Tumgik
dustedmagazine · 18 hours
Text
Civerous — Maze Envy (20 Buck Spin)
Tumblr media
Photo by Juliet Guzman
Civerous is one of those death metal band names that seems as if it should actually be a word in the OED, likely something along these lines: “Civerous, adj. Of or in the manner of a predatory quadruped with enormous incisors and canine teeth; voracious; possessing an outsized appetite averse to regulation or restraint.” Unbound from the specifics of an actual definition, it’s a lot of fun to imagine those sorts of usages, beasts and other linguistic contexts for the word. It’s decidedly less fun to listen to Maze Envy, Civerous’s first LP for the prolific death metal label 20 Buck Spin, but fun is not among the priorities motivating music this heavy and intense. It bites.
The band seems to be characterizing that intensity with the inventive subgenre tag “caustic death/doom,” and this reviewer can stipulate to the caustic properties of the guitar tone that dominates Maze Envy’s heaviest passages — it’s tasty. But we should note that guitarist Daniel Salinas and vocalist Issaiah Vaca also play in heady post-black metal band Aylwin, and there are aspects of Civerous’s sound that create textures notably removed from the gruesome down-tuned disgust of death/doom. See the George Crumb-like glissando strings that shimmer and keen through “The Azure Eye,” or the guttering glow of the clean plucking in “Endless Symmetry.” Those two tracks function as introductory passages to longer, more dour and (yep) caustic songs, “Shrouded in Crystals” and “Labyrinth Charm,” respectively. But the intro tunes frame the longer compositions with what feel like arch ambitions. Are those gestures post-, or are they proggy?
Some listeners (hello) do not respond productively to the conjunction of “prog” and “death metal” — and to be clear, it’s not Civerous invoking the problematic p-word. There’s a pummeling toughness in Maze Envy’s heaviest minutes (see the opening of the title track, or the closing three minutes of “Shrouded in Crystals”) that’s akin to the growling, blatting, thunderous approach of a biker gang. Those passages ground the record in doom metal’s traditional grit, a gravid muscularity that struts and glowers. The results are more than adequate to banish the preening peacocking endemic in prog’s valorizations of technical mastery.
But still, Civerous makes an idiosyncratic variety of death/doom. It often feels like high-brow stuff (a decidedly proggy attribute), as interested in ornament as it is in ponderous power. The closest this reviewer can come to making sense of the combination of sensibilities is to compare the music to some transcendent visual moments in From Beyond (1986), Stuart Gordon’s hilariously esoteric sleazefest: see the spectacular death of Bubba Brownlee (Ken Foree), or the initial glimpse of the mutated Dr Pretorius (Ted Sorel). Those shots are as gloriously hyperreal as they are confessedly fabricated with cheap foam latex and syrupy fake blood; they are comic and horrific, vertiginous and goofball. At its best, Maze Envy produces a similar collision of ill-fitting but effective aesthetic elements: a strange sort of good taste, and lots of ripping teeth.
Jonathan Shaw
1 note · View note
dustedmagazine · 20 hours
Text
IMustBe Leonardo — Not To Be Scared of Weekend (Self-Release)
Tumblr media
“Why should you need gods when you have John Peel or PJ Harvey or Meryl Streep and Stan Kubrick and Kim Gordon, fallible, fantastic, inspiring people but just people like you trying to create and share beauty?”
That’s a small part of a monologue that ushers in IMustBe Leonardo’s “Kim Gordon,” a meditation on humanism, the power of creativity and the emptiness of organized religion. It’s an odd, intoxicating little glimpse into an idiosyncratic mind, spoken in uninflected tones by the Google reader, but even so, deeply, fundamentally human. When the spoken word fades, the music enters, a wispy, whispery voice asking repeatedly, “Why should...you need god…when you have Kim Gordon?” against a minimalist frame of acoustic strumming, which is just a bit later submerged in a most satisfying swell of amp feedback and dissonance. It’s a poem, a philosophy, a lo-fi acoustic lament and a blast of rock-and-roll mayhem all in one, and while certainly one of the most arresting tracks, not even the best thing on this eccentric album.
IMustBe Leonardo is a Berlin-based songwriter who has been making his oddball songs since around 2016. He gets a little radio play here and there, and a handful of people are ardent supporters, but you could spend a whole lifetime listening to music and not run across his work. That would be a shame. His outsider-y poetry is slow to light but catches fire on repeat plays. About half the tracks are hand-made rock songs, bolstered by clicky drum tracks and ravaged guitar tones. The other half are the maddest, most surreal campfire songs you ever heard, gently strummed but extremely odd.
Out of these, perhaps, consider “All the Poets Here” a murmured litany of wry observations about all the things that the poets are getting up to. The line lifts gently at the end of phrases, not so much a question implied as these evanescent thoughts blowing away on a slight breeze, and every sentence is a little koan. “Oh the poets here are naked and they feel like war/oh the poets here they say they’re crying when it rains/Oh the poets here don’t wash for days and weeks and months” and so on.
Other cuts are more taut and rhythmic, as for instance, “Government Press Office’s New Rattle,” with its staccato Young Marble Giants-ish guitar riff and punching drums. The cut might remind you of Lewsberg in its mordant chant that takes brief flights into melody, in its quiet tensions that erupt into noisy crescendos of guitar. There’s a song in there, a well-shaped melody, swamped almost entirely by ennui and static.
And indeed, the artist seems aware of his tenuous but legitimate claim on pop music. His song “Perfect Pop Song” rattles on like a wind-up toy, with its sharp hedges of guitar picking, its nonchalant chatter of verse. And yet, it is sort of a pop song. You can sing along after a bit. It creates an economical amalgam of melody and meaning, a unitary sort of structure that is exactly what it is, and then blows out that structure in a profusion of harmonies and vocal counterpoints.
This is a wonderful album, absolutely original and striking and unpremeditated. Listen to it a few times, and you might find yourself asking questions, like: Why do we need gods when we have human beings making beautiful little songs out of sticks and string and imagination? Why do we need forgiveness when art swaddles us in solace and connection and meaning? Why do we need religion at all when we have IMustBe Leonardo? 
Jennifer Kelly
3 notes · View notes
dustedmagazine · 22 hours
Text
Amirtha Kidambi's Elder Ones — New Monuments (We Jazz)
Tumblr media
The great DC artist, audio scholar and activist Thomas Stanley once described Sun Ra’s concept of the Alter Destiny as “a small chunk of language, a key unlocking large powers and capacities that will allow us to realize sustainable futures that are not subordinate to the same imperial regime that fucked up our planet in the first place. History is the plantation, abolitionist Ra reminds us, and it is time to break loose from these chains and leave.” This is a particularly resonant message today, in an era of late capitalism, deteriorating institutions and genocidal warfare. Yet, the inevitable future promised to us by this seemingly unending quagmire presents a sense of stability in its repetition of failures that enables many of its subjects to cling to its promise even as we further careen into the abyss. Amirtha Kidambi is not one of those people, and in the five years since her previous release with her group Elder Ones — a period marked by the pandemic, the George Floyd protests, and a rapidly-encroaching American fascism — her resolve has only been strengthened. Their record New Monuments is a battle cry for building not a better future, but a different future entirely, one free from the ghosts of colonialism and imperialism.
Kidambi has a background in both new music and DIY, and navigating these disparate worlds has informed her unique approach to improvised music. This is on full display on the opening track “Third Space,” on which Kidambi sings with punk-inflected energy while maintaining complete control and authority over her vocals. The track takes its name from influential postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of a liminal space in which, in the context of colonial ambivalence, different cultures interact with each other. The (very) basic gist of this theory is that, in post-colonial society,  culture is constantly moving, never one singular thing and never the property of any singular people. In turn, on this track, and the album as a whole, Kidambi defies any essentialized notion of “Indian music” or Indian jazz (which has become yet another needlessly limiting genre term in this “spiritual jazz” era), and not just by invoking Bhabha. From the moment the record kicks off, new agey world music treacle is left behind on another planet entirely.
On this record, Kidambi is backed by a top group of New York improvisers, including Elder Ones mainstay Matt Nelson on soprano saxophone alongside cellist Lester St. Louis, known for his work in the late Jaimie Branch’s Fly or Die group, and Jason Nazary, frequent collaborator of Darius Jones and one half of Jaimie Branch’s Anteloper group. Rounding out the quintet is Eva Lawitts, whose propulsive basswork pushes the multi-part compositions on the album forward. On album centerpiece “Farmer’s Day” the band balances a modal, in-the-pocket groove with loose improvisation, with a particularly dazzling solo from Nazary showing off his impressive and dynamic range as a percussionist. After this solo, the song slows to a crawl as Kidambi invokes the now-yearslong protest movement of Indian farmers against a series of bills designed to weaken working farmers and benefit corporations: “We work from cradle to grave / conditioned like a slave.” This is protest music, as clear in its radical intentions as it can be, but the Elder Ones find plenty of room for beauty in struggle. This is especially true on the title track, which has a synth line that, if isolated, would call to mind the devotional music Alice Coltrane recorded in the 80s. Kidambi asks “in the end is history always doomed to repeat?” The answer she arrives at for this unanswerable question is to “build new monuments to new futures,” an affirmation of the Alter Destiny. Though the struggle is neverending, these new futures are still well within our capabilities. All it takes is a level of fearlessness, something Amirtha Kidambi has shown in spades on this record.
by Levi Dayan
1 note · View note
dustedmagazine · 2 days
Text
Mind Over Mirrors — Particles, Peds & Pores (Mind Over Mirrors)
Tumblr media
Like the Fairport Convention song goes,  “It all comes round again.” Particles, Peds & Pores brings Mind Over Mirrors full circle to its beginnings as the solo project of Jaime Fennelly (Peeesseye, Setting). Whether that represents the closing of said circle or a new start, the recording stands on its own as an absorbing work of self-contained kosmische music.
Fennelly first conceived Mind Over Mirrors after decamping from Brooklyn NY to an island in the Salish Sea in 2007. Residing off the grid in a series of cabins dependent upon solar energy, Fennelly began composing solo pieces for electricity-independent keyboards, most particularly a harmonium. After shifting once more to Chicago in 2010, he added synthesizer and pedals to the harmonium and began playing the music before audiences. A sequence of strikingly packaged LPs on Digitalis, Hands In The Dark, Immune, and Paradise Of Bachelors documented Mind Over Mirrors’ evolution from a sonic expression of a mind expanding in solitude to an ensemble of singers and multi-instrumentalists whose ritualistic performances required the resources of an art museum in order to be fully realized.
In 2018, Fennelly stepped away from the stage, and pursued some geographical and priority shifts; nowadays he spends a lot of time in North Carolina. But the Particles, Peds & Pores recording credits show that he never quit playing. Between 2019 and 2022 he composed and recorded eight pieces for harmonium and synth, the same instruments he had used when Mind Over Mirrors started out a decade earlier. But while the instrumentation is the same, the vibe has changed. Early Mind Over Mirrors music often foregrounded the physical action required to sustain its sound; the bellows-driven rhythms evoked the experience of long march through forests dampened by salty ocean air. The new record opens with “Blank Vessels I,” a layered wall of slow-moving, continuous sound; you could pair it with a sunrise, and the music would not be shamed. “One Wing Beat” introduces a defined beat, which sounds synthetic in tone but hand-played in cadence.
But even though it is not alone among Particles, Peds & Pores’ tracks in covering some ground, the music inevitably returns to moments of appreciative stasis comprising sounds stacked one over another. If the original Mind Over Mirrors recordings sounded like a person consciously leaning into a remote, solitary experience, these express a comfort with that state, a sort of sun-lit, piney satori. However, coincident with the completion of this music, Fennelly started jamming with Nathan Bowles and Joe Westerlund, and Setting was born. After a decade of being the man in charge, he's back to being one of the band. And while they’ve pursued an expanding touring schedule and released a couple recordings in 2023, Fennelly has played just one Mind Over Mirrors gig and quietly released Particles, Peds & Pores on Bandcamp. If the project stops here, one might feel a bit of disappointment that there’s no physical edition. But the music itself feels satisfying and complete.
Bill Meyer
1 note · View note
dustedmagazine · 2 days
Text
The Narcotix — Dying (Self-Released)
Tumblr media
“The Maiden” is Dying’s longest and most astonishing track.  It starts in disembodied, wordless vocal sounds, a three-some of “la-la-lah”s breathed first by one vocalist, then joined by another.  Their notes play tag with one another, overlapping and darting in and over and around, all by themselves until a malleted percussion instrument joins, plunking out silvery tones in conversation but not synchrony with the voices.  The song picks up other instruments as it goes, a syncopated funk bass, a trebly, twitchy highlife guitar.  A tropical heat and humidity permeates the sound — you might flash on Flora Purim in full skittering fusion-jazz flight — but it is also cerebral and clean.  At least it is, right up to the moment when one singer, Esther Quansah I believe, intones “Someone told me to make an impression/someone one made me…” and then a wild cacophony of voices and drums and guitar tumble down in a swirl.   
The Narcotix is a Brooklyn band centered around two female singers, both striking in their distinct ways.  Esther Quansah wields a jazzy melismatic alto, an alto sax of a voice if you will.  Becky Foinchas, who also plays keyboards, sounds more like a trumpet, producing clear, bell-like tones that ring out against the baroque squiggles and flourishes of her partner. 
The two of them are both children of the African diaspora.  Quansah’s family is from the Cote D’Ivoire, Foinchas’ from Cameroon.  You can hear that West African influence in many of these cuts, in the warmth and clarity of the guitars and the syncopation of the percussion.  Yet The Narcotix’s music has a theatrical sweep and neoclassical precision.  It reminds me a lot of Ohmme’s complicated pop, though with a bit of world music penciled in. 
Thus while the early single “Mother,” glitters with bright, pizzicato keyboards and throbs with luminous synths, its focus remains on the two women, Quansah singing low and fluttering over the notes in syllable stretching free play, Foinchas dipping in and out of the main melodic line with airy descants and counterpoints.  The words disappear into the pure sonic pleasure of dizzying vocal interplay, rising to the surface occasionally in French and then in English to ask “What’s the meaning of time?” and then later answer “Time means nothing, nothing at all.”   
This is the Narcotix’s first full-length following a 2021 EP called Mommy Issues, and it is extraordinarily assured given the early stage in the band’s development. The Narcotix already has its own enveloping and idiosyncratic sound, an aesthetic that touches on West African forms without recreating them, and a command of complicated, multi-voiced song structures.  Nothing else sounds like The Narcotix at the moment.  Don’t miss it. 
Jennifer Kelly
1 note · View note
dustedmagazine · 3 days
Text
Prefuse 73 — New Strategies for Modern Crime, Vol 1 (Lex)
Tumblr media
Since the double hit of Vocal Studies + Uprock Narratives and One Word Extinguisher in the early aughts, Guillermo Scott Herren’s output as Prefuse 73 seems to have dictated by the law of diminishing returns. It’s not that he puts bad records but they can meander, combining the interesting with the mundane in ways that make it hard for the listener to gain traction. Herren’s new offering, New Strategies for Modern Crime Vol 1, also frustrates. Presented as a series of noirish film soundtracks Herren’s music lacks enough tension, drama and, yes, humor to fully engage. His music is clever and well-constructed  but the tracks slip by like conspirators skulking after that priceless objet d’art.
There’s much atmosphere setting orchestration and dramatic percussion not to mention interjections of venetian blind lit saxophone. The collage of electronics bedaubed with fusion jazz, 1970s soundtrack music, 1960s exotica and hip hop beats hits the occasion height. The prepared piano and lush strings to “Onboard, Overboard” have an appropriately seasick instability, the vaguely threatening sound effects on “Fare La Corna” will have you glad you crossed yourself when the mellifluous alto comes at you. The glitchy hip hop of “Full Recollection” harks back to Herren’s early work and feels like the most fully realized track here. On the other hand, the protagonist of  “Clean-Up Scene Apprentice” sounds like they’ve been assigned to tidy up after a particularly heinous pun while “Desperate Demise” sounds like a lament for a watered-down cocktail rather than a despairing cry for help. “She Needs No Introduction” rolls along on a groovy bassline and some intriguing keyboard effects, but she is made to sound more Effie Perrine than Brigid O’Shaughnessy.
For all his noirish ambitions, Herren misfires on much of New Strategies for Modern Crime Vol 1. Engaging with soundtrack conventions that have ossified into cliché, he his caught between homage and pastiche without overcoming either. The occasional clue piques the interest but without loss was there even a crime? The Maltese Falcon was a red herring at the center of one of the classic of hardboiled detective stories. Here there are no tarantulas bestriding angel cakes, no pink headed bugs crawling up the side of city hall, no corpses, no femme fatales.
Andrew Forell
1 note · View note
dustedmagazine · 3 days
Text
Jim White — All Hits: Memories (Drag City)
Tumblr media
Reasonable enough, perhaps, that drummer Jim White, after four decades in the trade and with a sprawling resumé of indie rock collaborations (not to mention percussion duties in the Dirty Three!), would only now get around to releasing his first solo album. After all, drums by themselves offer a challenging compositional palette, at least in certain idioms. However White, who is deeply respected by his peers, makes some clever moves on All Hits: Memories which clear the way. The first move is to turn toward free jazz, where solo percussion is a bit more familiar than in indie rock. Without doubt he has the chops, too, shifting between groovy phrases and episodes that expand and branch rhizomatically. While it would be difficult to pinpoint his central references here, and while I suspect that difficulty is intentional, it's hard not to hear Milford Graves in the room.
The second move is to play/think not just in rhythm but in sound; each song contains at least one or two rewarding sonic surprises, as White plays with room echo or drags a stick around the ride like a sound bath meditation bowl. These moments give somatic depth and draw the ear in close. It is a chestnut, but headphones add a lot to hearing this album.
The third move is working with brief songs, most of which are essentially vignettes (with just a couple of exceptions). There is a feeling here not unlike, say, J Dilla (and without drawing generic comparisons otherwise), who in his own solo work built breathtakingly complete musical worlds in 30 seconds, only to leave them aside for the next lush thing. White builds worlds similarly, extending the kit in gorgeous ways in rapid fire assemblages of ideas.
Lastly, there is a feeling of manipulation in much of the album's production, an insinuation of treatment in the studio. I have no idea whether that is the case, and I prefer not to check. In the mid-1990s many artists, perhaps fascinated with new studio tools ready to hand in bedrooms and apartments, played with the blurred line between live performance and post-hoc manipulation. (See e.g. the gorgeous, nebulous percussion on Stereolab's Parsec (1997)). There are elements of All Hits: Memories that seem to be looking backwards, perhaps to the aesthetic concerns of that moment, or to earlier moments of sonic synthesis (there are Stranger Things-like retro swells on several tracks). The title itself, of course, feels like a tongue-in-cheek, playfully self-aggrandizing glance backwards. There is a whole lot converging here.
Benjamin Tausig
5 notes · View notes
dustedmagazine · 6 days
Text
Kevin Drumm — OG23 (Streamline)
Tumblr media
youtube
On OG23, Kevin Drumm simultaneously plumbs the deep seas and tumbles through outer space. Incidentally, both environments are potentially lethal; the ocean’s pressure will squish our bodies, and the vacuum of the cosmos will tear them apart. Sounds pleasant, right? Drumm thinks the concept is worth probing. With a wry smile, he’s placed a broken-down submarine right in the middle of the album’s cover. Sadly, there isn’t a damaged spaceship on the other side, but the point is obvious: these sounds evoke uncontrolled motion, existential dread, and the ironic beauty within that which threatens our survival. To borrow a concept from Harry Sword’s tome on drone music Monolithic Undertow, Drumm has created a “sonic womb.”
Drumm originally posted these multi-dimensional meanderings on his Bandcamp page in 2022. The transitory emanations are singular within his extensive catalog, and thus the sounds begged for a physical release. Enter Christoph Heemann with his Streamline label and the mastering expertise of Drumm’s longtime pal Jim O’Rourke: the ghost in the machine is now alive and it has scratched its sinister signature into vinyl.
Situating any new release within Drumm’s oeuvre is an arduous task. Between his overflowing Bandcamp catalog and his physical output, he has hundreds of releases. Drumm’s vast body of work is also a multi-dimensional continuum, morphing based on his chosen tone generating apparatus. He delivers barely perceptible hum as seriously as he does meditative drones, agitated mechanical clatter, and punishing harsh noise.
Drumm can be withholding regarding the genesis of the material he releases, and this is the case with OG23. It’s clear, however, that he’s harnessed electrons to do his bidding. The tones slide around like multi-hued oil droplets on water or condors drifting on atmospheric air currents. Sounds enter the field of perception, alter course, and then disappear like whisps of vapor. As one element vanishes, more appear. Mid and low-register swarms provide a scaffold-like hum, like a fleet of airplanes performing a flyby or the rumble of a distant factory.
OG23 resembles aleatoric or generative music in the way its tones worm around and vanish. Drumm’s established a sinister calculus and dialed in the parameters. The fractalized patterns use his framework to writhe and take on new forms. Each of the side-long pieces corrupts Drumm’s algorithm with its own unique mutation. On the A side, a flock of robotic birds explores the Starship Enterprise engine room, whereas on the flip, the passerine beings search for home within the humid air of a subterranean cavern. Drumm is the mastermind behind both scenes, reveling in the strange harmonies he’s set in motion.
Bryon Hayes
7 notes · View notes
dustedmagazine · 6 days
Text
Mint Mile — Roughrider (Comedy Minus One)
Tumblr media
Photo by Patrick Masterson
Mint Mile has been an active concern for going on a decade now, but the build has been slow: Three promising EPs were finally followed by a sweeping full-length that dropped the week after the bottom dropped out on reality and the pandemic began. Ambertron was a grand triumph in a year that did its best to stifle such art, but its casual, communal air felt out of sync in a year where easy connection was impossible. Like time and those of us that survived, however, the band has moved on. Those changes are well processed and documented on the appropriately titled Roughrider.
The best place to start with Roughrider might be right at the end with “I Hope It’s Different.” The alt-country ensemble SIlkworm’s Tim Midyett has been writing for and helming with the steady assistance of bassist Matthew Barnhart, guitarist Justin Brown and drummer Jeff Panall is here led by Nina Nastasia on vocals instead — an acclaimed songwriter in her own right whose “That’s All There Is” Silkworm covered way back in 2003. Nastasia looks optimistically to what comes next as she sings “I hope it’s different / Not just another good time / Insulated by uncomfortable lies” set to the band’s twangy slow dance and given added flourish by Poi Dog Pondering’s Susan Voelz organization of the strings. It’s like opening a window and walking outside, the promise of fresh air and a new environment before you after Midyett’s scrawling shifts and meandering moods.
That doesn’t mean “I Hope It’s Different” is the best song here, exactly. Mint Mile has taken up the mantle of the kind of unspooling Americana Jason Molina used to excel at so well, which is a funny thing to say given Roughrider’s brevity relative to Ambertron. Even so, the band is firing on all cylinders here regardless of track length; “Interpretive Outlook” does every bit as much with its sub-three-minute runtime as “Brigadier” does pushing eight. The breadth of musicianship is on full display and Midyett’s songwriting expands or contracts to fit the music as needed; his roughened, unsparing delivery had me recalling early Jets to Brazil and Lucero.
But perhaps even more so than Ambertron, this is a record about community. To wit: The band shines brightest when the core four are accompanied, which is almost always. The fluid grace of Brown’s pedal steel guitar and Barnhart and Panall’s anchoring rhythm section never sounds better than when there’s just a little something extra — Susan Voelz’s violin, say, or Alison Chesley’s cello. I was disappointed to discover frequent associate Howard Draper did not bring back the “magic spackling thing” as a credit from Ambertron, but nevertheless, his piano, organ and lap steel guitar frequently add a magic touch where an otherwise strong song could’ve settled. There’s Corvair’s Heather Larimer lending vocal assistance on “Empty Island.” And for Silkworm fans, “Halocline” and “S c ent” each feature Joel R.L. Phelps on saxophone. You could write out the whole list of credits for how many contributors are worth noting and for how much they add to make such a satisfying record.
As with Ambertron, though, the best songs on Roughrider happen when Mint Mile piles on the people in a gradually growing jam that stretches the band’s legs. Mirroring “The Great Combine” and “Amberline,” “S c ent” and “Brigadier” probably started as simple singer-songwriter sketches but grew into enormous, swooning spins. MIdyett appropriately struggles on “Brigadier” to hit an attempt at his highest registers as he sings “Can’t overcome the life we made” while the strings skitter and Panall’s percussion finally brings the band to a crashing finish, where Draper’s pulsing, spirit-cleansing organ takes you out. It’s a real thing of beauty.
The whole album and band — really, we should be more generous and call them a collective — is a thing of beauty. Once again, Mint Mile has delivered music with weathered emotional complexity that retains an open-ended sense of optimism that, maybe from now on, the ride won’t be so rough. How easy it is to fall for that kind of burdened but unbeaten perspective.
Patrick Masterson
6 notes · View notes
dustedmagazine · 6 days
Text
Sarah Shook and the Disarmers — Revelations (Abeyance/Thirty Tigers)
Tumblr media
Photo by Brett Villena
youtube
“I built my life on the edge of a knife when nobody believed that I could,” rasps River Shook, the tough but tender leader of this kicking cowpunk band. The song is “You Don’t Get to Tell Me How to Feel,” a boot-stomping statement of purpose, as the guitars flare,  the drums bolt upright like a scared horse, and Shook makes the case for constructing their own narrative in no uncertain terms. 
Shook came of age in Bible belt America, forbidden as a child from any contact with secular music.  Still these things have a way of back-ending.  The artist learned the piano, then the guitar, then formed a series of bands under their birthname Sarah Shook; they switched to River a few years ago as a personal identifier but continue to record under the old name.  Their music, however, remains sharp and unsentimental, punk in energy, country in its twang and sway.  Move over Beyoncé, you’re not the only one pushing out the boundaries of what Americana can represent. 
And so, Shook delivers gender inclusive busted romances in old-school juke joint style. Pedal steel flies through the jangling twang of “Backsliders” while an in-the-pocket country band keeps two-stepping time.  There’s a cheating partner and a wounded one, just like in all the old songs, but the trick is neither one is a dude.  “I’m a real piece of shit and you’re a vixen in a dress/I thought we was moving on/I was wrong I guess,” Shook cracks, out of the corner of their mouth, like Johnny Cash but different. 
The very real pleasure of this collection of songs comes in how the love of tradition collides with raucous rule-breaking energy.  You’ve got your outlaw country, sure, but did any of those guys write a song called “Motherfucker” and carry it off?  Shook does.   
Not every song stomps.  Some are plaintive and yearning, like the lovely “Jane Doe,” others full of anthemic slow-rocking swirl like “Nightingale.”  But all insist on direct emotional engagement and brutal honesty and acceptance of a very specific point of view.  River Shook is definitely not your grandma’s idea of a country powerhouse, but they are one all the same.   
Jennifer Kelly
1 note · View note
dustedmagazine · 7 days
Text
Paprika — Let’s Kill Punk (Iron Lung)
Tumblr media
Photo by Johnny Camacho
However you want to hear it, there’s something undeniably punk rock about the clause “Let’s kill punk” (this reviewer hears it historically, and more on that below). It may be even more punk rock to name a slaveringly aggro hardcore punk record Let’s Kill Punk, which is precisely what Paprika has done. This is the first LP for the New Orleans-based outfit, and it’s a stone (stoned?) killer. To be sure, Paprika doesn’t seek innovation: Let’s Kill Punk is all nasty, chunky riffs; reverby vocals, barked in a harsh and urgent holler; galloping basslines that regularly drop into tasty, lunatic breakdowns. Those are reliable techniques and conventions in contemporary hardcore, and one could say, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” — but as the record’s title suggests, the dudes in Paprika seem principally interested in smashing everything in sight to bits.
That impulse is endemic in punk music, and always has been. Get weird, act unpleasantly and break some stuff: rules, rooms, noses. What have you got? Punk’s forms are various, but some of us are old enough to remember the particularly violent shock of No Wave, among the most intentionally ugly and transgressive coteries in 1970s punk. The volatility and rage in the songs often seemed to turn in on themselves, on their own entangled and inbent forms. Lydia Lunch, an important figure in No Wave’s emergence, once noted, “All the No Wave bands just self-destructed…. It wasn’t a premature death, it was an immediate and an accurate one.” The anti-music and anti-art underpinnings of punk reached a sort of nihilistic crescendo in 1979: No Wave bands were anti-No Wave.
Paprika’s foul and ill-formed hardcore songs, howling up out of the Deep South, seem a very long way from NYC’s Downtown Scene and its aesthetically complicated ambitions and archness (I say those things with no stink on them; I can hang the busy abstractions of aesthetic theories, and archness can be well used — see the first couple records by Mars). And the impetus behind Paprika’s version of Let’s Kill Punk works to register the significance of that distance. See the record’s title track: “Let’s kill punk, it deserves to die / Destroying shit, ruining lives / Gotta kill it now before it’s too late / Gotta kill punk before it kills me.” There’s a bit of contemporary culture’s tortured relation to irony in the lyric. How seriously should we take the objection to punk’s negations? And what is the moral content of the impulse to destroy that which destroys?
One suspects that irony wins out, as it did on that first Ramones LP, on the Heartbreakers’ first 7” records, on the Contortions’ “I Can’t Stand Myself.” Given that long standing dynamic, Paprika slots its own considerable nihilisms (see “Madness Mantra” or “Insane Machine”) into familiar spaces in punk. The remarkable durability of those spaces and the sounds that crowd them suggest that even an outfit as feral and pugnacious as Paprika will have a tough time killing punk. It will go on, destroying shit and ruining lives—but also making music and records and experiences, and even improving the occasional life. More than anything else, Let’s Kill Punk proves that punks not dead.
Jonathan Shaw
2 notes · View notes
dustedmagazine · 7 days
Text
Liberski/Yoshida —Troubled Water (Totalism)
Tumblr media
It’s not always easy to connect instrumental music to the concepts it is theoretically linked to.  Beyond track titles and liner notes, with no lyrics to ponder, is this simply a case of burdening the music with unwarranted significance? On Troubled Water Belgian pianist Casimir Liberski and Japanese drummer Tatsuya Yoshida address this by producing a tempest that mirrors the turbulent effects of climate change on ocean currents and marine ecosystems.
Although centered in jazz, the duo draws on elements of classical, electronic and experimental rock during this set of six improvisations recorded live at Tokyo club Jazz Spot Thelonious in early 2023. Liberski’s interest in erasing genre boundaries complements the work of Yoshida, a central figure in the Japanese avant-garde and free-form rock with his long running project Ruins. As a duo they develop a clairvoyant link as their music moves through tumultuous rhythmic patterns and pacific lulls which illustrate rather than explain. Both play with a physicality which demonstrates an elemental connection to their instruments and an awareness of the lengths to which they can push themselves and each other.
Liberski opens “Shark Attack” with his synth producing granular white noise with barely audible sonar like beeps as Yoshida works his cymbals. Liberski shifts to the piano in a danse macabre with Yoshida’s drums. The agitation builds towards frenzy, Yoshida stomps double and triple time on his kick drum and pummels the kit, Liberski races to and fro across the keyboard and interjects thick blurts from the synth. It sounds chaotic but the inevitability of the outcome is clear. The music, like the shark and its prey, has a purpose and will not be denied. “Plastic Island” begins with Liberski’s pensive, almost romantic piano figure behind which Yoshida issues operatic ululations from behind the drums. As they progress, the piano becomes knottier and the drums cluttered and abstract. The pair share percussive and melodic duties, intersecting and diverging, emphasizing the organic, primal nature of rhythm and the intuitive intelligence of their improvisations. The Kuroshio Current is vital to the north Asian climate and the aquatic ecosystem of the region. On the track named for it, the duo is at their most pacific. Liberski’s right hand to the fore, beginning with a slow ascent through the octaves before rolling out delicate glissandos which Yoshida complements on his cymbals. The mood is  elegiac and when Yoshida’s ululations reappear it feels like both a lament and a ritual summoning to life. The outro passage of silence punctuated by a distorted synth tones — an alarm, a whale song, sonar — as eloquent as the preceding music.
Andrew Forell
3 notes · View notes
dustedmagazine · 7 days
Text
Michael A. Muller — Mirror Music (Deutsche Grammophon)
Tumblr media
youtube
Ten independent artists — largely from the improvised, jazz-adjacent ambient side of things — venture into Michael A. Muller’s glowing, swirling soundscapes, each finding and bringing different textures there. Muller, a founder of the Texas minimalist music collective Balmorhea, sticks to long-toned, keyboard-based instruments: a Mellotron, an Oberheim Two-Voice Synthesizer and a Rhodes organ, creating luminous auras of tone. His collaborators play a variety of instruments — guitar, percussion, voice and cello — populating these edgeless, serene sonic spaces with melody and rhythm.
Muller himself plays the guitar, and he seems to have a particular affinity for its devotees. Bay Area finger-picker Danny Paul Grody scatters sparkly chords and meditative runs across synthesizer washes that surge and swell and ebb. Without the guitar, these tones might be too unreal, too grand, too beautiful to catch, but with these slow-blooming, organic figures, the music makes sense on a human scale. Chuck Johnson is a different case. His silvery sustained pedal steel music contains its own uncanny valleys, and so he slides like a ghost between shimmering, vibrating curtains, carving aching arcs of longing into a chilled, cerebral landscape. Douglas McCombs, of Tortoise, Brokeback and Black Duck, picks a clean, reverberating, almost surf-toned melody across an oscillating, shifting, reverential backdrop; he cuts right through it, emphatic and sure.
Women artists make a mark, though mostly with their voices. Vestals float eerie, altered sighs and caresses over the clear tones of Rhodes, a piercing descant one of this disc’s most gorgeous sounds. The Polish composer and pianist Hania Rani also sings, in a whisper amid shivering ambiences, in a way that reminds me a little of Mia Doi Todd. But Clarice Jensen, who sometimes plays with Balmorhea, brings her instrument along, threading rich throbs of cello through a landscape of widely spaced piano chords.
In the mirror game, budding actors stand face to face, copying each other’s expressions and gestures in real time, in a sort of synchronized dance. Here, the interaction is more oblique, with each artist staring into a foggy reflection and finding some element of themselves there. The music that arises is hardly synchronized, but the players find a way to react and build on what the other is doing. Oh, and it’s lovely. That’s important, too.
Jennifer Kelly
4 notes · View notes
dustedmagazine · 8 days
Text
Moor Mother — The Great Bailout (ANTI-)
Tumblr media
Photo by Ebru Yildiz
Camae Ayewa, aka Moor Mother, has a genuine claim towards being one of the busiest artists working today. Over the past five years she has taken part in more than ten albums, with sounds spanning unpredictable hip-hop experimentation to free jazz odyssies. The Great Bailout represents yet another left turn, taking sonic inspiration from glitch and concrete poetry and working with noise veterans such as C. Spencer Yeh and Aaron Dilloway to put together something truly haunting. On this record, Moor Mother bears witness to centuries of violence, death and horror at the hands of European colonialism and white supremacy. She spits its debris back at the listener and forcing us to contend with our ability to remain nonchalant in its seemingly never-ending cycle.
The first thing heard on this record is not Ayewa, but rather the intonations of Raia Was and Lonnie Holley over the twinkling harp of Mary Lattimore. Was’ fluttering vocals could not contrast more with Holley’s powerful warble, but both convey the dread and weariness that come with continuing to survive in a society that offers nothing but death in return. Three minutes into the track, Ayewa sets the scene for the rest of the record: “Taxpayers of erasure, of relapse, of amnesia, paying the crimes off.” This is perhaps the condition of being an everyday citizen, living in a state that never shook off the ghosts of colonialism, if it ever even tried in the first place. On “ALL THE MONEY,” over an ominous dub-inflected beat, Ayewa lists off British national landmarks and the years they were established, building up to the British Museum, one of the world’s largest resources of stolen cultural landmarks. “They heard about the kingdoms of gold,” Ayewa states. “They heard about the books of mathematics, philosophy and rituals.” The title of the album could be interpreted a number of different ways, but in this context it is clear that Europe stole so much from Africa to bail out its own moral and spiritual failures.
One of the highlights of the album is “LIVERPOOL WINS,” which features Aaron Dilloway contributing a typically clattering, ugly backing track. “Payouts, bailouts, just enough to build the city, a country, an infrastructure, a financial revolution, a stronger christianity, a whiter God, a period of enlightenment,” lists Ayewa. “Who builds death like this?” This question resonates through the entire record. Towards the end of the record “SOUTH SEA,” featuring the contributions of Chicago jazz mainstay Angel Bat Dawid and her vocal group Sistazz of the Nitty Gritty, feels like a requiem for what’s been lost, both material and immaterial, in the fray of colonialism. “How many have to be slaughtered in front of you before you choke on your own tears?” Ayewa asks. “Before your brain convinces you that you are already dead and if you are still breathing, you shouldn’t be?” It’s difficult to listen to these questions without thinking of horrific images from Gaza, Sudan and the Congo, all of which are stark reminders that the same forces that bailed out Europe are continuing to fuck up the world to this day. There isn’t a singular, clear message of hope on The Great Bailout, but in documenting the rage and despair built into life under such a ugly and evil system, Moor Mother has provided something just as valuable — if not more so— in understanding the struggles of the present day.
Levi Dayan
2 notes · View notes
dustedmagazine · 8 days
Text
Adrianne Lenker — Bright Future (4AD)
Tumblr media
Photo by Germaine Dunes
On Adrianne Lenker’s last solo outing, 2020’s songs & instrumentals, it was just the artist, producer/engineer Philip Weinrobe, plus the rain and birds that could be heard from the cabin retreat where Weinrobe recorded direct to tape. Dominated by radiant finger-picked guitar and vulnerable voice, the double album had a consistent, intimate feel all its own. Though the recording process for Bright Future continued Weinrobe’s all-analog working methods, this time she's joined by Nick Hakim on vocals and piano, Mat Davidson (Twain) on vocals, piano and violin, and Josefin Runsteen on vocals, percussion and violin. This expanded instrumentation and collaborative spirit lends these songs a more eclectic flavor.
The most immediately striking songs are those dominated by piano, such as opener “Real House,” centerpiece “Evol,” and closer “Ruined,” demarcating the record’s potent emotional landscape. On “Real House,” Hakim’s piano meanders through a series of questioning, jazzy chords, while Lenker recounts what sound like pivotal moments from her childhood story. Given the scene-setting opening of the song, where the incidental sounds of the players settling into the session lend a feeling of ease and spontaneity, it’s unsettling to then witness a childhood story so vivid and stark: “When I was seven I saw the first film that made me scared / And I thought of this whole world ending / I thought of dying unprepared.” Though the wordplay on “Evol” is certainly clever, contrasting pairs of words running forwards and backwards, it’s the aching sway of the song’s delicate melody that’s especially moving. “Ruined” is similarly potent, shimmering with ghostly textures, sufficient to distract the listener from a rare lyrical clanger: “You just gave me an amethyst from your jeweled vest as you cried.”
Elsewhere the tone shifts wildly, from the swaying Dylan-inspired country-folk of “Sadness As A Gift,” featuring lovely vocal harmonies from Davison, via the breakneck guitar patterns of “Fool,” to the jaunty banjo of “Already Lost.” A rather odd inclusion is an acoustic rendition of “Vampire Empire,” which Big Thief released as a single last year. While Lenker included a couple of songs on abysskiss that were later reworked as full-band songs on the masterful U.F.O.F. (“Terminal Paradise” and “From”), here the acoustic version sounds like a step backward and doesn’t feel like it belongs, especially given this album’s 45-minute runtime. Nonetheless, there’s plenty of gorgeous material here, offering further evidence of Lenker’s subtle and surprising songwriting.
Tim Clarke
0 notes
dustedmagazine · 8 days
Text
Love Child — Never Meant To Be (1988-1993) (12XU)
Tumblr media
Love Child brings the detuned roar of Dinosaur, the nervy agitation of the Feelies, the arch literacy of Pavement, the barbed sugar of the Throwing Muses, shifting sound and style from song to song. This compilation spans the brief career of the New York City noise-punk-lofi outfit, with cuts from a debut 7”, both early 1990s full-lengths and unreleased and radio tracks. It’s an absolute riot from start to finish, even if it’s hard to get a grip on what Love Child was at its core.
The band came together in the late 1980s, when Will Baum, Rebecca Odes and Alan Licht were still students at Vassar. Licht, of course, later made a name as a critic and noise-minimalist. His work with Love Child overlapped with Blue Humans and slightly preceded turns with Run On and the Pacific Ocean. His collaborations with Jandek and Loren Connors took place later, in the second half of the 1990s.
The earliest cuts here come from a 1990 single, the brash, ragged-bassed “Sofa” (memorialized here in Love Child’s only video) and the vaguely “Summertime Blues”-ish “Crocus” (with its indelible line, “My mom threw me out until I get some pants that fit/She just don’t approve of my strange kind of wit.” ) Both balance garage-rock minimalism with a bursts of noise. “Sofa” intersperses catchy, kicky girl-boy choruses with blasts of unfettered guitar squall.
The first full-length, Okay, came on Homestead in 1991. Its tracks take up a large portion of this compilation, which is fine because they bang pretty hard, especially the multi-voiced “Diane” and “Fortune Cookie” which blends the pure blasting amp noise of J. Mascis , the yelping angst of Television and the clanking post-punk bass sounds of, say, Gods Gift. But other cuts run towards jangle pop, notably “He’s So Sensitive” a lofi girl group garage rocker featuring Odes on lead vocal. The other album, Witchcraft, followed a year later, also on Homestead. It’s a bit smoother, a bit more melodic, a bit more reliant on Odes’ buzzy, dreamy vocals. “AAA/XXX” is almost dream pop, though sharp guitar slashes prop up the verse, while “Something Cruel” jangles lyrically for a seconds before cranking up to pogo speed.
Additional, previously unreleased material bookends the album. “Asking for It,” from a 1992 Peel Session comes first, layering bratty, confrontational punk on wild eruptions of near rockabilly guitar; an oozing, sludgy noise interval bisects the cut. “Greedy,” another song from the same session exults in feedback and loose harmonies, tough and vulnerable at the same time. There are also a couple of cuts from a KSPC show, including the dreaming, droning, guitar-led “All Is Loneliness” with its shades of VU. That track was recorded in 1993, near the end of this evanescent outfit’s run, and it hints at other directions that they might have taken if they had persisted. Still no use mourning what never happened. There’s plenty to celebrate here without it.
Jennifer Kelly
14 notes · View notes
dustedmagazine · 9 days
Text
Kahil El’Zabar’s Ethnic Heritage Ensemble — Open Me, A Higher Consciousness of Sound and Spirit (Spiritmuse)
Tumblr media
Photo by Christopher Andrew
youtube
Celebrating 50 years of his Ethnic Heritage Ensemble bandleader, activist, educator and percussionist Kahil El’Zabar delves deeply into the music he has helped shape over his long career. Open Me is neither a valedictory nostalgia trip nor a lap of honor. Spanning spiritual and avant-garde jazz, African rhythms, soul blues and protest music, El’Zabar and his cohorts, trumpeter Corey Wilkes and baritone saxophonist Alex Harding, are joined by guests Ishmael Ali on cello and violinist James Sanders in collection of original tunes and finely wrought covers that look forward while linking the threads of El’Zabar’s musical legacy.
The quintet finds a devotional center to Miles Davis’ “All Blues”. El’Zabar plays on kalimba and bells, his hums and ululations a prayerful focus. The band play at a meditative pace with Wilkes pushing his tone through Davis’ modal calm into higher registers that evoke Don Cherry whilst Harding provides soulful counterpoint and a solo that carries the barest trace of Coltrane. Sanders’ short solo scratches then soars as if freeing itself from earthly concerns. “The Whole World in His Hands” feels reclaimed as El’Zabar lays down a rolling African beat and his vocal emphasizes the gospel blues root of the song. Behind, the horns and strings provide an intense group sound, with a call and response of short solos that mirror both church service and jam session. Their version of Eugene McDaniel’s “Compared To What” finds El’Zabar’s graveled vocal backed by Harding’s nimble baritone riff, a glorious clarion call from Wilkes and atmospheric flourishes from the strings. The spirit is to the fore, but this band also swings hard. “Hang Tuff” and McCoy Tyner’s “Passion Dance” are exuberant celebrations. The former graced by a dervish of a solo from Sanders and the latter played with all the power of a big band, the horns blasting the theme, El’Zabar all over his kit, the solos uniformly fiery.  
From Lester Bowie, Anthony Braxton and Pharoah Sanders to David Murray to Tomeka Reid and Isaiah Collier, El’Zabar’s career spans generations of forward-thinking musicians. The Ethnic Heritage Ensemble is the longest running of his many musical projects and on Open Me, they produce a stirring mix of spirituality, groove and fire music. This is history very much alive and kicking.
Andrew Forell
4 notes · View notes