From hereon in the big list I think, everything is a potential number 1. All of these are truly excellent. Each time I listen to one of ‘em, I want to move it straight up to the top, until I play the next one in line again. And, the records in parts #1 and #2 weren’t bad either. Such a fine year for ears, if not for most other organs and appendages.

 

 

Mixing near-eastern processional/celebratory music with the scuzz-drenched tape cut-up methodology of the western noise underground, N.R. Safi aka Naujawanan Baidar makes a racket as original, incendiary and authentically psychedelic as anything the brutalised culture of the 21st century has to offer. Wherever music finds itself heading in future years, MORE OF THIS SORT OF THING would seem like a good start.

From June 2020:  

“..combining traditional Afghan instrumentation with a bewildering array of loops, radio textures, distortion, digital effects, drums, Western/South Asian instruments and more besides, [this] dense and beguiling set of heavy psyche-blasted quasi-enthno semi-forgeries basically sounds 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.”

Side D of the album, comprising ‘Shakl-e-Barqi’, ‘Nagin Saaz’ and ‘Panj Ruz Pesh’, strikes me as particularly choice. 

 

 

I wouldn’t be a Stereo Sanctity best-of-year list without Mike Vest sticking his oar in at some point, and the most noteworthy project undertaken by the UK’s leading maximalist guitar savant during 2020 was undoubtedly Ozo, a studio-bound trio in which Vest’s distinctively uncompromising bass and guitar work goes head-to-head with the Equally forthright sounds of Karl D’Silva (sax) and Graham Thompson (drums).

Of ‘Pluto’, my favourite of the two LPs, I said in July 2020:  

“Moving at least slightly closer to realising the elusive space-rock / free jazz ideal Ozo are allegedly aiming for, this one is a heavy, heavy trip – a hulking motherlode of King Crimson-accented sonic gloop which feels more ‘high gravity planetary surface trek’ than ‘interstellar joyride’, stumbling over boulders on the way back to the landing module as the low-hanging sky overhead behind to look like this album’s cover.”

‘Saturn’ is well worth a listen too however, particularly for fans of Thompson’s powerhouse drumming, which effectively assumes lead instrument status through much of the LP, his meteor shower beat-downs often pummelling both Vest’s galaxy-questing, ‘Space Ritual’ bass lines and D’Silva’s squalling, disembodied ‘Funhouse’-in-a-hall-of-mirrors sax echoes into submission. A uniquely wild and disorientating new sound in the space-rock firmament, whichever way you look at it. 

 

 

The interplay between bassist Dezron Douglas and harpist Brandee Younger was a big part of what made the New York side of Makaya McCraven’s ‘Universal Beings’ double LP so sublime, and here the duo return with one of the world’s first real lessons in how to make the concept of a “lockdown album” really work.

Culled from a series of lunchtime live-streams the couple undertook from their NYC apartment through the peak of the city’s first wave in March-June 2020, Douglas & Younger’s instinctive / off-the-cuff playing here succeeds in providing a veritable beacon of good ol’ peace, love and understanding in a cold and threatening world, proving (lest the thousands of such recordings made during the 20th century left us in any doubt) that with the right players, and the right feel, one half-decent microphone is all that’s needed to make an album for the ages.

Concentrating largely on melodically potent material which will likely be at least distantly familiar to most of their listeners, ‘Force Majeure’ is probably at its best when the duo explore the jazz repertoire, working over such touchstones as John Coltrane’s ‘Equinox’ and ‘Wise One’, Alice Coltrane’s ‘Gospel Trane’ and Pharaoh Sanders & Leon Thomas’s ‘The Creator Has A Master Plan’ with a sense of warmth and constant harmonic discovery that it’s near impossible not to be moved by. Their (instrumental) interpretations of pop songs are good too, particularly when Younger takes the lead on comparatively simple, heart-rending reimaginings of Clifton Davis’s ‘Never Can Say Goodbye’ (you know, the Jackson 5 one) and Kate Bush’s ‘A Woman’s Work’.

On a slightly snarkier note, I would also like to state that this is the one and only occasion upon which this blog will provide positive commentary on a release which includes a track composed by Sting (that being Douglas’s solo bass take on a something named ‘Inshallah’ on side # 2). You may have won me over this time with your good-natured banter about coffee and human togetherness and your vast musical talent guys, but c’mon - don’t push it. 

 

 

As I mused way back in July, the extended vocal cuts led here by Chicagoan percussionist/singer Kahil El’Zabar often veer more toward a kind of spaced out, discombobulated soul than to anything in the jazz canon, with the simple hypnotic rhythms of El’Zabor and bassist Emma Dayhuff backing up the band leader’s resonant, mantra-like, sometimes entirely non-verbal, incantations, resulting in a sound which perhaps recalls the methodology of Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Going On’ taken to it’s furthest extreme, or perhaps Gil Scott Heron getting waa-aay out there on a jazz tip, if he’d stuck to pot rather than hitting the hard stuff.

At the same time though, as I’ve lived with this record over the past six months or so, it’s the instrumental cuts I come back to the most. Side # 3’s ‘Katon’ in particular spends quite a while digging into territory not too distant from the slow burn, ambient minimalism of Joshua Abrams’ Natural Information Society, until saxophonist David Murray eventually weighs in with some stark, unmistakably Trane-like tenor ruminations, paying heed to the feather-soft groove even as he briefly tilts in a considerably more fearsome direction - a trend which is furthered, naturally enough, on side # 4’s more conventionally lyrical ‘Trane in Mind’ - as knock-out a tribute to the big man as you’re likely to hear anywhere in the current musical firmament. 

 

 

Why, after all these years, does ‘The Devil Rides Out’, an insufferably boring novel written by arch-conservative imperialist blowhard Dennis Wheatley in 19…, retain such an irresistible aesthetic appeal, living on in the minds of horror/weird fiction aficionados like a rich bouquet of combined old book smell, empty church dust and ceremonial sulphur..?

Damned if I know, but Hammer’s ever-wonderful 1968 movie adaptation no doubt helps, as does this more recent ‘soundtrack’ to the novel offered up by Tom Mcdowell, aka Dream Division.

Of all the quote-unquote “dungeon synth” releases I sampled last year in fact, this one strikes me as by far the strongest. Not only does Mcdowell succeed in wringing exactly the right tones of comforting, TV/VHS-fogged dread and fascination from his wheezing, hissing analogue equipment, but he also brings a strong melodic sensibility to the material, filling the album with memorable, earworm-heavy numbers which would certainly not have disgraced the professional-yet-impoverished band of film composers who first minted this particular sound back in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Combine this with a keen appreciation of the intangible / irresistible ‘feel’ of the material he is plundering for inspiration, and Mcdowell has really created an all-time, party rockin’ classic for the world’s second-hand bookshop haunting creeps.

 

 

Single-handedly making the concept of “stoner rock” suddenly seem like a good idea again, this Vienna-based group’s shamelessly indulgent assemblage of gargantuan / Sleep-worthy riffs and foot-on-monitor solos, served up with just a touch of bonged out weirdness, has rarely travelled far from my turntable in 2020. Seriously - super-massive rock fun with real longevity right here. Do yourself a favour today and check it out.

Here is some further blather from way back in the carefree days of Feb 2020: 

 “‘Raging Mammoth’! ‘Shaking Pyramid’! Yes, these are the kind of things pieces of music like this should be called, and I commend artist Sandra Havik for her valiant attempts to literally illustrate these concepts on the album’s front cover. Side 2’s ‘Monolith’ is dutifully depicted on the back cover meanwhile, whilst the accompanying track mixes things up somewhat, heading in a more trad metal direction, bringing in NWBHM-ish harmonic leads and moving from curious, almost jazzy/modal passages early on toward some positively Maiden-esque adventures in mid-tempo, dragon-slaying guitar heroism. Probably the all-round best cut here, it’s pretty damn immense.” 

 

 

Making her second collaborative appearance on this year’s list, Kryssi Battalene (Head Room/Mountain Movers) here lends her guitar and vocals talents to former Mininokoto / LSD March frontman Kawaguchi Masami’s New Rock Syndicate, and, if the shorter, more garage-inclined numbers which begin the resulting LP perhaps don’t come off quite as well as they could, tracks like sitar-enhanced slow-burn epic ‘Sunday Afternoon’, the shimmering, scorched earth drama of ‘Shadow of the Earth’ and the churning, bad vibes jamming of ‘The Beginning’ and ‘Pieces of You’ all remain absolutely sublime.

Even more-so than with his previous bands, Kawaguchi seems intent here on digging deep into the legacy of late ‘80s legends White Heaven, tacking close to that band’s gospel of lysergic songcraft and elegiac guitar heroics, seasoned with a touch of AMT’s show-boating exotica, whilst Battalene for her part brings a more Bardo/MBV-like sense of blissed out pedalboard oblivion to proceedings, birthing beautific, timeless, trans-pacific psychedelic rock of the very highest calibre; just a sky-scraping, spirit-nourishing triumph of beautific noise, miraculously still available on wax to U.S.-based readers for the price of a six pack plus postage. 

 

  

From July 2020:

“As ever, it’s difficult to really put into words the unique amalgam that comprises Obnox’s sound, but nonetheless, let’s take a deep breath and try again. Mixing up lo-fi cut-up noise, rust-belt garage-punk, mutant p-funk derivations, ghostly regional/outsider soul and aggro-laden, street level hip-hop, ‘Savage Raygun’ makes for an exhilarating tour through the treacherous back alleys of American music, all mixed down with a chopped n’ screwed, basement tape-splicin’ aesthetic that makes the album’s presence on shiny, newly pressed vinyl feel kind of incongruous.

That said though, this is still perhaps a slightly more – cough –‘accessible’ take on the Obnox ideal than we’ve been presented with before, dialling back on the hyper-aggressive saturation of earlier releases, even as Thomas remains an elusive presence within his own music, his vocals often remaining distant and translucent as he slyly works earworms and familiar phrases from semi-well known songs in his material, leaving us trying to source them in the fog of our own memories like some form of archaic, pre-industrial sampling. The exception of course is on the full-on hip-hop cuts, where he’s upfront and in our grill, spitting as angry and unhinged as our stupid white asses could wish for, milling down decades of uncouth working class discontent for some implacably affirmative, ugly shit flow goodness.

All of the deep, strange threads Lamont Thomas is exploring and tearing through here seem to come together, just before the end of the record, on the supremely titled ‘Young Neezy’, looping an ancient tape of Neil’s ‘Southern Man’ riff and firing it straight off into the resentful depths of twisted r’n’b oblivion. It’s pretty inspired. A few years on from Obnox coining the phrase ‘America in a Blender’ on his mutant, malfunctioning non-“free jazz” LP [‘Templo dol Solido’, 2018], he’s still busy making supremely bitter-sweet lemonade from that terrifying concept.”

 

Makaya McCraven’s ‘Universal Beings’ double LP from 2018 is one of the records I’ve played most over the past few years, and undoubtedly the one which has had the biggest impact on my listening… so of course it's a no brainer that a further disc culled from the same trans-coastal / transatlantic sessions was going to find itself sitting pretty high up on this 2020 list.

Unlike the earlier LPs, tracks recorded in different cities with different line-ups are mixed up willy-nilly here, arguably resulting in a somewhat more bracing and unpredictable listen, but McCraven’s intense, skittering electronica-influenced drum style remains consistent throughout, lending the music a unified pulse even as the textures and atmospheres change on a dime.

Most of the pieces here are quite brief, with some sounding like repetitive / water-treading segments excised from longer jams, which perhaps explains why they didn’t quite make the cut on the first two LPs, but even in its more quotidian moments, this music retains a floating, blissful sense of infectious positivity, and highlights, of course, remain plentiful.

Several cuts from the hallowed (by me at least) New York session appear to be pieces of the same tight, rhythmic workout, foregrounding Joel Ross’s vibraphone alongside backing from the aforementioned Dezron Douglas and Brandee Younger, whilst ‘Half Steppin’, recorded in London with Soweto Kinch (sax) and Kamaal Williams (keys) is an altogether more hair-raising piece of work, with what sounds like a heavily processed and/or electronically-generated beat bringing a frantic, almost jungle-like feel emphasised by distant, juddering bass frequencies and strange, droning chords picked out by Williams.

Two further London cuts featuring a more trad sax/keys/bass line up (courtesy of Nubya Garcia, Ashley Henry and Daniel Casimir respectively) find McCraven's polyphonous beatdowns sometimes threatening to drown out his collaborators, but a louche slide toward the ol ‘smoky groove’ pocket eventually wins the day, with some lovely work in particular from Henry on Fender Rhodes.

Meanwhile, the Chicago material here is excellent too, with Tomeka Reid’s cello adding a baleful quality to proceedings, as Shabaka Hutchings’ rich, Trane-esque tone alternately locks into and drowsily pulls away from McCraven's meticulously detailed, double-time beat - but my pick for the absolute best stuff this time around comes from Los Angeles.

As the distinctive creepy-crawl of Jeff Parker’s guitar signals a shift to the West Coast, the combo of ‘Universal Being pt2’ and ‘Butterss Fly’ (named for bassist Anna Butterss) proves absolutely stunning, perhaps a peak moment of this entire project in fact, with Miguel Atwood-Ferguson’s violin cooing some some bird of paradise as Josh Johnson's alto rides the tightly-wound rhythm set by McCraven and Parker, eventually folding out into a beautiful cat’s cradle of interlocking, ‘Bitches Brew’-esque textures… oh man, it’s a shame they couldn’t have kept this one going for hours.

But, we’re reaching the end of the final side by this point, so needs must, and, back to London, Soweto Kinch shows us ‘The Way Home’ - a big, bold South African style melodic theme, played in a duo with McCraven, cheerfully waving us off into the sunrise of the perilously uncertain future we all now find ourselves stuck in. 

 

 

Year on year, I find myself feeling ever more distraught when the moment comes for me to vainly try, yet again, to find a way to convey the kind of magic routinely bottled by Chris Abrahams, Lloyd Swanton and Tony Buck whenever and wherever they convene to take care of Necks business.

These days at least, I can merely point to the bandcamp embed above and let more patient readers discover a way in for themselves, but, for those unwilling or unable to do so, I can at least suggest that, exhibiting a characteristically zen-like sense of internal symmetry (three tracks of equal length, three musicians), CD-only album ‘Three’ represents some of the band’s strongest work in years (which is going some).

Mixing restrained, ruminative piano and bass excursions with a chaotic, rotor-blade like clamour of disembodied percussion, ‘Bloom’ and ‘Further’ are both - and it makes my soul wither just to say this, but no alternatives immediately present themselves - classic Necks. The former leaves strange, distorted, guitar-like overdubs churning deep in the background, cymbal hits ringing through infinite space and fizzing, climactic organ chords occasionally rising up like fragments of Chicago house overheard from the wrong side of thick concrete wall. The latter meanwhile is a particularly special aural tranquilizer dart, tidal organ and string textures drifting against the frantic rattle of Buck’s bells and chimes as Swanson locks into an exquisite example of the kind of slow, cyclical groove which defined the band’s early work back in the ‘90s/‘00s.

By contrast, middle track ‘Lovelock’, named in tribute to recently deceased Celibate Rifles frontman Damien Lovelock, proves harrowing stuff - a dry gulch twenty minutes of exhausted, nocturnal dream-atmos which I’d characterise as ‘bereft’, but for the fact that that would imply a level of emotional manipulation mercifully alien to The Necks pointedly abstract/subjective methodology. 

---

To be concluded…

Labels: best of 2020, Dezron Douglas & Brandee Younger, Dream Division, Kahil El’Zabar’s Spirit Groove, Kawaguchi Masami, Kryssi Battalene, Makaya McCraven, Naujawanan Baidar, Obnox, Ozo, Ryte, The Necks

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