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Elliot

@slippery.el

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Rhodri Davies “Wound Response”

I had been meaning to write about this one, and then Anne Carson won the Nobel and it sealed the deal.

I can’t say precisely why but there’s an elegant convergence between the two: Carson’s curt, elegiac sentences that bob to the surface like expired goldfish; Davies’ wounded and wounding tones, like a dreadful chisel mark in pale skin. Both speak with an eloquence that doesn’t trumpet its arrival. Together, they make a scraping harmony.

Of course, Davies’ record is already loaded with heavy literary allusions - every track takes its name from works by untouchable authors like Borges or Bernhard or Prynne. The literary spectres roost.

Through a plethora of pedals, he drives his cartwheeling harp into a future unknown. Excoriating feedback, shredded molecules ricocheting about our little cell - it feels like mortification, mediaeval punishment, the hair shirt. It’s countless years of history flung into a whirling maw.

But through all the flecks of blood there’s a slanting ray, here to bathe the wrecks in gold.

It feels like the world is suffused in poetry. by @slippery.el

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18 hours ago

Nedly Elstak Trio + Voice “The Machine”

🎵 THE MACHINE IS MORE PERFECT THAN YOU 🎵

Apart from merely being the possessor of one of the most impressive names around, Nedly Elstak was also responsible for one of the most severely unheralded ESP-Disk releases - a European rumination that compounds free jazz and sprechstimme art song in some kind of leafy bolus rolling around your guts.

I came upon this record because of the involvement of the wonderful bassist Maarten Van Regteren Altena, but very quickly ended up wondering how I’d previously missed it. From the first moment you hear Martin Van Duynhoven’s drum barrage, like flurries of snow building up in great drifts, you know you are in for something extraordinary. Elstak’s trumpet jerks like a possessed pennant atop a castle. Altena’s bass grinds and drones like an infernal engine. And Sofie Van Leer declaims in a detached singsong.

But what of the title? Is there a mechanistic aspect here? Maybe it helps to think of The Machine more as a subject, a theme for obsessive reiteration, like an ordering principle or something to aspire to. It’s the superego that oversees every quaking stroke of the bow. by @slippery.el

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2 days ago

Bim Sherman meets Horace Andy and U. Black “In A Rub-A-Dub Style”

A subtly sublime set of tracks that transition, straightforwardly and unobtrusively, into their dub versions. No muss no fuss. In any other universe this record might go unremarked. But that would be reckoning without the extraordinary, alchemical voice of Bim Sherman.

Jah Woosh handles the production, but there is very little in the way of pyrotechnics or death-defying feats you might expect from someone like Scientist - instead just a beautiful rolling continuation of each track. And while Horace Andy and U. Black (who sounds a lot like Trinity) get equal billing on the sleeve, really it’s Bim’s show: a tender drawn-out affair, the bitter delivered with the sweet. by @slippery.el

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9 days ago

Möslang Wehowsky “Einschlagskrater”

An understated yet profoundly unsettling 7” from these two experimental black belts - like the outline of something hunched in a bath of milk or someone moving furniture around in a darkened ballroom, barely visible.

Norbert Möslang and Ralf Wehowsky are both highly prolific in the region of sound art/industrial/free improvisation/roving cloud of associations, the former most well known for his long-running Voice Crack outfit and the latter in the unforgiving P16.D4. This is decidedly more lowercase than either of those acts, but no less effective for that. It’s the soft breath of the indifferent sadist on your neck. by @slippery.el

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11 days ago

Rail Band “Salif Keita & Mory Konte”

Mande music like the crease in your hand: pliant and new, marked by millennia. Skin lit by the trickle inside, stone parched by the passage of time. All of these things at once.

It’s so hard to talk about Rail Band music, perhaps because it feels undeniable. It’s a Fact, like a cliff face, craggy and inscrutable.

The majority of this album is given over to the epic ‘Soundiata’ about the 13th century Malian king Sundiata Keita, founder of the empire and Salif Keita’s direct ancestor. Stories about Sundiata have been passed down through the griot tradition, ensuring that even now he’s like a myth made flesh. In many ways the music reminds me of Count Ossie’s Grounation, the piece that opens the LP of the same name - a lesson in song, slow-simmering, tracing circular patterns in the dirt floor.

Amongst an accumulation of elements not necessarily designed to stick out, Djelemady Tounkara’s guitar is what really leaps to the front of the mix. Its searing clarity is like staring at the sun - unflinching, deeply disorienting, and nearer to a notion of ‘psychedelia’ than a whole cartload of musicians given that epithet.

By the time Salif Keita’s vocals arrive on the second side, shouldering through a great brooding brass cloud, it feels like a benediction. Tidiani Koné’s muted trumpet makes wispy little obeisances while Keita’s beseeching tone brings the rains. by @slippery.el

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14 days ago

Pascal Comelade “Ready-Made”

This exquisite 7”, complete with a rough sketch of Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, is one of Comelade’s earliest recordings. A beautiful little assemblage that contains glimmerings of so much that was to come.

I say glimmerings, but really there is so much here that is already made flesh. The first side is taken up with a buzzing repetitive take on a theme - attributed to Kevin Ayers - that sounds like a red light blinking in an athletic field test gone awry.

The second side is more sedate, with ‘Canço De Bressol’ and ‘Distant Pianos’ like a watery, grey-green landscape interspersed with sombre figures. Piano vies with the plinking toy instruments that were to characterise Comelade’s career.

But it’s the final piece, ‘San-Salvador’, that blasts all microbes off the slide with its searching flame. Starting with an unobtrusive heat haze hum, it swiftly builds into a uncontained pyre, Armand Miralles’ white-hot guitar scorching its way through the scrub. by @slippery.el

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16 days ago

Antonio Russek “Paisaje Circular”

An incredible electroacoustic gem bestowed by the legend @diamond_marimba. Not only a beacon of taste and erudition, Alex is also an incredibly generous soul. It was really lovely to catch up on our recent trip to LA.

Russek is an unjustly neglected Mexican composer who’s been crafting teeming electronic ecosystems since the 70s. He appears on the Creel Pone classic Música Electroacústica Mexicana, which finally got a proper reissue from @auroracentralrecords last year. This particular 7” comes via @thenightkeptcoming, founder of Aurora Central, who is working with Russek to bring his amazing recordings back to light.

The ‘Great White Composers’ bias that runs like an ugly scar through music history certainly didn’t end with the advent of electronic music. If anything, it was probably bolstered by the academic climate in which it first took root. All of this makes counter-histories and archival projects like Aurora’s very important.

But what of the music? It’s a gorgeous mirage that arises out of a shimmering buffet of bells, chimes and gongs, all campanological sibilance stretching to the edges of the picture plane before winking out of existence.

With deceptive simplicity, Russek interrogates every aspect of his metallic subject. From silvery dewdrops, to clanking armour, to escape via monster plumbing and everything in between, he models and remodels each texture. It’s a work of subtle transfiguration. by @slippery.el

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23 days ago

Jean-Charles Capon “Timing No. 9”

The cello occupies a small but distinguished pocket in jazz. Abdul Wadud, Tomeka Reid, Dave Holland’s and Ron Carter’s stints on the instrument - it’s a darkly glamorous sound that transmogrifies the sound of a group into something burnished and caramelised. It’s as though it transmits the very grain of the wood to the music: all that elocution and toothsome cellulose.

Capon has his fingerprints all over avant garde jazz in France and beyond, playing on dates with Jef Gilson, Joe McPhee and many others. But his library records are few and far between: the incredible ‘Apocalypse: Biorhythms’ record with Daniel Humair is now well out of reach, so imagine how pleased I was to come across this one.

The jovial, rotund ‘Club’ is a fantastic way to open a record, but it is a little misleading. Nothing that follows approaches it in mood - instead, it’s a gorgeous but dour selection that blends austere classicism with spiralling improvisation in the way that only a master like Capon can.

Listening to these wonderful tracks stirs up echoes of elsewhere: ‘Cadence’ ploughs the same deep furrows as Elgar’s Cello Concerto; ‘Botafogo’ is reminiscent of François Rabbath’s fidgety little sketches; and the crunchy ‘Chaos’ is like something off Paolo Renosto’s glorious ‘Cronos’, performed by the brilliant Fernando Grillo. The emphasis is on atmosphere you can cut with a pallette knife, monstrous impasto Auerbach flakes lifting off the canvas, gruesome in their tactility. It’s not realism, rather an overabundance of reality. by @slippery.el

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a month ago

by @slippery.el

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a month ago

Nocturnal Emissions “The World Is My Womb”

Ok, so Spiritflesh is probably the apex of Nigel Ayers’ oddly organic industrial music. But this one from the year prior is a little more strange and disjointed - like a doll with outsized limbs - and for that reason I think I may like it even more. Just like its successor, it abounds in that organic quality, even as its harsh pagan tongue rings in its head. It’s a mossy epitaph, an unreadable inscription.

The formidable Caroline K is still on board for this one, and she helps to summon the oppressive fog that made her album ‘Now Wait For Last Year’ such a bleary classic.

There’s a gorgeous, delirious ambiguity to these sounds: what might be wind chimes could just as well be bells tolling for the dead. The wind that stirs the barley is the same wind that kindles the withering fire. Squashed beetle circuitry sweeps into a triumphant, unironic hymn. by @slippery.el

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a month ago

Amy Sheffer “Where’s Your Home?”

I returned from LA clutching a small pile of treasures with a slightly too-tight grip - including this one.

We all know 80s jazz tends, a little unfairly, to be disregarded in favour of its adventurous 60s and 70s forebears. Perhaps the later advances were a little more incremental than the great leaps of the past. But the landscape became more varied, heterogeneous: there’s less suggestion of straining toward a shared goal and more time to work on your own idiosyncratic practice, on your own terms. This is one 80s record that should be actively sought out.

An incredible pianist and vocalist, Amy Sheffer’s questing, quavering approach takes us to hitherto undiscovered corners of the map. Twisting strands of smoke drift languidly up to the rafters, then abruptly coalesce into lumpy, looming Rorschach blots. You soon realise that Sheffer’s searching tone is anything but random - she’s casting her rod repeatedly into the gloom, in the hopes of snagging something momentous.

Of course, comparisons will insist on being drawn with other avant garde jazz vocalists, like Jeanne Lee or Patty Waters. There’s a kinship there, but more than anything I hear echoes of the great (and underappreciated) new age artist Jeritree - in both vocal and compositional approach. There’s something pained and painfully direct, like a Francis Bacon wound, all gruesome pinks and shocking whites. You can’t hold their gaze for long.

The band is incredible, but I really know very few of them. David Durrah I recognise from his amazing collaboration with Doug Hammond, Reflections In The Sea Of Nurnen. Billy Bang is of course the profoundly brilliant violinist. And William Parker could lay claim to being the greatest bass player of the contemporary era. But regretfully the rest are completely unknown to me, despite the gorgeous seesawing groove they conjure. by @slippery.el

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a month ago

Edward Vesala “Afrikan Tähdet”

Maybe it was prompted by having a little one of our own, but recently I’ve been drawn to music made by or with children. Whether it’s the classroom funk of Græsrødderne or more unstructured free jazz meanderings of young collaborators with Arnie Lawrence or Bennink, Brötzmann and Van Hove, I’ve been craving the same thing many artists clearly do - unmediated expression.

Finnish free jazz giant Edward Vesala here teams up with a few kids (and a smattering of professional musicians, naturally) for a very uncharacteristic record. If the title is anything to go by (‘African Star’), then you’d expect it to reflect the music of that continent. Aside from some decisions re instrumentation - hand drums appear alongside morose brass and sinewy bass - there’s no more an ‘African’ flavour than anywhere else. Instead it sounds like the island of benevolent savages, miniature Robinson Crusoes, reciting mutated snatches of half-remembered rhymes in between dispatching volleys of poison darts.

Percussion jangles excitedly. Orphaned samples are extruded through a toothpaste tube. The little people’s strident voices intermingle like arrows in a quiver.

Wonderful. by @slippery.el

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2 months ago