The Polish composer Waclaw Zimpel has been brushing the brisket with four talented classical musicians from Southern India, playing in the Carnatic tradition; where our Polish genius supplies the electronics and jazzy woodwinds, the team of Udupa, Baba, Raja and Karthik dazzle with an array of traditional instruments. The stodgy word “collaboration” doesn’t really fit here when faced with such invention and infectious delights. Zimpel has been greasing this particular horn since 2015; he comes to us from a varied background in free jazz / improv, minimalist-inspired composition, something referred to as “folk trance”, and solo electronica albums. Indeed it’s even claimed that the Saagara project sprang to life out of a “jam session”, a term which I thought had long been deprecated.

The achievement here feels like something much greater than a run-of-the-mill “East meets West” contrivance, which has plagued recorded music for longer than it should, but I’m at a loss to explain what it might be. My familiarity with Carnatic music is less than minus-zero, but the juice in these grooves comes close to plugging into a universal language. Maybe Zimpel is attempting to reach a condition of “world folk” as he finds rich seams of commonality between free jazz and Carnatic, while continuing to honour traditions and never once settling for kitschy easy listening approximations. John McLaughlin is invoked in name, and it would be nice to think he approves mightily of this significant musical development. (23/09/2024)

If I’m reading this right, her singing voice can also be heard on this upbeat record, along with Svetlana Spajic and Zoja Morovcanin. While the opening cuts pander to those foot-tromping types hungry for dancefloor fodder, I think Lenhart’s plan is more oblique and intelligent than simply adding beats and electronic rhythms to samples of folk and ethnic music forms, and from about track 3 or 4 you can start to feel the waves of seriousness and engagement rolling off every track. One telling image might be the cover art to a marginal 2012 release of his, on which an Eastern European religious icon is détourned with slogans about capitalism and oppression by “the system”. I particularly enjoyed the relentless anthem ‘Mejremo’ – I might not understand the language, but the stern message of warning contained in this music is very clear.

Cover art to Dens is also very strong – a cabal of masked figures wearing gloves, handling bundles of tapes as if they’ve just discovered a cache of BitCoin keys and are wondering where to start their plan to take over the world. Vinyl edition of this tasty Pljeskavica is also available. (24/10/2023)

One breakthrough moment for them may have been their Thin Wrist Recordings LP in 2016 (quickly picked up by a German label the next year), but they’ve been putting out their own cassettes and LPs with hand-stamped covers since 2013. Another moment was 2019, when I Was Real appeared on an albums-of-the-year list chez The Wire. Even today’s record Power Failures (KR108) is a reissue, kind of, since it was one of many projects to which they turned their talented paws during the lockdown years, first emerging on Bandcamp in 2020. Today’s manifestation on good-old Karl Records is a double LP and sees our chums occasionally joined by guest musicians Sue Garner, Steve Maing, Yasi Perera, Barry Weisblat, and Ira Kaplan, guitarist from Yo La Tengo, who ya gotta figure is a loyal fan.

Before actually playing the record, for about two seconds I formed the wholly mistaken impression that we’d be getting Sunburned Hand of the Man mark II, or possibly something in mode of Mouthus, another NYC combo beloved of Thurston. Instead, 75 Dollar Bill turn out to be very far from excessive or noisy or trying to outdo a million Cecil Taylor imitators with a mistaken attempt at “energy” music, and have a strong “ethnic” vibe with their hand-knitted ragas, non-Western rhythms, and distinctly African flavour on certain cuts – ‘Another Jumper’s Harp’ could probably pass the Ali Farka Toure blindfold test at fifty paces. Although some listeners evidently perceive lysergic swirls and psychedelic patterns in what, inevitably, gets tagged as “mantric” or “trance-inducing” music, I’m more impressed by the unfussy and unpretentious playing of this duo, who work through each long-form groove with patience and insistence, and don’t feel compelled to hide their skills behind loud volume, effects, or other gimmicks. I’d like to think their stage show has the same “what you see is what you get” vibe. (July 2023)

Bartosz Jakubicki and Artur Blaszczyk are the Polish duo who record as synta[xe]rror, giving themselves a band name with unpronounceable square brackets and the suggestion of a computer program going wrong (they would have felt at home on compilations like Or Some Computer Music Issue 1, but that was in 1999). On their element [OFF] crime (ZOHAR 264-2) they’re explicitly adding lots more percussion to their work and aiming for a mechanised, “metal” effect as part of their take on the IDM genre. Although CD is structured as four separate “elements”, it plays as a non-stop party of 41:10, building in intensity and aggression as it proceeds. Actually this is a lot more varied and enjoyable than [DOT], their previous item for this label, which we heard in 2021 and which left an abiding impression of too much computer programming in pursuit of its dystopian future vision. Conversely, today’s “crime” special is an abundance of hammering beats, broken and distorted electric groinks, loops and repeats, and judicious use of voice samples. No matter what I say I seem to make this all sound rather retro and old-hat, but it’s worth investigating; exhausting, overloaded sound, which is also exhilarating at some level.

Equally overloaded is Artwork 51 (ZOHAR 273-2), the second release by the trio of Old Castle. I still remain slightly surprised at how this odd team-up of Robin Storey, Robert L. Pepper and Shaun Sandor ever came together, but you can recap what we know about their backgrounds from our brief note of February 2022. Crazy electronics, beats, samples, and distortions…what strikes me about this group is they can’t seem to leave anything alone and are never satisfied with a track, ever tinkering with additional elements, piling on layers as their artistic demons dictate. Rarely a quiet or contemplative moment for us listeners, nor a second to breathe fresh air; each tune feels like it’s being pulled in three different directions at once. Even so, some remarkable inventions and aural innovations do fly to the surface in amidst this confusing swirl of unhinged dynamics. The label press notes seem convinced this music is a plausible update on classic kosmische music of the 1970s from Cologne, and draw comparisons with Cluster and Neu!. In the next breath, they’re also telling us to enjoy the psychedelic trance states it can impart. It is kinda lysergic, but we can’t settle back and enjoy the trip because of some talkative hippy in the room who won’t shut up and who’s harshing everyone’s mellow.

Robin Storey here also as his solo act Rapoon with Skulls On The Plains Of Turkey (ZOHAR 274-2). I’m glad he’s found a sympathetic home on the Zoharum label who continue to publish his new releases and, for a time, offered reissues and remix versions of his earlier works. This one continues Storey’s preoccupation with non-Western music forms and repurposing of same; one way to account for his grand project might be as a recasting of ethnic music samples into new forms of ambient, techno, or drone music. What strikes me about Skulls is the clarity of the sound, betokening a clarity of purpose; each sound, each note, stands apart, taking its place in the well-knit tapestry. I shan’t say that his 1990s work was “murky” in comparison, but it’s interesting that he’s apparently set aside the processing toolkit and mixing desk in favour of a rigorous collage method, resulting in stark outlines and bold shapes. The press notes speak of “tribal rhythms” and “the exotic world of the Orient”, and hint at the possibility that the album tells a coherent start-to-finish fictional story.

A chunky set of pieces for contrabass clarinet, composed and performed by Michal Górczyńsky. Now, I am as much a sucker for an interesting clarinet album as anyone, so I was hopeful for this disc as I stuck it in the cd player for the first time. And I have to say I was not disappointed as it is a consignment of super-high grade product; recorded, mixed and mastered with great clarity and warmth by Andrzej Izdebski at Iziphonics Studio in Warsaw.

Michal Górczyńsky’s compositions appear to be made up of multiple parts so, being the sole performer, Górczyńsky overdubs his contrabass clarinet to achieve his desired effect. There are twelve “regions” on this disc and the sparse liner notes inform us that “All cantus firmus melodies come from Songs Of Polish Folklore by Oskar Kolberg”. Not having heard the name before, I did a little research. Born in 1814, Kolberg is hailed as “…the greatest chronicler of Polish folk life.” According to one source “…Kolberg devoted most of his life to researching folk culture. In 1839, he went on his first expedition around Masovia. He began documenting folk music, creating the graphic notation of many folk songs. Kolberg was the first ethnographer to divide Polish folklore into regions, which he described in his monumental work called The People: Their Customs, Way of Life, Language, Folktales, Proverbs, Rites, Witchcraft, Games, Songs, Music and Dances…” Friends with Frédéric Chopin, or perhaps it is more accurate to say a close acquaintance – Kolberg’s older brother Wilhelm was in fact more a close friend of the composer. However, Oscar Kolberg became fascinated by Chopin’s work and he studied at the Music Academy in Berlin. The Bloomsbury Dictionary of Music defines a cantus firmus as “…a pre-existing melody, usually derived from Gregorian chant, upon which a new composition is based…”

So, the material itself is sonically consistent in terms of the way the contrabass clarinet has been recorded by Górczyńsky in that there are no production bells and whistles; everything is recorded straight, better to let the compositions breathe, like a 2013 bottle of Nalewka Babuni.

Górczyńsky contrasts the melodic timidity of the first piece, “Lubelskie 504” with the temerity and urgency of “Radomskie 292”. The rumbling, rasping “Rzeszowskie 191” pairs the clarinet with the sound of piles of objects accidentally collapsing in another part of the studio, while “Lubelskie Oczepinowe” balances interweaving melodic lines with extended technique; Górczyńsky pummelling on the keys of the instrument; powering through the resultant blisters. He whistles in response to his clarinet lines on “Rzeszowskie 137” while Radomskie 213 churns out bass growling like the accompaniment to an all-night German Expressionist film festival in Transylvania.

Michal Górczyńsky is currently also a member of Bastarda, Boys Band Trio, Cukunft, Details In The Air (with Ken Vandermark and Mikolaj Trzaska), Ensemble Tuning XIII, Mikolaj Trzaska Clarinet Quartet, and Kwartludium. He also has releases on the Multikulti Project imprint; one a duo with Kora player Buba Badjie Kuyateh, the other a trio with pianist Thomas Wiracki and vocalist Sean Palmer. That trio’s 2019 album William’s Things is a surreal mixture of chamber jazz, improv, loops and progressive rock based on the works of William Blake which is worth seeking out if that sounds like your bag. Unzipped Fly Records describe themselves as a “Warsaw (Poland) based independent record label, management & production team”, but aside from a Soundcloud account – their website refused to load at the time I began writing this review – there is very little online about them that I could find. Since then I have successfully accessed their site, but their last release is from October 2020, so here’s hoping they are simply biding their time to resume operations and not a casualty of the pandemic. Nonetheless, they sport one of the best descriptions I’ve read of a label on Bandcamp lately; “…our music is REAL and contains the best phenomena in a borderlands of alternative / jazz / ethno music in Poland”. I’m feeling that. Good on ‘em.

Beyer and Arcomusical are on a mission to expand the repertoire of music that can be played on this indigenous instrument, and cultivate a diversity of musical approaches on this album – compositions, solo works, ensemble works, combining the berimbau with classical percussion instruments, allowing for a variety of melodic and rhythmic patterns. We can’t really say that they’re trying to “insert” the berimbau into Western classical traditions, despite all the obvious skills of the players involved, and instead they work to a very open-minded and porous musical philosophy, which undoubtedly do much to enlarge the musical potential of the berimbau, moving it well beyond any “folk” or “ethnic” traditions. Thankfully, they do all this without amplification or adding any electronic instruments or effects.

The showcase piece here might just be the impressive title track, composed in six movements by Matt Ulery, and performed by six berimbau players with the composer joining them on double bass. I like the idea that the ensemble “sounds like one hyper- berimbau”, as the press notes have it, and the piece is full of ingenious subtle shifting rhythms with a fascinating lilt; it’s impressive how the melodic and harmonic elements just seem to float out of the music, in a delicate way that makes most scored classical music seem almost overstated by comparison. Issued in a digipak with a booklet of notes and colour photographs. Available via New Focus Recordings. (18/03/2022)

Sleeve art-wise, an over-botoxed shark (?) with piercing, headlamped eyes welcomes you to the worldview of Širom, a Slovakian Slovenian trio where intimations of their being “an unplugged Faust”, while also displaying hints of the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Don Cherry’s multi-cultural period, can’t fail to spark the curiosity of even the most ennui-stricken audiophile. A trio-shaped combo stands before us, by the names of Istok Koren, Ana Kravanja and Samo Kutin. They combined their talents for the first time when Najoua, Ana and Samo’s kalimba duo, joined Iztok for an impromptu session. Then, after a shared tour with Iztok’s SKM Banda, the idea for the formation of Širom fell into place. …Liquified… follows on from 2019’s A Universe that Roasts Blossoms for a Horse (also on Glitterbeat) and was hatched/nurtured during those times of isolation and high covidity, where their time was spent on constructing acoustic resonators (as you do) and expanding their collection of exotic and obscure instrumentation; their origins seemingly spanning continents.

So, a forward thinking/driven outfit where the major directive is to plunder dusty, neglected sound sources from dusty, neglected places, might seem a tad perverse, much like a classic rotary dial ring coming from a top of the range smart-phone. But, three albums in, it’s clear that the acoustic-eclectica served as main course is not mere ethno-forgery hoopla or trend-conscious faddism. …Liquified… cements/refines their individualistic stance times two. It’s their first double album venture and this gives extra space to truly stretch out and to showcase/tweak the sonorities of their more recent acquisitions. The starter “Wilted Superstition Engaged in Copulation” (talk about unwieldy titles!!) is an exercise in conflicting moods where an attractive frame drum and chimes motif reverses into a lengthy outing for Ana’s frenetic skirls of viola (violation?) and the ancient-sounding blare of the Arabic double-reeded Mizmar. More of Ana’s dramatic bowing graces “Grazes, Wrinkles, Drifts into Sleep”, in which her extreme upper register vocal trills make for an effectively otherworldly shadowing device. “Prods the Fire With a Bone, Rolls Over With a Snake” (???) offers slightly more of a four-square experience. The plucky strings of the Tampura and again, Ana’s larynx from Planet Helium, wantonly disport themselves in ways of a decidedly pagan nature.

‘A reservation made at the Penguin Cafe made by the Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter’ might just shade it ever so slightly over the Art Ensemble/Faust/Cherry comparisons… but Širom are more than just playing with a few fractions and come thoroughly deserving of your attention. A scribbled entry in your wants list for the vinyl or c.d. version should follow…

There are other instruments and voices chanting and singing, providing a fuller picture of the musical life in these regions, but the gongs are the stars here. Close listening reveals remarkable differences in styles of playing, in tones produced by differing gong sizes and shapes, in melodic, harmonic and rhythmic contours from one group to the next; and yet at the same time connections can be felt and understood with repeated listening. The “Eagle Dance” from Luzon Island in the Philippines somehow sounds closer to the Cambodian Punong gong ensemble’s “Offering to the Spirits” than it does to other recordings from the Philippines.

Almost equally important to Morinaga is the act of field recording itself: the environmental sounds, the chatter of village life, the spaces in which these performances were recorded and how these affect the resonance of the gongs and the vibe of the performances. Some tracks (especially the “knobbed” or “nipple gongs”, such as those played by the Ede Bih of Vietnam) produce sustained trance-inducing overtones when played together. These overtones sound very different when bouncing off walls in an enclosed space than they do outside in the open air. The players seem to be taking advantage of such differences and the way complex overtone harmonics create their own beating patterns as the sound waves propagate, further compounding the rhythms of the actual striking of the gongs.

Yasuhiro Morinaga is an interesting character: ethnographer, field recordist, sound artist, composer, filmmaker and I’m sure many other things. We met several times in Japan where I lived for a five month residency in 2019. Like me he had an interest in early recording and the intertwining of ethnographic field work and recording technology and took me to meet a Japanese collector of antique Edison cylinders and talking machines that he wanted to work with for the score he was producing for a huge multi-media performance of Setan Jawa by acclaimed Indonesian director Garin Nugroho. I was introduced to Yasu through Moushumi Bhowmik, another interesting character (I seem to collect them). Moushumi runs the wonderful Travelling Archive in Kolkata, an archive of field recordings from throughout the Bengal regions of India and Bangladesh. Sublime Frequencies released an LP called The Travelling Archive of her work which I produced, and she introduced me to Deben Bhattacharya’s widow with whom I made the Paris to Calcutta: Men and Music on the Desert Road book and 4CD set, also for Sublime Frequencies. Deben was another collector of field recordings similarly interested in documenting musical traditions that seemed to connect more to each other and to unfathomable histories than to specific regions. He released many LPs of his recordings alongside radio shows and documentaries—a huge influence on my own and Sublime Frequencies work in general.

It seemed logical that Yasu’s gong recordings should also come out on Sublime Frequencies. We discussed a possible two or three record set, we sequenced recordings and took it to the bigwigs at Sublime Frequencies (Full disclosure about this review, now that you are nearly done with it, I am friends with Yasu and am rather biased towards his work…). I have been with Sublime Frequencies since its inception and am good friends with co-owners Alan Bishop and Hisham Mayet, so Yasu’s gong project seemed a slam dunk. But for some reason (Idiocy? Drunkenness? Brain aneurysms?) they passed on it. Perhaps the expense was daunting, and they HAD recently released an LP of music from Vietnam, Music of the Bahnar People from the Central Highlands of Vietnam, that had a bit of overlap with Morinaga’s recordings. I felt terrible. I believed I was a big record producer, making things happen…but nope. Then I thought of Sub Rosa, specifically because of the David Toop project Lost Shadows: In Defense of the Soul, an incredible and room-clearing collection of recordings from 1978 of Yanomami shamanism from the Amazon. I had no connections to Sub Rosa, but Yasu’s work spoke for itself and thankfully they saw fit to release it. And a good thing too. Morinaga’s work adds another chapter to the complex world of Asian gong culture and takes its rightful place with other fascinating releases—The Music of Indonesia series on Smithsonian Folkways (especially volume 12 Gongs and Vocal Music from Sumatra), David Blair Stiffler’s Music from the Mountain Provinces of the Philippines on Numerophon, the two volumes of Lyrichord’s Muranao Kakolitang: Philippine Gong Music, Playasound’s Gong’s Vietnam-Laos, Kink Gong’s beautiful LP Gongs of Cambodia and Laos. I’m sure there are more. It is another piece of the puzzle of humanity, strengthening the belief that there are ways to define culture and humanity beyond geo-political borders.

The package comes with detailed notes by Morinaga, an introduction by David Toop and lovely photography by Naoki Ishikawa, a mountaineer, adventurer, author and highly awarded photographer. These photos would have looked amazing in the LP-sized book I wanted to include with the LPs if my vision for its release on Sublime Frequencies had happened—CD packaging often leaves a bit to be desired, frankly.

If you want to go deeper into Morinaga’s work, he has a series of self-released CDs that include many more recordings from his archive. More info on his other projects can be found on his website.

ROBERT MILLIS

Many thanks to Rob for this guest review. Rob is a member of Climax Golden Twins, who released an excellent new double album at the end of 2022.

Daniel Pesca is a talented pianist, but his Promontory (Neuma 147) is not experimental or informed by modernism. On the contrary, the pieces here are very narrative and descriptive, many of them aiming to evoke a particular landscape, such as the ‘Olcott Park’ of Aaron Travers, the ‘Isles’ of Alison Yun-Fei Jang, or the ‘Hyde Park Boulevard’ composed by Pesca himself. All of this is in line with the pianist’s idea that he can use the piano to paint perspective views; he expresses the aim of “creating illusions of depth [and] distance”. If you like stories, you can enjoy this as an album of views. I enjoyed ‘Bell Illuminations’ composed by Augusta Read Thomas, with its musical expressions of carillons. No denying Pesca’s virtuosity and precision, but the music feels quaint and old-fashioned, like something from the 1920s.

Richard Carr has composed a series of string quartets on Over The Ridge (Neuma 146). Like Pesca, his music too seems largely untroubled by all the developments in modernism that have taken place since Berg and Boulez, but at least Carr is open to the possibility of improvisation in music, as are his talented team of players Lutzke, Lipchik, Burhans and Jensen; it seems that four of the 12 tracks here were improvised, with Carr himself joining in on violin on those occasions. However it’s interesting that even when improvising, the musicians rarely depart from a root note, and still arrive at pleasing melodic inventions. One senses a lack of risk-taking. Carr describes how the music came about by a “process of emergent structure”, which he likens to riding (a horse?) up to the top of a ridge and then deciding where to go next. Not unpleasant music, but not especially inventive or exciting.

The PAN Project group aims to play a mix of traditional Chinese, Korean, and Japanese music, using Western free improvisation as the basis for a lot of the performances; the team are four players from East Asia, along with the clarinet improv veteran Ned Rothenberg and Jeff Roberts. Apart fomr Ned’s bass clarinet, the instrumentation is 100% traditional – erhu, shakuhachi flute, guqin, piri, saenghwang, etc., and the group achieve some very moving and affecting music as well as meeting their goal of exploring “the creative nature of collaboration across cultures”. My favourite piece on the album PAN Project (Neuma 148) is the mournful ‘Si Xiang Gi’, which apparently comes to us from folk music of the Taiwan peninsula of Hengchun, and dates back to the 17th century Qing dynasty. You may enjoy ‘Yi Gu Ren’, which, although improvised, is derived from music of the even earlier Ming dynasty and is likewise rooted in a 3,000 year old history. There’s also plenty fireworks on the five-part ‘Song Of The Sea Palace’, derived from that Korean musical storytelling mode known as “pansori” – a morality tale in the form of a fairy story involving several talking animals. Performed simply with vocals and percussion, this set is a real rouser. We must also highlight the strong gender balance of PAN Project and the talented women in the group – vocalist Gamin from New York, erhu player Ying-Chieh Wang, percussionist Woonjung Sim from Korea, and vocalist Sae-Yeon Jeong (who performed the Sea Palace songs). Far from being a populist cocktail of genres and styles, this music has a real authenticity to it, and is well worth hearing.

All the above from 11th October 2021.

He’s picked up a bit of attention already for his open-ended approach to sampling music and culture from around the world (indeed MFD contains sound-samples picked up on his international travels), and for his unusual day job as a beekeeper. Indeed some sympathetic listeners find parallels between his music and his hives of bees so carefully cultivated. Today’s record – an acronym which unpacks into “Music For Dance” – contains 13 tracks, assembled by a wide variety of means and produced in several European locations…the chain of production is indeed quite hard to unpick…there are samples of field recordings and voices from his travels across Europe, the Far East, and America, plus many guests musicians contributing to certain moments like guests at a sandwich buffet. This included various vocalists and drummers, and also the gifted Ondes Martenot player Christine Ott.

Some pleasant and slightly oddball sounds surface now and again, but Kaspar – real name Yerri-Gaspar Hummel – hasn’t yet developed much in the way of musical or organisational skills to help him arrange his pot-pourri of elements into a coherent shape. Each track feels vague, unfinished, unsatisfying; more like doodles or sketches than finished works. I don’t doubt his sincerity when he claims to be engaging with culture, technology, and the environment, but he doesn’t manifest these truths very clearly or convincingly on record, nor does he say anything original about them. The playful cover art is by the great Tomi Ungerer. (20/09/2021)

The Dorf are a group of German players who create their own form of avant-garde big-band jazz, and have previously applied their talents to realising the compositions of Phill Niblock, plus there have been collaborative performances with Caspar Brötzmann, F.M. Einheit, and Eugene Chadbourne.

Today’s record Protest Possible (UMLAND RECORDS 50) is an unusual set of songs, played as a bizarre mix of upbeat jazz crossed with rock music (with very heavy drums), demented cabaret songs, or sometimes appearing as something more vague and dissonant. The plan was to create a “protest” record, in order to express their feelings about consumerism and materialism in modern society. It took them three years of effort to complete, mainly since to make sure they captured the zeitgeist, they recruited various German authors, philosophers, journalists and playwrights, to contribute the lyrics. The finished results are heavy going; all the lyrics are in German, so the messages are a bit lost on an English audience, but it’s evident that these songs are urgently trying to tell us something. Even without knowing the language, I still sense our highly-literate friends are over-explaining and over-complicating matters; nothing here is as direct as any given anarcho-punk record by Crass or Angelic Upstarts. The songs are sometimes frantic, with a barrage of slogans and verbiage delivered at high speed from several singing voices; and sometimes the message is literally hammered home, through the use of heavy drumbeats and overpowering rhythm.

No denying the depth and the heat of The Dorf’s passion as they try to deconstruct the malaise that’s currently being inflicted on the world through late capitalism, but the music feels very contrived, strained, heavy-handed, and formed from a queasy mix of ill-fitting elements. Very odd. (30/09/2021)