RIP. A weekly roundup of releases on Bandcamp and Soundcloud selected and delivered by Aidan
Take a read of this. It’s an essay by Jean-Hugues Kabuiku on the various links between Dominick Fernow aka Vatican Shadow aka Prurient and the far right. I’ve never really been a fan, but I did feature something from his label Hospital, a release from Exoteric Continent back in 2015. I didn’t quite realise the extent of Fernow’s associations, but I’ve been wary of him for a while. Sometimes it’s enough just to deny any mention or coverage. Sometimes a line must be drawn. There’s been some pushback on this from different parties, something along the lines of how everything must be ideologically pure nowadays. I think that’s a bit of an overstatement, but at the same time, if you’re going to associate with Nazis and fascists, I have no time for you.
In lighter news, I’m on radio on Sunday night. 9pm Irish time. Link here.
NP [Jad Atoui & Anthony Sahyoun] - Lattices
Simply magical sounds from Lebanon, recorded in Beirut last year during lockdown. “The rhythm and harmonic content created … is un-gridded, devout of time signatures or a linear time consensus.” Parts of this album are a-melodic, parts feature utterly random and glorious harmonies. It’s a thrilling experience.
Ihsan Al-Munzer – Belly Dance Disco
This is simply joyous. It’s a reissue from last year of a 70s album of Lebanese disco synth. Completely coincidental that I feature two Lebanese releases in a row! Composer and performer Ihsan Al-Munzer attempted to fuse Middle-Eastern belly-dancing sounds with western “modern” approaches. It’s so incredibly infectious, the opening tracks, ‘Girls of Iskandariah’ and ‘Night Entertainer’ feature the most beautifully haunting melodies played through marvellously oscillating synths. I haven’t heard anything that’s stopped me in my tracks like this in quite some time. There’s a rather bizarre rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’ entitled ‘A New Candle’, which is definitely the most daring attempt at East-West fusion I’ve ever heard.
The album was released on BBE, which is offering a 20% discount on all its releases (bar pre-orders) for the month of July with the code “summerhot”. There’s a huge range of funk, soul, house, disco and hip-hop on offer, but if I had to recommend anything beyond the above it would be Pal Joey’s Hot Music, the available M+M Mixes (if only for his MFSB edit), this early hip-hop collection or King Britt’s Adventures In Lo-Fi.
Jalen Baker - Love’s In Need of Love Today
This is an instrumental cover of the opening track from Stevie Wonder’s 1976 album Songs In The Key Of Life. Embarrassingly enough I’d never heard it until it was performed by the cast of Pose in a season 2 episode. As soon as they started singing I thought “Jay-Z sampled that”. Well, technically, No I.D. did. Anyway I’ve been listening to a host of tracks sampled by Jay-Z lately, and this one has come out on top as most played. So I went in search of different versions of it, and by far this is my favourite. Maybe it’s because no one can possibly top Stevie’s vocals. It’s a gorgeous rendition from Jalen Baker, a vibraphonist from Houston, Texas, who released his debut album This Is Me, This Is Us earlier this year.
VA - Brexshitting: The portmanteau of tautological research (Difficult Art And Music)
A sonic exploration of the Brexit referendum, merging Musique-Concrete, technological decay, and rigorous academic socio-political research.
If the title wasn’t enough to pull you in… This release takes the usual tropes of modern experimental music, be they noise and distortion, abstract silences and modular manipulation, and introduces field recordings from the EU HQ in Brussels and Wetherspoons pub in Kent. For those of you outside of Britain, Wetherspoons is a chain of pubs that serves very cheap booze, always keeps the house lights on and never plays music. Being in one is like being in a nightclub or at a wedding at closing time. All night long. Its owner is also a major Brexiteer. Anyway back to the non-music. It comes from Difficult Art And Music, a new label seemingly run by Distant Animals, who contributes the sounds along with Antoine Canon and Dylan Beattie, I haven’t fully wrapped my head around it and it’s not even released fully until July 31.
Vivian Yanzhe Yu - BEIJING STORIES-DAY
This is a really wonderful album from Chicago-based Vivian Yanzhe Yu, who took a series of field recordings during a trip to her hometown of Beijing, China. Upon her return to the US, she created these pieces, blending subtle ambient movements with the lilt of local speech and all manner of other sounds she encountered. It’s moving and hypnotic - the speech itself means nothing to me, but indeed it probably means nothing to anyone other than those having the original conversation. “Memories encapsulated like droplets of time,” as she writes herself.
This is pretty cool stuff, if I was being lazy I’d call it dusty loop-based sample-laden electronic hip-hop… It’s not dusty, there’s lots of hiss and crackle but it’s probably artificial, but does it matter? It’s a vibe. Hot and languid instrumentals.
evo-natura, a label based in Athens, Greece, has released this mixtape from Brooklyn-based Celes. Not to be mired in cliché, but it genuinely takes one on a journey. Bells, water lapping, friendly conversation, ambient wash and the crunch of footsteps combine to form the bulk of the first side, which is 14 minutes in total. Angry guitar intrudes into the second, almost reticent in its interjections at first until distortion brings it to uncomfortable but necessary levels. Those bells return to provide a coda of relief in the final stages of this trip.
A delightful blend of cello and electronics, this is haunting and enlivening. Created to coincide with an AV live show, the pieces are described as “audiovisual paintings”. The interplay between strings and electronic melodies, particularly on centrepiece ‘Camille’, are gorgeous.
Finally this week, here’s a mix I made for Chuck Pee. A while back he asked me to put together a mix like “Chilled Euphoria mixed by Bandcloud”. So I looked through the various CDs in that series and plucked my favourite moments, from people like Leftfield, Solar Stone and Salt Tank, remixes of big tunes like Chicane’s ‘Saltwater’ and that rather epic ambient mix of Humate’s ‘3.2’ from Bedrock. It’s pretty free-flowing, no proper mixing as such, I just wanted to let the tracks breathe. I hope it helps you too. Thanks to Chuck for asking, and for your friendship!