v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Best Music Music of 2020 - Ross Hammond

Dripping with acoustic authenticity Hammond's music with Pride and Lake running beside offers one of the best sounds of 2020. A trio giving it all they have at a time when we might not have much to give. As a fan of Oliver Lake from the early 70's it is so great to hear this adventurous walk into the future perpetually.

From All About Jazz:

Let's make the blues great again. Like a certain political slogan from the 2016 election, the blues, like America, has always been great. Guitarist Ross Hammond's blues are also analogous to the American experience, with his diverse and heterogeneous perspective. His trio recording Our Place On The Wheel reflects this variegated approach. The 'great' part is that Hammond's compositions are communicated through a dream team trio. His steel guitar is matched by jazz master saxophonist Oliver Lake of World Saxophone Quartet fame and the nimble drumming of Mike Pride.

This is the blues, but one whose locus cannot be affixed to a place. The music lands in Mississippi, Appalachia, and India. Hammond's steel guitar performance is steeped in blues feel but also draws from sitar-like sound on "Use Them Wisely." Why not, the blues are universal. With Pride's demonstrative drumming and Lake's saxophone vocalizations the music becomes a joyful blues, and that's not an oxymoron. Hammond draws on a plaintiff sound ("Mosaic") with Pride and Lake gathering energy as the music progresses. Lake's articulations burn through the piece, then turn gentle with a breathy extended technique. This mixed and matched stratagem expands the conception of the blues feel. "Gratitude" interweaves an organic folk sound with the sympathetic spirituality of Lake's alto and Pride's percussive rumblings, bells, sticks, and cymbals. The music rekindles the spiritual jazz of the 1960s with an all-welcome global perspective.

From Something Else:

In recent years, the guitarist, composer and bandleader Ross Hammond has transitioned from creating grand works of progressive jazz to simple, lightly accompanied acoustic blues, folk and spiritual music. Nowadays, he’s making music organically from a lap steel guitar and the contrast only points up to his broad range as an artist. Our Place On the Wheel is the latest in a string of releases along those lines but now with a nod back toward the jazz of his earlier works.

That’s because joining him are a couple of jazz hands a generation apart: drumming beast Mike Pride and a living saxophone legend, Oliver Lake. Their presence with Hammond adds a ton more intrigue and a trio is the largest ensemble on a Hammond-led record in several years, if memory serves me correctly. This trio, though, ain’t really playing jazz aside for the improvisational nature that’s always present in Hammond’s music. It’s still Hammond in full-on rural mode, only this time with some really good help.

Lake and Pride revel in the leisurely pace, and largely hang back and let Hammond’s blues trances take over. It’s not until the second track “Mosaic” that Lake gets more than waist deep in the water but the more he mingles with Hammond, the more he seems to enjoy himself. “Our Place On the Wheel” is another spot where Lake chooses to accentuate the main riff with some lyrical complements, taking on the spot normally taken by a vocalist.

Pride is likewise going with the flow, fully aware of the trickiness of keeping time when beat can sometimes be such a nebulous thing with this sort of music. He ignores the pulse altogether on “Blue and Pixelated” and instead constructs lively counterpoints to Hammond’s hypnotic grooves.

As pastoral as Ross Hammond’s other lap steel output, Our Place On the Wheel gets little more engaging with the presence of a couple of jazz guys taking a break from their normal genres. Those guys are clearly enjoying their vacation.

From Avant Music News:

Ross Hammond has quietly built up quite the discography playing jazz, blues, and folk music on various guitars, either solo or with groups of differing sizes. Here, he combines his steel guitar with the outside saxophone lines of Oliver Lake and the subtle, cerebral drumming of Mike Pride. Even if you are conversant with what each of these individuals is capable of, that would still not prepare you for Our Place On The Wheel, an album of soulful blues with more than a few hints of modernism.

Hammond extracts a steady supply of jangly and twisted notes from his steel, often providing both melodic and rhythmic voices. Lake’s contributions are more punctuated, consisting of short themes and motifs, providing atmosphere and discordance rather than solos per se. Pride’s percussion is perhaps even more unusual, bordering on extended techniques in addition to off-kilter kit-work. The result is an album that, to the casual listener, might not seem all that unconventional. But upon deeper review, Our Place On The Wheel is full of idiosyncrasies and more than a hint of weird Americana. At times it is more bluegrass than blues, and is interspersed with melancholy and darkness. Perhaps most remarkable, but not surprising, is that these three veterans recorded the eight pieces in one 90-minute, live-in-the-studio session.

While very different in sound than other types of music that usually grace these pages, this effort fits in spirit with the honesty and exploration of more overtly avant-garde recordings. Well done indeed.

The Reality of Maintenace

 

A review of The Innovation Delusion at LARB, coming from this industry to a degree I hear what is being said:

Innovation-speak is not the same thing as innovation or creativity. Indeed, Vinsel and Russell, professors at Virginia Tech and SUNY Polytechnic respectively, have lots of respect for creativity, work, and ingenuity. But they argue that just as technology has the power to shape our lives, language has the power to shape our thoughts, and the Valley has used both with ruthless effect. Innovation-speak allows us to acquire the power of Imperial Rome while insisting on its fundamental innocence. It lets us declare with absolute certainty that disruption is inevitable, unavoidable, and for the long-run benefit of humankind (and, incidentally, our short-term gain). It makes us winningly bashful about all the attention we get, and the influence a few of us have over billions of others. And it helps us sustain a childlike wonder at the trillions of dollars that keep pouring onto our balance sheets, which almost (but not quite) distract us from our mission of Bringing The World Together, or whatever.

Yet all is not well. People keep complaining that we’re invading their privacy, leaking their data, giving their jobs to robots, addicting their children to screens, and letting their elections and democracies be subverted. (We also still haven’t delivered those jet packs and flying cars.) It’s starting to look like innovation-speak … doesn’t really work as a description of the future, and it’s losing its power as a distraction from the present.

Beware geeks bearing gifts, Vinsel and Russell warn. The pursuit of novelty for its own sake doesn’t just fuel income inequality or threaten the environment (though it does contribute to those): it takes resources and attention from what really matters, which is maintenance and repair. These more modest activities are undervalued in just about every way. Despite their invisibility, they are indispensable, and absolutely essential in a crisis. There’s nobility in “keeping daily life going, caring for the people and things that matter most to us, and ensuring that we preserve and sustain the inheritance of our collective pasts,” they write. “It’s the overlooked, undercompensated work that keeps our roads safe, our companies productive, and our lives happy and secure.”

How central is maintenance? As Vinsel and Russell note, “about 70 percent of engineers maintain and oversee existing systems,” and “60 and 80 percent of software budgets are spent on maintenance.” Indeed, according to one estimate, two-thirds of US workers are engaged in maintenance of infrastructures, places, or people. Yet they’re often underpaid (65 percent make less than $20 an hour), and maintenance itself is chronically underfunded. (Maintenance is also largely overlooked by Russell and Vinsel’s fellow historians of science and technology, who are as focused on innovation as any comms shop in Palo Alto.)

This comes at a cost. If, as social scientists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling famously declared, “broken windows” signal a level of public disorder that invites more serious criminality, it is also true that neglected bridges and shabby public buildings impoverish civic life, slow economic growth and social mobility, and in the long run cost more to repair than to keep in good order.

Maintenance is also a deeply collective enterprise. It represents a willingness to invest in common goods, to choose the public benefit over private advantage; but public spaces also support social life in a way that private goods cannot. It takes a village to build a square; in turn, the square becomes the heart of village life.

Ama Chandra and Aaron Hill

Last Friday I had the great opportunity to shoot a concert by Aaron Hill and Ama Chandra at Blue Stone Park. Outdoors and at sunset it was the perfect music for the end of the Trump era. Positive and inspiring.

Best Music Music of 2020 - Mary Lattimore

ghostly · Mary Lattimore - Silver Ladders

Lattimore continues on her path to create a style of music that is a common language across a wide cross section of today's listening population. She is able to connect through the structure and sound of her music. The circularity makes easy familiarization with the melodies but her genius is she will take the music where it needs to go to signify something deeper than the superficial. And that is a lot.

From Pitchfork:

What makes Mary Lattimore’s work so entrancing is its interiority. With just a harp and loop pedals, the Los Angeles musician creates dreamscapes from the patterns behind her own eyelids and sweeps her audience up in them. She expanded her arsenal on 2018’s Hundreds of Days, adding theremin, electric guitar, and her own voice. On her new album Silver Ladders, she has teamed up with Slowdive’s Neil Halstead, swelling her gentle ambience with a more strident sound.

The two were introduced by a mutual friend at a festival, and although Halstead had never recorded a harp, Lattimore asked him to produce her next album, which she ended up recording at Halstead’s studio in Newquay, on the north coast of Cornwall. Silver Ladders is imbued with a mixture of nostalgia and fresh inspiration—the product, perhaps, of shifting to a small rural town with few distractions and ample opportunities to reflect.

Halstead’s touch is perceptible throughout the album as a subtle bolster to Mary Lattimore’s ideas. His influence comes through strongest on “Til a Mermaid Drags You Under,” where his reverb-soaked guitar dances around the steady harp melody. His dissonant, razor-sharp tones cut through the solemn, meditative bass line, and the guitar follows Lattimore’s lead as the song rises out of the melodic depths and takes a redemptive turn. Halstead’s thrumming guitar also enters halfway through “Sometimes He’s in My Dreams,” gradually introducing a secondary voice to Lattimore’s layered harp. A restless track, it feels like a vivid dream; Halstead’s guitar speaks as if for the title’s “he,” a mirror for the subconscious.

From Beats per Minute:

When harpist and composer Mary Lattimore sits down to create a song, she only really has, at most, an emotional or thematic undercurrent in mind. Perhaps a stray melody here or there has been perfected prior to hitting record, but once the red light goes on, Lattimore’s fingers start plucking, but simultaneously they are twirling knobs and hitting buttons, interweaving electronics and effects live in the moment. 

This type of technology-meets-classical approach has long been Lattimore’s calling card, and her improvisational methods allow for a real sense of unknowing, of unpredictability. Over the last decade she has been contributing strong session work for a multitude of artists that veered closer to the traditional, but it’s in her solo work and improvisational projects that her anything-could-happen style has been developed.

Now we find her casting her wild spells again on new album Silver Ladders. Produced and recorded by Slowdive’s Neil Halstead, this is the first record released as a Lattimore solo project that leans more toward the collaborative, as she has previously recorded and done everything herself in her own spaces. This welcoming of a production partner (and occasional songwriting and instrumental partner) does nothing, though, to dull the shine of the magic Lattimore can create.

The first thing we hear as the opening track “Pine Trees” comes to life is a simple, lovely, unadorned harp progression. Slowly, though, an encroaching hum grows in the background like a yawning cavern, while the harp subtly begins to echo and duplicate. It’s not unlike what cellist Zoe Keating does with her instrument: displaying a full comprehension of the limits of the instrument, and then a gentle pushing past it, into new territory. After years of playing classical music, Lattimore’s desire to start blending in improvisation, pedals and electronics has paid off in spades, and “Pine Trees” is a wonderful introduction to the world she creates here on Silver Ladders.

From Music OMH:

Is Mary Lattimore an astronomer creating celestial tones from within familial spaces? Is that a Geiger counter placed below the snuffed out oil lamp a warning to us about the dangers of industrialisation and he erosion of fossil fuels upon the landscape? Where has she disappeared to?

Perhaps you’d see the visual cues comparative with 2018’s Hundreds Of Days LP, itself another artwork by Suss, this time a formal living room in an unspecified suburban enclave, filled with academic bookshelves, antique plant illustrations and posters of prehistoric sculpture. You’d maybe hazard a guess that classically trained harpist Lattimore was a somewhat introspective artist hungry for knowledge, surveying her surroundings and conceivably hindered by the stifling provocations of domestic expectation.

With the temperate harp thrums that chime through Pine Trees, the tone of the record is distinctly established. Recorded in the Cornish countryside at the Newquay studio of Slowdive’s Neil Halstead, the restorative influence of time spent in nature, a clement, balmy tone infuses proceedings with wordless serenity as a breeze of bowed strings swirls the air and soft electronic waves lap at its shore. The restraint and considerate proficiency that has characterised Lattimore’s work to date is omnipresent but an amiable new sense of liberation is emerging. That placid sentimentality continues into Silver Ladders, a cloistered sonnet once more woven with grumbling surges of analogue synth whilst the harp shimmers and hangs delicately in the atmosphere.

For all the apparent awe at the physical world, there is an awareness of the primal influence of the elements, and the whispered folklore of Cornish legend. The middle section of the record imparts a caution to listeners. On ‘Til A Mermaid Drags You Under you can feel the portentous repercussions of some haunting (super) natural event as swells of hypnagogic synth rumble and prowl beneath the surface. Reminiscent of the digital bucolic pathways envisaged by Beverly Glenn-Copeland on his early ’70s and ’80s self-released records, the misleadingly pleasant Sometimes He’s In My Dreams finds Lattimore looking outwards across the horizon, temporarily forlorn as she reflects on the brittle impact of historic relations. Elsewhere, Chop On The Climbout, inspired by a warning heard whilst travelling a small craft on the Atlantic sea, starts steadily before dark billows of sputtering digitised keyboard start to reverberate and disturb the calm.

Best Music Music of 2020 - Aksak Maboul

A group that has regenerated itself after almost 40 years producing a sophisticated piece of contemporary popular music that really transcends time unlike most pop music. The compositions though playful seem to be aimed at people with both dancing and thinking tendencies. A lovely find and now I must check out their prvious work. Oh, it's in French so you need to learn French before listening to it.

From Pitchfork:

On Figures, Belgian avant-garde fixtures Aksak Maboul offer a compelling détournement of French pop’s gender assumptions. Led by Marc Hollander, Maboul emerged in the late 1970s as both globally minded experimenters and malcontents of convention. Their innovative 1980 album Un Peu de l'Âme des Bandits begins with a song called “A Modern Lesson” in which a signature Bo Diddley rhythm—the sort of clavé beat that courses through the bubblegum sounds of the ’60s—dissolves into distorted punk guitar work and discordant samples of Un Peu’s other tracks. The rest of the album thumbs its nose at Western pop, mixing in musical traditions from cultures as varied as Turkey, Polynesia, Baka, and the Mississippi Delta.

After Un Peu, Hollander put Aksak Maboul on the backburner, growing his record label, Crammed Discs, which expounds a highly influential global vision of contemporary sound. He also played in the post-no wave band The Honeymoon Killers, an early collaboration with the singer Véronique Vincent. By the time Aksak Maboul completed their next record, 2014’s Ex-Futur Album, Vincent and Hollander were married and had raised kids together. Musically, she had become frontwoman to his backstage sonic mastermind, a transgressively familiar format they bring to the double album Figures.

At its best, Figures addresses a 21st century in which the misogyny of the 1960s lives on, finding new places to hide and new opportunities to rear its head. One of the few English-language songs, “Dramuscule,” features a parodic conversation between a Georges Perec-reading man and a submissive woman. The man describes himself as the woman’s “hero,” and the woman tells the man, “I drink up your words, and I swallow mine,” before she later leaves him or kills herself—the narrative ends indeterminately. Vincent seems to echo yé-yé tradition on “Spleenétique,” repeating the song’s name at the beginning of each verse in a playful chirp before adding a few nonsense words. Yet the title translates to the English “Splenetic,” and the next lines maintain the rageful momentum coiled beneath her upbeat tone: “Idling speed attack/Ire swells in me.”

The conflict between words and music reflects the album’s gender battles. Though Hollander composed most of the music, Vincent wrote all of the lyrics, and her musings are often self-reflective. “La musique et les lettres,” she sings on a track near the end, her next line translating into English as, “Words have ensnared me.”

While the album’s hour-plus runtime is full of fragments and found sounds, Figures is most cohesive when it serves as a stage for Vincent’s writing. Hollander layers his restless electronic tracks with woodwinds, programmed beats, electric guitar, and runs of jazz piano, but the album lacks the surprising juxtapositions that mark Aksak Maboul’s early work, its relative smoothness often giving the impression that Figures’ arrangements are settings for words and voice.

From The Quietus:

Totally pop, yet psychedelic enough to make one reconsider the ingestion of psychedelic drugs just to hear it in in such a state, replete with wonderful touches (such as elements of the systems music of Steve Reich or Philip Glass), Figures manages to contain elements from every phase of the band, whilst still having a contemporary edge. As in the very best attempts to merge disparate elements, the pop and avant elements perfectly compliment one another. The strong melodies hit immediately, allowing time for all the other little embellishments to fill out the picture with subsequent listens. You can also dance to it.

Opener, ‘Among The Naeporu’, is an elegant little loop of clarinet, organ and percussion under thirty seconds long, that wouldn’t be out of place on the band’s debut. ‘C’est Charles’ stakes out the kind of electronic chamber pop territory established on Ex Futur, which will most likely find favour with fans of Broadcast and Vanishing Twin. Like many of the longer songs on the album, it starts strong and gets even better as it progresses, transforming into something else entirely by its conclusion. ‘Taciturne’ has an epic quality, like a thumping soundtrack to a stylish, noir-esque spy movie. ‘Silhouettes’ is pretty fine too. Dreamy and mesmeric, with Frith adding a touch of magic on viola. ‘Histoires de Fous’ is a real earworm of a tune, propelled by deftly programmed drums and a swirling organ arabesque, before entertainingly coming apart at the seams by its end. ‘Spleenétique’ begins promisingly, with a looped piano figure, pattering drum machine and Vincent’s compelling vocal. The second half of the song is perhaps the album’s most RIO moment, recalling the band’s first two albums. Far too joyous and infectious to be prog as it’s usually understood, keyboards and vibraphone entwine to euphoric effect, whilst Fraipont’s guitars add just the right amount of shredding. It’s a fantastic track that I couldn’t refrain from replaying on repeat. ‘Dramscule’ is equally as good. In this case, a dramatisation of the uneven dynamic between a romantic couple set to an insistent beat, squealing alto sax, bass clarinet, bassoon and guitar, and even something that sounds like an alarm clock going off that should be irritating but feels perfectly placed amongst the tapestry of surrounding sounds. ‘Un Caid’ again is as good, perhaps even better. Beginning with an uplifting beat and strong melodic vocal line, this story of a cad, a “bigshot, a spearhead, the lance / Of a movement, of a secret thought” would be a brilliant track even if it weren’t for its concluding minute-and-a-half. As it is, those final ninety seconds take that keyboard motif and elevate it to a realm only usually graced by the very best Kosmische music, whilst still retaining its lightness of touch.

From Psychedelic Baby Mag:

What is the concept behind Figures?

There was no pre-established concept. The album developed in a very organic way, with a great interaction between the music and the lyrics. My intention was to weave together the various strands of music I enjoy playing with, and to create an album in which elements from the previous three records would be subsumed, and turned into something else. I’m quite happy with the result.

As for the album title, it emerged from Véronique’s lyrics, in which a collection of characters, situations, relationships etc can be found. They’re also reflected in the drawing and paintings she’s done for this project , which illustrate the cover and booklet. ‘Figures’ means many things: the word can refer to people, to geometrical forms, to stylistic devices in literature…

It’s a new chapter in Aksak Maboul story. How would you compare it to your previous releases?

As mentioned I feel that this new chapter sums up some (not all) of the elements I liked in the previous releases, and creates a new context for using them, while opening new directions for future releases.

If we look back at the various ‘chapters’ in the Aksak story (a story which includes a long gap, during which I and Hanna Gorjaczkowska— who has run Crammed with me practically since the label’s early days— have put about over 350 albums by other artists!), we notice that the music and the band have kept shape shifting. The three previous albums (Onze Danses, Bandits and Ex-Futur Album) are quite different from each other, in terms of sound, instrumentation, they’re almost in different musical genres… But, for me, they’re like successive reconfigurations of diverse elements I’m fond of, and there seems to be a common thread running through them, maybe also a common style (no matter what genre we’re delving into), and certainly also a deliberate set of references, of musical vocabulary which appear in various parts of these records. It’s interesting to note that, in the early days, some people related a lot more to Onze Danses (and thought that Bandits was too busy and complicated), while some others way preferred Bandits (and thought that Onze Danses was lightweight)… But this has pretty much changed with younger generations of fans, who have no problem relating to the entire body of work (including Ex-Futur), and enjoy all the variations of the Aksak Maboul sound.

A Despotic Act

 

 

From The NYRB, Fintan O'Toole  writes:

It is impossible not to think, in this in-between moment, of Antonio Gramsci: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Something is dying, but we do not yet know what. Is it the basic idea of majority rule or is it the most coherent attempt to destroy that idea since the secession of the Confederacy? Something is trying to be born, but we cannot yet say what it is either. Is it an American version of the “managed democracy” or “electoral autocracy” that is the most rapidly expanding political form around the world? Or is it a radically renewed republic that can finally deal with the unfinished business of its history? The old is in a state of suspended animation; the new stands at a threshold it cannot yet cross.

In 1974 upon his inauguration as president, just half an hour after the resignation of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford declared, “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.” He implied that the lawlessness and derangement of Nixon’s presidency, laid bare in the Watergate scandal, had been more traumatic for the United States even than the violence of the Vietnam War, its wounds “more painful and more poisonous than those of foreign wars.” Yet he also suggested that Nixon’s departure had left the country in a good place: “Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men.” With its institutions intact, the US could quickly return to its natural condition of mutual benevolence: “Let us restore the golden rule to our political process, and let brotherly love purge our hearts of suspicion and of hate.” If you had an air to that speech you could sing it:

For the house fell on her head
And the coroner pronounced her dead
And thru the town the joyous news was spread
Ding-dong, the witch is dead!

Many Americans imagined themselves singing that national anthem on the morning of November 4. But long national nightmares do not end in real life as they do in Oz. Donald Trump himself crawled out of Nixon’s political grave, more lawless, more shameless, more openly unhinged. And he will not lie down. Joe Biden, like Ford before him, hoped to arrive in the Oval Office, not just as a healer, but as an exorcist, driving out the evil spirits of suspicion and hate. For many of those who voted for him, the end of the Trump regime, like the banishing of Nixon, would prove that, after all, “our Constitution works.” There could be a great sigh of relief: the system has corrected itself. That was not really true in 1974 and it is emphatically false now.

The established, uplifting alternative to the long national nightmare is the American Dream. Biden evoked it in his acceptance speech at the virtual Democratic convention in August when he insisted that the opportunity for every American “to go as far as their dreams and God-given ability will take them” is one “we can never lose.” But this is a hazy kind of reverie, and it could not stand up to Trump’s Gothic horror version of the trope. In announcing his candidacy for the Republican nomination in June 2015, he both performed its funeral rites and dragged it out of the grave: “Sadly the American dream is dead, but if I get elected president, I will bring it back. Bigger, better and stronger than ever before.” While Biden was insisting that the dream was undying, Trump’s promise to resuscitate its cadaver was, for so many of those who have experienced the demise of industrial America, a much more potent image.

It has, moreover, its own nightmarish history. As Sarah Churchwell points out in her illuminating exploration of the term, in her book Behold, America (2018), the first widely disseminated use of “American dream,” in the sense that later became such a staple of political rhetoric, appeared in the New York Post in 1900. It was in fact a warning about the threat posed by super-rich tycoons to the very existence of the American system of government. “Discontented multimillionaires,” it warned, form the “greatest risk” to “every republic.” All previous republics, it noted, had been “overthrown by rich men” and this could happen too in America, where the tycoons were “deriding the constitution, unrebuked by the executive or by public opinion.” If they had their way “it would be the end of the American dream.” This—and not a woolly appeal to its benign power—is the sense in which the term should resonate now. The American republic has come close to being overthrown by a discontented multimillionaire. Biden failed to say with sufficient force that America needed not to go from nightmare to dream, but to wake up to the urgent meaning of that threat.

Baltimore's Penn Station

We read recently that the Baltimore Penn Station (our railroad station) was up for some transformations. With that we saw design plans for a new terminal that looked very different from the current configuration. Before everything gets changed we said we should take some photos to document its current state. Here are a few of those pics.

Vallejo Nocturno 2020- Baltimore's Penn Station

Best Music Music of 2020 - Karuna Trio

A genre crossing recording focused on percussion and ambient sounds by two master drummers. Recalling some of the work of Jon Hassell these late night sounds are perfect for whatever you chose to do during your holidays. Cinematic.

From The Free Jazz Collective:

The sheer joy in discovering new combinations of sounds. The ecstasy of charting a fictitious but familiar world. The strange pummel of drums woven into a lush naturalistic arras of electronics and winds. Imaginary Archipelago is the second release from the Karuna Trio (Hamid Drake, Adam Rudolph, Ralph M. Jones) and it is a wonder. Sub-Saharan polyrhythms meld into North African trance which meld into other gradual, ritualistic repetition. The overlay of Jones’ reeds at times reminds me of Jan Garbarek’s work with Ustad Fateh Ali Kahn, Ragas and Sagas, minus the soaring vocals. At others it even touches on Marshall Allen’s EVI and the Arkestra, albeit with a different percussive vibe and fewer interstellar aspirations. Indeed, this seems more a spelunk into some parallel numinous realm than a turbulent ascent to the Afro-futurist stars.

On Imaginary Archipelago, the percussive textures are rich. The sonic tapestry is dense, a fact that is accentuated by Jones’ wafting melodies, Rudolph and Drake’s wandering drums, and, more broadly, the pulsing atmospherics. These lend the already soulful music an otherworldly character that relies more on spiritual/mental/metaphorical transcendence sheer strangeness. Oddness certainly abounds, but subtly. It remains a fine feature of the ambience rather than the central element. This stands in contemporary dub/electronic tracks such as Dimahala as much as the more acoustically driven Pitek or the slow, sweltering jazz meditation Chandirasa. (This one reminds me of a half-speed Herbie Mann’s At the Village Gate, though without the grounding of Ahmed Abdul Malik’s unwavering bass.) Often it is difficult to disentangle the processed sounds from the “pure” strings, surfaces, winds, and reeds. Was that tinny crackle natural or processed? How about that muted cluck, or that soft jangle, or that pervasive background static, or the brief references to splashing water near the end of Madazuba?

From All About Jazz:

Percussionists Adam Rudolph and Hamid Drake, and saxophonist/multi-instrumentalist Ralph Miles Jones play together as the Karuna Trio. These spontaneous compositions were built on a deep foundation of shared experience, dating back to their teen years, for Rudolph and Drake; Rudolph and Jones later played together in the Eternal Wind quintet. The concept here is that the music they were making is from a fantastical place: an imaginary archipelago. Each of the eleven tracks is named for an island in the chain.

The sound is a potent blend of acoustic instruments with electronic processing, at once ancient and modern. In his role as composer/conductor of the Go: Organic Orchestra—as heard to stunning effect on Ragmala: A Garden of Ragas (Meta Records, 2019)—Rudolph shapes the music using the entire ensemble as his instrument. He does much the same thing here by processing and editing the raw materials of the trio's initial performance.

"Okomibo" opens the set with a spacey flute and percussion soundscape, with substantial processing on the flute part. "Alima" features bass clarinet, weaving melodies through a pointillistic landscape at first, then a regular rhythm. "Ibak" has a ritual feel, and finds Jones switching between flute and saxophone, processing turning the saxophone into an echoing chorus. "Pitek" is carried entirely by rolling percussion at first, joined by echoing saxophone, while "Chandirasa" makes extensive use of chimes, bells and gongs. "Suwakaba" must be a jazzy place, as it is inhabited by drum kit and saxophone. Voice is a strong presence in "Vajna," and "Sorokaba" closes with a gentle, contemplative mood.

From Jazz Trail:

Master percussionists Adam Rudolph and Hamid Drake are forward-thinking musicians with a penchant for experimentation. They co-lead the innovative Karuna Trio along with Ralph M. Jones, a versatile woodwinds player whose unpredictable lines and unobtrusive posture make him a great fit for the ensemble’s sonic descriptions of landscapes that consolidate the ancient and the future.

Dedicated to the eclectic saxophonist Yusef Lateef, Imaginary Archipelago marks the trio’s return, two years after their debut album, Karuna. Each of the 11 islands depicted here is spontaneously imagined with rhythmic passion and an idiosyncratic tonal palette, yet they connect one another by certain elements that make this archipelago a consistent whole. 

“Okomibo” and “Dimahala” share trancing rhythms while exploring a natural freedom in its motions. The latter, for example, is marked by oscillatory electronic vibes, pounding drums subjected to opportune syncopation, and winding flute melodies.

While “Alima” is a close-to-the-nature contemplation professed with some circularity and an emphasized drum work as it moves forward, “Ibak” offers you a wonderful tour into a more jagged territory. Sounds of percussion and organic electronic manipulations come across with aesthetic intention, and its fluxes are occasionally interrupted by unusual slides and scrapes. The prayerful intonations of the soprano sax at the fore is more or less intensified as the rhythmic flow changes, and its phrases echo in the air, way above the entangling polyrhythmic tapestry. You’ll also find replicated phrases on the beautifully layered “Chandirasa”, a lament where flute and vibes collaborate closely, creating a placid mystery that is only shaken by occasional cascading streams. 

“Apekweh”’s offbeat and insistent pulsation comes in waves, and on top of it rests a meditative flute abreast of esoteric vocal chants and drones. Chants and drones that get a larger proportion on the hypnotic “Vajna”.

How he Lost

 

From the NYRB, Peter Bienart opines on Trump's loss:

The roots of Donald Trump’s reelection defeat can be traced to the early summer of 2016, when he made a fateful bargain with his own party. In June of that year, House Speaker Paul Ryan—who had pointedly refused to endorse Trump even after he became the de facto Republican nominee—finally caved. Or that’s the way it appeared. “Speaker Ryan’s abject surrender makes it official,” declared a Democratic spokesman. “The GOP is Trump’s party now.”

But that wasn’t quite right. Ryan hadn’t raised the white flag; he had made a bet. “I’ll be voting for @realDonaldTrump,” the Wisconsin native tweeted, because “I’m confident he will help turn the House GOP’s agenda into laws.” Ryan wagered that if he swallowed Trump’s racist authoritarianism, Trump would enact his economic vision. For Ryan and his ideological allies—who have devoted their careers to shredding America’s social safety net—that bet has paid off. It has also helped cost Trump a second term.

In his campaign four years ago, Trump didn’t tell Americans that he had embraced Ryan’s take-from-the-poor-and-give-to-the-rich agenda. To the contrary, Trump vowed not to cut Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid. He said he’d raise the minimum wage. He pledged to end Wall Street’s beloved carried-interest deduction. In his election night victory speech, he promised to “rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals.” In part because of these claims, polls found that Americans viewed Trump as more ideologically moderate than any Republican presidential nominee since 1972.

What Trump promised was authoritarian nationalism plus economic populism. It’s a recipe that in other countries has proven strikingly popular. In 2019, Poland’s xenophobic and homophobic Law and Justice party won a dominant election victory in large measure because of its immensely popular payouts to Polish families, which, according to the World Bank, dramatically reduced child poverty. (Law and Justice’s popularity has fallen since then, as many Poles have revolted against its draconian efforts to outlaw abortion.) In Hungary, Viktor Orbán has launched a New Deal-style public works program that gives hundreds of thousands of Hungarians government jobs. In Brazil, another Trump ally, Jair Bolsonaro, has boosted his approval ratings—particularly with poor Brazilians—by buffering them during the pandemic with government checks. Obviously, these autocrats also use repression and propaganda to buttress their rule. But even commentators who acknowledge their authoritarianism admit that their economic policies enjoy substantial support.

By contrast, Trump has—in spite of his campaign promises—embraced a fiercely anti-populist economic agenda. A Gallup poll taken the month he was inaugurated found that Americans considered infrastructure his most important campaign promise. But a former Trump official told The Washington Post that the White House never seriously considered making infrastructure its top agenda item because “Paul Ryan and these guys had waited 30 years for this once-in-a-lifetime chance to cut taxes. They were not going to let that go.” In 2017, after Ryan and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell shepherded a tax cut through Congress, Trump signed it into law even though, according to the recent book Let Them Eat Tweets by political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, it constituted the second-least popular piece of major legislation of the last twenty-five years. When the Trump White House did finally propose an infrastructure bill, congressional Republicans reportedly balked at both its price tag and the prospect that it would increase the deficit. So the idea was shelved.

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Best Music Music of 2020 - Astrid Engberg

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A major sonic surprise for me-the electronics, the orchestration, and the soulful pop approach, make this one of my favorite albums of 2020. Subtle, soulful minimalism in the age of pandemics. I'm surprised that it's not better known. A real sleeper.

From Scandanavian Soul :

The problem with genres is that they can only really describe the limits of something. They are great at sketching out musical demarcations but not so good when it comes to trying to discussing anything which inhabits those points of collision beyond or between, or anything which seems to be more about following its own rules rather than the traditions of the past. In fact, anything which is too far ahead of the curve.

Astrid Engberg makes music which is all of those things.



Tulpa is the sound of music scenes evolving and whilst it leans towards sounds of the past, soul, jazz and some more R&B style grooves on songs such as Dreamers. Its beauty lies very much in its lightness of touch and the weaving of some wonderfully contemporary sounds through the proceedings.

Opening track Oasis is the perfect calling card for the new paths that the album wanders. The new fusions it creates, a blend of chiming and charming, jazz-infused delicacy but hinting at the more indie and electronic sounds, spaces and atmospherics which are very much an integral part of the album.



Daylight conjures a gentle musical landscape, one which seems to combine a slick and sophisticate uptown yesteryear groove with some shimmering and cinematic modernity and the title track which rounds the album off is an even more experimental take on such sounds. Perhaps the sound of jazz had it been invented 100 years hence and so resting on a whole different set of traditions.

From  The Slow Music Blog:

For the Danish singer, producer, composer and DJ Astrid Engberg, Tulpa encapsulates the head injury from Astrid’s young adulthood, that still defines her everyday life over a decade later: ”I might never be without this pain, but it doesn’t stop me from living and experiencing life. Because life is too extremely valuable to let go.”

Interplaying between contemporary soul, classical, electronic music, jazz improvisation and her hiphop roots, Astrid sketches sonic landscapes that are both steeped in her Scandinavian roots and infused with the kaleidoscopic hues of her many travels.

Drawing inspiration in equal parts from nature, everyday life, people, images and sounds, her enchanting voice expresses both a sincere sensitivity and deep strength.

Daylight is the simple tale of seeing the light in the dark – as darkness quickly encompasses oneself, if the world moves too rapidly around you. On Phoenix Astrid conveys the indescribable connection with the outside world after years of being bedridden with chronic ache: <Yesterday I was born again. How do I explain it to someone who doesn’t know pain? The sounds, the colours, the silence..

From Palm Spree:

For the Danish singer, producer, composer and DJ Astrid Engberg, Tulpa encapsulates the head injury from Astrid’s young adulthood, that still defines her everyday life over a decade later: ”I might never be without this pain, but it doesn’t stop me from living and experiencing life. Because life is too extremely valuable to let go.”

Interplaying between contemporary soul, classical, electronic music, jazz improvisation and her hiphop roots, Astrid sketches sonic landscapes that are both steeped in her Scandinavian roots and infused with the kaleidoscopic hues of her many travels.

Drawing inspiration in equal parts from nature, everyday life, people, images and sounds, her enchanting voice expresses both a sincere sensitivity and deep strength.