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Vallejo Nocturno 2022- Lima Time

Best Music of the Year 2022- Whatever the Weather (Lorraine James)

We continue to be impressed with James' sonic experiments and ability to produce well-formed and coherent explorations. Not sure if it's me but these recent pieces really show and agility of creation. Keep it up.

 

From Pitchfork:

Emerging from the restrictive winter cold into the unpredictability of spring, it can be tempting to read a weather forecast like a horoscope. A brief glance at a row of temperatures and precipitation odds can send your mind running wild, soaring with hope at the suggestion of a sunny weekend day or plunging into despair at the thought of digging out that down jacket yet again. When you’re still emotionally digging your way out of the snow in March and the screen says it’s the bad number outside, your heart stops. 

Skim the tracklist of Loraine James’ Whatever the Weather and you might feel a similar reaction. In place of words or phrases, James has used only temperatures as titles. Such precise values might feel alien to ambient’s delicate dreaminess—it’s easy to project a series of highs and lows onto the journey before it’s had a chance to settle around your eardrums. But across these 11 tracks, James savors every opportunity to subvert the forecast, supercharging a balmy “17℃” with frenetic drumming, conjuring up a counterintuitively glacial synthesizer march for a beatless “36℃,” and letting the frigid “0℃” stand in for the record’s most danceable groove.

Such misdirection is hardly surprising for James, a genre-busting musician whose excellent 2021 album Reflection tore holes in the dancefloor large enough for the entire ’90s IDM scene to crawl through. Built from sessions that ran parallel to that album’s blisteringly funky experimentalism, along with lingering ideas unearthed from five-year-old project files, Whatever the Weather lightly tethers itself to ambient’s cool stylings, but the 26-year old also gracefully covers new ground; her experiments with improvisation lend this side project a lively, unpredictable edge. At every temperature, James finds a fresh inflection point, bending into the still-widening array of sonic identities at her disposal and shaking expectations loose.

From The Quietus:

Although the music of Loraine James – one of the hottest electronic prospects in Britain to come along in the last five years – usually evokes a basement club, the air thick with deadened kick drums and busy, chuntering percussion, her new Whatever The Weather project seems to gesture towards something cleaner and airier, though with less of a sense of place.

There’s something enjoyably knotty and awkward about this debut release. Even the song titles – various temperatures celsius – seem designed to dislocate you from any preconceptions about the music. Similarly, the beats – where present – can feel gutted, like they’re missing a vital percussive element that will link the whole groove together; this fragmentation means they seem jagged and spiny, sticking out at right angles from the skeletal ambient workouts.

On the albums James has made under her own name, For You and I and Reflection, there’s often a kitchen-sink production style that means many individual tracks seem to brim with ten, twenty, fifty ideas. However, on this album James selects two or three main sounds then runs with them, such as the interplay of piano chords and their twinkling tape delays on ‘14°’, or the gloriously incongruous cowbell on ‘4°’, or those two chords, also on ‘4°’ (an album highlight), that at first seem like they’ve been played an octave too low, but eventually persuade you of their roily delights. The bare bones arrangements make each piece feel like they’ve been cannibalised, gnawed at, so just a bleached carcass remains.

From Resident Advisor:

Just two albums and a few EPs in, Loraine James' catalog is already a scintillating web of abstract percussion, video game bleeps and glitchy production. Her work teeters on the edge of dance music and more introspective, home listening fare, as traces of grime and jungle appear subdued, or molded into prickly shapes. Even with that in mind, this LP from her new meteorologically-themed project Whatever The Weather is surprisingly sparse—she mostly abandons the bassweight in favor of iridescent ambient and IDM touches. The new name reflects a new kind of artistic freedom. Speaking to Pitchfork earlier this year, she explained that project's future might look like productions spanning anything from improv to math rock. "I don't want to limit what I make," she said. While working on her music over the years, James would file away tracks in the studio that didn't quite fit in with the music she put out under her own name. Close to the finish line of her 2021 album, Reflections, there were some outstanding ideas left on the cutting room floor that got the gears turning inside her head. Maybe there was a home for this material, just as part of an entirely separate project. These outliers make up Whatever The Weather's self-titled debut, an immersive assemblage of Telefon Aviv-inspired ambient tracks written in 2017 as well as music made by processing improv recordings through the sound design software Slate + Ash. Not every artist can pivot to beatless material and pass with flying colors. But what came out of James' many years of putting aside misfit tracks is a brilliantly serene album, where each song is assigned a different temperature, ranging from the biting winter lows to the blistering mid-summer heat. The record mainly homes in on resplendent, flowering arpeggios and frozen-over minor chords, but when James does lend her softly sung vocals to the project, her plaintive whine arrives airy and naked. (She's cited bands like Deftones and American Football as unlikely influences.)

Best Music of the Year 2022- The Soft Pink Truth

 

Boy I'm glad someone is putting out dance music of this quality out these days of commercialism. I only became aware of the The Soft Pink Truth about 3 years ago even though Drew Daniel has been producing music under this moniker for over 20 years. It continues, fresh as ever.

From Pitchfork:

Was It Ever Real? gives the impression of a brawny, fulfilling eroticism. The title alone of “Is It Going to Get Any Deeper Than This?,” not to mention the seductive moans and sighs that flutter throughout the mix like plumes of smoke, make the record’s preoccupations clear from its opening moments. Coil’s original 1986 “Anal Staircase” is a Stravinsky-sampling bruiser that seems to invite the listener to hitherto unknown pleasures, but Daniel replaces the unsettling laughter on the original with a smattering of lounge ambiance, and Balance’s screams simmer down to a close-mic’d whisper. This is a vision of sex not as something forbidding or forbidden but a healthy component of a comfortable life. The anal staircase is carpeted in velvet.

Daniel commits to a luxe version of deep house on these four tracks, ripe with vestiges of disco. The bass is big and plummy, and electric pianos mumble and splutter. The title track exists to flex this style. Acetone’s Mark Lightcap soars with a guitar lead that brings to mind the ‘70s-sleaze Shaft school of seduction, while a harpsichord performance from Tom Boram elevates the whole thing into the kind of orgiastic paradise-garden fantasy Prince conjured on the late-‘80s deep cut “Adonis & Bathsheba.” The pitch-shifted hi-hats, which seem to squelch through mud, impart a whiff of the peaty fertility of early-2000s albums by Matthew Herbert (whose challenge to Daniel to make house music led to the start of the Soft Pink Truth).

Much of the Soft Pink Truth’s catalog is devoted to provocative electronic tributes to genres like hardcore, black metal, and crust punk. This is his first project-length pastiche that isn’t a complete subversion, and it continues the turn away from “angry-white-guy music” that Daniel commenced on 2020’s beatific Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase? Like that record, Was It Ever Real? is a luxe, collab-heavy work that’s easier on the ears than most of his music. Unlike Sinning, this is a straight-faced genre experiment, leaning into club music’s carnal qualities without exaggerating them or sending them up, tunneling toward the center of classic deep house rather than scratching at its margins as Daniel did on his 2003 debut Do You Party?

 

From  Resident Advisor:

Depth in this situation doesn't mean the ideological, intellectual or thematic kind, but instead a type of immersion—the feeling of being transported into another world. Deep house retains the dynamic range of disco, where pianos and horns glimmer out of the mix as strings and synths simmer far away. Daniel employs a massive cast of collaborators in order to foster that three-dimensional feeling, from regulars like saxophonist Andrew Bernstein and his house-diva-of-choice Jenn Wasner to new faces like string arranger Uras Kurugullu and all manner of horn players, harpists, flautists and percussionists. The four-on-the-floor kick drum keeps the listener on a one-way track into the bowels of the 70-minute LP. Daniel does this by masterfully manipulating the mood of the album so that it's one thing and then another thing. without the listener ever really noticing the change. "Deeper" opens with 11 minutes of deluxe instrumental disco inflected with Latin percussion and loping rhythm guitars. Daniel keeps the groove going just long enough that we forget what we're listening to. Once we've started to settle in, here comes Xiu Xiu singer Jamie Stewart hamming it up on the Georges Bataille-referencing "La Joie Devant La Mort," taking exquisite queer melancholia to the edge of self-parody in that highwire way only Stewart can. Now that we know Daniel's going to use vocals, it's time to hear him do something beautiful with them: "Wanna Know" is a full-on pop song, with Wasner contributing saccharine Bee Gees harmonies. "Wanna Know" is probably going to be the all-time Soft Pink Truth banger, the one that ends up in playlists and party scenes in indie movies. Yet it does a great job of deepening the album—it's this record's "Tessio." Then it disappears back into the fog and smoke, and after a few minutes of "Trocadero" we realize, with a start, that there haven't been vocals for a while. Is It Going To Get Any Deeper Than This? proceeds like that for 70 minutes. It's deep, then it's funny, then it's pretty, then it's deep again, then it's funny again, then it's deep again. Actually, it's often at least two of these things at the same time. If the LP doesn't succeed at being the deepest album of all time, it's because of "Sunwash," a 13-minute Tangerine Dream-style sequencer fantasia that builds endless anticipation at the moment the album should be at its spookiest and most plangent. But it's hilarious when "Deeper Than This?" interrupts with close-mic'd, cartoonishly seductive French dialogue.

From Anthony D'Amico:

The album kicks off in style with its first certified banger, "Deeper," which deceptively fades in with bleary drones before launching into a straight up classic disco groove with all the requisite hand claps and funky guitars. There is enough subtle dissonance to give it a somewhat delirious and unreal feeling right from the jump, but things do not get truly art-damaged until an unexpected church bell passage subsides. While the groove remains unswervingly propulsive for a bit longer, the insistent sexy thump is increasingly mingled with generous helpings of kitschy string stabs, tropical-sounding guitars, hazy flutes, and a host of other inspired psych touches before it all dissolves into smeary abstraction. I suppose the extended running time and ambient comedown preclude "Deeper" from being a hot single, but several of the pieces that immediately follow gamely rekindle the dancefloor fire. "La Joie Devant La Mort" is one of the album's more "perverse pop moments," as Jaime Stewart sings a George Bataille line about being in search of joy before death over an endearingly weird groove that calls to mind Coil's Love's Secret Domain album colliding with "A Fifth of Beethoven" and a chorus of tiny frogs. Wasner then takes the mic for the breezily sensuous "Wanna Know," which milks the album title's question for all its worth over a groove that could have been plucked from a Love Unlimited Orchestra album. The following "Trocadero" then pays homage to the "sleaze" disco subgenre synonymous with the titular SF club before "Mood Swing" ends the first half with a killer slow-building disco fusion of spiritual jazz, gurgling psychedelia, and Reich-ian piano patterns.

The second half is a bit more abstract and eclectic, as the 13-minute "Sunwash" is a chilled out bit of synthy Tangerine Dream-inspired spaciness. To some degree, It feels like it belongs on a completely different album than everything that came before it, but it makes a fine palate cleanser and it technically is on a different album vinyl-wise (Deeper is a double LP). The languorously dub-inflected "Joybreath" extends that post-club "morning after" vibe further, as Rose E Kross whispers and murmurs Bataille lines in French as twinkling piano and bleary sax and vibraphone melodies lazily wander through a fuzzy dreamscape. I imagine it evokes the feeling of waking up on a beach at sunrise after a hedonistic night of dancing and substance abuse, but my life is far too boring for me to be entirely certain of that. A couple of curious detours then follow, but the album ends on an incredibly strong note with a swooning cover of Willie Hutch's "Now That It's All Over" that feels half "psychotropic exotica bliss" and half "Love Boat" theme. It's a fittingly beautiful and poignant end to the album, as Daniel arguably sheds all of his ironic, sophisticated, and avant-garde tendencies for six minutes of pure naked joy (albeit pure naked joy repurposed from a blaxploitation classic). In any case, it is one hell of a cover as well as the perfect end to a thoroughly enjoyable album. And, of course, both Deeper and Was It Ever Real? have earned a permanent place in my heart for being primarily inspired by an anonymous woman's decades-old grievance with a club DJ.

Best Music of the Year 2022- Eric Chenaux

 

 

Chenaux's musical surprising sound continues to explore authentic emotions in a self-confessional way that sounds fresh and innovative, almost childish and it works just like Monk's musical ruminations. Amazing musician and singer.

From The Quietus:

Now at his seventh release with Constellation Records, longtime listeners of Chenaux will find in Say Laura the distinctive sonic palette that the Montreal-born, France-based songwriter generated in his career, made of trumpeting guitars, fuzzy reverbs, and distorted picking; melding (semi-)improvised, jazz-adjacent guitar and a full songwriter croon; and once again enriched by the help of Ryan Driver, providing lyrics and the occasional Wurlitzer.

There is an untethered quality to Chenaux's music. Vocals and guitars play a game of tag in his tracks, only with the pursuer at times swerving abruptly away from the one who is chased, and taking the listener with them, down the same unexpected directions that the greatest works of improvised music have taken. In his 1978 book The Jazz Life, Nat Hentoff recalls this exchange between a lecturer and Thelonious Monk during a jazz class at Columbia University:

"Would you play some of your weird chords for the class?"

"What do you mean weird? They're perfectly logical chords."

Monk a tutelar deity to Chenaux, the apparent 'weirdness' is a trait they share and that makes the listener stay, mesmerised by the Canadian's approach to the guitar. Experimenting with a prism of carefully studied effects and styles, the musician builds a Merzbau of sound, a habitable structure made up of found objects. "My music plays with what has been left behind and dropped on the ground," Chenaux has said in the release notes, adding: "These things were left on the ground to lighten the load so that those in the past could get somewhere more freely and less encumbered. To shed cultural threads. When we encounter these things that have been dropped we are altered so that in fact the space between ourselves and the space between ourselves itself does not hold the same weight. I care about everything in song. And who cares?"

Juxtaposed to this avant-garde attitude is a deep taste for more traditional songwriting, especially for love ballads. This yang to the guitar yin is expressed by the warm, embracing vocal delivery. More than any other time, here, Chenaux's singing is profound yet airy, opening even more possibilities to the already multifaceted soundscape, adding glimpses of melodies and touches of pop.

From The Guardian:

Permit some warranted hyperbole: the Canadian songwriter has one of the all-time great singing voices in popular music, an intensely romantic Chet Baker-ish instrument that seems to float with piercing direction, like a paper aeroplane thrown hard through mist. Backed with his equally distinctive burbling guitar, Say Laura is a perfect gateway to his oeuvre with some of his loveliest compositions – and There They Were may be his best ever.

From The Vanguard:

Back, four years after ‘Slowly Paradise’, with his new album, there is a lot to celebrate in ‘Say Laura’. Eric Chenaux is still working with Ryan Driver, who contributes lyrics and some Wurlitzer. He’s also still making woozy, sun-drunk music with wayward notes that somehow work just exactly right.

Chenaux sings and plays electric guitar (both plugged in and not plugged in), harmonica and some electronics. Having seen him play live, nothing is as loose as it appears and he spends a long time getting his tunings and effects just right. So when you hear a buzzing bluebottle, that is the intention. When the guitar takes a dive off-note to somewhere you didn’t expect, he wanted that to happen. Vocals and guitar sometimes seem to travel slightly different paths but the tension between that is the jazz in the music. It still sounds haphazard and fortunately co-incidental but it is actually an Expressionist painting in sound. The lyrical journey, for me, is merely a set of words to hang a melody on – it’s hard to focus on words when the voice and guitar are pushing and pulling in such interesting ways.

This is ultimately a joyously relaxing album, a playful tugging of the earlobes and tweaking of expectations. It rarely goes in the direction expected, preferring to dance Puckishly away from the path we predicted. Eric’s sweet and pure lyrical voice is at odds from these wayward guitar notes that punctuate and illustrate the songs. The tunes are simple in concept but devious in delivery once the guitar has wandered around and the sonic space is wide and open, creating a big space for simple sounds to deliver complex ideas.

Effects pedals deliver beats, modulating the guitar and warping proceedings just enough to create exploratory tensions. These are fully explored and pieces average out at about ten minutes – time enough to bend into the strange head-space these sounds create. There is a beauty here, created from apparent randomness, focusing the ears into a light-hearted and spiritually free space. A special and other-worldly beauty that turns jazz guitar into an unhinged yet perfectly judged summer’s afternoon.

At Ivana's

Some of the first photo's I've processed from my trip to Lima over the last 5 weeks. Lots to come and see.

Copy-Vallejo Nocturno 2022-At Ivana's

 

Good Riddance

Let's hope the end comes soon from this monster haunting our land:

That is the fate now facing a Republican elite whose only idea is to hide, shirk, and mutter.

Over the months between now and voting day in 2024, Trump will likely face legal jeopardy, criminal and civil. Many in the Republican world hope that those jeopardies will eliminate Trump for them. But when the jeopardies arrive, will they rally to Trump’s defense? That’s what they did when the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago for stolen government documents. Trump’s Republican allies endorsed his false claims to be a victim of state persecution then—and pushed their party to protect the ex-president from the law he had willfully violated. If they repeat that performance, they’ll make Trump a martyr all the way to the nomination.

If they yearn for Trump’s legal troubles to disqualify him, they will have to signal to their supporters that those legal troubles are fair and legitimate, not acts of political persecution by the Biden administration or the New York attorney general. And if Republican leaders won’t stand up for the law, against Trump, they will back themselves into standing up for Trump, against the law. They got a lot of practice siding with Trump against the law from 2015 to 2022, and that practice has brought them to their present predicament. If they want to escape their predicament, they must change their practice.

The choices are fight or yield. Those have been the choices all along, and those are the choices again. If Republicans want a different outcome this time, then this time they’ll have to change their behavior. There is no coward’s way out of the dilemma. Either take the fight to the Minotaur or be devoured by him.

A Month in Lima

This has most likely been the largest gap in my posting in over 15 years. I think I have been trying to avoid the news and the common thinking which resides in the States which is negativism and magical conspiracy thinking replacing any sort of critical thinking. Or perhaps its that I've been busy seeing family and getting things fixed at our apartment. Here is a first drop of fotos: