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

MABE FRATTI – ‘SE VE DESDE AQUÍ’

Attempting to pin down the chameleonic music of Guatemalan cellist and composer Mabe Fratti is like trying to knit a hovercraft out of soup. A lysergic concoction of Latinate avant-folk and piquant chamber jazz, it inhabits a strange grottoed dimension where melody is the best friend of discord and pop’s usual rules of engagement are broken with impunity. Psychedelia of the common or garden variety it most certainly ain’t. Departing from the hazy introspection that marked Fratti’s lockdown masterpiece ‘Será Que Ahora Podremos Entendernos’, ‘Se Ve Desde Aquí’ spins a web of more inscrutable allure that centres on the ever-shifting dynamic between order and chaos. Where once her songs were noctilucent billows of variegated sound, here they more resemble a sequence of clockwork Fabergé musical boxes, each one more finely wrought and intricate than the last. Backdropped by clouds of pepper spray synth and efflorescent sax, Fratti’s oblique cello lines spool out in glistening platinized filaments, but it’s her glorious bell-clear voice that’s the real show-stealer, wheeling through the dissonance like a bird of paradise in a vast barbed wire aviary. Comparisons with so singular an artists are near impossible to draw, but if the effulgent esotronica of Camila Fuchs, Jenny Hval’s orchidaceous art-pop or the brambly jazz nouveau of Mirna Bogdanović light your candle, you’ll find much to love here. Stunning.

Tin Angel Records

SCHAKALENS BROR – ‘HOCKEYPULVER’

Brash, fun, toothless Harsh Noise Guitar carnage from Schakalens Bror. Blood-drenched guitar strings wound into booming psychedelic feedback live improv, a mad axe man swings his terrible weapon in front of a huge steaming amp stack, notes bending and warping in rote primitivism, searing blasting unmixed (?) abandon, simple pedal effects stomped in and out, strangling high end spikes choked from the axe neck – little moments of fleet fucked flubbed fingered runs appear in the third track from within the haze, conjuring an abused, demented, inept virtuoso feel. Cheap, nasty and lo-fi. Total Guitar butchery. Grab some of their shit from Team Boro Tapes.

Bandcamp

PANDISCORDIAN NECROGENESIS – ‘OUTER SUPERNAL’

One-man improvisational Black Metal from wyrd necromancer Steve Peacock. Incredibly musical, ordered and seemingly intently constructed, considering how it’s created in the throes of improvisation – Croakal blood throat vocal command, raw barbed ropes of sick trill evil riffs and dissonance movements coiled around supreme minimalist drums full of drifting ambience and sub-groove Ildjarn stomp, a boiling, exuberant menace of controlled and singular as fuck raw Black Metal, apraxic, simplistic and evil! Calculating and direct, conjured from virulent strains of Black Thrash lunacy and austere Black Metal orthodoxy. Imminent, immediate, dangerously esoteric. To be absorbed in the ecstatic throes of misanthropic inebriation.

Bandcamp