B.Cool Aid Cnt Go Back (Tell Me) ft Pink Siifu & Ahwlee (Lex)
It was the Pink Siifu that drew me to this but the Butcher Brown production credit also had a deep pull - BB knows how to build a track and avoid all-guns-blazing cliches, this builds from a hushed warp of cut up keys and bass into a thunking, smokily funky slab of boombap over which Siifu, B-Cool, Jimetta Rose, V.C.R & Maurice II lace in a gorgeous mix of soul chorale and sharp rhymes. Start your year off right.
Bulgarian Voices Angelite Medieval Eastern Orthodox Music (JARO)
Archaic in the best sense, the Bulgarian Voices Angelite were first formed in Sofia 25 years ago as a private choir from the ashes of the old State Television Choir which had been instituted way back in 52. This singing is unique, cryptic, suspended, often dissonant and completely shorn of vibrato or any kind of expressiveness that isn’t pure and ancient - it doesn’t merely feel like ‘period’ singing, more that the two dozen women in this choir have an innate understanding of how the medieval and the contemporary avant-garde relate and plunge these ancient Balkan and Bulgarian songs into that space. Hushed glissando, shouts, batshit rhythms, dissonant friction yet always with this solemn radiant focus - I found this stunning collection to be as close as I got to heaven this January. You put it on and you just vanish into the sound these ladies make.
William Byrd, Stile Antico The Golden Renaissance (Universal)
The second release in Stile Antico’s ‘Golden Renaissance’ trilogy on the Decca Classics label commemorates 400 years since the death of English composer William Byrd with a set focussing on the music of his final years, written for the clandestine Catholic services of his Essex patron, including his amazing Mass for Four Voices and the absolute CHOON Propers for the Feast of the Assumption. Sacred songs in English and Latin, and his Tribue Domine, a homage to the music of an older generation of composers, make this all the Byrd you could need this Spring and the recording and ensemble singing is as close to holy rapture and terror as you can get. Immediate time-travel.
Fly Anakin Blicky Bop (Lex)
Fly Anakin has been making some of the most spellbinding underground US hip hop of the past few years and this preview of his brilliant new LP (Skinemaxxx Side A dropping soon) is strange, trippy, refuses tactility, welcomes amniotic viscousness, and wraps its tendrils round your brainstem in 143 seconds flat. Every time your mind tries to reach out and touch this ectomorphic sound it retreats from you, its flaggelum twitching in response. I swear down I’m untwisted, but this record is deliciously psychedelic.
César Franck, Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, Alain Altinoglu Symphony In D Minor - Rédemption - Le Chausseur Maudit (Alpha Classics/Outhere Music France)
Altinoglu’s first recording as music director of the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra and he’s off to a flyer - having never heard this symphony before I dug into some VERY old reviews from the pieces’ first performance in 1889 and noted as usual that classical music critics have a savagery that makes us pop writers seem tame as fuck. Gounod called it "the affirmation of impotence taken to the point of dogma", Camille Bellaigue in a review published in Revue des Deux Mondes dismissed it as "arid and drab music, without ... grace or charm," and derided the principal four-bar theme as "hardly above the level of those given to Conservatoire students." In the wrong hands I’m sure this score can end up a lugubrious mix of French joi de vivre and Wagnerian moodiness, but I found this a great new addition to my symphonic understanding of that period ‘tween the Romantic and the Modern, irresistably tuneful - particularly the movement you may be familiar with, the second allegretto - in a C19 sense but also shadowed by portents of something irresolvably and unmanageably C20, not purely emotional but philosophic. Beautifully recorded (the Cor Anglais that early critics were disgusted to hear in a symphonic context is a particular highlight) - and the additional pieces here, the busy bustlingly melodic tone poems ‘Redemption’ and ‘Chasseur Maudit’ seal a lovely deal. Yes for Franckophiles but for everyone.
Grupo Um Onze Por Oito (Farout)
In a basement under Sao Paulo’s Teodoro Sampaio Street in 1975 teenage brothers Lelo and Zé Eduardo Nazario invited bassist Zeca Assumpção to join their musical experiments in a basement. All three had been playing in Hermeto Pascoal’s Grupo, all three were suffering under a military dictatorship in Brazil who had closed clubs and venues, censored radio and TV, but underground in this basement they created this amazing music that fused avant-garde impulses with jazz-fusion and Afro Brazilian rhythms. It sounds like the kind of escapism only a military dictatorship could engender - free and expressive, full of sky and ground, silkiness and stealth. They recorded an album ‘Starting Point’ in two days at Vice-Versa Studios with revered engineer Renato Viola, kept the tapes when no one would release it, and it’s only now, nigh-on a half-century on, that it’s seeing the light of day thanks to Far Out. It’s an amazing record and this lead-off gives you an insight into just how amazing. Get it on your wishlists.
Mez Atmosphere (Mez)
Just love the gaseous reach and miasmic oddity of this - Mez’s rhymes are as ever lazer sharp and compellingly repetetive, sense absconding amid the syllabic surges and stops but it’s Grandmixx’s production with Mez that really makes this so damn addictive and rewindable, like a Dennis Wize production timestretched until it warps and melds around the slo-mo Drill-paced beats. Stunning single.
Obijuan Guanahani (Bad Taste)
Led here by the Jaydonclover connection - this set of diseased, dank, deliciously deranged slo-mo madness comes from her producer dylantheinfamous and though adhering to Bad Taste’s usual template of idiot-savant wasted wonder dti throws enough curveballs into the mix, and Obijuan crafts some utterly absorbing anti-narratives to make this one of Bad Taste’s most compelling releases in years. The first essential rap album of 2023. Take a hit and get spellbound.
Phase Simulacrum EP (Metalheadz)
Belgian d’n’b don Phase’s ‘Shore To Shore’ LP was one of 2022’s bass-music highlights and this new EP sees his welcome return to the fray - gratifyingly where the LP mixed both lugubrious dankness with fluidity and lightness, this EP focusses much more on the darker edge of the d’n’b spectrum. Great rolling fuzziness on ‘Unsu’, cut-up breaks and a general vibe of nastiness on the title track, ‘Code Of Honour’ hits as hard as the Eric B/Rakim feel the title suggests and ‘I Need A’ is so damn satisfying in the low-end your neighbours are gonna be feeling it. Gonna keep em peeled on all Metalheadz and 31 output this year (and if any d’n’b headz out there know where else I should be looking please let me know in the comments).
Francis Poulenc, Veronique Gens, Orchestre National De Lille, Alexandre Bloch La Voix Humaine (Alpha Classics/Outhere Music France)
La Voix Humaine (The Human Voice) is a one-act opera for a soprano and large orchestra, based on a text by Jean Cocteau. It depicts a woman in a telephone conversation with a former lover, where only her side is heard in the conversation, Cocteau’s textwritten in disjointed bipolar phrases as tender as they can be anguished. This brokenness of structure, the fragmentary nature of the ideas (most of the tracks here are little more than two minutes long and many are alot shorter than that), means that no full aria is formed throughout the piece and Gens is amazing at putting us in the headspace of the lover on this emotional rollercoaster. As ever with Poulenc the orchestration is just sublime, played with colour and sensitivity by the players of Orchestre National De Lille under Alexandre Bloch and the Sinfonietta forms a blessed relief to the trauma and torment but also showcases the band’s precisely poised playing. Superb.
Margo Price Strays (Margo Price/Lorna Vista)
Recommended by a major musical discoverer out there right now (the inestimable Cindy Stern who you should find on FB and Insta right now) this is startlingly fresh country (? well - IS IT? In parts, but that feels reductive - so MUCH going on here) music with warmth, groove, soul and power. Price has this amazing voice that can be plaintive and punchy and at times even punkish, but the warm wood’n’wire production here not only brings out the gorgeous turns and trails that songs like ‘Time Machine‘ and ‘Hell In The Heartland‘ take, but also has that divine ability to just set up a great groove (check the opener ‘Been To The Mountain’) over which Price’s voice can soar and ebb and flow and feel free. Written in 2021 during a mushroom fuelled trip to South Carolina, completed in the ‘hallucinatory hills’ around LA, at times this sounds like Modern Lovers, at times like a great lost Stevie Nicks set with the heartbreaking plangency of a John Prine or Iris DeMent record, at times bizarrely close to Meg Remy’s US Girls (the wonderful ‘Radio’ ft. Sharon Von Etten). Eventually though it all starts sounding unique, all starts sounding like Margo Price music. A fascinating, constantly moving - in all senses - record, this.
Skyzoo x The Other Guys The Mind Of A Saint (First Generation Rich)
He really does have no right to still be this good and this consistent - for two decades now Skyzoo has been one of the best MCs and producers out there (for reconnaissance check this extremely cute lil' flip-book) and this latest collab with producers The Other Guys keeps the standard high. Based on the ‘Snowfall’ series apparently, and the character Franklin - about which I know NOTHING - but don’t let that preclude your listening, these are narratives you immediately understand, focussed on the drug-waves of the 80s and beyond, always suffused with fab arrangements and beats that lunge at your neck until it snaps. There are alot of old-skool 90s inflected/affected rappers out there who bore me to tears. Skyzoo NEVER has and isn’t about to start. Street narratives always with an eye on the cosmos and city hall and an album that rewards repeated listening just to uncover all its detail and derailments. Recommended.
Sonido Verde De Moyobamba Limited Dance Edition Nr. 17 (Analog Africa)
Fab, psychedelic Cumbia straight out the Peruvian jungle from a band formed in 1980 by guitar prodigy Leonardo Vela Rodriguez. Love the almost-Ventures-like surf geetar, trippy-as-fuck organ and the sheer unbridled danceable FUN of the rhythms here - this is music lit up with jungle colour and busy with jungle life to the point where the fuzzy psyche-ness of it all makes you suspect you’ve accidentally licked a toad you shouldn’t have. The band recorded five obscure-as-fuck albums for Discos Universal between 81 and 87 and godbless those miracle workers at Analog Africa for collating the best of them here. Superb.
Taraf Syriana Taraf Syriana (Taraf Syriana/Lula World)
Okay I’ve got to admit the description I read of a ‘eastern-Mediterranean Fairport Convention’ had me fkn DROOLING but in a weird way, that’s precisely the tightrope tween folkiness and fantasy that the brilliant Taraf Syriana walk so adroitly. Violist Omar Abou Afach performed with Syria’s National Orchestra before emigrating to Montreal in 2015 (perhaps the fact he was at a rehearsal in 2014 that was mortar-attacked contributed to this decision). He and other conservatoire-trained virtuosic players form this four-piece which also includes Naeem Shanwar (qanun), Noémy Braun (cello) and Sergiu Popa (accordion). What they play is the folk music of Syria, but also the music of the Balkan and Romani traditions, using traditional instrumentation (the qanun for instance is an instrument with a 4000 year history) and their strength as an ensemble and mutual understanding radiates out of every moment of this ace debut LP. There’s reverence here but also a huge amount of playfulness - Noémy Braun has actually added two strings to her cello to birth a new unique instrument called the sestacorda which sounds partly like a sitar, partly like a kemenche, partly like the Moroccan guimbri, and the band’s repertoire travels in both directions between its Balkan/Middle East bases, as well as bringing in songs and musical traditions emblematic of Syria’s oft-forgot minorities - the Arabic, Kurdish, Syriac, Armenian, Iraqi and Turkish components, all of which you can hear radiating out of this gorgeous set of songs. Highly recommended.