My gosh, I am SO SORRY for the delays in getting this list sorted out.

What can I say? Work has been ridiculous. Life has been only slightly less ridiculous. Who knew that you could be so busy without leaving home.

I’ve considered abandoning this list, or just posting the rest of it as a straight up 30 to 1 without written content, in order to allow me to move on to some more relevant and rewarding content-creation. But no. So much good music came my way in 2020, it would be a travesty of the blog’s loose principles not to follow through and give it all a good shout - so on we plough.

If you missed part # 1, please don’t forget to catch up with it here. (And again - please don’t take the numbers to heart; they make these things easier to manage, but are basically pretty arbitrary. If it’s on this list, I really liked it - end of.) 

 

From September:

“The three songs herein find [Paul] Allen’s strained, rather desperate voice holding forth against the blights of age, impoverished touring and, on ‘Six Six Sigma’, “a truly awful corporate training company”, apparently. Despite the somewhat, uh, mature nature of this subject matter though, the churning, discontented mid-fi murk of these recordings could have seeped up from a darkened Bristolian basement at any point over the past thirty summers, and is all the better for it, proffering an anxious and assaultive brand of acid-damaged space-punk grue which continues to feel exhilaratingly beyond the pale of mainstream acceptability, irrespective of the calendar year.

Allen’s defiantly Out There guitar-work is of course a consistent highlight, abetting technically accomplished Groundhogs-esque shred with some truly unhinged pedal-board demolition work, spurting malfunctioning dot matrix laser goo all over ‘Six Six Sigma’, and doing a pretty good impression of a garden gate being abused by a variety of power tools on… well, all three tracks really, now that I come to think of it.” 

 

 

Full appreciation of this double LP set from Manchester-based trumpet player Halsall and his backing band represents a bit of a challenge for me vis-à-vis my on-going struggle to widen the parameters of my listening. By which I mean, whenever I sling one of its sides on the turntable, some part of my brain immediately revolts, informing me that this basically sounds like an MOR rehash of the kind of stuff Don Cherry and Alice Coltrane were doing back in the ‘70s, with all the edges painstakingly filed off, leaving behind a brand of spiritual jazz suspiciously devoid of fire, challenge or experimentation.

The remainder of my brain however is forced to cop that the results sound ever so nice regardless, encouraging me to sink into the groove of Gavin Barras and Alan Taylor’s tidal rhythms, to appreciate the plain beauty of Maddie Herbert’s quivering, bead curtain harp strums, and to engage with the restrained, Miles-esque monologues of Halsall’s horn work.

Do what extent does music need an ‘edge’, I’m forced to wonder. Where does this relentless demand for sonic aggression and discomfort come from, and how has it become so completely embedded in my psyche? Ultimately I suppose, different kinds of music are needed for different times, to fulfill different purposes. When my energy levels are higher, when I’m out and about, pursuing my own real world objectives, much of ‘Salute To The Sun’, with it’s bamboo partition yoga studio vibes and ‘Mindfulness Meditations’ (actual song title - side # 3) sounds like absolute anathema.

Fact is though, I do not have the kind of energy (never mind aggression) that I used to. Give me a year of sitting at home, conducting business from a desk four feet from my bed, quiet streets, empty skies, and the multi-faceted stresses and uncertainties of global pandemic and economic collapse, and the winsome, overpoweringly pleasant rise and fall of Halsall’s ensemble starts to sound very comforting indeed, thank you kindly (and I do thank them kindly). 

 

 

Comprising a single, forty minute improvisation, ‘Unconscious Death Wishes’ finds this Portuguese duo building from a slow start - seagull cries and sinister, sustained organ chords creating a pensive, vangelis-like atmos - before voudon junk-can percussion, ecstatic, canine cries, questing clusters of Jajouka-like horn riffage and a forboding, perpetually rising string drone usher in an engrossing, hypnotic journey to the heart of some post-apocalyptic wasteland in which the animal skin and war-paint clad ‘Mad Max’ bikers have long since expired and turned to dust. More fun than it sounds. 

 

From June 2020: 

“As much as I’ve been enjoying Sarah Davachi’s work recently, her pursuit of monotonal melancholia can sometimes tend to get a bit, well, monotonous after a while – which makes this collaboration from French ambient artist Ariel Kalma feel like just the ticket. Herein, Kalma adds some welcome bursts of melodic and textural colour to Davachi’s pure-tone excursions, complimenting her quietly monolithic, largely synth-based work with the sound of tanpura, harmonium, slightly different synths and Vangelis-esque echo sax.

The simple fact that there are two people working together here helps cut against the barren loneliness that has sometimes made Davachi’s solo releases feel slightly unapproachable, making ‘Intemporel’ stand out as one of her sunnier, more optimistic recordings, with the sublime ‘Adieu de Vie’ in particular sinking into a warm steam bath of exactly the kind of ingratiating, escapist psychedelia I’m hard-wired to enjoy, electronics and delays burbling away like a morning chorus of robot birdies above a lightly LSD-brushed alien onsen resort.” 

 

 

Emma-Jean Thackray’s records to date have been consistently fun and forward-thinking, but this EP, released last March, is one of my favourites.

The opening ‘Rain Dance / Wisdom’ in particular powered me through much of 2020’s voluntarily locked down spring/summer, a sublime full band recording with gentle, sundazed Rhodes organ and echoed-out trumpet weaving around some of Thackray’s characteristically thunderous, distorted Sousaphone bass tones (played on this occasion by ben Kelly) and a clipped, head-noddin’, hi-hat heavy drum beat, courtesy of Dougal Taylor. Fantastic, effects-heavy production here, making a pretty much definitive exemplar of London’s all-directions-at-once, psych-tinged contemporary jazz sound. Splendid stuff. 

 

The back story behind the LP is pretty convoluted (see extended description on bandcamp page for more), but it basically boils down to Drew Gardner and Jesse Sheppard - who comprise instrumental guitar duo Elkhorn - becoming trapped in a New York apartment with their similarly inclined associate Turner Williams a couple of years back, as an unforeseen blizzard raged outside.

And, under such circumstances, what’s a bunch of pickers gonna do, beside pick? Record, that’s what. Though rooted in the post-Fahey ‘American Primitive’ tradition (never quite felt comfortable with that term, but there you go), the players happily see fit to expand considerably beyond that acoustic / folk-based MO, engaging - so one supposes - with the icy conditions out on the street to tease out an album’s worth of cold and lonely string-based meditations from a palette which includes 12 string acoustic, fuzz-toned electric and - courtesy of Mr Williams - electric bouzouki and shahi baaja.

Side # 1 finds Gardner initially dropping blissful, Garcia-type modal leads over Sheppard’s baleful, low key acoustic thrum, as Williams adds a burble of heavily effected weirdness to the mix, making for an agreeably psychedelic nest of interlocking string textures. It’s on side # 2 however that things really get going, as the tambora-like drone of the shahi baaja crashes head-first into some sheets of fuzz from Gardner, his pedal hitting that rather charming straight-into-practice-amp-at-living-room-volume sound which I suspect recording engineers would usually have moved heaven & earth to avoid under more conventional circumstances.

Though Sheppard’s 12-string maintains a lonely, falling snowflake vigil throughout, ‘The Storm Sessions’ nonetheless comprises a happy motherlode of loved up, multi-layered string jamming which, for me at least, hits a similar sweet spot to that mined so beautifully by Desmadrados Soldados de Ventura a few years back - which you can take as a fairly gargantuan recommendation, should you have a mind to. 

  

 

From way back in Feb 2020:

“So, Louise and Morgan range out beyond (what I assume to be) the more conventional, song-based folk of their own groups, embracing a woozier, more free-form approach, whilst [Kryssi] Battalene for her part nixes the PSF-styled noise-rock maximalism of her playing in the aforementioned bands, instead threading her way into the gentler, more delicate fabric favoured by her collaborators. Applying a variety of more intuitive and low-key guitar/effects treatments to the tracks here, she helps bring the underlying psychedelia of the enterprise simmering nicely to the surface, finally breaking out with some tormented, dissonant racket towards the end of the track-list, on what is probably my favourite track here, the mantra-like forest mulch trip-out of ‘Emerald Ash’.

Prior to that however, beautiful heavy tremolo strumming adds shimmering depths to the otherwise fairly trad country-folk of ‘Gathering’, whilst strange, throbbing delay pedal conjurations provide an ominous bed for ‘Squash Vine’s similarly healthy, no nonsense indie-folk take on free-from jamming, allowing it to grow into something rather spectacular across its six minute duration - a winning combo of elements repeated on the record’s slightly more tangible centre-piece, ‘Cherry Tree Carol’, whose mix of earnest, trad-arr vocal recital and more rock inclined backing might perhaps strike a distant chord with fans of Shirley Collins & The Albion Country Band’s revered ‘No Roses’.” 

 

 

Now here’s a funny thing. Way back at the start of last year, a representative of Slum of Legs very kindly dropped me a line to let me know they - finally, after about five years of silence (but no worries, band people all know how that goes) - had an album on the way. I was told that they were planning a tour for November, and I thought, boy, that’s really planning ahead, but it will be great to see them play again, despite the wait. LITTLE DID WE KNOW, etc etc.

Anyway - we still have the record. And the record still sounds great, so let’s count our blessings.

From March 2020:

“..for the moment, let’s just say that the six members of Slum of Legs still sound like an unruly gaggle of entirely disparate, equally strong voices, all pulling in different directions whilst still somehow coalescing into some unholy, unified whole that’s almost, well, pop, Jim, but not as we know it. I hate reviews that end with “For Fans of…” lists with a passion, but if you can find me another band somewhere in the world whose hypothetical list might include The Mekons, Broadcast, The Raincoats, Marianne Faithful, Rudimentary Peni and Fad Gadget, I’d probably really like to hear them. Thanks in advance.” 

 

 

Recorded live-in-studio in 2018, the simple arithmetic underpinning this collaboration between San Francisco-based guitar/drums duo Numinous Eye and Tokyo-based guitar/guitar duo Suishou No Fune, thus brings us a free-from splurge of moody, maxed out guitar/guitar/guitar/drums rumination - and you’d better believe those are the kind of odds we’re always happy to stake an LP’s worth of dough against round these parts.

As per the Elkhorn recorded I waxed lyrical on above, storm and blizzard are very much the kind of sonic metaphors being conjured here, but this time around it’s thunder instead of snow, black waves crashing ‘gainst a blighted, unwelcoming shore, as the guitar trio’s amps gradually fire up, reverb knobs pointed safely t’ward the east as judicious boot-clicks on a few suitably scary looking silver boxes bring us a damage-dealing buzzsaw growl worthy of the band’s name.

Though the players seem to be sounding each other out with some sustained, high pitched solo work on the record’s more low key opening cut, any sense of ego or individual dynamism soon disappears here, subsumed within a collective whole of eerie, shuddering yet oddly triumphant noise, rather akin to a totally unglued Cheater Slicks ploughing off on an SF ballroom tip, or Fushitsusha taking it easy with a mug of cocoa at their rural weekend hideaway, peeking at the inclement conditions outside and thanking the powers that (airb&)be for their well-worn sofa and functioning fireplace. About as cozy as soul-wrenching electrified skree gets, in other words. 

 

 

From Nov 2020:

“An exuberant and outspoken stage performer to put it mildly, Dawid here leads her band through an increasingly intense series of rhythmic vocal mantras and cathartic call and response routines, sometimes veering closer to some kind of unhinged improvised theatre, revival church testimonial or group therapy session than to many listeners’ preconceptions of a quote-unquote ‘jazz’ set.

To some extent recalling the more militant and unglued corners of Art Ensemble of Chicago’s discography, one imagines this must have put the wind up some segments of the refined European festival crowd presumably assembled for this show, but, any walk-outs or deserters from the concert space may well have been forced to ask themselves - if you don't want to listen to an African-American woman speaking her mind, what the hell are you doing at a jazz festival?

Contemplation of that question, to my mind, provides an immediate validation of Dawid’s confrontational - genuinely rather “‘punk’” in fact - performance style, and needless to say, those jazzbos who did stay on for the duration will have found themselves richly rewarded, in pure muso terms just as much as on the more visceral/emotional/existential side of things.

As unconventional as their approach may have been here, Dawid and her band are certainly no slouches on the technical front. The extended interplay between Dawid’s clarinet and Xristian Espinoza’s sax on the loping grooves of ‘London’, and her keyboard improvisations on ‘Black Family’, are absolutely inspired, whilst the smouldering, nocturnal heft of the piano/horn intro to ‘We are Starzz’ is just plain sublime. Enhanced by wild, rhythmic glossolalia and cosmic synth swirls, ‘We Hereby Declare The African Look’ and ‘Melo Deez from Heab’N’ meanwhile present bizarre, sci-fi groove-outs worthy of either Funkadelic’s most errant, acid soaked excursions or Sun Ra’s most wonkily accessible ‘80s pop crossover work (depending on which way you look at it), whilst the rolling rhythmic backbone provided by South African drummer (and bandleader) Asher Gamedze and lodestone bassist Dr Adam Zanolini is exceptional throughout.” 

----

To be continued ASAP….

Labels: Angel Bat Dawid, Anthroprophh, best of 2020, Elkhorn, Emma-Jean Thackray, Matthew Halsall, Paisiel, Sarah Davachi, Sarah Louise Sally Anne Morgan & Kryssi B, Slum of Legs, The Noise Birds

As you might well be aware, Bandcamp are doing another revenue-free Friday this week, so that seems as good a reason as any to round up another pile of great new(ish) sounds which have helped see me through the past month or so of brow-mopping, early summer heatwave home-working.

(Or alternatively, if you don’t mind waiting a bit and fancy helping out some of our fellow terrorist sympathisers, the site are donating their revenue from all sales on 19th June to the NAACP Legal Defence Fund.)

(And no, Bandcamp aren’t paying me (unfortunately), and I have no agenda to promote their site in-and-of-itself, but…. it’s currently the best place to listen to and obtain contemporary music in this cold, sad world, so makes sense to maximise the percentage of our pennies that go in good directions, no?)

Anyway, let’s get on with it.

Naujawanan Baidar.



Recorded via four track to “assorted dead stock cassette tapes” between 2016 and 2018, the material recently compiled on this double LP finds Tucson-based musician N.R. Safi combining traditional Afghan instrumentation with a bewildering array of loops, radio textures, distortion, digital effects, drums, Western/South Asian instruments and more besides, creating a dense and beguiling set of heavy psyche-blasted quasi-enthno semi-forgeries which basically sound like the wildest dream of some Sublime Frequencies junkie, obsessively scanning the scanning the short wave dials in search of mind-blowing pan-global audio to rip and reconstitute for hungry ears.

Beautiful collage artwork, vintage field recordings and track titles like ‘Blood Can’t Clean Blood’ speak of a legit and powerful engagement with the issues of cultural displacement and transformation which inevitably surround this music, which pulses and shrieks across imagined and real airwaves, like an affirmative signal of resistance for Middle Eastern and North American deserts alike. Righteous stuff indeed.


Emma-Jean Thackray.
Angel Bat Dawid.




In what now sounds like an evening of nigh-on unimaginable utopian bliss, one Thursday night late last year found my wife and I heading to Peckham, following up a cracking Italian meal by heading round the corner to drop in on what turned out to be the final hour of an evening of improvised music organised by the International Anthem label.

At the time, I was unable to establish the identity of the musicians we saw performing (no names were listed on the event’s advertising), but the group on stage as we entered was led by a woman conjuring careful, atmospheric textures from trumpet, keyboard, electronics and vocals, whilst another woman, initially seated, laid down wildly ecstatic, free-wheeling exclamations on clarinet, before rising to traverse the room in a state of reverie, powering the music forward in breathlessly thrilling fashion.

Backed up by an obligatory super-tight, laidback rhythm section (still unidentified at the time of writing), this performance was little short of mind-blowing - the kind of casually perfect summation of a particular strain of exultantly positive, welcoming culture which makes you feel humbled to have stumbled into its presence. Having spent almost every subsequent evening stuck in the goddamn flat at this point, I think back upon it often.

And now, many months of bandcamp-surfing later, I’m pretty sure I’ve established that we were listening that night to the sounds of Emma-Jean Thackray, whose new EP ‘Rain Dance’ came out in March, and to Angel Bat Dawid, who has an absolutely beautiful 7” out on the aforementioned International Anthem (see embedded links above).

Both of these short releases stand out as essential listening for anyone who’s been digging into this new stream of open-ended, jazz-affiliated greatness half as heavily as I have been in recent months, and, though the concept of Socially Distanced live music – or indeed any group playing whatsoever – still doggedly fails of compute in any way that makes sense to me, I continue to hope that somehow, someday I’ll be able to reconnect with these musicians and/or their contemporaries in a context that in some way rekindles the spirit of that glorious, random hour in Peckham, at some point before all is changed and gone.


Grey Hairs.



And speaking of memories of wild nights out meanwhile…. whilst I like Grey Hairs studio output just a little bit, the truth is that they’ve always really excelled as a live band. It therefore pretty much stands to reason that their new live LP – recorded last Halloween at exemplary Notts DIY venue J.T. Soar, and mixed and engineered brilliantly by in-house recording guy Phil Booth - is by default their best release to date.

If you like your rock served up with some crisp, hard-hitting Albini-isms, the quality of the sound here will likely floor you, it’s just a superb recording, and the band are on top form, the energy and good vibes palpable. I realise I’ve held forth repeatedly here in the past about the virtues of Grey Hairs’ approach to their craft, so what more is there to say? This is an excellent live album by an excellent live rock band, and how many more of those do you anticipate we’ll see coming down the pike over the next year or so?

Stand in the middle of your living room with a can of cheaper lager than you’d usually tolerate, turn off the lights, hang all your coats and stuff on a bunch of mannequins and chairs blocking your view of the hi-fi, and drink it all in.


Munehiro Narita.



Well, here’s at least one more skull-fuckingly magnificent live rock album to keep us going, anyway. Recorded by the god-like Ethan Miller (I mean, OF COURSE IT WAS) when former High Rise guitarist Munehiro Narita played a few dates in California in 2017, backed up by the rhythm section with whom he would subsequently form Psychedelic Speed Freaks, recording one of my favourite debut albums of recent years, this is as much of a roughshod, extremist rock apocalypse as fans of this incredible musician might rightfully expect.

Grinding through raw facsimiles of some old High Rise hits (‘Sadame’, ‘Outside Gentiles’, ‘Pop Sicle’) alongside a few marginally more restrained numbers from his subsequent band Green Flames [with whose work I confess I’m unfamiliar – need to get on that], this recording squashes most of the bassist and drummer’s spirited contributions into a blaring tar-pit thud, whilst Munehiro’s reedy vocals are pretty much an after-thought, just marking out time and space, against which the elastic lightning whip monolith of his infernally inspired guitar playing rages and howls centre stage, with the energy of a live audience and appropriately ripped amplification powering him forward toward some of the most jaw-droppingly exciting six string pyrotechnics I have ever heard - not just from him, but from anyone, ever.

I could, of course, continue spewing out this guff indefinitely, but instead let’s put it simply. If you are a fan of loud rock guitar playing who values actual music over posing and gimmickry, you need Munehiro Narita’s recent and reissued recordings in your life. Failure to heed this advice will be liable to label you as kin to the kind of idiots who sold their copies of the Stooges records in 1971 because they were ‘a bit much’.


Sarah Davachi / Ariel Kalma.



As much as I’ve been enjoying Sarah Davachi’s work recently, her pursuit of monotonal melancholia can sometimes tend to get a bit, well, monotonous after a while – which makes this collaboration from French ambient artist Ariel Kalma feel like just the ticket. Herein, Kalma adds some welcome bursts of melodic and textural colour to Davachi’s pure-tone excursions, complimenting her quietly monolithic, largely synth-based work with the sound of tanpura, harmonium, slightly different synths and Vangelis-esque echo sax.

The simple fact that there are two people working together here helps cut against the barren loneliness that has sometimes made Davachi’s solo releases feel slightly unapproachable, making ‘Intemporel’ stand out as one of her sunnier, more optimistic recordings, with the sublime ‘Adieu de Vie’ in particular sinking into a warm steam bath of exactly the kind of ingratiating, escapist psychedelia I’m hard-wired to enjoy, electronics and delays burbling away like a morning chorus of robot birdies above a lightly LSD-brushed alien onsen resort.


Asher Gamedze.



Intense, heavily Coltrane-influenced spiritual jazz from this South African quintet, led by drummer Asher Gamedze. Only the opening 18 minute suite from a forthcoming double LP on the UK-based On The Corner label is currently available for listening, but that alone covers a lot of parched ground, mixing abrasive, ecstatic-yet-controlled blowouts from tenor player Buddy Wells (whose name sounds so much like he should be a famous 20th century jazz luminary, I had to invoke google to confirm that he isn’t) with finger-scrabbling group improv passages and deep, sinuous low end melodies, seemingly drawn from the same well of tribal/traditional influence that Louis Moholo-Moholo and his colleagues have been working with across the decades.

This is heady, no nonsense stuff, foregrounding PLAYIN’ over tonal/textural concerns or sonic surprises, and speaking wordlessly of connection to people and to landscape, and to political/metaphysical engagement and such. It should certainly appeal to listeners whose interest in the J word ceased abruptly on 17th July 1967, although some affecting, poetical contemplation from spoken wordist Nono Nkoane suggests other directions in which the full four sides of this as-yet-unheard set might be apt to travel.


Curanderos.



Seemingly demonstrating that you can take the boys out of the Pond, but can’t dry ‘em off no matter how hard you try, this collaboration between Bardo Pond guitarists the Gibbons Bros and a drummer named Scott Verrastro finds the trio initially tip-toeing around each other with a few minutes of uncertain, questioning abstraction, before they apparently make eye contact, exchange shrugs and lock into exactly the kind of stoned, heavy-weight-on-butterfly-wings grandeur which has helped cement the brothers’ main band’s ‘90s output as such an indelible and insurmountable cornerstone of modern heavy psyche.

Although the sound is necessary somewhat stripped back here, I’ve not heard these guys tap into this particular sweetest of sweet spots for some years now, making their decision to break out the big spoons and just dig in across the majority of this three track release feel like a slo-mo, fungoid sugar rush of purest satisfation. Taped in Bardo HQ in Philadelphia in 2018, this was released as a tape and name-yr-price download by the Athens, GA based Null Zone label a few months back, and I’m sure that all concerned would appreciate it if you were to name said price at something higher than zero (see intro above).


Eric Arn & Jasmine Pender.



Heavy duty, oxygen-sucking, cosmic / cloud level Popal Vuh-esque drone-work here from Austria-based American guitarist Eric Arn (Primordial Undermind) and British cellist Jasmine Pender (Rotten Bliss). First cut is perfect for witnessing a pale sun rise across a planetery curve as one falls into the orbit of a frozen, featureless gas giant, or so I should imagine, whilst the second explores more tense, noisy and recognisably instrument-y angles on the same kind of weightless inertia. It’s good, in other words.


Kamaal Williams.



And last but not least…. South London keyboard luminary Kamaal Williams aka Henry Wu has his follow up to 2018’s ‘The Return’ up for pre-order, the curiously named ‘Wu Hen’, with a few sample tracks suggesting a more expansive palette than the previous record’s straight trio line up (strings, sax, street chat), alongside some more abrasive, Gameboy-ish tones on ‘One More Time’, but still heavily swathed in darkly sinuous, disarmingly blissful yet inexplicably menacing nocturnal pavement atmos, straight from the heart of some mid-gentrification, pre-pandemic cultural sandpaper zone. Being cautious, I’ll wait until I can catch a stream of the whole thing in July (hopefully), but hey – keep a close eye on this cat, if you’re not already.

(About that title by the way – just like a lot of faux-mysterious hardcore bands, Williams’ Black Focus label seems to have a bit of a fetish for Japanese words and characters, so I’m guessing he’s going for ‘hen’ as in ‘strange/perverse’ here, rather than hen as in cluck-cluck.)

Labels: Angel Bat Dawid, Ariel Kalma, Asher Gamedze, Curanderos, Emma-Jean Thackray, Erc Arn, Grey Hairs, Jasmine Pender, Kamaal Williams, Munehiro Narita, Naujawanan Baidar, Sarah Davachi