ALTER.NATION #109
David Bowie, Adulkt Life, Azymuth, Ali Shaheed Muhammad,Adrian Younge,The Silence, David Nance, El Shirota. Yves Jarvis, Stats, Heather Trost, Marika Hackman, Gregor, Mort Garson, Molchat Doma, Faten Kanaan, Nels Cline, Gwenifer Raymond, William Basinski, WL
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"She Shook Me Cold"
The mercurial music icon widely considered the original pop chameleon and figurehead for countless musical movements. The cliché about David Bowie is that he was a musical chameleon, adapting himself according to fashion and trends. While such a criticism is too glib, there's no denying that Bowie demonstrated a remarkable skill for perceiving musical movements at his peak in the '70s. After spending several years in the late '60s as a mod and an all-around music-hall entertainer, Bowie reinvented himself as a hippie singer/songwriter.
This November sees the 50th Anniversary of the release of David Bowie’s The Man Who Sold The World in North America. The rest of the world would have to wait until April 1971 to witness Bowie’s landmark entry into the 1970s, marking the beginning of a collaboration with guitarist Mick Ronson that would last through classic works including Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane—as well as the first in a 10-year series of indispensable albums stretching through 1980’s Scary Monsters… Originally titled Metrobolist, the album's name was changed at the last minute to The Man Who Sold The World -- the original stereo master tapes were in fact labelled Metrobolist, with the title ultimately crossed out. The 2020 re-release of the album under its Metrobolist moniker has been remixed by original producer Tony Visconti...
Angular and angry post-punk sounds from members of Male Bonding and Huggy Bear. Adulkt Life is a London punk band with a storied pedigree. Singer Chris Rowley was a vocalist for Huggy Bear in the '90s and guitarist John Arthur Webb played with the dynamic 2010s band Male Bonding. Together they make music that's a bracingly modern take on agit-pop and punk.
Roughly 25 years after the influential band Huggy Bear split up, one of the group's vocalists, Chris Rowley, returned to music in the band Adulkt Life. Teaming with two members of Male Bonding (guitarist John Arthur Webb and bassist Kevin Hendrick) and drummer Sonny Barrett, Rowley makes the most of his comeback. He yells, shouts, cajoles, croons wickedly, and sneers his way through the band's debut, Book of Curses, like barely a minute has passed since Huggy Bear's heyday... Webb's guitar playing is especially impressive; he blasts out power riffs, wrangles wild bolts of feedback, and generally plays each song like it was a chance for him to battle Rowley to the bloody death. Behind that raging duel, Barrett plays like a possessed Muppet who, despite not even being born until after Huggy Bear disbanded, fits perfectly with Rowley's vision. This is avant-punk for the ageless with songs that could appeal to the crustiest post-punk fanatic and those young enough to be living through their first global crisis.
The fourth volume of Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad's Jazz Is Dead series logically spotlights Brazilian jazz masters Azymuth after colleague Marcos Valle's turn on JID003. At the same time, this convergence enables bassist Alex Malheiros, drummer Ivan Conti, and keyboardist Kiko Continentino to continue their every-few-years studio release schedule. "Apocalíptico" highlighted the series preview compilation Jazz Is Dead 001, and here it's focal, a torrential groove that starts with a buzzing bass warning and increases in power until it abates quickly at the 9:30 mark. Although none of the other seven compositions -- all eight are credited to the trio and producers/arrangers Younge and Muhammad -- is as dark or dramatic as "Apocalíptico," it forecast this set's tougher physicality in relation to Azymuth's deep back catalog. That's not to say it's any less inviting. In a sneaky way, it also has the same subtly spirit-lifting effect as a lengthy conversation with a longtime friend. Malheiros, Conti, and Continentino sound at home in Younge's Linear Labs workshop of vintage gear, no matter how many elements -- churning rhythm guitar, brass, reeds, additional percussion -- enhance their intuitive interaction...
Since Masaki Batoh founded the Silence in 2014, the guitarist and group have traversed open sonic terrains between acid folk and psychedelic rock, free improvisation and structured composition, visceral statement and textured meditative space. Electric Meditations brings together the same quartet that issued the excellent, sprawling Metaphysical Feedback in 2019: Batoh on guitar and vocals; Taiga Yamazaki on bass and vocals; Futoshi Okano on the drum kit, and Ryuichi Yoshida on baritone saxophone and flute... The opening vamp in "Butterfly Blues" recalls Morphine's funkiest music, at least before Yamazaki's yowling vocal claims the center. That said, the punchy, spiky, James Brown-esque guitar vamps, baritone sax honks, and mercurial dynamics revolve around a restrained yet throbbing bassline and skeletal snare breaks. They usher in a wandering flute solo from Yoshida that eventually entwines with his baritone horn...
...Returning to the home-recorded magic of his early albums, "Staunch Honey" was recorded entirely to tape by Nance himself at his Omaha home with the occasional assistance from his longtime live bandmates Jim Schroeder & Kevin Donohue.
"Staunch Honey" is the culmination of two years of hard work - Nance worked and reworked the album three times over, recording & rerecording songs until they sounded just so - a stunning batch of sonic manna that hums with feeling and mood; expertly crafted, but sounding simultaneously off-the-cuff... Not content to let the album go by without the rumble of guitar, "If The Truth Ever Shows Up" closes out the album. It's an instrumental jam with Nance wrangling and riffing on a gut-punching guitar solo for 6-plus minutes that feels very much like the end credits to a long-lost midnight movie.
After forming in 2013, Mexico City-area quartet El Shirota went through years of changes in lineup and approach to their guitar-friendly rock sounds. Debut full-length Tiempos Raros follows multiple sporadically released EPs, and its dense waves of shoegazey production are far more refined and dreamlike than the abrasive post-punk of earlier releases... The steady midtempo beat and curiously dissonant interweaving guitars on noisy instrumentals "El Chirota" and "RTL" take notes from Washing Machine-era Sonic Youth... El Shirota wear their influences on their sleeve throughout Tiempos Raros, but the album's warmth, inventiveness, and various unexpected moves leaves things sounding fresh and exciting.
On his second album, 2019's The Same But by Different Means, Montreal producer/solo artist Yves Jarvis created a beautiful patchwork of impressionistic fragments that blurred together into a sustained mood. Cobbling together experiments with bleary, early-morning R&B songs, experimental tape manipulation, and lonely singer/songwriter fare, Jarvis (real name Jean-Sebastian Audet) followed no discernible stylistic guidelines, but glued his musical puzzle pieces together with an overarching reflective emotional tone. This sonic design based on color theory continues with third album Sundry Rock Song Stock, trading in the thoughtful, solitary blue qualities of The Same But by Different Means for a lively, organic lushness represented by the green hues of the cover art...
Although Stats had been around, quietly putting out short-form releases for several years prior, the group had a breakthrough of sorts with 2019's Other People's Lives, their full-length debut. They landed on some high-profile best-of-2019 lists in the U.K., made vocal fans of Elton John and Fleabag's Phoebe Waller-Bridge (her sister, Isobel, who composed for the show, is a member of the group), and quickly set to work on the follow-up. Recorded in Powys, Wales, near where singer and main songwriter Ed Seed grew up, the next year's Powys 1999 offers more of the debut's sleek, idiosyncratic, '70s- and '80s-inspired dance-pop/rock... Other potential club bangers include the slinky "Naturalise Me," which makes use of Seed's upper vocal range,...
As the core members of A Hawk and a Hacksaw, Heather Trost and her husband Jeremy Barnes have amassed a deeply eclectic catalog of globally minded experimental rock that leans heavily into Eastern European folk traditions, mariachi, Greek music, and a kitchen-sink's worth of other styles... Recorded by Trost and Barnes in their New Mexico home studio, the seven-song album retreats even further from their Gypsy folk past, recasting Trost alternately as a cosmic psych traveler and a mercurial torch singer... The lonesome "Tracks to Nowhere" makes a strong candidate for a showcase at the Bang Bang Bar, David Lynch's fictional Twin Peaks nightclub where this type of noir-ish pop fare often floats like a vapor, enchanting patrons into fits of mournful swaying... Sonically adventurous and rich with experimentation, Petrichor offers plenty to admire...
Marika Hackman - Covers / Playground Love
During the extended stay-at-home order of the last few months, Marika felt that creating a covers record was a way of exploring new sound ideas and expressing herself without having the pressure of the blank page. She recorded and produced Covers between home and her parents’ house, then got the legendary David Wrench (Frank Ocean, The xx, Let’s Eat Grandma) to mix it. David also co-produced her excellent 2019 record Any Human Friend. In contrast to her last two albums (including 2017’s I’m Not Your Man), this collection of songs is more akin in tone and feel to her debut We Slept At Last, with a darker and more introspective sound. On Covers, we hear Marika’s emotive voice set against sparse arrangements of guitars and strings with the occasional synth or scattered drum groove.
Marika explains how she came to choose the material: “When it comes to covers, I like to pick songs which I have been listening to obsessively for a while. It gives me a natural understanding of the music, and lets me be more innovative with how I transform it.”
Marika’s version of Air’s “Playground Love” is one of the highlights, taken from the soundtrack the group composed for Sofia Coppola’s coming of age The Virgin Suicides, the result being a moodier, disorientating reworking of a classic modern moment...
Having come up through the minor leagues of Australia's bedroom pop system, Melbourne eccentric Gregor made his first official album with 2018's Silver Drop, a weirdly appealing set of offbeat but astute tracks that blended acerbic humor, honest introspection, and dashes of art-pop and post-punk... After another two years of seasoning, Gregor is back with his even slicker follow-up, Destiny. Citing the undeniably hip influences of Arthur Russell and the Durutti Column on his first set, Destiny finds Gregor ascending into the celestial synth pop tones of 1980s pioneers like Talk Talk and the Blue Nile...
With their reissues of Mort Garson's body of work, Sacred Bones made it much easier for listeners to hear why he was as much of a groundbreaking electronic artist as better-known innovators like Raymond Scott. While the remastered editions of Ataraxia's The Unexplained and Lucifer's Black Mass were necessary, die-hard fans might be most excited by Music from Patch Cord Productions. The first glimpse into the huge archive of rare and unreleased material Garson left behind when he died in 2008 -- sadly, a few years too early to see his status as a pioneer cemented in the 2010s -- this collection finds him following his muse wherever it takes him... The graceful, erotically charged space-age pop of "Cathedral of Pleasure" presages the work of Broadcast and Beach House, while "Dragonfly"'s sparkling disco is so fun and funky that it's a shame Garson didn't do more in this vein. By turns delightful, spooky, quaint, and forward-thinking, Music from Patch Cord Productions is a treasure trove for fans of an artist whose music is still revealing different sides decades later.
Belarusian cold wave trio Molchat Doma had a breakthrough year in 2020, as their first two albums were reissued by Sacred Bones and their song "Sudno (Boris Ryzhy)" became a surprise hit through the power of social media. They were set to make their North American touring debut when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, forcing them to stay in Minsk, their hometown, and finish working on their third album. Just as second album Etazhi was a step up from the band's murky debut S Krysh Nashikh Domov, in terms of both recording fidelity and songwriting, Monument sounds much brighter and more polished, and contains some of their most hook-filled songs to date. It's also more overtly danceable than their earlier records... and "Leningradskiy Blues" (containing the album's most haunting guitar lines) leans a bit closer to David Sylvian's group Japan...
Based in Brooklyn, Faten Kanaan is a German experimental composer whose mesmerizing work is built around haunting, cinematic synthesizer loops played manually without the aid of sequencers, samplers, or arpeggiators... On A Mythology of Circles, her first album for U.K. indie Fire Records and fourth overall, Kanaan weaves themes of cosmology, mythology, and mysticism into 13 cyclical pieces that seem both vaporous and grounded. The subtle nuances in her distinctive looping approach and her apparent reverence for nature give the music an earthy, organic feel, while her crystalline synth tones, choral samples, and harp-like leads rise effortlessly into the ethereal mist. Much like her German forebears Tangerine Dream, Kanaan is a natural spellcaster of analog synth warmth, creating fantastic worlds on tracks like "The Archer" and "Hesperides," two standouts referencing Greek mythology...
On his third Blue Note date, guitarist/composer Nels Cline introduces his third ensemble to the label. He and drummer Scott Amendola began the Nels Cline Singers as a trio in 2002. The group has evolved into a sextet here with bassist Trevor Dunn, percussionist Cyro Baptista, saxophonist Skerik, and pianist/keyboardist Brain Marsella. These sessions marked the first time this particular ensemble ever played together. The idea was to record a series of live jams to edit into collaged moments (think Miles Davis and Teo Macero).... Closer "Passed Down" is an acoustic theme governed by Skerik's blue saxophone and Cline's vintage Dobro, as tom-toms, shakers, and skeletal keys whisper the set out. Share the Wealth is remarkable for its spontaneity but breathtaking in its focus. This is music-making that balances a desire to move beyond boundaries with canny instinct, an egoless restraint, and a collective openness that discovers what's next together.
Welsh acoustic guitarist Gwenifer Raymond appeared like an apparition in 2018 with her debut, You Were Never Much of a Dancer. Its music was steeped in an aggressive form of the American Primitive tradition John Fahey and peers created during the 1960s from the inspirational spell cast by the dusty 78s of Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James, Dock Boggs, and Roscoe Holcomb... "Hell for Certain" commences in folk-blues before Raymond's intensely rhythmic right-hand fingerpicking is a driving blur. .. While Raymond continues to use American Primitive as a core source of aesthetic and technical inspiration, her music on Strange Lights Over Garth Mountain grafts on the moods and atmospheres of her Welsh homeland and tradition as she inserts sense-memory impressions from her biography that add meaning to the music. This is a compelling, satisfying, richly musical statement from a gifted player developing a uniquely individual style. Welsh Primitive anyone?
William Basinski - Lamentations / Please, This Shit Has Got To Stop
With a patience and effortlessness all his own, ambient composer William Basinski's work communicates visceral emotions with minimal means. His best-known recording, 2002's The Disintegration Loops, utilized slowly decaying analog tape loops as a poignant reflection on the inevitable passing of time, and offered wordless commentary on the grief and confusion surrounding the World Trade Center attacks of 9/11... The reverb-heavy loop of skipping opera vocals on "Please, This Shit Has Got to Stop" is similar. The recontextualized audio on these songs brings to mind the scratchy antiquated 78s of the Caretaker, much like the more vacuous ambience of other tracks is similar to early Grouper recordings. Basinski's experiments with sounds less familiar to his ouvre hardly come off like a storied artist trying to keep pace with those that followed him... Lamentations wanders cautiously between dark and hovering gloom, tender reflection, and moments of wistful nostalgia that almost feel gleeful. It's one of the more accessible of Basinski's offerings, and continues building on the delicate language of subtext and observation that makes his work so important.
Experimental trio whose music ranges from cathartic noise to serene meditations. The music of Portland, Oregon's experimental pop trio WL (pronounced "well") ranges from cathartic blasts of noise to serene meditations. Built around the graceful voice of singer/bassist Misty Mary and the textural washes of multi-instrumentalist Michael Yun, WL established the fundamentals of their sound on 2013's Hold, a set of songs that touched on indie rock, dream pop, and minimal electronics.
With ADHD, WL place themselves among a select few musicians making experimental pop who put their humanity front and center. Shaped by vocalist/bassist/keyboardist Misty Mary's experiences with grief and anxiety, the trio's quietly stunning third album provides a balm for troubled times, whether they're personal or political... By contrast, the guitar-driven "Violet Shadow" is just as striking, with Michael Yun and Adam Breeden's brooding distortion making for one of the most abstract and powerfully emotional songs. Amidst all of the album's growth and change, WL manage to sound humble and confident at the same time. Inward-looking but never insular, ADHD is proof they're doing something special.
David Bowie, Adulkt Life, Azymuth, Ali Shaheed Muhammad,Adrian Younge,The Silence, David Nance, El Shirota. Yves Jarvis, Stats, Heather Trost, Marika Hackman, Gregor, Mort Garson, Molchat Doma, Faten Kanaan, Nels Cline, Gwenifer Raymond, William Basinski, WL
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