This week’s mixtape takes off with a track from The Endless Dance, the first collaborative album from Northern Irish producer and composer Hannah Peel and Chinese percussionist Beibei Wang.
From the notes: On ‘Awaken The Insects’, Wang’s voice is a key percussive element, rapping in a rhythmic duet with bamboo clappers called Kuai Ban (快板). She sounds angry and defiant, but she’s actually reciting a tongue-twister she learnt as a child. “As soon as I showed it to my Chinese friends, they could not stop laughing,” says Wang. “It’s just so silly, and I didn’t know I could do it.” Tongue twisters have a long tradition in Chinese comedic and performing arts (曲艺), and both artists credit this strong sense of play to the supportive relief of working with a fellow female artist, free of the competitive expectations of patriarchy.
An equally powerful track follows from Cocanha, who are at the forefront of a new generation of French artists breathing new life into French folk, or ‘trad’, and, with Flame Folclòre, Caroline Dufau and Lila Fraysse, have made their most radical and most personal statement yet. Their latest single, Remenanuèch, is about a group of Toulouse women who tame a mythological horse whose back miraculously stretches with each new ride. It pays tribute to the feminist marches La rue, la nuit, femmes sans peur of the 1970s, which denounced sexist and sexual violence.
We shared the news earlier this week that the Seoul-based seven-piece Leenalchi have announced their Luaka Bop debut, a new EP titled Here Comes That Crow. Their title track and lead single is adapted from a pansori tale about the Chinese warlord Cao Cao’s most decisive battle and stands as an allegory of life’s precariousness. Ahn and his bandmates wrote a short poem to help listeners interpret the song: “Doyung doyung goes the small boat seen floating down the river. Whether the chased or the chaser, no one can stop—just beneath the boards lies the underworld!”
We’ve also got new music from:
Shye Ben Tzur, Jonny Greenwood and The Rajasthan Express, taken from their album “Ranjha,” out 8th May via World Circuit/BMG. A decade on from Junun, the 21-strong ensemble reconvened in Greenwood’s Oxfordshire studio to channel Sufi devotion, Rajasthani folk and collective musical exploration into a long-awaited follow-up.
Himba Hymn: Ghosts of Namibia’s Skeleton Coast – Recorded live and on location by Grammy Award-winning producer Ian Brennan, this is the first album of the Himba people’s music ever released from Northwest Namibia.
From the album’s producer and recordist, Ian Brennan: “The Namib Desert is the oldest in the world. Therefore, the driest. Italian-Rwandan photographer, Marilena Umuhoza Delli and I had come to record with possibly the most photographed people on earth, the Himba — to listen rather than gaze at them as if on display. To share their voices as a counter to their visual objectification, particularly the inappropriate eroticization of the women who customarily go topless throughout daily life.
We had to stress multiple times that we did not want the musicians to don touristic tribal costumes — quite possibly the first music project in history that urged performers to cover-up rather than pleading with artists to expose more flesh. But it was to no avail. When the assigned hour arrived, the men all ditched the baseball caps and soccer jerseys that they routinely wear. And for the women, the reality is that they almost without exception keep their torsos bare, even in winter. We had to acquiesce. Forcing the issue would have only been the flipside of inauthenticity. The featured, traditional instrument is the Cattle Gun. It’s rarely found these days and therefore, costly. Made from the lengthy horn of an Oryx and coated in mud, it is blown, resulting in a breathy, rattled tone. Via the use of live looping on three of the album’s tracks, psychedelic vocal tapestries were created as if snatched from the evershifting skies that enshrined the valley from all sides. But even more esoteric results arose from members cupping hands over mouth to create chorusing and flanging effects sans electricity or gear. Rather than ‘primitive’ or traditional, the Himba music making is imbued with innovation and timelessness.”
Lauded guitarist/artist Marisa Anderson has shared “Quodlibet,” taken from her new album The Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music vol. 1, out May 22nd. “Quodlibet,” whose title in English means “a lighthearted medley of well-known tunes,” is an interpretation of a piece originally performed on Dambura by an artist credited as “Bābā Qerān” included on the album Afghanistan III-Music of the Tajiks released by Anthology Records.
Anderson explains how the piece informed her approach to the project as a whole:
“This was one of the earlier pieces I worked on. It sounded pretty straightforward until I actually tried to transcribe it and realized that the source melody doesn’t lend itself to the guitar. That tripped me up for a bit, until I realized that just about every song I would be working with would be similarly out of reach and I decided to just go for it and adapt the tune as best I could. The drone is played by a small chromatic accordion that a traveling friend brought back from Eastern Europe many years ago. I’m happy with the result although the song feels a bit simplified when compared to the original, perhaps making it a good illustration of what is lost in the transposition of music from the east to the west.”
Mama’s Broke — the Nova Scotian duo of Amy Lou Keeler and Lisa Maria — recently shared Heaven, the first taste of the pair’s forthcoming album. The song walks an old rail line through the wealth divide, rising temperatures, and a system where every nickel costs a dime and the least of us can’t afford to die. “We’ve been fed the distant promise that, through diligence and quiet perseverance, we will someday reap the rewards of our labour when in reality, we’ve been left with a system collapsing under the weight of its own greed and corruption,” the band explain. “The gap between rich and poor has reached unprecedented levels; a minimum wage no longer suffices to keep both the lights on and food on the table; and our air and water are more polluted than ever before.”
From Jim Moray‘s new album Gallants, one of our current Featured Albums of the Month, you can hear The Nightingale. As Thomas Blake notes in his review, “Moray is an expert at drawing out the inherent beauty of a song, and here, traditional ballads like The Nightingale are teased into stunning new shapes, delicate and melodically daring. He frequently uses a kind of patchwork technique, drawing on multiple sources to create something vibrant and new that nonetheless remains steeped in history. He concludes: Gallants confirms Moray’s position as a living embodiment of those roles, and of so much more.”
BCMC — the Chicago duo of Bill MacKay and Cooper Crain — have announced their second album, Stash, due June 26th via Drag City. You can hear their lead single Kaleidosmoke – clocking in at nearly eight minutes- Drag City highlight those Brit-rock-inflected guitars over a structure that owes something to the patient, accumulative logic of Terry Riley. Strands of Floyd, Deep Purple and Iron Butterfly wind through blues-scorched solos before the piece resolves into a slow, glass-like slide guitar passage. It is expansive and unhurried, psychedelic in the oldest, most saturated sense of the word.
Zoh Amba will release their Matador debut album, Eyes Full, on June 5th, which we recently previewed with her lead single Another Time, which is a pleasure to revisit here. Already one of the most exciting saxophonists to emerge from New York’s avant-garde scene, Amba is now letting their heart guide them back to their first instrument, the guitar, and to their hometown of Kingsport, Tennessee. The music is instinctively tied to that place: muddy, loose blues with sweet burnishes of Appalachian folk.
Aaron MF Olson has just announced Songs Album II, his debut for Country Thyme Records, due June 26th. The LA musician — best known as the architect of L.A. Takedown’s “Baywatch Krautrock” and a sideman of choice across the city’s experimental and folk circuits — marked the occasion with the release of lead single “Nobody Can Tell” – “It’s not a pessimistic look at the state of the world,” he says, “but rather an observation and subsequent expression of unease around the lack of responsible adults out there making decisions on humanity’s behalf.”
Bristol indie-folk songwriter Myer U Clark recently announced new album Tinderbox, due 26th June via Broadside Hacks Recordings, which he marked with his single Healers – “Healers is a love song describing a back and forth that isn’t going anywhere but both people suspect they could be right on the edge of something special,” Clark says. “There’s a thread throughout, that the two act as a kind of medicine for one another.”
We end on two more Featured Albums of the Month:
The latest reviewed is Emily Portman‘s Dominion of Spells. You can hear Flowerface, on which Thomas Blake notes: Lucy Farrell and Mary Hampton provide backing vocals, adding harmonic depth to tracks like Flowerface, a beautiful song that also features Sam Sweeney on violin, which again takes inspiration from Blodeuwedd, telling the story of a woman created from flowers who earns a hard-won freedom from her creators. Imagine Frankenstein retold by Angela Carter and you’d be getting close.
We end with a track from The Little Winters, the latest album from Edinburgh-born Anna McLuckie. Noting the leap she has made with this latest album, out now on Hudson Records, Thomas notes in his review: It sees McLuckie making advances as a musician and a songwriter, but also in terms of her overarching creative vision. She brings in even more influences and consolidates them with a refreshing economy. And the album is thematically and lyrically ambitious too. He later notes, on the track I’ve included: She can also conjure up a deeper, more moody melancholy: the drone and swell of A Man With No Tide is matched by its enigmatic lyrics, which paint a chilly, gothic picture, and the filigree of the harp panicking its way through a cold landscape.
Enjoy
Playlist
00:00 Hannah Peel & Beibei Wang – Awaken The Insects
03:55 COCANHA – REMENANUÈCH
07:04 Leenalchi – Here Comes That Crow
09:49 Shye Ben Tzur, Jonny Greenwood and The Rajasthan Express – SHIQWA
14:37 Various Artists – Friends Who’ve Passed
18:20 Marisa Anderson – Quodlibet
20:29 Mama’s Broke – Heaven
24:04 Jim Moray – The Nightingale
27:47 BCMC – Kaleidosmoke
35:32 Zoh Amba – Another Time
38:27 Aaron MF Olson – Nobody Can Tell
42:12 Myer U Clark – Healers
45:29 Emily Portman – Flowerface
49:57 Anna McLuckie – A Man With No Tide