Rum Music is modifying. I am unfortunate and happy to announce that just after this thirty day period the column will be switching to bi-month to month. It’ll be particularly the same, but with 50 percent the amount of episodes for each year. I am expecting an enhancement to my filters an inbox I may well even get on prime of, and the space to fall far more deeply in love with releases.
Nevertheless, this month’s Rum New music is an specifically excellent 1 if I say so myself. The Afrorack is the correct form of modular audio I will hardly ever ever tire of Aged Heaven Publications have place out one more definitely stellar release, potentially just one of their greatest ever and I have been waiting to converse about Cheri Knight for months. The latter is a guide review of types – there was so considerably I required to say about it, it pulled my attentions away from every little thing else. It is such a satisfaction to explain in crafting, much too.
Specified the incoming change in regularity, now would seem a good time to remind you that you can also locate my new music picks on extensive-jogging BBC Radio 3 show Late Junction, in which myself and Verity Sharp perform two hrs of tunes for adventurous listeners every Friday night from 11pm United kingdom time. Adventurous listeners is about the finest we have arrive up with to explain the display – my previous episode I performed new music for broken violins, Shun Nakaseko’s recording of a horn symphony in Kathmandu (included in past month’s column), and my producer Tej pulled out some fantastic new gamelan recordings to play (see AOB).
Outside the house of this column, I have been crafting a 2nd reserve, but also observed time to see Laibach in Lourdes for tQ, which was a deeply bizarre knowledge you can browse about listed here. My e book The Foghorn’s Lament, also arrived out in paperback this thirty day period, and was posted German via Mare Verlag. In situation you ended up thinking, the German for foghorn is ‘nebelhorn’. See you in July!
Cheri Knight – American Rituals
(Independence To Commit)
https://www.youtube.com/check out?v=EuDDokp7VJs
Cheers to FTS affiliate Pete Swanson for tipping me off really early about this. I have been pasting my review over for months right up until I can truly connection to somewhere that viewers can essentially hear it, but truthfully, it can be been my album of the thirty day period for about 3 months (eager listeners to Late Junction may have been the to start with to listen to it pre-release anywhere, as I have performed a couple of tracks there). It truly is about as up my strasse as it truly is achievable to be – bare bones vocal constructions and vernacular publish punk affected by Deep Listening, and minimalism, essentially. Consider that this could attractiveness to admirers of Steve Reich, Michelle Mercure and Ut, and you must get started receiving the photograph of the seem world contained. You can find something deeply foundational, ur-Do it yourself about the instruments Knight employs, and the lexicon in unique – most important colours, primary numbers – that assemble the monitor buildings. You will find also nothing extraneous. On ‘Breathe’, for instance, there’s minor far more than voice, pucks of percussion produced with what sound like metallic pipes basic bass motifs and scant curlicues of guitar. Knight built the tracks on this album in the early 80s, which have beforehand been scattered among a range of compilations. At this time she was section of the lesser-recognised Do-it-yourself scene about Evergreen State Higher education in Olympia, Washington, exactly where she researched composition. She labored with Pauline Oliveros, general performance artist Linda Montano, and afterwards in the alt-state band Blood Oranges, before moving into flower farming. She also retains goats.
The Afrorack – The Afrorack
(Hakuna Kulala)
The Afrorack is Brian Bamanya, who taught himself electronics and started building his individual synth models after he had hassle finding maintain of modules in Uganda, setting up what is now a significant wall of modules and Fx models in essence “Africa’s very first Do-it-yourself modular synthesizer”. A lot of a amazing synth engineer has failed to make fantastic new music, but not so below. The Afrorack faucets into the hi-resolution modern day zone-outs of knob twiddlers like Bass Clef and Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, retaining a percussive sensibility – it can be not like Sarah Davachi, for instance, which has a sense in which it is suspended, durational and stretched out. In its place, like Bass Clef in distinct, Bamanya lays down beds of thick syrupy indicators animated with lace-like designs and polyrhythmic percussions that are gloriously siren-like in their hypnotic signal loops. It sounds like on the lookout at marbled paper when tripping: its pulses give it a topography and the strains swim. The items are all ‘normal’ duration, but I would enjoy to get my ears into an extended piece. Vital for modular heads and meditators. Really satisfying on-physique printing on the CS too.
Ana Hato And Deane Waretini – Relaxed When You Handed By: Aotearoa Music 1927-29
(Canary Information)
Attractive tracks by Ana Hato, a singer from Aotearoa, the north island of New Zealand colonised by the British at the stop of the 19th Century. Hato’s cousin Deane Waretini, whom she worked in the vacationer trade and normally sang with, claimed that Hato was the best Māori singer the nation had ever identified – back in the 20s it was explained she experienced a voice with “trueness in purity and sign-up” and “hotu” (like a coronary heart beating, or sobbing devoid of tears). These recordings had been produced in the late 1920s (when Hato was in her early 20s), and at a century previous and from the other aspect of the earth, listening from my minor box space in North East London, it feels from yet another globe fully. Hato provides conventional Māori singing models into her music, and it really is the much less bouncy numbers I like. I really don’t usually delight in the jaunty piano accompaniment, but in tracks like ‘Hine E Hinei’ Hato and Waretini sing a stillness into staying with a longing that conjures a kind of threshold in time and in place, that I can truly feel, but from this distance, cannot understand or totally understand.
Propan – Swagger
(Couch)
Swagger began lifetime as a 2016 fee of the exact same title that also included choreography and lights. It is the second launch I’ve lined in Rum Songs by Propan, a Danish vocal duo of Ina Sagstuen and Natali Abrahamsen Garner. Though the previous tape felt like a relatively intimate and meditative set of recordings, right here they’re joined by an ensemble they’re contacting Propanions, that contains eight musicians on strings, winds, percussion, voices, and electronics. Some is scored and some is improvised, but just about every keep track of homes in on a audio, a source, or an thought. To me, it synthesises a lot of wondering about sound and feels like an understated but genuinely lucid software of these strategies, rendered in very spare pieces of new music. I can hear vocal references to small computer performs of the 60s the very well-sampled vocal tunes on the Ocora recordings from Burundi acoustic phenomena like Shephard tones, as properly as extended vocal tactics, noisy concrete experiments, bubbles and ball bearings.
Several Artists – Area, New music, And Follow Vol.1
(Aged Heaven Books)
Mamer, Lao Dan and some others surface on an album documenting an event I never have substantially element about, other than what is actually in the Bandcamp notes. The party brought alongside one another classic and contemporary methods Lao Dan and Mamer produced brand new functions, and Mamer begun a new band termed Mask. It contains improvisations and tracks played on mouth harps, standard flutes, and a sherter – a lute-like 3-stringed plucked instrument. The solo items are fantastic, and the album’s notably nicely-sequenced way too. I particularly loved the caustic twang of the mouth harp followed by the breathy pillow-like flute timbres. The Mask and Mamer tracks make from these parts, driving the usually scant (and at times frenzied) instrumentation with stomping rhythms. Instrumental piece ‘B10’ even has a contact of the Mule Variants about it. Really just one of my favourite releases that’s arrive out of this Shenzhen label and bookshop.
Gav & Jord – Writings Ov Tomato
(MAL Recordings)
Gav and Jord are Equiknoxx’s Gavsborg and Time Cow, aka Gavin Blair and Jordan Chung. In the context of their solo outputs these tracks are pretty heads down and pushed by a rolling torque. They nonetheless squeeze in some daftness in the observe titles (see ‘Childish House Mafia’ and ‘No Sweat In My Sweat Pants’). The bass on ‘Appiness’ has a satisfied-earning subterranean rumble title keep track of is occupied with hectic percussive splatters ‘Pig Pilot’ is driven by an insistent form of squeaking, and ‘No Sweat In My Sweatpants’ is built from gamelan-like small gong sounds that are ripped into by a unwanted fat kick, claps and odd, mumbled vocal snippets that seem like they are remaining shipped by an individual executing a baby voice for a sock puppet. Stuff like this is just why I like these two so much even though – they make a monitor that genuinely moves, with a small quantity of layers, then jack it with one thing fully incongruous.
Vox Populi! – Psyko Tropix
(Touch Delicate)
Sean Kitching has penned a for a longer time review of this for newcomers to Vox Populi but a) it truly is been on large rotation for me, and b) I think it warrants some relating to their finest identified do the job, 50 percent Useless Ganja Music. I generally just take tracks from HDGM to DJ sets, prior to realising its slurry of hand drums and rotten ooze of put up punk are deeply inappropriate for pretty much all settings exactly where you’re playing new music to persons who are drinking and socialising. On the other hand, this new archival comp and reissue may well alter all that, culling tracks generally from the time period 1986-1990, which are relatively glossy and very well turned-out in comparison to HDGM, with significant Persian influences from Mitra and Arash. ‘Caballo Blanco’ opens with chord organs and crisp unfurling riffs, un-locked to percussion that seems element drum circle, part plumbing pipes, the circle squared with crunchy French vocals mussing the blend and spiralling into psychedelia. Other tracks by this self-described “ethno noise” group have no sound, like ‘Holistikoholic’, and the people singing and birdsong of ‘Golpari June’ and often percussion is the sprung sound of tabla. Some are soaked in tin-foil reverb and lather up a cosmic wonderland, or engage in with mouth pops and grunts. Psyko Tropix is like the gradual sunny Sunday immediately after the heavy Saturday night of Fifty percent Dead Ganja Music. (NB: Psychological Rescue have also just lately repressed their reissue of Aither.)
AOB
I just obtained the Spring 2022 Finnish WeJazz magazine, identified as ‘Tetragon’ with Joe Henderson as the principal characteristic (the previous one particular was on Alice Coltrane, and was called ‘World Galaxies’). The Summer season version is also up, is on Horace Tapscott and is known as ‘The Call’. A lot more information in this article.
Also cheers to my Late Junction producer Tej Adeleye for flagging this task which is recording and releasing gamelan new music. Tons to dig into, and an ongoing problem too, it looks. Here’s the most recent:
