Ranked Number 4 in wire magazine’s “Releases of the Year”.
Raucus, raw, bracing, and unforgiving, obviously, I loved, “My Mother the Vent”.
It comes roaring out of the gate from the start and doesn’t lose a step until the end.
I have no idea how these kids, (and I can only assume they are kids with this energy level,) can possibly sustain this energy level for the duration of a concert. I felt a little tired just after listening to the pummeling beats, screaming yelps, and guitar abuse.
Remind me a bit of something that might have been on SkinGraft Records back in the 1990s, say a lost record from U.S. Maple or Lake of Dracula.
Ranked Number 2 in wire magazine’s “Releases of the Year”.
This album is pretty far outside of the type of music I usually listen to.
In fact, so far outside, that I’m not exactly even sure how to classify it.
Chopped and Processed Raps and other samples played over eclectic soundscapes?
Zuli is a Cairo, Egypt, based DJ and Producer. There are a host of guest vocalists on this album performing rhythmic poetry, most of it in Arabic.
The soundscapes often include the sounds of, I assume, Cairo. Car noises, construction, radio, etc. The sounds of a city. Some songs include legitimate music as backing, influenced or cut from eclectic sources.
The “beats”, such that there are beats, are usually digitally mangled through a chorus or flanger type thing.
Too strange to be pop music, but too accessible to be legitimately strange.
It exists in an odd place for me.
Interesting enough to listen to, but not something I am likely to go back to.
Metal Aether by Lea Bertucci; Bandcamp Link: Metal Aether
Ranked number 17 on wire magazine’s “Releases of the Year”.
I’ve listened to quite a few solo saxophone albums this year and it’s interesting what a diverse group they are. Almost all have gone in for some sort of extended technique, whether it is circular breathing or multiphonics or split tones.
Ms. Bertucci’s album, as is usual in these releases, isn’t strictly speaking solo, as she is manipulating the sounds with tape and also playing other samples or recordings of instruments to accompany herself or create atmosphere in which to perform.
She starts with a fairly typical arpeggio based song, “Patterns for Alto”. As is usual for this sort of music, it could be from a Philip Glass piece. One nice thing about Ms Bertucci’s arpeggio piece is that she leaves space in it rather than cramming it full of detail, then as it progresses, she allows echo or tape loops to build gradually behind her.
Other songs experiment with long drone, atmosphere, and near Industrial soundscapes.
It makes for an album that is continuously changing and morphing, once you think you understand where Ms Bertucci is coming from, she throws you a curve. I especially enjoy her pleasant use of dissonance and wonderful bird-like squeals.
Not because it is super long, but because it is super dense.
It is a Tenor Sax and Drum duo album from Travis Laplante, (of Battle Trance and Little Women,) and Gerald Cleaver, (of Farmers by Nature and Black Host).
Travis Laplante is well known, along with his other compatriots in Battle Trance, for extending the tonal vocabulary of the Saxophone. “Extended Technique” and all that. He is also an extremely melodic player.
But, when I first heard about this album I was wondering, where would Gerald Cleaver fit in?
Most saxophonists who traffic in arpeggio based extended technique and saxophone multiphonics do it solo. With all that going on, there’s just not a lot of room for other players to fit in.
So, I sort of put off listening to it for a while.
Foolishly, it turns out.
Mr Cleaver is a great foil for Mr Laplante, translating his complex saxophone polyrhythms into an ever changing sea of even more complex drum motifs. Somehow finding the accent points in Mr Laplante’s playing and using them to create rhythmic units.
The album is made up of 3 pieces. All three include passages of solos and duos.
Mr Laplante’s playing utilizes some of the same techniques as an Evan Parker or a John Butcher, but it feels more controlled and spacious than those men’s often extremely dense work. Which I guess leaves more room for others.
Though, some of the tempos these two build to are just nuts. The third piece, especially, Mr Laplante has a particularly long section where an arpeggio speeds up and speeds up until it is going so fast it is a single modulated tone. Nuts.
The funny thing, as I was thinking about this today, is the rhythms of A Dance That Empties often feels not so much like “Jazz”, as an extension of the type of playing that might accompany a Shakespeare play, Renaissance music, or an English traditional dance. Well, OK, a totally nuts Morris Dance Ritual, perhaps performed by extremely nimble goats.
Say you’re walking along, and you only have your phone or your iPod or your walkman.
You start having a heart attack. Your heart stops.
If you’re lucky enough to have “Cuts Up, Cuts Out” on your device, quickly flick to that album, turn your device up to 11, and lie down.
I feel certain that it will restart your heart.
If not, well, it’s a pretty great soundtrack as you speed up and away from this mortal plane.
Cuts is a group along the lines of a less polite “Last Exit”.
Take no prisoners noisey improvisation super group involving Reedist Mats Gustafsson, Masami Akita (aka Merzbow), Balazs Pandi of Zu, and, of all people, Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth.
If those people don’t mean anything to you, you probably won’t enjoy this music. Or, if you only know Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth’s Dirty, rather than his contribution to the Dietrich/Sauter/Moore album “Barefoot in the Head”, this may come as something as a shock to your system.
If those people mean something to you, you probably already know, as the press release suggests, “‘Cuts Up, Cuts Out’ is a snapshot of the four musician’s uncanny groupthink during a live performance at the Church of St John at Hackney at the end of September 2016. Spanning the highly exotic manifold of music dimensions of free noise, free and spiritual jazz, power ambient and grindcore, ‘Cuts Up, Cuts Out’ will cathartically renew and elevate the listeners Geist from the inside.”
