sleep at all after listening to this high energy album.

Crisis Man – “Asleep In America” – [Digital Regress]

whngr   2/2/2023   12-inch, A Library

High Energy Rock n’ Roll

Accelerated and emotive, these are sounds of progress with sweat, tears, and blood soaked strings that reverberate through our flesh suits. Rattling free the cobwebs and dust of acquiescence with considerable variety in structure and delivery; shaking the corpus into action, propellant and visceral with delicious synthy interludes. I am reminded of the sounds coming from N.Y. through Toxic State Records, beautiful in its rebellion and aggressively danceable. 

This five-piece is fronted by author, Ross Farrar (Ceremony) from San Francisco and graduate of U.C. Berkeley, “Asleep In America” feels deeply examined with an air of intellect but the delivery is from the heart or maybe the loins. Vibrant and evocative. Ben Wright (Acrylics), Jess Sylvester, Nick Vicario (Autistic Youth) from Portland, OR, and Shawn Mehrens (Abi Yoyos).

Santa Rosa – 2022

Microwaves – “Discomfiture Atlas” – [Three.One.G]

whngr   2/2/2023   12-inch, A Library

Perversely Frenetic Angles

Aggressively fractured art-rock with metallic elements and irregular time signatures applied with strange vehemence. Full sounding and note-intensive, the tone is a kind of disturbed resignation to a bizarre landscape that lacks optimism but perhaps not whimsy. A kind of mid-western Jazz is reprezzented on more strings than should be on an electric guitars with played with technical aplomb and electronic abstract elements. A clever and confrontational outing that might remind one of the illustrious MX-80 Sound or Voivod with spoken/shouted vocals and fever dream lyrics. Noisy and splintered, this is sonic high-math delivered with a deranged pessimism, and perhaps a resignation to eventual extraterrestrial incursion and then… dominance.

Microwaves are Dave Kuzy and John Roman (Brown Angel) accompanied by a retinue of complicit musicians including, Eric Paul (Arab on Radar, Doomsday Student, Psychic Graveyard), Sarah Quintero (Spotlights), Rebecca Burchette (Exosus), and Todd Rittman (Dead Rider).

Philadelphia, PA – 2022

Hiram – “Immersion” – [Home & Garden Music]

whngr   2/2/2023   A Library, CD

Quiet Natural Meditation

Minimalism stretched into almost 39 minutes of contemplative inner discovery with accompaniment by crickets, birds, empty space, pensive flute, possibly some sort of synthesizer, and your own inner dialog. Put this on before your Reiki treatment, ignite the white sage, align your crystals, your chakras, and your misguided intentions while you relax into the false security of your laying on of hands ceremony and pretend that you will be healed. Put all of your trust into faith healing and miraculous power of belief as you tell yourself that your suffering has purpose and that all will be well while you enjoy the sounds of insects desperate to mate before their short life is extinguished possibly by the birds that contribute to the duet. Remind yourself that this too shall pass… though in this albums case it will take a while. One long painless track, unless you are a cricket or a punk rocker and then strap in… it’s going to be brutal.

Hiram is one Mather Himes, interdisciplinary artist and musician from Minnesota who has committed 20 years to marrying “…traditional and natural elements combined with new techniques and technology, forming a bridge between past and present, and connecting self to space.”  (from mathewhiram.com)

Minneapolis – 2022

Hermanos Gutierrez – “El Bueno Y El Malo” – [Easy Eye Sound]

Albion Moonlight   1/29/2023   A Library, CD

Guitar duo Hermanos Gutierrez, brothers Estevan and Alejandro are Ecuadoran-born musicians who reside in Zurich, Switzerland. These 10 instrumental tracks are rooted in Western (‘the old west’) and Latin American music traditions. In an NPR interview, they stated that they are heavily influenced by movie film scores, hence the release’s title. What results are beautifully haunting compositions featuring electric guitars and sparse percussion, with lots of reverb and sustain; surf music of the Pampas perhaps?

This release was recorded in Nashville and produced by Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys. Highly recommended. Take a journey with the brothers to unimagined tonal vistas both familiar, strange, and melancholy.

Diamond Ortiz – “Bulletproof” – [Needle to the Groove]

karma   1/27/2023   12-inch, Soul

Diamond Ortiz was raised in Oakland, and he and his family played with funk musicians from Graham Central Station at an early age. He is now a modern/street funk musician in LA, and has also done session work for many hip-hop/rap artists (such as Snoop Dogg and Nipsey Hussle). This album pays homage to classic funk and hip-hop, and sometimes mixes them (the funk cover of California Love can duke it out with the orchestral version of the song from Sly5thAve). Ortiz’s talkbox skills and infectious optimism are a welcome dose of serotonin for the dark, cold nights of Soul Patrol. Or anytime!

Acid Twilight – “Mustang Zodiac” – [Not Not Fun]

karma   1/26/2023   A Library, CD

Second release by Buenos Aires-based modal psychedelia entity. Meandering instrumental tracks which feature a combination of electronic synth and a variety of acoustic instruments. The marimba on track one in particular has an earthy feel. Listening to Mustang Zodiac is reminiscent of a days-long train journey through slowly yet dramatically changing landscape. The album takes a while to build steam, and the message it sends is most visible after repeated listening.

“I want this music to invite the listener to contemplate the curves, cliffs, peaceful valleys, and quiet lagoons, the nights through the desert in the light of the full moon, the early mornings through immense sand dunes of imaginary sea coasts. The fire, the flow of water in the river. It’s a séance and a ceremony. Mustang Zodiac is a journey to rediscover our external world and our inner nature, a dialogue between being and environment. It is a commitment to the technological and the telluric, a hybrid of the Fourth World and electronic primitivism.”

-Acid Twilight

Deadform – “Deadform” – [Brainsand]

whngr   1/26/2023   A Library, Cassette

Created with GIMP

Oakland It Hurts

Feels sick and hopeless with despair. Five sonnets scrawled in the illegible script of the forsaken psychiatrist who has given up on the oath of Hippocrates, wrote on the gutter stained prescription pad of a life filled with abuse, confusion, and loss. Moderately fierce, feverishly despondent, three-piece sludge merchants/doom-saints crust out with chugging and a few perverted nods to Iommi. Unsettling samples/ambience, furious kit abuse, and a bit of slightly cringe worthy guitar leads that are rough and pinchy but paradoxically enjoyable… with riffs and guttural bellows that stretch bestial tendrils into the primordial lizard brain. The endless search for heaviness continues by one of the absolute paragons of the dark crafts and cultivator of an unmistakably regional sound that effectively channels profound mental illness into a life devoted to suffering.  An arguably noble, if hellish, cause that has grabbed many of us by our foundations, executed by one…

Dino Sommese (Dystopia, Asunder, Noothgrush) drummer and vocalist of profound influence with bassist Brian Clouse (Stormcrow, Fema Coffin), and Judd Hawk (Laudanum) on guitar. 

When AIDS slid this into my box and I discovered Dino was up to something new I went straight to the internet to see if I could cop a feel off b-camp and was immediately enthused but when I went to dub the cassette it sounded pretty fucking murky. Sometimes that can be good… but I decided that I would purchase the FLACs for a bit of unit measurin’. Whose do you prefer #6’s dirty as fuck analog contribution or my super clean, soulless offering built with ones and zeros. They are both on the cd. Mark your preferrence, ya slag, and I’ll tally all two of your meek little votes, and award the winner with absolutely nothing… at the end of never.

Oakland CA – 2022

Mo*Te – “Regulate Body Temperature” – [Rural Isolation Project]

whngr   1/26/2023   A Library, CD

Strange washes of mid-weight noise with distorted child-like melodies.

A child is playing alone quietly in the dayroom as the sun from the window stretches in oblique angles over the wall and floor, suddenly the air expands, making the windows flex gently as the crayon drawings taped to the colorful, muralled walls flutter and then fall to the carpet ornamented by friendly fish… our little one has discovered the gift of telekinesis and the blocks they were playing with begin to spiral into the air in a helical anomaly. Life will never be the same.

MO*TE is one  Fumiyuki Nagura of Saitama. Solo noise artist with at least 41 releases stretching back to 1995 and who was inactive from 2000 to 2009.
Japan – 2022

Schurer* ^ Steinbruchel* – “Falte” – [Non Visual Objects]

whngr   1/26/2023   A Library, CD

European High Art

Mostly somber abstractions constructed using the exquisite corpse method. I do something without you, you do something without me, and when we connect them it must be divine providence. Bells, chimes, drones, and hums, digital burbs, purrs, and equilibrium disrupting chords on these minimalist compositions intended tor an installation in 2006 at the Kunsthaus Zurich with a four channel visual accompaniment by Yves Netzhammer that we all most likely missed. These tracks might pair well with artisanal French pressed coffee and the rain on a quiet afternoon, inside with a cat and some light reading or possibly a dream of being pressed lightly inside a quiet French cat after noon in the rain.

Schurer* is one Brend Schurer, electro-acoustic, computer music composer, conceptual sound, performance, and installation artist (oh brother… you get an eye roll for that cv off from soundcloud) and Steinbrüchel* is German musician and graphic designer Ralph Steinbrüchel, both of whom reside in:

Zurich – 2007

Cetilia, Mark – “The New Way” – [More Records]

whngr   1/26/2023   12-inch, A Library

Not “modern jazz” you blind old fuck! MODEM JAZZ. If you’re volunteering here there is a 89.7% chance that you are closer to your grave than you are from your mother’s “Master studio” and if you’re from around here you are well beyond remembering the modem… you probably helped design them! Anyway this record yeah, sounds like modems drunk on jug wine and smoking filterless cigarettes with a fair amount of drone… and probably a few nasty surface nicks… that quizzically sound a little like other parts of the album that potentially are not a damaged record but at this point, here in 2023, in our modern audiosphere,  who can truly know the difference between intent and destiny? What is the difference between a quiet percussive passage and a damaged LP? What is intent? What is your intent… right now? Does it involve free will? Is the man in control of his destiny, or is the computer manipulating the man. Have computers finally freed us from free will? All important questions to ask… one’s that I have no answer to, but know this, you are free to play this potentially damaged double LP on the radio to a handful of other people whose lives are likely on the short end of their life stick. 

“The New Way” could easily be accused of having beats, but could also just as easily be considered interpretive beats or maybe “beat adjacent”? Beepy beats? I dunno, there is a lot of quiet and minimalism too. Maybe it’s a metaphor for something…  maybe the space between the beeps are the beats. 

“What is beats”?

From his very pretty website:

“…. Mark Cetilia is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice exists at the nexus of sound and image, the analog and the digital”… including …”generative systems in art, design, and sonic practice…” and, “…carefully controlled chaos.” 

So this is art I guess.

Rhode Island – 2022

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