Records Of The Month

The best stuff from August swear down.

The brilliant Spelling aka Chrystia "Tia" Cabral

Umeko Ando Upopo Sanke (Pingipung)

Yes, yes, I know I've already written about this magical record but I just wanted to say that since I wrote that I’ve been barely able to step away from it. That Pingipung piece will tell you about the provenance of this miracle but I have to mention the fact that it’s working on me like pop. Pop with hooks, that makes me grin, and laugh sometimes, but that absolutely works on me with the radiance and light and ecstacy of pure pop. No one is gonna put this on a pop playlist but it should be. It’s an absolute JOY.

Dadá Joãozinho tds bem Global (Innovative Leisure)

Can’t actually count the ways I love this cos this isn’t just musical galaxies being traversed but sonic multiverses - everything from psyche to tropicalia to dub to hip hop to noise to samba and STOP COME BACK HONESTLY it’s so much better than that might suggest. João Rocha moved from Niterói (the city across the bay from Rio de Janeiro) to São Paulo in 2020 - with his band paralyzed by the pandemic Rocha retreated into this alter-ego, Dada Joazinho. According to João his new music “needed to feel more intense,” seventies Música Popular Brasileira “didn’t make sense anymore”. So what this is is a “genre-agnostic mixtape” slathered in the kind of addictive latin/baile flavours you want to just slather on your gums and leer at. From the sublime Helado Negro-style sultriness of ‘Ô Lulu’, through ‘Cuidado’s Fela-meets-OsMutantes grogginess onwards through the stealthy samba-funk of ‘Minha Droga’ this is simultaneously a total fantasy of the connections any music fan would WISH had been made, but also works as way way more than mere record-collection pop. Delicious.

Giggs Zero Tolerance (No BS Music)

His first since 2020’s ‘Now Or Never’ (nuts to think it’s been 15 years since ‘Walk In Da Park’) and my god this is simultaneously both unforgivable and addictive. Unforgivable lyrically - that illiberal self-diagnosis that hip hop can never avoid which makes it always so much more lyrically compelling than any other form of music, even if now and then it literally takes your breath away with the nastiness and the menace. Addictive musically - the beats and bass here will bless your home and particularly your car with some gorgeously latticed matrixes that will rattle your rear-views a treat. Nice cameos from Popcaan, Jadakiss, 21Savage and Dave.

My guess is old fans might see this is an overly-slick pitch at the US market, and of course there’s an indignity to a 51 year old man bumping this but I don’t care. It’s too damn toothsome.

Hulubalang Bunyi Bunyi Tumbal (Drowned By Locals)

One half of the Indonesian electronic duo Gabbar Modus Operandi (check their ‘Puxxximaxxx’ and ‘Hoxxxya’ albums on Yes No Wave and SVBKVLK respectively) , Aditya Surya Taruna (aka Kasimyn) here drops his new solo project after extensive work with Bjork and it’s a head-rattling doozie. The title roughly translates to a "Synthetic Feeling for Anonymous Sacrifice" and is spurred, like the record, by his deep dive into Indonesian photographic war archives documenting the era of Dutch rule, captured through the lens of the colonizers themselves. The Dutch government has recently 'apologized' for the atrocities committed during Dutch rule but access to these frequenly horrifying images is still limited, the victims still anonymised into the peripheries of history. This record is tormented by that buried memory, takes Indonesian rhythms and spaces and puts them into a grinder of electronic sound, frequently touched by gamelan, often balefully bleak in its harsh sonics, always a compelling ‘Heart Of Darkness’-style journey without condescencion, and with a truly pitiless eye. I'm not making it sound like fun cos it aint but it IS cathartic, angry, and honours the lost while leaves burnmarks and scars you can’t shake.

Mick Jenkins  The Patience (RBC Music/BMG)

(From Wire magazine) “His best music since his early mixtapes and certainly his best official album since 2018’s remarkable ‘Pieces Of A Man’. The production throughout, handled by Jenkins alongside Stoic and others, is hooky, dusty, grainy but not quite retrograde, always shot through with a contemporary playfulness with tempo, time-signature and texture that makes it impossible for your brain to safely kick it into the normal alt-rap categories and confinements: check ‘Roy G. Biv’s strange swirl of gaseous keyboards, heart-trace funk and morphing analogue drones, or ‘007’s truly woozy plunging of submerged piano and sax against harsh old-skool beats. ‘The Patience’ is a reflective, yet raging record that in every vibrant moment proves rap remains an artform waiting to be reinvigorated by anyone able to tap its true revolutionary possibility. Great to have him back.”

Raw Poetic Away Back In (Def Presse)

Damu the Fudgemonk on the beats so you KNOW this is gonna hit with a lovely thunking smokiness but Raw Poetic (MC/lyricist Jason Moore and guitarist P-Fritz) have taken their licks and hooks and jazziness to new heights here on their best album yet. I love the way the album goes from the kinda sunny-side-up righteous manouvres of openers ‘Ease Side’, ‘Numb’ and ‘Birds Eye’ into a much darker, more ambiguous place on ‘Dank-ish’ & ‘Rehab’ precisely as the riffs get more abstract, sharper, the distortion more droney, and the shapes more populated with shadow and space. Ultimately redemptive but a lovely nuanced journey towards that redemption. Recommended.

Sextile  Push (Sacred Bones) 

(from Wire magazine) “One of the most instantly addictive things I’ve heard all year. As soon as ‘Contortion’ comes thumping out at you with a stereo–strafing precision you haven’t heard since Front 242’s ‘First In First Out’ you realise you’re in the presence not just of people dabbling with punktronica, but people who have clearly been immersed in both the most electronic side of post-punk production (Suicide & Chrome) and crucially - dancing their whole life to late 80s, and early 90s techno, jungle, drum and bass. Tracks like the stunning ‘New York’ and ‘Modern Weekend’ remind me deeply of those peripheral figures in EBM - Meat Beat Manifesto, MC900ft Jesus, Revolting Cocks - who got closest to melding noisy aggravation with gorgeously abrasive techno-textures. This never feels retro though - the sheer irresistible danceability and detail of the grooves in tracks like the stunning ‘Crassy Mel’ is fresh and immediate and delivers a fierce contact high that feels thrillingly fresh The d’n’b pace and propulsion of ‘Lost Myself Again’ and the strung-out doomed vaporousness of the stunning ‘Crash’ summon both night time highs and morning come-downs, the tension of the street and the release of the dancefloor, and further, offer moving apertures into the balance of personas in the band, and the tightrope of isolation and togetherness each member of the trio finds. The best party you’ve been thrown out of all year.”

Spelling The Mystery School (Sacred Bones)

Man oh man, it’s killed me never to have seen Spelling live - to establish whether songs so fragile/fragmentary and so spellbinding could actually be enacted in real time. This album - in which Chrystia Cabral is joined by her touring band and augmented by San-Fran chamber group Del Sol Quartet - gives us the fully-fleshed out morphings and changes and readings that her remarkable back-catalogue deserves. If you’re coming to this from the previous albums your mind is gonna get blown with the heaviness and the feather-lightness of the grooves and the faint hints of monomaniacal funkiness that shudders throughout. If this is the first Spelling you’ve encountered get ready for some major reverse-connaisance. Stunning. Songs pulled straight from the aether. Tough as granite.

Sult Always I Gnaw (Thin Wrist)

Noise from Oslo and from a three-piece - Guro Skumsnes Moe (contrabass) and Håvard Skaset (acoustic guitar) from Norway along with Jacob Felix Heule (percussion) based in California - whose acoustic improvisations are hugely suggestive, pleasingly intense. You’re reminded of AMM and Xenakis but where ordinarily I’d find such comparisons noxious (I mean, how can you be influenced by the UNREPEATABLY UNIQUE?) here they make sense, because as with those pioneers of blessed/damned RACKET you can hear nature here, humans here, something that speaks of both insect smallness and tectonic heft. Three long pieces here, not a jot of virtuosity but a mutal committment to freedom, unorthodoxy and surprise.

Various Artists  0 (Biswa Bangla Noise)

(from Wire magazine) “BBN are a label from West Bengal and O comprises experimental and avant-garde music from 9 practised and novice artists based in the state. It’s an enthralling journey - Hungry Thought’s ‘Gin Talk’ a wonderfully downbeat opener of gentle Satie-esque ambience and half-buried samples that slides into Flesheatingturtles ‘ঘামের মেশিন’, a starkly foreboding pulse too slow to be a human heartbeat, cold flames of hanging drones and distorted flute adding to the sense of unease. Bengal Chemicals’ ‘জল পরিবহন’ drops everything back to silence, before smearing and heavily dubbing the same kind of natural fricative sound-sources as Lucie Pachova has been doing to such engrossing effect recently, and the closer, Ritwik Mishra’s ‘दो 60 एक 30’ is a beautifully psychedelic ascension into the skies. This hugely engaging comp often feels like it could only come from Bengal, but also that the artists aren’t hobbled or hidebound by orientalist conventions or strictures, that they are continually pushing against and interrogating exactly what ‘Bengal’ means. It’s utterly free music that still expresses a real sense of place, and isolation within that place. Highly recommended.”

Various Artists The NID Tapes Electronic Music from India 1969-1972 (State51) 

(From Wire magazine) “ . . . Paul Purgas has collated early Indian electronic music from the archives of the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad. The NID studio was founded in 1969 when New York composer David Tudor set up a Moog Modular system and tape machine at the NID and what we hear on this compilation are excerpts from twenty-seven reels of archive tape spanning the three years of the studio’s operational history. Post-colonial and post-modern, these tracks from composers including I.S Mathur, S.C Sharma and Atul Desaiare form both neophyte explorations of a new sonic space for Indian music, but also fascinatingly seem to bridge that place where Western minimalism and electronic composition meet Indian classical ideas of the interpenetrative sonic life. Highlights for me in particular come from Gita Sarabhai whose intensely Radiophonic transmissions have the playfulness and intensity of prime Delia Derbyshire. An absolute goldmine and a righteous rewriting and recovery of a great lost chapter in electronic music’s history. Essential.”

Jim Wallis In Huge Gesturing Loops (Tip Top Recordings)

There’s a thing going on at the moment that worries me a touch - the direct linkage of a certain type of ambient/neo-classical music with ‘mindfulness’ and ‘well-being’. I resist it because though I know music can have these hugely healing and therapeutic effects I tend to find those effects wherever they might occur and not necessarily with that music that self-consciously sets itself up as ‘balm’ or ‘relaxing’. The New York Dolls are my comfort and calm BUT THAT SAID ‘In Huge Gesturing Loops’ - which should and possibly will feature on all kinds of ‘mindfulness’/’meditation’ playlists - is an inarguably gorgeous delight of a record, a sound to get lost in, a sound that repairs broken synapses not through connection but through a meeting of your brokenness with its own spaces and brokenness. It shimmers with a heat-haze this record, composed by multi-instrumentalist and Modern Nature member Jim Wallis around sublime recordings by pedal steel player Henry Senior. Think Stars Of The Lid and Labradford at their warmest, also think about the pellucid meanderings of ‘Paris Texas’ and the glimmering aquatic wonder of Hugo Largo. That cute artwork btw was put together by designer Luke Jarvis based on the 1930s swimming pool on Marshall Street in Soho, where Wallis swam regularly while working on the album, and the title comes from Philip Larkin's 'I Have Started To Say'. To be drowned in.