ALTER.NATiON #21
Jamila Woods, Zora Neale Hurston, Blu & Oh No, Octo Octa, Jessie Ware, Joseph Mount, pronoun, Wye Oak, Dexter Story, Sudan Archives, Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, Katarina Pejak, Joni Mitchell, Matmos, HÆLOS, Versing, Archive, Band Of Skulls
weekly favtraX
17-02-2019
Zora Neale Hurston was an acclaimed novelist who studied the vast complexity of black culture. She was a curious soul who wrote about everything—from marriage and Caribbean voodoo to the American South—by fully immersing herself in it. Yet for whatever reason, Hurston never got the credit she deserved when she was alive; even her masterwork—1937’s Their Eyes Were Watching God—was excoriated by fellow authors in the Harlem Renaissance... Jamila Woods celebrates the icon on “ZORA,” the first single of her forthcoming album LEGACY! LEGACY!, by singing from Hurston’s imagined perspective. Woods—in the spirit of Hurston—hears all the scrutiny from the likes of Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, but it doesn’t affect her in the slightest. “Your words don’t leave scars/Believe me I’ve heard it all,” Woods declares with a shrug...
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| Zora Neale Hurston |
Blu is a crucial and undersung name within the LA underground-rap lineage, a transitional figure between the early Freestyle Fellowship/Project Blowed days and the right-now dominance of Kendrick Lamar. Below The Heavens, the 2007 album that Blu released with producer Exile, belongs in the canon, and he never stopped working after that... Right now, Blu and Oh No — Madlib’s younger brother and a great psychedelic rap mind in his own right — are getting ready to release a collaborative album. This is good news, and on “The Lost Angels Anthem,” we hear just how it might work. Oh No’s track is warm and hazy, a hypnotic swirl of sweaty drum-loops and synthetic tingle. And Blu remains hypnotic in his own way, breaking down one vowel sound after another with deadpan gravitas, weaving images quickly enough to leave your head spinning.
The incantation that begins Octo Octa’s “I Need You,” 30 seconds of euphoric moaning, could introduce any number of songs. A post-yoga chant could develop with layers of blissed-out voices and the hum of a harmonium. A ’90s house sound might emerge, with a diva calling the shots over groovy drums. What actually happens is a bit of both, nine full minutes of bliss masquerading as a beauty of a dance track. “I Need You” is unquestionably the most perfect moment yet for Octo Octa, a producer who was a core member of the scrappy and adventurous house sound of the California label 100% Silk just a few years ago. Newly signed to Ninja Tune, her skills as a producer have caught up with her ambition. While “I Need You” is not a complicated song it still grabs you tight and hugs you close...
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| Jessie Ware co-wrote the song with Metronomy’s Joseph Mount |
...Jessie Ware co-wrote the song with Metronomy’s Joseph Mount, and it takes full advantage of the warm intimacy of her voice, the way she always sounds like she’s whispering right to you. It also takes full advantage of her rhythmic poise. Ware has been singing straight-up soul lately, but she got her start guesting on dance producers’ singles, and she knows how to float over a beat. That’s what she does here. The track, which Mount produced, is a sparse and spacious piece of architecture, full of beautiful little synth-glimmers. Ware breezes along over it, the exhilaration of the moment lifting her up. It’s the sound of someone who adores, someone just learning what it means to be adored.
The songs that Alyse Vellturo makes as pronoun are huge and immediate. They’re like standing in the middle of a road as an eighteen-wheeler washes over you. That’s how she describes how a break-up feels in her latest song “stay,” but it could just as easily apply to the soaring choruses and breakneck speed she maintains in her songs. “stay” rolls like a boulder down a hill. It takes place in the stolen breaths and dismantling revelations that come with a conversation that ends a relationship, when you realize the person you saw yourself no longer sees themselves with you. She takes that frustration and confusion and turns it into a weaponized pop song, words and thoughts crowding together into an undeniable force that’ll pummel you down.
...Considering it’s a one-off, “Evergreen” is probably not indicative of any permanent change in Wye Oak’s disposition. But it’s still striking — the first time they’ve really offered up a song that returns to that classic The Knot/Civilian aesthetic. The song almost sounds like it could’ve slotted right in on one of those albums, between Jenn Wasner’s characteristically elusive-yet-expressive vocal, the guitar tones, those spectral horns...
Dexter Story is a Los Angeles-based producer, multi-instrumentalist, and bandleader who’s worked with Madlib, Kamasi Washington, Carlos Niño, Sa-Ra Creative Partners, and more. After sitting in as a drummer for the Ethiopian jazz ensemble Ethio Cali in 2011, he began composing and arranging for the group, developing an interest in East African music that eventually culminated with the release of his 2015 album Wondem, melding modern
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| Dexter Story |
Parks is a kindred spirit to Story, a Los Angeles-based musician who takes inspiration from Sudanese fiddle tradition. We named her 2018 release Sink, a heady blend of R&B, electronic, and classical, one of the best EPs of last year. “I was intrigued by Sudan Archives’ name because it speaks to methodology and preservation all at once,” Story says. “We met through a mutual friend and this song is a result of us sharing and developing our musical wishes at the time.” “Gold” is a deep groove driven by Parks’ violin and coolly confident vocals...
New Orleans jazz trumpeter Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah doesn’t play jazz. Instead, he calls the music he makes “stretch music,” because it stretches the conventions of jazz to incorporate all kinds of musical idioms — electronic, hip-hop, trap, dub, R&B, funk, Mardi Gras parade music, all coexisting in one musical gestalt. And on “Ancestral Recall,” he continues his mission to use music as a unifying force, connecting the African diasporic tradition back to its West African roots through rhythm. Although ghostly electronic murmurs and Scott’s searing trumpet give the track an otherworldly, larger-than-life sheen, its true lifeblood is its hypnotic percussion...
Katarina Pejak is a Serbia-born singer, songwriter, and pianist who made her home in Nashville. A classically trained pianist, she embraced American roots sounds via her father's record collection and chose a career in blues while still in high school. In fact, her debut album, 2010's Perfume & Luck, gained her admission to the composition and songwriting programs at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she won the Songwriting Achievement Award. She released First Hand Stories in 2012 while attending, and after graduation issued Old New Borrowed and Blues in 2016. All were acclaimed in Europe. Her recordings and her high-energy live show on continental and Asian festival stages brought her to the attention of Ruf Records, who signed her for Roads That Cross, her first album with worldwide distribution.
...It’s a fairly relatable premise in the year 2019. Sonically, HÆLOS always traffic in darker aesthetics, but “Boy / Girl” may be the most anxious and melancholic single we’ve heard from Any Random Kindness thus far. Over sputtering beats and strangled synths, vocalists Lotti Benardout and Arthur Delaney trade lines back and forth; it illustrates the meaning of the song perfectly, two voices calling out to each other and occasionally intertwining yet fighting against the digital distortions surrounding them. Overall, “Boy / Girl” feels like a claustrophobic cloud, mirroring a mind paralyzed by broken transmissions sent between two people on opposite sides of an online ether. The song is also sneakily catchy the more you listen to it, almost depicting the way it can be hard to get someone out of your head when they keep reappearing as a specter on social media — or when the circumstances refuse to let those voices totally fade away into the past.
Versing play a loose, appealingly spiky form of indie rock with approachable melodies and a few squalls of dissonant guitar noise thrown in for good measure. The Seattle quartet met at University Of Puget Sound’s college radio station and released their debut full-length, Nirvana, a few years later in 2017... “Tethered,” a surging post-punk churn driven by the half-spoken chant “We’re tied together/ Tied together/ Tied together.” Salas says, “It’s a reminder of the interconnectedness of humans, to people who make excuses for not doing the right thing.”
Archive is a music-collective, originating from London, UK, but based in Paris, France for many years where they enjoy a much bigger following. They are signed to Warner Music France. Archive was formed by Londoners Darius Keeler and Danny Griffiths in 1994 and began as an electronica project. At the beginning, they mixed Bristol-style, Massive Attack, Portishead with Rap... Archive are a Collective, not a band.
Jamila Woods, Zora Neale Hurston, Blu & Oh No, Octo Octa, Jessie Ware, Joseph Mount, pronoun, Wye Oak, Dexter Story, Sudan Archives, Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, Katarina Pejak, Joni Mitchell, Matmos, HÆLOS, Versing, Archive, Band Of Skulls
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