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Best Music of 2018-Sinchi Atobe

Sometimes it's by accident that you come upon a sonic surprise. The name is unfamiliar and the cover says nothing about its contents. You do some research quickly before investigating its sound and it describes a mysterious producer who stays away from the limelight and has barely been seen or heard of recently. It begins and after five seconds your realize that yes you've heard this somewhere and sometime but the origin is distant. Slowly the rhythm takes you into the story which is new and then you begin its voyage.

From Tiny Mix Tapes:

Shinichi Atobe doesn’t make drum & bass music, and his music is nothing like Shortee’s The Dreamer, but Heat sounds like a kind of snippet that could get stuck in a 14-year-old’s head, without a name, without a hint that this is what house music sounds like. Atobe’s work sounds timeless, but unlike his magnificent From The Heart, It’s A Start, A Work Of Art from 2017, Heat’s surprise early-fall release may eventually be forgettable, save whatever sweaty remnants of its attic-bound charm end up stuck onto more high-profile 2018 releases. But that’s partly why Heat is so special.

Music that is associated with temperature often gets dubbed “evocative” or “transcendent” (I recently used these terms in my review of Body), and it is true that Atobe can make soothing deep house music seem hot. But what makes this release feel so fresh is that it doesn’t transport your body into its desert soundscape; it merges its space with your space, as if Atobe had constructed a L’Englian tesseract out of cardboard boxes and tacky glue, and then stepped across folded space into your room through your headphones.

Heat is seven tracks long, but it contains an hour of music that feels like an EP. Four tracks are called “Heat,” appended with a number (in this order: 2, 4, 1, 3); its bookends are both called “So Good, So Right” (1 and 2); and there’s a short, keyboard-heavy mid-album track called “Bonus.” It’s almost too appropriate that this release begins and ends with a title like “So Good, So Right,” but its tracklist isn’t a roadmap, it’s a travel journal, filled with familiar pictures that contain easily passable details. Heat’s movement is comparatively static, not like From Here We Go Sublime; there are no obfuscated samples here or dramatic beat-switches, just solid, vocal-less house tracks that occasionally snag and jump in strategic places.

From Pitchfork:

Up until four years ago, Atobe had exactly one release to his name—2001’s Ship-Scope, an EP of ambient techno so evocative it could elicit tears from a sympathetic listener. Then in 2014, Demdike Stare followed a tip from Atobe’s previous label, the Berlin dub-techno pioneers Chain Reaction, and tracked him down. Since then, Atobe has entrusted DDS to release both new and archival music from his collection, which now includes three albums of material, each building upon the dreamy logic of Ship-Scope. Cold and swirling and sad, Atobe’s recent releases have been every bit as enigmatic and alluring as their creator.

But Heat does not sound like any of this previous work—it’s a house record first and foremost. Heady and soulful and smooth in a way that harks back to Mr. Fingers, Heat is an open book compared to the black boxes of Atobe’s past albums. Its thesis is clear from the moment a humid synthesizer melody introduces the opener, “So Good So Right”: This is a record, as its title suggests, primarily interested in the warmer end of dance music. These are tracks to make you sweat. It’s a new climate for Atobe’s music, downright tropical. The plush hand drums and purring bassline on “Heat 1” swing and sway like palm fronds moving with the ocean breeze; the slippery and bubbly synths on “Heat 2” move like bodies writhing on a waterbed.

Even as Atobe paints with brighter, more vivid hues on Heat, a blueness works at the lower registers of the album. There is a rich, emotional world here, one where melancholy freely intermixes with joy: On “Heat 4,” hi-hats chirp and crawl around hissing ghostly ambient noise like crickets on a foggy night, but right beneath the creepiness is the softest, supplest low end.

Working in this hot and heavy mode, Atobe transports all the exacting rigor and creativity of his techno to the creation of house melodies whittled to dancefloor perfection. Patience is what connects the soulfuness of Heat to Atobe’s back catalog. But in the beatific piano chords and the crispy kick drums, it’s easy to hear the communal spirit of Heat: These are songs oriented towards public consumption, not private listening. That change in setting and intent might shock anyone who has been following Atobe’s records over the years. But when Heat locks into its groove, it taps into the contemplative spirit that powers all of his music. Atobe’s work has always been about the rewards that come with careful, repeated listens. The beauty of Heat is the way it allows its listeners to experience those gifts together.

From Pop Matters:

Shinichi Atobe's evolved the same way life on Earth has; after floundering about in the deep sea, he's flopped up on land. Maybe the beach on the cover of his new album Heat is where the dead and rusted things that populate his previous albums like Butterfly Effect and World wash up, because this is the sunniest music the elusive Japanese producer's ever made. The crusty distortion that defined his music and that of the Chain Reaction crew he ran with early in his career is gone, replaced by a spit-shined mix and insistent beats that indicate a desire to be heard in more DJ sets.

It's not as cynical as it sounds once you consider Shinichi Atobe's always made anthems. Most dub techno producers are content to let the stoned soup of their music ebb and flow around you unobtrusively, but Atobe makes tracks that stick in the head, the memory, the heart. What are "Plug and Delay", "The Red Line", "Regret", and "Butterfly Effect" if not bangers?

These tracks follow in that tradition. There are no crackly interludes made of seafoam and static, no numbers stations whispering at us out of the fog. The only track under eight minutes is "Bonus", whose title brings to mind the crustacean scuttle of "Bonus Break" from Butterfly Effect but is instead a pleasant interlude hewn from classic-house pianos. These tracks make the unlikely club staple "Regret" from last year look positively inert, and his earlier releases feel even darker and more diseased. This is dance music.

The tracks that will have the longest shelf life are probably "So Good So Right", which threads miles-wide sheets of synth between drums that jack like vintage Todd Edwards, and "Heat 1," whose chords contract and expand like polyps to find a sweet spot between between this friendly new approach and the mystery of his classic releases. "So Good So Right 2" sounds more like "Heat 1" than its sibling, which is emblematic of the mischievous sense of humor of a dude who won't even disclose whether or not he made these tracks this year or two decades ago.

Atobe tracks aren't exactly known for their high fidelity, so I struck by the multitudes going in in the plumbing of the record: the vehicular screech beneath the surface of "Heat", the dark water that sloshes in the bowels of "Heat 4", the short tail of pad that concludes "So Good, So Right 2" and suggests that the record's worldbuilding doesn't stop when the groove runs out.

This isn't an album that traffics in obfuscation. Its elements are all there in plain sight; you just have to squint to make some of them out. Some will miss the brininess of his early releases and grouse about how they're superior to these more gregarious tracks. This isn't an unfair reaction, but it ignores the fact that Atobe is great at this kind of music. Now that we know he's not a one-trick pony, we can hope for further elaborations on his sound. He hasn't abandoned his world but taken us to a new corner of it, and out of the murk, we can see more clearly than ever how vast it is.

 

Best Music of 2018-Rafiq Bhatia

A compelling mixture of electronic, ethnic, rock, jazz that produces a blend of familiar yet uncanny sounds at times cinematic at other times hypnotic. Gazing across time and geography, sometimes skipping past decades and into a turbine engine. Composed and improvised-it all works.

From  National Sawdust Log an interview with Bhatia:

Part of what I’ve always liked about your music is the melting pot within it: it’s very modern jazz, but it draws almost as deeply from hip-hop, rock, soul, and pop music as well. You’ve mentioned in the past that two of your big early influences were listening to your grandfather singing Ginans and gangster rap. How do you combine these different elements? Do you even consciously think about it? Is it just “this is what the music needs?”

I think it’s worth recognizing that every music is the result of a combination of ideas—some combinations are just more stable/codified than others. Rather than accepting a certain genre constraint or pre-determined combination as a basis for my work, I’ve always strived to build my own musical identity – one that feels honest and personal – from smaller building blocks. In large part, I think that feels very natural to me because it mirrors the way I’ve gone about the rest of my life as a first-generation American, having to assemble an identity piece by piece with little in the way of precedent. Also, it comes from being an omnivorous listener who finds attributes appealing across genres (e.g. the physical power of sound, transcendence, contrast), and recognizes that genres are the commodified face of lineages and communities that are usually entangled with one another.

As a result of all this, that aspect of my work really doesn’t involve a whole lot of careful planning or premeditation in the moment that I’m creating music—again, I find myself naturally inclined in this direction. But on a bigger-picture level, I do also think critically about the way that ideas and components are organized within existing disciplines and consider how certain elements could be repurposed or replaced by others to form a hybrid.

From the New York Times:

The inspirations for Rafiq Bhatia’s new album, “Breaking English,” include but are not limited to: Jimi Hendrix concert videos, blaring prayer calls from Turkish mosques, East African archaeological sites, the death of Trayvon Martin and Flying Lotus sound collages.

They might sound scattered on paper, but they coalesce in the hands of Mr. Bhatia, a guitarist who refuses to be pinned to one genre, culture or instrument. This 30-year-old musician fluidly moves between jazz and rock groups, Indian and American musical influences, and acoustic and electronic sounds. His transient approach, combined with his obsession of assiduously studying the past in order to break cleanly from it, makes him one of the most intriguing figures in music today.

“Breaking English,” due Friday, is not quite jazz and not quite electronica. The record is filled with booming electronic drums, bittersweet Carnatic violin melodies, hushed gospel choirs and swarms of feedback. It’s the sound of a confident artist showing off his digital ambition and technical wizardry, but the process of developing this sound was often fraught.

“I went through a lot of periods of very intense self-doubt about whether somebody like me could deal with this way of making music,” Mr. Bhatia said in an interview at a Vietnamese cafe in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

Growing up in a Muslim family in Raleigh, N.C., made him accustomed to being perceived as an outsider. “There was a very large percentage of the population down there that were not comfortable with our presence,” he said.

And when he recently started wading into the world of electronic music and sound design after spending years in jazz communities, he said he felt ostracized: “A lot of these spaces are dominated by white men or are very heavily segregated.”

From Sacred Exile:

Art can be challenging. Art should be challenging. When music isn't spoonfed to you in compact melodies, over-compressed choruses, and predictable structure, it can be coined a challenging listen. Breaking English is robust, ambitious, provocative and uniformly teeming with emotion in all avenues of its expression. It's one part avant-garde jazz, one part experimental electronica and full of soul. The human spectrum of emotion is on full display as Bhatia "sets out to challenge existing musical vocabulary with a language of its own." It's not always accessible, but being human isn't easy, and the album accomplishes a creation of the multi-layered good and bad of life as we know it.

Stepping out on his own after being one-third of Son Lux, Bhatia pushes and squeezes human qualities and showcases them in his music. Starting off the album, "Olduvai I - Minarets" creates tension through a mechanical set of ambient noises. It's the signal of something much larger to come, like the human fossils found at Olduvai from thousands of years before. "Hoods Up" was the first single from the album, the first song Bhatia started working on and one of the last to finish. Created in the wake of the Trayvon Martin killing, Bhatia said: "I think the music carries some of the struggle of its creation with it." Hiccuping drums organically push scraping and scratching strings forward, until Bhatia unleashes his precise and powerful guitar for the first time. There is contrast all over the song and the previously mentioned tension is complete with an intimate and serene depth. 

Before we arrive at the title track of the album, "The Overview Effect" stretches, throbs, and wails. Expressing the view of Earth from outer space, it is fragile and indescribable. The bass falls up and down the fretboard before the lead synth screams at you. And it really screams. It is tense, intense and overwhelming. Now that he has your attention, it's time for "Breaking English."

The title track is sonically, compositionally, emotionally and artistically perfect. It could make you want to cry from sadness on one listen, and cry from joy the next. A soulful, introspective and harmonious six minutes of pure bliss. Revolving around a seductive clean guitar lick and a free drum rhythm, the song is caressed by a gospel choir that elevates it to a new level. Stunning and one of the best songs of the year, "Breaking English" will devour your attention and cure any stress that is eating away at your brain. Unfortunately, it so significantly overshadows the other offerings from the album.

Bye Bertolucci

His adaption of Moravia's Il Conformista is still one of my top 5 film of all time and his films had the power to ignite those who weren't interested in Hollywood's thin and weak narratives-everyone, not just film students should be required to watch Il Conformista, especially in today's perverted times-from The Guardian:

Before the Revolution (1964), a far more personal film, explores the problems of a selfish middle-class young man who is torn between radical politics and conformity, and between a passionate affair with his young aunt and bourgeois marriage. He opts for respectability on both counts. The film, loosely based on Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma, is technically impressive, as is Bertolucci’s ability to articulate themes, such as the betrayal of a totemic father and the connection of the libido with politics, that would mature in his later work. However, as with the film’s hero, there is an element of the dilettante in Bertolucci’s approach.

This impression grew stronger in Partner (1968), which is an undigested homage to Jean-Luc Godard, about a young man literally divided into two by having a double. Derived from Dostoevsky’s short novel The Double, and updated to the Rome of 1968, it has the central character, played by Pierre Clémenti, speaking French while all the rest speak Italian. In the same year, Bertolucci was credited with the story of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West.

Bertolucci’s reputation was greatly enhanced when he joined forces with the cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, who had been a camera operator on Before the Revolution. The Spider’s Stratagem (1970), the first of eight films they made together as director and director of photography, easily transposed the Jorge Luis Borges story Theme of the Traitor and the Hero from Ireland to Italy. As oedipal and labyrinthine as its source, it concerns a young man who revisits the village in the Po valley where his father was murdered by the fascists in 1936, and gradually discovers that his father, whom he had considered a hero, was really a traitor.

The Conformist (1970) most successfully brings together Bertolucci’s Freudian and political preoccupations in an ironic study of pre-war Italy (beautifully captured by Storaro) and an attempt to penetrate the mind of ordinary fascism. The childhood trauma of having shot a chauffeur who tried to seduce him, together with his own repressed homosexuality, is a strong factor in making Marcello (Jean-Louis Trintignant) contract a bourgeois marriage and offer his services to the fascist party, for whom he is asked to assassinate his former professor. The Conformist saw the full flowering of Bertolucci’s flamboyant style – elaborate tracking shots, baroque camera angles, opulent colour effects, ornate décor and the intricate play of light and shadow that give his work such a distinctive surface.

After the release of Last Tango in Paris in Europe, Bertolucci was indicted by a court in Bologna for making a pornographic film. Although he was acquitted, he lost his civil rights (including his right to vote) for five years and the Italian courts ordered that all copies of the film should be destroyed. In recent years, further controversy surrounded the extent to which Schneider had consented to elements of the film shoot.

The worldwide acclaim and box office for Last Tango in Paris helped Bertolucci obtain the vast financial resources needed to embark on the long-planned project 1900. With this $6m, five-hour epic, released in 1977, Bertolucci turned away from the introspection of his previous films and tried to make a popular movie of the class struggle using the style of both American epics and the socialist realism of the Russian cinema of the 30s. Italian history is seen through the diverging lives of Olmo (Gérard Depardieu), the son of a peasant woman, and Alfredo (Robert De Niro), the son of the lord of the manor (Burt Lancaster), both born on the same day, 27 January 1901, through to Italy’s Liberation Day, 25 April 1945. Often bombastic and didactic, it enters greatness in the last 30 minutes.

Best Music of 2018-Binker and Moses

 

Raw in the best sense, this music has the spark of life that makes you feel like its all new again. This drum and sax duo adds other musicians in the brew and comes through with a lot of originality sparked by intricate drumming and fire-like solos from the saxes and trumpets. There are lots of roots here but the new growth is evident. Hope these young and experienced musicians visit the states soon.

From All About Jazz, Chris may writes:

Something wonderful is happening in London in summer 2018. A disruptive musical movement, led by an inter-connected community of young musicians, is taking jazz in vibrant new directions and finding enthusiastic new audiences. Hybridisation is the name of game, which reflects London's cultural diversity by absorbing locally created styles such as grime and broken beat within the music's traditions. Many of the new movement's auteurs and at least half of the players are black. Nothing like this has happened in Britain before. Not on this scale anyway.

The scene embraces nu-fusion, Afrobeat-inspired dance-centric bands, shamanic spiritual-jazz and free jazz. Binker and Moses, led by tenor saxophonist Binker Golding and drummer Moses Boyd, can best be described as playing semi-free spiritual jazz. Alive In The East? is the group's third album, following Dem Ones (Gearbox, 2015) and Journey To The Mountain Of Forever (Gearbox, 2017). Like its predecessors, it was recorded live, with no edits or drop ins. As on Journey, the group includes saxophonist Evan Parker and trumpeter Byron Wallen, representing older generations of London experimentalists, and harpist Tori Handsley and drummer Yussef Dayes, contemporaries of Golding and Boyd. Handsley is the least well known member of the lineup. She is remarkable. Her approach here has little connection with Alice Coltrane or Alina Bzhezhinska, eschewing glissandi and approaching the harp instead like a twangtastic, acoustic bass guitar.

The music's default position is ferocity. But discordancy is not a feature—the emphasis is on solo rather than collective improvisation, so avoiding the cacophony that is a characteristic of much full-on free jazz. Jumping-off points are provided as much by Boyd's beats as Goldings's harmolodic centres. Motor rhythms are ever present, not so much grooves as urgent pulses, pushing the music forward. The result is a whirlwind. It can rip the hair clean off the back of your neck.

It is impossible to pin a precise start date on London's emergence as a new global centre of jazz innovation. Movements such as this start with hints and ellipses before morphing incrementally into reality. An early marker was undoubtedly Sons of Kemet's debut, Burn (Naim), in 2013. But that album had a significant precursor in its producer and drummer, Sebastian Rochford's band Polar Bear, which debuted on disc ten years earlier. Certainly, an identifiable movement had coalesced by 2014, the year Golding and Boyd first recorded together in singer Zara McFarlane's band.

From The Free Jazz Collective, Sammy Stein writes:

Saxophone player Binker Golding and drummer Moses Boyd have a new release on Gearbox records called Alive In The East. My first real contact with their music was when I reviewed their album Journey to The Mountain of Forever after seeing them on Jools Hollands’ BBC Later show. Shortly afterwards when I curated the London jazz Platform festival in London their management and I were discussing them playing. Logistics defeated us then but the interest was born. They have continued to not only continue on their jazz journey but develop different projects and are now one of the forefront duos of the new jazz movement which merges street music, high energy driven power with traditional jazz roots and free improvisation. Many stalwarts of the free jazz scene willingly play alongside these young guns, as the wheel spins full circle and a new breed of strong jazz musicians is coming into their own.

Binker and Moses have collected a wealth of awards including the 2015 MOBO Award for Best Jazz Act, Jazz Fm 2016 awards for UK Jazz Act Of The Year and Breakthrough Of The Year and the Parliamentary jazz Award in 2016 for Jazz Newcomer Of The Year. Binker Golding graduated from Middlesex University and completed his master’s degree at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He has played with Jason Yarde, Denys Baptiste and Gilad Atzmon among many. Moses Boyd was the 2014 Worshipful Company of Music’s Young Jazz Musician of the Year and won the John Peel Play More Jazz Award at the 2016 Gilles Peterson Worldwide Awards. He has played alongside Ed Motta, Denys Baptiste and Gilles Peterson and leads his own outfits The Exodus (which includes Binker) and Solo Exodus, which infuses jazz, grime, and electronica. He runs Exodus Records label.

Their debut album Dem Ones featured just the duo. On their second CD, Journey To The Mountain Of Forever (Gearbox), they added guests including legendary UK free form saxophone player Evan Parker, trumpeter Byron Wallen, harpist Tori Handsley and drummer Yussef Dayes. On Alive in the East all these are back again. The CD was recorded live at the Total Refreshment Centre in Hackney. The title reflects the East London stronghold of UK jazz. Total Refreshment Centre offers varied spaces for music, recording and other arts projects and has been a valued community-based asset since 2012.

Of the album, Moses comments, “To be able to get all these musicians in a room at the same time is almost impossible, Alive In The East is a rare moment that captured how fun and special it is when we’re able to get together and play on home turf.’

‘Birth of Light’ opens the album and announces in no uncertain terms the energy and fervour of the music on this CD. It is a dialogue between Moses Boyd on drums and Yussef Dayes on drums and percussion and features rapid exchanges with a backwards and forwards motion of each passing the rhythms over and back, including a beautiful fast-delivered tok-tok section, interspersed with Yussef’s inimitable percussive interjections. This is a great piece to open with and it sets up the forward moving direction for the rest of the CD. Just over 3 and a half minutes passes in a flash.

From Nextbop.com:

Binker and Moses have somehow managed to combine elements from both the freer and more rhythmically-centered portions of jazz to create a truly impressive recording. The performance is often wild and exploratory – the horns play with fire. Low-key moments on Alive in the East? are rare, and even within those moments, like during the ghastly, languid notes of the horns on “The Discovery of Human Flesh”, there is a quiet intensity to the music. Throughout the album, Boyd, at times aided by the extremely talented Dayes, is an anchor that never loses its rhythmic ingenuity, frequently producing patterns that will make listeners’ head nod.

Alive in the East? opens up with “The Birth of Light”, an outstanding drum duet that is sure to move people out of their seats, which is immediately followed by the powerful “How Land Learnt to Be.” On “How Land Learnt to Be”, saxophones buzz around to create a constantly moving wall of sound as the harp is used percussively, adding another layer of rhythm to the infectious drumming. “Children of the Ultra Blacks” is a more spacious number, but equally as impressive. Rapid drumming begins the tune as the harp crashes in the background and transitions into resting between its dark chords as the horns come in. The trumpet takes the first solo, which is surrounded by a beautifully eerie atmosphere that eventually morphs into a brilliant chaos as the horns explode with energy in the song’s final third.

Alive in the East? is the type of record that could bridge the gap for many jazz and non-jazz fans. The aggressive skronk of its horns may appeal to fans of the avant-garde, while the excellent rhythms crafted by the drummers could draw in fans of more groove-based genres, such as afro-beat. The recording feels very organic – there is no doubting the chemistry between the musicians here and the excitement of the crowd can be heard with every cheer. After listening to Alive in the East?, it’s clear that anyone who has the chance to see Binker and Moses live should do so immediately.

Translations-How Language Works

From an interview with Colombian-American singer Kali Uchis:

I think many American-born Latinx people can relate to that. Spanish is your first language, right?
Yeah. My dad actually teaches English, so I grew up speaking both. I felt super embarrassed the last time I went to Colombia though – I did an interview and just failed miserably, because I wasn’t sure about which words to use. When you go for so long without speaking the language, you get rusty. I was like, “Fuck, I need to be constantly staying on top of my shit when it comes to my language – otherwise I’m just totally gonna lose my shit!”

Ever since then, every time I talk to my parents, I speak to them in Spanish. If your parents know English, you get reliant on that because you’re so used to speaking English in America. I know a lot of Latinos [whose] parents didn’t raise them speaking it at all. It’s way harder for them to connect, and they feel a little bit of their Latinidad is erased and taken away from them, which is unfortunate. I started feeling like maybe that’s why my friends don’t like to speak it – when I try to speak Spanish they respond to me in English.

Definitely. So you also spent some of your childhood in Virginia?
I would say most of my childhood. I was supposed to stay in Colombia my whole life, but my parents decided to move to Virginia. I mean, I was blessed to go to school in Virginia and visit Colombia – my family is still there, and my parents are there now. I got to experience both worlds in a way. I feel like that was really nice to have as a kid, and I would definitely want to give that to my own kid, the ability to have multiple places to call home. But Virginia is tricky because basically it’s between the North and the South.

It’s just under the Mason-Dixon line.
I’m from the DMV area, which is D.C., Maryland and Virginia combined, so it’s a subculture of its own. But for some reason when I tell people that I lived in Virginia, they ask, “Oh, is it a bunch of, like, hillbillies out there?” They don’t know a lot of legends come from Virginia – Pharrell is from there, Timbaland, Clipse and Missy [Elliott], obviously such an important icon in music and culture. But that’s OK, stay sleep.

How would you describe the area where you grew up?
We have Latin culture in Alexandria, but the Colombian crowd is not so big – it’s El Salvadorians, Ecuadorians, Hondurans. There’s also lots of of Ethiopians; I grew up with all the Habesha. I went to a high school called T.C. Williams High School – you know where the Remember the Titans movie was set? It’s one of the most diverse schools in all of the United States. Nowadays I get really uncomfortable to be in a room of people that are all the same, who all look the same, are the same ethnicity and dress the same. I feel like it’s because I just always grew up around people who were all different. There weren’t really any cliques – everyone was just cool with each other. I felt very blessed to be able to go to a school that had a lot of funding for the arts. Unfortunately, they’re shutting down some of those programs now, but they were key in developing me as an artist. I couldn’t afford cameras, or equipment, or a dark room. I wouldn’t have been able to access those things on my own, but we could play with them at school for free.

Best Music of 2018-Young Fathers

 

Unclassifiable - the Young Fathers mix it up nicely creating a music that gathers all those sounds around us and produce a coherent beat with vocals that whisper to us the advice of the young who are not yet jaded by the circular perils of today. A fresh sound that requires some close listening while you dance the night away. What a time to be alive.

From Drowned in Sound:

The fact that the Edinburgh trio took far more time over their latest record Cocoa Sugar than at any other period of their career so far, has not affected their staying power. Rather, it has added to their mystique. And it is immediately, abundantly clear that the time spent on Young Fathers' third record was time well spent. This is a far more stripped down, stream-lined record that remains just as essential and urgent as all their output so far with little to no compromise. Truly, we are lucky to be in a time and space where Young Fathers fly in the face of their myriad genres - pop, indie, hip-hop, punk - and traverse them all elegantly.

Right from the word go, 'See How' announces that while the band may have slowed down slightly, they've lost none of their intensity. Over the course of Cocoa Sugar's 12 tracks, the band prove again what accomplished songwriters they continue to be. Lead single 'In My View' is perhaps their most emotionally charged and moving song of their entire oeuvre so far, for instance. Meanwhile, 'Tremolo' may make a fairly obvious production choice, the repeated line of "Tremolo my soul" is a haunting sound that manages to avoid overt sentimentality. Proving their durability, this is immediately followed up with 'Wow' which with its pacy beat gives many punk songs a run for their money while even being able to throw in their "doo-wop" acapella vocal stylings in there without blinking.

In the album's second half of the album, the 'darker' sounds take over, such as on 'Holy Ghost' which is perhaps their most straight-up hip-hop song on the record. Other recent single 'Toy' however shows the band's more stripped back style isn't completely prevailing here, as it remains the skittish, textured track they are perhaps more known for. Finale 'Picking You' with its pulsating organ and marching drum snares (and I swear there's a distorted bagpipe drone in there) feel very much like the record's funeral procession - especially when featuring lines such as "I only go to church when someone dies" and "You'll never find your way to heaven"- giving Young Fathers third and possibly best record the deliverance it deserves.

Ultimately, Young Fathers continue to prove their worth as an outlier in UK art-pop. Their very specific melting pot of identities continue to be one of the most exciting things coming out of not only Scotland (which they very much are) but in the world, today, facing an increasingly divisive political sphere of which the band's music is in constant conversation with. In essence, we need Young Fathers more than we actually deserve them.

From Spill Magazine:

Nothing is easy about Edinburgh-based, genre-defying trio Young Fathers, though that ultimately is what is most arresting about them. Winning the Mercury Prize in 2014 and being heavily supported by trip-hop and electronic pioneers Massive Attack doesn’t hurt their appeal either. In truth, just like their genre and influences are hard to narrow down to a manageable list, it is similarly difficult to narrow down exactly why this album is so intensely engrossing. That struggle in classification and quantification may end up being the crux of the band as a whole – what is easiest to celebrate and appreciate about them is the simple fact that there is no box anywhere that could possibly fit the band inside.

Cocoa Sugar, a title based around the idea of dissonance and opposition, is a much more user-friendly (read: less experimentally noisy) album than past efforts, though the spirit of invention and creativity is very much on show from beginning to end. The album starts strongly enough but launches itself into the creative stratosphere with third track “In My View” and does not come down to Earth until the last note is played almost 30 minutes later. There are so many standout moments and tracks between those two points, but the most moving include the opening choral flurry and following feedback blast of “Lord”, the laissez-faire glory of the vocal delivery in “Wow”, the TV on the Radio feel to “Border Girl” and the fire and fury of the opening verses to “Toy”.

Lyrically, this is a challenging album, but part of the explanation there is that the band admit to using free association and religious references as often as sitting down with a purposeful lyrical focus in mind. Though they are perplexing, the lyrics are equally arresting.  Perhaps the standout in that regard is “Turn”, most notably the line “I didn’t work this damn hard to stay where I belong”.

In terms of the overall sound, it is not the lyrics that captivate as often as the trio’s delivery (all three members sing with no one set as lead vocalist) and instrumentation/production, both of which regularly steal the show. There are more sonic layers to the majority of the songs on this album than is reasonable to attempt to count, with the end result being a density of controlled chaos that resonates at levels that are again (this is definitely a theme) difficult to explain.

Greater minds than mine will likely have greater success qualifying the attributes of this album; perhaps with that in mind, I will let the great mind of Aristotle have the last word on this album and on Young Fathers as a band, that being that “No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness”.  Here’s to creative madness.

From Pop Matters:

Scottish based collective, Young Fathers, have always pushed at the expectations of what a band should be. Over their 10 years as a band, the trio of Alloysious Massaquoi, Kayus Bankole and Graham 'G' Hastings have reveled in consistently taking the road less traveled. Whether it be in defying commercial pressures to follow up their 2014 debut album Dead with 2015's willfully abrasive White Men Are Black Men Too, or providing a score for Topher Campbell's art film Fetish, they are a band who appreciate the value of music as artistic expression rather than throwaway commodity.

White Men Are Black Men Too solidified the band's standing as an excitingly unpredictable band. At times the album felt like a group trying to glue a broken bottle back together, so splintered and disparate were its various elements. New album, Cocoa Sugar, is, without doubt, the bands most accessible to date but don't think for a moment that they have compromised their sound in pursuit of mainstream success. For every hook or vocal melody, there is a contrasting, experimental noise, as if the band are at pains to scuff up the sound if things become too comfortable. It's this juxtaposition that makes the album such a thrilling listen.

Opener "See How" sets the blueprint for the album as a whole. More stripped back than previous work it rides a deep, shadowy grime beat backed by the majestic power of a gospel choir. Music writer G. Hastings adds strangulated saxophone notes that he warps and bends to add a little dissonance. Rather than overly downbeat, the song comes across as more world-weary but with an overriding sense that 'what will be, will be'. "Fee Fi" with its chanted, repetitive hook line, shuffling beat and slightly off-kilter, old-time piano sound takes its maverick cut-up approach from J Dilla. Willfully lo-fi, it contains one of the album's darkest and most sinisterly delivered lines with "Give me slice / I like your flesh / I know what's best."

The Democratic Tradition

From The Guardian, Tim Wu writes:

But there’s another, nearly lost, democratic tradition, in which the goals of a democracy and a worthy civilization are irreducibly linked to the healthy development of its citizens along social, intellectual, and spiritual dimensions. In this older conception, a great democracy is one that serves as a cauldron for the building of good character and the pursuit of a worthwhile life – one that includes but also goes beyond mere material security.

This version of democracy puts the focus not on the ballot box or the ticker tape, but on the quality of citizens’ lives as actually lived. In doing so, it recognizes that healthy personal growth doesn’t just happen: it requires both liberties and securities in which human flourishing becomes possible.

On this view, all citizens should have the security to transcend a brute struggle to survive and feel safe, and the freedom to seek something more with their lives. As the American jurist Louis Brandeis once put it, “the ‘right to life’ guaranteed by our Constitution” should be understood as “the right to live, and not merely to exist”.

Brandeis’s view has radical implications for what a country and its economy should look like. In particular, it demands that we acknowledge, limit and balance the dangers of both government oppression and private coercion in our lives. That means protection against government censorship and oppression, to be sure. But it also means freedom from industrial domination, exploitation, or so much economic insecurity that one constantly fears unemployment or poverty. As Brandeis wrote, no one is really free “if dependent industrially on the arbitrary will of another”.

Since the industrial revolution, we have had to reckon with the growth of private power – once in the form of the trust or cartel, now in the form of the giant corporation, the monopoly and the multinational. The might and wealth of these entities can exceed even those of governments. In the United States especially, they have also claimed many of the political rights of citizens for themselves: rights of free speech, to spend money to influence politics, and to the free exercise of corporate religion – nearly everything except, so far, the right to vote.

For most people in industrialized countries today, our sense of autonomy and security is equally, if not more, influenced by private forces and economic structures than by government. The conditions of work – from the size of one’s wages and the length of one’s hours, to threats of being fired, harassed or mistreated by bosses, to even personal safety – now largely determine how much of our lives are really lived.

Outside of work, our daily lives are also shaped profoundly by economic matters such as rent, access to transportation or groceries, and health insurance, even more so than by any abstract freedoms. That is why real freedom must be understood as freedom from both public and private coercion – a point that has been utterly forgotten by so-called libertarians, conservatives and even most neoliberals.

More

 

The Fish

Vallejo Nocturno 2018- Snappers

 

Lucia Berlin Arriving

Lucia Berlin is one of those rare writers who goes through life living and writing but never gets known during their lifetime. Now, when she is gone, we read her work and realize why didn't we know what she was doing. Like Julius Hemphill, a jazz musician and composer of immense talent who left us in the 90's, we did not see Lucia writing these furious stories that deserve so much attention. Good lord!

Here is a link to one of her incredible inventions.

The Corner

Vallejo Nocturno 2018 - La Esquina

Not much happens here. Some times we try to cross this busy avenue from this point. Other times we tried to get there to get closer to the sports bar that used to be down the road. For us it's a focal point where we can look down and see whether there is credible life outside our realm and occasionally we see someone lost not really knowing or understanding that this is a corner and at most only a point to get elsewhere.