MARTÍN ESCALANTE / TETÉ LEGUÍA / WEASEL WALTER – ‘KATYUSHA’

3 long tracks of multi-directional improvisational malfeasance to the destroy the illusion, reality shaking expressions of exuberance, power and lunacy. Totalitarian, maximalist torrent of free improvisation, an explosively intense expression of Free Jazz, a wordless primal scream dialed to 11 and vibrating with humming radioactive power. Delicacy and intonation wither like prone digits in a subzero torrent. Weasel pummels and plummets down the stairs in bursts of terminal velocity, crashing through the firmament with fearsome idiot energy and incredibly dexterous, choppy runs full of off-kilter hyper blast beats and endless rolling double bass. Leguía applies a tormenting, synapse poisoning saxophone performance best experienced behind bulletproof glass, each singing, stinging, screaming volley forced into life, choked and strangled, threatening to destroy your precious inner ear, and Escalante conjures a bass performance of the unfathomable, an iron curtain falling in plumes and rotten ruffles, coiling and piling beneath and amidst the insane percussion. Quieter moments serve to wane the friction and crank up the foul ambiance of these three demons at work(&play). A maelstrom of hyperkinetic aplomb and sweat-soaked interactive fervor, challenging and socially challenged. If you enjoy Painkiller era Zorn, Sissy Spacek or Peter Brötzmann, seek no further. Entirely essential, fun as fuck.

ugEXPLODE

ANDREJA SALPE & OLIVER MITKOVSKI – ‘POETRONIKA’

Skopje-based imprint PMG has been resequencing the genome of Slavic jazz for more than five years, but in a catalogue packed sardine tight with left turns, this audacious new venture from arch electronicist Andreja Salpe and actor Oliver Mitkovski is unquestionably one of the sharpest. Marrying shady spoken word (the word in this case being post-war Macedonian poetry) to acid-flecked minimal deep house, ‘Poetronika’ is the new paradigm of concepts that shouldn’t work but absolutely do, a slow-burning 80-minute art attack that unspools like the soundtrack to some low budget ultra-noir detective flick. Key to the album’s atmospheric gut-punch is the riveting dynamic between its creators, two artists who, on paper at least, appear to have precious little in common. Masters of syncretic dreamweaving, the duo assemble a sequence of interlocking tableaux, Mitkovski’s shadowy intonations streaking Salpe’s lambent beatscapes with the grit and grain of the dankest hip-hop. Reductive though it is to single out individual tracks from a project designed for unbroken live performance, the astonishing ‘Nataša Celaskoska’ is ‘Poetronika’ in microcosm. Ominous syncopations and an aromatic corkscrewing acid line are pebbledashed with notes from Salpe’s omnipresent Fender Rhodes while Mitkovski lurks in the shadows, waxing cryptically lyrical with the scuffed, taciturn diction of a barfly reciting passages from a Raymond Chandler novel. Evocative as the setting of a subterranean sun, ‘Poetronika’ offers escape-proof sanctuary from a deepening winter. Bask in its dark radiance.

PMGJazz

BEHOLD THE ARCTOPUS – ‘INTERSTELLAR OVERTROVE’

Hyperbole inducing Fusion Jazz Prog phantasmagoria from Behold the Arctopus. I hadn’t heard anything these guys had produced in a good few years, and in that interim they’ve only gotten stranger, jettisoning their metal carapace and exposing their prone insides to the void’s mutating, corrupting influences. ‘Interstellar Overtrove’ is a post musical sarcophagus of Avant Garde Prog and experimental Fusion Jazz wrought in impossible meter, nerd chin-stroke wank shit gone absolutely Tech Death haywire! Gated to death planed flat e-drums with mental timbral intrigue, firing through insane rhythms as many stringed instruments dance, flitter and pummel Morse code notations with cool, stasis inertia sound, clear and precise like fine silicone dust, a million opaque mathematical meanings and complexities delivered straight into the fucking third eye chakra – never to be decoded or understood! Computational excess, overreach and eventual accidental ignition and burning chrome, all hard disks erased for fear of malignant fractal replication. About as far from ‘songs’ as one might travel. Some stars to guide by might include ‘Three Of a Perfect Pair’ Crimson, Steinar’s spacegrinding Psudoku or perhaps those dry neat jazzer sections on Cynic’s ‘Focus’, distortion eroded and a bizarre and impossible skeletal structure found beneath, perfectly rendered in xenomorphic alloy. Rapturously weird.

Bandcamp

NDOX ELECTRIQUE – ‘TËDD AK MAME COUMBA LAMBA AK MAME COUMBA MBANG’

François Cambuzat and Gianna Greco are specialists in building bridges between worlds. Having cut their teeth fronting art noise provocateurs Putan Club, the duo journeyed to the Djerid desert in south-western Tunisia and forged an unlikely alliance with performers of the indigenous Banga ritual, an adorcism which invites, rather than seeks to reverse, spiritual possession. The two albums which resulted, both released under the monicker Ifriqqya Electrique, were fervid fusions of glowering industrial post-punk, transcendental chant-singing and frenetic hand percussion that stand amongst the most startlingly original cross-cultural collaborations ever brought to fruition. Upping the ante yet further, Cambuzat and Greco’s latest project relocates their theatre of off-grid operations to the isolated Cap-Vert peninsula in western Senegal. A joint enterprise with members of the resident Lebu community, Ndox Electrique capitalises on an uncanny symbiosis between brawny avant-rock and the polyrhythmic cacophony of the mystical n’doëp ceremony to create an electrfying hybrid, the ultimate in sonic polarity inversions. Crucially, it’s the paths Ndox Electrique DON’T tread that make ‘Tëdd Ak Mame’ such a formidable proposition. There are no concessions here to the pappy dietary requirements of the mainstream, nor does fusion equate to dilution. This is dissident, soul-stirring music that thrives on a commonality of intent, banger following cathartic banger in an uncompromising onslaught. Marshalled by lead vocalist Rokhaya “Madame” Diéne and featuring a trio of indefatigable percussionists, the band’s Lebu contingent generate onrushing waves of ritualistic rhythm and rhyme to which Cambuzat and Greco apply a treacherous undertow: scything, doom metal-heavy guitar riffs and an interlocking matrix of saw-toothed bass and electronics. Social media is cluttered with proclamations from the cloth-eared that there’s nothing new under the sun. For those of us who take a contrary position, Ndox Electrique have just delivered a motherfucker of a citation. Essential.

Les Disques Bongo Jo

WHITE BOY SCREAM – ‘TENT MUSIC’

White Boy Scream is the solo avant-classical project of Los Angeles based opera singer and composer Micaela Tobin, however, a recent chance meeting with prog folk artisan Joshua Hill has given rise to ‘Tent Music’, an enrapturing tour de force that glazes baroque experimentalism with the lustrous lacquer of oceanic rock. So named because its genesis occurred during two nights of improvisation in (surprise, surprise) a tent, the album’s immense force of attraction derives from the frictional dynamic between Hill’s latticework string arrangements and the unearthly effulgence of Tobin’s gravity defying vocals. ‘Overture’, for example is a palpitating crescendo of vinegary violin drone and calamitous percussion that could easily derail were it not for the starstream of oohs and ululations that reroute it towards to the nebulous realm inhabited by dreampop outliers like Cats Of Transnistria and Tan Cologne. Elsewhere, ‘Fade Away’ and the stunning ‘Fire In My Hands’ recall the seasick psych-blues roil of latter-day Swans, whilst ‘Beautiful Creature’ casts Tobin as strung-out balladeer, her mellifluous soprano melding with the aether like Björk serenading the bat population of a ruined mausoleum. The fulcrum on which ‘Tent Music’ pivots though is ‘Closer’, a chimerical epic that mutates from crystalline chamber folk to haunted abattoir clatter-fest over the course of eleven ear-strafing minutes. Addictive as chocolate-dipped crack, the allure this extraordinary record exudes is properly preternatural. Succumb without delay.

Whited Sepulchre Records

DON BRADSHAW-LEATHER – ‘DISTANCE BETWEEN US’

Don Bradshaw-Leather was an avant-classical sorcerer from the golden age of Brit-weird, but aside from this extraordinary work of entrepreneurial art which earned him an entry on the fabled Nurse With Wound list, he appears to have left little mark on history, musical or otherwise. Recorded in a purpose-built, CBS Records-funded studio then self-released after the label’s execs heard it and threw up their hands in horror, ‘Distance Between Us’ is the last word in Byzantine sonic overreach, a record which, from that alarming cover photo (Attila Csihar eat your heart out) to its sheer vertigo-inducing ambition, oozes bloody-minded lone wolf iconoclasm from every grime-encrusted pore. Comprised of four side-length epics pieced together using multitrack tape, the album unfolds like the seditious acid-fried flipside to Deep Purple and the RPO’s bombastic ‘Concerto For Group And Orchestra’, each track a deceptively haphazard assemblage of distorted Hammond organ, tribal drumming, frantic Liszt-on-crystal-meth piano arpeggios and dive-bombing string squalls that lacerate the soundfield like a flock of razor-winged nightingales. Fifty years on from its original release, it’s tempting to describe this astounding aural bijouterie as ahead of its time, but that presupposes its time will eventually come, something I doubt even Don Bradshaw-Leather in his wildest flights of fancy ever envisaged. Listen and be confounded.

Cold Spring