Records Of The Month: September 2023

All the platters that mattered this past month

Deena Abdelwahed

Deena Abdelwahed Jbal Rrsas ج​ب​ل ا​ل​ر​ص​ا​ص (InFiné éditions)

Perfect driving music for those who wish to make their grey commute lit with something tough, something with a different light, something that suits the rain and those dreams of a distant sun. A magical meld of electonics that swings across an axis connecting the European, Arabic, African & Indian, bass heavy and rhythmically often a tutorial in new steps you’ve not danced before. Rhythmically utterly fascinating. It’s a record that seems to create an identity for itself as it occurs, and (Tunisian DJ) Deena’s playfulness with sonic geography carves out that identity until it’s a clear new voice. Superb record this.

And Is Phi Double Pink (Albert’s Favourites)

This radiant dubbed-out delight of record from Indonesian-born, Norway-based Andrea Phillips sashays on textures part Alice Coltrane part Minnie Ripperton part Spelling part Can & is in the same intriguing space that Jaydonclover’s twisted downered R’n’b sits in. Calling it an r’n’b album feels reductive though - there’s a pellucid Hejira-esque sense of desolation and distance in its storytelling here, as well as odd little whorls of beats, and a thrumming bass-heavy smokiness that makes this simultaneously an amazing record to get fucked up to, but also one that can cast a baleful eye over day-to-day derangement. A record with a cut to its jib that’s iresistable cos it’s as fucked up and fantastic as you are.

Bile Sister Living On The Edge (We Are Time)

“Let’s snatch that term industrial and problematise it here in a way that can tear it away from its bloke-curators and frowny infantile outrage. This remarkable record is post-industrial in a sociopolitical sense as it comes from a place where work and survival are being eliminated, pre-industrial in a musical sense as it conjures the machine-music of Chrome & Cabaret Voltaire far more than anyone who then went on to despoil the term, and anti-industrial in its sheer anarchic refusal of co-option into the safety of a marketable genre. Its rock n roll title means so much more than the mere dangerous hedonism implied - this is underdog music, that could only come from someone marginalised and shut out from music’s current biz-narratives of warmth and kindness, someone who can only waste beauty into the void and hope to snarl and bite back before going under. Like Kilynn Lunsford’s similarly mind-melting masterpiece ‘Custodian Of Human Succession’ there’s a commitment to using what you have to create both beauty and revenge and far from the ‘extremity’ and ‘challenge’ so much electronic avant-garde music posits ‘Living On The Edge’ emerges as the only sane retaliation to these end times of decay and entropy. Energy is an anger. Underdog music and if you’re an underdog too, you need to hear it.”

Cultura Tres Camino De Brujos (Bloodblast)

“Oh HELL yes - South American metal/hardcore band transplanted to Amsterdam give us a gnarly, unruly beast of a record as touched by grunge and post-hardcore and those early mayhem-heavy Meshuggah releases as it is by Sepultura and Sarcofago’s blitzed spirit. This band can play at full-tilt lunatic pace - check the stunning thrash-storm of opener ‘The World & Its Lies’ - but are perhaps at their most murderously effective when slowing things into an almost-doom sense of sludginess on tracks like the amazing ‘The Land’ and ‘Proxy War’. Crank it and spank it.”

Eudemonics Best Behaviour (Bandcamp)

“Miraculous how people, no matter how much time passes and how much they change, can’t help but reveal themselves in their music - Eudemonics include original line-up Meat Puppets Cris Kirkwood and Derrick Bostrom (as well as later recruit, Cris’ son Elmo Kirkwood) alongside pianist Ron Stabinski and ‘Best Behaviour’ is a recording of 7 improvised modal yet funky instrumentals they laid down in June this year. The Meat Puppetsness of it is unmistakable because this is still a rhythm section like no other, and the melodic ideas still have that unique cut to their jib that makes these ten-minute pieces entirely engrossing and wonderful. It’s utterly magical that this is what the Puppets are doing now because it’s totally different, but somehow the same, just like THEY always were.”

The Gorge Mechanical Fiction (Pelagic)

“I’m not sure about the term ‘progressive’ when applied to music, especially heavy music as I prefer a regression to elementals rather than an expansion to absorb genres out of a sense of a butthurt inferiority complex. The Gorge play what could be called progressive metal but they come to it in an engagingly arse-about-tit way - they’re jazz musicians with a love for heavy music which they play with a precision that’s often staggering, shot through with judiciously chosen electronic elements and melodies (such on the spiralling hypnosis of ‘Remnants Of Grief‘’)  that are from the best math-rock heights of the 90s. A sealed bomb of tightness, a torsion to be devoutly wished.”

Andrea Phillips aka And Is Phi

Laurel Halo Atlas (Awe)

THIS is the first Halo LP that has really got me right in the solar plexus, right in the lungs, right in the head. By right in the lungs I mean this creates an ambience, an atmosphere you can literally inhale, breathe in, get heady on like you’re in the flower-room with Huysmans. Those elements that could be tactile (the piano, guitars) are always fuzzed and diffused into a blur, like you’ve lost your glasses for good and you’re looking at sound without squinting, happy that the edges are bleeding into each other cos the sound is just so damn sensual, feline, like a map of your subconscious breaking the surface and submerging itself again. Her best yet I reck.

Paweł Kulczy​ń​ski Biosignatures (Pointless Geometry)

Based on field recordings collected along the banks of the river Wisla in Warsaw, including the utilisation of electromagnetic and seismographic sensors and hydrophones, this fab record from musician and sound artist Kulcynski is like Xenakis without the heaviness, without the hurt, without the noise. That might seem like noise neutered - it isn’t, rather, like Lucie Pavlova’s recent records, this serves as a wonderfully aquatic space to inhabit for the landlocked and concrete-bound. The manipulations here are subtle but put you in a totally mesmeric space as both listener and sonic observer, a space where the distant urban soundscape can come swimming to you on a breeze, where the adjacent wildlife can rustle and ripple under your feet, where the underlying hum and noise of buildings and infrastructure start speaking to you. Enthralling, fascinating, amazingly executed.

Modern Nature No Fixed Point In Space (Bella Union)

“Jack Cooper tried to let the music you hear on ‘No Fixed Point’ emerge without set rhythms, structures or trajectories. Rather he’s aiming for a sound that’s free, entirely shorn of effects (you hear piano, guitar, woodwind, percussion and upright-bass) - songs certainly, songs that are impossibly moving, but songs unlike even the Spain/Low/’Astral Weeks’ sound they get close to. Recorded live and directly to tape, using the score only as a leap-off point, everything here is balanced in a way known to collectivist jazz but unknown to egotist pop and it makes for something refreshingly human, engagingly communal and ultimately convivial. Among the collaborators is Julie Driscoll, her first appearance on a recording for several years. A record I sense I’ll be returning to repeatedly as summer turns to autumn. Natural magic.” 

Some of Pawel Kulczynski’s knobs

Osees Intercepted Message (In The Red)

“The 27th Osees album is their most synth-heavy yet, but those Blurt-like grooves are still in place and the song-writing is still tight-as-a-gnats-chuff on a record that in typical Osees style ranges all over the shop from new wave to skronk to punk to disco (the highlights for me - the redhot groove of ‘Die Laughing’ and the Bowie/Eno/Wire glide of ‘Unusual & Cruel’). Crucially what’s always in place is what’s always grabbed me about Osees - this is an act of imagination on multiple genres, informed by a deep and wide musical knowledge but never about tasteful accumulation, rather the free friction that occurs when you run riot with ideas. Hooks for days, and a rock-solid dazzle to the sound that captivates throughout.”

Speaker Music Techxodus (Planet Mu)

“As a sonic statement the record swims in the same oceanic spaces as the furthest out Arthur Russell, Miles, A.R.Kane, Underground Resistance. As a listening experience it’s unlike anything else I’ve heard this year -  opener ‘D.T.A.W.O. (Deprogramming The Atonist World Order) is enfolding, engulfing, simultaneously a sanctuary of repetitive wonder but one populated with unpredictable elements that keep you on edge. The shift to polyrhythmic propulsion on ‘Techno-Vernacular Phreak’ is startling and then that deep subaquatic ambience starts seeping back in - you’re caught in this weird place somewhere between the Outkast of ‘Aquemini’ and the Dedekind Cut of ‘Tahoe’, and the remarkable ‘Holosonic Rebellion’ blends in African Warriors’ chants over glitchy funk in a way that has me flashing on memories of Saul Williams’ ‘Neptune Frost’. ‘Jes Grew’ is another highlight - whorls of jazzy bedlam plunged against beats and bloops that recall the Bomb Squad, before the stunning coda of ‘Our Starship To Ociya Syndor’, ‘Feenin’ and ‘Astro-Black Consciousness’ sees the album out with the sense of intergalactic escape and ascension that is almost overwhelming.”