Playlist 06.09.20 (7:41 pm)
Lots of sound-art tonight, but also other fusions of genres, such as Armenian folk with jazz, classical, prog and postrock, techno fused with field recordings & sound-art, indie fused with sound-art and experimental techniques.
LISTEN AGAIN to the connection between music & art. Stream on demand from FBi, podcast here.
Tigran Hamasyan - Levitation 21 [Nonesuch/Bandcamp]
Tigran Hamasyan - To Love [Nonesuch/Bandcamp]
Tigran Hamasyan - falling [Plus Loin Music]
Tigran Hamasyan - The Grid [Nonesuch/Bandcamp]
Tigran Hamasyan - At a Post-Historic Seashore [Nonesuch/Bandcamp]
Starting tonight with the Armenian jazz piano prodigy Tigran Hamasyan, still only 33 years old but with an extraordinary repertoire behind him. In the past he's melded his technical proficiency at jazz piano and complex Eastern European rhythms with prog rock - indeed he's even worked with fellow Armenian-American Serj Tankian of System Of A Down. And that technical aspect is still there in his last few albums (with a kind of live-drum'n'bass aspect to some of the drumming), but there's also a deep connection to the gorgeous modalities and melodic mellifluence of Armenian music. I couldn't help playing two contrasting tunes from his 2015 masterpiece Mockroot - the timeless beauty of "To Love" and the rhythmic insanity of "The Grid" - and also skipped back to 2009's Red Hail. We start & finish with new album The Call Within, which melds Armenian myths & legends with his interest in maps of all kinds.
Marianne Baudouin Lie - Loop 1_ Aapning (by Lene Grenager & Marianne Baudouin Lie) [Particular Recordings]
Marianne Baudouin Lie - Concertino per violoncello et voce, Take 6 (by Eirik Hegdal) [Particular Recordings]
New album Atlantis, Utopia og Ulvedrømmer from Norwegian cellist Marianne Baudouin Lie is unusual in that all the compositions (commissioned by Lie) use the musician's voice as well as cello. An educator and researcher as well as a cellist working across classical, improv and contemporary music, Lie covers a lot of ground in the commissions for this album. The "Ulvedrømmer" of the title are "Wolf dreams", depicted in a "one-woman musical" written with fellow cellist Lene Grenager; in saxophonist Eirik Hegdal's Concertino per violoncello et voce, each "Take" calls for the cellist to use her voice in a different way - the double-stopped cello chords here move exquisitely between dissonance and assonance with her vocal drone.
Félicia Atkinson - The Rain [Inpartmaint]
Takuma Watanabe - Particle [Inpartmaint]
Japanese film composer Takuma Watanabe has lately embarked upon a process of reimagining his original soundtracks. For new album Mada Kokoni Iru_ Original Soundtrack Recomposed, he takes the music from the short film I'm Still There by Shota Sometani, and as well as reworking two pieces himself, invited Akira Rabelais and Félicia Atkinson to do the same. Atkinson's piece fits well with her recent music - soft piano and electronic textures, with indistinct spoken word. I followed it with a short but brilliant piece from Watanabe which mixes strings and wind instruments with fluttery and clicky granular textures.
Mads Emil Nielsen - 2 [Arbitrary/Bandcamp]
Nicola Ratti - 2 (from a graphical score by Katja Gretzinger) [Arbitrary/Bandcamp]
Here's a strange & fascinating piece of concept art from Danish musician Mads Emil Nielsen on his Arbitrary label. It's a vinyl record of 3 pieces created by Nielsen from various electronic & percussive sound sources and a CD of 3 pieces by Italian sound-artist Nicola Ratti. Ratti's pieces are performances from a graphical score rendered by Katja Gretzinger from Nielsen's original works. So one assumes that by hearing "2" from each of the artists, we're hearing Ratti's interpretation of Gretzinger's interpretation of Nielsen's 2nd piece. Both pieces have similar tonalities, if nothing else because the two musicians have similar aesthetics. As for further connections, it's unclear - but it makes for a beautiful piece of art!
Bellows - Undercurrent 01 [Black Truffle]
Giuseppe Ielasi & Nicola Ratti - Bellows 03 [Kning Disk/Bandcamp]
Bellows - handcut 04 [senufo editions]
Bellows - Reelin' 06 (excerpt) [Entr'acte/Bandcamp]
Bellows - Sander 01 [Latency]
Bellows - Undercurrent 06 [Black Truffle]
For 13 years now, Nicola Ratti has occasionally created astonishing suites of minimalist, sparsely rhythmic sonic constructions with Giuseppe Ielasi. Their first album, Bellows, was released on Kning Disk in 2007, and since then the duo has been Bellows. Each subsequent album has a particular sonic space of some sort - from the scratchy, indistinct vinyl remnants of handcut to the bleepy electro-dub deconstructions of Reelin' and 2017's duo of Strand and Sander, each of which reference club music & hip-hop in diagonal fashions. New album Undercurrent, released on Oren Ambarchi's Black Truffle, steps back from the rhythmic music, with repeating textures here built from mournful sliding guitar, synth tones, and tape hiss among other things. It's very patient and rewarding music.
Kate Carr - It's a steep climb to the freeway underpass [Kate Carr Bandcamp]
Kate Carr - Pebble dash static [Kate Carr Bandcamp]
Kate Carr - Whinneys fading [Kate Carr Bandcamp]
London-based Australian musician Kate Carr continues to create some of the most exciting field recording-based music around, with a new release available on red vinyl called Splinters. It's a documentation of her relationship, over 18 months, with an artist-run space in South East London called TACO! - covering not only field recordings of the space and of Carr's journeys to and from the space, but also various performances in that space over the time period. So disembodied snippets of spoken word, electronic beats, or maybe even a distorted guitar chord contribute to the sound-world. Carr is brilliant at creating musically compelling works from non-musical elements (or musical elements used in unusual ways), and constructing a narrative as well. You don't have to know the space or have been part of the community to find this a thrilling listen.
Siavash Amini - Perpetually Inwards [Hallow Ground/Bandcamp]
Siavash Amini - A Collective Floundering [Hallow Ground/Bandcamp]
Art & music collide also on the latest album from Iranian musician Siavash Amini. A Mimesis of Nothingness was created in response to photographic works of Tehran by Noosin Shafiee which Amini describes as "eternal remnants of a violent scene, no matter how new or old they were. Never finished, never begotten, a stillborn." The music is accordingly dark, using processed field recordings, percussion and electronics to evoke horror and disquiet. It's quite something!
Iury Lech - Devastated Okeans [Amorfik Artifacts/Insolit]
Iury Lech - Stellium [Amorfik Artifacts/Insolit]
Two tracks from Spanish audiovisual artist Iury Lech, from his album Ontonanology, which is his most techno-oriented as far as I can see. A child of Ukrainian immigrants, his work first appeared in the late 1970s and early 1980s, combining video art with music that drew from ambient, world and classical minimalist influences, and later a solid base in industrial music. Those elements are here, but the sounds here evoke the deep of the oceans as well as the sub-molecular scale, with throbbing, pulsing music that could fit well on raster-media. I thought this album was going to be out now, but it seems like it's November, so you get one extra track preview. I really recommend this, it's enveloping and transporting stuff.
AVOLA - Rip It [SIGE]
AVOLA - Into The Fold [SIGE]
Faith Coloccia and Aaron Turner's SIGE Records has released a stack of music for each Bandcamp Friday this year, each time sending funds to a collection of bail funds, collectives, BLM-aligned organisations etc. This release from Veronica "Vern" Avola (previously known as EMS and Dirty Centaur) came out in July but the cassette will start shipping later this month. It's less psychedelic than some of her other work - primitive industrial electronic beats, basslines and noises that gurgle and sputter most excellently.
Shoeb Ahmad - eight [Shoeb Ahmad Bandcamp]
Here's one side of a new special limited 7" from Canberra's Shoeb Ahmad. Both tracks appear in different forms on her forthcoming album a body full of tears, but these stripped-down arrangements can only be found on this 7". It's a preview of her new industrial-primitivist leaning work which will be out in November!
On Diamond - Candle [Eastmint Records/On Diamond Bandcamp]
Showcasing the songs of Lisa Salvo with creative and experimental arrangements, Melbourne's On Diamond return with a wonderful new single this week. It's got a feel of that great '80s postpunk indie music - melodic, exotic, with unapologetically experimental sounds. The vocal harmonies between Salvo and Hannah Cameron are perfect, Jules Pascoe's bassline holds down the rhythm while Maria Moles' drums scatter and crash, and Scott McConnachie drops in an unhinged guitar solo. Can't wait for more.
Listen again — ~202MB
Comments Off on Playlist 06.09.20
