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

THE DWARFS OF EAST AGOUZA – ‘HIGH TIDE IN THE LOWLANDS’

The Dwarfs Of East Agouza are a criminally undervalued avant-garde power trio whose arabesque synthesis of West African free jazz and krautrock has precious few parallels in 21st century music. Comprised of Cairo-based composer Maurice Louca, Land Of Kush guitarist Sam Shalabi and Alan Bishop of Sun City Girls notoriety, the band’s modus operandi is mind expansion via the scenic route, a fact nowhere better exemplified than on their latest, and arguably most ear-boggling album to date. Recorded live in Brussels, ‘High Tide In The Lowlands’ manifests as two 20+ minute excursions through a teeming jungle of polychromatic sound that once entered blocks off all clear avenues of escape. Zone in or zone out, these are trips where the destination may be predetermined but the satnav has been sabotaged. Opener ‘Baka Of The Future’ ignites in a sunburst of Eastern guitar curlicues before a fitful motorik groove propels the track across the entropy Rubicon and it begins unravelling, tendrils of atonal ambience snagging at the synapses until disorientation sets in. ‘The Sprouting Of The 7th Enterainment’ follows a similar but even more tortuous path, variously channelling the spirits of Damo Suzuki, Sun Ra and Mulatu Astatke whilst remaining wholly placeless and divorced from obvious influence. Like the oeuvres of other absconders from the plane of premeditation (Skull Mask, The Necks) this is music that has magnitude but not direction; scalar fields of pulsating noise that teeter on the brink of complete abstraction yet grip like a vice from first minute to last. The Dwarfs are cruising some strange spaceways here. Hitch a ride.

Sub Rosa Label

VARIOUS ARTISTS – ‘SPECTRUM’

A prime mover in the resurgence of cassette culture, Newcastle-based imprint Cruel Nature boasts a catalogue of near unrivalled sonic eclecticism and its commitment to championing outsider music is nowhere better exemplified than on ‘Spectrum’, a gem-studded 23-track anthology compiled to mark the label’s 10th anniversary. Featuring artists drawn from an enviably deep talent pool and sequenced like the tasting menu of a cutting-edge restaurant, the album bodyswerves through a plethora of contrasting styles without once losing focus, highlights arriving thick and fast throughout its marathon 110-minute runtime. In the banger camp, VHS¥DEATH’S ‘Sacrifice’ is a hard-charging, Berghain-ready headrush, whilst the vertiginous ‘Nu-shunting’ by GK favourites Whirling Hall Of Knives, splits industrial techno’s atom sending quarks and gluons of percussive fallout skittering across the dancefloor. Otherworldliness abounds here too. The Durutti Column-gone-slowcore filigree of Charlie Butler’s sepia-tinted ‘Eagle’s Splendour’ is a transport of introspective delight but Dublin-based experimentalist Katie Gerardine O’Neill steals the strangeness show and then some with ‘Along The Shoreline’, a mind-warping odyssey into deconstructed chamber jazz that dazes and confuses in equally large measure. Elsewhere though, far darker forces are at work. ‘I Have Cherished Our Season Of Friendship’ from Esmé Lousie Newman’s Petrine Cross project is doom-laden ambient black metal at its most balefully cinematic and if blunt force trauma lights your candle, Lovely Wife’s bass-heavy sludge blowout ‘Letting Go’ delivers its payload with all the subtlety of a backstreet kneecapping. Packed sardine-tight with brilliance, and with all profits going to youth autism charity The Toby Henderson Trust, ‘Spectrum’ offers an unmissable glimpse into Cruel Nature’s singular soundworld. Here’s to the next 10 years.

Cruel Nature Records

PABLO GĪW & MARIEL ROBERTS – ‘KRYO’

The use of jazz instrumentation for non-jazz purposes is scarcely a novel concept but ‘Kryo’, the astonishing debut collaborative album from trumpet virtuoso Pablo Gīw and experimental cellist Mariel Roberts, looks so far beyond existing horizons it’s almost completely devoid of reference points. Trips seldom come much stranger than this. Key to the record’s unearthly, decryption-resistant vibe is the battery of extended techniques and electronic processing employed by both musicians, each alchemically generated sound dubbed, dissolved and recrystallised until the relationship between it and its parent instrument is near impossible to deduce. 15-minute opener ‘Icicle / Carámbano’ is an exercise in meticulously curated instability that pairs flocculent vapour trails of over and underblown trumpet with a loop of deadened pizzicato that rumbles like the engine of an idling bulldozer. Gradually, the Sturm und Drang deliquesces into a watery expanse of drone, its muffled percussive undercurrent reminiscent of Hieroglyphic Being’s experiments in (a)rhythmic cubism, albeit slowed to a torturous crawl. ‘Japanese Creation Myth’ is uncannier still, a fragmentary collage of thuds and groans that comes within a hair’s breadth of ambient techno before collapsing in on itself, and although closing epic ‘When The Spell Actually Worked’ trades bump-in-the-night scare tactics for fusion reactor ambience, it remains strikingly baleful, dissonant tendrils of cello and trumpet intertwining ever tighter until their tones eventually coalesce and become indistinguishable. ‘Kryo’ is more than just un-jazz; it’s a gateway to unseen worlds. Stunning.

Bandcamp

SANTAKA – ‘NO RIVERS HERE’

Santaka is the lockdown-birthed brainchild of Lithuanian drummer Marijus Aleksa and producer/DJ Manfredas whose symbiotic fusioneering expertise has resulted in one of 2022’s most audacious sonic statements. ‘No Rivers Here’ offers jazz without parameters, a fact writ vast by the undulating topography of the title track, a lurid, psychogenic shiver-fest that treads the path of most resistance for 18 breathtaking minutes. Alchemically concocted from aquaplaning percussion, pungent squalls of synth reflux, and a propulsive, slasher flick bassline, it has as much in common with Can and rRoxymore as Miles Davis and Sun Ra, which for those of us in the purist-baiting community, is A Very Good Thing Indeed. ‘555’ brings the low end into even sharper focus, dub-modulated congas and hi-hats swarming like bees around a honeypot of rapidly congealing sax. Unstable as neat nitroglycerine, it’s a potent intoxicant, but better still is ‘Opening Chasms (In Four Parts)’ which assembles a quadridimensional Rube Goldberg contraption from woodwind, brass and hand-drums that bears favourable comparison with Shackleton & Zimpel’s far-flung ‘Primal Forms’ and the Kryptox school of krautjazz outernationalism. Santaka are playing with divine fire here and to describe ‘No More Rivers’ as head-wrecking would be a galaxy class understatement. Fill yer boots.

Byrd Out

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

WATARU NOMURA – ‘WIPE KARMA’

An intoxicating, sultry abstract Jazz mix from hidden form Wataru Nomura – expertly selected, brilliant weird Jazz cuts and Ambience to get you contact stoned, totally inverse and extrospective abstract perspectives on dissonance and quiet. Being the novice that I am, I’m not familiar with all of the artists involved, so I can’t offer insights relative to their individual discographies beyond the obvious and easily researched. Paul Bley’s ‘Albert’s Love Theme’ opens the suite with spectral piano and bass groan, oblique and ponderous, flowing into some masterly percussion and Sax entanglements, stepping and dancing, leading to explorations of fusion types and Free Jazz improvisational expressions. Eddies of lone percussive motions and arcing slews of reverberating noises, spectral and diasporic horns, licks of field recordings, tracks flowing from form abstraction to formless reverie. Furthest out!

Bandcamp

AFRIKAN SCIENCES – ‘GENOME BENTLEY’S HERITAGE DRUM CORP’

In the domain of left-field electronic music, few artists cut such an elusively idiosyncratic figure as Eric Douglas Porter aka Afrikan Sciences. His recondite, Afrofuturist slant on house and its adjacent forms positions him in the exalted company of individualists like Jlin, Zamilska and Sam Shackleton whose work bears such a unique stamp of provenance, it practically births its own subgenre. Following hot on the heels of February’s astonishing ‘2220022 (Tiger Dynamics)’ (which, in typically capricious fashion, Porter deleted from his catalogue three days after it was released), ‘Genome Bentley’s Heritage Drum Corp’ is another fabulously out-there portfolio of possibility that reconfigures house to the point where it’s easier to describe in architectural rather than musical terms. Of course, this being Afrikan Sciences, the geometry of these precarious constructions is strictly non-Euclidean, each track a jazz-gilded labyrinth of illusion and improbability, like an M. C. Escher lithograph brought to angular sonic life. Booby-trapped with rapid-cycling time signatures (nothing so trite as a four-on-the-floor DJ tool here) and sampledelic whorls of every conceivable abstraction, this is music that, even at its most minimal (‘3 Things’, for example, is little more than an acidulated rumble of bass and percussion that spools out for almost 11 minutes), remains as resistant to decryption as the Voynich manuscript. It’s also an absolute fucking blast. If you’re an Afrikan Sciences virgin, pop your cherry with this then work back until you hit 2014’s twin masterpieces ‘Theta Wave Brain Sync’ and ‘Circuitous’. Trip isn’t the word.

The Student Body Presents

EATERS OF THE SOIL – ‘E.P. 2’

The permeability of the membrane that separates jazz from extreme metal has been increasing exponentially of late. From the cosmic overload of Neptunian Maximalism to Starboard’s funereal chamber doom, the slew of exotic new hybrids birthed by this osmotic pressure drop haven’t just rattled the odd cage, they’ve permanently altered the contours of an entire sonic landscape. As their name suggests, Dutch improv trio Eaters Of The Soil inhabit the dankest antechambers of the jazz/metal basilica, chiseling angular monoliths of ear-scouring discord from fretless bass, guitar, synth and trombone. The album-length sequel to last year’s riveting self-titled debut, ‘E.P. 2’ is a case study in nuanced cacophony that, despite its often pulverising heaviness, shows scant regard for the protocols of doom. Expect nothing so conventional as a riff here, just boulder upon boulder of sedimentary noise whose cumulative effect mirrors the Sisyphean slab-dragging of hardline sludgemongers like Primitive Man and Body Void. Jazz is likewise stretched way beyond its elastic limit, plumes of overblown brass erupting from plateau of bass-stiffened ambient grind that thrum like a vast network of conjoined substations. Tumours of forlorn melody grow briefly in the gloom only to be excised by scissoring blasts of dissonance, whilst snatches of dialogue apparently culled from interviews with a serial killer only deepen the sinkhole of unease this nerve-shredding noise-fest opens up. Join the feeding frenzy.

Forbidden Place Records

BLACK FLOWER – ‘MAGMA’

Historically, jazz has always fared best at the hands of heretics; outer-nationalists and inner-spacefarers like Don Cherry, Miles Davis and Sun Ra who squandered no opportunity to kick the shins of purism and steam full-bore into uncharted territory. Like their illustrious forebears, Belgian quintet Black Flower are seasoned recalcitrants having toed no-one’s line but their own since forming in 2014, but of their albums to date, ‘Magma’ is unquestionably the most ambitious, an intoxicating walk on the beguiled side that adds an extra dozen dimensions to the concept of fusion. Led by multi-instrumentalist Nathan Daems whose mellifluous flute leads run like threads of spun silver through every track, the band’s reach extends further than ever here, helped in no small part by the the addition of keyboard player Karel Cuelenare, a master of virtuosic understatement with an elegant line in rococo Farfisa flourishes. Sashaying seductively between fragrant Ethio-Jazz, baroque psychedelia and dub-dazed afrofunk, ‘Magma’ delivers rapture by the ream, but the twist in its tale is ‘Morning In The Jungle’, a wide-asleep waft of viridescent acid folk that recalls Beautify Junkyards at their most blissfully lysergic. Too early to be talking about album of the year? No.

Bandcamp

ANATOMY OF THE HEADS – ‘A BANISHMENT OF BLOODSHED AND SUPERSTITION’

The newest full length from martian jesuit pineapple pyramid-schemers Anatomy Of The Heads. Spiritually insane lounge Jazz Fusion Rock Tropicana to amuse and disturb, possessive arrangements of languid phosphorescent Jazz & Soft Rock to stir vegetative states of inner exploration, deep voiced jungle cult leaders exalt a world of sweaty jazz hunter hazed psychedelia and lush Jurassic sound effluvia, constructed from all manner of musical and non-musical sources. I can barely even fathom the third mind that could imagine these songs, let alone conjure them so singularly. This is a precise Noise of exquisite design and rich in unfathomable concepts, bad vibes lounge man-lizards amidst their unknowable and dreadful tasks, dissonant and disconcerting yet tranquilizing and lulling, exceptionally exotic and quixotic. A very strange and unique project – let the Sgt. Psyops Lizard Hearts Club Band waltz you down the primrose path of your screaming reptilian subconscious. Sweltering Hell Jazz!

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RAJA KIRIK – ‘RAMPOKAN’

The mainstream music press, that monolithic bastion of the craven and complacent, would prefer this record didn’t exist. Hermetically sealed inside their truth-proof bunkers, the last thing the embittered scribes of SPIN and Pitchfork need is a blinding bolt of futurism like ‘Rampokan’ blowing their dadrock applecart clean off its axles. The revelatory may be soul food for the cognoscenti, but it’s the retrograde that keeps the balance sheet looking healthy. Best then, to ignore it and hope it goes away. Out here on the periphery, however, such intoxicating mayhem couldn’t matter more. Armed with homemade instruments and a battery of electronics, Indonesian duo Raja Kirik build entire new worlds of sonic possibility, music that instantly renders obsolete so much of what came before, listening to it is genuinely intimidating. First released last year on cult imprint Yes No Wave and seemingly possessed of some hitherto unknown elemental force, ‘Rampokan’ is nothing less than staggering, a dangerously unstable cocktail of hypertensive proto-gabber, free jazz, Senyawa-esque improv noise and Javanese shamanic trance-dance that’s less artistic statement, more apocalypse in eleven acts. This is scarcely an exercise in recalcitrance for its own sake though. No premeditated attempt to colour outside the lines could possibly result in music this nonpareil, this utterly unfettered from trend and genre. Vision appears to be the sole driving force here, and Raja Kirik have it by the tankerload. Acquaint yourself with this mindbomb YESTERDAY. The war on The War On Drugs starts here.

Nyege Nyege Tapes

SPIRITCZUALIC ENHANCEMENT CENTER – ‘CARPET ALBUM’

Jazz is anathema to countless otherwise eclectically-minded music fans, and perhaps understandably so given the over-sufficiency of hamster-cheeked modality merchants noodling themselves numb at the trad end of the spectrum. Wisely however, outernational collective Spiritczualic Enhancement Center spit in the eye of such tedious virtuosity signaling, opting instead to establish their commune beyond the mainstream’s manicured banks in the lawless hinterlands where dissidence trumps orthodoxy and fusion takes a back seat to fission. The result of multiple recording sessions by an 18-strong cast of conspirators, ‘Carpet Album’ (no, me neither) is the musical equivalent of a fly agaric binge; a multi-tentacled chimera that, despite sporting the speculative friction burns of Sun Ra and Alice Coltrane, actually cleaves closer to krautrock’s serpentine inner spacefaring and the outré œuvre of such contemporary mystics as LCSM, Mansur and The Heliocentrics. Piquant with percolating synth, dub-flecked percussion ricochets, wah-wah guitar spume and aromatic Turk-psych curlicues, this is sonic alchemy of the highest esoteric order; a mind-dilating pleasure cruise to rattle the resolve of the most fervent jazz detractor. Your magic shagpile awaits.

Kryptox

NEOANDERTALS – ‘NEANDERTHALS WERE MASTER BUTCHERS’

Neoandertals emerges from Estonia sometime in the late Pleistocene Epoch, wielding primitive instruments and harboring early intelligence bloodlusts. Neolithic Brutal Death Metal via Fusion Jazz. Bass and Drums interlocked in furiously complex rhythms, shuffling and slobbering in bizarre arcane structures, dry concrete Bass whiplashing, super low vocal grunting describes the defleshing processes of Neanderthal cannibal consumption practices. Mud and blood flecked, erecting intellects and horrifyingly heavy and obtuse – little moments of more traditional riff arrangement and sort of slammer parts are all the more impactful and intoxicating for having surfaced from beneath such an obfuscate quagmire of audial brutality. These two barbarous pseudoscientists are doing something very weird and special indeed.

Bandcamp

SISSY SPACEK – ‘L/L’

Three longer tracks of Musique Concrete experimentation and shuffling Noise from Sissy Spacek – found sounds and samples stitched together in a serrated and dangerous arrangement, scuffed instrumentation ‘hits’, percussive impacts as unintended, hands on the guitar strings, little pieces of almost cohesive beats and drum phrasing, sort of Free Jazz influences, extremely weird but listenable, Ornette Coleman or Cecil Taylor fans might find something to enjoy here. A great example of the kind of contrasts in sound that exist within Sissy Spacek’s discography. I’ve returned to this one several times.

Bandcamp

SPEKTAR – ‘NEPOZNATE BOJE SPEKTRA’

Black Pearl Records is one of those crate digger type labels who reissue older and often overlooked records. Here’s some excellently weird early 70’s Croatian Jazz Funk, heavy on the Psychedelia and experimental fusion type sounds, compiled from several recording sessions. Funky and driving grooves with blurting psychedelic riffs and interesting arrangements, Jazz Rock mastery and a bit of Krautrock and Lounge vibes. Fantastic organ and Bass sounds, all slink and parp. Has a rather demo-style raw sound and a very dusty, forgotten and obscure vibe. There’s not a bad track on this thing! Perfect for burning cones in your lair.

Black Pearl Records

THUNDERCAT – ‘IT IS WHAT IT IS’

2017’s “Drunk” was one of my favourite albums from the last decade, so you can probably guess that I was more than a little excited for the release of “It Is What It Is”. All the ingredients that I could hope to find in a Thundercat record are present; the oddball humour, the lo-fi jazz-funk beats, the rich bass, the silky synths and of course, Stephen Bruner’s mellow, friendly falsetto. It’s a well arranged and concise collection of tracks, contrasting nicely with the sprawling madness of “Drunk”. There’s an ethereal yet occasionally melancholic feel to proceedings, with a handful of passages resembling the end theme to some stylish anime. It’s a superbly produced cocktail of dreamy funk, hip hop and soul, and it should be in your record collection. Essential.

Bandcamp

HUH – ‘DAZZLING DAMNED’

HUH is a two piece from Japan, playing some awkward, otherworldly rehearsal room Jams. This stuff is completely free associative, meandering, and northless, sounding like the true improvisation it likely is. A bizarre concoction of utterly minimalist recordings based largely in silence, seemingly cut off at random points, combined with louder, more involved Avant Garde freakouts. There’s yelpy madman Vocal, lots of effects, random instruments and percussion punching in and out, the occasional atonal all-together-now blasting commonly found in Noisecore and a truly wild and carefree spirit. This is barely music, beyond even the lower forms of Noise, Free Jazz and other affiliated styles, and obviously that is no bad thing. Brightly random, nonsensical and befuddling, and lots of fun indeed.

GK#376