062 ALTER.NATION weekly favtraX 03-11-2019

ALTER.NATION #62

Olivia Colman, Alcest, Cigarettes After Sex, Sudan Archives, Little Scream, The Bad Plus, Jeff Goldblum & the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra, Anna Calvi, Simon Joyner, Omni, Bradford Cox / Cate Le Bon, CUP, Nels Cline, Yuka C. Honda, Itasca

weekly favtraX
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"G l or y   B o x"

ALTER.NATION #62 on DEEZER

Sarah Caroline Olivia Sinclair, CBE, better known as Olivia Colman, is an English actress. Deemed a "national treasure", Colman is the recipient of numerous accolades, including an Academy Award, four BAFTA Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, four British Independent Film Awards, the Volpi Cup for Best Actress, and a BFI Fellowship.
Olivia Colman - Glory Box / Portishead from BBC Children In Need: Got It Covered
In an exclusive collaboration for BBC Children in Need, a whole host of stars have got together to record an entire album to raise money for this year’s appeal...
Each star has handpicked a song significant to them for the album.  Recorded at the legendary Rak and Abbey Road Studios in London, they each received expert guidance from Brit and Mercury award-winning record producers and songwriters, Guy Chambers and Jonathan Quarmby.

Alcest are a metal duo from Bagnols-sur-Cèze, France comprised of Neige (guitars, keyboards, vocals) and Winterhalter (drums). Their music has gradually shifted from black metal to shoegaze to post-metal, and finally to the integrated sound known as blackgaze. Intense melody, lush, swirling electronic textures, and sometimes screamed-sometimes cleanly sung vocals entwine in their mixes. 
Alcest - Les Jardins de Minuit from Spiritual Instinct 
When Alcest released Kodama in 2016, it stood apart from their previous catalog in exploring the "blackgaze" metal subgenre they'd created. It was darker, more aggressive, and had more pointed edges.... Spiritual Instinct, the band's debut for Nuclear Blast, builds on Kodama even as it reaches further outside the emotions expressed on it in order to transcend them. It explores dichotomies -- the divine and the primal, the raw and the refined, the hideous and the beautiful -- in a quest to reveal complexities at the heart of what humanity actually means. Opener "Les Jardins de Minuit" borrows a radically Gothic bassline from Joy Division before a single-string melody line, followed by doubled vocals, pave the way for blastbeats and powerful, strummed open chords. It's a swirl of gray and smoke that gallops along.

Ambient pop collective started as a recording experiment in an echoey hallway. Ambient pop collective Cigarettes After Sex grew out of an experimental sound project by songwriter Greg Gonzalez. 
Cigarettes After Sex - You're the Only Good Thing In My Life from Cry
...The project of Texas native Greg Gonzalez, Cigarettes After Sex's noir-ish imagery and languid odes to romantic obsession made them seem like unlikely candidates for such contemporary pop culture peaks, but the song and subsequent 2017 debut album nonetheless found a very receptive audience... With the gently hissing surf-and-sun-baked limestone cliffs as their backdrop, he and bandmates Randall Miller (bass), Phillip Tubbs (keyboards), and Jacob Tomsky (drums) recorded nine gentle, often improvised pieces of music to which Gonzalez added lyrics at a later date. Cry is nothing if not cinematic and, as its creator has indicated, is indelibly linked to its place of origin. Listening to the opioid strains of "Don't Let Me Go" or "You're the Only Good Thing in My Life," it's easy to picture the lovelorn indie playboy gazing wistfully from a marbled balcony out into the sea's infinite expanse...

Violinist, singer, songwriter, and producer who combines R&B, hip-hop, folk, and experimental electronic music for the Stones Throw label.
Sudan Archives - Pelicans In The Summer from Athena
Nothing about Sudan Archives and Sink, Brittney Parks' self-written and self-produced Stones Throw EPs, sounded underdeveloped or uncertain. That they were filled with tunes akin to repeated epigrams and transportive moodscapes -- instead of traditionally-structured songs -- seemed like a deliberate artistic choice, not a deficiency. It's only after being weighed against the LP follow-up Athena that they come across as unripe. The previously solitary Parks opted here to work with a crew including James R. McCall IV, Will Archer, Rodaidh McDonald, Paul White, and Catherine Parks (her sister) among the dozen or so fellow producers and songwriters... and "Pelicans in the Summer," a pulsing/snaking song of deep affection...

Delivering her own brand of ambitious, grand-scale indie pop, Little Scream is the stage name of vocalist, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Laurel Sprengelmeyer. Her music is at once lush and intimate, with a subdued approach informed by folk but with melodies that are drawn from indie pop and flashes of rock dynamics.
Little Scream - Switchblade from Speed Queen
Sometimes you have to spend some time away from home in order to see it as it really is. Laurel Sprengelmeyer, aka Little Scream, was born and raised in the United States before she settled in Canada and made a name for himself in the local indie music community... What she saw has become the foundation of the third Little Scream album, 2019's Speed Queen, a moody but beautifully crafted set of intelligent indie pop melodies matched to vocals that are graceful on first glance but speak of lives teetering on the brink if you're willing to take a closer look. The LP's title track speaks of the anxieties and desperation of a woman whose greatest wish is to have the means and stability to own her own washer and dryer, a simple dream that is painfully far from her reach...

Progressive jazz scientists who found a way to put a modern rock-oriented spin on jazz while still honoring its forward-thinking traditions.
The Bad Plus - Undersea Reflection from Activate Infinity
When the Bad Plus released Never Stop II in 2018, new pianist Orrin Evans had been in the group for less than a year. He's since logged thousands of miles with them, playing concert halls and bandstands across the globe. That makes Activate Infinity, their second album together, a much more integrated affair. Evans' decades of experience as a bandleader and inventive hard bop-inspired pianist lend immeasurably to the quirk and instinct of this trio...  Anderson's fluid soloing adds heft and imagination that Evans and King follow down an intricately constructed rabbit hole. Activate Infinity is a canny, wildly creative expression of the Bad Plus' collective persona; it's inspired, sophisticated, fresh, and a joy to encounter, time and again.

But the difference with Jeff Goldblum, who is releasing I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This one year after his debut and following a celebrated Glastonbury set this summer, might be that music came before the acting. Goldblum learnt piano growing up in Pittsburgh, and has played lounge gigs with the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra throughout his career. And musicianship courses through these classily rendered jazz standards.
Jeff Goldblum & the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra feat. Anna Calvi - Four On Six/Broken English  from I Shouldn't Be Telling You This
...Anna Calvi lends her lowest-register vibrato to the mash-up of Wes Montgomery’s “Four on Six” and Marianne Faithfull’s “Broken English”, which injects a rebellious splash of electric guitar. Sultry sweetness...

Prolific figure of the Great Plains' lo-fi D.I.Y. scene, and a heavy influence on Bright Eyes' Conor Oberst. Cited as a key influence by Conor Oberst (of Bright Eyes) and Beck, Omaha, Nebraska native and singer/songwriter Simon Joyner has been putting out delicate, intimate, mournful songs since the early '90s.
Simon Joyner - You Never Know from Pocket Moon
favorite musician's favorite musician. Consistently active and firmly independent since the early '90s, Joyner's influence is apparent in much more recognizable names like Bright Eyes, Kevin Morby, Angel Olsen, and other top-shelf artists occupying the space between Americana and lyrically focused songwriting. Pocket Moon continues Joyner's reshaping and refining of the elements that have given his work such impact since he began... The arrangements are simple, centered around vocals high in the mix. Throughout his discography, Joyner has consistently evoked Leonard Cohen's grim narratives, Dylan's flirtations with the surreal, and Townes Van Zandt's blue-collar storytelling. Combined with his own intricate lyrical perspectives, these influences are sharper on Pocket Moon... "You Never Know" runs through a series of everyday scenes that hold deeper emotional weight, stretching out with the same protracted lyrical rumination as Blonde on Blonde-era Dylan...

Energetic blend of Postcard pop, angular post-punk, and scrappy D.I.Y. punk by ex-members of Deerhunter and Carnivores.
Omni - Present Tense from Networker
After a jump to Sub Pop, Omni return with their most precise, most melodic, and best-sounding album yet. Like their first two, Networker was recorded in rural Georgia with Nathaniel Higgins and the sound is very similar. Frankie Broyles' guitar is a slashing, twisted ball of nerves, his drumming is spare and punchy, Philip Frobos' basslines are jabbing and melodic, and his vocals are cheerfully monotone and just barely poke their head out of the mix. What's different this time is everything is a little more jagged, the guitars have more restraint, and there are hints of avant-garde jazz and Television throughout...

Welsh songwriter Cate Le Bon's distinctive voice and smart arrangements manifested as a dark, looming take on psychedelic pop over the course of multiple critically acclaimed solo albums, side projects, and production for others.
Bradford James Cox is an American singer-songwriter and musician, best known as the lead singer and guitarist of the indie rock band Deerhunter. He also pursues a solo career under the moniker Atlas Sound.
Bradford Cox / Cate Le Bon - Canto! from Myths 004
Cate Le Bon's role as producer on Deerhunter's 2019 album Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? can be heard in both the album's experimental tendencies and organic yet distant arrangements. Le Bon's own 2019 strike Reward had the same balance of strong songwriting and production that blurred curiosity and confusion. The creative friendship between Le Bon and Deerhunter's Bradford Cox takes new shapes on their collaborative EP Myths 004. At its most straightforward, the seven-song project sounds like what could be outtakes from either artist's 2019 album. Opening track "Canto!" features Cox in a dramatic double-tracked vocal melody in an arrangement decorated with strums of autoharp, dissonant guitar soloing, and heavy tandem drum kits...

CUP is an experimental art-pop project from creative and marital partners Nels Cline (Wilco) and Yuka C. Honda (Cibo Matto). An intriguing blend of electronic, folk, rock, and improvisations, the New York duo made their debut with the 2019 album, Spinning Creature.
CUP -  Spinning Creature from Spinning Creature
A project from musical and marital partners Nels Cline and Yuka C. Honda, CUP is a delightfully strange affair that merges exploratory improvisations for guitar, percussion, electronics, and voice with more structured art-pop songwriting... The two come together most soundly on the album's title cut, an artful gem of circular folktronic pop with a curiously inviting melody sung in unison. Pleasantly weird without being pretentious, CUP defy easy categorization and their debut pops like the collision of two beloved nonconformists.

The wispy vocals and guitar-picking style of Kayla Cohen evoke the gentler branch of the singer/songwriter era as well as centuries past.
Itasca - Only a Traveler from Spring
Following Open to Chance, her first album to feature a backing band, by three years, Spring is the fourth overall effort from Itasca, the alias of indie folk balladeer Kayla Cohen. Collaborative or not, all four records are populated by the songwriter's gentle, fingerpicked tunes and evocative lyrics, inspired here by her temporary relocating from L.A. to rural New Mexico to write. Specifically influenced by the region's diverse landscapes, highway apparitions, and the isolation she experienced, the resulting songs were recorded to tape with members of Gun Outfit and Sun Araw. On an album where everything is soft and bucolic, notable behind-the-scenes collaborators include James Elkington, who provided atmospheric string arrangements, and singer/songwriter Chris Cohen, who mixed the record...

Olivia Colman, Alcest, Cigarettes After Sex, Sudan Archives, Little Scream, The Bad Plus, Jeff Goldblum & the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra, Anna Calvi, Simon Joyner, Omni, Bradford Cox / Cate Le Bon, CUP, Nels Cline, Yuka C. Honda, Itasca

058 ALTER.NATION weekly favtraX 09-10-2019

ALTER.NATION #58

Guerilla Toss, Omni, Hemlock Ernst, Kenny Segal, Lightning Dust feat. Stephen Malkmus, Levitation Room, Gong Gong Gong 工工工, North Mississippi Allstars, Hiromi, Jeremiah Jae / L'Orange, DIIV, Joshua Redman / Brooklyn Rider, Penguin Cafe

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"Future Doesn’t Know"

ALTER.NATION #58 on DEEZER

Brooklyn-via-Boston group combining no wave, punk, funk, psychedelia, and more in chaotic and ecstatic ways.
Guerilla Toss - Future Doesn’t Know
On their new EP What Would The Odd Do?, the art-rock experimentalists Guerilla Toss are addressing the opioid crisis from a deeply personal angle...  “Future Doesn’t Know.” It’s one of the poppiest songs Guerilla Toss have ever released, yet still fried and off-kilter, like Deerhoof if they were video game characters. At Flood, Carlson calls it “a song about the personification of the future, and finding your own truth.” She continues, “So often we look to others for the meaning of life or what to do next, but really the only answer is within.”

Energetic blend of Postcard pop, angular post-punk, and scrappy D.I.Y. punk by ex-members of Deerhunter and Carnivores. Atlanta group Omni channel the best herky-jerk pop through the ages, drawing inspiration from Devo, Television, Josef K, and Magazine, then filtering it through a no-frills lo-fi sound.
Omni - Courtesy Call
...the third single from Networker, their first album for Sub Pop... finds the Atlanta trio letting a bit of oxygen into their tightly wound post-punk sound. It begins with a reference to an “after hours history lesson and a smile that keeps you guessin’.”

Samuel T. Herring  also known as Sam Herring and by his rap moniker Hemlock Ernst, is an American performer and rapper from Baltimore, Maryland, better known for being the frontman of the synth-pop band Future Islands.
Kenny Segal also known as Syndakit, is an American record producer and DJ based in Los Angeles, California. In 2018, Mixmag described him as "one of the best hip-hop producers in the city.
Hemlock Ernst & Kenny Segal - Addicted Youth
For years now, Samuel T. Herring, frontman for the great synthy-indie Baltimore band Future Islands, has been making rap music. Herring raps under the name Hemlock Ernst, and it’s not the embarrassing, halfassed side project that you might expect from the not-so-proud history of indie rockers attempting to rap... “Addicted Youth” doesn’t sound that different from Future Islands. Segal chops up a few shards of acoustic guitar, and Herring ruminates on fears and regrets, letting some melody creep into his voice. We hear a few hints of the soulful growl that Herring uses when he’s singing. Herring also full-on sings on the outro, but only to quote Eric B. & Rakim’s “Microphone Fiend.”

Hemlock Ernst

Dark and synth-friendly indie rock from Black Mountain's Joshua Wells and Amber Webber. Dark and synth-friendly indie rock duo Lightning Dust started out as a side project for members of Vancouver heavy rock institution Black Mountain, but as years went by the project grew to become a primary focus.
Lightning Dust feat. Stephen Malkmus - A Pretty Picture from Spectre
Lightning Dust's excellent 2013 album Fantasy marked a shift for the Vancouver duo, moving from the subdued folky tones of their earliest work to embrace dark, synthy pop. The band began as a side project of founding Black Mountain members Amber Webber and Joshua Wells, foiling their main band's brawny guitar rock with moodier material. Fourth album Spectre comes after a six-year interim where Webber and Wells parted ways with Black Mountain to focus on Lightning Dust full time. Still leaning heavily on vintage synth sounds and brooding moods, the band lets go of the pop formula that informed Fantasy for a more multi-dimensional approach to the album's songcraft. Webber's stunning vocals are even more central to these songs than before... The production, songwriting, and performances all reach new levels of curiosity and unpredictable moves, making it some of the band's most captivating work.

Los Angeles-based psychedelic explorers meld garage rock energy with a lysergic sense of music adventure.
Levitation Room - 2025 from Headspace
After debuting with Ethos, an album that sounded like it could have been released in 1966 to minor acclaim, Levitation Room return with a record that maintains their note-perfect, backward-looking sound but adds some new wrinkles. This time around, they aren't stuck in one particular year or style and this looseness gives them room to explore. Some of these journeys lead to winning results; some of them don't work quite as well. Looking at the positives first, there are several tracks that capture the strutting swagger of Ethos and deliver similarly fuzzy garage feelings. "2025" lets guitarist Gabe Fernandez take off in flights of fuzztone frenzy while singer Julian Porte sneers mightily...

Chinese experimental rock outfit known for their "phantom rhythms" and genre-fusing. The brainchild of guitarist/vocalist Tom Ng and bassist Josh Frank, Chinese experimental rock outfit Gong Gong Gong earned underground acclaim in the late 2010s for their rhythmic genre-fusing.
Gong Gong Gong 工工工 - Gong Gong Gong Blues 工工工布魯斯 from Phantom Rhythm 幽靈節奏
Gong Gong Gong is a duo from Beijing who play an alarmingly stripped-down form of hypnotic rock which spiritually evokes the blues as well as punk, but otherwise can't be directly compared to any other genre or artist. The instrumentation consists almost entirely of Tom Ng's guitar (and a barely audible shaker) and Josh Frank's bass, which interlock to form insistently chugging rhythms. Ng sings entirely in Cantonese, and his lyrics (as indicated by the translated lyric sheet included with the vinyl pressing of the album) express frustration and anxiety, but ultimately provide words of encouragement...  their ability to create such a big, imposing sound out of limited elements is fascinating, and the determination which drives their work is admirable.

Greasy, bluesy jam band led by brothers Luther and Cody Dickinson, sons of Memphis studio legend Jim Dickinson. 
North Mississippi Allstars - Call That Gone from Up and Rolling
...NMA -- Luther and Cody on guitar and drums, respectively, Thomas on vocals and fife, Carl Dufrene on bass, and Sharisse Norman on vocals -- are a well-seasoned outfit; the quintet and most of their guests have been playing together in various capacities for most of their lives. "Call That Gone" is a filthy, squalling, bottleneck-guitar blues driven by rolling tom-toms with souled-out vocals from Luther and Thomas, her fife trading licks with his guitar...

A classically trained jazz pianist and composer who regularly employs electronic elements into a diverse but signature sound. Japan has added a wealth of fine pianists to the jazz genre. That said, few -- if any -- are as relentlessly inventive and stylistically mercurial as the award-winning Hiromi Uehara. Whether she is playing solo, with a trio, or a full-on electric band, she is as likely to meld post-bop and funk as she is rock and classical, and sometimes all four in the same composition.
Hiromi - Yellow Wurlitzer Blues from Spectrum
Since making her recorded debut in the 1990s, Hiromi Uehara has established herself as one of the most gifted jazz pianists of her generation. She issued Spectrum on the eve of her fortieth birthday as an overview of what she learned as a musician in her thirties...  It aches with emotion and the hint of a smile in its improvisational moments. "Yellow Wurlitzer Blues" reflects the harmonic invention of Thelonious Monk if he were a stride blues pianist. Hiromi's sense of improvisational lightheartedness is stacked in punchy grooves in turnarounds with deft scalar feints for good measure... This 75-minute recital portrays the nearly spiritual command Hiromi has of her instrument and its various languages to extend her astonishing technical facility. More than this, however, it underscores the visionary, authoritative place her pianism commands in modern jazz.

Son of jazz and R&B artist/composer Robert Irving III, rapper Jeremiah Jae has a solid left-field resumé, having worked with cutting-edge producers like Samiyam, Flying Lotus, and Ras G while landing on taste-making labels like Warp and Brainfeeder.
L'Orange is a North Carolina-born beatmaker with a penchant for sampling early jazz records and vintage radio broadcasts, lending a nostalgic, time-worn quality to his music.
Jeremiah Jae / L'Orange - Cool Hand from Complicate Your Life with Violence
Four years after their first collaboration, The Night Took Us In Like Family, enigmatic beatmaker L'Orange and left-field rhymer Jeremiah Jae teamed up again for another set of tense, thrilling tales about violence and vengeance. The duo conjure up a dark, twisted world where the past clashes with the future, and ruthless combat is necessary for survival. It's enough to drive anyone mad, but the constant struggle is life-affirming, and the album creatively illustrates this vicious cycle. While L'Orange was initially known for his extensive sampling of scratchy old jazz 78s and vintage radio broadcasts, his palette has expanded to incorporate twangy country guitars, blues riffs, funkier bass lines, and even faint traces of exotica...

The guitar-heavy project of Zachary Cole Smith combines grunge catharsis with shoegaze bliss. 
DIIV - The Spark from Deceiver
Since its earliest days, shoegaze has been seen as druggy music, with warped guitars and murmured vocals that suggest altered states of consciousness and prompt adjectives like "narcotic," "woozy," and "blissful" to describe it...  They first delved into this territory with Is the Is Are, which offered beautiful proof that they could be a functional band in the wake of Zachary Cole Smith's well-publicized substance abuse issues. After that album's release, DIIV experienced more seismic changes. Smith spent half of 2017 in different rehab programs; by the end of that year, founding bassist Devin Ruben Perez had departed. On Deceiver, DIIV emerge from these challenges as a stronger, even more expressive band...

An acclaimed tenor saxophonist, Joshua Redman is a thoughtful, forward-thinking jazz artist whose robust improvisational style balances a love of the bop tradition with an ear for advanced harmony and playful exploration.
Founded in 2005, New York string quartet Brooklyn Rider are known for their accessible but genre- and boundary-challenging repertoire. In addition to recording works by the likes of Beethoven and Philip Glass, they draw focus on emerging composers and contribute their own original compositions.
Joshua Redman / Brooklyn Rider - Sun on Sand from Sun on Sand
A collaboration between saxophonist Joshua Redman, forward-thinking chamber string ensemble Brooklyn Rider, and composer Patrick Zimmerli, 2019's Sun on Sand is a kinetic, richly attenuated album that straddles the line between jazz and modern classical... Also joining Redman are his equally talented rhythm section bandmates bassist Scott Colley and drummer Satoshi Takeishi; the latter of whom is also a longtime Zimmerli associate going back to the '90s... The most impressive aspect of Sun on Sand is how balanced the collaboration feels. Redman has the facility and sound to carry the music, but Brooklyn Rider offer a deeply textured counterpoint, while Zimmerli's expansive voice remains ever present.

Founded by Arthur Jeffes in 2009 as both a continuation of and homage to his father Simon Jeffes' original avant-pop band Penguin Cafe Orchestra. Distinct from the original ensemble, Penguin Cafe features no former members of PCO, but they perform some of their compositions, and play a similarly uncategorizable blend of folk, jazz, pop, and chamber music influences, occasionally using unconventional instrumentation. 
Penguin Cafe - Pythagoras on the Line Again from Handfuls of Night
In 2018, as part of a project commissioned by Greenpeace with the intention of raising awareness about the endangered Antarctic environment, Arthur Jeffes wrote four songs about specific species of penguins native to the continent. As Jeffes became enamored by their characteristics, he began to fantasize an entire world of anthropomorphic penguins, and he developed this concept into the fourth Penguin Cafe album. The nine compositions on Handfuls of Night serve as a soundtrack to this imaginary penguin world, and as one might expect of Penguin Cafe, they're as playful as they are poignant... "Pythogaras on the Line Again" is an interpretation of a piece which appeared on Penguin Cafe Orchestra's final album from 1993, using sampled dial tones to demonstrate the principles of harmonics. Conveying a sense of childlike wonder about the natural world, the album is full of life and immensely enjoyable.

Guerilla Toss, Omni, Hemlock Ernst, Kenny Segal, Lightning Dust feat. Stephen Malkmus, Levitation Room, Gong Gong Gong 工工工, North Mississippi Allstars, Hiromi, Jeremiah Jae / L'Orange, DIIV, Joshua Redman / Brooklyn Rider, Penguin Cafe